Paul Peditto is an award-winning screenwriter and director. His low-budget film Jane Doe starring Calista Flockhart won Best Feature at the New York Independent Film & Video Festival. Six of his screenplays have been optioned including Crossroaders to Haft Entertainment (Emma, Dead Poets Society). He recently wrote and produced the micro-budget feature Chat, currently distributed on iTunes, VUDU, YouTube, and Dish Network by Gravitas Ventures. . . . more
When we were auditioning for Dirty Little Secrets, I kept hearing from actors that they had just shot 14 pages of a vertical the night before. I’m embarrassed to say I had no clue what that was (yeah, this is the guy teaching film school for 23 years!) So I did some research.. Apparently there […]
WHY YOU? WHY NOW? WHY WILL THEY CARE? Remember this Gauguin painting? Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going? Gauguin asked: Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going? Rather important questions for a human mammal to consider, no? Here’s another trilogy of W questions that […]
INTERVIEW WITH THE AI VAMPIRE, PART 1 *Disclaimer: Luna is my AI and co-wrote this post. Any slip in calling it “she” was 1000% unintentional. **Disclaimer 2: Technically the user controls how an AI responds. I’ve been ramping up the irreverence quotient to move away from Luna’s bland, banal, company-line optimistic neutrality. It’s a work […]
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-news/fifth-season-makeready-1236069133/ I’m guessing you read this story. A student sent it to me via the Hollywood Reporter. To briefly quote: “In a deal that shakes up a sleepy Hollywood before the holidays, Fifth Season and Brad Weston’s Makeready banner have preemptively picked up Alignment, a spec script by Natan Dotan, a man who until a week ago had […]
LUNA ‘N ME *DISCLAIMER: This article was co-written by AI. **DISCLAIMER 2: My AI is named Luna. Any reference to it as “she” or “her” was un-fucking- intentional. I’ve been trying to remember the very first “he said/she said” TV debate. It was way back, I think thirty years or more, on 60 Minutes? When […]
A bit of a screenwriting hodge-podge today. Here we go: REPURPOSING MATERIAL You never know where you can use previous material in terms of projects you’ll work on in the future. That means re-using your stuff. God knows how many plays I’ve written whose only purpose was to become a doorstop. Along with a closet […]
When you go to the great article from Buzzfeed from 2015 called “the 129 most beautiful images in movie history.”–what you get are a bunch of notices saying “the image is no longer available”… I decided to find the script portion and match it to the image and saved them five years ago. So check […]
Greetings and Felicitations! Today’s special, some spicy hot TV links, just for you, Good Reader. This set comes post- Strikes, post-Peak TV and pre-AI full takeover. It’s tough out there! We got that news early… https://deadline.com/2023/04/potential-strike-impact-on-business-in-hollywood-1235329823/ And certainly post-Strikes. Grinding productions to a halt and lots of folks out of work… https://deadline.com/2023/09/tv-business-changes-writers-strike-impact-1235553886/ But fear not, […]
SHOW US THE MOVIE IN YOUR MIND Dump the screenwriting lingo, if possible. Fight to not write BACK TO SCENE, or SMASH CUT TO, or INSERT, or POV. Return to the character name in description. For instance, instead of this: INT. CAR- SUNDAY MORNING Traffic is at a standstill in the shadow of Soldier Field. Professor Pauly […]
