As I continue to read tons of amateur screenplays for my consulting services, I’ve noticed that I continue to give one note again and again. That note is, “Take a risk!” Take a risk SOMEWHERE in your screenplay. Because if you don’t take any risks at all, it’s very hard to write a screenplay that people actually remember.
Risks are scary. If I were to assess where I went wrong as a screenwriter, a lack of risk-taking would be up there near the top of the list. I can write you the most technically proficient screenplay that you’ve ever read. But without any risks taken, that’s all it would be.
Sometimes readers of this site erroneously assume that I’m Mr. Follow The Rules. And if you don’t follow the rules, that I believe it’s impossible to write a good screenplay. Well, I’m Mr. Follow The Rules with one major caveat. I want you to take at least one big risk in your script. Because that’s what’s going to bring your script alive.
But telling someone to take a risk is a weak note because what is a risk? Does anyone know how to break the word down into actionable tasks you can actually implement?
Yes.
I do.
Risk-taking breaks down into five distinct categories. I’m sure there are a few more. But these are the main ones. They are…
Concept
Plot
Character
Perspective
Time
Concept – Concept is picking a movie idea that is challenging just through its concept alone.
Plot – Something BIG happens in your plot that’s completely surprising and sets the story onto a previously unexpected path.
Character – You do something with one of your key characters that’s very risky. Something most movies wouldn’t do.
Perspective – The perspective from which you tell your story. Make it a little different, a little unexpected.
Time – Playing with time in such a way that challenges the story and challenges the audience.
Recently, I’ve been watching this show on Hulu called Fleishman is In Trouble. It’s about a New York doctor in his 30s, Toby, who’s in the midst of a divorce and, one weekend, when he’s taking care of the kids, his wife doesn’t show up to pick them up. She’s pretty much disappeared. We then spend the episodes bouncing back and forth in time, learning about how Toby met his wife and how they got to this point.
The show often contains narration by a third character, Libby, who is a former friend of Toby’s. She’s the one who takes us through Toby and his wife’s past and how they got to this point in their marriage.
So, in the case of Fleishman is in Trouble, the show is taking two of the six risks. First, the perspective. We’re not in some standard CW high school show where we dutifully see the story through each of the four main characters’ eyes, jumping back and forth between them in a very traditional 1-hour drama way. Instead, we’ve got Libby equal parts shot-putting and dragging us through this complicated relationship. The choice to make this random third character our narrator is definitely a big risk.
The other risk is Time. We’re jumping all over the place here. We’re in the present. We’re a year ago. We’re fifteen years ago. We’re five years ago. We’re never on this straight-forward linear path. That’s a risk.
Go watch an episode and see for yourself. The show doesn’t feel like other shows out there. And that’s because it’s taking two of the six risks!
In order to make this all a little bit clearer for you, here are five movies that took risks in each of the five categories.
Title: Parasite
Risk Type: Plot
Parasite was already a good movie before the big plot risk it took. This story about a family infiltrating another family’s home was one of the most entertaining commentaries on the disparity between the rich and the poor that we’ve ever seen. But the midpoint twist of there being an unknown basement in the home where another character was living, one who was even poorer than our protagonist family, elevated the film into an all-time classic.
Title: Marcel The Shell With Shoes On
Risk Type: Perspective
If you haven’t seen Marcel The Shell, it’s an animated film (for the most part) about a shell who’s living in this AirBnB house. The big risk the writers made was to tell the story in documentary style. This was a particularly risky choice due to the fact that animated films just don’t ever do documentary style. Which is a good lesson to internalize. Some risks are riskier than others. And this was definitely a huge one.
Title: Red Rocket
Risk Type: Character
One of my favorite movies from a couple of years ago, Red Rocket, follows a character, Mikey, a former porn star who’s been forced to move back to his tiny Texas town. Mikey starts dating a teenager who works at a local donut shop. The reason I liked this movie so much was because it was the biggest risk-taking character movie of that year. Sean Baker, the writer, made Mikey extremely likable. And you’re not supposed to do that in a story like this. And it made for a very complex viewing experience where you were constantly battling with how you felt versus how you were supposed to feel. And it was amazing for that very reason. I hold this movie up in the pantheon of how to take a big risk with a character.
Title: 1917
Risk Type: Time
When I say the words, “World War 1 movie,” what comes to mind? I’m guessing long-drawn out narratives about soldiers on the front lines for months if not years, and then coming home and dealing with the PTSD of war and not being able to re-integrate into society. Boring s—t, right? 1917 erased all that with one simple risk-taking choice. It made a World War 1 film real-time. Boom. Just like that, you have the most original World War 1 movie ever made.
Title: A Quiet Place
Risk Type: Concept
A Quiet Place did something very similar for the horror genre. It came up with a concept where nobody can speak. This instantly turned the movie into a silent film. That’s a pretty darn big risk. A major studio budgeted and promoted a horror film that was silent? Risks don’t get much bigger than that.
