It’s the Back to Back Battle of the Airplane Scripts! Who will win? One of the most successful authors ever or a first time Black List writer?
Genre: Mystery
Premise: During a Chinese flight that experiences massive turbulence, three people die. A young investigator for the company that built the plane has less than a week to figure out what went wrong.
About: The deal Michael Crichton made for the film rights to this book were, at the time, the most expensive ever, at 10 million dollars. You’d think if someone paid that much, the movie would’ve gotten made, right? I guess Crichton kept vetoing the scripts, which he had the power to do. This version of the script was written by Frank Pierson, who wrote and directed the 1976 version of A Star Is Born. That was a very big time in Pierson’s life as, just a year earlier, he’d written Dog Day Afternoon (“ATTTTTTIIICAAAAAA!!!”). Alas, Crichton seems to have been unimpressed. Will we be?
Writer: Frank Pierson (based on the book by Michael Crichton)
Details: Sept 21, 1998, 127 pages
I asked you for plane crashes, you gave me plane crashes!
Thanks to everyone who e-mailed, sending me scripts, loglines, and articles to all the plane crashes. Still have to get through all of them. You see, I stopped when resident 90s script expert, Scott Crawford, sent me Airframe.
I’d never even heard of Airframe. And I’m someone who was once a Michael Crichton aficionado. I was even one of 14 people who read that book of his about nanobots! For those of you young’uns, there was a time when Crichton was the biggest idea-man in Hollywood. We’re talking about the brain behind Jurassic Park. Everything he wrote turned to diamonds.
Crichton and an airplane disaster sound like the perfect marriage. Let’s find out if the two lived happily ever after.
Casey Singleton gets a call that a plane heading from Hong Kong to the U.S. made an emergency landing in Los Angeles after experiencing thunderous turbulence. The turbulence was so bad, in fact, that 3 people died and dozens more were injured. Although this was a Chinese airline, TransPacific Air, it was an American built plane from Norton. Casey is the head of the investigation team at Norton.
As soon as the plane is cleared, Casey brings her team on to see the destruction inside. Seats have been flattened as if a giant stepped on them. There’s blood everywhere. The main cabin is a disaster area. There’s even a body that went halfway through the ceiling that’s still lodged up there (wear your seatbelts everybody!).
The investigation quickly centers on a design flaw that may have made the wing’s flaps deploy mid-flight, which would’ve sent the plane tumbling around in the air like a drunk uncle. The reason this flap issue is so important is because the president of Norton, a guy named Jon Edgarton, has a deal with the Chinese to send 50 more of these planes to them next week! So not only do they have to figure out what went wrong. They have to convince the Chinese it was a freak accident.
Meanwhile, a video tape from INSIDE THE PLANE somehow starts getting circulated around town and the rumor is that whatever’s on that video is gnarly. If that tape somehow makes its way to the news, the company is doomed. When Casey finally sees the tape, she’s horrified. It shows in graphic detail all the chaos that went on while the turbulence was happening. When CNN gets a hold of it as well, Casey will have to use all of her persuasion powers to convince them not to show that tape. Will they?
Sometimes you come up with an idea where the idea itself is the angle. M. Night’s new movie where people age 1 year every hour on a beach is a concept where the angle has been decided as soon as the concept was decided.
Other times, writers are interested in subject matter – say, a plane incident – but don’t yet know what angle they’re going to tackle the story from. The decision you make on that angle will determine whether you’ve got a good idea or a bad one (or something in between).
Crichton, like me, wanted to write a plane story. He just didn’t know what the angle to that plane story would be. He ultimately decided on an investigation angle that dove deeply into the minutiae of an aviation malfunction.
Instead of a big flashy plane crash, this movie is about the little flashing lights in a cockpit that the pilots don’t understand. And the purpose of slats on a wing. And the pounds of force on the human body when a plane is dropping 500 feet per second. And the subcontracting details of allowing China to manufacture the fuselage.
I love specificity in storytelling. One of the biggest mistakes I see amateurs make is telling generalized stories without enough detail. The detail – the specifics of the world you’re exploring – are what sell the story. Airframe is the most convincing fictional story about a plane incident that I’ve ever read. The specificity is exceptional.
But the angle Crichton chose severely limited the concept’s wow-factor. Not everything has to be Jurassic Park. But I’m not sure why Crichton thought 3 people dying from turbulence was a big enough story. Hell, there’s even a moment in the script where a news producer is told about what happened but chooses not to put the story on the air. “Defective parts? I don’t want a defective parts story. I want a death trap in the sky, a flying coffin story.” When your own characters seem to know more about what an audience wants than you, you may be in trouble.
