PEOPLE & NEWS
The Buzz
Herb Sargent RIP, revenge of scripted TV, HuffingtonPost.com, instant theater.

Anatomy of a Spec Sale
The punch line to Michael LeSieur's joke was a $1.75 million spec sale.

Production Co. Spotlight
Lost Scenes
Time Bandits
This 1981 cult classic shows that cutting to the chase may mean cutting your opening.

People
Maxine Lewis, Jack Bailey

Breaking In
Michael Martin, Ben Olson
Why I Write
Rafael Yglesias's Dark Water

The Final Scene
The Brothers Grimm
By Ehren Kruger

Coming Soon...
Four Brothers
Personal loss and '70s films inform this gritty tale of vengeance. By Yon Motskin

Murderball
One of the year's best documentaries uses writing to show its atheletes as people, not cripples. By Jeff Goldsmith

Pretty Persuasion
This blackly comic tale of a Muslim schoolgirl's L.A. corruption packs a major punch. By Jeff Goldsmith

The Island
Two Alias writers script Michael Bay's existentialist action movie. By David Konow

Wedding Crashers
These friends followed their bliss to write a major summer comedy. By Jeff Goldsmith

Happy Endings
Don Roos breaks the rules of screenwriting in his new comedy. By Nancy Hendrickson

Bewitched
Nora and Delia Ephron's remake gives the '60s sitcom a post-modern twist. By Jeremy Smith

The Devil's Rejects
Straw Dogs meets Deliverance in Rob Zombie's latest thriller. By Christian Divine

Night Watch
From Russia, with vampires. By Jeff Goldsmith

Columns
The Busine$$ of Screenwriting
Want to Make a Difference?
Tired of hero-gets-the-girl epics or rehashing Gen-X angst? The world is waiting for your voice. By Ron Suppa

Writer Beware!
The Top Ten Ways to Get Taken
From bogus contests to producers who can barely produce a business card, here's a guide to some of the biz's worst pitfalls. By Steve Ryfle

Agent's Hot Sheet
Write For Free (for Fun & Profit!)
To write for free or not to write for free, that is the question. These agents and managers have the answer. By Jim Cirile

Our Craft
Learning to Love High Concept
Once you understand high concept and how it can help your career, you might just start to like it. Or at least respect it a little more. By Karl Iglesias

The Contest Beat
Rolling Contest Pros and Cons
There are some great reasons to focus on contests with monthly deadlines...and some great reasons not to. By Patricia B. Smith

You've Got to Produce
Give Me a (Tax) Break!
The tax breaks offered to producers by The American Jobs Creation Act seem unbelievable...are they? By Catherine Clinch

Features
Ehren Kruger's Key to a Grimm Summer
It's an Ehren Kruger summer, with two of the writer's films hitting screens within weeks of each other. The scripter talks about how he made The Brothers Grimm into fictional dragonslayers, and conjured a Skeleton Key from his interest in American folk magic. By Jeff Goldsmith

Virgin Territory: Judd Apatow and Steve Carell Talk Funny
Take one character thought up by a Daily Show actor, stir in the writer/executive producer of Freaks and Geeks, and put them together on the set of Anchorman. Thus was born a 40-Year-Old Virgin. Here Apatow and Carell discuss how Univeral greenlit their film so quickly, the intricacies of their writing process, and how they focused on a character-driven tale rather than a more typical set-piece-centric comedy. By Jeff Goldsmith

Hollywood Roundtable: Science Fiction and Fantasy Films
In a summer of everything from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory to The Island (and with another Harry Potter on the way), these are great days for science fiction and fantasy films -- or are they? The writers, producers, and agents behind these genres tell you about the market and its rule. By Josh Spector

The Fantastic Four's Fantastic Four: Stan Lee, Michael France, Mark Frost, Simon Kinberg
The Fantastic Four has ruled Marvel Comics for over four decades, but they've never hit the big screen with the budget they deserve till this summer. We talk to one of the FF's creators, three of the film's writers, plus the director and the chairman of Marvel Studios to track the cinematic brith of comics' first modern superhero group. By Jeff Goldsmith

Bulletproofing Your One-Hour Dramatic TV Spec
What does it take to have a one-hour spec ready for staffing season? We talk to the showrunners and producers behind Alias, Without a Trace, and Veronica Mars to find out what they're looking for when they're reading your scripts -- and what they're thinking when you're sitting across from them in that all-important first meeting. By Jason Davis