The contest runs at the end of the month so start sending your entries in now!
In this field, it’s rare that your screenplay ever gets any exposure. Even if you manage to get an agent and that agent sends your script out, you’ll be lucky if 20 people read your script from cover to cover. Scriptshadow is the only place in the world where people actually get to see and experience your writing on a large-scale level. And we’re on the cusp of celebrating your writing in a more visible way than ever before.
At the end of this month, we are having our first Mega-Showdown, a 2-week screenwriting competition for feature screenplays that anybody can enter, and it’s absolutely free. You will send me the title of your script, your genre, your logline, and the first 5 pages of your screenplay. From all the submissions, I will post the Top 10 loglines along with your screenplay’s first page. You, the readers of the site, will vote for your favorite. The top 4 will move on to week 2, where they will each get their own individual featured day, with their first five pages posted. Then, at the end of the week, we’ll have a second voting round and you will pick your favorite script of the 4. I will review the winning script that Monday.
All of it will play out in real time so you don’t have to spend months waiting for that e-mail from the contest-runners that may or may not come. This contest is a living breathing organism from the second we post the loglines until I review the winning script. And guess what? You can start entering your scripts RIGHT NOW. Here are the submission details…
What: Mega-Showdown (Online Feature Screenplay Contest)
What I need from you: Title, genre, logline, your first five pages
Optional: movie tagline, movie-crossover pitch
Contest Date: Friday, July 26th
Deadline: Thursday, July 25th, 10pm Pacific Time
Send to: entries should be sent to carsonreeves3@gmail.com
How: Include “MEGA” in the subject line
Price: Free
I’m giving out TWO July 4th Screenplay Consult Deals (notes on your script). These deals are half-off the full price. E-mail me at carsonreeves1@gmail.com with the subject line “JULY4” to get the deal. Also, if you suck at writing loglines, I’m here to help. My Deluxe Logline Consult involves me helping you craft your logline until it’s perfect. It’s 50 bucks. If you only want to know if your concept is good or not, I offer a basic logline analysis for 25 bucks. E-mail me at carsonreeves1@gmail.com to get either!
Genre: Drama
Premise: Two struggling lobster fishermen try to hold the crew of a giant container boat for ransom, but when the plan falls apart, one leaves the other to fend for himself.
About: This script finished with 11 votes on last year’s Black List. The writer, Josh Woolf, is brand new and does not yet have any credits.
Writer: Josh Woolf
Details: 120 pages
If you put any characters on a boat in the sea and place them in a dangerous situation, there’s a good chance I will want to read that script.
Being on a ship in the middle of the ocean is an inherently dramatic situation. Cause if anything goes wrong, you’re fuuuuuuuuuuu**ed.
But today’s writer takes that premise in a curious direction – his characters leave the boat and go back to shore! Can he still make it work? Let’s find out…
40-something Dennis Kelly is a broke crab fisherman. He didn’t want this job but, due to his fisherman father’s wishes, he took over the business after he died. Dennis works with ex-con Nick Silva. Nobody else will hire Nick because of his past.
Both of them are getting fed up because the shipping business is creating more and more shipping lanes in the ocean, limiting where they can fish, and leaving them with smaller and smaller catches. This leaves Dennis in a ton of debt, which he hides from his wife.
So Dennis comes up with a kill-two-birds-with-one-stone idea: Let’s hold the crew of one of these ship’s ransom. They’re in a unique situation where they have the kind of boat that can get them to these ships. And once they’re on, they can enact their plan. So that’s what they do. They pretend they’re stranded. Once they’re on the ship, they pull out guns, call the company president, and demand 25 million dollars.
But when the president gives pushback, Dennis goes to plan B. There’s a safe onboard. Dennis brings the captain to get that safe while Nick watches the other crew members. But, 20 minutes later, Nick looks out the window to see Dennis heading off in a life boat. Nick charges upstairs, only to find one of the crew members shot and dead.
Nick grabs his own boat and leaves. The two separately get back to shore, to their small Maine town, where they immediately become suspects in what just happened. Dennis hid the safe on his boat but then his boat gets impounded because he hasn’t paid the dock rent in months. As Dennis constructs a plan to retrieve the money, an angry Nick comes back into the picture, determined to make sure he doesn’t take the fall for Dennis’s plan.
