Gimme some sugar, I am your Reader
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Dabba (New York, USA)
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Gimme some sugar, I am your Reader
Yeh to hona hi tha. The deliciousness of the irony of it all has not been lost on me. I hated to read growing up, and would twiddle my thumbs or sometimes stick it up my arse since it was more fun than listening to my friends discuss Wodehouse or Forsyth or some other nonsense that they were reading. But now I find myself in the unenviable position of Reading (that’s right Mr. Chand, upper case and it’s not a proper noun or at the start of a sentence) on my way to movie glory.
I am part of an elite group of 786,933 readers that have the privilege of influencing the fate of some poor sod’s screenplay. I work freelance for a production house not larger than an ant’s teats, which means that I am paid so poorly that I should be happy I don’t have to pay them.
This company specializes in making low budget movies (under $2MM) for the SciFi channel and other cable channels that I have never heard of because I don’t watch telly. They have an arrangement that I don’t understand fully whereby their movies are pre-sold to these channels. There are no stars and all of these movies are shot in Canadia and they specialize in B Horrors and Z-Scifi.
A Hollywood Reader or Script Analyst ranks slightly higher than the toilet paper in most studios. Everyone has the power to say NO in Hollywood. In fact, the surest way to hold on to your job is to kill projects and say NO, unless you were the doofus that said no to Star Wars. But every reader wants to be the one to recommend the next Seven or Reservoir Dogs or Napoleon Dynamite.
I’m not even a player at that level but my job requires me to read and analyze a script and pass on it or recommend it for someone in the Story dept. to read and toss or rarely, rarely, rarely recommend. If your movie gets picked, you will have no glory but you will have a produced credit which is more than what a lot of writers get. Most script submissions come through someone that knew someone and some actually come from agents and talent agencies. They all have one thing in common.
They are atrocious. I read about 6 scripts a week (I have a day job) and it takes me about 5 hours to read a script twice, write a 2-page synopsis of the story and one page of comments and a paragraph synopsis of my synopsis and a synopsis paragraph of my comments and a two sentence logline, a rating grid for character, structure, dialogue and writing, followed by a one sentence “comments in a nutshell” and a final – pass, maybe, consider. The order in which my work is read is the reverse of what I detailed above. It is in your best interest to please me. There is a book out there called “500 ways to beat the reader” or something like that. Read it.
The average length of a screenplay is 105 pages. Do not exceed 110 unless you are Zaillian and then you can just ignore everything here. The tips below are directed at the nameless, faceless screenwriter that has this one killer story that everyone should watch and has conned her way into a submission pile somewhere. This is not a personal list of my quirks. This will improve the readability and tolerability of your atrocious script by several notches.
* There is no place for bad grammar or spelling. Proper format is assumed.
* If this is not the best you can come up with, and you don’t think it’s great, don’t send it. Better still, don’t write it or at least don’t show it to anyone.
* Keep it over 90 and under 105 pages.
* Ek galathi sab ko maaf. Save your galathi for the last page, if you must use your freebie.
* I am judging you from the first word and the first sentence. By the end of the first page if my balls don’t hurt from your vice-like grip, you are in trouble. We love blue balls.
* By page 5, I have written your script off but I am still forcing myself to read it because I still have to analyze it and say something positive. Imagine the khunnas in me.
* Don’t ever fucking direct the camera!
* If you must, and you have earned it, do it cleverly by using line breaks that imply shots or close ups. Read Pulp Fiction and see how Tarantino writes the Mia overdose scene and compare it to the film. See how he manages to write shots without ever describing the size of the shot or angle.
* Don’t use music cues (as in, the hero jams to “insert obscure song here” as he takes a drag on his cigarette and drives his car). Music rights are an entirely different post.
* Use precise verbs. Does someone walk in to a room or do they slither, sneak, tiptoe, saunter etc etc.
* Avoid wrylies (that pesky li’l paranthesis that people seem to love using under the character’s name) to indicate. Eg., JOHN (softens) “You wanna die?” The context and the character should do the work for you.
* When I write my synopsis, everything boils down to “He said, she did.” Try writing your own 2 page synopsis. If it is not about someone saying something or doing something, it won’t be in the synopsis. A 3 page chase sequence will be one sentence in my synopsis. The better the scripts, the easier to summarize and the quicker they read with a good balance of talk and action (active things protagonists do) and they are easy to follow.
* The eye is lazy and gravitates to white space. Don’t write long dialogue blocks or long descriptions. Vary the meter of your sentence construction and mix up simple and complex sentences. You are constantly at the risk of losing my interest. Monotony is your enemy!
* I know you have read Syd Field. Don’t wait for “inciting incident” or “tp1″ for something exciting to happen. A lot of scripts I read have this problem. They spend so much time trying to setup character, ambience etc etc until the movie kicks into gear.
* Structure means only one thing. Escalating conflict. That’s all you have to know.
* Learn to write good dialogue. If you don’t have good dialogue, most likely your script will not be considered.
