Genre: Superhero
Premise: The infamous Suicide Squad are dropped off on a Cuba-like island where they’ve been tasked to overthrow the authoritarian government.
About: 2016’s Suicide Squad was supposed to be DC’s secret weapon and depending on what metric you used, it either succeeded (it made 750 million at the global box office) or failed (nobody liked it). The fan reaction was so steeped in apathy, in fact, that a second movie was up in the air. Then, as if by some miracle, the sequel got someone, in James Gunn, who would normally never stoop to making a Suicide Squad film. And, all of a sudden, they had a hot juicy project on their hands. During the last year, The Suicide Squad was the most buzzed about upcoming superhero movie of them all. Well, it finally came out this weekend and, unfortunately, it looks like the pandemic once again reared its ugly head, eating into the film’s box office, as it only took in 27 million. For reference, Black Widow, released a month ago, made 80 million. There is a caveat to this. The Suicide Squad could be seen for free on HBO Max at home. I’m sure that ate into the numbers a bit because if you look at the reviews, both critically and fanwise (92% and 85% respectively), everyone seems to have liked the film. Which makes it very hard to tell where the Suicide Squad franchise goes from here.
Writer: James Gunn
Details: 132 minutes

I think everyone here knows the first question I’m going to ask.

Is Suicide Squad better than Jungle Cruise?

Such a great question. But the real question we should be asking is, is any movie better than Jungle Cruise?

Okay okay. I’ll stop the trolling.

The Suicide Squad is definitely a better movie than Jungle Cruise.

Let’s try to find a better comp, though.

Is Suicide Squad better than Army of the Dead? In both films you’ve got a team of bad people going into a dicey area where they’ve been tasked with achieving a singular goal.

I’m happy to report that The Suicide Squad is better than Army of the Dead. It’s actually not even close.

But now let’s make things interesting.

Is Suicide Squad better than Black Widow?

Now you’re moving into a dicier discussion because there were a couple of things I thought that Black Widow did better than The Suicide Squad. I thought that its depiction of a broken family hit harder emotionally than anything The Suicide Squad did. And I thought that both Black Widow’s sister and her father were funnier than any of the characters in The Suicide Squad. So I had a little more fun with the Widows than I did the Squad.

With that said, The Suicide Squad took a lot more chances than Black Widow and, as a result, was the more interesting film. I know that one thing James Gunn made a priority was that no one should be safe here. Marvel has become a joke in that respect because you know that nobody’s going to die in their movies. And, even if they do – *cough, Black Widow, cough* – they get their own movie a year later. So the fact that nobody was safe here ensured that the film was unpredictable. You guys know how much I love that.

But The Suicide Squad is a tough movie to assess. It has sky-high aspirations. It wants to be the team version of Deadpool. Yet it fails just as much as it succeeds in trying to live up to that expectation. I’m still trying to figure out why that is. There’s something gloomy about the proceedings that undermines their effectiveness. King Shark comes to mind. This character should’ve been the next Groot. But he just isn’t. He’s actually kinda boring.

For those who haven’t seen the film, the government sends a Suicide Squad group of supervillains to a Cuba-like island where they quickly realize they’re sacrificial lambs (one of the best moments in the movie is when Pete Davidson is blown to bits by the island’s army). Their job, it turns out, was to create a distraction for THE REAL SUICIDE SQUAD to sneak in, set up camp, and then come up with a plan to take out the island’s dictator.

The real Suicide Squad consists of their vanilla leader, Rick Flag, gun aficionado Bloodsport, angry killer Peacemaker, deeply psychologically troubled Polka Dot Man, sleepy girl who controls rats, Ratcatcher 2, always hungry King Shark, and, of course, what Suicide Squad team wouldn’t be complete without Harley Quinn? For those who don’t know the rules of The Suicide Squad, everyone on the team is outfitted with bombs in their heads and if they don’t follow orders, the bombs are remotely activated.

Once off the beach, the squad – which is already complicated by Mano a Mano d$@% measuring between Bloodsport and Peacemaker – makes their way through the jungle to the city. Along the way, they learn about this special Starfish creature that was found in space that is secretly being used by the dictator to control his people. That starfish (named Starro) is growing exponentially. It also has the ability to spit out little miniature starfish that attach themselves to people’s faces where those people now become a physical extension of the starfish.

The team breaks into the facility where Starro is being kept. Once inside, they quickly get split up. Because these are bad supervillains, remember, they don’t exactly follow the rules. If someone doesn’t like someone else, they kill them, as is the case with Peacemaker killing Boring Rick Flag. It starts to look like the group is such a mess that they won’t be able to come together to save the day. But once Starro, who’s become 500 feet tall by the way, escapes his confines, they have no choice but to get the job done.

