A reckoning is upon us.

Genre: Horror
Premise: An architect who’s been burdened with running a small town furniture store discovers an endless series of rooms running underneath his store.
About: The backrooms started as a picture of a real room of yellowed walls that looked both depressing and terrifying.  Reddit started writing nosleep articles about it and the lore became more and more expansive until people started making videos of this picture on Youtube — turning it into a never-ending maze of this awful piss-yellow sad endless series of walls and rooms. 17 year old Kane Parsons was the Youtube creator who got the most views from his Backrooms videos. His version was the creepiest and most imaginative. Now, here’s the interesting thing. Nobody owned the rights to the Backrooms IP. It was created publicly. But A24 was still terrified of putting millions of dollars into this property only to later find out that someone owned it and wanted compensation. So, if you read between the lines, A24 would not have preferred to hire a 20 year old director. It’s just not done for a major film. Too risky. However, Kane could use all of the lore that he created in his videos, which provided a legal safety net for A24. So, that’s why a 20 year old is directing such a giant film. The writer of the script, Will Soodik, has written for several high-profile TV shows, including Westworld.
Writer: Will Soodik and Kane Parsons
Details: 110 minutes

People have asked what I think of this new wave of young YouTubers taking over the movie industry.

You want to know what I think of it?

I LOVE IT.

I love it love it love it.

You know why? Because this is the first time in I can’t even remember how long that something fresh and exciting is happening in Hollywood. I’m actually going to go into this more in my Friday article, where I discuss how and why this is happening. But I think it’s great. People are talking about movies again and that’s a great thing. Cause they weren’t talking about them for a long time.

Now, when it comes to Backrooms, I’ve been a fan of these videos since they first popped up on Youtube. My first thought when I saw them was, “When is this going to be a movie?” Cause it was so obvious that it could be one. Well, that time has come.

Clark is a newly divorced failed architect who is slumming it up running a large crappy furniture store in this 1990s set story. When he can’t figure out where his way-too-large electric bill is coming from, he looks into the circuit breaker in his basement, which leads him to an invisible doorway that takes him into the backrooms, a never-ending connection of yellow-walled generic rooms.

Clark starts exploring the rooms and is baffled by just how expansive and random they are. He then gets a couple of his younger employees to come with him and document the experience. The trio then sets out to go deeper into the backrooms than Clark has ever gone before, and that’s when things get strange.

Some sort of unseen creature grabs the cameraman. Clark then gets split up from his second employee. And eventually he falls deeper and deeper into the backrooms until he’s lost.

We then cut to Mary, who we met earlier in the film. She’s Clark’s therapist. She goes looking for Clark. Cause that’s what therapists do when their patients don’t show up for a session. She goes to his furniture store, finds the basement, finds the secret entrance to the backrooms, and goes in herself. She eventually finds Clark. But poor Clark has kind of gone insane. And now Mary has to escape him and find her way out of… the backrooms.

There are so many weird things about this movie. Something that nobody is talking about is that this is a movie for 20 year olds yet they cast a 50 year old man and a 40 year old woman in the leads. Maybe they knew the youngsters would show up but still needed the old guard and that’s why they cast these two? Still a strange choice.

Getting to the story here, I thought the first 40 minutes was pretty good. It’s a little clunky at times, which I’ll discuss in a second. But the weirdness of these backrooms and the introduction into that world is exciting. You both want to know and don’t want to know what’s around the next corner.

However, the longer you stay in this world, the clearer it is that the director has only a slightly better idea of what this place is than you do.

This is actually important. Because when you do any sort of world-building in screenwriting, you need to understand your mythology 100%. The reason The Matrix is a classic is because the Wachowskis spent 10 years refining that mythology. Not by choice. But because their project kept getting rejected. But that ended up being a good thing cause it forced them to continue thinking about and building the world they were setting their story in.

Kane Parsons maybe understands 40% of the Backrooms mythology. And, keep in mind, he did not create this world. He built on what others had created. So, it makes sense he’s not sure what it is.

The reason all this matters is because a story like this needs its mythology to be 100% solid for it to fire on all cylinders. Because the whole deal is the backrooms. If there isn’t an understanding of what’s going on there, then the entire experience is going to be running on fumes and guesswork. Which is exactly what happens.

The interesting thing here, though, is that the backrooms are so trippy and so weird that they can kind of withstand some of this weak scaffolding. Mythology schmamolgy as long as there’s some trippy looking robot creature peeking its head out from one of the crevices in the walls.

But that then puts the pressure on the characters and the storytelling itself. And, ultimately, that’s where The Backrooms falls apart.

There’s a scene in the first act where, after a long day, Clark is in his bed, watching TV, about to go to sleep. And then we pull away and we show that Clark is actually still at the store. He’s using one of the for-sale beds to sleep in that night and has pulled up one of the televisions, I guess, to watch before going to bed.

It’s a cute little gag.

But there’s a deep tissue problem with this moment. We’re not exactly sure what it means. Does this mean that Clark lives here at the furniture store? There’s a moment earlier, during his therapy session with Mary, where he mentions that his ex-wife lives in their house now. But the indication is that that happened a while ago. So, surely, he’s rented an apartment since then, right?

Or hasn’t he?

