Genre: Thriller
Premise: A “Gone Girl” like tale where a young girl goes missing and the father becomes the number one suspect… but not for what you’d expect.
About: One of the hottest young writer-directors out there is Damien Chazelle. Chazelle started off with a movie I still think explored the most ridiculous premise of that year (Grand Piano – about a pianist being texted by a killer during his concert performance). Then, of course, he broke through with last year’s Sundance hit, Whiplash, which has since gone on to nab five Oscar nominations. Nice! This script is a recent Black Lister.
Writer: Damien Chazelle
Details: 120 pages (undated)

Chazelle (middle) with his Whiplash team.

One of the things I’ve noticed a lot lately while reading screenplays is that they’re very “screenplay-y.” What the hell is that supposed to mean? It means that I’m very aware that I’m reading a screenplay and, because of that, it’s hard for me to suspend my disbelief.

Now screenwriting has always carried this handicap of forcing writers to write inside the most writing-unfriendly format there is. There are ugly capitalized lines at the top of scenes that say things like “INT.” You’ve got weird and varied margins. The writing style is often clipped and abrupt.

All these things castrate any chance a screenplay has at naturalism.  And if I’m being honest, it’s started to bother me. FRANK. Dashes forward. Gets to Monica. Boom. They tumble.  Whatever happened to sentence structure???

I understand that sometimes you’re writing an action scene and writing in bursts helps convey energy. But every once in awhile I’ll see a writer use a full clean well-written sentence, and I’ll feel like I’m actually reading again. There’s something to be said for words flowing into one another – for us to take a journey through a sentence.

Frank dashes forward. He catches up to Monica only to have their legs collide. They tumble like clothes in the washing machine before crashing to the pavement.

I’m not going to step on anybody’s style here. Write how you want to write. But just know that you have the option to write complete sentences every once in awhile. And when you write them well, they can be quite pleasing! That doesn’t mean I’m giving you a green light to go prose-heavy. But go ahead and give us a beginning, a middle, and an end to a sentence every so often.

What does this have to do with The Claim? Well, Chazelle’s script does adopt that staccato writing style for the most part. And I get it. This is a thriller. I’m not saying what he’s doing is wrong. I suppose I’m just on the hunt for good-old fashioned REAL WRITING at the moment.

28 year old Harry Novak is trying to make ends meet as a mechanic but only barely getting by. And if it were only about him, he could handle the struggle. But he’s also got a 4 year old angel named Sophie he’s got to provide for. And he’s doing everything he can. In fact, when we meet him, he’s picking her up from swim practice.

When Harry and Sophie get home, Harry’s shocked to see that his place has been broken into. He looks around, however, and notices that not a single thing has been taken. Strangely, that makes the event even more terrifying.

When Harry gets a call for a quick shift change, he heads to work with his daughter, only for the car in front of him to stall. A huge bumper to bumper traffic jam follows. Luckily, being a mechanic, Harry’s able to fix the car quickly.

But when Harry looks back to his car, Sophie is GONE! He starts freaking out, but the cars start driving around him and there’s nothing he can do but head to the cops. They put an Amber Alert out for Sophie, and that’s when things get weird.

Within minutes, a family up in San Francisco calls to claim that this is THEIR baby who’s been missing for two years. The cops question Harry, who it turns out WAS up in San Francisco when this baby was abducted. Not only that, but Sophie’s mother (Harry’s ex) claims she has no idea who Harry is.

Harry’s able to escape custody and go on the run, where he searches for his daughter. What he finds out along the way is that this kidnapping goes far deeper than he could have ever imagined.

The Claim is fun. It really is. It’s the kind of script that readers like to read because there’s a new reveal or a new twist every 7-10 pages. Which gives it that roller coaster feel.

But here’s the most important thing Chazelle did to get this script noticed and it’s something all of you need to remember every time you write a screenplay. He adds a SECOND family claiming that the girl was kidnapped from them 2 years ago.  Now you don’t just have Liam Neeson chasing bad guys. You have a mystery. And not a simple one either. Who kidnapped Sophie? How is this other family in on it? Why isn’t Sophie’s mom (who Harry had her with) claiming to know who Harry is?

Any story where you can explore two genres at once (a thriller and a mystery) has the potential to be a lot more fun than your basic straight-forward genre tale.

