Binding Scripts for the Reading

While roughly half of the actors participating in this weekend's staged reading Total War are happy to print up their own copy of the script if I simply send them the .pdf, others have busier lives-- and so I have been spending evenings binding scripts.

My laser printer, which I acquired last year at a yard sale for $10 has proved invaluable for my career as a playwright, and despite the occasional paper-jam, does a fairly good job. Afterwards I sit on the living-room floor with my three-hole-punch and make a small amount of confetti, if one sees this as a celebratory part of the creative process, or chad, if one looks at this with a more pragmatic eye.

The next stage is probably the most time consuming and the most fun: Knotting the pages together into a book. Using three knots, two in the two left hand corners, top and bottom, and one in the middle of the left margin, I bind ten or eleven sheets together at a time, then bind the next ten or eleven sheets until a script is done.

Then I slide each copy into my milk-chocolate brown accordion-folder, ready for transport!

(Of course, were I a famous playwright, I would have an intern to do this sort of thing.)

In fact, if you look at the flyer I made for the reading, you will notice that the photograph, which shows a much earlier draft, shows an early permutation of my script binding method:

And if you look closely enough, you might even see the names of characters that do not appear in the current draft: