Blake Snyder "15 Beats" Workshop
Just finished a 2-day, intensive screenwriting workshop with Blake Snyder, Hollywood guru and recipient of two million-dollar paydays on his scripts. He told us he's had a 25 year career in screenwriting, and has written 78 scripts and sold 38 (or so). More about Blake and his method at www.blakesnyder.com.

What was fun was starting off Saturday morning with just vague ideas. The class was kept to 12 max so that these ideas could be worked into a logline and analyzed. Then a 2nd pass at the logline. Then we learned about the 15 beats in a well-structured script (which form part of the 40 scenes in an average script, per Blake). Our next assignment was to come back from lunch with 3 beats worked out: 1st scene, last scene and the midpoint. Then overnight we were to write out all 15 beats and share them. And the final exercise was getting up and doing a 10-min pitch of your story!

That was fun -- seeing these ideas go from vague and fuzzy to real, fleshed out, well-structured stories. We also brainstormed and questioned each other to make the works better. Several people got better screenplay names than what they'd had. (Blake suggested I call HEAVEN & NELL a different name -- ANGEL FALLS. But that's not gonna happen. My story name is fun and has a history.)

Mostly I worked on the comedy script I plan to write next: CAN'T SAY NO. Logline: A shy engineer invents glasses that give him such charisma he can convince anyone to do anything. But then his evil Shopping TV Channel bosses use them to take over cable TV -- and next, the world!

Oh, and fun surprise: Robert Rodriquez's cousin Al who co-writes most of Robert's stories with him was there. He already has some script credits, including FROM DUSK TO DAWN III (I didn't even realize that movie got sequels).



Blake Snyder at dinner with the ASG Friday night -- we were at Threadgill's!