Genre: Drama/Comedy/Family/Fantasy/Sci-Fi/Fish-Out-Of-Water/Thriller?
Premise: After being the first person born on Mars, 15 year old Gardner falls for an earth girl via an online relationship.
About: There isn’t much information on this one. I don’t think it ever sold. I believe Allan Loeb is developing it with the person he created the idea with. As we all know, Allan Loeb is one of the hardest working and highest-paid screenwriters in Hollywood, working on films as far ranging as Things We Lost In The Fire to The Dilemma to Wall Street 2. He’d been writing for something like 12 years with no success before he broke through with “Fire.” I reviewed one of his spec scripts a couple of years back, “The Only Living Boy In New York.”
Writer: Allan Loeb (based on a story by Allan Loeb and Richard B. Lewis)
Details: 122 pages – undated (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).

This one just sounded too bizarre to pass up. A kid – born on Mars – who falls in love with an earth girl over the internet. Now THAT is wild. And in more ways than one. Because when I heard that idea, I immediately thought of a dozen story problems they were going to run into. And I just didn’t see any of those problems being solved. Because I’ve seen them hundreds of times in scripts before and they’re notoriously difficult to overcome. Anyway, I don’t know what I was expecting when I opened this screenplay, but I knew it was going to be worthy of discussion.

Astronaut Sarah Elliot is preparing to be one of the first colonists on Mars. A day before her launch, she celebrates with her boyfriend with a little nookie nookie, if you know what I’m saying (I’m saying sex). Bad idea. Sarah ends up pregnant (which they find out quickly after launch), which means she’ll now be having a baby…on Mars. This is how Gardener Elliot comes into the universe, as the first known “alien” (born on another planet) in human history.

Sarah dies and Gardner grows up on Mars, mostly under the care of Kendra Wyndham, the only person on the red planet who doesn’t treat him like a freak show. Once Gardner hits his teenage years, he starts communicating with people back on earth, specifically a young alternative troubled girl named Root Beer. He falls for her, but doesn’t tell her his true identity.

Back on earth, the totally uncool head scientist of NASA, Ed Jurado, wants to use the first person born on Mars as his own personal guinea pig, so he orders Gardner to come back home on the next flight. Kendra comes with him, and nine months later Gardner sets foot on earth for the first time.

When he realizes he’s there to be studied though, he makes a run for it, looking for his online crush Root Beer and then his mysterious father (who was never informed of Gardner’s existence). After a few fish out of water sequences, Gardner makes it to Colorado where he finally teams up with his little bottle of A&W, and the two head to California, where they believe his father is living.

Ed Jurado and his nasties are always hot on their trail, while Kendra is forming her own one-woman show to divert them and save Gardner before he’s turned into a permanent lab rat. May the best…space…….person…team win.

So, like I said, when I heard this idea, I could see the problems from a million miles away (no pun intended). These are screenplay problems that even the best screenwriters in the world are going to have difficulty solving, so I was curious to see if Loeb could hurdle them. Here are the first three that came to mind.

1) Relationships over the internet are boring and un-cinematic. How would they deal with this?

Well, about midway through the movie, our young heroes finally meet, allowing them to be, in fact, face to face, at least for the second half of the movie. But it’s too little, too late, because, as I feared, up until that point you have two people e-mailing each other. And I don’t care if you’re the most original most amazing writer in the world. You can’t make two people e-mailing each other interesting. And no, don’t use “You’ve Got Mail” as an example. You’ve Got Mail is a terrible movie. But even if you argue that it’s a good movie (and you’d be wrong), the newness of e-mail was what allowed that script to overcome that rule. Keep your characters face to face people. It’s waaaaay more interesting.

2) How do you set up the Mars situation quickly?

When I heard this idea, I knew they were going to have to use a lot of exposition just to explain why this kid was on Mars in the first place. Whenever you have to explain something complicated, it eats up valuable screenplay real estate, real estate you should be using to tell your story, not explain what happened before the story. Sure enough, Out of This World has to burn its entire first act just to explain how our main character was born on Mars. This means the real story, coming back to earth, doesn’t get started until the second act. I would never want to be tasked with figuring out how to make this work. It’s just too complicated and no matter how you slice it, it requires endless explaining.

3) How is hooking up with a girl going to feel important to an audience when compared with a kid living on Mars?

To me, the bigness of this idea rests with the Mars angle. So doesn’t making the goal of our hero to hook up with a girl back on earth feel…I don’t know, a mite insignificant in comparison? I mean I get that the goal here is to have the reader love the characters so much that their relationship WILL feel like the most important thing in the script. But this goes back to problem number 1. How do you do that when you can’t even put your leads on the same planet for the first half of the movie? We’re just talking about impossible-to-solve screenplay scenarios here.

The uneven setup helped contribute to a few more clunky situations. Gardner gets to earth at the midway point, making what was a long-distance love story now a fish-out-of-water semi-comedy. Changing genres in the middle of your script is never a good idea. And the messy way it’s executed here doesn’t do the script any favors. It basically turns into the teenage version of Starman for the second half.

