Genre: Horror
Premise: When a deadly virus infects mothers and turns them against their offspring, a father must do whatever it takes to protect his daughter from her mom.
About: This script finished with 12 votes on last year’s Black List. It was picked up by Michael Bay’s Platinum Dunes in the hopes of becoming the next breakout horror hit, a la A Quiet Place. Screenwriter Marc Bloom, who hails from Cape Town, South Africa, was also on last year’s Black List, with Ferocious. He also has a script, Cauldron, set up at 21 Laps. Most importantly, he’s an OG reader of the greatest screenwriting site on the internet, Scriptshadow. 10 out of 10 highly recommend.
Writer: Marc Bloom
Details: 94 pages
Maggie G. for the mom?
One of the hardest balances to strike in spec screenwriting is writing a script that reads like lightning but still contains depth, particularly on the character front.
It’s hard to write one and two sentence paragraphs and still get into the heart of your characters. It can be done. I’ve seen Brian Duffield do it in Vivien Hasn’t Been Herself Lately.
But, usually, nailing one of these means sacrificing the other. And, with Mom? I think the wonderfully speedy read prevented the script from diving into that section of the story ocean that needed it most – the relationship between the members of this family.
Let’s take a look.
40-something John Slater is a doctor at an Urgent Care Clinic in a small town in Ohio. He’s used to seeing people throwing up, being in pain, and being generally uncomfortable. On this particular day, nothing that exciting happens at work.
But then he gets home where his wife Tess, and 12 year old daughter, Izzy, are waiting. The family seems to be normal and loving – no clear problems from what we can tell. When John heads off on an errand, his next door neighbor, an annoying man in his 60s, pleads for John to help him. His mother has disappeared.
John reluctantly goes inside the dark creepy house only to eventually find the mother walking around for the first time in years. The woman then picks up a rake and viciously attacks her son with it until he’s dead, then uses the instrument to bludgeon herself to death.
John hurries back to his own home where he finds Tess acting bizarre towards Izzy. There’s something sinister about the way she’s speaking. John senses that there’s more going on here and grabs Izzy to leave. That’s when Tess comes after them and things get real. Once outside, John and Izzy see that all across the neighborhood, mothers are killing their offspring. It’s time to get the hell out of here.
The two steal a car (Tess sabotaged theirs so they couldn’t leave) and hear some details on the news about what’s going on. It seems to be some sort of virus connected to trace tissues that every child leaves within their mother. These tissues have gone bad, for lack of a better word. And now mommies wanna slaughter their children.
The National Guard comes in to quarantine the town, which basically makes every person with a living mother a sitting duck, including our duo. So John and Izzy bounce around town, watching as various insane things happen (mothers swan-diving off their roofs once they’ve killed their offspring, mothers coming out of the woods in droves to attack the people stuck on the highway). Eventually, Tess catches up to them and she’s not leaving until her daughter’s ticker is no longer ticking.
I kind of liked this script but the thinness of the story definitely got in the way. It seems only natural that a script about mothers trying to kill their children is trying to say something. But no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t figure out what that message was. Which means this is just a movie about mothers trying to kill their kids.
Does a script like this have to say something?
I loved Final Destination: Bloodlines, and that wasn’t trying to sell any message. But that was a horror-comedy. “Mom?” feels more serious. The concept wants you to look deeper. But every time I dipped my head below the water, I just saw black.
The answer is somewhere in this family. All screenplays come down to broken relationships that need to be resolved. Whatever the issue is that broke the relationship is typically the message of the movie.
For example, if you watched that Netflix show, Four Seasons, Kate (Tina Fey) and Jack (Will Forte) have this relationship where they’ve become roommates rather than a couple. He wants to change that but she doesn’t want to put in any effort. That’s what they have to figure out. And it’s part of a broader message in the show about how relationships are hard and if you don’t nurture them, they will fall apart.
That’s very clear when you watch the show.
It’s telling when you write a script where the message ISN’T CLEAR. Because the reader is looking for a message. If they don’t find it, they start getting frustrated.
What a lot of writers do is they freak out when they realize their story doesn’t have a message so they kind of pepper it with several messages, unofficially telling the reader to, “Go ahead and choose whichever one you like best.” But that never works. Multiple messages just confused the overall point of the story.
