Genre: Thriller
Premise: When a major volcano in Hawaii is slated to erupt within a week, the scientist responsible for managing the eruption learns that the US military has been hiding a secret on the outskirts of the island that threatens to turn the eruption into a world-ending event.
About: This is an interesting one. This was Michael Crichton’s (Jurassic Park) final book he was working on before he died. The unfinished novel, which is nearly 20 years old, made its way to super-seller James Patterson, who decided to finish it for him. The package recently went to auction this year and sold for 7 figures to Sony. The directors who will helm this film? None other than Jimmy Chin and Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi, who directed one of my favorite films from 2021, Free Solo. Keanu Reeves is loosely attached to the project but is expected to officially attach soon.
Writer: Michael Crichton and James Patterson
Details: 420 pages

Michael Crichton is responsible for the most high concept movie idea of all time: Jurassic Park.

When you hit it big in Hollywood, you have this moment. That moment becomes bigger than you. It becomes bigger than the industry. You are “THE PERSON” that everyone and everything orbits around.

That moment happened with Crichton after Jurassic Park and, for a good five years there, every one of his books was slotted to become a movie. For some writers, that’s more than they can handle. But for Crichton, he was ready for this moment. Every one of his books was a big idea that felt tailor-made to become a summer blockbuster.

But the problem with having that big breakout hit movie is that it’s hard to live up to. How many writers can write a hit movie and have two, three other stories that will do just as well? The answer is very few. But Crichton gave it his best shot.

Not many people know this but he co-wrote the novel for Twister. That’s two bona fide monster hits there. Reality then caught up with Crichton as his follow-up films, Congo, The 13th Warrior, and Timeline, fizzled.

But that takes nothing away from a master of the “big idea.” Let’s see if his final book, ironically, is the beginning of a comeback.

36 year old John “Mac” McGregor, is the director of the Hawaiian Volcano Observatory. He lives on the big island, in a town called Hilo, which has always been a tricky place to live since it’s right at the bottom of active volcano, Mauna Loa. There have been a couple of times in history where an eruption nearly destroyed the town.

When earthquakes start happening, it’s confirmed that Mauna Loa is going to blow, once again, in a week. Just as John starts preparing for that reality, he’s ushered away by the local military who bring him to a nearby cave.

It’s here that they reveal hundreds of containers of radioactive waste being stored. Mac is enraged that they would be this stupid but it gets oh so much worse. The containers are old enough that they’re starting to splinter. Even trying to pick them up will likely cause them to break.

Oh yeah, and this isn’t just normal radioactive waste. It’s been mixed with herbicide, which makes it insanely easy to spread. In layman’s terms, if these containers were to break, every human being on earth would be dead within four months.

Mac immediately gets to work on a plan to divert the lava as far away from those containers as possible. His plan is to build a wall along the side of the volcano to steer the lava. But then a douchey billionaire shows up with his own plan, creating all sorts of conflict regarding what to do next. They better figure it out soon because the hours are ticking away. Any time now, Mauna Loa is going to blow.

I can’t tell you how refreshing it is to read something other than one of these so-so-so-very-serious Black List scripts. Everything’s so SERRRRIOUUSSSSS on the Black List. So insanely SERRRRIOUSSSSSS.

I don’t know when movies that are made for entertainment got such a bad rap but imagine the alternative? All these SEERRRRIOUUUSSS movies. Who comes away from those feeling anything other than bummed out? We have enough bum-outy things going on in the world. Movies should be there to make us feel better!

Which is exactly what today’s movie – err… book – is about. I nearly said ‘movie’ because this novel is written like a movie. There are 108 chapters here. In other words, each chapter is insanely short. Crichton and Patterson did this so that each chapter would read like a scene.

In the spirit of the high-concept idea, Crichton makes a decision here that every high-concept writer faces the choice of making. Which is whether to add a “multiplier” or not. A “multiplier” is when you take a big idea and add a similar big idea that “multiplies” the scope of the concept.

To understand this, let’s note what this idea looks like without a multiplier. Without a multiplier, this is a BIG ERUPTION movie. You could’ve even made it a “super eruption” which I hear is something certain major volcanos are capable of which could end mankind. That would be a big idea. But there wouldn’t be a multiplier in it. The concept is told to you straight away.

