Screenwriting Articles

Welcome to our archive of screenwriting articles, written by BlueCat founder and judge Gordy Hoffman.

We hope they shed light on possible solutions to the challenges you might face as a screenwriter.

Please contact us if you have any comments or questions. Do you have an idea of a future screenwriting article? Let us know.


5 Storytelling Flaws in The Great Gatsby

I haven’t read F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby since I was in the ninth grade, twenty years ago now, but I do remember it being a quick read; at fifty thousand words, an average reader can go cover to cover in little more than four hours. Watching the most recent film adaptation takes about [read more]

Top 5 Silent Sequences in Film #BlueCatBlog

Theater has dialogue, novels have the internal lives of characters, and movies have dynamic visuals. There is, of course, overlap. Many films are driven by dialogue, as are many novels, and the visuals in a Robert Wilson operetta are more important than mere words. But film is, as the cliché goes, a visual medium, and [read more]

Four Screenwriting Lessons We Can Learn from Iron Man 3

I don’t usually like to go to movies on their opening weekend—crowds of more than twenty tend to make me nervous—but it can occasionally be fun to see a big movie in a packed house. You get caught up in the atmosphere of the whole affair and have a better time than you would were [read more]

How To Win BlueCat by Gordy Hoffman

  Are you preparing to send in your screenplay to the BlueCat Screenplay Competition before the deadline? What can you do before you enter to increase your chances of advancing, placing and perhaps winning BlueCat? The first thing you should know is BlueCat is very hard to win. Our readers are incredibly tough on our [read more]

Kubrick’s Boxes

I watched a movie on Kubrick’s boxes last night. The master would prepare so completely and with such great detail, he left behind thousands of boxes of photographs, notes, memos, fan letters and blank stationary, all collected and stored meticulously in service of the development of his work, produced and very much unproduced. To some, [read more]

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