Screenwriting For Micro-Budget Films

SCREENWRITING FOR
MICRO-BUDGET FILMS
Screenwriting for micro-budget films can present its own challenges

and this book takes the reader through all the considerations that
need to be made to write an effective screenplay for a low-budget
film.
Drawing on his own experience, case studies from films such as
Primer, Coherence and Reservoir Dogs, as well as the perspectives
of working screenwriters such as Joe Swanberg and Alex Ross-Perry,
Greenberg explores common pitfalls screenwriters face and suggests
practical solutions. This book lays the groundworks of the realities of
low-budget filmmaking and also talks through the practical aspects,
such as story structure and genre considerations. Greenberg makes
the process of writing a screenplay for a low-budget film accessible
and creative, allowing student and independent filmmakers to tailor
their writing for their films.
This book is ideal for aspiring screenwriters, independent
filmmakers and students of screenwriting.
David J. Greenberg teaches screenwriting at Drexel University and

the University of the Arts in Philadelphia. He has written nearly
60 screenplays for features, documentaries and shorts. He wrote and
directed the feature Stomping Ground (2016) which was produced
for $18,000 and shot in 24 hours.
SCREENWRITING FOR
MICRO-BUDGET FILMS
Tips, Tricks and Hacks for Reverse
Engineering Your Screenplay
David J. Greenberg
First published 2022
by Routledge
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and by Routledge
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Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa
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© 2022 David J. Greenberg
The right of David J Greenberg to be identified as author of
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and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted
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Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be
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identification and explanation without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British
Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Greenberg, David J., author.
Title: Screenwriting for micro-budget films / David J. Greenberg.
Description: Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY : Routledge, 2022. |
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2021031300 (print) | LCCN 2021031301
(ebook) | ISBN 9780367687700 (hardback) | ISBN
9780367687694 (paperback) | ISBN 9781003138969
(ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Low budget films—Authorship. |
Independent films—Authorship. | Motion picture
authorship—Vocational guidance.
Classification: LCC PN1996.G74 2022 (print) | LCC
PN1996 (ebook) | DDC 808.2/3—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021031300
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/
2021031301
ISBN: 978-0-367-68770-0 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-0-367-68769-4 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-003-13896-9 (ebk)
DOI: 10.4324/9781003138969
Typeset in Bembo
by Apex CoVantage, LLC
CONTENTS
Introduction1
1 Know your limitations 15
2 Getting real 27
3 Write for your producer 39
4 Screenwriting hacks 49
5 Story structure 65
6 Model your feature on a short 87
7 Genre considerations 101
8 Case studies 109
9 Stomping ground 123
10 Final thoughts 133
Appendix149
Index159
INTRODUCTION
A funny thing happened to me while I was writing this book. I was

teaching my screenwriting classes, working on three screenplays for
hire and a documentary when a filmmaker friend called. He asked if
I had time to read a screenplay he was thinking about directing. I read
it, a sharp, witty horror-comedy and, at 77 pages, only two or three
locations, around eight characters, no big set pieces or special effects,
it was a great example of a screenplay that could be well produced on
a micro-budget. I called my friend immediately after reading it and
said “You have to make this film and I will do whatever I can to help.”
He said “Great, what do you want to do?” That was not the response
I was expecting, but it would have looked bad to contradict myself,
so the next thing out of my mouth was “Umm, produce?”
While, technically, I had done some producing on my feature
Stomping Ground (2016), it was not a role I felt comfortable in, ever
sought out and, to be completely honest, it was something I actively
avoided. But, I felt strongly that this film deserved to be produced and
I committed to it. The first and the best thing I did as a producer was
ask if I could show it to my friend Andy Silverman, a screenwriter
who had recently started producing, notably his amazing horror-
comedy Cyst, which has “midnight movie” and “cult film” written
all over it. We had been meeting weekly at a bakery down the street
from me, I told him about the screenplay, and he read it and signed
DOI: 10.4324/9781003138969-1
2 Introduction
on as a producer. That’s it; I just thought it was worth mentioning

that, as I write this book, I am also producing a micro-budget film.
What does producing a micro-budget film mean? It probably means
different things to different people. In my case, producing means
everything from cleaning toilets, washing dishes and loading/unload-
ing equipment to scouting locations, hiring personnel and playing a
homeless person.
In the end, we decided that producing a film with eight characters
and a crew of ten would be too tricky to do safely in early 2021, with
the COVID-19 pandemic still raging on. We turned our attention
to another screenplay by the same writer. It was 99% two characters
in one location. In May and June of 2021, we went to the Pocono
Mountains for nine days and lived in the huge house where we were
shooting and we produced Seclusion, which I will discuss in greater
detail in the chapter on writing for producers.
Next, I want to point out that the name of this book is “Screen-
writing For Micro Budget Films,” not “How To Write Micro Budget
Films.” Of course, the book is about how to write a screenplay for
a micro-budget film, but, in my experience, there is no “one” way
to it. With that in mind, I present various approaches to it from my
own philosophy but also include interviews with filmmakers whose
background, philosophy and approach differ from or even contradict
mine. I have found that, if you disagree with someone’s way of think-
ing, it usually forces you to refine, clarify and solidify your own. I do
not necessarily want you to come away from reading this book think-
ing that you should follow one of the models described, I want you
to come away from reading this book having heard about the differ-
ent ways to write a micro-budget film and then use the ones that you
agree with to come up with your own way of writing a screenplay.
To backtrack a little and fill in some blanks, I want to get into my
lifelong love affair with film. One of my earliest memories is of tod-
dling down the street, one hand in each of my parent’s hands, and
going to a repertory movie house in Philadelphia. I am pretty sure
that this was the day that I saw a film in a theater for the first time.
I think it was Charlie Chaplin's The Gold Rush (1925). In first grade,
we had a classroom guest who brought in a video camera. Keep in
Introduction 3
mind that, in 1971, few people were walking around with video
cameras. I can still remember looking through the viewfinder and, at
six years old, thinking “I like this!”
My mom had worked as an actress in her teens and through col-
lege. My father had been a professional tap dancer, appearing on a
weekly TV show in Philadelphia and did summer stock (four musi-
cals per summer) in Atlantic City. Both were writers and English
teachers, so I grew up with an appreciation for the arts. If hippies
deigned to carry cards, my parents would have been card-carrying
hippies. I like to say that I was raised on classic rock and soul, classical
music and show tunes. My father liked to show movies in class and
this period was before we had video stores so, in order to get mov-
ies, he could rent them from a distributor or borrow them from the
Free Library of Philadelphia, which printed a huge catalog of their
holdings. I can remember reading through that catalog at six or seven,
reading the synopsis of films and trying to imagine them in my mind.
I made my first (animated) films when I was nine, bought a super
8 camera when I was ten and made films with friends. Around that
time, I saw Jaws (1975) and North By Northwest on the big screen,
something clicked and I just said something like “this is what I want
to do” to myself.
When I was 16, I found out about film school. Do you mean,
you can go to college and study movies? I did go to film school
and I guess I am pretty glad that I did though I am not exactly sure what
I got out of it. For someone who loves film, it was total immersion,
I learned theory/esthetics, history, production, etc., and I loved it.
The first time I was really conscious of saying the words “inde-
pendent film” as in “I’m going to an independent film tonight” was
when I went to see the Coen Brothers debut Blood Simple (1984)—
itself a masterpiece overall but also a prime example of high-end
low-budget filmmaking, and a production model followed by scores
of would-be indie filmmakers ever since. I know that I had seen
low-budget independent films before, but this time it felt different.
I guess I was a sophomore in film school when Blood Simple came
out so, by the time I graduated in 1987, I had become well aware of
not just the Coens but Jim Jarmusch, Spike Lee, Susan Seidelman and
4 Introduction
so many more. Not long after graduation, I went out to lunch with
my dad, who asked if I was going to move to L.A. and I said “No,
there’s all of these people coming out of ‘nowhere’ making films for
nothing with friends and family in their backyards and that’s what
I want to do.”
I didn’t make my own friends and family film in the backyard until
2013. More on that story later.
So I did not move to L.A. after graduation in 1987 and I did not
start making my own low-budget independent film; I did about as
opposite as possible from filmmaking and got just about as far away
from L.A. in the geographical United States as possible. My father
was closing his bakery-cafe in Frenchtown, NJ, and reopening it in
Blue Hill, ME. Since I was literally doing nothing, not working and
nowhere close to having a “real” job, it was gently or perhaps not
so gently suggested that I move up to Maine with my dad and help
renovate the building. It was around this time that I started writing
my first feature-length screenplay, a run-of-the-mill, by-the-books
teen thriller called Play With Fire. Okay, technically, it was not my
first feature-length screenplay because I had written Pinball, a sort of
junior high spin on Saturday Night Fever (1977) in longhand when
I was 13. I stayed in Blue Hill until the December of 1987, moved
back to Philly and did what any film school graduate not working in
the film business would do. I got a job in a video store, in this case,
Philadelphia’s Mecca for filmlovers, TLA Video.
I didn’t last in Philly long because, the following spring, my father
told me that, of all things, a low-budget independent film was going
to be shooting in Blue Hill. Some of the advance team was already
in town, coming to my dad’s place, The Left Bank, regularly. He told
them about his son who just got out of film school and got a contact
number for me. I called the Unit Production Manager every week
for about a month but he wouldn’t commit to giving me a job, so,
one day, I just flew up to Maine, walked into the production office,
introduced myself and he said “Oh, you’re here.” I told him about
everything I studied in film school, he nodded politely, then pointed
to a bunch of guys raising a huge tent outside and said “See those
guys? Go help them.” We got the tent up, came back in, the UPM
Introduction 5
asked one of the other guys how I did, got a nod from him, turned to
me and said “You’re hired and it doesn’t pay.” The UPM was Daniel
Lupi. It was his second feature. Before movies, I think he managed a
restaurant in Manhattan. If you can manage a restaurant in Manhat-
tan, you can produce a movie. Today, Daniel has executive produced
Us, Her, all of Paul Thomas Anderson’s films, a few for Spielberg and
many others.
On the relatively low-budget Signs of Life (1989), I wound up
working as a P.A. wherever I was needed, in every department. One
day, things were sort of slow, so Daniel told me to get the producer’s
car washed. When I got back, he asked “what do you know about
cameras?” It was just a year after film school and, while I was never
an especially good director of photography (DP), there was a time
when I could load an old Bolex without looking at it. Anyway, the
First AC had to leave the set because he was sick, the Second AC
took his job and, all of a sudden, I was the Second AC for the day. It
was not until I later offered to take the place of the set security guard
who quit his all-night position that I started getting paid $50 a day.
I once worked all day, all night and then the next day, something like
45 hours straight on set.
Two days after Signs of Life wrapped, I started work on the con-
siderably higher-budget Pet Sematary (1989). In stark contrast to the
Signs of Life shoot, I had one job in one department, regular hours
and, for a fairly recent film school graduate, I was making pretty
decent money—as the set-construction department runner. The
what? I drove around and bought building supplies all day and then
delivered them either to the workshop or right to set. How low on
the ladder is this position? It’s not even on the ladder. My name is not
even in the credits of the film. On one set, I could see people pitch-
ing in to help each other, a small community with limited resources
striving toward the same goal. On another set, I saw bureaucracy,
rivalries, petty arguments between departments and a sort of all-for-
one-none-for-all kind of attitude. It was a life-changing experience
and drew me even closer toward the direction of smaller, independ-
ent films. I told myself then that, if I ever got a chance to make a film,
it would be a financially responsible production.
6 Introduction
At the end of being on sets for nearly nine months straight, I had a
revelation that I could probably continue to do this kind of work for
the next 40 years of my life, but that it was not what I really wanted
to do. At that point, I had worked in almost every department of a
film production and, while, of course, every shoot is different, there
was an overwhelming sense that I would be basically doing the same
thing over and over again for the rest of my professional life.
Also, at this point, the role of the screenwriter was becoming more
clear to me. I saw Woody Allen’s Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989)
around this time and loved it. Something that stood out to me was
that Allen’s character was a documentary filmmaker working on a
project about a philosopher. There were scenes of footage he was
editing, and after hearing a few lines from the philosopher character,
I thought to myself “Well, that’s an interesting philosophy, I need
to look into this guy. Funny that I have never heard of him.” Funny
that I had never heard of him? He was a fictional character and the
philosophy he was spouting was movie dialogue written by Woody
Allen. Suddenly, at that point, I said to myself “Woah, that’s what a
screenwriter does?”
I decided that screenwriting was my way in; it is what I do best and
enjoy most so that is where my attention shifted.
I had always been a decent creative writer, encouraged to write
from a pretty young age, but never really focused on it in film school.
I wanted to be a writer-director, figured I sort of had the writing
part down, so I set about learning as much of the production side as
I could. Turns out, in addition to not being a great cinematographer,
I am even worse as an editor. One professor literally ripped a film of
mine to shreds. In the spirit of full disclosure, now is as good a time
as any to reveal that I got a B− in screenwriting class. On the other
hand, I wrote and shot an original scene for a project in directing
class and the professor said “Good scene. Is that Mamet?” So, if noth-
ing else was remarkable about my film school career, a professor did
think that my original work might have been something by David
Mamet.
So, after Signs of Life and Pet Sematary in 1988, other than a few
shorts and a pilot I was hired to direct, I did not work on another
Introduction 7
feature film set until I made Stomping Ground in 2013 and Seclusion
in 2021. I focused on writing screenplays and studying the ins and
outs of the industry. I wrote low-budget indie type stuff that every-
one was doing in the early 1990s, stuff that I could produce myself if
I could raise the $30–50,000 (which I could not). Between 1991 and
1994, I eventually made The True Meaning of Cool (1995), which
I had written in 1989, basically a shorter version (although there
is a feature-length version of it somewhere) of Richard Linklater’s
Slacker (1990), which won an award from the American Film Insti-
tute. Pretty impressive, AFI, right? No, not really, it was a runner-up
award from Sony’s Visions of U.S. short film competition, which
was sponsored by the AFI. Hey, it was still the AFI, the trophy says
“American Film Institute” on it, so I can call myself an AFI award-
winning filmmaker and that phrase has been opening doors for years.
Through a contact at a record company, I got a couple of low-rent
screenwriting jobs in the mid-90s, adapting some true crime books
into ideas for films that could feature soundtracks by the record com-
pany’s artists. I did not get another screenwriting gig until 2007—true
story: my then-wife decided to do CPR on my career by employing
feng-shui. She rearranged the “career” section of our house and put
a couple of my screenplays on a desk by the front door. I got hired
to write a screenplay two weeks later and, two weeks after that, got
hired to write another screenplay.
To me, screenwriting is almost a spiritual quest, a never-ending
journey to learn more about the craft, art and science. I love that,
every time I sit down to work on a screenplay, it is going to be a new
experience; it is about knowing what tools I have access to and then
figuring out the best way to use them. The day I tell myself that I am
a good screenwriter, is the day I should quit.
The purpose of this book is to guide filmmakers toward making
the best films with limited resources by starting in the conceptual
phase, writing the screenplay. While the principles of dramatic sto-
rytelling are basically the same as they are for films produced with
seemingly endless pots of gold, writing for low-budget films requires
a much different technical and creative approach that many screen-
writers are not familiar with. My intent for this book is to not only
8 Introduction
lay out the savvy and successful way to approach a project that is
likely to be produced for little money, but it will also have case studies
examining the ways notable low-budget productions had cost-saving
techniques built in from the beginning, in the screenplay.
In 1991, Francis Ford Coppola famously suggested that “To me,
the great hope is that now these little 8mm video recorders and stuff
have come out, and some . . . just people who normally wouldn’t
make movies are going to be making them. And you know, suddenly,
one day some little fat girl in Ohio is going to be the new Mozart,
you know, and make a beautiful film with her little father’s camera
recorder. And for once, the so-called professionalism about movies
will be destroyed, forever. And it will really become an art form.
That’s my opinion” and if it has not exactly turned out that way, it is
awfully close to being accurate.
With the rapid development of digital production tools over the
past 30 years, filmmaking is something that anyone equipped with a
smartphone can pursue. Of course, just as in the case of major Hol-
lywood productions with budgets in the hundreds of millions of dol-
lars, technology means little if the filmmaker does not have a good
story to tell. In the case of low-budget films, there are certain hacks
to learn and many pitfalls to avoid before showing up on set; these
things need to be integral to the foundation of the production, key
components of the screenplay.
So, today, more than 30 years after Copolla’s proclamation, if it
seems like everyone’s grandmother or a next-door neighbor is an
“independent filmmaker,” it is because many grandmothers and peo-
ple in our neighborhoods are making films. I know grandmothers
and neighbors of mine who are making films.
Low-budget films have been around forever. In the earliest days
of filmmaking in the United States, Thomas Edison held the pat-
ents for film, cameras and projectors. A filmmaker could not make a
film without paying Edison, but many still tried. Edison reportedly
employed armed gangs to track down independent filmmakers who
tried to make underground—what many of us now call “guerrilla”—
productions without paying him. While Edison’s monopoly was ulti-
mately broken up, filmmakers working outside of the established
Introduction 9
system have always had problems finding ways to make their movies.
Over the years, filmmakers have found more and more hacks for
making films with less and less resources. This book is about the
hacks that writers can build into a screenplay.
Back to film history but skipping ahead to the Golden Age of
Hollywood, roughly the 1930s to the 1950s, B-movies, low-budget
productions often just over an hour-long, accompanied prestige
A-movies, the higher budget films with big-name actors, as a sort
of two-for-one deal. When we think of B-movies, many of us think
of gritty crime thrillers or frequently cheesy horror movies. On
the one hand, we often think of shadowy film noir movies with
their bleak themes, relatively small-scale stories and, yes, shadowy
imagery highly influenced by German Expressionism. All of these
characteristics are evident, but what might not have been so obvious
was that, according to many, these films were so dark and shadowy
because the budgets were too small to utilize a full arsenal of major
studio lights. Directors, cinematographers, grips and gaffers had to
get creative with their lighting, creating mood and atmosphere with
shadows when lavish sets were not at their disposal. In other words,
they used financial limitations to their advantage, taking what might
have been a challenging disadvantage to some filmmakers and turn-
ing creative workarounds into artistic wins. Contrast the stylish film
noir canon with the low-budget monster and science fiction films of
the era that are often comically bad due to the cheesy low-rent spe-
cial effects, costumes and props. These films frequently failed because
they attempted to make big-budget productions with a fraction of
the budget as if nobody would notice the considerable lack of pro-
duction values.
Jumping ahead into the 1970s, when low-budget grindhouse films
found a loyal audience at drive-ins, the relatively low-budget Hallow-
een (1978) spawned hundreds and hundreds of low-budget knock-
offs and sequels. Of course, the 1970s also saw John Sayles (who
cut his teeth by writing low-budget screenplays for Roger Corman)
release his first film, The Return of the Secaucus Seven (1979),
which kind of set the stage for the independent film boom in the
1980s, where we were introduced to The Coen Bros., Jim Jarmusch,
10 Introduction
Spike Lee and Steven Soderbergh, all working within the parameters
of low budgets.
Of course, while maybe not considered by many to be an inde-
pendent film in the conventional sense, the 1970s also gave us Rocky
(1976). When, then D-list actor Sylvester Stallone, unhappy with
the roles he was being offered, decided to write a vehicle for himself
and then almost single-handedly willed it into production, he basi-
cally cast the mold for countless independent films that came in the
generations that followed with some variation on the mantra “Make
Your Own Damn Movie.” Now, Rocky means a lot of different
things to a lot of people around the world. For a film geek grow-
ing up in Philly, the thought that this virtual nobody could write a
screenplay set in Philadelphia, shoot it in Philadelphia (“huh, you
mean that not all movies are produced in L.A.?”), see it become a big
hit and win the Oscar for Best Picture was mind-blowing, exhilarat-
ing and inspiring.
So, low-budget independent filmmaking is nothing new, but, in
the past 40 years or so, it has become more visible, less convention-
ally fringe and even has a dedicated audience of people who pro-
claim themselves “indie film fans.” For me personally, much in the
way fans of indie, underground music are always on the lookout for
the next great artist nobody has ever heard of, I am always look-
ing for low-budget, low-profile, often lo-fi independent films that
tend to fly way below the radar—and there are many of them out
there. Indeed, it seems like everyone’s grandmothers and neighbors
are making films.
Filmmaking has become democratized. Basically, anyone can do it
and many of them are. While, yes, this democratization has opened
doors for fresh, original voices to make films and share their ideas
in ways that would not have been imaginable 40 years ago, it also
means that there are not only a whole lot of really bad movies being
produced and distributed, there are even more really bad but possibly
really good movies that have not been finished because the filmmak-
ers ran out of resources. Too many filmmakers rush into production
without fully thinking things through. They aim for ambitious pro-
jects that ultimately fall out of their reach. The trick, and the point of
Introduction 11
this book, is for filmmakers to have a firm grasp on just how far their
reach goes and to then reverse engineer their projects accordingly.
Low-budget filmmaking is not rocket science. There are really
only a handful of concepts that you need to grasp. That said, losing
weight, on a fundamental level, generally comes down to burning
more calories than you consume, but it is often a little more compli-
cated. So, similarly, when it comes to making low-budget films, it is
a little more complicated than not spending as much money.
Then what can you afford? Yes, lots of people like to see stunts,
amazing sets, locations and special effects, but a producer can spend
millions of dollars on those things and still have a film that falls flat
if it is missing the heart and soul of a film: sympathetic or, at least,
compelling characters who do interesting things. Good stories come
from good characters.
Conveniently, human beings come with an imagination built-in;
it is not an added feature like a moonroof. If, for whatever reasons,
you cannot come up with a good, fully formed idea for a movie on
your own, you should find—and hopefully pay/defer pay or barter
with—someone who can: a talented, if not incredibly experienced,
screenwriter to write a screenplay. You can then afford to pay, defer
pay or barter with a crew to shoot this film and actors to play these
characters. If you do the things that this book discusses, you will be
able to find affordable places for these actors to perform the scenes
in the screenplay.
People make low-budget films for all kinds of reasons: some can-
not raise large amounts of money and some like a lo-fi/skin of the
teeth kind of mentality in production. What we are seeing more and
more of is filmmakers who score with a modestly produced low-
budget indie hit are being tapped to write and/or direct major, big-
budget releases. From Safety Not Guaranteed (2012) director Colin
Trevorrow and screenwriter Derek Connolly going from that film to
Jurassic World (2015) and steadfastly indie-minded writer-director
Alex Ross Perry getting hired to write 2018’s Christopher Robin
to Ryan Fleck and Anna Bolden moving from intimate small films
like Half Nelson (2006) and Sugar (2008) to Captain Marvel (2019),
more and more, filmmakers with humble roots are jumping to the
12 Introduction
head of the class and getting big-budget gigs based on the strength of
their early, low-budget work. Can you believe that Chloe Zhao has
gone from Songs My Brothers Taught Me (2015), The Rider (2017)
and Nomadland (2020) to Marvel’s The Eternals (2021)? I can.
Similarly, in the new era of “prestige television,” there have been a
number of shows coming directly from one-time indie feature film-
makers. The trend might have started with Lena Dunham, who had
made some shorts, her medium-length film Creative Nonfiction
(2009), and her feature Tiny Furniture (2010) before creating Girls
(2012–2017). Now, we have shows like Search Party (2016–present)
which was created by Sarah-Violet Bliss (who had co-directed one
feature) and Charles Rogers following the success of their film Fort
Tilden (2014) and Love Life (2020) by Sam Boyd, who had written
and directed one feature In A Relationship (2018) before creating
the show.
Let’s discuss what this book is not. Importantly, this book is not
an Introduction to Screenwriting book, it assumes some degree of
experience with the form. Though, by nature, I have to touch on
it, this book is not about structure, character development, dialogue
and formatting. There are ample places to learn about those ele-
ments of the craft. This book is really about hacks and strategies for
writing screenplays for micro-budget films that use limited resources
to their advantage as well as how to avoid some of the pitfalls that
micro-budget filmmakers often encounter (and too often ignore) at
the screenplay/concept stage. This book assumes that, on some level,
you know how to write a story for the screen but that you might
need to learn how to specifically design a story that can be produced
on a low budget.
This book explores the techniques and special considerations that
go into writing for low budgets. By presenting case studies of suc-
cessful low-budget films, writers, directors and producers will have a
solid foothold to stand on when starting out on a new project.
By laying out the concepts central to conceiving and writing a
story suitable for production on a low budget that I have learned
in over 30 years of study as well as in the production of my own
low-budget feature and including interviews from some of the most
Introduction 13
acclaimed independent writer-directors working today as well as

newer talent brewing just below the surface, I hope to enlighten,
educate and inspire others who dream of making films.
I think I always thought I would grow up and out of this silly
dream of making films for a living, but, despite ample inspiration, it
still has not happened.
1
KNOW YOUR LIMITATIONS
Orson Welles once said, “The enemy of art is the absence of

limitations.”
Not long ago, someone asked me “What do you call a person who
makes a film all by himself?”
My answer: “Resourceful.”
When my daughters were younger, they were really into doing
original plays for the family. These productions usually consisted of
them playing the major roles and their dolls taking on all of the sup-
porting parts on makeshift sets that were meant to represent elabo-
rate luxurious or fantastical worlds. After one of their shows, in a
case of what might be considered questionable parenting, I con-
gratulated them but suggested that they try to come up with a show
that did not require casting inanimate objects or using unrealistic
sets. What they came up with kind of blew me away. For their next
show, they had a total of four characters and the story was set in
the contemporary, everyday world. In the first act, the two of them
played two characters and, in the next act, they played two different
characters, but all of them drove the narrative and related to each
other in a coherent way. They really pulled it off; it was inventive,
ambitious, successful and, most importantly, resourceful. They took
stock of their assets and crafted a play that was brilliantly designed
to work with what was available to them, within their constraints,
DOI: 10.4324/9781003138969-2
16 Know your limitations
not against them. They even composed and performed the music.
Over 15 years later, the memory of that experience has never
faded and, in fact, moved to the forefront of my mind as I wrote
this book.
When I spoke with director, writer, producer and actress Meosha
Bean, she had just been asked to make a $100,000 film for a dis-
tributor who already had a screenplay. I asked about what she looks
for in a screenplay for a film that will be produced on such a small
budget.
Meosha Bean:
I look for a lot of things. One, if I liked the script and it spoke
to me, was it something that I really wanted to do. Number
two, what is it, what are we trying to say, what are we talk-
ing about, what message are we trying to put across for the
audience? Sure, of course, I’m trying to do the whole Jordan
Peele thing, where it is like, you watch a horror movie, but
you’re like, “Oh, wow, that was creepy. But also, it made me
think.” I got a script recently and it takes place in this house
and I like the challenges of having three people in one loca-
tion. It’s not “use the space I need”, it is “Let’s use the whole
house, let’s use everything, the backyard, the front yard, the
driveway.”
This distributor reached out to a filmmaker friend of mine
and they basically gave him $100,000 to make this feature. And
so, he calls me because I’ve done so many independent films. It
is fun location scouting and looking for places where we want to
make this happen. And of course, Los Angeles is very expensive.
So it goes back to asking for favors, friends that say “Hey, I have
a friend that has a really nice house, and I’m like, ‘this could be
this is doable.” He’s like, “Use my place.”
Lawrence Michael Levine is a screenwriter, a director, a producer

and an actor who frequently collaborates with his wife, screenwriter,
director, producer, actress and editor Sophia Takal. We spoke just
before the release of his film Black Bear (2020), which at times, feels
Know your limitations 17
like a fictional account of the production of Takal’s micro-budget

delight Always Shine (2016).
When I was in college, I watched Cassavetes, I watched all of

it. But I think Faces (1968) was the first one I watched. And
I was like, “Oh wait, you can make movies about real life that
feel really real and depict people as they actually behave and act
and comment on that?” And I thought, “Okay, well I can’t do
this.” Like bullshit movies that seem too big. Like I can’t make,
I don’t know, whatever was popular at the time, like The Matrix
(1999). I don’t see myself making that kind of movie. It’s just
kind of knowing your limits. But in my case, there was like,
actually no desire to do anything bigger. Look, this movie is
holding my interest. And it’s just people in very everyday situ-
ations and places and outfits. And I could maybe do something
like this. And then I was desperate to learn how to do it because
I didn’t know how to. I knew there was some kind of approach.
I knew this stuff was really interesting that was going on in Faces
but I didn’t really know how to accomplish effects like that.
So I was desperate to learn how to learn everything that Cas-
savetes seemed to know. So he was an actor. He started out
as an actor. I read everything I could get my hands on, Ray
Carney’s books, for example. And whatever was available at the
time about him. And, and that turned me on to other people
like Mike Leigh. So, I got really into Mike Leigh, who similarly
makes all that stuff that is pretty simple in terms of setting and,
and there’s nothing fancy there.
You know, these were people who were making films that
were drawing energy from different sources than your typical
Hollywood action film. You know, it was very obvious to me
that something rich was happening going on here. I just didn’t
understand how to do it, but I felt like I could get there. So, I got
into Mike Leigh, and then another guy that Ray Carney was
writing about, Tom Noonan. So, I watched Tom Noonan films,
and I really liked them. And I was just really looking for guid-
ance, and I was looking for a mentor and I had no idea that Tom
Noonan, at that time, was this remote figure as Mike Leigh is to

me now. I had no idea that Tom Noonan would ever be some-
body that I would meet or anything but one day, I was walking
around the village, and I came across a sign in front of a building
that said, Tom Noonan actually teaches acting, writing, direct-
ing, I don’t know exactly the time said, and I was like, “Holy shit,
this is crazy. Tom Noonan teaches classes, and I could take them.”
And, you know, Tom Noonan made these two movies where
it’s just people sitting around, you know, talking and I think they
work brilliantly. So, I got into his class. And it really set me on
the path that I’m still on today, because I learned the specific kind
of techniques and approaches to writing, writing drama, really.
Back to my earlier point, do it for fun. I would never tell you to

not write out your ideas. I feel that anytime we sit down to write, we
have the potential to become better writers by practicing our craft.
Also, it is just so much fun to create these worlds and think about
them. To me, there are few better feelings than that of looking for-
ward to writing, the feeling you get when you’re so in love with an
idea that you think about even when you’re not writing.
Now, if you have written a really great screenplay that’s been cali-
brated to be produced with a modest budget, you might have a better
chance. I had a very low-budget screenplay optioned by a production
company that was looking to make a feature after years in the business
of producing commercials, reality TV, music videos and so on.
Step 1, painful as it might be, is to be conscious of the kinds of
films that are problematic to produce on a low budget. Shifting to
the right mindset is the most important part of the job. Start small.
Do your research.
Noam Kroll is a filmmaker whose 2020 film Psychosynthesis was
made on a modest budget. On his podcast Show, Don’t Tell, he reg-
ularly offers filmmaking advice based on his own experiences. He
takes a philosophical approach to having limitations.
When it comes to writing, everyone sort of says minimal loca-

tions, minimal cast, there’s all these rules. And, and there’s
obviously a reason that people say that and, and all those param-
eters can certainly help you on your way to making your film
more feasible. However, the way that I like to approach it is
I like to think about what’s something that you can do on a
smaller budget that you wouldn’t be able to do on a bigger
budget. So sort of looking at ways to embrace the limitations.
So for example, a certain subject matters, certain points of view,
certain characters that you want to explore might not really be
feasible on a larger canvas, because if you have a bunch of inves-
tors putting $8 million into your indie movie, they’re going to
obviously want to have a say, they’re going to want to make
sure that it’s as marketable as possible and rightfully so when
you’re dealing with $20,000 or $50,000, that you sort of cob-
bled together to make your movie that opens up the door for
a lot of the creative exploration that you literally wouldn’t be
able to do, if you had more money, unless you were just inde-
pendently wealthy. So I think that’s sort of always my biggest
point that I try to get across to filmmakers is, look for the thing.
What’s the unique advantage that you actually have by not hav-
ing money? What’s the story that you could tell on a smaller
budget that you wouldn’t be able to, if you had more money.
You could take more risks.
Here is the thing, screenwriting is not rocket science. Anyone can

learn the basics of structure and formatting. That does not necessarily
mean that their screenplays will be good. What is more important is
that screenplays are not just good (well, okay, better than good), but
they are producible and, in a relatively perfect world, if produced,
stand a chance of breaking even financially if not providing a return
on investment.
In the early 1990s, I was a few years out of film school, reading
everything I could get my hands on about making low-budget inde-
pendent films. I kept seeing film magazine ads for Dov S-S Simens’
2-Film School, a weekend seminar that promised to unlock the mys-
teries of how to make a feature for next to nothing. Simens worked
for Roger Corman, one of the undisputed titans of low-budget,
independent films that countless filmmakers cite as an inspiration.

