Sci-Fi Showdown is just a month away and that means you should be carving your script into shape!
What: Sci-fi Showdown
When: Entries due by Thursday, September 16th, 11:59 PM Pacific Time
How: Include title, genre, logline, Why We Should Read, and a PDF of your script
Where: carsonreeves3@gmail.com
The most important thing when it comes to writing a science fiction screenplay is having a good concept. Since we’re well past the conceptual stage, I’m going to assume you’ve taken care of that part. This article is going to focus on everything else you can do to make your script great. So let’s jump into it!
I Need A Hero
Make sure we love your hero. This is applicable to all genres, of course. But when you look at the great sci-fi films of our time, they all have characters we love. From Neo to The Terminator to Ripley to Mad Max. All of these protagonists are iconic. A specific theme running through most great sci-fi characters is that they’re underdogs. Neo is a nerdy loner hacker. The Terminator gets his ass handed to him by the newer slicker T-1000. Ripley is just some lowly consultant in a ship full of marines. Mad Max is the ultimate loner, a man without a single friend. Robocop is relentlessly riddled with bullets until there’s barely anything left of him. The character in Upgrade becomes a paraplegic.
Giving the audience an easy reason to root for your hero can do wonders. If your protagonist isn’t an underdog, find other ways to make them sympathetic. When we meet Peter Quill in Guardians of the Galaxy, for example, he loses his mother to cancer. Sympathy is a screenwriting superpower when done right.
Don’t Settle For Average
One of the big things I’m going to be looking at is set pieces. ENTIRE MOVIES have been made because someone loved a single set piece in a script.
I recently read a solid action script for a consultation. But the writer seemed surprised that I didn’t like his set pieces more. What I explained to him was that I read set pieces ALL WEEK LONG every single week, and they’re all basically the same.
There’s a lot of running. There’s a lot of shooting. There’s a lot of fighting. There’s a lot of car-chasing.
What screenwriters don’t understand is that it’s virtually impossible to make those four elements exciting on the page. Think about it from the reader’s side. Let’s say you’re writing a shootout in the streets. How can you possibly write a shootout that isn’t going to have those same repetitive beats that we’ve read a million times?
So what I’m looking for when it comes to set-pieces is CLEVERNESS or UNIQUENESS. I’m looking for a setup that I haven’t quite seen before. That’s the kind of thing that gets me excited as a reader.
Inception is a good example. A situation where the environment is rotating and time is expanding. John Wick 3 – a fight in a library where books are being used as deadly weapons. Playing a deadly game of hide and seek with velociraptors in a kitchen. Navigating the collapse of a space elevator 100,000 feet above the earth’s surface (Ad Astra). These are the types of scenes I’m going to respond to.
Nuts and bolts action scenes like motorcycle chases through cities can work on screen. BUT THEY ARE OFTEN BORING ON THE PAGE. This is why spec screenwriters have to approach their set pieces differently. Their scripts are not getting automatically greenlit. So they must come up with set pieces that don’t just work on screen, BUT ON THE PAGE. Sci-fi is the perfect genre for achieving this because you have more elements at your disposal than just guns, fists, and cars.
World Build Your Ass Off
One of the unique things about science fiction is the mythology. Because you’re creating something that doesn’t actually exist, you are responsible for constructing all of that world’s backstory and rules. If you don’t do a thorough deep dive into your world’s backstory or effectively convey your mythology’s rules, you will lose the reader.
What do I mean by ‘thorough deep dive?’ Let’s take District 9 as an example. The movie starts with a ship hovering over a city. The beginner screenwriter says, “That’s all I need to know.” The seasoned screenwriter asks, where did that ship come from? How long did it take to get here? Why did it leave its planet? What kind of planet was it? What was the environment like? Was it a cold planet? A hot one? How did that affect the aliens? Why did they decide to come to earth specifically? What do they want? Are they intelligent?
The more questions you ask, the more SPECIFICITY you build into the mythology, which allows your world to feel more genuine. Remember, GENERALITY breeds GENERICNESS. So, the more you know, the more specific, and therefore believable, your world will be. Let’s take just one of these questions to see how it can affect the story. “Why did the aliens decide to come to earth specifically?” Maybe the answer is, they didn’t. Maybe they were on their way to somewhere else, got an intergalactic flat tire, and were forced to stop at earth. That changes the mythology drastically compared to if they had come to earth to destroy mankind and take over the planet, which is how most screenwriters would’ve approached the story.
The reason you do a deep dive on the first part – the mythology – is so that you can effectively convey the second part – the rules. The more you know about the backstory, the easier it is to formulate the rules. Now, District 9 isn’t as rule-based a mythology as say, The Matrix, which requires lots of explanation. But it’s still got rules that you need to convey, such as the fact that all the alien tech is DNA encoded so that humans can’t use it.
