It’s all about the style baby!

Genre: Psychological Thriller
Premise: A cocky corporate fixer’s last day turns into a nightmare when he’s locked in a remote exit interview with an HR rep whose questions strip away his lies, his dignity, and — piece by piece — his chances of leaving alive.
About: Last year I did a pitch contest called Blood & Ink where anyone could pitch me movie ideas. I accepted the best 100 of those ideas. The writers then wrote those scripts. Ever since, I’ve been reviewing them on the site, looking for the best one. Already, one script, Wildman, written by Jacob Rainer, sold!
Writer: Branko Maksic
Details: 97 pages

Today we’re going to talk about voice. We’re going to talk about writing style. We’re going to get into when this is an asset for your writing and when it’s a detriment. Let’s jump into it, shall we!?

Martin Crow Roberts could probably best be described as a fixer. Although his official title is Senior Vice President of Risk Management and Corporate Affairs.

While it’s all a little complicated, and I’m not sure I ever completely understood what his job entailed, when the enormous company he worked for screwed up and killed someone, Martin would come in and make it all go away. And not in the good cute nice way either.

If you tried to go to the press because your husband got chewed up by one of the company’s industrial-sized baler machines, Martin would literally ruin your life to the point where you couldn’t even pay your phone bill. Oh, and for those few who kept defying the company even then, Martin could make you disappear.

Now, Martin’s 37-year career is over and for his services, he is getting a retirement send-off of 13 million dollars. But there’s one final thing he has to do: his exit interview. Oddly, the interview is offsite, in some industrial building on the outskirts of the city, where nobody lives.

Martin enters this cavernous building and meets Evelyn, the woman conducting his interview. And it doesn’t take long for Martin to realize this isn’t your standard HR exit interview.

Evelyn starts bringing up all those old cases Martin made disappear, and immediately he realizes what she (and the company) are doing. They’re trying to prove malice so they can strip away his exit package, a million bucks at a time. In particular, Evelyn seems very interested in Dean Calloway, a worker who was crushed by an enormous industrial baler twenty years ago.

There’s a reason for that. Dean was Evelyn’s father.

And that baler? EVELYN HAD IT SHIPPED IN. It’s in the next room.

Which is when Martin begins to understand that this interview isn’t really about his retirement package at all. Evelyn has spent years waiting for this moment. She’s finally got Martin alone, miles from anyone who can help him, standing in the same building as the machine that killed her father.

Suddenly, getting that 13 million dollars is the least of Martin’s problems. Can the world’s ultimate fixer fix this?

I’m going to go off on an aside here and I can’t promise I’ll come back from it. But this was heavily on my mind when I was reading Exit Interview so I want to talk about it.

One of the relationships at play during a read is the relationship between voice and story. Every writer has a voice. But there’s a choice in how much you push that voice into the foreground.

Some writers want you to feel them on every page (the unusual phrasing, the clever observations, the specific way they describe things). Other writers disappear behind the story. Their primary goal is to make you forget that someone is writing the script so you can simply experience what’s happening.

Neither approach is right or wrong. There are scripts where a strong voice is a part of the appeal.

Something like The Menu benefits from a voice on the page. But imagine Jurassic Park being written with a strong voice. If every description of the T-Rex came with some clever observation or unexpected turn of phrase, at a certain point you’d become aware of the writer when what you really want is to be terrified by the fucking dinosaur.

That’s the risk of pushing your voice to the forefront. The story is no longer the only thing the reader is experiencing. They’re also experiencing you telling them the story.

I really battling that throughout this script. There were many times where I saw Branko as opposed to being lost in the story he was telling. Describing a character as “a heart attack in a Tom Ford.” Or how a character “pours two fingers of something older than both of them.”

I want to be clear about the fact some readers like this writing. I do not. I like when the story is the star. The hardest thing in the world for a storyteller to do is to create that suspension of disbelief in the reader. Make them actually forget that they’re reading a story and are, instead, experiencing it. Every time you write a “too clever by half” line of a prose, you break that suspension of disbelief.

