A 10 Year American Pie reunion? How bout a 50 year American Pie Reunion! Winter’s Discontent is American Pie spiked with Viagra.

Genre: Comedy
Premise: (from Black List) When Herb Winter’s wife of fifty years dies, the faithful but sexually frustrated widower moves into a retirement community to start living the swinging single life.
About: For a script that was so well received and for a writer this good, I find it strange that we haven’t heard more from Paul Fruchbom since 2008, when Winter’s Discontent finished #7 on the Black List. He does seem to be developing another property with Columbia, the same studio that bought Winter’s, called “Career Counselors,” but very little is known about it.Winter’s Discontent occasionally pops its head up into my Top 25.  I originally read it 3 years ago but this is the first time it’s being reviewed.
Writer: Paul Fruchbom
Details: 105 pages – 2009 draft (This is an early draft of the script. The situations, characters, and plot may change significantly by the time the film is released. This is not a definitive statement about the project, but rather an analysis of this unique draft as it pertains to the craft of screenwriting).

There are so many professional comedy writers who don’t know how to write that when one comes along who actually does, I’m not sure the industry knows what to do with him. When I say “don’t know how to write,” what I mean is, they can obviously construct a joke, but they lack the skills to create a compelling structured story with three dimensional characters.

Winter’s Discontent is one of the few outrageous comedies I’ve read that still has heart and an actual structure to it. I mean just the fact that the writer starts out with an ironic premise should tell you he’s ahead of most of his peers. Senior citizens in an old folks home who only care about getting laid. It’s the exact opposite of what we expect an old folks home to be like (Never forget! The best comedy premises tend to be ironic!).

Anyway, Herb Winters, a 75-year-old retiree, has just lost his wife of 50 years. I think this is the moment where I officially fell in love with Winter’s Discontent. I was expecting some sappy on-the-nose funeral scene. Instead, the service is interrupted by Herb’s voice over as he explains how psyched he is that his wife’s dead. I sat up and took notice. Hmm, I thought, that’s not what I was expecting.

For example, at the wake, we get this gem: “God, I hate this fucking house. Look at that wallpaper. Ellen loved that wallpaper. She must’ve been retarded.” This is followed by someone offering their condolences: “I’m sorry for your loss.” Herb replies, via voice over, “Loss? If you want to talk about loss, let’s talk about that piano. It hasn’t been touched in 30 years. It has a lot in common with my balls.”

And that’s the real issue here. Herb’s wife stopped having sex with him a long time ago. The man has simply forgotten what it’s like to be a sexually active male. And now that his wife is finally dead, he can find out what that feels like again.

So Herb grabs his best friend, Jules (a “Jewish Mr. Rogers.” Talk about a great description!), and the two head off to Spruce Gardens, a popular old folks home. The plan is to have sex with as many women as possible there. And when they arrive, it looks like that’s exactly what’s going to happen. The women outnumber the men 2 to 1 in this place and they’re all raring to go!

But just when things look like heaven, hell shows up. In the form of Mike Miller. He’s tan. He’s good-looking. But worst of all, HE’S IN HIS 60s! That’s like cheating in this place. And boy does Mike take advantage of it. Every single woman here wants the young meat and poor Herb and his buddies become wallflowers as a result.

As if getting laid wasn’t tough enough, Herb starts falling for one of his 50 year old nurses, Kate. Nabbing that kind of prime filet is going to take a lot more than funny jokes. It’s going to take a time machine.

In the meantime, Herb’s friendship with Jules starts to fray over Herb getting over Ellen so quickly. There seems to be something deeper going on here, to the point where the lifelong friends break up. Kate puts the kybosh on him as well once she realizes what he’s up to. And Mike somehow makes every single woman at Spruce Gardens unavailable. Herb’s dream trip to Spruce Gardens has officially become a nightmare!

I think one of the reasons this script brings a smile to our faces is that it faces a scary situation, one nobody likes to talk about, and has fun with it. We’re not used to laughing about death, yet this script makes it easy to do. There’s something refreshing about that. It’s almost like the script itself becomes a sympathetic character.

From a technical perspective, the script is both traditional and non-traditional. The goal is clear – to get laid. But the stakes are dependent on our character’s conviction. Herb doesn’t really lose anything if he fails, but he so intensely wants his goal (your character should always desperately want his goal!!!) that we do feel like he loses something if he doesn’t get it.

However, there really isn’t any urgency here. There’s no time limit on this goal. But here’s why I don’t think it matters. Fruchbom did a great job always keeping his characters focused on an immediate goal. Either they were trying to have sex with one of the women. They were getting sex lesson to update their moves. Herb was teaching Kate piano so he could get closer to her. If you can keep those smaller goals coming one after another, the reader doesn’t have time to notice that there isn’t a ticking time bomb in the story. It’s when there are large gaps between those goals that the reader starts checking the page count.

Also, when you’re writing a comedy, you want the humor to be PREMISE-SPECIFIC. That means all the humor should stem from your premise. This is a movie about old people desperate to have sex. So you have these nice little gems like Mike Miller being able to drive at night (which means he has the advantage of going on night dates with all the women – something unheard of to the rest of the seniors).

