Is today’s script killing the Black List?

Genre: Biopic
Premise: The true story of the aftermath of the most infamous audition of all time – William Hung’s “She Bangs” cover on American Idol.
About: This script finished with 9 votes on last year’s Black List.
Writer: Tricia Lee
Details: 125 pages

Somebody made an interesting comment to me the other day.

They had this cool idea for a script and noted that they were trying to figure out what direction to take it in. They said they were thinking about writing it for the Black List, which meant making it a slow burn, character driven, and more “cerebral.”

Or, he noted, he could “write a script that will actually become a movie.”

This characterization of the Black List struck me. That the writer thought of it as a compilation of scripts that will never become movies.

Because it didn’t used to be that way. The Black List used to gleefully tout how many of its scripts would go on to become films. But is that the case anymore? A lot has been written about how the Black List cares more about social causes these days than what it used to be about, which was compiling a list of the best scripts in Hollywood.

So I decided to do a quick unscientific look at a current Black List compared to an older Black List. I went through the 2019 Black List and counted how many of the scripts went on to become movies. I didn’t use 2020 or 2021 because scripts need time to get produced. But 2019 is still within the time period where the Black List had refocused its mission, leaning into more socially conscious screenplays and writers.

Here’s what I found. In the 2019 Black List, 8 out of 66 scripts became movies. That’s equal to about 8%. In the 2010 Black List, 36 out of 76 scripts became movies. That’s equal to 47%.

Now I know a few of those scripts from the 2010 list took longer than 3 years to get made but it’s clear to me that the Black List used to be a place where, if you made the list, you’d have an almost 1 in 2 shot of getting your movie made. Now it looks like that’s closer to 1 in 8.

What this tells me is that the writers have figured the Black List code out. They know that they can write scripts that have no shot at becoming movies but because the Black List loves those types of scripts, they’ll make the list. And since more scripts are being written to make the Black List as opposed to writing scripts that could be movies, the Black List has become more and more dominated by screenplays that aren’t movies.

Today’s script might be the perfect example of this.

The story is simple. William Hung is 21 years old in 2002, attending Berkley as an engineering student, when, on a whim, he auditions for American Idol, which was still early on in its run and Simon Cowell was fast becoming one of the biggest stars in the world for how mean he could be to aspiring singers.

An American Idol producer recognizes that she’s struck gold as soon as she hears the earnestness behind William Hung’s audition despite being a terrible singer and puts him through to audition on tape in front of the official judges.

It doesn’t go well.

Months later, when the show airs, William Hung is walking around Berkley and everyone starts approaching him, congratulating him on his audition. What quickly becomes apparent is that William is being made fun of, and the only one who doesn’t seem to realize this is William himself.

So when he’s offered a singing contract, he’s more than happy to sign it. His goal is to use this fame to make enough money to buy a house for his parents. Along the way, he’ll deal with fake friends, girls who use him, lots of ridicule, and even a woman who marries him and later takes half the money he earned from all his singing in the divorce. But through it all, William Hung always remains positive.

Let me start off by saying this script isn’t bad. It’s actually pretty heartwarming. The writer explores themes of celebrity and the pressures of being an Asian in America. And there’s something very sweet about William Hung as a character. His priority is spreading a positive message within a worldwide tsunami of negativity. It’s not reaching to say that we need more people like William Hung on this planet. Especially today.

But come on.

This movie is never getting made.

And while I don’t claim to know what’s going on inside the writer’s head, I’d be surprised if she said she wrote this script in the hopes of it becoming a movie. It’s a music biopic, the catnip of all Black List catnips. Just by writing that word – biopic – next to the genre category, the script’s chances of making the list went up 5000%.

You’re probably wondering what that means. “A movie?”

What’s the difference between a script that’s a movie and a script that is only ever going to be a script?

The answer is in the word itself: “Movie.”

“Move.”

A movie script tends to have MOVEMENT. Characters need to go places. They need to do things. And they need to do them NOW. Because if they don’t, something terrible is going to happen.

Several years ago I did a script consultation for a writer. The broad strokes of his story were that a guy comes back to his hometown for a weekend and spends some time with a girl he kinda likes.

This writer’s plan was to sell the script. And I kept telling him, in as many ways as possible, that this wasn’t a movie. Two people hanging out isn’t a movie. There was no hook here to build a marketing campaign around. It was just two people chilling. And nothing even happened between them.

I told him, literally, the only way this becomes a movie is if you’re the director and you find the money and make it yourself. Nobody’s going to buy this because it’s not something anybody can make money off of.

There’s no MOVEMENT. There’s no hook. There’s nothing important going on. Nothing with genuine stakes attached.

Maybe today’s script isn’t the best example because, at least with music biopics, you have famous music. And people will show up to a movie to see all their favorite songs performed from that group. But this isn’t even a real artist. Nobody’s pining to hear William Hung sing a Richard Marx song.

