Scene Workshop 1

Dorothy Parker founded the “hate writing, love having written” school. One of her beefs was rewriting.

As every one of us knows, you can stare at a problem scene for hours and just be stuck. You know the damn script better than anyone but it doesn’t help get you to any sort of solution. You can’t figure it out.

Then you get your hands on a friend’s script and can see, clear as day, not just every pimply zit in his script, but the obvious solution to all his life’s troubles.

Why is that?

The pressure is off. It’s always easier to see the errors in the other guy’s script. You have detachment, objectivity. You don’t have four months of writing invested. It’s no sweat to come in and be the hero with your ever-so-unique opinions.

I’d like to help with critical capacity, if such a thing is possible. In future posts we’ll look over some student-written scenes to break down. The thinking is: The sharper your critical eye for the other guy’s script, the sharper it will be when you train it on your own movie. It’s part of the sometimes mundane aspect of craft which you’ll have to work if you want a career in the biz. So, vamos. Identify where this scene can be improved.

There are some obvious things that could be cleaned up. Here are some I identified:

1. Characters with similar names. Avoid them. Do you really need three D names?
2. “Slightly emaciated”? I’m generally a hater of adverbs and adjectives. Doesn’t emaciated say it all? If not, pick another adjective that does the job. Slightly is a weak choice.
3. While telling me about his “dead end security job” and “two bedroom apartment” might shed light onto Darius, it certainly cannot be seen by the camera. In short, it’s unfilmable. We could have hours of debate on unfilmables, how the camera doesn’t always have to see what’s being described. While I might even agree with you under certain circumstances, this isn’t one of them. Start your action with who is in the shot and what’s happening now. You can’t go wrong with at least starting your action there. All the rest of what can’t be seen has to go.
4. “Begins to pace…” Cut every begins to, starts to, and continues to. Get to the verb. He paces the hospital lobby.
5. We’ve got Mom talking but he never introduced her in the action description.
6. “Waiting to get an update on his son’s condition“. Another unfilmable. Unless we saw the kid shot or brought in, I have no idea why he’s in that lobby. All the camera can see is that this man is pacing.
7. “Yeah, I remember. He was gunned down by the same type of men just because he didn’t want to join their gang. You know what, first thing I’m gonna do is buy myself a gun and then, I’m gonna find the men responsible for killing my son.” Exposition and backstory will absolutely kill your chances to get the script sold. Rewrite this scene with subtext. Say it without saying it. Leave some room for the action to use physicality, to fill in the gaps of emotion not with dialogue but with body language, with their eyes and movement.

Let’s try a few scene workshops for readers of SCRIPT GODS. If you have a scene of 3 pages or less you’d like me to look over, give some feedback on, and highlight on the blog, send it as a PDF or Final Draft doc. No guarantees all the entries will get broken down but I’ll be totally discreet and get to as many as possible. These scenes will be used as examples for the greater good.

Working together, maybe a few of us can Occupy Hollywood before we all croak.