reading

Fifteen minutes of fume

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I know Microsoft does this, Microsoft has a weekly email that tells you something or other about your wellbeing and your computer use. I don’t know what, exactly, I have never done anything but delete it instantly and briefly wonder if there was an unsubscribe button.

It’s Microsoft, there won’t be.

Apple is as bad. Apple has this thing called Screen Time where each week it tells you exactly how long you’ve been using your Mac, iPad, iPhone, and what apps you were in. Sometimes the total number of hours is up on the week before, sometimes it’s down, never can I do anything about it. I used what I needed, I did what I needed, get off my back.

But.

The one that makes me so ticked off that I appear to have blocked which particular technology monolithic corporation does it to me, is one where I am encouraged to read for so many minutes a day. Like reading is good for you and that’s why you do it, that it’s a health and fitness thing rather than just bloody reading because it’s great.

No machine is ever going to tell me I should read for 15 minutes every day and I will not ever have any machine pat me on the back for doing it.

Only…

About a week ago now, I tried adding something to my To Do app’s daily routine. Read for 15 minutes. If there’s a time set for it, I don’t remember, it’s not a calendar appointment, it’s something to do. Strike that: it’s something I want to do.

So it isn’t that a reminder pops up at a certain time or that there are fireworks when I do it. It’s not that there is this 15 minute block, it’s that I’ve made reading part of my day. It’s on a To Do app, but really in this one case it’s on an Excuse for Doing It app.

There are fewer than half a dozen tasks I have to do every day but I do them every day without fail and have done for many years. I wouldn’t and I don’t think I can add many more to the list, but popping reading on there means that at some point in the day, that’s exactly what I do.

And as well as the “Read for 15 minutes” being on an Excuse for Doing It app, it’s also bollocks. The 15 minutes part. It’s never just 15 minutes. Not because I have some awkward rage against all machines, but because starting something, even something you really want to do, is tough. So much easier to do the next job, especially if it’s for someone else.

So hang on, I can work some of this out. I think it was a week ago that I started this so call that 7×15 minutes. In theory I’ve read for 105 minutes.

In practice I have no clue and no care – but I finished a Star Trek novel that’s been on my desk for months and I also re-read Jane Austen’s Emma. I don’t know if this has made me healthier, I only know for sure that I had a good time.

I’ve been a bit in my head lately and there are better heads to be in. Such as Austen’s, now I think of it. So tomorrow when Screen Time pops up, I will dismiss it with a shrug like I always do, and on Monday when Microsoft bothers me with this crap again, I will growl a bit.

But I might do both over my shoulder as I read.

Stupid count redux

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I’ve read 2,000 scripts. Well, yeah, no, I’ve read an awful lot more than that but in my current reading of at least one script per day, I’ve just read my 2,000th and this was both later than expected and then sooner than calculated.

Not sure there’s much you can say to this other than big deal. I’m curious why I clearly have to tell you this trivial thing, but if I can salvage something useful, let me also tell you this. Of the 2,000, some 361 were on the excellent TV Writing site, which is simply a favourite corner of the whole internet for me. And 117 were from the script library at the BBC Writersroom, although note that their collection includes some post-production scripts that are cut-down documents, made less to read and more for some admin purposes.

The rest, by the way, were predominantly plucked from countless other sites and links, were sent to me directly, or were in the couple of hundred script books I own. Which reminds me, I’ve been meaning to recommend a couple of books to you.

Five Screenplays by William Goldman and Four Screenplays by William Goldman.

I’m a little torn over Goldman. I was a fan until his profoundly, aggravatingly awful non-fiction book Hype & Glory. (Goldman is famous for huge, huge surprises in his novels, really eye-popping revelations that make you want to go back to read the book again. Something like 90 pages into this tripe, he tries to pull off the same thing by suddenly announcing that his wife has left him. Rather than surprise, rather than eye-popping, it’s a moment that leaves you eye-rolling and realising that’s why this is all so bad.)

Then he regularly described critics as failures, which is harsh but I’ve been a critic, I could see his point, and allegedly called one woman critic a whore, which just pissed me off against him forever. Or nearly forever, I think it was a few years after this that I read his two books of screenplays and enjoyed them as much as I have again in the last couple of weeks.

