Scripts I Have Covered

Back when I was back in LA trying to be a screenwriter I did, as a lot of people in that situation do, a bunch of script coverage. Script coverage is basically reading a script (as a rule of thumb, scripts run one page per minute of runtime, with a lot less text per page than prose) and generating a 2-4 page summary and evaluation.

There are a few reasons you might have coverage commissioned: to evaluate a script for purchase and development; to judge its writer’s skills for employment on other projects; to judge its suitability for a particular actor or director; or just so you can pretend to have cared enough about it in Hollywood’s back-scratching favor economy.

The one constant is that it’s done by assistants or freelancers on behalf of executives, agents, or other “suit” variants who can then pretend they’ve actually read and judged the script themselves. Suits who make decisions relating to scripts are, as a rule, actively proud of the fact they don’t read scripts (or anything else).

On the one hand this makes sense; to them the script is a means to the end of making a deal and by treating it as a vestigal irrelevance they can attribute all glory of a successful deal to themselves. On the other hand, the hand that cares about human culture, this is worse than genocide, and would still be so even if I were particularly bothered by genocide.

Movies basically only have intelligible plots because movie stars have enough self-respect and pull to insist on only working on projects that do, which is why so often when you see a movie starring some interchangeable young models fresh off a fandombait CW series they don’t.

So that said, let me tell you about three scripts I remember doing coverage on (this was mostly 2005-07ish): the one that “got around”, in that I ran into the most people that also remembered having read it; the one I considered the best (but never got made as a movie); and the only one that actually got produced.

The one that got around: The Short Season

This was a script about a small-market but locally beloved baseball team and its general manager who, resigned to the fact that he didn’t have the resources to field a winning team, resorted to clever publicity stunts to keep up attendance and entertain the fans. At one point he fields an all-little people lineup only to discover that thanks to their tiny strike zones they’re quite competitive. Meanwhile the owner (and/or league, I forget) are plotting to abandon the team’s home city in favor of a more lucrative market.

This script was actually pretty decent and I could see it as a viable movie, but “mid-list sports dramedy” isn’t really something studios make very much anymore. Part of it is that the then-current* business model for movies was to finance films on foreign presales which were largely based on the brand recognition of star actors, and there weren’t really any A-list star roles here - I could see the manager/lead going to a Pierce Brosnan or Val Kilmer type, the love interest to a Cameron Diaz/Kirsten Dunst, but honestly I doubt there was a single player role strong enough to draw Peter Dinklage’s interest.

The best: Chasing the Whale

This was about a young man rising to prominence as the hospitality manager of a Las Vegas casino, and the mega-rich “Whale” super-gamblers he courted. I later read, and recognized as the source text, Whale Hunt in the Desert, the best pimp memoir since Iceberg Slim. The plot was an excuse to show off all sorts of colorful fun shit but for all that wasn’t bad, and I could see this as a great comeback vehicle for a Tobey Maguire or Daniel Radcliffe. I have no idea why this wasn’t made, particularly after The Hangover made bank and everyone in town must’ve been looking for a Vegas movie. Dumb industry politics is my guess, maybe whoever owned the rights was asking for too much money, who knows.

The one that got made: August Rush

I read this one with an eye towards a possible role for Aaron Carter (the managers I was working for seemed to specialize in child stars, former boy band members, and ex-SNL token brown girls. When the Family Guy movie came out and Stewie asked future-Stewie whether they ever found a role for Ellen Cleghorne I bust a gut because finding that role was literally my job at the time. Well, future-SNL token brown girls too, we also had Nasim Pedrad). My summary was “well a lot of this seems to be resting on the strength of the music, I hope it’s good because the rest is fucking terrible”, and though I didn’t see it that seems to be the critical consensus.


* well, for a while there before the ’08 crash they were also funded on German and Eastern European tax credits. That explains the career of Uwe Boll - his movies were absolutely terrible but he could keep to a schedule and a budget, and with all the tax credits they didn’t actually need any sales to be profitable - whatever they got was just gravy, and acquiring recognizable video game licenses was a cost-efficient way of starting off with a built-in opening weekend audience. Also some stuff with Gulf sovereign wealth funds and Asian box office, which is why even stuff like 2008’s Dark Knight will have semi-extraneous segments with Chinese locations and stars.