Saturday Hot Links
Time for the 392nd installment of Saturday Hot Links, your week’s essential reading about movies, TV, streaming, Hollywood, and other…
Time for the 392nd installment of Saturday Hot Links, your week’s essential reading about movies, TV, streaming, Hollywood, and other things of writerly interest.
Writers and Agents to Resume Talks After Guild Accepts UTA’s Offer
Writers Guild Adds Additional Claim to Suit Against Talent Agencies
Hollywood’s Writers-Agents War Bleeds Into ‘Walking Dead’ Profits Dispute
Why Verve Gave Up Packaging Fees — While Bigger Hollywood Agencies Will Fight to Keep Them
Box Office: ‘John Wick’ Dethrones ‘Avengers: Endgame’ With $57M Opening
Box Office Preview: ‘Aladdin’ Flying to $80M Memorial Day Bow
Yes, ‘Avengers: Endgame’ Box Office Was Massive, But It Fell Short of Expectations
How a Bunch of Cat Wranglers Helped John Wick 3 Director Chad Stahelski Perfect Dog Fu
As ‘Rocketman’ Prepares to Take Off, Hollywood Holds Its Breath
Quentin Tarantino, Brad Pitt, and Leonardo DiCaprio Take You Inside ‘Once Upon a Time…In Hollywood’
Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, The Ultimate Preview
Rotten Tomatoes Revamps Movie Audience Scores to Focus on Verified Ticket Buyers
AMC’s Movie Subscription Service Passes 800K-Member Milestone
Harvey Weinstein Is Said to Reach $44 Million Deal to Settle Lawsuits
Serious shortage of people doing ‘proper’ jobs on film sets
Canadian Studio Giant Expands With Toronto Film Facility
Two Hollywood Projects Pull Production From Georgia Due to Abortion Ban
Is Ryan Kavanaugh’s New China Deal for Real?
The Mogul for This Moment: Ava DuVernay Takes on the Central Park Five, Trump and Her Own Ambition
How Jessica Elbaum Went from Will Ferrell’s Assistant to Producing ‘Booksmart’ and ‘Dead to Me’
What Will Christopher Nolan Do With His Next Movie?
Katie Silberman’s Comedy Empire
Emma Thompson Gets a Shock at 60
Pixar Reportedly Focusing Only On Original Films After ‘Toy Story 4’ & Other Recent Sequels
2018–19 TV Season Ratings: 90 Percent of Veteran Broadcast Shows Fall
How ‘The View’ Became the Most Important Political TV Show in America
Peabody Awards: ‘Pose,’ ‘Good Place’ Teams Highlight Political Influence of Winning Series
‘Game of Thrones’ Series Finale Sets All-Time HBO Ratings Record
How ‘Game of Thrones’ Generated $2.2 Billion Worth of Profit for HBO
An Oral History of Game of Thrones, As Told By the Soldiers, Wights, and Wildlings
Winter is coming for HBO NOW subscriber growth
HBO Sets Scribes For 2019 HBOAccess Writing Fellowship
New Coke Was a Debacle. It’s Coming Back. Blame ‘Stranger Things.’
“Older, Broader, Edgier”: What to Expect From Hulu Under Disney’s Control
TV Streaming Shakeout Is Coming
ESPN President Jimmy Pitaro is fighting the cord-cutting wave
Why YouTube Is Changing the Way It Reports Subscriber Counts
Your Kid Wants to Be a YouTuber? There’s a Camp for That
Google Adds to NYC Footprint With Building Purchase in Chelsea
Xbox Head Addresses “Toxic Stew of Hate Speech, Bigotry” in Gaming
Top ‘Live-Streamers’ Get $50,000 an Hour to Play New Videogames Online
Facebook removed 2.2 billion fake accounts in three months
‘Napoleon Dynamite’ Getting Comic Book Sequel
Esquire’s Editor Is Out in Reshuffling at Hearst Magazines
Used Kurt Cobain paper pizza plate sells for $23,000
Whitney Houston’s Estate Plans a Hologram Tour and a New Album
When the Music Biz Had It That Way
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!