Genre: Horror
Premise: When a family moves into their new home in the country, they find a hidden room with a terrifying secret.
About: If you’re anything like me, you were there every Monday night for another episode of Prison Break. Imagine The Great Escape meets Lost meets Orange is the New Black with men. At the head of it all was our hero, Wentworth Miller.  But once Prison Break ran out of prisons to break out of, Miller disappeared, and didn’t reappear until a couple of years ago when he came out with two super-specs that took over the town. To ensure he didn’t taint anyone’s opinion, he sent the scripts out under an alias. The first script, Stoker, went on to a not-so-successful indie run.  The Disappointments Room is Miller’s second script, and supposed to be more traditional. The last I heard, it will star Kate Beckinsdale and be directed by DJ Curoso.
Writer: Wentworth Miller
Details: 126 pages (1st Draft)

Wentworth Miller

The Disappointments Room was about to be one big disappointment until Wentworth Miller went all Travis Bickle on us the last 20 pages. Rarely have I witnessed a script go from so average to so memorable in such a short period of time.

I’m not saying this script is great. I’m just curious why Miller played it safe for so long before he channeled his inner serial killer. Instinct tells me it may be a first draft issue, although everything else in the script is so polished, it’s hard to see why the structure isn’t.

The Disappointments Room starts out a lot like The Conjuring. You have a normal family, led by wife Dana, with husband David and son Jeremy rounding out the cast.  They’re moving into a giant house in the middle of the country with plans to start anew.

But something about the house’s energy is off. At least to Dana. An architect who’s trying to get back in the game, Dana notices an attic window from outside the house that isn’t there on the inside. She goes up to inspect it, and finds a hidden room that only locks from the outside. Someone was kept here.

She starts doing research on the house and learns it was home to a prominent couple known as the Blackers. The Blackers never had any kids. But Dana’s noticing some strange things around the house that indicate otherwise.

She eventually realizes this room is a “Disappointment” room. Back in the day, if you were a prominent family and had a freak child (with like Elephantitus or something), it was too embarrassing to bring your kid into the community. So these families would lock up these “disappointments” in their own little room where they’d live out their entire lives.

Naturally, Dana wants to find out who lived in the room and so continues her sleuthing. Her journey reveals a dark secret from Dana’s own past, that is so horrifying, it makes disappointment rooms look like 80s arcades. But it isn’t Dana’s shocking reveal of this secret that does her in. It’s what her husband tells her after the revelation. That’s the true shocker.

I experienced déjà vu today, as it was JUST YESTERDAY we were talking about not exploiting your premise properly. Once again, we have this strong uique set up (a “disappointments room,”), but very little is mentioned about it.

There’s the reveal of it as a disappointments room, which happens halfway through the script. Then it works its way back into the plot at the very end of the screenplay. But between all that, we have your typical “something’s making a spooky noise in the other room, let’s go check it out” generic horror flick.

I started to wonder if Miller made Fatal Screenwriting Mistake Number 7. Did he pick a concept that didn’t have enough meat on it to build an entire movie around? Admittedly, the disappointment room is a scary idea, but there’s only so much you can do with one room.

Actually, when Dana got stuck in the room early on and nobody could hear her screaming, I thought we were going to stay there with her for the entire movie. She’d be stuck in the creepy Disappointments Room, where she’d almost certainly die. I’m not sure that would be a better script, but at least we’d be exploiting the premise. But she gets out immediately, and it’s back to your typical procedural storyline. Head to the scary library, look up books on who these Blackers are, and see if you can figure out who this child was.

Then I realized this was probably an exploratory first draft. Miller’s figuring things out as we are. It’s the only excuse for why we don’t find out until page 90 that Dana lost a daughter six years ago. That doesn’t work as surprise information. It needed to be known earlier.

Which is why we rewrite. Rewriting is often the practice of moving the exciting things up earlier and earlier in the story so that your script stays exciting the whole way through.  In the next draft, Dana’s lost baby will probably be moved up to page 60. The next draft, page 30. And I’d bet in the next draft still, we’d open on it, sort of like they did in Dead Calm (Nicole Kidman). A dying baby is the perfect inciting incident to get them to move to a new home. And it sets up the ending better.

