Articles By: Ray Morton

Meet the Reader: A Few Brief Thoughts on the Death of Movies

There’s been a lot written lately on the decline of the movies as a relevant and vital entertainment medium and –like it or not — it looks like we are living in the last days of cinema as we have traditionally known it. There are three primary reasons for this: The technology is dying: the [...]

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Good Vibrations: Screenwriters Stephen and Jonah Lisa Dyer on Hysteria

The vibrator was invented by a man: a doctor, in fact—an upright, uptight doctor in Victorian England. That’s an amusing notion, isn’t it? It also happens to be true. But can you make a movie out of it? That was the challenge presented to the husband and wife screenwriting team of Stephen and Jonah Lisa [...]

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Darling Companions: A Conversation with Lawrence and Meg Kasdan

After rescuing a stray dog from the side of the freeway, sixty-something empty-nester Beth Winter decides to adopt the homeless canine over the objections of her husband Joseph, a successful but self-involved surgeon. Following their daughter’s wedding at the Winters’ mountain cabin in the High Rockies, Joseph takes the dog—now aptly named Freeway—for a walk [...]

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Meet the Reader: Deck Chairs

A while back, I received a rewrite of a script by an aspiring screenwriter that I have been working with for a while now. The first draft was based on a very cool idea and had some terrific elements in it with an enormous amount of potential, but the overall piece had some tremendous problems [...]

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Rewriting is Writing

Just because you finished a screenplay doesn’t mean it’s actually done. The script will need to be rewritten again … and again … and again.

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Acting Challenges

A good screenplay is a wonderful thing, but no matter how impressive a script may be, its potential will remain forever unfulfilled unless it is actually made into a movie. There are a lot of factors that influence whether or not a screenplay gets produced, but in today’s film industry, the most crucial of these [...]

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Meet the Reader: Don’t Be Silly

If you want to make it as a screenwriter, don’t waste your time and energy dreaming up stunts and gimmicks. Instead, put all of your focus into writing a great script. If you do that, then it may take some time, but it will get it and you where you want to be.

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Carnage: An Interview With Yasmina Reza

This is the story of Le Dieu du Carnage, the international hit play by acclaimed novelist and playwright Yasmina Reza. Based on a real-life incident, translations of Reza’s satirical comedy won an Olivier Award and a Tony® before director Roman Polanski and Reza wrote a new translation, for the screen. Ray Morton talks to the celebrated writer.

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Meet the Reader: Comic(s) Book

I was recently given a copy of a very interesting new book called Stan Lee’s How to Write Comics by Stan Lee and Bob Greenberger, a step-by-step guide to crafting scripts for comic books, co-authored by the legendary comics writer, editor, and publisher and co-creator of many of the medium’s most classic characters, including Spider-Man, The Hulk, Thor, and The Fantastic Four.

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