Connections are great.  Impressing people at parties is great.  Being the most well-liked writer in town is great.  All of the...

A lot of aspiring screenwriters keep churning out self-indulgent scripts, thinking that their goal is to find one “enlightened” ...

Before I go on summer hiatus, here’s a round-up of some advice I really wish I’d gotten for a career in the arts…   You probab...

So folks, have you noticed that the advice has been getting a bit more hard-edged on this blog recently?   That’s because I’m si...

The Year: 1937  What the Nominees Were: The Awful Truth, Captains Courageous, Dead End, The Good Earth, In Old Chicago, The Life...

--> People don’t speak in complex sentences. This is not only because our minds aren’t quite fast enough to nest clauses on t...

Okay, to conclude this series the notes I most often give to first drafts, let’s look at some dialogue notes:   Too much how it is, not...

Okay, yesterday we talked about some of the general notes that I typically give when I read people’s first drafts.   Now let’s t...

We spent the last week and a half talking about how to re-write a script based on notes.   As part of that, I went back and re-r...

So now you have a list of all the changes you want to make, but you’re still not quite ready to dive into the rewrite.  Befo...

It’s important to get lots of notes piled up before you start fixing any of them individually.  The danger is that you’ll deal w...

I love it when I’m watching a troubled movie and I can actually see the studio’s notes being physically inserted into the text b...

When building a house, it’s not immediately obvious where the load-bearing walls are.  If the client comes in and says, “I want to make t...

--> You can only see one dimension of your own work.   If you want to know the shape of it, you have to seek out other eyes...