As if that weren’t bad enough, so that we don’t forget about Root Beer, the story is forced to keep jumping back to her. We already have an extremely complicated story with Gardner. That we now have to jump away from this story to highlight Root Beer makes things even clunkier.

And then there were just a lot of lazy choices. The villain, Ed Jurado, was one of the more one-dimensional villains I’ve read in forever. There’s a setup and payoff with 15 year old Root Beer owning a crop duster and using it to help them escape the government baddies, despite not believing any of Gardner’s story about being hunted by the government because he’s from Mars. Yes, we have a 15 year old pilot on our hands. And then there was the IM’ing when Gardner was on Mars. Mars is like 50 million miles away. It has at least a 45 minute delay in communication. That’s going to be one boring IM session.

“Hey.”……………………………………………………………………………………………………..”Hey.”

I will say this about Loeb’s writing though. He has an amazing ability to string words together in a pleasing easy-to-read way. I don’t think I’ve ever read a script I’ve disliked as fast as I did “Out Of This World.” I know that’s a bit of a backhanded compliment but seriously, after reading The Infiltrator, where every word felt like it had a stop sign at the end of it, this was one continuous stream of green lights. Maybe this is part of why he’s such an in-demand writer. His scripts are so easy to read.

Is there a story in here? I don’t think there is. It’s just too complicated. But if I were judging what worked best, I would say the fish-out-of-water stuff. That’s where you’re going to get the most bang for your buck. So if you can get Gardner down to earth a LOT sooner, have him interact with the earth, and maybe meet Root Beer THEN as opposed to earlier on the internet? I suspect this story would be a lot cleaner and a lot better. But yeah, I couldn’t get into it.

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

What I learned: Just because an idea is cool or interesting or even great, it doesn’t mean it should be a movie. Sometimes you have ideas that simply can’t be executed. It unfortunately takes time and experience to learn which ideas fall into this category, but I will say this: Sci-fi or fantasy ideas that require a ton of backstory (as is the case with Out Of This World) are usually the biggest culprits. That’s not to say that’s the case with all of them (Star Wars was pretty good I remember), but just be wary of those ideas when they pop into your head. Make sure they’re workable in story form.

Genre: Dark Comedy
Premise: Two royally screwed up roommates secretly in love with each other throw a massive Jim Jones party on the eve of their suicide.
About: This was Joshua James’ first screenplay, which has been optioned on two occasions and has gotten him numerous writing jobs around town, including an adaptation of the book, DOWN & DIRTY PICTURES. Although he’s moved mainly into thrillers (He’s working on “A Black Heart” with Captivate Ent. and “Block Island” with Adler-Grey), The Jones Party is a favorite of his which he’d like to see made one day. James has his own blog where he ruminates on screenwriting whenever he gets a chance.
Writer: Joshua James
Details: 106 pages (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).

One of the things I tell new writers is to just write that first script and get it out of the way. Cause it’s going to be bad. Actually, I’m being generous. It’s going to be terrible. That’s not something to get discouraged by though. It should be freeing. It means you get to go crazy, experiment, have fun, and enjoy the high of writing without consequences. Well not so fast, Carson. While the club is limited, there are writers out there who have thrived on their first script, and Joshua James is one of them. True, he’s rewritten it to death over the years, but The Jones Party is his first foray into the craft.

33 year old Derwin is one of those people who just oozes cool, who oozes nonchalance. Volleyball-sized meteor chunks could be raining down around him and he’d still find time to smoke a cigarette and ask you how your day went.

Hope is the polar opposite. Young and pretty, she’s got Woody Allen’s neuroses and Russell Crowe’s temperament. She’s strange and fleeting and bi-polar and moody. It’d take her a couple of minutes just to find and light the cigarette, much less smoke it.

I guess that’s what makes them perfect roommates. Their weaknesses are the other’s…non-weaknesses. I wouldn’t say strengths because I don’t know that they have any strengths. Sure, Derwin is cool, but he’s so emotionless and detached. And Hope? Well, a good day to her is just making it to the finish line.

Which might explain why they’ve decided to kill themselves. But being that they’re Derwin and Hope, they’re doing it in style. Instead of just hopping in the car and letting the exhaust take them to happy land, they’re executing a Jim Jones style “End Of The World” party. You know Jim Jones. That crazy religious dude who convinced 900 people to kill themselves with him so they could get into heaven through the back door or something?

Yeah, so Derwin and Hope invite anybody and everyone who wants to terminate their policy early to come over for one rockin party where there are no rules, no consequences, nothing to do but drink, get high, and have sex. Then, at 5 a.m., they drink some specially spiked Kool-Aid, and call it a life. With a lot of people out there sick of the way the big blue marble has treated them, let’s just say the party is a lively ticket.

