Description: Acceptable. Shows definite wear, and perhaps considerable marking on inside. Shipped to over one million happy customers. Your purchase benefits world literacy! read more
Description: Acceptable. Ships from the UK. Former Library book. Shows definite wear, and perhaps considerable marking on inside. Your purchase also supports literacy charities. read more
Description: Satisfaction Guaranteed. Shipped quickly. Paperback. 1st Ed. Used, very good. Very good overall with light to moderate wear. No dust jacket. read more
Description: Good. Light shelving wear with minimal damage to cover and bindings. Pages show minor use. Help save a tree. Buy all your used books from Green Earth Books. Read. Recycle and Reuse! read more
Description: Very good. 1987 PAPERBACK, NOT a library book, clean, solid and unmarked, almost like new, guaranteed to be same book listed, ISBN: 0-396-08953-4. read more
"Meh. I have read this book before and while it is an overall good tool for beginning screenwriters, I am now in a Master's program and would like a more in-depth study."
"I will preface my review with this fact: I am a structuralist in pretty much everything I do. That being said, this is a pretty good book on screenwriting, focusing on structure. If you don't think structure is important in screenwriting, go find the last five movies to receive bad reviews in your newspaper. I would be surprised if more than one even mentioned the directing or acting. Most of the time bad reviews talk about how a film had holes or the story didn't make sense: structural problems.
This book was originally written for the purposes of rewrites, which may be fine if you have written a few screenplays and know what you are doing. However, the second addition added some material that could be applied to your first draft. The reality very little of the book focuses on rewriting (just the small "Application" section of each chapter.) Most of the book explains each structural element of drama and/or screenwriting in detail and with numerous, but dated examples (she sites movies that WILL be coming out in 94 or 95, but there maybe a third edition.)
This is the second time I have read this book, the first being in my college screenwriting class five or six years ago, which did not help my feature screenplay, but I blame the class aspect. It would have been best to read this book cover to cover, spend two weeks working on outlines, fixing structural issues before writing, then cranking out a 90-110 screenplay. The reality of semester length means that would have only given about 2 weeks to write ~100 pages, which is not feasible for a large group of 20-21 year olds. However, that is my intention this time around. When I am outlining my next project I will likely skim each chapter again to try to fix things in advance leaving more manageable rewrites for down the road. I think that usage of the book would be better than the author originally envisioned."
"What you get here is just a sound, basic text on act structure, turning points, catalysts, and overall narrative cohesion in films and television.
Sure, there are sections on character development and idea development, but I found the content in these sections to be obvious to the point of uselessness. I don't want to mean to the book or to anyone who found it entirely useful, by any means. Certainly, I understand that the whole book's premise is to be a primer on the fundamentals, it's just that some parts were more refreshing, lucidly illustrated, and therefore exceedingly useful for my purposes than other parts.
In any case, this is my second time reading through it. I returned to this text (as well as a few others), so as to thieve the more interesting approaches to storytelling, just in case I get stuck in the next several months when I'm working on revising a short story, working on my graphic novel shebang, or playing with a spec script. I'm thinking I'll actually make schematic-type notes on certain parts so I can quickly refer to their lessons when I'm frustrated."
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