I was developing a loop script recently and one of the questions that came up was, “Why did the loop start?” If a loop just decided to happen to, of all the people in the world, our hero, clearly something/someone made a choice to do that. Who was that someone/something? Why did they pick our protagonist? We actually never came up with a good answer. But, make no mistake, you need to ask those questions.
I can’t stress this enough. The more you know about your world, the more confident both your writing and your story will be. The opposite is also true. The less you know, the less it SEEMS LIKE YOU KNOW. And the second the reader senses that the writer is bullshitting them, they’re out. This happens ALL THE TIME WITH AMATEUR SCI-FI SCRIPTS. I know because I’ve read them all. Don’t let it happen to you.
A Sense of Urgency
Sci-Fi doesn’t tend to do well with slow narratives. It’s a genre that wants to move. Look no further than the trailer for Reminiscence. As I told you months ago, it looks slow and boring. What are all the critics saying now that they’ve watched the film? You guessed it. That it’s slow and boring. From Source Code to Terminator to Star Wars to Guardians to Fury Road to District 9 to Edge of Tomorrow… sci-fi works best with a sense of urgency. So I implore you to add a sense of urgency if you don’t already have it.
It’s true that not every story is set up to sprint. Ex Machina is a good example of that. But even Ex Machina operates within a contained timeframe – I believe that our main character is visiting the famous tech CEO’s compound for one weekend. So, even though the story takes its time, we, the audience, know the end of the journey is near. I know some of you loved Blade Runner 2049 but one of the reasons that movie only hit with sci-fi die hards and cinephiles is because there was zero sense of urgency. Don’t make the same mistake in your script. Especially if you want to do well in the Sci-Fi Showdown.
Before I let you go, let’s take a second to remember a few science-fiction movies over the last couple of decades, shall we?
Anon
The Island
Gamer
Equilibrium
After Earth
Mute
Battle Los Angeles
Space Between Us
Valerian
Life
The Darkest Hour
Ultraviolet
Jupiter Ascending
Johnny Mneumonic
Battlefield Earth
Elysium
In Time
I Am Number Four
What do all of these awful sci-fi movies have in common?
The hell if I know.
But if I had to bet, I would say that ‘writing laziness’ was a major contributor. This is a genre that if you don’t put in the hard work and make every aspect of the script as good as you can possibly make it, it will definitely fail. Assuming all the basics are in place (good concept, goal, stakes, urgency, conflict, obstacles, good dialogue, clean exposition, structure, character development) you must be creative. You must be imaginative. Know your world. Know your story. Give us scenarios we haven’t seen before. Give us someone to root for. If you do that, your script will have a chance with me and, hopefully, the rest of Hollywood.
Are you actually sending your screenplay out into the world without getting professional feedback first? That is dangerous, my friend. I can tell you exactly what script issues they’re going to criticize you for and help you fix them BEFORE you send it out. I do consultations on everything from loglines ($25) to treatments ($100) to pilots ($399) to features ($499). E-mail me at carsonreeves1@gmail.com if you’re interested. Chat soon!
Genre: Action Thriller
Premise: Her father clinging to life in the hospital, a young assassin heads deep into 80s New York City to find the man that put him there, killing everyone along the way.
About: This script finished with 7 votes on last year’s Black List. It comes from a new writer, Jason Markarian, who is repped by the spec sale king, David Boxerbaum. The script is not yet set up anywhere.
Writer: Jason Markarian
Details: 104 pages
Readability: Relatively fast
It’s funny.
I was chatting with a writer the other day and the topic of titles came up. He didn’t like the title of his script and wanted to know if I had any better options.
I’m notoriously bad with titles. Like most people, the only time I know a good title is when I hear it.
And make no mistake, titles matter. A good title can not only create curiosity about a script, it can build anticipation for the story (“Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind”).
The question is, how do you find good titles? The closest I’ve come to an answer is: IT’S RIGHT THERE IN YOUR SCRIPT. Often the title of your script is hiding inside the script itself. It might be a word. It might be a phrase. It’s anything that when you read it, you perk up and think, “Hmm, that’s catchy.”
Look no further than “Bella” as an example. “Bella” isn’t a very good title. I’m not against the “protagonist name as title” option. But it’s pretty safe and, so, isn’t going to get anyone excited to read your script. In fact, it’s probably going to do the opposite. It’s going to make your script sound just like every other script.
