My Non-Screenwriter Friends, You Should Read Scripts
Part of my strategy for staying sane during quarantine is to try to say “yes” more often to new kinds of arts and entertainment (that I can access without leaving my apartment, of course). Weirdo electronic vaporwave-y music I found on Bandcamp? Sure. Animal Crossing? Why not. Anime? Fuck it. I’ve baked bread, I’ve made ice cream, I exercise more, I’ve read more books than I normally do, and the list goes on. Despite the daily terror happening outside my door, it’s been a good time.
So if you’re anything like me, you’re probably itching for a new hobby, and to my non-screenwritin’ folk, I’ve got a perfect idea for you: Screenplays. Not writing them, but reading them. (Although nothing is stopping you from the former, but that’s for another article.)
In a certain sense, there really isn’t a complex point to belabor here. It’s just fun, assuming the script you’re reading is any good and you’re not forced to read bad scripts in a professional context. Then it’s hell. But if you’ve got a good script to read, then it can be just as gratifying and rewarding an experience as any other artistic endeavor. However, there’s a few points I’d like to belabor anyway because that’s what I do here.
A little bit of housekeeping before we go on: I’m talking specifically about reading unproduced screenplays. Scripts that have gained some sort of traction — they’ve been bought or did well in a competition or something like that — but they haven’t been made yet or will never get made. It’s not that reading scripts for movies you’ve seen can’t be fun or educational, but I think it’s more fun to read unproduced stuff for reasons we’ll get into in the third section.
Also, as should go without saying, assume I’m talking about reading a good effective screenplay and not shit. But yeah, screenplays. Read ‘em.
They read quick.
Let’s get a quick point out of the way.
Most books are a commitment. A commitment well worth your time for a vast number of reasons, but a commitment nonetheless. They’re designed to be savored. To explore a character’s emotional turmoil or a narrative in a less truncated manner. They’re designed to be in-depth, and that’s one of the many aspects that makes the medium beautiful.
Screenplays are designed to do the exact opposite.
They’re designed to be read “vertically,” as someone once said to me. (I wish I could remember who. Or maybe this is common advice and I’m just up my own ass.) Whereas when you read a book, your eyes go left to right, in a screenplay, your eyes should be going down as quickly as they go across.
Moreover, and I hope this isn’t a controversial standpoint, screenwriting is not a prose art. The artistry of screenplays isn’t in the aesthetic qualities of language, but how well they can effectively and affectively communicate narrative. As a result, scripts swap out a lot of adjectives in favor of verbs, and more often than not, the best TV and feature writers are the ones who know how to use language efficiently. In fact, the golden rule taught in most screenwriting books, websites, and professional courses is that you’re not supposed to go past three lines of description.
These rules and this style mean many things to writers, but for readers, you’re looking at about a one and a half to two hour reading commitment for a ninety to one hundred and twenty page script. If you’re having a good time, it can take considerably less. If you’re having a bad time, it could take all day.
As a result, scripts are a perfect beach read, provided you have a device that does well with glare. (Helpful trick: Wear a black t-shirt so it reflects on your screen.) They’re a perfect afternoon activity for when it’s not quite time to make dinner yet or when you want to read a full story from start to finish while you wait for the mechanic to finish work on your car.
To put it in caveman speak: It way do smart thing but less time.
Doesn’t reading a script before it becomes a movie ruin the experience of seeing the movie, assuming it ever gets made?
Not really.
Okay, maybe a little, but not in the sense that you probably think. Yes, reading the script does alter your experience with the hypothetical movie. However, it’s not always for the worst. In fact, in some ways, it can make the experience better.
Let’s get a minor point out of the way first. When a script is adapted to screen, there are almost always changes. Sometimes, these changes can be major. The script that became the movie Burnt began with our coked out protagonist chef getting attacked in the kitchen of his Paris restaurant by an armed drug dealer, not shucking oysters and delivering boring exposition to the audience in voice over. (Don’t get me started on Burnt.) Sometimes, these changes can be minor. Bad Education, the recent HBO movie, was more or less word-for-word the script. (The only differences I noted were that the movie has a different ending and the script explicitly lays out that the high school reporter’s father worked at Enron. Why they cut that detail, I don’t know.) It really depends on the script and the movie.
