Genre: Dark Comedy
Premise: 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.
About: A few weeks ago, I held an Amateur Showdown for all you aspiring screenwriters out there. The voting was really close. Two weeks ago, I reviewed the winning script. But today’s script was just one vote away from winning. And ever since The Ballad of the Ember Knight lost on an Amateur Showdown, resulting in me only finding out about it when the writers hired me for a consultation a year later, I’m a bit more curious about the scripts that don’t win these things. Hence, we get today’s review…
Writer: Jamie Porter
Details: 95 pages
I always like to give unique scripts a shot. So, when I was picking screenplays to compete in the Amateur Showdown, I was excited to find this one. It scratched that “weird” itch that makes me think of movies like Being Charlie Kaufman and The Squid and the Whale. Those scripts can turn into really good indie movies. Do we have another one of those today? Let’s find out…
17 year old beanpole Cornelius competes in an underground fighting league where grown men dress up in animal mascot costumes and beat the crap out of each other. Cornelius fights as a dolphin and is one of the league’s rising stars.
Greg, who’s obsessed with bleak sad Hungarian films, is officially Cornelius’s coach and unofficially his father. The two are also close with Halpert, a 72-year-old widower who’s barely hanging onto his life and runs the fighting league. Before he dies, Halpert wants to expand the league.
One day, Cornelius’s estranged mother, Sanni, shows up. Sanni is a very unhappy miserable woman so it’s not clear why she wants to reconnect with Cornelius. But it may have something to do with her ex-boyfriend. If she comes to him with Cornelius, maybe he’ll want her back.
Eventually, Cornelius meets Milky, a weird young girl who seems to understand him in a way no one else does. The two begin hanging out and, all of a sudden, Cornelius isn’t as interested in mascot fighting so much.
As the championship nears, Sanni does something catastrophic to destroy the league, leaving Greg and Halpert scrambling to save it. But will Cornelius even want to fight if they do?
The character study.
It’s when you strip away the big, sexy concept, the exciting plot, and you tell a slow, mostly intimate, story that focuses on the characters themselves.
So it goes without saying that if you’re going to write a character study, as is the case with Cornelius, you gotta give me some great character development.
I believe that Jamie believed he was giving us that. But I would argue that he didn’t get there. And it’s a rather involved explanation as to why so hang with me and I’ll do my best to explain it.
Let’s start with Cornelius himself.
He is the titular character.
But he’s not the main character.
That’s not unheard of for a movie. But it’s frustrating if you’re the reader. Cause you go in assuming that’s the case and then all of these other characters are getting way more attention and you’re thinking, “Well, wait a minute. Who’s the main character exactly?”
At first, it appears to be Greg. He’s taken Cornelius in. He’s pushing him to be this great fighter. Readers gravitate towards characters who are ACTIVE. And let me explain why. Because screenwriters hear that advice a lot: “Make your character ACTIVE!” But I’m not sure they understand why it’s important.
It’s important because active characters are PUSHING THE STORY FORWARD. Let’s take Jeff Lebowski. The fact that he has to go out and try to get the money back for his ruined rug FORCES THINGS TO HAPPEN IN THE STORY that push it forward.
Now imagine that nobody had pissed on Jeff Lebowski’s rug. He wouldn’t have to do anything. He wouldn’t have to go anywhere. And what would that result in? No story. No plot. A character hanging around his apartment all day.
So that’s why you want active characters.
Unfortunately, Greg is active in name only. He wants Cornelius to win. He wants to make a small fighting league a little bigger. But that’s pretty much it. That’s the extent of this character’s contribution to the story. Outside of that and his love for Hungarian movies, he’s too thin.
Then we have Sanni. I don’t know if I’d call Sanni the best character in the script because she’s unlikable in God-like proportions. But she disrupts a lot of things and, therefore, is the main source of drama in the story. Character studies NEED DRAMA. Too many screenwriters don’t know this. They think: Just create interesting characters. No. You need some sort of plot where dramatic events unfold.
My issue is that she doesn’t feel truly connected to Cornelius in any real-world convincing way. We later find out they’re not even related. She adopted him. Which makes it confusing why she would’ve abandoned him. I just never got the feeling that Jamie understood this character other than that she was a disruptor.
Eventually, Cornelius begins to break away from what everyone else wants for him when Milky comes along. But even as he starts making his own decisions, he still comes off as thin. Because when you strip everything away, what’s really happening here? A horny 17-year-old boy meets the first girl who wants to have sex with him, and suddenly he doesn’t want to fight anymore.
Is that a deep exploration of character? What are we learning about Cornelius beyond the fact that he’d rather have sex than fight? What deeper part of himself is being challenged? We get this late-arriving art storyline that seems designed to give Cornelius some of that missing depth. But rather than growing organically out of who he is and what he’s been through, it feels like another funky idea the writer has thrown into an already overcrowded script full of funky ideas.
And I kept coming back to: Who is the main character here? Cornelius starts to emerge as the main character as we near the finish line. But for the first half of the script, I don’t know if I knew a single thing about Cornelius. You can’t develop a character ONLY in the second half of the screenplay.
