Thinking through a new personal script principle:

Every scene in a script should do each of the following three things:

a) move the story forward
b) dramatize a new conflict and/or plot point and/or character reveal
c) deliver at least one quality gag A "gag" could be an actual visual or verbal gag, or it could be a very novel image or strange action. Whatever it is, it's the thing that makes that scene feel singularly unique. It can be something dark, like the boot marks on the linoleum in NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN.

The worst thing about cellphones is that they look so boring. Ordinary phone calls used to be pretty cinematic.





I think there's something about a character being tied to a specific physical space during an emotionally-charged moment that helps make for a more interesting frame.

One things I love about older movies -- especially films from the 1970s -- is how much of the texture of daily life you can soak up while watching them 50 years later. What rich, poor, & middle class people wore, drank, ate, listened to, read, smoked, drove, argued about, etc.





It feels less & less common to have the daily textures of ordinary 2023 lives make it on screen in 2023. Either the stories take place in an explicitly different reality, or they take place in some cleaner, brighter, more hygienic, more aspirational version of sorta-reality.

In my first draft of a script, I’m not necessarily trying to schematically plot out a story. It’s more like I’m trying to generate an energy field. I’m trying to make it so as many characters as possible create heat on the page. A character can create heat by pulling other characters towards them or by conflicting with them. They can create heat by the intensity of their desire, fear, or neuroses. Or they can create heat by interacting with genre expectations in an unexpected or powerful way.

REMEMBER MY NAME (1978). Geraldine Chaplin is genius as a woman recently released from prison who begins stalking Anthony Perkins. What begins as a basic FATAL ATTRACTION type setup -- a decade before that film was made -- gradually & patiently subverts all such easy tropes. Chaplin's live-wire tightrope performance as a tiny, chain-smoking walking mystery who has about five different ways of speaking depending on her emotional situation should be obsessed over the way people get fixated on say Dustin Hoffman or Joaquin Phoenix or whomever.

Geraldine Chaplin, after she was cast in DOCTOR ZHIVAGO: "I know I've gotten everything because I'm Charlie Chaplin's daughter." She's actually one of my favorite nepotism cases -- I don't know how else an actress with her singular, almost proto-Björk energy would've broken in. Every quote I've read from Robert Altman has overflowed with praise for her improvisational abilities. Some of my favorite parts of NASHVILLE are her scenes as Opal -- pretending to be a BBC reporter -- walking around junkyards, dictating brilliantly batshit cultural criticism.

FWIW, the film books I've found to be most useful:

ON FILM-MAKING, Alexander Mackendrick
CUT TO THE CHASE, Sam O'Steen
IN THE BLINK OF AN EYE, Walter Murch
THE CONVERSATIONS, Murch & Ondaatje
GETTING AWAY WITH IT, Soderbergh & Lester
CONVERSATIONS WITH SCORSESE
all Pauline Kael

https://twitter.com/tadaggerhart/status/1668769055023697921

Another big one for me is Peter Bogdanovich's massive tome of interviews w/ classic directors, WHO THE DEVIL MADE IT. Endless great working anecdotes and practical philosophizing from directors like Howard Hawks, Fritz Lang, Don Siegel, and so on:

Fayetteville, Arkansas summer -- 6/11/23

TOP TEN FILMS I SAW AS A TEENAGER THAT FIRST MADE ME WANT TO BECOME A WRITER-DIRECTOR

1. PULP FICTION (1994). I skipped school to see the first matinee showing on the Friday it debuted. Couldn't get any of my friends to join me because they thought Travolta & Willis were jokes. 2. RESERVOIR DOGS (1992). The reason I was so amped for #1. I saw the below image in ROLLING STONE & was intrigued enough to rent the VHS. Re-rented it so often my parents got me a copy for Christmas. First movie I saw that seemed to be made by someone w/ my personality.

MEAN STREETS (1973). If I was to make a list of the pictures I saw as a teenager that most made me want to become a filmmaker, this is like #3 or #4. Rewatching it 30 years later -- 50 years after its premiere -- and it's still just an absolute live wire of personal cinema. I've seen it at least a dozen times. Each time, it's just as inspiring & daunting as always. What it most makes we want to do is take more risks. I think I finally realized the key to Scorsese's early style: he's completely unconcerned with approximating professional norms.

