Go Into The Story Resource: Movie Script Scene-By-Scene Breakdowns
Go Into The Story followers are contributing breakdowns of contemporary screenplays to an ongoing script analysis series.
On May 16, 2018, Go Into The Story turned 10 years old — you can read the very first blog post here. I led with this paragraph:
Welcome to Go Into The Story! Right now, it’s nothing but a humble, threadbare blog, but I hope it will evolve into an active resource for aspiring screenwriters, as well as a community for anyone interested in storytelling and the creative life.
And evolve it did! To the point where it was recently named “Best of the Best” Scriptwriting Website in the 20th Annual Writer’s Digest Best Websites for Writers list.
To celebrate 10 years of blogging about screenwriting, writing, Hollywood, movies, TV, and the creative life, each day in May, I’m going to feature a piece of Go Into The Story trivia, plus a writing resource you can find in the site’s archives. This is not an exercise in self-congratulations so much as I figured readers could use some tips about how to best use the site. With — to date — 24,140 articles and over 100 archive topics, there is a LOT of content here. Hopefully, these posts for the next 31 days will clue in more recent followers and remind long-time readers about resources you can use to facilitate deepening your understanding of the writing craft.
Today’s trivia: For years, I ran six posts per day according to this schedule: 6AM, 10AM, Noon, 2PM, 4PM, 6PM. That final post was the day’s ‘biggie’ because when I was on Blogger, then WordPress, the articles were laid out in a vertical line, so the last post stayed up top for 12 hours.
Then I switched to Medium which, as you can see, offers a lot more variety. Within the last year, I made a few changes to post schedules. First, I cut back to 5 per day. Ironically, site traffic has gone up. The cynic in me wonders if I cut back to zero posts whether the numbers of visitors would skyrocket!
A second change is I schedule the posts to go live at these times: 6AM, 6:05AM, 6:10AM, 6:15AM, 6:20AM. Grouping the posts together enables me to schedule my tweets in one fell swoop in the AM, so I get that done and don’t have to tend to Twitter any further.
Speaking of Twitter, @GoIntoTheStory currently has 50,848 followers. Sure, not Taylor Swift, but not bad for a screenwriter, teacher, and blogger.
Today’s Go Into The Story resource: Movie Script Scene-By-Scene Breakdowns.
A great way to analyze screenplay structure is by studying a script’s scene-by-scene breakdown. Here are links to 62 posts which include downloadable PDFs of each breakdown.
12 Years a Slave
A Monster Calls
All is Lost
American Hustle
Argo
Arrival
Artist, The
Barney’s Version
Beasts of No Nation
Beginners
Belle
Big Eyes
Big Short, The
Big Sick, The
Birdman: Or (the Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance)
Boyhood
Celeste & Jesse Forever
Coco
Dallas Buyers Club
End of the Tour, The
Enough Said
Ex Machina
Eye in the Sky
Flight
Frankenweenie
Get Out
Gone Girl
Good Dinosaur, The
Grand Budapest Hotel, The
Gravity
Hanna
Hell or High Water
I, Tonya
Imitation Game, The
Incredibles, The
Invitation, The
Jackie
La La Land
Leviathan
Lincoln
Logan
Lone Survivor
Looper
Loving
Man Up
Miles Ahead
Monsters University
Moonrise Kingdom
Mudbound
My Big Fat Greek Wedding 2
Nebraska
Nightcrawler
Prisoners
Short Term 12
Silence of the Lambs, The
Social Network, The
Still Alice
Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri
Trainwreck
Whiplash
Wolf of Wall Street, The
Zootopia
Each day this month, I want to take the opportunity to thank you for supporting Go Into The Story. I’d love to hear from you in RESPONSES. When did you start following the blog? What are your favorite features? And as always, if you have any suggestions, feel free to suggest away.