Genre: Action/Supernatural
Premise: Based on one of the most famous video games in history, an aging amateur boxer is called upon to fight in an ancient tournament that takes place in multiple dimensions.
About: Greg Russo, who has upwards of TWELVE projects in development, will call Mortal Kombat his first official produced credit. When asked about which characters he was going to use, this is what he said: “Yeah. One of the trickiest things I think with adapting the properties are there are so many characters, right? I mean there are, I think there are 70 something characters in this and we don’t have the ability to stagger these films like the MCU does, right? We can’t do a Sonya movie and then do a Liu Kang movie. So we’re forced right into Avengers mode off the bat. When that happens from a story perspective, you’re naturally going to have to juggle a lot of different characters and you’ll realize very soon that you only have so much room in, what’s hopefully Story One. Our mantra as the team behind this movie is always kind of, Movie One first, you know, let’s just make that great. Let’s not think about anything else.”
Writer: Greg Russo
Details: November 2018 draft
I’m drawn to the ‘straight-up soulless assignment’ side of the business because there’s this irony in that, as an unknown writer, your sole objective is to write a script that gets you inside the golden Hollywood gates. Yet once inside, your focus is on winning jobs like Mortal Kombat.
I think the general population assumes that for a movie like Mortal Kombat, you scrape the bottom of the barrel and go with any writer who knows how to spell at a 4th grade level. But that couldn’t be further from the truth. A screenwriting job like Mortal Kombat is coveted by almost everyone in the business. Writers would die to get an assignment like this.
However, once they get the job, reality sets in. You have this concept that doesn’t really make sense. And that’s because the mythology wasn’t built to be some thoughtful movie narrative. It just needed to make enough sense for a video game. Which means your job is taking this thin nonsensical silly world and create a story that’s actually good out of it.
In South Philly, we meet 30-something boxer, Cole Morino. The cool thing about Cole is that his cornerman is the youngest in the business, his 12 year old daughter, Emily. Well, maybe she’s not officially his cornerman. But she’s spirited and a good motivator. If his wife, Allison, who he’s separated from, found out he was allowing Emily anywhere near one of his fights, he’d be dunzos. But they haven’t gotten caught so far.
After Allison picks Emily up, some dude in a blue outfit in a mask that I’m pretty sure has nothing to do with a pandemic appears and starts making killer icicles rain down. The guy seems to have a beef with Cole but we don’t know why. A woman named Jade and an Aussie dude named Kano come to Cole’s rescue, rushing both him and his daughter away. Cole’s wife, unfortunately, doesn’t make it, turned into an icicle and then blown into a million pieces by Sub-Zero.
It’s here where we learn that a big fight tournament is coming up – Mortal Kombat – but the baddies want to kill off all the good guys beforehand so they don’t even have to bother with the tournament. Cheaters!
Once Cole and his new friends get some distance from Sub-Zero, we learn that Cole has a very rare medallion in his possession with a dragon’s head on it. The only people who have that, Jade explains, are mortal kombat warriors, the greatest fighters in the universe. Since Cole sucks at fighting, they deduce that it must have been his father’s, who Cole’s never met.
When they’re snuffed out again by the bad guys – this time by a dude named Reptile who, yes, has a lizard head – they barely kill him. Afterwards, Liu Kang, one of the greatest warriors on earth, arrives, and says we have to go to the great temple to talk to Raiden, who’s in charge of the Mortal Kombat Tournament.
Once at the temple, several baddies, including that pesky Sub-Zero, show up to fight them AGAIN. But this time Raiden, who’s a God, steps in, and offers a Mr. Miagi special: “Save it for the tournament in four days!” The bad guys reluctantly back off. But they’re not worried. The humans are so outmatched that they’re going to get slaughtered. And, once that happens, not only will Group Evil win the tournament, THEY’LL WIN EARTH!
The first thing I want you to look at here is how Russo structured his story. Because it’s actually quite clever.
Say you’ve been given the task of writing Mortal Kombat. What does everybody know about Mortal Kombat? There’s a tournament where all the fighters fight each other. So that’s obviously going to be your ending.
But what do you do in the meantime? What average-to-bad writers do is use all the lead-up to the tournament as setup. They’ve got a ton of characters to introduce so they’re going to utilize every one of those pages to set our tournament characters up one by one. Then, they bring all the good guys together. There’s probably a lot of conflict because everybody has a different opinion on how to do this. So we get a lot tough-guy banter. And then we get our tournament. The End.
Your screenplay will die if you take that approach.
Why?