So I’m sure plenty of you are wondering, “Do you HAVE to take a risk?” The answer is no. You don’t have to. There are plenty of movies, with scripts, that didn’t take much of a risk at all. John Wick comes to mind. Top Gun Maverick. Black Widow. Free Guy. Knives Out. These are movies that know their lane and stay squarely inside of it.
But, here’s the thing. When you write a screenplay, you are now competing for readers’ interest. And readers read a lot of stuff. They see the same stories over and over again. The same characters. The same tropes. So, while it is possible to write this perfect version of a basic story, you can kind of hack the system with one big risky swing (assuming it pays off).
Uncut Gems is a huge character risk. We’re rooting for a truly despicable man. Barbarian took a plot risk. After that captivating opening, it jumped to a completely different character and now we don’t know where the script is going. Everything Everywhere All At Once, I believe, takes risks in all five categories. Which is why the movie is so beloved by the film community.
Risks are just like a lot of tools in screenwriting. You have to decide whether you want to use them or not. I can tell you, from personal experience, that when a writer a takes a big risk, that screenplay is always more memorable than the scripts that didn’t take a risk. Even if the risk doesn’t work.
So go out there and put your testicular fortitude on the line and take a risk in your screenplay. Something tells me it’s going to pay off.
Today’s script JUST SET THE BAR for 2023!!!
Genre: Sci-Fi Comedy
Premise: A low-level worker on a spaceship run by a dark god must steal the most powerful weapon in the universe to save his workplace crush.
About: This script finished Top 10 on last year’s Black List. The writer has a lot of credits in the animated kids TV space. He wrote on such shows as Monsters at Work and Vampirina. Which, after you read this review, is going to be beyond shocking.
Writer: Travis Braun
Details: 97 pages
This has Holland written all over it!
You are about to experience something so rare that you may not know what to do with yourself afterwards. The rumors are true. You’re about to read a glowing review of a Black List script.
This is no ordinary script. This isn’t graded on a curve to adjust for the current level of the Black List. This is a legit awesome script. I don’t know who this writer is. I don’t know where he came from. But if he doesn’t get snatched up by the Marvel universe by the end of this weekend, I’ll be shocked.
24 year old Charlie was delivering a package when earth was invaded and aliens either killed or enslaved everyone. Charlie is one of the enslaved. He lives on a Death Star like ship that travels around the galaxy, destroying planets.
The ship is run by a terrifying alien named Morticus. Morticus is the embodiment of evil. All he cares about is killing. The only reason Charlie, the other humans, or the other enslaved aliens on the ship, aren’t dead, is because he needs people to keep the ship running.
Charlie spends most of his time cleaning up weapons that have just been discarded during battles. This place is like the Wild West. If the guards aren’t killing you, another slave is. This is Charlie’s every single day. It is pure misery. He has no reason to live. The only reason he doesn’t kill himself is because he’s too much of a wimp to.
Then one day, he gets a message on his food ration plate. It says, simply, “Have fun.” Perplexed, Charlie looks to see who wrote the message, and sees Emma. Charlie is instantly smitten.
He writes her back a message, and the two continue to go about their days, stealing glances and smiles, but never actually talking to each other because if you talk to other people, they kill you.
For once, Charlie has a reason to be alive. And boy is he happy about it. (Spoiler) That is until Morticus comes down from his tower, finds out Emma was planning to escape, and takes his scepter and thrashes it into her, making her die the most horrible death imaginable.
Now, Charlie is even more devastated than he was before he knew Emma! His life truly sucks. That is until he hears a rumor that Morticus’s scepter has the power to bring people back alive. For the first time since he’s been on this hellscape, Charlie is going to rock the boat. He’s going to travel to Morticus’s tower, steal his scepter, and reanimate his girlfriend!
This.
Script.
Was.
Bonkers.
Good.
There’s so much bonkers good here, I don’t know where to start.
You read ten scripts in a row that are all somewhere between bad and average and you start to think that a) nobody knows how to write anymore. b) your standards have gotten too high, or c) some combination of the two.
But then a script like this comes along and reminds you that there is still good writing out there! Which means we have another script to place in the ‘good script’ archives to learn from.
First, I’ll start with the writing. It was so light and clever and effortless. It was such a joy to read. I know that’s cliche. But it really was. I found myself not just looking forward to plot beats, but looking forward to actual line descriptions. Which is crazy. Cause that never happens.
I mean how great is this line: “Charlie and Sodros enter the vast throne room. It’s cold and empty, no doubt a design choice to match Morticus’ soul.” Despite what one of the commenters here will say via a 750 word essay about why this isn’t a clever or good line, trust me, it is. I’ve read everything. I read anything. Nobody writes lines this effortlessly funny like this. It’s super rare. And Braun somehow keeps it up the whole script.
I mean check out this description of the ship: “A massive engine of intergalactic evil.” I don’t know many writers who can capture the essence of an object inside such a concise simple line with the kind panache that Braun does here.
And it’s just fun. The line is fun. The story is fun. Everything here is fun. Here’s a quick dialogue exchange.
HAYNES: C’mon man. I’m your bestie. I can practically tell everything you’re thinking.
CHARLIE: You’re a telepath.
