Incoherent rambling #1

I've been thinking a lot about what makes a script successful lately. If I think about most of the big budget movies that have hit the theaters this year, a few things to come to mind. The word "junk" is one of them. Between Saw 12 and High School Musical 15 and Bond 22 (that's actually the real number), it's pretty obvious that a lot of scripts these days are not first attempts at completely original ideas from unknown writers (we can't all be Diablo Cody). It seems like most big scripts these days are top-down scripts, where orders come from studio executives to create a certain type of film (mainly horror, comedy, or kids stuff) or even a very specific film (like Bond 22) and then they either pick a writer or have a few writers make proposals.
Anyway the point I was trying to get to in a roundabout way is that in an ideal world masterful scripts would make the industry go round, rather than all this junk we have to deal with (or ignore, though sometimes the trailers are so good it's hard to know what to expect). Sure there are exceptions, and good new writers get good deals once in a while, but how on Earth do all these studios and producers and agents read scripts like She's All That and think to themselves "This could be a hit!" and not "How did I make it all the way through that script without falling asleep?"

Where to go for screenwriting info

I've run into various books and websites over the last few years that I find especially helpful in the writing process. Here are a few of them:

Story by Robert McKee
Scriptologist
The Artful Writer blog and forums
Todd Alcott's blog
and a bunch of others

Welcome to my screenwriting blog!

I've been a casual screenwriter for a few years now, but I only started devoting serious time to it in the past year. So I haven't actually finished any scripts yet, but I've spent a lot of time studying screenwriting, writing and rewriting outlines, and working on the first draft of a feature-length script somewhere between the action and drama categories.