Outside of the glacially paced story, I can see why this got Hollywood all hot and bothered. Miller’s got a talent for pulling you into the page, forcing you to hear and feel the things he’s describing, then spitting you back out. In particular, he’s got a strong sense of atmosphere he builds into his prose (“It’s now pitch black and pouring rain. The car SLIPS and SLIDES along a muddy single-lane road, branches SCRAPING the sides as they pass. David hunches forward, squinting through the wipers”).

Or take the opening scene, a presumably boring packing scene that reads anything but boring.  We hear the SQUEAL of the packaging tape as it rolls. Miller increasing the pacing by compressing the description with each box packaged, giving the scene an almost frantic feel. Faster and faster it goes, until BOOM, we’re done. You can’t believe it but you actually feel exhausted. After boxes being packed! That’s good writing, my friends, when you can make boxes interesting.

But if Miller is going to compete with the likes of The Conjurings, he can’t just depend on atmosphere and a creepy hook. He needs to look at this script (if he hasn’t already) as an accordion. The whole thing is stretched out from end to end. He’s got to SQUEEZE it together as tight as he can, pushing the first 100 pages into 30, and then he’s got to give us a second act that’s more concept-focused. Jump scares are fun, but Miller’s proven he can knock your socks off with his ending. He’s got to bring that imagination to the middle act as well. I hope he gets there. Because this could be a really good film if he figures it out.

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

What I learned: When trying to come up with scares in your haunted house movies, instead of focusing on the house itself, look to other characters – characters eccentric or unique or who make your hero uncomfortable in some way. One of the most memorable threads in The Disappointments Room is they hire a plumber to fix a mysterious leak in the home. The plumber is intense and scary, but Dana finds herself strangely attracted to him. He senses this, and aggressively puts her in uncomfortable situations, letting her know that if she wants it, he’ll give it. And while she doesn’t do anything with him, she hates that she considers it. That to me is a memorable situation, something I haven’t seen before. It sticks with you a lot longer than, say, the 630th creepy girl in a horror movie trope.

Genre: TV Pilot (Sci-fi)
Premise: Inside a giant city within a spaceship, a former detective is hired to find a dead woman who’s uploaded her consciousness into a robot.
About: AMC wants that next big genre show. We reviewed Galyntine a few weeks ago. Now we look at Ballistic City, a creation from Tron director Joseph Kosinski, and written by Pacific Rim and Killing on Carnival Row scribe, Travis Beacham. The show is being pitched as Blade Runner meets Battle Star Galactica. While he’s definitely got talent, Beacham was one of the lucky ones. While in his senior year at college, he sent his latest script out to a recent graduate who’d gotten an intern position at a producton company in Hollywood. All he wanted was some feedback. A few days later, agents and managers and producers started calling, wanting a piece of this new talent.  That script was Killing on Carnival Row.  Beacham and Kosinski met on their collaboration of the as yet un-made remake of the “The Black Hole.”
Writer: Travis Beacham
Details: 60 pages

Here’s a question for you. How many scripts should a writer write a year? Because when you’re Travis Beacham, one of the most in-demand screenwriters in Hollywood, you’re constantly getting million dollar assignment offers. And success never lasts in Tinseltown. Just ask Val Kilmer. So the inclination is to take everything and get that money while it’s there. Indeed, Beacham seems to be writing everything these days (he’s got projects with JJ, with Cameron, with Del Toro, with Fox, with AMC).

Then you have the other end of the spectrum. When nobody even knows that you write. You don’t have anyone paying you or waiting for your next script. When that’s the case, it’s easy to lay back and putter away, finishing one script every three years or so. Which is not good if you want to work in this industry. Writers and managers want prolific screenwriters.

So that’s my question to you guys. How many scripts do you write a year? And how many do you think a writer should write a year? I’m thinking the top number is three.  Anything more than that and you’re sacrificing quality, no?

Speaking of sacrificing quality, Ballistic City isn’t what I was hoping for. I thought I was getting straight sci-fi, but this is more “Killing on Carnival Row on a spaceship” sci-fi. Some of you are going to love that. But this was so focused on the cricks and cracks of this noir-ish city, I began to wander why it was set on a spaceship in the first place. More on that in a second. But first, the plot.

