Mr. Robot creator Sam Esmail continues to set up his television empire with a new procedural!
Genre: TV Drama – Procedural
Premise: When a young criminal law student is murdered, a black female cop who hates her job will try and solve the crime.
About: This one comes from Sam Esmail via his deal at Universal. The show is being made for ABC. Esmail will also direct the pilot episode. Newcomer actress Candace Grace will star as Vivien.
Writer: Sam Esmail
Details: 52 pages
I debated whether to review this one or not. On the surface, it looks like a hornet’s nest of trigger warnings. Or a warning nest of triggered hornets? Or a trigger-happy hornet orgy. The script is probably going to be triggering, is my point.
On the flip side, it’s Sam Esmail, one of the most interesting writers in Hollywood. Everything he puts out there seems to have this level of prestige attached to it that’s hard not to get excited by. So I figured even if all my buttons were triggered, I would still be an entertained hornet.
Criminal Law Professor Louis Gaetz delivers a rousing speech about crime right before his students head off for winter break. We follow one of those students, 18 year old Jimmy Russo, as he heads back home and connects with an old friend, Kathy. They go smoke some dope at the old skate park and Jimmy gets in a fight with someone from his high school, a black kid named Khalid.
We then meet Vivien, a black cop who wakes up every day putting a gun to her head, wanting to pull the trigger. Vivien isn’t really into the whole cop thing. She just wants to get through the day without killing anyone or being killed herself, which she’s managed to do so far. She’s being paired up with a new partner, Todd, who’s the squarest of square white guys you’ve ever met.
They get a call to an old gas station by a forest where they find poor Jimmy’s dead body. Jimmy isn’t just dead, he’s got an “NPC” meme carved into his chest. The two cops immediately visit the last person who talked to Jimmy, his friend Kathy. At first they’re suspicious about Khalid, who it turns out is gay and was fighting with Jimmy because he once tried to kiss Jimmy and suspected that Jimmy had exposed his secret.
But Kathy eventually reveals that Jimmy was accidentally placed on Professor Gaetz’s e-mail chain, where Gaetz and his buddies were not only making racist remarks but were stealing from house vendors! Jimmy wants to expose his professor, who eventually figures out his mistake, lures Jimmy out, then gets in a skirmish and accidentally strangles him.
Vivien and Todd come to Gaetz’s house, who doesn’t even pretend to be innocent. He grabs a gun and starts shooting out his window. He jumps in his car, drives off. Vivien chases after him, gets him to crash, then shoots him dead. We then flashback to after Gaetz left Jimmy’s body to see some random guy in a raincoat emerge from the forest and carve the NPC meme into Jimmy’s chest. The end.
The TV procedural is one of the oldest genres in the business. Whenever you’re competing against a catalogue of shows this large (we’re talking hundreds of thousands of episodes) you need one of two things to get your show on the air. You either need a really unique concept or you need really captivating main characters. The less you have of these two things, the harder your job becomes.
The reason I had confidence that Acts of Crime could pull this off is because it was written by Sam Esmail. Esmail has always been a unique writer who tries different things. He was cutting edge even before he hit it big with Mr. Robot. Back then, he was known as sort of a new-age Charlie Kaufman.
So imagine my surprise when this pilot ended up so standard.
Whenever you’re watching a show for the first time, you’re trying to figure out what the “hook” is. Oh, I get it, they’re stuck on an island and have to find a way off. Oh, I get it, a judge has to protect his son from a murder he committed. Oh, I get it, the cops use the newest computer technology to solve murders. Oh, I get it, we see the procedural through the killer’s eyes as opposed to the cops’s eyes.
I kept waiting and waiting for that hook to emerge in Acts of Crime, but it never did.
I’m not even sure the pilot makes sense. The whole point of the episode seemed to be to expose Gaetz as the killer then kill him. So then why, afterwards, do we cut to a random dude who just happened upon this murder, cutting an NPC meme into Jimmy’s chest? The episode’s over. We’ve found the killer. What difference does it make if someone has an arts and crafts moment with our dead body? It’s weird. Criminal even. But cliffhanger-worthy???
Wouldn’t it be more interesting if Gaetz wasn’t caught? By pure luck, some psycho stumbled onto Jimmy’s body, decided to carve a meme into it, and in doing so, drew all the suspicion onto him? Gaetz now gets away with murder and is lurking out there with his evil racist ways, teaching the future of America. Wouldn’t we keep tuning into future episodes to see if the cops figured out the truth and caught this monster?
I kept asking myself, “What is it the producers see here? What’s different about this show than any of a thousand other procedurals?” If I really stretched my definition of a “hook” I might say that Vivien is our hook. She has that big Mel Gibson Lethal Weapon moment early on where she almost commits suicide. She also hates being a cop, making her the “anti-cop” cop. She’s also kind of opinionated. She’s black and female. But, I mean, I didn’t even know she was the main character until the end of the pilot. I just figured she was one of many cops I was going to meet along the way. So if she’s the reason they think people are going to watch this show… I’m not sure that’s going to be enough.
