What goes into writing a great movie script?

Your primary job is to create situations. Modern actors will fuck up your dialogue, despite whatever your contract says.

All rules are made to be broken, but you damn well better know WHY you’re breaking them.

Learn to tell a story orally and not through writing. Try telling your story to a friend.

Usher Serves as Groomsman at Robin Thicke and April Love Geary’s Mexico Wedding — See the Photos! - AOL.com

Maintain a slush pile/idea file. When you are ready to write, choose the best seeds to plant.

The DSM 5 is a wonderful character compendium.

Audiences are smarter than you think. Something about turning down the house lights makes their IQs go up.

What's the most trivial thing that ever made you go to the doctor?

Make sure to pack enough explosives into the rocket.

Leave holes. Write and unwrite. Put it in, take it out.

Conflict is your power source; without it you have no drama and hence no script.

Worm DNA is changing how we understand evolution - Earth.com

Only God gets it right the first time. Rewrite everything.

A scene should change valence from beginning to end. Up to down, down to up.

Primary characters must change polarities. Secondary characters can change less.

Why do so many people like life?

Cut everything that is not a payoff, or a setup for a specific payoff. “Omit needless words.” Think about the sparseness of joke telling, or Grimm Brothers.

Research the facts and then throw away the research.

Outline everything. Use story beats. Keep character’s mouths taped up, until they absolutely MUST speak. Write the script and the dialogue at the last minute, after you’ve revised the hell out of the outline.

Is it ok to be spanked by your parents if you are not in bed in your set bedtime?

People choose what to see based on the high concept. Make sure to deliver an ending consistent with the high concept -- it is what the audience paid for.

Use status to help drive conflict. King Lear/fool. Upstairs/downstairs.

What you leave unwritten is as important as what you write. SUBTEXT.

Its year 2041, and president Hunter Biden has ordered every republican who sweared at him to be arrested and shot. I am on my way to the death row listening to the cheer of the Liberal mob chanting death death death. How can I escape?

Don’t direct from the page. Everyone, from the director on down, wants to be part of the process of making movies. Let them do their work.

To develop a unique voice for each character, try interviewing your characters.

Write in reverse time. Major characters need to change polarity; minor characters may remain the same at the end.

AI Finally Cracks Decades-Long Mars Mystery That Has Baffled Scientists - The Daily Galaxy

A critical function of storytelling is wish fulfillment. This is why video games are so popular. “That protagonist is JUST LIKE ME.”

Get up there yourself. Be in a movie. Take some acting (not writing) classes. Learn how a trained actor approaches a text. Learn why actors take roles. They do as much if not more than the writer does.

Actors give better feedback than writers do.

Deportees are being held in a converted shipping container in Djibouti, ICE says - NPR