Genre: True Story/Comedy/Drama
Premise: Based on the true story of James Hogue, a talented student and long-distance runner who was admitted to Princeton University under the false identity of “Alexi Indris-Santana”–an orphaned, self-educated, teenage ranch hand.
About: James Hogue is a real person and, if you google him, he’s had a pretty adventurous life. The writer, Ryan Hoang Williams, wrote 11 episodes on the highly-rated show, “The Lincon Lawyer.”
Writer: Ryan Hoang Williams
Details: 121 pages

You know what I realized the other day?

The system in place for getting movies made is a meat grinder.

That’s how you have to think about it. It’s got a million of those little grinding wheels that you have to push your script through to get to the other side – the side where someone makes the movie.

If your script isn’t tough enough, every single one of those pages is going to get ripped to shreds. That’s why you have to fortify every page with your best effort. Your best effort is like encasing those pages in a diamond sheen. They cannot be ground up.

Let’s find out if today’s script is tough enough.

It’s 1989. A 21 year old man named James Cooper Hogue from Texas, decides he wants to go to Princeton. But he knows he can’t get in with a boring life. So he invents one. He names himself Alexi Indris-Santana, says he lived in Switzerland with his mother for most of his youth. He has since come to the states where he is now a ranch hand in Texas. He is not like other students they have because he has had no formal schooling. His school is the School of Life. He is also a long-distance runner, which is the one thing about him that’s true.

Princeton eats it up and accepts him and James quickly finds himself on campus mixing it up with the cross-country team. James gets along with everyone just fine. He starts dating a philosphy teacher’s assistant named Erica. He starts going to parties with the Old Money students. He’s really only got one issue. A student named Todd.

Todd is suspicious of James’s origin story and looks for any opportunity to catch him fibbing. He finally decides to challenge James and invite his father figure from back on the ranch, Mr. Oswalt, to come to the school and meet everyone. Except there is no Mr. Oswalt. James made him up. So James runs over to a local theater group and hires an actor to play Mr. Oswalt in order to save his butt.

Despite the actor convincingly portraying his father figure, Todd is still convinced James is a fake. So one night, while drunk, he confronts James and tells him he knows his true identity. James freaks out and murders him then disposes of the body. Will he get away with the murder? Or will James finally be exposed for the gigantic murdering fraud that he is?

One of the screenwriting strategies out there when trying to come up with the next idea you’re going to write is to take a ripped-from-the-headlines story and write a story about a similar situation from the past.

Writers do this for a couple of reasons. One, they’re not competing with anyone else if they’re digging up an old version of a similar idea. And two, your script is more likely to be labeled as “clever” since you’re not telling some on-the-nose tale about the latest ripped-from-the-headlines story.

This is what we get today.

There were all those shenanigans recently about rich people illegally getting their kids into schools. Others were pretending to be minorities to get into elite schools. So this script explores that idea except back in the late 80s.

And…….. I’m still trying to figure out how I feel about it.

There’s something that feels too small about the idea if I’m being honest. That’s a question every writer should be aware of when coming up with movie ideas: “Who cares?”

Would people actually care about your story?
Is it big enough?
Are the stakes high enough?
Why should we care about what’s happening?

The answers to those questions have to live up to outside scrutiny, not just your late-night flimsy personal wall of persuasion.  Why do I care if this guy gets caught? Let’s say he’s thrown out. Well, he was never supposed to be here anyway so… what has he really lost?

That was my big issue with Personal Best. I never thought it was that big of a deal if he got thrown out. This was back before the internet where, if you pulled a con and got exposed, you just moved on to the next con. There were no digital 1s and 0s immortalizing your crime for anyone curious enough to pop your name into a search bar.

There was also something quite convenient about the idea. The main character is pulling this giant con. He’s pretending to be this farmer. He’s from Switzerland. He faked his perfect SATs. But, oh, by the way, he also happens to be one of the best cross-country runners in the nation, which is a big reason why he’s accepted.

But I thought the whole point was that this was a con. It’s not really a con if the biggest reason you got accepted into the school was based on truth. It would’ve been better if he had made that up too and had to dance around it in order to keep his con going (i.e. shown up with a “sprained MCL” so he wasn’t able to run “full on” yet).

You see, the element that pulls the reader in is never the thing that’s easy for your character. It’s the thing that’s impossible for your character. In last year’s Willy Wonka, they don’t just hand him his chocolate store the second he arrives in town. There are three competitors determined to KILL HIM if need be to protect their market share and a hotel that enslaves him for the rest of his life. You’re genuinely wondering how Willy Wonka is going to succeed.

If we sense EVEN A LITTLE BIT that the writer is on the hero’s side, we tune out. That’s what bothered me so much about yesterday’s movie, Rebel Ridge. The writer allowed the main character to antagonize, humiliate, and even attack the local cops again and again. Yet the cops never killed him or threw him in prison. 100% that’s a writer padding his character with plot armor.

Despite this, I give props to today’s writer for understanding the low stakes of his story and introducing a plot point that never happened in real life – James kills Todd.

As I’ve told you a million times, if you’re unsure whether your script has high enough stakes… introduce a dead body. Even better, have your main character create the dead body! Which is exactly what James does when he kills Todd.

This is how powerful this plot device is: Before James killed someone, I was at a 3 out of 10 on the “interest” scale. Afterwards, I was 7 out of 10. Still not great. But all of a sudden I cared what happened next.

The problem was, the murder didn’t hit the story until page 80! So that’s 80 pages of 3 out of 10 compared to 40 pages of 7 out of 10. I would’ve at least made that plot point the midpoint shift. I don’t know why it comes so late in the story.

