Genre: Crime/Thriller
Premise: When his young son is viciously murdered by a classmate, a grieving father with a history of violence kidnaps the child responsible, igniting a frenzied manhunt fueled by a powerful politician — the father of the kidnapped boy.
About: This script made last year’s Black List with nine votes. A year earlier, it made the semi-finals of the Nicholl Fellowship. A reader from that contest characterized the script this way: “Barron’s Cove is probably the bleakest screenplay I’ve ever read. Its bleakness is only surpassed by its quality.”
Writer: Evan Ari Kelman
Details: 119 pages
Jesse Plemons for Caleb?
We’ve got a wild one today.
I don’t think I’ve ever read a script quite like this.
It’s Mystic River meets Prisoners by way of Taylor Sheridan.
But it’s also a new writer. And that newness is reflected in the storytelling, which at times soars but at other times, is eye-poppingly inconsistent.
I’m still not sure what to make of Barron’s Cove. But I can promise you it’s one of the more interesting scripts on the Black List.
36 year old Caleb Faulkner is a hit man for his uncle, Benji. But Caleb isn’t one of those fancy-schmancy hit men, the kind with smooth bald heads who wear Armani suits. He’s the backwoods type – the bearded blue-collar Ozarky hit man.
One evening, when Caleb goes to pick up his son, Barron, from his ex-wife, she stares back at him with confused eyes. “I thought you had him.” After their confusion subsides, the hunt is on to find out where Barron is. The news is not good as the cops get word that a 10 year old boy was strapped to the train tracks and got run over by a freaking train. Doesn’t take long to confirm it was Barron.
Caleb quickly finds out that two kids were out with Barron that day, Alex and Phillip. And all Caleb has to do is see Alex once to know he was responsible. In one of the craziest scenes I read this year, Caleb goes to Alex’s school and chases him THROUGH THE SCHOOL T-1000 style with everyone standing around watching. He catches him, throws him in his trunk, and heads upstate.
What Caleb doesn’t entirely understand is that Alex is the adopted son of Lyle Chambers, who’s about to become a state senator. So Lyle immediately mobilizes the might of the state to find Caleb and his son.
Except it’s much more complicated than that. You see, Lyle has a backroom deal with Benji once he gets elected. So Benji is now secretly helping Lyle take his nephew down. Oh, and as Alex will later reveal to Caleb, Lyle is a serial child abuser. So Alex doesn’t want to go back to his father. In fact, the only reason Lyle adopted Alex in the first place was to make him a more sympathetic candidate.
In fact, the further down the rabbit hole we go, the more we realize that there are no clean answers here. Barron’s Cove leaves you unsure who to root for at every turn. All the way up to the heartbreaking ending.
As I’ve said north of a quarter-million times on this site, you gotta do something different with your script in order to stand out. You gotta take risks – the type of risks that get some agents and producers telling you, “You can’t do that.”
I’ll be honest, if this logline would’ve landed on my desk, I probably would’ve told the writer, “You can’t write a story where the protagonist kidnaps a child with the intent to torture and kill him.” It’s just too hard to get an audience on your side.
Kelman clearly knew this so he went into kick-the-dog mode in building the character of Alex, the kid who may or may not have killed Barron. Alex is evil incarnate. He’s just a bad kid. When Caleb first confronts him, Alex gleefully tells Caleb that Barron killed himself because he hated his father. He repeatedly antagonizes Caleb and has zero remorse for what happened.
Kelman walks that tightrope for a while, but seems to understand that you can’t walk it too far. So, eventually, Caleb starts to feel bad about Alex and his abusive father, and backs down with the threats.
Eventually they come to a truce where if Caleb can get Alex to freedom, away from his abusive father forever, Alex will tell him what happened that day on the tracks. It’s not the easiest narrative to buy into. This kid has zero leverage so it’s hard to believe he’s calling the shots. But we go along with it for the most part.
The script does a great job keeping you guessing til the end. Even though we figure out what’s happened by the midpoint, there are still several questions as to why it happened that may have been out of Alex’s hands. I really had no idea where this was all going to end, especially with the wild card that was Benji. At one point he sends hit men to kill both Caleb and Alex, and we’re thinking, “What’s going on right now?!?”
While the script doesn’t have that big splashy final twist that, I believe, it hinted was coming. It does give us a final motivation for the kill that makes sense. A satisfying ending that I didn’t think was coming as I figured the writer had painted himself into too deep of a corner.
Oh, one more thing I want to highlight here – the school kidnap scene. In my opinion, every script worth its weight needs to have ONE GREAT SCENE. You should be trying to write more than that. But you definitely need at least one. Because what a great scene does is it sticks in a producer’s head and that producer really really really wants to see that scene come to life. It very well may be the motivator for the script to get sold and made.
This school kidnap scene was great for the simple reason that the writer did something THAT HAS NEVER BEEN DONE BEFORE. Every single time there’s a kidnap scene at a school – and I’ve read tons of them – it’s always the kidnapper sneaking around the outskirts of the school, luring the kid over with a lie or the promise of something, then when no one’s looking, grabbing them and throwing them in their car.
Whenever you enter a common scenario as a screenwriter, one of the first questions you should ask yourself is, “How can I make this different?” And here’s a pro-tip for you. Your first option should be to ask, “What if I did the complete opposite of what everybody else does?” Because the complete opposite will always be jarring. The thing is, it usually doesn’t work because it doesn’t make logical sense.
But what Kelman realized here was that, for first time in history, the kidnapper was the “good guy.” Once you shift that, it opens up new possibilities for the scene that you didn’t have before. Since we’re kind of rooting for Caleb, doing the complete opposite of what a writer would normally do in this scenario actually makes sense. Which is why we get this great shocking scene. At one point, Caleb is literally chasing Alex over lunch tables with hundreds of students and dozens of faculty around. That’s going to be a great scene.