Okay, let’s say he hasn’t. Let’s say he’s living here. Well, he has employees. Do his employees know this? Or does he hide it from them? Does he get up every morning an hour before they show up and hide the evidence that he sleeps there?   That information — the information that would actually tell us something about this character — is never shared with us.

Think about what the cost is for not clarifying this.  Those are two completely different characters — one who is okay with his employees knowing that he lives here after work and one who hides that from his employees. The first one doesn’t give a fuck. The second one feels ashamed. Two COMPLETELY DIFFERENT CHARACTERS. If you want to construct a strong clear character, those details matter A LOT. But we’re never given that information.  Or any information like it.

But you wanna know what?

I don’t think Kane Parsons knows the answer to that question. I don’t think he cares. He liked the bed gag. That’s all he cares about.

Now, you may say, “Carson, you’re looking into this way too deeply. People aren’t going to this movie for character development. They’re going to be creeped out by the backrooms.”

I agree with that. That’s what today’s “what l learned” section is about.  The problem is, the third act is about how the backrooms are part of Clark’s psyche! Mary is walking into Clark’s head. We are literally in the character’s head. Which means the entire script is dependent on the character development being A+. And the director hasn’t even established who this character is.

So, you’re watching this final act and you’re going… what’s going on here? Absolutely nothing about Clark’s descent into madness is earned cause we barely know anything about him.

And, again, the movie sort of covers it up with the effective creepiness of the tall pirate monster chasing Mary. That’s the power of the Backrooms. Is that every time a glaring screenwriting issue pops up, the backrooms says ‘look over here!’ and you stop focusing on it.

With that said, I still think they left a ton on the table with the backrooms. There are much better backrooms moments online (on YouTube) than what they gave us. That was what I was looking forward to the most — seeing stuff that I hadn’t seen on Youtube. This is the big screen baby. Give us something bigger.

But a lot of this was rehashed stuff you could already see online. There wasn’t a single new backrooms moment where I said, “Oh wow. That’s cool.”  Nor did it seem like they were looking to create that moment.

So, all in all, this movie wasn’t for me.

But what I say next might surprise you. I don’t think anything I just said matters. Yeah, the character development here wasn’t even half-baked. It was quarter-baked. But maybe that’s what makes the movie feel fresh. I remember watching Phantasm as a kid and a lot of it didn’t make sense. But it stayed with me my whole life. Cause it was weird and unpredictable and unsettling. And I think the teens and 20-somethings who see this film will leave having had a similar experience.

And I think that may be part of this larger movement going on with these Youtube filmmakers that is getting people back to the theater. The very fact that they AREN’T doing it the Hollywood way, or the Scriptshadow way, is what’s helping them stand out. I’m going to talk about that a lot more on Friday.

For Wednesday, I’m going to take a break from horror and review a script from that new female writer who had 40 companies chasing down her rom-com script last week. I’m not reviewing her rom-com. But I’m reviewing the script she wrote before that. That should be fun.

Seeya then!

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

What I learned: Like I always say — whatever it is that people are coming to your movie for, make sure that that thing works. If it’s comedy, the majority of your focus should be on making sure the script is funny. If it’s a thriller, the majority of your focus should be on making your script fast and exciting. If it’s a horror movie, your focus needs to be on scares and creepiness.  If you succeed in providing the key thing that the audience came to experience, the script can withstand a surprising amount of weaknesses. And I think that’s why Backrooms is doing so well. Its character development sucks. But it’s consistently creepy throughout. And since that’s what people are coming there for, they’re mostly leaving satisfied.

Should be there in less than an hour.

This was one of my favorite newsletters to work on. I document finding the Ember Knight script, the writers signing with Kaplane/Perrone and how you can be the next screenwriter to make that leap. I interview the writers and push them on why they decided to write such a long script. I also take a look at one of the hottest movies to come along in a long time. The way this film is performing at the box office is insane. And what I found out about the director’s father is going to surprise a lot of screenwriters, as I think it’s a big reason the movie is doing so well. So, if you’re not on the Scriptshadow Newsletter List, e-mail me at carsonreeves1@gmail.com with the subject line: “NEWSLETTER” and I’ll send it to you.

Yesterday, I took on Hollywood. Today, I take on Indie-land

Genre: Drama
Premise: A happily engaged couple are thrown a curveball a week before their wedding when one of them admits to something shocking about their past.
About: The Drama got a lot of pushback when it first came out as it was marketed as a mainstream romantic drama. But people only realized that it was an uncomfortable psychological dark comedy once they paid for their ticket. Writer-director Borgli is becoming known as the “Reddit Thread” director, as he seems to build his premises around questions that would generate healthy Reddit threads. In this case, would you marry your fiancé if you learned they were a school shooter? Borgli broke into the indie mainstream space a couple of years ago with his Nic Cage movie, Dream Scenario.
Writer: Kristoffer Borgli
Details: 1 hour 45 minutes

I haven’t been keeping up with the latest season of Euphoria because the whole experiment felt bizarre from the start. The show disappears for four years then comes back with a giant time jump? From a screenwriting perspective, that’s a recipe for disaster. That said, people are definitely talking about it. The reviews have been rough, but social media happily belly-dances after every episode.