But did Chazelle pull it off? For the most part, yes. I was unapologetically wrapped up in whether this San Francisco family really lost their child or if they were pulling a scam. And if they weren’t pulling a scam, then who orchestrated this kidnapping? And what did they want??

I do think Chazelle has a problem with something I call “Page Reality” though. Sometimes, a writer will take advantage of the fact that the reader can’t physically see the scene, and they’ll use that to cheat. So here, the critical scene has Harry helping fix this man’s car in front of him for 5 seconds. When he turns around, his daughter is no longer in her seat.

Now we’ve been told that this is a traffic jam and there are cars everywhere. How in the world does a man steal a child from a car in broad daylight during a traffic jam in under five seconds, and nobody sees it? It doesn’t make sense. And it’s a pristine example of a writer using the page to camouflage reality.

This was the same problem I had with Grand Piano. I read so many moments of that character texting where I was like, “There’s no way the audience can’t see this.” It drove me nuts.

The Claim isn’t perfect. It gets a little lost in its twists sometimes. It probably stays around longer than it should. But it’s the kind of script that’s hard to put down. And achieving that with any screenplay ain’t too shabby.

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

What I learned: “But what if I did this?” Every time you come up with a concept, particularly one that feels familiar or simplistic, you owe it to yourself to ask the question “But what if I did this?” a dozen or more times to see if there’s more you can do with the idea. Kidnapped girl scripts are a dime-a-dozen. Kidnapped girl scripts where a second couple is claiming that the daughter is theirs – we’ve never seen that before. That’s usually when you know you’ve got an idea. When you approach, “I don’t think I’ve seen that before” territory.

Genre: Comedy
Premise: In a world where every person gets one “do over” in their life, a “Do Over” consultant must use the power to go back in time and stop his ex-wife from getting married.
About: Today is a little different. I read this script for notes awhile back and really liked it. It’s rare I like a notes script enough to review it on the site, but this just so happens to be one of those occasions.
Writer: Angela Bourassa
Details: 95 pages

Adam Scott for Rick?

The cool thing about giving notes to Scriptshadow readers is that Scriptshadow readers are typically some of the most educated amateur screenwriters out there. These are writers who are serious about their craft. And for that reason, when they send me a script, it’s not some 150 page wandasaurus rex coming-of-age autobiography. These are educated writers with a strong understanding of how to tell a story.

With that said, one of the biggest problems I see with these scripts is inconsistency. The writer will nail a scene, then fail a scene. He’ll get one character perfect, but never develop another one. The script will pop in some sections, and deflate in others.

It’s rare that I get a script where I can honestly say the writer is ready to take the leap into the professional ranks. But today is one of those times. Now, if I’m being honest, I don’t know if it’s this script. I’ve had discssuions with Angela about the script’s issues, and I’ve even sent it to some of my contacts, who have the same issues – that the concept is a bit complicated and takes awhile to set up.

But, I believe this script shows that Angela is ready to play in the big leagues. And I’ll get into why after the summary.

“Do Over” takes place in a world exactly like our own, except for one difference. Everybody in the world gets one “do-over” during their lifetime. I’m sure we’ve all wanted one of these – an opportunity to erase a terrible life-ruining day and do it all over again.

But with that big of a decision and with the stakes that high, people can’t afford to screw up their do-over. That’s where Rick comes in. Rick is a do-over consultant. He helps people decide if the mistake they made that day is worth using a do-over for.

On the day we meet Rick, Rick learns from an old friend that his ex-wife, Sarah, got married THAT DAY. Depressed as all get-up, Rick gets black-out wasted, only to wake up in his apartment with a loud large folksy Minnesotan woman telling him to get dressed and get ready.

This is Connie. Connie, a friend of Sarah’s, tells Rick that she used her do-over last night to give him another shot at Sarah before she gets married. But there’s a catch. He has to bankroll her life-long dream to be a plus-sized model, a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity she screwed up yesterday because of a number of factors. Her second shot at the audition is in 6 hours. It’s time to get going.

Rick spends the first part of the day trying to eject from this lunatic woman’s orbit, before realizing that the only way he’s finding out the location of his ex-wife’s wedding is through her. He reluctantly teams up with her, and the two experience a city-wide adventure, capped off by Rick’s big opportunity to get Sarah back. The question is: can changing one day really change your life?

