Hey first of all THANK YOU.

Second, I am not only a UCLAx student, i am signed up for your next one-week class, so you're the one who'll get quoted next.

And to be clear, i am only an ASPIRATIONAL screenwriter.

But thanks for the boost!

I think the perception of vast new opportunity is a major cause. Cable channels testing the water with original programming (AMC with Breaking Bad, for instance -- an amazing show) and the explosion of internet content over the last few years created a larger market, and though there was no dearth of good writers already out there it *seems* like there's more opportunity for new writers to get paid to write for a living.

It's not entirely true, because -- like the Million-Dollar Spec Age -- there are countless people trying to cash in who have no real chance. (In my opinion, if you can't even spell you won't ever sell. It's common sense.)

In a way, the expanded need for content has boosted the cottage industry catering to the hopefully hopeless. Where there's a buck to be made on those aspiring to "strike it rich" you'll find screenwriting books to feed the dream. Not that those who write such books are doing it to exploit people. It's just a side-effect.

And heck, I have my own stack of books, so there ya go.

Once again, time for that Steven Wright line: "It's a small world... but I wouldn't want to paint it."

My next 1-week class is "Screenwriting as Scene-Writing" -- that one? That might have some applicability to your regular work gig. Certainly I hope so for your screenwriting.

Anyway great to 'meet' you. And look forward to an ongoing exchange of ideas.

Hey Mark, didn't you win the Cyberhouse contest last year?

How about this to bake your noodle. Screenwriting, perhaps, is nostalgia. It’s that pleasure principle marketers and advertisers bottle up in a 30 second commercial or on the printed page. It’s that return to youth, age of innocence, and a peek at the past that we can never recreate again (think of your first date, first kiss, first job, etc.).

It’s the tension we feel in our individual lives that gives us pleasure. We achieve catharsis through climax, though a rising tension that percolates throughout your screenplay. Do we want to capture that? Every day.

I dig Chris Soth’s idea of tension…. Take it this way.. tension = fear vs. hope. Something to root for, something to root against. If you keep this in every scene, I doubt you’ll find yourself in something worse than writers block.. BEING BORING.

Take a movie. Any movie. Use that formula. What do you root for in life, and what do you root against? Root for the protog getting the girl, root against your protog being alone all his life (rom com).. root for the good guys to win, root against the bad guys taking over the world (action)… and on and on we go.

Food for thought.

Scott -- yes that's the course. My pal Kate Eberle is in the one you just finished and can't stop talking about it.

Zack -- wow you have a great memory -- i won the contest for regular writing, not the screenwriting one. I guess it was the best 200 words i ever dashed off.

In terms of the larger question, why is screenwriting so hot? I got nothing. Other than this:

I am a baby boomer, and like all of my brethren and sisthren, we have a weird tendency to be reinventing ourself in our 50s. I've always loved writing, and there is something more "pure" about screenwriting than writing marketing strategy memos.

I'm in it 100% for the craft -- course if someone buys something i write, so much the better. I can buy that condo on Grand Cayman. Y'all are invited too.

I remember you won Mark, because I won the screenwriting half of it. I'll be in class too next term...

I'm looking forward to bouncing ideas off of you during the course... scott will have a handful with two ucla ex competition winners :)

Ah, now the small world starts to fill in the dots for me, Mark. I think it may have been Kate who introduced me to your business group. And I sent that link to my friend Richard (who I mentioned in my post). And he sent me the link of your post about screenwriting to me.

Wow. I got dizzy sorting all that out!

Matt (Luzid): Good point about cable nets going more toward scripted. It was announced today that Freemantle, major player in reality TV for years, just signed 5 overall deals with writer-producers as they continue to move into scripted. Same with Original Productions.

Zack: Per your post and our chat earlier, I'll use my series on Screenwriting Gurus to delve into Soth some more. Thanks.

It's because everyone loves movies ... so they want to know how they work and perhaps build them themselves ...

Ya Scott, and anyone else.. there's a free hour long MP3 on Soth's site...
http://www.screenplaybyphone.com/

check out the handout with the diagram on structure...so in his view, story is tension and time co-dependant on eachother. what is tension?

T = H v. F

or:

tension is hope vs fear

listen to his lecture, so interesting. i get no kickbacks on this, i'm just curious about all things movies/screenwriting, but he's got some amazing interviews with everyone hollywood as downloadable Mp3s.

okay and next scott... this got me thinking, whats in a title?

does it represent an antogonist/shadow/nemesis?

does it represent your protag's inner dramatic need (even if they don't know they have that need)?

do you write your title first, then FADE IN:? Or do you go UNTITLED for a bit?

Does it set a reader into a more "friendly" psychological state (they are reading your script, right, and you want everything on your side, right???) if you have a sexy or easy-to-market title?