All of these characters need more depth. A tragic childhood backstory and one quirky characteristic each is not enough development. Real character depth comes from establishing who a person is, identifying the thing that’s holding them back in life, then putting them through a journey that forces them to confront that thing.
I just watched Coyote vs. Acme, and Will Forte plays this bottom-of-the-barrel lawyer who’s given up on life. He’s a coward who’s known for settling every case that comes to him. Then he’s dragged into this ridiculous case where he can’t settle. And over the course of his journey, he has to decide if he’s going to continue being this guy who rolls over and accepts defeat or if he’s finally going to stand up and fight for something.
THAT’S character depth because we understand what the character needs to improve then we build a story around repeatedly testing him in that area. You want to introduce your character at a point in their life where, if they keep going down the road they’re on, they’re killing their own soul. And the movie is their last-ditch chance to change that.
That’s what makes a character journey compelling. We’re watching someone fight for their soul!
Nobody in this script really cares all that much about anything. Greg cares the most but what he’s fighting for is thinner than the pancakes I made this morning. And everyone else is just depressed and dying. Cornelius is the closest we get to a character transformation but he was set up so poorly – so passively – that we never, or I should say I never, cared about him.
Part of the problem is Jamie focused on the wrong thing. He put too much importance on the quirkiness. Giving Greg a backstory where he was left at a baby giraffe zoo as a child. Sanni almost ran away with a circus musician. Cornelius and Milky make art with blood. Backstories that all have some insanely unique element (your wife didn’t just die. She died climbing Mount Kilimanjaro).
These things may feel like good writing choices because they’re unique. But they’re also insanely unrelatable. To get the audience to understand your characters, they have to relate to what they’re going through. Nobody can relate to being 7 years old, told to swim under the ice in a lake, then come out the other side to find out that your parents have left you there. That doesn’t happen in the real world.
Generally speaking, you get one wild creative choice in a script (a kid fights in an underground animal mascot league) and that’s it. With everything else, try to keep it realistic.
I’m not going to lie. This one was frustrating. I kept waiting for it to find its footing. But there was never a moment in the script where I wasn’t aware that it was being written. With that said, if you are a fan of movies like The Squid and the Whale or, even, Little Miss Sunshine, you might like this one. Check it out, form your own opinion, and tell us what you think in the comments.
Script link: Cornelius
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: If weirdness could be measured on a 1-10 scale and you’re naturally a 6, don’t try to write a Level 9 Weirdness script. Stick closer to your natural level. Maybe push yourself to a 7 or 8. But the further you stray from your natural sensibility, the more inauthentic your writing will feel. Because at a certain point, you’re no longer drawing from your own imagination. You’re drawing from what you think a weirder person’s imagination looks like. And that’s the difference between being genuinely weird and trying to convince everyone you’re weird.
I dropped more screenwriting knowledge in this newsletter than probably any newsletter ever. There are some whopper lessons here that could literally change the entire trajectory of your screenwriting life. We talk about the hottest director in Hollywood. We talk about what the heck is going on over at Netflix. We talk about how Quentin Tarantino may hold the secret to you cracking your latest screenplay. My great grandmother makes her Scriptshadow debut. I review another huge short story sale that I got so worked up about, I had to go buy 20 pounds of ice over at 7-11 so I could create a cold plunge in my bathtub just to cool down. If you’re not signed up for my newsletter, I want to get you better health care because there’s clearly something wrong with your brain.
If you’re signed up but did not receive my newsletter, e-mail me. And if you want to sign up, e-mail me. All of you can reach me here: carsonreeves1@gmail.com
DC falling, documentaries rising, ancient characters coming back from the dead, and two Hollywood superstars bombing like it’s 1941
How crazy is it that a documentary is doing this well at the box office. You Can See Everything is continuing to break records. If I’m being honest, I don’t know what records are being broken, but I keep seeing that people say that on the internet, so I’m assuming it must be true.
So, what’s happening here? Why is this movie in the weakest performing genre almost beating DC movies with 100 times their marketing budget?
Well, one of the things co-directors Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim said is they would shoot a scene, then afterwards everybody, them and the crew, would discuss it, and every single person had a different opinion on what had happened in the scene.
That’s when Nathan realized that there might be something to this. Because when he went into shooting, he wasn’t sure if there was a movie here. And even as he talks about it now, he says, “Even after we shot, we didn’t know if we had a film.”
But the film appears to be about the different perspectives people take from it. Because everybody’s having the same experience that Nathan and Lance and the crew had, where they watch a scene and they come away with two completely different perspectives on it.
Like in my review, I point out that Amanda Seyfried comes off as completely awful, and someone comments she comes off as the best thing in the movie. And people think that Elizabeth Holmes is lying a scene, then other people think she’s absolutely telling the truth.
The famous Who’s on First scene, people think she’s a master manipulator as she says that she has no idea why it’s funny, and I think it’s obvious she’s not hip to that kind of humor and just doesn’t get it.
But what’s happening is that the fact that people have such differing perspectives is creating conversation outside the movie, and that is extremely rare nowadays, that people really talk about movies after watching them.
Another neat aspect about the film is people believe there are all these hidden Easter Eggs that are telling you the truth about Elizabeth Holmes. They think that Nathan has hidden the answer of the film, because the film leaves you with no clear answer, but people now think Nathan has left these Easter eggs in the film and in the marketing that are revealing what he knows.
