After a very touch and go preview Thursday, The Black Phone 2 led the weekend box office with 26 million bucks. Once again, horror is ruling the land. It’s so satiating for the masses these days that they’re even showing up for the limping weakened sequels.

For me, I can’t watch a sequel to anything that was clearly meant to be one movie. I read the original short story for The Black Phone and it was unapologetically a singular idea. It’s like when they came out with a second season to 13 Reasons Why on Netflix. That first season was such a singular story, it made zero sense to continue on and yet they tried. The whole time, you’re sitting there saying, “Why are we even here anymore??”

A story needs to have a purpose, and the stronger the purpose, the better the story. That purpose is tied to what’s unresolved. If the central unresolved question is a compelling one, people will watch. So, whatever story you’re writing, ask yourself, “What is unresolved? And how compelling is it?” If you have strong answers to those questions, you’ll be in business.

As we were talking about the other day, this has not been a good time for indie movies slash Oscar hopefuls. Derek Cianfrance’s Roofman is tumbling off the box office tiles with 15 million dollars over two weeks. I’ve never understood this guy’s films. They’re all weird. They have no marketable elements whatsoever. I saw billboards with Channing Tatum with a toy bear on his shoulders and I just felt sorry for everyone involved in that film cause who the hell understands what this movie is about looking at that billboard?

By the way, this is why studios hate working with writer-directors. Cause they’re stuck trying to market their dumb movie ideas. The movie is called Roofman. The main character walks around with a stuffed bear on his shoulders. And I think the story takes place in a Walmart. How do any of those elements come together in a cohesive way??

Poor After The Hunt is in free fall. It’s just too adult a premise and, as pointed out on Saturday, way too “arthouse” looking. It seems to want to promote how much smarter it is than you, which isn’t very inviting. Nor is the main character inviting. So… not a lot to pull people in there. I still love the script and the movie, though. Check it out once it gets to streaming. You might be surprised.

The Smashing Machine should be called The Crashing Machine, as it’s crashing and burning right in front of our eyes. It’s another film that looks extremely inaccessible. I’m told that the story of this fighter is incredible. All I see is The Rock looking really sad and that’s enough to keep me far away from this movie.

Warner Brothers continues to do everything in its power to make you think One Battle After Another is a good movie. It made 4 million bucks this weekend. People like to point out that it’s made 100 million overseas. But Leo’s movies always make something overseas ever since he became a global phenomenon with Titanic. I have no doubt that every single one of those ticket purchasers has buyer’s remorse. The film is projected to lose a hundred million bucks. It’s just a disaster of a project, even if they’ve got the best marketing team in town trying to convince you otherwise.

I’m not giving up on indie movies, though! I’m seeing Bugonia this weekend! I think they said you have to shave your head to get in. Hey man, whatever it takes! I’m there for the weirdness!

Marty Supreme is still coming out. That one’s a big curiosity because it’s the first solo film from Josh Safdie, one half of the uber-talented Safdie Bros. Ben Safdie is the one who directed The Smashing Machine. So, we’ll see how this Kane vs. Abel story climaxes.

I was going to see Good Fortune over the weekend but some things got in the way. I’ll see it at the end of the week instead. There has been a lot of talk over the years about how the feature comedy film died at the box office. The best explanation I’ve gotten is that people can get their laughs from other places like Youtube and TikTok.

But the real issues run much deeper. The key year seems to be 2008. There were a lot of successful comedies that came out that year (or right before or right after). Step Brothers, Pineapple Express, Superbad, Tropic Thunder, The Hangover, I Love You Man, Knocked Up, and Forgetting Sarah Marshall. It was a comedy smorgasbord.

And then… and then everything fell apart. There was the financial crash, which completely changed how studios did business. They decided that first downs weren’t flashy enough. They wanted to air-it-out with 70 yard touchdowns. They found the solution in superhero movies. To make matters worse, streamers were born. Comedy’s most bankable star, Adam Sandler, went to Netflix. Every comedian and their dog got a 1 hour streaming standup special.

And let’s not forget the studios insisting that the future of comedy was female. Honestly, while I think everything here had some influence on the death of feature comedies, that one really drove the stake into the chest. Because young males are the biggest audience for comedy. And the studios abandoned them. For, what seemed like, a political statement. So it wasn’t just not giving the audience what they wanted. It was telling the audience that they better get on board with what their *new* idea of comedy was, or get lost. And I think that just pissed the key comedy demographic off.

Flash forward to Good Fortune, which is trying to revitalize the genre. It’s got one of the only bankable comedy stars still out there, Seth Rogen. And it’s got Keanu and Aziz Ansari. I don’t think I’m out of turn in saying that’s a great cast. So, why didn’t anybody go see them?

My guess is that it’s a touchy-feely comedy premise. You watch that trailer and you see this movie that wants to make you learn something about humanity just as much as it wants to make you laugh. The screenwriter inside of me loves that. But the producer inside of me says, “bad move.”

These days, if you want to break out with a comedy, it’s got to be a full-on laugh fest, like Borat or Airplane. Or a premise with a little more teeth, like The Hangover. When audiences have already told you that they’re reluctant to come see a comedy film, you don’t get them back by giving them a “kind of” comedy film. You gotta slap them upside the head with comedy!

Then of course, you’ve got the premise, which feels dated. I always say, if you’ve come up with a movie premise that could’ve been used in a movie 100 years ago, it’s probably not the freshest premise. Now, every once in a while, something old feels new again because of a shift in society or new technology, like You’ve Got Mail updating The Shop Around The Corner. But I always get nervous when you’re banking on a 100 year old idea. Especially in comedy where you’re trying to get the kids into the theater.

