Posts Tagged ‘Screenwriting Blog’

5 Greatest Screenwriters of All Time? by Guest Blogger Danny Munso - Creative Screenwriting Magazine

Sunday, November 23rd, 2008

This is certainly a difficult question to answer because of the sheer number of choices and the vagueness of the criteria. Everyone who you ask will give you different answers, and I thought long and hard before narrowing my list down to these five (actually six) individuals.

Any great screenwriter list must start with Woody Allen, who remains prolific to this very date. His work in the seventies remains seminal with films like Annie Hall and Manhattan deftly blending comedy and drama into one tight package. His work since then has been more hit-and-miss, but has always included strong movies like Deconstructing Harry, Match Point, this year’s Vicky Cristina Barcelona, and the crown jewel of his screenplays: 1985’s Hannah and Her Sisters. It may be hard to remember now, but Allen’s work was and still is revolutionary.

One of the founding fathers of Allen’s best work was the great Billy Wilder, who will go down as one of the great directors of all-time, but should not be ignored for his writing capabilities. He had a hand in penning almost all of his classic oeuvre: Sunset Blvd., Some Like It Hot, Double Indemnity, The Apartment – do I need to continue?

It may be cliché, but I would add Quentin Tarantino to the list as well, if only for his rat-a-tat-tat dialogue and use of non-linear structure in his writing. His script for the upcoming Inglorious Bastards is some of his best work, and maybe the misstep of Death Proof is truly behind him. The Coen Brothers – Joel and Ethan – have proven to be masters of finding comedy is the darkest of places and with last year’s No Country For Old Men, finally proved that they could also make a deadly serious film.

Finally, no list of great screenwriters is complete with William Goldman, probably the only individual who almost everyone can agree should be included here. His adaptation of All the President’s Men is legendary, but it’s the feel-good buddy story Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and the timeless charms of The Princess Bride that will be his legacy. He is simply the best.

They are too green to be included, but I wouldn’t be surprised if two individuals who are doing their best work right now find a way to be mentioned in this space a decade down the line: Peter Morgan and Christopher Nolan.

I also would like to make special mention of two television writing duos, who revolutionized the medium in their own times. Larry David & Jerry Seinfeld helped turn “nothing” into entertainment, and Ricky Gervais & Stephen Merchant who’s work on The Office inspired countless copycats – both on the big screen as well as the small.

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13 Days ‘Till Launch

Thursday, December 27th, 2007

Scripped Laptop

This is not an advertisement for Apple (you can barely tell that I’m using an Apple from the grainy image), nor is it an advertisement for http://www.scripped.com (the world’s first web-based, free screenwriting software), but it’s just a random blog site from an overworked business school student trying to launch a website. I’m at Coffee Society in Cupertino, CA trying to think of everything that could potentially go wrong with our official launch on January 8th, 2008. I am not making crazy New Year’s plans, had a pretty quiet Christmas, and actually worked pretty hard during my vacation in Spain this past week (except for the 6am night at the discotheque - yeesh).

Zak Freer (a former college classmate, USC Film School graduate, and recent winner of the Hollywood DV Short Film Festival for “Best Horror Short), Ryan Buckley (Harvard/MIT MPP/MBA student, hippie, former consultant and generally good guy) and I started Scripped a little over a year ago and we finally have a beta site. I can’t tell you how much we’ve learned over the past year about entrepreneurship, each other, and how optimism needs to be tempered with a good dose of realism. We thought we would have a full site with all of the bells and whistles 8 months ago, we’ve changed the business model at least a dozen times, and we thought we would be way further along than we would be at this time. That being said, we’re happy with where we are, what we’ve learned, and we appreciate all of the support that our friends, family, and classmates have provided over the past year-and-change.

We were fortunate enough, thanks to a classmate of mine at UCLA, to make a connection with the Writer’s Guild. After a couple of successful meetings, we were able to come up with a pretty good barter: the WGA Foundation, the not-for-profit arm of the guild, will send two writers to UCLA on the 8th of January, and we will plan the event. In exchange for filling all of the seats in the audience, and taking care of the logistics, Scripped Inc. gets full sponsorship of the event. I think that’s a great deal. This is a huge opportunity for us to get some publicity and network with the guild (and take business plan number 15 to the guild in hopes of getting support and goodwill). If you’re interested in attending the event, email me at sunil@scripped.com. The two writers are superstars - one was nominated for the Academy Award for Field of Dreams (which he also directed), and the other was the former chair of the screenwriting department at USC.

Tuesday Jan 8th, 6:00pm-8:00pm, UCLA Anderson campus, Panel Discussion about the strike. Come with your questions!

More to come tomorrow - I am too busy burning a hole in my stomach with all of the caffeine I’ve had here… Thanks for keeping up - I’ll post every night ’till the event (and the night of the event, though admittedly, I have a bottle of Absinthe which I brought from Spain and I plan on opening after the 8th is over).

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