Melissa McCarthy for Connie – duh

Do Over does a few things really well. The two main characters are great. And by that, I mean, they both stand out, particularly Connie, who’s probably the best female comedy character I’ve read, amateur or pro, in a year. It’s not just the characters as individuals though. It’s the way they contrast. It’s the way they play off each other. To Rick, Connie is a hideous creature who needs to be placed back in the zoo. To Connie, Rick is a capital “D” douchebag who needs to be yanked off the Douche Highway. This contrast and conflict makes the two irresistible to watch together.

The story itself is also very contained, lending itself perfectly to comedy. They get one day to both get their shit done, and time is always running out. Any time you write a comedy, it works best if the goal needs to be achieved immediately. It just puts the characters under more stress, and stress is a great way to squeeze comedy out of people. So short time frame plus fun characters plus tons of conflict between the leads – plus the fact that Angela’s just naturally funny – these are the things that made this script stand out.

Here’s the big problem with the script though, and something I’ve discussed with Angela. It partly goes back to what I was talking about the other day. This is a BROAD premise (there’s no such thing as getting a “do over”). So it requires the audience to make more of a leap to believe in what’s going on – something studios aren’t favoring at the moment. They want comedy premises that can exist in the real world.

But this isn’t the only problem. The premise here isn’t an easy one to explain. In fact, the first 20 pages of the script are dedicated to setting up the rules and backstory of the script. The first ten explains the do-over rules themselves and what Rick does. And then we need to explain how Connie met Rick last night, Connie’s extensive backstory, and what Connie needs help with today. It’s a long sequence of pure exposition followed by a long sequence of pure exposition, a double-death exposition sand trap.

It’s actually a testament to Angela that she’s still able to make the script work after that. I remember when I read the first act for the first time and I thought, “Jeez, this is a lot of information required to set up the story.” If I were a producer, I probably would’ve mentally given up on the script then. However, once that’s gone and we’re just following these two characters, the script becomes so charming and fun that you can’t believe how big of a 180 it’s pulled.

There’s definitely a lesson to be learned here, and one I think Angela would agree with. Overly complicated premises that require a lot of explanation are the mortal enemy of comedy. It’s pretty obvious why. They require you to reserve a large portion of your script just to explain what’s going on. If you’re funny, you can add little jokes to this explanation, but no matter how funny you are, you can’t mask the fact that you’re having to explain so much. So when you’re picking your next comedy script, take that into consideration. Simplicty goes a long way towards allowing you to focus on the comedy.

And with that, I turn to you, loyal Scriptshadow readers. I feel that once this script gets rolling, you see the talent on display. But I can’t shake the feeling that there’s a simpler way to explore this premise that would help this script go from good to great. Anyone have ideas on how to pull that off?

In the meantime, I’m including the script. And I’m encouraging those in the business to check out Do Over. Angela will be writing in the professional ranks within the next year or two, particularly with Hollywood’s increasing love affair for female-dominated comedies. Get her while you still can!

Script link: Do Over

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

What I learned: The 3-Ply logline. Usually, a logline consists of two parts: the main character and the situation that character finds himself in. We can call this the 2-Ply approach. Here’s a 2-Ply logline for Taken:

(Ply 1) A former CIA agent (Ply 2) must find and save his teenage daughter when she’s kidnapped by a gang of ruthless criminals.

When you have a complicated world or idea that needs explaining, however, it forces your logline to become 3-Ply, since you now have to add a section where you explain the world. This makes the logline wordier and harder to digest. We can see this with Do Over.

(Ply 1) In a world where every person gets one “do over” in their life, (Ply 2) a “Do Over” consultant (Ply 3) must use the power to go back in time and stop his ex-wife’s wedding.

If you’re forced to write a 3-Ply logline, keep it as simple as possible. Don’t use a bunch of adjectives or tangents. Know that your logline is already a mouthful, and that keeping its pieces simple and to the point is the way to go. So, for example, this is how an inexperienced writer may write the logline for Do Over:

(Ply 1) In a world where every person gets one “do over” in their life, (Ply 2) a cocksure “Do Over” consultant who’s already used his own do-over (Ply 3) must count on the do-over of a random stranger he meets on a night of drinking to stop his ex-wife’s wedding, a stranger who’s going to make him jump through numerous hoops to get what he wants.

