Genre: Drama
Premise: A Nevada court judge who moonlights reffing high-profile boxing matches must face his demons when he’s assigned to the Olympic fight of an ex-con he’d previously sentenced for murder.
About: Justin Piasecki is a writer who’s slowly making a name for himself. You can usually spot the writers who are on the rise when they have consecutive showings on the Black List. Last year, Piasecki got on the list with, “The Broker.” This year he adds The Neutral Corner.
Writer: Justin Piasecki
Details: 112 pages
How great was that Logan Paul Floyd Mayweather fight? Easily the best 15 minutes of the past year for me. Totally worth the 100 bucks.
As we always talk about on the site, one of your primary initiatives as a screenwriter should be to find fresh angles to familiar setups. That’s what today’s writer did. Boxing is one of the oldest sub-genres in cinema. It’s made a ton of a money for Hollywood. Because the setup is so simple, though, there hasn’t been a whole lot of variation to it.
Today’s writer says, “I’m going to change that.” Instead of focusing on a boxer, he focuses on a boxing ref. Let’s see what happens.
50-something Ray Tennyson is a Nevada judge. But, as a former boxer who’s still in love with the sport, he also moonlights as a boxing ref. And he’s a good one. In fact, he’s so good that the Olympics call him up to be a ref. And not just any ref. The NUMBER ONE HEAD REF in all of the Olympics. It’s an amazing opportunity.
Ray’s dream turns into a nightmare, though, when he learns that a 17 year old kid he sent to prison for vehicular murder many moons ago, Cameron Mills, has gotten out, grown up, and will be on the Olympic team. Terrified that he’ll lose this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, Ray chooses not to report his conflict of interest to the Olympic committee.
But as the Olympics draw closer, it’s looking more and more like the committee is going to find out. So Ray starts throwing his judge weight around, using his contacts to jerryrig the system behind the scenes to get Cameron kicked off. When that doesn’t work, Ray starts getting mysterious phone calls late at night. Best friends start getting beaten to within an inch of their lives. Cameron Mills’s cronies start showing up at the courthouse. Watching Ray.
The script starts throwing flashbacks at us, each one revealing a new detail about the Cameron Mills murder case. First, we learn that Ray over-sentenced Cameron. He seemed to have some personal animus towards him. In the next flashback, we learn that Ray’s own sister was killed by a drunk driver, which clearly influenced Cameron’s sentencing. The more we learn, the more we realize Ray used his power to destroy this kid’s life. All of this is going to come to a head of course. The question is, will either of them be left standing?
This isn’t a feature film.
These are not feature characters.
These are TV characters. I know that because I’ve seen this TV show. It’s called Your Honor.
This is something screenwriters need to know.
There’s a difference between movie characters and TV characters. Movie characters are big. They have big goals. They’re going after big things. The stakes are bigger. Their personalities are bigger.
TV characters are more subtle. They want things but those things are often far off in the distance. Maybe they’re trying to make partner at a law firm. Or become a detective on the force. Or just get their life back on track.
It makes sense when you think about it. A TV show has to last longer. If your character is too big, they’re going to fizzle out before they get to the finish line. So TV characters have no choice but to be subtler.
Now, of course, there are *movies* with subtle characters. They’re usually the films vying for Academy Awards. Your Moonlights of the world. Your Manchester By the Seas. But this is a nearly impossible sandbox to play in. You’re trying to make a movie work with TV level drama.
If the characters are truly dynamic, the relationships incredibly captivating, the dialogue obviously awesome, the plot screamingly exciting, you can achieve this. But, most of the time, you get The Neutral Corner. It’s a pretty good script but the whole time I was reading it I was thinking, “This is a TV show, not a movie.” Especially in 2021 when you have to be BIGGER THAN EVER to succeed as a film.
I can already hear some of you saying: WRONG CARSON! UNDER THAT LOGIC, THERE’D BE NO AMERICAN BEAUTY! OR MARRIAGE STORY! OR LADYBIRD!
Again, I’m not saying it can’t be done. But if you’re writing a movie that only has a chance if it can be held up as one of the five best movies of the year… you’re making an already difficult job thousands of times more difficult.
However, I hear the screams. I hear the yells. So here’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to tell you the key to writing these movies if you so choose to.
