'No Sudden Move' Writer Ed Solomon Teaches Us About Success, Failure, Growth, and Alaskan Strip Clubs
Host George Edelman welcomes Ed Solomon to share how lessons from both success and failure—along with one wild night at an Alaskan strip club—have had a hand in shaping the writer he is today.
In this episode, we talk about…
- How Ed’s high school experience inspired him to be a writer and why he tells himself he’s an imposter daily
- How shifting from big-budget films to smaller specs expanded Ed’s creative path
- How a trip to an Alaskan strip club led Ed to write the play Strip Club and how it got him hired for Laverne & Shirley
- The fallacy about gateways that lead to your career—you make your own path
- Why Ed considers Men in Black as a series of failures that culminated in success
- Developing a skill set to learn how to write while you write and learning from every script
- How Ed approaches storytelling:
- Remember you’re always dealing with point of view even if you don’t realize it
- Know what it means to have a healthy relationship with the audience and always keep in mind what they know
- Examples of objective vs. subjective points of view
- Consider your audience as a friendly ally
Advice for new writers:
- Get other people to say your words out loud and listen to it
- Take your words and mount it, direct it, film it, edit it
- Take acting, editing, and cinematography classes
- Watch your very favorite movies and transcribe them—internalize what those writers did
What you can learn from transcribing films:
- How little dialogue you actually need
- How little stage direction you need
- How short scenes are and how they do not have a beginning, middle and end but just a middle (usually)
- The importance of sequences and how things are a juxtaposition of little pieces to form a sequence
- You really only learn about writing screenplays by writing a bunch of screenplays
- Why Ed is choosing to keep a beginner’s mind until the end
Links to Resources:
- No Sudden Move on HBO max
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- Check out our new video on lighting night shoots.
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Ask us questions at editor@nofilmschool.com!
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This episode of The No Film School Podcast was produced by George Edelman.
