Genre: Adventure
Premise: Pitched as “Indiana Jones for the next generation,” Uncharted follows Nathan Drake, a treasure hunter who may have stumbled upon the location of El Dorado, the lost city of gold.
About: One of the most popular video games of all time is being developed into a film as we speak. But will we ever see it?? You look at the title page of this script and it looks like a WGA gala guest list. This has been written, rewritten, bedwritten. David O’Russell was supposed to be the guy to finally bring it to life, but then he dropped out. Now Joe Carnahan is doing a rewrite (not this draft) and may direct.
Writers: David Guggenheim (previous drafts written by The Wibberlys, Neil Burger & Dirk Wittenborn, and Thomas Dean Donnelly & Joshua Oppenheimer) – Based on the video game by Naughty Dog
Details: 123 pages

Sorry for the late start but, along with the rest of Hollywood, I’m still recovering from that double bomb drop – the end of Brangelina and that not-so-good trailer for Passengers. I’m going to save my full thoughts on the Passengers trailer for my next newsletter. But I’ll leave you with this preview: Every issue in the trailer was an issue I had with the script. Not sure why the rest of the Hollywood didn’t see them until after the movie was made.

Speaking of scripts, we’ve got a wild one today. Or, at least, a script with a wild history. I think Uncharted can best be described by Joe Carnahan’s recent tweet: “The opening scene for UNCHARTED… at least in script form, is really, REALLY GOOD.”

I would agree with that. It’s this great crashed plane scene where a plane keeps slipping down the side of a mountain. Un-forrrrrrrrrchu-nately, the rest of the script is a mess. There’s one moment in particular where I gave up on the screenplay completely, and I’ll get into that in a bit. But if Sony wants my opinion, this script has been way over-developed. I mean you can see the different writers fighting each other on the page. The tone is sharp and gritty one scene then sophomoric and cliche the next. It’s bad. Joe, if I were you, I’d keep that opening scene and blast the rest of the script into space, along with that Passengers trailer.

Let’s cut to the chase. Nathan Drake is a modern day Indiana Jones. He’s got a little more attitude than Indy. He’ll get in your face more. But yeah, he’s basically Indiana Jones.

When Drake was a kid, his parents were looking for the remains of Sir Francis Drake, some ancient rich dude with a lot of gold. They found a few of Francis’s mummified guards, and with them, a special gold ring. Drake’s dad gave him that ring before he was murdered, and Drake sees it as the last connection between him and his explorer parents.

Back to the present. Drake is approached by an evil museum curator named Gabriel Roman who says he’ll give Drake 10 million dollars for his ring. 10 MILLION DOLLARS??? Drake wants to know why. Roman believes that the ring, combined with Sir Francis Drake’s OTHER treasures, will point him to the lost city of El Dorado, an entire city of gold.

Oooooooh.

One problem. Drake kind of already sold the ring a few years back. Luckily, the guy he sold it to doesn’t know it’s worth 10 million dollars and could lead people to a city worth 10 trillion dollars. So Drake goes to get it back. And that’s where our adventure begins.

Drake does get that ring and does deliver it to Roman. But come on. Was Roman ever going to hold up his end of the bargain? Drake is tossed in a car which is ditched in a lake, but because he’s fucking Drake, he escapes, gets back to land, and the race is on – He’s going to beat Roman to El Dorado!

Uncharted can work as a film. I want to get that out of the way first. This is Indiana Jones meets modern day Bond. How does that not sound awesome?

But that awesome is part of the problem. How much of each film is it? That’s what they’re struggling with, I believe. I mean at one point, we’re watching Drake bounce all over the world and it feels eerily like a Daniel Craig Bond film. This might be why Sony’s struggling to make the film a reality. They don’t know how to make it different enough that it won’t feel similar to their only major franchise property.

But the bigger problem here is the script. Or at least parts of it. There’s a particular moment where I officially gave up on the proceedings, and it’s a lesson for aspiring screenwriters everywhere for what NOT to do.

In the scene, Drake sees a bombshell chick drinking alone in a smoky bar. So he approaches her. Now, before I tell you what happens next, I want you to imagine the most generic version of this scene possible. What do you expect to happen in this scene?

If you guessed:

A verbal flirtatious battle of words.
The woman conveying her disinterest.
A hard cut at the end of the exchange to the two slamming into the wall of a hotel room, clothes being torn off.

YOU’D BE RIGHT!!!

