Genre: Action
Premise: An assortment of assassins and criminals are all stuck on the same Japanese bullet train searching for a briefcase with 10 million dollars in it.
About: It’s the hottest project in Hollywood. John Wick’s David Leitch is directing this monster movie for Sony which will star Brad Pitt, Lady Gaga, Sandra Bullock, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Zazie Beetz, Logan Lerman, Joey King, Michael Shannon, and most importantly of all, the return of Masi Oka, who played “Hiro” on the show “Heroes.” Bullet Train is based on a novel by Kotaro Isaka and was adapted, somewhat surprisingly, by Zak Olkewicz, who doesn’t yet have a produced writing credit (although he has a lot of scripts in development and has been featured on the Black List).
Writer: Zak Olkewicz
Details: 121 pages (2/21/20 draft)

This project has been all over the news for months – a non-stop feed of high-profile casting announcements. Which made me curious as that usually means the script has a lot of great characters in it. Also, I like thrillers on trains. There’s something about being cooped up on a train with nowhere to go that intensifies a situation. It’s the same reason I like plane thrillers (by the way, I’m going to review that monster plane thriller that 12 studios bid on in the next two weeks).

So does the script live up to the hype? Get your metro passes ready, baby, and we’ll find out together.

Kimura is a Japanese man with a major drinking problem. In fact, he was passed out when his young son climbed up on a roof and fell off, sending him to the hospital, clinging to life. That’s the reality Kimura has to deal with now as he gets onto this morning’s Tokyo bullet train.

Meanwhile, we meet Tangerine and Lemon, two hitmen who may or may not be brothers (they claim they’re not). Tangerine is the brains of the operation, while Lemon can’t stop talking about Thomas the Tank Engine, that kid’s show about a train with a face. It is through the prism of Thomas that Tangerine understands the complex workings of the world around him.

Tangerine and Lemon, who love bantering by the way, are in possession of The Son, who is the son of a Russian crime boss and all around terror best known as The Black Death. Some men kidnapped The Son and Tangerine and Lemon showed up with their ten million dollar ransom, but instead of giving it to the kidnappers, they killed them, all 17 of them in fact (we get a quick flash-cut of all 17 kills). Now all they have to do is deliver the suitcase of 10 million dollars and the Son to the Black Death at the end of the line.

There’s a small problem, though. Lemon thought it would be a good idea to leave the suitcase in the storage area, which has allowed a private investigator named Ladybug (a man, in case you were wondering) to take the suitcase and scuttle off to some other part of the train. When Tangerine and Lemon realize what’s happened, they make it their primary focus to find the person who stole their suitcase. The reason this is their primary focus is because if this person gets off at any stop and disappears, the two of them will be dead.

Back to Kimura, who is moseying about the train when a teenage girl named Prince (yes, I know Prince implies she’s a boy) snags him and ties him up in one of the compartments. She explains to Kimura that he is going to help her kill The Black Death. And if he doesn’t, she has a nurse on call in the hospital where his son is at and that nurse is going to kill him.

If all of this isn’t crazy enough, a giant poisonous snake is slithering its way around the insides of the train because… well, because why not? I suppose you could say it’s a precursor to just how crazy things are about to get. Because once Tangerine and Lemon get back to their seat after their first run-though on the train, they find that The Son is DEAD. Uh oh. Now what are they going to do?

Before long, we realize that the person we really have to be worried about is Prince. Prince is a legitimate psycho. She not only kills Kimura, but as he lays dying, she explains, in detail, how she’s going to slowly kill his son. Sounds like she’d be great at parties. All of this is happening amidst the broader question of, who is The Black Death? And what is he going to do when he learns that neither his alive son or his 10 million dollars is waiting for him at the last stop?

Let me start off by saying this is the kind of movie I would like to produce. All it cares about is that its audience has a good time. Every character, every dialogue scene, every plot choice, is designed to entertain. However, that doesn’t guarantee it *will* entertain. Intentions are not results. You still have to deliver. So let’s look at this piece by piece to see if it delivered.

