I pledged $10 to Zach Braff’s kickstarter campaign this week. I pledged money to his film, despite the fact that lots of independent filmmakers and screenwriters have been moaning about him using his celebrity status to crowd-fund his film, Wish I Was Here. Personally, I think their complaints are misguided and there is a lot we [...]

Isn’t that every writer’s greatest fear? Producer Anne Marie Gillen recently posed this question to our Mastermind Group: ”What keeps you awake at night?What are those nasty thoughts that keep playing around in your head?  The shoulda-coulda-woulda?” It stimulated such an open and honest discussion about our communal fears and insecurities that we entrepreneurial artists all share but rarely [...]

Editor’s Note: From the archives of Script Magazine, we give you a 2002 piece from William Martell that is still relevant today. A few days ago I had dinner with a group of screenwriters, including my friend Bob, who just made his first sale to Linda Obst at Paramount. By the end of this year there will [...]

If you’ve ever read one of the popular books on screenwriting, there’s a good chance you’re well on your way to planning your script. Depending on which book you’ve read, you’ve probably got a logline, an outline, pages and pages of character bios, half a trillion note cards thumb-tacked to your walls, a dozen journals [...]

I have an idea… I hear this all the time. It could be an idea for a television series or a film. And it may be a wonderful idea with a fascinating logline. There’s one problem with an idea, however. It needs to be fleshed out. As Shakespeare might put it: Ay, there’s the rub. [...]

Story structure constantly evolves and grows as the stories being told do the same. The traditional approach, “who wants what and what is getting in the way?” is still there; however, it has evolved and expanded to include so much more. I am going to describe two tools that are examples of how it has [...]

From the digital archives of ‘Script Magazine,’ we bring you a past interview of Syd Field.  Screenwriting “Guru” Syd Field sits down with Script Magazine to share his knowledge on story structure and discuss the difficult task of breaking in the industry. Ask screenwriters what the fundamental structure of a feature screenplay is and they’re likely [...]

Originally, my column for today was going to be a nice, 101 social media lesson for promoting your film through Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram, YouTube, Google Plus and LinkedIn groups – as well as Indie Backer, exclusive to the film community (Check them out, and tell me if you’re digging that song as much as [...]

I’ve always enjoyed blending genres, even though many of the great tomes of screenwriting wisdom caution against it. “From the first few pages of your screenplay, the audience has to know exactly what genre it is.” I’ve come to learn that it’s not the audience that needs to know what genre it is – the [...]