The only question with this movie is… is it so offbeat that people just aren’t going to be able handle it? Either way, it’s an entertaining screenplay. It’s different. And for that reason, I say it’s worth checking out.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[x] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: You have to be careful with writing kids like adults. I’m not talking about the precocious kids that are in every romantic comedy. I’m talking just normal kids in movies like this. There’s this tendency to bring their level of sophistication up to that of an adult to keep the dialogue sharp. Alex bordered on that a lot. For example, Caleb tells this deep intense story about being responsible for his brother’s death when he was younger. Alex – WHO’S 10 YEARS OLD MIND YOU – replies to this story with the line: “Do we have to be the worst thing we’ve ever done?” I mean come on. I’m not saying Alex needs to reply with, “Can I have a popsicle now?” But no kid has the emotional or psychological intelligence to come up with that kind of thought.
Is ‘Straight Man,’ Bob Odenkirk’s attempt to create his own Big Lebowski?
Genre: Dark Comedy
Premise: An aimless professor at a backwoods university creates a stir when he threatens to exterminate the local duck population if his college doesn’t get its act together and provide his department with a budget.
About: This is the big AMC project that will keep Bob Odenkirk in the fold after Better Call Saul. The book was written by Richard Russo in 1997. It’s being led by Aaron Zelman (supervising producer on Silicon Valley) and Paul Lieberstein (HR rep and Michael Scott foil, Toby Flenderstein, from The Office). Peter Farrelly (There’s Something About Mary, Green Book) will direct several episodes.
Writer: Richard Russo
Details: 391 pages
Since this may appear to be a strange project for a review, let me give you some quick background. Richard Russo’s novel, “Empire Falls,” is one of my favorite books. It would go on to win the Pulitzer Prize in 2001 and continues to hold a special place in my mind/heart library.
For reasons I don’t have an answer for, I’ve never read another Russo novel. Flash-forward to last week, and I saw that Bob Odenkirk had picked his next project with Better Call Saul ending. It was the Richard Russo book, “Straight Man.” It seemed like the perfect excuse to finally read another Russo story. So with that out of the way, let’s see if it’s any good!
“Straight Man” – A straight man is a member of a comedy act who plays a stooge, feed, or foil.
Our story, which takes place over one week, follows 49 year old William Henry Devereaux, Jr. a once famous author who wrote a New York Times best seller 20 years ago. But today William is an English professor at West Central Pennsylvania University who seems to be the only person in his department who isn’t worried about the impending budget cuts, cuts that most surely will result in the firing of several professors.
William has other things on his mind, such as his extremely successful author father moving back into town after having a mental breakdown. There’s also his wife, who sees him less as a husband every day than a child who needs to be taken care of. Then there’s William’s own child, his adult daughter, Julie, who moves back into his house after her seemingly sweet husband may or may not have hit her.
As the week goes on, more and more professors keep coming to William, wanting to know if they’re safe from the budget cuts. William finally has a mini-breakdown at a local park. Spotting a news crew doing a story, William grabs a goose by the neck and holds it up until the cameras are pointing at him. He then says he’s going to kill one “duck” a day starting next week until West Central Pennsylvania University gives him a budget. The fact that a man would make such a crazed demand and not understand the difference between a duck and a goose results in the video going viral (or “1997 viral”), where it ends up on Good Morning America.
This causes a stir in the school’s ecosystem. Some want William fired. Others think his outburst was productive, as it will put more pressure on the college to deliver a budget. William doesn’t seem too bothered by it, even as PETA moves into town to protest his actions. He’s more worried about his decreasing ability to pee (he fears a kidney stone may be forming). And if you’re wondering just how much play peeing gets in this novel, I’ll put it this way: More than in any other novel in history.
In the meantime, William attempts to fend off all the romantic feelings he has for his female professors and mentally prepare for the arrival of his father. He never takes any of it too seriously as William often sees life as one big joke. In a pivotal moment near the end of the story, someone frustratedly asks William, “What is it you *want*?” William doesn’t know the answer to that question. And, unfortunately, neither do we. The End.
Boy.
There’s a lot to say about this novel. It’s meandering. It’s frustrating. It thinks it’s funnier than it is.
Probably the worst thing about it is the lack of a plot. I understand that a lot of novel writers don’t care much for plot but jeez. Make SOMETHING happen. Just to give you an idea of how slowly everything moves in this story, we get our first indication that William needs to see a doctor about his urinary issues on page 75 and then don’t take our first doctor’s visit UNTIL PAGE 250!
And don’t get me started on the dad stuff. We never even meet the dad! We just keep hearing about him and hearing about him and hearing about him. But no dad! What an odd choice.
Nor do I think the novel’s main comedic storyline – William holding a goose by its neck and threatening to kill it – is going to go over as funny as the author, and apparently, Odenkirk, think it will. In screenwriting, your hero is supposed to save the cat, not kill it. Threatening to kill an animal is a surefire way to kill audience interest. Even in a comedy.
Another issue is that the main character doesn’t want anything. Your character has to want SOMETHING. To instead want nothing makes them uninteresting as a person and uninteresting as a character, since the lack of wanting anything ensures that they won’t be active. Indeed, William is highly inactive. He essentially stumbles around all day thinking about pointless nonsense.
So then what did Odenkirk see in this?
Well, if I were arguing FOR this novel, I would point out a few things. One, I like the real-time approach to the story. Russo seemed to understand, at least on some level, that his story could be perceived as boring, since there’s no plot. So by condensing everything into a single week, he was able to keep a stream of momentum that, at least, feigned structure.
Russo is also great at creating fully-fleshed out interesting characters. His best work in this novel is chronicling all these weirdo professors. One of my favorites was a fellow annoying professor who was such a devoted feminist that whenever a student used a masculine pronoun, he would always correct them by saying, “Or she.” He would do this to such an extent that everyone eventually began calling him, “Professor Orshee.”
Russo can also be quite witty at times. While jawing with a fellow professor, they say to William, “I hear you don’t write anymore.” “Not true. You should see the margins of my student papers.” “Not the same as writing a book though, right?” “Almost identical. Both go largely unread.”
And he has the occasional keen observation, some of which are more relevant today than they were in 1997: “I can’t remember the last time anyone changed his mind as a result of reasoned discourse. Anyone who observed us would conclude the purpose of all academic discussion was to provide the grounds for becoming further entrenched in our original positions.”
And I think I know why Odenkirk wanted to play this character. This is his Jeffrey Lebowski. This is his, “The Dude.” Without question. William’s a lunkheaded but sweet doofus who just wants everyone to leave him alone.
But Zelman and Lieberstein should take note of why the character of Lebowski worked. Remember, characters who don’t want to do anything in life aren’t interesting in a vacuum. They’re only interesting when they are forced to do something that they don’t want to do. That conflict is what creates the humor: a guy who doesn’t want to do a damn thing is forced to do lots of things.
You get a little of that in Straight Man. Annoying professors keep bothering William. But you don’t have it like Lebowski had it. Lebowski was forced to go on this entire adventure in order to be reimbursed for his ruined rug. There was more of an ongoing resistance he had to deal with and the stakes were much higher in regards to that resistance. Here, every time William has to do something he doesn’t want to do, it’s a minor inconvenience – some annoying student he doesn’t want to talk to, for example.
I know that TV doesn’t need plot the same way features need plot. But I worry people are going to think this character is boring because he doesn’t pursue anything, doesn’t want anything, and is never engaged in anything. He’s (or She’s) like a pinball that keeps getting knocked around with no agency unto himself. Can that work? I guess we’ll see.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: If you don’t have a plot, make sure you have a ton of characters who are all up in your protagonist’s grill wanting different things. This will, at least, ensure that your character is always having to deal with something. This is what Straight Man did well. The second William was done talking to one character, another character called him, or another character wanted to talk to him, or he had a meeting across campus with another character. While this doesn’t supplant the fact that there’s no plot, it at least makes it less of an issue.
It is 6pm Pacific time on Sunday, May 1, as I am posting this. That means you have exactly SIX HOURS to get your first act in for my First Act Contest (11:59pm Pacific Time!). I’d love to see you enter so hurry up and finish!
Okay, it looks like my review of Everything Everywhere All At Once created a cosmic level of interest about the film as everybody rushed to the theater and, in a first since the pandemic began, a wide release film made MORE money than its previous weekend, taking in 5 million dollars. The film has now grossed 35 mil, which is HUUUUUGE for an indie film. Go out and see it if you haven’t already.
I don’t think “Everything” is going to pull off that feat two weekends in a row, unfortunately, as this Friday we get our first giant release of the summer, Dr. Strange and the Multiverse of Madness. I have to give it to Marvel. I was planning on skipping this one. Despite enjoying the first film, this one felt like small potatoes compared to the recently released Batman and Spider-Man movies.
But now there are supposed to be all these cameos and darn it if I’m not a sucker for superhero cameos! Marvel is so smart. This is exactly what they used to do in their comics and they’re bringing it to the movies and gosh golly I can’t lie. It’s working!
But let’s be honest. What pushed me over the edge was the Avatar 2 trailer. Smart on both Disney’s and Cameron’s part to keep the trailer a theaters-only experience. I know it’s going to piss off the Gen-Zs and the Gen-YYs because they’ve never had to go to a theater to see anything in their lives, especially movies. But this movie is going to be a mega-event so you want to treat it that way from the start: Avatar 2 is a THEATRICAL EXPERIENCE.
I’m surprised, however, to hear people throwing shade at Cameron. They say nobody cares about Avatar anymore. They say it’s become a joke. Let me educate you people really fast: NEVER EVER DOUBT JAMES CAMERON. Ever. You lose every time.
Cameron had the entire Hollywood trade industry and Los Angeles media doing everything in their power to sink his Titanic production. Every day they gleefully tapped away on their IBM typewriters, betting it wouldn’t just be a failed movie, but that it would actually take down 20th Century Fox, the studio itself!
The funny thing is that they weren’t just wrong. They were as wrong as you could possibly be. They predicted it would be the biggest bomb in history and it literally became the biggest hit in history.
Flash-forward to Avatar and the infamous footage-screening incident where journalists crowed that they’d just watched a live-action adaptation of The Smurfs. Yeah, um, didn’t turn out too well you guys either, huh, as I’m pretty sure Avatar is, currently, the biggest box office hit of all time. Not even a film with all the superheroes in the world could dethrone it.
Probably the biggest surprise about Avatar 2 is that it’s actually coming out THIS YEAR. December 16th. It’s happening. An actual Avatar 2 movie is going to be available. Wow.
That’s not to say I don’t have questions. I didn’t think any of the underwater scenes in Aquaman looked very good. To set an entire movie underwater… I’m curious how that’s going to look visually and if the viewer is going to tire of it. Because moving around in water is slower, right? So is everyone going to look like they’re moving in slow motion the whole movie?
Or is there going to be a Gungan-like underwater city that people and Na’vi can walk around in?
I guess I’m going to defer to myself here. NEVER EVER DOUBT JAMES CAMERON. We’ll leave it at that for now. But I’ll surely have more to report to you next Monday.
The other big news in the industry is what’s happening at Netflix. The honeymoon is definitely over. We saw the first tangible evidence of that last week when they cancelled one of their high-profile (and high budget) shows, Space Force.
From a screenwriting perspective, the tale of Space Force is a fascinating one. Because, if you remember, the White House announced its assembling of the real Space Force on a Monday. And then two days later, Greg Daniels announces a deal with Netflix for a Space Force show.
The rumor is that Greg and Steve Carrell bumped into each other in the Netflix lobby, talked about the Space Force news like everyone else was doing at the time, mentioned how it would be funny if that was a show, then decided to go up and pitch it to the Netflix execs right then and there. It was famously bought right away, with Carell getting a million an episode, and off they went to make it.
I fault both parties here but I fault Daniels and Carrell more because they’re the ones who know that writing is hard and that ideas need incubation periods. They need to be tested. They need to feel just as exciting in a month as they did on the first day. And they need to be more than just an idea.
Space Force is one of those classic bad ideas disguised as a good idea. For any idea to be good, it can’t just sound good. There has to be a plan of execution in place. You have to see if the story has legs beyond the smile you get after hearing it.
Another classic bad idea disguised as a good idea was Flatliners. It’s a great high-concept pitch. A group of medical students try to find out what lies beyond life by killing (flatlining) themselves. Unfortunately, there’s nothing beyond that pitch. You flatline yourself and… what? No matter what you come up with, it’s stupid.
