Readers will delight at the best scenes ever written. They will find old favorites and savor scenes new to them. With each scene, Barnaby Conrad provides insights as to what the author wishes to accomplish with this passage and the literary devices he or she employs. Any avid reader will enjoy Conrad's ""101 Best Scenes Ever Written,"" but countless fledgling and established writers will benefit enormously by sampling and studying these gems from...

Learn the inside thinking behind 23 highly successful, classic, low-budget movies and discover techniques for making a little go a long way. Includes in-depth interviews with screenwriters with such credits as the Academy Award-nominated films You Can Count on Me, Metropolitan, and Capote - plus such classics as Repo Man, Re-Animator, Paris, Texas, Living in Oblivion, Suburbia, Hester Street, Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, and Eve's Bayou.

The film is an exploration of power and sex. Maud is a strong-willed filmmaker who suffers a stroke. Bedridden but determined to pursue her latest film project, she sees Vilko, a con man who swindles celebrities, on a TV talk show. Interested in him for her new film, the two meet and Maud soon finds herself falling for Vilko's manipulative charm as their parasitic relationship hurtles out of control.

In 1937 Hollywood, gossip columnist Sheilah Graham's star is on the rise, while literary wonder boy F. Scott Fitzgerald's career is slowly drowning in booze. But the once-famous author, desperate to make money penning scripts for the silver screen, is charismatic enough to attract the gorgeous Miss Graham, a woman who exposes the secrets of others while carefully guarding her own. Like Fitzgerald's hero Jay Gatsby, Graham has meticulously constructed...

Introduction / by Barbara Morgan -- 1. Inspiration. A conversation with Randall Wallace -- 2. Story. What makes a great story : a conversation with Bill Wittliff ; Steven Zaillian on where the story originates ; Peter Hedges on crafting story ; Lawrence Kasdan on story and theme -- 3. Process. A conversation with John Lee Hancock ; Sacha Gervasi on getting started ; The basics with Nicholas Kazan ; Advice from Bill Wittliff ; Anne Rapp's writing routine...

A fascinating look at the art of filmmaking, including stories and clips from the making of some of the greatest films of the '70s and '80s. Focuses on several men who made a huge impact on a craft that's vital to the making of any film.

This novel follows Bran, a high school graduate in California who is raised by her 'common-law-stepfather' in a rowdy home following her mother's death. After graduating from high school, Bran stays in town and is introduced to Peter, a college student who is engaged, and the two begin an intense relationship revolving around philosophy, literature, and their attraction for one another. Encouraged by Peter, Bran begins writing scripts for their friend,...

"A biography of the Oscar-winning screenwriter who broke the Hollywood blacklist"--Jacket. In the course of their interviews Dalton Trumbo told Bruce Cook, who was too ""embarrassed"" to ask, that he joined the Communist Party casually in 1943 and drifted away, unaltered (""I changed no beliefs"") in 1948, then rejoined briefly in the mid-1950s--which is just what you might have learned from the New York Times Trumbo obituary. Cook's only equipment...