This may become a new feature on the site depending on how it goes.

I was thinking of this recent article about Ridley Scott saying he doesn’t watch movies anymore. He feels that modern movies are “mediocre.”

I started to think about that. Because a collaborator of Scott’s, Denzel Washington, recently said something similar. “I’m tired of movies,” he said.

On the surface, this makes complete sense. Two legends north of 70, decades deep in the factory where the sausage gets made. When you know how the trick works, the magic evaporates. And movies ARE magic tricks—a carefully orchestrated series of misdirections and emotional manipulations. When they work, you get oohs and ahhs. When they don’t, you get One Battle After Another.

I’M KIDDING!

Sheesh. Try not to get triggered here. Actually, I have more to say about One Battle in a bit. And it may actually be positive.

Look, I get Scott and Washington to a degree. I’ve read thousands of screenplays. I see the gears turning, the tricks being deployed. Every year it gets harder to fool me. And when I hit a streak of ten mediocre movies in a row, I start wondering if the whole industry has driven off a cliff.

But here’s the thing—interesting movies are still being made. Great ones, even. Anora was phenomenal. Parasite was a masterclass. Eddington was fascinating. The last decade alone gave us Get Out, Promising Young Woman, The Big Short, Oppenheimer, Poor Things, Everything Everywhere All At Once, Red Rocket, The Brutalist.

Hell, the barrier to entry is so low now that Sean Baker made Tangerine on an iPhone, and it was brilliant. That film doesn’t exist in 1978. So maybe there are more interesting movies being made than ever before—we’re just drowning in so much content that the signal-to-noise ratio has scrambled our tuner.

Which made me wonder: Maybe Scott isn’t railing against ALL movies. Maybe it’s specifically the Hollywood studio movie he’s mourning. Because his solution to modern cinema’s mediocrity is rewatching his own filmography—and Scott has always operated in the big-budget studio system. That’s the language he speaks.

To that end, Scott has more of a point. Although it’s a complex one. Studio movies are definitely not the same as they used to be. I’m just not entirely sure what that means.

Because “Movies aren’t as good as they used to be” is the laziest take in cinema history. I’ve been hearing it for 30 years. I remember walking past an old couple after Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, and hearing them say, “That was so good. Hollywood doesn’t make good movies like that anymore.” As long as there is a movie business, there will be people proclaiming it’s “not as good as it used to be.”

What even IS a “good” Hollywood movie? Does it require a certain sophistication that appeals mainly to adults? Or is it just that the strenuous, obsessive development culture of the past did such a thorough job weeding out the stupid that finished products came out more honed? Movies like The Rock were notoriously beaten into submission during development until the scripts were bulletproof. You had a *genuine* good time watching The Rock—not an empty good time, which is how I suspect Scott categorizes the modern moviegoing experience.

Of course, the elephant in the room is the superhero genre. It completely rewrote the map. And if you’re not into superhero movies (which I’m guessing Scott isn’t, since he’s never gone anywhere near them) then you’d naturally think the Hollywood system has bottomed out.

But I’d push back on that. Big-budget Hollywood movies with weight and sophistication still get made every year. One Battle After Another is a studio movie. Warner Brothers dropped 150 million on it. And it’s about as adult a film as you can make. I don’t see Twitch-loving teeny-boppers rushing to Century City after school to watch 50-year-old Leo in a bathrobe pontificating about immigration.

We’ve actually seen some VERY INTERESTING movies in the studio system lately. Furiosa was such a bold, risky creative swing. Barbie was unlike anything we’d ever seen. Sinners just came out earlier this year! Top Gun Maverick was so universally loved that even the most cynical corners of the internet had to tip their hats. You had the Dune movies, which are so close to the heady books in their adaptation that the Herbert family should consider adopting Denis Villeneuve.

I think what’s happened is this: The superhero genre has so dominated the studio landscape that it’s overshadowed the fact that good, interesting movies are still being made. But if you look past those overbearing 200-million-dollar marketing campaigns trying to convince you that Superman is the only movie being released this year, you’ll find good stuff, Ridley Scott and Denzel Washington. You just gotta look a little harder.

Which brings me to this: What movies still win me over despite my knowing all the tricks? The answer traces back to the first movie I liked in 2025—Novocaine. And it reveals a formula that works on everyone, from newbie moviegoers to cynical old complainers alike.

