Martell - The Secrets Of Action Screenwriting (fully revised edition)

Welcome to the new edition of Secrets Of Action Screenwriting. You know, I never set out to write a best selling screenwriting book that would go for $510 as a rare edition on Amazon when it went out of print. All I ever wanted to do was write screenplays. After selling a script to a producer with a deal at Paramount, I quit my warehouse job and moved to Los Angeles to begin writing full time. I subscribed to every screenwriting newsletter or magazine, including the little newsletter that would eventually become Script Magazine. Almost every article was from some guru trying to sell their book or class. When I complained that no one seemed to have any actual screenwriting experience, the newsletter gave me a regular column... without pay.

As I continued to sell scripts and have them actually get produced, my friends started giving me their action and thriller scripts to read for feedback... and I found myself typing up the same notes again and again. So I created a master list of notes in a red booklet. Now I could say, Read page 12, page 17, page 32 and page 49. When the booklet expanded to 100 pages, a friend suggested I throw a cover on it and sell it. That was the first version of this book, made at a copyshop in the early 1990s; and up until *this* version, some of the chapters and sections remained completely unchanged. If you are one of the hundred people with one of those booklets, you have a real collectors item.

Another friend thought that little red booklet was the best screenwriting book he had ever read, and suggested I expand it and find a publisher. I wrote some new material, beefing the book up to 240 pages, then sent it to several publishers who specialized in film and screenwriting books. They all turned it down for the same reason - it focused on a single genre. One of the publishers suggested I rewrite the book so that it would be about general screenwriting and let them look at the new version. I thought they were all missing the point - the shelves were already flooded with general screenwriting books, but there wasnt a single book on how to write a specific genre. And Secrets Of Action worked well as a general screenwriting book even though it *also* contained techniques used in the action genre. I believed in my book.

So I took the money from my next screenplay sale, found a printer, and became my own publisher. When that run sold out, I switched printers and did another couple of runs. I was the top selling screenwriting book in the Sam French bookstores - they couldnt keep them on the shelves! Amazon sold hundreds every month, and the book ended up a featured selection of a film and theater bookclub. Other books that focused on a single genre began popping up on the bookstore shelves... many from the same publishers who wanted me to rewrite this book.

Those old chapters and sections from the original master list of script notes bothered me - they needed a page one rewrite. Plus, many of the film references were decades out of date. I decided not to do another print run until Id done a complete rewrite on the book... which became difficult, because my real job is writing screenplays. For a few years this book remained out of print while I wrote scripts, did endless rounds of studio meetings and did jury duty on Film Festival juries around the world.

But now the time has come to revise the book, to add what Ive learned over the past few years and examine the way the action film has evolved in the 21st Century. I have not only updated the book, I've almost doubled it in length by added new techniques and tools and digging deeper into why one film is a classic and another is now forgotten. The last version of the book was 240 pages, this version is over 460 pages!