Write Your Screenplay Podcast

The concepts of plot and structure are ideas that get mixed up all the time. They are words that are often used interchangeably, but that in my opinion actually mean very different things. I like to think of plot as the crap that happens in your movie, or for that matter in your life. And I like to think of structure as the choices a character makes in relation to that plot. The choices that change their lives forever. Plot is the stuff that happens, but structure is your character’s change. And if you think about your own life, you’ll probably realize that the difference between plot and structure matters to you as well. You’ve probably met the person who gets a hangnail and it destroys their whole day. And you’ve probably also met the person who gets cancer and gets a whole new lease on life. Find out more about Jacob Krueger Studio: WRITER RESOURCES: www.writeyourscreenplay.com/blog WORKSHOPS & SEMINARS: writeyourscreenplay.com/classes

There’s just so much we can learn as writers from Deadpool, and not just because the film manages to do that rarest of feats: to be an intelligent, creatively successful superhero movie, but also because Deadpool manages to both follow the rules of superhero movies and break them in really exciting ways. The first rule of superhero movies that every single person knows is that your super hero is supposed to be a super good guy. Find out more about Jacob Krueger Studio: WRITER RESOURCES: www.writeyourscreenplay.com/blog WORKSHOPS & SEMINARS: writeyourscreenplay.com/classes

As we discussed in Part 1 of this podcast, when TV producers ask you to write a TV Bible with your pilot script, they usually request it in a pretty strange form. And a lot of writers get confused about what producers are actually looking for when they ask for a TV Bible and what’s supposed to go in it. Most TV Bibles include a series logline, character bios for all the main characters, episode summaries for the first season, and often summaries of the future seasons as well. But the truth is, if that’s all you deliver, your TV Bible’s not going to take you very far. Find out more about Jacob Krueger Studio: WRITER RESOURCES: www.writeyourscreenplay.com/blog WORKSHOPS & SEMINARS: writeyourscreenplay.com/classes

We’re going to take a little detour from our regularly scheduled podcast and bring you an interview by Jacob Krueger Studio Director Chris Littler, with filmmaker Adam Bowers. Adam shot a feature film, New Low, for $2000 and ended up a official selection of the Sundance Film Festival in 2010. He then managed to parlay that success into Paperback, a second feature at a much higher budget, which premiered at the Austin Film Festival this year. If you are a film student here at Jacob Krueger Studio, you know it’s an extraordinarily exciting time to be a filmmaker. We are seeing more and more people like Adam, who are making their own material. These writers have stopped waiting for people to say “yes” to them, and instead started saying “yes” to themselves, developing great screenplays and going out and shooting them. Find out more about Jacob Krueger Studio: WRITER RESOURCES: www.writeyourscreenplay.com/blog WORKSHOPS & SEMINARS: writeyourscreenplay.com/classes

Whether you are one of the many that loved Star Wars: The Force Awakens and saw it again and again, or one of the disappointed few who were frustrated with the rehashed scenes and safe choices of the film, there is no doubt that there is a ton that you can learn from this movie as a screenwriter, particularly when it comes to rewriting your screenplay. As I was watching Star Wars: The Force Awakens, it occurred to me that in many ways, this movie is just a rewrite of Star Wars: A New Hope and The Empire Strikes Back with a little spattering of Return of the Jedi splashed in there. Find out more about Jacob Krueger Studio: WRITER RESOURCES: www.writeyourscreenplay.com/blog WORKSHOPS & SEMINARS: writeyourscreenplay.com/classes

What the heck is a TV Series Bible anyway? How do you write one? And why do you need one? The truth is, the idea of a Show Bible, as many people talk about it today, is total fiction.But like many fictional ideas, it’s become a reality that we now need to deal with as TV writers. If you ask Jerry Perzigian, who teaches our TV Comedy Classes, he’ll tell you that in his entire thirty-some year career as a show runner on The Jeffersons, The Golden Girls, Married With Children, and about a dozen other hit shows, he never once made a bible. Wondering if it’s different in TV Drama? Ask former Showtime Executive and Pulitzer Prize nominated writer Steve Molton, who teaches our TV Drama classes, and he’ll tell you the same thing. In fact, on these shows the bible’s weren’t made by the writers at all. The show bibles were made by the assistants. And only after the show was up and running for a good long time, when the old staff writers were moving on, and the new staff writers started coming in to replace them.

