The Tools of Screenwriting: A Writer’s Guide to the Craft and the Elements of a Screenplay

In The Tools of Screenwriting, David Howard and Edward Mabley illuminate the essential elements of cinematic storytelling, and reveal the central principles that all good screenplays share. The authors address questions of dramatic structure, plot, dialogue, character development, setting, imagery, and other crucial topics as they apply to the special art of filmmaking.

Howard and Mabley also demonstrate how, on a practical level, the tools of screenwriting work in sixteen notable films, including Citizen Cane, E.T., One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Rashomon, The Godfather, North by Northwest, Chinatown, and sex, lies, and videotape.

David Howard is an active screenwriter, ＂script doctor,＂ and script consultant, both in Hollywood and in Europe. He is also the founding director of the Graduate Screenwriting Program at the University of Southern California’s School of Cinema-Television. In addition to his teaching duties at USC, he frequently lectures and teaches, often in conjunction with Frank Daniel, throughout Europe as well as around the United States. He lives in Santa Monica, California, with his wife, the painter Victoria McClay.

Edward Mabley, besides being the author of Dramatic Construction, wrote, among other works, the play Glad Tidings and the text of the grand opera The Plough and the Stars (after the play by Sean O’Casey). He wrote radio and television plays, directed in television, and taught at the New School for Social Research in New York. He died in 1984.

Frank Daniel has been head of many of the world’s most renowned film schools. He was Dean of FAMU, the Czech film school, during the 1960s ＂Prague Spring.＂ He was the first dean of the Center for Advanced Film Studies at the American Film Institute, then he became co-chairman of Columbia University’s Film Division with his former student, Milos Forman. He went on to become the first dean of the newly expanded School of Cinema-Television at the University of Southern California. He was also the first artistic director of the Sundance Institute, and artistic director of the Flemish European Media Institute in Brussels. He is currently a professor in the Graduate Screenwriting Program, at USC and continues with his own extensive screenwriting schedule as well as teaching regularly in Europe.