Roman Polanski’s new thriller The Ghost has its premiere at the Berlin Film Festival tomorrow. The director will not be there, of course. Instead he is wearing an electronic ankle bracelet, under house arrest in Switzerland, fighting extradition to America. Meanwhile, in London, Polanski’s great friend and collaborator the British screenwriter Ronald Harwood is running up [...]

Storyboard TV, an online community of scriptwriters, television producers, and TV enthusiasts, launches its website today with a script contest awarding a $5,000 prize to the writer with the best pilot for a television drama. At storyboardtv.com, writers can share TV scripts for original shows with their potential audience members, while soliciting feedback and gauging [...]

There’s a whole lot more than ten things I could say on this subject. And this list is NOT a top ten. But people always wonder why certain scripts get acquired or developed, and others with similar content never touched; I would say the former’s filmmakers do most of the things on this list. You [...]

Selling a spec screenplay was the thing to do in the 90s. Then sit back, cash in and sell another. Be scorned, Joe Ezterhas. But times have changed and the lottery that is the hollywood spec screenplay market has changed dramatically. If anything, it has dried up and vanished. For every screenwriter that comes out [...]

Just as financiers make pilgrimages to Omaha to hear Warren Buffett and aspiring Jedi knights travel to the ends of the galaxy to hang upside down in front of Yoda, screenwriters, with dreams of summer blockbusters dancing in their heads, periodically make the voyage to the seminars of Robert McKee. He has trained scores of [...]

“White Collar,” a new dramedy about, yup, white collar crimes, debuts on the USA Network. The series stars Matt Bomer as Neal Caffrey, a romantically jilted con man who makes a deal with FBI Agent Peter Burke (Tim DeKay) to help him solve crimes in exchange for his own (ankle bracelet-monitored) freedom.
Shot in New York [...]

Akiva Goldsman arrived at the door of producer Brian Grazer in 1998 with one purpose. “I went there,” the screenwriter says, “to beg.”
Goldsman, who had enjoyed a steady ascension in Hollywood for years, was coming off a string of films that had badly battered his reputation. He had produced and written the forgettable dud “Lost [...]

Life after the “Hostel” horror franchise is keeping producer-director Eli Roth busy these days as he juggles a handful of projects.
Roth said at the Morelia International Film Festival on Monday that he expects to finish a script this month for the sci-fi project “Endangered Species,” which would mark his return to the director’s chair after several years [...]

A couple of powerful flashbacks to the Los Angeles of his childhood persuaded Robert Towne to write “Chinatown.”

One flashback came during a walk along the ocean in the early 1970s, when the quality of the light, the sea air and the smell of eucalyptus sent him into a reverie. “I remember thinking, ‘I’m 11 years [...]

The writers and exec producers of ‘Zombieland’, the new tongue in cheek zombie flick, sat down to chronicle the movie’s progress from idea to completion of how this zombie apocalypse found its genesis.
READ THE INTERVIEW