The Best Writing Advice I Ever Got

Hello,

there is a story advice I received from Brian McDonald: "Read old screenplays. Read classic screenplays. (...) Read/watch interviews with the writers of these classic scripts.". As he said, so I did: I watched an 60 minutes interview from Julius Epstein, recorded by the Writers Guild in 1995. You can watch it here: The Writer Speaks: Julius Epstein

Julius Epstein was one of the writers of the script of Casablanca (1942), which might the best movie in history.

Here is a summary of what you can learn by watching 'The Writer Speaks: Julius Epstein:

Julius Epstein is talking about following:

• he wrote each night one original story 10 - 15 pages/story, without dialogue (in the old days you did not need to have a finished script to sell it)
• he explains why he mostly adapted plays or books as screenplay, instead of using origianl stories: The reason for that is, that the Studio, the Director, Actors, etc. they all rip the story apart. As long as he adapted it from plays or books, it did not feel that painful
• he also talks about his writing method: (1) long hand on (2) yellow legal pad (3) he never reads what he has written, until the first draft is completed (4) after having finished the draft, he read it and was surprised about how good it was, or how bad it was. (5) Every scene needs to have a value in it (a bite, an entertaining factor for the audience)
• there are two evil words in the industry and they both start with the letter "i": Input & Improve
• About Camera Angles: He stopped writing them, because the directors pay no attention to it, so he stopped it.

Thanks for reading,

Best,

André