Another growing problem I’m noticing in the industry is that we’re in this weird state of having so much content that it’s easier than ever to convince yourself that your obscure script idea can get made. And to a minor extent, that’s true. There are more openings for content than ever.

But the principles for what sells are still in place. You got to have a concept with a hook, something that entices a mass audience. You gotta have that MOVEMENT I’m talking about – characters with goals that have stakes, and urgency. And freaking CONFLICT. That was another problem with the consultation script. There wasn’t enough conflict between the main character and the girl.

Even TV shows are becoming like this. They’re moving away from strictly character-driven stories to mini-movies. So they need that concept, goal, stakes, urgency, conflict as well.

Look.

There’s an opportunity out there for someone who wants to start chronicling the best scripts in Hollywood again. Cause The Black List clearly isn’t doing that anymore. And even though I thought this script was fine and it was a fast read, it shouldn’t be celebrated as one of the top scripts in town.

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

What I learned: A few weeks ago, I pointed out the opening bully scene in Lord of the Rings as an example of a great way to create sympathy for your main character. Readers immediately like a character who’s being bullied. However, the reason the scene worked was that it found an inventive way to approach the bullying. This little girl lovingly creates a little origami boat and then floats it down the river. And some jerk boys start throwing rocks at it to try and sink it. It wasn’t the on-the-nose bully scene that I usually read in scripts. “Idol,” however, does contain the bully scene you DON’T want to write. William Hung is 10 years old. He’s singing badly. And then we get this line: “Suddenly, a FIST comes rushing toward William’s FACE and makes HARD CONTACT with his right eye. The fist belongs to ANGRY WHITE KID (10).” The “angry white kid” then starts yelling at him that he can’t sing. It’s the epitome of a stereotypical bullying scene, which is why it doesn’t work. Bullying scenes are one of the best ways to create sympathy for your hero. But just like everything else in screenwriting, you have to be creative with it. You can’t give us the on-the-nose, “anybody could think of this” bullying scene.

In this review, I’ll not only discuss if Don’t Worry Darling is worth checking out.  I’ll reveal a potentially epic twist ending that the director and writer missed out on.

Genre: Drama/Sci-Fi
Premise: (from IMDB) A 1950s housewife living with her husband in a utopian experimental community begins to worry that his glamorous company could be hiding disturbing secrets.
About: After an endless amount of drama – Spit-Gate, Pugh-hate, Shia LaBeouf no longer being your mate — that became so obsessively covered that when it was reported Florence Pugh could only stay 15 minutes at the film’s Venice premiere because she was filming Dune 2, other news outlets questioned why Dune 2’s other big star, Timothee Chalamet, was able to come to the festival for an entire day — Don’t Worry Darling finally came out this weekend and made 20 million bucks. It was a haul nobody in the media liked because they couldn’t spin it into a good story. Had the film bombed, it would’ve been a perfect final chapter to all the behind-the-scenes drama. If it had been a hit, it would’ve been the ultimate redemption story. But, instead, it ended up right there in the middle at the amount everybody expected it to make.
Writers: The original script was written by brothers Carey and Shane Van Dyke. Olivia Wilde then brought in her Booksmart writer, Katie Silberman, to rewrite it.
Details: 2 hours long

Some would argue that the drama that went on behind the scenes of Don’t Worry Darling amounted to a better story than what ended up in front of the camera. The project is a rare studio release that came from a naked spec script sale, which is why I’ve been disproportionately obsessed with it.

Director Olivia Wilde, who had been unofficially propped up as Hollywood’s “Me Too” spokesperson after her beloved “you go girl” freshman picture, Booksmart, won the hearts and minds of Rotten Tomato critics, was set to level up with this movie, which was set to promote the power of feminism through its not-so-subtle message that men are a bunch of controlling jerk-faces.

I was particularly interested in how Wilde would approach the rewrite. For the record, I felt the original script was simplistic. And after seeing the excellent trailers for Wilde’s movie, it looked like she had solved that problem. The movie looked much deeper and more nuanced than the screenplay, which only increased my interest.

It’s the 1950s. We meet Alice and Jack, a very in-love young couple who live in a new community out in the desert. It’s run by this guy named Frank, who’s sort of like a 50s self-help dude on steroids.

After one of Alice’s friends tries to kill herself, Alice starts to question her own happiness and begins looking deeper into this Frank guy. He’s so smug. He’s so sure of himself. There’s something off about him.

After Alice spots a plane crashing in the desert, she heads off to help, only to find a strange house in the middle of nowhere. It’s here where she starts to suspect she’s not living in reality.

