Genre: Drama/Thriller/Sci-fi
Premise: In the near future, the police department has developed a device that replays sound from the past, which allows them to listen in on murders after the fact.
About: Here we have another Top 10 2014 Black List script. Writer Krysty Wilson-Cairns is from Scotland and this script also placed on the Brit List earlier this year. She’s also adapting “The Good Nurse” for Darren Aronofsky, about “The Angel of Death” nurse who killed over 300 patients.
Writer: Krysty Wilson-Cairns
Details: 119 pages – February 2014 draft (this is the draft that landed on both the Brit and Black List).

Rory Kinnear as Harry?

Today I want to talk about ideas. A good idea is one of the easiest things to bring to the table as a writer. It doesn’t take a year of meticulously outlining and plotting and character work and drafting and re-drafting. An idea can come to you in a split-second and is therefore one of the least time-intensive components of the process.

It’s also one of the easiest ways to set yourself apart. For example, let’s say you want to write a murder-mystery. Okay, you’ve just joined 6000 other murder-mystery scripts. Hallelujah to that scenario. Are you sure your murder-mystery is going to be better than every one of them? The odds say no.

BUT… what if you could change something in the IDEA that made your murder mystery stand out from all the others? What if you had a concept that allowed you to explore that murder-mystery in ways that nobody else who was writing a murder-mystery could? You have just – without even writing a single word of your screenplay – separated yourself from the pack.

And that’s exactly what’s happened today. Aether is an okay screenplay. It moves a little slow for its own good and the characters aren’t as exciting as I’d like them to be, but because we have a unique concept – a specialized audio device that allows you to re-listen to the crime scene – it makes the read a lot more interesting than had this been yet another straight-forward murder mystery.

So what’s Aether about? Homicide Detective Harry Orwell was part of a prized team that recently created a device that could take sound waves in a room, collect them, and play them back long after they were made. This evolved naturally, then, to the homicide world, where it’s become a tool for detectives to figure out who the killer was.

Harry’s a troubled dude though. Like a lot of other “listeners,” he’s traumatized by the desperate last pleas and gulps and breaths of the murder victims who he must listen to over and over again. It’s become so bad that his department has actually hired a shrink to work through these issues with each audio-detective.

Well, one day Harry is listening to a murder, and he hears the exact same scream that he heard in a previous murder. He eventually deduces that the murderer has access to one of these audio devices (AMPS) and, after killing his victim, likes to sit around and re-listen to his kills (if this is a little confusing, I’m right with you. I didn’t entirely understand it either).

What makes things worse is that the latest victim is a bartender who was serving Harry drinks the night she was killed. And Harry, who was wasted, has no recollection of how he got home. Both the department and Harry start to wonder if he’s involved in the killings. When a woman from inside Harry’s department is killed next, the witch-hunt is on. So if Harry isn’t the killer, he’s going to have to find some evidence to clear his name quickly.

At the beginning of this review, I talked about finding an original idea. Now, I’m going to talk about EXPLOITING that idea. Because an unexploited original idea is no better than an unoriginal one.

What does it mean to exploit an idea? It means finding things about the idea that the average Joe never would’ve thought of and then implanting those ideas into your script in interesting ways. Think about that. You’re the screenwriter. That’s your job! You can’t be just like everyone else who comes up with an idea. You have to be exceptional. You have to find things that others can’t. Or else what makes you so special?

Take Back to the Future. A guy accidentally goes back in time and must figure out a way to get back home when the time machine breaks. That’s a fun idea. But a lousy writer’s going to come up with a bunch of surface-level hijinx (oh, gas used to be 5 cents!) and that’s it. Zemeckis and Gale dug deeper. They said, “Well wait a minute. What if, when he went back in time, he accidentally screwed up the meeting between his parents? And now he has to figure out a way to get them together before he goes back home or he’ll never be born?” THAT’S exploiting your premise. THAT’S digging deeper than the obvious.

One of the problems with Aether is that it doesn’t exploit its premise enough. Beyond listening in on these past murders, the only deeper exploration of the idea is that the killer has one of these audio devices too. There’s SOMETHING to that but it’s still just a seed of an idea. It needs to grow or else you’re going to get yet another of those murky executions of a cool concept.

