Hello, I'm Jacob Krueger, and this is the Write Your Screenplay podcast. This week, we are going to be looking at Alex Garland's new film, Civil War. Civil War explores what happens when we become polarized, stop looking at each other as human beings and instead view one another as enemies. Structurally, Alex Garland’s Civil War is essentially built like Apocalypse Now, with a touch of The Last of Us.  But in the case of Civil War, the characters’ journey into the “heart of darkness” takes place in an America on the brink of collapse, rather than the Vietnam War. The zombie-like tones of Civil War won’t come as a surprise to those who know Alex Garland's work. He wrote 28 Days Later.  We're going to be talking a bit about the structure of Civil War and it’s similarities to the structure of Apocalypse Now and The Last of Us. We’ll also look at key differences in the socio-political implications of building a war movie by contrasting Civil War with Top Gun: Maverick. (Check out my Top Gun: Maverick Podcast). One of the interesting choices that Alex Garland makes in the writing of Civil War is not to tell you what the hell is going on. We only have snippets of what's happened.  We know that a president has stayed in office for three terms against the will of the American people, or at least against the Constitution.  We don't know exactly how or why that happened. There's virtually zero exposition but we know that has happened. When we first meet the President, played by Nick Offerman, we suspect he’s making a “disinformation” speech about a victory tha doesn’t reflect what is really going on.  We know that in this world, in Washington, D.C., the press are shot on sight. We know that the press are seen as enemy combatants by the President.  That is all we know. We don't know the President's politics. We don't know if he is left or if he is right or if he’s somewhere in between. We don't know if he is a fascist. We don't know if he is a communist. We don't know anything about his point of view except that he has violated the constitution and he is against journalism. He is against the truth coming out. We know that America has fractured and that some kind of alliance called the Western Forces (WF) has been created in opposition to The President. In our society this seems like an impossible alliance. It's between California and Texas. And quite frankly, we don't know what that alliance is about. We don't know their politics. We don't know what they believe in.  We don't know if they're liberal or conservative, Democrat or Republican, communist or fascist. But we know that they are fighting against the President, trying to retake the country. Alex Garland has come under some fire for his depiction of the Western Forces– the fictional alliance of California and Texas– in Civil War. Some critics have essentially said “This is crazy. This is just ridiculous whitewashing. California and Texas- they're so far apart politically. This choice to imagine them as a combined force is just Alex Garland obscuring of the actual political message to avoid offending anyone.”  And if you've listened to my Top Gun: Maverick podcast, you know that that's something that I criticized that film for. In Top Gun: Maverick, like in Civil War, the nature of the political conflict, who the bad guys are,

As many of you know, every Thursday Night, we host a free screenwriting class called Thursday Night Writes. A recent installment with Steve Molton was so groundbreaking that we decided to release it as a podcast for our whole community. Enjoy! Jake: Hello, everybody, welcome to Thursday Night Writes! Our guest tonight is Steve Molton.  Steve is a former HBO and Showtime executive, Columbia film school professor, and Pulitzer nominee. He wrote a movie with Frank Pugliese of House of Cards. He wrote limited series for Showtime. He has worked in television, novels, nonfiction, and film. He’s even penned an opera!  He's also just one of the great human beings in the world and a good friend. We're so lucky to have him back on our team, mentoring students in our ProTrack program and offering a new TV Drama Writers Room. Steve and I are going to be exploring the concept of internal antagonists in screenwriting and the role they play in your character’s journey.  Often, when we're thinking about the “antagonist” or the opposing forces in our script, we think about the “bad guy” or the “obstacle.” But today, we're going to focus on internal obstacles, things that get in the way of our characters on the inside, and the things that get in the way of us as writers on the inside.  Steve: Part of the reason I wanted to do this subject tonight is that, having walked the picket line in the last year, we were besieged by the notion that somehow machines will be able to replicate what we do. But as some great person had written on his sign while picketing, "Computers can't have childhood trauma."  We are still human beings. The fact that we live and die, that we are shaping the world and must still shape the world, sometimes in ways to protect ourselves, requires us to go really deep. So that's what we’ll do today, working from the inside out. I've been teaching at the French National Film School, doing a masterclass there for producers. These weren't people who were naturally thinking like writers, although they were storytellers of a kind.  I pulled together notes from a series of talks I did there on the seven forms of conflict.  There are seven forms of conflict that drive just about every great story. Writers have probably heard about the seven forms of conflict. We forget them because they're so common and ubiquitous. They are:  1) The self versus the self 2) Self versus another  3) Self versus society  4) Self versus technology  5) Self versus nature  6) Self versus the supernatural  7) Self versus God, fate, or destiny The first three of these are present in almost all strong movies and stories. The last four are genres unto themselves, but they often include those three forms as well. For example, you might find the self versus the self, the self versus the other, and versus society within a movie about the self versus technology. These conflicts are ubiquitous and they flow into each other. Jake: A question popped up in the chat. What's the difference between supernatural and God? Steve: That is a fantastic question.  Self versus the supernatural involves conflicts with inexplicable, otherworldly phenomena that defy scientific explanation.

This week, we are going to be talking about Poor Things, by Yórgos Lánthimos and Tony McNamara.  You could describe Poor Things as a hyper-sexualized, dark, feminist, Forrest Gump. But what is the movie actually saying?  How does Yórgos Lánthimos get away with such wildness while still telling a story that is both interesting and commercially successful? How does he both break the boundaries of what we typically think a movie or a screenplay could be, but also invite viewers in? We’re not only going to be exploring the theme, structure and character development of Poor Things, but also connecting these concepts to profound questions about what holds us back as writers, and as human beings, from expressing our pure voices.  Along the way we'll look at some of the countless movies that are referenced and twisted in the structure of Poor Things, from Frankenstein to The Wizard of Oz, and hopefully simplify this tremendously complex screenplay by exploring the core thematic oncepts that underlie its structure. What is Poor Things actually about? What does the story mean? How did Yórgos Lánthimos and Tony McNamara build it as a screenplay? And what can we learn from Poor Things as screenwriters?  The weirder your movie is, the more you need to understand what you are building. The more complicated your movie is, the simpler its premise needs to be. Where does this begin in Poor Things? Like all screenwriting, it begins with character. In Poor Things, it begins with Emma Stone's character, Bella. In order for you to understand the premise of Poor Things, I'll need to give you a couple of little spoilers from the beginning to the middle. I'm not going to spoil it all the way to the end without first warning you. So here's the premise: God, or Godfrey (Willem Dafoe's character) has attempted to create a woman who has no shame, no past, no history, no external or internal factors standing in the way of just being herself.  He has attempted to make a girl who is pure voice.  God is the product of horrific experiments that his father performed upon him. Unlike Bella, he bears the scars of his history on his face and has spent his whole life trying to rationalize them. Bella, on the other hand, bears none of the scars of her history. She is coming at the world with fresh eyes. How has she been created? I am going to spoil it a little bit more now. A woman has killed herself for reasons we don't know. Even God, (the character), doesn't know. She has hurled herself from a bridge in the opening frames of the movie. And, as we'll find out later, the stories God has told Bella about her past aren’t true. He’s made up a false history to preserve her innocence and sense of herself. The truth is that God, a brilliant scientist and doctor, discovered the body of the suicidal, pregnant woman from the beginning of the movie, and he has implanted the baby's brain into the body of the woman.  Poor Things is a Frankenstein story, inside out.  In this case, the scientist, God, as Bella calls him, is a long, suffering, twisted, deformed creator, who carries the wounds of his tortured past. He's the one who looks like Frankenstein.  And Frankenstein's monster looks like Emma Stone. She looks like perfection, or, to quote the film's ironic joke, like " what a very pretty retard."  And she has no past. Bella has been brought up inside a world that has been cultivated...

This week, we're going to discuss Beef, a fabulous limited series created by Lee Sung Jin.We will use Beef to explore two related and extremely valuable concepts for screenwriters: Game and Escalation.  Game and Escalation are concepts that we're taking from improv. But as we look at the screenplay for Beef, you’ll see that the same tools used for improv can also be hugely valuable for screenwriters. Usually, when we think about Game, we think about it as the funny thing in the scene.  If you're doing something funny, they teach you in improv to do it again. That becomes the Game.  And Escalation means you don't just want to do it exactly the same way again. You want to do it in a slightly different way that escalates it. You want to keep on building up, up, up, up.  Now, many people think of Game as a comedy thing.It’s obvious how you might Game if you're writing a sitcom or a sketch. But what if you’re writing a drama? What if you’re doing a historical epic? Do you still need Game? Does Game matter outside of comedy?  I'd like to suggest that dramas, and limited series like Beef, which mix dramatic and comedic elements, have Game, too, and that understanding Game is vital to writers in all genres.  Game is also part of the way the audience tells themselves the story of who the characters are, of what's really happening in the story, of how the character is changing or not changing, and of how the character is relating to other characters. Game and Structure are connected. When you become a master of Game, you also become a master of Structure. When you become a master of Escalation, you also become a master of Structure. So, we will be talking about all of that and more in this podcast. Note that there will be a couple of spoilers for Beef. But we’re going to limit most of our conversation to the way the pilot is structured so that we can start to understand how Game works and how Escalation works. And I’ll warn you before we get to any major spoilers for the rest of the season… Now, before we get rockin', there's some stuff I want to talk to you about that is coming up at the studio that is hugely valuable to you. So, if you enjoy this podcast, check us out live every Thursday night for free. We have a wonderful class with hundreds of writers from all over the world called Thursday Night Writes. So I'd like to invite you to join our community, where you can learn for free from me and top members of the Jacob Krueger Studio faculty.  We discussed the idea that Game is a concept taken from improv. If you are a screenwriter, if you've taken any of our classes, you know that we integrate many concepts from improvisation into screenwriting.  There’s a good reason for that: because most of what we are doing as screenwriters is improvising on the page. We are faced, just like an improv troupe, with a blank page. We might have a sense of who our characters are, but we also might not. We might have, like an improv troupe, just a suggestion, a word, an idea, a premise, a hook…  maybe just an image that came into our minds. We have the barest sense of who are characters are.  The truth is, even if we've done a whole outline and think we have figured out everything,

If you’ve watched the first episode of the Lessons from Sundance podcast, you know that JKS faculty member Christian Lybrook and I recently recorded a series of short form videos for our social media (@thejkstudio) about what you can learn as screenwriters from the films, lectures and documentaries we saw at Sundance. We’ve now compiled them into this two part podcast series, which we think is going to be tremendously valuable for all of you.In this second installment, we’re going to have a treat for you documentary filmmakers, looking at four vastly different documentaries, Nocturnes, (which won Sundance’s World Cinema Documentary Special Jury Award for Craft), Every Little Thing, Black Box Diaries and Eno.If you’re not a documentarian, don’t worry, we’ll be gleaning lessons from the structure of these films that will be valuable for screenwriters and TV writers of any genre.We’ll also sharing some insights from lectures by Jonathan Nolan and Steven Soderbergh on the art of storytelling, the importance of theme, and the use of research in scriptwriting, as well as script analysis of two very unusual action comedy features, Thelma and Kidnapping, Inc, with a really cool discussion about the use of humor to tackle serious issues in your screenwriting.We’re going to learn about alternative forms of structure, how to build through big and small choices, how to use obstacle and threat in your writing, how to write believable antagonists, how to listen to your characters, how to find a balance between the subconscious and the conscious mind, how to find your voice as a writer, how to find your hook and your take on source material, how to develop hot relationships in screenwriting, form as function in screenwriting, how to use theme, and much much more.There will be some minimal spoilers, but we’ll keep you posted between each analysis so you can skip ahead if you want no spoilers at all.And if you’re listening instead of watching and the sound is a bit different than normal, know that’s because each video was recorded live from a unique location at Sundance to give you a feeling of the festival.We talk a lot in our classes about character driven structure. But how do you find structure when writing movies that aren’t driven by traditional characters, or by characters at all? Let’s jump in and find out with our discussion of Nocturnes, by Anirban Dutta and Anupama Srinivasan and Every Little Thing by Sally Aitkin. Nocturnes and Every Little Thing: Approaches To Structure Jacob Krueger:   We're going to talk about two different documentaries in a way that will be valuable for you, whether you're a documentarian or writing a feature film or TV show. The two documentaries are Nocturnes, which is a beautiful meditation about moths shot in the Eastern Himalayas, and Every Little Thing, which is a story about a woman in Los Angeles who is rescuing thousands of hummingbirds.  These two documentaries are fascinating, because they're built in the exact opposite way. And we’re going to be exploring how much your take and your premise matters in building a script. Every Little Thing, even though it's actually about hummingbirds, is built around a traditional character journey. There is a particular hummingbird named Cactus.  Christian Lybrook: Oh, poor Cactus. Cactus was found with barbs sticking out of her chest. A tiny, baby bird. And Terry, the hummingbird whisperer, it is her goal to get Cactus back out into the world.

Jacob Krueger Studio faculty member Christian Lybrook and I attended Sundance 2024 together, leading to this new series of short videos about the films we saw there, and what screenwriters could learn from them. These videos were first released on our social media during the festival (follow @thejkstudio for future updates). The response was so strong, and the lessons so valuable that we’ve compiled them into a two part podcast series, built around common themes. Whether you’ve seen these films or not, there are so many lessons you can benefit from through these discussions, including how to lean into the emotional logic of your structure, how to control tone, how to surprise genre expectations, how to get the most out of your first image, how to build central metaphors and image systems, how to build mirrors for your main characters, how to write movies about profound socio-political issues, how to build structure through emotional needs and much more…In this episode, we’ll be looking at feature films Your Monster, Layla, A Different Man, and Reinas, as well as Sundance’s Grand Jury Prize winning documentary Porcelain War.  And for those of you listening rather than viewing… if you notice the sound is a little different in each of these podcasts, it’s because we’re trying to bring the Sundance Experience to you at home, by recording in lots of different locations– from the beloved Egyptian Theatre on main street to the Gondola at the Park City Mountain.The first film we’re going to be discussing is Your Monster, a sweet little Beauty and the Beast inspired– well let’s call it a “Romantic Comedy”-- with some other slightly less expected genre elements that we’re not going to give away. This is a film that moved, inspired, surprised and delighted us. And there’s so much you can learn from it as a screenwriter about leaning into the emotional (rather than the rational) logic of your screenplay, navigating toward the fun, establishing the tone of your screenplay, and squeezing out all the juice from a mash of different genre elements. It’s not yet in theatres, so we’re only going to talk about the opening sequence up to the inciting incident, so there will be minimal spoilers.  Your Monster written and directed by Caroline Lindy Jacob Krueger: Your Monster by Caroline Lindy is a relationship story about a girl and the monster who lives in her closet. One of the things that's really beautiful about this movie is it’s not just about her love story with a monster, it's really about a love story with herself. Christian Lybrook:  It's a “Beauty and the Beast” story. Caroline Lindy takes a story that we're all familiar with and she starts to spin it, looking at it from all different angles: You think it's going to go this way? I'm going to give you something else. And that's a great exercise for us to do as screenwriters.  Your Monster shows screenwriters the value of leaning into the emotional logic of the story, and navigating toward the fun, rather than getting caught up in the details. Jacob Krueger: The film primarily leans into the emotional logic of the relationship between the main character, Laura, and the monster in her closet, rather than getting caught up in the “logical logic.” It’s magical realism. There are a lot of elements in the film where, if you get into your logical brain, you could say, Well, hold on a second, how did she get into the theater? How did she get into the audition? How did these things happen?  And yet, as you're watching the film, you don't care at all.  Christian Lybrook: My analytical brain, it's loud in my head. And those moments, they did pop up. But the emotional storyline is so powerful that it just sort of dissipat...

 Past Lives: Genre & Premise This week, we are going to be analyzing the screenplay for Past Lives, written and directed by Celine Song. We'll use Past Lives to explore the intersection of two key concepts: Premise and Genre.  We'll look at the places where premise and genre meet and how they come together. And we’ll use that intersection to help you understand how to develop ideas, how to develop premises, how to develop the thing that's going to differentiate your script from other movies within your genre.  Further on in this transcript, there will be some spoilers for Past Lives. If you've seen the movie, you know that the whole thing builds to the ending, and you cannot understand the screenplay for Past Lives without understanding the ending. So I will warn you before I spoil it, but I am going to eventually spoil the ending of this movie if you have not yet seen it. Let’s start our screenplay analysis of Past Lives by defining some terms: What is genre and what is premise?  We’ll start with genre.  If you're old enough to remember Blockbuster Video, then you know that genre is what you and your partner fight about when trying to pick a movie.  One of you is in the Drama aisle, looking for a beautiful little drama. The other is in the Action aisle, looking for a really exciting action movie.   “Let’s watch Die Hard,” you try to convince your partner, “it’s a… love story!”“How about Remains of the Day,” they try to convince you, “it’s a… war movie!” You're trying to convince each other that your emotional needs, the feelings that you're coming to the movie for, are going to be met. That's actually what genre is. Genre is a feeling. Even back in the Blockbuster era, genre was very hard to categorize.  It’s 1987. You’re looking for, say, First Blood. You look all through the Action shelves and you can’t find it. Finally, you ask at the desk and the dude says, “It’s in Drama.”  Even back in the day, when genres used to be really simple, it was still hard to categorize things. There's always crossover. A movie is not just one thing. So, it has always been hard to label movies as one single genre.  Today, Netflix has something like 270,000 tags that they use to try to define a movie’s genre. So we think we know what genre is, but we kindof… don’t.  We're going to a western, so we expect to see Cowboys… but Star Wars is a western, right? Or is it a sci-fi? We think we know what genre is, but it actually becomes really hard to define. As soon as you put a label on it, you realize you're not completely right And today, we have movies that are a mix of genres, really interesting mixes of genres– in ways they weren’t mashed up back in the Blockbuster days. So that means, in today’s market, it's even more complicated to ask, “What genre is this film?”  So I want to give you a way of thinking about genre that is going to simplify it for you. A way to get past the confusing labels.  Genre is a mixture of the feeling that the audience wants when they go to see your movie and the expectations they have of what's going to give them that feeling.   Those expectations are based on other movies that gave them that feeling.  Feeling is the only reason anyone ever tunes into a TV show or goes to see a movie. We go to see movies because we want a specific feeling...

Dream Scenario: Passive Main Characters This week, we are going to be talking about the new Nicolas Cage movie, Dream Scenario, by writer and director Kristoffer Borgli. This will be a fascinating discussion, because we're going to talk about the strength of the screenplay, as well as the screenplay’s weaknesses.  We’ll use the strengths and weaknesses of Dream Scenario’s screenplay to understand one of the most important concepts in screenwriting: the difference between writing passive and active main characters.  Most screenwriters think their characters are active. But the truth is, we're often writing passive main characters without realizing why the character is coming out passive. So that's what we're going to be looking at here: how to recognize if your main character is a passive main character or an active one. We’ll look at the effects of a passive main character: what that does to your movie and to your audience. And we’ll look at some ways to transform passive main characters into active ones.  If you look at the Rotten Tomatoes TomatoMeter scores for Dream Scenario, you’ll see something that rarely happens – critics loved this film and audiences really didn’t.  It’s quite common to see critics dislike a film that audiences loved but here the exact opposite happened. Among critics, 91% loved this film but only 68% of the audience liked Dream Scenario.  Now, that is a really interesting phenomenon. So let’s look at why this might be happening.  If you look at the overall concept for Dream Scenario, it is totally fascinating. And this is part of the reason the critics love it. Sociologically, politically, this film is taking on some huge concepts and saying some really interesting things. And quite frankly, from a Hollywood perspective, this Dream Scenario also has a really interesting hook and a really clear execution of that hook.  Not only that, it has a really stellar cast in Nicholas Cage, Julianne Nicholson and Michael Cera. It's well directed. It’s well performed. And it's fascinating. So why aren't audiences connecting with Dream Scenario the way that critics are?  Simply put, critics look at movies differently than audiences.  If you're a screenwriter or you've studied screenwriting, in college or in grad school, or even if you've just read books about screenwriting, there's a really good chance that those books are written by professors. They're written by critics. And critics look at films in a different way than audiences (and producers) do.  The things that are actually important for the success of your film may be different than the things that are important for the critics to love it. That doesn't mean you can't do all the things that the critics love. Sure, if you want to make a really fascinating, critically acclaimed, complicated film that asks some really big questions about the world, yes, absolutely do that.  But you also have to make sure your craft is perfect. And there's a tiny little craft issue in Dream Scenario that's getting in the way. So let's talk a little bit about it.  Spoiler alert: There are going to be some major spoilers ahead as we discuss the structure of Dream Scenario. Dream Scenario is looking at one of the primary socio-political problems of our day: the desire for fame and the effects of that on our society.  To go even deeper, Dream Scenario is exploring the effects of the desire for fame for fame’s sake,

5 Simple Steps To Keep Your New Year’s Resolutions as a Writer It’s January 1, which means it’s time to talk about how to keep your New Year's resolutions as a writer. New Year's resolutions are one of the places where writers most often go wrong. We set these huge goals for ourselves, and just like everybody setting New Year's resolutions, we usually fail to keep them..  We believe the reason we're not keeping these New Year's resolutions, the reason that we're procrastinating, the reason why we're falling into the same patterns again and again… we believe it's a lack of willpower. We believe we're lazy. We believe maybe we just don't want it enough. We believe maybe there's something wrong with us. We believe that maybe we're just too scared.  We have all these stories for ourselves about why we're not changing. But really, most of the time, the reason that we're falling short of our New Year's resolutions, whether it's as a writer, or for any other resolution, is because we've set ourselves up to fail in the way that we've made the resolution in the first place. So we're going to talk today about 5 simple steps you can take to make resolutions that actually work, that will actually work for you, as a writer.  Step #1 For New Year’s Writing Resolutions That Work: Focus On The Small Steps, Not The Destination.  If you actually want to change your life, and you want those changes to last, the most effective way you can do that is often by making small changes frequently. It is much harder to make a huge change overnight than it is to take a small step overnight.  To be clear, I’m not saying that people can't make huge changes overnight. People do and can, but it's usually not the most effective way to get there.  For an example, think about your characters in a script. If you've taken my Write Your Screenplay class, if you’ve studied Seven Act Structure, you understand the concept that a movie is just a story of a character who changes. And that as we build that change, we need many steps to get the character there. And one of the big problems with the old three-act structure is that getting a character from A to Z in three steps is not very likely.  It's not that sometimes people don't just change like that. But most people don't.  When most people try to change forever in a moment, what they actually end up doing is just proving to themselves that they can't change.  And, inadvertently,. they end up reinforcing the very beliefs that get in the way of the change, and that get in the way of their goals.   We know this as screenwriters. We know that if your character is at A and then in the next scene suddenly they’re at Z, that’s not believable. We get feedback like: I didn't feel the structure of this. I didn't believe the change. I didn't believe that the change would stick.   When we build Seven Act Structure: when we build a movie, a limited series, a pilot– we're actually figuring out the movements by which a character can believably and lastingly change. So the first mistake in making New Year’s Resolutions as writers is that we tend to think only about the endpoint, rather than thinking about the movements we will need to get there.  And it's exactly the same problem that most screenwriters make with structure. They think, Oh,

4th Annual Pitch Festivus! This week, instead of our normal programming, we’re going to be bringing you a replay from our 4th Annual Pitch Festivus! event. We’ll begin with a roundtable where you learn pitching and get answers to common questions from Jacob Krueger and top members of the Jacob Krueger Studio faculty, Steven Bagatourian, Jerome Perzigian and Christian Lybrook. Then you’ll hear a series of pitches from members of our community, and feedback from me and my faculty members, so you can learn how to make your own pitches better and succeed in this challenging industry. And before we get started, congratulations to our winners:  The Audience Choice Award went to  J.D. Elliby for “The Kingmaker.” The Faculty Choice Second Place Award went to Fred Mazyck for “The Pain Reliever.” The Faculty Choice Grand Prize Award went to J.D. Elliby for “The Kingmaker.” The Pitch Festivus! Pitching Panel Jacob Krueger:WGA Paul Selvin Award Winning Screenwriter of the Emmy Winning The Matthew Shepard Story Steven Bagatourian:Independent Spirit Award Winning Screenwriter of American Gun and All Eyez on Me. Christian Lybrook:Award Winning Indie Screenwriter, TV Writer and Producer, with work featured at Tribeca Film Festival and SeriesFest. Jerome Perzigian:Emmy Award Winning Showrunner of The Jeffersons, The Golden Girls and Married With Children. Q: Why does pitching terrify me?  JERRY PERZIGIAN (ProTrack, TV Comedy Writer’s Room) Everybody's afraid! Not only afraid to pitch but also afraid to face that first blank page. And no matter how much success you may or may not have had in the past, each new venture is intimidating. It’s scary. And everyone is insecure. It’s normal to have fear. That's why I strongly advise practice, practice, practice.  Just sit, practice it alone, practice it at Starbucks, practice it with your friends until they get sick of hearing it. You’ll see what lands and what doesn't work. And then little by little, you’ll gain confidence in your premise, in your delivery of that premise, in the places where you stop and wait for a laugh or a reaction and the places where you bring more energy –  and you'll get less afraid.  Just remember that we're all in the same boat. When you see an executive that's pompous and intimidating, that person is scared too. Being seen in that way is their protection. So we're all in the same boat.  JACOB KRUEGER: (Write Your Screenplay,

This episode will be a special installment of the podcast, because we are building up to our fourth annual Pitch Festivus! free online pitching event on Dec 7. In years past, when we had a physical location in New York City, we used to have our annual holiday party in our physical location. Having gone online now and becoming fully virtual as a school, we took that party online as well.  So now, instead of a traditional holiday party, you are going to get a three-hour free pitching workshop with top faculty members at Jacob Krueger Studio. You’re going learn how to pitch from some of the best in the business. And we're going to be picking writers from the group who get to pitch their scripts and get feedback from Jacob Krueger Studio faculty members. It's all free – and you have a chance to win prizes. It's super fun. So what do you do if you get chosen to pitch? Well, I’m going to tell you how to prepare a great three-minute pitch. And this isn't only going to be helpful for you when pitching at Pitch Festivus. There are countless events (like Austin Film Festival, for example) that culminate in these awesome pitch opportunities.  So we're going to look at how to create a winning three-minute pitch.  A three-minute pitch for your screenplay or TV show is much different than the kind of pitch that you would give if you're actually in a meeting with an executive or an agent or a manager.  A lot of people call a three-minute pitch an “elevator pitch.” And before I teach you how to make one, I'd like to remind you that the idea of an “elevator pitch” is based on a little bit of fiction.  The concept of an elevator pitch is: “Oh, wow! I'm on an elevator with Martin Scorsese. He's going to floor 13 and I have to pitch my script before we get to his floor!” The idea is that you have to pitch that fast.  But that's not really true. In the real world, even if you are on an elevator with Martin Scorsese, if he's interested, he's gonna be like, “Yeah, keep talking. Come walk with me.”  And the same is true in a real-life environment. Let’s say you’ve just been invited into a producer's office. Sure, you don't want to waste their time. You don't want to wax poetic. You don't want to bore them. But no one is checking their watch going, “Oh, sorry,  that's two minutes and 58 seconds.” No one's checking their watch. It's more of a feeling of whether a pitch is a reasonable length or just too long.  At the same time, learning how to create a three-minute elevator pitch is a valuable skill. Pitch fests, which usually have these kinds of time limits, are wonderful opportunities to get attention for your script, often from very famous people. It's a chance to get heard and it's a chance to practice, but it's also a little bit artificial.  Pitching a producer, agent, manager, star, director, executive or anyone else in the industry is a lot different than the kind of pitching you’re going to be doing at Pitch Festivus! or at any pitch fest.  At Pitch Festivus! we’re going to share a ton of details about how screenwriters can succeed at real-world pitching. How to pitch if you are scared of pitching. If you're an introvert. If you're shy. We’re going to talk about pitching if you're not comfortable pitching. How to pitch without feeling like a used car salesman.

I was lucky enough to see Saltburn by Emerald Fennell at an advance screening at the Austin Film Festival last month. It was a packed house! (And by the way, while we're talking about Austin Film Festival, a shout-out to our six students who were finalists. Eric Potempa, Jonathan Finnegan, Kelly McAllister and Nancy Safavi were all finalists for the pitch competition with Nancy taking third place overall. Erin Brown Thomas was a finalist for her short film, Subtext. And Meredith Allen, former student and former faculty member at Jacob Krueger Studio, was a finalist for her horror film Sensei. We’re just so proud of all our alums who are out there doing amazing stuff and having such incredible success.)  There is so much that we can learn as screenwriters from Saltburn. It’s one of those films that pushes the edges in every way – that makes you laugh in the most uncomfortable ways, that makes you feel, that both entertains you and concerns you.  Saltburn, is of course, Emerald Fennell's follow up to Promising Young Woman. By looking at a movie that takes everything this far, we can learn about tone, we can learn about genre, we can learn about writing characters that should be unlikable and still make the audience fall in love with them.  To really help you understand Saltburn, I'm going to have to reveal a few spoilers right at the very beginning. So if you don't want the film spoiled, you might want to watch it first. If you read on, I'm going to give you enough context to understand what we're talking about here. In a lot of ways, you can think of Saltburn like The Talented Mr. Ripley on steroids.  It's The Talented Mr. Ripley with the volume turned up even louder, with things pushed to even more ridiculous extremes.  Structurally, Saltburn is built on a thriller framework. The genre elements and the genre structure of Saltburn are pulled directly from thriller.  It's a story about a young man, Oliver Quick, played by Barry Keoghan. He’s a student at Oxford University and he’s super bright but he has no money. And at Oxford that means he's a bit of an outcast.  He develops a sexual attraction and a friendship attraction towards Felix Catton, a ridiculously wealthy student who lives in a grand castle. Felix has everything that Oliver has ever wanted. Emerald Fennell talks about the film as a Gothic romance. To her, this story could just as well be Heathcliff in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, a story of a really complicated unrequited love.  But at the same time Saltburn is a Gothic romance with a lot of twisted stuff happening, it's also a thriller. It's also a pushed to the limits version of The Talented Mr. Ripley.  Emerald Fennell’s screenplay for Saltburn is fusing genres in ways we can all learn from as screenwriters.  So here's what happens. Felix becomes Oliver's best friend and invites Oliver to live with him at his ridiculously huge castle estate, Saltburn, for the summer because Oliver has nowhere to go. Oliver has told Felix that his mother is a drug addict, that his father has died, that he doesn't speak to his family. He has nowhere to go. He has no finances. And he basically becomes not only the friend but also the plaything to this ridiculously privileged kid. Felix is incredibly sexy. Every woman in the world is just throwing herself at him. And although it seems like it's an unrequited love story, it certainly seems like there's some kind of attraction between Oliver and Felix. In fact,

This week, we're going to look at Killers of the Flower Moon, by Martin Scorcese and Eric Roth. We’re going to talk about the art of adaptation: How to adapt a book or a true life story (or in this case both) into a feature film or TV series. We’re going to look at how to develop your “take” on a book or true life story and the many hard decisions you have to make in adapting a prior work.  When you're adapting material– whether it's a dream, an idea, a poem, a song, a show, a board game, a haunted house, a piece of IP, a novel, a play– regardless of what you're adapting, it's not just a process of taking what is and translating it onto the screen. It's actually the art of saying, What pieces of this am I going to hold on to? What decisions am I going to make around it?  As you’ll see in our script analysis of Killers of the Flower Moon, you cannot adapt the whole book. You cannot adapt the whole true story into a screenplay.  So you have to look at each part really closely. And that leads to thousands of decisions, which taken together are called your take on the material. So let's say you're Martin Scorsese and you find a book like Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI by David Grann.  Or let's say you are called in for a meeting with a producer who wants you to adapt something for them. They're not just looking for you to say, “OK, this is the book and this is what we're going to make.” They're looking for your take. They're looking for the you in it.  They're looking for, How are you going to approach it and what decisions are you going to make?  And that means making really bold choices, sometimes even making choices that depart in some way from the source material, so that you can look at the aspects of the story that matter to you most deeply.  And of course, this is what Martin Scorsese and Eric Roth have done in Killers of the Flower Moon.SPOILER WARNING: There are going to be some spoilers, especially as we get deeper into the podcast transcript (I’ll warn you when we get there), but we’re going to start with a broader discussion about the book, the history, and the development of the screenplay, that will discuss some elements, but won’t ruin the movie for you… David Grann’s nonfiction book Killers of the Flower Moon is primarily a whodunnit. And this is the obvious take on this material.  You have this tribe of Native Americans, the Osage, and like most Native Americans, they were driven off their land to the crappiest possible place that anyone could find for them — a reservation in Oklahoma where nothing could grow. Scorcese opens Killers of the Flower Moon with a ceremony of mourning. And then, it seems, fate intervenes. Oil is found on the reservation. We see this explosion of oil out of the ground and these Native men are splattered in oil.  And even though it’s a joyful moment, it’s shot almost like blood is splattering them. It’s like a premonition. It’s a Martin Scorsese movie, we know it's going to get dark, but at this moment, for the characters, it’s pure joy. They are dancing in celebration of the oil.  And then we are told, and this is true, the Osage people at this time became the richest people per capita in the world. In 1923 alone, the tribe made $30 million (over $500 million in today’s money.) So this is the world we're entering. But of course, we don’t stay on this joyride. 

