Today I’d like to riff off something I did with a series of post on the Buzzfeed article on the “129 most beautiful frames in the movies”. This time it’s a great Screen Crush article on The Long Take. I wondered what the scripts would look like for these famous long take action sequences. Academic […]
Last night teaching at Chicago Filmmakers we were looking over a script loaded with action line verbs like she realizes and he thinks, which, of course, triggered the Unfilmables debate. It always does. The student pointed out several professional screenplays that broke the rules. Being a rule breaker from way back, I was aware of […]
We recently went over Action Line POV looking at My Best Friend’s Wedding. How do the pros infuse their own personality into action lines? Remember, action lines are supposed to be what the camera is seeing now. The pros cheat this, big time. They infuse the objective with the subjective–meaning their own writing style. With […]
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 […]
All right, action fans! Let’s pick up where we left off with action sequence stylings that would make Tarantino or Shane Black envious! You can’t steal them outright, but let me remind you, Good Reader–while there are most definitely copyright laws for content, there is no copyrighting a style, how words are laid out on […]