I’m always mesmerized by the longevity of the procedural. It’s such a dated construct. I mean how many new scenarios can you come up with for someone getting murdered? I suppose the idea with these shows is to create 4-5 characters who are compelling enough that the viewer starts to think of them as friends that they get to visit with every week. But the whole reason I read this pilot was because Sam Esmail doesn’t write material like that. He pushes boundaries. Where was the boundary-pushing here???????
Mare of Easttown and last week’s The Mayor of Kingstown have proven that you can still write great 1 hour dramas. But you can’t slip even for a second. There’s too much competition out there. It’s more important than ever to take chances these days. And, unfortunately, Acts of Crime doesn’t take any. I was really bummed out about this one.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: You can argue with me until you’re blue in the face about this but audiences don’t care as much about male murder victims as they do female murder victims. Take a look at Mare of Easttown. One of the reasons that show was so successful was we needed to find out who killed that poor girl. Contrast that with who killed an 18 year old college guy? I’m sorry but I don’t care. Think long and hard about who the murder victim is in your pilot or feature. If it’s not a woman (or a child) you better have a really compelling reason for why.
Genre: Sci-Fi
Premise: Aliens have attacked earth in the future, requiring the military to draft soldiers from the past, including a lot of lazy 40-somethings.
About: The Tomorrow War was written by Black List mainstay Zach Dean. It was supposed to be his entry into the big-budget Hollywood world. But then the pandemic came around, forcing the producers to rethink their strategy. Now that I’ve seen the movie, I can tell you with 100% certainty what happened. They knew they had a dud. They knew this movie was D.O.A. in theaters. Streamer money was being thrown at them. They chalked up their losses, sold the film, and ran far far away from this abomination.
Writer: Zach Dean
Details: 140 minutes?????
Wow. We’ve got a Fourth of July doozy here. The state of science-fiction cinema is up in the air after this cinematic travesty. There are lame movies. There are bad movies. And then there are movies that become infamous for their awfulness. Is this Battlefield Earth bad? I don’t know. I’ve never seen that film. But something tells me that if I watched the two of them side by side, I would risk permanent brain damage.
Going to keep this summary short and sweet. Chris Pratt is a science teacher with a wife and young daughter. 30 soldiers who claim to be from the future but I’m pretty sure came from that 2017 Kendall Jenner Pepsi commercial show up at a globally televised soccer game to tell the world they need army recruits to fight aliens in the future.
Chris Pratt, along with a bunch of out-of-shape 40-somethings, are given the minimal amount of info before being vortexed into the future. There they fight big white alien creatures in a destroyed Miami.
Chris is then called in by a general who happens to be his daughter, all grown up. She recruited Chris because he’s a scientist and she thinks science will defeat these things. She and Chris then kidnap a “queen” alien so they can study it on a remote barge. They try to figure out how science can defeat these aliens but fail.
This sends Chris back to the past, where he hugs the young version of his daughter and then recruits his father, who’s not from the future to go to Antarctica and destroy the aliens before they can take over the world. The end.
One of the frustrating criticisms of criticism is, “Oh my God, loosen up. It’s a movie!” I understand this criticism. Hell, I’ve used it many times myself when people criticize movies I like such as A Quiet Place, Wonder Woman, and It. Some movies are meant to be fun. They aren’t meant to be judged like Minari.
I get it. The suspension of disbelief threshold is different for every audience member. But one thing is certain. When you want your movie to be taken seriously, more will be demanded of your narrative, more will be demanded of your characters, more of your plot, and more of your mythology. If everyone in your movie is playing it straight, you better have the writing to back it up.
The Tomorrow War does not have the writing to back it up.
Let me just take you through an early section of Tomorrow War.
First off, the future army recruits out of shape 40 year olds to be soldiers. They justify this by saying they have to draft older people because they need them to be dead by the time they show up in the future, or else they risk a paradox, which of course makes no sense. But if you buy into it, you next learn that the soldiers will not be participating in training.
Let me get this straight: You’re taking out-of-shape older people who have never done so much as a push-up in their life and sending them off WITHOUT TRAINING to take on the most powerful enemy earth has ever seen?
Seeing any holes here?
It gets better. When it’s time to send the people to the future, they space them out on a gym floor, suck them up into a ceiling vortex, then drop them into a city from 10,000 feet in the air. We watch as 90% of these “soldiers” fall to their death. The only ones who make it are Chris Pratt and a few others, who survive because they happen to fall over a building with a 10 foot deep swimming pool on the roof. Not sure when 10 foot swimming pools were able to break 10,000 foot falls but okay.
