Sexual Violence in Spec Screenplays

The Black List Blog: I’ll never forget the worst script I’ve ever read. It came across my desk while reading for the Black List in the fall of 2013, and was classified as a comedy. It was a coming-of-age story about a young woman with dreams of stand-up stardom. It also had eight rape scenes in it, described a ten-year old girl as “teasing like a stripper,” featured multiple scenes of child abuse, torture, and incest, and blamed the multitude of abuses suffered by its heroine on her inability to wear underwear. I’ll remind you again that this script was classified as a comedy by its own (male) writer.