“Ballistic City” is about a giant city on a huge spaceship that’s travelling between the stars. The journey for this voyage is taking so long that the last member of the first generation on the ship just died.

That’s where we come in, and where we meet Canaan Bendix (lots of bizarre names in this script), a private detective for hire. Bendix is hired by the police to look for the “Geist” of this First Generation woman who died. See, First Generation had a robot that backed up her memory. Therefore, when she dies, she’s still “alive” in this robot. Well, as soon as she died, her Geist ran off into the ship. And police wanna find her and ask why.

Bendix goes into the dirty underbelly of the city and Beacham gets to show off what he does best – create big detailed weird worlds. For example, people have modifiers for skin and hair and eyes to make them look like animals. They take “hits” off each other’s memory devices. You know, weird fucked up shit like that.

When Bendix finally finds Robot Chick (who actually looks like a beautiful younger version of our 117 year old dead woman), she claims that she was murdered. But she doesn’t remember how or by whom. So the two team up and look around the ship until (spoiler), it becomes apparent that no one murdered Robot Chick. She murdered herself.

First the good. This was better than Moonfall!

Of course, I’ve seen cats fall sleep on keyboards and create better screenplays than Moonfall. “Fffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffff” is still an all-time favorite of mine.

Ballistic City was good in that “Travis Beacham atmospheric” kind of way. He’s the screenwriting equivalent of a young George Lucas, filling every little piece of the frame with some cool gadget, a detail to help bring the world alive. Like the kids wearing animal mods. Like gene-modifier drugs that turn you into mold. Like dead people living their lives inside glitch holograms.

There’s actually this cool little storyline where Bendix’s old partner killed Bendix’s wife. The partner was convicted, went to prison, and was executed. His memory was placed inside of a hologram, and in accordance with the law, the last week of its life was erased, the week he killed Bendix’s wife. So Bendix goes to meet with his friend every so often, and the partner has no idea he killed Bendix’s wife. He always innocently asks what the last week of his life was like, but Bendix can’t tell him.

Neat stuff like this was scattered everywhere.

But here’s the big reason Ballistic City didn’t work for me. It doesn’t do anything with its premise. And that KILLS ME. We were just talking about this the other week. What’s the point of creating an eye-grabbing concept if you’re not going to explore it at all?? It’d be like building Disney World and filling it with skate parks. Yeah, we’re kind of having fun, but not “Disney World” fun.

Ballistic City may take place on a city inside a giant spaceship, but you wouldn’t know it by how little its mentioned. The ship and its ongoing journey are rarely talked about. And when they are, it’s never in accordance with a plot point. It’s a radio personality blurting out the equivalent of, “This trip is taking too long.”

Whenever you come up with an idea, you first see the material through a macro lens. If you came up with an idea about a future war on Mars, initially, you’d think of the big battles that would take place, all the cool Mars architecture being destroyed, the big beautiful centerpieces of the city.

But as a screenwriter, your job is to find a SPECIFIC vessel to tell the movie through. You must find an interesting character who’s living in this world, is directly affected by this world, who’s directly involved in the problems this world creates, and tell the story through their eyes.

So in our Mars movie, maybe we tell the story of a 20 year old female miner who lives in a dying Mars city.  In fact, the city is almost out of water.  She has the choice of moving to the bigger cities to survive, but if she does, she’ll have to join the army and fight in the war, something she doesn’t want to do. Now we’re tackling the idea through a specific point of view.

Ballistic City decides to make Bendix its specific point of view, and he’s a detective. Okay, I guess that works. A detective will have a new goal each episode (inspect a disappearance or a murder). And a detective will be exploring a big slice of the city, allowing the writers to show every nook and cranny of this unique world.

But if the people whose deaths we’re inspecting have nothing to do with this ship or where it’s going, who cares?? Tell that story back on an earth city. I mean this murder needed to be about someone who knew a secret about the ship, someone who was hiding something and could put a lot of high-powered people in danger.