I know this: If you want to write a more thoughtful powerful story, you need more words. You need more sentences and paragraphs. Which is scary for a screenwriter because they’ve been told from day one to keep it lean and tight.
But, remember, there are tools available that allow you to lengthen your descriptions and scenes and character moments without it FEELING like it’s longer. Which basically comes down to dangling carrots. If you’re dangling juicy carrots in front of the reader, that manipulates time. A continuous series of rewards (carrots) helps us forget about time.
This is why every Final Destination set piece moved so fast. Cause the big fat juicy carrot of death was dangling at the end of each scene.
I think Mom? needed more character development so that we understood what this family was going through and, therefore, what needed to be fixed. I don’t have the answer by the way. I don’t know, off the top of my head, how to construct a satisfying family drama in this scenario. It’s tricky. Cause there isn’t anything very relatable in life to your mother trying to kill you.
You can use metaphor (maybe mom has never understood you – so her killing you is a metaphor for your inability to connect) but even as I wrote that out, it didn’t sound quite right. In Vivien Hasn’t Been Herself Lately, Duffield uses possession as a metaphor for the difficulties of marriage. And he pulls it off perfectly.
Like I said at the outset, I kinda liked this script. And I think, depending on who directs it, it’s going to be full of some very freaky compelling imagery. Which I assume will get butts in seats. But I was looking for more here. I don’t think the script is where it needs to be to deliver on the promise of its premise. Yet!
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Your heroes should never feel safe in a horror movie. The safer they feel, they safer we feel. And if we feel safe for too long, we check out. Here, the moms are violent killers, but only towards their offspring. In other words, if you run into somebody else’s mom, she’ll walk right past you. Therefore, there were a lot of times in this script where I felt safe. Cause only Tess could hurt them and Tess was nowhere to be found. It’s kind of like a zombie movie where only one zombie is coming after you. I needed to be in fear a lot more here.
Short story sells for 2 million bucks!
Genre: Sci-Fi
Premise: A former astronaut must rescue his son from aliens.
About: Skydance beat out all other bidders for this short story, which sold within 24 hours of going out on the town. The writers, Ben Queen & Jason Shuman, took in 2 million bucks for their efforts and get to adapt the short story as well (which means even more money!). Andy Muschietti (“It”) is attached to direct. Before anyone thinks this is an overnight success, a trip through the Scriptshadow e-mail archives shows I communicated with Ben all the way back in 2012. Got to put in the hours, my friends! There are no free lunches in this town. That might not be the right metaphor but you get what I’m saying. :)
Writers: Ben Queen & Jason Shuman
Details: 38 pages
RDJ for Jack for sure!
People keep proclaiming that these short stories are dead but then we keep getting gigantic short story sales. I do agree with the premise, however, that if some of these stories don’t start becoming hit movies soon, Hollywood will stop buying them.
It’s one of the things they don’t seem to be considering when they purchase a short story – that they’re starting from ground zero. Getting a script into any sort of strong shape takes, at minimum, five drafts. And that’s if everything goes perfectly. This may explain why we’re not seeing any of these short story adaptations hit the big screen yet.
Jack was one of the most beloved astronauts in the world. That is until he sent one of his co-workers out on a spacewalk and they died. The decision so affected Jack that he quit his job, noped out of his life, and left his wife and his son, Leo, for 30 years.
Well now Leo is 30 years old and an astronaut himself. One day, Jack’s ex-wife calls him and says the connection to the space station is down and nobody can get in touch with Leo. Due to some random occurrence, Leo was in the ISS all by himself. And now nobody’s there.
Jack charges into Johnson Space Center, demanding to know what’s going on. The powers that be take him into a back room and show him a video. It’s Leo, standing in a very small weird room, demanding that someone “Surrender what is ours.” Jack is furious. He’s ready to go after the Russians. He’s ready to go after the Chinese.
Except it’s not either of them.
It’s aliens, baby.
Jack then learns about “the object,” something they found floating in the ocean, which everyone assumed was some debris from a rocket booster or something. The military tried to cut into it, only for it to start screaming. That’s when they realized this thing was some sort of biomechanical hybrid organism. The issue was now clear. The aliens wanted to make a trade – your hostage for ours.
This will mean getting up into space quickly and finding a rendezvous point to make the trade. An entire crew is put together and Jack is on the team. Up they go. But what Jack will quickly learn is that not everyone on the team is onboard with the plan. Some see this alien as a pot of gold that can save earth. Why would you give it away for one single human? Which means unless Jack can perform a miracle, his son is toast.
