Tag Archives: Screenwriting

Dan O'Bannon's Guide to Screenplay Structure: Inside Tips from the Writer of ALIEN, TOTAL RECALL and RETURN OF THE LIVING DEAD [Paperback]

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“Dan O’Bannon’s Guide to Screenplay Structure” often tends to read more like a memoir of a man who worked with the legendary late great director and writer, and less like an instructional book. Author Dan O’Bannon is able to build a book that’s outside the norm of your typical screenwriting book. Author O’Bannon stresses the importance of writing a book that stands out from the shelves of screenwriting books, and while demonstrating how he sought to break the formula of screenwriting in his days of making movies, he tries to break the formula of screenwriting books in general.

Much of “Dan O’Bannon’s Guide to Screenplay Structure” is based around Dan O’Bannon’s writing experience with screenplays, and co-author Matt Lohr’s experience working with Dan O’Bannon and how he changed his life. In the process, author Dan O’Bannon hopes to change the aspiring screenwriter’s life by assisting them in breaking free from formulas and clichés and attempting to re-mold stories no matter how old hat they may be. O’Bannon took what were traditionally cheesy and clunky premises and with his own sense of style and unique storytelling, reshaped them in to classics and hit films.

Author Dan O’Bannon hopes to instill this upon the reader by exploring all angles of creative writing and what you can hope to learn from him by his anecdotes and thoughts on storytelling in general.

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Coffee Break Screenwriter: Writing Your Script Ten Minutes At A Time (Paperback)

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Pilar Alessandra is thinking about the busy writer, the writer who doesn’t have time to sit down every day and write their novels or screenplays. Some of us actually have a day job to pull, but also have the aspirations to write a screenplay. Too often have I’ve heard someone who aspired to create their own screenplay but just didn’t have the time or drive. Alessandra takes that aspiration and fuels it with the ability to write a screenplay in ten minutes at a time. Not only that, but she also teaches you to micro-manage your tasks and create small windows of opportunities to write your scripts within the ten minutes that can guarantee you a perfect script you always envisioned from the get go.

Where to go from there that’s up to you, but getting the script done is a step forward. Picking up the book will cost you ten minutes and fifteen bucks, matched with the ten minutes reading each chapter, along with the ten minutes writing the script after reading the chapters for ten minutes and you have a mathematical formula I couldn’t possibly figure out but is nonetheless an approach toward accomplishing the goal to get a script done.

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Anticipating the Bang: Hitchcock – A Slice of Appreciation

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One angry father wrote to the brilliant director, saying his daughter had not bathed since viewing a bathtub drowning in the 1954 French film “Les Diaboliques,” and now she was refusing to shower after seeing Janet Leigh’s character slashed to death in “Psycho.” Hitchcock responded, “Send her to the dry cleaners.” – The Secrets of “Psycho’s” Shower Scene, Salon.com

“Always make the audience suffer as much as possible.” – Alfred Hitchcock

My obsession with Hitchcock was not one that blossomed in a split second. As someone exposed to the art of filmmaking and movies as a whole from a very early age, it took much time and patience to come around to appreciating folks like Stanley Kubrick, David Lean, William Wyler and Alfred Hitchcock. As a person who grew up in front of the television watching slasher films and zombie movie, it required some effort to sit down in front of a television screen to soak in the nuances and undertones of “Psycho” that would soon become one of my favorite horror films of all time. As a horror movie it’s without a doubt a keen exploration in the unending madness and reign of terror of a man forever damaged by his mother during and after her death. But as a film it’s so intricately made and so diversely entertaining that it’s almost impossible not to enjoy it. As a piece of horror filmmaking, Hitchcock made a movie that’s the epitome of the convention breaking genre masterpiece.

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The Virgin's Promise: Writing Stories of Feminine Creative, Spiritual and Sexual Awakening

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the-virgins-promise.1_largeThrough the respective teachings and psychology of Jung and Freud and many others, author Kim Hudson creates a rather astonishing look at the breakdown and dissection of the virgin role in popular fiction and how the role applies to the order of storytelling and screenplays. For those interested, this is strictly a book for the writers, primarily the screenwriter who would want a second glance and exploration in to the virginal figure of lore and myth that involves the female virgin that forms a quest of exploration through hardships.

While the male virgin is more based around realistic hardships that also lead to a similar quest of exploration. The way author Hudson masterfully breaks down the elements of the character and the models of archetypes and molds, she manages to explain just about every popular tale in pop culture where our virginal hero is one who is guided on a quest and led through a journey of awakening aided by the coward i.e. “Star Wars.”

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Save the Cat! Goes to the Movies [Paperback]

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9781932907353_p0_v1_s260x420What’s a MITH? Not a myth, you moron, a MITH.

Well, that’s something you’ll have to find out for yourself. I had to after reading “Save the Cat! Goes to the Movies” and I wasn’t sure I’d get anything out of it.

I mean on the cover it seems cutesy, but the introduction almost suggests it’s going to tell us something we already know. Does it? Well, upon reading the first chapter, I found I couldn’t stop reading, and that’s because Blake Snyder does tell us stuff we already know, but then… he surprises you too.

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