Here, we get the multiplier of the nuclear waste containers. I didn’t go into it in the plot but, basically, the herbicide acts as a virus whereby if birds or insects come in contact with it, they can easily spread it to other places. Which is why the entire planet would be in danger.

But the multiplier here is those containers at the bottom of the island. That’s what elevates this idea into something that feels BIGGER. With high-concept ideas, that’s what you should be looking for. You should be looking for any elements that make your idea BIGGER.

With that said, there’s a way to use multipliers and there’s a way not to use them. If I wrote a movie about dinosaurs and then, at the end of the first act, I introduced aliens, sure, by the letter of the multiplier law, this would be a “multiplier.” But for multipliers to work, there has to be an elegant or clever connection between them, which there was here.

Hawaii is a major military base for the United States. It makes sense that they would secretly store nuclear waste out there. And, for those of you hemming and hawing about why in the world would the US place nuclear waste at the bottom of a volcano, Crichton actually spends a good portion of the story explaining it and it made perfect sense (it essentially comes down to the government trying to cover its ass by hiding this stuff away).

Another thing I liked about this book was that it created a world-ending event that had nothing to do with nuclear bombs. When you’re writing these REALLY BIG ideas, you get lazy, and you go with the lowest-hanging fruit (nuclear bombs!). Writers have been using them for decades now.

Push yourself!

Come up with something fresh and new, like Eruption did. I’ve never seen this particular combination of concepts before and it was really fun.

My only pushback on the novel is that these ideas tend to have a “worth the read” ceiling. They focus so much on the plot and the bells and whistles that the characters rarely resonate. If you’re going to write one of these, put some extra work into the characters because if you can elevate a high concept to a double-worth-the-read or even an impressive, it’s like discovering plutonium. It’s a rarity and it will make your script unstoppable.

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

What I learned: One of my favorite phrases in screenplays is, “It’s better if I show you.” When the military picks up Mac to explain to him that this impending eruption is actually much worse than he realizes, he asks, “Why?” Their response: “It’s better if I show you.” From there, we get to see the actual containers. How fragile they are. A demonstration of what happens when an insect interacts with the herbicide. We SEE all this. That SEEING is our golden example of SHOW-DON’T-TELL and it’s so much more effective than a character just doling out exposition dialogue.

Genre: Horror
Premise: After a pregnant woman and her rich husband head to his remote country house, she has her baby, which turns out to be a spider, who she then uses to wreak havoc on those who have wronged her.
About: This script finished on last year’s Black List. Writer-director Katie Found has one produced credit, a lesbian-romance film titled, My First Summer.
Writer: Katie Found
Details: 92 pages

Today, I would like to discuss something that plagues the movie industry. It usually starts happening around this time of year. Hollywood begins releasing movies not that people WANT TO see. But rather movies they SHOULD see.

It is the only reason anyone outside of the film industry sees these movies. Because the marketing tells you, you SHOULD. Movies like Nomadland, Dallas Buyers Club, and Killers of the Flower Moon. That’s not to say that none of these movies are any good. But very few of them are. Their hit-to-miss ratio is WAY worse than studio movies.

This issue trickles down to screenwriting as well and happens when a writer writes a script not to entertain people. But to IMPRESS people.

Let me make something clear. If you are writing a script to try and impress ANYONE, you’re not writing a good screenplay. You should be writing to entertain the reader. Give them an enjoyable experience. If you focus on that one simple rule, I promise you you’ll give yourself the best chance at writing something good.

With that in mind, let’s get into today’s script…

30 year old Mary is very pregnant yet also quite sickly looking, for reasons that are never explained. Her rich and powerful husband, Charles, thinks it would be a good idea to visit his remote cabin until the baby is born.

So he and Mary drive out to the middle of nowhere and, within a week, she gives birth to the baby. Except the baby is not human. It’s a spider. Or, at least, that’s what Mary thinks it is. She and Charles never explicitly talk about what the baby looks like so it could be that Mary is simply imagining that it’s a spider.