Even though I skipped the new season, I did check out The Drama, starring Euphoria’s Zendaya, along with Robert Pattinson, and I honestly can’t remember the last time a movie frustrated me this much. If you’re looking to experience pure cinematic irritation, this thing delivers.

The movie follows Charlie, an insecure British man, and Emma, the woman he falls in love with, after an awkward coffee shop encounter. Their relationship progresses quickly. They get engaged and we jump to one week before their wedding. Then, during a night out with friends, someone asks the question, “What’s the worst thing you’ve ever done?”

Everyone gives uncomfortable answers, but Emma reveals that, as a teenager, she once planned to shoot up her school before deciding not to go through with it. Charlie initially thinks she’s joking. When he realizes she’s serious, the entire movie becomes about whether he can still marry her.

And here’s where the movie completely falls apart for me.

Technically speaking, this is an intense dramatic dilemma. Finding out your fiancé once considered mass murder is obviously high stakes. But drama is not just about stakes. Drama requires relatability. We have to emotionally understand the situation we’re watching.

This premise is so extreme and so bizarre that it breaks the connection between the audience and the characters. Most people can relate to discovering an uncomfortable truth about someone they love. Very few people can relate to wondering whether their fiancé almost committed a Columbine. The idea is so far outside normal human experience that the movie never figures out how to ground it emotionally.

I may not live on a desert planet farming wind and trading dewback saliva, but I understand Luke Skywalker wanting a bigger life for himself than being a farmer. That’s relatable. I have absolutely no frame of reference for deciding whether to marry someone because they almost became a mass shooter. The movie spends two hours trying to convince us this is an emotionally accessible drama, and it never gets there.

You can actually see this problem in Zendaya’s performance. For most of the movie, she looks lost. Nothing feels anchored. Nothing feels lived in. It honestly feels like rehearsal footage at times.
What’s interesting is that the second we get to the actual wedding, her performance becomes believable. She finally feels like a real person. And I think the reason for that is simple. Weddings are real. The tension there is human. The emotions are recognizable. Suddenly the movie is operating in a space we understand.

I honestly think director Kristoffer Borgli realized this too, which is why he tries to cover up the first three quarters of the film with film school gimmicks. Endless jump cuts. Time jumps. Fake future scenes. Multiple takes of the same moment. Charlie practicing his vows via voice over while we cut to different timelines. It’s all the kind of flashy artsy bullshit that screams, “I just time-traveled back from NYU circa 1997,” while adding nothing to the story itself.

And then something funny happens. With only a few scenes left before the wedding, Borgli stops doing all of that nonsense and just tells the story normally. And immediately everything improves. It’s almost shocking how much better it gets.

There’s a particularly strong sequence where Charlie has a breakdown at work and confides in a married female co-worker. The emotional spiral escalates and he ends up almost having sex with her before pulling away in horror at what he’s doing.

That setup becomes important at the wedding because the co-worker and her husband are both there, turning the entire ceremony into a ticking time bomb. Has she told her husband? Is she going to tell Emma? Is this all about to explode publicly?

That’s actual dramatic writing. You establish a bomb then force the audience to sit in anticipation of it detonating.

In fact, the wedding section is so much stronger than the rest of the movie that I honestly suspect Borgli originally conceived this as a short film or a contained wedding story and then expanded it into a feature later. Because suddenly everything becomes focused. Planned. Controlled.

There’s a scene during Emma’s father’s speech that perfectly demonstrates this. The father starts talking about Emma growing up, his time as a cop, a missing rifle, Emma’s anti-gun beliefs. Every detail makes Charlie more uncomfortable.

Now here’s the screenwriting problem Borgli faced. Real parent wedding speeches are long. But the only parts of the speech that matter here are the parts escalating Charlie’s anxiety. So Borgli cleverly has the DJ equipment malfunction immediately after the important information is delivered. The speakers pop (sounding like a gun going off), everyone gets distracted, and when we return to the father, he says, “I have more to say, but I’ll save it for later.”

That’s good screenwriting. It’s problem-solving. The writer found an elegant way to extract only the relevant material from the situation without bogging the rest of the sequence down.

We get another strong moment with Emma’s friend Rachel, who learned about Emma’s school shooting fantasy alongside Charlie. When Rachel gives her wedding speech, we’re terrified she might expose Emma in front of everyone. Again, that’s real tension. The audience is squirming because they understand the social danger of the moment.

The frustrating part is that none of this care exists in the earlier sections of the screenplay. Everything before the wedding feels random and underdeveloped. For example, in that ‘almost sex’ scene at the workplace shortly before the third act, that’s the first time we’re shown Charlie’s work! With just 25 minutes to go in the movie! And we don’t even know what he does still! We see him at work but nobody tells us what he does! That’s basic foundational character work you’re screwing up.

This is the kind of thing that exposes weak screenwriting immediately. If you don’t understand the fundamental pieces of your characters, the audience feels it. The script starts floating instead of standing on solid ground.

I was literally talking to a writer about this during a consultation today. He’d written a deeply damaged main character, yet he’d barely thought about the character’s parents. But most emotional damage originates with family. If you ignore that foundation, the character’s pain feels fake because the scaffolding underneath it doesn’t exist.

