Tag: People’s Pilot Contest

Carla Custance Wins Women in Film Screenwriting Award!

carla-custanceObservant visitors to TVWriter™ will note that just 2 days ago we reported that 21012 and 2014 Spec Spec Scriptacular winner Carla Custance was a Finalist for the Vancouver International Women in Film Festival UBC Creative Writing Award for Best Screenplay, and now we’re bustin’ with pride because:

Carla won the top prize!

Way to go, Carla! We knew you were awesome and loo, forward to the next honor (like maybe a gig?) your awesomeness brings you! read article

TVWRITER™ NEWSLETTER – Spring 2016

EDITOR’S NOTE: The following went out to those on the TVWriter™ e-mail list yesterday. Here it is for those of you who – OMG! – haven’t signed up yet:

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A WORD FROM LB read article

The 100 and the Power of Story

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by Kathryn Graham

On March 3rd, an episode entitled ‘Thirteen’ of The 100 aired on the CW. Shortly afterward, the social media sphere blew up with enraged and heartbroken fans. Why? Here There Be Spoilers.

In this episode, an older male mentor and advisor, Titus, shot his commander and the only lesbian character, Lexa, with a stray bullet mere moments after her one and only love scene with the bisexual female protagonist, Clarke. read article

SMASH Creator Proves There’s Life After Showrunning

Theresa Rebeck made the transition from playwright to TV showrunner and got cancelled and canned by NBC for her trouble. But is no longer writing TV really a major disaster? Or even a minor one?

smash creatorby Mitchell Sunderland

n her home office, the Pulitzer Prize-nominated playwright—and creator of the cult hitSmash—Theresa Rebeck holds a figurine of small, anthropomorphized bears, all seated around a miniature table. The male animals look like TV writers; one even holds a pencil to his mouth.

“This is my table of dudes,” Theresa says. “It expresses my love and terror of the whole experience.” read article

Larry Brody has yet more to say about characterization

Did you know that John Huston called Jean-Paul Sartre "the ugliest man alive?"
Did you know that John Huston called Jean-Paul Sartre “the ugliest man alive?”

The TV Writer on TV Writing
Characterization Part 3
by Larry Brody

F. Scott Fitzgerald, not exactly known as an action writer, said it best: “In movies, characters are what they do, not what they say.” This is the most important thing you can keep in mind when writing any script for film or TV, and believe me I know how hard it is to remember. After all, we’re writers, aren’t we? Eschewers of the deed who live and die by the word.

In a novel, we get into our protagonist’s mind. We know his or her thoughts. In a stageplay, the flow of spoken dialog is designed to both propel the story forward and illuminate the psyches of the speakers. But in a teleplay or screenplay the only way we can know what a character is thinking is by how he behaves. We never hear his thoughts, and the only time we hear him talking is when he’s in conversation with other people, to whom he could easily be lying.

Action, then, is what gives us our characters’ states of mind. An angry character throws a chair, breaks a mirror. A loving character holds a dear one tenderly. A character who can’t face life literally turns away. Whether the action is large or small, it has to come from within, driven by the needs of the character and therefore illuminating them at the same time. read article