EVELYN
The official report says Dean Calloway was crushed by an industrial baler during routine maintenance.

MARTIN
Official reports are wedding photos. Everyone’s smiling. Nobody mentions the affair.

This exchange gets to the heart of what I’m talking about. This is a good WRITER’S LINE. But it isn’t a particularly good HUMAN-BEING LINE.

Imagine somebody actually saying this after Evelyn tells him a man was crushed by an industrial baler. Wouldn’t the more accurate reaction be something like, “That’s what the report says. Doesn’t mean that’s what happened.” Instead, Martin apparently has an elegant three-part metaphor ready to go involving wedding photography and marital infidelity.

Look, I know that my good buddy John August (extreme sarcasm for those new to the site) is on record as saying “Movie dialogue is how characters would speak if they had a few extra seconds to compose their thoughts between lines.” But even if you use that as your guiding principle, Martin’s line about wedding photos feels more like he had three months to compose it.

None of this is to knock Branko. I’m not criticizing the dialogue. I’m noting that myself and people like me prefer more truth to the lines of dialogue and more invisibility in terms of telling the story. And to Branko’s credit. He does occasionally give us that.

MARTIN (CO NT’D)
Did you know him? Work with him?

Beat. Evelyn’s jaw tightens.

MARTIN
Fuck him?

EVELYN
(ice cold)
He was my father.

MARTIN
Oh, fuck off.

Not angry. Tired. The way you’d swat a fly that’s been circling your drink.

MARTIN (CONT’D)
The dead father. Really? That’s what we’re doing?

That’s an honest line. There’s no cleverness there. It feels innately “Martin.” That’s the stuff I like. I wanted more of that.

Okay, let’s talk about the actual story, shall we. I really like this setup.

This guy comes in. He’s ready to collect his 13 million bucks and head off into the sunset, only to encounter someone determined to make sure he gets nothing. The guy who screwed everyone else over is now the one getting screwed. Can he overcome it? Has he met his match? We’ve got a movie here.

Why?

Because we’ve got a goal (get the 13 million). We’ve got the stakes (if this woman bulldozes him, he gets nothing). We’ve got urgency (the exit interview is contained to this one day). And we got conflict (these two absolutely despise each other as well as want completely opposite things). That’s exactly what you’re trying to do when you come up with a movie idea. Is to create those four elements. Cause if you have those, there’s a very good chance you have a movie.

Once we get into the warehouse with Evelyn, that’s where the script hits its stride. I would say this is one of the best second acts in the Blood & Ink Contest. I love the reveal of the baler.

Because one of the big things we talk about when it comes to horror is giving the readers something they haven’t seen before. How do you create scares when the audience has seen every scare in the book? Branko does it with the reveal of the baler. I saw that thing like it was in front of me in my place. And it terrified the hell out of me.

Everything leading up to Martin having to decide whether to sign his sole responsibility for killing all these people or partake in the baler had me on the edge of my seat. I had no idea what was going to happen next. Which is the advantage of writing something this dark. You get the sense that the darkest option IS ON THE TABLE. And you’re wondering if the writer is going to go there.

But the second we cut to a time gap and Martin’s had his arm amputated and he’s in a hospital room, the script lost all momentum. All of a sudden, we’re talking about new time frames. 48 hours. 4 days. All that contained-ness is scrapped.

Then Evelyn comes in and says, “you can even call your daughter.” Now Evelyn is nice????? When did that happen?? And then we have an endless father-daughter discussion that plays out very predictably and it just kept sucking momentum out of the screenplay.

That baler is the boogeyman. And the boogeyman stops being scary after he’s already hurt you. I was just pointing this out to another writer during a consultation. The more information you give us about something, the less scary it becomes. And once that baler took out Martin’s arm, I thought, “I understand this thing now.” Something about that information torpedoed my fear. I wasn’t as afraid anymore.

So instead of taking his arm and then creating this kumbaya section between him and Evelyn, let’s keep escalating things. Let’s create another story beat. Make things nastier. And then let’s use the climax for the big baler. That’s how I would do it.