Last episode, we talked about the two different forms of writer's block. The first kind is the obvious kind of writer’s block– you're just not writing. And this is actually the easier form of writer's block to solve.  The second, much more insidious, form of writer's block exists where you might be writing a lot, but your writing is flat.  We also talked about the confidence game of writing, about doubt, and how to overcome doubt.  This episode we’re going to be talking about how to deal with another key component of writer’s block and procrastination: The Inner Censor. As we discussed last episode, screenwriters have three different gods that we’re always serving on every project.First, there’s the Project god, which we actually want to serve.  But there are two other gods we also try to serve, which actually just get in the way.  The Commercial/Career god, “Can I sell that?”-- which gets in the way of us having the curiosity to explore with our authentic voice.  And the Identity god. “Am I an artist? Am I a good artist? Am I deserving of being an artist?” Asking these kinds of questions only serves to undermine our creativity. If you’ve listened to my podcast on The Two Kinds of Writers Block, at this point, you have a pretty strong foundation in what causes writer's block. But there's another element that we still need to talk about to really understand how writer's block works and how to overcome it. We need to talk about the Inner Censor, how it works, how it gets developed, and how you can start to break past it to build the life of a writer that you really want, put your authentic voice on the page, navigate the challenges that press down on our voice, and keep writing even through times when you literally don't have a single idea in your mind.  We're going to talk about how to deal with all of that and how all of that is related to the Inner Censor. And I'm going to give you some really great tools for getting past it. When you were a child, you did not have writer’s block. You did not have an Inner Censor. You did not know that the Inner Censor existed. Children just say whatever they feel.  “How does Mommy look in this dress?” “Oh, you look fat, Mommy.”  They don't think about whether it’s reasonable.  “I want to go to the soccer game. I don't want to ride in the car!”  It doesn't matter that riding in the car is the only way to get to the soccer game. Children literally just express whatever they feel. For a child, there is no Inner Censor. If you ask a child to become a dog, the child will become a dog. They won't ask, “Is it a St. Bernard or a German Shepherd?”  They will become a dog. And they will do things that dogs do, and things that dogs do not do. And it will be fascinating to watch them. They will not be blocked for one second. Children do not have Inner Censors. Children are in touch with their authentic voice. It's the only thing they know.  Developmentally, young children are actually not able to recognize that they are not the only thing in the universe. Early in life, they believe the world revolves around them. 

For the last couple of episodes we have been talking about Talk to Me, a fabulous little horror movie. (Check out Part 1 and Part 2 of the Talk to Me Podcast) We've looked at this little horror movie from every different angle. We've looked at the first 10 pages. We've looked at mirrors and foils. We've looked at the genre elements. We've looked at world building. We've looked at theme. We've looked at a character's journey and structure. We've dissected it and pulled it apart and analyzed it and developed some really awesome skills that you can apply whether you're writing a horror movie or anything else. But what we haven't talked about is actually the most palpable form of horror for most screenwriters, which has nothing to do with horror genre movies. Writer’s block. Procrastination. Being stuck.  A lot of writers don't realize this, but there are actually two different forms of writer's block.  The first kind of writer’s block is when you’re just not writing.  If you have the not-writing block, you probably know it. It’s obvious. You know you have it because you're not writing. Or you're procrastinating. Or you're stuck waiting for the muse. You feel like you have no control over your own art or your own life. You can only write when you are inspired.  And sometimes months, years, decades go by without that inspiration. You don't know how to get yourself writing or you find yourself procrastinating– pushing it off, pushing it off, pushing it off– and then rushing, rushing, rushing, to get it done. You never really have the time you need to do something beautiful.  You’re not writing. And that is probably causing you pain.  Now for some writers, it causes so much pain that they quit. But for a lot of writers, that pain eventually forces them to seek help.  And the good news is you don't have to suffer with writer's block. In my Write Your Screenplay class, we get an entire class full of people– sometimes people who have been blocked for 20 years-- past writer's block in one session. And I've yet to work with a single writer where these skills did not work. There are really simple cognitive behavioral skills that you can apply to writer's block and procrastination. If you’re blocked from writing at all, these skills will break you through your block nearly instantly, with very little effort.  So the good news is, if you’re not writing, you can take care of it. You don't have to live with this. You don't have to be dependent upon the muse to come to you. You certainly can be in control of your own dream.  We’re going to talk about some of these strategies that you can use to get yourself writing again in a few moments, but first we need to talk about the other kind of writer’s block. The second form of writer’s block is flat, uninspired writing. If you have the second kind of writer’s block, there's a good chance that you don't even know it. Because you’re still writing… it’s just that you’re not writing anything very good. Which means there's a good chance it's having an even more deleterious effect on your writing than the first kind— not...

In Part One of the Talk to Me Podcast, we talked about the first 10 pages of Talk to Me and how the first 10 pages of your script work on three different levels.  On the writing level, they allow you to find your voice and the images that you're going to build from. On the structural level, they allow you to have a strong foundation that you're going to "yes, and..." as you build your character’s journey.  And finally on the commercial level, they grab your audience right away to say, “Hey, pay attention! This is going to be cool.”  In this podcast, we're going to do some deep script analysis of the structure and theme and world-building of Talk to Me. We’re going to learn how to build structure organically in your own screenplay through a simple concept called mirrors and foils.  We’re going to talk about how to intuitively build structure in your screenplay in relation to theme.  We’re going to be learning a new approach to creating the rules of your world and allowing your audience to discover them without exposition dumps.And we’re going to be exploring the essential human drama that we actually connect to underneath all those exciting horror genre elements.  There are going to be a ton of spoilers ahead… so, if you haven’t seen Talk to Me yet, you might want to before listening to the podcast.  Talk to Me is a great example of what's beautiful about genre movies.  Sure, a horror genre movie can be just a bunch of blood and gore (and Talk to Me certainly has enough blood and gore for years of nightmares).  But great horror movies are not just about blood and gore. These elevated horror films are not about the horror of monsters. They're about the horror of families, of relationships, of the personal challenges the audience is actually dealing with.  They're just personal dramas, blown up in an expressionistic, symbolic way.  Spoiler Alert: There are going to be a bunch of spoilers ahead, so if you haven't seen Talk to Me yet, this is a good time to go watch this film. (But be prepared to be scared). Or if you're not into scary then just read on, because you’re going to learn a ton about how to write in any genre…  When we look underneath the surface at the structure of Mia’s journey in Talk to Me, it’s about so much more than being possessed by a bunch of monsters.  The truth is, (most likely) nobody in your audience has ever been possessed by a monster or shaken hands with a creepy hand that might have been lopped off an actual psychic. No one in the audience is going to live a horror movie.  And at the same time, all of us are living horror movies in some way, because we're all human beings and life is frickin’ hard and scary and sad. If you've listened to my podcasts on A Quiet Place or Hereditary, you understand how these elevated horror movies are really family stories. And Talk to Me is no exception. What we're watching in Talk to Me is a family story about a girl who lost her mom.  As she tries to deal with this incomprehensible situation, Mia has two competing stories in her head. 

This week, we are going to be discussing Talk to Me, a sweet little independent horror movie written by Danny Philippou and Bill Hinzman based on an idea by Daley Pearson. There is so much that we're going to learn from Talk to Me and not just about making horror movies.  We're going to be using Talk to Me as a model to understand the vital role of the first image of your screenplay, the first page of your screenplay, and the first 10 pages of your screenplay on both a commercial and creative level. We’re going to talk about what your first 10 pages need to accomplish to get you better coverage, more festival wins, and greater commercial success, and also how to build from those first 10 pages to find theme, expand character development, find exciting twists on genre tropes and clichés, and to create the dramatic story underneath your genre film. If you have not yet seen Talk to Me, the first half of this podcast will just be about the first 10 minutes of the film, so I won't spoil anything beyond the first 10 minutes. Then, as we get to Part 2, we're going to start to get deeper into the structure of the film. At that point there will be some spoilers, so make sure to watch Talk to Me before Part 2 of this podcast comes out in 2 weeks.  These three ideas – first image, first page, first 10 pages – are the most important elements of your screenplay, not only on the commercial level but also on the creative level.  On a purely commercial level, here’s the reality: the first 10 pages of your screenplay are so important because producers don't like to read. Agents don't like to read. Nobody likes to read.  I'm not talking about their personalities or their predilections. There are some agents and producers who love reading a great novel or even a great screenplay. But every moment that a producer, a manager, an agent spends reading is a moment that they are not selling. And their job is to sell.  Just like a pro football player gets paid to score touchdowns, not to do bench presses, agents and producers get paid to sell, not to read. Reading is something that they have to do. But it's not something that they want to do, because it's not where they make their big money. It's not where they feel their biggest sense of accomplishment. They feel accomplishment when they sell something.  So there’s a reasonable business reason why producers and agents are so resistant to reading. There's also just a physical reason that they're resistant to reading: they have more submissions every single week than they could read in an entire lifetime. Which means that, most likely, your script’s not even getting read by a producer, agent or manager. Most likely your script is actually getting read by an assistant, by a junior level development executive.  Or even more likely than that, because those people also have more scripts than they can read and more calls than they can handle and more networking than any human being could possibly do, it's probably actually getting read by a coverage reader.  Who are these coverage readers? And how do you draw them into your writing to get better script coverage? A coverage reader is sometimes a brilliant writer who in the future will go on to be a great writer. A coverage reader is sometimes a terrible writer who will not end up going on to be a writer. A coverage reader is sometimes an intern.  But regardless, a coverage reader is most likely somebody who is reading scripts for $50 or less per script. Just think about that for a moment.

There's a scene in the very last episode of The Bear, Season 2 – the episode titled “The Bear” -- where Carmy is stuck inside of the walk-in refrigerator at the restaurant. Outside the walk-in refrigerator, all of Carmy’s dreams are actually coming true. His restaurant is actually a success. His team has actually come together against tremendous odds. Everybody has actually stepped up and bought in and everything is actually working. But inside of the fridge Carmy cannot see it. Carmy is only stuck with his self-doubt, with the mistakes that he's made. He is stuck inside his own ideas, and his history, and his past, and his patterns, and his problems and his imagination of what must be happening outside where he cannot see.  It occurs to me that the refrigerator scene in the finale of The Bear, Season 2 is a metaphor for how we as writers feel all the time during our writing process.  It is so hard to actually evaluate our own work. It's so hard to see if our writing is working, because in the process of building our dreams, we are going to make so many mistakes, we are going to fall short, we are going to grapple with our patterns, and our history, and our family history and our traumas. Because we're going to grapple with all that, we are so often actually inside the refrigerator where we cannot see the beauty in front of us, where we cannot actually allow the good to be good. So that's what we're going to be talking about in this episode. We’re going to be looking at the final season of The Bear. But what we're really going to be exploring is the process of writing, the process of rewriting, the process of turning something that doesn't work into something that does work.  And the most important part of that process is the process of dealing with our own self-doubt, our own self-criticism, our own self-blame, our own patterns, our own fears, our own spiraling, in order to actually get out of the refrigerator and be able to see the beauty of our own writing.  A warning, there are going to be some spoilers ahead. So if you haven't watched The Bear, Season 2 yet, you might want to do so; however, even if you haven't seen The Bear, a lot of the content of this podcast will still be very valuable for you. So let's talk briefly about how The Bear works as a series.  If you've listened to my episode on The Bear, Season 1, you already know some of this, but we're just going to do a quick recap. In Season 1 of The Bear, we meet this team trying to do the impossible – they are trying to run a restaurant. And we are caught in the heat and the emotions of a kitchen where nothing is working, where everyone is at cross-purposes, where everyone is fighting, where, emotionally, people don't know what they mean to each other yet.  We're going to watch a world of deeply dysfunctional but also beautiful people learn what they mean to each other, learn to show up for each other, learn to love each other. And just when everything seems like it’s finally coming together, we're going to watch “the bear” in Carmy come out. In the first season of The Bear, Carmy is a world-class chef who has come home to Chicago after his brother Michael’s suicide to take over Michael’s crappy, dying restaurant. Carmy’s decision doesn't make sense rationally. It only makes sense emotionally for him to do this. We don't know a lot of why. We don't know a lot of the past. We don't know a lot of the history. But we know that this place and the people in this place are a mess, and that they are all under so much intense pressure at every moment of every day that they just can't ...

This week, we're going to be talking about “Barbenheimer.” That's right, Barbie and Oppenheimer in the same podcast. And not just because you probably saw the two movies back to back.  We're going to be talking about “Barbenheimer”–Barbie and Oppenheimer–together because there is so much we can learn about screenwriting by looking at these movies in the same podcast. These are two groundbreaking political movies. These are two groundbreaking structural movies. These are two groundbreaking movies in their form and in their experimentation. And both of these groundbreaking movies were released in the middle of the summer, when we're used to seeing nothing but popcorn action movies. We're going to be looking at Barbie and Oppenheimer to understand how to write a political film. Or to say it in a more profound way, how to write a film that is really about something.  So often when we’re taught structure, we're taught about how to move a character from A to Z. How to test a character, how to change a character, how to make sure your character wants something and makes choices. All these things are really important, but they only matter within the context of what you are actually saying. We don't become screenwriters just because we like puppeting characters around. We become screenwriters because there's something we want to say. And all of our writing, whether we like it or not, is political. We are the mythmakers for our generation and for the next generation.  We write the stories that show people a way of perceiving their own identities and how to behave in the world.What does it mean to be a woman? What does it mean to be a man? What does it mean to be a person? What does it mean to be a hero? What does it mean to be good? Or what does it mean to be bad? Or what does it mean to be morally complicated? How should we act in the world? How should we try not to act in the world? What should we believe in? What do we not believe in? This tradition of mythmaking goes way beyond Barbie and Oppenheimer. It tracks back thousands of years, all the way back to Greek mythology and even beyond. For as long as there have been stories, human beings have looked to stories for meaning.  So it's our job as screenwriters to make sure we know what meaning we are actually communicating. Because if we don't, our films and our shows actare nevertheless going to have very powerful effects. Our films and shows have profound societal effects, whether we like it or not. If you listened to my podcast about therapeutic and anti-therapeutic films, you know our movies and shows, when they work, move people to a place of catharsis, a place of change.  We're not just changing our characters: we are changing our audience.  And that means every single thing about how you build your film, how you build your TV series, how you build your play, how you build your novel, how you build your poem, how you build your song. Whatever kind of writing you're doing, every single element of a story gctinrows out of the theme. It grows out of what you are building. Understanding what you're building is also going to serve you when your film is actually in production, or pre-production, or development, or even when your film is in the editing room. It's going to help you know which notes to accept (because they're going to make your film stronger), and which notes to reject or question. 

This episode we're going to be looking at Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 by James Gunn, and we're going to be talking about flashbacks and exposition. Using Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 as a model, you’re going to learn how to use flashbacks, and how to bury exposition in your screenplay.  The interesting thing about Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 is that it's not just one story. It's actually two stories taking place in two different time periods that are juxtaposed together, and those two stories collide at the end of the screenplay. The first story is very typical Guardians of the Galaxy fare. It's big, it's funny, it's action packed, it's larger than life, it's ridiculous, it's wonderful, it's got a great soundtrack, and it's about this ragtag family defeating evil.  And underneath that story, like in every Guardians of the Galaxy movie, there's a theme of loss that permeates everything– all done on the biggest, boldest possible palette that you could have as a screenwriter.  But then there's another story. There's another movie inside of Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3.  You can actually pull these two movies apart and look at them separately.  Technically, the second story in Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 is a series of flashbacks, but it's also its own story: the story of how Rocket Raccoon became Rocket Racoon.  This story is built like a play. It takes place almost entirely in one cage, and it is a tiny little character-driven story inside the giant action landscape of Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3.  If you pulled it out of the larger container, you'd have a beautiful, contained short about three animals who become Rocket’s friends and family.  There are going to be some spoilers ahead… Like all Guardians of the Galaxy movies, you know where this is going. Guardians of the Galaxy is a series of movies built around loss: so if little baby Rocket’s just made some sweet little animal friends, you know he's going to lose them.  What's really interesting is that the emotional core of Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 is built around a flashback sequence, which, if you extracted it from the larger movie, most people would agree is built a lot more more like a play!  If you go to a Guardians of the Galaxy movie and you don't feel that funny, action-adventure, sci-fi, crazy, awesome soundtrack, larger-than-life stuff, you're gonna be mad.  But buried underneath all that wonderful silliness, there's this sweet little play about how Rocket became Rocket, and about this beautiful family that came together and was destroyed. There's so much that I love about that.  Seeing this bold little choice play out in the context of a popcorn-movie blockbuster illustrates one of the principles that I always like to remind new writers about: if you deliver to the audience the main thing they're coming for, they will let you get away with nearly anything else.  You can do a little play buried inside your giant blockbuster movie, and as long as it ties together thematically, and as long as you're giving them the big action sequences they want, you're fine.  By the way, that doesn't mean that everything needs to be buried under action sequences.  People come to a Sundance movie because they want to cry. People come to a comedy because they want to laugh. People come to a romantic comedy because they want to believe that love is possible. And if you do these things,

Shrinking Part 2: Five Tips For Writing Better Dialogue and Exploding Cliché In Part 1 of my Shrinking podcast, we got really deep into the link between screenwriting and therapy, as well as the challenges of writing therapy scenes and scenes with therapists as characters. This episode, we’re going to get really crunchy with 5 hugely helpful craft techniques you can learn from Shrinking to write better dialogue in your screenplay. Then we’ll do a deep analysis of a pivotal scene from Episode 9 of Shrinking to show you how to deal with the biggest craft concern of most writers: cliché.   If you are writing therapy scenes, or if you are writing teaching scenes (which are related and equally challenging for the same reason: the teacher wants to teach, the student wants to learn, so where’s the drama?) there are a couple of things you can think about:  #1- Question Questions in Your Dialogue.  This is a good rule of thumb for almost any writing. That’s not to say that questions can't work in screenwriting. Questions can certainly work under certain circumstances, but questions are hard, because they can undercut drama and force all the weight of the scene onto only one character. If you've ever studied improv, you probably know that asking questions is the most challenging thing you can do to your improv partner.  That’s because, when you ask a question— unless it’s not really a question: sometimes a question’s a statement, an accusation, a tease, a game, etc— but if you're really asking a question because you want to know the answer, you are not sharing anything of yourself. You’re basically playing the role of the therapist. And now your partner is stuck. They can answer the question, in which case all the drama falls out. You wanted to know, they told you, you're done.  Or, they can refuse to answer the question, in which case you have drama, but you're just having a fight.  Or, if they are quick and sharp enough and are feeling inspired, they can occasionally come up with the most brilliant, funny, hilarious, complicated response to the question ever, which makes it look like the question worked. But regardless, there's only one character doing any work when that happens. There’s no real drama, because all the weight, all the vulnerability of building the relationship has fallen onto the character answering. The same thing is true in writing.  When we are writing a screenplay, what we're really doing is improv on the page.  We may think, as screenwriters, that we're supposed to be the puppet master puppeting our characters, but when you do that, you're basically taking most of the work onto yourself. And most likely your characters are going to come off as exactly the puppets you’re turning them into. Whereas if you allow your characters to do the bulk of the work for you, then the characters will carry you in so many wonderful ways, and you don't have to work so darn hard.  When a character is asking questions, it often means that they're not doing any work. The other character’s doing all the work.  If I ask a character, “How you doing?” The character can either reply “I'm doing good,” or “I'm doing bad.” They can answer the question.  Or, they can refuse to answer the question: “how dare you ask me how I'm doing?”  Or, they can come up with the most fantastic answer to how they’re doing.  But regardless of how they answer, they're doing all the work.  Whereas if I say “It's a sad day,” that's inviting the same kind of response as “how you doing?” But now I'm sharing something of myself, my own point of view on the day. I'm doing some of the work.  Or if I say, “the wind today is just perfect. The perfect briskness.”  Well,

This episode, we're gonna be talking about Shrinking by Brett Goldstein, Bill Lawrence and Jason Segel. In Part 1 of this podcast, we’re going to be exploring the links between therapy and writing, the challenges of writing therapists as characters, as well as some helpful craft techniques from Shrinking that you can apply to your dialogue when writing challenging scenes. Then, in Part 2, we’re going to do a deep analysis of a scene from Shrinking that will teach you how to explode cliché in your own writing.   Shrinking was created and written by some of the same writers who brought us Ted Lasso, and if you've watched Shrinking, you know that there's a very familiar feeling Shrinking shares with Ted Lasso.  Recently, in my Thursday Night Writes class, I spoke about how there are shows that are therapeutic, and there are shows that are anti-therapeutic.  When I speak about a therapeutic show, what I'm really talking about is a show that is built around the healing of the main characters.  Shrinking and Ted Lasso are both therapeutic shows in their structure: shows that are built around journeys of healing for the main characters. In Ted Lasso, we meet a good man entering a complicated world. We watch him heal all the people around him in Season 1, and then in Season 2, we watch him deal with his own healing. That’s why it's a therapeutic show: the character's journey is a therapeutic journey. In watching a therapeutic journey, the value for us as an audience is that we get to feel some of that therapeutic journey ourselves. We get to think hmm, maybe I could become a better person, maybe I could deal with my demons, maybe I could grow…  Meanwhile, an anti-therapeutic show is a show that breaks the main characters. It may take a well-adjusted character and break them, or it may take a maladjusted character and break them even worse.  For example, Succession is an anti-therapeutic show: It is a show in which the characters do not transcend, but instead are swallowed by their experiences.  Believe it or not, an anti-therapeutic show like Succession or Bojack Horseman actually has the same effect on audiences as a therapeutic show like Shrinking or Ted Lasso. It creates what the ancient Greeks called catharsis: this feeling of not being alone in the world.  Anti-therapeutic shows can lessen our own pain by recognizing that other people have gone through similar pains to the ones that we've gone through.  So, most shows and movies are therapeutic for the audience, regardless of what happens to the characters.  Some shows are also therapeutic for the characters, while some are anti-therapeutic, and some are a mixture of the two.  Black Swan, for example, is both therapeutic and anti-therapeutic for the character.  We have a character who has a repressed dark side, and she takes the therapeutic action of integrating her dark side into herself. She can only dance the white swan, and in the movie she learns to dance the black swan.  But it's also anti-therapeutic in that the black swan in her ends up basically eating her.  So, she reaches this moment that's— like in all Darren Aronofsky movies– a transcendent suicide– where she both kills herself and says the word “perfect.”  She has both a therapeutic and anti-therapeutic journey at the same time. And the audience finds catharsis.  Shrinking, of course, is literally a therapeutic show in that the characters are therapists.  Harrison Ford's character, Paul, Jason Segel's character, Jimmy, and Jessica Williams’s character, Gaby, are all therapists.

This episode, we're going to be talking about A Man Called Otto and looking at a very important screenwriting topic that we haven't covered for a while on this podcast: emotional need.  We're going to be talking about how to get in touch with your own emotional needs and the emotional needs of your characters. We’ll also be talking about a process called meditative writing, through which we can get past our inner censors in order to access those emotional needs in boht our characters and ourselves.  Meditative writing can be a very powerful way of writing, particularly if we are struggling to figure out what our characters want. If we’re struggling to connect to our characters, or if we feel like our characters are two-dimensional puppets that we're puppeteering around the plots of our screenplay, the solution is to get in touch with universal emotional needs and how they drive a character’s actions. In our script analysis of A Man Called Otto, we're not only going to understand the structure and the stakes of the film, but also develop some tools as screenwriters to connect to our characters at the primal level.  We're going to explore some cool hypnotic stuff to get deep underneath our own inner censor, and hopefully, we're going to be learning a lot about writing and emotional need.  Now, the screenplay for A Man Called Otto is not without its problems: there's a level on which this movie functions like a Hallmark movie. It’s predictable. It’s sappy. There are some places where the writers are simply not connected to their characters, and that lack of connection creates a level of falseness that we can feel.  Oddly, that’s also part of what makes the movie work tonally. A Man Called Otto is a feel-good movie, you know you're going to feel good the whole time and you're never going to have to wonder is this going to turn out OK?  This is not Succession. This is a really, really expensive Hallmark movie.   At the same time, there are moments in the screenplay for A Man Called Otto in which the writers are deeply connected to the emotional needs of the characters. As the audience, you can feel those moments of connection as strongly as you can feel the moments of disconnection. Which makes the script a great model for understanding what happens when we connect to– and also disconnect from– our characters as we write. What we're going to talk about today is a technique that can hopefully help you stay more connected, more often.  If you were working on a script like A Man Called Otto, a stronger connection to the emotional needs of all your characters could help get underneath some of the problems in the script and maybe take it to a deeper level.  There's one character that you can see the writers of A Man Called Otto are nearly always deeply connected to on the primal level of emotional need: Otto.  You can see that connection in the very first scene. For those of you who are worried about spoilers: you don't really have to worry about spoilers in A Man Called Otto. If you’re experienced with screenwriting, you will watch the first scene and you will know everything that's going to happen. You will know where it's going to end… and all the places that you expect it to go are correct.  That said, I'm going to focus mostly on the first scene of the screenplay of A Man Called Otto, and then we'll talk a little bit about the larger arcs of the characters as we get deeper into the concepts of meditative writing and emotional needs. The first scene in A Man Called Otto takes place in a big-box hardware store called the Busy Beaver– basically a Home Depot. Otto,Tom Hanks’s character, is trying to buy five feet of rope. The rope a tangible object, a tangible goal, that both we and Otto are consciously aware of, on the simplest level,

Welcome to Part 2 of my Everything Everywhere All at Once podcast. In Part 1, we talked about how Everything Everywhere All at Once was built, the link between Evelyn’s journey in Everything Everywhere All at Once and the writer’s journey in finding the structure of a screenplay, and the character driven elements that underlie the structure of nearly every screenplay or TV show, regardless of the genre. In today’s episode, we’ll do a detailed breakdown and script analysis of the opening sequence of Everything Everywhere All at Once, to show you how this scene lays the groundwork for everything to come in this remarkably ambitious, Academy Award-winning script. As you can see if you take a look at this early draft of Everything Everywhere All, the Daniels did not begin with a perfect understanding of all the elements of the simple character driven drama that would hold together their crazy Kung Fu concept.  What the Daniels began with was a twist on The Matrix, a question about the immigrant experience, some personal experiences with Daniel Kwan’s own immigrant family, a love for Kung Fu movies, the insane desire to tell a Kung Fu movie about empathy, and a curiosity about the multiverse and the idea that there might be multiple universes happening at the same time. And by pushing on all those ideas, they eventually figured out the character driven drama that would tie it all together, and created the incredible introductory scene that we are about to watch and analyze together. I'm going to show you how all the magic of Everything Everywhere All at Once actually builds out of the simple twelve minute scene that begins the movie.This is the very first sequence of Everything Everywhere All at Once.We begin with this image in the mirror of this family all together. It's doubtful whether a scene ever actually existed in these characters’ lives, but what we know is that this is Evelyn's dream of what her family was supposed to be, if she had been living the best version of herself.  What's important to understand is this is not the family that we end up with at the end.  Just like your screenplay is not going to be the vision that you have at the beginning, this image is the false belief driving Evelyn of what it is supposed to be, rather than the acceptance of what it is that she (and we) will arrive at by the end of the movie. We push in, and suddenly that mirror is blank.  If you look at the early draft above, you won’t see this image in it, because the Daniels didn’t know this image yet. This image is something they found, when they realized that we need to know what Evelyn's vision was, so that we can understand what’s been lost.  What follows is the movie in a microcosm. We push in through that mirror and we find Evelyn at– to speak metaphorically– her “writer’s desk,” completely overwhelmed.  Waymond’s face is reflected in the mirror behind her, but Evelyn doesn’t see it, because she is buried in her paperwork– all those piles of different possibilities of what her life could have been or was supposed to be.  Behind her, on the security camera, there are all these different views of the room. All these different camera angles, these fractured little universes.  As we push in, you may also notice the googly eyes on the laundry, but that’s just a sweet little detail. Really, we're seeing an overwhelming room, one that already has everything happening, everywhere, all at once. Waymond’s first action in Everything Everywhere All at Once  is to grab the piece of paper from his wife. He is trying to get her out of her head, to get her to simply pay attention to him for a moment. And what Evelyn says to Waymond is what every writer probably thinks when I t...

