Screenplay pet peeves

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  • Screenplay pet peeves

    Hi everyone,

    It's been several months since I was last on this forum. I took several months off to really focus on a couple of projects, which are going very well, it seems.

    Thought I'd ask an interesting question and get a conversation going...

    What is one thing you notice a lot when reading scripts that drives you insane? What do you think is over-used, as far as craft....style, etc...

    Looking forward to thoughts.

    Dan

  • #2
    Re: I'm back!

    "We'll call him/her..."

    Once per script is fine, but I recently read something where literally every character was introduced this way. Really got my goat.

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    • #3
      Re: I'm back!

      Drives me nuts when the writer uses "Think Matt Damon" or "Think Matthew McConaughey" when introducing characters... conjures a look, but that's about it.
      "The most terrifying thing is to accept oneself completely." ~Jung

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      • #4
        Re: I'm back!

        Originally posted by pabloamigo View Post
        "We'll call him/her..."

        Once per script is fine, but I recently read something where literally every character was introduced this way. Really got my goat.
        It'd be kinda fun to...

        "A MAN (40) sits on a bench. We'll call him FRANK.'

        ... and then, never mention him again.

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        • #5
          Re: I'm back!

          Great, now I need Frank closure...

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          • #6
            Re: Screenplay pet peeves

            I changed the title of the thread so it would be more accurate.

            I hate when the male characters all have really interesting and detailed introductions, but the women are introduced only by their level of attractiveness or hair color. It happens ALL THE TIME.
            Chicks Who Script podcast

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            • #7
              Re: Screenplay pet peeves

              Originally posted by emily blake View Post
              I changed the title of the thread so it would be more accurate.

              I hate when the male characters all have really interesting and detailed introductions, but the women are introduced only by their level of attractiveness or hair color. It happens ALL THE TIME.
              Uh oh... I introduced the female lead in my script this way (the one you're reading).

              I have two defenses: a) I introduced the male lead using the term "cute" as
              well. b) The other strong female character was introduced as gritty
              and hard-nosed with no mention of looks/hair color.
              I'm never wrong. Reality is just stubborn.

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              • #8
                Re: Screenplay pet peeves

                Too much swearing. I feel like a lot of times it's a cheap, quick way of making a character sound more "badass" or relatable without much effort or thought put into it

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                • #9
                  Re: Screenplay pet peeves

                  Overuse of emphasis in action paragraphs, especially when it's done in more than one way, needlessly underlining here, randomly capitalizing there.

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                  • #10
                    Re: I'm back!

                    Originally posted by pabloamigo View Post
                    "We'll call him/her..."

                    Once per script is fine, but I recently read something where literally every character was introduced this way. Really got my goat.

                    That's right. "We'll call him George. Which is odd, because his name is actually Pasquale. Which is what everyone else in the script will be calling him."

                    Minor pet peeve -- Giving women men's names. It seems as if everybody thinks this is just the cutest thing in the world. Scripts are just overflowing with women named Sam and Steve and Joe and Ralph (well, maybe not Ralph).

                    Really. How freaking adorable. Except these characters drop out for twenty pages and then I see a reference to Sam and suddenly I think -- who the hell is this guy Sam.

                    And it works the other way too. I read a mob script with a character Sally. That is, a minor male character Sal, who was referred to as Sally.

                    Except every time the name popped up, I had to hit the breaks and ask myself -- who's this girl Sally who just showed up in this scene?

                    A more serious thing that bothers me in screenplays -- and I also see it in finished movies as well, is when a writer jumps to a result.

                    I think everybody sort of knows what I'm talking about. You need to get your characters in some situation, some end result, either a plot situation, or an emotional situation. There's some place in the story you need them to end up.

                    But it's obvious in reading the script or watching the movie that they couldn't quite figure out how to get them there -- so they just sort of fudged it. They jumped to the result.

                    Classic example. Indiana Jones climbs up on the outside of the Submarine. You see it diving. Next thing you know, the submarine is in the sub pen at the island and there's Indiana Jones climbing around in the sub pen.

                    How the hell did he get there? The sub dived. What did he do? Hold his breath? Cling to the periscope?

                    Who knows? Certainly nobody watching the movie. It was a problem -- and maybe they could have come up with some solution, but they probably decided that it was more trouble than it was worth -- so they just jumped over it. They just jumped to the result. He was on the outside of the submarine. They needed him on the Island. Boom. There he is on the island.

                    And given the nature of the story, you probably let it go.

                    But there are other examples that are much more egregious, where whole stories are driven by that sort of thing, by artificial motives, by characters continually acting in the most foolish way possible, just to keep the story going, or where a story needs a character to be someplace emotionally and they don't quite know how to do the story work to get them there and so they fudge that and that really undermines the heart of what should be working in story.

                    I just find that my patience for that sort of thing is much thinner than it used to be.

