Genre: Horror/Slasher
Premise: When a new Ghost Face copycat killer starts piling up a fresh body count, the local teenagers realize that in order to survive, they’ll need to call on the survivors from the original Woodsboro murder spree for help.
About: Scream 5 has been getting some surprisingly active buzz on the internet. There’s a lot of talk about ‘shocking things’ that happen in the movie. It rode that buzz to a 4-day holiday weekend take of $36 million dollars. That’s pretty good considering the movie only cost $25 million to make. With Wes Craven passing away, the newest Scream was directed by Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett. The script was written by incredibly successful spec screenwriter, James Vanderbilt (White House Down, Murder Mystery) as well as relative newcomer, Guy Busick (Ready or Not).
Writers: James Vanderbilt and Guy Busick (based on Scream by Kevin Williamson)
Details: 115 minutes
Some of you may have seen the big fat title of this post and thought to yourself, “A Scream movie? Why is Carson reviewing a Scream movie?”
The answer is simple.
Scream remains one of the greatest screenwriting success stories of all time. And I know what you’re thinking. “Scream?? A screenwriting success story?? Has Carson added magic mushrooms to his diet?”
Yes, I have. But that has nothing to do with this review. You see, here’s what happened. Kevin Williamson sold Scream as a spec. And then, when it was made, it was a monster surprise hit. The opening scene in particular (still one of the greatest opening scenes ever written) blasted itself into popular culture.
But it wasn’t so much the movie that was Kevin Williamson’s success story. Williamson had been trying to make it as a screenwriter for forever in Hollywood. So he had all these failed scripts before Scream. And because Scream was such a hit, everybody in town all of a sudden wanted a Kevin Williamson script. They didn’t care if those scripts were bad. They wanted that name. And so Williamson gave them script after script at the bottom of his hard drive, all of which were average to not good. We got I Know What You Did Last Summer. The Faculty. Teaching Mrs. Tingle. And there were a bunch of others that didn’t get made. Williamson got SO MUCH MONEY from these sales.
So, you see, the reason I’ll celebrate Scream whenever I get a chance is because it’s a great example of there being a light at the end of the tunnel. All that hard work you’re going through as a screenwriter – all of those failed scripts – one day, when you break through, someone’s going to want those scripts. It’s a reminder to never give up!
Which is funny because I heeded that message while watching Scream 5. “Don’t give up, Carson. Keep watching til the end!”
JUUUSSSST KIDDDDDDING.
Kinda.
Scream follows a girl named Sam who, with her new boyfriend, Richie, head back to Woodsboro where her estranged sister, Tara, was recently attacked by a new Ghost Faced killer. That’s what happens in Woodsboro, by the way. Every few years, a Ghost Face killer copycat pops up and starts calling people on phones, giving them life or death movie trivia.
What we learn is that New Ghost Face Killer likely attacked Tara to lure Sam back into town. She’s his real target. Sam, understanding that this is above her pay grade, heads over to local legend and former sheriff, Dewey’s, trailer. After a charged speech, Dewey decides to help her take down New Ghost Face.
Dewey quickly gets the gang back together, calling up ex-wife Gale and the Scream final girl herself, Sidney, to come back into town and help her (spoilers follow). But soon after they get there, Dewey is killed by Ghost Face. Realizing that sh*t just got real, Gale and Sidney make a pact to help these kids take Ghost Face out.
The big showdown takes place at a house party, where the killers (yes, two, this is Scream remember) reveal themselves. Their plan, if you can call it that, has something to do with how the fictional movie franchise within Scream, called “Stab,” has made some terrible movies lately, so they want to provide some real-life inspiration to put the franchise back on track. Lots of killing hijinx then ensue. The End.
Houston, we’ve got a problem. That problem is the wimpifying of Hollywood. Scream 5 starts with a new variation of the famous Drew Barrymore scene from the first film. Tara answers the phone and Ghost Face makes her play a movie trivia game to save her best friend’s life.
The scene is okay. But that’s not what I want to discuss. What infuriated me was that Tara SURVIVES. She survives being brutally stabbed a dozen times. And it just made me sad. Because it shows just how terrified Hollywood is of doing anything remotely offensive. Part of what made that original Scream opening scene so great is that it was brutal and final. If Drew Barrymore survived, nobody would be talking about that scene today.
