Does this red-hot project deliver? Load up those arrows and let’s find out!

Genre: Drama/Period
Premise: Robin Hood, who in this iteration was a robber and serial killer, is seriously wounded after a battle, forcing him to get his injuries treated on an island led by a nun.
About: This script/package just came together a couple of weeks ago. It will star Hugh Jackman and Jodie Cormer. It’s written and directed by Michael Sarnoski, who made that Nicholas Cage movie, “Pig,” and just finished “A Quiet Place: Year One.”
Writer: Michael Sarnoski
Details: 98 pages

When a new Robin Hood movie is announced, there’s a symbolic meaning to it that digs deep into one of the many issues within Hollywood. Which is that the town cannot ignore free IP. They would rather make a bad movie and lose a ton of money off publicly available IP than leave the IP alone and keep their money.

It’s weird that they keep making this mistake over and over again. Cause let’s be real. The Robin Hood IP is deader than Blockbuster Video.

Luckily, there are still three ways to revive dead IP. The first is to come up with an angle so fresh, it reinvents the material. The second is to execute the script so well that we’re captivated by the story. And the third is to hire a director with a really unique vision who presents the story in a fresh new way.

I can tell you whether the first two criteria are met as I just read the script.

1246

A young girl walking through the countryside dressed as a boy to avoid attacks, stumbles upon a 50-something hermit who gives her food & shelter and tells her to be careful on her journey. That night, the girl attempts to slit his throat while he’s sleeping. But he was still awake, knowing she would do so, and mercilessly kills her.

The next day, an old friend of his, the burly Edward, comes by and says that a family stole his farm and kicked him out. He wants it back but he needs help. Robin and Edward head to the farm, where they kill everyone, unfortunately losing Edward’s wife in the battle.

When word gets to the local warlord that Robin Hood is around, he and his men head to the farm and engage in battle with them. Both Robin and Edward barely defeat them. But Robin is on death’s doorstep.

Edward puts him on a boat and takes him to an island run by Sister Brigid, a sort of hybrid healer/doctor/nun. She takes in whoever comes and nurses them back to health. So, for the next 80 minutes, Robin does just that. The end. No, I’m not kidding. That’s the whole movie.

To this script’s credit, it nails Revival Option #2.

It completely reinvents Robin Hood. That cannot be disputed. So kudos for doing that because it’s clear that that was why this movie got greenlit.

Another thing the screenplay did was help me discover a new type of screenplay opening.

Actually, the opening has always been around but I’m just now realizing that it can be categorized.

I call it the “We mean business” opening.

Basically, what you do is you write something so shocking that the reader has no choice but to sit up and pay attention. Now, I want to be clear here. You can’t fake a “We mean business” opening. Remember the opening of The Sixth Sense? A former patient breaks into Bruce Willis’s home and stabs him.

I read that type of opening all the time. It’s not a bad opening but it’s not a “We mean business” opening.

A “We mean business” opening is what they did here. They had Robin Hood, one of the most beloved heroes ever, violently kill a 14 year old girl. That’s a freaking “We mean business” opening. It’s the kind of opening that makes the reader go, “Whoa.” It stuns them.

And it worked! You can tell by my review intro that I was skeptical of this script. But that opening scene made me think, “Okay, maybe this is going to be better than I thought.”

By the way, note the skill involved in executing the “We mean business,” opening. It wasn’t just following an old Robin Hood through the streets, seeing some girl, then killing her. Sure, that would’ve met the criteria for We mean business, but it also would’ve felt forced and artificial.

Instead, we get this little story of this lost girl and she meets this hermit and asks for his help. Then, when they’re asleep, she sneaks up on him to kill him as it turns out she came here to assassinate him all along. But he was ready for her and able to turn the tables. It gave us the We mean business moment yet we don’t despise our hero afterwards. He’s still worth rooting for.

This “We mean business” vibe continues for another 15 pages. And, at that point, I was sharpening my pen, getting ready to anoint another [x] impressive.

