“… This is not about who showed what when. And this is not about writing a sex scene for the sake of prurient interests. This is about rising above those oh-so-clichéd scenes of two characters meeting and having mind-blowing sex. This is about how a sex scene can have so much more depth than that, […]

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“… In last week’s issue of The New Yorker, writer Nick Paumgarten writes a trenchant and sobering article about the totality of the financial meltdown.
“In just one paragraph he manages to summarize about as succinctly and completely as I have read anywhere, a description of the crisis and its multiple causes.
“If written in verse, it […]

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“… If applying specific terminology or methodology feels cumbersome - step away from the book and feel your way in more organically. If you get hung up on screenwriting labels and fixated on them (I seriously got really hung up on the terminology of the Hero’s Journey for awhile there) then that’s a sign that […]

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“… I’ve spent the past eight days analyzing what’s working and not working in four movies-to-be.  They were each of them comedies and/or romantic comedies, and weirdly, they were each new drafts that were more dramedy than comedy, thus sharing as a group the predominate note of: make this funnier!
“Apparently America wants to laugh (Can […]

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“… Around May last year, various television broadcasting companies started to realise HEROES was doing rather well. They realised this mainly because commissioning editors had started saying things like ‘That Heroes thing is doing rather well. Why can’t you come to us with something like that?’ And I realised this because that’s what a couple […]

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“… After a while you find that something always seems to come along when you really need it. Maybe it won’t be the job you really wanted, but just as you’re starting to feel the cold fangs of panic sink deep into your chest, the phone will ring, and all is suddenly right with the […]

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“… Created in 1990 in partnership with the Writers Guild of America West (WGAW), the Disney|ABC Television Writing Fellowship is based in Los Angeles and is widely recognized as one of the entertainment industry’s most coveted writing programs….
“Fellows become employees of Disney | ABC Television Group and will be paid a weekly salary … The […]

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“… In my travels, I often find myself talking to aspirants; people who want to get into the writing room and want to work in TV but … aren’t sure. The worst kind of “aren’t sure,” is the person who seems to have a job on the hook. Maybe they’ve made a connection with the […]

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The Cannes Festival opens today with “Up,” a 3D animated feature from Disney-Pixar.
“This is the first time in the history of the Cannes Festival that a 3D cartoon is being screened as the keynote motion picture at the opening ceremonies, a sign that animation is coming into its own. Up, the tenth movie produced by […]

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Jean-Claude Lewis has been hired to rewrite the script for Red Pony Productions’ upcoming movie “Blue Sky.” Congratulations Jean-Claude!
More details at Screenwriting BUZZ …

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Winners of the 2009 Tribeca Film Festival Awards were announced earlier this month.

Go To Site …

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The schedule for the 11th Annual Screenwriting Conference in Santa Fe to be held Tuesday, May 26, through Sunday, May 31, 2009, is available here.
Go To Site …

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“… Working with and teaching filmmakers all over the country, I am repeatedly astonished by how many people pursuing a career in Hollywood never bother to visit a movie theater. Or when they do, it’s to see some classic film from the forties, or something in a foreign language.
“There’s nothing wrong with visiting art houses, […]

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Peter Knegt at indieWIRE covered a Tribeca Film Festival panel discussion recently that “… examined the emergence of innovative new strategies for marketing as well as digital distribution, and how there are now multiple ways for filmmakers to control what happens to their film. Six industry insiders gathered at the School of Visual Arts Theater […]

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“… Whenever I send in a new script, I always do a ‘white space alert’ – just taking a long view of every page of my script to see if there’s too much black and not enough white. Big blocks of dialogue. Chunks of description. Excess wordiness. All of it has to go. And even […]

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