Develop a character that I really like. Put them in a difficult situation. Show them continually getting knocked down. Then have them keep getting back up and trying.

Do that, and everybody will like your movie. Because Novocaine doesn’t break ANY NEW GROUND AT ALL. It’s fairly standard. But that’s the power of that formula. When we genuinely like someone, we don’t need the story to be the second coming of Chinatown.

Of course, that first part—develop a character I really like—is the hardest thing to do in screenwriting. But the good news? Most of your writing competition doesn’t even know that should be the priority. The dumb ones actively rail against it. So just knowing that’s the goal puts you in position to write something great.

The movie business isn’t dead. It’s just changing, like it always has. It changes literally every decade. And as the superhero era flies toward its inevitable demise, it’ll change again. And I suspect it’ll change for the better, giving us more of these big, smart, fun Hollywood productions that Scott yearns for.

Genre: Drama
Premise: A young woman attends the funeral of her college boyfriend’s father, ten years after they broke up.
About: This script finished in the middle of the pack on last year’s Black List.
Writer: Gaelyn Golde
Details: 100 pages

The Feels.

We’ve all got them.

Well, most of us anyway.

And we use screenplays as vessels to convey those feels so we can give other people the feels too!

One could argue that the entire point of this maddening process called screenwriting is to deliver feels. The writers who can make people feel the most are the most successful.

But why is making people feel something so hard? We’re all living this same tough, hard-nosed life together. We’re all experiencing the same things. Just share what we’re going through and, naturally, other people will relate.

Except it isn’t that easy.

In fact, it’s really, really hard. There are a lot of ingredients that go into giving people the feels. There’s realism. There’s creating characters we care about. There’s regulating an emotional experience that maximizes a person’s likelihood of feeling sadness. There’s creating a compelling enough story that the reader stays invested enough that their “feels” nerve endings remain activated.

Today’s script hits the feels head on. A box of Kleenex was sent out to every producer who read it. Metaphorically, of course.

Let’s find out if we’ll all be blubbering crybabies by the end.

—

Saturn Return follows 29-year-olds Anders and Eve, along with their good friend Lincoln. The story is set in Indiana, where Eve and Lincoln drive in to attend Anders’ father’s funeral. The group, who met and became best friends in college, hasn’t seen each other in a long time. So there’s a lot of emotion hovering just beneath the surface of their reunion.

Just as the funeral is about to start, we cut back ten years to when the three first met at college. Eve is a nerd who doesn’t want to talk to anybody and only wants to study. Anders is, conversely, determined to network the hell out of the school so he can fulfill his dreams of becoming insanely rich. And Lincoln is a cool jock who carpe diems every day.

It isn’t long before the three become friends, and we’re jumping forward again to the present, where awkwardness reigns. There’s clearly a lot of tension between Anders and Eve. Although it’s never explicitly said, we get the feeling these two were once together and something happened to tear them apart.

And that’s pretty much the entire story. We keep jumping back and forth between past and present, getting little breadcrumbs tossed at us regarding Anders and Eve’s past. It turns out they did date. They did fall in love. But when the real world came knocking, they each got jobs on different sides of the country and had to split up. This funeral may just be an opportunity for them to revisit whether that was the best decision.

—

I’m going to make a big assumption here: this was based on a real experience for the writer, Gaelyn Golde. When it comes to writing stories about the feels, that’s a good starting point. You want to mine as much real-life emotion as you can.

But using real-life stories to inspire your screenplays can be dangerous. Here’s why: when you’re too close to the source material, you lose objectivity about what actually serves the story. A screenplay is about distilling everything down to what’s necessary and cutting everything else. When you write about real life, you tend to think everything is necessary because your subjective point of view tells you that if it happened to you, it matters. But “happened to me” doesn’t automatically equal “essential to the story.”

Take the character of Lincoln. Poor old Lincoln has nothing going on in this story. He has no bearing on the plot whatsoever. It’s not like him and Eve ever got together.

I’m guessing that in Golde’s real-life experience of going to this funeral, “her version” of Lincoln was part of that experience and, therefore, she felt he had to be in the screenplay too. But he didn’t. So he probably should’ve been excised. Or, if you just like the idea of having three characters instead of two—since it creates a more varied dynamic—that’s fine. But then you have to reimagine the real-world character so that he’s more intricately involved in the plot.

Okay, back to my original question.

Did the script give us the feels?