Fruchbom also creates a scenario where if a woman dies during sex, the man involved is blacklisted by the rest of the women. So Herb and crew set up this plan to get Mike to have sex with the most frail likely-to-die woman at Spruce Gardens. If he kills her, he’ll get blacklisted, and they’re all back in the game again. The key here is that the humor is *based on the premise*. It wouldn’t be as funny, for example, if they tried to murder Mike to get him out of the picture. Murder is boring. You can find murder in any movie. You can’t find men sacrificing an 80 year old woman so they can get laid again.  That’s premise-specific.

I know why, despite how well-written it is, “Winter’s” has had trouble getting laid (oops, I mean “made”). Studios only put out these senior citizen flicks once every blue moon. But of all of the geriatric projects floating out there, this script is clearly the best of the bunch. Personally I think it would be a huge hit, but then again I’m not the one who has to put up the money. I hope this finds its way to production at some point though because I believe Paul Fruchbom needs to be in charge of more comedies in Hollywood.

[ ] Wait for the rewrite
[ ] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[x] impressive
[ ] genius

What I learned: The success of this script reminded me how important it is to think outside the box with your comedy idea. So many writers focus on that comedy sweet spot of a 30 year old male caught up in some crazy situation. And I understand it. That’s where all the bankable comics are. But if you want to stand out, think outside the box a little. Look for ideas outside the sweet spot. We saw it with the success of this script and we saw it recently on the big screen with the success of Bridesmaids.

Allan Loeb embodies the dream scenario for any screenwriter.  Well, sorta.  After having inconsistent success in Hollywood for awhile, he fought through a crippling gambling addiction that nearly sent his life spiraling out of control. He eventually recovered, writing two scripts, The Only Living Boy In New York and Things We Lost In The Fire, that finished Top 4 on the inaugural Black List in 2005.  The buzz around those scripts began an insane hot streak for Loeb, who sold six projects in a single year. He’s since went on to write many movies, including 21, Wall Street 2, and Just Go With It.  In addition to feature writing, he has moved into TV producing, and is looking to have the same success in that medium.

SS: I originally heard it took you 12 years to finally sell something. Is that accurate? Can you tell us how you fought through that and were able to keep writing?

AL: I actually sold a pitch my fifth year writing, then a script two years later (guild minimum) and another (guild min again) a few years after that. So my career has actually been lived in three stages, five years of total rejection, about six or so of being on the bottom rung as a “baby writer” and finally eight years now of success. I didn’t actually fight through it, I — more or less — avoided the scary real world by doing the only thing I felt comfort in doing… making shit up.

SS: What did you do to pay the rent and what do you suggest other writers do job-wise to pay their rent yet still have time to work on their writing?

AL: I’m reluctant to say how I paid the rent for fear some of your readers may try it. It wasn’t smart and it should’ve ended in disaster. I gambled, day traded, ran through an inheritance and lived off credit cards. I sold my car in 2002 to pay rent and spent two years walking/taking the bus in LA. I sold an X-Box to a UCLA college student in 2005 for $90 and signed at CAA a week later. If I didn’t sign there or sell Only Living Boy shortly after… that $90 would’ve been my net worth.

SS: There seem to be levels for a writer. There’s the “get noticed with a good script” level. There’s the “get an agent level.” There’s the “sell your first script level.” Those are the levels I’m familiar with. What levels come after that? How many are there?

AL: There are so many levels after that. Most people are so consumed with the initial three that they never consider all the rungs in the middle. I’d say after “sell your first script” there’s the “do the rounds around town and get these people to like you” level. Then there’s the “get a job or sell something to them” level.

Then comes the most important level of all… “DELIVER!” This involves making your partners (producer, studio, director, movie star) feel heard and happy without compromising the quality of your work and your voice. It’s extremely delicate and challenging and if you can do it… you’ll work for a long time. It’s my opinion that most writers get spit out of the business at this level by the way.

From there the result in the market place matters. So the levels are “the box office gross level” and the “critical acclaim level” I have failed up at this level many times (but fortunately succeeded a bit too) and it’s extremely painful.

SS: My favorite script of yours is “The Only Living Boy In New York.” What inspired that script for you and when am I finally going to get to see it?

AL: I wanted to write my version of my favorite movie “The Graduate” with kind of a “Manhattan” love-letter to New York flourish to it. I went to New York in 2004, leased a loft for the summer with no air conditioning, cable or internet. The shower was a big sink I had to climb into. I just read everything I could about the city, met some really cool New Yorkers, partied till morning on the Lower East Side and somehow came back to LA with that script.

I’m hoping you’ll see it soon… it has new life to it that may finally get it made. Stay tuned.

SS: “Things We Lost In The Fire” was an independent movie script. But I remember it was very celebrated at the time. Without getting into specifics, can you sell those types of scripts for a lot of money or is every independent script more likely to result in a small sale?

AL: You can sell dramas like Things We Lost but you really need big talent attached. What drove that sale for me was Sam Mendes and his sway at Dreamworks. Sam loved the script and at first wanted to direct it. (He ended up producing it with me) 

SS: Can you take us through the specific process that led to Things We Lost In The Fire being found, bought, and ultimately made? It’s always fun to know the details of how these things come about.