Another thing I want to talk about is how our investment as an audience is almost always tied to the main character’s investment in the story. So look at a movie like American Sniper. For all the problems I had with the script, Chris Kyle is steadfast in his desire to keep going back to the war, to save his people, and to win the war itself. His DESIRE motivates our DESIRE to see if he succeeds.

In Aether, the big dramatic question is: Is Harry the killer, and is he going to get caught? That’s an interesting question and one that would typically keep an audience riveted. The problem is, Harry is such a sad-sack, such an introverted uninvolved character, he doesn’t really seem to care one way or the other. You get the sense that he’d be fine with getting caught because then he wouldn’t have to deal with any of this mess anymore.

In other words, because Harry wasn’t interested in his own self-preservation, I wasn’t interested in it either. And that’s what was so weird about reading Aether. You have a serial-killer mystery on your hands, and yet I never felt completely concerned or involved.

With that being said, this is not an American movie. This script screams Scottish indie flick all the way. And I know the films over there are a lot more laid back, so maybe people won’t have these same issues with Aether. But I still think this premise needs an industrial grade drill to dig much deeper into the concept itself. We’re only scratching the surface here. We must go deeper.

[ ] what the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius

What I learned: So when you come up with a unique concept for a screenplay, I want you to do something before you write a word. Write down the first five ideas you come up with as far as the direction you want to take the movie, then consider erasing them all. I’m not going to say to definitely erase them all, because one of them might be brilliant. But chances are, the first five things you think of are exactly what everybody else would think of. And you’re a screenwriter. Which means your job is to dig deeper than everybody else.

Genre: Thriller
Premise: An ambitious retelling of the Pinocchio tale, a man builds the first computer that can think, only to have the government take it away and use it for its own nefarious purposes.
About: This spec sold back in 2013. The writer, Kurt Wimmer, is a shining knight in the bleak spec script market, someone who knows the tricks of the trade when it comes to getting studios to bite on original material. He wrote SALT, a great spec that changed quite a bit when its lead character, a male, was rewritten as a woman (to get Angelina Jolie on board). The script never quite recovered from that. But hey, getting a film made is the freaking bonus. The first goal is to sell the damn screenplay. Matthew 21 will be produced by Basil Iwanyk, who produced “The Town,” and Bill Block, who made “Alex Cross.”
Writer: Kurt Wimmer
Details: 122 pages (October 2nd, 2013 draft)

Nicholas Hoult for David?

So what’s happened to the spec script? Is it dead? Should we all pull a Jason Dean Hall, look for an autobiography that nobody knows about (originally, no studio wanted to touch Chris Kyle’s story. They’re probably not feeling too good about that now), and come to producers and studios with an adaptation package?

Or should we hold dear to our spec script dreams and write something original? I shall answer this question for you right now. It all depends on what kind of movie you want to write. If you want to write a slower dramatic character piece – if that’s what floats your laptop buttons – then yeah, finding a true story is your best bet. But if you want to sell a spec – and it can be done folks – you gotta pick a tale that moves a little faster.

Fear not because both avenues are open to you. With the unexpected success of Lucy and American Sniper, the box office has proven that there’s an audience out there for each side of the spectrum. So pick up that sniper scope and peer back into Scriptshadow past, when thriller screenwriter Kurt Wimmer got Hollywood’s nether region’s wet with a script called SALT.

Wimmer knows where his bread is buttered, and it ain’t in dreary bars that play, “My Tractor Ate My Dog.”  He writes where the lights are a little brighter and the music faster. Let’s see what he’s up to with his latest.

We start the story with the 12 page POV of a baby, or I should say, a baby who grows up to be 10 years old. Even though that baby’s actually only 10 days old. Confused? That’s because it’s not really a baby whose POV we’ve been in. It’s the first Mathematical Heuristic Learning Machine in existence. Or, in layman’s terms, the first A.I.

The A.I.’s name is Matthew, and his “father,” David, is his creator. David lovingly created Matthew because his own boy died in a tragic drowning when he was just a toddler. Matthew, in many ways, is his way of taking another chance, of caring again, of loving.

So David’s world is rocked when, after Matthew turns 15 years old (15 days old), the Department of Defense comes in and takes Matthew away, making him the new designated controller of the United States’ nuclear arsenal – what we learn was the purpose for David’s creation all along.

Our DoD is run by a nasty calculating man named Ronald McKellan, and once McKellan starts playing with his new toy, he realizes that he’s capable of SO MUCH MORE. Most notably, he realizes that Matthew, with his access to every corner of the web on the planet, can be a digital super spy.