After her friends beg her to stop questioning Frank’s utopia, Alice finally learns the truth. (SPOILERS!) She’s living in a simulation, placed in here by Jack because she was too busy with work in the real world and never had time for him. So now she’s got to get out. But is it too late?

A photo more meticulously staged than The Last Supper.

I was curious how Wilde was going to change the story from the original script.

She stated, in interviews, that she liked the original idea but implied it wasn’t up to par. Which is why she brought in her own writer. I agree with her that the spec wasn’t up to snuff. But now you’re on the clock. If you’re going to change it, you better make it better. Did she?

[Major spoilers follow]

In the original script, there was no question we were in the 1950s. And it was a “clean” 1950s.  It wasn’t some special community.  The reason that was such a pivotal choice was that it made the twist truly shocking. When we find out that it’s actually the 2040s and the 1950s world is a simulation, it was a big “WHOA” moment and the reason that the script became such a big deal.

For reasons I’ll expand on in a second, Wilde and Silberman ditched that. Instead, they created this situation whereby a bunch of people got up, left their lives, and went out to live in an isolated community. In one of a handful of badly written aspects of the script, it’s never clear if the people in the community left their modern (2022) lives to live this 1950s life, or if they left their 1950s life to live an even more isolated 1950s life.

Right there, you’ve committed a major script faux pas. You’ve made something that didn’t need to be complex unnecessarily complex. And I know the rationale for why they did it. They did it because they couldn’t have characters mixing with the rest of society. They couldn’t have them wanting to go on vacations or explore the world or head down to San Diego. So they created this isolated town in the middle of nowhere where nobody could ever leave. It allowed Wilde and Silberman to have total control over their characters.

The problem with this is, we know the twist pretty much after the first 10 minutes. We know this place is artificial because you’ve got a radio station that talks about tech-y things and you’ve got men who walk around in red jumpsuits and you’ve got husbands who go off to a secret Marvel underground base every morning.

You’ve tipped your hand before you’ve even got to the inciting incident.

The way you pull off a big twist is to not tell us any of these things. Which is the one thing that the original spec got right. They made us believe we were living in the year 1954. So that when we wake up in 2050, we’re like, “HOLY S#$%.”  It was a total shock

Wilde almost made up for this weak choice by inventing the character of Frank, played by Chris Pine. Frank is like the world’s biggest self-help guru, to the point where he’s built his own community so he can infuse every aspect of his philosophy into the townspeople.

As the script goes on, this rivalry begins to emerge between Frank and Alice, taking a narrative that was fast decaying and resurrecting it. There’s a really fun scene late in the movie where Alice attempts to take Frank down in front of all her friends – to prove that he’s manipulating and lying to them. When the script focused on those two, it worked.

And about three-quarters of the way through the movie, I realized why Wilde had changed the original screenplay. This new character, Frank, infused the story with an omnipotent malevolence. There’s even a scene where Alice and Jack sneak off to have sex during Frank’s party and Frank catches them. He and Alice lock eyes in a sexy but uncomfortable way as she’s having sex with Jack but Jack never sees this.

And I thought, oh my God, Olivia Wilde came up with a way better final twist! That’s why she changed the original spec!  I was convinced that instead of Alice waking up and finding out that Jack had incapacitated her to keep her in this virtual world, instead, Frank had created AN ENTIRE WORLD in order to control and be with all of these women.

I thought we were going to find out that none of the husbands were real. They were all Frank’s virtual creations, bodies he could slip in and out of whenever he wanted, allowing him to be with all of these woman. It’s basically the original twist, but on crack.

“Frank’s 1950 Simulation Pleasure Matrix.”  Now THAT would’ve been a great twist.

But, instead, they stayed with the original twist, showing that Alice was being kept in a coma by Jack in his apartment so he could control her. Which no longer worked because you basically hinted that something like this was going on all the way back on page 10 and then kept telling us over and over again that it was coming. They found a way to neuter the twist as much as possible.  Wilde may have introduced a new screenwriting term – the “twist neuter.”

But probably the biggest surprise here was that Wilde did a poor job conveying the original feminist message of the screenplay. Which is strange because the original screenplay was written by two men. And the rewrite was written by two women. So you’d think that Wilde and Silberman would’ve gotten that right.

The original script leaned hard into toxic masculinity and men wanting to control women. You don’t get that sense here. Jack was super in love with Alice. He’d clearly do anything for her. Sexually, he was more interested in pleasing her than her pleasing him. If the idea was to convey that Jack was this awful toxic male who wanted a robot for a wife, they did a really poor job of it. The original script made that much clearer.

Also, Alice’s best friend in the film, Bunny (played by Wilde) – it turns out she knew she was in the simulation all along. She actually CHOSE to be in the simulation because, in the real world, her kids died. Here, in the simulation, she could have her kids be alive.

So, wait a minute. Is this simulation designed so that men can imprison their wives and make them their virtual slaves, as was the focus in the original script? Or is this an “anything goes” simulation, where you can come here for whatever reason you want? Cause it sounds like the latter. And, if that’s the case, what the heck is your movie about?

It was sloppiness like that that kept intruding upon a really cool concept. Which made it frustrating.

But you know what?

I still recommend this movie.

And let me tell you why.

The cinematography and, overall, vision of the film, is really strong. Wilde deserves a lot of credit here. There’s a scene early on in the film where Jack and Alice are doing donuts in their car in the desert. It’s filmed from above and it’s not only beautiful, but it CAPTURES THE MOMENT. These were two drunk and in love people just enjoying each other’s company. That camera shot sold that better than any other shot they could’ve used. And there were a dozen moments like that in the film where the visuals truly sold the moment.

Definitely should start worrying, darling.

I also loved Florence Pugh. Even when the script hit choppy waters, she was a ship-steadyer. She’s just a great actress and she’s always 100% committed to her performance. She *was* Alice here. Just like there’s suspension of disbelief in screenwriting, there’s suspension of disbelief in acting. If the acting is weak, we’re pulled out of the movie. Florence Pugh is the opposite of that. She’s so in it we can’t help but be in it with her.

Chris Pine is also superb. I love him as an actor and I love him here. My only complaint was that he wasn’t in the movie enough. I get the feeling that if they had a couple more drafts, he would’ve been more present and we would’ve gotten that awesome final twist.

Even Harry Styles is solid. I’ve heard a lot of people say he’s a terrible actor but I didn’t see that. Who knows? Maybe all that extra attention Wilde gave him in the trailer resulted in him picking up a few acting tips.  I suppose there’s a method to every director’s madness.

And then you gotta give credit to Wilde. She’s the one who cast these actors. She came up with the overall vision of this movie.

It’s just that the script wasn’t there. And, hey, welcome to the hardest part of making a great movie – writing a great script. Wilde is not alone in falling short in that department. She’s another casualty of the elusive puzzle that is nailing the screenplay

But I was right there with Alice all the way until the final frame. And for that reason, I say this film is worth checking out.

[ ] What the hell did I just watch?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[x] worth the price of admission
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius

What I learned: You don’t want to mess with a good twist. Good twists are rare. I come across one or two of them a year in the screenplays I read. Where I genuinely think, “Whoa. I did not see that coming! That was great!” So when you have that, you don’t want to overthink it, which is what Wilde and Silberman did. When you tell us at the outset that we’re in an artificial community, you put the audience on guard that something funny is going on. And it totally killed the power of this twist. Cause you’ve already put us on the “twist lookout” 70 pages earlier.

”Andor” asks, can a Star Wars experience without humor or padawans who hate sand entertain a rabid fanbase desperate for a good Star Wars show?

Genre: Sci-Fi Fantasy (TV show)
Premise: After a thief kills two employees from a large corporation while looking for his missing sister, he becomes hunted by the company on the backwater planet where he lives.
About: It’s finally here! Andor, the series. I’ve talked about it endlessly on the site. Tony Gilroy, who reportedly saved Rogue One from original director, Gareth Edwards, was gifted this show as his reward by Lucasfilm head, Kathleen Kennedy. Despite Gilroy insulting poor Star Wars every chance he gets and making the world’s most confusing statement about how the timeline in “Andor” is going to work, the show finally debuted today.
Writer: Tony Gilroy
Details: This review is for the first 3 episodes, which are each about 30 minutes.

Let us start by stating the obvious.

Before this series was announced, nobody was asking for a Cassian Andor show.

Which makes you wonder why they wanted to make it so badly. Lucasfilm has become infamous for terminating in-development Star Wars projects. So why were they so determined to get this one to the finish line?

Who knows? Most of you will probably say, “Who cares? As long as the show is good.”

To this, we can agree. I may not have asked for Andor but you can bet Chukhuh-Trok’s hunting spear that I’d love to be proven wrong. Probably more than anyone on this planet, I want to love a Star Wars show. And, from what we’ve been told, this show was made more for my demographic than any Star Wars project yet.

Are we ready for this?

Okay, let’s dig into Andor!

We meet Cassian Andor on some planet run by what Amazon might look like in a thousand years. Andor heads to a brothel where he appears to be looking for his sister, who may have worked here at one point. He doesn’t get any information on her so he leaves, and is immediately confronted by a couple of drunk-with-power Amazon employees. He quickly kills them both.  Take that, Bezos!

Andor then heads back to his current planet of residence where he’s putting together some plan that is so secretive even the audience is not allowed to know it. In between scenes of him sneaking around and never allowing his voice to rise above 3 decibels, we cut back to when he was a kid on some planet living with a bunch of other kids and they discover a crashed ship.

