About the Book:

Acclaimed by CNN as the "guru of all screenwriters," and by The Hollywood Reporter as "the most sought after screenwriting teacher in the world," several generations of screenwriters have used Syd Field's bestselling books to ignite successful careers in film.

Four Screenplays: Studies in the American Screenplay is your very own hands-on workshop – the book that allows you to participate in the processes that made the Syd Field workshops and seminars invaluable to beginners and working professionals alike. Here the celebrated lecturer, teacher, and bestselling author analyzes four screenplays to show how a great script is written.

Technology is transforming the art and craft of screenwriting. How does the writer find new ways to tell a story with pictures, to create a truly outstanding film? No one knows more about screenwriting than Syd Field – he provides frame-by-frame analysis of Thelma and Louise, Terminator 2: Judgement Day, The Silence of the Lambs and Dances With Wolves – and explains what made the films work and why.

In Four Screenplays you will learn how:

• Callie Khouri, in her first movie script, Thelma & Louise, rewrote the rules for good road movies and played against type to create a new American classic.

• James Cameron, writer/director of Terminator 2: Judgment Day, created a sequel integrating spectacular special effects and a storyline that transformed the Terminator, the quintessential killing machine, into a sympathetic character.

• Ted Talley adapted Thomas Harris’s chilling 350-page novel, The Silence of the Lambs, into a riveting 120-page script-a lesson in the art and craft of adapting novels into film.

• Michael Blake, author of Dances with Wolves, achieved every writer’s dream as he translated his novel into an uncompromising film. Learn how he used transformation as a spiritual dynamic in this work of mythic sweep.

Informative and utterly engrossing, Four Screenplays belongs in every writer’s library, next to his Screenplay: The Foundations of Screenwriting, which is universally considered to be "the Bible" of screenwriting.

What people say:

"If I were writing screenplays ... I would carry Syd Field around in my back pocket wherever I went." — Steven Bochco, writer/producer/director, L.A. Law, Hill Street Blues, NYPD Blue, Doogie Howser, M.D.

About the Author:

Syd Field (1935-2013) was an internationally acclaimed teacher, lecturer, and popular speaker who held workshops and seminars for writers hoping to grasp Hollywood's magic formula. Writers who learned from Field – including Tina Fey, Alfonso Cuaron, Judd Apatow, John Singleton, and Frank Darabont – worked in all genres of film and television. Born in Hollywood, he grew up immersed in the film world. He attended Hollywood High School and UC Berkeley, where he received a degree in English literature in 1960. He began his career at Wolper Productions in the shipping department before writing for the original Biography TV series. He was also a script consultant for 20th Century Fox, Disney, Universal and TriStar Pictures. In the mid-1970s he began teaching screenwriting at Sherwood Oaks Experimental College on Hollywood Boulevard and went on to became a lecturer at USC and the American Film Institute. He was the American Screenwriting Association's first inductee into the Screenwriting Hall of Fame.