Anyone else reading screenplays for a popular (or even not so popular) movie to just kinda jump start your creative juices? Any one particular script that you keep going back to? I find myself going back to Juno...I have no idea why. My script has teenage characters but that where the similarities end. Pretty weird...maybe I just like how coy and sarcastic it is. :P

Fargo for me.

Oozes quality, brevity and wit. A real lesson in story - flawed characters feeding a spiralling plot. Genius!

Titus Andronicus for me. All the blood, death and senseless dismembering you could ever want.

END OF THREAD

XD

The Prestige, by Chris & Jonathan Nolan, is the only screenplay I have in book form, but I keep revisiting it for its mere shock ending factor, which totally outdoes all other movie twists IMHO.

It's mesmerising - a really good film/screenplay for the kind of movie I'm writing, which makes about the same amount of sense, but for a different reason :P

I'm reading Back to the Future.

I've read "Slumdog Millionaire" and it's amazing how many rules that script breaks and yet wound up winning the Oscar. I read an early draft of "The Bourne Identity" and it wasn't all that hot, but you could see the beginnings of what the movie became in it. And I read a couple of drafts of "Notorious" (1946) that were amazingly different from the final movie, which had a nearly perfect script.

Dude! me too. Back to the Future is a good screen play man

I think mine's The Italian Job (the new one, not the one from the 70's). My script doesn't really have a lot in common with it plot wise, but both have similar formatting funnies, like montages, so if I have any questions I just refer back to it.

I will sometimes look at the "Lord of the Rings" one mostly for style and formatting and for help with other mechanics that go into writing a script. But for inspiration...not really. Of course, mine is totally different than LOTR.

I just re-read Tarantino's Jackie Browne, and while my Screnzy is nothing like it, it helped with ideas to add some energy and quirky language.

Snatch and True Romance. snarky movies with lots of bloody action.

Labyrinth and the new Underworld and the first Resident Evil. I've got a fantasy/horror/romance mix going on, so I figured I'd sample a little bit here and there.

NaNo08 - Darkside - Won Screnzy09 - Darkside - Won

I've been reading loads of scripts over the last month, to try and get a feel for the form.

On my list has been:

The Usual Suspects
North By Northwest
Pulp Fiction
The Man Who Wasn't There
and all three scripts for the original Star Wars trilogy (since I'm adapting a Star Wars videogame to film)

It's been very educative - especially in terms of seeing just how sparse and concise the writing is. Normally I have a tendency towards sentences so long they could be their own paragraph, so it's been a challenge to change from my usual writing style. But reading the scripts has definitely inspired me and helped improve my writing.