For starters, they use a good old fashioned McGuffin. Which is the briefcase. This is the *thing* that all the characters are after. I don’t think a lot of writers understand why a McGuffin is so useful. The main reason is that it makes every character in your story active. If everyone’s got the same goal – get the suitcase – then they will all be actively pursuing something.

The best thing about a well-constructed McGuffin is that it creates collisions. Characters will keep bumping into each other. And since the characters want the same thing and only one of them can have it, there is natural conflict in every interaction. That’s an underrated story device, in my opinion – the value of constant collision between characters. The more of that you have going on, the more drama you’re going to have in your screenplay.

But even if you do these things, it does not guarantee a successful result. That’s because the individual pieces themselves – the characters – must all be interesting. And I think that’s where you’re going to have differing opinions on Bullet Train. They’re going for this late 90s, almost Tarantino-like approach, to the characters – especially Tangerine and Lemon – and it’s hard, when reading their dialogue, not to think about how much better Tarantino is at this stuff. That’s not to say the dialogue is bad. But it has a little bit of a try-hard quality to it. The Thomas the Train stuff, in particular, was overcooked. It’s one thing to bring it up a couple of times. But it’s literally all Tangerine talks about.

Luckily, those two are balanced out by Prince, who’s an excellent character. In fact, I think Joey King is going to steal this movie. She’s a legit psychopath, essentially playing the worst version of a Generation Z teenager. If you’ve ever thought you’ve run into the most entitled person you’ve ever met, wait until you meet Prince.

Another thing I liked about Bullet Train is that it made some splashy unexpected choices, which I think you have to in a movie like this. If you play a movie called Bullet Train, where a bunch of assassins are stuck in a train together, too straight? You’re missing out on some fun. So I liked the fact that there’s this random snake on the loose. I liked that The Son dies on page 30. I like anything that makes the audience think, “Uhhhhh, now what?”

I do have some advice for those writing scripts like this. You have to rewrite these scripts incessantly. Because they are highly dependent on how clever they are. And the best way to be clever is through setups and payoffs. But, as seasoned writers know, setups and payoffs are always clunky in the first few drafts. You have to keep smoothing them out over time to the point where you don’t even notice the setup.

And I don’t think Bullet Train quite got there. Then again, this is a 2/21/20 draft. I don’t think they started shooting until this year? So they’ve had some time to clean those up. What they’ve got here is good. But when you’re jumping around this much and there’s so much to keep track of, you have to rewrite tirelessly to get all the setups and payoffs exactly right.

Final thoughts. This was good. It’s going to be a fun movie. In fact, I’d say it’s the exact type of movie we need right now. Good old fashioned movie magic fun.

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

What I learned: Design a script with a bunch of fun characters who get to do a lot of fun things. You do that and you get actors wanting to play parts. This isn’t as important in studio movies where money gets you any actors you want. But when you’re an aspiring writer trying to make a name for yourself, a script with a bunch of actor-friendly parts is a great way to get noticed, and, more importantly, get your movie made.

As the movie landscape continues to nosedive, my desperate search for something, anything, to watch continues. This weekend, I hit an all-time low. I found my finger painstakingly scrolling down the Netflix queue where it landed on “To All The Boys Always and Forever Part 3.” As the highlight box surrounded the film, I almost – ALMOST – pressed “okay.” Don’t worry, though. Cooler heads prevailed and I clicked away – far far away from any Boys Always Being Loved.

Luckily for me, I got one of those recommendations that happened to be something that had been recommended to me before. A movie on Hulu called “In and Of Itself.” Which is usually a sign that something is good – if two unrelated parties are suggesting it to you. Not gonna lie. It looked pretty weird. But desperate times call for desperate measures. So I restarted my Hulu subscription and off I went.

In and Of Itself mirrors what they did with Hamilton. A guy was doing a one-man show in New York that played for over 500 nights. The play then became so popular, that he taped one of the performances and sold it to Hulu.

The show/play/movie/performance/documentary immediately shows its hand, establishing that it’s not like anything you’ve seen before. The unassuming mild-mannered orator, whose name I don’t know, proceeds to tell us a story about a guy named the “Rouleteesta.”

