Get Your Script Reviewed On Scriptshadow!: To submit your script for an Amateur Review, send in a PDF of your script, along with the title, genre, logline, and finally, something interesting about yourself and/or your script that you’d like us to post along with the script if reviewed. Use my submission address please: Carsonreeves3@gmail.com. Remember that your script will be posted. If you’re nervous about the effects of a bad review, feel free to use an alias name and/or title. It’s a good idea to resubmit every couple of weeks so your submission stays near the top.
Genre: Action-Thriller
Premise (from writer): When an ex-UFC fighter reluctantly accepts a kidnapping job from the Russian mob, he sneaks into an upscale apartment complex to capture the target but finds himself in a high intensity hostage situation when armed terrorists simultaneously take over the building in a Mumbai-style attack.
Why You Should Read (from writer): Been hacking away at this craft for several years now. Have written several scripts, read countless others. It can be a frustrating grind — writing scripts and trying to find success with them. Sometimes I’d love to quit. But I just can’t. Nothing else even remotely interests me the same way. — This is a classic blood-pumping action thriller with a modern touch that should be a fun ride if it ever makes it to the screen. But don’t take my word for it. One reviewer had the following to say: ”Although there are big budget explosions and gun fighting scenes, the script never feels cliche in its execution of plot. It doesn’t lean on the violence and pays close attention to staying original and dark throughout. This could be a big, blockbuster film that would attract a broad audience and potentially an A-list actor.” — Also, it’s a quick 105 pages with sparse, vertical writing. At the very least you won’t get a headache reading it.
It’s done well in contests (initial draft was top 15% in Nicholl) and on the Black List (revised draft recently received an overall rating of ’8′), but I’d love to get it some more exposure. The more eyes on it, the better, right?
Writer: Bill Anthony Lawrence
Details: 105 pages
Is Andrew Lincoln ready to make the jump to the big screen? This might be the perfect vehicle.
Yesterday’s late posting (sorry about that guys) stirred up a bit of controversy in the comments section, with someone saying, “Is this all ya got?” In five years of reading Amateur scripts on Scriptshadow, is this really the best you can come up with?
Now personally, going off all the professional and amateur scripts I’ve read, I think yesterday’s top 10 is AT LEAST better than the bottom 25% of the Black List, with the only difference being the Black List writers have agents blasting their scripts all over town, to the very voters who vote on the list.
However, I will admit that we haven’t found anything world-changing. But that’s because no one’s writing anything world-changing. Not amateurs, not pros, not anyone. A world-changing script (which I’d consider “American Beauty”) comes around once every few years. “Genius” scripts, maybe once a year. Really really awesome scripts, maybe 3-5 times a year.
It’s really hard to do.
And I do think there’s a bit of a “lightning in a bottle” thing going on when it comes to writing a great script. Something you only realize you’re onto once you’re 40-50 decisions deep into the process. There’s no real way of knowing you’re there until you’re there. And there’s no way of really going back if you aren’t. You’ve already committed a ton of time to the script.
I’m a Chicago Bulls fan. Which has been hard since Michael Jordan left the team. We have zero talent on our team. The kind of situation where if a player goes down, we’re asking people on the streets if they know how to dribble a ball.
But the Bulls have this coach. And the coach only requires one thing from his players. That they give their all every single second of every game. And I don’t mean that in some vague “try your hardest all the time” kind of way. I mean literally EVERY. SINGLE. SECOND.
So while the other team is strolling up, dribbling the ball, the Chicago defender will be right up in his face, waving his hands around, dancing his feet back and forth, non-stop high energy ball all the time, making that other guy miserable. If a player stops moving for so much as a second, the coach calls a timeout and benches him.
And you know what? They’ve been one of the best teams in the league because of it – finishing way higher than they have any business finishing. And it all has to do with effort. They just outwork the more talented teams. Finding lightning in a bottle is near-impossible. But effort is something all of you have control over. You may not be the best in your class. But if you give your all on every single element, if you work your ass off, you can hang with writers a lot better than you.
Where does that leave us? Oh yeah, reviewing a script! Roy Spence Jr. used to be one of these badass MMA fighters who could choke people out with his legs and stuff. You know, one of those cool cage-fighting guys that laugh at boxers because they’re such pu*&ies. Now he runs an honest business while occasionally looking for his Russian wife, who deserted him and took their only daughter.