While we bounce around from partygoer to partygoer (which includes a really clever device by James of having a “confessional” room where people just randomly rail on life), we keep coming back to Hope and Derwin. Though their relationship seemed to be so cut and dry at first, flashbacks (yes, dreaded flashbacks!) paint a more complicated picture, and we soon realize that these two are in love with each other but so afraid of emotion, of closeness, of committing to life, that they’ve been unable to admit it. So will they be able to admit it before it’s too late?

The Jones Party was a fun script and the neat thing about it is that it feels very much like a first screenplay, yet one that’s been reworked through the eyes of a wily vet. What I mean by “it feels like a first screenplay” is that there’s all this emotion, all this frustration, all this dialogue, all these flashbacks, all these fun little asides. When you first start out, you want to try a lot of things and you want to scream out to everyone and let them know how YOU feel, what YOUR position on the world is. A first screenplay tends to be the bullhorn that allows you to do that.

The problem is that, normally, that’s all it is – a big bottle of opinions and emotion. There’s no structure. There’s no form. And I don’t know what the very first draft of The Jones Party looked like, but I’m willing to bet it was a lot more ranting and a lot less direction than this.

Clearly, over the years, James has learned to give his stories purpose, and the mystery of what’s going to happen to Derwin and Hope helps guide this story to a perfect climax. To be honest, I was a little worried that this was going to be Dialogue Fest 3000, just a bunch of characters telling you how they felt about the world. But the flashbacks of Derwin and Hope not only brought direction back to the screenplay, they moved the story forward.

Wait a minute wait a minute wait a minute.  How did flashbacks move the story forward? Isn’t that a paradox? Here’s how. Each flashback revealed a key piece of information about Derwin and Hope’s relationship that we didn’t know before. We thought they were just roommates. Oh wait, we find out Hope has feelings for Derwin. We think Derwin is impervious to feeling, but oh wait, we learn that he does indeed feel. These increased our appetite for an answer to the question – will Derwin and Hope realize they love each other in time to call off the suicide? It’s a powerful question. And one we desperately want answered.

And to me, that’s what really separated this script from all the wannabes – the ending. (Spoilers!) The script’s tone dictates that anything other than suicide will be a cheat. So the story is kind of handcuffed in that sense. It has only one option. Kill off its characters. Somehow, and I’m still marveling at how he did it, James managed to accomplish this but still keep his characters alive in a believable satisfying way. You’ll have to read it yourself to find out how. But I thought it was the perfect ending.

Longtime Scriptshadow readers will be quick to point out that there is no character goal (other than to kill themselves – although that’s not really a goal since it’s already pre-determined). But remember, if you don’t have a character goal driving your story, you need a compelling question in its place, and The Jones Party has one: Will Hope and Derwin get together before it’s too late? As long as we care about the answer to that question, we will stay interested the entire time. Not to mention, the time frame is so tight here (less than 8 hours) that the structure becomes focused almost by necessity.

I liked the dialogue a lot. I liked that the script got me thinking what I would do with 8 hours to go and no consequences. Always good when a script breaks that fourth wall and makes you an active participant. My complaints are few. I didn’t like the opening. It was confusing. Something happens in the closet and then Hope breaks out in a clown suit with a gun. It felt like a very “writerly” moment. In other words, I could feel the writer’s hand from above. And it led to more confusion than intrigue, at least for me.

And the only reason I don’t give this an impressive is because it’s not the kind of film that I’m personally into. Yes, it wisely peppers its story with humor. But we’re still talking about suicide here, not the kind of subject matter I typically block out my Friday nights for. In a strange way, this is a script you battle with just as much as you enjoy, and it’ll be interesting to see how people react to that.

Still, this was really solid writing, and I can totally see why it’s helped James carve out a career.

Edit: Josh has ok’d me posting the script.  Link: The Jones Party

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

What I learned: Again, if you’re going to write about something really depressing, it’s a good idea to do so from a humorous angle. If The Jones Party would’ve been a straight drama, it would have been dead (no pun intended) by page 10. It would have been a Depressing Fest, the worst kind of scripts there are. Humor is to depressing subject matter what the Iron Man suit is to Tony Stark.

The word “rules” stirs up a lot of debate in the University of Screenwriting. Some believe there should be no rules when you write. Others believe rules are the lifeblood of a screenplay. I fall somewhere in between. You definitely need to know the rules. Whether you choose to use them, however, is up to you. The thing is, most great scripts break at least a couple of rules. Why? Because if you follow ALL the rules then your story will be predictable, average, and boring. You need to take those chances in order to stand out. The problem is when these deviations get celebrated and writers erroneously believe that that’s proof rules aren’t important (“Quentin Tarantino writes 10 page dialogue scenes, so why can’t I!”). Rules are extremely important. David Mamet uses them. Aaron Sorkin uses them. Michael Arndt (Toy Story 3) lives by them. The key is knowing what rules you’re breaking so you can adapt your screenplay to absorb the breakage. Here are 7 memorable movies, the major screenwriting rules they break, and why they still worked.

