A script is never finished. Only the film.

I may have said this here before, but I hate when a script is called a "blueprint" for a movie. It simply doesn't take into account all the things a script must have to make a great movie. I guess if you want to think that way, I'll picture your script as a fully built house, barren of anything inside it. Not a house I wish to spend very much time in.

This leads me to today's topic, why I also hate ever saying a script is "finished" (this should not be confused with being done writing it). A script is not literature. It is not fully realized until it is made into a movie. And as we've learned a lot lately, that doesn't make the script "finished", as we get bombarded with remakes galore. Have you ever read a remake of a novel? Yeah, I didn't think so.

This, of course, is a blessing and a curse for us writers. If you're Robert Mark Kamen, the blessing came this summer with The Karate Kid. The curse? Well, I've heard that's called "development hell" but I've never been there myself and I hope to never.

I for one love getting to the end of a draft. But each time I do I think of Michael Arndt and his 100 drafts of Little Miss Sunshine. It reminds me that if you have a great story, with motivated characters, doing unexpected things, with a hook to be advertised, tied together with a universal theme; don't ever stop writing drafts until the movie is made. Because you've built that great house and now you just need to fill it with the right decorations to make it feel like home.