Episode 202: Here, After by Joel Kim Booster
This month, Dead Pilots Society welcomes back writer, actor, and comedian Joel Kim Booster , whose pilot Birthright was previously featured on Episode 34. Joel wrote and starred in the hit Hulu movie Fire Island. He was a writer on The Other Two and Big Mouth, and as an actor, you've seen him on Shrill and Search Party.
Joel's pilot…
Three Days of the Condor opened in September 1975, just as American audiences were still processing Watergate. There was plenty to be paranoid about. The film is also a standout entry in the middle-of-the-'70s film Renaissance that gave us some of the best movies of all time.
Sydney Pollack directed the thriller. Robert Redford starred as Joe Turner, a CIA analyst whose entire job is reading…
A few years back, the American Film Institute released its list of the 100 greatest heroes and villains in Hollywood history. Voted on by more than 1,500 figures from the film community, the company it keeps is about what you'd expect... Hannibal Lecter, Darth Vader, the shark from Jaws. It's a who's who of baddies.
Number 20 on the villains list, sandwiched between Captain Bligh and Mrs.…
Noah Hawley has a resume most writers would kill for. He created _Fargo_ for FX, turned _Legion_ into one of the stranger superhero shows on TV, adapted the _Alien_ franchise for Hulu with _Alien: Earth_ , and has written novels on the side.
In a conversation with David Perell, Hawley broke down how he thinks about story, the realities of working inside a system, and what it takes to build a…
Whenever I sit down to break a new story or to give someone notes, I always think deeply about the shape of the story I want to tell and how it will affect the characters inside it.
For me, I like to know which beats I'm trying to hit and then mold my set pieces and other ideas around them. I can also then find the spaces for the character to evolve.
To do all that, I have had to become a…
Suleika Jaouad writes memoirs. She came to writing the way none of us would willingly choose—from a hospital bed, at 22, while being treated for leukemia.
She's not a screenwriter, but there are plenty of lessons to be learned from her creative process. The advice she delivers in a recent conversation with writer David Perell takes on some of the most stubborn problems screenwriters face,…
There's a line in _The Good, the Bad and the Ugly_ that lands so quietly, between bigger moments, you could almost miss it.
Blondie (Clint Eastwood's laconic bounty hunter) delivers it with the same flat affect he gives everything else. Tuco has just shot a one-armed gunslinger who had the drop on him and made the mistake of monologuing instead of pulling the trigger. Tuco says, "When you…
Screenwriter, novelist, editor, professor, and New York Film Academy instructor Matt Harry has taken one of the longer roads to a working career in Hollywood. Everyone comes to the work a different way, and we love learning from everyone's paths.
In a recent YouTube conversation with Film Courage, he broke down the realities of breaking in, staying in, and figuring out what kind of writer…
Steven Spielberg said four words in a 1985 Time Magazine interview that have stuck around for 40 years.
"I dream for a living."
We're pretty romantic about the director and his work around here, as his films have played as a backdrop to our lives, particularly the early stuff— _Jaws_ , _E.T._ , _Close Encounters_. Now, with _Disclosure Day_ nearing release, we're thinking about his career…
The great Clint Eastwood has directed more than 40 films.
When the Associated Press asked him in 2010 to name his favorites from that impressive stack, he came up with six: _Bird_ , _Letters from Iwo Jima_ , _Million Dollar Baby_ , _Mystic River_ , _The Outlaw Josey Wales_ , and _Unforgiven_ (via CBS).
His own comments about each film reveal something about how he approaches the craft as a…
I grew up on classic films, the wackier the better. So, of course, I saw my share of movie musicals and high-concept comedies.
In honor of Marilyn Monroe's birthday, we're looking at one of my favorites of all time.
_Some Like It Hot_ is the 1959 Billy Wilder comedy that topped the BBC Culture 100 Greatest Comedies of All Time poll and that the AFI ranked #1 on its list of the 100 funniest…
I've been thinking a lot lately about ways to approach characters, including considering them in terms of their Enneagram type. How does a 4 see the world, compared to a 2? What would Myers-Briggs have to say about certain characters?
Another thing I love is a big, big character—you almost write them exaggeratedly large on the page.
So I loved seeing Nerstalgic's new video pop up in my…
When you're deep in a screenplay draft, it's easy to obsess over dialogue and structure and forget entirely about how your scenes might be lit. That's a production concern, right? The DP will handle it. Worry about it later.
But if you really want to make an impression on a reader, the goal should be to conjure images in their minds, and light is arguably the most important visual element in…
Martin Scorsese finally won his first Best Director Oscar in 2007, which was his eighth nomination, for _The Departed_ , presented by his contemporaries Coppola, Lucas, and Spielberg.
His speech is famously chaotic and includes a torrent of thank-yous, a joke about double-checking the envelope, and a lot of names. But read it carefully, and it's actually a map of everything it takes to make…
The Criterion Collection just dropped a 4K release of Body Heat, and with it comes a new interview with writer/director Lawrence Kasdan. And we always love learning from the greats.