Charles is your typical 2020s evil toxic male character, always looking for sex even though Mary is in no mental state to reciprocate. One day, Mary has had enough and allows her baby spider to kill Charles and wrap him up in its web. She’s finally taking charge in life! Not letting evil dudes dictate her actions.

Mary enjoys the experience so much that she lures another older toxic male from in town, ties him up, and then has her baby spider kill him as well. All of a sudden, that postpartum depression ain’t feeling so bad!

After killing one more dude, her father-in-law, her sister comes to the house to save her. Mary grabs the baby and the three flee in their car, presumably to happier times.

One of the more frustrating things I encounter in screenwriting occurs in scripts like this, which are highly specific in the areas that don’t matter and highly general in the areas that do. For example, we get a lot of passages in Down Came The Rain like this one…

Note how nothing happens in this scene. It’s just mood-based imagery. Yet there’s a lot of effort placed on describing it. Meanwhile, when we met Charles earlier in the script, he’s giving some extremely vague speech about bettering the world to a bunch of rich people. Yet we don’t have any idea what he’s talking about. We don’t have any idea what his actual job is.

THAT’S the stuff that matters. That we understand the man who’s holding our hero captive. Not the way our protagonist feels when she puts on earrings.

You can make the argument that the writer is creating a mood with the above passage, which enhances our understanding of how she feels. But that logic only works if it’s balanced with a story that’s MOVING FORWARD. A story where THINGS ARE HAPPENING. There’s simply not enough happening here where we’re going to give you the luxury of writing an entire uninterrupted page of description.

You need to focus on the right things when you write a script. There’s a reason why one of the first screenwriting lessons you learn is: “Every scene must move the story forward. If it doesn’t, get rid of it.” That’s because readers get bored fast. So if they read three, sometimes as few as two, scenes in a row that don’t move the story forward, they give up on the script.

You need a plan when you write.

You need to structure your story in a way where we’re constantly moving forward, where we’re constantly BUILDING towards something.

There were basic mistakes made here in that department.

Charles, the husband, is the big bad of the film.

Why are we killing him off at the midpoint?

Once Charles died, the story had nowhere to go. You keep luring these other people into your web but they’re all small potatoes compared to the husband. So it feels like we’re going backwards. Oh, we killed the annoying drunk guy from down the street. How is that building from the murder of the husband?

I suppose you could make the argument that she’s now at risk of being discovered for killing her husband. So the suspense comes from these other men potentially figuring out her secret and then her, I don’t know, going to prison for it. But none of these guys are formidable opponents. The second they walk in the house, we are 1000% sure Mary will easily kill them. So there’s zero suspense.

In the end, this script represents one of my least favorite screenwriting combinations: Description and Metaphor. The focus is on the description (let’s spend a page describing this room and the way Mary walks through it) and metaphor (what does the spider represent!?). Neither of those things move the story forward.

Between today and yesterday, we have two scripts, both of which place our characters in a remote rural home where danger enters the equation. Yesterday’s script attempted to entertain you with every scene. Today’s script wants to be discussed in a college English class. For that reason, I could not connect with it on any level.

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

What I learned: If you asked me what the most underrated mistake in screenwriting was, I might tell you it’s when a writer doesn’t know what his main characters’ professions are. A person’s job takes up 8-10 hours of their day! If you don’t know exactly what that profession is and what they do all day, you have no idea who that character is. And I promise you, that will come across in the writing. I will not understand that character either. I have no idea what Charles does other than that he’s rich and deals with rich people. But what’s his job?? I mean think about it for just a second. You have this high-paying top 1% of top 1% job. Yet you can just jet off to a cabin for two weeks? That’s clearly CLEARLY a result of a writer not knowing what their character does on a day-to-day basis. To extrapolate that, I’m not going to care that Mary kills him if I don’t understand who he is! I need to understand this man in order to have an opinion on his relation to this story.

Scene Showdown coming up next week!

