Might Emancipation be the next Revenant, switching out a bear for an alligator?
Genre: True Story/Drama/Thriller/Period
Premise: (from IMDB) A runaway slave forges through the swamps of Louisiana on a tortuous journey to escape plantation owners that nearly killed him.
About: This is the huuuuuge package that sold to Apple TV (for 105 million bucks!), no doubt buoyed by the attachments of Will Smith and Antoine Fuqua. One of the more interesting things about the project is that it was written by Bill Collage, who isn’t known for this kind of material. He wrote Assassins Creed, Allegiant, and broke into the industry with the college comedy, Accepted. This is pretty cool to see since it’s often thought to be impossible to break out of your pigeonhole. Emancipation proves it can be done!
Writer: Bill Collage
Details: 104 pages
Readability: medium
Figure out what’s unique about your script THEN LEAN INTO THAT. Simplest most effective screenwriting advice there is. If your concept doesn’t have anything unique about it, you’re probably in trouble. Because how do you mine unique scenarios out of a familiar premise?
You would think, at first glance, that Emancipation would fall victim to this pitfall. A slave on the run isn’t exactly an original premise. But look closer and you’ll find that you’re dead wrong. That’s because of one, seemingly, irrelevant factor – TERRAIN. The terrain that our main character must escape through is swampland. And swampland might be the most unique terrain of all.
It’s 1862. The Civil War is raging. Slaves are free but only in the North. In the South, where our main character, Peter, lives, slavery is still legal. Peter is ripped away from his family and sold to a man named Jim Fassel, who’s using slaves to build a railroad halfway across the state. Peter’s specific job is to bury slaves who die on the job.
Peter is two things – a God fearing man and a perceptive man. And he hears a few of Fassel’s men talking about how Baton Rouge was claimed by the Union army. That’s about a 5 day journey north. He thinks he can make it. So he pitches the idea to four other slaves. They think he’s crazy but eventually buy in.
When the time is right, they make a break for it. When Fassel and his hounds begin chasing, the five split up. Which means Peter is alone. He eventually trespasses on a farm, resulting in the family hunting him throughout their cornfields. Peter escapes to the bank of the swampland, and reluctantly enters. Within seconds, he’s attacked by an alligator. This is not going to be easy.
Peter improvises his way through miles of swampland, at one point building a makeshift canoe out of a hollowed tree. He encounters 100 degree heat, giant spiders, gianter rats, snakes, more gators, even raging fires. He finally makes it to the end of the swamp and jumps on a passing train. The train takes him to the battlefield, where he’s forced to join the war and fight. But before he does, someone sees his back, which is scarred with lash marks. A war photographer takes a picture of it and that picture becomes one of the most well-known photos in American history and the face of slavery.
Emancipation tries to walk a three-pronged tightrope over the course of its 100 pages. Those prongs include 1) entertainment 2) reality 3) trying to win an Oscar. I liked when the script was focused on 1, not so much when it was focused on 2 or 3.
One of my favorite moments occurs when Peter first goes into the swamp, sees an alligator, turns back to shore, sees his pursuers, and must choose which direction to go. He chooses the alligator, which forces him to fight it, leading to, easily, the most memorable scene in the script.
There are also encounters with snakes, with spiders, and with a terrifying animal I’d never heard of before called a Louisiana swamp rat. Just the way these things were described scared the hell out of me. These were the moments when the script felt most alive, mainly because of what I said at the outset – we were leaning into what was original about the material.
The reality stuff was harder to stomach. There’s a sequence where Peter comes across an abandoned slave house and goes down into the basement to find that a dozen slaves were chained up and left to die. There’s one 10 year old girl barely still alive who Peter tries to save to no avail. Those moments were too sad for me. I found myself not wanting to subject myself to more of that.
Then you had the statue-chasing moments. The big one occurs when Peter takes off his shirt to have his scarred back photographed. It’s an iconic moment because Peter is based on the slave who the original picture was taken of. The problem is that the original picture has inspired so many versions of this scene throughout history that it, ironically, feels cliche. It also feels like it’s trying to be a big important moment. And that’s when moments don’t work. Cause we feel the manipulation of the writer underneath the scene. For these moments to work, you have to come at them in the most natural way possible. Which Emancipation does not do.
I think the reason I’m on the fence about Emancipation is because the first 45 pages promise something intense and visceral and entertaining. I loved, for example, the escape sequence in the opening act. It was like a mini-version of The Great Escape. Then, right after that, it becomes this exciting chase movie.
