I get that Richard Linklater is not interested in writing classic narrative films, loosely defined as a single main character chasing a single goal in spite of intense opposition. As a character in Everybody Wants Some!! says while stoned (and I’m paraphrasing), “You have the program

Un Prophète (A Prophet), the French nominee for the best foreign film Oscar in 2010, is a revolutionary step in French cinema and the world entertainment business. It’s an epic crime story, but it’s not told from the top down, giving us the “big picture,” like

Using advanced storytelling techniques (see the Advanced Screenwriting Class and the Masterpiece Software) is probably the single best way to set yourself apart from the Hollywood screenwriting crowd. But this approach is extremely challenging as well, and if you aren’t careful

Stephen Gaghan’s Syriana is one of the most ambitious scripts to come out of Hollywood in a long time. His story strategy is a strange combination of showing the audience an extremely big picture while also placing them in extreme ignorance. He tells a very horizontal story, showing m

Crash is an excellent example of horizontal storytelling, for both what works and what doesn’t. Horizontal storytelling is everything happening at the same time. Vertical, or linear, storytelling is what happens next. Horizontal storytelling works primarily by comparison. Vertic

Every once in a while a screenwriter creates an original script that manages to maintain its originality all the way to the screen. Alan Ball’s American Beauty is such a script. Though it is not obviously filmic in a “Star Wars” kind of way, it is a classic example o

The Joy Luck Club shows writers the commercial and critical success that is possible by using the structures and techniques of advanced screenwriting. I have long argued that the old 3-act structure is too elementary for anyone wanting to write a mainstream Hollywood script that will