That way we’d have Bendix, who was previously inspecting a tiny little crime, moving up the ladder to a bigger and more elaborate conspiracy. Plot points should include ship-specific things like a decrease in cabin pressure, slow-downs in engine velocity, the discovery that their course has been changed. This is a show about being on a ship. Therefore, the plot points we encounter need to be about the ship. A show about a robot killing her human self is a different show altogether.

Ballistic City did bring about one good thing though. The question: Would you have sex with a 117 year old woman if she were inside a synthetic fake body? Because Bendix didn’t seem to have a problem with it. But you guys are the final authority on this.  Yes, we’re pushing the boundaries of screenplay analysis here. But if your script doesn’t bring it, we gotta find something to talk about.

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

What I learned: Beacham is a big imagination guy. And a lot of people have asked me if should they should “limit” the imagination in their script to account for budgets. Beacham was asked this very question by Film School Rejects. This is what he had to say: “As a writer, you can easily get stuck in the trap of, “Is this doable? Are people going to pay to make this?” I think you have to bury that. You just gotta try the best you can, and if it’s good and people like it, it’ll get made. With special effects nowadays, you can basically do anything. If somebody likes something enough, they’re going to find a way to get it made. When you’re in the early stages of coming up with an idea, you just have to let it tell the idea tell you what it is.”

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Genre: Sci-fi
Premise: A group of galactic misfits are forced to work together to stop an evil mad man from destroying the universe.
About: Up to this point, the Marvel universe has kept things pretty conservative, bringing out its most cinematic and popular heroes for display (Iron Man, Captain America, Thor). “Guardians” is the first true risk its taken. Not only has the average moviegoer never heard of Guardians of the Galaxy, but we’re switching genres as well, from Comic Book to space operas. Writer-director James Gunn originally had no interest in directing Guardians. But after The Avengers came out, he saw the opportunity to do something cool (and make a lot of dough doing it!). Gunn’s more of an indie guy on the directing front, directing the 2010 Sundance hit, “Super,” about a regular guy who turns himself into a superhero. On the writing front, though, he hasn’t shied away from studio assignments, writing stuff like Scooby-Doo and Dawn of the Dead. The original draft of Guardians was written by unproduced “neophyte” screenwriter Nicole Perlman. Perlman got the Scriptshadow treatment for her breakout Black List script, Challenger (about the crash of the space shuttle, Challenger). It’s rare to see an unproduced screenwriter working on a project this big, but Perlman was able to get into the Marvel writer’s program early (never knew Marvel had a writing program) and pick up Guardians when no one was interested in it. Guardians debuted to a big box office haul this weekend, bringing in 30 million more than everyone expected it to (93 million total).
Writers: James Gunn and Nicole Perlman (comic book by Dan Abnett and Andy Lanning)
Details: 121 minute running time

Is Guardians of the Galaxy the new Star Wars?

It might be. No space flick has come this close in 30 years. It definitely captures the thrill of exploration the original Star Wars had. It nails the fun. It even brings something the original Star Wars didn’t have (but I think modern audiences need). It had attitude.

But before we anoint Guardians of the Galaxy as the next big thing, we should look closer. There’s kind of a “flawed masterpiece” thing going on here. For the first half of Guardians, I thought I was watching a rough cut of the film. The timing of the jokes felt a beat or two off. The characters felt forced (I’m looking at you, Rocket Raccoon). Some of the choices seemed uninspired (how many people need to shoot other people with colorful electrical weapons when they’re running away?). Even Chris Pratt, who going in was the best thing about the film, felt muzzled. Like someone kept telling him to “calm down.”

But here’s the thing about watching something truly unique. You’re not prepared for what you see because you’ve never seen anything like it before. And Guardians is so different (in many respects), you can’t quite process it yet. It’s similar to how I felt after watching my first Wes Anderson film. I couldn’t decide whether I’d just watched genius or a train wreck.

“Guardians” follows former earthling Peter Quill, a galactic scavenger of sorts, who’s been tasked with securing a tiny sphere thing that we’ll later find out has the power to destroy the galaxy. But Peter doesn’t know that yet.

