What is an action line? New screenwriters are taught to write action lines as: Who is in the shot and what is happening, now. What is the camera seeing, now. But when you study the pros you’ll find they do more than this. Pros cheat. They do it all the time. How do they do […]
Bet that title got your attention…beats freakin’ Plot Points! Today we’re gonna continue our script/clips series for Great Scenes with, YES!, the scene where mom (Joan Allen) masturbates for the first time. I’ll show the script here and you can go down to the YouTube video below (and thanks to Cyrille from France for preserving […]
So I’ve talked a bit about character introductions and arcs, but what happens when a character isn’t even a person? What about when the living characters are defined by their environment and the locations themselves become a character in the movie? I want to show how this is handled in some well known, and not-so […]
Writing an action movie? Let’s do some work today on action sequences by studying Tarantino. Yeah I know, I’m on record as not worshiping at his alter like so many of my Columbia kids. There’s much to love about some of his stuff– Pulp Fiction, sure…that staggering opening set piece in Inglorious Basterds, how y’gonna beat […]
I’ve done a few of these Top 10 psycho scenes for Script Gods. Most of them, notably the Fargo wood chipper scene and Barton Fink’s Madman Mundt’s finale, or the American Psycho “Ever listen to Hughie Lewis And The News?” Paul Owen scene–are FULLY creatures of each director’s blackly comedic imagination. They are great because […]
