Write Your Screenplay Podcast

Sometimes, even a flawed script can give you tremendous insights as a writer, not only as to what makes a screenplay succeed or fail, but also about the strengths and weaknesses of your own writing.

So, as we talk about 50 Shades of Grey, we're going to be setting aside the question of whether or not it is a good movie, whether or not you enjoyed 50 Shades of Grey or found it sexy, or even if you thought it was a reliable adaptation.

Instead, let's look at 50 Shades of Grey and think about what could have made it a great script. And how those lessons can apply to your own writing.

Find out more about Jacob Krueger Studio:

WRITER RESOURCES: www.writeyourscreenplay.com/blog

WORKSHOPS & SEMINARS: writeyourscreenplay.com/classes

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American Sniper: Is Your Adaptation Running Toward The Truth?

By Jacob Krueger

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Hello, this is Jacob Krueger and welcome to the Write Your Screenplay podcast. As you know, on this podcast, instead of thinking about movies in terms of two thumbs up or two thumbs down we like to think about movies in terms of what we can learn about them as screenwriters.

So we’re going to look at all kinds of movies. We’re going to look at good movies, we’re going to look at bad movies. We’re going to look at movies that we love and movies that we hate. But we’re going to look at them in a way that helps us to better our own writing.

Today’s movie is certainly one of the more controversial movies that are out right now: American Sniper by Jason Dean Hall. Let me just start off by saying that my politics are certainly not Clint Eastwood’s politics and that made American Sniper a hard movie for me. I think it made American Sniper a hard movie for a lot of people.

I’m not the kind of person who believes, as Chris Kyle says at the beginning of the movie, that there are three types of people in the world: sheep, wolves and sheepdogs. I’m not a person like Chris Kyle who believes that things are purely black and white, and that there’s very little grey. Watching a movie that cuts directly from planes crashing into the World Trade Center to the war of Iraq and makes that argument all over again, linking Iraq to the September 11th attacks, politically - that’s hard for me to watch.

That said, those are the politics of the main character, Chris Kyle. Those are the politics of a lot of people like him who went into this war, believing they are the heroes. Believing that the people they are fighting are savages, and as Americans, they are purely a force of good in the world.

There is something to be said about directing and writing a movie that looks at the world through the eyes of your protagonist. The hope of course, as you work on such an adaptation, is that even as you’re looking at the world through their eyes, you’re also maybe revealing something to the audience, and to yourself, that is even more complicated than the main character can see.

These elements of American Sniper which do succeed in this way.

 

Clint Eastwood, in fact, has said that he views American Sniper as an anti-war film, and quite frankly, as much as I may disagree with his politics, on this, I agree with him.

I agree with him for a couple of reasons. The first is: Bradley Cooper’s performance and Eastwood's direction of that performance. While Chris Kyle may be saying things throughout this movie, like, “I don’t regret a single kill” and “I will go to my maker happy to answer for every one of them” and while he may talk in his memoir about enjoying war, the performance of the main character (as corroborated by the interviews that Chris Kyle’s wife has given) tells us a very different story.

Even as this character believes that he’s A-Okay, it’s pretty clear that he’s suffering from increasingly severe Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Even as the character is telling himself that he is doing the right thing, that he is inside the good, it’s pretty clear that the war is changing him. We are watching him become haunted by demons that cut him off from his wife, his children, his friends, and even his country. In this way American Sniper is an anti-war movie.

Jacob Krueger discussed one of the more controversial movies of this year: American Sniper by Jason Dean Hall.

"Let me just start off by saying that my politics are certainly not Clint Eastwood’s politics and that made American Sniper a hard movie for me. I think it made American Sniper a hard movie for a lot of people."

Listen to Jacob breakdown the elements in the movie that succeed as well as the areas that could have been pushed much further in both the script and in the movie.

Find out more about Jacob Krueger Studio:

ADAPTATION SEMINAR: http://www.writeyourscreenplay.com/product/adapt-seminar/

WRITER RESOURCES: www.writeyourscreenplay.com/blog

WORKSHOPS & SEMINARS: writeyourscreenplay.com/classes

Adapting a stage musical to the screen is never easy. On stage, musicals work because of their theatricality—the feeling of pretend, play, magic, and performance. Whereas in the relatively naturalistic world of film, those elements are very hard to pull off. Which makes the surprisingly successful film adaptation of Stephen Sondheim’s and James Lapine’s stage musical INTO THE WOODS even more worthy of study.

In this podcast, Jacob Krueger discusses how adapting INTO THE WOODS for Disney might just have been one of the most challenging projects ever.

Find out more about Jacob Krueger Studio:

WRITER RESOURCES: www.writeyourscreenplay.com/blog

WORKSHOPS & SEMINARS: writeyourscreenplay.com/classes

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Into The Woods: Navigating The Development Process

By Jacob Krueger

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Adapting a stage musical to the screen is never easy. On stage, musicals work because of their theatricality—the feeling of pretend, play, magic, and performance. Whereas in the relatively naturalistic world of film, those elements are very hard to pull off. Which makes the surprisingly successful film adaptation of Stephen Sondheim’s and James Lapine’s stage musical Into The Woods even more worthy of study.

That’s because successfully adapting Into The Woods as a musical for Disney might just be one of the most challenging projects ever.

For all its hilarity and fun, Into the Woods is one of the saddest, darkest fairytales ever. It’s essentially structured like The Wrestler, where by the halfway point everything is perfect, everyone’s gotten their wish, and then, basically, everybody dies.

It’s horribly sad. It’s a movie about loss, based on a play about loss, written by James Lapine (book) and Stephen Sondheim (music and lyrics). Loss is what they do. They just make it really funny.

And that’s simply not what Disney does.

For anyone who has ever developed a movie with a producer, some of Disney’s notes, and some of the brilliant elements that had to be lost in the adaptation won’t be much of a surprise.

But how Lapine and director Rob Marshall navigated those notes in a way that served both the producer and the screenplay is something that every aspiring screenwriter, and anyone who has ever felt that their “perfect” screenplay was being run off the rails by the development process can learn from.

You see, somewhere during the development process, Disney said to Lapine, “we’ve got a problem, James, with the body count.”

Most writers would have responded to a note like this with total incredulity… and maybe even a little bit of rage. In fact, if you look at some of the response from hard core Into The Woods fans, you can see that rage expressed on Sondheim and Lapine’s behalf.

We’re talking about one of the most beloved musicals of all time. And that shocking body count (as we’ll be discussing later) is one of the things that makes the story so successful, not only thematically but also structurally!

To reduce the body count is not just to make a couple changes to the plot! It means potentially undermining the structural integrity of the story, the meaning of the songs, and the natural evolution of the characters’ journeys—not to mention cutting some of the most beloved and memorable elements in the play.

But Lapine’s reaction, under the circumstances, was remarkably zen.

Rather than going to war over the script the way it was, he dedicated all that energy to figuring out how else it could be done, playing on the same team as the producer, rather than seeing them as the enemy.

After almost 30 years of wandering in the woods of Hollywood, searching for someone brave enough to produce a film musical of Into The Woods, Sondheim and Lapine had finally found a partner in Disney.

By committing 100 million dollars to Into The Woods (this number was later reduced to 50 million), Disney had taken a huge leap of faith on Sondheim, Lapine, and director Rob Marshall. Unfortunately, the basis of that leap of faith may have been what the lyrics were saying rather than wha...

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Nightcrawler: Writing The Issue-Based Movie

By Jacob Krueger

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Hello, I’m Jacob Krueger and welcome to the Write Your Screenplay podcast. As you know, in this podcast, we don’t look at movies in terms of whether they’re good or bad, two thumbs up or two thumbs down, instead we look at movies of all kind. We look at movies that succeed, movies that fail, great movies, bad movies, old movies, new movies, and we try to look at them and pose the question: “what can we learn from these movies, as screenwriters?”