Everything Everywhere All At Once: Evelyn’s Journey is the Screenwriter’s Journey Pt.1 In this episode, I'm going to try to do the impossible, and help you understand how the screenplay Everything Everywhere All at Once was built. The truth is, to fully break down the structure of Everything Everywhere All at Once would take me a full day. In fact, it did! Back when the movie first came out, I taught a Master Class during which I broke down the full structure of the movie over an entire Sunday.  I’m not going to try to do that in this podcast. What we're going to do today, in Part 1 of this podcast, is compress some of the incredibly complicated ideas in this film into some useful concepts that you can use as you're trying to do what’s probably the hardest thing for all screenwriters: to balance the art, the craft, and the business of screenwriting as you find your way through the multiverse of possibilities for your own writing.  Then, in Part 2, we’ll do a detailed breakdown of the opening sequence of Everything Everywhere All at Once and look at the ways it sets up everything to come in this remarkably ambitious, Academy Award-winning script. Building a screenplay, even one far less ambitious than Everything Everything Everywhere All at Once, can feel overwhelming. We often feel caught, as writers, between three competing challenges: what we want the screenplay to be, what we believe the market is telling us a screenplay needs to be, and how to develop the craft we need to solve the screenplay and make it do those two other things at once.  There are so many possibilities for who the characters could be, for what could happen. We are adrift in a sea of good and terrible ideas. As writers, we are actually experiencing everything, everywhere, all at once: every possibility in the multiverse, all at the same time.  We feel overwhelmed, just like Evelyn, the main character of Everything Everywhere All at Once, feels sitting at her desk covered with papers.  And when we feel overwhelmed, we tend to fall back onto some tropes that we probably know aren't true, but seem easier and safer than the discomfort of the unknown.  We convince ourselves to let go of our own dreams for the project, often both the art and the craft of writing our dream script, and instead just try to focus on the business side: What should I do? What should I write? What is selling right now? What is hot? We lie to ourselves, looking for a formula that's going to solve the script for us. Then we ask that formula (or that guru) “Tell me what happens in this act!”  We're looking for a simple model to solve the problem of structure for us, because like Evelyn in Everything Everywhere All at Once, we feel overwhelmed. And like Evelyn, we are finding all the wrong answers, because our real problem usually stems from not listening to our characters.  When we get overwhelmed, instead of listening to our characters, instead of listening to that simple voice within ourselves, just like Evelyn, we get distracted by the chatter.  Instead of seeing the beauty that is in front of us, we get distracted by what we, or our writing, or our characters, are supposed to be.  There is a beautiful line, in Everything Everywhere all at Once. It's really the seminal line of the movie. Joy says to Evelyn, “You could be anything, anywhere. Why not go somewhere your daughter is more than just this? Here, all we get are a few specks of time where any of this actually makes any sense.” And Evelyn responds with maybe one of the most beautiful lines in cinema: “Then I will cherish these few specks of time.”  What I'd like to suggest to you is that your job as a screenwriter is to cherish these few specks of time when your movie makes sense, and to recognize,

Succession Season 4: The Difference Between Plot & Structure This week, we are going to do a deep analysis of Succession, Season 4, Episode 1. There will be spoilers, but only for Episode 1.  This is actually my fourth podcast on Succession, and there's a reason for that. There is so much you can learn from this show– as a screenwriter, as a TV writer, as any kind of writer– because the writing is just so extraordinary.  In my previous Succession podcasts, we've broken down the engine of Succession and how it actually relates to the engine of some very different shows like Arrested Development and Gilligan's Island. We've talked about the use of subtext in Succession, and done a really deep scene analysis to show you how to use subtext in your writing. And we've talked about the engine of Succession as it relates to each subsequent season, and how each season is designed to feel the same but also different.  But today, we're going to be talking about something bigger. Yes, we're going to be talking about engine, and how Episode 1 of Succession Season 4 relates to Episode 1 of Succession Seasons 1, 2, and 3. We're going to talk about how that engine gets replicated now for a fourth time. But that’s only the beginning. Today, we're also going to use Succession Season 4 as a model to understand one of the most foundational concepts that you can learn as a screenwriter: the difference between plot and structure.  Plot and structure, when looking at a screenplay, tend to be used interchangeably– but they are actually very different. So what is the difference between plot and structure?  Usually when screenwriters come to me– whether they're coming for a Master Class, ProTrack, or even our Foundation Classes– they generally come with a problem. And those problems tend to fit into two different categories.  You get the screenwriters who come and say, “Jake, I'm so good at character but I suck at structure.” And then you get the other group of screenwriters that say, “Jake, I'm so good at structure, but I really suck at character.”  While there may be the rare exceptions, generally both of these types of students are wrong.  Structure and character are inextricably tied together. You cannot build structure without character, and you cannot build character without structure.  The reason for that is psychological: we are what we do.  You are the choices that you make, that's what makes you a character. That's what makes you someone to root for. You are the choices you make, in relation to the things that you want, and the obstacles you face. And you are the unique way that you make those choices. That's who you are. And it is actually choice that gives structure to your life. In the same way, it's a choice that gives structure to your character's life.  Structure is just the process by which we change, or fail to change, by which we break our patterns or by which we repeat our patterns, by which we go on a journey or by which we refuse to go on a journey (which, by the way, is its own journey).  So, structure, at its simplest level, is “I want this.”  As soon as you decide you want something, you’re likely going to realize that it’s harder to get than you expected. Or maybe you get it without much challenge, only to realize that it comes with unexpected consequences which make your life hard.  Those challenges may seem like a bad thing, but actually,

The Last of Us: How To Find Variations on Your Series Engine This week we're going to be talking about The Last of Us, the HBO TV series by Craig Mazin and Neil Druckmann.  For the last couple of episodes, I have been hammering on this idea that the TV Series Engine is designed to make each episode of your TV series feel both the same and different... but then we get to Episode 3, an episode that feels… well, different and different.  Episode 3 of HBO’s The Last of Us series seems to completely break the engine of the show, at least in the way we usually discuss it. So what the heck is going on here?  And why does it work so well?  We're going to have a really fun ride, talking about some of the variations you can pull off within the engine of a TV show, and some of the ways that we can start to push against expectations while still keeping that engine intact. Even better, we’re going to be talking about idea creation, and how to take a “seen it before” idea (like a zombie apocalypse) and transform it into something that feels new and fresh— whether that’s a video game, or a TV series (or, as in the case of The Last of Us, both!) Now, I want to warn you, there are going to be quite a few spoilers of Episodes 1, 2, and 3 of The Last of Us TV series in this podcast. I’m not going to spoil anything beyond Episode 3, so if you're up to Episode 3, you’re set.  If you’re not up to Episode 3, turn off this podcast, watch the show, and then come back. You're going to get more value out of our conversation here if you’ve seen The Last of Us– and it's quite a show.  Also, note that I’m not an expert in The Last of Us video games. Analysis of the changes between the game and the show are based on research— so if I’ve gotten anything wrong, or if there are any ideas that can be deepened by experts in the game, please let me know in the comments.  Let's start by talking about the premise of The Last of Us TV series.   It's a hard premise to pull off, and it’s hard because of its simplicity.  How many zombie movies have we seen? How many zombie series have we seen? How many zombie video games for that matter?  How do you walk into the post-apocalyptic genre and outdo The Walking Dead?  (Which, by the way, pre-existed not only the show, but also the game). One of the constants of being any kind of writer: a screenwriter, a video game writer, a TV writer, is always being concerned that our ideas aren’t good enough. Maybe it’s derivative? Has it been done too many times before?  Well, what has been done more often than zombies?  On the surface, it would seem like The Last of Us is a pretty bad idea— not only for a TV series but even for a game!  The truth is, had these writers been less experienced, they might have depressed themselves out of it: do we really need another post-apocalyptic “zombie” series?  To make matters even more challenging, the foundational structure of the Last of Us is one we’ve seen before, in other shows, in games, and in novels. It’s basically Cormac McCarthy’ s Pulitzer Prize–winning book The Road, set in a zombie world. And even The Road is derived from Stephen King's The Stand– we can see the elements that carry through all three, the apocalyptic pandemic and the traveling survivors searching for somewhere safe. So looking at The Last of Us as a TV Series, and as a game, we have a premise that someone who only took a surface look would tell you is doomed. The idea just “isn’t good enough.” We’ve seen this premise a million times before: After the zombie apocalypse, a father and daughter travel together and try to survive in a cruel world while watching civilization rebuild. Sounds pretty familiar, right?  Yet, The Last of Us franchise has been hugely successful,

The White Lotus: Engine of a Limited Series This week, we're going to be looking at The White Lotus, Season 1 and Season 2, and through The White Lotus we’ll be looking at a really important concept in writing for TV: the TV Series Engine. We're going to be learning how to build an engine for a limited series, and how to apply those concepts to any kind of series– whether it's a TV drama, comedy, dramedy, or anything in between.  To understand how the engine of The White Lotus works, let's start by talking about what the engine of a TV show actually is.  The engine of a TV show is the collection of consistent elements that allow that show to feel both similar and different at the same time. When you sell a TV pilot, you are not just selling a great story: you're actually selling a blueprint. You're selling a model for a kind of storytelling that can produce episode after episode, and in which each episode will feel both similar and different from the others. That blueprint is the engine, and it’s something you need to understand when you’re writing for TV. When you tune into your favorite shows, you're coming for a familiar feeling: to hang out with specific characters and to see them act a certain way. But you also want to feel like you're going on a journey, and you want to be surprised. So you want it to feel different and similar at the same time.  In a way, every show is like a franchise: just like a McDonald's! Every episode has a certain feeling in common, and each show has certain elements that are designed to generate that feeling. While you can play around with those elements, if you change too many of them, you break your engine.  If you break the engine of a TV show, the show either peters out because you can no longer sustain the drama, or you end up losing its audience because you no longer have the feeling. On the simplest level, a limited series like The White Lotus is really just a giant movie, so the engine works differently than in a traditional TV comedy, drama or dramedy series.  Normally, when a limited series is conceived (what used to be called a miniseries) it’s conceptualized like a giant movie. Each episode is designed to feel similar to the ones that preceded it, while also being different enough to hold your interest.  Each episode is designed to double down on– or, in improv terms, “Yes, and”– everything that's happened before, until it’s all boiled up into a giant mess that gets resolved in the final episode.  The structure of a limited series is very similar to that of a movie. While a movie might have seven acts (the way I teach it in my Write Your Screenplay class), The White Lotus has six “acts” in Season 1, and seven “acts” in Season 2. Except in a limited series, we call these acts episodes, and they are broken down into smaller acts inside each of those episodes and into scenes within that.  In a limited series, you have to think about the engine in terms of how each episode relates to the others– but normally, when you conceive a limited series, you don't design a season engine. In other words, you're conceiving it as a single product, not as something you're going to replicate season after season.  But of course, what tends to happen when a limited series is successful is that we want it again, and that limited series ends up turning into a series, just like The White Lotus. One of the big differences between a TV series and a movie is that movies are designed to create catharsis: when we get to the end of a movie or limited series, we want to feel a feeling of completion. We've gone through this journey with these characters and we've reached an end. And that end, whether it's tragic, or comic, or somewhere in between,

Triangle Of Sadness: Meaning, Structure and the Power of Location in Screenwriting [sf_button colour="blue" type="standard" size="small" link="https://youtu.be/Nu82LANSo9Q" target="_self" icon="" dropshadow="no" extraclass=""]WATCH VIDEO HERE![/sf_button] Hello, I'm Jacob Krueger, and this is the Write Your Screenplay podcast. This week, we're going to be talking about Triangle of Sadness by Ruben Ostlund.  There are so many valuable things that we can talk about, looking at this movie. You can think of Triangle of Sadness as basically “White Lotus on a boat,” but there's also something fascinating happening in the structure of Triangle of Sadness.  Triangle of Sadness has a dialectical structure, banging ideas about  capitalism and socialism together in an attempt to arrive at something closer to the truth, and it’s in that structure that the meaning of Triangle of Sadness is found. The script looks at those competing political point of views in a really complicated way, and by the end of it, Triangle of Sadness is looking at the challenges of making any kind of sense out of political philosophy in a world where everybody is ultimately motivated by power.  So we're going to be talking about the meaning of Triangle of Sadness and how to convey meaning in structure. But we're going to be pressing all those complicated concepts through a very simple idea, one that I think is going to be hugely helpful for you as a screenwriter.  We are going to be analyzing Triangle of Sadness in the context of how to use location in your screenwriting, not only in relation to budget but as a structural element.  Location is one of those elements of screenwriting that most screenwriters don't think about enough. Sure, if you're an indie filmmaker, you've probably been told to write a “contained” movie. Maybe, if you're a horror filmmaker, you've been told to write a “contained horror” movie. The idea of limiting locations is pretty simple at its core: you limit locations, you limit budget.  Every time you go to a new location in your screenwriting, you're asking for more money. It makes sense for any movie with budget constraints to try to limit its locations. But there are also big budget movies, where it seems like there is no limit on locations. Not every horror film is a contained horror film, and not every independent film takes place in just a handful of locations.  It is true that every time you introduce a new location into your screenplay, as a screenwriter or TV writer, you are asking for money. You are saying “I'm raising the budget,” and there's nothing wrong with that. But it means that you want to get the most out of your locations. So I want to give you a stronger way of thinking about location, and help you understand the value of location in your script.  Too many screenwriters think about location as simply a place where they happen to write a scene in their screenplay. Not something valuable in itself, just the place where the thing that happens, happens.  Often, we think, okay, well, what's the normal location for this to happen? And there's nothing wrong with that: there are normal locations for things to happen, and those normal locations can appear in your screenplay and be used for good purpose. For example, in Triangle of Sadness: the argument between Yaya and Carl starts off at a restaurant, which is a really normal location for that kind of relationship argument to take place.  But we want to get the most value out of every location, and that means closely observing each location, and thinking about how to have the most fun with each location we use. If, every time we write a scene heading, we cost our producers money, then we want to make it worth their while. We want to build structure and character and f...

The Banshees Of Inisherin: Allegory, Stakes and Structure  This week we're going to be looking at The Banshees of Inisherin, by Martin McDonagh. It was fascinating to see The Banshees of Inisherin up against Everything Everywhere All at Once at the Golden Globes, because Everything Everywhere All at Once was such an extraordinarily complicated screenplay, and The Banshees of Inisherin is such a simple one. It was very interesting to see those two scripts in head-to-head competition, because they represent the far extremes of what a great screenplay can be. The truth is, these are both highly effective screenplays.  Today, we're going to talk about some of the more complicated elements underneath this apparently simple screenplay. We're going to talk about the piece as a political allegory for the Irish Civil War and the troubles in Ireland that took place in the many years after it, and how Martin McDonagh’s incredible screenwriting makes this allegory work so well. But first, I want to talk about one of the biggest accomplishments of the film: The Banshees of Inisherin creates stakes out of a situation that almost anyone would consider extremely low stakes.  Now, there are going to be some spoilers ahead. So if you have not yet watched The Banshees of Inisherin–  what are you doing? Run out and watch it, and then come back here. How does The Banshees of Inisherin build high stakes out of a low stakes situation? The Banshees of Inisherin takes place on a mythical island during the Irish civil war, but the Irish Civil War is barely seen. It's basically just some distant explosions and a couple of references. The characters live in a perfect, idyllic community–  or at least, what seems like it. In the first image of the piece, we see this perfect rainbow over this beautiful town. And it's very “green screened,” but it works that it looks fake. Because it's so perfect, so happy– it almost feels like we're going to start a musical or something. We're watching this nice guy named Pádraic Súilleabháin.  He loves his life, he loves his sister, he loves his town and he loves his best friend, Colm Doherty. He goes looking for Colm so they can have a drink. This is the normal world of The Banshees of Inisherin. It’s happiness turned up almost to a mythical level; it’s the kind of idyllic dream that we have of home. It's the way this relatively simple man sees his home: as the loveliest place on earth. Pádraic knocks on his friend Colm’s door– the guy he has a pint with every single day at the pub– to pick him up. And Colm does not respond. Structurally, what happens for the whole first half of The Banshees of Inisherin is simply Pádraic trying to understand why Colm doesn't want to be his friend anymore. In fact, it's not until page 31 of the script, the end of Act One, that any threat of what's going to happen in the movie actually occurs! It's not until page 55 (of a 94-page script) that the first truly horrible thing happens. That is incredible! It means that Martin McDonagh has basically created unflinching drama for more than half the script without actually allowing a single act of violence to happen. He has wrestled one simple idea– “maybe he doesn't want to be your friend anymore”– into nearly an hour of compelling screen time with tremendous stakes. Why is your screenplay low stakes? I’m going to be talking about how to build stakes in your screenwriting, and how to use The Banshees of Inisherin to understand stakes and how they're built. Because building stakes is one of the most common notes that you will receive as a screenwriter. So how do you write a script with high stakes? You're going to get this note all the time: “the stakes are low,” “it kind of felt low stakes,” “I wasn't connected,” “I don't know,

Avatar: The Way of Water VS. Avatar - Spectacle and Structure This episode, we're going to be looking at Avatar: The Way of Water as well as the first Avatar, the 2009 film. We’re going to be breaking down both movies structurally, analyzing their strengths and weakness, and understanding the role of spectacle in both Avatar films, and how to apply those lessons to your own writing. There's an interesting thing that happens with sequels. When we're building sequels, our movies actually become more like TV shows than like traditional feature films.  Traditionally, when we think of a feature film, we think of a contained unit. But when we think of a TV series, we actually want to create a replicable element, where every installment of the series feels like every other installment of the series, even as the plot and certain elements change.  In other words, we're trying to create the same feeling in a different way. And this is true whether you're making Avatar, the Avengers, or even The Godfather Part 1 and 2, (we'll leave The Godfather, Part 3 for another conversation). By looking at the engine of Avatar and Avatar: The Way of Water we can better understand how sequels work and how to write a successful sequel.  When we create sequels, we're not just continuing the story, we're building an engine. We're asking, What are the replicable elements of the first movie? And how do I replicate them in a way that feels the same, but also feels different? We want movie goers to feel like they got what they came for, while also feeling like they got something a little unexpected.  James Cameron has been very clear on this. He developed the scripts to ensure that if you liked the first Avatar movie, you’re going to like Avatar: The Way of Water. In fact, Cameron  had trouble with the writing of Avatar: The Way of Water because he was frustrated with the writers trying to come up with new stories rather than first looking at what made the first one so successful, and trying to replicate those elements.  We're also going to be talking about the role of spectacle in both Avatar films, the importance of spectacle, and how to find spectacle in your own writing. Whether you're writing a huge feature film like Avatar: The Way of Water that's going to cost $400 million to make, or a $20,000 feature, we're going to talk about the value of spectacle, and the importance of spectacle and how to build spectacle in your screenwriting, your TV writing, even your playwriting. We’re going to explore how the use of spectacle in Avatar and Avatar: The Way of Water allows both films to transcend some of the problems in the screenplays. Both screenplays have their weaknesses, and they have their strengths. But structurally, the script for the first Avatar, despite its unabashedly cheesy dialogue and all that kind of stuff that everyone complains about, is actually a much stronger film than Avatar: The Way of Water. So we're going to be talking about some of the structural differences. so you can understand how to apply those lessons to your own screenwriting.  We talked about the idea that a sequel is supposed to create the same feeling as the original. So, what's the feeling that Avatar is supposed to give you? There are a couple of different elements to that feeling.  On the simplest level, both installments of the Avatar series are supposed to give you a feeling of wonder.  Sure, there’s going to be lots of action and excitement, like in all James Cameron movies, but the Avatar series is supposed to do more than that. It’s supposed to transport you.  It's not just a movie about a bunch of action sequences. Even though it is built like a video game, Avatar and Avatar: The Way of Water are both intended to t...

New Year’s Resolutions For Writers That Actually Work It's New Year's Day. That means, if you are like most people (and certainly if you're like most writers), you probably just set a New Year's Resolution for your writing.  The truth is, you probably set a New Year's Resolution last year for your writing.  And you probably set a New Year's Resolution the year before for your writing.  In fact, you've probably set a ton of New Year's Resolutions for your writing.  Which raises the question: Why don't New Year's Resolutions work for writers?  If all the New Year’s Resolutions you’d set in the past were actually working, you wouldn't need to set a new one every year. But the truth is, most people don't keep their New Year's Resolutions.  And I'm not just talking about artists. If you’re a writer struggling to keep your New Year's Resolution, you're in great company.  Everyone who's trying to lose weight, go to the gym, eat a healthier diet, spend more time with their family, finally quit that job, finally do the things that matter to them– we all struggle to keep our New Year's Resolutions.  What makes keeping New Year’s Resolutions for your writing so difficult?  To understand how to set New Year's Resolutions you're going to keep for your writing, we have to understand why New Year's Resolutions generally don't work in the first place.  To do that, we have to explode some of the general misconceptions of what it takes to build a life and a career as a screenwriter.  Blocked writers come to me all the time, and always say the same thing: “Jake, I need discipline! Help me get some discipline. How do I find some discipline? I just struggle with discipline.” And I always respond, “You are an artist. Of course, you struggle with discipline!” Everybody struggles with discipline. But artists by nature are rebels.  And what happens if you discipline a rebel? The rebel is going to rebel.  When you're setting a New Year’s Resolution as a writer, you're not just setting a New Year’s Resolution for the “adult” part of you.  The conscious, “adult,” part of your brain is what I call the “editing brain.”  It’s the super-smart adult part of you that knows, “I’ve got to set these very clear goals and then I’ve got to show up that these specific times. And if I just do this again and again, I'm going to get to where I want to go.”  You're not just setting New Year’s Resolutions for that part of yourself.  You're also setting New Year’s Resolutions for the child part of yourself, the subconscious mind, the actual writer inside you.  That childlike “writing brain” is not a polished adult with an agenda.  That part of you is a brilliant, intuitive artist, who in many ways is still a child. Who thinks like a child. And it's your inner artist's ability to speak like a child, to think like a child, to write like a child, to imagine like a child, to play like a child, that actually makes it a great writer!  That creative, childlike part, most likely, is a rebel. And if you punish a rebel, if you discipline a rebel, if you're tough with a rebel, the rebel rebels.  If we want to be successful with our New Year's Resolutions as writers, then we have to change our whole relationship with our conscious and our subconscious minds. In other words, if, instead of just beating ourselves up for not writing, we actually want to set New Year's Resolutions that set us up to successfully write, we must find a balance between our writing brain and our editing brain, the part of us that has an agenda, and the part of us that just wants to play.

Pitch Festivus! This podcast is a replay of our Dec 8, 2022 Pitch Festivus event, where I was joined by Jacob Krueger Studio faculty members Steven Bagatourian, Keatyn Lee, Ron McCants, Karin Partin Wells and Jonathan Redding for a 3 hour pitching extravaganza!  The transcript includes my introductory lecture about how to pitch your screenplay or TV show from the event as well as pitching advice from each faculty members. To listen to the fabulous pitches of our competing students from the event, and learn even more about pitching from the faculty responses, please listen to the podcast.   Pitching is one my favorite parts about being a screenwriter. I love to talk about pitching because there was a time when pitching my screenplays was not my favorite thing to do.  There was a time when I had terrible social anxiety. And I was afraid to even talk to someone, much less pitch something that mattered to me.  I'm excited to talk to you about this, because now, I would pitch all day, every day if I could.  So even if you're terrified of pitching, even if you're an introvert, even if you don't like selling, even if you don't like talking about yourself, there are skills that you can develop that will allow you to succeed in pitching and to even enjoy it.  I want to start today by talking about some of those skills.    The most important thing to remember about pitching your screenplay: Pitching is Personal.  All pitching is personal. Pitching is relational. Pitching is about building relationships with people. That means the biggest mistake you can make when you're pitching your script is to read your pitch! And the second biggest mistake you can make is to memorize it. If you read your pitch, if you memorize your pitch, you are actually sending a couple of unconscious signals to the person that you are pitching, that you don't want to send.  The first message you're unconsciously sending when you read or memorize your pitch: “you're not that special.”  When you read or memorize you pitch, you’re visually showing the person that you’re pitching, “I'm doing the same thing for you that I'm doing for everybody else. You're not special. I'm just here trying to sell you something. And when I leave here, I'm going to read this same pitch to somebody else and somebody else and somebody else.” The person you’re pitching is not consciously thinking that. But that's the subconscious message that you're sending the person.  Don’t read your pitch. If you came to this event planning to read your pitch, don't worry. You know your pitch better than anybody in the world. And that means you can pitch it without reading or memorizing it. The second subconscious message that you're inadvertently sending when you read or memorize a pitch for your movie or tv show: “I don't know what I'm doing.”  If you wrote a screenplay, the truth is, you know that screenplay inside out.  If you wrote a screenplay, you've already done the hardest thing in the world.  And if you've written a good screenplay, you've done the hardest version of the hardest thing in the world.  That means you are the world's authority on your pitch. There is literally nobody who knows your pitch better than you, because there is nobody who knows your project better than you.  So if you have something memorized, or if you read from something you’ve written down, you're sending the message that you don't actually know your script well enough to pitch it off-book, to just talk about it.  No matter how nervous you may be about pitching, you know on some level that's not true,

Is Your Pitch Working? Before we get started this week, I want to remind you that Pitch Festivus. our annual pitch party and holiday event is coming up. It's FREE! Thursday, December 8, Online, from 7-10 pm Eastern/ 4-7 pm Pacific. The entire JKS faculty is going to be there. We're going to teach you about pitching, we’re going to teach you how to handle pitch meetings, we're going to talk everything pitch. And you'll even get a chance to throw your name in the hat for a chance to pitch your script! The winning pitch is going to get a pitch consultation with me worth 1500 bucks. It's a pretty amazing experience and a wonderful community. You can RSVP here for free. With that in mind, in this podcast, I want to talk a little bit about pitching. I want to help you get a little bit more comfortable with the idea of pitching.  During Pitch Festivus, we're going to talk a lot about how to deal with the insecurities we feel around pitching the fears we feel around pitching. But today I'm just going to talk about how to pitch your script, and what a pitch actually needs to do.  The first myth I want to bust about pitching your screenplay is this: the purpose of your pitch is not to sell your script. I'm going to say that again. The purpose of your pitch is not to sell your script.  If you are thinking of your pitch as something that is designed to sell your script, you're going to be so stressed out. And you are going to be behaving in a way that's going to make it a lot harder for you to reach your goals.  Nobody likes the feeling of being sold.  Have you ever been to the store to buy some jeans, and some particularly “helpful” salesperson comes over and starts talking to you, and you can feel their intention is to sell you jeans? You want jeans. That’s why you came into the store. But at the moment you feel the pressure to buy, all you want is to get out of that store! You want to choose to buy. You don't want to be sold.  Nobody likes the feeling of someone coming at them with an agenda.  (Now, if you happen to have a career in sales, and you're great at sales, if you’re one of those people who can sell anything to anybody, please disregard this advice).  But if you're a normal human being, most of us are very uncomfortable selling, and even more uncomfortable selling ourselves.  If you're one of those people who is uncomfortable selling, which is most writers, I'm going to urge you not to sell.   Think of your pitch not as something designed to sell your script, but instead as something designed to open the door to a relationship.  It is not 1983 anymore. Unless you are a famous writer, you are not going to sell your script off of a pitch.  The only purpose of a pitch is to open the door: to get somebody to say, “yeah, maybe I want to read that.” Or, “yeah, maybe I want to help you get to the right person.” Or, “I just believe in you as a writer, maybe I'm interested, maybe there's a connection here.” The only purpose of a pitch is to open the door. So how do you open the door?  It's important to understand that pitching is just like any other human interaction. Though you might be very uncomfortable with the idea of having to sell something, you're probably very comfortable with the idea of talking about something that matters to you.  You probably already talk about your script with friends, family, and people who you feel comfortable with (and if you don’t, start doing so!).   While you might not be comfortable trying to sell your screenplay with a pitch, you’re probably relatively comfortable with talking with ...

The Shed Today’s podcast is an excerpt from a recent Thursday Night Writes in which we discussed some of the causes of writer’s block, how to overcome procrastination as a writer, and how to keep your writing flowing through the chaos of the holiday season, so when you’re setting your New Year’s resolutions, they can be about how to take your writing to the next level, rather than how to get the engine started again.  I realized I've been doing this wrong for 17 years.  For 17 years, I’ve been talking about how the holidays are hell for screenwriters. And for 17 years, on January 1st, I have reached out to our community with a Screenwriting Challenge, to help you get your engine started again.  And that's completely backwards.    I need to talk about how to stop procrastination and writer’s block before it starts: how to keep your screenwriting going during the holidays! It is 100 times harder to get your screenwriting engine going again than it is to just keep it running.  When I was a kid, we had this shed in our backyard. I was 13 years old. It was 1987. But nobody had been in that shed since 1980.  The truth was, I was afraid to go into that shed. In fact, my whole family was afraid to go in there. My mom was afraid to go into that shed. My sister was afraid to go into that shed.  All that was really in that shed was some old bicycles, a lawnmower, and some rakes… normal shed stuff like that. But the shed was scary because we hadn't been in there for so long.  And that's exactly what happens to writers when they let that engine for their writing come to a stop. When you stop going into the shed, the shed gets scarier and scarier.  There are many reasons it gets scarier.  The cycle of procrastination and writer’s block means that writing gets scarier when you stop doing it! Part of this is simply the way your mind processes the unknown.  Hey, can I even get in that shed again? If I do get brave enough to go in there, am I going to find anything good? Or is everything going to be ruined? Do I even have the courage to open the door to the shed?  One of the reasons you get afraid is just that you haven't been in there for a while. You don't know what's in there. And when you don't know what's in there, it's a little scary.  The second thing that makes it so hard to go back into the shed is that, on some level, you know that whatever is in there isn't in as good shape as when you shut the door a couple of months ago! If you're writing on a consistent basis, it's like having well-oiled sharp tools. But if you leave them in the shed unattended, pretty soon they’ve got cobwebs all over them, and the blades are dull, and things squeak that didn't used to squeak.    The same thing that happens to your tools in the shed is what happens to your skills as a writer when you stop using them. When you're using them every day, it’s easy to keep using them. It's like if you run every day, taking a jog is easy. If you haven't run for six months, you finally take a jog and you think you're going to die! The most important thing to remember is you’ve got to keep going into the shed.  You’ve got to keep going into the shed, no matter what is going on in your life.  And if you haven't been in the shed, then you’ve got to summon up the courage. Because every single day that you wait to go into that shed, the shed gets scarier.  The shed may never stop being scary. But it will get scarier the longer you stay out of it. Your imagination will simply be able to imagine more horror there.  Just like Jaws,

Every Genre Is Like a Musical This week, we're going to be talking about writing genre movies and TV shows. We're going to be talking about writing the horror genre, and writing elevated horror. But we're also going to be talking about writing any kind of feature film or TV show, or even a play, comic or novel that has strong genre elements.  The truth is, every film and every show, every work of art for that matter, has a strong genre element.  Whether you're writing an action movie, an action comedy or a romantic comedy, a musical, or even a little low-budget indie drama, there is always a genre element.  If you think of a Wes Anderson movie, for example, the genre element is that Wes Anderson movie is cool, hip cuteness, the odd characters, and the really beautiful tableaus: that's the Wes Anderson genre. Or, if you think of a writer like Charlie Kaufman, even though he seems to defy genre, he has his own genre as well. Generally, in his early work, he's writing inside of a romantic comedy genre. But it's also going to have that mind-bending quality to it, it's going to make you laugh, and it's going to have some hidden darkness underneath the surface. You can see that Charlie Kaufman's genre changed as he evolved in his career when he stopped working with Spike Jonze, and the darkness that used to be hidden under the humor emerged onto the surface. In films like Synecdoche New York or Anomalisa, the mind-bending Charlie Kaufman elements are still there, but the darkness rises to the surface and the romantic comedy elements disappear.  So what are we really talking about when we talk about the genre in screenwriting? Essentially genre is made up of two different elements.  The first element is the way that your movie or show makes the audience feel.  Every audience goes to a movie or binges on Netflix for the exact same reason that you do. They want to feel a certain way. Perhaps they want to feel like love is possible. They're going to show up and watch a romantic comedy or a romance because it's going to make them feel that way. Or maybe they want to feel an adrenaline rush. They might show up for your action movie, or a noir thriller to get that kind of adrenaline rush.  They might want that sci-fi or fantasy experience, that feeling of experiencing other worlds that both allow us to escape and better understand our own. They might be coming for a feeling of violence and action. They might be coming for a feeling of adventure. They might be coming for a feeling of connection and understanding. They might be coming for a feeling of being challenged creatively. Your audience is always coming to a movie or TV series for a genre feeling. And if you don't deliver that feeling, the audience is going to be pissed off.  If you're writing BoJack Horseman (see my podcast on BoJack Horseman) and you don't deliver 500 puns a minute (and then every once in a while make us cry), we're going to be pissed off.  If you're writing Curb Your Enthusiasm and you don't make us laugh at the little eccentricities of neurosis as Larry tries to get along in reasonable upper-class society, you haven't done your job. And if Curb Your Enthusiasm ever made you cry, you'd be angry. Because that's not the feeling you're coming for.  The first element that we're talking about when we talk about a genre is how the movie or show makes you feel.  That doesn't mean that you should adjust the feeling of your show for your audience and it doesn't mean that you can't do cool mashups of genre feelings and genre elements. You certainly can.  For example,

Pulp Fiction: A Simple Trick For Shaping Your Audience’s Expectations This episode is going to be a throwback to Pulp Fiction. I recently rewatched the film in preparation for the ProTrack mentorship session with one of my students. There are so many lessons in this film that will be really valuable for you all, so I’m excited to share them with you. Pulp Fiction, on its surface, seems to be completely revolutionizing what screenwriting structure looks like.  Pulp Fiction unfolds out of chronological order. It has these long, long, long scenes. It has monologues, it has dance, and it has all these things that we don't typically see in movies. Pulp Fiction looks like it's doing something completely wild and complicated. And yes, it is.  But at the center of Pulp Fiction is something so incredibly simple. And I want to talk about this one simple idea because this is an idea that you can use in your writing. Here’s the simple screenwriting idea that all of Pulp Fiction grows from: You never give them exactly what they're expecting. We talk a lot in this podcast about getting in touch with your voice. If you have taken my Write Your Screenplay Class, you know that there are actually four phases of writing, and the phase where you're getting in touch with your voice is really just one of those phases.  One of the phases of writing that we haven't talked a lot about on this podcast is a phase I call The Audience draft. How do you manipulate the audience's expectations? How do you surprise the audience? How do you track the journey that the audience is having and the way it relates to your main character’s journey.  But there's a deeper thing that we can do as we write The Audience Draft. We can use The Audience Draft to actually push ourselves past our own inner sensor. In other words, by surprising the audience, we can also surprise ourselves. And we can also surprise our characters.    This is one of the things the screenplay for Pulp Fiction does so brilliantly: it sets up really clear expectations for the audience, and then it both delivers upon and violates them, in wonderfully entertaining ways.  For example, in the first scene, we're going to watch this loving couple, played by Amanda Plummer and Tim Roth, plan a robbery of a diner. We think we know where we are: Oh, these crazy people who are so madly in love with each other are going to rob this diner, and we're going to watch their little heist movie. Their expectations around robbing the diner are set so clearly. They've talked about all the hard places to rob and why the diner is going to be the easiest possible place to rob.  Once you set those expectations, you know it can never happen like that.  You can never give your characters what they're expecting. And you can never give your audience what they're expecting. It has to happen in a slightly different way.  How do we surprise the audience's expectations?  Well, rather than watching these two rob the diner, we cut away, and suddenly we're in a completely different story!  That's a shock for the audience, the audience is asking themselves, Oh, how are these two storylines going to match up?    How do you surprise the audience’s expectations? Well, that's going to come a little bit later. But you can see that there's a string of the plot of Pulp Fiction that Tarantino’s choice to cut away leaves dangling for us. We don't forget about that string even though we lose track of it. And when it comes back together in a way that we could never have anticipated, it’s so much fun for us to experience.  We're going to cut away from Tim Roth and Amanda Plummer.