Question. Why didn’t the soldiers who sent them to the future prepare them for this? Why are the soldiers finding out ON THE FLY that they’re arriving in the future 10,000 feet above the city? And, oh yeah, minor question here. If the future army knew this, um, just thinking off the top of my head here, why not maybe, oh, I don’t know, outfit everyone with a parachute?
There’s actually a bigger screenwriting discussion to be had about this. I read a lot of screenplays that involve people going to war. Whether it’s a war in the past, a war in the present, a war in the future – I read this plot all the time. And what always trips screenwriters up is training. Because, in reality, in order to become a soldier, you need to train. But training takes time. Ten weeks for most soldiers. And the writer doesn’t want to lose story momentum. They just want to get to the damn war. So they always fudge this section or speed through it or, for the writers who actually try, throw together a quick montage. They don’t want to deal with the reality of basic training since it’s in the way of the story they want to tell.
This is one of the laziest treatments of this problem I’ve ever seen. They literally just ignore it. Someone says, “You won’t be training,” and then walks away, lol. People… bad Hollywood directors… you have to put some effort into this stuff. It’s not hard. If you don’t want training, rewrite your story so that they’re only using military vets. “But we want to show that it’s so dire they have to use average people to fight,” the dingbats on this production would argue. Well then train them. Make it HALFWAY fucking believable.
Cause when you’ve got an overweight 43 year old office worker who’s never fired a gun before trusted to kill the fiercest beast in the galaxy, what are we even doing? Why even waste the particles required to send him to the future if he’s doubled over after jogging ten paces? Why would you think any halfway intelligent person would buy into this?
One thing that didn’t help was how disastrous the directing was. From the awful special effects (was that early city shot created by a film student using a 2003 copy of Photoshop 9?) to the terrible acting to the Directing 101 scene-blocking to the uninspired shot-framing to the overwhelming lack of vision.
But there was one moment in particular that infuriated me. Chris Pratt gets an emergency text in the middle of class so he walks over, picks up his phone… AND PROCEEDS TO POINT THE PHONE’S SCREEN DIRECTLY TO THE CAMERA.
You may see this as insignificant. But, to me, this embodied everything that was wrong with this movie. Good directors pay attention to detail and are obsessed with making everything look and feel believable. If it’s not believable, the audience will check out.
So either one of two things happened here. One, the director was so lazy that he didn’t even attempt to make it look like the actor was looking at his phone. That’s egregious in itself. But worse is option two: he was so terrified that the audience might miss the text that he committed to the 1,000,000x over-the-top choice of pointing the phone directly at the camera to make sure audiences got it. This despite the fact that THE AUDIENCE DIDN’T EVEN NEED TO SEE THE TEXT! This is a 2nd Grade Movie Concept. We know how it works. Something bad has happened, something the actor is going to talk about in 30 seconds, reiterating what we just saw on the phone. So why the fuck are you so obsessed with showing us this meaningless exposition-heavy message on the phone????
Go ahead. Check it out yourself. It occurs at 13.27 in the movie. It’s embarrassing.
Did anything at all work?
Bits and pieces of the father-daughter relationship worked. That was the one part of the script that had potential. You’re sent into the future to fight a war and your commanding officer is your daughter, who, five hours ago, was eight years old. That’s a cool idea. And it happened to be the only actor interaction in the entire movie that had chemistry. Every other scene felt like the actors met each other 2 minutes before cameras started rolling, which was probably what happened.
I also thought the aliens were cool. It’s hard to come up with cool aliens. And while I wouldn’t call these aliens groundbreaking, they were better than the aliens in Edge of Tomorrow. There was a scene, early on, where one of the aliens is coming at us in a hallway, using the floor, walls, and ceiling, to maneuver towards us, that was genuinely scary.
But that was it. Everything else in this movie was so bad, so embarrassing. The only good thing to come out of it was that this abomination didn’t make it into theaters. If it did, it might’ve seriously hurt Chris Pratt’s career. Since it’s streaming, nobody will bat at eye. I actually feel bad for Chris. One of the hardest things to do in this business is promote a movie you know is terrible because everyone knows you’re lying to them. And that doesn’t feel good. I think he’s hoping this disappears quickly.
If it sounds like I’m being harsh on this movie, it’s only because I’m desperate for a good sci-fi film. I could tell this wasn’t going to be great from the trailers but I was hoping it would at least be enjoyable. It wasn’t only unenjoyable, it was a disaster.
[x] One of the worst sci-fi action movies I’ve ever seen
[ ] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: When it comes to the military and how they operate: DO YOUR RESEARCH. They have a very particular and specific way of operating that if you don’t know intimately, your script will come off as clueless and fake and dumb and lazy, which is what happens here. I don’t like to do research either. But it’s your job as the writer ESPECIALLY if that’s what your movie is about. I understand doing minimal research if the military is 10% of your movie. But 100%? And you don’t even want to figure out how basic training works? Shame on you.