The Rouleteesta was a gentleman so lost after having returned from war that he would do anything to feel alive again. So he entered a highly illegal underground game of Russian roulette. Yes, this was real Russian roulette. With an audience. And it was so popular that everyone would come in to bet big on the winners and losers.

Now, every contestant who played this game only played once. Because if you lost, you’re dead. And if you won, you got paid a handsome fortune. This game brought in a lot of desperate people who needed money. Once they got that money, they weren’t dancing with the devil a second time. Not so for the Rouleteesta. After winning that first night, he came back the very next night to play again. People thought he was crazy. And maybe he was. But that didn’t matter. After he won a second time, he came back a third.

And when people started to doubt him – assuming he figured out a way to cheat the system – he insisted that they put TWO bullets in the chamber instead of one. Let’s up the stakes, baby. And even with two bullets, when the Rouleteesta pulled the trigger, he was still alive to tell the tale.

I should inform you at this moment that our stage the orator is on has, behind it, on the wall, six windows, each of which holds a lit display. In the top left display is an artistic rendition of a rouleteesta puppet. And whenever we hear about another night of Russian roulette, the puppet mimics the motion of putting the gun to his head and, ‘click,’ surviving.

Back to the Rouleteesta. After the the two-bullet gimmick wore off, the fearless Rouleteesta says, fine, I’ll put three bullets in the chamber! At this point, he’s up to a 50/50 shot of blowing his brains out. But he’s the Rouleteesta! And despite several nights of holding a half-loaded gun to his head and pulling the trigger, the Rouleteesta continued to survive!

So he adds a fourth bullet. And then a fifth bullet! And after surviving night after night, he finally demands that they put a SIXTH BULLET in the gun. That would mean the gun was loaded! And so on that night, with everyone betting against the Rouleteesta, figuring even he couldn’t outsmart a loaded gun, you know what happened?

I’m not going to tell you.

You’ll have to watch the movie to find out.

Believe it or not, I’m not trying to anger you. Quite the opposite, actually. I’m trying to help you. You see, me stopping the story before I give you the ending was done to make my first point about storytelling today.

Which is what all of you screenwriters do, by the way. You tell a story. Every time you write a screenplay. Every time you write an act. Every time you write a scene. You’re telling a story with a beginning, a middle, and an end. And if, at any point, you were to stop telling that story, your reader should be furious with you. Just like you’re upset that I didn’t finish this story.

Think about it. If you’re writing a screenplay and, at any time, you could take the screenplay away from the reader, and they aren’t upset with you, you’ve failed. If they’re like, “Yeah, I’m fine whether I know what happened or not,” you’ve failed. You must design every story you tell in a manner that makes the reader furious should that story be taken away from them.

And I don’t think 95% of writers write that way. I think they write on their time, on their schedule, and never once consider how invested the reader is at any given moment.

In and Of Itself is fascinating in the respect that we are all this orator. We are all one person on a stage trying to keep an audience invested. We desperately need them to care. To want us to keep going. As such, it’s our job to use every trick in the book – everything we know about writing – to keep their interest. It doesn’t matter if it’s sophisticated or the cheapest trick in the book. If it works, it should be in the toolbox.

And our orator has many tricks up his sleeve. For example, he establishes these window displays behind him. Each of them has a different object in it that, until called upon, is a mystery to us. But starting with the Rouleteesta story and connecting that to the Rouleteesta puppet display, he now has us wondering, “Hmm, I wonder what those other displays mean.” And what’s the only way for us to find out? It’s to keep listening to the story.

You can do the same thing in screenwriting. In Star Wars, when we see the Death Star blow up Alderaan, Princess Leia’s home planet, and Mof Tarkin demands that Leia tell him where the Rebel Base is, that is a ‘window display’ screenwriting trick. You are saying to the reader, “This planet-destroying death star is going to try and blow up the Rebel Base.” You’re giving us a peek into the future, just like those displays give us a peek into the future. And, also, just like those displays, there’s still mystery attached. We don’t know if they’re going to succeed or fail.

