Screenplay: Writing the Picture [Paperback]

Robin U. Russin (Author), William Missouri Downs (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 1, 2003

This is a complete screenwriting course -- from developing a theme, researching a story, plotting and structuring a script, developing characters, and plying methods that aid the actual writing and rewriting processes to understanding the ins and outs of marketing and pitching scripts. Well-written, comprehensive, and filled with illustrative screenplay examples, both innovative and tried-and-true writing techniques, sage advice from veteran writers, and pertinent writing anecdotes, this one-of-a-kind screenwriting book will help both novices and working screenwriters to improve and sell their scripts.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

ROBIN U. RUSSIN

Robin was educated at Harvard, Oxford, Rhode Island School of Design and UCLA, where he received his MFA in screenwriting. A Rhodes Scholar and member of Phi Beta Kappa, he has written for film, theater, television and various national publications. He has twice won the Jack Nicholson Award for screenwriting.

Among his entertainment credits are the #1 box office feature On Deadly Ground, the eco-thriller starring Steven Seagal and Michael Caine, which Robin co-wrote. Six of his other original feature spec scripts have been bought or put under option by both studio and independent producers. Robin also recently produced an independent feature, Shark In A Bottle.

For television, Robin has written, produced and directed numerous segments and specials for America's Most Wanted, as well as having written for half-hour television animation series. He was also Senior Producer of the hour-long primetime series, Vital Signs, which aired on ABC, and co-produced Alcatraz--the True Story, a Fox TV one hour dramatic special. He is currently adapting a novel for the screen, as well as writing an independent feature, both to be produced next year.

His stage play, Painted Eggs, was produced at the Harman Avenue Theater in Los Angeles.

Robin teaches screenwriting at UCLA.

WILLIAM MISSOURI DOWNS Bill earned an MFA in screenwriting from UCLA and an MFA in acting from the University of Illinois. For many years, he studied playwriting under Lanford Wilson and Milan Stitt at the Circle Rep Theatre in New York.

In Hollywood he wrote for such NBC sitcoms as My Two Dads, Amen and Fresh Prince Of Bel Air. He sold the movie Executive Privilege to Tri-star, and won the Jack Nicholson Award for screenwriting.

His plays have been produced all over the world, from the Kennedy Center to the Berkeley Rep, and from the International Theatre festival in Israel to the Hexis in Singapore. A few highlights are: Innocent Thoughts winner of the National Playwrights Award, Jewish Sports Heroes and Texas Intellectuals, which took first place at the Mill Mountain Theatre's Festival Of New Plays, Dead White Males a Eugene O'Neill semi-finalist and Kabuki Medea, winner of the Bay Area Critics Award for best production in San Francisco and the Jefferson Award for best production in Chicago. Bill is the co-author of the book, Playwriting: From Formula To Form, published by Harcourt Brace.

He lives in Wyoming. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Product Details

• Paperback: 424 pages
• Publisher: Silman-James Press (March 1, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1879505703
• ISBN-13: 978-1879505704
• Product Dimensions: 9.8 x 1 x 7.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.7 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (33 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #598,496 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

15 of 16 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Putting The Writer in the Picture July 18, 2001

By William Hare

Format:Paperback

Russin and Downs received the highest tribute from Lew Hunter, the head of the screenwriting department at UCLA, who called "Screenplay: Writing the Picture" the best work he had read on this subject, including his own. My own experience in reading the book prompts me to echo Hunter's words of high praise.

So many times "how to" books in different areas can be downright dull, like a series of "do's" and "dont's" written in the manner of an old Sears Catalogue. Such is not the case here. This book uses numerous examples from scripts of major films to put the prospective writer on track in determining which techniques work as well as those that do not. The major element separating screenwriting from all other types of fictional writing endeavors is the all-important presence of the camera. Accordingly, the authors demonstrate the importance of stressing visuality and exercising word economy in crafting a professional level screenplay.

One area stressed which greatly assisted me, someone coming from a non-fiction and journalistic background, was the importance of using index cards to set up the story. The authors explain that the reason why this technique is so important in structuring a story is that, with the profound influence of the camera and the role it plays, it is important for a writer to see the scenes unfolding pictorially before beginning the process of writing words to accompany the images.

