Screenwriting Book Review: "Writing A Great Movie"

A while back, I promised to share the occasional screenwriting book review. When I was starting out, I'd view these books with skepticism but now I find that a good, well thought out guide can introduce a new tool, sharpen your skills or allow you to better analyze a script's problems ...it's just a matter of separating the dross from the gold. Yes, Third World Girl's age of cynicism with regard to books on screenwriting is dead. It died right around the time I discovered Jeff Kitchen's “Writing a Great Movie: Key Tools for Successful Screenwriting.”


“Writing a Great Movie: Key Tools for Successful Screenwriting” targets the experienced, adventurous writer willing to go outside the usual starter-kit when it comes to crafting the salable screenplay.

Kitchen brings forth a mishmash of approaches that defy easy categorization but are exceptional at refreshing a stalled script. Using six hit movies—“Training Day,” “What Women Want,” “Minority Report,” “The Godfather,” “Tootsie” and “Blade Runner”, “Writing a Great Movie” brings to light seven approaches, or tools, to turn mere story into drama. In addition, once Kitchen explains how to use these tools, he mimics the writer’s creative process, building an original story from scratch using the methods presented.

Many screenwriters will already be familiar with some of Kitchen’s kit like “The 36 Dramatic Situations” and the “Enneagram,” a blend of tradition and psychology that comes together in a personality profile of nine behavioral character types. Other familiar concepts have been recast as tools in surprisingly effective ways. Kitchen shows, for example, how writers can use dilemma to shape an entire plot and how theme is the lens that brings drama and clarity to an unfocused story.

Rounding out these tools are “The Central Proposition” and “Sequence, Proposition, Plot” which both use the power of logic to help bring order to the chaotic creative process. The Central Proposition strips the script down to three sentences. “Sequence, Proposition, Plot” extends this approach to outlining the entire script working backwards from the final outcome of the story.

Kitchen makes this all much more entertaining than it should be with his easy style, practical strategies and continuous check-in with his chosen movies. Though “Writing a Great Movie” sometimes feels like several different books because of the lack of a cogent theme, and because any of the tools could spawn two hundred pages in their own right, Kitchen does an admirable job of showing writers the “road less taken” when it comes to ratcheting up drama.

Shelf or Toss: Shelf. I turn to this book as a diagnostic tool to help solve script problems at the end of a draft or to brainstorm upping the conflict on a rewrite.