The thing that ultimately doomed the script though – and I give credit to the writer for acknowledging it – was that James didn’t just have to graduate school to complete the ruse, he has to carry this name and backstory with him for the rest of his life. It just seemed like a really dumb plan – not a lot of thought put into it.

The script has its moments. It’s not bad by any means. It’s just one of those scripts you read and nod your head every once in a while thinking, “That was a pretty good scene.” But the totality of the experience doesn’t move you so you’ll never recommend it to anyone else. And that’s what every script needs. It needs that RECOMMEND quality because, otherwise, not enough people are going to read it to push it through that meat grinder.

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

What I learned: A good show to compare this script to is Inventing Anna. In that real-life story, Anna Sorokin was conning people out of millions of dollars. And she was doing it to the upper-crust New York party scene. Those two high-level elements (conning millions and the elite NY party scene) made that feel larger than life. Not to mention, that person became infamous. This script only ever gets up to the line of being larger than life. It’s an old story. Nobody’s heard of this guy. Yeah he murders someone later on but, for most of the script, he’s got nothing to truly worry about. So the story experience was too casual.

C’mon Netflix.

You’ve had your streaming service for 17 years now and you STILL don’t know how to release a movie!

The only reason I knew Rebel Ridge came out on Netflix this weekend is because I saw a couple of you guys talking about it.

The strange thing is that they seem to know how to promote shows. Their good shows always do well. But I can’t remember a single true breakout Netflix movie. And that may not be because they don’t have one. It’s because they don’t know how to let anyone know they exist!

This comes down to Netflix arrogance. The second they dropped the first ten episodes of House of Cards and declared, “BOOM!” as if they’d finally proven string theory, they assumed that every industry-changing move they made was genius.

Not promoting movies was their next big idea and they’ve been so stubborn about proving they were right, they seventeen-fold-downed on the practice.

Who honestly thinks that a movie is going to do well if nobody knows about it!?

I remember a long time ago when Mike Judge came out with his movie, Idiocracy. Because of some weird issues within 20th Century Fox, they decided not to promote it. Believe it or not, they didn’t even have a poster for it at first! If you went to the theater and saw all the movie posters of the movies they were showing, all you saw for Idiocracy was a blank white poster with the title “Idiocracy” written in generic font.

It made me wonder what would happen if they didn’t promote the Pirates of the Caribbean sequel which, at the time, was one of the flashiest franchises going. Would people actually show up?

Of course SOME people would show up. But it’d probably be like 1/5 of what the audience would be if they had promoted it.

I just find it weird that Netflix allows so many of their movies to show up and die on their app. Nobody will know what Rebel Ridge is in a week.

The question is, should they?

Cause three of you in the comments section called it the best film of the year.

I read the script four years ago when Jeremy Saulnier was first going to make the movie with John Boyega before Boyega ran away from set and never came back. Even though I reviewed the script, the review no longer exists on the site. Why? I have no idea. It disappeared.

My question to the three people on the site who loved this movie is: ARE YOU OUT OF YOUR MINDS???

All the issues that were on display in the script were in big bright Netflix lights here as well.

It’s no secret that I like a simple well-told story. I don’t like when stories get unnecessarily complex, when too many elements are thrown into the mix. I don’t like when plots jump around too much. The only time I like that stuff is when I’m in the hands of a true master and I can feel the confidence in the writer’s hands that he’s going to deliver.

Rebel Ridge does not move that way.

It’s a movie that never seems to know what it is.

Let me give you a quick breakdown of the plot so my analysis doesn’t confuse you.

Terry, who’s black, bikes into a racist southern town to bail out his cousin who’s being kept in a nearby jail. He’s got a stack of money on him to do so.

But he gets stopped by racist cops who not only give him a ticket for “evading pursuit” but they take all that bail money and tell him he can’t have it back. Terry’s mad so, later that day, he charges into the police station to make a complaint about the cops. An even bigger racist captain tells him to screw off.

He leaves and goes to talk to a female lawyer in town who’s kind of helpful. He goes back to the station again, then he leaves again, then he goes back AGAIN, then he leaves and comes back AGAIN, ties up all the cops, gets the money, and goes to bail out his cousin, only to, after getting the bail through, get arrested for tying up all the cops.

His cousin is killed in jail, possibly because these cops put a hit out on him. The captain then gives Terry a car and some money and tells him to leave town. But Terry is determined to even the score so he teams up with the lawyer to expose their corruption.

At one point they end up in a dungeon somewhere. It’s very confusing. Finally, there’s this shootout by the station and, for no clear reason that I’m aware of, the very same racist cop who stole his money at the beginning decides he’s going to team with Terry because it’s the “right the thing to do” or something. It’s apropos that it’s the first football Sunday of the year because, from there on, the movie stumbles to the finish line.

It was just. So. Sloppppyyyy.

I don’t like sloppiness in storytelling.

Why are we taking four separate trips to the police station in the first act when we could’ve gotten it done in one? Or at most two! Screenwriting is about efficiency. You don’t want to do anything more than you have to. And you definitely don’t want to repeat beats.

As I said in my script review, this movie could’ve been awesome if Terry held everyone hostage in the police station for the full movie. And a group of cops show up outside surrounding the place. You’ve got a great contained thriller if you do that. But all this back and forth and back and forth destroyed the story’s momentum.

Another thing that drove me nuts was that these cops were letting this dude have his way with them. This guy LITERALLY stole their guns and tied them up in their own station and the next scene is the captain giving him 10 grand and a new car and telling him to leave town!

WHY NOT JUST KILL HIM???

There’s literally NO REASON why they didn’t kill him other than that the writer saved him. That’s it. And that’s unforgivable to me. You can’t be your hero’s guardian angel. If your bad guys, who demonstrated they had zero morals right from the opening scene, don’t kill this guy after he breaks twenty laws in their town, including holding them hostage while he steals their money, that’s only because you’re saving him.

