Genre: Period
Premise: The true story of the first and only African Samurai in feudal Japan who rose from being a slave for the Jesuits to fighting as a Samurai in the unification of Japan.
About: Screenwriter Stuart Paul sold this project to MGM back in 2019. He also sold a spec around that time called “Terminal Point,” to Universal. Don’t know what that one’s about but the title sounds cool so if you’ve got it, send it my way!
Writer: Stuart Paul
Details: 121 pages
Period pieces.
What happened to them!?
They used to be a Hollywood staple.
I’m guessing it’s Marvel’s fault. I mean, samurais used to be bada$$, right?! These days? They’re superheroes without powers. And who wants that?
Not to mention, period pieces require patience in a world that no longer has any. So that might be why it’s so hard to push these through the system these days. Let’s see if Stuart Paul’s period piece is good enough to get made.
It is the late 1500s. Iosufe, 25 years old, is minding his own business in his home country of Mozambique when Portuguese warriors swoop into his village and brutally slaughter everyone, including his two children. Iosufe is then separated from his wife and thrown on a boat, sent to far off lands to be a slave.
Eventually, he meets Valignano, a Spanish aristocrat who is spreading the word of God across the world. Valignano has never seen a man as enormous as Iosufe, and so makes him a de facto bodyguard. Through Valignano, Iosufe starts to become educated and cultured.
After many months, the two hop on a boat to the Far East. The last place to conquer for Christianity is Japan, so Valignano sails there and begins his mission. The only problem is that there’s this guy named Nobunaga who is trying to take Japan from the current Emperor. And if he becomes Emperor, he will likely put an end to Christianity.
So Valignano and Iosufe travel to his city to negotiate with him. When Nobunaga sees the physical specimen that is Iosufe, he becomes obsessed with him. Seeing this, Valignano gifts Iosufe to Nobunaga in the hopes of gaining political favor from him. For the time being, at least, Nobunaga promises not to take over Japan.
Nobunaga immediately calls for Iosufe to be trained in the ways of the samurai, something the rest of the samurai aren’t so keen on. But after several trials, Iosufe, who Nobunaga renames, “Yasuke,” (meaning, “Idiot”), becomes a samurai.
Nobunaga then brings his army to the last major opponent between him and the Emperor, where Yasuke proves his worth by leading the charge and taking over the city. But after he learns that the women and children of the village will be slaughtered, and he will lead it, he must ask the question, has he become the very man who destroyed his own life? With renewed purpose, he plans his escape in the hopes of finding his wife and reuniting with her.
When you write a script like this, there are two things you must get right.
- There must be sophistication to your writing.
- You must be entertaining.
By sophistication I mean you must have a deep knowledge of the subject matter. You must write with specificity. You must write with discipline. The dialogue has to sound like people speaking back during that time. And there’s no room for messiness. Yesterday’s script, the Michael Bay comedy biopic, had endless room for messiness. These scripts don’t tolerate it, though. They must possess a novel-like attention-to-detail.
Ironically, if a writer can excel at the first thing, they tend not to excel at the second one (write entertainingly). This is because the writers drawn to this subject matter prioritize authenticity so heavily that they forget it doesn’t matter unless the script is entertaining. They’d rather accurately describe the architecture of Rome than write a baller conflict-heavy dialogue scene between the hero and the villain.
Yasuke gets an 8 out of 10 in the sophistication department and a 6 out of 10 in the entertainment department. Which averages out to a solid 7 out of 10.
On the plus side, the writer gets the main character right. It’s hard not to root for someone whose kids are brutally murdered in front of him (and when I say brutally, I mean brutally), whose wive is taken away from him, and who becomes a slave. I mean, if you’re not rooting for Yasuke, there’s something wrong with you.
But then the script runs into a unique problem. Our main character has zero agency over his journey. He’s a slave. So he’s not making any decisions. He’s not being active. He’s just following others around and doing what they say. This makes for a frustrating reading experience because whenever a big moment arrives, it’s whoever’s leading Yasuke that makes the decision, while Yasuke just stands there and nods.
I suppose the argument against this is, “Well, he’s a slave. Slaves can’t lead or it would defeat the point.” I understand that. But then you have to ask, was it the right call to write the script in the first place? Cause it was you who wrote a movie where your hero’s situation necessitated that they stay passive the whole time.
