10 Years of Bitter Posts - Dan Callahan and Robert Levine interviews

Over the years I've done a number of interviews (all of them conveniently linked on the side of the blog,) but the first two deep-dive interviews I did will always remain closest to my heart. Part of this is because it was nice to have these interview subjects indulge me for what often came out to an hour and a half chat. The result of that longer talk was an ability to go further in depth about topics that often get skimmed past in shorter interviews.

With Dan Callahan, I knew I had a compelling opportunity. In 2008, Dan saw his first produced feature script hit theaters, a late summer arrival entitled COLLEGE. If you remember this movie you might not remember it fondly - it only scored a 6% on Rotten Tomatoes and opened at #15 in the box office. Its entire domestic gross was less than $5M.

I spoke to Dan nearly a year after this, so he was under no illusions about the film or its reputation. One pre-interview request I had was that I wanted to read the draft that sold so that I could compare it to the film. Would it be possible to see where this film went so wrong? Or was it a case of every failing of the film already being deep in its DNA?

To spare you the suspense, the script - written with Dan's co-writer Adam Ellison - was quite a bit better. Had it been shot as is, it probably would have been a decent film. Not a monster hit, but one that its target audience would probably remember fondly. And so with Dan, I tried to trace all the ways that bad choices turned his earnest teen comedy into... something less.

Part 1 - The Writing Process
Part 2 - Getting an Agent and Selling the Script
Part 3 - Notes, Rewriting, Casting, and SUPERBAD
Part 4 - More Rewrites
Part 5 - Release and Reaction

Some time after that, I interviewed Robert Levine, then an Executive Story Editor and writer on HUMAN TARGET. Since our interview, Robert has become the creator and showrunner of the successful Starz series BLACK SAILS. At the time, I was interested in talking to Robert because he was a writer who came up through the assistant ranks.

There are a lot of writers who break into TV via means that seem less achievable - they had a couple unproduced feature sales and then someone bought their pilot, they sold their novel for adaptation, they had a career as a doctor and became a writer/consultant on a medical show. Robert's path seemed more achievable - get in as an assistant and figure out how to make yourself valuable to the show. In our chat we covered that, as well as some specific questions about JERICHO, which was his first show as a staff writer.

Part 1 - Climbing the ladder as a writers' assistant
Part 2 - Working on JERICHO's first season
Part 3 - Writing season two of JERICHO
Part 4 - Writing the JERICHO comic book and getting an agent
Part 5 - Writing for HUMAN TARGET

Please give these a look. I sometimes worry that since they're so far back in the archives, newer readers haven't seen them.

10 Years of Bitter Posts - ER week and TV deep dives

Working my way through my old posts, I see it only took me a couple months to do my first deep-dive theme week on a TV show. It was March 2009 and ER was just about to finish a 15 year run on the air. Having watched the series pretty much since the beginning - and with the morning TNT reruns a staple of my viewing while I started my day - I saw an opportunity to use the show as a teaching tool.

It was the first time I felt like I really went in-depth on a topic, and probably one of the first times I strayed so far from my direct experience as a script reader. A lot more work went into these posts, but it was more satisfying because I always enjoyed talking about what I loved than bitching about what I hated.

When you're putting so much energy into communicating your opinion, you're more easily fueled by an appreciation for the topic rather than distain. This is not to say I don't enjoy the occasional "Oh, fuck THIS" post, because I do, but I have far more enthusiasm for a series of posts that go "Oh my god! This is so awesome! Let me count the ways so you can take it in and see how this is awesome too!"

This might be how I ended up writing a thirteen part-series on 13 REASONS WHY. It's DEFINITELY how I ended up writing an love letter to the 16 Great TV Shows that made me the writer I am today.

But my blog's virginity for that approach was lost to ER, almost ten years ago.