Structure is a Puzzle This week, we're going to be talking about screenplay structure in what may be a different way than you have experienced it before. Usually, when people talk about screenwriting structure, they might be talking about outlines, or plot, or the kinds of things that might have to happen, or Three Act Structure, or Seven Act Structure, or The Hero's Journey, or any of the millions of other permutations by which people try to understand structure with their intellectual brains.  What we're going to be talking about instead today is a simple metaphor that might help you understand the process of finding structure for your screenplay and how to do that in an organic and intuitive way.  Sometime in your childhood (or in your adulthood!) you probably have had the experience of putting together a puzzle. I want you to imagine 1000 piece puzzle, one of those really complicated ones with a lot of intricate detail and a lot of pieces that maybe look similar or even the same. On the cover of the box, there's a picture. You're trying to create that picture.  When you're just looking at 1000 puzzle pieces, it can become completely overwhelming. In fact, if you just start trying to put random pieces together, you’ll probably just get overwhelmed and quit, just like most screenwriters do when they try to figure out the structure of their screenplays. You need a process to group those pieces so you can start to make sense of them. When you're putting together a puzzle, you're going to start, usually, by looking for the corners. You're looking for pieces that have a very specific shape, a shape that makes sense, a shape that can be a central building block for your puzzle.  What's nice about the corners is that in pretty much any puzzle, you're only going to have four of them. So you do have to sort through a lot of pieces to find those corners, but you don't need to actually find a lot of them to start building. Once you find those corners, you can start to place them.  In screenwriting, we also need to look for those corners. We need to look for those corners in order to find the shape for our structure.  But our challenge is a little bit different than the challenge of putting together a simple puzzle.  See, with a simple puzzle, you always have that picture on the box. It's not a vague picture. It's not a general picture.  It's not a picture that's clouded by your subconscious mind, or your dreams. It’s not a picture that’s shimmery and changes as you think about it, and maybe first looks like this and then looks like that.  In putting together a puzzle, we have a picture that looks like a picture and we have pieces that look like pieces. They already look like pieces. And we simply have to sort through the pieces that already exist in order to find those corners. In screenwriting, we have to make the puzzle pieces that we will build the structure of our screenplay. We have to actually create the pieces! And even as we create them, though we may have a sense of what that final picture looks like, we don't have an exact image to build towards. We have to develop our own image along the way.  Screenwriting structure is like putting together a puzzle. But it's like putting together a puzzle where you have to make the pieces and where you don't know exactly what the final image is going to look like.  That means you need some different skills in order to succeed. What a lot of people do is try to figure out an outline for what they imagine the “image on the box” will turn out to be. They try to say, okay, there's going to be a puppy dog in the bottom left corner, and there's going to be a cute little Victorian cottage up to the right.

Homeland: Getting Staffed on a TV Show with Jonathan Redding Jake: My guest today is Jonathan Redding. Jonathan is the newest faculty member at Jacob Krueger Studio.  Jonathan was a writer on Homeland, which, if you haven't watched, is an extraordinary show. We're going to be talking about how Homeland was built, and what was it like to be in that room, especially as your first staff gig as a staff writer.  Jonathan began as a playwright and a dramaturg. And we'll talk a little bit about the journey from playwriting to TV drama writing and how those things are related and connected. Jonathan, why don't you just start off by telling us a little bit about your journey. Jonathan: I shall, but first, just let me say thank you so much for having me on. I am a fan of this podcast. And I'm so excited to be here. I'm so excited to be working with you. This is really fun for me. The big thing for me, Homeland was when I first got staffed. That was really my introduction into the industry. I had been pursuing it for quite a while before that, but I had mainly been in the theater world. I had been a playwright and a dramaturg and an actor.  I had been resident playwright to a theater in Santa Monica called The Broad Stage Regional Theater for a number of years, and while I was there, I got to work alongside some incredible artists: Mikhail Baryshnikov, Shakespeare's Globe of London and Anna Deavere Smith came, and did workshops with us. I was part of the early development process for Hadestown. Anaïs Mitchell still just had the concept album because Dale Franzen. who wound up being the executive producer of the Broadway run, was at the time, our artistic director.  That was back when it was just first being workshopped, with actors singing it live, and trying to put together some simple kind of movement and things to it.  Prior to that, I had my own company called the Los Angeles Theatre Ensemble, who are perennial Ovation Award nominees out here. And had a number of celebrated and award-winning plays, including The War Cycle, which was a trilogy of plays. Still, breaking in was a struggle for a long time. I had been writing specs and features for a long time. When I first came to town, I brought with me spec episodes of The Shield and Lost, they were in the middle of their runs. That is how long ago I started this march. Homeland was my first show. It took so long! So long to get to. Jake: I think it’s actually very heartening for students to understand that, yes, some people get lucky– and I always say, you never know when luck will come! Luck could happen tomorrow, luck could happen in 10 years. But I think, the people who are successful are often people for whom the luck doesn't necessarily happen when they want it to, but they keep writing, they keep pushing, and pushing and pushing.  It's very valuable to understand that it may take you a long time to build a career. And that's not because you're failing. That's because you're doing something really hard. Jonathan: Yeah. It's like Theseus’ boat. You start out with your piece of material, your one or two scripts, and you think, this is the thing, and it's going to get me there.  And then by the time you've actually reached a destination, or reached some far long part of your journey, every part of the boat underneath you has been replaced, patched over and become new. And you are the constant.  Jake: Yeah. I love that as a concept, especially because there's so much bad advice out there. I get writers all the time, saying, well, this person told me I should write this script. And then I write that script. And then somebody else said, I should write something like this instead. So I wrote that.

The Inner Game of Screenwriting with Christian Lybrook Jake: I have a special guest today, Christian Lybrook, who is one of our ProTrack mentors at Jacob Krueger Studio.   I'm especially proud to have Christian here because Christian came up through our program. He's an extraordinary writer. He has produced and directed his own work, he's managed to maintain a career as a writer from Idaho! ( we won't tell anybody, Christian) And he's also just a sensitive human being with incredible emotional intelligence, towards both his characters and the writers that he mentors.  We're going to be talking about the inner game and the personal side of becoming a writer today with Christian. Welcome, Christian, thank you so much for being here.   Christian: Thanks for having me. As you know, one of my favorite pastimes is chatting about all things screenwriting. Happy to be here. Jake: Tell us a little bit about your journey as a filmmaker. What has that looked like? And what do you think was most important thing in making the transition from being someone who is dreaming of doing this to being someone who's doing it? Christian: Yeah. Great question. You know, when I think about my journey as a screenwriter, everybody knows that every journey is different. And anybody who's listening to the podcast, you're going to have a different version of what your story is.  But I think it's helpful to talk about these stories, because they can be illustrative of the things that we have faced and the things we have to overcome. I wast somebody who didn't go to film school, I wasn't somebody who grew up in the business, I didn't grow up in LA or New York.  And for a long time, I was always interested in film and screenwriting. But I didn't think that I could do it because I didn't know how to get into the industry.  I grew up on the East Coast. I was born in Massachusetts and moved around a lot. But by the time I was kind of pursuing writing, I was in grad school in Alaska, which is about the farthest away you can get from LA and still be in the United States.  I took a screenwriting class as I was getting an MFA in Creative Writing. And I was focused on fiction, primarily because, although I secretly wanted to be a screenwriter, I just didn't know how to complete that training. And I took one screenwriting class, and that immediately ignited something in me, but I still was literally thousands of miles away from the industry.  And living in Alaska, and trying to make it as a screenwriter just seemed like a ridiculous ask. So  I stayed focused on prose, and eventually, I followed a girl to Idaho. And that's where I am today. One of the nice things about Idaho is it's a very small place. And you could do things and meet people much more easily. It's a very small community. You meet one person and they're going to introduce you to the next person, and the next person.  But it was also at this time when technology was being democratized. And for the first time, if you owned a video camera and a computer, you could make a movie. And that was really my entree into taking a stab at this stuff. Because I didn't have to be in LA. I realized I didn't have to be surrounded by pros, I could just make it up as I went along.  The first short film I made was with some buddies. None of us had training, none of us had experience. And we all thought, how hard can it be?  It turns out, it's really fucking hard.  But it was a great introduction. And there are elements of it that I fell in love with. I taught myself how to edit.

The Bear: The First Image and the Opening Sequence This week, we're going to be talking about The Bear.  We're going to be analyzing the first image of The Bear and the opening sequence of the pilot. We’ll be talking about the importance of the first image in your screenplay not only when it comes to selling your script but also on a creative and structural level. And most importantly, we’re going to talk about how to make the first image work for you in your screenwriting.  The first image of your screenplay, just like the first image of The Bear, is the most important image in the whole script.  That's because it's the only element that you know that every reader is actually going to read! When a coverage reader reads your script, they are actually making the decision from that very first image: am I going to read, or skim? Is this going to be cool? Or is this going to suck? Am I excited about this? Or is this just another script I've got to slog through?  When a producer, director, manager, agent, or star reads the first image of your script, from that very first image they are making a decision: Is this script for me? Is this something I'm going to want to make? Is this one strong enough to take home to read tonight compared to all the other ones on my desk or iPad? Is this the one that's most likely to actually be good?  This may seem like jaded Hollywood B.S., but it's not. Because the first image is also the image that the audience uses to decide if they’re going to watch your show. Is this show for me? Is this movie for me? Do I want to stream this? Or do I want to flip to something else?  Netflix has actually proven that audiences make a decision about whether they're going to watch your show or movie in the first 10 seconds.  Think about that! The first 10 seconds!  Yet, despite this, many writers throw away their first image! Many writers simply don't understand that the first image is the moment that pulls the reader into the script, or fails to pull them in.  Another reason the first image is so important is that the decision to buy a script or to option a script is an emotional decision.  You may think that people are buying your script, because it's “four quadrant” or because it has this element or that element. Sure, that's a part of it. But usually, someone's actually buying your script because they had an emotional experience when reading it, an experience that made them say to themselves, I've got to do this, I need to do this, I absolutely need this script.  You can think of the first image in your screenplay or pilot like the first moment on a first date. No matter what happens next, that’s the moment that’s going to set your expectations. You might have a lot of great stuff (or terrible stuff) that comes after that first image in your screenplay. But that first image is going to determine the way that the reader feels about the rest of the script. Everything else in the script is going to happen in relation to that first image. Many years ago, I used to direct off-Broadway and off-off Broadway theater. And I realized very quickly that when people come to see off-off Broadway theater, just like when most coverage readers sit down to read a script, they are not expecting to have a good experience. When people come to watch off-off Broadway theatre, they're actually coming to support their friends. Most of your audience is there as charity. And what they're really doing when they sit down is praying! Please, please, let it not suck! Please let me not have to have this negative experience, and then have to go pretend to have liked the play and act supportive of my friend! Please let it not suck! They are not coming into an off-off Broadway play thinking, I hope this is awesome.

How to Transition from Playwriting to Screenwriting  This episode is for the playwrights among you. We are going to talk about how to make the transition from playwriting to screenwriting, the difference between plays and screenplays, and how you can use some of the incredible skills you have as a playwright in order to make the transition into screenwriting or TV writing.  What is the difference between playwriting and screenwriting? And how do you make the transition from playwriting to screenwriting or TV writing? There's an interesting phenomenon happening in TV writing. TV producers are looking for playwrights to staff their writers' rooms.  There's a vast number of playwrights who are making that transition into screenwriting– a field that's very different from the one that they're used to.  And why are playwrights getting staffed in writers' rooms? Because quite frankly, playwrights are a lot better trained than most screenwriters.  There’s a simple reason for that. Choose the playwright of your dreams, and pretty much guaranteed, they are teaching at some university. Nearly all playwrights need to subsidize their income with these teaching positions. Whereas successful screenwriters get paid vastly more than playwrights. And for that reason, there are just far fewer experienced screenwriters who are teaching.    Unlike playwrights who are mostly trained by experts in playwriting, most screenwriters have actually learned by taking classes with and reading screenwriting books by academics, not by working screenwriters. As a result, these books and classes tend to be much more academic, much more conscious mind focused, and quite frankly, a lot less interesting than those about playwriting. Unlike screenwriting, most playwriting education begins not with craft, but with character.  This causes a challenge for many playwrights as they transition from playwriting to television writing or from playwriting to screenwriting.  They have this intuitive organic process that they have developed over time, that works when they are writing a play. But when they start to read books and seek mentorship about screenwriting, if they don't find the right teacher, they will often learn a lot more about how to plan a script than how to actually write one! Rather than learning how to develop a great movie or tv show from the blank page, they’re learning how to reverse engineer one, deconstructing it like a critic, rather than learning the process of developing it like a screenwriter.  This can cause tension in the writer and often cause their screenwriting to go flat in a way that their playwriting does not. Of course, if you've never been a playwright, the effects of this can be even more dramatic.  Playwrights at least have that strong foundation in character underneath them, which can sometimes help them transcend the formulas that are being taught when it comes to screenwriting.  Whereas if your only education isn't screenwriting, there's a good chance that you've barely been taught how to write character at all.  And yet, if you look at the best movies, the best movies are all about character. The best TV shows are all about character, the structure of the shows and these movies is all about character.  That's true whether you are writing a blockbuster popcorn movie like Top Gun: Maverick, which, (despite the concerns I bring up in my previous podcast), succeeds because it is not really about the air-fights, but about the relationship between Maverick and Rooster, between Maverick and Penny, between Maverick and Hangman, between Maverick and the Forces of the Army.

Top Gun: Maverick - All Writing Is Political This week, we're doing something special. I'm actually sharing a video from my latest Thursday Night Writes Class. This is the free class that I do every Thursday night.  But this particular lecture, I felt was so timely and so important that I wanted to share it with everyone on the podcast. You'll notice we had some sound issues. The sound is not as good as you would normally expect from the podcast. But I think you will get a lot of value out of this content. And hopefully, it will affect your writing for the better.  If you do the exercise, and you'd like to share your results, feel free to join the JKS Writers Collective Group on Facebook, and you can share your results there and get feedback from our community. Thank you so much. And enjoy. I went to see Top Gun: Maverick a couple of days ago. And I had an amazing time. And then I got really angry. And it's not a popular thing to say that Top Gun: Maverick got me angry. Everybody loves this movie. But I got angry.  I got angry because I think Top Gun: Maverick is such a missed opportunity. Because the film has dumbed down war to a place where we can all feel so good about it.  It’s dumbed down war to a point where there are no consequences, there is no death– there's not even a moment like Goose's death in the first movie. There are no consequences to being a maverick and refusing to follow any rule. And anybody in charge is a total idiot, so there’s no risk in being a Maverick, because you’re so obviously right and everyone else is so obviously wrong. And the girl that you've wronged, again and again, and again, is still going to be there waiting for you forever– apparently for the last 30 years. And, nothing we do is going to have any frickin’ consequences.  I think part of the reason Top Gun is doing well is for exactly that reason. All of us want to escape right now. Who doesn't want to escape?  I’m not arguing that Top Gun: Maverick is anything other than a successful screenplay. Sure, we can get into the formulaic aspects of the film’s structure. And if we wanted to get really specific about its applicability as a model for new writers. It’s not. You can't sell Top Gun: Maverick as a new writer. You can't follow a formula that is predictable and succeed unless you happen to own a franchise that everyone in the world is nostalgic for.  But outside of those issues, the screenplay for Top Gun: Maverick is tight as hell. And it’s doing everything the writers want it to do. It's a joy ride. It gives you the fun you're looking for. It’s got well-built characters that all have really clear wants and go on really clear journeys. And it’s got some of the most incredible stunts ever filmed.  And no one could argue that it’s been anything but totally financially and critically successful.  But it's still a missed opportunity.   Top Gun: Maverick wants to be a piece about drones. It wants to script who we're becoming as America.  It wants to be a film about the difference between being the pilot in the pilot seat and making decisions based on what you know is right and wrong. And being a drone, following a plan without conscience or connection, where there is no feeling in war, where you are playing a video game.  The script starts out with that promise. It starts out like this: Maverick you're the old guard. We're getting rid of you. We don't need pilots anymore. We’ve got drones. (in fact, we have a mission that probably should be flown by drones considering the pilots keep blacking out from the G forces as they try to prac...

Winning Time: How To Adapt a True-Life Story This week, we're going to be looking at Winning Time: The Rise of the Lakers Dynasty by Max Borenstein and Jim Hecht, and how to adapt a true story into a TV show or feature film. We’ll be building on our conversation from my podcast about TV Bible writing, to help you understand how to translate some of those concepts into the structure of your TV Series. And most importantly, we’ll be learning how to develop your TV series structure around the hook that is most important to you.  There are a million places online where you can read about exactly what is true and what is not true in the adaptation of Winning Time. In fact, there are sites that break down every episode into truth and fiction. So we are not going to focus our inquiry there. Instead, we're going to be looking at how you, as a writer, take this giant beast of a true-life story, with all this plot, and squeeze it down into a form that you can actually structure and sell.  A lot of writers make the mistake when adapting a true-life story like Winning Time into a TV show or feature film, of believing that the hook of their adaptation exists in the true-life story itself.  A pitch from one of these well-meaning writers often sounds a little bit like this.  “It’s this incredible story that's never been told! It takes place over multiple years. It's got the most amazing characters, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Magic Johnson, Jerry Buss, it's got political stuff like HIV, Islam, it's got basketball, drug addiction… so much awesome stuff, the story practically tells itself!”  But the truth is, the story does not tell itself. And while the frenetic pace and structure of Winning Time might make it seem like it just threw all this stuff together, underneath all that is a really simple take on the material: a strong drumbeat that tells these two very talented writers and their writing team exactly what to focus on, exactly what the real story is, and what is just extraneous plot and noise.  The biggest problem in adapting a true-life story into a TV show or feature film is that there is just so much noise.  And where does that noise come from? It comes from the very process of writing a show like Winning Time. You see, as part of that process, you are going to do a ton of research. In fact, if you're really doing your job, you're going to turn yourself into an expert on the Lakers. You are going to know every little micro detail about what happened during the period of time that you're trying to capture in your TV show or in your feature film.  And the result of all that research, if you don't have a really strong central premise, a really strong structure to hang that all on, is you can get distracted by all those details you’ve discovered, and lose track of the forest for the trees.    When you discover an incredible true-life story to adapt, it’s easy to imagine that you are the first person to ever think of telling this story as a TV show or movie. Chances are, you're wrong.  Chances are, there are dozens of people who are pitching the exact same idea you are pitching. There are just so many people pitching show ideas and movie ideas every single day.  In fact, if you've targeted the right producer, there's a good chance that they have already heard this exact project pitched many times before! They've been looking to tell this story, and they've maybe heard 10 different takes on this material over the years. They've just never found the one that made them want to move forward.    This is the most important thing when it comes to adapting a true-life story into a screenplay or pilot, finding the hook that makes your take on the material unique,

Selling a TV Series: The Role of the Show Bible Today we are going to talk about what it takes to sell at TV series, and specifically the role of TV Show Bible and the way it works together with the Series Pilot to make the sale. We're going to answer the questions: What is a Show Bible? Why do you need one? What does a TV Bible supposed to do? How do TV Bibles relate to Pitch Decks? And how do you actually know if your TV Bible is working or not?  How does a TV Bible help you sell your TV pilot? There's an interesting history to TV Bibles. Back in the day, the TV Bible used to be a document that was put together by a young staff writer, story editor or assistant. It was a cheat sheet for new writers when they came onto a long running show.  For example, Jerry Perzigian, who teaches our TV comedy writing workshop here at the Studio, were talking about the difference between what Show Bibles used to be and what they are now. Jerry is an Emmy Award winning showrunner. He came up on shows like The Jeffersons, The Golden Girls and Married with Children. These shows ran for a really long time, which meant that often they would lose their original staff writers as those writers moved on to bigger and better things (or, at least, different things).  A new flock of staff writers would come on, and these staff writers hadn't necessarily watched every episode of The Jeffersons. They didn't necessarily know what had happened already in the show, what was happening, what could happen, what couldn't happen– they didn't necessarily fully understand the engine of the show. The Show Bible was created for these writers.  Back in the day, the TV Show Bible wasn't a sales document. It was an internal document, a cheat sheet that these writers could read like a training guide.  They could look at the TV Bible for whatever show they’d just be hired on, and realize “Oh, I get it.  This is how the show works. This is the secret recipe, the secret sauce for the show.” But today, a TV Bible has evolved into a different kind of creature entirely. Today, a TV Bible is a sales document.    If you imagine your TV Pilot is the thing that gets the big fish to swallow the hook, the Show Bible is the thing that sets the hook and reels them in. Without a great pilot, the idea of writing a TV Bible is just silly.  Unless you are already a famous writer, the chances that you can sell an idea with just a TV Series Bible are close to zero. The producer is not just interested in buying a great idea (they get lots of those). They’re interested in buying the successful execution of the idea. And they can only see that execution in the pilot that you write.    The most important element in selling a TV Series is writing an amazing pilot. Having a pilot that has a clear voice, a clear point of view, that feels like something we have not quite seen before, that is disruptive in some way, that grabs someone, shakes them a little bit, demands their attention and takes them on a journey– that is the most important element of selling a TV Series. Your pilot allows the reader to fall in love with your characters, with your world. It makes them want to invite these people back into their living room again and again.    That doesn't mean your pilot has to have nice characters in order to sell.  If you think of shows like Breaking Bad or BoJack Horseman. These aren't nice characters, but they're fascinating characters going on incredible journeys.  You also don’t have to have really dark or twisted characters. If you think of shows like Ted Lasso, or The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel,

Archetypes vs. Stereotypes: A New Look At The Hero’s Journey Archetypes are one of the most valuable and also most challenging concepts in screenwriting.  To understand how to use archetypes effectively, we have to go back all the way to the source, Carl Jung (famously not a screenwriter).  We have to understand where the concept of archetypes comes from, and how it connects to a larger concept called the Collective Unconscious.  And we have to learn how to tap into archetypes intuitively, rather than just intellectually.  If you are trying to tap into archetypes from a purely intellectual perspective in your screenwriting, there's a good chance that you're not actually writing archetypes. You're actually writing stereotypes.  So what is an archetype? How do they work? How do you write them? How do you connect to the archetypes that live inside of you?  That's what we're going to be talking about in this podcast.  As I mentioned, archetypes begin with Carl Jung, and his idea of the Collective Unconscious. To vastly oversimplify this very complicated concept:  The idea of the Collective Unconscious is that there's a fabric that ties all human experience together. That even though in my waking life, I think I am Jake, and you are you, and we think that we are different and separated, in our dreams we can actually tap into a collective fabric, a shared experience, that makes us human.  Jung believed that there were certain metaphors, certain elements, certain aspects of our dreams that actually mean the same thing to everyone who experiences them.  And by using our subconscious mind, by using the power of our dreams, we can tap into the Collective Unconscious and step into experiences that we've never yet had, and parts of ourselves we have never yet met.  In doing so, he believed that we could find the universal tie that binds us all together. A brilliant professor named Joseph Campbell came along and took Jung’s beautiful concept of the Collective Unconscious to the next level for writers, by creating something called The Hero’s Journey   To vastly oversimplify Campbell in the same way we just did Jung, Campbell essentially realized that if there's such a thing as a Collective Unconscious, there must also be such a thing as a Collective Story, a universal story.  And if we could learn to tell that universal story, that universal story would speak to everyone. Everyone could go on that same journey together; it would mean the same thing for everyone.  And in that way, it could move us all to a place of catharsis, of meaning, of growth, of connecting to who we are as human beings. He called this The Hero's Journey.  You've probably heard of The Hero’s Journey if you've been studying screenwriting, or any kind of writing. In fact, Campbell’s work spawned hundreds of disciples, from really incredible theorists like James Bonnet and Christopher Vogler, to more surfacy Save the Cat! kinds of approaches. Almost every screenwriting book, and almost every screenwriting teacher, teaches archetypes in some way, and they're all tracking back to Campbell, who's tracking back to Jung.  Sounds like a pretty good idea, right? There are 21 steps of The Hero’s Journey, and a host of specific archetypal character types, and these theorists suggest that if we simply find those steps and find these characters, then we've got a structure and the characters of a screenplay that will have universal appeal. In other words, if there are certain kinds of archetypal roles in every life, there must also be certain kinds of archetypal characters in every screenplay: The Terrible Father, The Emotional Mother,

The Gilded Age: 5 Steps To Raise The Stakes in Your Screenplay This week, we are going to be talking about how to raise the stakes in your screenwriting and TV writing. This is probably one of the most confusing notes that writers tend to get from producers, and one of the most popular.  “Raise the stakes! Raise the stakes! Raise the stakes!” But what are stakes? Why is it that you can blow something up, burn $3 million bucks, shoot at a baby, and it can still feel like there are no stakes? And then you can watch a show like The Gilded Age where the stakes are about who's going to come to what dinner party, and feel like the stakes are really high.  Today, we’re going to be talking about what stakes are and how they work. And I'm going to give you a simple five step process that you can follow to make sure that stakes are happening in your screenplay, without feeling like you have to blow something up every time you get a note from a producer.  One of the biggest confusions about how to raise the stakes in your screenplay or TV pilot is thinking that stakes are about what happens in your script.    The Gilded Age is proof that this is certainly not the case. What happens in your screenplay is actually a lot less important than what it means to the character that the “what happens” is happening to.  And even that is much less important than what is driving the character that it's happening to.  Because if something's happening to a character, but we're not actually connected to what matters to that character and the journey of that character, then what happens doesn't really matter.  And that's why you can do a lot of big spectacular things to your character and still have the feeling that there are no stakes in your screenplay.   Stakes begin with empathy. Raising the stakes in your screenplay begins with developing empathy for your characters. We feel stakes when we connect to a character on the big screen or little screen, and we see a tiny piece of ourselves up there, we connect to them, we empathize with them, we feel what it would feel like to be in their shoes.  This is why we cringe when we watch Curb Your Enthusiasm. And this is why we care when we watch The Gilded Age.  It's not because of the “what's happens” to your character. It's because of the “what does it mean?” to the character.  And in order to develop that “what does it mean?” to the character, there are a couple steps that you can follow.    STEP #1: To raise the stakes in your screenplay or pilot, make sure you know what the character wants.  The more specific you can be about what they want, the better.  Notice, I'm not talking about the audience yet. There's a whole other level of structure that I call secondary structure that we build, which is about how you communicate this stuff to the audience. And that stuff is really complicated; that takes a long time to learn, a lot of practice and experience. Whereas these skills that I'm giving you are skills that you can actually use right now, very intuitively, without having a tremendous amount of craft behind you.  Start out by asking yourself: “do I know what the character wants?” You'll be surprised how often you realize that you don't! And if you don’t know, don't freak out!  If you realize “okay, I've got a bunch of cool stuff happening, I got some cool images, I got some cool lines of dialogue, but I actually don't know what the character wants…”  Okay, well, choose something!    When building stakes in your screenplay, the “what” of what your character wants matters much less than the fact that your character wants something.

