Don’t write a single paragraph in your script that’s more than three lines long – You are writing a spec script and you are an unknown screenwriter. Those two things equal an impatient reader. Never give them an excuse to give up on your script. Keep the action lean so the eyes fly down the page.
Cut out 50% of your backstory – We tend to think the audience needs more information about the hero’s past than they do. Only include the BARE MINIMUM of backstory and not a word more. Have you ever heard of a movie called Chinatown? Won a few awards. Considered by some to be the best screenplay ever. Did you know that in the original script there was this big long monologue from Jake (the main character) about this terrible thing that happened to him in Chinatown? But, ultimately, Robert Towne realized it wasn’t important for anybody to know. So he cut it. If the monologue that explains why a movie is titled what it is can be cut, you can certainly ditch all the excess backstory in your script.
Give your three biggest characters AMAZING IMPOSSIBLE TO FORGET introductions – I’ve read so many scripts where I’ve forgotten the second or third biggest character in the script. And when I go back in the script to figure out why I forgot them, it’s almost always because they had a weak introduction. It should go without saying that your hero needs a big memorable introduction. But it’s also the case for your second and third biggest characters. Don’t introduce them as, “Brenda, 25, bright and fun” and then have them say two lines in the scene. Give them an action or a difficult choice or a monologue or SOMETHING that makes them instantly memorable. Go check out Clementine’s introduction on the train in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Tell me you don’t remember that character instantly.
Either your villain or your hero needs to be pushing the story forward – If any other characters are pushing the story forward, you’re probably doing it wrong. You want to either put the plot on your hero’s back, meaning he’s carrying the plot forward (Arrival – Decode the alien’s language) or the villain’s back, meaning he’s trying to accomplish something (The Invisible Man – the dead husband attempts to drive his ex-wife insane). Often in movies, it’s the villain who will carry the plot initially (Darth Vader in Star Wars – retrieve the stolen Death Star plans) and, at some point, the hero will be the primary carrier (Luke is determined to save the princess and, eventually, blow up the Death Star).
In a key scene, write your hero into a corner that even you don’t know how to get them out of – I can’t stress this one enough. Too many writers write their heroes into “difficult situations” that aren’t difficult at all because they knew how they were going to get the character out of the problem from the get-go. If you already know how to get them out of the problem, chances are the reader does as well. You want the opposite effect. You want the reader to think, “How the hell are they going to get out of this pickle?” If you don’t know, they won’t know. Yes, it’s harder to figure out how to get them out of that pickle. But nobody said writing was easy.
Give your scenes a beginning, middle, and end – Too many writers these days rush through scenes, creating scene fragments. Treat each scene like its own little mini-movie, even if it’s short. Give it a setup (character goal), some conflict (something gets in the way of the goal), and a resolution (they either succeed or fail at obtaining the goal). So, for example, maybe a cop is trying to extract information out of a witness to a murder. That’s the goal: to get the information. However, as soon as he starts asking questions, the witness is worried about incriminating herself. She wonders out loud if she should have a lawyer present. The cop assures her that they’re just talking. Nothing she says is going to get her in trouble. But now she’s on guard, not as open (conflict!). Finally, the cop either gets her to give him the information or fails. The scene is over.
Eliminate AS MANY ACTION LINES BETWEEN DIALOGUE LINES as is humanly possible – Readers love uninterrupted dialogue. They hate when Joe says something to Jane, then you tell them that Joe lights a cigarette, then you have Jane respond. “But Carson. What if it’s important to show that he lights the cigarette?” Nobody cares if your character is smoking a cigarette. The exception would be if the cigarette plays into the scene later, such as it accidentally starts a fire. If you must tell them, tell them before the dialogue begins, not during. And this goes for any ultimately unimportant action.
Eliminate every single dialogue line where your character is talking directly to the reader – For example, if it’s important that the audience know that the hero’s mother is dead, don’t have them say, “That reminds me of when my mother died. I still don’t know if I’m over it.” Look for another solution. Maybe your hero saved his mother’s last voicemail to him and he plays it whenever he misses her. “Hey Brett, it’s me. Just checking to make sure you and Liz are still coming for dinner tonight. Dad’s looking forward to meeting her. Love you. Bye.”
