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

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Star Wars: The Rewrite Awakens

By Jacob Krueger

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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.

And like any effective rewrite, the structure and the approach of Star Wars: The Force Awakens focuses on two vital concepts: Compression and Amplification.

Compression begins with identifying the very best elements of your early draft, and cutting out all the boring, average, or even good stuff in between, so that you’re left with only the very best of the best.

And Amplification is about “turning up the volume” on those vital elements, visualizing them even more closely, exploring them even more deeply, and pushing them even further than you knew they could go.

On a creative level, this brings the essence of your script to the surface, allowing you to get right to the heart of what really matters, without distracting yourself, or your audience, with all that stuff in between.

On a commercial level, this makes every page a heck of a lot more compelling to read (and worthy of the thousands, hundreds of thousands, or even millions of dollars it’s going to take to shoot each line you write).

But most importantly, on a story level, this means you can tell more of your story faster, allowing you to take your character, your audience, and even yourself further than they (and you) were expecting when you first sat down to write.

In this way (and in true Star Wars fashion), rewriting isn’t just a mechanical process of making your script better or following a bunch of suggestions from coverage readers or producers. It’s also a spiritual journey towards connecting with yourself and with your voice as a writer.

It’s interesting that The Force Awakens came to the theatres just as we were talking about the concept of “The Engine” of so many successful TV series on this podcast. Because every movie also has an engine. And once you’ve identified that engine, both structurally and thematically, the process of compression, and amplification, and revision, becomes much easier.

It’s a search for that sweet spot, where it still feels like the same movie, even as it changes, deepens, pushes and surprises.

So it’s fitting that (after originally embarking on a different path with Michael Arndt, the writer of Little Miss Sunshine) Disney brought in Lawrence Kasdan, the writer of The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi to bring their mega-franchise to the promised land.

Because if anyone understood the engine of Star Wars, he was the guy.

And if you’re one of the disgruntled, who were hoping that a guy like Kasdan was going to deliver something revolutionary in The Force Awakens, the way he did in his sequels to the original Star Wars, you need to think for a moment where Disney was coming from.

They’d just spent over 4 billion dollars to acquire the rights to Star Wars from George Lucas. They were building theme parks, video games, re-doing Disney World. But they had a problem. Despite the financial success of the last three installments, there was a nearly universal agreement that those movies were ...

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

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Does Your Show Need A Bible?

By Jacob Krueger

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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.

Since new writers joining the writers room likely wouldn’t have had a chance to see every episode, and even if they had, they certainly wouldn’t know them in the same detail as the original staff who wrote them,the assistants would compile old episodes into a document which could be given to new writers on the staff. It was a quick way to acquaint them with what had already been done, what will never be done, the kinds of things that generally happen in an episode, and the rules of the show that make the show’s engine run.They called this document The Show Bible.

What ended up happening was, people who weren’t in the industry or had never worked in television (the people who all too often end up teach TV and screenwriting classes) started to hear about this thing called a bible, and realized there was money to be made teaching people how to write bibles. So a whole new field of TV Writing teaching bubbled up about creating your Show Bible.

At the time this started, it was especially ridiculous,because at that time you couldn't even sell a pilot unless you were already showrunner. You could really get someone to read a spec episode for an existing TV show, and hope that it got you staffed on this show. But you could never get anyone to read a pilot from a new writer in those days.

So, this was craziness. But in an interesting example of the tail wagging the dog, what happened next was that festivals started popping up for TV Writing. And hearing about this thing called a bible that everyone was talking about, a lot of them started to require writers to submit a bible along with their show.

To me this is a fascinating example of having festivals who are run by people not in the industry, who are getting their information from teachers who are not in the industry. And somehow that all coming together to change the actual industry!

Because it’s gotten to a point where now a big change is happening in the industry. And,this is actually a very exciting change, as far as I'm concerned. Today, producers, agents and managers are asking for pilots. They're excited to sell pilots, because we're having a renaissance in TV Writing right now, and there are a lot of new markets with Amazon, and Netflix, and other internet based networks with a huge demand for content in television.

Suddenly, we’re finding ourselves in a market where we’re not only seeing great writing is happening in Television, but also a market in which you can sell a pilot,

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.

Find out more about Jacob Krueger Studio:

WRITER RESOURCES: www.writeyourscreenplay.com/blog

WORKSHOPS & SEMINARS: writeyourscreenplay.com/classes

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Buildout Your Script, part 2: A Decision Every Moment

By Jacob Krueger

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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.

As those of you who have taken our screenwriting classes know, when you don’t know what choice to make in your script, you look towards your theme to guide you. Just like when you don’t know exactly what choice to make in your space, you look toward the purpose you ultimately want that space to serve.

But what do you to when your theme changes? Or when you’re not really sure what your theme is yet?

I recently faced this quandary while running Ethernet, HDMI , USB and microphone wiring for the online setup of our new classrooms. I knew that I wanted to build the most incredible experience possible for our online students, with top-end microphone, camera and television setup that would allow every student to see, hear and participate as if they were live in the room.

The challenge of course was that the ideal setup would be different for each kind of class we offered, and each decision I had to make seemed dependent on a million other choices: Would we be using HDMI cameras, IP cameras, USB cameras or some technology yet to be invented? Would the cameras always be in the same positions, or would they need to move for different classes? What technology would our students all over the world be most comfortable with, and which of these top-end solutions would it be compatible with?