I parsed this story through the Scriptshadow Isthisanygood Machine and didn’t receive the feedback I was hoping for.
My guess as to why this sold comes down to the same reason that a lot of these stories sell – people liked the concept. Cause the concept is kind of fresh. We’ve seen hostage swaps before. But we’ve never seen a hostage swap with aliens. Any time you can come into a 500 year old genre with a new idea, that’s worth something.
But as far as the execution of that idea, I was hoping for more.
My main issue with the story boils down to the way the character development was handled. You have Jack, who had this devastating space walk screw-up, which then destroyed his entire life.
But the more you dissect the incident, the less it seems like it should’ve messed our hero up so badly. For starters, accidents happen in space. Sure, you don’t want to be indirectly responsible for your co-worker dying but am I really supposed to believe that it would make you leave your own family? Isn’t it more likely that the opposite would happen? You would lean on your family for help? This idea that Jack just decides not to talk to his son for 30 years due to a work accident doesn’t pass the smell test.
Emotional plotlines need to be constructed on two levels. First, the character stuff needs to be authentic and real. For example, if you’re writing a character who has stopped talking to their son, you want to look back at your own life and find instances where you yourself stopped talking to people you were close to. Ask yourself why that was and see if you can bring some of that authenticity (how it happened, why it happened) to that character storyline in your script.
The other part of nailing an emotional plotline is the logic. It’s got to make logical sense why it’s happening. Too often, there is no logic to the actions of the characters other than it’s what helps the writer write their story. This short story is the result of that mindset. I needed more authenticity and I needed more logic.
Can a story survive a subpar character storyline? Yes, but only if it pulls a 10 out of 10 on its genre execution. People come to sci-fi for the imagination. They come for the endlessly fascinating mythology of the Matrix. They come for the ingenuity of the T-1000. If you’re one of those sci-fi writers who can give the reader cool imaginative things they haven’t read before, they’ll be more than satisfied with your story.
The most inventive part of this story is the alien himself. He’s a big chunk of metal that can “transform” into an alien at any time. So, it’s kind of unique. But it doesn’t contain that ‘wow’ factor I’m looking for when I read sci-fi.
(Spoilers) The more interesting stuff comes later when we learn that our alien lived on a planet with a brutal authoritarian regime. He was a rebel who escaped. He didn’t come to earth by accident. He came to hide. These aliens don’t want him back cause they’re all besties. They want him back so they can kill him.
It’s stuff like that that tells me the writers thought deeper than the average scribe. They’ve put some effort into the world building and backstory here.
But even that didn’t quite click. Because think about it. The point of creating that complication is to make Jack’s decision more difficult. This isn’t a straight hostage exchange. By giving this alien back, he’s signing the alien’s death warrant.
The only problem with this is, Jack’s decision is still easy as pie. He’s not going to save some random alien over getting his son back. There’s no version of the story where that’s not the case. For these ‘complications’ to work, the choice has to be 50/50. We have to feel like we have no idea what the hero is going to choose. And we always know Jack is going to choose his son.
What I’m just now realizing is that you can eat into that issue by letting us connect more with the alien. In this short story, the alien never says anything. He shows one character his past via touching her. And then she explains his history to Jack. But that’s not enough. We need to get to know this alien because, at least then, *we’ll* want Jack to figure out a way to save both of them (alien and his son). As it stands, I didn’t care about the alien because I barely knew him. That’s something that could be addressed in the longer format of a screenplay.
I also felt the hostage exchange could’ve been better. We can’t even see the alien ship because it’s cloaked. The exchange itself isn’t as crisply described as it could’ve been.
In my experience, the ending is always the last thing you figure out. I’d go so far as to say the ending in the first three drafts is the worst thing about a script. This is because writing a script takes an enormous amount of mental energy to pull off. By the time you get to the end, you just want to get it over with.
I’m not saying this is a “get it over with” ending. But it has a little of that feel to it where we’re not experiencing the level of detail and imagination worthy of a great climax.