You must write a complex character who’s just as bad as they are good. Look at Promising Young Woman. This is a woman who has good intentions – she wants justice for her friend who was raped – but who goes about it in very dark and questionable ways, threatening and humiliating innocent people to achieve her ultimate goal. Those tend to be the characters that can carry TV level dramas into the feature space.
That’s where I think The Neutral Corner falls short. Ray *sort of* did a bad thing. But every questionable choice he makes in this film is offset by an explanation of why it’s okay. Yeah, he sent a 17 year old kid to prison for a long time but the kid did, presumably, kill a young woman and permanently maim a young man because he was high on multiple drugs.
For these types of movies, you need your main character to lean into that bad side. Or give them something really terrible they once did. Like Bryan Cranston’s judge character in Your Honor. He covers up his son’s murder *and then* allows another innocent kid to take the rap for the murder and go to prison, where he’s ultimately killed. That’s bad.
Giving someone a harsh sentence for killing a woman isn’t that bad.
This is why it’s so often advised that you not write dramas as an aspiring screenwriter. Readers read these scripts and think, “There’s not enough going on here.” I’d rather you write a giant idea and try to push the limits of character development than write a big strong character piece inside a tiny narrative. It can be done, of course. But for every Promising Young Woman, I read 200 middling versions of these scripts.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: If you need to flashforward, flashback! Stay away from long timelines. Try to keep your movie timeline to 2 weeks tops. Movies have to move fast and every time you cut to “3 weeks later” or “4 months” later, the momentum from the previous timeline ceases. Which means you have to start building momentum all over again. Not advised. HOWEVER, if you’re going to do it, The Neutral Corner gives you a great way to do so. Here’s what you do: If you ever want to jump forward in time, give us a flashback first. After the flashback is over, cut forward “3 weeks” or “4 months” or however much time you need to. The flashback works as sort of a “camouflage” for the forward jump that follows. We won’t notice it nearly as much as if you would’ve jumped forward out of nowhere.
What I learned 2: If you are going to write a drama, make sure your hero has a legitimate darkness to them. Don’t sugarcoat their darkness to make them “more likable.” These characters only work if the darkness within them is significant. Promising Young Woman, Joker, and Nightcrawler are all good examples of this.
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Genre: Superhero TV Show
Premise: Thor’s misfit brother, Loki, tries to steal the time-travel trinket known as the Tesseract but is quickly arrested and imprisoned for the crime of time travel.
About: One of the more underreported aspects of Loki is that it’s been written by Michael Waldron who is, self-admittedly, a nobody in the screenwriting game. Waldron started out as an intern on Rick and Morty and cleverly orchestrated a Rick and Morty softball team with the specific purpose of cozying up to creator Dan Harmon. After working on Rick and Morty, he got a chance to create his own show, a wrestling series called “Heels,” which Starz developed but Waldron eventually left (it’s coming out with new creatives in a couple of months). While there, Waldron asked everyone how he could write for Marvel or Star Wars and they told him to write a feature script. He wrote, “The Worst Guy of All Time And The Girl Who Came To Kill Him” which made the Black List and that I reviewed here. That script made its way up the Marvel ladder and somehow got to Kevin Feige, who hired Waldron for Loki. Feige liked Waldron so much that he hired him to write TWO movies for him: Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness and Kevin Feige’s secret Star Wars film. In as long as I’ve been covering this business I’ve never seen someone set goals this high and achieve them so quickly and easily. Is Waldron the real deal? Or just a crafty self-promoter who makes a plan and executes it?
Writer: Michael Waldron
Details: A little under an hour
As much as I like to poke the Marvel bear, I actually thought their TV release strategy was genius. After building up so much good will with their movies, they knew that they could literally release any show and people would watch it. So they took an all-or-nothing shot with Wandavision, a concept so bizarre, that if it hit, it would hit huge. If it didn’t, well, no worries, we’re still Marvel.
I’m not going to say Wandavision was terrible but it was too bizarre for its own good. I got the feeling it was trying to be the comic book version of “Lost” but Lost had a much better hook (“What is this island?”). I think when a beekeeper is one of your season’s biggest twists, your show is in trouble.
But Marvel knew this was a possibility. Which is why they followed Wandavision with their mainstream offering, Falcon and The Winter Soldier. Created to shoot straight down the middle, if you wanted your mainstream Marvel on a stick, Falcon and Winter Soldier had you covered. Again, not a terrible show. Just not memorable enough to get people talking.
