2022 Blacklist scripts Google drive
Why Do Screenplay Coverage Services Suck?Thomas David Kehoe Follow Feb 8 · 15 min read Screenplay coverage services will, for around $300, provide feedback on your script. About one in four coverage services provides useful feedback. Show
Of the more than thirty coverage notes Ive gotten,
Whom not to ask to read your screenplayDont ask your friends/family to read your screenplay. Your screenplay sucks. Parts are embarrassingly bad. Dont rely on free feedback from people on Reddit or in Meetup groups. Analyzing a screenplay takes training and skill. Dont rely on a writing partner for feedback. Different people will see different ways to improve your screenplay. You need multiple readers to find every way to improve your screenplay. Dont ask someone you know in the industry to read your screenplay. They wont read it. Dont pay for feedback from competitionsYoull receive your feedback three to six months after you submit your screenplay, by which time youve written ten new drafts. The reader will likely be a volunteer with little or no training in screenwriting. And dont enter your screenplay into competitions until you have at least two 8's on the Black List. What about screenplay exchange websites?Giving feedback can teach you as much as getting feedback. I tried Coverfly X, Ill tell you what happened below. Screenwriting booksRead a stack of screenwriting books before you pay for coverage. I recommend:
No screenwriting books Ive read talk about coverage services or the Black List. Coverage Ink has been around since 2002. The Black List was started in 2005. I.e., how to write a screenplay books may be timeless but how to sell a screenplay books are decades out of date. Spell check before coverageThere are writers and there are storytellers. Dan Brown, for example, is a terrific storyteller but hes not a great writer. If spelling, grammar, and formatting are not your strong suit, many coverage services offer copy editing services. Or use Final Drafts spell checker, under Tools. Final Drafts Format Assistant will catch many formatting errors. Coverage servicesCoverage services read your screenplay and deliver two to six pages of notes. Response times are around a week. What coverage is, isnt, and whom its intended forDevelopment executives hire assistants (paid) or interns (unpaid) to read stacks of scripts, write a page or two of notes and rate each screenplay pass, consider, or recommend. That coverage isnt intended for the writer. Script doctors are hired by producers to rewrite a finished screenplay to improve the structure, characters, dialog, etc. Script doctors are uncredited but paid well. Coverage services provide a page or two on a scripts strengths and weaknesses plus give a numerical rating. Rewriting (script doctoring) is never done. Now for my Coverfly X story. I downloaded a script and read it. It was a talking animals story, set in a typical American town. I wrote extensive notes with lots of ideas for improvements. Wouldnt it be more fun if it were a backwoods bayou where the isolated, inbred locals thought of animals as food and/or transportation and didnt listen to their animals (or each other)? Lost Sierra Club birdwatchers wash ashore and have to team up with the talking animals to avoid getting beaten up by the locals? I moved a scene on page 50 to the opening. I changed the names of one or two characters and wrote a page or two of dialogue. The writer sent me two abusive notes, calling me every name in the book. The Coverfly X admin told me
The typical screenwriter wants to hear, Your script is perfect! I wouldnt change a word! This may be why coverage services suck. Coverage services are careful not to tell you how to improve your screenplay. The strengths+weaknesses model gives feedback on the story the writer is trying to tell, not on a better story lurking in your script. Screenwriting is a marathon, not a sprint
Coverage Inks Jim Cirile preaches the 30 drafts mantra:
Logline and synopsisNotes usually begin with a logline and synopsis. These tell you where the reader missed plot points. I saw The Sixth Sense with two friends. I stumbled out of the theater, shocked by the final reveal. They were talking about getting ice cream. I didnt want ice cream, after the chill of the last scene. As they ate their ice cream I said something about how incredible the movie had been. They hadnt been impressed. I asked when theyd figured out that Bruce Willis was dead. They looked at me blankly. If the reader misses plot points you wont get a fair critique of your screenplay. Highlight every mistake the reader makes in the synopsis and then rewrite these scenes to be clearer. Numerical ratingsThe Black List scores your screenplay on five categories, plus an overall score. The five categories are Premise, Plot, Character, Dialogue, and Setting. The reader wrote a paragraph of notes about the plot (7), or lack thereof. The reader didnt say anything about dialogue (6). Giving you a low score on something and then not writing notes about it is lazy. Is my idea worth working on?The Script Lab offers First Draft coverage for $79 to tell you if you have a good idea and should continue working on it. Blake Snyder should have hired them for his screenplay about Santa Claus doing online dating. Thirty categories: failIndustrial Scripts evaluates on thirty categories:
Originality is listed twice. Young Adolf got an 80 and a 70 on originality. This shows that the reader was filling in numbers without paying attention. Whats the difference between Market Potential and Marketing Capability? Between Clarity of Genre Positioning and Match for the Genre? Thirty categories is a fail. But there are some Industrial Scripts categories that I like. For example,
