Genre: Horror/Supernatural
Premise: When a disillusioned magician takes a gig in a remote carnival town, her tricks injure volunteers for real, but the locals act like nothing’s wrong.
About: Last year I did a pitch contest called Blood & Ink where anyone could pitch me 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, got him a manager and possibly more. Stay tuned. One of the criteria for getting into the Blood & Ink contest was that, if I did not personally approve of the idea, it could still get voted in by the public. If you got 15 votes, you got in. This is one of the upvoted scripts.
Writer: Russell Nichols
Details: 99 pages

We’ve got another user-voted in pitch from the Blood & Ink Contest. I’m putting my trust into you guys that I overlooked this one. Let’s find out!

36 year old Maya Pryce is a magician but she’s not exactly selling out Carnegie Hall. Instead, her current gig is performing once a week for an old folks home where her 65 year old father, Will, stays. Her performances are actually payment for Will staying there.

After her latest performance, the manager comes to her and says that they can’t keep Will there anymore. He’s a menace to everyone. So, their deal is over. Maya tries everything in her power to make them reconsider but they won’t. Instead, they hand her an envelope with another job opening for a magician.

Maya and her dad then get in the car and, with a little coaxing from the dad, they decide to go check out this new gig, which takes place in a small town called La Cuna. It takes them forever to find it but they finally do, and when they get there, the mayor, Mr. Quillford, tells Maya that her contract consists of 3 shows and, afterward, they’ll consider a permanent residence.

Apparently magic is important to this town because they have these rules around how magic shows must be conducted. The main ones are that you have to use a prop from their prop house every night, and you have to use a volunteer from La Cuna.

So, Maya conducts her first show the next day, using a Houdini strait jacket as her prop. She brings a little girl up from the audience and places her in the jacket. But to Maya’s horror, when she takes the jacket off, the girl’s arms are disfigured! The next day, Maya is shocked to see that the girl’s arms have been amputated! And despite all this, the girl and her parents are fine with it!

Maya and her dad then spend some time in town, which has this carnival going on. We’re told early on that everybody is dead and that they died a long time ago but they all believe in pushing forward, or something, so that’s why they’re still kind of alive.

Maya then does another show with one of those sliding cabinets that you put a body inside, and disfigures another woman! And this woman ALSO acts like everything is okay afterwards. What the heck is going on??? It seems to tie back to Maya’s mother, who may have once been a magician herself here at La Cuna. And maybe her dad didn’t guide her here by chance. Maybe he was on a mission all along.

You know how when you’re dating, there are red flags that indicate that person isn’t good for you?

The same thing happens when you read a script. If red flags start popping up early, you know that script is in trouble. And they popped up pretty quickly here.

After Maya performs for the old folks, the manager there, Teresa, pulls her aside to tell her that their deal (Maya performs magic there every week and they, in turn, take care of her father) is over. Maya is upset so she reminds Teresa that they had a deal.

That scene ends and we cut to Maya following Teresa down a hallway doing what? Reminding her that they have a deal. In other words, a redundant scene. We already had this discussion. You don’t want to create two scenes in a row discussing the same thing, ESPECIALLY at the beginning of the script, when things need to be moving the fastest.

On top of this, the deal itself doesn’t make sense. What’s the going rate for a once-a-week magician at an old folks home? 40 bucks? 60 bucks? And the trade-off is that the home has to house, feed, and take care of her father? What’s the going rate for that? 1000 bucks a week? 2000? The math isn’t mathing here.

Two red flags stacked on top of each other have me worried about the script by page 10.

But I read on! Cause I want to review this for you guys and see if there’s anything more to learn from it.

The short version is that this isn’t a movie concept. But I understand why Russell and 15 of you may have thought it was. You have magic. That’s cinematic. It’s also unique and offers some fun opportunities for entertainment. You have this weird town. Weird towns are fun! Right? There’s some mystery here about who these people are and what’s going on with them.

These elements INDICATE that there’s a movie in here.

But take note of that word: INDICATE. A movie idea is not a collage of interesting elements that hopefully combine to form a movie. At its most basic, a movie idea is: SOMETHING IMPORTANT IS HAPPENING, AND OUR HERO MUST DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT.

A family’s block gets transported back to prehistoric times where dinosaurs roam the earth. That’s a movie idea.