So you’re probably asking, “Yo Carson. Then why did it sell again?” Look, this is the product of a plan. This is what every agency tries to do. They hype something up, they go to each studio with their own individual creative attachments. And then they send the story out and hope that at least one person of importance loves it. Cause if that one important person (big actor, big director, big executive, big producer) loves it, everyone else will start bidding on it as well, regardless of how much they liked (or disliked) the story.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: One of the advantages of writing a short story, I’m realizing, is that the execution of the story doesn’t need to be as good as a script due to the fact that everyone knows they’re going to have to adapt the story into a screenplay anyway. So they figure any weaknesses in the short story will be resolved during the adaptation. This little quirk definitely helps short stories sell, which is probably why they’re edging out big script sales these days.
An absolutely SUPERB moviegoing experience!
Genre: Horror
Premise: (from IMDB) Plagued by a recurring violent nightmare, a college student returns home to find the one person who can break the cycle and save her family from the horrific fate that inevitably awaits them.
About: The Final Destination franchise is back! Where did it ever go???? This franchise has always been awesome. Maybe we’ll get some answers in the review. The movie MASSIVELY over-performed this weekend, taking in 51 million dollars, bigger than any Final Destination opening by far. And both critics and moviegoers love it, as it has both a 93% RT score and 89% Audience score.
Writers: Guy Busick & Lori Evans Taylor (story by these two and Jon Watts) – characters by Jeffrey Reddick
Details: 110 minutes
Girl, it don’t get better than the latest Final Destination movie.
You know how, sometimes, you’re jonezing for a cheeseburger and you get one from that new smashburger place down the street and it hits your gullet like a magical marshmallow and you’re having that once-a-year foodgasm that allows you to see God?
That’s what Final Destination did this weekend. It was the perfect movie arriving at the perfect time.
DAMN was it good.
It’s funny how this movie even got made when you consider Hollywood all but forgot about the Final Destination franchise. Now that’s it’s pulled in a whopping 50 million bucks, everyone’s thinking, “Why didn’t we do this sooner??”
I’ll tell you exactly why.
Jason Blum.
This is one of those things that annoys the heck out of me about Hollywood. Jason Blum comes around and says, “Never make a horror movie for more than 7 million bucks. Do that and you’ll print money.”
And that formula worked for a while. But that doesn’t mean you can’t ALSO make bigger budget horror movies. Especially when you consider that people get bored of watching the same thing over and over again. I can only watch so many 7 million dollar horror movies before I slam my fists down on the table and demand me some production value.
Which is what is so glorious about Final Destination. You get more horror production value in the first 15 minutes of this movie than you’ve gotten in the last 5 years of horror movies combined.
The opening Skyview Restaurant set piece is BANANAS on top of BANANA SPLITS. “Splits” is a fitting word, actually. The movie starts with a young couple back in the 50s who go to this brand new “Seattle Needle” type restaurant. But then a jerky little kid throws a penny off the top of the tower that gets sucked into the air conditioning unit, creating a chain reaction that takes the entire restaurant down. OR SO WE THINK.
Cut to present day, where college student Stefani starts having these nightmares about that very catastrophe. It bothers her so much that she leaves school to go home, where she reunites with her brother, Charlie, and her dad. Long story short, her grandmother, Iris, was the woman on the date that day. Iris had that Skyview implosion vision in real time and was able to stop the jerky kid from ever throwing the penny.
But that’s baaaaad news for Stefani and her cousins, who are also under the same bloodline of Iris. You see, all those people were supposed to die that day. And because they didn’t, death owes them. The only thing that’s protected Stefani, her bro, and her cousins, is that Iris has become a hermit psychopath, designing a house to keep her safe from death’s attempts to kill her. But once death finally succeeds, it can now come after her bloodline. And only Stefani believes this will happen, meaning everyone else is cluelessly walking into death’s grip.
Can I just thank the screenwriting lords, for a second, for designing a screenplay THAT ACTUALLY HAS SCENES!!!!
For goodness sake! Instead of 50 mini-scenes, we get seven bona fide set piece sequences (aka, long scenes). These scenes are designed around death attempting to kill one of the characters. We have the Skyview scene, a backyard barbecue scene, a fun tattoo parlor scene, an MRI that goes berserk scene, a dump truck scene, and a couple of final scenes for the climax.
A huge reason why this movie is blowing away expectations and everyone loves it is because it SITS IN ITS SCENES. It allows you to marinate in that early anxiety, when we know death is planning its kill. Then things get worse, and worse, and the characters try to save each other. But no matter what they do, death is too strong and wins out.
