Support Staff 202: The Script Coordinator
Why you want this job, why you don’t, and what all those colorful pages are about.
If you’ve skimmed our website, you’ll see us mention more than once that all Plot & Page readers were Script Coordinators before we were Staff Writers. But what is a Script Coordinator, and why is that such a relevant credential for the services we offer?
Here’s the first secret about Script Coordinating: No one else knows what the hell you do, and they definitely don’t know how to do it. Which means there’s not a lot of help available for you in the room, at the studio, or on the production team. And because every show is a little different, there’s no operating manual, either. The Script Coordinator’s most basic function is to proofread and distribute scripts. But that isn’t nearly as simple as consulting Strunk & White and emailing them to a bunch of BCCs in the cast, crew, and studio.
Script Coordinators get a front row seat to the entire production process, from the Writers’ Room through the last day of filming.
But let’s talk about why you’re going to work so hard to get this job, despite the challenges: Script Coordinators get a front row seat to the entire production process, from the Writers’ Room through the last day of filming. In fact, on a lot of cable and streaming shows (where writers room finishes their work and shuts down before production begins,) you and the Showrunner might be the only people to the process through to the end.
Okay! Enough prologue! What does a Script Coordinator do?!
Proofreading
GET SCRIPTS READY FOR PRODUCTION. Production-ready screenplays are technical documents nearly as much as an expressive ones. Sure, the actors need to be able to follow their character’s journey and learn their dialogue from it, but the casting and costume departments also need to know how many people are in a given scene, and the ADs need to know how long they’ll be in a location and at what time of day. The crew needs to be able to pull all this information out quickly and accurately, so in addition to fixing spelling, punctuation, etc., you also need to make sure that time of day is listed correctly in every slugline and that the switches between day and night align with the time meant to pass in the script, among a thousand other little production peculiarities. (Not to mention the peculiarities of the Showrunner: you need to make sure scripts from all the writers look like the show on the page, which means using em and en dashes and ellipses and parentheticals the same way they were used in the pilot.)
FIX WHAT YOU CAN AND FLAG OTHER ISSUES. Most of the time, it’ll be obvious which changes you can make on your own and which you should run by someone. You never change grammar in dialogue, for example, because it’s a so often a creative choice. But if a character is highly educated and speaks in an erudite, precise way, you can always (gently) flag the mistakes you’ve noticed for the episode’s writer and let them decide whether they want to make a change. You might also need to flag things you notice that disagree with previous episodes or what the room decided for a future episode, and check if the writer intended that change or not. And then there are the increasingly difficult decisions: Do you tell the writer “judges aren’t allowed to issue warrants without X,” or is that an overstep? …It depends on your relationship with the Showrunner. (See? This job isn’t so cut and dry, is it??)
TRACK CHANGES… FOR EVERYONE. You’re also in charge—and this is where the colorful pages come in—of tracking changes and making sure everyone has the most up-to-date script. You need to be extremely familiar with Final Draft so you can pull out all the pages with changes in just the right way, so crew members who have put a lot of effort into spreadsheets with the original page numbers don’t have to redo any of their work. The names for these revisions are a vestige of when all scripts were printed and you needed a different colored page to show which draft you had: The production draft is White, the second draft is Blue, then Pink, Yellow, and Green. (Most productions these days will then just go to Double White, Double Blue, etc., though sometimes you work for a Goldenrod person. Later colors can vary, so you’ll need to check with the studio when you start to see if they have a preferred color order.)
Distribution
PROTECT WHO GETS SCRIPTS… AND WHEN. Screenplays and teleplays have this quirk: When they’re a spec, you’re desperate to get anyone to read them, and then once they cross a certain contractual threshold, they become a closely guarded secret. This is certainly true when it comes to scripts for shows that are already on the air or based on big IP. So disto happens through proprietary software that watermarks the scripts and sends them to pre-set email lists. A script going to the wrong person at the wrong stage is a fireable offense, so maintaining and double-checking these lists is absolutely critical.
GET SCRIPTS OUT AT THE RIGHT TIME. If you’re distributing a draft among the writers, or to the studio or network, you usually have a good amount of time to make the changes and everyone can see the script whenever it arrives in their inbox. But if you get a new draft at 2am before a 5am call time, or, heaven forbid, while everyone’s already standing around blocking the scene, you have to swing into action, make tough decisions about how many questions you can ask about the pages, and know just which department heads to alert about the new pages coming in. It’s… not easy.
Make sure your Showrunner sees you as a writer in training, not just a highly valued assistant.
As with all of our Support Staff posts—see Writers’ PA, Showrunner’s Assistant, and Writers’ Assistant—we want to leave you with some advice you can put into play once you have the gig. The stakes of hiring a bad Script Coordinator are extremely high, so once you have experience on a big show on your resume and have impressed a writing staff or two, you tend to keep working. But beware! It’s easy to become part of the furniture, a reliable cog in a long-running machine. You have to make sure your Showrunner sees you as a writer in training—not just a highly valued technical asset—if you want to advance. Carefully feel out opportunities to pitch ideas for the series, and once you have rapport, see if a couple of upper level writers will read your sample.
And, finally, to answer the question we posed at the top: Why does having an experienced Script Coordinator (like us) proofread your script matter? You might have had a friend read your script and give it the seal of approval. And maybe their notes are terrific! But trust us; if a writer hasn’t worked extensively in production or done this exact job, there’s zero guarantee they’ll know everything it takes to make a script look shootable and professional on the page, or that they’ll take the time or have the eye to give you notes on all the small things that might cause a studio executive to roll their eyes, click their tongue… and toss your script aside without giving it a chance. But luckily, with Plot & Page in your corner, you don’t have to worry about that anymore. We’ve got you.