The averageness of Falcon and Winter Soldier paved the way for Marvel’s third TV offering, Loki. Loki had the zaniness of Wandavision but in a more accessible package. Sure, time-travel and multiverses can be tough to wrap your head around, but they’re easier to digest than superheroes pretending to be sitcom characters.
So did Marvel’s biggest entry into the TV universe blow me away?
“Loki” follows, well, Loki, right after he stole the Tesseract in Avengers Endgame and sped off into the future. Loki arrives in some desert on the other side of the world where, seconds later, time travel police show up and arrest him. They bring him back to their all-in-one prison/courthouse place and force Loki to go through a series of bureaucratic tasks in order to determine his prison sentence.
Even though he’s a God, Loki’s powers don’t work here. So every time he tries to wreak havoc, he’s met with a snort or a giggle. Just when Loki’s about to receive his sentence, one of the time travel directors, Mobius, shows up, and asks the judge if he can leave Loki in his care. The judge is reluctant but allows it, telling Mobius he better not screw up.
Mobius then takes Loki into a small screening room and shows him his greatest escapes throughout time, one of which, it turns out, was D.B. Cooper. That’s right, Loki was D.B. Cooper! We get the sense that Mobius is psychologically probing Loki for something, trying to figure out why he does what he does. But why?
After watching several additional events from Loki’s life, including the moment his mom dies, Loki breaks down and admits that the reason he’s evil is to instill fear in others so that he can get what he wants. It’s all about manipulation. Good, Mobius says, that’s why we need you to help us track someone down. Who? Loki asks. “Yourself.” END OF EPISODE!
Marvel is clearly still struggling with the TV medium. Comics don’t translate to TV the way they do movies. With superheroes, we’re used to them going after problems NOW. We’re used to universe-level stakes. We’re used to big tension, big set pieces, big dialogue. To realign our expectations so that we have to wait for all those things, sometimes over the course of eight weeks, it’s a huge adjustment.
It’s weird to see a superhero sitting around talking for five minutes at a time. Isn’t it?
With that said, Loki is easily the best of the three Marvel offerings.
Right off the bat, it’s got the best setup. Loki has to hunt himself down? Count me in. This isn’t a new idea, by the way. They came up with it 15 years ago with the Harrison Ford starring “Gemini Man” spec. That project would eventually get made with Will Smith. But the point is, hunting yourself down isn’t new.
However, a supervillain hunting himself down… that’s new. And my mind is already going to exciting places imagining how this is going to play out. That’s when you know you’ve got a good idea. When the setup has readers eagerly thinking up scenes and plot lines. The opportunities seem endless.
With that said, Loki gets off to a slow start and a big reason for that is limited scope. About 95% of the scenes in this pilot are two people talking in a room. And the few times we aren’t in a room, we’re clearly on a stage with the Stagecraft technology. Stagecraft needs to improve those virtual desert sets. They all look fake for some reason.
Luckily, Owen Wilson comes in and saves the day. The second his character, Mobius, arrives and starts sparring with Loki, the pilot receives a much-needed jolt. I’ve seen some people praise the dialogue between these two, and while I agree the dialogue was good, I was more impressed by the dynamic. On the one hand you have this mischievous mentally unstable God character and, on the other, you have this soft-spoken straight-arrow dude in a suit. The chemistry was great.
BUT!
This is a superhero show. We expect superhero shows to do superhero things. Yet we don’t get superhero things. Half of Loki’s pilot episode is Mobius and Loki sitting at a desk talking. I didn’t mind this that much because I enjoy the unexpected but I’m wondering what the average comic book fan thinks about EPISODE 1: THE DESK!
The ultimate test for any pilot is, will I make time for Episode 2? That answer is a definitive “YES.” I love the idea of Loki going after himself. It’s genius. If the second episode turns out to be more talking but at a bigger table, I’ll be out. But if I get Loki trying to outsmart Loki, count me in!
[ ] What the hell did I just watch?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[x] worth the stream
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: One of the biggest problems I see in pilot scripts is that they become Setup City. The writer is trying to set up every aspect of the entire series in one episode. Every character. Every storyline. Every backstory. Remember, for every minute of information you’re giving the audience, that’s one less minute you’re entertaining them. Now, while there are ways to entertain viewers while delivering information (using humor, for example), the smarter choice is to only include information that you have to and NOTHING ELSE. Your primary goal with a pilot should be to write entertaining scenes that pull us into the story. If that’s being compromised by tons of setup, rethink how much you need in your pilot. “Loki” is overly reliant on exposition, probably because they believe they can get away with it since they’re Marvel. You don’t have that luxury, unfortunately. So only include as much backstory, setup, and characters as you need.
