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Articles by Linda Cowgill |
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Linda Cowgill began her screenwriting career after completing her MFA at UCLA's School of Film and Television. While covering scripts for various agencies and production houses, she landed her first job writing for THE INCREDIBLE HULK at Universal Television.
She sold a feature screenplay that Orion Pictures produced. The film, OPPOSING FORCE, starred Tom Skerrit, Lisa Eichhorn, Anthony Zerbe and Richard Roundtree, but was credited to Gil Cowan -- Linda's pseudonym after seeing a rough cut of the film.
Linda has written television and films for Paramount, Universal, MGM, Warner Bros., and several small independents. She wrote for the acclaimed series LIFE GOES ON before her daughter arrived on the scene. Since then, she has focused more on teaching screenwriting.
She has taught seminars and workshops at the American Film Institute, the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., the Boston Film Institute, Loyola Marymount University, the Los Angeles Film School, IFP Miami and NALIP. Her books, Secrets of Screenplay Structure and Writing Short Films, are used at colleges and universities across the US, Canada and the UK. Recently, Writing Short Films has been translated into German, and Secrets of Screenplay Structure into Korean.
Her experience mentoring screenwriters in the LA Film School's Feature Film Development Program led her to create The Art of Plotting seminar. Linda saw that while her writers were using structural concepts, they were still not maximizing the emotional, creative and technical potential of their stories. Building on the lessons she gave to those writers, The Art of Plotting hopes to provide other writers with the effective tools to weave the threads of their stories into emotional, compelling and unified wholes.
BOOKS BY LINDA
- Secrets of Screenplay Structure: How to Recognize and Emulate the Structural Frameworks of Great Films (1999, iFilm publishing)
- Writing Short Films: Structure and Content for Screenwriters (1997, iFilm publishing)
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