I suppose the argument here would be, they’re not trying for the young audience. They’re trying to get the adults who used to go to comedies back in the theaters. So they’re providing a slightly more “thoughtful” concept to lure those adults in. But it didn’t work. They’re going to get my money, though! I think this looks fun and the cast is irresistible.

On the TV front, I’m currently working my way through Task, on HBO Max. It’s about this older alcoholic FBI agent who’s given this young task force to help take down some nasty drug dealers in Pennsylvania. There’s just enough there to keep me watching but it’s not a slam dunk by any means.

The show moves along slower than a clock in a school classroom but I’ll give it this. It’s one of the more intricately plotted TV shows I’ve ever seen. They’re setting up three large groups of characters (the task force, a small family of criminals, and a biker gang) and each one has a highly intricate backstory that also needs to be set up.

The show comes from Brad Ingelsby, who created The Mare of Easttown, which was great. I get the feeling that this is his opus. Cause it’s so damn intricate. For those of you who have been with the site for a long time, you know that Ingelsby was once a writer just like you, writing up scripts trying to get noticed. Making The Black List every once in a while. So it’s a great reminder of how far you can get if you stick to it.

If Task doesn’t kick into the crazy soon, I may have to ditch it for The Hunting Wives. I keep hearing about how crazy that show is. And I will not apologize for being a fly drawn to light. Or is it a fly drawn to shit? I guess I’ll find out!

A couple of weeks ago, I did an interview with screenwriter William Mager, who created the show, “Reunion.” William detailed his pursuit of becoming a produced writer, which involved working in various forms of production. He was a researcher, wrote short VT inserts, and directed factual TV, amongst other things.

Years later, after he had written Reunion, he ran into actor Joe Sims while picking up his daughter at school. Joe had once done voice over work in a factual show William had worked on. Joe asked him what he was up to and William told him about Reunion. Joe said he should apply for Philip Shelley’s 4Screenwriting scheme.

William took the advice, applied to the prestigious program, and got in! When Joe found out, he asked if he could read the script. He loved it and sent it to his partner, who was high up at Warp Films. From there, the project came together and turned into a TV show.

Now, because William is such a nice guy and the interview was with me, everybody was very cool in how they responded. But I could still sense some writers low-key disqualifying the achievement because William had known somebody in the business. YEAH he got his show made BUT it’s because he knew Joe List.

It got me thinking how screenwriters are obsessed with this idea of the virgin Hollywood birth. They don’t consider anything a real achievement unless it happened to a true unknown with zero connections. You had to be a grocery store bagger who struck up a conversation with a producer and you happened to have a script in your backpack and the producer said, “Actually, I have some time tonight. I’ll read your script.” They read it, loved it, and said, “This is now my number one priority! I’m handing it to Chris Hemsworth tomorrow!”

Nora Garrett, the writer of After the Hunt, has gotten a lot of attention due to the fact that this was her first ever screenplay. And it sold! It not only sold but got Hollywood royalty, Julia Roberts, attached. Not long after that, it snagged one of the buzziest directors in town.

However, if you read deep enough into After The Hunt’s origin story, you got to the point where she says she handed the script to a friend who knew an agent. That was enough to discredit the sale for the Yeah But Crew. She had a friend who knew an agent!!?? That’s a free ticket into Hollywood as far as they were concerned.

More recently, you have the story of “Crush,” the near 7-figure spec sale that I reviewed Tuesday. John Fischer was an executive at Temple Hill but was nervous about showing the script to his peers (I guess admitting that you’re a screenwriter is the most embarrassing thing one can do in a Hollywood office). So he invented a pseudonym and put the script up on the Black List, where amateur scripts compete for reads. The script quickly became the most buzz-worthy on the site, turning it into the ultimate anti “Yeah But” story. A person who had all the contacts in the world shunned them and got his script noticed the old-fashioned way – pitting it against hundreds of other screenplays.

But the “Yeah But” mafia wasn’t impressed. YEAH, he got buzz anonymously. BUT it was the company he worked for that ultimately purchased the script. Just another Hollywood guy using his connections to get his script sold.

Why do I bring these stories up?

Because “Yeah But” is ruining your life, man! It’s one of the worst ways to look at the business.

Let’s go back to William Mager because I find the “Yeah But” label used on him the most ludicrous. William spent TWENTY YEARS trying to be a professional writer before he finally got his break. And the actor who eventually helped him was someone he had only an informal relationship with and who didn’t even help him at first! He did the classic shake-off where you pawn the help off on someone else. “Oh, you should go try this.” It was only after William succeeded at getting into the program that Joe asked to read the script.

Even so, if you’ve been at screenwriting for any significant amount of time, you should have connections. I’m not talking about big connections. But you should know people who are, at the very least, peripherally involved in the business. It could be a gaffer. It could be a friend who knows a manager. It could be some retired guy who worked as an entertainment lawyer (my first contact).

If you don’t have these connections, you haven’t sent your script out to enough people. Cause you gain contacts by making people aware that you are a screenwriter. And you can’t do that if you never show anybody your work. I guarantee that if you’re sending your script out to 10-15 new non-industry people a year (which is a low number), you’re going to gain access to people in the industry.

Because if you believe that the only way to make it in Hollywood is through this mythical virgin birth, you’re setting yourself up for failure. You’re not going to be Andrew Kevin Walker, whose spec, “Seven,” sat collecting dust for months in a producer’s slush pile, before an assistant reluctantly read it one night and fell in love with it.

Those success stories are built on luck. You need to build your success story around a plan. And the best plan is to widen the network of people who know you’re a screenwriter as much as possible, so that when your screenwriting skillset catches up to your screenwriting ambition, you have people you can send your script to who are either in Hollywood or who know people in Hollywood.

Look. I get it. There’s something warm and safe about “Yeah But.” It allows you to dismiss other success stories so that you don’t feel so bad about your lack of success. But I’m telling you, it’s hurting your mindset. Because you’re saying to yourself, “I have no agency over my success. The only people who make it in this business are people with industry contacts and I don’t have those so I don’t have a shot.”

