Technically speaking, montages are more the domain of an editor, splicing together different scenes to illustrate a passage of time. Montages, however, became such a fixture in the cinematic vocabulary that it’s not unusual to find them in screenplay...

Many talented people helped to make Alien a landmark film, but screenwriter Dan O’Bannon created the blueprint.

Paul Schrader is one of the most important screenwriters of the twentieth century and helped to define the New Hollywood of the 1970s. Unlike most filmmakers, Schrader didn’t grow up loving movies. In fact, he had not seen one until he was in his lat...

The original Ghostbusters film remains to this day a benchmark for supernatural comedies. It’s a tricky genre to get right and increasingly unpopular among studios due to budgetary concerns. But if you’re going to attempt to write a supernatural come...

A unique voice and iconoclast, Colin Higgins was one of the most important screenwriters of the 1970s and early 1980s. Born in France but raised in Australia by an Australian mother and American father, Higgins was a young man searching for his place...

John Hughes’ The Breakfast Club is one of the most beloved films ever made. Many of its themes—such as bullying and alienation—ring as true for teenagers today as it did when it was first released in 1985.

With contributions from various writers, a director and even the actors, the screenplay for Jaws is one of the best examples of cinema being a collaborative art form. And the circumstances surrounding the writing prove that sometimes a deadline is go...

In the normally male-dominated world of screenwriting, Leigh Brackett distinguished herself as a versatile talent who worked on some of the biggest films of all time, including The Empire Strikes Back.

In my opinion, the greatest success story in screenwriting belongs to Billy Wilder. The Austrian-born Wilder was a Jewish scribe in the prewar German film industry. When Hitler and the Nazi regime began their rise of power, Wilder, who was very stree...