Genre: Sci-Fi
Premise: A mysterious terrorist takes over a top secret U.S. mountain military base that contains within it every ancient artifact that the U.S. has ever collected.
About: New Line just won the auction for this project. John Wick 4 helmer Chad Stahelski will direct it. The writers are Andrew Deutschman and Jason Pagan, who are on a tear right now. They just sold a horror project to Neal Moritz based on a series of TikTok videos, another horror project to Netflix, and a third horror project to eOne with one of my favorite directors, Andre Ovredal (Trollhunter), set to direct.
Writer: Andrew Deutschman and Jason Pagan
Details: 114 pages

Today’s script makes me want to think of potential movie crossover pitches that would blow a studio executive out of the water.

The Matrix meets Shutter Island.

Star Wars meets The Joker.

Jurassic Park meets Deadpool.

Alien meets American Psycho.

Okay, fine. Those all suck. But today’s crossover does not suck. Die Hard meets Raiders of the Lost Ark?? Every 80s kid just got the visual material required for their next 30 wet dreams.

But here’s the funny thing with these monster crossover ideas: they can become a victim of their own amazingness. The reader is going in SO EXCITED that how can what’s delivered possibly live up to expectations?

We’ve had a few of those scripts come here only to plunge off a cliff. But I’m willing to bet that “Classified” will be different. Grab your whips, check your rear view mirror for stray boulders, and take a trip with me into this booby-trapped screenplay cave!  And watch out for snakes!

Cold open on the Cold War era, circa 1956. American Captain Carl Stoller escapes a laboratory right before a black sickness overtakes everyone inside. This disease came out of an ancient box scientists were studying.

Cut to present day and black market dealer Charlie finishes selling stolen ancient swords and vases for hundreds of thousands of dollars. As he’s packing up, Hamid Al-Ahtari arrives and tries to tell him a shield he claims belonged to Achilles. Yes, of heel fame. Charlie is incredulous but when a mysterious 90 year old man (Mr. X) backs Al-Ahtari up, Charlie gets the feeling the shield is the real deal.

But the second he buys it, the FBI charges in, led by Agent Jordan Gelman (a woman), and a kerfuffle follows. Charlie and Jordan end up on a Harley chasing Mr. X and Al-Ahtari in their truck, a truck that eventually crashes into a fuel tank, exploding! But somehow, there are no bodies inside the wreckage. Only the Achilles shield!

A couple of months later, Mr. X and Al-Ahtari break into a secret missile Silo base inside a mountain. That base happens to have a collection of Raiders of the Lost Ark like boxes in the back, things the U.S. military has collected over the past century. And guess what? They’re going to steal all of them.

It’ll be up to Jordan to lead a team in there (through a back tunnel connected via Camp David, the president’s vacation home) and stop Mr. X – who, by the way, sheds his old man skin revealing a 30 year old Carl Stoller! Jordan will need the help of the guy she hates most in the world, Charlie, to figure out what these guys plan to do with these artifacts!

Once the pair lead a team of agents into the mountain base, they realize what it is Stoller is looking for. PANDORA’S BOX. That’s right, the biggest artifact of them all, even bigger than the Ark of the Covenant! Since everyone’s aware that once Pandora’s Box is opened, it can never be closed again, the race is on to stop Stoller before her finds it.

I’m going to talk about something that’s a little uncomfortable but if we’re being real with ourselves as screenwriters, it’s an important conversation to have.

What is your level as a writer?

Are you a wordsmith on par with the genius of Cormac McCarthy?

Or are you more on par with the guys who wrote Sonic The Hedgehog?

To be clear, both writers can make money in the writing space. But you need to know which one you’re closer to as that will determine what kind of scripts you should write.

Put simply, the lower your writing ability is, the more high concept your ideas need to be.

If you’re an average writer, this is the exact kind of script you want to write. Cause any average writer who studies the heck out of the craft and writes a bunch of scripts to get their skill level up, can work in this industry if they’re writing concepts like this one. These popcorn blockbuster type concepts are very forgiving. They don’t need you to be a great dialogue writer or a thematic mastermind. They just need you to write fun characters, fun scenes, and keep moving the story along.

From there, the script will be elevated by imagination and research. You have to be someone with an active enough imagination to come up with memorable scenes, such as being dropped in a 2000 year old snake-infested Egyptian tomb. And you need to do a ton of research to find the cool antiquities that are going to make a script like this shine.

Which leads me to the script’s biggest strength – and I don’t know if I’ve ever celebrated this as a script’s number one quality before – the exposition!

Exposition, Carson?? The script is good because of exposition??

