Book Reviews - Friday, December 12, 2008 13:14

Your Screenplay Sucks: 100 Ways to Make it Great

So, you’ve written a screenplay. You feel it’s as good as it can be. Your Mum loves it. Maybe even the odd film-buff friend has proclaimed it a work of genius. So you send it to an agent, only to find that it joins the work of thousands of other disappointed writers on the reject pile.

There are, frankly, more than a hundred reasons a screenplay doesn’t get produced.  Perhaps the reader had a hangover, or a lover’s tiff, or perhaps a similar script was optioned just the week before. Whatever the reason, when bad luck isn’t to blame for a script’s failure to crack the market, you may just want to consider reading Your Screenplay Sucks, by William M. Akers.

Akers knows scripts. He has written both TV and film scripts for MGM, Disney and Universal Studios, and he has taught screenwriting at Vanderbilt University for the past seven years. He has read thousands of them.  His passion for the form comes through on every page. And his passion also comes through when he is telling the reader how NOT to do it.

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