Writing for the mind’s movie screen

Do you know about Script­Shadow? It’s one of my favorite blogs lately: a smart, snarky, insid­ery screen­play review. It focuses (as best I can dis­cern) on screen­plays that have been bought by a stu­dio but not pro­duced yet. There are some excep­tions, but that seems to be the core of it—and as such, it’s actu­ally an odd pre­view of the next 2–5 years of releases.

Any­way, I men­tion it now because it’s sci-fi week, and you can read the review of the script for the Ender’s Game adap­ta­tion that will prob­a­bly still never be pro­duced. You can also down­load the script in its entirety!

Read­ing screen­plays, like read­ing plays, is actu­ally pretty fun in its own right. They’re always tight and terse: very con­sum­able. And I find the descrip­tive lan­guage of screen­plays sort of charm­ing. That is, not the dia­logue, but the parts that go

EXT. NEW JERSEY COUNTRYSIDE - MORNING

The train hurls straight at us.

NEW ANGLE — Skim­ming along­side as the train twists and turns, suck­ing up track — feet, yards, miles of it.

Beneath it, the curv­ing rails, which the rush­ing train barely seems to touch. They vibrate with an eerie, dul­cimer HUM.

It’s never par­tic­u­larly good prose—but it’s not sup­posed to be, right? It’s sup­posed to be descrip­tive and con­ver­sa­tional. These are words that will never be seen or heard by the pub­lic! Their audi­ence is all agents and pro­duc­ers and, ulti­mately, a direc­tor and pro­duc­tion staff. They’re the dark mat­ter of storytelling.

That sec­tion above is from the first page of Source Code, one of the most pop­u­lar scripts on Script­Shadow, and one that I enjoyed reading.

I often find myself read­ing scripts before bed. Maybe that tells you some­thing about their sen­si­bil­ity and heft. Actu­ally, I think it has a lot to do with their look: a scat­ter­ing of lines, lots and lots of white space. They’re light and airy. The words flow fast. The film strip plays. Ahh.