What I learned 2: “Loki” is another example of “Write the type of script for the type of job you want to get.” Michael Waldron wrote a feature script about a girl jumping throughout time to stop someone. He’s now writing a TV show about a guy jumping throughout time to stop someone.
Recently, I’ve been working on two projects. One of them you know. Kinetic. Another one you don’t. In both cases, rewrites were involved. When it came to Kinetic, the writer, Chris Dennis, took what was already a good script and did a page 1 rewrite to amp everything up several notches, turning it into a great script.
On the other project, the writer and I have been going through rewrite after rewrite for a while now – even I dusted off Final Draft and took a shot at a draft – and not getting anywhere close to what we think the potential of the premise is.
And that’s been kind of a mindf&%#. Why is it that with just a single rewrite, one script becomes so much better? Yet with the other script, it feels like we’re going in circles? So I sat back and I thought about it for a long time.
Finally, the answer came to me.
The main character.
The main character in Kinetic is awesome. He’s this tough man’s man with an inner rage he struggles every day to keep a lid on. He’s the middle America version of the Hulk. He’s just a really captivating character you want to watch. You’re always curious to see what he might do next.
The main character in the other script is your classic ‘safe protagonist.’ He’s a normal dude. He’s grounded in reality. There isn’t anything about him that stands out, that’s memorable.
This is an EXTREMELY COMMON problem in screenwriting. I pointed this out in my review of the Martin Scorsese, Eric Roth, Leonardo DiCaprio collaboration – Killers of the Flower Moon. That main character was just like this main character. Safe. Grounded. Nothing about him stood out. And, what do you know, Leonardo DiCaprio eventually decided not to play the part for that reason (he went over to play the more interesting bad guy instead).
All of this led me to realize that if a script isn’t working and you haven’t yet figured out a strong main character, it doesn’t matter how many times you rewrite it, it’s not going to work. Conversely, when you have a great main character, you can do a page one rewrite on everything else, and because your main character is so awesome, it still works.
That’s why Chris Dennis was able to rewrite an entire screenplay in 45 days and actually improve the script. Cause the hero, Clay, was so awesome.
Now before we get to the solution here, let’s first acknowledge why this happens. The main reason is because it’s hard to write a movie with an extreme protagonist. There has to be some level of “grounding” when it comes to your main character so that they feel realistic and audiences can empathize with them. And also so the journey itself feels grounded in reality.
It’s the difference between making Phil (Bradley Cooper) from The Hangover your protagonist versus Alan (Zach Galifianakis). Phil needs to be the anchor of the movie. That means he can’t fly too high. Meanwhile, since none of the emotional core of the movie rests on Alan, he could fly off to freaking Mars if the writers wanted him to. And we actually saw what happened when Alan became a lead character because they did it in Hangover 3. And the movie was terrible.
So I understand why this mistake is made as often as it is. The more exaggerated, exotic, eccentric, crazy, weird, your hero is, the harder it is to ground them. So most writers stay closer to the “everyman” option, hoping that creating a “real” person will automatically make the audience empathize with them. More often than not, however, it just leads to a boring character.
So how do we reconcile this? Well, there are three main categories you should be considering when building your hero. They are: INTERESTING, LIKABLE, SYMPATHETIC. You want to come up with some combination of traits that fit into these three categories. And the good news is, you can pack as many as you want into your character. You don’t have to stop at one or two or even three.
With that in mind, here are 10 traits you can add to your hero to make them more interesting, more likable, and more sympathetic.
1) Give your hero a vice they can’t control (Interesting) – In order to make characters interesting, you usually have to lean into negativity somewhere. That leads to conflict, which is what makes the character come alive. Like I was talking about above, for Clay in “Kinetic,” his vice is rage. It’s deep within him. He must battle to keep it bottled up every day. With Jordan Belforte in The Wolf of Wall Street, it’s excess. Drugs, alcohol, women. He needs it all the time. To understand how effective this is, imagine The Wolf of Wall Street if Jordan didn’t have an excess problem. I’m guessing the movie would’ve been pretty boring.
