Ask many novice screenwriters what their story is about and you’ll often get a vague description that their story is about a woman searching for love or a man trying to kill his boss. While vague story ideas are fine, what every story needs is inherent conflict. A South Korean movie called “Welcome to Dongmakgol” […]

In every screenplay, the first 30 minutes contain exposition that explains what the story its about and what the hero wants to achieve. Then in Act II (the next 60 minutes), the hero sort of gets what he or she wants, but there’s a catch and that catch is irony. In “Up,” the old man […]

Everyone has ideas for a screenplay. The hard part is coming up with interesting ideas that will grab people’s attention. One simple technique for doing this is to look at the latest news headlines. Anything in the news is interesting or else they wouldn’t publish it. That alone means that a true story can be […]

Coming up with a new story is difficult. That’s why Hollywood often looks to foreign movies and borrow existing plots and characters to create a Western version of the same story with English-speaking actors and actresses. “Quarantine” is a found footage horror film based on a Spanish film of the same name. By simply remaking […]

Here’s the hard way to write a story. Come up with an interesting plot and then come up with interesting characters and situations. Here’s the easy way to write a story. Come up with interesting characters and situations. Why about the plot? Borrow a plot from an existing book that’s old enough to be in […]

With movie theaters largely empty and the coronavirus pandemic keeping everyone separate and isolated, the movie industry has changed drastically in ways that it may never recover from again. First, movies used to be major spectacles that demanded multimillion dollar budgets and proven stories based on comic books, popular novels, or video games. Second, studios […]

Any time there’s a popular novel, Hollywood wants to turn it into a movie. More often than not, the movie fails to match the book. Just as you should study bad movies to see where it went wrong, so you should especially study bad movies based on good books to see what went wrong. In […]

To create greater conflict in any tory, use irony because irony makes events and situations more dramatic. Think of the big reveal in “The Empire Strikes Back” when Darth Vader reveals to Luke Skywalker that he’s Luke’s father. That’s ironic because all this time, Luke wanted to know more about his father only to discover […]