But Without YOU, the Writer, There Wouldn’t Be a Movie!

When actors, directors, cinematographers, and editors get up at the Oscar podium to give their thanks for their awards, they often thank the scriptwriter, without whom they wouldn’t be at the podium. Likewise, without the great talent they bring to the written word there would be no award-winning movie. This all goes to show that film is a highly collaborative art.

Great screenplay.biz/top-screenplays/" 786 target="_blank">Screenplays in the Past

Think of the great screenplay.biz/top-screenplays/" 786 target="_blank">screenplays over the years. They almost all had great directors, actors, editors, music scores, and production people who attached their incredible talent to the projects. Recently the Writers Guild of America came out with a list of the 101 greatest screenplay.biz/top-screenplays/" 786 target="_blank">screenplays ever written. Although not in any particular order, here are some of the most recently written ones:

• Shakespeare in Love by Mark Norman and Tom Stoppard

• American Beauty by Alan Ball

• Fargo by Joel and Ethan Cohen

• Jerry Maguire by Cameron Crowe

• Thelma and Louise by Callie Khouri

• The Shawshank Redemption by Frank Durabond, based on a story by S. King

• Field of Dreams by Phil Alden Robinson. Based on a book by W. P. Kinsella

• Back to the Future by Robert Zemeckis and Bob Gale

• Sideways by Alexander Payne and Jim Taylor

• The Sixth Sense by M. Night Shyamalan

widespread misunderstanding as to exactly what a screenplay is..

An increasing number of people have taken to scriptwriting as a way of breaking into the movies. Unf0rtunately, there is also widespread misunderstanding as to exactly what a screenplay is and how it differs from other types of written work such as novels or plays. Because of this lack of understanding, a lot of people fail as scriptwriters.

This e-book attempts to help young writers become scriptwriters by explaining what a screenplay is and how to write them so that they can avoid many of the common pitfalls that befall many inexperienced writers and provide them with some of the tools that they will need to succeed.

One important piece of advice before you proceed: try to read as many scripts as possible before you start writing. This will give you a feel for what a screenplay actually is, as well as the general formatting standards used in the industry. Scripts can easily be downloaded from many websites or, if you would like some screenwriter’s commentary, you can buy published screenplay.biz/top-screenplays/" 786 target="_blank">screenplays from the bookstore.

YOU CAN’T TEACH SCREENWRITING!

“You can’t teach directing. There are no rules in making pictures. It’s just your particular instinctual feeling for what it is,” director George Sidney.

“You can’t teach directing!” director Nicholas Ray.

Don’t tell that to Martin Scorsese (who went to NYU Film School) or any of those great 1970s directors (the “Movie Brats”, the first generation of directors who went to film school) or anyone who has come after them. Though you can’t teach talent and you can’t teach art, you sure as heck can teach the craft side. Films were not ruined by USC and UCLA and NYU and any of the other film schools which have popped up over the years. Add to that all of those great online tutorials on editing and composition and use of angles and camera movement. Hey, I’m even one of the contributors to a series on the directing techniques of Alfred Hitchcock which is designed to teach filmmakers how to learn from the master. It seems you *can* teach techniques and craft. The result? There are good films made, and bad films made, and lots of films in between.

Same with screenplay.biz/top-screenplays/" 786 target="_blank">screenplays.

For as long as there have been people writing stories for film, there have been books designed to educate writers on the craft of screenwriting… and this book from 1920 proves that. And classes? A 1915 Classified Advert section of Motion Picture Magazine lists a bunch of correspondence courses on how to write movies! So we have all of those books which were published in 1913 plus these mail order classes and probably some actual classes with teachers which sprung up in the nineteen teens, yet none of those ruined movies or screenwriting or brought about the end of the world. The idea that education somehow kills creativity is silly, and seems to be in favor of ignorance. It also seems to be something that only happens in screenwriting…

When I first began writing my column for Script Magazine back in the early 1990s, my inspiration was Lawrence Block’s “nuts & bolts” (technique based) column in Writer’s Digest Magazine. That column taught me more about writing and how to do specific things in fiction than a lifetime of reading had. Much of what Block did was just point out things that I had noticed but hadn’t ever really thought about.

Even though we have been speaking for most of our lives, it was our grade school education which taught us how to structure sentences, so that we could write and speak with more clarity and more effectively. When you hear someone whose speech is full of double negatives and misused words, you label them uneducated. They have been speaking for most of their lives… but haven’t learned how to speak clearly. Same thing with any craft, including writing. For fiction writers, there have always been books and magazines and courses. Writer’s Digest Magazine first began publishing in 1920 and has been going strong ever since then. They also publish how to books for writers and novelists, and a quick search of Amazon returns 5,689 books! That’s from *one* publisher! So novelists seem to have no problem with books on how to write novels, or magazines with articles on how to write novels and short stories, or creative writing classes. So what’s up with screenwriters?