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Genre: Comedy
Premise: Patricia Ford feels pretty good about trading her South Boston roots for a “perfect” life on New York’s Upper East Side, until everything falls apart and her raucous girlfriends throw her a Divorce Party at the home she’s about to lose. As the night goes from wild to totally insane, Patricia takes back control of her life.
About: Imagine being a writer nobody’s heard of with no credits and then finishing top five on the Black List! This life-changing experience happened to today’s writer, Rebecca Webb.
Writer: Rebecca Webb
Details: 105 pages
I will bet my retirement savings that Aniston plays Patricia.
I’ve put off reviewing the number 3 script on the Black List long enough. But it’s only fair that I give it a shot. Hey, I still remember when I waited two years to review the number one Black List script, Blonde Ambition, thinking it was going to be yet another boring biopic, and it turned out to be great! Can Divorce Party do the same?
I do think there’s something to building comedy scripts around trendy phrases in pop culture. There was a spec script that sold in 2006 called “Bromance” back when that word was a thing. We got “Cougarville” after the mainstreaming of the word “cougar.” And here, we’ve got “Divorce Party,” which follows one of the newer trends, having a party for your divorce.
An additional trait that helps elevate this concept is irony. You’re not supposed to have a party for a divorce. That’s what makes the whole ‘divorce party’ trend fun, and is why someone decided to turn it into a screenplay. Now let’s see if that screenplay is actually good.
We begin in the aftermath of the biggest party ever. A beautiful Hamptons home has been trashed beyond all recognition! Oh, and there’s a dead dude with an arrow in his head lying face-down in the pool. Whatever happened here was really bad.
Cut to several months earlier.
40-something Patricia Ford finds her long-time husband getting pegged by a 23 year old woman in a hotel room, initiating her worst case life scenario – DIVORCE! If that’s not bad enough, her ex-husband takes everything, leaving Patricia with nothing except for one night a year at their Hampton’s home.
Searching for meaning, Patricia visits her childhood best friend, Amy. Whereas Patricia has become uptight and socially conditioned by her rich New York lifestyle, Amy still dances on Boston bar tops and beats up anybody she doesn’t like. She’s the anti-Patricia. And she thinks the solution to this divorce is a DIVORCE PARTY.
So Patricia invites all of her friends to the Hamptons on the one night of the year that she gets the house, and the group buys a ton of sex toys that they then play games with. As they get more and more drunk, they head to a local bar, where they meet a bunch of men, who they invite back to the house.
After each woman explores the sexual potential that their current relationships aren’t giving them, they find themselves, inexplicably, tied up. That’s because… THIS IS A ROBBERY! I guess these men are professional divorce party targeters who systematically befriend divorce parties that have taken detours to local bars then came home with them so they can rob them. Ummm…. Yeah!
So that happens. And after the men leave, our ladies learn a valuable lesson. Which is that divorce parties are dumb. Or maybe that it’s worth getting all your things stolen if it wisens you up and makes you realize that life is hard and you need to keep overcoming obstacles… or something. Or maybe there’s some other lesson here. Oh, and if you’re wondering who killed the dead guy in the pool, let’s just say you’re going to be disappointed.
Divorce Party wants to be the next Hangover or Bridesmaids.
But it’s missing a very important screenwriting ingredient to achieve this feat.
A clear destination.
In The Hangover, the clear destination is finding Doug, the missing groom. In Bridesmaids, the clear destination is the wedding. We know that’s where we’re headed.
Divorce Party doesn’t have that. The destination is the divorce party, so we’re technically at our destination by page 40. Now, what are we supposed to hang around for? Because I’m sorry, but “shenanigans” isn’t enough. The reader needs a destination.
Webb tries to solve this by creating a murder-mystery element. We start our movie at the end, a la Sunset Boulevard, with a dead guy floating face down, in a Hamptons pool, at a house that’s been decimated by the titular “divorce party.” We then intersperse post-party police interrogations of all the women, as we try to get to the bottom of what happened.
The issue with this approach is that nobody seems all that concerned about the dead man. Everyone’s rather blasé about it, which takes the one element that’s pushing the plot forward – the murder-mystery – and neuters it.
Of course, nobody comes to a comedy film for the plot. They just want to laugh. So does Divorce Party make you laugh?
I think if you’re a 40-50 year old woman, it will.
I don’t think anybody else is going to laugh, to be honest. The jokes and writing are highly specific (“Despite Bonnie’s best efforts, the house is still a cross between a Nancy Meyer wet-dream and a wing of the Whitney”). What the heck is “The Whitney??”
That’s not a dig at the script. I’d actually prefer that a comedy target a specific demographic than go with generic poop and fart jokes that are attempting to make 99% of the planet laugh. Even when you’re laughing at those films, the laughs are always hollow.
To Webb’s credit, there’s an undercurrent of drama here that gives the script more depth than your average comedy. There’s a harsh exploration of how terrifying it is for a woman in her 40s to get divorced. And if there’s an underlining theme, it’s that a lot of women hang on to their marriages not because they love their husbands, but because they’re terrified of being alone.