So imagine my surprise when I read the opening page and saw that the title WAS RIGHT THERE FOR THE TAKING. Let’s see if you guys can spot it. Here’s the page…
We’ll cover what that infinitely better title is in a second. But first, let’s check out the plot of Bella.
Our movie starts with Bella infiltrating a 1982 New York disco where “Staying Alive” by the BeeGees is blasting onto the dance floor, except Bella is doing everything in her power to have nobody stay alive. She kills almost everyone on the dance floor and we gradually learn that these are mostly (but not all) mobsters.
You see, someone riddled her cop father with bullets (he’s currently clinging to life at the hospital) and she’s going to pull an Inigo Montoya on his ass. The big difference between Bella and Inigo Montoya, though, is that INIGO MONTOYA DOESN’T ALSO DECIDE TO KILL 500 OTHER PEOPLE ON HIS WAY TO KILLING THE SIX-FINGERED MAN.
Yes, this is a bloody script. Very bloody. Pretty much all Bella does is kill people. How much killing are we talking about? Well, at one point, because there is apparently not enough time in the movie to cover all the killing, the screen divides up into 16 different squares so we can make sure to get all of Bella’s kills in.
Bella teams up with her former NAVY SEAL priest who taught her everything, and her former bad boy boyfriend, Jericho, to infiltrate every pocket of New York’s seedy underbelly to find out who shot dad. This eventually puts her on DEETS’s radar. Deets is a cop who’s determined to stop the bloodshed.
After Bella successfully evades him for most of the second act, he locates her and the two prepare for battle. But when Bella gets the chance to kill him, she doesn’t because he’s a cop just like her father. And that would make her a hypocrite. Bella saving his life seems to spark something in Deets, who shifts his priority from taking down Bella to taking down his corrupt police department! So that’s what he does, exposing all of the bad meanie police in this town. The end.
If you answered, “What is ‘Seven Days of Death,’ Alex,” you win! That definitely should’ve been the title.
To say that “Seven Days of Death,” aka, “Bella,” is an overly-stylized script would be like saying TikTok is a minor player in the social media market. Here’s a page from early in the script to give you an idea of what we’re dealing with.
Here’s the thing about overly-stylized scripts. If they’re not written to perfection, they come off as try-hard. By that I mean you can see how hard the writer is trying to be cool and stylized and irreverent.
Now you may ask, “What’s so bad about try-hard? It’s a fun writing style. People should lighten up and enjoy it.” The problem with try-hard is that the reader becomes acutely aware of the writing. Which means they’re NOT focused on the story. And I’d argue the reader should always be focused on the story, not the person writing it.
I’ll admit that this isn’t an across-the-board opinion. Plenty of people enjoy highly-stylized scripts. I’ve enjoyed a few of them over the years. But no matter how good you are at writing them, they cast a long “Please love me and my writing” shadow over the screenplay that’s hard to shake.
With that being said, was the script good?
Let’s start here. One of the things I promote on this site is exploiting your concept. Identify what’s unique about your concept (hopefully you thought about this when you came up with the script idea) and give us scenes that can only take place inside of that concept.
This is 80s New York. What can you show us that’s unique to 80s New York? Well, there’s a scene early on where a guy is getting his rocks off at a Peep Show joint. But as he opens the window curtain, he does not see a naked woman but rather Bella killing bad guy after bad guy. The scene is specific to the time and place of the concept.
That I liked. And Markarian does a lot of that.
But for every moment like this, there was another moment that felt familiar. For example, when Bella needs to up her kill game, she goes to the cemetery, digs up a grave, opens the coffin, and we see it’s filled with guns. Wasn’t this in one of the Terminator movies? And a dozen other movies? And every action script I’ve read in the last half decade? If you’re going to be the cool stylistic ‘look-at-me’ writer, you need to be original. You can’t recycle cool moments from other movies.
Also, like a lot of these overly-stylized scripts, the writer realizes, at a certain point, that clever phrasing and balletic night club shootouts aren’t going to be enough to keep the reader emotionally invested. We’re going to have to tell an actual story here with actual characters. And so the tone of the script shifts as the writer tries to play catch-up with all the emotional beats that weren’t laid out in the first half of the movie.
It’s a bit confusing for the reader, who now feels like they were given the bait and switch. Which the writer ALSO begins to realize, which sends them back into stylistic mode, giving the script a schizophrenic feel.
I wouldn’t call Bella bad. I just think it wants so badly for your to love it that, like anything that covets attention, it eventually becomes a turn-off. In the writer’s defense, this script is written to be a movie. And, with the right director, it could be a “John Wick meets Joker” type situation. It just wasn’t my jam.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: I like movies where the pursuer also becomes the pursued. It can get a little monotonous if your “John Wick” character is doing all the chasing. To spice up the narrative, create a character who chases your John Wick. That’s what Markarian does here. Midway through the screenplay, Deets starts tracking Bella while Bella tracks down her guy.