So, I took the workshop in early 1992 and hung on every word. I still
remember that one of Simens’ parting lines was “Rent a house in the
woods, hire a bunch of kids, chop ‘em up and you’ve got a movie.” It
is a model that has endured for generations and even spawned some
good movies.
At this point, the model for micro-budget filmmaking is nothing
new and fairly well-known: few locations and few characters, no
exterior shots at night if possible, minimal special effects or stunts.
Frequently, this approach leaves us with films about people talking
to each other. There are few cheaper ways to make a film than just
shooting people talking to each other. The problem that many film-
makers attempting this kind of shoot is that scenes are often longer
and “talkier” than average and, unfortunately, more static and stagy.
No matter how ingenious the plot is and how sparkling the dialogue
might be, there is great danger of the film becoming visually dull.
So, one of the primary goals of this book is to look for ways to keep
micro-budget films genuinely cinematic (which comes from the root
kinetic, meaning motion), visually active by building activity into the
project at the screenplay level.
Sure, you say, what about My Dinner With Andre (1981), that
was just two guys talking? If you can write something on the level
of My Dinner With Andre, please do, I would love to see it. Sure,
you say, we can just do an Aaron Sorkin walk-and-talk to keep things
active visually. Well, can you? Do you, as a writer, know what goes
into producing a walk-and-talk, how much time, effort and expense
of your resources will be required? If you do and you think it is the
right way to go, then go for it. Filmmaking is 90% problem-solving,
figuring out how to tell a good story with a camera.
Remember, when we talk about cinema, movies, we are talking
about motion pictures. Cameras can both capture motion and move
themselves, so it is critically important to keep these elements of cin-
ema in mind. Orson Welles really understood the power of the cam-
era and his films are filled with stunning compositions of characters
in motion as well as camera movement back and forth, up and down
the frame and, of course, as famously seen in the opening sequence

to Touch Of Evil (1958), a frame that can move with action. No,
on a micro-budget film, you might not be able to afford dollies and
cranes, but there are many ways to move a camera and, when appro-
priate for the film, a production should remember to utilize them.
When I spoke with writer-director Alex Ross Perry, the topic of
writing for your limitations came up,
When you’re writing the script, how much do you already

know? I’m not going to write a location that can take me all
this time and money to find. I wrote a movie for this location.
I don’t need to go find it. And I wrote a scene right for this
aesthetic decision. I’m not going to have to think of that later.
And a lot of the work as a writer is just solving every production
problem and every question while you are writing.
DG: But on this level, you have to reverse engineer and say “What do
I have access to? You know, my parents own a laundromat,” and
you set a movie in a laundromat instead of the other way around
where you think of locations while you’re writing.
ARP: “That’s always been my method, at least on those earlier films.
And still, no matter what I’m aiming for, on whatever script or
project I’m currently attempting to unlock. That’s my back-
ground, that’s my education that I gave myself, I cannot detach
myself from that, because every attempt I’ve ever made, to just
shoot for the moon in terms of locations or resources, those end
up being the scripts that do not get made or get changed the
most, to the point that it’s not the thing anymore. And those are
hard-earned lessons, but they just came about by making two
movies, both for under $25,000. And this still again, from those
two movies. I remember I was outlining Her Smell (2018). And
I called both the wardrobe designer and the makeup designer
that I’d worked with on my three previous films, and said, ‘If I’m
writing scenes that have seven women completely styled from
head to toe, how bad is that logjam going to be at the start of the
day?’ What they both said was, ‘Here’s the budget we’re going
to need to be able to get that size of a cast looking the way you
want this movie to look out of wardrobe, hair and makeup in
about 90 minutes every day, so that you have a full day to shoot.
If you can provide us with this budget, and this many hands in
our department, then there’s nothing to worry about.’ So I then
had the freedom to continue writing as I wanted, and then telling
everybody I already checked with these department heads, they
asked for a department of seven instead of department of three,
and we need to give it to them or else we’re never going to make
our days. And everybody was very amazed that that problem had
been solved before it ever became a problem. And that is a lesson
you only get if you’re writing a movie you’re going to make for
$20,000 and calling people while writing it and saying, will you
be in a movie? If I write a character right now? I want to do a
scene with this car, you have that car? Can we borrow it? And
then you just solve this stuff while you’re sitting by yourself.”
If I would also make a movie the size of Queen of Earth (2015).

If we were saying, post pandemic, our only option to make a
movie is going to be making something in one location where
the actors wear their own clothes. I would be writing that
movie, but I did not, Her Smell was not that story. So therefore,
everything had to be thought of while writing. And again,
that’s a movie that far outpaces the parameters of what you’re
discussing, the blessing is it was only possible because of how
I made my earlier movies.
So, it is critical to be aware of your limitations and your resources.

I spoke with writer-producer-director, fellow screenwriting pro-
fessor and host of the Scriptcake podcast Lovinder Gill on the topic
and he said,
So whenever you’re shooting a movie, you’re gonna have some

limitations. Whenever you’re writing a movie, even if you want
to write something in a particular genre, that genre comes with
limitations. But a low budget does not mean you cannot be

creative. In fact, it means you have to be creative. “I don’t have a
lot of money?” That’s fine. That doesn’t mean you can’t be crea-
tive. If you look at a simple sequence, where two people are dis-
cussing something, (some) writers will put that in a restaurant.
Why? Because that’s where people talk. Right? Okay. But that
doesn’t mean or say anything about the characters. You know, in
fact, you’re gonna have to pay for a restaurant and pay for all the
people in the background and pay for a whole bunch of other
stuff. People are thinking about the parameters of a story that
they want to write and they will limit themselves beyond their
actual limitations.
As an example of effectively utilizing available resources, take a

look at the Bad Ben (2016-present) franchise. Never heard of it? You
are not alone, but you might be shocked to find out what a rabid fan
base it has. It is one thing to make a micro-budget film in your own
house with available resources, but to make nine films like this—in
the same location—for a grand total of around $20,000 is a whole
other story.
Written, produced, shot and edited by my friend Nigel Bach, Bad
Ben cost $300 to make and then another $1300 went into market-
ing. Bach willed the film into existence when his original plans went
awry after his cast dropped out right before shooting. He improvised
a monologue, cast himself and designed the entire film to be shot on
home security cameras and cell phones. Bach is the only actor in the
film and made up 99.9% of the crew. Eight Bad Ben films later—and
#9 just wrapped—the series has made back its budget many times
over. No, it’s not as well-known as The Blair Witch Project (1999)
or the Paranormal Activity (2007–2015) series, but proportionately,
it has to be considered a success especially because it never had a the-
atrical run with a big advertising campaign or press and, bottom-line,
the director makes a living on these films.
Nigel Bach: I’d been writing screenplays and trying to pitch them.
And people would say to me, “Why don’t you make your own mov-
ies?” And the thing they didn’t realize, because you own a camera,
does it mean you can make Avatar? You know, you have limitations?
I reverse engineered my movie. I’ve heard this saying “when the only
tool you have is a hammer, you tend to treat everything like a nail.”
So I knew that I had a camera, but it still was prosumer at best. I had
to think “what could I make with what I had?” I had a hammer, what
could be my nail and I knew that a found footage type film that’s
supposed to look like something that was shot on a regular camera
or even security cameras? That was something that was my nail, and
I had the hammer to do that.
Someone once asked me if it is possible to make a feature for $100.
As much as I would try to dissuade anyone from making a film on
that budget, I cannot say that it is impossible. If you reverse engineer
your production, you can, conceivably, make a movie for $100. Is it
going to be a movie with state-of-the-art cinematography, effects,
acting, sets and costumes? Probably not. But, honestly, if you really
think everything through and become incredibly resourceful and, if
you write a great screenplay for it, one that embraces the limitations
of your budget, it is possible to produce a $100.00 feature film.
So, what do I mean by “reverse engineer” and “embrace the limi-
tations”? Indie film 101 is founded on this principle: two to four
characters, two to four locations. First, unlike most movies with
decent budgets, for a micro-budget film, you should take stock of
your available resources. Do your parents own a deli? If so, you write
a screenplay where 90% of the story takes place in a deli. If you know
anyone who owns a spaceship, then you can make a science fiction
film. Next, cast the best, most reliable actors willing to work for
little-to-no money.
When I say “embrace the limitations,” I mean “don’t agonize over
production values.” Yes, make the film look as good as you can but
you are unlikely to be able to afford especially nice art direction,
costume design, stunts and sets, so write a screenplay that does not
require them. There are few things worse than a movie that looks
low rent because the filmmakers tried to shoot for high-end settings,
locations and props but used cheesy substitutes. Make a movie about
“regular” people who don’t have fancy cars or lavish homes—unless
you have unlimited access to those things.
Noam Kroll told me:
My biggest point that I try to get across to filmmakers is to look

for the thing. What’s the unique advantage that you actually
have by not having money? What’s the story that you could tell
on a smaller budget that you wouldn’t be able to, if you had
more money, you could take more risks. You could be more
experimental with blending genres, if you’re making a com-
mentary on something, that there’s an angle to it. I think about
exploring that because the number one thing that ultimately will
help your micro budget film is the concept and is differentiating
what you’re doing from the $10 million movie to $50 million
movie. But I do think that you’re better off when you embrace
the limitations, as opposed to try to, uh, pretend that they’re not
there and try to make your production or your, even the writ-
ing of your film resemble a much larger budget feature, because
then you’re not really taking advantage of the smaller canvas that
you’re working on.
The last, possibly most important point to me is, above
anything else: write a great screenplay with well developed
characters.
Robert Greene works primarily in documentaries, but he has also

edited films by Alex Ross Perry and Bob Byington, among others.
As a director, he first entered my radar with the astonishing narrative-
documentary hybrid Kate Plays Christine (2016). He reaffirms the
philosophy that
with micro budget films, you really do have to factor in the

production technique. I mean, you have to know what your
parameters are and how you’re going to execute when you have
no money. I think any time you’re writing screenplays, espe-
cially with budget limitations, with time limitations, and those
go hand in hand, I think it’s really a matter of just setting up so
the vision of the overall film needs to match and lean into the
strengths, not the weaknesses. You need to write with a mind of
where you’re going to shoot, you need to write a mind of who

you’re going to have in it, you need to write with a mind of
like, what are your days going to look like filming it, and those
need to be integrated and, and they need to relate to each other
strongly.
Jim Byrkit co-wrote Rango (2011) and has had a solid career
doing things like concept art on some of the Pirates of the Caribbean
films, but it was his 2013 feature writing-directing debut Coherence,
a mind-bending lo-fi sci-fi psychological thriller made for $50,000
and shot in five days that got my attention. Byrkit told me that
When you don’t have resources, it forces you to be creative and

look around. And what do you have and I had a living room,
and I had some friends that could act and I had a camera. It’s
surprising what you will come up with when you’re forced to
deal with the resources at hand. You come up against the limits
of your imagination.
When you read movie reviews, what is being criticized? Usually, a

movie review says who made the film, who’s in it and if the story is
any good. Rarely, do you see a review that criticizes the sound effects
editing or the best boy. People want to see a good story and, at this
level of filmmaking, the screenplay is the least expensive element of
the production. It costs next to nothing—sometimes even less—to
write a good screenplay, so take your time, be smart about it and
never forget that you are making a $100–$100,000 film but bend over
backward to make sure that your screenplay is not as good as it can
be, it is ten times better than it should be.
Audiences will forgive low-production values if they are wrapped
up in a good story. Nobody will forgive a bad story no matter how
much the film cost to make.
2
GETTING REAL
Plain and simple, you can have a $200,000,000 budget, a top-notch

crew, a cast full of A-listers and the best special effects in the business
but, the vast bulk of the time, if you do not have a really good screen-
play, the chances of making a really good film are usually pretty small.
On the flip side, a micro-budget film with technical limitations but a
strong enough screenplay and great cast stands a pretty strong chance
of becoming a decent film.
Someone started telling me about the series of screenplays he had
written and the cinematic universe he had created. He asked me
“How do you pitch it to Hollywood?”
As gently and diplomatically as possible, I said something to the
effect of “You don’t.” I tempered that statement with “Do it for fun.”
I get it; everyone likes movies and quite a few people dream of
having a career in film as a director, a cinematographer, an actor or a
writer. Films are the art form closest to dreams; we have little movies
that play in our heads every night. When I wrote my first screenplay
at 13 years old, I could see it so vividly in my mind, it was wonder-
ful to sit down and write (longhand) and imagine the world of my
film. So, I get it, world building, dreaming up elaborate scenarios,
dynamic characters and imagining who would play them is fun. It is
when you start to take it too seriously and think about trying to get
DOI: 10.4324/9781003138969-3
28 Getting real
the film produced that the fun can disappear faster than you can say
“smash cut.”
If you are talking about a big-budget, FX-heavy series of films
like Avatar (2009), Star Wars (1977) or The Avengers (2012), look
into the history of those projects. Cameron was a massively suc-
cessful filmmaker before he introduced the Avatar universe. Lucas
was a moderately successful filmmaker when he started Star Wars.
The MCU is a pre-sold commodity because the films are based on
characters who have been popular for decades. Getting them pro-
duced was considerably easier for them because they were estab-
lished entities.
If you are not an industry insider with a track record of success,
you might find a lot of closed doors if you have written a location/
large cast/stunts and special effects intensive screenplay, unless you
have secured financing. If you have the money to make that kind of
film, you will easily find a production company to make it for/with
you. The days where a “regular” person could send out a screenplay
to a production company and have even a slim chance of getting it
made are largely gone.
Let’s get real about selling screenplays and creating cinematic uni-
verses. Something like 94% of all screenwriting jobs are assignments
for-hire: the producers generate a project they can afford and hire a
writer. It’s usually not the other way around where a writer generates
a project and then goes looking for people to finance it—especially
if it is a big-budget, effects-heavy production featuring unfamiliar
characters and worlds.
Unless you are working in the business now, doing well and have
a good reputation, you are probably talking about submitting a spec
screenplay. Hollywood receives about 100,000 spec screenplays every
year and usually less than 100 are sold. The odds are so high. What
spec or under-the-radar scripts have done well recently? BlaKK-
Klansman (2018) and A Quiet Place (2018) were both reportedly
discovered on The Black List. Whether or not they were truly specs,
I’m not sure. I can’t think of a “universe” or series of films that began
as a spec. Okay, Cameron was not a big director when he made
The Terminator (1984). Technically, maybe the Rocky franchise
Getting real 29
sort of counts but, again, the first film was essentially a grungy, low-
budget indie.
No matter what you think of him as a person, Woody Allen has
been nominated for 16 Best Original Screenplay Oscars and won
three times. In Eric Lax’s Conversations with Woody Allen, the film-
maker says,
If you have a good script and you shoot it in a stupid way,

badly lit and badly shot, you can still have a successful movie . . .
Whereas, if you have bad material, if the writing is not good,
you can shoot the eyes out of it every way and, most of the time,
no matter what style you bring to the film, it doesn’t work.
I believe that very few filmmakers gather financing, resources,

equipment, crew, cast, then just turn on the camera and wait to see
what happens. The same approach should apply to films made on any
budget. I seriously doubt that any films went into production with-
out something resembling a screenplay, but I have heard of plenty of
films that started shooting with a screenplay that needed more work;
was clearly not camera-ready and resulted in a less than satisfying
film. Do you remember Sydney Pollack’s 2005 film The Interpreter?
You are forgiven if it does not ring a bell, it was not well received.
Reportedly, star Sean Penn convinced Nicole Kidman to take a role
in it even though the problematic screenplay was still undergoing
major rewrites, assuring her that everything would work out in the
end. Sure, it actually made decent money worldwide, but, on Rot-
ten Tomatoes, the film has a 57% critical score and 54% audience
score with the consensus summed up by “A polished and intelligent
thriller, though marred by plot implausibilities.” Okay, “polished and
intelligent” sound like compliments to the production and screenplay
(which was, in part, written by superstar screenwriters Steve Zaillian
and Scott Frank), but, to me, if you are part of a studio machine that
is spending $80,000,000 on a film, it should not be “marred by plot
implausibilities.” Yes, maybe the plot logic was sound in the screen-
play and lost in the editing room but, what should come first here, a
sensible plot or the running time? Why would you sign on to a film
30 Getting real
without first making sure that the screenplay was, at least, mostly
airtight?
To me, on a major film, where costs can be more than $1,000,000
a day, the idea of going into production without an airtight screen-
play seems irresponsible, irrational and like a recipe for disaster or, at
least, mediocrity, but it happens all the time. It was reported rather
publicly that the screenplay for Joker (2019) was being rewritten
every day. I saw Stephen King working on revisions to the Pet Sema-
tary screenplay on set. Steven Spielberg once said “You can’t start a
movie by having the attitude that the script is finished, because if you
think the script is finished, your movie is finished before the first day
of shooting” because things usually change in production and post-
production, but going into production without a relatively coherent
sense of what happens in the story is asking for trouble. I’m not say-
ing that filmmakers should not be open to sudden fits of inspiration
during the shoot, things change and people come up with new ideas
all of the time.
Between writing the first draft and the second draft of this book,
I went off to produce Seclusion. Now, I have had screenplays radically
altered in production and it took me a while to adjust to the reality
that my words were not written in stone. In a theater, the words of
the playwright are usually treated like a holy text; they are not altered
without the input of the writer. Not so in film. While the WGA
sets a limit on the number of screenwriters who can be credited on a
film, there are often as many as dozens of writers who contribute to
the final screenplay. In the case of Seclusion, we had seven or eight
drafts from the original writer and we tinkered with it but, once on
set, things shifted. Toward the end of the shoot, scenes were get-
ting cut, lines were being added and, most importantly, because the
chemistry between our leads was so strong, we began to emphasize a
romance element of the story that was not in the screenplay. Now it
was my turn to be one of the guys altering someone else’s screenplay
in production rather than the other way around. Because the story
can be in flux and evolve during production, it has been said that
there is the screenplay you write, the screenplay you shoot and the
screenplay you edit. The lesson is that you have to be flexible, ready
Getting real 31
to solve problems on set and be open to inspiration. We were happy

with the Seclusion screenplay when we went into production, but
inspiration struck and we were ready to adjust as needed.
So, I hate to sound cranky, but I have seen a lot of low-budget
indie films made by people who know how to shoot well, light well,
edit well, do special effects well but cannot tell an interesting, com-
pelling story and that should not be the case. It is really not that hard
to come up with a story for a film. Yes, it is hard to come up with
an original, intelligent story for a film, but so many of you are just
aiming to make basic, ordinary films anyway and there is nothing
wrong with that if the story is strong, the structure is sound and the
characters are compelling.
If you are reading this book, there is a good chance that you have an
interest in writing and maybe producing a film on an extremely low
budget. The average major studio release costs around $80,000,000
to produce. In Hollywood, anything under $50,000,000 is consid-
ered low budget. Even some small-scale producers will not consider
any project with a budget less than $10,000,000. The reality is that
most of us are going to have a hard time raising even $1,000,000
to make a film. It’s been said that filmmaking is 90% fundraising
(I know that I just said “filmmaking is 90% problem solving” in the
last chapter so, for the sake of argument, let’s call lack of funds a
problem that needs to be solved) and there is something to that way
of thinking.
My feeling has always been “Why write a symphony if you do
not have an orchestra to play it? Why not write for a string quartet
instead?” Writing a micro-budget film is writing for a string quartet.
I read screenplays all the time. I grade them for students and I read
them for filmmaker friends who come to me for advice. From time
to time, someone I do not know reaches out to me and asks me to
read a screenplay for them or to ask for suggestions on how to get
into film production.
Recently, a stranger asked me to read a screenplay for a film that
they want to make. The guy can write and the film would be really
cool if he could make it. The project involves many locations (from
city to beach, east coast to west coast), lots of characters, stunts and
32 Getting real
special effects. So, like many of the screenplays I read, the “if he could
make it” factor is where a lot of beginning filmmakers struggle and
I offered him the following advice:
The bottom-line with this screenplay is the bottom-line. As-is,

I think it would be expensive and complicated to produce. Now
someone else might read it and jump at the chance to take on
this challenge. My orientation has been towards really simple,
Micro Budget films because, of course, they don’t cost that
much to make and they don’t cost so much to make because
they usually involve small casts and few locations.
Unless you have very deep pockets, have connections to
investors or are really good at fundraising, the big trick to film-
making from my perspective is coming up with a screenplay that
you can actually make, that is not going to require a lot of set-
ups in different places, complicated effects or stunts and a cast
and crew of thousands, hundreds or even dozens.
I came to screenwriting after film school and working on the

crews of movies, music videos, infomercials, etc. so, for better or
worse, I write with production in mind. I want people to pick up my
screenplays and say “I want to make this film and I think I can make
this film.
So my advice would be to do what you are doing, get out into
your local film community if you have one, meet people, offer to
work on their films, make connections, get hands-on experience and
build up a network of people who can help you with your stuff.”
It doesn’t cost much to write a screenplay, but a screenplay on
its own is nothing—remember it’s like writing a symphony but not
having an orchestra to perform it. With today’s technology, anyone
can make a film and plenty of people are trying to make films. I have
seen plenty of people start films and not be able to finish them. I have
seen some great films made with simple, inexpensive equipment, and
I have seen a lot of really bad films. The point here is to know what
you’re doing as well as you can before you actually go out and try to
do it.
Getting real 33
Filmmaker and novelist Polly Schattel has made three features and
had a number of screenplays optioned. We spoke about the way to
approach the writing of a film on this level.
The films are so writing intensive, because you don’t have to

rely on special effects and great cinematography. You just have
to have good words. You start looking for these scenarios,
and start thinking, “What can I dig out of this scenario?” For
instance, on my second film, Alison (2009), I had just bought
a new house. So I knew I had the run of the place. So you
look for these little complications that you can flesh out. But
necessarily, of course, these are indie films, rather than a super-
hero blockbuster, these are smaller, more character based dra-
mas. You can’t afford to do flying and shooting and blowing
up. You sort of work backwards from what you actually have.
You know, for instance, on my third film, Quiet River (2015),
I had a really talented actor who lived in the weirdest little
tiny cabin ever. And she basically gave me the run of it, she
said we can shoot in here alone. So we literally fashioned that
story backwards out of what we had available to us and we cre-
ated this thing and she helped me to create this narrative of a
Ted Kaczynski-like troubled senior who was living in this small
cabin. So you work backwards from what you have available to
you. And that’s really where you start.
In 1999, I was teaching film classes at my old high school. The

students and I were trying to come up with an idea for a film that we
could shoot start-to-finish during a class period. Quickly we deter-
mined that we should set it in real time, have one primary location
and have new characters come to it rather than moving characters to
another location. We never wound up making that film, but the idea
and the approach to production stayed with me and ultimately turned
into the feature I shot in 2013, Stomping Ground (2016).
Around the same time, I was reviewing films for Home Media
Entertainment Magazine and became one of the primary review-
ers for IndieTalk.com. In that capacity, I saw a lot of movies and,
34 Getting real
in the case of reviewing for IndieTalk, I saw a lot of films that had
not (and would not) get distribution, some of them really good
and some of them truly terrible. The bottom-line for me was that
the “digital revolution” had arrived and that everyone was mak-
ing micro-budget films. I figured, “I should try to make a micro-
budget film like everyone else, spend a modest amount of money
and, if the film never gets distributed and I lose some money, I can
live with it.”
In one of my IndieTalk reviews, I bashed the filmmakers for hav-
ing a terrible screenplay, but I wrote that I didn’t mean to single them
out, that bad screenplays are a real issue in many of the films that
I reviewed for that site.
I know that the technology at our hands is amazing, cool, etc.,
that the possibilities are virtually endless these days. There are so
many great cameras out there now—I have seen most of the hottest
cameras and accessories out there up close and they really are all that
they are cracked up to be. There are also plenty of really decent,
moderately priced cameras out there that do perfectly acceptable
work. High-quality post-production seems to be at everyone’s
fingertips.
So, what is the problem? Too many of “us” in the indie world
(well, the mainstream film world, too) seem to be too focused on the
technology, so much so that the foundation of a film is being ignored.
I implore you to put your camera down, step away from your soft-
ware and invest in what I consider essential filmmaking equipment:
a good book on screenwriting. But, that’s just me. Some filmmakers
interviewed for this book might disagree.
For $25.00 or less, you can buy a book that will open your eyes to
the magic of plotting out a story. I know that a lot of technical, crea-
tive people are intimidated by screenwriting that they find it mysteri-
ous and daunting to have to learn “the formula” and the formatting,
but it really helps.
Even if you just learn the basics, it can make your films and your
approach to filmmaking so much better. Learn the basic concepts of
structure, conflicts, what makes a strong main character, etc., and it
might be revolutionary to you.
Getting real 35
So, by all means, while you are waiting for your Blackmagic URSA
Mini Pro to arrive, pick up a good book on screenwriting, learn the
basics and apply them to your next film, please.
I get it, why read a book when you could be making a movie?
I have had to work to fight against my resistance to conventions.
When I read Syd Field’s classic Screenplay as an idealistic but cynical
and opinionated young 20-something back in the 1980s I couldn’t
get through it, I was so disgusted by the idea that the art of cinema
could be boiled down to a simple formula, X, Y and Z by page 10,
An Act Break on or around page 30, Act 2A, mid-point, Act 2B,
another Act Break on page 60 or 90 depending on how long the
film is, etc. I reread the book in my slightly more serene late 30s after
having had a couple of professional screenwriting gigs and came to
embrace it warmly.
Okay, still not convinced that the screenplay is not the most impor-
tant part of a film, don’t want to read a book on screenwriting and
learn some of the basics? Fine, just do me a favor, find someone who
has read a book on screenwriting and ask them to write a movie for
you.
Indiewire.com recently published its list of the Best Undistrib-
uted Films in their year-end critics poll. More than 160 critics
voted. Altogether, around 275 films made the list. Granted, some
of these films have gotten distribution deals that have not yet been
announced, but, according to the site, the top five films, those that
were mentioned the most, do not, at this time, have deals for theat-
rical distribution.
Everywhere I turn, I hear about an actress or actor friend shooting
this film or that film and everyone seems to be a director or a pro-
ducer promoting their new film as they are shooting it—sometimes
even long before they start shooting. I understand that marketing
buzz, building brand awareness and consumer interest is the name of
the game but it sometimes seems like that is the only thing happen-
ing. I hear about all these films in the pre-production, then produc-
tion stage and then what, they’re gone?
So many of these films just seem to disappear without getting
much, if any kind of “proper” release—much less a theatrical run.
36 Getting real
Maybe I am old school in thinking that having a movie shown in

a movie theater is the ultimate goal. However, film is a public art, it
succeeds when people see it and I am not just talking about having a
screening at a bar for friends and family.
Still, for me, a theatrical screening—even if it is just at a film
festival or two—is the gold standard. Maybe I am small minded
in thinking like this, but, if I bust my butt and break the bank to
make a film, it means more to me to have people make an effort to
go see it in a theater than it does to know that they are clicking a
button on their computer and watching it while they are checking
their email.
For some people, having a screening of their film—maybe renting
out a screen at the local art-house theater—for friends and family
is as good as it will ever get. For some people, the gold standard is
breaking even, maybe even having something to hand over to their
investors.
If you really want to know my feelings on the matter, I want to
make a film that does “well enough” critically and/or commercially
to inspire someone to back me on another film and the film after that
one and the film after that one and so on.
I have been watching the business of indie films and how they get
to their audience almost as long as I have been watching indie films.
In the “anyone can make a film” era, saying that you are making a
film does not carry much weight with me. Telling me that your film
screened at a reputable festival, got picked up by a distributor with
muscle or even, yes, that it’s been downloaded/whatevered 500 times
is going to impress me.
So, whether or not my thinking is stuck in the past is less of an
issue for me.
The Hollywood Economist Blogspot estimates that, worldwide,
there are 4000–5000 independent features made each year and, of
that number, only 2% will be purchased for distribution. Making a
film is half of the battle, maybe not even half. Getting people to see
your film is the real trick.
Today, anyone can make a movie and, from my perspective, far too
many people are making mediocre movies and, not that I am a math
Getting real 37
whiz by any stretch or into odds and probabilities, it just seems that
the more movies that are out there, the more chances for more of
these movies to be bad increases.
Some people see the glass half full; I see a little crack in the glass
where stuff is slowly leaking out.
Know what you want to do. Know what you are able to do.
3
WRITE FOR YOUR PRODUCER
Screenwriter and director Paul Schrader once said,
I could be just a writer very easily. I am not a writer. I am a

screenwriter, which is half a filmmaker . . . . But it is not an art
form, because screenplays are not works of art. They are invita-
tions to others to collaborate on a work of art.
Just like sheet music is not music, it is a document that tells the
musicians what to play, the screenplay is an instruction manual for a
film that tells directors, directors of photography, actors, production
designers, costume designers, etc., what they need to do for their job
on the film.
I write for the producer as much as I write for the director or the
actor.
What that means is that I write and teach my students to write in
a very spare, conservative style that results in what I call very user-
friendly screenplays. But it also means that I have to keep scope and
scale in mind when I write. I probably should not edit myself like this
when I write and maybe it is not really editing but it is writing with
the parameters in mind, being aware of what this production is and is
not going to be able to produce.
DOI: 10.4324/9781003138969-4
40 Write for your producer
Alex Ross Perry told me:
Part of being a writer on a micro-budget movie, for me was

always also writing as a producer, because I can’t, as a writer,
write a movie that is going to be made where I’ve already told
everybody, we’re making it in July. And I’ve already basically
gotten a sense of how much or how little money I’m going to
have. As a writer, I cannot put in front of the producer an ele-
ment in the script that is unachievable. And since I’m the only
person wearing both of those hats, it is very easy for me to
constantly be calibrating the script. Because the producer who
knows how much money we’re going to have is also sitting there
writing the script.
My philosophy is that the screenplay is the instruction manual or

blueprint for a film, and while it, of course, demands a high degree
of artistry, the screenplay itself is not a work of art unto itself, it is
the foundation of a film—a jumping-off place for directors, actors,
cinematographers, etc., and so, at the most basic level, it has to be a
working document that serves everyone on the crew, not weighed
down by verbosity, literary conventions and flowery prose.
Now, I have heard from students who interned at production
companies in L.A. and they tell me that some producers like flowery
prose. Their philosophy is that flowery prose in a screenplay means
that the author is a good writer. I do not subscribe to this philosophy.
Going in almost the opposite direction, I was judging screenplays
for the Set in Philadelphia Screenwriting Competition for a few years
and I came upon a screenplay that was almost the antithesis of what
I teach. The screenplay was full of sentence fragments and editorial
comments like “This woman will stop at nothing” that I usually scoff
at. I was reading the screenplay and thinking to myself “What, this
is not how to write a screenplay? Where did these people learn to
write” but also, most importantly, “Why do I love this screenplay so
much?” I finished reading it, filled out the review form and, when
asked, I wrote emphatically that yes, this screenplay deserves to win.
It won.
Write for your producer 41
I was really rocked by the experience, wondering how a screen-

play that was written in a style so opposite of the one I preach could
be so effective. I reached out to a mentor and asked him for some
thoughts because, most of the time, I am teaching “Introduction to
Screenwriting” and I feel like students should learn the basics first,
before they start getting into fancy stylistic flourishes and he agreed
but tempered it with
Ultimately, sentence fragments are perfectly acceptable, as long

as the result is clarity. If you’re conveying what we’re supposed
to see and, more important, what we’re supposed to feel, the
actual grammar isn’t that important. If it helps the read without
getting in the way of the read, it’s okay, just don’t show off.
And he went on to say that, at this point, I could probably stand to

jazz up my writing style.
It’s fun to come up with cool ideas and great scenes that will look
good onscreen but be aware that these scenes will have to be produced
and, if you are not also acting as the producer of this film, someone
else will have to handle the logistics of shooting these scenes.
A few years ago, I was on a LinkedIn message board for produc-
ers. One of them posted the question “Producers, what is the hardest
thing about working with screenwriters?” Many of the answers came
down in the area of
Most screenwriters have no idea about what actually goes into

the nuts and bolts of day-to-day filmmaking; they just write
stuff and expect us to be able to produce it without having any
sense of the manpower, time and money involved.
Tom Quinn’s first feature The New Year Parade (2008) won the
Grand Jury Prize at Slamdance and his latest film Colewell (2019)
was nominated for a couple of Independent Spirit Awards said,
I think I don’t know how to separate the writing and production,

because I think they’re not that separate. But I know for me, in the
writing process, it’s where I can explore things, make mistakes,
and not be spending money. But at least I can try a bunch of

different things. And I was kind of surprised that when a friend
asked to see The New Year Parade script at one point, I hadn’t
read in a long time and I was surprised by how close it was.
Because in my mind, we just threw out the scripts, you know, the
specifics of like, where things happen, during production.
Screenwriter Angela Marie Hutchinson has a degree in engineer-

ing but still needed a hand when it came time to reverse engineer
her screenplay Hollywood Chaos (2013). Originally breaking into
the film industry as a casting agent, she eventually started writing and
producing.
I did not write with a low budget in mind for Hollywood

