You know that that totally relatable feeling when the lovely people who run the Screenwriter’s Network give you a column on their blog and you want to seem like you’re competent and have a ton of ideas, but you aren’t and you don’t (or you’re too lazy to put the work into the good ideas you do have), so you go into the Discord and mine questions from the users so you don’t have to think of your own ideas?
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Anyway, let’s get to some questions!
“What is the mindset of the everyday script reader?”
–lightly edited and courtesy of The Mild Sausage
The Metaphor
I live in California, and as you may have seen from the news or your air quality index or, depending on where you live, your skyline, we’ve had some teeny tiny little wildfires here lately. Thus, as a big fan of breathable air, I recently bought an air purifier. The part of the purifier that actually purifies comes in three parts: The pre-filter (the outermost layer), the deodorization filter (the middle layer), and the “True HEPA” filter, (the innermost layer). Assuming I understand the manual correctly, the True HEPA filter does the heavy duty cleaning, the deodorization filter deals with the odor, and the pre-filter captures all the stuff you can see or feel. Dirt and dust and the down that you’re pretty sure is leaking from your comforter that you spread into your living room, driving your roommate insane.
You may already see where this metaphor’s going, but it becomes abundantly clear early in your reading gig that your job is to be the pre-filter. To catch the crap so the rest of the machine can do its job more efficiently.
The Reality
Yes, it is lowly position, and yes, it’s not a particularly well respected one in most of the industry. (One of many the reasons why there are fewer actual reader jobs is because the responsibility of reading scripts falls more and more on assistants and unpaid interns. We’ll save my rant about the treatment of Hollywood’s labor force for another day.) But it’s still an important job. Though the machine may be broken and easily criticized and treats minorities and women like shit and Jesus-fucking-Christ we need to upgrade this machine, it still has to run and scripts still must be read so the higher-ups can make decisions
Really, I can only speak for my own mindset, and for me, the goal was to be the best pre-filter I could be. I tried to go into every script as open-minded as possible, I tried to read with a minimal amount of screwing around on my phone, and I tried to give the most thorough and honest feedback I could.
Sure, I slacked off. Sure, most of the time, I was tired and grumpy and I complained a lot. Sure, every once and awhile, I encountered a script that I hated so much that I felt compelled to write some particularly unprofessional comments to try to make my immediate supervisor laugh. (A phrase I may or may not have written, though I don’t remember the hypothetical exact verbiage: “I wanted to use this script to paper-cut my wrists open and namecheck the writer in my suicide note.” Should you get a reader gig, do not behave like this.) Every reader does this stuff, and any reader who says otherwise is lying.
And sure, there are probably readers out there who are insecure about their lack of writing talent, and thus dunk on everything they read. But I’m pleased to say that I’ve never encountered them. As for me, I always felt like the work was valuable, and as an aspiring writer myself, I had no desire to add any undue bitterness into the already bitter struggle of getting a script sold. So my mindset was, “Keep it professional. Do your work. Be honest, but not brutal. Don’t be an asshole.”