Just for a second, imagine Star Wars without the Death Star demonstration scene. If we never see it blow up a planet, we never see the window display that tells us what’s coming. That doesn’t mean we wouldn’t think it was dangerous. But the window display trick gets us a lot more invested. And that’s the name of the game. The more invested the reader is, the more excited they are to turn the pages.

It turns out the orator is really good at giving you reasons to stick around, which is the secret sauce of any good story. You have to set up a situation by which people want to stick around. And so after the Rouleteesta story, the orator explains that one person from the audience, every show, must agree to come to the next night’s show. They will be in charge of the show’s “book,” which is sort of like a diary of every night’s performance. Unfortunately, that audience member is not allowed to see the end of the show. They will be required to leave, with the book, come back the next night, and only then will they get to see the ending.

The orator leans into this fact and explains to the book-taker that he’s going to LOVE the ending. There’s going to be an elephant. Like a real live elephant. Out here on this tiny stage. It’s what makes the show everything it is, he emphasizes, reiterating several times the craziness that’s going to happen at the end of the show. It’s life-changing.

Most people, when they hear this, don’t know what’s going on. They’re wrapped in the comedic back-and-forth between the orator and the audience member, who’s learning the rules of the book and what will be required of him going forward. But seasoned storytellers know exactly what’s happening. The orator is feeding our need to stick around – to be there when this big crazy thing happens. Everyone in that audience is now looking forward to the ending. Imagine having a reader that excited about the end of your story. You could probably write a 50 page dialogue scene in a diner before that ending and still have the reader excited to get to that final act.

In and Of Itself is one of those rare experiences for screenwriting fanatics like myself where we get to see the storytelling form from a different perspective and therefore notice things that we usually overlook. It’s a reminder that all we’re trying to do in a screenplay is tell a series of stories – through scenes, through sequences – that readers want to keep reading. And that there are numerous tricks you can use to get there. This movie was a great reminder of that.

One of the projects I’m developing as a producer is a tennis movie. For those who read the site regularly, you know I’m a big tennis fan, so it’s only natural that I’d have a tennis movie on my slate. We can go into the specifics of how marketable a tennis movie is at a later date. But for now, we’ll stay on topic.

In researching other tennis movies, most of which have been failures, I came across this 1995 tennis movie called, “The Break.” The Break is a really bad movie. It’s about a former tennis player turned teaching pro who mentors a young prodigy during his first year on the tour. You can experience some of the movie yourself here, although I wouldn’t recommend it.

The Break has a lot of script problems. The main character – the coach – is too on-the-nose. The plot, which involves gambling for some reason, is overwritten. And the tone is all over the place. One second it wants you to take it dead serious. The next it wants you to treat it like a Farrely Brothers comedy. Watching the film is a frustrating reminder of how easy it is to make a terrible movie.

As I continued my research, I looked to other successful sports movies to see how they did it right. Eventually, I was reacquainted with Bull Durham. Bull Durham is an interesting film. It’s quintessential late 80s/early 90s and already feels pretty dated when you go back and watch it. But one thing is clear. The movie works. That’s all you’re asking for as a writer, director, or producer. Does the movie work? And Bull Durham works really well.

But that’s not what I was focused on. What I was focused on was the fact that, as I watched Bull Durham, I realized that The Break was a total ripoff of the film. Everything from the sports angle, to the mentor stuff, to the [attempted] tonal balance between drama and comedy. Heck, the main character in The Break even copied Kevin Costner’s 5 o’clock shadow and Bon Jovi haircut.

The difference between the two films was that Bull Durham was just better. Everything about it worked better. Most importantly, the writing itself. It was more sophisticated, less cliche, took more chances, had better jokes, understood character dynamics better, conveyed the eccentricities of its sport better. It was better in every way.

That experience reminded me of one of the biggest mistakes screenwriters make: They are slaves to the moment. In fact, I would say that every screenwriter IN HISTORY has made this mistake at least once. And most of them continue to make it. We allow the generation of our ideas to be influenced by whatever the latest fads are. As such, we come up with stuff that can be categorized as “just like everything else out right now.” There’s actually a term for this. And I’m going to give you that term in a moment. But before we get to it, let’s discuss the two types of idea generation philosophies you want to be using.