Space Force never had legs. And that’s because they never thought about the legs when they pitched it. If you haven’t seen this show – I mean wow – it’s bad. I’m talking really really horrible. I’m talking aggressively unfunny. The biggest problem with it is that they had no idea what to do with Carrell’s character. It was unclear who he was or what was supposed to be funny about him.
The reason The Office was such a great show is because it was built on the perfect character – a boss who badly wanted to be liked by his employees. 90% of the jokes were built around that premise. Space Force didn’t have a clear comedic angle for its hero so there were no jokes to build around him. This left the writers languishing, looking for jokes inside every corner and behind every crevice they could find, which is why the humor felt so desperate.
On top of that, it’s not clear what the show even is. It’s supposed to be parodying the real Space Force, except nobody’s heard anything about the real Space Force since the week it was introduced, which means the show is just making up a fictional random version of Space Force based on nothing. It’s hard to imagine people who’ve had as much success as Daniels and Carrell making a mistake this big.
Luckily, there is a lesson for screenwriters everywhere to take from this: Don’t rush an idea. Don’t spend three months writing a screenplay for an idea you just came up with yesterday. You need time to see if you’re still excited about the idea a month from now. And you need time to flesh the idea out. See if there’s an actual story to tell.
The cancellation of Space Force is symbolic. For years now, Netflix has been flexing their might to everyone, saying, “We have so much more money than you, we don’t care if 100 million dollar investments don’t work out.” They even went a step further with the second season of Space Force and said, “We’re even going to renew a 100 million dollar show THAT NO ONE IS WATCHING! That’s how powerful we are!”
To finally put the kibosh on Space Force is Netflix finally admitting, “Our model does not work.” But I’d say its cancellation signifies something even worse. One of the big reasons everyone wanted to work at Netflix in the first place is that they let you do your thing without interference. There was no development. No notes. It was just: Go mad!
But what they didn’t realize by doing this was that they were establishing a reputation as a place you didn’t need to bring your quality ideas to. Once you establish that a place says yes to whatever you think up, regardless of quality, you get situations like two people in the lobby coming up with an idea on the spot and actually believing they can sell it to you ten minutes later.
Since they know nobody is going to check their shit later on during development, they know they can literally get away with pitching an idea that has zero legs, hoping they’ll be able to “figure it out” later. Which is exactly what Space Force feels like when you watch it. It feels like everyone, from the writers to the actors, is desperately trying to figure out what the show is. That always happens on some level. But it happens way less when a show has been through the development ringer and all the show’s worst qualities have been stripped away.
The industry is struggling to understand what all of this means. Agents, creators, and writers are not happy because the Netflix gravy train has been shifted over to a maintenance track. Just about everyone else, though, is cheering as loud as they can. Netflix is seen by rivals as pure evil and this giant hiccup confirms what many of them believed, which is that Netflix has zero IP and, so, sooner or later, that would catch up to them, and, in the process, confirm that the legacy studios aren’t the dinosaurs they were assumed to be.
I’m not sure what to make of this either. I mean, am I really all that thrilled that the side that gave us Sonic 2: Tails and Sonic Unite won a round? Am I really all that thrilled that Netflix has less money for writers? Not really.
But as a spectator, I’m definitely curious what happens next. We shall see!
Right Now #10: James Gunn – The strange thing about this choice is that I go back and forth on Gunn. I’ve appreciated him from afar, but he’s been hit or miss for me. Guardians of the Galaxy 2, for example, was one of the biggest disappointments I’ve had in a theater in a while. With that said, Gunn is one of the most unique writers out there and has an amazing ability to infuse genuine weirdness into big budget mainstream movies. Most big movies are paint-by-numbers. Gunn’s movies are never that. Guardians of the Galaxy literally has a talking raccoon who’s best friends with a tree. But the project that tipped the scales for me and put Gunn on this list was Peacemaker, which is probably going to end up being my favorite TV show of the year. The dialogue in that show is exceptional. And Gunn continues to execute one of the hardest skills in screenwriting, which is to create multiple memorable characters in a single show or movie. That’s the true test of a screenwriter – their ability to create characters who resonate with audiences. Any screenwriter who’s given this craft any time at all knows how hard that is to do, and James Gunn makes it look effortless time and time again. The man gave a full-on heartfelt arc to a character named Polka-Dot Man.
The Replacement: The Daniels – Just like Gunn, these guys have created a writing language unto themselves. They operate in a reality that’s in a different time and space from our own. I mean, a literal quote from one of them is: “Anyone can make a good movie out of a good idea. We like to take the worst idea possible and make a great movie out of that.” That would certainly explain Swiss Army Man, whose main character is a dead farting corpse. I just saw their latest film, Everything Everywhere All At Once, and I’m still processing it. It’s like a candy coated sundae at the world’s funnest funeral shoved into 500 years of philosophy dangled on top of every Dr. Seuss book ever written until it dissolves into fairy dust that perpetually falls on you wherever you go. But it isn’t just its weirdness that makes it great. It’s that the Daniels are so committed to character development that even if you stripped away all the movie’s shenanigans, you’d still have yourself one of the most heartfelt movies of the year. My only question with whether these two become stars befitting their talent or not is if they’ll play by the Hollywood handbook. The Daniels were not meant for notes. And any time you make one of these Hollywood movies, you’re going to get notes. But I think they’re so talented that they’ll find a way into the system, much like Gunn eventually did.
Right Now #9: Christopher McQuarrie – Who can deny McQuarrie’s track record. He won an Oscar (for The Usual Suspects) at just 27 years old. While he would go on to have a somewhat rocky decade after that Oscar win, his career was resurrected with 2008’s Valkyrie. That led to Jack Reacher and one of the 10 best sci-fi scripts ever written, Edge of Tomorrow. Since then he’s become the general for the Mission Impossible franchise. What McQuarrie brings to the table is an exceptional understanding of the screenwriting matrix, all the hundreds of little things that make a script work. For example, he knows that if two tough people are talking in a room, that the scene becomes infinitely more tense if one of them is cleaning a gun (scene from Jack Reacher). And I love that he continues to grow as a writer, always adding new skills. The most recent addition to his repertoire is his set piece writing. He’s a guy who looks to deconstruct the set piece so that you get what you want in a way you don’t expect. Take a look at the bathroom fight scene in Mission Impossible Fallout to see what I’m talking about. Finally, just as a personality, he kind of reminds me of the feisty writers of old. He’s got a little bit of Hemingway in him. He’s got a little bit of Eszterhas in him. I know this firsthand as he’s come after me a few times! I think the easiest way to determine who the best screenwriters are is to ask, if you had two million bucks to hire a screenwriter for your movie, who would you hire? If I were making a big action movie, I’m calling Christopher McQuarrie’s agent faster than you can say ‘slugline.’