We only had one chance to do this the right way, before the sheetrock went up, the insulation went in, and running wires inside the wall became very difficult and expensive, I found myself up all night for many nights, crunching on one wiring blueprint after another. Trying to figure out every possible scenario for the next ten years, before I’d even taught my first class in our new space.

Yeah, it was a nightmare.

Then I realized, of course it was a nightmare! For the same reason writing a script this way would be a nightmare.

Because, as nice as it would be to know every element you were ever going to need in your story before you wrote the first page, the truth is, you need to know the variables you’re playing with before you can learn how to play with them.

You have to let the story show you what it wants to be, and sometimes that means writing some scenes, or running some wires, that aren’t going to make it to the final draft. There are some things that you’re just not going to realize you need until you’ve lived in the script for awhile, and really come to understand what you’re building.

So how do you accept the messy nature of this process, while still “running your wires” in a way that’s likely to serve the final product you’re building?

Fortunately, there is a long history of great writers, all with their own solutions for this very problem…

Paddy Chayefsky, the writer of Network used start out by writing one word above his typewriter.

So, for example, he might write Capitalism above his typewriter before he started a project. This was his way of focusing his theme consciously. He allowed himself to write anything he wanted,

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

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Developing Your Brand As A Writer

By Jacob Krueger

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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?

So I want to talk about what happens when you realize you are ripping yourself off. When you realize you are writing the same movie again, and again, and again.

There are a couple of possibilities as to why this happens. Some of them are good, and some of them are bad.

Sometimes, there are themes that we just have not finished dealing with, themes that we still have to get out of ourselves. And sometimes those themes actually occupy more than one screenplay worth of writing.

All writing is really just looking inside and wrestling with the stuff that we have going on inside. And, if we're doing it right, we're wrestling with the stuff we don't totally understand yet, or we wouldn't need to wrestle with it in the first place.

Sometimes, when the same stuff comes up again, and again, and again, it's really just a sign that you haven't totally figured it out yet: that there is something still a little broken in there, still a little confusing. Just some old stuff that you're still cycling through and trying to figure out.

There are many, many examples of truly great writers who do this. And not just screenwriters.

Take the great novelist Haruki Murakami. It seems like in nearly every novel he writes, there's a well, and a moon, and a cat, and the cat runs away, and then his girlfriend disappears, and he ends up at the bottom of a well or looking at the moon. This happens again, and again, and again in his novels. There is also moon imagery in everything that he writes. It’s the same symbols, used in different ways.

And as you're reading his novels, the truth of the matter is you don't care at all! Every time you see a cat, you know the cat is going to run away, and his girlfriend is going to leave him. And the reason you don't care, is that Murakami finds a way to push a little deeper on those symbols each time. He's giving you the same symbols, he's wrestling with the same symbols. But never in exactly the same way.

There was obviously a time in Murakami’s life when an animal left him and his girlfriend left him at the same time, or when something that felt like that happened to him. And there is obviously something for him about wells as a symbol of change and coming out a different person than when you went in. These are obviously things that mean something to him. The moon means something to Murakami. And like the moon, sometimes there are just phases that we go through as writers.

Another great example is Darren Aronofsky. Nearly every movie he has ever directed, has ended with some version of a death or a suicide that is also a moment of salvation. Pi, The Fountain, The Wrestler,

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.com/classes

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Build Out Your Script: Choosing The Right Idea To Write

By Jacob Krueger

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As many of you know this has been one of the most exciting months in the history of the Jacob Krueger studio. We have recently signed a lease on a new location in New York City with an expected opening date of January 1st. We're going to have three brand new classrooms, eight one-on-one offices for our Protrack mentorship program, and plenty of space for our students to write and to gather. 

This is the culmination of a dream that started about ten years ago for me and my staff. And in the process of finding and now building out that space, I've learned a lot of lessons, many of which apply not only to New York City real estate, but also to screenwriting.

So, in this series of podcasts I'm going to be sharing some of the lessons that I've learned and how they relate to screenwriting.

Lesson #1:

The Perfect Space & The Perfect Idea Have One Thing In Common: Neither Of Them Actually Exist.

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…

The first are the ones that look perfect when you first see them. They're in the right location, the right size, the right price. And these are few and far between. But when you look at them you get so excited, only to realize once you get involved in the negotiation, just like once you get involved in the writing, that there are problems that you never anticipated: crazy landlords, unexpected bidding wars, hidden costs, or clauses in the lease that you never would have expected when you first sat down to look at the space.

The second category of spaces are the spaces that have obvious problems and in New York you can imagine what those problems are: they're either too expensive or they're in the wrong place. And the process of looking at space after space after space trying to find the right combination of size and prices and location reminded me of a time in my own screenwriting career, shortly after I'd finished The Matthew Shepard Story.

The first draft of Matthew Shepard was without a doubt, at that point in my career, the best thing that I had ever written. And I remember setting the goal that this next project, whatever it was, had to be better, even better, than Matthew Shepard.

And I remember going through a process of rejecting idea after idea after idea. It was one of the rare times in my life during which I actually had writers' block.

No matter how good the idea was, I could always see a problem. I could always see something getting in the way. I always felt like it wasn't quite going to match up to Matthew Shepard.

And if you're a writer you've probably had this experience before as well, feeling like no idea is good enough, or embarking on an idea that feels perfect, only to realize that there are problems underneath that you didn't anticipate and that you don't quite know how to handle.

In the process of finding a space, ultimately I had to decide on what was really important to me. The things that I knew were vital: I needed a ten year lease.