Scan barcode
A review by thekarpuk
Writing Movies for Fun and Profit: How We Made a Billion Dollars at the Box Office and You Can, Too! by Robert Ben Garant, Thomas Lennon
4.0
Some reviews of this book have referred to sections of it as "fluff". What they call fluff, I call the funny bits. This book is as much a mockery of screenwriting guides and Hollywood as it is an in depth look into the matter.
Even though I write, I've never really had a compulsion to go out to LA and give the world of big studio screenwriting a whirl, and this book has in no way changed my mind. While they pretty explicitly state some parts of this, it's valuable to remember that these guys primarily sell broad comedies to big studios, so their advice is probably more applicable to comedy writers than someone who wants to write dramas.
The bits where they take the stuffing out of failed writers turned public speakers is probably my favorite, and since Goodreads went dead as I attempted to save a much more thoughtful review, I'm going to close on this quote:
"Screenplays are like blueprints. A guy who's drawn up a lot of blueprints that have never actually been made into buildings is not an 'architecture guru,' he's an 'unemployed douchebag.' A guy who talks about screen-writing but who's never sold a screenplay is not a 'screenwriting guru,' he's a 'lecture circuit bullshit artist.' From now on, that's what we'll call them."
Even though I write, I've never really had a compulsion to go out to LA and give the world of big studio screenwriting a whirl, and this book has in no way changed my mind. While they pretty explicitly state some parts of this, it's valuable to remember that these guys primarily sell broad comedies to big studios, so their advice is probably more applicable to comedy writers than someone who wants to write dramas.
The bits where they take the stuffing out of failed writers turned public speakers is probably my favorite, and since Goodreads went dead as I attempted to save a much more thoughtful review, I'm going to close on this quote:
"Screenplays are like blueprints. A guy who's drawn up a lot of blueprints that have never actually been made into buildings is not an 'architecture guru,' he's an 'unemployed douchebag.' A guy who talks about screen-writing but who's never sold a screenplay is not a 'screenwriting guru,' he's a 'lecture circuit bullshit artist.' From now on, that's what we'll call them."