Genre: Comedy
Premise: When an ultra-religious yet porn addicted teen discovers that keeping her virginity is the only way to stop Satan from taking over of the world, she has to team up with a celibate warrior monk to ward off the irresistible Incubus sent from Hell to seduce her.
Why You Should Read: If you don’t follow the worldwide box office, you may be oblivious to the fact that the two highest grossing movies of 2021 are both comedies, that in the middle of a global pandemic, have out-earned both Deadpool movies to become the highest grossing live-action comedies of all time. Now, I haven’t seen either of the Chinese made Hi, Mom or Detective Chinatown 3, but since they were both approved and oversaw by a communist dictatorship, I’m sure they’re fucking hilarious. Meanwhile, the last full year theaters over here were open, the highest grossing comedy the free world’s been able to produce was the Upside. Do any of you remember that hilarious comedy about a suicidal paraplegic? A movie so concerned with checking all the inclusion boxes, but was still able to piss everybody off because it cast Brian Cranston instead of an actual paraplegic. What kind of a world do we live in where the Chinese Communist Party seems to have a better sense of humor than Hollywood? I would try to get to the bottom of this, but the answer to that question would probably make me want to slit my fucking wrists. So instead, I will forgo the autopsy on American big screen comedy and proceed straight to the resurrection. That’s right, just think of Two in the Pink as your own personal screenplay Jesus, here to absolve you of all your comedy sins. The first ever faith-based-teen-sex-comedy for the “me too” era. A story so raunchy that it makes Porky’s look like Paw Patrol. Did anybody ask for this? No, but trust me, it’s just what the world needs right now. If Communist China wants to lead the world in everything else, so be it. But they can have comedy when they pry it from my cold, dead, medium-sized pecker. — I thank you for your consideration. God bless Script Shadow. God bless America. And Hail, Satan!
Writer: Erik “Bang” La Desh
Details: 99 pages (update: This is an updated draft)
In the official Comedy Showdown post where all first pages of the entries were posted, I spotted a comment regarding Two in the Pink that said, “Your first page was the only one that made me laugh.” I agreed. Two in the Pink was the only first page IN THE ENTIRE SHOWDOWN that made me laugh. Some other entries made me smile. Some made me do that thing where you nod your head silently and mutter, internally to yourself, “Not bad.” But Two in the Pink was the only one that invoked a laughing noise from my body. Satan walking down a staircase made of live kittens?? How does someone even think of that, lol?
So I was a little bummed when Two in the Pink didn’t win. I wanted to see if there were more laughs where that came from. That’s not to say I was disappointed in Senior Prank. I still think it’s the most marketable concept of all the entries. But I felt that the funnies were going to be much more frequent in Two in the Pink. As fate would have it, the script Gods have implored me to review the script. Let’s find out if I was right.
Satan is so ready to take over the final earth (final earth? More on that in a sec). But to do so, he needs to take high school senior Stacy Wentworth’s virginity. If he can do that, the final earth will descend into a gigantic bang-fest where all anybody cares about is sex. And if that happens, Satan will have no problemo owning it.
So he creates Chad (Mid-twenties, long blonde hair, Australian accent, perfect abs, perfect face, perfect everything) the perfect fuck-boi. All Chad has to do is have sex with Stacy. Which should be easy. Stacy is a horn-dog. She’s spent her entire life determined to have sex. The only thing preventing her is her pure dorkiness. I mean, like really bad dorkiness. As in, whenever she’s nervous, she sings the 1990 MC Hammer hit “Can’t Touch This.” Yeah, that kind of dorky.
Now you may be asking, in what reality does any girl have trouble having sex? Aha, let me explain to you the world Two In the Pink exists in – the Pink World. The Pink World is like our world but reversed. Women are the aggressors. They’re the horn-dogs. They’re the ones who stay up all night masturbating to porn. It’s the men who wear dresses, who are reserved, who shake their butts for dollar bills at the strip clubs.
Stacy is just so darn dorky, she can’t get laid! So this should be a lay-up for Satan’s chosen bang-boy, Chad. All he should have to do is say “Let’s have sex” and the deal is sealed. Which is what happens. That is until a glowing wiffle ball bat hits Chad in the face! From out of nowhere, a 40-something dude named Reggie arrives, grabs the wiffle ball bat with one hand and Stacy with the other. Come with me if you don’t want to engage in sexual intercourse!
But Stacy DOES want to engage in sexual intercourse. So Reggie has to kidnap her. As they drive away, he explains the situation. She is the Last Smasher. He is the Suppressor. If she caves and has sex, this earth, like all the other earths, will fall, and Satan will be able to invade and rule all the earth planets. “Well what should I do?” She asks. “We train.”
