FYI, my second-hand copy of Story came in the mail yesterday and I started reading it last night. Phenomenal book! My only complaint is that the previous reader highlighted a lot of passages. It’s really annoying — like having someone reading over your shoulder and commenting. Fortunately they only made it through the first three chapters. Quitter!

I just checked your post on required filmmaking books, and thought it was completely missing some important ones.

To specifically stay on the screenwriting topic here: Amy, I highly recommend you skip the class and pick up Robert McKee’s STORY and Drew Yanno’s The 3rd Act.

Neither really talks about screenplay formatting (Syd Field comes to mind), which you can find in a million other books, online, and as the inherent awesomeness of Final Draft software. STORY should be required reading for anyone who wants to make a movie, from Screenwriter to Production Assistant. The 3rd Act deals with knowing your ending before you start and how to build yourself back to it. Endings are hard and this book helps. It does focus on the third act, but in doing so, it lets you know what the first and second acts need to have to make a good resolution to the main conflict and how to put seeds in throughout the story to make that resolution have a strong impact.

I would completely skip Halperin’s Writing the Second Act. I thought it would be good like The 3rd Act, but was horribly written and didn’t help at all.

There are other great screenwriting books out there, but I highly recommend starting with Story, and then once you feel ready to tackle to project, moving on to The 3rd Act.

I’ve also picked up Paul Chitlik’s Rewrite, but haven’t quite conquered the blank page yet. Perhaps Joe this book will help you, and you can tell us about it on your endeavor?

And since I am on topic here and not at your other post: Joe, I agree, many filmmaking books suck the fun out of the process. Syd Field is a little to “paint by numbers” screenwriting (or is it “write by numbers” – gosh, I love those binary code scripts) for me. I feel these books give a solid understanding of the game so you can go out and write something structured and producible.

Josh

PS- 2 other books I would add off the top of my head to your filmmaking list that are instructive, but come from filmmakers who love what they do and want to share that. Both are books by editors on editing (and in my mind, editing isn’t that far off from screenwriting in a structural sense):

Walter Murch’s In The Blink of an Eye
Edward Dmytryk’s On Film Editing

Overall wordpress is great. tumblr.com is good, but doesn’t have multiple page options. Both allow you to edit the html of your blog. WordPress also has some great templates. You can import the stuff from your old blog, too. Give it a shot, it’s free!

That friend?

JAMES JOYCE.

Hey, how do you like WordPress? I’m thinking of making the switch for my blog and I’m wondering what you think of them.

http://www.youtube.com/user/joeavella

I knew deep down that a seminar wouldn’t change my lazy-fuckedness. But it would’ve been a good time killer.

Hope to see some new and brilliantly hilarious shorts from you on FOD soon.

Unless the seminar is free, I’d skip it. From what is sounds like, you have ideas, but no idea how to turn it into a screenplay. That’s just about everyone. Don’t know what a seminar will do for you, except make you feel bad about how much writing you’re not doing. If it’s expert advice you’re looking for, try these sites:

http://www.wordplayer.com/
http://johnaugust.com/answers
Lots of brilliant writing advice from real professionals.
I have a post about my film maker’s required reading. Hope that helps.

Check those out first. Maybe they’ll give you the push you’re looking for. I don’t want to rag on writing seminars or instruction in general. You say your ‘lazy as fuck’, a seminar won’t change that.

Good luck, and thanks for stopping by!

I just sauntered over here from FOD, where I’d been checking your page to see if you’d posted anything new.

Interesting to read your comments about screenplay writing. I’m thinking about taking a week-long seminar later this summer on basic screenplay writing. In your experience, is this kind of thing useful or should I just read a good book on the subject and get on with it? I have “treatments” (i.e., scrawled paragraphs from the last time I got drunk) that I want to flesh out, but I’m one of those people who puts off the actual work. I think it’s called “being a lazy fuck” in the vernacular.

Actually, I’m just commenting because Josh Roberts did.

Amy(4birds)