Except, as well as superb screenplays, each book has thousands of words of background detail about the writing and production of these films. Fascinating, illuminating, compelling, it is like having a friend sitting there telling you these things. These essays of his were so good that a few more years on, I was actually eager to read his non-fiction book, “Which Lie Did I Tell?”

Unfortunately, I already had.

The majority of that book is a reprint of the essays from the screenplay books. I know few people read script books, but you could be pretty certain that everyone who did would read this. I remember flicking through and through and through thinking I bought the hardback of this.

Anyway.

Five Screenplays has All the President’s Men, Magic, Harper, Maverick and The Great Waldo Pepper. Four Screenplays has Marathon Man, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, The Princess Bride and Misery.

They are two tremendous collections and on the page, Goldman’s scripts fly. Some day I must actually see Waldo Pepper; I’ve read it a couple of times and yet never got around to watching.

Howay. That’s nine of the 2,000 scripts I’ve read in this run and if I don’t shut up now, I’ll be telling you about 1,991 more. Well, yeah, no, there have been some incredible stinkers that make you feel a) great that you can probably write better than that and 2) regret the time you spent turning those pages.

Although then there are others that are so good that 3) I want to give up writing.

Also, though, a fascinating number where either the script was a huge slog to read yet the show was great, or the script was incredible and the film was boring. I keep thinking about that.

It might be that a script is just the first, if biggest, if most crucial, part of a production. Might be.

Stupid count

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For six weeks now, I’ve been counting the days until today when I could say to you that I’ve read 2,000 scripts –– and I’ve blown it. I’m not sure why I was proud enough of this trivial fact that I wanted to boast at you about, but seemingly I did and seemingly I was going to preen for some reason. Instead, on slightly closer examination, I have to tell you that I’ve miscounted and today’s script was only the 1,899th.

Yes, I have just filed my tax return. No, I’m not now terrified at all.

Look, I’ve read a lot more than 2,000 scripts in my life. I love reading them, I always have, it’s just that on December 23, 2017, I read a piece by Lorenzo Colonna on Hayley McKenzie’s Script Angel site which suggested reading a script every day. I can see me now, at this keyboard, thinking yep, good idea, I’ll do that. Since then I’ve read at least one script every single day and after the first year of it I wrote about the ten lessons I felt I’d learned from what I believed was 620 but who knows now, could’ve been 12.

I keep a list of what I’ve read and after the first while, also a link to where I read it if it’s online. It’s from examining that list that I discovered the miscount, but I was examining the list in order to hopefully be useful and I can still do a bit of that. I can recommend scripts and moreover, I can recommend sources for scripts. Let me do two sources and two specific scripts from those sources.

So while I see no reason you should ever trust me again about numbers, I believe that of my 1,899 in-a-row script reading, 318 were from my favourite site, TVwriting. I’m honestly a bit surprised it wasn’t many, many more because that is my go-to site when I just want something good to read.

Another 105 were from the BBC Writersroom script library. I can’t say I’ve cleaned the BBC out since if I disliked a script to a show’s first episode, I skipped the rest. But still, I open that library page and it’s sometimes hard to find something I haven’t read. Certainly I’ve vacuumed up the entire radio drama, radio comedy and television comedy scripts.

I will press on, though, even beyond 2,000 when I finally get there in at most another 100 days. And let me offer this as another lesson from reading scripts: I may have read some stinkers, but there amazing pieces of writing just waiting for us all online.

The internet’s faults are legion, but there are gems, too. Including these two. It is completely unfair to pick out two scripts but no one said writing has to be fair, or at least nobody any good.

If you fancy reading a film screenplay, relish Man Up by Tess Morris, which I read on the BBC Writersroom on both January 5, 2018 and August 28, 2019.

Or if, like me, you’re more of a television drama nut, go for the pilot episode of Veronica Mars, by Rob Thomas, which I read on TVwriting on May 31, 2018.

I suppose you can call this educational reading and when I started this lark there was certainly an aim of improving my own scriptwriting. No question, it worked. But also no question, I read scripts for immense pleasure and if you don’t already do that too, I hope you will.

Just don’t bother counting them, it’s too difficult.

Scene and not seen

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This was hard for me. I ran a workshop about scriptwriting last weekend and I was required to teach a group of teenage writers how to format scripts. I did try telling them to just get it right, but for some reason they wanted more detail.