2) Make your hero really good at what they do (Likable) – This is a major reason why John McClane has become an all-time classic hero. He was a really really really good cop. He was always ahead of the bad guys in Die Hard. For more modern examples, check out John Wick and Ryan Gosling’s character in “Drive.”
3) Bully your hero (Sympathy) – One of the easiest ways to make someone feel sympathy for your hero is to have someone else hurt them. It’s even more effective if your hero isn’t physically or mentally capable of fighting back. This is the very first thing they did in “Joker” to make you like Arthur Fleck. They had a group of teenagers steal Arthur’s clown sign then beat him up.
4) Have your hero be kind to others (Likable) – This may seem obvious but if you need a “straighter” character and you’re worried about them being too bland, this is a good trait to add because it makes the character very likable. This is a big reason why Forest Gump was so popular. He was one of the kindest protagonists in history. If you want to go back even further, check out George Bailey in It’s A Wonderful Life. They may never make another character as kind as George Bailey.
5) Make your hero a little bit unstable (Interesting) – Again, when it comes to making your hero interesting, you have to lean into the negative. And a popular way to create interesting characters is to make them a little bit unstable. Like Lou Bloom in Nightcrawler. Sara Connor in Terminator 2. Cassandra in Promising Young Woman. The reason these characters work is because they keep the reader guessing. If someone’s unstable, you never know what they’re going to do next.
6) Have your hero save the cat (Likable) – Have your hero do something nice for someone early on. The audience forms their opinion quickly with characters. So what you show them do early has an outsized effect on how they’re perceived.
7) Give your hero someone to love (Sympathy) – I want you to imagine a psychopathic serial killer. Do you have any sympathy for them? I’m guessing not. Now I want you to imagine a psychopathic serial killer who loves his daughter more than anything in the world. Now do you have sympathy? You may be conflicted but you definitely have more sympathy than you did before. That’s the power of giving your hero someone to love. We like people who care about others and love people who will do anything for their family.
8) Make your hero an underdog (Likable) – The underdog is one of the more guaranteed ways to make a hero likable. Slumdog Millionaire Moneyball. Rocky. The entire family in Parasite. There’s one catch to this though. The hero must be active in trying to succeed. An underdog doesn’t work if they’re not trying to change their situation.
9) Make your character a little bit of an asshole (Interesting) – This is a dangerous one because if you go to far, you get the dreaded reaction of, “I never liked the main character.” So there’s a large emphasis placed on the “a little bit” part of this advice. Tony Stark is a little bit of an asshole. Starlord (Guardians of the Galaxy) is a little bit of an asshole. The idea is to have fun with it and not emphasize the “asshole” part too much. A reason I think this works is because we’re all kind of tired of having to be so polite in society. Watching guys like Stark and Starlord be kind of a dick stirs up a bit of wish fulfillment in us.
10) Make your hero very very very active (Sympathy, Likable) – Audiences absolutely LOVE characters who doggedly pursue their goals. From Indiana Jones to Clarice to Erin Brokovich. More recently you have John Wick, Robert McCall (Equalizer), and Howard Ratner (Uncut Gems). People like people who go after things in life. It’s no different in the fictional world of movies.
Keep in mind that every movie and every main character will have different requirements. Therefore, certain traits won’t work on certain characters. For example, the way that the story in JoJo Rabbit unfolds doesn’t allow for our main character to be very very very active. There’s more introspection. There’s more character exploration. So you don’t want to try and fit square pegs into round holes. Only add a trait if you believe it works for your character in your particular movie.
Good luck and I would absolutely LOVE to hear your tips for creating a more likable, more interesting, and a more sympathetic character in the comments!
Genre: Horror – Social
Premise: Aisha is an undocumented nanny caring for a privileged child. As she prepares for the arrival of her only son, who she left behind in her native country, a violent supernatural presence invades her reality, jeopardizing the American Dream she’s carefully pieced together.
About: This script finished with 9 votes on last year’s Black List. Nikyatu Jusu has made her name on writing and directing a lot of short films. This will be her first feature as a writer-director.
Writer: Nikyatu Jusu
Details: 104 pages
“Nanny” seems to be the exact type of script Hollywood is looking for at the moment – a horror script laced with social commentary. But is this the next Get Out? Or just a deep character drama masquerading as a horror film? Let’s find out!