Genre: Thriller
Premise: After meeting on vacation, a family accepts the invitation of another family out to their rural home. But once they get there, they begin to suspect that their hosts are not as cute and cuddly as they first presented themselves.
About: Today’s Blumhouse film won over the festival crowds. It’s gotten great reviews. It’s one of those movies that both critics and audiences love equally. It’s based on a Danish film from a couple of years ago that I plan on watching. The flick didn’t do great at the box office, tallying about 13 million bucks. But for this KIND of film – a thriller that doesn’t have any marketable elements – it did amazing.
Writer: James Watkins (original film written by Christian and Mads Tafdrup)
Details: 110 minutes

I want to start off right away by saying something because whenever I love a movie or a script, people say, “Well, but it did that thing that you hate, Carson.” Or, “But hold on, it had bad GSU.” Or, “Are you kidding!? That one scene sucked. I thought you liked good writing!”

So let me be clear: Every screenplay is the sum of its parts. Every single script will have weaknesses. Outside of Back to the Future, that’s the law of the land.  So yes, this script isn’t perfect.  But I still loved it.

One of the things I liked best was that it’s a great SCENE movie. And how perfect is that timing, with Scene Showdown coming up? If you want to see how good scenes are written, watch this movie. It’s designed to place its characters into interesting scenarios and then we watch those scenarios play out.

Americans Louise and Ben, along with their daughter, Agnes, have recently moved to London and are taking advantage of their new hub by traveling around in Europe. They spend a holiday out in Italy, where they meet another family on a holiday trip, Paddy and Ciara (along with their disabled son, Ant).

The four hit it off and after Louise and Ben head back, they get a postcard from Paddy and Ciara inviting them to their rural home in Scotland. Louise is reluctant but they’re experiencing some marital issues so she concedes it might do them well to go. So they head out.

Paddy is ecstatic when they arrive and, even though he’s more rough and tumble than Louise and Ben, they’re all having a good time together. But then Ant (who can’t speak) keeps trying to shutter Agnes away and tell her something. (Spoilers) In the most horrifying revelation of the movie, he shows her that their family is about to be massacred. Ant will then be killed and Agnes will take his place.

Once Louise and Ben learn this, they have to get out. But they must do so without alerting suspicion. Because if Paddy gets even a little bit suspicious, they’ll end up like every other family that’s come through here.

So many good things about this script.

I like the different take on serial killing. We tend to think in mono when we come up with ideas. We stay with the established trend. Serial killers are usually one creepy dude stalking women and killing them. Well, what if an entire family was the serial killer? That’s a fresh take.  When you have a fresh take on an established trend, it opens up the door to write brand-new scenes in the genre.

The more I do this, the more I realize that you don’t come up with concepts just to come up with concepts. You should be looking for concepts that give you an opportunity to write the most great scenes. If you’re not getting ideas for six great scenes when you come up with your concept, you have to start asking whether that script is worth writing.

Cause I used to think it was all about characters and plot. Those were the top dogs in a script and you needed to place all your focus on making them great. But now I think scenes are right up there with them. Cause if you can write just three truly memorable scenes in a script, THAT STAYS WITH PEOPLE.

And Speak No Evil has a lot of them.

Probably the most talked about scene is the one where the couples are having dinner together. Paddy and Ciara reveal that they like to spice up their love life. They start talking about role play in the bedroom. They start acting out one of their role-plays. Ciara pretends to drop something. Her head disappears beneath the table. Paddy starts to make groaning noises. Are they still acting things out? Or is this really happening? We suffer through an excruciating long drawn-out moment as we wonder before, finally, Ciara pops up and they start laughing. They were just kidding. ….. Or were they?

Here’s why I liked this scene. There’s a statistic in baseball called W.A.R. “WAR” stands for “Wins Above Replacement” and what it means is, how many wins does this player get you above what the average player in that position would give you. So if a player has a WAR of “5,” that means that player is going to help you win 5 more games than you would’ve won had you had an average player in that spot instead.

I apply that same logic to writing. I say, how much better is this scene versus what an average screenwriter would’ve given you? I have no doubt that the average writer wouldn’t have come up with that moment. Instead, they would’ve given you some generic dinner debate about the politics of the day.

Good writers know that that’s standard stuff. It’s meat and potatoes. But it doesn’t give the scene any memorable qualities. Here, Watkins knew he had to play with the scene more. So he came up with something more unexpected, more cringey, something that would get a reaction.