AL: I gave it to my agents on Friday. Sam had read it and was attached by Monday. Dreamworks paid me a lot of money for it with-in a week. I’ll give credit where credit is due… CAA.

SS: When you first break out as a screenwriter, you’re the new guy and everybody wants to meet you and know what else you have and if there’s some way you can work together. What can you tell us, from your experience after your break out, as far as what opportunities came up and how future screenwriters should handle that situation should they break in? Should they be taking advantage of every opportunity and trying to sell every pitch they can because they’re hot, or should they just focus on meeting people and developing relationships?

AL: Yes, yes and yes. This is such an important part of the business. It’s as important as the words on the page. Connect with these people you’re meeting on a human level. See what movies they love and where your tastes align. Get their email addresses and follow up and update them to what you’re doing… stay on their radar.

Most of them are smart, most of them are perfectly nice, most of them want to make good movies… they are not the enemy. If they believe in you, if they genuinely like you, if they think you’re going to make a good partner… they will stop at nothing to pay you real money to make shit up on a computer (while drinking coffee in between naps.)

SS: What do you think is the toughest thing about screenwriting?

AL: Handing the shit in.

SS: I’d love to get two pieces of advice from you. First, what’s the most important lesson you learned about the craft of screenwriting? And second, what’s the most important lesson you learned about the business side of screenwriting?

AL: The most important thing about the craft… economy/befriend the reader.

Say it with economy… don’t over describe. They get it. They’re reading quickly. They want to know what happens next. They don’t give a shit about most of the things you think they do… they just want to know what happens next.

The most important thing about the business… fun, enjoyable collaboration/be a pro.

Be open, be collaborative, they’re your partners, this is not poetry or Ibsen… it’s a business and you’re building a product with a team of people. Have fun, don’t freak out and be open to what your partners need or they will find someone else. Now you have to do that without totally killing your voice and particular story and that’s the dance… that’s where the game gets really fragile and difficult. You have to defend what makes this story great and make them happy. You have to play offense and defense… you can’t win by just playing one.

And it’s critical to be a pro. Hit every deadline, be calm, be available, be Kevin Durant at the foul line, don’t be an emotional basket case. You’re their doctor. Be their doctor… don’t be their frantic child.

SS: Now I don’t know this from any personal experience but I’ve heard that once you have a couple of hit movies, people just throw gobs of money at you to write their screenplays. I imagine that presents some dilemmas for you. Like getting offered, say, a million dollars to write something big and marketable yet artistically unfulfilling, and $250,000 to write something smaller and less marketable but very artistically fulfilling. Have you been in that situation before and how do you handle it?

AL: This is an issue for many writers but not for me so much. I’m a lover of movies of all genres and I write in all genres. I’m not precious and I see as much merit in a big rom-com as I do in a Terrence Malick film. There’s something for everybody and people simply get too judgmental when it comes to what stories they believe people should be told. It becomes a personal thing. I’m lucky that I get as excited about a big commercial idea as I do a small character piece… they’re just two different types of food to me. One is not inherently better than the other. I’m just as proud of “Just Go With it” as I am about “Things We Lost” — who’s to say which has more merit? To me… that’s arrogance.

So I can cash a big check and be fulfilled at the same time… I guess that’s called being a hack :)

SS: Having spent that early part of your career struggling for so long, what advice can you give writers from that experience so that they don’t make the same mistakes that you did, and can break out sooner?

AL: Don’t chase the market. Work on your specific voice and not what you think they want. Keep your day job.

Don’t get to the point where you’re selling your X-Box to a UCLA kid because getting lucky from under that stupidity only happens once and I already cashed that chip.

SS: Now I know you do a lot of assignment work. Are you able to still find time to write your own material? Are you still putting your own specs out there? What are you working on now?

AL: It’s a good question. I don’t spec. I’m transitioning a bit into writing a script a year for me and seeing where the chips fall but it’s been hard. I truly love what I do and most of that is incoming work.

I’m currently rewriting an action movie for Universal, finishing up a baseball comedy for Disney and working on a pilot for 20th/NBC.

Writer of one of my Top 25 favorite screenplays takes a few moments to share his experiences with Scriptshadow Nation.

Brian Duffield shot onto the scene with his Black List script, “Your Bridesmaid Is A Bitch,” about a young man who must endure a wedding weekend around his ex-girlfriend, who he’s still trying to get over.  Since then, he’s sold two screenplays, “Worst Honeymoon Ever” and “Jane Got A Gun.” I think you guys will enjoy this interview because, as you’ll find out, Brian broke in purely on talent, not because he was best friends with Steven Spielberg or something. Follow Brian on Twitter @BrianDuffield or check out his blog.

How did you get into screenwriting? Was it completely independent of what you were doing before or had you done other types of writing as well? 

