Saturday Hot Links

Time for the 347th installment of Saturday Hot Links, your week’s essential reading about movies, TV, streaming, Hollywood, and other things of writerly interest.

MTV Movie and TV Awards: The 10 Standout Moments.

DGA Says Number Of Minority Film Directors Hit 5-Year Low Last Year, Down 46% Since 2013; Women Making Gains.

BAFTA Enacts Diversity Requirements for 2019 Awards Season.

From Ocean’s 8 to #MeToo: why the gender bias in film criticism matters.

How Brad Bird Steered ‘Incredibles 2’ Through “Complete Chaos”.

Who Will Disney Promote to Fill the John Lasseter Void?

‘Star Wars’ Fandom is Broken.

Rian Johnson Baits ‘Star Wars’ Trolls by Begging Them to Remake ‘The Last Jedi’ in Order to ‘Save the Franch

There Will Be No More Star Wars Spinoffs, for Now.

Disney may be re-thinking its plans for all those Star Wars standalone movies.

Lucasfilm Denies Pausing Development Of Spin-Offs And Says “Multiple” Films Are In The Works.

Pete Docter, Jennifer Lee to Lead Pixar, Disney Animation.

Disney raises offer for 21st Century Fox to $71.3bn and outflanks Comcast.

Warner Bros. Crackdown Puts Dark Mark Over Harry Potter Festivals.

How ‘Jurassic Park’ Changed the Way Movies Looked at Dinosaurs.

“Coco,” a Story About Borders and Love, Is a Definitive Movie for This Moment.

‘Infinity War’ Writers Shade DC: ‘There’s a Lot of Spaghetti Being Thrown at the Wall’.

How Game Night Broke Modern Comedy’s Rules to Win at the Box Office.

‘Get Out 2’: Jason Blum Says Jordan Peele Is ‘Flirting With the Idea’ of a Sequel to Their Horror Film.

‘Mudbound’ Producer Cassian Elwes’ New Banner Completes Financing for First Movie via Crowdfunding.

Disney raises offer for 21st Century Fox to $71.3bn and outflanks Comcast,

Finding Comedy in Violence With Shane Black.

Shaquille O’Neal Steps Up Showbiz Plans: “Who Am I to Say No to Hollywood?”.

The History of A24: A Timeline of the Rising Distributor.

Endeavor’s Ari Emanuel Credits His ‘F — ed Up Mind’ for Success Beyond the Agency Business.

MoviePass Adding ‘Bring-A-Friend’ Option and Surge Pricing, Which Will Cost You More Money to See Popular Films.

Struggling MoviePass Launches $164 Million Bond Sale.

AMC Launches $20 Subscription Plan to Rival MoviePass.

Let’s Reconsider ‘Sleepless in Seattle’ From Walter’s Perspective.

World Cup: Meet Iceland’s Goalkeeper, Who Moonlights as a Filmmaker.

The Greatest TV Writers Rooms Ever.

ABC’s ‘Roseanne’ Spinoff Officially a Go — Without Roseanne Barr.

Fox’s Newest Dramas Will Run During Commercial Breaks.

Fox News Faces Criticism of Family Separation Coverage From Inside Murdoch Empire.

Gina Rodriguez Funds College Scholarship for Latinx Student With Emmy Money.

MTV Launches Studio, Sets ‘Daria,’ ‘Real World,’ ‘Aeon Flux’ Revivals.

ESPN’s Internal Political Divide: Bristol Tradition vs. “Woke” Reformers.

Scribes on ‘Handmaid’s Tale,’ ‘Westworld’ and 12 More Shows Reveal Secrets From the Writers Room.

Netflix Is Coming to More Hotel Rooms.

This Is the Netflix Exec to Thank for Your Wild Wild Country Binge.

Netflix Says 20 Million Hours of ‘Mudbound’ Have Been Streamed, Which Is ‘Dramatically Bigger’ Than a Theatrical Release.

Michael Jackson Bio-Musical to Moonwalk on Broadway.

Screenwriting Master Class tip of the week

I’m only offering the Prep workshop one more time this year, so check it out.

The next session of my Prep: From Concept to Outline class begins Monday, July 9. 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 sent to me from Dawn LeFever who worked with m in the Prep workshop in October-November 2014:

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 8 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 AM TEACHING THIS PREP WORKSHOP ONE MORE TIME IN 2018!

That session begins July 9.

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

I look forward to the opportunity to work with you!