How do you think your brain responds to that when it’s time to write a new screenplay? Are you going to be excited? Are you going to push through when writer’s block hits? Of course not. You’ve already convinced yourself that success is not possible. So why even try?

Going forward, if you encounter a Yeah But scenario, don’t allow it to discount the achievement. Try to see the positive side of it. If someone the writer knew gave it to an agent, say to yourself, “I should be trading my scripts with more writers because one of them might know an agent.” Or simply say, “That was smart by that writer to take that job in documentary research because it allowed him to be around actors doing voice over. Are there things I could be doing to be around more people in the industry?”

And don’t tell me you live in another country so you can’t make connections. Dude, I started this when the internet was barely a thing. You truly had to be in LA to have any shot at becoming a writer. That’s just not true anymore. You literally have access to 1000 times the number of industry people that I would’ve had access to when I learned about screenwriting. Sorry but you don’t get that excuse.

What are some actionable things you can start doing? The first and easiest is to consistently trade scripts or script pages with other writers. Let that be your first network. And you can find those writers right here in the Scriptshadow comments section. Or over on Reddit.

Become an active member of online screenwriting communities, such as this one. There are commenters on this site who are so well-known that if they posted a script right now, 25 writers would want to read it. And I’m guessing a couple of those writers know someone in the industry. If they loved your script and thought it was right up their contact’s alley, of course they would send it to them. This can’t happen if you stay in your little bubble and never share your work or connect with others.

Post your pages on Reddit. Engage with all the showdowns here at Scriptshadow. These are slow but steady ways to keep moving forward. And, unfortunately, it is a slow process. It takes time to build a name. First it’s getting a few fellow writers to enjoy your stuff. And then that network expands as each script you write gets better.

If you really truly want to be the lone wolf screenwriter who breaks into Hollywood with that virgin birth, then only enter contests. I just don’t think that’s smart. Contests give you deadlines that motivate you. And tracking your placement in contests is a good way to measure where you’re at. But you know who entered a contest? Nora Garrett. With After the Hunt. She entered Bluecat a year before she gave it to her friend with the agent. You know where After the Hunt finished in Bluecat that year? It didn’t get out of the first round. In fact, the reader who read it hated it so much that he eviscerated the script in the feedback that all Bluecat writers get for their entries.

So which of these avenues sounds more prosperous to you? Sending your scripts to contests where you’re at the whim of each reader’s individual taste? Or trying to build a network that it going to support and help you get the script into the right hands?

I’ll wrap this up by summarizing something Nora Garrett said about mindsets. She said that, in researching her main character, Alma, she looked into liars. And one of the things she found was that the most successful people in the world are the people who lie to themselves. Who tell themselves that they will be successful, even if the odds say they won’t.

I don’t like the concept of lying to yourself. But I agree with the foundation of that premise. If you believe, you have a shot. If you don’t believe, you don’t. So which one should you choose? Every time you focus on mindsets like “Yeah But” you are feeding the “I don’t believe this is possible” dragon. I want you to permanently slay that dragon. And I want you to start now.

So get to it. :)

The movie with the greatest set piece ever is finally getting a sequel!

Genre: Drama/Thriller/Crime
Premise: The lone survivor of a master thief’s crew evades a relentless detective’s shadow across decades and borders, from Chicago heists to L.A. freeways, in a web of betrayal, cartels, and redemption.
About: Making Heat 2 has become an obsession for Michael Mann. But the plummeting box office takes of movies like Blackhat have left the industry sour on a Mann sequel. So Mann took things into his own hands and wrote a Heat 2 novel, which made the NYT best seller list (side note: to make the list, you generally have to sell at least 5000 copies in one week). With buzz in his corner, Mann secured Adam Driver to play a young Neil (DeNiro) in 2023. But then Ferrari came out and bombed. Mann was up against a new hurdle – recasting icons like Pacino, DeNiro, and Val Kilmer, posed “impossible” hurdles. Warner Brothers, where the script adaptation of the novel was being developed, was not thrilled with the first draft, which, as we’ll talk about in a second, had a lot of timelines! But then a couple of weeks ago, the project moved over to United Artists with Leonardo DiCaprio attached and now it looks like the movie is finally going to happen.
Authors: Michael Mann and Meg Gardiner
Details: 450 pages

One of the prominent go-tos for amateur writers or filmmakers is that IF THEY ONLY HAD the same access to industry contacts that professional writers and filmmakers had, they’d be blowing up local cineplexes with a new movie every six months.

But they don’t realize that the hustle never ends. It doesn’t matter who you are. It doesn’t matter how much success you’ve had. Unless you’ve just made a surprise hit film with a 10x multiple box office return (Get Out), you will ALWAYS have to hustle to get your next movie made. Michael Mann is the perfect example of this. He’s wanted to make Heat 2 for two decades. But no one has allowed him to make it.

This for a sequel to a movie that features a scene that is more influential to modern filmmakers than maybe any other scene in history. I am talking, of course, about the incredible bank robbery set piece in Heat. How good was this scene? It inspired the entirety of Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy. Yes, it’s THAT influential.

Now, obviously, Michael Mann is dealing with different types of problems than the average unknown screenwriter. People have most certainly offered to make this sequel, but with a budget that didn’t make sense. Still, my point is valid. It doesn’t matter what the actual obstacle is. There will always be an obstacle to getting your project made.

It can be said that the people who find success in Hollywood are the ones who stop at nothing to find solutions to these obstacles. Which is exactly what Michael Mann did. There are only so many times you can walk into a room and pitch Heat 2 until it becomes noise to the executives. It’s like trying to sell a house that’s been on the market for 2 years. Nobody wants that house because all they’re thinking is, “well there must be something wrong with it if it’s been sitting on the market for that long.”

