Fun with Forgery

Before Picasso achieved genius status, he copied his predecessors. And he’s not alone…

Imitation preceded creation, I would copy Combat Casey comics word for word in my Blue Horse tablet, sometimes adding my own descriptions where they seemed appropriate. […] Eventually I showed one of these copycat hybrids to my mother, and she was charmed – […] She asked me if I had made the story up myself, and I was forced to admit that I had copied most of it out of a funnybook. 

– Stephen King

Copying the masters is a proven method of learning technique in many disciplines.

This is a thing for new writers. They will take a really good screenplay. They’ll take Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, and they’ll put it next to them and they will type Butch Cassidy and the Sundance […]. I know novelists who do that with Mark Twain, and I know screenwriters who do that with the great screenwriters. 

– Aaron Sorkin

In the first half of this course, we’re going to copy some of the greatest scripts in a diverse range of genres. The script snippets we copy, we’ll call scrippets.

What are we copying, and why?

The point is to learn sci-fi specific techniques and insights, and the scrippets are meant to facilitate this. In other words, it’s about the words on the page rather than the scene on the screen.

In the second half of the course, we’ll throw the doors right open and transcribe some classic scenes.