Good Boys is a hilarious comedy about three sixth grade boys who ditch school and embark on an journey to return their father’s precious drone after it’s stolen by some teenage girls. Part Stand by Me, part Ferris Bueller’s Dayoff, it’s probably the funniest movie of the summer.
Wine Country is a new comedy movie about a group of longtime girlfriends who go to Napa for the weekend to celebrate Rebecca’s (Rachel Dratch) 50th birthday. The film also stars female comedy legends Amy Poehler, Tina Fey, Ana Gasteyer and Maya Rudolph. Directed by Poehler, from a script written by Emily Spivey and Liz Cackowski, the film is based on a real-life wine country trip some of the actresses attended a few years ago. Co-writer Liz Cackowski opens up about the real-life trip that inspired the film, her time writing for Saturday Night Live, and of course, wine.
If you were a fan of edgy, youth-driven literature in the 1990s, you may remember books like Sarah or The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things by an author named JT LeRoy. Jeremiah Terminator LeRoy quickly became a literary sensation. But his story, like many stories that make it to film, is lovingly filled with both fantasy and fraud.
When you think of poet Emily Dickinson, it’s likely you think of a hysterical Victorian recluse who locked herself in her bedroom and went to the grave without sharing her trove of poetry. The new film Wild Nights with Emily, however, paints a very different portrait of America’s favorite poetess. I sat down with the film’s writer/director Madeleine Olnek to find out how history got Dickinson’s story so very wrong.
In 1993, I was invited to a party in Beverly Hills at 10050 Cielo Drive, a dead-end street roughly half way up Benedict Canyon. I knew full well it was the so-called “Sharon Tate Mansion,” where the Charles Manson “family” brutally murdered Sharon Tate and three other unfortunate souls.
When you’re a creative person, it’s important to find a community that supports your efforts, especially when it comes to filmmaking. By definition, there is no more collaborative venture than making a film because it truly takes a village to act in, produce and finance. For filmmaker Linda Palmer, she’s found that supportive village right here in the ScreenwritingU community.
Even if you haven’t seen the film The Wife starring Glenn Close, you probably know that Close is cleaning up this awards season having won both the Golden Globe and SAG Award for Best Actress. She’s also nominated for her seventh Oscar for playing Joan Castleman, a wife who must face her life choices when her husband Joe (Jonathan Pryce) is set to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature. Soon, however, the question of who’s really the literary talent in the marriage begins to plague the long-married couple. Secrets, repressed emotions and anger all begin to bubble to the surface.
“Film’s thought of as a director’s medium because the director creates the end product that appears on the screen. It’s that stupid auteur theory again, that the director is the author of the film. But what does the director shoot—the telephone book? Writers became much more important when sound came in, but they’ve had to put up a valiant fight to get the credit they deserve.” – Billy Wilder
On the Basis of Sex is a biopic about Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg written by first-time screenwriter Daniel Stiepleman. It’s pretty rare that the subject of a biopic will give notes to the screenwriter, but this case was special. Stiepleman is actually Ginsburg’s nephew. His mother is Ginsburg’s husband Marty’s sister, so I asked him what it like having a groundbreaking Justice in the family.
ScreenwritingU sat down with Australian filmmaker Joel Edgerton to get his take on this emotional story. He writes and directs this film based on the memoir of Garrad Conley. In his early 20s, Conley personally experienced abuse at the hands of Love in Action, the fundamental Christian program for gays. Edgerton himself plays Victor Sykes, lead counselor at the gay conversion ministry who’s clearly in over his head.
As storytellers, many of us frame our screenplays around The Hero’s Journey architecture, where the hero goes on a dangerous quest and returns forever changed. In many ways, the new film First Man, about astronaut Neil Armstrong, is the ultimate hero’s journey – he spends years sacrificing as he prepares to go to the moon, then, despite setbacks that are both scientific and personal, he makes the perilous journey to the moon – a huge victory for himself and for humanity – and returns home triumphant.
We sat down with Goddard to find out what inspired him to make Bad Times at the El Royale and get tips on writing a screenplay with multiple protagonists.