Reggie introduces Stacy to Mama Ilsa. Things have changed, Mama says. Satan knows we’re onto him. In order to stop him, we will have to descend into Hell and defeat him. Reggie bequeaths the Wiffle Ball Bat of Chastity to Stacy and teaches her to fend off penis with it. Because there will be a lot of penis in Hell. And no matter how much she wants all of it, she must resist. Not just for herself. For all womankind.
Wait a minute, what??? There’s no more live kitten stairway!? I e-mailed Erik to ask him what was up. He said there were a lot of complaints about it so he took it out. I hate you guys!
Anyway, moving on.
Two in the Pink might be too smart for its own good.
What I mean by that is that I had to do a lot of mental gymnastics during every boy-girl interaction in order to properly understand the jokes. For example, early on Stacy is hitting on a boy at the comic book store. And the boy is ignoring her. And I had to remind myself, “oh yeah, this is a play on when a guy hits on a girl and she’s too cool for school and ignores him.” The reason it was tricky was because, these days, I see scenes just like this in regular movies – where a dorky girl hits on a guy and he’s not interested. So I had to, again, remind myself that if I just imagined Stacy as a guy and the dude as a girl, it was funny.
Since humor is so timing-sensitive, the time-delay of understanding these moments often ruined the joke. Any time you have to explain a joke to yourself, you’re probably not going to laugh. Which is too bad because I think Erik is really funny and has some strong comedic dialogue skills. If I wasn’t always having to decode interactions, I’m sure I would’ve laughed a lot more.
But that doesn’t mean there isn’t a lot of funny here.
I loved all the 80s movies references. I love that Reggie is Kyle Reese from The Terminator. I thought the wiffle-ball bat of chastity was hilarious. Erik’s imagination knows no bounds. This mans creates one of the all-time dream teams in comedy history – Succubus Squad 69, which consists of Andromeda Tittie-Bang, Lady G-Spot, and Princess Butt-Fuck. There’s a battle on a highway where Reggie takes all three on with his wiffle-ball bat of chastity that was hilarious.
I did feel like Erik missed an obvious opportunity here, though.
This movie is all about not letting Stacy have sex. If she has sex, it’s literally the end of the world. So wouldn’t it be better if there was romantic interest between Stacy and Reggie? You would need to lower his age to around 23 so he’s not the beaten down older vet. But now you’ve got this guy who’s here to stop this girl from having sex, who starts falling for her. And she’s falling for him too. They themselves could screw this whole thing up if they give in to their urges. That makes every scene between them a lot more interesting.
Part of me wonders if there are one two many stories here. Satan sending someone to earth to take a virgin’s virginity is one story. An alternative earth where men and women have opposite characteristics is another story. Should we be trying to combine the two? Is it too heady? Why can’t Satan be trying to do this on a normal earth? I don’t think that gets in the way of the idea. And, as I pointed out earlier, it potentially makes it better, since we’re not doing gender math before each joke. Curious to hear what you guys think.
Two in the Pink gets points for being unique, for being daring, and for having some laugh out loud moments, even if it was playing to its audience…
But I’m not sure I ever truly wrapped my head around the premise. For that reason, it wasn’t quite pour moi.
Script Link: Two in the Pink
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Character descriptions in comedies should be funny! I love this one of Satan. “SATAN; the dragon-winged and goat-horned Prince of Darkness, as sinister as he is sexy.” Erik could’ve easily stopped at “Prince of Darkness.” He could’ve even slipped “sinister” into the description and called it a day. “As sinister as he is sexy” is a much funnier (and better) description though.
I listened to the entire 3 hour Joe Rogan interview with Quentin Tarantino yesterday and it’s an interesting listen for sure. Rogan isn’t much of a movie buff. Ironically, the only movies he seems to love are Tarantino’s. So the interview was more of a love fest from Rogan’s end and that prevented some of the more free-flowing conversation that you usually get from the podcast. Still, because it was Tarantino, there were lots of gems dropped. So many, in fact, that I thought I’d highlight the top 10 for you. I always learn something about screenwriting when Quentin speaks and this was no different. Let’s take a look.
1) Tarantino reads a lot of biographies – This may not seem like that big of a deal but it may be the most important tip on this list. I noticed, throughout the interview, that Tarantino kept referring to biographies he’d read. “I read this biography on So and So.” “Oh, I read her biography.” “Yeah, he’s got a great biography.” I’ve often wondered how Tarantino creates such vivid interesting characters. This may be his secret sauce. Biographies allow you to get into people’s heads in a way nothing else does. I’m sure, whether intentional or not, this is what allows Tarantino to access such incredible detail when he creates characters.
2) Go against the grain! – Tarantino points out that he grew up in a terrible era for movies – the 80s. Everything in the 80s was a correction of the avant-garde movies of the 70s. As a result, they were safe, they were friendly, they were politically correct. Tarantino responded to this with, “I don’t want to make those movies. I want to make something different.” Which is why his movies revolutionized the business. They were unlike any movies we’d seen. I want you to apply that mindset to the cinema of 2021. Are you writing movies that are just like the movies you’re seeing today? Or are you writing movies that you want to see? You can make both work. But the second option allows you to become a potential game-changer.