It’s not that Yasuke doesn’t have some great moments in this. He does. Heck, he fights a ninja. And he has this killer sword battle with his rival at the end. But these moments combine to make up, maybe, 7% of the movie. The other 93%, Yasuke is standing around, either watching or listening to people more decorated than him make decisions.
The script still does a lot of things well. One of the issues I commonly run into in scripts with tribes is that we’ll start the movie off with a hunt. The characters, and our hero, then kill the animal they’re hunting. A good portion of your audience isn’t going to love meeting your hero as an animal killer. Some people don’t care about this, obviously. But it’s dangerous in the sense that the audience is forming the majority of their opinion about your hero during their opening scenes. So if you want to make that character likable, you have to take that into consideration.
“Yasuke” had a clever solution to this. They had a lion kill a bunch of Yasuke’s cattle. So, now, when Yasuke and his tribe went off to kill the lion, they’re not just killing an animal for sport or food, they’re killing it for revenge. I noticed how much more I was rooting for them to take down the lion for that reason. So they showed how capable our hero was on a hunt, all without making him barbaric or heartless.
The writer also does a good job of keeping the plot going despite an elongated time frame of 5 years. The trick with this is to keep introducing goals.
-Now we have to go to Japan.
-Now we have to start a church.
-Now we have to convince the Emperor’s rival not to attack him.
-Now we have to take down Nobunaga’s rival.
The plot always had purpose. And as soon as one goal was reached, it was replaced with another. When readers complain about a “lack of momentum” or “weak pacing,” this is often what they are talking about. Writers aren’t staying on top of their hero’s goals.
The script reminds me a bit of that old Tom Cruise movie, The Last Samurai. It has just enough going on to keep us invested. But, in the end, it still feels like a movie you should see and not one that you want to see. It’ll make a great trailer. But I’d put the ceiling at ‘worth the read.’
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[x] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: The gap between your hero’s last accomplished goal and announcement of his next goal is where boredom gestates. So if Yasuke’s goal is to kill a rival bad guy, and he goes and kills him, that character goal has now concluded. Let’s say the next character goal is to escape Nobunaga. If you wait 15 pages after Yasuke killed Rival Bad Guy to announce that he plans to escape Nobunaga, your script will have 15 pages of stasis. You are not moving forward. You are staying in place. Stasis is where boredom sets in. So try to eliminate any of these gaps in your script.
Genre: Comedy
Premise: (from Black List) Packed with enough C4 to split an asteroid in two, this tell-all Michael Bay origin story reveals the explosions that defined him, the fire that ignited his little heart, and the fate that sealed his Hollywood destiny.
About: This writer’s name may sound familiar as I’ve reviewed one other script of his on the site. That one was called Super Dad. Here’s the logline: A subversive superhero story about the world’s only superhero living a bachelor lifestyle, learning he has two very different teenage twins he never knew existed, and now has to figure out how to be a father.
Writer: Sean Tidwell
Details: 91 pages
I’m happy to see that they still put stuff like this on the Black List.
Good clean goofy entertainment. Not a single message to be found.
With that said, there is a bigger lesson to be learned here, which is that, if you do want to send a message out, it’s more effective to do it through comedy.
There are probably 50,000 dissertations on the internet about how terrible a director Michael Bay is. How he doesn’t care about story. He’s obsessed with explosions. He keeps making the same movie and over again.
But if you’re angrily stomping your feet in an attempt to get that point across to others, it’ll barely make a dent.
It’s much more effective to do what Tidwell has done with this script. Which is to comically show how ridiculous Michael Bay is. If there’s anything that came out of this script, it was that.
With that said, the comedy is so insanely broad, it takes a certain juvenile attitude to enjoy it. I mean, at one point, Michael Bay, at 10 years old, tries to kill his teacher with a makeshift flamethrower.
And we also get moments like this, which occurs after Michael Bay inadvertently drops acid…
Maybe the most interesting creative choice in today’s biopic was to focus solely on our subject at 10 years old. That’s when we meet Michael Bay, flying a kite, eagerly awaiting his imprisoned father, who’s flying into town along with 150 other prisoners. Michael is so excited to see his father’s plane approaching, he accidentally lets go of his kite, which zips up and gets lodged in the plane’s engine, blowing it up, crashing the plane, and killing everyone on board.
