Genre: Comedy (Stoner)
Premise: After accidentally losing her company’s mascot, an uptight junior food scientist reluctantly enlists the help of her pothead building superintendent and together they battle against a relentless vermin exterminator to recover the missing ferret before her career goes up in smoke.
Why You Should Read: With marijuana being legalized all over the place, it’s a topical subject, plus it has a fresh twist with the ferret angle. Stoners and ferrets go together like macaroni and cheese! I’ve directed several short films featuring ferrets, including a short called DUDE, WHERE’S MY FERRET? that is meant as a teaser for the feature version, featuring Bubbles from The Trailer Park Boys. I also directed THE MAGIC FERRET, which was Jacob Tremblay’s (Room) first leading role. I like working with ferrets because it’s something different than what most people are used to seeing – and I know something about them because I have one as a pet (used to have two, R.I.P. Falcor the Ferret). I think this is a great recipe for a stoner comedy – but we need some help to get it to where it needs to be. I say ‘we’ because I’m the director but not the writer – I found someone to write this for me while I learn the craft. We could highly benefit from a review by Carson and our peers. I’m smishsmosh22 and promise to participate in the comments if we get chosen!
Writer: Tim McS
Details: 93 pages

Dude, where’s my ferret?

It’s fun to say, right? Go ahead, try and say it without smiling.

Like a talking ferret, it’s impossible.

Unless, of course, you believe in talking ferrets. And in that case, you’ll like this script. In fact, one of the first things you’ll realize when reading today’s script is that Tim McS really likes ferrets. No, I mean like really really really likes ferrets. And while we’ve always supported the mantra, “Write what you know,” at what point has that philosophy gone too far???

26 year old Laura Frye is a junior food scientist. That means she designs food to taste better, last longer, or look more interesting. And her latest project is improving the lifespan of a pet food company’s ferret food line. As you might imagine, the CEO of the company, Peterson, is none too pleased with this development. The faster ferret food goes bad, the sooner the customer has to buy more ferret food. So Laura’s invention will lose the company money.

After dropping a couple dozen F-bombs on her, Peterson punishes Laura by assigning her to watch the company ferret (lovingly named “Ferret Bueller”) for the evening and bring him to his big ad photoshoot tomorrow. Ironically, Laura doesn’t even like ferrets. But she waltzes back to her apartment with the ferret and somehow ends up in 25 year-old All-Star stoners, Spoke and Noodle’s apartment.

After accidentally eating their pot cookies, Laura inadvertently lets Ferret Bueller loose. With her job on the line, Laura desperately enlists the help of Spoke and Noodle to find Ferret Bueller, who has since crawled into the walls and is running around the insides of the apartment complex.

Laura and Spoke team up, following the screams from apartment to apartment, while Noodle heads down to the basement, which he seems to think is the best place to find stray animals.

I should mention that Noodle lost his memory in a terrible accident years ago and has no idea who he is. So, of course, he starts seeing hallucinations of Ferret Bueller, who begins talking to him, revealing pieces of his past, from which he finally starts putting together his identity.

Meanwhile, unlikely sparks are flying between Spoke and Laura. She’s educated, driven, and organized. He’s jobless, dumb, and addicted to pot. But if you’re both high, none of that matters. And you can never predict how the search for an elongated rat-animal-thing can bring two people closer. But will they capture that little minx before it’s too late? Dude, read the script to find out!

Hey, I got a joke for you. How did one ferret receive money from another ferret? He inferrited it.

Haha. You get it?

Right.

Anyway, Dude Where’s My Ferret is a surprisingly well-constructed screenplay considering the subject matter. Typically when I read these kinds of wacky comedies, there is zero effort or even understanding of how to add structure to the story. The scripts are usually a series of loosely-connected sketches.

We’ve got some great GSU here (goal, stakes, urgency). Goal – find the ferret. Stakes – Laura’s job. Urgency – the photo shoot. So we’re always clear on what needs to happen and where we are in the story. That’s important. A lot of writers don’t know how to do that, causing their scripts to wander.

It’s a clever little plot too. The fact that we get to chase the ferret through the building allows us to go into the apartments of a varied cast of characters. It was basically a license to go crazy with character, and as anyone who writes comedy knows, crazy/weird/outrageous characters are key. Melissa McCarthy’s character in Bridesmaid’s. Mr. Chow in The Hangover.

I also liked the technologically sophisticated pest exterminator. An exterminator who uses drones to search for his prey – I’d never seen that before. But more importantly, McS was employing a classic storytelling technique. Figure out what your main character wants, then put as many obstacles in front of that “want” as you can. The more creative the obstacle, the better.

