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Who are the best screenwriters of all time? That&#39;s a question you get to answer. Without great screenwriters, there wouldn&#39;t be great movies. They&#39;re the ones who not only write the dialogue&nbsp;but also devise the story and structure the plot so that it has maximum impact for the audience. It has often been said that writers get the least amount of glory when a film becomes a hit, even the most famous screenwriters. That may or may not be true. What&#39;s certain is that the best screenwriters become recognizable &quot;names&quot; to the public. Diablo Cody, Charlie Kaufman, and William Goldman&nbsp;are just three examples of writers who are widely known for their work.

The following list contains screenwriters from every era. Writers from the earliest days of cinema share space with writers who are in the prime of their careers today. We&#39;ve also included writers from every genre.&nbsp;Horror&nbsp;and sci fi screenwriters are right next to those who write comedy and drama. Many&nbsp;of the individuals here are writers only. Others -- like Quentin Tarantino, Judd Apatow, Nora Ephron and Orson Welles -- also directed some or all of the films they wrote.&nbsp;

Vote up your top choices for the best screenwriters in Hollywood, regardless of when they worked or what genre they are most noted for.

Looking to catch your big break, check out this list of the&nbsp;<a href="https://www.ranker.com/list/best-2020-screenwriting-contests/grayson-titan" target="_blank">top&nbsp;screenwriting competitions</a>.

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Stanley Kubrick

Stanley Kubrick (; July 26, 1928 – March 7, 1999) was an American film director, screenwriter, and producer. He is frequently cited as one of the most influential filmmakers in cinematic history. His films, which are mostly adaptations of novels or short stories, cover a wide range of genres, and are noted for their realism, dark humor, unique cinematography, extensive set designs, and evocative use of music.
Kubrick was raised in the Bronx, New York City, and attended William Howard Taft High School from 1941 to 1945. He only received average grades, but displayed a keen interest in literature, photography, and film from a young age, and taught himself all aspects of film production and directing after graduating from high school. After working as a photographer for Look magazine in the late 1940s and early 1950s, he began making short films on a shoestring budget, and made his first major Hollywood film, The Killing, for United Artists in 1956. This was followed by two collaborations with Kirk Douglas, the war picture Paths of Glory (1957) and the historical epic Spartacus (1960). His reputation as a filmmaker in Hollywood grew, and he was approached by Marlon Brando to film what would become One-Eyed Jacks (1961), though Brando eventually decided to direct it himself.
Creative differences arising from his work with Douglas and the film studios, a dislike of the Hollywood industry, and a growing concern about crime in America prompted Kubrick to move to the United Kingdom in 1961, where he spent most of the remainder of his life and career. His home at Childwickbury Manor in Hertfordshire, which he shared with his wife Christiane, became his workplace, where he did his writing, research, editing, and management of production details. This allowed him to have almost complete artistic control over his films, but with the rare advantage of having financial support from major Hollywood studios. His first British productions were two films with Peter Sellers, Lolita (1962) and Dr. Strangelove (1964).
A demanding perfectionist, Kubrick assumed control over most aspects of the filmmaking process, from direction and writing to editing, and took painstaking care with researching his films and staging scenes, working in close coordination with his actors and other collaborators. He often asked for several dozen retakes of the same shot in a movie, which resulted in many conflicts with his casts. Despite the resulting notoriety among actors, many of Kubrick's films broke new ground in cinematography. The scientific realism and innovative special effects of 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) were without precedent in the history of cinema, and the film earned him his only personal Oscar, for Best Visual Effects. Steven Spielberg has referred to the film as his generation's "big bang", and it is regarded as one of the greatest films ever made. For the 18th-century period film Barry Lyndon (1975), Kubrick obtained lenses developed by Zeiss for NASA, to film scenes under natural candlelight. With The Shining (1980), he became one of the first directors to make use of a Steadicam for stabilized and fluid tracking shots. While many of Kubrick's films were controversial and initially received mixed reviews upon release—particularly A Clockwork Orange (1971), which Kubrick pulled from circulation in the UK following a mass media frenzy—most were nominated for Oscars, Golden Globes, or BAFTA Awards, and underwent critical reevaluations. His last film, Eyes Wide Shut, was completed shortly before his death in 1999 at the age of 70.

Quentin Tarantino

Quentin Jerome Tarantino (; born March 27, 1963) is an American filmmaker, actor, film programmer, and cinema owner. His films are characterized by nonlinear storylines, satirical subject matter, an estheticization of violence, extended scenes of dialogue, ensemble casts, references to popular culture and a wide variety of other films, soundtracks primarily containing songs and score pieces from the 1960s to the 1980s, and features of neo-noir film.
In the early 1990s, he began his career as an independent filmmaker with the release of Reservoir Dogs in 1992, which was funded by money from the sale of his script True Romance. Empire deemed Reservoir Dogs the "Greatest Independent Film of All Time". His second film, Pulp Fiction (1994), a black comedy crime film, was a major success both among critics and audiences. Tarantino paid homage to the blaxploitation films of the 1970s with Jackie Brown (1997), an adaptation of Elmore Leonard's novel Rum Punch.
Kill Bill, a highly stylized "revenge flick" in the cinematic traditions of kung fu films, Japanese martial arts, spaghetti westerns and Italian horror, followed six years later, and was released as two films: Volume 1 in 2003 and Volume 2 in 2004. Tarantino next directed the exploitation slasher film Death Proof in 2007, as part of a double feature with Robert Rodriguez, released in the tradition of grindhouse cinema of the 1970s under the collective title Grindhouse. His long-postponed Inglourious Basterds, which tells an alternate history of Nazi Germany, was released in 2009 to positive reviews. After that came critically acclaimed Django Unchained (2012), a Western film set in the Antebellum South. His eighth film, The Hateful Eight (2015), was released in its roadshow version in 70 mm film format, with opening "overture" and halfway-point intermission. His ninth film, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, was released in 2019.
Tarantino's films have garnered both critical and commercial success as well as a dedicated cult-following. He has received many industry awards, including two Academy Awards, two BAFTA Awards, two Golden Globe Awards and the Palme d'Or, and has been nominated for an Emmy and Grammy. In 2005, he was included on the annual Time 100 list of the most influential people in the world. Filmmaker and historian Peter Bogdanovich has called him "the single most influential director of his generation". In December 2015, Tarantino received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame for his contributions to the film industry.