3) Let the character decide where the story goes, not the writer – This is a hard one for beginners to grasp because they look at their characters as fictional creations and therefore the idea of giving them creative autonomy is an assault on logic as well as their ego. But here’s why it’s a relevant philosophy. Screenwriters are too stringent. They’re trying to hit that first act break. They’re trying to shove in those Blake Snyder beats. Their intentions, much of the time, are in service to structure. If you see your characters as real people, their intentions will be much more pure. What they say and what they do is going to steer your story in a more unique direction. This explains why Quentin’s movies are so original. He doesn’t play God. He lets his characters play God.
4) But he gives himself an out – With that said, Tarantino gives himself an out. “I am the storyteller,” he says, “so if I have to steer [the characters] in a direction that I think is more interesting or more exciting, well then obviously I can do that. I have the power to do that. But I’m trying not do that.” In other words, this kind of rule works in theory but it doesn’t always work in practice. If characters are blathering away about something mundane or boring, it’s in your interest to reevaluate the scene and, possibly, steer it in a more interesting direction. Also, we’re talking about Quentin Tarantino here. His characters are so vivid and his imagination so active that his version of “letting characters take you where they want to go” is going to be more interesting than the average writer’s “let your characters take you where they want to go.” So don’t assume that following this advice is an automatic win. Sometimes you have to intervene.
5) Don’t be afraid to write uncomfortable moments – I already know this tip is going to trigger some people but it’s one of the things that sets Tarantino apart. Ever since that brutal torture scene in Reservoir Dogs, Quentin hasn’t been afraid to take on the PC Police. Here, Rogan brings up the scene in Hateful 8 where Jennifer Jason Leigh’s character gets brutally beaten and he basically asks Tarantino, “Is that okay?” considering it was a woman. Tarantino’s answer was that, of course it was okay. This was a really bad woman who had done really bad things. If she was a man and did the exact the same things, everyone would be fine with him getting beaten. So why should her gender matter? He acknowledged that it is tougher to watch. But that was the point. He wanted that moment to be uncomfortable. That was a deliberate artistic choice. This is a big reason why Tarantino’s movies feel so different. He’s comfortable with making people uncomfortable. So you can be the artist who stays between the lines and writes comfortable safe things. Or you can be the one who stands out.
6) Making a movie is easier than ever – Outside of maybe Robert Rodriquez and Kevin Smith, Quentin is the OG DIY filmmaker. When he got money in his bank account, his sole focus was to figure out how to use that money to make a film. He made 30 grand for writing True Romance and his first thought was, “I’m going to make Reservoir Dogs with that money.” You have to understand back in 1991 just how insane of an idea making a movie for 30 thousand dollars was. Just the cost of film processing alone was probably 30 grand. But the mindset back then was: FIGURE IT OUT. Do whatever you have to do to get your movie made. It just so happened that a producer was able to raise a million bucks for Tarantino to make Reservoir Dogs. But he would’ve made it for 30 grand if he had to. I bring this up because the barrier for entry to make a movie in 2021 compared to 1991 is 10 times lower, AT LEAST. Yet people seem to have more excuses than ever why they can’t make a film. I know not every screenwriter wants to be a director. But if you’re interested in directing at all, channel that original Tarantino spirit of getting your movie made no matter what. It’s still the fastest way into the business.
7) Quentin’s writer’s block advice – Tarantino’s process works like this. He’ll write a scene and, if he doesn’t finish the scene, he’ll get away from his writing pad (he still writes longhand), and just think about the scene in terms of what could make it better and where it could go next, and then he goes back to his pad, jots down all those notes and then he DOESN’T WRITE IT. He waits until the next day to implement that stuff. If he *does* finish a scene, he utilizes this same process but focuses more on the next scene and where that scene could go. Afterwards, he writes down notes and calls it a day. This way, he’s always going into tomorrow’s writing session with momentum. Cause he’s always got something prepped to write.
8) Audiences need someone to root for, even in Tarantino movies – One of Tarantino’s least successful films is Hateful 8 (by the way, this is one of my favorite Tarantino films). He recognized, after reading criticisms of the movie, that he made a choice the movie couldn’t overcome, which was that every character was a villain (that’s why it’s called the “hateful” 8). And while he personally loves the movie, he learned that making a film without anybody to root for isn’t the best way to go. Although he doesn’t say this in the interview, this may have been why he followed that movie up with one of his most likable characters ever in Once Upon A Time In Hollywood’s Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt).
