Marilyn Horowitz on... SCREENPLAYS TO READ

http://www.marilynhorowitz.com/

First of all, if you're going to write in genre, you should read everything and see everything in that genre because you have to transcend it. Good, bad and indifferent. Basic teaching screenplays, it's hard to say. I don't teach any screenplays, because I see movies, I want people to mentally write movies. So I have a different agenda.
But screenplays I recommend are anything by Sam Ravelson who wrote all the Lubich comedies, The Shop Around the Corner, all of Billy Wilder, Ailel Diamond screenplays. Not just comedies, I think that In the Line of Fire, Die Hard, Lethal Weapon, even though they're old are classic triumph variete of really well-crafted action thrillers. Somewhere between the three of them you get an almost perfection when you study them.
Aliens is probably the best horror script I've read in a long time. Really scary script. Seven -- Andrew Kevin Wong, who in general is one of my favorite screenwriters -- is a screenplay where you have what McKee calls an inciting incident. Which I prefer to call an inciting accident, if we have to use that term, happens every 10 minutes and is a structure I prefer.




Marilyn Horowitz, the author of "How to Write a Screenplay in 10 Weeks" and creator of The Horowitz System™, is an award-winning university teacher, a producer, a screenwriter, a script consultant and a successful writing coach. Her students include published novelists, screenwriters and award-winning filmmakers. Her website is: http://www.marilynhorowitz.com/

Category:

Film & Animation

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• screenwriting
• movie
• scripts
• films
• genre
• billy
• wilder
• die
• hard
• aliens
• mckee
• se7en
• inciting
• lethal
• weapon