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10 Things to Consider
Before You Send Out Your Script
By Steve Piper

My company has been accepting scripts mostly through it’s website at http://www.coffeefilms.com since 1998. We’ve read literally thousands in that time, and replied with feedback on almost all, but a lot of our feedback tends to say the same thing; new writers all make the same mistakes.

So before you send out that next batch of screenplay e-mails to a bunch of production companies you’ll probably never hear from again, refer to this checklist and see if you can’t give your script a better chance.

Incidentally I’m more than happy to accept that these “rules” aren’t cast in stone; they can be broken and they can be broken well, but I challenge anyone to show me a film which breaks more than one of these (without being mad experimental bizarreness) and remains a good film.

1. Formatting
I remember when I started and heard people wouldn’t read scripts unless they were properly formatted; “How dumb is that?” I thought, “They could miss screenplay gold.” This was before I noticed a distinct pattern emerge; those who couldn’t be bothered with screenplay format generally couldn’t be bothered with such irrelevancies as spelling, grammar, plot, dialogue and characterisation either.

Any company that begins to receive large volumes of scripts will automatically bin unformatted ones because it’s always an indication that everything else will be bad; bear in mind anyone getting lots of scripts probably also has a very full slate.

Formatting is easy to pick up and achievable with Word if you have a little patience, learn more about formatting at http://www.films.com.br/introi.htm, or you can probably download a free copy of Final Draft from somewhere or other.

2. Those Irrelevancies Again
You are a writer and that means people expect proper spelling, punctuation and grammar, dialogue can be phonetic on occasion but scene descriptions definitely can’t be. These kinds of mistakes indicate you probably haven’t proof read your own work, and if you can’t be arsed to read it you can’t expect anyone else to be either.

Also avoid putting draft numbers on your cover page; “draft 2” indicates it’s probably underdeveloped, “draft 20” indicates it’s beyond help, and even something safe like “draft 4” will indicate you don’t draft very carefully if it still retains typos and so on.

3. Storyline
A lot of stuff I get is just rehashes of work already out there; obviously, when one big fantasy film hits the box office everyone starts writing LOTR style scripts, it’s writing for the market, but here in Britain I’m still getting the same tired witty-London-gangster scripts I was 5 years ago and none of them offer anything new, it’s just Guy Ritchie material with different character names. Writing for the trendy market gives your script a short shelf life which is bad news for an unknown writer, it probably also means you’re writing outside your field of experience; I get witty London gangster scripts from people who have lived in Yorkshire all their life, it’s ridiculous.

All writers should write about things they know and understand, especially early on, if you have to wade into unknown territory you need to research it very thoroughly; that means more than skimming a couple of pages of Google results, if you want to really have a good chance of getting produced or recognised you need to bring a different angle to your chosen genre.

4. Dialogue
To write good dialogue you need to write how people in general speak, not how the Terminator speaks. You also need to consider character, the way that person speaks. When reading a script a character is most clearly defined by their dialogue, inexperienced writers will often give everyone the same voice; they all joke and talk about the same things in exactly the same way and it’s very dull and stands out a mile. An easy way to get around this is to base your characters on people you know, or even on famous actors, when you write you can picture them saying it and how they’d say it and get a more natural variance to your dialogue and far more interesting characters.

5. Character Progression
Referred to also as ‘character arc’; your lead characters need to start in one place and finish in another or it’s been a pointless journey. In it’s most basic form imagine an Arnie cheesefest where someone kidnaps his neglected daughter, in finding her again Arnie learns just how much she means to him and how he must be a better Dad; his character has progressed, he starts an idiot and finishes reborn giving his character a clear storyline arc. Ask yourself what your main protagonists have learned from their film experience and make sure it’s something interesting.