Ignorantly, he tries to deliver the sphere, but is attacked by others who want it, namely Gamora, a hot green chick (when in doubt, just insert a hot green chick into your script).

A chain of events eventually leads them to Rocket Raccoon (a genetically altered human turned raccoon) and his muscle, the giant but adorable Groot (a tree that can only say three words – “I am Groot.”) Finally, there’s Drax, a muscled alien whose species takes everything literally (“Whatever you say goes right over his head.” “Nothing goes over my head. I’m too fast. I’ll catch it.”).

Our ultimate baddy, a face painted nasty dude named Ronan, finally steals the sphere away, allowing him to become super human (or super-alien I guess). He then heads to the nearest planet to destroy it. It’ll be up to our band of misfits then, none of whom really like each other, to put their differences aside and stop Ronan from turning this planet into a galactic parking lot.

Whenever you sit down to write a sprawling sci-fi flick, you need to find your focus. You need something to keep the characters and the plot centered, or else things fall apart quickly. There are a few ways to go about this, but the best way is probably the “MacGuffin Approach” a favorite of one George Lucas. You’ve seen it in films like Star Wars, Indiana Jones, and Pirates of the Caribbean.

Basically, the MacGuffin Approach creates an object of desire that everyone wants. The reason this approach works so well, particularly on the blockbuster stage, is that it simplifies things for the audience. Almost every character has the same goal (get the sphere), which is advantageous if you’re throwing a ton of information at the audience (new characters, new worlds, lots of exposition, lots of rules). If you try to give every character unique goals, it can be hard for the audience to keep track of it all.

Simplifying the plot was important because Guardians had one of the toughest jobs you’ll find in screenwriting – bringing together five totally unique characters and seamlessly and quickly sending them off on their journey

Now some of you might say, “It’s not hard to bring characters together.” But it really is. In the same way you’ll never see Justin Bieber and Bill Gates at the same venue, in a screenplay like this, where all the characters are different, it’s unlikely you’d find Raccoon Man around Painted Chick Girl. So you gotta come up with reasons they’d cross paths. And then you gotta come up with reasons they’d be at that location at the same time (it can’t be coincidence!). And then you gotta come up with reasons why they’d leave together. And you gotta do that for three other characters as well.

It all seems so easy once you’ve seen the film, but it often takes draft after clunky draft of cramming the characters together before a natural flow emerges. And Guardians didn’t quite get there. If we’re looking at 10 drafts to perfecting this first act, it looks like they made it to Draft 6. The weird Jackie Chan sphere bobble city set piece was way forced.

Chris Pratt didn’t help either. His forced opening dance routine (I swear it was like we were watching one of those leaked actor auditions) felt like 21 suits were behind the camera simultaneously yelling at him to “stop being so weird” until the take we saw, where he was as stiff as a tree.  It’d be like if Captain Jack Sparrow acted only 50% like Captain Jack Sparrow.  You can’t muzzle Captain Jack Sparrow!

Compare Pratt’s mechanical delivery to, say, Han Solo in Star Wars, who never once seemed to give a shit about what came out of his mouth. Solo is so iconic because he let loose. Pratt wasn’t allowed to let loose until the end, likely when those producers finally left the set.

And then something happened. I can’t pinpoint when or where it happened. But out of nowhere, everything finally gelled, especially the characters. They weren’t trying to announce their arrival anymore. They weren’t scared to take chances.  They were just “being.” And once that was the case? Guardians got REALLY good.

And yeah, I’m doing it. I’m announcing Groot as one of the best big-budget movie characters in history. It goes to show how awesome showing and not telling is (Groot is so “dumb” he can only say three words – much of what he offers, then, is through action). There were these great visual moments, like after Groot vouching for Peter, Peter making a point that Groot seemed to be the only smart one here, only for Peter to look over and see Groot eating a flower off one of his limbs.

Groot takes the “Chewbacca” role and makes it even more lovable, if that’s possible. He’s such an earnest goof who only wants to protect his partner (Rocket) that we can’t help but love the guy. One of the best moments in movies this year (spoiler) is when he builds that tree nest in the end to protect everybody as the ship goes down.