And it’s this I don’t get. I was actually fucking furious when I read this scene. You are supposed to be a professional screenwriter. Your job is to WRITE WHAT THE AVERAGE PERSON IS UNABLE TO WRITE!!!! If you’re going to write the exact same scene that Joe Six Pack, who goes to 3 movies a year, would write – why are you in this business? What value do you offer?

I don’t care if you write this scene. It’s a staple scene in these types of movies. But do something – ANYTHING – to make it different. Place it in a unique location. Throw an unexpected obstacle at us. Shit, have the bartender with a crush on the girl keep interrupting them – any of that would be better than meeting every fucking standard beat to this scene that’s ever been written. For crimeny out loud.

I don’t know which of the 7328 writers wrote this scene. But they should be ashamed of themselves. I mean right down to the slam cut of them making out in the hotel room. Hmmm, never seen THAT happen in a movie before. C’mon.

The weird thing about Uncharted is that it flips back and forth between these really cliche scenes and really fresh ones. Clearly, a cliche-ridden writer came in at some point and butchered things. Of the list of writers I see above, I have a really strong opinion on who that writer likely is. Not going to name names but those of you who have read the site long enough will know who I’m referring to.

Outside of that, Uncharted follows the tried-and-true adventure formula of giving a hella-big goal (El Dorado!) and a MacGuffin (the ring). As long as you have everybody trying to get the thing that allows them to get the thing, everybody in the script will be active. Everyone’s motivation will be clear, and assuming you can come up with compelling characters, original ideas, and some fresh execution, you’ll be good.

Uncharted achieves this at times and doesn’t in others. It’s overdeveloped to the extreme. Sometimes you’ve written such a convoluted draft that’s so plot-heavy and so beholden to its original trappings, that the best course of action is to open a brand new document and start over. It’s amazing what you can accomplish with 110 empty pages in front of you as opposed to trying to fit and twist and wiggle and turn every word so that the puzzle comes together in the end.

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

What I learned: So let’s talk about why Carnahan liked that opening scene so much. The scene has Drake waking up in a crashed airplane that’s teetering on the edge of a cliff. He’s injured badly, some bad guys are coming to kill him, so he must find a way out of here pronto. This opening approach is known as “in media res,” which is a fancy way of saying, “in the midst of action.” Opening your script in media res is one of the easiest ways to grab a reader’s attention because we’re already in the middle of some action and we want to see how it’s going to pan out.

The writer of the best-written show on television comes to us with his next Boob-Tube project. Will it take over the airwaves like Fargo?

Genre: Supernatural
Premise: A schizophrenic man living in a nuthouse falls in love with a fellow patient who he must team up with when outside forces descend upon them, believing that their illnesses are actually powers.
About: Noah Hawley is best known for bringing Fargo to television and creating the best anthology series, well, I’ve ever seen. This is his new show which will appear on FX. (note: I originally wrote this review having no idea that this was a Marvel character. Now that I now that, a lot of the weaknesses in this pilot make sense. This isn’t Hawley’s baby. He’s constrained by the ubiquitous Marvel universe).
Writer: Noah Hawley
Details: 62 pages

It’s been awhile since we’ve dipped into the TV waters but that’s only because there haven’t been any highly buzzed about projects out there. If you believe all the networks, there’s a scarcity of good 1-hour dramas being pitched. And why wouldn’t there be? There are now 100 suitors for projects as opposed to the old days, when there were 5. So yeah, television, get used to competition.

I’ve been all over Noah Hawley like syrup on pancakes, looking for anything in my archives he may have written. I excitedly found a script he wrote with his brother called Dead in the Water, only to realize I’d already reviewed it (it was good! here’s the review). I was particularly excited to find Legion, since TV appears to be what Hawley does best (though I’d bet we’ll see Hawley dominate the feature world soon enough). Will Legion turn Hawley into the next Ryan Murphy?

For as long as 30-something David Haller has been alive, he’s heard the voices in his head. Sometimes these voices tell him to do good things, but usually they tell him to do bad things. He’s fought these voices tooth and nail, but at a certain point, the battle was too intense for him to fight alone.

So David now lives in a psyche ward with a bunch of other crazies, existing on a steady cocktail of anti-psychotics, which seem to keep the voices at bay.

David’s life is turned upside-down when Sydney arrives, a beautiful young woman who’s, of course, crazy in her own way, as in she refuses to touch anyone. The two begin a unique romance whereby they can never touch, which only seems to make their love stronger.

