A HUGE shout out to yesterday’s mini-contest scene winner. Deanb absolutely NAILED the “show two people fall in love without any dialogue” scene. Head back and sort the comments by “best” to read his killer interpretation of the challenge. Also, Nick Morris finished in second place with a strong emotionally charged scene of his own. You guys exceeded my expectations with this challenge. Congrats!
Genre: Thriller/Anthology (aimed at Netflix/Amazon/HBO, etc)
Logline: When the main suspect commits suicide on the twentieth anniversary of her mother’s disappearance, a woman soon finds out that everything she held true about what happened all those years ago is shattered and she must partner with an unstable Texas Ranger to save her own life and uncover the truth.
Why You Should Read: I grew up in a small Texas town (pop. 2000). After a local woman simply vanished in the ’90’s, I would listen to my dad come in late at night and tell my mother about the case, which he was investigating. The stories were replete with local scoundrels, psychics, and drugs. — Even as I entered adulthood and went on in the world, the case never left my psyche. It’s exacerbated each time I see her daughter, who was a few years younger than me, posting on Facebook each year on the anniversary. — Although the real-life story and my version are vastly different, I still owe the seed being planted, so many years ago, to those late night stories about the case. A case that I feel is hard for me to let go of emotionally, although I have no deep personal connection to any of the parties that were involved.
Writer:Randall Alexander
Details: 63 pages
I’m on a Scriptshadow Reader high right now. Last week’s amateur script was kick ass. The scenes you guys have been writing for the Scriptshadow Lesson series have been awesome. I just feel like the hardcore readers of this site are starting to come into their own. It’s all starting to click.
And it goes to show that this strange code known as screenwriting can be cracked with hard work and perseverance. You target the key areas of the craft (structure, drama, character, dialogue, goals, stakes, urgency, obstacles) and try and master them one by one. Once you have a good feel for all of them and you pick the right concept? You’re going to write something good.
The Remains feels like it’s going to continue the hot streak. The script won a lot of fans over last Saturday, and Randall’s passion for the material ensured that we weren’t going to get some run-of-the-mill AMC clone. Let’s check it out!
Trina Littlejohn is 30 and has a beautiful young daughter and a brother she loves more than anything. But Trina’s been carrying a monkey on her back since she was a child. Her mother disappeared 20 years ago and she’s convinced that her neighbor, Red, killed her.
This has caused a really awkward 20 years in the community as Trina and her brother, Jesse, have dedicated their lives to making Red’s life hell. And when Jesse is released from his latest stint in prison for beating the shit out of Red, he and Trina are shocked to find that Red has hanged himself.
Trina has mixed feelings about this. Yeah, the asshole’s finally dead, but now he’ll never be able to tell them where he buried their mom.
As if that isn’t frustrating enough, there’s a new cop in town, Shane Webb, a Texas Ranger who isn’t buying into this whole suicide scenario. I mean, what suicide victim handcuffs himself before a hanging? Is that even physically possible?
Maybe what Trina’s really afraid of is if Shane is right. What if someone framed Red’s suicide? And if that’s the case, why did they do it? Could it be to stop Trina from looking into her mother’s disappearance. Could it be to stop her from finding out what really happened that day?
The Remains is like a lot of scripts I read. It’s really good in places. And not so good in others. This is the issue that holds back a lot of “almost there” writers.
Inconsistency.
It’s no different at the top of any profession. What’s the difference between Joe Benchwarmer and Lebron James? Joe Benchwarmer can occasionally throw down the dunk to end all dunks. But he can’t do it consistently. Lebron James is able to do it every single night.
A script isn’t going anywhere if you write a great opening scene, followed by two decent scenes, followed by three not-so-good scenes, followed by another good scene, followed by a bad scene… You have to bring it scene-in and scene-out.
The Remains starts off great. Our main character has stashed someone in her trunk and is driving him somewhere to kill him. All the while, she’s giving us a smoothly constructed voice-over of who she is and what’s most important to her. I’d give this scene an “A.”
But then things get clunky when we realize (I think) that the opening scene was a flash-forward. And quickly after bouncing back to the present, we get a flashback scene (to Trina’s childhood). One of the reasons I dislike flashbacks is because they ask the reader to split their brain in two. On one side, they’re told to keep up with the present-day storyline, and on the other, they’re told to keep up with the past storyline.
Things get even more complicated with every new time frame you add. And that’s what happened here. My mind started doing somersaults trying to figure out where we were. And when you’re telling a story, the last thing you want your reader expending energy on is “Where are we again?”
Also, once you get into three-timeline territory, you’re presenting the possibility of four, five, six, seven timelines. Where does the time-jumping end? Your reader doesn’t know. And when they don’t know, they start wondering where they are.
I’ll give you an example. The movie starts with Trina drilling into our heads how important family is. So when Jesse gets out of prison, why isn’t Trina picking him up???? Trina has pretty much been YELLING AT US for the past five pages how important family is, yet she doesn’t pick up her only brother from prison??
For this reason, I assumed we had to be in a fourth timeline where Trina couldn’t pick Jesse up for some reason. That’s the kind of thing that happens when you start fucking around with multiple timeline trickery. Our answer to confusion is, “Oh, we must be in another timeline.”
After that, the script starts to pick back up. Randall lets us in on all the valuable pieces of information he’s been keeping from us (who is this woman everyone keeps talking about? who is this man Trina keeps screaming at?) but by that point, I was so frustrated with how much energy I had to expend just to keep up with basic plot points, I’d checked out.
And it’s too bad, because the pilot does set up an intriguing mystery. And the characters were really well-developed and given the kind of depth required for a long-running TV series. But we have a simple story here that was muddled up due to too many bells and whistles.
Now whether those bells and whistles could work with a “clarity rewrite” or they need to be ditched altogether, I can’t say. I’d need to see the clearer version first. But I do believe the lesson of the day is one I’ve droned on about for years now: You go down Complex Avenue and you’re asking for trouble. Keep it here on Simple Street.
Script link: The Remains
[ ] what the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: There’s a fine line between being clever and being too cute. Time-jumping is fun. Keeping important details from the audience for extended periods of time is fun. But if you go overboard with those sorts of things, you’re no longer serving the story. You’re serving yourself. Stop trying to be too cute and just tell your story.