Part 1 is an examination of the pilot script and the main characters:

I recently rewatched the pilot for the first time in several years and several things struck me. First, at the time it premiered, I remember all the hype about how ER moved too fast, the camera never slowed down, the editing was too quick and MTV-like. It just goes to show you how things change in 15 years of TV because the pace was a bit more leisurely than on most ER episodes today, and the moving camera wasn’t nearly the breakneck pace it was made out to be. The lighting was also more diffused and “natural,” along with a more muted color palate. It’s as if they were making an effort to be “real.” If I wanted to be glib, I’d say that the current incarnation of the show is like the TV-version of the original series. 

But never mind much of that because we’re here to talk about writing. There are five regular characters introduced in the pilot: Doctors Mark Greene (Anthony Edwards), Doug Ross (George Clooney), Susan Lewis (Sherry Stringfield), med student John Carter (Noah Wyle) and surgeon Peter Benton (Eriq la Salle). (Nurse Hathaway is in the pilot as well, but at the time of production she was not intended as a regular character and was in fact, supposed to be killed off in the episode, but more on that later this week.) The premise is simple – we’re a fly-on-the-wall for 24 hours in the life of Chicago’s Cook County General emergency room.

Part 2 takes a look at a two-character scene where one of the doctors has to break it to a patient that they have terminal cancer.

Part 3 examines another pivotal scene, the doctors reacting to Hathaway's suicide attempt.

Part 4 is a deep-dive into one of my favorite episodes, "All in the Family," aka the one where the ER staff fights to save Carter and Lucy after a stabbing.

10 Years of Bitter Posts - I'm gonna keep talking about sexism and misogyny until you stop writing it

There are some topics that I've covered from the start of this blog and have kept returning to over the years. You'd think I'd have run out of things to say about it, or at least that an issue of such magnitude would have seen some progress over the years, which only makes a lack of progress even more disheartening. I'm speaking, of course, about misogyny and sexism in scripts.

There are a lot of things I've seen recur in bad scripts. When you've read a lot of these, you almost start to get desensitized to it because you notice there are certain mistakes that every first-time writer is going to make. Dialogue will be too on the nose, scenes will take too long to play out, characters will give long speeches about meaningless pop culture because the writer really wants to pontificate about Bob Dylan... and every female character will have ample breasts.

Let's say I was reading 10 scripts a week. I would bet that AT LEAST two of those scripts described the size, shape and/or condition of the breasts of a female character. It's almost always gratuitous too. Even if the script organically got to a moment where the female character strips down to a bikini or lingerie, there's rarely a need for leering scene description. (Too few writers think about the fact that the actresses are going to READ that description too.)

You might be inclined to consider this as benign sexism, but it's dangerous to objectify your characters like this - and when it's systemic across a lot of scripts, you start to realize the problem is bigger and uglier than a screenwriter who is typing while horny.

I don't think this casual sexism is unrelated to an uglier brand of misogyny I often encountered in scripts. Rape and sexual assault are often badly mishandled and one of the biggest red flags is when the writer objectifies the victim of sexual assault. A rape scene should not feel sexual - it should feel like a violation. It is not a power fantasy - it is an act of violence and degradation. Emotionally, we should NOT be relating to the perpetrator (unless the entire point of the script is to implicate the audience along with your assailant, but that's a rare situation and a tricky needle to thread to boot.)

Just over a month into the life of this blog, I wrote "Misogynistic Violence against women."

After more than five years as a reader, I now know far too many ways to mutilate, subjugate and sexually degrade a woman. I’m by no means a feminist, and there are plenty of instances where I’ve read an act of violence committed upon a female character and haven’t raised an eyebrow at it. Don’t misunderstand me – I’m not saying you should never hurt, injure or kill your female characters. That would be equally sexist. The problem sets in when it feels like the victimizer in the scene is a stand-in for the writer’s own sick desires.

This is one of those subliminal things that’s hard to point out without using specific examples, and unfortunately, to show the worst/best examples of such writing would likely get me sued. As blurry as the line gets, it most frequently gets crossed when some sort of sexual element is added to it. A scene where a woman is stabbed and her throat is slashed probably wouldn’t set of any alarms – but a scene where a woman is stabbed, then raped as the attacker takes obvious glee in her pain is going to be more repulsive.