It certainly tries to. But the story is so on-the-nose (it delivers this very literal, grounded story about funerals and former relationships) that it almost doesn’t feel like a movie.

Contrast this with a similar story I reviewed last year, Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow, which also covered a trio of friends: one girl and two guys. That story felt more cinematic. It followed a group of friends who started a video game company, and we watched them grow together and become rich and famous and then deal with the fallout after the fame. It just felt bigger and less obvious.

So that’s what I struggled with here. Saturn Return was too on the nose. I guess you could argue that rawness, that realness, should make the feels even more intense. But it didn’t for me. It felt like the writer was trying too hard to make us cry and not hard enough to tell us a good story. Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow was a big, grand, sweeping story that definitely made you feel something.

I will say this, though: time-cutting in a love story is very effective at creating emotion. We do this all the time as humans. We time-travel in our heads back to moments in the past, thinking, “What if this had been different? What if that had gone differently?”

Scripts like this are the visual representation of that. And it was probably the best thing about the script.

But the problem with Saturn Return – which phonetically doesn’t sound right, by the way – is that it leans so heavily into death that I became too aware of its manipulative tendencies.

There’s a scene in this script where Anders, whose dad has just died in the present, is with Eve in the past when she’s talking to his dad, who at that time was alive. Anders’ dad asks Eve what her dad, who died when she was young, was like. Eve tells him her complex feelings about her dead father, and Anders’ dad says not to worry and brings up when his father had died when he was young.

And it was just like… come on, man. Too much.

Look, I get what you’re going for. You want us swimming in an ocean of our tears. But here’s the thing: overloading people with any one emotion, especially grief, is not the path to feels. You have to create constant contrast between happiness and sadness, taking the reader on a roller coaster. Because it’s the roller coaster effect that creates the crying. You bring them up, and then, when they least expect it, you pull them down.

There’s a little of that here. The characters joke around with each other some. But it’s not enough.

What I will say is that Golde achieves what she set out to achieve. This is not some poorly constructed script, like a lot of the scripts that plague the Black List. But because it’s so on-the-nose with its treatment of its concept, and because it hits us with death again and again and again, it shows its hand too clearly and we never fall under its spell.

Decent but not quite recommend-worthy.

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

What I Learned: All story engines are not created equal. You could even say that every engine has a number beside it representing how powerful a force it is in pushing the story forward. 1 being the lowest and 10 being the highest. Killing Thanos? That’s a “10” on the story engine scale. Finding out what happened to Eve and Anders’ relationship? I’d give that maybe a “3.”

Now, that number could’ve been higher had the writer spent more time hyping up what had happened. If, for example, you kept telling us that something big and terrible had occurred—but we have to wait to find out what—now you’re bringing that story engine up to a “6,” maybe even a “7.” The lesson? Don’t just rely on the inherent drama of your concept. Amplify it. Make us desperate to know the answer. That’s how you turn a weak engine into a powerful one.

The most ambitious movie of Paul Thomas Anderson’s career

Genre: Drama/Thriller
Premise: A former revolutionary who gets high all day must spring back into action when his teenage daughter is taken by the very group he used to fight for.
About: Paul Thomas Anderson burst onto the scene as a directing superstar with his one-two punch of Boogie Nights and Magnolia. The auteur continues to try and push the boundaries of cinema in an industry that seems determined to push the auteur aside. One Battle After Another, which stars Leonardo DiCaprio, brought in 22 million dollars on its opening weekend, and attempts to have staying power for the rest of the year in hopes of becoming Warner Brothers’ big flashy Oscar hopeful.
Writer: Paul Thomas Anderson
Details: Almost 3 hours long!!!

A month and a half ago, I started seeing a lot of publicity for this movie, which was confusing because Paul Thomas Anderson movies don’t usually get marketing campaigns this big. Sure, it had Leonardo DiCaprio in it. But it’s not like he was playing Jack Dawson again.

Paul Thomas Anderson hasn’t exactly been hitting the ball out of the park lately. The worldwide box office for his last film, Licorice Pizza, was 33 million. For The Phantom Thread, 48 million. Inherent Vice, 15 million. And The Master, 28 million.

So why is his latest movie getting the same marketing push as a Marvel movie?

Finally, the answer revealed itself.

Warner Brothers paid 150 million dollars to make this movie.

150 million dollars!!!

That’s four times the budget of any previous Paul Thomas Anderson film.