Look, you know and I know that scripts are laid out in certain formats and they are different to prose fiction, you would never accidentally write in these layouts. What you would do is read scripts. Read enough scripts, you get it. Film scripts are pretty rigidly formatted, television comes in a couple of different forms, radio is bit more relaxed and theatre is a Wild West.

But read scripts, you get it.

I don’t expect any writer to happen to know the millimetre dimensions of every indent, but I will not accept a writer who thinks it doesn’t matter. Who thinks script formats are solely done because there’s some secret club that has agreed it all.

Instead, scripts are laid out in their various ways for very specific reasons, all of which are long-won over decades of you writing and other people making the show out of that script. Some poor sod will count your INT for interior scenes and your EXT for exterior, for instance, as they try to balance the budget between days of location filming versus building studio sets.

There are reasons, they’re practical, none of this is hard. So what I told the group was that if you send me a script and it isn’t laid out correctly, really you are telling me to stop reading. Rather than showing me you’re a free spirit who won’t be confined by arbitrary layouts, you’re shouting that you don’t read scripts.

There’s no reason you should read scripts, unless you want to write them. If you do and yet still can’t be arsed to read any, I struggle to see why I should read yours. You could be a natural, brilliant talent, but you’re not. Get it right, I said to this group, because it’s not as if it’s hard, and read scripts because you’re a scriptwriter, you’re surely interested in your own field.

However.

I also explicitly told them that I know instantly when you’ve got a format wrong. I know from the first glance, before I’ve read a word, I know it’s wrong. I said it was that obvious.

It turns out that I lied.

I still believe what I said and I obviously didn’t set out to lie to them, but something happened shortly before the workshop and something happened shortly afterwards. What makes it worse is that it was the same something.

It was that I read the script to the pilot episode of “The Last Ship” by Hank Steinberg and Steven Kane, distantly based on the book by William Brinkley. I enjoyed it very much, I bought the episode off iTunes to watch, and then I bought the next episode, then I bought the season. By the time of the workshop, I think I’d seen six episodes and the day after, I re-read the script.

So there I am, barrelling along, enjoying it again, seeing the differences between the draft and the final production, having a fine time.

Until I noticed that it has no scenes.

There isn’t a single scene heading and I hadn’t noticed. I’d got so caught up in the reading that despite all the rest of the format being full-on script, I completely failed to notice that there wasn’t one single INT or EXT in 54 pages. When I did notice, around 30 pages into the re-read, I went back to the start and checked it out in case I were mad or the copy of the script I got was peculiarly incomplete.

It wasn’t. Rather than say what you’d expect, such as:

EXT. FLIGHT DECK – DAY

the script instead says:

CUT TO
XO MIKE SLATTERY (40’s) walking on the FLIGHT DECK, crossing with NAVY SEALS DANNY GREEN and FRANKIE BENZ (both 20’s). He shakes Danny’s hand.

I do feel for the poor sod working out the budget, but then the great majority of the script is set on a ship which appears to clearly be a real one shot on location. So I suppose that one big EXT is somewhat implied.

There’s no lesson here, certainly not for you because you didn’t sit down to get lectured at, but also not for me. I was wrong about seeing deviations from the format instantly. I lied to those teenage writers. But I’ll lie in the same way again, I’ll always write INT and EXT. But I was wrong.

It’s just that instead of instantaneously recognising something was off, it took me one and a half reads of the entire script to notice. Instead of seeing it on page one, then, it effectively took me 84 pages.

I’m suddenly reminded of when novelist Paul Auster stopped writing chapters. I can’t remember which novel it was now – I want to say Oracle Night – but the entire book is a single chapter, just as this script is a single scene. With the novel, it was oddly compelling. I don’t understand how, except that late at night, figuring I’ll just read to the end of this chapter, I was a bit tense.

“The Last Ship” script is an exciting, absorbing read. My concern for the poor budgeting sod is too great for me to ever try abandoning scenes, but it is true that ditching them makes this feel like a faster read, that it pulls you through instead of pausing to plant an INT or EXT flag.

#Relax

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So the lack of chocolate is now making me shake, but fortunately it’s a metaphorical lack even if it’s a real shake. Anyway, it’s enough that I’ve been hearing about this relaxation thing and figuring now is a good time to give it a try.