The thing I like about the Suicide Squad movies – and something all screenwriters can learn from – is that they contain a perfect structural setup for a screenplay. A group of people come together to achieve a clear high-stakes goal. When you have that, the movie pretty much writes itself because we all know what the characters are trying to achieve and we’re excited to see if they can do it.

The conflict, in the movie, comes from within the group itself. What The Suicide Squad is SUPPOSED to offer that movies like Fast and Furious and Star Wars, and even Avengers, cannot, is that the conflict within their group is NUCLEAR. These aren’t just normal people coming together to get the job done. They’re evil people. They’re bad people. They’re people with no moral code. This is supposed to create such intense conflict that the group’s attempts to do even the simplest things become impossible.

The Suicide Squad tries to do this but James Gunn has a blind spot when it comes to letting his villains “villain.” Sure, he kills off the ones he never liked in the first place. But he loves the ones he loves so much that he doesn’t want to create too much conflict between them. As a result, we get these neutered “sorta conflict” scenes that feel like they’re missing a gear. Take the scene where Bloodsport and Peacemaker are trying to one-up each other with fancy kills in the jungle. It feels more like theater than that these two are actually trying to outdo each other. As a result, the scene is decent instead of iconic.

Then there are times where this works in Gunn’s favor. The man loves his characters so much that he’ll prioritize their development over any and all action. Take Polka Dot Man, for example. This could’ve been a joke character. The guy shoots polka dots, for God’s sake. But Gunn gets into his past and how awful a person his mother was while he was growing up. Gunn conveys this by occasionally showing Polka Dot Man’s point-of-view, where he sees everyone as his mother. Even when they’re fighting Starro, we see Polka Dot Man does not see a 500 foot tall starfish, but rather his 500 foot tall mother.

You can tell that it’s the biggest misfits Gunn connects to the most. We see this with his second favorite character, Ratcatcher 2. Ratcatcher 2 was not as effective as Polka Dot Man. But she has some great moments, including her contentious interactions with Bloodsport and that last second call-out to the rats in the city to save the day. It says a lot that Gunn didn’t use the obvious alpha character to save the day, but rather the team’s biggest underdog.

The one character he didn’t seem to know what to do with was Harley Quinn. And I don’t blame him. I still don’t get this character. We’ve proved she’s a failure as a character with the disastrous Birds of Prey. Why does WB keep pushing her?

What is she even doing in this movie? Why do they need her? At the end when she’s running around with a javelin, I’m thinking to myself, “What are you going to do?” Is she even trained with weapons? I made this same critique about Black Widow but at least Black Widow spent the first 15 years of her life being trained as an assassin. Has anyone ever taught Harley Quinn how to do anything besides not shut up? I will contend til the day I die that the only thing Harley Quinn has going for her is her look. But when it comes to personality and superheroing? She kinda sucks.

Whenever you finish a superhero movie, one of the criteria you use to judge whether the movie was successful or not is breakout characters. Did any characters break out here? I would say no. Polka Dot Man was interesting. Ratcatcher 2 was too, to an extent. But nobody here’s going to stay with me the way Peter Quill, Rocket Raccoon, Jax, and Groot stuck with me.

The Suicide Squad is swinging for the fences. Usually, when you do that, you either strike out or hit it out of the park. The Suicide Squad is that rare “swinging for the fences” hit that dribbles into right field for a single. You got on base. You’re fast so you have the potential to steal second. But it’s definitely not what it’s trying to be, which is a classic. And that’s unfortunate because I thought it had the potential to be.

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

What I learned: Look for creative ways to convey backstory. Polka Dot Man had a psychologically abusive mother. However, we never do a flashback to his mother being psychologically abusive to him. Instead, we see other people through his eyes and those people take the shape of his mother. This was one of the most effective ways of conveying traumatic character backstory that I’ve seen in a long time.

You thought the Jungle Cruise discussion was over.

How dare you.

In my Monday Jungle Cruise post, I noticed some interesting conversations happening in the comments section. Some Scriptshadow readers proclaimed that almost anyone could have written Jungle Cruise. Since I LOVE these types of debates, I had to write an article about it. So I ask the question: could anyone here really have written a 200 million dollar Disney film? Is writing a big family blockbuster that easy?

Let me take a second to remind everyone that screenwriting is the most underestimated art form of all the art forms. I don’t know many people who think they can paint the Mona Lisa. I don’t know many people who think they can write the next Catcher in the Rye. I don’t know many folks who think they can produce a Kanye album. But I’ve met more people than I can count who believe they can write a screenplay that makes a billion dollars at the box office.

