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Is Your Plot Thickening?
21 September 2026 · 2 min read
This (photo) is of me and my friend Chris Jones, writer and director of award winning features – long and short, and Oscar shortlisted writer and director for the short film, ‘Gone Fishing’.
Chris is also the co-author of the seminal ‘The Guerilla Film Maker’s Handbook,’ a book which graces the shelves of many of my film making friends, and if I’m in a name-dropping mood, I might mention Chris, our friendship and delight in the near-mythical status he has among said friends.
But that’s not why I’m friends with him. It was many years before I knew anything about his writing, directing or mythical status. We met through the LSF about 15 years ago (which he also set up) when he asked me to come in and deliver a masterclass to the participants during a lunch hour.
Over the years, he’s persuaded me to move from reading word-for-word from typed up notes, to presenting my ideas on power point (with notes) to giving a power point lecture without notes to close-to 200 people in April this year. (It was the most fun ever).
Year by year we’ve developed a trusting bond and a friendship based on creativity and mutual respect. We have the kind of back and forth where we can call each other out on crap ideas, and action the good ones. He is the most generous soul and gets high on creativity which is why he’s so able to revel in the success of others wherever and however it lands. He opens his contact list and network more readily than anyone I know because he understands this is how success in built in our fragile, ever-changing industry.
This week for the first time he told me the whole madcap story of how he came to write ‘The Guerilla Film Maker’s Handbook’ and bashfully brought it down from the shelf in his teeny office in London’s iconic Ealing Studios.
Something we are both very interested in, is the intersection of craft and commerce, which is why we felt it made so much sense to share our knowledge with others, and create and encourage creativity wherever we could with whoever wanted to hear about what we had to say.
After a successful first run of ‘The Plot Thickens with Eleanor Greene’ we’re running the course again in October but this time with a new title.
We’d love to see you there, cook up some ideas, and open up some neural pathways for YOUR success. Link in comments to How To Write Successful TV Drama with Eleanor Greene. DM me, or just sign up! Chris and I would love to see you there.
Written by
Chris JonesPassionate about all things film, I have spent my life watching movies, making movies and helping others make their movies too. Most recently I have been directing Splinter Unit on 'Mission: Impossible Dead Reckoning', parts 1 and 2 for Paramount. I also executive-produced 'The Enfield Poltergeist' for Apple TV+. Deeper into my past, my early major projects include action thriller 'The Runner', serial killer thriller 'White Angel' and paranormal horror 'Urban Ghost Story'. I co-created and authored The Guerilla Film Makers Handbook series, published by Bloomsbury. There are now eight books in the series. More recently I have run a series of London-based festivals, kicking off with the London Screenwriters Festival which attracts over 1,000 professional screenwriters from around the globe annually. I also set up and run TEDxEaling, an annual TEDx conference on storytelling and human communication. In 2009, I made the multi-award-winning and Oscar-shortlisted 'Gone Fishing', the whole process being heavily documented on my blog. In 2014 I completed my fourth feature film, the crowd-created 50 Kisses which entered the Guinness Book Of Records for most screenwriters on a feature film. Following this success, I founded Create50 to continue the idea of crowd-created projects. Twisted50, our first book, was published on Halloween 2016 and immediately toppled Stephen King from the top spot on Amazon. Five books have followed in the Twisted50 series and we are working on the sixth now. During the summer of 2016 I trained to become a master Firewalk instructor and now regularly take people across the hot coals for charity. Late 2017 I directed the short film 'Seeing Him' which collected a ton of awards too. Over the following years I continued to make award-winning shorts, such as Meet The Nativity and Never Too Late. In the summer of 2022 I premiered Impact 50, the second feature-length movie from Create50. This time I directed the segment at the start of the film, with Olivia Williams as the President, and written by Joe Eszterhas. In the summer of 2022, I also joined the Mission: Impossible 7 and 8 productions as Splinter Unit director. At Halloween 2023, the Apple TV+ show that I co-executive-produced, 'The Enfield Poltergeist', premiered. I run regular filmmaking workshops for filmmakers both online and in person. Some people ask how I began making films? Like most filmmakers of my generation, it was with a Super 8mm camera, summertime and school friends, usually after watching a behind-the-scenes TV programme on a Hollywood movie like Star Wars. My first film was a zombie horror called Necronomicon, heavily influenced by John Carpenter's The Fog. And I was hooked for life. Contact me at Ealing Film Studios, Ealing Green, London, W5 5EP, UK