I was a big pop culture geek growing up in Pennsylvania, and when I was nine my family moved to middle-of-nowhere Ireland. I remember our tiny school had some movie novelizations and, since we lived nowhere near a movie theatre, those more or less became my movie substitute. I think when I was around fourteen or fifteen I knew I wanted to be a writer and had the massive revelation that scripts were much shorter than novels, plus they would be turned into movies. That sounded pretty awesome to me, and I haven’t grown out of it yet. I really don’t have anything to fall back on besides prostitution, so fingers crossed I don’t have to grow out of it anytime soon.

When you first started, was it easier than you expected or more difficult? What was the most difficult thing about the craft for you in those early days?

I don’t ever remember writing screenplays being “difficult,” but it took years and years before it seemed like something that could potentially be a real career instead of something I dreamed of doing but didn’t actually think could happen, like going to Mars or working at Jurassic Park.

The most difficult thing about starting to write screenplays is that I just had no idea how to do it. I think it’s safe to say I was the only person I knew who wanted to be a screenwriter until I went to college. I didn’t have any screenwriting books, but I remember when people started uploading classic scripts onto html and txt back in the day. It was better than Christmas. By the time I got to college I had a lot of unique writing habits that came out of teaching myself what I thought a screenplay should be like.

I was also obsessed with Jeff Goldsmith’s Q+A’s with screenwriters that he’d put on iTunes – I’m not sure when he started putting those out, but I honestly found those more educational and helpful than college. He’s not even paying me to say that. I think a big part of that was just hearing the voices and stories of real screenwriters. It made the career less of a fantasy and more of a possibility.

After how many scripts did you start to feel like you had a grip on screenwriting? Was it “Your Bridesmaid Is A Bitch,” or was it a script before that? What would you say was that “ah-ha” moment that got you over the hump?

I’m still not sure I feel like I have a grip on screenwriting. I feel like I’m getting better at it in general but I’m constantly terrified everything I write is garbage. I think the first time I felt really proud of something I wrote was in college when I wrote a man-in-suit monster movie about mankind’s need for a god, and I think the reason that one clicked for me was because I realized pretty early on that no one else would probably think to tackle these questions I had about faith with dudes in giant monster suits beating the crap out of each other. That was a pretty big moment for me, because I think I finally understood that even if what I had to say was completely idiotic, there probably weren’t too many other writers out there that would say it like I would.
I think YBIAB was something like my tenth script. It was the first one people paid attention to and I haven’t really shown the earlier scripts to anyone in LA. They served their purpose and I’m proud of them but I’m more interested in what I’m going to write next than rewriting some lousy script I wrote when I was 18.

Many writers want to know if they should write something personal to them and not worry about its marketability, or write something marketable, even if their heart and soul isn’t as into it. Which one of those was “Your Bridesmaid Is A Bitch,” and what’s your opinion on the matter? 

For my specs, I don’t really see any reason why personal and marketable can’t go hand in hand. I just read this amazing quote by Jonatham Lethem which went “every book is an inadvertent journal” and I think that (should be) exactly true for screenwriting as well. I also just really wanted to be cool and drop a quote in this interview.

I think there’s a lot of really good screenwriters who reveal nothing about themselves in their movies, and I think you can tell instantly who that may or may not be when reading their script. Personally, I’d always like to err on the exposing too much side of things, because as a viewer/reader those are the movies I latch on to the most. I think some of the greatest blockbusters of all time are also some of the most personal movies ever made. There’s no reason why you can’t do both. I know a lot of people say they hate “Hollywood” movies, but I think what they mean is they hate bad Hollywood movies, in the same way they’d probably hate bad indie movies. The difference being bad indie movies generally never get seen by anyone.

I can source every script I’ve ever written to a particular feeling I was struggling with or issue I was trying to sort out in brain. And when you make those personal problems a character’s problem, just take all the stakes they’d be going through as far as they possibly could go. For “YBIAB,” I think it came out of a) a string of really terrible relationships, b) everyone getting married around me and c) perpetually being afraid to see an ex at a wedding. I don’t really see how I write scripts to be any less biographical than how Taylor Swift writes songs about all the boys she’s angry at, except sometimes I add explosions and dinosaurs. Which Taylor Swift should really do as well.

How did all of this lead to you finding your manager and agent? Were you sending out naked query letters? Did you build up contacts, one of which finally got a script of yours to someone important? How did that happen?

The space between getting a manager, an agent, and selling YBIAB was probably about two weeks long. It was October and I was working at a clothing factory in Vernon, CA and I wasn’t actively sending the script out anywhere. I had worked a string of typical crappy assistant jobs and had reached my breaking point, so I was just trying to regroup and work with people that smiled and shit like that and I didn’t really care that I was “outside” of Hollywood at the time.

I had finished YBIAB the previous December and shown it to some of the industry people I knew and nothing had come of it. I had given it to some pals of mine out here and one of them, a Mr. Matt Downing, gave it to a friend of his he played basketball with who worked at Circle of Confusion. I’m not really sure what the time gap was between Matt giving it to Zach (Cox, now my manager) and Zach reaching out to me. But eventually I met with Zach, Noah Rosen and David Engle at Circle of Confusion and they said they wanted to manage me and try to sell the script. And I thought that sounded cool since I was working at a clothing factory in Vernon, and they then sold it a week or two later. I got my agents (Devra Lieb and Bayard Maybank at Gersh) around the time it sold. I got really lucky because my managers and agents are about as far from being douche bags as possible.