So with all this good, why didn’t I love Dude, Where’s My Ferret? Well, to put it plainly, I thought the comedy was too standard. One of my big red flags when it comes to comedy is excessive swearing. It’s not that swearing can’t be funny. With the right character, it can be hilarious. But usually it’s a sign of the writer not being creative enough. A guy who swears a lot (in this case, Peterson, who says “fuck” every other word) tells me, “I’m not willing to put in the effort to come up with genuine thoughtful comedy.”

I mean look at one of the movies this was inspired by – Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. Hilarious movie. Not a single swear word.

If it’s an organic part of the character (for instance, the character has Tourette’s), that’s fine. Otherwise, it’s a signal that you may be reading something where the comedy’s not going to rise above “swearing is funny” level.

Another issue with the comedy here is that it feels dated. These stoner characters could’ve been transplanted right out of a 1980s film. They talk, sound, and act exactly the same as the characters from those movies used to sound.

It’s fine to be inspired by movies from your past. But the difference between creating a movie that’s inspired by old films and movies that feel plain old is taking what worked in those old films then ADDING SOMETHING NEW.

Where’s the “new” in Spoke and Noodle? How have you made their stoner schtick different from past stoner schticks? I’ll give you an example – the movie, “Friday.” That was a movie about potheads, but told in a completely different cultural setting from where we were used to seeing potheads.

So all the spaced-out jokes were crammed up against new environments and fresh problems. In the past when a stoner got high, he ate cereal. In Friday when Ice Cube got high, he ate cereal with water cause they were too poor to buy milk.

That’s what I mean by fresh, and it’s something I discuss here all the time. It doesn’t stop with comedy. You have to ask yourself, “What am I bringing that’s new to the table?” I’m guessing McS would say that the ferret is the new element. But typically the “fresh” component has to be represented by the characters somehow, and that’s not happening here. These characters are exact replicas of 1980s stoner movie characters.

That’s why I read this with an occasional smile, but never laughed out loud (okay, that’s not entirely true. I did laugh at them trying to figure out if the exterminator was actually an “ex-Terminator”).

So moving forward, my suggestion to McS would be to add fresh angles to both Spoke and Noodle to bring them into the year 2016. I don’t know if you need to change their culture, their race, their ages, their sexual preference, but it has to be something. 25 year old white stoners is the most “first choice” of choices a writer can make, and therefore shows a lack of creativity.

Next, push yourself with the comedy. A lot of these jokes feel safe, and a bit dated to be honest. Again, it seems like you’re writing a comedy spec from the year 1988. You’ve got to modernize this somehow. Make it feel current. Or else I’m afraid people are going to label you with the dreaded “dated” tag like I just did.

With that said, losing a ferret in a building is funny. And while I’m not the biggest fan of stoner comedies, this is a prime situation to add pot to. So I think you have a foundation to build on. Oh, and I agree with that commenter who said you should change your title. You don’t want to use a variation of a mildly successful 10 year old movie title. Distinguish yourself. Show that you’re original by coming up with an original title. Good luck!

Script link: Dude, Where’s My Ferret

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

What I learned: One of the best ways to avoid cliche characters is to ask yourself, “What kind of person would never be this cliche?” What this does is it places you on the other end of the spectrum as far as stereotyping, opening up new avenues to create unique characters. Stoners are one of the most cliche character-types out there. So ask yourself, “What kind of person is never a stoner?” A businessman with his shit together. An intensely religious person. A police officer. You don’t have to choose any of these but they’re great starting points for going against the grain and coming up with somebody original.

What happens when you switch a whole lot of shit around in a great script? Today’s script-to-screen breakdown tells you!

Genre: Contained Thriller/Sci-fi
Premise: (IMDB) After getting in a car accident, a woman is held in a shelter with two men, who claim the outside world is affected by a widespread chemical attack.
About: This movie has had a weird journey. It started as a spec script unrelated to the Cloverfield franchise. You can check out my review of that script here. Then Bad Robot bought it and decided to turn it into a Cloverfield thing. The film came out this past weekend and did really well for a contained thriller, pulling in 25 million dollars off of a 15 million dollar budget. For comparison’s sake, the new Sascha Baron Cohen film pulled in 3 million dollars on a 60 million dollar budget (I’m sensing a Borat sequel very soon). The film’s success also hinted at a new avenue for screenwriters – writing specs that you can sneak into existing franchises.
Details: 103 minutes
Writers: Josh Campbell & Matthew Stuecken and Damien Chapelle

Cloverfield Lane has to be one of the strangest script-to-screens I’ve done so far. That’s because the writers changed a whole shitload of little things despite the fact that they didn’t have to. Nothing was wrong with the previous script. And yet despite all these changes, the movie still worked. In fact, BOTH versions of the screenplay worked great.

