Unfortunately, I’m traveling this week, which is going to make it hard to post. But I didn’t want to leave you high and dry so I thought I’d quickly share my thoughts on Alfonso Cuarón’s high-production foray into TV, Disclaimer.

Cuarón likes to bounce back (Roma) and forth (Gravity) between low and high budget faire. He is the filmmaker’s filmmaker, the kind of guy you would imagine drags a Panovision camera over to the local coffee shop JUST IN CASE he sees a magical shot he could use in his next movie.

So it was shocking that Cuarón finally made the plunge into television. These film purists haaaaate TV. They think it’s evil. They think it latches onto your inner intestines and slowly nibbles away until there’s nothing left of you but a shell. Cuarón making a TV show is only one director removed from Christopher Nolan doing TV. Considering Nolan would rather fry his eyes inside an industrial sized Mumbai frier before doing TV, that’s a big deal.

Disclaimer is about a very successful journalist, Catherine, who, one day, receives a bunch of photos of her younger self in very sexual positions. Over the course of the story, we learn that, 20 years ago, while she was on holiday with her husband and son, she engaged in a secret intense sexual fling with a young man on the trip.

The next day, due to her negligence, her son ended up on an inflatable boat way out in the water (her husband had to return home early so he wasn’t there). Her lover swam out to save the boy but drowned in the process. Catherine was happy because it meant she could completely bury what happened. There’d be no trace of any relationship.

However, the boy’s parents not only found out what happened, the mother wrote a book about it which the father later published (after the wife’s death). The book focuses on just how awful this woman is. With the book and pictures out there, our dirty debutante must try and clear up the mess before her reputation is ruined forever.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen a show that wanted to be seen as genius more than this one. Even if we’re only going off the cinematography, this is true. 99.9% of the shots are at magic hour. That may seem trivial but if you’re only shooting at magic hour, that means you are spending a lot of time during the day NOT SHOOTING. Which is expensive. That alone tells you how great Cuarón wanted this to be.

The problem is the same problem with all these “tweeners.” Which is that we’re dealing with a half-movie half-show. It never becomes one or the other. In refusing to do so, we’re never sure what to make of what we’re watching. It really does feel like an odd beast.

But I think the real problem is the characters. There wasn’t one character that worked. Catherine, the lead, was too passive and weak. Stephen, the father of the kid who was killed, was too weird. The guy wore his dead wife’s too-small pink sweater everywhere, like some deranged, but more accessible, version of Buffalo Bill. Catherine’s husband was so spineless you were begging for his scenes to end the second he showed up on screen. Their son was so melodramatic (drug addict, always mad) he didn’t even need to be in the show since we ALWAYS KNEW EXACTLY WHAT HE WAS GOING TO DO.

The only part of the series that kind of worked were the flashbacks to Young Catherine and her lover. Both those actors were strong. They had great chemistry. There was actual tension when they were onscreen. This is the rare instance when I admit that the flashbacks in a story actually helped it. But that’s at least partly due to the fact that everything in the present was so overwrought, making you beg to be anywhere but there.

I can’t believe I made it through the whole series. (spoilers) To be honest, the only reason I kept going was because I heard there was a whopper of a twist. And, to the show’s credit, the twist is pretty shocking. Even more shocking is that we wonder if the final development was the truth… or a lie. But could it make up for 7 episodes so determined to win awards that I wouldn’t be surprised if Cuarón’s crew submitted the series not just for this year’s Emmy’s, but for every Emmy’s through 2034? It couldn’t.

It’s not a bad show. It’s just not as good as it wants to be.  And, sometimes, that’s worse than being a bad show.

What did you think?

We might be looking at 2024’s Best Picture winner

Genre: Drama/Thriller
Premise: An exotic dancer marries the son of one of Russia’s richest men, creating chaos within the family, which is determined to annul the marriage.
About: Sean Baker’s Palme D’Or winning film, Anora, is already his biggest box office hit, taking in 7.5 million dollars so far. To people who only track the box office of movies with 200 million dollar advertising campaigns, that may not seem like much. But Baker’s movies have no money for advertising and are dependent on their quality alone (unlike the Marvel universe) and therefore, 7.5 million dollars WITH MOMENTUM to make a lot more is amazing.
Writer: Sean Baker
Details: 2 hours and 20 minutes

Sean Baker may be my favorite director at the moment.