This script is chock full of so much fun exposition about secret societies and ancient cultures and exotic trinkets and fantastical history that every time someone started talking, I found myself smiling and leaning in, trying to “hear” them better.

“In Doha they were in possession of a shield that supposedly belonged to Achilles, the greek warrior. It and had originally been acquired by the CIA in the 50s, when Stoller was a Marine… The shield casts a 30 foot wide radius of complete protection, so much so that if you stood ten feet to the left, and I fired a grenade at you, you wouldn’t even feel a flutter.”

This is where research and imagination collide. As the writer, you have to do the hard work and read the history that gives you your ideas. And I’m not talking about wikipedia pages. I’m talking about books. I’m talking about hardcore hard to find microfilm level sh*t. And you have to read through all the boring stuff to get to the good stuff. Which takes time. Which is why no one does it.

But if you’re not Sorkin, if you’re not Tarantino, this is how you make up for it. Cause you need to give the reader SOMETHING they don’t get anywhere else. Let me repeat that because I don’t think screenwriters understand how important that is: If you’re not giving the reader something no other writer can, then why would they care about your screenplay? So if you can’t offer genius dialogue or effortlessly compelling drama, it’s gotta be something else.

For Classified, it’s the gobs of really fun exposition highlighting all this bonkers mythology.

Another thing I have to give these guys is that they actually NAILED “Die Hard meets Raiders of the Lost Ark.” Sometimes writers use juicy movie crossovers to hype up their script and you read the script and isn’t a representation of the movies at all.

But Die Hard meets Raiders is actually the BEST way to pitch this script. You have a bad guy who takes over a base (aka a building). And you have tons of magical religious artifacts being kept in that building that the bad guys start using (Raiders) and the good guys have to stop.

What’s impressive about this is that I’ve been hearing “What if…” pitches about those boxes at the end of Raiders for decades. Everyone has tried to figure out a way to build a movie around them. The problem is the same problem everyone runs into when they deal with mystery boxes. The boxes are almost always more interesting closed than they are open.

You got to do a lot of research to come up with even one interesting artifact inside a box. And these guys did a good job of making everything that was found fun. I mean at one point we even explore Korean myth Hong-Gil-Dong, Doppelgängers made out of straw that follow their master.

I’m not sure the script ever elevates beyond pure fun. But it sure understands fun. Which is why I had such a good time with it.

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

What I learned: This script is a great example of the writers asking themselves, “If someone heard this movie idea, what would they want in the movie?” And then they made sure to give you that. Too many times we come up with ideas and we sort of let them get away from us. Never let your script go so off course that you’re no longer giving the moviegoer the best things about the idea. It’s like if you wrote a movie called Wedding Crashers and the protagonists only crashed one wedding.  Audiences are going to be disappointed.  Top Gun Maverick is a great example of a film that lived by this mantra. They knew exactly what their audience wanted and gave it to them.

There is a movie Hollywood wanted you to see this weekend.

There is a movie Netflix tried to convince you you wanted to see this weekend.

And there is the movie you actually should’ve seen this weekend.

We’re going to talk about all three today.

We’ll start with shocking box office news. The second weekend of the dinosaur sequel, Jurassic World Dominion, beat out the premiere weekend of Pixar’s, Buzz Lightyear. Jurassic World took in 58 million and Buzz Lightyear took in 51 million.

For reference, the last Toy Story film took in 120 million on the exact same weekend three years ago.

I know some of you don’t care about box office. But I do. I think every box office success and failure tells us something about the stories the general moviegoing audience wants to see.

What was it about this story that kept people away? Some analysts point to it being a confusing concept. The origin story of a fake toy. I don’t know about that. I thought that was quite clever. In a movie landscape where prequels and sequels and spinoffs and sidequels have become commonplace, this is one of the more original spinoff ideas I’ve come across.

I honestly think one of the big reasons the movie opened low was the music choice in the trailer. Starman by David Bowie??? A song recorded in 1972. And your audience is 9 year olds? I’m sorry but that doesn’t track. It didn’t feel right and I honestly think it painted the film with a confusing brush.

The more common belief is that Buzz doesn’t have his ensemble of toys to accompany him this time around. It’s just him and that’s not enough to get people to show up. I guess that makes sense. You’ve grown up getting all the toys, now you only get one of them. But I don’t know. The Marvel movies that focus on one character seem to do just fine at the box office.

There’s also the matter of the gay kiss in the movie, which may have scared off more conservative families than Disney had anticipated. And Chris Evans, who can be, let’s just say, aggressively political at times, called anyone who didn’t agree with his opinion on the matter, “idiots.” Regardless of which political side you find yourself on, that’s bad form. You shouldn’t call anyone an idiot. But, in the end, who knows how much of an effect that had on the box office. It’s impossible to tell.

