Confessions of a Script Doctor

Most first-time screenplay writers can't bear to hear the bad news: Their scripts were not only dead on arrival at a production company, they were dead long before arrival.

Screenplays look deceptively simple on paper. For example:

JOHN bites into a jelly donut and fires his .38 at a roach running across the ceiling. The bullet JUST MISSES the creepy, skittering critter.

John looks at his gun quizzically and then looks at MARSHA.

JOHN
I love you, Marsha. You know I do.

Marsha smiles demurely and takes the jelly donut from his hand. She throws it--HARD--at the roach, now running down a wall, and SPLATs it.

Roach and donut THUD to the floor.

MARSHA
Yes, I do. But show me again, John. Prove you love me.

And so forth, for 90 to 125 Academy Award-worthy pages.

In much of my practice as a script doctor, my "patients" arrive at my office already dead. They are just a bunch of zombie vowels, consonants and punctuations crammed into PDFs or printed out on three-hole paper.

Producers--but, more specifically, the all-powerful freelance script readers hired by producers to render judgment on "spec" (speculative) screenplays--would start seeing the dreaded "PASS!" word in their minds within the first two or three pages of these scripts.

So it is my job to try to bring the zombie typing back to life--or at least try to make it a little less dead--so my clients' screenplays have a better chance of being read and considered for purchase and production.

A couple of things I have observed about many first-time screenwriters:

1. They paid no attention in English class.

2. They paid less than no attention in English class.

When I must try to resurrect a dead screenplay, most of my work initially involves fixing grammar, spelling and punctuation problems, usually a dozen or more errors per page.

Many of Hollywood's script readers were conscientious English students, so a screenplay must be almost completely error-free. Otherwise, the readers will start noticing and mentally counting the blunders, rather than focusing on the story the writer is trying to convey.

After I clean up the grammar, spelling and punctuation problems, then and only then can I get to the real work of trying to help the characters, descriptions and plot become a story--a movie--that somebody might actually want to see.

Then and only then can I also start trying to (1) eliminate a billion dollars' worth of special effects that nobody can afford to produce and (2) find the heart and soul of the story--if it has a heart and soul beneath its myriad explosions, car chases and outbursts of gunfire.

Often, it's a tale about a discredited, burned-out FBI agent or CIA agent trying to save the world by driving fast, shooting assorted guns, blowing stuff up--and falling in love. New screenwriters, especially the young male ones, all seem to be infected with this same, lame story line.

Doctoring a "spec" script--one created merely out of hope by a writer without a paid assignment--often is an ugly process, but somebody has to do it. And that's why I'm paid the small bucks by a few producers and screenwriters willing to admit they need some help.

I know where to put the commas--and the smoldering love and the blazing gunfire--in the verbal sausage otherwise known as a screenplay.

-- Si Dunn

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