HAYNES: That’s fair. But if I wasn’t, I’d like to think our connection was such that I could still tell.
Now if it was just about the description and dialogue, that wouldn’t be enough for me. It’s the way the story is told as well. This is a writer who understands the craft. For example, Charlie’s job is to clean weapons. Weapons are used non-stop on this ship because all anybody does here is kill. The script lures us into that reality without us really thinking about it. Then, when Charlie finally decides to do something and re-animate his girlfriend, guess who has access to a bunch of weapons in order to do so?
You can always tell seasoned writers because they’re great with setups and payoffs.
But probably the thing that I liked about this script the most and what really separated Braun’s script from all the others is his dedication to turning moments on their head end not giving you what you expect.
For example, we’ve got Charlie and Emma flirting from afar with the kind of sexual tension that, if converted into raw energy, could power a mid-size country. Braun builds that up to crazy levels over the course of 15 pages. Then there’s a big dust-up and several creatures are killed. Charlie and Emma are order to transfer the dead aliens’ armor and weapons down to another floor.
The two wheel the armor into an elevator, and it’s the first time they’ve ever been alone together. As soon as the doors close, Emma says, “I think we have about ninety seconds.” “Yeah,” Charlie replies. “We should use it wisely,” she says. “Totally.” I think you know where this is going.
One of the biggest teaching tools out there for screenwriters is measuring what you would write versus what a great screenwriter would write. I can honestly say that, 99% of the time, the weak screenwriter writes what you expect. This is why only 1% break through. Because those are the screenwriters who think differently. They’re the ones who come up with the moments that the audience couldn’t have come up with themselves.
So when you look at the above scene that I set up, where they’re in the elevator together, I’m guessing 99% of you assumed that we would then cut to them having sex. Or cut to the end of the elevator ride, the doors opening, and them looking disheveled, clearly just having had sex.
Guess what?
That’s not what happened. And if you would’ve written that, you would’ve lost the game of screenwriting. Because EVERYBODY would’ve written that. The accountant in the back of the theater who’s never written so much as essay in his life would’ve come up with that reveal.
Instead, after their little exchange, we smash cut to them each wearing the alien armor, swords raised and they proceed to play fight with it.
It’s such a clever cut that you can’t help but smile. But, more importantly, it displays pro-writer behavior. Which is to ask what the audience expects and then make sure to give them something different.
This happens repeatedly throughout the script.
Later on, Charlie, while sneaking around trying to get to Morticus, gets stuck in a fuel pipe, and is all of a sudden sucked deep into this thing by fuel, and will for sure drown. Except, at the last second, he gets yanked out of this thing by a cool Oscar Isaac like character named Ignacio. Ignacio is this bada$$ who’s been living here in the front of the ship, using his awesomeness to survive. We immediately love the guy.
Him and Charlie get to chatting and I’m all psyched about how Charlie is going to team up with this dude and they’re going to save Emma’s life together. That is until Ignacio confides that he’s heartless and only cares about himself. Charlie says, “No you’re not. You saved me.” And Ignacio’s entire persona flips on a dime. He replies, “Who says I saved you?”
All of a sudden, straps whip around Charlie’s arms and legs, tying him to the chair. Ignacio then says he’s sorry but he’s got to kill Charlie and sell him off for food pound by pound, cause human flesh is worth a lot around here.
Braun had me hook, line, and sinker. He set up the Ignacio character so well that I never in a million years thought he was a bad guy. But, again, this is what good writers do. They lead the reader towards a conclusion they’re sure of, then repeatedly pull the rug out from under them.
On a slightly different topic, today’s script is the perfect comparison piece to yesterday’s script. You may be saying, “Carson, are you insane? Yesterday’s script was set on earth and followed a depressed pregnant pizza deliver girl struggling to accept whether she would be a good mother or not. What does that have to do with running around a spaceship trying to reanimate the love of your life?”
Quite a bit, actually.
You see, movies are great at exploring universal themes, the things we all experience in life. But they’re not good at doing that LITERALLY. They’re much more effective when you find larger-than-life stories in larger-than-life genres that explore those same themes on a much larger tapestry.
Dying For You is about depression just like Pizza Girl is about depression.
The difference is, the depression is explored on a much bigger canvas, which allows us to actually be entertained while we’re exploring that theme. Writers make the mistake of thinking that if they’re very literal and show dying and crying and drug addiction and daddy hit me exactly how they happen, that we’ll eat it up. But if you show that exactly the way it happens in the real world, there’s a good chance we’re going to be bored and miss the point.
That doesn’t happen in a movie like Dying For You. This is a story about a guy who has zero reason to live. He’s a slave on a spaceship where everything is designed to kill you. The love of his life was killed in front of him. His baseline is depression. But because we get these fun exchanges between him and friend. Because we get this exciting adventure where he goes off and gets in all these battles and chases – we’re actually entertained. And because we’re entertained, we’re more present – WHICH ALLOWS US TO FEEL THE DEPRESSION MORE INTENSELY.
Let me summarize that: “If we’re more present, we care more about what’s happening. Which means we feel your emotional beats more effectively.”
Now, I can already hear some of you rolling your eyes. “So I should never write a drama Carson? What about Lost In Translation? What about Good Will Hunting? Those weren’t great movies that made us feel for the characters?”
That’s not what I’m saying. I’m saying that as an unknown screenwriter trying to capture a reader – or even as a professional writer trying to bring in a real audience to his movie – you’re much better off looking for a larger-than-life setup to explore universal themes than you are doing it literally via a drama.
There’s a version of Everything Everywhere All At Once that doesn’t have multi-verses. That’s just about an Asian family that a mother has checked out of. The Daniels could’ve written that movie. And guess how many people would’ve seen it? Hold up both your hands, fingers extended, then lower three of those fingers. Count the rest. That’s how many people would’ve gone to see that movie.
I’m getting off-track here.
The point is, this is a great script. It’s honestly everything a spec screenplay should be. It’s got a big fun premise. It’s got a likable main character. It’s written in a fun, effortless manner with tons of white on the page. The dialogue is funny. The writer is constantly surprising us. The mythology is great. This is it, man. This script IS screenwriting.
All Hail Morticus.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[x] impressive (Top 25!)
[ ] genius
What I learned: This script reminded me that when you create a scenario where two people can’t be around each other (in this case Charlie and Emma), every single moment they do get together is CHARGED. When these two were around each other, I can’t remember a time where a scene between romantic interests felt so big and important.
Genre: Drama
Premise: A pregnant pizza delivery girl becomes infatuated with a customer, a mother desperately trying to raise a son on her own.
About: This script finished top 5 on last year’s Black List. The writer is very new and green. She has one produced credit, writing an episode of Law and Order: Organized Crime.
Writer: Jean Kyoung Frazier
Details: 101 pages
Nayah Damasen for Pizza Girl?
I’ve been seeing some gabbing in the comment section about nepotism. I know that Franklin Leonard, the creator of the Black List, is a rampant hater of all things nepotistic. So his list is, basically, a compilation of anti-nepotistic entries. I think the scary question to ask – and one a lot of people are afraid of – is, “What does this anti-nepotism get us?” Cause, for the last few years, it doesn’t look like it’s gotten us a whole lot. Let’s hope Pizza Girl changes that.
Pizza Girl is half-Korean, 18, and pregnant. She works at a pizza joint called Eddie’s with her best friend, Darryl, a young black man who seems to be in constant drama with his many boyfriends.
Pizza Girl has a boring life. She doesn’t like her mom or her (Pizza Girl’s) boyfriend, Billy, because they’re disproportionately in love with the baby she’s about to bring into the world. Billy wants nothing more than to be a father which is exactly why Pizza Girl is disgusted by him.
I’ll tell you who Pizza Girl does like though. A random woman who calls in and asks Pizza Girl to go buy pickles and add them to her pepperoni pizza. She has never met this woman yet loves her more than the man who impregnated her.
She delivers the pickle pizza to Jenny, a 38 year old woman who lives in a nice neighborhood in town. Her and her 8 year old son have recently moved back to CA and her son hasn’t been eating. Pickle pizza is the last hope to get him to nourish himself. Which is where the unique order comes from.
Thus begins a plot-averse character journey where Pizza Girl becomes more and more obsessed with Jenny, to the point where when she’s having sex with Billy, she imagines Jenny in order to orgasm.
We’re never quite sure why she likes Jenny so much but I think it’s because Jenny is a mother and is doing such a good job loving her child. So maybe that means Pizza Girl, who’s not exactly thrilled to be a future mom, can overcome that issue and be like Jenny. Whether that actually happens or not, however, we’ll have to see.
It actually took me a while to understand what this script was. I went in expecting a 2023 version of Juno. But this definitely isn’t that. What I liked about Juno was that it had something to say. The movie was about a young girl making a very adult decision and navigating all the complexities of managing that decision.
I was 50 pages into Pizza Girl and I couldn’t figure out what it was about. If you had forced me to come up with a brief summary, I would’ve said something to the effect of, “It’s about a really depressed pregnant girl who likes one of her pizza delivery customers for reasons that aren’t entirely clear.”
That doesn’t exactly have the same punch as Juno.
But somewhere between pages 50-60, I started to realize the script was about depression and the fear of being a mother. Which is a noble topic to take on. However, it’s one of the harder subject matters to explore. Because 99% of moviegoers go to movies to escape their own feelings of aimlessness and depression. They want to forget that for two hours.
At our core, we are a feel-good industry in a feel-bad world.
Which puts Pizza Girl into that specialty market where the prime consumers are critics and cinephiles – the moviegoers who watch everything and are, therefore, bored, by those dopamine distilleries known as Hollywood flicks.
But that market isn’t easy to thrive in. If anything, it’s harder than the mainstream stuff. Because it’s such a tiny slice of the movie business and the people you’re writing to are extremely discerning. These are expert moviegoers and they’ll demand a lot more from you because of it.
So, when you’re writing a script like this, one that treats jokes like lepers, the two things you absolutely must get right are: we have to want to root for the main character. And we have to be captivated by the story’s central relationship.
