This is not an official post. The following thoughts you read will not be coherent. This show does not deserve coherent thoughts. But since there wasn’t going to be a post today, I thought I’d give you my stream-of-conscious thoughts on Ozark Season 3. A TON of people recommended this season to me. To the point where I was expecting one of the all-time great seasons of television.

That is not what I got.

What I got was shoddy writing, awful acting, and an all-around disaster of a season. But let me start with the good. The bi-polar brother character was good. His storyline worked. But he was the only storyline that worked. Everything else ranged between bad and terrible.

The thing that frustrates me most is that no one on this show knows how to write towards a goal. The season started out with a plan. The Byrds buy a casino boat they can launder money on. Okay, that’s something we can use to build a storyline around. But by the fifth episode, the casino had become background noise, something the Byrds occasionally went over to and checked on.

By the way, I’m three seasons into a show about money laundering and I still don’t know how money laundering works. And I’m positive that half the writers on this series don’t know either. Whenever money laundering is brought up, it’s done so in general terms. Some character over in the corner is doing it. Or if Marty is doing it, he keeps to himself about it. There’s never any explanation of how much money is being laundered or what the ultimate goal is other than there’s some guy in Mexico who “needs his money laundered.”

Speaking of Marty, HE HAS NOTHING TO DO ON THE SHOW!!!! The only purpose of this character is to come into a scene when two other characters are arguing and say, “Guys! Guys! We need to focus here. Okay?” I swear he said a variation of that line six million times in the season. Isn’t Marty supposed to be your main character?? Why doesn’t he have anything to do!

In Marty’s one big episode, that I call, “The Laughably Awful Excuse for a TV Episode” episode, Marty is kidnapped and taken to Mexico so the big drug cartel guy can scare him a little. The awfulness of the writing was confirmed to me when they cut to Marty, in a cell, ravenously ripping rice off a bowl with his bare hands, jamming it into his mouth, desperate for food. The problem with this moment? Marty had only been in Mexico for a FEW HOURS!!!! And he’s already starving to the point where he’s ripping food off bowls. It’s classic amateur writer hour. They want all the drama and none of the logic. It’s probably going to take your character longer than a few hours to be starving. This sequence is intercut with some faux important flashback of Marty as a kid waiting in the hospital when a parent is dying and he keeps playing one of the video games down in the waiting area. I’m sure to the writer, this video game had a ton of significance. It was symbolic. It was a metaphor! To us, it was, “WHY THE F%$# ARE YOU FOCUSING SO HARD ON THIS RANDOM STUPID VIDEO GAME??”

Oh, and don’t get me started on Ruth. The actress who plays that character is one of the single worst actresses I’ve ever seen allowed on a professional TV set. She makes the wrong choice on EVERY SINGLE LINE she reads. It’s clearly meant to be read one way and she, without fail, always emphasizes the wrong word or says the sentence the wrong way, completely killing the meaning of the line. It’s actually quite spectacular that you can make the wrong choice that many times in a row. And I didn’t keep count, but she says the word “f%$king” at least 1000 times over the course of the season. It’s one thing to keep a character’s verbiage consistent, it’s another to be plain lazy. Give the character SOMETHING to say other than “f%$king” every single time she opens her mouth.

But I soldiered on. I kept going. Because everyone said the ending of the season was great. I figured this had to all come together somehow. That something world-changing was going to happen.

I guess (spoiler) everyone was talking about the fact that they killed off the brother. And that was a nice moment. But I was expecting more.

And the baffling part about that is they killed him in episode 9. So episode 10 rolls around, after all the air had been let out of the balloon, and as a result they had NOTHING TO DO IN THE EPISODE. It was like watching a real-time 60 minute car crash. It was clear the writers had no idea where to go or what to have the characters do. Every scene was characters either standing around outside discussing something that had already happened or sitting down inside discussing what already happened.

YOUR FINAL EPISODE SHOULD NOT BE ABOUT WHAT ALREADY HAPPENED! IT SHOULD BE ABOUT WHAT’S HAPPENING NOW!

I couldn’t believe what I was watching.