Sometimes we write screenplays.
And, sometimes, screenplays write us.
What I mean is, you can have an idea of what your script is going to be. But then when you start to write, it begins wriggling around like a fish. It doesn’t want to go where you want to take it. So you let it take you where it wants to go before, after a while, you’re in an entirely different screenplay from the one you started.
That’s how Sea Dogs read to me.
It reads like a writer who planned to write about two regular guys taking over a giant container ship, but then detours off the ship, back to land, and becomes about the fallout from the botched plan rather than the plan itself.
I could be wrong. Maybe that’s where Woolf always wanted to take the script. But that’s what it FELT LIKE when reading it. Because when you have choices in writing, the route you usually want to take is the one that creates a more compelling situation. There’s no question that staying on this ship and dealing with the deteriorating factors of a botched ransom had a lot more potential than going back home and running away from cops.
There are a million scripts about guys running from cops in small towns. But there are very few where people are trying to rob a giant container ship.
So I think Woolf made the wrong creative choice there. A lot of people are going to read this and feel like it was a bait-and-switch.
But to his credit, he does a pretty good job with the fallout part. At least up until the last 20 pages, when things got too messy. The best thing he did was have Dennis betray Nick. When Nick sees that Dennis is shooting off in the lifeboat, we’re genuinely thinking, “Wait, what’s going to happen now?”
And Woolf keeps us on the edge of our canoe, asking that question, for a good 50 pages. We’re following the two individually and we gradually realize that Dennis set Nick up. He’s hoping he’ll get blamed for the crew member kill and Dennis will be able to slip away Scott-free.
Of course, that’s not what happens. Dennis’s problems get worse as he gets separated from the money he stole and he desperately tries to get it back, all while the cops are closing in.
The script is also a good example of the power of money as a dramatic tool. Running out of money can be cliched if you’re just focusing on overdue bills. But it can be quite intense when it’s all-consuming. That’s what Dennis goes through. He’s 4 months late on every single bill, plus his mortgage. He also loses his boat. He tries to win money back through poker but just loses more. Everywhere he turns, money is being taken away from him.
When you take away enough money from your character, your character becomes desperate. And desperate characters are more reckless. They make riskier choices. They hurt people. Those are all things that make dramatic storytelling better!
Unfortunately, that entertaining reckless behavior is muted due to just how pathetic Dennis is. Actually, both Dennis and Nick are pathetic pathetic people. The way that Dennis has made all these terrible choices in his life and hidden them from others, despite the fact that they could blow back on them (such as his wife) is despicable. So we actually want Dennis to get caught. Hell, I wanted him to die.
I’m still not sure how that story-type works. I grew up with the traditional storytelling axiom of “Make your hero likable so we’ll root for them.” Or, if they’re “bad,” give them some qualities so that we still root for them. Dennis didn’t have a single redeeming quality.
I think there was more of an opportunity here to make Nick a genuinely good guy. Dennis would then screw him over so he’d have to take the blame for what they did. Nick finally toughens up and comes after him. Make it more: Nick vs. Dennis. But, instead, the script mostly forces them to deal with the fallout individually.
I would say the script is worth checking out. But it’s another instance, similar to The Instigators, where it starts off big then tapers off. The script can never quite recover from our frustration over what it could’ve been. Had this stayed on the boat and we beefed up some of the boat worker characters, it could’ve been a really fun screenplay.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[x] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: How to open your script with a flashforward — Opening flashforwards are very common in screenplays. I read a lot of them. But most writers write them incorrectly.
What they do is give you a tiny snippet of an exciting situation before quickly ending the scene and cutting to the present. Instead, you want to do what Josh Woolf does here. You want to create an actual SCENE with a beginning middle and end.
Cause think about it. The whole reason you’ve chosen to use this scene from the future is that it’s exciting right? You’re jumping forward in time because, had you started your script at an earlier point, you wouldn’t have had anything exciting to start on.
So the fact that you’re utilizing an exciting situation means YOU SHOULD MILK IT. This scene, which follows the act of picking up two people from a lifeboat and them being dangerous, is exactly 3 pages long, which is the bare minimum of how long a flashforward scene should be. And it’s good! It’s one of the best scenes in the script.