For whatever reason, there’s something about screenwriting that makes people believe it’s easy to do. I think it comes down to the belief that if you’ve *watched* a movie, you think you can *write” a movie. I mean, they’re practically the same thing, right?

The irony is that screenwriting may be the HARDEST art form to master because it’s so darn restrictive. It forces you to work within very specific parameters, parameters that seem to actively stifle your creativity.

Successful screenwriters are the ones who keep studying that formula until their storytelling becomes invisible. That’s the nut that every screenwriter is trying to crack – tell a story with such skill that the audience forgets it was written. The reason people can’t appreciate that effortlessness (and believe screenwriting to be so easy) is because they’ve never seen a movie where it wasn’t present. They haven’t seen a student film or a bad festival film. Those films more accurately represent the challenges storytelling involves.

So I’m going to highlight five things I saw in Jungle Cruise that I do NOT see in the average amateur screenplay. I do this not to dismiss aspiring screenwriters. I do it to remind you that there are many skills one must learn to be a competent storyteller. Also, it’s good practice to take some personal responsibility in your screenwriting. Ask not why some unimpressive screenwriter is getting work while your screenplays are collecting digital dust. Ask how you can improve as a screenwriter to give yourself a better chance at succeeding. Here are five starting points from Jungle Cruise.

1) Do more than one thing at a time

Most aspiring screenwriters can only ever handle one thing at a time. For example, if they’re setting their protagonist up, that’s all they’re doing. The scene is solely meant to establish the hero and nothing more (that he’s mean, or sweet, or greedy, or selfless). Scenes that are only doing one thing are often boring. Professional screenwriters understand that you’re often required to do several things at once in a scene. In the opening of Jungle Cruise, which has Lily watching her brother make a plea to an auditorium of aristocrats to finance their voyage, she slips away to look for, and steal, the arrowhead that contains the location of the healing flower they’re after. So instead of setting up our two lead characters – Lily and McGregor – and that’s it, Michael Green also sets up the plot (that they’re looking for this flower) while creating a scenario to ENTERTAIN us (Lily sneaking around the building to steal something). Rarely should you ever write a scene that does just one thing. The limited number of scenes in a script (around 50) necessitates that you’re always doing two, three, even four things at once.

2) Creating obstacles for your characters

Another common issue I find in amateur scripts is that the writers make things incredibly easy for their characters. They open up this wide road and say, “Drive on it for as long as you want until you get to the finish line.” Professional screenwriters do the opposite. They add potholes to the road, dead ends, alternate routes, they have a bomber fly by and drop a bomb on the middle of the road, they have a magician make the entire road disappear. Professional writers are always looking for ways to make things harder for their characters. Green could’ve easily written Jungle Cruise so that when Lily arrived in the Amazon, she had a quick chat with Frank (The Rock) about a cruise price and off they went. Instead, Green created local gangster, Nilo, who Frank owed money to. Nilo removes Frank’s boat engine and says he won’t return it until Frank gets him his money. This is the way you want to think as a screenwriter – always looking for ways to make things harder on your heroes.

3) Good plotting requires creativity and imagination

Beginner writers don’t try very hard when it comes to plot. They piece together a bare-bones foundation that does just enough to move the plot forward and nothing more. Professional writers are always looking for clever ways to twist and rearrange the plot in order to keep things exciting. There’s a scene late in the first act where Frank sneaks into Nilo’s office to steal the key that gets him his boat engine back. As this is happening, Lily shows up at Nilo’s office as she’s heard he’s the one who can get her a boat. What this plot development does is it allows Frank to pretend to be Nilo in order to get Lily’s business. It’s a fun little scene that moves the plot forward in a cute way. Consider the beginner screenwriter alternative. Lily finds Frank drunk in a bar and asks him to take her down the Amazon. That’s the scene I see in 99% of the scripts I read. Cliche. Unimaginative. Would it have kept the plot moving? Sure. But in a boring obvious way.

4) The dialogue is almost universally better in a pro script

Dialogue is so subjective that it’s almost impossible to discuss how some dialogue is better than other dialogue. But if we’re being honest with ourselves, the dialogue we see in movies is almost always better than the dialogue we read in amateur screenplays. There are a lot of reasons for this that are hard to quantify. But one that can be quantified is that pro writers are always looking to twist a dialogue line in a way that makes it fresh. For example, during a break in the action in Jungle Cruise, Frank and Lily are having an argument. During a pause in the argument, Frank notices the special arrowhead necklace around Lily’s neck. He stares at it as he realizes its importance. Lily notices this. Before I tell you what Lily’s next line of dialogue is, I want you to try and think of a good line of dialogue yourself. What should she say here? I can tell you from experience that most amateur screenwriters will write a line like, “Why are you staring at me,” or “Stop staring at me.” Note how generic and unimaginative these lines are. Better yet, imagine an entire screenplay full of basic lines like this. That’s what amateur dialogue looks like – an entire script full of tired, cliched, unimaginative sentences. Instead, Lily utters this line: “You’re staring at me. How do I make it stop?” It’s by no means a world-beater line. But it’s more thoughtful and kinda funny, giving the line an extra kick. This is how you want to approach your dialogue, always looking to find that twist that improves the cliched line.