That’s exactly how The Drama feels for most of its runtime. Like it skipped the foundational work and jumped straight to the fun stuff the writer wanted to feature, like this famous wedding photo scene where they’re getting their pre-wedding photos taken despite the fact that their relationship is falling apart. People have mentioned that as a highlight of the movie. I found it to be on-the-nose myself. But the point is, that shouldn’t be your only goal as the writer, to write those fun scenes. You gotta get the blood & sweat annoying stuff down first.

And then there’s the ending. Massive spoiler here.

The movie spends its entire runtime hinting that something catastrophic is going to happen at the wedding. At one point, it even flashes forward to imagery suggesting multiple guests have been shot and killed. So naturally we’re thinking: Does Emma snap? Does Charlie snap? Is the wedding going to become a massacre?

And then… nothing happens.

Which leaves you sitting there wondering why the movie spent so much time building toward an explosion it never intended to deliver. It ultimately feels like confirmation that Borgli never figured out how to connect the pre-wedding movie to the wedding movie.

The result is a bizarre mash-up of genuinely strong dramatic writing trapped inside a much weaker, self-conscious art film. Sometimes impressive. Often unbearable. Never fully cohesive.

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

What I learned: We all love writing the scenes that we thought about when we first conceived of our idea. Like the wedding photo scene here. But the scenes that make a script work are the workhorse ones, the ones that establish your characters, establish the plot, set up a situation we can relate to. Those foundational pieces are what’s going to make your script feel genuine and real.

Jon Favreau swung for the fences with his first Star Wars movie and not a single person who’s watched the movie realizes it.

Genre: Sci-Fi Adventure
Premise: The Mandalorian and Grogu team up with Jabba the Hutt’s son to take down a local mob boss in the dangerous Outer Rim, then must battle a couple of gangsters who want this trio out of commission for good.
About: There has been much discussion about how this movie will do this weekend. Would it have the worst Disney Star Wars opening ever, besting Solo? Its 4-Day holiday weekend haul is looking to be just north of 100 million, which means it will come down to the wire with who takes the crown.
Writer: Jon Favreau, Dave Filoni, Noah Kloor
Details: 2 hours 12 minutes

Almost everyone you talk to who has seen The Mandalorian and Grogu gives the same review. “It was bland.” “It was vanilla.” “It was a side quest.” But what none of them realize is that Jon Favreau took a gigantic swing with this screenplay. He tried to make one of the best Star Wars movies ever. So, why is nobody acknowledging that? And did he actually… you know… succeed?

Before we get into that, let’s talk about Disney’s beautifully calibrated marketing campaign for our beloved Star Wars duo.

For starters, Star Wars has always gone to its secret bag of tricks in regards to its opening weekend box office. Their movies always come out on a big holiday weekend. Therefore, they get to report the non-official number for their movie’s opening weekend gross ($100 million??) instead of the actual number ($80 million??) for the Fri-Sun weekend.

The most egregious use of this was during The Last Jedi. If I remember correctly, they opened on Christmas, which was a Wednesday. So they counted Wednesday through Sunday for the opening weekend numbers and, as a result, were able to hyper-inflate how much money the movie made.

But that’s old school cheating. New School deceit is what Disney did Thursday, which is to pre-empt the expected backlash for the film by planting a story in The Hollywood Reporter where they claimed it was impossible for The Mandalorian and Grogu to lose money.

The theatrical box office for this film, they claim, is insignificant. The Mandalorian and Grogu is a commercial for Disney Plus and will therefore bring all sorts of new people to the service. In addition to that, Grogu is a super toy and worth a billion dollars all on his own. So, you see, it’s impossible for The Mandalorian and Grogu to not make money.

Look, I think there’s some truth to the fact that Disney Plus subscriber sign-ups and Grogu toys factored into Disney green-lighting this movie. But let’s be real here. The folks who went to see this movie are people who already had the service. And the Grogu toy sales are heavily weighted to that first season, when he became part of the zeitgeist. But come on. Grogu is not a hot toy anymore.

I think the bigger story here is why does Disney think they need to take over The Hollywood Reporter to defend a film before it’s even come out? If you think you’ve got a winning film, you don’t need to preemptively defend it. So, it’s a little suspicious.

The truth is that Disney has become hyperspace sensitive about Star Wars because they haven’t been able to figure it out. I don’t think the franchise is dead, like a lot of these doom and gloom influencers insist it is. But there’s no doubt it’s become “just another thing” rather than “THE thing.” And if they want to make it “THE” thing again, there’s a lot of course correcting that needs to go on.

Just like Han Solo said to Luke in the original Star Wars when Luke tried to jump to light speed, “Traveling through hyperspace ain’t like dusting crops, kid! Without precise calculations we could fly right through a star or bounce too close to a supernova, and that’d end your trip real quick, wouldn’t it?”

Now, here’s the irony. Jon Favreau attempted to enter the precise calculations with his first foray into feature film Star Wars. But the result is yet another example of how challenging screenwriting really is.

Mando and Grogu are helping the New Republic take down the bad guy terrorists in the outer rim, where lots of nefarious stuff happens. They’re tasked with finding the mysterious “top” terrorist, which will require them to help the Hutt Twins find their nephew, Rotta the Hutt, who has disappeared. Rotta is the son of dead mob kingpin, Jabba the Hutt.

