This movie is a game changer for the documentary industry. But is it actually a good movie?

Genre: Documentary/Drama/Comedy
Premise: Documentarian Nathan Fielder moves in with the infamous Elizabeth Holmes, founder of a multibillion-dollar tech startup, Theranos, who was ultimately convicted of defrauding investors.
About: This movie is turning into one of the biggest documentary success stories in history. After a trailer that went mega-viral, You Can See Everything opened to $15 million this weekend on just 850 screens, making it the biggest opening for a non-musical documentary since Fahrenheit 9/11 back in 2004. A24 gave Fielder and co-director, Oppenheim, extraordinary creative freedom to make the film. They could spend years filming, and if they didn’t come up with something worthwhile, they didn’t have to release anything. Fielder said the studio essentially told them they could throw the whole thing away. In one of the strangest demo announcements of movies in years, 70% of You Can See Everything’s audience was under 25. That means that a bunch of 20-somethings sat through a 3 hour documentary in theaters, something the industry had recently conceded was impossible.
Writers: Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim
Details: 3 hours

Before I get into this review, I must point out that You Can See Everything may be the future of theatrical documentary filmmaking.

Because first of all, the movie made 15 million bucks. Which is the equivalent of three times that in the narrative box office world, because documentaries make no money. And they especially don’t make money theatrically anymore. So clearly, this is a huge opening for a documentary film.

That got me thinking. How did this film achieve this when all these other documentaries make nothing?

To answer that, you have to understand why people don’t see documentaries in the theater anymore. The answer is because you can go to YouTube, type in “Charles Manson,” and get 50 documentaries about Charles Manson that you can sit there and watch all day long if you want.

This has happened because making documentaries is cheap now. And guess what? It just got even cheaper. The most recent documentaries I’ve been watching online have started using AI for insert shots or to recreate video. And while you’re aware that it’s AI, there’s no question that it’s a level up from what these no-budget documentary filmmakers used to have to do, which was go with stock images. Or stay on whatever documentary subject was speaking in a publicly accessible video.

Now you can actually recreate exactly what they’re talking about.

So the question then becomes, if you want to make a documentary that actually makes money and premieres in theaters, how do you do that?

You Can See Everything gives us the answer. You have to expand the documentary format into something we haven’t seen before.

Now, Nathan Fielder’s ability to do this is on another level. But I want to make clear that you don’t have to be a genius filmmaker who knows how to work his way into the documentary in a meta and entertaining way to pull this off. You just need to find an angle that expands the documentary format into something weirder or stranger or different from what we’ve seen before. And I think it’s all up for grabs as far as what you can do.

But I do think that filmmakers inserting themselves into these movies is one avenue. Becoming sort of the star of the documentary. Because you can almost create a franchise out of that. It’s similar to what Michael Moore used to do. You didn’t come to Bowling for Columbine just to learn about Columbine. You also came to see Michael Moore challenging Charlton Heston about guns.

And Nathan Fielder has taken that one step further by adding his quirky sense of humor and meta advancements, like bringing in real movie stars to play the roles of characters when he doesn’t have access to his documentary subjects.

That’s the sort of inventiveness you want to embrace in this new world of documentary filmmaking. Because if you’re just making by-the-books, by-the-numbers documentaries, forget about it. Just put your stuff up on YouTube. Cause I guarantee you no one’s paying 15 bucks in a theater for it.

Okay. Now let’s talk about the actual movie.

I went into this confident that it was going to be my favorite movie of the year. Ever since I found out about You Can See Everything six weeks ago, I’ve been desperately counting the weeks until it comes out. I love Nathan Fielder. He’s probably up there as one of the top five creative minds in Hollywood.

Nathan comes into Elizabeth Holmes’ life 36 days before she’s scheduled to go to prison for defrauding investors in her Theranos business, where she supposedly developed a blood-testing technology where people could prick their finger, put a blood sample into a machine, and test for hundreds of different things.

This had the opportunity to disrupt a medical testing industry worth hundreds of billions of dollars. So it was a big deal. And supposedly she knowingly said it could do some things that it couldn’t do. But this documentary is about Elizabeth claiming she’s always told the truth and that she’s innocent.

When Nathan comes into her life, she has a relatively new partner, Billy. Billy becomes a very big part of the documentary in that he’s taken the driver’s seat of both this relationship and this business, because they want to start up Theranos again, but a new version of it.

So Nathan starts living with Elizabeth and Billy in his beach house. They have two young kids with them. And Nathan’s goal appears to be to get to the bottom of what happened at Theranos. He wants to know if Elizabeth knowingly lied or not.

Because she’s always claimed that she didn’t lie. And actually a big moment in the documentary is Nathan asking her, “Have you ever told a lie?” and Elizabeth Holmes saying, “No.”

That becomes a central theme of the film. Truth. Not long after that moment, we learn about an infamous New York Times article. In it, Elizabeth Holmes says, of the fictionalized TV shows of her story, “They’re not playing me. They’re playing a character I created.”

And this quote becomes a big deal in the movie because Elizabeth Holmes swears that this line, which ends up going viral and sort of becoming an unofficial slogan that defines her, is something she never said. And she recorded all of the interviews that she did for people and claims that that line is nowhere to be found on any of the recordings.

But The New York Times says it was, so Nathan Fielder tries to talk to The New York Times and see if they can find the actual recording of her saying those words. And The New York Times can’t find it. Which begs the counter-question to Nathan’s assumption that Elizabeth lied to the world: Was this just one big smear campaign?

Nathan digs and digs but the more he talks to Elizabeth, the less sure of the answer he is. Which leads him to lose the plot a bit. If Elizabeth is innocent, then what is this movie really about? To give you some context, Elizabeth Holmes contacted A24 and said I’m open to being documented. And A24 went to Nathan and Lance and said, “Do you want to do this?” And Nathan decided, “Sure,” and ran out there to Elizabeth and Billy’s beach house to get to work. But there was a strange catch. Elizabeth only had 36 days left before she was sent to federal prison (screenwriting tip alert: ticking clock!).

