Simon Willison’s Weblog

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6 items tagged “screenwriting”

2023

There is something so vulnerable and frightening about doing your own thing, because it’s your fault if it doesn’t work. And then there’s this other kind of work, where you’re paid an extraordinary amount of money, you’re the hero before you walk in the door, you’re not even held that accountable, because you have a limited amount of time, and all you can do is make it better.

Craig Mazin

# 31st December 2023, 8:53 pm / entrepreneurship, startups, screenwriting

Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse screenplay (PDF) (via) Phil Lord shared this on Twitter yesterday—the final screenplay for Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse. It’s a really fun read.

# 5th December 2023, 7:42 pm / movies, screenwriting, spiderverse

Cellphones are the worst thing that’s ever happened to movies. It’s awful. [...] I think you could talk to a hundred storytellers and they would all tell you the same thing. It’s so hard to manufacture drama when everybody can get a hold of everybody all the time. It’s just not as fun as in the old days when the phone would ring and you didn’t know who was calling.

Steven Soderbergh

# 12th June 2023, 6:13 pm / mobile, screenwriting

2020

Weeknotes: Working on my screenplay

I’m taking an Introduction to Screenwriting course with Adam Tobin at Stanford, and my partial screenplay is due this week. I’m pulling together some scenes that tell the story of the Russian 1917 February Revolution and the fall of the Tsar through the lens of the craftsmen working on the Tsar’s last Fabergé egg. So I’ve not been spending much time on anything else.

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2019

Story Structure 104: The Juicy Details. Dan Harmon (Community, Rick and Morty) wrote a fascinating series of essays on story structure for his Channel 101 film festival project. It’s worth reading the whole series, but this chapter is where things get really detailed.

# 25th April 2019, 1:17 pm / writing, screenwriting

2012

How could Sherlock be improved?

Watson needs to be more competent. Jude Law’s Watson is significantly more useful than Martin Freeman’s—Watson is a military man and a doctor, and is hence useful for far more than just bumbling around with a quizzical expression and updating his blog.

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