One Easter Egg I found, and I haven’t seen anything about this, so I’m actually very proud of myself for discovering it, is I looked at the poster up above and I was wondering why they decided to choose it. Cause I don’t think it’s a very good poster. Then I looked closer and I realized that a big part of the movie is Elizabeth Holmes’ big, bright, blue eyes. But when you zoom in on her eye there, you see that she’s wearing a contact lens, and the implication is that it’s a color-corrective lens to make her eyes very, very blue.
If she’s doing that, if she’s lying about the color of her eyes, then what else is she lying about? She’s probably lying about everything.
The funny thing is I don’t think she’s a liar at all. I think she’s no different from any other CEO of any other company. No CEO is going to walk into a financier meeting and say, “Oh, these are all the things that are wrong with my product.”
No, they’re going to hype the product. They’re going to tell you why it’s awesome and oversell it. That’s literally what all CEOs do all the time. And that’s all she was doing. And to claim that she was deceiving anyone, well then you got to put every single CEO on earth in prison, because all of them do the exact same thing for a literal living.
I think the movie’s great, though, and it’s really cool that this non-traditional movie is getting so much attention. It’s rare that this happens, and it’s fun to watch.
On the flip side, we have Klara and the Sun and the now confirmed completed downfall of Taika Waititi. I don’t think I’ve ever seen someone who was so high fall so far so fast. I mean, one day, he had all of Hollywood wanting to do whatever he wanted to do, and the next, he had Klara and the Sun.
I don’t think it helped his cause that he cast Jenna Ortega, who also flew too close to the sun and, like Icarus, fell to Earth. They both made their big mistakes that led to their downfalls around the same time. For Taika, it was Thor: Love and Thunder.
Which was, I mean, if you want to see a movie that shows why screenwriting matters and why you can’t just make shit up as you go along, go watch that movie, because it’s the perfect exemplification of very poor writing and a lack of structure and a lack of a plan and a lack of a foundation in the screenplay that you’ll ever see.
Jenna Ortega’s downfall was more self-inflicted. She had that press tour where she told everybody that she did everything. She did the writing, she did the choreographing, she told the cinematographer where to put the camera, she ran craft services. Queen of all Movies Ortega.
That is one of the fastest ways to make every single person who works on movies hate you. Because if you’re going to take credit for everybody else’s work, they will hate you.
And it used to be in Hollywood that you could get away with this because stars were so important to movies that the on-set people just had to shut up and take it.
But nowadays, with social media and the fact that stars aren’t as big as they used to be, they don’t have the power anymore. Your every move on set is being watched and potentially reported on. And your star power alone, your fanbase, can’t shield you from all of that. So that trickles down from your jobs to the internet and people stop going to see you.
And it’s too bad because I read Klara and the Sun and it was a good book, and it had this perfect balance of sweetness and sadness. Which used to be Taika’s brand. JoJo Rabbit is an excellent script and an even better movie. But the guy has lost his confidence or his mojo or something because all you need to do is watch 10 seconds of that trailer to know that they screwed it up. You can tell the movie doesn’t work immediately.
There are actually two movies I wanted to see this weekend but wasn’t able to. I wanted to laugh, so I wanted to see the Ali G movie. I realize we’re 20 years late on this movie having any buzz at all but I still think that the Ali G character is hilarious. And even if Sacha Baron Cohen is probably just doing it for a paycheck, it’s hard to find movies that make me laugh, and I knew this movie would. I mean, this jacket alone makes me laugh.
But it’s playing in barely any theaters! Luckily, I heard it’s coming out on Amazon Prime quickly, so I’ll be looking forward to that.
The other movie I wanted to see was Wildwood, which is the only movie out there that’s actually got better critic and audience scores than You Can See Everything, which is not an easy task.
But I had trouble finding this one as well. The only place it was playing near me, at the Grove, had very strange showtimes, to the point where I thought there was something wrong with the AMC website. But I double and triple checked, and, nope, it was just weird showtimes. I guess this is the side of Hollywood they never talk about. When you have the tiny distribution company, you don’t get any of the good theaters, any of the good showtimes.
But this one, I mean, if you haven’t seen the trailer, the trailer’s amazing. It looks like the modern-day version of The Chronicles of Narnia, a real adventure.
And then finally you have Clayface, which made $24 million this weekend. It’s not looking good for WB or DC or James Gunn. Because he chose these movies. He chose these characters. And they’re not doing well.
You can see what Gunn’s vision was for the DC universe. It was, A, Superman – just get the Superman movie right. And then he asked the question, “What are the most interesting characters that I can build a movie around?” And let’s not go to the obvious candidates. Let’s find those comics that have the most interesting characters.
And when you look at Clayface, it’s no doubt a very interesting character on the surface. It’s Vanilla Sky, the Tom Cruise film from 2o01. You’re beautiful, and then you get this terrible face, and you fix it, but then it’s unpredictable when the ugliness is going to come back. That’s a very compelling character. So I understand what he was thinking.
Then Supergirl as well! Supergirl was all about this drunk woman who lost her family and stewed in her own misery and in her own substance abuse as she ignored the world, and then she’s tasked with saving it. And that too is objectively an interesting character. So I can see where he was coming from, from a screenwriting perspective.
