There’s a funny scene in Shakespeare in Love in which a boatman – upon recognizing the young Bard as his passenger – eagerly tries to foist a new script on him. As anyone who has lived in Los Angeles for more than 10 minutes can attest, it’s an accurate send-up of the fact that almost every valet, waiter and clerk you encounter will just happen to have an extra copy of his or her latest project if they overhear you have any connection to Tinseltown. (“Here’s the Cobb salad you ordered, Ms.
Amidst the bright lights of Tinseltown, the line between fantasy and reality is often a blurry one. Unlike an earlier era when movie stars and TV personalities were accorded a certain measure of privacy whenever they stepped away from the cameras, we’ve become a society that’s obsessed with knowing every intimate detail about those whom we’ve placed on celebrity pedestals.
If they made a movie:
Jennifer Aniston, Peri Gilpin, Matthew McConoughey
As goes a favorite Christmas week tradition at our house, I was in charge of picking the movies we’d traipse off to the mall to see while everyone else was doing frantic last-minute shopping. “Sweeney Todd is first on the list,” I told my husband. Who could blame him for raising an eyebrow? Tim Burton’s adaptation of the bloodiest musical in the history of American theater is unquestionably an odd choice in a season synonymous with sugarplums, mistletoe and joyous conviviality.
If my husband and I are ever on a quiz show and the topic is White Christmas, we will easily leave our fellow contestants in the dust. Throughout our marriage – and, for me, even longer than that – it has been a tradition that the holidays don’t officially commence until we’ve watched Bing Crosby and Danny Kaye croon their way to Pine Tree, Vermont and give their former commanding general the best darned Christmas of his life.
Choose elements of three other books or authors this book reminds you of:
Linda Seger, Syd Field, William Goldman
"Could it Be a Movie?" tackles the title question with wit and a great sense of the craft and business of storytelling. Beyond that, it explores the fundamental question: Could I Be the Movie Writer? If that is a career you are considering, read this book first. Not only does it give solid information to help you make that decision, but it clues you in on the fundamental principles of the craft and business of writing for the movies. This remarkable book is loaded with resources from the library and from the internet. Could your idea be a movie?
If they made a movie:
Ellen DeGeneres as Christina Hamlett
For new screenwriters, crafting credible conversation is a major challenge. Too often, someone who would probably be better suited to writing novels or short stories tries to put words in the mouths of live actors. It’s a dead giveaway when they don’t know what they’re doing. Why? Because (1) the characters all talk exactly the same way, (2) they talk more eloquently than normal people ever do, or (3) they talk way too much.
THE CRITICAL DO'S AND DON'TS OF DIALOGUE
Made you look, didn’t I? The power of a strong hook has been fueling marketing schemes for years, not the least of which involve the glamour and glitz of writing scripts for the movies.
Writers have often expressed the view that Life is a continuous melting pot of free material; it’s just a matter of soaking it all up and discerning which parts are the most likely to yield commercial success when you put them to paper. To someone like myself who is as much an enthusiast of good writing as I am of good food, the journey to success doesn’t even have to start with taking a step outside one’s front door. If you want your plots to really get cooking, there's no better place for your education to begin than in your own kitchen.
Wally found me - as so many clients do - by reading screenwriting magazines and trolling the Internet for advice. He liked what I had to say and wanted to engage my consulting services to mentor him through his Epic.
Yes, you read that right. Epic. Wally was fixated for some inexplicable reason on Lewis and Clark. In fact, he had spent a good deal of his adult life reading everything he could about the intrepid explorers and decided the time was right to tell The True Story.
