Screenwriting consultant Laurie Hutzler has an excellent blog post on why “War Horse” lacks emotional impact, and here I want to focus on why the film’s key symbol — the Boer War red and tan campaign pennant — lacks the emotional impact it was meant to convey. [Read more…]
Probably the best chance you have of selling your screenplay or raising funds for your indie project is to create lead characters that attract top talent, or, if not well-known actors, the best talented actors available. So how do you do that? For starters, [Read more…]
So you’ve finished your screenplay and are ready to shop it around, but how exactly do you know when your screenplay is ready to stand out in the crowded market? Start with the “First 10 Pages Challenge.” Give the first 10 pages to a variety of friends — not all need be trained screenwriters — and ask them to summarize what they think the story is about. They should be able to identify some key story elements that should be present in the first 10 pages of any entertaining feature script: [Read more…]
How you introduce your main character not only affects how the audience perceives your character, but, more importantly, whether the audience is likely to be emotionally engaged with your character, and, therefore, your story. Without that engagement, your story is dead because [Read more…]
If you attended the Aug. 1 script reading that included my Greek diner sitcom, please take this brief anonymous 8-question survey to share your views about the story and characters. Your feedback is very valuable to me.
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You’ve heard the phrase “writing is rewriting,” and that’s particularly true for screenplays and sitcoms because your goal as the writer must be to entertain, and the whole point of the rewrite is to shape your script into one that maximizes the [Read more…]
Well, after listening to the 22-minute audio recording of the script reading of the sitcom I’m developing, I came to two cruel-reality realizations:
- I can write better; and,
- I can direct better.
No worries, though, because, well, there is no spoon. [Read more…]
Script magazine’s Dr. Format (Dave Trottier) is the go-to reference for the constantly changing landscape of screenplay formatting minutiae, and his latest compilation of what the industry expects in terms of properly formatted screenplays [Read more…]
Sometimes it’s tempting to start pounding out dialogue for a scene before you’ve fully plotted the story or thought about core character traits, but such hastily written dialogue quite often is the worst thing screenwriters write — at least during the first draft anyway — because the goal of the first draft is to finish a first draft, not to have in hand a refined industry-worthy screenplay. But it’s okay, because dialogue easily can be improved simply by [Read more…]
