Saturday Hot Links

Time for the 314th installment of Saturday Hot Links, your week’s essential reading about movies, TV, streaming, Hollywood, and other things of writerly interest.

Four Mother-Daughter Movies Could Dominate Awards Season.

Four Big Guns Could Save the Disastrous 2017 Box Office.

Horror Movies Have Grossed Over $1 Billion at the Box Office in 2017.

China Box Office Surges in October, Returns to 15% Growth Rate.

‘Star Wars’ Films Planned For the Next 10 Years Says Kathleen Kennedy.

Defiant Theater Owners Are Refusing To Play ‘Star Wars: The Last Jedi’.

AFM Lacks Standout International Indie, to Dealmakers’ Dismay.

Hollywood’s man problem may be a matter of simple math.

Warner Bros., Brett Ratner Sever Ties Amid Harassment Claims.

Why Warner Bros. Was So Willing to Split With Brett Ratner.

What ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ Can Tell Us About Hollywood’s Sexual Assault Allegations.

New Female Spy Films Look to Go Beyond Bond.

Blade Runner 2049’ Was First Cut Into A Four-Hour, Two-Part Epic (But We’ll Never See This Version).

Title Revealed For Hayao Miyazaki’s Final Feature Film.

‘A Wrinkle in Time’: How Ava DuVernay Overcame Her Fear of VFX.

Guillermo Del Toro on Confronting Childhood Demons and Surviving a Real-Life Horror Story.

Should George Clooney Stop Directing Movies?

Deadpool Comic Creator Says Movie Sequel Will Clobber Han Solo Movie at the Box Office.

Christine Vachon Stays Thriving by Telling the Stories That Hollywood Won’t.

‘I Only Have My Chihuahuas’: Why The Florida Project’s Sean Baker Won’t Sell Out.

Quentin Tarantino Seeking New Movie Home: Studios Reading #9 This Week.

Fox Animation Names Andrea Miloro, Robert Baird Co-Presidents.

Bold Films Signs First-Look Deal With Industry Entertainment.

The Hollywood Darling Who Tanked His Career to Combat Anti-Semitism.

Dick Cavett Donates Thousands of Hours of Interviews to Library of Congress.

There has never been a better time to be a bad actor.

Netflix Cancels ‘House Of Cards’, Says It’s “Deeply Troubled” Over Kevin Spacey Claims.

House of Cards’ Suspends Production on Season 6.

The Duffer brothers thought they’d flamed out in Hollywood. Then they came up with ‘Stranger Things’.

Amazon Studios, IMDb Moving to Historic Culver Studios Site.

‘Lord of the Rings’ TV Series in the Works.

‘The Blair Witch Project’ TV Show in the Works.

YouTube’s Quest to Make TV Work Everywhere.

Mark Zuckerberg Vows to Stop Russian Facebook Trolls: ‘I Am Dead Serious About This’.

Outgoing Twitter employee deactivates Donald Trump’s account for glorious final act.

Listen: Scriptnotes (Episode 323).

Screenwriting Master Class tip of the week

Imagine having your very own private script workshop. A structured environment with content and a schedule tailored to meet your specific creative needs. Your own unique online course site. And a one-on-one mentor relationship with a professional screenwriter and educator.

You can do this through Screenwriting Master Class.

The Quest is one such program. It is an intensive 24-week online screenwriting workshop. It consists of three stages:

Core [8 weeks]: Participants learn essential screenwriting principles covering Plot, Concept, Character, Style, Dialogue, Scene, Theme, Time. There are 6 written lectures each week which post daily, then a writing exercise due Sunday to put the theory into practice. I wrote all 48 lectures amounting to over 250 pages of in-depth content and believe it to represent a new, cutting edge way to think about screenwriting.

The approach presented in Core is unique in these respects:

Coherent: Rather than a writer being forced to pick a bit of screenwriting theory from this guru or that, this educational resource or that, the Core content comes from a specific perspective — my own — based on over 25 years experience as a screenwriter and over 10 years as an educator. Every concept presented in Core is tied together by an overall philosophy about screenwriting, writing and creativity.

Comprehensive: The content presented in Core provides writers all the knowledge they need to have to be able to write a professional quality screenplay.

Character-based: Whereas so much of the conversation about screenwriting is focused on structure [and by ‘structure’ most people mean ‘plot’], Core presents an approach that begins and ends with character. In my view, this is not only the best way for a writer to craft unique, compelling, and entertaining multidimensional characters, it’s also the most effective — and frankly logical — way to find your story’s plot.

For 8 weeks in Core, participants in The Quest are immersed in screenwriting theory. At the end of that time, they put their understanding of those essential principles to work writing an original screenplay of their own.

Prep [6 weeks]: Starting with an original concept, participants in The Quest develop it through a series of 6 weekly lectures and writing assignments, each building upon the other until they end up with a thorough outline of their story.

I have been teaching Prep at SMC since we launched in January 2011 and the course has proved to be extremely popular. It picks up on the theory laid out in Core and runs with it in a workshop environment. The six weeks lay out like this:

The first two weeks are about Exploring the Characters, starting with the Protagonist and a series of key questions to help define some of the narrative’s fundamental elements, then a full week’s worth of brainstorming, three different ways to prompt the writer’s creativity and engage the story.

The next two weeks are about Wrangling the Narrative, the primary Plotline points that provide the spine of the plot, and the movements of the Themeline, the story’s emotional plot.

The final two weeks are about Crafting the Structure, scene by scene, sequence by sequence, subplot by subplot until the participant has a detailed outline.

Armed with their outline, the writer can approach the page-writing part of the process with confidence, primed to type FADE IN and go.

Pages [10 weeks]: Using their outline as a guide, participants pound out script pages through a series of 10 weekly lectures and writing assignments. Averaging about 10–15 pages per week, by the end of The Quest the writer has a complete first draft of their original screenplay.

Here, too, the process is founded on the principles presented in Core and put into use in Prep, all reflecting a character-based approach to screenwriting.

The Quest changed my life. It gave me the structure to be immersed in screenwriting and the flexibility needed to write and accommodate work and family life. Not only did I come out with a quality screenplay, but a practical approach that I can apply to each script I write.

Scott’s instincts as a mentor are spot on. He can tell the difference between when you need encouragement and when you need a good kick in the pants. Under his guidance, you become the kind of writer you want to be, the kind that doesn’t need to wait for inspiration.

You can spend your time reading through screenwriting inspiration, tips or shortcuts, thinking it will help more than actually doing the work, or you can take the leap and do The Quest.

— Taylor Gordon

As noted, The Quest is a private screenwriting workshop and that means:

• Weekly writing exercises and assignments
• Detailed feedback on all exercises, assignments, and script pages
• Regular teleconferences
• A structure to motivate the writer through the entire process
• One-on-one mentoring with me as your guide

Here are three big reasons to consider an SMC private script workshop:

• Writing a screenplay involves making thousands of choices about characters, plot, theme and so forth. Wouldn’t it be helpful to have feedback from a professional to help steer you through the process enabling you to avoid huge story pitfalls that could derail your scripting process?
• Writing a screenplay is a thankless, lonely job. Wouldn’t it be great to have the ongoing support of a professional to enable you to overcome inevitable story problems and emotional downswings?
• Writing a screenplay is a mystery. Wouldn’t it be wonderful to learn proven principles and practices from a professional with years of experience working in the entertainment industry, an approach to writing you can use again and again on your future stories?

If your are serious about learning the craft with a coherent, comprehensive, and character-based approach to both theory and practice, check out The Quest. I look forward to the opportunity to work with you.