If you're writing your first script, this book will help develop your skills for telling a compelling and dramatic story. If you're a veteran screenwriter, this book will articulte the skills you know intuitively. And if you're currently stuck on a rewrite, this book will help you analyze and solve the problems and get your script back "on track."

This book covers everything from doing the necessary research and developing the backstory and character psychology to avoiding stereotypes and working through character blocks. Throughout are interviews with many of today's top writers for film, television, and advertising as well as novelists and playwrights.

A comprehensive handbook for screenwriters, producers, and directors who want to successfully transform factual or fictional material into film. Seger tells how to analyze source material to understand why some of it resists adapting. She then gives practical methods for translating story, characters, themes, and style into film. A final section details essential information on how to option material and how to protect oneself legally.

Along the way you'll meet the industry's leading writers, directors, producers, actors, editors, composers, and others behind the scenes. From their unique vantage points, personalities as diverse as Oliver Stone and Robin Williams reveal the alchemy they use to bring great stories to life. What's more, From Scipt to Screen is as provocative as the films it investigates.

When Women Call the Shots is 75 percent focused on Hollywood and 25 percent focused on the rest of the world. The book is divided into six sections discussing the history of women in film, how women influence the business, what women can bring to the storytelling process, how they create characters, sex, love and romance and finally, a social and global perspective.