Film Courage: What are the biggest mistakes you see in screenplays over and over again?
Cody Smart, Writer/Script Doctor/Teacher: I would say that the first one is formatting.
I hate when I open a script and I immediately know you don't know how to write. Then it comes
down to very passive voice and it's all is, are or ing and things that. They're just not moving
the story forward. But then it comes to bigger things, those are just the very few things that
you notice you open it and you kind of skim and you're oh they don't know how to format,
they are not using active tenses but then when the characters are not fleshed out that's one
of the things I immediately see or when the protagonist's goal doesn't connect to the
turning points where there's no clear central conflict and you're just kind
of giving me vignettes of scenes that are not connected and they're not leading to something
I think that dialogue where all of the characters sound the same as another
thing I see a lot and granted that's one of the hardest things I believe for writers is to nail
dialogue and make characters sound different because obviously everyone talks just one way
so it's hard to kind of talk different people but that's an art form that you really need to
work on and people watch and study the grades and how they do it and how they make the characters
sound different and why writing your character bio is so important because that's where you
can figure out how they say things different I think that those are the biggest things I say
I'd find but then if we go deeper into little things the antagonist is not fleshed out and
they're just the stereotype of the bad guy or the supporting characters are sort of forgotten just
very one note if you want a good script all of those should be good fleshed out characters
especially in television because then we'll see the characters over time so they need rich
backstories that actors want to play those roles I always say it that to to writers winning even
the notes I'm all of the supporting characters that you have just don't have personalities think
of the actors who are going to play these roles you want great supporting cast that it's going to
bring life to it do they want to play these roles that they all look and sound the same probably
not so think of all of the great supporting characters from TV shows and try to think
of ways where you can make the best friends more interesting for example Will and Grace
that show is a great example of making the best friends so unique that Jack and Karen could have
almost been the protagonist of that show because a lot of the times they overshadowed Will and
Grace because Jack and Karen which is so unique so layered so amazingly funny in their own way that I
think they even make that joke one time themselves that they could have their own show which was
the meta joke that they were making in the show because they were layered they were interesting
they weren't just the typical best friend that's just a sounding board for the two protagonists
they're rich they are unique and that's what we want to see in scripts and one of the things that
writers tend to forget about when they're writing how common is it for you to read screenplays that
are too short I think that most of the times writers have the opposite problem and they're just
way too long especially nowadays where I think producers obviously are trying to cut the budgets
more so I tend to tell writers you're overwriting and your story could be told in 90 pages and not
120. I'd say that most of the times is that I it's rare when I say you need more pages or your
story shouldn't be a half hour show and should be an hour long show I think it's the opposite
especially for example if you're writing an animated movie that is aimed for kids you want
to target 90 pages not 125 because no kid is going to sit there for that long and animation
gets expensive but I think that when a story is too short which does happen every now and then
it's because they haven't really fleshed out the story enough and because you you kind of
have the expectations in a feature that they're going to reach the arc and the goal that change
towards the end so you haven't fleshed that out then that's when your story kind of gets cut or
there's no subplots that you were adding you just focus on your protagonist and you forgot
about your supporting cast I think that that's another thing that's very common so make sure to
include those other important characters that it not the protagonist but should also reflect the
themes of the story or what your protagonist is going through and maybe that can actually
add to that arc of your protagonist what are some do's and don'ts as it relates to world building I
think that the world needs to be established from the very beginning and the rules need to be clear
so one of the problems I see in scripts very often is when the world is not well established and then
things start happening later on that we're not planted so when we see them happen we are kind of
taken out of the world of the story so for example if a magical occurrence happens then the world
needs to be set up in a way where we know magic could happen even if we don't see a fairy right
away but we know that there's something that could happen or when the world sort of doesn't establish
the rules in magical sci-fi stories or where the rules keep changing or are not clear enough I
hate when I'm reading horror and then it's not established exactly how things could work and
what would happen if something doesn't work that way so you need to pay attention to that and then
the world also needs to stay sort of consistent the same thing with genre and tone I hate when
those switch or shift halfway through this story when you're writing a romantic comedy in act one
and that it turns into a thriller in act two you're completely taken out of the world of
the story because it just doesn't add up or things that where just the world is not adding up because
things don't make sense in what you establish in act one so act one is really where all of
this should be established mostly in the first half of act one which is called in my opinion
the Ordinary World that then gets disrupted by the inciting incident that Ordinary World is
where you established all of the rules of the world of your story where you establish how
your protagonist relates to that world relates to the characters what the rules are what we
could expect to happen in this world that's why a lot of times horror movies start with this little
sort of teaser snippet at the beginning where they set up I don't know I mean the mythology of
it all so things that and then they start we set something up or with shows lost where this world
of the island happens and then several episodes later things start happening lost actually for me
it kind of threw me off when in season one kind of the bear appeared in I don't know episode
eight or nine or something I don't remember exactly what episode but the show turned a
little more fantastical and that wasn't set up in the first handful of episodes and that kind
of threw me off because I was not expecting that I was oh you're changing the rules than
me so late into the show that I I can't connect with it anymore so you need to be careful with
how you set things up more than your reader or viewer might be turned off from that world
so if there's magic or any kind of underworld or or a crossing over mediumship or whatever
it should be established right away so that we're not surprised by it exactly the mythology all of
that kind of needs to be there so we know and it doesn't have to be necessarily obviously magic or
things that but for example if the world of your story is a greedy cop show set it up that from
the start don't just then introduce something else or if they're all good cops we need to understand
what the show is about and what the dynamics are and how things work within that world for example
Sons of Anarchy, it's all about family and the life of gangs and by gangs so we understand from
the beginning and that's a show that's very heavy on the world because it needs to introduce this
world that we haven't seen on TV probably before the show came out then the spin-off happened with
Mayans but Sons of Anarchy was original and that we hadn't really seen that world on television but
there was a lot of world building and there was nothing magical or rules that but the
rules were about how the gang operated and those rules were established from the very beginning.