Read Any Good Movies Lately?

In Los Angeles, script reading can be a badge of honor, a sign of position. “Don’t bother Mommy now, she’s reading scripts.” The little tyke is expected to back off, knowing there’s no appeal. Mommy’s mired in her “weekend read,” plowing through scripts of unproduced movies. It means Mommy’s important.

Now another kind of script is gaining a new popularity: the published versions of movies already made and in some cases even playing at the multiplex.The volumes are traditional paperbacks with snappy covers, usually with a still from the movie cropped in a way that probably gives pause to the cinematographer. The treatment of the text ranges from what looks like photocopied pages from the Mommy version, full of terms of art: POV, smash cut and even the occasional n.d. sedan (for nondescript). Others have the slick surfaces, easily read typeface and layout of the big publishing houses.

A film script, if it is ever produced at all, is produced only once, unlike its cousin the stage play, which may be done many times in many different styles. If a film is remade, a new script is written. A strange counter-example is the remake of “Psycho.” Gus Van Sant, an otherwise exemplary director, made a point of shooting Joseph Stefano’s original script and repeating Alfred Hitchcock’s camera angles. The result was stillborn, more an art student’s stunt than an independent work.

Published scripts date to the silent era. An early example is “Just a Song at Twilight” by Henry Albert Phillips, published in 1921 by the Home Correspondence School, an organization that must have been selling screenplay lessons even then. Publishing scripts hit a peak in the late ‘60s, when art house scripts were published here and abroad by Lorrimer, Grove and others. That was an era before videotape and DVD, when reading the script was the only practical way to examine a movie.

So who reads these scripts? As the old joke has it, everyone has two businesses: his own and show business. Interest in Hollywood and its lore has never been greater. In many cases, I suspect, these scripts are the equivalent of action figures for grown-ups. People often want to own a souvenir of a movie they’ve liked. Published scripts serve as a memento with more gravitas than a T-shirt.

Film students read them, trying to divine their mysteries. Writers collect them, looking for models. Academic presses publish them, heavily annotated with variant scenes and essays. The magazine Scenario has been publishing current scripts (three per issue) since the mid-1990s. Many scripts pop up on the Web.

Actors and acting students do scenes derived from these published versions for auditions or in class. A generation ago, in New York, young actresses often did Viola’s ring speech from “Twelfth Night” (“I left no ring with her....”). They had probably played the role in college. They were pitting themselves against 400 years of tradition, hoping to hit all the right notes and perhaps add a bit of their own interpretation.

Now, in Los Angeles anyway, they might do a scene from “Erin Brockovich,” throwing themselves up against Julia Roberts. They usually do better with the Shakespeare. One can hear the ring speech done many ways. It’s part of our common literature, and anyone may take a whack at it. Erin belongs, body and soul, to Roberts, and anyone else seems a pale imitation.

A similar dilemma exists with reading film scripts for pleasure. When reading a play, you are free to imagine anyone in the roles. If you were to read, say, “Red River,” it would be hard to picture anyone but John Wayne and Montgomery Clift.

Most of the scripts published today are “shooting scripts,” a term that used to mean the script that started production, the so-called blue pages, the final revision. Now, in this new publishing sense, it’s a record of the production. Hollywood scripts go through many drafts, often with contradictory purposes. A script that someone is hoping to sell to a studio (the selling draft) might have baloney along the lines of “It’s metal against flesh as the cyborgs attack the giant strippers. Good golly, Miss Molly, what a fight!!!”

Then there’s the star’s draft, designed to flatter a big player, which might say something like, “The most gorgeous woman ever seen walks into the room. She radiates intelligence and wisdom.” The writer, presumably, imagined a grand star reading that and thinking, “Hey! That’s just like me. I think I’ll say yes.” There’s often a director’s draft that might say something like, “Put director’s chase here.” The budget draft, that is meant to make an expensive proposition sound flexible, might say something like, “It would be swell if we could have six camels in this scene.”

The published version will have none of that but might include the work of other writers, ad libs and improvisations. So Mommy, absorbed in unproduced scripts to the exclusion of her family life, is not reading what you can buy at the bookstore.