With his only competition being the Safdies and the Daniels, Baker is number one in the books at bringing ENERGY to indie movies.

Every other indie movie is slow and lethargic. You watch a Sean Baker movie and you feel like you’ve just watched an Avengers movie. They have the same kind of energy. Dare I say, Baker’s Anora has MORE energy than any of the last five Marvel films.

That may be more of a commentary on Marvel than Baker but regardless this guy is a master at making every moment in his movie watchable. I can’t overstate that. This movie was 2 hours and 20 minutes long and there was never a moment in the film where my concentration strayed.

That NEVER happens to me these days. I’m always straying. Because writers (and directors) don’t know how to keep my interest. The better ones can create great scenes every once in a while and keep me engaged in the meantime. But to make EVERY moment compelling?? I don’t experience that anymore except for Baker and maybe the Safdies.

Oh, and by the way!? Baker may be the best casting director in the world. Let me give you a concrete example. The Pitt-Clooney movie Wolfs on Apple contained a very similar character to the character of Ivan in this movie (he’s known as “Kid” in Wolfs and he’s supposed to be this young wild character). The actor who played Kid in that film was below-average to weak. Even annoying at times. He wasn’t exciting nor was he really watchable in any way, which hurt the film because he had a giant part.

But the actor who played Ivan in Anora? I don’t think I’ve seen a young actor this charismatic in two decades. And Baker found him. And don’t even get me started on the actress who played Anora, Mikey Madison. She’s amazing. The guy seems to have an incredible instinct for this stuff.

I wanted to get the directing praise out of the way first because I want to use the rest of the review to talk about the unique screenplay here.

Note: This script’s narrative moves in an unpredictable way so the very nature of reading this synopsis is a spoiler. I suggest you see the movie first, if possible.

Anora is a 23 year old exotic dancer who works in a Jersey strip club. One day, a 21 year old boisterous Russian kid comes in to get a lap dance, chooses Anora, and afterwards, he gets her number. The next day he pays her to come over to his sick crib and have sex.

At first, Anora is all about the money. But it’s clear she’s starting to like Ivan. Ivan proposes hiring Anora for the week and she accepts. They have sex, party, play video games. Then they go on an impromptu Vegas trip and, while there, mostly because he’s wasted and lives in the moment, Ivan proposes to Anora. She says yes and they get married that night!

They go back to Jersey and that’s when Ivan’s handler, Toros, shows up with two thugs, Garnick and Igor. We learn that Ivan’s Russian parents are extremely rich and that there is no f*cking way they’re letting their son marry an American stripper. But the parents are back in Russia. So Toros must get this marriage annulled immediately or he’s in a heap of trouble.

There’s only one problem: Ivan runs away!

He just leaves the house! He even leaves his wife there! Toros has no choice but to call the parents and tell them what happened. Furious, they immediately get on a plane to Jersey. Anora, who’s blindly convinced that things are still going to work out, is now forced to team up with Toros and the thugs to go find her husband before the damn parents arrive.

(Ending spoilers follow) It’s an all-night excursion as Ivan gets plastered and jumps from nightclub to nightclub, party to party, with our pursuers always a step behind. When they finally catch up to Ivan, Anora is expecting him to make things right. But a sobered-up Ivan shrugs his shoulders in defeat and says, sure, let’s get it annulled.

Betrayed, Anora spirals into a mental tailspin. The only person by her side is Igor, the kind-hearted, but dim-witted, thug who, in his own quiet way, has been there through it all. After the annulment is finalized, Igor is the one tasked with bringing her back to her sad Jersey life. But in those final moments together, as she reflects on everything that’s happened, Anora begins to wonder if she’s missed something—or someone—who’s been right in front of her all along.

There are so SO many good things about this script I don’t know where to start. Baker is a low-key great writer.

Let’s start somewhere random – the villain. Because we haven’t talked about villains in a while and this is a great example of how to write a villain with logic. Most writers start off knowing their villains are bad and then spend the rest of the script figuring out WHY they’re bad. Whereas, with Toros, Baker started with WHY Toros was “bad” and then let the villainy aspects of the character emerge from there.