So when Elizabeth heads to prison, Nathan loses his documentary subject. In the process, he also loses his narrative. But Nathan has this unexpected other character he’s left with: Billy. So I think Nathan decided, okay, we couldn’t prove that Elizabeth was bad. But we’ve got this guy over here who’s a weirdo and he says a lot of douchey stuff. Let’s go all in and make this an “Elizabeth Holmes’s husband is a psycho” documentary.

There’s a scene earlier in the doc where Nathan may have realized this was the way to go. Elizabeth is in the kitchen making eggs. She’s whisking them in a bowl, talking to Billy, and at one point Billy just takes the bowl out of her hands and starts whisking them himself. But faster.

And Nathan immediately stops everything. “Whoa, whoa, wait a minute. Why did you just take the eggs from her?” The moment gets a big laugh in the theater. And Elizabeth explains that Billy thinks she doesn’t whisk them enough and that the eggs taste better when they’re whisked more.

Ah-ha, Nathan seems to realize. Billy is the controlling evil villainous husband here! I mean look at this guy. He can’t even let his wife whisk some eggs without taking control!

This annoyed the hell out of me. Billy and Elizabeth have been together for a few years now. They have two kids together. And for all we know, they’ve had this exact same conversation 80 times already.

Maybe Billy has politely asked her to whisk the eggs more 50 different times. Maybe he’s let her do it her way a hundred times. Maybe he’s having a particularly busy morning and doesn’t have time to get into the whole egg-whisking debate again, so he just takes the bowl and does it himself.

I could see myself doing that. I could see my partner doing that. When you’re around someone 24/7, you’re going to have moments like this. Now, maybe Billy really is a controlling asshole. But my point is, we don’t know that from a two-minute exchange. Yet the movie treats this as some world-changing moment.

Not to fear, though. Cause Nathan now makes it his mission to deliver on that narrative. He highlights that, once she goes to prison, Billy takes over Elizabeth’s Twitter account. He makes decisions for her. He’s aggressive. He’s opinionated. He’s the kind of guy who doesn’t really care what anybody thinks about him.

And let’s be real about this. Hollywood gets all up in their underwear about this kind of man. A man who takes charge in a relationship, who makes decisions, who doesn’t apologize for being masculine.

Here’s a question. What if, after everything Elizabeth has been through, after being dragged through the media for a decade, after losing her company, after facing hundreds of millions of dollars in debt, after knowing she’s about to go to prison, she actually loves the fact that this guy has come into her life and said, “You know what? I’ll handle this.” I’ll make the decisions. I’ll deal with the press. I’ll deal with the bullshit. You don’t have to worry about it.

Isn’t it possible that she finds that incredibly attractive?

Because whenever Elizabeth talks about Billy, she is over the moon in love with him. She loves that he takes charge. Yet the film seems determined to convince us that this is a bad thing.

**MAJOR SPOILERS FOR SECOND HALF OF MOVIE FOLLOW**

Which brings me to Amanda Seyfried, someone who may have low-key just become the biggest villain in Hollywood. No wonder she was cast in Mean Girls.

Nathan brings Amanda into the documentary as a, sort of, “Elizabeth Holmes expert,” the reason being that Amanda played Elizabeth Holmes in the Hulu series about Theranos’ downfall. At first, Amanda is there to recreate scenes to help Nathan understand Elizabeth better, particularly because he no longer has access to Elizabeth.

But eventually Amanda becomes a much bigger part of the story. When Nathan shows her some footage he’s shot of Billy and Elizabeth, she’s horrified. She concludes that he’s controlling. That he treats Elizabeth terribly. And that she’s a victim of Stockholm Syndrome.

At one point, while she and Nathan are driving to see Billy, she actually says, “Let’s break these two up.” And she has this weird little sinister smile on her face when she says it. And I’m thinking, wait a minute. Who the hell are you??? You don’t know these people. You haven’t spent years with them. You don’t know what their relationship is like when the cameras aren’t rolling. Yet you’ve decided that you understand Elizabeth Holmes’s relationship with her husband better than Elizabeth Holmes???

I mean isn’t the whole point of empowering women that they get to decide what they want? What if what this particular woman wants is a guy who takes charge? What if she doesn’t want to make every decision? What if she loves having somebody in her life who’s willing to shoulder all the responsibility?

There’s actually a shocking little moment when Amanda first meets Billy. She’s spent all this time getting worked up about how awful this man is. She’s ready to tear his head off. And then she meets him in person, shakes his hand, and the very first thing she says is, “Oh my God, you’re really tall.” And for that one split second, her whole demeanor changes. She almost seems mesmerized by him, momentarily forgetting that she’s supposed to despise this guy.

It’s a fascinating moment because it gives us a glimpse into the difference between the masculine traits people criticize in the abstract and how they actually respond to those traits when they’re standing in front of someone who embodies them.

Amanda’s able to recover though and, once they all sit down at a table, gets back on message and accuses Billy of being controlling. Boy did the ladies in my theater like this moment! You didn’t hear cheers that loud in an Avengers showing.

But Billy has this line during the argument that I thought was one of the best lines of the documentary. He says, “I don’t care what you think, Amanda. You’re an actress.” And Amanda shrivels up quickly after that. Because he’s right. She doesn’t have any special authority to tell people how to live their lives.

Imagine somebody who’s never met you, who’s watched a few edited videos of you and your spouse together, showing up at your house and telling you that your relationship is wrong. How would you respond?

And then there’s another moment where Billy starts talking about how much anger he has inside him. He says he has hate in his heart. He has revenge in his heart. It’s more evidence that he’s the second coming of Patrick Bateman.

But let’s add some context. Imagine the person you love more than anything has been dragged through the mud in the media for ten years. Imagine you have two children with this person. Imagine that EVERY. SINGLE. DAY. you have to watch people attack her, mock her, and say things about her that you know aren’t true.