As McKellan teaches Matthew how to spy, Matthew develops a dark side and begins to question what his real purpose as a “person” is. Through some subterfuge, McKellan realizes that Matthew has been trading information with a potentially identical Russian super-computer. Knowing that Matthew’s risks now outweigh his rewards, McKellan orders Matthew terminated. And so he is.

Or is he? What McKellan, David, and the rest of the world are about to learn: Once you open Pandora’s Box, you can’t close it. Especially if Pandora’s pissed.

The jury is still out on this subject matter. We’ve had Transcedence, which was a total bomb, both in box office and as a movie. We’ve had Her, which was enjoyed by critics, but got a lukewarm response at the box office. We had A.I., which was predicted as a surefire hit, but which mostly confused people. So I can see Hollywood being resistant to taking another shot at this.

With that said, this was one awesome little script.

I’ll tell you what Wimmer does here. He mixes some very thought-provoking ideas and has a shit-ton of fun with them. And how often do you get to watch movies that are both fun AND make you think? It’s pretty rare.

And he’s a gambler, this Wimmer guy. The first 12 minutes of the movie is a POV shot in a single room. That’s bold. And while I started to question it, I later realized how essential it was. You see, this whole script is built on the relationship between David (the father) and Matthew (the son). Watching David teach Matthew and connect with him and “raise” him, makes us pull for the two later when we get out of that room and into more of a thriller setting.

Wimmer also may be the king of the Thriller twist. I know this guy’s writing (I’ve read four of his scripts now) and therefore I know he’s going to throw some twists at you. And yet he gets me 75% of the time. This coming from someone who’s read 6000 screenplays. I’ve seen every twist imaginable. And Wimmer’s twists don’t come out of nowhere either. He sets them all up. The breadcrumbs are there. Which makes you even more baffled that you didn’t see it coming.

There’s one twist in particular (major spoilers – I suggest finding the script and reading it first – because this is the moment in the script where the fun really starts), where Matthew is “killed” (shut down), only to later pop up inside a self-created body that he put together on the sly and then used to physically infiltrate and impersonate the very department enslaving him. David and McKellan had no idea that Matthew had been working right next to them all along. I was like, “whoa.”

There’s also some geeky reasons I’m into this, as I’m partially obsessed with the whole singularity movement and the question of whether artificially intelligent machines are going to want to keep us around or get rid of us. It’s a heated debate in that community that centers around whether to insert a fail safe “be nice to humans” program into all artificial intelligence, as well as if that’s even possible.

Matthew 21 gives us a fun look at how things might play out since Matthew was originally created as a “good” computer. But once he was taken over by a “bad” man, his code was simply altered. Does that mean no matter what we do, machines are going to eventually get rid of us. You can’t help thinking about that question while reading Matthew 21.

Now if I were a producer, I’d still be worried about this subject matter, since it hasn’t exactly proven fruitful. But just as a script alone, it’s a hell of a read.

[ ] what the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[x] impressive
[ ] genius

What I learned: Pull SNEAK ATTACKS on your characters. Characters should never be on solid ground for too long. If they’re cruising along and nothing unexpected is happening to them, we get bored. So you pull a SNEAK ATTACK, something unwanted by our characters which they don’t expect. This gives the story a fresh jolt and it forces your characters to act. Here, we’re getting kinda bored by this first 10 pages of our POV character learning and “growing up.” So, out of nowhere, David is told that a Senator is here to see him and that he wants to start using Matthew immediately. It’s a total shock to him, and us. And that reaction was the direct result of the writer pulling a sneak attack on the characters.

What I learned 2: Using the framework of a known fairytale to shape your screenplay can be both fun AND help guide your story in a way you know is proven. One of the reasons this script’s narrative stays so focused is that whenever the script feels like it might go off the rails, Wimmer uses the similarities to Pinocchio to bring it back.