But his whole thing was: ”We’re not making movies until the scripts are great.”
And both of these scripts don’t look to be great. Clayface got a 75% Rotten Tomatoes score. And that’s what it looks like. It looks like an average ass movie.
And the problem here is that, and what a lot of people who are playing defense for Clayface are saying is, “Well, it’s not a superhero movie. It’s a horror movie.” Well, okay. That’s fine. But if you’re going to be judged by the horror movie space, well, guess what? Resident Evil made $60 million its opening weekend. Backrooms made $80 million its first weekend. So you don’t really have an excuse here, because you’re not even scoring well in the horror department.
The reason I have no interest in seeing it is two-fold. And I sense that a lot of people feel the same way. One, the actor has a fairly weird face. It’s not a face I want to watch for 2 hours. And two, the movie looks off-putting. I don’t know how else to explain it. So, why would I want to feel put-off for 2 hours?
It sucks because if you take away the Hollywood gossip factory and all the typical BS internet chatter, I think you’re looking at a man in James Gunn who’s honestly looking for good stories to tell, for good characters to build movies around.
Unfortunately, it isn’t just about finding a great character and a great plot. You got to – and I talked about this in an article recently – you got to connect it together in a way where it feels like this well-constructed living breathing organism, rather than just something you plot out the beats for and then make your character change over the course of the story. That’s not enough. You got to make it something that we feel.
I know this because the script I get emailed about the most, by far, is Osculum Infame, and people are constantly asking me about it. They’re just obsessed with it and it’s because Bernd, the writer, he just… he wrote something special, and it just all connected, and it just all did everything it was supposed to do, and it found that way to not just be something on paper, but reach out and pull the reader into its world.
It’s so hard to do that.
Have you guys seen any of these films? What are your thoughts? In the meantime, I may just check out the first episode of Carrie tonight. Why not? It’s free on Amazon. The TV pickings have been so slim that if this doesn’t work, I’m stuck waiting another year for White Lotus Season 4 to come out!
An advanced screenwriting method that takes your screenplays to the next level!
When I first started writing screenplays, I didn’t know what the hell I was doing when it came to writing scenes. I mean, I knew what a scene was in the abstract. I knew that characters were supposed to talk to each other and things were supposed to happen. But as far as how to actually construct a scene? It was total guesswork and I mainly operated on feel.
Then, somewhere along the way, I read a screenwriting book that said every scene should have a beginning, a middle, and an end. Or, in storytelling parlance, a first act, a second act, and a third act. And that was a revelation to me. A scene should be its own miniature movie!
Suddenly, I had a system. I had rules. I had something I could actually apply when I sat down to write a scene. There was only one problem. When I went back and started studying some of my favorite movies, I noticed that a whole bunch of their scenes didn’t follow this rule.
Some scenes were only half a minute long. Some were nothing more than a character walking into a room, learning a piece of information, and leaving. Some started right in the middle of a conversation. Others ended before the characters had resolved anything. Where were the three acts in those scenes?
And the more I studied them, the more I realized that the advice itself seemed to contradict another famous piece of advice: Enter a scene as late as possible and leave as early as possible.
Wait, hold on a second. If I’m supposed to enter a scene as late as possible, doesn’t that sometimes mean skipping the beginning? Let’s say two characters are meeting at a coffee shop. The beginning of the scene might be them arriving, ordering coffee, sitting down, and getting comfortable. The middle might be them discussing the problem they’re there to solve. And the end might be them finally reaching a decision.
But what if the only thing I need from that scene is the decision? Why would I waste two pages setting everything up when I could start right before the decision is made, get the information I need, and move on?
And what about those tiny scenes whose only purpose is to get us from one part of the story to another? Am I really supposed to give every one of those scenes its own three-act structure? It didn’t make sense. So, for a while, I was stuck.
I still believed in the beginning-middle-end approach. I liked how it forced you to think of a scene as a complete dramatic unit instead of just a bunch of people talking. But I couldn’t reconcile that belief with what I was seeing in actual movies.
Then, eventually, I realized something. The beginning-middle-end rule was right. I was just applying it to the wrong thing. See, sometimes a scene really is its own miniature movie. It has a setup, a development, and a resolution. Everything happens in one location during one continuous stretch of time.
But other times, that miniature movie is spread across multiple scenes. Maybe three scenes. Maybe four. Maybe five. And when you combine those scenes, something interesting happens. They form a complete story.
The first scene sets up a problem. The next couple of scenes develop that problem, complicate it, make things worse. And the final scene brings everything to a head. Beginning. Middle. End. It’s the exact same principle! The only difference is that instead of applying it to one scene, you’re applying it to a sequence of scenes.
And that’s when everything clicked for me. I didn’t need every individual scene to have three acts. I needed every dramatic unit to have three acts. Sometimes that unit was a single scene. Sometimes it was five scenes working together.
Suddenly, all those movies I’d been studying made sense. The short scenes weren’t breaking the rules. They were parts of larger dramatic units. They didn’t need to be complete stories because they were contributing to a complete story. Once I understood that, I had a much more flexible way of constructing screenplays. Instead of forcing every scene into the same rigid structure, I could move back and forth between two approaches.