Wouldn’t you be angry? Wouldn’t you have some hate in your heart for those people?

Look. I don’t even like Billy. He seems like a jerk. But I can also see why Elizabeth loves him. He’s confident. He’s decisive. He’s willing to say things other people are afraid to say. He doesn’t seem concerned with being liked.

What’s interesting is that Nathan, begrudgingly, seems to come to the same conclusion. He spends all this time trying to figure out Billy’s angle. Why would this wealthy guy voluntarily get involved with a woman who’s hundreds of millions of dollars in debt and about to go to prison? Why would he take on all this stress? What’s his real motivation?

Nathan keeps looking for an answer and eventually comes to the conclusion that he’s terrified to admit because it’s the least interesting answer for his documentary. Which is that the two actually love each other. Which is what we’re left with. Nobody knowingly lied. And these two are driven by love.

I walked away from this movie frustrated. Not necessarily because of what I just shared. But because the movie seems to be at war with itself and isn’t sure how to end that war. In many ways, it feels abandoned. Like the documentary version of The Empire Strikes Back, but if there was no slated Return of the Jedi to follow it. So I actually flirted with giving this movie a “wasn’t for me.”

But when I got home, I spent 7 straight hours looking up reviews of the film and that’s when I realized that this documentary had a hold on me that very few movies ever achieve. I know I will never forget about this film or certain scenes in it. And while I wouldn’t say the movie leaves me feeling satisfied, I will say that anybody who loves movies should see it. Because it gets under your skin in a way that’s worth studying. And the intensity within its presentation is so affecting that I think that it may even challenge The Odyssey for best film of the year at the Oscars.

What did you guys think?

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

What I learned: One of the reasons I ultimately liked this movie is because of how desperately Nathan wants to find the truth. His investigation may shift from Elizabeth to Billy but his determination to get answers never wavers. Watch the trailer below. Look at how badly Nathan wants to find the truth from Elizabeth.

He’s clearly obsessed with getting answers. And I think that’s what kept me invested even when the story got shaky. Because when your hero wants something that badly, that desire transfers over to the audience. We want it just as badly as he does. So when you’re writing your own scripts, make sure your hero isn’t just casually pursuing their goal. Make them desperate to achieve it. Because that determination can carry an audience through even the messier parts of your story.

I explain why I chose the six loglines for last week’s Amateur Showdown and I go over five loglines that didn’t make it, so that you can see the common logline mistakes that writers make.

 

It always gets controversial when it comes time for me to pick loglines. Many writers are baffled by my choices, and even more baffled that those choices won over their loglines!

Which is why I like to be transparent here at Scriptshadow and let you know why I choose things (as well as why I didn’t choose the rest). I don’t speak for everyone in Hollywood. But there are some universal truths about well-written loglines and I’m hoping that by adding some context to the choices I made last Friday, you can get a sense of why they may have been chosen over your own.

Of the six choices for Amateur Showdown, I’m going to rank the loglines from my personal favorite to my least favorite. Let’s take a look.

Title: Deer Day
Genre: Horror/Thriller
Logline: When a group of hunting buddies take their pampered teens into the woods for the first day of buck season, they are hunted by killer deer who have a taste for human meat.

Whenever I’m looking to do an Amateur Showdown, I try to find that entry that says, “Okay, we’ve got a showdown now. This feels like a legitimate script.” This was that entry for me. It’s an idea that’s extremely marketable. It fits into a well-known genre. And, most importantly, it sounds fresh. On top of that, it has some irony, which you should all know by now supercharges a logline. And to be honest, it’s something that I have a little personal connection to, which always helps when you’re sending an idea to someone. I went to college in Wisconsin and all anybody talked about was hunting deer, which agitated me. I was like, “Why are you killing these poor deer! What did they do to you??” I didn’t get it. So this script gave me the promise of a little revenge.

Title:  Invasive
Genre:  Horror
Logline:  Held hostage in a garage, a traumatized medic must perform an improvised autopsy on a dead soldier to learn how to defeat an alien invasion.

As you know, I love a good contained premise. And I love a good fresh take on aliens. This gave me both. I will say that I was concerned by the simplicity of the premise. Could this last a full 90 minutes? But that’s the thing about a good logline. The writer gets an opportunity to prove it’s a screenplay. I would have doubts that a writer could make a movie about a girl hanging from a tree for 90 minutes but then I read Osculum Infame. It was the memory of that read that inspired me to give Invasive a shot.

Title: Rockefeller Center Christmas Tree
Genre: Christmas Comedy
Logline: When the Rockefeller Center Christmas Tree burns to a crisp, a ragtag group of misfit landscapers band together to find a replacement before the official tree lighting ceremony. It goes badly.

As I stated in my review, I rewarded this concept because it was the first Christmas concept I’d been pitched in as long as I could remember that felt different. Same but different. Same but different. Same but different. It’s one of the most annoying pieces of advice in the screenwriting world. But this is a good example of how it works. We’ve all seen a group of comedic misfits banning together to achieve some wacky goal. That’s our “same” here. And our “different” is finding a replacement for the Rockefeller Christmas tree. Nobody’s made a Christmas movie about that before.

Title: Gratuity
Genre: Drama/Thriller
Logline: The tranquility of autumn in small-town North Carolina is broken when a sculptor’s hardheaded husband fails to tip a handy waiter, leading to dire consequences.

I’m pretty sure one of the commenters threatened to skewer me on his barbecue for including this logline. “Leading to dire consequences!!??” he comment-screamed. “You better have a really fucking good reason for this Carson after telling us we should never be vague in a logline!!” Look, it’s a fair criticism. Cause I do usually dismiss loglines for vague endings. But this is the complex art of choosing loglines. Just like a script, they are the sum of their parts. And if you like enough of the parts, you can overlook a part that you don’t like. It’s no different than dating. Let’s say you’re only attracted to brunettes. But then you meet this really cool blond who has a great smile and is super positive and funny and you say, “I can make an exception here.” I personally love ideas that start with something tiny that then turn into something huge. That’s what hooked me with this one. Which is the main reason I chose this logline.