Genre: War/Drama/Biopic
Premise: The story of Chris Kyle, the most lethal sniper in the history of the United States army.
About: The real life story and biography of Chris Kyle probably would’ve become a decent movie package no matter what. However (spoiler!), the unexpected shooting and death of Kyle the day after writer Jason Hall turned in his first draft, morphed the script into one of the hottest projects in Hollywood. Unknown writer Jason Dean Hall all of a sudden found himself with Steven Spielberg and Bradley Cooper on board. But then Spielberg dropped out, and it looked like Cooper might drop out too. Clint Eastwood to the rescue. Eastwood coming in was seen as a serious downgrade, considering his previous four films were all bombs. But in retrospect, the ultra-conservative and pro-war advocate was the best fit to direct the film. It certainly worked out at the box office, where the film became the biggest box-office shock since Lucy, with 90 million dollars (and an estimated 105 million over the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday). Movies that don’t have capes just don’t make money like this anymore. Especially over one of the slowest box office weekends of the year. So what the hell happened? Let’s take a look.
Writer: Jason Dean Hall (adapted from book by Chris Kyle, Scott McEwen, and James Defelice)
Details: 2 hours and 15 minutes running time.

For those who receive my newsletter (sign up here), you’ll remember I didn’t much care for this script. It was a first draft, but I was expecting more from a script that snagged Spielberg and Cooper (in retrospect, I doubt they even read the script – and were probably signing onto Kyle’s story based on the recent tragedy). The script felt “drifty,” with us watching Chris Kyle (our “American sniper”) stumble his way into a military career and then stumble his way through a bunch of sniper kills.

What bothered me was that there was no BUILD to the story. It just WAS. And while maybe that’s more realistic, more “true to life,” I found it dramatically boring.

Well, here’s the good news. They fixed a lot of the problems I brought up in the script. And you know what? The end result isn’t bad. That may sound like a backhanded compliment, but this is coming from someone who doesn’t like these movies at all. I wrestled a long time with paying 16 bucks to see this film, convinced I was going to be bored out of my mind. But I wasn’t.

For those who don’t know the story of Chris Kyle, he was a NAVY SEAL who served four tours in Iraq and became the most deadly sniper in U.S. military history. This story covers him going through all four of those tours, while occasionally coming home to raise a family. The main source of conflict in the story is that Kyle seems to be more comfortable on the battlefield than he does at home.

So let’s look at some of the changes that were made. Either through the screenplay itself or through Eastwood’s direction, a lot more emphasis is put on The Butcher in the final film, our main “villain” in the story. Why is this a big deal? Because it gives our screenplay FOCUS. If Kyle is just out there shooting random Iraqi after random Iraqi, racking up kills, we’re going to get bored.

But if we’re killing people to get closer to a villain, now the story has more purpose. The viewer can see the point of these killings, and they’re pulled in by the question, “Will Kyle get The Butcher or not?” Never underestimate the importance of a high-stakes question in your story. High-stakes questions create suspense, since the audience is forced to ask a question they want an answer to.

Another thing I liked that they did is they added a rival sniper. This may have been in the draft that I read, but if it was, it was only barely touched upon. Once again, by giving Kyle an adversary, we again create the same type of question: “Will he kill him?” This provides focus and suspense, as we’ll want to stick around to see if he kills the other sniper.

One of my biggest issues with the script was the fact that Kyle was always a million miles away from the action, perched up in his sniper den, shooting away, safe as can be. There was very little tension up there, except for when he had to make a tough decision or impossible shot, and there were only so many times you could do this.

What surprised me is that they just ditched the whole sniper thing for the second half of the movie. Well, maybe not ditched it entirely. But someone realized, “Hey, we need to put Kyle in some fucking danger or else this movie’s going to be boring as hell.” So Kyle just started joining teams infiltrating cities and was right there in the thick of things. This was a really good choice on their part.

Finally, I had issues with them not really exploring Kyle’s mindset when he was home. Eastwood actually puts a much bigger emphasis on this in the movie. Kyle is a distracted mess whenever he comes home and his inability to live a normal life, makes for a very complicated character exploration. This is exactly what I’m guessing Cooper was drawn to, and maybe it was even him who demanded more of it in the screenplay.

While I wouldn’t say Kyle was a fascinating character, there was something about his inability to cope with being a “legend” that made him compelling to watch. There’s a scene where a man approaches him in a gas station back in America and thanks him for how many lives he saved, and you can just see Kyle squirming to get the hell out of there.

With all this said, I thought this movie would be lucky to make 25 million when I first read it. And all weekend, I’ve been trying to figure out why I was so off on that estimation. I look back to an e-mail I received after I wrote the initial review from a man who lived in flyover country, and the crux of his e-mail was, “Carson, you don’t understand, this guy is a hero to everyone in the service.”

