16 days left to enter the Mega-Showdown Screenplay Contest! Head over to this post for details on how to enter. It’s easy!

Genre: Horror
Premise: A hacker tasked with looking into a strange suicide begins to find herself followed by random crowds of people who she suspects may want to kill her.
About: There are a lot of Jack Hellers. I think this is the producer Jack Heller, who’s produced all of S. Craig Zahler’s movies. This script of his finished on last year’s Black List and was one of the only scripts on the list to get a coveted “must read” rating from me.
Writer: Jack Heller
Details: 97 pages

In the comment section yesterday, we were talking about Eddie Murphy and how he went from the biggest comedic actor in the world to 35 years of missteps.

Here are some of the concepts he signed up for…

The Adventures of Pluto Nash – In the future, a man struggles to keep his lunar nightclub out of the hands of the Mafia.

Vampire in Brooklyn – A Caribbean vampire seduces a Brooklyn police officer who has no idea that she is half-vampire.

Metro – A hostage negotiator teams up with a sharpshooter to bring down a dangerous jewel thief.

Holy Man – An over-the-top television evangelist finds a way to turn television home shopping into a religious experience, and takes America by storm.

Norbit – A mild-mannered guy, who is married to a monstrous woman, meets the woman of his dreams, and schemes to find a way to be with her.

Meet Dave – A crew of miniature aliens operates a spaceship that has a human form. Their plans get messed up when the human form falls in love.

Some of these concepts are misguided (why is the vampire, oddly, Caribbean?), some bland (hostage negotiator tries to take down a jewel thief??), some forced (aliens piloting a person), some lacking a clear comedic angle (Pluto Nash).

The reason I bring these up today, of all days, is to remind everyone HOW IMPORTANT CONCEPTS ARE. When you have a great concept, the majority of the script writes itself. When you don’t, you spend 90% of your time forcing things to work. And they never quite work because the concept itself never worked.

This is why, when you stumble upon a good idea, you must cherish it, like a rare Pokemon. It is worth more than you could possibly imagine.  I mean that.  A good idea could conceivably last CENTURIES.

I would place today’s concept in that category.  Well, it’s maybe not centuries-lasting good but it’s one of the first concepts I noticed when last year’s Black List came out. I wanted to save it for a rainy day. It’s not exactly raining out but I’m in the mood to read something awesome.

Let’s check it out.

We start off by seeing a girl, Tabitha, hurry into a subway with a giant crowd slowly following her. The crowd of people eventually surrounds her and positions her head in the path of an oncoming train and she’s beheaded.

Cut to several days later, where we meet Lou. Lou is one of those “Girl with the dragon tattoo” types. She’s a hacker who does occasional jobs for an insurance company. The company is trying to prove that a girl (Tabitha) killed herself so it doesn’t have to pay out her life insurance.

Lou, who’s at the tail end of a long journey to end her conservatorship for, presumably, mental instability, starts looking into the video of Tabitha’s death, which shows… NO CROWD. Only Tabitha. But Lou curiously finds a strange blur moving towards Tabitha that warrants more investigation.

So she goes to the last person who saw Tabitha before she died, the subway ticket guy. That guy doesn’t want anything to do with Lou’s questions and goes home. Lou follows him and oddly sees the guy screaming to random nothingness, “Get away from me!” 20 minutes later, back at his home, he kills himself.

Lou then begins having dreams of a crowd of people in her bedroom watching her while she sleeps. It creeps her out enough that she reconnects with her ex-boyfriend, Wes, who assures her she’ll be fine.

But as Lou starts to move around the city, she notices crowds starting to form, sometimes following her, sometimes just looking at her. It becomes apparent that she is in some sort of chain of people who are killed by a crowd. She must figure out how to stop this crowd before it makes her its latest victim.

The first question that pops into a reader’s head after a script is, “Is this script good enough to recommend?” If the answer is yes, the writer is in a very good place. Because it’s hard as hell to get people to recommend a script.

The section question that enters a reader’s mind is: “Could this be a movie?” A screenplay is a proposed blueprint for a movie. So readers want to know if the blueprint could be successful.