But the script makes this choice to become darker as it continues on and so, with every 15 pages, I was a little less engaged than I was the previous 15 pages. Which leaves me not quite sure how I’d rate the script. If I were basing the rating off the first 45 pages, it would get an “impressive” without question. But, unfortunately, movies don’t get graded on their best 45 minutes.
The straw that may have broken the camel’s back was Peter himself. He just wasn’t that interesting. His core identity is built around his unwavering belief in God. For every obstacle he encounters, he assures everyone that he’s going to be fine because of God. And he’s right. He always comes out okay.
But how does that make for an interesting character? For characters to be interesting, their inner beliefs need to be challenged in some actionable way. So what you would do is place Peter in a dire situation where his only way out is to denounce, or stop believing in, God. In that moment, Peter has an actionable choice of whether to live, in which case he denounces everything he believes in, or die, in which case he goes to the grave still believing. That’s how you develop character. You constantly challenge their belief system, whether that be a belief in God or a belief in drinking alcohol til you’re blackout drunk every night.
But nothing like that ever happens in Emancipation. There isn’t any character growth at all. I think they figure you’ll get your emotional needs met through the ups and downs of Peter’s harrowing journey. But my experience has taught me that these movies only stay with audiences when there’s character growth. And there’s none of that here.
Emancipation has some really great moments. But the majority of them are packed into those first 45 minutes. What my rating comes down to is simple. Would I tell people to read this? I probably wouldn’t. It just never quite lives up to its promising opening.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Make a little movie out of your first act. Don’t get locked into this idea that your first act is only about setting your characters up. Do what Emancipation does. It uses its first act to create a mini-movie built around escaping “prison.” The planning, the suspense, the build-up to their escape – all of that makes for a really exciting mini-movie that thrusts us into the second act.
Genre: Sci-Fi/Horror
Premise: A woman is recruited to participate in an experiment where she’s digitally inserted into her comatose mother’s mind. Once inside, she must come to terms with her mom’s homicidal past.
About: Demonic is the latest entry from writer-director Neil Blomkamp, of District 9 fame. Blomkamp, who was once anointed the next great science-fiction director, followed up surprise hit District 9 with two disappointing films, Elysium and Chappie. After becoming momentarily attached to two gigantic 80s properties, Alien and Robocop, he retreated back into his filmmaking cocoon, choosing to make short films. “Demonic” is his first feature film in six years. It is currently at 14% at Rotten Tomatoes.
Writer: Neil Blomkamp
Details: 104 minutes
One of the things I’m fascinated by is artists who create something amazing then never replicate their success again. Because it taps into this fear that I think a lot of artists have, which is: “What if it’s all luck?” You come up with a masterpiece like The Sixth Sense only to then make a dozen terrible movies in a row. Why is it you can’t tap into that reservoir again?
That’s the question that comes up with Blomkamp. But, with Blomkamp, it goes a step further. Because his latest film isn’t just “not as good as District 9.” It’s a legitimately terrible movie. It doesn’t work on any level. So you have to start asking tough questions. Was Blomkamp involved with the screenplay for District 9 at all? Because it doesn’t make sense that the same person who constructed that universe constructed this one.
I know that he had a co-writer on District 9 in Terri Tatchel. And I remember Peter Jackson was shepherding the project, which means he was bringing two decades’ worth of storytelling experience to the table. So maybe it’s as simple as Blomkamp took care of the visuals while everyone else wrote the story. Otherwise, Demonic’s existence doesn’t make sense. It plays like a 23 year old film school student shooting his first movie.
And I’m not talking about just the writing. I’m talking about the acting. Who are these people? You’ve never heard of anybody in this cast. Blomkamp’s career may not be what it was after District 9. But he can get name actors if he wants to. The fact that he’s choosing not to indicates he has at least some propensity for self-sabotage.
30-something Carly, who lives out in the wilderness as far as I can tell (any sense of geography in this movie is non-existent), is contacted by her ex-boyfriend, who informs her that he recently signed up for an experiment at a local medical company only to find out that the company has Carly’s mom there, who’s in a coma and on life support.
Carly heads over there to see what’s up and they explain that her mom fell into a coma and the only way to get in touch with her is by digitally entering her mind. They would love it if Carly could go into her mind to see what she’s thinking. Carly reluctantly agrees and heads into her mother’s brain, which has her waiting for Caarly inside their old house.