Another scene I liked occurred late in the film. Ben and Louise have discovered the truth and are trying to leave the house without Paddy or Ciara catching onto them. They get all the way into their car when Paddy stops them and points up to Agnes’s stuffed animal, Hoppy, which has “gotten caught” (Paddy clearly placed it up there) in the gutter.

It’s actually quite a clever moment because, even though Agnes, who loves Hoppy, is willing to leave it there, the families have already established in previous scenes how valuable that stuffed animal is to her. So for her to all of a sudden not care about it would be suspicious. So Paddy says to Ben, “I’ll get the ladder and you can go get it cause you’re a little taller than me.”

He holds the ladder while Ben climbs it to retrieve Hoppy. Watkins did something really fun here where the ladder wasn’t tall enough. So Ben has to climb onto the tippy top of this shaky ladder (that Paddy is holding remember) and reach up with as much length as he’s got to get Hoppy. And the whole time, we’re just thinking, “Oh man, he’s going to fall,” or “Paddy’s going to drop him.”

It’s such a simple scene and yet it’s so effective.

Another scene I liked was the serial killer reveal scene with Agnes and Ant. Ant sneaks Agnes down into Paddy and Ciara’s ‘memoir’ room, where they keep the items from all the couples they’ve killed. Ant then pulls up a picture book which shows group pictures of Paddy and Ciara with a bunch of different families.

Remember, Ant can’t talk. So he proceeds to go through each picture, point to the kid in each of the families, then turn the page, show the next family, and point to how that kid is now Paddy and Ciara’s kid. He finally gets to his own picture with his own real family, points to himself, then to himself with Paddy and Ciara. And then he turns the page to the final picture, which is of Ben, Louise, and Agnes. And he points to how Agnes is going to replace him!

Not only is it a compelling scene in its own right. But it’s a great example of how to convey exposition in an entertaining way. And it’s a great example of showing as opposed to telling.

The scene also has two great reveals. This whole time, we’ve figured out that Ant isn’t Paddy and Ciara’s real son. We know that. So we understand why he’s so depressed all the time. But this scene reveals that it’s actually much worse. The reason Ant is so down is because he’s about to be replaced. He’s about to be killed. Also, in that same breath, Agnes realizes she’s going to be their child, and her tongue is going to be cut out just like Ant’s.

Funny enough, my favorite scene of all was one you can’t write. It’s one of those scenes that only works onscreen. And it’s the scene where Paddy takes Ben out to hunt and, on the drive there, Paddy blasts the slow song “Eternal Flame” by The Bangles and proceeds to sing it with an intensity and excitement that’s downright weird. Watching Ben’s reaction to this is absolutely hilarious.

But the scene works for a couple of reasons. It plays against type. This is a mistake SO MANY WRITERS make. Let’s go back to our “WAR” stat. What song is the average writer putting in this scene? Something like Metallica, right? Or Slipknot? On-the-nose. Expected. Cause Paddy is this ultra-masculine intense dude. But it’s always CONTRAST that creates the most interesting moments. To go with the softest song imaginable is so much more interesting for this scene. And way funnier! It turns a forgettable scene into, arguably, the most memorable of the movie.

There’s very little I didn’t like about this movie. If I had one complaint, it’s the same complaint I have for every movie in this genre. Which is that the ending gets sloppy with everyone running around and shooting at each other. But, even then, the writing built up so much goodwill that it didn’t bother me as much as it normally does. And there were still some good little sequences within that final act – like when they’re trying to sneak out the upstairs window.

This is the kind of script that inspires me. It reminds me that all you need is a good idea, some fun characters and you can write a really good script.

[ ] What the hell did I just watch?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the price of admission
[x] impressive
[ ] genius

What I learned: Add ACTION to dialogue scenes. We’ll often be too strict in the way we think of dialogue. We assume that if four people sit down at a table for a meal that it has to be all dialogue in that scene. But do what Watkins did. Look for opportunities to add action. SHOW things. Don’t just TELL things. The whole oral sex fake-out scenario moved away from pure dialogue and, in the process, made that scene much better.

I don’t know about you. But one of the most frustrating things FOR ME coming up as a writer, eager to figure out this whole screenwriting thing, was understanding what agents and executives meant when they’d tell me my characters weren’t “three-dimensional.”

