Script Readers: Hollywood’s Threshold Guardians

They may not get a lot of respect, but they are important to writers.

Outside of yourself, the single most important person in the life of your spec script is the reader assigned to it. Almost no material gets submitted in Hollywood without coverage and that coverage is written by a script reader who is paid — or sometimes not — to read your script. What they write about your script, how they distill in their coverage the key narrative elements of your story can have an enormous influence on how the material is perceived by people further up the food chain … indeed, whether anyone else will choose to read it.

But who are these people? What sort of lives do they lead? How do they go about the grind of reading scripts and writing coverage?

To wit: “An Impression of a Script Reader: Hollywood’s Threshold Guardians.”

It is late at night, 10:58 on a Sunday evening to be precise. We are in an apartment in Santa Monica. Scratch that, Los Feliz. Uh… let’s get real. We are in a cramped two bedroom one bath dump in North Hollywood. The script reader — let’s call her Beth — shares the apartment with two other young adults (mid-20s), one of whom is on the lease with Beth, the other an old high school friend who hit LA to stay for a few nights, but now has essentially moved in, sleeping on the living room couch.

Fortunately, Merritt — that’s the slacker roommate’s name — is out tonight carousing. Maybe Merritt the Mooch will get lucky and he won’t come staggering home drunk as usual, Beth thinks hopefully. The other roommate Brenna is asleep, no doubt grinding her teeth, already in nocturnal stress about what Monday morning nightmares await at her job as an agent’s assistant at a boutique lit agency.

Beth is sprawled in her reading chair, the nicest piece of furniture in a living room jammed with mismatched pieces. It was her best yard sale find to date, all of $18. The fabric is well-worn and frayed, but its arms are wide, perfect for piling up scripts, pens, laptop, and endless bottles of Celsius energy drinks to fuel her reading regimen. She loves that her chair is so functional and comfortable. She hates sitting in the chair because she knows when she’s there, she is working.

Computer on her lap, Beth finishes pounding away on the keyboard and hits save. Coverage on a script, the last of five she was assigned to read over the weekend. Yet another pass. Yet another shitty script. Yet another two hours of her time in this universe devoured by 107 pages of wan inspiration and lame execution.

Beth offers perhaps the world’s weariest sigh, then thinks: How did I get here? She didn’t intend to be making a living — such as it is — reading scripts. Eighteen months ago after finally landing an intern position at a big production company, when she showed up for her first day of work, a stack of scripts somehow ended up in her email, accompanied by a two-sheet explanation of the outfit’s guidelines for writing coverage. No matter that Beth had never read a script before. She would learn as she went along. Fortunately, she had majored in creative writing in college. Her overlords must have liked her coverage because she became the go-to person in-house to read the higher tier of scripts (which at least got her out of reading all the stray submissions that mysteriously slipped through the cracks of the company’s ‘no unsolicited material’ policy).

One thing led to another — picking up a freelance script coverage gigs, moonlighting at an actor’s prod co that was suddenly plowing through all the pay-or-play scripts that had stacked up — Beth found herself working as a script reader. No diploma. No business cards. No office. No certification. Just a steady stream of phone calls from a variety of clients requesting her services. She likes to think it’s because she is good at it and people can see that she really understands story, but she has a nagging fear it’s because she’s cheap. She keeps intending to raise her quote, but doesn’t. It’s incredibly competitive out there. Moreover a lot of outfits are relying solely on interns to provide script coverage. As if, Beth sniffs. They wouldn’t know a good story if it hit them in their pretty little faces. Then there’s the threat of AI. Please, dear God, don’t let machines kill my job. And yet companies keep cutting back on paying for script coverage, a silent battle being waged from Culver City to Burbank. No matter the quality of coverage suffers. In these economic times, the bottom line isn’t “Recommend,” “Consider,” “Pass,” rather it’s all about dollars spent and dollars saved.

Beth stretches, rolling her head around resulting in a series of explosive skeletal pops. How long had she been sitting here? Three hours? Four? When was the last time she’d been outside? Had she eaten dinner? Lunch? No matter. Now it was finally her time. 11:00PM. One hour left in the weekend. What would she do with it?

Of course, she knows what she should do. Click open the Final Draft file of her spec script To Dwell, the period piece family drama set in Ireland she’d started… God, was is really eight months ago? She’s a writer, she knows that. She is passionate about this story… or at least used to be when she first conceived it. She still claims she is, but she has hectoring doubts. A period piece. Family drama. Ireland. Even the title. If she picked up that script to provide coverage, she knows the first thing she’d do when she checked it out would be to groan. And yet Hollywood needs great stories, right? At least that’s what all the screenwriters say when she attends the endless rounds of free seminars and screenings in town.

Beth is just about to open To Dwell when her phone chirps. A text. From her most important client: Just sent you a script. Cover by tomorrow AM.

And there goes her best intentions to work on her own spec script, crushed by yet another story requiring coverage. Fuuuuuuucccck.

Checks her email. Downloads the script. Beth presses her eyes shut, hoping it will all go away. Her exhaustion, the rent check that is due, Merritt the Mooch … and most of all this goddammed script.

There is nothing… nothing Beth wants to do less than read this script.

Guess what?

THAT’S YOUR SCRIPT!

I share this story with my film school students. You should see them squirm when I hit that punch line. I follow up with something like this:

Therefore, the next time you sit down to write, you would be well advised to have Beth in mind. Are your pages entertaining enough to break through her weariness and encroaching cynicism? Is your story compelling enough to propel her to read every page as opposed to the first 30… or not even 15… or maybe just 5… then scan the rest?

Write your script. Write the hell out of it. Write something that shakes Beth out of her lethargy and reminds her why she got into this business in the first place: To tell great stories.

Same goes to you, reader.

Write something Beth will love.