You’ve had a few sales now and a few scripts on the Black List. In your experience, what’s the determining factor that leads to a script sale? What should other writers be focusing on? 

I feel like every week my opinion on this changes. Look, a lot of amazing scripts never sell and a lot of horrible ones do. It’s just the nature of Hollywood. At this point, I try to just write the best script I can and as soon as I turn it in, I try to pour all my energy into the next one. Possibly because I’m a neurotic pessimist, I just assume none of my scripts will sell. If I had to tell other writers going through the spec market how to handle it, I’d just say to ignore it as much as possible.

You work in comedy, which is the most competitive genre on the spec market. In your opinion, what’s the most important thing about making a comedy script work? 

For me, probably the fact that I’ve never thought of myself as a comedy writer. I think my last spec, “Jane Got A Gun,” is relatively unfunny. For “YBIAB” I never sat down and thought “time to write a rom-com” and I honestly don’t know if I’ll ever write another straight forward rom-com again. I kind of viewed YBIAB as a horror film because at the time it was literally one of the scariest ideas I’ve ever had. I also thought of it like a war film, because whenever I had been cheated on in the past it felt like I was suddenly plunged into a battle with some other dude who had spent all this time building his defenses and arsenal, while I was just flailing about. Noah, the lead character, never realizes he’s in a romance or a comedy, and I think that’s the key. He really just wants to survive this wedding. He’s not looking for love and he’s not trying to make anyone laugh. I’m not really sure I ever thought any particular scene had to be funny. I remember watching “The 25th Hour” a night or two after getting dumped and when Ed Norton has his big “Fuck You New York!” scene, it really affected me because I felt the exact same way, just about a girl. I wanted to include that in YBIAB not because it was funny but because it’s the farthest thing from funny to Noah and those feelings felt honest to me.

I think, in short, break-ups are the funniest thing ever in hindsight and the least funny thing ever when you’re in the middle of them.

I’ve never been too married to genre conventions. Some of my favorite movies are absolutely hilarious but you’d never find them in the comedy section, and vice versa. I think it changes from project to project. I know I tune out when characters act like they’re in a comedy and they’re begging for you to laugh at them, so I try to avoid that as often as possible.

Comedies and romantic comedies usually require a likable main character. How conscious are you of creating a “likable” hero or do you not pay attention to that stuff? Are there any instances in “Bridesmaid” you can point to where you’d say, “I deliberately wrote this scene so that you’d like my main character?”

I don’t necessarily agree that characters need to be likable, I think they just need to be watchable.

With YBIAB though I thought it was important that the reader is rooting for Noah. A dick being upset over getting cheated on isn’t very watchable. Before he gets to the wedding, I wanted to show that even though he was hurting, he was still doing the best he could. He loved his family, had friends that cared for him and most of all, he didn’t want to be depressed and hung up on this girl anymore. He was doing everything he could to be better and be a better person. He wasn’t lounging around being depressed – he was out in the world, he was working out, he was going on dates, he even moved to a new city – but he was just stuck. I think that feeling of being stuck is pretty relatable. Or at least I hope it is and I’m not the only weirdo that’s felt like that before.

I wanted to establish all of this because I knew how easy it would be for him to just become a whiny little bitch boy, and I knew how easy it would be to lose the entire female audience if this depressed asshole kept calling this girl who left him for a better man a bitch.

What’s your approach to structure? Are you a traditionalist or do you not think about 3 acts when you’re writing? Some people like to be as specific as breaking down their screenplay into 20 or so “beats.” What’s your method? 

I’m staunchly against Blake Snyder type beat sheets and ordering out pages for scenes. I used to write outlines and found that once I got into the script writing I would want to break from the guideline 100% of the time. For me, those outlines really restricted my creative freedom and from letting the characters lead. I know that sounds douchey, but I think a lot of the fun in writing specs for me is just letting them evolve and change.
I think the best argument I have for this is the fact that my last spec, “Jane Got A Gun,” started out as a modern day reluctant road trip movie between two guys. And now it’s a western with a female lead. I realized while I was working on my thoughts or beats for the project that the story I was trying to tell was much more interesting from the woman’s point of view, and once I knew that I tried to figure out what setting her character would be the most affective and interesting in. If I had blocked myself into a rigid outline I never would have felt I had the freedom to go as far off track as I did. The most outlining I wound up doing on that script was a series of post-it notes on my wall so I could keep track of everyone I had shot.

For studios/assignments outlines and structures like that are vital, because it’s so much more of a team effort than specs. With my specs, I never show anyone anything until I’ve done a draft that I’m proud of. It gives me the freedom to be a moron and it’s both the most frustrating and exciting part of writing for me.

I was a script reader for a few years and I found that I never gave a crap about people’s structure, I just cared when a) something was terrible and b) something was boring. At the end of the day, that’s really all anyone cares about. Just figure out what works best for you.

Did you ever enter screenwriting contests? If so, how did your scripts do? What’s your opinion on entering contests overall?