                    I don't necessarily need characters in movies to be smart, but when they're not, I want them to be real and to be interesting in the way that they're not smart.

                    NMS

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                    • #11
                      Re: Screenplay pet peeves

                      Lately, I've been reading a lot of scripts where the writer thinks they need a character who is "comic relief"... who is not interesting, undeveloped, not funny (although EVERY line they utter is supposed to be a laugh line), and not the least, completely distracting from the story.

                      The last three rewrites I have been hired to do, all three had "comic relief" characters and I eliminated them immediately, to the joy of the producers and myself. Gone... onscreen death is too good for them. Nonexistence works better.

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                      • #12
                        Re: Screenplay pet peeves

                        Oh, man, so many, so many ...

                        EXPOSITION
                        The one that I dislike the most is the use of exposition to tell what happened to someone in the past and to use it as some kind of measure or comparison to a current event.

                        FRANK, in his late forties, is angrier about this treachery than he was 30 years ago when his date ditched him at the high school prom.

                        I made that one up, but, honest to God, I have seen things far worse.

                        ANACHRONISMS
                        These can involve things, culture, or language. Just looking at linguistic issues ... It is really hard to write about an ancient era or at least an older time. You want your language to sound natural, but it cannot sound like high school kids from the 21st century. One of the most common offenders is the word *okay/OK*. It did not even exist until sometime in the early 19th century. It is an Americanism, which has now infected the entire world, and if Fortean and I are right about the UFOs, it is probably in use somewhere in a star system not too far away, having infected some other portions of the Milky Way. Please do not have your Persian soldiers in the army of Xerxes saying things like "Okay, let's get down with the program."

                        LOGIC PROBLEMS
                        This issue is like the matter that NMS was talking about, in which Indiana Jones mysteriously rides the submarine some way or another.

                        What I see a lot is that someone runs out of the scene to do something or find something, but then, having moved as fast as Superman, comes back about a minute later after traveling what has to be a pretty great distance to accomplish a task of some kind.

                        USING 'CONTINUOUS' INSTEAD OF DAY/NIGHT
                        Granted, it does not matter sometimes. But it gets to be a problem when, over a long sequence, every scene is 'continuous' with the previous, and you suddenly realize that it was night at the start of this whole sequence but it is now day ... or is it? Things are happening that you would only be able to see well in the day, but it is still not clear what the author intends. And then, in the next scene (also 'continuous'), it appears to be night again ... maybe? I have seen 'continuous' used when the location of the 'continuous' scene was not even anywhere near the preceding scene, and it did not even matter whether the scene was 'continuous' in time or not.

                        "The fact that you have seen professionals write poorly is no reason for you to imitate them." - ComicBent.

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                        • #13
                          Re: Screenplay pet peeves

                          One that's shockingly common in amateur screenplays is not naming characters until somebody says there name. (I'm not talking about cases of hiding a name for dramatic purposes. Just, rather, calling someone MAN until you find an excuse for him to say "I'm Adam" a few lines into a conversation. And doing this with almost every character).

                          The anarchronisms is hard, because, let's face it, those Persians wouldn't be saying ANYTHING in English, and one has to assume that they had colloquialisms. One way I'm wrestling with this right now is in a medieval script. Do I remove all the contractions? They did not emerge until a few hundred years after the period I'm writing about. On the other hand, to avoid them makes the language sound stilted to modern ears.

                          Everything is a compromise when it comes to those things.

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                          • #14
                            Re: I'm back!

                            Originally posted by nmstevens View Post
                            Classic example. Indiana Jones climbs up on the outside of the Submarine. You see it diving. Next thing you know, the submarine is in the sub pen at the island and there's Indiana Jones climbing around in the sub pen.

                            How the hell did he get there? The sub dived. What did he do? Hold his breath? Cling to the periscope?
                            On the blu-ray there are out-takes of him clinging to the periscope, which didn't quite work... But, yeah, deleting them creates an annoying jump.

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                            • #15
                              Re: Screenplay pet peeves

                              The anachronisms [issue] is hard, because, let's face it, those Persians wouldn't be saying ANYTHING in English.
                              That's true, and it is the usual comment that people make about representation of speech that would really be in a foreign language, and in an archaic form, at that.

                              But the writer still has to try to avoid things that jerk the reader or viewer out of the artistically created world of the past and back into the current setting and time.

                              About the medieval stuff ... The best thing is just to use standard English. You do not have to avoid all contractions. Just do not go overboard and use them almost exclusively (which seems to be the tendency nowadays, even in formal narrative, and I truly hate it). Just strive for a smooth tone. Use contractions when you think they help, and don't () worry about it. I do not know what era you are writing about, but English contractions were used in the Renaissance (not the same as Medieval, I know). They were not common, but you do find them. I was reading Ben Jonson's Volpone just a few nights ago, and I was surprised at how many Jonson used in that play.

                              "The fact that you have seen professionals write poorly is no reason for you to imitate them." - ComicBent.

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