And look, I’m not here to tell anyone who loved this season that they’re wrong. I get that when you become attached to characters as an audience, you don’t see the same flaws other viewers do. So if you cared about these people, your experience was likely different. The only person I cared about was the brother. But every other character was so poorly written (except for Wendy and the lawyer lady at times) that I couldn’t muster even a microcosm of interest in what happened to them.

I feel like I spent 10 hours watching a show where two things happened. You watch a season of Breaking Bad and a million things happen.

I don’t get it. Sorry. I had to get this out of my system.

Curious to hear your reaction. :)

DEADLINE FOR THE LAST GREAT SCREENPLAY CONTEST IS JULY 4TH!!! JUST 10 DAYS AWAY!!!

This is the 3rd in my line of “How to Win The Last Great Screenplay Contest” articles. You can read the first one, on dialogue, here. Last week’s, on character, here. Today we’re going to talk about the second most important part of your screenplay: the ending. Or, to be more specific, the third act.

Why is this the “second” most important part? Because the first 10 pages are the most important part. If the reader doesn’t like those, it doesn’t matter what your ending looks like, cause they’ll never read it.

The reason I’m talking about the third act with just 10 days to go is that it is probably the section you’ll be spending the most time on. The first act of a screenplay gets the lion’s share of a screenwriter’s time. I’d guesstimate writers put 50% of their efforts into the first act, leaving only 50% for the second and third acts!

The third act, being at the very end of the screenplay, often gets neglected. And since it’s critical that your script go out with a bang, you should be spending a lot of your time in the lead up to our deadline making that ending great. For that reason, let’s discuss what you should be doing with your third act.

As a reminder, the end of your second act – which will take place around page 75 of a 100 page script, 82 of a 110 page script, and 90 of a 120 page script – needs to be the lowest point for your hero in his journey. What does this mean? It means that whatever your hero is trying to accomplish, this is the moment where it seems like all hope is lost. If it helps, there’s usually a death involved, if not directly then symbolically.

With Star Wars, it’s Obi-Wan dying. In Toy Story 4, it’s when the antique store doll, Gabby, is rejected by her ideal owner, Harmony. In JoJo Rabbit (major spoiler – WATCH THE MOVIE FIRST!), it’s when JoJo finds his mother hanging in the town square. In E.T., it’s when E.T. dies. In Deadpool, it’s when Ajax kidnaps Vanessa. It’s important in this moment that everything feel helpless, that it feel like there’s no chance our heroes will succeed.

For those of you who think these pre-mandated moments in a script are hogwash, let me explain why you’re doing this. Every movie should be an emotional roller-coaster. You want to bring the audience up, bring them back down, make them laugh, make them cry, make them angry, make them happy. This vacillation of emotion is highly addictive. It’s the same reason people get infatuated with lovers. It’s the ups and the downs and this constant intense emotional flow that you can’t get enough of. The idea with your ending is that you’re going to bring the audience up as high as you possibly can. So it only makes sense that, before you do that, you bring them as low as you can. That is what allows for the largest leap in emotion. The bigger the leap, the more memorable the experience will be.

A lot of people don’t know what to do after the “lowest point.” Well I’ve got good news for you. It’s simple. You give your hero 2-3 scenes to stew in their sadness, to feel sorry for themselves, and then they have a REBIRTH. The rebirth is them realizing that, even though the situation is impossible, they still have to try. They still have to go after the girl, even if she’s leaving for Australia in 20 minutes. They still must fight the bad guy, even if he’s effortlessly beat them five previous times. You still must try and destroy the Death Star, even if it requires a one in a million shot.

From there, what to do should be fairly clear. Your final twenty pages is going to be a mini-movie. You should have a clear goal (save Vanessa), clear stakes (if you don’t, she dies), and urgency (you only have until the end of the day). And, just like your script is divided into three acts, your ending will be divided into three acts.

We need a setup (this is where we set up the hero’s plan), the conflict (this is where the antagonist will try everything in his power to prevent the hero from succeeding), and the resolution (our hero either succeeds or fails).

