On Screenwriting: Twenty Screenplays by Women to Study

Twenty screenplays written by women to download for free and study.

“Hi, I’m really writing a screenplay and am definitely not a random photo of a woman working at a laptop that Cole Haddon found online.”

My dear friend writer-director Liz W. Garcia (THE LIFEGUARD) recently replied on Twitter to a tweet from a male filmmaker recommending a series of “perfect” feature scripts…written exclusively by men. Sadly, it’s far from the first time I’ve seen filmmakers (consciously or unconsciously) omit women from the cinematic conversation.

If you’re an aspiring, emerging, or established screenwriter and you are not reading screenplays by women, you are failing yourself in so many different ways. Amongst them:

• The educational factor: losing out on seeing how 51% of the population think to write screenplays, how they approach characters both female and male, how they resolve conflicts, and more.
• The patriarchy factor: participating in the sexist system of Hollywood storytelling that has dominated for nearly a century and appears will do so, according to most data, for many years to come. Male or female or however else you identify, don’t focus entirely on what the Industry and our childhoods tell us make…