Volunteers is almost the opposite of that. This woman and her father stumble into this town and spend most of the story walking around trying to understand why the town is so weird. There is no strong propulsive protagonist goal.

What would that look like? Well, let’s say a girl has gone missing. That’s the premise behind a similar “go to a weird town” movie, The Wicker Man. And that’s just one of a million directions you could go. But the point is now there’s something actively driving the story forward. It’s the “G” in GSU. Without the G, you’re wondering why you should turn the page.

I suppose the answer is: to find out the mystery of this town. But the characters tell us what’s up with the town right away. It’s a ghost town. Everybody here is dead. There was some fire a long time ago. We know all that early on. So… what’s left to find out? Who caused the fire? Okay. But have I been given a set of circumstances that makes the answer to that question feel important? No.

You need a strong goal. You need stakes. You need a propulsive engine. Not because every movie has to be some giant save-the-world blockbuster. But something has to matter A LOT to somebody. Because if the central situation doesn’t matter enough, you’re going to be fighting an uphill battle in EVERY SINGLE SCENE.

I’ll give you an example. Maya is tasked with giving her first magic show the same day she shows up at La Cuna. So we get this seven-page magic show and the whole time I’m struggling to care. What are the stakes of this show? What happens if Maya bombs? She and her father go back on the road and they’re literally in the exact same position they were in 24 hours earlier.

That’s a problem.

This is where concept and execution are more connected than writers realize. It’s easy to look at that scene in isolation and think, “Okay, how do I make the magic show more exciting?” But that’s a patch. The deeper problem is that the movie hasn’t created a reason for this performance to matter in the first place.

If Maya desperately needed this job because losing it meant losing her father forever, suddenly every trick matters. Every mistake matters.

This is why, when I’m picking ideas in the pitch contest, I’m not just picking anything that sounds sort of interesting. I’m looking for ideas that first, have a strong concept, but then also have a strong goal, real stakes, and an engine that I believe can generate 100 pages. Because those things aren’t screenwriting decorations you sprinkle onto the script later. They’re the fuel that allows you to create compelling scenes in the first place.

About 10 pages past the midpoint, the script starts delivering on its logline. Maya takes people from the crowd for the magic tricks and they get injured afterwards. This adds a little more intensity to Maya’s journey but it definitely has a “too little too late” quality to it. As I’ve stated before, the hook of your movie needs to start at the beginning of the second act. The hook here starts at the midpoint and it’s simply too late. That’s a structural issue.

This is screenwriting, people. You gotta learn the basics first, then you gotta get comfortable with them, and then you gotta be able to execute within them. This script definitely has a “still learning the craft” quality to it and when you drop that on top of a faulty concept, you’re trying to make fire out of sticks.

Script link: Volunteers

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

What I learned: If your concept has weak stakes, those weak stakes will trickle down into every major scene you write. You’ll find yourself creating these big set pieces and pulling your hair out trying to figure out why they don’t feel big. A lot of the time, it’s not the scene that’s broken. It’s the concept. The story hasn’t created consequences that make the scene matter. Give yourself a strong goal, meaningful stakes, and real consequences at the concept level, and suddenly your major moments have weight before you’ve written a single word of them.

Genre: Horror Thriller
Premise: A medical student testing a new memory drug experiences sudden transitions (‘shimmers’) to a past-life working in a Victorian hospital. He’s intrigued – until during one shimmer he learns the year is 1888, his past-self is Jack the Ripper…and that whenever he is in Jack’s body, Jack is back home in 2027 occupying his.
About: Last year I did a pitch contest called Blood & Ink where anyone could pitch me 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, got him a manager and possibly more. Stay tuned. One of the criteria for getting into the Blood & Ink contest was that, if I did not personally approve of the idea, it could still get voted in by the public. If you got 15 votes, you got in. This is one of the upvoted scripts.
Writer: Frank Enscribe
Details: 107 pages

Okay. Yesterday got ugly.

So I’m a little nervous about reviewing another user-voted-in script.

But, with today’s script, we’re dealing with Jack the Ripper. Ripper is one of the most popular “free IP” characters out there. Writers love him. Hollywood loves him. So I’m hoping, today, I’m going to love him. Let’s find out together, shall we?