For everything I do, I lean on a bionic To Do app called OmniFocus. If you want to, you can put tags on the tasks you pop into that. I have a tag called #pressing, for instance, and when there’s a spare moment, I’ll tap on that and see everything that’s making my stomach learn what a reef knot feels like. Or less problematically, I’ve got a tag called #email. Whatever the project, whatever the job, whatever the deadline, I can tap on that tag and see a list of emails I need to send to get something done. Again, spare moment, knock a couple of those off.

Earlier this week, though, I heard a podcast that suggested creating a tag called #relax.

Okay.

That’s three days ago now and I’ve made this #relax tag, but I’ve nothing in it.

There’s reading, I could pop reading into the list. And I do read a script every day, but as enjoyable as that is most of the time –– I have read some stinkers lately –– it is a kind of work. I have just finished a novel I liked and am tempted by the sequel, plus I am reading an autobiography that’s a delight. But they’re both tangentially related to work, to the extent that it’s hard to separate them from a writing project.

I did just call out to thin air, “Hey, Siri, play something I’ll like,” and the room filled with music. That was good. Except the first track was Mike Oldfield and he’s pro-Brexit. And the second was by The Corrs, at least one quarter of whom is a climate-change-coronavirus denier.

None of this stops me liking the two tracks –– “Moonlight Shadow” and “Bring on the Night” –– but, come on, Brexit and COVID. Not exactly #relax.

I have been watching even more TV drama than usual lately, but again that’s a little work related. I read all 24 of the scripts in one series and then watched the episodes, trying to understand how it was irritatingly written and yet compelling at the same time.

Yesterday I did also look at a sign for a gym, but you know I’m a bit more likely to run away to the circus.

Long walks. How long are we talking, exactly? Heading out in the sunshine: tricky, since if it’s daylight, I’m working.

I don’t drink, I’m not a gamer, there is no sport in the world that I’d sit through voluntarily. And Strictly isn’t back for months.

I do get to talk to you, mind. Which is why this is headed #relax. That’s one thing on the list, then. Great: job done, now what’s #pressing?

No actors to grind

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I have eaten all the chocolate. And while I wait for the manufacturers to catch up, I’ve been grumbling. Chiefly because of a YouTube video I watched last night called “Lisa Kudrow on creating Phoebe on Friends”. I didn’t really hope that it would be her talking about how David Crane and Marta Kauffman created this great character that she got to play, but I did hope the title was a mistake.

It wouldn’t be the first time that a headline was written by someone who thinks actors make it all up. I had a stand-up row with an entertainment editor once who entirely believed that. I’ve had people enthuse about incredible ad libs an actor has thrown into a stage show and then I’ve heard precisely those same ad libs when I’ve seen the same production a year later.

But if an entertainment editor doesn’t know and a theatregoer somehow wants to enjoy believing the actors invent their lines, at least you would expect that an actor would know what acting actually is.

Well, I say that, there’s still the case of some cast members in The Usual Suspects who insist they didn’t know if their character was the baddie or not until they saw the film. Fellas, fellas, it’s in the script. Page 142. Seriously.

Or there were those couple of times on BBC police drama New Tricks where the ensemble cast swore up and down that they rewrote every word of every script. Some writers and some directors said “prove it”, while all writers and all directors and all producers said “bollocks”. These were fine actors and yet for all their vehemence, those scripts did not have one word rewritten. Writers on the show were saying come on then, show us a comma you changed, if you think you’re hard enough.

I would’ve said that Lisa Kudrow is remarkably talented. I would’ve said that the reason I can read the pilot script to Friends and cannot hear anyone else’s voice in that role is a mark of how extraordinarily well she played her character. But unfortunately it turns out that she would say she created that character.

That YouTube video is painful. She goes into great detail about her process and how she decided on the character. Then the interviewer eventually asks something like “Wasn’t it written that way?” and Kudrow basically says “Oh.”

She expands that into “maybe” before throwing in that she doesn’t remember. And then in the last moments it’s as if you can see her realising that this is why the producers said they liked how she did it.

Lisa Kudrow is unquestionably more talented than I am, unquestionably. She’s also vastly more successful. But there is one thing I have done that she hasn’t: I have read the script.

