“One of the hardest concepts for new screenwriters to master is the active protagonist. Passive protagonists populate the pages of countless screenplays. As a screenwriting teacher and screenplay consultant, I see this all the time. But don’t just take my word for it. According to a reader friend of mine who’s read over a thousand [...]
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While I have written my share of posts about the long journey it has taken some screenwriters to break in (10 to 12 scripts is not unheard of) here’s some encouragement from a screenwriter who sold her very first script. Just like Diablo Cody—except in this case the script didn’t get produced, but it did [...]
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“Write 10 pages, get a video camera, shoot a master shot and a shot/reversal shot, and edit it in iMovie. When you’re done, you’ll see you didn’t need 10 pages to tell your story you told. You’ll cut it down to five pages, and be a better writer for it.” Marc Maurino Script magazine article [...]
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“The book came to me in sort of a haze in Harry’s Bar in Venice.” Ernest Hemingway speaking about writing In Harry’s Bar In Venice When I was in high school I don’t think I really understood that Ernest Hemingway was a literary giant. But I knew Jimmy Buffett was fond of Hemingway and that was [...]
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“Find what gave you emotion: what the action was that gave you excitement. Then write it down making it clear the reader can see it too.” Ernest Hemingway (The Old Man and the Sea) “For me, it’s about setup and payoff. I try to set things up so that they pay off in a way [...]
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“What’s in a name? Possibly everything…One of the most difficult and important things to do in film is to make internal qualities apparent. Some writers choose names that suggest emotional or psychological characteristics for this reason. These names often have a mythical air about them. George Lucas utilizes them throughout Star Wars: Luke Skywalker’s destiny [...]
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“I’d counsel anyone that as soon as they see a movie which starts ‘Based on a true story’ should look at it the way you do with a painting and not a photograph.” Screenwriter Aaron Sorkin In yesterday’s post Emotional Climaxes I pulled a quote from Aaron Sorkin on how he used “emotional climaxes” in [...]
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“When I wrote the screenplay for A Few Good Men, not only had I never written a screenplay before, I had never read a screenplay before. I didn’t know much about movies at all. I had been a student of plays…so I read as many screenplays as I could. I started to pay attention to [...]
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There just a few more days left on my posts on screenwriting and emotions and I have read that of all the emotions you can hit in a movie that you could generally boil them all down to hope and fear. So I googled “hope and fear in screenwriting” and I came up with a [...]
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“Big is one of those rare films that will tickle the funny bone and touch the heart.” Movie critic Peter Travers (then with People magazine) “(As a screenwriter) I’m in that emotional place where there is room for idealism. In Big (1988) and Dave (1993) there is a similar question being asked: Is innocence redemptive? And I [...]
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