I think what it comes down to with every project – and this is something that Hollywood, despite the billions of dollars it’s shoved into R&D over the years, has never figured out – is that some movies have that x-factor that gets people excited and some don’t. Buzz Lightyear never had that x-factor.

Cause I was originally going to see it. But the closer I got to the movie, the more I started to weigh the three hours it was going to take out of my day against what else I could do with that time. In the end, alternative use of that time won out.

I’m still going to watch Lightyear when it hits Disney Plus. I’m a sci-fi geek so I root for any big-budget sci-fi story. I also love Toy Story. But this movie never got up into that exclusive “must-see” territory, which is why it lost out to Jurassic World.

By the way, what a huge win for Jurassic World, right? This movie was murdered last week by critics and most movie-goers. There wasn’t a single positive storyline around the film. But this surprise win makes the movie relevant, at least for the next seven days!

For those who stayed home, they had a big Netflix release awaiting them in Spiderhead. Spiderhead was a movie that wasn’t on anybody’s radar. Netflix knew they had a dud but when director Joesph Kosinski and Miles Teller debuted the most talked about movie of the year in Top Gun, Netflix went all-in on Spiderhead’s promotion.

There’s nothing worse than “clumsy and silly” masquerading as “high-minded.” And Spiderhead is the epitome of this. It wants so badly to make a statement about… I don’t know, the world or something. But it’s such a weak script combined with such a haphazard execution that virtually nothing works.

For starters, it throws us into the movie midway through the main character’s journey. That was a terrible decision. We show up watching our characters freak out after drugs have been injected into their system and we never catch up to what’s going on or why. Which I think was the point but it was a really bad point because it didn’t work at all.

The first draft of Groundhog Day famously dropped us into Bill Murray’s nightmare hundreds of days into the loop. The producers loved the concept but immediately identified how confusing it was to already start in the loop and ordered the writer to begin the story before the loop.

Reese and Wernick or Kosinski or whoever made this choice would’ve done well to approach Spiderhead in the same way. The movie never recovers from starting at such a strange point in the process.

And then there are just basic bad storytelling choices. There are two “suits” conducting the experiments and no protocols for if someone dies or commits suicide in the trial rooms??? They have to deal with it themselves??? That’s a straight up lack of effort on the writers’ part. They needed to figure out their mythology and understand what happens in those circumstances and create the proper staff support to deal with them because even if something basic goes wrong, there clearly should’ve been staff to deal with it.

And then the patients can come up and hang out with the suits whenever they want? They have full access to them? Can even sneak up on them? This when you have mentally unstable prisoners with violent tendencies??? I mean come on. How much sense does that make? Every creative choice in this screenplay seems designed to destroy the viewer’s suspension of disbelief. It’s baffling how lazy and stupid it all is.

And by the way, one of the easiest ways to know if a movie is bad is when the trailer doesn’t even know what the movie is. It shows you a bunch of random shots. Nothing is cohesive. There’s no clear narrative to latch onto. Whenever that happens in a trailer, as it did Spiderhead, that’s exactly how the movie ends up.

Which is why I’m worried about “Nope.” Its trailer has the same problems that Spiderhead had in its trailer. But back to Spiderhead. Stay as far away from this movie as you can. I would even suggest hiring a local programmer to come to your home and reprogram your Netflix app to eliminate all references to Spiderhead just so you don’t accidentally click on it and are forced to watch the first several seconds.

Spiderhead is the embodiment of a “What The Hell Did I Just Watch?”

But do not fear, my friends. This does not mean you are without something to view this week. There is a good movie out there. The only catch is it’s on Apple TV. It’s called “Cha Cha Real Smooth,” and it’s one of the big success stories to come out of Sundance earlier this year.

The movie was written and directed by (and stars) 23 year old Cooper Raiff. It follows 22 year old recent college graduate, Andrew, who finds himself really good at being a hype man at bar mitzvahs, to the point where he starts getting paid for it.

During one of these parties, he meets Domino, the mother of an autistic teen girl, and Domino instantly falls for him when he does the impossible, getting her daughter to have fun at the party.

Of course, she’s in her 30s and he’s 22 and, oh yeah, she’s also getting married soon. So it’s far from smooth sailing. That’s really what the movie is about. They’re navigating this impossible situation and all of it is done in classic Sundance indie fashion that’s at times frustrating but most of the time, satisfying.

For starters, 23 years old?? And this is your first movie? That’s amazing. Visually, the director, Cooper Raiff, is nothing special. But where he shines is he gets amazing performances out of everyone, especially Dakota Johnson, who’s irresistible in this. He also gets a good performance from Leslie Mann, Vanessa Burghardt (the actress who plays the autistic daughter), as well as himself!

And the writing is surprisingly strong for a 23 year old. When you’re writing character based storylines, you need to create character-centric plot pieces that make us care. And one of the ways to do this is to make the character goals impossible.

There was something I loved about Raiff’s choice to have Domino months out from her wedding. Being already married is kind of cliche. More importantly, it seems easier to overcome if you’re Andrew. If they’ve been married for a long time and they’re both numb to marriage and don’t really care about one another, that’s a shield that can be penetrated by Andrew.

But the fact that they’re GETTING MARRIED and therefore still in the happy phase of a relationship made it seem a lot tougher to penetrate. That’s what you’re trying to do as a writer. You want to make things as hard as possible for your hero. And the further into the story we got, the harder Andrew prying Domino away from her fiancé felt.

Let me explain why this choice is such a good one. If it becomes clear that Andrew is going to win Domino over, that it’s only a matter of time, we have less need to read. Because we already know what’s going to happen. But if you go the opposite direction, and after every ten pages, Andrew feels further away from his goal of getting Domino, then we have no choice but to keep reading. Because we’re thinking, “Well it’s a movie so he has to get her. But it looks like he’s not going to.” That conflict is what powers our curiosity and makes us want to charge through the rest of the screenplay to see what happens.

I don’t think this is a perfect movie. It’s not as good as its big brother, Coda. But it’s sort of like the perfect Sundance indie movie. It hits all those beats that make you feel like you’ve discovered a cool little movie that nobody else knows about.

I suggest you check it out.

Also, feel free to leave your reviews of both Buzz Lightyear and Spiderhead! I’m curious what you guys thought!

If you would’ve told me two months ago that not only would I *like* Ms. Marvel more than Obi-Wan, but that the show would be infinitely better than the latest Star Wars offering, I would’ve told you’d certifiably lost your mind.

And yet here we are. I have watched 5 episodes of Obi-Wan and 2 episodes of Miss Marvel. And Miss Marvel is executed better in every conceivable way. Today I want to discuss the screenwriting reasons for why that is so that you, dear writer, make more Ms. Marvels, and less Obi-Wans.

Let’s start with the concepts for each show because each is utilizing a time-honored trope, which means there isn’t any originality in the concept of either show. Obi-Wan utilizes the “Taken” trope – a young girl has been taken and he must save her. Ms. Marvel utilizes a “being unpopular in high school” trope.

If you haven’t seen Ms. Marvel, a young high school girl who idolizes superheroes finds an old bracelet in the family attic that gives her superpowers. So while she’s the world’s biggest dork at school, she secretly becomes a superhero herself.

Why does Ms. Marvel’s cliched setup work and Obi-Wan’s doesn’t? Well, with Obi-Wan, we literally just saw a similar setup with another Star Wars show – The Mandalorian. The Mandalorian protects a little kid, who also gets kidnapped, and who our lead also must retrieve. In other words, nothing about Obi-Wan’s setup feels new or fresh.

Meanwhile, Ms. Marvel leans heavily into Kamala’s culture, which is Pakistani. Now I don’t know about you. But I’ve never seen a high school movie where the main character is Pakistani. And what Ms. Marvel does a great job of is leaning into that culture and exploring the ways in which it affects Kamala’s life.

For example, the Muslim religion is a lot more conservative and, therefore, Kamala can’t wear the sexy things that get girls attention at school, that help them get boyfriends and increase their popularity. So the religion and the culture aren’t just a thin coat of paint. They deeply affect how our hero lives.  All of this helps the show feel fresh and new.

Another way the show differentiates itself from Obi-Wan is through the relative importance of this moment in Kamala’s life. For Kamala, this is the single most important thing that’s ever happened to her. She is becoming a superhero. It doesn’t get much bigger than that.

With Obi-Wan, this is nowhere near the biggest moment of his life. He defeated Anakin in Episode 3. That was one. He helped take down the Death Star in Episode 4. That was two. And if we’re to believe all the stories we’re told, he’s done a lot of other big things as well. This is conceivably the 10th, maybe even 15th, most important adventure he’s ever had. Which is why the show constantly feels unnecessary.

As shocking as this might be to hear, Ms. Marvel is also a way better character than Obi-Wan. I can’t believe I typed that sentence so let me clarify it. Ms. Marvel is a better character than THE VERSION OF OBI-WAN THEY GIVE US IN THIS SHOW.

Why is that?

Well, one of the most powerful character types you can create – the character that’s most likely to make people fall in love with your character – is the underdog. Audiences love underdogs. As it so happens, both protagonists in these shows are underdogs. But one underdog we love. And the other we could care less about.