Every one of these set pieces is designed that way and it’s a perfect design because it keeps you captivated the whole way through the sequence. And then as soon as the sequence is over, another one starts. It’s so refreshing to experience a movie that’s not afraid to sit in its moments.
Let me be clear about that. A big reason nobody does this anymore is because THEY’RE TERRIFIED that the reader is going to get bored. God forbid you don’t machine-gun a new scene at them every 60 seconds.
The irony is, the reader is going to be MORE INVESTED when you slow down. Because it’s exciting to see what’s going to happen next in the scene. Granted, you have to do it well. You can’t just write a bunch of boring nonsense for 8 pages and expect readers to be captivated.
The reason Final Destination kills at this is because each of these set pieces is heavily designed around suspense. Death is trying to kill one of our characters. We turn the page because a) we want to see HOW it will try to kill them, and b) to see if it succeeds.
You can replicate this in your own writing. Just come up with another line of suspense. Some other looming issue that will hurt your character in some way if it succeeds. It could be as simple as a teenager getting ready to go to school knowing that the school’s biggest bully is waiting for him and plans to beat the hell out of him (Dazed and Confused).
One of my favorite things to share with you guys is the ways in which writers show that they’re better than the average writer. I always compare a writer’s creative choices to what the average schmo screenwriter would’ve done. If the professional writer did what the schmo writer would’ve done, that means they’re not a good writer and are extremely lucky to be working in Hollywood. Although they all eventually get figured out. So, like the characters in Final Destination, their luck won’t last forever.
(Spoilers) Here, there’s this moment near the midpoint where Erik, one of the cousins, is up next for death. He’s working late night at his tattoo parlor and has to close up. As he’s closing, a chain from the ceiling flips down and connects to his nose ring. The chain starts getting wrapped up in the slow-moving ceiling fan and Erik is getting pulled closer and closer to the ceiling. Meanwhile, he trips on some alcohol cleaner, which spreads over the floor and catches fire on a flame. Needless to say, Erik is going to die.
The next morning, Stefani realizes that Erik never texted her back so she grabs her brother and they hurry off to the tattoo parlor to make sure he’s okay. On the way, her brother gets a text notifying him of the fire at the tattoo parlor last night. That’s when both of them realize Erik is dead.
SLAM ON THE BREAKS AS THEY ALMOST HIT SOMEONE
Stefani looks in front of her car to see… Erik???!!! Yup, turns out Erik is still alive! He DIDN’T succumb to death last night. All of this is confusing until they get the family together that night and Erik’s mom comes clean. Erik is not her husband’s (Iris’s son) child. His mom slept with some other guy. This means that Erik is not part of the bloodline and, therefore, isn’t on death’s hit list. The stuff at the tattoo parlor the previous night truly was a freak accident, lol.
Why is this good writing? Because I read all the scripts where the writers settle into a predictable pattern. They would never ever write a surprise like this. They would’ve had death’s hit list and gone down it one by one. They think, “This is what the audience wants! So give it to them!”
Yes, the audience wants the kills, of course. But they also want to be surprised. They want unexpected things to happen. Because when unexpected things happen, it’s exciting AND it programs into the reader/viewer that more unexpected things can happen. So the reader/viewer always feels unsteady. Which is exactly where you want them.
There were only two issues I had with this movie. I can’t stand CGI deaths. I wish they would’ve spent a little more money on making some of these look real. And the acting here was barely passable. This may be the first studio movie I’ve ever seen where I didn’t recognize a single actor. I’d never seen ANY of these actors before in my life. And I’ve seen every movie ever made! So they saved A LOT of money on acting here.
But it didn’t matter because the writing was so good and every single freaking set piece worked. It’s rare to write one good set piece in a script. It’s super hard to write two. It’s nearly impossible to write 3. I heard that Mission Impossible, coming this weekend, only has 2. And that movie cost like half a billion dollars. To have 6-7 truly awesome set pieces is so hard. But it’s the reason this movie has taken over the town and will be one of the biggest hits of the year.
[ ] What the hell did I just watch?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the price of admission
[x] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Big-budget horror is back, baby!!! You don’t have to write 5 million dollar horror movies for the next year or two. If you have a higher-budgeted horror, write it. It will still need to be better than its low-budget equivalent because if people are paying more money, they want bigger and better ideas. So you need that big juicy strong concept.