Because setup is information. It’s not drama. It’s not entertainment – even if you sprinkle some fights in there. Without any engine pushing the characters forward, we’re just waiting around meeting people. I just encountered this in a script I read over the weekend. The first 30 pages was the writer conveying information without any drama.
So, what Russo does to kombat this is he creates this little storyline by which the bad guys, led by Sub-Zero, want to kill all of earth’s competitors before the tournament starts. Why wait for the tournament when you can take everyone out now? This initiates Sub-Zero to go after Cole and Sonya and Jax and Kano, which puts them on the run. Which means that we’re still meeting all of our characters, just like we would in the bad writer’s version, but we’re meeting them ON THE MOVE, AS THINGS ARE HAPPENING, IN THE MIDST OF DRAMA. Which is not only more exciting but required in a movie like this.
Let’s talk about another thing that pro writers understand.
The biggest problems that the Mortal Kombats of the world face is that they commonly lack soul. Without soul, a movie is a lifeless experience. It is eye-candy and nothing more. So how does one create soul within a movie?
The best way is through the main character. The main character is our vessel through which we experience the story. So if you can create a character who’s going through something universal that people can relate to, then we will feel a connection to them. There are other things you can do as well. But that’s your starting point.
Russo makes Cole our main character.
And Cole is in a situation that a lot of adults have either experienced or experienced something similar to. He and his wife are separated. They’re sharing custody of their child. It’s not easy. A part of each of them still wants to be together. But they don’t see eye to eye on big issues, such as what Cole wants to do with his profession. So we understand what Cole is feeling. Which means we have a connection with him.
Now, not everyone has their separated wife frozen and broken into a million pieces in front of their eyes. But loss is a universal experience. And since Russo did a good job of establishing this broken marriage and hinting at them fixing things, it hits us hard when she dies, and we want Cole to get revenge.
Something more specific to these types of assignments is you’re looking for the stand-out characters so you can feature them. When you play Mortal Kombat, it’s clear that Sub-Zero is a special character. There’s something unique and scary and badass and cool about him all at once. So Ross wisely made him the primary antagonist in the story. Don’t try to make weak characters from source material strong. Lean into the characters that already work. They’re your secret weapon.
Finally, just as a creative choice, I liked what Russo did with the human characters. He did a great job establishing how big of underdogs they were against the bad guys, who were all from different dimensions and had otherworldly powers. Cole couldn’t even beat up a 180 pound amateur boxer at the beginning of the movie. How is he going to defeat someone who can throw a freeze-spell at you, turning you into ice? Ditto with everyone else. Not only were they outmatched, but 9 tournaments have already been won. If the bad guys win this last tournament, earth is theirs. Talk about high stakes.
The only problem with Mortal Kombat is that it can’t escape its goofy mythological roots. I still don’t even know how it works. There’s different dimensions and the tournament is held on different planets in different dimensions all the time? Or something? If things would’ve been clearer, I might’ve upgraded my rating. But you can only give a script that contains a random monster with 4 arms so much screenplay cred. Which means Mortal Kombat skates by with a ‘worth the read.’
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[x] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: When you’re adapting something silly, it’s always a good idea to create a character that calls the silliness out. If Mortal Kombat takes itself too seriously, you’re going to lose your audience. Here, we have Jade explaining how Mortal Kombat works to both Cole and Kano: “They weren’t repeating stories they heard… they were reporting things they saw. That one shared myth was no myth. It was true. At various points in the past, Earth’s greatest champions went to war for mankind’s survival. An eternal war. To protect Earth from foreign enemies. The war was known as: (points to written symbol) Mortal Kombat.” Kano then pops in. “ Did you make that part up? (off Sonya’s look) It sounds like you made it up. Plus you spelled it wrong.” You gotta have some fun, man.
Genre: Action
Premise: Following in his murdered mother’s footsteps, Michael Griffiths enlists in the United States Postal Service… only to discover a mail route full of surprises and a job that means maybe, just maybe, saving the world.
About: This script finished with 11 votes on last year’s Black List. This writer is just getting started. He does have some Hollywood experience though, being Nicholas Stoller’s assistant on both Neighbors 2 and Storks. It looks like Amazon Studios may have purchased this to produce. It also appears to be an original spec. It isn’t based on anything that I know of.
Writer: Perry Jane
Details: 122 pages
Before I dive into this one – because I’m going to warn you in advance, it wasn’t for me – I want to say something positive. Which is that it was nice to see a big fun movie on the Black List for once. The Black List has become… I don’t know… weird. Some of the scripts that make the list defy explanation. So it’s cool that something your average moviegoer would pay for got on there.
