Quotes About Screenwriters

Writers - all writers, even screenwriters - like to make their mark. I don't think many screenwriters can write. They pass as writers.

I don't believe moviegoers don't have patience. Screenwriters are told a scene can't be longer than three minutes, that you have to cut to the chase. Not true!

There's a certain exhaustion that sets in when screenwriters are approaching sequels, and they start to lean on crutches - those same old wacky characters!

Many actors in films are willing to go to Broadway, and screenwriters are writing plays. It's almost commonplace.

If I write a cop show, it's not up to me to decide how different it is from 'Law & Order.' I had screenwriters go on and on and on about how their cop show isn't like any other cop show on TV. They made very good points, and it absolutely doesn't matter. It's entirely up to the audience to decide.

India needs better producers than screenwriters. No producer wants to invest in out-of-the way scripts.

From a writing point of view, you now have teams of screenwriters working with a director. What's lost in the process is the power of that one heart, brain, gut and soul that makes something an original piece of writing.

As screenwriters, we struggle with our own success. We have wallpapered our world and now we can't get anyone to notice the picture we just hung.

Young screenwriters are always very frustrated when they talk to me. They say, 'How do we get to be a screenwriter?' I say, 'You know what you do? I'll tell you the secret, it's easy: Read 'Hamlet.' You know? Then read it again, and read it again, and read it until you understand it. Read 'King Lear,' and then read 'Othello.'

I grew up in the Midwest; you don't know any screenwriters. It didn't seem like a realistic career possibility.

From the onset of the 'Live-Read' series, we wanted to hit all the major writers and Woody Allen is simply one of the greatest screenwriters of all time. He has ability to match pathos and comedy and drama and then turn it all on a dime. If you're going to make a series based on dialogue, you can't find much better than Woody Allen.

Hollywood is a special place; a place filled with creative geniuses - actors, screenwriters, directors, sound engineers, computer graphics specialists, lighting experts and so on. Working together, great art happens. But in the end, all artists depend on diverse audiences who can enjoy, be inspired by and support their work.

Supernatural films allow you to bend the rules of time and space - that's really fun, especially for screenwriters who often get shot down for logic reasons.

Obviously there's a lot more to a TV show than just a book... I think adaptations are a bit tricky for the screenwriters because they're worried about upsetting the author.

The simple idiot's advice I give to screenwriters who say they want to sell a screenplay is, 'Write good.'

'Off With Their Heads' by Frances Marion. I love a showbusiness autobiography - and this one resonates because it's written by one of the great Hollywood screenwriters.

The screenwriters I know share a few personality traits and one of them is anxiety.

I've never been conscious of having any real career plan, and I do not have a wish-list of actors, directors, screenwriters, or cameramen I'm hoping to work with. Life, I feel, has a way of leading us to the right situations and people, or at least to interesting ones.

There's no big splashy renaissance in Italian films. We have good young actors and directors. What we lack are screenwriters. It's hard to write about Italy.

In L.A., we have a saying - 'What do you do?' It's less of a question and more of a self-defense mechanism for wayward screenwriters looking to slip you a first draft, or the occasional actor looking to get in on the latest shoot. But I hate the question because of my own answer - I write about games.

Realistically, it's the great truism that screenwriters are fungible, that at the end of the day a studio is not going to want to fire a movie star. And they're really not going to want to fire a star director because the director has the hand on the tiller of a ship.

Screenwriters get paid a hell of a lot more money but their level of frustration seems to be so high that I don't want that.

Her friendships were as legendary as her stories and some of the best were with her fellow writers for during the teens, 1920s, and early 1930s, almost one quarter of the screenwriters in Hollywood were women. Half of all the films copyrighted between 1911 and 1925 were written by women.

A lot of screenwriters write certain characters, certain parts, with actors in mind. I don't really tend to do that. I describe them as specifically as I can, but I don't really picture anyone in particular.