Sonya Levien was among the most successful and respected screenwriters in Hollywood. During her career from 1919 to 1960, Levien worked on well over one hundred screen stories and scripts for both silent and sound pictures. She wrote comedies, melodramas, epics, and musicals. A Great Lady details the course of this exceptional career at Fox and M-G-M and her most interesting projects and colleagues. It examines her relationship to the important political and labor movements affecting the motion...
In the post-World War II era, authors of the beat generation produced some of the most enduring literature of the day. More than six decades since, work of the Beat Poets conjures images of unconventionality, defiance, and a changing consciousness that permeated the 1950s and 60s. In recent years, the key texts of Beat authors such as Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs, and Jack Kerouac have been appropriated for a new generation in feature-length films, graphic novels, and other media. In Ad...
Adaptation of true stories is an incredibly tricky task. Truth doesn't necessarily make great drama, yet when adapting real stories to screen, writers need to make sure that real people do not object to the way they or their families are portrayed in film. Most screenwriters, and even some Hollywood pros, don't fully understand the practical problems involved in depicting "true stories" for the screen. Possible risks for the writer or filmmaker include the inability to close a sale because of le...
You've got an idea for the next great screenplay. Maybe you're just getting started or perhaps you've spent time with other screenwriting books, and you have your hero's journey, plot twists, reversals, and cat-saving scenes all worked out. Either way, what stands between you and an outstanding finished screenplay are the blank pages that you must fill with cinematic life, energy, conflict, and emotion. So how on Earth do you do that? The secret is scenewriting. This thorough and effective gui...
Broadcast Writing (Routledge Library Editions: Broadcasting)
by Ken Dancyger
Broadcast Writing (1991) looks at the tools necessary for writers to find and develop stories for radio and television. Through the use of numerous original examples, the reader learns to shape ideas into well-developed scripts. It addresses the challenges of documentary and dramatic writing for TV and radio, and provides examples for most of the different writing genres.
'An unremitting powerhouse of a novel that marks the arrival of a major new talent. Trainspotting is a loosely knotted string of jagged, dislocated tales that lay bare the hearts of darkness of the junkies, wide-boys and psychos who ride in the down escalator of opportunity in the nation's capital. Loud with laughter in the dark, this novel is the real McCoy. If you haven't heard of Irvine Welsh before-don't worry, you will' The Herald
Beyond Spatial Montage: Windowing, or the Cinematic Displacement of Time, Motion, and Space offers an extended discussion of the morphology and structure of compositing, graphic juxtapositions, and montage employed in motion pictures. Drawing from the history of avant-garde and commercial cinema, as well as studio-based research, here media artist and theorist Michael Betancourt critiques cinematic realism and spatial montage in motion pictures. This new taxonomic framework for conceptualizing l...
This book provides aspiring screenwriters with a practical and informed way to learn how to think and write like a “creative” (the film industry term commonly used to refer to members of the key creative team – writer, director or producer) by connecting the transdisciplinary academic fields of screenwriting, film studies and cognitive psychology and neuroscience. It stands apart from other screenwriting “how to” books by applying contemporary scientific research about creativity to the craft o...
Next Level Screenwriting is an intermediate screenwriting book, for those that have already learned the basics of screenwriting, written a screenplay or two and want to bring their writing and stories to the next level. Each chapter of the book examines a specific aspect of screenwriting, such as character, dialogue and theme, and then provides the reader with ideas, tips and inspiration to apply to their own writing. Rather than being another "how to" book, this volume features a variety of c...
What does it take to go from being a fan to professional television writer? For the first time outside of the UCLA Extension Writers' Programme classrooms, TV writers whose many produced credits include The Simpsons, House M.D., and Pretty Little Liars take aspiring writers through the process of writing their first spec script for an on-air series, creating one-hour drama and sitcom pilots that break out from the pack, and revising scripts to meet pro standards. Learn how to launch and sustain...
Film version of Jim Cartwright's acclaimed play starring Jane Horrocks (who played Little Voice in the stage play) and Michael Caine Jane Horrocks (Little Voice) takes centre stage as the 14-year-old Lancashire girl who can only relate to the world by mimicking the musical hits of pre-50s divas in her bedroom; a refuge from her widowed mother's sniping, boozing and whoring. When Ray Say (Michael Caine), a tacky night-club impresario recognises LV's talent her mother soon hears the sound of pound...
Every generation produces a counterculture icon. Joss Whedon, creator of the long-running television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer, is famed for his subversive wit, rich characters, and extraordinary plotlines. His renown has only grown with subsequent creations, including Angel, Firefly, Dollhouse, and the innovative online series Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog. Through premises as unusual as a supernatural detective agency run by a vampire and a Western set in outer space, Whedon weaves s...
The simple story of an unrequited love affair between a suburban doctor and a middle-class housewife, Brief Encounter is perhaps the most romantic film in the history of British cinema. Noel Cowards' screenplay conjures the drab, emotionally restrained world of post-World War II Britain better than almost any other literary text. This edition is being published to coincide with the centenary of Coward's birth and contains an illuminating Foreword on his work by his official biographer, Sheridan...
This is the unabridged original text of Dennis Potter's acclaimed six-part television serial. The narrative counterpoints life in a hospital ward of a writer crippled by a horrific skin disease with the plot of his atmospheric thriller to the point where fantasy and reality seem to exchange places. The result is the most painful and disturbing screen drama of the 1980s.
Magnolia-Shooting Script -OSI (Newmarket Shooting Script)
by Paul Thomas Anderson
The play that gave birth to the smash-hit film - a wonderful comedy about growing up in multiracial Salford. The six Khan children, entangled in arranged marriages and bell-bottoms, are trying to find their way growing up in 1970s Salford. They are all caught between their Pakistani father's insistence on Asian traditions, their English mother's laissez-faire attitude, and their own wish to become citizens of the modern world. Ayub Khan Din's play East is East was first performed at Birmingham...