WHAT’S OLD IS NEW AGAIN

This is one of the best ways to create fresh ideas. You take something that hasn’t been around for a while – a situation, a character, a setting, a concept – and then you bring it into the present, preferably with a spin. This is what Star Wars famously did. Westerns were becoming old hat. So Lucas created a space-western. We saw it with one of 2019’s biggest pictures, Joker. That was basically a reimagining of the 1982 movie, The King of Comedy. Todd Phillips found his spin by putting a famous DC comics character in it. Same for 2017’s Get Out. That was “Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner” with a modern horror twist. “What’s Old is New Again” is a great way to generate ideas.

WHAT’S NEW IS NEW AGAIN

“What’s New is New Again” is another good way to generate ideas. This is when come up with a truly new and fresh idea. Something that hasn’t been done before. Because you’re competing against a century of movies, going this route can be challenging. “New is New Again” ideas often involve new technology. Newer ideologies. New stories in the media. New cultural shifts. I would argue that The Matrix was a “What’s New is New Again” idea. Some people may say we’ve done versions of The Matrix before but I’d push back on that and say the large majority of it was something fresh. Ditto Jurassic Park. We’d never seen a dinosaur island idea before. A lot of Black Mirror episodes feel “new is new” to me.

WHAT’S NEW IS OLD AGAIN

This is what I was referring to with “The Break” versus “Bull Durham.” And it’s the mistake most writers make when coming up with an idea. They see the latest hit movie in the theater or they track which movies are doing well at the box office and they come up with an idea that’s similar to them. For example, if someone saw Tenet, they might come up with an idea about heading backwards in time against the grain of everyone else moving forwards in time. It certainly FEELS like a new idea due to the fresh “new” feeling you got while watching Tenet. But six months later when you begin sending the script out, everyone’s going to say “This is just like Tenet.”

Yes, you want to understand what’s trending in the industry. But you must be careful about being too influenced by the current slate of popular movies. Unless you get in at the very beginning of the trend, by the time you send out the script, it’ll be old hat. A lot of people called Bird Box a ripoff of A Quiet Place. Instead of not being able to make a noise, you’re not able to look at things. But the reason Bird Box still did well on Netflix was because it was well into development by the time A Quiet Place came out. So they were able to get it out there immediately, when a “sensory” horror movie still felt fresh. If you, the unknown screenwriter, started writing a “Quiet Place” clone immediately after the movie came out, you’re already racing against time. Every single day, your idea gets more stale. It’s not a pleasant place to be.

There’s a final category that’s not worth getting into since it’s obvious. But I’ll mention it anyway. “What’s Old is Old Again.” This is when you take an old movie and basically write the exact same movie. You’re not bringing anything new to it. Writers sometimes make the mistake of believing an “old is old again” is actually a “old is new again” situation. They believe they’ve created a fresh twist but the twist is too subtle, or not enough to make the idea feel new. So you want to watch out for that. Ask yourself if you’re TRULY bringing something new to the old idea. But I think this category speaks for itself. Don’t do it.

You should be focusing on the two best ways of coming up with an idea – “old is new again” and “new is new again.” They’re more likely to garner a response (assuming that your idea is actually good, lol).

With that said, I don’t want to scare you. Coming up with ideas is hard enough and here I’m saying, “Do this and don’t do that or you’re screwed!!” I concede that there’s a fifth option. And that’s when you come up with an idea that just “feels right.” It may violate some of the things I’ve warned you about here. But the idea excites you for some reason. On Tuesday I reviewed a script called “Towers” about a family man who wants to build a club on the top of his company’s building and later gets into drag-racing. I’m not sure what category that idea falls into but something about it excited the writer and that ended up getting him a lot of attention. So there is an element of following your gut here. Use these categories I’ve discussed above as a guide, not as gospel.

