NineCo-Drafting the Script

“What a feeling having you inside my head.… Indescribable—you knew just when to feed me the next thing, just a split second before I needed it. There was a rhythm we got into, like great sex.”

—Tom Grunick (William Hurt), Broadcast News

Of all the questions people ask us about the collaborative process—and there are many—the most frequent one is, “How do you actually write it together?” They can see how two or more writers brainstorm and create character, story, and structure, but how two or more writers put one script on paper is perplexing.

And no wonder. It’s the most intimate part of the process, a shift from foreplay to performance, to borrow Marshall Brickman’s marriage-bedroom metaphor—“You never really know ...

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