And if your response to that is, “They couldn’t kill him because it would’ve been too obvious and they don’t want trouble,” I’m not buying it because they just killed his cousin!

I cannot remember a screenplay that frustrated me as much as this one.

So then why is the film getting such good reviews? I know the answer to this. It’s the ‘ace in your sleeve’ move that every screenwriter has at their disposal: If you give us a character we love who someone else is taking advantage of and you execute that character well, the readers and the viewers will become blind to any plot holes in the movie.

When we like someone – and particularly in a movie like this where we really want justice for Terry – we don’t see the cracks in the screenplay. We just don’t. And that’s the one thing Jeremy Saulnier got right. He got that main character right.

But, to me, the plotting was so egregious that I couldn’t overlook it. I mean that stupid lawyer plot was soooooo dumb. That little side journey we went on with her in the second act? I could barely contain my fury that she was in the movie.

This should’ve been a simple story about Terry getting that money back. 90 minutes in and out and it would’ve been great. Because, like I said, the character worked. Instead we get all this nonsense in the meantime. I strongly strongly discourage anyone from watching this film. Watch the first scene for Scene Showdown. But, after that, save yourself and go watch some football.

Okay, we can’t leave without talking about Beetlejuice Beetlejuice! A 110 million dollar box office bonanza built around Michael Keaton trying to either entertain or annoy us to death. I can’t decide which. I had no idea this franchise had this kind of box office power. The only way I can make sense of it was that the Netflix show Wednesday (which also starred Jenna Ortega and was directed by Tim Burton) was such a smash hit for them. And all those people came out to see a continuation of that team-up.

Good for everyone involved. 2024 has taught us over and over again how stingy the average moviegoer is. To make 110 million dollars off of something that has no superheroes, no spaceships, and no fast cars, is a gigantic accomplishment.

Next weekend I’m very excited because I’m going to see Speak No Evil. It looks awesome. As you know, I love it when a movie comes out that could’ve been a spec script. No special effects. All it has is people talking. Yet here it is, with a wide release. I can’t wait. I’m not going to look up any of the reviews or anything. I want to go in as naked as I can. Go watch it too so we can discuss it afterwards.

In the lead-up to this month’s “Scene Showdown,” the question must be asked: ‘What, exactly, is a scene?’

Before we break down what a scene is, here are the submission details for Scene Showdown. Literally EVERYBODY who reads this site should enter. Here’s what I need from you…

Title
Genre
Logline
Up to 50 words to prep the scene (up from 30)
A PDF of your scene (no minimum length, maximum is 5 pages long)
Send submission to: carsonreeves3@gmail.com
Deadline: 10pm Pacific Time, Thursday September 26th!

It’s funny because when I came up with the idea for Scene Showdown, I assumed it was self-explanatory. I thought that everybody knew what a scene was. But after all the questions that popped up in the comment section, I realized that a scene is not clear at all. So, let’s talk about what a scene is.

I started off by asking Chat GPT and I can’t say I’m a fan of his answer:

A scene is a distinct narrative unit where characters interact within a specific time and place to advance the story.

I then asked Miriam’s Dictionary for help and this is what they told me:

A division of an act presenting continuous action in one place.

I didn’t love that definition either so I googled a few other options:

A complete unit of storytelling, usually consisting of a sequence of events and dialogue taking place in a specific location and time.

A scene is a section where a character or characters engage in action or dialogue. You can think of a scene as a story with a beginning, middle, and an end.

Change (the writer of this article defines a scene as anything where a character expects one thing but something else happens)

Color me surprised that defining a scene is so difficult because, on a macro level, it seems obvious. Similar to how we inherently know what a paragraph is because we’ve read so many books, I figured we inherently knew what a scene was because we’ve watched so many movies.

But the more we get into the micro – nailing down the specifics of what makes a scene – the harder it becomes to define.

There are common threads in these definitions, however. Continuous time is one. A single location is another. There is action, dialogue, or both. Maybe the one thing that these definitions are missing is that there’s an actual point to the scenario. I like to think of it as a little story (which may align with the writer above who defines a scene as “change”).

With that in mind, our definition of a scene might look like this…

A storytelling unit where characters engage in action or dialogue within a single location during a continuous time frame.

Now, for those of you already getting wound up about the restrictions of that definition, calm down. This is a BASELINE definition to work with. It’s not the law.

If, for example, you write a scene where a married couple is fighting and they take the fight from their kitchen to their backyard, then to their car as they drive to work, that has three location changes but it’s still considered to be one scene because it’s continuous.

I think where writers get the most confused is with the time continuation thing. Because sometimes you’ll write three “scenes” that have time breaks between them, but they’re all so intricately woven together, you could make the argument that they’re one scene.

For example, let’s look at Kinds of Kindness, which I reviewed yesterday.

One of the scenes, from the middle story in Kinds of Kindness, has Robert, who’s mentally deteriorating rapidly in his marriage, coming to his wife, Rita, and asking her to chop off her finger, cook it, and include it in his dinner. This is, I guess, technically, one scene.

Right after that, we show Rita wrestling with whether to oblige her husband. She eventually decides to do what he says so she chops off and cooks her own finger. Again, this could be considered its own scene.

Finally, we have Rita serving Robert his dinner, with her finger, and him being confused as to why she would do this (remember, he’s going insane). That’s its own scene as well, you could say. But, really, all three of these moments, when combined together, make up about 5 minutes of screen time, and could, conceivably be pitched as one scene, even though there are time breaks between them.

Now some of you may say, “No, Carson. That’s a sequence (a “sequence” being a series of scenes).” And I wouldn’t say you’re wrong. But I think this speaks to why the question of “What is a scene” has perplexed so many of us. There is a greyness to the definition.