So of course WB was promoting the heck out of the movie. They had to after sinking 150 million dollars into it.

Did the movie deliver on that huge investment? Not exactly. It squeaked out 22 million bucks, officially killing the overtly political movie going forward. I mean, if audiences won’t show up for a film that mirrors the biggest political story in the country, when will they?

Everybody knows that if you want to make a political movie, you do it through sci-fi or horror. How do I know this? Because James Cameron made a movie about the environment in 2008 and it made 3 billion bucks. It was called Avatar.

Look, I’m not here to sugarcoat it — I’ve always had mixed feelings about Paul Thomas Anderson, who invented his own lane, aka, “the sloppy auteur.” He’ll present his movie as if it’s set in 1983, like he does here, yet have cops taking selfies at the end of the sequence. Maybe in his late-night drug-addled writing sessions, choices like that felt inspired. To me, they just feel careless. Have a plan. Build a consistent world that makes sense so we can believe in it. It’s not 1992 anymore — you can’t cram 72 storylines into a two-and-a-half-hour movie and expect critics to call it genius. The internet changed that. It raised the bar. But Anderson still seems to be playing by the old rules.

If you haven’t seen the film, and I hope you never have to, it follows a terrorist group called the French 75 (yet the movie looks like it’s set in 1983, though we later find out it starts in 2009, only to eventually to be set in 2025). Leading the group is a black woman named Perfidia. She and Bob (Leonardo DiCaprio), the French 75’s resident bomb expert, are in a relationship.

Colonel Steven Lockjaw (Sean Penn) has been tasked with stopping the French 75, but quickly falls for the sexy Perfidia. He tells her she can do all the terrorist things she wants if she just has sex with him. That’s an easy decision for her and she does so without telling Bob.

Perfidia later stupidly kills a cop, gets arrested, and the only way to lighten her sentence is to name names. She gives up everyone but Bob.

16 years later, a severely lazy Bob is raising his daughter, Willa, he had with Perfidia (or so he thinks). Willa just wants a normal life but gets taken by a reestablished wing of the French 75.

They’re saving her because word is Colonel Lockjaw is looking for her, as he believes she’s his daughter. Lockjaw’s pursuit is complicated by the fact that he’s a part of a secret white nationalist group that doesn’t allow interracial relationships. So Lockjaw wants to erase the evidence by killing his half-black daughter.

Meanwhile, Bob, who’s been laying on a couch for 16 years getting high, is pulled back into service. The lazy forgetful bumbling druggie teams up with Willa’s karate sensei to go and save her. Turns out it’s hard to do stuff, though, when you’ve become the physical embodiment of Jeffrey Lebowski.

Hmmmmmm…

I’m trying to think of anything I liked about this movie. The closest I’ve got to a positive would be Sean Penn’s character, Colonel Lockjaw. I wouldn’t say I liked the character. But the combination of the character and Sean Penn’s weird interpretation of it was, at least, interesting.

I don’t know what Leonardo DiCaprio is doing these days. This is the second major role in a row where he plays a half-witted dolt. At this point, if your script has a moronic main character, just send it to Leo’s people — he clearly loves these guys.

The frustrating part is that there was a version of this character — Bob — that could’ve made the whole movie work. Here’s what I mean. The film revolves around a group of ultra-progressive revolutionaries determined to change the world, and Bob is one of them.

Then comes the fallout (Perifia names names), sixteen years pass, and Bob gets pulled back into that world. Now, from a dramatic point of view, the most interesting version of this setup writes itself: Bob’s grown up. He’s changed. He’s become a middle-aged, 9-to-5, moderately conservative guy. The polar opposite of who he used to be.

That’s where the tension (and the humor) would’ve come from. A man re-entering a culture he no longer understands. A rebel turned square who suddenly has to face the ideals he abandoned. That’s conflict. That’s irony.

And you can tell Anderson wanted that contrast. Like when Willa’s friends come over and one of them is transgender. Bob awkwardly asks what pronouns he should use. It’s a great setup for a generational or ideological clash… except it doesn’t track, because Bob’s still progressive. He’s still this aging hippy whose identity was built in the same world that would obviously be comfortable around a transgender person.

The same issue pops up later, when Bob’s trying to call the French 75 number and forgets the old code words that will allow him access to his daughter’s whereabouts. He starts yelling at the operator, who chirps back, “You’re invading my safe space!” Bob snaps, “Invading your space? We’re not even in the same room!”