Most of the flashforwards I read, especially in beginner screenplays, last half a page, sometimes a full page. But rarely longer. Sea Dogs’ opening scene is strong in part because the writer takes the time to tell a story within it.
This is the elusive STALLONE scripted version of Beverly Hills Cop, that only recently surfaced.
Genre: Action (not Comedy)
Premise: When an esteemed Beverly Hills art dealer kills his brother, a Detroit cop heads to the prized zip code to enact some vigilante justice.
About: Like just about every project in the 80s, multiple actors were attached before the film went into production. In an ironic twist, today’s project mirrors what happened with the script I reviewed in my newsetter, The Instigators. The original script, with Sylvestor Stallone attached, was meant to be more of a straight-action movie. When they couldn’t get it exactly how he wanted, he bailed, Eddie Murphy came on, and they turned it into a comedy. This is the Stallone-written draft, which was lost for a long time and only recently uncovered.
Writer: Daniel Petrie, Jr. and Sylvester Stallone (my assumption of what this means is that Petrie Jr. wrote the original draft and this is Stallone’s rewrite of it. They did not work together. That’s what the “and” means. If they were working together, it would be “&”).
Details: 114 pages
It remains one of the most intriguing questions that hasn’t been answered in Hollywood: Can Sylvester Stallone actually write?
To answer that question, let me give you a quick peek behind the curtain of how Hollywood [used to] operate. Someone would write a decent script. The script would get purchased. The studios and production houses that purchased that script would now work with the writer to get that script into “movie shape.”
9 times out of 10, after a few drafts with the original writer, they’d fire the writer (or not renew them) and hire someone else, usually a writer they had worked with before and knew could deliver what they wanted.
Because it’s so hard to get a movie made in Hollywood, that new writer would often be fired as well and a new-new writer would be brought on. Then, if the script was so lucky as to get a production start date, bigger and bigger writers would be brought in to patch up the script’s lingering weaknesses.
Because of this, nobody really knows who wrote the script! This is why Ben Affleck famously quipped after winning the Oscar for co-writing Good Will Hunting that he felt like a fraud. It was rumored that a ton of writers came in and cleaned that script up, most notably a writer I mentioned in my newsletter, William Goldman.
But you have to understand that with Stallone in the 70s, it was a whole different level of fraudness because you could control the narrative exactly how you wanted to. They didn’t have any way to check it. This is why there were so many good stories about the industry back then. Because it was easier to make them up! The story of Rocky as a film is a lot better if Stallone wrote the the thing in a week and refused to sell it if he couldn’t star. That’s the kind of story that makes headlines in the trade papers.
But did it really happen? Has Stallone written anything Oscar-worthy since? No. He hasn’t written anything close to that.
Look, here’s what probably happened. Stallone wrote the first draft. Maybe he even did it in a week. But like a lot of newbie screenwriters or people who don’t dedicate themselves to the craft, it was mid. They then brought in REAL SCREENWRITERS, people who know how to maximize the drama and maximize the character development – people who know their sh*t. They came in and made it something great. But “Stallone Writes Okay Draft and Then A-List Screenwriters Come In and Fix It” isn’t as good of a headline, is it?
Either way, we now have yet another Stallone screenplay to add more context to the discussion. Here is… the Stallone version of Beverly Hills Cop!
Detroit cop Axel Cobretti busts a couple of low-lives with a fake stolen cigarette scam but, in the process, destroys an entire police truck, leaving him to get reamed out by his boss, who’s sick of Axel pulling these ridiculous scams without running them by him first.
That night, Axel finds his brother, Michael, who just got out of prison, waiting at his apartment. Michael shows him this very expensive-looking little statue that he says is going to make him rich. The two get drunk and when they come home, thugs are waiting in the shadows. After knocking Axel out, they brutally torture and kill Michael.
The next day, Axel traces the statue back to an old friend of theirs, Jenny, who made it big in Los Angeles working for an art dealer, Paul Fleming. Axel heads to Beverly Hills and immediately meets with Jenny, who’s freaking out that Axel has brought her into this. She begs him not to mess with Fleming, who’s a powerful dude.
