Keeping in mind that adapting The Hobbit is probably one of the tougher screenplay jobs this side of the slugline, how did Jackson and his co-writers fare?

Genre: Adventure
Premise: Bilbo Baggins reluctantly joins a band of dwarves who go on a quest to reclaim their kingdom, which has since been taken over by a dragon.
About: After lots of legal battles and one giant director fallout, the first of three Hobbit films finally comes to the big screen. The talk about these films seems to be Peter Jackson’s pioneering use of 48 frames per second as opposed to the traditional 24. This new frame-rate is supposed to make the movie a lot more enjoyable in 3-D. We’ll see about that.
Writers: Fran Walsh & Philippa Boyens & Peter Jackson & Guillermo del Toro (based on the novel by J.R.R. Tolkien)

I’ve been to the Shire. I saw Ryan Gosling there and he said he didn’t want me to review his script today. So I decided to review the Hobbitses instead.

Before I get into the writing side of this movie, I first have to address the 48 frames per second phenomenon. Now maybe I’m wrong and in 10 years every movie will be in 48 fps and we’ll look back at this 24 frames stuff as ancient history, the way my generation looked at Black and White films. And the way that generation looked back at films without sound. But I don’t know. I understand we’ve been conditioned on this frame rate for over a hundred years, and we’ve been led to believe that anything 30 frames per second or higher looks like home video, but that’s what this looked like to me. It looked like home video.

No, you know what it looked like? It looked like those History Channel reenactments, but with like 100 times the production value. I mean for the first half of the movie, I couldn’t stop thinking about it. All I kept saying was, “This looks so cheap.” Not only because it looked like video but because it was so smooth and crisp you could see the make-up on the actors. You could see all the imperfections. Now I did start to get used to it as the movie went on, but I’d be surprised if James Cameron decided to shoot Avatar this way after seeing the footage (as he’d been hinting at).

But what about the actual movie!!? Well, I always had a problem with going back and doing a Hobbit trilogy as it seemed like a pared down version of the Lord Of The Rings. If the world were made of truthful marketing campaigns, this one would read, “Everything you got before, but smaller.” And that’s what this felt like. There wasn’t that grand scale that dominated the earlier (later) films. This felt more intimate. At times that was good but since this is a spectacle movie, it was mostly bad. Wanna know what the film was about?

Okay, I’ll tell you, but not in Middle Earth-speak. That would take me an extra two hours of name-checking in the Hobbit encyclopedia. I’m going to tell you in layman’s terms. Basically, these dwarves lose their kingdom to this really evil dragon who wants it because there’s a lot of gold stored there. I’ll admit, I was confused right off the bat on this one. Why would a dragon need gold? What can a dragon possibly use gold for? He can’t make gold dragon clothes. He doesn’t need it to buy anything. His currency is breathing fire on people. But whatever. Point is, all the dwarves got kicked out of their home.

Many years later we meet Bilbo Baggins, a hobbit, who’s minding his business when Gandalf and a bunch of dwarves show up telling him he has to go on a mission with them, a mission to get their castle back. This confused me as well because I couldn’t understand why they needed a hobbit to help them. From what I understood, Bilbo was scared, inexperienced, didn’t want to go, and didn’t bring anything advantageous to the table other than it’s harder for dragons to smell hobbits. Maybe this is explained in the books or the sequels somewhere, but at least in this story, I couldn’t understand why Bilbo was even part of this adventure. Even Obi-Wan says to Luke, “I’m getting too old for this.” So it made sense why Luke needed to come on that journey.

Anyway, off they go to take on that bad dragon with an irrational gold fetish. However, mid-way through, we begin to realize that them taking on the dragon ain’t going to happen in this movie. Nope. We’re going to have to wait til the third film for that one. Which leaves us feeling empty. Luckily, Jackson helps us forget this with a wagon-full of orc attacks! Orcs and trolls. Every 20 minutes or so, some orcs would find them and we’d get a big set-piece. These set-pieces ranged from cool to really cool, but never quite awesome (however running across bridges in the underground orc lair got close).

Our good buddy Golum does make an appearance in the film with his and Bilbo’s “Battle of Riddles (?)” and it’s the one thing I remembered from the book as a kid so I was excited to see it play out on the big screen. I was disappointed. The rules of this riddle game seemed vague, and it appeared that you could ask the most nonsensical question ever and it would be considered “fair.” “Trust and trout and beetles and stout. Seven tigers drink six cups of milk. What’s the answer?” Errr, what? More concerning was the way Bilbo won. “What’s in my pocket?” That’s the question he won with? You can just ask a question that there’s no way for someone to know the answer to? “How many centipedes live underneath the big rock in my garden back home?” I don’t know! I wanted to feel like Bilbo cleverly outwitted Golum. Instead, I’m left wondering what the hell the rules were to that funky game.

Eventually, Bilbo escapes Golum and the dwarves escape more Orcs and they all get away. But then they have to fight one last battle against the King Orc, who our Prince Dwarf supposedly killed many years ago, but who has come back for revenge. Oh, and then there’s a guy who rides around on a sled pulled by rabbits.

To “The Hobbit’s” credit, we do have a clear story here. We have our goal (Get to and reclaim the Dwarf Kingdom), we have our stakes (the dwarves will be without a home until they get their kingdom back), and we have our urgency (they’re constantly being chased by orcs). Despite all that, The Hobbit takes its time in too many places. Jackson knows he’s got you stuck there in the theater and boy does he take advantage of it, giving you a twenty minute opening scene in Bilbo’s house, and a 15 minute exposition-laden scene at the Elf kingdom. There are a lot of talking scenes in this script and that almost dooms it.

Luckily, Jackson (and Tolkien obviously) throw tons of obstacles at our heroes to keep the entertainment level high. Just when the story’s about to run out of gas, orcs show up, or trolls show up, or giant raving mad rock monsters show up, or Bilbo falls into the dark crevices of a cave with no way out. Remember, as long as you give your characters a goal, you can place tons of obstacles in front of that goal. And as long as we care about them achieving their goal, we’ll be entertained by them trying to overcome those obstacles. Jackson adds several nice touches where we see how important getting their home back is for the dwarves. So we’re entertained by the obstacles that get in their way.

Character-wise, Bilbo, our main character, is a tough call.  He’s very passive for most of the screenplay, and for that reason he’s one of the least interesting characters in the bunch. There’s an old saying that your main character should be the most interesting person in the movie. I don’t know if that’s always possible because a lot of times the hero has to play the straight man, but it would’ve been nice if Bilbo was a LITTLE more interesting.

With that said, he did have a flaw, and therefore an arc. And it’s one of the better flaws you can give a character, since it’s so identifiable. Bilbo lives a safe life. He doesn’t take any chances. He’d rather stay holed up in a tiny hobbit shack than deal with the dangers of the outside world. This journey is about him learning to step out of his safety bubble and do something different and new and scary. Haven’t we all felt that way at one point or another in our lives? Always add a flaw to your hero if you can, guys. It’ll provide your story with a more dynamic, and therefore more interesting, character.

One thing that KILLS this movie for me, though, is the trilogy format. This tale is lighter than Lord Of The Rings as it is. And now you’re telling me that the goal your characters are after isn’t even going to be pulled off in this film? Not only is that a big tease, but it throws the entire rhythm of the script off. In a story, the whole point is to build to the climax, the thing you’ve been telling us is our heroes’ objective. If there’s no objective, there’s no climax, and that’s exactly how the Hobbit felt. I didn’t know where we were going after awhile or what the ultimate point of THIS MOVIE (not the entire trilogy) was. I don’t think any script should end with the reader saying, “Oh, that’s it?” And that’s how this one ended. I honestly wouldn’t have been surprised if The Hobbit had gone on for another 30 minutes, and that’s sloppy storytelling as far as I’m concerned. The audience wants the payoff. We got it a bit with the King Orc showdown, but that felt like the appetizer to the big meal, a meal we won’t be eating for another two years.

I don’t know where I come down on this one. It held my attention, but sometimes for the wrong reasons. I just couldn’t comprehend why they’d put something onscreen that looked like it had been shot on a Best Buy video camera. However, I suppose the script had just enough thrust to keep my attention til the end. For that, I guess it’s worth a matinee ticket.

[ ] Run for your life
[ ] Wait for video
[x] worth the price of admission
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius

What I learned: How much time is too much time to build up your characters in a screenplay? Peter Jackson takes his sweet time in this area, giving us 30-some minutes with our hobbits and dwarves before they get on the road. This can work if a lot’s happening (we don’t get on the road til the 30 minute mark in Star Wars, for example, but a TON of stuff happens before that – evil villains chasing, forgotten hermits reemerging, droids running away, aunt and uncle killed), but if you just have people sitting around at tables talking, the script is going to drag. I see this sometimes with established writer-directors. They know they don’t have to keep a reader’s interest. They already have you in the theater. So they take forever to get going. I think established or not, all writers should try and keep the story moving. Don’t waste a line of screenplay space if you don’t have to, especially in the opening, when it’s imperative you hook your audience. The Hobbit could’ve moved a lot faster.

Amateur Friday Submission Process: To submit your script for an Amateur Review, send in a PDF of your script, a PDF of the first ten pages of your script, your title, genre, logline, and finally, why I should read your script. Use my submission address please: Carsonreeves3@gmail.com. Your script and “first ten” will be posted. If you’re nervous about the effect of a bad review, feel free to use an alias name and/or title. It’s a good idea to resubmit every couple of weeks so your submission stays near the top.