And the best part was that I no longer had to sacrifice pacing to satisfy some arbitrary structural requirement. If a scene only needed to be ten seconds long, it could be ten seconds long. If a scene needed to be eight pages long, it could be eight pages long. The only thing that mattered was whether the larger dramatic unit was doing its job. And that brings us to the screenwriting approach I want to talk about today, which I call…
THE ACCORDION METHOD
The Accordion Method is a way of constructing scenes where you can either compress your beginning, middle, and end into a single scene or stretch them out across several scenes. Just like a real accordion, you can push it all the way in or pull it all the way out, depending on how much room you need.
So let’s start with the accordion pushed all the way in. A great example of this is the first time Clarice meets Hannibal Lecter in The Silence of the Lambs.
The scene starts with Clarice approaching Lecter in his cell, hoping to persuade him to complete a questionnaire. She has a clear goal. Which is important to point out. Scenes that have a beginning, middle, and end are stronger when a character enters them with a goal. We know what the character wants and we can measure everything that happens against whether they’re getting closer to or further away from that goal.
Next comes the middle of the scene, which is where the conflict takes place. Clarice tries to get Lecter to cooperate, but Lecter has other plans. He starts probing her insecurities, analyzing her background, and psychologically turning the interrogation around on her. This is the meat of the scene. It’s where the resistance (the conflict) comes from. Clarice wants something and Lecter isn’t going to make it easy for her.
Finally, we get our ending. After their unpleasant exchange, Clarice walks away, seemingly having failed in her mission. But then Lecter calls her back and gives her a clue that could help with the Buffalo Bill investigation. And that’s our climax! Clarice came in wanting something from Lecter. Lecter resisted her, creating conflict. And in the end, despite all that resistance, she walks away with a valuable key to the next stage of the story.
Beginning. Middle. End.
Now, when I was coming up with the Accordion Method, a question I asked myself was, “Why can’t you just make every scene have a beginning, middle, and end?” And the most obvious answer I could come up with was: Some scenes are too short for a beginning, middle, and end.
But after doing some research, I realized that just isn’t true. I bring this up because I think every writer should go into every scene with the intention of giving it a beginning, middle, and end. If the story doesn’t allow for it, I’m okay with that. But one thing you cannot blame is a lack of time. You’d be surprised at how much story you can stuff into a small amount of space.
A great example of that is a scene from Jaws that occurs 12 minutes into the movie. Chief Brody is on a car ferry when Mayor Vaughn approaches him, along with a couple of other local officials.
The setup is simple. Brody wants to close the beaches because a young woman has just been killed in what he believes was a shark attack.
Next comes the middle of the scene, where we introduce our conflict. Mayor Vaughn doesn’t want the beaches closed. It’s a summer tourist town. Closing the beaches would be disastrous for business. So he and the other officials push back against Brody, suggesting that maybe the girl wasn’t killed by a shark at all. Maybe it was a boating accident.
This is what you’re doing in the middle of your scenes. You’re introducing obstacles that prevent your character from achieving their goal. Brody wants to close the beaches. The mayor and his buddies don’t want him to. So we have conflict.
Finally, we get our climax. The mayor effectively overrules Brody. The beaches are staying open. Brody is frustrated, but there’s nothing he can do about it.
And that’s it!
Beginning. Middle. End.
And you know how long the scene is? Just one minute and forty seconds long.
So don’t tell me your scene is too short to have a beginning, middle, and end. If it’s good enough for Jaws, it’s good enough for you.
Okay, so now that we’ve learned how to write a scene with the accordion pushed all the way in, let’s learn how to write one with the accordion extended out. All that means is that instead of giving our beginning, middle, and end to a single scene, we’re going to spread them out over several scenes.
For this example, we’re going to go back to the OT trilogy and look at Return of the Jedi.
Five minutes into the movie, we see R2-D2 and C-3PO walking through the desert on Tatooine. We learn that they’re on their way to Jabba the Hutt’s palace to deliver a message.
Right away, we have a goal: Deliver the message.
Again, just like with individual scenes, when you’re writing a sequence of scenes, it’s always helpful to start with a character who has a goal. That goal gives the sequence purpose. It gives us something to follow.
Now, there’s something important I want you to notice about this scene. It’s almost entirely expositional. R2-D2 and C-3PO are walking through the desert, talking about Jabba the Hutt, how dangerous he is, and what they’re getting themselves into.
This is where a lot of amateur writers get into trouble. They need to convey exposition so they write a scene where two characters walk around talking about stuff the audience needs to know. But because there’s no dramatic purpose behind the scene, it feels like exactly what it is: an exposition dump.
Here, however, that exposition is being delivered in the midst of a pursuit – the characters’ ultimate goal. These two droids are on a mission. They’re trying to get somewhere. So even though the scene itself is two characters talking, there’s forward momentum. And just to convey how this fits into the accordion method, the scene itself DOES NOT HAVE REAL CONFLICT. IT DOESN’T HAVE A CLIMAX. But that’s okay! Because this scene is the beginning of our larger dramatic unit.
