Admit it. Most of us have thought at one time or another, especially after seeing a particularly bad movie, that we could write a much better script than some Hollywood “hack.” We would write a movie everyone would want to see.
It isn’t as easy as it looks, though, and Hollywood itself will attest to it in movies and television shows that show the trials and tribulations of screenwriting–two recent examples being the Oscar-winning film Adaptation, about screenwriter Charlie Kaufman‘s arduous task of trying to adapt a book into a movie, and Showtime’s original series Out of Order, about a husband/wife screenwriting team barely hanging on in Hollywood.
Because becoming a screenwriter is serious business, Hollywood.com consulted two working professionals on how to make it happen: Syd Field, one of the leading authorities in craft of screenwriting and whose book Screenplay has become somewhat of a screenwriter’s bible; and Stephen Berger, a working screenwriter who’s sold scripts to Paramount and Warner Bros. and has taught screenwriting at UCLA Extension. Click on the links below for their advice.
The Do’s
The Don’t’s
For more information on the series, visit the Out of Order site on SHO.com. Out of Order airs Mondays, 10 p.m. ET/PT.
