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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That day never comes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Got a screenplay nobody wants to read? This is your chance! Send me that script NOW and you may find yourself competing in the coolest rootin-tootin screenplay challenge on the internet!

Yo! What do you say we spice things up around here?

Things have been a little slow lately but it’s nothing that a little dancing can’t solve. Let’s get crazy. Let’s get naked. Let’s bring back a fan favorite.

YES! IT’S TIME FOR ANOTHER SCRIPTSHADOW AMATEUR SHOWDOWN!

It’s been a while since we’ve done one of these and I’m curious what you guys have been working on. Especially all the new blood! I’ve been getting a lot of emails from people who’ve discovered the site over the last couple of months. Well, now’s your chance to show us what you’ve got.

For those of you who are new, here’s how it works.

You send me your title, genre, logline, and a PDF of your screenplay. I’ll look through the submissions and pick the five that sound the best. Those five scripts will go up on the site next Friday morning.

Then, all weekend long, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, the readers will check out the contenders and vote for their favorite. Whichever script gets the most votes gets a review on Scriptshadow the very next week.

That’s right. No waiting six months to find out whether you’ve advanced to the semifinals of the preliminary quarterfinals. Win the weekend, get your review the next week. And as we’ve seen, a Scriptshadow review can quickly turn into a screenplay sale.

You can start sending your entries in RIGHT NOW. Here’s what to send:

To: carsonreeves3@gmail.com
Subject line: Amateur Showdown

In the body of the email:
Title
Genre
Logline
Attach a PDF of your screenplay
(I don’t know if I’m going to allow posters yet but feel free to send one just in case)

And one little suggestion. I wouldn’t send a script you’ve already submitted to me that never got featured. There’s probably a reason I didn’t pick it. Give me something new. Give me that fresh screenplay blood so I can suck on it.

Okay, that sounded a little weird.  Hey, cut me some slack.  I just read a script about AI vampires.

The great thing about Amateur Showdown is that there are no restrictions. Got a weird script nobody will give the time of day? Send it. Got a big fancy blockbuster? Send it. Got a coming-of-age script that everyone keeps telling you isn’t marketable? Send it!

Just remember that the readers are voting, and they usually gravitate toward the idea that sounds like the most interesting movie. The one they’d actually want to see. So keep that in mind when choosing your script. And make sure that logline is doing its job!

Let’s find a great script, guys.

Get to it!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The readers of the site let Randy down.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Then you have the flashbacks.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Screenplay Link: Glumford

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Avengers: Doomsday is coming.

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

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

But those bad times were pretty damn toxic.

The Marvels.

Brave New World.

Black Widow.

Dare I say it? The Eternals!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Now we have Jon Watts.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Really?

That’s the team??

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The genuine blueprint for writing a great screenplay

So I was reading this consultation script recently and I really wanted to like it. It had all these elements that I’m into.

And the thing is, I did enjoy it. It had some fun moments and I was mostly curious what would happen next.

But the thing about screenplays that take over the town, that shoot to the top, that sell for a million bucks, that get fast-tracked into production, is that you don’t just “enjoy” them. You fall into them. They become an extension of you. The two of you fuse into one singular organism.

People always ask me, “Carson, why don’t you write scripts? You know everything about screenwriting.” It’s true. I know enough that I can write one of these good scripts. I can hit the proper beats, set everything up, create a reasonably compelling main character, give them a goal, throw obstacles at them, and construct a story where people will probably keep turning the pages.

But that’s not what results in the screenplay we’re talking about here.

We’re trying to write the script where, at some point, the reader loses awareness that they’re reading a script at all. They’ve become so completely absorbed in the story that the script doesn’t even exist anymore. The characters feel real. The situation feels real. You’re no longer analyzing anything. You’re just THERE. That’s a different ballgame. And figuring out how to get there has become something of a life’s work for me.

Unfortunately, I’ve learned that there’s one gigantic component of this that is extremely difficult to control. Every once in a while, something magical happens where all the elements you’ve chosen for a story start interacting with each other in this perfectly harmonious way. The concept, the characters, the relationships, the plot, the voice, the theme. Everything starts feeding everything else, and suddenly the story becomes more than the sum of its parts.

I want you to hone in on that phrase: MORE THAN THE SUM OF ITS PARTS.

That’s the screenplay that fucks.

And today, I’m going to show you how to give yourself the best possible shot at writing one.

99% of the screenplays I read are PARTS. And some of those parts are great. Great character. Great scene. Great midpoint. Great dialogue. Great climax. But they’re not summing. They’re not interacting with each other in a way where they start to feel like one living breathing organism. A screenplay cannot break into the stratosphere unless it eventually becomes more than the sum of its parts.

But here’s what’s annoying. Before you can get to the sum, you first need those parts!

Which is why I want to reinforce the foundational parts of a good screenplay. It all starts with the concept. I know that “good concept” is subjective. But after reading through thousands of ideas for the High Concept Showdown, you notice patterns. Most weak concepts are undercooked, too familiar, too obvious, the stakes aren’t high enough, or there simply isn’t enough conflict built into the idea.