9) You can’t spell Tarantino without “fun” – What I’m about to tell you is something I don’t think even Tarantino realizes about his movies. Tarantino talks all the time about violent films that inspired him. He talks about “Manhunt,” “Taxi Driver,” “Mean Streets,” “A Million Ways To Die.” But those movies never touched the popularity or the box office of a Tarantino movie. And I think the reason for that is is because Tarantino likes to have fun in his movies. No matter how dark or violent his movies get, they have tons of jokes, they have tons of fun moments, they have tons of entertaining dialogue. What he’s done is basically figure out how to popularize dark cinema. He’s made it fun. I’m not saying you have to do this. But if you’re writing something dark and you want to broaden your audience (aka, get more producers interested), consider doing what Tarantino does and add those fun moments, those jokes, that dialogue.
10) Tarantino doesn’t like character arcs – Listening to Tarantino talk, you get a sense of his disdain for movies that have heroes who act one way for 70 minutes, only to completely change into a nicer more wholesome person for the final 30 minutes. You can tell he doesn’t buy it. He doesn’t see any authenticity in it. And if you look at his last movie, you can see that none of the three main characters, Rick Dalton, Cliff Booth, or Sharon Tate, change in the movie. They’re the exact same people at the end. To be honest, I don’t know what to make of this belief. I understand that artificially forcing a character transformation at the end of the movie is weak sauce. But it’s tough to sell characters who don’t learn anything at all over the course of their journey. There’s an element of “well then what was the point?” to the viewing experience. I’m not sure I agree with Tarantino’s take here. But, again, this is one of the many rules he lives by that makes his movies feel different from everybody else’s.
Genre: War/Thriller/Horror
Premise: A female U.S. Army Special Agent is sent to a remote, all-male outpost in Afghanistan to investigate accusations of war crimes. But when a series of mysterious events jeopardize her mission and the unit’s sanity, she must find the courage to survive something far more sinister.
About: This script finished on the lower half of last year’s Black List. I may be a little salty in this review considering Lafortune stole my Kinetic creative duo, Ric Waugh and Gerard Butler, for their next movie, Kandahar, about a CIA operative and his translator who flee from special forces in Afghanistan after exposing a covert mission. Grrrrrrr…
Writer: Mitchell Lafortune
Details: 97 pages
I really like this setup for a movie.
You’ve got someone going into a remote, potentially dangerous, situation, and they’ve a job to do. They have to solve a mystery.
The reason I like it is that it keeps the main character active. I’ve read the “bad version” of this setup numerous times, which is the same thing but without the mystery. A new person comes to a remote location and just has to… hang out or whatever.
Since these movies are about the shit eventually hitting the fan, you need enough meat beforehand so that you don’t start the “shits hits the fan” section too soon. Because if the shit hits the fan on page 40, it’s really hard to come up with pure chaos for 60 straight pages. You want to delay that as long as you can. And this setup allows you to do so while keeping the story interesting. If there’s a murder to solve, every scene leading up to the “shit hitting the fan” moment contains dramatic tension.
Amelia Yates is a CID officer for the army. That stands for Criminal Investigation Division. She’s out in Afghanistan in 2008, trying to get by, when she’s chosen for a mission in Afghanistan’s valley of death, the Korengal. The U.S. has a remote outpost there and a soldier named Ismail’s gone missing.
Amelia’s a little concerned since this is an all-male unit. Normally, they’d send a male CID out there. But the only male CID they’ve got is on leave. So Amelia will have to substitute. She heads out to the Korengal, which people have dubbed “the most dangerous place on earth,” a tiny little valley in between huge mountains.
There, she meets the team, a bunch of dudes who are mostly good guys with a couple of bad apples. A youngster soldier named Grady is particularly scary as he seems to have left the laws of America back in his country. You get the sense he’s ready to pounce the second he sees Amelia alone.
Which, of course, makes Amelia’s job a lot tougher. She’ll be responsible for talking to all these men, one by one, to try and figure out how Israel disappeared. Everything goes swimmingly at first, or at least as swimmingly as you can imagine in the remote Afghanistan mountains, but Amelia starts learning some unsettling things. Such as that it wasn’t just Ismail who went missing, but his entire unit.
Also, everybody seems to be on edge here. They’re all going a little cuckoo in the head. For example, they keep telling Amelia that they’ve been attacked by monsters. Amelia assumes they’re suffering from some collective mental disorder until she starts seeing some strange things herself. Like one day she sees Ismail walking around, perfectly fine. Then the next day, he’s gone.
Things come to a head when attacks ramp up on the base and Amelia sees giant alien spider monsters attacking them from all sides. They end up winning that firefight and then, the next day, Amelia wonders if what she saw was real. Good news comes down the pipe as home base closes her mission. She can come back now. But she’ll have to wait for a helicopter to come and get her. And maybe, just maybe, that helicopter’s never coming.
