Steph has posted a great quote for me on her blog, so great in fact, that I have to republish it here (I want it for my archives so that I can reread it every time I wait for comments on a script.)
It’s from Collected Screenplays 1, by David Cronenberg.
How can anyone possibly read a film script? A script is not writing. A script is a ghost of something not yet born. It is by nature imprecise, inchoate, and provocative rather than evocative.
Screen prose is rigorously functional. Its focus is very narrow, narrower than a haiku, and its purpose is very limited. And yet it is not functional in the simple way that the owner’s manual of a motorcycle is functional. Screenwriting is hybrid prose, mutant prose, chimaera prose � part matrix, part blueprint, part shadow play, part prayer.
Its proper audience is a motley assortment of actors, directors, agents, producers, financiers, studio executives, and movie production personnel, none of whom will actually be reading the script for pleasure. The production of pleasure in the literary sense is not a goal of the screenwriter. The inducing of the birth of a film � that is the best a screenwriter can hope for.
