There’s no 'one size fits all' formula for writing a kick-ass script. Unfortunately, despite what the gurus say, screenwriting is an esoteric art, not an exact science. It’s difficult to say exactly what defines the good ones. A tiny, tiny minority sing on the page, enthrall me while I’m reading, stay with me for weeks afterwards, and ensure that I’m first in line to see the movie when it finally gets screened. Many are competently done, but they’re dull, full of cardboard stereotypes and stock situations, predictable and small-minded. Some scripts are so badly written that after a few pages I start to think I’ve had a stroke, and my brain no longer has the capacity to process language. There’s no guarantee of quality at any level. I read competition entries by complete unknowns and scripts about to go into production written by (and starring) A-listers – and everything in between. I know this because I read, on average, somewhere between 400-500 screenplays a year. And most of them, 99.9% of them, are bad, occupying all points on the bell curve between eye-gougingly horrible and utterly mediocre. Thanks to technology, there are more unproduced screenplays out there in cyberspace than there are photos of Kim Kardashian. Now, any idiot with script software can vomit their twelve-stepped thoughts into a laptop, convert to a pdf, hit send and voilà! Instant screenwriter. When Field said 99/100 screenplays weren’t good enough, he was talking about 100 of these precious, handcrafted documents, these labors of love. Once completed, the final product had to be copied at great cost, bound with covers and brads, and mailed (with the correct postage) to each prospective reader. A mistake, or a rewrite, involved weeks of retyping. In 1979, a screenplay was an analogue manuscript, bashed out a page at a time on a typewriter. they’re extremely rare.ĭespite the hundreds of seminars, books and DVDs Field (along with McKee, Knopf, Voegler, Seger, Truby, Snyder et al) has contributed to teaching the science of screenwriting over the past four decades, it’s still a form that very few people manage to write right. They’re elegant, simple, rhythmic, adhere to a specific structure, and nail a problem/solution within the requisite number of lines.

Creed screenplay online read