So Mann bet on himself and even at his age (82), spent a year of his life writing the novel for Heat 2 to drum up buzz again. And guess what? It worked. Because it got Warner Brothers actively working on it again. Which eventually led to a couple of weeks ago, when Leonardo DiCaprio signed on. And that’s all the investors needed to make this a go-picture.

Heat 2 is a novel with a very wide scope. We start off right after the events of the first film, set in 1995. Chris (Val Kilmer) is the only survivor from the infamous heist team and he’s got to get out of LA immediately or Detective Hanna (Al Pacino) is going to nail him. Some people help him escape across the Mexican border, and he eventually flies off to Paraguay.

We then cut to 1988 in Chicago where a younger Detective Hanna is hunting down some crazy dude named Otis Wardell who breaks into rich peoples’ homes, kills the fathers, and rapes the women, before running off with the loot. He’s truly crazy. Hanna sets a trap for him, which mostly works, as they’re able to kill his entire crew. But somehow, Wardell gets away.

Concurrently in the 1988 storyline, we see the inaugural meeting of Chris and Neil (Robert DeNiro) who become a team and start robbing banks. The team eventually focuses in on a cross-country shipping operation they can rob for 4.8 million dollars. We observe as they slowly put together and, finally, execute that plan.

We then cut to 1996 where Chris has become a security expert at a mall in Ciudad del Este, Paraguay. He gets pulled into some criminal operation that provides an opportunity to make some real money again. But he eventually gets double-crossed and must flee the city.

Finally, the movie culminates in the year 2000, in LA, where Hanna now works. Detective Hanna has become more obsessive than ever when a murdered-woman case he’s working on appears to be tied back to a ghost. Yes, Otis Wardell is back! And when Chris shows up back in LA as well, his criminality tools sharpened from dancing with the craftiest of third world criminals, it will be a giant criminal showdown for the ages on one of LA’s glorious enormous highways.

I’m going to start off by stating the obvious.

THIS BOOK IS INSANE!

I don’t see any scenario by which this movie is under five hours long. Now that I think about it, maybe that’s why Mann hasn’t been able to get it made! At 5 hours and four super-giant set pieces, it’s easily a 200 million dollar budget. Maybe more.

So the question becomes, is this story good enough to warrant that much of an investment?

I’ll say this. It’s better than I thought it would be.

Mann has some of the same issues that Paul Thomas Anderson has. He’s not great with narrative. His scripts can wander. So I was expecting that here. And while there is wandering, each time period has a storyline that clearly builds. So, at least, when we’re in these individual storylines, we’re invested.

My favorite storyline was Otis Wardell. I suspect that this is the role Leo’s going to play. It’s more age-appropriate than Chris, who at times is in his late 20s in this movie. Wardell is a classic 90s villain. He doesn’t just sneak into houses when no one’s home and steal their shit. He actively waits until the family is home so he can sexually assault half of them in the process of the heist. This guy is just a baaaaaaad dude.

Ironically, this makes Detective Hanna a much more enjoyable character. One of the downsides of Heat is that we didn’t really want Hanna to succeed. Cause we wanted Neil to win. But here, Wardell is so bad and Hanna becomes so consumed with taking him down, that we really really root for Hanna in this sequel. I would say he’s the standout character, even above Chris.

As much as I hate to say it, Chris’s storyline is the weakest. Paraguay is a nothing country in the average audience member’s mind. They rarely hear about it. They don’t know anything about it. So it seems like a strange place to build Chris’s story around. I suppose nobody knew about Casablanca before Casablanca came out but something about this storyline feels detached from the rest of the novel. It’s off on its own island and, therefore, feels inconsequential.

My guess is that Mann fell in love with this riverboat shootout in Ciudad del Este and moved hell and high water to shove it into the novel somehow. That set piece here will be the most unique of the movie, I guess. But I’d also presume that when the budget gets written up on this film and they start looking for places to cut, this Paraguay section will be the first to go. Unless they’re committed to the 5 hour version of the story.

All anybody really cares about, though, is, “Are we going to get our 2025 version of the best heist action scene ever?” And the answer is… yes. There’s this big shootout scene on LA’s 105 freeway that sounds like someone said, “How do we do the Heat heist set piece but make it ten times fucking crazier?”

And here’s what’s even cooler about that. Unlike in Heat, where the best set piece was in the middle of the movie, this set piece is the culmination of the movie. All of the storylines collide here. So it’s not just going to be a visceral experience. It’s going to be an emotional one. And therefore has the chance to be historic.

Michael Mann is his own worst enemy. He loves that driftiness. And he doesn’t seem to realize how much it hurts his movies. Does anybody remember Collateral? That was his last good movie and a big reason for that was, he was forced to eliminate the driftiness, cause everything took place over one night.

When he opens himself up to narratives such as this one, it’s like giving cotton candy to a sugar addict. It’s not helping things. Ironically, this is the exact kind of writing THAT WORKS WELL in a novel. So it works here (for the most part). But a movie needs to be focused. So many writers have tried to manipulate the format to embrace their unfocused narratives, determined to be the one writer who figures it out. And it never works. The rumor is that WB was like, “What the fuck is this crazy all-over-the-place script?” when they got that first draft. Which is why they had no issues kicking the project down the street to United Artists. “You deal with this,” they said.

It’s going to be up to someone with some actual writing know-how to guide Mann into a workable draft here. In all honesty, I think what they have to do is a) ditch the Paraguay stuff and b) tie Chris’s storyline to Hanna better. Right now, Hanna’s real beef is with Wardell. Chris is more of a side quest for him. I think that’s dumb. If this movie is really going to cook, those two storylines need to be interwoven much more tightly.