When a local Russian crime boss tells Roy that he knows where to find his daughter, and he’ll offer that information to Roy if he does a job for him, Roy’s in. Of course, Roy has no idea what he’s in for. Turns out he has to find and bring back an FBI informant, who’s hiding in one of most heavily secured buildings in the city.
Roy suits up and heads over to the building, gets all the way up the 30th floor, where the informant, Marat Dementyev, is located, only to find that Marat’s being guarded by a powder keg of an FBI agent named Sandra Packard. Packard neutralizes Roy, but before she can take him down for good, explosions start happening all over the building.
After looking into it, they realize a terrorist organization consisting of 40+ men, is coming up the building to get that informant. Roy and Sandra are now forced to work together to get Marat, and themselves, out of the building in one piece. Wouldn’t you know it though, there are a lot of unexpected surprises along the way. Let’s just say other people have thought way further down the road than Roy has. And they’re going to make sure he’s not walking away with Marat.
You know how everyone pitches their action script as “Die Hard on a plane,” “Die Hard on a bus,” “Die Hard in a 5 star restaurant.” The funniest thing I’ve ever heard is this producer who said that he was once pitched, “Die Hard in a building.” So ignorant had people in this town become, that they didn’t even know what movie they were referencing anymore.
And indeed, one look at Nerve and Sinew, and it appears to be the embodiment of that pitch! Die Hard in a building, right? That’s certainly what you’re worried about going in. Another action-thriller clone, so many of which gum up the script airwaves to the point where Hollywood has to cough them out on a weekly basis. Maybe that’s why we have so many earthquakes.
But I’ll tell ya this. Nerve and Sinew is not your average action-thriller. This is good! I mean, it’s kind of formulaic, but it’s got its own thing going on as well. One of the hardest things to do in screenwriting is to have a simple plot, yet keep your audience guessing. And that’s what I liked most about this script. You think you know what’s going to happen next, but you don’t.
The first thing Lawrence did right was the opening. Instead of only following Roy’s storyline, we’re following Sandra’s also. And with Sandra, we’re not quite sure what’s going on with her. So there’s a mystery box quality to her storyline. Eventually, near the end of the first act, the two storylines meet up, and we get some semblance of what she’s up to.
But at that very moment, a third entity, the terrorists, show up, and neither Sandra or Roy know who they are or why they’re here. That’s good writing. As soon as one thread is settled, you want to introduce a new one. The audience always has to have a carrot dangling in front of them.
The script then segues into one of my favorite devices, the “temporary truce” between two enemies, who now have to work together. This allows conflict (them each needing to do things their way) inside of conflict (having to maneuver around the terrorists). Thats’ the “fresh piece” that separates this from Die Hard. It’s two people, both of whom don’t like each other, forced to work together.
The only problem I had with the script was that it may have tried getting too cute. Spoilers abound. Halfway through the script, Lawrence made the daring choice to have our hero escape the building. But it’s a false escape. It turns out the informant was a fake. The real informant is back inside. Which means Roy must go back in.
The problem I had with this is that you basically say to the audience, “Getting out of the building isn’t that difficult.” Because they already did it once. And there’s something about completing the goal and then having to go back in and complete the same goal that feels a little repetitive. I just thought, “Haven’t we been here already?”
Also, from that point on, the story and the elements weren’t as clever. And how could they be? We’d already been down this road.
It’s one of those 50/50 choices that are really hard to gauge as a writer in the moment. I can see why Lawrence made the choice (Roy getting out of the building at the midpoint is completely unexpected, and the detour informant is a nice surprise). But in making it, you force the story into a weird corner where everything feels kind of sleepy. Like giving kids cake at a birthday party, having them go outside and play around for awhile, then bringing them back in for more cake. No matter how you cut it, the enthusiasm for the cake is never going to be as high the second time around.
But I’ll give it to Lawrence, this is really solid writing. I can totally see him writing a big action flick assignment in a few years if he keeps at it. And who knows, he might even get this one made. All the elements are there for a movie. No doubt about that. If he can pull off something a little more exciting with that second half, I may be in. Oh yeah, and this needs a new title! Scriptshadow Nation – Help him out!