Now here’s the part that drives aspiring writers crazy. You can get a “no” on the first question, a “yes” to the second question, and people will still want to buy your script. That’s because “Can it be a movie?” is the only question that really matters.

The Crowd is a movie. Potentially a very successful one. It’s as if someone combined It Follows and Smile and injected the offspring with several performance-enhancing drugs.

Crowds are scary. The fact that nobody has thought to make a horror movie about one is shocking. And the writer knows exactly how to milk fear from a crowd.

I love how the crowd kills. It keeps following you and following you until it’s surrounding you. Then, it keeps moving in, moving in, and soon, it’s crushing you. And it doesn’t let up. It keeps crushing and crushing til bones start snapping, til eyeballs start popping. The crowd is ruthless.

And I love how the writer didn’t stop there. In addition to the crowd, there’s an individual within the crowd – a sort of alpha demon of sorts – and as the crowd holds you in place, the demon weaves through the crowd, getting closer and closer. It’s another scary element within an already terrifying element.

The crowd can also appear momentarily. You can be walking somewhere in the city and then, all of a sudden, everybody stops and turns to you. In this iteration, the crowd only wants to watch. Or to warn.

It’s genuinely spooky stuff.

And I liked what the writer did with the main character as well. We meet Lou at the end of a long journey where she’s been trying to get herself out of a protective conservatorship (think what Britney Spears parents were doing to her), which gives her a personal goal that works, concurrently, with the plot goal (find out what this crowd is before it kills you).

As someone who’s read a million and one characters, I don’t remember a single script where a character was trying to get out of a conservatorship. I love writers who go the extra mile and come up with unique angles like that.

But I do have one beef with The Crowd.

There isn’t enough crowd!

When you have an idea this original, you want to take advantage of it! So much of this script is about the investigation into how the crowd came to be and how it ended up with her. I don’t go to a movie about scary crowds to spend 75% of the time watching characters look at computer screens and say stuff like, “Yeah, that person in that video clip DOES look strange.”

I want my character in CROWD SITUATIONS!

I actually thought this script was going to be one long real-time story where the main character must make it through the city with crowds moving in on her wherever she goes.

I’m fine that that’s not the case but, at least give me 25% of that!

I’m guessing the writer thought that if there was too much crowd stuff, it would lose its impact. I suppose that’s an okay argument. But not if you get inventive. I already liked this rule he created where sometimes the crowd just watches. It doesn’t move in on you. So I know the writer has the creative ability to come up with different variations of the crowd. I would like to see more of that variety.

I’ve said it once, I’ll say it a million more times: GIVE US WHAT’S UNIQUE ABOUT YOUR MOVIE. That’s the one thing of value you possess – that unique asset.

Any time you are not focusing on that asset, you are focusing on things MOVIEGOERS HAVE SEEN BILLIONS OF TIMES ALREADY. You know how many investigations I’ve seen in movies? 11 billion.

That’s my only issue here. More crowd. Cause crowds are scary and the writer did a great job showing that. So show it more.

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

What I learned: Don’t overthink verbs – “Tabitha strolls her eyes to a confusing sight.” If the reader has to stop to try and figure out what “strolling” one’s eyes means, you’ve written a clunky sentence. Just use normal words! “Tabitha notices something confusing.”

What I learned 2: Horror writers. Yeah, I’m speaking to you. YOU ARE NO LONGER ALLOWED TO WRITE SCENES IN BATHROOMS ANYMORE! STAY. AWAY. FROM BATHROOMS.  No bloody sink scenes. No mirrors with monsters behind you in the reflection scenes. No foggy messages in the mirrors. Stop! Stop stop stop! You are writing things that a reader has read in 4 other horror scripts JUST THAT WEEK. If you’re going to write something in a bathroom, it must be something truly original.

18 days left to enter the Mega-Showdown Screenplay Contest! Head over to this post for details on how to enter. It’s easy!

