Saturday Hot Links

Time for the 348th installment of Saturday Hot Links, your week’s essential reading about movies, TV, streaming, Hollywood, and other things of writerly interest.

Academy Invites Record 928 New Members.

The 3 Biggest Ways Those 928 New Academy Voters Could Change the Oscar Race.

Oscars: What Does It Take to Become a Member of the Motion Picture Academy Anyway?

Summer Box Office Rebounding From Last Year’s Bust, Eyes Near-Record Boom.

Marvel Studios Head Kevin Feige Isn’t Taking Over Lucasfilm.

Sony Working On ‘Spider-Man’ Spin-Off ‘Silk’ About A Korean-American Spider-Woman.

‘Sicario: Day of the Soldado’ Won’t Be a Blockbuster, But It’s Rewriting Movie Sequel History.

‘Hereditary’ Breaks a Momentous Box Office Record.

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

‘Indiana Jones 5’ Delayed as Jonathan Kasdan Whips Up a New Script.

Ron Howard Says ‘Solo’ Was Part Of The “Process” Of Disney And Lucasfilm Figuring Out The Spin-Off Films.

‘Star Wars’ Isn’t Going Away.

Disney Shuts Down Disneytoon Studios in Glendale.

How Pixar’s Open Sexism Ruined My Dream Job.

How the #MeToo movement is changing Hollywood.

CAA Launches Writers Database to Help Fix Hollywood’s Diversity Problem.

‘Sorry to Bother You’ Producer Charles D. King Says 2018 Is “Renaissance Period” for Diverse Films.

Mudbound’ Producer: ‘The Marketplace Is More Receptive to Diverse Content’.

Why making Hollywood more diverse requires far more than shaking up who’s onscreen.

We Can’t Trust Hollywood to Fix Toxic Fandom.

Appeals Court Rules Against Fox in Netflix Poaching Dispute.

Weighing up Hollywood’s fixation with the War on Drugs.

A Beginner’s Guide To New German Cinema.

‘Billy Elliot’ Hungarian Production Canceled After Paper Says Show ‘Could Turn Children Gay’.

China’s Wanda Plans $1.78B Consolidation of Film Assets.

Will Jason Blum’s High-Concept Horror Work in China?

Regulators Keep Chinese Film Industry in Suspense.

50th Anniversary Release Of Beatles Animated Film ‘Yellow Submarine’ Brings Help For The Lyrically Challenged.

Why Do Good Biopics Happen to Bad People?

In Defense of the Romantic Comedy.

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

How Harold Ramis and Bill Murray Ended Their Feud and Other Things We Learned in This Memoir.

Sundance Announces Creative Fellowship to Support Self-Distribution of Fest Favorites, Including SXSW Winner ‘Thunder Road’.

More Socially Progressive Westerns Are Highlighting Female and Native Stories.

MoviePass Competitors, Ranked: AMC, Cinemark, and the Other Ticket Subscription Services That Want Your Loyalty.

Alamo Drafthouse testing a subscription movie pass.

AMC Launches $20 Subscription Plan to Rival MoviePass.

Cineplex, Uber Eats Launch Home Delivery of Movie Popcorn.

What You Can Do in Distribution to Maximize the Life of Your Film.

5 Crazy Ways The Real World’s Changing Thanks To Video Games.

‘Fortnite’ Soars With $318M in May Revenue.

Internet TV Services Get Big Boost From World Cup.

Fox Showrunners are Speaking Out Against Fox News in the Midst of the Family Separation Crisis.

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

What Show Does ‘Westworld’ Want to Be?

Netflix Stock Tumbles Amid Competition, Chinese Trade-War Concerns.

Amazon Makes Play for Younger Viewers With Three YA Pilot Orders.

Hollywood, Beware: Apple’s Content Harvest… Has Begun.

Apple’s Big TV Push: A Comprehensive Guide to All Its Programming.

Writer Harlan Ellison Dead at 84.

Watch: Dancing in Movies.

Watch: A Brief History of Paramount Pictures.

Watch: Jurassic Park — Using Theme to Craft Character.

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!