All in all, this was close to a “worth the read.” But my personal preferences surrounding aggressive writing voices along with the creative choice to take off Martin’s arm and slow the pacing to a crawl really hurt the script in my opinion. Address these things and this script gets better.

Script link: Exit Interview

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

What I learned: Here is a useful test for whether your voice is becoming too dominant on the page. Simply ask yourself, “Is this sentence making me notice the story more, or making me notice the writer more?” That’s it. And if it’s making you notice the writer but you’re okay with that, that’s your artistic right. But for readers like me, I like to get lost in the story. So I don’t like when the voice takes precedence.

And let the power of possibility motivate you.

Ever since The Ballad of the Ember Knight and Wildman sold, I’ve been getting a lot of e-mails from writers new to Scriptshadow. Which I love. Come on in, the water’s warm.

But because these writers are new to the site, they don’t yet know how Scriptshadow works. I think some of them believe it’s like the Black List, where you send your screenplay in and it enters some giant system where, theoretically, someone important might find it. Except nobody’s sending me any money. Apparently, I’m the Black List’s new nonprofit division.

As a result, I’ve been getting pitched A LOT of movie ideas lately. And reading through a lot of these weak ideas, combined with the fact that Ember Knight and Wildman just sold, has gotten me thinking that if you want to write a script that has a shot at selling, there are two viable routes you should focus on.

You can write a GREAT STORY.

Or you can write a GREAT CONCEPT.

Let’s start with The Ballad of the Ember Knight.

Ember Knight is almost the anti-high-concept. It’s a giant medieval period piece written by two unknown writers. The draft I originally read was 185 pages long. I’m not sure you could construct a screenplay more hostile to the spec market if you limited your subject matter to parking regulations and probate law. And yet the script sold. Why? Because Kieran and Brennan did something that sounds ridiculously obvious but that a surprising number of writers don’t do.

They wrote a GREAT STORY.

What does ‘great story’ mean? Let’s get specific.

In Ember Knight, we have a disgraced knight traveling through 14th-century France who must protect the murdered king’s son and get him to the city where he can eventually take the throne. Right there, we’ve got a strong narrative spine.

I had lunch with one of my brothers the other day and he hasn’t seen a movie in 5 years. He has zero interest in them. When I told him about the Ember Knight sale and then told him the plot, I was shocked when his face lit up and he said, “That sounds like it could be good.”  This is a guy who falls asleep if I even mention the word “Godfather.”

We have a destination. We have a goal. We have stakes. We have danger. We have people trying to stop them.

But that’s only the beginning. The Ember Knight is hiding a gigantic secret. HE’S THE ONE WHO KILLED THE BOY’S FATHER. We know that. The boy doesn’t. Which means that in addition to wondering whether these guys are going to make it across France alive, I’m wondering when this kid is going to find out who the man protecting him really is. And, more importantly, WHAT’S GOING TO HAPPEN WHEN HE DOES?

That’s what I mean when I say STORY. You’re creating reasons for me to keep reading.

You’ve got a destination I want the characters to reach. You’ve got a secret which I’m waiting for to explode. You’ve got mysteries I want answers to. You’ve got relationships whose dynamics are changing. You’ve got characters I’m interested in. You’ve got danger closing in. You’ve got reveals that change my understanding of what I thought was happening.

And, most importantly, the story BUILDS.

That last one is important. A lot of writers mistake “things happening” for story. Somebody gets attacked. Then they go somewhere. Somebody else attacks them. Then they go somewhere else. Then another problem occurs. Technically, stuff is happening. But the story isn’t BUILDING.

So if you want to take the Ember Knight route, here’s a simple exercise. Before you start writing, write down five reasons why someone will want to keep reading your script. And “to see what happens” doesn’t count. Be specific. “I want to know if Michael discovers that Sarah killed his brother.” “I want to know if they reach the border before midnight.” “I want to know what’s inside the red door nobody is allowed to enter.” “I want to know whether Bill finally gets together with his Tess after 20 years.”

