Hello everyone!

I wonder how many screenplays you look at each month and what sort of things you hope to find when you are reading through the scripts.

Is there anything in particular that encourages you to get your friends to look at a script, or gets you excited?

I don't know that many actors, even those auditioning a lot, get to read many full scripts. I have read a few for auditions, but I've probably read more from friends.

I also was a paid reader on two, years ago.

What do people look for? The simplest answer is probably something fresh. Which of course is hard to define.

A producer with some money to back up their opinion may be looking more specifically for:

- a script that is "like" a recent hit
- a script that has a good role for a particular (usually well-known) actor
- a script that doesn't include all kinds of additional expense (period, sci-fi, etc.)

But even that will vary.

The other thing, and this is surprisingly hard to find, is a script with nothing blatantly wrong with it. I've read scripts that repeated information, that had no obvious plot, that depended on frankly erroneous stereotypes, etc.

I helped with a reading of one script that was a hodgepodge of all kinds of action sequences, some of which were fun, except for one thing: no character appeared as the protagonist. When I asked the writer "whose story is this?", he couldn't answer.

How do you go to an agent and say, "I've got a film for your star?" if you can't point to a role that makes it their movie?

So before showing any script who counts, it's important to show it to enough people who will warn you of the missing pieces you may not even thing about.

But as for exciting people, it is almost by definition indefinable. "Juno" probably caught people's eyes by the language and the endearing main character. I never got either "Lost in Translation" or "Little Miss Sunshine", but again the slight quirkiness of the characters probably was key. "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly" not only involves a striking situation, but brings unexpected humor to a tragic situation.

Did "Titanic" even have a script, really?

You might think about the films YOU'VE been excited about - not just like, but really were touched by - and list all the things in it that made that so.

But really the core elements are indefinable. One thing you do hear a lot from writers is that the worst thing you can do is to try and write what you think other people will like. The best thing is to find your own truest preoccupations and work from there.

I usually read a script a week (or at least once every two weeks), primarily through class and auditions. I've also helped a partner pitch scripts before to studios.

What gets me excited is what JimChevallier said - something fresh.

Or as a studio guy once said to me half-jokingly "we're looking for more of the same, but different."

In other words, it's finding a new kink on the same stories we've been telling for hundreds of years.

It's taking archetypal stories and giving it an original twist -- that "twist" being anything from characters we're not used to seeing living out stories we've seen before (Brokeback Mountain), saying things in a certain way we're not used to hearing (Juno), or turning specific story conventions on its head without completely getting rid of convention (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Being John Malkovich).

And as an actor, that's what I look for too. I don't particularly care for abstract figurative art pieces -- but visceral stories with fascinating characters -- stories with a twist or a kink that makes it different, but still familiar enough that I can still relate to it.

It's scripts that have characters that I'd LOVE to play even if it was say an all-girl cast and I'm a guy.

It's scripts where even the supporting roles are interesting and 3-dimensional.

It's scripts that are page turners just like a great novel - the conflict in the story continues to escalate that I *need* to turn the page to find out what the character will do or what happens next.

In other words, it's got to have something different that keeps me off guard enough to keep reading -- but keeping it familiar enough without alienating or losing me completely. It's a delicate balance between being different and being predictable.

However, most of the "mediocre" scripts I've come across are mediocre not because they're *too* different, but because they're simply too predictable. The kink or twist on the story simply isn't compelling enough for me to even turn the page.

For example, I'm tired of reading scripts about gangsters that seem to be a mish-mash or B-movie version of Godfather, Scarface, Goodfellas and The Sopranos -- without offering anything really new. It's probably one of the reasons why American Gangster didn't do as well as the studio hoped - they thought that the "black gangster" would be enough of a kink or twist to the gangster genre to get people to go see it - but the story and character development offer nothing we haven't seen before already.

And lastly, the most important aspect of the script is it's got to have heart. Some scripts seem like intricate architecture, but lack a certain humanity or heart -- where you can appreciate the construction of the story, but you don't really feel for the characters at all.

And sometimes scripts try too hard to be clever.

Which seems like a contradiction, but I guess it's about finding a script that is clever in its twist/kink, without losing its heart. And to find scripts that have both is pretty uncommon.

quote:

the most important aspect of the script is it's got to have heart.

In a word, if a writer wants people to care, the writer has to care.

Tarentino could take sequences from cheap action movies and make memorable work from them because he really cared about that genre. George Lucas made iconic images out of what was genre for others because of his passion for the whole concept.

In other words, heart, caring, call it what you will doesn't have to be sentimental or pretty, it just has to be close to the writer's own center of gravity.

That, I think, is the key. That's what makes for the "little engines that could", the unknown, often low-budget films that become juggernauts, and lets them moves mountains. (There's one in France right now about the - very depressing - North of France that's wiping away a large-budget film about Asterix at the Olympics.)

If you can't write one, find one. But I think the old song holds the key:

"You gotta have H-E-A-R-T!!!!"