Some of the many ways I’d hear the criticism was that my characters were “flat,” or “uninspired,” or “bland,” or “forgettable.” But it would often come back to that common phrase, “They weren’t three-dimensional.”

So, when I got this criticism, I did what any determined aspiring screenwriter would do. I did an internet search for three-dimensional characters! What I got back was not good. In fact, if I could give any criticism to these results, it would be that they weren’t three-dimensional enough.

As the years passed, I would get little pieces here and there about what created “depth” in a character. But I never got anything concrete – something I could incorporate into my characters *right now.*

Once I started reading screenplays, though, that changed. When you encounter 20,000 characters a year, you begin to see patterns in the ones that are good whether you want to or not.

Over time, I piecemealed together a vague method for creating characters with depth. But just like anything in screenwriting, you focus on it for a while, then you get distracted by something else (“Ooh, different ways to create conflict in scenes!”). You become obsessed with that other thing. You sort of forget the things you figured out with character depth and don’t recover the information again until months later watching some late night movie on Netflix.

This happened to me recently when I went to Alien: Romulus. I liked what they were doing with the characters in the first act so, like any good screenwriting analyst, I paid attention to WHY I felt that way. I wanted to know the specific reasons why the characters were working for me.

It was in this analysis that I had one of those “ah-ha” moments in screenwriting.

In a heartbeat, I knew EXACTLY what was required to write a three-dimensional character. And I’m going to share it with you now.

But before I can explain the ah-ha moment, I must first explain how to write a two-dimensional character. A two-dimensional character consists of… you guessed it… two dimensions. One, what they say. And two, what they do. As long as you have a character saying and doing things, you’ve created a two-dimensional character.

You can actually go far with this. I might argue that, if you do this well, you could add another half-dimension (giving you 2 and a HALF dimensions). That’s because what a character DOES has a major influence on the reader.

Think about Civil War. The very act of those photographers traveling deep into war-torn America to do their job tells you something about them. That they’re strong. That they’re brave. Those are things that factor into how we judge a character’s depth. That’s why they say screenwriting is a show-don’t-tell medium. The most effective way to have us connect with the characters and root for the characters is through action.

Okay, that’s all well and good, Carson. But what about that elusive THIRD dimension? How do we get there?

What Alien Romulus taught me was that the secret to the third dimension is everything YOU CANNOT SEE about your character. It is…

THE PAST
THE FUTURE
THE WITHIN

With Rain, the two biggest things about her are her past (she lost her father) and the future (she’s desperate to get to a planet that has sunlight). Unfortunately, the character didn’t have much going on within, which is why she fell short of becoming a truly memorable character. But that’s, ironically, what completed the lesson for me. Cause I asked myself, “She’s got a past that makes me care. She’s got a future goal that makes me care. Why am I not head over heels about this character, like I was Ripley?” The reason was, she had a weak “within.” No real flaw.

So, let’s look at these three things we “cannot see” more deeply.

THE PAST

We’ll start with the past. The tricky thing about the past is that it’s backstory. And most screenwriting professors will tell you that backstory doesn’t matter. All that matters is what the reader can see. And they can only see the present. So focus on that.

That’s true. But your character lived an entire life. To pretend like that doesn’t affect how your character is acting in your movie is ridiculous. If your character has been in an abusive relationship for the past five years, then got out of it, and now your movie starts, it would be foolish not to write that character in a way where that abuse doesn’t affect their personality and the way they deal with others.

The tricky part with the past is giving the reader the relevant details about that past without stopping the story.

Luke Skywalker, for example, doesn’t wait for a silence and then say, “Hey everyone, by the way, I used to be a pilot. Did you know that?” Instead, he’s in an argument with Han Solo about the price of smuggling them off the planet and, when pressed, he lets Han know, “Yeah, I’m not such a bad pilot myself.” Because that information is given in the heat of the moment, we don’t notice it. We don’t label it as: SCREENWRITER JUST PROVIDED BACKSTORY.

That “invisible” delivery method is essential when informing the reader about the past.

THE FUTURE

Let’s move on to the future. Because this is the part of the third dimension that gets the least love. And I think it’s super important. Basically, the future is what your character wants out of life beyond this movie. It could be as simple as wanting to buy a home on the beach of Zihuatanejo, Mexico. It could be finding the love of your life. It could be a three-picture deal at Paramount (do they still give those out?).