I feel like any screenplay that can connect the reader to some truth hits harder than the screenplay that doesn’t. And Webb seems to have some keen insight into the world of marriage in your 40s.
She also does a good job with the key friendship in the story between Patricia and Amy. You could feel the pain in Amy when Patricia shows up after 20 years, looking for a shoulder to cry on. Some of the better scenes in the script are when the two try and reconcile their broken friendship, with Patricia admitting that she’s been terrible.
The contrast between the characters – Amy doing whatever she wants and not fearing consequences, and Patricia doing whatever she’s supposed to do in desperate fear of the consequences – makes them fun to watch. You couldn’t ask for two people who were more opposite.
Comedy often comes from contrast. So the more opposites you can have bumping up against each other, the better. And when I say “opposites” I don’t just mean people. I mean anything that’s the opposite. One of Larry David’s best Curb Your Enthusiasm episodes involves a Palestinian chicken restaurant located next to a Jewish deli. Two opposites.
Much like the bulk of the 2021 Black List, though, Webb is clearly a newcomer. One of the easiest ways to tell is all the dual-side dialogue. Nobody I know who’s written more than three screenplays uses dual-side dialogue except maybe for one line when they’re really emphasizing two characters talking over each other. Otherwise, it’s a purely beginner habit.
Which should be motivating to you guys. Cause it shows that you don’t have to be perfect to make the Black List.
Divorce Party is a tough call. It’s probably a better drama than it is a comedy. But it’s marketed as a comedy. So… how do I judge this thing? I suppose I recommend it. I very well may be lowering my standards because we’ve gotten so few good scripts off the Black List lately. But it does have a nifty little twist ending that makes you feel good. And if you make the reader feel good at the end of your script, they’re probably going to recommend it.
Script link: Divorce Party
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[x] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: This is smack dab exactly where you want to be for a comedy script – at 105 pages. You do not want to go ONE PAGE OVER 105 for a comedy.
What I learned 2: An ironic comedic premise is always better than a non-ironic one. Divorce Party is better than Christmas Party. Whereas Christmas parties are expected, you’re not supposed to celebrate something as sad as divorce (where is where the irony comes from!).
Genre: Action
Premise: (from IMDB) When the CIA’s most skilled operative, whose true identity is known to none, accidentally uncovers dark agency secrets, a psychopathic former colleague puts a bounty on his head, setting off a global manhunt by international assassins.
About: This is the Russo Brothers first big film after their Avengers movies, and they’ve brought along their Avengers writers, Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely, to write it. The 200 million dollar film is Netflix’s biggest yet. The Gray Man has been in development for a long time and is sort of a peek behind the Hollywood curtain in regards to how complicated these long-running properties are. The Russos’ version of this movie is so different from the original Gray Man project that none of the writers on the previous drafts even get credit. It’s like they only used the title. Which makes you wonder, why not just come up with an original idea? You can check out my review of the original script here…
Writers: Christopher Markus & Stephen McFeely and Joe Russo (based on the book by Mark Greaney).
Details: 2 hours long
In the early 1980s, Francis Ford Coppola famously decried the day when Hollywood started publishing box office numbers. “Now,” Coppola said, “people are only going to produce movies that will make the most amount of money.”
That comment seems a little silly now. Why else would you make movies? For your health? Look at France, a country that still doesn’t care about box office, and the cinematic sludge that comes out of their system. I’m not talking about the one good French film that makes it over to the U.S. every year. I’m talking about the 50 other movies that are all terrible because there’s no incentive to make something that people actually want to see. Is that what we want the U.S. to become?
Well, the streaming revolution allowed us to get a peek into what that process might look like here. Since Netflix movies don’t have any box office, their directors, technically, don’t need to worry about how many people watch the film. It’s why we got such Netflix classics as Mank and Roma (a teensy bit of sarcasm there if you can’t tell).
But now, ironically, Netflix has gone in the other direction, moving away from artsy “who cares how many people see it” movies to 200 million dollar wanna-be-Bond action films. The only difference is that we have NO IDEA if anybody’s actually watching these movies.
If you were just to go by online chatter, a lot more people saw “Nope” this weekend than “The Gray Man.” Which would imply that, if The Gray Man were in theaters, it wouldn’t have surpassed 45 million dollars (Nope’s first-weekend gross). Which sort of begs an opposing question. Just as it seems strange to make small budget theatrical movies that aren’t going to make money, it’s even stranger to spend an inordinate amount of money on TV movies that don’t bring in any money.
If all of this seems confusing, that’s okay, because I would argue that The Gray Man is a confusing project, an action movie without an identity. I have a theory on why that is, which I’ll share at the end of the review.
Sierra Six (Ryan Gosling) is a convicted murderer who’s pulled from prison by his new handler, Fitzroy, to be in a new CIA assassin program. Years later, after becoming one of the most lethal assassins in the world (a ‘gray man’), Six is assigned to kill a target who, as the target lays dying, says he’s also part of the Sierra program, and that Six will be next.
Six grabs a USB drive from Four (I think that’s his name) causing Six’s boss, Carmichael, to turn on him, believing the drive has evidence of his nefarious doings. So Carmichael hires the one killer good enough to eliminate Six, Lloyd Hansen (Chris Hansen), a wise-cracking mustache-twirling (literally!) bully.