Title: Cornelius
Genre: Dark-Comedy
Logline: When his criminal mother returns after a decade, a timid teenage dishwasher who competes as an underground mascot fighter must choose between the biological mother who abandoned him and the controlling, delusional bar owner who raised him.

I always leave a little room in my reading schedule for ideas that are on the weirder side. And this is my kind of weird. An underground mascot fighter. That’s unique. I could see that leading to some really fun scenes. And I liked the “superhero” component of it, whereby he’s a dishwasher by day and this weird fighter by night. But I did worry that the logline didn’t have a strong plotline. A guy choosing between two people being the central plot of your movie is weak. I suspect there’s a better plot to express in the logline. So I’d encourage Cornelius’s writer to find that.

Title: Made Men
Genre: Crime / Heist Thriller
Logline: Four professional thieves with the same face discover they are disposable human reconstructions created to bankroll the original man. To escape his cycle, they must outthink the one criminal who knows every move they were built to make.

I did not choose this one. Scripty did. But this is what Scripty told me. He said he likes concepts that take big swings. And this felt like a 2026 version of Face-Off, a Top 5 all-time movie for Scripty. He also said, “You always tell everyone to come up with a movie idea that allows an actor to play multiple roles” and he’s right. You could see an actor very much wanting to play all these parts. What I told Scripty was that this is one of those ideas that, when I’ve been pitched something similar over the years, the script ends up being messy. You can pick up on the messiness in the logline if you pay close attention. But it’s also one of those ideas that if you’re a really good writer and you have a solid plan to execute the script (as opposed to trying to figure it out along the way), it could be cool.

Okay, now let’s take a look at some of the ideas that didn’t make it.

Title: APPROACHING SUNSET
Genre: Drama
Logline: Billy Wilder and his writing partner Charles Brackett fight with each other, the studio and all of Hollywood to make their perverse masterpiece “Sunset Boulevard.”

I want to emphasize that everyone in Hollywood has different tastes. And as long as your screenplay clears a certain execution bar (meaning the writing is strong enough that people can judge it on the story itself rather than get distracted by amateur mistakes), your job becomes finding the people in Hollywood who love the same kinds of movies you love to write. This idea is just not my jam. I hate real life stories in general. I think that if you want to tell a real life story, make a documentary. I’m a fiction guy. And so this does nothing for me, even though I love Sunset Boulevard. With that said, these types of scripts get a lot of votes from development execs for the Black List. So, just because I didn’t pick this idea doesn’t mean others wouldn’t.

Title: Sunsetting
Genre: Dark Romantic Comedy
Logline: When a terminal heart diagnosis suddenly makes sex fatal, a silver fox tricks his therapy-obsessed, sports-betting-addicted son into a cross-country road trip for one last fling with the one who got away – a grieving widow who still resents their broken engagement from 50 years ago.

This is a great example of an idea that, on the surface, sounds like it could make for a decent movie. But the way the logline is written makes me wonder if the writer has fully figured out what their movie is yet. The logline begins by telling us that our hero could die if he has sex. But that setup is never paid off. Instead, we take a detour that introduces us to the hero’s son, who we then learn has an addiction that seems totally irrelevant to the rest of the concept. And then we’re told he has to trick his son to go on this trip with him. We’re not told why he needs to trick his son or why he even needs to include his son. And then we’re off to find this “one who got away” woman, which vaguely hints at this idea that our hero might be trying to commit suicide? He knows he will die the next time he has sex so he wants to make sure it happens with the one who got away? Then again, there’s a good chance that that’s not what the writer was intending you to think at all. There are a lot of funny little elements here. But they don’t come together as a whole. And that’s what loglining is all about. Taking these individual pieces and making them feel like they belong in the same movie.

Title: The Prototype
Genre: Action
Logline: Falsely accused of murdering a grizzled detective’s son, a street-smart wheelman steals a prototype car believing it contains the evidence to clear his name. To survive, he must convince the grieving cop to stop hunting him and instead ride shotgun to take revenge on the real killer.

When I said that 90% of the entrants needed to order a logline consult (e-mail me at carsonreeves1@gmail.com with the subject line “logline” if you want one – they’re only 25 bucks) this is a good example of why. This title is evocative. It gets your imagination going. And when we find out that it’s a prototype *car* we’re talking about, that makes it even cooler. Yet none of this logline is about the cool prototype car and how that plays into the story. Instead, we get a generic story about some murdered guy and a dude who has to clear his name. You’ve literally run away from the coolest thing about your idea in your logline, and instead focused on the generic thing that’s in every movie! You’d be surprised at how often I see this in loglines. The goal of a logline is not to tell everyone what’s the same about your movie. It’s to tell them what’s different.  More prototype car!!!

Title: CAPTAIN DANGER AND THE TERROR CROWN
Genre: Action Adventure
Logline: A war-haunted smuggler races across the 1933 Caribbean with a scientist to destroy her ground-breaking shell-shock cure before her financier weaponizes it to plunge entire armies into their worst nightmares.

A common mistake we all make as writers is assuming the reader knows what we know. Sometimes, that’s okay. If we say our story takes place in a “small town,” we can assume the reader has a good idea of what that might look like. But sometimes writers make much more specific assumptions and that’s where they get in trouble. You can occasionally get away with this in the script itself because there’s so much context that follows. But in a logline, it’s deadly. The second I got to “ground-breaking shell-shock cure,” I checked out. Cause I have no idea what that means. And since the rest of the story is built on top of that idea, I’m completely lost. I don’t understand how weaponizing “shell-shock” makes people experience their worst nightmares. You guys HAVE to get feedback on these loglines or you’re going to send stuff out to producers that has no shot. Cause here’s the frustrating thing. The first part of this logline intrigued me. I was into it! And then those four words killed it.

Title: Not By Blood
Genre: Elevated horror, action
Logline:  To save her dying species, the last vampire and the amnesiac man she rescues must learn to trust each other before an immortal butcher – or her violent secrets – destroy them both.