I started giving more thought to this after the recent Boba Fett debacle. Boba Fett is a crime lord. Killing is in his job description. And, yet, when the mayor’s secretary attempts to pull one over on him and race off, Boba Fett’s punishment amounts to a harsh talking-to.
Why are we afraid to kill fictional people all of a sudden? I suspect it has something to do with this newfound fear Hollywood has of being yelled at on Twitter. It’s just bizarre to me. The second Tara was announced as alive, I rolled my eyes and knew the movie was done. I knew the next 90 minutes couldn’t possibly be good. Because how can you write a good movie if we already know, after the very first scene, that you’re never going to do anything risky? That’s the whole reason the original Scream did well. It took chances.
Another issue was the odd tone they chose to frame the story within. Scream, I guess, is now a sad drama as opposed to a fun horror slasher flick. The music was slow. There were a ton of slow scenes with people in rooms talking. We must’ve been in the hospital for 20 minutes at one point. A sad scene where two sisters talk about their past. Then a sad couple talk. Then a scene where sisters and boyfriend all talk about more serious stuff.
What was so great about Scream is that it had ENERGY. Every scene was charged. It was like each scene took speed right before it was time to shoot. I’m going to go ahead and assume this had something to do with Wes Craven. He cast that original movie perfectly. More importantly, he must’ve tested the kids together to make sure they had great chemistry. Because they all felt like they really knew each other.
Here, there wasn’t a single scene where the kids riffed off each other. They seemed like they all met yesterday. They never looked comfortable. They all seemed to just wait for their lines as opposed to engaging and reacting to one another. Go back and watch that first film because it’s really good and the characters/actors all felt like real friends. And this director didn’t seem to understand how to do that.
Every movie franchise has the thing that it’s known for. And Scream’s thing is its excessive self-referentialism. It loved to make fun of horror movies, lean into cliches, and break the fourth wall.
Scream 5 tries to do that, most notably with its discussion about the “Re-quel.” A requel, as they point out, is a combination between a reboot and a sequel. It’s Ghostbusters. It’s Halloween. It’s Terminator. It’s Star Wars. And what they concede is that it’s impossible to get a requel right because while one foot is trying to move the story forward, the other is planted firmly in the past.
It’s an intelligent assessment of Hollywood’s newest obsession. But here’s the problem: they don’t solve it. They accept it then thrust their story into the exact same problems. You’ve got the new kids participating in a showdown at a house party while Sidney and Gale, our two OGs, become keystone cops, discreetly hiding trackers on cars so they can find the party and take down the killer Scream 1 style.
It’s a mess.
And I’m not going to throw all of the blame on the writers because I’m not convinced you can write yourself out of the problems a requel creates. It’s hard enough to create a good story that has no limitations. Once you tell me I have to find ways to include 50 year olds with kids and marriages and careers in a movie about teenagers who like to get high and hook up… you’re never going to be able to write something satisfying.
The final disappointment with Scream 5 was that I heard the third act was supposed to be great. So much so that they were begging audiences not to share spoilers. I now know that these public cries not to give away spoilers are, simply, marketing gimmicks. Nothing crazy happens in the third act. It’s just your average “everybody tries to kill each other” finale. A final nail in the coffin for the film.
While Scream 5 wasn’t very good, I continue to see the franchise as a symbol to screenwriters everywhere for what’s possible. Write a high-energy entertaining script in one of the five marketable genres (horror, sci-fi, action, thriller, comedy), sell it, then reap the rewards of the buzz by selling all the other scripts on your hard drive.
[ ] What the hell did I just watch?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the price of admission
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Understand the type of film you’re writing and make sure you’re delivering that film. We’re all trying to create compelling characters with compelling pasts and interesting flaws that they have to overcome. But if you’re writing a fun slasher movie, 60% of the movie can’t be characters in rooms having sad conversations over depressing musical scores. You need the fun interactions between all your teen characters. You need the fun killings. You need energy. Scream 5 had numerous problems, but the choice to slow down the script to the point where it became a character drama went directly against the DNA of the original film, and therefore killed the movie.
Fellow nerfherders!
You knew I had to review this episode, right?
Like Watto’s ascension to junk yard magistrate in Mos Eisley, you knew it had to be done.
