Wednesday, October 15, 2008

Blake Snyder has made a career writing and selling big spec scripts. He also wrote a book about screenwriting, SAVE THE CAT. I'm probably going to interview him for this blog. What should I ask him?

Labels: interviews

10:18 PM

5 Comments:

Why is he so damned positive all the time?

Doesn't he know screenwriters are supposed to be bitter and anti-social?

To borrow a line from Lou Grant, Blake's got spunk. I hate spunk.

Now I'm gonna have to be positive and social and goal oriented and shit. Damn.

By  odocoileus, at 11:32 PM  

What's he have against Memento?

By  DougJ, at 12:22 AM  

Here's an actual serious question. When he writes a spec, who is he thinking about. Is he just writing something he wants, or is he thinking about a certain audience? At some point, he's got to be thinking about commercial viability, but when does that come up?

By  Tim W., at 12:51 AM  

I've seen his method of writing loglines, and I like the approach ... but hasn't anyone else pointed out how fricken long the loglines end up? They end up looking like Microsoft tried to summarise one of their EULAs into a single paragraph.

Sure, it might have all the needed information, but the result just seems cumbersome and not very catchy.

So I guess my question is simple:

(1) His logline method seems like an interesting experiment .. but have people actually use the resulting loglines to sell anything?

Since these questions are free, here's another one:

(2) I was going to buy his book 'Save the Cat goes to the Movies', but then I noticed that his first book was subtitled 'The Last Book on Screenwriting you'll ever need'.

Does that mean that he suggests people don't buy his books from now on !?

Thanks,

Mac

By  Mac Harwood, at 7:26 AM  

I've found the StC methodology helpful in outlining features -- does he have any plans to adapt it for television writing? It'd be interesting to see what elements of the framework would be suited to TV structure. I may give it a whack myself in the pilot I've just started.

By  Kira Snyder, at 3:40 PM  

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