If you can’t come up with five strong answers, I’d be worried. Because your screenplay should be a machine that’s constantly generating reasons for the reader to turn the page.

But before any of that matters, you have to give them a reason to turn the very first page of your script and start reading.

And that’s where a great concept comes in.

Here’s the Wildman logline: “When his brother is gunned down by a murderous gang, reclusive Joel must leave his hidden mountain home to get revenge. His quest for justice sets him on a collision course with a homicidal cop, stone-cold psychopaths, and a bloodthirsty militia, but Joel won’t stop until he’s torn them all limb from limb. Also, Joel is a Bigfoot.”

Come on.

You hear that last part and you immediately want to read the script. That’s what a great concept does. It gets you to turn that very first page. After that, it’s the story’s job to keep you turning the rest of them.

Now I know there’s a cabal of you who think starting with concept is evil. To you guys, screenwriting should be more pure than that. Write what moves you. Write what you care about. Write the story you desperately need to tell.

And you know what? I don’t disagree with that! Ember Knight just proved that route can work.

But you also have to acknowledge reality. A great concept makes everything that happens AFTER YOU FINISH THE SCRIPT easier. Mainly, it gets you more fucking reads. A LOT MORE.

Let’s say you write this beautiful deeply personal screenplay about agricultural studies in Sudan and five people read it. All five say, “Wow, this is really good.” But none of them can figure out how to turn it into a movie, so that’s where your journey ends.

Meanwhile, the guy who came up with a fire hurricane headed towards Miami is getting 50 reads. Maybe his script isn’t as good as yours (hypothetically speaking). But he has ten times as many people reading his screenplay. That’s ten times as many opportunities for somebody to fall in love with it, ten times as many opportunities for somebody to pass it to someone else, ten times as many opportunities to get that script into the hands of someone who can actually do something with it.

And let’s not forget about the little cheat code that comes with high concept: AN ERROR MARGIN.

Let’s say the reader gets to page 45 and there’s a sequence that isn’t working. In Ember Knight, if that happened, a reader is looking at that page count and all of a sudden wondering if continuing on is worth it. With Wildman, there’s something sitting in the back of their head saying, “Yeah, but it’s a Bigfoot revenge movie.” They can still see the poster. They can still see the trailer. They can still imagine THE MOVIE.

And this brings me to the thing I’ve really been thinking about these last couple of weeks. When you choose your next screenplay idea, you aren’t just choosing what you’re going to spend the next six months writing.

YOU’RE CHOOSING THE ROAD YOU’LL HAVE TO TRAVEL AFTER YOU WRITE IT.

If you write Wildman, you know when you’re finished, the logline’s going to open doors. If you write Ember Knight, you’re accepting that you’ll have to fight harder. You’ll have to enter a lot of contests. You’ll have to query more people. You may have to pay for professional feedback just to get the script in front of somebody who recognizes how good it is.

That road can absolutely work. It just did.

But know what you’re signing up for. And make sure it factors into what your writing life looks like right now. If you’re 23 years old and you’ve got all the time in the world, write your Ember Knight. Spend a year on it. Obsess over the characters. Obsess over the story. Obsess over every twist and turn.

But let’s say you’ve been writing for 15 years. You’ve written twelve screenplays. Every new screenplay takes six months out of your life and you’re still having trouble getting people to read them. At some point, I think you have to ask yourself: Why am I playing on hard mode?

Why not write something where, when you tell somebody the idea, they immediately say, “SEND ME THAT!” That’s the direction I would lean. Cause I’ve seen too many writers send me their versions of Ember Knight, and even though they were good, they weren’t good enough to overcome how difficult the scripts were to market.  Ember Knight was that rare 98th percentile script that was good enough to overcome its extracurricular shortcomings.

The good news is, you get to choose which avenue you want to go down. So pick one and give it everything you’ve got. That’s all we can do as screenwriters. :)

I’ve been so busy this week I haven’t been able to post but when this hit the Hollywood Reporter today, I couldn’t not use the opportunity to congratulate Jacob Rainer, whose Bigfoot spec, “Wildman,” born out of the Blood & Ink Screenplay Contest, sold.