Ethan Coen

Ethan Coen is a film director, film and television producer, film editor and screenwriter.

Billy Wilder

Billy Wilder (; German: [ˈvɪldɐ]; born Samuel Wilder, June 22, 1906 – March 27, 2002) was an Austrian-born American filmmaker, screenwriter, producer, artist, and journalist whose career spanned more than five decades. He is regarded as one of the most brilliant and versatile filmmakers of the Hollywood Golden Age of cinema. With The Apartment, Wilder became the first person to win Academy Awards as producer, director, and screenwriter for the same film.Wilder became a screenwriter in the late 1920s while living in Berlin. After the rise of the Nazi Party, he left for Paris, where he made his directorial debut. He moved to Hollywood in 1933, and in 1939 he had a hit when he co-wrote the screenplay for the romantic comedy Ninotchka, starring Greta Garbo. Wilder established his directorial reputation with an adaption of James M. Cain's Double Indemnity (1944), a film noir. Wilder co-wrote the screenplay with crime novelist Raymond Chandler. Wilder earned the Best Director and Best Screenplay Academy Awards for the adaptation of a Charles R. Jackson story The Lost Weekend (1945), about alcoholism. In 1950, Wilder co-wrote and directed the critically acclaimed Sunset Boulevard, as well as Stalag 17 in 1953.
From the mid-1950s on, Wilder made mostly comedies. Among the classics Wilder created in this period are the farces The Seven Year Itch (1955) and Some Like It Hot (1959), and satires such as The Apartment (1960). He directed fourteen different actors in Oscar-nominated performances. Wilder was recognized with the American Film Institute (AFI) Life Achievement Award in 1986. In 1988, Wilder was awarded the Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award. In 1993, he was awarded the National Medal of Arts.

Francis Ford Coppola

Francis Ford Coppola (, Italian: [ˈkɔppola]; born April 7, 1939) is an American film director, producer, screenwriter, film composer, and vintner. He was a central figure in the New Hollywood filmmaking movement of the 1960s and 1970s.
After directing The Rain People in 1969, Coppola co-wrote Patton (1970), earning the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay along with Edmund H. North. Coppola's reputation as a filmmaker was cemented with the release of The Godfather (1972). The film revolutionized movie-making in the gangster genre, and was adored by the public and critics alike. The Godfather won three Academy Awards: Best Picture, Best Actor, and Best Adapted Screenplay (shared with Mario Puzo).
The Godfather Part II, which followed in 1974, became the first sequel to win the Academy Award for Best Picture. Highly regarded by critics, the film brought Coppola three more Academy Awards: Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Director, and Best Picture, and made him the second director (after Billy Wilder) to be so honored three times for the same film. The Conversation, which Coppola directed, produced and wrote, was released that same year, winning the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival. His next film, Apocalypse Now (1979), which notoriously had a lengthy and strenuous production, was widely acclaimed for its vivid depiction of the Vietnam War. The film won the Palme d'Or, making Coppola one of only eight filmmakers to have won that award twice.
While a number of Coppola's ventures in the 1980s and 1990s were critically lauded, he has never quite achieved the same commercial success with films as in the 1970s. His best-known films released since the start of the 1980s are the dramas The Outsiders and Rumble Fish (both 1983), the crime dramas The Cotton Club (1984) and The Godfather Part III (1990), and the horror film Bram Stoker's Dracula (1992). A number of Coppola's relatives and children have become famous actors and filmmakers in their own right: his sister is the actress Talia Shire; his daughter Sofia Coppola and granddaughter Gia Coppola are actresses and directors, and the actors Jason Schwartzman and Nicolas Cage are his nephews.

John Hughes

John Wilden Hughes, Jr. was an American film director, producer, and screenwriter. He directed or scripted some of the most successful comedy films of the 1980s and early 1990s, including the comedy National Lampoon's Vacation, the coming-of-age comedy Sixteen Candles, the teen sci-fi comedy Weird Science, the coming-of-age comedy-drama The Breakfast Club, the comedy Ferris Bueller's Day Off, the romantic comedy-drama Pretty in Pink, the romance Some Kind of Wonderful, the comedies Planes, Trains and Automobiles and Uncle Buck, the Christmas family comedy Home Alone and Home Alone 2: Lost in New York.
Hughes is known for his work on teen movies and for helping launch the careers of several actors, including Michael Keaton, Molly Ringwald, Anthony Michael Hall, Bill Paxton, Matthew Broderick, Macaulay Culkin, and the Brat Pack group.

Who are the best screenwriters of all time? That's a question you get to answer. Without great screenwriters, there wouldn't be great movies. They're the ones ...