Axel doesn’t listen and starts tracking Fleming around town. Fleming then sends guys to track *him*, and to make matters complicated, the Beverly Hills police send two of their own dudes to track Axel. Axel looks deeper into this statue that came from Fleming and begins to suspect Fleming is doing something illegal. Axel’s plan is to find out what, or kill Fleming in the process.
You know, they actually didn’t change much of the plot here. They did switch up a few areas though. In Stallone’s BHC, the person who gets killed, Michael, is his brother. In Murphy’s BHC, it’s a childhood friend. What’s the difference here? It’s intricate but it’s noteworthy. A brother’s death is going to create more of an emotional impact than a friend’s death.
So why did Murphy’s version change it? Simple, because Murphy’s BHC is a comedy. In a comedy, you want to be a little lighter with the major plot beats. You don’t want to make things too sad. So turning him into a friend makes sense. Stallone clearly wanted us to feel this death. So he didn’t just make him Axel’s brother, he had the bad guys ruthlessly torture the brother before killing him. And it worked! I was gung-ho about Axel getting revenge.
The downside of Stallone’s version is that the concept so aggressively covets a comedic treatment that it’s kind of a waste to set it in Beverly Hills, since we’re not really taking advantage of the difference between the two cities. That’s what Murphy’s BHC did so well, is it leaned into its concept and had fun with the fact that the most “Detroit” guy ever is operating in Beverly Hills.
It always makes me nervous when the genre is working against the promise of the premise. I remember working on the Black List script “Court 17” with Elad, which is about a tennis player who gets stuck looping his first round match over and over again, and when we started that script, it was a comedy. Cause it made sense to be a comedy.
We came up with a lot of fun stuff. The player starts to use his knowledge of the day as an, almost, superpower, and he’d do things like sneak into his opponent’s locker and cut the strings in his rackets. And some days he would show up to matches dressed and groomed (and mimicking) exactly like his opponent to throw him off.
But as the script matured, we ditched the comedic angle and went with a dramatic one. After a while, I got frustrated because we were no longer taking advantage of our premise. Things were happening that could happen in any movie, and not, specifically, a tennis looping movie. That always bothered me and something about the script was definitely lost through that transition.
With the comedic version of Beverly Hills Cop being so iconic, you can see, from reading this dramatic version, where it’s not popping as much as the movie. At times, we could’ve been in New York. We could’ve been in Miami. We could’ve been in New Orleans. It wasn’t specific enough to DETROIT—->BEVERLY HILLS.
I’m guessing that’s because Stallone was less interested in exploring the concept as he was writing a character he wanted to play. Which is fine. If you’re going to star in a movie, you want the character to be great. And Stallone’s Axel does have moments. At one point he charges into an expensive restaurant where Fleming is eating and hurls his bodyguard across Fleming’s table, destroying the intricately laid out dinner, and when Fleming stares at him in fury and asks him what he wants, Stallone’s Axel stares right back and says, “You.” And then walks out.
For a quick screenwriting lesson, I want to highlight a scene early in the script. In it, Axel and his brother, Michael, head to the bar. At the bar, they have a really (and I mean REALLY) long dialogue scene. It’s mostly boring stuff. They talk about the past. They talk about feelings. As I was reading it, I was thinking, “Why would Stallone write such a boring long dialogue scene?”
And then, right after that scene, when they go home, is when Michael gets tortured and killed. I realized, in that moment, is that’s the ONLY TIME IN SCREENWRITING you can write a boring five-page dialogue scene where characters talk about the past, and feelngs, and people they know. Is when you’re going to SLAM INTO US WITH A GIANT MOMENT RIGHT AFTERWARDS. If you try to write one of these scenes within the normal flow of your script, fuggetaboutit. You’ll lose the reader.
Another little tip from this script, which was included in both this version and Murphy’s version, was the Beverly Hills cops openly following Axel around. In storytelling, you’re always looking to flip the script, to do traditional things non-traditionally. That’s when moments stand out.
When people follow other people in action and crime movies, they do it secretly. The whole point of following is that they don’t want to get caught. But Axel comes straight up to these guys as they begin following him and says, “I can just tell you where I’m headed and you can meet me there.” Both sides knowing that they’re “secretly” following him added a fun little dimension to that relationship and they pulled that off by taking a known trope and playing around with it.
