FilmmakerIQ.com

Writing Dialogue: Subtext Speaks

by Penny Penniston
The dialogue scene you’re struggling with? Take the page, crumple it into a paper ball and throw it into the trash can across the room. If you can make the shot, then you instinctively understand everything you need to know in order to write subtext.
Making the shot requires […]

Precious Screenwriter Geoffrey Fletcher

After graduating from Harvard University and NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, Geoffrey Fletcher spent nearly a decade writing thousands of unproduced script pages while working at temp jobs. In 2010, Fletcher’s first produced screenplay, Precious: Based on the Novel “Push” by Sapphire, was nominated for Writers Guild and Academy […]

The legality of using someone else’s fictional character?

Mark Galsor and Jesse Saivar tackle the question of what’s legal when dealing with fictional characters from other movies.

…Q: My company is producing a film which has a character that is taken from another very well known film. This new story has absolutely nothing to do with the […]

Nature as Mythic Storyteller

by Jennifer van Sijll
Films that last often have a mythic quality. Like great children’s stories, we consume these films as we do ageless fables. Unlike lesser stories, the lessons learned in these films carry a universal authority that seems to transcend man.
Biblical stories naturally achieve this mythic stature by virtue […]

Approaching Character: The Circle of Being

by Syd Field
Henry James, the great American novelist, in an essay entitled The Art of Fiction, asks a rhetorical question about the nature of character: “What is character,” he writes, “but the determination of incident. And what is incident but the illumination of character.” The key word of course, is […]

Writing to a Quota

by Gene Perret
Whenever I do interviews or seminars concerning my book, The New Comedy Writing Step by Step, interviewers and writers invariably ask “What’s the first thing a person should do if he or she wants to become a comedy writer?” My response is a two-parter and although it’s aimed […]

A Nineteenth-Century Guide to Screenwriting

by Michael Halperin
Victorians’ Secrets: A Nineteenth-Century Guide to Screenwriting, or How the Victorians Invented the Screenplay
It may seem peculiar in the 21st century to discuss screenwriting in the same breath as anything that had to do with the 19th century. What does one have to do with the other? After […]

Making Christian movies

Screenwriter John August offers a few points of advice to a reader asking a question about creating niche market films.

…What is your take on the Christian movie scene?
I am new to all of this and just finished up a treatment for a Christian movie. I have been doing some research […]

Documentaries and Films Based on True Life Stories

By Jon M. Garon
Gallagher, Callahan & Gartrell, PC
Despite the short-term glut in the market, documentaries have become an increasingly important part of the film industry as well as tools of public discourse. Since documentaries only rarely receive national theatrical distribution, audiences do not treat nontheatrical distribution as an aesthetic judgment […]

Why Story Structure is the Key to Success

by John Truby
There is a system of thought known as the As-If Philosophy. In a nutshell, the As-If Philosophy says: We know we will die, but we act “as if” we will live forever. The ironic result is that our lives are not nearly as fulfilling as they could be. […]