The screenplay at a glance

Sometimes a screenplay comes in from a student that I can tell at a glance has serious problems. I can do this without reading a word. The giveaway is "text density" -- there is so much of it on the page, so little white space, that the writer clearly misunderstands what it is s/he is supposed to be doing. The same thing happens when I'm a judge in a screenplay competition: I find scripts I reject unread. They simply do not present themselves as screenplays. This is the classic case of the writer shooting himself in the foot.

I had an extreme case this term. A student turned in a script with two long paragraphs that took up the entire first page. Well, he turned in the rewrite with the midterm and it's great! Short paragraphs, simple sentences, the narrative darting forward nicely in an airy script that moves the eye vertically as much as horizontally -- a spec screenplay! It's satisfying to see someone "get it" and especially as quickly as this. From disaster to good screenwriting in one rewrite.

The reason I have one-on-one conferences with each student is to make sure they understand the format and rhetorical hoops they must jump through. Screenwriting is primarily about storytelling, and the quicker all the other issues are out of the way, the better. Let format and rhetoric serve the story, which comes first.