But what I hope this does for you, in regards to the showdown, is help you relax a little. As you can see, there’s some flexibility regarding what makes a scene.

I don’t want to stifle anybody’s creativity because some of the best writing I receive is from writers who have their own creative ideas and don’t try and retroactively engineer stories to my liking.  BUT if I were you entering the showdown, I would be thinking in terms of a short story that fits within the constraints of our scene definition. Something that could, if not completely live on its own, is entertaining enough that we’d enjoy it without context. Get that clear beginning (setup), middle (conflict), and end (resolution), in there.

If you want to get more specific, use GSU. Have a character who wants something (goal), will gain much if he succeeds or lose much if he fails (stakes), and has a limited amount of time (urgency).

Some recent examples of mini-story scenes that have clear beginnings, middles, and ends, would be the scene in Furiosa when Dementus enters the Citadel and tries to convince the ruler, Immortan Joe, to hand the city over to him.

In The Killer, the Killer gets a taxi/uber ride with a specific cab driver and demands information on the person the driver gave a ride to three days ago who went to kill his wife. Simple beg, mid, end. Simple GSU.

In Parasite, the family who invades the home is surprised when the real family, who is supposed to be gone, comes back unexpectedly. They all must hide within the house and not be seen until the family goes to sleep and they can sneak away.

In Emily the Criminal, a good scene is when Emily is tasked with stealing her first car. She has to go into a dealership and buy the car with a fake credit card from the salesman. But she’s told that 8 minutes from the moment he swipes the card, she has to be out of there, or else the card company will call the salesman and tell him it’s a fake.

As you can see, all of these scenes feel important. They’re not just casual things going on between people. There are stakes involved. The moments are larger than life. That’s where you want your head when submitting for the Scene Showdown.

I hope that clears a lot of things up. But I noticed there were other questions in Tuesday’s post so let me answer the relevant ones here…

Does it have to be the first scene of your script? – No.

Can it come from a screenplay that hasn’t been written yet? – Yes

50 words to prep the scene – What I mean by this is, if the scene comes deep in your script, you can provide some context as to who the characters are and what was going on before the scene. This is not mandatory.

Logline and Title – As best you can, create a logline and title for the scene (not the script). I know it’s hard and you don’t have to be too specific (you can be mysterious if you want, i.e., “A young woman wakes up to find her dead child alive and well in her arms”).

Winner – Winner gets a deep dive review of the scene on the site and a collective kick in the behind to write the full script!

Is Kinds of Kindness genius-level writing?

I want to pose a question to you.

It’s a simple question.

Here it is.

Have you seen Kinds of Kindness?

If not, why?

Maybe you can’t detect this but there’s a little aggression in the way that I’m posing the question because I see a lot of complaining in the movie space that movies don’t take risks anymore. They all play it safe. That’s why you don’t go to the movies as much.

Well, this movie does anything BUT play it safe. It’s about as risk-taking in the creativity department as a writer can get. So, why didn’t you see it?

You said you wanted stuff that’s different. This is different.

I have good news for you if you didn’t see it. I saw it for you. Mainly because it was free on Hulu.

The movie is definitely unique. It’s actually three separate 45 minute movies. With the same actors. Playing different roles in each one.

The first movie follows an executive named Robert who lives his life to please his boss, Raymond. Raymond controls every aspect of Robert’s life, from what he eats to when he has sex with his wife to what kinds of clothes he wears. But one day Raymond goes too far. He wants Robert to crash into another man’s car and kill him. Robert says no and Raymond deserts him. Robert then comes clean to his wife that the reason she can’t have children is because he’s been poisoning her coffee every morning (per Raymond’s instructions). So, of course, his wife leaves him. And now Raymond is desperate to get both her and Raymond back into his life.

The second movie follows Robert (who’s a completely different character now – a cop), who’s devastated that his wife, Rita, has gone missing. She was on a boat and the boat disappeared. But they find her on a deserted island. She comes back home and everything seems okay at first. But when she can’t fit her feet into her shoes, Robert suspects that she’s not his real wife. Robert then begins deteriorating mentally, going so far as to demand Rita cut off her finger and include it in his next dinner. Although a bargain basement police psychologist tries to help him get back on track, he keeps asking for more and more horrible things from Rita, until he goes too far.

The third movie follows Rita and Robert, who have fallen victim to a rich man’s cult. That cult is attempting to find a very special woman with supernatural abilities. So Rita and Robert are scouring the area trying to find this woman for their leader. But when Rita screws up and goes back to her former husband for a night, she’s deemed by the leader as “impure” and kicked out of the club. Rita now knows that her only way back in is if she finds the girl. So off she goes.

This is one of the more interesting explorations of screenwriting I’ve come across in a while because, usually, you can tell where a story is going. But when you take away most of the structure, you now have no idea where the story is going. And there’s something exciting about that. Cause for a good portion of the running times in all three movies, I struggled to guess what was going to happen next.

However, you can’t just write WHATEVER YOU WANT and expect it to work. When you’re going off-road, there are no more signs for your readers informing them they’ll be rewarded if they stay in the car. The way screenplays work is, like roads, they promise you things are coming up. This town is coming up in 30 miles. This other town is coming up in 70 miles. This big city is coming up in 120 miles.

Once you go off-road, there are no more towns or cities. You’re in the middle of freaking nowhere. So you have to find other ways to keep the reader turning the page. One of those ways is utilizing what I call the “Fallout Narrative.” The Fallout Narrative works like this. Something bad happens and then your hero struggles to adapt to it. That’s why we keep turning the pages. Because we want to see if he succeeds or fails in his adaptation.