But I liked Heat 2. It’s not perfect but it’s a vibe, man. It’s worth checking out if you are a lover of Heat.

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

What I learned: You can’t include it all. We all want to. We love our stuff SOOOOOOO much. But we can’t include it all. The mark of a great writer is someone who is able to cut out something they love because they know the story will be better for it. And, by the way, I’m not referring to this novel. You have more leniency to keep multiple narratives in a novel. I’m talking about the movie. Movies are smaller than you think. They’re only 2 hours long. So you gotta cut things. But here’s why that’s such a good deal for you: It makes you really think hard about what’s important for your story. If you know everything can’t make it in, you will only include the best stuff.

Big spec sale from last week!

Genre: Contained Thriller
Premise: After her father’s death, a young alcoholic woman ventures into the Everglades to get clean, only to find herself trapped in the deadly coils of a giant python, forcing her to fight for her life.
About: This script sold to 20th Century Fox for almost a million bucks. Writer John Fisher, a producer at Temple Hill, wrote the script in secret, afraid of how friends in the industry would react. He went the anonymous route, writing under a pseudonym and posting the script on the Black List site. It gained a ton of traction there, which led to the bidding war that ended with the big sale. This blows out of the water writers’ theories that “you have to know someone” to get a script sold. This person literally knew everyone, and he sold the screenplay as a nobody.
Writer: John Fischer (written as J.W. Archer)
Details: 90 pages

Aimee Lou Wood for Grace?

Contained thrillers will always be one of the smartest genres for a spec screenwriter to write in. The “thrill” component automatically makes it marketable. And the “contained” part of it makes it cheap to produce.

But “Crush” is not that. “Crush” is a sub-genre within the contained genre. That sub-genre is the ULTRA CONTAINED THRILLER. A contained thriller needs to be at least as big as a room. But ultra-contained thrillers are limited to a tiny amount of space. A coffin in “Buried.” A ski-lift chair in “Frozen.” The top of a tower in “Fall.” And with “Crush,” inside the grasp of a snake.

You’re playing in a different league when you write one of these because the containment is so severe, you have far fewer variables to draw upon for drama. This requires a higher skillset to pull off. The irony is, the best screenwriters never write ultra-contained scripts. They’re usually written by relative newbies. Which makes it rare for one to turn out great.

Here’s to hoping that “Crush” is the exception to the rule.

27-year-old Grace is an alcoholic. When we meet her, she’s barely waking up in her dirty apartment, the kind of place you’d expect a wayward soul with no direction to inhabit. We get the sense, through missed phone calls and text messages, that she may have hightailed it out of her most recent rehab stay.

Through some other visual cues in the apartment, we learn that her father may have recently passed away. So, long story short, Grace isn’t having her best moment in life. Which is why she decides, on a whim, to grab up all her old camping gear and head out to the Everglades. If she’s out in the middle of nowhere, it will be impossible to drink.

And that’s where she goes. She doesn’t just traipse along the outskirts of the Everglades. She marches two long days into the heart of it, to make sure the nearest convenience store might as well be in Egypt.
Funny enough, despite the isolation, she runs into some Instagram influencers who make silly videos about getting bit by things in the Everglades. The group wishes her luck and continues on. That next day hiking is when Grace slips, bumps her head on a rock, and wakes up with a giant python wrapped around her leg.

Before she can get her bearings, it starts dragging her into the forest. Grace is able to grab onto some roots and slow it down, eventually creating a stand-off. The snake seems to be waiting for something. But what? Grace finds out when she’s able to call the National Park Service, which informs her that it’s “scoping you out.” Whatever she does, do not let the snake coil around her chest!

Well that’s just jolly, Grace thinks. But at least now she has the Parks people looking for her. She just has to hold this thing off until they come. But when the snake does, indeed, make its way around her chest, Grace will have to get extra-crafty to stay alive. And when it starts to look like the rescue team ain’t coming tonight, Grace might have to defeat the snake all on her own.

Fischer had a big decision to make as he faced down this screenplay.

It’s a decision that every writer who’s writing a contained thriller faces. Which is: Do I fully commit to the emotional storyline or not?

Why is this question so important with contained thrillers? Because writers know that the big advantage of writing a contained thriller is that the read is going to be fast. Which means readers love reading these scripts. They know they’ll be able to whip through them in less than an hour. Conversely, reading something like One Battle After Another could take up to 4 hours, a reader’s worst nightmare.

But if you not only add an emotional storyline, but you truly COMMIT to that emotional storyline, you’re going to slow your story down. So you’re working against the very thing that’s supposed to be your script’s main advantage.

The solution most writers will use in these cases is to provide lip-service emotional storylines. The storyline will check the boxes of “character-driven” and “emotion,” but will do so in name only. They keep that aspect of the story so lean that the emotion never gets off the page. It’s just there so they can say they did it.

But here’s what Crush taught me. It taught me that you have to risk losing readers if you want to sell your contained thriller. Because a real emotional storyline is the thing that’s going to make a contained thriller stick with a reader.

So, as much as it kills you, and as much as it’s counterintuitive, you have to slow down your script. Which is exactly what Fischer did. The first 30 pages is all set up. Normally you’d get your hero into the grips of the python by page 15. But here we linger on how hard it is just for our hero to get out of bed. We linger on all the unresponded to text messages from concerned family and friends. When Grace is getting ready to leave, we linger on the things she sees that bring back difficult memories, like her father dying.

When a group of friends stumbles upon Grace’s campsite and they share some time around the fire, Grace confides in them, explaining that she’s out here detoxing. When her sister unexpectedly calls while she’s wrapped up by the python, they discuss her addiction. They discuss their father’s passing.
But here’s the key to all of this. THE WRITER COMMITTED TO IT. There’s a HUUUUUGE difference between a writer who commits to an emotional storyline and one who just does it to check boxes. Honestly, if you’re just adding an emotional storyline to check a box, I’d recommend getting rid of that emotional storyline altogether. It’s not worth it if you’re not committed to it.

By “committed,” I mean that I have to smell and taste that the writer is working through some real life shit. That they’re bringing into this story stuff that they have had to work through in the past or that they are working through right now. That creates an authenticity that, all of a sudden, turns a straightforward story into something that moves the reader on some level.

And I get it if you’re afraid to do this. I’m afraid too! I was told when I stumbled into this screenwriting thing: GET INTO THE STORY AS SOON AS POSSIBLE. So every page you’re not yet into your story feels like you’re sabotaging yourself.

To be honest, if you’re struggling with this decision, here’s how I would approach it. If you are a newbie, don’t bother with the emotional storyline. Because it will probably be surface-level. That’s the stuff that takes the longest to learn in screenwriting, in my opinion. But if you are more advanced, definitely take your time and use that time to build up the emotional side of the storyline.

It means everything later on. Think about it. The degree to which this screenplay works is the degree to which you are hoping the main character survives. With a surface level treatment of this concept, I’m probably hoping Grace makes it at a 6.5 or 7 out of 10. But with the emotional version, it’s closer to 9 out of 10, or 10 out of 10. So it makes a big difference.

Beyond that, the script is quite clever. I thought Grace was just going to get wrapped up by this thing and spend 90 minutes trying to poke her arm out of one of the slits between the coils and grabbing something to use as a weapon. Which didn’t sound appealing to me.

But there was some real thought put into this and I think the best part was that Fischer researched how the snake operates and built that into the story, which created a progression of attack that allowed the story to play out over a longer period of time.

For example, it just grabs her leg at first. We learn later, from a phone call to the National Parks, that it’s “assessing” her. They even tell her how to get out of the coil. They also tell her, whatever you do, don’t let it coil around your chest.

It was moments like this that mined the potential of the concept. That opened up this entirely new line of suspense where we’re desperately hoping that the snake doesn’t coil around her chest. And it also created that progression.

And if you want to get into the advanced side of screenwriting, let’s talk about goals and obstacles. Typically in a movie, the hero must go after the goal and then, along the way, they encounter a lot of obstacles. Those obstacles, and whether our hero can overcome them, become the drama that keeps us entertained.

But here, the reverse is happening. The snake is the one with the goal. It wants dinner. Therefore, it is up to Grace to create the obstacles. Which she does. She comes up with little ways to leverage herself away from the snake, sometimes by just a couple of inches, to keep it from delivering its final squeezing blow. And it’s all very effective. I was riveted as the snake progressed its way up Grace, making her chances of survival smaller and smaller.

This allowed relatively basic plot beats, such as Grace calling 9-1-1 and asking for help, to become supercharged. Every minute here is precious. So when 9-1-1 says they have to forward her call to the Parks Department, when there’s only one connection bar on the phone, we’re on pins and needles hoping the call doesn’t drop.

There were other really smart decisions as well. I loved the Parks call where they took Grace through the “rules” of a snake attack. A lot of writers would not have done this. When you don’t do it, the reader is flailing in the dark about what’s going on. Sure, we feel the fear of Grace’s situation. But it also feels untethered and random. And without a set of rules to guide us, we’re just basically hoping she squirms away.

Instead, by having the Parks lay out the rules, it creates structure. They explain what the snake is doing (coiling). They explain how to get out of the coil (take it by the head and slowly twist opposite the direction of the coil) and they explain not to make any sudden movements and not to let it coil around her chest.

Now we have a set of rules to work with! We have structure. We understand what needs to happen. So we can now PLAY WITH THAT. Let’s say there is no “rules phone call” in this script. And you’re a reader like me. You don’t know anything about python attacks or how they work. Well, if the snake starts coiling around her chest, there’s not any suspense. Or at least, there’s not a ton of suspense. Because I don’t know that it’s game over if it wraps around her chest. But with the call, since I now know that, then any inching towards the chest creates a sense of panic and suspense. I’m gripped. I want her to stop it from moving in that direction. That’s what laying out the rules does.

Beyond all this, in addition to Grace having this compelling emotional backstory, she’s a fighter. And we LOVE fighters. Readers LOVE fighters. If you just make your hero a fighter and nothing else, I guarantee the reader will, at the very least, root for your hero. And there’s a good chance they’ll love them. Just as I loved this script!

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

What I learned: In a script like this, which is mostly physical and visual, you want to look for ways to throw in the occasional dialogue scene. The reader is craving it. Because it’s tough to read through a ton of description. Also, stories can get monotonous so you should always look for ways to break up that monotony. I thought that Fischer did a great job of that. It felt like every 20 pages, he’d give us a dialogue scene. The Instagram crew who meets her by her camp site. The National Parks guy on the phone. Her sister on her phone. They were placed at just the right times in the story that we needed in order to recharge for the amount of consecutive description we were about to endure next.

Scriptshadow called it the best script of 2024. How did it hold up!??

Genre: Drama
Premise: A Yale professor up for tenure must navigate a rape accusation from her most cherished student against another professor, who happens to be her best friend at the school.
About: After the Hunt was one of the buzziest scripts of 2024. When Julia Roberts hopped on to play the lead role of Alma, the Oscar statuettes began humming into the ethos, beginning their manifestation of Julia Roberts winning a second Oscar. But when the movie “only” received a 6 minute standing ovation at the Venice Film Festival (the best films routinely get over 13 minutes these days), worry began to permeate the post-festival game plan. Then came the critics’ response. The film is hovering around 45% on Rotten Tomatoes, a shocking score when you consider the talent involved (the movie is directed by current indie god, Luca Guadagnino). It is near impossible to get me to the theater for any movie that scores lower than 80% on RT. But I figured, since I loved the script, it would be an interesting case study on what went wrong. Imagine my surprise when I realized NOTHING WENT WRONG. That the movie was actually awesome. What makes this script-to-screen tale even cooler is that the writer came out of nowhere. Nora Garrett had zero footprint on the internet as a screenwriter before After the Hunt changed her life.
Writer: Nora Garrett
Details: 130 minutes

There was a time in Hollywood when studios would make movies and let the audience decide which were good enough to promote as an Oscar contender.

Those days, unfortunately, are long gone. They’ve been replaced with studios treating their “Oscar movies” like Marvel films, planning them 2-3 years in advance. They say, “This will be our Oscar film for 2025!”

They’ll then build marketing campaigns well ahead of time doing everything in their power to manipulate the general audience into believing that their movie is the most important piece of digital celluloid anybody will ever see.

The problem with that is audiences are pretty hip to the game these days. We can smell the manipulation. It smells like old car grease. And so it becomes this frustrating experience of watching a movie we’ve been told is amazing when, in actuality, it’s just some average adult-skewing film with more mature themes than usual.

One Battle After Another is a textbook example of this, and it frustrates me to no end that so many viewers are falling for it. It’s no different than when we thought we loved Chocolate, The Shape of Water, The Artist, or The English Patient. These movies were, at best, average. But the marketing campaigns gaslit us into believing they were masterpieces.

After The Hunt is a stupendous movie. I loved it. But it is not immune from this criticism. This movie wants to win the Oscar even worse than One Battle. At least One Battle has action scenes. This is just people in rooms talking.

But boy are they delicious ‘people in rooms talking’ scenes.

As some of you may know, I reviewed the script a year ago and called it the best script of 2024. The finished film started screening a few weeks ago and the critics were not kind, giving it a 45% Rotten Tomatoes score, effectively ending any chances of it winning Oscars.

What went wrong? It’s hard to tell! I don’t understand why people aren’t loving this film. I’m going to break down several areas that I believe may have caused the critics to sharpen their knives. But it’s disappointing because I think they’ve got it all wrong and are ignoring one of the best movies of the year.

After the Hunt is a simple story. Alma is a beloved professor up for tenure at Yale. Rumors are that her star student, Maggie, is putting the finishing touches on an amazing dissertation.

Alma is married to Frederik, whom she no longer finds attractive, but poor Frederik is in complete denial about it. Alma is best friends, drinking buddies, and flirting buddies with Hank, known around campus as the hot, cool professor.

One night after professors and students mingle at a party, Hank walks Maggie home. The next morning, Maggie comes to Alma and claims that Hank raped her. Alma, in a state of shock and confusion, is far from supportive.

This begins a series of “he said, she said” interactions where Alma, being violently pulled in opposite directions by each party, finds herself trying to gauge what the truth really is. But because her support for Maggie isn’t absolute, Maggie turns on her, putting Alma’s shot at tenure in question.

Let’s talk about the first screenwriting reason why I think people aren’t connecting with this film. The main character, Alma (Julia Roberts), is inaccessible. She’s cold. She’s unable to connect with others on any emotional level. She can’t be there for Maggie in her worst moment, she can’t give love back to her over-loving husband, and she’s able to heartlessly cast off Hank, who has fallen in love with her.

It’s very hard to pull people in when their entry point is a person who doesn’t let anyone in. That’s screenwriting 101. If you create a warm main character, we feel warm. If you create a funny main character, we feel good. So that’s definitely something to keep in mind when you write a script.

Now, the reason this didn’t affect me personally is that I am fascinated by these types of characters. I have had people like this in my life. And I can sometimes be this way myself. So that’s another lesson in why storytelling is so tricky. You never know what the audience is going to relate to because everybody’s different. Due to my negative experiences with people like Alma, I carry a higher emotional investment in what happens in this story because I’m hoping that Alma can change. That way I, retroactively, can change the people in my life who were similar to her.

But the point is, I think this was a big reason critics didn’t like the film. Alma put this giant wall up in front of the story and unless you were like me and were really determined to get to the other side, you decided not to scale it.

The next big screenwriting thing that hurt this movie was the back half of the second act. I would actually be surprised if anybody watched the first half of this movie and didn’t love it. It’s an incredibly compelling scenario! Someone accuses a beloved figure of sexual assault. The accuser is obsessed with a professor who just happens to be very close to the accused. That is a PERFECT dramatic triangle.

But 80% of that situation is resolved by the midpoint. Hank has already been fired. So we’re left to wonder: what is the story now? The makers of the film would probably argue that the story is the fallout – it’s about what happens to these relationships “after the hunt.” But the movie doesn’t do the greatest job of signaling that shift. So I think viewers felt a little lost. Like, “Why are we still here?”

There’s no doubt that 65-70% of the way through this movie, things have slowed down A LOT. It made me realize just how much writers struggle to nail the second act! It’s literally a problem in 9 out of 10 movies that I see. I don’t think anybody out there has truly cracked how the second half of the second act of a screenplay is supposed to work.

And it got me thinking: How *does* it work?

Most writers know that the third act is where the script “revs up” again. It’s where your heroes get together and execute that one last push to obtain the goal or take down the bad guy.

So, intrinsically, you would think that BEFORE THAT, things would need to SLOW DOWN. You can’t rev up if you’re already moving fast, right? Therefore, writers allow their second acts to drift off into this little nap as the act nears its completion. There’s no doubt that’s what happened here.

The solution? It’s tricky. Since Garrett is new to screenwriting, she may not understand story engines well yet. This movie is strongest when the story engine is: what’s going to happen between Hank and Maggie? Who’s going to win that battle? Well, Maggie wins it pretty quickly. Hank is out of a job by the midpoint.

So what’s the story engine now? The engine becomes: will Alma get tenure? And the drama comes from how nasty Maggie is going to get with Alma, since Alma didn’t give her full support.

But here’s why the engine sputters. The writer and director completely forgot to remind us how important tenure was for Alma. I don’t even think the average person understands what tenure means or why it would be so important for someone. It’s up to the writer to convey that and to also continuously hype up its importance. We need scenes where we see Alma freaking out or getting angry when her grasp on tenure starts slipping. But there was none of that and, as a result, the end of the second act began to wander.

Had they tightened that up and better established the engine, I think critics would’ve been more favorable.

And if you want to know how to handle second-halves-of-second-acts in general, here’s the trick: Go hard and crash hard. Yes, there needs to be that “lowest point” for your hero at the end of the second act. It is their “death.” And then the third act is their “rebirth.” But the second-half-of-the-second-act should not be a cancer death. It should not be slow and lingering. Instead, you need your hero pushing and pushing and pushing to obtain whatever it is they’re trying to obtain, and then you give them a heart attack. The death needs to be sudden (metaphorically speaking, of course). Even in these slower dramas. In fact, ESPECIALLY in these slower dramas.

Okay, I’ve told you why I think everybody else didn’t like After The Hunt. But why did I like it? Well, for starters, I’m personally drawn to a lot of things here. I love old college institutions and campuses. I find them very romantic and one of the few pieces of real history that America has.

I think the character-writing here was amazing. Just like in the script, every character had something deep going on. You just don’t see that in screenplays these days. They even improved the character of Maggie from the draft I read, giving her more depth. She’s a black woman whose parents essentially run the school, so she has some power. She’s gay. She’s dating someone who’s non-binary. And it all plays into the story. There’s this great late scene where Alma calls her out on all of this. She points out: “you don’t even like this person you’re dating! You just think it makes you look more interesting!”

But what made the movie even better than the script was the performances. The performances here are SOOOOO good. I mean, Julia Roberts isn’t playing as splashy a role as she did when she won the Oscar for Erin Brokovich. But in many ways, it’s a much harder role because it’s so internal. And she does an amazing job of playing this character who’s keeping all of this damage inside while smiling at the rest of the world.

I recently told a writer that the key to writing an Oscar-winning character is to create the biggest gap possible between who they are on the inside versus who they are on the outside. In other words, if they’re extremely damaged, don’t have them act extremely damaged. Have them act happy. And that’s what you get here.

Ayo (who played Maggie) won me over by the end because she really is a good actress. Michael Stuhlbarg almost steals the show playing the “cuck” husband of Alma. He’s so nice and such a good guy and just has no idea that that’s the exact reason why his wife has fallen out of love with him. The way that Stuhlbarg passive-aggressively expresses his anger by cooking with the music volume dialed up to a hundred—he’s just a really fun but tragic character.

But the actor who steals the show, without question, is Andrew Garfield. Andrew Garfield is AMAZING in this. He plays the PERFECT balance between charming professor and potentially creepy guy. He steals every scene he’s in. He should be up for an Oscar for this, but I just don’t know if the Academy has ever celebrated a role like it before. It’s not the kind of role that results in awards, which is exactly why it stands out. In many ways, it’s a throwaway role. He’s there to jump-start this movie that will ultimately be about Alma and Maggie. But he’s just so damn fun to watch any time he shows up.

For example, there’s a scene in the middle of the film where Hank gets Alma to come have Indian food with him so he can explain his side. And as he’s explaining the very thing that could ruin his life, he’s gleefully ordering everything on the menu, flirting with the waitress. And you’re just like, “What the hell is up with this guy!??” You don’t know what to make of him, which is exactly why you want to keep watching him.

There’s another scene later in the story where he goes to Alma’s secret apartment, where they, presumably, used to hook up. It’s a 15-minute scene of just them hashing it out. And he’s so incredibly good in it. I’ve always thought Andrew Garfield was a solid actor. But I came out of this thinking he was a great actor. And he’s a big reason why, even when that second act took its nap, I still enjoyed it. Because he kept showing up.

The final, and probably biggest, mistake they made was miscasting Maggie. Ayo was good. Of course she was good. She’s a good actress. But her image was completely wrong for this part. This girl needed to be stunning, and that would’ve changed EVERYTHING about how we saw the situation. Hands down. It’s a completely different film. And it sucks because this is one of the things that writers have no control over, how a director can undermine a role just by miscasting it. It was the only mistake Luca made, but it was a big one. I think that alone would’ve bolted this up AT LEAST another 30 percentage points on Rotten Tomatoes.

Will you like this movie? That depends. Does this setup sound intriguing to you? If it does, I find it difficult to believe you wouldn’t like it. But if this isn’t a movie or a concept you find any interest in, you’re probably not going to like it. It’s not something that converts people who wouldn’t normally like these types of movies.

But for me, I loved it.

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

What I learned – Here’s Nora Garrett on selling the script in her interview with Indiewire: [Before I sold the script], I didn’t have an agent, I didn’t have a manager. I asked a friend to introduce me to a manager. I thought, best case scenario, the script would become a spec that I would use as an example of my writing, and then I would hopefully get a manager, hopefully some jobs. Because it’s the exact opposite of what everyone tells you to write, it’s an adult psychological drama, it’s very heady. There are a lot of people talking. There aren’t a lot of action sequences. It can feel very play-like. And it’s about a subject that most people don’t want to talk about or touch. But then the woman who became my manager, Sydney Blanke, was very smart about who she sent the script out to. Allan Mandelbaum had just come out of doing “Fair Play,” and was then at Imagine. I had a meeting with a couple of interested producers, but Allan and the rest of the team at Imagine were always the ones who I felt like had just a real creative understanding, and also a really good idea of how to approach getting it made.