Genre: Family/Action-Adventure
Premise: (from writer) A ten-year-old girl finds a dragon egg in the desert behind her New Mexico home. The egg hatches and the girl befriends the creature. After discovering a way to return the dragon to its natural world, the duo embarks on a cross country journey, flying at night, with government agents on their tail.
Writer: Troy Warren
Details: 99 pages.

I know I don’t review many family scripts on the site, but a producer was telling me the other day that the two genres that have been the most dependable throughout the years – dating back as long as the movie business has been around – are Action and Family.  Those movies make a ton of bucks and they make a ton of bucks all over the world.  Now I know most family films are developed internally, and the total historic box office is swayed by the ridiculous grosses of all those Disney animation classics, but the comment did open my eyes and is what persuaded me to go with Luna this week.

I’m also really curious because I received two early reactions regarding the script.  One called it charming, cute, and essentially perfect.  The other said it was the worst thing she’d read all year.  Hmmm, which one was right?

10 year old Luna Cruz lives in that magical desert land known as New Mexico.  She resides in one of those adobe houses that sits amongst dust, tumbleweeds, and roadkill, without a hint of civilization in any direction.  In other words, 10 year old Lana lives in a pretty boring town.  But that doesn’t mean her life’s boring.  She has a brother who thinks he’s a young John Travolta, a grandmother who wears a house arrest bracelet, and a little brother who finds pooping his pants to be an almost zen-like experience.

But none of these characters are as wacky as the one who’s about to enter her life.  During an Easter egg hunt, Luna’s pooping little brother finds himself a giant easter egg that quickly hatches.  But it’s no bird that comes a chirpin’ out.  It’s a baby….lizard maybe??  Oh, she wishes.  It’s only when the little ball of scales starts burping out fire that Luna realizes – Holy Baloney – she’s found herself a real live DRAGON!

Meanwhile, over in Los Alamos, Californigh-yay, some government types get all uppity about a strange energy blast that occurred down in New Mexico.  The implication is that something other-worldly went on, and they wanna get their hands on this other-worldliness.  So they send agent Sophia Bailey down to get to the bottom of it.

Back in New Mexico, our little dragon friend, who Luna’s decided to name “Gordo,” is growing faster than Rosie O’Donnel at an Old Country Buffet.  Since Luna realizes she’s in over her head, she tells her grandmother about Gordo, and after doing a few Google searches, realizes that Gordo probably got here via some time vortex from the past.  They find a bunch of Ivy League nerds who know all about these vortexes and decide to travel to New York to meet them.

With Sophia, and soon the military, hot on their trail, they make it to New York where the Vortex Nerd Patrol uses a mathematical equation to determine where the next vortex is going to appear, the one that can get Gordo back to mama.  It turns out it’s in Nevada (Area 51 to be precise) and they only have 44 hours to get there. If Luna and Gordo miss that window, there’s a good chance our little dragon buddy is going to live the rest of his life as a lab subject, something Luna will do anything to prevent!

So who was right?  The extremely negative reviewer or the extremely positive reviewer?  To be honest, I’m not sure either of them were right.  My issue with Luna is that the story is too average.  Those who read the site know I can’t stand when I’m 40-50 pages ahead of the writer.  And that’s the problem I ran into with Luna.  I always knew exactly what was going to happen 50 pages ahead of time.  And it’s hard for me to be entertained when that’s the case.

Now I had a discussion with another reader about this and they pointed out, “Yeah but you have to realize, Carson – this is a kid’s movie.  To kids, it IS going to be surprising and new because they haven’t seen thousands of movies and read thousands of scripts like you.”  It was a good point and something I’ve thought about before.  Is the bar just WAY LOWER for the general audiences out there?  Specifically children?

On the one hand I’d say, yes, it is.  But on the other, I still think it’s a problem.  Whenever you write a script, it has to get past the bullshit detectors.  Whether those detectors are readers who have read hundreds of scripts or producers who have made dozens of movies.  These guys are the line of defense your script must make it past to be both bought and made.  And their bar is just as high as mine.  They’re looking for a freshness, a new take on familiar stories, an unpredictability to the characters and structure, just like me.

I look at a movie like Up or Wall-E, popular children’s movies, and there’s definitely an unpredictability to those stories.  I mean, one of them has no talking for 45 minutes and the other has a house that flies around the world via hundreds of helium balloons.  Those are both things I haven’t seen before.  And I feel like you need those elements, even when you’re playing to a super-young audience.

So moving forward, I believe Troy needs to dig deeper here.  I think the story needs to be more complex and less familiar.  A couple extra subplots could help, just to make the story less linear.  And I think we need to do more with the characters.  Where’s the fatal flaw in the main character, Luna, for example?  Luna was a blank sheet of paper to me.  She was cute.  But because there wasn’t anything complicated or difficult going on in her life (other than her schoolmates making fun of her) I never felt more than one-dimension with her.  And your main character needs more than one dimension!