So, in the first of the three movies here, the fallout is when Robert refuses to kill the other man in a crash. Raymond rejects him, leaving him without a job or a guide. Then his wife leaves him too. Robert is in major fallout mode. He has to try and get them back. In this particular scenario, the Fallout Narrative provides a couple of goals. Goal #1: Get Raymond to accept him again. Goal #2: Get his wife back.

When you have goals, you have active main characters. And an active main character will push the story along. If no one is trying to do anything, the story, by definition, cannot move.

The second of the three movies in Kinds of Kindness is also a Fallout Narrative. Rita comes back into her husband’s life. But her husband, Robert, is unconvinced that Rita *is* his real wife.

The storytelling mechanism behind why this works is a little more complex. Because the fallout to this one doesn’t create goals like the first one did. Instead, the fallout focuses on the deterioration of Robert. He becomes less and less convinced that Rita is his wife and the less convinced he becomes, the crazier he gets. There’s a wild scene where he and his cop partner stop a drunk driver and Robert shoots the passenger in the hand then runs over and starts trying to eat the blood from the wound.

If a character continues to change, whether it be in one direction (a good way) or the other (a bad way), we will keep turning the pages. It’s like approaching a car crash. We can’t wait to see just how bad the crash is. However, if Robert wasn’t getting worse, but rather staying the same, there would be no story here. Because there would be no fallout. It’s Robert’s deterioration that is the engine driving this middle story.

The third of the three movies is ALSO a fallout narrative, although it takes a little longer to get to the fallout. Rita and Robert are looking for this special girl. Rita goes back to her actual husband for a night. He rapes her. The leader now considers Rita impure. He kicks her out (this is the fallout) and now she’s desperately looking for this special woman so she can get back into the club.

What’s unique about the third story is that the first half is presented “in media res.” We’re dropped into this weird world where we don’t know who this cult guy is, what he’s talking about half the time, why Rita and Robert are testing a woman’s ability to raise the dead.

If you have enough odd things going on, that can definitely add an engine to your story until you move into a more traditional story engine. In the end, the name of the game is to keep the reader turning the pages. They will do that if you’re throwing weird stuff at them and they want to figure out what’s going on.  Just don’t make them wait too long.  If you keep piling weird onto weird onto weird, the reader eventually gets frustrated.

I would say that all three of these stories work, which goes to show that if you’re watching something artsy *AND IT WORKS* there’s a good chance that traditional storytelling mechanisms are in place. The writer is just better at camouflaging them.

When you watch weird/artsy stuff that sucks? It’s almost always because zero traditional storytelling mechanisms are being used. It’s just the writer trying to be weird for weird’s sake. That never works.

Even the story with the weakest plot engine here, the second one, technically has a goal driving the plot. Rita is trying to save her husband, who’s descending further and further into madness. But, to be clear, the reason why that’s the weakest story is because it has the weakest engine. Rita isn’t super-actively trying to save her husband, like Robert is trying to get his life back in the first story or Rita is trying to find the perfect girl in the third story.

That shows you that the IMPORTANCE of the goal to the hero (how much they want it) has a significant effect on how the reader takes in the story. The less your primary characters want something, the less your primary characters go after something, the slower the story will move and the more likely the reader will give up.

I do want to finish this article up by saying one thing. If you have three ideas, you have no ideas. There should always be a clear number one idea in your movie idea bag. If there isn’t, then you don’t have that idea worth writing yet. Kinds of Kindness is a “couldn’t make up my mind” movie: Throw three different shorts into the mix and call it a film. That’s a lazy move that rarely, if ever, pays off. You know how I know? Because nobody saw this movie.

You should’ve figured out which of these ideas was best and built a feature screenplay around that! They actually, all three of them, have the potential to be a feature film, with more development. To give us these tiny versions of all three stories feels like Yorgos gave up.

So, why did he do it? I would assume that Yorgos Lanthimos can get almost any actor he wants. With that said, the competition for the time of three of the most desired actors in Hollywood is immense. So, if you can offer them three roles for the price of one? That may be the deciding factor in picking you over [other hot director of the moment].

Which is another helpful reminder to write characters that actors can’t resist.

This movie WILL make my Top 10 of the year, no doubt. But it’s certainly not going to be for everyone. If you want to test your screenwriting mettle, however, I say check it out. It allows you to see how writing in non-traditional ways affects the viewing experience.

SINCE I HAVE NO IDEA IF THE NEWSLETTER IS GETTING TO PEOPLE, I’M JUST GOING TO INCLUDE IT HERE ON THE SITE. ENJOY! AND IF YOU WANT FUTURE NEWSLETTERS, E-MAIL ME AT CARSONREEVES1@GMAIL.COM. THAT’S ASSUMING I CAN GET THEM SENT OUT!

I was talking to an aspiring writer the other day and we got onto the topic of movies, specifically what we’d seen lately. He said that he’d rewatched this old movie that both of us liked and I said to him, “Have you ever read the script for that movie? It’s even better than the film.” What he said next shocked me. “I don’t read scripts.”

I gasped and replied, “What do you mean, you don’t read scripts? Like you don’t read them that often?” He said, no, he’d read maybe three scripts in his entire life and they were all classic film scripts. “You’ve never read a screenplay that hasn’t become a movie yet??” I asked. “No,” he said. “Never.”

This wasn’t the first time I’d heard this from a writer. In fact, I once knew a writer who didn’t just *not read* scripts, he was so uninterested in doing so, he’d go on 20-minute villain monologues about how pointless (and boring) reading scripts was. And he had proof to back it up! He actually sold a screenplay! For mid-to-six figures!

How the heck did that happen? Well, to his credit, he was really good at picking high concepts and injecting GSU (goal, stakes, urgency).

