10 Pet Peeves That Make A Script Reader Pause

Rewind.  Did you know that our host and creator of The Writers’ Hangout, Sandy Adomaitis, has extensive experience in script development for both television and film? She has worked with some of the industry’s top showrunners, including Carlton Cuse, John Wirth, and Tom Spezialy. Now, for the first time, Sandy has compiled a list of ten warning signs that could dampen her enthusiasm for reading your script, available exclusively to our devoted listeners.

Executive Producer Kristin Overn

Creator/Executive Producer Sandy Adomaitis

Producer Terry Sampson

Music by Ethan Stoller

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Transcript

0:12

Hello. My name is Sandy Adamidas, the social media director for the Page International Screenwriting Awards, and your host for The Writers Hangout, a podcast that celebrates the many stages of writing, from inspiration to the first draft, revising, getting the project made, and everything in between. We'll talk to the best and the brightest in the entertainment industry and create a space where you can hang out, learn from the pros, and have fun. Hey writers, it's Sandy coming to you from Studio City with a rewind episode, 10 pet peeves that make a script reader pause. I'll be back next week with a brand new episode, so until then, please enjoy this fan favorite. And the best part of this episode, Terry Sampson is back. I miss having Terry on the show, and I hope to get him back, but he's been so busy. If you miss Terry as much as I do, I have a plan. Let's get him back with flattery. Shall we write to him at thewritershangoutpodcast@gmail.com again, thewritershangoutpodcast@gmail.com and let him know how much we miss him. Let's start the show. We're going now. We're going now? Right now Oh, usually you do, we're recording, or something like that. I said that half an hour ago, let me try again. I did not even hear it. I'm so sorry. I'm not How do we, how do we pause again? And we're rolling. Hi, I'm Sandy Adomitis. And I'm Terry Sampson. Terry, may I welcome us back to the Writers Hangout Podcast? Yep. We ran away from school for a whole month. We did. Mm-hmm. Did you miss me? Yeah. Terry, for today's episode, we're gonna do Sandy's top 10 list of mistakes that show you are new to writing. I've been a script reader in some shape or form, uh, for, I think, 74 years. It's just, I don't know when I have not had a script in my hand. Because every minute you read is actually, it puts five minutes of- Yes. Okay. That makes sense. Exactly. Thank you for calculating that out. Now, a script reader, a script analysis, they, uh, read scripts and they help determine whether they make a good option for a studio to pursue. They often work between the original script and a script writer and with the executives to make recommendations. If you write for the studio, you do a synopsis of the script and then you do pass recommend. Then there's things like notes where you have to read the script, point out what you think the problems are, and you have to have fixes or suggestions for fixes. You just can't say, uh, lead character is unlikable. You have to do notes and notes and notes on why you think certain things should be fixed. When I was working in development, I detested that part of the process and tried to get out of it all the time. I liked finding the stories, coming up with the stories, and writing, and then handing it to, excuse me, my executives, and then we pitch it to the studio as an original idea. That was my wheelhouse. Is that- Yeah, wheelhouse is good. Wheelhouse. Also, being a writer, I just didn't like facing another writer and telling them what I think you should do. But then there's a flip side of that where you do notes for your friends. That's, I've done tons and tons of If you're a writer, you've done notes on other people's scripts. It's just, um, the way it is. So I thought, again, for today's episode that I would give you a top 10 list, and these are really kind of pet peeves when I'm reading scripts. Things that just jump out at me and, uh, just give me an indication that you might not be seasoned yet. And trust me, the things that I'm gonna, um, tell you are so simple to fix, and I hope that it helps the writers out there. Number one, for first time writers, only bite off what you can chew. If you are sitting down to write your first screenplay, don't try to tell the story of the building of the Suez Connect. You're not gonna like, this thing is gonna be like 20 episodes, okay? Yep. Just, just don't, just don't, don't make life so hard for yourself. You know, here's the fix. Write a story between two people with the building of the Suez Canal as the backdrop. Right. You can play any part in it- You can play it. when you need it. Play part in it. Just don't write a historical drama with 80 main characters as your first script. Number two, scenes that accomplish nothing. I like to think of a script as real estate. You have, what, 102, 120 pages to tell your story. I get that you wanna do personality things, quirky things, fun things. I can always tell when there's like a, um, ritual in a writer's family that they do, it'll show up in the script. You know, uh, every night the family sits down and they go salute and they drink their wine. Right. I can spot it a mile away. There's that touch football they play in the morning every morning- Yes. at 6:00 AM. Yes. The thing And, and this is also, again, with characters. Characters, you, you have a character there who, who doesn't really accomplish anything. What you can do is collapse scenes. You wanna show that your protagonist meets with his or her mentors and plays chess in the park. And you have five scenes. And you gotta set it up. They meet,"Hey, how you doing? We've been doing this for 20 years. Let's play chess." 