Reader Question: Where to find spec scripts, not shooting scripts, to read and study?
A reader question from Courtney:
Scott,
Last year I decided to give up on my social life and write a screenplay. : )
Digging around for as much information as I could find I discovered your blog and I truly enjoy it!
Sifted through many of your posts then found the challenge…14 Days of Screenplays.
For so long, I’ve had the following comments driven into my head…NEVER give camera angles…NEVER give music cues or suggest songs. Things like that.
Scripts I’ve found on the web..so far (all of them) are shooting scripts.
I assume most of these scripts have been revised…and revised…and revised?
“First Draft” is stamped upon the title page…however…ZOOM IN…ZOOM OUT…CUE “ROCK ME AMADEUS”…etc..etc…are there. All of the things that I am advised to stay away from…are there.
I’ve kept up with a few sites for aspiring screenplay writers. The writers that submit with angles and such get hammered and slaughtered by their peers. But that’s all that they know…from reading scripts from the web.
My question…where can I find true spec scripts that have sold before they were rewritten?
I’ve read many books on the craft that have, to be honest, clogged my brain. I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s all about the story. Beats…ARC…all of that is fine and well. But the story is what matters.
I want to learn, from those that made it before their stories were filled with camera angles and music cues.
Can you help a rookie?
Once again, great blog. Enjoy my daily dose of wisdom!
Then this P.S.:
Never tell a producer how to produce…
Never tell a director how to direct…
Never tell an actor how to act…
But why…why…are we always told how to write?
Right?
Okay, Courtney, a few things. Per your latter comment first, perhaps you’ve seen me post this from time to time on GITS:
There is no right way to write a script.
Anybody who tells you there is only one correct approach to writing a script is wrong.
Every writer is different.
Every story is different.
There is no single formula for writing a script.
On this blog, I don’t tell people, “You must write a script this way.” Rather I try to provide readers with a plethora of theories, concepts, paradigms, approaches, and ideas in the hopes that something will stick.
Do I feel pretty confident the things I promulgate on GITS can work? Yes. But I don’t make any guarantees, nor should anybody else.
There are folks out there who do tell people, “This is how you should write a script.” I suppose that’s because they have books to sell, seminars to promote, DVDs to hawk, and so on.
If you have the time and money to buy their products, that’s your choice and not necessarily a bad one because — again — hopefully something of what they say will stick.
But I would be extremely cautious about putting much, if any, stock in someone who is telling you how to write a script, that they have discovered the secret paradigm, the mystical pattern all screenplays share, etc.
Again there is no single right way to write a script. You have to figure out what works for you. You have to figure out what works for each story.
Thus endeth Part 1 of my sermon!
Now per your first question, there are many online screenplay sites where you can access scripts. For instance under “Resources,” I have GITS links to:
My PDF Scripts
Script Collector
Simply Scripts
There are a zillion others.
Courtney, you are right that many of the scripts available online are shooting scripts, which typically feature camera angles and director’s lingo. You are also right that the current approach in Hollywood development circles is that a selling script (i.e., spec script) should avoid using camera angles and director’s lingo. That said, I have read spec scripts that have sold that do use such stage direction. Which leads to another ineffable truth about screenwriting:
Story trumps all.
You could write a script with psychedelic crayons and if it was a great story, it could sell. True, a script written with psychedelic crayons would piss off every script reader in L.A., but the reality is Hollywood’s desire to unearth great stories is so intense, there’s almost nothing you can do to make a great story unsellable.
Now does that mean you should use psychedelic crayons for your next spec script?
Uh… no.
Rather you should strive to write a clean script with proper formatting demonstrating an awareness of and capability to write scene description per the current style, one that bypasses camera angles and director’s lingo, short paragraphs (no more than 3–4 lines), and so on.
How to find spec scripts (not shooting scripts) that represent good, clean reads?