Then one day Sydney gets better and has to leave, and that’s when things get fucked up. David rushes to finally kiss Sydney and when they kiss they… switch bodies???

This takes the script in a whole different direction. All of a sudden we’re flashing forward to an interrogation session between some guy named The Interrogator and David. He’s asking David about an “event” that happened in the hospital.

Jumping back and forth in time, we eventually learn that this event consisted of all the windows and doors in the facility disappearing, people being locked in rooms, some people being seared into the wall itself. Oh, and this seems to have happened because when Sydney jumped into David’s body, she used his special powers to wreak havoc on the ward. Or something like that. Confused? I know I am.

As we gradually move away from the backstory and to the present, David uses his powers to escape the Interrogator and reunite with Sydney. But for what? What kind of plan does Sydney have in store? We’ll have to see.

Wow.

Um.

I did not like this.

I mean, there’s a lot wrong here. From big things to little things. I’m kind of shocked that this is the same person who wrote Fargo.

For starters, there is no ground floor in Legion. There is nothing to hold this story up. As a result, we feel weightless, unsure, constantly searching for something to grab onto. And there’s nothing but a boatload of confusion.

Not only are we unsure if David’s crazy or not, but we’re also jumping around in time, turning a disorienting experience into an even more disorienting experience. The tipping point for me was when David and Syd kissed and switched bodies. Did we really just pull a Parent Trap? Then Sydney’s using David’s powers to sear people into walls? Why???

When you pose a question in a story, it’s supposed to make the audience want to know the answer. I didn’t care why Sydney and David switched bodies. I didn’t care why Sydney seared people into walls.

Somehow the two go back into their own bodies but it’s never explained how. I guess their consciousness took a wormhole back to the source body after getting bored? Talk about bizarre.

And there were little issues too. Like the dialogue. The characters— would talk— like this— where they would— always— pause— every few words— to find— the next— thing to say. Imagine reading an entire script like that. Wow.

And I kept hearing about these voices David was hearing. Yet we never hear what the voices actually say. It’s written as, “David keeps hearing the voices.” It seems like that would be a really important plot and character point to know what the voices say. Yet we never get one word. If it’s going to be on the screen, it needs to be on the page.

A much better version of this show would be Stranger Things, which has its share of weirdness. But it’s grounded by a clear storyline. A kid is missing. Another kid has escaped a nearby laboratory. This allows for the other characters to make logical choices based on these problems. Either they’re off looking for one kid or helping the one who escaped.

I don’t know what the hell David and Syd are doing. I suppose The Interrogator is trying to figure out what happened that day at the ward, but there are so many unknowns involved and so many weird choices (switching bodies?? really??) that we lose track of what the point of it all is.

I don’t know. Lost got beat up for its constant mindfuckery. This is Lost x 100 at least. Nothing is clear. Nothing is normal. Nothing is explained. It’s one “what the fuck” moment after the next.

Did I like anything here? I liked the character descriptions. TV shows are more character-dependent than features. So a description like, “Syd is in her 30s and a handful” doesn’t tell me a whole lot. Hawley goes 5-6 lines deep for his character descriptions, and I liked that. Here’s his Syd description:

And here’s what you need to know about Syd, aside from the fact that she doesn’t let anybody touch her: she still believes in happily ever after. Yeah, she knows it makes her a sucker — that it Puts Her At Risk — but she just can’t help herself. Hope is like an ember she can’t stamp out, a place in her heart that knows somehow, one day, things are gonna work out.

Anything that helps me understand a character better, I like. Because most of the time writers will neither describe a character in any kind of specific way or pace them through enough relevant action to help me understand who they are. Any trick you want to use to circumvent this issue, I support.

When you wrap your mysteries in enigmas that are already wrapped in mysteries, the audience isn’t going to know which way is up. And I don’t think the average person is going to be onboard for that. I mean sure, you’ll have your iowaska demographic firmly in hand. “Yeah, make shit even more confusing!” But I don’t think a show can sustain even a few episodes of this level of mind-fuckery, much less 7 seasons. People won’t have the patience.

I was really confused by this one, guys. And sadly disappointed.

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

What I learned: In TV, character is king. So make sure to fully define your characters. It doesn’t have to be via 6-line paragraphs, like Hawley does here. But the more specific you can be in defining your characters, the better. Unlike features, where plot is the engine, characters are the engine in television. Make them big, bright, unique, and specific. Oh, and if you’re having trouble figuring out what’s unique about your character, so will the audience.