5) Characters are purposeful and clear in their motives

Aspiring screenwriters too often believe that the reader can read their mind. These writers may have never *stated* what the hero’s motivation is but their assumption is the reader will know it based on… well… they should just know because it’s “that kind of movie.” That’s not how screenwriting works. If you don’t tell us something, we won’t know. I can’t stress how often I encounter this issue in beginner scripts. New writers assume the reader knows WAY MORE than they actually do. So when it comes to important things in your script, like character goals or character motivation – these are things you want to clearly convey to your audience. A good example of this occurs when Lily sits down to explain to Frank WHY THIS JOURNEY IS SO IMPORTANT. She explains what these special flowers are, what they’re capable of, and how they’re going to change the world. After this speech is over, we understand the importance of the journey and why Lily is so passionate about it. Newbie writers often overlook such moments. They either have no idea an audience would want this information or assume that a vague understanding of the information is enough. Professional writers are keenly aware that unless the characters are clear on what they’re doing and why they’re doing it, it’s hard to enjoy the story.

I know it’s easy to dismiss family films as “screenwriting-lite” because they play to the broadest possible audience. But don’t fool yourself. Just like any piece of art, it takes a ton of skill to make the experience feel effortless. Keep learning these individual screenwriting skills. Only after you’ve mastered them will you be able to write something as clean and as fun as Jungle Cruise.

Genre: Biopic
Premise: (from Black List) Sex, money, and one schoolyard fad that took a nation by storm. Based on the true story of Ty Warner, the enigmatic entrepreneur behind a ‘90s toy craze that sparked madness, murder, and a billion-dollar empire.
About: This script finished with 8 votes on last year’s Black List. I do not know if the writer, Alexandra Skarsgard, is related to the famous Skarsgard family of actors, but my guess is that she is. Skarsgard is repped by UTA and managed by Kaplan/Perrone. From what I can tell, this is her first big screenplay break.
Writer: Alexandra Skarsgard
Details: 126 pages
Readability: Fast

Ryan Reynolds for Ty?

We’ve been talking all week about the battle between positive material (which tends to make a lot of money) and negative material (which tends to struggle at the box office). A not inaccurate way to characterize Hollywood is it’s a bunch of people trying to become that one artist a year who writes a negative movie that goes on to make a lot of money. That makes them the artist who can do it all.

Well, today, I’m going to give you one of the best templates for achieving this plan: THE TRAGEDY TEMPLATE. The tragedy template requires your movie to star an anti-hero, someone with a series of flaws.

You spend the first two-thirds to three-quarters of your screenplay showing the RISE of this character. The “rise” is important because these movies don’t always have clear goals. Nobody has to save their daughter in a tragedy.

The reason the “rise” works is because everyone likes to watch a character’s rise to prominence, regardless of whether they’re good or bad. There’s something about seeing them get bigger and bigger that’s addictive. Because we know that there’s no drama unless there’s eventually a fall. So there’s a natural desire to get to the fall.

Pro-Tip: All screenwriting effectively is is creating reasons for the reader to keep reading. You do this by injecting a series of “checkpoints” that the reader wants to read to. Certain narratives have those checkpoints built in, such as the tragedy. The reader always wants to get to the “fall.” That means that when you write a tragedy, readers are going to at least want to get to this point in the screenplay.

The fall itself is all about our hero’s main flaw getting the best of them. In a script like this, where someone amasses a lot of money, that flaw is usually greed. Their greed blinds them until they can’t see straight anymore, and it all comes tumbling down. The Wolf of Wall Street is a recent example of this.

The problem with tragedies is that no matter how well they’re written, they always end sadly. It’s built into the formula. Now how many times in your life, when a movie has ended on a down note, have you recommend it? It happens every once in a while if the movie moves you emotionally, such as Titanic. But it’s hard to recommend a movie that you know is going to make people feel down afterwards. So you usually recommend movies with uplifting endings.

That’s why this negative movie thing is so hard. No matter how well your script is written, it’s hard to make a “down” movie go viral.