Michael’s mom is so mad that he killed his father, she disowns him, forcing Michael into an orphanage. From there, Michael somehow finds himself filming a wedding, where he accidentally knocks over a candle, starting a fire and killing everyone at the wedding. When the news plays Michael’s footage, an aspiring filmmaker named Steven Spielburger recognizes Michael’s insane filmmaking talent and adopts him.
Steven then sets about teaching Michael how to be a director. He teaches him how to act (by robbing a bank). He teaches him about wardrobe (by breaking into Macy’s and stealing clothes). And he teaches him how to man a camera (by making him walk across a tightrope above a canyon while filming).
As this is happening, Michael must fight his pyromaniac urges and his desire to blow up as many things as possible. He must also avoid the mob, who’s mad at him because the mob boss’s father was on that Con Air flight he accidentally blew up. But Michael is about to learn some shocking news about his new father, news that threatens to destroy his filmmaking apprenticeship and his love of the perfectly lit shot… forever.
“Michael Bay” definitely brings its share of lols. I particularly liked a lot of the dialogue exchanges. After a 10 year-old Michael Bay attacks his teacher with a makeshift flamethrower and gets sent to the principal’s office, the principal tells his mom. “This is the third fire incident this week.” The school counselor follows up with, “And it’s only Monday.”
Or after Michael Bay killed everybody at the wedding recession by starting a fire and was being arranged in court. The prosecuting victim says, “Judge, this boy’s carelessness killed 30 of my friends!” “Anything else?” “He mouths off, too!” “He mouths off? Jesus.”
Or, when Steven is trying to get Michael to cross the valley while carrying a heavy camera on a tightrope, Michael says, “But. But I’ll die.” Steven responds with, “Boy. Have you looked in the mirror? You’re already dead.” Just imagining that line delivered to a 10 year old boy had me on the floor laughing.
If I had a complaint, it would be that this is the loosest broadest comedy I’ve read all year. The story is never grounded. Sometimes we were so far off the ground we might as well have been in space. But then I started wondering, “Is that the point?”
It seems ridiculous (and kind of barbaric) to kill off 30 innocent people in a fiery death. But maybe this was Tidwell’s subversive commentary on how little Bay respects human life in his own films. It’s meta to the max. The thing is, the script is so wild that it’s hard to make yourself believe that any commentary is actually being done.
Another problem I had was the whole Steven Spielburger character. At first I thought it was supposed to be Steven Spielberg in disguise and we were going to learn that he was secretly Michael Bay’s mentor before something terrible happened that broke them up. But then I realized he was just some random guy named Steven Spielburger. It didn’t make a lot of sense, even in the context of a wild comedy. There were these random references to Steven Spielberg movies as well and all I could think was, “But we’ve established this is just a random guy, lol. Why are we making Spielberg movie references in a Michael Bay biopic?” I couldn’t figure it out.
A somewhat smaller issue is that Michael Bay movies aren’t very memorable. At least in my opinion. So there were a bunch of moments here that I assumed were references to Michael Bay movies but because Michael Bay movies are like popcorn – they’re in and out of your system in a day – I didn’t recognize them.
Take the opening shot with a kid flying a kite. I vaguely remember a famous kite shot in a Michael Bay movie. Maybe Pearl Harbor? Armageddon? Or we meet this crack dealer named Mike Lowrey who Michael has a fleeting friendship with. At the end of their friendship, Michael promises to make a movie called Bad Boys and name one of the characters after him.
I had zero idea that a character in Bad Boys was named Mike Lowrey. 99% of the people on the planet know those two characters as Will Smith and Martin Lawrence. I guess there are Bay enthusiasts out there who will fight me on the memorability factor of a Bay movie but, if I’m being honest, the scene I remember more than any other scene from his movies was the animal cracker scene in Armageddon. And not for the right reasons.
This script is light and airy fun. I did laugh. In the end, though, it was too loosey-goosey for my taste. A comedy script should feel effortless. But it should not feel like the writer didn’t put in their full effort. I kinda got the feeling that this script was written in under two weeks which is why it doesn’t hit a ‘worth the read’ for me.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: I am begging -BEGGING – comedy writers to stop using acid trips in their comedy scripts. They are in literally 7 out of every 10 comedy scripts I read. In general, I believe all writers should tattoo the phrase, “I’m not as original as I think I am,” to their foreheads and then, every thirty minutes while in a writing session, go look in the mirror, just to remind yourself that, yes, something like an acid trip would be funny, but if the guy that reads your comedy script has read an acid trip in the last five comedy scripts he’s covered, you’re going to look unoriginal. It’s better to push yourself and come up with that scene that nobody else has yet.