Today, we’re going to be talking about Nightcrawler and Dan Gilroy’s script. We’re also going to be talking about a lot of other movies that fall into the same genre: these political character-driven movies that seem to succeed so well by being subtly political, rather than overtly political.

Just a quick warning for all of you: there are going to be spoilers in this podcast! So, if you have not seen Nightcrawler yet, you should definitely run out and see it.

Nightcrawler is a really interesting script. I feel like if Taxi Driver and Network got together and had a baby, it would probably be something like Nightcrawler.

The script succeeds on many merits. It succeeds on the merits of its spectacular dialogue. It succeeds because of the great performances of Jake Gyllenhaal as Louis Bloom and Rene Russo as Nina Romina. It succeeds because of the world: it’s a world that we have not seen before. It’s a world that we feel like we maybe should be familiar with, but we’re not. It’s that world of freelance newspaper photographers, which is a world that we’ve never been exposed to before.

The movie also succeeds on the basis of some really bold writing choices that integrate a strong political message. It’s a real indictment of our media in a way that we really haven’t seen since Network or maybe Bowling for Columbine. And it does it in a way that never feels preachy and that never feels like we’re being told what to think. In fact, it does it in a way that even somebody who doesn’t necessarily agree with the writer can still be moved, can still be taken on a journey, and maybe even can still have their thoughts change – just a little bit – by this film. And this is one of the most important lessons, I believe, whenever we’re working in a political framework.

As a writer who also works on social-political movies, when we have a strong socio-political point that we want to make as writers sometimes the urge is to get up on our soapbox and start preaching. We have the urge to tell people what they should think, to expose hypocrisy or the thing that we’re angry about, and to sway the audience’s view of the world. That is a really strong urge, especially for those of us who do want to make a change and who do see the media and film as such a powerful opportunity to make a change.

Sometimes we fall into the trap of getting onto our soapbox. Or – the worst version of this – we’ve all seen those movies with the big speech at the end that tells you what to believe. Instead of doing theme, we’re doing moral. Instead of having real characters that people can care about, we have political puppets that we’re moving around on the screen.

There’s a big tradition of movies that have transcended their political bases while still delivering a really powerful p...

Sometimes, when we have a strong socio-political point that we want to make, as writers, the urge is to get up on our soapbox and start preaching. But Nightcrawler succeeds precisely because the screenwriter, Dan Gilroy, was able to step off the soapbox and trust his story.

In this podcast, Jacob Krueger discusses Gilroy’s script for Nightcrawler and his spectacular ability to express a strong political message without shoving it down our throats.

Find out more about Jacob Krueger Studio:

WRITER RESOURCES: www.writeyourscreenplay.com/blog

WORKSHOPS & SEMINARS: writeyourscreenplay.com/classes

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TV Series Writing:  What You Need To Break In

Podcast with Jacob Krueger, Jerome Perzigian, and George Strayton

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Everyone agrees that some of the best writing in Hollywood right now is happening in television. And with brand new web networks like Netflix and Amazon hungry for quality new series, now is one of the most exciting times to be a TV Writer. So what do you need to break into this exciting industry?

In this free 2 hour podcast, three experts in the industry come together to teach you exactly what you need to succeed in the world of series. Whether you’re writing a half hour comedy, an hour-long drama, or an episode for your own web series, you’ll learn what you need not only to break in, but also to build a career as a series writer.

Learn the elements of a successful series, and what every network, studio and series producer is looking for when they read a series spec script or an original pilot. Understand how a TV Writers Room work, and what your role will be within a team of writers.

And most importantly, learn what it takes to write a grade script that works within a series structure, without sacrificing your unique talent as a writer.

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Jacob Krueger

The founder of Jacob Krueger Studio, Jacob has worked with  thousands of writers to bring their screenplay and television projects to the screen: from Academy and Tony Award winners like Alain Boublil & Claude Michel Schonberg (Broadway’s Les Miserables & Miss Saigon) to young writers picking up the pen for the first time. His writing includes The Matthew Shepard Story, which won the WGA Paul Selvin Award and was nominated for a Gemini Award for Best Screenplay.