Boba Ep 3 had to be the single most inconsistent Star Wars TV episode to date. We got some great. We got some awful. And we got everything in between.
I don’t even know where to start. I guess I’ll give a quick plot breakdown for those who didn’t see it. There will be spoilers.
We start off with Boba Fett learning that nobody in the city respects him. So he goes into town to lay down some order and meets a gang of teenagers who outfit themselves with droid parts. He likes what he sees and asks them to work for him.
Boba then goes to the mayor as he suspects he’s up to no good but the mayor sneaks away. That night, while Boba is sleeping, Black K the Wookie rips him out of his bacta tank and fights him. Boba and his security somehow subdue Black K and, the next morning, get a visit from the Hutt twins who apologize for sending him.
They offer Boba a make-up gift – a new rancor monster – and tell Boba they’re heading back to Hutta, their home planet. Before they leave, they warn him of a much worse enemy than them. Boba then falls in love with his new rancor monster and prepares for war with this new unseen enemy.
One of the issues the Boba Fett show is running up against is that it had to emasculate the character to provide a path for growth. As I pointed out, nobody respects Boba Fett. The reason they’re doing this is because they believe if Boba Fett is already a badass, there’s nowhere to go with the character. He can’t become a badass because he’s already a badass.
I don’t subscribe to that logic since there are ways around it. Take The Godfather, for example. He was doing fine when we met him and they were still able to build a story around him. You can always throw obstacles at the crime boss which is going to provide a steady stream of plotlines. So I don’t know why they’re so insistent on making Boba a bottom feeder considering it erases the reason we fell in love with him in the first place – because he was a badass.
I mean you’ve got Dwablee The Water Mumbler telling Boba to his face that he sucks at his job and Boba just shrugging his shoulders. What do you think Jabba would’ve done to Dwablee? The writers are so focused on the character journeys here that they’re overlooking the impact an emasculated Boba Fett has on the show.
That’s a constant battle I have while watching Book of Boba. I’m annoyed at what a pushover the main character is.
But let’s talk about the real issue with the episode – the fact that Robert Rodriquez ported Shark Boy and Lava Girl along with Biff’s gang from Back to the Future 2 into the Star Wars universe. I’ve seen some bad Star Wars miscalculations before. Rose Tico. Canto Bite. Jar Jar Binks. But I don’t think anyone has come close to the characters that Rodriquez dropped into this episode. What was he even thinking??? These are not Star Wars characters. Why are they driving around in lollipop colored Vespas? These characters are too cheesy for even a Star Trek show, let alone Star Wars. Who okay’d this?? Why didn’t someone put their foot down and say, “We can’t include this. This is bad enough to damage the Star Wars brand.”
But nothing could prepare us for the now infamous “chase.” I call it a chase although I’m not sure I’ve ever watched a chase where both chaser and chassee were going 6 miles per hour.
I’m sure a lot of viewers wondered how such a terrible chase scene could’ve made it into a 200 million dollar show. And I already know the answer. I knew the answer the second I heard the director’s name. Robert Rodriquez’s “thing” is that he likes to do everything himself. I think on one of his movies he directed, photographed, lit, stunt-coordinated, did the special effects, edited, and scored the movie. He wants to do EVERYTHING. And the problem is that he does this even when he doesn’t know what he’s doing, which was clearly the case here. He didn’t know how to put together a complex chase with practical and digital effects through a make-believe city. But he’s Robert Rodriquez and he must do EVERYTHING so that’s what he did.
What happened to Kathleen “The Axe” Kennedy when we needed her? She’s around whenever a director needs to be fired for a feature. Why does she disappear when the single worst chase scene ever put to film needs to be axed?
What makes the scene so bad is that Rodriquez already created these terrible characters. He’d already created these ugly vehicles. And now he was directing a big set piece that featured both. Even if he hadn’t run into the ‘too slow’ problem, it still would’ve been bad. But the ‘too slow’ problem put it over the top and made it one of the worst Star Wars scenes ever.
Maybe Rodriquez’s biggest achievement is the fact that he salvaged the episode after that. We get a fun unexpected fight scene between Black K, the wookie, and a naked Boba Fett. I would’ve preferred the battle be on equal ground but maybe we’ll get that later.
We then get to see my two favorite new characters in the Star Wars universe, the Hutt Twins. I absolutely love these two. Everything about them works. From their voices to their interplay to the special effects to the design behind their walking platform. They’re just awesome. Needless to say, I was devastated when they said they were leaving the planet. Why are you getting rid of your best characters?? I’m hoping they’re lying and we’ll see them again. Cause they’re the only characters that truly scare me.
Then we get the coolest part of the episode, the introduction of a new Rancor. I was gobsmacked by this. I thought it was so neat. I loved the way it was sort of brought in on this hover-platform and that it seems to be drugged, like King Kong. But it didn’t stop there. We get one of the best scenes in the series where Boba Fett falls in love with this thing. He’s fascinated by it. We start learning all this new information about rancors, like the fact that they’re very sensitive and get depressed easily. And I’m thinking to myself, “This poor rancor! I want to give him a hug!”
The majority of the time Star Wars tries to rewrite history, they fail. So it was nice to see them get one right. This makes the rancor so much more interesting in my eyes. And I have no doubt him and Boba are going to tear some sh*t up.
As for the rest of the show, I’m still all over the place on it. I feel like they don’t quite know what they’re doing. For example, there’s nobody around in the palace! Some viewers may argue that that’s because Boba is new to the job and hasn’t put together a staff. I contend it’s more that the writers don’t understand the inner workings of this place. For example, we see Boba and Fenec with this giant spread of food for dinner. But who cooked it?? I haven’t seen any chefs around here. I haven’t seen *anybody* around here. I just don’t think they know how to populate this place. They need to figure that out because, until they do, it’s not going to quite feel like Star Wars. It feels like fan fiction. There’s a reason fans aren’t real authors. They don’t think as deeply. They don’t know the inner workings like authors do.
Somehow, amongst all this turbulence, the show still has me. I’m still interested to see what happens in episode 4. But dude, new rule. Robert Rodriquez does not get to create new characters anymore. He can bring back old ones. But if I want to watch Shark Boy and the Dolphin Whisperer 7, I’ll head over to Netflix. Keep your YA novel nonsense out of the Star Wars universe.
And keep the Hutts on Tatooine!
Earlier today, Pia Cook, a talented writer who I’ve known for a long time, sent me a logline through my logline evaluation service (just $25! – carsonreeves1@gmail.com). As a reminder, send me your ideas BEFORE you write them so I can tell you if they’re worth writing or not. That’s what Pia did. And here’s the logline she sent me:
Working Title: June East
Genre: Comedy
Logline: After a near-fatal accident, a chunky divorcee beat cop, wakes up convinced she’s Mae West, and armed with new confidence becomes the city’s only hope to catch a monstrous serial killer.
I told Pia that the logline had potential but I was worried it was too old-fashioned. The industry likes fresh ideas, ideas that lean into new subject matter and trendy topics because you can mine a lot of new material from them. For example, a month ago I reviewed a script about a guy who stalks a Youtube celebrity and tries to infiltrate his crew. The social media angle gave the classic stalker genre a fresh angle.
While it’s possible to mine fresh ideas from the past, a woman who bumps her head and starts acting like a 1920s movie star didn’t generate the kind of excitement a big modern idea usually gives me.
Then, as I was writing up my analysis, I re-read the logline and, momentarily, thought of the cop as a man. Out of nowhere, I started laughing. Not only was the idea of a man thinking he was Mae West funny, but I noticed that the idea, which seemed dated just moments ago, all of a sudden felt fresh. With all of the discussion around gender malleability lately, this idea immediately became current.
Not to mention, when I thought of a woman thinking she was Mae West, I merely smiled. But when I thought of a man doing it, I laughed.
I sat on this mutation of Pia’s original concept for a long time. Should I recommend to her that she switch gears? Or is my version of the idea nothing more than a 4-minute Saturday Night Live sketch? Would people really be able to sit through 2 hours of a man thinking he was Mae West?
The question got me thinking on a more macro scale. What I’ve noticed after reading so many loglines through the years is that most screenwriters gravitate towards the safe idea. For example, take 2020’s sci-fi flick, Underwater. A deep-sea team based on the ocean floor encounters a monster. This is basically “Alien” but underwater. You’ve changed the location but everything else is identical. The concept sure feels like a movie. And yet, there’s something lacking.