Genre: Action/Vampire/Comedy
Premise: A family man uses the cover of being a pool cleaner in Los Angeles to hunt vampires.
About: Netflix is trying to recreate some John Wick magic. They’re going with the new industry trend of hiring a high profile stunt coordinator to direct. Put a B-level movie star in the lead role. Throw in a little mythology. And hopefully create something great. The film debuted on the streamer this weekend. Not surprisingly, John Wick alum Chad Stahlenski produced the film. He brought along young screenwriting superstar, Shay Hatten (who I’m guessing, with how many jobs he’s gotten over the last two years, is a billionaire at this point), to bump up the dialogue for an original script by first time screenwriter, Tyler Tice.
Writer: Tyler Tice & Shay Hatten
Details: 115 minutes
Day Shift is one of those scripts that comes across your desk and you think, “This is a movie.”
For those of you who wonder what I mean by that, a movie is something that can be marketed. That has a legitimate chance of being watched by a lot of people and therefore make money. It must feel larger than life. It must have high stakes. Two people on a road trip in Alaska – that’s not a movie. That’s a screenplay. Even if you were to make that movie – and sometimes they do turn scripts like that into movies – it’s still a screenplay at heart.
When you’ve got a pool cleaner who secretly kills vampires for a living? You’ve got a legit movie.
So when I saw this trailer pop up, I thought, “This is the perfect example of the kind of script you should be writing if you want to sell a screenplay.”
But there’s a weird thing about spec script subject matter that I’ve never quite been able to reconcile. Some of the things that help it become a movie are also, ironically, what sink it as a movie.
The main issue boils down to not having anything figured out beyond the marketable aspect of the script. The emperor has no clothes. Heck, he doesn’t even have underwear. That’s the feeling I got while watching Day Shift.
Day Shift follows 30-something, Bud, who lives in the San Fernando valley, and works as a pool cleaner, something his wife is none too thrilled about since they’re barely able to pay the mortgage and feed their 8 year old daughter. So Bud is feeling the heat to pick up the financial slack.
The thing is, Bud doesn’t really clean pools. He cleans the clocks of vampires. As in kills them. The pools are cover. He sneaks into the backyards of vampire home owners, pretends to do a little cleaning, then SHAZOW! He’s putting a silver bullet through your head. Or whatever they use to kill vampires. A wooden stake or something.
He then takes their fangs and sells them on the black market. The more prestigious the vampire fang, the more money he gets.
What Bud doesn’t know is that the last vampire he killed was some special vampire so now the vampire elite is after him. This forces Bud to re-join the “union” of vampire killers, where he’s paired up, “The Other Guys”-style, with a nerdy union accountant, Seth, and the two try to kill more vampires as well as avoid the elite vampires. Shenanigans galore follow.
Just to remind everyone, we have a HIGH CONCEPT SHOWDOWN coming up in December. So I hope you’re writing your high concept scripts as we speak. Day Shift would definitely fall under the ‘high concept’ category.
What: AMATEUR SHOWDOWN – HIGH CONCEPT EDITION
When: Entries due December 1 by 8pm Pacific Time
How: E-mail me your title, genre, logline, any extra pitch you want to make about why your script deserves a shot, and, of course, a PDF of the screenplay.
Where: carsonreeves3@gmail.com
Anything else?: You can start sending in your scripts right now!
But the script is a reminder that coming up with a high concept is half the battle. You then have to actually write 100 pages of story that execute that concept in an entertaining way. And what I’ve found is that a lot of writers feel like they did the hard work already by coming up with the concept and therefore half-a$$ the creative choices throughout the script.
Those choices in Day Shift were often fine, mind you. But no reader or audience member in history has ever gotten excited about “fine.” In my book, fine is worse than “bad.” Because at least bad creates some emotion, albeit negative. Fine doesn’t create any emotion at all. Everything about this movie was fine.
Take, for example, the creative choice of the “union.” It doesn’t fit into the movie. It feels forced. The mythology underneath it is not strong enough to support the choice. It just feels like it’s there because another movie did it and, so, maybe it’ll work in our movie too.