But then this script falls off a freaking cliff.

And oh how spectacularly it falls.

It fell so far so quickly, I had whiplash.

How could this have happened, I asked myself.
And that’s when I saw it:

Writer-director.

As I’ve chronicled before, very few directors can also write. I mean… we’re talking a narrative engine so inert here that the script stands in place for the last 80 pages. It’s stunning how boring the story that follows is.

What sucks is that this is Michael Sarnoski, who directed one of my most anticipated movies of the year: Quiet Place Year One. Now I’m worried that movie’s going to disappoint too!

So why, specifically does this script fall apart? Well, for one, it becomes a “waiting around” script. These are scripts where your characters just wait around the whole time. These narratives are incredibly difficult to make entertaining. Because movies are great at celebrating active-ness. They like when characters charge forward and take the story with them.

A hero can’t do that if he’s lying around for 80 minutes.

Your one respite in that situation is conflict. If we’re waiting around in a situation ripe with conflict, it can still be entertaining. Heck, we just saw this YESTERDAY! In my review of The Last Stop in Yuma County. Characters were all waiting around for a fuel truck to show up. But the difference was, there was an insane amount of conflict due to the hostage-situation.

Here we just… wait for Robin Hood to get better. And he doesn’t even have a goal he’s trying to achieve after he gets better. He’s just… trying to get better.

But this script violates a much bigger issue: It pretends to be a reimagining of Robin Hood but I have the sneaking suspicion that the original drafts of this script had nothing to do with Robin Hood and that, in the last couple of drafts, Sarnoski changed his main character’s name to Robin Hood to capitalize on the IP and have a better chance at getting it made. Which, to his credit, is exactly what happened. Talk about a “What I Learned.”

But yeah, I kept waiting for Robin Hood mythology to work its way into the story in clever ways but that never happened. There are a few moments where minor Robin Hood lore is brought up, but it’s presented in a manner by which it’s conceivable it could’ve been thrown in there at the last second.

I have to say, this is one of the most spectacular nosedives I’ve seen in a screenplay. It starts off SO STRONG and then it’s as if someone who’s never written a story before mumbled out 80 pages of jibberish.

And it’s not like it couldn’t have been saved! That’s the frustrating part. Late in the script, we learn that Sister Brigid’s family was killed by Robin Hood. Why not learn that earlier and then play up the suspense of whether she’s going to kill him? At least then we’re building towards a showdown.

But Sarnoski, oddly, runs away from conflict whenever the possibility presents itself. Brigid tells Robin she knows he killed her parents but, you know what, she’s okay with it. She still wants to heal him.

Wow.

Just wow.

It sticks a dagger into the center of my body when I see writers making these giant movies who possess so little storytelling ability. It sucks! Because what it means is we’re going to get this beautiful-looking movie with this cool trailer that’s going to focus on those first three violent scenes and then people are going to show up to the movie and say, “What the f**k was that???” Cause nothing happened for the last 80 minutes. Literally nothing.

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

What I learned: Take a well known beloved hero and make them bad (Robin Hood). Or take a well known beloved villain and make them good (Wicked). Tried and true method for reinventing classic stories.

When a movie nobody knows about is actually one of the best movies of the year

Genre: Contained Thriller
Premise: A knife salesman is holed up in a diner in the middle of nowhere when two bank robbers show up, loose canons who are a beat away from killing anyone who could ruin their score.
About: First time writer-director Francis Galluppi has talked about the challenges of getting his movie made. At first, he was going to direct a 5 million dollar version of the film but he quickly learned that when you go that high, the financiers demand that you use certain actors in the main roles, as they are proven in foreign sales. Those actors, unfortunately, carry the sheen of a “straight-to-digital” vibe (aka John Cusack) so Galluppi decided he was going to shoot the movie for 1 million instead. That way, he’d be able to choose all the actors he wanted. The difference is a buzzy movie that will be a calling card that should send Gulluppi up the Hollywood ladder quickly, compared to sending him into the doldrums of straight-to-digital purgatory.
Writer: Francis Galluppi
Details: 90 minutes

The best way to experience this movie is the way I experienced it, which is to not know anything going in. Because I really didn’t know where this thing was going. And that was exciting because that rarely happens to me with movies anymore.