The Replacement: Shay Hatten – Shay Hatten is the youngest screenwriter on this list, at just 28 years old. He broke through back in 2017 (at 23!), when his script about a coked up Stephen King trying to direct his first movie, Maximum Overdrive, made the Black List. A year later he wrote a killer fun script called Ballerina. That got him a job to write John Wick 3. He’s since written John Wick 4 and 5. Ballerina is going to get made. He wrote Army of the Dead for Zack Snyder and also Snyder’s newest film, Rebel Moon. This is the hot young screenwriter that everybody wants for their big action movie and he hasn’t hit 30 yet. Of all the the big future screenwriters on this list, Hatten may become the biggest of all. I don’t remember this level of success this early for a screenwriter since another “Sha” writer, Shane Black, came onto the scene. Not a bad screenwriter to be compared to.
Right Now #8: Jordan Peele – Am I still so blown away by the amazing script for Get Out that I can’t see Peele’s work objectively? Maybe. But let me explain why I included Peele. First, he celebrates the big juicy high concept idea like no other. And to me, the big juicy high concept idea is the heart and soul of the movie business. It’s that “what if” idea that’s led to so many of the most memorable experiences of my life. And two, Peele is one of only a handful of writers who can get people revved up about a movie that isn’t gigantic studio-owned IP. He has access to that rare vein that goes from his brain directly to the zeitgeist. Guys like Spielberg had it. M. Night had it for a brief period. JJ had it. Anyone who gains access to this vein is a best-of contender. If I were Peele, though, I would take a page out of Tarantino’s book and make a movie once every three years instead of once every other year. Also, get out of the TV business. You’re not seriously dedicating yourself to it so it’s only stealing time away from writing new drafts of your feature scripts. “Us” was three to four drafts away from being a horror classic. You would’ve had the time to write those drafts had you not been producing questionable television like, “Weird City.” Despite this, I remain a Peele fan. We’re just a couple of months away from “Nope.” That movie will prove whether I’m right or wrong about including Peele on this list.
The Replacement: Emerald Fennell – Was it Kathleen Kennedy who got a lot of flack for saying, “The Future is Female?” I think she was just echoing what everyone in the studio hallways were already saying. Indeed, there are some killer female screenwriters on the rise. Emerald Fennell probably wrote the best script (Promising Young Woman) I read in 2019, when it made the Black List. Just like Jordan Peele provided us with those ‘wow’ moments in Get Out, so did Fennel In “Promising.” That opening scene when our drunk main character instantly sobers up still gives me shivers. It shouldn’t be surprising, then, that Fennell was recruited into the DC universe as soon as Promising Young Woman hit theaters. She will write the origin story of Zantanna, a female magician who is known to appear in the Justice League Dark series (that of which JJ Abrams is shepherding). Fennell’s voice is so distinct that I can’t imagine a future where she isn’t a writing superstar.
Right Now #7: The Coen Bros – I went back and forth on whether to include this dynamic duo because while they’ve had an amazing career, which includes two screenwriting Oscars, they haven’t had a hit movie in over a decade. Even the recently announced “Drive Away Dykes,” which was hilarious, is a script Ethan and his wife wrote 15 years ago. The thing that tipped the scales for me, however, was their 2018 Netflix collection of shorts, The Ballad of Buster Scruggs. There are three genius short films in that collection (The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, Meal Ticket, and The Gal Who Got Rattled), all of which are exceptionally written. It reminded me that the Coens can still take over a game whenever they want to. Plus it’s hard to think of any writers who can go toe-to-toe with these guys in a screenwriting challenge. They’re always going to write you a stand-out character. They’re always going to come up with the most unique way into a scene. They’re always going to take things in a direction you didn’t think they were going to go in. You bet your screenwriting tushy they’re one of the ten best.
The Replacement: Sam Esmail – I was impressed with Sam’s screenwriting long before he broke onto the scene with Mr. Robot. He just always had interesting concepts and played with screenwriting formula in interesting ways. Much like the Coens, you never truly knew where his stories were going. And I like that Sam is always looking forward, trying to find the hot new thing. When everyone else was staring at podcasts cross-eyed, it was Esmail who, hot off the success of Mr. Robot, decided to adapt podcast, “Homecoming,” for Amazon Prime. The show was a hit for Amazon and even got Julia Roberts to commit to her first TV starring role. Up next he has the high concept, “Leave the World Behind,” which I recently reviewed on the site. Esmail is going to be a force for a long time to come.
Right Now #6: Eric Roth – Roth has an incredible resume that includes films like Forrest Gump, Benjamin Button, A Star is Born, Dune, Ali, and Munich. But that isn’t even a fraction of the number of unproduced projects he’s written that haven’t been made yet. He’s the first guy the studios call when they have a big movie that needs a level of gravitas, gravitas these candy-coated Marvel screenwriters couldn’t find if they were placed in the middle of the Library of Alexandria. Roth’s secret sauce is his unique approach to screenwriting. As he was never formally taught (there were no screenwriting books published when he started), he doesn’t write with structure or character arcs or dialogue tricks in mind. He writes completely on instinct. When asked what he does when he runs into a story problem, Roth famously answered, “I change the weather.” This is why you rarely feel any gears grinding beneath a Roth script. They’re written on gut and therefore there’s no artificial sweetener giving the story that stale aftertaste. His creativity goes directly from his mind to the page without stopping. There’s nobody out there like Roth. Nobody.