Still, we see safe concepts like this do well all the time. Another recent example is the film, “Nobody,” which became a minor hit. It’s a mini-Taken built around a suburban dad. Been there, done that, and yet the film, by most measurements, was a success.
However, here’s the issue. You’re not one of the chosen few who have direct access to people who can put movies together. You’re just someone generating ideas on a laptop. So the rules are going to be different for you. A logline for “Nobody” is going to be too generic to generate any reads. Hence you have to think more aggressively.
Which brings me back to June East. Writing this script with a female lead is the safer play. Without question. But writing it with a male lead has the bigger upside. That’ because it’s more unexpected, it’s weirder, it’s riskier. All of those things increase the chances of it leaving an impression. That’s what you’re trying to do with a logline. You’re trying to leave an impression so that the potential reader can’t help but request the script.
I’m bringing this up because I feel like we’re all stuck in this bubble where we’re regurgitating familiar concepts from our past with only minor adjustments, and thinking that’s enough. Yes, we’re providing a proven movie formula. But we’re doing it inside the most bland boring package possible. And we make this mistake over and over again.
I don’t know what “Male Mae West” looks like after the Fun-and-Games section of the screenplay. I don’t know if the joke gets old within ten pages. I do know, however, that if these two loglines – one with the woman and one with the man – landed on my desk, I’d check out the male one before the female one. Cause it’s more unique.
So what does “risky” look like? How does one go about creating a “risky” concept? I think the most obvious way is to find a common formula and do something truly unexpected with one of the main elements. “Taken” for example. We all know the formula of a tough guy trying to save his daughter/wife/son/family. A recent risky twist on that formula is “Pig.” A guy goes into the local Portland underworld to rescue his pig.
We know this risk worked because everyone who heard this idea said, “Wait a minute, what??” And they searched it out to see if it was true. That’s when you know you’ve done something fresh and risky. People are talking about it. People are interested enough in it to seek it out.
Another example is JoJo Rabbit. Here, Taika takes several risks. He made a World War 2 film (the most common setting for a movie in history) but instead of focusing on adults, he focused on children. That hasn’t been done much. He then took another risk by focusing on the Hitler Youth Program. Most writers would’ve focused on Jewish kids. And then he took the biggest risk of all. He made our main character’s best friend Hitler.
All of this resulted in a movie that was unlike any movie we’d seen. That’s the power of a risky concept. Whether it works or not, it results in double-takes. People have to know more.
Unfortunately, they don’t all end up this way. Anybody remember The Happening, M. Night’s infamous horror film about killer wind? That was a huuuuuuge risk. You turned house plants into evil killers. Nobody had done that before. Well, guess what? Nobody will do it again because it was a dumb idea. But it was risky. You can’t deny that.
Complicating the equation further, non-risky ideas can still pay off big. Take Free Guy. That’s one of the most mainstream ideas of the decade. There’s nothing in it that’s risky or trying to push boundaries in the genre. It’s a gentle yet fun execution of a standard Hollywood idea. And it ended up being the surprise hit of the summer. Had you tried to doing something risky with it, like have Ryan Reynolds realize that because it’s a video game and therefore nothing’s real, he can mass murder everyone inside of it – we would not be talking about Free Guy as a massive box office hit.
Which brings us back to the question, which route is better? Risky concept or Safe concept? Here’s the way I see it. As an unknown screenwriter, you must take risks. However, you shouldn’t take risks just to take them. They have to make sense in some way. So whenever you’re coming up with script ideas, part of your process should be to ask yourself, “Is this a risky idea?” Or, if it’s not, “Can I do something riskier with this idea?” If you find angles that are riskier that make sense, consider them. Because I’ll tell you this. The writers who languish in obscurity for decades tend to be the ones who keep going back to that safe well of mainstream movie ideas and not doing enough with them. They try something a teensy bit different, like a romantic comedy set in Idaho instead of New York, but they never take that risk that’s truly going to make their ideas stand out.
I hope you enjoyed this latest foray into the always fun topic of concepts. I’ll remind you once again – I’m preparing everyone for the Fabulous First Act Contest. We start writing our first acts March 1. And I want you to have the best possible concept so that your script has a legitimate shot at winning. Feel free to share your concepts in the comments section where our esteemed group of longtime Scriptshadow readers will happily provide feedback for you.
Is “Grizz” as good of a bear movie as “Jaws” was a shark movie?