This is how you create characters with truth. You don’t force aspects onto them. You figure out their motivation and let them act in accordance with that motivation. Toros is the villain to Anora and Ivan here. They like each other. They’re married. He wants to destroy that. But Toros has a very good reason for wanting to destroy that. He’s been hired specifically by Ivan’s parents to watch him and make sure he doesn’t do anything stupid while in America. So if Ivan does anything remotely stupid, it is Toros who is going to be in trouble. And not regular trouble. Angry Russian oligarch trouble, which is the kind of trouble that could end with you six feet under. So OF COURSE Toros is doing this stuff.

There’s this blink-and-you-miss-it moment late in the screenplay when they go to the Jersey courthouse to get the marriage annulled and learn that they can’t get it annulled here. It must be in Vegas. Toros is stumbling back to the car outside saying, to no one in particular, “I didn’t know this! Everyone can see that right? I was not told that they got married in Vegas. This is not my fault!”

You can see the fear in Toros’s eyes in that moment and understand why he is so adamant about achieving his goal.

Which brings me to another aspect of the screenplay that I loved, which is that every character here has a story. There is no character who is overlooked. For example, any other writer writing these two thugs would’ve seen them as afterthoughts. Baker gives Igor this under-the-radar crush storyline on Anora. And Garnick has this hilarious storyline where he deals with the deteriorating effects of a head injury dished out by Anora early on.

But the coolest thing about this screenplay is that it reboots twice. Rebooting is the act of telling one story but then, at some point, abandoning that story and telling another one. It’s a high-risk high-reward tool and should not be used by the faint-hearted. Because it rarely works.

Usually, people come to a movie to see THAT MOVIE. So, when you, all of a sudden, tell them they’re now going to watch another movie, they feel hoodwinked.

Let me try and explain this. You’ve all seen Pretty Woman, right? Pretty Woman is about a businessman who hires a prostitute to be his girlfriend for the week he’s in town. When we went to see that movie, THAT’S THE MOVIE WE SAW. We didn’t see a movie about a businessman who hired a prostitute to be his girlfriend for the week and then, midway through the movie, he flew back to his hometown and dealt with family issues there. However, if he had, that would’ve been a script reboot.

In Anora, the script starts out as a Pretty Woman update. Ivan hires Anora to be his girlfriend for the week. But he takes it a step further and marries her. The bad guys come in and say you need to get an annulment. We’re thinking this is a 2024 version of Romeo and Juliet. That the movie is going to be about them resisting their evil older overlords and that love will conquer all.

But the script reboots when Ivan runs away. That doesn’t fit any of the criteria of the story we have been promised. They must now go find Ivan. And that becomes the entire middle of the movie. It is a reboot because it is a completely different movie. It’s basically a chase movie now. It certainly isn’t a movie about Ivan and Anora falling in love because Ivan’s barely in the story anymore.

That’s a giant risky move as a screenwriter and it worked.

But what shocked me is that Baker had the balls to reboot the script AGAIN. Technically, once they get the annulment, the movie should be over! Think about it. We’ve achieved the goal. What else is there to do?

Well, Baker has been stealthily setting up this low-key romance (mainly one-way romance) between Igor and Anora. So he creates this final storyline where Igor takes Anora back home. It’s a good 25 minute story that is completely different from everything that’s come before it. Which is why it’s a reboot.

Typically, when you end a storyline (in this case, getting the marriage annulled), all the air goes out of the balloon. So if you try and start a new storyline, you’re asking the reader to stick with you while you blow all that air into a new balloon. And most readers just don’t have the patience for that. Yet here, it works because Baker did such a good job setting it up that we want to see how this relationship is going to be resolved.

There’s a lot more to this movie than what I’ve covered but this should give you an idea of why I love this movie so much and why I think it will probably win Best Picture.

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

What I learned: Don’t be afraid to incorporate big-budget screenplay tactics into small-budget indie-type scripts. I loved that Baker created this 15 hour ticking time bomb in the second act. They needed to find Ivan and get the marriage annulled by the time his parents’ plane landed. That urgency helped move that second act along like a bullet train.

And a deeper dive into how a script sold for 2 million dollars

Note: If you want to read the script I refer to today (Love of Your Life) for more context, ask for it in the comments section. Someone will send it to you. Otherwise, you can check out my review of it (which has a plot synopsis) here.

I was thinking about yesterday’s big script sale and trying to derive meaning from it. It may be a fruitless venture since it’s difficult to deduce anything from a single data point. But 2 million dollars for a script in a landscape that barely likes to write six-figure checks is worth looking into.

