99% Of All Screenplays Submitted Are Unreadable - Jeff Kitchen (23:33) ~ Film Courage

submitted by JasonCarswell from youtube.com

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[–]jet199 2 insightful - 3 fun2 insightful - 2 fun3 insightful - 3 fun -  (2 children)

When you get a good screenplay you really tell the difference to the majority.

However not one film I've worked on made from one of those great, readable screenplays has turned out as good as it was to read.

There are just too many ways to fuck up a film between writing and release.

Often bad, hard to read screenplays make decent films because they give the filmmakers more room to do their thing.

[–]JasonCarswell[S] 1 insightful - 3 fun1 insightful - 2 fun2 insightful - 3 fun -  (1 child)

I didn't know you were in show biz.

Agreed. A film is a machine of a thousand parts that need to work well. Just a rattle in the trunk and you're easily distracted.

My experience reading screenplays is limited to a handful of masterpieces - and some of the meh I worked on. I haven't read any that were hard to read.

I know what I want for the opening of my Bittersweet Seeds story, an abstract bookend intro that will make sense in the end, so I very well know it starts out hard to read. Thereafter nothing is abstract beyond unconventional or radical ideas (to normies) the characters may express. My only hope is it might make a difference, big or small, when I finally get a first draft out at least. Then storyboard. Then graphic novel. Then...?

[–]jet199 1 insightful - 2 fun1 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 2 fun -  (0 children)

A hell of a lot of writer/directors write unshootable scripts with lots of descriptions because they want to capture the feeling as much as the action.

I wonder if part of the problem he's talking about is due to film writing experts encouraging people to write industry standard shooting scripts which can be very dull and too boring to read. They even encourage people to read published scripts, to work out their secrets, which of course were never used during the actual shoot. They are the product of every amendment during shoot and what's left after the editor's been at it and not the inspiring piece of writing which first got the funding and the cast attached.