Script Club

Here’s an opportunity for you to read the screenplay for Everything Everywhere All At Once and discuss live online.

I get email requests. Lots of them. Most I reply with a kindly “no.” But I received one recently which caught my attention.

As anybody who has followed Go Into The Story for awhile will know, I am a HUGE proponent of reading scripts. It’s the second part of the screenwriting mantra I created over a decade ago:

Watch movies. Read scripts. Write pages.

I did not attend film school. Apart from two classes at UVA (Cinema as an Art Form), I had no formal education as a screenwriter. Zero.

When Fate intervened in my life and a grad student at USC asked, “Maybe you could write a script,” and I responded with “I can do that,” the extent of my education before I wrote my first screenplay was reading Syd Field’s book Screenplay: The Foundations of Screenwriting, and three screenplays: Back to the Future, Witness, and Breaking Away.

After I sold K-9 as a spec script to Universal in 1987, I had to play catch up. Big time. And in a hurry. A key part of my education? I read every screenplay I could get my hands on.

This was before PDFs. It meant quite literally sweet-talking my agent’s assistant to make copies of scripts or meeting other screenwriters to swap actual three-hole punch screenplays which we’d take to Kinko’s, copy, and swap back.

Reading scripts. That turned out to be a critical part of my education in the craft. To this day over three decades later, I still read screenplays.

There is something you simply cannot replicate apart from reading actual scripts. Format. Style. Pace. Scene construction. The look of a script page. Story structure. Narrative voice. Word usage. On and on and on.

This is all by way of a preface to Luke Foster, a fine fellow from England who has founded an outfit called Script Club. When I received that email and right up top, it described how the group reads and discusses screenplays, that was enough to lead to a call.

You can check it out here.

Are you a fan of Everything Everywhere All At Once? Of course, you are. Tomorrow, Wednesday, May 17th at 2:30PM (E.T.), 1:30PM (C.T.), 11:30AM (P.T.) is your chance to have read the screenplay, then get together with other film fans and discuss it with them live.

You can download the screenplay and register to participate in the live event by going here.

Plus, you can put this additional item on your calendar: Wednesday, September 20, 7:30PM (U.K.), 2:30PM (E.T.), 1:30PM (C.T.), 11:30AM (P.T.), I will be joining the Script Club crew to discuss one of my favorite movies from last year: Women Talking. Download the script. Read it. Discuss it.

Of course, we have been running an annual Go Into The Story Script Read and Analysis series for a decade. To date, we have read and reviewed 118 movie scripts. You can check out the archives here.

Bottom line: READ SCRIPTS!