Screenwriting
Filmmaking - Screenwriting
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“It’s Just a General”: How to Take a General Meeting
At some point in your career, things are going to break your way — you’ll be lucky enough to have your crowdfunded labor of love generate some heat at a big festival. Or your short film will go viral. Or maybe you’ll sell a hot spec or make the Black List. Whatever happens, you’ll land managers and agents, and people in L.A. will want to meet you — and not a minute too soon, because you’re four months behind on rent and need to pay for T-shirts for all your backers. It’s time to meet studio execs looking to hire […]
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Note This! How to Successfully — and Thankfully — Receive Notes on Your Film or Screenplay
“I would write a book, or a short story, at least three times — once to understand it, the second time to improve the prose, and a third to compel it to say what it still must say.” – Bernard Malamud “Relax and take notes, while I take tokes.” – Notorious B.I.G. I was once at a work-in-progress screening of an independent film for which we were asked to give notes. It was a long cut, and we’d all come out in the rain. After the screening, the director sat by himself near us. When someone addressed him directly, he […]
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James Franco, Vince Jolivette Launch Online Screenwriting Class
Continuing to disprove the assertion that there are 24 hours in a day, prodigious multi-hyphenate James Franco, who has taught at USC, UCLA, CalArts and NYU, and his Rabbit Bandini producing partner Vince Jolivette are launching another new venture: an online course, “Introduction to Screenwriting for Short Films,” on the Skillshare site. Over 30 short video lessons beginning screenwriters will learn the craft by penning an eight-page adaptation of one of three texts: John Steinbeck’s Pastures of Heaven, a story from The Spoon River Anthology, or Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio: A Group of Tales of Ohio Small-Town Life. Right now […]
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On Finding New Screenplay Structures for Independent Films
The below is a guest essay by Jennine Lanouette, Founder and Chief Content Creator at Screentakes Digital Publishing, who is currently in the midst of a Kickstarter campaign for a line of media rich screenplay analysis ebooks. Lanouette has taught screenwriting and lectured on story structure and script analysis for over 20 years, and much of her wisdom can be found at her site. The new ebooks use text, video and interactive graphics to provide a new dimension to screenplay study. For more details, and to donate to the campign, visit its Kickstarter page. — SM It often seems to […]
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The Independent Screenwriter: Jon Raymond
Portland-based Jon Raymond has four screenplay credits, all in the last decade, to his name, but his iMDB page only tells half the story. Raymond began his career and is still well known as a writer of novels and literary short fiction, and his film career has come not from the usual Black-Listed spec script but from adaptations of his work co-authored by a director/collaborator/friend, Kelly Reichardt. Two stories from his short story collection Livability, “Old Joy” and “Train Choir,” became Reichardt films (Old Joy and Wendy and Lucy, respectively), with the two co-authoring their scripts. That work, and the […]
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Life of the Mind: An Interview with Screenwriter Cliff Dorfman
A bit player since 1993, Cliff Dorfman was instantly drawn to the movie business. “I started out scamming my way into whatever premieres were happening in NYC however I could,” he said. “I just wanted to be around it and absorb it. That attitude blossomed into connections that valued my work, which ultimately led to Entourage.” As we sat down for coffee, Cliff talked candidly about his journey and the writing process. After transitioning from acting to writing on HBO’s hit show, Cliff picked up a nomination from the Writers Guild of America and finally found his calling. “Thought I […]
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Lost in Translation: Public Hearing
If you want to make a movie, you need a good script. Or, at least that’s what they tell you. A script gets the talent, which gets the financing (the two are really synonymous). The other thing you’ll need, of course, is luck. First-time filmmaker James N. Kienitz Wilkins can thank Google for both (not the money part though). While cruising the Internet in 2007, Wilkins came across a transcript of a public hearing on a town hall website. It described in detail a well-attended public hearing in Allegany, New York, population 8,000. At issue was a proposal to replace […]
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How Filmmaker Magazine Helped Me Launch My First Feature, the SXSW-Bound The Heart Machine
Zach Wigon has written a number of provocative, discursive and highly original film essays for Filmmaker over the last couple of years, and now he is making his first feature. In this guest essay, appearing alongside the SXSW-bound film’s Kickstarter campaign, he describes how the interests explored in these pieces dovetailed into a seductive thriller for the NSA age, The Heart Machine. After reading, check out some of Zach’s old pieces for us and consider contributing to his campaign. — SM It all started with Filmmaker Magazine. In the Fall of 2010, I received an email from a producer […]
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John August Launches iPhone Screenplay Reader, Weekend Read
Screenwriter and director John August and his colleagues at Quote-Unquote Apps have launched Weekend Read, a full-featured screenplay reader for the iPhone. The app imports scripts in Final Draft, PDF, Fountain, Markdown and text formats and then creates an “optimized view” that’s perfectly sized for the iPhone’s 4″ screen. Fonts can be increased, decreased or changed; there’s a “night mode”; and scripts can be imported from Dropbox, a URL, email or any app that has an “Open in” option. I read screenplays on my iPad using Goodreader to narrow the margins and thus increase the font size. It’s a decent […]
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Interview with Love is Strange Screenwriter Mauricio Zacharias
Mauricio Zacharias is currently in Park City for the premiere of his latest film, Love is Strange, directed by Ira Sachs. The previous project the director and writer collaborated on, the erotic and turbulent love story Keep the Lights On, also premiered at Sundance back in 2012. Love is Strange tells the story of Ben (John Lithgow) and George (Alfred Molina), a couple who’ve been together for 39 years who finally tie the knot in New York City. As soon as George’s employer, a Catholic school, hears the news of the gay marriage he is fired from his longtime job. Unable to afford the […]