As the rewriting process goes on, place heavy emphasis on the third act – Whenever we write a script, we prioritize the first act. We rewrite it over and over and over again because it’s the first thing we see when we open the script. Meanwhile, our final act gets neglected. Technically speaking, your final act is usually 4-5 drafts behind your first act because you haven’t spent nearly as much time on it. So stop obsessing over making those first few scenes perfect and spend that time getting your third act up to speed. It almost always has catching up to do.
And the hardest tip of all….
Hold yourself to a higher standard with every single scene – Grade every scene in your script HONESTLY on a scale of 1-10. Do not show anybody your script until every scene is at least a 7. Preferably, it should be an 8 or higher. If you hear yourself thinking stuff like, “But this is just a normal scene to get my hero from A to B. It’s not meant to be special.” That’s a good sign you either need to get rid of the scene or rewrite it. You want every single scene to be entertaining. For reference, the average scene I read from an amateur screenwriter is a 4. The scenes aren’t unique or entertaining at all. They’re just moving the story along without the drama required to keep the reader engaged.
Today’s screenplay cleverly combines the core relationship of Terminator 2 with the wacky video game premise of Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle.
Genre: Action/Adventure/Comedy
Premise: After a marauding warrior from a popular video game dies, he is reincarnated in our world and discovers the god he’s always worshipped turns out to be a 13-year-old Asian kid from New Jersey.
About: I was just talking about this project on Monday. It’s the spec script Amazon picked up from Jeff Chan and Andrew Rhymer for high six-figures. David Leitch, who is not so quietly building an empire, is producing. It’s amazing how fast your star can rise in this town. This guy was a life-long stuntman. Now his movies are responsible for over 2 billion dollars at the box office and he’s producing everything in town. Yowzers!
Writers: Jeff Chan & Andrew Rhymer
Details: 111 pages
I’m a sucker for these concepts. I love when people from one realm are dropped into another realm. I loved Enchanted’s concept. I thought Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle was fun. Elf was a classic, of course. Fish-out-of-water ideas are some of the best ideas you can come up with because they’re a perfect fit for the movie formula.
I liked what today’s writers did. They basically looked at Jumanji and said, “What if we went in the other direction?” Take a character from the game world and place them in the real world. When screenwriting websites tell you to come up with ideas that “are the same but different,” this is exactly what they mean.
If Johnson and Chen had instead came up with an idea about four female friends who get sucked into a video game, that would’ve been “the same but the same.” That’s how most writers think. Their ideas are only one degree different from the idea that inspired them. You need to go two or three degrees before you get into “same but different” territory.
13 year old Edwin from New Jersey has found solace from his father’s cancer bout in the video game, Lord of Etyrium. He plays all the time with his best friends Benji and Soo. But when Edwin’s father dies, Edwin becomes too violent within the game. He has his hulking character, Valor, kill a bunch of peaceful troglodytes. Or kick down the wall to one of the cities, exposing everyone to monsters and beasts.
After a while, Benji and Soo don’t like playing with him anymore. This sends Edwin even deeper into the game. Here, he continues Valor’s violent streak. That is until his mom screws up the game, accidentally killing Valor. A depressed Edwin is sitting around the next night when a mysterious person from online sends him a special file. Edwin opens it and Valor appears in front of him in his room! “What strange realm is this?” he asks. “It’s New Jersey,” Edwin answers.
Valor is determined to head out into New Jersey and kill as many people as possible. Why wouldn’t he? Edwin has instilled him with violence. Edwin does everything he can to calm Valor down. And that’s when he learns that Edwin is “the” Edwin – the god that controls him! Valor swears allegiance to Edwin, agreeing to help him with anything he needs. Edwin shrugs his shoulders and thinks… hmmm. And so off to school he goes to have Valor scare the shit out of some bullies. Valor even helps him tap into his masculinity and ask a girl out!