It’s 2027 and 26 year old Danny Foley is living in London, barely getting by. The dude is taking care of his mother, who has dementia, and he’s so poor that he’s been forced to participate in one of those “drug trials for $$” at one of the local hospitals.

The trial, unfortunately, is causing him to have hallucinations. He’ll briefly think he’s in 1888 London. And as time goes by, these hallucinations last longer, and, within them, he’s inhabiting a medical student named Fredrick Eltham.

In 2027, Danny befriends a local nurse who’s taking care of his mother. Her name is Ava. And he shares his hallucinations with her. They both find them interesting. But the longer they go on, the more Danny starts to think they may be real.

Also, the more that he inhabits Frederick, the more he realizes this is a bad dude. Frederick gets a fellow student pregnant and just ditches her, telling her to figure it out on her own. It’s only when Danny jumps into Frederick’s body seconds after Frederick just slit a woman’s stomach open that Danny figures out that Frederick is Jack the Ripper and all this is real.

Meanwhile, when Danny is jumping to the past in Frederick’s body, Frederick is taking over Danny’s body. And boy does Frederick, aka Jack the Ripper, think 2027 is wild. Just the porn alone blows him away. So, Frederick begins using Danny’s body to explore every hedonistic temptation on the spectrum. Strippers, hookers, chaotic nights of excess, you name it.

In a slightly hard plot development to follow, Frederick has found a drug back in 1888 that allows him to spend longer periods of time in Danny’s body. This keeps Danny back in 1888 longer, which puts him in more danger of being caught as The Ripper. So Danny has to figure out a way to stop these hallucinations, get back in his body, and somehow kill Freddy along the way.

First of all, a huge salute to Frank for his first three scenes.

All three scenes did something well.

The first scene is one of the better cold opens I’ve read in a while. Download the script below and read the scene then come back here. One of the big issues I see with cold opens is that they’re too short. The writer gives us the BEGINNING of something exciting. But then cuts to the main story without following through.

A good cold open has a beginning, a middle, and an end. And a really good cold open will have a reversal, which this cold open did. We’re watching this butcher chase this woman through the streets. Things get interesting when two other dudes show up. We’re trying to put together the pieces of the Ripper and why he would have two other people with him.

Then this fourth well-dressed man shows up, puts a knife through the butcher’s throat, and just as we think he’s about to escort the woman to safety, he slits her throat. It was a really great scene. Constantly evolving. Keeping you on edge. Great writing overall.

We then meet our hero, Danny, in a coffee shop. I ramble on and on to you guys about how important a hero’s introductory scene is. It’s one of the top 3 most important scenes in a script. Because if you nail it, we’ll root for your hero the rest of the movie.

And one of the best ways to write a good protagonist introductory scene is to have your hero do something clever. We LOVE clever people. Love them. And that’s exactly what Frank has Danny do. Danny is at a coffee shop. He realizes he doesn’t have enough money for a coffee. But he’s desperate for one.

He then hears the barista call out the order for, “ENRICO!” Danny waits for Enrico to get his coffee and leave. He then walks up to the counter and says, “Hey, I’ve been waiting for my coffee forever. Where is it??” “What’s your name?” “Enrico.” The barista realizes that the other guy “stole” the coffee and makes Danny a new one.

Two for two on scenes!

We then have Danny spot the beautiful Ava, a nurse in the nearby hospital. In an attempt to shoot his shot, he tells her he’s a medical student over there. Ava says she’ll give him a ride to the hospital. The dialogue here needed work (and, actually, all the dialogue in this script needs work) but what Frank did well is he KEPT THE STORY MOVING.

We’re literally moving through space constantly. From the coffee shop to the car, form the car to the hospital. They’re walking through the hospital together when Ava gets called. There’s no time to split up so Danny is all of a sudden in an elevator with her to the top of the building.

This propulsion is pushing us through the story and it’s a great way to keep the reader turning the pages. What I mean by that is, if Frank would’ve, instead, had Danny sit down with Ava back at the coffee shop and talk about each other’s lives, that may have brought the script to a standstill. I’m not saying it would have for sure. But my point is that, by physically keeping our characters moving, we keep the beginning of the story moving.