The Replacement: Alex Garland – One of the ways you identify the truly good writers is that when you read their scripts, they feel unlike anything else out there. Garland’s reflective tortured stories exhibit a pain that goes way deeper than your average screenplay. Check out Devs on Hulu if you want a dose of this. Garland manages to transition the series’ central villain, tech giant, Forest, into its protagonist by the end of the show. It’s these types of weird industry-challenging creative choices that make Garland’s work so powerful. He’s thoughtful. He’s calculated. He’s brave. He might be the most intelligent person on this list. I know it’s weird to include a 51 year old on any “future of” list, but ever since Garland started taking control of his career as a writer-director (something he did not do because he wanted to direct, but rather he realized it was the only way to protect his writing), he’s elevated himself to a new level. His next film, “Men,” looks creepy as hell. After that, he’ll be tackling a movie about civil war in the US.
Right Now #5: Taika Waititi – If there’s a theme to today’s screenwriting superheroes, it’s that they all have their own unique voice. Voice, as a reminder to newbies, is the unique personality a writer inserts into both his prose and the story itself, and almost always centers around the writer’s unique brand of humor. Taika arguably uses humor in a more interesting way than all of today’s writers. Just look at what he does with Hitler in JoJo Rabbit. A quick diversion if you will allow me: Whenever I read a great screenplay, the movie never lives up to it. For that reason, I’ve gotten into the habit of avoiding watching movies for scripts I loved. This is what I did when JoJo Rabbit came out. I said, the movie can’t possibly be as good as the screenplay, which I felt was perfect. So I didn’t see the movie when it came out. I didn’t see the movie when it came to digital either. I’d honestly planned on never seeing it. But one day it popped up on a streaming service and I thought, what the hell. JoJo Rabbit turned out to be the only film I’ve watched where the movie was actually better than the great screenplay. I was fucking bawling by the end of that movie even though I knew everything that was going to happen. Such is the effect Taika has on me. Between the feature version of What We Do In the Shadows to Hunt for the Wilderpeople to his older stuff like Eagle Vs. Shark, this guy is a superstar. And now that Hollywood has given him the keys to the city, we’re going to see just how high his star can rise. Next up on his list? Saving Star Wars!
The Replacement: Phoebe Waller-Bridge – Okay, so I admit this is a little confusing because Taika’s probably going to be around for a while. But sticking with the theme of our list, we have to provide him with a replacement, and what better replacement than Waller-Bridge? Like Taika, Waller-Bridge’s writing effortlessly shifts between making you spit-take and making you cry your eyes out. Go watch the opening scene of Fleabag Season 1 then the first episode of Season 2 to see what I’m talking about. After Waller-Bridge’s shockingly open introduction into her titular character’s sex life, we get an episode that contains a secret miscarriage during a family dinner. Waller-Bridge had one of those rare double-hit debuts, when she came out with both Fleabag and Killing Eve at the same time. Now she’s got two new big shows coming up, Mr & Mrs Smith and her next under-wraps Amazon show.
Right Now #4: Christopher Nolan – While people have had legitimate gripes with Nolan’s writing, which can vacillate between bombastic and over-expository, he remains one of a select few who can write an original idea with absolutely zero ties to IP, and get 200 million dollars to make it. Trust me, we don’t want to live in a world where that gets taken away. Because that means the only big-budget movies we’ll get are Marvel, DC, Fast and Furious, and Star Wars. If you’re okay with that, fine. I’m not. Despite his missteps, I still think Nolan is the number one writer in the world for exploring big ideas. From Memento to The Prestige to Inception, he takes these gigantic concepts and plays with them in such interesting ways. I love, for example, that he didn’t stop in Inception at one dream. That you could go to dreams within dreams. It’s that sort of dedication to concept exploration that sets Nolan apart. And, to this day, I still think Memento is a Top 5 ever screenplay. I went back and watched it recently and the complex narrative is so cleverly simplified. Nolan is definitely a superstar.
The Replacement: Greta Gerwig – What’s the secondary theme of this list? The future is female! Here we have Nolan, his hard edges, his big handsome male movie stars, his love of guys expressing themselves externally, in the most masculine of ways. And on the other end of the spectrum we’ve got Greta Gerwig, with her soft feminine approach to storytelling. She focuses on the internal, on the angst and emotions going on inside the individual. You can’t discount the one two punch of Ladybird and Little Women, both of which had major awards pushes. Gerwig’s melancholy view of existence feels right for anyone who’s been overwhelmed by the demands of day-to-day life. Since those two films, Hollywood has now gone all in on Greta, giving her access to the single most feminine property in Hollywood – Barbie. I don’t know what’s going to happen with Barbie. I’d be lying if I said it didn’t have the potential to be disastrous. But what that tells me is if Greta pulls a “Lord and Miller” and makes a great movie out of subpar subject matter, she will truly be one of the most powerful forces Hollywood.
Right Now #3: Taylor Sheridan – Not unlike Nolan, Sheridan recognized that as the culture shifted, there was an opportunity to exploit the counter-culture. As Hollywood sprinted towards social issues and politically correct causes, an avenue for masculinity in its purest form became available. That is the DNA of Sheridan’s success. He gives you back the heroes of yesteryear, men who were traumatized by wars as opposed to tweets. While Hell or High Water is the screenplay that put him on the map, and Sicario the movie that first introduced us to his back-to-basics American perspective, it’s been his growing Yellowstone empire at Paramount that is making him one of the most formidable players in show business. Think about that for a second. Taylor Sheridan went from a nobody to a Hollywood titan IN JUST SEVEN YEARS! That’s how long it took him from his Black List debut. Sheridan’s rise is also a look into the future of writing. Sheridan started out with features but eventually moved to the much more lucrative world of television. It isn’t Sicario that’s going to put him in the 9 figure earning bracket. It’s Yellowstone. It’s why I couldn’t ignore television when curating this list.
