Hey everyone Hope you’re all having a wonderful day. I was hoping to please get some feedback. Before I carry on. I’m working on my pitch deck - I’m just playing around with tone and the vibe of how it looks - the writing will be changed as I just wanted to se show it looked. Soo ignore the actual words because they will be changed. I’ve only done three pages. Before work - is this the kind of thing and way it’s meant to look. I’ can’t seem to find examples or many online, so I’m guessing. Thank you sm.

I live in Santa Monica, 6 blocks from the beach. I didn't go to film school, or really know anybody when I moved here years ago. But in that time I've... - Dabbled in movies. Co-wrote Shrek 2, Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius, Disenchanted, the Smurfs movies, the Rugrats movies, and Are We There Yet? - Made a few dimes on my way to $2.5B cumulative box office across a 30+ year career writing, rewriting, pitching, and fixing projects for Disney, Dreamworks, Paramount, Fox, etc. - Written for Eddie Murphy, Cameron Diaz, Mike Myers, Neil Patrick Harris, Sofia Vergara, Ice Cube, Katy Perry, Antonio Banderas, Patrick Dempsey, Hank Azaria, Cuba Gooding Jr. etc etc. - Invested my dimes in a house in Pacific Palisades, so my kids could grow up in one idyllic little town, rather than get bounced from place to place like I did. - Watched said town burn down in Jan. 2025, including that house and everything in it. Then watched my daughter go from devastated to thriving her freshman year at NYU. - The same year, I built The Writer's Forge to 620+ members, coaching writers three times per week. Because it's all, all of it, about mindset. - Created the Primal Forge Method: a character-first story development process that helps writers find the emotional engine of their story before touching structure. - Developed proprietary tools already working inside the community: Primal Forge GPT and The Diner Test. Next up: Helping 25 serious screenwriters write, finish and market the best screenplay of their lives in a private cohort I'm calling The Screenplay Forge. If you're ready to get serious and take your writing to the next level, click here to apply. First in, first served. Lock your place now.

I got the news yesterday, and I am incredibly grateful! The thing is, my rugby team is from San Francisco, that's why I submitted to the SF Int'l Screenwriting & Film Awards. Then I submitted to the Cannes Script Festival Summer Season because it's in France and my team and the sport of rugby have deep roots there. I am so honored that out of 410 submissions, Cannes selected my story because it brings this wild life I had full circle. On the 1967 Olympic Rugby Club tour to Ireland, England, Wales, and France, for which my dad was the athletic trainer, and my mom got to be a tourist, the rugby team literally broke apart from the Olympic Club in a hotel room in Paris and returned to San Francisco as two different teams—the former Olympic Club, and the one that raised me, The Bay Area Touring Side, B.AT.S. And I got to celebrate my 18th birthday in Paris in a most fitting way, under a full moon at a rugby match with a special man in my life who happened to be the coach of the team. LOL, but that's another story for another time. So wild that on the same day, two different countries that had an impact on my life, selected my story about rugby, found family and belonging, and it feels so good! Thanks to the Writer's Forge @David Stem , @Anna Fermin, @Chad Desrochers and everyone here for being so supportive as I share my first screenplay's awesome journey!

I used to be a hungry writer with ideas, instincts, and zero map. No industry access. No real feedback. No one who could tell me what was alive in my work. I once wrote a magazine piece I thought would be my big break. Got a form rejection. Cried in the shower because I felt like an idiot for believing it might happen. I knew what it felt like to be isolated, broke, scared, and creatively unsure. To write things that were funny but shapeless. To be told the work was clever while knowing you could feel the writer trying too hard on every page. Then I learned three things the hard way. Talent isn't enough. Silence only changes when you take action. And real story doesn't start with structure. It starts with what a character is avoiding. Those lessons carried me through a 30+ year career writing and rewriting for major studios. Shrek 2. Jimmy Neutron. Disenchanted. Walking red carpets. Watching movies premiere. And eventually building this groovy little place to help serious screenwriters get the process, courage, and professional direction I wish I'd had when I was starting out. Want the process I wish someone had handed me back then? Comment YES and I'll send you the details.

Most screenwriters are formatting before their character is alive. The problem is that format feels like progress. INT. DINER - NIGHT. Clean margins. Courier 12. It looks like a real script, so you start defending it. That leads to months polishing dialogue and protecting scenes built on an engine that was never running. Ninety pages that look like a movie and feel like nothing. Technically perfect. Emotionally dead. And you can't figure out why nobody leans in. // I know because I did it for years. I moved to Hollywood at 22. The Rugrats Movie came when I was 33. In between: - Three and a half years in aerospace, where I thought I'd die of boredom - Journalism - Advertising - Sketch comedy Every job built a skill. None of it coalesced. Because at the keyboard I did what you're probably doing right now. I ran to the script. I told myself I'd find the story in the drafting. That wasn't a process. That was me treating my ADHD. // Then Sherry Lansing, the President of Paramount, wouldn't let me. She made my writing partner and me write the treatment over and over. And over. She wouldn't let me run to the pages. She made me find the story. The story came from character. And once it was right, the screenplay emerged from it. First draft in five weeks. The notes went from "there's a lot of great stuff here" to "you've written a beautiful story and you should be very proud." That movie opened at #1, beat Will Smith's Enemy of the State, and made $100 million. Eleven years of skills finally coalesced, because someone held my feet to the fire. // So here's what I'd do instead. Build the character before you build a single scene. - The Wound - The Lie - The small life they've settled for - The hunger underneath the plot Then forge the whole movie in prose, a treatment and then a scriptment, while it's still soft enough to change. This is because a living character generates the story. Structure stops being a checklist you force from outside. It becomes pressure the character produces from inside. The scenes have to exist, because the character makes them.