Imagine this: you are an American working on a Norwegian screenplay on a Greek island which you must deliver to the director in Spain when finished. Sound like a new half-hour sitcom? Actually this is just one of my many personal experiences I have had in the past few years that leads me to be a firm believer of "global screenwriting." Yes, and I feel it is a phenomenon that is both exciting and definitely on the rise!

What exactly do I mean by global screenwriting, I hear someone say? Well, for a number of reasons I will mention below, I think the term embraces a double view of screenwriting today. First, as my opening suggests, I am speaking of multi-national and cross-cultural possibilities for writers everywhere. And yet, I am also referring to increased chances of writing and making your film locally and getting it out to an exciting variety of places, countries, and venues.

I wish to say from the start, loud and clear, that this first "in print" issue of SCREENTALK is itself a helpful vote for global screenwriting. Under the able leadership of Eric Lilleør, this website has grown, in just a few brief years, to being the major site on the net, for those around the world who wish to stay in touch with developments in screenwriting everywhere, from Santa Monica to Istanbul and back again. Clearly, SCREENTALK understands what more and more writers globally have discovered: that the net is a new lifeline for almost every aspect of the craft and business of writing and selling scripts.

Below are some of my thoughts on this important topic. With these thoughts, I am beginning to put together my next book on screenwriting, which will be a follow up to my previous script books, Writing The Character Centered Screenplay (2nd edition, 1999), and Laughing Out Loud: Writing The Comedy Centered Screenplay (2000), both with the University of California Press.

I begin with the fact that, yes, Hollywood still dominates most box office receipts everywhere. But increasingly, mainstream Hollywood films are not the only game in town, or nation, or world. Screenwriting, like filmmaking itself, has truly gone global in ways no one could have predicted, say, ten years ago.

Did you know that 25% of German television is written by Hollywood writers?

Were you aware that many countries including the European Union have script development money through government-sponsored film funds that can include "foreign" writers as well as native screenwriters? And then there is the global impact of the Internet: of course, we all know that The Blair Witch Project was such a hit, for the most part because of its website, which was set up a year before the film appeared. Screenwriting and the Internet, as SCREENTALK so well demonstrates, thus becomes a major topic for us all.

But in the following pages I wish to touch on different representatives of global screenwriting today including some of my own experiences and to discuss Five (But Not the Only!) Commandments of Global Screenwriting.

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