I was just watching a commentary on The Empire Strikes Back, and the person had an interesting take on things. She was talking about the sequences where Luke sees a vision of his friends in pain, and Yoda tells him he's seeing the future. Will they die? It's ...

We talk a lot about Franchises here because those have been the big, widely known movies/stories in the culture in recent years.

But it's not all about Franchises - one thing that a standalone story can do, and occasionally does, is have an ending that changes the world forever ...

Within the past couple years I finally saw the original ending of Little Shop of Horrors directed by Frank Oz. This movie made a big impact on the culture when it came out. It wasn't super important to me personally, so it was years after the release of the ...

I've had this Newspost in mind again since I saw Spider Man: No Way Home. That movie pushes the nostalgia buttons with abandon, to an extent I couldn't believe. To avoid having anything spoiled I rushed out to the theater to see it as soon as I could ...

Last week I talked about what kind of stuff to stick in the middle section of stories.

Here's a tangent I found myself on, about the actual halfway mark:

Well, the middle bit almost always contains the actual halfway point of the story. In many stories this is a ...

We've talked before about theme in these Newsposts.

Many people know what a theme is, but just to set it up right, theme is what a story is about, on a deeper level. It's about the journey the character is taking. It's the larger “point” of the ...

Do the things you draw come true?

At the end of Annie Hall, Woody Allen's character writes a play that recreates his breakup with Annie. But in the fictional version, they stay together and the romance continues. Narrating the movie, Woody apologizes to the movie's audience and says ...

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Endings… getting them right is SO very hard. We've chatted about this before but this time Tantz has a number of good methods to make them ...

The original story of the Dark Crystal was released in 1982 by the Jim Henson company. It was a viewing staple for many children who are now adults with a dark, yet hopeful storyline. It was a story about balance with the mystic Urus contrasted against the devious Skesis. There ...

At the end of Annie Hall, Woody Allen's character writes a play that recreates his breakup with Annie. But in the fictional version, they stay together and the romance continues. Woody is apologetic to the movie's audience and says “What can I say; it was my first play ...