What really impressed me though is how Gunn used the theme of friendship to drive the film. I thought all these guys hating each other was totally believable, and the gentle changes throughout that brought them closer together, to the point where they’re actually (spoiler) using the “hold hands” move to save the galaxy (and it working) is a testament to the excellent mix of character development and theme in the film. Shit, I even got teary eyed when Groot says (spoiler) “We are Groot.”

I don’t know if Guardians was shot in order or not, but it’d make a lot of sense if it that was the case. At the beginning, everyone seemed tense and forced (including the director), like they didn’t want to be Marvel’s first big bomb. But as the movie went on and everyone got comfortable, the film started to shine. It’s not perfect, but these types of movies never are. In fact, their weaknesses end up becoming strengths, as they’re woven into the re-watch fabric of the legacy.

And I’m going to say one more thing about this film before I go. Because it’s one of the few times I’ve seen it in the past 20 years. For some reason, at some point in history, summer blockbusters became “one and done” movies. They were made to work for one weekend and that’s it. Gone were the Star Wars’s, movies so rich you wanted to keep watching them over and over again. Guardians is the first summer movie I’ve seen in forever that wasn’t interested in being one and done. It wanted to be rewatchable. It wanted to do more. And I hope its success inspires more summer movies to do the same.

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

What I learned: With a giant blockbuster flick that requires conveying a lot of information to the audience, instituting a MacGuffin (an important item that all the characters, good and bad, are after) is one of the easiest ways to simplify the plot.

What I learned 2: Embedded Goals – Embedded goals are goals your characters need to achieve in order to get back to the main goal (in this case, getting the sphere).  So, early on, our group is thrown into prison.  Obviously, the main goal needs to pause while they deal with this problem.  They must accomplish the embedded goal (escape the prison) to get back to business.  Embedded goals help add texture to the story.  If your characters are only pursuing one single thing for all 120 pages of a screenplay, things can get monotonous quickly.

Read this week’s Amateur Offerings collection and offer constructive criticism below, plus vote for which script you want to be reviewed!

TITLE: Blood and Sangria
GENRE: Comedy Horror
LOGLINE: After agreeing to visit his sister in Marbella, Spain, perennial loser Morgan Maloney realizes he has made the mistake of his life when his schizophrenic alter ego, the serial killing and out of control psychokiller– Mister Galloway – rears his ugly head.
WHY YOU SHOULD READ: Who wouldn’t enjoy a light hearted tale of love in the Spanish sun with a psychopath akin to Patrick Bateman, Don Logan and Ben from Man Bites Dog.
WHY YOU SHOULDN’T READ:  Copious foul language, extreme gory violence, auto-eroticism, bondage, murder, infanticide, blood, guts and more foul language and death. – And yet I would be surprised if you didn’t laugh out loud while all this stuff is going on. If all the blue dialog, action and death was removed it is after all a love story and tale of sibling redemption and resolution and not just an aimless goriest. Please enjoy and don’t think bad of me for writing such a fantastically horrible gross out script – it is Mister Galloway who made me do it.

TITLE: Weekend Dad
GENRE: Dramedy
LOGLINE: A down-on-his-luck, divorced father, fearing he and his son are growing apart, struggles to get his life together and compete with the new, larger than life, billionaire stepdad.
WHY YOU SHOULD READ: I just had my first child, a boy. Well, my wife actually had him. I was there when he came out. And participated when he was conceived. I barely remember either event due to lack of sleep. These babies are tough to get on a schedule. Anyway, I look at my son and hope he will be a good person. I look at him and hope we stay close and nothing will break our bond. I know I don’t have to worry about this for a while. I am one of his only sources for clean diapers.

TITLE: I Am Ryan Reynolds
GENRE: Comedy, Fantasy
LOGLINE: Ryan Reynolds’ marriage, career, and sanity are threatened by a plastic surgery treatment that allows anyone with $10,000 to look like him.
WHY YOU SHOULD READ: You read the title, you read the logline, and now you’re wondering if the author is: 1. a crazy person, 2. a huge Ryan Reynolds fan, 3. someone who needs to get out more, or 4. some combination of those three things. In any case, “I Am Ryan Reynolds” is a surreal Hollywood satire with an unlikeable protagonist and very specific casting possibilities. It’s like “Being John Malkovich” for the common man, “Multiplicity” but with different character names, and “The Player,” except almost entirely different. Also, the descriptive paragraphs top out at two lines in length, so at the very least, the script is a quick read.

