The Sixth Sense

So I was doing some research online about some of the most successful screenwriters in the trade today and a surprising number of them named "The Sixth Sense" in their top five scripts they have ever read, so I decided to download it and give it a read. It has been years since I last saw the film, probably in 2000 along with everyone else.

The script is powerful and moving. You really feel for Cole (Haley Joel Osmund) as a poor kid who wants nothing more than to be normal. Dr. Malcolm on the other hand is struggling with his own personal demons throughout the entire screenplay, and plays a great ally/ mentor for young Cole. While reading it I dissected the pacing and structure more than I would any other typical god-awful crap I was required to read. The moment we find out that young Cole "sees dead people" was on page 64. The screenplay is 127 pages long, so pretty much the exact middle of the story. Convenient? More like precise. One thing that Shyamalan does perfectly throughout the entire screenplay is that he sets the mood in each new scene with a short and adequate description. Whether the room is cold, dark, bright, ominous... whatever he uses short descriptive phrases that lay the mood down perfectly.

After being forced to dissect scripts for the tiniest of mistakes I can also say that his script would have been penalized by "reader" standards and forced to have been given a 3 or 4 out of 5 because of it. He often phrased entire paragraphs using ALL CAPS. It works beautifully to draw attention to something important but the reader in me wants to scream out. He even called a silly ancillary character two different names in the same scene. And of course the most noticeable of mistakes is that the script isn't even in Courier font. From the looks of it, it might be Arial, or something similar. It makes me want to yell because he made almost 3 million dollars on selling the script. By "hollywood" standards it is too long, and not properly formatted, so the question is how did he get the bound, three-hole punched paper, past the gatekeepers, and into the hands of powerful executives. But that is another story....

All in All, check it out, it is a good and surprisingly quick read, especially if you haven't seen the movie in a while. (It's on instant Netflix)

http://www.imsdb.com/scripts/Sixth-Sense,-The.html