Once again, I am giving out TWO Script Notes Deals. 40% off regular price. E-mail me at carsonreeves1@gmail.com as soon as you see this and we’ll get you set up. The script doesn’t have to be ready yet but you do have to pay now to get the deal.
Something I go on about all the time on the site is this concept of “creative choices.” But I’ve never directly written an article about what that means and why it’s so important. Because it is important. In fact, it may be the most important thing of all.
That’s because, when you write a script, you’re constantly making choices throughout the process. If I had to guess, I’d say there are probably somewhere between 75-100 key choices you’re making per script. If the quality level of those choices is low, the script will suck. If it’s high, the script will rock.
What is a “creative choice” exactly? Every time you have a decision to make in the writing of your screenplay, you are making a creative choice. For example, if you’re introducing a new character, you can make that character overweight and annoying, fit and charming, tall and neurotic, stout and fragile. Whichever direction you choose to go, you’ve just made a key creative choice in your screenplay.
Same thing goes for the process of writing a new scene. If you’re writing a scene where a character gets fired by his boss, you can make that scene intense and fiery or reserved and calm. You can make it a surprise that the character is fired. Or maybe the character gets a heads up before it happens, giving them an opportunity to prepare a rebuttal when the firing happens.
You could change the location. Make it happen in an elevator. Make it happen at drinks after work. Make it happen over the phone, minutes before they’re headed to work.
You have an infinite amount of choice every time you introduce a new element into your story. And those choices are where you show JUST HOW CREATIVE YOU ARE. The bad writers don’t put a ton of effort into these choices. They choose something. But they forget the creative part. They forget that, as writers, the main way you differentiate yourself from every other writer is IN YOUR UNIQUE CREATIVE VISION.
I’ll give you an example from last night. I rented a movie called Cleaner, starring Daisy Ridley. It’s like a cheap Die Hard by way of a window cleaner. One of the big creative choices the writer made was to give Daisy’s character an adult autistic brother. You could tell INSTANTLY that it didn’t work. For starters, we didn’t rent this movie for an autistic brother subplot. We rented it to see a window cleaner 40 stories up dealing with death and chaos.
Everything about the brother was annoying. Everything about their relationship was forced. It was one of those things a writer feels like they’re supposed to write in order to make their script “deeper” and contain more “character development.” It was such an awful creative choice that it destroyed the movie before it got started.
So, what does a good creative choice look like? Well, I just talked about one on Monday, in the movie Novocaine. Spoilers if you haven’t watched the film. In that script, the highest profile creative choice was, later in the script, revealing the love interest to be a bad guy. It was shocking. And we didn’t see it coming due to the fact that their love was so convincing.
The key creative choices that come up in a script are:
- Coming up with the concept of the movie itself.
- Every time you create a new character.
- Every time you write a new scene.
- Every time you introduce a new plot development.
The first is obvious. You have to come up with an interesting idea. When you have an interesting idea at the heart of your story, it’s much easier to make good creative choices because the characters and scenes will stem from an already creative premise.
Take Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. It’s a very interesting premise. What if you could erase the memories of your previous relationships so you didn’t have to feel the pain of that loss? That gives you all sorts of opportunities to be creative with your characters and scenes.
Next, we have characters. Look, not every lead character is going to be László Tóth in The Brutalist. You can’t write that kind of complexity into, say, the next Mission Impossible movie (and yes, there WILL BE more Mission Impossible movies).
But you should be trying to create compelling characters that are either likable or interesting that we want to root for. I don’t care how you get there but that should be the goal. And even within that narrow highway of choice, there are still lots of fresh things you can do with your leads. Look at Ken in Barbie. That’s a next-level creative choice — the creation of that character.
Where the rubber really meets the creative choice road in character creation is with the secondary characters. That’s where you need to go hog wild. That’s where you can show off just how unique and original you are. That’s how you come up with characters like Alan in The Hangover, Mark Ruffalo’s character in Poor Things, or Sam Rockwell’s character in Three Billboards Outside Ebbing Missouri.
I know that a writer isn’t ready for the big show when their secondary characters are all boring.
Next up we have scene-writing. This is the most laborious of the creative choice options. Because you’re going to have 30-50 scenes in a script. My feeling is that you should be rating your creativity in your scene choices on a 1-10 scale. And you should be aiming for at least an 8 out of 10 with every scene.