Genre: Thriller
Premise: A car accident strands a young paramedic in the rugged Pacific Northwest where she is hunted by a ravenous grizzly bear.
About: This was one of the loglines that stood out to me on the Black List. Connor Barry has produced some indie movies but this is his first screenplay recognized by the industry.
Writer: Connor Barry
Details: 101 pages
I’ve used this logline in several recent logline consultations to demonstrate what an effective logline looks like. Let’s take a look at why it works so well.
“A car accident strands a young paramedic in the rugged Pacific Northwest where she is hunted by a ravenous grizzly bear.”
The logline starts with the inciting incident (a car accident). It then introduces us to the main character. Constructing a main character in a logline is difficult because you only get 1-3 words to do so. It basically comes down to a choice between an adjective, a job, or both. Here, we get both. A ‘young paramedic.’ It’s enough to get a sense of who our hero is.
Next we get the setting. The key with setting is to paint a picture in the reader’s mind of what the movie world they’ll be entering looks like. The choice they use here is perfect. We don’t just get “the forest,” or “nature.” We get “the rugged Pacific Northwest.” I know immediately what that looks like so I can imagine the setting. It’s a beautiful but dense endless sea of giant trees that are impossible to navigate.
Finally, we get our antagonist, or the central conflict of the movie – the bear. But if you just put “bear,” that’s boring. A logline is the written version of a billboard. It has to create an image in the reader’s head. So you have to be a little more exciting with your word choices. Hence, we get a “ravenous grizzly bear.” It’s almost a perfect logline.
Now let’s see if the script lives up to it.
Cari is a 30-something paramedic who’s been suspended from her job after assaulting someone. So Cari decides to go on vacation. While driving on the mountainous roads of the Pacific Northwest, her van goes shooting off the road and tumbling into some trees. Cari only barely survives the ordeal and quickly realizes the cliff is too steep to climb back up. She’ll need to find another way out of here.
Her barely functioning phone tells her there’s a highway 8 miles north so that’s where she heads. She doesn’t get very far before she encounters the world’s meanest (and hungriest) grizzly bear. The bear doesn’t even hesitate. It attacks, digging its jaws into her midsection. Cari somehow gets away and hurries back to her van. In one of the best scenes in the script, Cari tries to fend off the bear which squeezes through the windshield and inches its oversized body further and further into the van, pushing Cari further and further back until she has nowhere left to hide.
After stabbing the annoyed bear several times, it retreats. But this is just the beginning for these two. It’s only page 25! After another attack, Cari makes a run for it but doesn’t get far. This thing is FAST. Cari shoots into a tiny cave opening the grizzly can’t penetrate. Or can it!? The bear repeatedly slams the cave opening until it crumbles.
Around this time, two hunters find Cari, thank God. But even though Cari explains to them that this is no ordinary bear, they seem unfazed. They follow Cari back to her van where they subsequently rob her and leave. Less than an hour later, she hears them being attacked by the grizzly, sending one of them right back to her, inspiring the world’s most reluctant team-up.
As their supplies dwindle, Cari realizes that there is no way out of this forest without going through that grizzly bear. It will require all the strength and intelligence she has left to do so. Will she make it? The answer may surprise you.
Many years ago, in one of the most infamous stories to ever come out of Hollywood, producer Art Linson paid famous screenwriter David Mamet a couple million bucks to write a movie for him. He didn’t have a concept. He didn’t even have an idea. He simply wanted one thing – that there be a bear in the movie. That’s how we got the movie, The Edge.
Boy would Linson have loved to have had this script instead of that one. Cause this could be the bear movie that beats all bear movies.
The thing with “Grizz” is that it’s such a simple and clear idea. And simple clear ideas tend to be the scripts that become good movies. The only downside of simple and clear is that they don’t pack a lot of plot into them. So you end up running out of story by page 45. Maybe sooner.
The way to defeat this is to figure out what your major plot beats are ahead of time and space them out accordingly. A major plot beat in Grizz would be that scene I mentioned above of the bear invading the van. Or the bear collapsing the cave. Or the hunters showing up. You would take each of these and chart them out in an outline. This scene will happen on page 20. This scene will happen on page 40. This moment will happen on page 50. When you do that, you’ll always have something to write towards instead of looking at 70 blank pages ahead of you and thinking, “What in the world do I do now??”