I submitted a couple times when I was in college. I think I got some honorable mentions or quarter final shout outs a few times. The best thing that happened through those is that it helped convince me that I wasn’t the worst writer of all time. I don’t see anything wrong with submitting to them, as long as if you don’t put too much stock in their opinion of what you write.

I’m sure with your recent success, you’re taking a lot of meetings around town. For future writers, what should they be prepared for in these meetings? What is it they should be looking to get out of them? 

Be prepared for everything. I’ve made some really close friends out of general meetings, and I’ve had some bizarre generals where I’m 99% sure they hate everything I’ve written. Sometimes people have really cool ideas to pitch you and sometimes they’re really horrible and you have to fake enthusiasm. When I started out a year ago I was terrified all day every day because it’s like going to a dateapalooza (I’ve never been, I’m just guessing, I swear) and I’m typically pretty shy. But for the most part, they’re meeting you because they liked what you wrote, and they’re looking to start a relationship with you. I think going on generals has forced me to come out of my shell a lot more, which probably isn’t a bad thing.

If you could go back in time and do it over again, what would you have changed as a screenwriter to accelerate your success? 

I honestly have no idea. I’m sure there are some things I could have done differently, or done better, but I’m thankful that it happened at all so I’m not going to nitpick too much. If present me could time travel back to crying-in-the-shower-because-I-kept-get-cheated-on past me and tell him that it was all just research for the first script I would sell, I would probably do that.

The Captain America screenwriters tackle the Cold War with this 2009 Black List screenplay

Genre: Spy/Romance
Premise: (from the Black List) Two spies fall in love while participating in separate Cold War missions in Prague during the 1980s.
About: This finished in the middle of the pack of the 2009 Black List. Markus and McFeely, the writers, have a list of impressive credits on their resume which include all three Chronicles of Narnia films and, most recently, Captain America.
Writers: Christopher Markus & Stephen McFeely (based on the short story by Arthur Phillips)
Details: 123 pages – May 14th, 2009 – 2nd draft (This is an early draft of the script. The situations, characters, and plot may change significantly by the time the film is released. This is not a definitive statement about the project, but rather an analysis of this unique draft as it pertains to the craft of screenwriting).

Okay, I have a lot to say about this one but before I do, I’m going to put forth a theory on what I think went down. This is just a theory. I have no inside information. But it’s the only thing that makes sense. Especially because today’s writers are no slouches. You don’t get writing credit on some of the biggest movies of the year by being a hack.

Remember, almost all the money writers make in this business is from assignment work. For that reason, writers are forced to consistently take on material that isn’t very good. It’s sort of the same predicament non-A-List actors are in. Sure, they’d all love to be in the latest David Fincher or Quentin Tarantino movie, but only a few actors in the world are lucky enough to get those opportunities.

For those who don’t, they need to make a living. And that usually means, at least occasionally, being in Spieces 4: The Egg Layer. Especially if they’re willing to pay you a trunk full of cash to be in it.

That’s the big misperception about screenwriting – that it’s an all or nothing deal. You’re either Joe Nobody, or Dan Fogelman, making 2.5 million dollars per spec. I got news for you. There’s this whole area in between where writers are jockeying for position to get on any project that’s going to pay them money, regardless of whether the project’s any good or not.

I mean, if you were offered $200,000 to adapt some book you knew was terrible, would you do it? Of course you would.

I bring this up because this is the only way I can explain today’s screenplay. I’m guessing that the short story this script was based on was so boring that it had no hope of being turned into a good script. These writers did the best that they could, and delivered the best possible draft they could, but because the material was so devoid of story, the screenplay was doomed from the start. Let’s take a look at the plot, if that’s what you want to call it.

It’s the 1980s. 20-something Tyler Vanalden is working as a low level US official in Czechoslovakia. Tyler is sly. Tyler is charming. He’s a guy you’d want to hang out with on a Friday night.

At the beginning of the story, he walks into a local bar and runs into Jarmila, a beautiful Czechoslovakian woman. He’s instantly smitten by her, or so it seems, and they start chatting. As we will later find out, Tyler is targeting this woman for possible information gathering. I think. Actually I have no idea because it was never adequately explained.

Eventually we realize that Jarmila holds a similar low level position at her country’s own information gathering agency. She, in fact, is targeting Tyler just like he’s targeting her. But what she doesn’t know is that Tyler knows she’s targeting him. I think. Maybe?

So as the two start a love affair – or “fake” love affair – Tyler starts feeding her enough low-level information to gain her trust. In the meantime, he’s also extracting information from her. Or at least, that’s what he tells his bosses. I personally never saw it. The only thing I ever heard them talking about was some boyfriend of hers that the script dedicates 50% of its time to even though we never meet the guy or understand what he has to do with anything. I wish I could wrap up this synopsis with some kind of definable climax but there really isn’t one. The two just keep talking the entire script in repetitive scene after repetitive scene until the screenplay runs out of pages.

Now it should be noted, this is a second draft. So you have to give the script some leniency. However, it’s the draft that made The Black List, which is why I’m reviewing it.