Unfortunately, the script fails on the first front. Pizza Girl is not likable. She seems to hate her boyfriend and mom, despite them being super loving and supportive. She drinks all the time, despite being pregnant. She becomes infatuated with this other person for reasons that the reader doesn’t understand (she literally falls for the woman off her initial phone call, before she’s even met her??).
As I’ve said many times before, it’s impossible to win over a reader if they don’t like your main character. And that’s where I was with Pizza Girl. Despite her awesome name, she was impossible to get behind.
Now, the relationship with Jenny was a different story. That had me kind of intrigued. Jenny was a bit of an enigma so I was curious what was going on with her. Why was she a single mother? Where was the dad? How did she live in a nice neighborhood when it didn’t look like she had a job? So whenever Pizza Girl would go to her place, I noticed I was a lot more interested in the script.
But a lot of this was offset by the overwhelmingly depressing tone that I could never get past. All of us writers are feelers. We feel deeply, especially when we’re down. But you have to be careful to separate the feeler in you from the storyteller in you. Let the feeler feel. But, in the end, the storyteller has to steer the ship. He has to come up with the most entertaining scenes, the most entertaining plot points, the most entertaining characters. If you leave the feeler in charge, especially if you’re writing a movie about depression, it’s going to be a big fat drag.
Juno says so much more about pregnancy than this script and it’s because Diablo Cody prioritized storytelling over feels. She made her main character likable. She went out of her way to make the dialogue entertaining. Her plot points (like the husband crossing the line with Juno) were all interesting.
And she was still able to get that shot of depression in there through the character of Vanessa, the wife desperate to have a child.
Like a lot of Black List scripts, Pizza Girl has some strong pieces to it. But the overall experience feels uneven and too depressing. I think I understood what the writer was trying to do but was just never able to get past that down feeling the story gave me.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: You can explore depression without making every single beat of your story depressing (Skeleton Twins). Just like you can explore humor without making every single beat of your story funny (Tom Hank’s Punchline). I think it’s dangerous if you explore depression as a subject matter by only showing depression. We feel an emotion the greatest when we can contrast it against the opposite emotion. And I never saw the opposite emotion in Pizza Girl.
What I learned 2: Be careful not to confuse the reader with contradictory elements. In this script we see Pizza Girl constantly ignoring Billy’s calls. Then, when she sleeps with him at night, she kisses him desperately, clinging to him with all she’s got. So does she like Billy or doesn’t she? Jenny lives in a rich neighborhood but in a poor house. Is she well off or isn’t she? Pizza Girl wears her lack of ambition like a badge of honor. She’s also mad that Billy doesn’t have any ambition. Does Pizza Girl value ambition or doesn’t she? I think some writers believe these contrasts make their story more complex. But, more often than not, they just confuse the reader.
Genre: Post-Apocalypse/Zombie
Premise: Set 20 years after a zombie outbreak, an alcoholic teams up with a young girl to find his brother.
About: I have not seen HBO go more all-in on a new show, maybe, ever. They have been promoting the heck out of this thing. As a point of reference, they didn’t tell anyone The White Lotus Season 1 was coming. They just dumped that on the service. For this, they’re blanketing every real, virtual, and conceptual space with ads for THE LAST OF US. Which indicates to me that they think they have something great on their hands. The show is spearheaded by Chernobyl’s showrunner, Craig Maizen. As well as Neil Druckman, who wrote all the video games the show is based on. It stars Pedro Pascal. They’re hoping this is the next big pop culture hit. With a 96% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, it just might be.
Pilot Writers: Craig Maizen and Neil Druckman
Details: about an hour long
Okay, just to give you some backstory here.
I’ve never gotten more recommendations to play a video game then I’ve gotten to play this one. Tons of people have told me to play it.
I think that’s because this is supposed to have the best story to a video game ever. So, obviously, that intrigues someone like me, who loves storytelling in all its forms. I don’t care if it’s a script, a book, a short story, a poem, a video game, an oral recounting – if it’s a good story, I want to hear it.
Funny enough, when I heard that a Last of Us project was in development, I decided not to play the game. Cause I figured: I’ll just watch the story instead! I won’t have to have put forth any effort. Little did I know it would take ten years for me to see a Last of Us show. But better late than never.
The Last of Us starts in 2003 for some odd reason. That’s when the worldwide plague hits. Joel Miller, who seems to be some small-town worker guy, is a single parent to his tween daughter, Sarah. Sarah is sweeter than a brownie sundae which means her lifespan is probably the same as the time it takes for that ice cream to melt.
When zombies start popping up like a whack-a-mole game, Joel, Sarah, and Joel’s brother, Tommy, make a run for it. But the army moves in and shoots Sarah dead. We then cut to 20 years later, aka, 2023, and the world looks a lot different. Our story is focused on a walled-in version of Boston that can best be described as, The Town Where Nobody Showers.
It’s here where we go from exciting story to Setup City. We start meeting characters, fast and furious, and hear about something called “FEDRA,” which I think is the current national government. A lot of people living in this quasi-Boston town, including a now gray-haired Joel, are part of a rebellion trying to take FEDRA down.