Unfortunately, for script snobs like me, The U.S.P.S. was more “general postage rate” than “Express Mail.”
When word gets to 20-something security guard Michael that his mother died on her postal route, he’s already feeling guilty about not spending more time with her. But then Michael gets a security box key, and that’s where he learns that his mom was a lot more than your average postal worker. She was an agent who used her postal office cover to take down bad nasty people. His mother didn’t die. She was murdered!
Michael is quickly recruited by someone named Sinda, who knew his mother well. She takes Michael to a secret underground location where he’s instated as a trainee in the U.S.P.S. program – The United States Program of Spies!!!!! (“Neither snow nor rain nor gloom of night, nor threat of suffering and death, stays these agents from the swift completion of their mission.”)
Sinda believes that Michael’s mother was killed by a woman named Bonnie Jo Boone, who has just sent a message to the U.S. government that they have to give back 5 trillion dollars to be dispersed to all the poor people in the country that it was “stolen” from. Bonnie Jo works with six modified humans that are basically like, cyborgs, I guess. Translation: she’s serious.
Michael doesn’t get the gig right away, though. He has to try out against a bunch of other prospective spies. So he has to do things like sneak up to a house and deliver mail without anybody noticing.
When Bonnie Jo accelerates her plan, Sinda realizes they have to do the same. So Michael is promoted to a spy on a ‘probationary period.’ Michael is sent to a suspicious bank in the middle of Manhattan, where he discovers Bonnie and her team, waiting to rob it. The postal spies attack, which sends everyone on a crazy car chase through New York, complete with an old postal truck that transforms into a super-car-weapon-thing.
Bonnie Jo is able to get away. But Sinda learns something even worse. That Bonnie Jo is working with someone from the inside! They have a traitor in their midst! So off they go to the supposed traitor’s party (someone at the FBI) where they look for clues to take him down before Bonnie is able to commence her bank-draining plan that will move 5 trillion dollars out of the hands of the wealthy and into the hands of the people!
What is plot?
Plot is the sequence of events that push your primary story forward.
The spacing between these “plot beats” will dictate whether your script is designated as “plot heavy” or “plot light.” Smaller movies tend to have more spacing between their plot beats. Big Hollywood movies tend to have less. The reason is obvious. People who go to see a big Hollywood movie are expecting to be entertained consistently the whole way through. So you’ll see a lot of plot beats in Fast Furious, Iron Man 3, Star Wars.
Here’s the problem, though. If you erase all spacing between plot beats, your story loses its soul. If the only thing that is happening in your script is you’re racing your characters from one plot marker to the next, it’s hard for the viewer to connect with the characters. And that’s my problem with The U.S.P.S. It’s plot plot plot plot plot plot plot plot and plot.
Now the writer of The U.S.P.S. may argue that he does have some slower moments. We see Michael get drunk one night thinking about his mom’s death. I think there are a couple of more scenes like that throughout the script. Here’s the thing, though. You don’t get points for trying. For character-driven moments to resonate, you, the writer, have to care about them. If you’re just putting them in there because a screenwriting website told you to, or because you want to avoid someone giving you the note that you didn’t focus enough on character, they’re not going to work.
For character stuff to work, you have to be interested in the internal workings of your characters. You have to want to be exploring something with them that you’re just as curious about as your plot. One of the reasons the last two Avengers movies were so popular is because of Thanos. This is a guy who truly believed in what he was doing and had to make some horrible choices, including killing his own daughter, to succeed at his mission. There was something going on in that character. Something he was battling inside.
This is a major difference between the screenplays I read that are good and the ones that are bad. The good screenplays are almost always the ones where the writer is curious about the human condition with at least one of their characters. They want to know what makes a person tick, not how many ticks to the next plot twist. They’re interested in what it feels like to be Wade Wilson (Deadpool), who’s forced to stay away from the love of his life because he’s been burned beyond recognition and is ashamed of how he looks. They don’t care about the flashy Deadpool fight scenes. Well, they do, but they know those won’t work unless they get the character right.
And what’s so hard for writers – especially new writers – to understand, is that you can’t fake it. You can’t show a character looking sad remembering their dead parent if you haven’t sat down and thought about how that death has shaped them as a human being. Because it’s that shaping that’s going to come out in every scene they’re in. If you have to remind an audience that a character is affected by a traumatic event, you probably haven’t figured out who your character is yet. Characters LIVE those events.