However, in order for me to convey just how strong the writing was in this script, I need to unleash a ton of spoilers. So, again, go watch this first THEN COME BACK. Otherwise, you’re going to be robbed of a really cool experience.

We’re in the middle of Nowhere Arizona. A well-dressed knife salesman pulls up to the last gas station for the next 100 miles, only to learn from Vernon, the attendant, that they’re out of gas. But the gas truck is on its way. So just sit tight in the diner and you’ll be on your way soon.

One of the first clever things about this script is that the opening title sequence is a bunch of close ups of that fuel track flipped upside-down off the highway, post-accident. In other words, it’s the first of many uses of dramatic irony in the script. We know that truck is never coming but the characters do not know that.

The pretty waitress at the diner, Charlotte, is married to the town sheriff, who dropped her off. We keep hearing through the radio something about a local bank robbery. And then, what do you know, two nasty looking dudes, Beau and Travis, show up for gas only to find out the same thing – there is no gas yet. So they head to the diner as well.

Not long after Beau (the older bank robber) susses out that Charlotte may be onto him, he pulls out a gun and tells everyone not to do anything stupid, like call the cops. Just do as he says and once the fuel arrives, it’ll be like they were never here.

After this happens, more people start showing up – a young wanna-be Bonnie & Clyde couple, an older couple, and a Native American man. None of these newer people know what’s going on here. But the knife salesman and waitress do.

As the tension builds and people start putting two and two together, Beau decides to pre-empt any uprising and pulls out his gun. Beau seems to forget, however, that this is America. And, in America, everybody has guns. This begins a wild Mexican standoff, the result of which will blow your mind.

I LOVED the directing here. It was so simple yet still stylish.

However, it’s the WRITING I was the most impressed by. I see so many upcoming directors debut with these films that everybody says show “PROMISE.” The reason they say “promise” and not “this film was great” is because the script is always bad. And that’s because young directors don’t put any stock into the script. It’s an afterthought compared to the directing.

This is the first time in a LONG TIME that a new director genuinely put just as much effort into the script as the production.

There are two places in particular where this script excelled.

1 – Dramatic Irony

2 – Setups and Payoffs

This is a dramatic irony masterclass here. Dramatic Irony is so important that I dedicated an entire section of my dialogue book to it.

Most writers who understand dramatic irony only do so on a basic level. This writer understands that it has multiple facets and if you can learn those facets, you can make a simple premise like this one play out with more power than your average Marvel film.

I mentioned the crashed fuel truck. Normally, with dramatic irony, the character and the audience know a secret together. But you’ll notice here, we’re given the crashed truck information on our own. We’re the only ones who know it. Not a single person in the diner knows it. This ostensibly adds a layer of drama before anything has even happened, which was such a rad creative choice.

But you’ll also note that Galluppi doles out the information about the bank robbers being in the diner to only two other characters, the knife salesman and the waitress. This introduces what I call in my dialogue book “superior” and “inferior” points of view, which is what really brings dramatic irony to the next level.

Because when Beau is talking to the Old Man and his wife, there are different ways in which his dialogue is affecting people. To the Old Man, his words are harmless. But the knife salesman is sitting right next to the Old Man, and he (as well as we) interpret his words much differently, since we know he’s a bank robber and that he has the capacity to kill.

Another thing Galluppi nailed was the setups and payoffs. Setups and payoffs are one of the easiest ways to tell if a writer put a lot of work into a screenplay. Because good writers connect the early parts of their scripts with the later parts.