“Plush” introduces us to real life figure Ty Warner. Ty originally wanted to be an actor, mainly as a way to escape his father, who worked as a salesman for a middling toy company called Dakin. But after realizing that being an actor is actually difficult, he comes back to his old Chicago suburb and reluctantly follows in his father’s footsteps.

But unlike his father, Ty is an amazing salesman. He actually enjoys selling stuffed animals. One day, he comes across a specialty stuffed animal that looks realistic in a way stuffed animals never have before. A lightbulb goes off in Ty’s head. He wants to marry the “realistic” stuffed animal with mass production. He then begins selling these mass produced animals to his Dakin contacts.

When Dakin finds out about this, they fire Ty, and Ty starts his own business, pulling a Jerry Maguire and hiring his old secretary, Carol, from Dakin to build the operation. The company is successful but by no means a phenomenon. That is until something funny happens. It’s the mid-90s when the internet is first coming around. Ty realizes that suburban moms are buying up his discontinued beanie baby units and selling them to the tune of thousands of dollars on the open market.

Ty gets the genius idea to strategically introduce and retire certain beanie babies every month, incentivizing people to buy as many as possible in the hopes of snagging a winning lottery ticket. The strategy is so successful that it turns Ty’s company from a tens of millions of dollars business to a billion dollar business.

Of course, this can’t last forever, and beanie babies are eventually supplanted by Pokemon. As the ship was sinking, Ty hid a lot of his money overseas, which got him into a bunch of tax trouble. Many people thought that he’d be going to prison for several decades. But the judge decided to let him off with 2 years probation. Ty’s public image never recovered after that, but he still runs a successful business to this day.

“Plush” wants to be “Steve Jobs” meets “The Social Network” but it’s not as sophisticated as either of those screenplays. It has the lawsuit framework like Social Network. But its implementation is haphazard. It comes and goes unpredictably. It doesn’t sandwich the narrative in a nice balanced manner.

Nor does it have the clever device at the heart of “Steve Jobs” whereby instead of the lazy cradle-to-grave style most biopics use, Sorkin explored Jobs’s life via Apple’s three biggest public announcements. “Plush” jumps around in time at first before eventually becoming completely linear. It didn’t really feel thought-through to me. Like a building that was built without blueprints.

With that said, two parts of the script worked. The first is Ty. Ty is a strange dude. His mother is schizophrenic and required hospital care for most of her life. That seems to have messed with his perception of reality and at least partly leads to an insane addiction to plastic surgery.

The real Ty Warner

The second is the beanie baby craze moment. It’s interesting seeing how that came about. Nobody had ever done with stuffed animals what Ty did here – creating purposefully discontinued animals in order to create a sales frenzy whereby everybody needed to have all of them. That was fascinating to read about.

There was also this underlying theme of whether Ty was a good person or not. This is a man who kicked his own sister out of his life while making sure his sick mother was always cared for. This man was an asshole to every person he worked with yet he’d help random people he met on the street get major surgery when he found out there were dying. All of this comes together in the final court case scene when the judge is trying to decide what Ty’s sentence should be, and that decision is tied to what kind of person he’s been throughout his life. He has to weigh the good against the bad to make a decision, which makes the stakes very personal.

The big problem that the script can’t overcome, though, is that it’s not as salacious as it wants to be. The logline says there’s murder. There was no murder in this script. The fact that this is a tragedy implies that Ty’s life fell apart. But I just looked online and it appears Ty is still a billionaire and doing just fine.

It seems like the script is taking liberties in assessing how much of a downfall Ty actually had.

All of this left me confused as far as to what to rate the script but I’d say the main character is interesting enough to warrant a ‘worth the read.’

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

What I learned: If you don’t have a traditional goal-driven narrative (for example, Fury Road – get to the promised land), choose a narrative that KEEPS YOUR HERO ACTIVE. The nice thing about tragedies is that your hero is typically spending the first 70% of the movie trying to build something. That act of building keeps them active and that’s a huge reason we keep watching even though you don’t have the traditional dramatic setup of saving something or delivering something or avenging something.

What I learned 2: This tip comes from the main character himself! One of the reasons Ty became so successful is that he REALLY FREAKING CARED ABOUT EVERY DETAIL OF THOSE STUFFED ANIMALS. He would stare at them for hours. If the eyes were just a little off, he wouldn’t produce that beanie baby. All artists should be this way. They should be obsessed. If you write John Wick, you have to care about the specific gun he uses. About what his suit measurements are. About how he got his training. The audience doesn’t need to know this stuff. But YOU DO. When you don’t know specifics, you use generalities. Generalities, I shouldn’t have to tell you, lead to GENERIC movies.

Genre: Crime/Thriller
Premise: A single mother who’s about to be kicked out of her recently deceased father’s home becomes a hostage during a bank robbery that ends in shocking fashion.
About: HBO Max is not playing around anymore. They want their own IP. Which is why they bought up Black Choke. I’m thrilled about this development. The more buyers there are in this town, the more opportunity there is for screenwriters like you to sell scripts. And not just any scripts – ORIGINAL MATERIAL. Which, as we know, is sorely lacking in Hollywood. Black Choke sold last week and comes from Doug Simon, who’s previously appeared on the Black List with his contained thriller, “Breathe,” about a family who’s quarantined in a special underground tank after the world’s air becomes unbreathable.
Writer: Doug Simon
Details: 119 pages

Cormer for Nina?

Today’s script is an update on the 1998 movie, A Simple Plan. And dare I say, its execution is even better. Let’s take a look!

30-something Nina Trainer is barley making ends meet. She works two jobs, one of those as a maid. All so she can barely put food on the table for her young son. Nina needs a big break soon since the bank is about to re-claim her home.

40-something Sara, a security officer at that very bank, has seen better days. She was once the best cop on the force, until she tried to save some people from a burning car and has never been the same since.

One rainy day, two men in masks break into the bank and steal half a million dollars from the vault. While this is happening, a dumb teller tries to intervene, resulting in the robbers killing both him and the bank manager. Sara was shot as well and is barely hanging on.

As the robbers exit, they’re forced to take a random person in a rain parka so they don’t get shot by the police. They then speed away. Once inside the van, we pull away the parka hood to reveal… Nina! She was coming to the bank for one last ditch effort to stop them from taking her home.

Later, when they’re driving up the hills, trying to figure out what to do with Nina, she pounces, and the truck goes plunging down the hill killing everyone inside except for… Nina! As Nina is about to call the police, she notices that there’s a car with two dead people and HALF A MILLION DOLLARS inside. Free money! Money that will solve all her problems.

She takes the money, finds and steals a car, and drives home. Nobody saw Nina inside her parka so she’s Scott free. That is until her awful ex-husband, Ray shows up. Ray spots the money and wants in. Because she knows he’ll call the cops otherwise, she’s forced to bring him into the fold.

Meanwhile, Sheriff Keene heads over to the hospital to find that his old partner, Sara, is hanging in there. He wants to know what she saw during the robbery so they can find out who these dudes were. Not to mention the person in the parka they kidnapped. But Keene doesn’t know the half of it. You see, Sara was in on the robbery. And she quickly figures out that whoever her accomplices kidnapped now has the money. She just needs to find that person… and get the money back.

Not long ago, a writer sent me a bank robbery script for a consultation, and my big note to him was that the script didn’t have a hook. It was just characters committing a crime. He came back with a good point. He said, “Did The Town have a hook? Did Hell or High Water have a hook? How bout Heat?” I had to concede that he was right.

However, while a story hook isn’t necessary to sell a screenplay or get a film made, they’re the screenwriting equivalent of having your own publicist. Every time you send your query out, there’s this cool hook dangling there, making it impossible not to request the screenplay.

By not having a hook, you basically cut down the number of people who request your script ten-fold. Let’s run the numbers. If you send a query out for a screenplay that has a great hook, you might get 8 out of 10 requests for the script. If you send a query out for a script that doesn’t have anything resembling a hook, you’ll be lucky to get one request.

In other words, you’re playing 8 lottery tickets instead of 1.

Does that mean you should only write scripts that have a big hook? The short answer is yes. Especially if you’re an unknown. But there’s a bigger point to be made here, which is that, the less of a hook you have, the better the script needs to be. Since less people are going to read it, those people will have to be louder in their endorsement of the script. And they’re not going to be loud unless you blow them away. Let me now ask each and every one of you here at Scriptshadow, how many times are you BLOWN AWAY by a script?

Conservatively…. Once a year? Once every two years maybe?

But this gets into an even DEEPER question, which is, should you assume that you’re the exception? Should you assume that you’re the one writer a year who writes the script that BLOWS PEOPLE AWAY? And therefore, because you are that exception, you don’t need a hook? Theoretically, we should all feel this way, right? If we don’t believe in our writing, who will?

But my whole thing is, why make things harder for yourself? They’re already hard. The odds are already stacked against you. Why not do something that makes things easier for you? You can still believe in your writing. You’re just making sure that more people get a chance to read it!

I bring all of this up because today’s script has a fairly basic premise (it’s got a *bit* of a hook but nothing I haven’t seen before) and despite its pedestrian setup, it’s one of the rare instances where the writing is so good, it makes up for the lack of a hook.

For starters, Doug Simon does an incredible job making you fall in love with Nina Trainer. I’ve talked about using bully scenes to make your hero sympathetic before. If you show a bully picking on your hero early on in the screenplay, we’re going to have sympathy for them.