This might sound familiar to fellow struggling artists. Kasdan spent seven years writing things that went nowhere before he ever got paid. He wrote _The Empire Strikes Back_ and _Raiders of the Lost Ark_ before…
_Almost Famous_ opened September 15, 2000, on a $60 million budget (according to Box Office Mojo) and grossed $47.4 million worldwide. That meant a $12.6 million shortfall before marketing spend.
By the time you factor in print and advertising (typically 50% of production budget at the time), the total loss lands in the $30 million-plus range.
Roger Ebert gave it four stars and included it…
I'm on a contained story kick right now. My creative partner and I are fresh off a short film shoot and want to make something else, but we want to make it as easy on ourselves as possible in terms of production, and _cheap_. So, of course, my mind went straight to single-location, contained ideas.
While contained stories are easier to produce and one of the most practical formats for…
Obsession was one of the best films we saw at SXSW 2026. Imagine a late-night room full of horror film fans all totally bought into your world, gasping in all the right places, choking out laughter, even crying out, “Hell, no!” That was _Obsession_ in Austin, Texas.
The film originally premiered at TIFF Midnight Madness, promptly sold to Focus Features for $15 million, and then landed its…
When I was a kid, I made a bunch of silly sketch videos with my cousins. I would never want to go back and try to talk about those videos critically because I know they’re bad. And I think most filmmakers would feel the same about things like their student work, which often gets buried in our memories somewhere.
But Avery Dohrmann put his work under a microscope in a recent video. Most…
If you've ever sat through a script note session and thought, "I wish someone would just say what they mean," Scriptfella is your guy.
In this excerpt from one of his free live classes, screenwriting coach Dominic Morgan workshopped _How's the Pain_ , a script by writer Garrick Hamm about a terminally ill hit woman who forms an unlikely connection on what turns out to be her final job.
The…
Writing a script is really, really hard. You have to fit a dozen pieces together to create an experience that engages a reader and creates an emotional journey. And that can take months, maybe even years, to get into a place that feels right.
So when you're finally finished and ready to get reads, it can feel extremely frustrating if no one bites when they hear your idea. What gives? You…
What does it mean to write cinematically?
You probably want to conjure images in a reader's brain via your screenplay. But you have to do that quickly and economically, because your screenplay isn't a novel. You can't describe every little detail.
So what do you do instead?
Film Courage sat down with screenwriter Brandon Violette (co-creator and head writer of _CoComelon Lane_ on Netflix,…
Writing a great opening to your screenplay is important, but once you're through that scene, you have so many more pages to get through.
For me, I like to break the story down into ten-page chunks. And the first ten pages of your screenplay are the absolute most important .
They set the stage, introduce your characters, and determine whether your reader gets hooked or puts your script down.…
As a writer, I am always looking for the right words to put into my screenplay. I want what I put onto paper to be evocative, real, and powerful.
To do that, I often need to find the right strong verbs for the job.
Hopefully, this list helps your story come together and takes you somewhere you never thought possible.
Let's dive in.
It is totally possible to move between writing screenplays and writing books, and many, many writers have done so. But to get good at it, you need to realize that the styles of writing are completely different, with different audiences and ultimately different uses.
If you've been a prose writer your whole life, don’t despair, and don't throw out everything you know. Your sense of rhythm and…
If you're like me, then you're a huge fan of Pixar's storytelling. It's hard to believe this animation company used to be a struggling group of friends, now, they've built a mega empire of original ideas and their name is synonymous with beautiful character development, thoughtful arcs, and now an incredible storytelling formula.
Director and Pixar storyboard artist Emma Coats (@lawnrocket)…
If you're like me, you're always looking for a new way to spice up the action lines of your screenplay.
Action lines really need powerful words that not only communicate the image you're trying to put in the readers' minds, and eventually to the screen, but they also have to be concise.
One of the ways to rally be evocative is through the use of onomatopoeia words. But what does that mean,…
I was giving advice to some younger writers this week, and I talked about "economy in storytelling," and they looked at me like I was crazy.
It dawned on me that the average writer may not have heard this before, so I wanted to enlighten them and talk about it today.
With page counts bloating and stories getting far too long, it seems like a good time to talk about why your spec script…
_Project Hail Mary_ has become a box-office behemoth, not to mention an online and fandom hit, with inspired creators making edit after edit of the hopeful scientist and his alien companion. The film has been perfectly timed to the zeitgeist, too, with the emotional Artemis II moon mission uniting space lovers around the world.
Adapting the popular book by Andy Weir, screenwriter Drew…
Movie genre and TV genres are how we pick what we want to entertain us or inspire us.
We've all logged onto Netflix or Amazon, even wandered the Blockbusters of old, peering up and down aisles or scrolling through endless topics, trying to decide on the genre of film or television we want to watch. The genre we wind up picking depends on our mood, the day we've had, and sometimes it depends…