It’s common to hear of actors who don’t read the scripts –– Kudrow is blatant and entirely unconcerned about how she skipped everything but her character’s dialogue –– and I don’t know why it seems to be accepted.

I actually completely get why actors tend to thank directors and rarely writers. The writer may not even be there during filming and certainly they’re not as hands-on involved at that stage as the director or other cast. Naturally you’re going to bond most with the people you work with.

I said I had no actors to grind and clearly I have some. Yet I think of casts who’ve performed my words and they’ve been a marvel. I think of Conrad Nelson playing Iago and being so incredibly frightening in that role that I was scared of him over a drink in the bar afterwards. My 58keys YouTube series featured an interview last Christmas with actor/writer Debbie McAndrew and, unprompted by me, wanted to mention how galling actors find it when other actors do this thing of claiming to have created their characters.

And yet there are actors who are hired and don’t bother to read the script. You had one job…

I’m not sure that word means what you think it does

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So I read a poem yesterday. I mean, I read it aloud, you can hear me on the Birmingham Literature Festival’s Staying Human series of poetry. The thing is, I read the text when it was sent to me and I rather liked it, but it was when I was saying it aloud that it affected me. Smiles by Mimi Khalvati. I didn’t know her work, I’m no kind of poet, but this stabbed me.

Words. It’s not as if I can be surprised that words have this strength, I write for a living. But lately I’ve been circling back around a thought that spoken and written words are not the same thing. I love, I so deeply love, that friends have told me that they knew I’d written something because they could hear my voice in it. I adore that, I relish it, I’m proud of it.

And the other day I was listening to a podcast where the host was adamant we have to use emoji because text can’t convey emotion. If you just wrote down everything I said, this fella insisted, you couldn’t get the tone, the meaning, the subtext, the flavour.

I was wearing AirPods and walking upstairs to my office when I heard this and so my wife Angela Gallagher heard me saying to thin air, “be a better fucking writer then”.

She didn’t think it strange.

She’s heard me say it about myself often enough.

But the poem, that podcast nonsense, it’s been a bit Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon for me. Speaking of things I love, the Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon can very well be an example of the Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon. Isn’t that wonderful? You know this, even if you don’t necessarily know the term: it’s when you hear something for the very first time but then seem to hear it everywhere. I don’t mean in the way I’ve said it three times now, I mean you will hear it again today or this week or surely at most this month. You’ll notice it now, you’re aware of it, so you seem to notice it more often.

And if it’s not a phrase that I’m hearing again and again, if it’s actually a thought that keeps coming back, it’s tied to the very name Baader-Meinhof. That was and I suppose still is another name for The Red Army Faction, so it starts out as a name, it’s one particular group’s title, and then it becomes this term for something that is completely unrelated to them.

We choose what words mean. Collectively, we choose what we want words to mean. I think it’s atrocious that, for instance, there this is this unfathomable power in the universe but we’ve pretty much ignored it since we’ve all decided to give it the name “magnetism” and be done with it.

Whereas I think it’s tremendous that the word “nice” used to be such a repulsively damning word, then we made it so sweetly praising that we got repulsed by it all over again in a different direction. It’s as if the extremes of revulsion made the word into a pendulum and right now “nice” is stuck in the middle of the arc, neither good nor bad. But still faintly repulsive. It holds an echo of a previous distaste.

We decide these things. Except I think we also decide it as individuals. Or at least I hope we do, to be specific I hope that you do because otherwise you’re going to look at me very strangely now.

Okay, I walked into that one. You’re right, you’re going to look at me exactly as strangely as usual.

So I’m just going to tell you. When I hear something described as being “bucolic”, I think that means it’s horrible. It cannot mean pleasant, it must mean a rotting disease. Bucolic. You will never convince me I’m wrong.

However, this week – told you this keeps coming back – a friend described herself as being nonplussed and from the context, I knew she couldn’t mean that she was shrugging, that she didn’t particularly care one way or another. That time I actually looked up nonplussed but would you believe that every dictionary has got it wrong? I know. Inconceivable.

Whereas I accept that this is me, all me. When I was very young and just learning to read, I saw a film set in a creepy old house and there was a sign outside it that warned people “trespassing is prohibited”. I asked my sister what that pro- prohib – pribited? word was. “Forbidden,” she said.