Look, this script wasn’t bad. It’s like an American version of Kingsman. So if all you care about is eye entertainment, it might be fun. It’s a little out-there. A bit goofy for my taste. But it should make for an interesting movie.
I guess my issue is that U.S.P.S. felt like a writer who had 52 beats he had to stuff into a 120 page package and his mission, instead of writing something that explored the human condition in an entertaining way, was to make sure all 52 beats got in there through hell or high water. For that reason, the script couldn’t breathe. It was always about getting to the next checkpoint. And that’s why it wasn’t for me.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: I want to talk about bolded underlined sluglines for a second because I see them being used occasionally, including here. One of the goals of a writer should be to make the reading experience as easy as possible. The more your eyes flow from left to right and down the page, the better. Bolded underlined sluglines create the effect of blockages on the page. That big ugly black line feels like something you have to burrow through or go around. If your script is light on locations (and therefore doesn’t have a lot of sluglines), this might not be a big deal. But if you’re switching locations a lot? If you’ve got 3 or 4 on a page? Those bolded sluglines can start to look like giant blockades in the middle of a street. It’s not pleasant. It’s something you should definitely think twice about.
Has Scriptshadow become the “I Care A Lot” channel? Is tomorrow a 5000 word breakdown on Peter Dinklage’s character in the film? No, but the Golden Globes are so weak this year (it feels like the bronze medal game at the Olympics) I don’t have anything to say about them other then they should come up with a new category called, “Most Boring Movie” and just put all the movies in that category because that’s how good these movies look.
On the plus side, this gives me an opportunity to talk about my favorite topic: “I Care A Lot,” a movie I just highlighted a scene from last week. At that point, I had only watched half the movie, mostly because everyone said the movie “fell apart in the second half” and that didn’t exactly motivate me to finish it. But this weekend I sat down and gave it a full watch and you know what?
You were all wrong.
This is a good movie from start to finish and I’m going to explain why. Now, you should know that this is a twisty turny flick and, therefore, you should check it out before you read this because I’m going to be spoiling the bejesus out of everything. But if you’re okay with spoilers, let’s continue.
“I Care A Lot” attempts to walk one of the thinnest tightropes in screenwriting – building the story around an unlikable protagonist. Marla is someone who makes her living off of conning old people. These seniors are perfectly healthy. Yet she thrusts them into assisted loving homes without their permission so she can take control of their finances and rob them blind.
The reason it’s so hard to make scripts like this work should be obvious. If we’re not rooting, in some way, for the main character, nothing else matters. You can have the most amazing plot in the world and it doesn’t matter if we detest the protagonist.
I want to highlight something I’ve never seen any other screenwriting enthusiast talk about. Which is that there are three degrees of unlikable protagonists. I bring this up because a lot of writers push back when you talk about unlikable protagonists and say that as long as they’re “interesting,” you can build a story around them.
But it’s actually more complicated than that because the different degrees of ‘unlikable’ dictate how hard you have to work to get the reader to root for your hero. The first and most common unlikable hero is the ‘bad but not really bad’ protagonist. This would be someone like the Mandalorian. He’s not very nice to anybody. He only does things if it helps him. He doesn’t talk a lot. But let’s be real. He loves Baby Yoda and at the end of most episodes, he’s helped someone else out. Readers will always root for these characters because they know, deep down, they’re good.
The second type of unlikable protagonist is the “genuinely bad” protagonist. This is someone slightly more sinister than the Mandalorian and truly in it for himself. A good comp would be Melvin Udall (Jack Nicholson) in As Good as It Gets or Louis Bloom in Nightcrawler. These characters can be downright nasty, saying mean things to people or constantly screwing those people over. Still, if you know what you’re doing as a writer, you can keep us rooting for characters like this.
The third type of unlikable character is the “truly bad” protagonist. What separates this character from the others? These characters are morally bankrupt. Not only do they hurt others, but they hurt people who are lesser than them. Children. Old people. The poor. Underlings. This is what Marla is and this is the single hardest character to make an audience give a shit about.
Which is why so many viewers had a problem with I Care A Lot. We watched this despicable character get away with destroying numerous old peoples’ lives and then, once she’s finally met her match (the son of one of the old people she screws over turns out to be a crime boss), the writer asks us to get behind Marla and root for her in the last 45 minutes.
One of the best tricks you can use when you have an unlikable protagonist is to make the antagonist even worse than they are. That’s the method writer-director J Blakeson used when constructing this movie. He brought in crime boss, Roman, who was even nastier than Marla. Theoretically, at least. Roman tries to kill Marla and her girlfriend, but Marla survives and wants revenge.