Pro Tip: Writer’s block is usually a result of bad planning.
But Grizz goes one step further here in that it does a great job creating this, almost, intimate connection between Cari and the bear. They’re going through this together, even if they’re trying to kill each other. So even without the cool plot beats and set pieces, we’re attracted to this unique relationship and what’s going to come of it.
There are numerous moments in Grizz where Cari and the bear just stare at each other, almost like they’re trying to read each others’ minds. I’m not going to lie – it made me emotional. Barry, the writer, even makes us feel sympathy for the bear. He explains that the bear is starving. That it’s one of the last bears in the lower 48 states because the others all starved to death. So we understand why the bear is doing this. He’s not just doing it because he’s a big old meanie.
That propensity to lean into emotion is what separates Grizz from scripts like this that just want to show a woman running from a badass bear.
From a technical standpoint, if you’re going to write a script with so few characters and so little dialogue, you need to keep the paragraphs to 1-2 lines. Because readers do not like reading non-dialogue scripts with thick paragraphs. They actually become enraged if you do this. Do what Barry did. 1-2 line paragraphs all the way through so that the reader’s eyes move down the page quickly.
Grizz nearly got that ‘impressive.’ It was so close. I think I wanted one more big plot surprise. There’s a minor twist late in the script that was fairly predictable. That twist needed to be better to push the script over the top. With that said, the ending is strong. We get our money’s worth with a few unexpected final bear encounters. Definitely check this out. It’s the best script I’ve read from the 2021 Black List so far.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[xx] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: When things are good, make them bad. When things are bad, make them good. In any script where there’s a pattern, you need to occasionally reverse the polarity of that pattern. This is why, in a script where things are going well for your heroes, you introduce obstacles. Conversely, for scripts like Grizz, where your hero is constantly experiencing bad things, you need to introduce the occasional good. One of the better moments in Grizz occurs when the two hunters find Cari. When they arrive, we’re like, “Thank god. She’s okay now.” It’s not like a bear is going to be able to take down two armed men. Sure, it amounts to a false victory. But before we learn these dudes are bad, we get that ‘thank god she’s safe’ screenwriting dopamine hit that interrupts the pattern. If a pattern is never interrupted, the reader will get bored
Genre: Sci-Fi/Drama
Premise: A famed experimental musician finds himself embroiled in the race to solve Earth’s primary existential threat: A deafening sound that never stops, forcing all of humanity to survive in silence.
About: This script finished in the top 15 of last year’s Black List.
Writer: Whit Burnham Brayton
Details: 119 pages
I was really looking forward to this one. I love myself a good sci-fi setup and I’ve never encountered anything quite like this concept before. Sound can be terrifying in the right situation. Whit Brayton seems to have found that situation. Let’s see if the script delivers.
A few years into our future, a sound emanating from within the earth’s atmosphere has taken hold of the planet. It’s so loud and so intense that we’ve been forced to build a society that blocks the sound out as best we can (those who can afford it wear expensive noise-canceling headphones, those who can’t suffer).
Our hero is a 60 year old former maybe-musician (more on that later) named Caden Laforge. After 20 years of being sober, Caden has, for reasons that are unclear, fallen off the wagon. It may be because his wife has been stricken with Alzheimer’s and stays in bed all day. Or it may be because living with the sound has stressed him the heck out.
Caden’s daughter, Vera, works for the president of the United States, Syreeta Chambers, and the next election is right around the corner. Syreeta needs to make progress on the sound within the next few weeks so she can be in a strong position for re-election. Hence, she allows Vera to hire her father, who’s a bit of a sound expert, to see if he has any thoughts.
Caden, who may be the most dreary depressed man in the history of film, notices that they’re fighting the sound instead of absorbing it. He tells Vera and her team to adjust their experiment to be more accepting of the sound, which ends up working!
What they eventually realize is that the sound isn’t some evil thing, but rather a message from the future, which they now must decode! Although it’s never clear, there appears to have been a rift in the space-time continuum 20 years from now which indicates the end of humanity. If they can decode the sound, it may tell them what to do in these next 20 years to prevent the end of times.
I’ve come to realize that the Black List is no longer an indicator of the best scripts but rather a list of writers with potential. And I don’t want that to sound like a bad thing. We need outlets to find writers with potential. But gone are the days when the Black List was a place where you could open up a script and reliably know it would be good.
