nmstevens,
You said MOS is a production term and that you've never seen it in a screenplay. I hope I’m not going too far off point, but I have a question regarding this comment.
First, I’ve used MOS in a spec script and I’ll explain why:
I wrote a scene in which a mother and father discover their child missing. First they search the home together. When that fails, the father tells the mother to check with neighbors while he calls the police. I wanted to follow the mother out of the house, but I also wanted my reader to hear the father’s frantic 911 call (the call is used against him later by the police). To accomplish this; I describe the mother racing out of the house, going to a neighbor’s house, and asking that neighbor about her missing son. All of this is done MOS while we hear the back and forth between the father and the 911 Operator.
Now I hate to encumber the read, but I also shoot for clarity. I first learned about MOS in school. I studied theater and as a requirement had to take a number of playwriting classes. I’m sure I heard about the use of MOS while studying the difference between screenwriting and playwriting. MOS is also talked about in Trottier’s S.W.B and in The Hollywood Standard. Would I be incorrect in assuming that although the term may be either production or archaic; isn’t it widely known by script readers, producers, agents, etc… And if so, I’d rather my reader have as clear a picture as possible.
It’s much like the term “beat”. I strive to never use it and I rarely do, but sometimes those four little letters are the clearest way of telling the reader to hold on a sec… okay now read ahead. And if I’ve told a compelling story at the end, I’d rather have a reader think that I used a production and or archaic term than have the reader not get it.
Again, I hope this isn’t going too far off point, but it’s something I’ve thought about a lot.
Rai
I've seen many things in many scripts and what you have to understand is that this isn't like writing a thesis where you've got rules about exactly how you have to write the footnotes.
It's not like if you put it in somebody is going to take points off your final grade -- except in the larger sense that, given that it's a production term and not generally used, when it comes in front of a reader, it's use, like many other such things -- making references to shots and atypical formatting and all of those things that beginners tend to get warned against --
Sure, you can always find examples in professional scripts where professional writers do all of those "Don'ts" and they probably always did do them.
But you have to look at in this light. You want your script to get all the way to the top of the heap. And just by virtue of the fact that it's a spec script from an unknown writer, it starts at the very razor's edge of being rejected.
That's just a fact of life. If it's a script by a successful produced screenwriter, it starts much closer toward being bought. No guarantee. In fact, any script by virtually any screenwriter -- even somebody who just wrote an academy award winning movie probably has a greater chance of being rejected than bought. That's just reality.
But they obviously have a better chance than you. Or me. And I have a better chance than you.
You have a very small chance, though still a chance.
So what you don't want to do, right off the bat, is to do anything in your script that pushes it closer to that edge. For instance, you write a script that 150 pages. Before the reader has even read a word, your script has just been pushed way closer to the edge. He opens it up and riffs through it. Huge blocks of dense text. Pages of description with almost no dialogue. Page after page after page of it. Even closer to the edge.
Then he starts reading. Odd ball non-traditional format.
Let me tell you, maybe your script can still sell -- but boy, it had better be brilliant. I mean, Pulp Fiction brilliant from page one. Because if it isn't, it's pretty much already gone.
And it's the same deal with all this little stuff. There's just kind of an accumulation of things that go on the wrong side of the balance. Put just one more little thing on that wrong side and oops -- over it goes, into the circular file.
As far as MOS -- It's very easy to say something like, No ambient sound or -- the following is silent except for the Voice Over.
Yeah, it takes a few more words but it also falls in the same category as specifying shots. It never bothered me, but given that it bothers a lot of people, it probably makes more sense, when it's possible, to find a way to indicate it, even when it takes a few more words, then to come right out and say "CLOSE SHOT ON THE ALIEN PARASITE as, unnoticed, it burrows into the base of Sheila's spine."
NMS
