Released to mixed reviews in 2005, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close is a first-person, non-linear, stream-of-consciousness novel narrated by a ten-year-old boy with Asperger syndrome. To handle the tricky adaptation, Hollywood turned to Eric Roth, acclaimed screenwriter of such other challenging adaptations as Forrest Gump, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, The Insider and Munich.

"Gee. I forgot my line," says Marilyn Monroe (Michelle Williams) in The Weinstein Company's My Week with Marilyn, in theatres now. To which her exasperated co-star and director, Laurence Olivier (Kenneth Branagh), angrily calls, "Cut."

Hollywood is all about connections. Networking is how people make connections. L.A. has tons of networking events every week, helping people meet people who can help them move forward to the next stage of their career.

As a writer, it's easy to get so caught up in networking that you don't leave yourself time to keep writing. As an unproduced writer with no income, it's also easy to go broke joining all the various networking organizations all over town.

If you want to write screenplays, you have to read screenplays -- to see what they look like. But stay away from the "classics." Standard screenwriting styles have evolved over the decades.

Take a look at the Oscar-nominated screenplay for Alfred Hitchcock's 1959 masterpiece North by Northwest. Here's how Ernest Lehman described the iconic image of a cropduster bearing down on Cary Grant:

You may have heard famous screenwriters tell anecdotes about walking studio executives through their scripts, literally performing the scenes, in 45-minute pitches. Those writers are established professionals who were invited to pitch directly to head of the studio. That's not what happens at a pitch festival.

You get five minutes with a junior assistant. You're trying to convince them to read your script because it may be the one they can take to their boss that will get made and get them a promotion.

Last month I wrote that story trumps everything else when it comes to filmmaking. When you read a novel, you need a reason to keep turning the pages. You have to want to know what's going to happen next. Even though we're a captive audience while watching a movie, locked in a dark room with strangers for two hours, we need to be engaged in a story unfolding from scene to scene to keep us from playing with our smart phones or just getting up and leaving.

Yes, this Friday brings two more remakes to theaters. On the heels of underperformers Fright Night and Straw Dogs comes a remake of John Carpenter's 1982 remake of Howard Hawks' The Thing, as well as an update of the 1984 musical Footloose.

For me, story is 90% of a movie. Someone asks me what I thought of a movie, my answer will mostly be based on its story. It seems basic to me, but then I'll come out of a movie that had three meandering subplots that never came together and my friends will say, "Wow, what a great movie. I loved the performances!"

Earlier this year I moderated a panel of professional screenwriters and a development exec. They talked about how letter perfect your script must be for a studio to absolutely fall in love with it. Then they told us how they make that perfect script even more perfect by hiring twenty-four more writers to incorporate notes from marketing experts, stars, directors and industry pros who all understand what audiences want better than we novice writers ever could.

The first question from the audience was: Then how come movies suck?

My friend Michael Engel, president of the Scriptwriters Network, always says there's nothing sadder than a lonely screenwriter. That's why he appointed me to coordinate the organization's Writers Groups program, to help writers connect with other writers who can help each other.

Some writers like to stay in their cave and view other writers as their competition. But Tate Taylor and Kathryn Stockett are a recent example of writers helping each other.