Character Traits vs Character Development Today we are going to be talking about character traits, character development and how to write great characters in your screenplay.  Basically, all of character development comes down to one really simple concept: A lot of people think that characters are adjectives. They think that a character is “funny,” “responsible,” “smart,” “kind” or “hard-working.” But characters are actually verbs. When developing characters, writers often think that characters are their traits. But what makes a character feel like a character is  actually the verbs that they do.  Traits-vs-Character-Development-2.png"> If you want to understand if you are building great characters, or if you are simply building what I call characteristics, all you have to do is ask yourself: is my character an adjective or is my character a verb?  If your character is an adjective, there's a really good chance that you are not writing a character, but a stereotype. In other words, that you're writing “a funny best friend,” as opposed to this funny best friend, that you are writing “a brilliant scientist” rather than this brilliant scientist.  It's not our traits that make us who we are. It's our actions.  If you think about your best friend, I'm sure they have a lot of the same traits as any other best friend. They may be caring. They may be reliable, smart, dependable, fun to hang out with. They have a bunch of character traits of adjectives that describe them, and all these adjectives are true.  But at the same time, you probably wouldn't trade your best friend for my best friend. Even if they have the same trades. Even if my best friend is also reliable, dependable, smart, fun to hang out with… you still wouldn’t want to trade. And the reason you wouldn't trade is that your best friend does stuff, has done stuff and continues to do stuff. They continue to take actions with you, towards you and around you that makes you fall in love with them. That makes you remember them. That makes you say, “that is so them.”  It's not the adjectives that lead to character development, it's the verbs. It's the things your characters are doing.  In my Write Your Screenplay class, I call this concept the how of the character: how is this character slightly different than any other character?  But the how is never independent of the action. The how is how the character does the verbs that make them, them.  When you're developing characters in a screenplay, there are usually four elements in play. Traits-vs-Character-Development-1.png"> The first element: does the character want anything?  How tangible is the want? The less tangible the want is, the harder your character development is going to be. Because the less tangible the want is, the less specific the actions that the character is going to take to get the want.  If the character wants a Starbucks, for example, it's a relatively tangible want. But if the character wants a venti latte with oat milk, that's a more specific want. And just in the want, we're already starting to understand that character. Because the venti latte with oat milk character is completely different than the whole milk with whipped cream character, who is completely different than the frappuccino character. If the character is not pursuing anything, or if the thing they're pursuing is too general, it becomes harder and harder to write them. Whereas the more specific they are,

How to Sell Your Screenplay: Learn from Indie Producer, Noah Lang Jake: My special guest today is Noah Lang. You just finished a really interesting film, This Is Not A War Story.  I thought this would be a wonderful interview for our final podcast in the Sell Your Screenplay Series, because this film is not what most people would traditionally consider a “likely” movie to reach production, much less a release on HBO Max. your-screenplay-podcast-learning-from-producer-jacob-krueger-studio.jpg"> So many new writers think that selling a script is about “selling out” or doing something commercial, when in fact, often the exact opposite is the case. So I'm curious, what's the origin story of This Is Not a War Story? How did this happen? Noah: There are a couple of parts here that'll be fun to unpack. The first thing is that Talia Lugacy, who wrote, directed, and is one of the leads in it, produced it with me. She's a force of nature. I love her. She's so talented.  We met in New York and Brooklyn years ago. She was developing it– this was called 8000 Shots at the time– and just the rawness of it, the realness of it all. My family has a history of interest in veterans issues, and as a person of progressive political leaning, I was interested in it. But more so than anything was this: this filmmaker is going to get this done and come hell or high water.  As a producer, that's what you're looking for, those people that are unstoppable. That was the impetus for diving in, and we were in the fortunate position that there was private financing to do it, at a very small level. In terms of what you were saying, we made it for the number that the market could sustain doing a film like this. There are massive exceptions for dramas, justifying much larger budgets. Those tend to be star-driven: A-list directors, Academy Award stars, and things like that. In this case, the calculus for someone like me is that this is a filmmaker I want to work with. I love this project and I think we can grow and keep doing things together. She also had the benefit that her first film, which was a Tribeca Film Festival selection and a New York Times critics pick up, starred Rosario Dawson, who then Executive Produced this with us.  We had some kind of good strategic elements to be able to play with, so kind of jumped into the deep end on that one rather quickly.  It's a film that we're incredibly proud of. We've managed to sell it to HBO, an Independent Spirit Award nomination, good reviews in The New York Times, Roger Ebert, Film Threat, Hammer To Nail, all sorts of nice places.  Now that we're heading towards the end of its initial life cycle, it's also the tool we use for the next thing, which still has Talia’s identity, but it's slightly more commercial and has a different set of ambitions. In terms of what you talk about in this series, there are different benchmarks for selling your script. In a way, it's almost like making your script can be one step towards doing more things that you'd like to do. A lot of writers have very disparate interests, others have very similar ones.  I admire [Justin] Benson and [Aaron] Morehead, who made The Endless, Resolution and Spring. What I saw there was that they were very deliberate about a progression in the size of the movie they were producing, so that they could keep taking those steps to be able to get to the place that they ultimately want it to be and do interesting things along the way.  This Is Not a War Story is a good example of what we can do, and a lot of our greater ambitions, within the framework of a film of this size.

How to Sell Your Screenplay Pt. 4: Getting Past the Gatekeepers Today we're going to be talking about how to get past the gatekeepers, so that you can pitch your script to the producers, agents, managers, directors, and stars that you need to reach in this industry.  First, a warning, these techniques actually work. So before you use them, please make sure you have a pitch that is actually at a professional level. And even more importantly, please make sure you have a script that is at a professional level.  You don't want to do all this work of getting past the gatekeepers to pitch your screenplay, only to finally get into that meeting of a lifetime and realize you're not wearing any pants.  Your-Screenplay-Podcast-Jacob-Krueger-Studio-How-to-Sell-Your-Screenplay.1.png">I've seen so many talented writers make this mistake. I've judged so many pitchfests, watching writers with really great stories pitch them in ways that made them seem unreliable and unprofessional.  And during my previous life as a producer, I've also seen so many writers show up with an incredible pitch, and then a screenplay that does not back it up.  If you make this mistake, you're not only wasting your time, you're wasting the time of every single person that you pitch. So if you have not yet gotten professional feedback on your pitch, and on your script, if you are not 100% convinced that your pitch and your script are at a professional level, hit pause on this podcast. It is not time for you to make a full time job of getting to the right people. Because all you're going to do is end up burning your contacts.  First, it's your job to make sure your content is incredible, so that when you pitch those right people, they actually respond. Unless you are already famous, you are not going to sell a great idea, what you're going to sell is a great screenplay. So get professional feedback. And when I say professional, please, this is not development notes from a coverage reader. This is not a bunch of written development notes from a contest. This is not feedback the lovely writers in your writers group who have not yet sold a script. This is not your mom, your friend, your family. This is feedback you want from a professional writer, somebody who has done this more than you have, who knows what an industry-ready script actually looks like and what an industry-ready pitch actually sounds like.  And if you need help with that, that's what we do here at the studio. So you're welcome to call us. And we will hook you up with somebody amazing who can help you develop your project.  So, now, we're going to make the assumption you've done all that work. You actually have a script that is ready to go when you show up for your big meeting. You're not missing your pants, you're wearing your finest suit.  So how do you get past the gatekeepers to actually get that meeting? The best way to get past the gatekeepers and sell your script is actually to never deal with the gatekeepers.  Remember the gatekeeper’s job is to keep you out. So if you can go around the gatekeeper, you want to. And there are so many wonderful ways you can do this!  As we talked about in Episode 3 of this Sell Your Script series, you can target very specific producers, directors, agents, managers and stars, and start to talk to everyone you know about them.  Shake the tree of your own social network, and you might be surprised to find out that somebody that you know, happens to know the person you’re trying to get in touch with. Even if it's a distant contact, a warm call is always better than a cold one.

How to Sell Your Screenplay Part 3: How To Find The Right Producer Okay, it's time to get to the nitty gritty. How do you get to producers? And even more importantly, how do you know which producers to get to?  Well, that's what we're going to be talking about in Part 3 of the How to Sell Your Screenplay series. Before I jump in today, a shout out. Much of the information that I'm giving you today was developed by a wonderful acting teacher, John Dapolito.  If you're an actor, you should check him out. He has some brilliant ideas about how to brand actors and how to use theme to find the roles that actors should play, the people most likely to cast them, and the projects they're most likely to get cast in.  Today I’m going to build upon John's work, and show you how you can adapt it for your work as a screenwriter. When we think about selling a screenplay, it’s very rare that anyone tells us to consider the theme. Selling a screenplay, that’s business, right? Shouldn’t we be talking about four quadrant finance kind of stuff? Isn't that all about numbers and what's hot right now?  It’s easy to overlook the touchy feely emotional part of selling a screenplay.  But having been on both sides of this picture, having been both a writer and a producer, I can tell you that the decision to buy a screenplay is rarely a rational decision. The decision to invest years of your life into bringing something to the big or the small screen. That's not a pure numbers decision. That's an emotional decision.  I'm not saying the producers don't have numbers in their heads. I'm not saying producers don't have mandates from their bosses or their CEOs. I'm not saying that there aren't business concerns involved in the decision. As we talked about in episode one of this How To Sell Your Screenplay series, that's why it takes some luck to sell a script. So sure, everyone’s got business concerns. What's hot right now for this particular producer is always going to factor into any decision. How that lines up with your scripts: that's the part you can't control.  But when you’re a producer contemplating two scripts that both fulfill your business needs, which one do you buy? Which one do you fight for? Which one makes you want to dive in? That's an emotional decision.  There's a really simple reason for this: There is no rational reason to spend a million dollars on a script. Or 10 million dollars, 100 million dollars…  Most likely, if you had 100 million bucks in your bank account, you wouldn't be thinking, “you know what, let me take all that cash and let me put it into something that very well might not make the money back.” Right? This is the Hollywood business model: we are going to lose money on five movies, sometimes hundreds of millions of dollars. But then on the sixth movie, we're going to make so much money that it makes all that money back and more.  This is not a traditional business.This isn't: “we’ve found a niche in auto tires that isn't filled right now. And a brand new kind of tire everyone wants.” The finance model for films and TV, whether it’s an indie movie or a huge Hollywood production, is a gambling model.  And since no one ever knows for sure which movie will turn into a blockbuster, Producers have business plans, but they make emotional decisions.  Producers, directors, agents, managers and stars are attracted to very specific scripts. And the same people aren't attracted to every script.

How to Sell Your Screenplay Pt. 2 - Contests & Festivals As we talked about last week, there are no easy answers to how to sell your script and break into the film industry. In this series of podcasts, I’m not going to give you a simple five step program for selling your screenplay that's going to instantaneously change your life.  But I am going to give you some techniques and skills I've developed in my own career that have been successful for my students, as well as a whole new way of thinking about what it means to break into the film industry in the first place. Remember, breaking into the film or TV industry is different for every single writer. Breaking in is a marathon, not a sprint. If you are looking at selling your script as a way of changing your life and fixing all your problems, you're probably looking at it backwards, not to mention putting so much pressure on your writing that success is going to be very difficult for you to find. Last week, we talked about laying the groundwork for success as a screenwriter by building a lifestyle that supports your writing, cultivating a process in which every day is a good day because you are showing up and doing what you love, creating the space for your writing, and building your infrastructure so that you can keep writing and working your business plan as an entrepreneur until the luck you need to break into the industry matches up with the work you’re putting in to open the door for you. This episode, we’re answering one of the most popular questions for screenwriters and TV writers hoping to break into the film industry: Do screenwriting contests and festivals actually help you sell a screenplay or TV pilot? One of the wonderful things that exists for screenwriters today, that didn't exist when I was coming up, are screenwriting contests and festivals. Back in the day, we didn't have this stuff. In fact, I have never competed in a screenwriting contest or a film festival in my life.  Today, we have what seems to be an amazing resource, but it's also a really expensive resource. All those application fees for festival after festival raise a few questions. Are all those festivals really helping? How do you get the most out of them? How do you know which festivals to apply to and which to run from? Like with many aspects of this industry, there are a lot of sharks in these waters. There's a lot of gold in them hills (to mix my metaphors a little bit). There are also simply a lot of well-intentioned and less well-intentioned people out there trying to snap up money from desperate writers who are trying to break in.  It's important to know what screenwriting festivals and contests are likely to do for you and what they're likely to not do for you.  It's important to know which ones to apply to and which ones to run away from.  It's important to understand the business model by which contests and festivals can both help writers and also inadvertently hurt writers.  We're going to talk about all of this so that you can get the most out of screenwriting contests and festivals.  The first thing to understand is that not all film festivals and screenwriting contests are created equal.  There are many different kinds of screenwriting competitions. There are festivals and contests where it's just amateur writers competing against other amateur writers. There are other contests and festivals where you're competing against emerging writers and even professionals.  Then there are contests and festivals like Disney/ABC, the Academy Nicholl Fellowship, or the Austin Film Fest...

How to Sell Your Screenplay Pt. 1 There's a really important question that we have not explored deeply enough on this podcast. How do you sell a screenplay?  How do you sell a TV pilot?  How do you actually break into this crazy industry? We're going to start exploring that today, and we're going to continue over a multi-part series of podcasts where we try to build some of the skills that you need to succeed in the film industry.  I want to start with a warning: Anytime someone promises you a fool-proof method for selling your screenplay, that person is lying to you.   Anytime someone tells you, “Here's how you sell your script in 30 days,” or, “here's a simple 10 step plan to sell your screenplay,” or even worse, “if you give me money, I will introduce you to someone and sell your script, guaranteed…” Anytime someone makes you a promise like that, run! Run, run, run as quickly as you can.  Please know that there are no easy answers or fool-proof methods when it comes to selling screenplays in the movie business.  There are a lot of sharks in these waters. There are a lot of people preying on the desperation of screenwriters who want so desperately to break into the film industry.  No one should be charging you for an introduction. No one should be charging you for representation (agents and managers get paid when they sell your script). No one should be charging you, saying, “Hey, if you give me your money, I will get your script to this person.” That's an unsustainable business model. Even if such a person really has that connection-- and there's a good chance that they don't-- if they start sending scripts to that connection because they're getting paid by desperate screenwriters to do so, well, guess what's gonna happen. Pretty soon that connection’s going to stop reading scripts submitted by that person, whether those scripts are good or not.  The screenwriting business is a relationship business. Nobody is going to help you sell your script without knowing your work intimately. And if they do know your work intimately, and like it, they will want to help you, and they will not expect to get paid until you do. If it seems a little too good to be true, if it seems a little too easy, if it seems like a one-size-fits-all set of rules that's going to work for everybody, then run. You're being lied to. What we're going to try to do in this series of podcasts is answer a question that, quite frankly, is really hard: how do you sell a screenplay? 1.png"> One of the reasons why it’s so hard is because it’s a question that doesn’t have a definitive answer. But we're going to try to give you some skills that you can use to break into the film industry once your screenplay is ready. The first thing you want to know is that nearly every story about how someone broke into the film industry and sold their screenplay, represents an exception to the norm. Almost everyone who has actually succeeded in the film industry has some crazy story about how it happened. Often, you're going to hear that story and realize the truth. Wow, they had a lot of luck.  I had a lot of luck. The teachers who work for me had a lot of luck. Now, if you don't do the writing work, quite frankly, it doesn't matter how much luck you have. If your script isn't actually ready to go, it doesn't matter how many wonderful breaks happen in your favor.  If you are not really ready in both your art and your craft to be a screenwriter, it is probably not going to happen for you.

We set out with such good intentions for our writing every New Year.  We make writing resolutions that we truly do intend to follow through on.  We make commitments to change our lives, to realize the full potential of our artistic selves and to emerge into the role that we want to play in the world.  We make these writing resolutions with total seriousness. We're not joking around when we make a New Year's resolution.  But for most writers, it’s easy to start the year off really strong with your writing, and then a couple months down the road, find yourself back where you started.  Why does this happen?  We fail to keep our New Year’s writing resolutions for a couple of reasons, but the biggest reason is what I call the Flash Flood Principle.  Here's the Flash Flood Principle: If you go to a barren desert, and suddenly there’s a giant rainstorm, you don't end up with a beautiful river that's going to feed the fields and transform that desert into a lush garden.  What you get instead is a flash flood.  You get all this rain pouring down with nowhere to go. It erupts over everything, it knocks a bunch of stuff out, and then the sand just reabsorbs the moisture. It disappears as if it had never been there.  It's my belief that when a lot of writers make their New Year's resolutions, they're actually making flash flood resolutions. They're trying to change everything about their writing at once in such a big way that it's actually not sustainable.  In the desert of their creativity, they've brought a giant rainstorm of writing, but there's nowhere to channel all that energy because the landscape has not been prepared for all the rain. For so many writers, creativity is like an out of control storm in the desert. It comes out of nowhere in a torrential downpour, and just as quickly disappears, having made no meaningful change upon the landscape. Whereas if you just turn on a little drop of water into a desert, and you just allow those drops to keep coming in a little concentrated place, eventually you get a little rivulet.  If you turn on a little bit more water, eventually that little rivulet is going to become a little stream.  If you turn on a little bit more water, eventually that stream is going to become a brook.  If you just keep that brook coming, it's going to be a mighty river. At that point, if you send a giant thunderstorm, the water has somewhere to go. It all ends up channeling into that river, allowing that river to flow with even more force and power.  As you're making your New Year's resolutions this year for writing, I want you to ask yourself, Am I making a flash flood resolution? Or am I building a riverbed? Let's talk about how you build that riverbed for your writing. The answer for most writers is not to lock yourself in a room for a weekend of non-stop writing. You might be able to sustain that kind of writing commitment for one weekend, but can you really write like that every weekend? The chances are, your life isn't going to suddenly change overnight so that all your weekends become available just for writing, which means as wonderful as such a weekend could be, it’s not going to help you build the rhythm you need to create a new habit. Furthermore, you probably don't have the skills or stamina as a writer yet to sustain that kind of intense weekend where all you do is write. You probably don't have the support system you need to sustain that kind of writing. Your family, your partner, your kids, your friends: they're not necessarily going to understand why you suddenly disappeared from the world and plan to disappear from the world every single weekend.

How to Win Pitch Contests: Pitching Tips For Pitch Festivus! Coming up on December 9 is our second annual FREE Pitch Festivus and Holiday Party. We're going to have eight different members of the Jacob Krueger Studio faculty sharing some of their very best pitching tips.  There are going to be opportunities to connect with our community.  Most exciting of all, we're having a little pitch contest where we are going to randomly pick volunteers and give them a chance to pitch their scripts, get some helpful feedback, and compete for a chance to win a one on one pitch consultation with me worth 1500 bucks. It's gonna be awesome. And it’s totally FREE!  With that in mind, I thought it might be helpful to give you guys some information about how to do a quick pitch.  How do you create an elevator pitch? How do you pitch for a contest or festival? It's important to understand that this is different from a professional pitch or from the kind of pitch that you do at a party, because in the real screenwriting business, there is no such thing as the elevator pitch. In the screenwriting world, the elevator pitch is a giant myth. If you haven't heard the term, the elevator pitch imagines a scenario in which, if you were to bump into Martin Scorsese on the first floor of an elevator, and he hits the button for floor 14, you now have 14 floors to pitch in your project. This is your only opportunity to pitch your screenplay and if those doors open before you’ve finished, you're screwed.  That's not the way it works in the real world.  In the real world you want a nice quick pitch that you can share with anyone. But no one's going to cut you off in the middle of your pitch. No one's going to say, Sorry, that pitch was two minutes and three seconds, and that’s just too long. Basically, your pitch is simply a pitch of a short length that can hold a person's attention. But when you're competing in a screenplay pitch contest - and there are lots of pitch contests, pitch slams, or other pitch opportunities, including our Pitch Festivus event coming up on Dec 9 - there's this kind of added pressure of a ticking clock.  I want to talk to you about how to deal with that pressure, how to prepare yourself for that pressure, and how to be really good with your pitch when you're pitching for a writing contest or festival like ours. Here's the first thing you should know about how to make a quick pitch: Do not rush your pitch. Take your time. Slow down. A minute and a half, two minutes, two and a half minutes, whatever the time, is actually a lot of time to pitch your story. 30 seconds is a lot of time to pitch, even 10 seconds.  Take ten seconds right now and just listen to how long ten seconds really is… No, actually do it. If you did it, I think you just realized that’s actually a lot of time. That's more time than you would think when you actually listen to what that dead space sounds like.  Far too many well-intentioned screenwriters end up rocketing through their pitch so quickly that the person listening can't even pick up what the pitch is.  The first thing you want to focus on is the purpose of your pitch. Why are you actually pitching this story? In the normal world, the only purpose of your pitch is to get somebody to say, Yes, I would like to read your screenplay. In the real world, unless your name is Sorkin, nobody is going to buy your idea off of a pitch. They want to see the execution on the page. The real purpose of the pitch is to open a door. You know what?

Why Every TV Series Is Like Thanksgiving This week, we're going to talk about Thanksgiving. We're not just going to talk about turkeys and football, though. We're going to talk about television. Everything you need to know about how to write a TV series you can learn at Thanksgiving.  I'm going to encourage you just for a moment to think back to your very first Thanksgiving. Don't think about the way it was supposed to be. Think about the way it was. Maybe your first Thanksgiving (or at least the first Thanksgiving you remember) was a wonderful experience filled with beauty and connection and laughter and love. Maybe the first Thanksgiving you remember was a terrifying experience filled with stress and anxiety and people misbehaving and family not getting along and tearing each other apart.  If you're like most people, your first Thanksgiving was probably a really complicated mixture of beauty and drama and pressure and tension and joy and laughter and love and all the things that go into family. (If you don't celebrate Thanksgiving, you can substitute any holiday that mattered to you where your family gathered together.) You probably realize that there are certain rituals that tend to happen in this genre of holiday.  At Thanksgiving, you're going to eat way too much food, you're going to talk about tryptophan as if it was something that you just discovered for the first time. You're probably going to retire to watch football (or if you're not a football family, maybe you're going to sit around and play board games or just chat). You're going to eat dinner earlier than you're used to. You're going to cook more food than anybody should. You're going to wake up at two in the morning and make a stuffing sandwich.  Just like there are certain elements that tend to be part of almost everybody's Thanksgiving, there are certain elements that tend to be part of every genre of TV show. If you're writing an action TV series, there are going to be a bunch of action sequences. It's just gonna happen. If you're writing a drama series, there are going to be tears, there's going to be pressure, and there are going to be hard decisions.  If you're writing a comedy series, there are going to be jokes. If you're writing a thriller series, there are going to be thrills.  If you're writing a horror series, there is going to be blood and gore. If you're writing an elevated horror series, there is going to be a spiritual transcendent level to it. There are certain kinds of plot elements that tend to happen in every series, just like there are certain plot elements that happen in every holiday.  If you think back to your first Thanksgiving you’ll probably realize that in every Thanksgiving that followed, you either tried to replicate or change that first feeling that you had. That in some way you’ve either been chasing that feeling for every Thanksgiving of your life, or the longing for a different feeling… of what Thanksgiving could have been, or should have been, or one day could be. And you’ll start to realize that your first Thanksgiving is really just a pilot episode for every Thanksgiving that followed. That Thanksgiving is a series that keeps you coming back, year after year, for laughter, drama, tears, and connection. Thanksgiving is a series that keeps you coming back for a feeling--- a feeling you either hope to one day experience or long to experience again. So what was it that gave you that feeling? That kept you coming back, no matter what happened, “episode” after “episode,” year after year? It was the same elements that make a successful engine of a TV Series…” If you think about it long enough, you’ll realize it wasn’t the turkey that gave you th...

Dune: Exposition Is Killing Your Screenplay Dune is a film adaptation that has brought some of the greatest filmmakers ever to their knees. So why is it so hard for screenwriters to transcend the challenges of Frank Herbert’s source material? The screenplay for Dune is nearly all exposition--the writers  narrate nearly every moment with some kind of voiceover telling the audience what's happening-- so why is everyone still so confused?  Why does the audience still not know what's happening when the writers give them so much exposition?  Why does a film that is so incredible to look at feel so boring and hard to connect to?  Why does a film that is trying so hard to make a sci-fi for adults, to write about real-world issues, real characters, and real complexity rather than simplistic Hollywood solutions-- why does a film that's trying so hard, with such positive intentions, ultimately seem so predictable?  There are a lot of challenges for the writers in adapting Dune, challenges that you're also going to experience if you're working on an adaptation of a book into a screenplay. These writers are dealing with all kinds of challenges: complex world building, shifting point of view, a preponderance of characters.  But mostly, in adapting Dune into screenplay form, they are trying to take something very big and make it very small. Screenplays are small. A typical screenplay is 105 pages long. Even a two and a half hour movie like Dune is probably around  a 150-page screenplay.  How do you take a 900 page novel and crush it down into what should probably be no more than a 120-page screenplay or even maybe a 105 page screenplay? How do you take all that information and exposition and squash it down so the novel of Dune will actually work in a screenplay adaptation? How do you adapt a screenplay out of a novel that is sprawling and internal?  How do you take the things that novels do really well, which are different from the things that screenplays do really well, and translate them into a form that can work in a movie?  How do you stay true to the intentions of the author - whose novel has inspired generations of sci fi movies - when elements that weren't cliché when the writer wrote them have now become cliché because they've inspired and been adapted and used by so many sci fi writers?How do you stay loyal to the intentions of a beloved book while also updating it and making it make sense for today's audience?  How do you make Dune into a 2021 movie?  I wish I could say that these three very experienced, very talented writers on Dune had achieved that in their screenplay adaptation, but in my opinion, they did not.  Where the writers fell short in their adaptation of Dune, oddly, is not in the difficult elements of screenwriting. They fell short in the simple ones: the same elements you are likely to struggle with if you're a new screenwriter…like exposition. We sometimes think that if you write 100 screenplays that you’re suddenly going to know how to write great exposition and adapt epic books into amazing scripts because you now have screenwriting experience. The truth is that every screenplay is like a new baby, especially when our writing goals get really lofty. When we set lofty writing goals, we're not just trying to tell the truth or make an entertaining movie, we're trying to make a great movie.  We're not just trying to write the best screen adaptation of Dune we can, we're also trying to do an homage to the 1984 David Lynch adaptation, and we’re also trying to correct all the mistakes made in that adaptation, and we’re also trying to take our adaptation to the next level, and we’re also trying to be the new Star Wars. 

Dexter: How to Write Action Screenplay Season 9 of Dexter, New Blood, is premiering soon, so I think it’s about time we talked about Dexter on this podcast.  We’ll explore not only the engine of the Dexter series, but also do a deep script analysis of a very specific scene of Dexter to teach you how to create unforgettable images when writing action in a screenplay. I have to admit, when Dexter first came out, I was resistant to watching it. I thought, A serial killer who only kills bad people? Talk about taking the easy way out! Fortunately, I made the mistake of letting that perspective slip to my fiancé, who promptly sat me down and forced me to watch every single season. It turns out I was completely wrong.  This is a show that takes what could be a glossed over, super-palatable Hollywood take on serial killing, and turns it into a really deep exploration of something much more interesting: not what it means to be a serial killer, but what it means to be a human being.  It takes a deeply disconnected character, who desperately wants to feel human connection despite being biologically unable to do so, and takes him on a journey where, season after season, he becomes a little bit more human.  Along the way, Dexter shows how we all become disconnected as people and as writers. It shows how we all keep secrets that cut us off from other human beings, how we all hide ourselves from the people we love most, and how we can all be a little sociopathic at times. But Dexter also shows us how we all strive to feel connected. It shows both the beauty and the cost of longing for, and coming closer to, and missing out on opportunities for vulnerability and empathy. How this will play out in the new ninth season of Dexter: New Blood remains to be seen. But for the first three seasons, Dexter slices its way through those treacherous waters with a simple but really elegant series engine. And though Dexter may stumble a bit in its middle seasons, it finds its way back to what makes it great in a way that is valuable for anybody who wants to really understand how to write for television. Usually, when we're looking at a television series on this podcast, we talk about big complicated things like engine and structure and how they're put together. And we’re going to cover these concepts in Dexter today as well.   But then we're going to get really deep by looking at Dexter from a different angle, analyzing the way one very specific scene in Dexter was put together and what you can learn from it when it comes to writing action in a screenplay.  Through some deep script analysis of Dexter, you’ll  learn not only how to write better action in your screenplay, but also find that idiosyncratic, personal voice in your writing.    It’s a complicated thing to find your voice in screenwriting, especially when you're writing a scene in a familiar genre that we've seen a million times before, when you're writing within parameters that maybe seem a little too familiar. We’re going to dive deep into one very specific scene, a scene that in other hands could have been extremely boring. It's the kind of scene that we've seen many times before not only in Dexter, but in any show in the cop genre: The scene where the latest murder victim is found.  The scene we're going to look at is at the very beginning of the Season 3 finale, Episode 12: “Do You Take Dexter Morgan.” To catch you up on what’s happening up to this point in Dexter I’m going to talk a little bit about the engine of the Dexter series. Dexter is a serial killer. The engine of the show is that all Dexter wants is somebody who understands him because for his entire life he has had to keep a terrible secret: He is a sociopath who doesn't feel anything and carries a “dark passenger” th...

Are You Afraid of Pitching?   Halloween is coming up and I had all these thoughts about doing a podcast on horror. But by the time this podcast comes out, you are going to be so tired of people talking about horror movies, so instead of talking about horror movies, we're going to talk about what’s really horrifying to many writers… pitching. The source of the most abject terror for screenwriters is definitely having to go into a room and pitch your work. There are exceptions to this rule. There are writers who love to pitch. I'm a writer who loves to pitch. But I didn't start that way. When I started, this is how I experienced something as simple as having to make a phone call: Okay, I'm gonna pick up the phone. No, no, I'm not ready. I’ll walk around. I'm going to pace around. I’m going to do some deep breathing. Now, I’m going to write down exactly what I am going to say. No, that's not good enough. You know what? I should read the trades. I should read the trades just so I have something to talk about. So I'm up on everything. I'll read the trades. Oh, it's already four o'clock. It's kind of late to call somebody. I mean, they're probably ready to go for the day. Maybe I should just repeat this whole process tomorrow... That was me, believe it or not, as a young producer. I was terrified of using the phone. In fact, I had to learn how to use the phone in order to do my job, and it was scary for me to get up there and pitch somebody else's project, much less my own. So, I want to talk to you about how I overcame that fear of pitching, as well as some ways that you can overcome your own fear about pitching your screenplay. That process starts with understanding where that fear comes from. Like in any good horror movie, the real fear is in the anticipation.  Jaws is not scary when you see the shark. Jaws is scary when you don't see the shark. The first season of Stranger Things is so freakin’ scary before you see the Demogorgon. When you finally see the Demogorgon, it’s fine… but it's kind of anticlimactic compared to all the thoughts you had in your head.  In True Detective, you're waiting for this horrible confrontation with this horrible killer. But the real interesting things happen way before that. When you finally find out who the killer is, it's actually not as scary as all this stuff leading up to it.  The monster is only scary when it's under the bed or in the closet. The first rule for confronting your fear of pitching your screenplay (or any fear) is to get that monster out from under the bed or out from inside the closet where you can deal with it. Psychologically and physiologically, there's also an interesting thing that happens in your mind when you run from fear. It’s how your brain learns that something is “really dangerous.”  The more you run, the more your brain knows there is something to fear. And the more you’re like, meh, the more your brain says, maybe this isn’t so scary. Maybe this isn’t such a big deal. Now, I don’t want to oversimplify the psychology of fear. There is a lot of psychology underneath fear. But there are some simple cognitive-behavioral things you can do. Remember, you've got to get that fear out in the open and confront it as quickly as you can. Back to that example of young me making that phone call. What was the worst part of what I was doing? It was putting those phone calls off until the next day because of fear. That gives me another night to stew on today and imagine how bad it’s gonna be tomorrow.  We’ve got to get that fear out. The next step in overcoming the fear of pitching is better understanding the nature of fear.  We're more afraid of things that we aren't used to than things that we are used to. Think about COVID.

