Screenwriting 101: John Michael Hayes

“I prefer to start a screenplay and go through the whole first draft in one fell swoop. To get all the emotion, color, drama, melodrama, purple prose, and everything else that I can put into a story. Because I know that, during subsequent script conferences with the director and the stars, many things get leeched out of it. So I want to put as much as I can into the first draft. I, therefore, have to be given my head, instead of writing a few pages and then having a conference, and writing a few pages and having another conference. It ends up that you don’t write the kind of picture you want to write, and the director never gets a chance to see what you can do.”

— John Michael Hayes (Rear Window, To Catch a Thief, The Man Who Knew Too Much)

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