Take her family.  Clearly, something’s happened to Luna’s family.  It appears that her mom and dad are absent?  There’s some interesting backstory there which we’re not privy too.  Then you have this dragon, who’s been ripped away from his mother.  Why not make a connection there?  Why not explore that?  The effects of a child who grows up alone?  Who doesn’t have that mother/father figure in their life.  If Luna can get Gordo back to her mother, it’s almost like she’s able to get herself back to her own mom.

You don’t have to go that way, obviously.  But that’s the way you need to approach it in order to add depth to your story, in order for it to be more than just names on a page.  You want to make audiences and readers think and this was too simple of a plot, too obvious of a direction, to get us thinking.  Both from a standpoint of depth and choices, there wasn’t enough meat on the bone.  Look at Bailey, who had the potential to be much deeper, not unlike Tommy Lee Jones’ character from The Fugitive.  Start her off emotionless.  Then, as she gets to know this kid and what she’s going through, she starts to turn, and by the end, she’s trying to save Luna.  Maybe you tie in that theme of being alone and Bailey herself grew up without that all-importnat mother figure.  There’s SOME OF THAT here now, but not nearly enough.

I also think more could’ve been done with the ending.  And this goes back to many of the choices here being too simple.  As it stands, (Spoiler) Luna has to get the dragon to the Vortex without getting shot down by the military.  So what happens?  Luna gets the dragon through the Vortex without getting shot down by the military.  It goes EXACTLY the way it’s supposed to go.  That’s not interesting. That’s not drama!

What if we establish in the past that the mama dragon is looking for her baby, and when that Vortex opens up, she surprisingly comes bursting through to get her baby back.  So now we’re not dealing with one dragon, but two, with the military forced to make a tough decision.  Do they start shooting?  Do they take down the bigger threat?  Every part of the plan is thrown off because the mother dragon has arrived.  And now you have a finale that could go in a million different directions (maybe the mother is killed.  Maybe the mother is injured. Maybe Gordo is injured and the mother has to save him).  That’s the way you want to write your stories, by throwing things in there that open up a bunch of fresh options, not just stay on that obvious straightforward path.

I realize I’m being a little harsh here.  Luna is actually one of the better written Amateur Friday scripts I’ve read, but I think that’s why I’m so passionate about its flaws.  I know Troy can do better.  He has the writing chops.  But like a lot of writers out there, he has to challenge himself more.  Your protagonist’s journey should feel troubled, impossible and unpredictable.  There were a few speed bumps here, but none of them felt that difficult to me.  I always knew Luna and the dragon were going to be okay.  Do you remember when E.T. died??  Yeah, E.T. DIED!!!!!  How devastating was that????  That’s something I DIDN’T EXPECT.  I wanted stuff like that here.  I know Troy can do it, but he’s gotta push himself.  And so do the rest of you.  Always PUSH YOURSELVES when writing scripts.  If it’s too easy, you’re probably not working hard enough.

Script link: Luna Found A Dragon

What I learned: I have a rule.  If you feel like you’ve seen it before, erase it and write something else.  That goes for lines of dialogues, scenes, action sequences, characters, whatever.  If you feel like “I’ve seen this in another movie,” pound that delete button.  Add a little twist to it, go in a different direction, or completely rewrite it.  Do anything BUT write what’s already been done.  I specifically kept thinking of E.T. while reading “Luna.”  The secret pet aspect.  The military aspect.  Getting the dragon home aspect.  Let’s go back, erase all those references, and replace them with something new and fresh.  This should not feel like an E.T. update.  It should feel like its own individual movie.

Genre: Sci-fi
Premise: A group of survivors search for answers in an ash-fallen Los Angeles after an alien invasion.
About: Ben Magid first gained traction in Hollywood with his dark take on Peter Pan, which reimagined Pan as a serial killer. He sold this script, Invasion, a couple years later to Summit.
Writer: Ben Magid
Details: 8/11/09 Draft – 98 pages

I was able to escape the Cambodian village I was being held captive in last night, hitch a ride from a local one-eyed chicken farmer, and make it to Phnom Penh Airport, all before the screenwriting terrorist organization known as “Eat The Cat” knew I was gone. However, I did manage to secure a producer credit should their reboot of “The Adventures Of Pluto Nash” make it to theaters. I also hold the rights to my story, which will be the focus of a primetime special on 60 Minutes. More on that before Thanksgiving.