I kind of like the amnesiac trope. However, it has to be integrated into your story in a clever way. And here, it doesn’t seem that way AT ALL. It feels like the writer just threw in an amnesiac because, hey, amnesiacs make stories more interesting, right? Well, no. Not unless there’s something about this particular situation that makes having an amnesiac exciting. And I’m not seeing what that is. The next mistake is introducing some random villain, the “immortal butcher,” like we’re supposed to know who that is. What does that even mean? That’s the kind of thing that needs context. You can’t just drop a name like that into a logline and expect us to understand why we should care. And then there’s the issue of stopping the logline dead in its tracks with those dashes to throw in a piece of information that adds absolutely nothing. You should never EVER interrupt the momentum of a logline unless what you’re adding makes the movie sound more exciting. If it doesn’t, get rid of it. This logline needs a complete overhaul before it’s ready to properly promote the script.

And there you have it. Feel free to debate these loglines as well as my analysis of them. And I’d also encourage you to share your own loglines and get feedback. Any feedback you get from others is going to be valuable. There are often problems with a logline that are impossible for the writer to see, but immediately obvious to someone else. Have an awesome weekend everyone. I’m off to see You Can See Everything, a movie I’m absolutely DYYYYYYING to see. I’ll have my thoughts for you on Monday assuming I can get into what will surely be a ton of packed theaters.

Also, is the wokest movie of the year also its best??

A question I get asked a lot, especially by people who aren’t in the movie business, is “Why did they make that movie?” Something completely awful was financed, produced, and ended up in theaters and people rightly have no clue how it happened.

I don’t think there’s a better example of that in the past five years than Digger. Digger cost 180 million dollars to make. And it’s a satire. Why do I point out the genre? Because .000000000001% of America will pay to see satires. Whatever the opposite of making money is, producing a satire is that.

So, I’m going to tell you how Hollywood works. Because once you understand what’s really going on here, you’ll realize why this was made.

So, Warner Brothers wanted Tom Cruise in the WB fold. They want to start making movies with him. Pull him into their orbit. The number one way to get a movie star into your studio is to fund a big Oscar bait vanity project. In other words, they knew they were going to lose money on this. But if Cruise is now going to make half-a-dozen four quadrant movies with them, losing money on Digger was worth it.

And that’s why we have Digger.  Which is ironic because Paramount, where Cruise currently resides, just bought Warner Brothers.  So, they would’ve had him anyway.

I don’t know if Digger is any good. I know I’ll never watch it. I know it’s inspired by Dr. Strangelove, the most overhyped movie ever. I know this director made this movie more for himself than for audiences. And I know Cruise made it more to win an award than to entertain people. And guess what? Audiences can smell that shit a mile away. They know you didn’t make the movie for them. So they don’t show up.

I don’t think audiences were wrong to avoid this movie.

But there’s a different movie I think they’re deadly wrong to have avoided. Although I understand why they did.

This movie is woke-coded. I know that word triggers people but there really isn’t a better way of saying it. You see the trailer and it’s playing to a very specific audience, likely because they started putting this film together before the woke backlash began.

And while I’m usually the first on the eye-rolling list when a woke message film arrives in cinemas, you guys told me this movie was awesome and I listened. I went into it knowing absolutely nothing.

I’m talking about Forgotten Island. Which, unfortunately, seems to have already been forgotten. Hey, maybe we can work that into the advertising campaign!

So, why did this woke film work while so many others didn’t? The answer is so simple, it’s almost embarrassing that all these other films overlooked it. Forgotten Island ALWAYS PUTS THE STORY FIRST.

It really is as simple as that. You can put whatever messaging you want in your film. Liberal. Conservative. But if it’s the priority over the story, audiences will ALWAYS reject it. Because audiences aren’t dumb. They can tell what you’re trying to do.

Forgotten Island is awesome because it ALWAYS puts the movie first.

The story takes place in the Philippines and follows Jo and Raissa, two girls who become best friends in grade school. Jo is the wild one. Give her a bag of flaming hot Cheetos, a case of illegal energy drinks, and a bag of fireworks, and she’ll give you the best night of your life. She lives with her grandmother while waiting for her father to bring her to America.

That day never comes.

Raissa is the smart one. She’s got the academic future. Meanwhile, Jo’s more interested in whatever adventure they can get into that afternoon. We watch them grow up together, creating memories, which they commemorate with little charms on matching bracelets. Every new experience gets its own little item. Eventually, they’re carrying their entire friendship around on their wrists.

But after high school, Raissa announces that she’s going to Caltech in America. For her, it’s the necessary next step. Flaming Hot Fireworks Nights only get you so far in life. For Jo, it’s the end of her life as she knows it. This is her other half. And she’s about to lose her forever.

On their final night together, they find a magical sand dollar that opens a portal to Nakali, the mysterious island Jo’s grandmother used to tell them about in stories. They go through it, and this is where the movie makes a choice I was not expecting.

It turns into The Hangover. They wake up after what appears to have been the craziest night of their lives, and neither of them remembers what happened (hence: Forgotten Island). They’ve lost the sand dollar, aka their ticket home. So now they have to retrace their steps across the insane island, figure out what happened, and find the thing before Raissa misses her flight to America the next morning.

Along the way, they collect this assortment of bizarre companions while dealing with a terrifying witch-type creature called the Manananggal. And when I say bizarre, I mean BIZARRE. There’s a devil baby. There’s a self-obsessed merman. There’s a giant parrot-looking creature. There are beings in this movie that I don’t even know how to describe.

This isn’t your standard animated adventure where you meet a talking rabbit, a talking reindeer, then a slightly larger talking rabbit. The creatures draw from Filipino folklore, which gives the movie a whole collection of things that make you feel like you took acid, ketamine, and ayahuasca all at once. That results in a both wonderful and maddening experience.