Is The Time Traveler’s Wife the “thinking man’s” Loki?
Genre: TV Pilot/Drama/Sci-Fi
Premise: A relationship is put to the test due to one of its participants randomly jumping through time.
About: Despite its failure as a movie, The Time Traveler’s Wife apparently became a high profile project that many studios bid on. HBO won out, attaching Dr. Who writer Stephen Moffat as the showrunner. Moffat was a huge fan of the original novel. He believes that TV is the proper medium for this complex unique story. The series will star Rose Leslie from Game of Thrones.
Writer: Steven Moffat (based on the novel by Audrey Niffenegger)
Details: 61 pages
Readability: Medium
I went back and forth on whether to review this one.
The 2009 movie was a disaster.
It didn’t have a narrative.
I even tried to read the original book in which I struggled to understand why anyone would think it was worthy of printing.
The reason I’ve changed my mind is because this is an HBO pilot. And HBO continues to be, by far, the most consistent channel when it comes to content. Having hundreds of projects in development. Having a model where you’re not afraid to tell people like David Fincher, “No.” Only allowing the creme de la creme of projects on air. All of that has resulted in the best programming of any channel.
I noticed several of you chirping about an HBO show I had no interest in checking out – White Lotus – which I finally watched. And even that show was good.
So I’m thinking HBO must have figured out an angle to make this story work. I mean, heck, it’s got time travel in it, right?
When we meet Clare Abshire, she’s being interviewed, I think by herself – I have no idea – in a home video about what it’s like to be with Henry Detamble, who is also being interviewed on home video – probably also by himself – about what it’s like to time travel.
We never get any explanation as to why these two are being interviewed. But that’s par for the course with The Time Traveler’s Wife, which seems to have no qualms being a random directionless mess of a pilot.
Oh, yeah, Henry is a time traveler. But not willingly. He periodically gets sucked into a time hole, or something, every once in a while, wakes up in the new time without his clothes on, must then find clothes (I do not say this lightly – 80% of the plot of this show is about how important it is that Henry find clothes whenever he time travels), and eventually keeps running into Clare, who becomes his girlfriend. Well, not all the time. Sometimes Henry will meet Clare when she’s six. In those times, he must be delicate about explaining their future together.
After a lot of jumping around, we settle into a time when Clare is 21 and Henry is 28. He works at the library – because, of course, that’s a normal occupation for a strapping 28 year old male – when Clare walks in, sees him, walks up to him, and tells him they’re going on a date. “But I don’t even know you,” he says.
During their date, Clare informs Henry that, in the future, they’ll be married to each other! Henry is shocked by the news but rolls with it, especially because it means Clare wants to have sex tonight. So they go back to Henry’s place, bang, and then Clare sees another woman’s bra in the bedroom. What’s this, she asks? Oh, I’m seeing someone, he says.
Pissed off, she storms out, seemingly unaware of the possibility that a man who had no idea who she was four hours ago might have a girlfriend. Clare would not do well on The Bachelor. While moping in her apartment, Henry comes to apologize. But not 20-something Henry. 30-something Henry! Ahh, and here’s where we see our unique premise at work. In this relationship, you can recruit your older self to take care of your problems for you.
And that’s the end of our pilot. Which, believe it or not, expects you to want to watch more of it.
Good God.
I am going to go so far as to say this is the worst thing I’ve read all year.
The number of things wrong with everything about this show/pilot/book/movie is endless.
Literally nothing works.
And it all goes back to the source material. The source material turns a weak directionless juvenile concept into a 500 page story. And then, for some reason, someone wanted to make a movie out of it. And when that didn’t work, a TV show.
Where is the narrative here?
What is going to keep people watching?
There is no goal. There is no purpose.
Are we going to be in episode 37 with Henry still hopping around in time before we realize there’s nothing here? “Oh hi, Clare! I’m 51 now and you’re 12. Let’s play hide and seek!”
Seriously, why are we continuing to watch? What is the overall purpose of the story?
On White Lotus, in the very first scene, we’re told that somebody was murdered. We then jump back in time to when everybody got to the island and watch the story play out as we wonder who it is who’s going to die. There’s a purpose.
Here it’s just a guy, at different ages, showing up and going on dates with a girl. How quickly is that going to get old? 10 minutes into the first episode? 20 maybe?
Who thought this was a good idea? It’s so bad it actually hurts my brain to think about.
Honestly, HBO is risking this becoming their worst show ever. If they want to go down that road, great. They’ve built up enough credit to have a few failures. But man. This one is going to hurt badly because it’s going to get roasted.