Get Your Script Reviewed On Scriptshadow!: To submit your script for an Amateur Review, send in a PDF of your script, along with the title, genre, logline, and finally, something interesting about yourself and/or your script that you’d like us to post along with the script if reviewed. Use my submission address please: Carsonreeves3@gmail.com. Remember that your script will be posted. If you’re nervous about the effects of a bad review, feel free to use an alias name and/or title. It’s a good idea to resubmit every couple of weeks so your submission stays near the top.

Genre: Drama/Crime-Thriller
Premise (from writer): When her older brother — a notorious NYC graffiti writer — is murdered, a teenaged fine arts student must infiltrate this underground world in order to find her brother’s killer.
Why You Should Read (from writer): The script takes place in NYC during the implementation of Mayor Guiliani’s infamous “broken window” theory. I hurried to get this draft done, as I feel it’s only gaining relevance given the current events. Graffiti’s a tough subject to crack (since most people see graf writers as nothing but vandals), but I tried to make the world as human as possible — through the eyes of a strong young woman. Think Point Break in the world of graffiti, with some freaking GIRL POWER!
Writer: ??
Details: 100 pages

Who says we don’t give high ratings to amateur screenplays on Scriptshadow? As long as you bring the goods, you’re going to get recognized. And Ivy brings the goods. Yet it almost wasn’t to be. Ivy went neck and neck with The Multiverse in last week’s amateur offerings and you guys know I prefer a good sci-fi premise to almost anything else. The Multiverse sounded like it could be the next Inception.

But there’s also something to be said for unique subject matter. When’s the last time you saw a movie about graffiti? Well, I guess there was Exit Through the Gift Shop, but that wasn’t so much a movie as it was a strange movie-docu hybrid. This is a straight up screenplay about the underworld of graffiti artists, seasoned inside a nice little murder-mystery. Let’s take a closer look.

The year is 1995. 18 year-old Ivy goes to a prestigious Michigan private school on an art scholarship. Ivy is extremely talented, but too shy about her work. She’s scared to put it out there for others to see, and it’s starting to take a toll on her education. Her professor tells her that if she doesn’t come out of her shell soon, she may not be here much longer.

Tragedy strikes when Ivy gets word that her older brother back in Brooklyn’s been murdered. When she heads home, we learn a little more about her background – abandoned by both their parents, the siblings leaned on one another to scrape by. It appears that since Ivy’s left, her bro, “Jocky,” has become quite the celebrity on the graffiti scene.

When she asks the cops what happened, they tell her, look, we can’t help you unless you help us. Get in with the graffiti gangs and sniff around, see if you can’t get us some names. It isn’t long before Ivy meets Sev, the 24 year-old reining graffiti king. Word on the street is that Sev killed someone a year ago for stepping on his territory. Could he have done the same to Jocky??

Ivy joins Sev’s gang and shows the kind of promise few graffiti artists do, and her and Sev get real close. The more she gets to know him, in fact, the more she questions whether he could have really killed her brother. But when Sev starts to suspect that Ivy may be working with the authorities, all bets are off, and Ivy may find out first hand what Sev is capable of.

If Ivy were graffiti art, it would definitely be the kind you’d stop and look at. However, the closer you looked, the more you’d see some rushed strokes, some clumsy color patterns. You’d take note of the artist though, and keep an eye out for more of their work.

One of the things I liked about Ivy was its attitude towards art. It reminded me a little bit of Dead Poet’s Society. Characters would routinely trumpet the importance of “letting go” and “breaking the rules.” That’s where all the best graffiti came from.

The problem with this is that Ivy doesn’t break any rules itself. It’s a straightforward setup. Ivy must figure out who killed her brother (goal). She gets in with a dangerous crowd (stakes). Her school is only giving her 30 days leave (urgency). Not that I see anything wrong with this. I love a well-structured screenplay and thought Ivy did a great job of it here. It was just funny that what the characters were saying didn’t match up with what the writer was doing.

But it does bring up an issue we don’t talk about enough. And that’s that, when you do stick to the rules, you have to camouflage them. If it’s too transparent that you’re hitting all the standard story beats, the story itself becomes transparent.

For instance, in an early scene where Ivy goes to her brother’s apartment, the cops knock on the door. They come in, discuss her brother for a minute or two, and then say, “We need you to infiltrate these graffiti gangs. Will you do it?” Now, this scene may need to happen to push the story forward, but that doesn’t mean you can just plop it in there with no finesse.