Either way, yes, generally speaking, you’ll know what happens in the movie before you watch it. However, in my opinion, the fun isn’t in the suspense, assuming there ever was any. The fun is in the execution.
I read the script for Django Unchained about a year or so before the movie was released. (The script was part of the annul Black List, more on that later.) It was, as far as I can recall, an incredibly fun read. The action popped, as did the characters, and as Tarantino scripts have a particularly coke-y quality to how they’re written, even the prose was entertaining.
What a script can’t provide as well, however, is the intended style. The sound of the gunshots and the bullet impacts in the shootout scene. The way the big dumb tooth on Dr. Schultz’s flops on top of his wagon. The preciseness of the editing in the scene where Schultz serves Django his beer. The Rick Ross song, which I definitely don’t remember being in the script.
I knew every beat of the story, but that did nothing to curtail my enjoyment when I saw it in a theater.
Though Django was a great script that became a great movie, there are plenty of examples of scripts that weren’t actually “fun” to read but turned into fantastic films. I know that I’ve talked about this before, but imagine trying to read Arrival. I read the script back when it still had the name of the short story it was based on, “Story of Your Life.” It was not exactly what I’d call “enjoyable.” While I generally understood what was going on, reading it felt very cold and detached. But I did walk away thinking, “Okay, if you get the right director, this can be a really cool movie.” And goddamn did they pick the right person.
Or take Pacific Rim, the script for which I got early through… means. (It’s not that interesting a story.) The draft of the script I read was written before Guillermo Del Toro’s involvement, and while credited writer Travis Beachum is an incredibly talented filmmaker, the script lacks a lot of the movie’s flavor. I don’t remember Ron Perlman’s character being in that draft, for example, nor do I remember the sword or a lot of the more specific character beats. I was meh on the script, but I ended up loving the cheesy charm Del Toro brought to the movie.
The only downside to reading scripts ahead of time are those instances when a great script is turned into an okay or outright bad movie or when a good script makes for a final product that didn’t resonate with you, but worked for seemingly everyone else.
The former, we’ve talked about before. The most recent example of the latter, for me, was Jojo Rabbit. I read the script in the year before the movie came out, and I loved it. I thought the tone worked, I loved how it was paced, I thought all the character arcs were executed well. But when I saw it on screen, the magic didn’t work for me, and to this day, I don’t really know why. There’s a real possibility that my audience sucked, as they weren’t really laughing. (It was the middle of a week day.) There’s also a real possibility that I read it in Taika’s New Zealand accent, which makes all scripts more fun to read. But when I saw it, the tone didn’t work for me, the jokes didn’t pop, and I was just kind of numb. I don’t really have a good reason why.
There’s always a risk when you read the script before you see the movie. But if it pays off, then the script is damn well worth it.
You get to make a movie in your head.
To a certain degree, you’ve already been doing this every time you read a book. As you read, you develop an image of what you think everything looks like, from the characters to the worlds they occupy.
But for me, when you read a script, it’s a bit more literal.
When I read a book, I develop an image of what the characters look like, as well as the spaces they inhabit and their physicality. However, I’m also a bit more of a literal fly on the wall. As far as how I see a scene or an event, my “camera” so to speak, I’m a presence floating around. Not a character in the room, but a ghost, able to focus on everything and nothing until I’m given something to look at.
In a script, I know I’m reading something that’s meant to be seen on a screen, so I’m thinking more about the details. I’m thinking about framing. I’m thinking about lighting. I’m thinking about color palette. If we’re not given a specific town or city or landmass, I think about where that might be. I think about the other people in the room and what they might look like.
Apart from visual details, I’m also thinking about how the characters say what they’re going to say, and inevitably, this leads to thinking about how a scene should feel. If you’re reading an action script, how do you think action movie lines should be delivered? Probably not like a low key indie comedy or a sci-fi mystery or something in between.