A couple of additional pieces of advice. Your third act is where you’re going to pay off all your setups. So if you set up your hero as a guitar player and, at the end of the movie, the guitar player at the high school prom breaks his finger and can’t play but the band needs to play the song in order for your mom and dad to dance so that they can kiss on the dance floor, fall in love, get married, and you’re born (Back to the Future), well, this is the moment to pay that off. Marty was set up in act 1 as wanting to be a guitar player so he can stand in for the guitar player in this final scene.

Go crazy with setups and payoffs. As I’ve said here before, the biggest bang-for-your-buck screenwriting tool is the setup and payoff. Unless you completely botch them, they always work.

And, also, just like your script had a “lowest point,” your ending should have a “lowest point.” There needs to be a moment in the final battle, or car chase, or race to get the girl, where your hero fails. And it looks like the movie is over. That should be your goal. To make it look like YOUR HERO HAS LOST. This is the one final EMOTIONAL LOW you’re going to put your audience through so that when they leap up and defeat the villain, we get that goosebumps feeling that you can only get while watching a great movie.

I also want to point out that the more non-traditional your movie is, the harder it will be to institute this formula. This is why so many indie movies run into trouble with their endings. There was never a real character goal. And if there’s no character goal, it’s hard to know what your character should do at the end. The whole point of creating a character goal is to create a clear final ending where they either achieve the goal or don’t. So if you don’t have that, it can get complicated.

That’s not to say it’s impossible. Just that it’s harder. My advice to you would be to institute this formula as well as you can. And for the parts that don’t fit, follow the emotion. What you’re looking for in a great ending isn’t beating the bad guy. Sure, that’s all well and good. But the true magic of a great ending comes from an emotional beat, usually a character finally overcoming their flaw, or two characters who’ve been at odds with each other the entire movie finally coming together.

A good example of this is JoJo Rabbit. I would implore anybody here who hasn’t seen the movie to go watch it first due to spoilerage. It was my favorite movie of last year (I saw it after I made my 2019 Best Movies List, so it’s not on there). And a big reason for that was the ending, which, it turns out, is non-traditional.

JoJo Rabbit does not have a character goal that drives the film. He’s just living his life, which has been interrupted by the Jewish girl his mother has helped hide in the walls of the house. So a lot of the movie is about the conflict between those two characters.

What JoJo Rabbit did that was smart was it used the end of the war as a framing device to create its ending. Taika still used the “lowest point,” by killing off Jojo’s mother. And then he throws in Hitler’s suicide and the Americans rushing into the city to take out the Germans. This provides our big exciting ending even if our hero doesn’t have a goal to achieve.

And to provide the emotional catharsis that all good endings have, Taika creates two unanswered questions. One with Imaginary Hitler. What will JoJo do now that Imaginary Hitler is insisting he take out the Jewish girl living in his house. And two, what happens with Elsa (the Jewish girl)?

The final scene is JoJo going back to his house and letting her know she’s free. It’s an amazing scene because throughout the whole movie, her life was dependent on him. Now, he’s all alone. He has no parents. Nowhere to go. His life is dependent on her. She’s all he has left. Will she leave him? Or will they go off together?

I’m not going to pretend like endings are easy. But hopefully this has given you some framework to work with so that you can ace your ending. Good luck!

Next week, we’ll talk about what you can realistically achieve in a script with three days before a deadline!

Today’s project is another Stephen King adaptation. Can we learn some of the movie adaptation master’s secrets from the review?

Genre: Thriller
Premise: A writer on a late-night drive stops at a rest stop only to find himself in the middle of an escalating domestic dispute.
About: This was a Stephen King short story that Lionsgate picked up last year. Her Smell’s Alex Ross Perry will direct. This is from King’s 2009 collection of short stories, “Just After Sunset.” It originally appeared in Esquire magazine in 2003.
Writer: Stephen King
Details: about 25 pages long

Stephen King has had more of his stories adapted into movies than any other modern writer. And it isn’t even close. King has 39 produced feature credits off adaptations. Elmore Leonard is second with 21. And the next closest is Nicholas Sparks, with 11. (Shakespeare, of course, has had like 250, but he did have a 400 year head start on King, so let’s give it time)

That’s fascinating to me. That someone can be so tuned in to what makes a movie concept work that nobody else is even within shouting distance of him. I’ve thought about this for years. What is King doing that nobody else is doing? The only thing I can think of is he doesn’t set out to write movies. He sets out to write novels and short stories and if a studio ends up wanting to adapt one, great.

