About Jurgen Wolff

Jurgen Wolff is a writer, teacher, and creativity consultant. In the United States, he wrote for sitcoms including Benson and Family Ties. He wrote the feature film, The Real Howard Spitz, starring Kelsey Grammer and directed by Vadim Jean. He was a script doctor on the hit film, Mannequin and others starring Michael Caine, Walter Matthau, and Eddie Murphy. For Germany, he co-created the comedy series, Lukas, which ran for 65 episodes, and an original comedy series called Krista. He also wrote nine episodes of the series, Relic Hunter. He wrote two TV movies for the Olsen Twins, and several the German TV movies including, On Top of the Volcano, starring Maria Schrader and Sebastian Koch (2007). His play, Killing Mother, was produced at the Gorky Theatre in Berlin, and he’s also had plays produced in New York, Los Angeles, and London.
As a writing and creativity teacher, his courses include Beyond Brainstorming, Create Your Future, The Creative Breakthrough Workshop and the ground-breaking Script Coach Series developed exclusively for Raindance. He has presented his courses at the University of Southern California, the University of Barcelona, the Skyros Institute, many films schools, and groups and organisations including The Academy for Chief Executives, Egmont, Grundy-UFA, and Columbia-Tri-Star. For eight years he was a visiting lecturer for the Pilots Program in Sitges.
His books include Your Writing Coach and Your Creative Writing Masterclass (Nicholas Brealey Publishing), Creativity Now (Pearson), Do Something Different (Virgin Business Books), Successful Scriptwriting (Writers Digest Press), Top Secrets: Screenwriting (Lone Eagle Press), and Successful Sitcom Writing (St. Martin’s Press).
He has written for many publications including the Los Angeles Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, Broadcast Magazine, and he is the editor of Brainstorm, the creativity ebulletin.
by Jurgen Wolff | 16 February, 2020 | Uncategorized
When you’re pitching your screenplay or series you have to be prepared for the question, “What’s the tone?” It can be challenging to answer that question, because there’s exact definition of tone as it relates to movies, and no standard set of tones to refer to. Tone...
by Jurgen Wolff | 3 February, 2020 | Filmmaking, Screenwriting
Jurgen Wolff, instructor, The Script Coach workshops You know that composing a powerful log line (a sentence that conveys the concept of your script) is useful in pitching and it can also be a good way to helping you stay on track as you work out the plot. These four...
by Jurgen Wolff | 31 January, 2020 | Filmmaking, Filmmaking Career, Promotion, Marketing and Distribution, Screenwriting
Jurgen Wolff, Script Coach Series instructor How do you tell if you have a commercial screenplay idea? I’ll admit it right away: you can’t. Sure, there are some genres that have been a hard sell for a long time, namely Westerns and, more recently, romantic comedies,...
by Jurgen Wolff | 8 July, 2019 | Screenwriting
Maybe you’ve heard the saying that a script is just a blueprint. If so, forget it! The first goal of your script is to be a great reading experience. Later there will be a production script annotated by the director and others involved in planning the actual...
by Jurgen Wolff | 1 July, 2019 | Screenwriting
There are many ways of constructing a plot. One I find useful is to consider what I call the three C’s: Conflict Choice Consequence You can use these to develop your main plot and they are equally useful in constructing the smaller components of your...