The Social Network
Rule Broken: Page Count 162 pages
Why It Didn’t Matter: 162 pages! I get mad at people who write 122 pages. Who in the world gets to write 40 more pages than THAT and still get a pass? Why Aaron Sorkin of course! The man who could write a script in comic sans on discarded wallpaper and still get away with it. Well, before you think about reinstating that 30 page subplot about your hero’s blind Nazi mistress who’s just come down with a bout of scurvy, let’s take a look at the content of this behemoth. Go ahead and open up The Social Network right now. What I’m betting you’ll find is dialogue. Lots of dialogue. I’d go as far as to say that The Social Network is 95% dialogue. That’s important for two reasons. One, dialogue reads a LOT faster than action, making a 162 page script fly by like it’s 110 pages (Fincher actually shot the draft word for word and it ended up being under 2 hours). And two, dialogue is this particular writer’s biggest strength. If the reason your script is too long is because you have a lot of dialogue and you’re a dialogue master, then it’s not going to read like a script that’s too long. Now does this mean you get to write a 160 page script if it’s all dialogue? Hell no. Learn to be great with dialogue, put a few hit shows on the air famous for their dialogue, get a dialogue driven-script near the top of the Black List, THEN maybe you can write that 160 pager. But I’d still stick with the good old 110 page rule. That’ll force you to learn one of the most important skills in screenwriting, cutting out the pieces of the story that don’t matter.

Titanic
Rule Broken: The inciting incident doesn’t happen until 2 hours into the story.
Why It Didn’t Matter: The inciting incident is the incident that throws your hero into peril, that forces him or her to go on their journey. It usually happens around 15 minutes into the story (In Shrek, it’s when his swamp is invaded). Some might say that the inciting incident in Titanic is Jack meeting Rose. Some might say it’s Rose meeting Jack. And you can probably make a good case for either of those. But to me, what really incites this story is when the ship hits the iceberg. And that doesn’t happen until a full 2 hours into the movie. That means we’re stuck watching two people diddle around a ship and fall in love for two hours! Doesn’t that sound boring to you? And yet it works. You want to know why? Because Titanic has one of the most unique and powerful story advantages in the history of cinema – a built in super-dose of dramatic irony. Dramatic irony is when we the audience know something about the characters and their situation before they do, preferably something that puts them in danger. Remember in Die Hard when McClane gets stuck up on the roof with Hanz, who pretends to be a hostage but WE KNOW he’s the villain? That scene is exciting because of the dramatic irony. *We* know McClane is in trouble. But he doesn’t. Well Titanic has the mother of all dramatic ironies. We know that the Titanic is going to sink, and our poor characters don’t. So we watch for 2 hours with baited breath, wondering how they’re going to handle it, what they’re going to do when it happens, and specifically what will happen to Jack, since he’s unrepresented in the modern day storyline. Cameron could’ve added a whole extra hour in front of the iceberg collision if he wanted to because he had the single biggest case of dramatic irony on his side during the story. I don’t know if there can ever be another movie with this advantage. But I do know that a solid dose of dramatic irony will allow you to push key story points back if need be.

Lost In Translation
Rule Broken: No character goal
Why It Didn’t Matter: Lost In Translation is a story that wanders. Which makes sense because it’s about a girl stuck in a city where she doesn’t understand the language or know anyone. So the fact that she doesn’t have a goal stems organically from the situation. But make no mistake, if you’d had Scarlett Johanson, voluptuous as she is, wandering around Tokyo and riding trains for 2 straight hours, we would’ve killed ourselves by minute 40. If you don’t have a goal, you need to create a dramatic question that will drive the story. That question almost always comes in the form of a romantic interest. Bring in another character and now your dramatic question is posed: “Will these two end up together?” Or “What will happen between these two?” But Coppola takes it a step further. Had the person our protagonist met been some suave-ish good-looking 20-something who’s also stuck in Tokyo for a few weeks, that would’ve been a boring question. Because we’d already know the answer (“Yes, of course they’ll end up together”). Instead, she introduces an offbeat, older, weird guy who’s about as opposite from her as they come. Now that question has some real meat to it, some real uncertainty.  I still recommend giving your characters a goal AND adding a dramatic question (in the recently discussed spec, “Seeking A Friend At the End Of The World,” about two people who meet a few days before the earth is to be struck by an asteroid, the couple is trying to reach a certain location (goal) and we’re wondering if they’re going to end up together (question)). But if you can’t add that goal, like Lost In Translation, you better add an interesting question to the mix or else there’s no reason for us to watch.