Genre: Cop/Action/Comedy
Premise: When his lawyer daughter gets mixed up in a deadly gang-related case, Detroit cop Axel Foley will have to, once again, travel to Beverly Hills and save the day.
About: Axel is back! Newbie Aussie director Mark Molloy came into the film with one directive: Do everything practically. That’s why when you watch Beverly Hills Cop 4, it truly does look like turning back the clock and a film from a different era. It looks from the writing credits that Will Beall, who usually writes dramas, fortified the cop stuff and the dramatic elements of the screenplay. And then writing team Gormicon and Etten came in to add the funny.
Writers: Tom Gormicon & Kevin Etten rewrote cop-writing whisperer Will Beall
Details: exactly 2 hours

If you guys have been reading my posts and my newsletters, you know I’ve been looking forward to this movie.

The cop-comedy, which was a studio staple in the 1980s, has always been primed for a comeback. I’m hoping this movie can start that comeback.

Let’s find out how it did!

Axel Foley is still out there on the streets of Detroit, taking down the bad guys. After a particularly elaborate takedown of an attempted Detroit Red Wings stadium heist, he gets a call from his old friend in Beverly Hills, Billy, who tells him that his estranged lawyer daughter, Jane, who also lives in Beverly Hills, is involved in a gang-related case and was nearly killed by the gang recently.

So Axel gets on the next flight to Los Angeles and, when he lands, immediately starts fishing around for who’s coming after his daughter. To be honest, I’m not sure I ever figured out what was going on there. But what I do know is that the new Captain of the Los Angeles police, Cade Grant (Kevin Bacon), is somehow involved.

After Axel gets in a car chase with a parking cart up the famous Rodeo walkway in the center of Beverly Hills, he’s brought back to the Beverly Hills police department where he gets yelled at by some of his old friends.

That’s also where he meets Bobby Abbot, a buttoned-up cop who just happened to date Axel’s daughter not long ago. Bobby becomes Axel’s informal chaperone around town and the two try and figure out what the bad guys are trying to cover up. When all roads lead to Captain Cade, there’s a big showdown at his Beverly Hills mansion where not everyone survives.

Believe it or not, there are a ton of screenwriting topics to discuss with Beverly Hills Cop 4. To understand why, you have to understand that this was considered the perfect screenplay formula in the 1980s.

A good fish-out-of-water comedy concept was gold back then. And the concepts always lent themselves to plots that could be easily constructed in 3 acts. In fact, it’s movies like Beverly Hills Cop that inspired the most successful screenwriting book ever, Save The Cat.

The juxtaposition of a Detroit Cop showing up in Beverly Hills may be the most perfect scenario for a “Fun and Games” section that has ever been conceived.

Beverly Hills Cop 4 doesn’t mess with that formula much. And why should it? If something works, don’t mess with it. Speaking of another 80s icon, Rocky, the reason that Rocky 5 sucked was because they messed with what worked and took the big fight out of the ring and put it in the streets.

If you’re ever tasked with working with a successful formula and you’re worried, by following it, your script will be predictable and cliched, you address that issue the same way that Beverly Hills Cop 4 addressed it. You build a new central character dynamic.

That is your story within the story and what allows the reader to experience something new. In this case, the new 3-way conflict is between Axel, his estranged daughter, Jane, and the buttoned-up young cop he has to work with in Beverly Hills this time around, Bobby Abbot.

The twist on this new relationship is that Jane and Bobby used to be in a relationship, which, theoretically, adds an extra layer of conflict between Axel and Bobby.

You’ll notice that while I said this is the way you want to approach these things, I did not say that it worked. In fact, the “working” part is the hardest part to get right. Because while I understand why the writers came up with this dynamic, the end result only occasionally paid off. Had it worked, the movie would’ve been gangbusters. But because it was so weak, it left the movie feeling ho-hum.

Let’s look at it piece by piece so we can understand what happened.

We’ll start with Axel and his daughter Jane. The reason the writers chose this dynamic is because it would create obvious conflict. You want conflict in every major relationship in your script. So, by the letter of the screenwriting law, it was the “right” choice.

