by Michael Rahhal The casting assistant comes out of the room. Young, normal looking, she ignores us all. “Ben?” she asks. One of the basketball players stands up, bursting into action. He flashes his veneers, running a hand through his thick, black hair. “Let’s party!” he says. The assistant laughs, charmed. The rest of us […]
Author: Randall Whittinghill (Page 1 of 2)
by Michael Rahhal It’s raining. I pull into the enormous lot of the Sunkist building—an island of brick and wood surrounded by a gray moat of blacktop. Signs direct me toward the visitor’s parking area, and rain hammers the roof of my pick up as I park. I’m as far from the main entrance as […]
After taking notes and implementing them, I expand the circle slightly, taking another round of notes. By this stage, I’m confident that I don’t have any major structural problems but am open to new ideas. But before sending it out, I give the screenplay to someone who proofreads and cleans up the grammar. Because of […]
I use a specific technique to give notes that allows me to be of service, whether I like the content or not. I ask the writer/artist what they are trying to say with the work. That way, it is not about me and my taste, but about whether what they have done is getting their […]
The rewriting process can be challenging at best, demoralizing and un-ending at worst. The first lesson I learned was to carefully select my notes givers. These people aren’t necessarily writers, but are familiar enough with screenplays that the format won’t affect their experience. I have two or three people whose taste and opinion I respect, […]
I like to make 40 index-card sized boxes with electrical tape on a big board. Each card is a story beat, and I write out as many as I have. I love puzzles and this feels much more tangibly solvable than staring at a computer screen. Usually, the middle of the board is frustratingly light […]
So now I have my ending, I know where my protagonist begins and where she ends up. (Though I talked about the importance of endings yesterday, beginnings can also give clues to what the ending should be, as long as the central conflict is clear.) I start to think about the journey to the finale, […]
It’s not a movie until I find the right ending. Sometimes, the final scene is the first idea I have. But, more common, a character, image or line of dialogue strikes first. In these cases, the hard work begins with figuring out what the central conflict will be. What is the protagonist’s insoluble problem? Most […]
I started writing. I also read every book on screenwriting I could get my hands on, finding Blake Snyder’s Save The Cat particularly helpful. With this idea of scripts as transformation machines, I carefully mapped out the journey of my protagonist, one beat at a time. It took far longer than I expected. There are plenty of […]
I became a writer by accident. A dyslexic kid who wasn’t diagnosed until I was 20, the English language felt like an enemy to be defeated. If I didn’t get it right the first time, I didn’t see the point in trying. And without academic support for my learning disability, I was never going to get any […]