However, after those three scenes, the script never quite found its footing. It had some nice moments. I thought that things got interesting with Jack the Ripper spending time in 2027 (inside Danny’s body). And there was a particularly well-written sequence where Jack keeps a diary of his experiences in 2027 that Danny later reads when he comes back to the present. And it’s a very thoughtful and descriptive account of what the future may have looked like to someone coming from 1888, whether you’re a serial killer or not.

But a lot of the script is all over the place. There doesn’t seem to be any structure. We kind of stumble into 1888 and then stumble back and then stumble into 1888 again. That’s how I would describe the personality of the story: stumbling.

The great thing about a traditional serial killer narrative is that the structure is always clear: STOP THE SERIAL KILLER. Figure out who he is. Capture him. Stop him before he kills his next victim. That goal gives the story a strong structure.

We don’t have that here. Danny spends at least half of the movie confused about what’s going on. He assumes it’s all a dream brought on by these meds. So that period of the story is, basically, a giant dream sequence.

It isn’t until later that he and Ava start taking things seriously and, even then, it’s not like they develop a coherent plan. The plan seems to be off-the-cuff. I’ll go back there and turn myself in as “The Ripper.” The best way to explain it is that it felt like a plan two high school freshmen would’ve come up with. Not two intelligent adults.

I’m trying to decide is this script can get to “sale-worthy” territory through rewrites. Cause I don’t want to send Frank off on a Odysseus-like journey where he’s working on this thing for 20 years trying to fix it. But I suspect that if he started by fixing the structure that a lot of other parts of the story would fall into place.

By structure I mean, let’s have our heroes identify the problem earlier, realize it needs to be fixed earlier, come up with a plan (earlier), and then execute it earlier. We have to get the story moving… earlier.

Now, even if we do that, I’d still be worried about the dialogue. And I’m worried about the Danny-Ava relationship in general. It doesn’t feel true to me. It feels sort of like it was lifted from an abandoned romantic comedy script. This is not that kind of movie. I would make the relationship here more professional. And it’s fine if romantic feelings develop over time. But I would keep the tone more in line with other serial killer movies, like Lambs and Seven.

Cause the rom-commish relationship is leading to some cheesy dialogue that doesn’t feel like it belongs in this movie.

But, overall, I want to commend Frank because I did not vote for this idea to get into the contest and, in retrospect, I probably should have. I underestimated that Frank was going to be able to make the “jack the ripper in modern day” stuff work. And yet, that ended up being some of the coolest stuff in the script.

The script is too clunky to get a ‘worth the read’ but if these changes were made, I could see it getting there.

Script link: The Shimmer

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

What I learned: This is a small detail, but I think it’s a smart one. Scripts can become dated fast, so you want to look for little ways to extend their shelf life. If you’re writing a script that requires you to establish the current year, one trick is to push that year forward. So, if we’re living in 2026, set the story in 2027, which is what Frank does here. That way, if the draft sits around for a while before someone remembers it or requests it, it still feels current. Even if it gets passed to someone in 2028, it only feels a year old. This is also why I advise not putting the date of the draft on your title page. Hollywood is weird. If someone sees 2021 on the title page, their first thought might be, “Oh, this has been around for five years and nobody wanted it. There must be something wrong with it.”

Genre: Horror/Comedy
Premise: In a world where the Grim Reaper has a popular TV show with live random fatalities, a struggling rock artist agrees to become his assistant to protect her marked-for-death band members.
About: For those new to the site, last year I did a pitch contest called Blood & Ink. Anyone who wanted to could pitch me movie ideas. I then accepted the best 100 of those ideas. The writers then wrote those scripts. And, ever since, I’ve been reviewing them, looking for the best one. Already, one script, Wildman, written by Jacob Rainer, got him a manager and possibly more. Stay tuned. One of the criteria for getting into the Blood & Ink contest was that, if I did not personally approve of the idea, it could still get voted in by the public. If you got 15 votes, you got in. This is one of those upvoted scripts.
Writer: Mikael Grahn/TigerMoomin
Details: 114 pages

I made it pretty clear at the time that I didn’t think this concept could work. But you guys voted it in. So, let’s see how you did.

We hop right into the story here. There’s no dilly-dallying. There is a live TV show where the Grim Reaper – like, the real one – kills people. And people watch it. It’s a complicated production run by a couple of guys named Brian and Colin. They have to get cameras in place for all of these kills, as well as make sure everything’s set up ahead of time.

