Screenplays are like rollercoasters in reverse. A roller coaster starts with the biggest hill and then the hills get lower and lower until the roller coaster finally coasts to a stop. You don’t want that in a screenplay. You want to end with the biggest spectacle possible. The ending must be bigger than anything else […]

Browse through the movie offerings on Crackle, Netflix, or Redbox and you’ll likely find dozens of movies you’ve never heard of before. Despite the fancy artwork and teasing headlines, most of those movies are simply awful, especially the cheap horror or science fiction flicks that involve mutated sharks. What’s the problem? First, the problem is […]

Nothing should be ordinary or normal in your story. Even a simple trip to a restaurant should be interesting and supportive of your story’s main theme. In “Hell or High Water,” the main theme is that banks are ripping people off so two brothers decide to rob banks and rip them off in return. To […]

If you read novels that were turned into movies, you can see how the movies (usually) alter the story to make it stronger. One way to do this is to keep the hero actively trying to solve his or her own problems and putting the people who have the most to lose in the most […]

In general, men like action and woman like relationships. In a bad movie, you only get one or the other. In a good movie, you get both. Think of your favorite movies that are now considered classics like “The Shawshank Redemption” or “Pulp Fiction,” or older classics such as “It’s a Wonderful Life” or “Casablanca.” […]

Initially, the hero and the villain live in two completely different worlds. To bring the hero and villain together, the hero has an unfulfilled dream and has no idea how to achieve that goal. What links the hero to the villain and gives the hero a path to the goal is something form the villain […]

A novel and a movie are two different ways of telling a story. A novel lets you get into the thoughts and emotions of different characters while a movie must show you scenes and let you infer the emotions of the characters since you can’t get inside their heads. Stage plays are much closer to […]

The latest action thriller is “Jason Bourne,” a rogue CIA agent who’s targeted by the CIA itself. While there’s plenty of car chases, car crashes, and fight scenes, it all feels emotionally empty. Just watching cars constantly crashing into each other or weaving in and out of traffic while shooting at each other gets boring […]