The first thing I noticed is that this script was not a previously set up deal. Sometimes what happens is a studio will have a meeting with a writer and/or a producer they’re working with and say, “We want this kind of movie. We can’t put the money up front. But we basically promise that if you deliver what we want, we’ll buy it on the back end.”

These types of script sales are deceiving because they don’t reflect what the industry is looking for. They reflect what one specific person at a studio is looking for. Love of Your Life was more of a traditional spec sale in that it was sent out on the town and everybody liked it so they started bidding on it.

The reason that matters is that it means the script sold on merit alone. Which means we know the writing is good. Back in the old days, a script went out on the town and, because lines of communication were still in the stone ages, studios would read the first act and, if they liked it, start bidding in order to beat out the other studios, who they assumed were bidding as well. Hence, a lot of scripts that became garbage in act 2 and 3 were purchased. And I mean A LOT.

These days, studios don’t make that mistake. They will read the entire script. They will pass the script on to other people in the studio and have them read it. They will get their opinions. They will ask for honesty. If they’re going to pay for anything, they want to make sure it’s a quality screenplay. That was the case with Love of Your Life. It won over everyone who read it.

That’s the first big lesson to come out of this sale and it’s a lesson I’ve been preaching since I started this website: If you write something good, good things will happen.

But, of course, that advice reads hollow since every screenwriter who finishes a screenplay believes they’ve written something good. But how do we know if something we’ve written is actually good? The only true way to know is if you get at least ten people to read it and give you their opinion. One person’s opinion can be a fluke. So can two, three, even four people, if they’re not the right audience for your script. Case in point, a few of you have read this script and thought it was weak. Had you been the primary studio reader in charge of evaluating scripts, the studio would’ve passed.

But once you get up to 10 people, it’s hard not to see a trend in the responses. You’ll know if you’ve written something bad, good, or something that’s not quite there yet but has the potential to be good with more rewrites.

Unfortunately, that doesn’t help you when you BEGIN writing your screenplay. So, what are some specific ways in which we can write something good? Funny enough, after this script sold, my answer to that question changed. Well, maybe not changed. But it reminded me that the bells and whistles of a spec script (sexy concept, GSU, bankable genre) aren’t as important as what’s underneath the hood.

Which leads me to the premise of today’s article.

Every genre is a drama in disguise.

Therefore, if you want to write a good script in any genre, you must first understand the basic tenets of dramatic writing. Dare I say, you should even write a drama. Just so you understand how to entertain people without any tricks. With the drama genre, you entertain readers through the simple act of character exploration.

With that in mind, the number one thing you want to do is anchor your screenplay with someone we want to root for. I would even say, 90% of the time, you want to anchor it with someone we like. Because the second we like someone, we’re willing to go with that person wherever they take us.

And you don’t have to reinvent the wheel to achieve this. The main character in Love of Your Life, Maya, is just a nice person. Not to mention, she’s an ER doctor. So her job is to literally save people. It’s hard not to like someone like that.

Imagine if screenwriter Julia Cox, instead of going the ER nurse route, made her main character a selfish drug addict. I want you to sit in that for a moment. Consider how differently you would feel about this character (a character built around negativity). It would be much harder for you to instantly start rooting for her.

Now, ironically, Maya becomes more prickly as the story goes on. But it works because it’s a result of progressive character development. She was a happy in-love person. Something terrible happened to her. So we understand why she’s shifted from the positive end of the spectrum to the negative.

This leads to the next dramatic lesson of this article, which is that you can always do things to STRENGTHEN THE BOND between the reader and the main character. The stronger you make that bond, the more connected we are to that character. Seeing a character lose the love of their life takes a character we already like and makes us care for them EVEN MORE. That’s because we sympathize with them. And for anybody who’s lost a loved one, we empathize with them. These are two incredibly strong tools that, along with likability, make the bond between us and the hero elevate to nuclear levels.

But Cox takes that development to an even HIGHER level. Let me explain. Normally, you don’t have time to show the bond between two characters in a screenplay where one is going to die. Scripts move too fast. This forces the writer to kill off someone we barely know 10-15 pages into the script. In some cases, the script will even start right after a death.