Never EVER think that way as a writer. Don’t do what other movies do. Other movies have their own set of problems. Your movie has it own culture, its own unique set of circumstances. So make decisions that are best for your movie only. I mean give me a break. You’ve got a Men In Black like secret organization for vampire killing. It was a dumb idea.
This movie works so much better if killing vampires is an informal thing. It’s fine if there’s a bigger network but the second you have this Steve Spielberg like organization, it took a gritty gnarly crazy cool job and buttoned it up. It made it lame.
I get that it gives us Seth. And Seth is, arguably, the best part of the movie. Especially (spoiler) when he turns into a vampire himself (which was the lone strong creative choice in the script). But there were other ways to team Bud up with a character like Seth that didn’t require some stupid underground organization that doesn’t feel like it has anything to do with your movie.
Another big issue with the film was that the main character was boring. And he shouldn’t have been. Tice and Hatten did everything you were supposed to do in creating Bud. He’s a poor guy trying to support his family who loves his daughter more than anything. Why aren’t we rooting for this guy?
This is the kind of stuff that keeps me up at night. I’m not joking. I go to sleep wondering why some of these characters work and others don’t despite both following the same playbook. Bud is clearly likable. He’s a selfless person who wants to make a good life for his daughter. Why doesn’t he work?
The conclusion I came to was that he’s boring. A character still has to be a person. They can’t just be a combination of correct screenwriting choices. Save the cat. Be a nice human being. Care for a weaker character. Sure, those help. But your character still needs a unique likable personality. They need to feel like their own person. Bud doesn’t feel like anyone. He’s more vanilla than my Muscle Milk protein powder.
So remember that. Separate from the “likable traits,” make sure your protagonist has their own unique personality.
This is not a terrible movie. It’s just a forgettable one. Which is disappointing because I was hoping for more.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Figure out who your characters are by asking ,“What would their ringtone be?” Seth is a nerdy by-the-book sorta douchebag. The reason his ringtone – Nicleback – is one of the funnier moments in the movie is because it perfectly encapsulated him. So when you’re trying to figure out what kind of funny a character in your screenplay is, ask yourself, “What would their ringtone be?” We don’t have to ever hear it in the film. But you should personally know it. By doing so, you’ll have a better feel for how to write that character.
Someone once said that the key to becoming successful in life is mastering the ability to delay instant gratification for long-term benefit.
In other words, if someone handed you 100 bucks, would you spend it all right now? Buy that video game you’ve been jonezing to play? Celebrate with a wild night out of drinking? Head over to farfetch.com and snag that fly pink polo you know you’d look great in?
Or do you put it in a savings account, let it accumulate interest over the years with all the rest of the money you’ve strategically saved, so that when it comes time to buy a house, or send your kids to college, you have more than enough in the bank?
I think there are benefits to both options. Sure, if you spend the money now, you don’t have it in the future. But in a world where happy memories are, arguably, more valuable than anything else, including money, who’s to say that spending that money today on a good time is a bad idea?
With that said, being 60 and broke ain’t the coolest thing either.
This debate is not limited to money. Do you do a fun low-paying job now as opposed to a boring high paying job that will set you up for later? Do you date the young crazy-fun partner now or do you find a mate who, while not as exciting, is more stable and good for you in the long run? These aren’t the easiest questions to answer.
You’re probably wondering why I’m bringing this up.
It’s because writing a screenplay brings up a similar dilemma. Do you try and write the best possible story for the moment, always keeping the script exciting on every page, knowing that you risk the screenplay burning out? Or do you stoke a reserved fire and pace yourself in the hopes that the larger story experience is more rewarding?
To answer this question, I want to talk about two screenplays I’ve read over the years.
The first is one I read a few years ago. The script was a sort of Quentin Tarantino inspired story that involved over-exaggerated characters and a lot of dialogue. And it was GREAT. The characters were all fun. The scenes were long with lots of tension-filled dialogue. It was a really enjoyable read.
What made this particular script such a shocking discovery was that the writer had sent me another script five years earlier and I had privately labeled it one of the worst scripts I’d ever read. It was a quasi biopic comedy about a famous person that, to be frank, was more boring than waiting for water to boil.
