Here’s a courtroom tale to prove my point — Beyond writing and teaching I have had a number of sidelines. Among the most fascinating, I am a longtime court-authorized expert on intellectual property law. I testify regularly in litigation regarding copyright infringement and plagiarism. The question before the court is invariably a version of: Who really wrote the movie? …

Write so well that people have to read your work — In past blog posts and podcasts I have cited the power of the old fashioned query letter. I’ve argued that smart writers writing smart queries can win the attention of even the most powerful agents and elusive producers. I’ve presented some negative letters, diatribes, rants, tantrums, and screeds guaranteed to…

Take Terminator, for instance — No medium is better than movies for depicting big things. An ocean liner crashing into an iceberg, as just one example, can be portrayed onscreen more effectively than any other medium. A shark attack, an army invading Europe: ditto. Even so, what movies do still better than that is to…

Hollywood loves a sequel — Approximately thirty-five years ago I got an idea for a screenplay I called Film School. I like to consider the script an ‘homage’ to Billy Wilder and his timeless Oscar winning Sunset Boulevard. Another way to put it is: I stole the idea from Billy Wilder. If you’re going to…

With apologies to the late standup comic icon Lenny Bruce, one of my heroes, whose timeless autobiography is entitled How to Talk Dirty and Influence People. — When I was new to the business, foul language was still banned in movies. You couldn’t use the S word, much less the F word. Indeed, the writers of MGM’s classic Dr. Erlich’s Magic Bullet, the story of the doctor who found a cure for syphilis, had to battle with…

You need provision for the vision — Many scribes, seeking to support their writing habit, seek work teaching writing. The best such job was my own: forty-plus years as a tenured full professor at a leading film school at a world class institution of higher learning. I never sought such a position; as I have recounted elsewhere…

Obviously, it has to do with money — There’s a joke about two television writers. One boasts to the other that his young daughter just spoke her first word. “What’d she say?” “ ‘Residual.’ ” Some years ago, on the same day, two legendary TV writers died: Sol Saks and Madeleine Pugh Davis. Saks wrote the first episode…

We have just one job and only we can do it — I’ve had it up to here with screenwriters acting like crybabies. As I told a hugely successful writer who was cataloguing the litany of grievances visited upon him throughout his career, in Hollywood it is a privilege even merely to be mistreated. Far worse is to be ignored. There is…

Good is how you get great — The three worst things about the ’90s were pasta salad, fruit in beer, and atrium hotels. Regarding the latter, the atrium hotel seems like a good idea. A huge open space indoors, with a vast skylight at the top, surely would brighten the interior and provide useful space for concessions…