Read The Screenplay Series

EXCLUSIVE: The United States vs. Billie Holiday, Hulu’s dramatic retelling of the “Strange Fruit” singer’s battle against the federal government, originated as a single chapter in Johann Hari’s 2015 book Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs. When tapped by director Lee Daniels to pen the…

EXCLUSIVE: Sacha Baron Cohen had no plans to make another Borat movie after the success of 2006’s Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan, which broke the satire mold (and the bank) and made Baron Cohen’s intrepid journalist Borat Sagdiyev far too popular to pull off a…

Joe and Anthony Russo went back home for their return to directing after guiding Avengers: Endgame to the biggest box office haul in history. That’s where they found Cherry, the Apple TV+ indie drama based on the novel by their fellow Cleveland native Nico Walker. The book was based on Walker’s own experiences and…

EXCLUSIVE: David Fincher’s Mank has been near the top of the heap this awards season, scoring the most nominations at the Golden Globes and Critics Choice Awards and a place on the AFI Top 10 movies of 2020 for the take on the relationship of screenwriter Herman J. Mankiewicz and Orson Welles during the writing of the…

EXCLUSIVE: In 2014, French playwright Florian Zeller won the Molière Award for Le Pere, a play about an aging man’s bout with dementia. Seven years, a TV series and a French film adaptation later, Zeller brings his words to the big screen and to the Oscar-season awards race. Starring Anthony Hopkins and Olivia Colman…

John Lee Hancock wrote the screenplay for Warner Bros’ crime thriller The Little Things in 1992, around the time he penned A Perfect World and Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, both for director Clint Eastwood. At the time an in-demand screenwriter, he hadn’t been a director yet, and the script, about a pair of…

EXCLUSIVE: Kelly Reichard’s First Cow, based on her frequent collaborator Jonathan Raymond’s 2004 novel The Half Life, brings new life to pre-statehood Oregon and the early Americans seeking to stake their claim in the burgeoning Pacific Northwest. The A24 film, which is up for three Film Independent Spirit Awards…

For Nomadland, writer-director Chloé Zhao adapted Jessica Bruder’s 2017 book Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century into a screenplay, got Frances McDormand to star in the movie, and hasn’t looked back since. The film, the third in the Beijing-born Zhao’s trilogy of a sort on the state of the…

EXCLUSIVE: In 2016, Cheryl Guerriero’s script about a college football star-turned-convict landed her a spot on the Black List. Nearly four years later, the writer-producer’s screenplay became Palmer, the Apple TV+ film directed by Oscar-winning The Cave helmer Fisher Stevens with Justin Timberlake starring in the…

EXCLUSIVE: When Oscar-nominated director Paul Greengrass began working on News of the World, he said he set out to create a family movie with purpose and edge. However, he didn’t expect the film’s touching on pandemics and a politically divided country to strike such a chord with current events. “It was sort of eerie…

EXCLUSIVE: Warner Bros’ Judas and the Black Messiah may have been set in the late 1960s, but it could have very well taken place in 2021 as it puts a glaring spotlight on the treatment of the Black community, activism and identity. Director Shaka King co-wrote the script with Will Berson and chronicles the lives of…

EXCLUSIVE: For nearly 15 years, director Ramin Bahrani and novelist Aravind Adiga shared a symbiotic relationship of inspiration that culminated into Netflix’s rags-to-riches drama The White Tiger. Bahrani’s 2005 feature Man Push Cart inspired Adiga, a former Columbia University classmate, to write The White Tiger, a…