Back at Amazon, a middle management type wants to sweep these employee murders under the rug. But a young ambitious dude in the company wants to kill the murderer in the hopes of propelling himself up the company ladder. So he recruits a dozen soldiers and heads off to Cassian’s planet to find him.

Cassian’s super-secret plan finally reveals itself when he meets with a mysterious rich guy named Luthen Rael. Cassian thinks he’s selling Luthen a star-thingamacalit, after which he’ll use the money to escape to some place far away. But it turns out Luthen has other plans for Cassian. Seeing how crafty this guy is, he wants to recruit him into his shadowy organization. Cassian has to make a decision fast – yes or no? He decides ‘yes,’ and that is the end of our third episode.

I was worried about two things going into this show.

1) That Cassian Andor isn’t a very interesting character.

And…

2) That this show would be way too serious.

I am sad to report that “Andor” confirmed both of these fears.  Much like Tion Medon’s infamous botched dental visit, it’s a big fat whiff on each front.

Cassian is boring. He’s active, which is good. But if we never understand what our character is being active for, it doesn’t really matter. Being ultra-mysterious about who your main character is is one of the riskier moves in screenwriting. Because you’re basically saying, “You must like my character even though you know nothing about him or what he’s doing.”

There are examples of this working but they’re few and far between.

On top of this, the show is more serious than Emperor Palpatine when he’s drawing up his latest galaxy takeover. I think there were two attempted jokes in 100 minutes. And they were highly neutered. This is something I tried to warn the Star Wars fan base about. If you go super dark with Star Wars, it’s no longer Star Wars. An essential component of Star Wars’s makeup is fun. And this show is about as fun as when Malakili watched Luke kill his pet Rancor.

The closest to fun we get is the droid, B2EMO, and while I’d anoint him as my favorite character in the series so far, he’s got five minutes of screen time.

So is there anything good about this show, Carson?

I’ll say this. The dialogue is way better than any of the other Star Wars shows. There’s a level of sophistication you’re not used to seeing in this franchise. For example, there’s a scene where Andor comes to a work friend and asks him to provide an alibi for why he wasn’t at work earlier.

The dialogue is not framed in a clunky on-the-nose manner where Andor says something like, “I need you to help me with an alibi. I flew off to another planet which is why I missed work and now I need you to tell Boss Doug that I was hanging out with you.”

Instead, the dialogue is framed as if it really happened. So Andor immediately jumps in with, “I was at your house yesterday. We drank all night. You got mad at me because I bought cheap liquor.” “I would’ve yelled at you for bringing cheap liquor. We were drinking [different booze] instead.” In other words, they set up the alibi by speaking as if it really happened rather than asking for help and then coming up with a story together.

With dialogue, you’re always looking for ways to make the exchange different somehow. You want to avoid straightforward, Character A: “This is what I have to say,” Character B: “And this is how I respond to that” dialogue if possible. You could tell Gilroy is a step above all these newbie screenwriters that Star Wars has been hiring to write their shows. At least in the dialogue department.

Ironically, that same knowledge hurts Gilroy in the storytelling department. What usually happens when you get older as a writer is you show more restraint. You don’t feel the need to constantly titilate the audience every scene. You trust yourself and therefore take your time setting up the bigger plot developments.

But what sometimes ends up happening is you cross the Rubicon and show so much restraint that huge chunks of scenes go by without any payoff. We’re watching you setup and setup and setup and setup and it’s like, “Dude! Give us something for all the hard work we’re doing!”

I get the impression that Gilroy is playing to the highest common denominator here – the 60 year old intelligent veteran moviegoer who’s seen it all and is, therefore, willing to make the trek down Patience Lane.  It’s a risky game to play in a franchise built off a never-ending supply of entertaining moments.

I would not have watched Episode 2 if they had only posted the first episode on Disney Plus today. I wouldn’t have even watched Episode 3 if they’d posted the first two episode on Disney Plus today. That’s how slow the story develops.

To Gilroy’s credit, all the things he was setting up in episodes 1 and 2 start to pay off in episode 3. This is the episode where the Amazon Corporation sends their soldiers to Andor’s planet to find and kill him. Gilroy did a really good job building up to this confrontation. What I enjoyed most about it was he made the whole thing just as scary for the Amazon soldiers as he did the locals. These soldiers are inexperienced. They’re 12 in a city filled with thousands of people. At any moment, if the people decide to revolt, they’re screwed.

That combined with the mystery of where Andor was going and who he was meeting created a tense atmosphere throughout the episode. It helped me see the potential of the series I was unconvinced it possessed in the first two episodes.

This has led me to a very confused place going forward with Andor, and with Star Wars in general. The Obi-Wan Kenobi show was a mess. Those rookie writers shouldn’t have been let anywhere near a franchise this big. The Boba Fett show was some of the worst writing I’ve seen on a show with that kind of budget. The Mandalorian is uneven but has some good episodes. It’s written well at times.