Just like the images that pop into your head when you read that book or the literal images you see on screen when you watch that movie, once you see it, the experience becomes much more personal. When you read a script, the movie you’re making in your head is your interpretation in the most literal sense. Maybe you don’t get to dictate the trajectory of the story, but you have the power to change its meaning and how it feels by deciding where to point your mental camera or telling your mental actor to say the line in a certain way.
In a sense, this is the artistry of a screenplay from an audience’s perspective. Scripts aren’t meant for the general public. They exist for people who work in studios and other industry insiders to read. It’s a reality I’ve wanted changed for years. Reading scripts affects your relationship with the finished product. However, just like any great work of art, the attachment you form never really goes away, and it’s something everyone should get to experience.
You’ll gain a much bigger appreciation for the craft and the artists who make your favorite movies as great as they are.
How does a good script become a bad movie? It’s a question we’ve talked about before.
How can a bad script become a good movie? It’s a rare phenomenon, so rare in fact that I can’t think of a good example without a trillion qualifiers. But I’m sure it’s happened one way or another. After all, if the movie worked for you, there’s a possibility that you wouldn’t notice or care if the script was “bad” in the usual sense of the word.
How do so many mediocre movies get made? How do adventurous scripts become middle of the road films? How do you start at creative concept A and wind up at creative execution B?
The answer to all these questions is roughly the same: Films are made by people, people can be flawed, and people can be brilliant, and someone somewhere down the line saw things differently than you.
The director who ruined that script you loved had a much different understanding of the material or didn’t have the budget or talent to pull it off. The actor who elevated the mediocre script or the mediocre film saw a spark of humanity in the character and had the talent and the understanding to bring that spark to the forefront. Maybe you didn’t like the final execution of the movie, but since you’ve read the script, you have a more nuanced understanding of what all involved were trying to accomplish and you’re able to appreciate it more than you would have otherwise.
When you start reading scripts, you’ll see great scripts turn into subpar movies and you’ll see boring sluggish scripts become the most exciting movies of the year. Either way, you’ll come to understand just how much a movie relies on the people who make it. You’ll come to appreciate how much talent has to be pulled together to make a movie great. You’ll still have a considerable amount of antipathy for filmmakers who ruin scripts you like, but your opinion will become much more informed. You’ll truly see the importance of a vision, and those who work to bring that vision to life.
If you want to fall further in love with this medium, scripts are where it all starts.
How to Find Scripts to Read
Let’s expand out into produced work for this section. Let’s also be honest about something I should’ve mentioned much sooner: Getting scripts can be a bit of a pain in the ass. But it’s not as hard as you think.
Produced work is generally easy to find. A lot of famous movies have had their scripts produced into book form. (Some of my earliest script memories are of reading the published versions of Pulp Fiction and Network.) If not, google “ X MOVIE TITLE PDF.” The more famous the movie, the easier it will be to find.
Unproduced work is a bit trickier. Not only do you have to know where to look, but what to look for. After all, how will you know if what you’re about to read is any good?
One resource for finding scripts are the various prestigious screenwriting lists that are published throughout the year and voted on by industry professionals. The Black List (the most famous and prestigious one of the bunch), the Hit List, the Blood List (for horror and thrillers, something weird’s going on with their site which is why I didn’t directly link to it), and so on. While not every script on these lists are perfect, they’re a good place to start. Hey, if they make it on, at least somebody likes it!
Another good place to look are websites and blogs that review screenplays, of which there are dozens, as well as the Screenwriter’s Reddit. (I personally frequent Scriptshadow.)
Once you know what you’re looking for, you’ll have to do a bit of hunting. If you’re looking for a Black List script, most of the time, you’ll find them on Reddit or if you go into the comment sections of certain blogs. Another resource is the Screenwriter’s Network Discord. Join the network, request access to the script hub, wait until your granted, and you’ll have access to fifteen thousand scripts. If you don’t want to go through these steps, a little Googling never hurt anyone, but all this work is worth your time.
Again, scripts are fun. Give ‘em a whirl!