I have to say that while this script doesn’t work as well as the comedy version, it’s still solid. The structure is there. And while we don’t laugh as much, we’re more emotionally invested because of the slaughtering of his brother. I really wanted to see Fleming go down.
You can check out the script for yourself here: Stallone’s Version of Beverly Hills Cop
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[xx] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: After reading Stallone’s BHC, I kind of want to bring back these old-school longer character descriptions. I know Paul Fleming better from just this intro than any character I’ve read in a script over the last month.
Have you ever heard of “The Hype Man” screenwriting tip? Of course not. It’s ONLY in this month’s Scriptshadow newsletter, a newsletter that does a deep dive into the difference between good screenwriting and bad screenwriting. This newsletter includes the latest movie from one of the most innovative directors ever, a new movie from one of the most underrated directors ever, and a movie from the director of Jumanji. And you know what? The movie from the director of Jumanji might be the best one! I also review a script that reunites two Hollywood mainstays who could’ve disappeared off the face of the earth if their movie hadn’t been an unexpected hit 20 years ago. Finally, we continue to rev up for Mega Showdown this month. Start sending in those scripts!
One thing I didn’t have time to get into in the newsletter was the new season of The Bear. The Bear has been one of my favorite shows on TV these last couple of years so I’ve been super-psyched for the third season. I’m now three episodes in and my alarm bells are ringing.
One of the signs of a brilliant artist is that you’re never sure what they’re going to do next. You look at guys like Quentin Tarantino, Christopher Nolan, Yorgos Lanthimos, and Ruben Östlund, and every time they come out with a new movie, it’s inventive and different and unexpected.
Then you have guys on the opposite end of the spectrum. Directors like Wes Anderson, Terrance Malick, David Leitch, and Matthew Vaughn, who keep making the same movie over and over again. The movies vary in quality and can sometimes even be good, but they never give you that amazing feeling you get from a truly original artist.
Christopher Storer, who created The Bear, is in danger of creating a third variation of director, which is someone who tries so hard to be unique with each new iteration that he’s actually becoming predictable.
Storer so badly wants to be perceived as an artist that he’s lost sight of how to tell a story. The first season of The Bear was a traditional (and brilliant) exploration of running a fast food restaurant. It was so well written in part due to the irony at the top of the show – that the fast food joint was being run by a 5-star chef.
The second season was nothing like the first. Storer bucked the traditional A to B narrative structure and told 8 self-contained stories, many times focusing on individual characters as opposed to the ensemble. The season had more highs than the first but also more lows, as it was all heaped in a giant pile of discombobulation. But Storer displayed a propensity to radically experiment. For example, in the big final episode, the main character spends the entire time in the freezer.
With the third season upon us – and keep in mind I’m only 3 episodes in – I’m starting to predict what Storer will do, which amounts to anything nontraditional. A 30 minute opening montage episode of stuff we’ve already seen is a “Get real” moment for him. That’s film school nonsense. Then the second episode all takes place in one room. Another film school faux-genius choice that, when we saw it the first time on the show, it was cute. Now it’s getting annoying. And the third episode was just people running around the kitchen getting angry in real time. We already did real-time. So this is starting to feel played.
With 7 episodes left, I’m going to guess at where Storer is going next and while I don’t expect to be 100% right, I expect to be mostly right. Because he’s showing his hand. He wants to be lauded as an artist and so he’s doing as many weird film-school things as he think up.
There will probably be an episode that focuses on the clock in the restaurant and while we HEAR everything that goes on in the restaurant, we stay on the clock the entire time. There will probably be an episode that takes place from the POV of a utensil – my guess is a spoon – for the entire running time. The ending will be the spoon being thrown away in the garbage and we’ll all feel sad.
There will be an episode where everything is told backwards. So we’ll start at the end of the episode and end at the beginning. There will be an episode that takes place when Carmy was 5 years old. His grandmother will be played by Liza Minelli. And in real-time we’ll see him make his first meal (maybe Mac and cheese?) and fall in love with cooking.