Note how different the effect of death is on the reader if it’s done before the screenplay starts versus watching two people fall in love for 20 pages. That’s what Cox opted to do. So this wasn’t some random person our protagonist loved. This was a character WE OURSELVES GREW TO KNOW AND LIKE. To see Maya lose him hurt us almost as much as it hurt her. Which means that now we are connected to Maya EVEN MORE. We already like her. We sympathize and empathize with her. But by allowing us to get to know the character before they die, we have so much more attachment to Maya and what she’s going through.

Moving on, any good dramatic script takes their protagonist through a range of experiences. This makes the character stereo as opposed to mono. We like contrast in characters. We like depth. But there’s a way to do it and a way not to do it. Cox shows you the right way. First establish who Maya is (good, positive, happy) and then throw something devastating at her. This takes her to a dark place where she lives in the opposite of the above emotions.

The way NOT to do this, which I see all the time, is to smash all these conflicting emotions into the protagonist right away. They’re happy one second. They’re angry for no reason a second later. They’re cool as a cucumber. Then they’re a bull in a china shop. This may create contrast within your character, which technically makes them “complex,” but the chaotic nature of it leaves readers confused rather than intrigued.

From that point on, Love of Your Life is driven by two dramatic factors. And these are the factors that will power any dramatic screenplay. One: resolution from within – Your hero must resolve that which is broken inside of them. Two: relationship resolution – Your hero must resolve all unresolved relationships in the story.

Note how I’m not saying anything about plot. That’s because plotting is not as important in a dramatic screenplay. The “plot” is essentially the main character’s arc. We’re there to see them resolve their brokenness. This is why it’s so important to establish the likability and sympathy early on. Because the less we like the hero and the less with sympathize with the hero, the less we’ll care about them resolving their internal issue. On the flip side, if you create amazing likability and sympathy (and, in this case, empathy), then we’re with you hook, line, and sinker. We’ll be dying to see your hero resolve their issue (in Maya’s case, to get past her grief and move on from the death of her husband).

However, when it comes to the drama genre, a single internal arc for your protagonist isn’t enough to power the entire screenplay. Remember, you often don’t have a strong plot in these dramas. So, you need more.

You get that from UNRESOLVED RELATIONSHIPS between your hero and other characters. The cool thing about this aspect of drama is that you can add as many of these unresolved relationships as you want. For Love of Your Life, the two main unresolved relationships are her best friend, Jason, who she ran away from the second her husband died. And Ruth, the mother of her dead husband, who she also abandoned.

There is also another man Maya falls in love with that acts as a bridge between her husband’s death and those later character resolutions.  Any interaction with another character that contains an unresolved element counts.  So, in this case, the unresolved element is whether the two will remain casual lovers or become official.

The point is, we will keep turning the pages to see how those relationships get resolved.

It’s important to note that relationship exploration is not just about checking boxes. You still have to be creative in the way you explore these resolutions. For example, the conclusion of the Jason relationship could’ve gone in a much more conservative direction. It could’ve just been the two reestablishing their friendship.

But, instead, it veers into the potentially dangerous territory of a romantic relationship. There’s so much baggage here and these two both loved her husband so much, that getting together probably isn’t the best idea. But it’s that creativity in the exploration of the storyline that makes this relationship exciting to read. If it was a nuts and bolts resolution, it wouldn’t have been as compelling.

It’s a funny thing, screenwriting. Cause when you break it down – when you look at all of the individual components that make a script work – it seems obvious. But, of course, it never is. Coming up with this stuff requires taking a lot of risks, getting a lot of feedback, and receiving a lot of rewriting based on that feedback.

But I stand by what I said. If you can make a script work just on drama and character, you are so much better equipped to go into the sexier genres of action, horror, thriller, and sci-fi because those scripts will always take you to moments where you don’t have any fireworks to light to keep the reader invested. In those quieter moments, it is your dramatic writing skills that will get you through. So, it wouldn’t be the worst idea to write your own “Love of Your Life.” If only to sharpen your dramatic writing skills. :)

A 2 million dollar spec sale in 2024!

