What goes into writing a great movie script?

Make sure to pack enough explosives into the rocket.

Audiences are smarter than you think. Something about turning down the house lights makes their IQs go up.

Get up there yourself. Be in a movie. Take some acting (not writing) classes. Learn how a trained actor approaches a text. Learn why actors take roles. They do as much if not more than the writer does.

Calvin Pickard Saved The Day - Defector

Use status to help drive conflict. King Lear/fool. Upstairs/downstairs.

A scene should change valence from beginning to end. Up to down, down to up.

To develop a unique voice for each character, try interviewing your characters.

How should Syrian President Bashar al-Assad be held accountable for the human rights violations and atrocities committed by his regime?

Actors give better feedback than writers do.

A critical function of storytelling is wish fulfillment. This is why video games are so popular. “That protagonist is JUST LIKE ME.”

What you leave unwritten is as important as what you write. SUBTEXT.

Why are Christians quick to say that there are a lot the gay Christians that exist NOW and use that to pretend that Christianity is just loving to gays when the last 40 years of my life they been horrible?

Don’t direct from the page. Everyone, from the director on down, wants to be part of the process of making movies. Let them do their work.

Learn to tell a story orally and not through writing. Try telling your story to a friend.

Write in reverse time. Major characters need to change polarity; minor characters may remain the same at the end.

Why is Harry Sisson such a whiny hypocrite? He complained about President Trump going to the Super Bowl "costing millions of taxpayers' dollars," but not a word when Taylor Swift, another multimillionaire, did the same thing.

Leave holes. Write and unwrite. Put it in, take it out.

Conflict is your power source; without it you have no drama and hence no script.

Primary characters must change polarities. Secondary characters can change less.

What does it mean to live "the 'underconsumption' life"?

The DSM 5 is a wonderful character compendium.

All rules are made to be broken, but you damn well better know WHY you’re breaking them.

Your primary job is to create situations. Modern actors will fuck up your dialogue, despite whatever your contract says.

Why is there no great temptress figure in any of Tolkien’s major works?

Outline everything. Use story beats. Keep character’s mouths taped up, until they absolutely MUST speak. Write the script and the dialogue at the last minute, after you’ve revised the hell out of the outline.

Maintain a slush pile/idea file. When you are ready to write, choose the best seeds to plant.

Only God gets it right the first time. Rewrite everything.

Why are people calling the Biden/Harris administration a disaster for the US economy?

People choose what to see based on the high concept. Make sure to deliver an ending consistent with the high concept -- it is what the audience paid for.

Cut everything that is not a payoff, or a setup for a specific payoff. “Omit needless words.” Think about the sparseness of joke telling, or Grimm Brothers.

Research the facts and then throw away the research.

Warming climate may flip the script on the amount of CO₂ released by trees, study finds - Phys.org