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Genre: Sci-fi
Premise: (from writer) Framed for the murder of a mafia boss, a futuristic courier has four hours to fight his way through hostile gang territories to deliver his message that will prevent an all out turf war.
WHY YOU SHOULD READ: (from writer) Yeah, it’s basically a futuristic version of The Warriors but with cyborgs, mutant tigers and four-armed chainsaw wielding maniacs. So, you know, better. Hoping I’m passing the Hollywood litmus test of “it’s X but different” here. I put a rough draft of this up on the tracking-board forums and it ended up being requested by three management companies as well as a producer reaching out to me. This is the latest draft and I’m hoping lightning will strike twice.
Writer: M.D. Presley
Details: 110 pages
It’s the end of the week, and with next week being Thanksgiving, it’s going to be a turkey shortened fortnight. I’m not even sure if there’s going to be an Amateur Friday next Friday since most of you will be lined up at Best Buy at 4am for Black Friday (next to me of course) buying your X-Box 8s. Which means this is your last opportunity for awhile to give some feedback and help a fellow amateur writer.
Just like I talked about last Thursday, feedback is so critical to a writer’s progress (REAL feedback, not pat-on-the-back bullshit feedback). Just the other day this writer sent me his first ten pages, which he’d been told was bad but he didn’t know why. I read it and the script had way too much going on in the opening. It was impossible to understand where the script was going or what it was about. I told him he needed to simplify it, dial it back, which is what he’s now doing. Afterwards, I thought to myself, what if no one had told him what he’d done wrong? He might’ve written five more scripts exactly like it. You have to know what’s wrong with your writing before you can improve it.
And with that, let’s discuss Cipher!
Cipher is set in a future city run by gangs. These gangs communicate through couriers via an extensive number code. The only way to remember these numbers is a special memory drug called “cipher” which lasts until the drug’s high runs out. Eventually, your memory goes back to normal, and whatever code you’re carrying disappears for good.
One of the best couriers in the business is a dude named Manx. He’s so deep in the courier trade, he’s forgotten who he really is. And it doesn’t help that he’s constantly morphing his face to look like other people, a part of his cover.
So one day Manx delivers a message to one of the biggest gang leaders in town, a dude named Gomi. When Gomi decodes the message, a calm comes over him and he delivers a code for Manx to deliver to his rival that will end the gang war and bring peace to the city. In essence, Manx holds the key to peace on earth.
But before Manx can deliver the message, he’s attacked by Cobb, a dirty cop. Manx gets away, but when he comes back later, Gomi AND Cobb are dead, and it looks like Manx did it. Little does he know, Cobb is still alive and has framed Manx to look like the killer. The evil Cobb wants to keep the war going for his own reasons and poor Manx is a casualty of that plan.
Manx tries to get away but is snatched up by Gomi’s top sergeant, a hot chick named Bledsoe, who plans to kill him. But when she realizes he’s been framed, she becomes his partner instead, and the two go on a journey through the city to get to the other big boss, Aquila, to give him the code that will end the war. But in order to get there, they’ll have to go through every single gang in town, and they must do it all before Manx’s cipher high runs out.
Cipher was hard to decipher. You read through the first twenty pages of this thing, and you know you’re reading a movie. I mean the setting itself is movie-like. The future is very well detailed. The craziness of the body and gene modification alone made for a world we’ve never seen before. The idea of a courier running around through it all, passing secret codes, battling weird gangs – all that’s very movie-like.
But the attention to detail in Cipher is its own worst enemy. I got to page 30 and I was just exhausted. So much information had entered my brain, that even simple sentences became hard to read. Here’s an example: “In a daze, Bledsoe draws out her STASH, a case containing a DOZEN ampoules. A myriad of different abilities denoted by different COLORS, all nearly clear and the HIGHEST QUALITY.” And then here’s a later (unconnected) dialogue exchange:
BLEDSOE
This is the farthest I’ve ever been without my brozen.
MANX
Just keep your head down and don’t make eye-contact.
BLEDSOE
Pfft. Techen ain’t scitte. All into data driving and node blasting.
I’m not saying any of those sentences don’t make sense. But they’re all a mouthful and I had to read everything twice to get it (“What are ampoules again?” “Why are there different colors?” “What’s a brozen? Is that a term of endearment? Like, ‘Hey brozen, how ya doin?’”). And it felt like every sentence was that way after awhile – packed with information I didn’t entirely understand.
And then there were the characters. Lots of them with lots of weird names and lots of different affiliations. And the problem was you were never sure which character being introduced was only going to be around for a page and which would be around the whole screenplay. So after awhile you sort of give up trying to figure out who people are. Then low and behold, page 30 rolls around and you realize that that character 20 pages ago IS an important character and you only have a semblance of who they are. So you go back to their intro, which you always hate to do and almost universally spells doom for the script, and you find out who the person is, rereading the entire page they were introduced on, before going back and trying to find your place again. However, the story is so thick and detailed, you’ve forgotten what’s happening. Forcing you to go back a page and re-read where you are to catch up again. Does that sound like the kind of process a reader wants to go through again and again?
This is what happened with Bledsoe. At first I thought she was an unimportant stripper. But later she’s got Manx in a prison cell so I was like, “Is she a cop??” But it didn’t seem like she was a cop so I had to go back and check. Complicating this even more is that she has a MAN’S NAME. And then, of course, once you’re not really sure who one of the main characters is, it’s a snowball effect. The vagueness of that character extends to whatever situation they’re in, which means you never totally understand a scene, which makes you frustrated, which means eventually you check out of the story.
And I’m not going to say this is why every story should be dumbed-down. But the more complex and the more detailed and the more populated and the more subplots and the more world building and the more vocabulary you have in your story, the more complicated that story becomes to tell. So it usually takes a writer awhile and a number of scripts to realize that while THEY understand their 10,000 characters and super complex world they’ve built because they’ve put 500 hours into it and know it intimately, the reader’s only spent 2 hours with it, which means if you haven’t been patently clear as far as who every character is and how everyone is connected and what’s going on (which takes a lot of writing to figure out), we’re going to get confused!
And the reality is, even if you’re the best in the world at keeping things clear, sometimes you’ve written more information than the writer can keep up with. And it’s your job to know when you’ve done that and PULL BACK.
I mean a quick look at Cipher and I’d make a few choices right off the bat. Don’t give your lead girl a male name. You already have a ton of people in this. Why risk that we’re going to be confused as to the sex of one of your main characters? And when you’re introducing a major character in a character-heavy pace, make sure WE KNOW you’re introducing them. Give them a big intro. Describe them in a way that sets them apart from the minor characters. I’d also drop the face morphing. It feels like you have some thematic and character reasons to include this, but it does more harm than good. It’s confusing. This is “Warriors in the future.” Why complicate it? These are just a few of many ways to make things easier on the reader.
But this isn’t one of those hopeless cases where Presley doesn’t have any talent. I think he’s just overwriting. He’s spending too much time on his world and overcomplicating his story. We’ve said it a million times here on the site, but when in doubt, KISS. Keep it simple stupid.
Script link: Cipher
[ ] what the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: When you overcomplicate the world and rules, readers get tired trying to figure it all out and give up .
