Write Your Screenplay Podcast

Often times we think of formatting as the grammar of the screenwriting. We think of it as this very simple, basic, elemental set of rules that you go and look up in The Hollywood Standard in order to do properly.

But the truth of the matter is formatting is much more than grammar. It's a way of speaking to your audience, thinking about your movie like a filmmaker, and capturing the visual eye of your reader.

Find out more about Jacob Krueger Studio:

WRITING RESOURCES: www.writeyourscreenplay.com/blog

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Formatting: Isolating Visual Moments of Action

By Jacob Krueger

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Often times we think of formatting as the grammar of the screenwriting. We think of it as this very simple, basic, elemental set of rules that you go and look up in The Hollywood Standard in order to do it properly.

But the truth of the matter is: formatting is like grammar. If you actually spoke proper grammar you’d most likely have no friends. “To whom should I direct this email?” You’d just sound too darn formal. And the same is true for “proper” formatting. It’s just not going to work for you.

And, at the same time, we all know bad grammar when we hear it!  And just like bad grammar, when we see bad formatting in a screenplay, we make instant judgements that can really end up leaving your script at the bottom of the pile.

So, today I want to talk about formatting. But I want to talk about formatting in a creative way. Because I feel like a lot of writers at all different levels are really stuck on this idea of formatting. And instead of looking at it as a creative tool of their craft they’re looking at it as something that gets in the way of their creativity.

I want you to understand that formatting only exists for one purpose. The whole purpose of formatting is to isolate visual moments of action.

When you learn to isolate the visual moments of action in your script, you start to do four very important things:

1) You're going to be writing even better than most professionals—allowing your work to get noticed and stand out from the crowd.

2) You're going to have a lot more fun writing, because writing is going to be more creative for you.

3) You're more likely to sell your script because the people reading it are going to be able to visualize each thing as if they were watching a movie in their heads.

4) You’re going to save tons of money when it comes to production. And be a lot more likely to actually like the movie that you end up with.

So let's talk about what each of the those four words mean: "isolate," "visual," "moments," and "action…"

ISOLATE

Isolate means that we’re choosing the little turning points where your character makes big choices. So, when I say "isolate" we're never going to show "Jake is running." Because that's not isolated. That's a continuing state.

Instead, we're going to show, "Jake hops over a large boulder, skins his knees across the pavement, slips on his own blood, and catches his balance against the flag pole."

Do you see the difference between the state of "Jake is running" and the sequence of isolated moments that told the story? And do you see how much more interesting it was just to watch that sequence of isolated moments than it was to see Jake running? Jake running requires the audience or the reader to be creative. And guess what? They're not.

Your ideal reader is a producer. And an ideal producer is a salesperson, not a creative writer. And although there are salespeople with creative proclivities, you can't depend on them in that way. You should depend on them to be able to cut a deal, to talk people into doing things that they don't want to do, to get more money than you'd ever expect, or to get more movie out of a little bit of money. But you shouldn't expect them to be able to read "Jake is running" and visualize something cool. That's your job.

You need to understand coverage readers are even worse. Your coverage reader may be an aspiring writer but the chances are that they are a struggling writer. Otherwise, they would not be reading coverage for $50 per script.

So,

"Trainwreck" could so easily have been a movie about pointing fingers at the trainwreck girl that we all have known, or the trainwreck guy that we all have known.

But the truth of the matter is that "Trainwreck" is not about a skanky trainwreck of a girl. "Trainwreck" is about a beautiful and broken girl who's trying to fall in love, who's finally got an opportunity to be with someone good, but can't get out of her own way.

"Trainwreck" is a story about how hard it is to actually open yourself to another human being whether you're the famous doctor or the struggling journalist.

Find out more about Jacob Krueger Studio:

WRITER RESOURCES: www.writeyourscreenplay.com/blog

WORKSHOPS & SEMINARS: writeyourscreenplay.com/classes

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Trainwreck: The Game of the Scene

By Jacob Krueger

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Before we even get into the structure of Amy Shumer’s Trainwreck, I want to start by talking about the inception of the movie, and how it came to the screen.

Oftentimes if you're an emerging screenwriter, it's easy to imagine that the professionals must totally know what they're doing, write one draft and it magically comes to fruition.

But the truth of the matter is that Amy Shumer’s process on this screenplay was very similar to the process that a lot of you go through.

Writing a great screenplay does not happen overnight. This screenplay took Amy years and many drafts to write. And interestingly it started off as a completely different movie.

Judd Apatow tells a story about working for about nine months with Amy on a completely different version of the film. And then one day the two of them realized that this wasn’t the story they really wanted to tell.

And Judd Apatow told Amy Schumer, despite all the work they’d put into the draft, that he was really more interested in those personal stories that she was telling when he first heard her jokes. When she was talking about her father and his real experience with M.S. and what that real relationship looked like.

