The Truth About Script Analysis On The Web

Everywhere I look somebody is promising that if you join their site you will have a good chance of selling a screenplay. Whether getting script coverage, a synopsis, industry contacts or for no reason at all, they sell you an unrealistic dream that a script sale is imminent. And what really scares me are the prices some of these sites are charging. I have seen script coverage for as much as $700! That is seriously highway robbery.

The only way people will have a chance to sell their screenplay or TV show, is if it's great, and if they have many people to send it to, hoping that one will be smart enough to sign them/buy their script. So when you send a script to an analysis service, what do you need? Why should you do be doing it?

Anybody can list what a scripts problems are, but giving a writer the tools to attack the rewrite is what you should be looking for. And not just attack the rewrite, but give you a real understanding of why things don't work, and how they will work if you fix them. You should be given the tools to repair your script, not just this one time, but any time you write a script. If you're paying for a service related to writing, shouldn't you be paying to become a better writer as well? I do.

Basketball Jones

With the basketball playoffs in full swing, it got me thinking about the best basketball movies of all time. Here's my top five:

#5 The Fish That Saved Pittsburgh-Julius Erving, Stockard Channing, Jonathan Winters, Flip Wilson, Meadowlark Lemon, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. Not the best, but Dr. J's in it!

#4 White Men Can't Jump-With Wesley "What Taxes" Snipes, Woody "How's the air up there?" Harrelson and Rosie "Hey, how you doin?" Perez. Gets to the comedy of street ball that often gets overlooked.

#3 Teen Wolf-Michael J. Fox as a teenage werewolf who howls on the court. Somehow it snuck in here. Maybe because I never saw Air Bud.

#2 Hoop Dreams- William Gates, Arthur Agee. Basketball, no basketball, one of the best documentaries of the last ten years.

#1 Hoosiers-Gene Hackman, Barbara Hershey, Dennis Hopper. Never gets old. Heart all the way through. The little guy wins one on the biggest stage. Kind of like the Atlanta Hawks tonight over the Boston Celtics.

Moonstruck -

           Ronny
Loretta, I love you. Not like they
told you love is and I didn't know
this either. But love don't make
things nice, it ruins everything, it
breaks your heart, it makes things a
mess. We're not here to make things
perfect. Snowflakes are perfect. The
stars are perfect. Not us. We are
here to ruin ourselves and break our
hearts and love the wrong people and
die!

- Moonstruck