After we watch a plane engine fall off a plane and land on someone, we then see (via a drone camera) a group of teens watching this very show in a house while eating popcorn. But it turns out production made sure that, when this popcorn was made, that a glass broke in the factory and all the pieces fell into the popcorn. So all four of the teens die by their throats ripping up due to the glass they just ate.

We then meet rock and roll lead vocalist Roxanne, who, along with her band Megalotherium are late to their gig. They’re zooming through traffic, and barely get there in time. But then Roxanne notices a mini camera in their green room and figures it’s for the Grim Reaper show. It turns out this whole place is rigged to go up in flames and they’re all supposed to die for the show!

Roxanne makes her case to the Grim Reaper why he shouldn’t do this and the Reaper likes Roxanne so he makes her a deal. He’ll spare her bandmates if she finds him a new person to kill every week for the show.

Roxanne doesn’t put up much resistance so now her life consists of looking for bad people she can mark for killing. The job is fairly easy cause there are a lot of bad people out there. First, a sleazy guy who hits on women in a bar. Second, the magazine writer who gave their last gig a bad review. Then an ICE agent. Then a guy online who says he’s going to suicide bomb a mall.

Can Roxanne keep this up forever, though? Or will she run out of targets, forcing the Grim Reaper, along with the show, to finally take down the rest of her band, Megalotherium?

Tiger?

You might want to turn your head here. This is going to get ugly. There’s no way to sugarcoat this.

I remember early on in my screenwriting days hearing that some people you sent your script to wouldn’t even finish it. I was mortified by that. I’d say for a good year I thought of these people as the worst people in the universe.

These days, I have a slightly different point of view. I’m one of the few people in Hollywood who, when I say I’ve read a script, I’ve actually read the entire script. Because I’m reading them for consultations or script reviews. And that’s given me a great perspective. Because I’ve gotten to see what actually happens after most people give up on a script. I get to see if the writer turns it around.

And I can tell you that after reading 10,000 scripts, that 99.99999% time they do not turn it around. If you run into 7-8 red flags by page 15, the chances that that script is going to somehow get its shit together are basically 0.

I gave this script until page 50. Which I’m guessing is more generous than most people will give it.

And I’m disappointed. Not so much with Tiger. But with the people who upvoted this concept because you wanted to be friendly. You sent Mikael on a suicide mission. This script had no chance of being good. The concept was insanely flawed and people still said, “Yeah, go spend six months writing this.”

For starters, we’re dropped into the most ridiculous world ever and asked to just accept it. We live in a world now where the Grim Reaper has a TV show where he just kills people in bloody horrible ways and the whole world watches.

I suppose you can argue that The Running Man and The Hunger Games did something similar. But those are set in the future, where you can buy into the idea that the future got so fucked up these things could happen. This show is set in the present. And there’s no explanation as to how it came to be.

But it’s more than that. We’re already being asked to accept that society has somehow reached a point where watching innocent people get brutally murdered on live television is mainstream entertainment. That alone is a gigantic conceit. But then, on top of it, we’re asked to accept that the Grim Reaper is real and hosts the show. That’s another gigantic conceit. Instead of taking one crazy idea and surrounding it with a believable world, you’ve stacked crazy on top of crazy. And every time you do that, you make it harder for the audience to buy into the movie.

From there, we’re introduced to rules that don’t make sense at all. This show seems to be tracking these deaths via a very elaborate production system that includes drones flying around and hidden cameras set up ahead of time, all so that these deaths can be recorded live. For example, somehow, we have a camera up on a plane to catch its engine falling.

As far as I can tell, this entire production team consists of maybe 10 or 20 people. But they’re somehow setting up and filming multiple elaborate live kills every episode, all over the world. Think about the logistics involved in pulling that off. Wouldn’t this require hundreds, if not thousands, of people working behind the scenes?

Also it seems, at times, that the production team is helping the Grim Reaper kill people. For example, with Roxanne’s band’s gig, some of the production team get there ahead of time to set up a bunch of flammable material in order to burn the whole place down and kill everyone inside the venue.