My guess is that A.I. generated art will be perfectly acceptable for people who are mostly interesting in consuming content: treasured IP characters being placed in stories with pleasing-enough plot turns & vibes & pretty pictures, etc. But I also think that A.I. will be a non-starter for those who turn to art to experience the singular style or sensibility or personality or insights of an artist. An A.I. generated Peele or Nolan or Gerwig film won't satisfy a real Peele or Nolan or Gerwig fan.

The JOHN WICK phenomenon can sometimes be underrated as just a fluke convergence having to do with our love of Keanu Reeves & amazing practical stunts & cool cinematic visuals & dogs. That's all at play, of course.

But also this: it's a rare modern film about honor. Because John loses his wife, & then a gangster's idiot son kills the puppy she got for him & steals John's car, the WICK franchise can be mistaken as being about grief. But John goes on his four film killing spree not out of grief, but because the code he upheld was broken.

Favorite Altman-esque films not directed by Robert Altman:

SMILE (Michael Ritchie, 1975)
THEY ALL LAUGHED (Peter Bogdanovich, 1980)
MYSTERY TRAIN (Jim Jarmusch, 1989)
MAGNOLIA (Paul Thomas Anderson, 1999) Favorite Cassevetes-esque films not directed by John Cassavetes:

MIKEY & NICKY (Elaine May, 1976)
SAINT JACK (Peter Bogdanovich, 1979)
UNCUT GEMS (Safdies, 2019)
RED ROCKET (Sean Baker, 2021)

I was asked in a general meeting today to name the film I most wish I would've made. My immediate answer was HELL OR HIGH WATER. Great blue collar genre story set in the real world. Packed w/ killer characters & performances. Has something to say about America w/o being cringe. Upon reflection, the other film that I could've named, but didn't, is GHOST DOG: WAY OF THE SAMURAI. Tonally it's got more of a self-aware wink to its genre vamping than HELL OR HIGH WATER does, but otherwise: same reasons.

The hardest part of screenwriting for me is figuring out how to push a working class story through the fairly entrenched upper class firewall of the industry & get that story to the audience for whom it's intended without losing all the story's specificity on the way. I think it helps that I usually use genre. I don't write scripts "about" the working class. I tend to write genre stories with a working class perspective. My genre leads tend to have manual labor or customer service jobs. If I write about labor history, I write it as a western.

Greatest country artist of all-time | group one of four Greatest country artist of all-time | group two of four

Four Hollywood movies that get country music right:

TENDER MERCIES
COAL MINER'S DAUGHTER
PAYDAY
HONEYSUCKLE ROSE Altman's NASHVILLE is one of my 20 favorite movies but not necessarily because it gets country music right. Altman transposes lots of coastal values onto it. Example: when Barbara Jean (based on Loretta Lynn) has her breakdown, there's no chance country fans would boo her.

I can't imagine a lazier, more belly-rub-begging critical ploy than jabbing Tarantino for listing primarily male directors when discussing the two competing camps of new Hollywood directors in the 1970s in his new book. I'm a bit of a '70s American movies fanatic. Far as I can tell, here's an exhaustive list of the female directors who made more than one Hollywood or adjacent picture in the '70s:

Elaine May
Joan Micklin Silver

That's all.

Here's a thread of my most read pieces from my PRACTICAL SCREENWRITING substack. I came to this line of work as a bit of an outsider. My goal is to share some things I've learned over the last 10+ years to fellow outsiders trying to break in. (Tho all are welcome, of course.) #1: "The Revised & Expanded Script Principles of Tony Tost"

This is simply a collection of screenwriting notes-to-self I've been maintaining since I broke in as a freelancer on LONGMIRE:

open.substack.com/pub/practical/…

Maybe the simplest pilot script advice I ever got came very early in my career, from Kurt Sutter. But I return to it & use it often: "every character should have a secret." I don't necessarily think it means every character should reveal their secret in the pilot itself. But as the writer you should know their secret, & it should inform how you write your characters. How they carry themselves. How they use language. What topics trigger them. Etc.

After directing my first film, I'd say, in terms of performances, most of the directing job is accomplished by having a script w/ defined roles & playable scenes, & by casting strong actors in the right parts. So, say, 75% of your directing is done before shooting starts. Then I'd guesstimate that -- in terms of performances -- 15% of your directing job is accomplished in the editing stage. Choosing what takes to use, what shots to utilize, taking out unnecessary lines or beats or scenes, trimming away any untruthful moments, & crafting an arc.