Taking Bollywood more seriously: the career of Salman Khan
WriteMovies Director Ian Kennedy writes: Why Bollywood should take ITSELF more seriously! The career of Salman Khan and the Bollywood tropes that hold the Indian film industry back…
WriteMovies Director Ian Kennedy writes: Why Bollywood should take ITSELF more seriously! The career of Salman Khan and the Bollywood tropes that hold the Indian film industry back…
Ian Kennedy writes: In this series of articles, I’m exploring some reasons we should take Bollywood cinema more seriously – it’s definitely not for everyone, but I for one find it a refreshing way to enjoy movies on different terms to the normal Hollywood mindset. Here, I’ll be looking at the biggest classic of the Bollywood system, SHOLAY (1975), to show why it’s got something distinctive to offer English-speaking audiences.
SHOLAY’s scriptwriting works differently to Hollywood classics and as a script analyst and producer I find that refreshing. On my editors’ suggestions, the film and its songs also found a place in several episodes of the drama series I used to write for, so I had a personal connection to it long before I saw the movie, which made it even more enjoyable to finally see it years later.
Still trying to come up with the right punchline? Still trying to figure out how love’s going to conquer all? You’re in luck – we’re giving you two more weeks to enter our Romance and Comedy Award!
One of the most important skills for a writer is getting the opening of your script right – and part of that is setting the tone. A great premise can be ruined if its presented in the wrong way, and this often happens if the screenplay doesn’t set the tone correctly. So what even is “tone”, and how do you get it right?
If you haven’t entered our Romance and Comedy Award yet, you’d better move fast. There’s just one week until the deadline, which is coming up fast on January 17th!
John McCoy not only took 2nd place in our Fall Contest, he was also our Horror Award winner with his script THE DEVIL’S TIDE! We’ve already introduced him and his script here, but we wanted a closer look at what inspired him, his writing process, and his advice for writers.
The first deadline for our Winter 2021 Screenwriting Contest and Romance and Comedy Award is in just a couple of weeks, and we’re sure many of you are hard at work on your scripts.
To give you a helping hand, we thought we’d look back at the submissions to our Fall Contest and tell you what we learned from them – giving you a valuable insight into what works, what doesn’t, and what you need to do to really succeed in our contests and the wider industry! Here are our insights…