Okay, so, where to start here. This is actually a situation that *should* work for a movie. You have two spies, both hiding their identities from each other, who start falling in love. You have built-in dramatic irony, conflict, tension. So why doesn’t any of it work?

Simple. There aren’t any stakes! Not only are these two on the lowest rung of the ladder in their respective agencies, but absolutely nothing will happen to them if either of them get caught. Seriously, ask yourself, what happens if one of these two catches the other? I’m guessing they shrug their shoulders, smile, say “You got me,” and walk away.

This is a huge issue in a script like this. Stakes are everything. But what makes the script so bad is that the motivations are ALSO non-existent. We’re never sure why anybody is doing anything. What is it these two agents/agencies are trying to get from one another? We’re never told. So now you have no clear motivation and no clear stakes. That is a recipe for screenplay disaster.

The lack of these two critical components puts all of the focus squarely on the love story– on the interaction between the two leads. And that too is below average. Which means there’s nothing in this screenplay to get excited about.

The thing is, there’s potential for a story here somewhere. We find out near the end that this was all happening right before the fall of communism. But even though that information would’ve benefited the story greatly, nobody ever gives us a hint that it might happen.

Why not put the state of the entire Cold War on the shoulders of these two characters? Now you have stakes. Now their lies to one another actually mean something. Now lives are the line. Freedom is on the line. Nuclear war is on the line. Doesn’t that sound just a tad more exciting than the stakes of the current script –Jarmila’s husband being angry with her?

There were also a lot of confusing choices in the screenplay. For example, one of the Czechoslovakian agents is named Johnny 1950. No, you didn’t read that wrong. A Czech agent is named “Johnny 1950.” How does that even make sense? Wouldn’t that be like a CIA agent named Yvgengy 1812? I don’t know man, I just kept shaking my head during this script, wondering if it was some sort of joke.

And then people would say things that made no sense. Here’s a character line from after the Berlin Wall is torn down: “Look, our primary job now is to sift the fallout for gold. If the Communists bail, there are going to be a lot of spooks in the wind, and not all of them want to go house hunting in Moscow.” I don’t have any idea what that means.

I will throw up this disclaimer. I’m not the biggest spy movie fan. So I may have missed a lot of nuances here. And I had a similar reaction to that German film everybody loved, “The Lives Of Others,” so who knows? Maybe I just didn’t get it. But no matter how hard I try, I can’t find anything good about this screenplay. I don’t understand how it made the Black List. Maybe spy fans can enlighten me.

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

What I learned: “Love” cannot be the only thing at stake in your movie. There must be something bigger. If you look at another love story – Titanic – Rose deciding whether or not to be with Jack isn’t just about her. Her father left her family in a boatload of debt (no pun intended). For that reason, if Rose doesn’t marry Cal, she’s not just hurting herself, she’s hurting her mother, who will likely have to become a seamstress. And then, of course, there’s the whole second half of the movie, where the characters’ very lives are at stake. This was my issue with Wencesles Square. The only thing at stake was the characters’ feelings for one another. That can carry a small portion of the movie. But it can’t carry the whole thing.

There hasn’t been a good art heist screenplay in over a decade. Does The Fugitive screenwriter finally crack the code?

Genre: Action/Adventure/Heist
Premise: A pair of rival art thieves must team up to steal a Leonardo da Vinci painting that nobody knows exists.
About: This is a spec script written by David Twohy. Twohy is probably best known by today’s moviegoers as the writer of Pitch Black. But his most well-known work is, obviously, The Fugitive. Right now, Twohy is currently filming the new Riddick movie with Vin Diesel. If they’re filming the same script that I read, that one will go back to Pitch Black’s roots, keeping things simple (Riddick stalking a group of men on an isolated planet).
Writer: David Twohy
Details: 117 pages – April 16, 2011 draft (This is an early draft of the script. The situations, characters, and plot may change significantly by the time the film is released. This is not a definitive statement about the project, but rather an analysis of this unique draft as it pertains to the craft of screenwriting).

I kind of love David Twohy. How can I not. He wrote The Fugitive, the best thriller ever. He also penned one of the great sci-fi screenplays of all time with “Pitch Black.” Not only did it have one of the coolest central characters you’ve ever seen in a sci-fi film, but talk about a midpoint shift! An entire planet turning dark and billions of aliens shooting out of the planet’s core to feed on anything they can find!

Where I’m still smarting, however, is in Twohy’s last effort, The Perfect Getaway. That movie was awesome for about 90 minutes. And then……well, and then…the ending happened. The “big twist.” And oh boy was it not good. It was everything you don’t want your twist to be. Manufactured. Forced. Nonsensical. So while my love for Twohy still remains, I still haven’t gotten over that flick.

But I have good news. Twohy is back! And if The Leonardo Job turns out anything like the script, it’s going to be great.

Steve Styles is a gadget heister. He’s the kind of guy who will build a $50,000 mechanical dragonfly to scout out the room that houses the painting he’s about to steal. And that’s exactly how this movie begins, with Styles deftly using a number of gadgets to get into a museum and steal a 3 million dollar painting.