I returned to the topic in a later post, "The script that made me want to recommend psychiatric help for the writer."

And then there was one of the most vile, misogynistic pieces of violent writing I had ever read.  It was perverted, disgusting and disturbing to such a level that the only reason I ended up with the script was that the (female) reader who had to cover the first submission of this script refused to read it again due to being the product of a sick mind.

She was right. I googled the writer.  He was a studio exec.

As much as that deserved a rimshot THAT WAS NOT A JOKE!

The coverage that script provoked was some of the most unvarnished coverage I ever had submitted to these bosses.  Some of my employers enjoy it when I take a more Simon Cowell-like approach to shredding the truly terrible scripts, others have preferred a more measured, even take on it.  The bosses for this submission were among the more buttoned-up, but in my write-up, I only barely restrained myself from suggesting psychiatric help for the submitter.

A few months later, the script was resubmitted.  I had to read it again.  The fucker barely had changed anything - and he certainly hadn't toned down the misogyny or the violence.  Or the misogynistic violence.  I made sure when I wrote the synopsis that I included every last instance of such.

I'll put it this way.  He made I Spit on Your Grave look like Mary Poppins.  So I tore him a new one, then emailed my boss's assistant and said, "Look, this concept is NEVER ever going to get a Consider from anyone.  If we take it again, we're wasting our time and the company's money."  As I understand it, the message was conveyed.  In spades.

A few weeks later, the writer attempted to submit again.  He was unsuccessful.

I've probably written other scripts that were just as bad or worse, but few made me as violently angry at the writer as that.  Rarely have I ever felt I was looking into the mind of such a sick individual.

I'm still angry about this one. I felt violated just having been forced to read it and spend three hours of my day immersed in this and then writing it up.

Granted, that's an extreme example. And almost every time I get going on this topic, there'll usually be at least one person responding with an attitude about how I shouldn't tell writers what to write, or that I'm advocating censorship, or listing rape scenes in acclaimed films as if that disproves my argument.

So here's my concession right here - YES, it's possible to write a rape scene that is integral to the story, makes a point, isn't exploitative and doesn't objectify the victim. I'm not saying never write about sexual violence. Hell, I think 13 Reasons Why did a very solid job of depicting sexual violence and doing it in a way that wasn't sleazy or crass. (I hasten to add that I'm speaking of Season 1 here, NOT the controversial sexual assault in Season 2.)

So if your takeaway here is that I'm saying "NEVER write about rape," you're misunderstanding me. All I'm asking for is some responsibility. A checklist like this wouldn't hurt:

• Is it essential to the story?
• If yes, are steps taken to depict the victim as more than just a victim?
• If yes, are you writing the scene in a way that isn't designed to excite and arouse?
• If you had to remove the rape from the story, how much would it change? Is it substantial?
• Whose arc is altered the greatest by the inclusion of the rape: The male character's or the female characters?

Many of these questions relate to issues I raised in this post, "Let's talk about rape scenes." Though it's more than five years old, it's worth a read. At one point it was one of my most popular posts. It also lead to one of my favorite reader emails, where a reader named Diana really hit the nail on the head:

I remember a foreign film way back when about the brutality of the civil war in the former Yugoslavia and its affects on women. (can't remember the title). It showed the lawlessness during that time, and the resulting roaming gangs of men. And the violence that was regularly perpetrated against women. It showed a brutal gang rape scene (that must have lasted at least a full 5 minutes of film time!) of two women in their home. It included the act of anal rape. It was riveting. Horrifying. Visceral. And realistic. It was not sexy in the least. And it was not done for shock value, though it most certainly left most of us in the audience in shock. 

And as it turns out, no superhero guy (or hubby/boyfriend) appeared in a fit of rage in that film to avenge the violence against these two women. After the rapists left, the women were simply left alone with their physical injuries and their shattered psyches. And their own rage. Of which they had plenty. 