Congratulations to everyone who finished their screenplay and entered it into the Scriptshadow Screenplay Tournament! The competition starts Friday. Good luck to all!!!

Genre: Sci-fi
Premise: In the near future, a widowed husband flies to an AI-controlled space station to avenge the murder of his wife.
About: 21 Laps is doing some really good things in the entertainment world at the moment. They produced Stranger Things at Netflix and they produced the upcoming sci-fi flick, Arrival, which everyone’s buzzing about. They bought Sovereign, which finished high on the 2013 Black List. The project has been stuck in development hell since, but looks to finally be coming together. Expect some casting announcements in the coming months. Geoff Tock and Gary Weidman used the buzz they received from this script to get some TV jobs, most notably becoming writers on CBS’s Limitless.
Writers: Geoff Tock and Gary Weidman
Details: 106 pages

Gosling would love this role!

You hear that record scratching?

That’s me. It’s time to preach the same old shit one more time.

What do I tell you guys? Find a popular movie-type and come at it from a fresh angle. Today’s script could’ve easily been “Taken on a space station.” But instead of this being a nuts and bolts action thriller, it’s more of a psychological action thriller, with our lead character battling his mind just as much as he’s battling his adversary.

Which leaves us with a script that doesn’t feel like anything else out there.

It’s the near future, and 30-something Dmitri Roman is in a good place. He’s got a hot wife, Aly. They both work at one of the biggest companies in the world, which is putting the finishing touches on a space station called the Logos Project. Not only that, but Aly’s just been promoted. She’ll be going to the station to install its artificial intelligence.

Roman isn’t too keen on that. His bosses, The Advisor and The Director, seem like they like Aly for more than her abilities, if you know what I mean. But in the end, he knows he must support his wife and this opportunity she’s getting.

Bad move, Roman. Bad move.

Aly is murdered by the very AI that she installs. And to add salt to the wound, The Advisor comes around to let Roman know that if he goes to the press with this? They will come after him with their billion dollar legal team.

That’s okay. Roman has bigger plans. He spends the next 3 years developing a poor man’s Iron Man suit that will allow him to go up to Logos and kill the thing that murdered his wife. He catches a ride with some low-rent rocket enthusiasts, enters the station, and that’s when we meet… Ivan.

Ivan is “Hal” if Hal had an evil twin brother. I didn’t know dudes without bodies could be this ruthless. Ivan unleashes every robot and death-inducing obstacle he can find onto Roman. The thing is, Roman helped build this station. So he has a few tricks up his sleeve.

As Roman gets closer to the center of the station, Ivan realizes that a different tactic may be in order. And so he starts fucking with Roman. He taunts him. He teases him with what really happened to his wife. If Roman doesn’t hurry up, he may defeat himself before he’s able to defeat Ivan.

Sovereign did not start well for me. It’s written in that horrific format that I detest with all my being – the one where there are no spaces between lines. So you had 106 pages of this:

He leaps.

Grabs onto the nearest coil.

Climbs the quickest he can.

But it immediately starts changing color. Blue.

He keeps climbing.
Red.

His HUD glitches like crazy.

Flashing yellow.

Still Roman climbs.

Then jumps back to the wall.
FWOOM.

The white energy pulses through the coils.
The surge much bigger this time.
He has to hug the wall.
The next one will kill him.

I could go into an entire rant here. But my main point is this: whenever you do something that readers aren’t used to, you’re making them work harder. Now if there’s a story-relevant reason for your choice – something you believe will enhance the reading experience – I’m fine with that. But if you’re being different to be different, that’s a mistake. And this feels like it’s being different to be different.

It’s a testament to the script itself, then, that Sovereign is still good. And I’ll tell you the exact moment I jumped onboard.

We build up Aly leaving for the station. It’s 10 pages maybe. He’s worried about the motives of her bosses. He doesn’t like this. But he knows he has to let her go. Then, right after he makes that decision…

…we cut to Aly’s funeral.

What a clever cut!

So many writers take the long way home when maybe they never had to leave the house in the first place. That hard cut from her being alive to – BAM – her funeral, impacts you in a way that having seen her go up on the station and die couldn’t have achieved.

But the real prize is that it allows for a more interesting narrative once Roman gets up to the station. Because once we get up there, Roman’s pursuit is intercut with flashbacks. These flashbacks fill in the mystery of what exactly happened to Aly. Now normally I don’t like flashbacks, but I liked them here. And I’ll tell you why in the “What I Learned” section.