William Hare

16 of 18 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars First "Textbook" on Screenwriting I've Seen -- Great Read! June 27, 2001

By Dr. Ervin Nieves

Format:Paperback

Robin U. Russin's and William Missouri Down's SCREENPLAY: WRITING THE PICTURE is the first "textbook" quality paperback I've seen in screenwriting literature. Chapter 2 (Format), together with Chapters 12 (Narrative), 13 (Dialogue), and 14 (Rewriting) provide a solid foundation in the mechanics of writing. If you augment these chapters with Trottier's chapter on format in THE SCREENWRITERS BIBLE, Flinn's format section in HOW NOT TO WRITE A SCREENPLAY, and Argentini's entire book, ELEMENTS OF STYLE FOR SCREENWRITERS, you pretty much cover the mechanics of writing a properly formatted script. Russin and Downs also present a solid overview of story building, which can be augmented by reading Jennifer Lerch's 500 WAYS TO BEAT THE HOLLYWOOD SCRIPT READER. Russin and Down's text doesn't favor any structural approach over another. One is given a thorough summary of various screenwriting structures which would take reading many screewriting volumes to distill: three-act, five act, seven act, mythic, and more contemporary structures. What I enjoyed most in SCREENWRITING: WRITING THE PICTURE were chapters 8 (Beat, Scenes, and Sequences - which identify building emotion, rhythmn, pacing, and coherence in one's script), 9 (Scene Cards -- which has the entire movie "SEA OF LOVE" on film cards to teach us how it's done!), 11 (The Structure of Genres - a wonderful overview of different expectations of readers and audiences when "reading" a particular kind of script or film), and the entire third part on writing (the chapters on Narrative, Dialogue, and Rewriting). No one screenwriting book has it all, but SCREENPLAY: WRITING THE PICTURE makes a wonderful effort to do so. The authors are humble, yet entertaining. They offer no shortcuts, make no claims to be better screenwriting authors than anyone else. In fact, Russin and Downs constantly recommend books by other authors to supplement their own well-written sections on a particular topic, when in fact they did such a knock-out job, little supplementary reading is needed. As a first dip into screenwriting literature, SCREENWRITING: WRITING THE PICTURE is a wonderful splash! And DO READ other wonderful books on screenwriting by: Jennifer Lerch, Denny Martin Flinn, Paul Argentini, David Trottier, Katherine Atwell Herbert, Michael Hauge, Robert McKee, Vicki King, Lew Hunter, Tom Lazarus, Linda Seger, D.B. Gilles, Linda Palmer, David Howard & Edward Mabley, Pamela Wallace, Andrew Horton, and all the other wonderful screenwriting authors, including the UCLA and USC gurus: Richard Walter, Lew Hunter, and Irwin R. Blacker. And don't forget the two "King Williams" of screenwriting pedagogy: William Goldman and William Froug! And the many wonderful interview books by: Jurgen Wolff & Kerry Cox, Joel Engel, William Froug (again), et. al. Read them all! But also read SCREENWRITING: WRITING THE PICTURE. It has one of the funniest jokes on screenwriting I've read: "A producer and a screenwriter are stuck in the desert...."

13 of 15 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars The new favorite July 4, 2004

By Robert Graves VINE™ VOICE

Format:Paperback

The vast majority of screenwriting books fall into 2 categories: pretty good, or pretty average. Then there is the occasional book that is horrible - Robert Berman's "Fade In" for example - and the very rare book that is extraordinary. Screenplay: Writing the Picture falls into this last category.

The problem with most screenwriting books is that they manage to cover only a small angle of the process, or they try to span the gamut and do it so thinly as to be useless. Writing the Picture succeeds in covering every aspect of writing a screenplay (or any work of fiction for that matter), and presenting the info in a way that makes it sink in to an applicable level - more than any other book available.

It's written as a textbook, and will surely work its way into all screenwriting classrooms across the country within the next few years. Aside from the instruction, there are several great appendices, including a list of other screenwriting books that you need to have, specific clich?s to avoid for each genre, where to find scripts and where to attend graduate screenwriting programs.

I do have one complaint though. The degree to which these guys pander to political correctness in the use of gender-specific pronouns is truly staggering - I've never seen anything like it. If a subject is of an unspecified gender, they will always go with "she," and on the rare occasion they do use "he" they always write "he or she" or "s/he." They can't even write a simple euphemism like "The main man." They write - and this is not a joke - they write "the main wo/man," and then a page later write "right hand wo/man."

Personally, this really annoys me. It's distracting from the text, and approximately 1% of the population actually gives a rip about this anyway. It's unfortunate they chose this route over the much more readable usage in Robert McKee's "Story." In his book he states very simply, right up front, "...I have avoided constructions that distract the reader's eye, such as the annoying alternation of `she' and `her' with `he' and `him,' the repetitions `he and she' and `him and her,' the awkward `s/he' and `her/im,' and the ungrammatical `the' and `them' as neuter singulars. Rather I use the nonexclusive `he' and `him' to mean `writer.'" We have no such luxury in Writing the Picture, which is filled with enough "wo/man's" and "he or she's" to, well, write a book.