All those “Mommy’s busy” scripts, which emerge from laptops in coffee shops and keep a part of the city’s economy humming, provide a certain excitement. A reader never quite knows what will be on the next page. Will it be clever? Exciting? Idiotic? Misspelled? No matter how many of these untried scripts one reads, they always contain a mixture of dread and possibility that is not a part of the published versions.

The first published screenplay I can recall reading was Dudley Nichols’ script for “Stagecoach,” which I had recently seen. It was included in “20 Best Film Plays,” a 1930s anthology. I had never seen a script and had no particular ambition to write one. It must have been curiosity, or perhaps I had come across this already aged volume in the library. I recall that it held my interest but was only a shadow of the movie I had liked so much. The question that I didn’t yet know to ask was, “If I had read ‘Stagecoach’ before I had seen it, what sort of reaction would I have had?”

I was pondering that conundrum when the Faber paperback of “Storytelling” all but fell on my desk. The movie, written and directed by Todd Solondz, was in the theaters, though I had yet to see it. I knew Solondz to be the definition of an independent filmmaker: quirky and idiosyncratic, often unpleasant, more widely reviewed than distributed and a man with a particular voice.

I encountered a sly meditation on the nature of narrative. The first part is set around a university creative writing class and some earnest student stories that hewed closely to quotidian events, mostly to do with two sour love affairs. The second part has to do with documentary filmmaking, documented situations and extravagant theatrical events: fires, hypnosis, wild strokes of luck and misfortune. Very much a writer’s script.

When I saw the movie, the writing still felt well drawn, and the ideas were certainly there, but the whole business felt exasperating and a little heavy, though it had more humor than I had recognized. Could it be that it had less power for me because I read it first? It is a question that by its nature is unanswerable.

The opposite of “Storytelling” might be “A Beautiful Mind,” Akiva Goldsman’s adaptation of the life of the mathematician John Nash. It’s a big-studio script, an example of what Europeans mean when they speak, sometimes with hostility but usually wistfully, of Hollywood craft. It’s about mental and mathematical dilemmas, and it marches along with a bright clarity that is teasingly revealing. It plays well and reads well, which is unusual. It’s my bet to win an Oscar in tonight’s little hootenanny.

“The Matrix,” written and directed by Larry and Andy Wachowski, is a stylish sci-fi story filled with eye-popping special effects. It’s an exception to the “shooting script” designation. The authors explain they are using the term in the earlier sense, of the version that went into production. Does any of it come alive on the page? Well, yes and no. The action is clearly described. The meaning is often clearer than it is on the screen, but there’s no juice in it. It really does feel like a technical document. The pictures from the movie are a help, though.

Should we expect a written script to be as compelling as the filmed version of it? They’re different forms, with different imperatives. If you want a look at some good ones, I’d suggest reading the scripts that Samson Raphaelson wrote for the Ernst Lubitsch movies of the 1930s, particularly “Trouble in Paradise” and, best of all, “The Shop Around the Corner” which is as near to perfection as this tattered art can achieve.

Running a close second are Preston Sturges’ scripts from the early ‘40s, particularly “Sullivan’s Travels” and “The Lady Eve.” Of course, it helps to picture Barbara Stanwyck and Henry Fonda in the latter, not that anyone who has ever seen the movie could forget them.

Scripts from the 1930s and ‘40s are from an era before location shooting was commonplace. Special effects were minimal. The archness of black-and-white film shot on sound stages is closer to the theater than to contemporary pictures. Scenes were allowed to run on a bit in contrast to today’s shorter, punchier ones; combined with the natural wit of the period, they can make us feel as if we’re eavesdropping on a cocktail party.

The recent Writers Guild contract calls for a payment for the right to publish a script as part of a DVD. The payment was achieved as a way for the guild to squeeze a little more money out of the studios without establishing a precedent for the other guilds. So far, no one seems to have exercised this right, though one can imagine a day when you can read the script on the DVD with links to the film. Read a scene, click a few clicks and see how it plays.

A modern script usually has little in the way of language and only a shadow of character. Performances make scripts sing. Movies are kinetic, crammed with information that seems to change all the time. The good ones are alive. A book is stable. That’s its nature. The life in it is in the words, permanently nailed to the page. Publishing scripts sometimes seems an attempt to tame a wild thing. It does little more than create artifacts of the cinema nation.