26 year old Aisha, a Senegalese nanny, comes to New York to work for a rich family. Aisha has a plan in place. Back in Senegal, she has a little boy, Kofi. This job should allow her to save up enough money to bring her son to live in America.
Amy is the mother Aisha works for. And her five year old daughter, Chloe, immediately falls in love with Aisha. While at first, everything seems great, Aisha starts to notice some cracks in the affluent family. Adam, the husband, is always gone. And because of this, Amy has developed a serious drinking problem.
But shit really hits the fan when Amy starts shorting Aisha on her paychecks. 20 dollars here, 40 dollars there. Then Aisha starts doing overnights that she doesn’t get paid for at all. Aisha tries nicely to bring this up Amy, who’s always apologetic, pooling together any cash she can find around the apartment and throwing it at Aisha. But she’s still always short.
Aisha eventually starts dating the doorman, a studly African guy named Malik, who Aisha bonds with over being single parents. Then Aisha meets Malik’s grandmother, who’s a psychic. Aisha confides in her that she’s been having these nightmares about an evil mermaid woman. The grandmother gives her the typical spiel about how when the spirit wants something, you have to find out what it is, or whatever.
Finally, we begin to think something odd is going on with Aisha’s son, Kofi. Whenever she Facetimes with him, his picture freezes up. And while all of Aisha’s friends seem to know about Kofi, he’s always spoken of generally. Does Kofi even exist? Has he been taken by the Mermaid Spirit? These are the questions we are left with as we head into the final stretch of “Nanny.”
I’m going to add a new genre to the cinema lexicon.
Fake-Horror.
Fake-Horror is a script or film that promotes itself as a horror film despite the fact that there’s no actual horror in it.
Two of the most disappointing horror components are ‘bad dreams’ and ‘scary mirror moments.’ Any horror thing that happens in a dream is not actual horror because there’s no physical threat. You’re not actually in danger, which is a key component to why horror is effective. Nor is using a mirror to show a scary image that’s more about the SYMBOL of the image rather than the actual monster/ghost/being. Again, if it’s not a physical threat, it’s not real horror.
It’s the movie equivalent of blue balls.
“Oh look! I’m going to give you horror. I’m going to give you horror! Ah ha, nope, enjoy a character driven drama.”
Let me tell you why doing this is so detrimental to the script. Because “Nanny” actually has some good stuff in it. The interplay between Aisha and the family she works for is really well done. The mother is drunk all the time. Underpaying her. Aisha’s having to use her own money to feed Chole. And then you have this scumbag dad who’s looking for all these opportunities to make a move on Aisha.
Watching Aisha try to navigate all that is fun.
But none of it matters because all I kept thinking was, “When is the horror going to show up?” Not psychological horror. REAL HORROR. Shit that puts the character in danger. If you promise something with your premise and don’t deliver, people are going to leave upset EVEN IF your movie is good. Because nobody likes to be lied to.
And critics don’t help. Critics love these movies for some reason. I think because they get off on the symbolism. But audiences hate them. It reminds me a lot of that movie on Netflix called “His House.” It was the exact same thing as this. The horror was all symbols and nonsense. And it got 100% on Rotten Tomatoes, which should tell you right there how worthless their scoring system is. But go over to IMDB and audiences gave the movie a 6.5.
I think this gets to a deeper issue with me that I’m admittedly sensitive about. Which is people writing for critics and awards rather than who they should be writing for, which is audiences. Horror is supposed to be that one genre you can depend on having fun with.
Now you may say that this is what the industry wants right now – social commentary horror. Which is fine. But when it comes to horror films, you can never write a horror movie where the horror is secondary to the message. Horror doesn’t work that way. People come to horror movies to be scared. Get Out showed us the template for how to do that right.
And again, the reason it’s so frustrating is because I want to celebrate this script. It does some things well. Normally in these character driven movies, GSU is thrown out the window. But Aisha has a goal – a very powerful one: she’s trying to save up money to bring her son here. How much bigger of a goal can you ask for?
The writer, Jusu, also throws a lot of obstacles at that goal to keep things interesting. For example, Amy is always short with her payments. This puts Aisha in a precarious position. She needs this job which means she can’t rock the boat. Yet, she needs every cent of her paycheck to get her son here. Imagine a Senegalese nanny having to stand up to her rich employers to tell them enough is enough. They need to start paying her what they owe her.