Structural analysisA mediocre reader sees your screenplays strengths and tells you to do more of the same. E.g., if your screenplay is a comedy they tell you make to it funnier. In contrast, a skilled reader sees whats missing. Great notes feel like the reader time traveled five years into the future and saw the Academy Award Best Picture-winning movie you wrote, then came back to tell you the differences between your screenplay and the finished movie. Structural analysis shows whats missing. Joseph Campbells Heros Journey is one method (Writers Journey). Act structure (three-act, five-act) is another method (Into the Woods). Ive never seen either used by a screenplay reader. Coverage services tend to be superficial reads. No comment
and the reader didnt tell you where these spelling, grammatical, and formatting errors are. Coverage readers dont know how to click to add a comment to a PDF. If they were good with technology theyd be in production, not on the creative side. Same goes with I hated your female lead. Which scene made you dislike her? Which line of the scene? Bad coverage makes general statements when you need specific pointers to what needs rewriting.
Coverage Inks reader attached 532 comments to my scriptmore than four comments per page. I cut eight pages from the script. These coverage services will attach comments to your PDF:
Generic notes; or, I hate your screenplay
Some coverage readers sound like theyre sophomore interns who took Screenwriting 101 at UCLA. Or they sound like they got a boilerplate set of notes and are copying and pasting generic critiques. When you dont like a screenplay your brains critical functions shut down and you cant think of anything useful to say. If a reader hates your screenplay after ten pages they should stop reading, while their brain is still functional, and write useful notes. Its traditional that assistants and interns have to read the entire screenplay before writing coverage. This appears to be part of the Hollywood caste system in which executives make peons lives miserable. Everyone knows that coverage readers can tell the bad ones in the first ten pages. Everyone knows that reading the rest of horrible screenplays is hell. These coverage services offer notes on the first ten pages:
Ask them for the first ten/twenty pages notes if the reader hates your screenplay, and the full screenplay notes if the reader likes your screenplay. Different people like different movies.If you write a novel and thousands of people buy it, youre a successful novelist. A movie, on the other hand, has to be seen by millions of people. We each live in a bubble and we each like different things. Most people arent going to like your screenplay. Your job as a screenwriter is to make a story that appeals to millions of people. This is hard but structure is what does this. The job of a coverage service is to assign a script to a reader who likes that genre. Coverage Ink assigned Young Adolf to a reader who is a history buff whod read a biography of Adolf Hitler. Not all coverage services do this, you might get a reader who hates your genre. If it aint woke dont fax it.When Young Adolf gets a 3, 4, or 5 the readers have the same response:
Lets look at the comps. Downfall (2004) was praised by critics, nominated for Best Foreign Language Film, and did well at the box office. But, according to Wikipedia,
Oliver Hirschbiegel, director of Downfall, responded:
One reader flagged every mention of Jews in Young Adolf, even lines that werent anti-Semitic, and told me to remove them all. Borat 2? Borat Subsequent Moviefilm (2020), in which Sacha Baron Cohen played a misogynist anti-Semite who joins a right-wing populist movement aiming to overthrow the government, was one of the top movies discussed on social media and was nominated for Best Screenplay. My blog post comparing Donald Trump and Adolf Hitler has 50K reads (tl;dr: similar times, different personalities). Audiences want to know whether the 2020s are repeating 1920s Germany. These comps show that audiences would likely be interested in Young Adolf. It could be worse. If the movie industry were based in San Francisco you wouldnt be allowed to write about George Washington or Abraham Lincoln. The rest of the country laughs at what offends woke Californians. Los Angeles isnt as far left as San Francisco but coverage service and Blacklist readers wont give a recommend if your screenplay isnt woke. While Im on this rant, coverage readers cant read historical dialog. In Young Adolf much of the dialog is direct quotes from historical sources. I get notes back saying that dialog is wooden or unnatural. One coverage reader helpfully rewrote some of Hitlers speech to sound like a 2020s Los Angeles millennial. Shakespeare is performed more often in foreign languages than in English because modern audiences cant understand Elizabethan speech. My girlfriend and I went to see Twelfth Night at the Colorado Shakespeare Festival. We left at the intermission because we couldnt understand what the actors were saying. Also the play was four hours long. I have no doubt that if I submitted Hamlet to the Blacklist itd get a 2 and notes saying that the dialog needs a lot of work. Where can I find reviews of coverage services?Only three coverage services are set up for writers to review their services:
If you cant find these businesses on Google Reviews, go to Google Maps and type in the name of the business and California. Most coverage services ask you to rate your individual readers. None make these ratings available to you, the writer. Reviewing the coverage service and the reader are different. You could get five-star notes and one-star notes from the same coverage service (with different readers), while the coverage service has great or poor customer service. Who are the people who read screenplays at coverage services?Screenplay Readers and Script Reader Pro provides names, pictures, and bios of their readers. Other coverage services hide their readers identities.
Can you recommend a good coverage reader?The coverage readers who gave me awesome notes:
My reader is a genius! Should I ask for notes from the same reader on my next draft?After you do a major rewrite, usually a few months later, get a second reading from the same reader. In my experience a third reading isnt useful as after two readings youve fixed all the problems you and the reader agree about, and you havent fixed problems that you dont agree about. The reader is just going to tell you to fix those problems. I had a brainstorm after I uploaded my screenplay!I never fail to have a brainstorm after I send in a screenplay to a coverage service. The Black List and Coverfly allow writers to upload new drafts before a reader downloads your screenplay. Industrial Scripts charges $15 for sending in an updated PDF. Coverage Ink will try to accommodate an update for free. Most other coverage services dont allow updates. If you ask someone to read you screenplay dont send a PDF. Instead send a Dropbox or Google Drive link to the PDF. Then you can update your screenplay and the recipient will always download your latest draft. An advantage of using Google Drive is that the reader can attach comments to the PDF free. If you send a PDF then the reader has to pay for Adobe Acrobat Pro to attach comments. Or maybe they just hire idiotsA reader objected to the stormtroopers in my script. Why did I put Star Wars characters into an Adolf Hitler biopic? Assume that the first person wholl make a decision on your screenplay is a 20-year-old underpaid intern who knows nothing about anything. Rather than explaining what a Nazi stormtrooper was, I broke the no pictures in screenplays rule and put in a picture: The Black ListThe Black List is not a coverage service. The Black List is an evaluation and discovery service. Your screenplay is read and given a numerical rating. Producers look through the top-ranked screenplays and select the ones they want to read. Planet Money did a podcast about Franklin Leonard and the Black List. To quote Wikipedia:
The Black List costs $30/month plus $75 per evaluation. Black List readers write a page or so of notes. This isnt a coverage service; dont expect deep analysis. The goal on the Black List is to get ratings of 8, 9, or 10; and to have an average rating above the average (6.15) for all screenplays. If you get two 8s your screenplay goes into the monthly Black List recommendations; if you get five 8s you get onto the annual Black List. Are there alternatives to the Black List?Coverfly has a Red List. This combines scores from selected competitions and selected coverage services. Is there a Black List in Europe?As far as I know, European producers dont use the Black List and dont have a European Black List. Is there a Black List for stage plays or the publishing industry?Ha! All this is getting expensive! How can I spend less?Expect to spend $2500 to $5000 on coverage services (30 sets of notes at $100200 each), plus $1000 to $2000 on the Black List (ten evaluations at $75 each plus six months at $30/month), plus a thousand dollars on competitions. $10,000 seems like a reasonable budget. Every dollar you spend on books will save you ten dollars in coverage services. Every dollar you spend on coverage services will save you ten dollars on the Black List and competitions. How can coverage services do a better job?
Your screenplay Young Adolf sounds awesome! Where can I read it?Logline: A dark comedy about Adolf Hitlers early years, before he was famous, with parallels to current right-wing populist movements. Download Young Adolf from the Black List or this link: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ENsZLVIINggXu7C5YgPCYMw92Mn9LXBk/view?usp=sharing |
