Script Gods Must Die! by Paul Peditto
Dorothy Parker founded the “hate writing, love having written” school. One of her beefs was rewriting. As every one of us knows, you can stare at a problem scene for hours and just be stuck. You know the damn script better than anyone but it doesn’t help get you to any sort of solution. You […]
This will be the first in a series of rule breakers. I love a good hell raiser and I’ll attempt to highlight a few here. By doing so I’ll likely be contradicting a ton of rules that I’ve thrown at you before. Not to try to be an asshole, but the only absolute in screenwriting […]
Here’s Part Two of famous movies with serious character arcs. I point these out not to say that the characters in each of your scripts HAVE to make such journeys, only that you should define the journey. Where does the character arc begin (Point A/ORDER), where does it change (Point P/CHAOS), and where does it […]
The generic term character arc is something you might hear coming from your agent, at a story development meeting, or from your damn Columbia College part-time instructor. They can’t figure out what’s not clicking so out comes the cure-all: Your lead character hasn’t explored the full range of character arc. But what the hell […]
“THE IDEAL LOW-BUDGET MOVIE IS SET IN THE PRESENT. FEW SHOTS, LOTS OF INTERIORS, A COUPLE OF SPEAKING ACTORS (UNKNOWNS), NO MAJOR OPTICAL EFFECTS, NO HORSES TO FEED. BUNCH OF NOT-IN-THE-GUILD TEENS RUNNING AROUND AN OLD HOUSE WITH A DUDE IN A HOCKEY MASK CHASING AND SKEWERING THEM.”—JOHN SAYLES There are no absolutes. For each […]