They eventually find Rotta on some planet, where he’s been forced to fight gladiator battles to pay off a debt. When Mando shows up to rescue him, Rotta says he doesn’t want to be rescued. He’s only got one more fight anyway. Leave him alone.

After that final battle goes haywire, Mando learns that Rotta doesn’t want to go back to his aunt and uncle (the Hutt twins) because, as the son of Jabba the Hutt, he’s a threat to their throne. He’s pretty sure they’re going to kill him. But Mando, being a bounty hunter, emphasizes that he’s “just doing a job” and doesn’t care about any of that.

So, after some adventurous set pieces with Mando, Rotta, and Grogu, Rotta is returned to the twins. The twins then decide to kill Mando because…. Well just because. Mando survives their giant pet snake attack, but just barely, as he was poisoned during the battle.

As he and Grogu escape into the forest, Mando passes out due to the snake bite, and it looks like he’s going to die. This leaves Grogu all on his own and, for the first time, he will have to figure things out by himself. He ends up lucking out, as some local alien fish farmer gives him the snake antidote. So, Grogu is able to save Mando’s life.

Once he’s back on his feet, Mando decides they have to kill the Hutt twins and save their buddy, Rotta. So the two arm up and bombard the Hutt Twins’ swamp castle. I think you can all assume what happens next (they win). The End.

All right, let’s get to it.

Why am I saying that Jon Favreau tried to write the best Star Wars movie ever if everyone’s saying the movie is blander than unscented hand lotion?

Favreau tried to write an all-time great character in Rotta the Hutt. The fingerprints of it are everywhere. Rotta is his Michael Corleone. He’s the son of this great big powerful presence. He has no interest in working for the family. He just wants to go do his own thing and get out of his father’s shadow.

We’re talking about a Hutt as a key character in this movie. You could argue that he’s the main character. Mando has no personality and never changes. Grogu is too juvenile to arc in any compelling way. This leaves Rotta the Hutt as your major character arc in the movie. Which is why Favreau got the hottest actor in town, Jeremy Allen White, to play him. Cause he wanted to win an Oscar for this character.

So, why didn’t it work?

Well, part of the reason is that, on the page, you can make an alien work. Because nobody’s seeing any images yet. But, on screen, you have no idea how it will turn out. Hutts have notoriously just sat down in Star Wars movies. They don’t have to move which helps make them more believable. But once you start moving them around, especially as much as Favreau did, every bit of CGI weakness is amplified. There were basic close-up shots of Rotta in this movie where his eyes were warped in weird ways.

The reason this matters is because if things are even slightly off, the suspension of disbelief is broken and all those endless hours you spent creating this deep intense tragic character arc go out the window because we look at this creature and he looks dumb. He doesn’t look real.

But let’s say they somehow pulled off the technical side of this character. It still wouldn’t have worked because we don’t want a Hutt character arc. Hutts are meant to be simple creatures. I actually thought the Hutt twins were the best thing about this movie because they served that original purpose that Jabba the Hutt served. Which is that they were big, they were intimidating, and they instilled fear with their words. When those two spoke, it felt like old fashioned Star Wars.

But when Rotta is racing around in a hot rod car throwing out zingers like Adam Sandler, it totally betrays the original concept of these creatures. They were meant to be placed on big slabs of concrete, to tell people what to do, and to be evil. That’s it. No car races. And no arcing. Hutts don’t arc.

Not every character type is meant to have a redemption. Some are created to be one-dimensional and that’s fine! If you want a character arc in your movie, create better characters in Mando and Grogu. They’re the centerpieces. They’re the ones you want to arc. But because you screwed up their creation, you’re now hampered with these issues that can’t be overcome. And the feature treatment really puts a spotlight on that.

I mean, your main character WEARS A MASK. That doesn’t seem like a big deal but think about it for a second. We don’t get to see the expression of our main character for 99.9% of the running time! That’s INSANE. What other movie has done that? I don’t think any movie in history has done it. If you want to point to a reason why people aren’t connecting with this story… you don’t need to look much further than that!

Another big issue with the movie was the lack of stakes. The goal here is to save Rotta the Hutt. What happens to the galaxy if Mando and Grogu fail at this mission? Nothing! This is what I’ve been saying with Star Wars shows. They’re impossible to make work because the stakes are so low.

The Star Wars creative team will clap back, “No. These shows are exploring the characters. Making you care about these people and these aliens. They’re not about big stories. They’re about small intimate ones.” But the problem is that they’re *not* making us care. Mando is such a boring character. The only contribution to his character’s likability is that he takes action. But his personality is drier than a Tattooine beach. When has any well-liked main character throughout time had a weak personality?

The final big mistake the movie made was that the story engine dropped out for the last 30 minutes of the film. The Mandalorian is half-dead and Grogu is sitting around hoping that changes. It’s actually a very interesting sequence because we’ve had another similar sequence to compare it to early this year, in Project Hail Mary.

Nearly the exact same thing happens. In Mando and Grogu, Mando looks to be dead and Grogu has to wait and babysit him. And in Project Hail Mary, Rocky looks to be dead and Grace has to babysit him.

Despite both sequences stalling the movie at the same time, Project Hail Mary’s sequence is a highlight while Mando and Grogu’s sequence has the audience checking their watches. Why? What’s the difference if they’re the exact same plot development?

