“You, Ryan Traynor, have convinced someone to pay you to do stuff? Likely story.”
As unlikely as it seems, I am
in fact employed. And I love my job. How many people get to say that they sit
around and read all day for a living? Every day when I go to work, I have absolutely
no idea what to expect.
I want you to imagine walking
into work and then stepping through a door into another world. One minute you're filing
papers, and the next you're in a submarine searching every inch of the dark
seafloor for buried treasure. You're grabbing coffee, when suddenly you’re in a
crowd of detectives at a mansion in the heart of Beverly Hills arguing about
the best way to fish a body out of the swimming pool. That’s what work feels like for me as a
Script Coverage Intern.
I work for a Hollywood based indie
production company called Ramona Films that makes TV shows and movies. They get
hundreds of scripts, books, and other potential projects from agents and
writers every day. My job as a Script Coverage Intern is to sort through the
massive tidal wave of scripts and find the best ones.
“What are you even talking about?”
Script Coverage is a fancy way
of saying that I read a script and write a book report on it which I give to my
boss. The only thing that separates me from a 5th grader is that my
coverage report contains useful information tailored to the interests of my boss
so that she can tell right away whether the project would fit in with the
production company’s other projects.
I start my coverage by reading
the entire script from cover to cover and writing a short one sentence summary
called a log line. This log line tells the production executives the general
gist of the plot within a sentence. This way, they can decide whether they have
any interest in buying the script without having to read any of it. Then I
follow up with a more general synopsis which goes over all the plot points and
character arcs. Finally, I follow up with my thoughts on the work and a
suggestion for my boss about the writer and the script.
“A 5th Grader could totally do that! I’m not convinced.”
It isn’t that easy. A large part
of it is being able to critique another person’s work without pulling any
punches. The most heartbreaking thing I see everyday are scripts that have a great
kernel of an idea lying deep inside of them, but the writer’s bad or lazy writing
brings them down so I cannot recommend them. This job requires you to be a huge
nerd who enjoys reading scripts for fun and watching tons of TV and movies. (I'd like to see a 5th grader try to recite every line from the movie Die Hard)
It takes a large amount of
perseverance to get through a whole day of script coverage. There have been
many scripts and books that I knew within the first page that I would not find
enjoyable to read, yet I had to spend the next 9 hours chugging through it,
powered only by pure caffeine and willpower. Every bad script that I read makes
me stronger, and I try to dissect it to figure out exactly where it went wrong
so that I know for the future.
My instinct is to regurgitate
my thoughts onto the page when I write, so I found this job extremely
challenging because it requires you to be extremely concise. Imagine trying to
fit a 500+ page novel full of characters and intersecting plot lines into a
1-page synopsis (true story). While difficult, this aspect of the job is also
extremely rewarding, because there’s no feeling quite like finding the right
word combo that gets your logline down to exactly one sentence while including
everything that you wanted to say.
“Yikes. Why bother?”
One of the major benefits of my
job is that I get to form close bonds with the other interns. We swap
stories all day about all the crazy scripts that we’re reading. I also get to
talk face-to-face with the extremely talented production executives that I’m
writing for like Dave and James Franco, which could never happen at a larger
company.
People are always saying that
Hollywood is creatively-bankrupt, but nothing makes you realize quite how wrong
they are like working at an indie production company and going through hundreds
of unique, passion-filled scripts. Being part of the development process is
extremely rewarding because every day when I go into work, I feel like I am
helping shape the future of Hollywood by pulling good scripts out of the pile
and making sure that they got the attention they deserve. But most importantly,
I’m making sure that the bad scripts never get made to spare people like you
from ever having the misfortune to see them in theaters.
According to Hemingway:
0 uses of Passive voice
Grade 9 Flesch-Kincaid Readability
Test
This comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDelete^^Sorry I had a bunch of typos in the original comment. I like the imagery you used in the introduction to describe what it's like entering your job. You're also the first one to use quotations as headers which is pretty cool.
DeleteI liked how you created a casual tone that made it very easy and engaging to read. You can really tell how much you enjoy your job from reading this!
ReplyDeleteAs someone who has also worked as a coverage intern in a production company, I feel your pain in trying to cram hundreds of pages into a one page summary. Figuring out which content to cut is the bane of my existence in those jobs. But you came up with a really creative way to lay out the job description, and I'd love to talk to you about the industry sometime!
ReplyDeleteI really enjoyed the way you set this up, it was very engaging. Also, doesn't hurt that you got to meet the Franco brothers! -Taylor Berry
ReplyDelete