Chaos. I actually wrote it as a $3,000,000 million movie. So
definitely lower, not a huge budget. But I had actually tried to
produce it before and it just never really panned out, like trying
to raise the money, it was difficult, it was just difficult. So after
doing casting on a couple of different movies as a casting direc-
tor, I’d done maybe about six or seven independent movies, and
I wasn’t often on set and seeing how they did things, how eve-
rything was shot and how they kept the budget down, I was like,
you know, I could probably try to do this again thinking of it as
much, much cheaper. So then I just went forth with trying to
raise the money and everything. Then once I had the money in
place and we knew what we had to work with, I went back into
the script and said, “Okay, my character is a basketball player.
So instead of him playing with a whole stadium, we’re going to
have it be the offseason. So he’s being interviewed, and he’s just
shooting hoops or working out or whatever it might be that just
shows that he is a basketball player.” So, yeah, I definitely feel
that after I realized what our budget was, and was like, “Okay,
the same (screenplay) is not possible. So how can we still do
this?” But I didn’t write with that in mind. I did end up work-
ing with a consultant to kind of bounce ideas off from a story
perspective. We walked through some of the things to make
sure from a story perspective, it wasn’t being compromised, if

we were changing this event, and just to look at it as a whole
picture as opposed to like, just picking apart parts of the script
that we had to pick apart for budget purposes. I went to the
consultants and made sure that “Okay, here was our original
script.” And this is where we are now, does it still make sense?
I see myself really, as a writer, fundamentally, I became a pro-
ducer because I had to, I didn’t ever think I wanted to produce
movies. It was like, “I know, I want to write movies.” And so
they’re like, “Oh, you have to produce them if you want them
made.” Okay, guess that’s how it works.
I’m not saying that every screenwriter should know how to set
up a C-stand or mic a scene in the woods, but being completely
divorced from the production element of filmmaking can be a real
disservice when it comes to writing for micro-budget. Say you put
yourself out there as a screenwriter, you capture the attention of a
producer or director with a little bit of money and they hire you to
write a screenplay for a $50,000 film? You have to know what you
can and cannot do in your screenplay and have a sense of what this
group will be able to do on a meager budget.
Writer-director Bob Byington said,
I think in some ways, if you’re writing a script, it’s helpful not

to be thinking about the production and logistics and then in
other ways it is. I really think that if I were a young person, or if
I were trying to make a movie for no money, I would definitely
be thinking about that at the writing stage. And you’d have to
be a lunatic not to be thinking about it. If you’re an established,
skilled screenwriter, no, I don’t think you should be thinking
about the budget. But if you’re, if you’re a kid, or if you’re going
to make a movie and you have $65,000, then you should have
your head examined for not thinking about the logistics.
So, while it is not going to suit every writer or every production,

if possible, I recommend that screenwriters spend at least a little time
on a set or, if nothing else, in a production meeting so that they can

hear what producers, AD’s, UPM’s and so on discuss.
Filmmaking is a team sport and the screenplay, while critically
important to the success of the film, is only one element of the col-
laborative process. It is not enough for me to be happy with the
screenplay: everyone else involved with the film has to like it too. It
takes a variety of people doing different things together to make it
happen, but, honestly, I didn’t think the teamwork element applied
to the screenplay.
When I was just starting out, I naively thought that the process
would be “I write the screenplay and the team makes it” but came
to realize that there has to be a degree of teamwork in the writing
stage. I have to be open to input, questions, suggestions and different
perspectives because, at this point, I am usually not the person who
is making the film.
The person who is making the film either asked me to write a
screenplay based on his/her ideas or saw something in one of my
original screenplays that he/she wanted to produce. It becomes my
job to serve the producer or director’s vision even if I was the one
who came up with the idea in the first place. Ultimately, at some
stage in the process, I have to sign off on the screenplay, walk away
from it, let the production team do whatever they want to it—while
I cower in the shadows and hope for the best.
The L.A. producer who optioned Stomping Ground in 2009
wanted me to make a number of changes to it in the six months
that we worked together. The development and re-writing process
was the hardest work as a writer that I have ever been asked to do.
Honestly, I have often been able to coast on the relative strength of
generally decent work but relative strength and general decency were
not going to cut it in L.A. and I was really stretched and challenged.
The result was a screenplay that is much deeper and richer, more
solid than I could have done on my own.
Oh, yes, you might think that you sell a screenplay and that’s the
end, but, no, you can be kept in limbo doing rewrite after rewrite. In
my case, the producer who optioned it optioned an 80-page screen-
play and, by the time I made all of the requested changes, it had
ballooned up to 104 pages before gradually coming back down to

98, 96, 92, 86 and, finally 82 pages! She told me to make all of these
changes and then we whittled it all down until it was nearly identi-
cal to the original screenplay, but this process had somehow made it
much stronger, as if all of the stuff we added and then took out left
some kind of narrative residue behind.
This is just something to consider because writing a screenplay is
only part of the battle, and getting someone to produce it and then
someone else to distribute it are massive mountains to climb and the
further and further you try to climb, the less and less control you
have. I have seen too many micro-budget films not make it all the
way up the mountain.
Writer-director Martha Stephens said “I think I still have that
mindset when I’m writing where I am writing practically. Because
even though I might be writing something with a bigger budget, I’m
still thinking like, ‘how is this going to get made?’ ”
I often tell my film students that it can be as hard to make a bad
movie as it is to make a good movie.
I remember watching a terrible movie on DVD a few years ago,
then watching the “making of ” special feature and seeing how much
time, mental and physical effort went into the production of this
awful film, how earnest and hardworking they were, etc.—I guess the
disconnect is at the point where someone or some people all missed
the fact that the screenplay was bad and went forward with millions
and millions of dollars to sail this doomed voyage.
On a film crew, everyone thinks that their job is the most impor-
tant. Directors often think they are the most important person on set.
Actors often think they are the most important person on set. I once
worked with a gaffer who clearly thought he was the most important
person on set. But, for me, as the screenwriter who might not even
be on set, I know that my job really is pretty darn important because,
without me, nobody else has a job to do, right?
Back when I reviewed films for IndieTalk, I criticized the film-
makers of a film I had to watch for having a terrible screenplay, but
I wrote that I didn’t mean to single them out, that bad screenplays are
a real issue in many of the films that I review for this site.
So, what is the problem? Okay, I know that I am going to get a lot
of grief for this next statement, but, as a screenwriting professor, it
often seems to me that many students go to film school to learn how
to push buttons on machines.
Yes, film is a mechanical art; it utilizes technology and cinema-
tographers, editors, audio engineers and visual effects; artists need
to know how to use these tools. Screenwriting is a class that all film
students have to take and many of them are not especially interested
in it, they are just looking to fulfill the requirement. I get it, some
people are intimidated by writing or insecure about their writing and
screenwriting involves learning about story structure, formula and
formatting, all of which might be off-putting to budding cinematog-
raphers and editors.
It is hard to come up with ideas for film and there are no machines
out there and no buttons to push to make it happen on its own. Yes,
without taking a deep dive into the topic, there are AI screenwrit-
ing programs out there and, to be completely honest, from the lit-
tle I have seen, they seem to do a surprisingly good job. I suspect
that there are working screenwriters out there who secretly use these
tools.
Too many of “us” in the indie world seem to be too focused on
technology, so much so that the foundation of a film is being ignored.
I implore you, the film community, to put your camera down, stop
tapping your keyboard and invest in what I consider essential film-
making equipment: a good book or two on screenwriting.
For $20 or less, you can buy a book that will open your eyes to the
magic of plotting out a story, usually in accordance with the Three-
Act Structure. I know that a lot of technical, creative people are
intimidated by screenwriting that they find it mysterious and daunt-
ing to have to learn “the formula” and the formatting but it really
helps.
I already mentioned that screenwriters who do not have a firm
grasp on what takes place in production will be doing themselves
and their collaborators a big service if they educate themselves
about production. Your producers will thank you for it. Read your
screenplay the way a producer reads a screenplay. Yes, of course,
they have to like your story, but they also have to figure out if and
how to make it.
Even if you just learn the basics, it can make your films and your
approach to filmmaking so much better and I will not have to sit
through films where the inciting incident comes 45 minutes into the
story—okay, yes, I know that the inciting incident in The Godfather
(1972) comes around an hour into it but it is not the early 1970s;
you are probably not Francis Ford Coppola and that kind of move is
pretty hard to pull off. Learn the basic concepts of structure, conflicts,
what makes a strong main character, etc., and it might be revolution-
ary to you.
So, I hate to sound cranky, but I am seeing a lot of low-budget
indie films made by people who know how to shoot well, light well,
edit well, do special effects well but cannot tell an interesting, com-
pelling story and that should not be the case. It is really not that hard
to come up with a story for a film. Yes, it is hard to come up with
an original, intelligent story for a film, but so many people are just
aiming to make basic, ordinary films anyway and there is nothing
wrong with that IF the story is strong, the structure is sound and the
characters are compelling.
Noam Kroll said,
From a production level, filmmakers often do try to, I guess

they feel the biggest challenge is that they want their movie to
look like a “real movie.” They want it to feel like a real movie,
but, when you’re competing in the same sort of territory or
arena as these other films that have way more money and way
more resources and producers attached and stars attached, you’re
never going to win at that game because they’ve beat you before
you even start. So try to create your own game that they can’t
compete with because their system is going to have more of a
hierarchy. It’s going to have more of a chain of command and a
lot more cooks in the kitchen. And, when you’re working on
that level, that can be incredibly frustrating. So why not? There’s
no need to sort of try to emulate that when you have a lot more
freedom in the early days making these smaller films.
He continued,
I knew from the get go, we would only be filming in two loca-
tions. Other than a couple of shots, everything was either one
house or the other house, and we only have four to five days
depending on the home to shoot in. And obviously that’s not a
lot of time for a feature film. We had to fly through these scenes.
When I was writing the script, I tried to make sure that none
of the scenes with a couple of exceptions were longer than two
pages. In some cases I wanted everything to be like one page or
page and a half. And that was sort of a rule that I imposed on
myself right away, because I knew when it did get into produc-
tion, it would get complicated to cover those scenes. Let’s say
there was a five or six page dialogue scene, things would get
more complicated because we couldn’t just shoot it as a one or
it would get boring, that the visual is not interesting. So with
this, by keeping the scenes short, I basically knew, okay, no mat-
ter what, we can, if we had to, we could shoot every scene in
this movie just from one angle. So if we’re reaching the end of
the day and you know, we’re losing time and we had to do it all
in a one, it would be possible because we’re just shooting these
quick little scenes. And from a writing perspective, it helped to
keep things fresh too, because I think when you give yourself all
the time in the world to write a scene, you don’t always get to
the heart or the meat of what it is for a while. There could be a
lot of dialogue back and forth, a lot of wasted space on the page.
And you end up trimming that down anyways, whether it’s on
set or in the editing room. So by forcing this one to two page
per scene format onto the screenplay, it made me do a lot of the
editing work as I was writing, because I was just immediately
just saying, “Okay, if this doesn’t fit, or if this isn’t a hundred
percent necessary, just lose it.”
So, by all means, while you are waiting for your Blackmagic to
arrive, pick up a good book on screenwriting, learn the basics and
apply them to your next film, please.
4
SCREENWRITING HACKS
Writing a screenplay for a low-budget film is not like writing a

screenplay for big-budget films. There will usually be fewer char-
acters, fewer locations and fewer scenes. The scenes are often much
longer than scenes in films with big budgets. There is a real danger of
scenes becoming static and stagy.
Your story has to account for audience fatigue, the fact that they
might get tired of looking at the same scenery after a while. Build
drama into your story at regular intervals, employ locations within
locations (sub-locations), incorporate motion as much as possible and
have characters doing things, not just sitting around.
To me, screenwriting involves two distinct phases, the Creative
Conceptual Phase and the Creative Mechanical Phase.
The Creative Conceptual Phase is where you formulate your char-
acters, plot, themes and figure out the way your film is going to
unfold. In a micro-budget film, the Creative Conceptual Phase is
where to figure out what you are going to be capable of doing in
your film and how to plan for it in the story.
I am a big fan of outlining. It took me a while to embrace
outlining. If you think about it, many people prefer to get right
into the writing. Outlining forces us to think everything through
before jumping into the project. For me, it is a great way to
organize all of my thoughts before I start to write and I would
DOI: 10.4324/9781003138969-5
50 Screenwriting hacks
rather be organized when writing than making things up as I go

along.
If you were going somewhere for the first time, would you look up
the address, put it into GPS and then figure out the best way to get
there or would you just hit the road and hope for the best? To me,
outlining is narrative GPS.
If you have a strong outline, moving into the Creative Mechani-
cal Phase will be much smoother. The Creative Mechanical Phase is
where you are actually writing the screenplay. Of course, it involves
a lot of creativity because your time should be spent focusing on
writing rich but efficient scene descriptions and dialogue. Ideally,
you should be focused on writing scene descriptions and dialogue,
not story. To me, you should not be working out story issues while
writing scene descriptions and dialogue, the story should have been
worked out before starting to write the screenplay so that you can
place your energy on the Creative Mechanical elements of the
screenplay.
I got hired to write a screenplay once and the producer said
“Great, I will send over the outline.” He sent over a rich, complete
ten-page outline. Boom, I could get right down to the writing.
Another time, the same thing happened and, when I opened the
outline, all I saw was one paragraph. I could not get right down
to the writing because the story was not completely there. I had
to write big chunks of the story and fill in lots of blanks, not what
I was expecting to do.
There are countless ways to write an outline. If you search “How
To Write An Outline,” you will find an overwhelming number of
philosophies and approaches. Do not get overwhelmed, do what
feels right to you. Just get your ideas out of your head and into
a document. The outline should be a really personal document
that represents your creative work style and serves to inspire you
in the Creative Mechanical Phase. Some people write outlines
that are basically screenplays without dialogue. That works. Some
people include artwork and music in their outline. Some outlines
read like journal entries. I call outlining the Creative Conceptual
Phase because there is so much thinking involved before you even
Screenwriting hacks 51
start to write. There is that saying about writers never taking a

vacation because they are always either writing or thinking about
writing.
So, when I am finally feeling ready to start outlining, I open a
new document and begin to type in random thoughts for characters,
scenes, lines of dialogue, locations, themes, references to other films
and so on. Once I have seven to ten pages of these notes, I stare at
them deeply and get a feel for where they would fit into the story.
Then I start cutting and pasting the notes into some sort of rough
beginning, middle and end order. Once the notes start to feel like
they are in order, I expand upon them, fill in details and then start
to come up with the narrative connective tissue that will bind every-
thing into a coherent story.
When I feel that this process is successful, I will usually have a
seven- to ten-page outline that I keep open on my desktop as I write
the screenplay. I write a scene and then refer to the outline to see
what scene comes next. To me, if I write a scene and then have to
ask myself “What should happen now?” I have not done an effective
job of writing an outline. That question should have been answered
in the Creative Mechanical Phase.
When I teach outlining in my classes, I always tell students
Because of the current dynamic where I am the professor and

you are in my class, I have to give you a grade on your outline
but the true grade will come from you because, if the process
of writing your screenplay is smooth, it is because you wrote a
good outline and if it is rocky, chances are good that your out-
line could have used more work. Only you will know if you did
a good job on the outline.
Now, this method works for me and I think you cannot go wrong
with it, but that does not mean there are other approaches.
We have touched on the topic of taking stock of your resources,
figuring out what assets you already have in place that can be utilized
in your film. Next, it is time to figure out how best to stretch those
resources. Of course, as mentioned here and there, your film is prob-

ably going to have limited characters and locations.
A film with limited characters and locations? That sounds sort
of like a play. There is a lot of sense to, at least, start thinking
about your film as a play. Now is as good a time as any to men-
tion one of the classics of low-budget filmmaking that embraced
the concepts necessary to make this kind of film. Polly Schattel
said, “The original conception of Reservoir Dogs (1992) was as
a smaller $30,000 budget, indie film with just like five characters,
almost like a play.”
Lawrence Michael Levine talked about thinking about writing as
if for a play when he took classes with Tom Noonan.
I learned so much from Tom Noonan. I studied with him for

about three and a half years. He didn’t really teach any kind
of traditional storytelling stuff, Three-Act Structure or eight
sequence structure or anything like that, it was really a great
way to learn dialogue writing. And he had an interesting setup
where he taught writing and acting. And in the writing class,
what he would do is he would bring in actors from the act-
ing class to read your material. And for me, there was no real
issue between theater and film. Cassavetes did plenty of work in
the theater. I was looking at stuff like My Dinner With Andre
(1981). The Harold Pinter stuff that the BBC did, all this kind
of stuff.
So a couple of people from Tom’s class started a theatre
company. And they were looking for work. And I just decided,
“Okay, well, these guys have a theatre company. They’re my
friends. Maybe they’ll put up my play.” So I started to work on
a full length and showed it to them, and then they put it up.
And, I was encouraged by the reaction to it. So, for me, the
natural thing was just like, “Okay, well, I want to turn this into
a film.” What I really wanted to do is make films, I just didn’t
have the possibility. And it was sort of like, ‘Wow, that play
was coming out.’ The DV cams were coming out. And I was
like, “Okay, so now you can just make a movie on this video.”
That looks pretty good when it’s blown up. So I’m going to
do that. And so we cobbled together some money, the people
who produced the play, helped me out, and I think paid for
half of it. So I think it was just like 10 grand, and from them
and 10 grand from my dad. Yeah, and, and we made a movie
of Territory (2005). So that was my first experience of film-
making. I was actually enrolled at film school, right after my
play had come out. So I shot it over Christmas break of my
first year of school.
There is only so much you can do onstage. Yes, there have been
big-budget Broadway productions where characters fly or there is
rain onstage, but, much like a micro-budget film, when trying to
mount a play on a modest budget, there is only so much you can do
onstage.
Scenes tend to be longer onstage mostly because set changes can
be complicated. In film, long scenes are usually not as natural. As
recently as the 1990s, the average movie scene was two or three min-
utes long and today, the average scene is about ninety seconds long.
I know that, in my process of writing non-micro-budget films, if
I find a scene stretching past three pages, I am already starting to
look for a way out, already telling myself that something might not
be working.
So, in a micro-budget film with limited locations—i.e., set
changes—there is, by nature, an increased chance of having longer
scenes. The trick is to find ways to keep these scenes from becoming
too static or stagy. Sure, one way is to make these scenes extra dra-
matic, comedic or otherwise active narratively, but that is not going
to be possible in every scene.
The easiest, perhaps most obvious, hack might not always be avail-
able but will likely be available more times than not. Simply breaking
scenes up into sub-scenes where, instead of having two people sit on
the couch and talk for eight minutes, have them get up, go to the
kitchen for two minutes, maybe go back to the couch for a couple
minutes and maybe go into another room for two minutes. The dia-
logue doesn’t have to change.
Here is an example from a screenplay I wrote a few years ago. To

put it in context, it is about a teenage boy, Ryan, who discovers that
his boring accountant father, Julius, had once been the lead guitar-
ist of a briefly semi-famous 1980s hair metal band, Iron Teardrop
(because who doesn’t like any opportunity to come up with a band
name?):
For context: teenage Ryan and his father, Julius are estranged fol-
lowing a divorce. Ryan does not think much of his boring, basic
father until he discovers his dark secret, that, in the 80’s, Julius was
Maxx Voluume, guitarist for the briefly famous hair metal band
Iron Teardrop. In this scene, Ryan reveals that he knows the truth
about Julius by showing him a replica of a guitar made sort of
famous in a music video.
VERSION I:
INT. JULIUS’S APARTMENT—DAY

Julius and Ryan sit at the table. Ryan glances at him anxiously then
opens the guitar case to reveal Julius’ guitar from the video.
They glance at each other knowingly.
RYAN: I got it on eBay.

JULIUS: E-bay. I mean, this thing must have cost . . .
Beat.
RYAN: Not really.
JULIUS: No, probably not.
RYAN: I told the seller I was your son.
Julius picks up the guitar awkwardly.
RYAN (CONT’D): How come you never told me?
JULIUS: How did you find out?
RYAN: Hannah was looking for . . .
JULIUS: For?
RYAN: Costumes for a party . . .
JULIUS: Pretty funny wasn’t it?
Ryan’s eyes widen as Julius adopts his old 80’s persona.

JULIUS (CONT’D): Didn’t know your old man used to be Maxx Voluume?
RYAN: So . . .
JULIUS: So, why didn’t I tell you? I think you already have your answer.
RYAN: I do?
Julius hands the guitar to Ryan.
JULIUS: You guys were looking for a costume, right, something to
parody, laugh at, make fun of . . .
RYAN: Dad, I mean, it’s not like that.
JULIUS: It is, Ryan. Always has been. It was joke, a joke from the start,
a joke that everyone but the band got.
RYAN: What do you mean?
JULIUS: I loved music. I played everything, all the time. That wasn’t
what I wanted to do, what I wanted to be. I didn’t get into it to
be laughed at.
RYAN: But . . .
JULIUS: It just happened and, before I knew it, I was making money,
money I made by, I don’t know, selling my soul. I’m embarrassed
by it.
RYAN: But the people, everyone who bought your albums and went
to your shows . . .
JULIUS: What about them?
RYAN: You think they’re embarrassed? Okay, maybe now, maybe a
little but, back then . . .
JULIUS: Back then?
RYAN: It kinda looks like they were all having a good time . . . . You
made people happy, dad. No, maybe you didn’t change lives or
inspire a generation but, I don’t know, being able to say that, for
awhile, you were part of something that took people out of their
everyday lives for a bit, made them happy for a minute . . . That’s
kinda cool, isn’t it?
Julius, chokes up, looks over at Ryan.
RYAN (CONT’D): Well, I know you said you have something to do . . .
JULIUS: Yeah, I really should be going . . .
They eye each other expectantly.
VERSION II:

Julius and Ryan sit at the table. Ryan glances at him anxiously then
opens the guitar case to reveal Julius’ guitar from the video.
They glance at each other knowingly.
RYAN: I got it on eBay.

JULIUS: E-bay. I mean, this thing must have cost . . .
Beat.
RYAN: Not really.
JULIUS: No, probably not.
RYAN: I told the seller I was your son.
Julius picks up the guitar awkwardly.
RYAN (CONT’D): How come you never told me?
JULIUS: How did you find out?
RYAN: Hannah was looking for . . .
JULIUS: For?
RYAN: Costumes for a party . . .
JULIUS: Pretty funny wasn’t it?
Ryan’s eyes widen as Julius adopts his old 80’s persona.
JULIUS (CONT’D): Didn’t know your old man used to be Maxx Voluume?
RYAN: So . . .
JULIUS: So, why didn’t I tell you? I think you already have your answer.
RYAN: I do?
Julius heads into the kitchen.
INT. JULIUS’S KITCHEN—DAY
Ryan enters the kitchen with the guitar and hands it back to Julius.
JULIUS: You guys were looking for a costume, right, something to
parody, laugh at, make fun of.
RYAN: Dad, I mean, it’s not like that.
JULIUS: It is, Ryan. Always has been. It was joke, a joke from the start,
a joke that everyone but the band got.
RYAN: What do you mean?
JULIUS: I loved music. I played everything, all the time. That wasn’t
what I wanted to do, what I wanted to be.
(MORE)
JULIUS (CONT’D): I didn’t get into it to be laughed at.
Julius strums the guitar absently but expertly.
RYAN: But . . .
JULIUS: It just happened and, before I knew it, I was making money,
money I made by, I don’t know, selling my soul. I’m embarrassed
by it.
He hands the guitar back to Ryan and heads into the living room.

Ryan follows Julius in.
RYAN: But the people, everyone who bought your albums and went
to your shows . . .
JULIUS: What about them?
RYAN: You think they’re embarrassed? Okay, maybe now, maybe a
little but, back then . . .
JULIUS: Back then?
RYAN: It kinda looks like they were all having a good time . . . . You
made people happy, dad. No, maybe you didn’t change lives or
inspire a generation but, I don’t know, being able to say that, for
awhile, you were part of something that took people out of their
everyday lives for a bit, made them happy for a minute . . . That’s
kinda cool, isn’t it?
Julius, chokes up, looks over at Ryan.
RYAN (CONT’D): Well, I know you said you have something to do . . .
JULIUS: Yeah, I really should be going . . .
They eye each other expectantly. Ryan hands the guitar to Julius.
Nothing fancy, nothing radical, no lines change, but the scene is

more active and dynamic visually because of the diversion into the
kitchen and the addition of “symbolic gestures” with the guitar.
Now, importantly, while breaking scenes up in this manner will
keep the final product a little more lively, in production, it will add
another set-up. Instead of just knocking out three or four pages in the
living room, you will have to shoot the scene on that set, break down
the lights and camera and then move everything to the kitchen. So,
you might not want to do this kind of thing in every scene, but, if
you are worried about having too many talky scenes in your screen-
play, breaking scenes up can be a helpful hack.
This approach came up with Noam Kroll, who said:
How are you going to keep those scenes interesting and keep
the camera moving or keep the angles changing? So sometimes
what I would do if I had a scene that I felt like it should’ve
been five pages or six pages and it was all gonna take place in
one room. I might just break it up and split it in thirds, and
I’d have the first third of the scene take place in this room.
I did this little transition experiment; we did these little black
frames to transition from scene to scene. And then, when it
would come back, then we would jump ahead, be in a differ-
ent location and we sort of pick up the conversation or we’d
pick up some of the details. So, by doing that, essentially, I had
my same five or six page scene, but it just became three smaller
scenes, which in this case just made practical sense. Some peo-
ple liked it and the other people didn’t, but that was kind of
part of the fun.
He continued,
So, in the script itself, while I didn’t do any camera direction

or anything like that, I did try to infuse a lot of visual language
into the scene descriptions in a way that would at least give me
and hopefully, the actors and the other crew members, the con-
fidence as they’re reading the script that there was going to be
some sort of progression in every scene that it wasn’t just, these
characters are talking in a room.
But again, I think that’s where the scene descriptions came into
play. And I think if you can create that feeling on the page where
things are changing and progressing and where you get a sense that
from scene to scene, the tone is shifting and the mood is shifting.
Even though I wasn’t using camera direction, you could kind of
picture that. And “Sure, we’ve been in the living room before, but
we’ve only seen it during the day. So now we’re seeing it at night. So
it’s going to kind of feel like a different environment. So I think it’s
all about like, you know, it really does come down to just embracing
those limitations and while you’re writing, looking for just some sort
of measure of progression.”
Another way to break up scenes is with flashbacks. Now, in my
circle, I have gained a reputation for being militantly anti-flashbacks.
The charge is partly true. It is just that, too often, I see flashbacks
(and for that matter, voiceovers) used to fill in plot holes rather than
as an integral part of the storytelling style. Double Indemnity (1944)
is a beloved classic, cited by a number of directors as one of their
favorite films. The film is almost entirely flashbacks and voice-overs
that completely work to make a great film. Speaking of beloved
classics, I know I am alone here, but I feel that Casablanca (1942)
would have been fine without the single flashback in it. Does the
flashback provide the specifics of exactly what happened between
Rick and Ilsa? Sure. Did it tell me anything I needed to know that
I did not already know? Ilsa is Rick’s ex-girlfriend and I knew that
without the flashback. Deadpool (2016) effectively used an escalat-
ing series of flashbacks to show how the character arrived at his
current state.
Dead Funny (1994) is a not widely known film but remains a
personal favorite of mine from the mid-90s indie era. It’s not avail-
able on DVD or on streaming services, but, at the risk of coming
off as a fanboy, I contacted John Feldman, the director, and he made
a copy for me. While technically not a micro-budget film in the
context of this book, it clearly exemplifies many of the concepts
discussed here and it was inspiring to me in those earlier days as a
beginning screenwriter. The bulk of the film is set in one apart-
ment and gets around the potential for staginess by not just employ-
ing flashbacks; it employs flashbacks within flashbacks that all take
place in the apartment.
Another hack that will only be appropriate in certain cases is musi-
cal performances. Of course, a micro-budget musical is a tall order,
but it has been done. Before Whiplash and LA LA Land, Damian
Chazelle made the black and white, 72-minute-long musical Guy

and Madeline on a Park Bench (2009) for a reported $60,000. While
a little bit over the $100,000 figure used as the baseline for this book,
Once (2007) is another example worth looking at. Honestly, I have
never been able to get my hands on the screenplay. I even asked at the
WGA library and they had a digital copy, but, as I was there at the
very beginning of the 2020 pandemic, they were not allowing anyone
to access their iPads. At 86 minutes long, it contains performances
of complete songs, which leads me to wonder if the action and dia-
logue portions of the screenplay were in the 50–60 page range. Con-
veniently, I did have an opportunity to write a musical that never got
produced but my screenplay was, in fact, 43 pages long and indicated
spaces for several complete performances of songs.
Next, while more of a production concern, a producer I worked
with when she optioned a screenplay of mine suggested that I have as
many two-person scenes as possible. The reasoning is that, once you
add additional characters to a scene, you are dramatically increasing
the amount of coverage that needs to be shot.
A hack that you can build into your screenplay via dialogue is cre-
ating a vivid outside world for your characters. Create images in the
minds of audiences; describe people, places and events in provocative
detail. After a screening of Stomping Ground, someone came up to
me and said:
Don’t take this the wrong way but watching the film was sort of
like listening to an audiobook because the characters reference
all of these different places and people we never see on screen so
we are forced to create images in our heads.
I took it as a compliment. You never see the antagonist in the film,

but you hear so much about him that it is hard not to form an image
of him in your mind.
The first scene of Reservoir Dogs is a model of an effectively
dynamic one-location scene. At around ten minutes long, the scene
is full of snappy dialogue aided by some flashy camerawork and edit-
ing, but what it does so well is pique the attention of the audience,
who is left wondering “What is going on here?” What it does espe-

cially well is establish a tone that is then radically subverted in the first
scene after the opening credits. It has been done before and I am not
sure if it will ever be done quite as well, but the rest of us can give it
a shot—without borrowing too heavily from it.
Not exactly a hack in the conventional sense but it is important
to keep in mind that good stories come from good characters. Okay,
that advice applies to screenwriting in general, but it is especially
important on a micro-budget film where you are unlikely to dis-
tract the audience with stunts, special effects and exotic locations.
Face it, the audience is going to be spending a lot of time getting to
know your characters and, if much of what they are doing on screen
involves talking, they better be interesting people in a captivating
situation. I think an actor’s face is the greatest special effect we have
at our disposal in general but especially at this level. Torture your
characters, put them through hell and, by doing so, you are giving
your actors a lot to work with.
Depending on your perspective, creating a character is your
opportunity to play either God or Dr. Frankenstein. Unlike actu-
ally parenting a real person who will grow up and develop their own
personality based on environmental factors and nurturing, you are
inventing someone: their background, strengths, weaknesses, wants,
wishes and desires as well as the internal and external obstacles that
sometimes interfere with the pursuit of their goals.
You create a character who has challenges and then throw your
character into situations that put them to the test. If your character is
not being tested, pushed to their limits and beyond, there is a good
chance that your screenplay is not as effective as it could be.
Now, this is just me and my process, but I need to know what kind
of music my character listens to. For me, if I don’t know what kind
of music my character listens to, I don’t know my character and, if
I don’t know my character, I don’t know my story.
Remember, as if you can forget, that we are talking about film,
not narrative prose here. It’s been said that a novelist has to be the
writer, director, cinematographer, costume designer, set builder
and so on when writing a book. In film, if we want to show
something, we put it in front of a camera. The human brain is

designed to take in, then analyze data and make a decision about
it, so, when your characters first appear on screen, the audience
will make assumptions about who they are. Remember the phrase
“don’t judge a book by its cover”? It means do not prejudge. In
film, we want the audience to prejudge, we want them to know
or at least think they know who the character “is” when they first
see them. It is the screenwriter’s job to design book covers for the
filmmakers to produce.
While we get to know and invest in a character over the course
of a film, it is important to establish your character as soon as they
appear in your film. John August, one of the few people out there
who is both a successful screenwriter and a well-respected speaker,
writer, blogger and podcaster on the subject of screenwriting said,
when asked how quickly he knows that he is reading a screenplay that
is not working “To me, it’s as the first few characters are introduced.
If character introductions are not done artfully, the odds of anything
else in the script being great are slim.”
Harsh maybe but pretty accurate. I love teaching students about
character introductions, but there is just not enough room in this
book for a deep dive into the subject. Just think about it when you
are writing. Imagine the way your character appears for the first time
in your film. People, in general, judge books by their covers and they
do it every day; it’s called prejudice in some places and street smarts
in others. Think about it, have you ever seen someone walking down
the street and thought “He looks like a dick. He looks like he could
use a slap in the face.” One of my favorite examples of a character arc
in visuals is the opening and closing of Saturday Night Fever (1977).
When we first meet Tony Manero, in the opening credits of the
film, before he even says a word, he is strutting down the street in a
black leather jacket, acting like he thinks he is all that. He looks like
he could use a slap in the face. In the final scenes of the film, he is
wearing a white jacket, has been taken down a notch or two and has
a bandage on his face.
No need to answer me. Put this concept to work in your story. How
do you engineer a character introduction that establishes the desired
first impression of your character? The audience should know or, at