To give you some perspective, on an average amateur screenplay that I read, 90% of the creative choices in regards to the scenes are at a 4 out of 10. Maybe a few are a 5 out of 10. And then maybe one or two scenes are above that.
What frustrates me so much about this is that it all comes down to effort. Creative choices, when it comes to character, are actually quite complex. Because a character must be woven into many aspects of the story and work within all of them. But a scene is a scene. It’s one unit, typically between 1.5 to 4 pages long. So, with a little effort, you can consistently create strong scenes.
The error I see a lot of writers make is that they go into the scene with a weak creative choice then spend tireless rewrites trying to make that scene as good as possible. But it never gets anywhere because the original creative choice behind the scene was weak to begin with.
By the way, when I say, “creative choice,” that doesn’t mean you have to write something wildly original or crazy, like the now famous scene in White Lotus Season 3 where Saxson and his brother get busy with each other. As long as you’re coming up with a scene that maximizes whatever it is you’re trying to do in the moment, that’s a success.
Using White Lotus again as an example, there’s a scene late in the season where Belinda and her son attempt to make a business deal with Greg. Belinda knows Greg killed his wife. She says, give me 5 million bucks and I’ll leave and never bring this up again. It’s an intense scene because we don’t know what Greg’s going to do. He’s unpredictable and dangerous. But the scene itself is not that original. It’s just maximizing the impact of the moment. There’s even a great creative choice within the scene itself. Originally, Belinda wanted to ask Greg for 1 million dollars. But, in the moment, her son shockingly asks Greg for 5, instead, upping the stakes considerably.
If you want to go old school, one of the best creative choices for a scene ever was when Clarice Starling went to check on a final lead for her case and, unknowingly, knocks on Buffalo Bill’s door (in Silence of the Lambs). We know this is Buffalo Bill. She does not. As a result, it’s one of the most tense scenes ever.
Think about how a poorly conceived creative choice could’ve affected that scene. A bad writer may have had Clarice’s boss call her and say, “Clarice! We just realized Buffalo Bill’s house is two blocks away from you! You’re the closest person we’ve got. Go there now and save the girl!” And Clarice charges into the house like Arnold Schwarzenegger. I read scenes like that all the time. It goes to show that when you really think it through, you can probably come up with a better creative choice for most of the scenes in your script.
Finally, we have plot developments. This is any major development in your script that has larger ramifications for the story. Twists, turns, reveals, new information. If you don’t have 2 to 3 big plot developments stemming from smart creative choices, your script is too tame.
Have you ever read a script and thought, “Eh, that was okay?” That’s typically a script with no creativity in the plot developments.
If you want to go old school, Darth Vader and Moff Tarkin blowing up Princess Leia’s planet before Luke, Han, and Obi-Wan get to it. That forces them onto the Death Star instead of the planet they were heading to, leading to a whole series of fun and memorable scenes. I don’t think Star Wars would’ve found anything as fun as the trash compactor scene had those characters made it to Alderaan.
More recently, I love the plot development in The Killer when our assassin misses his shot in the opening scene. I liked the plot development in Wonka where Willy gets imprisoned in the hotel. And I liked the plot development in Spider-Man: Homecoming when Peter’s Homecoming date ends up being the Vulture’s daughter.
As I wrap this up, the main takeaway I want you to have from today is to constantly ask yourself when you’re writing your scripts, “Am I making the best creative choice I can in this moment?” Don’t settle for weak choices. Cause they add up. Instead, push yourself and come up with as many strong choices as possible. It makes a difference. Trust me.
Good luck!
Genre: Drama
Premise: (from Black List) Haunted by the death of his hoarder mother, an antisocial man suffering from obsessive compulsions takes work as a trauma cleaner in hopes of facing his past, but the job soon begins to infest and unravel his mental state.
About: This script made the Black List and was selected for the Blumhouse and K Period Media Screamwriting Fellowship. Screenwriter Geo Bradley describes it as, “REPULSION by way of CRONENBERG.”
Writer: Geo Bradley
Details: 109 pages
Matt Smith would be perfect for this role.
Rot feels like a script that was written in 2004, right at the end of the indie era. It’s part Sunshine Cleaners, part Lars and the Real Girl, part, well, Cronenberg.
The script conveys a simple easy-to-follow narrative. Along with its low character count and one-to-two-line paragraphs, you can fly through it in under an hour.