Does that mean there’s something to the approach of writing stories for the page rather than the screen that creates better movie ideas? Or is it as simple as King is the only author who writes successful mainstream horror consistently, and since horror is cheap to produce, many of his ideas get made?

I know this about King. His concepts tend to be very simple. A clown that eats children. A killer dog. A girl who has the power to start fire. A family stays at a haunted hotel. An author’s biggest fan kidnaps him and forces him to write a book. Simple concepts mean focused narratives. And you guys know how much I value simple narratives. Yesterday’s horror script fell apart specifically due to how un-simple it was.

But that begs the question. With concepts so simple, how is King able to pull 700 pages out of them? I mean who, other than King, is able to turn a killer clown into a double book? Could that hold the secret to King’s adaptation success? Unfortunately, we won’t find out today, since this is a short story. But maybe Rest Stop will get us one clue closer to the answer.

English professor John Dykstra just finished speaking at a benefit as his alter ego, Rick Hardin. Rick Hardin, you see, is a best-selling thriller novelist. Rick Hardin is the cool guy with a hop to his step who wears shit-kicker cowboy boots. Rick Hardin is a pseudonym. And after the benefit, Rick Hardin morphs back into John Dykstra.

Dykstra is driving home late on a deserted highway, and because of a few drinks he had at the benefit, he needs to go to the bathroom. Luckily, he knows of a rest stop up ahead. When Dykstra pulls in, he sees one other car there, a PT Cruiser. Just as he’s about to walk in the bathroom, he hears a man cursing out a woman in the woman’s bathroom.

Amongst the screaming is hitting. Lots of it. Dykstra is all of a sudden faced with a tough choice. Does he, all of 5’9” and 160 pounds, try to go in and stop this guy, or does he become the guy on the news in a week who was a witness to a murder yet stood by and did nothing? As much as he wants to do something, Dykstra doesn’t have the courage.

We then cut inside the woman’s room and switch POVs to Lee, the man doing the beating. Just as he’s putting the finishing touches on his girlfriend, he gets clocked in the back with something, yanked backwards, and shoved to the ground. It’s Rick Hardin. Yes, Dykstra’s cooler alter-ego. He tells Lee if he tries to get up, he’ll clock him in he head with the tire iron he’s holding.

Rick, aka Dykstra, tells the woman to get in the car and drive away. Once gone, Rick berates the man for what he does and finds himself actually enjoying it. He likes being in this power position, being the abuser. After threatening to come after the man if he ever does this again, Rick heads off in his car, drives 15 miles, then promptly throws up on the side of the driveway, turning back into John Dykstra.

Let’s start by stating the obvious. This sold last year. 2019 is still firmly in the #metoo trending stage. Which makes this a great example of understanding what the market wants (toxic masculinity, female abuse storylines), then going back into the library of the most movie adaptable author in history, and finding a story that fits that need. That’s good producer work there.

As a story, this is classic King. He sets up a simple scary situation – being stuck at a truck stop with something dangerous – and makes you wonder what’s going to happen. One of the things I noticed about King that might separate him from other writers who likewise favor simple concepts, is he really likes to get into the details of the characters’ lives. Both what led them to this point and the unending number of thoughts going on in their head at the moment.

The entire first part of this story is Dykstra recounting how he got to this point in his life. The reason this is relevant is because readers don’t care about characters they don’t know. Had this story begun with Dykstra walking up to the rest stop, it wouldn’t have worked. We needed to know who this person was to care about him when he got into this situation.

I’m thinking this is part of King’s secret sauce. Despite his concepts being scary simple, he loves character. He loves detail. He never just sees what’s in the frame. He wants to know what’s above the frame, below it, next to it, behind it. That curiosity factor elevates his characters above what everyone else is doing.