But there’s another reason you want a great concept that I don’t think gets talked about enough: A GREAT CONCEPT WRITES THE MOVIE FOR YOU.

If your concept is, a group of people visit a state-of-the-art theme park filled with dinosaurs, only for the security system to fail and the dinosaurs to get loose, I already have scenes. I have people trapped in cars while a T-Rex approaches. I have velociraptors hunting people in buildings. I have characters trying to restore the power. I have people attempting to escape the island. The concept is generating situations before I’ve written a single page.

Compare that to: Two friends travel around the world trying to figure out who they are. Okay. What’s scene 12? I don’t know. What’s scene 27? I don’t know. What’s the midpoint? I don’t know. You’re going to have to invent everything because the concept isn’t generating anything for you. And since a screenplay is going to have 40 to 50 scenes, you’re essentially asking yourself to come up with 40 to 50 great ideas in a row.

Why put yourself in that position? Do the hard work up front, come up with the great concept, and let that concept start generating scenes for you.

The other thing I want from the concept is IMPORTANCE. Whatever’s happening in this story should be the most important thing that has ever happened to these characters before. That doesn’t mean the world needs to be ending. Losing your family’s restaurant can be just as emotionally important to someone as saving New York from a time-traveling alien invasion.

Look at Braveheart. William Wallace isn’t having an interesting six months in Scotland. His wife is murdered. That event sends him into war. This is THE defining event of his existence. Your story should feel like we’re meeting your character at the moment their life can never go back to what it was before.

Once you have that, I want a great main character. And “great” doesn’t mean likable. It doesn’t mean funny. It doesn’t mean they need to be some flamboyant larger-than-life personality. It can mean all these things if need be. But most importantly, we want our main character to be INTERESTING in some way.

A good way to measure this is, if you removed your plot, would we still be interested in watching your main character?

Louis Bloom from Nightcrawler is a great example of this. Take away the nightcrawling, the car accidents and murders and news stations, and Louis is still fascinating. He has insane ambition, a bizarre self-help language, a transactional understanding of human relationships, a complete lack of boundaries. I could watch Louis Bloom work at a Starbucks and still be entertained.  And baby, I got receipts for that claim…

Your character obviously doesn’t have to be that extreme. But there should be some sort of internal conflict inside of them that would still exist if you removed the entire plot. If the serial killer disappears, if the aliens leave, if the heist never happens, this person still has something they’re wrestling with. The plot shouldn’t be the only interesting thing about them.

Then I want RELATIONSHIPS. Relationships are secret weapons that are vastly underutilized in screenwriting. Because relationships are stories unto themselves. Every unresolved relationship creates a plotline of uncertainty that the reader must keep reading to resolve.

Good Will Hunting is one of the best examples of this ever. There’s Will and Sean. There’s Will and Skylar. There’s Will and Chuckie. There’s Will and Professor Lambeau. All four relationships have different unresolved questions attached to them. Will has to decide whether he’s going to let Sean in, whether he’ll become vulnerable with Skylar, whether to stay in the familiar world he shares with Chuckie, and whether he wants to become the genius Lambeau so desperately wants him to be.

So now I don’t only care about the plot. I care about what happens in FOUR different relationships within that plot. If you can create two or three really compelling unresolved relationships in a screenplay, it becomes exponentially harder to put down.

Then there’s the plot. Interestingly, I don’t think the plot has to be amazing. But it can’t be predictable. One of the fastest ways to lose a reader is to let them get 20 to 30 pages ahead of you. Which happens in 90% of the scripts I read. I get bored because I know what the next scene is before you’ve even written it. As well as the next one. And the next one.

This doesn’t mean you need to be M. Night every ten pages. It just means you need to occasionally knock the reader off balance. You need to do something that makes them realize, “Oh, wait. Maybe I DON’T know where this is going.”

I was reading an article about the re-release of the animated Transformers movie from the 80s. One of the most infamous decisions in that movie was killing off Optimus Prime early on. Imagine being a kid watching that movie in 1986. WAIT. WHAT??? You just killed OPTIMUS PRIME??? Whatever you thought this movie was, you were wrong. And once a movie proves it’s willing to do something you never thought it would do, you stop feeling like you’re ahead of the writer.

Next, we get to VOICE. Voice is tricky because writers hear “voice” and think they need to reinvent the English language. You don’t. There are probably five screenwriters working today who have voices so distinct that you could remove the title page and know who wrote the script within five pages. Everybody else exists somewhere in the same realm.

The goal isn’t to sound radically different. It’s to sound JUST DIFFERENT ENOUGH. Aaron Sorkin has this stage-like quality to his writing. Jordan Peele mixes social awkwardness, comedy, horror, and racial observation. Then you have Zach Cregger, who enjoys disrupting traditional storytelling patterns.

