[Link] 10 Stories of How Famous Screenwriters Broke In

by Kathleen Laccinole

Find out how the big guns got their big feet in that tiny door.

Most of us have probably gone down a similar path in hopes of getting that foot in the door: Try to make connections with producers, agents, and creative execs through queries, cold calls, blind submissions, and waiting tables at Musso and Frank’s. Upload your screenplays to online databases. Submit your script to awards, festivals, and screenwriting competitions. Or hike Runyon Canyon until your feet fall off hoping to bump into Natalie Portman or Channing Tatum so you can fake twist your ankle and when they stop to help, mention you have a script JUST PERFECT for them.

Suffice to say, this well-worn path rarely takes us anywhere. Rather, it’s usually some sort of unexpected combination of luck, talent, and more luck that makes that big break happen. Just take a look at how these now-famous writers got their big break.

Quentin Tarantino: Don’t Underestimate the Community

Quentin Tarantino (One Upon a Time in Hollywood, Inglorious Bastards, Kill Bill, Django Unchained, Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction, etc., infinity…) hand-wrote True Romance on a pad of paper while working at the Video Archive, a video store in Hermosa Beach. When he finished it, his co-worker and friend, Roger Avary (Rules of Attraction, Pulp Fiction, Killing Zoe), was the first to read it.

“He not only read it, he typed it up,” Tarantino said. The video store brought him into contact with the film community and from this, he got work as an assistant on a Dolph Lundgren exercise video. From there, he got his first paid writing gig – the script for From Dusk Til Dawn. This got True Romance noticed… and he was given $3 million to write and direct Reservoir Dogs! The rest is, well, you know the rest. 

Read the full article:

https://thescriptlab.com/blogs/16514-10-stories-of-how-famous-screenwriters-broke-in/

Motivational Monday: Silent Film Scripting (Lillian Gish)

 (Copied and Pasted)

On this day in 1893, silent superstar Lillian Gish was born in Springfield, Ohio.
In 1988, I wrote to her asking if silent films had actual dialogue written
out in the scripts or if there was just a general description of what was
being said. This was her remarkable reply.

(@StoliarSteve)

[Link] There Are Only 37 Possible Stories, According to This 1919 Manual for Screenwriters

by Colin Marshall

“Great literature is one of two stories,” we often quote Leo Tolstoy as saying: “a man goes on a journey or a stranger comes to town.” That’s all well and good for the author of War and Peace, but what about the thousands of screenwriters struggling to come up with the next hit movie, the next hit television series, the next hit platform-specific web and/or mobile series? Some, of course, have found in that aphorism a fruitful starting point, but others opt for different premises that number the basic plots at three (William Foster-Harris), six (researchers at the University of Vermont’s Computational Story Lab), twenty (Ronald Tobias), 36 (George Polti) — or, as some struggling screenwriters of a century ago read, 37.

The year was 1919. America’s biggest blockbusters included D.W. Griffith’s Broken Blossoms, Cecil B. DeMille’s Male and Female, and The Miracle Man, which made Lon Chaney into a silver-screen icon. The many aspirants looking to write their way into the ever more celebrated and lucrative movie business could turn to a newly published manual called Ten Million Photoplay Plots by Wycliff Aber Hill. “Hill, who published more than one aid to struggling ‘scenarists,’ positioned himself as an authority on the types of stories that would work well onscreen,” writes Slate’s Rebecca Onion. In this book he provides a “taxonomy of possible types of dramatic ‘situations,’ first running them down in outline form, then describing each more completely and offering possible variations.”

Hill’s 37 basic dramatic situations include...

Read the full article: https://www.openculture.com/?p=1080397

[Link] Joss Whedon’s Top 10 Writing Tips

“Joss Whedon is most famous for creating Buffy the Vampire Slayer, its spin-off Angel and the short-lived but much-loved Firefly series. But the writer and director has also worked unseen as a script doctor on movies ranging from Speed to Toy Story. Here, he shares his tips on the art of screenwriting.

1. FINISH IT

Actually finishing it is what I’m gonna put in as step one. You may laugh at this, but it’s true. I have so many friends who have written two-thirds of a screenplay, and then re-written it for about three years. Finishing a screenplay is first of all truly difficult, and secondly really liberating. Even if it’s not perfect, even if you know you’re gonna have to go back into it, type to the end. You have to have a little closure.

2. STRUCTURE

Structure means knowing where you’re going ; making sure you don’t meander about. Some great films have been made by meandering people, like Terrence Malick and Robert Altman, but it’s not as well done today and I don’t recommend it. I’m a structure nut. I actually make charts. Where are the jokes ? The thrills ? The romance ? Who knows what, and when ? You need these things to happen at the right times, and that’s what you build your structure around : the way you want your audience to feel. Charts, graphs, coloured pens, anything that means you don’t go in blind is useful.

3. HAVE SOMETHING TO SAY

This really should be number one. Even if you’re writing a Die Hard rip-off, have something to say about Die Hard rip-offs. The number of movies that are not about what they purport to be about is staggering. It’s rare, especially in genres, to find a movie with an idea and not just, ‘This’ll lead to many fine set-pieces’. The Island evolves into a car-chase movie, and the moments of joy are when they have clone moments and you say, ‘What does it feel like to be those guys ?’

Continue reading: http://www.whedon.info/Joss-Whedon-s-Top-10-Writing-Tips.html

[Link] I Will Not Read Your F**king Script

by Josh Olson, screenwriter of A History of Violence

WARNING: This linked article contains adult language, or bad words, or vulgarity, whatever you prefer to call it. Don't read it if that sort of thing offends you. 

I will not read your fucking script.

That's simple enough, isn't it? "I will not read your fucking script." What's not clear about that? There's nothing personal about it, nothing loaded, nothing complicated. I simply have no interest in reading your fucking screenplay. None whatsoever.

If that seems unfair, I'll make you a deal. In return for you not asking me to read your fucking script, I will not ask you to wash my fucking car, or take my fucking picture, or represent me in fucking court, or take out my fucking gall bladder, or whatever the fuck it is that you do for a living.

You're a lovely person. Whatever time we've spent together has, I'm sure, been pleasurable for both of us. I quite enjoyed that conversation we once had about structure and theme, and why Sergio Leone is the greatest director who ever lived. Yes, we bonded, and yes, I wish you luck in all your endeavors, and it would thrill me no end to hear that you had sold your screenplay, and that it had been made into the best movie since Godfather Part II.

But I will not read your fucking script.

At this point, you should walk away, firm in your conviction that I'm a dick. But if you're interested in growing as a human being and recognizing that it is, in fact, you who are the dick in this situation, please read on.

Yes. That's right. I called you a dick. Because you created this situation. You put me in this spot where my only option is to acquiesce to your demands or be the bad guy. That, my friend, is the very definition of a dick move.

Continue reading: http://blogs.villagevoice.com/runninscared/2009/09/i_will_not_read.php