This Boston place is pretty brutal, by the way. When a poor little feral kid comes in from the outside, they take him in, tell him he’s going to be just fine, then EUTHANIZE THE MOTHERF—-ER. And they don’t even get canceled for it! This is a very different 2023 than I’m used to.
The story shifts to focus on the rebellion crew, who I think Joel is a part of. It’s a little confusing. The crew is obsessed with this teenaged girl named Ellie, who they are both intrigued and terrified by. We get the sense that Ellie may be special. When the rebellion’s current mission falls apart, they call on Joel, his girlfriend, and Ellie, to go outside the walls and grab them some drugs. Or weapons. Or both. Again, it’s a little confusing.
But off they go!
There are so many interesting storylines here.
It’s inspiring to see a video game writer upgrade to a huge Hollywood project. That almost never happens and says a lot about the value of writing a great story in the video game universe, as opposed to what normally happens, which is that the story is the least important thing to game developers.
You’ve also got this show trying to exist in a space that is, arguably, beyond dead. No pun intended. The Walking Dead has done everything within their power to suck the last millimeters of life out of the melodramatic zombie genre, leaving no other avenues to tread. How do you come into that space and bring a fresh perspective?
Then you have the video game curse itself. Video games never make good adaptations. Mainly because video games are about interacting and their stories are conceived for such. TV is a passive viewing experience and requires a completely different approach.
So what does this all add up to?
Well, the opening 20 minutes of the show are amazing. I was already dusting off the “genius” stamp, which has been packed away in the back of my closet. When things start going south and they have to escape town? There was some A-grade studio-level production value. I was on the edge of my seat. And then we get that whopper of a shocker where Sarah’s killed. Oof! That was one hell of a first act.
But there was definitely a shifting of the gears once we jumped to 2023. We started bouncing around to a lot of different people – probably too quickly. I wasn’t really getting to know them. I wasn’t caring about them. Which was surprising because the opening of the show does such a great job setting up the characters.
When you’re writing a pilot, the bulk of your focus should be on creating the best characters possible. Cause we’re going to have to watch these characters over the course of 60 episodes. So, if you lose that battle of creating strong characters in your pilot, your show is dead before it’s even started.
Another high profile show that came out last year – La Brea – It pretty much got every single character wrong. And the show was dead from that point forward. It had no hope.
So it was good to see that we got Joel down. I’m onboard with him. I like the brother (who, by the way, played the most recent Terminator). I think I like Ellie. I’m still trying to figure her out. I don’t really like this girlfriend character (who, by the way, was the lead in Fringe). So I guess I’ve got one foot in and one foot out right now.
I know that when a pilot ends, I need to be dying to see the next episode. I was not dying to see this next episode. It didn’t even have a good cliffhanger. They just panned up to a night shot of a dilapidated city. I don’t know about you but that seems mighty unimaginative to me.
I’m not even clear what the overall hook of this show is. I think in Walking Dead, Rick had to find his family? I guess Joel is looking for his brother here but it’s not nearly as compelling because his brother isn’t lost due to the apocalypse. He’s been doing just fine for 20 years. He only recently hasn’t come back to town. Is that a big enough hook to keep watching?
There’s a minor twist where we find out Ellie might be sort of infected but not really? So maybe she’s the secret to the cure? Didn’t Walking Dead do that like a dozen times during its run?
I don’t know, guys. I was hoping for a lot more. There’s some fun stuff if your’e paying attention, like the opening nod to Dawn of the Dead. But it’s far from must-see television. And since that’s what it wants to be, it’s got a higher bar to clear. At least for its pilot, it came up short of that bar.
[ ] What the hell did I just watch?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[x] worth the stream
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: The opening of the pilot went full exposition mode, as newscasters debate what it would take to create a worldwide zombie pandemic. Unknown screenwriters can’t do this. Not enough is happening to keep the reader reading. Maizen can do it because he knows the show will be on television no matter what. So he can open with a guy taking a ten minute nap if he wants to. But you can’t. You have to write a scene more like the opening of Dawn of the Dead, which had a similar exposition first act, but then the news station starts violently falling apart in the wake of the zombie uprising.
Also, does Carson actually know what he’s talking about?
It’s time for me to cash those receipts. The problem is, I don’t know if the receipts will support my claims or refute them. I guess we’re going to find out together. That’s because today, I go through the last ten movie releases that I’ve done script reviews for.
The idea is to see if my assessment of the script was a proper indication of how the movie would perform. Now performance is a relative term. That’s what she said. And also what I said. That’s because certain movies get 100 million dollar advertising campaigns and others get 5 million dollar advertising campaigns.
We can’t compare those films on numbers alone. It has to be relative to the movie’s budget and marketing campaign. In order to provide more clarity, then, we’re going to look at the critical score (RT) and also the audience score (RT). If two out of the three of these numbers support my initial script rating, I consider my assessment of the script correct.
Although we can’t completely dismiss how the pandemic skewed these numbers, I stayed away from any movie released in 2020.
Okay, are we ready to see how right I was? Or how wrong?
Let’s do it!
