Reader questions: Day 1

I'll start off with these questions from Kevin and Kerri, because I get them so many times a week that I really should start an FAQ just to answer them:

Will you read my fucking screenplay?

Nope, sorry.

How much do you charge for coverage?

I don't. Sorry guys, but I don't offer coverage services at this time. Maybe I'll get around to it down the line, but right now I'm a little busy with my regular work and my own writing. There are a few hurdles I'll still have to clear, not limited to working out some kind of legal release form as well as working out some way to accept payment anonymously.

Jen writes in to ask:

Just wondering if you have any books you'd recommend for learning the ins and outs of script coverage? I'm an aspiring TV writer and think it would be helpful to learn more about how readers break down a script and what they tend to look for during the coverage process.

I hate to say this, but I learned more from coverage simply by getting my hands on some samples and diving in with both feet. I'm sure there are books out there with examples, but that's not how I picked it up. Anyone have any suggestions for Jen?

It helps to read a lot of movie reviews, particularly from reviewers who get you to really look beneath the surface of the movies you see. For me, it was reading a lot of Roger Ebert's reviews and columns that really helped. There were also a lot of TV review blogs I read regularly in college. All of that got my inner critic in the habit if breaking down a story.

But the basic format of coverage tends to be: one paragraph intro/overview, one paragraph on plot/concept/structure and one paragraph on characters and character arcs, followed by a conclusion. Four paragraphs, one page.

Purpletrex asked a trio of questions:

Do scripts longer than 120 pages automatically get thrown in the trash?

No... but in most cases they probably start out with one strike against them unless you're a "known" quantity.

Also, what is the "acceptable" number of pages in a spec these days.

Depends on the genre. Comedy definitely hovers somewhere around 100-105 pages. Action is more likely to be 105-115. Horror is usually anywhere from 95-105. Drama's probably somewhere around 105-110. As much as the screenwriting books say that 120 is the typical length, the "average" industry script probably falls between 105-115 pages. I'd say that 95% of the "pro" scripts I read fall in the 105-115 range.

Has any spec longer than 120 pages ever made been bumped up the ladder?

I'm sure it happens, but statistically speaking I'd bet the odds of making it up the ladder go down the longer the script gets. If you're over 120 pages, there had better not be a single scene that feels too long or self-indulgent. Believe me, there's always something you can cut.

More answers later this week, and if you've got a question, please send it in.

Friday Free-for-All: Musical shows

My favorite new show this season is Glee, which is consistently entertaining despite the presence of two utterly, utterly stupid pregnancy plotlines. (I'm coming around on the Quinn/Finn pregnancy, but I still think it was a bad story to do so early in the run. There is NO redeeming value in the Terri pregnancy, or Terri as a character, though.)

Impressively, the show seems to be popular despite the fact that musical shows have rarely caught on. Either you get examples like the Jamie Waters drama The Heights, which managed to produce a Top 10 hit in "How Do You Talk to an Angel" but still tanked in the ratings. Remember it? Sure you do!



Gotta love how quickly that band jam session comes together. And could that long-haired guitar player BE more 90s? Man, everything about this screams "cheesy."

And who could forget Cop Rock? I couldn't decide which of these clips was more cringeworthy so I had to post both.

A Call for Questions

Well readers, I've received a few emails this week with questions that will soon make upcoming blog entries, but other than that, email questions have been pretty sparse lately. Consider this an invitation for open forum questions, much like what Scott did over at Go into The Story last week.

So hit me up with your question(s) and topics you'd like to see addressed in the blog. Email me at zuulthereader@gmail.com, Twitter me at @BittrScrptReadr, or just comment below.

I've just hit 200 followers on Twitter so if everyone sent me just one question, I'd have enough to keep me busy for a year. There's no limit on questions, and feel free to be creative. Answering your questions is one of my favorite things to do on this blog.

Cliches I'm Tired of Seeing - Part Seven - Newscaster exposition

My writing group will find this ironic considering I used this very trope in a recent script, but I really don't like when writers resort to using the tried-and-true expositional approach of the TV newscaster. It often feels lazy, like the writer couldn't think of a better way to introduce his world.

But the real problem is that most of these newscasts seem to have been written by writers who apparently have never watched the news in their life. If you want to see an example of this expositional trick employed correctly, watch the beginning of Tropic Thunder. After the long battle sequence, the film transitions into an Access Hollywood segment that drops a truckload of backstory on the audience. Why does it work? Because the scene in question sounds exactly like an Access Hollywood story, down to the bad puns and weak transitions. The writers absolutely nailed the tone and the cadence of that show and how it incorporates clips.

Bad newscast scenes feature things like remote reporters doing long live interviews for segments that would likely have been pre-taped and edited into soundbites on a real newscast. You'll also see things like two local news anchors discussing the issues of the day in a back-and-forth conversation more akin to Meet the Press than the 6pm affiliate news in Jersey.

There's also usually a lot of "As you know, Bob" type narration in these reports. True, the local news might recap some events for views unfamiliar with what happened, but it's unlikely they'd go into deep detail reminding the audience of the very specific circumstance two weeks ago that led to the mayor being arrested on charges of solicitation and drunk driving. In all likelihood, that would have been such a big local story that everyone in town would be aware of it. Thus, only a brief recap would be necessary.

So the next time you have the urge to write a newscast scene, don't. And if you're determined to ignore me, please at least spend a full week watching your local news so you get a flavor for how the pros do it.

Tuesday Talkback: They stole my idea!

I'm sure this happens to a lot of writers - ever work for weeks or months on a great new story idea, only to go to the theatre and see a trailer for a film with that exact same premise? That's got to be one of the most frustrating things for a creative person because you know you didn't steal that idea, but now your innovative concept is going to look like a rip-off and probably will have a much harder time finding a buyer.