Lloyd, a giant weasel and purveyor of such lines as, “If you want to make an omelette, you gotta kill some people,” goes to Fitzroy and orders him to order his own men to turn on Six, which they do. But of course Six escapes. This enrages Lloyd, who then orders a super-hit on him, which means that every single bounty hunting team in the world is now looking to kill Six.
Six teams up with another agent for the first time ever, Dani (Ana De Armas), and doesn’t like it because Six works alone, darn it! When Six learns that Lloyd is holding Fitzroy and his pacemaker-laden daughter hostage, he decides to turn the tables on Lloyd and go save them. But can Six survive going into the belly of the beast? Or will he be Lloyd Hansen’s toast?
These movies are so hard to do well.
You’re trying to differentiate yourself within one of the most cliched well-worn blueprints of modern cinema – the big action movie.
The degrees to which you must differentiate yourself to stand out seem trivial. For example, John Wick’s differentiation revolved around well-tailored suits and tighter, better choreographed, fight scenes. A betting man would say that’s not enough to get audiences to show up. And yet, John Wick is the sexiest action franchise alive.
Meanwhile, Jack Reacher comes out, angling for a “thinking man’s action movie” and it lands with a thud.
In my experience, big action movies come down to nailing four things, in this order: A protagonist we absolutely love, groundbreaking or unique set pieces, a strong villain, and a plot that’s strong enough to keep us invested the whole way through.
Let’s start with A. As much as I like Ryan Gosling, there’s nothing about this character that stands out. I don’t know if this is the writers’ or actor’s fault, but I suspect it’s the writers. Gosling has proven he can play cool memorable characters, such as the “Driver” in the movie, “Drive.” What was the difference? Well, it might be each character’s opening scene. In Drive, Gosling had this really cool escape scene from Staples Center that set the tone for the character. Here, we meet Gosling sitting in a chair, smiling as a man tells him he’s free. Not exactly a, “Whoa! This character is so cool!” moment.
Next we have the set pieces. The set pieces are all okay but I was expecting groundbreaking stuff when we’re talking about the most expensive movie Netflix has ever made. The movie-killer for me was the ubiquitous plane crash set piece. Not only has this scene been done in the last 20 action movies, but they didn’t even do as good of a job as “Man From Toronto,” an action-COMEDY for goodness sakes.
Next we have our villain, Lloyd Hansen, played by Chris Evans. Chris Evans is definitely having fun in this role, and is hoping for a sprinkling of Henry Cavill magic, donning a mustache just like Cavill did in Mission Impossible. But while Hansen is the most memorable thing about this film, I’d argue he’s having more fun with himself than we are with him.
The showiness of his performance often borders on “try-hard,” which breaks the suspension of disbelief, and makes us see Chris Evans instead of Lloyd Hansen.
Finally we have the plot. I’ve long chastised big action films for overcomplicating their plots when the objective for anyone watching an action movie is to turn your brain off and have fun. It’s why movies like Taken and John Wick are so popular. The plots are mind-numbingly simple.
In movies like James Bond and Mission Impossible, you need a pen and notepad to keep track of the main plot, subplots, motivations, double-crosses, and everything in between. I wouldn’t put The Gray man in that company. It’s essentially one guy chasing another guy. But there were too many times where I didn’t understand exactly what was going on.
For example, there’s this whole baby-sitting storyline where Six babysits Fitzroy’s daughter and it took me a full five minutes before I realized it was a flashback. I get that they wanted to create an emotional connection between Six and the daughter, but a five-minute flashback in an action movie??? Come on.
I have no idea how this movie came together. But I suspect it went something like this. Netflix initiated a meeting with the Russo Brothers. They said, “We will hand you a blank check and a high percentage of franchise ownership if you give us our own James Bond franchise.”
The Russos then scoured the town for the best available action property. They found The Gray Man, which had been in development for 13 years and, therefore, was well-known around town. They didn’t necessarily like it so they totally rewrote it into their own version. And that’s what we got here.
The reason it’s not very good is because they never had an emotional attachment to it in the first place. Again, blank checks are big motivators to make movies. I’m not turning a blank check down and neither are you. But personal emotional attachment is the motivator to make GOOD movies. And that seems to be missing here.
[ ] What the hell did I just watch?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the stream
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: It’s hard to scare or anger or evoke negative emotion in an audience with a jokey villain, which Lloyd Hansen very much is. If we’re not feeling those big negative emotions from a villain, we’re not going to be scared for our hero and we’re not going to want to see that villain go down.
What I learned 2 (dark evil screenwriting tip): When writers want to get credit on a movie, one of the first things they do is change all the names of the main characters from the previous draft. This makes it appear, to later WGA readers who don final credit, that they’ve made the characters up wholesale. We see that done here. Can’t let those former writers get any credit and take our money!
Genre: Horror/Sci-Fi/Comedy/Monkey Massacre
Premise: A couple of horse ranchers attempt to capture a UFO on camera, but must avoid being eaten up by the pesky flying saucer before doing so.