I mean a) why would they think some uppity private school girl would be able to infiltrate a dark dangerous graiffiti world that she didn’t even know about until today? And b) Where are the formalities involved in creating this operation? Police work has to be documented, it has to be approved. Yet here, apparently, two random cops can just be like, “Go infiltrate a gang,” and that’s that.

We needed more camouflage here. We needed the cops to have seen Ivy’s art to get the idea that she could impersonate a graffiti artist in the first place. We needed more formality than 2 minutes of conversation and “Go do something that could get you killed.” Sometimes, as writers, we’re so blinded by what needs to happen in our story, that we don’t think to ask, “Does this make sense?”

Your story has to be seamless, especially when in it’s in a construct where readers are predicting your beats before you write them. If you write a scene that screams: HERE’S A MAJOR STORY BEAT – you can bet that it will take them out of the story.

There were a couple of other rushed decisions at the end of the script too. A new character (and potential brother murderer), Oz, shows up with only 20 pages to go. Although we’d heard Oz’s name before, it wasn’t in any meaningful capacity. So to then make him a major character in the very last act is jarring.

This seems like it would be an easy fix though. Just make Oz more of a rival to Sev. Maybe Oz tags over some of Sev’s work, or challenges him on subway cars – anything to make him more of a presence earlier in the movie.

And finally (major spoiler), I didn’t like the absentee father coming back to save the day. The father had ONE SCENE previous to this, and all of a sudden he’s Superman, arriving at the last second to save the day. I like the IDEA of the father arcing, but once again, if you don’t put in the legwork earlier in the script (aka more than one scene with dad), it reads false.

But this is also an easy fix. When Ivy comes back to the Bronx, why can’t she have two goals? The primary one is to find her brother’s killer, of course. But the secondary goal (and major subplot of the film) is to reconnect with her father. Or at least find out why he left Ivy and her brother. That should give you a few more scenes between the two, and make the father’s arc more believable.

This may sound like a bunch of criticism, but actually, these problems I’m mentioning aren’t big at all. Most of Amateur Friday scripts need major overhauls. This just needs adjustments. Ivy was not only a fun script, but I could see it playing at Sundance. For that reason, it gets the first amateur “worth the read” of the year!

Script link: Ivy

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

What I learned: Camouflage. Camouflage your story beats, people. Think of it this way. Let’s say you want to hit on a girl. Do you walk up to the girl and say, “I’m hitting on you.” No, you walk up, ask her the time, what she’s doing here, what her name is. Hopefully a good conversation follows, and then you ask her her number.  You’re camouflaging your true intention. Same thing with story beats. You can’t have a cop say, “We need you to infiltrate a gang” out of nowhere. You have to build up the situation so that the statement becomes a natural extension of what’s come before.

Genre: Drama/Thriller/Sci-fi
Premise: In the near future, the police department has developed a device that replays sound from the past, which allows them to listen in on murders after the fact.
About: Here we have another Top 10 2014 Black List script. Writer Krysty Wilson-Cairns is from Scotland and this script also placed on the Brit List earlier this year. She’s also adapting “The Good Nurse” for Darren Aronofsky, about “The Angel of Death” nurse who killed over 300 patients.
Writer: Krysty Wilson-Cairns
Details: 119 pages – February 2014 draft (this is the draft that landed on both the Brit and Black List).

Rory Kinnear as Harry?

Today I want to talk about ideas. A good idea is one of the easiest things to bring to the table as a writer. It doesn’t take a year of meticulously outlining and plotting and character work and drafting and re-drafting. An idea can come to you in a split-second and is therefore one of the least time-intensive components of the process.

It’s also one of the easiest ways to set yourself apart. For example, let’s say you want to write a murder-mystery. Okay, you’ve just joined 6000 other murder-mystery scripts. Hallelujah to that scenario. Are you sure your murder-mystery is going to be better than every one of them? The odds say no.

BUT… what if you could change something in the IDEA that made your murder mystery stand out from all the others? What if you had a concept that allowed you to explore that murder-mystery in ways that nobody else who was writing a murder-mystery could? You have just – without even writing a single word of your screenplay – separated yourself from the pack.

And that’s exactly what’s happened today. Aether is an okay screenplay. It moves a little slow for its own good and the characters aren’t as exciting as I’d like them to be, but because we have a unique concept – a specialized audio device that allows you to re-listen to the crime scene – it makes the read a lot more interesting than had this been yet another straight-forward murder mystery.