* Don’t describe sunsets and moonrises. Don’t try to be a poet but write poetically. That means understand the rhyme and meter of words and give it a cadence.
* Don’t introduce 10 characters by name before page 5. It’s hard to keep track on the page. Characterize them but don’t tell me that they love their granny and have a pet dog named rufus.
There’s more. Will add when I can. I have recommended 1 script out of 42 I have read so far and it was a western. I didn’t recommend the script. Just the writer. Everything else I passed on and some of them were quite enjoyable because I like reading about guts spilling all over the place. But they didn’t have an idea strong enough to be a movie and were poorly written. Good luck.
Tags: Teaching Film-making
Anurag Kashyap
Abhay Deol
Dibakar Banerjee
Hansal Mehta
Khalid Mohamed
Kundan Shah
Anish Kuruvilla
Jaideep Verma
Manish Gupta
Navdeep Singh
Bhavani Iyer
D. Santosh
Onir
Ashvin Kumar
Ramu Ramanathan
Sudhir Mishra
Pankaj Advani
Revathy
Saurabh Shukla
Shilpa Shukla
Sujoy Ghosh
Suparn Verma
Santosh Sivan
Shashank Ghosh
Shivajee
Pavan Kaul
Partho Sen-Gupta
Prroshant Naryannan
Sam Langoria
Satish Kasetty
Sirjee, more gyaan and kt over Irish coffee!
):))
Dabba, was thinking of sending mine over to you but don’t want to be the reason you give up on PFC!
@DnC
me was thinking the same thing eheh
Dabba…nice post. had great fun reading. yes, everyone has that one story that can do everything. but then it all makes to the dabbas only,i gues!!
@Dpac- x(
thanks guys.
I am not going to be nice and say go ahead send me the script. I really want to find some good writing but I read so much that I’ll probably burn out soon. Eventually some of that suckiness creeps into your script if you are not careful monitoring it.
also, dramas are the hardest to sell and evaluate.
I am desperately looking for something that I can produce but it’s got to be single location and a genre film.
one of these days i may have to be brave enough to post a link to my screenplay if i continue pontificating on screenwriting.
As an exercise in screenwriting, count the number of scenes in No Smoking which, if chopped out completely do not affect your understanding of the story. Meaning they should not be there.
First example – Dinner at home with friends scene. 2-3 pages. What happens?
Dabbba – great post!! I hope you write a script one day which is really out-of-the-dabba
dabba- very important scene no, that? one of the friends is quiet who has quit smoking so he has lost his individuality?
plus K and his relatioship with his wife is established since parallely his wife cribs to her friends in the kitchen?
not saying that there no such scenes in NS but don’t think that the one you mention is one of them…
that is exactly what most people think. the need to establish a relationship etc etc, how many friends do we need to show that they quit smoking. Abbas does a fine job acting weird and nervous without fingers in the restaurant scene. The whole dinner scene is a waste and a good editor would have cut that and a better director would not have filmed it. There is absolutely no need for that scene. Read the script without that scene. Nothing will change in the story.
If a scene does not move the plot forward, AXE AXE AXE. Don’t be precious about your writing or dialogues.
You only needed 4 scenes before he goes to the prayogshala. His dream sequence can stay. Him telling random old woman in the elevator to get out. Abbas at the restaurant. Wife playing inky pinky ponky with ring and cigarette and choosing to leave him followed by their phone conversation.
Thanks for this.
Dabba- still disagree. Why do you think only one person quitting smoking is enough. Every person who takes the name of Baba Bengali reinforces his presence even before he is there in the scene…A sense of foreboding is established that he is a powerful man who can get it done…I agree every scene has to move the story forward and I think that that scene does that, maybe in a different way. I agree the writer is tripping out a little there…
“To tera bhai kab hua”
“Doosre divorce ke baad” and
“Religious differences- he thinks he is god, I disagree”
Come on yaar let him be clever.
You tell me now why Ray in Pather Panchali had the two kids running away the big long distance to look at the train.
I mean it rains after that and the girl falls sick but why the whole long scene till they see the train?
I have not seen Pather. I am a disgrace.
Dabba, that was a very informative post.If B grade movie scripts are scrutinised so thoroughly then what about Hollywood flicks?
Do we have similar systems in Bollywood ?
@ 14 arun prakash –
I don’t know how they do it in India. There are 1000s of scripts registered at the WGA every year. If you look at the list of all Hollywood releases and subtract –
Sequels
Remakes
Comic Books
Adaptations from literature
Video Game inspired movies
You will realize that only 10% of the movies made every year come from original scripts. Now factor in the 100,000 odd WGA member screenwriters…it’s very hard for a new comer to break in. You have got to be better than the established writers to get a break and that’s a tall ask.
Among recent moviees, the only ones I know that are by debutant writers are –
The Inside Man
Harold & Kumar
Red Eye
Stranger Than Fiction
Saw
Notice a pattern or genre?
If you want to break into Hollywood, write a thriller, comedy or horror.