But there was always something off about his writing that I couldn’t put my finger on. The rhythm wasn’t quite there. The sentence structure was slightly odd. And just the whole experience of reading his scripts felt like you were reading a “highlights reel” of a script, ” if that makes sense. His scripts never felt like true screenplays.

Not that I wish any ill will on writers, but I wasn’t surprised to hear that the writer hung it up three years later, failing to experience any more success. You can sometimes get a lucky invite into the game. But it’s hard to stay if you don’t know what you’re doing. People figure that out sooner or later.

I have no doubt that the fact this writer had never read any screenplays before hurt his writing A LOT. Let me explain why.

I’m currently working with an actress who’s writing her first screenplay. It’s a true story about the birth of a particular tech industry. One of the issues she’s running up against is explaining the complicated world of that industry which is clear to her but foreign to us. So I sent her the Sam Bankman-Fried script I reviewed the other day, which did a lousy job of explaining its industry, in order to show her how the lack of properly conveyed exposition makes it hard for a reader to follow along.

It’s only when you experience writing weakness as a reader that it clicks for you what you have to demonstrate in your own scripts. How can you possibly understand how to keep someone interested in your story if you have never read a screenplay that’s kept your interest before? How can you ever understand how to keep someone from getting bored if you yourself have never been bored reading a screenplay before? How can you understand the rhythm of a screenplay if you’ve never been subjected to good screenplay rhythm? How can you know how much information the reader needs about your world if you’ve never read a script that effortlessly disseminates a lot of information?

You can’t just answer, “I can do that because I watch movies” because you’re not yet writing for a movie audience. You are writing for a reader. A series of readers must approve of your script before it can become a movie. So you have to be hip to THAT PERSON’S EXPERIENCE, not the audience member’s experience. And believe me, it’s a different ballgame. Movies are a passive experience. Reading is an ACTIVE experience. Or, to put it bluntly: Reading is harder than watching. So the bar for keeping the person engaged is higher.

I’m not saying you need to read as many scripts as I do. But you need to read at least a couple of scripts a month. Lucky for you, I have some reading material to pass on! I’m giving you four good scripts and two bad ones. You may be wondering why I’m including bad scripts. It’s because you need to know what types of things frustrate readers. You can’t write a good script unless you’ve been on the receiving end of a bad one. Because those are the scripts that drill into your head, “I’m going to make sure I never do that myself.”

Here are the scripts. Start your reading TODAY.

GOOD EXAMPLE #1
Title: After The Hunt
Logline: A Yale professor up for tenure must navigate a rape accusation from her most cherished student against another professor, who happens to be her best friend at the school.
Why I included it: This is considered to be the best script of the year so it’s definitely one you’ll want to check out.

GOOD EXAMPLE #2
Title: The Nowhere Game
Logline: Two young women are kidnapped, brought deep into the woods, given a head start, and then hunted down by their sadistic captor all for the pleasure of the online fans of “The Nowhere Game.”
Why I included it: This is a great example of how to write a script that reads quickly. Those tend to do well with readers because readers don’t have a lot of time.

GOOD EXAMPLE #3
Title: Dying for You
Logline: A low-level worker on a spaceship run by a dark god must steal the most powerful weapon in the universe to save his workplace crush.
Why I included it: This is one of my favorite scripts from last year. It’s really fun and effortless to read.

GOOD EXAMPLE #4
Title: Anaconda
Logline: A group of 40-something friends decide to remake their favorite film, Anaconda, in the real Amazon forest, only to learn that an actual giant Anaconda snake is out there.
Why I included it: I don’t love this script. But it’s a great example of how to come up with a fresh angle on an old property that the studios might get excited about if you pitched it to them. This film is being made with Paul Rudd and Jack Black. (More details on this project later)

BAD EXAMPLE #1
Title: Return to Sender
Logline: A woman who’s moved into a new home and is buying a lot of things from a giant delivery company learns that she is being used for a new delivery scam.
Why I included it: This script only got recognition because the writer directed a short that did okay. But the feature adaptation of that short is awful. Note how boring it is. Note how the story barely moves. Note how small the story feels. It’s an exercise in how easy it is to make it nearly impossible for the reader to turn the pages.

BAD EXAMPLE #2
Title: Star Blazers
Logline: A rag-tag group of space pirates come together to travel to a mysterious planet to retrieve a technology that will help them defeat the alien presence that has annihilated earth.
Why I included it: This is an old script that Hollywood never made. You can see that there’s not a single original idea in the script. It also takes waaaaay too long for the main plot to get started, a COMMON problem I see in screenplays, especially for newer scriptwriters.

It’s fine if you dislike any of the scripts I recommended here or like the ones I didn’t. The objective isn’t to have you mirror my taste. It’s to help you develop your own. Regardless of which side of the fence you end up on, take note of *WHY* you like something or *WHY* you don’t. That way, you can apply (or not apply) that same approach to your own material.

NOW TAKING SUBMISSIONS FOR “SEPTEMBER SCENE SHOWDOWN!”

This month’s showdown is a SCENE SHOWDOWN. I enjoyed the process of posting the first five pages of the Mega-Showdown finalists. So I thought I’d capitalize on that theme this month. Hence, we’re going to have a SCENE SHOWDOWN. Your scenes can be five full pages long and not a word more. Write the best scene possible, submit it to me, and I will post the best five entries on the site. Another reason I’m doing this is so as many of you can enter as possible. You can write a scene in a single day. So take advantage of this. Help me discover a writer who’s ready to blow up!

For the submission, it’s going to be a little tricky, cause it’s hard to write a title or a logline for a single scene. But the good news is, I’m going to read every scene that’s submitted. And I’ll be choosing on strength-of-scene rather than the title or logline. So do your best. Also, I’m going to give everyone 30 words to prep the scene if they want to. So, here are the submission details:

Title
Genre
Logline
Up to 30 words to prep the scene
PDF of scene (up to 5 pages long)
Send to: carsonreeves3@gmail.com

Deadline for entries is 10pm Pacific Time, Thursday September 26th!