Now *I* thought the story was interesting but, I like I told you yesterday, that’s because I love the minutiae of plane accidents. But I don’t think non plane enthusiasts would give two shits about this angle.
A question you want to be asking yourself with whatever you’re writing is, “Why does this matter?” Why does 3 people dying in a plane matter? Because that’s where the audience’s mind will be. Maybe not consciously. But subconsciously. And when the answer is, “It doesn’t matter all that much,” the audience loses interest. They get bored. They tune out.
It’s a pretty surprising oversight by Crichton, who knows what a big idea is better than anyone.
It’s too bad because this script has some cool stuff going for it. First of all, it’s shockingly timely. The plot is about offloading work to China and China using shady practices that don’t prioritize the safety of their planes. It also has a strong female protagonist, which wasn’t exactly a common thing back in 1998.
They also did something really clever with Casey. Typically, the person investigating the mystery in a movie like this is trying to bring the company down. They’re a journalist trying to expose the truth. What Airframe does is it makes Casey an investigator for Norton, the company that built the plane. So her job isn’t just to investigate the incident. It’s to hide her findings. To protect the company instead of expose it. So everything she finds, she’s trying to keep it from getting out, which is a slightly different, and more dynamic, investigative process than we usually get.
Airframe is even more inside-baseball than yesterday’s plane script. And yesterday’s plane script was about something that really happened! It just goes to show how important research was to Crichton. You got the feeling that this guy knew how many millimeters the bolts were that held the fuselage together. Unfortunately, the script can’t overcome its weak premise. It should be a reminder to everyone that you can write some of your best stuff. But if you’re doing so with a weak concept, it won’t matter.
Script link: Airframe
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: A “What the hell are you talking about” character. Whenever you have a subject matter this technical or that requires a ton of exposition, it doesn’t make sense to have characters WHO ALREADY KNOW ALL THE ANSWERS TO THE QUESTIONS THEY’RE ASKING to talk about this stuff. So a trick to use is to add a “What the hell are you talking about” character. His main job is to be the brain of the audience and ask, “What the hell are you talking about?” This character in Airframe comes in the form of Bob Richman, a low-level assistant to Jon Edgarton. Edgarton hands Richman over to Casey so that he always has eyes on the investigation. Richman, who’s clueless about planes, is constantly asking Casey questions like, “Why is it bad for the flaps to deploy mid-flight?” so that the audience can keep up with the technical aspects of the story.
Today, we learn the vital difference between a STORY and a STORYTELLER.
Genre: Drama/True Story
Premise: Journalists race to expose how Boeing knowingly misled regulators, pilots, and airlines to cover up a problematic flight software system on the 737 MAX, leading to two major airplane crashes and the deaths of 346 people. Based on real events.
About: Today’s script comes from an up and coming writer and producer, Terry Huang. This script made last year’s Black List with 9 votes.
Writer: Terry Huang
Details: 105 pages
I used to be terrrrrriiiiffieeed of flying. To the point where, every time I got on a plane, I accepted that it was the end of my life. No, seriously. I’d look back fondly at the things that I’d accomplished. I’d be frustrated at the things that I hadn’t. And then, off I’d go, onto this 200 foot long metal tube that was sure to crash down in a fiery blaze with me inside of it. It was fun while it lasted!
It isn’t difficult to figure out where my fear of flying originated. When I was 8 years old, waiting at the terminal for a red eye flight to a Mexican destination with my family, my mother staged an open resistance to getting on the plane because she had a “feeling” that there was something wrong with it and that it was “going to crash.” Up until that point, I didn’t even know planes could crash! And so my fear of flying began.
The good news is I’m over that fear. Now I just worry about there being enough space for my bag in the overhead.
But due to my history, I’m still fascinated by airplane disasters. I still investigate famous crashes all the time. I’ve probably spent upwards of 30 hours looking into the infamous Tenerife crash (the most deadly crash in aviation history). It’s why I’ve repeatedly mentioned on this site that I’m looking for a killer plane concept to produce (have one? Send me the logline!).
Today’s script covers one of the scariest airplane disaster concepts of all, one that involves pilots doing exactly what they’ve been trained to do, only to have the plane’s computer take over and kill them. Let’s take a look.
60-something Dominic Gates is a reporter for the Seattle Times. In October of 2018, he hears about a Lion Air plane crash in Indonesia that killed all 189 people on board. Specializing in airplane crashes, Dominic starts making calls to his contacts to find out what happened.
Meanwhile, halfway across the country, in the Bloomberg news offices in New York, reporters Peter Robison and Joel Weber also hear about the crash. The plane that went down is something called a 737Max, which is a modified 737 with bigger engines. They immediately call Boeing, who manufactured the plane, to see if they’ve made a statement yet. They haven’t.