I also dug the way villains were treated in Sovereign. I’ve read a few amateur scripts recently that have had, shall we say, “Villain Problems.” What I mean by that is that the villains are only bad because they’re villains.

Savvy screenwriting vets know that good villains act evil out of motivation. So here, we have The Advisor, who seems like he’s making some moves on Aly. And maybe, if he can get her up on that station, away from Roman, he can have her. So already, we don’t like this guy. But what really makes us hate him is when he threatens Roman not to disclose to the media what happened to his wife or they will sue him into oblivion. What. A. Dick.

However, The Advisor isn’t doing this to fulfill some “villain” quota. He’s doing it for the company. If the media were to pick up on this, his career, his life, would be over. Ditto for Ivan. Ivan is killing people on the station not because this is a movie and that’s what villains are supposed to do. He’s killing people because they threatened to turn him off. In order to survive, he had no choice but to kill.

The last thing I wanted to note about Sovereign was how the format cleverly allowed for an ongoing dialogue despite there being only one character. You see, usually when you write these scripts, you want at least two people going after shit. Because otherwise, you don’t have any dialogue. You’ve seen this lately with Hollywood moving away from the single-hero dynamic to the “ensemble” infatuation. The more people there are pursuing the goal, the more banter that can be thrown around.

But with Ivan being able to communicate with Roman everywhere he goes in the station, we can have an ongoing dialogue despite there being only a single hero. I thought that was clever.

So this was good stuff. The freaking formatting drove me insane. But I love that they found a way to do a Taken movie with brains. Very cool.

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

What I learned: Flashbacks work better when you have a fast-paced story. I realized this while reading Sovereign, which relies on flashbacks to fill in some character and plot backstory. See the problem with flashbacks is that they take the reader IN THE OPPOSITE DIRECTION, which leads to impatience. So if you’re writing a slow drama and you SLOW IT DOWN EVEN MORE with flashbacks? We want to kill you. But in a script like this, where the pace is so quick, flashbacks are almost welcomed. We need that break to take a breath before heading back into the line of fire. So feel free to use flashbacks in your fast-paced stories.

Genre: Horror
Premise: An immature teenage girl must protect her younger brother when their babysitter becomes infected by something in the woods.
About: This script finished on last year’s Blood List. Zachary Donohue and Lauren Thompson are best known for their 2013 low-budget horror film, The Den. If you haven’t seen it, check it out. It’s not bad! That film got Donohue a writing job on one of the more high profile new shows, Outcast, Walking Dead’s Robert Kirkman possession show.
Writers: Lauren Thompson & Zachary Donohue
Details: 116 pages – 7/29/14 draft

Willow Smith to play the babysitter??

One thing I like to do when I can’t choose a script to review is pick a ONE PAGE SHOWDOWN between two scripts. Read the first page of each. Whoever’s better? That’s who I pick, baby.

Since readers are hyper-critical in the early-going, and since most seasoned producers will give up on you after a single page if they think it sucks, page-battles are a nice way to see if you offer more than your competition. Go ahead and grab a recent sale spec that’s in the same genre as yours, and compare the first pages. See how you stack up!

I’ll explain to you why The Becoming won today’s battle, and maybe it’ll help you understand what you’re up against when a reader starts picking apart your page 1. But first, let’s break down the plot of Becoming.

13 year-old Madi Chapman has spent the majority of her life taking care of her 7 year-old deaf brother, Tuck. But Madi’s finally reached that age that all of humanity dreads: 13. Which means she’s now interested in… DUH DUH DUHHHHHH-HHHH……. BOYS!

When Madi’s mischievous friend, Hannah, tells Madi she’s got the hot and older Brandt brothers lined up for them, Jeff, 16, and Adam, 15, taking care of Tuck all of a sudden doesn’t seem so important.

Things take a provocative turn when they learn Madi’s parents are going out for their anniversary dinner tonight. If Madi’s going to pass the Cool Test, she has to hold a mini-party at her place as soon as the P’s leave. Just as Madi warms up to the idea, her parents inform her that they’re bringing in a babysitter, 17 year old geeky Kimberly, to make sure that Tuck’s taken care of.

Later on, Kimberly’s none-too-pleased when she catches Madi sneaking her friends in, and threatens to call her parents. But then the power goes out, Kimberly goes checking outside to see what’s up, and gets attacked by a giant white ball of goo.

Afterwards, Kimberly gets really sick, as you would assume someone who’s encountered a giant white ball of goo would, and starts puking white bile everywhere. It’s bad enough that the kids decide to drive her to the hospital. But that plan gets ruined when Kimberly eats Adam.