AROUND TOWN

Mega-Showdown Winner, “Bedford” – The Scriptshadow Mega-Showdown winning script won me over just as it did the readers. It is a taut contained thriller in the vein of The Vast of Night. But it stirred quite a bit of controversy in the comments, with a lot of readers claiming it’s more of a stage-play than a film, since the majority of it takes place in one room and focuses on a single character. If the script were to be filmed, they argued, it would be boring because there’s nothing cinematic about it. It’s the age-old dilemma every aspiring screenwriter faces. The best way to get the most interest is to write something contained and low-budget. However, by doing so, you risk writing something static and boring. I, personally, think you could make a cool movie out of Bedford. Keep the camera moving when possible. Maybe get the hero out of the control tower a couple of times so that the location doesn’t get too stale. It was fun to see all the responses to the script. We haven’t had that spirited of a discussion about a screenplay in a long time. You can read the script for yourself here then head over and read my review!

Weird Anaconda Reimagining Somehow Going Forward at Sony – When I read this Anaconda reboot script, I thought it was a fun experiment but, by no means did I think they were going to make it. It was too weird – like something a couple of stoner college kids would write in between parties on Spring Break. But guess what? Sony’s actually going through with it! They’re signing Jack Black and Paul Rudd to play the leads, which certainly makes the project more enticing. For those who don’t know, the new Anaconda movie is going to follow a group of former aspiring filmmakers who loved the original Anaconda so much, they head to the jungle to film a low-budget version of the film in the hopes of selling it to Sony. Except they quickly learn that the giant anaconda snake is real! And it’s after them! Sony is obviously trying to do what they did with the Jumanji franchise. They took a sort-of popular movie from the past and reimagined it as a video game. So there’s some logic to the offbeat approach. But I’m just telling you – the script was really sloppy. It literally feels like the characters are making things up as they go along. If this movie is going to work, they will need to massively tighten up the story. Cause it’s a loosey-goosey premise as it is. When you add a casual narrative to a loosey-goosey premise, it has the potential to become a “What the fuck did I just watch” movie.

Worst Case Scenario – TJ Newman is back with her third big thriller book. For those who don’t know Newman’s journey, she’s the flight attendant who wrote a book in between serving passengers on transatlantic flights. She then sent her first book, Falling, to 40+ agents, all of whom rejected her. Until finally she landed one, which helped her secure a million dollar movie deal for the book. What I like about TJ is that she writes these high concept ideas as fast-moving thrillers. In that way, they mimic screenplays. This allows for quick and dirty reads that present the core concept in a digestible way. In other words, they’re easy for a producer to say ‘yes’ to. Newman said this idea – a plane crashing into a nuclear reactor – came to her because, in a search for story ideas, she asked all the pilots she knew what their biggest fear was. One of them said, that a terrorist not only hijacked their flight, but flew the plane into a nuclear reactor. Pro tip: Be ready for success like TJ Newman was. She wrote her second novel QUICKLY and, therefore, was able to take advantage of the buzz surrounding her first sale, grabbing a second flashy movie deal with “Drowning.” And she wrote this third book pretty fast as well. If you wait too long and a movie falls apart before production or the movie gets made and it sucks, you lose all that buzz, which makes it much harder to sell stuff. But if you can write more books and scripts BEFORE any of that happens, you can really cash in. That’s what Newman did.

 

Jurassic World Rebirth – Things have gotten so competitive in the content space that studios aren’t even waiting the minimum amount of time to reboot franchises anymore (that would be 5 years). They’re now trying to do it in 3 years! The last Jurassic World movie came out in 2022. This new one, starring Scarlett Johanssen, will come out in 2025 (funny enough, the setting for the new story will take place 5 years after the previous film). Here’s the premise: The three biggest dinosaurs have a genetic secret that will help save a bunch of human lives. So Scarlett must travel across the world and get DNA samples from these three rogue dinosaurs. But, in the process, she gets stuck on an island with them. Let’s be honest – it’s an uninspired, borderline clumsy, premise. You would think that if they were rushing to get this made, they’d have something sexier. But this feels like par for the course. It is interesting to note how Anaconda is rebooting itself in a risky way whereas Jurassic World is taking zero creative risks. There is a mystery as to what is on the island in this movie. It could be the long-rumored “Dino-humans” that found their way into earlier Jurassic Park sequel drafts. But I don’t think Dino-humans are going to cut it for audiences. This feels like a cash-grab and the stench of that greed is so thick, I’m anticipating nobody showing up for dinner.

Don’t Forget to Grab The Greatest Dialogue Book Ever Written!

This Labor Day, it’s time to finally improve your dialogue. I keep running into amateur scripts with weak or average dialogue. My dialogue book gives you specific instructions on how to add more flavor to your characters’ interactions. It’s just $9.99 and has over 250 dialogue tips in it. That’s 240 more than anybody else is going to give you. What are you waiting for!?

Book Review – Caught Stealing

Genre: Crime/Thriller
Premise: A baseball-loving lowlife agrees to cat-sit for his neighbor, inadvertently getting pulled into the seedy underworld of New York crime, where people will do anything to get the money they deserve.
About: This is uber-auteur Darren Aaronfsky’s (The Whale, Requiem for a Dream) latest project. It has a flashy cast list that includes “Elvis,” wannabe Oscar-winner Austin Butler, House of The Dragon’s Matt Smith, and borderline Hollywood royalty, Liev Schrieber. The writer, Charlie Huston, has written six books and tons of comics.
Writer: Charlie Huston
Details: about 250 pages

It’s always interesting to see which projects great directors, actors, and producers choose, as it’s a window into their decision-making process and, therefore, knowledge you can use if you ever get an opportunity to pitch them yourself.

