Advice

STAGE 32 NEWS This weekend Stage 32 and the Stage 32 Happy Writers descend upon Austin, Texas for the Austin Film Festival. We are proud to be a sponsor of the 2015 Austin Film Festival and we have a week filled with educational panels, events and more! We invite our Stage 32ers to come join us! To find out more about the events and to RSVP to join, click here: Stage 32 at the Austin Film Festival   The October 2015 edition of On Stage With RB is now available to watch on-demand!  This bro...

The October 2015 edition of On Stage With RB was almost 3 hours jam-packed with incredible tips and advice! Up first RB interviewed Jeff Kitchen. Jeff Kitchen has been one of the top screenwriting teachers in the film industry for twenty years, and is a sought-after script consultant. He worked as a dramaturg and taught playwriting in New York theater, and is the author of Writing a Great Movie: Key Tools for Successful Screenwriting. Jeff has taught development executives from all the major H...

STAGE 32 NEWS Starting today, all Stage 32 members have automatically been set to receive a single email a day with all network requests. Keep in mind, you have full control of these settings. So if you would still like to receive a single email for every network request sent to you on Stage 32, you can change the setting accordingly. To learn more about this exciting site update and learn how to manage your settings, click here: Manage Your Networking!   Stage 32 is heading to the Austin...

Whenever a script is submitted in the industry, it is passed off to a reader for analysis. The reader will give the script a "recommend," a "consider" or a "pass." And unless it gets a recommend, probably no one else is going to look at it. So how many scripts get a recommend? About two percent....which means roughly 98 percent of spec scripts are dead on arrival. Many of these scripts make the same mistakes. Here's my take on the ten most common mistakes reported by the studio and network rea...

It’s been said that luck is where preparation meets opportunity. Only one of those things is completely in your control — preparation. Whether you’re a screenwriter, a filmmaker, an entrepreneur or anyone else trying to draw attention and support to a personal or professional endeavor, there’s no excuse not to have your elevator pitch down cold. It needs to be practiced, honed and memorized so that when opportunity rears its head, the words roll off your tongue with an undeniable confidence. T...

STAGE 32 NEWS It’s that time again! Time for the October 2015 edition of On Stage with RB. Every month our Founder & CEO, RB, in an online webinar setting brings on special guests who work in the industry, such as filmmakers and executives to offer advice to our community, and he goes over the best way to use Stage 32 to help your career. Afterwards, he opens up the floor to you for a live Q&A session about anything and everything in the industry. Best of all, this is FREE, exclusively for St...

STAGE 32 NEWS Stage 32 was featured as the top story on Variety's website this past Saturday. Needless to say the entire Stage 32 team is quite excited to have our efforts recognized. To see a video from RB and to read the article, click here: Stage 32 Featured in Variety   The September 2015 edition of the On Stage With RB webcast is now available to watch on-demand for FREE! This broadcast was a smashing success jam-packed with over 3 hours of information and 2 exciting guest interviews...

THE SHOOT DAY 1 It’s kind of surreal when your doorbell rings at 5am and twenty people enter like it’s just another day at their office. By 7am my house was a working movie set, complete with a green room for talent, hair and makeup station, video village, lit diffusion screens framing the exterior windows, giving it that unmistakable look of a movie shoot. By 8:15 we were behind about an hour due to an issue with my lead’s wardrobe and a difficult lighting set up in the garage. But by 8:30...

Trying to stay competitive as ‘just a screenwriter’ in a world of multi- hyphenate writer-director-producers or the trans-hyphen ‘content creators’ is kind of like an old school boxer competing against today’s mixed martial artists: Even if the boxer is a straight-up brawler he’s still going to have a tough time in the ring. But over a decade ago, when I was starting out, being a spec screenwriter with a knack for concept-driven comedies was a viable thing. I sold my first script, land...

History does not record if Otto Von Bismark was twirling his waxed Prussian moustache when he declared “Politics is the art of the possible”. He meant that dreams and ideals are nothing if we don’t grapple with the real world, and work through real problems to get from where we are to somewhere closer to where we want to be.   For those trying to make their way in the film or TV world in the 21st Century, I would say movie making is the art of the possible. For every thousand people who like...