Jerome Perzigian

With more than 25 years of Hollywood experience, Jerry has been a showrunner, writer, and producer on some of the most successful half-hour series in history, including “The Jeffersons,” “The Golden Girls,” “Frasier,” “The Nanny,” and “Married…with Children.” He has worked with, for, and alongside some of the biggest, most successful names in the the medium, in virtually every half-hour genre: smart shows, silly shows, black shows, white shows, kid shows, sports shows, sketch shows, and a couple that defy rational explication. He won an Emmy in ’04 and has been nominated for three others. Jerry runs the half hour TV Comedy Writing Program at Jacob Krueger Studio.

George Strayton

Most recently the recipient of the 2014 Sundance US Audience Award (Co-Writer; Alive Inside), over the past fifteen years, George has worked extensively on both hour-long television and feature films including Transformers 1 & 2, Star Trek (2009), Sam Raimi’s Hercules: The Legendary Journeys, Xena: Warrior Princess, Stardust andDragonlance: Dragons of Autumn Twilight. In that time, he’s  collaborated with many genre showrunners and fi...

Everyone agrees that some of the best writing in Hollywood right now is happening in television. And with brand new web networks like Netflix and Amazon hungry for quality new series, now is one of the most exciting times to be a TV Writer. So what do you need to break into this exciting industry?

In this podcast, three experts in the industry come together to teach you exactly what you need to succeed in the world of series. Whether you’re writing a half hour comedy, an hour-long drama, or an episode for your own web series, you’ll learn what you need not only to break in, but also to build a career as a series writer.

Learn the elements of a successful series, and what every network, studio and series producer is looking for when they read a series spec script or an original pilot. Understand how a TV Writers Room work, and what your role will be within a team of writers. And most importantly, learn what it takes to write a grade script that works within a series structure, without sacrificing your unique talent as a writer.

Panel members for the podcast include three faculty members from Jacob Krueger Studio: Jacob Krueger (Studio Founder & Award Winning Screenwriter), Jerome Perzigian (“The Jeffersons” and “The Golden Girls,”), and George Strayton ("Hercules" and "Xena: Warrior Princess").

Listen to Part 1: https://soundcloud.com/jacob-krueger-studio/tv-series-writing-1

Find out more about Jacob Krueger Studio:

WRITER RESOURCES: www.writeyourscreenplay.com/category/sc…g-articles/

WORKSHOPS & SEMINARS: writeyourscreenplay.com/classes

Everyone agrees that some of the best writing in Hollywood right now is happening in television. And with brand new web networks like Netflix and Amazon hungry for quality new series, now is one of the most exciting times to be a TV Writer. So what do you need to break into this exciting industry?

In this podcast, three experts in the industry come together to teach you exactly what you need to succeed in the world of series. Whether you’re writing a half hour comedy, an hour-long drama, or an episode for your own web series, you’ll learn what you need not only to break in, but also to build a career as a series writer.

Learn the elements of a successful series, and what every network, studio and series producer is looking for when they read a series spec script or an original pilot. Understand how a TV Writers Room work, and what your role will be within a team of writers. And most importantly, learn what it takes to write a grade script that works within a series structure, without sacrificing your unique talent as a writer.

Panel members for the podcast include three faculty members from Jacob Krueger Studio: Jacob Krueger (Studio Founder & Award Winning Screenwriter), Jerome Perzigian (“The Jeffersons” and “The Golden Girls,”), and George Strayton ("Hercules" and "Xena: Warrior Princess").

Listen to Part 2: https://soundcloud.com/jacob-krueger-studio/tv-series-writing-2

Find out more about Jacob Krueger Studio:

WRITER RESOURCES: www.writeyourscreenplay.com/category/sc…g-articles/

WORKSHOPS & SEMINARS: writeyourscreenplay.com/classes