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Best Original Screenplay 2011
It’s that time of year again when Hollywood likes to pat itself on the back. For the last 10-15 years, the awards have been highly ironic, since the best work has come largely from the independent film community, not the major studios. While the studios have been busy making money from superhero franchises, the indies have been making original and compelling work that has approached the quality of American TV drama. Nowhere is this phenomenon more apparent than in this year’s Best Screenplay category.

The Oscar nominations came out this morning. But I have found the Writers Guild awards to be a better gauge than the Oscars of the year’s best writing. Nominated this year for the WGA Best Original Screenplay are 50/50, Bridesmaids, Midnight in Paris, Win Win, and Young Adult.

The most glaring similarity among all these films, besides their high quality, is that four of the five combine comedy and drama, while the fifth, Bridesmaids, is a straight out comedy. Normally comedy doesn’t get anywhere near the respect it deserves, especially at awards time. But when you combine it with drama, you get a powerful hybrid where the comedy comes out of real people and their pain, and the serious drama is leavened by the often-ridiculous nature of life.

I liked all of these scripts, but the real surprise for me was the sleeper film, Win Win. This is a comedy drama combined with a sports story, and the film’s ability to weave all three threads into a seamless whole is exceptional (the fact that a second, equally-fine sports drama, Moneyball, came out the same year is amazing). Sports stories can be dramatic and inspiring, but they are almost always unbelievable. First, they try to compress too much improvement into too short a period of time. Second, they often use actors who have the athletic ability of a snail. The resulting lack of authenticity is deadly.

A sport is a physical and mental craft. Like screenwriting, it takes years of training and practice to do well. The result, when played at a high level, is art. Film, as the sensual and realistic medium par excellence, is potentially unmatched in bringing the thrill of this art form to the audience. But you have to know how to do it. And the writer of Win Win does.

The first key to Win Win’s success is that its main character is not the athlete but the coach. The comedy and drama comes out of this character’s journey, with the elements of the sport, in this case wrestling, hung on that line. Coach Mike

Flaherty is a family man and a lawyer in a small town, and he’s in trouble from page one. Times are hard, his practice is dying, and he doesn’t want to tell his wife. He’s also the wrestling coach at the local high school, and they haven’t won a match all year.

This is putting tremendous psychological pressure on Mike. But another technique that writer-director Thomas McCarthy uses to kick the film to a higher level is that Mike doesn’t just have a psychological flaw. He makes a moral mistake. When he sees the opportunity to make $1500 a month as the guardian of a senile old man, he grabs it, even though the way he does it is illegal.

With that as the foundation and spine of the story, McCarthy then brings in troubled high school kid Kyle from out of town. Kyle, who is the old man’s grandson, is a scrawny-looking, 120-pound boy with badly bleached hair. He is also a fantastic wrestler.

Directors often say that casting is 90% of their job, and director McCarthy did his job to perfection. He knew that the success of this little indie sports-comedy- drama rested on the authenticity of his kid wrestler, even though actual wrestling takes up only about a quarter of the film. The actor, Alex Shaffer, was a New Jersey state wrestling champion, and he has skills that you just can’t fake.

Of course the reason most directors don’t use real athletes for lead roles in their sports movies is that real athletes don’t have the acting chops. But this kid does. Sure, he’s no Paul Giamatti, who plays Coach Mike. More >>

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Screenwriting

Over the course of 3 decades, John Truby has taught more than 30,000 students the art of screenwriting. Providing the knowledge and expertise he has applied as a consultant on over 1,000 movie scripts, Truby offers an approach to storytelling that has earned acclaim for his instructional classes and screenwriting software from students and critics alike.

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Truby's Blockbuster screenwriting package allows students to learn the art of developing ideas into fully realized, professionally structured scripts right at home. Based on a user interface that teaches as you write, Truby's Blockbuster screenwriting software shows you the deep structural weaknesses that are likely to be in your script and takes you through the ideal order for fixing them.

Truby's Blockbuster software package is the only screenwriting program of its kind to focus in on writing for specific genres. With add-ons for action, comedy, horror and every genre of screenwriting, Blockbuster can be tailored to fit exactly the style of movie you?re working on.

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From the writers, directors and producers of Shrek to Sleepless in Seattle to Star Wars, Truby's screenwriting classes have trained some of the top players in Hollywood today. Truby's audio and video screenwriting courses will teach you hundreds of screenwriting techniques that will allow you to compete with the best.

Truby's 14 hour audio classes and 8 hour video courses focus on the 22 building blocks of every script. These screenwriting tools will take you from beginning to end in the development process of your script idea.

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In addition to screenwriting courses and software, Truby.com also offers classes which include one-on-one interaction with a personal mentor. The Great Screenwriting Online Class is 12 weeks long and contains all the information from the Truby live seminar. Writing exercises at the end of each lesson help you apply the course information to your story.

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