Script link: Nerve And Sinew
[ ] what the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[x] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Never weigh your twist on the twist alone. What’s more important is what the twist does to your story afterwards. A great in-the-moment twist is worthless if it saps the air out of the balloon for the next 30 pages.
Here they are folks! These are the top 10 Amateur scripts ever submitted to Scriptshadow (not including The Disciple Program and Where Angels Die). My voting system works like this. People send in their top 10, and then I assign a sliding point system to each entry. So if something finishes number one on someone’s list, I give that 10 points. Finishing number two gets you 9 points. Three gets you 8 points. I then tally all the points up. I’ve included the point totals of all ten. I believe over 300 people voted!
Inside the numbers: Only one script that got a “wasn’t for me” made the list (Primal, at number 8). The Savage South, a rather low key script at the time, had a lot more supporters than I thought! Finishing at number 8. Things got REALLY crowded at the bottom and some scripts JUST MISSED the list. The three that were the closest were Goodbye Gene, with 170 points, A Bullet For My Best Friend, with 163, and Guest, with 156. Also a sorta surprise was Grendl’s Real Monsters making the list. A lot of people seemed to like that one. Well, I’ll leave it at that. Here is the list. Congratulations to the top 10, and thanks to everyone who voted!!!
1) Rose in the Darkness – 533 points – A secluded boy’s way of life is threatened when he befriends Rose – the girl whom his parents have imprisoned in the family attic.
2) Patisserie – 502 points – A young Jewish woman in occupied France escapes the Nazis by changing places with a shop owner. But as her love grows for the other woman’s husband and child, so does her guilt.
3) Fascination 127 – 419 points – A group of men are hired by a mysterious client to remove Jim Morrison’s casket, give it to him for 24 hours and then return the casket into the ground before it is publicly exhumed to be moved to the United States.
4) Keeping Time – 390 points – A for-hire time traveler who specializes in “preventing” bad relationships meets his match with a mysterious woman who claims to also be a traveler and is determined to stop him from completing his mission.
5) Fatties – 308 points – When a lonely masochistic chubby chaser is abducted by two fat lesbian serial killers, it’s the best thing that ever happened to him.
6) The Devil’s Hammer – 297 points – When an outlaw biker, and soon to be father, attempts to leave the sins of his old life behind, he is pushed by a vengeful Sheriff into the arms of an ancient cult of disease worshiping sadists.
7) Primal – 234 points – After survivors of a recent hurricane relocate to a quiet Louisiana bayou town, a creature goes on a nightly rampage of terror and carnage. Convinced it is the legendary werewolf known as loup garou, an intrepid teen vows to discover the beast’s true identity and destroy it.
8) The Savage South – 201 points – When a professional contract killer discovers he’s become the target of an assassination himself, he teams up with the would-be killer to figure out who set them up.
9) Real Monsters – 180 points – The members of a small Irish town housing a supposed Lochness-like monster in their lake find their world turned upside-down when an American documentary crew arrives to find out if the monster is real.
10) Reunion – 176 points – At their ten-year reunion, a formerly bullied outcast decides to enact revenge on the cool kids who made his life miserable.
Genre: Sci-fi Thriller
Premise: In a future where a portion of the population displays exceptional intelligence, an agent for the U.S. government must stop these “brilliants” from starting a war.
About: “Brilliance” was adapted from the best-selling novel of the same name. The producers have been out there working hard to get an A-lister attached, but haven’t succeeded yet. For awhile, Will Smith was attached. When he dropped out, they went after newly minted Oscar winner Jared Leto, but he passed. They look to be regrouping before they target their next actor. Marcus Sakey, who wrote the novel, is best known for writing crime novels set in Chicago, making Brilliance a departure for him. David Koepp, who adapted the book, is one of the top 5 scripters in Hollywood. He’s the big gun you call in to make people in town take your project seriously.
Writer: David Koepp (based on the book by Marcus Sakey)
Details: 126 pages – August 11, 2013 draft
What would you do if you were 100 IQ points smarter than everyone else? What would be your first order of business? Personally, I’d learn how to predict the stock market, become a billionaire, buy Twitter, then only allow one user, myself. And I’d tweet only 80s movies catchphrases like, (Ah-nold accent) “I let him go”. I know, I know. Cliché. But when you’re a genius, being cliché no longer bothers you. Your very existence is unique enough to negate all cliches.