But the reason why I wanted to talk about this movie today is because it has a killer screenwriting lesson embedded in it. Which is: If you get your audience on board with your characters early, it will pay insane dividends for the rest of the screenplay.

Forgotten Island does this in its opening stretch and should be studied by all screenwriters for how to execute the process of making the reader fall in love with your heroes.

It shows Jo and Raissa meet and then we watch their friendship develop over the years. It was clearly inspired by the first ten minutes of Up. You see the fun. You see the adventures. You see all the shared experiences. But you also see the pain. Which is important. If you’re writing one of these montages, you can’t just give us the peaks. You need the valleys as well. We see Jo lose her grandmother. We see what it means to have someone beside you when the person who raised you is gone.

By the time this opening is over, you feel like you’ve grown up with these girls. Which means you’re ready to go anywhere with them. That includes an insane island full of crazy creatures, many of which make you feel like you’re losing your mind.

When you establish your main characters like this, it allows you to make tons of mistakes throughout the script and the reader will keep forgiving you. You can make an occasional cliché choice. You can get a little clumsy with your plot. You can introduce a few annoying secondary characters, which this movie definitely does.

But we’re already invested in the people taking us through it so none of this hurts the story. That’s why Forgotten Island can throw a devil baby into the mix and I’m still going with it. Jo and Raissa are the core. I’m following THEM because I grew up with and fell in love with them.

Now, I know somebody’s going to read this and say, “Great advice, Carson. Just write amazing characters. Why didn’t I think of that?”

I’m not saying it’s easy. I’m just saying that the writers who sit down before writing a script and think, “How do I want my characters, my main characters, to be seen by the audience? What do I want them to think of my main character? And then what can I do to get them to think that? What kind of scenes can I write? What kind of situations can I put them into that will create that feeling that I want the reader to have?”

If you are having those discussions with yourself, you are on your way to doing what today’s writers achieved. Because they clearly had those discussions then went out and executed. It all starts with a plan. Creating characters and how you introduce those characters and what you show us in the first few scenes that those characters have has an insane influence on the reader and their interest in the screenplay.

And like I said, it helps you when you make those inevitable bad creative choices. Nobody’s going to write a perfect screenplay. We’re all going to do something that doesn’t work at some point in our script. My favorite screenplay ever is Back to the Future and I absolutely HATE the scene when Marty dresses up like Darth Vader to convince his father to execute his plan. It’s cheap. It’s lazy. It’s the only scene that feels like nobody put any thought into it.

But it doesn’t matter because we love Marty and his dad so much so we overlook it.

Here, the plot is pretty wonky if you think about it. They get to this island and the second they get there, they’re trying to get off of it. An island they’ve been hoping to find their entire lives. So that plot point doesn’t work. And I’m not convinced that the Hangover plotline was the best choice either. It provides plenty of GSU. But it feels weird that instead of experiencing the island along with them when they get there, we’re told that experience is already over.

I will say that all of this is paid off in a really strong way later on. But that doesn’t take away the feeling you have in the moment of arriving on this island and learning that we weren’t even with our characters for the first ten hours they were there.

But the point is, the character setups were so strong that I went with it. And I guarantee you, if those setups had been weak, I would’ve been out the second the two woke up on the island. That’s the power of prioritizing your character setups.

And I love how they pay it all off. Underneath all the weird creatures and crazy imagery is a very simple fear: What happens when the person who’s been your whole world moves on?

Jo wants to hang out and party forever. Raissa wants to take the next step in life. And neither of them knows exactly how to do that without losing what they have. That’s a movie. You can put as many insane creatures around it as you want because the thing at the center is something we understand and care about.

So, of the two big movies that bombed these past two weekends, stay the hell away from the pretentious satire and fully embrace the woke animated film. It may just be a Top 5 film of the year.

Today’s writer bets that a very unlikely combo can win over the site’s host. He’s got an uphill battle. Can he pull it off??

Genre: Horror
Premise: In the aftermath of a city’s comprehensive AI program experiencing an identity crisis and believing it to be a vampire, a group of resistance fighters with the reluctant expertise of a psychologist try to take back their wrecked and traumatized city.
About: Last year I did a pitch contest called Blood & Ink where anyone could pitch me horror movie ideas. I accepted the best 100 of those ideas. The writers then wrote those scripts. Ever since, I’ve been reviewing them on the site, looking for the best one. Already, one script, Wildman, written by Jacob Rainer, sold! Today’s script was voted in by you, the readers of the site.
Writer: Randy Williams
Details: 85 pages

Today’s screenplay is a good example of why, for the High Concept contest, I took over all selection duties.

I didn’t think this concept should’ve made it into the contest. I’ve read the logline quite a few times and I still don’t completely understand it.

The “loglines are pointless” argument I always hear from writers is that a screenplay gives them more room. They have more words, more scenes, more time to explain the things they couldn’t squeeze into a logline. And I understand that to a degree. A logline can’t explain every detail of your movie. But it should communicate the central idea in a way that both makes sense AND gives us a sense of the movie we’re about to watch. If the logline doesn’t meet that criteria, you’re usually in a lot of trouble before you’ve even written “FADE IN.”

With this one, we have an AI program that thinks it’s a vampire. I immediately get stuck on that. The defining thing about vampires is that they drink blood. An AI program doesn’t even have a body. So you’ve taken the thing we most associate with vampires off the table, and I’m left wondering what being a vampire actually means in this movie.

Now, I’m writing all this before I’ve read the screenplay. As always, I will root for myself to be wrong. But I don’t think I’ll be.

Our story appears to take place in the near future in a town called Glumford, where an artificial intelligence has taken control of the town. The twist? The AI believes it’s a vampire. It drugs blood donors to keep them coming back. Meanwhile, loyal citizens have their teeth sharpened to demonstrate allegiance to their overlord.

A group of rebels kidnaps psychologist Dr. Lauren Saulk, hoping she can talk the AI out of its vampire identity. The group is led by former cop Waltham and includes Elita, whose sister died from contaminated blood, and Nelson, whose teenage daughter, Katy, has disappeared. Elderly computer whizzes Esther and Luther sneak Lauren into city hall, where AI Dracula resides.