About: Nope is Jordan Peele’s third directing venture and is performing quite a bit lower than Peele’s previous outing, Us, which made 70 million on its opening weekend. As of the latest numbers, Nope has a 45 million dollar opening (off a 70 million dollar budget, Peele’s largest). The film received a B Cinema score, which is the same that Us received.
Writer: Jordan Peele
Details: 131 minutes
I haven’t thought this hard about how I was going to write a review since, probably, Inception.
There is so much to say here in regards to the director, the industry, the movie, the screenplay, the budget, history, influences, and, overall, the way Hollywood props up auteurs in a way they can’t possibly live up to.
It’s so overwhelming, I don’t even know where to start.
Since this is a movie review, I’m going to focus on the movie, which, ultimately, doesn’t live up to expectations. That doesn’t mean I don’t appreciate the huge swing Peele took. If there’s one good thing that can be said about Nope, it’s that we’ve never seen anything like it. And that’s worth something in SamenessWood.
But the film is ultimately sabotaged by its screenplay, which is so shoddily cobbled together, that, at times, if feels like a first time filmmaker stumbled onto set and started shooting the script he and his buddy wrote over the weekend.
Jordan Peele wrote Get Out over the course of ten years. He whipped “Nope” up in half a year. So it shouldn’t be a surprise that the result isn’t as good. I guess I just expected it to be better than this.
Spoilers abound by the way.
After their father dies when a nickel that was accidentally ejected from a plane, flies down and slices through his skull, horse ranchers OJ and Emerald struggle to pick up the pieces of their father’s business, which is built around lending horses to Hollywood productions. In one of the many barely explained components of the film, it appears that they’re running out of money and *might* (it’s important to note that this is never clear) have to sell the ranch.
By the way, the family dynamic of OJ and his sister, Emerald, is never adequately explained. They work together. We know this because when OJ takes a horse to a commercial set, Emerald shows up and helps out. But Emerald does not live on the ranch. She lives somewhere else entirely and, I guess, meets OJ whenever there’s a Hollywood job. It’s all incredibly confusing. Anyway, for reasons that are still unclear, she decides to start staying at the ranch with OJ. So I guess she’s living on the ranch now.
OJ, unconvinced that the nickel that killed his father (I can’t believe I’m typing that sentence) came from a plane, starts putting together this theory that the nickel came from a UFO, which he believes hovers around the ranch every once in awhile. Out of nowhere, his sister becomes infatuated with this idea and figures if they can get the first clear footage of a UFO, they can sell it to the news for hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Meanwhile, a former child sitcom star, Ricky, has put together a fun little theme park nearby where the featured act is a, sort of, goofy rodeo. Peele spends most of the script’s creative energy on Ricky’s backstory, which involves the day the monkey from Ricky’s old sitcom went berserk and started killing everyone. It even ripped off the face of his young co-star. That event ended Ricky’s TV career, which is why he’s here, out in the middle of nowhere, doing this.
Ricky, it turns out, has been buying horses off of OJ to supplement his act (one of many plot points that is so lazily explained, we only barely put it together after the fact) which, it turns out, involves using the horses as bait to lure in that UFO, which then eats them.
Side note: Ricky has apparently done dozens of these shows already to audiences that, presumably, all own a smart phone. The entire point of the movie is for Emerald to get this UFO on video to sell the footage for thousands of dollars. Yet, apparently, all of these audiences that have come here before and watched the UFO snatch up horses – they have never thought to record the UFO themselves. But I digress…
So the big, sort of, twist is that the UFO is not actually a ship, but rather a predator in our skies. A predator who especially likes horses for some reason (I thought aliens were into cows). Emerald and OJ decide to hire one of the best cinematographers in the world to come and get the footage of the UFO that they’re then going to sell. They then set up an elaborate trap to pull UFO Animal Thing down and… well, a lot goes wrong. The End.
Okay, where do we start?
I think we start at the beginning. Cause that’s usually where you can tell if a movie is going to work or not. The monkey killing backstory is definitely memorable. It’s probably the only thing this movie will be remembered for. But it feels so distant, so disconnected from the rest of the film, that we don’t know what to do with it.
I’ve noticed people saying that it’s setting up the fact that, at a very young age, Ricky learned that you can’t control animals. Yet here he is, trying to control animals once again (if you think of the UFO as an animal) for entertainment purposes. So he never learned his lesson. I mean… I guess that sort of makes sense. But it certainly doesn’t come across naturally. I never would’ve made that connection if I hadn’t heard somebody else explain it.
In my many years of analyzing screenwriting, this felt more to me like one of those really sexy ideas that you want to get into a script even though it has nothing to do with the story. So you move mountains to somehow cram it in there and then try to find enough connective tissue to make it make sense.
But to Peele’s credit, it does lead to one of the most tragic and affecting images of the screenplay, which is the actress who got her face ripped off still coming to Ricky’s shows, hanging out at the top of the bleachers, her skinless face occasionally being revealed when the wind whips up her protective veil.
That opening is followed by the dad nickel-killing scene. I mean… it’s just a weird scene all around. It’s not clear what’s happening so we’re more trying to figure out how this dad is bleeding than we are mesmerized by his unique death. (Wait, what just happened? Wait, he got killed by a random nickel falling from the sky?? Does that sort of thing actually happen???).
