7. Woody Allen: A Documentary (2012)
Woody Allen is one of the most prolific writer/directors to have ever walked this good Earth: any documentary which attempts to look at that part of his life is going to prove of value to screenwriters everywhere, right? Right! And though this movie takes a lot of time exploring Allen's boyhood and early career (still essential learning, in my opinion), there are things scattered throughout Robert D. Weide's documentary will certainly prove of interest to screenwriters everywhere. To be fair, I'm not really even sure why I'm justifying this choice: it's a
documentary about Woody Allen, for God's sake. Watch it. I don't know about anybody else, but I absolutely love being given a glimpse into other people's writing processes: not necessarily so I can copy or adhere to then, but because - as somebody who writes a lot - it's just massively interesting. This documentary gives you the chance to do that with Woody Allen (!), as we get a good look around his apartment, at his typewriter, at his Post-It notes, and in the notebooks where the man has been scrawling his ideas since the dawn of time. As a cinema fan, watching all that got me practically giddy.