When I found out that the same writer had written both scripts, I had to know what he did with the latest script that he hadn’t done with the earlier one. And his answer surprised me. He said that with the first script, he’d carefully mapped out the story and was trying to weave a theme in there and write a traditional three-act movie. But with the second script, he hadn’t even intended to write a movie. Instead, he wanted to practice his scene-writing and write a series of scenes that were entertaining on their own.
He wrote four or five of these scenes before he realized, maybe I can connect these and turn them into a movie. However, even after he started connecting the scenes, he still wrote the rest of the script in the same fashion – just trying to write great scenes.
I was fascinated by this answer because what he was effectively saying was that, with this script, all he was trying to do was write a compelling scene in the moment. He was trying to entertain the reader immediately, with no plans of making a larger story work. He was the equivalent of the guy who spent his 100 dollars right away.
I didn’t put too much stock into this at first. Cause the way I saw it, this was a writer who’d had five more years to get better since his previous screenplay. Maybe he just got much better at writing in general and would’ve written a good script regardless of how he approached it.
But then, around a year later, a producer asked me if Tyler Marceca’s “The Disciple Program” was available cause he wanted to see if he could buy the rights and do something with it.
This got me thinking about The Disciple Program and I remembered the circumstances by which the script was written. It was written for a screenwriting contest (I think it was First Draft’s contest) and they had a very unique contest structure. Each week, you would send in 10 pages of your screenplay and a contest reader would give you notes on those pages to help you craft the next 10 pages. And then the next 10 pages. And so on and so forth.
What this did was force Tyler to only focus on making the current 10 pages as good as possible. Because he couldn’t, for example, write some slower setup scene that was going to get paid off on page 75. There was no reward to setting something up that the reader wouldn’t be able to read for another 8 weeks. So instead, Tyler focused on writing 10 really freaking exciting pages. And then 10 more exciting pages. And then 10 more exciting pages.
He basically wrote a series of ten really exciting 10-page segments.
Naturally, you can see the connection here. Just like the Quentin Tarantino writer, Tyler was focusing on entertaining the reader here and now as opposed to carefully crafting a longer, more deliberate, story.
I think you guys know where I’m going with this.
I’m a believer that you should spend that 100 dollars every 10 pages, instead of saving it all for your climax.
Obviously, there are challenges to this approach. Such as maintaining momentum when every section of your script has to be great. But it’s doable. Tyler’s script was a non-stop action ride. But the first script I mentioned was almost entirely dialogue. The writer just knew how to build up conversations in an exciting tension-filled way. For example, we’d know going into a scene, that Character 1 was planning to kill Character 2, but Character 2 didn’t know that. So there was dramatic irony and tension building during their conversation as we eagerly anticipated the attempted assassination.
And this is not to say you should throw out any pre-construction of your story. I’m not saying never plan your screenplay again.
But this approach does necessitate you do more organization on the back end. The idea is that you write for the moment all the way through your first draft. And then, once you see what you have, you use subsequent drafts to pull all those separate pieces together.
Can EVERY screenplay be written like this? I don’t know but I suspect not. For example, I don’t think you can take something like Lord of the Rings – which has an immense amount of backstory and exposition that needs to be conveyed – and just try to write that in the moment. Movies like that need more planning.
But I do think this strategy can work for most screenplays. And it has a precedent for working. I’m a big believer in The Sequence Approach, which is the process of breaking your screenplay down into eight mini-movies and trying to write eight of the best mini-movies you can. This 10-page approach just tightens that up a bit. Eight sequences in a 110 page script amounts to roughly 13.5 pages each. So you’re cutting that down by 3.5 pages to 10 pages each.
And just to be clear, there are no hard-and-fast rules here. If one of your sequences is 8 pages and the next is 12, that’s fine. The main thing is you’re writing for the here and now. You’re writing roughly 10 pages where your only objective is to make those pages impossible to put down. Put yourself in the reader’s head. Could they be bored by this? If the answer is yes, erase, go back to where it started getting boring, and write something better.
Keep in mind also that you’re writing a SPEC SCRIPT. A spec script does not operate by the same rules as a greenlit Hollywood movie. A greenlit Hollywood movie has the script written in-house. They can have a couple of slow-moving scenes because nobody’s judging the script. They’re all working together. When you’re writing on spec, you’re not working for anyone yet. You’re trying to write something good enough so that Hollywood will allow you to work for someone. For that reason, your script has to be more consistently entertaining than a Hollywood movie. I know it’s not fair but those are the rules, bub.
