We’re going to have some fun today.
I want you to rank, in order of importance, these three screenwriting categories.
Plot
Character
Concept
Tell me which of them you believe is most important to a screenplay’s success. Then rank the other two in order of importance. There ARE right and wrong answers here so don’t screw up. You’re being graded.
Okay, do you have your final answer? Go ahead and display it to the class in the comments. Yes, BEFORE I tell you what the correct order is, go down and leave your order in the comments. Just like any good screenplay, we have to up the stakes. We do that by having you risk public shaming for being wrong. :)
Now before I give you the answer, I want you to either mentally of physically write down ten of your favorite movies. It doesn’t have to be your FAVORITE TEN OF ALL TIME. Just ten movies you liked a lot. Now, what’s the very first thing that comes to mind when you think of any of these movies? Cause I’m willing to bet that in every single case, it’s the characters.
When I think of The Matrix, I think of Neo.
When I think of Die Hard, I think of John McClane.
Shawshank, Red and Andy.
Nightcrawler, Louis Bloom.
Aliens, Ripley
Deadpool, Wade Wilson
The Martian, Mark Watney
Guardians of the Galaxy, Peter Quill (and Rocket, and Groot)
So the top spot on your list should be CHARACTER. Character character character. Character trumps everything. If you get the character part right, nothing else in the script needs to be great. How do I know this? Because you can name plenty of movies with weak concepts or weak plots that you still liked because of the characters.
Swingers, great characters bad plot. Once Upon A Time In Hollywood, strong characters janky plot. The Wrestler, great character weak plot. Yes, even the juggernaut that was The Joker, strong main character, forgettable plot.
But you’d be hard-pressed to think of any movies where you didn’t like the characters but you still liked the movie. I can think of a couple I guess. Mad Max Fury Road. I didn’t dislike those characters but they weren’t memorable to me in any way. The Thin Red Line. I love the feel of that movie but I don’t know a single character’s name. Dunkirk to a certain extent. But it’s rare. You’re more likely to fall in love with a character than a plot.
Let me share with you my most recent experience with how important characters are. I have been OBSESSED with the concept for the show, “Beforiegners” ever since I saw the trailer last year. Beforiegners is set in Oslo and follows a strange phenomenon where a bunch of Vikings from 500 years ago begin inexplicably showing up in modern day. We then follow what happens when these inadvertent travelers are forced to integrate into society. I absolutely love this concept. I’ve been impatiently waiting for it to come out on HBO but I was lucky to get my hands on some episodes ahead of time. I’m telling you, I can’t convey enough how excited I was to sit down and watch this.
And it was a total effing bore.
Why was it bore?
Because the characters were lame as hell. The two main characters, one a male cop, the other a female viking who’s become his partner, are beyond boring. They’re both quiet. They’re both methodical. They approach their job in the same way. There’s zero contrast. Zero conflict. But, worst of all, neither of them have any personality. Which killed the show. And it wasn’t the actors faults. It was 100% the writing. They never sat down and tried to create two great characters.
We’ll get back to character in a bit.
But now that we’ve established our top dog, we need to figure out who gets the red ribbon, concept or plot.
My answer might surprise you. But I’m going to say concept. And I know that sounds crazy to some of you because concept is just one overall idea whereas plot is something you meticulously work out over numerous rewrites until everything in your story is woven together in the most entertaining and harmonious way.
But here’s the little secret about concepts. They inform everything about the plot. Let me give you an example. Back to the Future is probably my favorite movie of all time. But for a moment, I want you to imagine if there’s no time travel in Back to the Future. Instead, it’s a high school teen comedy set in modern day called “The Power of Love.” It’s about Marty trying to make it as a singer in a band. Think about how much you just limited your plot. You’ve taken out the opportunity to do so many of the cool things that Back to the Future did. And it’s because you now have a much weaker concept.
Using that logic, you’re always going to have a hard time plotting screenplays with weak concepts. It can be done, of course. Mean Girls was a teen high school comedy and a lot of people liked that movie. But having a good concept is like showing up to a race with a jetpack. It’s going to make things so much easier for you.
None of this is to say that plot doesn’t matter. Even if you have a great concept like Back to the Future, you still have to come up with the plot ideas that elevate that concept, that make the read exciting. Remember that, originally, the time machine in Back to the Future was a refrigerator. That severely limited the time travel plot points of the movie. Once they switched it to a car, however, all sorts of great plot ideas emerged. You will slave away to get your plot right. But I still think it sits behind both character and concept.
So that means we have our order.
1 – Character
2 – Concept
3 – Plot
What does this mean for you, the screenwriter? It means you have to put a lot more thought into your 2-3 main characters. They will be the most critical components to making your script work. And here are some things to consider – things that weak writers overlook.
First and foremost, you must think of your character as their own story, independent of the story in your movie. To understand this best, think of all the challenges and failures and successes and highs and lows you’ve had in your own life. That’s YOUR STORY. You need to give your characters that story as well or else they’ll never pop off the page.
