ASK & DISCUSS
INDEXReading screenplays, my favo(u)rite way to procrastinate
12 years, 9 months ago - Vasco de Sousa
How can someone claim to be a screenwriter and not like reading screenplays?
I'm sure the average budding novelist has read a thousand novels before attempting his or her first one.
As a kid, I wasn't too keen on novels. Okay, I liked To Kill a Mockingbird and Megan the Klutz, but Wuthering Heights just didn't do it for me. But when I heard that my literary heroes had been in the children's section and read every book there (like real life Mathildas), I thought I'd rather spend some of the time watching movies and playing football with my friends.
However I loved Shakespeare and other theatre writers, and when I started reading film scripts it was like total magic.
I love to imagine myself acting out one of the Marx Brothers movies, putting in my own camera angles, replacing Groucho or Harpo's mannerisms with my own antics...
When I read an episode of Fawlty towers, or Golden Girls that I don't remember too well, I can direct the show in my head. And from reading Star Wars I learned what all those thing-a-ma-bobs they run through on the set are called. (uh, corridors right?)
Of course, there are a few novels, and a lot of stage plays, that I also enjoy reading.
Now, I won't claim that reading screenplays has taught me how to write them. Not one bit. I think it's the other way around. Writing scripts, using scripts and directing films; storyboarding, acting and toying with set designs on programs like Bryce and Maya (as well as on paper), has taught me how to really read a screenplay.
But telling screenwriters to "read scripts" to me seems as strange as Field's advice to "watch movies". By the spectacles of Eisenstein! if you don't like scripts and you don't like movies, what business do you have writing them? The advice should be "stop reading so many scripts, if you find yourself reading more than ten a week then..."
(This is an old post from well over a year ago that I never got around to sending, because I didn't know how to end it. But reading screenplays is still a great way to procrastinate.)
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12 years, 9 months ago - Dan Selakovich
Yeah, sorry, but this is nonsense. Watch any Tarantino movie, and count how
many he steals from (beautifully, by the way). Or if you can't learn something
from reading a William Goldman script, you're simply not paying attention.
Jack Kerouac would retype Hemingway novels. Martin Scosese said if he had
seen "I Am Cuba" early in his career, it would have changed the way he made
movies.
When I was a young man, I'd watch a film and then head over to the Academy
Library and read the script. There's no question it made me a better
screenwriter. Now it's so much easier: watch a DVD of a film you love, and
look up the screenplay on-line. Even a novice writer will start to see structure
after 5 scripts or so. The added bonus is knowledge of a writer's work gives
you something to aspire to. My problem, if you can call it that, is that I have
trouble sticking to a genre. Studios are sticklers for that sort of thing. If you
want to write a Romantic Comedy, for example, you'll go far reading and
watching romantic comedies for a week before you start to write. The rules of
the genre will be stuck in your head good and solid.
In the end, you aren't so much reading a script as studying it. Try it. If it
doesn't work for you, then you've lost nothing.
Response from 12 years, 9 months ago - Dan Selakovich SHOW