Love on the Spectrum: Understanding Subtext Subtext is one of those things that screenwriters get so freaked out about! Almost every screenwriter is scared that their dialogue isn't good enough or that their dialogue isn’t real enough. We all have those words echoing in our ears from some screenwriting teacher: “It's too on-the-nose! It’s too on-the-nose!” We're all terrified of writing this “on-the-nose” dialogue. But sometimes we don't even actually know what “on-the-nose” is. We know it's this bad thing, and we know that subtext is supposed to be this good thing. We’re afraid that our dialogue is bad, and we want our dialogue to be good. So, this raises the question, “what is subtext?” What is on-the-nose dialogue? What's good dialogue? How do you even do it? To talk about it, we're going to discuss a really fabulous show. It's a different show than most of the shows that I’ve talked about in that it's a documentary format reality show on Netflix called Love on the Spectrum. This reality show is beautiful on so many different levels. What it does is take autistic adults, many of whom have struggled in relationships, many of whom have never even been on a date before and who long for love and for romance and connection, and it pairs them with other autistic adults. For many of them it is their first date ever. And the show tries to help them, through relationship training, to actually find love. The reason I thought Love on the Spectrum be such an interesting show to discuss writing subtext is because it features characters who seem incapable of subtext; characters whose dialogue seems to always be “on-the-nose.” These are characters who literally say exactly what they're feeling. Because of this, Love on the Spectrum seems to do away with these layers of dialogue that we're always expecting.  (As I’ll discuss later in this podcast, there actually is a surprising amount of subtext happening in these scenes, but let’s start with what’s on the surface) One of my favorite interchanges takes place between a couple, Ronan and Katie. They are both on the first date of their lives. And that date actually ends up blossoming into a really beautiful love affair. And it features dialogue that kind of sounds like this (paraphrased):  “How do you feel about me?” “I feel warm.” “I feel warm, too.” We wish we could be so honest on a date with someone we just met! We wish we could be so vulnerable! On our real dates we're filled with wordplay and little games and showing how cool we are and hiding our true feelings. In Love on the Spectrum, these characters just come out and say it. In fact, they need to say it. They need to check in with each other and they need it reported because they struggle to pick up visual and subtextual cues. The result is the exact opposite of what you might expect. You’re not experiencing the scene as cheesy, “on-the-nose” dialogue.  What you're actually seeing is something beautiful and connected and special. Which leads us to our first lesson about understanding subtext in dialogue: Sometimes it's better just to say it. There's something actually really beautiful and powerful about letting a character come out and say what they feel. I'm reminded of a wonderful improv teacher I used to study with, one of my mentors. We’re placed in a scene and it’s obviously a seduction. Like most inexperienced improv actors, we’re kind of dancing around with subtext and trying to be funny as we try to seduce each other. And on the sideline, here is my mentor coaching me: “Just say it! Just say it!” So finally I say, “I want to sleep with you.” And everybody laughs. Suddenly, the scene takes off. And I realized at that moment that I was so busy trying to be a “g...

Life as a Writer: How to Build a Writing Lifestyle This week, we're going to be talking about a subject that we probably don't talk about enough:  How do you actually build a life as a writer?  Sure, it would be easy if all you had to do was write, if you didn't have a day job, if you didn't have friends, if you didn't have work, if you didn't have vacation, if you didn't have family, if you didn't have hobbies… But the truth is that the magical future we all dream of where every element of our lives just effortlessly supports our writing really never comes.  Even for hugely successful writers, there remain many conflicting needs pulling at our attention: meetings, productions, multiple projects that we're juggling, family and experiences.  We need these things. If we lived in a total solitude where all we did was write, it would be really hard to come up with interesting ideas for a film or a TV show. Our ideas grow out of our relationships, friendships, experiences, and even out of our frustrations and problems.  At the same time, it can be extremely challenging to make room for your writing lifestyle.  How do you make room for your writing lifestyle when your life is already over-full?  How do you make room for your passion when you have so many responsibilities? How do you break through the inertia when you already don't have enough time to get all the things you need to get done? How do you start an overwhelming passion project in the midst of all that?  That's what we're going to be talking about in this podcast.  Where do you start?  It's a truth about human nature that we tend to prioritize whatever is in front of us.  Whatever message you send to your subconscious mind when you first get out of bed, it's going to kind of take that as super important. So, if you roll out of bed and the first thing you say to yourself is, “I gotta check my email,” your subconscious mind says, “Okay, got it. That makes sense. Emails are really important. Let's keep focused on email.” Somehow that email checking and that anxiety that you woke up with rolls into a whole day. You never get out of your email and you never do that important thing that you really wanted to do.  As opposed to thinking “Well, what's the big dream?” and focusing your life around that. Without a little help, your subconscious mind is just going to accept “Okay, whatever you're showing me is probably what I actually need to focus on.”  To change this on the simplest level, and start prioritizing our writing, we need to establish a pattern that consistently shows our subconscious mind what really matters to us.  That starts by showing our conscious mind what really matters to us because often, we don't actually take time to consciously think about it.  In a way, many of us are passive main characters in the journey of our own life. It gets really hard to root for passive main characters. It becomes really hard to feel structure for passive main characters. It feels really easy to become just as stuck about them as they are about ourselves.  If you want to actually achieve your dreams, then that begins with doing the hard work and asking, “What matters to me? What actually matters most?”  You’ve got to do some meditation and ask yourself, “What is the most important thing in my life?” That doesn't preclude all the other things that matter to you.  You don't have to be a narcissist or a megalomaniac to become a great writer, but everybody needs a dream.  If your dream isn't writing, then find one that is your dream.  But if your dream is writing, then it's important to remember that you must serve your own dream in order to serve all the other things that are important in your life. 

Ted Lasso: Is Your Screenplay Idea Good Enough? What's interesting about Ted Lasso is that on the surface it is not exactly the newest, freshest, most original idea at all. On the surface, Ted Lasso is actually just Major League. Sure, it takes place in soccer rather than in baseball, but you essentially have the exact same setup. You have the nasty owner who has inherited her husband's team and is now trying to drive it into the ground. You have the unsuspecting coach who's trying to win with the Bad News Bears of soccer, who ends up turning his team around against the odds. It's the same story. It’s just Major League.  Yet, Ted Lasso is able to hit a place of transcendence that we rarely see in a 30-minute comedy. Ted Lasso is actually able to do things that Major League—as funny as it may have been—doesn't manage to achieve. As screenwriters, we all have this desire to write something "really good.” We have this fear that maybe our ideas aren't good enough.  Of course, this fear gets exacerbated by the screenwriting industry which says, “What's your logline? What's your outline? What's your treatment? Show us the plan. Show us how you know this is going to be good. What differentiates your work? Why is this different? Why today? Why now?” We have all of these voices chattering in our heads telling us what our script is supposed to be.  We're starting out with a little baby script and it's still kind of drooling on itself. It doesn't walk right yet. The truth is, at this early stage, it is just a reboot of whatever your equivalent of Major League is, or inspired by something else you’ve seen on TV or in the movies, sometimes consciously and sometimes not consciously. It's probably riddled with clichés, not that you put in on purpose, but that you just kind of inherited. Sure, sometimes the brilliant idea for a script or a TV show just comes to you, but so often our initial ideas are just not that good. It's easy to feel “Well, what am I supposed to do? I don't want to start writing some crappy idea that's not going to take me anywhere. I have to keep figuring out the idea. I need the better idea. I don't have the right idea.”  If the screenwriting gods are kind, and they come down and they give you the perfect idea, please take it! say, “Thank you. Thank you, screenwriting gods. I will take this and run with it. I will turn it into something beautiful.” But sometimes the screenwriting gods are not kind. Sometimes they only give you a piece of an idea, or a thought that’s maybe even been seen before but that for some reason you want to write. Don't run away from that! Don't allow the most insecure part of you to cut you off from the direction you need to take. Having worked with thousands of writers, from little baby writers to Academy and Tony Award-winning writers, it is my sincere belief that you can make anything good.  Even some of the best writers in the industry hit that place where they don't know how to make it work. It doesn't feel like a good enough idea anymore.  If that happens to you, what I want you to remember is that you can make anything good if you are willing to push on it hard enough. If you take the movie Mannequin and you push on it hard enough, it turns into Lars and the Real Girl.  If you take the movie Major League and you push on it hard enough, it turns into Ted Lasso.  Don't try to find the idea that’s good enough. Even if you think you've got a brand new idea for a screenplay or a show, the chances are, early in its development, that someone’s seen something like it or someone's thought of it before.  Darwin came up with the idea of evolution, but a lot of people don't know that some other dude actually beat him to it, the dude whose name you'll never know (unless you listen to my podcast about “

Character Development Through Emotional Needs This week, we're going to be talking about connecting to your character’s emotional needs.  Usually when we talk about characters, we don't talk about their emotional need at all. We talk about their tangible goal, the tangible object: What do they want? What are they going for? What's their dream? What's their goal?  If you want to talk in acting terms, what's their super objective? What's their intention? What's their objective in the scene? What's the thing they want more than anything else that they're trying to get?  If you want to talk in Hitchcock terms, what's the MacGuffin that everyone's trying to get in the movie?  We're really comfortable with this idea of the tangible object.  For examples of a tangible object, in Raising Arizona, everybody wants the baby. In The Godfather, Michael wants to protect the family. In The Handmaid's Tale, June wants to save her children. Almost every character has this tangible object that they are seeking. If you know that tangible object, character development becomes much easier.  In fact, all you have to do is make it hard for them to get the tangible object and they will go on a journey. They will have to start making new choices and those new choices will change them, just like in your own life.  If you know what you want and you start going for it, you will hit obstacles. We think about those obstacles as bad things, but oftentimes when it comes to character development they're not. The obstacle is just the thing that makes it hard. The thing that makes it hard is the thing that forces you to learn who you really are and to make choices you've never made before and to experience who you really can be.  If you've ever had a great creative partner, great director, great actor, that person doesn't just say, “Sure, anything you want, boss!” A great collaborator, a great mentor, pushes you, asks you hard questions and forces you to think more deeply, to get under the surface. They don't make it easy, they make it hard.  In making it hard, they force you to discover who you really are as a person and as an artist and as a writer.  It’s the same way with our characters, if you know the tangible object and you attack the tangible object and you make it hard, the character has to make new choices, and that sends them on a journey.  This raises two really interesting questions: 1) How to develop characters when you don't know what the character wants? 2) Why is it that we care so much about what some characters want and we don't care at all about what other characters want?  Why is it that sometimes you go to see a movie and sometimes the character wants something that you don't even connect to?  If you're watching There Will Be Blood, the character wants oil. How many of us are seeking oil? How many for how many of us are like, “Yeah, that's my dream. You know, I just really want to be an oil man.” Most of us don't have that dream. So, why do we care about Daniel Plainview?  If you watch The Wrestler, the wrestler wants to wrestle again. Well, most of us don't have the desire to get the crap beat out of us in a ring by a 300 pound man. Most of us don't connect to that tangible object. So, why is it that we care about the wrestler?  Yet, there are other movies that you've probably watched where they're trying to save the baby or save the world, and you're like, “Who cares? This feels so fake. I don't get it. I don't connect to it. I don't care.” Sometimes we root for characters pursuing tangible objects that we don't even agree with.  If you think of Breaking Bad, we don't agree (hopefully) with the idea of becoming drug lords. We don't agree with the idea of manipulating our own worst student—who b...

How To Write a Logline This week we're going to be answering a really great question: how do you write a logline? But before we start talking about how to write a logline, I think it's pretty important to define what it actually is.  Sure, we all technically know what a logline is. It's a short sentence that tells what a movie is about. We see crappy ones all the time on Netflix and Amazon. They're not usually very descriptive. They don't usually make you really feel anything. So is that the kind of logline you want to write? If you browse the internet, there are 50,000 different formulas where people tell you this is how to write a logline, as if there was a simple rule that you simply had to follow that would make a one-size-fits-all logline that would work for any story.  You're probably not surprised that I disagree with this idea.  If you want to learn how to write a logline, you first have to truly understand what a logline is, and that begins with understanding what a logline does.  First, a quick bit of history, where do loglines come from?  Back in the days before we had Netflix and Amazon and Hulu and DVRs and all this fancy stuff that we have now, we had this crazy thing called television. In order to figure out what was happening on television, there was basically one resource: a magazine called TV Guide. People would pick up TV Guide, “let's see what's on at eight o'clock tonight on CBS.” They would look it up and voila! There's the name of some movie that had been in the theater a long time ago.  But having just a title wasn’t enough. After all, this movie was in the theater a long time ago. You might have completely forgotten what it was. So underneath the title, there would be a short description called a logline. It was called that because the studios would send the line to be logged at TV Guide.  So, it's important to understand that loglines started as a marketing tool, not as a writing tool. They're often now marketed the opposite way.  So many screenwriters are taught that they must start with a logline and that only once they have their loglines perfected can they actually start to write the script. As if the movie should be created to fit the marketing materials, instead of the other way around. But real screenwriting isn’t so simple. If you happen to have a great logline from the very start, there’s nothing wrong with using it.  If the screenwriting gods are kind… let’s say you're in the shower rub a-dub-dubbing, and the heavens open up and suddenly the perfect logline comes down to you, please accept it! “Thank you, screenwriting gods. I will take this beautiful logline and I will do my best to execute it.”  However, a great screenplay doesn't always come so linearly, in a nice little one-sentence logline all wrapped up in a bow.  Sometimes figuring out how to write the perfect logline can be elusive, especially at the beginning. Sometimes that great idea for a screenplay doesn’t instantly materialize as a perfect logline. Sometimes it comes as a character you can’t stop thinking about. Sometimes it comes as a world you want to explore. Sometimes it comes in a line of dialogue. Sometimes it comes as a question that you don't know the answer to. Sometimes it comes as a reaction to watching something else.  So, if the screenwriting gods are not kind enough to give you a perfect one, it's important to remember that no great higher power came down and decreed, “You must have a logline before you write a screenplay.” In fact, this is a marketing tool that used to get done after the movie was already completed, after it was done and over, after it had already been made. It was a marketing technique to be logged with TV Guide.  Okay, so now that we know the facts,

Halston: How to write a likable main character  This week we're going to be looking at the new limited series Halston and how to write a screenplay where the main character isn't exactly likable. If you look at Halston, the main character played by Ewan McGregor is basically an assemblage of neuroses and self-involvement that we probably shouldn't like. And yet, we managed to stay with Halston for five episodes, completely involved and connected and in love with Halston and his world.  So how does that work? How did they pull this off? Why do we care about Halston?  There's a famous book called Save the Cat that many of you are probably familiar with.  Save the Cat suggests that if you are writing an “unlikable” main character like Halston, and want your main character to become likable, you should send a cat up a tree and let the main character heroically save the cat. The idea is that the audience will then magically fall in love with the previously unlikable main character, because they can see what a lovely person he or she is.  Of course, you can probably imagine that I think that this is total baloney! Look at the character we meet in Halston!  Halston is a character who probably wouldn't even condescend to pet the cat if it was anything less than a purebred.  Halston is a character who would probably have screamed at the cat and blamed the cat for his own failings until the cat climbed up the tree to escape.  Halston is a character who would most likely leave the cat stuck up in that tree and then take credit for whatever the cat's work was.  Halston is a character who's so self-involved that he might not even be aware of the cat.  Halston is a character who would likely chop down the tree that the cat was stuck in, and land it smack dab in the middle of his own house, and then blame the rest of the universe for it.  Halston is a character who's constantly egotistical, narcissistic and self-involved. He’s not saving the cat at all. Yet, he’s far from an unlikable main character. In fact, we don’t just like him, we love him.  Of course, this is also true in life. When you think about your friends, everybody's had that person in their life that is just too nice. “Wow, they brought me cookies. Wow, they showed up and helped me mow my lawn. Wow, they're so nice. Wow, after doing all this nice stuff, I oddly still don't I really want to hang out with them?” On the other hand, you might have another character in your life who is a little bit of a jerk, but you kind of get them and you enjoy their company. I'm not suggesting that a main character needs to be nasty for us to love them. There are plenty of lovely main characters that we fall in love with. Look at the main character in Soul that we discussed a couple podcasts ago. He's a beautiful character. He's a sweet, sweet man. Look at the main character of Chef, another wonderful, lovely main character. Look at the main character of Toy Story. Why do I keep going to Pixar movies? Because they have sweet main characters. The character doesn't have to be nasty. Look at the characters of so many movies and TV shows and you'll see lovely people trying to do the right thing. You'll see the Erin Brockovich type characters, those characters who are fundamentally good people. Look at every Tom Hanks movie ever made, like Forrest Gump, for example. Tom Hanks constantly plays a character who is an all around good guy, and these characters are equally likable. I'm not suggesting that your character needs to be a badass tough guy like Walter White....

WandaVision: Genre, Structure, Theme, Engine and Your Voice as a Writer When you watch WandaVision, you just can’t help but think: “I am so frickin’ lucky to be writing in this golden age of television!” The fact that Jac Schaeffer and these writers could actually get away with WandaVision, not as an experimental thesis project for film school, but part of the Marvel Cinematic Universe on Disney Plus, with a gigantic budget shows you is that the lid has literally been blown off of what you can and cannot do as a screenwriter today.  WandaVision reminds us of a screenwriting concept we discuss on this podcast all the time, the idea that as a screenwriter, success doesn't come from following some formula, it comes from finding your voice as a screenwriter. It comes from going inside and finding that story that literally only you could write, telling that story that literally only you could tell, finding that unique voice that only you have. There's a habit that we all have of surrendering our power.  We want to play nice, we want to play by the rules, and we want to do the things that we're supposed to do. We often think that if we play nicely like that, and if we follow the rules and if we follow the formulas, that somehow we are going to have the Hollywood life that we envisioned for ourselves or that you could sell out into the future that actually works.  And of course, that's exactly the opposite of what's true. What's actually true is there are way too many experienced writers who can write a clear well-told story with a good premise. The thing that breaks you in as a writer is that unique voice, that unique take, that unique thing that literally only you could come up with.  Sometimes, it's the script that doesn't get made that breaks you in as a writer. Sometimes, the script that people don't have the courage to write makes people decide, “I need to read more of their work. I need to work with this person because they have this incredible voice.”  You may have noticed as I'm talking about your journey as a writer, it sounds oddly similar to Wanda Maximoff’s journey in WandaVision. That’s because WandaVision is more than just a history lesson in television. WandaVision is more than just a thematic lesson in how to build a superhero movie that's actually about something. WandaVision is more than just a structural lesson about how to focus even the wildest work into a shape that a mainstream audience can connect to and understand.  WandaVision is also a commentary on the journey of every writer.  Just like Wanda, we come from influences. We grow up watching shows. We grow up watching movies. We grow up inspired by other writers and believing that we are supposed to have a life like theirs. We buy into other people's vision. And often in the process, we end up surrendering our voice and surrendering our power, or trying to please those around us and trying to hold onto this vision of who we are supposed to be. We also hold onto that vision in the way we structure our scripts. We make these beautiful, very clear outlines that seem to make “so much sense.” We come up with a great pitch. We come up with a great logline. We come up with a great synopsis that makes us feel like we know exactly what story we're telling.  We have a vision for that story, and where does that vision come from? It often comes from (even though we're not conscious of it) what society is telling us a story is supposed to be or what Hollywood is telling us a show is supposed to be, or what we've already seen on film or television, rather than from our own voice and our own experiences and the truth of what actually is.  We get attached to that vision. We get attached to that structure.  And sometimes, along the way,

UP vs. SOUL: What Theme is Driving Your Writing? Today we're going to be looking at Soul by Pete Docter, Mike Jones and Kemp Powers.  Soul is a fascinating movie, especially if we think of it in terms of the whole Pixar library, because the truth is Pete Docter has already made this film. Pete Docter, many years ago, made a film called Up. In today’s podcast, we’re going to analyze the scripts for Soul and Up, exploring how the two screenplays explore the exact same theme and structure through a different plot. Along the way, we’ll learn some powerful lessons about how theme can drive your writing. So, what's the theme of Soul? The theme that Pete Docter is still hammering away at so many years later in Soul is the idea that by getting too attached to what we perceive as our life's purpose, we can become lost souls. By becoming so obsessed with what we're supposed to be doing, we actually end up missing life.  In Up, the way that that problem gets created is through a man who is madly in love with his wife. She dies young. And he spends the rest of his life trying to preserve her memory, trying to get to this place called Paradise Falls, which he believes is his destiny.  In a typically Pixar-magical way, in search of that destiny, he flies his house to Paradise Falls using balloons and ends up on the wrong side of the falls. Unfortunately, he has a stowaway passenger that he was really hoping not to bring along on the journey, this little kid named Russell, who is desperate for a father.  To understand why that little stowaway is there, we have to look at the beginning of Up. There's a beautiful 10 minutes of silent filmmaking at the beginning of Up that is pretty much a perfect short film. In the short film, Carl meets the love of his life, Ellie, and they dream of having a child together. And she can't have the child. They build a life together and they get consumed by normal life obstacles, and they never make it to Paradise Falls before she dies.  He gets obsessed with preserving what’s left of his destiny with Ellie, the things from their past and the things that they were supposed to have before she was taken from him.  Having arrived at “the wrong side of the falls,” the house becomes a visual metaphor, literally tethered to him by a garden hose, as he drags it behind him to Paradise Falls.  It's like the albatross around his neck, and he’s so obsessed with getting that house to where it’s “supposed to be” that he almost misses the real destiny that's right in front of him: this little boy who can become the son that he always wished for, that he always wanted with Ellie.  So, that's the structure of Up.  By the end of the film, Carl finally lets go of the house, when he realizes that the things that mattered most to him with Ellie were not the big things that they dreamed of. The everyday little things in his life with Ellie was the real adventure. Like many writers, despite having made an absolutely perfect movie, Pete Docter is still not done with that theme. 12 years later, he’s still wrestling with it in a different form, this time in a movie called Soul.  This is something that happens to all of us. Some themes will work themselves out over the course of a single script and other themes we have to look at from one angle after another.  And it makes sense, because Pete Docter is one of the great producer-director-writers in history. He's behind some of the greatest Pixar films, and always in collaboration with other brilliant artists (in the case of Soul with writers like Kent Powers and Mike Jones). Being that big head honcho and making those big things and doing these great things, it's only natural to feel pressure between being the powerful creative force who you're supposed to be-- who you have t...

The Mandalorian: Where Hook Meets Engine This week, we're going to be talking about The Mandalorian and the incredibly important screenwriting concept of hook. And we're going to relate that idea of hook to another very important idea in TV writing, which is engine. So this is the podcast on where hook meets engine. Let's start off by talking about hook. What's the hook of The Mandalorian? Just like in your screenplay or pilot, the hook is the thing that hooks the audience, like hooking a fish. It's the thing that keeps them coming back again and again. And what does the audience come back for again and again? They come back for a feeling. The feeling is the internal hook, that's the actual thing that the audience is buying. That's why we are paying for Disney+. Because we want to watch The Mandalorian, we want to feel that Mandalorian feeling! But you can't go into a producer's office and be like, “Let me tell you how this piece is going to make you feel.” So what we use is this concept called hook, which turns into a little pitch for your show, capturing that big, ironic, super-cool element that's going to deliver that feeling. In The Mandalorian, that hook is so simple, right? The simple hook, the simple premise of The Mandalorian is that the most hardened bounty hunter ever is going to fall in love with little Baby Yoda. A guy who has no moral compass outside of the world of his Mandalorian religion, outside of the world where he doesn't remove his helmet, a guy who has no ethical compass in relation to the people that he takes prisoner, that he sells for money, whose only value in the whole world is beskar armor—is going to fall in love with a cute little Baby Yoda who is supposed to be his prisoner. So you have this wonderful, ironic hook of the hardened bounty hunter falling in love with the cute little Baby Yoda. And you can see that pretty much everything in The Mandalorian is built around that hook! From the very first episode, by the time we get to the end of the pilot, we already know what's going to happen. We already know, oh my gosh, it’s little Baby Yoda! And we already know that this particular Mandalorian has a history, that he was a foundling, that he understands what it is to be an orphan, that he was taken in by someone who cared for him when his own parents were killed. And so you take this character on this wonderful A-Z journey, where he is finding his internal compass—a man who has none. That's the simple hook. All of The Mandalorian is going to grow around that simple hook. It's all about Baby Yoda. Tough Mandalorian, cute Baby Yoda. That's all it's about—tough Mandalorian, cute Baby Yoda! And just think about how much effort went into that? There is not a frickin’ frame where a little Baby Yoda isn't doing something cute, right? He's eating something that's ball-shaped. He's getting into some kind of trouble. He's doing some kind of adorable little look. He's always doing something. Why? Because it's about little Baby Yoda. You lose little Baby Yoda and The Mandalorian is over. You lose little Baby Yoda, and The Mandalorian is just about a dude in a helmet whose face you can't even see traveling the world having adventures. It's little Baby Yoda that gives the piece its feeling: What does it feel like when a hard guy goes soft? What does it feel like when a hard guy starts to find something that he actually cares about? What does it feel like when a rigid man starts to lose his rigidity, because of a little baby that he loves? So that's The Mandalorian. That's the hook. If you were going to pitch The Mandalorian, you're pitching the Bounty Hunter with a little Baby Yoda.

One Night in Miami: Writing for Political Change This week we're going to be looking at One Night in Miami by Kemp Powers, adapted from his play. The movie, if you haven't seen it yet, is about a fictional evening between Malcolm X, Muhammad Ali, Sam Cooke, and Jim Brown. In exploring One Night in Miami, we’re going to be talking about three things that will be incredibly valuable to you as a screenwriter: the way the screenplay lands its powerful political and emotional message, the slightly old fashioned way it uses exposition (it’s not perfect), and the simple power of a character’s secret as a tool for building structure. When you’re writing a political screenplay like One Night in Miami, it’s important to make sure you’re not just preaching to the choir.  To create a desire for change in your audience, you need to take your audience to a place of deep and transformative emotional power. And the way One Night in Miami succeeds in doing this is by fusing its political message with a powerful emotional message. And this is what we all strive for when writing a political movie: we're all striving to move an audience to not just affect their intellect, but to actually move them emotionally in relation to a topic, so that they feel a new kind of empathy and understanding they might not have felt if they hadn’t watched the film. And the way that we do that is by allowing them to see themselves in a character and move them on a journey just like that character is going through. So it's an emotional move that actually creates the power of a political film.  What's really interesting about One Night in Miami is that despite the incredibly powerful place it ends up, it doesn't start very strong, mostly because of that pesky little problem called “exposition.”  In an attempt to set up the world of the movie for the audience, rather than launching us right into the action, One Night in Miami starts off by introducing the four main characters and setting up things the old-fashioned way. The most problematic of these intros is the one with Jim Brown, so that’s the one we’ll look at.  Jim Brown, potentially on his way to Miami (it's not quite clear) has stopped off at the house of a white family friend. And he has an extraordinarily long conversation with his white family friend on the front porch of the Southern gentleman's house. And while the writer has an ace up his sleeve for the final line, the conversation is problematic for a lot of reasons.  The first is, nothing is happening. And when I say nothing is happening, what I mean is Jim Brown doesn't want anything from his white friend. He's simply stopping by. And similarly, the white friend doesn't want anything from Jim. He's simply chatting him up.  If anybody wants something, it's the white friend's daughter, who just wants to be in the company of this legend. But even her want really gets attenuated. And what the scene ends up doing is what a lot of not-so-successful scenes do, it ends up being a set-up scene for the audience.  Now there is an incredible line at the end of the scene that is absolutely devastating. Because what you watch is a very long scene where this white man is so nice to this black man, is so kind to him, and so lovely to him. And Jim Brown is so nice and lovely to his white friend. And then, for reasons that are not exactly clear, the daughter pops in and says, "Hey, Dad, are you going to help me with that furniture?”  And why exactly the daughter, who just wants to be in the company of this legend Jim Brown, is interrupting her dad's meeting with this superstar family friend to move a piece of furniture is not particularly clear. But it's really there as a setup, right?  Because we're going to find out that this white man who has seemed so nice (“if there'...

