A Script Has a Job
How are we out there, in the Slow Apocalypse? Hydrating? Go get a glass of water. I'll wait. And do that square breathing.
If you thought I was joking about the water, I wasn't.
This week's newsletter probably falls into the beginner level of screenwriting advice, which'll happen. Those of you with overalls can skip to the recommendations below.
We dropped a fun little tip last week, but we should probably start with first principles. What is a script? To paraphrase the pragmatists (William James, you moody gorgeous bastard), the thing is what it does. So what is a script supposed to do? What's the script's job? As art and object?
As art, it has the same wondrous job as all art: be an emotional flamethrower. Per George Carlin, the idea of a flamethower ...
"It means that at some point some person said to himself ‘Gee, I’d sure like to set those people on fire over there, but I’m way too far away to get the job done. If only I had something that would throw flame on them …'”
A script's first job is to convert the images and words in your head into a FEELING that this story evokes in your own skull and somehow, miraculously, throw it in someone else's skull, way over there.
Some people will try to put the exact, actual movie or show from their head into other people's head. Those scripts don't read well. The writers direct on the page, they overhammer dialogue. Every dialogue beat has a parenthetical. That's not going to work. You can't describe a sunset with the right shade of red off a Pantone sampler, you can't evoke a precise emotion though describing a series of facial expressions, or even worse with a needle drop, you fucking ... sorry.
You must, through a combination of talent and craft, make a complete stranger have the same desire to experience the feelings of the story as you have to explore those feelings. The script's job is to ask a question which one is compelled to see answered, by the end credits if it's a movie, or explored through the run of the series if a television serial.
There's only one problem: we never actually get to communicate directly with our intended audience. Our vision is mediated by directors, actors, physical production. In one of his books, William Goldman suggests that screenwriters should always have an artistic hobby they find creatively fulfilling, because they are the only artists who will never see their art produced exactly the way it is in their head. You are, as a screenwriter, doomed to spend the rest of your life as the only person who's actually seen the whole movie and has to describe it to everyone else at work the next day.
So our direct audience for a script is everyone but the final viewer we hold in our head. This is script as object. 30/50/110 physical pages. What's the job of this script?
And I mean quite specifically, this script. This thing existing in space, as part of a process. A pilot is not a season premiere is not a midseason is not a movie is not an offspeed. A single script doesn't even keep the same job as it moves through its lifespan. Producers have heard me say (snap? snarl? grouse?) "It's not even a script until the pink pages."
Let's do a quick review of a TV script's life, which I think might be illustrative for nonprofessionals. Because in TV we've had the rise of auteur showrunner theory, which is as bullshit as auteur director theory, but it's romantic and empowering so like all romantic and empowering myths it survives.
The rough idea or high concept for the episode. Anywhere from a sentence to a few paragraphs.
The Story Area, a 2-3 pager with the rough beats of the story. That's read and receives notes by the studio, network, and any other producers.
The Outline, which will run anywhere from 8-40 pages depending on your network or the sanity of your showrunner. I had a network where the executives choked on anything more than 8 pages. THE CLOSER infamously had outlines you could shoot. Sometimes the outline contains representative dialogue, it's usually sluglined for production. The Outline receives notes by the studio, network, other producers, physical production if you've got your pants on properly, and sometimes actors if your pipeline allows it.
The Writer's Draft, which is usually read, noted and occasionally rewritten by the showrunner depending on their own personal level of control. Sometimes this gets notes from the studio and producers, if you have a producing director they may have dropped in earlier but they're definitely here, this turns into the ...
Production Draft, the White Pages. Now we're into proper prep, so now you're having a production meetings, line producers are complaining about shit they should've noticed in the Outline, directors are out scouting and deciding they have prettier/easier/more interesting variations on locations, costuming would like a word about the number of days and changes. In the old days, as the writer, you'd be in all these calls and meetings. You may have heard about a little strike recently which had as one of its main points keeping you in all these meetings.
If you have a table read (DO NOT. HAVE. A TABLE READ. Unless you're a four camera sitcom) the actors have some feedback. They should have feedback here even without a table read. You should pray they have some feedback here, because if not, that means they're not reading the script ahead of time, they're reading it in their trailer right before they walk on set and you will have conversations on the shooting day, burning daylight, as opposed to a few days earlier.
Revisions, done on colored pages, as you move through prep and production. The traditional order is white, blue, pink, yellow, green, goldenrod, salmon, cherry, tan, then back to white or "double white", and so forth -- "double blue",etc. Some places have a "buff" and an "ivory" set of pages in there, your mileage may vary. This system is so that revisions for the day are instantly recognizable and easy to track, old pages torn out and new colored pages physically dropped into your script. Everyone knows if they need to check the pages for changes that affect their job, and which pages. It's elegant as hell.