But, with this one, there isn’t a lot of guesswork as to why Aronofsky chose it. His previous movie was all about a man glued to his chair (The Whale). This movie is all about a man who never stops moving. Whether Aronofsky was conscious of that radical shift or not, he obviously wanted to go in the opposite direction of “guy on chair.”

New York City. Hank is a professional drunk. He used to have a future as a major baseball prospect but nowadays, in his 30s, his only proximity to baseball is betting on it. After a particularly gnarly night of drinking, Hank is asked by his apartment neighbor, Russ, to take care of his cat while he’s gone. Hank thinks nothing of it and agrees.

The next day, after he feeds the cat, he moves the cat litter box and finds a key taped to the bottom of it. Hank shrugs and heads out to drink again. When he gets back, some Russian guys want to talk to him. They explain that they’re looking for his neighbor, Russ, and they really REALLY need to find him. Hank tells them the truth – he doesn’t know where his neighbor is or when he’ll be back – and they begrudgingly leave.

But the next day, the Russians come back, and this time they’re a lot less kind. They know Hank knows where Russ is as well as where the key is. Then they beat him up badly to let him know how much they need that key. Hank says fuck this and calls the cops. A policeman named Roman comes over. Asks him a bunch of questions. Roman says be more careful. And leaves.

The day after that, two large black men in cowboy attire show up and THEY want to know where the key is. They drive him around and rough him up in order to let him know how much they need that key. As soon as they’re gone, the Russians come back to beat Hank up some more. But this time, they bring Roman with them. Yes, Roman the Cop is working with the Russians.

Fun and games are over. If Hank doesn’t give them the key, they’re going to kill him. Okay fine, Hank says. I’ll get you the key. There’s only one problem – Hank hid the key when he was blackout drunk. So he doesn’t remember where it is. His best guess is at the bar he always hangs out at. But telling Roman that is a big mistake. They all head there and Roman’s men mow down everyone at the bar when they don’t offer up access to the key. This makes Hank the most wanted man in New York.

Just when things can’t get any weirder, Russ returns, finally providing clarity to the key’s importance. That key is for a storage unit that contains 4.5 million dollars. Hank will have to figure out how to push Russ out of this equation, get the money back to the bad guys so they’ll leave him alone, and oh yeah, get the cat back from Roman. Spoiler alert. IT’S NOT GOING TO BE EASY!

The one thing I’ll give Caught Stealing is that, once you read it, it’s impossible to get it out of your head.

It’s one of the most raw, visceral, intense, violent, things I’ve ever read. And it isn’t just the 50,000 punches thrown that you feel. It’s the limitless amount of alcohol being poured down our hero’s throat. It’s the devil-like screaming at Hank from every character he encounters. Even the anguish in this book feels like physical punishment.

But the story has a pretty glaring weakness. And while I believe that Aronofsky is the director best suited to tackle this weakness, I’m not convinced he can overcome it. That weakness is that the story is led by one of the most passive characters I’ve ever come across.

60% of this story is Henry getting his ass handed to him. He’s a punching bag. Again. And again. And again. And again. And again.

I suspect that’s the point. There’s some sado-masochist thing going on with Aronofsky where he wants to show someone get relentlessly beat up for 2 hours. I just don’t know if audiences are going to be able to handle it. Cause it’s so uncomfortably relentless!

But the passivity really bothered me. I’m trying to think of movies that have attempted this before. There was Equalizer 3. Denzel’s character sat back and waited most of the movie. But that was a unique situation in that we knew, from his two previous films, what he was capable of and that it was only a matter of time before he beat some ass.

And then there was Fury Road, where Mad Max gets thrown on the front of a truck for the first 45 minutes and doesn’t do anything. But he eventually got out and began kicking ass.

While it’s true that, once the midpoint hits, Hank starts becoming more active, I’m not sure it made up for the first half of the movie where the dude was just thrown around like a rag doll for an hour. I want you to imagine watching a friend of yours get beat up for 2 straight minutes. How painful would that be to watch? NOW MULTIPLY THAT BY 30! That’s what we see Hank go through.

I will say that we’re all looking to give audiences something fresh – something they haven’t seen already. One of the best places to do that is in your set pieces. If you can come up with three memorable set pieces, you’ve probably written a really good movie. And while there’s nothing outwardly original about the set pieces here, the sheer magnitude of violence on display acts as its own set piece. It’s very much “Resevoir Dogs ear-cut-off scene.” But imagine after that scene was over, you got another ear-cut-off scene, and another one, and another one. At what point, as a viewer, do you surrender!??

In that sense, Caught Stealing makes me think of early Quentin Tarantino with a healthy dose of Fight Club mixed in. I mean the budget for this film is going to see a quarter of it spent just on the Foley artists crafting the thirty-some variations of the sounds of skulls cracking.

Just like all of Aronofsky’s movies, when you see the trailer, it’s going to be different. You will note how you have not seen a movie like this before. Even Fight Club and Reservoir Dogs are not as violent as this film. So it’s going to stand out. But will that lead to people wanting to see the movie? I don’t know, man. It’s a tough call. I’m emotionally spent just reading it. I can only imagine the toll it will take on me watching it.

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

What I learned: We talk a lot about the midpoint shift in a story. It’s the thing you use to create a different SECOND HALF of the movie that doesn’t feel like the first half. Here, we have a very prominent midpoint shift. Russ (the neighbor), the one who’s responsible for all this, returns. So, whereas, before we had zero knowledge of what was going on, Russ’s entrance allows us to have ALL THE KNOWLEDGE. This changes everything for our hero and how he approaches the problem.