I mean look at You Should Have Left. There’s character backstory in that script. But nothing to the level of even what this short story provides. In fact, I think when King stories don’t adapt well, that’s a common reason. The person adapting isn’t able to transfer over the level of detail in the characters that King put on the page.

Now some of you might point out that King depends too much on on-the-nose situations. We have the good guy here. And the really bad guy who’s beating up a girl. I mean how much more obviously bad can you make a character? However, I think that also is a reason King is so successful on the movie front. Too many writers try and create these ultra-complex characters with too many dimensions and, in the process, dilute who they are. There’s definitely a factor in mainstream Hollywood films where a certain level of “on-the-noseness” is required. Any Steven Spielberg movie will prove that. They’re mostly filled with archetypes.

And when it comes down to it, King puts his characters into interesting situations. Situations where they’re forced to act but can’t (Misery) and situations where they’re given a problem and must make a difficult choice (Rest Stop). If you’re ever looking to write a good story, just do this. Put your character in a bad situation and see what happens.

All in all, I liked this short story. I was more into the “what is he going to do?” stuff than the silly Clark Kent-Superman stuff. But I was definitely pulled in and wanted to know what would happen, which is an indication that the story is working. It’s going to be interesting to see how they turn this into a feature, though. I’m guessing it won’t end so abruptly. This will likely extend out into the surrounding forest and have a few more twists and turns.

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

What I learned: You have to have an insatiable appetite to get to know your characters if you want to be a really good writer. That’s what King reminded me of today. If your characters are just pawns to move the plot forward, there’s always a chance that you can make that work, such as the John Wick movies. But it will serve you better to get to know characters as much as humanly possible. It helps on pretty much every front of writing.

Genre: Horror
Premise: (from Black List) After strange deaths and suicides skyrocket in a dying Appalachian coal town, Maggie – a first responder – wages a personal war against the local coal mine, unearthing a disturbing past that the company has kept secret within the waters of the local lake.
About: This script finished on last year’s Black List with 10 votes (ranking it just outside the top 20). It is the writer’s, Ezra Herz’s, breakthrough screenplay.
Writer: Ezra Herz
Details: 105 pages

Reader RT posted a great quote after yesterday’s script from writer David Koepp: “This is my 30th movie/script and storytelling is a mystery every single time. Things that you think will work, don’t. Things that you didn’t expect to work, do. Things go together that you didn’t imagine. You’re uncovering stuff as you go. Every single one of them is HARD.”

Never have words rung so true.

Every screenplay is a leap of faith. You know what you’re trying to do. But you won’t know if it works until you finish. Because scripts look different on 110 pieces of paper than they do as an abstract idea in your head.

Which is why you want to start with the best concept possible. The weaker the concept, the more it’s going to break down over 110 pages. A strong concept gives you the best chance at mitigating those things Koepp was talking about.

What’s a strong concept, Carson? Isn’t that subjective? Yes, it is. But all I’m saying is, you’re better off starting with an idea like Knives Out than Portrait of a Lady On Fire. You’re better off starting with an idea like Yesterday than Manchester by the Sea.

Today’s script has some mad potential for scariness. But when it’s all said and done, the fear factor is diluted – a scare fest in search of a focused story.

Maggie Dawson is a first responder in a small Appalachian town that’s participating in an upgraded coal delivery system called mountain shaving, a recently developed technology whereby you blow off the tops of mountains so you can pluck the coal from them right out the top.

Maggie’s town has been dealing with mining issues for decades. Many of the people here worked in the mines and developed black lung, including her father, who she has to steal morphine for from the hospital every day.

When Maggie starts to notice that many of the people she treats have a black rash on them (and commit suicide later), she suspects that something more sinister is going on, especially because every time anyone walks past an open mine, they hear creepy whispers coming from inside.

Maggie already had it bad seeing as her mom went crazy and died which led to Maggie’s husband leaving her and him restricting access to their 12 year old son (as far what happened with mother, that remains a mystery for the majority of the script).

Convinced that the mining company is behind all of this mayhem, Maggie goes digging, which leads her to a river by the local dam, where an entire town has been buried beneath the water. She scuba dives down to the ruins, sees a bunch of dead people in the houses (despite nobody else seeing them) and that’s when she knows it’s time to take this evil mining corporation down for good!

My experience has been that if a horror script not associated with Nightmare on Elm Street is using nightmares excessively, the script isn’t working.

If your scares are coming from random nightmare scenes as opposed to emerging organically from your concept, you probably have a weak concept. Or, at least, an unfocused one.

This is two horror scripts in a row (along with yesterday’s “You Should Have Left”) where we’re getting nightmare after nightmare scene. And, to be frank, it feels lazy. Even when it works it feels lazy because you’re cheating. You’re slapping together an easy scare sequence because nightmare scenes don’t need to connect with anything. For example, you can have a dead character come alive in a nightmare scene and then not have to explain it.

So whenever I see that, I know a script is in trouble. It’s not that it never works. But it’s one of those works 1% of the time deals. Take The Exorcist, for example, considered to be the best horror movie of all time. There’s no dream sequence in that movie. Good horror doesn’t need cheap nightmare scares.

Ripple is a frustrating script.

There’s something here. You have elements that could lead to a good horror film. But there’s way too much going on. We have a mother who went crazy backstory. We’ve got a father who’s dying from black lung. We have eerie orbs that pop up at night. We have a mysterious black rash showing up on everyone. We have people losing their minds and committing suicide. We have an evil mining corporation. We have strange whispers that come from the caves. And to top it all off, we have an underwater town that was flooded when the damn was built.

It’s idea overload.

I know you’re sick of hearing this but screenplays need FOCUS. Make your characters as complex as you want. But the plot needs to be reasonably simple. And today’s script is anything but simple. At one point a girl who was saved from a fire starts showing up behind our heroine when she’s at the hospital, then disappearing when our protagonist turns around and all I’m thinking is, “What does this have to do with anything?” It feels like a scare always took precedence over logic.

This week is a reminder of just how hard writing a script is. Because yesterday we had what I’m arguing for today, which is a simple story. But yesterday’s script was weak too. And that was written by one of the top screenwriters in Hollywood! I guess it’s a reminder that you’re always striving for balance. You don’t want things to be too sprawling. But a script that’s so simple there aren’t any toys to play with isn’t fun either.

There is one consistent thread between these two scripts, though. When you write a horror script, the horror element needs be clearly defined. Both of these scripts fail in that department. Yesterday’s script was about a haunted house that was brand new which sometimes had time displacement and disappearing doors?? Today’s script is about a mining operation that gives people black rashes and forces some to commit suicide which is tied back to strange orbs and a town underneath the water??

Contrast that to movies like A Quiet Place: If you make a noise you’re dead. The Exorcist: A demon has possessed your daughter. It: An evil clown kills children in a small town. Midsommar: Four friends visit a remote strange cult that starts killing them. The horror element in all these movies is very clearly defined.

I suppose if you’re making an argument against this line of thinking, you would use a movie like, “The Ring.” You’ve got a video tape that kills anyone who watches it after seven days. You’ve got a scary wet dead girl who comes out of a TV?? People die in frozen screams (but are also somehow aged into a mummy state when they die??). You’ve got dead horses. A bizarre 8mm film. A little boy with psychic powers. An island with a lighthouse. It’s a weird combination of elements, for sure.

But to be clear, I didn’t say it was *impossible* to make these sorts of horror scripts work. Only that it’s harder. A lot harder. As weird as The Ring was, the story connected together well. The setups and payoffs were strong. Everything that happens in that weird 8mm VHS tape film is a setup for things they encounter later in the movie.

I didn’t get that same sense after reading “Ripple.” The elements felt too raw and too disconnected. Then again, this is screenwriting. You can always write another draft and keep connecting those dots. That’s actually what rewriting is all about. Using each draft to make everything feel a little more connected than it was before.

I wanted to get into this script because I like the setting. I like the idea of putting a horror film in this environment. But it was too messy for my taste.

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

What I learned: I’m all for creating conflict and strife in your main character’s life. But it feels manufactured if EVERYBODY in their life has some form of conflict. Here we have the mom who went crazy and died. We have a dad who’s dying of cancer. We have a husband who left our hero and doesn’t trust her. We have our protagonist’s kid who she’s not allowed to see. It’s too much. There has to be some normality SOMEWHERE in your character’s life or their life won’t feel real.

You Should Have Left leaves aspiring writers the breadcrumbs for how to write the perfect company man screenplay.

Genre: Horror
Premise: A man accused of killing his ex-wife heads to a brand new Air BnB home in the English countryside with his new actress wife and young daughter. But nothing about this house is what it seems to be!
About: I don’t have the financial documents to prove it, but if I had to guess, David Koepp has made more money on screenwriting than anybody else in history. And yes, that includes Joe Eszterhas. Not only does he have 36 credits, but he’s done tons of uncredited late-stage work on scripts, and that late stage work is where they pay the big money (since they’re hurriedly trying to get the script ready for production). Koepp has had his ups (Panic Room) and his downs (Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull) but all in all has had an incredible screenwriting career by any measurement. Koepp teamed up with horror titan Blumhouse on this latest script, which he also directed.
Writer: David Koepp
Details: 90 minutes long

You Should Have Left may be the single best example of what a script looks like through the eyes of the ultimate screenwriting company man.

To the average Joe, this is another mildly amusing haunted house movie. But if you’re a screenwriter, you’ll notice that David Koepp is, intentionally or not, telegraphing the exact formula a screenwriter must use to get a movie made in Hollywood.

You’ve got your single location. A house. Keeps things cheap.
You’ve got your horror genre. Easy to market.
(spoiler) You’ve got dual parts for your lead role. This increases the chances a good actor will want to get on board, which helps with financing.
The hero is tasked with an impossible choice at the end. What will he choose!?

To be honest, it’s a little bit disheartening. Koepp knows the exact formula to get a movie made because he knows the Hollywood system so intimately. But it’s for that very reason the movie feels so uninspired. It was conceived not out of inspiration but rather as a vessel that could be effortlessly sling-shotted through the system.

Contrast this with a movie like Uncut Gems. Uncut Gems is the anti-Hollywood movie and, therefore, should never have gotten made. Which is why it took 20 years. It required its writers to become a hot property in town before they were finally able to get Adam Sandler to look at it and get enough money to shoot the thing.

However, it is a lesson in how Hollywood works. You have a choice, as a screenwriter, to make things easy or hard for yourself. You can go the David Koepp route, come up with something perfectly packaged for Hollywood, get it made quickly, but your movie is forgotten a week after it debuts. Or you can go the Safdie Brothers route and write something you’re passionate about regardless of whether it fits into Hollywood system or not. Of course, as noble as that sounds, you’re going to have to work a lot harder and a lot longer to ever see your movie made.

The generically titled, “You Should Have Left,” follows a former banker named Theo, who has a messy past. How messy? His wife drowned in a bathtub and everyone thought he did it. He even went to trial. But he ended up getting acquitted. Unfortunately, the case made him infamous, giving him minor celebrity status.

This status is what allowed him to meet another “celebrity,” rising actress Susanna. The two make a cute couple. And along with Theo’s six year old daughter, Ella, they’ve got a nice little family going.

When Susanna is scheduled to shoot her next movie in England, they rent a house on Air BnB in the English countryside. The brand new construction is nice enough. But there’s something a little too sparse about it. It doesn’t feel lived in.

When Susanna goes off to shoot her movie, Theo and Ella are stuck in the house alone. And that’s when Theo starts noticing odd things. For example, he’ll explore all the little rooms in the house, only to learn that instead of ten minutes having past, it’s been six hours. Or he’ll notice a door he could’ve sworn wasn’t there before. He’s constantly getting turned around in the house, entering rooms that should’ve been on the other side of the house.

If that isn’t trippy enough, Theo finds out that Susanna has been cheating on him! She’s having an affair with someone from her last movie. He kicks Susanna out of the house for the evening. But that’s when the house starts acting next-level creepy. He and Ella try to escape. But after walking down the hillside, they end up right back at the house again!

What we eventually learn (this is a spoiler if you care) is that the house is Hell. Or, at least, a form of Hell. And it’s punishing Theo because, you guessed it, he did kill his wife. Well, he saw her dying and didn’t do anything. So… he indirectly killed her? Theo even meets the house’s owner, Stetler, who is a stand in for the devil. And Stetler is also… Theo? Or looks like him? Should I even try and save this summary? Nah, we’ll end there.

I’d forgotten when I first started this movie that David Koepp wrote it. But I could tell immediately it was written by a pro’s pro. The dialogue wasn’t just wandering surface level drivel. Everything implied a past, hinted at deeper backstories with the characters. “I think he recognized me,” Theo says about the P.A. when he picks Susanna up from her shoot.

There’s also an early scene where Susanna takes Ella for a walk and Ella asks her why everyone “hates daddy.” Most amateur writers would’ve written this scene back at the house. But Koepp writes the scene with Ella climbing a tree. Susanna worries that Ella is going to fall. And as Ella is asking her questions about Theo, Susanna is begging her to climb down. Adding “agitations” like this into the scene is a nice way to give basic dialogue extra pep.

The problem with this script, though, is that it’s trying to stage a Kardashian level wedding on a Jersey Shore budget.

One thing I constantly drill into your heads is leaning into your concept. Your concept is the one thing that – theoretically – differentiates you from every other movie. If you’ve written A Quiet Place, you want to lean into a lot of scenes where your characters need to be quiet.

You run into a problem with this advice, however, if your concept is weak. Cause now you’re leaning into something that isn’t that interesting in the first place. The “strange attractor” in You Should Have Left is the house. And I’m not clear on what’s unique about the house. It condenses time sometimes. It moves doors around. I’m not seeing a whole lot to work with here.

I’m guessing Koepp thought that all haunted house movies up to this point have taken place in old scary houses. So what if you made a haunted house movie about a brand new house? I suppose you could talk yourself into that being a fresh idea but it’s clear, in practice, that there isn’t enough to work with.

I mean how many times can you show someone walking into a room that they didn’t think was there before?

I feel like Koepp has written in the system for so long that he isn’t able to generate emotion or surprise anymore. He knows how to do everything. And yet, everything he does is so vanilla.

(spoiler) For example, we get this final scene in the film where Theo realizes that the house is Hell. And the reason it brought him here was to keep him here forever for killing his wife. The Devil (Stetson), gives him a choice, though. He can bring his daughter with him so they can be with each other forever.

Technically, this is what you want to do as a writer. You want to give your hero one final impossible choice to make. And what they choose will determine if they’ve overcome their flaw or not. If Theo chooses to bring his daughter with him, it will prove that he’s still the selfish man who let his wife die because he was unhappy in the marriage. If he lets Ella go with Susanna, it means he’s finally accepted what he did.

And yet we feel nothing. I didn’t care if he kept her there or not.

I thought about why that was and that’s when I realized the script made one of the biggest screenwriting mistakes you can make. The main character was passive! He didn’t even have a job, lol. He just wanders around the house waiting for his wife to get back. Why am I going to care what a guy like that decides to do? We only care about “the choice” when we care about the character. And this is a guy we never gave a damn about.

With all that said, I have to say that even at 61 years old (!!!) Kevin Bacon is still a stud. I hope he continues to get leading man roles after this.

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

What I learned: One thing I HATE is when writers are afraid to make tough choices and they waffle. Theo didn’t *technically* kill his wife?? Give me a break! It’s one of those “have my cake and eat it too” choices veteran writers make who it’s been drilled into their heads a million times “don’t make your hero unlikable.” They want the surprise of him murdering her but they don’t want you to dislike him. So they give the twist a smooth candy coating. He didn’t *physically* kill her. He saw her drowning and didn’t do anything. That’s the weakest “murder” I’ve ever seen. If your hero is going to do something bad, don’t sugarcoat it. Commit to it. We’ll respect you, the character, and the story more.