He would eventually quit.Īnd while there’s no way to attribute any individual’s success or failure to a single variable, I’m convinced it’s because he never read a script. He then tried to go back into spec-writing but none of his scripts went anywhere. As it happens, he spent the next three years trying to get work in the industry but was unsuccessful. He sold the script! Isn’t that what we’re all trying to do here? Didn’t he win the lottery? It depends on your definition of winning. If he’d read a lot of screenplays, I have no doubt he would’ve known how to fix this.īut wait, Carson. It was like a human being without any muscle. It was a fun concept but it had the same problem. It was a script I was familiar with and, to be honest, I was surprised. I’m not going to chain you down and force you to read if you don’t want to.Īs it so happens, he went on to sell a script.

Why wouldn’t I spend that time writing, was his argument. I’d tell him that if he wanted to improve this weakness, he needed to read scripts.

His scripts and his dialogue were always way too sparse. I still remember this writer years back who was decent but lacked the skills to truly bump his screenplays up to a professional level. It’s only through objectively seeing mistakes in other screenplays that you learn to correct your own. That’s because you can keep making the same mistakes again and again if all you’re doing is writing scripts. Reading scripts is almost as important to your screenwriting education as writing them. It is where you decode the screenwriting matrix. It is where things you could never quite define which annoyed you in movies all of a sudden become clear. This is the moment when I remind you guys how important reading scripts is for a screenwriter. “Uh, how many have you read in total?” I responded, a little confused. She said, “How many have I finished or how many have I read in total?” I asked her how many scripts she’d read this year. I was talking to a screenwriter the other day and we got on the topic of reading scripts. 1997’s The Postman was voted the most boring movie of all time

Cheaper by the dozen script pdf