Brilliance is about the smartest men in the room, which I always find interesting because if you’re writing about the smartest people in the room, don’t you need to be the smartest man in the room? How can you write genius if you, yourself, aren’t a genius?
Then again, “Lucy” did a jammin job of creating a genius hero. And Luc Besson can’t be that smart, can he? He created Ruby Rhod in The Fifth Element. I suppose with a combination of intense research and clever writing, you can fool the audience. But it’s not easy. And I didn’t expect it to be easy in “Brilliance.”
It’s been 30 years since a small subset of people on Earth started displaying extreme intelligence. Enough time to develop a system to identify these people, cultivate them, and integrate them into society in ways to help the planet become a better place.
Unfortunately, a sort of intelligence racism has evolved, due to a large group of “abnorms” jetsetting around the planet and blowing things up. These intelligence terrorists, led by a mysterious figure known as John Smith, are gearing up for a war, a war that may make anyone not an “abnorm” abnormally part of the past.
Enter agent Nick Cooper. Nick is an abnorm himself, and an expert at reading people. We meet him as he’s tracked down a terrorist at a bar. He tells her he knows she’s got a disk drive in her pocket because, like, he’s smart n stuff. That drive contains information on the next terrorist attack. Unfortunately the woman, Shannon, gets away, and Nick must chase her halfway across the country.
He finally catches her and, as you’d expect, realizes not everything is what it seems. Turns out his agency wasn’t telling him the whole truth. (spoiler) These attacks were actually coming from within the government. And wouldn’t you know it? The terrorist leader? John Smith? Turns out he’s a pretty good guy!
After Nick comes to grips with this news, he races to stop the next attack, an attack that may set off World War 3. That’s easier said than done since almost everyone he encounters is an abnorm. But Nick is a resourceful guy. And let’s not forget, smart. If there’s anyone who can save the world, it might be this guy.
Brilliance seems to be the ideal book adaptation. The story was made for the big screen. An active main character. A world on the verge of war. A hero who’s always on the run. A hook you can sell on a poster.
But that blessing is also the book’s biggest curse. This story was so perfect for the big screen that it doesn’t have anything else to offer. It’s your garden-variety Hollywood thriller. Which is ironic, since as you can see on the cover, Lee Child notes it’s a story you’ve never read before. And I just linked to an article by Lee Child Monday. But I feel like those author quotes are always friends helping each other out. It’s hard for me to take them seriously.
The hook, our supposed “fresh” take, is that a number of people are “brilliant.” Unfortunately, my worst fears were realized. Nobody really seems that brilliant at all. At least actively. Yeah, there’s the guy who bought Wyoming after figuring out the stock exchange, but we don’t SEE that intelligence in action. It’s relayed to us after the fact.
As far as what’s happening in the moment, nobody seems that smart at all. For example, Shannon, who’s “smart specialty” is being elusive, is able to blend into a crowd seemlessly. I don’t know what that has to do with intelligence.
I have a lot more admiration for the Lucy film now, as at least that displayed some thought into how intelligence works. The way Lucy was able to read people’s minds through the vibrations coming off of their heads. How each level up in intelligence was accompanied by a more autistic disposition. How her cells were accelerating out of control to keep up with all the changes.
The most intelligent thing we see anybody do here is a character saying, “You already know what I’m feeling, don’t you?”
I guess what I’m trying to say is, if you’re going to sell us on really intelligent people, there has to be a ‘wow’ factor involved with those people, something where we go, “Holy sh*t, they are f*&king smart!” I had that moment a few times in Lucy. I didn’t have it here.
As for the structure of the script, it felt off. In the first half, Nick’s playing for the good guys. At the midpoint, he says he has to infiltrate the terrorists from the inside, so he goes and pretends to be a part of the bad guys.
I didn’t buy this. Why would the terrorists, who know Nick, believe he’s one of them now? I never took Terrorism 101, but I know one of the first lessons they teach you is not to take a high-ranking official from the other team at his word when he says, “I’m one of you now.”
The personal stakes feel low here as well. Remember, the overall stakes are different from the personal stakes. The overall stakes are what happens on a large scale. Those were there. If Nick didn’t succeed, World War 3 was going to happen. But the personal stakes were Nick’s “abnorm” daughter, who the agency had just found out about, being placed in an “abnorm” school, where Nick wouldn’t be able to see her often.