Sometimes the script is nothing but different colored pages by the end of shoot. Or you can wind up with what are called "full blues", which means you rewrote the white pages so completely that, after just the first revisions, it makes more sense to issue a full new script rather than drop 45 revision pages into a 50 page script.
I have seen "double cherry". That is a bad, bad day.
Why did you do these revisions? You lost a location. You lost an actor. You realized during rehearsals, or watching dailies, that there was an artistically more satisfying way to execute a scene. Sometimes you finally realize that no, subtext is not going to work here, just Say the Damn Thing. Or you finally figured out that goddam couplet that's been bugging you since Week Two of the room. A creative change was made by the director and actors in one scene, based on their rehearsal and blocking, that needs to track in another. Sometimes for that one, you issue changed pages after the fact. At what point do those changes cross into actual writing? Well, my friend, that is a good question. I'm sure your WGA Arbitration Board will have strong feelings on the matter, particularly if it occurred during a strike.
Your cutting script. You as a writer don't issue this, it's the end result of the shoot. During the shoot, the most valuable, beautiful, important human in the whole production, the sainted Script Supervisor, is taking notes with a lyrically arcane, specialized form of shorthand, which not only tracks continuity but reminds the director what they shot, and what takes they preferred for the edit, and a million other little things. Scriptie knows if you got your coverage. Scriptie knows if your eyelines match. A smart director looks to Scriptie before calling "moving on!". Treasure Scriptie. Say hi every morning. You can make a perfectly good TV show with a chimp in the director's chair and a great Scriptie. I have occasionally been that chimp.
Each stage of this script serves a different purpose for the different participants at different phases of production.
The Story Area is a sampler. Sometimes you skip this with a spec script, sometimes Story Area and Outline are merged as a 5-8 page document that never gets more detailed. The Story Area/Outline combo is often your verbal pitch for a feature or a pilot. The Story Area is telling people the destination. Character, tone, plot. "Here's the basic idea of the trip we're going to take together."
But "We're going to go to Rome, visit all the museums, take pictures at the Vatican, have a big dinner with my cousins" vs. "We're going to go to Rome, take drugs, fight God in an underground rave in some catacombs, and then rob a bank." are two very different trips. The Story Area enables the reader to make an informed choice -- which trip do they want to invest time or money in pursuing? Which one excites the person reading? Which one is boring right out of the gate?
The Outline is the itinerary. We told you what trip we're going to take, the vibe, the voice, who we're taking it with; this is how we're going to get there. This is the shape of it. These are the turns, our specific travelling companions, the surprises, the landmarks. Again, no "audience" as you think of an audience will ever see this. But you and your partners will. It's part of your job. You're about to load a lot of people onto the bus (or get someone to spend a lot of money commissioning a draft) and we want to know you have a map. You're not going to get us stranded in Wendover, Nevada, which for the sake of this metaphor is page 75 of a feature script. Which is a cursed page. Fuck page 75.
You can skip an Outline, sure. I occasionally do. But that's like getting in the car and just driving. Let's get lost, baby. But budget your time and energy (and other people's money) accordingly.
Writer's Draft ... movies hang out in that writer's draft for a few years. Occasionally, so do pilots. The job of that draft is to a) get people so excited at sharing your vision that they want to spend time -- months to years of their precious finite life -- helping you bring that vision to the world, b) convince Money Humans that if they make this show they will get More Monies, c) get you hired on a similar gig, because the voice and craft in this script proves you have the toolbox necessary to solve Problems. Problems which currently vex the Money Humans.
The Writer's Draft is the first and last pure draft. This is where that connection, that void must be crossed. You have to get readers to feel what you feel. This draft's where you have permission to use any technique you think does this job. Run-on sentences. Weird page spacing. Snarky asides, bold color choices, snappy action. Poetic description. If one must, a needle drop. One.
But this is not some amorphous batch of trickery, this draft also has to be crystal clear in intention. The scope must be defined, the characters' desires and actions sensible (or properly insensible). Because everyone who reads this script must not only come away emotionally invested enough to want to explore this story, they have to come out of it with a pretty good idea of how they, personally, are going to help make it.
The Production Draft and Revisions are where we are no longer pretending, folks. We are laying track and praying we are doing it fast enough to stay ahead of the train. This is where your job shifts. Some say to architect, correct enough I suppose, but I prefer navigator. Because this is where it is very tempting, as you get into the nuts and bolts and meetings and complications and CHRIST how does it cost $50k to move some goddam trucks, to forget what that first job was: to convey a feeling. So this is where you put that feeling up high, it becomes your North Star, and no matter what happens, no matter the treacherous tide or mutiny or reef you keep your eye on that star. While everyone else does their specific job to realize this vision (and we will get into those jobs later), they can look over to you, and you can nod at that original intent hanging up there, and they glance up and think "right, that direction" and go back to their awesome skillsets. Skillsets they can exercise with rigorous precision because in every revision, you're telling them what to do, why. (Not how. That's their job. They're better at it than you are. Don't be a dick)
Some will argue, particularly in film, that such navigation is is the director's job. It's a fine argument. It's a reasonable one.