This goes back to an issue all writers must watch out for.
Which is that not every concept is meant to be a movie or a TV show. This is one of them. You can tell it’s one of them because there’s only one scene that the writer had in mind when she came up with the idea. The moment where a woman invites a guy out on a date and tells him that they get married in 15 years. You get to play with the shock from the guy’s side. “What?? I don’t even know you!” He says. It’s an effective trailer line moment. “I know you don’t know me. But you and I are married in the future!”
And they literally have ZERO PLANS for a story after that. That was clear in the novel. That was clear in the movie. And it’s clear here. There’s no plan.
In fact, it doesn’t even make sense!!!
Why is Henry confused by a woman telling him that they get married in the future? If there’s anybody who would be able to believe that… IT WOULD BE A PERSON WHO’S SPENT THE LAST DECADE OF HIS LIFE TIME TRAVELING!!!! Pretty much any time some random person says they know you, you’d have to give them the benefit of the doubt, right? Why would Henry act like Clare is crazy with this proclamation?
The bad ideas don’t stop there. We get a scene where Henry time jumps into some year, encounters a couple on a date, throws up, then uses the “toxicity” in his vomit as a weapon to distract the man so he can beat him up and then take his clothes. That’s right. There is a scene where our hero scrapes up some vomit with his finger, flicks it into a man’s eyes, and then beats him up. I did not know it was possible to come up with an idea that bad.
Now I do.
If you put a gun to my head and told me I had to give you ONE THING about The Time Traveler’s Wife that worked, you’d be reading my obituary now. But the argument I *might* try and make is that, at least you have a unique relationship to explore.
Because every love story has been told a million times over, it’s impossible to come up with new angles. The Time Traveler’s Wife is a rare example where they’ve come up with a unique relationship angle. Clare and Henry are constantly coming at each other at different points in their lives. So no conversation is quite the same.
But even that part of the story only works conceptually. In practice, it sucks. The conversations between these two are boring and predictable 99% of the time. You have a good feeling of what they’re going to say to each other before they say it because that’s how little thought has been put into this world beyond the initial concept.
There’s one moment in particular in this pilot that symbolizes how dumb this entire pilot is. Early on, when 30-something Henry meets 6 year old Clare and tells her he’s a time traveler, she asks him if he’s ever seen dinosaurs before. He answers, “I tickled a dinosaur’s tummy once. Actually twice. But that was in a Natural History Museum.”
Then, later in the pilot, 10 year old Henry is at the Natural History Museum and an older Henry comes to him and tells him he’s from the future and he needs to teach him about time traveling. While walking around, he lifts young Henry up so he can tickle the belly of a T-Rex model.
That’s right. We actually go through the trouble of paying off the most random line in the entire pilot. That’s not how setups and payoffs work. Setups and payoffs are for things that actually matter to the story. But not for The Time Traveler’s Wife! Nosiree. There’s so little going on plotwise in this disaster that it becomes imperative we pay off someone saying they once tickled a fake dinosaur.
The irony is that you would’ve had the ONLY INTERESTING MOMENT IN YOUR ENTIRE PILOT if Henry had actually time-traveled back to the prehistoric era and touched a dinosaur.
There is nothing worse in the world of fiction than something that thinks it’s clever when it isn’t. The Time Traveler’s Wife is a weak idea in search of a narrative that covets boredom at every turn. If I could give this less than a what the hell did I just read, I would.
[x] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Beware the script idea that you only have one good scene idea for. Before you write a script, you should have at LEAST five killer scenes in mind. Preferably more. If you only have one, I can pretty much guarantee your script will be as bad as The Time Traveler’s Wife.
We’ve got the Sundance grand prize winner here! Is it, like Rolling Stone claims, “every single Sundance movie rolled into one?”
Genre: Drama
Premise: A high school girl with dreams of becoming a singer is held back by her deaf family, who desperately need her help in order to succeed in their new fishing business.
About: Writer-director Sian Heder was approached by Lionsgate to remake Coda, which was originally a French film. They developed it through Lionsgate but, ultimately, the studio (which isn’t known for films like Coda so I don’t know why anyone thought it’d get greenlit in the first place) decided to pass. The producers then put the financing together independently, got the film made on their own, and, after it debuted at Sundance, Tim Cook bought the film for 25 million dollars for his Apple streaming service.
Writer: Sian Heder (based on the French film, The Belier Family written by Victoria Bedos, Stanislas Carré de Malberg, Éric Lartigau, and Thomas Bidegain.
Details: 110 minutes
Every writer needs to establish a modus operandi.
They need to have a writing rule-set to operate by. Mine is: simple story complex characters. 99 times out of 100, when a story gets too complicated or tries to do too much, it falls apart. Which was my big issue when I saw that Coda won Sundance. You have commercial fishing. You have a deaf family. You have a girl who wants to be the next American Idol. At first glance, there’s too much going on here.
That’s where my skepticism was born. But, believe it or not, I want to be proven wrong. When something proves me wrong, that means there’s something to learn. What did they do to navigate this pitfall? What can I learn that’ll help me expand my knowledge of storytelling?
Let’s see if I even need to worry about that with Coda…
Coda (which stands for “Child of Deaf Adults”) takes place in Good Will Hunting land, aka Boston. Frank and Jackie Rossie are deaf parents who own a fishing boat. Their two children are 20-something Leo, who’s also deaf, and our main character, 17 year old Ruby, who’s the lone member of the family who can hear.
Because Ruby can hear, she’s tasked with keeping the family business together. You’re not allowed to commercially fish with an all deaf crew. You need at least one person who can hear. Because the family is barely scraping by financially, they have no choice but to employ Ruby.
But Ruby has big dreams. It being her last year of high school, she signs up for choir class, as she’s always wanted to sing. When it turns out she’s good, her teacher, Bernardo, encourages her to try out for a music scholarship. Ruby never even thought about college as she figured she’d be working with her family forever. But she decides to give it a shot.
The family, meanwhile, gets tired of being taken advantage of in the fish market and decides to start their own company where they keep all the profits. Of course, in order for this to work, they’re going to need Ruby to handle all of the ‘hearing’ related stuff, which is a lot. For example, in order to get some exposure, they do an interview for the local news. Guess who has to be there to translate?
Ultimately, we know where this is going. Ruby is going to stick around for her family. Not because she wants to. But because she has to. That is, unless, her parents realize how important it is to let their daughter live her own life. Will they come around?
Okay, let’s make one thing clear. The rumors you heard about the echoes of a man sobbing relentlessly in Hollywood are NOT TRUE. I know there were Youtube videos posted. I know the local news nicknamed this handsome gentleman – not that anybody saw him, I’m just assuming he’s handsome – “The Sacred Sobber” – but whatever you heard about this rumor, it is not true, okay? So stop accusing me of wasting an entire box of tissues while I watched Coda. It’s fake news.
Now that we’ve gotten that out of the way.
Here’s the thing with Coda. It *is* messy. And it *is* trying to do too much. And not everything fits together perfectly. But it still somehow works. I think I’ll chalk it up to, the best movies are imperfect. It’s their strange concoction of ingredients that make them so memorable. Coda falls squarely into that category.
I also think there are certain movies that weren’t meant to be distilled into a logline or even a trailer. You don’t understand them until you’re living inside the context of the movie itself. When I saw the trailer, the fishing and singing stuff didn’t go together at all.
But in the movie, they do a good job of establishing the fishing stuff as the family’s livelihood. It’s very realistic. We see their job in intimate detail. So we buy into that world. It *is* a little jarring when Ruby, out of nowhere, says, “I want to be a singer now.” But just like the fishing stuff, we get into the details of her teacher coaching her and her practicing her duet with another boy in class – and that world gets established as well.
You sort of realize that that’s the point. This singing world is an escape for her. So it has to be different from the fishing world. Cause that’s why she’s doing it. It’s almost like her “Matrix.”
But where the movie really excels is when we realize that Ruby is going to have to choose between family or herself. This is one of the most universal themes you’ll see. It’s a story as old as time. And, for that reason, it’s a powerful story. Every good story should, at some point, give your hero an impossible choice to make. And by “impossible” I mean a choice that seems so difficult that even the audience is unsure what the character will do.
Coda does a great job of upping the stakes for the family so they don’t just kind of need Ruby. They REALLY need Ruby. For starters, they begin their own business which is impossible to run without a hearing person involved. And then they get caught fishing one day without a hearing person on the boat. They’re told that if you don’t have a hearing person on the boat moving forward, you’ll never be able to fish again.
Talk about STAKES! The consequences are dire for the family if Ruby decides to leave. All of that creates a ton of suspense as we wonder what Ruby is going to do. It’s great.
There’s one other thing I want to point out with Coda and it regards “showing not telling.” Coda has a series of three scenes that exemplify the power of “show don’t tell.” When you’re a new screenwriter who’s trying to understand why this is important, remember that when you cover major character moments through dialogue only, you risk them feeling on-the-nose or melodramatic. So you want to look for “show” options instead.
