[***This article contains SPOILERS for seasons 1 & 2 of HBO’s “Succession.”]
There’s something odd about HBO’s hit television show “Succession.” It’s not the well-deserved accolades and prestigious nominations – that’s ...
You’ve got an idea for a screenplay. In fact, you’ve got three – plus the one your taxi driver is pitching you right now about space whales enmeshed in a bitter divorce.
All the ideas are good, but you’ve only got a limited amount of time ...
For those of us who grew up watching the original Jumanji (1995), it's hard not to feel nostalgia around the reboot that trades in a magical board game for a video game. In the original film, Robin Williams is at his peak as an actor, bringing ...
The amazing ripped-from-the-headlines film Bombshell tells the story of the women of took down Fox News CEO Roger Ailes (John Lithgow), specifically Gretchen Carlson (Nicole Kidman) and Megyn Kelly (Charlize Theron), after gross accusations of ...
The new movie Playing with Fire is an adorable family comedy that stars John Cena, John Leguizamo and Keegan-Michael Key as a crew of rugged firefighters who meet their match when attempting to rescue three rambunctious kids. The movie is funny, ...
Greener Grass is a surreal comedy of manners, set in a pastel-tinted suburbia where best friends Jill (Jocelyn DeBoer) and Lisa (Dawn Luebbe) do social acrobatics to passive-aggressively impress each other. When Jill notices that ...
For my new book, Sitcom Writers Talk Shop: Behind the Scenes with Carl Reiner, Norman Lear, and Other Geniuses of TV Comedy, I had the honor of interviewing over 50 successful television writers. I chose this book subject because my dad -- Herb ...
You might remember a news story back in 2007 where NASA astronaut Lisa Nowak drove from Houston to Orlando, wearing a diaper, with the alleged intent of kidnapping an Air Force Captain involved in a love triangle. This bizarre story was the ...
You’ve got a secret. Don’t you?
If you’re like most of us, you have a secret you don’t want anyone to know. Maybe you’re wearing mismatched socks, maybe you’re the lunchbox thief at work, or maybe you’re a hundred rats in a trench coat posing as a Brazilian spy. The point is: most of us know what it means to worry someone will find out our secret, leaving us vulnerable to rejection and shame.
The adorable new indie comedy Before You Know It stars Hannah Pearl Utt and Jen Tullock as sisters who find out their mother, played by Judith Light, isn’t dead, but alive and acting on a popular soap opera. The two women must overcome their ...
The Pokémon franchise has been around for over two decades. Trading cards and videogames featuring over 800 adorable “pocket monsters” as they’re called in Japan (the birthplace of Pokémon), have enchanted both kids and adults. More recently the augmented reality game Pokémon GO, played on a smart phone, has captivated the world and continues to increase in popularity.
One of the biggest mistakes screenwriters can make is overwriting their screenplay. Unless you’re Aaron Sorkin, whose screenplay for The Social Network was a whopping 164 pages with scenes lasting eight pages, you need to keep the dialogue, scene descriptions and page count as short and tight as possible. It’s worth repeating that film is a visual form of storytelling and we want to support the images with our screenplay, not the other way around. Here are a few guidelines to keep you from writing too much.