This is important to remember. Stakes are relative. If you’re writing an indie movie about a mother and her new boyfriend and the boyfriend wants to put the woman’s daughter in a boarding school so he can have her all to himself, the stakes in that situation feel high.
But here, in a world where World War 3 is about to happen, a girl being forced into a special school feels like a minor inconvenience for the main character. We needed personal stakes that matched the gravitas of the rest of the script.
If Brilliance is going to work, it can’t feel like a garden variety on-the-run thriller. The “powers” of the intelligent people need to be bigger and more imaginative, the kind of things that get audiences talking. A woman so intelligent she can blend into crowds doesn’t exactly get me firing up the Tweet Deck (“Did you see that girl blend into the crowd!? Yikes. Now that was a girl who knew how to blend!”). You need those moments like in Lucy, the kind of moments you can feature in trailers. Sadly, I didn’t read a single trailer moment here.
[ ] what the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] brilliant
What I learned: Designating description as passive or active. – When it’s time to describe something in your script, the first thing you need to do is decide whether the element is active or passive. An active element is anything that’s going to factor into the story somehow. If you’re describing a new building where an adjacent crane is going to become a part of your characters’ escape later on, you want to take some time and describe the crane. It’s an active element. If, however, the building is just a building and won’t be used in any unique way after the scene, it becomes a passive element, and therefore deserves no special distinction. Keep the description as short and generic as possible.
I bring this up because amateurs tend to think everything should be described as an active element. It doesn’t matter if it’s a house, a refrigerator, a street, a car. They over-describe these things to death and it KILLS the read because it forces the reader to trudge through a bunch of description that ultimately doesn’t matter. Imagine, for example, your character is flying into Washington D.C. How might you describe the approach?
The beginner writer focuses on the way the moon reflects off the building windows and how the people on the ground look like ants in some sort of post-apocalyptic wasteland. Blah blah blah. NO! Here’s how Koepp describes the approach.
Gliding silently through the sky over Washington, D.C., we see the familiar landmarks — the Washington Monument, the Lincoln Memorial, the White House.
That’s it. That’s all we need because the city is a passive element in this context. Now if your hero was flying into Dubai, and a key scene takes place later on the city’s tallest skyscraper, that makes the skyscraper an active element, which means you might want to give it a more elaborate description. But it all comes down to designating what the element is. Figure out if it’s active or passive, then describe accordingly.
Genre: TV show – Drama
Premise: A young ballet actress with a haunting past joins one of the top ballet companies in New York. Once there, she quickly realizes just how competitive the New York ballet scene is.
About: As it became harder for actress Moira Walley-Beckett’s to find acting roles (she had parts in over 35 TV shows), she transitioned into writing, joining writing staffs for a few failed shows before eventually finding a writing gig on the short lived but heavily hyped, Pan Am. That exposure helped her become part of one of the most famous writing staffs in history, that of Breaking Bad. Walley-Beckett actually wrote two of the most talked about episodes in the series – first, Fly, with co-writer Sam Catlin. And then Ozymandias, which is considered to be one of the best television episodes in history. Now that Breaking Bad is over, Walley-Beckett is heading out into the scary world of show creation, where she’ll be the big writer in the room. Does her pilot warrant this promotion? Let’s find out.
Writer: Moira Walley-Beckett
Details: 60 pages
One of the first things you want to look for with any idea is irony, as it continues to be the best way to sell a show/movie. A lawyer who can’t lie. A vegetarian chef opens the best steakhouse in the city. The ballet profession’s dirty little secret – that it’s the most abusive and cruel profession of all. Without irony, you’re forced to cram as much information about your show as possible into the logline to help the consumer get what’s unique about it. And no matter how hard you try, you can never seem to make it all fit.
Taking on ballet’s dirty little secrets felt right for a Breaking Bad alum. That writer’s room was used to dealing with dirty little secrets. But the ticket for this anticipation train comes with an asterisk at the top. Wasn’t this idea just done in movie form a few years ago in Black Swan?
I’m seeing more and more of this as scripted television continues its Big Bang expansion. Instead of looking for new ideas, writers are taking their favorite movies and simply turning them into TV shows.
