here are exceptions, of course—somewhere there must be the Emily Dickinsons of the script-writing world, content to craft 120 pages of riveting slug lines, evocative description and snappy or even sappy dialogue with no intention of exposing them to other eyes.
But this week we're not talking about the exceptions. We're talking about the rule: Your scripts must get read.
Ever since Ray Bradbury's novel Fahrenheit 451 (1953), reading has been a—forgive the pun—hot topic in sci-fi circles. For the three of you who may not have read this masterpiece ... or seen the somewhat less masterful Truffaut adaptation (1966) ... or heard about its relationship to Michael Moore's controversial Fahrenheit 9/11 (2004) ... the story posits a future in which television watching has replaced reading, in which books are outlawed, and only outlaws have books.
Chilling. And yet, somehow wrong.
Bradbury suggests that the majority of the human race reads, or would read if taught to do so. That, given the choice, we would obviously chose to curl up with the plays of George Bernard Shaw or the novels of Herman Melville rather than plop on the couch and watch the World Wrestling Federation, The O'Reilly Report or reruns of The Outer Limits.
People have always said that the ability to write is a talent. My theory is that the ability to read is just as rare.
And as a writer of scripts, that's the challenge you must overcome.
Readers are rarer than ever
Yes, yes, yes, you can train just about anybody to register the words on a freeway sign or to absorb a newspaper headline or decipher the figures in a URL, but how many people have the skill, desire or talent to enjoy fiction? To allow themselves to read so deeply that they are transported to another world? A fifth of the population? Fewer?
Not many.
And fiction—certain writers excluded—is designed to be read.
Working scripts are not. They are tools for actors, directors, production teams. They are poorly copied black-and-white versions of multicolored pages, whose descriptions are often bland, technical, even boring ... as is the reading experience.
But bland, technical, boring scripts can make good television episodes or even feature films. Just as wonderfully written, surprising teleplays can stumble when making the transition from page to stage.
How do you train a reader—anyone from an agency assistant to a development executive to a studio head or show runner—to read a writer's work and make the adjustment?
You don't. The reader either has this skill (actually, empathy) or she doesn't. She will skim a produced script, see nothing on the page that leaps out as unique (especially if the script is for a series she doesn't know well) and put it down after 10 pages.
If that was your script, too bad.
Knowing this, you, the wily writer, create a sample designed to counterattack this human response. ...
What kind of sample?
There is the pure reading spec. This is the script that is aimed at getting, and holding, a reader's attention. It will have snappy lines in narration, lush descriptions, snappy asides, possibly even typographical experiments.
W.D. Richter's first script for Big Trouble in Little China (1986) ended a page of balls-out action with the narrative phrase "Yes, it's going to be that kind of movie."
If you were Richter, writing your first (dream) draft of a picture for a director, you got away with it—and got produced, even though you later shared credit with other writers.
If you were Harlan Ellison, writing a wonderful adaptation of I, Robot back in 1978, a script as impossible to put down as it was to produce (at that time) ... well, you got a book and notoriety, but no movie.
Spec scripts get Desperate
Then there is the selling spec. The feature film world goes through cycles in which specs are "hot," and bought in huge deals that make the front pages of Variety and The Hollywood Reporter. (The first major spec script sale, according to legend, was by Preston Sturges in 1933, for The Power and the Glory. In case anyone asks.)
After a while, the spec market cools. You can't sell anything that isn't a pitch. (Or so the mythology goes. In truth, both specs and pitches are sold all the time.)
But with the exception of the live drama days, when Kurt Vonnegut could write a script, give it to his agent and see it sold, television has resisted specs. Every now and then some writer would sell a spec episode, but it was rare enough to be noted in the trades and talked about for months.
Lately, however, television has been open to spec pilots.
A veteran comedy writer named Marc Cherry sold Desperate Housewives as a spec pilot. I recall that Steven Long Mitchell and Craig Van Sickle did the same with The Pretender in 1996. Rockne O'Bannon has a new project, Cult, which just set itself up at The WB.
You are allowed—nay, even encouraged—to be cute in selling specs, though not too cute. Selling specs need to show the reader that the writer understands that a series needs a hero (and possibly a villain), a central setting, a cast of reasonable size and no spaceships.
(Sorry, I've just been hearing "no spaceships" for the past two years.)
They need to help the reader. Dialogue shows character. Narrative describes the action without clogging the page with endless wordage about furniture, clothing, the curl of the heroine's locks.
These scripts need to be designed to be reader-friendly. And it takes a lot of work.
Writers get lazy—or, worse, arrogant. I know that faithful readers of this column will be shocked, shocked to think it of me, but once when I was busy with one assignment, I was asked to provide a sample for a second potential project. "They need to read you," the producer told me.
"My resume is two pages long," I snapped. "Let them read that."
Do I need to tell you that I didn't get the second assignment?
Keep writing. Keep reading what you write. Read it aloud.
Help your readers. There aren't enough of them to waste.
Michael Cassutt has been reading a lot of his own work lately, notably a miniseries script for the SCI FI Channel in collaboration with David Kemper.