THE DIFFERENCE IS THE CHARACTERS.

Grace is full of personality and easy to love. Rocky has even MORE personality than Grace and is even EASIER to love. Not only that, but they did a great job carefully setting up that moment with Rocky being dead. They made a point to set up that this alien species looks the same whether they’re asleep or dead. So, we truly don’t know what’s happened to Rocky or if he’s going to survive. It’s a sequence where we’re all on the edge of our seats.

Mando is such a poorly conceived character (low vibration, no personality, always wears a mask so we can’t connect to him expressively) that it doesn’t affect us if he’s in danger. That’s why I always say, before you write your script, make sure your 2-3 major characters are very strong. Cause if they are, you can make a ton of script mistakes. But you can’t do the opposite. A good plot cannot survive weak characterization.

Another realization I had while watching this movie was how drawn out everything was. One of the many genius things about Star Wars was how punchy it was. It felt like the entire team would sit in the editing room and debate FRAMES. Not seconds, mind you. But, “Can we cut a frame here so we can move to the next scene faster?”

Go back and watch Star Wars. It’s extremely punchy. The end of every scene is almost like a cliffhanger that then JUMPS to the next scene. Luke spots Threepio in the back room and Threepio says R2 is gone. Lucas would just HOP right into tomorrow with Luke and Threepio shooting across the desert in their landspeeder. The scenes would pop into each other like that.

Here, it’s like somebody’s falling asleep in the editing bay every once in a while. We’ll linger on with a scene well after it’s finished. And those needlessly extended moments add up. It creates this lazy lingering feeling that a summer movie is not supposed to have.

What Favreau probably knows deep down is that these characters aren’t meant for a feature film. They’re not big enough. Because I was trying to think of what a better plot could’ve been. But then I realized, “It doesn’t matter.” You could write 100 different plots for these two and they’d all land somewhere in the middle. Cause the characters just aren’t big enough to carry the high stakes world of a feature film.

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

What I learned: Don’t try to fit a square peg into a round hole. Trying to turn a Hutt into a tragic character was such a miscalculation on many levels. Hutts were literally designed to be bad. They look that way because they’re bad. I’m not saying that turning a Hutt tragic and giving him some big character arc is impossible. Anything is possible. But if a creative choice has a .01% chance of succeeding, here’s a tip: Don’t try it.

An amateur screenplay achieves the impossible and BLUDGEONS its way into my Top 25!

Genre: Period/Adventure
Premise: Amid the devastation of 14th century France’s war with England, a mysterious man on the run is forced to team up with a ragtag group of misfits who could be the key to restoring France to greatness.
About: A couple of weeks ago, I teased that I’d just read a 180 page amateur script that was so good, it was going into my Top 25 Screenplay List. Not the amateur list. But the big boy list. Since then, I asked the writers if I could review the script on the site and they said yes. So today… I’m reviewing it! How bout that! :)
Writers: Kieran and Brennan O’Dea
Details: 186 pages

(Note: I highly recommend reading this script BEFORE reading the review. A big part of what makes it so fun are the reveals. You’ve been warned!)

Pretty much every writer has a tough time getting their script read. I mean think about it. When was the last time you read some random person’s script? That’s a 2-3 hour commitment! 2-3 hours that you could use to do some errands you’ve been putting off, or catch up on some work, or clean your place, or go on that date with your wife you’ve been promising for weeks now.

Asking any grown adult to spend 2-3 hours of their time to not only read your script but think about it constructively and take down notes to give the writer? Good luck finding that person. Cause you’re here at Scriptshadow where you have the best chance of that happening of anywhere else on the internet and even here it’s tough.

But imagine that script you’re trying to get read isn’t 100 pages. It’s 180. That’s the problem Keiran and Brennan were running into with this script. It’s a tough pitch sending that script to a 2026 attention span-challenged Hollywood exec, especially if you’re not a produced screenwriter. And, by the way, the reason people in Hollywood will reject you for a 180 page script is not because they fear having to spend 4 hours reading your screenplay. They can stop reading your script any time they want. They reject you because they assume you don’t know what you’re doing if you’re writing something that long. Because the industry standard these days is 110 pages.

So after managing to get the script to a few people without any success, writers Kieran and Brennan came to me as sort of a Hail Mary. They paid for a consult. By the way, if anyone’s thinking of also sending me a long script for a consultation, my rule is that every extra page after 130 costs 2 extra bucks. So keep that in mind before sending me your 308 page sci-fi opus.

And look, I’m not going to lie. When I saw that page count, I took a deep breath then let out a long painful exhale. That’s because I don’t just read scripts when I consult. I have to think about every single page critically. Which is mentally taxing for even “regular” scripts. But 180 page period pieces? I was preparing for an extensive character list I would have to jot down. I would have to keep up with a potentially complex timeline. Surely there would be mythology to learn. And you figure that subplots and secondary character plotlines were going to make this one of those days where I would need every single neuron in my brain. To put it frankly, this was gonna suck.

However, the wonderful thing that I always love being reminded of is that when a writer is ready, when a writer understands the craft, when they understand how to create compelling characters, when they understand plotting, and they understand stakes, and they understand the specific challenges that the script they’re writing poses and they’ve been through the process enough times to know how to problem-solve those challenges, and on top of all that, they’ve come up with a really good idea for a story…. then none of the other stuff matters. And that’s what happened with this script.

