The Hollywood Standard, The Complete and Authoritative Guide to Script Format and Style, Christopher Riley

– published by Michael Wiese Productions

Sticking with the script writing theme, we move on to The Hollywood Standard by Christopher Riley. Leaving mythic structure for writing aside, it’s all very well to have a script for a tightly-wound thriller, which moves at break-neck speed, follows well-developed characters and culminates with an earth-shattering climax, but if you happen to include an illustration on the front cover to snaz it up a bit for a potential buyer, chances are your script will come back to you as a recycled Starbucks cup.

Ah, yes. The recycled Starbucks cup is a recurring theme throughout Riley’s manual on how to write and present a script to the standard set by the Hollywood elite. This is a book for anyone who has ever entered a few lines of text into Final Draft, examined them closely, scrunched up their nose, deleted them, re-entered them, deleted them again, and repeated the process ad infintum, or until they have had to stop because of either a) profuse bleeding from the eyes, or b) having a complete mental breakdown. Final Draft is a clever programme and there’s a lot that it can do, but what it can’t do is teach you how to write action scenes properly, to control pacing, or how to know the difference between writing for a single camera format or a multi-camera format.

This book can. It can teach you in bucket-loads. But what is most important is that not only does Riley teach us what to do, he teaches us what not to do, and in fact, one of my favourite parts of this book is the chapter recently added for this second edition, ‘Avoiding a Dozen Deadly Formatting Mistakes’. Tips like leaving enough white space on your pages to let the script breathe, thereby saving the reader the psychological toll of wading through pages of dense text, seem simple enough, but it’s a very easy mistake to make, and a great example of the benefit of Riley’s foresight in action. As with The Writer’s Journey, we have here another established classic, and a book which new writers and old, will carry with them for as long as they’re involved in the craft. If writing is either your passion or profession then this should be your first port of call.

The Hollywood Standard, The Complete and Authoritative Guide to Script Format and Style is available from  Amazon here priced £9.89

John Gibb