So what’s Aether about? Homicide Detective Harry Orwell was part of a prized team that recently created a device that could take sound waves in a room, collect them, and play them back long after they were made. This evolved naturally, then, to the homicide world, where it’s become a tool for detectives to figure out who the killer was.

Harry’s a troubled dude though. Like a lot of other “listeners,” he’s traumatized by the desperate last pleas and gulps and breaths of the murder victims who he must listen to over and over again. It’s become so bad that his department has actually hired a shrink to work through these issues with each audio-detective.

Well, one day Harry is listening to a murder, and he hears the exact same scream that he heard in a previous murder. He eventually deduces that the murderer has access to one of these audio devices (AMPS) and, after killing his victim, likes to sit around and re-listen to his kills (if this is a little confusing, I’m right with you. I didn’t entirely understand it either).

What makes things worse is that the latest victim is a bartender who was serving Harry drinks the night she was killed. And Harry, who was wasted, has no recollection of how he got home. Both the department and Harry start to wonder if he’s involved in the killings. When a woman from inside Harry’s department is killed next, the witch-hunt is on. So if Harry isn’t the killer, he’s going to have to find some evidence to clear his name quickly.

At the beginning of this review, I talked about finding an original idea. Now, I’m going to talk about EXPLOITING that idea. Because an unexploited original idea is no better than an unoriginal one.

What does it mean to exploit an idea? It means finding things about the idea that the average Joe never would’ve thought of and then implanting those ideas into your script in interesting ways. Think about that. You’re the screenwriter. That’s your job! You can’t be just like everyone else who comes up with an idea. You have to be exceptional. You have to find things that others can’t. Or else what makes you so special?

Take Back to the Future. A guy accidentally goes back in time and must figure out a way to get back home when the time machine breaks. That’s a fun idea. But a lousy writer’s going to come up with a bunch of surface-level hijinx (oh, gas used to be 5 cents!) and that’s it. Zemeckis and Gale dug deeper. They said, “Well wait a minute. What if, when he went back in time, he accidentally screwed up the meeting between his parents? And now he has to figure out a way to get them together before he goes back home or he’ll never be born?” THAT’S exploiting your premise. THAT’S digging deeper than the obvious.

One of the problems with Aether is that it doesn’t exploit its premise enough. Beyond listening in on these past murders, the only deeper exploration of the idea is that the killer has one of these audio devices too. There’s SOMETHING to that but it’s still just a seed of an idea. It needs to grow or else you’re going to get yet another of those murky executions of a cool concept.

Another thing I want to talk about is how our investment as an audience is almost always tied to the main character’s investment in the story. So look at a movie like American Sniper. For all the problems I had with the script, Chris Kyle is steadfast in his desire to keep going back to the war, to save his people, and to win the war itself. His DESIRE motivates our DESIRE to see if he succeeds.

In Aether, the big dramatic question is: Is Harry the killer, and is he going to get caught? That’s an interesting question and one that would typically keep an audience riveted. The problem is, Harry is such a sad-sack, such an introverted uninvolved character, he doesn’t really seem to care one way or the other. You get the sense that he’d be fine with getting caught because then he wouldn’t have to deal with any of this mess anymore.

In other words, because Harry wasn’t interested in his own self-preservation, I wasn’t interested in it either. And that’s what was so weird about reading Aether. You have a serial-killer mystery on your hands, and yet I never felt completely concerned or involved.

With that being said, this is not an American movie. This script screams Scottish indie flick all the way. And I know the films over there are a lot more laid back, so maybe people won’t have these same issues with Aether. But I still think this premise needs an industrial grade drill to dig much deeper into the concept itself. We’re only scratching the surface here. We must go deeper.

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

What I learned: So when you come up with a unique concept for a screenplay, I want you to do something before you write a word. Write down the first five ideas you come up with as far as the direction you want to take the movie, then consider erasing them all. I’m not going to say to definitely erase them all, because one of them might be brilliant. But chances are, the first five things you think of are exactly what everybody else would think of. And you’re a screenwriter. Which means your job is to dig deeper than everybody else.

A more complex script than you might’ve thought.