Genre: Drama
Premise: A young woman meets a man and they fall in love quickly. But then they encounter a devastating setback that will change the direction of both of their lives forever.
About: Last week, there was a big bidding war for this script and Amazon/MGM won it for 2 million dollars. It was like the spec script days of old! The writer, Julia Cox, has one feature screenplay credit, for Nyad, the Jodie Foster film about the real-life swimmer who swam from Cuba to Florida. As of today, Sydney Sweeney is being tabbed to play the main character, Maya, although no official deal has been made. Ryan Gosling is producing and I’d be surprised if he didn’t star in some capacity (there are three main male roles).
Writer: Julia Cox
Details: 120 pages

NOBODY. KNOWS. ANYTHING.

The famous words of William Goldman that assessed the competency of the people who run Hollywood.

After you hear the plot and analysis of today’s script, that phrase will be tattooed to your brain.

Because everything I’ve told you to do in order to sell a script… is the opposite of what this writer does.

How can any screenwriter understand anything going forward?

I don’t know.

But I do think there’s a bridge between the high-octane storytelling I preach and how this unconventional spec script sold. So let’s talk about it!

20-something Boston nurse, Maya, meets 20-something Charlie (who specializes in audio synthesis) while buying an end table from him. The sparks fly immediately so Charlie suggests they meet again and Maya doesn’t even try and play it cool. She’s in.

Over the next 20+ pages, the two fall into that kind of love that everyone around them rolls their eyes at. Cause it’s that annoying! But neither Maya nor Charlie care. They are so smitten that they spend every waking second together, oogling and smoogling each other. A couple of years pass and then they get married.

(Spoilers follow)

The year? 2020. The year of Covid.

Charlie gets sick. And sicker. Being an ER nurse, Maya is concerned. She keeps pushing Charlie to go to the hospital, especially because he has asthma. She finally convinces him to go but a couple of hours later, his health deteriorates and he dies. Maya is devastated. She shuts down. There isn’t a life for her without Charlie in it.

Cut to years later and Maya lives in Portugal. She basically eats, drinks, screws dudes, and sleeps. She is on autopilot. Until she meets a sexy Portuguese man named Felix. For the first time, Maya feels positive emotions again. She really likes Felix. And he likes her enough to push her towards a future together.

But emotions scare Maya and she bails, traveling through Europe, getting lost again. The years pass until she’s in her 40s and she finally feels like she can go back to the U.S. It is there where she must face the people she left when Charlie died. And one person, in particular, helps her see through her pain. A person who, in the most unexpected of ways, could be the love of her life.

Does this sound like a 2 million dollar spec sale to you?

I’m guessing not.

Which is why I’m sure your first question is: WHY THE HECK DID THIS SELL FOR 2 MILLION DOLLARS?

Luckily, I think I can answer that question.

You see, there are two types of scripts that sell. The first is a good movie concept. Something like Leave The World Behind. But there is a lesser-known type of script that sells, and that’s the script that does an amazing job of emotionally connecting with the reader.

Which is the category that Love of Your Life falls under.

Because think about it. If you’re crying at the end of a screenplay, that story has succeeded in connecting with you. Which means it has a good chance of connecting with movie audiences as well. Which is the endgame here. All the studios and streamers care about is people watching their stuff. It doesn’t matter how those people get there – concept, emotion – as long as they get there.

The thing is, scripts that connect with readers on an emotional level are significantly more challenging to execute than concept-driven stuff. It takes way more skill to pull one of these off. Which is why it’s so rare. I can’t remember the last time a script blew me away on character and emotion alone.

So, you have to be someone who’s in tune with writing authentic characters who say authentic things. You have to understand what’s too melodramatic, what’s too cliched. If you don’t know exactly where those lines are, then when you write one of these scripts, they turn out like bad Hallmark movies. I can’t emphasize enough how hard these are to execute.

Because look at how many screenplay rules this breaks. It’s 120 pages (too many!). There are lots of 5, 6, 7 line paragraphs (too long!). There’s no clear goal driving the story. You’re working with an elongated time frame, which is always hard to wrangle.

But the hardest thing to get right  is the characters. You have to write authentic characters and Julia Cox does a really good job of that. Maya feels real from the very first page.

Another thing that scripts like this need is scope. Because they don’t have a concept, they need to feel big in other ways. This script includes the death of the main love interest on page 45, which is a big moment. And then the character travels the world to forget it. Time then passes. All of these things create scope.

If, however, your main character’s love interest had died and the whole movie takes place in a small town, that’s not enough scope to sell a script for 2 million dollars.