Again — Anderson wants that contrast, that sense that Bob has drifted so far from his roots he no longer speaks the language. But it never lands, because Bob isn’t fundamentally different. He’s only slightly less progressive than before. And “slightly” doesn’t create drama. It just creates noise.

All of this ties back to the larger point: Paul Thomas Anderson is a screenwriting cautionary tale. He came up in an era that celebrated anti-storytelling — where craft was considered “square” and traditional structure was seen as a prison. As a result, he never fully grasped that to make this premise work, Bob needed to be a true fish out of water. Instead, Anderson seems to think that simply moving Bob from one pond to another is enough.

By the way, one of the easiest tells of a weak screenwriter is an inflated page count. Long scripts are what happen when a writer can’t make decisions. Instead of committing to a clear direction, they throw everything in — every tangent, every side character, every half-idea that should’ve been cut. The result? A screenplay equivalent of the director’s cut. The one that no one asked for.

Look, I don’t love cutting scenes I like either. But that’s literally the job. You have to serve the spine of the story. This whole subplot about Colonel Lockjaw’s wannabe–white nationalist group that forbids interracial relationships? It’s so ludicrous it drags the film into parody. You didn’t need it. His motivation was already clean and compelling: he wants his daughter. That’s enough.

Unless you are heavily into leftist politics, a self-proclaimed cinephile, an uptight critic for one of the major newspapers, or a die-hard Paul Thomas Anderson fan, I would not watch this. I wouldn’t even bother when it shows up on streaming. It’s long. It’s aimless. It’s self-serving. And it’s ten drafts and a much better screenwriter short of anything watchable.

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

What I learned: “The Level Above The Level” – In both this movie and Eddington (a movie I liked), both writers create this level of people above the central antagonists. Here, it’s this group of white nationalists who supposedly rule the world. And in Eddington, it’s this black ops military unit that protects ultra-progressive ideology. I don’t believe “the level above the level” works. Without enough time to let the plotline blossom, it always feels forced. I thought the wild gun shootout at the end of Eddington was fun. But I had no idea why this black ops unit was interested in killing a random small-town sheriff. And here in One Battle after Another, the white nationalist storyline had such a weak payoff that you clearly didn’t need it. Which meant you could’ve chopped off 10-15 minutes of your movie just by dropping it. So, the next time you’re thinking of adding a level ABOVE the level, don’t do it. It’s probably not going to work.

These scene showdowns always end up being a little more controversial than I expect. Some people have said that by creating this challenge, it forces writers to write bigger scenes than they otherwise would have. I don’t think that’s true. As unknown screenwriters, you have to hook a reader right away. So starting with a great scene is, dare I say, essential.

And how do I respond to these criticisms? By announcing another scene showdown!

So you know I’m not trolling, the main reason I’m holding this new showdown is TO KEEP YOU GUYS WRITING. I’ve already heard several of you complain that writing your scripts has been difficult. So, anything I can do to push you forward and continue to write, I’m going to do.

What’s this latest showdown?

It’s called the “THAT SCENE” SHOWDOWN.

Every good movie has THAT SCENE, that amazing awesome scene that everyone remembers. Technically speaking, your climax should be your best scene. But, for whatever reason, it never ends up that way. The best scene is usually somewhere in the second act. So that’s the scene I want you to write. I want your best scene that occurs in your second act (it’s fine if it isn’t in your second act but that’s what I want you to aim for).

If you want examples, the Deli scene in The Wrestler comes to mind. Will confronting the Harvard Douchebag in the bar in Good Will Hunting. Anton Chigurh’s coin toss in the gas station in No Country for Old Men. The cars waiting at the border crossing scene in Sicario. The blood test scene in The Thing. Clarice’s first meeting with Hannibal Lecter. Georgie talking to the clown in the storm drain scene in It. When the marines inspect the colony for the first time in Aliens. The clown doll attacking the boy in Poltergeist.

It’s that scene that people talk about for years. It’s that movie that you put on JUST SO YOU CAN GET TO THAT SCENE AND WATCH IT. It’s your movie’s best scene. And I want to see what that’s going to be for all the Blood & Ink participants.

Even if you haven’t gotten that far in your screenplay yet, you should already know what that scene is going to be.  So, don’t wait to get to that scene. Jump ahead and write it. That should actually help those of you who aren’t writing fast enough. It’ll give you a checkpoint to write towards.

