Read it aloud, make sure there’s a favourite bit - and don’t fall into the ‘German funk trap’. Frank Cottrell Boyce who scripted 24 Hour Party People and A Cock and Bull Story, lays down his screenwriting golden rules.
(The Guardian UK)

Showtime has ordered 12 half-hour episodes of “The United States of Tara,” a comedy from Oscar-winning “Juno” screenwriter Diablo Cody.
Toni Collette stars as a wife and mother with dissociative identity disorder. John Corbett plays her husband.
Story lines will examine how a dysfunctional family copes with the various identities that might appear on any given day [...]

Talk about your high-concept lowbrow humor.
In the big-budget action-comedy “You Don’t Mess With the Zohan” (which arrives in theaters Friday), Adam Sandler portrays the titular Zohan, an ultra-lethal Israeli counterterrorist operative who tires of his part in his country’s war on terror, fakes his own death and comes to New York in pursuit of his [...]

 
It’s not so surprising, really.
Celebrated hyphenate David Mamet - playwright, screenwriter, movie director, TV show creator, sometime actor, academic, author, essayist, etc. - had a fight film in him. Naturally it’s a poetic-sounding one with perfect meter. But there’s plenty of blood, too. No one walks away from Mamet’s arena unscathed.
“Redbelt” focuses on the world [...]

 
One day in the mid-’90s, the lanky and sometimes manic James Ellroy walked into the brownstone New York office of his publisher, Otto Penzler — the two were going to a fight that night — and broke the news: He had just sold the film rights to his novel “L.A. Confidential.”
“We were laughing so hard [...]

 
Abby Mann, writer of socially conscious scripts for movies and television and winner of the 1961 Academy Award for adapted screenplay for “Judgment at Nuremberg,” has died at 80. if(window.yzq_d==null)window.yzq_d=new Object(); window.yzq_d['yayar0LEYrQ-']=’&U=127hbtc8h%2fN%3dyayar0LEYrQ-%2fC%3d-1%2fD%3dRMP%2fB%3d-1′; if(window.yzq_d==null)window.yzq_d=new Object(); window.yzq_d['yqyar0LEYrQ-']=’&U=128q8o0jh%2fN%3dyqyar0LEYrQ-%2fC%3d-1%2fD%3dSIPR%2fB%3d-1′; if(window.yzq_d==null)window.yzq_d=new Object(); window.yzq_d['xayar0LEYrQ-']=’&U=13bhajse8%2fN%3dxayar0LEYrQ-%2fC%3d619213.12054948.12500301.1442997%2fD%3dLREC%2fB%3d4919452′;
Writers Guild of America spokesman Gregg Mitchell said Mann died Tuesday. [...]

The wave of euphoria that swept over Hollywood following the end of the WGA strike has been replaced by a whole new set of emotions: anxiety, depression, fear, nervousness — and anger.
One month after scribes put down their pickets, a March malaise has set in, with folks in town wondering when — or if — [...]

In June 2006, when the bulk of papers belonging to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. were about to be auctioned at Sotheby’s and possibly into private hands, Mayor Shirley Franklin and the city of Atlanta pre-empted the bidding with a $32 million offer — ensuring that the papers stayed both in the city and for [...]

 
Strike? What strike?A survey by a New York-based ad buyer finds a majority of TV viewers are more than willing to forgive and forget about the monthslong disruptions to their favorite shows. A total of 62% of TV viewers are planning to return to their favorites when the shows return to originals next month, according [...]

 
If the trailer to Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull made you feel like a kid again, you’re not alone — even among some of the heaviest hitters in Hollywood. Screenwriters Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci (whose credits include Transformers; Mission: Impossible III; and J.J. Abrams’ upcoming Star Trek reboot) were equally [...]