Saturday Hot Links

Time for the 390th installment of Saturday Hot Links, your week’s essential reading about movies, TV, streaming, Hollywood, and other things of writerly interest.

#WGAStaffingBoost Yields First Success Stories With Pitch Season Looming As Key WGA-ATA Battleground

No agent? No problem. Writers find ways to work around agency feud

How the WGA Crisis Has Rocked the TV Business: ‘Best Staffing Season in Years’ or ‘Complete S– Show’

Writers-Agents War: Are Labor Strikes Next?

‘Avengers: Endgame’ blows past $2 billion and more box-office records in 2nd weekend

‘Avengers: Endgame’ Becomes Second-Biggest Movie Ever Internationally

‘Avengers: Endgame’ Has Taken Over the World. Let’s Talk About Fan Service and Marvel’s Legacy

Avengers: Endgame brings superhero cinema’s 9/11 obsession full circle

James Cameron Reacts With Optimism to ‘Avengers: Endgame’ Dethroning ‘Titanic’ Box Office

‘Avengers: Endgame’ Writers Take on Biggest Fan Theories

‘Star Wars,’ ‘Avatar’ release dates announced in wake of Disney-Fox merger

Indie Focus: Rom-com revival continues with ‘Long Shot’

The 24 films everyone will be talking about this summer

Franklin Leonard’s The Black List Foretells the Changing Future of Hollywood

25 Film Finance Insiders Who Can Actually Get Movies Made

Buchwald Adds Five Agents In New York, Los Angeles Outposts

AMC Theatres Swings to Quarterly Loss, Cites “Industry-Wide Softness”

European Box Office Hits Four-Year Low in 2018

6 Takeaways From Variety’s 2019 Inclusion Summit

‘Fast Color’ Filmmaker Slams Hollywood’s “Lip Service” to Diversity, Inclusion

Hollywood working moms and the brutal conflict between family and career

Amy Poehler, Issa Rae, and More Will Be Honored at Women In Film Annual Gala

Marvel Studios Will Announce First Openly Gay Superhero Character Sometime Soon

What Pop Culture Misunderstands About Serial Killers, According to the FBI Agent Behind Mindhunter

All the Video Game Adaptations Currently in the Works

Four Hollywood Production Companies Boycott Georgia Over Anti-Abortion ‘Heartbeat’ Bill

Saudi Arabia Quietly Trying to Salvage Its Plan to Build a Film Industry

Sigourney Weaver Attends NJ High School’s Viral ‘Alien’ Production

‘Galaxy Quest’ Live Symphony Concert Coming to San Diego During Comic-Con

Amazon Is Shuttering Its Free Scriptwriting and Storyboarding Tools

TV Upfronts Preview: Burning Questions for Each Broadcast Network

Welcome to the Age of Background TV

‘The Big Bang Theory’ is ending, but we shouldn’t let multi-cam sitcoms die. Here’s why

Vince McMahon’s XFL Sets TV Deals With Disney, Fox

‘Stranger Things’ Lawsuit Dropped Ahead of Trial Date

Megan Amram Signs Overall Deal With Universal TV

Fox’s ‘Bones’ Fracas: A $128 Million Legal Fight That’s Just Beginning

Pilot Season: Female Directors See More Representation Gains

Greg Berlanti’s TV Record Grows to 18 Series Across Six Outlets

TV Networks Rush to Stream Video. The CW Has Been Doing It for Years

The Game of Thrones Coffee Cup Breaks Her Silence

Indie Filmmakers Puzzled As Amazon Prime Drops Some Poorly Viewed Projects

Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes calls for company’s breakup

Audible Sets First Originals From Reese Witherspoon’s Hello Sunshine

Peabody Futures of Media Awards: Winners List

‘To Kill a Mockingbird’ Becomes Top-Grossing American Play in Broadway History

UMG Fights Musicians Who Wish to Terminate Copyright Grants

Listen: Screen Talk (Episode 242)

Alvin Sargent, Oscar-Winning Screenwriter on ‘Julia’ and ‘Ordinary People,’ Dies at 92

Screenwriting Master Class tip of the week — Prep: From Concept to Outline — “It works!”