If you want to truly know someone, ask them what their big dream is. What do they want out of life more than anything? That answer will tell you SO MUCH about a person. It’s no different with your characters. Figure out what they want beyond this movie, drop that information somewhere in your script, and you’re a third of the way there to creating that third dimension.

THE WITHIN

The final piece of the puzzle is the WITHIN. I call it the “within” because it can either be a flaw or a conflict. But it must be something going on WITHIN your character. It’s something we cannot physically see.

I’ll give you a great place to study the WITHIN. Reality TV. What reality TV does now is focus heavily on character flaws. If you pop in an episode of 90 Day Fiance, which has five couples, so 10 characters total, every single time they cut to one of those storylines, the show will start hitting on each of those characters’ fatal flaws.

For example, one character has trust issues. No matter what happens, they can’t trust their partner. Another has control issues. They have to control everything. Another has jealousy issues. Another has anxiety stemming from trauma. Another is stubborn. Another is blindly optimistic. Another is codependent. Another has zero self-confidence. Every episode is about those characters battling those specific issues.

Screenplays are no different. You figure out what your character’s inner weakness is – the thing holding them back from being whole, from being happy – and you repeatedly put them in situations where that weakness is tested. If their weakness is that they’re stubborn, you put them in a bunch of situations where they have the opportunity to compromise.  And, since it’s a movie, they will fail that test every single time until the end.

And that’s pretty much it.

Make those first two dimensions as good as you can make them. Make sure the things they say are entertaining. And make sure they’re active as heck (they’re DOING things).

Then, with that third dimension, give us the relevant things about their past. Tell us what they desire most in their future. And finally, identify that thing within them that’s unsettled. Their flaw. Their inner conflict. Whatever you want to call it. Then test it over and over again.

If you do all those things well, you will have a three-dimensional character.

:)

Genre: Biopic/Sports
Premise: Set in the early 2000s, superstar Ivory Coast soccer player, Didier, joins his flailing home-country team again, but finds that they’re divided by the political civil war brewing within their nation.
About: A fresh and green writer pens one of the top ten Black List scripts.
Writer: Jackson Kellard
Details: 115 pages

This is the highest-ranked screenplay from last year’s Black List that I haven’t reviewed yet, with 24 votes.

But it is also… a biopic.

I’m reminded of a line from my favorite movie whenever I read biopics: “You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy. We must be cautious.”

Should we hold out any hope that the script will be good?

I hold out more hope that the Big Mac I order from McDonald’s later is going to be piping hot.

The one chance this script has is if it constructs an amazing character. An amazing character trumps all. It is the boundless beating heart of every great storytelling experience. Didier? I do not know ye yet. But please, I beg of you. Be great.

It’s 2002 and 27 year old Didier Drogba, an Ivory Coast native, had decided to leave his superstar French team to come back to his hometown and play for the Ivory Coast.

But while his return is celebrated, it is a complicated time in the nation. The north and the south hate each other. And guess what? The Ivory Coast team is made up of players from both the north and the south. Which is probably why they suck so bad.

But Didier’s arrival allows them to start winning games. After several wins in a row, the unthinkable starts to become thinkable: a birth in the World Cup. But, to do so, they’ll need to beat both Ghana and Cameroon, powerhouses in the region.

As those games approach, Didier makes a plea to the country to stop fighting and start uniting. That plea places Didier in the middle of a political firestorm. The current president, Gbagbo, notices and sees that he can use Didier as a pawn.

You see, Gbagbo’s presidency thrives on division. He rules through fear and inspires the north to hate the south. So, when the Ivory Coast gets to the final deciding game with Cameroon to make the World Cup, he tells Didier that he has to lose so that the country remains divided, placing our hero in an impossible situation.

With Scene Showdown coming up, I want to talk about scenes today.

The problem with scene-writing in 2024 dates back to the 1980s, with the introduction of video editing hardware, and then more severely, the 1990s, with the introduction of digital editing software.

Before the invention of these two things, film was being physically cut by an editor. The reason that’s important is because you didn’t have an unlimited number of options when you physically cut into film. You had to think about what you wanted to cut and, because you didn’t have time to make a million cuts, the shots and scenes were longer.

