A childhood friend of mine wanted to be a hit songwriter. I was with him once when one of his mentors sat him down and taught him how to listen to songs on the radio. Not just to enjoy them, like regular kids, but to deconstruct them. To sit down at the piano and change them around just enough to make them into something new while still fitting into the formula of what was already successful.

Same rhythm. Similar chords. Altered melody. New words. This method of creation is not plagiarism. It is merely employing a template. That's how my friend had his first number one single before he turned thirty.

How many screenwriting books have you read where the authors point to scenes from classic and hit films as examples of their theories? "Writing the Perfect Thriller" by Neill D. Hicks begs thriller writers to use North by Northwest as a template. Billy Mernit's "Writing the Romantic Comedy" urges his readers to follow the genre's rules as set down in It Happened One Night.

Studios are always looking for something that's the "same but different." As in, Speed is "Die Hard on a bus."

So using a great movie as a template for your script is a good thing. But, like my composer friend learned early on, it's not enough to be a casual consumer of movies. You have to get inside them to see how they work.

Buy the DVDs of films that were successful and are similar to the type of script you want to write. Watch those movies again and again. Don't be afraid to watch the same movie two or three times in the same day. You're not watching it to be entertained anymore. You're trying to learn from it. Study the movie like you would study for a trigonometry test in high school. What motivates the characters? How are their goals expressed? When is the antagonist introduced?

Do you have trouble outlining? Try writing an outline for the movie you're studying. See where the beats fall. It's the rhythm of the story. It's a chord structure to start with, to lay your unique melody and new dialogue on top of.

I stumbled on to a trick when I wrote my second screenplay. It was a story I was struggling with how to tell for ten years until I came upon the 1999 remake of The End of the Affair. It had a unique, non-linear structure that revealed information to its protagonist in an order I felt was appropriate for my character. I went through the movie with index cards. For each DVD "chapter," I wrote on one side of one card all the major story points and the purpose for each scene. Then, on the back of each card, I wrote the equivalent story points and scenes for my story.

That became my template for that script. It gave me an outline that served up a first draft. Scenes would later get shuffled around in subsequent drafts to solve problems that were unique to my story, but I had learned so much about structure that it got me over the big hurdle of having a foundation to work with. Keep in mind, my story is completely different from The End of the Affair. It's set in a different time and place with different characters who have different goals and motivations. You'd never recognize the similarities unless I told you. It didn't sell, but it got decent coverage and contest placement, with one reader comparing it to the similarly structured Best Picture Oscar winner The English Patient.

Whatever problems you're having with your script, if your dialogue is too on-the-nose or your scenes are too long or whatever, pay attention to how the films that came before you handled those pitfalls. Pay real close attention. And don't stop watching them until you get how they did it, so you can do it yourself.

Dan Margules is a screenwriter and co-founder of San Diego Filmmakers. His award-winning short film, Begleiter, is available as a Special Edition from Amazon.com or happy-the-dog.com. It used Wings of Desire as a template (well, actually a little more than a template in this case), which is available in a new Criterion Edition DVD. Both films together would make an excellent study guide.