[…] The tornado scene sequence in The Wizard of Oz is memorable for a number of reasons, not the least of which is without it, there’s no Oz and therefore no story. This meteorological event is (my terminology) The Lock, serving as the major plot point that transitions the story from the Ordinary World (Kansas) into the Extraordinary World (Oz). The script, credited to Noel Langley & Florence Ryerson & Edgar Allan Woolf, based on the books by L. Frank Baum (in IMDB, there are 15 other people who provided uncredited writing services for the project), is …read more […]

This'll sound weird...but that's pretty much my writing style. WRITE W/O CAMERA SHOTS. Think of them, see them vefore me, but...WRITE W/O CAMERA SHOTS. I'm also big on ellipses. WALDO SALT write exactly this way in MIDNIGHT COWBOY, which the director, John Schles. pretty much shot verbatim. But here's what's funny... I got gigged for that EXACT style by Readers. Which basically tells me...those SAME READERS, aren't top professionals to begin with, since I don't really get gigged on plot and characters. But, in today's fear-based climate in Hollywood...we know many unknown writing talents aren't even being looked at. That's why I'm starting up my own prodco. and shooting shorts as a calling card, and not just relying on the spec game. So...I either cut back on that style for one spec; or...stay on that style and be more "picky" about prodcos I send my work to.

Of course, back in the day when Oz was filmed, there were very few spec scripts and no computers. If you were writing a script for a studio, you could pretty much guarantee that it would end up being a shooting script.