Unfortunately, the NSA gets word that a hulking barbarian man is running around New Jersey scaring the crap out of people. Which, it turns out, is just the latest in a series of strange things happening around the state. It turns out whoever sent Edwin that file sent it to other players as well. Valor is just one of several beasts wreaking havoc. With the NSA on his tail, Edwin must enlist the help of his former friends to find the porthole back to Etyrium so he can send Valor back before he’s killed!
There’s a fine line between what makes these concepts work and not work. When they don’t work, they seem so silly as to be ridiculous. When they do work, they can be magical. And Valor works.
The scene that convinced me this was a real script and not someone fudging their way through a fun concept, happened around the halfway point. Valor asks Edwin why he’s so depressed and Edwin confesses that his father recently died. Here’s Valor’s response…
Valor then convinces Edwin to go out into the street and perform this ritual. Of course, since Valor is socially clueless, he starts belting the ritual at the top of his lungs. Edwin, meanwhile, is begging him to go back inside. But Valor keeps yelling at him to participate. Which only makes Edwin more embarrassed. But Valor keeps pushing and pushing until Edwin joins in, gradually losing himself to the ritual and having a massive breakthrough/breakdown where he finally mourns the loss of his father.
It’s a wonderful scene for a few reasons. But the main one is the contrast. Whenever you’re writing a big scene, you’re always looking for contrast. If it’s a light scene, you’re looking to contrast it with darkness. If it’s a dark scene, you’re looking to contrast it with lightness. If Valor had stayed in Edwin’s room with him, patted him on the back, and told him his dad loved him, it would’ve been the worst scene you could’ve possibly written. It’s the fact that the writers contrasted the sadness of losing a father with this big goofy video game chant that makes the scene a winner.
The real winner of the script, though, is Valor himself. He’s really funny. He’s so dialed in to the world of Etyrium that virtually everything he says is hilarious. Like when Edwin wakes up one morning, Valor is mischievously holding the neighbor’s dog. Edwin asks him what he’s doing. “I was about to slay this feral hound as a blood sacrifice to you. We can use the remains for a morning stew!” He’s got about 50 lines like that.
The only problem I had with the script was that it didn’t establish a goal for the characters until too late. It would’ve been nice if they had some adventure to go on here on earth, at least to give the characters a goal. But the only thing driving the plot through the first half of the screenplay was the NSA chasing them, which didn’t have much impact because it took them too long to figure out where Valor was.
Eventually, we learn that the goal is to get Valor back to his world. But that goal shows up around page 75. We needed it a lot earlier. Still, I can see why Amazon bought this. It’s perfect Lord of the Rings adjacent programming (Amazon is spending 1 billion on a Lord of the Rings show). But even without that, there’s so much potential for a franchise here. You have so many directions to go with a sequel. I can already imagine tons of creatures from Etyrium entering our world, leading to a giant battle. Which would be expensive. But guess who has lots of money?
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[xx] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: On Deadline.com, this was the logline for Valor: “After a marauding warrior from a popular video game dies, he is reincarnated in our world and discovers the god he’s always worshipped turns out to be a 13-year-old Asian kid from New Jersey adjusting to life with a single parent.” You’ll notice that, in the opening logline I used, I eliminated “adjusting to life with a single parent.” Why? Because you want to end your logline with a BANG. Not a dragged-out whimper. The “bang” is the shock of the god being a 13 year old Asian boy from New Jersey. Every word you add after that weakens the logline. Nobody wants to read, “Superman is tasked with stopping a group of evil aliens hellbent on destroying our planet… and also some people in his life are starting to realize he’s Clark Kent.” Why would you ever include that last part? END YOUR LOGLINE WITH A BANG!!!!
Carson does feature screenplay consultations, TV Pilot Consultations, and logline consultations. Logline consultations go for $25 a piece or $40 for unlimited tweaking. You get a 1-10 rating, a 150-word evaluation, and a rewrite of the logline. They’re extremely popular so if you haven’t tried one out yet, I encourage you to give it a shot. If you’re interested in any consultation package, e-mail Carsonreeves1@gmail.com with the subject line: CONSULTATION. Don’t start writing a script or sending a script out blind. Let Scriptshadow help you get it in shape first!
