Reviews

The Hollywood Standard: The Complete and Authoritative Guide to Script Format and Style

By Christopher Riley

Publisher: Michael Wiese Productions

Price: £11.99

ISBN 1-932907-01-7

Review by James MacGregor

My first two thoughts on picking up any new book on scriptwriting are, “Does this book fill a gap in the market?” and “Does it tell me anything new?” The answer to both of those questions in regard to ‘The Hollywood Standard’ is, without a doubt, a resounding yes.

This isn’t a book that will teach you the intricacies of plot construction or the difference between a three and four-act structure. This book is purely and simply about showing you the best way to lay your script out on paper.

You could be forgiven for thinking that in these days of word processors, script templates and Final Draft that such a book would be completely redundant to all but the absolute script novice. It’s entirely to Christopher Riley’s credit that any such preconceptions I might have harboured before I started reading were banished by page 14.

Christopher Riley has an impressive track record when it comes to knowing about script layout. He worked as a script reader at Warner Brothers’ script processing department for over fourteen years. He rose to head the department and developed their own in-house script layout software. In short, he has read thousands and thousands of screenplays. He has seen countless mistakes made by writers over the years and this book is the result of a professional lifetimes worth of accumulated knowledge.

What works so well about this book is that the author has used plenty of examples to back up his layout advice. He gives you a scripted action sequence that is both hard to read and confusing in terms of which character is doing what and the time they do it. Then he shows you how he would lay out the exact same sequence. The results really are dramatic. A dull, plodding sequence suddenly takes on life. It lifts off the page. It achieves what any scriptwriter is trying to do - make the words form pictures in the reader’s mind.

That’s just one example of many. Riley works the same magic with the often badly used Point-of-view shot. He shows how to get into it cleanly, so that the reader isn’t confused about whose point of view we are looking at. He does the same with flashbacks, montages, split screen sequences, foreign language dialogue, and more. Every single one is backed up with clear, authoritative examples. You can see that what he is saying makes sense. Script directions that start out garbled and confusing are transformed into directions that are punchy, concise and, most importantly, clearly understood.

He also deals with the more mundane, but still vital, aspects of script layout. Slug lines, beats and capitalisation of character names often confuse writers and again Riley utilises lots of scripted examples to show how to use them correctly within your script.

I liked this book immensely. A confusingly written screenplay is a very frustrating thing to read. Good ideas can become buried under layers of confusing stage and camera directions. Any script that is confusing to read is far more likely to be passed over by a script reader or potential producer simply because they don’t have the time to try and decipher exactly what the author is trying to say. It’s a sad fact of life that such a script is unlikely to go into production and far more likely to go in to the bin.

In “The Hollywood Standard”, Christopher Riley very clearly demonstrates the difference that following a few simple layout guidelines can make to a script. He does it with a quiet authority that’s very persuasive. You know that his ideas work because you can see that they do. This is a book that I’m going to be referring back to constantly from now on. Any scriptwriter, both new and experienced, would be well advised to have a copy on their bookshelf. Highly recommended.