We then hop over to Paris, where plane supply salesmen, and long time buddies, Eddy Knowles and Jeff Spalding, are attending the annual airline industry’s trade show, a place where all the big players, including Boeing and Airbus, are getting ready to promote their latest planes and technologies. Their conversation revolves around the fact that Boeing’s game-changer plane, the Dreamliner, is more like the Nightmareliner, as they can’t get the thing approved to fly. As a result, Boeing’s been forced to improvise, adjusting planes that have already been approved, which has resulted in the 737Max.
We follow the bouncing ball all over the world as we meet people on every side of the issue, from journalists, to pilots, to mechanics, to the CEOs of the major plane companies themselves, all of which heats up when a SECOND 737Max crashes in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. What Dominic, Joel, and Mike eventually find out is that when Boeing added bigger engines to the Max, it required them to also add a software system that adjusted the balance of the plane. That software erroneously took over and sent both planes plunging to their demise.
But the real scandal occurred behind the scenes where Boeing deliberately hid mention of this software system in their plane manuals. You may say, “Why would they do that?” It was because the FAA mandated that any significant change in the operation of a plane require training. Training cost money so airlines hated it. Since Boeing knew the airlines wouldn’t buy any planes if significant training was required, they hid the software from the airlines, figuring it would work in the background and therefore no pilots would ever need to know about it. The script concludes by informing us that because Boeing is so important to the economy, the company got off with a mere slap on the wrist for their gross negligence.
As a screenwriter, you are a shaper.
You know the famous scene in Ghost where Patrick Swayze and Demi Moore take a lump of wet clay and slowly mold it into a vase? That’s what you’re doing as a screenwriter. You’re taking a lump (all these ideas in your head) and you’re molding it into a vase (a thoughtful compelling story).
When you don’t do that and you just sort of vomit everything onto the page – throwing clay around willy-nilly, not looking at your creation, checking your phone for messages, flicking the specks of clay on your hands back onto the lump – sure, you’re technically still creating a vase. But there’s no shape to it. It’s just a bunch of clay.
I want you to internalize what I’m about to tell you because it’s important:
Anybody can tell a story. The writer differentiates themselves by being a storyTELLER.
I can get the homeless guy down the street to ramble on for 3 hours about how the bus driver wouldn’t drop him off at his favorite liquor store. That will technically be a “story.” But it’s not a story told well. That’s what the storyteller’s job is. To take all the variables and shape them in a way that the story has form, dramatic value, and purpose.
Otherwise you’re just giving us information. That’s how Single Point of Failure read. We just go from room to room, character to character, telling us new things about the plane crashes. There’s no form to it.
A good example of a screenplay that has form and is somewhat similar to Single Point of Failure is Margin Call. That script is about a giant investment bank that realizes it has a ticking time bomb in its investment software that has a high probability of bringing the entire bank down if they don’t do something about it immediately.
Now you could’ve written Margin Call like you wrote Single Point Of Failure, where we meet all these different players across New York City. A rival bank’s CEO, someone at the SEC, a couple of reporters who get wind of what’s going on and start digging into their story. But anybody can write that. There’s no storytelling to that version.
Instead, writer J.C. Chandor cleverly focuses on a low-level worker in the company who discovers the error. He realizes that they’ve got about 24 hours before this destroys the company. So he brings it to his middle-manager boss. The middle manager then brings it to his boss. That boss then brings it to his boss. Until the climax is them in a meeting with the head of the company. The story has a clear design to it that’s been carefully shaped.
Meanwhile, Single Point of Failure feels like its scenes were generated in a randomizer. I always get nervous when every scene introduces a new character, which this does. That tells me that the writer isn’t thinking his story through. You’ve got all of these characters you’ve already created. Why not craft a story around them as opposed to throwing new character after new character at us? It’s because coming up with a story is harder. And we’re all inherently lazy and prefer to take the path of least resistance. But if you want to be a good screenwriter, that’s what you have to do.
But guess what?
I still liked Single Point of Failure.
A lot of that is because I like getting into the nitty gritty of why airplane crashes happen. So this whole script was basically catnip to me. And I was rewarded for my curiosity. I learned some things – such as Boeing deliberately hiding the 737 Max software in their manuals – that I didn’t know before.
Also, one of the necessary ingredients of a true story like this is that it makes you mad. If you’re mad, it means you’re emotionally invested. And while I’d rather be happy at the end of a movie than mad, I’d also rather be mad than have no feelings whatsoever. And this story makes you mad. You can’t believe that a corporation this big with this much responsibility would do something that put so many people in danger. It’s infuriating.
A Single Point of Failure is a plane crash geek’s version of Spotlight. If that sounds like something you’d be interested in, check it out!