The issue with Obi-Wan’s underdog is that it’s inauthentic. Obi-Wan is made to be this washed up loser who keeps his head down and doesn’t remember how to use the force. Everything about it is manufactured. It doesn’t feel genuine at all. They needed to make him this way to create some semblance of an arc for the series. In order to “get his mojo back” he must overcome his sad sack ways.

Granted, this issue is complicated by things outside the Star Wars writers’ purview. They have a highly restrictive character canon they must work within. But that’s not an excuse. If you don’t have leniency to create a character we like, then don’t make the show. You don’t get to make a show then cry that you had all these restrictions. If you’re going to say, “Watch this,” then you have to stand by the choice you made to bring back a character who doesn’t have anything left to explore.

On the flip side, Kamala’s underdog-ness is excessively authentic. It’s not easy wearing drab clothes that cover your whole body when 99% of your classmates are dressed to attract attention. It’s going to increase the chances that you’re ignored or made fun of. Plus you have this cultural background that not a lot of people understand, which makes you even more of an outcast and, therefore, more of an underdog.

Everything about Kamala’s underdog status feels natural. There aren’t any forced aspects to it. This is something all writers need to watch for. Are you trying really hard to make the audience feel a certain way? If so, the audience probably detects that. And the second someone detects that you’re trying *really hard* to make us like your character, that’s the second we stop liking your character.

Speaking of manipulation, who would’ve thought that a Marvel show aimed at teens would be 1000% more nuanced than a Star Wars show? When Reva bursts out of her ship in her introductory scene in Star Wars, looking for Jedi on Tatooine, she does so with all the subtlety of Happy Gilmore.

I’m two episodes into Ms. Marvel, and the only villain so far is Instagram star, Zoe Zimmer. Zoe has so far been highly nuanced. She’s obsessive about her IG account, yes, but she’s quite friendly towards our hero. This is what a villain should be. They should have bad traits, but also good ones. Even “Obi-Wan’s” late season attempt to explain why Reva’s so angry doesn’t justify her rage. Nothing about her feels organic.

This speaks to a larger problem with Obi-Wan, which is that it’s writing as much to fix problems as it is to create entertainment. It has to weave through so much mythology and plot that it can’t help but feel forced. You can tell that Ms. Marvel has way more freedom in its narrative. The writers can go anywhere they want and, therefore, all they have to focus on is entertaining us.

By the way, this issue can pop up in stories other than those with sequels and extensive mythologies. If you write any kind of story where you’re trying to do too much, your writing will dissolve into the same thing that’s killing Obi-Wan. You’re writing to avoid problems instead of create entertainment.

We saw a gigantic example of this at the beginning of the week, in Jurassic World Dominion. The reason that movie felt so boring was because the writers had to spend the whole time navigating the thick-as-molasses plot rather than just write fun sh*t. There’s a reason they had so much fun with that Dino-motorcycle chase. It was the only scene where they were allowed to let loose and not worry about anything.

There are other things I love about Ms. Marvel as well, which I’m now anointing as the best Marvel show so far. I love that there’s a personal reason for keeping her superhero identity a secret. It’s well-established that her family doesn’t want a daughter who does anything out of the norm. So even if Kamala wanted to tell all her classmates (and the rest of the world) that she was a superhero, she still would’t be able to. There’s no way her parents can ever find out about this or they would disown her.

And that makes this one of the best “has to keep my secret identity” superhero movies/shows yet. I never bought for a second that Peter Parker needed or wanted to keep a secret identity. Honestly, who cares if people know he’s Spider-Man? But with Kamala, since the reason is so personal, you root harder for her to remain anonymous.

There’s also the costume. When I saw the costume in the trailers, I thought, “oh boy, they’ve really hit the bottom of the barrel with superhero shows.” But when you watch the show, you realize that Kamala is the world’s biggest superhero fan. Her dream is to go to Avengercon in cosplay. So she makes that suit herself. Which is why, of course, it’s imperfect. It’s another thing about the show that feels organic, rather than forced.

And the show explores this notion of Instagram celebrity obsession better than any show or movie I’ve seen so far outside of Eighth Grade. Imagine that you want to be popular more than anything. And you have all these people around you who have Instagram accounts that are semi-popular and it makes people like them and boy would it be great if you could somehow have a popular IG also, which would get you more friends and a boyfriend. Then you become a superhero, something that would allow you to have the biggest IG following ever. Yet you can’t tell anybody. The show does a great job showing how frustrating that is for Kamala.

I can’t believe I wrote this article, guys. In a way, it’s cool, cause I found a new show I like. But in another way, it’s sad. Because it shows how far Star Wars has fallen. This is one of their most popular characters and they’ve essentially neutered him. They have to now hope that everybody simply forgets this show existed if they’re to preserve Obi-Wan’s name.