Brian Duffield’s latest script asks the question, “Who needs dialogue?”
Genre: Horror/Sci-Fi
Premise: An exiled anxiety-ridden homebody must battle an alien who’s found its way into her home.
About: This is Brian Duffield’s latest script, which he will be directing. He’s got rising star Kaitlyn Dever (Booksmart, Unbelievable) starring in the title role. I don’t think I have to remind everyone of my love for Brian Duffield. He’s one of my favorite screenwriters!
Writer: Brian Duffield
Details: 90 pages
Will the writer with the most scripts ever to appear in my Top 25 add yet another script to the list? Let’s find out!
20-something Brynn lives all by herself in a house out in the woods. She spends her days buying those little holiday village buildings online and adding them to her growing little miniature town. She also likes to write letters to friends and dance by herself to music from the 30s on her record player. Yeah, Brynn doesn’t exactly live the FOMO life.
Brynn is also not well liked in town. Whenever she has to go into town to send her letters, we see people staring her down, giving her the evil eye. We’re not told why. But Brynn doesn’t have any friends around here. Which makes it sad when she visits her dead mother’s grave. Even there, people from other funeral processions stare.
One night, while Brynn is sleeping, she hears noise downstairs. When she goes to inspect the noise, she sees that it’s a gray alien. The alien spots her and begins chasing her around the house, climaxing in a face-off in the living room. Brynn takes one of the village buildings she collects and cracks it across the alien’s face, killing it instantly!
As soon as the alien dies, all the power, including the battery in her car, goes dead. It appears to have released some sort of EMPT bomb when it died. Brynn rides her bike to town the next morning to tell the police, but all of them stare at her coldly. Clearly, the police hate Brynn for some reason. By the way, there’s been no dialogue this entire movie so far.
Brynn decides that the only course of action is to leave town. But when she gets on the local bus, one of the passengers attacks her! Clearly, it is connected to the alien from her home somehow. The bus screeches to a stop and Brynn runs back to her town, having no choice but to go back home.
Once at the house, her worst fears come true. Aliens come back to pick up their own. These are much bigger, much scarier, aliens. And it takes every ounce of fight Brynn has left to elude them. But they eventually capture her. In our big final climactic moment, an alien places its finger on Brynn’s forehead, which sends us into a flashback of how Brynn ended up alone in this house, hated by the town. It acts as some sort of catharsis for Brynn, who, theoretically, can now move on with her life. But will she?
Let me show you what an average page of this screenplay looks like…
Brian Duffield may be the most minimalist screenwriter in Hollywood. Most of his action paragraphs in this script are one line. At most two. As a point of reference, I just got done with a screenplay consultation where I had to tell the writer he should probably scale back all the 8-line paragraphs.
Not enough writers think about the load of work they place on the reader. The more dense with text the pages are. The more characters there are in the story. The more plot there is. The more exposition that needs to be conveyed. All of these things factor into the workload you’re placing on the reader. The higher the workload, the better the script has to be because you’re making the reader work harder. And when the reader works harder, they want to be rewarded for that extra work.
That doesn’t mean every script should have two characters, a super-lean writing style, a thoughtless plot, and zero exposition. Writing a script like that has its own challenges, namely that ‘too simple’ can quickly become ‘too boring.’ All I’m saying is ‘workload’ is one of the factors you want to take into account before writing your script. Or choosing your concept. Because there is something to be said about making the reading experience easy.
Nobody understands that concept better than Duffield. I would even say that it was a key ingredient to his success. Nobody ever read a Brian Duffield script and said, “Man, that was such a long tedious read.” You may not have liked it, but it only took 60 minutes out of your life. Compare that to the post traumatic stress I’m still experiencing after the 4 hour battle I had with the “Mank” script.
As for the story itself, I have mixed feeling about No One Will Save You. I always wanted to keep reading. But I’m not sure I was satisfied with the payoff. In fact, I don’t know if I understood it. I’m going to reserve my thoughts about that to comments so that I don’t spoil anything here. If you understood the ending, head down to the comments so we can discuss.