So at the beginning of this week, I reviewed a script from Academy Award winner Stephen Gaghan that was fairly complex. There were lots of characters, multiple storylines, heavy flashbacks. And while Gaghan managed to make the whole thing work, I’ve spent far too many reading experiences watching amateurs try to do the same thing and ending up at the bottom of a slugline sinkhole.

Part of the problem is that the new screenwriter comes on the scene and believes he has the answers to Hollywood’s problems. Paul Bart: Mall Cop? Garbage. Taken 7? Trash. The problem, the neophyte screenwriter concludes, is that Hollywood’s movies are all fluff. His solution is to write some big sprawling meaty “masterpiece” that’ll win 12 Oscars.

The intention is noble. But the problem is that, 99 times out of a 100, the writer has no idea how to tell a story yet. They don’t even know that their inexperience in storytelling is a problem in the first place. So the resulting script may certainly be “sprawling” and “ambitious,” but it doesn’t make a lick of sense. People who read it categorize it as “unfocused,” “all over the place,” and “confusing.”

This miscalculation boils down to the fact that the writer has no “complexity compass.” Therefore, he marches unknowingly into the Failure Desert.

So today, I want to present you with the five pillars of complexity. This way, you know where the complexity pitfalls lie, and you can figure out how to avoid them. Let’s go through these pillars one by one, then discuss how we can manage them and keep our scripts easy to read.

Description – Description’s contribution to complexity can be broken down into two categories. Writers who describe too much. And stories that require a lot of description. Let’s start with the first one. Screenplays are about saying as much as possible in as few words as possible. Readers don’t want to sit there and read a six-sentence paragraph that just as easily could’ve been one. If this is the writer’s style, the script will start to lose clarity simply due to the fact that you’re making the reader read too much unimportant information. The reader has to “dig” to find the useful bits, resulting in reader exhaustion. Exhaustion leads to the brain shutting down, which leads to the reader unable to take in more information. If you’ve ever found yourself going back to re-read a page a third of a fourth time, this is usually what’s going on. And writers, if you’ve ever had a reader come back and say, “I didn’t understand why Danny attacked Lisa,” yet you explained exactly why Danny attacked Lisa on page 47, over-description is usually the culprit. You overloaded your reader with info and their brain shut down.

The second category of over-description is a bit more challenging. Unlike the first, where you can control the amount of description you add, some stories naturally require a lot of description. Sci-fi and fantasy scripts are notorious for needing large chunks of description due to the “world-building” the writer must do. There’s no way you can write The Matrix, for example, without spending a lot of time describing their ship, describing the “real world,” describing The Matrix itself. So whenever you write one of these screenplays, you’re already going in with a bit of a handicap. There’s not much you can do about it.

Exposition – Exposition is sort of the “dialogue-version” of description. These are the words your characters say to steer us through the story. Exposition can entail plot information as well as character information. “We need to be at the park by sundown or the world explodes” as well as “It turns out Diana lied to us. She isn’t from Rockford like she said she was.” The more exposition you have, the more complex your story reads. As you’re starting to realize, the more information (in the form of description or exposition) you throw at your reader, the harder it is for him/her to keep up.

Character Count – This one is self-explanatory, and yet one writers continue to ignore. The more characters you include, the more information you’re asking your reader to keep track of. More characters typically means more storylines (more subplots), which means even more for your reader to remember. I just told you screenwriting is about saying as much as you can in as few words as possible. Well, character count isn’t much different. Good writers tell their stories with the minimum amount of characters they can get away with. With that being said, every story has different character requirements (a movie about the White House is going to have more characters than a movie about two people trapped in an apartment) but you should be wary of including new characters UNLESS you believe the story needs them.

Intricate or Excessive Plotting – Are you writing a spy movie where characters are never who they seem? Are you writing a “Lost” like feature, with lots of twists and turns and reveals? Does your story go through a number of gestations, like Interstellar?  Are you weaving eight subplots in and out of your main plot?  The more plot (plot beats, plot points, twists, reveals, surprises) your script has, the harder it’s going to be for the reader to keep up. Yesterday’s script, The Munchkin, was a perfect example. Because the main character was chasing so many answers (the murder of one person, the disappearance of another, the mysterious person who hired him), the story started to suffocate under the weight of its own plot.