But in order to send the site into the weekend on a high note, I will say that the Vader-Reva lightsaber battle at the end of the latest episode was the best lightsaber battle in all of Star Wars so far. It was really creative. I just wish they would’ve brought more of that creativity to the storytelling.

Genre: Drama/Crime
Premise: An Australian heroin-addict prisoner escapes to Mumbai to disappear, before cozying up with the local mob to make ends meet, and falling in love with a fellow criminal.
About: Shantaram is widely considered to be one of the top 10 books that have not been adapted into a movie or a TV show. After 20 years, all that TV streaming money finally resulted in an adaptation (starring Charlie Hunman, release date TBD). But I recently learned that Eric Roth did a feature screenplay adaptation of the book. Once I found that out, I had to read it!
Writer: Eric Roth (based on the novel by Gregory David Roberts)
Details: 146 pages

Eric Roth is one of the top 10 writers on my Best Screenwriters in the World list. So you know I had to check this out. I read the book years ago. I’ve heard of numerous attempts to make it into a movie since. They just couldn’t make it happen. Let’s see what Roth did with it.

Lin is an Australian heroin addict who robbed and stole to feed his drug habit. This gets him sent to prison. But you can’t keep Lin locked up for long. He orchestrates an escape, heads to the nearest airport, and gets as far away from Australia as possible. Which is how he ends up in Mumbai.

Once in Mumbai, he meets a tour-guide named Prabaker, who may be the most persistent tour guide in the city. Lin asks him only for a hotel recommendation, but Prabaker will not go away. He wants to show Lin the entire city. So he begins driving Lin around, which allows Lin to meet some of the locals.

One of these locals is the mysterious Klara, who Lin is immediately smitten with. Maybe because she’s a criminal like him. Lin also finds himself staying in a local slum, and when he administers a band-aid to someone with a scraped knee, word spreads quickly that the slum has a new doctor. So Lin is a doctor now.

Lin’s ultimate plan is to make it to Germany. But when his passport and all his possessions are stolen, he realizes he is now stuck here, possibly for a very long time. While he fights his way through his love story and navigates the tricky criminal underworld of Mumbai, Lin realizes that he kind of loves this city, and may want to stay for good.

Everybody who reads Shantaram loves it.

Which is why they’ve been trying to adapt it.

But Hollywood has a blindspot whereby they think anything can be adapted. And the reality is that movies work best under a certain type of structure. If your book or video game or Twitter rant doesn’t fit into that structure, it’s not going to work.

Love in the Time of Cholera. A mega-success in the publishing world. But they forced a movie out of that sucker and did anybody see it? No. Because some books just aren’t meant to become movies.

This is one of them.

Shantaram is about a dude who moves to Mumbai and experiences both the good and the bad of the city. But there’s no freaking goal. There’s no ticking time bomb. This is, essentially, travel porn. Really good travel porn.

The level of specificity here is second to none. And that **is** something audiences want to see when they go to the theater. They want to be taken to a place they’ve never been before. You can’t forget that that was one of the original appeals of film. Before we could fly from Los Angeles to Paris in 9 hours, the only way you saw another country was through magazine pictures and movies!

Which is what’s so cool about Shantaram. Cause you don’t just get taken to Mumbai. You get taken to the spots of Mumbai only the locals know about. There’s a moment in the script where they’re walking past all these men who are standing against a wall. Prubaker explains to Lin that these men have all sinned and, therefore, they’ve agreed to stand for the rest of their lives to make up for it. They even have special pole devices to keep them upright when they fall asleep.

That’s highly specific travelogue stuff there that you’re not going to find in any other screenplay.

But, again, there wasn’t enough of a narrative. Book narratives can be powered by questions: “What’s going to happen here?” And “What’s going to happen there?” Open-loop questions are enough to keep people invested. But movies need goals. And they need those goals to have stakes.

Which is why, of course, this was never made into a film, and is instead being made into a show. Books and TV are similar in that they can be built around questions such as, “Will this man and woman get together?” “Will our protagonist slip back into his drug habit?” “Will the local mob boss force our protagonist to commit a crime for him at some point?” “Will our protagonist get in touch with his daughter again?”

Those are all dramatically compelling questions. But notice that they don’t PROPEL THE STORY FORWARD. Jurassic World Dominion was not the best movie but it did have a narrative with strong immediate goals (find and save the daughter, stop the locusts from destroying the food supply) that forced the characters to be active and aggressive.

This is probably why they gave the Shantaram assignment to Roth. He’s one of the few writers who can work with slow narratives. He just did so with Dune. Forrest Gump has an elongated narrative as well.