And I liked how Jusu played with the execution of that storyline. It wasn’t just a black and white solution. Aisha has to go to the father because he’s more willing to give Aisha the money. But then he’s telling Aisha she can’t tell Amy about this. And then he kisses Aisha one night. And, obviously, she has to keep that secret from Amy now, while not getting too angry with the dad, lest he stop paying her, because then NEITHER parent will be paying her. So it all gets rather intricate and interesting.
But, in the end, I didn’t care. I was so mad that the horror never showed up. And what little did show up was weird and confusing. Aisha is being haunted by a mermaid monster?? Only in the vaguest most symbolic of symbolic pretentious college English classes would someone be able to make sense of this choice.
Why are we having mermaid spirits in a movie about a New York nanny??????
Ugh. This was so frustrating. This had the potential to be really good. That’s why I’m mad.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Refrain from overwriting imagery in your scripts. “At the foot of one doorway, shards of light refract like luminescent knives off a pool of blood.” I don’t even know what this means. I see lines like this all the time in scripts, usually on the first page. Stop trying to impress readers. Just give us clear imagery.
What I learned 2: The more vague and symbolic your horror monster is, the less effective he will be as an antagonistic force.
Genre: Science Fiction
Premise: Two decades after three strange abandoned alien city-ships crash into earth, a mysterious secondary enemy attacks our planet, forcing us to protect ourselves with the crashed vessels’ unique alien tech (robotech).
About: Sony has the rights to make a Robotech movie. At one point, Andy Muschietti (“It”) was tasked to direct. The project is currently stalled but it’s a property Sony likes a lot so it should get made at some point. This draft was written by S. Craig Zahler, who currently holds the number 3 slot on my Top 25 with his western, The Brigands of Rattleborge.
Writer: S. Craig Zahler (based on characters/concepts by Shoji Kawamori)
Details: 145 pages
I know we still have to finish up Comedy Showdown, but I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t stoked for Sci-Fi Showdown!!! And when this script showed up in my Inbox, well, I couldn’t help myself.
Man, I loooooovvvvvvvved Robotech as a kid. I must have asked my parents a thousand times for the Robotech robot and got flat out denied each time. Instead they got me books. Wooopdeee doo. “Hey Baby Scriptshadow. I know you wanted that really cool robot that all of your friends would be jealous of but here’s a copy of Catcher in the Rye!”
Maybe this script will provide me with the joy I never received as a child.
One day, out of nowhere, three giant empty alien city-ships crash into our planet. One in Iceland, one in the Himalayas, and one off the coast of North Carolina. The ones in Iceland and the Himalayas explode on impact. But the one off the coast of North Carolina, while heavily damaged, manages to survive, resting out in the ocean.
Twenty years later, a global commission has sent a healthy group of individuals to live on the ship. Half of these people are mechanics, tasked with fixing everything up. The other half are military, there to study the unique vehicles in the city, which consist mostly of transformable airplane/robots called “Veritechs.”
Our main character is a mechanic named Hunter. He was recruited to come to the city by his military brother, Roy. The two just lost their father recently, and Roy is pissed that Hunter abandoned both of them. So let’s just say there’s a healthy dose of conflict in the family.
About 60 pages into the script, earth is attacked by an alien entity that’s been hiding out on the dark side of the moon. How long they’ve been there is anyone’s guess. But one thing is clear – they mean business. They start blowing up cities left and right. Hunter, who was once a pilot, ignores protocol and jumps into one of the Veritechs to fight off the aliens, which are known as Zentraedi.
The leaders of the planet do a little recon and discover the aliens’ plan. They’ve built giant thrusters into the moon so they can fly the moon away from earth, which will destroy all the tides. The oceans will wipe out all of life. Then, once humanity is gone, the Zentraedi will fly the moon back, re-establishing the tides, then take over earth for themselves.
What we eventually learn is that the Zentraedi were fighting some other mysterious alien race halfway across the galaxy. This race sent us these giant cities because they knew the Zentraedi were coming to wipe us out. Sort of like an intergalactic Amazon order. “Can you please send me one giant alien city with a couple of hundred transforming jet robots so I can protect my planet? Thank you. Wait, what are you talking about it’s not Prime. It’s not going to be here until next week??? Awww, come onnnn!”
