Screenplay: the Foundations of Screenwriting

by Syd Field

I called up this guy who was advertising for a proofreader a few weeks ago, and it turned out that he had written a screenplay and this producer had refused to even look at it because it was too short, and he wanted someone to look at it and tell him if it was really long enough. So I borrowed this book from my friend who does movies, and it's pretty amazing. Just open it to any random page, and a nugget of golden wisdom tumbles out! For example:

"As far as I'm concerned, 'Chinatown' is the best American screenplay written during the 1970s. Not that it's better than 'Godfather I' or 'Apocalypse Now' or 'All the President's Men' or 'Close Encounters of the Third Kind...'"

"How many hours a day do you need to spend writing?

"That depends on you. I work about four hours a day, five days a week. John Milius writes one hour a day, seven days a week, between 5 and 6 p.m. Stirling Siliphant, who wrote 'The Towering Inferno', sometimes writes 12 hours a day... You need two to three hours a day to write a screenplay."

But the guy never called me back.