BABYLON
Original Script Rating: What the hell did I just read?
Domestic: $13m
Worldwide: $13m
Rotten Tomatoes Critic Score: 55%
Rotten Tomatoes Audience Score: 51%
Breakdown: I knew this script was an utter disaster 30 pages in. If they would’ve stayed at the party the entire movie, maybe this movie would’ve had a chance, since, at least then, it would’ve been focused. But the second that party ends and we enter into this elongated nonsensical rant of a narrative, every ten pages was a million times worse than the previous ten pages. I call these movies, “The Big Swing,” because directors make them when they have a lot of heat and they can get anything made and so they make their weirdest most precious screenplay. And, unfortunately, these movies are often better in their heads than in reality. We saw this with Southland Tales, Under The Silver Lake, Bardo, Babylon, and the upcoming Beau is Afraid. “B” seems to be a common letter in a lot of these films. Bablyon is the biggest loser of all because Paramount put a giant marketing campaign into this, hoped it was going to be an Oscar contender, and instead it was a big incomprehensible mess.
Conclusion: Carson knew exactly what he was talking about
Original Script Rating: Impressive
Domestic: $8m
Worldwide: $8m
Rotten Tomatoes Critic Score: 65%
Rotten Tomatoes Audience Score: 91%
Breakdown: How’s the old saying go? You win some, you lose some. Looks like I lost this one. There’s no other way to look at it than to call this film a failure. It started out so positively, with Brendan Frasier getting 9 day standing ovation at the World Festival. When I reviewed the script, the one thing I was worried about was how small the movie was. It was a guy in his apartment. Now, unlike a lot of contained movies, this one was well-motivated. It was contained to one space because the main character was 600 pounds and couldn’t move. But I think, ultimately, that killed the movie cause it’s really hard to make non-genre contained movies entertaining for 100 minutes. If you don’t have murders or killer zombies outside trying to break in, where is the entertainment factor coming from? Maybe I was a little blinded by what Aronofsky would do with this. But, it the end, I have to take the L. This one I was wrong about.
Conclusion: Carson didn’t know what he was talking about
Original Script Rating: wasn’t for me
Domestic: $45m
Worldwide: $87m
Rotten Tomatoes Critic Score: 39%
Rotten Tomatoes Audience Score: 74%
Breakdown: Man, what a s—t show this project turned out to be. I’m not sure we’ll ever know what fully happened – if Harry Styles spat on Chris Pine. But I do know this. A script will tell you a ton about a movie. And this script had all the earmarks of a failed production. The story was too darn thin. And you might say, yeah, so then go rewrite it. Well, when something is this thin, a few rewrites is not going to do the job. It’ll fill in some of the gaps. But it won’t fill in all of them. And you could see that in the finished product. Things kind of connected. But not really. What was that plane doing in the sky? Who knows? It may be fun to write “mystery plane flies through sky” in a late-night writing sesh. But then you actually have to explain what it is at some point. The numbers on this film represent EXACTLY what that original script score indicated. The numbers aren’t disastrous. But they aren’t good. This project may have been cursed. But the real issue was probably buying a script and then not identifying how to fix it.
Conclusion: Carson knew exactly what he was talking about
Original Script Rating: Impressive
Domestic: $37m
Worldwide: $87m
Rotten Tomatoes Critic Score: 89%
Rotten Tomatoes Audience Score: 76%
Breakdown: I was going to declare this one a definitive win for Team Scriptshadow until I saw the budget. It cost 30 million to make this film. I thought it cost half that. Making 37 million at the box office on a 30 million dollar budget is not that impressive. With that said, I think most people consider this film a mild success. It got some pretty good buzz going for a concept that nobody had ever done before. That’s not easy to pull off. It got a really high RT score. And it did well worldwide for a movie that wasn’t an action or superhero flick. I felt the movie was a perfect adaptation of the script. The casting was great. Most everyone I know who’s seen the movie liked it. This wasn’t a runaway success but it definitely made a mark.
Conclusion: Carson pretty much knew what he was talking about
Original Script Rating: wasn’t for me
Domestic: 148
Worldwide: 401
Rotten Tomatoes Critic Score: 41
Rotten Tomatoes Audience Score: 90
Breakdown: These are probably the hardest movies to judge on the page because they’re so action-oriented and action doesn’t work nearly as well on the page as it does on the screen. I know that I did like that opening crazy set piece in the script, though. But, after that, there was a lack of elegance to the proceedings. It just seemed generic and dumb. Was the movie ultimately successful? I’m not sure it was, despite what Sony will tell you. It had a 120 million dollar budget and only made 148 domestic. That’s not a great number. The critical score was weak. And the audience score is most likely due to how likable the two leads – Wahlberg and Holland – are. Everybody likes those two. So I’m going to go ahead and chalk this up to me being right.