Good luck! :)

Genre: Drama/Thriller
Premise: After a real estate agent in the richest suburb in America is brutally murdered in a home she was showing, a Boston detective zeroes in on her dangerous ex-boyfriend.
About: This will be Grant Singer’s official feature directing debut. Singer is best known for directing Super Bowl singer, The Weekend’s, videos. You can see one of those videos here. Singer co-wrote the script with Ben Brewer. The film will star Benicio Del Toro.
Writer: Grant Singer & Ben Brewer
Details: 127 pages

Guys, before we get started, SEND ME THE SCRIPT TO BULLET TRAIN (carsonreeves1@gmail.com). I have to find out what’s attracting all these actors to this movie. Most scripts have 1 or 2 juicy parts. Outliers have 3 or 4. But for a script to have this many interesting characters that they’ve nabbed this many big actors?? I have to know what’s going on. So send it to me! I will buy an animal style double-double from In and Out in your honor.

Okay, on to today’s screenplay.

I went into this script not knowing much about it. When I began to realize it was a murder investigation story, I tensed up. These are incredibly difficult stories to do anything new with. You’re not only competing with similar movies that came before it. But a good 70 years of television has been covering this genre as well. I mean, how are you going to come up with any murder scenario that’s unique at this point?

For this reason, these scripts tend to depend on the strength of their characters. The characters have to be above and beyond your average movie characters if the script is even going to sniff ‘decent’ territory. Let’s find out if Reptile was able to achieve this.

30-something Will Grady is the kind of rich you only become if you were born into money. And Will was definitely that. His mother, Camille, is richer than anybody in town. She’s also attached to Will at the hip. If you marry Will, you marry his mother.

Which is probably why Will’s wife, Summer, is so bummed out. It seems like every occasion she and her husband attend includes Mommy Dearest. Well, that’s not going to happen much longer. Cause when Summer (who’s a real estate agent) goes to show a new house, she’s brutally murdered inside of it.

Local detective and all-around good guy, Nichols, comes onto the case, and the immediate suspect is Summer’s ex-boyfriend. Word around town was that he always used to beat her up. Feels like an open-and-shut case. But the further Nichols digs, the more complicated things get.

For example, every one of the houses Summer has sold this year is currently empty. She may have been involved in a scam whereby she helped wealthy criminals launder money. And, if that’s the case, it means the ex-boyfriend is the least of Nichols’ worries. In fact, the more Nichols keeps pushing, the more he realizes no one wants to help him – even his own police department. Could they be involved in this?

Just when things can’t get any worse, Nichols learns that some podcaster is out there chronicling the case in real time, giving the potential bad guys important information that can help them win their case, should it go to trial.

But Nichols pushes on and eventually learns that the companies who have been buying all these houses from Summer are connected to Will’s mom herself! Is she the one who murdered Summer? Or could it be someone close to her?

Reptile suffers from the problem I noted at the outset. It’s not giving us anything new. There was one tiny moment where Nichols confronts the podcaster where I thought, “Okay, I’ve never seen this before.” But, in the end, it was no different from detectives having to fend off traditional media. It was just that the form of the media was new.

With that said, the script is pretty good. It’s certainly better than the last movie that came out in this genre – The Little Things – because, ironically, it does a lot of the little things differently. For example, we spend a lot of time inside the crime scene throughout the first three-quarters of the screenplay, and the writers deliberately don’t show us the body. They keep hinting at how horrific the murder is, which does a wonderful job of keeping the reader turning the pages. The longer you don’t show the crash, the more we’re going to want to see the crash! So that was smart.

Also, the relationship between Will and his mother felt different. I’m sure one of these crime procedural shows have done a mommy-son suspect thing before. But there was something fresh about this emasculated husband that made him interesting. We find out, at some point, that Summer was still sleeping with her ex-boyfriend, the guy who used to beat her. So the fact that this woman was resisting a “perfect” life to be with this abusive terrible person made the characters a bit more complex.

I found myself wondering what I was supposed to feel. I didn’t like the husband, Will. And, of course, I didn’t like the ex-boyfriend. But, in a way, I didn’t like Summer either. Because she was cheating on her husband to willingly be with this man who abused her. It didn’t exactly endear me to her. Yet when you were in a room with Will and his mom, you could see how someone would perceive that as a living hell. So you kind of sympathized with her choice as well.