To give you a little background on this one, earlier this year, Jake Wagner, from Alibi management, called me and said, “Carson, we have to meet. We haven’t talked in forever.” I’ve known Jake all the way back since The Disciple Program, believe it or not. He was one of the first industry people to read that script and say, “This is awesome.”

So we had lunch at Superba on Sunset. Great spot. And he said, “I want to sign some people. I want some fresh writers.” What I knew about Jake was he loves genre stuff. He loves horror. And I said, it just so happens that I’m doing this horror contest called Blood & Ink. I’ll slip you any scripts that I read that are good. As soon as I read Wildman I said, “You may want to check this one out.”

What I didn’t know about Jake is that he LOVES Bigfoot. So he was stoked. He immediately signed Jacob and he gave him the same mission I talked about in the review, which was to streamline the script and just focus on Bigfoot. I came in for a quick set of eyes on the new draft, offered some notes, and credit to Jacob. He wrote another draft FAST.

Jake then went out to about 8 people. And Badlands loved it. And we liked them. Wildman was always, “John Wick with a Bigfoot,” and Badlands is an arm of Thunder Road, who made John Wick. So it was a perfect marriage. Also, they’re about actually making movies. They’re not interested in buying a bunch of projects and letting them linger in development hell. If they buy something, they want to make it. Which means not only is this script getting purchased. There’s a very good chance it will get made!

Dreams do come true!

So keep writing!

And if you need script notes, let me know (e-mail me at carsonreeves1@gmail.com). I’m busy but I’ll try to fit you in.

A lot of people are talking about Ridley Scott’s latest film, The Dog Stars, bombing at the box office, snagging just 8 million bucks on its opening weekend. And all I could think was, “Uhhh… how did you NOT see this coming?”

This remains one of Hollywood’s biggest blind spots. They put together packages and not movies. Let’s take The Dog Stars out of this. Doesn’t matter what the project is. When someone comes to you with a package that has mega-director Ridley Scott directing and shooting star Jacob Elordi starring, every single executive at every single studio says “yes.” Every time. Cause it’s a strong package.

The downside of that? The Dog Stars. Dud dud DUD subject matter.

I actually read The Dog Stars (the novel) and I specifically remember finishing it, dropping it down on the floor and, in theatrical fashion, screaming, “That’s it!????” The book was about some guy who’s mourning his dead dog in the apocalypse. Almost nothing happens in the story. And what’s up with this premise?? Why do we need to go to the apocalypse to explore someone’s feelings about their dead dog? YOU CAN DO THAT IN THE PRESENT!

I eventually concluded that the only reason the book became popular was because it made people cry. That’s it. “Dead dog. Sad.” That could be the logline of the book. I’m not kidding. It made no sense as a story and even less sense as a movie. I didn’t keep up with the development of the project but it looks like they may have changed some things and turned it into more of a basic apocalyptic adventure.

And guess what? That’s EXACTLY why no one went to see it! You watch that trailer and you say, “This is a basic bitch apocalyptic story.” The only thing that differentiates it is the dead dog stuff and they knew if they led with that in the trailers EVEN LESS people would’ve shown up. Which begs the question: WHY DID THEY MAKE THIS MOVIE???

I’m starting to realize that studios don’t have the control in this town anymore. They had it for awhile when people went to see superhero movies. But nowadays? The directors have all the control. Specifically the top 10 directors. Whatever those 10 directors want to do, the studios have to do them.

I’m learning this even as I hear rumors regarding The Ballad of the Ember Knight. Not from Aaron or Kieran or Brennan (they won’t tell me anything because they’re afraid I’ll spill the beans on the site). I’m hearing it from my other contacts. All they care about now is getting one of those top 10 directors attached. And the word on the street is that they’re very close! And once you get that director, you get that actor. And now it’s a huge package. That project is on a buzzy run like I’ve never seen.