And I think therein touches on another part (I think actually it's the crux) of the (inherent) problem with these many rape scenes of women penned by men: It is that the man (boyfriend/husband/superhero guy) gets to feel the resulting rage for the violation. And to act on that rage. Not the woman who was violated. 

Rape happens to women. A lot. So not ever showing rape of women would be sort of a denial of this horrible reality. And aside from the reality that some male writers might write such scenes a little too (disturbingly) gleefully,i t's not even (just) the fact that the aftermath of the rape on the female victim is never really shown-- such as, say, the woman/girl sobbing and stuff. Or being an emotional/psychological wreck. Or even being terrified in the aftermath--maybe of men, maybe of just going outside. Whatever. No, it's not even just about those things. What's it's also about, maybe even more so about, is THE RAGE. And who gets to have it. 

THE RAGE. It would be a great term for the last year and a half, as sexual harassment and misogyny have been called out with much greater frequency and we have seen women push back against abuse, saying "No more!"

Feel that rage - and understand that rage belongs to every female character abused and mistreated. If your writing isn't reflecting that, you need to go back to the drawing board.

Dare I hope that the next five years of rape in spec scripts will look and feel different from the five or ten years that proceeded it?

10 years of Bitter Posts - Structure

In today's installment of our month-long retrospective, I tackle a post that I feel less enthused about a decade later. Even then, I was careful to couch most of what I said as general advice, not as any kind of iron-clad "rule." This was because the instant you call something a "rule," even half-jokingly, you'll attract the attention of someone who'll shout "There are no rules in writing!" and then suddenly the debate is about "How DARE you tell someone what to write!" than it is about the actual issue you were writing about in the first place.

That usually then spins out to the fire-breathing attack that "if this guy was any good, HE'D have sold a script!" The argument turns into pro-vs-amateur, which is never a good look for either side and nothing productive comes of it. 

(I want to point out that 99% of my interactions with professional writers has been positive, but every now and then you find one who seems resistant to the idea that someone without a script sale to their name could POSSIBLY understand when a script makes a bad choice. If you're writing scripts ONLY for an audience of screenwriters, then sure, shut out everything else. OR if you're faced with a snake oil guru who makes a living by slapping bullshit terminology on top of more commonly-understood jargon and then charging you through the roof for it, by all means, go after him.)

This older post was about structure. While I still stand by the spirit of the post, I wince a little at how I used page numbers as a signpost, even though I made a point of saying not to use those page numbers as exact markers. CAN you have twenty pages until you hit the inciting incident? Sure. But it doesn't happen often and when it does happen, you'll find that those first twenty pages are some of the most compelling you've ever read.

But as someone who's a stickler for structure, particularly in my own writing, I want to find a way to give the novice a way to understand how Three-Act Structure works. Save the Cat has a brilliant breakdown, but is almost two specific in two different ways: I think it seems to mandate too many specific plot points AND it's pretty specific about where the pages fall.

So how would I handle it today? I'd probably write the post without the page numbers first, describing the act breaks and turning points entirely in terms of what their function was.

To wit:

• The inciting incident is the change in the status quo that instigates the story. It's Casey Becker being murdered by Ghostface, Vincent getting into Max's cab, Chief Brody finding the body of a half-eaten swimmer and realizing he's got a shark on his hands. It's the starter's gun for your story and your protagonist. Everything else is setting the stage for that and laying out the world.
  
• The first act turning point is the major shift in the story trajectory. It's Marty McFly realizing he's in 1955 and accidentally messing up his parents' first meeting. Something MAJOR happens and it defines how the protagonist is going to spend the rest of the movie reacting to it or fixing it.
  
