“A great script is…”

“A great script is…”

…built on a fresh concept that is fully realized by richly drawn characters who are constantly challenged and tested by arduous physical, moral, psychological and emotional impediments. A great script is a cinematic roller coaster ride that I can see and feel as I eagerly and quickly flip the pages in anticipation of what tenuous choices the characters will make next to solve problems I can relate to or am titillated or confounded by. A great script defies my expectations at every turn and leaves me in the end affected, satisfied and yet wanting more (like seeing it spring to life on the big screen).

Those words from DC Mar are a fitting finale to the week-long thread “Dispatches from the Front Line: A Script Reader Speaks!”



I’ll compile the various questions that were raised in comments and forward to DC for further comment. But in the interim, I hope you’ve found these posts helpful — to get inside a script reader / story analyst’s mind. As I noted in the very first ‘dispatch’ here, these people are the guardians at Hwood’s gates, no script gets read unless it has received some type of coverage. Therefore, it behooves us to keep at least some small part of our awareness open to the script reader’s experience when we craft and write our screenplays.



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