Not only that, but the themes are gigantic and universal here. A big reason why I think this script sold is because it’s arguably about the meaning of life. I know that’s not going to get the kiddies pressing play on Roku but for the adults, they won’t just press play, they’ll toggle the subtitles onto the largest font.

It really comes down to the characters, though. I can’t emphasize enough how weak the characters are in the majority of the scripts I read. They’re either thin, boring, uninspired, or plain. They rarely have personality. They always seem to act inauthentically. In other words, they don’t act like people. They act like writers are writing them.

That’s where Julia Cox excels. I didn’t detect a single inauthentic moment in this script. The characters always acted consistently and realistically. There’s a conversation Maya has with Charlie’s mother late in the script that’s a de facto apology for disappearing after his death. That’s such a tricky scene to write because there are so many temptations to go for the “make the reader cry” line. And those are the lines that always bomb, that always feel like a reach. Cox never gets over her skis in the scene. She just allows the characters to speak to each other.  Here’s a small part of that conversation…

(Spoilers)

For the majority of this script, I was going to give it a double worth the read. But the thing that pushed it up to an impressive was the stuff regarding Jason, her best friend. Jason is a huge ally to Maya in her romance with Charlie. So when she reunites with him back in the U.S. and the two decide to push it beyond friendship, I realized that it was actually Jason who was the “love of her life.” Maybe not the love she wanted. But definitely the love she needed. And it got me. Just like I suspect it got everyone else who read the script. Which is why it sold for 2 million dollars.

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

What I learned: Resist writing what you WANT the character to say and instead write what that person WOULD say.  If you can master this one tip, your dialogue will be better than 90% of the screenplays out there.  You can get a lot more dialogue tips like this in my DIALOGUE BOOK!

What I learned 2: Between this and Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow, we might be hitting a “feels” trend in screenwriting. Scripts about family, love, death, universal themes. Something to keep an eye on!

A Hugo Award Winning author adds a high concept twist to the giant monster space.

Genre: Sci-Fi
Premise: A Door Dash driver is recruited to a secret parallel world where humans attempt to preserve giant monsters, carefully preventing them from transporting to earth.
About: Today’s book, The Kaiju Preservation Society, was optioned by Fox Entertainment two years ago, before the book was published. This is what agents do, by the way. Before a book is officially released, they try to build buzz and sell the movie (or TV) rights. It’s sort of like what they do with spec scripts. The difference is, even if the book fails to get a deal, it’s still going to be published so people can read it. John Scalzi has been a popular sci-fi writer for over a decade now. He won the prestigious Hugo Award (best science fiction novel) for his book, Redshirts, in 2013. He also wrote the Old Man’s War trilogy, which is a sci-fi franchise about an intergalactic war that needs soldiers, so they place a bunch of old people into young bodies to go fight the war.
Writer: John Scalzi
Details: about 264 pages

This is the kind of thing you want to write about to cast the widest net of potential suitors for your concept possible.

Hollywood is obsessed with giant monsters. But the challenge is finding new avenues into the giant monster space. Scalzi did that. Technically speaking, Godzilla is a kaiju. But nobody has the IP on the word “kaiju.” So, if you create some world where there are a bunch of new kaiju you invented, you’ve created a potentially lucrative franchise for a Hollywood studio. So it’s a forward-thinking move by Scalzi.

Not to mention, it’s a unique angle. The first thing you think of when you think ‘giant kaiju’ is not a preservation society. That, therefore, creates an intriguing contrast. You want to open the book to see how those worlds collide.

That’s why I wanted to check this book out. Now let’s find out if Scalzi nailed the execution.

Jamie Gray is an exec at a Door Dash like company called Fudmuud (Food Mood). But when Covid hits, his evil CEO billionaire boss, Rob Sanders, demotes him and he’s forced to be a driver. One night, he delivers food to an old friend who says, “Why don’t you come work with me?” Even though the guy doesn’t tell him what Jamie would be doing, Jamie says, ‘sure, why not?’

Several days later, Jamie is transported to another earth-like planet in a parallel dimension. On this planet, a bunch of giant monsters called “kaiju” roam. Along with 150 other people working for the organization, Jamie is tasked with preserving these kaiju. For example, one of his first missions is to fly a plane and spray pheromones over a kaiju (named “Bella,” in honor of Twilight) so that another kaiju (named “Edward”) will mate with it.