I would say that Andor is the most sophisticated written Star Wars show by far. I’m just not sure that’s showing the dividends it needs to after three episodes. Clearly, Gilroy knows how to write a scene. But is his overarching narrative as compelling as he thinks it is? I’m not sure. And is his main character as interesting as he thinks he is? Probably not.

I think this begs the question: Does Gilroy mesh with the Star Wars brand? Or is he pulling a Rian Johnson, where you hijack a franchise to tell the story you want to tell rather than the story that’s right for the franchise?

I’ll probably check back in with you guys at the season midpoint to give you better answers to those questions. In the meantime, tell me what you thought of Andor.

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

What I learned: Andor is yet another example of why all writers should seriously reconsider adding flashbacks to their story. We saw this in Boba Fett with the silly sand people flashbacks. We see it here with all this time spent on Cassian’s childhood that doesn’t tell us anything we couldn’t have already imagined ourselves. You have to ask the question, is what the flashbacks give you worth the momentum-stoppage they take from you? In this case, the answer is clearly no. The flashbacks dragged along. I’ll never say never. But, in my experience, flashbacks almost always take more from the story than they give.

Genre: Period/True Story
Premise: The true story of the murder of four American churchwomen in El Salvador in 1980 and the low-level American diplomat who teamed with his most dangerous informant to smoke out their killers. Based on Raymond Bonner’s work for The Atlantic.
About: This script finished on the Black List. One of the writers has written several Christmas movies. The other is writing an upcoming action film with Mila Jovovich titled, “Hummingbird.”
Writers: John Tyler McClain & Michael Nourse
Details: 121 pages

This feels like a Sebastian Stan starrer to me.

I think these writers got the memo from studios that with Stranger Things and Cobra Kai and Top Gun Maverick that: “Everything 80s is selling right now. We want more 80s!” I can see the pitch meeting now…

Writers: “You want more 80s? We’re got just the story for you. It’s set in 1980 in El Salvador! It’s about how 80% of the El Salvadorians don’t have a say in their government and then this innocent woman gets killed and then we follow the political machinations of the U.S. Embassy and how they ultimately solve the murder. It’s gonna blow everyone away.”

Today’s Studio Execs: “Uh, that’s not quite what we meant when we said everything in the 80s is selling.”

Writers: “Should we take that as a yes?”

Hey, I mean, it made the Black List, right?

Sister Dorothy Kazel is an American missionary in El Salvador in 1980. Not long after we meet this very cool motorcycle riding nun, we learn that her and three other nuns were raped and murdered.

This brings the American consulate into it, represented by a young man named Carl, who’s the only one at the American Embassy who seems to speak Spanish. He teams up with an angry Israeli agent named Idan to figure out what happened.

Betting odds are on a kill team led by an evil dude named D’Aubuisson. D’Aubuisson is going through the country randomly killing civilians for reasons that I’m not entirely clear about.

D’Aubuisson is obsessed with a group of pirate radio people known as “Radio Vencéremos,” who are warning everyone in the country where the Death Squad is. If you want to piss off a Death Squad leader, any preventative measure that will lessen his deathing is sure to rile him up.

Carl and his current bedroom buddy, Molly, slither around the El Salvadorian mainland asking a lot of questions. Their best bet is a guy without a name (“Killer”) who used to work in the Death Squad but hates it. To find D’Aubuisson, they’ll need to trust this dude. But is he leading them into a trap? Only time – and an obsessive amount of paying attention – will tell.

You know, I used to get upset with how many World War 2 scripts there were. The pile was endless. Don’t we have anything else to write about? I then read something like today’s script and it’s like, ‘Ohhhhhhh, this is why.’ Cause in Central American civil wars of the 1980s, everything is gray and unclear and random and we’re in El Salvador and we don’t really know why or what this has to do with anything on the world stage.

When you read a World War 2 script, it doesn’t matter if it’s about the U.S., Germany, Japan, Russia, France, Poland, or Great Britain, you immediately understand who’s good and who’s bad and can, therefore, participate in the story.

In a script like this, where the burden of investment is higher than One World Trade Center, you’re spending 80% of the time just trying to keep up with the exposition. There’s this Death Squad and maybe they’re working for the El Salvadorian army, or maybe they left because they *don’t like* the El Salvadorian army, and there’s a religious issue and also the Death Squad kills people to make statements, although it’s not clear what those statements are.

I know vociferous cinephiles say they love the grey area. But the grey only works when we understand each shade of grey. If each shade of grey is, itself, many shades of grey, we’re clueless as to what’s going on.