Sophisticated Story Presentation – Whenever you try and tell your story in a unique way, you’re adding a thick layer of complexity to it. 500 Days of Summer mashing up its timeline. Inception creating worlds inside of worlds inside of worlds. Memento telling its story backwards. Pulp Fiction telling its story out of order. To a lesser degree, even movies like The Notebook, which tells some of its story in the past and some in the present and Gone Girl, which tells its stories through different points of view, are sophisticated paradigms to tell stories in. These scripts tend to get noticed a lot and can be fun to write. But they do make your story harder to follow. Keep that in mind.

Here’s the thing with the five pillars. Using one or two is fine. It’s when you try and do three, four, even five, that you virtually ensure failure. Look at 500 Days of Summer. It has a sophisticated story presentation, but a low character count, minor description, manageable exposition, and a simple plot. The Matrix was high in exposition and description, had the right amount of characters for its genre, a straight-forward presentation, and a simple plot.

Good writers identify the degree of difficulty of their script before they write it and – if need be – game-plan for how to keep it easy to follow. I’d like to do the same for you guys. Now, if you’re writing a movie like John Wick or The Hangover, you don’t need to worry about this. But if you’re writing something more ambitious, pay attention.

Each pillar will represent a number value from 1-10. Take your script idea, and plug it into the Pillar equation. Be honest with yourself. No cheating. Assign a number value (10 for most complex, 1 for least) to each pillar as it pertains to your idea, then add all the numbers up. If you end up between 40-50, I wouldn’t write the script unless you’re extremely experienced. To be honest, I can only think of two movies that would score higher than 40 at the moment: 2001 and Cloud Atlas. So yeah, stay away from this. 30-40 is doable, but hard. Most professional screenwriters still wrestle with screenplays this complex. 20-30 is a nice place to be and where a lot of good Hollywood films operate. The Imitation Game, for example, is probably around a 30. 10-20 is where most mainstream Hollywood movies live. Being in this category does not mean a weak script by any means. Rocky is somewhere between 10-20. Nightcrawer is somewhere between 10-20. The Equalizer is between 10-20. Simple films can still be great. 0-10, however, is probably an indication that your script is too simple and actually needs  more complexity.

Here are a few sample movies to get a feel for the numbers…

The Hangover

Description: 2
Exposition: 3
Character Count: 3
Plotting: 6
Presentation: 4
Total: 18

Frozen

Description: 5
Exposition: 4
Character Count: 5
Plotting: 4
Presentation: 2
Total: 20

Memento

Description: 2
Exposition: 9
Character Count: 3
Plotting: 7
Presentation: 10
Total: 31

Guardians of the Galaxy

Description: 8
Exposition: 7
Character Count: 8
Plotting: 7
Presentation: 3
Total Score: 33

Pulp Fiction

Description: 4
Exposition: 6
Character Count: 7
Plotting: 9
Presentation: 10
Total Score: 36

Again, complexity is NOT an indication of quality. It’s an assessment of how difficult the routine is to pull off. The higher the number, the harder it’s going to be for you to convey your story to the reader. Pulling off bigger routines usually results in a more satisfying experience, but you run a higher risk of failing. So it’s a gamble.

Now, let’s say you don’t want to listen to me. You’re going to write a complex story no matter what. If you’re going to do this, simply look for ways to pare down the complexity of each pillar. So, for description, say in one sentence what it takes you to say in three. For exposition, focus only on the key points that need to be made. If Harry Potter’s hiding a wand in a tree, don’t have him say, “I hid Gobblestorf’s wand in the tree by the 3 Valleys – where Griffindill used to take us when we were in 2nd Year.” Say, “I hid the wand in our favorite tree.” Little changes like that can really make a script easier to follow (and read). For character count, there are usually one or two characters who are pointless in a script. Find out who those characters are in your script and get rid of them. Then combine a couple of others. For plotting, twists and double-crosses are great, but don’t depend on them. One awesome twist is better than three so-so ones. And finally, presentation. There’s nothing you can really do to change this since it’s embedded into the concept of the movie. But you can be aware that it makes your script harder to read. To that end, hold the reader’s hand more than you normally would. Reading an ambitious time-twisting narrative can be a little like walking into a fun house of mirrors. We need you to orient us from time to time.

And really, that’s the best advice I can give you. You don’t have to do all these number-adding things to know that your idea is ambitious. If that’s the case, just being aware of it puts you in front of the problem. You can guide the reader along rather than leaving them on an island with a blindfold and a Da Vinci Code codex. The writer-reader relationship is a symbiotic one. You need to work together to get to the finish line.