What Kind of Clothes is Your Screenplay Wearing?

What Kind of Clothes is Your Screenplay Wearing? 
By Jacob Krueger 

 
What’s The Number One Reason A Screenplay Gets Rejected? 

Imagine you’re about to interview for the job of a lifetime. If you get the job, you’ll potentially make hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars, doing what you most love in the world. 

How would you dress for that interview? 

Would you roll out of bed, show up half an hour late, and trust that your integrity and talent will win them over, despite your bad breath, half-­â€prepared presentation, and that unfortunate hole in your pajamas?  

More likely, you’d wake up early, change your clothes ten times searching for the perfect balance of business and personality, put that final touch on your PowerPoint, and show up ready to knock their socks off from the moment you stepped through the door. 

You Never Get A Second Chance To Make A First Impression, And Neither Does Your Script 

As anyone who has ever tried to get an agent or producer to pay attention to his script can tell you, getting through the door is the hardest part of any screenwriter’s career.   

It’s going to take everything you’ve got to pry that door open. So when it finally happens, you want to make sure both you and your script are ready to make a grand entrance. 

Because if you don’t, it may be years before you get a second chance.

Don’t Rush Through The Door Before You Put On Your Pants. 

As impressive as your pitch or your concept might be, unless your screenplay delivers what you promise, you’re going to end up with a lot of doors slammed in your face. 

It won’t always be this way. There will be a time, after you’ve made somebody a lot of money with your writing, when you can sell out like the other Hollywood writers do, sell scripts off half-­â€baked ideas, and get paid for it. 

But as a young writer, unless your best friend is Brad Pitt, that’s probably not going to happen for you. Producers hear 100 great ideas a day, from writers with much more extensive track records than you have. 

What they very rarely get to see is a truly great script. And if you have that, you have the one thing that actors, writers, producers, agents, screenwriting contests and even coverage readers all want. 

A truly great script is like finding a hidden spring in the middle of a vast desert. But industry executives are so used to seeing mirages, that unless you show them in the right way, they may not even recognize real water when they see it. 

What Kind of Clothes Is Your Screenplay Wearing? 

Just like a potential employer starts judging you the moment you walk into the room, producers, agents, development executives and coverage readers start judging a script before they even read the first page. 

If your script is dressed in the wrong clothes: too long, improperly formatted, or even just too dense to read quickly, the chances are a producer is never going to look at it. 

And even a coverage reader, who doesn’t have a choice, is going to start skimming before they’ve finished the first page. 

This is not because they’re bad people. It’s because they have to read hundreds of scripts, and most of them are terrible. Which means they have to spend their time on the ones that seem to show the most potential, and skim through the ones that don’t. 

That’s bad news for a lot of writers. But it’s good news for you. Because if you learn the things that turn readers on, and the things that turn them off from the very first page, it means you can turn them to your advantage, and make it more likely that your script is one that captures their attention. 

Finding Your Way Through The Goldilocks Syndrome 

A producer’s desk generally has a stack of unread scripts about ten feet high, all of which they are supposed to read, and most of which they will never even find time to look at. Every night, before they go home, their guilt compels them to pick up a script to read that night, even knowing they most likely will not complete it. 

The first step in this process is to find the thinnest script in the pile. Now that doesn’t mean that your 37 page screenplay is going to get read. The thing has to feel like a movie or they know they can’t make it. What it does mean is that unless you’ve got a killer agent calling every day to harass them, your script had better be less than 100 pages, or it’s never going to make it out of the pile. 

You can imagine Goldilocks in the home of the three bears… looking for the script that’s not too short… not too long… but just right. 

Help Your Screenplay Pass The Flip Test 

Once they’ve found a script of the right potential length, a producer’s next defense mechanism is what I call the flip test. A quick flip through the script to see if it looks right. Does it look like a screenplay? Or more like a novel? Is it in the right font, and the right format? Is it too dense, or too sparse? Does it have the right balance of action or dialogue? 

Fail the flip test, and you’re back in the limbo of the pile. Pass it, and there’s just one more test to go. 

The Importance of the First Page 

Before he takes your script home with him, the producer will generally skim the first page. Hook him, and you’re going in the briefcase. Lose him, and he’s lost forever. 