But it tackles that age old script trope of, “Is this reality or is the main character going insane?” I think that when writers make this choice, they think there are maybe… 5-10 other scripts like that bouncing around Hollywood.
I got news for you. There are a lot more than that. We’re talking hundreds. Maybe even thousands. It’s easily one of the most common tropes I run up against when reading scripts.
So you’re kind of undercutting the very thing you’re trying to do. You’re trying to write a non-Hollywood script – something with some actual originality to it. But these scripts aren’t original.
Doesn’t mean they can’t be good. But it’s tough. The best version of this screenplay I’ve read in the last five years was Magazine Dreams. Probably because it never crept too far into the “dream” component. It was more about the character. That’s the best avenue to go down with these scripts. Write the most compelling character ever. And surround him with the best story you can! That’s something writers of these stories always forget. They get so focused on the character and the dream sequences that they forget to add the kind of story that makes people want to turn the page.
29 year old Marshall, a construction worker who hates his job, is a huge loner. The guy had a weird childhood where his widowed mother was a hoarder. The kids at school eventually found out about his house and, from then on, it was game over for him. He was a freak.
At 29, not much has changed. Marshall barely talks to his co-workers and pines after one of the workers at the nearby sandwich shop, Liv. One day, Marshall nearly takes someone’s hand off with a staple gun and is fired.
Luckily, the superintendent at his building, Keith, needs someone for his very specialized job – cleanup after someone dies in their home. As it turns out, a lot of these people who die alone aren’t the cleanest, so going to their places reminds Marshall of his mother’s house. And yet, there’s something cathartic about it. Like he’s cleaning up his mom’s house each time.
After learning that Liv has a secret – she has an Onlyfans site – Marshall grows some balls and asks her out. Liv is thrilled and the two immediately enter into a sexual relationship, terminating Mashall’s v-card. Liv is way more sexually experienced and settles into a sort of dominant-submissive relationship with Marshall, which he loves.
Meanwhile, Marshall continues to do more clean-up jobs, until, unexpectedly, a lonely female neighbor of his dies in an accident. Cleaning out her place has an intense effect on Marshall, who starts thinking of the woman as his mom, and that cause him to begin losing his mind. When Liv dumps him, Marshall falls even further. And if something doesn’t change quickly, he will completely self-destruct.
As I said above: Nobody ever adds a storyline to these scripts.
What’s the story engine here?
What’s pushing us to turn the pages?
The only real thing is the “will they or won’t they” storyline with Marshall and Liv.
Sometimes that can be enough. But the characters have to be 10 out of 10 to pull that off all by themselves. Otherwise, you need a story.
And there were stories to be had here.
Why not have one of the early cleanups lead to some suspicion on Marshall’s part that the person didn’t die, but rather was killed. Now you have a mystery. A goal – solve this murder. He could still do other jobs, if that’s what the author liked best about their idea. But you also now have this story engine of the murder.
You could’ve even applied it to the neighbor. Marshall could’ve seen someone sketchy go into her apartment days before she died. The script would have had so much more juice had it gone down that route.
You always know these scripts don’t have a story because the writer never knows what to do with their ending.
Let me lay it out for everyone. When your character has a goal, the ending is mapped out for you. They either achieve the goal (successfully blow up the first atomic bomb) or not (they fail). Without a goal, your ending will always feel like some variation of tentative and uncertain.
Which is exactly what we get here. Marshall is wandering around, confused, unsure where to take his life next. We do get some finality with Marshall’s arc as a character. But would I say it’s as satisfying as it would’ve been had there also been a plot directive? No.
With that said, there is a unique voice at the heart of the script. If you like heavy darkness, this script might be for you. It got too depressing for moi at times: People dying alone on chairs watching The History Channel. Murder-suicides with pregnant women. Lots of detailed sequences involving bodily fluids and insects. The sex stuff is kind of sad. But I know this is perfect for some of you sickos.
My rating here is not for the writing itself, which I thought was good. It was for the execution. For my personal taste, I thought this was the wrong creative direction to go in.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: If you’re going to write dark subject matter, this script is how you do it. The writing here is extremely sparse. Remember that drama is the slowest of the genres. So, if you write a drama with big long thick paragraphs, you are adding slow on top of slow. By adding fast on top of slow, Bradley neutralized the problem. Even though this script wasn’t my cup of tea, I appreciated the writer for making it such an effortless read.
