Advice

Why should a writer bother to learn about production budgets? Isn't that the Production Manager's responsibility? Let me tell you why. Though the writer may not be directly involved in the business side of making the film, the script that he or she writes will be.A completed script is not a finished product unto itself; it is the production's road map to making a finished product: the completed film. Moving from development of the script through production and post of the movie adds an enormous number of collaborators and factors that affect the original story on its journey from script...

When you write your first screenplay, the path to glory seems clear—find an agent who will get you a six-figure deal. A hundred and fifty query letters later, you’re languishing at Hollywood’s front gate. You’ve received a lot of encouragement, but, as Pauline Kael put it, “Hollywood’s the only town where you can die of encouragement.” Maybe it’s time to try another approach. In the film marketing business, if you lack resources but have a winner, you platform that winner by showing it to one or two markets at a time and letting it accumulate positive reviews. In other words,...

When I was in high school, there were three sets of twins – two fraternal and one identical. The latter - a pair of sisters a year ahead of me – were a particular object of fascination. What would it be like, I mused, to have a lookalike sib who excelled in the very subjects that weren’t my strong suit? Would our parents be so attuned to our personalities that we couldn’t occasionally trade places? Would we ever ignore a chance to play tricks on friends or make shopkeepers think they were experiencing déjà vu? I remember peppering these girls...

Is there a woman’s voice in screenwriting? And if there is, how do we recognize it? If you’re a male writer, you might think this question doesn’t even apply to you. You might think this is simply a problem for women writers. Besides, how often has anyone said that you write with a man’s voice? You might have been told you are good at exploring masculinity through your characters and themes, and you might have a preference for writing in genres where male characters tend to dominate, but even so, isn’t the concept of a man’s voice patronizing and limiting?...

Time and time again, people come up to us and pitch ideas for movies and television. Everyone thinks their story needs to be told or that they've got the greatest idea since the invention of the iPhone. But it's not just enough to have an idea. You have to see if it can go the distance. Does it have legs? Is it really a movie? Or is it just a sketch? Is there enough there to keep an audience engaged? Are the characters unique enough yet still accessible enough for audiences to root for? These are just some of the...