Mostly he uses the stellar character lineup Gregory David Roberts came up with to distract us from the overall lack of plot momentum.

And Roth has an endless supply of screenwriting knowledge to help him navigate the book’s handicaps. For example, there was a chapter in the book where Lin and Prabaker witness a car crash in Mumbai. And, all of a sudden, pedestrians swarm the car, pulling the driver-at-fault out, and start beating him to death.

Roth includes that scene in the script, but he smartly places Lin and Prabaker in the car that gets in the wreck. That makes the wreck more personal, as well as more dangerous. Cause now, they’re in danger of being beaten themselves. That’s a great screenwriting tip. Always try to bring your characters closest to the action. You don’t want something cool to happen far away from your protagonist. You want them to be involved.

Probably the best example of why you pay 1.5 million dollars to have Eric Roth adapt your book is the way he handles his main character’s backstory. When Lin is in Prubaker’s village, he wakes up after a long night’s sleep and finds a little Indian girl sitting next to him with a tea set.

The girl starts talking to him in a language he can’t understand and it becomes clear she’s talking about herself. So when she stops, Lin takes it upon himself to tell her his story as well. Of course, she can’t understand him either. But it becomes a very clever way for Lin to explain a ton of backstory about himself, all in a way that feels honest. I don’t think I’ve ever seen exposition done quite this way before. And I consider it genius.

Roth also recognized that he had a goldmine in Prabaker. As I’ve told you before, if you want to write great dialogue, you need to look for DIALOGUE-FRIENDLY characters. You don’t get good dialogue out of introverted folks who carefully choose their words. Prabaker is like a coked-up Mumbai version of Yoda.

“Very few foreigners know how to speak this language, Marathi. There is only one other tourist I tried to teach to it. But he was hit by a bus who didn’t want him crossing the street when he was not looking.”

He was a single-handed lightning bolt on every page. You wanted to read whatever Prabaker said next. Which is when you know you’ve got a winning dialogue character (and a winning character in general).

Roth is such a good writer that he makes this script work. But only for what it is. Which is a distilled down version of the novel. This book was never going to work as a movie. But it was fun to read such a great writer’s attempt at it. I’m guessing it was the best draft of everyone they hired to try. Which I understand was a lot of writers.

Screenplay Link: Shantaram

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

What I learned: A structure that they might have been able to use here is that Lin doesn’t want to stay in Mumbai. But when his fake passport is stolen, he’s stuck here. So that gives him his goal. He’s got to save up enough money to buy a new fake passport and a plane ticket to his final destination (we’re told he ultimately wants to end up in Germany). That gives him anywhere from 2-4 weeks here in Mumbai, which is plenty of time to experience all the city’s craziness and keep a tight enough timeline that the story contains momentum. You would then put him at the airport at the end with a choice. He’s kind of fallen in love with this city. But he has bigger goals in Germany. Does he stay or does he go? I think that’s a better structure than what we have here, which is too loosey-goosey.

The creator of Apple’s most popular show, Ted Lasso, has struck a deal with the streamer to produce a new comedy for them!

Genre: TV 1 Hour Comedy
Premise: A suspended Florida Keys cop must solve the strange case of a man’s arm that was found floating in the ocean.
About: Bill Lawrence is going to try and do the same thing for Vince Vaughn that he did for Jason Sudekis, giving him an Apple show perfectly suited for his talents. Lawrence has had an incredibly successful career. He wrote his first TV episode back in 1993 on Boy Meets World. He later developed Spin City, Scrubs, Cougar Town, and most recently, Ted Lasso. This guy must have a house the size of a large island. Michelle Monaghan (Mission Impossible franchise) will also star.
Writer: Bill Lawrence (based on the novel by Carl Hiassen)
Details: 61 pages

I’m far from an expert on cop shows. I just know that it’s the most well-tread TV genre of them all. And that’s something writers have to beware of. Whenever you’re entering well-tread territory, you have to work harder to come up with a fresh angle. Cause you have a lot more competition.

For example, if you write a zombie script, you have to realize that you’re going up against soooooooo many zombie scripts. So if yours is another basic zombie outbreak story, it’s not going to stand out. Just like if you write a cop show, you probably don’t want to set it in New York City.

And that’s actually a great way to separate your cop show from others – find a unique location. A cop show in Alaska is going to be a lot more unique than a cop show in Los Angeles.

Here, we’ve got a cop show set in the downtrodden “backwoods” sector of waterfront Florida – the West Keys – a sort of “Anti-Miami Vice.” That alone is going to separate it. Also, since there are a lot more dramatic cop shows out there than there are comedic ones, you have a secondary factor separating your show.