It all seems rather serendipitous, seeing as there was that big debate on TV last night, what with the presidential election and all. I expect screenwriting terrorism to be a hot topic moving forward, and I want to make sure my story is known. For those of you wondering which way I’m leaning, I’ll just say that there’s nothing more annoying than political junkies arguing about politics. It’s almost creepy in fact, and sorta makes me not want to vote. By the way, when the heck are they going to make it so you can vote online??? Voter turnout would go up 500%!!! But nooooo. They have to make us go OUT and vote. You wanna know what that is? That’s bias against lazy people. If the lazy people in this nation were allowed to vote, I promise you things would be a LOT different.

Don’t I have to review a script today? I guess so. Except today’s script is so….average. How is one supposed to get excited about an average script? And it shouldn’t be that way. I like invasion scripts. Well, I like the IDEA of invasion scripts. But they need that little Sunkist twist so that they stand out, and I’m not sure Invasion has that. With that said, surprisingly enough, I believe Invasion could be a cool movie. But it’s going to need some characters and it’s going to need a pulse – two things it’s lacking at the moment.

Invasion starts out sharply enough, with a group of commuters travelling through Los Angeles via subway (L.A. has a subway?) when they hear a giant BOOM from above. Their train goes haywire in a way that would scare even Chris Pine and Denzel Washington. It accordions into a wall and the survivors, after checking to make sure all their limbs are intact, make their way up top.

They’re greeted with a Los Angeles awash in what looks like snow, but it quickly becomes apparent that this is ash. LA has been nuked, and not by your friendly neighborhood North Koreans either. But by aliens! The only reason our crew survived is because they were in some lead-lined portion of the subway tunnel.

But that hardly means they’re out of trouble. This ash limits visibility to about 30 feet, which means they’re walking blind in this battleground, with strange alien forms always looming just beyond your field of vision. That and the GOOP. What’s the “goop” you say? Well, the goop would be the big puddles of sticky gooey goo that seem to be everywhere. Our survivors realize that this goo used to be PEOPLE! And if you touch it, the goo contaminates you, turning you into fellow goo.

Like most group survivor movies, the goal is to get to the survivor rendezvous point, which our guys make a guess is at the Federal Building in Westwood. But when they get there, there’s no one around. They do find a radio transmission, however, that states the Navy is sending ships over to Santa Monica to save all the survivors. So away they go again, this time encountering some heavy casualties. For those who manage to survive, they’re met with quite the shocker, a big surprise that’ll have them wishing they were K.O.’d back at that subway crash along with the rest of the commuters.

Before I get into my problems with the script, I have to admit Invasion’s kind of a clever idea for a movie. When you take on these giant cataclysmic events, it’s a smart idea to localize things. But that usually means putting your characters in an ordinary location, such as a house (i.e. the way “Signs” did it). In this case, we’re actually in the middle of the chaos, however it plays like a contained thriller, since we can never really see beyond 30 feet. We’re watching things play out, but only within this tiny fog-limited bubble. I thought that was cool. Remember, our imaginations are always worse than reality, and wondering what was just outside that bubble made for some nice suspense.

However here’s the problem. I didn’t care. You’ll notice that I didn’t mention any characters in my review and that’s because I don’t remember any. Oh sure, there was the tough former army type and the annoyed businessman type. But there wasn’t a single character who had anything unique or interesting going on. Even Magid seemed unsure about his characters, as he didn’t really decide who to focus on until the third act, where I guess this dad and his daughter became the de facto protagonists with a broken relationship that all of a sudden needed mending.

I seem to say this until I’m blue in the face but you gotta spend more time on your characters people! You gotta give everyone AT LEAST ONE unique trait, something (or a combination of somethings) that make them unlike anybody else we’ve ever seen before. Because if a character doesn’t feel real, then we’re bored by them, and if you have a script like this with 7-8 generic stereotypes running around, it doesn’t matter how cool your plot is, you’ve written a script without a pulse.

But some of you are probably saying, “But wait a minute, Carson. This sold!” True true, it did sell. But it sold on the concept and Magid’s heat due to his hot script, Pan. That’s the thing – when you sell a script or you write a hot script, companies are much more comfortable buying from you, and won’t hold you to the same standards unknowns are held to. I know it’s backwards thinking – but it’s the way the business works. If you’re not known to Hollywood, you need to be amazing. Because if someone buys something from an unknown and that script has a lot of problems, people won’t want to push it through the system and whoever was responsible for buying it could get fired. But if you bought a script from a celebrated writer with a hot script that everyone loves, that’s something people want to get behind, even if the script isn’t that great.  So it’s a much safer bet, even if it’s not as good!

But I’m getting off track. The point I was trying to make was this: NAIL YOUR CHARACTERS. Put everything into your characters. Make them flawed and mysterious and conflicted and relatable. But most of all, make them unique. We’re more likely to see someone as a real person if we haven’t seen that person before in a movie.

Invasion: Cool concept. Could be a neat movie. But needs unique and way more interesting characters.