Next, the droids arrive at Jabba’s palace where they’re confronted by a giant metal door. A little gatekeeper droid pops out, and they have to convince it to let them inside. Now we’re in our second act – the conflict portion of our story. Our characters have a goal, but we’re going to start putting obstacles in their way. The gatekeeper droid is our first obstacle.
Eventually, they’re allowed inside, but they’re not out of the woods yet. They encounter Jabba’s right-hand man, Bib Fortuna, who isn’t particularly interested in letting them see his boss. Another obstacle!
Then they face their biggest obstacle yet. Jabba the Hutt himself! Jabba is this giant, disgusting, intimidating creature surrounded by criminals and henchmen. He’s the embodiment of conflict.
The droids deliver their message, which turns out to be a hologram of Luke Skywalker offering to negotiate for the release of Han Solo. And as a gesture of goodwill, Luke offers the two droids as gifts. Which comes as a surprise to C-3PO, who had no idea he was part of the deal!
That brings us to our final scene, where R2-D2 and C-3PO are taken into the back of the palace and handed over to the droid supervisor, who assigns them their new jobs as servants. And that’s the ending to our sequence!
Our characters started out with a simple goal: deliver a message to Jabba the Hutt. They encountered a series of obstacles along the way, each one bringing them closer to their objective. And finally, they delivered the message, only to discover that they’d been given away as part of the deal. Beginning. Middle. End. And that’s the Accordion Method!
Notice how much freedom that gives us. That opening desert scene doesn’t need its own three-act structure. It doesn’t need some artificial conflict where C-3PO and R2-D2 get into an argument that has to be resolved before they reach the palace. Its job is simply to establish the mission and provide some exposition. The subsequent scenes then build on that mission, introducing obstacles and moving us toward the resolution.
So what are the rules of the Accordion Method? There are really only three.
1-Give your dramatic unit a goal – Whether that unit is one scene or five scenes, we should understand what the character is trying to accomplish.
2-Create conflict, build toward a resolution – Introduce obstacles, create conflict, and eventually bring the situation to some kind of resolution. Success or failure, it doesn’t matter. What matters is that the dramatic unit feels complete.
3-Don’t force every individual scene to be complete. – This is the whole point of the method! Sometimes a scene’s only job is to introduce a problem, deliver a piece of information, or create a complication. It doesn’t need its own beginning, middle, and end as long as it’s contributing to a larger dramatic unit that has one.
I know that once I learned this method, it became easier for me to see where writers were losing readers. Because bad writing includes a lot of these scenes that don’t have any structure around them. They’re just empty scenes that the writer has some small individual purpose for (stick in some exposition, establish camaraderie between characters, introduce a new character). The Accordion Method allows you to make those scenes part of a larger sequence that keeps your reader entertained. It’s very powerful when you master it so start giving it a shot right now!
A big six-figure script sale comes from another Scriptshadow reader!
Genre: Horror
Premise: When a scientist ventures deep into the Amazon rainforest in search of a rare fungus that could save her dying daughter, she finds herself trapped high above the jungle floor, hunted by a terrifying creature that lives among the treetops.
About: Today’s script sale is one of those dream scenarios for scriptwriters. This thing sold fast! And since it comes from a Scriptshadow reader, I’ve got the inside scoop. More details below.
Writer: Brandon Feldman
Details: 98 pages – First Draft
Today’s review is a special one because I’ve known Brandon for a while now. I’ve given him notes on several of his scripts and, as a matter of fact, I was supposed to give him notes on this one but the darn thing sold so fast, he never got a chance to send it to me! (get notes from Carson!)
So I reached out to Brandon and said, “Okay, you have to tell me how this happened.” And he was more than happy to share.
Brandon has been writing comedy scripts with his writing partner, Ben Agron, for about 15 years. They’ve had some success, the biggest being a rom-com they wrote called Manimony, about a woman who owns the world’s biggest dating app and needs her ex-husband off her payroll so she uses the app to find him a new wife.
But a few years ago, Brandon started writing horror scripts on his own. Canopy was his third horror attempt. Now here’s where this story gets crazy. Brandon came up with the idea for Canopy in late July and ended up selling it in October!
How did this happen?? Well, he started by pitching the idea to his writers group. All of them loved it. This is a detail I think a lot of aspiring screenwriters will overlook. Brandon didn’t just come up with an idea and start writing. He tested the idea first. You guys know how much I preach this. It’s the whole reason I created The High Concept Club Contest. I want writers to know whether they have a good idea before they spend six months writing the script.
So Brandon spent August outlining the script. His final outline was forty pages long. He then sent that outline to his manager, who liked it enough to tell him to go write the script. And Brandon proceeded to write the entire thing in five weeks, finishing in mid-September.
How was he able to write it so fast? Because he had a 40 page outline! I keep telling you guys, the more you outline, the easier the writing process becomes. If you’re someone who routinely gets stuck in the middle of your scripts, consider outlining. And if you’re already outlining and still running into trouble, consider making your 5 page outline a 20 page outline. The more specific you are, the easier it is to know where to take your story.
Anyway, before Brandon’s manager even had a chance to read the script, Brandon uploaded it to the Black List to get a feel for where it was. He ended up getting an 8 out of 10 on his first evaluation. For those of you who don’t know, an 8 on the Black List gets your script included in their newsletter, which goes out to industry professionals.
