Time to Read 2018 Movie Scripts

One of the best ways to learn the craft: Read scripts!

With the ongoing release of 2018 movie scripts as part of the studios annual For Your Consideration campaigns, it’s a great time to resume our Go Into The Story Script Reading and Analysis Series. To date, we have covered 69 movie scripts of such notable movies as Argo, Arrival, and Boyhood, all the way up to Up In The Air, Whiplash, and The Wolf of Wall Street.

With each script, we spend an entire week analyzing it:

Monday: Scene-By-Scene Breakdown
Tuesday: Plot
Wednesday: Characters
Thursday: Themes
Friday: Dialogue
Saturday: Takeaways

Check out the list of 2018 movie scripts available to the public:

A Quiet Place (Paramount)
The Ballad of Buster Scruggs (Netflix)
Colette (Bleecker Street)
Disobedience (Bleecker Street)
Dumplin’ (Netflix)
The Front Runner (Sony)
The Kindergarten Teacher (Netflix)
The Land of Steady Habits (Netflix)
Leave No Trace (Bleecker Street)
Norway (Netflix)
The Other Side of the Wind (Netflix)
Private Life (Netflix)
Quincy (Netflix)
Roma (Netflix)
Roxanne Roxanne (Netflix)
Sorry to Bother You (Annapurna)
What They Had (Bleecker Street)

NOTE: NETFLIX HAS PULLED THE LINKS TO THEIR SCRIPTS. NOT SURE WHY, HOPEFULLY THEY’LL BE BACK UP SOON.

Last year, the studios and production companies released nearly 50 scripts, so there’s a lot more to come in the next two months.

What I propose: Let’s read and analyze one 2018 movie script every other week beginning in January 2019.

Here’s where you come in: We need volunteers to read a script and provide a scene-by-scene breakdown as the launching point for our weekly discussions. Trust me, this will be a great learning experience for you and we can add your breakdown to the 62 we already have in archives, thereby adding to a valuable resource for the online writing community.

To download PDFs of the scene-by-scene breakdowns we have aggregated to date, go here.

For those folks who volunteer to do a scene-by-scene breakdown of a 2018 movie script, you not only get your name duly noted in a blog post and your name enshrined in archives, you also get a special dose of creative juju.

If you need additional inspiration, here is Jefferson Airplane belting out “Volunteers” from the Woodstock Festival in 1969:

Finally, allow me to use the words of one of Hollywood’s hottest screenwriters to bludgeon you over the head with the value of reading scripts. From my most recent interview, Jon Spaihts responds to my final question, What advice would you offer to aspiring screenwriters about learning the craft and breaking into Hollywood? Here’s his answer:

Read the script and then watch the movie. Watch the movie and then read the script. Watch the movie with the script in your lap. Study the parts. You have to see through the surfaces. Being a fan is insufficient. Break it down. That means slowing it down and looking at it through a series of different lenses.

Once you’ve begun to do that, you can see what the parts of a screenplay and the parts of a movie do.

First thing Jon said: Read scripts.

We’re going to do that every other week in 2018 and do a week-long analysis of each script. People who volunteer to do a scene-by-scene breakdown provide an important aspect of that process.

Who’s up to read a 2018 movie script and do the online writing community a solid by working up a scene-by-scene breakdown?

Hit me up in comments with your preferred movie script. And my personal thanks in advance!

UPDATE: We have our first set of GITS readers who are volunteering to do a scene-by-scene breakdown of a 2018 movie script.

Dumplin’ / Joni Brainerd
A Quiet Place / Mark Furney
Roma / Alex Payne
Sorry to Bother You / Chetan Pal Ashta

Thanks, all!