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.