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:

22 July
All Is True
The Ballad of Buster Scruggs
Beautiful Boy
BlacKkKlansman
Black Panther — Not a PDF, only readable online
Boy Erased
Capernaum
Colette
Crazy Rich Asians
Destroyer
Disobedience
Eighth Grade
First Man
First Reformed
The Front Runner
The Happy Prince
If Beale Street Could Talk
Leave No Trace
Mary Poppins Returns
Mary Queen of Scots
Never Look Away
On the Basis of Sex
Puzzle
A Quiet Place
The Rider
Roma
Ruben Brandt, Collector
The Sisters Brothers
Sorry to Bother You
Spider-man: Into The Spider-Verse
Stan & Ollie
A Star is Born
Vice
What They Had
The Wife

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

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.

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 in 2019, a week-long analysis of each script. People who volunteer to do a scene-by-scene breakdown provide an important component 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 volunteers to do scene-by-scene breakdowns of 2018 movie screenplays:

The Ballad of Buster Scruggs / Jeff Messerman
Black Panther / Stacey Wright
Destroyer / Roo Black
First Man / Denise Garcia
If Beale Street Could Talk / Kirby Marshall-Collins
A Quiet Place / Mark Furney
Stan & Ollie / Andrew Lightfoot

[Note: Bold means the volunteer has sent me their scene-by-scene breakdown.]

Who else will rise to the challenge?