Conclusion: Carson pretty much knew what he was talking about
Original Script Rating: wasn’t for me
Domestic: $11m
Worldwide: $13m
Rotten Tomatoes Critic Score: 86%
Rotten Tomatoes Audience Score: 69%
Breakdown: I thought this was one of the thinnest concepts I’ve ever come across. And the script was one of the most basic obvious executions of that concept you can imagine. It was basically like an adult game of tag with the lights off. That should’ve been the title actually: Adult Game of Tag With The Lights Off. I later found out that the script had been written by the original short story author and she’d never written a script before. So they brought a real writer in to improve it. Which may explain why the film was a hit with critics. I will say that I could see talent and vision from the director in the trailer. That probably helped as well. I don’t know if you’d call this movie a hit, though. I know it got a little buzz. But I’m not sure 11 million is a good enough haul to call this movie a success. Which means, once again, I was correct!
Conclusion: Carson pretty much knew what he was talking about
Original Script Rating: Double-Impressive
Domestic: $22m
Worldwide: $52m
Rotten Tomatoes Critic Score: 68%
Rotten Tomatoes Audience Score: 88%
Breakdown: Just when I reach the top, they pull me back down again. I can’t escape this one. I thought this script was excellent. It was one of the best action thrillers I’ve ever read. But let’s be honest. The movie massively underperformed. In retrospect, you can kind of see why. It was posing as a big movie when, in reality, it was a medium one. You can see 15 ambulance chases in a Transformers movie alone. Why would you pay the exact same money for no Transformers and just the ambulance chase? I will say that I’m on record worrying about Bay as the director. Bay’s style is so well known that I was afraid it was just going to look like all the rest of his movies and not be able to differentiate itself. I also don’t like Bay’s weak attention span, which results in his movies moving too fast at times. But I’m making excuses. This one’s another L for me. I got it wrong.
Conclusion: Carson didn’t know what he was talking about
THE BLACK PHONE (review in newsletter)
Original Script Rating: double worth the read
Domestic: $90m
Worldwide: $161m
Rotten Tomatoes Critic Score: 83%
Rotten Tomatoes Audience Score: 88%
Breakdown: This may be the most low-key movie success story of the year. I saw very few stories about The Black Phone on the internet, and yet it made 90 million dollars. Which is incredible. It also scored well with critics and audiences. This analysis is a bit of a cheat since I read the short story and not the script (which was reviewed in my newsletter). But even then, you could just tell that the movie was going to work. You had two strong elements adding value to the story – the serial killer and the ghost phone. You’re always looking for a fresh angle in the serial killer genre and you’re always looking for a fresh angle in the horror genre. Hill said, “What if I just combine the two?” It turned out to be a genius move.
Conclusion: Carson very much knew what he was talking about
THE UNBEARABLE WEIGHT OF MASSIVE TALENT
Original Script Rating: double worth the read
Domestic: $20m
Worldwide: $29m
Rotten Tomatoes Critic Score: 87%
Rotten Tomatoes Audience Score: 87%
Breakdown: This script was one of a thousand that tries to get on the Black List with that well-known gag of using a real-life actor and placing them in the story. It just so happened that this script *did* make the Black List. And the actor actually agreed to be in it! Unfortunately, The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent is a minor failure. Almost everyone I know who saw it, liked it. But the industry was hoping for a lot more from this film. This was supposed to make Nicholas Cage a big star again. The film is a good example of where most movies end up, which is somewhere in that middle space. Not a big hit. Not a big failure. For that reason, I consider my assessment an incorrect one.
Conclusion: Carson didn’t really know what he was talking about
Original Script Rating: worth the read
Domestic: $101m
Worldwide: $239m
Rotten Tomatoes Critic Score: 54%
Rotten Tomatoes Audience Score: 76%
Conclusion: I had to double check my research here. Bullet Train crossed 100 million dollars at the box office?? Good for them! Bullet Train got a pretty bum rap when it first came out. But it ended up doing fairly well. From the moment I read the script, I pegged this as a movie that was right down the middle. It wasn’t going to cause any massive opinions one way or the other. And that was the problem with it. It was just kind of bland. Which is yet another reminder that scripts don’t lie. If they’re telling you, “This is average,” you don’t want to go make that movie hoping to fix that averageness in the production. It’s not going to happen. You gotta fix it in the script.
Conclusion: Carson very much knew what he was talking about
So what’s the tally? Carson knew what he was talking about with 7 out of the 10 screenplays. Which means, guess what? THE SCRIPT MATTERS FOLKS. You can tell when a script is going to result in a good movie and when it isn’t. And the thing is, I’m no one special. I’m guessing anyone here who read these scripts probably saw the same thing. If you have a script and there’s something that’s nagging you about it, there’s likely something to that. Address the issue and get it fixed. Then, and only then, are you going to make a great movie.
SCRIPT CONSULTATION DISCOUNT 100! – I’ve got a couple of screenplay consultation slots open. If you’re interested, e-mail me with the subject line, “100,” and I’ll take $100 off my regular rate. If you’ve never had notes from a professional before, I would strongly recommend taking this opportunity to do so. I can help you identify and fix things in your writing that would otherwise take you years to learn on your own. Not to mention, elevate your current script. So if you want to get a consult, e-mail me at carsonreeves1@gmail.com. I do features, pilots, first acts, short films, loglines, whatever you need me for!