I mean this is some high brow grey-scale stuff here. We get exchanges like, “It’s not socialism, it’s communism. We know the Soviets are here. Dominoes of these backwards countries could topple straight up to Texas!” “That was our excuse in Korea – and Vietnam. But Communism evolves into facsimiles of Stalin; it’s a place marker for tyranny and eating its young. Socialism is different.”

I actually majored in world politics in college and I can only quasi decipher that exchange.

I suppose the counter-argument to this is, we live in an entertainment vacuum of Thor penis jokes and UFOs that turn into giant pieces of origami. You have to open up some slots for sophisticated adult fare somewhere. Which, I suppose, is a fair argument. But that’s the dilemma I was going through while reading this. Was the script too sophisticated for my taste, or is the subject matter uninteresting? Is the storytelling confusing?

Cause what often happens when you’re reading a script that you’re not enjoying is your mind starts wandering. And you dislike the script enough that, when you realize your mind is wandering, you don’t do the proper thing and backtrack to the spot before your mind started wandering. You instead keep reading despite not properly downloading what just happened during those two pages where you weren’t paying attention.

So is your confusion the writer’s fault or is it your own fault? Is it not the writer’s job, in the first place, to keep you entertained enough that that doesn’t happen? Or even if you dislike what you’re reading, do you still owe it to the writer to make sure you read and understand every single page? I’m curious what you guys think so feel free to give your opinion in the comments.

Another small thing I noticed in the script was this new trend of writers overwriting. Here’s an example from this script: “As he walks off, Dorothy looks back to the MOB being vomited from the church, to Diego, an 8yo boy, clinging to her motorcycle like it’s the only sanity left.”

There’s no need for “like it’s the only sanity left.” It’s a try-hard addition to the sentence that doesn’t need to be included. You *can* include it, of course. There are no rules in writing. I’m just telling you, whenever I read stuff like that, I roll my eyes a little. It feels desperate, like a writer trying to prove to the world that he’s a Writer, with a capital, “W.” More on that in the What I Learned section.

One of the most important questions anyone should ask before writing a story is, “Why would they care?” Why would an audience care about this story you want to write? If it’s a fictional story, is it unique and entertaining enough? If it’s a true story, what is it about this true event that makes it big/important enough that it must be told?

Now, of course, the answer to that question is subjective. But it’s still a question that needs to be asked because the ultimate goal here is that a large amount of people want to see your movie.

Every time I go through the variables here. El Salvador, 1980, 4 random women are murdered, I find myself shrugging. Of course, murder is bad. But there are literally hundreds of millions of murders that have occurred throughout history. I guess I’m having a hard time convincing myself that these particular murders are movie-worthy.

Maybe if there was some giant twist at the end, and it was the American government that killed them to validate an invasion or something, that might have convinced me. But there’s nothing that big here.

To the writers’ credit, they do have some fun with the dialogue, particularly between Carl, Molly, and Idan. But it’s not enough to offset a concept that I think is lacking enough punch to be a movie.

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

What I learned: Going back to that earlier line – “As he walks off, Dorothy looks back to the MOB being vomited from the church, to Diego, an 8yo boy, clinging to her motorcycle like it’s the only sanity left.” Movie writing is about the VISUAL. Not the figurative. So if you’re going to make an analogy or use a metaphor, make it visual. For example, you might say, “As he walks off, Dorothy looks back to the MOB being vomited from the church, to Diego, an 8yo boy, clinging to her motorcycle as if it were a life raft.” It’s not a great line but at least the metaphor is focused on an IMAGE and not a state of mind, such as “sanity.”

Genre: Comedy/Sci-Fi
Premise: A disastrous Grindr hookup goes from bad to worse when a meteor unleashes a horde of aliens on New York and the two ill-matched men must depend on each other to make it through the day alive.
About: This is another breakout script for a writer, Thomas Kivney, who made it onto last year’s Black List with Max and Tony. Kivney got his MFA in screenwriting at the American Film Institute Conservatory. He previously worked at a literary scouting agency for four years, which is “where I started becoming more involved in film. It was a rewarding experience that meant getting to work closely alongside Warner Bros and Netflix, advising them on the acquisition of books for adaptation to TV and film.”
Writer: Thomas Kivney
Details: 115 pages

Perfect comedy vehicle for Jerrod Carmichael?

With Billy Eichner’s “Bros” (produced by Judd Apatow) coming out in two weeks, the LBGTQ community is looking to make a push into the mainstream instead of being relegated to speciality releases. If that film does well, expect today’s script to get immediately greenlit. To be honest, this should’ve been the movie Eichner made. It sounds a lot more fun.

Max and Tony match on Grindr and immediately agree to meet and bang at Tony’s place. If this is how fast all gay hookups come together, I need to seriously reevaluate my sexual orientation.

