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The Script Factory's Book
READING SCREENPLAYS, by Lucy Scher
How to analyse and evaluate film scripts
"Like the best script reports, this book is clear thinking, well reasoned and very readable. The section on treatments alone is worth the price."
Joe Oppenheimer, Executive Producer, BBC Films.
It began with two green sofas.
In 1999 The Script Factory was asked, albeit politely, to leave the BFI at our earliest convenience. We had heard that British Screen might have a spare desk and so Charlotte and I, lip-sticked and hair brushed went to meet with Simon Perry and Mike Kelly to see if there was any possibility we could charm our way into their Wells Street Mews office. So our surprise and delight knew no bounds when without too much persuasion they offered us our very own office in Wells Street.
Our new office had two full-length green sofas and not much else, and as we each lay on one so excited to have a place to grow, the possibility of running a course on script reading went from an idea to a plan. On a Monday evening between 6.30 and 8.30pm I gathered the first six Script Factory readers to come for six weeks to discuss a method of reading and reporting that would engender a useful document for the writer.
This book is based upon knowledge acquired during the years of teaching the Script Factory Reader Training Course both in the UK and internationally. The Course has used good produced scripts as well as a huge range of unproduced projects, very generously made available by aspiring screenwriters. Participants have ranged from heads of studios, heads of funds and screen agencies, producers, distributors, commissioners, directors, agents and screenwriters as well as those seeking to start a career in reading and development. The intention of this book is to equip script readers, whatever their role and experience in the wider film industry, with everything required to write intelligent informed script reports.
Alongside the chapters on the detail of the script report, including a sample report, this book introduces a analysis of genre and how to use it in reading and development; a chapter on both writing and assessing treatments and a final section on the job of development, both what it is and how to manage the transition from reading scripts to working with screenwriters.
Understanding how a script is assessed and developed is possibly the most valuable training that a screenwriter can access, and if you read this as a writer, the step-by-step process of analysing the material offers you the best way to obtain distance from, and objectivity about your project to help in making the decisions that will improve it.
The input from those first readers taught me to value the thoughts and experience of anyone who reads and indeed writes screenplays and I hope that the spirit of the course, a lively, discursive, inspiring arena, and shaped by the many people who have been through it, shines through.
I very much hope you enjoy.
Lucy Scher
Reading Screenplays by Lucy Scher is now available to BUY HERE.