Many aspiring screenwriters watch the latest releases and then get influenced by them. The drawback is that they tend to churn out scripts that are derivative of today’s hits. Rather than waste your time and money on new releases, watch old movies. Go to Hulu or Crackle and you can watch plenty of movies for free. […]
Screenplays aren’t divided into three Acts, but four. Each Act tells a mini-story all by itself which strung together creates a coherent whole. In outlining your story, start with the big question: what is your story about? In “Die Hard,” the story is about a man trying to get back together with his wife when […]
Today’s movies seem to rely too heavily on special effects, which act like fireworks to capture the audience’s attention through sheer pyrotechnics. But after these effects fade away, the audience is left with a dull story anyway. There’s a term for many horror movies called “horror porn.” The idea is that you focus on attractive […]
Most screenwriters come up with a story and then try to write it down as a screenplay. Inevitably, they run out of ideas about halfway through and wind up with a 50 page screenplay that goes nowhere. Here’s what you can do to fix this problem. Every movie is about a big story, but it’s […]
The four Acts of a screenplay (Act I, IIa, IIb, and III) correspond to the four parts of a story where part I is about the hero witha problem, part II is about the hero achieving success in solving the problem, part III is when everything falls apart, and part IV is the final conflict […]
A great story answers every question and fulfills every implied promise. A bad movie doesn’t. Here are some examples of what completeness means. There’s a saying that if you show a gun, then it better go off before the end of the story. Otherwise there’s no purpose showing the gun. In “Thelma and Louise,” Thelma […]