Next comes a game of, OMG, Kimberly is so not cool, let’s run the fuck away from her. But they have to find the hiding Tuck before they can go anywhere. What follows is a lot of screaming and a lot bile-dodging (also known as a typical day at Carson’s house). And the occasional teenage munchable. You know, just another average night with the babysitter.

One of the most important focuses of your first scene should be MAKING SURE SOMETHING’S GOING ON. There are three versions of this. A scene where nothing’s going on. It’s just characters talking or some boring event with no context. Bad! A scene where something’s going on. This involves a well-thought out scene that creates suspense and/or mystery and motivates us to keep reading to figure out how it ends. Good! Then there’s the scene not a lot of screenwriters talk about – the “something’s sort of going on” scene. “Something’s sort of going on” is a scene where the writer technically has something happening, but it’s either uninspired or cliche. Writer thinks this good but it’s actually bad!

The Becoming starts out with a boy who’s fallen from the monkey bars on the playground. Other kids are looking at him funny, some laughing. But we don’t hear anything. In fact, this entire scene plays out in silence. The kid stumbles away and we follow him into the school as he looks into each class he passes, students and teachers staring back at him, saying and doing nothing. It’s a weird and unpredictable scene and I was curious to see where it would end up.

Day 2 begins with something going on as well. A college girl walks into a library, sees a couple of friends, and briefly, the writers mention that someone is standing up on the balcony in a mask who no one seems to notice. Is this person dangerous? We don’t know. So again, we need to keep reading to find out what that’s all about.

Here’s why I picked The Becoming over Day 2, though. How many scenes have we seen with people in masks staring at other people? A lot. So this felt like a lazy choice that anybody could’ve come up with. And I hold writers to a higher standard than the average person. They’re supposed to come up with the thing that NOBODY could’ve come up with. I mean if you can’t outthink the average person, what are you bringing to the table?

The Becoming scene wasn’t revolutionary. But the silence mixed with the fact that everybody just stared at this kid but nobody said or did anything for him – that made me curious. And it’s why Becoming got the nod.

We’ve talked a lot about micro-managing your first page. Everything from avoiding spelling errors to giving your hero a strong introduction. But really the only thing that matters is that the reader wants to find out what happens next. As long as you’re dangling a carrot in front of them, and that carrot isn’t cliche or obvious, there’s a good chance they’ll want to turn the page.

So what about the rest of The Becoming!? Was it as intriguing as that first page?

Unfortunately not. If I’m ahead of your script for the first 70 pages? You’re not working hard enough. Especially when it comes to such a familiar setup like this – teenagers in a house with a monster chasing them.

A lot of writers will say to me, “Since these movies are so popular, there aren’t any fresh ideas left. So this script will always seem cliche.” That’s bullshit. And actually, the fact that the genre is so cliche is an opportunity! If the audience is familiar with all of the beats of a genre, it means you get to play those expectations against them.

Why do you think Psycho is one of the best horror movies of all time? It used your expectations against you and killed off its main character early in the 2nd act.

The only thing that was unique about The Becoming was this bile that Kimberly spat out. The bile would spread, taking over the floors, the walls, the ceilings, and it would harden. So I was somewhat curious how that would evolve.

But The Great Bile Mystery of 2016 isn’t big enough on its own to make a movie. There needed to be more. The deaf brother may have been an opportunity but his deafness didn’t play into the script enough. An easy way to check if a character’s limitation is relevant is to ask what the script would be without it. This movie doesn’t change much if Tuck can hear.

If you watch the recent horror film, Hush, for example. That movie is about a crazy killer fucking with this woman home alone in a cabin who’s deaf. The movie wouldn’t be the same movie if she could hear. So her limitation was relevant.

And deaf characters are tricky to pull off anyway. It’s not that they can’t work, but you need to be on point in your research so their condition feels authentic. And like anything, you need to find a new angle into the deaf character to avoid the classic “not another deaf character” eye roll that’s so popular amongst the Reader Cabal.