The plot here is so wonky that it’s easy to overlook the most catastrophic mistake that Peele makes, which is his main characters. OJ is one of the least likable people you’ll ever meet. He mumbles all the time. He’s depressed all the time. He never does anything that makes us like him. Some people have pointed out that he just lost his father. That’s why he’s such a downer. I’m not buying that. He seemed just as sad and depressing before his dad died.
Then you have Emerald, who’s a better character than OJ for sure, because at least she has energy. But she’s still kind of annoying. And she’s the one with this really stupid idea to capture this footage of the UFO. I don’t know about you, but I don’t have a lot of respect for annoying stupid people. These are the two people taking us through this story.
Oh! And there’s this guy Angel, who is a Best Buy installer guy. He helps install the elaborate security system that Emerald needs to track the UFOs (wait, I thought they didn’t have any money) and then just decides to hang around the whole movie. I’m laughing as I type this but nothing in this movie makes sense. Since when do the installer people just keep hanging out at your house?? That’s the lazy logic Peele uses throughout the writing of this script. He wanted a comedic relief character in the mix. He just didn’t want to do the work to come up with an organic way to get him in the script. So he created a brand new first-ever way to make friends: Order stuff from Best Buy and have them install it.
Speaking of sloppiness, the stakes are never clearly established here. I can’t emphasize how important this is. It’s never made clear that they need money. It’s implied. But you never outright hear it. And because of that, the goal – to capture the UFO on camera – seems trivial. A goal without stakes is cereal without milk. We need to understand why the characters *need* to do this. If we’re unsure whether getting the footage saves the farm or not, then why would we care about getting the footage?
Go watch Goonies again. They establish that the entire community is selling their houses to the golf course developer. They’ve got less than 24 hours to stop this from happening. They hear about a treasure buried within the area and go searching for it. We now know, with extreme clarity, that if they find the treasure, they don’t have to sell their houses.
We never get anything approaching that level of clarity here.
In addition to this, the world-building is never clear. At a certain point in the story, OJ realizes that if you don’t look at the UFO, it won’t eat you. Once you tell the audience that, that’s an established rule. However, throughout the movie, the characters are racing away from the aliens, and yet the alien is still trying to kill them. I thought if you don’t look at the alien, it doesn’t kill you. So that… changes… sometimes???
This leads to one of the clumsiest climaxes I’ve ever seen. They try to lure the alien down so they can get footage of him. That’s the goal. Again, we’re not clear why they need the money this footage is going to bring them or why the hundreds of people who saw Ricky’s show haven’t already got the UFO on camera, but whatever. That’s the goal. However, midway through the climax, it appears they now want to kill the thing. So the goal becomes killing it. But then, in the very end, they want footage of it again. So they’re trying to kill it but also get the footage of it???
It’s so confusing.
Finally, Emerald leads the UFO over to Ricky’s adventure park, and the big moment revolves around this odd picture-taking mechanism. I guess there’s a fake Old Western water well that you look down into and it takes a picture of your faces looking into it. And so Emerald realizes that if she can get the UFO to fly directly over that well, she can take a picture of the UFO. So that’s what she’s waiting for and she keeps trying to take pictures but the UFO is never directly over the well.
Meanwhile, she releases this giant float into the air by accident that the UFO tries to eat (I’m not making this up), which ends up exploding the Ufo (I’m not making that up either) and right as that’s happening, she’s able to take the well picture of it. And she’s so freaking happy that she got her photographic proof! She’s going to be so rich now! She’s got the proof! She’s got the proof!!!
Except, um, there’s now the remnants of a GIANT UFO A MILE AWAY THAT EVERYBODY IS GOING TO SEE AND IS GOING TO BE ON THE NEWS FOR THE NEXT YEAR that sort of kind of makes your little picture worthless?
I’m verifiably confused about some of the positive reactions this movie is getting. It’s so sloppy it’s almost embarrassing. The only thing that keeps it from being a total embarrassment is that it’s shot so well, has a couple of fun creative ideas, and has some memorable imagery. But the story and main characters are so poorly conceived that the film is, sadly, really bad.
The defining moment when I realized Peele was high during the majority of his writing process was when, out of nowhere, at minute 115 of the movie, a brand new character enters the story named Tron TMZ Tesla Motorcycle Guy. This random TMZ journalist who dressed like he’s in a sci-fi movie, just shows up out of nowhere and becomes a major part of the climax! What are we even doing here????
It’s sad, man. Because I would rather live in a moviegoing world where we get the occasional big budget original idea like Peele’s. But Peele has to understand that, in order to stay in this prestigious position, you need to take more time on the script and get more people vetting the screenplay to show you where it’s weak. If he had 3 strong script guys look at this script, it would’ve been a thousand times better.