I feel bad for Coyote vs ACME. Here is a movie that got ditched, was celebrated as this canceled tour-de-force. And then it sat in a trash can. Then another studio bought it. And finally it’s being released.

And after allllllllllllll that, nobody went to see it. All that celebration for nothing! The problem, of course, is that the big story (of how secretly amazing the movie was) was being spread to the exact demographic (people over 30) who had absolutely zero interest in seeing the movie.

You could’ve said Coyote vs. Acme was better than Casablanca and it wouldn’t have mattered. It’s a movie for little children. And I’m just guessing here, but I don’t think 7year-old Joey was sitting in the sandbox telling 7 year-old Billy, “You know, I just think Warner Brothers completely mishandled the Coyote vs. Acme situation.”

But all is not bad with the box office! Especially if your name is either Christopher Nolan or Spider-Man.

What’s crazy about the success of these two films is that they’re the two most adult films of the summer. The Odyssey’s success is particularly impressive when you consider that, prior to its opening, its claim to fame was being something your English teacher forced you to read. Christopher Nolan somehow took a homework nightmare and turned it into $1.4 billion.

And then you have Spider-Man, which is easily the most adult Spider-Man film ever made. Which is a risk when you think about it. Spider-Man is uniquely high school. But this latest iteration went deeper into the character than ever before, culminating in a very adult, character-driven finale. I know people in their 60s who love this movie. Sony better take half the profits they made from this film and invest it in cloning technology so they can keep Tom Holland around forever.

Speaking of Sony, I had a meeting there last week. I was meeting with a producer and he is all in on family films. If there is a great family film script, he wants it. “Get me an awesome four quadrant script, Carson!” I was kinda busting his balls a bit about how many family films he makes and he said, “Hey, this is my way to compete with IP. I don’t have Spider-Man. I don’t have Fast & Furious. But I have holidays. Everybody knows what Christmas and Halloween and Independence Day are. So I can use those to get big movies made.”

I’m not a family film guy but I know what a good concept looks like. So if you guys have one, keep me in mind!

Finally, I continue to look for something, ANYTHING, to watch on TV. I’ve gotten pretty desperate. It’s like clockwork with these shows. Two episodes are good and then the writing COMPLETELY falls apart. Why? Because the whole system for how shows are made is faulty. The only script you show them is the pilot. So you can spend an entire year getting it perfect. And because you always end the pilot with a fun cliffhanger, the second episode is usually good too. But now you’re writing the other six episodes in six months! Of course the writing is going to suck.

I decided to take a shot at Sterling Point, an Amazon show about a New York girl who inherits a tiny island in Canada and heads up there, where she discovers there are many mysteries to discover about her past. I’m five episodes in and while there are definitely aspects of what I just said (the lead girl’s brother – played by Mark Ruffalo’s kid – follows her up there and, within 24 hours, throws himself a giant birthday party that everybody comes to despite the fact that literally nobody knows who he is), the show is quite good.

If you ever spent your summers away from home when you were young, you know the strange little world that gets created. You’re surrounded by people you’ve never met before, nobody knows who you were back home, the entire social hierarchy has been wiped clean, and suddenly you’re free to become somebody different. Throw in raging hormones, that girl/guy you’re obsessed with, instant friendships, and that weird knowledge that this whole thing has an expiration date, and everything feels ten times more intense. Sterling Point does an amazing job of capturing that very specific feeling.

Most important of all, as is the secret to making anything with impact, the main character is instantly lovable. You’ll follow her anywhere. She’s very sympathetic and sweet and raw and open and we want so desperately for her to find the truth to all these questions she has.

Writing, in many ways, is so simple. Write us a character we love and we’ll come back week after week to watch them. And the nice thing about the script is that it’s got some plot to it as well. So it’s not all soap opera scenes. It’s worth checking out.

What are you guys watching? What did you see? Is Coyote vs. Acme as good as everyone says it is?