Apollo 13
Rule Broken: Audience already knows how the story ends.
Why It Didn’t Matter: I don’t’ know if I’d call this a broken rule per se, but it is something that a lot of famous real-life stories have to deal with, and Apollo 13 was one of the more famous ones so it’s worth exploring. How do you make a disaster movie work when everybody who sees it knows that your main characters get out alive? If dramatic irony is the audience being ahead of the characters in knowing something bad is going to happen to them, isn’t this the opposite? Which would then create the opposite effect? “Oh, well we know they’re going to be okay, so who cares?” Writers Broyles Jr. and Reinert, under Ron Howard’s direction, did two things to combat this problem. First, they made sure you loved these characters more than anything. That was key. Once we love the characters, we’re going to care about any threatening situation they’re in. And second, they always kept the focus on THE HERE AND NOW. Apollo 13 hits its characters with one obstacle after another, each one bigger and with larger implications than the last, sometimes compounding these obstacles on top of each other (they need to get the navigation data while coming up with a way to conserve air). Their journey is so battered with obstacles that all we’re focusing on is the RIGHT NOW. They’re so focused on surviving that so are we. If they didn’t have all these things to do up there. Had the obstacles been less challenging or not as many, there’s a good chance we would’ve seen through the charade and said, “Hey, don’t these guys all live? Who gives a shit?”

Rush Hour
Rule Broken: Derivative story execution
Why It Didn’t Matter: Being derivative is one of those mistakes that 99.999% of scripts can’t overcome. If we’ve seen it before, we will not want to see it again. Yet Rush Hour has one of the most derivative stories you can imagine and still works. This script is 48 Hours. This script is Lethal Weapon. This script is Beverly Hills Cop. It doesn’t even try to be anything else. So then why does it still work? Because the central relationship/dynamic is unique. We’ve never quite seen the pairing of an African American and a Chinese cop before. And so while everything that’s going on around them is shit we’ve seen a thousand times before, we excuse it because we’ve never seen this particular dynamic before. Now the screenwriting purist in me will beg you to write an original story AS WELL as have an original central relationship. However, if your buddy cop film (or romantic comedy, or road trip comedy) has a ho-hum storyline, make sure your central relationship is new/interesting/fresh/exciting in some way. You just might be able to cover-up the fact that your story is been-there-done-that.

Big
Rule Broken: No urgency (no ticking time bomb)
Why It Didn’t Matter: On its surface, Big is one of those scripts that seems like it follows the Hollywood formula to a tee. Well, yeah, concept-wise, it does. But the next time Big is on, fire up some popcorn and pay attention to the plot. What you’ll see is that there’s no urgency to the story at all. There *is* a time frame (I believe it’s six weeks until the wish-machine shows up again) but Hanks isn’t in a hurry to accomplish anything in the story. Contrast this with another high-concept comedy, Liar Liar, where Jim Carrey must figure out how to lie again before the big trial that night. So why does Big still work even though Tom Hanks’ character isn’t in a hurry to achieve anything? Because Big exploits its high concept premise better than almost every high concept comedy in history. From him playing on the giant piano with the boss to becoming a top toy company executive to being with a woman for the first time. Big gives you everything you want to see when you think of a kid getting stuck in a man’s body, and that helps us forget the fact that Hanks doesn’t have anything to actually do in this world.

Star Wars
Rule Broken: Main character isn’t introduced until 15 minutes into the story.
Why It Didn’t Matter: These days, if you’re not introducing your main character in the very first scene, then you sure as hell better be introducing him in the second one. Anything beyond that, and it’s no soup for you. The hero is the person the audience identifies with. We want to meet him as soon as possible. So then how does one of the greatest movies in history introduce its main character fifteen minutes into the story and get away with it? The answer is simpler than you think. It doesn’t matter that it takes so long for our hero to arrive because AN EXCITING STORY IS HAPPENING IN THE MEANTIME. Characters with immediate wants are tracking down characters with harmful plans. People are being killed to retrieve information. There’s mystery. Excitement. High stakes. Why would we be thinking about our main character when so much story awesomeness is going on? Had we started with Darth Vader chilling out on his throne back on Coruscant casually inquiring if his cronies had located the Death Star plans yet… Had we cut to R2 and C3PO casually landing on Tantooine, in no rush to find Obi-Wan… then yeah, we probably would’ve been like, dude, where the fuck is the main character?? But the intensity of the story, the immediacy of everyone’s actions, the mystery behind why it was all happening, kept us engaged to the point where we just weren’t thinking about it.

And there you go. Seven movies. Seven broken rules. Seven reasons why those movies still worked. Remember, no rule is carved in stone. Any rule can be broken. But if you’re going to break it, know why you’re breaking it and make sure it’s for a good reason. Otherwise, you’re flying by the seat of your pants. I’m still waiting for the first great script that isn’t built on a foundation of solid storytelling. I don’t think that script is coming any time soon so best to stick with what’s worked for thousands of years.

Genre: Family/Fantasy
Premise: 13 year old aspiring inventor Andrew Henry begins to suspect that the world he lives in is not what it seems.
About: Didn’t research this until after I wrote the review, but it appears that Andrew Henry’s Meadow is a well-known children’s book, which would make this an adaptation, not a spec script, as I had originally thought. Although I don’t know as much about Adam as I do Zach Braff, I’ve read in several of Zach’s interviews that Adam is interested in writing children’s books, which would make this adaptation a logical choice. Zach Braff starred in the NBC sitcom, Scrubs, and went on to surprise Sundance back in 2004 with his well-crafted writing-directing debut, Garden State. This is an early draft of the script.
Writers: Adam and Zach Braff (based on the 1965 children’s book by Doris Burn)
Details: 126 pages – 2004 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).

