Screenwriting

Over at Tor.com, comic artist John Bonner published a simple and elegant strip explaining why one science fiction classic should never be turned into a Hollywood blockbuster. Follow this link to read the whole comic book review.

Check it out: “Every so often, comic artist John Bonner reviews books, audio, and more, then turns his reactions into a comic strip. You can check out many more of them at Bonner’s site and more of them here on Tor.com. He recently reread Arthur C. Clarke’s Rendezvous With Rama and tried to imagine how Hollywood would turn it into a film that held as much wonder as the book.”

What book should never be filmed? Share your thoughts in the comments, and we will publish your answers in a future post.

Launch a social media campaign that will build your brand and deliver results in our online Social Media Marketing Boot Camp starting June 7. Speakers include Abigail Cusick (Bravo Digital), Gregory Galant (Sawhorse Media), Alex Leo (Thomson Reuters Digital), Jim Tobin (Ignite Social Media), and many more. Read the reviews.

UK readers can buy a digital copy of the screenplay for Moonrise Kingdom, the upcoming Wes Anderson movie. The script was written by Anderson and Roman Coppola.

To help American readers prepare for the film, we’ve made a Spotify playlist of music from the soundtrack. It is filled with inspiring music to keep you writing all day. Click here to listen to the playlist (made with a help from The Playlist and Margot Stephenson).

The Bookseller has more: “[It] will include the complete text of the screenplay, a 2,000-word interview with Anderson, and 30 colour images from the film. It will be priced £4.99 and will be available across all devices.”

Amazon Studios will now accept pitches for comedy and children’s series, hoping to add one project a month to the company’s growing slate of projects to develop for its instant video viewers.

The company will pay creators $55,000 if they distribute the series, along with “up to 5 percent of Amazon’s net receipts from toy and t-shirt licensing, and other royalties and bonuses” for the work. If any children’s writers in the audience apply, keep us posted on your progress.

Here’s how to apply: “To submit, a project must have a five-page description, along with a 22-minute pilot script for comedies, or an 11-minute pilot script for children’s shows. Within 45 days of submission, Amazon Studios will either extend an option on the project for $10,000 or invite the creator to add the project to the Amazon Studios site. If a project is not optioned, creators may remove their idea from the Amazon Studios site or leave it to get community feedback.”

Journalist and screenwriter David Simon has published his first blog dispatch. His new site is called “The Audacity of Despair.”

After holding on to his website for many years, the creator of The Wire opened his site to share his online thoughts. In his introduction, Simon included a stern warning for all creators who write for free on the Internet. Check it out:

Anything that says content should be free makes it hard for all writers, everywhere.   If at any point in the future, this site offers more than a compendium of old prose work and the odd comment or two on recent events — if it grows in purpose or improves in execution — I might try to toss up a small monthly charge in support of one of the 501c3 charities that I soon hope to list in the How To Help section.  And yes, I know that doing so will lose a good many readers; but to me, anyway, the principle matters.  A free internet is wonderful for democratized, unresearched commentary, and it works well as a library of sorts for content that no longer needs a defense of its copyright.  But journalism, literature, film, music —  these endeavors need people operating at the highest professional level and they need to make a living doing what they do.  Copyright matters.  Content costs.

Read more

Disney’s John Carter has bombed at the box office, a blow for novelist Michael Chabon. The Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist had co-written the script for the film, achieving a 17-year-old dream to make a movie script about Mars.

We’ve embedded the trailer above–did you see the film? The New York Times compared the failure to the most famous movie flop in recent history, Ishtar.

Check it out: “John Carter, which cost an estimated $350 million to make and market, and was directed by Mr. Stanton, took in about $30.6 million at the North American box office, according to Rentrak, which compiles box-office data. That result is so poor that analysts estimate that Disney will be forced to take a quarterly write-down of $100 million to $165 million.”

Read more

In a video short about the scriptwriters working on the new TV show Touch, producer and writer Tim Kring revealed what he is looking for when hiring a screenwriter.

Kring created hit television shows like Crossing Jordan and Heroes, so his advice is valuable for all the aspiring screenwriters in the audience. If you want more writing advice, we interviewed 24 producer Howard Gordon about his new novel, Hard Target.

Check it out: “One of the things I set out to do in terms of finding writers for this show–I was very interested in writers who wanted to write short stories. In essence, short stories. So I was interested in writers that were really good at creating characters. Who really wanted to tell stories that were contained, and had a beginning, a middle and an end.” (Via Antoine Wilson)

Amazon Studios has awarded $1 million to Rob Gardner for his test movie, 12 Princesses–”family friendly musical tale about a love-struck farm boy in a magical world.” Follow this link to watch the 12 Princesses test film.

In addition, Matthew Gossett won Amazon’s $100,000 best script award for Origin of a Species, “a thriller about an ex-cop facing the greatest obstacle of his life.” Follow this link to read the script for Origin of a Species. Every year the  studio collects scripts and test movies from aspiring filmmakers, rewarding the best work with annual prizes.

Here’s more about the program, from the release: “Amazon Studios first launched in November of 2010, since then the Amazon Studios community has submitted more than 700 test movies and 7,000 scripts. In the last year, 39 scripts, test movies and trailers were highlighted in contests and awarded more than $1.9 million in cash prizes. Additionally, Amazon Studios recently attached prominent producers to three projects discovered through the community to help further their development process.”

Read more

For the second year in a row, the Writers Guild of America, West and the Writers Guild of America, East will celebrate new media writing at their annual awards ceremony, recognizing pioneers in the frontier of web video writing.

Below, we’ve linked to all the nominees in the Original New Media and Derivative New Media categories (including the Jack in the Box episode embedded above). Just click on the individual episode links to watch and explore this new kind of writing.

The winners will all be revealed on February 19, 2012 at simultaneous ceremonies in Los Angeles and New York. Here’s more about the awards: “For WGA awards purposes, a new media platform is defined as the Internet via a major video sharing site or unique URL, mobile devices such as cell phones or PDAs, or any other established new media platform.”

Read more

Twihards around the world will watch The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn Part 1 this weekend. In the latest installment of the blockbuster series, fans can expect to see a dramatic vampire wedding and eventful honeymoon.

We caught up with screenwriter Melissa Rosenberg to talk about writing scripts and the adaptation process. The highlights follow below…

Q: Describe the writing process when you are charged with adapting a book for a script versus writing an original script.
A: Each comes with its own challenges, but nothing is more difficult than starting with a blank page, as a writer does with an original project. I had the good fortune to start with an already fully fleshed out universe and mythology. But an adaptation comes with its own challenges: Honing a 500 page novel into a 110 page script. Externalizing very internal character arcs. Not pissing off the millions of fans around the world who don’t understand, or frankly care, that a book and a movie are very different animals, and that one can’t simply transfer the entire text into screenplay format and shoot it.

Read more

In April, 19,197 writers from all around the world scribbled 358,214 pages of scripts in the annual Script Frenzy writing marathon. In all, 2,204 writers completed the challenge and wrote 100 pages of scripted material.

To help all the aspiring screenwriters, comic book writers, and playwrights participating in the audience, we offered daily scriptwriting tips. Below, we’ve linked to 30 days’ worth of scriptwriting intelligence that works all year round…

1. Make an Outline First
2. Plotbot Streamlines Scriptwriting
3. Use a Screenwriting Glossary
4. Find the Scripwriters in Your Neighborhood
5. Watch a Great Screenplay

Read more