There will be an “alternate history” episode where we get to see what the restaurant would be like if Carmy’s brother was still alive. We’d probably still be at the beef shop and his bro would be running the place and the episode will focus on Carmy visiting Chicago for the weekend from his big fancy California restaurant job and we see the two brothers fight the whole time. To motivate it, the episode will end with Carmy waking up from a dream.
And the final episode will probably be Richie on top of a building, thinking of killing himself, Carmy comes to stop him, and Richie gives a 78 minute no-cut monologue about how he came to this decision.
I am all for writers and directors taking risks. But if the only reason you’re taking risks is to take risks? And it’s not because you actually think it will result in a better product? That’s a waste of time. I’m being facetious with most of these episode predictions but that’s only because I’m frustrated. In the end, we want a good story. Bells and whistles only get you so far. It’s the substance that matters. The Bear? Please bring back some substance for the final 7 episodes.
If you’re not on the newsletter, e-mail me at carsonreeves1@gmail.com and I’ll put you on!
Genre: 30 min. Comedy/Period
Winning Logline: A troupe of struggling actors fight for relevancy for their small, dingy theatre located directly across the cobblestone street from Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre at the height of its fame.
About: Dan Martin beat out seven other contenders on Pilot Showdown Day with his clever logline. It is the first comedy pilot reviewed on the site in over four months! Can he do the impossible and win over a Scriptshadow comedy crowd that is said to be even more discerning than the crowds at the Globe Theater???
Writer: Dan Martin
Details: 34 pages
If you had told me I’d be traveling back 5+ centuries TWICE in the same week to review scripts, I would’ve told you… well, I would’ve told you that’s possible because that’s the wonderful world of screenplay-reading. You never know what you’re going to get.
It is the year 1594.
Playwright Thaddeus Longfellow is with his friend (who he secretly loves), and actress, Katherine Greyman, at the world-famous Globe Theater, watching Romeo and Juliet. In the audience is the writer, William Shakespeare, who loves himself more than anything else on the planet. This man’s life is the life Thaddeus dreams of living.
But that life probably isn’t going to happen anytime soon because Thaddeus has had writer’s block for over a year. As he frustratingly picks up Katherine (she’s in tears after the ending of Romeo & Juliet), they head back to their theater, The Silver Theater, across the street.
The Silver Theater, and pretty much everybody who works there, suck. You’ve got Michael the Mute. Kurtus the German (who’s actually from Austria). As well as a number of other not-attractive-enough actors casually awaiting their next play – casually because Thaddeus doesn’t have any new material.
But then Thaddeus has an idea. Through the grapevine, word is that Shakespeare doesn’t write his own stuff. It’s actually ghost-written by a guy named Joseph Noone. So Thaddeus recruits Noone to write the Silver’s next play. The cocky Noone comes in and writes one of the worst plays ever, making the Silver’s acting troupe look even worse than they already are. And the out-of-ideas Thaddeus goes wandering the streets drunk, fantasizing about killing himself.
But right before he takes action, he runs into none-other than an also-drunk William Shakespeare. Shakespeare and Thaddeus get to talking and Shakespeare says it’s lonely at the top. I don’t know if people love my writing or just love it because my name’s attached to it. It would be nice to know if I’m actually as great as I think I am. And that’s when Thaddeus gets an idea: Give me one of your unknown scripts, I’ll play it at my theater, and we can find out together. Shakespeare agrees and that’s the end of episode 1.
I feel a little out of my comfort zone here. Analyzing half-hour comedy is not one of my strong suits. I find that because comedy is so subjective it’s very hard to gauge when the comedy is working and when it isn’t.
I was recently on a Zoom consultation for a comedy spec and the writer and I were talking about some of the jokes in his script. I told him I wasn’t laughing at them and I proceeded to offer some alternatives which he, then, proceeded to tell me were even less funny. And that’s how a lot of generating comedy goes. It’s not easy.
Despite that, my big takeaway here was this: We need more jokes.
When I first read that great logline for the pilot, I thought, “That’s good. That could be really funny.” And the main thing I imagined was leaning into the contrast between the two theaters. We would see perfectly choreographed comedy perfection at the Globe and then quickly cut to the lazy sloppy mistake-prone acts at the Silver Theater.