It's also pants. Did the directors get back to work after they settled their contract negotiation, without the writers? No, no they did not. Sure, maybe they do take the tiller, maybe they are the ones checking the rigging, deciding on which sails, which crewmen. But they're still sailing for your damn star. History is full of wrecked ships and ruined movies and shows where that point was forgotten. History's also full of wrecks where the navigator plotted them straight into a storm because they were too focused on the destination to listen to their crew. Don't be that dick, either.
How can one document accomplish all this? It's easy enough, if we slightly reframe a script as a communicative act. It is a conversation. It will communicate different things at different times to different people depending on their needs, and you can tailor it to those needs as you get more experienced.
(Yes, yes, all art is a communicative act, but a script as object is special as its intended audience is limited in scope to a few dozen people, and if it's misinterpreted or even interpreted creatively but differently from its intention, the script has failed. All authors may be dead, but the screenwriter is alive. Not even sick.)
We'll get into what do do when that communication breaks down in later newsletters. The take away here is to always look at our draft and ask "Is this the conversation I want to be having with the reader? Like a good conversation, am I clear in my intentions?"
I've read a lot of scripts that seem to exist in their own space, as objets d'art. A lot of scripts that read like the movie or pilot from inside the writer's head rather than the movie or pilot that most effectively makes me want to spend more time with either the work or the writer. The communicative script is not lesser. It is, in fact the point.
SIDEBAR: Some of you read that list of drafts and thought "Man, that is certainly a lot of humans interfering with your precious vision! Don't you wish you were a cowboy writing perfect scripts dumped off on production to be executed letter accurate, letting all those production problems be somebody else's problem?"
No. I can imagine no creative life more sterile. I pity such screenwriters.
You want to work alone, go be a novelist. You want a life of unexpected surprises because you're constantly surrounded by talented, passionate people, where your art is expanded, made bigger than your tiny little single viewpoint brain, every single day? Write television and movies and embrace the process.
You may disagree. There are newsletters for such people. This ain't one of them.
Who am I kidding? Those writers don't read newsletters. Their own voice is the only one they need.
Reviews and Recommendations
HOW INFRASTRUCTURE WORKS by Deb Chachra
Oh, anyone who knows me knew this was coming. A tour of the systems that keep the modern world running, how they're falling apart, and how we can fix them. Amateurs study tactics while professionals study logistics, etc.
One of the reasons I'm digging this -- not quite finished yet -- is a growing interest in physical space. It's very easy in a digital world, to lose track of what's actually around us. What can actually affect us. Our consciousness is smeared out over distances it's not wired to handle. But what exists within ten feet of me, a hundred, a mile? What can affect me, hurt me, within that range? Within the next ten seconds? The next minute, or twenty? This is my personal frame for anxiety. I realize I'm entitled in that the answer is often "not much". But if it is indeed "not much", then that means I don't need to spend energy worrying about myself and can spend it instead on helping someone else.
This book is of a piece with the great A BURGLAR'S GUIDE TO THE CITY by Geoff Manaugh. Burglars don't look at doors and windows and walls like we do. Whether you're writing crime stories or just want to look at the city around you with a different eye, enjoy the change in perspective.
DIABLO ROJO by Rodrigo y Gabriela (live)
Did you know there was a plan to release a movie adaptation of Pat Rothfuss's KINGKILLER CHRONICLES and a prequel TV series and the third book in the series all at the same time? Did you just read that and think "Jesus, that sort of thing never works, what utter berk took the job of creating and running the TV series"?
Ah-ha.
That said, creating those ten, spoiler-filled queer as fuck swordfighting, body horror magic, and bard-as-rock-star episodes set in a sprawling mad magical world was one of the best gigs I've ever had with one of the best staffs I've ever worked with. In particular because it made me stretch my muscles: music as a crucial part of narrative rather than score. Or even just to set tone -- musical performances were crucial plot points, their success or failure mattered. Jose Molina wrote an episode that relied on the (literal) magical power of a fifty minute guitar solo. One of the anchor musical references for the show was the amazing duo of Rodrigo and Gabriela, Mexican speed metal guitarists who trained in flamenco in Spain and then busked in Ireland.
Gabriela's right hand is the right hand of God, and that amazing strum/percussion style was going to be played on a custom built ... ah, but you know, it's okay to let things go. Maybe for the subscriber tier I'll let you hear a bit of the song Lin Manuel Miranda wrote for Arliden.
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See you next week. And again, hydrate.