Don’t forget. You have one week left to turn your script in for the HOLIDAY AMATEUR SHOWDOWN. Must be a late-year holiday-themed script. I’m giving you til next Thursday, December 12, at 8:00 pm Pacific Time. Send the title, genre, logline, why you think it deserves a shot, and, of course, a PDF of the script (you’d be surprised at how many people forget that part), to carsonreeves1@gmail.com
Genre: Action
Logline: A disaffected NYPD cop visiting her daughter in a state-of-the-art hospital is unwittingly caught in a hostage situation when extremists raid the building seeking the cure of a deadly virus.
Why You Should Read: I got my start writing for B-Movie King Roger Corman, which basically means your creative flexibility gets completely strapped by ultra-low budget constraints. I wrote “Hemorrhage” to break free of such restrictions and focus on telling a story about a hard-pressed mother struggling to mend old wounds between her sick daughter, albeit with armed extremists threatening to rip apart what little bond they have left. I love the thrill of a good action movie, especially ones with compelling antagonists whose motives aren’t simply black or white and make us truly fear for the principal characters’ lives. If you get a kick out of the same thing, then you’ll have a blast reading “Hemorrhage.”
Writer: Justin Fox
Details: 108 pages
When I conceived of Action Week, this is exactly what I imagined. A good old-fashioned balls-to-the-wall action flick. But I realized something while reading “Hemorrhage,” which is that reading action scripts is challenging. Action is meant to be experienced visually. It isn’t meant to be conveyed in words. There are only so many “He jumps,” “She shoots,” “They runs,” “It explodes,” a reader can take before they tune out.
This is why I encourage writers to come up with action concepts and set pieces that are unique in some way. The more uniqueness you can bring, the more you disrupt the pattern. “Gravity” comes to mind. That movie had so many unique action scenes because of the story’s unique setup. Or that library book attack scene in John Wick 3. That’s the sort of stuff you need to put on the page.
Let’s see how Hemorrhage fared in this department.
An American doctor in Afghanistan is trying to help contain a deadly virus when she, herself, gets infected. She’s tossed on a plane and flown back to New York City so she can be treated. Meanwhile, 35 year old cop Laken Atwood is finishing up the day’s beat so she can get to her daughter, Piper’s, lung surgery. Piper’s lung was punctured due to a car accident where Laken was driving. So Piper’s not exactly thrilled to see her mom.
While this is going on, terrorists led by creepy frenchman, Cedric, creepier fake doctor, Mateo, and Mateo’s angry younger sister, Ana, show up at the hospital the Afghanistan doctor is being sent to and start killing everyone they see. They then withdraw blood from the woman, which no doubt they will use to kill large portions of populations at some point in the future.
In case you were wondering, this is the same hospital Piper is staying at. So when Laken and Piper hear all the shooting, Laken knows it’s time to high-tail it out of here. There are a few problems though. One, Piper is connected to a computer thing that’s keeping her lung pumping. Two, Laken’s husband, Danny, is downstairs grabbing snacks. And three, New York is in the midst of a storm so bad the streets have turned into lakes.
Laken tries to construct an escape plan but the terrorists are on them quickly. Laken kills Emil AND Ana, which makes Mateo so angry, he momentarily ditches his plan to destroy the world so he can find this pesky cop and kill her. Eventually he’s able to get his hands on Piper and does the unthinkable – HE INJECTS HER WITH THE VIRUS!!! This gives Piper a couple of hours to live. So now Laken will have to retrieve her daughter from the terrorists and somehow find the vaccine before Piper bites it. Will she succeed?
I like what Fox did with his characters.
He made this about the mother-daughter relationship. A lot of action writers don’t care about character stuff. But if you can create characters who a) we want to root for, and b) have a conflict that we want to see resolved, we’re going to be a heck of a lot more invested in your story.
I also liked the way the setup made our hero’s job more challenging. Laken isn’t the female John McClane. She doesn’t get to roam free through a building wherever she wants. She has to protect her daughter who’s only got one lung and has to lug around an apparatus in order to breathe. That was good.
And my favorite part of the script was when they jammed the virus into Piper. Now you’ve got this literal ticking time bomb that’s going to go off ON TOP OF Laken needing to get her daughter back from the terrorists. All of that was great.
But every time it felt like this script took a step forward, it would take two steps back. Let’s start with the storm. If you’re using something to create a convenience in your story that is so big it could be a movie on its own, that’s a problem. Fox needed to create a reason why cops couldn’t just descend upon this hospital and rescue everyone. So we get a storm so intense it’s creating rivers on the streets. I don’t know if that’s ever happened in New York history. If the thing you’re using to plug up a pot hole is so big it could be its own film (A flooded New York City!), people aren’t going to buy it.
Then you had the dad. He was clearly the weakest character in the script. The guy goes missing for long stretches of time without an explanation. What I’m guessing happened is that Fox never truly understood the dad so there wasn’t any commitment to the character. All writers run into this problem. At a certain point, if you’re not going to fully commit to a character, you have to cut bait. The dad could’ve died a few years ago. He and Laken could be divorced and he lives in another state. But he definitely shouldn’t have been here in this hospital.
And, finally, I didn’t understand Mateo’s plan. At first we learn that the terrorists fighting for him are doing so because he planned to use this virus to save people. How do you use a virus to save people? It didn’t technically matter since he was lying to them and was always going to use it as a weapon, but we still have to buy into why the terrorists believed such a thing in the first place. And even once we learn that he’s going to use it as a weapon, it isn’t clear who he’s going to target or how. And then, late in the movie, we establish that Piper needs to get the vaccine which means that… there’s a vaccine. So how is this virus going to kill a bunch of people if we have a vaccine for it? As your villain’s ultimate plan emerges, we should feel more and more satisfied, not more and more confused.
But hey, this is Amateur Action Showdown. So what about the action, Carson!?
The action was fine. My favorite sequence was the sky-bridge. That felt unique to the situation and therefore it popped as the most memorable of the action sequences. But everything else was standard shoot-shoot-duck-hide-shoot-fight-shoot. There wasn’t a lot of creativity. I implore action writers everywhere to do as little of the generic action stuff as possible. We can get generic action anywhere. What action can we only get from your movie? Figure that out and you’re going to come up with tons more creative action scenes. Like the “attacked at the border highway” scene in Sicario. I’d never seen anything like that before.
This is probably stale advice to you, at this point. I talk about it all the time. But, it’s one of the main things that distinguishes the writers who stay stuck on the outside from the ones who make millions of dollars. The writers who can come up with original situations within the genres they specialize in will stand out PRECISELY BECAUSE the majority of writers do not bother to go the extra mile.
This isn’t to say Fox’s script was too generic. Not at all. It’s simply that it wasn’t creative enough. If I were to rate it on a scale of 1-10, I’d give it a 6. Which is respectable because most of the action scripts I read are 5 and below. I could even see Hemorrhage sneaking into the 9 or 10 slot on my Best Amateur Screenplays of the Year list. However, I think this script has another gear or two to it and that Fox needs to really push himself if he wants to get it there.
Script link: Hemorrhage
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: “The Baby Yoda” – In order to make your hero’s journey more difficult, add something fragile that they have to protect. In Mandalorian, it’s Baby Yoda. Here, it’s a physically impaired daughter.