least, make a snap judgment about your characters before they even
say a word. People say a lot with fashion style, grooming, demeanor
and what they are doing. I still remember working on a film school
project in Philadelphia’s Rittenhouse Square and seeing a heavyset
man walking through the park, smoking a cigarette and wearing a
t-shirt with an image of a barbell and the words “Workin’ Out” above
it. That image made an impression. I made assumptions and a judg-
ment about this guy. You want the audience to make assumptions
and judgments about your characters. Bottom line: when a character
appears onscreen for the first time, we take in the data, analyze it and
make a decision about how we feel about them.
In the film Non-Stop (2014), the first time we see Liam Neeson, it
is morning, he parks his car at the airport, opens his glove box, takes
out a bottle and does three shots. How do you feel about a guy who
does three shots first thing in the morning before getting on a plane?
There’s got to be a story there, right? Next, as he is entering the air-
port, a guy approaches him and asks for a cigarette. At that moment,
I said to myself “Okay, he’s going to be the bad guy.” For the next
87 minutes or so, the movie bends over backward to suggest that any
number of other characters are the bad guy(s) but, in the end, yup,
SPOILER ALERT—it was that first guy. Now, truth be told, the
same thing happened to me when I saw Taken. A big chunk of the
first ten minutes is spent establishing Neeson’s card-playing buddies,
so I naturally assumed that one or some of them were setting him up.
Wrong. These well-established characters never appear again.
So, when conceiving of your micro-budget screenplay, always keep
in mind any narrative/visual shortcuts that can keep costs down.
I spoke with writer-director Vera Brunner-Sung about her remark-
able feature Bella Vista (2014), asked about engineering hacks into
a screenplay for a micro-budget film and she gave me a wonderfully
candid answer.
DG: Did you engineer any, in any specific hacks or anything, presum-
ing that you were going to go with an ultra low budget? Did you
write specifically for that?
VBS: I mean, I guess, I guess, but, you know, I feel like this question
presumes some kind of knowledge about how much a movie is
supposed to be. I just didn’t really have a sense of how to budget it
until I got my producers on board. But, in my mind, the mantra
was just like, “simple.”
5
STORY STRUCTURE
I am sure that someone else has said what I am about to say, but I can-
not find it anywhere or attribute to anyone so, for now, I am calling
it Greenberg’s Formula:
Screenplay = Idea + Story + Plot
Idea—The overall premise, themes and thoughts that inform the film.
Story—Everything that happens either onscreen or off even before
the movie starts.
Plot—Everything that happens on screen.
Note that this approach does not prescribe page numbers where major
beats should occur; it is a general overview of how a story can unfold.
A simplified example:
Spielberg says, “I know, I have an Idea that I would like to express—
‘War is bad’ ”
So there is this Story about the four Ryan brothers who go off
to fight in World War II. Three of them are killed, and the Army
decides to find the other one and bring him back alive to avoid a
public relations nightmare.
The Plot then follows Tom Hanks and a band of broadly drawn
characters as they hunt for Private Ryan, many of them getting killed
DOI: 10.4324/9781003138969-6
66 Story structure
along the way and leading the audience to realize how Bad War Is
and how brutal WWII was. The three dead Ryan brothers are part
of the story but not part of the plot because, for the most part, their
deaths occur offscreen before the start of the movie.
Make sense?
To be honest, my roots are in theater, offbeat, avant-garde or absurd-
ist theater. I have been influenced by more playwrights (Pinter, Albee,
Stoppard and Ionesco) and stand-up comedians (Richard Pryor, Bill
Cosby and Steve Martin) than I have been by screenwriters.
I gravitate toward the unconventional, so books like Syd Field’s
iconic Screenplay and Blake Syder’s massively popular but wildly
divisive Save The Cat, which have lots of useful material, are really
geared toward conventional, commercial mainstream films. Alterna-
tive Screenwriting by Jeff Rush and Ken Dancyger is one of my
favorite books—period, not just a favorite screenwriting book, a
favorite book.
Yes, I had misgivings about including a quote from Woody Allen
in Chapter 2. From the start, there was a filmmaker I planned to
interview for this book, but, when charges of sexual assault made the
news, I decided against it. Similarly, I am conflicted about discussing
Bill Cosby and I hope you will forgive me.
In my teens, I dabbled in stand-up comedy and even dipped my
toes into that pool now and then. My parents knew Bill Cosby in
college. I listened to a lot of Cosby growing up.
In 1980, I went to see Bill Cosby at the York, PA State Fair. He
came out and told one funny story, went off on a slightly related
tangent, came back to the story, went off on another slightly
related tangent, came back to the story and repeated the process
for an hour.
It was one of the most brilliant, unified, cohesive pieces of stage-
craft I have ever seen, so carefully plotted and conceived that I was
truly left in awe.
The act had a narrative spine and everything else grew out of
it organically, nothing was random and it all served to support the
whole piece, the overall idea. A film should be about something and
all the scenes should serve to make your overall point.
Story structure 67
So, have you ever seen a bad movie? What was bad about it?
Costume design? Sound effects editing? Or was it something like
“I just don’t buy that this character would have done that” or “it
wasn’t funny” or “it wasn’t scary” or “it was stupid” or “it was too
long.” Even worse, have you ever seen a movie that started out well
but fell apart later? Most of the time, it is rarely the cinematography,
the editing, costume design, the DIT, craft services or special effects
that is the issue; it is usually because the screenplay needed more
work. Most of the time, if a movie is bad, it is because there were
issues with the screenplay. Of course, let’s not forget that, on the
other hand, most of the time, if a movie is really good, it’s usually
because the screenplay was really good.
In certain circles like theater and TV, the writer and the script
are considered an almost holy text that is not to be messed with. Of
course, plays and TV shows are tweaked in production, but it is rarely
ever like the assembly line approach to writing many major movies.
The WGA allows only three screenwriters or screenwriting teams to
be credited with the screenplay for a film, but it is not uncommon
for dozens of uncredited writers to contribute to the final product.
So, how should you approach the screenplay for your micro-budget
film? As mentioned earlier, this book assumes a degree of familiarity
with the basic concepts of screenwriting. Maybe you have taken a
class, read some books on the topic and studied screenplays for films
you like. If you read enough screenwriting books, you might come
to the conclusion that the Three-Act Structure rules.
Many of the filmmakers interviewed for this book had strong feel-
ings about applying the Three-Act Structure in their films.
I spoke with director Ry Russo-Young about the approach to
her earlier films Orphans (2007), You Won’t Miss Me (2009) and
Nobody Walks (2012).
DG: I want to go back to the conceptual phase of Orphans, and take

stock of parameters, and things like that, which is a pretty classic
model now that everyone knows.
RY RUSSO-YOUNG: Obviously, it’s a highly charged situation, the scenario
is already dramatic. And there’s conflict and an emotional void
68 Story structure
before the movie even starts, I mean, so you’re starting at a kind

of an emotional high point.
DG: But then as a writer, when you’re writing the script for this very,
you know, limited location set story. How did you engineer in
more conflict and crisis to the degree that you did?
RRY: I mean, just to keep the story going. Yeah, things escalate. But
I guess that’s screenwriting 101.
DG: But were you concerned about the dynamics of it manifesting in
the one location?
Some people have applied conventional Three-Act Structure to their
micro-budget films.
RRY: My personal feeling was always that you needed it even more,
when you were in a contained space, again, needed to rely on
those tenets of drama. And if you look at movies like Rope (1948)
or something that have been made with very limited settings or
even the Polanski film Repulsion (1965) or something like that,
those are very much using the Three-Act Structure and are very,
very creative, within a narrow confines in a box.
Do not get me wrong, I like plenty of conventional, commercial

mainstream films, but that type of film can be hard to make on a
micro-budget that has limited characters and locations; so, if you are
short on funds, there is a good chance that you are looking at making
an unconventional film that could struggle to find a mainstream audi-
ence and yield much commercial success. Embrace that status, look
outside of the box and come up with the best idea for a film you can
make with what you have access to.
As a screenwriting teacher and a writer for hire, I have found that
I frequently have to utilize the Three-Act Structure. I have taught
the Three-Act Structure in my Introduction to Screenwriting course
over 100 times since 2004. I frequently refer to the Three-Act Struc-
ture as “screenwriting with training wheels.” Most people learn to
ride a bike by using training wheels. Few people just hop on a bike
for the first time and compete in the Tour De France. Most screen-
writers learn the “rules” of screenwriting before producing anything.
So, the metaphor is appropriate. Take Advanced Screenwriting or
Story structure 69
Screenplay Story Development with me and things are different.

That said, I have come to recognize and appreciate Three-Act as a
beautiful thing, a really effective model to hang a story on, a conven-
tion to work within, a formula to follow—yes, when we talk about
films being formulaic, we are talking about the Three-Act Structure.
I can appreciate when a film hits its marks like a precision instrument
as much as I can appreciate the rare film that defies convention and
still succeeds.
But to slavishly adhere to the formula is to intentionally rule out
other approaches to your story and maybe to push the boundaries
of convention that have the potential to render it fresh and origi-
nal. Look at some recent Oscar-winning screenplays and ask your-
self if they truly follow the Three-Act Structure in the conventional
way—a sympathetic, needy protagonist is unwillingly thrown out of
his/her comfort zone and forced to take action in order to achieve
a goal, encountering obstacles and setbacks along the way that ulti-
mately result in the protagonist growing and changing as a person for
the better.
In 2010, screenplays based on true stories won the Oscars for the
best original screenplay and best-adapted screenplay. In the first scene
of The King’s Speech, Bertie is second in line to the throne—he’s
unlikely to ever become king—and his profound speech impediment
makes it nearly impossible and emotionally difficult to perform royal
duties like addressing his subjects. In the last scene, he has done a
deep dive into what might be driving his speech issues and he makes
peace with his inner turmoil, becomes king, largely overcomes his
stammer and can calmly address the people of England. He has over-
come internal and external obstacles, grown, changed and become
a better person. It is a textbook example of the Three-Act Structure
used well.
In the first scene of The Social Network, cocky and arrogant Mark
Zuckerberg’s girlfriend is breaking up with him, saying she thinks
they should be friends, to which he replies “I don’t need friends.” In
the last scene, Zuckerberg has created Facebook, become wealthy,
set fire to many bridges, remains cocky and arrogant but, in the final
shot, sends a friend request to the young woman who dumped him at
70 Story structure
the start of the film. Has Zuckerberg grown, changed and improved
as a person? So, does it follow the Three-Act Structure in the conven-
tional sense? In Django Unchained (2012), the protagonist is much
changed and much improved when you compare him at the begin-
ning to him at the end but almost any resemblance to the Three-Act
Structure ends there.
It has always interested me that Tom McCarthy’s wonderful, rela-
tively low-budget, distinctly “indie” debut The Station Agent (2003)
really follows the Three-Act Structure pretty faithfully, but his Oscar-
winning big-budget, more mainstream film Spotlight (2015) does
not follow it in the conventional sense. Who is the main character
in Spotlight? Does he or she grow and change as a person in the
end? Birdman (2014)? Is Sgt. James a better person at the end of The
Hurt Locker (2008)? People like to fight me on this point, but I lean
toward it: screenplays that think outside of the box can win—and
frequently do—win Oscars. Okay, let’s not get ahead of ourselves.
micro-budget films of the kind we are talking about making usually
do not get nominated for Oscars.
Noam Kroll came to writing after establishing himself as more
technically oriented.
I came more from a camera angle, but, when I first got into
writing, kind of resisted -like every filmmaker- Three-Act
Structure, you want to do everything your own way. And, and
you realize after a while that you can play within those lines and
be completely unique and different, but also adhere to these
principles that have existed for thousands of years in storytell-
ing and exist for a reason because they mimic human life. You
know, human life has a beginning, a middle and an end, all of
us, whether we’re trying to navigate getting a new job or getting
a divorce or having a kid, we go through these phases of essen-
tially a beginning, middle and end like The Hero’s Journey, the
Joseph Campbell stuff and the poetics and all this stuff that eve-
rybody kind of comes back to. I definitely believe that structure
is incredibly important and Three-Act Structure is one method
of creating a format that your story can follow. But I like to also
Story structure 71
embrace other structures as well when I’m writing. I definitely

feel that having any sort of goal posts that you can hit along the
way that allow you to, at least, create some boundaries to work
with and that can be actually really liberating. I think if you have
a great story and you’re trying to force a square peg in a round
hole and get an inciting incident on page 12, when it should
really be on page 14, I feel like that can really hinder your crea-
tivity because I think it is really important for filmmakers who
are writing and producing and directing their own material to
remember, is that a lot of the screenwriting advice that people
give is actually geared toward people who want to specifically
just be professional screenwriters and their path is very differ-
ent. They’re not trying to make those movies, they’re trying to
option them or use them as calling cards. Yes, there is a case to
be made about, okay, you want to hit this on page 12 or this on
page 50, because you might have a reader who is looking for
those things, but if you’re making your own film and it doesn’t
feel right to do that, then you’re essentially going to be making
a decision based on essentially a standard from a different indus-
try almost entirely or a different subsect of your own industry
instead of instead of embracing the choices that that would best
benefit of what you’re trying to do, which is, is actually making
the film.
I am not against the Three-Act Structure. I have even come out

of films and thought to myself, “That film would have worked bet-
ter if they had gone with a more conventional Three-Act Structure
approach to the story.” That said, on a micro-budget production, this
formula might not be the best approach.
Lawrence Michael Levine writes, produces and directs his own
films, but he makes his living as a screenwriter for hire and he touched
on the topic of Three-Act Structure:
When I’m working on more conventional stuff, I definitely use

a Three-Act Structure. And I use an eight sequence structure
we have, which is like eight plans. And each plan gets messed
72 Story structure
up. And then a new plan has to be formed at the end of every
sequence, is kind of my approach to things. But not in the films
that I’ve directed. The only one that utilized it was Wild Canar-
ies (2014), which is kind of a caper movie. And it needs that
kind of structure. It definitely needs Three-Act Act Structure.
Mysteries are very structural, even if they’re a joke and I find
mystery writing very, very structural. It has to be very plot
oriented.
Now, there is another school of thought that promotes not hav-

ing any consciousness of the “rules” of screenwriting and just letting
screenplays flow organically. I get it on one level, but, from experi-
ence, on a practical level, it can make the job much harder than it
needs to be. I have read too many rambling, unwieldy, stream-of-
consciousness screenplays to be fully supportive of this approach. It is
kind of like handing a guitar to someone who does not know how to
play it and then expecting music to be created. I can see taking this
approach in early sketching sessions, looking for beats and getting a
feel for the story, but, in terms of practical screenwriting, actually sit-
ting down and writing something, I think it can pose problems.
Back to the “rules” of the Three-Act Structure, this model has
been the industry standard for a long time. Why? On one level, since
the publication of Syd Field’s Screenplay in 1979, aspiring screen-
writers have felt like they have a roadmap or, okay, I will say it, a
paradigm for learning how to write a screenplay. It was not only
aspiring screenwriters who flocked to the book, but it was, to some
degree, the movie business. Remember, in 1979, we were a few years
into the “neo-blockbuster” era where, perhaps more than ever, major
motion pictures had to be so much more than mere movies, they
had to generate merchandise sales. There seems to have been this
perception that Field had unlocked the secrets to making a successful
film so that all anyone had to do was follow his Three-Act Structure
Paradigm in their screenplay and get that much closer to having a
better chance of having a hit. Movies cost a lot of money to make
and people do not want to lose money, so anything that seemed like
a formula for success would be embraced. Look at the films of the
Story structure 73
1970s as compared to the 1980s. By 1985 or so, it seems like most

mainstream films were following the “Paradigm” closely.
No, Field did not necessarily invent this stuff on his own, there
were other teachers discussing the same thing with slightly different
language, something which persists to this day, but he was the first
or one of the first to put everything down in a book. Most books
on screenwriting all say the same thing in a different way. In Field’s
2013 New York Times obituary, it said “The term “plot point”
appeared in The New York Times fewer than ten times during the
century or so before 1979. Since then, it has appeared more than
200 times.”
Back to formula and “rules,” if you were in Hamburg, Germany,
in the early 1960s and went out to see a band in a club, you might
have seen a group called The Beatles. At first, The Beatles were a
cover band, doing two- to three-minute-long pop songs by Ameri-
can musicians. Even if you are not a musician, if you have any famili-
arity with popular music, you probably know the structure that 95%
of all pop songs take:
Verse
Chorus
Verse
Chorus
Bridge
Lead Break
Verse
Chorus
The Beatles performed six or seven nights a week, sometimes spend-

ing as much as eight hours onstage over the course of a night. It is
not hard to imagine that, after playing covers of pop songs for hours
and hours and hours, the band had a pretty fair understanding of the
structure of the form. Their first few albums were a mix of covers
and originals, eventually giving way to more and more originals.
After more than a few years of writing and recording two- to three-
minute pop songs, they knew the form inside and out, backward and
74 Story structure
forward, up and down and they revolutionized popular music with

deep experimentation and sophistication.
So, even if you do not plan to follow the “rules” of screenwriting,
I think it is important to know them inside out, up, down, backward
and forward. With that philosophy in mind and as briefly as possi-
ble, let’s take a look at the conventional Three-Act Structure. In this
model, screenplays are broken down into, that’s right, Three Acts.
Usually, the First and Third Acts are each half as long as the Second
Act, so you might have a 30-minute first act, a 60-minute second
act and a 30-minute Third Act. Rather than Beginning, Middle and
End, we say Set-Up, Conflict and Resolution. In the First Act, you
introduce all or most of the main characters and put your protagonist
in conflict or crisis. In the Second Act, the protagonist takes action to
resolve the conflict through trial and error, usually failing miserably
by the end of the act. In the Third Act, the protagonist licks their
wounds, picks themselves up and gives it one more try, often tapping
into some hidden strength, overcoming a major internal flaw, rising
to the challenge and succeeding in the end.
Now, those are just the broad strokes and they apply to almost any
story, so let’s break it down even further. I am not sure what came
first, the unwritten rule that anyone in the business will read the
first ten pages of any screenplay and, if after ten pages, they are not
hooked, they stop reading or the practice of screenwriters to front-
load their first ten pages with all kinds of hook-worthy story beats.
I suspect it was the former first and then writers started tailoring their
first ten pages to get past the gatekeepers.
So, the first ten pages are supposed to set the tone of the film,
establish the genre, introduce all or most major characters, give a
sense of where the story is going to go and, most importantly, have
an Inciting Incident, the big beat that gets the story going, frequently
something that shocks the protagonist out of their comfort zone and
forces them to take action.
Some common inciting incidents include:
Getting fired
Getting hired
Story structure 75
Getting dumped
Getting unexpected news
Meeting an attractive new person
Being bitten by a genetically modified spider
Having your son kidnapped by fishermen and taken to a dentist’s
office in Sydney
It has been said that good stories come from good characters. If you
know your characters well enough, you will have a good sense of
how they will respond to a crisis. Quick, who is the antagonist in
Rocky? William Faulkner said, “The only thing worth writing about
is the human heart in conflict with itself.” Rocky Balboa is his own
worst enemy and, to me, he is the true antagonist. Now, that’s a good
character. Next, give the character a crisis that will test them and
force them to confront flaws and weaknesses. In most conventional
Three-Act Structure screenplays, the character grows and changes,
usually for the better. In Tootsie (1982), Dustin Hoffman’s character,
Michael Dorsey, is a male chauvinist at the beginning and, at the end,
he has a more enlightened view of women.
So, give your characters room for growth, flaws they need to fix
and wounds that they need to heal. Think of your Three-Act screen-
play as a Before and After advertisement. At the beginning of the film,
when we first see the protagonist, he or she is often much different
at the end of the film. Many protagonists have an emotional void left
by the loss of a loved one, which is a device to almost automatically
breed sympathy for your main character. Why do you think so many
Disney and Marvel characters are missing one or more parents?
So, in the first ten minutes of 95% of all mainstream films, we
usually meet a sympathetic, kind of needy protagonist with an emo-
tional void. The character’s life is thrown out of whack by an inciting
incident. After trying to make sense of the new situation created by
the Inciting Incident, around 30 minutes into the film, the protago-
nist makes a conscious decision to pursue some kind of resolution.
Note that it is important to keep in mind that the Inciting Incident
is something that happens to the protagonist and the decision he or
she makes at First Act Break is something they choose to do. Usually,
76 Story structure
that decision winds up being faulty, leaving the protagonist in worse

shape at the end of the Second Act than he or she was in when we
first met them. In the Third Act, the protagonist regroups and attacks
the issue with more tenacity, often risking literal or figurative death
to succeed, usually becoming a better person in the process.
Let’s get even more granular by breaking down a film. In School

of Rock (2004), Dewey Finn (Jack Black) is an obnoxious, some-
what delusional rock star wannabe. The audience knows these things
about him even before he has his first real line of dialogue. He acts
like he is headlining Madison Square Garden when the reality is that,
when we first see him, his band is playing to a sparse, indifferent col-
lection of bar patrons. Even the other musicians in his band appear
to dislike him.
In the second scene, we discover that Dewey is broke, crashing at a
friend/former bandmate’s apartment and has not paid rent for a long
time. His roommate, Ned (played by the film’s screenwriter Mike
White) gives him an ultimatum: get a job or get out. Dewey says that
the band is about to hit it big, win an upcoming Battle of the Bands
competition and get rich, thus stating Dewey’s conscious external
goal: win the Battle of the Bands and become a rock star and estab-
lishing his unconscious internal goal: get real and grow up. When
Dewey chides him for being a substitute teacher, Ned responds with
Story structure 77
“You think it’s so easy, I’d like to see you try; you wouldn’t last a day.”
Spoiler Alert: Dewey winds up masquerading as Ned and taking a job
as a teacher. Ned’s line gives the audience a sense of what is going to
happen in the film.
Next, in the third scene, an inciting incident: Dewey is fired from
the band, dashing his hopes of winning the competition, paying back
Ned and taking a step closer toward becoming a rock star. Now,
Dewey has to find a new band. In the meantime, he answers a call for
Ned from a school that needs a substitute. Dewey pretends that he is
Ned and accepts the job in order to make some quick cash.
At the end of ten minutes, there is an inciting incident. We have
met Dewey, Ned, Ned’s girlfriend, Dewey’s old bandmates, the prin-
cipal of the school and all of his students.
The next major plot point usually comes in at around page 28,
when a character is motivated to take action based on the situation
presented by the Inciting Incident. Around 28 minutes into the film,
Dewey sends his students off to music class. With time on his hands,
he peeks into their classroom and sees that most of them can play an
instrument. Around page 30, he has decided that he is going to use
the students as his new band. This bad decision comes to a head at the
end of the Second Act, when he is exposed and even threatened with
legal action. In the end, his students rally around him, they perform
at Battle of the Bands but lose to Dewey’s old band. Cut to sometime
in the near future, Dewey has opened The School of Rock, where
he gives lessons to kids. He has failed at his attempt to become a rock
star—his external, conscious goal—but he has somehow managed to
mature into a successful business owner who can pay his bills while
still indulging his love of rock music—his internal, unconscious goal
or need. Final shot of the film: he is surrounded by musicians who
love him, contrasting the first scene of the film.
We all know that Aristotle defined a story as something with a uni-
fied beginning, middle and end. Later, Jean-Luc Goddard amended
that statement with his own “Every story has a beginning, middle and
end but not necessarily in that order.” Just keep in mind that, while
it seems like many, many films follow the Three-Act Structure, there
is no law stating that you have to use it. That said, even if you do not
78 Story structure
use the Three-Act Structure, your story does need some rhyme and
reason, some kind of structure and an organized order of events.
In a micro-budget film, where there are usually no big set pieces or
special effects to dazzle the audience, story structure and construction
become even more important. On a micro-budget film, your story
and the way it unfolds are usually your primary “special effect.” You
have to make sure that the drama is compelling and surprising, so,
without overdoing it, twists in the narrative can become fuel to keep
your plot moving. If you are making a micro-budget comedy, you
have to be really funny most of the time. If you are making a horror
film, you have to be scary or, at least, ominous, most of the time. In a
micro-budget film, there is no time for filler or wasted scenes that do
not go anywhere. I am not saying that your comedy has to be wall-
to-wall laughs or that your horror film has to be wall-to-wall scares
but that you have to make sure that the moments between the laughs
and the scares cannot be throwaways.
Look at the conventional structure of a horror movie: something
scary happens in the first scene and then, for the most part, nothing
really scary happens until 30, 40 and 45 minutes into the story. In
a micro-budget film with limited locations and characters, you are
often already at risk of testing the audience’s patience, so you are
advised not to have 30–45 minutes where nothing really happens.
The relatively micro-budgeted ($130,000) 2003 film Open Water
built its marketing campaign on the fact that the production used real
sharks to terrorize a couple of divers left at sea when their charter
boat departed without them. The film is about 80 minutes long and,
as I recall, there are no sharks in it for the first 35 minutes or so and,
even then, they only show up occasionally. So, what does that leave
us with? A not particularly compelling domestic drama for the first 35
minutes that continues, albeit with interruptions from the sharks, for
the rest of the film. To reiterate, this is an 80-minute film, ostensibly
about a couple terrorized by sharks, but there are no sharks for the
first half of the film. In other words, it feels like this film is half filler.
Okay, there are a number of finer points that I left out of this exam-
ple, but, if you really wanted to learn conventional, industry-standard
story structure, you probably would not still be reading this book.
Story structure 79
How all of this applies to writing micro-budget screenplays is really

important here.
By nature, in a conventional Three-Act screenplay, not much
can happen in the plot between the inciting incident and the plot
point on page 28, it is sort of wasted space leading up to the Second
Act, when the story kicks into high gear. In a micro-budget film,
you often cannot afford to have as much as 20 or 25 minutes where
nothing really happens. Because micro-budget films tend to run 90
minutes or less, those pages after the inciting incident become more
valuable in terms of plot.
Here is where you could start thinking about alternatives to struc-

ture that will better serve your film. Also, because of the low budget,
there is only so much you can do in terms of keeping things moving
with location changes and adding minor characters. You need to keep
your film going by making more things happen in your screenplay,
especially in this first third of the story. So, rather than waiting for the
major plot point on page 28 and the Act Break on page 30, strongly
consider employing multiple big—but not huge plot points through-
out the act. Throw in complications, revelations and issues for your
characters to deal with early on so that you can avoid those frequently
80 Story structure
deadly long scenes of people bantering back and forth. Stuff has to
happen. Because you cannot afford big set pieces or special effects,
you need more drama in the first act to keep the film engaging.
Personally, I think that, if you are spending money to produce a

film, you should avoid wasting it through not being prepared with
any sense of what to do, where to do it and who to have do it.
The topic of story structure came up with Jim Byrkit, too.
DG: You built it on the foundation of structure and yet there was this
freedom to go off on tangents.
JB: The only reason I knew that I could allow for the tangents was
because I had the structure underneath, I knew that it would
survive, and still get to the end and tell the story, even if this
couple started arguing, or even if this guy started being a lot
more sarcastic than I thought, or even if this person was a lot
more emotional. If you know, the structure is there, then you
know that there, you’re still on the path. So the specifics of the
arguments and whatnot, might not have mattered as long as they
were still going in the right direction. I started out being utterly
anti structural, I couldn’t stand the idea of there being you know,
Story structure 81
rules or templates or guidelines. We spent a year really figuring

it out scene by scene, it became very classically structured. I real-
ized that in order to do the things that I was interested in doing,
which were pushing the boundaries of what had been done, the
only way to keep those understandable for an audience was to
pin them on some kind of structure. So I learned very slowly that
structure could be my friend and I could still do all the creative
things I wanted to do, using that as a backbone.
Introducing the character, having you know, in Coherence, she’s

given the call to adventure. Very quickly, the guy says, “Hey,
come to Vietnam with me.” She refuses the call to adventure, all
those little things? We didn’t make them quite so obvious as a
normal film. It’s not Luke Skywalker, getting the offer from the
mentor. So everything is there. But it’s just not quite as obvious
as a typical Hollywood film. But by having it there, by having the
structure there, you can then judge when you’re editing. Why
isn’t this working? Why? Why did we seem to have a scene that
doesn’t fit and if you keep comparing it to the structure, keep
comparing it to a template, you can then decide what to keep
and what not to keep. So Coherence actually really, really fol-
lows classic structure almost perfectly, it’s just not as apparent,
not because of style. She has an ordeal absolutely, a transforma-
tive experience that could only happen through this story. And
the only things that the storyteller reveals to the audience are the
things that you need to understand how she got there. It’s just like
a campfire story. If you’re telling it as a campfire story, you tell it
just like so. So this girl shows up at a party, and you start giving
only the information to understand how you got from A to B.
While there is not enough space to take a deep dive into scene
dynamics in this book, because your film is going to be made up of
scenes, we should take a little look.
It’s tempting to say that a 120-page script at approximately two to
three pages per scene should have 40–60 scenes. While not wrong,
this is a gross generalization.
82 Story structure
The better answer is that a screenplay should have as many scenes

as are necessary to tell the story, but no more.
For the sake of laying a foundation, let’s define a scene as gener-
ally thought of as the action in a single location and continuous time.
Anytime the crew needs to break down the lights, camera, sound,
etc., pack them all up, move to a new location and set everything up
again; it is usually because it is time to shoot a new scene. It is impor-
tant to keep this concept in mind when making a micro-budget film
because, when time and money are at a premium, you might want to
consider the number of times you have to perform this routine. No,
I am not saying that your film should have five 20-minute scenes, but
that you should be conscious of how much time you will need to
allow for company moves.
Scenes are made up of beats. A beat is an exchange of behavior in
action/reaction.
A scene is like a miniature model of the story itself; in that it also
has an act structure: Beginning, Middle and End or Set-up, Conflict
and Resolution. Most scenes include the protagonist or the antago-
nist. Every Scene is About the Hero (even if he or she is not in the
scene). Each Scene Chronicles the Hero’s Quest. Scenes should cre-
ate anticipation.
Byrkit talked about the importance of having only scenes that
serve the story in Coherence.
One of the traps that filmmakers fall into, especially on their

first films is that they have scenes that are interesting to them,
but they don’t actually forward the story or thicken the tension
in any way. And so we knew that because we had such a limited
range of resources that every scene had to escalate it, somehow
every scene had to be a piece of the puzzle. So, if you work
backwards from the end of the film, and say, “What is her end
state?” Every single scene in the film then shows you how she
got step by step from the first shot to the last shot. And if some-
thing didn’t really further that path, then it was extraneous, and
probably got cut.
Story structure 83
A great example of the way scenes work can be found in Tony

Gilroy’s masterful screenplay for The Bourne Identity (2002). In
every scene, Jason Bourne is either looking for information, acting
on information he has found or defending himself against the bad
guys. The scenes of Bourne alternate with the scenes of the bad
guys tracking him, looking for information about him or acting upon
information they find.
They do not take credit for this concept, but there is a great, two-
minute video from MTV U. on YouTube that shows South Park
creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone talking about scenes to a class
at NYU. They make the point that, if the words “and then” can be
written between your scenes, you are in danger of having a boring
screenplay. Instead, they say, either the word “but” or “therefore”
should come between your scenes. When you outline, you should
not be writing “this happens AND THEN that happens AND
THEN this happens AND THEN that happens,” you should be
writing “this happens BUT that happens THEREFORE this hap-
pens BUT that happens THEREFORE this happens” and so on.
Take this approach and the chances of writing a dynamic screenplay
improve dramatically.
Scenes typically have four possible functions:
• Forward either a story’s plot, one of its subplots, or both