Where Blakeson gets in trouble, in my opinion, is that Roman isn’t bad enough to make us Marla’s number one fan. What you have to remember with screenwriting is that how you introduce your character influences the lion’s share of how the audience perceives them. Even though Roman’s a big fat heartless meanie to Marla, we haven’t forgotten how horrible Marla is. How horrible are we talking? Well, I recommended this movie to a friend and she stopped me halfway through the pitch saying, “Oh, that’s horrible,” in response to what Marla was doing to people. She then said she wouldn’t watch the movie.
In other words, your villain has to be EXTREMELY TERRIBLE for the average viewer to change their mind and root for Marla.
While at first I thought Marla and Roman ending up on the same level was a mistake, I began to think that that was Blakeson’s plan all along. This feeds into why the movie works for me. After Marla survives, she kidnaps Roman and brings him to the brink of death, leaving him out in the middle of nowhere, which results in the police finding him, bringing him to the hospital, and labeling him a ‘John Doe.’
We then learn that when a John Doe is found and can’t take care of himself, a legal guardian must be assigned to them. And guess who that legal guardian is? That’s right. Marla. — When movies fall apart, it’s because the writer didn’t come up with a plan. So as they race towards their ending, they throw in a bunch of craziness hoping it’s enough to distract the reader from the fact that they have zero plan. But by creating this twist that pays off Marla’s job, the writer clearly had a plan in mind.
Next up, Marla says she’ll release Roman from her care if he gives her 10 million dollars, which is the amount of money she’s wanted all along. Roman comes up with an alternative idea. Expand her care-taking business. Enough of this small-potatoes shit. Let’s lean into the American dream and go national with this business model of yours. He’ll fund it. She’ll build it. They’ll become partners.
It’s an admittedly zany development. But here’s what I respected. Blakeson understood that neither character should win. They were both too despicable. If she destroys him, we’re upset. If he destroys her, we’re frustrated. The one direction we do not expect the plot to take is a team-up. And the more you think about it, the more sense it makes. They’re both greedy. Of course they want to team up to make even more money than they could separately. It’s the right choice for the story.
What Blakeson also knows is that you can’t have a negative character who doesn’t change over the course of the movie be rewarded. The audience won’t accept it. They need “the right thing” to prevail so they can leave feeling like the world is fair. And so Blakeson has one more payoff. After Marla becomes a multi-millionaire, she’s heading to her car when a crazed man who we recognize from the opening charges at her screaming that his mom died and because of her, he never got to see her, and he shoots Marla dead.
The wicked witch is dead. Order has been restored.
I was told that everything that happens in the last 40 minutes of this movie was random and dumb. But I didn’t see it that way at all. It was all clearly and cleverly constructed with setups and payoffs that make sense. Blakeson knew what he was doing, delivered the movie he intended, and I’m here to tell you he pulled it off. In fact, I would go so far as to say that the reason so many people are so passionate about this film not working is why it works. A movie only truly doesn’t work when our response is apathy. Passion, positive or negative, only comes when a movie affects us in some way. And while this movie made some unconventional choices, the fact that you care a lot about discussing it tells me it worked. :)
Are we getting a black Superman? What’s going on with Kinetic? Are there any updates? What the heck is a “programmer” and why is it now my least favorite word? A trip down memory lane on the eve of David Fincher and Andrew Kevin Walker re-teaming. What is the hardest character for a reader to remember? I review the SINGLE HOTTEST PROJECT IN HOLLYWOOD right now. Did I like it? And what is it like breaking up with Gerard Butler just 14 short days after Valentine’s Day? All of that and more in this month’s newsletter!
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Recently, I started watching “I Care A Lot,” on Netflix. I’m halfway through it and, although I’ve been told that it falls apart, I like it a lot. Specifically, there’s a scene at minute 37 (if you want to queue it up) that I loved. In fact, it’s the best scene I’ve watched all year and has some of the best dialogue I’ve encountered all year. So I thought I’d transcribe the scene for you (this isn’t the official script) and explain why the scene is so good.
Here’s what you need to know. Marla is a professional guardian for older people who can’t take care of themselves. But Marla’s real racket is putting old people in homes who are perfectly fine and then stealing a ton of money from them. Recently, she’s put an older woman, Jennifer Peterson, in one of these homes. What Marla doesn’t know is that Jennifer Peterson’s son is a criminal kingpin. That’s where we pick up the story. A lawyer, Dean, has shown up at Marla’s office and wants to talk.