Once video and, especially, digital editing came around, you no longer needed to worry about this. You could make 1000 cuts in a 3 minute piece of video/film within 30 minutes.

What that ended up doing is leading to much shorter shots and scenes. At first, this was a good thing. If you watch some of those 1970s movies, there would be unnecessarily long shots of people getting out of cars and walking up stairs. The audience didn’t need those things so it made sense to cut them out.

But then directors and editors started going too far. It wasn’t just the unnecessary heads and tails of shots that were being cut. It was the whole beginnings of scenes. Or the whole endings of scenes. This led to writers believing they only had to write the middles of scenes. Which is why you get scenes like this…

What is this scene??

It’s just information about a character. There is no conflict. There is no drama. There is no building of tension or releasing of tension. There is no suspense. Where is the craft in this scene?? What are we, the reader, supposed to be entertained by?

I don’t blame the writer for this.

Honestly, I don’t.

I blame the last 30 years of storytelling for making writers believe this is a proper scene to include in a script.

To be fair, I get that you can use scene-fragments to build larger sequences that can have all the things I listed above (tension, conflict, drama, suspense). The problem is when you overdo that. Cause if every scene is just a fragment, I guarantee you you’re going to lose the reader at some point.

Why not write longer scenes that have their own entertainment value, and use those longer scenes to STILL build compelling sequences? Then you get the best of both worlds. We’re entertained DURING the scene and THROUGHOUT the sequence.

But I honestly don’t think writers know how to write scenes anymore. Any scene they write that’s good is by accident. They stumble upon it and realize, “Oh, yeah, this is pretty good. I like this scene.” Instead of planning the script so that nearly every scene reads like that.

And today’s script is where you need that consistent scene-writing ability more than usual. Cause readers are already coming in expecting to be bored. They’re reading some serious biopic about African politics. But you can win them over if you give us entertaining scene after entertaining scene.

This is why I’m doing the Scene Showdown. Not just so you write a full scene with a beginning, middle, and end. So that you realize, “Oh, I should just approach every scene like this.”

Yeah, I get it. Sometimes you have to write a scene fragment to bridge two scenes together. But let that be the exception as opposed to the rule.

All right, so, what about the rest of the script?

I’m not going to lie. I spent the first 75 pages of this script debating whether to jump head first into a volcano. It was just so serrrriuossss. I wanted to be entertained and, instead, I felt like I was doing homework.

But the script picks up in its last 40-45 pages because the stakes are so high. This game they’re playing against Cameroon is not only to get them into the World Cup for the first time ever, but President Gbagbo is threatening to destroy Didier’s life if he wins, because he believes a win will unite the country and, subsequently, eliminate his power.

That’s a great place to put your character – in an unwinnable situation. Cause we truly have no idea what he’s going to do. How rare is that in a sports movie where we don’t know what’s going to happen in the final game? It’s pretty darn rare.

Also, any script can be saved if you get the hero and villain right. If we’re rooting for that hero to succeed and rooting for that villain to go down, that can be enough to do the job. Even if your script is steeped in 50 tons of seriousness, that alone can make us care. I wouldn’t call Didier a perfect hero. But I was rooting for him. I was more rooting against Gbagbo. That guy I definitely wanted to see go down.

So that tipped the scales into a ‘worth the read’ here. But I would still be surprised if anyone who wasn’t an Ivory Coast history buff made it through the whole thing. It’s still a biopic so it’s never going to win over the casual movie fan.

To win over the casual movie fan, you need to be a WANT TO SEE movie, not a SHOULD SEE movie.

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

What I learned: Complex socio-political period stories NEED CONTEXT. You can’t just hope to teach the reader everything through exposition. You need a title card at the opening. Tell us what’s happening. Explain this world to us. I spent the first 40 pages only vaguely understanding the conflict between the North and the South. I didn’t even know, at first, that the Ivory Coast team was struggling with North-South division within it. All of that could’ve been easily remedied with a quick title card explaining the basics! How do I know this? Because I am willing to bet my life savings that when this movie comes out, the powers that be will make sure there’s a title card.