yennranmma: whenever “strong female characters” insult men by calling them girls my eyes roll so far back in my head i can see my brain cells die

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CONSISTENT MOTIVATION

You will sink your script if you take your alpha bro protagonist and twist him around into a self-aware gentleman scholar for five seconds to advance a plot point, or worse, keep a line a dialogue you’re proud of. All character changes must be properly and visibly motivated by what has already happened, not by…

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With short films, you get to focus on making yourself happy first. You’re kind of given the ability to do what you want. For a small amount of money, you can go out and write about what you want to write about, hire who you want to hire, and work in black and white if…

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The 2013 Black List

The 2013 Black List sperling: Founded by Franklin Leonard in 2005, the Black List is an annual survey of film industry executives who are asked to submit up to 10 screenplays that were “written in, or are somehow uniquely associated with” a specific year, provided they did not enter principal photography in that year. The…

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COACHING ACTORS

The odds that an actor needs you to tell them to toy with a napkin or scratch their forehead at a given moment in the story are vanishingly small. It’s also not very interesting to read. Little meaningless details don’t belong in the script at all. The exception is when a character’s tic or physical…

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