• Reveal or explore a character’s personality or behavior through
their actions
• Introduce or deepen thematic ideas
• Give expository information
If a scene is not doing one or more of the previously mentioned

things, it should be cut.
Director Mike Nichols once said, “Every scene should be a fight,
a seduction, or a negotiation.”
The question of how long a scene should be is a tough one and,
while there is no hard and fast right or wrong answer, in a micro-
budget film, it has to be a major consideration in some ways that dif-
fer from bigger-budgeted productions. Remember when we used to
84 Story structure
buy DVDs and sometimes the disc was promoted by advertising that
it includes anywhere from five to ten or more deleted scenes? That
means that someone signed off on a budget to produce a screenplay
that had five to ten scenes that could ultimately be cut from the final
film and not dramatically affect the story. Keep in mind that the
average major film costs $80,000,000 to make, productions aim to
shoot three to four pages of screenplay a day. Honestly, you could
probably make a micro-budget film for the amount of money that
was spent on producing one of those scenes that were cut from the
film. The point here is that, in a micro-budget screenplay, there is
little room for throwaway scenes that could or could not fit into the
final cut, so write them carefully. You cannot afford to write, cast,
shoot and edit scenes that you do not really need. Look at every
scene and ask yourself “Would the movie still make sense without
this scene?” If the answer is “yes,” then you don’t really need the
scene, shouldn’t bother writing it and, if you have written it, think
about cutting it.
So, how long should a scene be? Short, in general. How short is
short? Conventional wisdom says that a scene should be about a max-
imum of two to three pages/minute. As recently as the late 1990s,
the average scene was three pages/minute. Today, the average scene is
1.5 pages/minute. Keep in mind that some scenes are only 1/8 of a
page, while others might be four to five pages. If, when I am writing
a scene, it gets to the bottom of page 3 and I am not finished, I know
that I am in “trouble” and, if appropriate, I break the scene up into
sub-scenes as illustrated in Chapter 4.
The big takeaway here is that, in a Micro-budget film where you
are usually less likely to be able to captivate and dazzle the audience
with special effects, stunts and set pieces, your story is the main thing
you have going for you. Pump up that story. Now, to be clear, you
do not need to bang the audience over their heads with a barrage
of content; you do not need to go overboard and veer too close to
melodrama; you just have to be especially conscientious of things
happening in your film because, in the end, your story is the main
thing that is keeping your film going.
Story structure 85
Now, all of that said, Vera Brunner-Sung’s Bella Vista (2014)

adheres to almost none of it and I loved the film. There is no incit-
ing incident, we know almost nothing about the main character, she
seems to have a sliver of backstory, but there is no clear, tangi-
ble external goal, no definitive emotional void and no unconscious
internal goal; there is not much in the way of drama or conflict and
the end? I am not even going to discuss the end. The film really
challenged conventions of what a film is supposed to be and really
opened my eyes to what a film can be, maybe what more films should
be. I was not sure what to expect when I interviewed her, but, as
soon as she told me about her background, everything about the film
fell into place and made sense in my mind.
Vera Brunner-Sung: My background is an experimental docu-
mentary. I went to CalArts, and I studied with James Benning and
Tom Anderson. And I really thought I was the kind of a one-woman
band filmmaker. So that was the sensibility that I brought to the writ-
ing. And while the sensibility was, “who cares how you’re supposed
to write a script?”
6
MODEL YOUR FEATURE
ON A SHORT
Remember, originally, all films were short films. A film was about as
long as the amount of celluloid on a reel, around ten minutes. In the
early 1900s, people began to realize that they could start combining
these ten-minute reels into longer films. Up through the 1970s, it
was not uncommon for a studio-produced short film to accompany
a feature in a theater.
Making short films can be like a training camp for a feature. Shorts
are a great way to experiment with shots, effects and editing. Making
a short can also be an effective way to see how well you work or do
not work well with members of your crew.
But you should consider shorts on a much deeper level. First, and
importantly, short films are an art form in their own right. Looking
at shorts can be priceless when looking at ways to approach your
micro-budget Feature.
Allow me a little diversion. Think about your favorite poem. You
have a favorite poem, don’t you? Okay, if not, for the sake of example,
take a look at Robert Frost’s Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening
This poem is one of the most famous poems by one of Ameri-
ca’s most famous poets. Would it have worked better as a novel? Of
course not. Poetry and Fiction are two different art forms that have
many qualities in common. Both forms utilize words to create and
imply mood and imagery.
DOI: 10.4324/9781003138969-7
88 Model your feature on a short
Similarly, short films and features both usually employ some

degree of cinematography, sound and/or editing—not to mention
the occasional actor and dialogue. My point here is that short films
and features should be considered separate art forms and not com-
pared to each other. Yes, a short film can resemble a truncated fea-
ture, but, in my experience, shorts are most effective when they are
not trying to emulate the narrative scope of a feature in a fraction
of the time.
Years ago, when I was reviewing films for a trade publication,
I came across a bad horror film that seemed like it had been adapted
from a five-minute short. In other words, the story of the feature
only worked for about five minutes. By pure coincidence, not long
after, I somehow found myself up for a screenwriting gig by the
director of the bad horror film. I do not know exactly what got
into me, but I mentioned that I had seen the horror film and that it
seemed like they had a five-minute film and tried to squeeze a fea-
ture out of it. He responded by saying “We had a five minute film
and tried to squeeze a feature out of it.” We chuckled about it. He
was amused. His producer was not amused, and I did not get the gig.
I guess that “If you see something, say something” does not apply in
cases like this one.
Next, sometimes it seems like many people think of shorts as mini-
features or, maybe more commonly, the teaser trailer, not a work of
art on their own but more like a commercial for a work of art.
I am split on teaser trailers. A producer I know was having lunch
in L.A. with the producing partner of a major A-list actor/direc-
tor/producer. She wanted to pitch him a project and asked if he
would read a one-page synopsis. No. Would he read a half-page
synopsis? No. Would he read a logline? No. Would he watch a
ninety-second teaser trailer? Sure. Nice story but I think it is a
pretty extraordinary situation. If you have a cast, location and
a crew to make a teaser trailer, I think you should hold off until you
can make a feature with all of them. Can’t afford to make the fea-
ture version? Chances are slim that the project is something that
you can get financing for. My suggestion is, make a micro-budget
film instead.
Model your feature on a short 89
I have just seen too many people put too much energy into making
a teaser trailer and hoping for financing when they could have spent
that time on making a micro-budget feature. Yes, there are famous
cases of teaser trailers being the key to getting financing. Whiplash
(2014) comes to mind, but the teaser trailer story is only part of
what happened. Damien Chazelle was not a complete unknown by
the time he was trying to make Whiplash and the feature version
of the screenplay was already attracting some attention. So, yes, the
teaser trailer—actually just a short scene from the feature—did help
with financing, but what helped more was that, while not exactly an
insider, he was not exactly an outsider. Personally, I would be cau-
tious about putting too much time and energy into a teaser trailer.
Next, if you are in film school or a film school graduate, chances
are good that you have some experience with making a senior the-
sis. The topic of student films came up when I spoke with Alex
Ross Perry.
I spent, probably about $20,000 to $25,000, on my 22 min-

ute, senior thesis. I wrote something as completely ordinary and
simple as a scene set in a cafe. But I never forgot this, the cafe
that we found, I think charged me $1200 for an overnight, so
we got in when they closed, and we’re able to shoot until they
opened. So we were there, probably 6pm to 8am, or something.
And my teacher said, “That’s an amazing rate for a location, and
it’s a one and a half page scene.” Wow. And it seemed reason-
able, you know, for $1200, you get your location for 12 hours.
And then, two years later, when ultra low budget, micro-budget
movies are being made into features for $10,000 total, there’s
no $1200 for one location, one and half pages. That’s ludicrous.
And I was just like, “the only way you can pull off a 70 minute
feature on the budget is you do not write a $1200 check for
a single location, unless you’re shooting that location for the
entire shoot.” And that whole $1200 check covers your sole,
shooting location, and then the whole crew lived there. If you’re
paying 5% of your budget, or 10% of your budget for a location,
you better be in it for 30% of the movie.
There are standards and approaches that frequently apply to features

but do not always work in shorts. That said, after teaching courses on
writing short films for nearly 20 years, I have been finding ways to bor-
row techniques from short films and utilizing them to write features.
In discussing short films, we need to talk about story structure
because it can have a significant impact on the way you approach a
feature. Looking back over my favorite short films, one of the things
that emerge is that few short narrative films follow the Three-Act
Structure in the same way that 95% of mainstream features do. Yes,
there is a discussion of the Three-Act Structure elsewhere in this
book, but, for the sake of illustrating the way it compares to shorts, it
makes sense to do a mini-review in this chapter.
As discussed in Chapter 5, in the conventional Three-Act Structure
film, the first ten minutes is critical. It is well known that, supposedly,
anyone in the business will read the first ten pages of any screenplay
and, if it does not tick certain boxes, the reader stops reading. We
usually meet a needy, sympathetic protagonist in the first ten minutes
of a film and, also within those first ten minutes, something—the
inciting incident—throws them out of their comfort zone. About 20
pages/minute later, the protagonist makes a conscious decision about
the situation presented by the inciting incident and takes action.
Next, there is a series of plot ups and downs, obstacles to overcome,
adversaries to face and, usually by the ⅔ or ¾ mark, the protagonist
crashes and burns, hits bottom, has to pick up the pieces, tap into
some hidden strength, resolve some internal issue, rise to the occa-
sion and resolve the issue of the film.
This approach to story is frequently ineffective when approaching
a short film. First, of course, in a ten-minute film, you do not have
ten minutes to introduce and establish the protagonist, the setting, an
inciting incident and a resolution. Have you ever encountered a short
film online, maybe even as short as two minutes long but turned it
off? How can you not sit through a short film? Too many people take
too long to establish the story in their short films. Well, if it does
not grab you from the beginning, chances are you are not going to
watch it to the end. So, the key in short films is hooking the audience
within the first 15–20 seconds.
One of the best ways to hook an audience quickly is to begin

mid-crisis that is after the inciting incident. I have been show-
ing Nash Edgerton’s wonderful short film Spider (2007) to classes
for years. After screening it, I ask my class what it is about and
most students usually answer “It’s about a couple having a fight”
to which I respond, “Actually, it is about a couple who has had a
fight.” The fight is the inciting incident that causes the situation in
the film, but we never see the fight, we see the aftermath of it. Jim
Cummings’ much-lauded (and deservedly so) Sundance-winning
Best Short Thunder Road (2016) begins at the funeral of the pro-
tagonist’s mother—her death is the inciting incident. In a shining
example of a short that was successfully adapted into a feature, the
full-length adaptation of Thunder Road (2018) won Best Feature
at South By Southwest but also begins the same way, after the
inciting incident.
Yes, you do not have to show the inciting incident in your fea-
ture, you can introduce your characters already in conflict, already
dealing with a challenging situation. This approach can be extraor-
dinarily effective because the audience comes in late, has to play
catch-up and put extra effort into focusing on what is happening
and engaging with the story. In a short film, there is no room for
superfluous action. Short films have to be lean and mean, brutally
efficient in their storytelling.
So, you are starting after the inciting incident. As mentioned, in a
feature, the inciting incident usually occurs in the first ten minutes
of the film and then there is a period of nearly 20 minutes before the
next major plot point on or around page 30. So, what happens in that
20 minutes? A lot of acclimating to the situation. It usually works in
a conventional feature, but it will not work in a short film and, in a
micro-budget feature, it can be a deadly waste of time. The big lesson
here is that, in a short film, the inciting incident can also be like the
act break that comes on page 30. The point is that, in a micro-budget
film where you will likely have limited visual stimulation from loca-
tion changes and special effects, you need to keep the story moving
and engaging. Consider having your inciting incident as close to the
beginning of the film if not before the beginning of the film so that
you can engineer something resembling an act break within the first
10–15 minutes instead of coming around page 30.
Next, the ending. When we sit down to watch a feature, we have
come to expect a tidy resolution where all of the loose ends of the
plot wrap up. Short films frequently leave stories with unresolved
characters hanging in limbo. There are no FDA regulations stating
that you need to wrap everything up at the end of your micro-budget
film. An unresolved ending can be provocative, leaving the audience
to wonder “what’s next?” and try to fill in the blanks. Audiences have
come to expect to be spoon-fed a tidy resolution, and I think it can
be fine to deprive them of that closure. Stomping Ground ends with
all of the characters facing an uncertain future. Let the audience think
about what happens after the final scene.
I am starting to see more and more features that borrow from

shorts in this manner. As mentioned in another chapter, much in the
way that some people like indie, underground music, I spend a lot of
time browsing for indie, out of the mainstream or underground films.
One of the most exciting trends going on now is the increase in the
number of what some people call Medium-Length Films. These fre-
quently low-budget, homespun films are usually in the 60–80 minute
range and, in the streaming era, where sometimes you do not want
to commit to a two-hour film at 11 PM, a 75-minute-long film can
look appealing. Many of these films employ some of the techniques
characteristic of short films that I described earlier—opting against
the conventional Three-Act Structure, an accelerated beginning, a
break into the second act long before the 30-minute mark and vague,
unresolved endings.
The topic came up when I spoke with Aaron Katz, who might
have unwittingly been part of the first wave in the modern era of
Medium-Length Films with Dance Party USA (2006).
I have to say, honestly, the movie wasn’t intended to be 66

minutes long, I’m pretty sure the script was like 105 pages or
110. . . . I thought it was a 90 minute feature. And once it got
down to 66 minutes, which it felt like it had to because that’s
what made sense. But I remember feeling like just crying, hon-
estly, kind of devastated that Dance Party was only 66 minutes
long. I was like, “it’s not a short, it’s not a feature.” That length
of movie was generally not seen as very legit, except for a lot
of Roger Corman and grindhouse stuff but High Noon is 80
minutes. I remember looking at the Sundance guidelines, and
being like, “the Sundance guidelines say a feature needs to be
at least 70 minutes long. And instead of just writing “TRT,
70 minutes” on the DVD, or whatever, I was like, “Oh, it’s
only 66 minutes.” I guess I had submitted it as a short, and
of course, got rejected. But I remember feeling like that it
felt like a rejection of that it was even a real movie. I’m sure
we had an 85 or 90 minute cut that felt really flat and really
not good. And I think, on instinct, we’re just kind of just
chiseling away at it till whatever was left was good. And we
were sitting at this 60-something minute runtime, and I was
just like, “Is there anything to put back in here?” Not even
because I thought it was a good idea, but because it felt really
depressing that it wasn’t a normal length. In retrospect, I like

that length. Quiet City (2007), which is 78 minutes, is still
in that ballpark, it feels good. But I just kept submitting it to
festivals. I got rejected from Sundance, as a short rejected from
Slamdance. And then we got into South by Southwest. Matt
Dentler, who was the programmer there is like, the reason that
any of us—Swanberg, Barry Jenkins, Lena Dunham—got to
play our movies. I think Dentler was like, “I want to program
this kind of movie, like, I want to find new and young and
unheard of people.”
Fun Fact: Aaron Katz shot part of his 2019 film Gemini in his
house, which is the same house Jim Byrkit lived in and used for
Coherence.
To that point, recently, one of my grad students turned in the
outline for her screenplay. I really liked it but knew that there was
not enough material for a 90-minute feature. We tried to brainstorm
ways to expand subplots and give supporting characters more to do,
but, in the end, to me, it felt like we were adding filler, not enhancing
the story, so I said “You know what, let’s just leave it as-is and say we
have a solid 75 minute film.”
I spoke with Martha Stephens about the experience of making
shorts and how it influenced her feature work.
DG: And do you feel that your experience with short films was help-
ful when approaching a feature?
MARTHA STEPHENS: I only made short films in college. So just being on set
learning how stuff operates on a set was super helpful. I needed
that sort of training to be able to go into feature filmmaking.
I never had any proper training on how to write a feature film.
So the reason I approached my first movie that way was because
I wrote it as like, four short films. And then I wove them together,
knowing that I didn’t quite have the skill set to plot out a feature
film, if that makes sense. So it was a love story, each story has its
work but it’s more of like a 30 minute story per each story, as
opposed to like one big slide.
DG: Thisis something nobody’s said to me before in the interviews

for this project, this kind of four short films combined into one
feature approach. And I’m sure there’s a lot of reasons she did it
that way; it keeps things active and engaging. One of the prob-
lems I find with Micro Budget films is because they’re so limited
in scope most of the time there’s not much that you can do to
expand the world of the film. Many of them do start to feel a bit
familiar, like you’re spending a lot of time in one location with
the same characters.
Remember that Tom DiCillo’s indie classic about the making of

an indie film Living In Oblivion (1995) was originally a 30-minute
short and then they decided to make it into a feature by making two
more 30-minute shorts. Fun fact, the producer of the film, Marcus
Viscidi, was the producer of the first film I ever worked on, Signs of
Life.
It also came up with Polly Shattel: I made a kind of a no-budget
film. It was like Short Cuts (1993) by Altman. It was several short
stories kind of cut together into one intertwining narrative.
Noam Kroll said,
One of the films that was sort of an indirect influence for this
feature (Psychosynthesis) was an even shorter film that is 52
minutes long called See The Sea (1997) by François Ozon. And
I loved that film. It was so simple. It’s basically a two-hander,
two characters. So minimalist, very creepy. And, if it was a min-
ute longer, it would have been too long. And when films can
pack that much into, you know, 45, 50 minutes or 75, 80 min-
utes can be, that’s always sort of a treat.
I think a lot of filmmakers hit this crossroad, especially on this
budget level where maybe they can raise 20 grand or 40 grand
and they’re trying to decide between, “Do I make a really sub-
stantial, short film that’s 25 minutes or 30 minutes and it’s got
really great production value and it’ll be this great calling card or
do I just extend it a little more? I have the crew, I could shoot
for twice as many days and I could turn this into a 75 minute, 80
minute film, and then it’s a feature.” I’m not going to tell anyone
what to do, but I obviously tend to lean toward feeling like if
you’re going to make a, a short film that’s 25 or 30 minutes, why
not make one that’s two minutes or that’s three minutes because
those films are more likely to get programmed at a major film
festival than a 30 minute short film.
He continued:
I watch a lot of French New Wave films and even old silent
films. And you go back to the origins of cinema. A lot of films
were these shorter feature films, or they were 40 minutes. They
were 70 minutes. And there’s no reason why we have to be
boxed into feeling like if it’s not 90 minutes on the dot, it’s not
a feature film because I can list plenty of films that are 90 or
longer that, you know, wouldn’t hold a candle to other films
that you are, I might love that are seventy-five minutes, eighty
minutes that are iconic feature films, like broke new ground. So,
you know, I think that understanding that is super important,
embracing it.
Just as a practical tip for writing, but I think a lot of new
writers sort of take the rule of one page per minute, very lit-
erally. And they don’t realize that a page of dialogue versus a
page of action are very different. And some people write a 77
page script. You might be working on something that perhaps
has a really healthy mix of action scenes and dialogue scenes
where someone might write something that’s all dialogue that
is 77 pages. But even if they keep in every frame, it might be
a 52 minute movie because the characters talk fast. So I think
like understanding the mechanics of it, it’s so important to
just actually get the runtime that you’re looking for. But yeah,
I agree with you, nobody should ever, in my opinion, be afraid
of these shorter feature films. I think less is more. Personally, I’d
rather see a great 77 minute film than a mediocre 90. I think
one of the reasons I probably gravitate to these Micro Budget
films is because you have the ability to do that, to not wrap
things up. Oftentimes, when people watch my films, whether

they’re short films I’ve made, or in this case, Psychosynthesis,
the thing that people often say is like, I feel like it was just start-
ing. Like, I feel like you ended it when the movie was starting
and when I wanted to see where it was going to go and it’s
never my intention to frustrate people in that way, but I guess
my intention is always to leave things open-ended. I think that
the best films that I enjoy the most are the films that wrap up
enough that you feel there was a conclusion to the story that
you’re following.
But with that conclusion, open up a whole other can of
worms and questions about where this would now go. I think,
uh, if you can, if you can balance that, those are some of the
best films. Getting back to the Micro Budget format, you can
try to leave some, some things a little bit looser at the end, you
can kind of leave some question marks open, um, when, when
you’re not having to, um, think like a big studio movie.
All ten of Bob Byington’s films come in at 80 minutes or less.

“You know, the movies are pretty short, the movies end up being like
77 minutes, because I think I’m just terrified of having a feeling they
go on too long or for the movie to drag on.”
A friend of mine just finished a feature, and there were a lot of
issues because the running time was something like 80 minutes,
81 minutes, and the executive producer had a fit saying, “You know,
you’re contractually obligated to turn in a 90 minute film.” And they
went to court on that, even though, if you ask me, it doesn’t need
another second, but now they have to find ways to puff it up to
90 minutes and it just seems ridiculous.
So, do I think there is a future for Medium-Length Films? I hope
so. There was a time midway through the pandemic in 2020, when
all the movie theaters closed, there was talk of Amazon and Netflix
and Disney buying all the movie theaters, and people would go and
have an Amazon or Netflix or Disney experience. And there are so
many 70-minute movies on Amazon now, because anybody can put
anything on Amazon. And I thought, well, who would go see it?
Nobody would go pay to see a 70-minute movie, but they might go

pay to see two 70-minute movies like a double feature. I probably
would.
Still, whether you are going to see Medium-Length Films in a
theater or streaming them at home, I think that there is much to
observe, analyze and learn from these films with regard to story struc-
ture, pacing, beginnings and endings that owe something to the way
some of the best makers of short films approach the form.
7
GENRE CONSIDERATIONS
Okay, I think we have established the point that, most of the time,
you are not going to be able to afford elaborate costumes, stunts,
locations, effects and so on. If you have unlimited access to a fancy
location, by all means, write a story set in a fancy location. In a
micro-budget film, the story has to do the heavy lifting so that is
where you really need to focus your energy on coming up with great
characters, a great story and great dialogue.
So, something to consider, things to ask yourself before proceeding:
1 What kind of movie is this? What genre does it fall into? Mixed-
genre films can be a tough sell because the distributor doesn’t
know how to market them—which is not to say that you should
not make one if you have an idea for one.
2 What other movies are like yours? This is really important. It has
been said that nobody wants anything original; they want mov-
ies that are like other movies that were big hits. There is the old
joke/anecdote about a screenwriter taking a meeting, trying to
get an assignment where the producer refers to a current big hit
and says “Give me the same thing . . . only different.” If you are
going to be pitching a movie, you want to be able to say “This is
Bad Boys For Life meets 1917,” referring to two big hits because,
the bottom line is the bottom line—how much the film will cost
DOI: 10.4324/9781003138969-8
102 Genre considerations
compared to how much it is likely to make, based on other simi-

lar films.
But you are not going to be pitching your film, you are going to
be writing, then making it and you want to be conscious of genre
conventions whether or not you are adhering to them or subverting
them.
Noam Kroll told me:
The Micro Budget films that fail are typically the ones that are
trying to be a big movie. They’re trying to be a scaled down
version of, you know, an action thriller or this or that. I don’t
mean to scapegoat any specific genre because any of them can
work on a Micro Budget canvas. You could be more experi-
mental with blending genres if you’re making a commentary on
something, that there’s an angle to it. I think about exploring
that because the number one thing that ultimately will help your
Micro Budget film is the concept and is differentiating what
you’re doing from the $10 million movie to $50 million movie,
because the Micro Budget films that fail are typically the ones
that are trying to be a big movie. They’re trying to be a scaled
down version of an action thriller or this or that. I don’t mean
to scapegoat any specific genre because any of them can work
on a Micro Budget canvas, but I do think that you’re better off
when you embrace the limitations as opposed to try to pretend
that they’re not there and try to make your production or your,
even the writing of your film resemble a much larger budget
feature, because then you’re not really taking advantage of the
smaller canvas that you’re working on. I would probably use my
more recent film uh Psychosynthesis as a, as an example, because
that’s a film that really blends these two genres. So on the one
hand, um, when you watch the trailer, it probably comes across
more like a traditional genre film, like it’s a horror or a thriller,
and there are elements of that, but what I think makes the film
interesting, and the reason I wanted to make this go home and
write this film is because it also infuses this dramatic component.
Genre considerations 103
Not long ago, I watched a low-budget heist thriller on a major

streaming platform. Never mind that is was badly written and acted,
highly derivative of big-budget films in the same genre—in fact
shooting in some of the same locations as a much-revered film in the
same genre and even referring to a character from that film, the big-
gest insult was the attempt at bigger budget stunts and effects that the
filmmakers could not afford.
In one scene, a character is “thrown” to his death from the top
of a parking garage. The actor is led to the edge of the garage and,
in the next shot, he is lying on the ground, dead. Audiences are
sophisticated today, if someone is thrown off the top of a building,
they expect to see a stunt man execute the stunt. Similarly, while,
to some audiences in 2004, adding muzzle shots and blood in post-
production with Adobe After Effects might have been passable, nobody
buys it anymore. If your production cannot afford a stunt, do not
fake it. If your production cannot afford blanks for gunfire and squibs
for blood, do not show characters getting shot. I wrote a screenplay
where a climactic gunfight happens in the woods at night. From a
distance, you can shoot “gunfire” or something flashy in the dark and
add sound effects later.
Certain genres present more challenges than others, so, if you
want to work in one of them, your screenplay is going to have to be
especially inventive. Earlier in the book, I discussed the differences
between low-budget film noir and low-budget monster movies. Film
noir found ways to use their shortcomings to their advantage, while
many monster movies are laughably bad because they could only
afford low-rent costumes and effects.
Science fiction films usually conjure up images of intergalactic
space battles, gleaming high-tech-looking sets, futuristic costumes
and so on. Sure, with a lot of time spent on finding creative work-
arounds, you can make a micro-budget science fiction film, but
I advise against attempting anything that is going to be too heavy on
the elements mentioned earlier. So, what does that leave you with?
A story.
Darren Aronofsky’s conceptually dense and technically raw debut
Pi (1998) had a budget of $60,000 and Gareth Edwards’ narratively
rich and technically inventive Monsters (2010) cost $15,000. Both

films are distinguished by their stories.
It is really hard to write a chapter on genre considerations in a
book on micro-budget screenwriting and not mention Shane Car-
ruth’s 2004 Sundance hit Primer. Reportedly made for $7000, the
most effective special effect in the time travel story is the dense,
highly technical dialogue and concept. Honestly, I could not
understand most of what the characters were talking about, but
I picked up on the urgency and the drama in the screenplay and
got sucked in.
Mike Cahill’s Another Earth (2011), also a Sundance hit, was
made for $100,000 and lauded for the science elements in the story,
but, ultimately, even though the concept underlying the story is
clearly science-fiction, the heart of what makes it so effective comes
from the characters’ dilemma, these are people we care about and
invest in. Similarly, Jim Byrkit’s Coherence was shot in five days
for $50,000. It is completely character and concept driven, a rivet-
ing thriller that draws its tension from the interpersonal dynamics
among a group of people trapped in a house during a crisis caused
by a passing comet. So, you can make a cool science-fiction film,
but it is going to require a strong concept to distract audiences from
the fact that they are probably not going to see spaceships zooming
through the galaxy.
I would be hesitant to approach a western on a budget of $100,000
or less, but it can be done if you have non-budget resources in place.
Chloe Zhao’s The Rider (2017) was modestly budgeted and ben-
efited considerably by featuring a real cowboy, a guy who, among
other things, trains horses for a living as her main character. Since
Zhao was shooting in documentary/verite-hybrid style, she was able
to shoot his work with the horses. There have been a few other low-
budget westerns in recent years, but they tend to be smaller, intimate
character-driven stories.
Similarly, if you want to shoot a war film, you are going to have to
get especially crafty in your screenplay. It is unlikely that you will be
able to stage epic scenes with a large cast, use tanks, bombers, gunfire
and explosions. That said, with creative sound design and minimal
CGI, you can suggest a battle going on around your characters. One
really handy tip is to, if applicable, connect with re-enactors. These
guys come with their own (usually accurately detailed) wardrobe and
weapons and, in my experience, often gravitate toward any opportu-
nity to strut their stuff—meaning that you can sometimes luck into
getting a bunch of them inexpensively. Years ago, one of my students
made a WWI film for his senior thesis (in German, no less) and made
extensive use of re-enactors. Lovinder Gill told me about a Civil
War film that he wants to make where the bulk of the film involved
a young character eager to take up arms. Most of the film would
have shown the character traveling on his own to join the army only
to discover the bloody aftermath of a battle. Yes, it would have cost
something to cast a bunch of re-enactors to play bloody, dead or
wounded soldiers, but, for one scene in a film, shot creatively to
make the scope of the scene much bigger than it really was, it would
probably have been worth it.
Period films are heavily reliant on wardrobes, sets and locations
devoid of glaringly obvious contemporary details. If you know that
you have access to a period wardrobe and a location largely untouched
by time, you might already be thinking about making a film set in
another era. Honestly, when I first saw Whit Stillman’s Metropolitan
(1990), which is set “not so long ago,” I did not know that it was
supposed to be set in the 1960s. On his modest budget, he could
not afford period recreations, so he went in the other direction and
attempted to remove all traces of the modern world. Because the
film is about upper-class characters participating in decades-old high
society functions and rituals, it seemed natural for the actors to be
clothed in classic (i.e., timeless) formal wear.
Mickey Keating’s black and white psychological thriller Dar-
ling (2015) has a timeless look, thanks to wardrobe and lack of cell
phones, clearly inspired by films like Polanski’s Repulsion (1965) and,
for that matter, The Tenant (1976). So, when does it take place? It is
hard to tell until a single blink-and-you-won’t notice it (the date on
the driver’s license) gives us a clue.
David Robert Mitchell plays with period in his first feature The
Myth of the American Sleepover (2010), $50,000 and, to some
degree, in the follow-up It Follows (2014). There are no comput-

ers in sight, people do not use cell phones but some of them use
e-readers and teenagers watch movies on VHS.
Again, not to belabor the point, the inspiration for a film often
comes from recognizing available elements and concocting a story
that utilizes them.
Polly Schattel offered:
To do a low budget film, again, you have to use what you have
available. So contemporary, often rural, because, if you’re in
New York City, it’s hard to rent space for no money. You can’t
do a period film because you can’t put Model T’s on the curb
outside the general store.
I would be hesitant to suggest making an action film on a micro-

budget unless you happen to know a lot of stunt-savvy actors and fight
coordinators. Yes, of course, Robert Rodriguez pulled it off in the
$7000.00 El Mariachi (1992), but he really knew what he was doing,
really worked within the parameters of what he was capable of, what he
could pull off with a mix of resources at hand, confidence and bravado.
I would advise against car chases if possible because 1) they can be
dangerous even if you do happen to have a stunt driver and 2) they
can be complicated and time-consuming to shoot. Still, as mentioned
elsewhere in this book, I once challenged myself to see if I could write
a $50,000 action film. The entire story takes place in and around a strip
club—the actual bar area, the dressing rooms, the offices, the base-
ment and the parking lot—all one building. It worked. The punchline
here is that, after a producer asked to see it, he told me that he liked
it, wanted to make it but asked me to rewrite it for a $60,000,000
budget. It was fun to blow up the proportions of the story and, as
I recall, blow up some other things in the new version of the story, but
it never got made. Of all of the unmade shards of projects I have sitting
around, this is the one that I keep coming back to, sniffing around and
thinking about making—the original $50,000 version.
Thrillers and, to some extent, crime/gangster films are frequently
a good bet because they are generally driven by complex stories and
characters, both of which might be harder than average to write but

cost about the same as simple stories and generic characters. Like the
classic film noir canon, thrillers tend to be more about people in situ-
ations and less centered on having many locations. Yes, Karyn Kusa-
ma’s brilliant The Invitation (2015) cost about $1,000,000 to make,
but there are few reasons that the story could not have been made at a
fraction of the cost in a cheaper location, with less refined production
design by less experienced filmmakers and actors—with a screenplay
as good as Phil Hay and Matt Manfredi’s is. Similarly, Creep (2015)
might have been more than $100,000 but that is because, between
them, Mark Duplass and Jason Blum could afford to produce it for
more. At the heart of it, the story is still Micro Budget friendly.
On an intellectual level, comedy seems to make sense for a micro-
budget production, but humor tastes vary and, for whatever it is worth,
they tend not to play as well internationally. So, there are lots of small-
scale comedies that involve a handful of characters in funny situations.
It is a good model to consider but only if you have a screenplay that is
widely accessible and funny to anyone who did not work on the film.
Kevin Smith’s classic Clerks (1994) is famous for its minuscule budget,
but it is also a genuinely funny screenplay. Micro-budget romantic
comedies and, for that matter, dramas also fit into this category.
I have already mentioned the lower budget musicals Guy and
Madeline on a Park Bench (2009) by Damien Chazzelle and Once
(2007) by John Carney elsewhere, but it is worth bringing them
up again. We tend to think of lavish song and dance sequences in
musicals, and it is going to take a lot of effort to pull off this kind
of scene on a micro-budget, but, if you have a relationship with
a musician who can write and record songs for you at a bargain
rate and you are savvy about staging, I would not rule out making
a musical although you will likely be limiting yourself to fans of
musicals. Because I know a lot of musicians, I have long toyed with
the idea of doing an open-mic, aspiring musician-centric story. As
mentioned elsewhere in this book, I was once hired to write a
micro-budget musical and kept it small in scale by rooting it in
the reality of the everyday world and, of course, limiting locations,
which, of course, leads us to horror. I like to call horror “the genre
that never dies” because it never goes out of style. The horror audi-
ence is large, loyal and, with all due respect, not too discriminating.
By that I mean the audience tends to be more forgiving of lower
production values, amateurish acting, borderline special effects and
rehashing overly familiar stories. Basically, as long as there are a rea-
sonable number of scares and, much of the time, lots of gore, many
horror fans are satisfied. At the American Film Market, I learned
that—big surprise—horror films are the top-selling films. Recalling
Dov S-S Simens parting words “Rent a house for the weekend, get
a bunch of kids and chop ‘em up.” Honestly, I sort of feel like I am
catching a break when I get hired to write a horror film because
they rarely involve Three-Act Structure or character development
in the conventional sense; characters do not necessarily have to
grow and change; they have to either live or die.
That said, we have been in a new golden age of artsy, intellectual
horror films and, as a horror fan myself, I do appreciate them, films
like Robert Eggers The Witch (2015) and Trey Edward Shults It
Comes At Night (2017)—which was marketed as a horror film but
is more of a psychological thriller even though I sat in the theater
watching it and actually said to myself “This is truly horrifying.”
So, in some ways, the bar is high if you are aiming for something
beyond the run-of-the-mill horror and yet, plenty of people are sim-
ply ignoring that high bar and continuing to crank out basic slice and
dice, blood-soaked scary movies.
For a great, easily digestible analysis of the financial considerations
surrounding horror movies, check out the short horror movie video
produced by NPR’s Planet Money.
No matter what genre you choose to work in, if you are proceed-
ing with a micro-budget approach, you will do yourself a big favor
by making sure to be well-versed in genre conventions and audience
expectations because one way to make your film stand out is by suc-
cessfully challenging or subverting those conventions and expecta-
tions. Few things jump out as “original” more than appearing to give
the audience what they want and then pulling off a surprise twist on
the genre.
8
CASE STUDIES
In this chapter, the filmmakers I interviewed talked about some of

the specific ways that they approached their films.
BOB BYINGTON ON FRANCES FERGUSON (2019): We sort of built the scripts

around the woman who plays the lead. And I had workshopped
an idea I had for a short with her and then determined that we
were trying to make the feature with her. And so we built a story
around her personality. Logistically, we knew that we wanted to
be in a small town where we would have free reign. The story is
also built with North Platte in mind and some of the things you
see in the story were built into the script.

MARTHA STEPHENS: Like,Aaron (Katz), I made my first movie in and

around my hometown, so I could call in favors, you know, get
my cousin to donate our dinner one night. With no money, I was
having to put people up in my aunt’s house. So I think writing
something for where you’re from or someplace where you have
some kind of a foundation or resources is really smart. You can
make that money go a lot further that way.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003138969-9
110 Case studies
DG: I want to go back to the genesis of the project. Did you have the
sense of wanting to make a film but knowing that you might not
have the financing for a big elaborate film?
JIM BYRKIT: Totally. There’s the sense of sitting down thinking, alright,
“I don’t have anything. What can I make with nothing?” The
main thing is to find something that absolutely inspires you, so
that you can’t wait to do it. Like for me, I had been working on
these big movies that took so long to get one shot off, because
you’re waiting for the lights, you’re waiting for the actors, you’re
waiting for all the production to happen. And so I had this crazy
idea of like, what if I got rid of the two things that really slow me
down, which is the script and the crew? And then I could really
make a movie? And so I’d been fantasizing about that. Like, what
would that look like if I just didn’t have a crew? How small could
it be? And I thought, well, I do need a DP. And I need sound.
You just have to have good sound. And so our crew was me, my
DP, Nick Sadler, and two sound guys. And then I couldn’t wait
to test. It was really an experiment, the whole thing started as an
experiment to see what would happen. If, instead of writing out
every line of dialogue, I just prepped the characters with their
backstory and their relationships.
JB: It was a 12-page outline just for me, that didn’t share it with any-
body. It was right for me only so that I could understand what
had to happen before the next thing could happen. And I kind
of brainstormed it with Alex Manoogian, who plays Amir in the
film. And so we would talk about it. And that’s how we got to the
point of multiple realities. And we would discuss Alright, well,
how are these characters in conflict with themselves, everybody
has some kind of internal conflict, everybody has a deep relation-
ship with the other people. So it becomes this math problem that
you really have to talk through over and over and over, in order to
give just the tiniest clues to the actors, because the actors are just
getting notes every day from me. I’ve emailed them a few lines
or a little story or something. But they wouldn’t know what was
going to happen. They had no idea, you know what the story
Case studies 111
was. So we looked at it as almost like a fun house. When you’re in

a fun house, there’s only one door in and out of each room. But
you can do whatever you want in the room, you can stay as long
as you want, you can look around. But there’s one way out of
that room. And that’s how we looked at the scenes. We don’t care
what you do in the scene is sort of how I approached it, as long as
we hit this, and this and this. And that can trigger the next scene.
DG: I just feel like in a film, this scale, where we don’t have set pieces
and multiple locations to work with, we have to turn up the heat
on those relationships.
JB: Yeah. For something like this, it can’t all just be a concept. It
can’t just be reality fracturing at some point, the human brain
first, maybe it’s because of the way we evolved, but we’re fasci-
nated by human relationships. Our minds can’t help but we want
to track Okay, who’s with who, who likes who who’s trying to
steal whose boyfriend, right? That’s why even in Shakespeare,
you know, the Best Writing in the world, there still has these
soap opera elements to it, there still has, you know, just very
heightened, very well written interpersonal drama. Right. And
that because we’re human beings, and that’s ultimately what we’re
genetically programmed to care about.
DG: From a writing perspective, did you map that out with every
character’s relationship with every other character?
JB: Yeah, every character’s starting relationship with every character
like “you were her teacher. Many years ago, she was your favorite
student. Now you become best friends. Even when you were
dating this person”, like we just talked about that, worked it all
out. So everybody knew their history.
DG: So you left certain elements of the story, for lack of a better
phrase, open ended.
JB: Oh, for sure. I think about all the characters, clearly having
interpersonal dynamics between each one, and that gets really
mathy. In terms of relationships and because I wanted the sur-
prise, I wanted the collaboration to work with great actors,
because they have so much to bring in. If you’ve just already
112 Case studies
scripted every single word, then all they’re doing is a variation

of those words. But this was much more fun, because I would
give them prompts, and then see where they take it. Like, I had
no idea that the interpersonal conflicts at the table would sort
of generate so much tension when Laurie is confused about
seeing Mike in her favorite TV show. That was originally just
supposed to be a commentary on another version of him. You
know, he’s, he’s an actor, and there’s another version of him out
there. But to see it sort of escalate to this really weird meta-
physical battle and challenge and challenge to his ego, and then
how he had to respond by insulting her memory. That was
just gold. And that’s when, as a filmmaker, you’re holding the
camera, you’re so excited. You’re just hoping for your focus,
because it’s magic.
DG: You shot this in a week or something like that.
JB: Five Nights, five hours a night.

