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Showing posts from October, 2013

CARRIE meets IT'S A WONDERFUL LIFE

... that's the story I'm working on right now. I'd read much about Capra's beloved IT'S A WONDERFUL LIFE, but I hadn't seen it.  Before I remedied that, I grabbed a copy of the script (transcribed; if you have a scanned copy, please email me!) — written by Frances Goodrich, Albert Hackett, Frank Capra, and Jo Swerling — and did a page breakdown. I work in four acts, being your traditional three-act structure split equally into quarters.  Feel free to lump my Act Two and Act Three into a single Act Two, if that's your model. The [F] indicates the protagonist's rising or falling fortune at the end of the scene.  Take note how the writers ping-pong George's fortunes during the first half of the story — fortune smiles upon him here and frowns on him there — then they carve out a precipitous, continuous drop in George's fortunes from around page 105 onward, until things finally bottom out at the Climax and his fortunes rapidly ascend during the