Script Delivery Quotes

We barely had cell phones on '90210.' It started in the '90s. That's pretty much when fax machines came into play. When I first got the script for '90210' I had to come into New York to get it. It was not emailed to me; there was no email.

A German shepherd dog could walk in the office with a script in his mouth, and if that script was really good, they'd buy the script.

It's not like I have boxes of scripts arriving at my door.

I thought I'd give myself 10 years as an entertainment journalist and build up so much clout that there was no way Hollywood could ignore me when I started delivering scripts. Little did I know they were very good at ignoring it.

Dictum on television scripts: We don't want it good - we want it Tuesday.

In film you have the script months ahead of time often, for a good film, but in television it seems like you might not get the script until a week or two weeks before you've got to film it. It's a little weird, but also quite challenging. It reminds me of repertory theatre.

Somebody comes to your house. You know they're coming, so it's not a surprise. And they give you an envelope that has your scenes in it. And they sit in the car outside for a half an hour while you read your scenes, then they ring your doorbell and you give your scenes back. Then you shoot the movie a few weeks later or something. The next time you see your scenes is the night before you start shooting. I never read the script [Blue Jasmine], so I didn't really know what it was about.

There's a lot of writing in television that can sound like it's taken out of a package, and the way to get around that is to not allow yourself to deliver it that way.

We seem to spend a lot of our time in very small spaces spouting a lot of dialogue very quickly.

When I started to work in Hollywood at a fairly low level delivering scripts around town, listening to AM talk radio, I at first listened to it as a novelty.

There's this exhausting energy from you getting your lines out and your words right, especially if it's a complicated scene. And as soon as the camera is off you and goes on the other person, you're talking garbled garbage and you feel so sorry for them because you've lost the will to live, after 18 hours of saying those lines. That's terribly unfair. So, I do love the quick-paced nature of it.

I can take scripts directly to actors. Agents don't like to hear that.

If people don't actively knock the scenery over and they get the words out in something approximating the right order, you're moving on.