What follows is a worldwide battle if there ever was one. We jump to the Arctic, we jump to Beijing, we jump to Taiwan. Hunter, not unlike Will Smith in Independence Day, becomes the best Veritech fighter. But will he be enough to take out an entire invading alien species? I guess we’ll find out!
I have a secret to share with you.
Even though I tell screenwriters never to write these large scale sci-fi screenplays (because they’re big and unwieldy and hard to manage), I LOVE the idea of large scale sci-fi. That’s what got me into this whole movie thing in the first place. Star Wars.
But I don’t think, since Star Wars, that I’ve read a single large scale sci-fi screenplay that’s worked.
The reasons are varied. The feature film format rewards tight timeframes and contained locations. Large scale sci-fi is the opposite of that. Then there’s the issue of creating a new universe out of whole cloth. In almost every iteration I’ve read of a screenwriter trying to do this, it ends up being a cheap copy of a movie that’s already been made.
I’d never tell you large scale sci-fi is impossible. But it’s whatever percentage it is that comes right before impossible.
However, if there’s any writer who’s got a shot at succeeding, it would be Zahler. I saw him create a universe out of whole cloth with The Brigands of Rattleborge. Granted that took place in the Old West. But it still exhibited the type of imagination required to tackle giant world-building.
Which is why I was so excited to read this script.
As is the the case with all of Zahler’s scripts, he takes his sweet time setting up the story. But unlike Brigands, which was clearly building towards a great sequence (the invasion during the storm), the buildup here is more expository in nature. Sure, seeing giant ship cities crash into earth is fun. But spending the next 50 pages setting up 20 different characters and the rules of the alien tech and what we’ve done since they’ve arrived got tiresome.
I supposed if you’re REALLY into the details of this mythology, it might be enough. But it reminded me a lot of Matrix Reloaded. Theoretically, going down into this underground city (Zion) and seeing how it operates should be interesting. But I, along with everyone else who watched that movie, was bored to death. We were ready to move forward a lot sooner than the directors were.
I get it. It’s hard to figure out with sci-fi what needs to be included and what should be relegated to backstory. But one of the most important ingredients in any screenplay is MOMENTUM. Once you lose that, it’s hard to get it back. And a lot of the momentum was lost in the section of this screenplay after the ship-cities crashed and before the aliens attacked.
Let’s talk for a second about what you can do to prevent something like this. Because, sometimes, you do need time to set your story up, especially if it’s a story like Robotech with all these moving parts.
Here are a couple tips. One, get rid of anything that you don’t absolutely need. Sure, spending several scenes setting up your Fifth Biggest Character helps us know that character better. But is knowing the 5th biggest character that well worth sacrificing momentum? You can usually cut out more than you think you can. So you should always err on the side of cutting.
Two, use ‘dramatic questions’ to keep “slow” sections interesting. A dramatic question is something you pose in a scene or a sequence of scenes that demands the reader keep reading to get an answer. The idea is, the reader’s more likely to stick around if he doesn’t yet have an answer to something.
And since not every scene in a movie can be juiced up with nuclear level GSU, a ‘dramatic question’ is a nice backup plan. In A Quiet Place 2, the characters get to safety early on in the screenplay when they reach a neighbor’s hideout. The script could’ve easily, then, gone into basic ‘information mode’ of “here’s how this guy lives. Here’s what all of the characters are now going to do moving forward.” But the sequence had this nice dramatic question of, “Who is this guy?” Is he good? Is he dangerous?” That added a little pep to a section that could’ve been stale.
That’s all dramatic questions are – they provide an extra layer of intrigue playing underneath the story for sections that are taking a GSU breather.
Robotech is okay. It’s one of those scripts that’s going to look so much better onscreen than it does on the page. Still, it was too information-heavy for me and needed more than those two modes – all-out exposition and all-out action. For that reason, it wasn’t quite worth the read.
Screenplay link: Robotech
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Dramatic questions are only as effective as how interesting the question is. Let’s go back to that Quiet Place 2 example. The question of, is Cillian Murphy’s character dangerous(?) has major implications. If he’s a killer, they’re all in a lot of trouble. If the dramatic question had instead been, “Will they find food for the night?” I mean, sure, there’s some dramatic value to that question. But since they’re not going to starve if they miss one meal, the dramatic value is, overall, pretty low. So don’t just add dramatic questions. Make sure they’re compelling dramatic questions!
