Latest in Screenwriting

UPDATED with latest: The Oscars, strike-delayed Writers Guild Awards and the 2023-24 awards season are history, and it’s time to look at what’s ahead trophy show-wise. Here is a list of awards shows, events and the like ahead as we cruise into Emmy season and look ahead to Cannes, the fall film…

The WGA West said today that it has settled an arbitration claim with CBS regarding work done by its members after writers rooms were closed on a trio of series. In a note to members, WGAW leaders said the network will pay $3.05 million to two dozen affected writers on the dramas MacGyver, SEAL Team and Ha…

Loyola Marymount University School of Film and Television honored the winners of its inaugural MFA Screenwriting Competition, a contest that engages industry leaders to evaluate the best work emerging from the student body. The winning students were selected blindly by a panel of more than 40…

The David Hemingson-scripted Alexander Payne dramedy The Holdovers and Cord Jefferson’s American Fiction were the big film winners at the strike-delayed 2024 Writers Guild Awards, which were handed out Sunday in Los Angeles and New York. Jefferson — who also was honored with the WGA West’s Paul Selvi…

The screenwriters and authors behind Oppenheimer, Origin, American Fiction, Poor Things and Killers of the Flower Moon and The Crown, Daisy Jones & The Six, The Last of Us, Winning Time and last year’s TV winner Slow Horses have been nominated for this year’s USC Libraries Scripter Awards. In its…

Final Draft 13 dropped this week, which introduces more workspace customization on the screenwriting software. “With Final Draft 13, writers have more tools than ever to enhance productivity,” Shelly Mellott, President of Final Draft, said in a statement. “We're excited to help writers set goals for…

Deadline’s Read the Screenplay series spotlighting the year’s most talked-about scripts continues with Flora and Son, John Carney’s latest indie ode to music that stars Eve Hewson in a breakout role. Written and directed by Carney, whose credits include the song-centered Once, Begin Again and Sing Str…

Sylvester Stallone took his friend’s advice on a rewrite of the original screenplay to Rocky. A few tweaks later, he was on his way to major success. In the new Netflix documentary Sly, Stallone discussed how he initially conceived of the project, which had a much harder edge. In the early version…

Few living screenwriters boast the credits of Eric Roth, even before he teamed with Martin Scorsese on an adaptation of David Grann’s Killers of the Flower Moon. Besides his Oscar-winning job adapting Forrest Gump, Roth’s work includes Dune, A Star Is Born, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, The Good She…

EXCLUSIVE: Ron Bass, the scribe best known for his Academy Award-winning work on Rain Man, has been set to write and produce Music on the Bones, a new film inspired by real events. Set in 1968. a moment in time when rock n’ roll was banned in the USSR, the story follows young Russian doctor Max as he…

EXCLUSIVE: In one of the first big spec sales following the resolution of the WGA strike, Ben Ketai’s script Undying has sold to Netflix for development under its first-look feature deal with Shawn Levy’s 21 Laps. Deadline hears that the deal was for mid-six against seven figures. 21 Laps brought the…

Over a week after Israel was brutally attacked by Hamas terrorists, a number of showrunners today publicly called out the Writer's Guild for their silence on the matter. Today, in an open letter posted to Medium, senior showrunners expressed disappointment that the WGA has not spoken. “When it…