But as he’s speeding away in a getaway car, he’s unaware that a man on a sled is secretly breaking into his trunk, stealing the very painting he just stole…AT 65 MILES PER HOUR. When Styles figures this out, he knows exactly who’s responsible: Kofax.

Kofax is much older than Styles and doesn’t believe in gadgetry. He believes in good old-fashioned hard work. And this is just one of the many differences between these two rivals – art thieves who hate each other with every bone in their body.

After Kofax steals from the stealer, he learns of a big deal going down in Europe and so he flies there, where he eventually meets Gina, a woman who claims to know about a secret 23rd painting from Leonardo da Vinci. But this isn’t any ordinary painting. It’s a fresco. That means it’s the size of a giant wall. It’s also hidden behind another wall in a museum due to a misguided construction choice 500 hundreds years ago.

Kofax thinks the job is impossible (how do you even get behind a wall in an active museum?) and isn’t convinced that the painting exists anyway. So he’s out. Enter Styles, who’s eager to take on the challenge. But once Kofax realizes Styles is on, he wants back on too, and Gina’s solution is to have them work together.

Of course, since this is a Twohy script, there are lots of twists and turns along the way, and just when you think you know what’s going on, you realize you don’t. There is plenty of jockeying to figure out who here is telling the truth, who’s lying, who you can trust, who you can’t. In the end, someone’s going to end up with this painting – if it indeed exists. The question is…who?

Let’s start off with the obvious. This script is expertly written. This is what a script looks like from a seasoned professional who’s mastered his craft. Let me give you an example.

The movie starts out with an art heist. It’s a reasonably simplistic scene that we’ve seen many times before. It’s well written but nothing special. Yet here’s the difference. Most amateurs would stop there. They’ve written their opening heist scene. They’re done.

What makes Twohy different is that he’s not done. As Styles races away, we cut to somebody on a sled, picking the lock of the trunk. This surgeon of a man is about to lift the painting this guy just lifted. Now THAT’S something I’ve never seen before. In other words, the writer pushes himself to do something different – to do something fresh.

The next awesome choice Twohy makes is in the construction of the heist itself. Whenever you create a heist scenario, it’s imperative that you make the heist look impossible. If it doesn’t look impossible, then we’ll have no doubt our hero can pull it off. And if there’s no doubt, there’s no movie. The doubt is what creates the drama! So the more of it you can produce, the more exciting your movie will be.

Thirdly, Twohy creates a ton of conflict between the two main characters. No, we’re not talking Chris Tucker/Jackie Chan conflict here. Styles and Kofax have tons of history together and absolutely despise one another. They’ve stolen paintings from each other worth millions of dollars. So we have a real conflict and a real distrust between the two. That makes every scene between them fun.

On the flip side, there were a few things I didn’t like. One thing that always bothers me is when a writer starts the movie off with one character, then switches over to another character, who becomes our hero. The reason I don’t like that is because, mentally, I’m always waiting for that first character to come back and lead the story. He was introduced first, so naturally I assumed he was the hero.

So I kept waiting for Styles to reemerge, until, after 25 pages, I realized Kofax was the protagonist. Complicating this is that Kofax is introduced as the bad guy. He’s the one who stole the painting from the guy we liked. It would be like in Raiders, if after Belloq stole the idol Indy just secured from the cave, that we followed Belloq for the next half hour. Do we really want to follow him? Or do we want to follow the guy who stole the idol in the first place?

I admire that Twohy likes to explore the antihero (as he did with Riddick), but it threw me off guard as I wasn’t sure who I was supposed to be rooting for for the first 40 minutes.

Twohy also makes the questionable decision to bring in our villain late. I don’t think he shows up until page 75. This is something I tell writers to avoid if at all possible. Not only does the audience need someone to root against in these kinds of films, but it’s really hard to build up an entire bad guy with just 45 pages left in a screenplay. So I wish Twohy would’ve found a way to get him in earlier.

Still, Twohy is such a great screenwriter that even with these unconventional choices, he finds a way to make it work. And like I always say, you have to do something differently in your script or else it feels cookie-cutter, which can sometimes be worse than writing a straight up bad script. So in the end, this is definitely a script worth celebrating.

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

What I learned: To spice up a predictable scene, add a ticking time bomb. There’s a nifty little scene early in the movie where Styles is chasing Kofax after Kofax stole the painting Styles stole. Styles, in order to catch him, calls the On-star people on a fake police line, telling them that Kofax’s car is stolen. The Onstar people remotely turn Kofax’s car off, inadvertently stopping it in the middle of some train tracks. This allows Styles to confront Kofax, while in the distance, a train approaches. With the painting tucked into the trunk, neither of them will leave until it’s safely secured. – Notice how the ticking time bomb here adds tension to the scene. If Styles had simply run Kofax off the road, hopped out, and demanded the painting, there’s no “ticking time bomb,” there’s no reason to take care of things immediately. It might’ve been an okay scene. But it wouldn’t have been nearly the scene that’s in the script now. So add a ticking time bomb to your scenes to bring them alive (you’ll notice that we had a similar scene in The Fugitive – with Richard Kimble trying to get out of the bus before the train hit).