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An Inside Look: Judging Creative Screenwriting Magazine’s Competitions

  • Jeffrey Morales
  • .January 10, 2025
Creative Screenwriting Magazine runs a range of screenwriting competitions for television pilots and feature length scripts throughout the year. Each one has a specifically-trained pool of readers to judge each category. This article breaks down the various components that are judged and some sample comments you can use to ensur...
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Screenwriting Within A Budget

Screenwriting Within The Parameters Of A Film Budget - Films are very expensive to make, and very expensive to market. Even TV series on streaming networks such as Netflix, Hulu, and HBO are dealing with multi-million-dollar film budgets per episode. If you're trying to work in Hollywood, you may be under the impression that Hol...
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Colliding Two Story Ideas Together To Make One Great One

  • Jeffrey Kitchen
  • .March 12, 2024
The quest for a great story involves chewing through hundreds of ideas trying to find one with that magic something. And not only do you have to find an idea, but you have to evaluate its power because the ability to tell gold from fool’s gold is crucial to having a sustained screenwriting career.Wasting time building a script a...
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Unconventional Roles for Women

Unconventional Roles for Women Aren't Just Empowering, They're Game Changers It’s a shame the wonderful coming-of-age comedy Booksmart has not done well at the box office. Expectations were high for the clever story about two female high school seniors (Beanie Feldstein and Kaitlyn Dever) cutting loose on their last night before...
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What Makes Gangster Stories So Endlessly Fascinating?

(REPOST) Cinema fans love the genre, going back to the early 1930s when stars like James Cagney (The Public Enemy) and Edward G. Robinson (Little Caesar) made films about the underworld into big (ahem) hits. Since then, almost every movie year has seen a gangster film ride a hide tide of popularity with moviegoers. Be it Key Lar...
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Reverse Cause and Effect

  • Jeffrey Kitchen
  • .August 7, 2023
Reverse Cause and Effect is a unique development tool that enables you to wade into a complex mix of story material and pull it together into a tight sequence of events. Cause and effect is a crucial part of good screenwriting because Plot Point A should cause Plot Point B which causes Plot Point C, and so on through to the endi...
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Jeff Nichols on Screenwriting

  • Kelly Leow
  • .May 30, 2023
(REPOST) I’ve made five films now and written all of them. I’ve been fortunate enough to keep creative control over my work, and that’s because I’ve kept control of the stories themselves - Jeff NIcholsJeff Nichols is an award-winning writer and director, whose credits include Mud, Midnight Special, and Loving.In this short but ...
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The Rarity of Rug-Pulls in the Modern Era of Entertainment

Pulling the rug out from under an audience is tricky work these days. We’ve all seen so many hours of entertainment, even the casual viewer has become well-versed in narrative structure, the tropes of Hollywood storytelling, and genre clichés. For a screenwriter, trying to write a screenplay that will surprise an often jaded aud...
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“Outline Over Screenplay” Jeff Baena On ‘Spin Me Round Interview’

When writer/director Jeff Baena (Horse Girl, The Little Hours) returned home from a shoot in Italy and came across a quirky story of professional misrepresentation, he saw more than someone’s frustration at a major career letdown. He saw his next project.Spin Me Round stars Alison Brie, Alessandro Nivola, Aubrey Plaza and Molly ...
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The Female Action Hero

At the Oscars in recent years, Brie Larson, Gal Gadot, and Sigourney Weaver presented the music awards while trumpeting the powerful women they played in, respectively, Captain Marvel, Wonder Woman, and Alien. Weaver even cracked about how they were going to go out and start their own ‘fight club’ after the show. Indeed, female ...
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A Thoroughly Contemporary Take on “Little Women”

In this overpopulated age of remakes, reboots, and re-imaginings, how do you find a new path in on a property that’s already been told on the big and small screen over a dozen times? Filmmaker Greta Gerwig has managed to make something quite new out of Little Women, the classic and over-exposed Louisa May Alcott novel. She direc...
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I Wanted To Be The Manager I Never Had

  • Jeff Belkin
  • .September 5, 2022
“I Wanted To Be The Manager I Never Had” Says Jeff Belkin From Zero Gravity Management:Jeff Belkin represents screenwriters and directors for both film and television at Zero Gravity Management (Ozark, The Accountant). His stable of clients ranges from first-timers, Blacklist writers, and the more established studio scribes. He ...
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“We Prefer Stories Relatable To Our World Today”

  • Janet Jeffries
  • .July 28, 2022
“We Prefer Stories Relatable To Our World Today” Says Lawrence Bender Productions Creative Executive, Janet Jeffries:Janet Jeffries is a Development and Production executive working in both features and television for Lawrence Bender Productions / Bender Brown TV Productions. Recent films include Greta directed by Neil Jordan an...
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Why Demons and Devils Make for Superior Villains

(REPOST) We all know that “the devil is in the details,” but why are there so many demons in movies and on TV these days? In the past two years, there have been 26 horror movies released where the primary antagonist is some sort of supernatural force (It: Chapter Two), a demon (Annabelle Comes Home), or in some cases, ol’ Beelze...
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How the Film & TV Industry is Starting to Really Get Teens

  • Jeff York
  • .March 30, 2022
Hollywood has always had a difficult time portraying teenagers in an accurate manner. Granted, movies and television generally present fantastical lives of all kinds of people that don’t resemble anything close to reality. Actual doctors don’t get so intrinsically involved in their patients’ personal lives, cops don’t play elabo...
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What Screenwriters Can Learn from the Oscar-nominated Live Action Shorts

  • Jeff York
  • .January 19, 2022
REPOST: It’s a shame that the AMPAS has decided to give out the award for Best Live Action Short winner during a commercial break at the Academy Awards telecast on February 24, 2019. No artist who wins an Oscar should be denied his or her time in the sun. It’s especially egregious given that a short subject winner could give eve...
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‘Sleepless In Seattle’ Screenwriter Jeff Arch On His Novel ‘Attachments’

This entry is part 2 of 2 in the series Jeff Arch:Now that you’ve all read our interview with the Oscar-nominated screenwriter Jeff Arch, you’re ready to read about his latest book called Attachments.Although the skill sets between screenwriters and novelists are distinctly different and not necessarily interchangeable, Arch has...
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“I Sent A Valentine To The Planet” Says Screenwriter Jeff Arch

“I Sent A Valentine To The Planet” Says Jeff Arch Screenwriter Of ‘Sleepless In Seattle’:This entry is part 1 of 2 in the series Jeff Arch.The eighties and nineties are arguably two decades where some of the most influential romantic comedies were made. It is no wonder that Sleepless In Seattle is on many lists of all time favor...
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The Difficulties in Adapting Stephen King’s Horror for the Screen

Ever since Stephen King became a best-selling author in the 1970s, Hollywood has been eager to adapt his works for the big and small screen. With such a long history, not every adaptation is going to be great, but more have been terrific than one might realize. Few would argue about the classic status of big-screen King adaptati...
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“We Prefer Stories Relatable To Our World Today” Says Janet Jeffries

“We Prefer Stories Relatable To Our World Today” Says Lawrence Bender Productions Creative Executive, Janet Jeffries:Janet Jeffries is a Development and Production executive working in both features and television for Lawrence Bender Productions / Bender Brown TV Productions. Recent films include Greta directed by Neil Jordan an...
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