But you don’t have to approach the bully setup literally. In Black Choke, when we meet Nina, she’s a maid riding up the elevator to clean an office floor. When the elevator doors open, we see a group of drunk laughing office workers who’ve just finished up the day with a party. They stumble into Nina – to them a faceless maid – who then comes out onto a trashed office floor, cake and ice cream scattered about, no thought whatsoever for who has to clean up their mess. This is going to take all night. These jerks have effectively bullied Nina, just in a non-traditional way.

Now, normally, you’d look at this and say, “Who cares? Everyone knows you have to make your hero likable or sympathetic. That’s screenwriting 101. This should hardly be considered ‘good writing,’ Carson.”

But here’s where the skill is. Later in the movie, Nina is going to be doing some bad things. She’s going to be stealing half a million dollars, for example. She’s going to be killing someone. When your hero is going to be doing some truly despicable things, your average “save the cat” or “kick the dog” trick isn’t going to be enough. You have to come up with something that’s going to make us love this character no matter what they do. Which is why this opening is so good. We see this woman being dehumanized by these jerks to such a degree that we’re going to love her no matter what.

Simon also does a kick-ass job of keeping us guessing in a plot where we already know he’s trying to trick us. Pretty much every major story beat had a surprise development in it. Hill achieved this by setting up each plot beat so that you’d only ever assume one outcome. That way, when the other outcome occurred, you were shocked.

When Nina’s ex-husband, Ray, finds out about the money, he becomes the most important variable in the story. Nina can’t do anything without figuring out how to keep Ray happy, since he knows the secret and has to be involved. Now, as a screenwriter, I would tell you that this is dramatic gold. Keep Ray front and center because he complicates Nina’s journey so much. Therefore, when Ray’s accidentally killed later (in a really fun scene), it’s a total shock because the twist HELPS rather than HURTS Nina.

But then Simon hits us with another twist. It turns out Ray told his current girlfriend, Eliza, about the money. She calls Nina, wanting her cut. Which means Simon was able to both give us a shocking twist AND keep the exact same amount of pressure on Nina, by supplanting Ray with Eliza.

There’s a lot more good here I could write about. This script is really clever and really fun. My only complaint is that there are too many characters. I’m not convinced the script needed so many people. But, boy, it’s so well-done. If you want to write a crime script without a hook, check this one out. It shows you where the bar is.

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

What I learned: I used to dislike small town crime movies. They didn’t have that sheen a big city crime movie has, like “Heat” with Los Angeles. But now I know why they work. They work because the small town setting means everybody knows each other. And when everyone knows each other, you can have a lot more fun with the characters. For example, bank security guard Sara is trying to help Sheriff Keene find the money. Normally, this is a standard pairing. But their scenes are charged because they used to be partners, and when they were partners, they were sleeping together. That’s harder to do in a big city crime movie where the individuals are more separated. So if you’re trying to decide between the two, know that the big city crime movie will feel bigger. But the small-town crime movie has more character possibilities.

I don’t know what I was expecting from Jungle Cruise but I will say that when your lead actress’s main talking point in her press appearances is that she did everything within her power to not be in the movie, that doesn’t exactly give you confidence in the flick.

Then again, the history of this project dictates that whoever ended up in it will have probably done so kicking and screaming. Jungle Cruise has been one of those cursed projects in Hollywood, the very definition of “development hell.” The project was first conceived after Disney converted Pirates of the Caribbean into a successful film and was to star Tom Hanks and Tim Allen. Since then, it’s been one problem after another.

But after a Rock attachment and more rewrites than the Bible, the movie found a green light when Disney convinced Emily Blunt to come onboard. Producer Hiram Garcia claimed that the script was cracked when they realized that Emily’s scientist character should be the lead, not The Rock. Without the burden of having to ground the protag, The Rock could develop his own version of Jack Sparrow, and just… to put it simply… screw around.

Jungle Cruise draws most heavily on two films – Raiders of the Lost Ark and the aforementioned Pirates. It takes place in 1916. Lily, a privileged scientist who wears pants instead of dresses, has heard of a sacred flower deep in the Amazon Jungle that can cure any disease. So she and her brother, MacGregor, head to the heart of Brazil with a mechanical arrowhead thingey which holds the key to finding the flower.

Once in the Amazon, they run into Frank, a bargain basement cruise skipper who hasn’t uttered a single truth in 40 years. When Frank can’t make the rent on his boat, he’s forced to accept the Lily job, and off they go. Almost immediately, they encounter a Nazi (you may ask how there are Nazis in 1916 but just trust me, he’s a Nazi) with his own sub (I told you about those Raiders references) who will stop at nothing to get that arrowhead. Gotta have your McGuffins if you’re writing a big Disney movie!

