I don’t publish reviews of unproduced screenplays (ahem), but I’ll happy share what I wrote about Tarantino’s NBK. I read it (and wrote this coverage) during my first semester of film school at USC. I probably read 200 scripts that year, but I remember this one distinctly, because upon reaching the last word I promptly flipped back to page one and read it again.(This was Fall 1992. Little did I know that the following year I’d be working for the movie’s producers during post-production, and would co-write the novelization.)Next to James Cameron’s ALIENS scriptment, NBK was probably the single screenplay that most made me want to become a screenwriter.So why the hell did I give it “good” across the board rather than “excellent?”An acute case of chickenshititis, I suspect. We were strongly discouraged from ever using the “excellent” boxes. Just writing “consider” was a bold move. I’ll cut my younger self a break just this once.Some extra details about this document, just because I remember: I’m pretty sure I wrote this for a class assignment, rather than my reader internship. Laura Ziskin taught our first development class. Each week, we checked out two scripts from her extensive script library. I wrote this on the Mac, most likely in ClarisWorks. For the cover page, we had a pre-printed template to use. Most readers used a typewriter to do the cover sheets, but with enough finessing, I got the fields in ClarisWorks to line up properly. This coverage was probably printed on a StyleWriter. Sometime later that year I bought a LaserWriter — an expensive indulgence at the time, but much cheaper through the USC Bookstore. The LaserWriter had a thin and terrible version of Courier, so I used Fontographer to make a chunkier one I called Dorphic, which I continued to use for many years. (Go is printed in Dorphic.) In my essay on Professional Writing and the Rise of the Amateur, I make a pointed challenge: “So you have to ask yourself: a year from now, five years from now, how am I going to feel when someone asks me about that thing I wrote?” This coverage is eighteen years old, from the pre-internet era. Further proof you don’t get to choose when to be professional.You can read the full coverage here.
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I don’t publish reviews of unproduced screenplays (ahem), but I’ll happy share what I wrote about Tarantino’s NBK.

I read it (and wrote this coverage) during my first semester of film school at USC. I probably read 200 scripts that year, but I remember this one distinctly, because upon reaching the last word I promptly flipped back to page one and read it again.

(This was Fall 1992. Little did I know that the following year I’d be working for the movie’s producers during post-production, and would co-write the novelization.)

Next to James Cameron’s ALIENS scriptment, NBK was probably the single screenplay that most made me want to become a screenwriter.

So why the hell did I give it “good” across the board rather than “excellent?”

An acute case of chickenshititis, I suspect. We were strongly discouraged from ever using the “excellent” boxes. Just writing “consider” was a bold move. I’ll cut my younger self a break just this once.

Some extra details about this document, just because I remember:

  • I’m pretty sure I wrote this for a class assignment, rather than my reader internship. Laura Ziskin taught our first development class. Each week, we checked out two scripts from her extensive script library.
  • I wrote this on the Mac, most likely in ClarisWorks. For the cover page, we had a pre-printed template to use. Most readers used a typewriter to do the cover sheets, but with enough finessing, I got the fields in ClarisWorks to line up properly.
  • This coverage was probably printed on a StyleWriter. Sometime later that year I bought a LaserWriter — an expensive indulgence at the time, but much cheaper through the USC Bookstore. The LaserWriter had a thin and terrible version of Courier, so I used Fontographer to make a chunkier one I called Dorphic, which I continued to use for many years. (Go is printed in Dorphic.)

In my essay on Professional Writing and the Rise of the Amateur, I make a pointed challenge: “So you have to ask yourself: a year from now, five years from now, how am I going to feel when someone asks me about that thing I wrote?”

This coverage is eighteen years old, from the pre-internet era. Further proof you don’t get to choose when to be professional.

You can read the full coverage here.

Source: johnaugust.com

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