This goes to show that when you have a good premise or a good setup, it’s hard to screw things up. Sort of like how if you have good bone structure, it doesn’t matter if you grow a beard or have a strange haircut. What’s underneath is so structurally sound that you’re still going to look good regardless. This doesn’t even get into the final 20 minutes of the film, which I’ll be spoiling later in the review (You’ve had your warning!). So let’s get into it.

For those who didn’t read my previous review or see the movie, here’s a quick breakdown of the plot. A young woman, Michelle, wakes up in a room, chained to the wall, with no idea of how she got there. Eventually, Howard, an older large man and the owner of this place, comes in and tells Michelle that he saved her life.

He proceeds to tell her that they’re in an underground bunker and that the United States has been attacked by some sort of chemical weapon, which means they’re stuck here for two years. Also living in the bunker is the young man who helped Howard build it, Emmett. Michelle has her doubts that any of what Howard has told her is true and begins plotting her escape. But as the old saying goes, “Be careful what you wish for.”

Right away you noticed differences between the script and the movie. First off, instead of starting with Michelle waking up in the room, they start with her in the real world – first at home, then driving her car, then getting hit by another car and crashing.

I was shocked to see this. One of the most intriguing things about the original script was that we didn’t know if anything Howard was telling Michelle was real. He’d say he found her in a car, but both she and we were wondering, “Did he?” Here, we know he’s telling the truth since we saw it with our own eyes. This stole a lot of the mystery away from the script, and I’m still not sure why they did it.

I know that sometimes when a production is given more money (as is the case when you go from a contained no-budget thriller to a Cloverfield film), they feel like they have to use it somewhere, and therefore stick in some high-production-value shots at the opening of the film to show you, “This is a big movie.”

They made the exact same mistake with Source Code. It was critical in that film that we wake up with the main character in a train with no idea where we were or how we got there. Instead, they had some costly opening crane/drone shots of a train shooting down the tracks. Sometimes, less money can be better, as it means less temptation.

Anyway, once we’re in the room, waking up with Michelle, I noticed we were drawing this scene out way longer than in the original script. In the original script, Michelle wakes up, and a minute later this guy comes in, she attacks him, fails, and he tells her, “I’m here to help you!” Here, we stay with Michelle for awhile as she tries to figure out how to get out of the room.

I can understand this choice better. You’re in a contained location. It’s easy for things to become boring. You want to draw out any potential suspenseful situation you can. A girl waking up in a room without any idea of how she got there is inherently suspenseful, so I liked that we stayed with her for awhile as she tried to solve the problem.

Next up is Howard. In the original script, Howard has a meekness about him. In the new version, he’s much more dangerous. He has more of a “you need to walk around on eggshells around him” quality. It was an interesting choice because it definitely made the character more powerful. But one of the strengths of the previous version of the character was that even though he was meek, you had the sense that he could become dangerous at any moment. And we were always waiting for that dangerous moment to arrive.

Here, we know Howard is capable of being horrible from the get-go and it takes some of that mystery away. I’m still not sure how I feel about it. On the surface, he’s a more memorable character. But the other incarnation may have been better for the overall story.

Then there’s Emmett. Poor Emmett. Emmett was this cool dangerous unpredictable character in the last script. Here he’s a boring nice guy. If you’re like me, you’re probably wondering, “Why did they do that???” I’ll tell you exactly why. Once they changed Howard’s character into a more surface-level badass, he became too close in tone to Emmett. So they had to change Emmett’s character to complement him. Unfortunately, Emmett’s fate as an interesting character was sealed.

This felt to me like a “ran out of time” choice. Emmett is the third most important character in the script, and therefore the one that they’re not going to worry about until they have Howard and Michelle figured out. Once that happened, the obvious choice to complement Howard was to go “nice.” With more time, I’m sure they would’ve tweaked this, made Emmett nice-but-with-an-edge. But hey, it’s hard to be perfect in any screenplay.

A result of this choice was that there’s no longer an “Are they collaborating?” element to Howard and Emmett’s storyline. That was one of the strongest parts of the previous script so I’m surprised they removed that. However, someone pointed out in the comments of my previous review that there’s a famous play and/or short story that sets up this exact same premise, so I’m wondering if they dropped that simply to avoid a potential lawsuit. Man, writing screenplays is complicated!

Finally, there’s Michelle. They definitely improved this character, making her much more active. From the very first scene, she’s using tools to create an elaborate hook to drag her phone towards her while chained to the wall. Later she’s using liquor to create fires to force Howard to take her out of the room. She’s always thinking, always trying to escape. It wasn’t like she was passive in the last script. But she’s aggressively active here, and that has a huge effect on how we view her. It’s nearly impossible to dislike a character who’s in a bad situation yet won’t stop fighting. So that was another smart choice.

Finally, there’s the ending. This is spoiler territory and I’m not even sure it’s worth discussing, to be honest. Basically, the last 20 minutes of this movie became a completely different genre, which is totally bizarre. Now I knew this was coming, so it’s hard to gauge how successful the choice was. But I’m curious what people who had no idea what to expect thought when, all of a sudden, our main character is fighting aliens and spaceships. It’s a really weird way to end the movie.

But I have to admit, the nerdy side of me was desperately trying to figure out how this linked up with the original Cloverfield. In that movie, we had a giant monster. Here we have a fucking spaceship. What does that mean?? I want more Cloverfield movies to find out! I’m actually surprised that they still haven’t created a direct sequel to that surprise hit.

Anyway, like I said, this setup was so strong that the execution was malleable to the point where several hundred choices could’ve worked. So besides the lesson I’m about to teach you below, the takeaway here is: come up with a concept with strong bones.

[ ] what the hell did I just watch?

[ ] wasn’t for me 

[ ] worth the price of admission 

[x] impressive

[ ] genius

What I learned: Today we’re going to talk about the concept of EXPANDING. Expanding is something you’ll do between drafts. It’s the process by which you look for potentially dramatic situations within your scenes to create new “mini” or full scenes from. The final draft of Cloverfield Lane did a lot of expanding. For example, in the spec script, Michelle wakes up in that room, hears someone coming, and prepares to hit him. The writers of the script expanded this for the final cut. They decided that the first thing Michelle would try to do was call someone. But her phone was all the way across the room in her bag and she was chained to the wall. So Michelle has to use the objects around her to construct a pole which she then uses to reach across and pull the bag towards her, all with the threat of that man potentially coming in at any moment. There are expandable scenes everywhere. You just have to look for them.

Congrats to Paul Schellens! Who yesterday won the “Introductory Character Scene” Contest. Really good scene – did everything I asked for. Was even clever enough to use a scene I’d previously suggested, which always gets you points. :) Nice job, Paul!

Genre: Horror, Thriller
Premise: After accepting a gig to craft a demon mask, a makeup effects artist must protect her and her daughter from her abusive husband and the sinister forces that stalk them.
Why You Should Read: I’m not a mother but I want to be (eventually). I also want to be a paid screenwriter, proficient Japanese speaker, dog owner and in another life, Cirque du Soleil performer. What most people know (especially in this industry), is it’s really hard to find balance and sometimes you must sacrifice something to get your heart’s desire.
Besides that idea, I wanted to pair movie horror with the real horror of domestic violence. I researched, googled and trolled forums to craft my story. It wasn’t until after a reading when a woman approached me that I realized I was telling her story. It hurt to hear her share her accounts of abuse that she’d mostly kept to herself. I hope if anything this story inspires people to take control of their own lives.
Details: 103 pages (updated draft from last week)

Let’s get Emily Blunt in here for this one!

Guys, I’ve been doing this for awhile now. So please stop. Stop trying to game the system. It’s not just a bad idea here at Scriptshadow. It’s a bad idea for your pursuit of success in this business. If your script didn’t get the requisite number of votes to win a review, read the comments and figure out what the problems were. This is one of the only places on the internet where you can do that. So take advantage of it.

I love self-promotion. It’s a huge under-talked-about element of this business. But self-promotion cannot prop up subpar writing. You have to get the writing part down before you blitz the world with your work. But how do you know when you’re ready, you ask. That’s a bit harder to determine. But Scriptshadow is a great place to start. If legitimate people aren’t voting for your script and if those same people are agreeing on common issues, accept that you have some work to do and then go get the work done. There are no shortcuts here. So stop trying to create them.

Okay, I don’t want to take away the spotlight from the true winner the week, Devil’s Workshop, so let’s get to it! Note that I’m reading a newer draft than the one you guys read, I’m guessing because Katherine incorporated a few of your suggestions.

Serena Berkin is in an abusive relationship in every sense of the word. At the center of the abuse is her husband’s, Isaac, desire to have a child, something Serena has been secretly preventing by taking birth control pills.

But when Isaac discovers her secret, he eliminates that problem and the two end up having a daughter. Flash forward nine years where the bulk of our story takes place. Serena is now a struggling make-up artist secretly using the money she makes from jobs to save up so she and her daughter, Charlotte, can get out of this dungeon of a marriage.

So Serena takes a job on a low-budget film that needs a demon character quickly. As she starts creating this demon, strange things start happening around the house, such as Charlotte talking to people when no one is around and waking up with strange bruises on her body.

At first Serena assumes that the culprit is Isaac. But when Isaac is sent to jail, Serena notices that Charlotte’s strange behavior and mysterious injuries continue. In comes Isaac’s mother, a rich old hag who would stick up for her son if she found out he was one of the 9/11 terrorists. She’s convinced that it’s Serena abusing the child, and begins proceedings to gain custody of Charlotte.

In the meantime, as Serena continues to create this monster, stranger and stranger things begin happening, such as the actor cast to play the demon taking on the persona of the monster when he wears the suit. Is he just method acting? Or could this be something more?

Serena holds off on the assumption that this suit could actually be demonic until the evidence is too strong to ignore. But by that time, there are so many people closing in on her, trying to steal the daughter she, ironically, never wanted in the first place, that this demon may be the least of her worries.

Wow, this was a good script!

I really only have one major complaint, and it’s the opening scene. The scene shows our main character, Serena, secretly taking birth control pills, her husband discovering her, and then him pinning her against the wall. We then see: “9 YEARS LATER.”

I bring this up because I see it a lot. The starting-off-with-a-flashback scene that isn’t big enough to necessitate a major time jump afterwards. Look, it’s a good scene. Our main character is discovered pulling off some shady shit by her abusive husband.

But that’s not a “CUT TO 9 YEARS LATER” opening scene. If you’re going to cut to 9 years later, you have to hit us with something huge in that opener. Somebody needs to die. Something utterly unforgettable needs to happen.

A couple of weeks ago we had “American Witch,” which started with a group of people carrying a witch into the caves and burying her alive as she stuck an acorn up her vagina which we then watched grow over the next 100 years. THAT’S a scene worthy of jumping forward in time after. This is just a normal well-written scene.

But after that, the script gets good. Katherine does a really nice job of building an emotional core into her story. Sure, this is about a demon suit that may or may not be associated with the devil. But it’s also about a woman who’s trying to protect her child from an abusive husband.

And what’s cool about The Devil’s Workshop is that it isn’t straightforward. It’s not black and white. I loved that this is a daughter Serena never wanted. And now, ironically, she’ll do anything to protect said daughter against the man who DID want her.

Another thing I want to touch on is originality. Look, we’re all trying to come up with that premise that nobody’s heard of before. That’s what turns heads in Hollywood. But it’s hard to find anything original when you’re competing against 100 years of film.

Lucky for writers, there’s a “next best thing.” Which is a world or a job that not many people know about. In this case, that’s a make-up artist. The reason this still works is because a lot of what you’re going to be writing about are things that the average person doesn’t know about. Which means your script is going to feel “new” and “fresh.” And that’s exactly how I felt here. Sure, we’ve seen plenty of horror films like this. But not from a make-up artist’s point of view. So that was fun.

Katherine wraps all this up by writing about something she cares about, that she’s emotionally invested in – abuse and the power of standing up to it, of getting out of it. Never underestimate the power of something you care deeply about. It comes out in the writing and it turns your script from just another horror flick or just another thriller flick, into something that hits people on a gut level. And that’s how you write a screenplay that stays with someone. You hit’em in the gut.

I really liked this. The only other change I’d suggest is possibly making Isaac more three-dimensional. You want to be careful not to make your villains too villain-y. Isaac coming home and calling his wife’s make-up work garbage is a bit on-the nose. What if that’s what he loved about her? Her artistry? That would make him even more fucked up that he’d be able to go from that to beating her.

Just a thought. But in the end, these problems were minor compared to the script’s strengths.

Script link (new draft): The Devil’s Workshop

[ ] what the hell did I just read?

[ ] wasn’t for me 

[xx] worth the read

[ ] impressive

[ ] genius

What I learned: Everybody says, “Write what you know,” but then you have writers who all they do is play video games all day, so they write about a character who plays video games all day. “Write what you know!” they defend their script with. Uhh, no not really.

So today, I’m going to make two addendums to this famous piece of advice.

1) Write about the most interesting thing you know.
2) Package your “write what you know” idea inside a marketable premise or genre.

Let’s say you’re a housewife. You could write a story about being a houswife because you know it well. But is there enough to work with there? Is it that interesting? Probably not. But being a make-up artist? That’s a pretty unique job with some potentially interesting avenues to explore. I’d pick that over a housewife in a second.

Next, create a marketable component around your “write what you know” subject matter. For example, Katherine could’ve written a drama about a make-up artist who’s in a custody battle with her child. But that’s not going to sell tickets. Instead, she placed her subject matter in one of the most marketable genres in the movie business – horror. And the result is something that could actually be a movie. Well done!

Genre: TV Pilot – Drama
Logline: The show follows a troubled couple involved in the disturbing depths of the Los Angeles psychic community.
About: Last night Hulu debuted their Stephen King adaptation, 11-22-63, and if you think it was just another Hulu original, think again. When you get a Stephen King book produced by JJ Abrams starring a movie star, you’re announcing to the industry that you’re an official player. Netflix may be the bully on the block, but that doesn’t mean you and your big wheel gang can’t control the alley. One of their next big shows is Shut Eye, which features Burn Notice star, Jeffrey Donovan. It was created by Les Bohem, who came out of nowhere and landed a huge deal with CBS for his creation, Extant. Among the producing team is Melissa Bernstein, who of course worked on Breaking Bad.
Writer: Les Bohem
Details: 59 pages

TV is at a crossroads. Despite everybody and their daughter-in-law throwing their pilot scripts into the mix, we haven’t seen any breakout shows in awhile. It reminds me of the time when $300 video cameras started hitting the market and all you heard was, “Now anyone can make a movie!” And so everyone DID start making movies. And none of them were any good. Or the reality TV craze. Remember that? When you could say, “What about a dating show… with midgets,” and a network would give you a couple million dollars to play with?

I guess it makes sense. These networks and streaming services have to put SOMETHING on the air. But quality control seems to be at a minimum. Even streaming titan Netflix has a bit of a “throw shit at the wall and see what sticks” mentality. I think this speaks to just how difficult TV writing is. You don’t get to wrap everything up in 90 minutes. You’re responsible for keeping it going… and going… and going… I loved the first season of Orange is the New Black. The second season was an absolute disaster though. You could feel that the writing team had run out of ideas. Ditto the disastrous third season of House of Cards.

To be honest, if you keep a rapt audience past season three, you’re probably a writing genius. I don’t know where Shut Eye will end up in this discussion, but I know that its pilot is pretty good, and pretty damn weird too.

40-something Charlie Haverford is a psychic in Los Angeles. He lives with his cunning wife, Linda, who also works in the business. Charlie’s pretty good at what he does, predicting infidelity left and right, but there’s a sadness to him that belies a man looking for more. Is this really what he’s going to spend the rest of his life doing?

A lot of that comes from Linda, who’s clearly unhappy with their situation. And as we get to know these two, we realize they’re more wrapped up in the psychic community than we thought. Charlie owns a number of small outfits throughout the city, and is responsible for training and keeping those outfits kosher.

If he doesn’t, he has to answer to Fonzo, who’s like the drug kingpin of Los Angeles psychics. He’s in charge of everything. And because of his deep gypsy roots, he deals with problems a little… differently. When Charlie’s psychic sister, Sylvia, tries to con someone, Fonzo has her go through a humiliating ritual where all the other psychics spit on her and call her names.

Things get weird when Charlie gets into a scuffle with the boyfriend of one of his own clients and he bumps his head. Later that day, a hypnotist comes to Charlie and Linda for a job interview. The hypnotist puts Charlie under and something about the combination of the head bump and the hypnosis changes him. All of a sudden, Charlie starts seeing things before they happen. And that means, in a profession of con men… Charlie has become the real thing.

Whoa. This one was out there. You never knew what was coming next. And most of what came next was good. The best way I can describe it is, imagine if a really talented writer got really drunk and let himself go. We’ve got spooky ass seance sessions, weird psychic kingpins, a deeply troubled marriage, bizarre sex scenes, humiliating gypsy rituals, the ability to tell the future. It was like jumping on top of a bucking bronco and not stopping for 60 minutes.

I just wish it all connected more naturally. For example, we meet Charlie in a session and he seems to be honest about what he’s doing. There’s no indication he’s conning the person. So, in my mind, he’s the real deal. However later, he gets the head bump and hypnosis and starts seeing into the future. So now he’s… more the real deal? Or does that mean he wasn’t the real deal earlier but now he is? There were a lot of little things like that that weren’t clear.

But what I liked about Shut Eye was a) it introduced us to a world we knew nothing about and b) it was hella well-researched. From the sessions themselves to the cabal like network that linked all these psychics together – it felt like this is what really goes down. And I’m fascinated by psychics. So each page was like candy to me.

I do want to air a grievance, though. Weird sex stuff can become a crutch for writers of dark material. As storytellers, the ideal situation is that we come up with a plot beat or a character moment to keep the story compelling. In Ozark, when we find out that the main character’s partner has been secretly siphoning money from the drug kingpin, that’s a nice plot beat that adds another layer to the story and pushes it in a new direction.

But when we can’t think of those moments, we go to our trick-box. The trick-box is full of things that don’t require connective tissue to work. You can throw them in anywhere and they’ll titilate or surprise the reader. But the truth is, they’re tricks – a distraction to hide the fact that you haven’t figured out something else in your story.

Throwing in a weird sex scene is a trick-box move. Here we jump into this scene where Linda is beating the shit out of Charlie while having sex with him and while I guess it had a teensy bit of setup, it felt isolated and too much like a trick. You see the same thing in bad horror films. Show something really gross and fucked up that has no connection to anything. Audiences above the age of 12 are pretty keen at spotting these manipulative moves. So beware of the trick-box UNLESS your trick is tightly woven into the plot.

Despite that, Shut Eye achieves what very few scripts these days do – It brings you into an unfamiliar world and unravels in an unexpected way. For those reasons, I found it enjoyable.

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

What I learned: I’ll give you an example of how to use weird sex stuff without resorting to your trick-box. In one of my favorite films, The Sweet Hereafter, there was a high school girl who’d survived a bus accident that killed most of the other kids on the bus. It unfortunately left her in a wheelchair. Midway through the movie, we learn that, before the accident, the girl had been sleeping with her father. It’s the classic “shocking sex scene” that could’ve easily been a trick. However, late in the movie, the father is part a group suing the bus company for millions. And everything will come down to his daughter’s testimony. Now since the daughter is in a wheelchair, her father is no longer interested in her “in that way.” So guess what happens when the girl testifies? She makes sure to paint the accident as no one’s fault so that her father doesn’t get the money. You say how the shocking sex stuff WAS AN INTREGAL PART OF THE STORY? That’s why it works. But had they just inserted incest sex in there to be shocking and that was the last we heard of it, it would’ve been a trick.

The Deadpool writers are hot again. They give us a new script that asks, “What if the Alien movie scenario happened in real life?”

Genre: Sci-fi
Premise: When the International Space Station team starts studying the first microbe of life from Mars, they quickly learn they’re in for more than they bargained for.
About: Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick are best known for their breakout hit, Zombieland, but they’ll soon be known for a much bigger movie, the first superhero film of the year, Deadpool. This is another project they just set up with Mission Impossible 12 breakout star, Rebecca Ferguson. One of the best things about this project is that it’s, wait for it, an original story. Why is this important? Because if a project like this does well, it reignites the industry’s faith in original material. So let’s set our prayer alarm on level awesome and hope Life delivers.
Writers: Rhett Reese & Paul Wernick
Details: 115 pages – March 6, 2015 draft

Isn’t this town wonderful? Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick became Hollywood darlings when their script, Zombieland, became an unexpected box office hit. For a good half-year, they were the “It” writers in Hollywood. Everyone wanted their next script. Then the two chose to take on G.I. Joe 2 and their heat melted faster than a Snake Eyes action figure under an industrial sized microscope. If it wasn’t for someone throwing up test footage of their long-ago written Deadpool screenplay, they might be writing episodes of The Goldbergs right now (“Hey Gladys! Are we still going to the Duran Duran concert tonight!?” ZOINKS!).

Zombieland is actually a cautionary tale that up-and-coming writers (and directors) should take note of. Everyone associated with that project should’ve ended up becoming huge. Instead, they made critical mistakes that almost cost them their careers (and for director Ruben Fleischer, it may have done just that).

Here’s how it went down. After Zombieland, Reese and Wernick were offered G.I. Joe 2. No doubt they had other logs in the fire, but G.I. Joe was their big paycheck. When that much money comes at you, the temptation to take it is high. The problem is, you just came off of a buzzy over-performing “cool” movie. Moving over to G.I. Joe significantly “uncools” you. Now you’re not the hip guys with the magic touch anymore. You’re the guys who did G.I. Joe. Thank God for Deadpool, as they’re now hot again (this non-IP project of theirs being set up last week is proof-positive of that).

The director, Fleischer, made a different kind of mistake. He fell into the Hollywood Hype Bubble, a unique ecosystem where all the studios are hyping their projects, using any sort of trickery they can find to make their project sound cooler than the next. They have to do this, as they’re all going after the same big names, the same hot directors. Overselling is a necessity. As a result of this, you have tons of “house of cards” projects. Everyone SAYS they’re great. But those people are usually just re-chirping what they heard somewhere else. Rarely has someone checked to see if the project’s, indeed, any good.

I remember when Gangster Squad was the most talked about project in town. I read the script and it was not something that should’ve been talked about. There was no focus, no story. It shouldn’t be suprising then that that’s the criticism the movie got when it came out.

The point here being that you don’t want to sign on to something just because everyone is talking about it. You want to sign onto something because you feel passionate about it. Nowadays, Ruben Fleischer is directing episodes of that NBC Walmart sitcom, Superstore. If he and his writers would’ve stayed within their wheelhouse and taken on something cool and fun, I have no doubt they’d be on a much steadier career path now. Future breakthrough writers beware.

Life starts off FRENZIED. The crew of the International Space Station is running around like test lab rats with their heads cut off because the team back on Mars found a living bacterial organism and has sent it their way via Space Fed Ex. Something malfunctioned though, and the container is going to shoot past them, potentially burning up in earth’s atmosphere. So they come up with some complex maneuver to grab the delivery, barely saving the cargo. Oh, the irony.

Once inside the ship, they place the thing in one of those fancy germ-container lab rooms. By “they” I mean 10 astronauts, the key of whom is Miranda Bragg, a by-the-books representative for the Center for Disease Control. The whole reason they’re studying this Mars bacteria up here instead of down on earth, is in case it should happen to morph into something dangerous and become the next black plague.

Now remember, this cell is supposed to be dormant. So everyone’s shocked when it starts multiplying. Still, they’re more excited that this proof of life on Mars is actually proving its life in front of them. I mean, if they’re anything like the rest of us, it’s been announced to them five million times in the media over the last decade that “There’s water on Mars” and “Life found on Mars!” For once it’s actually TRUE.

Soon this thing morphs into the size of a Frisbee and starts taking interest in the humans observing it. After grabbing one such human and crushing his hand, it gets inside another’s suit and crush-eats him a chunk at a time. Luckily, it’s stuck in that lab. There’s no way out. Oh, except when someone tries to kill it with fire, which triggers the sprinkler system, which provides a small hole in the ceiling for Frisbee Alien to sneak out through. Which now means… IT’S SOMEWHERE IN THE WALLS OF THE STATION.

Shit only gets worse (as you can imagine) as this thing starts stalking them, seemingly understanding that if it doesn’t kill them, they will kill it. This information gets down to good ole planet earth, which decides to enact Order 66 on the station, meaning our occupants are going to need to find a solution fast or join George Clooney as part of earth’s low-gravity memorabilia. It’ll be up to Bragg to find that solution, but it all may be too late.

The first thing that stuck out to me about Life was how badly written the first scene was. And I italicized “written” because despite the scene sucking on the page, I know it’s going to work onscreen.

“Wait a minute, Carson. That makes no sense. Please explain.”

The reason the first scene is a mess is because we’re introduced to 10 people inside of two pages. We obviously don’t know who any of them are yet. And on top of that, it’s an action scene. So while we’re trying to keep track of all of these people, we’re also jumping around from room to room on the run. We have no spatial reference for anything outside of our general knowledge of the ISS. It’s a bunch of empty descriptions mixed with people we don’t know, trying to do something we don’t understand.

The idea behind the scene is sound. Reese and Wernick want us to be pulled in by the mystery of, “what are these people trying to do that’s so important and causing such chaos?” That doesn’t work on the page though since we’re trying to keep up with who’s who and who’s where, and where is where.

The reason this will work onscreen though is because we’d be SEEING all of these things. We’d be SEEING the geography. We’d be SEEING the faces. So we’d be able to put together what was happening rather easily.

This is why writing for producers/directors/studios is different from writing for an unknown reader. The producer knows this scene is going to work onscreen (and it can also be explained to him in person). So you can write something complex without worrying if he’s going to get it. But if you’re sending a spec out to bottom-of-the-barrel tired-ass readers, they’ll throw your script down the second they don’t know what the hell room they’re in.

I guarantee you if Reese and Wernick were writing this as a general spec that had to work its way up through the system, they wouldn’t have started with this scene. Or if they did, they would’ve made it a lot simpler and easier to follow.

The other talking point here is just how similar Life is to “Alien.” They made one change though. They asked, “What would it be like if the Alien scenario REALLY HAPPENED to modern day humanity?” And that’s the premise behind this script. At first, you’re thinking to yourself, “Why should I care about this if it’s 10 times smaller than Alien?” We don’t get a giant monster in this. The thing always stays under the size of a car tire.

But Reese and Wernick use that against us. We underestimate this thing. So when it starts wreaking havoc, we’re pulled in under the table as opposed to on top of it. This allows the two to have more fun with the “attack” scenes, which are much more intricate. One of the highlights of the script is the first time the monster strikes. It’s in one of those glass boxes that have the empty glove inside so you can stick your hand in and manipulate the thing.

Unexpectedly, however, the monster grabs onto the astronaut’s hand and doesn’t let him go. After crushing the man’s hand, it then cleverly finds a way out of the box. That was the moment I was hooked.

I don’t know what the Alien people are going to think of this. But it’s just different enough to invite a fresh take on the “alien organism attacking humans in a contained station” situation. And also, it’s a riveting read.

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

What I learned: Drew Goddard (writer of The Martian) mentioned that you’re always writing scripts (or drafts of scripts) for different people, and you need to know who you’re writing for so you can target that person. If you’re writing to get an actor, you want to focus on giving that actor’s character a lot of great moments. If you’re writing for the production of the film, you’ll got more into detail about the sets and the logistical things that go on in action scenes. But as a spec writer, you’re writing for everyone. And that means you have to write the most entertaining easy-to-read story you can. So you wouldn’t start your script the way Life did here. You might put in a similar scene later, once we know the layout of the station and all the characters better. But since you’re trying to hook readers right away, you’d write an opening that’s a lot easier to grasp. Keep that in mind the next time you write a spec.