Loud’s potential has everything to do with its world-building. I loved this intense sound as our antagonist. I loved the way the world has adjusted, such as people using specially constructed noise-canceling headphones. I loved this idea of people interacting with the world but hearing nothing. Not even white noise. How all voices cut through the silence as if being heard through a radio, like helicopter pilots, since that’s the only way people can communicate with each other. I liked how a sound – just a sound – has destroyed all society. All of this was cool.
But nothing else here clicks the way the world-building does. There are some nifty plot beats. Caden has to try and solve the sound so that his daughter’s political party can go into the debates with a convincing plan for defeating the sound. And there’s some kinda cool stuff about the sound being from the future.
But the characters didn’t do enough for me. The main character is an alcoholic for no other reason than to make him feel more dramatic and deep. He’s got a wife suffering from Alzheimer’s for the exact same reason.
By the way, for aspiring writers out there, alcoholism and Alzheimer’s are two of the most cliche character choices you can make. I encounter one of them in every third script I read. So when I see these things, they’re typically a red flag.
That’s not to say they can’t work. But they have to be baked into the story in an organic way. You can’t just put them there as some blanket attempt to make the characters look deeper. If you’re unsure what’s organic and what isn’t, I have a quick test you can use. Erase the characterization (alcoholism, Alzheimer’s) and see if the story changes at all. If it doesn’t change or changes very little, it means you don’t need it.
By comparison, look at The Notebook. Try to take Alzheimer’s out of that film. The movie completely collapses because Alzheimer’s is so tightly woven into the storyline.
But there’s an even bigger problem here which I need to come up with a term for so people can identify and avoid it. It’s the act of writing really serious talking scenes that don’t provide any entertainment value. We get a lot of scenes here of Caden talking with someone else – his housekeeper for instance – that amount to them sharing how depressing their lives are.
To new screenwriters, these scenes feel important and deep. But to a reader, they’re empty and boring. Since the characters aren’t trying to achieve anything in the scene, the story doesn’t advance. And since you only have 50 scenes in a script, every one of them should advance the story. We should feel like we’re a little closer to the objective than we were before the scene started. If you don’t abide by that rule, your script stagnates.
That’s not to say there aren’t scenes here that push the story forward. There are. In fact, the scenes where they’re trying to figure out the origin of the sound are some of the best in the script. But you don’t then get to take five scenes off before you give us another scene that moves the story forward. If anything, the ratio should be reversed. You should give us five scenes in a row where we’re moving the story forward, then maybe one character driven scene.
And there were a lot of issues here that chipped away at my enjoyment of the story. For example, I had no idea what Caden did for a living. I was on page 80 and I was still unsure. I thought he might have been a famous musician or producer. He was obviously rich. But nobody ever said exactly what he did for a living. Which is a pretty important piece of the puzzle considering he’s the one who figures out the Sound.
It wasn’t until I put this review together and I copy and pasted the logline from the Black List, that I saw his official job title – “a famed experimental musician.” I don’t know if there’s a screenwriting rule for this. I just know that I shouldn’t have to go to your logline after reading your script to know what your main character’s job is.
I think the script is attempting to make a statement about the pandemic. At times the “sound” seems to be a stand-in for Covid. But that stuff only works if the script is clicking on all cylinders. I didn’t even know simple things like the protagonist’s profession. So when it comes to something as complex as a metaphor, I can’t give the script the benefit of the doubt.
To top it all off, this is a fun idea yet we didn’t get any fun.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Straight sci-fi and drama do not go well together. The drama sucks all the fun out of the sci-fi concept. We see that with Amazon’s Prime’s Encounter. We see it with Apple’s Swan Song. We see it with Needle in a Timestack. We see it with Reminiscence. Say it with me screenwriters: Sci-Fi and Drama are a recipe for boredom! Science fiction is meant to be played with. It’s a genre that celebrates imagination and playfulness. Have freaking fun with it for goodness sakes.
What I learned 2: It’s hard to make scripts work that possess a very downbeat tone. It’s hard to stay motivated when reading them. It’s hard to drum up enthusiasm for recommending them. I would strongly discourage writers from writing scripts where every paragraph is steeped in a malaise of sadness and negativity.