I’m only offering two Prep workshops this year, so check them out.

The next session of my Prep: From Concept to Outline workshop begins Monday, May 27. I love teaching it because it’s exciting to dig into a new batch of stories and the process we use has a transformational effect on writers, a wonderful thing to behold. For example, here is an email from Dawn LeFever who worked with me in the Prep workshop:

Hey Scott –

Hope you and your family are well. I know you are about to begin another prep course and I thought I’d give you a little insight you might want to share with your new students.

Since taking the course last year at this time, I not only wrote the script I prepped in class, but have written three more since then, having just completed the first draft of the third one yesterday. I LOVE this process and it feels really organic to me.

Every time I begin a new project, I pull out my notebook with the reading assignments and work through the process just as we did in class. I sort of begin the brainstorming list from day one and just add to it whenever anything comes to me while working through the process. I also use note cards before going to outline because it helps me with pacing.

Then, when I’m writing, I have both my script and my outline on my screen and just write away, checking back at the outline to stay on track. More than a few times, as I’m writing, I think about a line of dialog or an action and then look back at my outline and realize what I have in the outline is much better than what was occurring to me in the moment.

At other times, while writing, I will find ways to weave moments in the script that foreshadow what happens later, because I know what’s coming thanks to the thorough prep process.

In other words, as you say, I do truly break the story in prep, which makes the writing so much easier and (hopefully) deeper and richer. I easily knock out 10 pages a day with this process.

I know there are as many different ways to approach writing as there are writers, but, for me, your process makes everything click and, even more, allows me to get really excited to finally sit down and write.

In the past year, I have had some encouraging responses — I was in the top 15% of the Nicholl Fellowship screenplays and was in the top 50 for the ISA Fast Track Fellowship. I made the quarter finals for the Screencrafting Comedy Competition with two scripts (One of them a rewritten version of Smoker’s Choice).

So… forging ahead and having a blast!

Thanks again for everything and tell the folks IT WORKS!!!

All the best,
Dawn

When Tom Benedek and I launched Screenwriting Master Class 10 years ago, the very first course I created was Prep: From Concept to Outline. Why? Because no one else was teaching story prep for screenwriting. That struck me as crazy because most professional screenwriters I know and all TV writers break their story in prep.

Since 2010, I have led over 30 online sessions of Prep and worked privately with dozens of writers. The response has been almost universally like the sentiments expressed by Dawn above.

In fact, Christian Contreras whose script “LAbyrinth” made the 2015 Black List is a Screenwriting Master Class alumnus, having taken this same Prep class with me back in 2014. Verity Colquhoun, an Australian writer who did a private one-on-one version of my Prep class in 2011, let me know the script she wrote (“Wonderful Unknown”) landed a director and is slated to go into production. And David Broyles, who participated in the very first Prep workshop I led back in 2010, was named as one of 25 Screenwriters to Watch in 2016 by the Austin Film Festival. When I emailed David to congratulate him, he sent back a note with this comment about Prep: From Concept to Outline: “I loved that workshop!”

I literally tell writers at the beginning of every Prep workshop: “If you do the work… it works.”

It’s not magic. It’s just a proven, professional approach to develop your story, stage by stage, from concept all the way to outline, beat sheet, or treatment, whichever you prefer.

Consider joining my next session of Prep. But whether you take a class with me or not, it’s imperative you learn some sort of approach to story prep.

Can you imagine routinely writing 10 pages per day? Can you imagine being able to write 3 full-length screenplays in a year? Can you imagine actually enjoying the page-writing process?

As Dawn suggests, all of that can happen if you wrangle your story before you type FADE IN.

I WILL ONLY BE TEACHING THIS PREP WORKSHOP TWICE IN 2019!

The first session starts May 27. The second session begins July 8.

Enrollment is limited on a first come, first served basis.

To check out the Prep: From Concept to Outline workshop, go here.

I look forward to the opportunity to work with you!