**SPOILERS FOR LAST ACT**
One of the primary unresolved conflicts in Coda is between Ruby and her father, Frank. Frank doesn’t understand all this singing nonsense. And, even if he did, it wouldn’t matter because he can’t hear Ruby sing. So he doesn’t even know if she’s good or not. Therefore, one of Ruby’s major roadblocks in chasing her dream is winning over her father. There are three scenes that show his transformation from “non-believer” to “believer” and all of them are show-don’t-tell.
The first occurs when the choir class puts on a show at the school auditorium. Ruby’s family comes but, of course, they can’t hear anything. So they’re sort of bored and signing to each other during the show. “What should we have for dinner later?” That sort of thing.
Then, at the end of the show, Ruby has a solo. During the solo, for the first time in the movie, the camera takes the POV of the deaf family, specifically Frank. So we’re hearing what they’re hearing, which is nothing. While this is happening, Frank starts to look around, and he notices how everyone is reacting to his daughter singing. Some are smiling. Others are crying. Others are moving to the music. It’s the first moment where he sees what his daughter’s singing is doing to people.
Frank is now conflicted. Is he holding his daughter back by keeping her in the family business? When they get back home that night, Frank calls his daughter over and asks her to sing the song again. But this time, since he’s next to her, he can place his hands on her vocal cords and “listen.” It’s through this experience that he becomes even more convinced of her talent.
This leads to the third and final scene, when Ruby does her audition for music school. It’s a closed auditorium so her family is forced to sneak into the upper deck. While singing the song, Ruby notices her parents, and begins to sign the song as he she sings it so they’ll understand it. It’s in that moment that Frank finally realizes that he can’t hold his daughter back. And so, even though she’s chosen to stay with the family at that point, he insists that she go to music school.
Three MAJOR story beats. All conveyed through SHOWING not TELLING. That’s how to screenwrite, people!
I don’t think Coda will be for everyone. I admit that it tries to hit those heartstrings a little too aggressively at times. But it’s so well done that it works (in my opinion). You love these characters. And that’s another feather in the movie’s cap. No character is left behind on the development front. Every single character gets their own storyline, their own arc.
Finally, it’s just nice to get a drama that’s going to be pushed at the Oscars without a single political agenda on its docket. All this movie cares about is entertaining and emotionally resonating with people. On that end, it does a tremendous job. Coda will definitely be a Top 10 movie of the year for me.
[ ] What the hell did I just watch?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the stream
[x] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: You want to feature scenes unique to your premise. Every concept should be original enough that you can write scenes that nobody else can write – because they’re specific to your setup. You have a movie about a deaf family. You BETTER THEN GIVE US SCENES ABOUT A DEAF FAMILY THAT WE CAN’T GET IN ANY OTHER MOVIE. Or else what’s the point of even writing the movie? One of the early scenes has both Frank and Jackie go to the doctor because they both have, um, itching in a sensitive area. The doctor doesn’t sign. So guess who has to come and translate? You got it, their 17 year old daughter! The scene that follows is both uncomfortable and funny.
Reposting this screenplay review with Free Guy debuting this weekend!
Genre: Action (sci-fi?)
Premise: (from Black List) A bank teller stuck in his routine discovers he’s a background character in a realistic, open world action-adventure video game and he is the only one capable of saving the city.
About: Matt Lieberman sold this script just a month ago. That helped it finish number 17 on the just-released 2016 Black List, with 15 votes. Lieberman is starting to make a name for himself, with several high-profile projects in play at the major studios. He is currently writing a feature version of The Jetsons.
Writer: Matt Lieberman
Details: 109 pages
Usually I’ll review the number 1 Black List script right away. But the number 1 Black List script in 2016 is a biopic about Madonna. And to put it bluntly, I’d rather bake myself inside of a pizza oven than read a script about the origin of pointy bras.
It’s not that Madonna doesn’t deserve a biopic. In fact, I’m guessing the script is damn good. But I’m sad that this is what the Black List has become – a list of people re-telling stories about other people. The Black List used to be populated with all these weird original gems. Now it’s “The true story of this” and “The true story of that.”
And you know who we have to blame for this? Us. As long as we keep buying tickets to movies like Sully – wonderful real life stories that have no reason to become movies – then writers will peddle more real-life stories to the studios, since they know that’s what they want. And the studios want them cause you’re paying for them.
It’s like people who complain about Transformers. If you don’t want shit like Transformers, don’t buy tickets to it. Don’t rent it. I guarantee you they’ll stop making Transformers movies.
Luckily, if you go deeper into the Black List, you start to find some originality, and Free Guy was the first script I hit where I went, “Hmmm, that sounds interesting.” Ironically, it’s a story about going against the grain. Something I hope screenwriters will do more of in 2017.