A few years ago, my roommate and I were spitballing ideas and eventually came up with a clever comedy premise that could have been either a movie or a comic book. As I recall, since the premise was mostly his idea, he was the one who got to run with it, and though it wasn't an active project, he often came up with new gags for the eventual script. Then, about a year or so later, I was reading the latest comic book news at Newsarama, only to run across a feature article on a miniseries with that EXACT SAME PREMISE. That would have been bad enough, but I went out and bought the comic, hoping to reassure myself that they were significantly different so as to not make our idea a ripoff.

As it turned out, the hook was the same, but the main plot was totally different. Unfortunately, the tone and the style of the writing was so similar to my roommate's that had I not been the one to discover the comic, he easily could have dropped it in my lap and made a convincing case that it was written by him under a pen name.

I've also had some of my ideas end up as episodes of Dollhouse, as well as a spec script that has been in development with a major director for a while. Since there's a chance that project will still fall through, I'll keep quiet about specifics. There was also the time I was at lunch with a friend, and tossed out a high concept logline for what could be an HBO series. My friend, an aspiring comedy writer, agreed it was funny and for a while it sounded like we might develop it.

A few weeks later he shot me an email, informing me that one of his friends who worked in comedy at NBC had been on a conference call and heard about a project that had been pitched using the exact same logline as ours. Knowing that if this thing went to series, our idea would be dead in the water, we decided to abandon it. However, it's been a few years and has failed to surface so maybe we'll revisit it soon.

Has this ever happened to you? Does anyone have any really funny horror stories of getting "ripped off" after pouring blood, sweat and tears into your work?

Cliches I'm Tired of Seeing - Part Six - It was all a dream!

Take note, writers. There are few things you could do that convince me more of your hackitude than having a cop-out ending where everything is revealed as "just a dream." From where I sit, it completely guts the story on an emotional level because then nothing that happened in the movie "mattered." There were no rules for anything that happened. Plus, it's often a cheap out for a writer trying to surprise the audience.

Yes, The Wizard of Oz reveals that all of Dorothy's adventure in Oz was a dream. But that was 70 years ago, and done that way because the studio feared the audience wouldn't accept the fantasy any other way. If the movie was made today with that ending, it would be more critically derided than the endings of any M. Night movie post-Unbreakable.

And to tell you the truth, I'm not terribly fond of dream sequences within the film either. Slasher horrors tend to be the worst here (excluding the Nightmare on Elm Street series, where it has a context) because scary dreams are an easy way to get in some gore and perhaps even rough up or kill the main character without having to make it count or affect the plot. I've read many a horror film where the writer tried to compensate a dead Act Two by tossing in a few scary dreams in order to up the violence without actually advancing anything in the story.

Aside from violence, fantasy sex scenes also tend to be popular among writers for similar reasons. It's a good way to get a prudish female character gratuitously naked without compromising her character. Either that, or it's done to get your virginal male lead into a threesome without instantly resolving the main plot of him trying to get laid for the first time. In any event, the cheap trick is usually transparent from a mile off.

The worst use of a dream sequence that I ever read had to be a script I read for Big Deal Agency a few years back. I probably am legally bound from even giving the premise, but the whole story was built around a totally ludicrous conceit. It was ridiculous on the level of the world suddenly switching to a swatch-based economy. The most absurd thing was that the writer treated this premise with the utmost seriousness, as if the events in the film were even remotely plausible. Well, in my coverage I pointed out just how utterly unbelievable the premise was and how the way the writer chose to introduce that premise only enhanced its implausibility.

About a month later, the script was resubmitted and it again landed on my desk. Comparison coverage is always a great gig because usually all you have to do is read the script and if there aren't any major changes, just affirm your original notes. Most of the time, you'll only have to tweak your original synopsis and notes, getting the same pay for a fraction of the work.

By p. 30, I had yet to notice anything different, including the implausible premise and inciting incident. Ditto p. 60, and then p. 90. With only five pages left in the script, I noticed nothing different, and was perplexed that the writer had resubmitted the same draft with all the aforementioned weaknesses. And then, right at the very end a new scene emerged. The main character wakes up on a bus, right back at the point we last saw them on p. 12. Almost everything in the movie was a dream. That was their out for why things didn't make sense. You could almost hear them say, "See? Now it doesn't HAVE to make sense! It was all a dream!"

All this did was made me think the writer was even more of a hack than I had originally given them credit for. It's already difficult to get an audience to sympathize with a fictional character within the construct of a fictional story. Once the script adds another layer of fiction within that fiction, it takes the film to a whole new level of unreality. Often the audience says, "Well if none of this matters, why should I care?"

At the start of the film, the creators are essentially entering into a contract with the audience. The first act sets the tone and establishes the boundaries of that particular film. Basically, it shows the audience what's in-bounds and makes an implicit promise not to cheat by stepping outside those bounds. "It was all a dream" breaks that contract with the audience. It's not clever - it's a cheat, it's lazy, and good writers don't have to resort to it.

Friday Free-for-All: Friday the 13th

This is probably one of the most obvious Friday Free-for-Alls I've ever done, but given today's date, it seemed appropriate to pay homage to one of the more prolific horror/slasher franchises, Friday the 13th. It's actually a little weird to be writing this tribute because I've seen very few of the Jason movies. My viewing is limited to Jason X, Freddy vs. Jason, and the Michael Bay-produced remake that came out earlier this year.

Because of that, I have very little knowledge about any classic kills, or other major moments from earlier in the franchise. Plus, even if I could find many of them on YouTube, excessive gore seems a little violent for this blog, so today, I'll just stick to posting humor.

Here's Jason making an appearance on The Arsenio Hall show:



Jason busts a move: