A quick Last Great Screenplay Contest Update here!
Genre: Sci-Fi Fantasy/Televsion
Premise: Mando and Baby Yoda must travel back to Tatooine in search of a fellow Mandalorian.
About: It’s baaaaaa-ack. The Mandalorian is back along with a fresh batch of rumors, the biggest of which is that Pedro Pascal, who plays The Mandalorian, left production midway through the season due to an ongoing dispute about not being able to show his face onscreen (the Mandalorian mythology states that you can never take off your helmet). It’s unclear what this means for the show but it, supposedly, altered some storylines in the second half of the season. We will have to see. I’m currently in a “mostly” Star Wars boycott (based on Wesley being “mostly” dead in The Princess Bride). Until they get rid of Kathleen Kennedy and get a real leader in there who understands the Star Wars universe, this is the only show I’m watching and I’m watching it with my arms crossed. Jon Favreau is directing a few of the episodes this season for the first time. He also wrote a ton of them.
Writer: Jon Favreau
Details: 56 minutes (longest episode yet!)
GSU has been coming up a lot lately in my consultations. Either the writer is asking me how it works or I’m suggesting how to utilize it better. It’s a common conversation piece when discussing screenplays. Well, this week’s episode of The Mandalorian taught me something. And that is that GSU is not a magic wand. You do not wave it over your unfinished document and all of a sudden it becomes great.
If anything, GSU is what makes your script OKAY. It’s there to give your screenplay a framework so that it works. It’s rare that GSU actually elevates a script into greatness. For that, you need a unique voice. Or you need a killer concept. Or you need some amazing plot twists that no one saw coming. Or you need an insane command of some major element of the craft – Hitchcock with suspense. GSU is a frame. It conveys to everyone, “This is a painting.” But you still have to paint the painting.
Mando is back at it again – trying to figure out what to do with Baby Yoda. I guess we’re extending that storyline out for two seasons then. That’s not going to cause repetition issues in the storytelling or anything
He hears of one mysterious Mandalorian hiding out on Tatooine so that’s where he goes. There he runs into a sheriff of a small town who’s wearing the Mandalorian armor (but is not a Mandalorian)! After a standoff, the sheriff tells Mando that he can have the armor if he helps him defeat a giant sand worm that’s terrorizing his town.
Mando agrees but explains they can’t do this alone. They’re going to need the help of some locals – SAND PEOPLE! Nobody on Tatooine likes sand people so there’s a lot of resistance. But they eventually form a temporary pact to kill this thing so they can all be happy. Spoiler alert – they succeed. And at the end of the episode, we see a man standing on a cliff watching. That man? Boba Fett.
First, let’s get to the obvious. This is a rerun. We had an episode early in the first season with the Jawas where they had to kill a giant bulldog lizard thing. We had an episode later in the season where they had to kill an AT-AT that was terrorizing a village. This is the same episode. I mean, what’s going on here? We’re not even 12 episodes into this show and we’re already repeating ourselves a second time?
This, if anything, is why they need to ditch this “villain of the week” format and start making the show serialized. Because there are only a set number of “missions” you can send your hero on. We need some nuanced story development. We need to get into these characters’ lives. Why make a Star Wars TV show if you’re just going to give us a series of mini-movies, all of which aren’t nearly as good as, you know, the ACTUAL MOVIES.
One of the reasons we’re not getting this expanded, epic type of storytelling is that the show is 99% told through one character’s POV. When you do that, it’s the very definition of non-epic. How can we get a sense of the biggest universe if we’re only ever seeing things through one character’s eyes? Look at Game of Thrones. We might cut to 7 different storylines in a single episode. Mando doesn’t do that which is why it’s being forced to repeat itself less than a dozen episodes in.
The funny thing is, this is exactly what feature films were made for. Since they’re only two hours long, you tend to want to tell the story through one character’s POV. You don’t have the time to bounce around to a lot of people. Yet Star Wars films have always bounced around. So in the movies, they’re doing the opposite of what they’re supposed to do and in the TV show they’re doing the opposite of what they’re supposed to do. Classic Star Wars.
Another thing I noticed was that Favreau has a strong case of genre blindspotting. This is when you love a genre so much that you lean into all its cliches without realizing it. Favreau is obsessed with Westerns. I’ve reviewed a Western script he wrote. He also directed Cowboys vs. Aliens. He loves the genre. When you’re obsessed with certain stories, it’s easy to fall into the habit of “I want to do that too.” So when you have two guys in a Western bar, you’re going to want to write that face-off showdown the way you’ve seen it in every other Western. Which is what happens between Mando and the Sheriff.
Now you may say, “C’mon Carson. It’s a Western. Those scenes are part of the language.” They are part of the language. But that doesn’t mean you can lazily script exact replicas of scenes we’ve already seen a million times. My rule with genre blindspotting is two-fold. One, limit the number of cliche moments as much as possible. If you want to throw a couple of tropes in your script that you’ve seen in other Westerns, be my guest. But if you do that three or four times in a single episode/movie, I promise you, your script will be labeled cliche.
Two, always look for a way to twist the cliche. It should never go down exactly as expected. In fact, one of the biggest advantages of using cliches is that the audience believes they already know what’s going to happen. You can use that expectation against them. A good example of this is the bar scene in the Cohen Brothers’ Ballad of Buster Scruggs. Between Buster’s small stature, laid back demeanor, propensity to talk a lot, and lack of a gun, the showdown between him and the other cowboy plays out anything but predictably.
If you made a list of all the things that I didn’t like in screenwriting, somewhere in the top 5 would be a script that goes exactly how you thought it would. That is the WORST. Cause it exposes you as a storyteller. You either a) don’t know what you’re doing. Or b) are so effing lazy that you’re not willing to do the hard work and find better options to all your story choices. Literally an 8 year old could’ve told you exactly what was going to happen in every minute of this episode. That’s how obvious it was.
So to say I’m frustrated would be correct. To say I’m surprised? Not really. Outside of Baby Yoda, Mandalorian has kept things so vanilla and so predictable that spotting an original plot point is akin to spotting John Boyega at Rian Johnson’s birthday party.
I’m not mad, though. Star Wars is facing much bigger questions, such as what it’s going to do with its movie division. They literally have zero plans going forward. Until they let us know what their next trilogy is going to be, we might as well all be stuck in the Sarlac Pitt, as my Star Wars fandom feels like it’s being slowly digested over a thousand years.
I’m not against setting a trilogy in the New Republic Era (200-300 years before the Prequels). Anything that forces writers to be creative and come up with new stories and new characters – I’d love that. But, honestly, I think Kennedy is so scared to make a decision right now that I wouldn’t be surprised if we didn’t get a feature Star Wars announcement for a couple of years. Which means I’m stuck with 700 more “creature of the week” Mandalorian episodes. Yay.
[ ] What the hell did I just watch?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the stream
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Tension comes from uncertainty. It comes from us not knowing what’s going to happen next. Is there a single person in the universe who didn’t know, when Mandalorian and the Sheriff squared off at the bar, that nothing bad was going to happen to either? If you don’t have genuine uncertainty in a situation, it’s extremely difficult to create tension.
What’s that old saying? Fool me once, shame on me? Fool me twice, shame on Carson? Well, I know I promised you that I would be done reading all the Last Great Screenplay Contest entries by today but I’m not done reading all the entries today. I’m trying. As soon as I finish putting up this post, I’m going back in to read more entries. My new finish date is November 15th! Hang tight and thank all of you for your patience!!!!!
After reading Silo, I realized how important it is to create a unique horror concept. I read horror concepts all year long. Unending numbers of horror loglines. And my thoughts are always the same – I’ve seen this already! Usually, multiple times! So when someone comes up with a unique horror idea, it stands out simply due to the fact that it happens so rarely.
While it’s easy to say, “Just give us an idea we haven’t seen before,” the reality is that coming up with an original idea is HARD. So today I’m going to give you some tips on how to stay fresh while writing in screenwriting’s most cliched genre – Horror. There are four main areas you want to focus on. If you come up with a unique option for ANY ONE OF THESE FOUR THINGS, that should be enough to differentiate your horror script from others. But if you can incorporate two or more of these variables, you should have something extremely unique.
1 – LOCATION – Where you set your horror script is going to help set your horror idea apart. If you’re setting a horror story in a house, you are in trouble. Houses aren’t original. Yesterday’s script, Silo, had a unique location. An abandoned missile silo! You’re not picking a unique location just to stand out in your logline. You’re doing it because unique locations lead to unique stories. Most houses are the same so there are only so many original things you can do inside of them. But a missile silo? With a radiation leak? That gives you story options galore. One of the best movies I saw this year was The Platform. Talk about a location – two people on a mysterious platform with half-eaten food that comes down every day. Another thing to keep in mind with location is that you want your heroes to be stuck there. The easier it is for them to walk away, the less tension there will be in the story.
2 – MONSTER – This should be obvious. But the more original your monster is, the more your horror concept will stand out. Yes, a unique mask for your monster will help. But I don’t know a single mask that hasn’t already been used in a horror film at this point. Something that gestates inside of you then bursts out of your chest (Alien) is a high quality unique monster. But monsters can be anything. In It Follows, the monster keeps taking the form of whoever is currently cursed. The Quiet Place monster had large ears since it needed great hearing to track its prey. Get creative. If it’s a ghost, come up with a new kind of ghost. If it’s a vampire, come up with a new kind of vampire. If it’s a scarecrow or a clown, you’re not trying very hard.
3 – CHARACTERS – It should come as no surprise that the characters at the heart of your story are paramount to making your horror script work. So try to construct a character we haven’t seen before. A mother who resents her special needs child (The Babadook). An author’s unhinged superfan (Annie Wilkes in Misery). A split-personality motel owner (Pyscho). A child who sees ghosts nobody else can see (Sixth Sense). I want you to think less about the physical (a character in a wheelchair – although that can work) and more about the psychological. A 150+ year old man in a little girl’s body (Let The Right One In) is an extremely unique character.
4) TIME – When you set your horror movie has a significant effect on how it will play to readers. A haunted house in 2020 is different from a haunted house in 1980 is different from a haunted house in 1870 is different from a haunted house in the 1500s. Setting a horror movie during World War 2 will play differently than setting a horror movie during the Bubonic Plague. If you just move down the timeline, you can find an endless number of eras that would make for interesting horror movies. The concept of time can be played with as well. We could have ourselves a loop movie (Happy Death Day). We could have a real-time horror movie. Lots of options available to you.
Once you have all these things, try to tie as many of them as possible to the situation in your story. For example, look at Get Out. If the girlfriend had brought home a white boyfriend, the family and community still could’ve been crazy and tried to sacrifice him in some weirdo climax. But by making the boyfriend black and the community white, it created a more interesting logline whereby it felt like, because of his skin color, the boyfriend was going into a potentially dangerous situation. It makes the logline sexier, which is what you’re looking for with horror concepts.
And, finally, in horror narratives, you start with a problem. Your heroes are living their lives and then this thing – usually a bad thing – arrives, and the movie becomes about solving this problem. In Poltergeist, the family buys a new house. Everything is wonderful. And then the TV takes their daughter. That is the “Problem.” Now how do you solve it? Trying to solve it becomes the goal (goal!) Preferably, the stakes are high (stakes!) and time is short (urgency!). There will be many obstacles along the way (the house starts attacking the other occupants!). If you’ve written strong characters, we’ll want to see them overcome all those obstacles and achieve the goal in the end. Easy peasy, right? Now get to writing!
Well this script sure turned out to be bat#$@% bananas. Get ready for adult fetus mayhem!
Genre: Horror
Premise: A team of military personnel are sent to inspect an abandoned missile silo after a diseased old man emerges from it.
About: S. Craig Zahler! The man. The myth. Zahler’s magnus opus Brigands of Rattleborge is STILL in my top 5. They keep saying they’re going to make it yet it still hasn’t been made. One of these days. I’m not sure when Zahler wrote Silo but I’m surprised nobody’s jumped on it. It’s one of his most marketable ideas. AND it’s actually original. When does that ever happen with horror scripts? I have a feeling this review will renew interest in the script.
Writer: S. Craig Zahler
Details: 112 pages
The other day I decided to celebrate Halloween Candy Week by buying one of those big square packs of single-dose Reeses Peanut Butter Cups. I’m watching the Bears game and I eat one. And then I eat two. And that leads to me eating three and four. Once I get to four, I’m like, why would I stop? At this point I’m covered in a myriad of orange wrappers, brown chocolate holders, and those white cardboard pieces that give the wrapper structure. It was in that moment that I had an out of body experience whereby I looked down at myself covered in this shameful mess of corn syrup debauchery and thought… Why didn’t I buy two of these??
Reeses are the “Dale” of Halloween candy. All other candies can only hope for a few seconds of attention. Sorry if you didn’t get that reference. I promise you it was funny.
Robert Linderman is a 30-something psychiatrist working for the military. He gets a visit from a couple of higher-ups who take him to meet fellow military personnel, Kirstin, Bodell, and Tyler. These three specialize in decommissioning missile silos that the U.S. military doesn’t need anymore. They’re charged with going to silos, taking out the warheads, and closing the place up for good.
Well, this latest job is going to be different. A few days ago, an old man who appeared to be heavily diseased, attacked a woman at a truck stop. That man, it turns out, was thought dead 30 years ago. They’ve traced him back to working at an old missile silo. But here’s the spooky part. The military doesn’t have any records of this silo. Fearing that it might still have active warheads, the team’s mission is to go in there, make sure there’s no one else, and retrieve any warheads.
They’ll be accompanied by Captain Gonnersnson, a man they will later find out is an absolute psycho who shouldn’t be in charge of anything. They head to the silo, go inside, but are immediately met with a wall that’s been welded closed with all sorts of random junk. Whatever’s going on in this silo, it looks like someone (the military??) made sure it could never get out.
The team go down several staircases and hallways until they finally reach the main room. It’s there where they find the first bodies. Mostly military people who have committed suicide. Except for one room where a naked woman has been hanged and, below her, 5 men have been laid out, naked from the waist down, and shot dead. Above the woman’s head, someone’s written, “Traitor.”
The next room they check, there are three old men. Who are alive! They come at our group, trying to grab at them. Our team shoots them dead. Yay for guns. The guys begin to put together the puzzle. Some sort of radiation leak happened here 30 years ago. Instead of exposing the story, the military decided to lock everyone in here and wait for them to die. Except they didn’t die. All of this resulted in something unheard of. Twin fetuses… that grew into a psychotic adult fetus coupling. Try that on at your next Halloween party!
You know you’re reading an S. Craig Zahler script when you encounter the line, “We found the skull of a rat in his feces.”
First, I want to commend Zahler on a cool idea. How many zombie scripts have you read that felt, oh, I don’t know, just like all the other zombie scripts you read!? A lot, right? Silo goes to show that if you can come up with an interesting location (a missile silo), even if it’s in a familiar genre, you can give people something they’ve never seen before.
Zahler isn’t afraid to take chances in his execution either. Once we got deeper into the silo, we started hearing voices. Voices that only some of the characters were able to hear. I was thinking, “Aren’t we getting off track here? Let’s stick with the genre we’ve set up.” But then I remembered, this is EXACTLY what you need to do to stand out in a popular genre. You have to take chances. Do weird stuff. That’s why Hereditary was a hit with so many people.
But Zahler’s got Ari Aster beat on the weirdo front. He creates a fetus that has, assumingly, continued to grow even after it was out of the body, due to all the radiation madness in the silo. This created an adult fetus (that’s actually twins and still talks like a child) that was running the silo. I mean… not to say ‘mic drop,’ but Ari? You better bring the crazy in your next movie if you want to stay on Zahler’s level.
Another thing I like about Zahler is that he’s not afraid to build up to something. A lot of writers get impatient in this genre. They feel like they need to hit you with a big scare every few pages. If they don’t, you’ll stop reading. Zahler doesn’t have that worry. He’ll take his time getting to a set piece. He’s able to do this for a couple of reasons. One, there’s a sophistication to his writing that makes you trust him. I’ve read a lot of unsophisticated writing and if a writer can’t even make a sentence work, why would I assume that if I stick around fifteen more pages, he’s going to make something interesting happen?
And two, he knows how to build to a moment. Characters are active and moving towards the next goal at all times. We’re getting little clues (a bunch of large furless rats) that something is amiss. Each time we go down a new hallway, it gets a little darker. Every time we go down a new stairway, we hear another strange sound. There’s purpose to Zahler’s sequences that let you know, at the end of the sequence, you’ll be rewarded. If you can do it this way, do it this way. It’s much better than throwing an endless array of scares at the reader. It’s only a matter of time before that scare-a-minute approach stops having an effect.
But the truth is, this is just a cool idea. My feeling with cool ideas is that they do a lot of the work for you. Which means lots of writers could’ve made this work. Zahler’s just got that extra crazy gear he can go to. I’m still not sure what I think about grown twin fetus guys. That may have been a bridge too far for moi. But I’m not telling you it isn’t original. That’s for sure.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[x] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Let me tell you the one particularly genius angle Zahler came up with that got me: The military wasn’t aware of this missile silo. I thought that was so cool! 99 out of 100 writers would’ve had the military aware of it. By making it unknown to the military itself, it made the mystery of what this place was that much deeper, that much cooler. Always be looking for that one extra angle that elevates your idea. This was it for me.
Genre: Horror
Premise: Three women attempt to climb a dangerous mountain only to learn that a giant of a man hunts anyone on the mountain down.
About: This rare script was written all the way back in 1975. John Carpenter was writing the script for Bob Clark, who directed, “Black Christmas.” Clark was skittish about doing another horror film so, as the legend goes, “Prey” became a spiritual prequel of ideas for what would later become Carpenter’s most famous work, Halloween.
Writer: John Carpenter and James Nichols
Details: 97 pages
Old horror movies are funny.
Recently, I re-watched Phantasm. That movie haunted my dreams when I was younger. So I was curious to see how it would affect me today. Haunt me it did not. Instead, I got caught up in how ridiculous the plotting was.
It was a reminder that tons of horror movies in the 80s didn’t care about an overarching narrative. All they cared about was piecing together scenes in such a way that they got the movie to the next big scare.
For example, there was this ridiculous subplot where the hero’s younger brother is obsessed with him. “I don’t know what’s wrong with him,” the hero says to a friend. “He just follows me around.” And then we literally cut to the little brother chasing his brother throughout the neighborhood. Like, his big brother is driving a car and the kid runs after him, for miles at a time, to wherever he goes, lol.
I realized this was the “writer’s” way of getting the younger brother around all the scares. Because if he wasn’t following his brother around, he couldn’t encounter all the horror. All I I could think was, “Why not just come up with a separate storyline and give him his own objectives?” I guess writers didn’t think like that back then.
Anyway, John Carpenter is a cut above whoever wrote Phantasm. So I’m not expecting the plotting to be that bad. But who knows? This is a 40+ year old script!
Newswoman Elaine Macavie, archer Rose Helm, and obsessive jogger Kathy Briggs, are going to attempt something that’s never been done before. They’re going to climb Mount Tobias in 72 hours. How badass is this girl crew? They’ll be the first women to climb the mountain PERIOD.
The locals don’t like it, though. They warn the girls that up there on that mountain, strange things happen. But our crew shrugs them off, thinking they’re climb-shaming them cause they’re women. After they get an okay from the local sheriff, off they go!
Meanwhile, we cross-cut to some giant man lugging a huge log through the forest. He uses the log as a bridge whenever he encounters big drops he has to cross over. This guy is ginormous, almost 7 feet tall. On the very first night, the girls see him deep in the forest. Or they see someone. A second later and he’s gone.
As they get higher up, Kathy stumbles upon an old civil war canteen. That’s never good. The three have fun with trying to figure out its origins but you can tell they’re starting to have second thoughts about climbing this mountain. And they should. Because late at night our 7 foot log-puller, Otis, and his father, a gray-bearded man named Swain, capture the girls while they’re sleeping by simply zipping up their sleeping bags all the way (so they’re stuck in there) and throwing them over their shoulders. Like logs!
That can only mean one thing. Especially since this was written in 1975. Yup. A Texas Chainsaw Massacre situation. Once the girls are safely tied up in Otis and Swain’s remote cabin, a grandma lady comes up and explains that the Civil War killed off all their women, see. So they don’t have any way to breed. Which means these three ladies will be doing the breeding!
They’re all like, “no thank you,” but Otis and Swain and Grandma don’t seem to be taking no for an answer. Still, an escape attempt is made that Rose doesn’t survive. Elaine and Kathy are thrust back onto a mountain they don’t understand and must outwit their pursuers, who have lived on this mountain their whole lives.
The best part of this script was originally thinking, “Wow, this is such a current script! We’re following three women who are trying to climb a mountain together. This is so timely, I could totally see someone buying this tomorrow!”
And thennnnnnnnn…. Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2. Once you have Old Man Swain ripping womens’ clothes off to rape them, there goes your 2020 buying potential.
To me, this is a lesson in influences-of-the-time and how they can negatively impact your story choices. Texas Chainsaw Massacre had come out a year prior to this. Deliverance had come out a couple of years prior. What that did was majorly influence Carpenter and Nichols to make story choices similar to those films. As a result, something that had a lot of promise at the start turned into something cliche and not very interesting. It’s a good reminder to not use story choices from recent films. Find your own choices.
Another reason this lost 2020 street cred was that, while it had an all-female cast, the character work on that cast was weak. Not a single woman had anything going on outside of this mountain trek. Nobody talked about anything other than plot points (“How much further?” “There’s supposed to be a tree up this way.”).
When readers give you the criticism that your script has no character development, this is what they mean. If characters only have the plot to talk about, you’re going to have a really bored reader. We only connect with stories when we get inside the heads of the characters on some level. We have to know things about them, preferably things that they’re struggling with in life. We want to know what’s holding them back from overcoming those things. And we want the journey to test that part of them so that, by overcoming those obstacles, they can finally overcome the obstacles holding them back in their day-to-day real lives.
You may have heard me say, characters sitting in a room talking about their problems is boring. Which is true. However, when your characters are physically on the move, you can give them some of these same conversations and they’ll work. That’s because at least one of the two lines of progression is being met – the physical line. They’re physically moving forward towards the top of the mountain. So readers don’t mind character-based dialogue during that time.
But when you don’t do the research of your characters’ lives, you won’t know how to write those conversations because your characters’ backstories are invisible to you. How can a character explain the frustrations she’s having trying to get a promotion at work if you don’t even know what she does for work?
And it’s not like Carpenter doesn’t have the capacity to achieve these things. Check out how he describes two women in a cafe during breakfast. “At the counter sit CADY and PRICE, two locals. They are both middleaged with the peculiar kind of hostility that pervades the consciousness of mountain people.” I know EXACTLY who he’s talking about. I know I’m dealing with a good writer when they can describe someone perfectly. And the description of these two was downright perfect. But he didn’t put that same thought into our three leads for some reason.
Despite that, I loved how much SHOWING as opposed to TELLING was going on in the first 20 pages. In that first act, there’s a lot of meeting people while they’re doing things. Nobody’s standing around talking. If someone’s talking, it’s because they need something. That ‘show don’t tell’ skill probably comes from his directing. He knows that characters standing around talking is death. Still, he put SO MUCH focus on it early on, and it was so effective in creating a mood, that I’m reinvigorated for showing. It’s so much more powerful than telling.
It’s too bad this script went south so fast. I think if these women would’ve gotten picked off one by one and the final girl had to outwit and defeat the bad guys, I would’ve liked it a lot better.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: John Carpenter once said, “To make Michael Myers frightening, I had him walk like a man, not a monster.” In our eternal struggle to create memorable monsters and villains in our horror script, we try to come up with all these gadgets and overtly creepy things to shape them. When, sometimes (not all the time, but sometimes), the scariest thing is for the monster to be as human as possible.