As we continue to build out the new home for Jacob Krueger Studio (in expectation of a Jan 1 move in!) this series of podcasts will explore the many ways in which building out a space is like building out a script, taking some of the lessons I’ve learned in our buildout, and applying them to writing. Today’s podcast covers a topic that any screenwriter, and anyone who has ever built out a space, knows well. The millions of little decisions you have to make at every moment of your buildout, and on every page of your script. Find out more about Jacob Krueger Studio: WRITER RESOURCES: www.writeyourscreenplay.com/blog WORKSHOPS & SEMINARS: writeyourscreenplay.com/classes

I recently had a student ask me a pretty interesting question: “What do you do when you realize that even though you think you’re writing all these different projects, you’re really just writing the same script over and over again?” And this made me think about a couple of different questions facing writers as they move into their professional careers. The first is an artistic question: What do you do when you’re following the same cycle again and again and again? What do you do when all your scripts seem to be converging around the same idea or the same themes? The second is a question about branding: How do you brand yourself as a writer? How do you figure out what box to put yourself in? How do you figure out whether you should write a script that’s very different from the ones you’ve written before, or whether you should build a brand around scripts that are similar? Find out more about Jacob Krueger Studio: WRITER RESOURCES: www.writeyourscreenplay.com/blog WORKSHOPS & SEMINARS: writeyourscreenplay

Over the past six months I have probably looked at about five hundred spaces all throughout New York City. And I’m not even going to talk here about the spaces that were obviously not a fit for my school, I want to talk about the ones that potentially were. Because the process of finding a space is a lot like that unenviable hunt for the perfect screenplay idea. Oftentimes during the process of searching, it feels like we’re never going to find that right idea or we’re never going to find that right space. And that’s because spaces, like ideas, tend to fall into two categories… Find out more about Jacob Krueger Studio: WRITER RESOURCES: www.writeyourscreenplay.com/blog WORKSHOPS & SEMINARS: writeyourscreenplay.com/classes

In Part 1 of this podcast, we used There Will Be Blood as a model for understanding the vital craft of externalizing the internal in a screenplay. But how do you go about using this technique in early drafts of your own screenplay, before you’ve got that perfect image in your head? Today we’ve invited Jessica Hinds, who teaches our Weekend-Long Craft Intensive Nov 7-8th, to give you a sneak preview of some of the core concepts she’ll be covering, and speak about some practical things you can do right now to externalize the internal in your writing and reap the benefits in your career. Find out more about Jacob Krueger Studio: WRITER RESOURCES: www.writeyourscreenplay.com/blog WORKSHOPS & SEMINARS: writeyourscreenplay.com/classes

Rather than looking at the structure of There Will Be Blood this podcast will be looking at There Will Be Blood in terms of a concept called externalizing the internal. Often times when we're not externalizing the internal it's because we have not actually seen it yet in our own mind’s eyes. We haven't looked closely enough yet to see it exactly the way it needs to play out on screen. We've got a kind of sense of it, but we haven't taken the time to step inside and let it play frame by frame in the little movie screen in our mind, until we know exactly what we're seeing and exactly how we're seeing it. Find out more about Jacob Krueger Studio: WRITER RESOURCES: www.writeyourscreenplay.com/blog WORKSHOPS & SEMINARS: writeyourscreenplay.com/classes

The success of The Martian is extremely exciting if you’re a screenwriter, especially because it breaks so much of the traditional Hollywood dogma. Often, as screenwriters, we think that our movies have to exist within some kind of orthodoxy: that there are certain things that you are just not allowed to do, and if you do them somehow you have no chance of writing a movie that’s a hit. And yet, The Martian seems to throw all of those cares to the wind. If you’ve taken the average Screenwriting 101 class you’ve probably been taught a couple of concepts that are supposed to be the rules for all movies. You’ve probably been taught that structure is always built on characters’ change. Yet, here is a character who doesn’t change at all. Find out more about Jacob Krueger Studio: WRITER RESOURCES: www.writeyourscreenplay.com/blog WORKSHOPS & SEMINARS: writeyourscreenplay.com/classes

Now this is a really extraordinary true story, based on the life of Whitey Bulger, and featuring one of Johnny Depp’s all time best performances. And we’re going to be discussing some of its most compelling scenes and the elements that made them work in this podcast. And yet, at the same time, despite the power of Johnny Depp’s and the supporting cast’s stellar performances, there is something about Black Mass that just leaves you (or at least left me) a little hollow– a little bit unsatisfied. Find out more about Jacob Krueger Studio: WRITER RESOURCES: www.writeyourscreenplay.com/blog WORKSHOPS & SEMINARS: writeyourscreenplay.com/classes