(Big spoiler so don’t read this until you’ve seen the movie) My favorite setup and payoff was when the Knife Salesman is getting away in his car but then he runs out of gas (due to a separate clever setup and payoff) and he’s stranded in the middle of nowhere. And we know the cop is coming after him (another example of dramatic irony).

So he’s screwed. Sooner or later, someone is going to find him out here with the bag of money. And he sort of stumbles to the other side of the road, over to this dip down from the highway. And there he sees… the crashed fuel truck! This fuel truck had been talked about the entire movie. What better way to end the movie than to pay it off? Ironically, he ran out of fuel at the very place where he could get more fuel.

And yet, as this screenplay did over and over, it didn’t go in the direction you thought it would.

I only had two minor issues here. One, Galluppi cheats with the whole cell phone angle. He puts us in an unidentifiable year, almost in a different dimension, where it’s both the present and the past. This was clearly to take cell phones out of the equation.

And two, the knife salesman is introduced as someone who clearly has a secret. So when that secret never emerged, I was disappointed. The only explanation I can come up with is that the actor misplayed the role. He was supposed to play a coward but his eyes and his actions tell us the entire time he’s hiding something. But it turns out he isn’t hiding anything.

Still, this was such a fun movie. If you’re a screenwriter or a director, go watch this now. You will learn something, be inspired, or both!

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

What I learned: If your story takes place in one location, which almost always requires you to have a lot of dialogue, dramatic irony is practically a must. Because without location changes, you need changes in the conversations themselves. Which you can achieve by building superior and inferior points-of-view regarding key information. Character A and G know that Character X is a bank robber. But characters B, C, and D don’t know that. And character E suspects he might be the bank robber but isn’t sure. So you can even play with the middle-ground there. But the point is, if all of your dialogue is on the surface and none of it requires the reader to think at all, your one-location story’s going to get boring fast.

Do you have a short story? Do you want to enter it into our Short Story Showdown? You should. It’s FREE. And there are no angles here. No readers with an agenda. It’s your peers who are voting. I need you to send me your title, genre, logline, and the first page of your short story. And do it by Thursday. Cause that’s the deadline!

What: Short Story Showdown

I need your: Title, Genre, Logline, and FIRST PAGE

Competition Date: Friday, May 24th

Deadline: Thursday, May 23rd, 10pm Pacific Time

Where: Send your submissions to carsonreeves3@gmail.com

The deadline for the Mega Script Showdown is July 25th!

Week 1 – Concept
Week 2 – Solidifying Your Concept
Week 3 – Building Your Characters
Week 4 – Outlining
Week 5 – The First 10 Pages
Week 6 – Inciting Incident
Week 7 – Turn Into 2nd Act
Week 8 – Fun and Games
Week 9 – Using Sequences to Tackle Your Second Act
Week 10 – The Midpoint
Week 11 – Chill Out or Ramp Up
Week 12 – Lead Up To the “Scene of Death”
Week 13 – Moment of Death
Week 14 – The Climax
Week 15 – The End!
Week 16 – Rewrite Prep 1
Week 17 – Rewrite Prep 2

It’s time to begin the rewrite of the script we just finished! As a reminder, here are all the steps you’ve taken so far…

If you didn’t participate in the “Write a Script in 2024” Challenge, don’t fret. You can still take advantage of these Thursday articles. Bust out an old script of yours that you’ve always liked and use this Rewrite Guide to rewrite it!

Time to talk logistics.

Thursday, July 25th at 10pm Pacific Time is the Mega Showdown deadline.

That’s the date we need a finished screenplay by.

Therefore, I want to be done with this rewrite on July 1st. That will give us three final weeks to make last-second changes and do all the necessary spelling and grammar checks.

To meet that July 1st goal, we’re going to be writing 6 days a week, with one day off. You are going to be rewriting (or moving through) three pages a day, for a total of 18 pages a week. That will have us finished with the second draft in six weeks.