And so, eight or nine months into the process, Amy Schumer completely reconceived the movie, refocused what it was really about, and made it personal.

You can see how putting that personal stuff on the page brought this movie into instant focus. Not only for the writer and director, but also for the audience, and for the character.

Trainwreck starts with a really amazing little vignette. Little Amy, whose character's name is Amy, and her sister Kim, whose character's name is Kim, are sitting across from their dad, whose real name is Gordon and whose character’s name is Gordon.

Gordon, in his own funny way, is trying to explain his impending divorce to these little girls in terms of their dolls: "What if you had to play with that doll for the rest of your life? What if there were other dolls that you wanted to play with?" And the scene is hilarious, but it's also heartbreaking. Because by the end of this scene, dad has the two kids parroting back to him a mantra that will come to rule Amy’s life: "Monogamy isn't realistic."

And what a wonderful place to start a movie about intimacy, about how hard it is to fall in love, how hard it is to actually break past our own walls.

There's a wonderful journey for Amy in this movie and one of the things that I love about that journey is that even though it hits all of those traditional romantic comedy beats-- down to the big, theatrical performance in the end to prove her love-- it does it in a way that is extremely personal, and extremely vulnerable, and extremely truthful.It does so in a way that looks a lot more like real love, in all its messiness, than a lot of romantic comedies.

Now I'm not saying that this is the real Amy Schumer, because when you write from your real life you're not trying to put your real, real self on the page. You're not trying to put your life experiences exactly the way they occurred on the page. You're trying to look closely at one specific aspect of yourself: one little broken piece of yourself, or one little beautiful piece of yourself. Or maybe, like in this movie, a mixture of the two.

For example, Amy Schumer steals from her real life a very funny and very awkward breakup with an ex-boyfriend, which occurred at a time when she was starting to think about dating other guys. He was getting suspicious,

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Me and Earl and the Dying Girl: Two Levels of Sturcture

By Jacob Krueger

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Hello, I'm Jacob Krueger and this is the Write Your Screenplay Podcast.  As you know on this podcast, rather than looking at movies in terms of two thumbs up or two thumbs down, loved it or hated it, we look at them in terms of what we can learn from them as screenwriters. We look at good movies, we look at bad movies, we look at movies that we loved and we looked at movies that we hated.

This week, we're going to be looking at Me and Earl and the Dying Girl. If you haven't seen this movie yet, please be aware that this podcast does contain spoilers, which will change your experience of the movie.

And it's interesting that these spoilers will change your experience of the movie because this should be an impossible movie to spoil. The title of the movie is Me and Earl and the Dying Girl. The logline of the movie tells you it's about a friendship between a teenage boy and a girl with cancer. And even the main character himself tells you, at the beginning of the movie, that he made a movie so bad that somebody died from watching it.

Every single thing about how this movie was constructed is basically telling you that this girl is going to die. And there's an interesting thing that happens to an audience when they know they're watching a movie that's going to hurt them: they start to put a little cocoon around themselves to protect themselves from getting hurt.

Whether you loved or hated Me and Earl and the Dying Girl-- whether you were part of the crowd that was ready to stand up and cheer at the Sundance premiere (after which the film was immediately snagged up after a fierce bidding war) or whether you're one of the more skeptical audience members who have accused the film of being cliché in its depiction of Earl and of its self-aware film references-- one thing that you have to admit about Me and Earl and the Dying Girl is that, for all its humor and all its fun, ultimately the movie is devastating.

It’s not easy to devastate an audience. Especially when they come to a movie called Me and Earl and the Dying Girl. It’s not easy to actually move them to a point of personal exposure with a film like this, because of the protective wall that the audience is naturally going to put up between themselves and the film.

So, I want to talk today about how you get an audience to take down their walls.

In lesser hands, Me and Earl and the Dying Girl is a Lifetime movie.  In lesser hands, it's just another movie in a long line of melodramatic tearjerkers: the kind of movie that makes you cry but doesn't really change your life. The kind of movie that makes you cry in a safe way.

Me and Earl and the Dying Girl does not make you cry in a safe way. And the reason for this is that it sucks you into seeing the world through the character's eyes, forcing you to lower your guard and expose your own vulnerability.

 

As I’ve mentioned, the film has taken a lot of criticism for this. It's been argued that Rachel (the girl who is dying of cancer) exists for no other reason than to force the main character, Greg, to change. It's been argued that Greg is a total narcissist who is so completely unaware of anybody other than himself in the world.

But I completely disagree. For me, what is wonderful about this movie and what is successful about this movie is exactly the way it pulls you into Greg’s perspective, as narcissistic and self-involved, and downright teenage as it might be.

The most obvious way it does this is by lying to you.