If you’re curious about what script did this better than any script I’ve ever read, look no further than Source Code. If you only ever saw Source Code the movie, you may think that’s a bold statement. But that original script was pretty much designed to be written the way I’m talking about today. So check it out…
Link: Source Code Original Draft!
By the way, you can still plan your story ahead of time. This is not an excuse to never outline. But when you sit down and write, you need to prioritize entertainment over everything else. If it comes down to you following your outline but your outline idea for the scene is boring? You need to throw away your outline and write something the reader can’t put down. That’s what Tyler did. That’s what the Tarantino writer did. That’s what Ben Ripley (Source Code) did. And that method produced three great screenplays. Why shouldn’t you take advantage of this approach as well?
Are you looking for help on your latest screenplay? – Let someone who’s read over 10,000 scripts help you. I have a 4 page notes package or a more detailed 8 page option designed to both fix your script and improve your writing. I also give feedback on loglines (just $25!), outlines, synopses, first acts, or any aspect of screenwriting you need help with. This includes Zoom calls discussing anything from talking through your script to getting advice on how to break into the industry. If you’re interested, e-mail me at carsonreeves1@gmail.com and let’s set something up!
Genre: Drama/Comedy
Premise: (from Black List) An autistic kid tries to do normal college things — making friends, figuring out if girls like him, getting over his mom’s death — while seeing life in his own “musical” way.
About: Today’s script finished on last year’s Black List. Augustus Schiff grew up in Los Angeles, went to the University of Chicago, then came back to LA and, against all the advice he’d received growing up, got into screenwriting. This is his breakthrough script.
Writer: Augustus Schiff
Details: 114 pages
Timothee for Ben?
Man, it turns out all these scripts I’ve been avoiding from the Black List are actually the good ones!
You do understand why I avoided this script for so long though, right? Right at the top, we’ve got autism and mom dying. You play either of those too melodramatically, and we’re done before we even get started.
These are what I call landmine subjects. You step on them and they blow up.
That’s not to say you can’t use them. But you need to treat them a certain way. You can’t take them too seriously. You have to allow the reader to laugh at them (at times). You do that and maybe, just maybe, you can make them work. Which is the exact approach Schiff took.
19 year-old Ben, who’s autistic, spends an entire year watching his mother succumb to cancer and die. Immediately after her death, he enrolls in college at the University of Chicago.
Ben is totally unprepared for the university experience. People at college are so relaxed and fun and social and energetic. Meanwhile, Ben stays in his own little world, under his headphones, listening to music. That is until Carl, his floor mate, invites him over for drinks. There, Ben meets a cool new group of friends including Emma, a super cute girl who seems to like Ben.
On Ben’s first night ever getting totally wasted, he makes out with Emma, which is the talk of the group the next day. This was Ben’s first ever kiss, so naturally he likes Emma. He enlists the help of Carl to make her his girlfriend and Carl is more than happy to oblige.
During this time, Ben develops a separate friendship with his next door neighbor, Rebecca. Rebecca is extremely cold. Feelings are off-limits with her. But there’s something about Ben’s oddness that draws her to him, and the two form a cool friendship built around sharing music.
Even though Ben is hanging out with Emma a lot, it isn’t getting romantic. So Carl re-focuses the mission, eyeing a giant party coming up as the day Ben will make his move. Unfortunately, when the party comes, a lot of things go wrong, and Ben ends up getting too drunk. (Spoiler) When he finally does spot Emma, she’s kissing none other than Carl. Which infuriates Ben, who punches his friend.
The fallout is massive. His entire group of friends kick him to the curb because he’s “a psycho.” As Ben tries to process this betrayal, he comes to terms with the fact that he never properly mourned his mother’s death. Luckily, just when all is lost, Rebecca comes back into his life and picks him up, helping Ben to finally realize that it’s okay to be weird.
The rule with character pieces is that, because there’s no plot, we need two things. We need a main character we really like. And we need at least one unresolved relationship that we are desperate to see resolved.
Today’s main character, Ben, is nearly impossible to dislike. Audiences will root for nearly any character with a disability/condition, whether it be physical, mental, or intellectual. We naturally root for people to succeed who start out in life as underdogs.
But that’s not going to be enough to power an entire character-driven script. Since you don’t have a plot, you need at least one unresolved relationship. This relationship will act as the engine of your story. It will be the only reason we’re turning the pages. We want to see how the relationship gets resolved.