Did you like Twister? Make a show about storm chasers. Neighbors? Make a show about a frat house. Lucy? Make a show about a secret agent who gets really smart. It’s gotten to the point where writers are being straight up lazy. And the only way lazy entries work is if you can bring something fresh to the idea. The fact that you didn’t work at all to come up with the idea in the first place sheds doubt on this possibility. But I’m going to hold out hope. I’d love to watch the ballet version of Breaking Bad.
When we meet 21 year old Claire Robbins, she’s running away in the middle of the night. What she’s running from is a mystery, but by the look on her face, you can tell it’s haunt-you-for-the-rest-of-your-life bad.
Claire escapes on a train and arrives in New York City the next day, where she knows a total of zero people. Luckily, Claire’s got one hell of a skill to fall back on. Girl can dance. So she heads to one of the best ballet companies in the city, snags an audition, and kills it. She makes it into the troupe.
If you don’t already know, ballet chicks are the most ruthless, the most jealous, the most nasty girls on the planet. Actually, I don’t know if that’s true or not. But that’s the way they were portrayed in Black Swan and since I base all my knowledge in life on movies, I’m assuming this to be fact.
When the other girls figure out how awesome Claire is, they get even more jealous. And when cut-throat bi-sexual troupe leader, Paul, decides to have her headline his next show, well, the jealousy hits an all time high.
Claire somehow makes a couple of friends, including Mia, who spends more time banging random hook-ups than breathing. And Daphne, who secretly works at a strip club in order to afford an apartment overlooking the Hudson River.
Unfortunately, that past she ran away from ends up finding her, a man she shares a terrifying secret with. Will she be able to handle the pressure of New York City and her elite ballet troupe, or will she falter and have to go back to her hometown, where, surely, this horrible secret will continue?
Well, let’s just get this out of the way. Flesh and Bone failed test number 1. It wasn’t fresh. This was almost EXACTLY like Black Swan. A timid little girl. A dance troupe where all the girls hate her. An overbearing troupe leader who uses his power for inappropriate means. The aging girl who sees the new girl as a threat to her spot. Our heroine gets the lead part. We even have a wild night out to a strip club, similar to the famous night out between Natalie Portman and Mila Kunis.
It’s a weakness every writer seems susceptible to. We fall in love with certain movies, and we want to make something similar. So we go in with the best of intentions, oblivious to the fact that our movie/show is the EXACT SAME THING as our favorite movie.
I mean we could literally write a beat for beat remake of Titanic and not know it until someone says, “You do know they already made a movie about the Titanic with a doomed couple that revolved around a missing diamond that sunk with the ship, right?” Ohhhhh, we think as we’re counting future box office receipts in our head. Yeah, I guess I didn’t consider that.
But if you’re able to move past the show’s common bond with the Aronofsky thriller, you’ll find some good stuff. What a TV show allows you to do is explore the more specific areas of a subject matter, enabling you to go beyond the classic movie beats into stuff like bleeding ballet shoes at the end of a dance, pulling an entire toenail off before the next session, and those dirty ugly locker room sessions before and after practice (girls stuffing paper towels into their no-no area because they forgot to bring tampons).
Also, a few of the characters are well-drawn. I liked the sex-crazed Mia. I liked secret stripper Daphne. This easily could’ve devolved into wall-to-wall darkness, which can drown a show (AMC’s “Low Winter Sun”). These two lit things up with their overbearing personalities, a nice contrast to many of the unscrupulous things happening elsewhere in the story.
In fact, there was enough good for me to almost give this a worth the read… until the ending. Now this is a huge spoiler, so turn away if you don’t want to know. But basically, a guy from back home keeps calling Claire throughout the episode, but she keeps avoiding him.
Finally, in the last scene, she answers, and we cut to the caller, Bryan, sitting in Claire’s bedroom back home. After a few exchanges, we realize that Bryan is Claire’s brother. And he’s beating off. To Claire. This is when we learn that Claire ran away from an incestual relationship with her brother. Cut to black.
Uhhhh…SAY WHAT!??
Where the HECK did this come from??? Where was this set up? What in King Joseph’s name happened earlier in the episode to indicate that incest was going to be a theme in this story?
I couldn’t believe that after a pretty well-written pilot, I witnessed a classic rookie mistake. The twist ending that has nothing to do with anything, and is only there for shock value. Twist endings need to be set up with a series of hidden clues to work. We get none of that here, turning the ending into a desperate gimmick rather than an “Oh my God!” moment.
