HOLLYWOOD WEEKEND: WORD-WORKING TIME

At 3 p.m. last Sunday, as millions of Americans tuned in Super Bowl XXI, Karl Schanzer nestled in his favorite chair in the den--but the TV wasn’t even turned on. Schanzer, a creative affairs executive for 20th Century Fox, was about two-thirds through his weekend homework. By kickoff he had already read eight scripts, a synopsis and a treatment--roughly 1,000 pages of text--and he still had five scripts left.

At 1 a.m. he finally crawled into bed. At 5 a.m. he got up to finish the last screenplay in time for the studio’s Monday morning creative meeting. It was there that he finally learned the Giants had blown out the Broncos.

In Hollywood, weekend reading -- not football or baseball -- is the local, national and sometimes only pastime. This is the mental equivalent of prospecting for gold. Between Friday evening and Monday morning, studio executives must read anywhere from six to 16 scripts along with assorted synopses, treatments and the occasional novel. They plow through scripts in development at the studio, “spec” scripts (submissions on speculation from writers without deals yet), writing samples, “hot” submissions that come in at the last minute and, of course, scripts smuggled from competing studios.

All in search of the mother lode, the undiscovered blockbuster.

Even for seasoned, lightning-fast readers, the quantity can be exhausting and frustrating. “There is always more to read than there is time for,” says one junior executive. “If you’re watching a game or something , there’s always a script saying, ‘Read me! Read me!’ It’s not the guilt that motivates you, it’s wanting to have the edge on the competition. In this business, reading is information.”

Every Friday afternoon the required reading list for the “weekend read” at each of the major studios gets distributed to the creative team. (Heavy reading dominates weekends because weekdays are devoted to a heavy diet of meetings, business meals and political in-fighting.) On Monday morning, in a meeting usually chaired by the president of production, each script is discussed and each of the executives is polled for reaction. While a short synopsis (known as “coverage”) is attached to each of the scripts, most executives questioned in an informal sampling said they rarely skipped anything on the list.

“You always have homework Sunday night and invariably you are panicked Monday morning as you try to finish,” says Jane Rosenthal, vice president of production at Walt Disney Pictures where the assigned reading last weekend totaled 13 items. “The reading load is excessive in this business.”

Depending on reading speed, executives can easily spend the vast majority of their weekends with their noses buried in mountains of pages. “They really do all of that reading,” says David Obst, a screenwriter and former executive at CBS Films. “People are willing to forgo any sort of life whatsoever to avoid the embarrassment of being unprepared. They are literally willing to drown in words.”

So what do you do when you simply conked out in the first act of, say, “Squadron” (inevitably described as “Platoon in Space”), and the boss wants to know what you thought? “I think it’s dangerous to bluff,” says one veteran executive. “You can fool some of the people some of the time, but eventually you’re going to get caught.”

Others are not always so fastidious. “It depends on the situation,” says one creative affairs executive who insisted on anonymity. “If everyone hated the script, it’s easy, because then you just jump on the bandwagon. The problem is that if you say you liked it, you have to defend your opinion.”

Executives are not always the best actors though. A high-priced comedy writer recalled--with understandable anger--a meeting with the head of a small production company. The company had commissioned a comedy script from him and his writing partner and insisted it be done in six weeks.

“We turn in the script and the meeting is canceled twice. Finally we go in to see the guy, and he starts off with some good notes and intelligent questions. Then he gets very vague. I finally ask him, ‘Did you read this script?’ And he says, ‘Well, not all in one sitting.’ ”

Clearly, speed is a valuable asset in this game. The sheer volume of material is a good motivator, but most executives queried said that it takes between 1 and 1 1/2 hours to read a typical 120-page script.

There are exceptions. Twenty-six-year-old Ellen Collett, a Yale graduate and now director of development at Gale Ann Hurd’s (“Aliens”) Pacific Western Productions, says she can read an entire script in 15 minutes. “I can do it between phone calls,” she says. “On a good weekend, I can easily get through 20 scripts.”

For those with less supernatural abilities, there are some shortcuts. Executives who instantly dislike the subject and the writing will usually quit reading by page 30. Jackie Gerken, executive in charge of creative affairs at DEG, says she limits herself to five scripts a day on Saturday and Sunday but reads all of them all the way through. “Any more than that and the material starts to blur,” she says.

But when the weekend list is as high as 14 or 15 scripts, the executives sometimes have little choice. Climbing that paper mountain can create some difficulties in maintaining a social life. “You feel guilty if you are not reading for neglecting your work, and you feel guilty if you are reading for neglecting your personal life,” says one exasperated woman executive. “You can’t win.”

It’s not all drudgery though. The fulfillment comes, these folks say, when late at night, just when they’re about to fade, they open the cover page of the 12th script of the weekend and suddenly they are entranced with a story or a dazzling writing style. “There’s nothing better,” says Disney’s Rosenthal. “Then you just stare at that stack and say, ‘Hmmm, what else is in there?’ ”