Screenwriting: From the Trenches

As AFF (and others) loom in the Fall Festival Festivities, Rob and Kay discuss "Are festivals worth it?" (for writers) as, post-pandemic, we move away from online-only and back to in-person activities. 

Our Weekly Resource: Moviemaker's 50 Film Festivals Worth the Entry Fee is mostly compiled by Film Freeway (whose business model is built on getting you to submit to festivals, so take it with a grain of salt), but at least it'll get you a place to start.  

Rob's YouTube Channel

I mean the title says it all. And to that end, we have a guest, Andrea Berting, who recently signed with Tobias Management.

Our Weekly Resource: If you want to see what a manager attracting script looks like, look no further than Andrea's "Breast in Show", on Coverfly which got her a full read from a management company with just the first 25 pages. As always we want to shout out those of us who are in the trenches, aka doin-the-damn-thing and here's a great example of one lady rising out of the pandemic to make something out of her (new) writing career, with a day job.

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Rob's YouTube Channel

There are folks out there within the screenwriting community who seem to believe that you can't be original with your writing. Luckily, Rob and Kay are here to take umbrage!

Our Weekly Resource: Stephanie Palmer’s "Good in A Room". Pitching and putting yourself out there can be hard and you can feel anxious and awkward. Despite the natural urge to run and hide in a sock drawer when the time comes, it’s better to put yourself out there and get some practice in. That, unfortunately, is the only cure and Palmer has some great tips.

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Rob's YouTube Channel

For their first screenwriting DEEP DIVE, Kay and Rob have chosen their personal, sterling example of one location ingenuity, "The One I Love" starring Elizabeth Moss, Mark Duplass and Tony Dan -- sorry Danson, Ted Danson. Kay and Rob manage to extoll the virtues of this brilliant film with NO SPOILERS (mostly), so feel free to listen and then watch the movie to see what they see. In fact, you probably should.

Our Weekly Resource: "The One I love" (of course), which, is currently streaming on HBOMax, WHICH, as we discuss in the episode, now has *the* catalogue for all of those "film school movies" that are a part of curriculums across the world. From Truffaut to Kurosawa, to Duplass (and everything in between), a subscription to HBOMax is probably worth your cash.  

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Rob's YouTube Channel

This week Kay and Rob are talking about the sun to our moons, the yins to our yangs -- writing short films vs feature films.

Our Weekly Resource: Kay and Rob believe that one should always consider themselves to be a student of film (even after your degree). Andf to this, there are many teachers out there (in various media), from Alex Ferrari, Ryan Connolly, and Robert Rodriguez, to even youtubers like Sara Dietschy, or Peter Mckinnon. This week’s resource is a mixture of both. Kent Lamm and his channel, Standard Story Company, have a wide variety of videos to help you on your filmmaking journey, whether you’re attempting a short or a feature from both writing and production standpoints. There’s a lot of good, competent, advice from someone who’s in the trenches, presented in a fun and interesting way.

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Rob's YouTube Channel

This week we are continuing our foray into sharpening our skills on the page, and we’ve got some cool things on the docket, not only including something we've never heard done on a podcast before (a live notes session, where the writer, Rob, is "in studio") but also a guest, Michael DiBiasio-Ornelas, filmmaker, screenwriter, friend of Rob's who joins our host to help and celebrate some of his latest accomplishments.

Our Weekly Resource: Our Guest, Michael DiBiasio-Ornelas is a talented filmmaker who has done 3 feature films and numerous short films. I found most of his short films, I believe, on Vimeo and they are full of wonderful characters and heavily feature his lovely wife, Rebecca De Ornelas.

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Michael's Twitter

This week, Professor Kay Tuxford takes the lead on our topic of Sharpening Your Skills! We get very specific in our crafty episode, focusing on those things that help to make your screenplay functional AND specific.

Our Weekly Resource: This week’s Resource: The Hollywood Standard by Christopher Riley. This is a formatting guide that constantly is updated and is available in paperback or as a PDF. Used copies sell online for $7. You have no excuse why it isn’t your constant companion.

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Rob's YouTube Channel

This week, in the midst of all the current turmoil in the world, Kay and Rob examine the important job we, as storytellers, have to the world at large. 

And why.

Our Weekly Resource: This week we have article by Jon Schiefer, a listener of the podcast and his article on Pipeline artists, “Make the Red Flags” which is kind of a treatise on what we talked about today, but very elegantly written and about Fight Club and on Screenwriting: From the Trenches we are happy to promote both our listeners and people who agree with us, and this qualifies as both.

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Rob's YouTube Channel

This week Kay and Rob talk about the industry whirlwind that surrounded the script "Billy Karate”, to that end, we have the writer of that script, novelist, screenwriter and podcaster, Robert Brockway, who also recently got representation at Entertainment 360. We also talk the internet thirst trapping Ryan Gosling (again) as Ken in Greta Gerwig's Barbie movie, how Rod Serling was woke before woke was technically legal, and discuss -- at length -- our theories about what that woman did to that freaking elephant in India.

This is possibly the funniest episode of the podcast that we've done. Blame our guest.

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Robert Brockway's Twitter

This week Kay and Rob talk about “The Drop”: that moment in screenwriting when the story/characters fall into place and suddenly you know EXACTLY what the whole thing is going to be about. We also discuss the origins of the Bechdel Test, the proper way of spelling "whoa" (or is it "woah") and why coming for Bernie Mac's (RIP) comedic prowess is a very bad idea on the internet.

Our Weekly Resource: We started this podcast to focus on the un-repped, unloved, and unproven (to some) screenwriters out there, who are doing the work, just like the rest of us, but not necessarily getting the kudos. And so, this week I would like to shout out two of our brethren, Paige Feldman and Jay Fingers who both have AMAZING YouTube channels about the life of a screenwriter and you can take all kind of lessons and catharsis from them, and you should.

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