Saturday Hot Links
Time for the 386th installment of Saturday Hot Links, your week’s essential reading about movies, TV, streaming, Hollywood, and other…
Time for the 386th installment of Saturday Hot Links, your week’s essential reading about movies, TV, streaming, Hollywood, and other things of writerly interest.
Talent Agencies Offer to Share Packaging Fees With Writers in Significant Move Towards Deal
Writers Guild Standoff Won’t End Hollywood’s Culture of Conflicts
Joel Stein: This Is How I’ll Fire My Agent
Why Some Writers Won’t Need to Fire Their Agents If a Deal Isn’t Reached
Golden Globes Reveal Nominations, Voting Dates for 2020 Awards
Box Office: ‘Shazam!’ Zooms to $53.5M Bow; ‘Pet Sematary’ Digs Up $25M
Box Office: ‘Shazam,’ ‘Pet Sematary’ Cement Superhero and Horror Domination
‘Avengers: Endgame’ Advance Ticket Sales Set New Record
Box Office: Can ‘Avengers: Endgame’ Crack the $300M Ceiling in U.S. Debut?
Star Wars Movies Will Take a Break After Episode IX
‘Her Smell,’ Like ‘Teen Spirit’: Why Are There So Many Movies About Music Stars Right Now?
Fox News vs. Fox News: How Hollywood’s Dueling Roger Ailes Projects Compare
Why everyone in Hollywood and Silicon Valley is stalking J.J. Abrams
Tom Hanks-Starrer ‘News of the World’ Moves From Fox 2000 to Universal
George Clooney Inks First-Look Movie Deal With MGM
Producing Partners Will Ferrell, Adam McKay to Split
How we made A Clockwork Orange — by Malcolm McDowell
Hey, Hollywood: What do you have against women’s sports?
Netflix in Talks to Buy Historic Egyptian Theatre in Hollywood
Sundance Institute Names Four to Board of Trustees
German Box Office Fell 15 Percent to $1 Billion in 2018
Beijing Fest Feels the Chill of China’s “Cold Winter”
Italy’s Legendary Movie Lot Is Primed for New Productions
Emmys: TV Academy Reclassifies ‘American Horror Story,’ ‘The Sinner’ and ‘American Vandal’
Broadcasters in 40 Largest U.S. TV Markets to Roll Out “Next-Gen TV” by 2021
MIPTV: Local TV Shows Top Ratings Worldwide, Report Finds
“Death by Thousands of Needle Pricks”: HBO’s Executive Exodus and the Challenges Ahead
Why ‘Game of Thrones’ Is a Once-in-a-Lifetime Show
From Hatchlings to Gargantuan Fire Breathers: How ‘Game of Thrones’ Makes Its Dragons
The next front of the streaming wars is the battle for ad-supported programming
How Disney+ Could Raise the Stakes in the Streaming Wars
Disney+ Unveils Robust Unscripted Slate Featuring Pair of Marvel Docuseries
Cord-Cutters’ Savings Shrink as Online TV Services Raise Prices
YouTube TV Raises Price, Adds Discovery Channels
YouTube Plots Interactive Programming Push
The golden age of YouTube is over
Univision Finally Finds Buyer for Gizmodo Media Group
The Rise and Fall of a New York Shock Jock
The Downfall of Alex Jones Shows How the Internet Can Be Saved
The L.A. Times, Once a Print-Media Tragedy, Is Rising from the Near-Dead
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!