Well, for reasons I won’t get into here, today was supposed to be the review of my first “impressive” script (possibly even Top 25!) that I’d read in a long time. The script was “Seeking A Friend At The End Of The World,” which I’m guaranteeing will end up top 10 in this year’s Black List. But a series of events have prevented this from happening so instead I’m going to review Zach Braff and his brother’s script, Andrew Henry’s Meadow. However, if you’ve read “Seeking a Friend” and want to comment on it in the comments section, feel free to.

I didn’t know anything about Andrew Henry’s Meadow but the title made it sound like a more fantastical version of Garden State (Meadow? Garden?), so I was down. I’ll be the first to admit that Garden State’s script lacked some punch, but the movie was different and definitely captured the frustration and uncertainty that we often experience at different points in our lives. I was in that kind of mood so it sounded like a nice fit.

Well, as I would quickly realize, this wasn’t that script at all. Andrew Henry’s Meadow reads like a mix between Meet The Robinsons and The Goonies. It also has a healthy dose of the 2004 thematic soup du jour, “Governments control us with fear.” (as seen in The Village and Fahrenheit 9/11).

13 year old Andrew Henry lives in a Truman Show like suburb where all the houses are the same and all the people are the same. In this fantastical version of our world, a single dominating company named Omnimega rules everything. OmniMega has built walls around our city to keep us safe from the “killer mutants” who would eat us up, regurgitate us, and eat us again if they only had the chance.

An aspiring inventor, Andrew finds a secret room in his house that contains an old book which states that, gasp, there are no mutants! That there’s nothing evil or scary outside of the city! So off he goes to test this theory, and finds that, indeed, all there are are big beautiful meadows as far as the eye can see. He begins to build the Michael Jackson mansion of all treehouses in this meadow, and soon other outcast kids, like himself, join him to help.

Naturally, he learns that Omnimega has made all this stuff up to scare people (hey, just like leaders in the real world do!) so he and his outcast friends must find a way to expose them before it’s too late (the Omnimega president is transmitting content through TV waves that keeps the populace in a zombie state). The plan is to break into the Omnimega TV tower, seize the production floor, and transmit the truth to everyone out there.

Okay, so, I’m sure you’ve already identified several things wrong with this script just by reading my summary. Most notably, it reads like an amalgam of two writers’ favorite movies. We have scenes straight out of the The Truman Show, The Village, The Goonies. Although I’m forgetting which one, the whole “TV static in people’s eyes” thing has been done in several super hero movies before. We have The Running Man ending with them trying to bust into the TV tower. That was easily the biggest fault in Andrew Henry’s Meadow. Every single development felt like something I had seen before.

But the problems with Meadow began before that. This is a laborious read. Open this up to any page and you will find skyscraper sized paragraph chunks that go on forever and ever. Over-description is an easy way to spot a new screenwriter, as they approach their scripts more like a novelist (since that’s where the bulk of their fiction reading has come from). You don’t need to tell us every little place your character walks, every little thing they see, every little way they react, every little crevice in their apartment. Only tell us what’s necessary for the story to continue. If you can’t describe an action beat in 3 lines or less, you’re probably writing too much description.

The direction of this story is all wonky as well. I understand that this is called “Andrew Henry’s Meadow,” but I’m not sure why we’re spending 20 some pages off in this meadow with all these kids building a tree house. To me, the story is that this Omnimega villain is trying to take over the city. When they’re out here in the meadow enjoying life and building things, there isn’t any story being advanced. It’s a completely separate storyline, which made most of the second act boring.

There’s a really good script that made the 2009 Black List called “Toy’s House,” where a high school kid builds a house in the forest and starts living there with his friends. That made sense because THAT WAS THE STORY – his building of that house and how it changed his life. In Andrew Henry’s Meadow, going to build this house feels like an unnecessary detour. Had they eliminated it, the story still would’ve made sense, which usually means it’s unnecessary.

Everything here takes too long to get to. It seems like we spend years before the inciting incident happens (he finds the book). It takes way too long for him to then get out of the city. I guess the “have fun in the meadow” stuff is supposed to be the second act, but since the second act is, by definition, the conflict stage of your story, it’s weird that this whole section is happy happy joy joy with no conflict whatsoever. This is followed by the “comes out of nowhere” Omnimega uses TV to hypnotize people subplot. Had that been set up earlier, it might have had a chance of working. Here it just…comes out of nowhere. And then the last act is so much like The Running Man that all we can think is, “Man, this is exactly like The Running Man.”

Now, it’s not all doom and gloom. Clearly, Zach Braff’s experience as an actor has taught him the importance of character, and while I didn’t fall in love with any of the characters in Meadow, I acknowledge that all of them were unique and interesting. We’ve seen the young shunned inventor protagonist before, but Andrew Henry’s underdog starry-eyed determined persona was easy to root for. Whereas in yesterday’s TV pilot, 17th Precinct, we only got the Cliff’s Notes version of each character, here, with Andrew, his parents, the girl he liked, his nerdy best friends, there was enough detail where the story could’ve centered around any one of them. And that’s not easy to do.

