FrankenScript :: Lee Gabel's Screenwriting Journal/Blog

Ryan Gosling and Michelle Williams hit it out of the park with this deeply touching story of a relationship imploding under its own weight. Told in a nonlinear way, we learn of their relationship’s beginning and its impending end. After watching I couldn’t help but to wonder how many scenes were improvised a little, because [...]

The Shawshank Redemption is my all-time favorite film. It continues to hold the top stop in IMDb.com’s top 250 films, even though it tanked at the box office. This classic story of hope and friendship remains in the back of my mind to this day. It is the movie that made me want to write [...]

I red this script back in February, 2010. It had promise then but still had a few issues. Now I don’t know how much the script changed between the version I read and what ended up onscreen, but I am certainly not going to pay to see it now. Here’s a quote from the film’s [...]

From the onset of this film, I just could not take it seriously. It almost felt like the film was making fun of itself. The police are complete idiots. Anybody can tell you that in order to not draw suspicion to yourself, you don’t tail a suspect twenty feet behind them… in a windowless van. [...]

A comedy and a drama? You can have a comedy with dramatic elements, and a drama with comedic elements. I don’t think you can’t have both. At least it is very difficult to have both, and I’ve been seeing a lot of films recently that try and do both. They all have done poorly. Pick [...]

The logline sounded good: Unfortunately, this film fell into the same traps most wannabe horror films fall into. We get the same old setup of characters that we’re supposed to believe are the “stalker”, only to have them predictably knocked down one at a time. And startling the audience is not the same as scaring [...]