Naked Screenwriting

Lew Hunter is an American screenwriter, author and educator and is chairman Emeritus and Professor of Screenwriting at the UCLA Department of Film and Television. Over half of the Oscar-winning scripts over the past twenty years have been written by students of Hunter. His former students and advocates include Adrienne Parks, Allison Anders, David Koepp, Mike Werb, Sacha Gervasi, Dan Pyne, David Titcher, Diane Saltzberg, Michael Colleary, Don Mancini, Kathy Stumpe, Darren Star, Alexander Payne, and Tom Shadyac. Steven Spielberg has called Hunter “the best screenwriting teacher going.” Hunter resides in Los Angeles, California.Meg Gifford is a screenwriter and author. She won the Samuel Goldwyn award, the Sloan Science writing award, and every showcase while under Lew’s advisement. She recently wrote a play that was produced in Los Angeles and also writes novels. Gifford resides in Los Angeles, California.

Screenwriting manuals typically walk readers through key structural elements and techniques, using famous scenes as their guide. Here, however, screenwriters Hunter and Gifford provide a wonderful collection of interviews with 22 Oscar-winning screenwriters, mostly conducted in front of an audience of students and professors as part of Hunter’s UCLA graduate course. Legendary writers such as Francis Ford Coppola, William Goldman, Oliver Stone, Callie Khouri, and Billy Wilder move between anecdotal stories and the minutiae of a writer’s process, with a healthy dose of insider information on the business side of Hollywood screenwriting. A clever and original look at the art of screenwriting.