Story. Screenplay. Sale.
These articles elaborate on the Screenplay Checklist, a collection of commonly made errors in beginners screenplays.
Give your characters something to do. Always. Long dialogue without action essentially means you are filming talking heads, which is profoundly anti-cinematic. It’s a simple rule but still too many newbies ignore it. It’s called MOVIES, remember? This is a really easy check. Flick through your script, checking for pages with only dialogue. See that continuous … Read more
In newbie screenplays I often read “POV [Character Name]”. This is almost always unnecessary. BTW, Any technical element that is about HOW it is filmed rather than WHAT is filmed, takes us out of the read. This includes “Point of View”. So it is annoying. But more importantly, it is totally superfluous. To get my … Read more
‘Unfilmable’ has two distinctly different meanings for screenwriters. On the one side ‘unfilmable'(*) are those works that are impossible to adapt to the screen, Ulysses being an infamous unfilmable. But we’ll talk about something else altogether. The inexperienced screenwriter, in an attempt to clarify what a scene, a shot, a line really means, will occasionally … Read more
If I read the line ‘she smiled at him lovingly’ one more time, I swear I will kill the writer. Uncountable are the screenplays where characters are constantly smiling, looking ‘lovingly’, expressing ‘dark anger’. Some inexperienced writers are of the belief they can implant emotions into the brain of the audience simply by describing the … Read more
When I re-watched the pilot episodes of LOST, it struck me how late the main characters’ names are introduced. And it works so well. By the time we hear the names mentioned, we are already wondering about them. First we see the stranded group realize their situation, dumbfounded. Then they start interacting and some characters … Read more