PRODUCT REVIEW: Chat GPT for the Screenwriter

AI is here and its mission is to help screenwriters and democratise movie making / decimate the screenwriting profession (delete as appropriate). There are a number of different writing AIs, also known as LLMs,—Large Language Models—but Chat GPT is the best known. As the head of Open AI, the parent company, is currently wooing Hollywood, […]

Shallow HAL

The Use of AI in Screenwriting Geisler: Ever act?Barton: …Huh? No, I’m—Geisler: We need Indians for a Norman Steele western.Barton: I’m a writer. Ted O—Geisler: Think about it, Fink. Writers come and go; we always need Indians. ‘Barton Fink’ screenplay Ethan & Joel Coen The film and TV industry is scared. Why?The Rise of the […]

Saving the World in the Nick of Time

Making films and TV About the Climate Emergency ☛ “Hmmm… tricky…” I’m at a UK-based Film and Television Market and a panel of mainly TV executives have just been asked how they’d respond to being pitched scripts on the subject of the climate emergency. “We don’t want to preach to people.”“We don’t want to scare […]

This Time It’s Personal

Writing from experience vs. writing from imagination ☛ I recently took part in a competition where I was pitching a spec script and was asked by one of the judges why I was the right writer for the project? Part of me wanted to reply “because it was my idea, and I’ve written it, so…” […]

Blurring the Border

Where fiction lies ☛ The question of when and how fiction can tell lies has been very present in the public mind recently, especially in the UK. The new series of The Crown has ruffled establishment feathers by taking what some see as an overly free hand with historical reality, especially in its depiction of […]

No More Heroes Anymore

The Hero’s Journey: mythic or myth? ☛ Toby Litt recently wrote a fascinating article in which he argued that writing screenplays about climate issues has become difficult because movie screenwriters, and indeed audiences, have all got too use to the Hero’s Journey model of storytelling. His logic goes that tackling climate change requires collective action, […]

Cast Away

The Joy of Small Cast Screenplays ☛ Times being what they are, and social distancing being a fact of film sets for the foreseeable, we’re all scrabbling around for ways to deal with the restrictions this creates. What seems to be generally agreed is that scripts with small casts will be considerably easier to film. […]

From Hairdressing to the Fall of the Roman Empire

‘Process’ in Storytelling If you’re a screenwriter, one questions you’ll always find yourself asking is “what gives my story structure?” What is it that keeps the audience engaged as they watch and then provides a pleasing sense of closure? Traditional Hollywood script gurus will point you to The Hero’s Journey. According to this model, the […]

The Heart of the Matter

The Primacy of Emotion in Screenwriting ☛ Emotion is at the heart of every story. This statement won’t sound controversial if you write relationship dramas or rom-coms, but those of you who pen complex political thrillers or action movies will probably disagree. If you do, you’re wrong and I’ll tell you why. In a bit. […]

Not ‘How’ but ‘What’

There’s a question that’s on the lips of virtually no screenwriter. So how is that a good subject for a blog? Because, while they rarely ask it openly, it’s a question all writers will have asked themselves privately at some point in their career. And it is: What should I write? Whether you take that […]