Today I get a momentary respite from the Scriptshadow 250 to review a real-live spec sale. How does a 500 thousand dollar script hold up against your contest entries?
Genre: Fantasy
Premise: A cancer-stricken teenager gains cartoon powers when he finds a magical doorway that leads to a cartoon universe inside his missing father’s old office.
About: This script just sold a couple of weeks ago to Warner Brothers for half a million bucks! The writer, Mike Van Waes, used to be an assistant at the Jim Henson Co. and, not surprisingly, has his own web comic (called Vexed Wisecracker – write what you know!). The script sold without an attachment. Nice!
Writer: Mike Van Waes
Details: 118 pages – July 2015 draft
It’s happening quietly. But it is happening.
Specs are selling, my friend.
A sci-fi spec called Ascension just sold yesterday and Matthew Vaughn(!) is going to direct it. Matthew Vaughn tends to direct IP property that he finds himself. So him attaching himself to an original spec is a big deal. With the recent sale of The Virginian, and now Hammerspace, the spec market has quietly come alive.
I want to ask why but I also don’t want to ask why. This is one of those waves you just ride.
Mason Mulligan is 16 years old and doesn’t have a lot of time to live. He’s been diagnosed with an aggressive form of cancer, and sometimes simply getting out of the house is difficult for him. Not that Mason is feeling sorry for himself. He hates that his mom babies him. And that his younger brother, Wyatt, has been tasked by said mom to follow him around and make sure he’s okay.
One day, in a fit of rebellious angst, Mason heads over to the decrepit roller rink his father used to use as an office. Mason’s father, Henry, is the creator of Hammerspace, a popular “Spongebob Squarepants” like character who a comic book company bought off him early and turned into a smash hit on every platform imaginable. Unfortunately, because of a bad deal, Henry never saw any of that money. That might have contributed to Henry disappearing. That’s right, nobody’s seen Mason’s father in two years.
Anyway, while reminiscing at the old rink, Mason finds a magical key that allows him to open up a magical locker that takes him into a Narnia-esque animated universe where he meets Punchy, the 3 foot-tall squattish overly-happy main character his father created. Punchy is so excited to meet another human being besides Henry that he follows an annoyed Mason back into the real world.
Meanwhile, Mason starts to gain animated powers, like the ability to walk on air, get slammed by a frying pan with no repercussions, and defy human physics. As fun as that is, Mason learns through Punchy that his father might still be alive in the animated universe, which means he must find and confront him about why he left the family.
As most of you know, I’m reading through 250 amateur screenplays for the Scriptshadow 250 contest. It’s nice to mix in a professional script that just sold, as I can ask myself, What is it that this guy’s doing that the contest entrants aren’t doing? Why did his script sell?
Well, for starters, you gotta be professional. I know that’s a vague term so let me elaborate. I was reading a contest script yesterday. I was five pages in and I liked what I’d read so far. Then I saw a misspelled word. It was a minor mistake, but it was a mistake nonetheless. To the outside observer, this might seem like an overreaction. Who cares, right! But to someone who’s read thousands of amateur screenplays, this was a red flag. I’d seen it so many times. A red flag in the first five pages ALWAYS leads to more red flags.
Sure enough, on the very next page, the paragraphs started to get longer. They went from 3-4 lines to 5-6 lines. A writer who isn’t putting in the effort to keep his paragraphs short and to the point? Who’d rather be sloppy and redundant, making the read more of a chore? Red flag.
In the coming pages, more spelling mistakes. And now misused words were showing up. And the dialogue, which was crackling before, was becoming sloppy, as if the writer was no longer proofreading what he read. He was just flying by the seat of his pants and refusing to do any rewrites.
Naturally, the story continued to get sloppier, to the point where I didn’t even know what was going on. And it was only page 25. That’s why when I see that early red flag, I always cringe. It’s like seeing an ant in your apartment. THERE’S NEVER JUST ONE ANT. There are more lurking. It’s only a matter of time before you find them.
Hammerspace was tight and professional. No red flags. You could tell this script had been combed over, outlined, rewritten, double-checked, triple-checked, quadruple-checked. Doesn’t matter if you hated the script. You could tell that the writer made a professional effort. And while I shouldn’t be praising a script for that (professionalism should be a given), I see it so rarely on the amateur level, that I do appreciate it whenever I encounter it.
Now, what about the story? That I’m less sure of. Hammerspace takes a familiar concept and explores it through a new medium. We’ve seen the normal guy who gets super powers, of course. Hammerspace asks, “What would happen if you got cartoon powers?” My question is: Is that a compelling question?
Because while I liked the idea of a kid whose cartoonist father disappears and he goes looking for him only to end up in the cartoon space he created, this is less about that storyline than it is about Mason being able to walk on air and survive zany moments like being hit with a frying pan. The gimmick gets old quickly and never really gets used in an interesting way.
I actually thought Hammerspace was going to be darker. It starts off with this terminally ill kid dealing with the end of his life and his father who went missing two year ago. But as the script went on and it focused more on the aforementioned powers and the silly character of Punchy, it felt more like the cousin of the Goosebumps movie opening this weekend.
And that may be exactly why franchise-starved Warner Brothers bought it. But I guess with the script teasing something darker, I felt let down.
I also don’t think the script had a strong enough narrative engine. Once Punchy E.T.’s himself into Mason’s life, it isn’t clear where the script wants to go. The dad stuff is still always looming, but never quite thrust into the spotlight, leaving for a lot of characters wandering around and getting into random hijinx (here comes the bully!).
Contrast this with the similarly-conceived Ready Player One, about a kid going on a quest inside a popular video game universe, where the goal is clear. Solve the riddles that the creator placed in his game. If you solve them all, you get the creator’s entire trillion dollar fortune, as well as the game itself. Talk about clarity and high stakes. We never had that here. Or, to put it in Scriptshadow terms, the GSU was muddled at best.
I don’t want to sound like a bummer. I’m just not sure where they’re going with this. They could either Charlie Kaufman this motherfucker or turn it into the next Zathura. Right now it’s riding somewhere in between, and that’s probably why I didn’t respond to it as much as I wanted to.
[ ] what the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Sophistication of Presentation. Sophistication of Presentation is the minimum level of skill you’re required to display on the page in order for the reader to judge you solely on your story (and not on your writing ability). Sophistication of Presentation isn’t just about avoiding spelling and grammar mistakes (although that’s part of it). It’s about having a strong understanding of sentence structure, of vocabulary, of how people speak to one another. Here’s an early line of dialogue from an uptight female friend of Mason’s in Hammerspace: “But maturity is more a state of mind. Don’t you think? Like, a search for greater meaning. Intellectual curiosity. Finding the poetry within what others find trivial.” This is a writer who clearly paid attention in their English and writing classes, someone who passes the “Sophistication of Presentation” bar. What I usually encounter is something more like this: “You’re not a mature person, Joe. You should stop being an a-hole and learn more to be a person of intelligence.” Do you see what I mean? There’s a lack of sophistication to that sentence. When I see that lack of sophistication displayed throughout the script, it’s a quick sign that the writer isn’t ready for the big leagues yet.