The year is 1359. We’re in France.

If you don’t know what was going on in France in the 14th century, let me put it this way: seeing bodies hanging outside a town was as common then as seeing people staring at their phones while waiting for coffee at Starbucks is today. It was bleak shit, man. England had ravaged France and the leadership vacuum left behind opened the door to warlords, corruption, and chaos.

That chaos is embodied perfectly by our antihero, The Prisoner. Once a strong and imposing man, he’s now covered in rags and filth, wandering the countryside looking like someone who’s already lost the war inside himself. We don’t yet know why he’s traveling through France. We only know that he avoids others like the plague.  This man is in some kind of serious danger.

He arrives at an inn and, while paying to stable his horse, overhears a vicious royal named Sir Jean Devar informing the innkeeper’s daughter, Marie, that he’ll be raping her later that night. But don’t worry. He’ll compensate her employer generously for the inconvenience. Yup. That’s the kind of world 1359 France was operating in.

The Prisoner wants no part of any of this. His goal is simple. Sleep for the night and get the hell out of France as quickly as possible. But later, while hearing Marie being assaulted upstairs, something inside him snaps. Against his better judgment, he storms into Jean Devar’s room and beats the man to death.

The next morning, Jean’s young squire, Thomas, asks to become The Prisoner’s squire instead, despite The Prisoner insisting he’s not a knight. The Prisoner steals Jean’s royal clothing as well, realizing it’ll be easier getting through checkpoints disguised as royalty than as the man he really is: Roland Chandos, the king’s most trusted knight, the legendary Ember Knight, and the man rumored to have murdered the king and both his sons.  Which means, yes, France may very well be collapsing because of him.

Meanwhile, we meet two monks traveling quietly through the countryside. Like many people in this story, they are hiding who they truly are. The younger monk, Charles, is actually the Prince of France. The older monk, Bernard, is his protector. And it turns out the rumors surrounding Roland’s massacre were only partially true. One son survived.

That survival creates a massive problem. France is now so unstable that multiple factions are maneuvering for the crown, including England, which is preparing to swallow the country whole. The second Charles learns his father and brother are dead, Bernard explains the horrifying reality: everyone will now want Charles dead as well.  And almost immediately, they try.

A group of assassins descends upon them and Charles is seconds away from being slaughtered when Roland appears and single handedly destroys the attackers.

Bernard immediately realizes the situation. He must get Charles to Avignon before someone else kills him so the boy can claim the throne. But he can’t do it alone. He needs Roland. So he offers Roland and Thomas five grand to escort them across France.  Roland accepts, seeing the money as his chance to disappear forever and start a new life. Along the way, the group picks up one more member, a bizarre old hermit who knows the backroads of France well enough to get them safely to Avignon.

Of course, the real journey isn’t physical.  Because eventually Prince Charles is going to learn that the man protecting him is the same man who murdered his father and brother.  And we still don’t know why Roland Chandos, the Ember Knight, the king’s most loyal confidant, betrayed the crown in the first place.  Those answers slowly emerge during a brutal journey through a dying country tearing itself apart.

I think Netflix is going to make this movie one day.

Why Netflix?

Cause as much as the feel of this script is cinematic, the running time is too long for something that’s not proven IP. Or even known history. If this covered something we were all familiar with, like, say, the Salem Witch Trials, you could maybe justify the length. But nobody knows what was going on in France in the 14th century. I don’t even think the French could tell you.

When it comes to Netflix, however, running time doesn’t matter. That along with the fact that they’re flush with money makes them the best destination for this movie. So, hopefully some smart exec over at Netflix is reading this right now.

The thing I liked best about Ballad was that it brought us back to a true hero’s journey tale but within a world that is darker and less familiar. I grew up with the hero’s journey that was Star Wars. The next generation grew up with the hero’s journey that was Lord of the Rings.

And that’s it for consequential classic hero’s journey tales in cinema. I’m talking about where someone goes on a geographically long adventure and is joined by a group of characters, each unique in their own way, creating a fun little pack of people who we would follow anywhere.

Matrix is not that. Harry Potter is not that. Avatar isn’t. In those movies, we’re always staying in the same place. There’s something primal about an adventure where you go on this long journey to achieve a goal. It’s low-key the secret to Star Wars being iconic.

And what’s awesome about Ballad is that it’s the adult version of these stories. If a new Star Wars or Lord of the Rings came out today, I’d probably find them to be too juvenile. But the intensity of this story is consistent with the seriousness of the things I experience as an adult. It really is a movie for people who were kids when they watched Star Wars and can’t find movies in the same vein that resonate with them anymore. This is that movie.

Everybody talks about the main character’s introductory scene. And making sure that you introduce your hero in a way where we like them. And I agree that that’s important. But for truly memorable characters, I think you need an additional scene. And that’s the scene where your protagonist does something that makes the reader say, ‘I’m ride or die for this guy now.’

And while that sounds vague, it really isn’t. You simply say, “What scene can I write for my main character that is going to make the audience really get behind him?” And then write that scene! Because if you nail that scene, it’s like taking care of 75% of your screenplay right then and there. Seriously! Because if the audience now loves the hero, then they’re going to like almost every scene that hero is in. And assuming your hero is in most scenes, that’s a big percentage of your screenplay!

