I never went to film school. Instead I learned screenwriting by no-budget filming.
I have read that students at film schools are told to watch good movies, and turn each movie into a screenplay. To learn how to write screenplays.
How many screenplay do students typically write in this way?
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If a student is on the screenwriting track and not the production track, they'll probably will pick one or two films to translate to a screenplay.
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Dear Christopher, many thanks for answering. Then I was wrong, because i thought the number was much larger.
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I haven't heard of students practicing in this way but comparing a final film to its screenplay is a valuable tool for anyone to see how the work gets translated.
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The thing is most produced scripts available for the general public to read are transcriptions off final edited films. It's rare to find original scripts that got producers & filmmakers excited from jump.
The John Wick spec screenplay was a complete page 1 rewrite by the time Keanu Reeves committed to star and trained for a year. Supposedly, there was never an approved script for Gladiator and Russell Crowe said he wrote his own dialogue.
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I don't know of any film school that does this. Learn structure, storytelling, and read good scripts.
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If you look at a syllabus from a masters level school, the early section is about diving into theory and immediately workshopping what the students will write. For undergrad, students will have a list of films to watch and talk about and sometimes transcribe a film, discuss theory.
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The definition of a "good" script is vague, highly subjective, and may be genre specific. Just because a movie gets rave reviews or even gets made at all doesn't mean the script is good. It may mean the crew made lemonade from a lemony script. If I were you, I'd pick a movie that you really love, and analyze why...what is there about this script that attracts and keeps your attention? Pacing, lighting, music, comic relief, or the film is so bad, it's good? Another approach, time the scenes, and see if you can diagram the movie the way people once diagrammed sentences. Because I like to write noir stories, I listen very carefully to the dialog of neo-noir films (Chinatown, for example.) After a while, (like Rocky Horror Picture Show diehards for example), you'll be able to recite the dialog along with the actors. Do the characters banter, or deliver soliloquies? Are there memorable lines like I'll make him an offer he can't refuse; or Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn, for example. I saw a Murder, She Wrote rerun where Jerry Orbach, as P.I.Harry McGraw stole from Maltese Falcon: When a guy's partner gets killed, he got to do something ... It even had a shot of Harry's office from the street level that replicated the shot of Spade and Archer's office in Falcon. A film like Magnificent 7 (1960s version) had a bland, predictable script, so what made it a good movie? Certainly not Russian-born Yul Brynner as "Chris" delivering cowboy lingo ...but Vaughn, McQueen, Bronson, Coburn saved the film.
Just some ideas to consider when writing a script.