The hookup doesn’t go exactly as planned, though. Max can’t stop talking about his ex he just broke up with, Oliver. And Tony is extremely determined to shut out all the noise (from Oliver’s mouth) and just have sex. After the clumsiest sexual encounter ever, the two aren’t really sure what to do so they go to sleep.

The next morning, Max gets the text he’s been waiting for. Oliver wants to get back together! Max can’t dance out of Tony’s apartment fast enough. Until he sees a dog-sized monster in the hallway devour a frat bro. Time to reassess the morning’s activities.

Max races back inside Tony’s apartment, inadvertently allowing the monster-alien-thing in with him, and Max and Tony tag-team the cosmic creature, killing it through sheer luck. After realizing the city is under attack, they decide to team up and get to Hell’s Kitchen, where Tony’s brother and Max’s boyfriend, Oliver, live.

They instantly realize these aliens identify as ‘stranger danger,’ as they’re able to combine with each other and eat humans to turn into even bigger scarier aliens. Oh, and they also spit goo in your face, and if it gets in your eyes or mouth, you turn into an alien within the next ten minutes.

While Max wants to help everyone they meet along the way, the more selfish Tony just wants to get to their destination. After a particularly gruesome encounter, Tony finally reveals why he was so awkward in the bedroom. It’s that he only recently came out! More sympathetic to his reluctant teammate, Max starts to fall for him, which puts his and Oliver’s relationship in serious jeopardy.

Today’s script is maybe the hardest of all to read.

No, I don’t mean that in a negative way.

I actually mean it quite positively. The script is well-written. It moves fast. It’s got a nice fun vibe to it.

But the problem with the script is the real problem with most of the scripts in Hollywood. Whenever I tell anyone I’m a screenplay reader, the first thing they say is, “Oh, it must be so hard to read all those bad scripts.”

Well, no. The bad scripts aren’t the hard scripts to read at all. I actually enjoy reading bad scripts because nothing serves as a better reminder of what doesn’t work than a bad script. “On the nose” dialogue is a vague term that means nothing in a vacuum. But all it takes is reading one bad script with a ton of on the nose dialogue to remember exactly what on the nose dialogue looks like.

But scripts like Max and Tony’s Epic One Night Stand – they don’t do anything technically wrong. The script has two main characters, each with a strong goal. It has really high stakes. It has urgency galore. There’s the perfect amount of conflict between the two leads, which allows for a lot of chirpy comedic dialogue.

And that’s the problem. The script does exactly what it sets out to do and not an inch more. Which means it’s hard to identify why you don’t like it. Cause I didn’t really like the script. And I can’t really tell you why.

I suppose if you put a serrated knife to my throat and started mimicking a sawing motion, I’d start with the characters. Max kind of comes off as the stereotypical 90s gay character. He’s dramatic. He’s flamboyant. No matter what I did, I could not *not* think of Sean Hayes in Will & Grace.

And then with Tony, he didn’t have any personality at all. Now, in the writer’s defense, it turns out there’s a reason for that revealed later. Tony is hiding a lot about himself. But that doesn’t get you extra points. It’s more important for the audience to like the character than to be bored by the character but then get a really good reason for why they’re boring 80 pages into the script.

And since I’m so focused on dialogue these days, I’d make the argument that the dialogue here falls into that same category as the story execution. It’s never bad. But it quickly establishes a pattern – Tony tries to calm Max down, Max can’t help himself and continues to freak out – that it never deviates from.

If there’s a lesson to be learned about dialogue from this script, it might be that. If you keep doing the same-rhythmed joke over and over again, it starts to lose its power.

It’s a good reason to think long and hard about your characters before you write the script. Are they going to be able to deliver not just funny dialogue, but a VARIETY of dialogue, for 110 pages?

I felt like we needed one extra character who had a style of talking that was completely different from Tony and Max just to mix up the rhythm in places. With that said, there was one line that made me crack up. The ‘totally-in-denial-that-he’s-gay’ car service driver says: “You two are a real cute couple you know that? You remind me of this one gay dude I used to date and the other gay dude he left me for.”

I wished there were more clever lines like that. But most of it is just Max going crazy and saying something silly.

I did like the mythology of the aliens, though. I liked that they kept getting bigger and could mesh with each other. And essentially adding zombie rules along with it added another dimension. But the script could never overcome its expectedness. We always knew what was next. Maybe if the characters were sharper and more original, I wouldn’t have cared about the predictability as much. But since that was a problem, I definitely noticed it.

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

What I learned: A common issue I run into in these comedic team-up scripts is that the writer makes one half of the team the “funny character,” and then, in trying to make the second character the opposite, they just make him bland. And that was the issue with Tony. He was too bland. The “non-comedic” half of your two-hander still needs personality. The Other Guys is a good example of this. Mark Wahlberg plays the hot-tempered comic relief cop. But Will Ferrel is still hilarious as the ultimate rule-follower.