That newsletter went out on a Monday and Brandon’s script got something like 20 downloads. By that night, a producer had already emailed him saying he loved the script and wanted to send it to Netflix.
Oh, and just to show you how wacky the Black List is, Brandon’s second evaluation eventually came back. He got a 4! Just goes to show how inconsistent that site is but for Brandon, it worked out. He now had buzz.
Around this time, Brandon’s manager got back from vacation, read the script, and said, “Yeah, let’s take it out.” So his manager started sending it to producers and production companies. Meanwhile, one of Brandon’s buddies sent it to a producer who eventually took it to Sony. Another friend sent it to David Boxerbaum at Verve.
This is the great thing about having a script that you know is good. All those favors you’ve been saving up? Now’s the time to use them. Because you know you’re using them on a script that’s worth it. I’ve seen so many writers waste favors on bad scripts, and in a lot of those cases, you never get another shot with that contact.
By the end of that week, they were assigning territories and had multiple studios reading the script. And in the end, Netflix won out. Canopy was sold. Which meant from the moment Brandon came up with the idea to the moment he sold the script, just 15 weeks had passed.
FIFTEEN WEEKS!
This is the kind of script sale story you used to hear about in 1997. Not 2026! Certainly not in an industry where everybody keeps telling us that nobody’s buying anything anymore.
And here’s the craziest part. It was one draft. No notes. No rewrites. A huge congratulations to Brandon. And now, finally, I get to read it. To Brandon’s credit, when I told him I was going to review it, he said, “Be as brutal as you want.”
Careful what you wish for. :)
Laurel Reed is a scientist whose young daughter is dying from a rare disease. Deep in the Amazon rainforest, there’s a fungus that grows on the bark of these enormous trees and research suggests it could help treat her daughter’s illness. So Laurel heads into one of the most remote parts of the world with her fellow scientist, Cole, to find it.
A local guide sends them off in the right direction and the two finally reach their destination, a group of gigantic trees, some of them 250 feet tall. They split up, each climbing a different tree, and eventually reach what’s known as the canopy, this upper section of the rainforest where branches and vines form almost a second forest floating above the first one.
Laurel finds her fungus, which is great. But then they both discover something that isn’t so great. Hidden inside the trees is a structure made of HUMAN BONES. Laurel quickly loses contact with Cole and before she can reach him, this creature that looks almost exactly like the bark of the trees comes out of nowhere, grabs Cole, and yanks him up into the darkness.
Laurel realizes she needs to get the hell out of here. Except that’s easier said than done when you’re 175 feet above the ground and there’s a giant tree monster who wants to turn you into bone soup. So Laurel starts making her way down, dealing with bullet ants, pumas, and these evil little monkeys that seem determined to make escape life as hard as possible.
Meanwhile, the creature is moving through the trees, sometimes so well camouflaged she can’t even see it. But she soon finds out that the creature refuses to go to the forest floor. Which means if she can just get to the ground, she’s safe.
But just when Laurel is getting close , human blood starts dripping on her. She realizes somebody might still be alive up there and makes the decision to CLIMB BACK UP.
Girrrlllll. No you didn’t.
That’s where she finds Kenji, a Japanese scientist from the cold open, who’s been woven into this horrifying architecture of bones and branches. He’s begging to die, but Laurel insists on saving him. And that’s when Kenji drops a bombshell. There isn’t just one creature. There are TWO OF THEM. A big one and a smaller one. So now Laurel has to figure out how to get them both down before these things turn them into their next construction project.
There’s fifteen years of craft on display here, no doubt.
The writing is hella confident. Brandon understands character, he understands cold opens, quick plot setups, how to create a sympathetic protagonist, how to place that protagonist in a high-stakes situation that’s unique, and he knows how to stretch a potentially thin situation out into the 3-act structure.
Conclusion: Brandon knows his shit.
I think one of the reasons his writing group loved this idea is that it takes us somewhere we haven’t been before. There was a time when simply taking an audience somewhere unfamiliar was worth something. It’s why James Bond movies were such a big deal back in the day. They took you to exotic locations most people would never get a chance to visit. And even if the story wasn’t great, you still got something out of the experience.
That’s what Brandon does here. Instead of giving us the 5,000th horror movie about a haunted house, or the 5,000th masked psycho chasing us around, he takes us into one of the most remote rainforests in the world.
We’ve got bullet ants out here. You don’t see those in San Francisco. We’ve got strangler trees, weird little monkeys, evil spiders, mega-snakes, and enormous trees that practically have their own ecosystems. All of that is interesting before you even introduce the horror element.
Another thing Brandon does really well here is his setups and payoffs. This is pretty impressive for a first draft, by the way. We’re told about the bullet ants ahead of time. We’re told about the little tamarin monkeys. We’re introduced to the strangler tree and the jungle cats. And all of these things eventually come back into the story.
Now, I did have a few issues with the script.
I struggled to understand exactly what a canopy was. I always felt like I had about a 75 to 80% understanding of what Brandon was describing but I eventually had to look it up. And even then, I was a little confused. The best way I could understand it was that it’s sort of an upper-forest version of the ground. Considering it’s the title of the movie, I would’ve liked more clarity there.