This despite us seeing the Grim Reaper snap his fingers and make a giant church bell fall to the ground from its perch. So, sometimes the Grim Reaper kills people using his superpowers but other times he needs help from a production crew? I’m so insanely confused by the rules of this story.

From there, we basically get Roxanne looking for really bad people to kill so she can keep her bandmates alive. The problem is, we’ve barely established her relationship with those bandmates. We haven’t seen why she loves them, why she needs them, or why losing them would devastate her. So the entire emotional engine of the movie is built around Roxanne desperately trying to save people we don’t care whether she saves.

I think the official ‘tap out’ moment for me was Roxanne finding some sleazy guy with a pee and poo fetish at a bar, marking him for that week’s death, and then going to his place and setting up cameras so we could see the death on the show and then showing that the sleazy guy, in anticipation of Roxanne coming, fills a tub with poo for their sexual exploits.

This is why I tell you guys – you can’t outsmart a bad concept. You just can’t.

But it’s actually more than that. When you have a weak concept, you eventually run out of story. That’s the problem with bad concepts. They don’t naturally generate scenes. They don’t keep opening new doors. You exhaust the premise quickly and suddenly you’re out on a plank in the middle of the ocean with nowhere to go.

So what do writers do? They start manufacturing increasingly outrageous situations in a desperate attempt to keep the reader reading. Enter the sleazy poo-fetish guy. But outrageousness isn’t story. It’s noise. And by that point, it doesn’t matter anyway, because the reader checked out 20 pages ago.

But look. I learned from my mistakes last time. That’s why I created the “veto” rule for the High Concept Pitch Contest. And I’m okay with going into this new competition with less scripts for that reason. I don’t want anybody spending six months on a script that never had a shot.

I’m actually curious what the people who upvoted this idea saw in it. Can you tell me the movie you were imagining it was going to be? Cause I was 1000% certain there was no way it was going to work. Can you give me a movie like this that did work?

Screenplay link: Untimely

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

What I learned: There’s some confusing advice out there when it comes to generating screenplay concepts that says instead of building your movie around one strong high-concept idea, you should combine it with another one. This supposedly “doubles” the power of the concept. So if you have a zombie movie, add time travel. Two hooks are better than one! I don’t agree with this advice. If Curry Barker had followed this logic with Obsession, Bear would’ve also been a hitman who had to kill five people in the neighborhood. Now you’re not strengthening the original idea. You’re competing with it. The best concepts tend to be simple. They take one strong, easily understood premise and squeeze everything they can out of it. Combining a live television show where people are murdered with the literal Grim Reaper didn’t double the power of this concept. It diluted it. And in this case, it sent the movie straight to the grave.

Genre: Horror
Logline: At a couples retreat for failing marriages, a husband and wife face an extreme form of therapy that requires purification through pain. As the therapy grows increasingly brutal, it becomes clear that their hosts have no intention of letting them leave alive.
About: For those new to the site, last year I did a pitching contest called Blood & Ink. Anyone who wanted to could pitch me movie ideas. I then accepted the best 100 of those ideas into a contest. The writers then wrote those scripts. And, ever since, I’ve been reviewing them, looking for the best one. Already, one script, Wildman, written by Jacob Rainer, got him a manager and possibly more. Stay tuned.
Writer: Steven Rauber
Details: 105 pages

I figured I’m never going to finish these Blood & Ink entries unless I review them, so for this week, I’m doing five Blood & Ink script reviews. And possibly five more next week. The goal? To find one good script. And with the streak that Scriptshadow’s on right now, I’M FEELING GOOD ABOUT IT!

Gotta keep getting writers reps. Gotta keep getting writers sales. Let’s turn this industry upside-down, baby!

Now, quick aside here. I know Scripty held his own pitching session this weekend. I would STRONGLY advise you to ignore any encouragement he gave you. Scripty’s favorite movie is Mac & Me. He eats salsa for breakfast. So that should tell you what kind of taste you’re working with.

Okay, let’s get into today’s script!

When we meet Martin and Leigh Langford, they’re in a marriage therapy session, trying to hash out, for the umpteenth time, why Leigh had an affair. They’re so deep in their unhappiness with one another that even their therapist has gotten sick of them.

So, she recommends that if they really want to save their marriage, they attend the most intense couples retreat in the world, an off-the-books program held on its own private island. They’re reticent about it, but they really do want to save their marriage, so they agree to go.