Don’t worry about context. I’ll give you 100 words to set up your scene for the readers if need be. And we’re going to post this showdown on Halloween – this October 31st. Which gives you about a month to write it. I would think that’d be plenty of time! And, you can start sending in your entries RIGHT NOW.

By the way, a few Blood & Ink participants seemed to think that, by not making the First Scene Showdown, they were no longer in the contest. Let me be clear: ALL 97 BLOOD & INK ENTRIES ARE STILL IN THE CONTEST. You don’t have to enter these Blood & Ink showdowns if you don’t want to. But you should still be writing your script so that it’s ready in February.

Okay, here are the details for ‘THAT SCENE’ SHOWDOWN

For Blood & Ink Contest Participants Only!
What: “That Scene” Showdown
When: Friday, October 31st
Deadline: Thursday, October 30th, 10pm Pacific Time
Send me: title, genre, logline, up to 100 words of context for the scene, a PDF of the scene
Sent to: carsonreeves3@gmail.com

Should today’s scene have been included in the First Page Showdown? A lot of you thought so!

This week, I’ve been breaking down the top scenes in my Blood & Ink Screenwriting Contest. This is a contest writers had to pitch for—you had to come up with a good enough idea just to get in. Of 2500+ pitches, only 97 got through. Last weekend, I did a “showdown” for those 97 writers where they could compete to see who had the best first scene.

The six best scenes were featured on the site. However, Eldave, who’s in the contest, posted his scene in the comments section and got a ton of positive feedback, with many readers proclaiming he  should’ve won!

Should he have?

Let’s find out!

I love the first three paragraphs of this page. They’re simple. They’re effective. They’re descriptive. They imply a strong sense of craft. I know, after reading these first three paragraphs, that I’m dealing with someone who’s written a lot of scripts. However, that’s not always an advantage.  More on that in a sec.

When you read a lot, you come across patterns. Writers tend to make similar choices since we’re all drawing from the same pot of ideas. And it can be said that what a reader is looking for is a writer who disrupts the pattern. Not haphazardly. But with a plan.

So when I read this opening page, my first thought was, “It’s the old suicidal person on the other line scene and our heroine is going to save them.” It’s a scene pattern I’ve come across a lot.

Now, that doesn’t mean I’m tuned out. If the writer can give the main character a clever way to solve the problem, I’ll call the scene a success. Or if the scene goes in a different direction than I expected, that’s also appealing to me. So let’s see what happens.

When I read this second page, the big word that popped into my head was “competent.” The writing is very competent. It’s very professional. It’s doing the job.

But a screenplay needs something beyond competence. It needs a special quality, wherever that quality is going to come from. And when I read this page, this fear started to creep in that this scene was going to be adequate and nothing more. Because I feel like I’ve read hundreds of scenes just like it.

All of this is going through my head as I’m trying to decide if this scene is going to make the cut for the weekend.

This was probably the page where I decided this wasn’t going to make the cut. Because this is the page where our main character solves the problem. And my question is: what special or unique or clever thing did she do to solve the problem? As far as I can tell, nothing.

She just got the guy to stay there long enough so the cops could pick him up. Remember, when you’re introducing a character, you’re trying to create something the reader will either fall in love with or become fascinated by. Anything less, and the reader isn’t going to be interested in them.

I’ll give you an example. The famous Lethal Weapon Mel Gibson suicidal jumper scene. In that scene, a guy is about to jump off a building and Detective Martin Riggs (Mel Gibson) is tasked with stopping him. What does Riggs do? Instead of trying to stop him, he says, “Let’s do it!” The jumper is so confused he’s not sure how to react. Riggs keeps pushing him. Let’s do it. Let’s do it! And eventually, they jump!

It’s a scene that both goes against what we’re expecting and creates a fascinating character in the process.

Those are the kinds of things I’m looking for when I get introduced to characters.

The explanation of using the word “darling” didn’t make this feel any more clever. If the idea is that she goes against the handbook to save people, I’m down with that. But if sometimes using an unapproved word is breaking the rules, it’s the tamest rule-breaking I’ve ever seen. So much more could’ve been done here.

For example, if this would’ve been some incel lamenting the fact that no girls like him and Zoey exploited that to save his life by pretending to be romantically interested in him. Maybe even agreeing to go on a date with him if he stepped back, only to go cold the second the cops snatched him up, that’s a character I would’ve been interested in. But just calling someone ‘darling’ doesn’t move the needle for me.