Cobra Kai: How to Find Your Hook This week, we're going to be looking at the hook, engine and structure of Cobra Kai, learning how to find the hook of your screenplay or series pilot, and what to do if your original engine seems like it’s running out of steam. Hook is one of those all-powerful tools when you're a screenwriter. Because hook is not just how you sell scripts. It's not just how you write scripts. It's how you get work-for-hire jobs, the primary way that screenwriters make a living. Most writers start off their career thinking it’s all about this one great idea. “I've got this top secret idea that only I've thought of. I've got this piece of IP (intellectual property) that nobody else knows about. I've got this book. I've got this novel. I've got this true story that happened to me. I've got this crazy thing that came to me in my dream.”   We have this brilliant idea, and we get really stuck on it. We think the idea is the thing that sells. But as you get more advanced, as you start to actually live and work in this industry, you start to realize that ideas are a dime a dozen. And the same ideas tend to kind of make the rounds, again and again. In fact, that really unique idea that you have, that nobody else ever thought of... there's a good chance that actually somebody else not only has thought of it, but has written it and has circulated it around Hollywood!  It's very rare that you see a new idea. And yet, producers do buy one version of the idea and not the other. They do buy this project and not that project. So it's important to understand what they are actually buying.  As you’ll see as we start to break down the structure of Cobra Kai, It's not actually the idea that a producer buys when you sell your screenplay. It's the hook. So what is hook? Hook is your unique take on the idea.  Hook is “I found this incredible piece of IP. And this element of it spoke to me. And I saw it a little different than everybody else.” Hook is “this dream came to me. And I saw this kind of unique take on it, this little twist on it.” Hook is the thing that makes you you. And hook is the way you find yourself in what you're writing.  When you're thinking about hook, don't think about hook as selling out. Think about hook as a way of entertaining yourself. By finding little fun ironic twists, by finding things that you didn't see coming when you first had the idea.  In television writing, hook becomes even more complicated because hook gets connected to this vital tool called a series engine. A series engine grows out of the key elements of a TV series, and the way those elements are put together each episode and each season to create the same feeling and the same hook again and again and again... to create something that feels the same, but is also different.  So we're going to be talking about that special place of screenwriting magic where hook meets engine. We're going to be talking about how to find your hook. And we're going to be talking about what to do if you lose it.  You would think once you had a good hook that you would never lose it! Once you had that amazing take on new material, you would think that you would hold on to it like your life depended on it. But if you're a screenwriter, guaranteed, you have written a draft in which somehow you lost track of that great idea you started with! You’ve written a draft and then realized, “huh, that's funny, I wrote a different movie.” Or you realize, “wow, that hook is there, but I've got secondary characters and subplots that are kind of gumming up the works and taking away from it.” In TV, it gets even more complicated. Because often you start off so strong,

The Little Things: How to Write a Trick Ending This week, we're going to be talking about The Little Things by John Lee Hancock, as well as some other films with the greatest trick endings of all time, like The Sixth Sense, The Usual Suspects and Se7en. Specifically, we’re going to be answering the question: how do you write a trick ending in your screenplay? If you haven't seen The Little Things yet, don't worry, I am going to talk about the plot, but I will not give away the big surprise until the very end. And I promise I'll warn you before we get there. And if you have seen the movie, then you and I probably can agree that it has (what should be) a really fun trick ending, the kind of trick ending that we all look for, that wonderful moment that seems connected to character, that has emotional stakes to it, that surprises the audience, that’s even is a riff on the title of the script.  It's a nice little moment, or at least it should be.  But somehow, you probably found that the trick ending in The Little Things left you just a little bit cold. It just doesn't totally land. In your head, (if you didn’t see it coming), you might still think, “oh, that's interesting, that's a cool trick ending.” But in your heart, you don't really feel the trick ending.  That happens for a very simple reason.  So in looking at The Little Things we’re going to talk about exactly why the trick ending doesn’t work to its full potential, and how to write a trick ending for your screenplay that works both intellectually and emotionally. Often, when your trick ending isn't landing, or for that matter, when any element of your script isn't landing, you rush back to rewrite, and you start to get focused on all the little details that aren’t working. And, of course, we could talk about all the little details of The Little Things. We could talk about the kind of clunky exposition at the beginning where we're told again, and again, and again, and again about Denzel’s nervous breakdown and what a messed up cop he was before he lost his job and ended up at this crappy little out-of-town precinct.  We could talk about the good things about this script. We could talk about the wonderful performance of Jared Leto’s character, and the nice little twist on the serial killer that we see with him. We could talk about the cool 90’s throwback stuff and the old technology of solving a crime. We could talk about the pacing of the script.  These are exactly the kinds of things that we often get obsessed with when we rewrite, especially when something big isn't working in our script. All those little details. “Oh, no, I messed up this little line of dialogue...”  But what I want to tell you is that these are the little things. They're not the big ones.  And as screenwriters, as much as we care about the details, we actually have to make sure we take care of the big things before we take care of the little ones. (Even if we're writing a script called The Little Things).  The reason the trick ending of The Little Things isn't landing has absolutely nothing to do with all the little clunky execution issues in the script.  The truth is, the script could survive those clunky issues, even though I wish the writer had cleaned them up. The real reason the ending doesn't land comes down to what almost always gets in the way of trick endings: it's all about the characters.  The first key in writing a trick ending that works is making sure that the trick ending isn't just happening for the audience. It’s also happening for the characters.  And that's especially important if you're writing a two-hander like The Little Things.  By two-hander I mean, there are really two characters in The Little Things. Sure, you have Jared Leto’s character,

How To Be a Dope Ass Motherf#&ker: Writing for Hire Tips with Steven Bagatourian Jake: My guest today is Steven Bagatourian. Steven is an award winning writer. He wrote All Eyez On Me, the Tupac movie. He's done huge budget features. He's done tiny little independent films. He's done everything in between. He's also a tremendous mentor here at the studio, working with some of our top writers in our Protrack Mentorship Program and our Workshop Program. And so thank you, Steven, I'm so glad to have you on the program today. Steve: Thank you so much, Jake, for having me. It is a pleasure to be here. Jake: I’d like to start off by talking to you about work-for-hire projects. Because so much paid work comes out of the work-for-hire world. You've worked on projects that originated with you, and you've also worked on projects that are not original, that have come from producers. And I'm curious, how do you find that passion and voice when you're working on a project that didn't start with you? And how do you bring that when you're working on an assignment? Steve: That's a terrific question. And it's something I think that a lot of screenwriters don't really give enough thought to when they get into screenwriting. Because so much of learning to write screenplays is so focused on (especially on the feature side) spec scripts and original scripts, but then you find yourself in the business and all of a sudden you're in bizarro world. It's a complete reversal of what you've been doing the whole time you've been like learning to write!  The dirty little secret of screenwriting is that over 95% of the work you're going to get as a professional is going to be on assignment. And so it's a very specific skill set, to speak to your question directly, it's a very specific thing to learn how to bring your passion and your voice to an idea that you didn't originate, that might be dealing with a subject matter you have no particular interest in.  And I know, for me, it was one of the biggest struggles in my career, because it was terrifying. And it's very much on the job training. You're hired by a studio, they say, “we're making a movie about a wacky person who is a dentist, and he's got some problems with his family,” and certainly you're passionate about dentistry! Like, oh, who's not? And you've got six weeks to deliver a draft, go! And on some of my early jobs, it was really scary to me, because there's a legitimate reason to be afraid at that point. If you mess up, then it's going to be difficult to continue to work in that space.  So, at the beginning, I tried way too hard to follow instructions and meet the brief that I was given by the studio executives, and I naively thought that they wanted you just to listen to them as a screenwriter. And I quickly found out, that is actually not what they really want.  They want you to hear their notes and hear the spirit of their notes, but then they want you to do something creative and original and address the heart of the note, without literally just becoming a dictation machine for their idle musings and the things that they happen to just throw out in a notes meeting. They understand that you might have a better idea, that you hopefully will have a better idea, but you’ve got to figure out how to make it your own.  And so, my first couple of assignment jobs, I was miserable with the drafts that I turned in. And at the end of the day, when the assignment was done, I was left with nothing, because the studio decides, “hey, we're going to go another direction.” They’re either not going to make it, or they’re going to make it,

Ma Rainey's Black Bottom: The Art of Adaptation This week, we're going to be looking at Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, by August Wilson, adaptation by Ruben Santiago-Hudson.  I'm so excited to talk about this script, not just because it's a great movie, but because it's one of the great plays of all time. So that means, this episode, we get to talk about the link between playwriting and screenwriting, the similarities and the differences.  And more importantly, it means we can talk about the art of adaptation. If you're a screenwriter or TV writer, at some point in your career, you're going to do an adaptation, which means, just like the writer of Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, you need the skills to know how to adapt a play, novel, memoir, short story, true story...heck even a board game into a movie or TV show. If you look at what's happening in the industry right now, most of the work-for-hire projects are based on something called IP, intellectual property. We're taking this thing that is not yet a movie, and we're translating it into something that is a movie or TV show.  I want you to focus on that word translation. An adaptation is not a copying of the plot. An adaptation is a translation of something that was written in one language into a different language.  And the art of adaptation is challenging, because as screenwriters, as writers we want to honor the work of the artists that we are adapting.  Even if you're doing something crazy, like adapting an amusement park ride like Pirates of the Caribbean, you want to honor what's great about that ride. If you're adapting The Lego Movie, you want to honor what's great about Legos. And if you're adapting a play, you want to honor what's great about the play.  And honoring what's great about the play, or the movie, or the video game, or the book, or the memoir, or the torn from the headline story, or your personal life story, or the dream you had last night... or even adapting the rough draft of your script. When you're doing this act of adaptation, you're translating something from one form to another.  And that means that you may not get all the literal details. Because the literal details were created for a different form. But what you're trying to capture is the intent.  The first question you want to ask yourself whenever you're working on an adaptation is: do I trust this material?  Do I trust this writer? Do I believe in this material? Do I generally like the project?  And that doesn't mean is the project good or not? It means does it resonate for you? Does it matter to you? And if it doesn't all resonate for you, you want to ask yourself, Well, what part of it does? What part of it do I really, really, really connect to?  If you think about The Lego Movie, Chris Miller and Phil Lord, my friends who adapted it, connected to this idea of playing by the rules, and also playing in your own way, right? That was the piece of Legos that connected them in a personal way. How do you express yourself, when “everything is awesome,” and playing within the rules makes everything awesome, but you also want to be a wild artist and do your own thing.  They took that one idea about Legos and they built around it. They decided they trusted the material, found the thing they connected to about it, and built around that. If you look at The Reader by David Hare, that's an adaptation of a book that is not very successful in its own right. The book is written by a lawyer and it's focused on the ins and outs of Nuremberg law. And underneath all the not-so-exciting details is this really complicated story about a little boy, who's in love with a woman who turns out to be a Nazi. She comes back into his life, later in life, and he has to deal with the fact that he loves her,

The Queen's Gambit: Writing the Limited Series Today we're going to be talking about The Queen's Gambit by Scott Frank and Alan Scott. This is actually the first time since Chernobyl that we've looked at a limited series. So, I want to talk a little bit about limited series, how they work, and also how they've changed over the years. I actually came up in the world of limited series (or miniseries, as we used to call them). Back in those days, when we thought about a project that could become a limited series, we thought about giant, sprawling, epic stories with a tremendous amount of plot-- so much plot, so many subplots, so many twists and turns, so many characters, such huge historical scope, that you couldn't fit it into a movie.  When we thought about miniseries, back in the day, we were looking for stories about topics that people already had a feeling that they knew about, but that maybe they didn't know the real story. Something really big, because miniseries were expensive and hard to sell and hard to make. The truth is, until very, very recently, we were looking for stories a lot more like Chernobyl than The Queen’s Gambit.  When you look at The Queen's Gambit, you see that shape, scope and structure when writing a limited series (or miniseries) has completely changed.  The Queen's Gambit actually started as a novel. It bounced around Hollywood for about 30 years. And the first adaptation as a feature film was written about 10 years ago. And although it was written by the same writer, Alan Scott, who would eventually pen the limited series, they simply could not sell it. In fact, the response they kept getting when they pitched it was “nobody's going to be interested in chess! This story is too small.” It wasn’t until after doing Godless that Scott Frank came up with the idea to reimagine The Queen’s Gambit as a limited series.   And what’s really interesting is that they conceived of it not as one of those traditional, epic, plot driven, historical limited series that had always sold in the past. But instead as a much quieter approach to a limited series, that really allows you to drop into the eyes of a character.  Back in the day when I was coming up in the industry, if you pitched The Queen's Gambit as a limited series, you would have been laughed out of the room.  There are many things about the structure of The Queen's Gambit that simply shouldn't work according to Hollywood convention. And yet today, it’s become the most popular limited series in Netflix's history. So, today I’ll be talking about what’s unique and original about the structure of The Queen’s Gambit, and how these filmmakers flew in the face of the traditional Hollywood wisdom to make something that was greater than the sum of its parts. When you look at the elements of The Queen's Gambit, they don’t exactly suggest a blockbuster movie, much less a successful limited series.  It's about chess, which unlike football, or baseball, or any of the other typical sports about which movies get made, is a sport that nobody knows anything about!  It’s a sport that you can't follow unless you’re an expert. Which makes it really hard to cheer for the character like you would in a football movie. You don't even know where the end zone is! Unless you’re Bobby Fisher, you can’t even look at the board on screen and realize “she’s got it! Checkmate!” The Queen’s Gambit is essentially a sports movie that's not a sports movie. A movie based around a game where the audience can't tell if you're winning.  You also have another really interesting thing going on, which is a character, who, for the most part, doesn't form relationships.

Keep Your New Year's Resolutions as a Writer It's January 1st, which means, if you are a writer, you probably just made a New Year's resolution. It also means, if you’re a writer, last year you probably made a New Year's resolution as well.   And that probably means that you also fell short of whatever New Year’s resolution you made for yourself last year. And maybe even many years before... Which probably means that you're already feeling a weird mixture of confidence and doubt, of hope and fear, of confusion and relentlessness. It means that you're probably already excited to overcome whatever you feel like you missed out on doing last year, and also afraid that history might repeat itself.  Keeping Your 2021 New Year's resolutions is more about the way you approach goal setting towards your resolutions than it is about the resolutions themselves.  So, on today's podcast, what I actually want to talk about is goal setting. I want to talk about how to set goals, not to create the change overnight (which we all know doesn't happen). But how to set goals that actually set you up for success, so that you can create the long term change that we are all looking for in our lives...  This is so valuable, and not just as a screenwriter. This is valuable in literally any endeavor in your life that really matters to you. It’s valuable anytime you're trying to do something hard that you can't just do in one sitting, anytime you have a task you can’t just check off of your Asana or your reminder notification, anytime you’re doing something big that requires continuous effort. Often, these big things that require continuous effort, these superobjective kinds-of-things (to speak in screenwriting terms) are actually the things that matter most to us.  Learning to set goals as a writer begins with learning to think a little more like your characters. One of the ways that we tend to be a little bit different from our characters-- and not in a good way-- is that our characters in a movie or TV show are really good at relentlessly pursuing these hard things. That's what makes them so compelling as characters. It's what makes us fall in love with them. They are going for something they want so badly that they're making choices every day, every scene, to get them. Choices that are so big, that are so passionate, the kind of choices that we wish that we could make in our lives.  And that's the reason that when we watch and read these shows, these movies, these plays, these novels, we connect to those characters. Even when our characters are pursuing goals that we don't approve of, or agree with, or even if they're pursuing goals that are completely external from the realities of our lives, there's a part of us that can’t help but root for those characters.  We root for them because there’s a part of us that feels like “that's me up there, or at least a part of me… the part of me I wish I could be… the part of me that wishes I could go for the things that I want with the kind of passion that these characters go for them.” The truth is, your characters are actually no different from you. They're just distilled versions of you. Versions that are very good at intensely pursuing their goals. If you think about your lifetime, you've actually accomplished huge and incredible and challenging things. And the pursuit of those things, sometimes over years and years and years has changed who you are as a person and revealed who you really intend to be, not just to other people but also to yourself. The process of overcoming obstacles in pursuit of something that really matters to you doesn't just reveal who you want to be on the outside, it actually reveals who you really are on the inside. It shows you parts of yourself that you weren't aware of; it allows you to be more you. 

Pitch Festivus: Pitching Tips from Jake & the Faculty This episode features a transcript from our recent Pitch Festivus event, in which faculty members from JKS shared their insights into how to pitch screenplays, TV shows, plays, novels and other writing projects. Jake: Hello everybody! I am so happy and delighted to be surrounded by so many wonderful writers from our community. We have almost all of our faculty here, and it is just great that in these crazy times we can all still be together connecting and creating. Let’s talk about pitching. In a moment, I am going to introduce you to my whole team, and we are going to learn how to pitch from all these talented writers. Audrey Sussman - Specialty: Writers Block, Hypnosis for Writers The first person that I want to introduce-- we are going to go in alphabetical order, but this works out perfectly--the first person that I want to introduce is my mom, Audrey Sussman. Audrey is not a screenwriter, Audrey is a hypnotherapist. Audrey does hypnosis for artists, she does hypnosis for anxiety, and the way that she works in our school is helping our students through the emotional side of screenwriting and through those roadblocks that get in the way. She is also a master of NLP, which is an incredibly valuable sales technique in addition to being an incredibly powerful therapeutic technique. And so, Audrey, mom, I wonder if you could talk a little bit about how hypnosis works and how people can break through those blocks that they have about pitching when they feel anxious about it? Audrey:  When you are pitching or when you are writing and you feel like “agh!” anxiety gets in the way of you being at your best. Your creativity gets kind of stifled because you are anxious. Those are called triggers that are set into the unconscious. And you may not realize where they are coming from. Many times, they come from childhood.  So, what we can do hypnotically is release some of that trauma (almost like from the cellular level) or whatever caused those triggers to get set in, and you create a new pathway so that when you go to pitch you step into calm and confidence, and you are at your best.  I work with some of the students privately, and one of the guys had a big movie that had already come out and when he came to me he was anxious because he was thinking, “How am I going to recreate this? How am I going to do this again? They are paying me all this money!” He was creating some negative self-talk and self-doubt. We found out it was coming from earlier in his life, got rid of it, and then he flowed with his writing. So, any time you are feeling that you are getting stuck, there is usually a little younger you inside that is triggering you. So, you can use hypnosis and neurolinguistics in pitching. If you know how to use words and matching body language, many times it helps the person you are pitching to feel like you are like them. And so, there is a whole slew of information about how to use body language, words, to make your pitch even that much more powerful. Jake: Will you teach us all a quick NLP matching thing that we can all do right now that we can use next time we are in a pitch meeting? Audrey:  Absolutely. I was working with this guy and he was trying to get a grant, and he did not get it the first time and he begged the person, “Can I just pitch you one more time?” And I did not have time to teach him words and neurolinguistics and hypnosis, I said, “Okay all I want you to do is match the body language, whatever that person does I want you to match it.”  So when the guy shouted, “You are…” (SLAMS HAND ON TABLE), “....not going to get this,” the guy mirrored him, (also slamming his hand on the table) “I absolutely under...

Engineering Your TV Drama Pilot w/ Ron McCants Jake: My guest this week is the newest mentor at Jacob Krueger Studio, Ron McCants. Ron is a wonderful writer, he is a playwright, he is a TV writer, and he is also a development executive, which is a very exciting combination because he has worked on both sides of the screen, in addition to working in comics and in many other fields. So, he brings a really vast wealth of information. He is also a tremendous activist. We’re actually partnering with Ron as part of our Black Lives Matter initiatives with his project called The Parity Project. So, I’m sure we’re going to get to talk a little bit about that as well. I want to start by welcoming you Ron. We’re so happy to have you. And I wanted to ask you a little bit about how you came to this place as a writer? What is your origin story? Ron: What is my origin story? So, that’s a great question. I always ask people what their origin story is. And mine is that I started off in Missouri--I was born in Lincoln, Nebraska but I was raised mostly in Missouri-- and I did really well with science and math and I ended up going to Dartmouth College in New Hampshire and I was put in this remedial writing class based off of my SAT scores. Now, my math, it was like through the roof kind of deal, but the verbal, hmm, barely average. And I was at the bottom of this remedial writing class. And then, I worked from the bottom to the top of that class. I worked with a tutor, I worked with my professor and I found out I could write an essay. And then I decided, “Let me make a commitment to myself,”  so I took a writing course every term while I was at school, and I found myself in this playwriting class and we had a reading at my first show. I was like, “this was amazing I am going to do this for the rest of my life.” Joe Sutton, who was my professor at the time, told me, “You know, you had a good reading, don’t make a commitment like that.” But, you know, almost 20 years later I’m still doing it, but as a TV writer. And so, that’s kind of how it all started. Jake: A lot of writers make that transition, starting in the world of theatre and moving into the world of television. And you’re one of the people who have done that successfully. So, I’m curious, what were the skills that you took from playwriting that you brought into your TV writing career and what had to change as you started to make that transition into writing for the screen? Ron: Well, I was mostly an engineer so I really knew myself. As a playwright, you always almost have to have another job, so you live your life and you get all these experiences. And I think the thing that I take most from playwriting is the way in which I might build the show.  As a playwright, a lot of times you approach things with a question or you wonder about a concept and you figure out what the world is, you figure out what you're trying to say-- this, that and the other. And then, you find your characters and you say, “Will this character do this thing for me because I’m trying to explore this, that or the other?” Whereas in the TV world, you usually first start with an idea or a world but you start thinking about the character first, and what their journey is and like how you would make something for an American market in most cases.  Understanding the difference between how TV and plays are created, I think is a key thing. And so, what I’ve taken from the playwriting world is how to develop conceptual shows that make you think, but also are compelling and interesting and have great characters that TV requires. I also appreciate the community of theatre. I think that’s probably what led me to starting the nonprofit. I’m more of a community minded person because of my experience in the theatre.

Curious About Playwriting? A Conversation with Lisa D'Amour Jake: My guest today is Lisa D’Amour. Lisa is a brilliant playwright, she has taught at some of the finest grad programs in the country, including running the MFA Playwriting program at Brown. She is a Pulitzer finalist for her play Detroit, and she is also one of my mentors. She is the gifted teacher with whom I studied playwriting when I first came to New York City. And so it is a real honor for me to have Lisa on this podcast and also to have Lisa now teaching for us at Jacob Krueger Studio. I wanted to ask you first: whether you’re a playwright, a screenwriter or a poet, a novelist, a memoirist, a song writer, everybody talks about this thing called voice, right? Lisa: Hmm-hmm. Jake: We all know that the great playwrights and screenwriters that we admire have a specific voice. So how did you find your voice as a writer? And what did that mean to you, as you were coming up? Lisa: Hmm-mmm, that’s a great question. I sometimes associate voice with things like chemistry and sense of humor, actually. Not that I’m trying to say that in order to find your voice you have to write funny plays, that is not what I mean at all. But, when you’re with friends and you’re feeling really at ease and someone makes a joke and suddenly you just find yourself laughing and feeling so flexible and open-- I think that when we are writing and feeling our own voice, when we’re writing inside what we call our voice, there is something that feels very pleasurable and very free. And for me, as a very young writer before I went to grad school, I remember trying to write plays that looked a lot like “plays”-- that had lights up, lights down, a single set-- just kind of trying to fit my words into the structural box. And I remember that one day I just was like, “You know, I don’t know if this will get produced, I don’t know what this is going to look like, but I’m curious about these two characters that are hanging out in a New Orleans cemetery.” And New Orleans cemeteries are unlike these other cemeteries; they are these big, above-ground kind of tombs. And I really just let myself be with those two characters, and what I remember is finding lusciousness, finding poetry, and in some ways, finding some humor. But it was really letting go of what the shape of the play was going to be, and just kind of being with the space and the characters. Jake: I love the word “curious.” I was always a student of writing and so I was always studying the masters, I was always studying the scripts that I loved, and that caused a kind of intellectual approach for me early in my career where I was trying to control everything. And at the beginning of my career, I always felt like voice was my weakest thing. Now, I actually feel it is where my strength is. But at the beginning of my career, I always felt like, “I don’t even know what people are talking about when they say ‘voice,’ I’m just, I’m putting the Legos together and trying to make the Death Star.” And that lesson about curiosity, coming from a place of curiosity rather than control, is what helped me. Lisa: Yes, I love that, that’s great. Yeah and I think also just like being, letting yourself be and see what feels good to you, see what cracks you up in your own writing, can sometimes be a good sign. Sometimes I talk about that moment when you’re like, “Oh my god, I just wrote that? Can I write that? Am I allowed to write that?” And that’s usually a good moment. Jake: Yeah. Lisa: So, it’s an interesting process, and it is hard to name that process of finding your voice. Jake: I like what you said about, “Am I allowed to say that?” Often,

Jacob Krueger interviews actor/director/writer and JKS alum Jenna Laurenzo about her smash hit film Lez Bomb and the spiritual side of screenwriting.

Jacob Krueger does a deep analysis of Ozark, Season 1, Episode 8, to show both the dangers of exposition and how to approach it in your own TV writing.

Jacob Krueger analyzes the pilot of Ozark and shows the link between theme, hook, engine and secondary structure.

Jake: People who don’t know a lot about comics might think about comics as good guys and bad guys. One of the things I think is so interesting happening in comics today is the complexity of character and the nuance of character. This is not just purely a visual spectacle medium anymore. This is a character driven, character based storytelling medium.

Jacob Krueger analyzes the structure of Joe Exotic’s journey in Tiger King to demonstrate the concepts of structure, genre, hook, and engine in screenwriting and TV writing.

Jacob Krueger analyzes the structure of Joe Exotic’s journey in Tiger King to demonstrate the concepts of structure, genre, hook, and engine in screenwriting and TV writing.

Tiger King: Part 1. What gets you hot? This week we’re going to be talking about Tiger King, the most appropriate possible topic for this crazy time. It’s most appropriate because it’s been a source of escape for a whole country who desperately needed one, and it’s also most appropriate because it shows the power we have as artists to shape reality, for better or for worse, and the risk we take when we let go of the ethical implications of every word we write. We’re going to be talking about Tiger King as a documentary. But we’re also going to be talking about Tiger King as a film. We’re also going to be talking about Tiger King as a miniseries. We’re also going to be talking about Tiger King as an adaptation of a true life story. We’re going to talk about why people got so hot and enthusiastic about it as a story. And we’re going to talk about why people got so hot and angry about it’s ethical and political failings.  As many, many articles have pointed out, Tiger King does not function like a typical documentary, in that, well, not everything in there is, um, exactly, true… Rather, Tiger King has been rewritten like a work of dramatic storytelling, with the repurposing of certain clips and the exclusion of others,  in order to make you fall in love with  a character who you probably should be reviling.  It’s one thing when that happens in Breaking Bad, with a totally fictional main character. But what is our responsibility as filmmakers when the subjects of our documentary are real people with real lives? When the issues at stake are real issues that are actually happening, right now, in the world?  So we’re going to look at the ethical implications of Tiger King, and the ethical implications of writing any movie or TV show. But we’re also going to be looking at Tiger King without judgment, just like we do every film we analyze, to discuss what we can learn from it as screenwriters, documentarians, TV writers, and adapters of true stories.  Because there’s a reason Tiger King is successful. And that success has actually shockingly little to do with the questionable ethical decisions of its directors. Rather, it has to do with certain foundational ideas of screenwriting. And those are the ideas we want to learn from the film. Whether you’re writing Tiger King or Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon or Save The Tiger or Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo, what your audience is coming for is a feeling. We call that feeling “a genre experience,” and it is the only reason anybody ever comes to see a movie or turns on a television.  Because it is the only reason you ever go to see a movie, or ever turn on a television.  You turn on the television or you go watch a movie because you want to feel something. And our genre experiences, our genre preferences are very strong.  Oftentimes when we think about genre we break it down into categories like; romantic comedy, drama, documentary, thriller, horror film. But this is the most oversimplified possible way to think about genre.  And if you are making a documentary you know that Super-Size Me and Bowling for Columbine and Tiger King are as far different as three documentaries could be that in fact they live in completely different genres. If you are writing a TV series, you know that Westworld and Succession, even though they are both TV dramas, are as far away from a genre perspective as they could possibly be. You know that Fleabag and Arrested Development are as different genre wise as TV series could ever be even though they are both TV comedies. And similarly, you would recognize that A Quiet Place and Chucky are as far apart genre wise as two horror movies could be. And you start to realize that genre is not a label that you put on a movie, it is a feeling. 

Why Am I Procrastinating? I want to start today’s podcast with a personal story, something that happened to me early in my writing career. I had just sold my first screenplay, which meant I got to do the thing that everybody dreams of doing, the thing that I had always dreamed of doing. I got to leave my job and I got to devote every hour of every day to the thing that really mattered to me. I got to spend every moment being a writer.  And I was primed for success. I was ready to create, and create, and create and write screenplay after screenplay. I was filled with passion and excitement and I felt like the dream was finally coming true. And what came instead of the dream that I had planned was months of the most intense writer’s block and procrastination that I have ever experienced.  What followed was three months in which I accomplished pretty much nothing. And what followed was emotionally probably the hardest three months in my career. I was very lucky.  My dear friend and writing partner, John Wierick, drove down to Venice Beach, took me for a walk on the beach and he said, “Jake, I’m worried about my friend.”  And I said, “You know, I am really struggling. Every idea that I write is not as good as the one I just sold. I start something and then I abandon it. And lately, I am not even starting at all... And I am not having fun procrastinating, I am not flying to Tahiti or going for a walk or working out or painting or playing my guitar or doing anything that gives me joy.  I’m sitting in front of my computer just staring and not writing or I’m reading the Hollywood Reporter or the Daily Variety cover to cover or I’m playing that stupid MineHunter game” (if you remember 20 years ago that crappy little game you’d play on your computer where you clicked on little boxes on a grid and tried not to get blown up by mines) “this is what I’m doing with my days and I’m miserable. But somehow, I can’t seem to find any time to write, even though I have all the time in the world.” And it was John Wierick who pulled me out of that tailspin with some very powerful advice.  He said, “Jake, it doesn’t matter which idea you choose. It doesn’t matter if the idea is good or bad. And it doesn’t matter if it is the right one or if the script is any good at all.”  He said, “You have to choose an idea today and you have to start writing it today and you have to finish it and you can worry about making it good later.” And that was some of the best advice I ever got as a writer and it was the first step of pulling me out of a very, very dark time and really saving my career.  And so, I want to do for you today what John Wierick did for me early in my career. Because, for many writers in our community, we’ve, in a different way, just experienced what I experienced all those years ago. Our lives suddenly and irrevocably changed. And we found ourselves suddenly with this strange thing that we’ve never had before called time. And I’m hearing from so many writers their frustration with themselves, feeling like “I have all this time but I’m not doing anything with it. I have all this time but I’m still stuck. I have all this time but I’m watching Tiger King and checking Facebook instead of doing something that matters. I have all this time but I feel lazy and scared and I can’t seem to get myself focused on anything. I have all this time but all my ideas seem so unimportant in light of what’s actually happening out in the world.” “I have all this time, but somehow, I don’t seem to have any time.” And so, I want to tell you how I was able to pull myself out of my writer’s block.  With the benefit of some good 2020 hindsight, I want to talk to you about what actually causes writer’s block and procrastination.  I want to talk about why you're doing it, and some very concrete steps you can take today to pull yourself out of it. Because, months from now, our world will go back to normal.

Parasite vs Little Miss Sunshine In my last podcast, we discussed Parasite and the way tone is used in the film. We compared Parasite to Little Miss Sunshine, another Academy Award-winning film that uses tone in interesting and unusual ways, and we talked about the difference between tone and genre and how that plays out in both these films. In this podcast, I want to dive even deeper into Parasite and look at the place where tone meets theme. I want to look at how the theme of Parasite ends up informing the tone and structure of the film.  Bong Joon-ho, the writer/director, created this film without even knowing where he was going or what happens in the second half of the story. We’re going to talk about how he achieved that, by allowing tone, structure, and thematic exploration to help the movie unfold in front of him.  Parasite is built around a question: Who is the parasite?  Previously, we talked about how Bong was interested in the idea of infiltration when he started writing the script. But in the title, Parasite, he really focuses on the meaning of that theme. This is a story about parasitic infiltration. This is about the way our society views each other as parasites. It’s about the way the rich view the poor as parasites, the way the poor view the rich as parasites, and the way the poor view the underclass as parasites. In a way, what he’s really looking at is our political situation and the ongoing class wars we’re experiencing around the world. The question Bong is asking is one that he doesn’t necessarily fully know the answer to, and that’s what makes his exploration so interesting and compelling.  Many writers, especially political writers, confuse the concepts of theme and moral.  They think they’re exploring a theme, but what they’re actually doing is trying to impose their moral point of view on the audience. Often, the result is very bad movies-- movies that not only fail dramatically but also fail to influence anyone politically, at least not anyone who doesn’t already believe what the writer believes.  A great writer, instead of pretending they have the answer, admits it’s never that simple. They try to instead pose a question to themselves that they’re not fully capable of answering, a question they’re going to have to wrestle with on the page in order to make some sense of it. When you work in this way, you not only take the audience on a journey, you take yourself on a journey.  You force yourself to challenge your assumptions and easy answers and to look for something closer to the truth. Along the way, you’re going to end up writing a movie or TV show that’s a lot more convincing to your audience, especially to those who may believe something different than you.  The bad version of Parasite, from one political point of view, might say, “You know what the problem is? The problem is the rich.”  It might say “The rich are parasites living off the poor, sucking up all the resources off the backs of the good, poor, hard-working folks who just want to do right. These rich parasites are taking everything for their own selfish aims. Those nasty one-percenters.”  The bad version of this movie from the opposite point of view, says, “You know what the problem is? The problem is the poor. The poor are parasites feeding off the rich. They need to pull themselves up by their bootstraps because anyone can make it. I started with nothing, and now I’m a one-percenter. The poor just need to stop thinking of themselves as welfare cases and take responsibility for their lives. They need to stop being parasites.” A more complicated, but also bad, version from this point of view would be, “You know who the problem really is? It isn't the middle class.