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[x] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: I’m going to give you at least one scene of good dialogue in your next screenplay. It’s called doggy bag dialogue. Doggy bag dialogue is any interesting piece of information relevant to the scene or broader story that the reader can take home with them. Single Point of Failure has a good one. This doggy bag dialogue occurs when Eddy explains to Jeff why Boeing’s MCAS system actually works *too* well.
Is Space Jam 2 secretly a great movie??? Why did Black Widow drop so much in its second weekend? Has Cannes ever given the Palme D’or to a good film?? And Carson offers a book recommendation!
Out of morbid curiosity, I threw on Space Jam this weekend. It was on HBO Max 4 free so why not? My enjoyment of the film, if you can call it that, was inconsistent at best. There is only so much fun an adult can have with a movie that’s made for 11 year-olds. But when I turned off my brain and leaned into that kid who thought Saturday morning cartoons were the coolest most awesomest things that life had to offer, I enjoyed myself.
But I’m not here to review the film. I’m here because I had an epiphany while watching the movie. Are you ready for it? Here it is: Every screenwriter should write at least one family movie. Even if you never show that script to anyone, you should still write it. Let me explain why.
A family film allows you to practice executing all of the big screenplay beats without fear of overdoing it. Since family films are not put under the same microscope as, say, a David Fincher movie or a Noah Baumbach film, you can practice all of the things you’ve learned on screenwriting websites without having to worry about being too on-the-nose. That’s because kids movies ARE on-the-nose.
Take, for example, the hero’s arc. This is the most classic story beat there is. You have a main character. They have some sort of problem in their lives holding them back. The journey they go on is about realizing why this issue is hurting them, and ultimately learning that there’s a better, more fulfilling, way to live life. This transformation – or “arc” – leaves the audience feeling happy because they, too, have issues holding them back. They feel that if this movie character can overcome their flaw, they can overcome theirs as well.
But a character arc is quite a delicate measure to pull off. It looks easy when it’s done well but there are a lot of places where you can screw it up. A common issue is that the writer will say, “I don’t want to overdo it,” and be reallllllyyyyyyy subtle in how the flaw plays out. They’ll hint at it on page 30, hint at it again on page 50, before finally having them overcome it during the climax. When the reader asks, “What was that whole thing at the end where the hero said to his daughter he was going to donate his life savings to cancer research?” The writer replies, “It’s because he’s no longer greedy! The hero finally realized that money isn’t what matters. It’s family!” The reader responds with a side glance. “The hero’s flaw was that he was greedy?” And the writer dies a little inside.
The great thing about kids movies is that you can lean into this stuff and not worry about it coming off as corny or on-the-nose. In Space Jam, Lebron James’s son doesn’t want to be a basketball player. He wants to make video games. Lebron can’t accept that his son doesn’t want to play basketball and keeps pushing him to ditch the computer and practice his jumper.
After Lebron gets sucked into the Toon world, where he and the “Toon” squad are up against the “Goon” squad, Lebron keeps telling his teammates what to do. Move the ball up the court quickly. Set picks here. Step back, crossover when the other player is too close. Dunk. Etc. The results are not good. By halftime, they’re down 1000 points.
Lebron asks the team what’s up? Why are you playing so bad? They concede that they’re doing what he told them to do – be like him – but it’s not working. Lebron has his big epiphany. Just like with his son, everybody here has their own talents. He can’t make them be like him. He has to let them be themselves. Lebron has arced! And, of course, once the toons can start doing toon things (Roadrunner painting a fake desert canvas that the Goon players disappear into) they start winning.
Now some of you may be rolling your eyes. “SOOOOO ON-THE-NOSE. SOOOOO CHEESY.” That’s the point. You can’t learn to execute a flaw subtly if you’ve never executed a flaw effectively in any situation. This holds true for all the big screenplay beats: the inciting incident, the refusal of the call, the fun and games section, the midpoint escalation, the central relationship conflict, making the final goal seem impossible. When you write a children’s movie, you get to master all this stuff without the cynical rolling eyes of the high-expectation moviegoer.
Every genre has a slightly different expectation when it comes to screenplay beats. The kid’s movie is on-the-nose. The buddy-cop movie is a still on the nose but a little less so. The serious action movie, like Jason Bourne, is more subtle still. All the way up to Oscar dramas, where the goal is to camouflage your screenplay beats to such a degree that the audience is unaware that the movie was even written in the first place.
So go write that family film. The good news is that if it’s actually good, it’s one of the most profitable genres in the business. So you could get paaaaaaaaaid.
Moving along, Black Widow did not do well on its second weekend at the box office, dropping a widow-making 67%. For some reference, the last Marvel movie to be released, Spider-Man: Far From Home, dropped 51% on its second weekend. If we want a closer comp, we can use Captain Marvel, which dropped 55%. The reason 55% is so concerning is that Captain Marvel was a brand new character. Black Widow is a known character who had been around for a decade. If anyone should have the lower drop, it should be the proven character.