For at least the next year I would pronounce the word “prohibited” as “forbidden”, like it had a silent f, o, r…

Tell me, what’s my job again?

Reading enough into it

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Last night I reread an Aaron Sorkin script for his comedy series Sports Night and it was the 220th screenplay I’ve read this year. I’ve been reading at least one script every day since late December 2017 and so “The Local Weather” was also my 1,469th in this run. And yet it wasn’t until during this one that I remembered.

I remembered what it was like the first time I read a script. I don’t mean when I read The Time Tunnel: The Last Patrol on December 23, 2017. I mean back in the day, back whenever it was. While I’ve not been so regular about it before, I’ve read scripts all my life but there must’ve been a first one.

I definitely can’t even remember what it was or even begin to guess. I mean I’ve just turned to my shelves and I’ve a couple of hundred books of TV, film, radio and theatre scripts. But there must’ve been a first and somehow, reading this one – more likely re-re-reading it – the sensation came back.

And that sensation is excitement.

You forget things so easily. But to have a show that made you laugh, that reached inside you, that changed you, and then to see its script. No actors, no music, just the bare words on the page and it is a thrill. From that writer’s mind to yours, a direct connection. A sense of enormous effort behind each casual line, before it even got to the screen.

Drama is collaboration and I’ll never think it is or should be anything else, but you can’t see drama direction without there being a script. (Well, maybe when it’s very bad.) You can’t see an actor’s performance without there being a script. Possibly only music can have two lives, existing in its own right as well as being part of the final mix.

I suddenly remember giving a friend a spare copy of the published Frasier scripts I’d got –– I’d bought one and then Channel 4’s press office sent over a copy to the newsroom –– and I can still see her face. They’re scripts, she said. I don’t know how to read scripts.

You see her point of course: all that formatting, all those page conventions like INT and EXT, it’s something you need to get used to. But I must’ve given her that book around the year 2000 and by then I was already so familiar with the form that it took me a beat to comprehend what she meant.

I must ask her if she’s ever read it.

UPDATE: I did. I sent her a message and –– she is such a good writer –– she sent a line straight back that instantly made you picture her shuffling her feet uncomfortably. “A bit,” she said. She read it a bit.

I was going to say that I can’t understand why that delights and tickles me so much but of course I can: she wrote the reply well. What I can’t understand is quite why scripts thrill me so much.

But we don’t need to understand or comprehend or label a thrill. I’m just going to get some tea, head out into our garden and – depending on how you count – enjoy reading script number 211 aka 1,470. It’s going to be the stage play Harry Potter and the Cursed Child and I can’t wait.

Script pages

My 10 lessons from reading 620 scripts

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Late in December 2017 I read a piece by Lorenzo Colonna on Hayley McKenzie’s Script Angel site that suggested reading one script a day. And I thought yep, good idea. I would read a script every day for a year. Now it’s 28 December 2018 and when you and are done today, I’m going to go read my 621st.

I am surprised that it turned out to be so many but I was more surprised by how many people have asked why I was doing it. Just to keep this surprise line going a little further, I obviously wasn’t even mildly startled that I learned some things from these scripts. But I was and am shocked at how they changed through the year. Or rather, how I did.

I kept a list so that I didn’t repeat any – and with the idea that a growing list would keep me at it. And now I can look at any entry and tell you where I was, what I was doing or going through, and how I felt. Plus I can tell you about almost any script: there are a couple where I nearly did read them again because I’d forgotten about ’em.

Sometimes, I’ll fully admit, they were a chore. They were a job to be done in the last moments of the day. Other times they were a joy and the first thing I did before breakfast. You could’ve guessed at that, especially as I went so far over the one-per-day idea. What I didn’t guess is that sometimes they were an escape. Occasionally, on some supremely bad days, they were even a refuge.

And then there would be times, so many times, when I’d read something that was extraordinary and I’d know that I will never write that well.

Doesn’t mean I’m not going to try.

While I do that, while I crack knuckles, let me please tell you the ten things I believe I learned from reading these scripts.

10. It’s got to be there on the page
I’ve seen actors lift a piece, most especially including one of my two staged shorts this year, but there’s a limit. Very talented actors and directors can make a poor script seem okay, but it will never be good on its feet if it isn’t at all on the page.