TOM QUINN: On The New Year Parade, you go and you meet people,
you hear how they talk, and then you come back and you’re writ-
ing that. And if I build trust, that’s a thing that will add specificity
and value, and all kinds of visuals to my film. That, to me, is part
of the writing process. I do think like that, like research and like
relationship building can really be part of the process in a way
that is even more on a Micro Budget, or at least in a different
way on a Micro Budget than you would if you were like writ-
ing a script and then turned over to production in another way.
Because it’s building you the things that are going to save you
money later. But also adding specificity to your scripts that sort
of beyond what you do have access to. On The New Year Parade,
I would do that and I would write drafts of the script. And then
I put scenes up on this Mummers message board and they would
shred it and then they would be like, “We would never say.” They
would just make fun of it but, weirdly, it made them start to like
me, because they knew I wasn’t just like, writing a thing that they
were gonna be embarrassed of. But since I could hang in there a
Case studies 113
little bit, they started to like me, and then when we would meet
in person later on in production, we had trust.
So on The New Year Parade, it was a pretty traditional 100,
105 maybe 110 not 120 page script or something. And, then we
would rehearse that quite a bit. And I would ask Jen, who played
Kat, if there are scenes that you think are missing, as someone
who’s gone through a similar situation, tell me what they are and
we can write them. And so, I had done the eight drafts in a very
traditional way first. And then it’s interesting because we almost
never looked at the script in production but we would use it from
a breakdown standpoint. And, but then we would do long, like
20 minute, takes that were kind of improv. If we ever got stuck,
they go back to the script, and they say the lines and usually what
that would get me by the end was a mix of what I had written,
and a mix of what they came up with and I could kind of dial that
back and forth in the edit.

RY RUSSO-YOUNG: I literally reunited with someone that I went to

high school with, my best friend’s younger sister and I just
started interviewing her as a character and we kind of made up
the character as she went along. And I was just asking the char-
acter questions and we shot a three-hour interview and I found
her fascinating as a character and then we had some friends
come over and we shot some like verite scenes with her in
character and the other friends were kind of playing characters
and kind of playing themselves. Then I went home and I edited
this footage and I looked at it and I showed it to some friends
and I said “Is this interesting? I think this is fascinating. Like
she’s a really interesting character, right? Like, don’t you agree?
Yes, no, am I crazy?” And they all said “Yes, this is really inter-
esting. Keep going with it.” So I started just writing out little
scenes that I wanted to see the character in that felt right for the
choices we had already made for her. So they would improvise
the scenes I didn’t even write dialogue in.

114 Case studies
LAWRENCE MICHAEL LEVINE: But anything that I’ve done myself, I’ve

written for myself, I’ve done with a mind to giving costs as low
as possible. Because I always wanted to be able to say “Okay, well,
if I can’t raise my money outside, I can always just find a way to
pay for it myself.”
But from a writing perspective, it started with just trying to keep

things interesting, with as few characters in as few locations as pos-
sible. This is just what I’ve done with every movie that I’ve written,
including Black Bear, with the mindset of keeping costs down. Gabi
On The Roof In July (2010) was written less with price in mind than
almost any of my other movies. And I don’t really exactly know why.
I mean, it was just such a wild, crazy process. We made Gabi On The
Roof In July for about, I don’t know, $38,000 and then we made
Always Shine (2016) for maybe $100,000.
It is hard to get people’s attention and say something meaningful in
a two-hour window. And that’s what, that’s what making movies is,
it doesn’t matter if you’re relying on special effects. Or if you’re lying
on interpersonal dynamics, you have to have something to say, and
it has to be interesting. It’s kind of like movies now, or in the same
thing as rock or it’s, or country music or whatever, three chords, and
the truth is just like, you got a camera and the truth, you can make
a movie.
So the question is, like, how do you get to the truth? And in
my case, it just was a lot of learning how to write, spending a lot
of time writing and studying, studying people who had done what
I wanted to do. So, you know, after I had done this play, the technol-
ogy came out and existed where you could shoot something and edit
it in your house and I took advantage of it. And that was my first
film (Territory), and then the next film Gabi On The Roof In July.
It’s interesting, because that was when I got involved with Sophia,
romantically and creatively. And she’s such an incredible organizer
and producer, that I, at that point, in a way kind of abdicated those
kinds of responsibilities and thought to myself, well, we’re gonna
make something and she’s going to figure out how to do this, you
know? In fact, almost more than any of my other films I didn’t really
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think, think consciously about keeping things cheap. With Territory,

my first thing, I knew three-people-one-location that it was going
to be cheap. But Gabi was many characters, many locations. I think
I had been emboldened by watching some of my contemporaries
like Andrew Bujalski and Swanberg. You know, and people like that.
I think those were the two big ones at the time. And I was like,
“these guys are making movies where people are all over the place.
So obviously, it can be done. I’ll just, I’ll shoot in my apartment,
I’ll shoot in my friend’s apartment, we’ll get permits for the street,”
which I learned from film school that you could do. And so I kind of
moved out of that three- people-one-location mindset and was like,
“No, you can do this with lots of different people.” In a way, I feel
like, of all of the stuff that people call mumblecore, Gabi is almost
Altman-esque and it’s kind of because it has a lot of characters and a
lot of locations and stuff. It has more characters.
So, it was a great experience in that way. I think the plan was that
we were going to do about six months of rehearsals, we’re going to
make up the characters together and we were going to make up the
story together. And then it was like, and then we were going to start
to film the rehearsals. I came up with a lot of character questions
and there was good preparation for that, because then all this charac-
ter development I did in tandem with the actors. It was a character
quiz and a character questionnaire that I gave everybody. And it was
really cool. I mean, I think they really felt ownership of their roles
and their characters. And they were really engaged with the project
because of it. Basically, Sophia, and I transcribed all of those rehears-
als. So we had like 300 pages of material that we whittled down to
about 160. But it was very collaborative, because a lot of the dialogue
was generated by the actors themselves. Then Sophia helped me and
Kate Kurtz, another screenwriter, helped me in terms of figuring
out what went into the movie and what went out. It wasn’t like any
other script writing process I’ve ever been involved in where, you
know, basically, I’m alone, and I devise everything myself. And there’s
nobody else really involved except some people who gave me notes.
This was a totally collaborative effort. I did my own final pass the
week before the week before the shoot. So Sophia was like, “Get this
116 Case studies
thing as short as you can, until the week before the shoot, then go off
and figure out how you’re going to shoot this movie and do a final
pass on the script.” And that’s pretty much exactly what happened.
But when we started the shoot, the script was 162 pages, which is
long. And what happened was, after we shot this week that then had
to be completely reshot. I, once again, had to look at the script with
Sophia and Kate. And we had to rewrite it. We had to be like, “Okay,
what can say what can go because now we can’t afford, we don’t have
time, we can’t afford to shoot this scene, we had a big scene like in
an AA meeting, we would have required extras and additional loca-
tion to shoot”, so we had to cut that out. So, after we had to reshoot
this entire week, I had to go back and cut a bunch of scenes and alter
the story significantly. And, and what you see is the final movie as a
result of that. So that’s kind of a crazy process. And I’ve never done
anything like that, again, although I’d be interested in it. It required a
lot of things. And also feeling like I had nothing to lose, feeling like
it might be fun to revisit that process. Again, you know, many years
later. I think it’d be nice to like, go back and revisit those characters
and do something with all the same cast.
In some ways, Black Bear is my most contained film that I’ve made
since territory.
It’s mainly three characters; half of it is three characters in one
location. And then it’s like maybe 10–12 characters in one location,
but it’s all set in one location. You know, I think the focus needs to
be on character’s motivation when you can’t rely on external conflict,
special effects or action. You know, whatever normal movies tend to
do, it just really comes down to character, their predicament and the
relatability of their predicaments and then drawing people in based
on characters.
On Green (2011), we wanted to do it even cheaper because we
had just lost our lunch with Gabi. It was financed by Sophia, who
had been cast in a commercial that she was ultimately basically cut
out of. I think you see her for a second.
Sophia wrote an outline. The location was Sophia’s dad’s country
house. And then (actress) Kate Lyn Sheil, myself and Sophia improvise
Case studies 117
the scenes. And then they started to take shape. And then I think
there was some rewriting that went on in between the two shoots,
because that was done, like I said, in two parts, one in which we shot
and failed. And the second which we shot and I guess, succeeded.

NOAM KROLL: Probably the greatest challenge, I would say, just from
a visual standpoint, trying to write for those locations was tricky
because, although I think both locations looked good and I knew
where I was going to shoot even during the rewriting phase so
I could actually, you know, sort of write with that in mind. Um,
and although I thought they looked great on camera, both locations
were really small. For example, the second location we filmed in,
I knew we were supposed to show three bedrooms, but there were
only two bedrooms in the actual house. So right away there were
those sort of challenges as I was writing. I was trying to stay con-
scious and cognizant of the physical parameters that we would be
in. And, and, you know, to some extent that was helpful because it
allowed me to sort of visualize how the scene would play out. But,
in other ways, it was challenging because, when you’re writing a
script and you don’t have to worry about “if I write the character
walking out onto the balcony, does this house actually have a bal-
cony?” Usually you don’t worry about that, you just write it and
if there’s no balcony, you rewrite it and that’s it. But in this case
I knew. So that sort of almost created a bit of a writer’s block kind
of in certain moments where I would try to get through scenes
and then get stuck because I’d realize “What’s the point in writing
the scene if it’s going to have to change, or if that location is going
to work?” So, that was definitely an issue.
So in my first feature film, Shadows On The Road (2018), just to

contrast that film with Psychosynthesis, every day, we were in a dif-
ferent location and I didn’t even have to worry about the visuals. You
know, one day we’re on the beach the next day, where, you know,
in the desert and everyday it was something else. So that was sort of
baked into the idea for the purpose of it, not becoming stale and still
118 Case studies
feeling like the story was progressing and the mood was progressing.
And in this case, I didn’t have that crutch to lean on because we were
only in the two locations. So it really forced me to sort of lean into
those scene descriptions and those visuals on the page in a way that
hopefully would differentiate things and keep it all fresh.
NK: I wrote this film knowing it would probably wind up at 70 some-

thing minutes, but actually I think the script was over 90. Maybe it
was 89 pages or 90 pages or something. So, quite a bit was cut from
it. But I think that’s actually an important point for filmmakers to
remember, especially if they’ve never made a feature before, is that
what happens if you really go through the editorial process is at a
certain point, you have to become ruthless with the material and
you start cutting stuff left. And right. So if you’re starting with an
85 page script or in this case, let’s say someone sees a movie like mine
and they say, “Oh, cool. I want to make a 70 minute movie.” Don’t
write a 70 page script necessarily because then you have no room.
DG: Did you feel that the 100 minute cut wasn’t working?
NK: Yeah, I didn’t think it worked as well. I think there were scenes
in there that were fine, but they didn’t progress the story the way
that I intended, they didn’t capture the mood. Maybe there was
something that we explored that we improvised in a scene that
covered an element. So there might be this five minute or three
minute scene, let’s say, and there was really only one line in that
theme that actually mattered. So we would just cut that scene.
And in some cases I would be in the edit, take a line and put it
in the background or sneak it into another part of the story. But,
yeah, it was just too much material. And I think no matter what,
there’s always the case. I mean, anyone, even on big studio movies,
they have a 130 page script and then the first cut ends up being
three and a half hours. And then by the time they’re done, it’s an
hour and 50. So you want to have a, you want to give yourself
wiggle room when you’re writing and, and build in some, some
extra breathing space. So you can give yourself those puzzle pieces
later on and figure out which ones fit and which ones don’t.

Case studies 119
DG: Did you accommodate for budget limitations in the screenplay?

Did you, for instance, write in locations that you knew you would
have access to? That kind of thing?
ANGELA MARIE HUTCHINSON: I definitely looked at, “Okay, what loca-
tions do we have accessible?” As an example, with a basketball
player character, for example, I remember when we were actually
mapping out all of our days, and all of our shooting days were
like, “Gosh, are we actually going to be able to get to a basketball
court, for these two actors to go shoot scenes?” Are we really
going to go to a park, or we’re going to send like a remote crew
over to go do this while we’re shooting something else? And
then we’re like, “Let’s just change them from playing basketball to
them working out in a gym, which we could shoot at our current
location, and so, they were just lifting weights, doing the same
lines that they would have been saying on the basketball court.”

ROBERT GREENE: The title Kate Plays Christine literally comes from
me thinking about Kate Lyn Sheil playing the role. Like there
was no other choice. There was no casting process. It was Kate.
I called her and I said, “Hey, I got an idea. Do you want to do
this? It’s literally this.” And the film, for all the twists and turns
that we went through, became almost exactly the film that we
talked about on the phone that day. And that’s because of the
concept and the script. And the or the concept in the scripting,
I would say not the script, because it was those scripts, the con-
cept of the scripting, and the execution and the pursuit of it were
all intertwined. And that’s because we only had so much money,
we only had so much time, we had to make it work.

For his film Drinking Buddies (2013), like all of his films, Joe
Swanberg employed what he calls a “scriptment,” no dialogue but
long descriptions of emotional beats and action. The scriptment
for the 90 minute film was 45 pages of extensive notes on what
happens in each scene. Swanberg famously casts actors who are
120 Case studies
adept at improvising dialogue but he is not just setting them up

in front of a camera and telling them to speak. Before stepping in
front of the camera, they have been given lots of information on
who the character is, what he or she wants, what the obstacles are
and what attempts to overcome them should or should not be in
the scene. A few years ago, I had Swanberg as a guest speaker in one
of my screenwriting classes. He leaned over to me before starting
and said “I’m not really sure what to talk about since I have never
written a screenplay.” When we turned on the projector and were
able to take a look at one of his scriptments, I said to him “That’s
a screenplay.” Anyone taking a look at that document would have
been able to understand what needed to be produced. In fact, we
looked through the pages describing the opening sequence of an
episode of his Netflix series Easy. Then we watched the sequence
and it was exactly as described. That is, in part, screenwriting.

ALEX ROSS PERRY “Every problem that I knew would come up from
having gone to film school and made an overly expensive, unnec-
essary thesis, I was solving because I said, “I’m going to make
a movie. The thesis shoot was eight days and I said, I’m going
to shoot a feature in less days than that for less money. And it’s
going to be three times as long, I’m going to shoot a 70 minute
movie for the same $20,000 or less. We’re not going to do it like
a student film; a professional schedule where you do maybe two
or three pages a day, we’re gonna do this the way people my age
are now doing this, where you’re shooting like 10 or 15 minutes
of usable footage a day. And you’re shooting for seven days. You
know, that’s still plenty of material, I think, a movie 73 minutes
long, I think I probably shot maybe four and a half hours for it,
you know, 30 minutes a day for seven days, roughly.”

DG: So, you were making the story up as you were shooting?

NIGEL BACH: I had to write down ideas about what it would be so it
wasn’t a script, per se, it became an outline that I operated off
Case studies 121
of. And, like, there were times where it was reverse engineering,
when I found somebody that wanted to be in it, I would create a
situation. In the case where I’m the only actor in the film, I have
to only remember what I’m supposed to do, but when I involve
other people in it, I can’t think that they’re inside my head to
know everything so that’s why I wrote out a screenplay for Bad-
der Ben (2017) and for Steelmanville Road (2017), and for the
Crescent Moon Clown (2018).
I knew you’d written many screenplays and your Badder Ben co-
stars Matthew Schmidt and Jacquie Baker had written sketches and
I could have gotten the same result, but it would have taken five times
as long five times as five times as long if I had just said, “This is what
I want to happen, adlib.” And it was more efficient to write out a
screenplay and present it to you guys. But what I find by doing that is
my actors are more dependent on a script in the beginning and then
they begin to take ownership of the character and then they become
the character by the last third of the movie. And they are able to rely
less on a screenplay and more on what the person they’re representing
and what their character would do in that situation.

VERA BRUNNER-SUNG: Bella Vista sort of came to me and we made it

happen in a relatively quick turnaround, the shoot was like 12
days. I think the script was 45 pages but I thought it would prob-
ably be between 75 and 85, maybe 90 minutes long. But I real-
ized, with a feature, that you will reach more people than you will
with an experimental short film, even the most experimental fea-
ture is probably going to reach more people. I felt like I was doing
something bigger and more different and more ambitious than
anything I’d ever done before, relative to my body of work and
it was a real opportunity in terms of pushing me to think bigger.
I’m working on things that feel much bigger and more ambitious
and more, you know. I spent several years in development, some-
thing that would have seemed insane to me. At that time when
I was making Bella Vista, I was like, “Why would anyone spend
122 Case studies
more than, you know, a year working on their scripts?” Now I’m
a better writer and I just have a clear vision of what I want my
work to do and I couldn’t have gotten to this place without mak-
ing that film the way that we made it.
9
STOMPING GROUND
One day, in 1988, on the production of Signs of Life in Maine, I body-

doubled for actor Vincent D’Onofrio, even though he is about eight
inches taller than me. It was one of his first big parts. Years later,
D’Onofrio had gone on to become a well-established, well-regarded
actor and I was one of the film reviewers for IndieTalk.com and
Home Media Entertainment magazine. I found myself reviewing
his feature writing-directing debut, a micro-budget horror-musical
called Don’t Go In The Woods (2010). It is not a very good movie
in the conventional sense but I kind of liked it.
I read up about it and even found an interview with him where
he said that the plan was to “make a bad horror movie” where they
intentionally cast unknowns who had music and singing experience
whether or not they had acting experience. He cast a band that his
nephew was friends with, he cast some girls who worked at the cof-
fee shop around the corner from him and he cast a couple of girls
who had been extras on Law & Order and they shot in 12 days on his
property in upstate New York for $100,000.
The whole piece smacks of artistic experimentation, like
D’Onofrio, was making a test film and challenging his own notions
of what acting and film could be. The clue to this theory is that
the film really only ever comes alive during the musical numbers.
In general, the songs (written by co-screenwriter Sam Bisbee) are
DOI: 10.4324/9781003138969-10
124 Stomping ground
actually pretty catchy, decent takes on the acoustic indie-rock singer-

songwriter vibe that would be right at home playing in the background
of a scruffy little coffeehouse. That the cast, made up of enthusias-
tic, fresh-faced but character-appropriate-grungy 20-somethings, is
clearly better at performing the music than they are at delivering lines
seems to suggest D’Onofrio picked people with some musical skills
who might or might not be able to act rather than casting actors who
have some musical skills. The difference might seem subtle on paper
and, in action, it jumps out, but the film has a loopy, engaging, infec-
tious “let’s put on a show” energy.
So, it seems like D’Onofrio was going for a degree of Neo-realism
here a la Vittorio De Sica, Gus Van Sant’s Elephant 2003 and Para-
noid Park (2007) and Matthew Porterfield’s Putty Hill.
In that regard, the experiment pays off to a degree in that, over-
all, the attractive cast does have an appeal, they really do feel like a
social circle plucked off the streets of NYC by someone who wanted
to make a film about who they are—fresh, raw and palpably full of
spirit, no baggage, giving it their all and probably not for the promise
of what, presumably, was not a huge payday.
Sometimes it seems like certain filmmakers are trying to make a
point about bad films by going out and making a bad film, almost
a sly send-up of bad films. So what is this film, a drama with bad
acting, a musical without a good story or a horror film without any
scares? The whole thing felt as if it was really about D’Onofrio and
some friends getting their feet wet, experimenting with film-making
in anticipation of more ambitious projects to come. He went on
to write and direct the considerably more polished The Kid (2019)
Since this chapter has taken an unexpected detour into a discussion
of Vincent D’Onofrio’s directing career, it only seems right to men-
tion his only other directing credit Five Minutes, Mr. Welles (2005),
a wonderful 30-minute short in which he gives an amazing perfor-
mance as Orson Welles.
So what did all of this mean for me? Could I, a nobody, throw
together a cast/crew of nobodies, run around, shoot a film and
throw it up on the Internet? Sure, I guess I could. Did I know that
I had screenplays sitting around that were designed to be shot for
Stomping ground 125
little-to-no money? Sure did! If I went out and made one, would
anyone see it?
Oddly, watching Don’t Go In The Woods was one of the things
that really inspired me to give Stomping Ground, which had now
been optioned twice but did not seem to be going anywhere, a shot.
My screenplay Incorporated had been a semi-finalist to get into the
Sundance Screenwriters Lab and, even though I had written it for a
relatively low budget, I did not think I could raise enough money to
do it justice. I’m not a natural producer and I am not especially good
at the fundraising/financing side of things, so, without anyone to
partner with, I seriously doubted my ability to pull it off on my own.
So, in 2005, I turned my attention to another, even less expensive
project but ran into the same problem. Then I wrote Aftermath,
which eventually became Stomping Ground, specifically with the
idea that I had to come up with a viable project. I decided to take a
scientific approach to writing a screenplay utilizing all of the lessons
I learned over the years, to write an innovative, inventive screenplay
that could be shot in 1–2 days for little to no money and avoid all the
narrative and technical pitfalls that plagued so many micro-budget
productions. The film could not merely be cheap; it had to be enter-
taining and accessible, something that would appeal to both an art-
house crowd and a mainstream audience.
I knew that I was not going to be able to raise much money and,
because I didn’t think I could get a cast and crew to work for free for
very long, that it was going to have to be a really short shoot. I also
started thinking about ways to shoot it quickly. Because the screen-
play is essentially a one-act play that takes place mostly in one loca-
tion and in real time, I knew that there was a great risk of it becoming
static and stagy. In the writing phase, I knew that the standard Three-
Act Structure would not suit this story.
Borrowing lessons discussed in Chapter 6, things I learned from
teaching my Writing The Short Film courses, the inciting incident
in Stomping Ground happens off-screen. The film is about the after-
math of a random act of violence, but the violent act is never shown
on screen, it happens before the movie starts, so the story begins
in crisis. Also, in a significant break with convention, the inciting
126 Stomping ground
incident is not something that happens to the main character, it is

something he chooses to do. Similarly, also from the lessons I learned
from short films, some things are left unresolved at the end. Sure,
there are suggestions of some definitive moments but nothing is
spelled out, nobody grows and changes for the better and, inasmuch
as there is a good guy, when you really think about it, while he
appears to be the voice of reason, the moral compass of the story, in
the end, he emerges as someone few would call noble.
I had a colleague for awhile, screenwriter Joe Stinson, who wrote
four screenplays for Clint Eastwood (including the iconic line “Go
ahead, make my day”), a really sweet guy, but, if he did not like your
screenplay, you would hear about it. So, one day, I saw him reading
Stomping Ground and I prepared for the worst. When he finished
and came over, he said “You managed to break all of the rules of
screenwriting and still come up with a piece that works.”
With Stomping Ground, I knew that I could not have a 20-minute
stretch where nothing major happens, so I made sure to write in
major act breaks, revelations, complications or decisions every seven
to ten pages. Knowing that watching four guys in the woods could
get old really fast, I knew that I had to keep my foot on the drama
pedal, keep throwing things at the characters to keep the audience
engaged or, at least, distracted from the reality that they were just four
guys in the woods shot with low production values.
Now, while the focus of this book is on screenwriting because
there are plenty of other books on micro-budget production, I did
write with the shooting style in mind. From a technical standpoint,
one of the best ways of keeping your film from being static and stagy
is to avoid having your camera be locked down. No, I am not the
biggest fan of shaky handheld camerawork, but I knew I was going
to have to employ it.
Next, because of my background in theater and my experience
with film production, I came upon the idea to shoot Stomping
Ground as if I had been hired to shoot a play. You would never go
into a theater, set up a camera in the back and just get one wide,
static shot of the stage. Well, I guess that, if you have kids and they
have ever done anything on stage, maybe you would shoot it in that
Stomping ground 127
fashion. If I had a gig shooting a stage performance, I would do my

best to show up to the theater with at least three or four cameras and
set them up around the room. So, that’s how I decided to shoot my
film, as if it was a one-act play being shot by three to four handheld
cameras almost always in motion. The actors would know all of their
lines, not just the ones being shot that day as most films are shot.
Cameras would roll, I would call “action,” the actors would do the
screenplay start to finish, I’d yell “cut,” we would take a break and do
it a few more times.
I have to admit that, for better or worse, I got caught up with the
idea of shooting a feature in 24 hours and breaking so many of the
rules of screenwriting. I had to put my theory to the test.
In the summer of 2006, I had assembled a cast and crew but, just
hours before the first day of the shoot, my lead actor quit due to
personal reasons. I rescheduled the shoot for a couple of months
later, the lead actor came back and, the night before the first day
of shooting, he broke his foot and then moved to L.A. I recast the
whole film, scrambled to replace the original crew and it just never
came together.
All along, a producer in L.A. had been asking me to option the
screenplay and I had been turning her down. I optioned it to a Philly
company, it never really progressed, the producer in L.A. asked about
optioning it again and the third time was the charm. I sold the rights
to the screenplay for two years and was hired to rewrite it for six
months. Near the end of the two-year option, the producer stopped
responding to calls and emails. It often turns out that, if neither party
takes action at the end of an option, the producer can sometimes
retain the rights for free. With about two weeks to spare and the help
of a generous volunteer lawyer, I retained the rights to my screenplay.
That was in January 2011.
On July 1, 2013, I met with a bright, daring, ambitious young
producer and we decided to go ahead with my idea that Stomping
Ground could be shot in two days. I kept waiting for someone to say
“Okay, Dave, we’re not really going to shoot it in two days, right?”
We mounted an aggressive crowd-funding campaign that brought in
a big chunk of our budget. I have to come clean about one of the
128 Stomping ground
more successful elements of the crowd-funding campaign. As it was

drawing to a close and looking like it might fall short of our goal,
I went on social media and posted “Thank you Kevin Smith! Thank
you Edward Burns!” suggesting that these two icons of micro-budget
filmmaking had become aware of the campaign and contributed.
What more needs to be said about the power of suggestion? I never
said that they contributed but people interpreted it that way and
we got a surge of new backers. Still, the campaign was going to fall
short, so one of the producers and I each kicked in enough to put us
over the top. It is really important to point out that the production of
Stomping Ground depended heavily on the cast building rapport and
knowing all of their lines before the shoot, so we rehearsed exten-
sively for a month before hitting the location. It is also important to
note that my theoretical approach to the production, having the cast
perform the screenplay start to finish, in real time, while we shot did
not work. After shooting the first scene or two, we realized that this
approach was not going to work. My industrious producers broke
down the screenplay, rescheduled the shoot in a ridiculously short
amount of time and we got right back to business, barely missing a
beat. While my original approach to the production did not work
in practice, we still shot it in two 12-hour days and wrapped it on
September 1, 2013.
After two and a half draining, demanding, arduous years of post-
production, Stomping Ground was completed in January 2016 and
premiered in May at the Philadelphia Independent Film Festival.
From the start, I knew the film was going to be divisive, mostly
because of the way I planned to shoot it and partly because of the
story. I wanted to test a theory that a bad screenplay produced well
would probably result in a bad film, but that a good screenplay pro-
duced badly might still yield a good film. I wanted to strip everything
away so that all I was left with was a good story and good acting.
Stomping Ground is a sloppy film. I always knew it would be.
I wanted it to be. Before I even wrote the screenplay, I told myself
“I pity the editor who, one day, will have to make sense of this mess.”
My editor, Robert Larkin worked wonders with the footage we gave
him, and it is as choppy and hand-held as I expected it to be. I shot
Stomping ground 129
the film in 24 hours in part because I knew I would not be able to

afford the cast and crew for much longer and I also thought it might
make for good P.R. If I had it to do over again, I would have shot it
in 36 hours.
Making Stomping Ground was pretty tough. Everyone tells you
that it can be brutal to make a film, that it can push you to the lim-
its of any number of things. I remember, one night, I was leaving
the recording studio in the suburbs where we were doing the sound
effects and music and then driving downtown to work with the col-
orist and I was so stressed that I was saying to myself “Never again!
I will never put myself through this and make another film!” Was
I serious? Was I kidding myself?
Godard’s Breathless (1960) is a sloppy, choppy, anarchistic film,
and I feel like almost every great film since 1960 owes it a debt of
respect. Okay, maybe that is extreme and I, in no way, want to be
seen as comparing my film to it. But I was inspired as heck by it. I call
Breathless cinematic punk rock. Much like the music that emerged as
a response to political strife and bloated corporate music of the 1970s,
in 1960, Breathless was a bold and brash reaction to the bloated films
coming out of the Hollywood machine, and it really shook things up,
much like, decades later, the way Nirvana shook up a music indus-
try that was, once again, in need of some shaking up. Still, I was a
shy, sensitive, nerdy tween in the 1970s, but I followed the exploits
of the Sex Pistols et al. the way some people watch the stock mar-
ket. That said, I had an uneasy relationship with punk rock because
I was a generally happy, well-adjusted kid who did not have that
much to rebel against. I liked a lot of the music and the esthetic but
never felt like dressing the part because, at the end of the day, I am
a basically nice guy, I am not a punk and, not to call out my many
well-adjusted peers and contemporaries who did embrace it, literally
wearing it on their sleeves, for me to pretend that I was mad at the
world or somehow dangerous or something, just felt disingenuous.
Stomping Ground, however, is what I call a “punk rock production,”
because I was so sick of seeing bad, bloated, ridiculously expensive
films devoid of heart and soul. I wanted to be sincere, to explore
platonic love among young men who are aware that they probably
130 Stomping ground
have emotions but are not always adept at managing them. Like punk
rock, I wanted the emphasis to be on characters and story rather than
technical proficiency. I always wanted to tell a sad, angry story with
something to say about sad, angry people.
Stomping Ground was submitted to quite a few film festivals and
has not been accepted by that many. Bottom-line, I have sat in screen-
ings with filmmakers, film lovers and film students who cannot see
past the technical flaws. I have seen it with “civilians,” regular folks
who just want to sit down to watch a movie and I have heard them
gasp, laugh, exclaim “Oh my God!” and I have seen them on the
edge of their seats.
I knew what I was getting into when I started to make Stomping
Ground. I knew that it might be one of those films that never got
distribution—either because it was so bad or because there was
nobody to champion it. I always thought Stomping Ground would
find an audience. It has not, yet.
Remember that most of us make films or want to make films
because we love films. That said, even when we use the term “Micro
Budget,” we are talking about money and nobody wants to lose
money. I lost money on Stomping Ground, my own money. No,
you do not have to pander to the audience, but, depending on your
aspirations, you need to be conscious of the market. The wider the
appeal of your film, the more likely it is to attract a bigger paying
audience. I say, write from your heart, do what you feel, but if that
approach leads you to an obtuse subject matter, you have to know
that you are likely aiming for a small, niche target audience and, sad
as it is to say, you might need to ask yourself if the investment, how-
ever small, will be worth the limited return on investment.
Did I achieve the cinematic acclaim and notoriety I so desperately
craved? Not yet. Will I ever? Not counting on it.
Am I disappointed? Sure. Defeated? Not exactly. I actually see the
Amazon release as a fresh opportunity to get the film out there and
part of me just wishes that I had completely sidestepped the festi-
val submission route in the first place. Has it gotten lots of negative
reviews? You bet. Has it gotten a handful of glowing reviews? Yup.
That is the risk of trying to make art.
Stomping ground 131
One of the biggest surprises over the course of this whole

experience has been the number of close friends and associates
who seem to think I cannot handle negative criticism. So many
people have asked to see the film, gotten it and never offered me
any feedback, as if it simply never happened. I know that they
probably do not want to hurt my feelings and I get it, but some-
times no response is worse than a negative response. Of course,
not everyone wants to offer an unsolicited critique. I made the
mistake of giving a friend some unsolicited but respectful notes
on his film after seeing it at a festival in 2012. We have not spo-
ken since.
I feel like I successfully accomplished what I set out to do from
the beginning, not pander to conventions, not accommodate for a
lack of story by covering it up with state-of-the-art graphic effects
but delivering a good, rich, important story performed well by my
talented cast.
You can see Stomping Ground on Amazon now. If you like it and
have something nice to say, I’d appreciate a positive review. If you see
and do not like it, feel free to write a negative review.
It’s not enough to make a film these days, anyone can make a film,
that’s only half the battle—not even half. Getting people to see your
film is the trick.
There are so many immaculately produced, state-of-the-art films
out there that have unconvincing stories. What is the point of mak-
ing a film if it does not have a compelling, believable, provocative
story? The average cost of a major Hollywood film is somewhere
around $80,000,000 and, of that number, the screenplay represents a
tiny fraction, usually no more than a few million dollars, but, to me,
it is the essential ingredient. I am not saying that screenwriters should
be paid more, I am just saying that producers should not make a film
until they have an extremely good screenplay. It’s not that hard, get
a screenplay, ask the writer to do re-writes and, if you’re not happy
with them, get another screenwriter to make revisions. Importantly,
do not call the screenplay finished when you’re happy, call it finished
when there is a consensus of sound opinions that feel it is a great
screenplay.
132 Stomping ground
Stomping Ground is a reaction to people throwing buckets of

money at bad screenplays and turning them into beautifully produced
bad movies. Stomping Ground was not beautifully produced, it is a
ragged, rough around the edges mess but I think it has a good story.
A veteran screenwriter told me that he related to it on a deeply
personal level. That’s the kind of film I want to make, films that make
people say either “I remember when something like this happened to
me” or “I can imagine what it would feel like if this happened to me.”
In a 2017 New York Times interview, Steven Soderbergh said “It’s
really easy to make a movie that five people understand. It’s really
hard to make something that a lot of people understand, and yet is
not obvious, still has subtlety and ambiguity, and leaves you with
something to do as a viewer.”
So, no, Stomping Ground did not make me an “indie darling,”
did not catapult me to the head of the class, if anything, it might
have landed me near the bottom of the waiting list to get into the
school. However, when I pitched this book and submitted my pro-
posal, much of the feedback that came back from peer reviewers fell
down along the lines of “he is qualified to write this book because he
made his own Micro Budget film.”
Epilogue: while writing this book, 15 years after writing the
screenplay, nine years after shooting the film and five years after fin-
ishing it, Stomping Ground got a deal with a well-respected boutique
film distributor.
10
FINAL THOUGHTS
For many aspiring screenwriters, the dream is to break into the busi-
ness by selling their screenplay, getting it produced, then moving onto
writing another screenplay and selling it. Remember, as mentioned
at the beginning of this book, the reality is that 94% of screenwrit-
ing jobs are assignments, paid gigs where you are hired to work on
an existing property already in some stage of development. I can tell
you that, as a writer for hire, you do not always love the story you
are getting paid to write: the job is “take this story and turn it into
a screenplay” and, inasmuch as I ever actually make decent money,
I take almost every job that comes my way; I cannot afford to be
picky—okay, I once turned down a job writing a sequel to a film
considered one of the worst ever made. What does seem to be hap-
pening is that big producers and studios are looking to independent
filmmakers who have written, produced and directed award-winning
low-budget films that get distributed.
A director friend of mine recently had a chat with the resident
producer at the Independent Feature Project. The producer told
my friend that “people in Hollywood want to see if you can take
a $70,000 budget and make a film that looks like it was shot for
$1,000,000.”
The point is that it is no longer enough to pin your hopes to a
great screenplay that you can sell, you have to craft a screenplay that
DOI: 10.4324/9781003138969-11
134 Final thoughts
you and some filmmaker friends can actually produce for little-to-no
money and the first step in that process is learning specific tricks,
hacks and philosophical approach to write screenplays for the type
of film.
Screenwriting can be fun. Yes, to do it well and make a living
doing it takes a lot of hard work. Until the point where you are
doing it for a living, it can be a lot of fun to come up with stories,
characters, give them lines and imagine who you would cast in the
roles and, to me, it sounds like it could be a fun hobby. That said,
I want to caution people about taking this kind of thing too seriously.
Remember, in a practical sense, a screenplay really only does anyone
any good if they are making a movie. If you are a painter, you can
hang your pictures on a wall. If you are a musician, you can play for
people. If you are not making it into a movie, what do you do with
a screenplay when it is finished?
I once got the question “I have created my own cinematic universe
with ten screenplays, how do I sell it to Hollywood?” Sadly, you do
not, that is just not the way it works. I do not want to spoil the party
or crush anyone’s fun, but there is a difference between writing a
bunch of screenplays for fun and writing a screenplay that is a viable
project from a financial perspective, basically something that inves-
tors/stockholders can actually be made into a film that people will
want to see.
No lie, I met someone whose plan to support his family was “take
Robert McKee’s class, write a screenplay and sell it for a million
dollars.” The spec screenplay market is no longer what it was for a
brief time in the 1990s. Sure, out of the 100,000 specs that get sent
to Hollywood every year, a few (literally less than 100) get sold and,
of those few, now and then, one goes for somewhere in the mid-six
figures. At this point, I would find it frustrating to write screenplays
for fun; if I write something, I write something that has a good
chance of getting produced. By “good chance of getting produced,”
I mean that it either has marketable qualities that someone in the
business might find attractive or that it was written to be produced
on a micro-budget.
Final thoughts 135
Be conscious of the business end of things. Keep in mind that most

people do not make money on their first feature. I like to think of
first features as coming attractions for subsequent work. Make a film,
maybe develop a small following of people who will look forward to
your next film and the one after that. If you are just looking to get
rich, there are probably better ways to go about doing it.
Okay, enough gloom. On the other hand, if you love film, making
movies and solving puzzles, maybe writing a micro-budget screen-
play is the right way to go. For me, I absolutely love the challenge of
writing for micro-budgets; it is a test of both my storytelling—
How do I make this story active and compelling?

But also my knowledge of nuts and bolts film production—
How could we shoot this scene?

Where could we shoot this scene?
How can we cheat this stunt?
How can we keep the narrative and the visuals engaging?
Remember, as mentioned earlier, years ago—for fun, mind you—I

challenged myself to write a one-location micro-budget action film.
It was, in the end, a lot of fun. A few years later, a producer friend
hit me and asked if I had any action screenplays laying around. I said,
“Why, yes, I do and it can be made for $50,000!” He said, “Do you
think you can rewrite it for a $60,000,000 budget?” I did and it was
kind of fun to radically expand it into this big action film where
nothing was constrained by budgets—a helicopter chase down the
middle of city streets? Sure, why not?
But it was not as much fun as solving the puzzle of setting a whole
action film in one location.
All of this stuff gets back to something that I bring up on the first
day of class every semester: the role of the artist in society. Artists
take in the world, observe and consider some piece of the human
experience and then represent (or RE-present) it in some form to
an audience. In a best-case scenario, a work of art provokes the audi-
ence, stirring emotions and ideas. Either the audience responds and
136 Final thoughts
relates to it or reacts against it. We all have different experiences, and

we all have different tastes. Yes, you should draw on personal experi-
ences and feelings about things you have seen and done; they should
inform your work, but you have to remember to say something about
the world other than that it exists.
I remember going to see the feature debut of a legendary televi-
sion showrunner. The producers of his film clearly took great pains
to be extremely accurate about period details, but the film itself
was rather flat. The problem is that we do not go to movies to see
great production design; we go to see good stories about interest-
ing characters working through circumstances that, in one way or
another, we relate to, think about and take something away from,
deriving a new sense of the world and our place in it, whether we
know it or not.
I tell my students on both the first and the last days of class that,
as artists, they need to decide what they want to be and what kind
of work they want to do. They should be provocative; that is, create
work that not only entertains but also strikes a chord and makes peo-
ple think or feel something about the world around them, either on
a small, intimate, personal level or on a broader, grander scale.
They cannot—well, they should not—spoon-feed the audience
simplistic, meaningless junk. I compare movies to food. There are
health food movies, and there are junk food movies.
Their work should not just sit there like a bag of chips. Of course,
as I tell them, people like chips, and following that model, like junk
food movies. One can earn a pretty solid living making junk food,
but you cannot really live on junk food.
One way or another, all of my students want to make a living
in the film industry. Making art and making a living can be tough
desires to combine.
I read a screenplay recently, and I am getting paid to evaluate it.
The script was in really bad shape, and I dreaded the idea of talking to
the writer, telling him how much I didn’t like it. While I knew that
I couldn’t tell him it sucks, I could point out what is wrong with it,
what is right with it and what it needs in order to be a good movie.
So, we finally spoke, he knows that it needs work and he was really
Final thoughts 137
receptive to my ideas for it. If I got hired to rewrite the screenplay,

I would try to find something in this story, something I could work
with, something that I could make entertaining and, if I am lucky,
meaningful. I would do my best on the job and, if I do my best, it
just might wind up being a pretty decent screenplay. So, why do I put
myself through this? Why am I going to work so hard on it? Because
this is what I want to do for a living.
I read screenplays all the time. I grade them for students, I evaluate
them for competitions and I read them for filmmaker friends who
come to me for advice. From time to time, someone I do not know
reaches out to me and asks me to read a screenplay for them or to ask
for suggestions on how to get into film production.
Recently, a stranger asked me to read a screenplay for a film that
they want to make. The guy can write and the film would be really
cool if he could make it. The project involves many locations (from
city to beach, east coast to west coast), lots of characters, stunts and
special effects. So, like many of the screenplays I read, the “if he could
make it” factor is where a lot of beginning filmmakers struggle and
I offered him the following advice:
“I came to screenwriting after film school and working on the
crews of movies, music videos, infomercials etc. so, for better or
worse, I write with production in mind. I want people to pick up my
screenplays and say “I can make this film.”
The bottom-line with your screenplay is the bottom-line. As-is,
I think it would be expensive and complicated to produce. Now
someone else might read it and jump at the chance to take on this
challenge. My orientation has been toward really simple, micro-
budget films because, of course, they don’t cost that much to make
and they don’t cost so much to make because they usually involve
small casts and few locations.
Unless you have very deep pockets, have connections to investors
or are really good at fundraising, the big trick to film-making from
my perspective is coming up with a screenplay that you can actually
make, that is not going to require a lot of set-ups in different places,
complicated effects or stunts and a cast and crew of thousands, hun-
dreds or even dozens.
138 Final thoughts
With today’s technology, anyone can make a film and plenty of

people are trying to make films. I have seen plenty of people start
films and not be able to finish them. I have seen some great films
made with simple, inexpensive equipment, and I have seen a lot of
really bad films. The point here is to know what you’re doing as well
as you can before you actually go out and try to do it.
“So my advice would be to do what you are doing, get out into
your local film community, if you have one, meet people, offer to
work on their films, make connections, get hands-on experience and
build up a network of people who can help you with your stuff.”
Just like Elvis inspired people to start making rock music and the
Beatles, inspired by him, inspired scores of kids to form bands in their
garages. Simply put. Just because you have guitars and drums, there is
no guarantee that you will become the next Beatles.
Today, you do not even need instruments in the conventional
sense, you can make music by clicking some buttons on your laptop
or phone even but, because you can do it, does that automatically
mean that it is going to be any good?
With today’s technology, however, anyone can make a movie and,
from my perspective, far too many people are making movies and,
not that I am a math whiz by any stretch or into odds and probabili-
ties, it just seems that the more movies that are out there, the more
chances for more of these movies to be bad increases. Some people
see the glass half full; I see a little crack in the glass where stuff is
slowly leaking out.
I used to show the 2002 Sundance hit Pieces Of April to my stu-
dents. I quite like this film, and I always show it to classes right before
Thanksgiving because that is what, among other things, the film is
about. It is my favorite Thanksgiving film. Pieces Of April is a low-
budget indie-style film. I say “indie-style” because, even though it is,
technically, an independent film, it is deliberately, maybe even self-
consciously lo-fi. It does, however, boast a great (well-known) cast—
Patricia Clarkson (in an Oscar-nominated performance), Oliver Platt
and Katie Holmes and Derek Luke—at the top of their game and,
most importantly, it is well-written and directed by Peter Hedges.
I show it to illustrate the point that, if there is a good screenplay
Final thoughts 139
in place, it almost doesn’t matter how the film is shot. So many

people throw so much time and money up on the screen without
truly understanding and respecting the importance of having a good
screenplay.
There is a line in Black Swan, “Perfection is not just about con-
trol. It’s also about letting go.” While, of course, in the context of
the film, the discussion is about ballet, I have always interpreted it
as also applying to film in general and, to some degree, this film in
particular. At that point in his career, Aronofsky might have been
able to make a film for more than the $13,000,000 that Black Swan
cost, but he chose to make a gritty, grainy, bumpy, choppy and, dare
I say it, imperfect film—albeit one with state-of-the-art visual effects.
Would a glossier, higher-end production have served the story well?
Sure. Does the story suffer because of the lower-end production?
Not at all. Is there a commentary about perfectionist filmmaking to
be found in the subtext of the film? To me, yes.
I first heard about the film Putty Hill (2010) when IndieWire
reported that there was an issue surrounding the distribution of the
film because they had used a song by the Rolling Stones without
clearing the rights. I thought to myself, “What kind of idiots take a
copyrighted song by a well-known band, put it in their film without
paying for the rights and expect to get it distributed?”
On day 1 or 2 of my screenwriting classes, I always tell my students
to never specify copyrighted music in their screenplays but, the vast
bulk of the time, doing so will add thousands of dollars to the budget
of the film—and make the screenwriter look like an idiot.
So, I had to find out what this Putty Hill film was and what
kind of losers would be so careless about the music. The film, it
turns out, is a micro-budget indie about young people dealing with
the aftermath of a tragic event. The film was shot on lower-end
video in just a few days and largely improvised with a cast of non-
professional actors.
At the time that I saw Putty Hill, I was working on my film
Stomping Ground—which is about young people dealing with the
aftermath of a tragic event and which was designed to be shot in a
few days, without name talent for no money.
140 Final thoughts
This, I had to see, was a film that raised so many red flags for me.
How could it be any good?
I really liked it.
The film is shot on slightly lower-end cameras. It does not have
a slick, pristine look technically, but there are some really well-
composed shots and the final image has stayed with me. The story
and execution are simple; the style, mood and atmosphere are rich.
I could go on and on, but, the bottom-line, the takeaway, is that
financial or technical shortcomings do not have to be a handicap.
Filmmakers need to know what they have to work with and focus
on crafting strong, cinematic narratives first and practical, technical
execution that will serve the story shortly thereafter.
Once, one of my students asked me if I would read his senior the-
sis screenplay, one of the biggest projects of his college career and it
really got me thinking. Here is my response:
Did I like the screenplay? Basically on one level, yes. If this was
a movie, I would enjoy it but I think I would enjoy it in the
way that I enjoy a candy bar or pizza. It tastes really good going
down but, in the end, I know that it is empty, pointless, worth-
less and, ultimately, bad for me.
So, as a guy who likes trashy, junky B movies about hot girls
and bad guys and stuff blowing up, I liked it.
As a screenwriting teacher, I feel that it is my job to inspire
art, to get students to aim higher than writing screenplays
for movies that appeal to the lowest common denominator
audience.
Of course, there is something to be said for movies that appeal
to that demographic because it encompasses the highest number
of people and, of course, the biggest possible box office for your
product.
So, honestly, your screenplay feels like a lot of other movies
by people of my generation and the generation after mine, are
movies that are based on stuff we know from having seen lots of
other movies, not stuff that is based on our observations of the
world around us.
Final thoughts 141
When Scorsese made Mean Streets (1973) he was really draw-

ing from the stuff he saw happening in his neighborhood. In the
early 1990s, when it seemed like the long strange trip of the
Grateful Dead was starting to wind down, there was this prolif-
eration of younger bands clearly inspired by them, sort of emu-
lating that stuck-in-the-60s sound (and fashion sense) and they
got lumped into a sub-genre known as Baby Dead. Similarly,
when Rob Weiss made Amongst Friends (1993) and Troy Duffy
made Boondock Saints (1999) and all of those other people who
made films about young tough guys they all had this detached
from reality element that felt Scorsese inspired, like it came from
watching films rather than from watching real life and I feel the
same thing about your screenplay.
The hardest that I can be on you is to say that I know that
you can do better. Your screenplay, with its glorification of sex
and violence feels rather juvenile to me, it’s a fourteen year old
boy’s wet dream.
Look at your project and ask yourself if it is a four-star movie,
if it is a Grade A screenplay.
If produced, does your screenplay have the potential to be
Citizen Kane, The Godfather or some other movie that histori-
cally gets four stars?
So, the point here is to be realistic about our work.

If you look up what movies are playing in theaters in your area,
you will see that there are maybe 50 different movies playing in town.
Of those 50 films, maybe five got a four-star review and maybe five
got a one-star review. What does that leave us with? A lot of two- and
three-star movies, basically pretty average stuff. Most films are aver-
age, just okay but not great and also not terrible.
In the past over 25 years, I have been hired to write or doctor
around 60 screenplays and honestly, I do not know if there is a four-
star screenplay in the bunch.
I know structure and I know formatting and character develop-
ment, and people consistently tell me that I write good dialogue;
I know about plot points, act breaks and all of that stuff but that’s only
142 Final thoughts
the beginning, lots of people know how to do that stuff and that is
why there are so many two- and three-star movies.
Sometimes, I worry about being creative enough, smart enough
or deep enough to write a four-star movie and there is no shame in
that. The point is you can teach the nuts and bolts, but I don’t know
if I can teach you to be creative, deep or smart—that is called talent.
How did I get into the film business? Now that’s a hard question
because I hardly feel like I am in the film business. Yes, I did it, I have
now done what thousands upon thousands of people are trying to
do, I have sold a screenplay (did not get paid especially well), I have
been hired to write or work on screenplays for other people—again,
not very well paying, actually minimum wage or less and that is not
an exaggeration.
So, my suggestion to people who want to get into film is to make
films, either put your own stuff together—shorts or features—make
them good enough to attract attention. So that means that you need
to know how to write a proper screenplay and how to do all of the
nuts and bolts technical production stuff or you can become a spe-
cialist. I am a screenwriter now, but at one point, I could take apart a
camera and put it back together with my eyes closed. Not anymore.
If I wasn’t a writer, I’d be a gaffer.
Do it for love, because you love film, love working on films. You
can work on making your own films or you can work on films for
other people, just sniff around the local filmmaking scene if there is
one where you live. You might (probably) work for free BUT you
never know who the next big filmmaker will be, maybe you, maybe
someone you meet.
Noam Kroll: the first piece of advice that I would give them before
they start writing anything is take as long as you need to think about
your idea and, uh, and make sure that that’s the idea that you want
to stick with, because so much of the success of your film is already
determined before you even start writing the script. If you have a, a
concept that is really strong, that you can describe to someone eas-
ily, that gets them interested, that gets you interested, and that you
could see yourself working on for the next one to three years, um,
then that’s setting you off on the right foot and the right path. And
Final thoughts 143
I think that where a lot of people, including myself have gone wrong
in the past is, um, we want to just jump in right away. We have an
idea that we think is pretty good, and we just jumped in with both
feet and we just got started. And, um, that’s good too, cause you
don’t want to spin your wheels forever and procrastinate, but you
have to find a balance because if you don’t really assess what you’re
doing creatively, if you don’t really ask yourself the hard questions
about whether or not this is something that you’re really going to
love in three years when you’ve been working on it everyday. And
you know, you’ve seen the movie a thousand times then, uh, then
you’re not, uh, you’re potentially going to run out of steam at some
point, if you pick the wrong concept. So I think number one, the
biggest advice is pick the right concept. Number two, which kind of
goes hand in hand with that. And this is something I’m focusing on
for my next film is take the advice where people see age old advice
that people give you when you’re writing a movie that you should
find a way to kind of make it personal, make it the story that only
you could tell it, maybe it’s about your real life, but it doesn’t have to
be. Maybe it’s just about a topic that you understand, or that you’re
interested in, in a way that others aren’t, or that you have a point of
view on that others don’t. So find this story that only you could tell.
Um, and, and that’s something that, again, I’m very much being cog-
nizant of moving forward on my future films. Um, and then when
it comes time to actually write the film, my biggest advice is, uh, it’s
just write it. It’s going to change a thousand times. You’re going to,
uh, it’s going to, uh, not only when you produce it and edit it, it’s
going to change and become a totally different movie, but even just
in the writing process, um, be prepared to do many rewrites and get
feedback and change it. Um, but with that in mind, when you do
have your concept, when you are confident in the idea of, um, jump
in, you know, do your outline, whatever it is that you need to do
to get started. But once you get started, just, just go and don’t look
back and until you’re done with the script, you go and revise it and
just keep, keep plowing through. And I think if you pick the right
concept, you’re that excited about it, you’ll have the stamina to see
that process through.
144 Final thoughts
Martha Stephens offered:
I think also really helpful as a way to approach writing some-

thing small, like if you have a friend that’s talented or even a
relative that you think could really be interesting on the screen,
write something with them in mind. If you know someone
who’s a fireman, and you cast them as a fireman, it is probably
going to have some authenticity, whereas you cast the fireman
as a king of England.
Ry Russo-Young: I would say that, on my first movie, I certainly

wrote a script. And I felt like in retrospect, the weakest parts of the
movie were the script. And so, on the second movie, I threw it all
out the window, and didn’t write a script and sort of wrote in editing
throughout the process and other people were credited; certainly the
lead actress, Stella, with a writing credit, because some of the stuff
that she said, and improv was just incredible, and way better than
I could have ever written. And since then I co-wrote Nobody Walks
with Lena Dunham, and I give her a lot of credit for the script being
good. So yes, I don’t think I mean, that was my first sort of hesitation
in talking to you is that I don’t really consider myself a screenwriter.
The thing that I say to younger filmmakers who, if you’re not a
writer, I think it’s very, very daunting to make a movie. And this is
kind of the Joe Swanberg model, like, you can also just shoot a cou-
ple of things, something that you find interesting, and see if it goes
somewhere, because maybe it will, and that will give you more ideas
to take it from there. But that’s sort of what I mean by there’s like a
million different ways to make a movie. I basically just kept adding on
over the course of the year. I would shoot something, I would edit it,
I would write more, I would shoot it, I would edit it, I would apply
for a grant, I would raise the money, I’d compile a bunch of scenes,
and I’d shoot it. And it’s because we were doing it chipping away at a
nice block and a bunch of different methods that felt story applicable,
but also taking advantage of all the things that you can take advan-
tage of when you’re small, and you’re lean. I mean, I would meet
somebody at a film festival, or literally meet somebody at a party and
Final thoughts 145
say, “Hey, you seem interesting. You want to be in this movie with
me? Show up one day.” Do you want to play a theater director? And
they’d be like, “Well, I used to do theater” and I’d be like “Cool.”
Here’s a text, can you be the theater director? And then I’d have the
actor come in cold to the situation and have an audition, you know,
or whatever it was?
DG: It’s such an exciting way of making a film. When you were doing
that, did you have any sense of, for example, how it’s going to
end? Or is it that you just shot and knew you’d put it together?
RRY: I just shot and put it together. I mean, it was like I was sort of
writing it as I was going. But I was also writing it based on what
I had so far. And I ended up with a really helpful person’s sug-
gestion and editor named John Walter, who had looked at a lot
of the footage, he had an amazing idea that I shot that then sort
of framed the whole story. I think it’s liberating for people to
understand that there’s so many different kinds of ways to make
a movie, and you have to find the way that really works for you
and your skill set.
TOM QUINN: I’ll be honest, I think something that a lot of low budget
filmmakers don’t do that I become more and more interested in—
and even in the films I’ve done—is just research. I think there’s
the first piece, which is like starting with what you have. But
there is another piece: really doing a deep dive on; whether it’s a
job or a hobby, or a defining characteristic, or whatever. I think
of when I used to work with (writer-director) Eugene Martin,
and the one film that we did, The Other America (2004) was in
a women’s shelter. It was really helpful for me to see ‘You know,
he did the research and the research fed back into the writing,
and the characters and the setup.’ But you can stretch what you
already have, the part that you already have access to. But then
there’s this other piece, which is like, “Okay, what’s around in my
community or my world, but I don’t have access to right now?”
But there is a relationship I can build there. I mean, research is
great, because you can sometimes find elements of the story that
you didn’t know about and it really can spin your story in a new
146 Final thoughts
way. And it also helps you when you’re researching the commu-
nity because you might be able to come up with some of those
plot points and complicating factors. You know, it’s not what you
know, it’s who you know, and I always try to tell students “Who
do you get to know?” And I do believe that on a low budget,
they’re also the things that are around you that you can build rela-
tionships and invest in and it’s going to pay off dividends.
DG: If some 22-year-old came up to you now and said, “Hey, I have
$60,000 to make the film. Do you have any advice?” What would
you say?
ROBERT GREENE: To me, it’s thinking about the images. First, start
with the images. A lot of people would say, “lean into the perfor-
mances,” meaning, find people who can execute that vision, and
I think those two things go hand in hand. Great acting can get
you farther than anything else. But I think it’s the images. I think,
without compelling images, acting can go away very quickly, and
then it just looks like acting. Without compelling images. It’s
difficult to edit. As an editor, I think the screenwriting process
should be thinking about “as long as we give our editor things
to work with.” So, you’re thinking about how the cake is gonna
taste while you’re baking it and often, when you’re baking a cake,
that’s not what you’re supposed to do. But when you’re writing
at a lower budget, you should be thinking about the taste, and
you should be thinking about how the table is going to be set.
And you should be thinking about what the lighting is going to
be like, when you invite the people in to come have the cake and
think about that, and, in the end, have a holistic approach. That’s
the way you can make something for $60,000.
Martha Stephens said:
You just can’t sit around and wait for opportunities, you have
to make them for yourself. I showed To The Stars (2019) last
year to some kids at my school, NC School of the Arts, and
when I told them that I graduated in 2006 and, here in 2019,
I finally had made a movie for over a million dollars, their jaws
Final thoughts 147
dropped. They’re just like, “It took you fifteen years to get
there?”
I had to learn the hard way that the screenplay serves as the foun-
dation upon which the director builds his or her film. I have had
screenplays radically reworked after leaving my hands, sometimes for
better and sometimes for worse. Still, I feel like having something
to start with, an idea that is organized and in some kind of coher-
ent order, when making a film is critical. That something is usually
a screenplay, the initial physical manifestation of the answer to the
question “What is this film about?” or, more accurately, “What hap-
pens in this film?”
A screenplay is an instruction manual for a film.
Yes, “screenplay” can mean a formal script with every line writ-
ten out and all of the scenes described, but it can also organize and
document the ways and manner in which a filmmaker aims to cap-
ture everything needed to tell the story he or she wants to tell. Even
in the second scenario described earlier, the filmmaker has an idea
of what kind of film is being made, he or she is not just coming up
with random ideas to shoot, turning on the camera and hoping for
the best.
When a professional sports team takes the field, court, rink, dia-
mond, etc., they do not just go out and hope for the best, they have
a Game Plan, a sense of who they are opposing and how best to play
against them. A screenplay is a game plan for a film.
If you are reading this book, chances are good that you are inter-
ested in making a film but concerned that you cannot afford to make
a film. If you fit that description, chances are good that you have
watched Mark Duplass’ practically legendary 2015 keynote address
at SXSW where, among other things, he discusses the conception of
the feature that really put them on the map. “When Jay and I made
The Puffy Chair (2005) we were very clear.” We had my apartment in
Brooklyn, and my wife Katie’s apartment in Brooklyn. My street was
really quiet and I knew we could shoot on that. I had a van because
I was playing in bands. So I was like, “road movie—that’s good for
a van.” There was a furniture store in Main that was going out of
148 Final thoughts
business, and we had like two identical chairs we could get for $300.
I was like, “Great! I’ll burn one of them and that will be our big stunt
in the movie.”
Work hard, have fun. Know what you want to do. Know what you
are able to do.
APPENDIX
Someone suggested that I include a list of the films mentioned in this

book. I thought it was a good idea. Years ago, on the last day of a
screenwriting course, a student raised her hand and announced that
she had written down every film I mentioned in class over the course
of 16 weeks: 175 different movies. Whoops, it looks like I only
referred to about 150 movies or shows here.
1917 (2019), Directed by Sam Mendes, Written by Sam Mendes and Krysty
Wilson-Cairns; available on Hulu
Alison (2009), Directed by Polly Schattel, Written by Polly Schattel and the
Alison Cast; available on Amazon
Always Shine (2016), Directed by Sophia Takal, Written by Lawrence
Michael Levine; available on Amazon
Amongst Friends (1993), Written and directed by Rob Weiss; available on
Tubi
Another Earth (2011), Directed by Mike Cahill, Written by Mike Cahill
and Brit Marling; available on Amazon, YouTube, Google Play, Vudu
Avatar (2009), Written and directed by James Cameron; available on Dis-
ney+, Amazon, YouTube, Google Play, Vudu
The Avengers (2012), Directed by Joss Whedon, Written by Joss Whedon
and Zak Penn; available on Disney+, Amazon
Bad Ben (2016), Written and directed by Nigel Bach; available on Amazon
Bad Boys for Life (2020), Directed by Adil El Arbi, Bilall Fallah, Written by
Peter Craig, Joe Carnahan and Chris Brenner; available on Hulu, Sling
TV, Starz, Amazon Prime Video
150 Appendix
Badder Ben (2017), Written and directed by Nigel Bach; available on Amazon
Bella Vista (2014), Written and directed by Vera Brunner-Sung; available
on YouTube
Birdman (2014), Directed by Alejandro G. Inarritu, Written by Alejando
G. Inarritu, Nicolas Giacobone, and Alexander Dinelaris; available on
YouTube, Google Play Movies & TV, Apple TV
Black Swan (2010), Directed by Darren Aronofsky, Written by Mark Hey-
man, Andres Heinz and John J. McLaughlin; available on Amazon
The Blair Witch Project (1999), Written and directed by Daniel Myrick
and Eduardo Sanchez; available on Hulu, Amazon Prime Video, You-
Tube, Apple TV, Sling TV, Philo, Google Play Movies, Vudu
BlaKKKlansman (2018), Directed by Spike Lee, Written by Charlie Wach-
tel, David Rabinowitz, Spike Lee and Kevin Willmot; available on Hulu,
Sling TV, YouTube, Google Play Movies & TV
Blood Simple (1984), Written and directed by Joel Coen and Ethan Coen;
available on HBO Max, Google Play Movies, Amazon Prime Video,
YouTube, Vudu, Apple TV
Boondock Saints (1999), Written and directed by Troy Duffy; available
on Tubi, Vudu, YouTube, Apple TV, Pluto TV, Amazon Prime Video,
Google Play Movies
The Bourne Identity (2002), Directed by Doug Liman, Written by Tony
Gilroy and William Blake Herron; available on Peacock, Google Play
Movies, Vudu, YouTube, Apple TV, Amazon Prime Video
Breathless (1960), Directed by Jean-Luc Godard, Written by Francois Truf-
faut, Jean-Luc Godard and Claude Chabrol; available on Netflix
Captain Marvel (2019), Written and directed by Anna Boden, Ryan Fleck;
available on Disney+, Google Play Movies, Vudu, YouTube, Apple TV,
Amazon Prime Video
Casablanca (1942), Directed by Michael Curtiz, Written by Julius J. Epstein,
Philip G. Epstein and Howard Koch; available on HBO Max, YouTube,
Vudu, Amazon Prime Video, Apple TV
Christopher Robin (2018), Directed by Marc Forster, Written by Alex
Ross Perry; available on Disney+, Google Play Movies, Vudu, YouTube,
Apple TV, Amazon Prime Video
Citizen Kane (1941), Directed by Orson Wells, Written by Herman J.
Mankiewicz and Orson Welles; available on HBO Max, YouTube, Apple
TV, Amazon Prime Video, Google Play Movies, Vudu
Clerks (1994), Written and directed by Kevin Smith; available on HBO
Max, Amazon Prime Video, Vudu
Colewell (2019), Written and directed by Tom Quinn; available on Hulu,
sling TV, fuboTV, Amazon Prime Video
Coherence (2013), Directed by James Ward Byrkit, Written by James Ward
Byrkit, and Alex Manugian; available on Tubi, Vudu, Hulu, fuboTV,
Appendix 151
Philo, Google Play, Pluto TV, Crackle, Sling TV, Amazon Prime Video,
YouTube, Apple TV
Creative Nonfiction (2009), Written and directed by Lena Dunham
Creep (2015), Directed by Patrick Brice, Written by Patrick Brice and
Mark Duplass; available on Netflix, Google Play, Amazon Prime Video,
YouTube, Vudu, Apple TV
Crescent Moon Clown (2018), Written and directed by Nigel Bach; avail-
able on Amazon Prime Video
Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989), Written and directed by Woody Allen;
available on Amazon Prime Video
Cyst (2020), Written and directed by Tyler Russell, Written by Andy Sil-
verman and Tyler Russell (release TBA)
Dance Party USA (2006), Written and directed by Aaron Katz; N/A
Darling (2015), Written and directed by Mickey Keating; available on Tubi,
Pluto TV, Sling TV, Amazon Prime Video, Philo, Vudu
Dead Funny (1994), Directed by John Feldman, Written by John Feldman
and Cindy Oswin; N/A
Deadpool (2016), Directed by Tim Miller, Written by Rhett Reese and
Paul Warnick; available on Hulu, YouTube, Apple TV, Amazon Prime
Video, Sling TV, Google Play Movies, Vudu
Django Unchained (2012), Written and directed by Quentin Tarantino;
available on Hulu, Amazon Prime Video, YouTube, Google Play Mov-
ies, Sling TV, Vudu, Apple TV
Don’t Go in the Woods (2010), Directed by Vincent D’Onofrio, Written
by Sam Bisbee, Vincent D’Onofrio and Joe Vinciguerra; available on
Amazon Prime Video
Double Indemnity (1944), Directed by Billy Wilder, Written by Billy
Wilder, Raymond Chandler; available on YouTube TV, Apple TV, Ama-
zon Prime Video, Google Play Movies, Vudu
Drinking Buddies (2013), Written and directed by Joe Swanberg; available
on Sling TV, YouTube, Vudu, Amazon Prime Video, Google Play Mov-
ies, Apple TV
Elephant (2003), Written and directed by Gus Van Sant; available on You-
Tube, Google Play, Amazon Prime Video, Apple TV
El Mariachi (1992), Written and directed by Robert Rodriguez; available
on Vudu, YouTube, Apple TV, Amazon Prime Video, Google Play
Movies
The Eternals (2021), Directed by Chloe Zhao, Written by Kaz Firpo and
Chloe Zhao
Faces (1968), Written and directed by John Cassavetes; available on Prime
Video
Fort Tilden (2014), Directed by Sarah Violet-Bliss and Charles Rog-
ers, Written by Sarah-Violet Bliss, Brian Lannin, and Charles Rogers;
152 Appendix
available on Hulu, Amazon Prime Video, Google Play Movies, Vudu,