Ever hear about a studio buying a title, just the title?

titles, titles, titles. curious minds wanna know.

Thanks Zack for the lead on Soth -- I may even sit thru his MP3. On eo fht ebook we used in one of our classes last term was "Screenwriting: the Sequence Method," which also claims to be the principal approach at USC. I found it extremely helpful. between that and Karl's class, it was a very productive term!

yes, and chris is a USC MFA grad and he bets his soul the sequence approach, which is the tentpole of usc's screenwriting methodology, and what he remarkets at the 'mini movie method, is a sure fire you will always have the ability to write what you want to you say... in that sense, there's no such thing as writers block, its that we don't know how to say what we want to write.

Why screenwriting is ever-present? My guess is money and accessibility.

Money - as you said there have been scripts sold for a great deal of money.

Accessibility - an illusion, but still I think that is what many thinks. Like "it's just to write, how hard can it be?"

The movie industry in the US are huge! It is a castle of dreams for many people.

Stellan Skarsgård told me he couldn't take a cab in LA without the taxi-driver bringing out a script from under his seat.

Desiree, I had that exact experience when I was living in LA. Took a cab from the airport home and once he found out I was a screenwriter, he produced a script and handed it back to me. I learned a lesson that day: Never tell cabbies in LA you're a screenwriter.

Scott:

I enjoy your blog and make my "real" living writing advertising. In my latest column from Electronic Retailer (a publication for direct marketers), I touch on some of the issues being debated herein. It comes out in about two weeks, but here it is:

“What’s the Story Morning Glory?”

By Rick Petry

There is something fascinating happening in this age bereft of heroes. When greed has left potholes on Wall Street large enough to sink an entire global economy, and athletes super-sized by steroids totter off pedestals built on iffy statistics, where do we turn for the mythical, inspirational figures that are supposed to guide us during a period of uncertainty and malaise? The answer lies all around us.

Given the leadership void that lurks beneath the domes of many churches and the nations’ capitols, it is ironic that to begin our story, our eyes turn to the likes of the Cinerama Dome. Note that February movie ticket sales in the United States just reached an all-time high for the month of $770 million, despite a crushing recession. People are looking for escape, but also something else – the catharsis of a narrative where the audience experiences the thrill of extraordinary danger or emotional tumult at the side of a reliable actor as protagonist before returning safely to their ordinary life. In the absence of courage from our statesmen, it is thespians playing fictitious luminaries projected on a grand scale in the darkened movie palaces that have become our most reliable role models.

While great movies are about the most important event in the hero’s life, television shows are about a significant episode in the history of their chief characters. In competition-based reality shows, the prize itself and the drama inherent in pursuing it becomes the basis for spectacle whereas makeover-type programs derive tension from the transformation. In all cases there is a dramatic arc: the subject of the drama starts in one place and ends in another, changed forever. But unlike the tableau of the silver screen that seems no more attainable to the average person than winning the lottery, these stories told in our living rooms in miniature could be any of us. So while The Amazing Race and The Biggest Loser don’t require any particular skill apart from an appetite for destruction, amid the parade of human foibles we may mock with laughter, we also recognize ourselves. Damn it if those high-definition screens don’t turn into unblinking mirrors.

Take this idea into the universe of direct marketing and the modern ability to self-publish user-generated content in blogs and on the likes of YouTube and suddenly a whiff of greatness is easily within the grasp of everyone. Hence, P90X users time-lapsed body transformations get hundreds of thousands of hits on YouTube. These are folks just like you and me who have achieved transcendence through commitment to a lifestyle change and, dare I say, a product.

I mention all this because as marketers we are all storytellers of one stripe or another. Storytellers with tales to tell about products and services and the lives they have changed. Yet I doubt many of us stop to regard our selves in such explicit terms or consider how important skillful storytelling is right now. But we should. Why? Because with discretionary income shrinking, folks become more discerning about what they will spend their dollar on, but they’ve proven time again from the Great Depression to today, that they will pay attention if the story is a tale well told. It is a truism as old as the days when the caveman spun tales of the hunt around the fire, though today’s hearth is more likely a screen and the hunter’s weapon of choice a mouse or a remote. For the marketer wondering what it takes to reel today’s consumer in, the answer may be as simple and complex as a good yarn.
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Rick Petry is a freelance writer who specializes in direct marketing. Online at rickpetry.com.

@ Zach:

The sequence approach is awesome! When I went to that method, my writing leveled up a lot.

Screenwriting is everywhere, simply because everyone thinks they can do it. Ask yourself the question, have you ever seen a movie and said to yourself, ”I can write better than that?“ If you haven't, I fear your in the minority. If you have, then you're probably writing something right now, and finding it a little harder than you first thought.

The joke in LA around the 80's you describe was, to live here, you had to have a screenplay in progress. You could probably tell the same joke today....