Next week will feature a series from Uncle Jam on the most common scripts he encountered during his time as a Hollywood reader, as well as the lessons we can take away from them.
You start your first reader gig. You’re excited to be there. True, nowadays, you’re doing it from home, so “to be there” means at your living room table, and chances are that your first reader “gig” is as an intern working either for college credit or minimum wage. But you’re excited to be there because you love screenwriting, and in your head, reading scripts all day doesn’t really sound like “work.”
You read your first script, and you don’t like it. As you were smart and you had foresight, you knew perfectly well that you weren’t going to like every script you read, and you accept this disappointment as part of a day’s work for a reader. So you go on about your business as professionally and cordially as you can.
However, that practicality wares off in less than a month. It’s not that you’re reading bad scripts all the time. It’s that you’re reading the same bad scripts all the time. Or at least that’s how it feels. As you read these same scripts over and over again, your coverage gets grumpier and more caustic, and one day, you get reprimanded by your boss because you decided it would be a good idea to use the word “stupid” as many times as possible in one particularly immature write-up you submitted. (If I remember correctly, I got the count up to fifty one.)
So what were these scripts I encountered all the damn time? Well, I’m here to write some articles about them. Five, to be exact.
Purpose of these Articles
Before we get into the nitty gritty, there’s a few points I’d like to get out of the way first. I’ve had two reading gigs, both of which were at mid-tier companies. The first gig was at a company a little higher on the “mid-tier” spectrum, and more than likely produced something you’ve seen or at least heard of. The second was a little lower on that spectrum, as they primarily do distribution work. I bring this up because there’s a relationship between the quality of scripts a company can get and the amount of money they can throw around. Or, to put it bluntly, I read a lot of schlock.
I mention this for one simple reason: As budding screenwriters, your script will more than likely be read at these kinds of companies before they’ll ever be read at a big studio or an agency. It doesn’t matter what you write, that’s where they’ll be read, and that’s the reality you live in. So a picture of what annoys the readers at these companies might be helpful.
Secondly, my reading gigs were in the early to mid-2010s. Some of the trends I’ll be talking about are assuredly out of date. However, I’m going to talk about them anyway because this business is simultaneously cyclical and unpredictable, because there’s always a lesson to be learned, and, frankly, because some of them are kind of funny.
Third, and most importantly, the goal of these articles isn’t to dissuade you from writing whatever it is that you want to write. Every writer is different, every script has its own nuances, any subject can be interesting, and as you rarely get to control which scripts you’re assigned to read, I ran into some of these more than others due to random luck of the draw. If you’re passionate about your idea, go for it with everything you have. I’m not here to stop you.
My only goal is to be as helpful as I can, and part of that is reminding you of the circumstances in which readers read scripts. In a perfect world, I would have showed up to work everyday with an open mind and a stupidly large grin on my face ready to love your screenplay. Sadly, that was not the case. My job was to weed out the good from the bad, and chances are that I was tired, stressed out, and grumpy. I’m not saying readers can’t be won back. I’m saying people are petty. Your script may have a nuance or two, but if I read a billion scripts just like it, that was all I needed to pass on your work.
So let’s avoid that, shall we?