Tag: Spec Scriptacular Contest

Working the Nostalgia Thing – Pushing Buttons & Tugging Strings

by Diana Black

Screenwriting 101 classes all across the country stipulate, “For the suits to buy your script (the product), it must be brilliantly crafted. They (not just you) must perceive it to be a highly marketable concept entailing a great story with astonishing characters.”

In order to receive such high praise from these folk, who are renowned to have a serious, ‘hard core’ exterior, we need to emotionally ‘move’ them. As in blubbing like babies. After all, we may be highly sensitive and committed artists, but this is a business – for us and the suits. Everyone’s ass is on the line. But if every aspiring writer delivers what we know the suits want, all that does is keep us in the pack, not ahead of it.

So let’s explore possible ways to get ahead with the objective being to generate deep, almost imperceptible emotional responses to our masterpiece. A knowledge and understanding of how to generate nostalgia in subtle and profound ways may be a useful skill component in one’s kit-bag. read article

What We All Need to Know About Crowdfunding

No one sets out to fail when raising money for their beloved project, be it a film, a book, an invention, whatever. But far too many people fall short of their crowdfunding goals. Here are some tips on avoiding their fate:

big crowd

by Stephen Follows

Hark, Filmmakers! For I hath climb’d the Big Data Mountain and I returned with holy verses for when thouest plans to commit thyself to speak to the masses via crowdfunding and ye shall thee listen… ok I can’t keep this up. I’ll be honest – I liked the headline, but carrying on the tone will get tiresome for you and I. read article

It’s Not the Delivery, It’s the Content

Or, to put it another way, the success of a TV show doesn’t come from the platform it’s on – network, cable, interweb, etc. – it comes from the @$#! writing!!!

Even a website and magazine devoted to serving the broadcasting and cable platforms knows this:

measure read article

88th Oscar Screenplay Nominees Announced

wide oscar

A lot of people think movies are dying, or maybe already dead. We at TVWriter™ are much more into TV than film, regardless of whether we’re watching actual broadcasts on actual TV sets or interweb presentations on our iPads, but the Motion Picture Academy has just released its list of Academy Award nominees for films released in 2015 and we’re passing on the important ones.

So here they are, the not-dead-yet for Best Screenplay. See ’em, read ’em, and learn from ’em, gang: read article

Tyler Perry Tells Us How to Become a Famous Writer

tyler_perry1600

…And the gist of what he says is, “Put your name in all your titles and write faster than a sumbitch. Here’s what ABC News says he said:

“Very early on when I started doing these plays and live shows I would travel from city to city and there were a million shows out there … so I wanted to step out among it and I started putting my name above the title,” he told a room full of reporters today in New York City. read article