But the attention to character detail was the only thing that really worked for me. One of the most important things a script must accomplish is telling a story in a way that an audience hasn’t quite seen before. In other words, surprise us. If we can guess what’s coming around the corner every step of the way, if every plot development feels like, “Hmm, I’ve already seen this in another movie,” then the reader’s going to lose interest. And that’s how I felt reading Meadow.

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

What I learned: In any script where you’re introducing a made-up world, there’s going to be more description than usual. However, there isn’t a more suicidal tactic in screenwriting than writing huge paragraphs. First of all, it depresses the reader. They know their reading time just went up by 50%. They hate sloshing through tons of extraneous detail to get to the important stuff. And sooner or later they just start skimming through those paragraphs anyway, causing them to miss key important details, which leads them to become confused later on. So only include the details in your description that are necessary to tell your story and NOTHING MORE. The reader will love you for it.

It’s Comedy Theme Week everyone. For a detailed rundown of what that means, head back to Monday’s post, where you’ll get a glimpse of our first review, Dumb and Dumber. Today, I’m taking on the best sports comedy ever made, Happy Gilmore.

Genre: Comedy
Premise: A failed hockey player is forced to join the pro golf tour in order to save his grandmother’s home.
About: As not many people saw Adam Sandler as a movie star at the time, Happy Gilmore did only so-so at the box office, taking in 38 million dollars. The movie, however, would later become a huge hit on video and help propel Sandler into becoming one of the highest paid actors in the world. Roger Ebert said of Sandler’s performance at the time, which he did not like, that he “doesn’t have a pleasing personality: He seems angry even when he’s not supposed to be, and his habit of pounding everyone he dislikes is tiring in a PG-13 movie.” As I find Sander’s anger to not only be the funniest part of the film, but an integral part of his character and character arc (and thus organic to the story), it just goes to show how polarizing reactions to comedy can be!
Writers: Tim Herlihy and Adam Sandler

Leave it to Adam Sandler to restore some normalcy to the craft of screenwriting.

Uhhhhh….what?? Did I just mention Adam Sandler and screenwriting in the same sentence? And that sentence didn’t include the words “dreadful,” “incomprehensible,” “horrifying,” “unreadable,” or “brain-cancer-inducing?” I believe I did. Yes, believe it or not, before Sandler and his “writing team” began invading our cineplexes with movies like “Has-Beens Hanging Out At A Cabin” or whatever the hell that piece of crap was with him and Chris Rock and Kevin James, he actually made a few good movies. And Happy Gilmore, by a country mile, was the best of them.

While yesterday’s comedy made all sorts of funky structure-breaking choices that confused and confounded me, Happy Gilmore is one of the most straightforward by-the-book executions of the three-act structure there is. In fact, if I was going to recommend a template for the execution of the single protagonist comedy, I would put Liar Liar first and Happy Gilmore second. As shocking as it sounds, this screenplay is a thing of beauty.

As many of you know, Happy Gilmore is about a lousy hockey player with anger management issues who’s forced to become a professional golfer in order to save his grandmother’s house. Happy’s unique talent is his ability to drive the ball further than any professional golfer in the world. But after his success begins to draw the ire of tour hot shot and universal asshole Shooter McGavin, Happy finds himself not only struggling to win back his grandmother’s home, but trying to defeat the best golfer in the world.

What I love about Happy Gilmore is that it follows all the rules, yet still manages to feel fresh and funny. It starts by giving us a hero with a flaw.  Happy has anger issues. This flaw, while admittedly simplistic, gives our character some depth, something to overcome during the course of his journey.  And even better, in “proper” screenwriting fashion, we find out about this flaw not because our hero or some other character *tells* us he has anger issues. We find out through his *actions*. After not making the hockey team, Happy proceeds to beat the shit out of his coach.

This is followed by the inciting incident, the moment in the screenplay that incites a call to action. Happy’s grandmother loses her house because she didn’t pay her taxes. She owes $250,000 dollars and if she doesn’t come up with it within 90 days, the house will be sold off. So our character goal is set: Get $275,000 before the 90 days is up.

In order to beef up that goal, the writers make sure you know that the grandma is the nicest sweetest coolest most loving woman in the world. And because you love her, you want to see Happy get her house back for her. Also, remember how the other day I was talking about positive and negative stakes? How you want your character to not only GAIN something if he wins, but LOSE something if he loses? We have that here when we find out Grandma is staying at the nursing home equivalent of a concentration camp. If Happy gets the money, he gets her house back. If he loses, she’s stuck in this hellhole forever!