Genre: Horror comedy
Premise: At the “MonstroCon” horror convention, a group of washed-up monster movie legends are reluctantly gathered in the green room, nursing bruised egos and lukewarm coffee. When they find themselves under siege by rabid, parasite-infected superfans they must fight their way out—armed with foam props, years of regret, and very bad knees.
About: Last year I did a pitch contest called Blood & Ink where anyone could pitch me movie ideas. I accepted the best 100 of those ideas. The writers then wrote those scripts. Ever since, I’ve been reviewing them on the site, looking for the best one. Already, one script, Wildman, written by Jacob Rainer, got him a manager and possibly more.
Writer: Ed Wood
Details: 90 pages

This was one of my favorite Blood & Ink pitches. The idea has all sorts of potential. Now, let’s see what Mr. Ed Wood has done with it, shall we?

We start on a dude known as The Fixer, who’s pitching a bunch of studio executives on how movies are dying. But he’s got the solution. You simply create an audience that wants to see the same thing over and over again. And he’s even got a way to do it!

He’s found a rare animal called a rat-monkey that contains a parasite that, when introduced into the human body, turns that person into a rabid fan who only wants to watch the same movies and TV shows over and over again. Studios will never have to try to be original again!

But first, they need a test bed for the parasite. So they create Monstrocon and stick it in the middle of nowhere, aka Gary, Indiana. They then recruit five of the biggest horror villain icons of all time: Robert Englund, aka Freddy Krueger; Kane Hodder, better known as Jason Voorhees; Doug Bradley, aka Pinhead; Warwick Davis, of Leprechaun fame; and finally Brad Dourif, the voice of Chucky.

Robert has just learned he’s going to die in two weeks. Kane chops quarry blocks for a living, so he’s still in fighting shape. Doug has become a sexual Mr. Miyagi, helping couples improve their sex lives. Warwick is dealing with blowback from woke audiences who think his Leprechaun movies encouraged stereotypes. And Brad still spends most of his days bitching to the Chucky doll, who lives with him.

The group heads to Monstrocon to make some extra cash and, while there, meets Luna Linwood, the hot-ass actress from Halo, who informally joins their crew. Before long, they spot someone walk up to another fan, dislocate their own jaw, then shoot goo into the person’s ear. Turns out this is how the zombies pass on the parasite.

It doesn’t take long for our group to realize that, for the first time in their lives, they’re the prey. And if they want to survive, they’re going to have to kill for real, just like they’ve spent their entire careers doing in the movies. Naturally, they’re all idiots, so they spend the majority of their time bumbling their way through these kills.

Eventually, they learn that Monstrocon is one giant experiment and the studios plan to blow the entire place up once the test is over, killing everyone inside. So our crew not only has to fight its way through an endless wave of zombie-fans, but they also have to stop this death trap from atomizing them.

Can they do it?? Based on their age and collective idiocy, the odds are against them!

I thought this was okay but, as we all know, ‘okay’ isn’t good enough if you want your script to move up the Hollywood ladder.

What’s holding it back? A few things. Starting with the setup.

I don’t like overly complicated, laborious setups in comedy screenplays. Comedy should be simple. And right now, we’re doing a ton of work to set up these movie executives trying to create the perfect fan, this virus that’s supposed to make people want to keep going to the movies, this convention in a random town where they’re testing it, and then a plan to destroy everyone afterward. It’s a lot, and I’m not even sure the logic makes sense.

If the virus is designed to make people want to see movies over and over again, how does testing their reactions to old horror stars at a convention prove that it works? And it’s also unclear whether turning everyone into zombies was the bad guys’ plan or whether the virus has unexpectedly gone haywire.

That’s a whole lot of setup for what is ultimately a very simple premise: five iconic horror movie actors are at a convention when a zombie outbreak occurs, and for the first time, instead of defeating monsters on a movie set, they have to defeat them for real.

That’s the movie! So let’s get to the convention, introduce these five actors, establish their situations, and then let the zombie outbreak begin. We don’t even need to know why it’s happening. Most zombie movies don’t stop to give us some elaborate explanation for where the zombies came from. If we come up with a great explanation that can be integrated later without slowing things down, fine. But it’s not something we need to build the entire opening around.