TITLE: Mgimbwa
GENRE: Animal, Drama
LOGLINE: After a chimpanzee’s community is driven from its territory in the African jungles by a rival tribe, he struggles to rise through social ranks and take back the territory once his.
WHY YOU SHOULD READ: No dreams. No flashbacks. No narration. No humans. No dialogue.

TITLE: Crash Backwards
GENRE: Thriller
LOGLINE: A happily married woman begins to question her sanity when she discovers a stalker may be her husband from another life. In her quest for the truth she must make a choice that could wipe out her existence.
WHY YOU SHOULD READ: I had this idea several years ago and have been “thinkubating” on it since then….About two months ago it all came bubbling out and I couldn’t stop writing until it was finished. — I love roller coasters in the dark. That’s what this is. It takes you on a jolting, hair raising ride in the dark, all while you try to guess the next turn. — This story is a total mind job that puts you in the seat of the protagonist. You learn as she learns. You experience right along with her never knowing what’s going to happen next. It twists and turns right up to the final reveal, then….well you’ll just have to read it to find out. Also, here’s a poster for the script.

One of you suggested this in the comments the other day and it sounded like a wonderful debate. The two biggest geek shows on TV are Game of Thrones and The Walking Dead. My guess is that both shows have a lot of crossover viewers, which means most of you are educated enough to offer your opinion on both. Therefore, I shall ask: Which is the better written show, The Walking Dead or Game of Thrones? Notice I didn’t ask which is the “better” show, but which show is better written.

In my eyes, this isn’t even a fair fight. The Walking Dead is a much better written show. I’ve never felt more worried for characters than I do during this show. At any moment, they’re in danger from either a zombie or fellow human attack, which leads to that necessary discomfort the audience must feel in order for the story to work.

The scene-writing is also top-notch, always so clever. They’re constantly setting up complex situations that don’t have clear resolutions, keeping you on the edge of your seat for up to 10 minutes at a time. My favorite scene of the year (in anything!) is the one where Rick sends his son and Michonne out to get food while he takes a nap in an abandoned suburban house. In the interim, raiders show up and take over the house, forcing Rick to hide.

If he tries to leave, they’ll easily catch and kill him. If he doesn’t, his son comes home unaware the raiders are there and they’ll kill him instead. These are the best kinds of scenes because there’s no solution. Every road traveled leads to failure. And if you set up that kind of situation, you better believe your reader/viewers are going to stick around to see what happens. The Walking Dead is filled with cleverly thought-out scenes like this.

Like any show, The Walking Dead has some good characters and some not so good characters. But on the whole, they’re good. Watching Rick fight a daily battle against losing his humanity is one of the better inner conflicts I’ve watched a main character go through. Watching inventive characters like the zombie-carrying sword-wielding Michonne emerge is beyond delightful. And meeting the best villain of the last decade in the endlessly complex “The Governor” was the cherry on top of Season 3.

Finally, The Walking Dead is really good at structuring its storylines. There’s almost always an episode goal (Find a way out of the house without the Raiders seeing you), a season goal (Get to the safe city, Terminus), and a series goal (survive and find ultimate safety) to keep everything focused and on track. There’s never a point in The Walking Dead where you’re saying, “Wait, what’s going on again?” It’s always clearly laid out.

Game of Thrones is a completely different animal, but good in its own ways. Its number 1 asset is its mythology. With The Walking Dead, the mythology is being built as we experience it.  There’s not a lot of mystery there.  But some of the things affecting the characters in Game of Thrones go back thousands of years. For that reason, you feel like you’re living in a truly immersive world, and every episode is a gift you get to unwrap to find out more about that world.

