Good day to you, Stage 32!

Many of you know me as a regular blogger here, but I’m also a development executive with more than twenty years of experience and a screenwriter with more than 70 screenplays under my tires. More than half of these screenplays were written under other writers’ names, working under the most explicit conditions of secrecy and anonymity. Yes, dear reader, I am a script doctor.

Presumably because of the secrecy and compromise involved, I get the impression from fellow writers that they perceive script doctor work to be some gushing font of workflow that keeps undiscovered screenwriters in demand to the same ceaseless and renewable degree that the romantics among us imagine stripclubs and the porn industry are employing fresh female talent. If producers are getting the benefit of all my work and genius, and if the people employing me don’t even need to admit that my unknown ass exists, then have I not found the perfect means of teasing the lurid designs of established Hollywood? How is hiring writers for script doctor work not every producer’s dream? Surely, there must be room for one more writer in the warm, wet innards of Hollywood’s broken film development system. “Hook a fellow writer up, brah! Help me pay my dues! Help me get discovered by people who are actually making movies!”

Much as the emotional math may suggest otherwise, letting go of one’s entitlements as a screenwriter is not actually a fast track to success in Hollywood. What’s more, the people who pay for script doctor work are not seeing movies into production with any more consistency or speed than the producers writers like us already have access to. In spite of all this, I have built some vital creative collaborations through my script doctor work and I’ve carried those relationships over into my own career, projects, efforts, and interests. Apart from the odd client here and there who legitimately doesn’t appreciate my work, and the occasional client who thought they could get more work out of me through belittlement and the threat of slander (you literally cannot say my name in public without admitting that you can’t write, you unrepentant dingus), I’ve been richer for the experiences I’ve had in this line of work.

Let’s address some of the questions I get about working as a script doctor, shall we?

HOW DID I GET INTO SCRIPT DOCTOR WORK?

Reader, you will hate the simplicity and the utter lack of reproducibility in my answer to this question. Still, I think we should talk about it. While the specifics of my wholesale exploitation as a creative talent may not serve a handy blueprint, I believe the principles that led me here are universal.

If you read my blogs, you probably know that I consider the strength of our craft and the strength of our community to be the only factors in our success as entertainers. Investing in these two pillars of our own sustainability, rigorously and ceaselessly, is the only professional commitment with which we need concern ourselves.

During the pandemic, I was approached by the owner of another, much more posh (I love you, RB!) script services site because of the monthly blogs I was writing for Stage 32. After we’d been working together a little while, he asked me to help him develop a script doctor services program for the site. Since then, my work has grown prolific and my reputation has grown in kind.

Am I saying you should blog for Stage 32? Yes. Contact Ashley Smith and blog for Stage 32. Do that.

Am I suggesting that blogging for Stage 32 will provide the keys to a sometimes modestly lucrative side hustle in the withering field of Hollywood film development? No. Furthermore, I submit that anyone who feels the impulse to put those foolishly reductive words in my mouth is the reason why the online screenwriting community can’t ever have nice things.

What I will say, and what I have said many times, is that building the habits that hone our craft towards a perpetually superior standard and building the habits that make us ever more necessary to the other people in our community empowers us to fail upwards. Writing blogs for Stage 32 didn’t necessarily help me find success as a script doctor. Building the habits that made writing those blogs feel natural and necessary, on the other hand, keeps me trending toward success. If I hadn’t found success in script doctor work, I would have found it some other way.

WHAT DO CLIENTS WANT? IS IT MOSTLY POLISH WORK?

Nobody who loves writing is ever really struggling to find the right words… so no, it’s not mostly polish work. When a writer is so stuck in their work that a development team is willing to entertain the idea of letting someone else step in, there’s always something deep and structural going on. At the same time, every screenplay is a product of the writer’s creative negotiations with themselves and their collaborators. Nobody wants to believe that the script needs more than a polish, and everyone struggles in their own way with the “sunk cost fallacy,” so walking clients through the necessity of that deeper, structural work is a big part of my job.

In my experience, writers or development teams that are struggling with tone, pacing, or other cosmetic issues are always - literally always - actually dealing with a passive dramatic structure. Literally, every time, the problem boils down to the fact that the performances feel like they’re trying to sell the story to the audience. Reactive character work is designed and intended to make a plot feel credible through the fidelity of the emotional and tonal performances… so yeah. If you ask your actors to sell a story to the audience, the movie’s going to feel like you’re selling something. While that reads like a tonal problem, it’s not something you can ever really polish out. Trying to fix that problem with polishes only drives other symptoms of those structural issues to the surface, and the eternal game of film development whack-a-mole that results from those efforts is how scripts wind up in development hell.

