Last week, a commenter brought up a concern that I hear a lot from screenwriters. He was upset that A Quiet Place did so well at the box office when it so clearly cheated its way through its second half.
For starters, a noise-making machine (a newborn baby) was thrown into the mix with zero consequence. Also, there was no reason to go save the kids at the end. They’d been trained to deal with this situation and knew what to do. Or someone brought up (spoiler) that the dad sacrifices himself by screaming when he could’ve easily hurled his axe at the nearby tool shed, which would’ve made just as much noise, and gotten all three family members out of there safely.
The writer was making the argument that Hollywood allows professional writers way more rope than amateurs. Huge gaps in logic are overlooked if you’ve got an IMDB page. Whereas if you’re an amateur, you get points docked if your slugline isn’t formatted properly. I’m sure all of you have felt this way at one point or another: “Why do they get to get away with it but I don’t?”
Before I answer that, I want to say that this is a terrible attitude to have in general. You’re playing the victim. And when you play the victim, you subconsciously build a narrative where success is unlikely. You’ve convinced yourself that an evil system is keeping you down. And therefore, you will do your best to live up to that scenario. So my first piece of advice would be to NEVER blame anyone for your lack of success other than yourself. If it’s all you, that means you have the power to fix the problem and change your circumstances. If it’s all on the system, there’s nothing you can do so you might as well quit.
Now, I can unequivocally say that nobody in Hollywood is personally targeting you. Nobody says, “Oh, they’re just Amateur Screenwriter X. Therefore, nothing they ever write is good enough.” Hollywood doesn’t care about who you are. All they care about is making money or winning awards. That’s it. If your script can bring them one of those two things, you could be the homeless man who stands outside my supermarket every morning asking me if I want to join him on a trip to Neptune and they will still buy your screenplay.
As for the technical answer to your question, I want you to write down this mathematical formula: Scripts are graded on the INVERSE RELATIONSHIP between the quality of the concept and the quality of the execution. What that means is that the less impressive a concept is, the more impressive the execution needs to be.
So if you’re not getting good reactions, you’re probably failing in one of those two areas. In other words, your “A Quiet Place” equivalent concept didn’t sink because readers are judging your mistakes more harshly than they do professionals. It sunk because your concept was inferior to A Quiet Place, and therefore your execution (plot holes and such) was being graded more harshly.
This leads us into a larger conversation about concept. Concept, while not as big as it used to be, is still king in the spec world. I’m not talking about the adaptation world, where writers are getting paid before they write the script. I’m talking about the spec world, where the idea alone must stand out enough to get the attention of people with money to spend. And this is where things get a little confusing. If a concept is super-awesome – there’s something clearly special about it – that is the one time a producer will abandon their concern about subpar execution and take a chance on the material, as they believe they’ll be able to hire their writers to fix it.
This is why, sometimes, you’ll read a script with a big flashy concept that’s poorly executed and wonder why someone bought it. It’s because a producer loved the idea, knew they could market it, and figured they’d fix the script problems along the way. These are the sales that confuse aspiring screenwriters the most because they can’t understand how a script that’s so poorly executed sold. Well, now you know.
But getting back to what we can control, if your script isn’t clicking with people, either the concept is lame or the execution is bad. And if you want to know which of these two is more important, it’s the concept. That’s because you don’t need to nail the execution to get people in the theater on that critical first weekend.
Now, let’s assume that your concept is decent but not great. This means you have to nail your execution to have a shot. But what does “execution” mean? That’s a pretty broad term. Execution includes everything from plot to theme to dialogue to structure. However, the number 1 thing producers and agents are talking about when they mention “execution” is the characters and the relationships.
Do we feel something for these people? That’s the big one. Because if we do, that acts as a deodorant for plot and logic holes. Keep in mind that while we assess screenwriting daily here, the average audience member has no idea how screenplays work. All they know is how the script makes them feel. And if they feel positively towards the characters, they won’t notice plot holes as much.
Nowhere is this more evident than in A Quiet Place. The writers and Krasinski made us fall in love with that family early on using a combination of intense loss (losing their son) and intense conflict (how that loss has driven a wedge between key members of the family).
We’ve gone through such a range of emotions by the end of that movie that unless you’re a screenwriting geek who visits Scriptshadow, you don’t consider the fact that the dad could’ve thrown the axe at the shed and stayed alive in the process. All you’re thinking is, “How is everyone going to make it out of this okay?” And that’s what your job is as a screenwriter. It isn’t to create the PERFECT illusion. That’s not possible. It’s to create just enough of an illusion that the audience buys into the moment. And nailing the characters is the secret to covering up plot and logic holes.
So don’t whine. Don’t blame others. Don’t be a victim. If you want to sell a script, control what you can control. Get better at concept creation. Get better at character development. And get better at relationship development. If you get those three things right, you don’t have to be perfect with the other stuff. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try. I’m not advocating writing a sloppy script. But if you can get those three things right, that’s what’s most important. Good luck and happy writing!