• The midpoint is an equal raising of the stakes. Then the second act climax is usually where we hit the do-or-die moment. The character is at their lowest point and usually needs to rally for the endgame. If there's a plan, here's where it goes off the rails. In Back to the Future, it's probably the moment where George shows up for his rehearsed fight with Marty, only to find that Biff is about to sexually assault Lorraine. In Batman Begins, it's when Ra's burns down Wayne Manor and Bruce is left for dead, even as the League of Shadows puts into play their plan for Gotham's demise.
  
• The third act then becomes a ticking clock down to the climax. What are our heroes trying to stop or achieve? This is hero vs villain, or the big game where our characters face their opponents.

(Though to be honest, Back to the Future is a dangerous script to use for these purposes because nearly EVERY scene is so propulsive that you can make a case for it as a turning point. Marty still needs to play at the dance, George still needs to kiss Lorraine AND then Marty has to get home even as the clock tower plan falls apart piece by piece.)

But those are usually the five structural questions I need to have answered before I start writing:

• What opens up the world?
• What is the change or escalation that will define the second act of the story? What's the "oh shit" decision that gets made there? (Better if it comes from something the protagonist does.)
• What's the new challenge or threat that shows itself after the characters are starting to feel comfortable?
• What is their lowest point?
• What is the final test they face? What are they trying to stop/achieve ultimately?

There! Did it all without citing page numbers.

10 Years of Bitter Posts - Cliches I'm tired of seeing and Quick Tips

Another early feature on the blog was "Clichés I'm Tired of Seeing." When you're reading 15 scripts a week for five years, you start becoming nauseous at the signs that always accompany the least satisfying scripts to read. Most of these could be easily evaded, but too many writers fell into the most unimaginative ways of using them.

The first cliché I targeted was a resolution I'd seen in many rom-coms and dramas - where the "surprise" visual reveal of a woman's new baby bump at the climax was used as shorthand for "and they lived happily ever after." I started with that because it's not a BAD way to communicate the strength of the relationship, it's just a technique that's been done so many times that the impact it carries is usually outweighed by the audience feeling it coming.

I also took writers to task who ended their scripts with "To Be Continued." This was less common then and hopefully is non-existent now. I detested this the most when I could feel writers holding back from giving a story proper resolution solely so they could justify a sequel.

Later posts addressed:
- a struggle between two people for a gun that ends with a BANG while the gun itself is off-screen. After a moment of "suspense," one of the two combatants falls, revealing the other to be the winner.

- the old "start with the climax to get the audience hooked and then flashback to reveal how they got there" trick.

- racing to the airport to stop the love of your life from leaving.

- "It was all a dream!"

- The newscaster as an exposition delivery system.

- The use of "Get me a beer" as a universal indicator that a male character is an asshole.

- Using a bet as the catalyst for a premise that would never happen otherwise.

Looking at this list, I can see why I moved away from this series. The clichés it called out were becoming so cliché that even pointing them out was tired. It was a little like a stand-up comedian with a Jack Nicholson impression or a tight five on how white people and black people dance differently.

Somewhat concurrently, I started a series of posts I called "Quick Tips." In all candor, this was so I could get away with putting up shorter posts just to build up content. The practice ended mostly because I'm so goddamn wordy that my attempts to be "quick" soon dragged out too long.

1. First Impressions
2. Brainstorming by imagining your movie's trailer
3. Knowing your title should be catchy
4. Character names
5. Don't try to solve a note about "this character seems thin" with a one-scene dumb of emotion and backstory.

Reading these early posts, I'm very aware that I was still clearly trying to find my voice. While all of these tips come from experience, they seem somewhat generic to me. They don't even come from the affected voice of a weary, bitter reader. I figured out early on that writing every post from the point of view of someone bitching would be exhausting. I mean, I love Lewis Black, but there's a reason The Daily Show didn't need him on every night.

It's all basic, 101 level blogging. Today, I wouldn't write some of these because I don't think I'd have any new way to say them. Part of why my presence has been less and less over the years is that I realized it shouldn't feel like an obligation to have an opinion about a particular facet of writing. I can just blog when I have something to say.

