You may or may not know this, but I’m an aspiring screenwriter. I’ve been writing since I was a child. In college, I studied Journalism, then switched to Creative Writing, and then switched to Screenwriting. The idea of taking a screenwriting class only occurred to me in my creative writing class. My professor told the class that taking a screenwriting class helped her write better proses. When I took my first screenwriting class, it felt like I finally found the type of writing I’d been looking for.
I say all that to say I do what I can to study my craft, be it reading, watching tv shows/movies, playing video games… and occasionally writing.
A goal I gave myself was to read 52 scripts this year. One script per week. I’ve fallen a bit behind and have been playing catch-up. One of the most recent reads was The Craft. This is a film I remember watching when I was in elementary school. It didn’t scare me, I thought it was cool. I even talked to two of the cast members thanks to living in Los Angeles.
If you don’t know, The Craft is a film from 1996 about a group of teenage girls who can do magic. As a child, and even now, you give me a film/show/game about characters with powers/abilities, I’m in, and reading scripts of shows/films I love just makes sense.
I’ve done this reading a script a week challenge at least two years prior, so I’ve read my fair share of scripts. One of my favorite things is getting to experience a different writer… if that makes sense. For instance, from what I can tell, there was a shift in writing, in general, from the 90s to now. This script read almost like proses. There were poetic bits. I loved it. (After The Craft, I read the pilot script for Breaking Bad and that script has less flowery wording, though I enjoyed both.)
Another thing I enjoy is seeing the differences between the script and the final film (this is a reason I DON’T like reading MCU scripts, but maybe I’ll address that in another post.) This final film seemed to be fairly faithful to the script. I remember reading in Rachel True’s book that Rochelle’s character arch was changed from being bulimic to being bullied for being black, and the script initially is just about her being bulimic… yet still bullied… for some reason. Some scenes were shortened, some were rearranged, and some, the film made better. It was a joy to read and it makes me want to re-watch the film.
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