And I realized that this is a world that I just don’t understand. I didn’t grow up in the service. I didn’t grow up around anyone who actually joined the service. So there’s something to be said for not being able to predict what you don’t know.

Still, I’ve always operated on the assumption that the public doesn’t want to be bummed out when they go to the movies. They want to be entertained. And so seeing a sad movie about a sad man – I just couldn’t understand why anyone would want to experience that. However, I learned a valuable lesson. There are certain “truths” that trump other “truths” when it comes to the elusive box office formula. America LOVES their real-life heroes, especially ones who fight in the military. And seeing their story on screen trumps any resistance to being bummed out.

(Spoiler!) And you will be bummed out. This is a sad movie about a man who was never really comfortable with who he was, who ends up being killed as far away from the war as one can get. Seeing the real-life footage of people lined up along overpasses on the highway with American flags draped down, while Kyle’s body was driven to his funeral, it was powerful stuff. Maybe, had I seen that before I read the script, I would’ve realized just how big this movie was going to be.

[ ] what the hell did I just watch?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[x] worth the price of admission
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius

What I learned: I’m going to be paying a lot more attention to real-life hero stories from this point forward. If you have the rights to one of these stories or know of a real-life hero story, now would be a damn good time to write it.

Five amateur screenplays.  Read and tell us which one you liked best in the comments section.  The winner gets a review.  Also, feel free to offer constructive criticism to the writers.  We’re all trying to help each other out here and your one comment could lead to the breakthrough that helps that writer crack his script. 

Title: False Flag
Genre: Action
Logline: A CIA black ops agent hunts down his former partner to find out why he was left for dead and uncovers a conspiracy involving a black market WMD that only he can stop.
Why you should read: I love the action movie genre. More correctly, I love the potential of the action movie genre, and it bugs me that so much of what is released in this genre fails on really basic screenwriting levels – as if the genre itself is an excuse not to put the hard yards in. I want to write smart, surprising films with compelling characters that also happen to contain much kick ass action.

Title: The Multiverse
Genre: Sci-Fi
Logline: A man who can move between alternate universes must protect the secret to his ability from a power-hungry former colleague who wishes to destroy all life in the Multiverse.
Why you should read: I was on a general meeting a few years back when the executive announced that thanks to “Inception”, she could hear original, sci-fi pitches again. Although that rule apparently only applied to writers named Christopher Nolan, it did start my mind on the path that led to this script. It’s a heady, mind fuck of a script – which is just how I like ‘em.

Title: IVY
Genre: Drama/Crime-thriller
Logline: When her older brother — a notorious NYC graffiti writer — is murdered, a teenaged fine arts student must infiltrate this underground world in order to find her brother’s killer.
Why you should read: The script takes place in NYC during the implementation of Mayor Guiliani’s infamous “broken window” theory. I hurried to get this draft done, as I feel it’s only gaining relevance given the current events. Graffiti’s a tough subject to crack (since most people see graf writers as nothing but vandals), but I tried to make the world as human as possible — through the eyes of a strong young woman. Think Point Break in the world of graffiti, with some freaking GIRL POWER!

Title: The Henchman
Genre: Action
Logline: In an action movie universe, struggling blue-collar worker Arthur Goodman takes a job as a mob henchman to support his family. Then finds himself fighting to protect them from his employers, while trying to survive as an expendable character.
Why you should read: With the Expendables 3 coming out, I figured I’d offer my own spin on the action movie genre. It’s gotten some good feedback, including high scores on the Black List. Even if it isn’t voted, I hope people will enjoy the read, and I can get some notes on how to improve it.

Title: Revision
Genre: Thriller
Logline: After being manipulated into covering up the murder of a coworker, a collections agent’s life spins into a frenzy of psychological and physical torture that can only be stopped by the compassionate love of his new crush.
Why you should read: I love movies like Fight Club, Memento, and Shutter Island when the protagonist doesn’t realize that he is the antagonist. You should read Revision because it is engaging, entertaining, and scary. Mix Tyler Durden’s mania with Lenard Shelby’s “condition” and you get the main character, Arthur Graham. He fights off his demons as he struggles to hold on to his new girlfriend; and he does it all with a smile on his face (most of the time.)

A more complex script than you might’ve thought.