The Replacement: Christy Hall – Uh, Carson. What could Christy Hall and Taylor Sheridan possibly have in common? First off, for those who don’t know who Christy Hall is, she came onto the scene in 2017 when her script, Daddio, finished in the top 10 of that year’s Black List. The script, about a conversation that occurs between a passenger and a taxi driver from the airport to the hotel, is one of the most honest genuine realistic scripts I’ve ever read. It’s almost as if it was transcribed from a real cab ride. Hall followed that up with the most controversial script of 2018, “Get Home Safe,” a nuclear attack on toxic masculinity. And that, my friends, is why I paired her up with Sheridan. Hollywood would prefer to hide any celebration of masculinity going forward. It wants femininity, especially the kind Hall brings to the table, the kind that isn’t afraid to poke, push, prod, and provoke. Get Home Safe was like the screenwriting national anthem for pissing off dudes. Am I fan of that type of writing? Not really. I’m one of those “dudes.” But I can’t deny the fact that Hall is amazingly talented and in our push, as an industry, to become as divisive as possible, Hall is the poster woman for these types of stories. Her first big credit was Netflix’s, “I Am Not Okay With This,” a unique take on the superhero genre. Next up she’s got Kat Coiro’s (She-Hulk), “The Husband’s Secret,” which will star Blake Lively.
Right Now #2: Aaron Sorkin – Is there anyone else on the planet who can make a 180 page script read like it’s 90 pages? Sorkin, who’s a playwright at heart, eschews the belief that movies should be about showing and not telling. Instead, whether it’s on purpose or not, Sorkin tells, tells, and then tells some more. Of course, when your dialogue is as good as Sorkin’s, it’s easy to break the most harrowed rule in screenwriting. I’m sure some will say Sorkin’s passed his ‘used by’ date but I think as long as this guy is writing, he’s one of the best. Both Steve Jobs and Molly’s Game are decidedly underrated scripts. To date, Steve Jobs is probably the most clever biopic ever written. The choice to condense Jobs’s life into his three biggest Apple presentations was a stroke of genius. If there’s a knock on Sorkin, it’s that his scripts tend to feel the same. Lots of walking and talking. They have a very “play”-like feel to them. But dude, come on. Who doesn’t want to read the next Aaron Sorkin script? His scripts are literal teaching manuals for how to approach dialogue. Hell yeah Sorkin makes this list.
The Replacement: Jesse Armstrong – This might be the biggest no-brainer in the history of lists. Jesse Armstrong, the writer of Succession, whose first two seasons of that show were two of the best seasons of television in the last ten years, probably owes his recent rise to Sorkin. They love to play in that same walking-and-talking powerful people conversing sandbox. The one big difference is that while Sorkin leans towards sweet, Armstrong bathes in salty. He is the king of the expletive-laden insult. Now my British audience will laugh at this pick as Armstrong has 30-some writing credits dating back to 2000. One of those, Peep Show, is iconic over the pond. The future? Really, Carson? But sometimes it takes a while for a writer to find their calling, to hit their breakout “zeitgeist” show. And once you do, you become a force. Armstrong will now try something different as his next project is a movie starring Michael Cera called, “Jonty,” about a coddled kid who joins forces with an old friend to produce a terrible Broadway play.
Right Now #1: Quentin Tarantino – There is nobody on this list who holds a candle to Tarantino’s dialogue. There is nobody on this list who holds a candle to Tarantino’s scene-writing. And when it comes to characters, well, most writers on this list haven’t created more memorable characters in their entire career than Tarantino has in a single one of his movies. He takes more chances than anyone else. He created his own genre. You never know where his stories are going. This guy doesn’t have any rivals. Two personal experiences stand out to me whenever I think of Tarantino’s greatness. Experience 1: I was sitting in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, which is a movie about an actor whose career is on the downslide, and smack dab in the middle of the movie Tarantino switches over into another universe and gives us an amazing 20 minute short horror film! He just switched genres for 20 minutes!!! Then went right back to the story he was telling. Who else can pull that off besides Tarantino? Experience 2: I tried to watch The Hateful Eight once, got bored, and gave up on it, figuring it was a rare dud from the established writer-director. But I checked it out several months later and discovered I turned it off right before the major twist happened that turned it into one of the coolest and most fun movies of the year. It reminded me that you never count Tarantino out. He’s always got a plan, even when it appears he doesn’t. In my opinion, this guy is the best screenwriter in all of Hollywood and nobody else comes close.
The Replacement: The Safdie Brothers – I remember when I first saw Good Time in an advance screening with no heads up on what I was getting into. I was blown away. I was even more blown away, two years later, by the directors’ writing habits, which included over 100 drafts of Uncut Gems. Their movies may seem improvised and unscripted, but that’s only because they do an ungodly amount of preparation, on both the writing and directing end, to make it seem that way. That’s when you know you’re a great screenwriter, when your dialogue is imperceptible from real life. These two bring an energy to the page that I don’t know if anyone in the next 20 years is going to be able to rival. Go check out Good Time. There’s a scene about 60 minutes in where this random drug dealer shows up and we go into this wild ten minute flashback of how this drug dealer ends up in our protagonists’ car. The randomness of that sequence combined with the fast-talking character combined with the non-linear flashback combined with the excessive focus on a character who, technically, had nothing to do with the movie, reminded me of early Tarantino. While I still don’t think anybody can hold a candle to Tarantino, I have a feeling these two can satisfy the same audience.
The ‘Almost Made It’ List: Donald Glover, James Cameron, Judd Apatow, Derek Kolstad, Chris Morgan, David O Russel, Martin McDonaugh, Tina Fey, Shonda Rhimes, Ryan Murphy, Steven Zallian, Woody Allen, Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely, Christopher Miller and Phil Lord, Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick, Greg Daniels, Dan Harmon, Mike White, Isa Rae, John Logan, David Koepp, Charlie Kaufman, Brian Duffield, Adam McKay, Guillermo del Toro, Noah Baumbach, Noah Hawley, Charlie Brooker, and Alan Yang.
Today’s script just may be the ‘thinking man’s Die Hard.’
Genre: Action
Premise: A naval engineer and her crew find themselves trapped in a deadly game on a shipping vessel in the middle of the Atlantic when they learn a series of car bombs are hidden amongst the thousands of vehicles on board.
About: This was one my favorite concepts from last year’s Black List. Justin Piasecki is an Iowa-born writer. He was a 2016 Nicholl winner with his script, “Death of an Ortolan.” Here’s the logline for that one: “A disgraced White House chef is discovered decades later preparing meals for prisoners on death row, but he risks a chance at redemption when he befriends an inmate whose guilt appears doubtful.”
