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Screenwriting for Dummies |
Author: Laura Schellhardt
Published: 2003-01-02 |
List price: $19.99
Our price: $13.59
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In stock soon. Order now to get in line. First come, first served.
As of: January 07th, 2009 06:45:59 PM
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Customer comments on this selection.
 A Decent Place to Start for Beginners... Could Have Been Better, Though
This book is a fairly comprehensive guide to writing screenplays. You'll find tips on how to structure your screenplay, advice on how to craft compelling plots and deeper characters, instructions for formatting your script to industry standards, and finally a guide to marketing your script to Hollywood agents and producers. I was going to give this book 4 stars, but ultimately decided on 3 stars due to the author's unfortunate habit of using music metaphors to explain film industry techniques. There are two problems with this... 1) For a reader who has no experience as a composer or a performing orchestral musician, the author's use of one artform (music) to explain another (filmmaking) is completely useless as the analogy will not make any sense and only serve to further confuse the reader 2) In addition to being confusing for non-musicians, these analogies are infuriating to those of us who actually do understand music, because of the author's ignorance of the subject matter. This is most evident in one example (there are many others that I won't take the time to detail) where the author claims that a pause in dialogue is analogous to a grace note in music. She obviously has confused grace notes for rests. A grace note is a short note that precedes a written note, typically used to create an accent. A rest indicates one or more beats of silence. She is way off the mark here, and it makes her look more than a little foolish to those in the know. In summary, I would recommend this book as a starter for beginners, with a warning to ignore her attempts at analogy and focus in on those parts of the book where she explains things in a straight-forward and less colorful manner.
 An Excellent Introduction
For those who have little idea of where to start in writting a screen play, this book will get you on the right track. It was worth the money and is helping me think about all the details that a project can enclude.
A good start but not the only resource
I have never written a script before so the "For Dummies" title, I thought, applied to me. However, as much as the book offers a lot on formulating a story, I was looking more for actual tips on structure and acceptable formatting of the physical script. There is very little of that in this book. The majority of the book deals with how to come up with a character, conflict, plot and all the other components of a story (something that I already have). If you are in the same boat as me, I suggest Christopher Keane's book, How to Write a Selling Screenplay.
Screenwriting for Dummies
This is a nice book to offer up important information if you have some silly desire to try to write a screenplay. It gives you plenty of basic information concerning proper formatting and how to deal with your ideas.
Although it doesn't write it for you, if you happen to be serious about joining the (probably) millions that are trying to break into the business, it's a good start.
Charles A. Reap, Jr., author of "Devil's Game," and "My Friend Sam."
 Great
This book is great would recommend it to any one interested in writing for film or tv. adios
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