No Film School
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The talk of both Hollywood and the publishing world is Matt Dinniman's Dungeon Crawler Carl . I was talking to an exec last night who told me they got 900 submissions for the writers' room. And the new chapter of the latest book is blowing up, as well. So, how did we get another global publishing phenomenon turned into a TV show that's sure to be a hit before they even film the first frame? Well,…
By now, you’ve probably heard the supposed mandate from streamers, specifically Netflix, that filmmakers and writers need to continually keep the audience engaged by repeating plot points and reexplaining the story frequently. At least according to Matt Damon and Ben Affleck . (For what it’s worth, Netflix execs later refuted those claims and said there was “no such principle” in play during their…
Have you been thinking about the Hacks series finale since it aired a few months ago, or are you mentally stable? I'm not! So I've been watching all those emotional TikTok edits of the characters and thinking through the mastery of that last season since the end of May. Show creators and writers Paul W. Downs and Lucia Aniello appeared on the recent episode of Scriptnotes with John August to talk…
I wanted to write about something ridiculous today. So I legit was like, what are three words that I think would stand out on the opening page of a script and get me to lean in? What started as a new exercise for me quickly became this post. Before you write an email to me in anger, I want to tell you that this is not prescriptive. Do whatever you need to do, write whatever you want. But this was…
We all know that opening scenes are all about setting the tone for the movie, but if you're strapping in for a war film , how can you set the genre while also delivering something more surprising than just a battle? We already know that when we're watching one of these kinds of films, the stakes are inherently life-and-death. Today, I want to talk about how the best opening scenes in war movie…
The most quoted thing in Trainspotting started life as an advertisement for staying clean. Kinda ironic, right? "Choose life" was a wholesome anti-drug slogan before the iconic character of Mark Renton got hold of it, essentially turning a public-health message into a battle cry for anyone who ever wanted to opt out of what he feels is a normal, boring lifestyle. Here we are, 30 years later, and…
Sometimes the simplest lines in a movie can hit the hardest, and today's example is one such line. It's from The Good, the Bad and the Ugly and is spoken by the man with probably the least use for it. Near the beginning of the movie, as a crowd gathers to watch an outlaw hang, a woman on a passing stagecoach says she's glad they finally caught him. The bounty killer beside her hardly reacts.…
The biggest hit of the year, so far, is The Odyssey , which rocketed past a billion dollars worldwide today and will probably top off somewhere around $1.5 billion, making it Nolan's top-grossing film ever and solidifying it as one of the top-grossing movies this year. As with any movie, it starts with a screenplay. This one is an adaptation of Homer's epic, where Nolan read a few translations of…
I fI could pick one actor to deliver something I wrote, it'd be hard to pick against prime Clint Eastwood. The guy has spoken some all-time lines, from Dirty Harry ’s "Do you feel lucky, punk?" to Unforgiven ’s "Deserves got nothing to do with it." His characters and their voices stand the pantheon of time. And here's another sneaky thing: he makes sure that in the movies he directs, even the…
There are no real shortcuts to writing something good, especially since there are so many ways to attack story. The closest you can probably get if you're writing in a specific genre is to look at that genre's story tropes and just copy the steps. I'm thinking in this case specifically of Lifetime and Hallmark movies, and how they always hit the same beats. Romance actually is a great example of a…