Guy works as a bank teller and goes through the same routine every day. He gets up, goes to work, survives a bank robbery, plays softball (where his team always loses), gets drinks with the guys afterwards, then goes to bed. Then does the same thing all over again tomorrow.
Then one day Guy stumbles across some glasses that, when he puts them on, show a map of the city he lives in, as well as a meter for his health, and how much money he’s got. And thus begins Guy’s awakening. He realizes that he’s a background character in some sort of giant simulation.
Guy approaches a hot girl he routinely sees around, MolotovGirl, and after some initial resistance, learns that she’s a player in this game – as in there’s a real person in “another dimension” playing her. The game is called, “Free City.”
As if having his reality rocked wasn’t enough, he learns from MolotovGirl that Free City is about to be closed down in a week to make way for Free City 2. Guy and everything he knows is about to be shut down forever… UNLESS he can find a way to keep Free City operational.
So Guy begins a revolution, telling anyone who will listen that they’re all background players in a game and if they don’t rise up and rebel, Free City is toast. When the game’s programmers learn that the game is rebelling against their code, they pull out all the stops to take down Guy… FOR GOOD.
I love premises like Free Guy. You’ve got some Matrix in here, some Truman Show, some They Live, some Groundhog Day, some Ready Player One. You read Free Guy and you say to yourself, “How come someone hasn’t made this movie already?” That’s when you know you’ve got a good idea.
But it isn’t just the concept that works. Free Guy makes you think! Whenever you can zoom in on those universal conflicts, you can elevate a silly movie idea into something special. When Guy’s going through his daily routine and asks, “What if I took a single step out of my comfort zone? What would happen?” but then doesn’t do it, it hits you hard.
Because aren’t we all Guy? We all THINK about doing something different. But we never do it. It’s so much easier to stay in our lane. To the point where it feels like we’re being controlled. I mean when was the last time you truly took a chance in life? That you truly put yourself on the line? I’m guessing not recently.
That’s the great thing about channeling these universal human truths through your hero. Is that the reader is going to sympathize with your hero. And once you have that, you have them for the rest of the story. Cause we’re going to want to see if Guy finds a way out. If he finds a way out, it means maybe one day we’ll find a way out.
Structurally, Free Guy breaks down into four sections, each with a different story-engine. Remember that in screenwriting, as long as some type of engine is driving the current section of your screenplay, you’re good. The second there’s no engine is the second your script is dead.
The first section is driven by mystery. Guy knows something isn’t right about his life, about the way the world operates around him, and he wants to find out what it is. That takes us through the first act.
The second section is about leveling up. Molotov Girl – the one person who can answer Guy’s questions – is level a million and lets Guy know that she does’t talk to newbies. Hit level 50 and they can chat. So the engine for this section is the goal: “Get to level 50.” We watch Guy rob banks and steal cars until he gets to level 50.
The third section is “RUN.” The programmers designate Guy and MolotovGirl as threats to the game and chase them around the city (as cop characters) to try and eliminate them. Having your characters chased is one of the oldest story engines in the book.
The final section is “REVOLUTION.” It’s another goal – to start a revolution in the city so they can rise up to the programmers and keep the city in tact.
And, of course, Lieberman adds another element of dramatic conflict by installing a literal ticking time bomb – the arrival of Free City 2.
It seems straight forward when you break it down, but as is the case with everything, it’s hard as hell to make something look simple. As I read Free Guy, I noticed numerous components that I could tell drove the writer crazy during the writing process.
For example, you have the old zombie question: Are there video games in Guy’s world (do people in zombie movies know what zombies are)? Because if there is, then Guy would understand what was happening immediately.
However, that’s not as dramatically interesting as Guy having to piece together that he’s part of a false reality. So Lieberman had to eliminate complex games from Guy’s world, even though that doesn’t make any sense. How is this world the exact same as the world we live in, yet they don’t have one of the most popular forms of entertainment on the planet?
These are the annoying rules you have to figure out when writing a script (particularly sci-fi) because if you don’t, if you decide “Eh, maybe they have video games, maybe they don’t,” that unsuredness oozes into the read and we feel it. We know you’re either bullshitting us or not doing the hard work and the final product feels foggy instead of clear.
So I give Lieberman props. This script is pure fun for the very reason that he did all the hard work. And more importantly, Lieberman proves that something good can come out of playing video games 8 hours a day.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[x] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: You must know the rules of your sci-fi script, even the rules that you don’t have to explain to the reader. The more you know, the more solid the foundation of your screenplay will be. I read so many scripts where the writer doesn’t know the answers to half the questions about his world or rules, and those scripts are always foggy frustrating reads.
