I'm driving myself crazy editing this script... because I edit it one way at the behest of some advice only to find advice in the contrary. I'm talking about formatting, basically. The problem is I don't have a trusted source whose advice I have faith in. And, that I see it done both ways.... every possible different way imaginable. Like this:
PAN TO THREE SOLDIERS 40 yards away -- ZOOM IN --
If an unknown wrote that, they'd be castrated. But, that's directly from a script that became a well known movie. So, it seems I'm going in circles, editing to fit one way, then re-editing to fit another way, and so on... I'm driving myself crazy and want to know HOW to stop driving myself crazy and become a known writer, so I don't have to worry about this...
HELP!
The point is, different writers have different styles and despite what a lot of people may think as a rule, whatever a successful pro writer's style is now, working as a pro, it's pretty likely that that was his style when he was first breaking in.
That is, it's not as if someone was careful not to use "we see" when he was first writing specs, but now that he's rich and famous and successful, he litters his script with "we sees" just for kicks.
That being said, it's important to understand that there are many gatekeepers in this business, and that there are widespread prejudices among those gatekeepers.
They tend not to like camera directions, flashbacks, the use of "cut to" and "we see" -- or at any rate, if used, used only very sparingly.
Blocks of text shouldn't be much more than five or six lines before you have a paragraph break -- if only to make the script more easily readable. Aim to make blocks of dialogue short as well (although it isn't always possible).
And, of course, any kind of significant formatting error, like the wrong typeface or anything that effects the page count, is absolutely verboten.
None of this is about the underlying quality of the script. This is about moving your script past the gatekeepers, who are only empowered to say no, and are always on the lookout for quick and easy reasons to say no to your script.
Give them a reason and they will say no.
Regarding this or that script that has broken this or that rule -- it may very well not have been a spec at all. It may have been an assignment, where they've already paid the writer to do the work.
Or, if a spec, it may have been a spec that managed, through some way or other, to by-pass the reader process which you are not likely going to be able to by-pass.
You never know.
What you should know is that in a game where the odds are already stacked against you, there's really no upside to writing your script in a way that may stack them even higher -- especially when it's possible to write your script in a way that doesn't have to do that.
Regarding describing shots in your script -- which your job is clearly to try to make the reader see the movie as they read your script, you almost never want to actually, literally describe shots, and if you're doing your job correctly -- that is, if you describe the action correctly, you almost never have to.
Sometimes, very rarely, you do. But that's only in situations where the *way* in which a particular scene or moment is shot is important to the story. It's pretty much never important to the story whether or not it's a continuous dolly shot or not. That may be the way you see it, but that's too bad. The scene could be shot twenty different ways and the "story" would still unfold in the same way.
The only example that I can think of offhand -- I did one of the (unused) drafts of Blair Witch 2 -- and in the version that I wrote, it preserved the whole faux documentary style -- and so it had to specify, at various points, that this scene was shot by the camera in a police car, or that scene was being shot by a low light camera in a house, or whatever.
That's obviously a very unusual situation -- but sometimes within a movie, there are times when you have to specify how a scene is shot, because it isn't simply a matter of the action unfolding in a certain way, but also that the scene has to be shot a certain way for the story to make sense.
In that case, you can break that rule.
But that doesn't happen very often. In a lot of movies, it never happens.
NMS
