Top 20 Favorite Films

Occasionally, I'm asked which movie stars I see playing my characters when I write a screenplay.

I never approach creating characters that way. It's only when I know a story from start to finish do I start writing the script. By then, the characters are fully formed, unique individuals.

After I've completed a screenplay, I like to host a table read with actors to hear what dialog works and what still needs tinkering. I'm constantly amazed by how actors bring characters alive, making them their own living creations in unexpected ways.

It's obvious casting a film can make or break a production.

Below is my list of top 20 favorite films, which certainly would have been quite different if other actors had played the leads.

 1. La Belle et la Bete - Magic, Jean Cocteau, French surrealism.

 2. Chinatown - Crushing corruption.

 3. The Last Picture Show - Fading dreams.

 4. The Maltese Falcon - Lies, seduction, more lies.

 5. To Have or Have Not - Desperation, romance, Nazi intrigue in Africa.

 6. Dark Passage - Revenge, jealousy, love, madness.

 7. Rebel Without a Cause - Troubled teens, spiritless adults in stifling 1950's America.

 8. The Wizard of Oz - The archetypical hero's journey.

 9. Annie Hall - Love, connection, rising above those who first raised you up.

10. Bringing Up Baby - The best screwball comedy. Ever.

11. Parting Glances - The best American gay-themed film. Ever.

12. Rear Window - A peeping tom nearly bored to death.

13. L. A. Confidential - Lies, corruption, love.

14. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid - Free spirits living on borrowed time.

15. It's A Wonderful Life - Sometimes, you need to be reminded how good you have it.

16. 2001: A Space Odyssey - Evolution.

17. Blade Runner - Don't ask questions. Love your maker.

18. The Matrix - Life is but a dream.

19. Donnie Darko - Bizarre and sad. Only film this century I watched twice in a row the first time I saw it.

20. Close Encounters of the Third Kind - Aliens are our friends.

More Than a Screenwriter

I am more than a screenwriter.

I began writing short stories in the fourth grade. My first story (which I carefully illustrated and bound with red yarn) was about a group of shipwrecked friends trying to escape a magical world hidden inside an iceberg.

I have always been drawn to stories involving magic, mythic beings and heroes who must navigate alien worlds to survive and, once transformed by their adventures, often find the people around them have also changed.

My all-time favorite film is Jean Cocteau's La Belle et La Bête (Beauty and the Beast), which was released in 1946.

It is everything I crave from film – from great storytelling.

I started screenwriting in 2001 and learned a lot online, most notably from Project Greenlight, which was a television contest with extensive online forums. It was produced by Ben Affleck, Matt Damon, Sean Bailey (a television and film producer now the President of Production at Disney) and Chris Moore (a film producer whose biggest hit to date is the Academy Award-winning Good Will Hunting).

For a year or so, I spent a great deal of my spare time commiserating with other newbie screenwriters on the hardships of learning our craft. I pursued several pros I suspect PGL paid to patiently share their knowledge with even the most recalcitrant of us newbies on the forums. And I read a lot of scripts from first-time writers and compared them to those of classics like Bladerunner and Chinatown.

I learned how to write in the proper script format and, most importantly, honed my writing until my voice was my own: concise, a bit ironic and more than a little darkly comedic.