Whether you loved or hated "Me, Earl and the Dying Girl," you have to admit that the movie is deeply emotionally moving, both in its humor and its sadness.

It’s not easy to move an audience emotionally. Especially when they come to a movie called "Me, Earl and the Dying Girl." It’s not easy to actually move them to a point of personal exposure with a film like this, because of the protective wall that the audience is naturally going to put up between themselves and the film.

So in this podcast, Jacob Krueger discusses how to get an audience to take down their walls.

Find out more about Jacob Krueger Studio:

WRITER RESOURCES: www.writeyourscreenplay.com/blog

WORKSHOPS & SEMINARS: writeyourscreenplay.com/classes

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Writing The Horror Movie: The Inner Psychology of Se7en, Drag Me To Hell & Dawn of the Dead

By Jacob Krueger

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There are two kinds of horror movies.

There’s the basic gross-out horror movie, which is really just about creating a progression of increasingly horrible images and getting a high body count. These movies have a very simple formula: Establish a bunch of characters and relationships, then kill those characters off, one by one, with the greatest efficiency and bloodiness. All the creative work in those movies just goes into creating the most horrible of horrors. It’s about making the most disgusting, horrible, frightening, “This is going to haunt me in my dreams; I can’t unsee that” kind of moment.

But the best horror movies try to do something much bigger. They are either psychological commentaries, political commentaries, or sometimes both.

 

For example, Dawn of the Dead is actually about consumerism. There’s a reason they’re stuck in a shopping mall. The horror of their situation is really just a metaphor for the horror of consumerism and the way it makes zombies of us all.

This is important because most of us are never going to find ourselves in a real-life horror movie situation. We’re never going to be chased by a zombie, haunted by a spirit, or pursued by a serial killer.

If a horror movie is going to do more than just gross us out, if it’s truly going to scare us in a way that shakes us to our core, it should relate in some way to the experiences of our lives, our real fears and anxieties.

And that becomes a guiding principle for you as a writer. It can help you stimulate your creativity. When you realize, “This is what it’s really about,” you can start to get even more creative about the horror moments.

Se7en is a great example. Se7en is about sin. It just so happens that Se7en has seven of the most gruesome horrors ever shot on film. (Technically, you can argue that Se7en is a cop movie or a thriller or a serial killer movie more than a horror movie.)

But Se7en, despite all its genre elements, despite each crime that grosses you out more than the last one, is actually about sin. Why? Because it’s called Se7en; it’s about the seven deadly sins.

As cool as that hook may be, you don’t want to build a movie like this just around an external hook. I promise you that before Se7en was ever created, 500 other writers also wrote a seven deadly sins movie. It’s not that original of an idea!

But you don’t want it to just be about how a serial killer recreates the seven deadly sins because you’re going to end up writing one more seven deadly sin movie, just like all the others.

If you’re writing a movie like Se7en, you want it to be an exploration of the real role of sin in our lives and who we really are in relation to sin.

That’s where you’re going to find the creativity and the truthfulness that makes your film stand out from the others in the genre.

The thing that makes Se7en a great movie is not that it’s a seven deadly sins movie. The thing that makes it a great movie is that it’s a movie about sin. It’s a movie that asks the question, “Are the sinners different from us? Do we all carry sin within us? Are we all capable of true evil?”

 

If you think about Se7en, you realize that’s actually the structure of the main characters’ journeys. There are two main characters, played by Brad Pitt and Morgan Freeman, and they go on parallel journeys.

Morgan Freeman’s character, Somerset, begins the movie believing the world is full of sin and there is no difference between “us” and “them” — the sinn...

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INSIDE OUT: Character, Archetypes and The Psychology of Revision

By Jacob Krueger

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Hello! I'm Jacob Krueger and this is the Write Your Screenplay podcast. As you know, on this podcast, rather than looking at movies in terms of two thumbs up, two thumbs down, loved it or hated it, we look at movies in terms of what we can learn from them as screenwriters. We look at good movies, we look at bad movies, we look at movies we loved and movies that we hated.

Today we're going to be looking at Inside Out. One of the exciting things about Inside Out is that the main character actually isn’t the eleven year old girl, Riley, at the center of the movie. Instead, the main character is actually an archetype inside of her head: the emotion of Joy, played by Amy Poehler.

And Joy is joined by four other archetypes: Fear, Anger, Disgust, and Sadness.

 

One of the most interesting things about this movie is that it's actually based on real psychological research. In fact, they even brought in two professors of psychology (Dacher Keltner and Paul Ekman) to consult on the project.

These psychologists wanted Pixar to have a character for every emotion in the vast array of emotions that human beings experience. And Pixar made an interesting decision, which, if you're a screenwriter, is a decision that you may want to think about as well.