But here’s where the genius really kicks in. For most movies to work, your hero must DESPERATELY WANT TO ACHIEVE HIS GOAL. If your hero doesn’t want to achieve his goal, then what’s the point in watching? He doesn’t really care. So why should we? But if someone’s desperately going after a goal doing something they enjoy, where’s the fun in that? Especially in a comedy. It’s much more fun if they DON’T like what they’re doing. And Happy hates playing golf. So then how do you make someone despereately want to achieve something if they don’t like what they’re doing? Simple. You force them into it. So Happy hates golf, but he HAS to play it. And this conflict he has with the sport is what leads to the majority of the comedy in the movie. Again, CONFLICT BREEDS COMEDY. This is how we get Happy swearing up a storm as he tears up a pack of clubs on national TV while the Tour President tries to calm down the sponsors. Or how we get the classic comedy moment of Happy fighting Bob Barker. It’s the key component to the movie working, that Happy wants desperately to achieve his goal, but still hates what he’s doing.

One commonality we see between Happy Gilmore and Dumb and Dumber is that the writers work really hard to make sure you love the main character. We start out with Happy’s voice over. Voice overs always get you into the head of your hero, breaking that fourth wall and making you feel like you know them. So it’s a great device to create sympathy (though still dangerous!). Through it, we find out that Happy lost his father when he was young (sympathy). Happy doesn’t make the hockey team (more sympathy). Happy gets dumped by his girlfriend (more sympathy). Happy employs a homeless man as his caddy (more sympathy). But what you may not have picked up on, is that there’s a very subtle twist to all of these sympathetic moments to draw our attention away from the fact that the writers are pining for our sympathy. Each moment is cloaked inside comedy. In other words, because we’re laughing, we forget that the writers are blatantly manipulating us. When Happy gets kicked off the team, he hilariously beats the shit out of the coach. When his girlfriend leaves him, he screams at her through the intercom (she eventually leaves and Happy is talking to a young boy and an aging Chinese maid). It’s very cleverly disguised inside comedy, and a neat trick to use in your own comedies.

Another great touch is that Happy Gilmore constructs the perfect villain: Shooter McGavin. A lot of writers think you just throw an asshole into the mix and that’ll be enough. Crafting a villain, even in a simple comedy, requires a lot of work. You have to give us someone we hate, but not in that obvious cliché stereotyped way. The mix here of arrogance, passive-aggressiveness, fakeness, and elitism, along with all those annoying little traits (his little “shooting of the guns” and recycled jokes) makes Shooter just a little bit different from the other villains you’ve seen in comedies.

Even the love interest is perfectly executed here. Usually, the love interest in a non-romantic comedy is unnaturally wedged into the story to appease producers. Here, it feels organic to the story. The romantic lead (who’s Claire from Modern Family btw) is the public relations director of the tour. So when one of the tour players is acting up (in this case, Happy Gilmore), it’s only natural that she be brought in to keep him in check. This stuff sounds like it just happens. But you gotta be on your game to make it feel natural. And you have to admit, you never question it in Happy Gilmore.

Chubbs (the one-armed golf pro) is also organically integrated into the script. Whenever you write a sports comedy, you want to not only have an internal flaw (anger, in this case) that the hero battles, but an external one as well, so there’s something physical they have to fix in order to achieve their goal. Here, it’s Happy’s putting. That’s what’s preventing him from beating Shooter. This is the reason Chubbs becomes essential. He has to teach Happy how to putt. Again, it seems obvious, but that’s because it’s so well done.

Another key that makes Happy Gilmore work – and a requirement for any good comedy – is that it exploits its premise. Whenever you come up with a comedy idea, you want to make sure you have 3 or 4 scenes that showcase that idea. That’s why the Bob Barker fight is genius. That’s why Chubbs taking Happy to the miniature golf course and Happy getting in a fight with the laughing clown is genius. These are the moments that represent the audience’s expectations of the idea. If you’re not including these scenes, you might as well not write the movie.

Happy Gilmore is also an incredibly tight script. That was another reason Dumb and Dumber threw me for a loop. It’s over 2 hours long. Most comedies need to be short. You’re making people laugh. Not giving them a history lesson. So by making Happy Gilmore a lean 93 minutes long, it forces the writer to make every scene count. And indeed, every single scene here pushes the story forward. Even the most questionable story-related scene, the pro-am tournament with Bob Barker, sets up Shooter’s goon/cronie who later tries to take down Happy in the Tour Championships.

This is by far the best sports comedy ever made. And just as a straight comedy, it’s pretty high up there as well. If you’re writing a comedy with a single protagonist trying to obtain a goal (like most comedies), you definitely want to study the structure of Happy Gilmore.  It’s pretty much perfect.

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

What I learned: Look to make your villain unique through a combination of traits. Shooter McGavin is clever (sending Happy to the 9th tee at nine), passive aggressive (offering backhanded compliments whenever asked about Happy’s talent), cowardly (backing away from a fight) phony (pretending to care about his fans when all he cares about is himself). This combination of qualities gives him a depth that you don’t often see in comedic villains. Making your villain a straight-forward asshole may get the job done, but layering him with numerous quirks and traits will separate him from all the cliché villains of the past.