But I know people found these early posts useful, and so I try to remember that I have a lot of readers who might still be contemplating writing their very first script. For them, these early posts will always be there.

10 years of Bitter posts - When Good Scripts Go Bad

When I started the blog, one feature I thought I'd get more milage out of was "When Good Scripts Go Bad." It seemed like an interesting way to pick movies that turned out less than good, but that read so much better when I saw them in script form. It sounded like a good idea in concept, but in practice, writing those posts was less fun.

I don't shy away from writing dissections of TV and film that I felt fell short. Studying those mistakes can be instructive, and there is plenty you can learn from failures. I think what I discovered was that in framing the reviews in the way I did, it made the post too much about ME and less about the work. Also, every post was determined to have the same punchline - "I read it, it was great, but I was wrong and the movie sucked."

That doesn't mean it wasn't instructive in helping demonstrate the difference between a great script and a great movie. That disparity absolutely exists. The problem was that in most of these cases I experienced, the reason for my bosses passes almost ALWAYS came down to business reasons. After I've told you once or twice that, "this script came with Tony Scott attached and there's no way in hell these guys wanted to work with him" or "they didn't get it, but it was more that they saw no commercial potential because later that year they developed two scripts that clearly they didn't get either."

That's why this was an experiment I did only twice and when I was halfway through a third post following the same pattern, I could already sense I was repeating myself. I found I enjoyed dissecting failed films much more just as a straight review rather than forensically looking back at the original script and using conjuncture to presume how it ended up going from A to B.

One of my earliest mistakes in getting a script wrong was DOMINO, a Richard Kelley script directed by Tony Scott.

I had the then-rare distinction of reading a really clever and engaging script for my bosses at the time. It had a complex plot, a clever non-linear structure, some funny showbiz cameos, and some really well-executed twists. In short, it was one of the most original scripts I’d seen and also one that I would have been willing to stake my reputation on. The script in question? Richard Kelly’s Domino, the story of a former model-turned-bounty-hunter, based on a true story (sort of.)

Unfortunately there was not shortage of reasons why my boss felt that the script was an inappropriate fit for us at the time, and there were factors I wasn’t expected to know about, so the company quietly passed. I spent the next year lamenting the fact that my bosses had let such a sure-fire hit movie get away. During that time, whenever someone asked me if I’d read anything good lately, I was quick to reply that Domino was one of the best scripts I’d ever seen and that it was sure to be a hit when it came out. Maybe I’m exaggerating, but in hindsight it certainly feels like I was staking all my script-reading credibility on this movie, at least as far as my rep among my friends was concerned.

Long story short - the movie that was released was not the movie in my brain. But it took YEARS for me to see the final film, which was plenty of time for Richard Kelley to become cemented in my brain as a writer who was vividly creative and clever. It meant he started ahead of the game the next time a script of his crossed my desk...

Here's what I had to say about my enthusiastic coverage for SOUTHLAND TALES.

There was some incredibly clever writing in that script, as well as a truly unique premise. But it wasn't realized exceptionally well. Isolated pockets of it worked so well that as a reader you really wanted the whole thing to come together and be more than the sum of its parts. I got this just before a weekend and it was such a priority that I was going to be reading it alongside the VP of Development, the SVP of Development, the assistant to the President of Development and the President of Development himself.

After my first read, I could never have explained half of what went on in that script. It was just all over the place and full of complex, scientific concepts and technobabble about the nature of time and reality. There were enough ideas in there for three completely different films. But the one-third of it that I really understood, I really liked.

I read it a second time, and understood it only marginally better.

I read the script FOUR times over the weekend, taking notes each time until I felt I had puzzled out most of the narrative. Then read it a FIFTH time as I wrote up the synopsis and tried to bring some order to a very chaotic script. I gave it a consider, citing its imagination, even as I knew it only worked about 50% and that was with immense effort on the part of the audience. To bulletproof myself, I mentioned the commercial viability of all of the talent attached.