They arrive at the island retreat, called “Continuum,” and soon meet the other couples. Howard and Susan are the oldest, in their 50s. Then there are a couple of fit Aussies, Brock and Tara. And finally, the youngest duo, influencers Zane and Nikki.

Leading the retreat are Kip and Celeste. Right off the bat, they throw a shock collar on Zane and start electrocuting him. Later that night, they drug everyone, dump them in the middle of the forest, and force them to find their way back.

From there, the couples are subjected to lie detector tests. When Leigh is the only one unfazed by the exercise, refusing to hide anything the way the others do, it sets Kip and Celeste off. Now they’re determined to break Leigh and Martin, eventually throwing them into a holding cell.

Next, the couples are put in cages. And in a separate cage is Dominic, the guy Leigh cheated on Martin with. Each cage is rigged with a device that delivers a Mike Tyson-level punch right to the gut. Martin is given ten “punches” and told he must use all of them, either on Dominic, his wife, or split between the two. Martin uses every one on Dominic. Dominic dies.

At that point, Martin and Leigh are like, “We’re outta here.” But the staff won’t let them leave until they complete the retreat. During the next exercise, Brock is placed inside a giant web of ropes and inadvertently twisted to death by the other participants. Yet the more of these brutal exercises Martin and Leigh survive, the more alive they begin to feel, reigniting their passion for one another.

Finally, they’re faced with one last elaborate challenge, one that very few couples both come out of alive. But, spoiler alert, Martin and Leigh succeed. This enrages the staff, who we learn are all survivors of previous Continuum retreats whose spouses did not make it out of this exercise alive. They pressure Kip and Celeste into taking the final challenge themselves to prove the whole thing isn’t rigged. Will the two evildoers survive? Or will this be the last Continuum retreat ever?

Cleave is a hard script to categorize.

It doesn’t contain that “it” factor that allows it to stand out from the pack. But it’s not another one of these forgettable by-the-book scripts either. It’s stuck somewhere in between, and that’s what’s so frustrating about it.

Whenever I’m struggling with a script, I start with the main characters. Do I like these people? And if not, do I find them interesting? If the answer to both of these questions is “no,” you’ve got your answer right there.

Because if you’re not on board with the characters in a script, then every single scene is tainted by that lack of interest. And when it came to Leigh and Martin, I found them to be just… for lack of a better term… blah. They didn’t move the needle either way. They didn’t display any likable traits. And I didn’t find them or their relationship that interesting, to be honest.

Which is probably frustrating for Steven to hear because, technically, he did the right thing. He introduced the two of them in a marriage counseling session to establish that they had marriage problems. That’s what you want to do in a script. You want to introduce the characters quickly, establish their problem quickly, so you can then thrust them onto their journey where they will attempt to resolve that problem.

Textbook screenwriting there.

And yet, if we don’t like the characters, it doesn’t matter. So, I went back into that first scene and I asked, “Why?” Why don’t I like these characters? The answer was immediately obvious. They’re both miserable.

We meet them in this therapy session. They’re mad. They’re sad. They’re exhausted. They’re at the end of their rope. We are being introduced to zero positive qualities and, therefore, it’s quite easy not to like these two. Or, at most, feel nothing towards them, which is probably closer to what I felt. I didn’t dislike them. I just didn’t feel anything towards them.

For those who are veterans of the site, you will know that there is a similar script to Cleave in my Top 25. It’s called The Process. I loved that script. Out of curiosity, I went back to that script to figure out why I cared so much more about that couple than this one. I got my answer immediately.

Instead of introducing his couple in an angry therapy session, which increases the chances that we dislike them, the writer, Levin Menekse, comes up with a rather clever way into his retreat. The main character couple actually believe their marriage is great. They’re only going because the wife’s upscale law firm is making them go. They want to make sure that the people working at the company have strong marriages.

That takes so much pressure off the writer because now he can just focus on you liking the main characters as opposed to setting up their problems. That script’s opening scene is the married couple going over the legal agreement for the therapy weekend and making fun of how aggressive the contract is. In other words, they’re joking around. Levin is making us like these two.

