FOR MY SPRING 2022 SCRIPT WRITING STUDENTS: A NOTE ABOUT SCRIPT FORMATING

ROBERT GERST

ESSENTIAL LALW 338 SCRIPT FEATURES

EXT. COURTYARD PS 153 HARLEM – AFTERNOON

SCENE HEADING: Three elements constitute a scene heading: INT/EXT , the specific location,
and the time of day. Nothing less. Nothing more. It’s a formula. Everyone expects it. Don’t
flout the convention when it does you no good.

Part dog, part cunning child, shaking his dirty kinked hair
and his jaundice-looking eyes, SONNY'S FRIEND shuffles to
NARRATOR, accosting the narrator as he exits the school
building and steps across the nearly empty school courtyard.

ACTION: Keep the action tight! Put nothing in this section that a director wouldn’t need or
want, but include every element of action that expresses, without words, what the words
mean to the character or characters. Don’t “direct” by indicating how you think the director
ought to shoot this action (“Tracking shot,” “C.U.,” “pan right,”) and so on. Just describe the
action, not how the director is to treat it. The director is the director and you are the writer.
That’s it. Build your sentences on ACTION verbs, not state-of-being verbs. Find just the right
word, the perfect word, to express the action or object. “Shuffles” is better, for instance, than
“Walks” because “shuffles” characterizes the action and “walks” doesn’t. Never write up an
action using the past tense: you’re describing in “action” only what is happening now before
the viewer’s eyes. Don’t write in the “action” section about what a character is thinking or
feeling; what the character is thinking and feeling is for the words and the actions themselves
to reveal. The first time in the script that you set a character in action, put the character
name in upper case. But only the first time! Describe your action as if it were taking place on
a brightly lit stage. A script takes place in the eternal present. Remember: script writing is
WRITING. Punctuate right. Spell right. Space right. Formatting isn’t writing: it’s just typing.
But poorly formatted text loses you readers faster than riders in uncinched saddles slip from
a horse.

SONNY'S FRIEND

CHARACTER: In this section, the character name always appears in uppercase. Final Draft
creates the uppercase for you. Once you enter a character’s name into a script, Final Draft
includes it among the character names that it auto-guesses. Replace the name in
Edit>Replace Character and you change it everywhere in your script. Endow characters with
distinctive names whenever possible. . A script with three same-age females respectively
bearing the names of “June,” “Jane,” and “Jillian” drives readers crazy.

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FOR MY SPRING 2022 SCRIPT WRITING STUDENTS: A NOTE ABOUT SCRIPT FORMATING
ROBERT GERST
I see you got the papers. So you
already know about it.

DIALOGUE: Movie characters rarely say much because they needn’t: lighting, blocking,
cutting, acting, audio convey much of what they mean. Keep dialogue concise. The “Sonny’s
Blues” segment this demo script adapts runs three hundred ninety-six words. In this script,
the characters exchange just seventy-six. Give each character, if you can, a distinctive way of
talking. This one pontificates, that one stammers, this other one is always interjecting, “Dig
it.” A reader should be able to identify which character is speaking, even when the line that
identifies the character is missing.

NARRATOR
You mean about Sonny? Yes, I
already knew about it. How come
they didn't get you?

Dialogue: Great dialog resembles poetry. Rhythm, rhyme, assonance deepen it. In the
exchange of dialogue above, the characters repeat the word “about” three times. Four times
they also repeat the word, “you.” Those recurring words are hands beating a drum: they beat
out what, in the subtext, these characters are actually talking about: Who is Sonny?

Sonny's friend returns a juvenile but repulsive-looking grin.

Action: Note that it’s not “SONNY’S FRIEND” here, but rather “Sonny’s friend” because we
previously introduced this character. No upper case is needed. Remember, above all, that
you are writing creatively, not typing. Where a writer places an element in a sentence
telegraphs (to a good reader) what the sentence is getting at. Writing “Sony’s friend grins like
a repulsive child” would move this sentence away from “grin” where it now ends and move it
instead towards “child.” But childishness is not the crucial feature of this character: the
crucial feature is the emotional mask the character dons when he “grins.” He’s a simulator,
as “as-if” person. That’s why he’s important.

SONNY'S FRIEND
I wasn't there. I stay away from
them people.

Dialog: Notice the “Them people,” not “those people.” This character is a street person and,
accordingly, he speaks as a street person. How a character talks in a script constitutes the
character’s signature. Your characters need to talk as they would, not as you do. If your
characters sound like you, you aren’t creating characters. You’re just talking selfies of
yourself. Don’t!

Narrator offers Sony's friend a cigarette and watches the

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FOR MY SPRING 2022 SCRIPT WRITING STUDENTS: A NOTE ABOUT SCRIPT FORMATING
ROBERT GERST

ACTION: In all writing, nouns plod and verbs dance. A vigorous verb (action word) is worth
twenty-five enfeebled nouns (person, place, or thing). In the action description above, smoke
“envelopes” this character. That verb conveys that the smoke wraps around him, entraps
him—and escape from entrapment, after all, is the very theme of “Sony’s Blues. Verbs are the
heartbeat of sentences.

NARRATOR
Good for you. You come all the way
down here just to tell me about
Sonny?

SONNY'S FRIEND
That's right.

NARRATOR
Well, thanks. But I already know
about it and I got to get home.

SONNY'S FRIEND
I'll walk you a little ways.

FORMATTING CONVENTIONS: Notice that the dialogue follows without a space beneath the
character name. Left margin, right margin, spaces between speeches—all these script
features are standardized as soldiers drilling. Ignore the conventions and readers—at least
readers who read scripts for a living—assume the worst. Why make trouble for yourself?
Final Draft takes care of almost all that formatting for you.

The two men start walking across the courtyard together past
a pair of boys, and one of them bids the narrator good night
while he suspiciously eyes Sonny's friend.

ACTION: Interacting with the narrator above isn’t a crowd, isn’t a solitary person, but rather
it’s a “pair” of boys who interact with the narrator. It’s a pair—two persons—because
fundamentally Sonny’s Blues opposes two similar but different versions of a single
personage— the male child of this tortured and turbulent family, the two brothers. When you
know what your theme is, run with it. You want to invest it everywhere you can in your script
so that, almost invisibly, it feels everywhere.

SONNY'S FRIEND
What're you going to do? I mean,
about Sonny?

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FOR MY SPRING 2022 SCRIPT WRITING STUDENTS: A NOTE ABOUT SCRIPT FORMATING
ROBERT GERST
DIALOGUE: Whenever you can, end scenes with suspense, portentous action, something. We
end here with the fundamental question that the story seeks to answer—but no, no, we
don’t answer the question here! Instead, we provoke the reader to ask, “Then what
happens?” In essence, our ending says, “Stay tuned...”