SCREENWRITING 101

posted by James Reel

    In today’s Tucson Weekly, I interview Blake Snyder, author of the latest book that tells you how to write a commercially successful Hollywood screenplay. He seems like an exceptionally nice guy, but I fear my inner snark emerged once or twice early in the article. Here’s the beginning:

    Fifty years ago, anybody with any intellectual ambition spent odd stolen hours writing the Great American Novel. Of course, the novels usually weren't so great, rarely got finished and almost never got published.
    Today, everybody's working on a screenplay. These supposedly fabulous movie scripts rarely get finished and almost never get turned into movies. But that doesn't stop everybody from wanting to be a screenwriter.
    "It looks easy," says screenwriter Blake Snyder. "And guess what? It is easy. My earliest inspiration was seeing movies that were not very good and thinking, I could do that."
    Write a movie that was not very good? "No, I mean I could do better."