Funny enough, I find that this problem is actually easier to resolve when there’s source material that the production is beholden to. If there’s a novel or a comic book or something to fall back on, then your job is to take the passive, observational writing of the original author (of course, I mean passive in the dramatic sense rather than in any literary sense) and you find the line of action that drives that narrative from the perspective of the protagonist. If you present that active narrative thread to the producers as the actual core of the film, if you show them how the same narrative they fell in love with can be told through the efforts of the protagonist to achieve some kind of super challenging goal - even if that effort isn’t obvious on the surface of the text - there’s a sense of relief that sets in, as everyone starts to see how the movie can actually work.

THE TROUBLE WITH WRITERS

Most writers adapt literature and comics by cherry-picking and editing for story beats, and that approach leads to reactive performances. Actors perform actions, so those actions are what we need to tease out of the narrative. Adaptation is a simpler, harder, and much more holistic process than most writers want it to be, frankly.

If a screenwriter is the original creator of the story, rather than someone writing an adaptation, they tend to be much more attached to the passive story beats they’re trying to sell through the performances. Typically, that writer sees the cast as being there to serve the story. Telling them that the story needs to serve the cast is, in cases like this, likely to start a fight over the line between matters of craft versus matters of creative opinion. If the producers of that film don’t believe there’s a fundamental difference between literary and cinematic storytelling, then the fact that they’re having problems with how the performances feel at the table read - just for example - is causing cognitive dissonance with their whole creative ethic. Either those producers need to accept that there’s a fundamental problem with the movie, and that massive changes to how that movie works are the only way out of the hole they’ve dug, or they need to trust the writer that inspired them to make this film in the first place.

While I will always stand up for the structural needs of the cast, I can also promise you that the icky sense of salesmanship everyone’s getting from that table read has nothing to do with the writer’s command of tone, or pacing, or their voice on the page. If the production team wants to engage those deeper structural changes, then I’m happy to help! More than likely, the writer in question came from literature or journalism and they simply don’t have the experience to see problems related to scenework. What I don’t want, however, is a table full of people nitpicking the wordsmithing of a writer who clearly knows how to write something that’s good to read.

SELFLESSNESS MAKES IT WORTH THE EFFORT

If I’m taking on a project as a script doctor, then I know there’s already an effort being made to tell a specific story. My job isn’t to tell a better story. My job is to step in and help everyone make the movie they’ve been struggling to make from the beginning. Within the context of that story, it falls to me to give the actors and the director the tools to do their jobs as well as they can be done. Most of the time, delivering that script gives everyone involved in the project a tremendous sense of confidence and relief… and that’s what I like about script doctor work.

Several times now, I’ve been asked to step in and help writers adapt memoirs that they’ve written about their own lives, achievements, and self-development. Finding the action in a narrative that’s been presented in a wholly observational way is challenging from a creative standpoint, but it’s also a huge emotional risk for a client to view their life as a series of events they created for themselves in the pursuit of some larger goal. Figuring out what that goal might have been, and then taking a look at what was actually done to achieve it and whether those efforts paid off is usually where the process starts becoming transformative. My clients start seeing themselves as architects of their own destinies, rather than as circumstantial products of their lives, even when the events that shaped their lives aren’t necessarily the kinds of things a person would want to be personally accountable for. Acting, as an art, is inherently empowering for this reason… and sharing that empowerment with people, in the context of the narratives they find most important, is something really beautiful.

WHAT ABOUT THE CREDIT, THOUGH?

Speaking for myself, I am a showperson. Making shows successful is what I do. If a producer or a writer needs help leveraging their ideas to empower performances and empower cinema, then stepping in and doing that work feels like a pretty natural thing. If someone doesn’t want to credit me for that work, then I’m sure there’s a reason for it.

More than once, projects that I ghostwrote as a script doctor have been reorganized into projects that I worked on as a screenwriter specifically because the client wanted me to be a more active part of their community. To me, that’s a natural consequence of my efforts to make every production stronger. If a client isn’t investing in my success, it’s because they don’t see how my success is connected to their own… and privately, I do often question the sustainability of their projects.

Hey. At least I got paid.

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