[ ] What the hell did I just watch?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the price of admission
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: You can’t be theoretical when it comes to stakes. Emerald randomly coming up with the idea that a clear video of the UFO would be worth 100,000 dollars… what is that based on? She just makes these stakes up. Stakes can’t be theoretical. They have to be actual. This would’ve been so easy to fix, too. Because there was actually a guy, for a while, offering, I think, half a million dollars for verifiable photographic proof of a UFO. All you needed to do was have Emerald go online, see this guy offering this money, and us see it as well, then establish that if they don’t get that money, they lose the ranch, and boom, you have your stakes. It’s frustrating because Get Out is such a well-written script and yet, here, it seems like Peele doesn’t understand basic storytelling principles.
No, this is not my response to the entries! But there is a projectile vomit scene in one of the featured scripts!
Today we’re going to look at ten entries from the Scriptshadow First Act Contest. For those who don’t know my judging process, I give each entry at least 10 pages. From there, I keep reading until I get bored. If the script manages to keep me reading all the way to page 30, it advances to the next round. From there, I’ll re-evaluate every script that advanced, pick five finalists, then choose a winner.
Today, I’ll be letting you know a) what page I made it to, and b) if the script advanced or not. Also, just so there’s no confusion, I’ll often open a script without reading the logline because I want the writing to speak for itself. Therefore, if I seem confused by something in my analysis that’s easily explained in the logline, you know why. By the way, roughly 1 in 30 scripts are advancing, so there’s little margin for error. Let’s get to it!
Title: Haven
Genre: Supernatural Crime Drama
Logline: Held on an isolated farm, three desperate and debt-ridden scientists have twenty-four hours to recreate a failed experiment. When their captors seek to erase the secrets of the site, its full, terrifying potential is unleashed and their logical world descends into chaos.
Writer: Ben Allan Watkins
Analysis: There were a couple of things right off the bat that hurt this entry. First, we have a second page dedicated to the script’s logline. You don’t want to do that. That’s a pretty overt sign that an amateur writer is writing the script. But the more damning mistake was introducing the main character, Sam, without a character description or even an age. You can’t make that mistake. From there, I couldn’t really understand where I was or what was going on. I was in some sort of farm, as far as I could tell. It was a commune, maybe? People were sleeping everywhere. Nobody seemed to be related, which is where I drew the “commune” assumption from. When it’s hard to figure out even the basic building blocks of a story, that’s a script killer. Those early pages cannot, under any circumstances, be confusing. I would encourage Ben to work harder on his clarity. Put yourself in the reader’s shoes. Ask, if you were them, would you easily be able to tell what was going on? If not, add more information.
Read until: Page 10
Advance?: No
Title: Killer Instinct
Genre: Action Comedy
Logline: A man gets injected with a pheromone-based serum that makes anybody who smells him suddenly want to kill him…
Writer: Mike Hurst
Analysis: This entry felt more professional. But it was a mixed bag and, ultimately, I had a couple of issues with it. The first scene is a senator beating up a woman and then throwing her out a window to her death. That’s a dangerous scene to write in a post #metoo world, even if it’s motivated by the concept. But that wasn’t my main issue. My main issue was that the woman was super sick or something. She could barely stand? So she’s got her own weird thing going on (sickness). Then this senator comes in and has a completely different thing going on (rage). So there’s just no consistency across the scene. I suspect it will later be revealed that the woman’s sickness is what activated his rage. But, in the moment, there are too many rules being thrown at us so the scene doesn’t go down easy. By the way, I would recommend switching genders here. Have the senator be a woman. Have the person in the hotel room be a guy. It’s a way more interesting scene if a woman easily beats this guy up. Not bad writing at all. Had a good laugh later in the classroom scene. But that opening scene was problematic enough that I decided not to advance Killer Instinct.
Read until: Page 10
Advance?: No
Title: Too Old to Rock and Roll, Too Young to Die
Genre: Comedy
Logline: When they are mistakenly plucked from obscurity to headline a summer festival tour, a band of middle-aged Dads have four weeks to live out their rock and roll fantasies and learn that not all dreams are quite what they seem.
Writer: David Glitzer
Analysis: Comedy is a funny thing. Just like it’s hard to make a joke funny by explaining it, it’s hard to explain why a joke didn’t make you laugh. Here we open on a guy who works in a bird store and the recurring joke in the scene is all the birds say dirty sexual sexual things (“Lick my balls.” “Tickle my a$$hole”). I just didn’t understand why all the birds were sexual. I thought maybe they overheard the owner having a lot of sex all the time? And they were parroting the things they heard from his dirty sexual exploits? The problem was that the owner was described as a loser who owns a bird store. So that would imply he doesn’t have a lot of sex. Which brings me back to the birds. Why do they scream out sexual things? Frankly, I just didn’t get the joke. That’s followed by a projectile vomiting scene and I was pretty much out from there. As I’ve said numerous times, I think body fluid jokes are lowest common denominator comedy. I like comedy that’s more clever. That’s just me personally. Doesn’t mean the next reader won’t like it. But, obviously, if I wasn’t connecting with the comedy, I can’t advance the script.
Read until: Page 10
Advance?: No
Title: Swift Wing <—- Carson note: Needs a better title!
Genre: Science Fiction/Dramedy
Logline: On a dying wish, two explorers land on a strange planet in search of the legendary Winged Creatures, but the local inhabitants believe otherwise and try to kill the alien invaders.