[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] Wasn’t for me.
[ ] Worth the read
[ ] Impressive
[ ] Genius

What I learned: Even when you’re focusing on a group of people, it’s a good idea to have a lead protagonist.  Not that “a group as protagonist” can’t be done, but if you’re not focusing on a lead person or a lead couple, it’s hard for us to make that connection with the characters so that we actually give a shit about them.  And that’s exactly what happened here.  I didn’t know who the main character was so it’s not a surprise that I didn’t feel a connection to anybody.

Amateur Friday Submission Process: To submit your script for an Amateur Review, send in a PDF of your script, a PDF of the first ten pages of your script, your title, genre, logline, and finally, why I should read your script. Use my submission address please: Carsonreeves3@gmail.com. Your script and “first ten” will be posted. If you’re nervous about the effect of a bad review, feel free to use an alias name and/or title. It’s a good idea to resubmit every couple of weeks so your submission stays near the top.

You guys know one of my weaknesses is time-travel comedies.  Back To The Future is the responsible party.  I don’t know why I keep thinking I’m going to find the next Marty McFly.  Time travel is so difficult to get right.  Comedies are so difficult to get right.  So these sci-fi time travel comedies are NEVER very good, and nowhere close to the perfection that is BTTF.  And yet I continue my search!

Well, I finally found something.  Now I don’t want to get TOO excited here.  This isn’t BTTF quality (What is???).  But this Eternal Sunshine meets Adjustment Bureau comedy is the best time travel thing I’ve read in forever.  It’s really clever, really fun, and really well-written.  And best of all, it’s written by an amateur!

I knew I was in for something good right away when we see our hero, Charles, walk in front of a car, about to get plastered, then FREEZE to the title card: “48 Hours Earlier.”  Oh no, the dreaded “48 hours earlier” title card!  The thing Carson hates more than anything!  But then the “48 hours earlier” is crossed out and replaced with “48 hours later.”  Which is also crossed out.  And finally a title card appears that tells us that in the near future, time travel is a reality, and that for the right price, you can take care of hurtful past relationships that have turned you into a walking pile of sludge.

All you have to do is sign up at “Forget-Me-Nots,” the company our soon-to-be-road-kill hero, Charles, works for, and an agent will go back in time to make sure you and that guy who dumped your ass never meet in the first place.  And of course if you never meet, you never break up, so you never experience heartbreak.  Hey, sign me up!

When our story begins (or ends??), Charles is approached by a recently scorned woman, Julia, who wants to make it so that she and her ex, Tom, never meet.  Julia tells Charles how they met, and he heads back in time to make sure it never happens.  Now the rules of time travel are strict.  The governing body of time only allows people to jump for 48 hours, so Charles has to be efficient in his approach.  And he always is.  So far, he hasn’t screwed up a job yet.

But that’s about to change.  As Charles moves to prevent Julia from meeting Tom, a cute 22 year old spunky chick, Dora, bumps into him, unloading a cup of coffee onto his shirt.  She apologizes profusely as Charles tries to get away, but she insists on cleaning him up.  He fights and claws to escape, but in the end loses the battle and watches helplessly as Tom and Julia meet across the street.

No problem.  He’s missed first encounters before.  He’ll just prevent their first date from happening.  But what Charles soon finds out is that something keeps preventing him from executing his plan.  And there’s one common factor involved: Dora!  She ALWAYS seems to be around when things go south.

Charles finally confronts her and finds out that she’s a time traveler as well, and that she’s been sent here to make sure these two stay together.  Charles is pissed, but takes it as a challenge.  He’s been on dozens of trips.  This girl is a rookie.  He’ll be able to handle her no problem.

So the two start an Adjustment Bureau-like battle where they each make moves to alter fate surrounding the couple.  And every time Charles seems to have a leg up, Dora outfoxes him.  But as this time battle escalates, Charles starts to see the Tom-Julia job as secondary.  He wants to know who this Dora girl is, and who sent her here.  All of this will come to a whopper of a conclusion when we finally catch up with the opening scene that has Charles staring down death in the form of a car seconds away from crushing him.

This one was good.  Really good.

Yesterday we talked about clarity and how difficult it is for some writers to write even the most basic scene.  Keeping Time jumps between the present and the past and has multiple versions of characters and yet I knew what was going on 95% of the time (the ending does get confusing, which I’ll talk about in a sec).  For example, instead of just assuming we’d get it, Nathan will stop the script to explain the difference between “Past Charles” and “Present Charles,” so we won’t be confused by their interactions.

What I also liked about “Time” was that it kept evolving.  Every time I thought I knew where the story was going, it took a left turn.  For example, when Charles misses the first Tom-Julia encounter, he  decides to use the information she gave him back in their interview to sweep her off her feet, keeping her away from Tom in the process.  I thought, “Uh-oh.  Now we just have another version of There’s Something About Mary.”  Except when Tom tries to use her secrets against her, she stonewalls him, which confuses the hell out of Charles and left me wondering – “Wow, what now??”