What does that mean? It means you have to polish the heck out of that first page. It means you’ve got to captivate him from the first line, and the first image. It means you have to catch every grammar and spelling error. And most importantly, it means you have to establish a language in the way your screenplay delivers information that makes your story easy to read and visualize, and conjures it as a film in the mind of your reader. 

Once you’re in the briefcase, it means you’ve done your job. But now it’s time to make sure your script is wearing something appropriate under that jacket. 

Remove The Obstacles That Block Your Reader’s Way 

With all the emphasis that we put on hook, character, dialogue, and ideas, it’s easy to forget that the most important element in truly hooking your reader, and making sure they see the value in your script, is actually format. 

Now don’t get me wrong. If your characters are poorly developed, your hook is weak, your scenes are passive, and your dialogue is boring, it’s not going to matter how perfect your formatting is. But once you’ve got a screenplay that’s actually working, format is the delivery mechanism that allows your story to play visually in the reader’s mind, as if it were a movie.

Format Isn’t Just About Rules 

Many writers make the mistake of thinking that all they have to do is look up the proper formatting in The Hollywood Standard in order to make their script perfect. 

But the truth is actually much more complicated. 

Format is a lot like grammar. No one speaks it properly, and if you did, you’d end up like that kid in high school who insisted on the difference between who and whom when addressing his friends… not exactly the most popular guy to talk to. 

At the same time, everybody knows bad grammar when they hear it. And if your grammar is bad, that’s even worse than being stilted, because nobody takes you seriously. 

No producer has read The Hollywood Standard. And just like with grammar, most producers don’t really know what a script is “supposed” to look like. But what they do know for sure is what it’s not supposed to look like. 

So as a writer, you not only need to define clear rules for your script, you have to learn to do so in a way that conforms to producers’ expectations… without compromising the integrity of your storytelling. 

Understanding the format of your script is about understanding what rules you need to conform to, and which rules you need to bend in order to make your script readable and compelling. And more importantly, it’s about understanding that just like every region of the country has its own way of speaking, every script has its own dialect. 

If you think about it like a Southern drawl, or a New England twang, you’ll realize that the way you handle your screenplay’s format communicates more than just shots of your script. It also communicates the feeling of that script as people read it, the pacing, the rhythm and the emotional world of your story. 

An Organic Approach To Format 

The good news is, when you’re thinking in format, you’re not just thinking like a writer. You’re thinking like a filmmaker. Telling your movie in the images and the cuts, the pacing and the montage, and creating an experience on the page that not only looks like a screenplay, but also captures the feelings an audience is going to have as they watch the film on screen. 

The best screenplay format doesn’t just tell the reader what’s happening. It conjures the experience of the film. So the reader doesn’t just read your script. They actually see it. 

When you understand this, you can stop seeing format as an obstacle or as the annoying busywork of your screenwriting, and start seeing it as part of your art as a screenwriter.

Master Screenwriting Format 

The best format is not something imposed upon a screenplay. Rather, it grows out of the needs of the individual script. That’s why a Charlie Kaufman script reads so much different than a Coen Brothers script, and why there can be such strong variations even among scripts by the same writer. 

Generating the right format for your script can help you to locate the essential elements of each scene, and bring them to the surface so that everyone can appreciate them. It means delivering information in a way that even a skimming coverage reader can’t miss it. And it means making your writing so compelling that once someone starts reading, there’s no stopping them from finishing. 

 
To follow Jacob Krueger's blog or learn more about his Screenwriting Workshops, Online Classes, and International Retreats please visit WriteYourScreenplay.com. 
 
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ABOUT JACOB KRUEGER 

The founder of Jacob Krueger Studio, Jacob has worked with all kinds of writers, from Academy and Tony Award Winners, to young writers picking up the pen for the first time. His writing includes The Matthew Shepard Story, for which he won the Writers Guild of America 
Paul Selvin Award and was nominated for a Gemini 
Award for Best Screenplay.  
 
"Jacob Krueger is a true collaborator, totally dedicated to the project, leaving his ego behind, but nevertheless demanding the highest standards because of his sharp dramatic sense and intuition.”  
— Claude Michel Schonberg 
     Composer, LES MISERABLES, MISS SAIGON 
 
Jacob teaches screenwriting in NYC, online and throughout the world for students of all levels. 
More info: WriteYourScreenplay.com