It’s here where we learn that Carly’s mom burned an entire building full of people, killing them all, which is why Carly hasn’t seen her in forever. Carly takes this opportunity to tell her mom how much she hates her. Carly’s mom is apologetic, but there’s something else bubbling underneath the surface with her. The company (which amounts to 2 guys) thinks it’s worth sending Carly in for a second visit.
Eventually, we learn that Carly’s mom may be possessed and it was the demon who killed all those people, not the mom. Meanwhile, Carly starts experiencing incidents where she’s out in the real world only to realize she’s actually still in her mother’s, aka the demon’s, mind. The movie’s only scene that approaches halfway decent territory takes place when her best friend transforms into the demon and comes after her.
We eventually learn that the two company men are exorcists, complete with military Vatican gear (I’m not kidding). And they’ve been using Carly to pull the demon out of the mother’s mind so they can kill it. At least I think that’s what they were doing. Carly then runs around the woods a lot until she defeats the demon, I believe. The end.
Blomkamp just did a three hour interview with Joe Rogan which brought up even MORE questions because, when you listen to Blomkamp, you note how smart he is. He’s smarter than me. He’s smarter than anyone in this comment section. He’s smarter than 99% of the people in Hollywood. And yet he made this terrible movie. How can that be?
This got me wondering if being too intelligent is actually a detriment to creativity. Because to create great art, you have to have a strong connection with the non-logical side of your brain. That’s the side that comes up with the weird interesting shit. The logical side helps when it comes to structuring and plotting. But, in every other facet, logic gets in the way.
A steel skeleton cyborg limping down the street chasing a woman named Sarah Conner – that’s not a logical idea. That’s pure creativity. Listening to Blomkamp, he seems stilted and logical when he’s explaining his work. And, unfortunately, that’s not how you create great art.
Another issue Blomkamp has to contend with is that he’s never studied screenwriting. The most blatant example of this is Carly. Carly does not have a job. We have no idea what she does for a living. We have no idea how she makes money, how she survives, what her daily list of tasks is.
That’s because Blomkamp doesn’t know. As a result, the character is just waiting in her room for the writer to call on her. This is one of the most common beginner screenwriting mistakes there is – not knowing what your character does for a living. Thinking that that’s not important. As I’ve stated here before, a person’s occupation makes up half their life. It has tons of influence on who somebody is. Imagine a coder’s daily life compared to a fisherman’s. Do you think those jobs aren’t going to lead to those two people being drastically different? So why would you ever write someone without a job?
But it’s not just that. A job structures a character’s day. If a character doesn’t have one, they have nothing to do. Which makes them inactive, which makes them boring, which makes them unclear. Yet that’s the character leading this story. And the fact that nobody told Blomkamp to fix this indicates that he has zero people giving him feedback. Which is a recipe for disaster.
Where does Blomkamp go from here? I don’t know. Spike Lee ran into a similar problem back in the early 2000s. He was making a lot of bad movies that nobody saw so he was forced to make a studio film. That ended up being The Inside Man and giving his career new life. Of course, it only led to him making more bad movies that nobody saw but at least he was working. Blomkamp will now have to consider making a studio film in order to keep the lights on.
Unless someone pays him to make District 10. But I’ll be honest with you. It’s starting to look like the *other* people involved in District 9 had more of a creative impact than we thought. I still think Blomkamp is an excellent technical director. He has some shades of Lucas in him in how he comes up with interesting sci-fi imagery. But if this guy is going to keep making movies, he needs a collaborator who understands storytelling. Swallow the ego, find a screenwriter you love, and let him write your movies. If you don’t do that, your career might be over.
[x] What the hell did I just watch?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the stream
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: ‘Sitting down and talking’ scenes are the real demon in “Demonic.” I’ve told you before that you should never choose to write sitting down and talking scenes in your script. Ever. The only time you should write a sitting down and talking scene is when you’re on set, you’ve just lost your location, you have to get the scene shot, and the only option is to sit your actors down and shoot the scene quickly. That’s it. That’s your only excuse for writing a ‘sitting down and talking’ scene. But, believe it or not, there’s something even worse than sitting down and talking scenes. And that’s sitting down and talking scenes AT THE BEGINNING OF YOUR MOVIE. When you sit your actors down to talk, you are promoting stagnation. You are promoting inactivity. You are taking the “move” out of “movie.” It’s a terrible precedent to set for your story because it starts things off on a lifeless uninspired note. Of the first three scenes in Demonic, TWO of them are ‘sitting down and talking’ scenes – one with Carly’s best friend, the other with her ex-boyfriend. It was in those moments that I knew this movie was screwed.
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.