After Frank tries several times to con Lily (at one point orchestrating an operation of fake cannibal tribes to pretend to kidnap them), they run into an actual threat in Aguirre and his band of Spanish jungle spirits. Aguirre, who’s made out of snakes (I told you about those Pirates references), is also looking for the super flower, presumably to turn him back into a non-snake person. Even though they don’t trust each other, Frank and Lily will have to work together to defeat both the Nazis and the snake people so they can find the sacred flower and erase all disease and suffering on planet earth.

So, in the newsletter – which I know you all read – I talked about a famous screenwriter (Terry Rossio) who claimed that the reason he was filthy rich while so many other screenwriters couldn’t afford to refill their Lime Scooter credit, was because he focused on making fun happy entertaining movies while all the other screenwriters were trying to make edgy “dark” R-rated material. “Jungle Cruise,” this screenwriter would argue, is the sort of script you SHOULD be writing if you want to become successful beyond your wildest dreams in Hollywood.

Do I agree with him?

Can I say, ‘sort of?’

Family films for young kids (Pixar and Disney Animation), Family films for medium-aged kids (Jungle Cruise and Pirates of the Caribbean), and Family films for teenaged kids (Star Wars and Marvel movies) make the most money in Hollywood. Period. And these films are all uplifting positive experiences that make you feel good after seeing them. So, yes, if you’re writing any of these movies, it means you are getting a huge paycheck.

But I think the conversation surrounding why writers do or do not want to write these movies is more complicated that Terry Rossio laid out. If you write Jungle Cruise, nobody will ever EVER know your name as a screenwriter. Ditto The Jungle Book. Ditto Malificent. Ditto The Lion King. Ditto Black Widow. Ditto Captain Marvel. So, yes, you do get paid the big bucks. But you feel unappreciated. You feel like anyone could’ve done the job.

Remember, the only reason people know Terry Rossio’s name is because he started a popular website in the 90s where he and his writing partner were the only professional screenwriters out there giving advice. Had he not started that site, nobody would know his name.

So I think that’s the real dilemma here. When you write one of these movies, it’s purely for the paycheck. You will never get recognition for them EVEN WITHIN the industry itself. Because when these movies do well, it’s the director who gets the accolades, the actors, the visual effects team, and even the studio itself is going to get credit before the screenwriter does.

But some people don’t care about that. Some people want to make money. Hell, I want to make money producing movies. So I’m not standing up here on my high horse saying I’m better than this. But it is a question screenwriters have to ask themselves. Do they want to become a working screenwriter who nobody will ever know?

If you do, then by all means, write high concept PG spec screenplays and think of them as calling cards for getting one of those Disney jobs. Then, once you’re called into the room, you MUST be good at coming up with an angle.

The angle that got Jungle Cruise made was changing the main character from the captain to the passenger. Switching the protagonist is one of the best ways to find a fresh angle in any script. A lot of writers get lost in the bells and whistles of a property (“What if we set the cruise… IN SPACE?”). Yes, you can find fresh angles that way. But it takes so much less energy to switch the POV of the film, which often yields more interesting results.

By switching the main character from Frank to Lily in Jungle Cruise, it allowed them to make Frank more mysterious and more fun. I don’t want to spoil anything but there’s a major reveal with Frank later in the movie and I don’t see how they could’ve done that if he were the protagonist.

We were just talking about this in my Ernest review, which is a short story being adapted into a movie. The short story had the father as the protagonist. But the father was angry and inactive. The son, who was a secondary character in the narrative, was the most active character. So I’m willing to bet that the screenwriter will make him the lead.

I actually think every writer owes it to himself, before they start writing, to imagine the movie through every other characters’ eyes to see if they’re missing out on a better movie. Let’s take Raiders as an example. What does that movie look like with Marion as the lead? Pretty good actually. She’s a fun character who seems to get in a lot of mischief. But she’s not as good of a character as Indiana Jones.

Or, if we’re looking at recent box office, what about Stillwater? Does that movie get better if the daughter is the protagonist rather then her father? I think it does. She’s the one in trouble. Not him. Her story seems more interesting. Also, focusing on her would probably necessitate you back up and see the immediate aftermath of the murder, which would’ve been way more dramatic than anything else that occurs in that sloppy screenplay.

Getting back to Jungle Cruise, writing a movie like this isn’t dissimilar to watching a movie like this. You kind of feel good about it while it’s happening. But then, when you’re finished, the experience quickly slips from your mind, leaving you wondering if the whole thing ever happened in the first place.