How to Become a Hollywood Writer

If your dream is to become a Hollywood screenwriter, here are a few tips on how to write movies and how to go about selling your screenplay.

To the writing of his detective stories RAYMOND CHANDLER brings the experience and the skepticism of a newspaper reporter, the narrative gifts of a born storyteller, and a mastery of pungent American dialogue. His leading character, Philip Marlowe, is a professional detective who has held the spotlight thus far in four novels, all of which have been purchased by the movies. One of them, The Big Sleep, in which Lauren Bacall plays the lead, is soon to be released. In his screenplays as in his books, Mr. Chandler has scored a personal success, but he has done so without losing sight of the difficulties encountered by the creative writer in the studios. For this is the anomaly: the producers pay their authors large fees apparently for the purpose of disregarding their advice and their text.
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Here’s a day in the life of a writer that you don’t always get to hear about.

If you have a stellar script in hand and are prepared to spend three to five years trying to get a break, you might have what it takes to be a screenwriter, says Stephen Davis
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Dream of selling your story to Hollywood? Read this first.