Customer Reviews

Raindance Writers' Lab, Second Edition: Write + Sell the Hot Screenplay

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Raindance Writers' Lab: Write + Sell The Hot Screenplay is a book and CD-ROM created to speed aspiring screenplay writers to critical and financial success. Written from the ground up by Elliot Grove (Founder and Director of the Raindance Film Festival), Raindance Writers' Lab starts with the most basic tenets of how to create a screenplay and how to secure rights to true-life stories, offers extensive advice on how to properly tell a good, captivating story, and concludes with perhaps the most critical lessons of how to pitch a story and secure a deal. The CD-ROM files require Adobe Acrobat Reader 4.0 or higher, and also contain MP3/MPEG-1 audio clips and video interviews that require a media player (Windows Media Player or Macintosh Quicktime recommended). Final Draft demo software is also included on the CD-ROM. Raindance Writers' Lab is an excellent technical how-to source, and highly recommended for film students and aspiring script writers with an interest in writing a commercially viable screenplay.

Elliot Grove's engaging style ensures you'll write your best script yet. Just where other guides stop dead, this book goes on to offer fresh insights on how to sell your hot script.
Energetically written by a true enthusiast - Elliot founded the Raindance Film Festival - it is full of weaselly strategies to get you ahead of the game.
It even comes with a CD Rom featuring interviews with writers and filmmakers, sample contracts and screenplay formats. What more can be said? Beat the competition. Get it. Now.

This book offered good tips on what to watch out for as you write your screenplay. I especially enjoyed the inclusion of a memo from a hollywood executive detailing what he needs to see in a screenplay.

Highlights:

The side note of the frustrated writer who, as an experiment, submitted the Chinatown screenplay with the title and names changed. The feedback he got was funny... and enlightening.

The dangers of attaching people to your screenplay who may put a drag on it's chances of getting made into a movie.

In summary:

I really give the book 4 1/2 stars but I rounded up to 5 because the book offered so much that many other books I've read about screenplay never did. My hesitation at giving the book 5 unqualified stars was that I felt like it was missing a chapter(or at least an online resource). The first chapters of the "Raindance Writer's Lab" set up a "promise of the premise" that I would read a chapter where all the how-to techniques were actually applied comprehensively and in an iterative fashion. Specifically, an inclusion of a sequence of a screenplay (or an entire short screenplay) taken from initial idea, to outline, to first draft, to intermediate draft(s), to final draft. In each sequence of revisions Grove could nail all the issues that keep the screenplay from achieving it's maximum audience interest (whether the audience is a Hollywood reader or a film audience).