For some of you, this is going to be easy. For others, it’s going to be tough. It all depends on how raw your first draft was and how big the issues in the script are. This is why I avoid “vomit” first drats. Vomit drafts sound good in theory. But cleaning up vomit isn’t pleasant. It’s why I encourage writers to write extensive outlines, so they only have to clean up SOME vomit in the rewrite, as opposed to ALL vomit.

Let’s talk about those three pages a day. Because, unlike the first draft, a rewrite doesn’t always happen consecutively.

In fact, there are some days when you won’t write at all. That’s because a lot of rewriting is figuring out the answers to problems before executing then. You might spend an entire 2 hour writing session just coming up with a game plan to solve a particular problem.

For example, in the novel I referred to last week, I realized during one draft that everything in the story needed to happen sooner. It took too long to get to the part of the plot that the reader actually cared about. This is actually a very common problem in screenwriting as well. So I wouldn’t be surprised if some of you weren’t facing this same issue.

To achieve this, I needed to take a couple of days to move chapters up. In that process, I realized that some chapters would have to go. So it was this balancing act of moving stuff up and getting rid of the clutter.

But I didn’t get any pages rewritten in those two days.

However, once I set those scenes where they needed to be, then, whenever I got to those scenes, all I had to do was change a few words or lines of dialogue. I could get through 7 pages in 5 minutes.

In other words, the process of getting through pages in rewrites is less consistent than writing from scratch. So don’t get phased by that. Accept as part of the process. The main thing is just that we get through 18 pages a week. I don’t care so much about nailing those 3 pages every single day.

The next thing we need to discuss is what type of screenwriter you are and, therefore, what type of challenge are you facing.

In my experience, the veteran screenwriter understands how high the quality bar is. As a result, they’re often frustrated with their rewriting as they know a lot of it isn’t good enough. This is discouraging and whenever someone is discouraged for long enough, they tap out. So that’s the danger the veteran screenwriter faces: Getting frustrated and tapping out.

The newer screenwriter has a unique advantage in that, because they underestimate how high the bar is, they always assume their writing is above that bar. That gives them confidence which allows them to move through their rewriting a lot quicker. Whenever you think you’re writing greatness, you’re going to be motivated to keep writing.

As such, each of these screenwriters has a unique challenge. The veteran screenwriter shouldn’t judge themselves too harshly. They can’t try to beat the bar with every scene. Writing a script is a process. Most great scripts are written over time. I sincerely doubt that the draft of After the Hunt I reviewed didn’t go through several rounds of feedback and rewrites. So just do the best job you can. Don’t try to be SuperScreenwriter. And know that, if something isn’t perfect, there will be time in the future to fix it.

The newer screenwriter needs to do the opposite. Instead of writing as fast as they can and finishing their rewrite in a week, they need to push themselves further than they’re used to. They need to go through each scene and ask themselves if they’re capable of writing a better scene. If they’re not, great. You’ve done all you’re capable of at this moment in time. But if you think you can do better, then do better. Cause Hollywood is packed with scripts that are written too fast and they always feel messy and empty as a result.

One final thing. Take advantage of this July 25th deadline.

A major reason why writers never finish their scripts is because no one’s looking over their backs. There is no *REASON* for them to finish. But now you have a reason. You have the Mega Showdown. July 25th is the deadline. So let’s finish that screenplay!

By the way, I’ve spoken to a dozen or so of you on e-mail and Zoom and I’ve heard a lot of you say, “I’m trying to finish but… there’s just no way I’m going to be done in time.” You know what I have to say to that? Bullshit. It’s 100% bullshit and YOU KNOW it’s bullshit. You know how I know it’s bullshit? Because if someone put a gun to your pet’s head and said, “Cookie dies if you don’t finish a script by July 25th,” you’d finish that script.

So stop coming up with excuses and saying you’re not ready or you don’t have time. You have plenty of time. Rian Johnson had notoriously convinced himself that he needed tons of time to write screenplays. Then he got the Star Wars job, which gave him less than a year to write the script and… actually, you know what? Let’s not use that example.