20 pages later,"Hey, they're playing chess again," and the other chess player gives out a piece of information. Collapse those two scenes. Right. Just put it a little further in, and when they meet, get the information out. Uh, you, you gotta be skillful, but collapse the scenes. Collapse characters. You have four best friends, and n- you can't give the four people enough gravitas to even make a actor wanna audition for the role. Collapse it down to two people. Yeah. Just collapse it. Uh, number three, opening with a masturbation scene. I hate it. Does this happen a lot? Constantly. Co- what? Constantly. As of 2010, I would say every third script I read opens up with a masturbation scene or a couple having sex. Now, look, if your character's a sex addict, by all means, go at it. Yeah, you're getting to the point if you, if you will. Yes. Now, that's a bad choice because, uh, I would think if you're a sex addict, you're having sex other places than your own bed. And it used to be just men masturbating, and now it's women masturbating, and the couples are having sex. And it's not like the sex has anything to do with the rest of the story. It's that, it's a, a shock value i- item? It, I think they think it's edgy, but it's 2024 and it's not edgy. Please don't go back to making family breakfast. I don't want that either. Maybe I prefer it than the masturbation scene. Okay. Oh, man. And it's not because I'm a frude, I swear. Okay. Number four, never miss an opportunity to give the audience clues to understanding the character. A character doesn't just put on a hat. They put on a captain's hat. A bucket hat. A kangle hat. Think of one of your scripts. What kind of hat would the lead character might- Mine? put on, yes. Uh, they had to have an A's hat for a meeting that was coming up, and my character bought it at somebody's yard sale. So you needed it to look used. Yeah. No, I think- For, for the- Well, the idea was to make sure that they knew my character didn't have any dough. Yes, everything is a clue. Now you can go overboard with it, but who cares? When you do your edits, you can take them out. Okay. We have to discuss characters over 60. Okay. She says that she stares at me. Not everyone over 60 is on death's door. I would like to just put a period on that and just continue on. Right. They're younger writers, and so I have to give them space. But 60-year-old people are not all wearing their bathrobes. They don't all have gray hair. They are not all grumpy. They are not all losers. They are all not desperate. Now, I know we have Karens out there. I know we have grumpy elderly people, but I don't want to be reading your script and see you say 60, then see a very negative adjective. My, my eyes just skip over it because I know you're just gonna give me a scene that I've read- Yeah. over and over and over and over and over. Mm-hmm. No white space on page one. If you have to read a lot of scripts and you open it up to page one, and there is just a solid block, and you cannot see any white space, I, I wanna kill myself. I, I don't want to spend 10 minutes deciphering your first page. And you're introducing eight people and giving me their ages and their descriptions, and you're telling me what the rehearsal studio looks like down to the carafe at the side table. I hate you. I just hate you. Give space on the page. Right. Stop describing women's breasts. That's number seven. Number eight. Going that extra mile of writing a rape scene, it feels exploitive. I respect and know that that happens to women and that you, as an artist, want to portray it, but that's not the scripts that I'm talking about. Nine, exposition for the first three to four pages. Every page is about a minute. So if your characters at the top are talking for three to four minutes at a restaurant, unless a bomb is, uh, underneath the seat of one of the participants and a clock is ticking, I am bored and you're giving me way too much information. Again, this is for reading. This is not watching the movie. Y- you might have the most attractive people that I can't take my eyes off on the screen, but as a reader, a- and just cut it down. 10, do not title your movie the same as an iconic movie. Of course. I have seen scripts with titles of unknown smaller films. Uh, you can get away with that, but don't name your film Exodus. Especially if it is not the epic, historic drama about the founding of the state of Israel. D- don't do it. Don't, don't name your script Exodus as that is possibly the coolest name for a script sometimes, I think, but don't do it. Look, you don't think anybody's gonna remember Sunset Boulevard. They're gonna remember the title, Sunset Boulevard, trust me. Google, Google your title. I am sorry that the title that you decided on fits your script to a T and that it hurts you to your core, and you even feel that you're not gonna be able to sell your script without that amazing title. Change it. Well, this is a critical thing with songwriting. You have to come up with a title. It's hard to get people to listen to a song that you've written, and getting a great title will make people listen to it. I don't always pull that off, but I know that I have to try to get the best possible thing. Right. It's a hook, and you need to hook people into For a new songwriter, the song, the, the title that's used most often is the title, I Love You. It's never been a hit song, I don't think. There might have been one in the 30s. David Cassidy, I think I'm not- See, that's a better one, because now we wanna know why he's not sure.'Cause he's afraid he's not sure of a love there is no cure for. That's right. So as a reader, those are my top 10 tips of things to avoid. And I'm not saying a reader gonna put your