The Screenwriter's Anti-Manual - a survival guide

1. THE SCREENWRITER’S
A N T I - M A N U A L
A S U R V I V A L G U I D E
by Felipe Braga

2. Screenwriting textbooks and manuals have flooded the
market, and so have script doctors offering a yellow brick
road to commercial success and artistic celebrity. But
knowing the rules doesn't help much if you're not prepared to
break them in the benefit of your audience's surprise. The
panel will discuss some of the "do's and don'ts" clichés
reproduced throughout script manuals and how many of our
favourite films are truly original exactly because they
subverted them. Then, it will discuss how the "Script Writing
101" culture influences producer's decisions. Finally, a look
on the use of algorithms in storytelling, and how they are
shaking the discussion about "what the audience wants".

3. What Christopher Walken's scene in "Pulp Fiction" about his
father hiding a gold watch up his ass teaches us about
screenwriting structures?
QUESTION #1

4. How producers find comfort in screenwriting manuals'
clichés while decoding original storytelling - and why that
doesn't work even for them?
QUESTION #2

5. The film business is based on the assumption that executives
"know what the audience wants". How does the arrival of
algorithms changes the game?
QUESTION #3

6. Two times International Emmy Nominee and SXSW speaker, Brazilian
screenwriter and director Felipe Braga has written different HBO Latin America
series, and feature films as "Cabeca a Premio" and "Marighella". His first work as
a director was "B1", a feature documentary about a blind professional judo
player, followed by the feature fiction transmedia project "Latitudes" - part of a
cross-media project in partnership with YouTube and TNT, and "Life Outside the
Fields" an online documentary series with more than 15M views. Felipe Braga
has a PhD on Cultural History (PUC-Rio, Brazil/ Paris III, Sorbonne Nouvelle),
with a thesis on 19th Century Cinematography.
FELIPE BRAGA