But I still know that you’re all capable of finishing a screenplay by July 25th. Even if you started right now, you’d be capable. So stop making excuses and get to work. Homie. Let’s get this done.

2nd Draft Deadline: July 1st
Contest Deadline: July 25th
Daily Writing Goal: 3 pages
Weekly Writing Goal: 18 pages

Go ahead and share your rewriting challenges in the comments section so that I can use these Rewrite Articles to address them. But just know that any voice in your head that tries to tell you you can’t finish your script is a lie. It’s a liar voice. It’s not reality. You can finish. You just have to do it. And I’m giving you the framework to do so.

Genre: Horror
Premise: When a park ranger ventures into the wilderness to find a missing hiker before a storm, she finds herself lured into the woods by a dangerous, unearthly predator mimicking her dead daughter.
About: Today’s screenwriter, Nick Tassoni, graduated with an MFA (’21) in screewriting at the prestigious University of Southern California. His script, Lure, finished on this past year’s Black List.
Writer: Nick Tassoni
Details: 87 pages

Let’s get Rose Byrne in this movie.

Micro-script alert!

What’s a micro-script? It’s any script under 90 pages.

Micro-scripts were hot seven years ago. Are they making a comeback?

40 year old Evelyn Yang is a national park forest ranger (“sad skin hanging off her bones”). She’s teamed up with 22 year old newbie, Colby Roth, and the old veteran of the group, Jen Parker. We hear little whispers during conversations about how the only rangers who get stuck out here are the ones running away from something.

Evelyn is definitely in that camp. She was a working single mother who went camping with her 10 year old daughter, Angelica, a few years ago and Angelica disappeared. Now she pours vodka in her coffee every morning and does her best to make it through the day.

Well, today is a little harder than most. A huge storm rolls in and they get word that a flash flood is coming. This means that Evelyn has to run around the forest and tell campers to get the heck out. This is exactly what she does but there’s a complication when a camper claims that his brother went out for a hike this morning and never came back.

Evelyn heads deeper into the woods to find this guy but, due to all the rain, she injures herself, cracking a bone in her leg. She tries to radio for help but coverage is spotty. While she considers her options, the brother hiker appears at a distance and asks for help. Although he’s too far away to see clearly, Evelyn notes that something is wrong with his face. It doesn’t look like everything is in the right place.

The guy eventually disappears and Evelyn sees someone new in his place. Angelica. She’s alive. And she’s asking why Evelyn stopped looking for her. Evelyn knows something is off but the sight of her daughter blinds her and she begins to follow her into the forest. Eventually, she heads into an old mine shaft and that’s where, deep within the shaft, she finds a pit, and in that pit, a terrifying monster known as the Angler.

The Angler nearly lures her into his lair but Colby appears out of nowhere and pulls her back just in time. We soon learn that Colby escaped out here because his father was dying of cancer and he couldn’t handle it. So, naturally, Colby starts seeing his father, who wants him to come back to the lair. Both of these two must figure out a way to not only detach themselves from the Angler’s spell, but destroy the thing so it can never do this to anyone again.

A little love thrown to Nick Tassoni. Having his script reviewed a day after the screenplay of the year is like being a first-time stand-up comic following a Bill Burr set. How can you possibly measure up?

Let’s start by discussing…

Repetition.

It is the scariest word in all of screenwriting.

Well, that’s an exaggeration. But to repeat anything over and over in a script is dangerous because good scripts EVOLVE. They provide us with a series of new locations, new plotlines, new conversations, new characters, new relationships, new dynamics within those relationships, new twists, new turns, new information – all things that keep us on our toes and make us want to turn to the next page.

It was one of many reasons that yesterday’s screenplay excelled. New developments were constantly happening that would change our hero’s situation.

But when you write a script like Lure, one where someone’s stuck in the woods, one where there are very few story variables to work with (the forest, our hero, her daughter’s death, two other rangers), you are at risk of boring the reader to pieces. Cause it’s hard to keep that scenario fresh and different.

