Visit Crackle and you’ll see plenty of unknown movies that in most cases are absolutely horrible. However, use them for inspiration. First, watch them to see how not to create a story. Most bad movies rely heavily on cliches and predictable action sequences. The characters are simply people running around performing lots of physical action but without revealing any emotional background. Characters often appear for no reason and disappear just as quickly. Plot holes sabotage the story and make no sense where common logic goes out the window and people do the dumbest things just to add a fake level of suspense.
Second, watch bad movies because they’re a free source of inspiration for your own stories. Ask yourself how you would have fixed the movie. When you can recognize flaws in a bad movie, you can (hopefully) avoid those same flaws in your own screenplay. Better yet, once you can see how to fix a bad movie, you can see how to fix the flaws in your own story.
Third, create your own story based on a bad movie. You don’t want to duplicate a bad movie for more reasons than just copyright issues. You want to duplicate a bad movie’s plot to improve upon it with your own characters and plot twists, but you can use a bad movie’s plot as a starting point. Instead of trying to start from scratch, start with a bad movie plot and make it better with your own characters and setting to create an original and unique screenplay of your own.
Bad movies exist because of story flaws. Poor acting and special effects can sink a great script, but no amount of acting and special effects can mask a bad script. Use bad movies as a source of inspiration because if a bad movie can get made, certainly you can do much better. Now you just have to prove it by going out and writing a far better screenplay.
Remember, Hollywood is full of bad screenwriters. If you want to break in, you can’t duplicate their dismal output. You have to far outshine them and that’s your best way of attracting attention to yourself.
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