Tone is one of those really challenging things for writers, particularly on a movie like Diary of a Teenage Girl, which touches on some extremely controversial, taboo and uncomfortable subjects. In lesser hands, rather than being the delightful (but disturbing) movie that we saw at the theatre, Diary of a Teenage Girl would be a Lifetime movie: yet another tear jerking melodrama about a child victimized by an unfair world. Find out more about Jacob Krueger Studio: WRITER RESOURCES: www.writeyourscreenplay.com/blog WORKSHOPS & SEMINARS: writeyourscreenplay.com/classes

It’s an incredibly exciting time for writers of miniseries. The genre was all but dead in the water a couple of years ago, but recently we’ve seen a resurgence in miniseries sparked by the success of True Detective. In a way, the miniseries is the ideal form of storytelling for a screenwriter. In feature films, we are limited in many ways by page count, trying to squeeze a life-changing journey into an hour and a half. But in the world of miniseries, we actually have the one thing that most screenplays don’t have, the thing that novelists are blessed with and screenwriters long for: time. Find out more about Jacob Krueger Studio: WRITER RESOURCES: www.writeyourscreenplay.com/blog WORKSHOPS & SEMINARS: writeyourscreenplay.com/classes

Often, as writers, we get so hung up on linear, narrative structure that we forget that there are completely different forms of screenplay structure that can be equally moving and powerful. So for today’s podcast we’re going to take a blast to the past, and look at a film that seems to diverge in almost every way from the traditional forms of structure we’ve been talking about on this podcast: Terence Malick’s, The Tree of Life. What makes The Tree of Life so extraordinary is the effortless way it weaves traditional linear storytelling—the story of the family– with long meditative sequences of breathtaking images of the vast beauty and wanton destructiveness of the universe. But don’t let Malick fool you, underneath the melodic rambling of The Tree of Life is a rock solid structure, which provides the drum beat for the entire film. Find out more about Jacob Krueger Studio: WRITER RESOURCES: www.writeyourscreenplay.com/blog WORKSHOPS & SEMINARS: writeyourscreenplay.com/classes

'Tangerine' is a brilliant illustration of just how little you need to actually succeed as a screenwriter or a filmmaker. To make a successful film you do not need millions of dollars. To make a successful film you do not need years and years and years of experience. To make a successful film you do not need to follow the rules or follow a formula. To make a successful film there are really only two things you need: You need a Want, and you need an iPhone. Find out more about Jacob Krueger Studio: WRITING RESOURCES: www.writeyourscreenplay.com/blog WORKSHOPS & SEMINARS: writeyourscreenplay.com/classes

Often times we think of formatting as the grammar of the screenwriting. We think of it as this very simple, basic, elemental set of rules that you go and look up in The Hollywood Standard in order to do properly. But the truth of the matter is formatting is much more than grammar. It's a way of speaking to your audience, thinking about your movie like a filmmaker, and capturing the visual eye of your reader. Find out more about Jacob Krueger Studio: WRITING RESOURCES: www.writeyourscreenplay.com/blog WORKSHOPS & SEMINARS: writeyourscreenplay.com/classes

"Trainwreck" could so easily have been a movie about pointing fingers at the trainwreck girl that we all have known, or the trainwreck guy that we all have known. But the truth of the matter is that "Trainwreck" is not about a skanky trainwreck of a girl. "Trainwreck" is about a beautiful and broken girl who's trying to fall in love, who's finally got an opportunity to be with someone good, but can't get out of her own way. "Trainwreck" is a story about how hard it is to actually open yourself to another human being whether you're the famous doctor or the struggling journalist. Find out more about Jacob Krueger Studio: WRITER RESOURCES: www.writeyourscreenplay.com/blog WORKSHOPS & SEMINARS: writeyourscreenplay.com/classes

Whether you loved or hated "Me, Earl and the Dying Girl," you have to admit that the movie is deeply emotionally moving, both in its humor and its sadness. It’s not easy to move an audience emotionally. Especially when they come to a movie called "Me, Earl and the Dying Girl." It’s not easy to actually move them to a point of personal exposure with a film like this, because of the protective wall that the audience is naturally going to put up between themselves and the film. So in this podcast, Jacob Krueger discusses how to get an audience to take down their walls. Find out more about Jacob Krueger Studio: WRITER RESOURCES: www.writeyourscreenplay.com/blog WORKSHOPS & SEMINARS: writeyourscreenplay.com/classes