We watched The Wizard of Oz over the weekend in one of its many post-Thanksgiving television airings and I couldn’t help but think “One classic holiday movie down, several more to go!” My list of favs includes A Christmas Story, Die Hard, Christmas Vacation, Planes, Trains and Automobiles and the granddaddy of them all…It’s a […]
Two manipulative devices in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part I reek of a huge commercial cash grab that cheapens one of the great fantasy sagas of our time.
This is an absurd, yet hilarious spoof of the Amazon Studios Intro Video (original below)…(NSFW due to language) And here’s the original…
Rocky, written by Sylvester Stallone and directed by John Avildsen, is a classic American film and screenplay. It has become the template for so many sports films and what have come to be known as “underdog” stories. FREE DOWNLOAD: ROCKY SCREENPLAY ANALYSIS
I’m excited to offer a partial Story Map for the 2008 drama, The Wrestler, written by Robert Siegel and directed by Darren Aronofsky. The full story map for The Wrestler is available in my book Story Maps: How to Write a GREAT Screenplay. (Please note that the maps in the book are text-only; they do not […]
It’s been about one week since Amazon announced its Amazon Studios site, pledging $2.7 million in grants and prizes to new screenwriters and filmmakers. There’s already 1,078 projects posted. I’m kind of surprised there’s not more. But I bet that will double in the next month, and then go up exponentially before that first January […]
A thunderclap rocked the online screenwriter community yesterday when word came out that Amazon Studios hath been born: Amazon.com’s new “crowd-sourcing” filmmakers community site with a mandate to fund theatrical feature films by emerging, as-yet-undiscovered talent. It looks like it’s basically TriggerStreet.com but with a ton of money behind it and more of a mandate […]
Rain Man is one of those films that has suffered from its success. It’s easy to dismiss at it as a kitschy piece of 80s melodrama, yet another Tom Cruise vehicle in which he plays a man-child with father issues. Dustin Hoffman’s autistic savant Raymond has been copied and mocked so many times that it […]
Are there only seven basic stories or is it more like 36 dramatic situations? Or does it all boil down to Man vs. Nature, Man vs. God and Man vs. Himself? I’ll answer those questions with a question. Who cares?
Good actors, never use the script unless it’s amazing writing. All the good actors I’ve worked with, they all say whatever they want to say. -Jessica Alba in Elle Magazine
With two older brothers and no sisters, I wasn’t allowed to be a Disney kid. By the time I came along, fairy tales were “gay” and animated movies were for babies. I still got to watch a few Disney movies and was read some fairy tales, but the books were put away sooner than with […]
We’d all like to forget the bombs but they’re here to remind us of something important — the problems can almost always be found in the script. It’s easy to blame a bomb on the acting ‘talent’ of Ashton Kutcher or the further contributions to the art of cinema of director Paul W.S. Anderson, but […]
Frank Darabont (The Shawshank Redemption, The Mist, Frankenstein (1994)) and Gale Ann Hurd (The Terminator, Aliens, Armageddon, The Incredible Hulk) have an incredible pedigree in genre movies so it’s no surprise to see that their first television collaboration is on the level of a studio-quality horror film. The aesthetics of The Walking Dead (which premiered […]
I watched The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo on Netflix Instant streaming (which is fantastic for spontaneously watching movies that you missed or never wanted to pay theater prices for) and I was underwhelmed. I have not read the book, so I can’t speak as to the faithfulness of the film adaptation, but I can […]
Four Advanced Screenwriting Techniques used in The Social Network [Warning: Spoilers] 1) Angel and Devil. The use of two supporting characters who push and pull the Protagonist between Good and Evil. In The Social Network, we’ve got Eduardo (Andrew Garfield), Mark Zuckerberg’s (Jesse Eisenberg) best friend from the dorm days and Sean Parker (Justin Timberlake), […]
There are actually three climaxes in The Sixth Sense that satisfy the External and Internal goals of Cole (Haley Joel Osment) and Malcolm (Bruce Willis). Learn more about Story Maps and buy the E-Book Story Maps: How to Write a GREAT Screenplay. Related: Download the Full Story Map for “The Dark Knight:” here Where are […]
I thought I knew everything about Raiders of the Lost Ark until I Story Mapped it out. There is essentially a “soft” climax — Indy and Marian are strapped to a pole and rendered inactive. The day is won, but not at the hand of Indiana Jones. Our big action-adventure hero is essentially inactive in […]
<–Go to Part I: Story Mapping Raiders of the Lost Ark One of the greatest tools for learning the craft of screenwriting is writing Story Maps of your favorite films. When I was working as a professional Reader back in the day I wrote coverage on the original spec script of The Sixth Sense the […]
As any normal screenplay consultant would do, I decided to record some thoughts about the power of Story Mapping Raiders of the Lost Ark while driving on the 405 and 101 South to the first annual Inktip Pitch Summit in the Universal Hilton in Los Angeles. Raiders of the Lost Ark is my favorite film […]
Major movie studio screenplay consultant and professional Script Doctor Dan Calvisi decided to drive and shoot at the same time on the topic of unlocking the structural secrets of the action-adventure classic Raiders of the Lost Ark… Hey guys, I got inspired to deliver a message about the power of Story Maps while driving on […]