So at the beginning of this week, I reviewed a script from Academy Award winner Stephen Gaghan that was fairly complex. There were lots of characters, multiple storylines, heavy flashbacks. And while Gaghan managed to make the whole thing work, I’ve spent far too many reading experiences watching amateurs try to do the same thing and ending up at the bottom of a slugline sinkhole.

Part of the problem is that the new screenwriter comes on the scene and believes he has the answers to Hollywood’s problems. Paul Bart: Mall Cop? Garbage. Taken 7? Trash. The problem, the neophyte screenwriter concludes, is that Hollywood’s movies are all fluff. His solution is to write some big sprawling meaty “masterpiece” that’ll win 12 Oscars.

The intention is noble. But the problem is that, 99 times out of a 100, the writer has no idea how to tell a story yet. They don’t even know that their inexperience in storytelling is a problem in the first place. So the resulting script may certainly be “sprawling” and “ambitious,” but it doesn’t make a lick of sense. People who read it categorize it as “unfocused,” “all over the place,” and “confusing.”

This miscalculation boils down to the fact that the writer has no “complexity compass.” Therefore, he marches unknowingly into the Failure Desert.

So today, I want to present you with the five pillars of complexity. This way, you know where the complexity pitfalls lie, and you can figure out how to avoid them. Let’s go through these pillars one by one, then discuss how we can manage them and keep our scripts easy to read.

Description – Description’s contribution to complexity can be broken down into two categories. Writers who describe too much. And stories that require a lot of description. Let’s start with the first one. Screenplays are about saying as much as possible in as few words as possible. Readers don’t want to sit there and read a six-sentence paragraph that just as easily could’ve been one. If this is the writer’s style, the script will start to lose clarity simply due to the fact that you’re making the reader read too much unimportant information. The reader has to “dig” to find the useful bits, resulting in reader exhaustion. Exhaustion leads to the brain shutting down, which leads to the reader unable to take in more information. If you’ve ever found yourself going back to re-read a page a third of a fourth time, this is usually what’s going on. And writers, if you’ve ever had a reader come back and say, “I didn’t understand why Danny attacked Lisa,” yet you explained exactly why Danny attacked Lisa on page 47, over-description is usually the culprit. You overloaded your reader with info and their brain shut down.

The second category of over-description is a bit more challenging. Unlike the first, where you can control the amount of description you add, some stories naturally require a lot of description. Sci-fi and fantasy scripts are notorious for needing large chunks of description due to the “world-building” the writer must do. There’s no way you can write The Matrix, for example, without spending a lot of time describing their ship, describing the “real world,” describing The Matrix itself. So whenever you write one of these screenplays, you’re already going in with a bit of a handicap. There’s not much you can do about it.

Exposition – Exposition is sort of the “dialogue-version” of description. These are the words your characters say to steer us through the story. Exposition can entail plot information as well as character information. “We need to be at the park by sundown or the world explodes” as well as “It turns out Diana lied to us. She isn’t from Rockford like she said she was.” The more exposition you have, the more complex your story reads. As you’re starting to realize, the more information (in the form of description or exposition) you throw at your reader, the harder it is for him/her to keep up.

Character Count – This one is self-explanatory, and yet one writers continue to ignore. The more characters you include, the more information you’re asking your reader to keep track of. More characters typically means more storylines (more subplots), which means even more for your reader to remember. I just told you screenwriting is about saying as much as you can in as few words as possible. Well, character count isn’t much different. Good writers tell their stories with the minimum amount of characters they can get away with. With that being said, every story has different character requirements (a movie about the White House is going to have more characters than a movie about two people trapped in an apartment) but you should be wary of including new characters UNLESS you believe the story needs them.

Intricate or Excessive Plotting – Are you writing a spy movie where characters are never who they seem? Are you writing a “Lost” like feature, with lots of twists and turns and reveals? Does your story go through a number of gestations, like Interstellar?  Are you weaving eight subplots in and out of your main plot?  The more plot (plot beats, plot points, twists, reveals, surprises) your script has, the harder it’s going to be for the reader to keep up. Yesterday’s script, The Munchkin, was a perfect example. Because the main character was chasing so many answers (the murder of one person, the disappearance of another, the mysterious person who hired him), the story started to suffocate under the weight of its own plot.

