Introduction: Who Needs Another Book on Screenwriting?
Part I: Storytelling
1: So Why Write Screenplays?
2: What Is Screenwriting?
3: Stories: What They Are and How to Find Them
4: Ten Tips for the Road Ahead
Part II: Adaptation
5: Breaking the Back of the Book: or, The Art of Adaptation
STEP 1: THE STORY OUTLINE
6: Research and Development
STEP 2: THE ADAPTATION OUTLINE
7: The Elements of Screenwriting
STEP 3: THE CHARACTER BIOGRAPHY
8: Exploring Your Story and How to Tell It
STEP 4: THE TREATMENT
Part III: Production
9: Who Needs Formatting?
10: Actors Are Your Medium
11: Dialogue as Action
STEP 5: THE STEP OUTLINE
12: The Final Script
13: Epilogue: Breaking into Professional Filmmaking
Appendix A: The Basic Steps in the Screenwriting Process
Appendix B: “To Build A Fire” by Jack London
Selected Bibliography
Acknowledgments
Index
Joseph McBride is an internationally renowned film historian
and biographer and a veteran film and television writer whose
decades of experience have brought him a Writers Guild of America
Award, four other WGA nominations, two Emmy Award nominations, and
a Canadian Film Awards nomination. McBride was one of the
screenwriters of the cult classic punk rock musical Rock ‘n’ Roll
High School and co-wrote five American Film Institute Life
Achievement Award specials for CBS TV.
McBride was a film critic, reporter, and columnist for Daily
Variety in Hollywood for many years. His books include the
acclaimed biographies Frank Capra: The Catastrophe of Success,
Steven Spielberg: A Biography, and Searching for John Ford. The
French edition of the Ford biography won the Best Foreign Film Book
of the Year award from the French film critics' organization in
2008. McBride has also published a celebrated book of interviews
with director Howard Hawks, Hawks on Hawks, and three books on
Orson Welles, including What Ever Happened to Orson Welles?: A
Portrait of an Independent Career. That book is partly a memoir of
McBride’s experience working as an actor for Welles for six years,
playing a film critic in the director’s legendary unfinished film
The Other Side of the Wind, for which McBride cowrote his dialogue
with Welles.
McBride is an associate professor in the Cinema Department
at San Francisco State University, where he has been teaching
screenwriting and film history since 2002. In 2011, he became
the subject of a feature-length documentary on his life and work,
Behind the Curtain: Joseph McBride on Writing Film History, written
and directed by Hart Perez. McBride lives in Berkeley.
“Impressively readable, unpretentious, and remarkably useful. Based
on a lifetime of experience and observation, as well as
conversations with some of the greats (like Orson Welles, John Ford
& Howard Hawks), Joe McBride's comprehensive yet very succinct
work should become a standard text.”
--Peter Bogdanovich, screenwriter, director, film historian
“I must confess that I had never read a how-to book straight
through for the sheer pleasure of it, and I never expected to—until
I got my hands on the splendid Writing in Pictures. . .
. A word of warning: in this book you will not find the
Six Keys to Compelling Characters, the Seven Secrets of Successful
Plotting, or the Eight Jungian Archetypes No Studio Executive Can
Resist. There are no magic formulae here—but if you do
have a story to tell, this book will give you the solid practical
advice you need to tell it in the most effective
way. Writing in Pictures is a short course in how
to think cinematically. It will change the way you
write. It will change the way you watch.”
-- Sam Hamm, screenwriter of Batman,
Batman Returns, and "Homecoming"
“If this isn't the greatest screenwriting book ever, I'll eat
my hat! Writing in Pictures is the kind of how-to
book Ben Hecht would have written on that subject: a Socratic tour
of the profession the novice aspires to, filled with screenwriting
lore, for illustration and entertainment. If you want to judge
someone's work by how personal it is, this may just turn
out to be Joe McBride's masterpiece.”
--Bill Krohn, author of Hitchcock at Work and Hollywood
correspondent, Cahiers du Cinéma
“In this unique contribution to the screenplay literature, Joe
McBride invites writers to connect themselves to literary
tradition, relying less on formulas and more on intelligent uses of
classic storytelling technique. He blends general precepts,
concrete examples, hard-won experience, and lively anecdotes into
something more than the usual script manual: an invitation to
participate in the great human adventure of sharing stories.”
--David Bordwell, author of Poetics of
Cinema
“A real contribution to a much-abused genre. Most
screenwriting “how to” books are either formulaic, craven, or both.
. . .McBride’s book is something else. It’s a
straightforward, considered and lucid meditation on the arts and
crafts of storytelling for the screen, informed by McBride's
unsurpassed knowledge of, and deep love for, the movies.”
--Howard A. Rodman, screenwriter, teacher,
and vice president of Writers Guild of America West
"If it is possible for only one book to embody the ethos of
screenwriting, this is the one, a guide to screenwriting that is
more than a guide -- craft, history, practical advice,
philosophical bedrock, wisdom, wit -- and through it all, as in the
very best screenplays, the reassurance of one clarion voice."
-- Patrick McGilligan, film biographer and
editor of the Backstory series of interviews with
screenwriters
“McBride offers the kind of friendly but honest advice
that will make him the mentor to a new generation of aspiring
screenwriters. Born of long experience and exceptional insight, he
distills the lessons of screenwriting history into a first-rate
primer for the screenwriters of tomorrow.”
--Julian Hoxter, screenwriter and author
of Write What You Don't Know: An Accessible Manual for
Screenwriters
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