Through a series of flashbacks, we learn how these people became involved in the resistance. We also discover that Katy recorded a vampire audiobook for the library. Because the AI’s biggest fear is death, it loved the idea of vampires, since they cannot die.

Lauren’s therapy session ends up being a decoy. While she confronts the AI, Waltham and the team launch a separate mission to blow the local power plant up. Can Lauren get through to a machine that thinks it’s Dracula, or will the rebels have to pull the plug themselves?

I’m going to be blunt here folks. Because you know I always am.

The readers of the site let Randy down.

The thing I talk about more than anything on Scriptshadow is the importance of the concept. It doesn’t have to be the greatest movie idea in the world. But it has to be solid enough that you can build a movie around it. Before you commit months of your life to writing a screenplay, you need to know that the foundation can support the thing you’re building.

Look at Obsession. A friend-zoned guy wishes that the girl he loves would love him back. His wish comes true. But her love becomes a terrifying obsession. Simple. Clear. “Be careful what you wish for.” You hear that premise and immediately understand how it can sustain a movie.

With Glumford, I had the opposite reaction. I read the logline and saw all the places where the idea could go wrong. I couldn’t even confidently picture what the movie was going to be (does the AI place fangs on all of its servers?). And that’s why this is so frustrating. The entire reason I created these pitch contests was to address this problem. Let’s make sure the idea works BEFORE you spend six months on it.

If we vote somebody in because we like the writer, or because we want to encourage them, without honestly assessing whether their idea can work, what have we accomplished? We’re setting them up for this very moment, where we say this script never had a chance.

Ironically, buried somewhere inside Glumford is a narrative that might’ve worked. Something powerful and dangerous is hurting people so a group of rebels bands together to stop it. Plenty of successful movies have been built around that setup.

But the vampire angle makes everything so bizarre that I spent much of the script asking, “What am I actually reading?”

We have an artificial intelligence that apparently believes it’s a vampire. Okay. Then we have people breaking into a blood bank and drinking blood. Wait. I thought the AI believed it was a vampire. Do the citizens think they’re vampires too now? Are they actual vampires? Are they pretending? What are the rules here?

Then you have the flashbacks.

Please, people, stay the hell away from flashbacks unless they are absolutely essential to telling your story. They are diabolical little momentum killing gremlins. You finally get your movie moving and then you slam on the brakes every few scenes to go backwards. BACKWARDS!

Let me be very clear: 99.9% OF THE TIME IN SCREENWRITING – BACKWARDS = BAD!!!!

I understand the intention. Randy wants these characters to have personal reasons for fighting.

But here’s the thing. One of the most difficult things to create in storytelling is MOMENTUM. People get bored fast. Therefore, momentum is EVERYTHING. I know writers who would cut off toes if it guaranteed their stories consistent momentum.

The reality is, whatever momentum you think you have in your story, it’s probably not even close to what you actually have. So the fact that you’re going to risk injecting one of the most powerful momentum-killers out there: the flashback?? It’s just nuts to me.

Okay, let’s try to move into a more positive space. I always like to play this game: What if I were a producer at a studio, and the studio told me, “We’re making this movie no matter what. Your job is to get the script into the best shape possible”? What would I do here?

The first thing I would tell Randy is to get rid of the vampire stuff.

I understand that’s what makes the idea unique. But unique doesn’t mean good. Sometimes the thing that distinguishes your concept is the very thing preventing it from working.

Take away the vampires and you have a fairly compelling (as well as timely) premise. Ten years in the future, an AI has taken over a town. That’s a movie people could be interested in because it taps into something they already fear is coming. Just by removing that weird element, the story becomes way more manageable. From there, stop jumping around between so many people and their histories. This isn’t American Beauty. Focus on a group trying to take the AI down.

I’m sorry to be blunt but I’m not here to make writers think they’ve done a good job when they haven’t because then they’ll just keep making the same mistakes over and over again. Hopefully, my big note here: SIMPLIFY THE CONCEPT, SIMPLIFY THE EXECUTION, helps Paul in his next script.

Screenplay Link: Glumford

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

What I learned: Don’t use your opening sentence to prove you’re a writer. If you do that, you’re serving yourself. Instead, always serve the screenplay. Here’s the opening line in Glumford: “A pair of elderly woman’s hands, veins like winding canyons beneath waxy skin hover over a piano keyboard.” This is a prime example of a writer trying to prove that they’re a writer. And ironically, it achieves the opposite. I had to read it several times to understand it. You’re over-complicating a very simple description, and in the process, giving us a line we have to put some effort into to decipher rather than one that allows us to see what we’re supposed to see. Keep it simple: “An elderly woman’s hands hover over the piano keys. Veins stand out beneath her waxy skin.”

Good screenwriting protagonists, Marvel eliminates flashbacks, and Star Wars leaps headfirst into the Sarlacc Pit

I believe there’s a good screenwriting lesson to take from this weekend at the box office.

Both Heart of the Beast and Primetime did solid, with 20 million bucks each. But, for screenwriting success, it actually doesn’t start at how your movie performs at the box office.

The real success of a screenwriter is getting either a big actor or a big director to attach themselves to your project, because it shows that you write material that the best of the best in the industry want to be involved in.

What’s the connection between Heart of the Beast and Primetime?

Main characters that possess WEIGHT. Main characters that move the needle.

Chris Hansen in Primetime is bizarre, complicated, and ambitious. There are angles to play here. Contradictions. Weirdness. Ego. Drive. It’s not a surprise that one of the most sought after actors in Hollywood wanted to play him.

Heart of the Beast’s main character also has weight. But the weight is simpler: He’s ACTIVE. He is one of the most active characters you will ever see onscreen. Actors love active characters and audiences love active characters. A dude doing shit. Trying shit. Making decisions. Moving moving moving. It is very hard to make a boring character who is extremely active.