In every script, I’m always looking for honesty. For truth. In other words, are the people in the story acting out truthful moments, saying truthful things? Or are they just puppets for the writer to say what he wants or do what he wants? The more I see of the latter, the more tuned out I become. The more I see of the former, the more invested I get.

I have a hard time believing this call center goes cuckoo over “the q word.” That feels made up to me. It feels like a lie a writer concocted. I want the truth. And I want the details of that truth.

Whenever I hand myself over to a writer, I want to be pulled into their world, to the specificity of that unique place. I just read this interview with James Cameron where he talks about how obsessive he is with every single little detail on Pandora. Which is a huge reason the movies work. The details feel like they could only exist in that specific reality.

I would’ve liked to see more of that specificity highlighted in this call center. It should almost feel like an alien planet. Because it is to someone who’s never been inside one before. And it’s up to the writer to convey that.

Essentially what’s happening here is that the scene is rebooting. It’s starting over. We’ve got a brand new call. And the good news is, there’s something different going on with this call. There’s something glitchy, both in the connection and the way that connection is interfering with the nearby electronics.

Yesterday we talked about dangling carrots. This is the first true carrot being dangled in this scene. And it’s taken me six pages to get here. I’m not saying that’s too long. I think if some of the issues I brought up earlier were improved, this moment would hit harder. But as you can tell, I’m on the fence with these pages. So this moment feels more like a Hail Mary to bring me back into the fold than a continuation of an organically building sequence.

The good news is, it’s a pretty big carrot, which is the right move. We’ve waited through a handful of pages of what was, essentially, exposition. We deserve a reward. So you have to make that reward plump and juicy.

For some reason, I’m only casually interested in this boy’s plight. I don’t know if it’s because the rest of the pages haven’t fully pulled me in or if it’s something with the boy himself. If I had to guess, I’d say it’s because the scenario feels too obvious. First we have the drug addict tweaking out. Now we have the little child. None of these things feel different enough.

I can’t emphasize enough how much I read and, because of that, I read stuff like this all the time. Something that might help you guys is to put yourself in my head and ask, “Is this something Carson has probably seen a lot?” If the answer is yes, go back to the drawing board and write a scene that’s more original.

There’s a beat on this page that is the key to this entire scene living up to its promise. It’s when the boy says, “I got a bike. Santa already came.” And Zoey says, “Why would Santa have already—?”

This is supposed to be our introduction to the hook—the strange situation our operator finds herself in. Receiving calls from the future. But it’s such a blink-and-you-miss-it moment that it doesn’t register. I wouldn’t be surprised if someone reading this completely missed it.

Again, you’re trying to HOOK A READER. It’s one of the hardest things to do in the world. Reading takes work. So you need to give people a reason to do it. I would’ve built an entire page around the confusion surrounding what the boy is saying as opposed to just one half-line. Have him talking about several things that don’t make sense.

There’s this great sequence in Back to the Future where Marty is at his mother’s parents’ house in the past (1955), trying to find Doc. There are so many great lines in this scene, but my favorite is when Marty asks where Riverside Drive is. The dad says it’s on the other end of town, “a block past Maple.” Marty says, “A block past Maple? That’s John F. Kennedy Drive.” The dad looks at him like he’s crazy. “Who the hell is John F. Kennedy?” That dinner scene really mined the deliciousness of its concept – a kid getting stuck 30 years in the past with his young parents.

I get that Eldave doesn’t want to show his cards too soon, but you need to hook us here and this scene BARELY mines its hook. Even the scene at the house afterwards is rushed. You want to SLOW DOWN as we get to the house. Show that the cops believe someone is in danger. Have them carefully go up to the house, maybe even knock the door in when nobody answers. And they just see this family casually dining. That would’ve hit a lot harder.

To summarize, this scene was very competently written, but I think there were a lot of much stronger choices left on the table, which is the main reason it didn’t make the cut.

But as I said earlier this week, THIS IS FINE! Nobody writes a great first scene right off the bat. What often happens is, as you continue to write the rest of your screenplay and you understand your characters and world better, you go back to this scene with new information and improve upon it. I think this scene could be great. But it’s definitely at a 6 right now and it needs to be at a 9 by the time the script is finished.