At this point, I’d guess I’ve read 300 screenplays about people stuck in a forest. It’s a very common setup. So if you’re going to play in that sandbox, you better be ready to bust out the best toys. Otherwise, why would we bother playing with you?

Lure is built on that old horror conceit of being stuck in a place where your dead family member keeps showing up to test you in some way. I’m never thrilled with this setup. Yes, it does allow you a good way to explore grief and healing within your hero.

But you lose so much due to how forced the setup feels. I don’t think it’s worth it. It’s obvious that the writer is artificially creating a “monster” to achieve the character transformation they want to achieve. It never feels as natural as you want it to.

That doesn’t mean the script still can’t work. But in order to achieve that, you need BOLD CREATIVE CHOICES. If you can surprise me and bring me to cool unexpected places, the script still has a shot.

The closest Lure gets to that is the Angler. I’ve never seen this type of monster in this type of movie before. So that part did feel fresh. The problem is that, by the way it’s described, it seems very close to the Sarlac Pitt in Return of the Jedi.

When you steal things from other movies, this *is* the way you want to do it. You bring the item over from a completely different genre. That kinda tricks the audience into not making the connection. But it gets tricky when you take something from an iconic movie. Cause everyone knows iconic movies. Which means, now, everyone’s at least acknowledging that this monster is based on something they know.

I’m also looking for good fresh scares in these scripts. I don’t know if I got any. But there was one scare I liked. When Evelyn is injured and sitting at the fire early in her journey, she sees this man in a raincoat at the edge of the trees. He’s standing there saying, “Help me.”

The reason it’s scary is that he seems totally fine. If he needs help, why not just walk to the fire? It’s that confusion, that contrast between what he says he needs and his lack of need, that freaked me out.

It’s actually a good lesson for horror writers. The imagery rarely scares us on the page. Every horror image has been done a hundred times over anyway. It’s the things that seem out-of-place, the things that are being done or said that don’t make sense – that’s what scares us. Why is there a clown in the gutter in It? That doesn’t make sense. That’s why Pennywise is so terrifying in that moment.

One last point I want to make here is to introduce a concept called “Assumed Execution.” I tell you guys all the time not to write plot beats that the reader expects. And, to your credit, a lot of you listen. The problem I’ve found, however, is that when you do make these unexpected plot choices, it doesn’t change the story enough that the reader still isn’t ahead of you.

In other words, even if I don’t know EXACTLY what’s going to happen in your story, if I generally know where everything is going, that’s still bad. The second I get a good read on how your script is going to be executed, you’re toast. I’m ahead of you. Maybe I don’t know exactly what’s going to happen but I know enough that I’m bored.

Look at one of the breakthrough horror movies from a couple of years ago, Barbarian. I had no idea where that movie was going.

That’s why, even though this script had a few nice parts, I always knew where the story was headed. I knew the daughter was fake. I knew we were going to get some voice over or flashback showing that Evelyn wasn’t paying attention while her daughter wandered away. I knew we were going to get all these fake people or imagery trying to lure Evelyn to the monster. I knew the framework of what would be happening on page 80 by the time I was on page 10. You have to work harder to stay ahead of the reader. That’s one of the things that separates today’s writer from yesterday’s writer.

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

What I learned: I’m not going to beat this dead horse about “be more unexpected.” I’ve said that way too much on this site. But I will say that when it comes to your big “this is what happened” backstory reveal, for the love of all that is holy, please make THAT DIFFERENT. Cause you’ve been talking about it all movie so our expectations are high. But when we find out what happened to Angelica, IT’S EXACTLY WHAT WE EXPECTED. Please. That ONE PART OF YOUR SCRIPT: BE ORIGINAL! Just like I know that if I see ants on my table at McDonald’s, then it’s obscenely dirty back in the kitchen, I know that if you’re not being original during your FEATURED SCRIPT MOMENTS, you’re not putting effort towards being original everywhere else.