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.<\/p>\n
No, he said, I mean why read the scripts when you can just see the bloody film?<\/p>\n
He had a point. Crushingly cruel as he was.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
And I’ve just now finished being one of the many judges on the Writers’ Guild of Great Britain’s radio awards<\/a>. 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n You can imagine all of them except, I find myself hoping, one that matters rather a lot.<\/p>\n It’s quicker to read the script.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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. <\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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. <\/p>\n The trick is to read the ones by the fantastic writers.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Last week I was asked why I read other people’s scripts. For one brief, rather happy moment I thought the … Continue reading