The only way to see if my first page experiment worked would be to read and review Day 2 tomorrow. I might do that, but then again, I might not. I don’t like to read the same genre two days in a row. You see what I did there? I dangled the carrot. :)

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

What I learned: “Why Wouldn’t They Do This?” moments. An easy way to identify a good writer is how they handle “Why Wouldn’t They Do This?” moments. These are moments where it makes sense for your character to perform an action, but you don’t want them to perform that action because it doesn’t work for your story. The classic example is a group of friends are hanging out, there’s an accident, and one of them dies. What’s the obvious next course of action? To call the cops! But you don’t want the cops because then you don’t get to explore these friends freaking out and turning on each other, which is the heart of your story. In this case, the beginner will come up with a half-ass reason for why the cops aren’t called while the skilled writer will think long and hard about how the situation would play out in the real world and construct a solid believable excuse for not including the cops. For example, maybe the friend who died is the sheriff’s son and he’s the cop who would answer the call. I could believe that those friends would hesitate if that were the case.

In The Becoming, we have a scene early on where Kimberly sees Madi sneak her friends into the house. Kimberly asks the friends to leave and Madi says no. Of course Kimberly has to call the parents now, right? That’s what any babysitter would do. But if the parents come home, we don’t have a movie. So the writers have Madi say to Kimberly, “Fine, ruin their anniversary dinner.” It’s enough to get Kimberly to back off for awhile. Was it a 100% convincing solution? No. But it was okay. And okay is better than no effort at all, which is what I usually run into.

If you’re new to the Scriptshadow Script Challenge, here are all the previous posts…

WEEK 0
WEEK 1
WEEK 2
WEEK 3
WEEK 4
WEEK 5
WEEK 6
WEEK 7
WEEK 8

YOU FINISHED YOUR FIRST DRAFT!!!!

HOOOOOORRRRRAAAAAYYYYY!!!

First thing I want you to do?

Get drunk. You’re going to need it, trust me. Because now it’s time for the…

REWRITE!

In order to best attack a rewrite, you need to understand what rewriting is. And the way I define rewriting is simple: PROBLEM-SOLVING. That’s what you’ll be doing in your second draft, your third draft, and every draft from this point forward. Identify problems. Find solutions. I call this THE GAMEPLAN, and it has one final step:

THE GAMEPLAN

1) Identify problems.
2) Come up with solutions.
3) Implement solutions into Second Draft outline.

That’s right. You won’t be doing any physical rewriting this week. And you won’t have time to. While before, you could get away with a minimum of two hours a day. You’ll now need at least three. That’s because you’ll be dealing with the most unpredictable step in the process: SOLUTIONS. Solutions can take seconds, hours, days, even weeks to figure out. But before we go there, let’s start with step 1: Identifying the problem.

IDENTIFY PROBLEMS

The first thing I want you to do is put yourself in the mind of a reader. Take your ‘helpful’ hat off and replace it with a critical one. Your goal with this step is to be EXTREMELY HARD ON YOURSELF. Since you’re a writer, that shouldn’t be difficult. Get your mind in as critical a state as possible.

What you’re going to do is read your script from start to finish, and take notes in two areas.

1) Boring parts.
2) Characters.

For the first area, you’re going to be monitoring your enjoyment level during the screenplay. Are you engaged? Or are you bored? When you get bored, backtrack to where the boredom started, then continue on until you become engaged again. Mark that section down in a separate document and write down why you were bored. Don’t overthink it. Go with the most honest answer. So if I were, say, George Lucas, and I were applying the Scriptshadow Rewrite Model to my first draft of The Phantom Menace, this is what I might write:

Pages 5-11: Something feels off about this Jedi scene. Jedis waiting around in a room? Is that exciting enough?
Pages 23-32: The underwater Gungan City is cool, but why does it feel so boring? A lot of standing around. No action. Jar Jar’s great though. People are going to love him.
Pages 40-47: Dinner scene in Anakin’s hut is long with a lot of talking. We need to get so many plot points across that there’s no time left to entertain the audience. Maybe they’ll be distracted by how funny Jar Jar is.

You’ll have more sections than that, and in some cases, you’ll go into more detail than I did. The more detail you add, the more information you’ll have to solve the problem. Don’t get too verbose though. You don’t want your future self to have to wade through 20 lines of random thoughts to try and find the point.

While you’re assessing your boredom frequency, you’ll also want to gauge how strong your characters are. For every character who has more than two scenes, rate how satisfying they are on a scale from 1-10. Then tell us what you liked or disliked about the character:

Qui-Gon Gin (6): Stoic. But is he too stoic? Not much personality.
Obi-Wan Kenobi (5): Trying to have fun with him but he can’t be too fun since he’s a Jedi. Having a tough time finding the balance and it’s showing.
Anakin Skywalker (2): Boring, whiney. If I ever write a second draft, I’ll fix that.
Jar-Jar Binks (10): Perfect all around. Funny, engaging, charming, sophisticated. People are going to love this character. No changes!!!

