The Script Reader’s Verdict

A professional screen-experience review before your script faces the industry.

What you receive

One tells you where you stand. The other shows you exactly what happened.

A First Draft Review delivers two documents that never feel like the same report rearranged. Each arrives as a Word document and as a web page.

Document one

THE SCRIPT VERDICT

The executive professional assessment: where does this screenplay stand right now, and what are the highest-level reasons? It is the shorter document, the one a writer, producer, manager or development executive reads first. Its twelve sections, in order:

  1. The Script
  2. About This Read
  3. Where It Stands
  4. The Viewer's Experience
  5. What the Script Is Trying to Do
  6. Strongest Elements
  7. The Highest-Leverage Concerns
  8. The Craft at a Glance
  9. Missed Opportunities
  10. Genre, Audience and Comparable Work
  11. Revision Priorities
  12. Final Professional Perspective

Your Current Read is a professional band derived from what the read counted — never a decimal score. Your Estimated Potential After Priority Revisions is conditional on the named revisions, and never a guarantee.

Document two

THE SCREEN ELEVATION BRIEF

The working document: what happened sequence by sequence, what the audience experienced, why it mattered, and what you could consider doing about it. It gives one card for each sequence of your script — with the exact pages and scenes inside it, never one giant card per scene — in these six parts:

  1. What the viewer experienced
  2. What is working
  3. What may need attention
  4. Why it matters
  5. What you could consider
  6. Protect this

A sequence with nothing material to change says so in one line: “No material revision flag. The sequence is doing its job.” No note is manufactured to fill a box. Each highest-leverage concern is stated once, in THE SCRIPT VERDICT, with where it first appears, where it is reinforced and where its consequence lands; the cards point to it instead of repeating it. What you could consider is a direction with its reason — never a rewrite; an example is a short parallel illustration with invented characters, never your own scene rewritten. The brief closes with the craft notes behind the Verdict and three tables:

  • The Viewer's Attention
  • Setups and Payoffs
  • Character Arcs
Deep inside, simple outside

Two documents, in plain words

The intelligence may be complex. The delivery must not feel complex. Behind every read the house keeps its own record — every page and scene read, every check, every correction — so that your two documents can stay simple. THE SCRIPT VERDICT opens with About This Read: “SRV completed the screenplay from first page to last and verified the findings before delivery.”

The read offers options. You own the script, and you decide what changes.

Writing in another language? It’s coming.

Today The Script Reader's Verdict reads scripts written in English. Native-language reads are coming soon, and each language opens only once it has been proven on real screenplays written in it. If you would like to hear the moment yours opens, write to us: support@lovingmywords.com.