The other big thing we need to nail is our five horror icons. For this movie to work, at least four of these five characters have to be perfectly comically conceived. Each one needs a clear identifying trait that creates a constant stream of comedy opportunities.

Right now, Brad is easily the strongest. The idea that he still talks to Chucky, resents him, and has this bizarre Norman Bates-like relationship with the doll is hilarious. That’s a character.

Kane kind of works too because he’s essentially Jason in real life. The problem is that he doesn’t speak, which severely limits how much comedy we can generate from him. We need to find another layer there that gives us more opportunities.

After that, things get shakier. Warwick mostly just feels like Warwick: a nice, pleasant actor. Pleasant doesn’t get you very far in comedy. He needs a strong comedic trait that immediately separates him from everybody else.

Robert is the biggest missed opportunity because he’s arguably the most recognizable person here, yet he’s currently the most boring. Even his “two weeks to live” storyline isn’t being exploited for comedy. That should make him the wildest guy in the group. He just found out he’s going to die! This should be his, “You picked the wrong fucking day to mess with me” moment. He has nothing left to lose, so he goes absolutely nuts.

And Doug is currently the most incorrectly conceived of the five. I understand the challenge because most people don’t know anything about Pinhead. But turning him into some sort of sexual-healing doctor feels disconnected from the comedic engine of the movie. We need something sharper and exploitable.

The key is that each of these guys needs his own unmistakable comedic identity. What might that look like? I could see Kane refusing to kill anything. He’s an extreme pacifist. Which would be really funny because he’s undoubtedly their biggest potential weapon. So, everyone is constantly trying to unlock that.

Brad argues with Chucky more than dealing with the actual situation. While the other guys are killing 10 zombies who just got into the room, Brad is in the back arguing with Chucky who’s mad “that Brad didn’t pack his favorite socks.”

Warwick could have a MASSIVE EGO. He genuinely believes Leprechaun is the greatest horror franchise ever created. So the only way to activate him is to tell him that the zombies were talking shit about Leprechaun 7. And he gets VERRRRYYYYY sensitive anytime anyone disses Leprechaun in Space.

For Robert, ditch the 2 weeks to live thing. Instead, make him a giant coward. He’s terrified of everything. Spiders, blood, confrontation, dark rooms.

And I say we make Doug the pretentious artist. He considers himself an extremely serious actor and still performs in small stage plays. He’s embarrassed that Pinhead is his biggest success. He constantly intellectualizes everything to the most annoying degree.

Notice how all of these traits aren’t just funny. They make these guys the WORST POSSIBLE PEOPLE to be thrown into this situation. And, just as importantly, they give each character something they have to overcome during this movie. I don’t think the current character construction is doing that.

But when it comes down to it, funny is the name of the game here. That’s what we care about most in a comedy. The plot is often background noise. So, as a screenwriter, your job is to come up with a concept that naturally generates a ton of comedy scenes. Which this concept does. Give us a plot that then moves things forward but, at the same time, is so sparse that it stays the fuck out of the way. And then you need characters who naturally generate comedy within their scenes. That’s where the script is lacking.

I would argue that the number one way to make a funny movie is to create hilarious characters, because those characters are going to be in almost every scene. If you haven’t achieved that with at least two of your leads, you’re going to struggle to consistently generate laughs. Cause you’re going to be trying to create funny out of nothing. That’s where comedies die. Cause you can see the writer desperately scrambling in real time. If you want to see what this looks like, go watch the back half of any SNL episode, where they put on the weaker sketches.

So I would go back to the drawing board with these characters and not start writing again until you can make a convincing argument that every one of them is at least an 8 out of 10 on the comedy scale.

I still think this has potential but the rewrite would have to be pretty substantial.

What do you guys think?

Script link: Fan Favourites

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

What I learned: If you’re moving mountains to set up a comedy, you’re probably doing it wrong. Comedies should be pretty easy to set up. Set up your characters. Set up the problem that starts the movie. Boom, you’re into the fun stuff.