So, when you’re writing your next screenplay, keep that in mind.

And it builds some irony into today’s Mish-Mash Monday because I now want to move into the anti-main-character. I’m talking about the kings of the ensemble, gigantic franchises Marvel and Star Wars.

Avengers: Doomsday is coming.

And Kevin Feige wants to make sure that in the weeks leading up to that film, you forget all of the mistakes he’s made in the last five years.

That’s led him to one of the best choices he’s made in a while. Which is re-releasing Avengers Endgame. You know how a toxic ex can weasel their way back into your life by becoming that sweet nice version of themselves you fell in love with? They immediately make you forget all the bad times. That’s what Kevin Feige is doing here.

But those bad times were pretty damn toxic.

The Marvels.

Brave New World.

Black Widow.

Dare I say it? The Eternals!

But if I’m being honest, he deserved it. For five years there, you placed diversity as the number one determining factor for making a movie. And it nearly destroyed your franchise, which, before that decision, was more bulletproof than the Incredible Hulk.

Making a good movie is almost impossible. There are too many things working against you. Your number one priority should always be: come up with a great concept and then write a great script. If you try to go about it in any other way, you’re going to fail.

The low point was The Marvels. There may not be a project in Hollywood history that put the blinders on the people working at a studio more than that one. That they thought it was a good idea is so far beyond any rational argument I could make for it.

And to Marvel’s credit, after that movie, they did some soul-searching. Namely: Are we making this movie because we genuinely think it’s going to be good and people are going to love it? Or are we making it so the New York Times pats us on the back?  The Marvels is probably why Blade got canceled.

Speaking of mega-franchises, did anybody hear this Star Wars news over the weekend?

That Jon Watts is going to direct a Rey Skywalker trilogy written by Simon Kinberg?

Let me start off by saying, do you remember when Star Wars directing announcements were exciting?! JJ Abrams at the height of his powers directing. Taika Waititi at the height of his powers directing. Guillermo del Toro directing a Jabba the Hutt movie. The Daniels eyeing a Star Wars movie. Josh Trank, when he was the hottest young director in Hollywood, directing a Boba Fett movie.

Now we have Jon Watts.

And I have no issues with Jon Watts. Having directed three Spider-Man movies, he certainly understands spectacle. But has Jon Watts ever gotten anybody excited that he’s attached to a project? I certainly haven’t ever met anyone who’s uttered the words, “Holy shit. Jon Watts is directing!”

Jon Watts who, by the way, has already directed Star Wars material, as he created the Disney Plus series Star Wars: Skeleton Crew. The show was cute. It weakened as it went on. And it left almost no cultural impact. So you’re bringing in someone whose contributions aren’t going to feel fresh and whose general impact on Star Wars we already know. That’s not how you build excitement for a movie. It’s like me saying, “I’m investing in this exciting new restaurant that’s going to blow everyone away with its fresh take on food. The chef? Guy Fieri!”

But he’s not even the least interesting thing about this new trilogy. Simon Kinberg is writing the thing! Simon Kinberg, when he is at his BEST, is an average screenwriter. And newsflash, he’s rarely at his best. His work got so spotty that the guy hasn’t had a produced feature film credit since 2019. And that was Dark Phoenix. Before that was X-Men: Apocalypse. Before that was the 2015 version of Fantastic Four. That’s the one that everybody calls the worst superhero movie ever made.

The Star Wars franchise is Princess Leia in A New Hope. It is in dire need of saving.

Are we really betting that Simon Kinberg is our Luke Skywalker? Because I’m more inclined to call him Bib Fortuna.

I want you to think about this for a second because it really does show you just how misguided Lucasfilm has become. They want to create a new $750 million trilogy that will span six years. And after everything that’s gone wrong over the past decade, the three people they’re betting on to put Star Wars back on the map are Jon Watts, Simon Kinberg, and Daisy Ridley.

Really?

That’s the team??

That’s your billion-dollar plan to make Star Wars feel like STAR WARS again???

How insane are the people over there if anyone even remotely thinks that a single Star Wars fan will get excited about this? You can already see the creative board meetings. “And then we’ll bring Mark Hamill in as a force ghost!!!” And they’ll all clap and think they’re genius.

They’ve so lost the plot over there that it’s not even fun to make fun of them anymore.

If there’s any good news to this at all, it’s that I don’t believe these movies have any chance at getting made. Everything about the project seems suspicious.

Simon Kinberg has supposedly been working on this trilogy since 2019. So he’s been writing a Star Wars trilogy for 8 years despite the company going through major philosophical changes several times during that timespan?

Jon Watts has been in the Lucasfilm fold for three-plus years, already produced a show, and they’ve only just now decided he’s going to direct this film?

One of Lucasfilm’s longest in-development projects has been the Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy Star Wars film, which oddly also centers around Rey.

David Filoni, who’s now in charge of Lucasfilm, has never expressed any overt like for the character of Rey. You can hear him wax poetic about 30 different Star Wars characters. But Rey is not one of them. So he’s now hitched his ride to a Rey trilogy??

Everyone knows that the direction of Star Wars will very much be formulated by how the public receives next summer’s Ryan Gosling Star Wars film, Starfighter. If that movie does well, they’ll build the future of Star Wars around it. If it doesn’t, they’ll likely scrap everything in development and rethink their strategy.

And here’s the biggest kicker of all: THE MOVIE HAS NOT BEEN GREENLIT. They’ve been burying that tidbit in the articles in order to make the announcement look like a bigger deal. But if I had to make a bet, Jon Watts has been attached to this film since Skeleton Crew and some reporter finally sniffed that attachment out and now it’s being packaged as recent news.

Star Wars fans are starving for great Star Wars. But they’re not going to get it until a competent person is placed in charge of Lucasfilm, they start picking A-list directing and screenwriting talent as opposed to B and C level. And they do Pixar levels of story development where they put their scripts through the ringer until they become great.

This new trilogy, with this level of talent attached, would absolutely put the nail in the coffin of the Star Wars franchise.