I give the script credit for that. It makes you think. And it makes you think about uncomfortable things.

But the script was plagued with a lingering messiness that, like a groundhog, kept peeking its way above the surface. Important information wasn’t always presented clearly. For example, the first thing we’re told when Summer is showing this house is that all the houses on the block are empty. So what does that tell you? That this is a poor neighborhood, right? Everybody went bankrupt and left town. The suburb is dead.

However, 70-some pages later, another detective casually mentions that this is the richest suburb in the entire nation. Uh, what? How was I supposed to know that? Little blips like that would show up every 20 pages or so that kept me from really being able to invest in the story.

I also think this is an example of having a certain vision of what you want to do in a script and not changing that vision when it’s clear that certain things aren’t working. The podcaster guy had some interesting moments. But he had no broader connection to the story. In other words, if you got rid of him, nothing else in the story changes. This is all about Nichols. It’s his investigation to win or lose. The podcaster is an annoyance. And with the script being 127 pages, you can probably excise 15 of those just by getting rid of him.

Remember. You only want to include things in your story that push it forward. If characters aren’t pushing the story forward, you have to decide whether to keep them or not. Good writers are able to make that difficult call. They don’t want to get rid of characters they like and that they’ve spent so much time developing. But they know it’s best for the story.

If you’re into slow dark murder investigation movies, you’ll probably like this. Despite its occasional messiness and familiarity, the plot has been well thought-out and, therefore, results in a satisfying climax. It ain’t going to break any streaming records. But it’ll be worth watching.

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

What I learned: Extremes help a logline. If you can say that something in your idea is the “biggest,” “the most dangerous,” “the richest,” “the most decorated,” “the CEO of the most successful company in the United States.” Extremes like that add weight to your idea. Cause you’re not just talking about any old thing. This is the biggest, the best, the most important! That’s why people pay attention. “After a real estate agent in the richest suburb in America is brutally murdered in a home she was showing, a Boston detective zeroes in on her dangerous ex-boyfriend.”

Genre: Drama
Premise: (from Black List) A businessman’s obsession with his competitor leads him down a rabbit hole of self-discovery, fantasy, and delusion.
About: This one finished low on last year’s Black List. The writer, Aaron Rabin, has been making short films and writing for over 15 years.
Writer: Aaron Rabin
Details: 115 pages

As I pointed out yesterday, I’ve been having trouble finding movies to watch. This has led me down some strange paths where I’ve taken chances on movies that I’d normally ignore. One of those movies was a film called, “The Nest.” It starred Jude Law as a family man who enjoys the finer things in life, but doesn’t tell his family when he starts hemorrhaging money, resulting in him trying to live way above his means. Eventually, it catches up to him and his family, forcing him to finally tell them the truth.

Going off of that synopsis, you’re probably imagining an engaging story. There’s lots to work with there from a plot standpoint. But the writer/director made the classic writer/director mistake of lingering on every single mundane moment (lots of staring out at pretty scenery in this one) until it sucked every ounce of drama away. What we were left with was a moody piece that occasionally decided, “Oh, let’s add a plot point here.” And by ‘occasionally’ I mean every 25 minutes or so.

As a writer, these moody ‘tone poems’ as George Lucas once called them, are limited in their appeal. You get the hardcore cinephiles cheering you on and not much else. It’s been my belief that you can’t help these scripts. They’re doomed to be their inert selves. That was until I read today’s script, “Towers.”

40-something Jeff Armstrong works at a generic medium-height downtown building. We’re not told what his job is. It’s one of those generic job titles inside large corporations that don’t mean anything. Which is probably why his company is dying. It can’t even define its own workers.

Every day, Jeff stares over at the building across from them. It’s a giant blue tower that makes his building look pitiful. Jeff is convinced that he can change the course of his company and tells his boss, Clarence, how. He wants to build a club on top of the building, just like the blue tower has. But this one’s going to be better. It’s going to change the game.