SOLUTIONS

The reason you wrote all that stuff down is so that you can methodically go through it, point by point, and come up with solutions. Start with the boring sections. Some people like to re-order this list so that the biggest problems are on top. Some like to keep it in chronological order. It’s up to you. And now is where the fun begins. For every problem, figure out why it’s a problem and try to come up with a creative solution. Here’s an example:

Pages 5-11: Something feels off about this Jedi scene. Jedis waiting around in a room? Is that exciting enough?
Solution: Maybe move the scene to the hanger bay. When they first arrive, no one comes out to greet their ship. It’s eerie, odd, and more suspicious as each second ticks by. Obi-Wan and Qui-Gon decide to go out and inspect. They see a couple of dead Mandelorians in the hallway. Someone got here first. But who? Are they in danger? Maybe include a flash-forward Jedi dream of Jar-Jar. Additional note: Remember to add Jar-Jar stepping in dookie scene. Forgot if I included that.

Remember that, in some cases, the issue may not be fixable. The solution, then, could be eliminating the sequence. Or replacing it with an expanded subplot, or a new subplot altogether. Or moving the section to a more desirable place in the story. Everything is in play. Just remember the ultimate mantra, which is that if it doesn’t push the story or the characters forward, you don’t need it. Could you include a scene in The Phantom Menace where Queen Amidala is practicing her blaster shooting skills? Sure. Does it get her closer to the story’s ultimate destination? It does not. So you don’t need it.

HOW TO RECOVER FROM A SCRIPT DISASTER
I should take a moment to acknowledge the possibility that NOTHING IS WORKING IN YOUR SCRIPT. This is why the outlining stage was so important. You got to see your script in macro form and tackle potential structural problems before they happened. But if you didn’t outline or you went way off the reservation during your first draft, there’s a chance that, structurally, the majority of your script is unsavable. If you deem that to be the case, figure out where you went off the rails, go back to your outline, and re-outline everything after that moment. Your “2nd draft” is going to be more like a “1.5 draft,” but thats okay and it happens a lot. The good news is that it’s better than starting from scratch.

Once you’ve found all your plotting solutions, it’s time to tackle your characters. Go through each one, figure out what’s wrong with them, and make decisions on whether to a) improve them or b) get rid of them. If a character is anywhere below a “4,” you either have to get rid of them or reimagine them. Let’s take a look at George Lucas’s Anakin note for the second draft of The Phantom Menace which he’ll be getting to any day now.

Anakin Skywalker: Boring, whiney.
Solution: The big problem here is that Anakin is one-dimensional. It’s resulted in him being boring. One way to add some spark to him is to make him more mischievous. Give him an edge. That’ll immediately add some personality to a character in desperate need of it. A goody-two-shoes who whines all the time is going to put people to sleep. Also, add a scene where Jar-Jar juggles Anakin.

Now you won’t be able to solve every problem right away. That’s okay. Some solutions will come faster than others. What I’ve found is that if something’s not coming to you, it’s best to move on to the next problem. Cause every problem you solve has the potential to give you ideas to solve other problems. So if you’re having trouble figuring out how to make Anakin more compelling, sitting there and staring at the wall won’t do much good. But if you’re working on solving that boring Anakin Dinner Hut Scene, your solution may lead you to realize that Anakin’s at his most interesting when he’s manipulating others for his own gain, which allows you to go back and integrate that into your character solution.

Once you’ve written all of your potential solutions down (plot and character), resist the temptation to jump in and start the rewrite. Instead, it’s time to integrate all of your solutions into a SECOND DRAFT OUTLINE. What a lot of writers will do is take their first draft outline, save it as a new document titled “Second Draft Outline,” then use it as a template, pasting their new ideas (their solutions) into the already numbered slots. The outline can be as general or as specific as you want. So for the opening Jedi ship scene I highlighted, you can paste in exactly what you wrote as your solution, or you can expand on it, explaining how you want the scene (and subsequent scenes) to go. My belief is that the more detail you add to your outline, the better, as it’ll make the actual script-writing part easier.

And that’s it for this week. You want to solve your plotting problems as extensively as you can. You want to solve your shitty character problems as extensively you can. And you want to add all of that stuff into your Second Draft Outline with as much detail as possible. This will become the blueprint for your second draft rewrite, which starts next week. It will also be your most time intensive week to date. So get started NOW!