I’ve only just started reading Danny Rubin’s How to Write Groundhog Day, but it’s promising enough that I think many screenwriters will want to take a look at it this weekend.
It’s available on Kindle and Nook, on sale for $9.99 today.
Rubin walks the reader through the genesis of the idea — and all the other ideas competing for his attention. The ebook includes a lot of marked-up pages from his initial notes and drafts. Most of these are readable on a traditional Kindle, but it’s one of the rare titles that actually works better on an iPad.
Groundhog Day is nearly 20 years old, but still feels very contemporary in terms of high-concept comedies, with its simple-but-clever premise and curmudgeonly fish-out-of-water protagonist. My only caution to readers is that even though we keep making variations of this movie (c.f. Click, Liar Liar, A Thousand Words), the film industry itself has changed, so descriptions of the business and process might not reflect current reality.