To be honest, I think Moira could’ve saved this pilot with only a slight shift in her approach. One of the friend characters, Daphne, secretly moonlights as a stripper. Why didn’t Moira move this character angle over to Claire??? That’s a hook for a show. A girl at one of the most prestigious dance companies in New York moonlights as a stripper. There’s your irony. Now you have someone who has to hide that world while she becomes a star in the ballet world. I don’t know how long you could keep that going. She might have to quit stripping during the first or second season, but it’s a great place to start a character. Way more interesting (and relevant) than Incest Ballet Chick.
Not a badly written pilot at all. But a few questionable choices kept it from reaching its potential.
[ ] what the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: The “mystery box past” is a staple in television, and it’s a great way to hook your viewer for future episodes. You simply hint that something bad happened in your hero’s past, and if that something sounds dirty or scandalous or intriguing enough, the viewer will want to tune in for future episodes to find out what it is. We saw it with Scandal (the main character had an affair with the president), we saw it with Lost (with all the characters) and we see it here, with the incest shocker. I didn’t like the incest shocker, but the mystery box past is still a great tool to use when used well.
Jared is all about Mish-Mashing!
This whole month has been nuts, giving me very little time to get 5 posts a week up. Monday has been suffering, which I apologize for. But it may stay that way for the next few weeks so bear with me.
So what’s been going on in the world? Well, this past weekend was the worst box office frame of the year, ending an even worse summer. We’re down 20% in receipts from last year. Less and less people are going to see movies, and if they don’t figure out why and stop it, something bad is going to happen.
I recently watched the Jared Leto documentary, Artifact, about how his band sold 5 million albums, only to come home from their tour and be told by their label that they (the band) owed them (the label) 2 million dollars. The band tells them to eff off. The label then sues them for 30 million dollars. The documentary is about Jared and his group debating whether to release their next album independently in the midst of this lawsuit.
The doc is good, but it was a section near the middle that really got me. It covered the downfall of the music industry over the last couple of decades. Basically, everything was changing around the music business (most prominently, the move from physical to digital) and the people working at the music lables were too dumb to realize it in time. They watched as the entire world changed around them before doing anything, and by the time they did, it was too late. A company that previously knew nothing about music, was now taking all their money (iTunes). The labels now make half as much money as they did 15 years ago.
I often wonder – is the same thing happening to the movie industry? Like the music business, are we too slow to recognize the effects of the changes happening around us? Long-form media (television) with movie-like production value has pulled more and more writers away from the movie business, and now it’s pulling the talent too.
Indie movies are simultaneously debuting in both theaters and on Itunes, slowly moving towards a world where the indie producer skips the traditional distribution method and looks for ways to go straight to Itunes without having to pay a hefty cut to a third party.
Kickstarter is allowing filmmakers even more independence. If you’re a smart young director, you shoot a bunch of shorts, post them on Youtube, gain a following, get better, so that by the time your Kickstarter campaign begins for your feature, you have a kick-ass reel to show to inspire confidence from your investors. Ditto if you’re a writer. Learn how to direct and do the same.
I’m not saying the movie industry is screwed or anything. The international grosses are too big. But it doesn’t feel like the people in charge are moving fast enough to adapt, and they look out of touch in the process. The last time the movie business did something that actually made me want to go to the theater was adding the stadium seats. And that was 15 years ago. Itunes and Netflix intermittently come up with ways to make me want to use their services every month. They’re really staying on their toes – almost like they enjoy being cutting edge. I don’t get the sense that the studios are doing this at all.
The one thing the movie industry CANNOT do anymore is raise prices. When movies were under 10 bucks, I didn’t blink about seeing the latest movie each weekend. I’d even watch Step-Up 3 if it was the only thing playing. Why not? I love film and I don’t care how I’m entertained, as long as you entertain me. Now that I’m paying 18 dollars a film, I always calculate whether going to the theater is worth it. And many times the answer is no. In other words, there didn’t use to be a barrier to entry. Movies were priced in a way where you didn’t think twice about going. Now there’s a barrier, and you can’t put up a barrier at the very moment your business is losing 10% each year.