And we do get a little of that here. But not as much as I wanted. Which I think is Dan’s big mistake is he focused more on the plot than anything else. And, with comedy, you have to focus on the jokes. Where do the funny jokes come from? They come from characters. So you want to spend a ton of time coming up with the funniest characters possible.
Instead, we get a ton of plot here. And, to Dan’s credit, it’s good plotting. We set up the contrast between the two theaters. How Silver Theater is barely paying its bills. We set up our hero’s primary flaw, that he’s got debilitating writer’s block and can’t create anymore. We set up the rivalry (or perceived rivalry in Thad’s head) of Thad and Shakespeare. We watch him hatch his plan of recruiting Shakespeare’s ghostwriter. And then we get the big ending reveal, which is that, to save the theater, Shakespeare has agreed to allow them to anonymously use his play.
But because we had to set all that up, we didn’t get enough of the comparisons between the two theaters. I always try and remind writers – especially writers who win these contests with beloved loglines – to lean into that beloved concept as much as possible. Because that’s what we voted for. That’s what excited us. So if you’re spending 80% of the pilot on plot and setup instead, the reader’s going to feel let down.
Now, I’m guessing Dan would argue that the plan is to do exactly that throughout the rest of the show. It’s TV so there will be many episodes to play with this fun concept of the Globe Theater vs. the Silver Theater. Meanwhile, for this episode, he’s got to set everything up! But this is why screenwriting is hard. Readers and viewers don’t care that you have to set things up. If it’s a comedy, they want to laugh NOW. And that’s what I wanted, too.
I’m not going to pretend like I know exactly how to redraft this pilot to achieve this. But my initial thought was we needed to spend more time at The Silver Theater. I want to see just how bad it is there. I want to meet every hilarious character. I want to watch the world’s worst play. And, afterward, I want to see all of them disperse and go to their corners and complain in funny ways about all the reasons why their genius isn’t being allowed to shine.
To me, the most recent example of a great TV comedy ensemble was The Office. And while they didn’t have time in that pilot episode to introduce everyone in the office, they gave us Michael. They gave us Dwight. They gave us the Intern. And we got a few quick scenes with people at the back of the Office. And you were laughing! Cause they were all funny.
When I look at Thad, I’m not sure I find anything funny about him. He’s more of a tragic figure. He’s sad about Shakespeare being better than him. He’s sad about his writer’s block. Where are the laughs? One thing I know is that your lead comedy character needs to be funny. So Thad needs to be reimagined at the very least. You’d be surprised at how that could then open up comedy everywhere else.
Cause think about Michael in The Office. His comedic construction was not only great for him, but it allowed the writers to build Dwight around him, with Dwight being obsessed with Michael and wanting to make him happy no matter what. If you don’t first figure out Michael’s comedic angle, you can’t build Dwight’s comedic angle. So I could see the same happening once you figure out Thad.
Comedy is hard. Pilots are hard. Comedy pilots are, therefore, very hard. That’s what she said. Sorry, I’ve got Michael Scott on the brain. So I’m not trying to kill Dan here. I understand the difficulty of the task he’s up against. But I think Dan was too plot-focused in the writing of this pilot when he needed to be more character and comedy-focused. Give us funny characters, make us laugh as much as possible. Even if this comes in the package of a thin plot, we’ll still watch the next episode.
P.S. It might be funny to add a mockumentary style to this since it doesn’t make sense whatsoever for the time. One of the reasons The Office (and shows like it) were able to establish their comedic characters so quickly is because they could be asked direct questions about themselves in interviews. Which helped the viewer IMMEDIATELY get the characters. For example, in Michaels’s very first interview in The Office, he’s pointing to his “World’s Best Boss” coffee mug. We immediately understand, in that moment, what’s important to him, and where his comedy is going to come from.
Pilot Script Link: Playwrong
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: In my experience reading comedy, writers need to write at least twice as many jokes as they actually write. Because you have to remember that some jokes aren’t going to hit. This is something that Judd Apatow will tell his feature writers from time to time: “Go through the script and add 50 more jokes.” Cause the worst thing that can happen when reading a comedy script is the reader doesn’t laugh enough. So make sure they have enough to laugh about.