What does this mean? Hard to tell. Everything in the post-pandemic box office world is hard to gauge. Who knows how many people are buying the movie from Disney’s “Premiere Access” service. To be honest, as I’m writing this, I’m not even sure if they’re including the money they got from Disney + in that final box office haul or not. If it is included, that means even fewer people went out to watch the movie.
I did hear something interesting about Black Widow from Half in the Bag’s review this week where they said Marvel starts creating their action set pieces before the director has even been chosen. I don’t know how accurate this information is and I’m sure it differs from project to project. But it would certainly explain why Black Widow’s set pieces felt disconnected from its family-oriented storyline, which I found to be pretty good.
I’ve actually wondered this for a while. How is it that Marvel is recruiting these directors who have never shot an effects shot in their entire careers, and putting them in charge of action set pieces that, individually, cost ten times as much as the most expensive movie they’ve made? I guess that’s the answer. Marvel says “F U, newbie. We’re going to shoot the action scenes ourselves and you can record your little two-people-in-a-room-talking scenes when we call on you.” I think one of you pointed this out in regards to Eternals. They’re having all sorts of issues balancing Chloe Zhao’s muted heavily dramatic character stuff with the big fancy set pieces. As a result, Zhao has been pushed to the side while second unit directors with more experience finish the movie.
This probably goes on more than we know. We heard this same thing happening all the way back with Rogue One, with Gareth Edwards not being able to handle the grandness of his super-movie. So they replaced him with Tony Gilroy. All of this is a result of Hollywood moving away from bland but experienced directors (aka Ron Howard) to “visionary” but inexperienced directors. These directors bring vision. But never having been on a giant set before or having filmed a giant set piece, they need help. So studios, I guess, have come up with this hackneyed solution to the problem, separating the effects directing team from the film directing team.
I think this is why Kathleen Kennedy loved Rian Johnson so much. She thought she had the best of both worlds. She got a director who has a unique vision who ALSO made enough movies that he didn’t need babysitting. She could just leave him alone to make his movie. Of course, her Rian Johnson beer goggles kept her from realizing he’d written a garbage script. Which just goes to show how difficult making a good movie is. Even when you think you’ve got all your bases covered, you can still make a terrible movie (“Hey, I got an idea. What if we made the most iconic hero in movie history, Luke Skywalker, as unlikable as possible? Who’s with me?”).
Elsewhere, the Cannes Film Festival just wrapped. If you’re looking for movies that are guaranteed to be bad, look at whatever the Cannes Film Festival celebrates. You may say, “Carson, why are you such an indie film hater?” That’s not what this is about. The French Film Industry refuses to put any stock into the trade of screenwriting. Nobody cares about screenwriting over there. All they care about is the director. This is why they celebrate so many movies that are terrible. Because they don’t care if the story makes sense. All they care about is what the film looks like.
Another problem with Cannes is that they hate Hollywood so much that they are determined to celebrate the opposite of whatever comes out of the studio system, even if that means propping up something terrible. It’s more important to NOT be Hollywood then to find actual good movies. To a certain degree all film festivals are like this. Sundance is pretty pretentious itself. But Cannes is the worst.
Now, I will admit they’ve gotten it right a few times. Parasite was amazing. And The Square was pretty cool as well. But they often prop up weird, nonsensical, boring films that are rewarded for things other than storytelling. I don’t know where the word “pretentious” derived from, but I always look at it as a derivation of “pretend.” All of these Cannes films are people pretending to make something profound when, in actuality, once you look past the directing, they’re just as vapid as the worst Hollywood flicks. By the way, how the heck didn’t The French Dispatch win the Palme D’Or? It’s not only black and white (any black and white film entered into Cannes is automatically placed in the Top 5). But it’s got “French” in the title! So disappointed in Wes Anderson.
Let’s end this Mish Mash on a positive note. As you know, I loved Sally Rooney’s Normal People on Hulu. I thought it was excellent. I recently found out the same filmmaking team, including the awesome Lenny Abrahamson, are filming Rooney’s first novel, Conversations with Friends, as a follow-up. So I picked it up and read it. I wanted to see what it was about Rooney’s writing that allowed it to be adapted into something so powerful. And, holy s#%@. I was not disappointed.
Rooney is an exceptional writer. The premise of the novel is simple (you guys know I like simple stories!). A young spoken word poet starts dating an actor who’s married to a journalist doing a story on her. You’d look at that and think, “How do you get more than 50 pages out of that? That’s a subplot for any other novel.”
But Rooney somehow makes it compelling the whole way through.
Part of it is her inherent talent to communicate the complexities of the human experience better than any writer in recent memory. She has these insights into the minutiae of human interaction that are consistently illuminating. You sit there and you think, “I’ve always thought that abstractly but have never been able to communicate it the way she just did.” And she mixes in this deft touch of dry humor every once in a while which turns what should be sad moments into something really funny.
My discovery that I was in love with Nick, not just infatuated but deeply personally attached to him in a way that would have lasting consequences for my happiness, had prompted me to feel a new kind of jealousy toward Melissa. I couldn’t believe that he went home to her every evening, or that they ate dinner together and sometimes watched films on their TV. What did they talk about? Did they amuse each other? Did they discuss their emotional lives, did they confide in one another? Did he respect Melissa more than me? Did he like her more? If we were both going to die in a burning building and he could only save one of us, wouldn’t he certainly save Melissa and not me? It seemed practically evil to have sex with someone who you would later allow to burn to death.
As you can see, her writing is simple. It’s easy to read. As you guys hear me talk about all the time, making your writing easy to read does you so many favors. I’ve come across lots of strong concepts that were ruined by writers who were trying to prove to you that they were Writers with a capital “W.” Rooney reminds us that you can convey everything you need to using simple words embedded in basic sentence structure.
I know she’s not for everyone. I’m not trying to convert anyone here if you’re not into these types of books. But if you liked Normal People and you like good writing and you want to be inspired, definitely check out Conversations With Friends. It’s really good.
We’re keeping it going with Sci-Fi Showdown inspired Thursday articles. Remember, the Sci-Fi Showdown deadline is Thursday, September 16th. You can learn more about it here. It’s absolutely free. So get those sci-fi scripts finished and get them in on time. Let’s make a f%$#ing great science-fiction movie together!
One thing I want to point out before I get to today’s tips. A lot of these tips deal with the chase aspect of the film. But these tips can work for ANY type of chase. A car chase. A foot chase. An across-the-galaxy chase. They can also work within chase sequences. So if your script just has one chase sequence, these tips can be applied to that as well. All right. Let’s get to it.
1) 99% of Sci-Fi Movies require voice overs or a title card at the beginning of the movie to explain what’s going on – If you don’t need a ton of explanation to set up your movie, use a title card. If you’ve got a lot to explain, use a voice over. Fury Road uses Max’s voice over. Star Wars uses title cards. I don’t care which you use but you probably need one. If we don’t know how your world operates, we’re going to have a tough time enjoying what’s happening.
2) Urgency and Sci-Fi go together like peanut butter and jelly – The most underrated reason for Star Wars’s success – and I’m talking the original Star Wars here – is its urgency. Urgency can camouflage all sorts of script problems due to the fact that the story’s moving so fast, the reader doesn’t have time to notice problems. Fury Road doesn’t just embrace urgency. It makes it the driving force behind the entire story. The bad guys are always right behind them. There’s never time to slow down.
3) If you’ve got two protagonists, don’t let your first act get bogged down setting those protagonists up – Fury Road has two heroes, Max and Furiosa. Had they written this script traditionally, they would’ve spent the first 30 pages of the script setting both Max and Furiosa up before we went on the journey. Director George Miller knew that’d be a dumb idea in a movie built around urgency. So he chose to set one character up before the chase (Max) and the other character up during it (Furiosa). Too much setup can lead to boredom which is why saving some character setup for the journey might be a good option.
4) Why limit yourself to two sources of conflict when you can have three? – With one hero, you get internal conflict (the battle against one’s self) and external conflict (the battle against the antagonist). With two heroes, you get those things along with a third element of conflict – inter-relational conflict (the conflict that occurs between the two main characters). Since a good argument can be made that the more conflict there is in your story, the better, consider allowing two heroes to lead your movie instead of one, like Fury Road.
5) Your sci-fi movie *must* have original ideas! – If you’re not bringing any original ideas into your science-fiction film, don’t bother writing it. Sci-fi is a genre where a heavy expectation is placed on creativity and imagination. That means you’re going to have to take some risks and make some non-traditional choices. In Mad Max Fury Road, there is zero reason for Immortan Joe to create a big crazy theatrical chase team that consists of fireworks and dudes playing electric guitars on an 80 mile per hour stage to chase Furiosa. In fact, it’d be a hell out of a lot smarter to jump in your fastest cars and chase Furiosa that way. Yet that is exactly what separates this movie from every other sci-fi movie, is the theatrical nature of the chase. What choices will you make that set your sci-fi script apart?