9. Just because it’s on the page, it might not make it to screen
Conversely, I have seen the opposite happen. I’m sorry, I can’t remember which one it was now, but I read a sitcom script that I really enjoyed and then watched the aired episode. Jokes that had worked on the page simply didn’t on screen. Characters I liked as I read, I then didn’t as I watched, And somehow it all felt amateur.

I couldn’t leave you hanging. I’ve just searched. It was a US comedy called Happy Endings. I must be in the minority because it ran for a couple of seasons.

Still, I’m minded of Coupling. Once for BBC News Online I watched the pilot of the US remake of that show and then immediately watched the pilot of the original. There was some joke in the UK version that made me laugh aloud and was in the US one, in exactly the same point in the episode, and I hadn’t even realised it was a joke at all.

8. When writing and production work, there’s nothing like it
All this reading and I know even more so than I did before that cast and direction is crucial. Dammit.

There’s a scene in a Homicide: Life on the Street script that is so bare bones, so on-the-nose with people saying what they mean, that at least part of it could’ve been in a soap. Yet there on the page, you got why soap isn’t drama. This wasn’t simplistic or simplified, it was raw. You felt for these characters.

And then I watched the episode and felt it even deeper. No theatrics, no special effects, just pain transmitted into us from a superbly real character played perfectly.

Do give it a read. Homicide: Life on the Street: Every Mother’s Son. Teleplay by Eugene Lee, story by Tom Fontana & James Yoshimura. It was directed by Ken Fink and while that description I just gave you could apply to many characters in the episode, I’m thinking of the character Mary Nawls, played by Gay Thomas Wilson.

7. The first ten pages rule is bollocks
Some writers bleat on about how unfair it is that certain studios or production companies only read the first ten pages of your script. I’ve always known this is a fallacy: the argument is that the script gets really good after page 49. But if you are genuinely capable of making a script good after 50 pages but you can’t see it’s crap up to then, you’re not genuinely capable of writing.

Without exception, without one single exception, I have known from the opening page, the opening lines, whether a script was going to be good or not.

Now, that doesn’t mean I’ll like it, that I’ll enjoy it, but it means I know it works and is well done.

There is also the fact for the most part I chose the scripts I was going to read so you’d imagine I’d like them. It’s not as if I were picking at random or accepting anything sent to me. But then scripts were sent to me: during 2018 I was a judge on three separate awards panels and they were all about writing. I think maybe sixty of the scripts I read were nominees and I didn’t know anything about them in advance.

Didn’t make a difference. There were scripts I liked a lot but which abruptly shot themselves in the foot by the ending. There were others I slogged through because it was my job. But in each case, I knew whether there was going to be anything to like or admire or enjoy in each script and I knew right away.

6. Nobody gives a damn about writers and nor should they
Scripts about writers are death. If your lead character is struggling with writers’ block, well, boo fucking hoo.

5. Don’t be a smartarse
Alan Plater once told me that my stage directions made him laugh aloud – but that I should get that strength into dialogue instead. Then, when I did, he called it a great leap forward for writerkind. I did re-read one of my earliest scripts and it was dreadful for a thousand reasons, but one of them was that my stage directions were smartarse.

Again, I can’t remember which scripts I read this year that were like that and this time I won’t search because it feels cruel. But there was one that particularly sticks out. A location was described as being “the kind of house I’ll live in if this goes to four seasons”.

It was just a gag and it did the job of conveying the richness of the location but it jarred. Made me feel that the writer was more interested in the business than in the story.

4. You can lose anything, you can remove anything

I have always known this: the pilot to the sitcom Cheers is an extraordinary piece of work. I’ve seen it many times over the years but hadn’t read the script until now. I’d seen it so often that I would’ve been able to tell you in detail why it’s so good and I know I could even have quoted one of the jokes.

So it was somewhat surprising to find that the script has an extra character in it. When you’ve read the script and all her scenes, then you can actually see her in the finished episode. But every scene she was featured in and every line she said or was said to her is gone.

I’m sorry for the actor but it was the right choice. I’m sure it was only done because the episode was running long but it works better without her.