Parasite vs. Little Miss Sunshine In today’s podcast, we’ll be talking about Parasite by Bong Joon-ho. This is such an exciting film to discuss because Bong is a master of tone.  What’s happening with tone in Parasite is really unusual. We’ve seen comedic horror movies filled with horror genre elements, like Scream or Tucker & Dale vs. Evil. We’ve also seen hardcore horror movies like Drag Me to Hell and Friday the 13th slasher films. We’ve even seen elevated horror movies like Hereditary or A Quiet Place, films I’ve talked about on my podcast, which are really complicated character dramas built against a horror landscape. But what Parasite is doing is much wilder, because Parasite begins like a character-driven comedy and ever so slowly evolves into a horror movie. We’re going to do a two-part podcast on Parasite. Today, we’ll be looking at the film’s use of tone. In the next podcast, we’ll discuss its theme and structure.  Let’s start by talking about how Parasite accomplished this unique tone. How did Bong build a horror movie that satisfied horror fans in a form that looks more like a Sundance comedy? How did he evolve the horror? How did he make that tone work? To explore that, I want to talk about the connection between tone and genre. Tone and genre are some of the concepts almost every writer freaks out about. Almost every writer who sets out to write a comedy is afraid it’s not going to be funny enough. Every writer who sets out to write a drama is afraid it’s not going to be dramatic enough. Every writer who sets out to write an action movie is afraid the action isn't going to be good enough. It’s important for films to have a feeling of genre because genre is what your audience is actually buying, but how we define genre is complicated.  Back in the old Blockbuster video store days, if you're old enough to remember them, you’d go to Blockbuster, be looking around for a movie, and not be able to find it. This was back in the ‘80s. So, you’d ask the clerk, “Where’s First Blood?” The clerk would reply, “Oh, it’s in the Drama section.” You’d think, “Hold on. Isn't First Blood supposed to be in the Action section?” You could never quite find the right genre the film was in because it was hard to break the movie down into the one specific genre it belonged to.  Today, the way genre is defined is much more complicated. If you look at what Netflix is doing, they’ll list a film as “a critically acclaimed, gender-bending movie popular in Williamsburg.” It’s that specific. In fact, what Netflix has actually done, and I don’t have the exact number, but I believe they’ve created 278,000 different tags which can be linked together in any number of combinations to define genre. That’s pretty complicated, right? How are you supposed to think about genre in your movie when movies like Parasite win an Academy Award and seem to not fit specifically into any genre at all? So let’s talk about genre; let’s talk about tone. First, I want to give you a way of thinking about genre that might be a little bit different than the way you’ve thought about it before.  Instead of thinking about genre as a category or a combination of 278,000 different tags, I want you to think instead of genre as the overall feeling that the movie gives you. It’s the feeling you’re craving when you go to watch the movie. It’s like going to a Chinese restaurant because you’re craving Chinese food, or if you go to a Mexican joint, you’re probably really craving some chips and guacamole.  If you go to see The Fast and the Furious,

The Irishman: What’s Your Character’s “Thing”?  This week we’re going to look at The Irishman, written by Steven Zaillian and directed by Martin Scorsese.  Let’s set aside for a moment the all-star cast. Let’s also set aside whether the age-enhancement technology was distracting or valuable. Let’s set aside the pacing of the film and whether it should have been shorter or starts too slow. And let’s set aside thoughts about where this fits in the Scorsese canon. Let’s even set aside any questions about whether this is the true story or not. Instead, I want to focus on what this film can teach you as a screenwriter.  At slightly more than three-and-a-half hours long, we could probably teach a 15-hour podcast on this film and still not mine all the value in it for you as a screenwriter. I want to focus on one very important aspect that’s going to give you the most value as you watch or rewatch the film and look at how Steven Zaillian’s script is powering these extraordinary performances.  The Irishman is a primer on how to write a script to attract an A-list actor and create an unforgettable character.  This script is a primer on how to adapt an extremely complicated true story with a man at the center who doesn’t seem like the kind of character you would build a movie around. It’s a primer on how to take that story and create something compelling, to ask a profound question and build it around this vast array of characters we need to fully understand. I’m going to talk about how Steven Zaillian does that, then take you on a deep dive into what I consider to be the seminal scene in the film. I want to show you how Zaillian’s script allowed the actors to take that scene and push it to an even higher level. We’re going to talk about adaptation, rewriting, and the whole process a film goes through not just by ending at the finished page, but by how it’s transformed and shaped into becoming something even better on the screen. It’s important to understand that Frank Sheeran, the character at the center of The Irishman, is an extraordinarily challenging character to build a movie around. This is not Goodfellas, a fun film built around a tragically flawed and open book of a human being. This is a film built around a man who seems like ice and whose primary characteristic is that he doesn’t share his emotions. He doesn’t allow anyone to see what he’s feeling; he’s not actually connected to anyone. He’s the kind of man who can murder anyone for any reason and not even feel bad about or regret it. This is an extraordinarily challenging character.  Typically, when we think about a character, we think about an arc. We think about a character who’s going to go on a journey of change, usually a positive journey of change. Even if we’re building a movie like Goodfellas, we’re going to watch a character fall into the vortex. We’re going to take a relatively good guy and push him off the edge into the ocean. What’s happening in The Irishman is something much more challenging and complicated. You have a character at the center who is not going to change.  There might be a tiny glimmer of change toward the very end of the film, but this character is never going to have that cathartic moment you're waiting for. This character is so busy protecting something he doesn’t even fully understand that he’s never going to be able to see himself or step into the kind of change we would normally see. The question then becomes, how do you build around a character like that? How do you make that character compelling?  In a traditional film, you would carefully build the relationship between Frank Sheeran and his daughter Peggy, for example. You would build that relationship because you would know that ultimately -- and there’s a tiny spoiler here...

The Power of the First Image Show Notes Write Your Screenplay Podcast Hosted by: Jacob Krueger In an age where people make instantaneous decisions about the entertainment they consume, do you know what makes a reader, producer, or star swipe left or right on your script? It’s all based on the very first image they read on the page. “Remember, your first image is the first moment of your audition.” Your first image is that powerful, which is why choosing the right image to open with is so important. Every person who encounters your script is going to decide how invested they’ll become in your story based on that first image. Even whether your audience chooses to set down the remote or change the channel hinges on the opening scene of your show or movie. Your first image should accomplish three main goals right from the get-go: It’s something your audience hasn’t seen presented in exactly this way before. It’s the beginning of your main character’s journey. It sets the tone and feel you want your audience to experience. “That first image never goes away...that first image of your script becomes a window through which every other thing that happens is experienced.” In screenwriting, you have to hook your audience immediately and give them a reason to stick around for the rest of your story. But a powerful first image is much more than a trick to lure in your audience: It’s a structural building block you can keep coming back to and exploring. It creates a blueprint informing everything that follows. It piques your audience’s curiosity, which allows you the time and space to develop your story. “The way you structure your January as a screenwriter is your opportunity to show yourself that you are a genuine writer. This is your first image, the place you’re starting from, and the way you want to build your life.” The concept behind using a powerful first image in your script can also bring powerful change to your writing career. How do you see yourself as a writer? If you’d like to start the new year with a new attitude toward yourself and your writing, put the power of the first image to work and begin to see yourself in a new light by: Setting small, consistent writing goals you know you can achieve. Noticing how you feel when you meet those goals. Celebrating your successes! As you meet and celebrate each goal, you’ll see yourself more and more as a real writer. You’ll find more and more time to write begin building a writing lifestyle you love because, just like a captivated audience, you can’t wait to see what happens next. If you’d like a full transcript of this podcast or information on our screenwriting classes available in New York City and online as well as any of the other wonderful community events happening at Jacob Krueger Studio, please visit our website at www.writeyourscreenplay.com.

Does Your Writing Feel Boring? Show Notes Write Your Screenplay Podcast Hosted by: Jacob Krueger Do you ever feel disconnected from your writing? A sense that there’s a hidden wall or missing link between what you’re trying to communicate and what’s actually showing up on the page? Believe it or not, this is a very subtle form of writer’s block. It’s not only impacting your writing, it’s probably also got you beating yourself up and believing you simply don’t have any talent at all. But nothing could be further from the truth! “Getting a writer writing again is easy. Getting a writer connected again is hard.” Why is that? Why do you struggle as a writer to share this part of yourself that so desperately desires to be heard? It’s because you learned at a very young age to hide parts of yourself behind masks that kept you safe from being judged, labeled, made fun of, or hurt. These masks taught you to: Ignore your instincts Censor yourself and speak only the “acceptable” truths Avoid any original or disruptive ideas so as not to risk losing approval “The first step in pulling away a mask is to make it safe enough for the person to start to remove it...to create a world where everything is acceptable, even if we’re writing something normal and boring.” Writers are their own toughest critics. When you strive for perfection, you’re actually making your job that much harder because you’re judging every word you write. The harsher you are on yourself, the more your creative side will hide behind that mask and the less connection you’ll have to your story. To begin peeling away your mask and reconnecting with your writing, it’s vital you give yourself a safe space to do so by: Acknowledging you are not your mask Telling your editing brain to take a break Accepting everything you write on the page no matter how it sounds “The art of creativity is not actually about being creative and it’s not about making shit up. The art of creativity is about learning to look, listen, and feel.” Breaking through this more complex form of writer’s block involves using your senses in a way that gets underneath your writing and helps you find the specificity in each line of dialogue, action, and structure. When you give yourself permission to be curious, to dig deeper, and to openly receive whatever ideas your inner artist shows you, your mask will slowly fall away and you’ll begin to uncover the unexpected in your story and your unique talent as a writer. If you’d like a full transcript of this podcast or information on our screenwriting classes available in New York City and online as well as any of the other wonderful community events happening at Jacob Krueger Studio, please visit our website at www.writeyourscreenplay.com.

Write Your Screenplay Podcast Hosted by: Jacob Krueger Do you struggle with writer’s block? You’re not alone; every writer has had to face this obstacle. Though commonly thought of as being stuck and staring at a blank page, the truth is more than one type of writer’s block can impact your ability to share your story. Both forms can lead you to the false belief you weren’t meant to be a writer. “If you're experiencing standard writer’s block, where you aren't writing at all, this is actually a good thing.” It’s true! It’s so important for any writer to understand that breaking through writer’s block is easier than you thought possible. In Part One of this two-part podcast series on writer’s block, Jacob Krueger will show you how to build a no-stress, low stakes, regular writing habit that allows your playful, creative mind to freely flow and fill the page with some simple steps, such as: Creating a sacred writing space Breaking your writing down into manageable goals Focusing on quantity not quality “In order to build a habit of writing, you need positive reinforcement.” When you retrain your subconscious mind to treat your writing with the same respect as showing up for an important meeting, you’ll completely shift your ability to create and kiss writer’s block goodbye. It’s all about reframing your attitude toward your writing goals by: Scheduling your writing Celebrating your successes Releasing the myth of “discipline” “It isn't whether you do or don’t have enough time to write, it’s a matter of the little choices you're making every day.” If you’re driven by a passion to write, don’t let writer’s block stop you. With just a few small choices each day, you have the power to overcome it, breakthrough, and put yourself back in the driver’s seat of your creative life! If you’d like a full transcript of this podcast or information on our screenwriting classes available in New York City and online as well as any of the other wonderful community events happening at the Jacob Krueger Studio, please visit our website at www.writeyourscreenplay.com. And be sure to follow us on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube for more writing tips!

Succession Season 2: Generating an Advanced Series Engine In this podcast, we’re going to take a look at the Season 2 pilot episode of Succession to learn a little more about engine.  Last year, I did an in-depth podcast on the structure and engine of Succession and how the show is built. But one thing we haven't talked about on this podcast is how to build an engine season after season and how the season engines, not just the episode engines, of a really complicated series work. Looking back on Season 1 of Succession, the engine is quite simple. Engine begins with character and character begins with want.  What do the characters in Succession want more than anything in the world? Every character wants the company, their dad’s love, and a chance to succeed their father.  The father, Logan Roy played by Brian Cox, needs a successor, but he doesn’t want one. Logan thinks he is never going to die and he doesn’t want to let go. The series is a beautiful mash-up. If King Lear met Rupert Murdoch, that’s Logan Roy. And every character wants to succeed their dad. Some think they can, some think they can’t, but everybody wants this company and Logan Roy doesn’t want to let it go.  That’s the structure of the pilot in Season 1; it’s very simple. You’ve got four children who want the company and none of them deserve it. Kendall Roy is the next in line. He’s the closest thing there is to a golden child and, while he isn’t exactly golden, he’s getting the company. However, what ends up happening in the pilot is that on the day Kendall is supposed to inherit the company, a very complicated mind game begins between Logan and Kendall. It starts to become clear to both father and son, and all the other children, that a power play is underway and Kendall isn’t getting this company. This power game drives the whole season. The siblings are played against each other and themselves by their very complicated father as Kendall tries to save the family from Logan, while also trying to solidify his own power. What proceeds from this is a tragedy of Shakespearian proportion.  By the end of Season 1 -- and there is a spoiler here -- Kendall, who may be the only person who actually loves Logan Roy, has lapsed back into drug addiction because of the pain caused between him and his father which began with that power game. Kendall tried to take over his father’s company with the help of his father’s worst enemy. He has betrayed everybody in his family and accidentally driven off the road and killed a young man. He finds himself crawling back to his father for protection so he doesn’t get punished for the horrible thing he has done. So, as Season 2 of Succession begins, we have a problem. How do you restart that engine? How do you get the series moving again when the original story that moved it is gone?  There is absolutely no way, after everything that occurred in Season 1, that Kendall Roy can inherit the company. Because Kendall has already played his hand and tried his best to do everything he can to get the company, because his relationship with his father is so fractured at this point, and because Logan has survived every attempt Kendall used to overthrow him, there’s a feeling of, “Where do you go from here?”  At the top of Season 2, Kendall has basically become a puppet for his dad. In fact, he is physically becoming a puppet. Every single time he’s asked why he changed his mind, because he can’t tell the truth about the young man he killed, he keeps repeating what he was told by his father, “I saw their plan. My dad’s plan is better.” This is what he says to the competitors, to newspaper interviewers, and to his sister.

Once Upon a Time in Hollywood: How To Pitch a Work-For-Hire Project. This week we’ll be talking about Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, by Quentin Tarantino. We’re going to set aside the question of whether the movie actually works or not. Some people think it’s Quentin Tarantino’s finest work; some people don’t like the film at all. What I’m interested in with Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is how you build a premise into the story you want to tell.  Now, it’s impossible to talk about Once Upon a Time in Hollywood without some spoilers. I’m going to give some spoilers here at the beginning, but I’m going to keep them light. Then, as we get deeper into the discussion, there’s a big spoiler at the end. I promise to give you a nice warning before we get there.  The inception for Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is the Manson murders, obviously a subject that has been explored quite a bit both in news media and film. So, Quentin Tarantino wants to write a movie about the Manson murders. Whenever you’re exploring a topic other people have explored, you have to have a take. Now, you might love Quentin Tarantino’s take or you may hate Quentin Tarantino’s take, but he’s got a take. A take means this: why is your approach to this film slightly different than anyone else’s? How are you telling the story differently from an angle that only you could tell it? This is one of the most important skills to develop as a writer, both for the development of your own projects and also when you get into the work-for-hire world.  When someone is interested in hiring you, they have an idea, a project that’s maybe just beginning, or a project needing to be rewritten, and you're being auditioned as the potential person to do that rewrite. What they don’t want to hear is, “Hey, I’m a great writer and wasn’t Manson horrible?” They want to hear how you are going to approach the material in a way that will differentiate it from how anyone else would approach it. A lot of that comes from instinct and a lot comes from who you are. But the goal is to learn how to talk about it in a way that’s instantly clear so other people will instantly understand it. What you realize while watching Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is that Quentin Tarantino is doing the Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead version of the Manson murders. Instead of focusing on Sharon Tate and Roman Polanski, the people living at Cielo, the Manson family, or even Manson himself (who we only get one tiny little glimpse of during the whole movie), Tarantino’s take on the material is to focus on two fictional and tangential characters. One is an actor named Rick Dalton, played by Leonardo DiCaprio, who’s on the declining portion of his career. The other is his stunt man Cliff Booth, played by Brad Pitt, who is his best friend in the world and doesn’t have two nickels to rub together. Instead of watching the story from the main character’s point of view, we’re going to watch it from these secondary characters’ points of view. If you don’t know about Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, this is a play by Tom Stoppard in which he took Hamlet and turned it inside out using the perspective of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, the two tiniest characters in Hamlet. Quentin Tarantino is using Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead as a model to find his own take on the Manson murders. Maybe he’s doing that consciously or maybe he’s not. One of the interesting things people do when they pitch screenplays is they always say, “It’s this meets that.”  “It’s the Manson murders meets Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead.” “It’s Jaws meets Rosemary's Baby.” People always like to pitch mash-ups.  When I’m pitching a script, I don’t like to pitch mash-ups. If I pitch a mash-up,

Produce Your Script: An Interview with Indie Producer and Filmmaker Ramfis Myrthil Jake: I’m here today with a special guest, Ramfis Myrthil. Ramfis is our newest teacher here at the Studio and he’s going to be teaching a topic we’ve always wanted to share.  Ramfis is an incredibly talented, independent film producer and he’s going to be teaching a one-day seminar on October 19th called Produce Your Script. It will cover how to produce your own work as well as attach stars and money, all those important things we need to do.  When I was starting out, we did everything on film. If you weren’t super-wealthy and super-connected, it was just impossible. But today, people are making movies and web series on iPhones. You can do all of this with so little money; it’s so easy. The great dream used to be everyone wanted to write a novel. Now, the great dream is everyone wants to make a movie. And the truth is you can make a movie, but you have to have a plan because otherwise your movie, series, short, or pilot is just going to get lost in the chaos.  It really is about having a plan for everything, a business plan that’s going to take this dream and turn it into a reality. Ramfis has produced a ton of stuff. He recently got back from speaking at Cannes. He’s had films at Sundance and Tribeca and he is an all-around badass guy. So, today we’re going to be talking about how you start in self-production. You’ve written a script, you know the script is great, you’ve done all the work, you’ve gotten the professional feedback, and you know this thing is actually ready to go. What do you do? What’s the first step, Ramfis? Ramfis: Thank you for the very kind words and support.  The most important thing is obviously the screenplay. Your screenplay should be ready to rock and roll. The second most important thing I always advocate for is having a great team, building a team of producers or a production company and a director.  If you're the writer/director, then that role is filled. But if you're strictly the writer, finding a director that makes sense to warrant the stars you want to go after, if you're going after stars, and to also warrant the financing, depending on the budget level you're looking to make the film for, and to also warrant the distribution, that’s the end goal. The most important thing is setting that up whether it’s theatrical or straight to VOD or one of the streaming platforms. The key ingredient is the team. You could have a great script, but if you don’t have the proper people behind it, how are you going to execute? How are you going to get the stars and people that communicate well and follow through? Jake: Yeah. So, for a lot of new screenwriters, or even experienced screenwriters, there’s a lot of terror around the idea of production, right? And there’s a lot of terror around the idea of networking. I know a lot of our students who have fabulous scripts are asking themselves, “What do I do? Should I be trying to get an agent? Should I be shopping this to producers? Should I be trying to raise money myself? Should I be trying to get attachments? Or should I just keep my head down in my laptop and hope I get lucky?” How does a writer who has never produced before, how do you make that decision about whether this is something you should do yourself? And how do you know if you even have the skills to do it if you're brand new to this? Ramfis: Well, I think if you're a writer/director and the plan is to make this movie or project you're looking at, first make sure you have a reel or something you can show people because that’s what everyone is going to ask for.

Chernobyl: How to Write a Miniseries If you're enjoying these podcasts and it’s helping your writing, then come study with me. You can join our in-person classes in New York City or stream them live online from anywhere in the world. You can also work with us one-on-one in our ProTrack Mentorship Program. We’ll pair you with a professional writer who will mentor you through every phase of your career, reading every page you write. It’s really an amazing program.  If you’d like to learn more about ProTrack and our classes, please visit our website at www.writeyourscreenplay.com. Today, we’ll be talking about Chernobyl created by Craig Mazin. If you haven't seen this new miniseries, you definitely want to check it out. For the most part, I will avoid any major spoilers. What we’ll be talking about is writing miniseries. We get so many questions from students who want to write a miniseries, or who wonder whether their project would be better suited as a miniseries.  There are amazing things happening right now in the world of miniseries and Chernobyl is one of them.  So, we’re going to talk about how to know if your project is a miniseries and how to think about miniseries, as well as some of the commercial challenges of selling a miniseries to help you make the best decisions when writing your own script. We’ll do that by talking about Chernobyl and looking at how this miniseries on HBO functions and what made it so effective and essential. Before we get into talking about miniseries, I’ll share a warning. Most emerging writers working on miniseries are working on them for the wrong reasons.  They are doing so because they don’t yet have the muscle - the physical, technical skills as a writer - to tell their story efficiently. Many writers end up thinking they need to write a miniseries because they don’t actually know how to zoom in close on the part that represents the whole. They don’t know how to narrow their screenwriting down to the essence of the story that needs to be told, how to find their hook, or craft their character’s journey in an effective way. What happens for a lot of newer writers is their projects bloat. It seems like, “Wow, I could never fit this into a 100-page script or a 60-page series episode.” It seems so big because you simply haven't learned the tools of efficiency yet. So, the first thing you want to do if you're writing a miniseries is to make sure you're writing it for the right reasons. You should be writing a project that really needs to be told as a miniseries.  The other thing to be aware of when thinking about writing a miniseries is that it is harder to write a miniseries than it is to write a series. It is harder to write a miniseries than it is to write a feature. It is certainly harder to write a miniseries than it is to write a pilot. A miniseries, such as Chernobyl, is a huge investment.  Unlike a series that can grow an audience over time or many years, with a miniseries you really just have that one shot to get it right. It’s a huge investment of capital, it’s a huge investment of time, and, as a writer, it is a huge investment of your time and energy in the writing. These things are hard to write and they are big. So, the first question you want to ask yourself is, “Does this need to be a miniseries?” If it does, then you better do the work and figure out how to do it, because you’ve got to tell the story in the form it wants to be in. But if you're a writer early in your career, if your craft isn't all the way there yet,

Game of Thrones Final Episode: The Case for Compression This week, we’ll be discussing the Game of Thrones finale. However, we’re not going to join in on all the negative feelings about this episode. Everybody knows the problems. Instead, we’ll take a deep look at the episode and ask ourselves the same questions we’d need to ask if the ending of our own script or series wasn’t working. Despite everything that’s wrong, all the problems and disappointment, what actually works in this episode? And how could we have built on that in a rewrite and transformed it into an episode that works? It’s important to remember that though everybody is now asking for David Benioff’s and D.B. Weiss’ heads, these are the same writers who gave you all the episodes you loved. They gave you The Red Wedding, The Battle of The Bastards, Hodor, and all those moments you fell in love with while watching Game of Thrones. So why did these same writers, who were able to give us those wonderful episodes we fell in love with, struggle in Season 8? What made this final episode feel like it fell apart for most of the people who watched it? All the elements needed to make Season 8 of Game of Thrones great were already there. But the experience of watching this final season was like watching a rough draft, a draft that hasn’t been through all the steps we need to go through as screenwriters. This is what makes the lessons of Season 8 incredibly valuable for you. Typically when studying great movies or a great series, you're looking at scripts that are truly finished. You don’t realize even great writers have had to go through the same crap you do, that their early drafts don’t look perfect. In fact, their early drafts are just as much of a mess as yours! They have to do the same work as you to make those drafts effective. So, let’s discuss what that work looks like and how you do it. But before we do, I want to talk about the biggest thing getting in the way here. There have been issues with Game of Thrones before. There have been small problems, big problems we’ve forgiven, and the same leaps in character logic that suddenly everyone is up in arms about now. However, most viewers found this season very difficult to forgive. While I want to talk about what made everyone so upset, I also want to talk about what happened to the writers this season that changed everything. Although people are asking for a Game of Thrones Season 8 redo with good writers, I would suggest that, in fact, these are good writers. Unfortunately, they are just good writers who shot and showed you a draft a little bit too early. This is why it’s such a great lesson. I’ve seen so many of my students, brilliant writers, shooting drafts or sending scripts to producers, managers or agents a little bit too early. They take things that should have been moving and powerful, that everyone should have loved, but because they did it all a little bit too early and didn’t go through that final revision, they end up not getting the effect they wanted for their audience. Something else also happened to these writers. If you were watching Game of Thrones this season you probably noticed you were staying up later and later. That’s because Game of Thrones changed its format. Instead of short, hour-long episodes in a 10-episode season, Season 8 had fewer and longer episodes. I would suggest this was actually the biggest mistake Game of Thrones made, and potentially the main source of the negative reaction the audience is now having. When you allow yourself more pages in a script, as Game of Thrones did, you have to make fewer choices. When you give yourself fewer pages and try to do everything as quickly as you can, you have to make very strong choices differentiating betw...

Game of Thrones Season 8, Episode 5: Three Levels Of Structure This week, we’re looking at Game of Thrones Season 8, Episode 5: The Bells. Let’s set aside for now the question of whether or not this episode is actually good. This has been debated ad nauseum everywhere, and I’ve already waxed poetic for four episodes about some of the issues that have plagued the character development in Game of Thrones Season 8. Instead, I want to talk about what you can learn from this episode as a screenwriter or TV writer. I also want to discuss why this episode has sparked so much outrage and what you can learn from that when getting feedback on your own scripts or approaching your own rewrites. To talk about Episode 5, let’s start by going way back to Episode 1 of Season 1. If you’ve studied screenwriting with me in my Write Your Screenplay classes, you’re familiar with the concept of mirrors. This is the idea that elements of the structure of your screenplay evolve from reflecting back on moments that have already happened, but in a different way. Game of Thrones Episode 5 starts with a moment that is one of those mirrors, a reflection of something we saw back at the very beginning of Season 1. In the Game of Thrones pilot, we saw a king named Ned Stark execute a man named Will. Will was a ranger who went out beyond The Wall and encountered a White Walker, a creature Ned Stark believed had long since gone extinct. When Will comes back, Ned, as king, carries out what he believes to be his duty. Not understanding Will to be telling the truth about the White Walkers, Ned executes him. Not only does he execute Will, he brings his son to watch and learn what it means to be a king. Game of Thrones Episode 5 begins with a moment that is very similar, a reflection of that moment that launched us into the series. Except this time, it’s Daenerys pronouncing the death sentence and the person being executed is Varys. This time it’s Varys who is speaking the truth nobody wants to hear and it’s Daenerys operating as she believes a queen must operate in order to solidify her power. Thematically, what’s happening is the Game of Thrones engine is growing out of events that have come before. Yes, there are problems with how we got here. Problems such as Varys not acting like Varys, Daenerys not acting like Daenerys, the brilliant Tyrion suddenly becoming very stupid, and everyone being manipulated like puppets by the writers, which I discussed in my previous podcast. These issues with the path we took to get here do get in the way of what should be a very powerful scene being able to affect us in the way it should. There’s a part of us wondering, “Um, yeah, but wouldn’t she…? Um, wouldn’t he…? Didn’t they…?” So, to get the full value out of this podcast and analysis, imagine, just for a moment, the writers of Game of Thrones have found a way to believably get us to this point. Imagine they’ve rewritten the scenes in the previous episodes and found a believable way to chip away at Daenerys’ morality while still leaving her a living, breathing character genuinely trying to do good, and pushing the ever-manipulative Varys into getting caught in his own betrayals without simply being stupid about it. Let’s assume for a moment this all actually made sense. (For a deep discussion of one way to do such a rewrite, check out my Game of Thrones Season 8, Episode 4 podcast.

Game of Thrones Episode 4: Lessons in Revision As you know, I’ve been doing a series of podcasts on Game of Thrones, Season 8. If you’d like to check out the whole series, including complete transcripts of each episode, you can find them out on my website: www.writeyourscreenplay.com/got. And if you can’t wait for the full podcast, then tune in for some instant analysis on Facebook Live each Monday at 1:00pm Eastern Standard Time by following @thejkstudio. Season 8, Episode 4 is a challenging episode. We’ve just experienced the battle of Winterfell, the most epic battle sequence in the history of Game of Thrones and the fight between the living and the dead we’ve been anticipating for eight seasons. Somehow, you’ve got to get that engine started again. You’ve got to create a journey people are going to pay attention to, connect to, and care about again. It’s hard because we’re all feeling a little bit let down. Where the hell are we going to go from here? How do we get excited again now that the Night King is gone? To make it even more challenging, the beginning of Episode 4, “The Last of the Starks,” is pretty slow. There is almost five minutes of saying goodbye to the dead and an incredibly boring speech by Jon Snow before we finally get to the image that matters: all those bodies lit on fire, with the final image being Jorah’s body consumed by flames. This is followed by another 12 minutes of celebrating the victory, with a couple of nice scenes of characters jockeying for power mixed in. It’s only once we’re one-third of the way through this Game of Thrones episode that anything of real consequence happens. Don’t get me wrong, most of the writing is good. Most of these moments are good and most of these characters are good. Plus, it’s nice to check in with all of these characters we know and love in the wake of their epic victory. But, we can also see the length of a Game of Thrones episode is quickly ballooning in this last season. This is a risk you can take on a hit HBO series, but not one you can take as a new writer. Almost always, new writers come to me deeply concerned about one of two things. One, they’re concerned about not having enough material, that their idea isn’t really a movie or television series. Or two, they’re afraid they simply can’t fit all their material into a single feature, television, or web series pilot. They wonder, “Maybe it needs to be a two-episode pilot?  Or maybe it needs to be a miniseries?” No, that’s not what needs to happen.  The truth is any idea can become a movie or TV series if you’re willing to push on it hard enough. By the time you get to the end, the concern isn’t going to be running out of material, it will be figuring out how to squeeze in all your great material. This leads us to an important lesson about revision. Many people think revision is about changing or cutting the bad stuff in your script. That part is easy. Great writers know revision is about cutting the good stuff in your script until all that’s left is great. Revision is asking yourself after you’ve seen, heard, felt and captured on the page every moment in all its specific detail, “What is this scene really about? What is this sequence or this act or this movie really about?” Then it’s about capturing the heart of your story into the bare minimum number of pages possible, squeezing your scenes down to only the very best of the best moments, until there’s no good writing left. Until everything is great. What is this episode about? It’s about Daenerys and Jon and the rift that’s growing between them, their people,

Game of Thrones Episode 3: The Poetry Of Violence  This week we’re discussing Game of Thrones Season 8, Episode 3, “The Battle of Winterfell.” I am so excited to talk about this episode. I haven't had a chance to talk about a battle sequence of this length and consequence and poetry since my podcast on Mad Max, which you should check out if you're into action writing. Today we’re going to talk about the poetry of violence, the poetry of writing action into your screenplays. We’re going to talk a little bit about how to build a battle sequence, but also about what makes a battle sequence special. And just a warning, there are some major spoilers ahead... Action sequences in TV shows like Game of Thrones are actually built just like drama and comedy sequences. They aren't actually about the fight; they’re always about the interpersonal dramatic moment happening within a fight. It doesn’t matter how spectacularly you build the events or the plot of your action sequence. It’s the personal story, the drama underneath it, that’s going to make your action sequence succeed or fail. In fact, if you’ve done a really good job, you’ll be able to describe your action sequence as if it was a drama without talking about the action at all. You’ll realize the action is actually laid over the top of the drama, that it’s the structure of the character choices and the character changes giving us the drama and carrying us through the action. In a way, building an action sequence is similar to writing a musical. When you work on a musical, you write a dramatic scene and then your composers steal that scene and turn it into a song. They change it when they turn it into a song because songs work differently than dramatic scenes, but they are inspired by the dramatic content of what’s happening. It’s even true when you're writing a TV comedy. As Jerry Perzigian, the Emmy Award-winning showrunner who teaches our TV writing classes here at the studio, says, “First you write it true, and then you make it funny.” It’s the same in action writing in TV and screenplays; first you write it true, and then you find the action. So, let’s start by talking about what’s true and how you find it. What’s true in Game of Thrones is that once upon a time there was a dagger and that dagger was intended for Bran. That dagger, over eight seasons, has passed from character to character to character to character, until it finally landed in the hands of Bran’s sister, Arya Stark. That dagger will finally drive home the ending of an entire engine of the Game of Thrones story, the epic battle against the dead. Over the course of Game of Thrones, we’ve watched Bran Stark transform from a child to an otherworldly being who is at peace with his destiny. We’ve watched Arya transform from a child into a trained assassin who has worn many faces and will find her last face here when she kills the Night King. This is the completion of Arya’s fate, her journey from child to assassin, just as it is the completion of Bran’s journey from child to Three-Eyed Raven, both of which we’ve watched over the course of eight seasons. It’s the completion of Theon and Bran’s journey when Theon, who has been a coward for eight seasons, finally finds his courage after Bran, the boy he betrayed, tells him that he is a good man. The truth is that the structure is built out of all these relationships: the relationship between Tyrion and Sansa, between Melisandre and Davos, between Jaime and Brienne, between the Hound and Arya, between Daenerys and Jon,