With voice, there should just be something about the combination of your sensibilities, your humor, your observations, your characters and the unique way you look at the world which comes through in the way you choose your concept, plot, story points, characters and dialogue. Again, you don’t have to reinvent the wheel. Almost the opposite. You have to open up the restrictions within yourself that often keep those quirky aspects of who you are locked up.

And then we arrive at what I consider the final helping on the Thanksgiving plate. Your story should be ABOUT SOMETHING. Don’t worry. I don’t mean politically. Although it can be if you want. I’m talking more about humanity. What do you believe about people? What are you curious about? What bothers you about the way we behave? What have you noticed about love or greed or ambition or loneliness or family or friendship or jealousy or success?

The Truman Show is one of my favorite examples of this because it’s got such a great setup for a movie. A guy slowly realizes that his entire life is actually a television show. You can watch that movie purely for the concept and have a good time. But underneath that are questions about freedom, fear, comfort, and whether you’d rather live in a safe artificial world or take your chances in a scary real one (something that’s more relevant today than ever, btw).

Readers are constantly trying to connect the dots. We want to understand why you told us this story. We learn this when we’re children. The earliest stories we’re told have a moral to them. The boy who cried wolf isn’t just a fun story about a kid playing pranks. We’re being taught something about lying and trust.

As we’ve gotten older, we’re still looking for those morals in the stories we’re told. You can absolutely write a movie whose only goal is to entertain people. I would argue that Resident Evil is just that. But when you’re exploring something about humanity, you have a better shot at making the reader see that screenplay as an extension of them.

Okay.

So you’ve done all of that. You’ve created all those parts.

Congratulations.

YOU’VE WRITTEN A GOOD SCREENPLAY.

But this next part is how you make it great.

You ready?

The big secret?

YOU FUSE THE PARTS TOGETHER so that the script becomes MORE THAN THE SUM OF ITS PARTS.

Back to the Future may be the best example of this I know. You can certainly break that movie apart and admire all the individual pieces. Great concept. Great protagonist. Great supporting characters. Great relationships. Great set pieces. Great ticking clock. Great climax.

But that’s not why Back to the Future is Back to the Future.

What’s amazing about that screenplay is how difficult it becomes to separate one part from another. Marty travels into the past, which is the concept. But the concept puts him in direct contact with his parents, which creates the central relationship problem. Then Marty accidentally prevents his parents from falling in love, which turns the relationship problem into the plot. Now Marty’s own existence is at stake, which turns the relationship into stakes. The disappearing photograph then takes those stakes and turns them into a visual ticking clock.

And look at George McFly. George isn’t simply “Marty’s dad,” some character off in his own little character box. George’s weakness affects Marty’s life in the present. Marty then meets the younger George and realizes who his father actually was. Marty’s actions help George change. George’s change then alters Marty’s life when he returns to 1985. Character, relationship, concept and plot are all feeding each other.

Then you’ve got Biff. Biff isn’t merely the villain of the 1955 section. He’s bullying George in 1955 and still bullying him 30 years later. So defeating Biff isn’t just an obstacle Marty has to overcome to finish the plot. It’s connected to George’s character arc, which is connected to Marty’s family, which is connected to what Marty’s own life will eventually become.

Even Doc isn’t sitting outside of this web. Marty’s relationship with Doc creates the mechanism through which the time-travel concept works. But Marty also knows Doc is going to die in 1985, which creates ANOTHER unresolved relationship and another goal. Now Marty isn’t merely trying to get home. He’s trying to save his friend. And the movie finds a way to connect THAT to the mechanics of time travel.

That’s what I’m talking about when I say the sum becomes greater than the parts. Pull on one strand of Back to the Future and five other strands move.

That’s when a screenplay becomes ALIVE.

And this is where that final component comes in. Rewriting.

Your first job is to build the parts. Get the concept working. Get the protagonist working. Find the relationships. Figure out your plot. Figure out what the movie is actually about. Those things have to be strong because weak components aren’t suddenly going to become amazing just because you connect them to other weak components.

But once those pieces are strong, your next job changes.

Now you start looking for CONNECTIONS.

Can this character flaw affect that relationship? Can that relationship complicate the plot? Can something you established in the concept force the hero to confront their flaw? Can the villain somehow be connected to what you’re trying to say thematically? Can an object that currently exists just to solve a plot problem also become emotionally meaningful to the character? Can something that happens on page 15 come back on page 95 in a completely different context?

This is why you read so many scripts with the “correct” ingredients that still leave you cold. They haven’t done the connecting.

Which leads us to our final FINAL ingredient. It still doesn’t guarantee a great script. But it’s a multiplier without a doubt. You should love the story you’re telling.

I know that sounds corny, but it’s real. Because screenplays are long, they’re hard, and if you’re going to spend the agonizing number of hours required to find all these connections we’re talking about, you’re only going to do that if you love the story you’re telling. You’ll stop connecting if you only kind of like the script.

Writing a great script is really fucking hard. There are no guarantees. But this is the closest thing I’ve found to a formula that gives you a legitimate shot at it. Use it wisely. And have a happy weekend! :)