Five Tips for Getting Your Screenplay on Track

There's a joke in Hollywood that starts out: "Did you hear the one about the blonde who was so dumb she slept with the screenwriter…"

There's no punchline. It's just a painful reminder to Tinseltown scribes that "the power of the written word" does not translate to power for the writer. Not in L.A.

As a side-effect of their impotence, out-of-work screenwriters read many of the unproduced screenplays floating around town. Giving feedback as a favor, checking out the competition, boredom. Whatever. Reading tons of scripts that will likely never become movies is part of the territory.

Some of these unproduced scripts are pretty good. They make you root simultaneously for their success because you'd like to think that "good scripts get made", and for their failure because, well, you're a writer and you're petty and the last thing you want to see is some no-name written up in the trades with mention of a 6 figure sale in the cutline under his picture.

Some of these scripts are absolutely awful to the extent that they're barely readable. And maybe not even barely.

But the majority of scripts passed from scribe to scribe fall in the middle. Readable, competently written but, for one reason or another, ultimately unsatisfying.

Is there something particular about these scripts that makes them fall short? Well, a script can be both bad and good at the same time, obviously. Good dialogue, boring plot for example. Or imaginative premise, horrendous characters. The combinations are plentiful.

But I think there is something particular about competently written scripts that fall short. I believe there is one dominant flaw. Lack of focus. In other words, scripts that stray a little too far off the path with subplots or scripts that are padded.

Granted, successful movie plots do occasionally meander on purpose. Robert Altman and Richard Linklater films are known for that quality. But I'm speaking to the kinds of scripts in which getting sidetracked is clearly unintentional.