Archive for the 'How-To' Category

• 06.18.08 How to cut pages

  One page of screenplay translates to one minute of movie. Since most movies are a little under two hours long, most screenplays should be a little less than 120 pages.

  That’s an absurd oversimplification, of course.

  One page of a battle sequence might run four minutes of screen time, while a page of dialogue [...]

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• 05.12.08 How not to choose a movie title

  I’ve written about the importance of a good title before. A great script with a crappy title faces an uphill battle. That’s why I always make sure I have a title I like before I type “FADE IN,” even if I later change my mind.1

  So yes, I’d pay for a great title. Today’s LA [...]

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• 04.15.08 How to Meet

  I’m at the stage where I’ll hopefully be meeting with managers, agents, and producers. As a writer/director, what should I expect from these initial meetings and do you have any advice, or pitfalls to avoid?

  – Sam Los Angeles

  Meetings are a crucial part of a professional screenwriter’s job. Even when you’re not pitching a specific project, [...]

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• 03.10.08 How to explain quantum mechanics

  One of the more common challenges faced by a screenwriter is how to explain a difficult concept that’s important to your plot. For instance, in Jurassic Park, we need to understand how the dinosaurs came to be living on that island, so that when they start running amok, we’ll feel like we’re grounded in some [...]

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• 05.21.07 Title page trouble with Final Draft .pdfs

  Reader Josh C wrote in with one solution to a problem that’s been frustrating me for months. When you want to save a script as a .pdf, Final Draft won’t always include the title page. It’s frustratingly inconsistent. The obvious workaround is to save the title page as a separate file, which is [...]

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• 05.06.07 The perils of coincidence

  Like several million people worldwide, I saw Spider-Man 3 this past weekend. And like a substantial percentage of these viewers, I got frustrated by the number of unlikely coincidences in the movie.

  There’s nothing wrong with coincidence, per se. Almost every movie is going to have some incidents where one character just happens [...]

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• 04.16.07 How to introduce a character

  New Assistant Matt came into my office recently, a look of uneasy revelation in his eyes. He was holding the spec script a friend had sent him to read. “It doesn’t just get better, does it?” he asked. “If it’s bad on page six, it’s bad to the end.”

  I said yes, and assured [...]

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• 03.21.07 TV in movies

  I just finished writing a scene where a television news report was playing in the background and it reminded me how hard it is to get these moments right. Unless you’re literally having the characters stare at the TV set, you’re basically dividing the audience’s attention between two planes of information. If you [...]

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