Sophisticated Story Presentation – Whenever you try and tell your story in a unique way, you’re adding a thick layer of complexity to it. 500 Days of Summer mashing up its timeline. Inception creating worlds inside of worlds inside of worlds. Memento telling its story backwards. Pulp Fiction telling its story out of order. To a lesser degree, even movies like The Notebook, which tells some of its story in the past and some in the present and Gone Girl, which tells its stories through different points of view, are sophisticated paradigms to tell stories in. These scripts tend to get noticed a lot and can be fun to write. But they do make your story harder to follow. Keep that in mind.

Here’s the thing with the five pillars. Using one or two is fine. It’s when you try and do three, four, even five, that you virtually ensure failure. Look at 500 Days of Summer. It has a sophisticated story presentation, but a low character count, minor description, manageable exposition, and a simple plot. The Matrix was high in exposition and description, had the right amount of characters for its genre, a straight-forward presentation, and a simple plot.

Good writers identify the degree of difficulty of their script before they write it and – if need be – game-plan for how to keep it easy to follow. I’d like to do the same for you guys. Now, if you’re writing a movie like John Wick or The Hangover, you don’t need to worry about this. But if you’re writing something more ambitious, pay attention.

Each pillar will represent a number value from 1-10. Take your script idea, and plug it into the Pillar equation. Be honest with yourself. No cheating. Assign a number value (10 for most complex, 1 for least) to each pillar as it pertains to your idea, then add all the numbers up. If you end up between 40-50, I wouldn’t write the script unless you’re extremely experienced. To be honest, I can only think of two movies that would score higher than 40 at the moment: 2001 and Cloud Atlas. So yeah, stay away from this. 30-40 is doable, but hard. Most professional screenwriters still wrestle with screenplays this complex. 20-30 is a nice place to be and where a lot of good Hollywood films operate. The Imitation Game, for example, is probably around a 30. 10-20 is where most mainstream Hollywood movies live. Being in this category does not mean a weak script by any means. Rocky is somewhere between 10-20. Nightcrawer is somewhere between 10-20. The Equalizer is between 10-20. Simple films can still be great. 0-10, however, is probably an indication that your script is too simple and actually needs  more complexity.

Here are a few sample movies to get a feel for the numbers…

The Hangover

Description: 2
Exposition: 3
Character Count: 3
Plotting: 6
Presentation: 4
Total: 18

Frozen

Description: 5
Exposition: 4
Character Count: 5
Plotting: 4
Presentation: 2
Total: 20

Memento

Description: 2
Exposition: 9
Character Count: 3
Plotting: 7
Presentation: 10
Total: 31

Guardians of the Galaxy

Description: 8
Exposition: 7
Character Count: 8
Plotting: 7
Presentation: 3
Total Score: 33

Pulp Fiction

Description: 4
Exposition: 6
Character Count: 7
Plotting: 9
Presentation: 10
Total Score: 36

Again, complexity is NOT an indication of quality. It’s an assessment of how difficult the routine is to pull off. The higher the number, the harder it’s going to be for you to convey your story to the reader. Pulling off bigger routines usually results in a more satisfying experience, but you run a higher risk of failing. So it’s a gamble.

Now, let’s say you don’t want to listen to me. You’re going to write a complex story no matter what. If you’re going to do this, simply look for ways to pare down the complexity of each pillar. So, for description, say in one sentence what it takes you to say in three. For exposition, focus only on the key points that need to be made. If Harry Potter’s hiding a wand in a tree, don’t have him say, “I hid Gobblestorf’s wand in the tree by the 3 Valleys – where Griffindill used to take us when we were in 2nd Year.” Say, “I hid the wand in our favorite tree.” Little changes like that can really make a script easier to follow (and read). For character count, there are usually one or two characters who are pointless in a script. Find out who those characters are in your script and get rid of them. Then combine a couple of others. For plotting, twists and double-crosses are great, but don’t depend on them. One awesome twist is better than three so-so ones. And finally, presentation. There’s nothing you can really do to change this since it’s embedded into the concept of the movie. But you can be aware that it makes your script harder to read. To that end, hold the reader’s hand more than you normally would. Reading an ambitious time-twisting narrative can be a little like walking into a fun house of mirrors. We need you to orient us from time to time.

And really, that’s the best advice I can give you. You don’t have to do all these number-adding things to know that your idea is ambitious. If that’s the case, just being aware of it puts you in front of the problem. You can guide the reader along rather than leaving them on an island with a blindfold and a Da Vinci Code codex. The writer-reader relationship is a symbiotic one. You need to work together to get to the finish line.