I probably should have known better when it was taking that much effort to decode the script, but in my defense, the parts of the script I immediately liked were so good that they MADE me want to put in that time.

Of course, if you read that post, you'll see that I also was envisioning those scenes in an ENTIRELY different tone than they ended up being done in the movie. I supposes that exposes the limitations of coverage - sometimes your own imagination can steer you wrong, unless it's the fault of unclear writing.

I was early in realizing this, but sometimes the posts focused on the day-to-day work of being a reader were rarely fascinating to those who weren't readers themselves. It made me realize I'd need a different approach in discussing the script problems of completed works.

Preparing to celebrate 10 years as The Bitter Script Reader

For most of us, the dawn of a new year is the impetuous to look forward. The next twelve months are a blank page waiting to be filled with story that - hopefully - will be better than the 12 that proceeded it. This year, the start of 2019 is provoking me to look backwards and reflect, for it brings us closer to the 10th anniversary of this blog.

My first post appeared in this space on January 29, 2009, in a post laying out the mission statement of this blog. At the time, there were few resources available from the perspective of a script reader and I wanted to contribute to the screenwriting community from the perspective of the guy who says "no" to a lot of writers for many of the same reasons. My still-evolving vision of this site was that it would be a repository of "Don't do this" or "I'm sick of this" and the occasional gossipy detail about films I'd seen go through the development process.

Because there seemed to be a risk in slinging some dirt about how a few agencies dealt with the coverage process, I opted to hide behind a pseudonym. Since the definition of my job was to be a gatekeeper, I settled on... Zuul the Gatekeeper in what I'm sure was an obvious attempt to invoke the pen names of those who wrote for sites like Ain't It Cool News. The blog was titled "The Bitter Script Reader" because I sought something immediately reflective of what the site was about, even as I made ironic use of the retort many writers used when presented with unfavorable coverage. 

Because "Bitter Script Reader" seemed like such a mouthful, I doubted anyone would take to using it as my name, hence the brief adoption of "Zuul," stolen from GHOSTBUSTERS. For some reason it escape my imagination that people could just call me "Bitter." Before long, that became the preferred moniker, though, and so if  you ever wondered why my email was "ZuulTheReader at Gmail" now you know.

As I look at my first few months of posts, I see a lot of things I would be unlikely to do today. After having spent a number of years reading scripts where the formatting alone was a warning that the next hour was unpleasant. As I soon discovered, even just advising people on formatting leads to people complaining you're being a "formatting Nazi." This isn't helped by the complaints of pros who loudly argue against any "rules" and act as if anyone giving guidance is some kind of flim-flam man.

"No one ever passed on a script because it was in the wrong font! No one ever passed on a script because their action paragraphs had seven lines instead of three!" Yes, that's true. But good writers often forget there are a lot of things they do innately BECAUSE they are good writers. They're not consciously following rules because they have internalized so many facets of writing in a way that keeps them from making these kinds of mistakes on instinct.

In other words, they think they're rule-breakers, but the truth is that they're operating on such a higher level that they've forgotten how those at the very start of the race still need guard rails. So when I say, "Don't turn in a script written in Times New Roman. It tells me you don't know what you're doing!" a retort of "CHINATOWN would still be CHINATOWN in Times New Roman" is kind of missing the point. I often look at a script as a job interview for a film and when I go to a job interview, I dress the part.

I wish I'd found a better way to express that at the start of posts on formatting rules. It would have saved me a lot of emails over the years from people taking exception to the idea of a writing rule rather than looking for the "note behind the note" of this DON'T.

But if you want a look back on how I addressed formatting in the early days of the blog, jump into the Wayback Machine and take in these posts:

Formatting - The First Thing Every Writer Gets Wrong

Writing Action Paragraphs

Choreographing Fight Scenes

When to capitalize and underline

Bolding your sluglines

"We see" - to use or not to use.

For the rest of this month, we'll be taking a look back together. I hope you enjoy it as much as I do.