In “Weird,” that relationship comes in the form of Emma. Ben and her drunkenly kiss at a party. Ben likes her. He wants her to be his girlfriend. And, because he’s never had a girlfriend before, he enlists his friend, Carl, to help him, and we’re off to the races. The unresolved relationship here is Ben and Emma, since we’re curious if they’re going to get together or not.
But a little trick you can use in scripts like this is to add a secondary unresolved relationship, which I found to be the strongest creative choice in *weird. Ben also has this side friend in Rebecca and there’s just enough sexual tension there that we’re also wondering what’s going to happen with them.
I always like to point out that in one of the best character pieces ever, Good Will Hunting, there are four main unresolved relationships. There’s Will’s unresolved relationship with his psychiatrist, Sean. There’s the unresolved relationship with girlfriend, Skylar. There’s the unresolved relationship with math professor, Lambeau, and the unresolved friendship with friend, Chuckie.
I encourage writers to add one or two extra unresolved relationships in these scripts just to hedge your bets. Maybe one relationship doesn’t work as well as you want it to. But that’s okay if another one works great.
By the way, I still think that character-focused writers need to consider the plot in so much as if you don’t have any interesting plot developments at all, it’s hard for a story to stay compelling. This is true even if the characters are great. To that end, I loved (spoiler) the plot development of Carl hooking up with Emma. It made things messy and that’s what you want in a script. You want things to get messy because then your character has to figure out a way through that mess. And that’s why we watch movies. To see how they deal with the mess.
There were lots of other things I liked about *weird.
Schiff would do this thing where whenever someone was talking to Ben, they’d say something like, “You’re such a weirdo,” in a half-joking manner. And every time someone would say that word or a similar word, you’d hear this DING. “Off,” “Odd,” “Different,” “Strange,” “Unique.” DING. DING. DING. DING. We’re not really sure why we’re hearing the ding when these words are said. We just know from Ben’s reaction that he doesn’t like them. They seem to be code words that remind him he’s not like other people and that that’s somehow bad.
Then, late in the script, Rebecca says, “You’re weird.” But for the first time in the entire script, we hear a different sound: “Instead of a DING, he hears a lovely little chord progression.” It’s an aural cue to the audience that she didn’t mean it in a bad way like everyone else did. She meant it in an endearing way. And for the first time, Ben realizes that that word can be a good thing. It’s a really poetic and heartfelt moment.
Finally, this script reminded me that certain formats just work. One of those formats is fish-out-of-water. You wouldn’t realize that’s what this is at first glance because the main character isn’t a knife-wielding alligator hunter in New York belting out lines like, “Crikey!” But a fish-out-of-water story is ANY time you place a character in an environment they’re unfamiliar with. So we enjoy watching Ben navigate these foreign scenarios.
We haven’t had many good college movies over the years and I think Schiff found the secret. College is a such a cliched subject that it’s hard to portray it in a fresh way. It turns out all you had to do was change the point-of-view. Have us see college through the eyes of someone other than the average college kid. Excellent stuff.
Screenplay Link: *weird
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[xx] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Here’s the logline the Black List gave for *Weird – “An autistic kid tries to do normal college things — making friends, figuring out if girls like him, getting over his mom’s death — while seeing life in his own “musical” way.” There are numerous reasons this logline doesn’t work (for those who don’t know, someone other than the writer often writes the Black List loglines, which is why a lot of them are so weak). But the main reason is that, even with a character piece, you should still approach your logline from a plot perspective. The reason being, it makes the story feel more purposeful. At its core, this is a script about a young man who meets, what he believes, is this perfect friend group. So that’s what we want to build the logline around. This is what I would’ve gone with: “After losing his mother to cancer, a young autistic man heads to college where he finds a seemingly perfect group of friends, only to realize that they’re unable to navigate the unique idiosyncrasies of his disorder.” If you wanted to work the title of the script into the logline, you could do this: “After losing his mother to cancer, a young autistic man heads to college where he finds a seemingly perfect group of friends, only to realize that they’re unable to navigate the unique – some might say “weird” – idiosyncrasies of his disorder.”
Logline Consultations are just $25! – Stop trying to get reads with a lame logline! Let me help you craft something way better. E-mail me at Carsonreeves1@gmail.com and we’ll get started
