OTS Script Supervisor

It occurred to me that some of you might want to see what I spend most of my time doing. The short answer, of course, would be: "Obsessing." The long answer is a little more complicated.

Currently, I'm an Associate Producer and Script Supervisor on a feature film called The Chosen 1, a horror story about a child who can see other children who have been murdered. As a "scripty", my job is to ensure that (1) what gets shot is properly logged for the editor to make sense of, and (2) everything in the script gets shot.

Depending on the script, I sometimes take a more active role in translating the script from a reading script into a shooting script. The differences between each version of the script are self-explanatory—a reading script is written to be read, and a shooting script is written to be shot. (Most novice screenwriters write screenplays as shooting scripts, which is distracting to a reader unless the script is already greenlit to be produced; a shooting script contains details like camera angles, dolly shots, transition directions, etc., which are extraneous to most readers.)

When creating a viable shooting draft—because I'm a shade away from autism—no detail is too small for me to edit. I correct bad grammar, bad spelling, unclear stage directions... everything in the script is fair game to keep me from being distracting during filming.

Here's a excerpt from the script I'm currently massaging. All the red type are my edits:



Perhaps the most most signficant thing I do for actors is collapse stage directions into "wrylies", which are parenthetical asides telling an actor how a line should be read. The term "wryies" stems from a line being delivered wryly. For example:

——————————JAKE
—————(angrily)
You stupid cow!

——————————PHILLIP
—————(innocently)
What? What did I do?

Generally, I'm against wrylies because they're a lazy way to tell an actor how to act and good actors probably cross them out anyway. If a character's lines are written well, there's no need to tell them how to deliver their lines because an actor will gather a sense of the character from the lines themselves. As in the example above, the parenthetical asides are gratuitous. Number of times Shakespeare used wrylies: zero.

However, wrylies are useful for actors if they describe action the actor needs to know:

——————————JAKE
—————(to Kelly)
You stupid cow!

——————————PHILLIP
—————(lowering his gun)
What? What did I do?

On The Chosen 1, I'm doing a fair amount of this line editing, collapsing information to make it more efficient for the reader, the actor, and for me. I couldn't tell you how many hours I've already spent on this, but it's a passion, so I don't really see the time pass.

As Captain Reynolds once said, "This is what I do, darlin'... this is what I do."