Episode Three: The Backstory Behind The Vampire Russell
Screenwriter Backstory Hi. I’m Jeff Goldstein, and welcome to Screenwriter’s Backstory. Sometimes a screenplay starts with an actual story. The Vampire Russell didn’t. In 2015, I went on a screenwriting retreat in Costa Rica, and one of the exercises was to write scenes exploring mood and tone. So I wrote several completely unrelated scenes. One was […]
Episode Two: Why I Write
Why do I write screenplays? It’s not just because I love movies. In Episode Two, of Screenwriter’s Backstory, I share the personal reason I keep telling stories.
Episode One: Where Do Ideas Come From?
Have you ever been asked where an idea comes from? It’s one of the questions I hear most often as a screenwriter. People imagine there’s a magical moment when a story suddenly appears out of nowhere. The truth is, ideas rarely arrive fully formed. More often, they’re smaller sparks – a conversation, a news story, a memory, or a simple “what if?” – that grow into something much larger.