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As the Oscar-winning screenwriter Charlie Kaufman said in Seattle last year: "It's like an epidemic. Everyone I run into is writing a screenplay - waiters, taxi drivers, lawyers, accountants, you name it - and they all seem very dedicated."

So what's wrong with the scripts that go nowhere? How bad are they? And what are the problems that consign them to the "not in a million years" pile when they lob at a production company or government agency for funding? The best people to ask are professional script readers.

Informally, industry talk centres on writers who don't understand film genres, who struggle with the concept of a film as a three-act structure, who knock out meandering stories. There are mutterings about bad dialogue and scripts that are written as therapy.

But Duncan Thompson, a former project manager for the Australian Film Commission and now head of the Sydney International Film School and artistic director of the Aurora workshop, believes most Australian scripts are really television rather than film writing.

"I mean by that soap opera scripts where the characters say what they feel, say what they think, express opinions about the story they're in and express opinions about each other," he says. "They're things you don't do in a film script because it undermines the active engagement of the cinematic audience.

"The cinematic experience demands that you have to be working things out on a very subtle level. The definition of film is the state of mind it produces and most of the scripts written in Australia don't produce that state of mind. They produce the state of mind of being a passive watcher of a TV program."

Thompson believes Australians have been brilliant writers of Neighbours, Home and Away and other soaps and this has seeped into the rest of the writing culture. "In America, there's a real understanding of what a film is. Whether the films are any good or not, there's a rigour of understanding how to construct that experience and that's something that's just evidently lacking in Australia. It's quite dismaying because there are many, many talented people in this country but they don't seem to have that training."

Thompson considers Chopper a great example of cinematic storytelling. "You were watching his thought patterns - the twists and the swerves of his thought patterns allowed you into his mind and you understood him," he says of Eric Bana's characterisation of Chopper Read. "You understood what he wanted. What he said he wanted wasn't what he wanted ... There's a subtext - a man struggling with himself."

Troy Lum, who heads the distributor Hopscotch, reads up to 400 scripts from around the world every year, including 100 or so from Australia. He believes the most common problem is that they're written with no audience in mind.

"My first question for a lot of the scripts I read is 'who is this for?' and the answer is that they're actually for nobody."

Lum believes films need to be aimed at a target audience - upmarket arthouse viewers, for example.

"The market really works in two ways - you've got big tentpole Hollywood films and very uniquely driven pictures like Brokeback Mountain," he says. "In between is Nowheresville, whether an American film or Australian. A lot of what you get from Australian scripts is in the middle. It's obviously not a Hollywood blockbuster but it's also not uniquely driven. It's just there."

Lum believes many scripts are also flawed by having no clear character that audiences can follow during the story. Instead, the so-called protagonist is a bunch of quirky characters or the landscape. "A lot of writers are being taught not to write in a protagonist," he says. "But most of the great scripts that have come through, in my opinion, have really great protagonists."

But didn't Crash just win best picture at the Oscars with a bunch of characters interacting on the racially charged streets of Los Angeles? "They're very difficult to nail, those films," says Lum. "I don't think an Australian version of Crash would cut it."

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