Another issue I had was Cole. Cole is a weak-ass character. And look, I get it. When you’re writing a first draft, you’re usually focused on making your main character as good as possible, and the supporting characters get overlooked.
But Cole doesn’t have much of anything going on. He doesn’t have a memorable personality or an interesting relationship with Laurel. And I’m not saying he needs to be her husband. But he needs SOMETHING. Because right now, he’s another scientist whose sole purpose is to be sacrificed.
The other issue is the dying daughter storyline. This is one of the trickier things to pull off in scripts like this. You want your protagonist to have a personal reason for going on the journey. And an easy way to create those personal stakes is to give your hero a dying kid.
But the more you think about this particular storyline, the less sense it makes. Laurel’s daughter only has months to live. So even if Laurel finds this fungus, they still have to study it, develop the medicine, and put it through trials. Meanwhile, her daughter has months to live if she’s lucky.
And to Brandon’s credit, he acknowledges this. We get a flashback where Laurel’s husband says, what are you doing? Even if you find this thing, it’s not going to save our daughter in time. And Laurel’s response is basically, I HAVE TO DO SOMETHING. I can’t sit here and watch my daughter die. And you know what? I kind of bought that. Not completely, but enough.
Now, if Brandon had sent this script to me for notes, there’s one big creative note I would’ve given him. And I’m curious what you guys think of it.
Late in the script, Laurel is trying to escape the creature and she finds herself in this terrible situation where there’s a puma below her and the creature above her. The creature eventually goes after the puma and kills it easily.
I would’ve changed this. I would’ve made this puma the KING OF THE JUNGLE. Whatever the biggest, meanest jungle cat you can find in the Amazon is, that’s what this thing needs to be.
And when the creature attacks it, I want an EPIC BATTLE. I want these two animals going at it like it will be talked about for generations. And preferably, I’d find a way for the fight to get close enough to Laurel that she could actually contribute somehow. Maybe she helps the puma at a critical moment. And the big important creative change is that the puma would WIN. It kills the creature.
Now, why would I do that?
Because there’s a moment shortly afterward that didn’t make a lick of sense. Laurel is finally getting close to the ground. She’s practically home free. And then blood starts dripping on her. She realizes there’s a person up above her somewhere who might still be alive. So she climbs back up!
I’m sorry but come on. This woman just watched a giant monster kill her partner. She watched it easily kill this puma. She’s spent the last however many hours trying desperately to escape it. And now, when she’s finally about to escape, she’s going to climb back UP into the monster’s territory to save some rando?????
NOT. A. CHANCE.
But in my version, the creature is now DEAD. So now, when she sees the blood dripping from above, it makes sense for her to go back up. If somebody’s still alive up there, she’s going to try and save them.
So she climbs back up and finds Kenji, the Japanese scientist from the opening scene. And Kenji is in bad shape. He’s been woven into this horrifying architecture of bones and branches. And as Laurel tries to free him, Kenji is freaking out. He’s telling her they need to get out of there. And Laurel says something like, “Don’t worry. It’s dead.”
Kenji looks at her. “What?”
“The creature. I watched it die.”
Kenji stares at her, confused. “What do you mean you watched it die?”
“I saw it. It’s dead.”
And then Kenji says…
“There’s two of them.”
Now, in the current script, Kenji also reveals that there are two creatures. But he tells Laurel that there’s a big one, which is the one we’ve been seeing, and a smaller one that we haven’t seen yet. I would REVERSE THAT.
Because in my version, Kenji would say…
“There’s a small one.”
A beat.
“And there’s a big one.”
And that’s when Laurel realizes…
The creature that’s been terrorizing her this entire movie? THAT WAS THE SMALL ONE!
Which means the big one… IS STILL OUT THERE.
And we haven’t even seen it yet.
Now that’s a third act.
Because one of the most important things about writing a movie like this is that things have to keep getting worse. The closer we get to the ending, the more desperate the situation should become.
The spiritual predecessor to this movie, Predator, does this as well as any movie ever made. Things keep getting worse and worse and worse. And while Brandon flirts with that philosophy here, he doesn’t fully embrace it. This would change that.
Because now Laurel’s gone from thinking she’s survived the monster to realizing she hasn’t even met the real monster yet. That’s gettin me to lean all the way the fuck forward for act 3!!!
Look, there’s no way to predict with any certainty which scripts are going to get this kind of traction. Which ones are going to get passed around town, create a bidding war, sell almost immediately. But if I were a betting man, and this script came across my desk, I would’ve bet that this was one of those scripts. It’s a great premise and an extremely solid execution.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[xx] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: One of the most important things about writing a horror script like this is creating a monster that’s not only terrifying but also believable. Because the more believable the monster is, the more we buy into the story, and the more scared we are for our hero. This Canopy Monster feels like something that could actually exist. We’re deep in the rainforest, far away from civilization, where it’s not hard to imagine some undiscovered creature living in the trees. And the creature isn’t designed in some crazy, over-the-top way. Every aspect of it is designed to exist in this environment (camouflage, bark/moss skin, eyes that see in dark, strong arms, weak legs). I’m not saying every horror movie monster has to be realistic. But the more reality you can build into your monster, the scarier it’s going to be. Because what’s scarier than something that might actually exist?