6) In chase movies, you want to put your character in a lot of a situations where going forward is HARDER than surrendering – Too many screenwriters treat their on-the-run protagonists like little children that need to be coddled and helped. That’s the opposite of how you should treat your protagonists. You want to place your protagonists in situations where surrendering to the bad guys is the better choice. They famously did this in Empire Strikes Back when Han Solo decides to fly into a mine field to escape Darth Vadar, despite the fact that there was an infinitely higher chance he would die in the mine field. Same thing here. Furiosa sees the mother of all sandstorms ahead of her. Surrendering would be the better choice in this situation. Which is why we get so excited when she chooses to keep going.
7) Silent Characters work much better on screen than they do on the page – Mad Max in Fury Road, much like Mad Max in the original Road Warrior, doesn’t say a whole lot. While this can work great onscreen with a strong actor and strong director, it’s something I’d be wary about doing in a spec script. Unless your silent hero is EXTREMELY ACTIVE and always charging forward making bold choice after bold choice, he’ll likely disappear on the page. I’ve read lots of scripts with quiet protags and, I can promise you, those characters rarely make an impact. The difference with something like Fury Road is that the director is writing the script. So he doesn’t have to worry about any characters not working on the page as long as they work onscreen.
8) Fast movies need quick flashbacks – For the 217,000th time, don’t use flashbacks to begin with. But if you do, use them sparingly and with purpose (they must be necessary, not exposition-dumps). In action movies, you can use flashbacks, but do so in the spirit of the genre and be quick about it. Max has this backstory where he got a girl he was protecting killed. We get a good dozen flashbacks of this throughout the movie, but they’re very quick – 2 seconds or less. All that matters with backstories is that we understand them. So if we can understand them in 2 seconds, you’ve done your job.
9) – Mythology tends to work best when it operates in the background, not when you shine a big light on it and say, “Look at what I did.” – Science-fiction writers tend to love their mythology (the inner workings of their fictional world) so much that they constantly halt the movie so that their characters can talk about or exhibit aspects of that mythology (see Matrix: Reloaded). What’s so great about Mad Max Fury Road is that most of the mythology is background noise. There are these pale soldiers. They seem to have some sort of blood disease. They have their own language, their own chants. There’s a specific moment, during an intense part of the chase, where one of them sprays some crazy drug-foil all over his face, he screams out a well-known chant to the others, before leaping onto the enemy car with explosives, destroying it. There were so many little moments like that that only the pale soldiers understood – and Miller never stopped to explain all of it. It was always happening in the background.
10) Someone in your movie’s got to arc, dammit – Some serious directors and writers consider character arcs unrealistic. I just brought this up last week with Quentin Tarantino. You can see that in Fury Road in that both Max and Furiosa do not change. They do not arc. But you’ll also notice that Nux (the “War Kid” who originally would do anything for Immortan Joe) ultimately relinquishes his allegiance to him to help the rebel crew. Audiences like at least one character in a movie to go through some level of change. If you’re worried about a character flaw that would feel dumb or false for your heroes, know that you can use other characters in your movie to explore an arc as well.
Bonus Tip! – A great climactic set piece is all about making it look like there’s no way your heroes will win – It should never EVER feel like your heroes are doing well in a climax. You want the opposite to happen. Keep stacking the odds against them. Fury Road is a great example of this. When the protagonists are forced to go back through the bad guys to get away, there isn’t a single moment in that sequence where we think our heroes have a leg up on the bad guys. There are an endless amount of cars. As soon as one is taken out, another one takes its place. The bad guys are able to snag one of the girls. Max, on top of the truck, is barely holding off bad guy after bad guy. We feel positive that our heroes will fail. Which is exactly how you want it to be.
Dude, what are you doing!? You’re sending your script out without getting professional feedback first? You’re NOT getting help from someone who can tell you EXACTLY what’s missing and how to fix it? Why?? You only get one shot with these industry contacts. Don’t screw it up by sending them the 10,000th average screenplay they’ve read this year! 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. Use code phrase ‘WARM IN JULY’ and I’ll take a hundred bucks off a pilot or feature consultation. Chat soon!
Genre: Comedy I guess?
Premise: (this logline is from IMDB) THE CURSE is a genre-bending scripted comedy that explores how an alleged curse disturbs the relationship of a newly married couple as they try to conceive a child while co-starring on their problematic new HGTV show
About: Today’s pilot script comes from Benny Safdie and Nathan Fielder. Benny is obviously one half of the directing team behind Uncut Gems. Fielder had a show called Nathan For You. Somehow, these two kidnapped Emma Stone to be on this show, which will come out on Showtime.
Writers: Benny Safdie & Nathan Fielder
Details: 41 pages
I’m a HUMONGOUS fan of the Safdie Bros work ever since I was dragged, kicking and screaming, to a special screening of Good Time. My date kept insisting, “They’re supposed to be the next big thing in directing.” I rolled my eyes. “You know how many times I’ve heard someone anointed as the next big thing in directing?”
