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One of the reasons I have a unique perspective on screenwriting is that I’ve read more bad scripts, from cover to cover, than anyone else on earth.
I can’t prove this, of course. But if I’m not number 1, I’m definitely in the top 5. And that’s because I do something really unique, which is I review screenplays. And when you review screenplays, you can’t stop reading them when they suck.
Almost everybody else in this industry (and this industry is the only place where anybody actually reads screenplays remember) will stop reading a script the minute they get bored. They only finish a script when they’re enjoying it.
I would stop whenever I was bored if I could. But I can’t. I have to keep going so I can accurately review (or consult on) the script.
Maybe there are some readers – especially back in the 90s when agencies and production houses had to keep up with a massive screenplay-driven industry – who have read as many bad scripts, cover-to-cover, as I have, since they had to write up coverage. But I doubt it.
So why am I bringing this up?
Because you don’t truly understand what you *shouldn’t do* in a screenplay until you’ve been forced to read 80 pages past the first moment you knew the script sucked. Let me give you an example.
I read a script a long time ago. It might have even been reviewed on this site. It was about a group of people who were stuck inside a castle during a zombie attack. Absolutely nothing happened during this script. I think the zombies attacked once or twice. By and large, the script was about people waiting inside a castle. I figured out pretty early what the main script mistake was – that the protagonists weren’t active. That they sat around and did nothing until the zombies attacked, in which case they’d ward them off, then go back to doing nothing for 40 pages.
It’s one thing to learn what’s wrong with a script and give up on it immediately. It’s another to know what’s wrong with a script then have to endure two more hours of it. When you’re forced to sit with a mistake for that long, it gets tattooed into your brain. You will never again make the mistake of writing non-active characters after reading Zombie Castle.
But it goes further than that. Because then I had to ask the question, “Well, wait a minute. There are good movies with characters trapped inside of one location. Why do those movies work?” You research those movies then you say, “Oh yeah, a big difference is that there’s way more conflict between the characters in this one than in Zombie Castle. That conflict kept the scenes entertaining even though the protagonists weren’t actively trying to achieve something.”
In Cloverfield Lane, a group of characters are locked in a bunker the whole movie, the difference being our main character WAS TYRING TO ESCAPE. In other words, she wasn’t just waiting around chatting like the characters in Zombie Castle. She was scheming. She was plotting. That kept the plot moving despite the fact that it was contained.
I wouldn’t have learned this stuff if I hadn’t endured two hours of the worst version of it and then asked myself “Why?” That’s my favorite question to ask when I’m watching something bad, by the way. “Why is this bad?” Not “why” in a general. “Why” as in SPECIFICALLY WRITE OUT WHY. It’s a powerful way to learn.
I think you know where I’m going with this. That’s right. I’m telling you you have to read bad screenplays. And I don’t mean two or three total. I mean at least one a week. Because until you become a high intermediate screenwriter, you will learn more from a bad screenplay than you will a good one. Hands down, guaranteed. You need to sit in these mistakes for hours at a time for them to resonate. And once they resonate, YOU WILL NEVER MAKE THE SAME MISTAKES IN YOUR OWN WRITING.
I can already hear the whining. “I don’t want to.” “That sounds like my own personal hell.” “What a waste of time.” Guys. You want to make this your profession, right? Then that means, sometimes, you’re going to have do things that you don’t like. And this is one of them. Cause I’m telling you, it’s going to make you a better screenwriter.
The irony of only reading good scripts is that you get so lost in the glow of the script, you don’t actually understand why the script is working. You just have a good “feeling” after you’ve read the script. This feeling then “inspires” you to work on your own stuff.
But all you’re doing is riding the high of inspiration adrenaline. There isn’t some Law of Writing Transference whereby if Aaron Sorkin writes a great scene, you too, will write a great scene just because you enjoyed his. Let me quantify that for you: Feeling good while you’re writing doesn’t mean you’re writing well.
Don’t get me wrong. Inspiration is a good thing. But unless you identify what it is about a screenplay that works, you’re probably not going to be able to transfer that into your script. For example, if you don’t know that the main reason The Rock’s and Kevin Hart’s characters in Jumanji: Welcome To The Jungle work because of irony (a weak insecure teenager is placed into the strongest body in the world, a star high school linebacker is placed into the weakest body in the world) and instead try to generically mimic the banter between the characters, it isn’t going to work because you haven’t actually learned anything.
When you’re bored out of your mind reading a bad script, that’s all you have time to do is identify why you hate the script so much. It’s actually the perfect situation for learning because you’re stuck.
Let me give you another example.
I once reviewed a script with a really fun premise called, Liar, Coward, Judge. Here’s the logline: “Deep winter in Civil War Era Missouri – A Union Deserter, a Priest and an Assassin must fight for survival when they are stranded in the wilderness and hunted by a terrible Sasquatch.” Cool right? How can something like this be bad? But it was bad in the worst kind of a way: It was boring.
Because I was forced to sit with my boredom for so long, I got punched in the face over and over again with the script’s biggest mistake. That the characters were too simplistic. Here’s what I wrote in the review…
“But strangely enough, I didn’t sense depth to any of the characters. They were all surface-level people. A priest who’s a dedicated priest. An assassin who’s a mean assassin. A deserter who’s a coward.
The best characters tend to be dynamic. Bad people who have good qualities and good people who have bad qualities. That unexpectedness adds a rich extra layer to the character that makes them far more interesting to watch. Think of one of the most popular characters in the history of cinema – Batman. He’s a good person, but he’s not above doing bad things to get the job done.”
Sitting with weak characters for so long taught me the value of adding dimension to characters. I guarantee you I don’t figure that out if I stop reading the script the second I get bored.
So many of the mistakes I see writers make wouldn’t be made if they had read just ten bad screenplays cover to cover. For example, let’s say a writer sends me a 150 page script, which happens more often than I’d like. I guarantee they never would’ve done that, if they themselves, were forced to read ten 150 page scripts cover to cover. “Oh yeah,” they’d realize. “Reading one of these kind of sucks. Okay, I’m never making that mistake again.”
Where do you find bad screenplays? Head over to SimplyScripts.com. They’ve got a lot of beginner screenwriters over there posting stuff. You can also do a search here for “Amateur Showdown” and there are many amateur scripts you can download from the posts.
I’m going to say it one last time. You will be more likely to not make a mistake if you yourself were tortured by that mistake.
Happy weekend writing (and reading)! :)