3. Script books are dead and possibly should be
I have a couple of hundred books with scripts and screenplays in but I stopped buying them years ago. In this 2018 reading, I did raid very many of those books and there are scripts that I would never have been able to get otherwise. But the internet has killed off the script book and that’s a good thing.


Scripts in books are always reformatted to get as much text on the page as possible and while format shouldn’t matter, it does. When you’re reading a script in the layout it was written, you get the pace right in your head.

Also, published scripts are almost always cleaned up. Mistakes are removed and often scenes cut from the final show are cut from the script too. Getting to read the script as it was when it was handed to the actors is infinitely better and we can thank the internet for that.

For television scripts, I recommend Lee Thomson’s TV Writing site, which is my favourite, plus The Script Savant and Script Slug

For films there’s Simply Scripts.

Otherwise for radio and theatre you’re stuck with searching for individual titles. Actually, for theatre I would and did still go to books.

2. Save us from transcripts
On the other hand, you won’t believe how vehemently I despise something else the internet has done. It has given a platform for people who slavishly copy down every word of a broadcast show or film. They then post these online and some of these bastards claim that their transcript is the script.

Forget seeing the writing as handed to the actors, these transcripts are literally every word uttered on screen – and nothing else. Not even who said it. Certainly not where they were. These transcripts are an unreadable mess and I would burn them.

One thing. I did come across the reverse. I found a script to an episode of UFO and the site hosting it called that a transcript. What they meant was that they had a paper copy of the original script and had typed it up. That was fine. Although, wow, UFO’s pilot episode is of its time. Roaringly sexist, 1970s to its hilt, you can’t believe adults said some of these words.

This might help: if you’re searching for a script online, make sure you specify PDF in your search. I don’t know why, but transcribers don’t appear to have grasped PDF yet so the odds are that any result you get back is a true script.

And the last, perhaps most important thing I learned from reading hundreds of scripts:

1. It’s a damn sight easier to read a script than to write one.
This year I’ve read 620 and written only three. Well, there’s a fourth that I’ve written but it turned out half the length it needs to be. And I’m writing another one now but it won’t be ready for the end of the year. I would like to point out that two of the three I wrote have been staged. And the third got me some promising conversations with TV companies.

I would like to now say that I’ll write a script per day in 2019 but I have this feeling that might not work out. There were already days in 2018 that were so tight for time that I read ten-minute Danger Mouse scripts just to keep the tally going. (They’re very good, though.)

I would also like to say for sure whether I’m going to carry on reading a script a day. It has become a habit but it is also a lot of work. And I did notice that my other reading fell off a cliff. Maybe I should read a novel a day. What do you think?

All artifice just script away

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Last week I was asked why I read other people’s scripts. For one brief, rather happy moment I thought the fella might be asking because I am such a fantastic writer that I have no need of learning from other people.

No, he said, I mean why read the scripts when you can just see the bloody film?

He had a point. Crushingly cruel as he was.

I do know many writers who will avoid the actual script if the film or the programme or the show has been made. The script is, as I completely understand, the detailed blueprint. It’s not the final show any more than a house is the sum of its elevation drawings or isometric projections.

And I’ve just now finished being one of the many judges on the Writers’ Guild of Great Britain’s radio awards. I can’t tell you which entries were my favourites and apparently I can’t even know myself which one has actually won. But I can tell you that some of us simply read all the scripts while others listened to all of the finished shows instead.

I can make you a strong argument for both. If you needed this for some test, I could stock you up with reasons to read the script and reasons not to.

You can imagine all of them except, I find myself hoping, one that matters rather a lot.

It’s quicker to read the script.

There. I’ve said it. I can read an hour-long script in about twenty minutes. A full-length feature film, say 120 pages, is maybe fifty minutes reading time at most.

I do read quickly but I never speed-read and I don’t skip anything, it’s just that I’m fast and scripts have very few words on the page anyway.

There is also this. I know in the first few seconds on page one whether I’m going to think it’s a good script. Recently I read a set where it took a page to get going and if we were in production I’d just kill those pages. But even then, they didn’t get going good enough: my first reaction was maybe harsh but definitely fair.

One interesting thing about reading other people’s scripts is that you come back to your own with a different perspective. Hopefully a better perspective but unquestionably different.

The trick is to read the ones by the fantastic writers.