Story. Screenplay. Sale.
Over half a century on, Psycho is a tremendous inspiration to low budget filmmakers, as Hitchcock shot the film on a shoestring budget of under a million dollars. Admittedly, to generate the marketing and awareness of the film at the time, studios today would have to spend blockbuster budgets. Because many “B” movies did well … Read more
Film buffs love referring to Alfred Hitchcock. Invariably you’ll hear them rave about Psycho, Rear Window or Vertigo . Rarely do I hear anyone praise Hitchcock’s personal favorite A Shadow Of A Doubt, let alone his earlier English films. by Karel Segers BACK TO ENGLAND After all, Hitchcock’s greatest successes were his American movies starring … Read more
Keeping the audience interested throughout the ‘setup’ is a major challenge as professional readers won’t last until the Inciting Incident if the first ten or twelve pages don’t deliver. The ‘setup’ is often a complete sequence in which we see the ‘Ordinary World’, the protagonist’s ‘normal life’, an area of the story that by its … Read more
Michael Mann’s commentary on the Restored Director’s Cut of MANHUNTER focuses primarily on the parallel psychology of the serial murderer and the cop. But let’s skip to the last few minutes of the commentary in which Michael Mann summarises his approach to filmmaking. “Film is made in the editing room. In the writing and in … Read more
Following my post on SYRIANA writer/director Stephen Gaghan, I came across an interesting discussion on the necessity of rigorous structuring vs. a more liberal, visual approach to screenwriting. Jim Mercurio makes the following point about Gaghan’s comments in the notorious CS podcast: “Gaghan’s comments are showing that he is evolving from a screenwriter into a … Read more