Likewise with the Charles-Dora relationship.  I thought for sure these two time-travellers would battle each other to change fate and in the process fall in love!  But that doesn’t happen either.  At that point I’m thinking, “Man, this writer really knows how to craft an unpredictable story.”

And pretty soon, I found myself obsessed with finding out who Dora was and why she was here.  I had about five theories, but was never sure which one it would be.

On top of that, I felt the dialogue, for the most part, was really solid.  It wasn’t great.  It had some clunky moments.  But Charles and Dora’s back-and-forth was almost always fun to listen to.  The two had great chemistry and I’d find that even in scenes where they were just sitting at the table chatting for five pages (a scenario I tell writers to avoid all the time – two characters sitting at a table talking), I’d always be entertained.

But you know what really put me over the top?  What really got me?  This script had a theme!  I can count the number of amateur comedies I’ve read that have a theme on one hand – that were actually trying to say something!  Here, the theme was about allowing people to have the experiences in their lives, whether good or bad, because those experiences end up making them who they are.  I thought it was really well executed.

And to prove it, when the ending came, and one of the final twists arrived, I actually found myself tearing up!  And I realized that doesn’t happen by accident.  It happens because the writer was doing more than simply throwing a cool story on the page.  He created likable characters we wanted to root for.  He created interesting backstories (and forestories!).  He used a theme to add layers and depth to the script.  That’s how you emotionally affect a reader.

The only reason I didn’t raise the script to “impressive” status was the ending.  It gets a little too confusing.  I liked the ambition behind it.  But either it tries to be one level more clever than it needs to be and gets too confusing in the process, or it’s not described clearly enough.  I’m not sure which but if Nathan can fix that and improve a bunch of smaller problems in the script, this could EASILY be an impressive and get snatched up by a production company.

How much do I believe in it?  I’m going to try and convince Nathan to let me hop on as producer and push it around town.  We’ll see what happens! :)

p.s. I believe the draft I sent out to everybody was the wrong one and wasn’t spell-checked.  The one I personally read was devoid of errors.

Script link: Link taken down due to increasing interest.  Will keep people updated on my Twitter feed, @Scriptshadow!  E-mail me to read!

What I Learned: Getting back to theme, I find that one helpful way of expressing theme is to include a  scene (sometimes two) where the main characters debate both sides of the theme.  Some writers think this is too on-the-nose, but in my experience, theme does need to be announced in places for it to really catch on with the audience.  Be too subtle about it and your audience might miss it completely.  Charles and Dora have a scene in the middle of the script where they debate just that – whether it’s okay to erase our mistakes, since those mistakes are an essential part of who we are.

Genre: Sports Drama
Premise: An aging baseball scout who’s losing his eyesight must enlist the help of a daughter who hates baseball to scout a young prospect.
About: This one has a really interesting backstory to it and should give screenwriters everywhere hope that it can happen, if not on the timeframe they planned.  Writer Randy Brown wrote this 15 years ago and actually had Dustin Hoffman attached at one point.  But Hoffman and the producer didn’t get along, so the project went belly-up.  15 years later, Randy’s writing for some MTV shows (and running a cafe).  He met a producer through a mutual friend, who gave it to someone close with Clint who thought it would be great for him.  Now this is where you’re really going to freak out as you realize just how important timing is in this town.  Clint couldn’t do it because he was doing A Star Is Born with Beyonce.  Well, Jay-Z got Beyonce pregnant and all of a sudden, Clint had an opening in his schedule. The script was purchased for a million bucks and the movie is coming out later this year.  How bout them apples?
Writer: Randy Brown
Details: This says it’s a 2011 draft but the references in it clearly indicate it’s the original draft from 15 years ago.

Usually, when a script has been ignored for 15 years, there’s a reason for it.  It’s just not good enough.  Either that or its time has passed it by.  Or sometimes, when there’s a popular script in town that can’t get made for one reason or another, everyone in Hollywood plunders ideas from it, to the point where the original script now feels derivative.  I remember that happened with The Tourist, a famous script that keeps coming up on many people’s “Best Of The Unmade” lists.

So to be honest, I kind of expected Curve to be terrible, some barely-above-average screenplay whose only redeeming quality was a prominent senior role for Clint Eastwood. But boy was I wrong.  Curve is almost textbook in how to write a screenplay.  I’ll get more into that in a sec, but right now, here’s the breakdown.

Senior citizen Gus Lobel is baseball scouting royalty.  Credentials?  Oh, he only found Hank Aaron.  And he was the guy who scouted Micky Mantle and bet his career he would become a hall-of-famer, something many people ignored, only to find out 30 years later how wrong they were.