Another reason I love Game of Thrones is its restraint. Unlike certain fantasy franchises that throw a million pieces of fantasy at you a minute (orcs, spells, invisibility, giant spiders, talking trees), Thrones TEASES their fantasy elements. We hear about dragons, White Walkers, people coming back from the dead. But because these things are only hinted at, we don’t grow numb to them after five minutes. Instead, we eagerly anticipate when we’ll get to see them, which is another reason we’re so excited to keep watching.

Also, the relationships the show creates are captivating. Every character is connected to every other character in some way. To give you a taste, Cersei Lannister, the Queen, is secretly sleeping with her brother Jaime Lannister. We later find out that the three children the King and Queen have are not the King’s. They’re all from Jaime, which makes them inbreds. One of these children, the evil, unstable Joffrey, becomes King. Rumors spread throughout the land that Joffrey is the inbred son of Cersei and Jaime. Cersei must do everything in her power to keep this information from getting to Joffrey, since unstable kings who find out that they’re inbred probably aren’t going to take it well.

Finally, there are a lot of standout characters on the show. The empowered “mother of dragons,” Khaleesi, is exciting to watch as she goes from underdog outsider to plotting her Iron Throne takeover. Tyrion, the “imp,” played by Peter Dinklage, is lovely to watch if only because the character is so unexpected. Occasionally he’ll play the coward, only to follow it up by slapping the king. Arya Stark, the young daughter of the slain Ned Stark, is pulled from her family and must survive out in the wild. There’s the impossibly cold Cersei Lannister, whose utter hatred for the world drives her every action.  Her son Joffrey is so evil, you can’t look away, lest you miss him chopping someone’s head off. The always manipulative brothel owner, Littlefinger, charms with his whispering schemes and careful chess moves in order to keep his place in power. There’s always a character to look forward to here.

But here’s why Game of Thrones doesn’t compete with The Walking Dead. Whereas The Walking Dead is always clear – we always know what’s going on and can therefore participate in every aspect of the story – Game of Thrones is too often confusing. And it all comes back to one issue – there are too many characters.

In a show like this, a show that DEPENDS on you knowing the intricate details of every relationship, being confused about who’s who can destroy the enjoyment of an entire episode.  If I’m only just remembering that Robb Stark wants to kill Character A at the end of a scene where two characters are discreetly talking about Character A, I’ve missed the whole point of the scene. This happens a lot in Game of Thrones.

Tons of characters also means entire episodes go by without us seeing some of the characters. So when we finally come back to them, we barely remember what they’re up to. Again, two or three scenes may go by before we recall what they’re doing in this location in the first place. For example, I was watching Jon Snow traverse the North Mountains for an entire episode before I remembered, from a couple of episodes ago, why he was sent there in the first place.

No matter how you spin it, this is bad writing. One of the requirements of writing any story is that the reader always understand what’s going on. If they don’t, it can only be because you, the writer, don’t want them to for some reason. In other words, it’s the writer’s choice. But a lot of the confusion that comes from Game of Thrones is not due to the writer’s choice. It’s due to there being too many characters and too many camps to keep track of.

Another problem with Game of Thrones is that it errs on the side of “telling” instead of showing. It’s gotten better at this as the show’s gone on. But in the first season, there were endless scenes where two people were in a room talking. Therefore, instead of seeing troops move across the land, we hear two people TALK ABOUT troops walking across the land. Indeed, every other scene appears to be strictly exposition, which would often grind the show to a halt.

What’s interesting is that this exposition is a result of choices the writers made a long time ago. If you’re going to have a dozen factions all vying for the throne, you’re guaranteeing you’re going to have a ton of exposition. The Walking Dead doesn’t have that kind of complexity in its endgame. The endgame is simply, “survive,” so its exposition is often minimal, and we can focus more on the fun stuff, which is showing and not telling (characters getting into dangerous situations and then trying to get out of them).

Personally, I think both shows are great in their own way. But The Walking Dead is a cleaner more action-oriented story that can just “be,” whereas Thrones has to talk you through much of its world to get to its payoffs, which can sometimes feel like work.

What do you think? Which is your favorite show and why? Make sure to support your opinion with valid points about the writing.  And yes, this may be the nerdiest post I’ve written this year.

note: I’m on Season 2, Episode 5 of Game of Thrones.  Please note spoilers in your comments!