Instead of heeding the researchers’ advice, Inside Out writer/director Pete Docter boiled down the multitude of emotions into these five primary characters. The reason for this was simple: the story, like most screenplays, could basically only handle five or six characters.

In 105 pages, you've got time to take care of five to six characters really well. You don't have time to take care of 20 characters. So, what Docter did was boil down this myriad of emotions to five primary emotions: Anger, Disgust, Fear, Sadness, and our main character, Joy.

 

As we watch Inside Out, what we're primarily doing is not just watching the story of the little girl, we’re watching the story of the archetypes inside of the little girl's head.

Now, let's talk about what this term “archetypes” means.

This is a term that is thrown around all the time in screenwriting. Oftentimes, in practice, these archetypes descend into becoming stereotypes. But an archetype is different from a stereotype.

The term “archetype” doesn't come from screenwriting. It actually comes from a psychologist that many of you have heard of: Carl Jung.

Jung believed in this idea called The Collective Unconscious. The idea of The Collective Unconscious is that we are all part of a shared fabric. And though we may not be consciously aware of it, through our subconscious mind, our dreams and our fantasies, we can tap into this shared consciousness. And through that shared consciousness we can connect to symbology and types of characters and events that may transcend our own experience but that every single person in the universe can relate to.

Jung called these experiences, people, and events "archetypes."

After Jung, a guy named Joseph Campbell came along. Campbell is the guy who came up with the idea of The Hero's Journey, which you’ve likely heard about if you’ve studied screenwriting.

Campbell basically said: if there's such a thing as a Collective Unconscious,

As we watch INSIDE OUT, we're not just watching the story of the little girl, Riley, at the center of the movie. We’re also watching the story of the archetypes inside Riley’s head as they shape both Riley’s and their own realities.

READ PODCAST TRANSCRIPT: http://www.writeyourscreenplay.com/2015/07/11/podcast-inside-out/

Find out more about Jacob Krueger Studio:

WRITER RESOURCES: www.writeyourscreenplay.com/blog

WORKSHOPS & SEMINARS: writeyourscreenplay.com/classes

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ADAPTATION: The Rhythm of Rewriting

By Jacob Krueger

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Today’s podcast will be a special treat for those of you who did not get to attend our screenwriting retreat in Costa Rica this year. This is an excerpt from one of my retreat lectures about Charlie Kaufman's Adaptation screenplay and what it can teach us about rewriting and adapting our own screenplays.

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Here’s a fun thing to note about Adaptation that is also an example of how Charlie Kaufman pushes the edges of his own control: Adaptation is an adaptation of three different source materials.

ONE: it's an adaptation of a book called The Orchid Thief by Susan Orlean, which is a beautiful book that Charlie Kaufman loves.

TWO: it is an adaptation of Story by Robert McKee. No one has ever attempted to do a movie version of a screenwriting book before.

It is an adaptation of Story by Robert Mckee, which is a book that he hates… Even if Robert McKee does say, "As featured in Adaptation" on his website.

THREE: Adaptation is an adaptation of The Three by Donald Kauffman, which is a script that does not exist. In fact, in the original draft of Adaptation, the movie ends with a supertitle of this monologue from The Three:

"We're all one thing, Lieutenant. That's what I've come to realize. Like cells in a body. 'Cept we can't see the body. The way fish can't see the ocean. And so we envy each other. Hurt each other. Hate each other. How silly is that? A heart cell hating a lung cell."

- Cassie from The Three

This is Charlie Kauffman's little key - which the producer's cut - to what this movie is really about. This movie is really about archetypes. This movie is about the fact that inside of Charlie Kaufman, “the genius who can’t write” is the sellout brother, Donald. Inside Charlie Kaufman, “the genius who can’t write” is Susan Orlean, the New Yorker writer. Charlie Kaufman, “the genius who can’t write” is Laroche, the guy who's so passionate about one thing.

This is a script about multiple personality disorder. This is a script about fractured personalities and mirrors. This is a script about a bunch of characters who are all the same thing. This is a script about how orchids are women and women are orchids. This is a script about mistaking an orchid for a lover. This is a script about not understanding the difference between you and others. This is a script about how to write a script.

How do you write a script? You don't write a script by applying a bunch of principles. You write a script by looking inside and finding the piece of you that you're not inviting to the table. At least that's one way to do it.

So, in the case of Adaptation, the thesis is Charlie. This thesis is about purity, real life, not being a Hollywood sellout. What's the antithesis to that? Donald Kaufman via Robert McKee. And you breathe life into that Donald inside of you. There is no real Donald Kaufman, but you breathe life into the Donald inside of you because we are all one. You also breathe life into the Susan Orlean inside of you.

Now, here's what's really interesting, which ties into what Mirtha asked about about backstory today. So, I want to show you this. This section of the script gets cut,