Most bad scripts you can tell are bad right away because the signs are obvious. But, every once in a while, you run into a good writer who’s not the best storyteller and, for those scripts, it takes longer before you realize the script is in trouble.
But the writer usually provides you with a few signs ahead of time if you’re paying attention, which was the case with War Face. There’s a scene early on, right before Amelia is about to go to Korengal, where she’s walking through the barracks at night and she hears someone behind her, possibly dangerous, spins around, stabs him in the neck, kills him, only to realize it’s another officer. She freaks out, runs to a friend, tells him what she’s done, and he says, “don’t worry about it. I’ll cover it up for you.” And then Amelia just leaves.
You can’t have your main character murder someone and resolve that murder within a page. You just can’t. Just the logistics of covering up the murder take time. But the mental repercussions are something you have to deal with in writing. You have to take us through a few scenes to show the transition from that mistake to being able to move forward. To try and get away with your hero killing someone then leaving for her mission a page later does’t ring true at all.
That’s when I first said, “Something tells me this is going to get sloppy.”
Which is exactly what happens. After a couple of strong interrogation scenes when Amelia first gets to Korengal, the weirdness begins. They’re attacked but it’s not clear by who. Soldiers start having nightmares galore which we don’t realize are nightmares until after the fact (one of the number one ways to identify amateur writing), Amelia sees Ismail alive, but wait, maybe it was just her imagination, Amelia buries a group of child-aliens, more attacks, some giant-aliens attack the base, they barely survive, then Amelia finds Ismail again, he now says I’m a translator for a parallel world, we cut to another world that has giants.
If ever there was a script that embodied the phrase, “everything and the kitchen sink,” this would be it. It’s a jambalaya of cheap tricks, anything the writer could think of to keep the story scary. You can only use cheap tricks for so long. Audiences will give you one scary moment that turns out to be a nightmare. They won’t give you five.
Also, it’s not a good idea to build a story around everybody going insane. It encourages the writer to be sloppy. If you know you never have to explain anything cause you can always depend on the “it may have been a hallucination” explanation, you’re likely to keep going back to the well even though each subsequent use of it results in diminishing returns.
I mean, if all of this wackiness wasn’t enough, we finish off the script with a time machine. That’s not clever writing. That’s lazy writing. You want the rules of your world to be clear and easy to understand. If we’re still learning about the rules on the second to last page (now we can time jump!), your rules are not clear nor easy to understand.
Which is too bad because the script had potential. Like I said at the outset, this is a strong setup for a movie. I could even imagine War Face without the supernatural angle. Just the idea of a woman going into an all-male unit where someone’s missing and everyone’s been stuck there for 18 months is an exciting setup for a film. It’s still cool with the supernatural stuff, but this is exactly what I was complaining about in my Thursday article. Where so many writers go wrong is that they overcomplicate things. If you would’ve had a simpler story here, this could’ve been so much better.
Let’s finish off with some positives though. I loved the choice to use Korengal for a couple of reasons. One, it’s really hard to come up with places that audiences haven’t been to in movies. Movies have covered EVERYTHING. So I always applaud writers who can find a location that is both new and interesting.
Two, you want to come up with ideas that support superlatives. I love that Korengal is considered “the most dangerous place on earth.” That’s the kind of thing that makes a logline pop. Imagine if this story instead took place in “an extremely inhospitable place.” Doesn’t have nearly the same level of gravity to it does it? You want words like “most,” “worst,” “biggest,” “most devastating.” Movies are about extremes. Play to that.
Finally, I liked the choice to focus this around a female lead. Writers have been changing their leads to females over the last three years for no other reason than they hope it improves their chances of selling the script. Here, going with a female lead actually makes the script better. If this is a male soldier going into an all-male outpost, it’s a completely different movie, and not as interesting, in my opinion.
So there’s still stuff to celebrate about War Face. But once you get into that place where every scene could be a character’s imagination, all the stakes go out the window.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: I’m going to teach you a trick. Writers like to use phone calls to family members early in a script to establish exposition or create sympathy. For example, if you want to show that your character loves his kid but the conditions of the story don’t allow you to write a scene where they’re together, you might have him call and talk to his kid briefly. Here’s my tip. ALWAYS PUT A TIME LIMIT ON THESE PHONE CONVERSATIONS. It takes what is, essentially, an unimportant scene that doesn’t move the story forward, and gives it some dramatic tension in order to make it a little more entertaining. Wanting to talk to your kid but not having enough time is always more entertaining than giving your characters as much time as they want. There’s a scene early on in War Face where Amelia calls her dad right before she leaves for her mission and it was the perfect opportunity to create a time-sensitive phone call. “Come on Amelia, chopper leaves in two minutes. Gotta move.” That would’ve juiced up this phone call quite a bit. Instead, it’s a normal phone call with all the time in the world. Therefore, it’s boring. And it outs itself as a scene only meant to create sympathy for the protagonist.