Writer: Bruce Richardson
Analysis: A lot of times when you read a script, you’re just reading things that are happening. The writer isn’t in that mindset of “I must write a series of events that are so good, the reader cannot stop reading.” That “non-urgent mindset” is what leads to scripts like this one. Nothing here is bad. But nor is it “I must turn the page” good. We’ve got some beginner errors. When characters are introduced, their names are not capitalized. A park ranger is casually shooting and killing people. I suppose, if this is a comedy, casually killing people can work. But it seemed a little *too* casual. It just felt like life didn’t matter in this story, which is a bad way to start any story because it lowers the stakes. If lives are unimportant, then who really cares what happens to anyone? The two aliens who show up were *mildly* amusing. But I needed them to be *highly* amusing to keep reading. This is a classic example of the writer not understanding what the bar is. Cause I think Bruce is a good writer. But he’s not writing scenes that knock you out. He’s writing scenes that casually nudge you along. No nudging please. Readers don’t respond to nudges.
Read until: Page 10
Advance?: No.
Title: Paramedics on Patrol <—- Carson note: Needs a better title!
Genre: Thriller
Logline: A mysterious woman wakes up inside an ambulance to find she’s being abducted.
Writer: David Fabian
Analysis: This is the best of the batch so far. It’s a really fun idea. You wake up in an ambulance. You don’t know what happened to you. Then all of a sudden you start to suspect these aren’t really paramedics. And you may be getting abducted. That’s a movie premise right there for sure. I think the problem David runs into is that he moves the plot along too quickly. I know that’s a criticism that seems counterintuitive since I’m always saying to move the story along fast. But he’s got such a good setup that he should be milking it. I just feel like if we’re on page 20 and we’re already getting into the abducted woman’s secret life and reasons for why this entity wants to kidnap her – I don’t find that interesting. Her having some secret thing going on is a good plot twist but you don’t want to bring that up until the midpoint. Until then, this should be about her gradually realizing she’s been abducted. And instead of screaming at them, “You’re kidnapping me! Stop!” She should be more discreet about it and start to work the problem, figure out a way to escape. In other words, the story is more interesting when both sides are keeping secrets. Once everything’s out in the open, it’s just a screaming contest. I’m going to do something rare and advance this even though I didn’t get to page 30. Even though I feel like I’d need to guide David a lot to get this where it needed to be, the idea has a ton of potential. I would tell David, start writing a version of this where she suspects she’s being kidnapped but doesn’t tell them. And she starts working the puzzle. Trying to figure out who these guys are. Trying to figure out where they’re headed. Trying to figure out how she’s going to escape. There can be a scene where the bad guys are both up in the front for a minute and she tries to reach her phone and contact someone. We want those types of scenes, at least at first, rather than all this screaming nonsense. Oh, and one more quick thing, David. It’s “were,” not “we’re!!!!!”
Read until: Page 23
Advance?: Yes
Title: Gutshot
Genre: Thriller
Logline: A cop-turned-snitch fights to survive a night in the wild as she bleeds out from a gunshot wound sustained during a failed kidnapping attempt by her former partners.
Writer: Caleb Yeaton
Analysis: This script has the right idea. You start by showing a bad guy staking out a house, about to do something bad. Cut to inside the house to show unsuspecting people, in this case, a couple of women (or maybe one woman, with the other one being on the phone, it wasn’t clear) and now we have this dramatically ironic situation brewing where we know the women are in danger. But here’s the problem. None of this was clear. When the bad guy drives up, we’re told there are other people in his car, so I thought it was a family and, therefore, didn’t tab him as dangerous. Therefore, when we were in the house, we get this endlessly boring conversation between these two women where they’re talking about some random trial we know nothing about. This goes on for five pages (!!!). I was fighting to keep my eyes open. Granted, this dialogue plays a lot better if I know the bad guy is lurking outside. But it’s up to the writer to make that clear. I think so many writers are terrified of being on-the-nose that they’re too subtle with the details of their scenes. But the details are everything, especially in a scene like this, where, if we’re confused about even one variable, we miss the point of the whole scene. Also, the dialogue between the women here needs to be 10,000 times better. It just doesn’t have anything going for it. Needed more purpose.
Read until: Page 10
Advance?: No.
Title: Artificial Obsession
Genre: Sci-Fi
Logline: After a video of her goes viral to the world, a small town cop gets caught in the most dangerous love triangle in history when the first artificial superintelligence capable of taking over the planet becomes romantically obsessed with her.
Writer: Gregory Mandaro
Analysis: I’m not in love with the choice of spending the first two pages of the script focusing on an interview on the TV in a restaurant. I understand that we have to get exposition in somehow, especially if it’s complex exposition. But those first ten pages are such valuable real estate that I don’t think spending them on a television interview that doesn’t contain any of our main characters is the best way to go. From there, we get a random Twitch streamer approaching our heroine, who’s waiting for her date at the aforementioned restaurant. This leads to more exposition regarding our heroine’s deaf sister, who, coincidentally, is also a streamer. You’re trying to cram three different things into this scene (TV interview, girl waiting for her date who hasn’t shown up, random Twitch streamer who stumbles up and decides to have a conversation with our heroine). It makes for a clumsy reading experience. It was hard for the script to recover after that. We then get a chase scene (our heroine is a cop) which was fine, with a decent reveal at the end (there was no one in the car she was chasing – it’s A.I. driven). It was nice that Greg gave us a scene with something exciting happening. But that first scene really did the script in for me. That’s not the kind of clear entertaining streamlined scene you want to open a script with. Let’s focus less on exposition and more on entertainment in the next draft (straight up starting the script with the car chase and the “no one inside” reveal would be a much better first scene).