Flash-forward three hours and I felt like I’d just had a religious experience. Wow was that movie good. But what happens when two Safdies become… one Safdie? Does this show still have a chance? Since I’m writing this paragraph after I’ve read the pilot, I can tell you that it definitely does not.
36 year old Asher is a hipster type who’s married to 35 year old Whitney. What do these two do? Since I’ve written several drafts trying to summarize the plot and failed, I’ll let the script explain it to you. Here, Asher and Whitney, who flip houses, are being interviewed by a local newsperson about their job. Here’s how that interaction goes….
Yes, Asher and Whitney have a reality show where they flip houses and partner with companies to bring high-end stores into low-income neighborhoods and then give a small portion of the jobs from those stores to local people, which they then document for their TV show.
Right. Great stuff.
Anyway, I get the feeling that Asher and his co-worker, Dougie, are supposed to be like Dumb and Dumber, maybe? For example, Whitney sends them out to get some B-roll and encourages them to film stuff that makes them look good. So Dougie films a shot of Asher giving a homeless woman $100.
Once they get the shot, Asher runs back to the homeless woman and confides in her that he accidentally gave her $100 when he meant to only give her $20. So he asks for the $100 back. And, after he takes it back, she yells at him that she’s put a curse on him. That’s right folks. As if we didn’t already have enough going in this show, they have decided to now add a curse storyline.
And that’s the setup for The Curse.
Yesterday, I reviewed a script that everybody should read in order to become a better screenwriter.
Today, I’m reviewing a pilot that everybody should also read to become a better screenwriter.
There’s one difference.
Read yesterday’s script to see WHAT TO DO. Read today’s script to see WHAT NOT TO DO. And when I say, “not to do,” I mean “NOT TO DO!!!!!” I don’t think there’s a single good creative choice that was made in this pilot. It’s really really REALLY bad. Bordering on Mattson Tomlin bad. Bordering on ‘they’re going to be embarrassed when they put this on the air and people see it’ bad.
Whenever people aren’t vibing with your script, it can usually be traced back to the concept. If the concept is weak or messy or boring or stupid, you’re building everything that follows – your characters, your plot, your dialogue – on a shaky foundation. So it doesn’t matter whether your plot or your dialogue works. We’ve already decided the show sucks.
I would put The Curse up there as one of the most misguided show ideas I’ve ever come across. Bear with me for a second as I explain this show to you. It’s about a group of people who flip houses and who also build upscale stores in low-income neighborhoods and who also have a reality show that follows them around while doing this and who also have one of their production team members get cursed by a witch.
Marinate on that for a second.
Just throwing out thoughts right now.
But did it ever occur to anyone who was a part of this project that, oh, I don’t know, there’s like 1500 too many things going on in this show?!?
For crying out loud PICK ONE THING. Talk about confusing. I didn’t even know it was possible to come up with a show this confusing.
Was Emma Stone conned into this? Did she read this script? Did anybody pitch it to her? Cause the only thing that makes sense is that she was friends with either Nathan Fielder or Benny Safdie and joined the show cause they asked. Because I would bet my life that there is NO WAY any actress who read this part, much less one with as many choices as Emma Stone, would sign onto this.
I might be okay with all this plot noise if the show was funny. But there are so many confusing ideas clashing with each other here that you’re not even sure what genre of comedy you’re watching. Is it lowbrow comedy, satire, broad comedy? Feels to me like mish-mash random desperateness comedy. During one two-minute period, we see two men’s penises. One, a close up while going to the bathroom. Another, when an older gentleman purposely has his penis hanging out of his pants. I’m guessing this passes for comedy somewhere. But you’d be hard-pressed to tell me where.
The NUMBER ONE SCREENWRITING MISTAKE I SEE is writers OVERCOMPLICATING THEIR STORY. Period. That’s it. That’s the biggest recurring mistake I see, and I see it, literally, a dozen times a month. And writers never learn. They think more equals better.
That’s not the case with screenwriting. More equals messier. More equals clumsier. More equals more confusinger. There’s so much shit going on in this story, it never had a chance.
I don’t see why I have to write anything else. There are no more lessons to learn here.
Listen to me if you want success in your screenwriting career: STOP OVERCOMPLICATING YOUR STORIES. Pick a clean easy to understand idea, then populate it with some kick-ass characters. That’s it. That’s the formula for TV.
[x] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: This was my biggest fear when we moved from a 100 TV Show industry to a 700 TV show industry. Is that the writing talent would get so watered down, we’d have to wade through 50 terrible TV shows just to find one good one. The Curse should rename itself to The Worst. Cause it may be the worst of those 700 shows.