My main issue with No One Will Save You is that 90% of it is running from one location to another. It may be from home to a bus stop. It may be from the kitchen to the living room. There’s only so much of “Brynn scurries behind the refrigerator” a reader can. It reminded me of one of my least favorite of Duffield’s scripts, The Babysitter, which also had the main character running around and hiding a lot.
Whenever I read an action script, which is essentially what this is, I’m looking for unique or stand-out set pieces. If you can come up with 4-5 inventive set pieces in a script like this, you can make a good movie. But if it’s all just running from one hiding spot to another, there’s no structure to that. Point A to Point B gets repetitive quickly.
No One Will Save You has one stand-out set piece, which occurs on the bus when Brynn is trying to escape town. The mailman (who was set up earlier as a creepy guy) ends up getting on the bus as well and we see him seated far back behind Brynn, who is unaware of his presence. As time goes on, we see him keep moving closer and closer to her, moving up from seat to seat. It’s super creepy and we’re screaming at Brynn to turn around. Of course, she doesn’t until it’s too late and he attacks her. That was a fun scene. But that was the only true set piece scene in the script. I wish there had been more.
I will say this was better than the similarly-themed “Trespasser” from a few weeks back. Much better. So there’s that.
Part of me reads a script like No One Can Save You and thinks, “This is a 45 minute movie.” Most scripts are around 20,000 words. This is maybe 12,000. Is that enough meat for a movie? I’m not convinced it is.
However, the other option is that Brian Duffield understands this generation better than the rest of us. He knows that nobody has time. He knows that everybody has options. So he writes in a way that’s quickly digested. And his movies move in a way that allow them to be consumed quickly. Should we be resisting this style or should we be following his lead?
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: There is no dialogue in this movie. There’s no doubt that this had a huge influence on why Duffield chose to convey the action via extreme minimalism. There’s no way to make a reader angrier than a script with little-to-no dialogue and BIG CHUNKY DESCRIPTION PARAGRAPHS. That’s every reader’s worst nightmare. Dialogue is the fastest part of the script to read. When you eliminate it, it takes three times as long to read the screenplay. Duffield identified that issue and curtailed the action lines so that the script still read fast. Smart move on his part.
Hollywood’s crusade to make it impossible to know when and where any TV show or movie is debuting continues. Apparently, Army of the Dead came out this weekend. If you’re like me, you were under the impression that Army of the Dead was a Netflix movie. You were also under the impression that Netflix movies debut on… Netflix. But not Army of the Dead, apparently. Army of the Dead debuted in theaters instead of on the service that produced it. Confused? When they said ‘streaming wars’ I didn’t know that the war was against us.
HBO Max isn’t doing much better. I was shocked when I opened the app this weekend and saw… “Those Who Wish Me Dead.” I had no indication that this movie was coming out. It appeared out of nowhere, as if by magic. Some people may think this is cool. But there’s a psychological component to dropping movies on audiences out of nowhere. They think the movie must be bad because they’ve been conditioned to believe that big important movies are hyped up beforehand.
Netflix, which drops movies out of nowhere all the time, arguably changed this belief. But now Netflix is debuting movies in theaters! So what the hell is going on?? And as long as I’m ranting about streaming, I finally canceled my Apple TV+ subscription. They didn’t have a single show or movie I’d rate above a “wasn’t for me.” The whole reason I got the subscription was for that cool looking sci-fi show, Foundation. It’s been two years and I’m still waiting for the first episode!
Luckily, we’re finally about to get real movies back. In two weeks, A Quiet Place 2 hits theaters. I’m definitely going to see that. And then a week later, I believe, Fast and Furious 9 drops. So I’ll be seeing that as well. I can’t remember the last time I went to the theater two consecutive weeks in a row. I can’t wait!
About a week ago, I told you guys that, in June, the CIA is going to be releasing a lot of UFO documents. The reason this is happening, strangely enough, is that some congressman slipped it into the last Covid Relief bill that the government had to do this. Not sure what aliens have to do with Covid but I’ll take it.
The CIA releases documents like this every few years and they’re always disappointing as they cover peripheral mundane UFO events that have zero value to the community. For example, in 1978, Popular Mechanics may have called the government for a question about a UFO article they were going to run. So the CIA releases the letter that the government official wrote to their boss. “Hey, Popular Mechanics wants us to comment on some UFO story. Would you like to get back to them or should I?” It’s maddening how unimportant the documents they choose to release are.
However, the rumor is that, this time, they’re going to be a little more forthright – that there may be a couple of videos that are better than anything we’ve seen before. I’ll believe it when I see it because stuff like the video below aren’t good enough.
This is the current video everyone’s jazzed about. But come on. It’s a black dot. I undertand that this was taken in the dead of night and the only way to record it was with infrared. But everybody seems to think it’s amazing that the UFO goes into the water. WOOOOWWWWWWW! It went it to the water!? Wow. I’ve never seen any piece of machinery fall into water before. Wow. Stuff like this isn’t going to cut it if UFOs are ever truly going to cross into the mainstream. So I’m hoping they release something good for once.
The reason I bring up UFOs is because HBO Max just optioned Leslie Kean’s bestselling non-fiction book, “UFOS,” for Bryce Kass to script. Kass’s credits are kind of lean. But he was hired by George Clooney to adapt the Norwegian film, Pioneer, about a man working on an oil pipeline investigating his brother’s death.
I’ve read “UFOs.” Kean takes a neutral look at a handful of the most famous UFO cases, such as the case of an Irani Air Force pilot who engaged in a dogfight with a UFO. One of the things that’s maddening about the UFO field is the way skeptics dismiss these cases without knowing anything about them. Skeptics literally told a man who was in a dogfight with an unknown craft that he had mistaken Jupiter (as in the planet 500 million miles away) for the craft. These guys will jump through any hoop to avoid having to accept the reality of UFOs. But I digress.
I have no doubt that this project sold because of the upcoming CIA document release. And I think the rest of the year, for the same reason, will lead to a hotbed of UFO and alien spec sales. Which is a reminder that the SCRIPTSHADOW SCI-FI SHOWDOWN deadline is September 16th. I’ll release more information about that after Comedy Showdown is over. The Comedy Showdown deadline, for those who don’t know, is June 17th and you can find out how to enter here.
A few other sales of note, recently. Tyler Marceca, he of The Disciple Program fame, just sold a script called Stay Frosty for over a million bucks!!!! Here’s the premise: “After miraculously surviving a bullet to the head, a man has to figure out who wants him dead and why. He needs to stop the assassin while still making it back home in time to spend Christmas with his son.” Once Wahlberg abandoned Disciple Program, the script didn’t have anyone to champion it and so Tyler basically had to start his career over again. Kudos to him for sticking with it. And he’s got one of the hottest directors in town directing, Sam Hargrave. Sweet.
Another big sale was the spec script “Valor.” Hey, look at spec scripts making a comeback! This one sold to Amazon. Here’s the premise: “After a marauding warrior from a popular video game dies in a freak accident, he is reincarnated in our world and discovers the god he’s always worshipped turns out to be a 13-year-old Asian kid from New Jersey adjusting to life with a single parent.” Screenwriters Jeff Chan and Andrew Rhymer aren’t totally new to the game. They made a little movie called “Plus One,” about a couple of friends who agree to be each other’s plus ones at every wedding they’re invited to that summer. The movie ended up being a breakout hit on the indie scene, nearly nabbing a 90% on RT.
And finally, Phil Lord and Chris Miller have optioned the book The Premonition, by Michael Lewis, about some scientists who warned everyone of a coming pandemic but were ignored. If Lewis’s name sounds familiar, it’s because he was the author of another “doomsday is coming” book, The Big Short.
Hollywood doesn’t really know what to do with the pandemic from a story perspective. There have been a few attempts to mine the pandemic for movies that did not turn out well. I think focusing on the lead up to the pandemic is probably a better way to go. So maybe this will work.
But here’s my issue with doomsday sayers. You can find 500 people in any field right now who are warning you that the end of that field is coming. So if you just go off the numbers, there are always going to be people who ‘warned’ us something was coming after it comes. What was different about The Big Short was that you didn’t just have a guy warning everyone about the housing crisis coming. He was so sure of it that he actually bet all the money he had on it. That’s how they found him. They followed the money to figure out who really knew this was coming.
I’m guessing there are millions of people who were trying to tell everyone that a pandemic was on its way. So I’m skeptical of this movie. But that’s Hollywood. Hollywood refuses to see something big and believe that a movie can’t be made out of it. Even if logic tells you that the last thing anybody is going to want to watch after a pandemic is more pandemic.
“Hey Debbie. What are you doing tonight?”
“Going out to a bar and celebrating the ability to socialize and interact with the world again.”
“What would you say about seeing a serious pandemic movie instead?”
“Sounds great.”
One FINAL thing. There’s going to be no Rewrite Article this week. Just keep rewriting. You should be on the third quarter of your comedy rewrite (pages 50-75). You’ve got about a month left so no slowing down! Write every day no matter how bad you feel. That’s how you make it a habit. That’s how you finish scripts. Good luck! :)
A little while back, I was reading a murder-mystery consultation script. The opening scene covered the murder our detectives would spend the next 100 pages trying to solve.
Teaser scenes tell me a lot about a writer. Their construction is such that you can have a lot of fun with them, almost make them into a mini-movie. So if a writer can’t entertain me with their teaser, there’s a good chance they can’t entertain me for the next hour and a half.
Anyway, this murder scene takes place in a dorm room (I’m adjusting the actual details in order to keep the plot private). A stalker sneaks into the dormitory, makes his way up to his target’s room, and tricks her into opening the door. The rest of the scene takes place over one page and consists of the girl struggling a little bit but the killer easily subduing and, eventually, stabbing her to death.
The scene was extremely boring to read and I asked myself, “Why?” Technically, something exciting was happening. A girl was getting attacked. She was fighting for her life. And in the end, she sadly gets murdered. In what scenario is a murder “boring?”
The answer to this question is complicated but I’ll try and simplify it for you. In the real world, a murder is anything but boring. In a movie, however, people get murdered all the time. And because they’re fictional, the audience isn’t fazed by their death. So, in the context of storytelling, a murder can be just as boring as two characters talking at a diner.
But why was *this* scene so boring?
I had to keep reading the script before I noticed a pattern that ultimately identified the problem.
Anybody here a fan of Gwen Stefani’s old band, “No Doubt?”
That was the problem.
There was NO DOUBT within this opening murder scene that the murderer would succeed. There was never once where the girl got the upper hand. Or tried to talk the murderer out of it. The scene was a foregone conclusion. And foregone conclusions in the medium of storytelling are the equivalent of death. There is nothing that brings on boredom faster than a foregone conclusion.
I want you to imagine a see-saw. On one end of the see-saw is DOUBT. On the other end of the see-saw is CERTAINTY. Now I want you to imagine each one of your script’s 50 scenes as a person. Every time you write a scene where the outcome is certain, you are adding a person to the “Certainty” side of the see-saw. Before long, you’re going to have twenty people sitting on the Certainty side and, by sheer accident, one or two on the Doubt side.
How do you think a script like that reads? I’ll give you a hint because I read all these scripts. IT READS BORING.
Now it just so happens that I’ve been coming across a lot of suggestions to check out the old murder-mystery show, “Columbo.” I’d never seen Columbo before. Something about it put me off though I could never identify what. But I’m always willing to give something a shot.
So I watched the second episode (due to some confusion, I thought it was the pilot). By the way, before I get to the analysis, I suggest all of you check it out. The story is about writers who live in Los Angeles so there’s plenty of familiar territory to appreciate. And it was directed by Steven Spielberg!
‘Murder by the Book’ introduces us to Jim Ferris, one half of a successful murder-mystery writing team. Jim is up on the 30th floor of his Century City office all alone for the weekend doing some writing. There’s a knock on the door.
He goes to open it and his co-writer, Ken Franklin, is standing there with a gun pointed at him. At this moment, we know what’s going to happen. These two are a writing team that are coming to an end. Ken wants all the money for himself so he’s going to kill his partner. It’s as certain as certain can get.
But then, oddly, Jim smiles. “Nice try,” he says. “What?” Ken replies. “You wouldn’t kill me with that gun. You’re not wearing gloves. Your fingerprints would be all over it. We’re murder-mystery writers. We know this stuff.” Ken smiles and lowers the gun. “You got me,” he says, and proceeds to walk past Jim into the office.
Notice what’s transpired. We were certain something was going to happen. Ken was going to kill Jim right there. But it turns out we were wrong. Ken was just playing around. The writer of this episode, Steven Bocho, had now injected some DOUBT into the scene.
Ken is still going to kill Jim though, right? We don’t have a procedural if there’s no murder. But even after Jim closes the door, Ken seems to relax. Is he going to kill him? (DOUBT). We learn a little more about the situation. The two are splitting up. Jim, it turns out, wants to move away from mystery writing and take on more serious subject matter.
Still, even though it seems like Ken is up to something, we’re not clear what his plan is. There are several moments he could kill Jim in the office yet he doesn’t (DOUBT). Ken eventually makes a pitch that they drive down to his house in San Diego and celebrate their big split with some champagne and good conversations. Reminisce about all the good times they had.
Jim is a little reluctant but eventually concedes. The two walk down to Ken’s car, which is all alone in the parking lot. But when they get inside, Ken “remembers” that he left his lighter up in the office. “I’ll be right back,” he says. I was absolutely certain that the second Ken was twenty steps clear of that car, it was going to blow up.
But it didn’t. Even more DOUBT.
At this point I was so curious how and where this murder was going to happen that I was hooked. I’d reached that point in a show or movie where you stop analyzing and start enjoying. And I can confirm to you that the primary reason for that was the level of doubt Bocho and Spielberg infused into the scene.
You see, most writers think of scenes as a sprint. Get from Point A to Point B as quick as possible. Good writers think of scenes AS A DANCE. And DOUBT is like a good set of dance shoes. It really allows you to get jiggy with a scene (or an entire narrative).
I was doubting how Ken was going to kill Jim ALL THE WAY UP TO, literally, the second the murder happened. That was how well-constructed the doubt was. And, by the way, this is from an episode of television 50 YEARS AGO. Think about that for a second. This writer was able to fool a viewer after 50+ years of similar content, much of which was inspired by this show.
That should tell you just how valuable the tool of DOUBT is in storytelling. It doesn’t matter how seasoned the viewer is. With some carefully placed moments of doubt, you can stay ahead of any viewer.
Some of you may say, “Well, sure, Carson. If I had 15 minutes to write an opening murder scene, I could create plenty of doubt too.” Which is a valid point. But you don’t need tons of time to create doubt. All you’re looking for is to make the viewer think the scene could go one of two ways. That doesn’t take much. It could take one moment that creates doubt.
Let’s go back to that opening consultation scene. What could we have done to create doubt? Well, the college girl is the potential victim here. So what you want to do is give us at least one moment where we think she’s going to escape. For example, the killer gets inside her room, corners her, and there’s a scuffle. It’s intense. She’s fighting hard. She somehow manages to stun him enough to get around him and run for the door.
Just as she grabs the doorknob, though, she’s dragged back. Even that moment – right up until she’s grabbed – is going to give the reader hope that she might get away. In other words, they’re doubting that the murderer will succeed. And if you really want to have fun, take the character as close to escape as you can before ripping it away.
For example, maybe she gets away A SECOND TIME and this time she DOES open the door. And she DOES run down the hallway. But it’s winter break. She’s the only one on the floor. So she’s screaming for help but nobody’s around. The killer is able to catch her again and murder her right there in the hallway.
How much more exciting is that scene than the killer easily walking through her door and easily killing her in her room? Way more entertaining right? That’s the power of DOUBT. Let it become a major part to your writing.