What’s the answer? I honestly don’t think it’s difficult. People crave something new. They think they want Spider-Man 2. But what they really want is a dancing tree. Until you show them the dancing tree, though, they’re never going to know they wanted it. Look, studios will always need their Transformers and their Fast and Furiouses. I get that. But each studio needs to set aside a division for taking risks, for trying out new things. Call it R&D. It’s the reason why Apple became the biggest company in the world. They knew if they didn’t allocate a bunch of money to trying out weird and new ideas, that they’d never grow, that people would eventually get bored of their products. I want to see some products that come out of the movie studios’ R&D divisions, not the cookie-cutter Teenage Mutant Ninja Electro Boogaloo nonsense I saw this summer. A decline of 20% in a year is your consumer telling you you need to work harder.
Speaking of R&D (if R&D stood for “really depressing”), I finally saw Draft Day last week. Now some of you might remember that Draft Day was the number 1 screenplay on the Black List a couple of years ago, a story that seemingly came out of nowhere (a sports script topping the Black List??? Unheard of!). I thought the script was worth the hype. It was a different kind of sports movie. It had urgency. It had mystery. No cliche last second touchdown. Really lived up to the hype in my opinion.
Now a lot of people ask me how a good script gets turned into a bad movie. Well, this would be how. Three crucial mistakes were made that doomed this great screenplay. First, the edgy gritty script (about football in Cleveland – one of the dirtiest grungiest cities in America) was given a romantic comedy color-popping scheme for reasons beyond logic. If you’re looking to grab your core audience, the football fan, you probably don’t want to shoot your movie to look like Dolphin Tale 2.
Second, Kevin Costner played the role all wrong. Like wrong wrong wrong. In the script, our hero was a guy who knew his job was on the line, who was desperate to do anything to help his team win. He had fire, he had energy. And you could SMELL the pressure on him in every scene. It was exciting watching this guy scramble for his life while pretending to have it together on the outside.
Costner, however, played the part like a sad disinterested IRS agent. Whenever he was approached by any character, he looked like he was going to shake his head, say “I give up,” then go take a nap. He sucked away every ounce of energy this character had with his performance. I felt horrible for the writers.
But the most critical mistake was a directing one. For those who haven’t seen the movie or read the script, a lot of it takes place over phone calls. Costner’s character is a general manager on Draft Day, and he’s calling everyone all over the country to figure out who he’s going to pick. Every 3rd scene was a phone scene. These intense mano-a-mano scenes, in many ways, defined the energy of the story.
So it was baffling when director Ivan Reitman decided to create split screens for all of the calls. But it wasn’t just that. It was that CLEARLY none of the actors were actually talking to each other during the shoot. For example, P. Diddy would shoot his half of a phone conversation and then two months later, Costner, talking to a stand-in, recorded his half of the conversation.
Because the actors weren’t actually talking to each other and because Reitman insisted on using split-screens (which meant no cutaways), there were these giant gaping moments of silence after each actor’s line. Costner: “I want to go with Bryant as our quarterback!” 1 Mississippi . 2 Mississippi. 3 Mississippi. Diddy: “Fuck you. He’s not good enough!” Imagine an entire day of conversations with people where, after you said your line, they waited three seconds before responding. That was every phone call in Draft Day.
And the funny thing is, I know what Reitman was thinking. He thought he’d use the split-screen to infuse energy into the calls – having both the actors right there on screen together battling it out. Ironically, it had the opposite effect. It locked him into a situation where he couldn’t cut for timing, and the dialogue just died on the screen as a result. It’s scary how easy it is to screw up a good script. I mean you know Costner, notorious for being a hands-on actor, lobbied to play this character as a slow tired broken down General Manager, despite it being completely wrong for the story. And what can you say when your lead actor tells you that’s how he’s going to play it? “No?” He’s just going to do it anyway. A great script down the tubes based on one bad decision made by an actor.
Luckily, I’m going to leave you with something that’ll blow your little screenwriting mind and make you forget all about the Costner! It’s the best article about suspense I’ve ever read, and the author, Lee Child (author of the Jack Reacher books) gives one of the best analogies about a writing tool I’ve ever read. Any attempt to summarize it would cheapen the article, so I’m going to let you read it yourselves.
And finally, thanks to everyone who contributed to this weekend’s Pitch Post. It was fun to see some of your pitches get so much love from the community. Did anyone tally the best five so we have some surefire amateur scripts to review? I tried to go in there a few times and count myself but got lost in the 900 posts!