But Gus is also a stubborn crotchety old fuck.  And he doesn’t listen to many people besides himself.  So nowadays, with all these fancy-schmancy computers coming around, detailing RBIs and OBPs and OBGYNs, giving new scouts a whole new arena to judge baseball players on, Gus is insistent that none of that shit does anything.

Which is why the upper levels of the team he’s working for, the Atlanta Braves, are starting to have questions about if Gus is stuck in the dinosaur ages.  Sure he knows his stuff, but as one executive points out, “Nobody cares who scouted Hank Aaron anymore.”

But that’s only the beginning of Gus’ problems.  Gus is also losing his eyesight.  He’s had to rearrange his entire apartment, in fact, so that he doesn’t randomly bump into furniture.  Because Gus is so stubborn, he’s in denial about this, but he’s going to have to figure it out fast.  The team is sending him out to scout Bo Gentry, an 18 year old phenom who’s projected to be the next Mark McGuire.

Across town, we’re introduced to Gus’ 30-something daughter, Mickey.  Yes, Mickey was named after Mickey Mantel, even though she’s a girl.  That right there shows you what Gus’ priorities are.  It’s baseball first – daughter second.  And that isn’t lost on Mickey, who loves her dad more than anything, but when you show up for family dinner only to find out you’ll be watching a 3 hour baseball game…well…EVERY SINGLE TIME, you begin to hate baseball more than hell.

But when Mickey catches on to her father’s eyesight problems, she worries for him, and imposes herself on his latest roadtrip, something he’s vehemently opposed to.  But as he follows Bo Gentry from game to game, he realizes it’s impossible for him to SEE whether this guy is the real deal or not.  And that means he has to depend on his daughter, a girl he groomed to love baseball when she was growing up, but who hates it now, to save him.  In the strangest of ways, this dependency brings them together in a way no other experience could.

Okay, to start things off, let me reiterate that you should NEVER TRY TO SELL A SPORTS SCRIPT that isn’t based on a true story (or novel) unless it’s a boxing script or a comedy.  Trouble With The Curve is the rare exception to the rule, although I will say that when this exception comes around, it’s usually with a baseball script.

Okay, now on to the script itself.  The writing here is amazing!  And I don’t mean it’s beautiful to read.  I don’t mean the prose makes my heart sing.  That’s not what a good screenplay should do.  When I say the writing is amazing, I mean that every sentence is carved down to only its bare essence, only the words we need to know, and nothing more.

I bring this up because of a couple of scripts I read recently.  The first was a confusing mess and a big reason for that was that there were too many words.   The writer kept tripping over himself because he was constantly navigating through a sea of alphabetical albatrosses.  He was trying to be too clever by half when he should’ve stuck with the “half,” as that’s how many words you should be shooting for when you’re writing screenplays.

I also compare it to tomorrow’s script, which is well-written and clear, but every page feels like it’s taking twice as long to get through because of the extra verbiage.  This kind of writing gets exhausting to read.  I mean, I’m enjoying the script because it’s an interesting mystery (I’m not finished yet), but I find it hard to get through because of that excessiveness. And I’m not even talking like HUGE BIG PARAGRAPH CHUNKS here.  It’s more that the simplest sentences, something like, “He darts over to the phone,” become, “He peers at the surrounding walls, which seem to be closing in on him, then darts to the phone across the room.”  It’s twice or three times as much reading as the reader needs to be doing.

But what I really liked about this script was the character work, and more specifically the relationship work.  It’s simple but clever, and very well done.  You have a man who thinks a sport is more important than his daughter, who must now depend on that daughter to save his position in the sport, even though she hates the sport because of him.  I don’t know if you can come up with a more beautifully constructed triangle of conflict.  Watching Gus start to reluctantly rely on his daughter, and the ironic way in which that brings them closer – it was perfect.

I could go on about this script.  It’s just really well done.  I don’t know if it’s Oscar worthy. That’ll depend on if it’s directed well.  But the foundation is definitely there.  This one surprised me!

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

What I learned:  Let me tell you when I knew I was dealing with a professional here, and not an amateur, or one of these pros who got lucky and cheated their way into the system.  The stakes and the deadlines.  Only the good writers know to contain their screenplays with them.  First, the end of Gus’ contract is coming up (deadline).  So if he doesn’t prove his worth with this prospect, he loses his job (stakes).  Then there’s Mickey, who just got a job at a prestigious law firm.  Now she has to go on this trip with Gus.  They’re upset and tell her, “That’s fine, but you need to be back to meet with the client by Thursday. (deadline)”  The implication is, “If you screw this up, we’re letting you go (stakes).”  From there, we keep cutting back to the Atlanta Braves’ offices, where the club’s brass are pushing harder and harder to eliminate Gus if he screws this up (raising stakes).  Stakes and deadlines need to be everywhere in your script.  They’re the plot mechanics that keep your audience invested in the story.