SCREENPLAYS ON THE WEB
Screenplays, screenplays, get your screenplays here!
Reading professional screenplays of produced movies is one of the very best ways a budding screenwriter can learn their craft. Getting your hands on them, though, is sometimes easier said than done.
While there are many scripts published in books, very few are in the correct format; typically they are laid out in playwriting style, which can lead you badly astray. If you’re buying a published script for formatting reference, make sure it is printed in the right format. Faber & Faber Published screenplays, for instance, while a significant publisher of extremely interesting and important screenplays, still insists on printing them in the incorrect “theatrical play” format. Read them for content definitely, but not for format. Applause Books, on the other hand, is a publisher who makes a point of publishing scripts the exact way the author originally wrote them. Examples of their publications include THE FISHER KING, JACOB’S LADDER and TERMINATOR 2.
Beware of Transcripts Posing as Screenplays!!
What’s the difference? A transcript is just what it implies: someone sat down with a VCR or DVD and painstakingly wrote down every single line of dialogue and lightly sketched out all the scenes’ main actions. What it doesn’t do is tell you what the writer originally wrote — none of the scene description nor any of the writer’s style and syntax used to make mere black words on white paper come to life and persuade someone to finance a movie.
It also underscores a common misconception: that dialogue is the most important element in a movie. While good dialogue is always savored, the real truth is that it’s the first, last and most easily changed element of any film. Without the proper structure, characters and pacing, whatever the characters say will be meaningless.
I admire people’s tenacity and resolve for undertaking creating a transcript, because I believe it may have some merit as an exercise for themselves (it forces the transcriber to focus on what exactly is taking place on screen), but I think it is useless as a resource for people looking to read scripts.
Drew’s Script-O-Rama
The Web used to contain more sources of scripts, but copyright questions raised their hydra heads and closed several sites. One spot still running is Drew’s Script-O-Rama.
The selection is very diverse and though it does veer more toward genre material, there are some real gems here. Plus Drew has a wide selection of Television scripts for those of you who are multiplex-ly challenged.
iScriptdb Movie Screenplay & Review Database
iScriptdb.com wants to be the IMDB.com of screenplays, but falls short. First of all, finding where the downloadable scripts are is difficult; you have to hunt and peck through the links to find a script you can download. But I was able to find a first and shooting draft of MINORITY REPORT here, which was very informative.
Part of the problem in finding scripts on this site, is that it has links to scripts, script reviews and movie news all on the same page and doesn’t always clarify the difference between the three. It’s nice to have screenwriting news and reviews (which are written by users of the site), but better organization would be even nicer.
iScriptdb Movie Screenplay & Review Database
So You Wanna Sell A Screenplay.com
Gotta love the name of this site! I don’t know anything about them, but I do know they have a web page of various screenplays for you to look at and download and that’s all we care about on this page. The formatting sucks on the HTML scripts because it’s hard to get a web page to faithfully mimic a script’s layout, but read only for content and you’ll be okay.
So You Wanna Sell A Screenplay.com
Congratulations, you’ve found the right page … almost.
Now, just click on the link below to go the exact page where you can download the scripts discussed in class:
Let me know if you have any trouble downloading or opening any of the scripts or have any other questions: