A HUGE announcement in this month’s newsletter. I’m hijacking your entire 2024. Also, out of left field, I read an amazing screenplay. Was not expecting that at all. So I reviewed that. There’s a Scriptshadow connection with the writer, by the way. I haven’t talked about Star Wars in a while, so I had to pass on some deep Star Wars thoughts. I also get into Back to the Future, Speed, and The Fugitive, all of which provide some screenwriting lessons for us. And then, of course, I can’t have a newsletter without some Sydney Sweeney. Who can? Oh, and there’s a great deal on script notes inside too!
If you want to join my newsletter, e-mail me at carsonreeves1@gmail.com
P.S. I’m posting November Logline Showdown tomorrow morning to give this post time to breathe.
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NOVEMBER LOGLINE SHOWDOWN – DEADLINE TONIGHT!
What: November Logline Showdown
Send me: the logline for any script you have (features will take precedence over pilots but if you’ve got the best tv show idea ever, send it in)
I need: The title, genre, and logline
Also: Your script must be written because I’ll be reviewing the winning entry the following week
When: Deadline is Thursday, November 30th, 10:00pm Pacific Time
Send entries to: carsonreeves3@gmail.com
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As many of you know, I’m a UFO nut. I love UFOs. I love them so much, in fact, I get angry when the internet tries to make me call them UAPs. I kick it old school. Don’t ruin my high, Internet. Don’t ruin my high, AI.
The UFO community long needed a way to identify UFOs. So they came up with something called “The five Observables.” If something you see in the sky displays these traits, it’s likely an alien space ship. The five observables are anti-gravity lift, instantaneous acceleration, hypersonic flight without signatures (no ‘sonic booms’ for example), low observability (cloaking), trans-medium travel (can move from space to ocean effortlessly).
This reminded me of something I’ve been thinking about in regards to screenwriting. With screenwriting, there are a bunch of things you can teach. You can teach a writer how to break their screenplay into acts. You can teach a writer how to set up and pay off things. You can teach a writer how to create obstacles that your protagonist must overcome.
But there are also things that are next to impossible to teach. These are what I call the “screenwriting unobservables.” They are, mostly, the innate talents that one is blessed with, and, therefore, you either have them or you don’t. You’ll notice that I said, “next to impossible.” I’m going to list these unobservables and then offer some advice on how you can still improve in each category.
UNOBSERVABLE 1 – CONCEPT CREATION
Concept is elusive even before we assign it ‘unobservable’ status. We know this because even the best concept creators strike out. Anyone remember Tenet? For whatever reason, ‘concept’ seems to elude a large percentage of writers. No matter how hard they try, they don’t seem to understand what makes for a good movie idea. So they shoot themselves in the foot, repeatedly writing screenplays that have no shot at being good because they were doomed by their concept from the get-go.
Advice: As a Scriptshadow reader has noted, try to write a come up with a new logline every week. If you have 50 loglines a year, there’s probably a good one in there. Pay attention to movies (not sequels or franchises) that end up having mass appeal and dissect why. Conversely, pay attention to what bombs and ask why. And, finally, send your loglines out to as many friends as possible and listen to their feedback. If no one is excited about your idea – even if they only say it’s ‘good’ – don’t write that script. Keep going, keep logging feedback, and keep challenging yourself to come up with better, more unique, ideas, until others start telling you “That’s a great idea.” Concept creation is no different from writing a screenplay. It takes time to master.
UNOBSERVABLE 2 – CREATIVE CHOICES
I can teach writers how to craft a story with a beginning, middle, and end. But it’s much harder to teach writers how to come up with interesting creative choices within their stories. Creative choices are the things that happen in your screenplay, either through the characters or the plot, that make your story stand out from all the other screenplays out there. Andy Dufresne’s amazing escape plan in The Shawshank Redemption is a masterful creative choice. Getting rid of a body by chopping it up in a woodcutter, a la Fargo, is an interesting choice. John McClane running into Hans on the roof and thinking he’s a hostage is a great creative choice. Most writers make boring or predictable choices throughout their screenplays. The writers who stand out are the ones who come up with the clever stuff. And you’ll know that you’ve got the clever stuff when it’s clear audiences will be talking about it afterwards.
Advice: Remind yourself that you’re boring. This will work even if it’s not true. If you’re convinced you’re a boring writer who writes boring stuff, you will constantly strive to come up with better creative choices. You’ll take more creative risks. Also, use every rewrite as an opportunity to find a new strong creative choice in your script. Don’t leave that rewrite until you’ve come up with a choice that clearly makes your script better.
UNOBSERVABLE 3 – VOICE
This is the big one. The big Kahuna. The writers with a unique voice have a huge advantage over every other writer because they don’t need strong concepts to make their scripts work. Their talent is in finding the unique within the mundane. “Voice” is, essentially, the comedic way in which you see the world. It’s your own sense of humor. Almost all of the best “voice” writers (John Hughes, Woody Allen, Larry David, even Aaron Sorkin) have varying degrees of offbeat humor that power their writing.
Advice: The thing with “voice” is that you can’t create it. So don’t try to write a script with voice. It won’t work. Your voice is already within you. Your job is, simply, to find a concept that aligns with that voice and then your voice will come out naturally. So if you have a dry sense of humor, write an indie concept with dry main characters.
UNOBSERVABLE 4 – CHARACTER REALITY
When I talk ‘character reality,’ I’m not talking about flaws and likability and internal conflicts and vices. Those are all part of creating characters but they’re not the most important part. The most important part is creating a character WHO FEELS LIKE A REAL PERSON. We’ve all experienced this when reading scripts – a character who just feels so incredibly real. Lester Burnham’s character in American Beauty felt like this real burnt-out suburban loser whose family didn’t respect him anymore. More likely, we’ve experienced these characters in television, where there’s more time to flesh characters out. But if you don’t have characters that feel like real people, you’re always keeping your reader at arm’s length.
Advice: Take an intense curiosity in other human beings. Figure out what makes them tick. If you don’t have that curiosity – if you don’t desperately want to know the inner workings of why people are the way they are – it is highly difficult to write a character that readers connect with. If you do this well, you will write your descriptions of characters with more detail. The things they say will contain more specificity. They’ll always act from a place of realism, as opposed to doing things only because the writer needs them to. This is the hardest unobservable to achieve. But boy does it pay dividends for those who can do it.
UNOBSERVABLE 5 – DIALOGUE
There is an innate divide between how the majority of writers make their characters speak (perfunctory, on-the-nose, devoid of personality) and how people actually speak. There is an elusive ability that some writers have whereby they can channel this actuality, as well as make their characters say charming, clever, funny, or intelligent, things effortlessly. And this is a skill that the large majority of writers don’t have. The good news is, you don’t need it to become a professional screenwriter. You can learn to write strong functional dialogue. But boy does it help if you have this special dialogue ability.
Advice: A lot of weak dialogue stems from writers who are afraid to let go. They don’t want their characters to sound weird or odd so they keep a muzzle on them, not unlike they do when they interact with people in the real world. They’re afraid to say something out loud that someone else thinks is strange. You have to let that go because when it comes to speaking, we only ever say interesting things when we’re not holding back. The great thing about writing dialogue is that you can write the craziest s**t imaginable and then, if it’s too much, you just edit it down. But if you’re a dialogue muzzler, it’s going to be hard for you to ever write memorable dialogue.
Genre: Drama
Premise: Courted by colleges and sponsors alike, a burnt-out tennis prodigy fights to maintain dominance against her Academy rival as she hurtles toward the existential decision of turning Pro–a choice that will force her to double down on her dream or walk away from the future she’s fought for.
About: This script finished with 6 votes on last year’s Black List. Zachary Joel Johnson was an assistant at Skydance, Scott Free, and Dreamworks Animation.
Writer: Zachary Joel Johnson
Details: 103 pages
Iman Vellani for Faheema?
I’ve been saving this one.
If you’re a new Scriptshadow subscriber, this is where I tell you I used to teach tennis. And, oddly enough, I get at least two tennis scripts a year to review. I’m not sure why the sport is written about so much. It’s inherently boring. I mean how do you tell a story about a sport that nobody in the world understands how to score????
If Player A has Ad-In on match point and the audience doesn’t know what “ad-in” or “match point” means, there’s literally no way to convey the drama. This is something Elad (writer of the other Black List tennis script on the list – Court 17) and I spent hours upon hours discussing while developing that script – how much we should teach the audience. Or if we should just leave it. It was agonizing to discuss and reminded me why I get so frustrated whenever I encounter a tennis screenplay.
The solution is probably to do what Challengers did. That’s the last tennis script I reviewed on the site, the one that stars Zendaya. The script was less about the tennis and more about the dirty love triangle at the center of it.
Believe me. I want this script to be an ace. Because if it is, it means the next 90 minutes is going to fly by. If it isn’t, it means the next 90 minutes is going to feel like the first 10 minutes of The Seeker, which felt like 10 years.
Ya follow that?
Faheema Nassar is an introverted 17 year old tennis prodigy who just won her first professional tournament. However, despite her coach, Bebe, and father, Omar, wanting her to turn pro, Faheema is reluctant. If you turn pro, you can never play college tennis, and Faheema wants to play tennis at Columbia.
So she rejects the prize money and heads back to her tennis academy in Florida to train. There, she’s met with a new face, 19 year old mean girl, Caroline Werber. Werber is only here because Faheema is the best junior talent in the world. By playing alongside her, people will notice Caroline.
Soon after, Prince Rackets shows up and wants to sponsor Faheema. Again, if she does this, she can’t play college tennis. So she’s reluctant to sign. Also, they’re barely giving her any money. Faheema realizes that if she wins the 18s Nationals, that gives you a wild card slot into the U.S. Open. Prince would have to double their offer if she pulls that off. So that becomes her goal.
The problem is, everyone there is obsessed with Faheema and works her to death. She’s getting burnt out. If that isn’t bad enough, Caroline keeps talking her down, telling her she’s worthless, trying to destroy her mental game. And then you have a former Russian Wimbledon champ coming in to train Faheema who’s even more of a c**t than Caroline! If Faheema can somehow survive all this pressure, she can begin her promising career. The question is, does she want to?
Tennis players are actually interesting people.
They tend to be loners at heart. They’re introverted. They’re socially awkward. As a tennis instructor, I can confirm that the kids who the parents brought to my classes were never the cool athletic types. They were always the kids who were a little bit “off,” lol.
I think that’s what Johnson is trying to capture here with Faheema. She’s anxious, socially awkward, introverted. Unfortunately, this combo makes her unlikable. She’s a super downer who never smiles, is never happy, who never likes playing tennis, who doesn’t make an effort to connect with anyone, who doesn’t like any of the people who train her, including her own father.
Why would we root for someone like that?
This is the crux of screenwriting here people. Forget that this is a tennis script. It could be a superhero script, a guy-with-a-gun script, a comedy, a Western, a buddy-cop flick — IF WE DON’T LIKE THE MAIN PERSON WE’RE FOLLOWING, NOTHING ELSE MATTERS.
And I think too many writers craft their protagonists without that in mind. To them it’s like a mound of clay that you shape on a whim. If it works it works. If not, it doesn’t. Oh well. Screenwriting starts with making the audience care about the main character and I just don’t see any strategy at all in this script to achieve that.
I’m not even sure what the central conflict is for our main character.
She’s torn between turning pro or playing for Columbia. Why does she want to play for Columbia? Columbia doesn’t even have a good tennis team (which is noted in the script). So why is that so important to you? That question is NEVER answered. It almost seems like Johnson confuses the fact that turning pro means you can’t play in college OR go to college. But that’s not true. You can go back to college after playing on the professional tennis tour. You just can’t play on the tennis team. So what’s really at stake here with this choice of Faheema’s? As far as I can tell, nothing. And it’s supposed to be the central conflict in the script.
This means we have a character we don’t root for in a situation with weak stakes. That’s a bad combo. It’s hard to create something good out of that scenario.
You need to create stakes that hold up in the real world. For example, Faheema decides she’s going to play the Nationals in the hopes of winning in order to double her contract offer from Prince. But what does that really mean? She’ll make 160 thousand dollars instead of 80 thousand.
You have to think about these things from the perspective of the reader. Is the reader really going to say, “Oh man! I was not interested when she was only going to make 80 grand. But now that she’s going to get 160 grand?? I’m all in. I really want her to succeed!!!” Stakes have to feel giant in movies. They can’t be casual. They can’t be ‘sort of big.’
The best aspect of the script was probably the relationship between Faheema and Caroline. Caroline, by the way, had actual stakes attached to her actions. She was 19. She was going to stop getting funded by her parents unless she made the tour. So she needed to win the Nationals to get that wild card or else she’d be forced to quit tennis. THOSE ARE STAKES. Why didn’t we have stakes like that for Faheema?
But anyway, seeing how cruel Caroline was to Faheema provided an ample amount of conflict within the tennis academy. And there’s a nice moment late in the movie where Caroline finally apologizes for being so awful to Faheema. But even that storyline suffered from Caroline being a two-dimensional character for most of the movie (she’s Mean Girl To The Max whenever she walks in the room).
Unfortunately, this script does not give me hope that tennis scripts are now easy to write. Challengers is still my number 1 script. Court 17 is number 2. Everything else is a distant third.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Sometimes, how you want to portray your protagonist makes them unlikable. And it’s your job to recognize this and decide if that’s really want you want to do. For example, if you want to create a story around a really depressed person, well, depressed people aren’t likable. So you either need to have a plan to make them likable or you need to scrap your idea entirely. — It can be done by the way. Making a depressing person likable. Sometimes it’s as simple as giving them a sense of humor. Faheema smiled once in this movie. The final line of the script! Just have her crack some jokes. Have her have fun. If your character is down all the time, I PROMISE YOU we will not like them.
Genre: Horror
Premise: A childhood folktale comes to life when children of the neighborhood start to go missing after playing hide and seek.
About: Camrus Johnson is on the rise. He is best known as an actor who had small parts in Quiz Lady and Batwoman. He also created two animated shorts that debuted at Sundance and Tribeca. He’s from Georgia and this script of his finished with six votes on last year’s Black List.
Writer: Campus Johnson (based on the novel by Daka Hermon)
Details: 109 pages
Actor/Writer/Director Camrus Johnson
Horror may be the only genre where you have literally no idea if it’s going to work until opening weekend. But I do know this. The simpler the idea, the better the chance it’s got. The Exorcist – someone is possessed. It Follows – something follows you. A Quiet Place – monsters hunt by sound. M3GAN – there’s an evil AI doll. The Nun – there’s an evil nun.
Today’s concept falls right in line with that simplicity. Hide and Seek! It’s a game where every audience member already knows the rules. And it does feel like a game that could be reincarnated into something really scary.
We’re in Atlanta and 11-year-olds Justin (leader), Nia (brains), and Lyric (lone white kid) are a group of young detectives. They used to have a fourth member to their team, a kid named “Zee.” But Zee disappeared during a game of hide and seek a year ago.
However, they just found Zee yesterday so he’s back home. Unfortunately, nobody can get through to him. He speaks in tongues and riddles. So we don’t know where the guy was during that time.
When “adorkable” Quincy and his bully sister, Carla, show up, Carla starts trash-talking the detectives that they’re all wimps and afraid to play Hide and Seek, believing in the old myth that if you lose the game, you disappear. So she forces them all to play and that they do.
After the game is over and the kids go home, Quincy arrives at Justin’s house and says that his sister has disappeared. Justin rounds up the crew and, upon doing so, Quincy disappears as well. They all suspect this has something to do with the game so they begin their search for their friend and his sister. What they discover is that there’s another plane of existence called “Nowhere” where the rules of the living are no longer applicable.
In all of my days operating Scriptshadow, I’ve only ever stopped reading a script a handful of times. You can add this one to the list.
I don’t see any redeeming qualities in this screenplay that anybody can learn from.
I knew I was in trouble when one of the kids’ limbs disappeared and then his head turned into a cloud of purple smoke.
I’m big time struggling to understand how this made the Black List.
What do we have here that is in any way redeeming to Black List voters? This isn’t a marketable idea. It’s not a cool idea. It’s not a heady idea. It’s not a clever idea. It’s not written in a unique voice. The execution is okay but far from exceptional. Why would people vote for this?
This is basically the definition of a writer-for-hire script. Nobody takes a job like this cause they have a passion for telling the story. I’d probably take the money too. Well, maybe not. Depends on how much it was. But why is a blatant writer-for-hire script making the Black List? Isn’t this list supposed to be about self-expression? Creativity?
The thing is, I do believe that there is a market for a Hide and Seek horror film. It’s got to be done right but just that title with a spooky poster… it would for sure sell tickets. I don’t know what this is, though. If I’m being generous, it’s somewhere between Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory and It. But it’s not nearly as good as either of those films.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: I’m going to remind writers of the importance of expectation in a script, specifically when you market your script as something MORE SERIOUS THAN IT IS. So if you make me think I’m going to read the next HEAT, but instead I get John Wick, I’m going to be upset. If you make me think I’m going to read the next John Wick, but instead I get The Lost City, I’m going to be upset. If you tell me I’m going to get The Lost City and instead I get Spy Kids, I’m going to be upset. Always be 100% clear about what kind of movie your script is to the reader. Cause if they have something in their head that isn’t what they end up getting, they’re almost always going to be disappointed.
Can it be possible?
Is the Hunger Games sequel actually good?
The film made 44 million on its opening weekend, which was considered a proper fail. But it made 28 million on its second weekend, only a 35% drop. For comparison’s sake, another sequel, John Wick 4, dropped 60%. Even Guardians of the Galaxy 3 dropped 47%.
This would seem to indicate that Songbirds and Snakes is getting great word of mouth. But I have a theory here. And it’s a two-pronged theory. I’ll let you guys decide if I’m descending more into the conspiracy zone.
Part 1 is that Taylor Swift has a cameo in the film as an extra. With the Swiftie Army in full assemblage, I’m betting that a bunch of girls came to this film to grab a glimpse, a tiny visual nugget, of the famous singer.
Part 2 – and the bigger reason – is that I think everyone’s sick of Disney. I’ll get into this more in a second. But anything that doesn’t look like Disney right now, people are interested in. They don’t want superheroes. They don’t want space men. They don’t want live mermaids. They want something that feels new.
It’s Hollywood’s biggest blind spot. They milk the cow long after it stops making milk. They can’t help themselves. To be fair, Lionsgate, the studio behind Songbirds and Snakes, would probably do the same. They just don’t have any of those fancy properties. So they’re forced to make stuff that’s different. And, although it took a while to finally start digging into that Disney pie, apparently Thanksgiving was the breaking point for America. They’re finally telling you they want something new with their hard-earned money.
Speaking of Hollywood they’re, once again, using their tricky box office reporting practices to sell a not-so-accurate picture of Napoleon’s debut. Everyone’s touting this 32.5 million dollar opening weekend for the film, a significant box office upgrade over its primary Oscar competition, Killers of the Flower Moon, which only made 22 million its opening weekend. Until you realize they’re using the 5-day holiday take rather than the 3-day take. Napoleon only made 20 million dollars for the 3-day, less than Killers did.
I suppose you want the biggest numbers possible behind your opening weekend but everyone knows that these movies aren’t built to be giant blockbusters. Anything adult-skewing is lucky to hit 30 million on opening weekend. 20+ million is still quite good. Oppenheimer skewed everything but it was an outlier. It probably made 15 million alone that first weekend on dads being forced to take their wives and daughters to Barbie. An atomic bomb was the perfect escape route, lest they be permanently ported into Barbie’s perpetually pink universe.
I tried to get my family to come see the movie with me on Friday but there wasn’t a taker in the bunch. It was an indictment on what streaming has done to the movie-going public. The general consensus seemed to be, “Why go through all that when we can just watch something here on one of our eight streaming services?”
To be fair, it’s a hard point to argue against. Jaqouin Phoenix is one of the five weirdest people on the planet, a total wild card. Who’s to say we aren’t stumbling into another Beau is Afraid as opposed to another Joker?
Maybe the biggest surprise of the weekend is Disney’s Wish. Disney should own any holiday weekend it debuts a movie in. Especially going up against adult fare. Yet Wish found itself the stray coin, far removed from the fountain it was hurled towards—a toss so errant that the U.S. Treasury resolved to expunge its existence from the annals of the mint.
A lot of people are saying that Wish is the culmination of the 2016-2022 Disney era strategy of prioritizing social change over stories that people actually want to see. From Turning Red to Strange World to The Little Mermaid. I think the answer’s a lot simpler: NOBODY KNOWS WHAT THE F*&% THIS MOVIE IS ABOUT.
I actually liked the trailer. The villain is hateable. The lead is likable. The music sounded great. The secondary characters were funny. But it just goes to show that if you don’t get your concept right, nothing else matters. You’re building a house on a foundation of sandpaper.
Either way, Disney’s been playing with fire lately and they’ve turned their head long enough to miss the fact that the fire is now a raging inferno. Marvel is in trouble. Star Wars is in trouble. Pixar is in trouble. Disney Animation is in trouble. Disney animation-to-live-action is in trouble.
I remember writing an article six years ago about how every one of these divisions was churning out record-breaking hits. For each one of them to now be as abysmal as they are is kind of shocking. There are a lot of areas you can blame here but, whatever the reason is, they need to figure it out fast. Cause even Disney can’t keep losing 200+ million dollars a movie.
They don’t even have a strategy to get out of this. Their next Star Wars movie is being directed by the director of the least watched Marvel show Disney has ever made and starring the most average character Star Wars has ever created – Rey. And Marvel is expecting to make an Avengers film in 2025? They haven’t even filled in the empty slots that the last Avengers left. The whole reason that the Avengers worked was because it was carefully built up to over 8 years. Maybe they can squeeze Deadpool in there. He’s the only superhero that has a chance of making that interesting.
But they’re in trouble, man.
To finish off on a positive note, I keep running into people who tell me All The Light We Cannot See – the Netflix adaptation of the super bestselling novel – is awesome. They don’t even say, “It’s pretty good.” Or “It’s good.” They literally say “It’s amazing.” Or, “It’s one of the best shows I’ve seen this year.” I have been ignoring all these recommendations because it’s unheard of that I’ll like something that gets in the 20s for an RT score (All The Light has a 28% currently). But I can’t ignore this anymore. I have to watch this show.
Are you guys going to watch it with me?
I need some backup.
Feel free to opine on this weekend’s box office. And remember that Thursday we have a Logline Showdown. So make sure you enter!