6. Budget
My company is very small and based in the UK, which has one of the most retarded film industries on the planet, budgets are tiny for all but the romantic comedies released by Working Title (“Four Weddings…” etc). Our background is in underground, zero budget, occasionally experimental short work, probably the most we or most of the other UK producers can aspire to is around £1-2m for a feature if we’re really, really lucky all of this is either common knowledge or made crystal clear on the website. With all that in mind consider the opening lines of this script submission;

“We open in a luxury beachfront penthouse in LA, a Porsche and a Humvee sit in the driveway, we swoop majestically over the building to see …”

Is there really any point in me reading the rest? It got sent to me though. Until your budget gets well into the millions everything needs to be cheap, this means avoid foreign or high cost locations, avoid demands for sweeping helicopter shots, avoid demands for hordes of CGI werewolves to attack the hero, avoid stunts, avoid guns, avoid demands for chart topping music; it’s not rocket science, these kinds of films cost millions of dollars for a good reason, it’s expensive specialist stuff! If you want all that in you need to go for the big companies and to do that you will need an agent or a lot of time spare to play the Hollywood “casting couch”.

7. Structure
This one’s a harder thing to learn, but it’s also an essential and something most new writers think isn’t important or they don’t need to know. All writing is structured; film, books, theatre, music, everything, it’s a bit like working out the track listing for a compilation CD, what’s the best order to put the individual tracks (scenes) in?

Films typically run in three acts, the first introduces the characters and the main situations, the second (often referred to as “the mess in the middle”) develops and sometimes twists those characters and situations, the third winds everything up in a satisfactory manner. Most people get this much (for anyone interested in developing more try studying Shakespeare’s five act structures, much better for complex or very character driven work), but they don’t get that there needs to be structure to the scenes within those acts as well; at it’s most basic level you may feature the same location three times in a row when it would be more interesting to cut away to other locations in between, on a more complex level it could be the structure of the character arcs; you need to consider what each character knows at each time and how that affects everything else.

The only sensible way to deal with this is to plan and develop your idea rather than wade in; trying to write a script straight out from scratch is usually impossible to achieve. You should start with a one page synopsis, then develop that into a treatment; basically the script without dialogue, list every scene and what happens in it, juggle scenes around, see what works or what becomes most interesting before committing yourself to pages of dialogue.

8. Ego
Do not headline your name above your script title i.e. “Steve Piper’s The Evil Cat”, apart from the fact it’s really sad, it also typically correlates with the kind of writer so deeply entrenched in their own arsehole that they will be completely impossible to work with, or will expect to retain all rights to their script (forget it if you want a career).

All writers need to be prepared for a lot of criticism, getting accepted by a producer is just the start; what probably faces you is weeks or months of rewriting as the producer and director pick out little things they don’t like or developments they want to see more of; do pay attention to their suggestions, what works on paper doesn’t always work on screen and good producers and directors should have a really good understanding of that which they’ll want to use to make the script as good as it can be.

9. General Presentation
I hate getting a script with the cover e-mail note that reads “here’s my script”; what am I, your dog? Producers are the only people who can get your script made into a film, at least have the decency to address them with some kind of pitch/synopsis cover note that sounds like you might care if they were interested.

10. Ten Pages
You’ve probably heard how most producers only read the first ten pages and make a decision from it; it is the truth and it surprised me to learn it’s not as dumb as it sounds. After ten pages you know whether the writer is capable or not; the spelling, the dialogue, the story idea, I have yet to read the script that had a weak first ten then suddenly got amazing. Opening scenes are often the best in the script; you enter a new world and meet new characters and learn about a new set of circumstances involving those things; most writers have lots of events in the opening scenes (essential to get a viewing audience involved), so if it doesn’t happen in those first ten pages, it never will. If your first ten pages are good, then you can be fairly assured that at least the next 20 pages get read!

Further reading:
The web is awash with sites on writing in all its forms. There is a list of good screenwriting links at http://www.coffeefilms.com/scriptlinks.html, from which I would particularly recommend www.wordplayer.com. It helps to study the competition as well, both www.simplyscripts.com and www.script-o-rama.com offer huge libraries of screenplays to download completely free of charge. Always keep up to date with the trade press; one of our writers came up pretty much with The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen only for me to make him aware of the comic and at the time forthcoming film; a month’s work wasted!

Steve Piper is the managing director of Coffee Films, a production company based out of England that focuses on all forms of zero-budget filmmaking.

His company website is: http://www.coffeefilms.com.

 

 

 

(Reprinted with permission from Steve Piper and Microcinema Magazine.
Originally appeared at http://www.microcinemamagazine.com.)

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