Which is why Bad Monkey feels like its own thing.

The story follows a suspended cop in Key West Florida named Andrew Yancy. Yancy is either doing one of two things – being a cop or chasing women. And since he’s suspended, he’s happy to use that extra time chasing women.

But then Yancy’s partner comes to him with a severed arm (whose hand still has its middle finger extended) that was found by a fisherman in the ocean. He wants Yancy to get rid of it. Opening up a case for a dead body based on a severed arm would disturb the community and also create a lot of headaches for an incident that clearly happened in Miami (and therefore has nothing to do with them).

But Yancy’s cop training won’t allow him to throw it away. He asks a hot coroner to take a look at it. She’s got nothing for him. His partner eventually gives Yancy good news. A woman claims the arm belongs to her husband who died during a terrible boating accident. “Just give her the arm and walk away,” his partner says.

But Yancy can’t help himself. He starts asking the woman questions. Notices her pull an Amber Heard (try really hard to cry). Now he’s suspicious. So he goes to the funeral and meets the man’s daughter, who swears that the wife killed him. Which means Yancy’s got a bone. And he’s going to hold onto that bone all the way until he solves this case and gets his badge back.

I used to hate that cop movie trope where the officer would lose their badge at the midpoint because they did something illegal but still decide to pursue the case anyway. It was so cliche it actually hurt to watch.

But now I understand why writers do it. It creates a much more interesting character situation. For starters, the character is now acting illegally. So if he gets caught, he’s in a lot more trouble, which of course creates more tension and suspense.

He’s also neutered, like a superhero without his powers, which forces him to be more creative (always force your heroes to be more creative!).

Finally, it allows you to cheat as a writer. There are a lot of rules cops must abide by. But those rules don’t apply if you’re not officially a cop. You wouldn’t go into a dangerous situation without backup for example. But if you’re not officially a cop, you don’t need backup.

I noticed all this while reading Yancy’s story.

I also noticed that Bill Lawrence doesn’t give a crap about impressing readers. His writing style is almost anti-reader. I suppose if every TV project I wrote went to air and became a hit, I wouldn’t worry about readers either. But to give you an idea of what I’m talking about, the first paragraph of the script is 12 lines long!

Here I tell amateur writers they can’t get away with this yet now we have verifiable proof of a professional screenwriting doing so. Like I mentioned, guys, when you have five hits under your belt, Hollywood will let you write your scripts on toilet paper in the comic sans font.  Heck, they’ll let you write them in Celtx.

There’s also some very advanced technical stuff going on here. For example, here’s Lawrence writing a highly complicated voice over scenario…

I warn writers away from this kind of stuff only because anything that’s hard to explain might confuse the reader. Too often as writers we think the reader can read our mind. I’ll often tell the writer, save the complex version for when your pilot is purchased and you’re going into production. When it’s still a spec, keep things easy to read. Coming up with some complex voice-over scenario – like something you’d see on Euphoria – it’s too big of a gamble when you’re an unknown dealing with impatient low-level readers.

It’s worth discussing why Bill Lawrence is so successful. Because we’ve seen plenty of writers who write a good show then never write a good show again. What is it that Lawrence is doing differently?

My friends, when it comes to TV, it’s all about the main character. If your main character is the right combination of likable and interesting, we’re going to be on board. Yancy could’ve been written as a deadbeat cop who didn’t give a sh#@ about anyone but himself. Instead, Lawrence kept the lazy morally-questionable womanizing aspect of the character, but balanced it out with a guy who loves doing his job.

It’s such an advantage when your character is active, like Yancy. Because active characters push stories forward. I was talking about this with a writer not long ago. He was wondering if he should write a “Lebowski” type character who didn’t care about anything but chilling and getting high. I told him, if he does that, the character is going to be too passive and hard to root for. The genius about The Dude was that while he preferred to be lazy, the circumstances required he be active.

If Lebowski just sat around all day, we wouldn’t like him at all.

Which is a long of way of saying, find any possible way to make your hero active, even if they don’t want to be. Cause that always creates a better narrative. And here, Yancy can’t help but to investigate this severed arm. Cause he’s a cop at heart.

And by the way, this is why there are more cop shows than any other genre on television. Cops have THE MOST ACTIVE JOB there is. They always have some place to be, some crime to solve, some issue to settle. And as soon as they solve it, they’re handed another one.

Just make sure that if you write a cop show, you check with some people that it’s a unique idea.

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

What I learned: Location is a great way to spice up cop show concepts. A cop on the moon. A cop on a tropical island. A cop stationed at the biggest airport in the world. Just like the real estate industry, it’s all about location, location, location!