Meanwhile, one day while Jeff is doing errands, someone steals his boring blue Dodge car. When Jeff gets home, he gets even worse news. His daughter, Mona’s, doctor believes she has leukemia. Strangely, Jeff is not concerned about his daughter’s health. He’s more focused on the fact that his company stopped their health insurance coverage last year. If Mona has cancer, treatment will be coming out of his own pocket.

After Jeff argues with his overweight wife, Serena, about how they’re going to pay the bills, he finally gets some good news. They found his stolen car. However, a group of street racers did the whole thing up so now it’s a flashy street racing car. Jeff is both horrified and intrigued. Driving the car around gives him a new sense of confidence, which he parlays into an affair with Catherine, the city planner overseeing his ‘club’ plan.

Eventually, Jeff comes up with an idea. He sees a group of drivers racing cars late into the night at a local impromptu speedway. They are offering 100,000 dollars to the winner of an upcoming race. If Jeff can somehow win that race, he’ll be able to put a down payment on the most expensive cancer treatment for his daughter, potentially saving her life. Jeff is in, to the bafflement of just about everyone he knows.

“Towers” is a script that shouldn’t have worked.

It’s written with that same character-driven vague narrative that The Nest used. At least at first. Everything about the story is vague. For example, Jeff will come into his boss’s office and ask him about the “investment” they both made. His boss will get a very serious look on his face, as if to say, ‘don’t bring that up,’ and Jeff will drop it. And that will be the scene.

Ditto the club. I wasn’t even sure what kind of club it was at first. He just kept referring to it as the “club.” A sports club? A rich people’s club? All of this was done on purpose. We’re not meant to know the details. And usually that bothers me. So I wondered why it didn’t here. I finally came to the conclusion that it’s because, unlike The Nest, Towers had a plot.

That plot was developed in three areas:

The first was Jeff wanting to create this club. This meant that, right off the bat, our hero had a goal. And it was a goal he cared about (even if we didn’t know what it was ourselves at first). What this does is it makes your hero active from the start. Active heroes are plot-movers. If they’re trying to get something, they organically pull the plot along with them.

Next, we have an “in” plot point. You might remember this from my article titled “In and Out,” – how it can help you become a better screenwriter. In that article, I say that there are two types of plot mechanics. You have the ones where your hero pushes OUT on the world (like the example I used above, with the club). And then you have the ones where the story pushes IN on the hero.

Here, we get our ‘IN’ when Jeff’s daughter gets a cancer diagnosis. This is now something your hero will have to deal with throughout the rest of the movie. ‘Dealing’ with anything creates plot. So you’ve now got two plotlines pushing the story along.

Finally, we have the car race. That becomes the big final goal of the movie. Jeff’s trying to win this race to save his daughter’s life. Stakes don’t get much higher than that. This is where Towers separates itself from other indie fare. Typically, the end of one of these movies is some late-starting half-realized low stakes affair. Towers is anything but that. Rabin started meticulously setting up this plotline in the first act, when Jeff got his car stolen.

Still, you’re not sure what to make of this script. It’s so understated and hides so much of its soul beneath its surface that a lot of it feels like a dream. It’s an interesting dream. One of those dreams you don’t want to wake up from. But it carries some of that weird dream-like logic where, afterwards, you’re not sure why you bought any of it. I mean, this guy becomes a street-racer despite never having raced a car. I don’t know. It’s trippy. But it somehow works.

If you’re someone who wants to understand how to write scripts with voice, this is definitely a script you want to check out. There are so many writers out there who write the exact same as every other average writer. This is not that writer. This is different. Which is why it made the Black List.

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

What I learned: Give secondary characters something to do separate from your hero. This is how you flesh characters out. Serena, Jeff’s wife, could’ve easily been a stock character who was only there to be Jeff’s sounding board. Instead, she’s sick of being overweight and decides to do something about it. This gave her a goal, a purpose, an identity, all of which made her memorable. I can’t stress enough how few characters are memorable in the scripts that I read. So giving secondary characters their own goals and aims is an easy way to up their memorability factor.