Read until: Page 10
Advance?: No.
Title: SYSTEM ERROR (alt: A CYBORG MANIFESTO)
Tag: What happens when you’re the glitch in the system?
Genre: Sci-Fi
Logline: When her brain-implanted medical device suddenly develops a personality, a codependent geneticist must save the rest of a tech-addicted humanity from the same glitchy global update.
Writer: Katie Gard
Analysis: It’s good to finally see Katie get in on the action. She always contributes thoughtful and inquisitive comments. I started off liking this one due to the intense specificity regarding the computer talk. A ton of world-building went into this and it pays off. I liked the stuff where she controls “skins” on the people she’s talking to. So she can make her 60 year old therapist look like Tom Cruise in Risky Business. I can see how that would lead to some interesting character situations. If you were with an average looking boyfriend, in order to make him look more attractive during sex, say, you could just add a skin to him. And he doesn’t even have to know. But what if he suspects that’s what you did because the heroine was more into the sex than normal? Now you have some interesting conversations to play around with. So I like that this setup makes you think. My issue is more on the storytelling end. 10 pages go by and what’s really happened? A woman has talked with her fake AI therapist and we’ve gotten some flashbacks to explain why she has a special ability to control the variables by which she sees the world. It’s essentially all exposition. Where is the entertainment? I suppose some of it comes from learning about this cool technology. But that can’t carry the entire load. You need to come up with scenes that ‘show don’t tell’ and have fun with them. Take my boyfriend example above. Start with them having sex, he’s suspicious after it’s over, he asks if she used a skin on him, something they agreed not to do. Guilty, we see from her POV as he goes from Zack Efron to Paul Giamatti, and now you’ve given us exposition in a more dramatic, and therefore, entertaining way. What I read was not bad but we need the storytelling to come up to the same level as the world building.
Read until: Page 14
Advance?: No.
Title: Druid
Genre: Horror
Logline: After returning to his family home on the wild North York Moors, a failed businessman must battle for survival against the human-hunting worshippers of a prehistoric god.
Writer: Finn Morgan
Analysis: “Druid” has the right idea. It starts off with a big snazzy cold open. A guy in an animal mask in the middle of nowhere throws himself in front of a BMW and gets obliterated. What was that all about? We have to keep reading to find out. We then meet a guy who tries to kill himself but fails. He goes home to his ex-girlfriend. Looks like they’ve broken up. This dude has definitely seen better days. Then he moves from the city back to his farm, I think. And immediately he sees someone in an animal mask chase someone else in an animal mask onto his property and kill them. He then has to run from the killer, and a chase ensues. To Finn’s credit, there’s a lot going on here, unlike many of today’s entries. I don’t know why I wasn’t more into it, though. The main character’s suicide attempt gives him some depth which makes us root for him. I guess my hesitancy comes from already having seen the whole “animal mask” thing before. So maybe it feels a little cliche to me. Not new enough? All I know is that around page 15, I wasn’t compelled to continue reading. I didn’t *have* to find out what happened next. And that’s the ultimate question in a script. Always. Have you created something that readers can’t *not* keep reading? I’d put this in the upper 30th percentile of today’s entries. But it wasn’t quite enough to advance.
Read until: Page 15
Advance?: No.
Title: America or Die
Genre: Action-Adventure
Logline: Post World War III, a fierce backcountry woman is enslaved to the Balkan Federation’s cruel Defense Minister and ends up in a do-or-die struggle for freedom.
Writer: Joe Stevens
Analysis: This is another script that does some things right. After setting up the post World War 3 world we live in via a title scroll, we meet this small community of non-technological people. The people are then attacked by a group with motorcycles and cars and drones. The pursuit soon centers on our heroine, Shelby. But here’s a crucial component to writing that you have to nail. Before Shelby gets chased, you gotta give us a reason to love her, to root for her, so that we care when she’s chased. Cause I didn’t care. The only thing I know about this person is that she thinks prayer is a waste of time. That’s not enough insight for me to say, “Oh my god! I’ll be miserable if these guys catch her!” Whether it’s through a save-the-cat scene or a more elaborate protagonist setup that really makes us like this woman, you need that part. Big action scenes carry with them a natural intensity. So they can be a good choice early on in a script. But if we don’t care enough about the characters involved in that big action scene, we’re not going to care what happens to them.
Read until: Page 13
Advance?: No.
And there you have it! One script advances. Congratulations to David Fabian. Download the scripts themselves above. I’ve provided links to all of them. Tell us what you think. Did I make a gigantic mistake and miss an obvious finalist? Let me have it. If you guys liked this exercise, let me know, and I’ll do another one next week. :)
Happy Weekend!
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