script down just because you described a woman's breast. If you can float without these things, you're gonna get a better response. Yes. The entertainment industry, the executive side, the, the gatekeepers, they live in a world of no. They're looking for nos. They want to be able to toss your script aside and say,"I only read 27 pages, and that's all it deserved." And we don't want to do that, right, writers? That's right. It's, it's good to know this stuff. And then I have some ticky tack things. I'm not a big fan of a, uh, Post Malone song would fit in here, or maybe Taylor Slift. Nope, you make the decision, you're the writer. I'm not making the decision as the reader. Don't watermark your script. It makes the script hard to read, and it's insulting. If you give someone your script to read, especially a friend to give notes, and it's watermarked, the reason why scripts are watermarked is because back in the day, Lost became so popular that the sides were released online. And so if your character happened to, that you were auditioning for happened to be in a pivotal scene and lost, at the time, you have no ideas. Lost was in the zeitgeist, everybody was talking about it, everybody wanted to know what was gonna happen in the next episode. So say you're an actor, and you're in a pivotal scene, and you leave your sides at a coffee shop. Someone picked them up, and Perez Hilton would put them online, or TMZ, or something like that. No, I don't even know if TMZ was around then. So then spoilers were given out. So what happened was the studio started to watermark with the script with the name of the person that was handed the script. I get scripts all the time with my name, watermarked. If I leave that in a coffee shop, that means Sandy left it at coffee shop- Oh. because I don't give my scripts out. They're not pool toys or books. Oh, it's been such a better example than pool, than pool toys. So it was to keep things on network and films secret. Do not number your scenes. That's from production. Don't explain a joke. And this is the next one, just to help you writers out. The very last one is asking one person to do notes on every draft of your script. Mm. You're really testing your friendship and a professional relationship. If I give you notes on a script as a professional, the next time I see your script and you want me to perhaps purchase it, you better have kicked it up 10 notches. And if I'm a friend of yours and you've asked me to do extensive notes on your scripts, um, you're testing our friendship. Y- y- I spent hours and hours and hours writing down notes. And then there's also that friend. I have this one friend, I don't think they've ever taken one note of mine. They never changed it? Never changed it. But yet they'll still give me draft after draft and ask me Now, and there's also different notes. Whenever some By the way, I don't read friends scripts anymore. First of all, my friends are so freaking successful. They're not asking me. There you go. Second- You value the failure of the friendship. Yes. Second, I'm at a point where I don't want to ruin my friendship with people. Sometimes people can get hurt. I give tough notes, and I don't Some people aren't, um, tough enough to get those kind of notes. And third, when someone gives me a script, I will say,"Do you want notes notes or just, uh, notes?" Which means, do you want me to go in depth or do you want me to just give you a joke here and there or say,"Oh, here's a misspelling and, oh, the character's name changed, um, 30 pages in. Kind of ticky tack notes. I'll give you small notes like that to the cows come home. But intensive, I spend a day reading your script and I spend hours thinking and then writing, you better not ask me to do that five times in a row. And when I was younger, I, I did do things like that. That's a vampire writer. They're just sucking the emotion and talent out of you. Oh, I did say that was the end, but this is one more thing. I will slam a script shut if someone is in trouble and they pull out their phone and there's no cell reception. Even though they're in the middle of Manhattan. I'll buy no power. Yeah. I ran out of 10. But I, I ain't buy no cell reception in ni- in 2024. Yeah. Maybe- You can drop the phone and have it, uh, not work. Mm-hmm. That's fair. Forget it. Don't have it. Yeah. And then as a writer, that's where you shine. If you could come up with another reason why your cell phone doesn't work- My dog- Other than you just stepped on it- Yeah. I love you. I love you. I cannot wait to turn the page. I want my dog to eat it and I want to still hear it ring in his little stomach. That's, that's where I would go with it. I once had a goose steal a cell phone from someone's hands. They were, they were in a park. And as it, you know, you could hear it in the distance that it rang when the goose was like a, like out in the lake. Full running. Yeah. Well, thank you writers for indulging me with my top 10 pet peeves and things that I really, really, really do hope will help you as a writer. And I think all of those are easy. I don't think that you really have to struggle with any of those. You just have to be aware of them. Yeah, being aware of them though is a good, it's a good thing. Yes. And that's a wrap for the Writers Hangout. Thanks so much for listening. If you enjoyed the show, please take a moment to leave us a review on Apple Podcasts. Your positive feedback will help us keep the show going so we can continue bringing you more future episodes. Remember, keep writing. The world needs your stories. The Writer's Hangout is sponsored by the Page International Screenwriting Awards with executive producer, Kristen Overn, producer Sandy Animitis, and myself, Terry Sampson. And our music is composed by Ethan Stoler.