Here, we get that with Roland when he meets this sweet Inn assistant, Marie, and then he sees this awful French Duke dude straight up tell this woman that later, he’s coming to her room to rape her. And there’s nothing she can do about it. This world we’re living in, France in 1359, there are no police to call. There are no ghostbusters. Everybody is on their own. And that allows for people like this druid of a man to roam through the country like a 14th century Harvey Weinstein.

So when we see Roland barge into the attempted rape and beat Jean Devar to death, how could we not fall in love with him? And let me get a little deeper here because this script is so well written that even seemingly straightforward moments are doing multiple things at once. We’ve established The Prisoner as someone trying to escape. We don’t yet know who he is. But we know that he’s in danger if he’s discovered. So he needs to get away. If he saves this woman, and kills this man, that is going to severely hamper his chances of getting away. Because this rapist isn’t some nobody. He’s royalty. If he goes missing, people are going to come looking for him.

In other words, there’s a real choice here for your hero. Again, back then, assault like this happened all the time. And even the most altruistic person can’t save everyone. This is how compelling characters are born, when you give them difficult choices where every option comes with consequences. That’s the part amateur writers don’t understand. They think heroism is the act itself. But heroism only becomes compelling when it costs the hero something meaningful.

For example, if the writers had made The Prisoner a completely different character, Jean Devar’s head guard for example, then stopping him would cost way less. He’d still be doing the right thing. But dramatically, the moment wouldn’t hit as hard because he wouldn’t be sacrificing much. In this version, The Prisoner is risking his entire escape. He may be giving up his freedom and possibly his life for someone he just met. And that makes us like The Prisoner even more. Cause we understand exactly what this decision costs him.

There are so many cool things about this script. For example, when Roland kills this man, he realizes that the only way he’s going to get out of this country is if he disguises himself as royalty. So he steals the rapist’s uniform so he can move through all the checkpoints of the country without people questioning him.

But like any smart screenwriters, the writers understand that advantages in stories are more interesting when they come with complications attached. So Roland just happens to be disguising himself as one of the most vile men in the country. This evil royal rapist is known for doing terrible things to people everywhere he goes. So even though Roland supposedly just gained an advantage, that advantage comes with a massive tax.

What better way to embody that than having Roland, assumed to be Devar, get arrested, and have to fight the nation’s strongest man for his freedom? Lesser writers would’ve used the disguise purely as a convenient plot device so Roland could move through the country easily. But these writers keep squeezing drama out of the choice by repeatedly turning the disguise into a liability. That’s strong writing.

I’ve talked to you guys about the complexities of keeping the second act interesting. This is how you do it. Conflict. Conflict conflict conflict. Look for ways to disrupt your character’s journey. If you’re forced to wear a disguise that could get you in trouble, that will lead to conflict again and again. Conflict leads to drama. And drama is where the entertainment is. So just keep looking for ways to disrupt the overarching objective.

I have a lot more to say about this script but I’m already running up against a 3000 word review here. So maybe I’ll save some thoughts for the newsletter. In the meantime, some of you are probably wondering, “But Carson. Does it ever *feel* too long?” Honestly, there were a few places in the late second act that I felt lingered a bit. But, surprisingly, they were few and far between.

This is the power of having a good foundation for your script. A main character we love. A mission that feels important. A series of tasks that have high enough stakes that we’re always engaged. Whenever you get the important stuff right, just like I was talking about getting the important stuff right in Send Help (the main relationship) that gives you so much leeway with everything else.

The scripts that feel the longest, regardless of their page count, are the ones where they got the important stuff wrong. And when you get the important stuff wrong, every page reads like a chore. Cause we were never pulled into the story in the first place. This story, however, you’ll be pulled into.

If you like Gladiator. If you like Knight of the Seven Kingdoms. If you like The Lord of the Rings or even the original Star Wars, I would venture to say you’ll love this. So check it out! I’m including it to download. :)

Script linke: The Ballad of the Ember Knight

[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[x] impressive (TOP 25!)
[ ] genius

What I learned: I was just talking with a really good director last week who said that he reads my site all the time and told me that the biggest lesson he learned from Scriptshadow was that when you have a good scene or a good sequence, milk it. Traditional screenwriting advice tells you to move the story along as quickly as possible. And so this director did that with every scene he wrote. He never considered that when you have a really juicy scene, you want to get the most out of it possible. That’s something that stuck out to me right away in The Ballad of the Ember Knight. In the sequence where The Prisoner kills the rapist, Sir Jean Devar, you could’ve easily had The Prisoner see Jean getting physical with Marie when he first sees her in the stable and had Roland act right there. You achieve what you want to achieve in making us like The Prisoner and you also keep the story moving quickly. But you lose the texture and the buildup that make a sequence like this resonate. The O’Dea brothers know that they have something here. So they let it sit. They let it build. They let us worry for Marie’s safety. They let us wonder if The Prisoner is going to help her. That’s exactly what you want to do if you’ve got something good. The times that you want to rush through things are when you have story exposition. That’s the stuff that you want to condense and move through quickly. Not when you have a really great dramatic situation like you have here.