But what they’re really trying to prevent is when kaiju spontaneously transport between that earth and our earth, which happens during high nuclear activity. This is complicated by the fact that kaiju are made of nuclear energy. So, if one blows up, it thins the veil between the two earths, and other kaiju can cross over.

One of the only ways to fund the Kaiju Preservation Society is through donations from billionaires. And, occasionally, those billionaires want a return on their investment. Aka, they want to come see the Kaiju with their own eyes. Jamie is tasked with taking the latest billionaire out on an expedition and who should that billionaire be? ROB SANDERS!

Jamie is pissed but their little walk is the least of his worries. That’s because Bella, who has since been impregnated, has disappeared! Nobody from the KPS knows where she is. It doesn’t take a bunch of brain cells to figure out that Rob Sanders has something to do with it. But what has he done with Bella? And what might the consequences be back on the real earth???

No doubt you’ve heard the metaphor that a story is like a house. And if you build a shaky foundation for your house, it doesn’t matter how pretty the house looks inside or outside, it’s only a matter of time before it collapses.

I like this metaphor because it best describes how books like this are failed ventures. This entire story was built on a shaky foundation and it never recovered as a result.

What does “shaky foundation” mean, exactly? Think of your foundation as a series of pillars. If any of those pillars are weak, the house will probably fall down. And, if more than one is weak, the house will definitely fall down.

In this case, you have a Door Dasher who shows up at a guy’s house. The guy knows our protagonist from school and says, “Hey, why don’t you go to a parallel world and help the organization I work for preserve giant monsters.”

Let’s think about that for a second. Before we even get to the monster part, we are telling a random citizen that there are parallel worlds out there. That would be one of the most top secret pieces of information on the planet. And we are just inviting random Door Dashers to not only BE TOLD about that planet, but travel to it!? Oh, and also to work with giant monsters!!??

None of this makes any logical sense. That is how you build a weak pillar, a pillar that is going to crumble when you pack your story on top of it. Because you’re building everything on something that would never happen. If this were real, the government would spend millions upon millions of dollars to recruit very specific people into these jobs. The second your evaluation criteria for saving monsters is, “Can they get Thai food to my house before it gets cold,” your story loses all credibility. As do you! For even thinking that would work!

If you look back at Jurassic Park, they recruit paleontologists. They recruit scientists. They recruit people who make sense in that world. That’s a strong pillar. This is one of the weakest pillars I’ve ever seen an established writer build a story on top of. And I know why he did it, which I’ll share with you in the “what I learned” section.

I suppose if you looked at this book as a comedy, the Door Dash thing wouldn’t bother you so much. So let’s say that’s not an issue for you.

Even if you were able to ignore that, the book is bogged down by glaring structural flaws. The inciting incident doesn’t come until 80% of the way into the story! The inciting incident is Bella disappearing. Nothing of consequence happens before that. It’s all set up of the world and how things work. It was almost like Scalzi was planning to write a 500 page book, got bored, and conked out at page 250.

My biggest pet peeve of all when it comes to writing is when it’s clear the writer didn’t give 100% effort. This space is too competitive to only give 90% of yourself. Or 80% of yourself. If you want something that will resonate with people, you have to give every ounce of what you’re capable of giving to the story. This feels like Scalzi barely gave an ounce.

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

What I learned: You’ve heard countless times (including here) to write what you know. Because when you write what you know, you’ll be able to write specifically, which makes the story feel authentic. That DOES matter. However, this advice doesn’t always work. And this book is a prime example as to why. It is clear that all of this Door Dash nonsense that permeates the plot was born out of Scalzi writing this book during Covid, and ordering a lot of food from Door Dash, like many people did at the time. So he used that as a jumping off point for his main character. But it’s a tonally disastrous choice, as it clashes oddly with the subject matter. Jamie’s job needed to be better integrated into this subject matter. Whether that be a scientist or a geneticist or an animal behaviorist or a government figure. All of those would’ve been better choices than a Door Dash delivery guy. The second Scalzi made that creative choice, he doomed this book.

What I learned 2: John Scalzi made his own way.  His big break came with Old Man’s War. In 2002, instead of pursuing traditional publishing right away, he published the novel on his website, offering it as a free e-book. The novel gained popularity online, and through this, he caught the attention of readers and eventually the industry.