Advice — expert series

I've been doing exactly what you do, writing, for a long, long time. I've taught and critiqued screenwriters for almost that long, and, lo and behold, I discovered that all beginning writers make the same mistakes. So I wrote a book, a checklist of stuff to do to your script before you send it out. Here's an excerpt from Your Screenplay Sucks!, 100 Ways To Make It Great. I hope it proves helpful as all get out. *** One fine sunny Los Angeles afternoon, I was sitting in an assistant's office, waiting for the producer, and her door was closed....

Shamans were the first master storytellers. As the preeminent narrators of our age, screenwriters can share in this venerable heritage. And in so doing, you can help reverse movie making's current disastrous trend of taking us deeper and deeper into ever more shallow waters. Key to Shamans' authority is the sheer scope and acuity of their consciousness. Ritual healers, they are the ones sought out to restore harmony to their villages whenever needed. Their knowledge embraces not only the stories of individuals, but how these stories nest in the larger tales of the clans and the tribe and so on...

Imagine being able to learn about something as complex as the Art of Cinematography in only half an hour or a weekend. Isn't that what we all want today, in our new millennium, instant gratification world of the Internet, High Def, GoogleEarth and YouTube? As we look back to the very origins, to the dawn of the Cinema and Cinematography, it's always amazed me, that filmmakers base their entire lives and careers on some thing that is totally intangible, something that is only the projection of the illusion of movement onto a screen. The very first camera was invented by...

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...