The King's Speech Wins Critics' Choice Best Original Screenplay

What do you think of the screenwriters' Critics' Choice Awards? David Seidler has won the Best Original Screenplay for The King's Speech and Aaron Sorkin Best Adapted Screenplay for The Social Network.

Both screenplays were pretty good, and Colin Firth certainly deserved his win for Best Actor.

Check out the full list here and make up your own predictions for the Oscars.

Best Original Screenplay: David Seidler (The King's Speech)

Best Adapted Screenplay: Aaron Sorkin (The Social Network)


Best Picture: The Social Network

Best Actor: Colin Firth (The King's Speech)

Best Actress: Natalie Portman (Black Swan)

Best Supporting Actor: Christian Bale (The Fighter)

Best Supporting Actress: Melissa Leo (The Fighter)

Best Young Actor/Actress: Hailee Steinfeld (True Grit)

Best Acting Ensemble: The Fighter

Best Director: David Fincher(The Social Network)

Best Cinematography: Wally Pfister (Inception)


Best Art Direction: Guy Hendrix Dyas (Inception)

Best Visual Effects: Inception

Best Sound: Inception

Best Animated Feature: Toy Story 3

Best Action Movie: Inception

Best Comedy: Easy A

Best Picture Made For Television: The Pacific

Best Foreign Language Film: The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo

Best Documentary Feature: Waiting For Superman

Best Song: If I Rise (127 Hours)

Best Score: Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross (The Social Network)

The Joel Siegel Award: Matt Damon

The Music+Film Award: Quentin Tarantino

My Screenwriting Book is finished!

I have now completed my screenwriting book on how to write screenplays of originality and cinematic passion. I'll be doing a countdown to publication so please check back on this blog for that.

In the meantime, have a look at my in-depth articles on my Unique Screenwriting website:
http://www.unique-screenwriting.com

Writers' Guild of America Best Screenplay Nominations 2010

Check out the WGA's best original and best adapted screenplay nominations here:
http://tinyurl.com/39s33d4

What do you think of the list? Any screenwriter you think should be on it? Anyone you think shouldn't be on it?

How I Recovered My Screenwriting Voice and Storytelling Instincts

With three producers asking to read one of my screenplays last week, I've been madly rewriting. And what's amazing is that writing my screenwriting books has had the most extraordinary effect on my own writing.

I went back to this script after quite a while away from it and discovered a miracle had occurred. I was approaching the story with a boldness and adventurousness I hadn't had before. I had made a quantum leap in my cinematic powers, in my dialogue, in pace, tension, subtext, exposition - the lot!

But you know what else I discovered? As well as working on this draft  I went right back to a much earlier draft.  And the most staggering revelation hit me.

Most of the stuff from the very early version which I would later cut out was really good. The recent draft didn't have a distinctive voice, mood and tone had become tamed, the pace was needlessly fast or just not right because I was following the '3-act structure' and so on. In short, everything that had made the very early version alive and interesting had evaporated.

I wrote the much earlier draft before I bought all the screenwriting guru books and attended courses and masterclasses. I've always known that following the so-called rules had damaged my screenwriting, but I simply had no idea how catastrophic that damage was.

So, having been on a mission to help writers break away from the rigid templates and useless guidance from the gurus, I now have an even more passionate desire to do everything I can to make sure screenwriters are given the confidence to trust their own voice, be daring, be bold, and resist all attempts by the 'experts' to turn them into timid, bland writers producing scripts that no one will want to buy.

I'm now hoping that my series of screenwriting books that give real hands-on guidance for creating screenplays of originality and cinematic power will have the same  amazing quantum leap effect for my readers.

So here's to exciting, innovative screenwriting!

Trust the Actor

It's one of the hardest things a screenwriter has to avoid and it's something which usually marks out a writer's inexperience:

Punching the line for the actor.

Typically, it looks like this:
                                         CHARACTER
                                                (angrily)


                                          CHARACTER
                                         (head in her hands)


                                         CHARACTER
                                          (looking soulful)


Actors hate this. They're often referred to as 'wrylies' as in:


                                        CHARACTER
                                             (wryly)

If your script is good, there's no need to put these in anyway. But most of all, it shows that the writer lacks confidence in their own ability to express meaning and subtlety of emotion.

Next time you feel tempted to tell the act how to play a line, stop. Imagine the moment or scene as it will play on the screen. The valuable lesson to be learnt is:

Trust the actor.

 




                                               

Yes, Writing is Rewriting, But...

I've gone back to a screenplay after being away from it for a while. And as always I'm struck at how differently I feel about it.

But why should that be unexpected? In the time I've been away from the script, things in my life have changed. I'm not the same person I was when I wrote that earlier draft. The world around me has changed. So it isn't strange that I now come back to it and find how some of it screams No! This is awful, and how some of it tells me, Yes, this is really quite good. Or Yes, that bit's brilliant. Or, the most painful of all: I might as well forget the whole thing and start a new script.

I'm also a writer who talks to my writing. I ask it questions. I'm forever having conversations with my characters. Trying to find out what's going on inside them, why they do what they do, why they feel what they feel.

With this script I've gone back to, I'm cutting back on many scenes because the whole story needs a new and different rhythm. What I hadn't seen before I now see with glaring clarity. And that's the thing I find both maddening and exhilarating about rewriting. It's no good saying to myself 'My didn't I see that before?'

I could not have seen it before because that was then and this is now.

In other words, I've changed. The world's changed. Now the screenplay must change.

Charlie Kaufman Articles

By the way, re: my last post. I've written articles about Charlie Kaufman's Adaptation on my site here:

 http://www.unique-screenwriting.com/adaptation-screenwriting.html

http://www.unique-screenwriting.com/adaptation-screenwriting-2.html