Now, does that mean you can’t start your broken-marriage movie with a therapy session? Of course not. It just means you have to be aware of how that choice is going to affect the reader and write accordingly. That’s a huge part of screenwriting: anticipating how the reader is going to interpret each choice you make, then shaping those choices so they create the exact response you want.

Once we get to the island and the therapy begins, Steven runs into another problem in that he’s trying to create these villains (the couple who run the therapy) and he leans into how evil they are right away. I mean, there’s no ambiguity here. From day 1, they’re putting shock collars on people.

This made the villains on-the-nose and the more on-the-nose you make characters, the harder that character is to believe. So I didn’t really believe these two were real.

I think where Steven saved the script is that he creates several tests that are quite original. Where scripts like this fall apart are when they conduct obvious tests, which there are a couple of. The characters are put through a lie detector test, for example. But even there, Steven creates a twist. The spouse is rigged with a shock lapel. So, if you lie, your partner gets electrocuted.

But some of these other exercises were pretty inventive. At one point, someone gets tied up in this elaborate web of rope and all the other couples have to work together (communicate – a big part of becoming a better partner) to untangle him. But they can only do so from a distance, each holding a part of the rope, and if they screw up, the rope gets tighter around the tied-up character rather than looser. And if you really screw up, it can get tight enough to kill him.

There were several tests like that that were very original. And I also thought that the villain couple got better as the story went on. The irony is that, because we didn’t really have anybody to root for (as I mentioned above, we didn’t love our heroes) a lot of our emotional focus was on hating this evil couple. So, by the end of the movie, I really wanted to see the evil couple go down. To Steven’s credit, he writes a strong final scene for them (note to Steven: But make it so the couples force Kip to take the test. Kip should not volunteer).

So, how do we fix this problem? I’m fine with establishing Martin and Leigh’s troubled marriage right away. But once they realize they’re in trouble on the island, that should be when you work to make us like them. Audiences enjoy when two people who don’t like each other team up for the sake of getting out of a bad situation. So, lean into that here. They put aside their issues for the time being, come together as a team, which now allows you to focus on their positive traits, which should make them a lot more likable.

For these movies to truly work, we gotta feel like we went through an honest exploration of a marriage between two people we cared about and genuinely wanted to see come out the other side together. And I never got there with these two. We got some inventive tests for them to endure along the way. But, unfortunately, that wasn’t enough to save the script.

Script link: Cleave

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

What I learned: Be careful about getting too comfortable in a script like this. Once you establish the pattern of the story and stick with that pattern the whole way through, unless everything else is firing on all cylinders, we’re eventually going to get bored. That’s why I always recommend throwing a whopper of a twist or reveal into a script like this. For example, so much of this story is focused on the destruction of the marriage through Leigh’s affair. So what if we learn, shocker of shockers, that Martin was having his own affair before any of that happened? A reveal like that would turn everything on its head and force us to reassess everything we thought we knew about the marriage. And I’m not saying that’s the perfect reveal. But that’s the kind of shock you need to throw into a story like this. Because, for me, the emotional trajectory stayed too consistent the whole way through. I wanted the script to shake things up more, surprise me, and force me to recalibrate how I felt about these characters.

Pitch your movie idea to Scriptshadow’s #1 Hype Man, Scripty!

Scripty’s been bothering me all week after this Ember Knight sale about wanting to move up in the company and get some more responsibility. “When do I get my pitch month?” He keeps asking.

So, I’m giving him a trial weekend of pitches. I can tell you this. Scripty is nothing like me. He likes weird stuff. He thinks high concept is dumb. So, I wouldn’t pitch any Die Hard in a building ideas to him.

“Tell them I like Charlie Coffington,” he just blurted out at me. I had to tell him that he means “Charlie Kaufman.” He then responded, “Who dat?” and made a ‘call me’ gesture then burst out laughing.

Now he’s eating leftover lasagna that’s been in my fridge since spring.

Listen, I’m going to be honest with you. I don’t think Scripty is ready for this type of responsibility but I’m going to give him a shot. So, if you have any weird movie ideas — wait, he just said, “TV be okay too.” So, if you have any offbeat movie or TV ideas, pitch’em.

I can’t promise anything. There’s a better than 50% chance that Scripty falls asleep in 10 minutes and doesn’t wake up until Sunday afternoon. So, I wish all of you luck.