Advice — advice

In 1994, Quentin Taratino wrote a fictional story about Mickey & Mallory Knox, a honeymoon couple who, as a perverse aphrodisiac, randomly shot and killed over 50 people. Oliver Stone directed the film and the week it opened, a real young couple in the Midwest went on a rampage killing 4-5 strangers. When apprehended by the police and asked their names, they replied that their names were Mickey & Mallory Knox - the fictional character's names from Stone's film. The film was Natural Born Killers, and this film made a difference. I wrote for a popular television series called Touched...

Based on a true story is one of those unfortunate catch-phrases that usually has the opposite effect in courting a producer's enthusiasm than most writers assume. Of the several hundred projects a year I review as a script consultant, nearly 20% are prefaced with some variation on the theme "Everything in this plot really, truly happened." Translated: "That's why I know/hope/expect you will really, truly like it." Whether such events happened personally to the author or someone else, however, these claims of authenticity garner pretty much the same reaction as whenever I see a car sporting one of those perky...

I admit I'm something of a contrarian. I don't believe that all good scripts follow the same three-act structure, and I don't believe we have to like our protagonists. A film like Goodfellas (written by Nicholas Pileggi and Martin Scorsese) offers a good case for this; what's more, with the emergence of such dark and non-formula - but successful- films as There Will Be Blood and No Country For Old Men, I believe it has renewed relevance. However, when I first saw this movie, I didn't like it. It upset me and put me off. But it stayed with me,...

A great query letter is your key to unlocking an executive's door. Take your time and be as thoughtful about your query as you were when writing your screenplay. Industry professionals view query letters as a reflection of the writer's screenplay and writing skills, so the assumption will be if the query letter is poor, then the script will be, too.A query letter serves three main purposes: It opens the door to establishing a relationship with an executive; It requests permission to legally submit your screenplay and; It creates a paper trail, which provides a written record of everywhere it...

Moviegoers and readers identify with stories through the characters. The most powerful way to reach an audience is through the characters' emotions. For only when we connect with the characters on an emotional level, does the interaction become deep and meaningful. Well-written scenes that include characters' emotions allow the audience to viscerally take part in the story and bond with the characters.In real life, we meet and interact daily with other people. Unlike in stories, many of these interactions are fairly superficial. Though some audience members rather enjoy a more distanced, intellectual challenge, most want to engage with characters in...