There are several tracking boards that make spec scripts available to users, two of which I know that are open to the public via subscription — trackingb.com and tracking-board.com. There are specific rules you have to follow, primarily that you do not disseminate spec scripts to anyone else, but if you’re using them strictly for your own education, then I’d say you’re pretty much fine.
I recently posted several reviews of online Hwood business information sites. Here are links to the two sites noted above:
trackingb.com
tracking-board.com
Bottom line, Courtney, you are to be commended for reading scripts. In fact, this is a perfect segue into something you mentioned: The “14 Days of Screenplays” challenges.
I have received many requests over the last several months to do another version of the “14 Days” script-reading fest. Here’s the deal: I am just too busy through the end of the year to add anything like that to my plate. However if enough GITS readers express an interest, I thought we could reprise all three of the already existing “14 Days” challenges.
[Of relevance is the fact that there has been an explosion of traffic to the site in the last couple of months (e.g., there were 180K unique visits to GITS in June) and many of those folks would never have even see anything about the “14 Days of Screenplays” challenges in the first place, so an excellent opportunity for newer GITS readers to participate.]
So what is the “14 Days of Screenplays” challenge? The idea is simple: Read 1 script per day for 14 days. Reading scripts is one of the single best ways you can increase your understanding of the craft of screenwriting. And reading 14 scripts in 14 days multiplies the benefit as you begin to intuit things, I guess you could say, on a macro level. You pick up pacing and tone, style and scene transitions, and on and on and on.
I’m proposing doing each of the three versions of the “14 Days” challenges back to back to back. That would be 42 scripts in 42 days, an awesome learning opportunity! If we started on July 15, that would pretty much take us up to Labor Day weekend — and you could look back on the summer of 2010 as the time where your understanding of screenwriting really cranked into gear. Here are the scripts:
“14 Days of Screenplays, Version 1.0”
Day 1: Back to the Future
Day 2: Witness
Day 3: Alien
Day 4: Some Like It Hot
Day 5: Body Heat
Day 6: Fargo
Day 7: The Shawshank Redemption
Day 8: Die Hard
Day 9: Thelma & Louise
Day 10: Dead Poet’s Society
Day 11: The Matrix
Day 12: Network
Day 13: Memento
Day 14: Toy Story
“14 Days of Screenplays, Version 2.0”
Day 1: Shakespeare In Love
Day 2: Pulp Fiction
Day 3: Casablanca
Day 4: Being There
Day 5: The Usual Suspects
Day 6: North by Northwest
Day 7: Broadcast News
Day 8: Platoon
Day 9: When Harry Met Sally
Day 10: Double Indemnity
Day 11: Pan’s Labyrinth
Day 12: Big
Day 13: Sideways
Day 14: Traffic
“14 Days of Screenplays, Version 3.0”
Day 1: American Beauty
Day 2: The Crying Game
Day 3: The Apartment
Day 4: The Sixth Sense
Day 5: (500) Days of Summer
Day 6: Chinatown
Day 7: Wall*E
Day 8: Tootsie
Day 9: The Diving Bell and the Butterfly
Day 10: Aliens
Day 11: Little Miss Sunshine
Day 12: Psycho
Day 13: Crash
Day 14: The Wild Bunch
That’s a helluva line-up of scripts, isn’t it? And frankly doing this would give me a good excuse to find PDF versions of the scripts for Versions 1.0 and 2.0 (all the scripts on Version 3.0 have links to download PDFs from mypdfscripts.com).
The drill is this: You read the script on the day it’s assigned. I post something here with some of my observations and GITS readers chime in with their comments / thoughts about the script. We’ve had some great discussions in the past “14 Days” challenges and I expect we would this time around, too.
So the question on the table is this: Are there enough GITS readers willing to commit to “42 Scripts in 42 Days”? If so, please let me know in comments. And if you can only do part of the challenge, that’s cool, too. Anything to get people to read scripts!
Who’s up for the challenge?!?!
P.S.: I’ll be sure to do Version 4.0 early in 2011.
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