Breaking the screenplay

I wrote this post for my blog a while back (2016) and then it was published in The Author. But I was re-reading it today and thought it worth posting here. There’s an update at the bottom.

Imagine you’re a development person. You have a pile of scripts on your desk and you have to wade through them. They’re all about the right length, they’re all nicely bound and they’re all formatted correctly because, if you expect nothing else from a professional writer, you at least expect them to be able to observe the simple rules of formatting. So you take the top one off the pile and you open it up and page one is a lot of white space and the text is in Courier Final Draft, or Courier Prime if the writer is fancy. And the two words at the top: “FADE IN” and then a line or two of white and then it says “INT. A ROOM — DAY” or “EXT. FARMHOUSE — EVENING” or “EXT. A CITY STREET — NIGHT”. And then there’s a couple of lines of description because the writer has read her Mamet and her Goldman and she knows that she’s not supposed to put anything there that can’t be filmed. This isn’t literature, this is a blueprint for a movie or a TV show and it’s nice if you can pretty up the language a bit but for the love of God only write that which can be seen on the screen or heard through the speakers. So that is what she has done, and then a character speaks and… And now you pick another script off the pile and it’s the same. And the next. And the next.

Screenplays all look the same. They don’t all read the same but they pretty much all look the same. How hard that story has to work for those first few pages to overcome the dreadful fucking tedium of the format. How that format sets itself against creativity.

Write only that which can be filmed. Why? Have you any idea how many people have to read this thing before it gets anywhere close to MAYBE being filmed? And you’re going to bore the pants off all of those people becaue you’re such a puritan? Because you took Mamet’s advice? Goldman’s advice? You took advice from people whose scripts can be as dull as anything because the mere fact of their name being on the cover means they skip most of the development process anyway? Not that their scripts are dull, obviously, they’re brilliant. But their advice is a little sucky.

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