Writer: Justin Piasecki
Details: 117 pages
This feels like a Jessica Chastain role.
Contained action thrillers.
One of the most valuable genres for the aspiring screenwriter.
It’s a genre that allows writers to show off their action chops, even if they must do so in a clever budget-friendly manner. No fights on top of the Statue of Liberty here.
As this was one of my favorite concepts from the Black List, I was excited to dive in.
Let’s check it out together.
40 year old Jodie Donnelly is a port captain for vehicle cargo ships. She operates on the big boys, the ships with 12 football-sized field-levels of cars lined up bumper to bumper. This is not a job for the feint-hearted, however. It requires an incredible amount of mathematical knowledge, as if the cars aren’t placed in such a way where the distribution of weight is even, the boat will tilt and sink.
In fact, that very thing happened two years ago to a ship Jodie was responsible for. She’s back in the saddle though, port captaining the Norfolk Emperor, which is heading out of Chesapeake Bay this morning.
Upon last minute inspections, she runs into an old co-worker, Felson, a man who was on that boat that went down two years ago. And with it, his son drowned, as he was also a worker on that boat. Before Jodie can say anything, Felson suspiciously hurries off the boat and drives away. That was weird, Jodie thinks.
She finds out *how* weird a few hours later when they’re out to sea. One of the cars on the ship blows up. At first they assume it’s a gas leak. But not long after the explosion, they get a call from the Navy, who just received an e-mail from Felson. After Felson reminds Norfolk of what they did to his son, he explains the situation to them: “By now the crew of the Emperor has discovered the explosive in the car on deck six. There are more hidden amongst the 8355 vehicles on board. If you do nothing, they will blow. If you go looking for them, you will not find them all. In time, the ship will go down.”
This guy just pulled an artificial Titanic on these m*therf**kers. The crew members and company see what’s been laid out before them. They can leave the boat before it sinks or they can stay on the boat in a desperate attempt to locate the rigged cars before they blow. The choice is up to Norfolk. Is your money – in this case 350 million dollars – so precious that you will, once again, let others die to protect it?
Lots of good in this one, guys. To start things off, here’s an early dialogue chunk:
“Okay good morning. We’re going to do the dirty version here and keep this short. We had a reversal of UK itinerary, so we’ll be starting with Glasgow moving back. First on last off. Drivers, Mr. Rooker will have your vehicle assignments. Lashing crews, nothing under a 2000 kilogram break load. You need chains, you need webs, you find the deck captains or you find Mr. Seaver here. Today’s load is… 2087 passenger vehicles, 47 city buses, 49 agricultural combines, 16 light rail subway cars, an electric wind turbine and an installation piece for the Belgium Royal Museum of Art… so check your mirrors. (lowering the binder) Get your rides, scan ‘em in, strap ‘em down. We launch at 18:00.”
You know what that chunk of dialogue tells me? It tells me: I DID MY HOMEWORK. And every time you do your homework and the reader sees it, that reader gains confidence in you. That reader believes the story more. That reader heads deeper into his suspension of disbelief. And this happens so rarely, by the way, that when it does happen in a script, readers immediately know they’re in good hands.
So I knew this was going to be a winner within the first ten pages.
And it continued to prove me right.
One of the reasons these sort of action-thriller “Die Hard” type movies went out of favor for a long time is because the bad guys had such lousy nonsensical motivations that we stopped believing the events in these movies were really happening and simply treated them like they were being written, which is that they were a bunch of nonsense.
So I put a lot of value into bad guy motivations. If a writer has come up with a good motivation for his villain, it usually means he’s put a lot of work into the other parts of his script. Here, we have Felson, who’s mad at his company because, in trying to maximize every single cubic inch of their ships for profit, one of them sunk, killing Felson’s son in the process.
So his motivation for putting these bombs on the ship makes sense. He’s saying that there’s no way they’ll find all the bombs. The ship WILL eventually sink, destroying all its cargo. They have time to get everyone off the ship before that happens, though. So the choice is tied back to his son’s death. Will you learn from your previous mistake and prioritize crew members over profit? Or are you so driven by money that you will, once again, place your employees in harm’s way to secure the bottom line?
That’s actually a very sound and intelligent motivation. And for those of you who think it isn’t, read the next 20 action thriller scripts with me. You’ll see motivations that range from our villain having secret ties to the Yakuza to being the previously unknown twin son of the protagonist.
Another thing I liked about the script was the unique way in which the danger operated. One of the first things the writer sets up is this idea of how these boats can sink. They are dependent on weight distribution. If the cars are packed in the wrong way, it will cause the weight of the boat to shift. And if it shifts too radically, it will sink.
So, when we find ourselves with this problem of cars blowing up, it isn’t like your typical action thriller where the threat to lives is an explosion. The cars in question have been chosen in a specific pattern so that after a certain amount of them blow, the weight will shift and the boat will sink. That’s a situation I’ve never seen before in a script. And if there’s one thing you know that I value, it’s originality. It’s giving the reader things they haven’t seen before. So the more this story unfolded, the cooler it sounded.
The only question I have about this script is, is it too smart for mainstream audiences? You’ve got this really interesting puzzle that needs to be solved. But is the lack of a clear “BIG BOOM KILL PEOPLE” problem going to make people check out? It didn’t make me check out. I was up for the whole ride. I think this script is gnarly. The writer is definitely someone to look out for.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[xx] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Time Capsule Actor Inception. One of the tricks you can use to put a clear image of your hero and what kind of person they are into your reader’s head is to use an older famous movie star’s name. So, in this case, we’re introduced to “Jodie,” who’s 40 years old. That’s clearly a choice by the writer to make you think of a 40 year old Jodie Foster. If you had a studly 30 year old male main character, you might name him, “Marlon.” A genius disrupter type? Name him, “Orson.” Obviously, this trick has its limitations. I wouldn’t name a 30 year old character, “Denzel,” as it’s too obvious. The trick is picking a name that’s known, but not too distinct.
What I learned 2: Always use analogies when describing complicated things! In order to explain to the reader why ten cars blowing up on a certain level are bad, the writer has Jodie use this analogy: “We lose ten cars on deck five and none on ten then we’re top-heavy, be like standing on a surfboard with a cinderblock on our head.”