But the choice had a complex hurdle to overcome. This is a comedy. If the conflict is too intense, too serious, their scenes will drag the story down. We don’t come to comedy movies to get serious. We come to laugh. With Jane being so serious, there was no spark between her and Axel. Their scenes felt like drama scenes and were the worst in the script.

How do you fix that? You find a way to make Jane funnier or you get rid of the Jane storyline and replace it with something funnier.

Next up we had Bobby. Again, Bobby was the “right” thing to do as a screenwriter. Here you have Axel Foley, one of the most over-the-top comedic characters in cinema history. You need a straight man to play against him so ultra-buttoned-up Bobby was a perfect choice ON THE PAGE.

But outside of the best scene in the movie – the helicopter scene – this pairing was a dud that generated little comedy. Why?

This is where screenwriting gets hard, guys. Cause not everything is within your power and if the director or actors interpret things differently than the writer intended, it can cause a cataclysmic chain reaction that can take the whole movie down.

The reason the Axel-Bobby pairing was a dud was because the writer assumed that Eddie Murphy was going to be playing the 1980s version of Axel Foley, the guy with an unlimited amount of energy and who chews up every scene he’s in.

But that’s not how Murphy chose to play it. And, to his credit, his choice makes sense. But Murphy figured that it’s been 30 years since we’ve seen Axel. He’s probably calmer. So Axel isn’t this crazy outlandish guy anymore. At one point, when he’s trying to pull one of his silly scams to get a better hotel room, he stops, mid-sentence, and says, “You know what, I’m too tired for this. Just give me whatever room you want.” That’s the Axel we get here.

The reason this is relevant from a screenwriting perspective is because the screenwriter wrote Bobby as bland as possible so that he’d be as polar opposite from Axel as possible. That contrast would create a ton of comedy.

But because Foley is more calm in this one, there’s less contrast between the two characters, and that lack of contrast makes them bland together.

Now, good screenwriters will look for additional ways to combat these possibilities and that’s exactly what happens here. They add an additional element of conflict with Bobby having had sex with Axel’s daughter. This gives Axel even more reason to dislike Bobby, which gives us more opportunities for the two to butt heads.

The problem is, Axel’s okay with it almost immediately. He makes one quip about it then it never comes up again. Not only that, but the sexual relationship ended months ago. So it’s not even happening now.

I have a good idea why they chose to do that despite it hurting the screenplay. Once again, this is why screenwriting is hard so pay attention. I’ll bet money that in earlier drafts, Bobby and Jane WERE DATING NOW. But, at some point, someone realized that their relationship might be more interesting if they were apart. Which I understand. If they’re apart, then the audience will want to keep watching to see if they end up together.

But what often happens in these re-drafts of key elements in the screenplay, is that the screenwriter forgets why it was so important for Jane and Bobby to be dating now, which was that it created more conflict with Axel. When you’re with a screenplay for a long time, you don’t remember why you did certain things and therefore, changing them, doesn’t seem like it would cause any problems.

But changing anything central to your story will always cause issues. And that was a big one that they missed. Cause think about it. Why are we here to watch this movie? Is it to see if two former lovers get back together again? Or is to see Axel Foley be as funny as possible? It’s the latter. So any choices you make need to support that direction.

Look, this movie wasn’t bad. It was pretty fun. But the two main characters you placed in Axel’s orbit weren’t good enough to make this movie stand out. And Axel needed to be bigger. I know the character is older. But he doesn’t look that much older. If Eddie had the energy and played the role a lot bigger, I think this film would’ve worked.

[ ] What the hell did I just watch?
[x] wasn’t for me (if you’re bored, I’d still say watch it)
[ ] worth the stream
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius

What I learned: Before you make a change to the core of your screenplay (major characters or major plot beats) ask yourself why you made the original choice. Then ask, from the change you’re about to make, is the upside you’re going to gain from that new direction big enough to supplant whatever you’re going to lose by eliminating the old direction?  Everything affects everything in a screenplay.  So a seemingly minor change usually has bigger ramifications than you think.  Do your due diligence and figure out what’s going to be lost before you make that change.

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.