HBO Max, YouTube, Apple TV
Frances Ferguson (2019), Directed by Bob Byington, Written by Bob
Byington, Kaley Wheless and Scott King; available on Amazon Prime
Video
Gabi on the Roof in July (2010), Directed by Lawrence Michael Levine,
Written by Kate Kirtz and Lawrence Michael Levine; available on You-
Tube, Vudu, Google Play Movies, Apple TV
Girls (2012–2017), Written by Lena Dunham; available on Amazon Prime
Video, Hulu, HBO
The Godfather (1972), Directed by Francis Ford Coppola, Written by
Mario Puzo and Francis Ford Coppola; available on YouTube, Vudu,
Apple TV, Google Play Movies, Amazon Prime Video
The Gold Rush (1925), Written and directed by Charlie Chaplin; available
on Amazon
Green (2011), Written and directed by Sophia Takal; available on Amazon
Guy and Madeline on a Park Bench (2009), Written and directed by Dam-
ien Chazelle; available on Amazon Prime Video
Half Nelson (2006), Written and directed by Ryan Fleck and Anna Boden;
available on Hulu, Amazon Prime Video, Google Play Movies, Vudu,
Sling TV, YouTube, Apple TV
Halloween (1978), Written and directed by John Carpenter, Screenplay by
Debra Hill; available on Prime Video, Roku, & Netflix
Her (2013), Written and directed by Spike Jonze; available on Amazon
Prime Video
High Noon (1952), Directed by Fred Zinnemann, Written by Carl Fore-
man and John Cunningham; available on Pluto TV, YouTube, Vudu,
Amazon Prime Video, Google Play Movies, Apple TV
Hollywood Chaos (2013), Directed by Abel Vang, Written by Angela
Marie Hutchinson; available on Amazon Prime Video
The Hurt Locker (2008), Directed by Kathryn Bigelow, Written by Mark
Boal; available on Peacock, Google Play Movies, Vudu, YouTube, Apple
TV, Amazon Prime Video
In A Relationship (2018), Written and directed by Sam Boyd; available on
Tubi, YouTube, Google Play, Vudu, Amazon Prime Video, Apple TV
The Interpreter (2005), Directed by Sydney Pollack, Written by Martin
Stellman, Brian Ward, and Charles Randolph; available on Netflix,
Google Play Movies, Vudu, YouTube, Apple TV, Amazon Prime Video
The Invitation (2015), Directed by Karyn Kusama, Written by Phil Hay
and Matt Manfredi
It Comes at Night (2017), Written and directed by Trey Edward Shults;
available on Netflix & Amazon Prime Video
Appendix 153
It Follows (2014), Written and directed by David Robert Mitchell; avail-

able on Tubi, Amazon Prime Video, Google Play Movies, Vudu, Pluto
TV, YouTube, Apple TV
Kate Plays Christine (2016), Written and directed by Robert Greene; avail-
able on Amazon Prime Video, Apple TV
The Kid (2019), Directed by Vincent D’Onofrio, Written by Vincent
D’Onofrio and Andrew Lanham; available on Hulu, Sling TV, Amazon
Prime Video, Philo, YouTube, Google Play Video
The King’s Speech (2010), Directed by Tom Hooper, Written by David
Seidler; available on Amazon Prime Video, Netflix
Jaws (1975), Directed by Steven Spielberg, Written by Peter Benchley and
Carl Gottlieb; available on YouTube, Apple TV, Amazon Prime Video,
Google Play Movies, Vudu
Joker (2019), Directed by Todd Phillips, Written by Todd Phillips; avail-
able on HBO Max, Hulu Premium, Amazon Prime Video, YouTube,
Google Play Movie, Apple TV
Jurassic World (2015), Directed by Colin Trevorrow, Written by Rick Jaffa,
Amanda Silver and Derek Connolly; available on YouTube
La La Land (2016), Written and directed by Damien Chazelle; available on
Hulu, Google Play Movies, Vudu, YouTube, Apple TV, Amazon Prime
Video
Law & Order (1990–2010), Created by Dick Wolf; available on Peacock,
Sling TV, Philo, Google Play Movies, Vudu, YouTube TV, fuboTV, You-
Tube, Apple TV, Amazon Prime Video
Living In Oblivion (1995), Written and directed by Tom DiCillo; available
on Hulu, YouTube, Amazon Prime Video, Apple TV
Love Life (2020), Created by Sam Boyd; available on HBO Max, and Ama-
zon Prime Video
The Matrix (1999), Written and directed by Lana Wachowski and Lilly
Wachowski; available on Peacock, Google Play Movies, Vudu, YouTube,
Apple TV, Amazon Prime Video
Mean Streets (1973), Directed by Martin Scorsese, Written by Martin
Scorsese and Mardik Martin; available on YouTube, Apple TV, Google
Play Movies, Amazon Prime Video
Metropolitan (1990), Written and directed by Whit Stillman; available on
Amazon Prime Video, HBO Max
Monsters (2010), Written and directed by Gareth Edwards; available on
YouTube, Pluto TV, Crackle, Philo, Apple TV, Tubi, Vudu, Amazon
Prime Video, Google Play Movies
My Dinner with Andre (1981), Directed by Louis Malle, Written by Wal-
lace Shawn and Andre Gregory; available on HBO Max, Amazon Prime
Video, Apple TV
154 Appendix
The Myth of the American Sleepover (2010), Written and directed by

David Robert Mitchell; available on Sling TV, YouTube, Apple TV,
Amazon Prime Video, Google Play Movies
The New Year Parade (2008), Written and directed by Tom Quinn; N/A
Nobody Walks (2012), Directed by Ry-Russo Young, Written by Ry
Russo-Young and Lena Dunham; available on Amazon Prime Video,
Google Play Movies, YouTube, Vudu
Nomadland (2020), Written and directed by Chloe Zhao; available on Hulu,
Apple TV, Google Play Movies, YouTube, Vudu, Amazon Prime Video
Non-Stop (2014), Directed by Jaume Collet-Serra, Written by John W.
Richardson, Christopher Roach and Ryan Engle; available on Hulu,
YouTube, Apple TV, Amazon Prime Video, TNT, Sling TV, Google
Play Movies, Vudu, TBS
North By Northwest (1959), Directed by Alfred Hitchcock, Written by
Ernest Lehman; available on HBO Max, YouTube, Google Play, Ama-
zon, Apple TV and Vudu
Once (2007), Written and directed by John Carney; available on Hulu,
Amazon Prime, YouTube, Apple TV, Vudu
Open Water (2003), Written and directed by Chris Kentis; available on
Hulu, Apple TV, Amazon Prime Video, YouTube, Google Play, Vudu
Orphans (2007), Written and directed by Ry-Russo Young
The Other America (2004), Written and directed by Eugene Martin; avail-
able on Prime Video
Paranoid Park (2007), Written and directed by Gus Van Zant; available on
Amazon Prime Video
Paranormal Activity (2007–2015), Written and directed by Oren Peli;
available on Hulu, Starz, Philo, Google Play Movies, Apple TV, Sling
TV, Amazon Prime Video, YouTube, Vudu
Pet Sematary (1989), Directed by Mary Lambert, Written by Stephen
King; available on Hulu, Sling TV, Amazon Prime Video, Paramount+,
Philo, Vudu
Pi (1998), Written and directed by Darren Aronofsky; available on Hulu,
Amazon Prime Video, YouTube, Google Play, Apple TV, Vudu
Pieces Of April (2003), Written and directed by Peter Hodges; available on
Hulu, fuboTV, Showtime, Google Play Movies, Vudu, Sling TV, Ama-
zon Prime Video, YouTube, Apple TV, Showtime Anytime
Pirates of the Caribbean (2003), Directed by Gore Verbinski, Written by
Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio; available on Disney+, YouTube, Google
Play, Apple TV, Vudu, Amazon Prime Video
The Pity Card (2006), Directed by Bob Odenkirk, Written by Bob Oden-
kirk, Simon Hedberg and Derek Waters; sporadically available on
Primer (2004), Written and directed by Shane Carruth; available on You-
Tube, Amazon Prime Video, Google Play Movies, Apple TV
Appendix 155
Psychosynthesis (2020), Directed by Noam Kroll; available on Amazon

Prime Video
The Puffy Chair (2005), Written and directed by Jay and Mark Duplass;
available on Amazon Prime Video
Putty Hill (2010), Directed by Matthew Porterfield, Written by Matthew
Porterfield and Jordan Mintzer; available on Amazon Prime Video,
Apple TV
Queen of Earth (2015), Written and directed by Alex Ross Perry; available
on Sling TV, YouTube, Apple TV, Amazon Prime Video, Google Play
Movies
Quiet City (2007), Written and directed by Aaron Katz and Erin Fisher
A Quiet Place (2018), Directed by John Krasinski, Written by Bryan
Woods and Scott Beck; available on Hulu, YouTube, Google Play Mov-
ies, Apple TV, Sling TV, Vudu, Amazon Prime Video
Quiet River (2014), Directed by Polly Schattel, Written by Polly Schattel
and Rae Becka; available on Prime Video
Rango (2011), Directed by Gore Verbinski, Written by John Logan; avail-
able on Netflix, Google Play Movies, Amazon Prime Video, YouTube,
Vudu, Apple TV
Repulsion (1965), Directed Roman Polanski, Written by Roman Polan-
ski and Gerard Bach; available on Vudu, YouTube, Apple TV, Amazon
Prime Video, Google Play Movies
Reservoir Dogs (1992), Written and directed by Quentin Tarantino; avail-
able on YouTube, Amazon Prime Video, Apple TV, Google Play Mov-
ies, Vudu
The Return of the Secaucus Seven (1979), Written and directed by John
Sayles; available on Sling TV, Apple TV, Amazon Prime Video
The Rider (2017), Written and directed by Chloe Zhao; available on Hulu,
Starz, Philo, YouTube, Apple TV, Sling TV. Amazon Prime Video, Vudu,
Google Play Movies
Rocky (1976), Directed by John G. Avildsen, Written by Sylvester Stal-
lone; available on HBO Max, Amazon Prime Video, Google Play Mov-
ies, Vudu, Hulu, YouTube, Apple TV
Rope (1948), Directed by Alfred Hitchcock, Written by Hume Cronyn
and Patrick Hamilton; available on YouTube, Apple TV, Amazon Prime
Video, Google Play Movies, Vudu
Safety Not Guaranteed (2012), Directed by Colin Trevorrow, Written by
Derek Connolly; Available on Vudu, Amazon Prime Video, YouTube
Saturday Night Fever (1977), Directed by John Badham, Written by Nik
Cohn and Norman Wexler; available on Google Play Movies, Amazon
Prime Video, YouTube
Saving Private Ryan (1998), Directed by Steven Spielberg, Written by
Robert Rodat; available on Sling, fuboTV, Amazon Prime Video, Philo
156 Appendix
School of Rock (2004), Directed by Richard Linklater, Written by Mike

White; available on Amazon Prime Video, YouTube, Google Play Mov-
ies, Paramount+, Vudu, Apple TV
Seclusion (2022), Directed by Lovinder Gill, Written by Ross Mihalko,
release date TBA
See The Sea (1997), Written and directed by Francois Ozon; available on
YouTube
Shadows on the Road (2018), Directed by Noam Kroll, Written by Noam
Kroll and Jennifer Stulberg; available on Tubi
Short Cuts (1993), Directed by Robert Altman, Written by Robert Alt-
man and Frank Barhydt; N/A
Signs of Life (1989), Directed by John David Coles, Written by Mark
Malone; available on Amazon Prime Video
Slacker (1990), Written and directed by Richard Linklater; available on
Google Play
The Social Network (2010), Directed by David Fincher, Written by Aaron
Sorkin; available on Hulu, Vudu, Amazon Prime Video
Songs My Brothers Taught Me (2015), Written and directed by Chloe
Zhao; available on Amazon Prime Video, Vudu, YouTube, Google Play
Movies & TV
South Park (1997), Created by Trey Parker, Matt Stone, Brian Graden;
available on Hulu, HBO Max, Philo, Apple TV, Vudu, YouTube TV,
FuboTV, YouTube, Google Play Movies, Amazon Prime Video
Spider (2007), Directed by Nash Edgerton, Written by Nash Edgerton and
David Michod; available on Amazon Prime Video
Spotlight (2015), Directed by Tom McCarthy, Written by Tom McCarthy
and Josh Singer; available on Netflix, Google Play Movies, Vudu, You-
Tube, Apple TV, Amazon Prime Video
Star Wars (1977), Written and directed by George Lucas; available on
Google Play Movies & TV, Amazon Prime Video, Apple TV
To The Stars (2019), Directed by Martha Stephens, Written by Shannon
Bradley-Colleary; available on Hulu, YouTube, Vudu, Amazon Prime
Video, Google Play, Apple TV
The Station Agent (2003), Written and directed by Tom McCarthy; avail-
able on Google Play Movies & TV, Vudu, Amazon Prime Video
Steelmanville Road (2017), Written and directed by Nigel Bach; available
on Amazon Prime Video
Stomping Ground (2016), Written and directed by David J. Greenberg;
available on Prime Video
Sugar (2008), Written and directed by Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck; avail-
able on Hulu, Amazon Prime Video, Vudu, Google Play Movies, Starz,
Philo, YouTube, Apple TV
Appendix 157
Taken (2008), Directed by Pierre Morel, Written by Luc Besson and Rob-
ert Mark Kamen; available on Hulu, Starz, YouTube, Apple TV, Sling
TV, Philo, Google Play Movies. Vudu
The Tenant (1976), Directed by Roman Polanski, Written by Roland
Topor and Gerard Bach; available on YouTube, Google Play, Amazon
Prime Video, Apple TV
The Terminator (1984), Written and directed by James Cameron and Gale
Anne Hurd; available on YouTube, Google Play Movies, Vudu, Amazon
Prime Video, Apple TV, YouTube TV
Territory (2005), Written and directed by Lawrence Michael Levine; N/A
Thunder Road {short} (2016), Written and directed by Jim Cummings;
available on Amazon Prime, YouTube, Google Play, Apple TV
Thunder Road (2018), Written and directed by Jim Cummings; available
on Amazon Prime Video, Google Play Movies, YouTube, Apple TV
Tiny Furniture (2010), Written and directed by Lena Dunham; available on
Sling TV, YouTube, Amazon Prime Video, Google Play Movies
Tootsie (1982), Directed by Sydney Pollack, Written by Don McGuire and
Larry Gelbart; available on Hulu, Starz, Philo, YouTube, Apple TV, Sling
TV, Amazon Prime Video, Vudu, Google Play Movies
Touch Of Evil (1958), Written and directed by Orson Welles and Whit
Masterson; available on YouTube, Apple TV, Amazon Prime Video,
Google Play Movies, Vudu
The True Meaning of Cool (1995), Written and directed by David J.
Greenberg; available on YouTube and Vimeo
Us (2019), Written and directed by Jordan Peele; available on YouTube,
Vudu, Google Play Movies, Amazon Prime Video
Whiplash (2014), Written and directed by Damien Chazelle; available
on Hulu, Starz, Philo, YouTube, Apple TV, Sling TV, Amazon Prime
Video, Vudu, Google Play Movies
Wild Canaries (2014), Written and directed by Lawrence Levine; available
on YouTube, Apple TV, Google Play Movies, Amazon Prime Video
The Witch (2015), Written and directed by Robert Eggers; available on
Hulu, fuboTV, Showtime, Apple TV, Google Play Movies, Sling TV,
Amazon Prime Video, Vudu, YouTube, Showtime Anytime
You Won’t Miss Me (2009), Directed by Ry-Russo Young, Written by Ry-
Russo Young and Stella Schnabel; available on Amazon Prime Video
Special thanks to Anna Greenberg for her extraordinary help with

this appendix
INDEX
action films 106 Benning, James 85

Aftermath 125 Birdman 70
Alison 33 Bisbee, Sam 123
Allen, Woody 6, 29, 66 Black Bear 16 – 17, 114, 116
Always Shine 17, 114 Black Swan 139
American Film Institute 7 The Blair Witch Project 23
American Film Market 108 BlaKK-Klansman 28
Amongst Friends 141 Bliss, Sarah-Violet 12
A-movies 9 Blood Simple 3
Anderson, Paul Thomas 5 Blum, Jason 107
Anderson, Tom 85 B-movies 9
Another Earth 104 Bolden, Anna 11
Aristotle 77 Boondock Saints 141
Aronofsky, Darren 103, 139 The Bourne Identity 83
audience fatigue 49 Boyd, Sam 12
August, John 62 breaking scenes up example 53 – 58
Avatar 28 Brunner-Sung, Vera 63 – 64, 85,
The Avengers 28 121 – 122
budgets 27 – 28; genres and
Baby Dead (sub-genre) 141 103 – 104
Bach, Nigel 23 – 24, 120 – 121 Bujalski, Andrew 115
Bad Ben 23 – 24, 121 Byington, Bob 25, 43, 99, 109
bad films 123 – 124 Byrkit, Jim 26, 80 – 81, 82, 96, 104,
Baker, Jacquie 121 110 – 112
Bean, Meosha 16
The Beatles 73 – 74 Cahill, Mike 104
beats 82 cameras 20 – 21
Bella Vista 63 – 64, 85, 121 – 122 Captain Marvel 11
160 Index
Carney, John 107 D’Onofrio, Vincent 123 – 124

Carruth, Shane 104 Don’t Go In The Woods 123 – 124
Casablanca 59 Don’t Tell (podcast) 18
Chaplin, Charlie 2 Double Indemnity 59
characters: creating good, Drinking Buddies 119 – 120
importance of 61 – 63; creating Duffy, Troy 141
outside world for 60 – 61; in Dunham, Lena 12, 144
Three-Act Structure screenplays Duplass, Mark 107, 147 – 148
75 – 77
Chazelle, Damien 59 – 60, 89, 107 Eastwood, Clint 126
Christopher Robin 11 Edgerton, Nash 91
Clarkson, Patricia 138 Edison, Thomas 8 – 9
Clerks 107 Edwards, Gareth 103 – 104
Coen Brothers 3, 9 Eggers, Robert 108
Coherence 26, 81, 82, 96, 104 Elephant 124
Colewell 41 El Mariachi 106
comedy 107 embrace the limitations 24
Connolly, Derek 11 The Eternals 12
Conversations with Woody Allen
(Lax) 29 Faulkner, William 75
Coppola, Francis Ford 8, 47 Feldman, John 59
Corman, Roger 9, 19 – 20 Ferguson, Frances 109
Cosby, Bill 66 Field, Syd 66, 72 – 73
COVID-19 pandemic, filmmaking Five Minutes, Mr. Welles 124
and 2 flashbacks 59
Creative Conceptual Phase of Fleck, Ryan 11
screenwriting 49 – 50 Fort Tilden 12
Creative Mechanical Phase of Frank, Scott 29
screenwriting 49, 50, 51 Frost, Robert 87
Creative Nonfiction 12
Creep 107 Gabi On The Roof In July
Crescent Moon Clown 121 114 – 116
crime/gangster films 106 – 107 Gemini 96
Crimes and Misdemeanors 6 genres 101 – 108; action films 106;
Cummings, Jim 91 budgets and 103 – 104; comedy
Cyst 1 107; considerations for 101 – 102;
crime/gangster films 106 – 107;
Dance Party USA 95 – 96 horror 107 – 108; Kroll on 102;
Dancyger, Ken 66 musicals 107; overview
Darling 105 of 101; period films 105 – 106;
Dead Funny 59 Schattel on 106; science fiction
Deadpool 59 103 – 104;
De Sica, Vittorio 124 thrillers 106 – 107; war films
DiCillo, Tom 97 104 – 105; westerns 104
Django Unchained 70 German Expressionism 9
Index 161
Gill, Lovinder 22 – 23, 105 embrace the limitations 24 – 26;

Gilroy, Tony 83 investors 19; low-budget 31, 52, 70;
Girls 12 reverse engineer 24; tv shows 12
Godard’s Breathless 129 IndieTalk.com 33 – 34, 45, 123
Goddard, Jean-Luc 77 Indiewire.com 35, 139
The Godfather 47 The Interpreter 29
Golden Age of Hollywood 9 The Invitation 107
The Gold Rush 2 It Comes At Night 108
Green 116 – 117 It Follows 106
Greenberg’s Formula for
screenplays 65 Jarmusch, Jim 3, 9
Greene, Robert 25 – 26, 119, 146 Jaws 3
grindhouse films, low-budget 9 – 10 Joker 30
guerrilla productions 8 Jurassic World 11
Guy and Madeline on a Park
Bench 60, 107 Kate Plays Christine 25, 119
Katz, Aaron 95 – 96, 109
Half Nelson 11 Keating, Mickey 105
Halloween 9 The Kid 124
Hay, Phil 107 Kidman, Nicole 29
Hedges, Peter 138 King, Stephen 30
Her 5 The King’s Speech 69
Her Smell 21 – 22 Kroll, Noam 18 – 19, 25, 47 – 48,
Hoffman, Dustin 75 58, 70 – 71, 97 – 99, 102,
Hollywood Chaos 42 117 – 118, 142 – 143
Hollywood Economist Blogspot 36 Kurtz, Kate 115
Holmes, Katie 138 Kusama, Karyn 107
Home Media Entertainment
(magazine) 33, 123 LA LA Land 59
horror film 107 – 108, 123 Larkin, Robert 128
The Hurt Locker 70 Lax, Eric 29
Hutchinson, Angela Marie 42 – 43, Lee, Spike 3, 10
119 Levine, Lawrence Michael 16 – 18,
52 – 53, 71 – 72, 114 – 117
idea, story structure 65 limitations for micro-budget
In A Relationship 12 filmmaking 15 – 26; Bach on
inciting incidents 74 – 75, 77; short 23 – 24; Bad Ben franchise
films and 91 – 92 example of 23 – 24; Bean on 16;
Incorporated 125 Byrkit on 26; Gill on 22 – 23;
Independent Feature Project 133 Greene on 25 – 26; Kroll on
independent film 3, 9, 10; 18 – 19, 25; Levine on 16 – 18;
democratization of 10 – 11 Perry on 21 – 22
indie film fans 10 Linklater, Richard 7
indie films/filmmakers 3, 11, 33, Living In Oblivion 97
36, 47; digital revolution and 34; Love Life 12
162 Index
low-budget films see micro-budget Once 60, 107

films/filmmaking Open Water 78
Luke, Derek 138 Orphans 67
Lupi, Daniel 5 Oscars: best-adapted screenplay 69;
best original screenplay 29, 69;
Manfredi, Matt 107 Best Picture 10
Martin, Eugene 145 The Other America 145
McCarthy, Tom 70 outlining 49 – 51
McKee, Robert 134 Ozon, Francois 97
Mean Streets 141
Medium-Length Films 95 – 100 Paranoid Park 124
Metropolitan 105 Paranormal Activity 23
micro-budget films/filmmaking; see Parker, Trey 83
also short films: Act I, theoretical Penn, Sean 29
structure of 79 – 80; cameras and period films 105 – 106
20 – 21; challenge of writing 135; Perry, Alex Ross 11, 21 – 22, 25,
creating good characters and 61; 40, 89, 120
genre considerations 101 – 108; Pet Sematary 5, 30
history of 8 – 10; introduction Philadelphia Independent Film
to 1 – 13; limitations, knowing Festival 128
15 – 26; model for 20; musical Pi 103
performances and 59 – 60; paying Pieces Of April 138 – 139
for 11; producing, described Pirates of the Caribbean 26
2; reasons for making 11 – 12; Planet Money (NPR) 108
selling screenplays 27 – 37; Platt, Oliver 138
technology and 138; Three-Act plot, story structure 65
Structure and 77 – 80 Polanski, R. 105
Mitchell, David Robert 105 – 106 Pollack, Sydney 29
Monsters 103 – 104 Porterfield, Matthew 124
MTV U. 83 prestige television 12
musical performances 59 – 60 Primer 104
musicals 107, 123 – 124 producer, writing for 39 – 48;
My Dinner With Andre 20 Byington on 43; Hutchinson
The Myth of the American on 42 – 43; Kroll on 47 – 48;
Sleepover 105 – 106 Perry on 40; Quinn on 41 – 42;
Schrader on 39
Neeson, Liam 63 Psychosynthesis 18, 97, 99
negative criticism 131 The Puffy Chair 147
The New Year Parade 41 –4 2, 112 –1 13 Putty Hill 124, 139
Nichols, Mike 83
Nobody Walks 67, 144 Queen of Earth 22
Nomadland 12 A Quiet Place 28
Non-Stop 63 Quiet River 33
Noonan, Tom 52 Quinn, Tom 41 – 42, 112 – 113,
North By Northwest 3 145 – 146
Index 163
Rango 26 screenwriting 133 – 134; breaking

Repulsion 105 scenes up example 53 – 59;
Reservoir Dogs 52, 60 – 61 creating characters 60 – 63;
resources, screenwriting and 51 – 52 described 7; hacks 49 – 64;
The Return of the Secaucus introduction to 7 – 8; Levine on
Seven 9 52 – 53; musical performances
reverse engineer 24, 42 and 59 – 60; outlining and 49 – 51;
The Rider 12, 104 phases of 49 – 50; resources and
Rocky 10, 28 – 29 51 – 52; two-person scenes
Rodriguez, Robert 106 and 60
Rogers, Charles 12 Screenwriting (Rush and
Rotten Tomatoes 29 Dancyger) 66
Rush, Jeff 66 Scriptcake (podcast) 22
Russo-Young, Ry 67 – 68, 113, scriptment 119
144 – 145 scripts, under-the-radar 28 – 29
Search Party 12
Safety Not Guaranteed 11 Seclusion 2, 7, 30 – 31
Saturday Night Fever 62 See The Sea 97
Save The Cat (Syder) 66 Seidelman, Susan 3
Sayles, John 9 sentence fragments 40 – 41
scenes: beats 82; breaking up Set in Philadelphia Screenwriting
53 – 59, 84; Brunner-Sung on Competition 40
85; Byrkit on 82; defined 82; Shadows On The Road 117 – 118
dynamics of 81 – 85; example of Shattel, Polly 97
83; flashbacks to break up 59; Sheil, Kate Lyn 116, 119
functions of 83; Kroll on 58; Short Cuts 97
length of 84 short films 87 – 100; ending in
Schattel, Polly 33, 52, 106 92; examples of 97; vs. features
Schmidt, Matthew 121 87 – 88, 93 – 94; hooking the
School of Rock 76 – 77 audience in 90 – 91; inciting
Schrader, Paul 39 incident in 91 – 92; Kroll on
science fiction film 103 – 104 97 – 99; length of 87; vs. medium
Scorsese, M. 141 length 95 – 100; Stephens on
Screenplay (Field) 66, 72 96 – 97; story structure 90 – 94;
screenplays: described 39, 147; student films 89; teaser trailers
flexible writers and 30 – 31; 88 – 89
Greenberg’s Formula for 65; Shults, Trey Edward 108
importance of 34 – 35; reading Signs of Life 5, 97, 123
136 – 137; rewritten 29 – 30; Silverman, Andy 1
Schattel on writing 33; selling Simens, Dov S-S 19 – 20, 108
27 – 37, 134; sentence fragments Slacker 7
and 40 – 41; spec 28 – 29; writing, Slamdance 41
for producer 39 – 48 Smith, Kevin 107
screenwriters: Connolly, Derek 11; The Social Network 69 – 70
role of 6; Silverman, Andy 1 Soderbergh, Steven 10, 132
164 Index
Songs My Brothers Taught Me 12 Three-Act Structure 67 – 85; Byrkit

Sorkin, Aaron 20 on 80 – 81; characters 75 – 77;
South By Southwest 91, 147 components of 74; examples of
South Park 83 69 – 70; inciting incidents 74 – 75,
spec screenplays 28 – 29 77; Kroll on 70 – 71; Levine on
Spider 91 71 – 72; micro-budget films and
Spielberg, Steven 30 77 – 80; overview of 68 – 69; rules
Spotlight 70 of 72 – 74; Russo-Young on
Stallone, Sylvester 10 67 – 68; scenes 81 – 85; short films
Star Wars 28 and 90 – 94
The Station Agent 70 thrillers 106 – 107
Steelmanville Road 121 Thunder Road 91
Stephens, Martha 45, 96 – 97, 109, Tiny Furniture 12
144, 146 – 147 Tootsie 75
Stillman, Whit 105 To The Stars 146 – 147
Stinson, Joe 126 Touch Of Evil 21
Stomping Ground 1, 7, 33, 44, 60, Trevorrow, Colin 11
92, 125 – 132 True Meaning of Cool, The 7
Stone, Matt 83 2-Film School, Simens’ 19 – 20
Stopping By Woods on a Snowy two-person scenes 60
Evening (Frost) 87
story, story structure 65 under-the-radar scripts
story structure 65 – 85; see also 28 – 29
Three-Act Structure; idea, Us 5
described 65; plot, described 65;
scene dynamics 81 – 85; short Van Sant, Gus 124
films 90 – 94; story, described 65 Viscidi, Marcus 97
student films 89
sub-locations 49 war films 104 – 105
Sugar 11 Weiss, Rob 141
Sundance Screenwriters Lab 125 Welles, Orson 15, 124
Swanberg, Joe 115, 119 – 120, 144 westerns 104
Syder, Blake 66 Whiplash 59, 89
The Witch 108
Takal, Sophia 16 – 17, 115 – 117
Taken 63 You Won’t Miss Me 67
teaser trailers 88 – 89
The Tenant 105 Zaillian, Steve 29
The Terminator 28 Zhao, Chloe 12, 104

Screenwriting For Micro-Budget Films

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SCREENWRITING FOR

Screenwriting for micro-budget films can present its own challenges

David J. Greenberg teaches screenwriting at Drexel University and

ISBN: 978-0-367-68770-0 (hbk)

1 Know your limitations 15

3 Write for your producer 39

6 Model your feature on a short 87

7 Genre considerations 101

8 Case studies 109

9 Stomping ground 123

10 Final thoughts 133

A funny thing happened to me while I was writing this book. I was

on as a producer. That’s it; I just thought it was worth mentioning

acclaimed independent writer-directors working today as well as

Orson Welles once said, “The enemy of art is the absence of

Lawrence Michael Levine is a screenwriter, a director, a producer

like a fictional account of the production of Takal’s micro-budget

When I was in college, I watched Cassavetes, I watched all of

Noonan, at that time, was this remote figure as Mike Leigh is to

Back to my earlier point, do it for fun. I would never tell you to

When it comes to writing, everyone sort of says minimal loca-

Here is the thing, screenwriting is not rocket science. Anyone can

independent films that countless filmmakers cite as an inspiration.

the frame and, of course, as famously seen in the opening sequence

When you’re writing the script, how much do you already

If I would also make a movie the size of Queen of Earth (2015).

So, it is critical to be aware of your limitations and your resources.

So whenever you’re shooting a movie, you’re gonna have some

limitations. But a low budget does not mean you cannot be

As an example of effectively utilizing available resources, take a

Noam Kroll told me:

My biggest point that I try to get across to filmmakers is to look

Robert Greene works primarily in documentaries, but he has also

with micro budget films, you really do have to factor in the

where you’re going to shoot, you need to write a mind of who

When you don’t have resources, it forces you to be creative and

When you read movie reviews, what is being criticized? Usually, a

Plain and simple, you can have a $200,000,000 budget, a top-notch

If you have a good script and you shoot it in a stupid way,

I believe that very few filmmakers gather financing, resources,

to solve problems on set and be open to inspiration. We were happy

The bottom-line with this screenplay is the bottom-line. As-is,

I came to screenwriting after film school and working on the

The films are so writing intensive, because you don’t have to

In 1999, I was teaching film classes at my old high school. The

Maybe I am old school in thinking that having a movie shown in

Screenwriter and director Paul Schrader once said,

I could be just a writer very easily. I am not a writer. I am a

Alex Ross Perry told me:

Part of being a writer on a micro-budget movie, for me was

My philosophy is that the screenplay is the instruction manual or

I was really rocked by the experience, wondering how a screen-

Ultimately, sentence fragments are perfectly acceptable, as long

And he went on to say that, at this point, I could probably stand to

Most screenwriters have no idea about what actually goes into

I think I don’t know how to separate the writing and production,

and not be spending money. But at least I can try a bunch of

Screenwriter Angela Marie Hutchinson has a degree in engineer-

I did not write with a low budget in mind for Hollywood

1 Know your limitations 15

3 Write for your producer 39

6 Model your feature on a short 87

7 Genre considerations 101

8 Case studies 109

9 Stomping ground 123

10 Final thoughts 133