The more you know about your character’s story, the stronger the character will be. Your character story should be divided into two parts. The story that led up to the beginning of the movie, aka the ‘backstory,’ and then the story of your character DURING the movie.
Let’s use the most famous action character ever, John McClane, as an example. He became a New York cop. He married this woman. She got a job opportunity in another city. He hoped she’d fail and come home. Instead she succeeded, which means now their marriage is on the rocks. And I’m sure the writer knew 100 times as much about John McClane as we’re told in the movie. That’s your backstory. And it’s where strong writers separate themselves because they’re willing to do the deep dive into how the character became the person they are even though 99% of that won’t directly show up on the screen.
Once the movie starts, you’re talking about a new character story, a story all of us get to see. You will draw from all the things that happened in the backstory to create the most entertaining John McClane story for the movie. If you realized McClane grew up as a wise-ass who challenged authority in his backstory, you now get to feature that in this story. But if you never did the work and figured that out, it won’t be there in the character. Even if you say to yourself, “This character is going be a wise-ass who challenges authority” but you don’t know how he became that person? Or what led up to that? Then the wise-assery is going to feel cliched.
I don’t think a lot of you realize how important this is. If you want a character to feel authentic, you need to figure out why they became the way they are. The more specific, the better. For example, maybe when John McClane was a young New York cop, he watched as, time and time again, him and his fellow officers were being put into dangerous situations by their Captain, some of which ended in friends of his dying. McClane knew that if he didn’t speak up, nothing would change. He HAD to challenge authority or he’d lose more friends. Once you’re able to ground your character’s identity in real events that you know the specifics of, I guarantee you your characters will come off as more authentic.
A few other things. You want to find character personalities that audiences either like or, if the characters are reserved, that we understand and sympathize with why they’re that way. In that Beforeigners show, they didn’t have either. They were boring people and there wasn’t a lot to sympathize with. You should also have a curiosity about human psychology. In order to get into why we are the way we are, you need to understand how we tick. A person isn’t just a drug addict. Their addiction is their way of coping with something. Find out what that something is. And, finally, you should be fascinated by interpersonal social dynamics – the way human beings interact with each other. Why people are mean to others, why they’re nice, why they’re guarded, why they’re happy.
I read this story recently about this woman who yelled at a random man for not wearing a mask. If you think that this woman is yelling at this man specifically, you don’t understand social dynamics. She doesn’t know this man. She’s spent the last 20, 40, 60 days bottling up her anger at people who don’t wear masks. This man merely represents everyone who’s not wearing a mask in her eyes. To tell him to wear a mask is to tell everyone to wear a mask. That’s what you have to realize about human interaction. It’s rarely about what’s happening on the surface. There’s always something going on underneath and you should have a curiosity as to what that underneath stuff is.
Finally, just to be clear, the ideal situation is that character, concept, and plot are effortlessly woven together so that each one depends on the other equally. You can’t imagine the characters without the concept and you can’t imagine the concept without the plot and you can’t imagine the plot without the characters. That’s the goal. If you’ve done it right, everything is so immaculately connected that it’s all one living breathing organism known as your story.
But just because I like a little controversy, I’ll finish with this: Pay a litttttllllllllleeee extra attention to characters above everything else.
:)
Genre: Horror
Premise: (from Black List) A woman with a troubled past invites her teen niece to live with her in the family’s farm house, but the two become tormented by a creature that can take away their pain for a price.
About: This script found some traction last year, allowing it to sneak onto the Black List. It hasn’t sold but it did get the writer, Christina Pamies, an assignment writing Baghead, a popular short film that they’re turning into a feature.
Writer: Christina Pamies
Details: 86 pages
One thing to remember whenever you’re writing a spec script is that, if the spec gets noticed, or better, purchased, it’s probably not going to get made. I’m not trying to bum you out. I’m just going off the percentages here.
However, that’s okay, because there are a lot of movies that ARE being greenlit that need a writer and, if those movies are in the same genre as your spec, you have a shot at getting an assignment that will turn into a credit. And credit is everything in this business. It not only gives you legitimacy. It ups your quote. It makes you a bankable writer, since you’ve proven that stuff you write gets made. And let’s not forget those glorious residual checks that keep showing up in the mailbox years down the line. You’re going to need them to fend off the bills of your 15 different streaming services.
This is why I always remind writers to write in the genre you love. Because you’ll probably get pigeonholed into that genre, which is great if you love the genre. But a nightmare if you hate it. Not to mention, you’re going to write better scripts in the genres you’re passionate about anyway because you’re naturally going to go the extra mile for them.
I’m only bringing this up because I remember when I first started writing and I would write whatever cool concept I came up with. I’d write a comedy then a sci-fi script then a drama then a dramedy then a horror then a sports movie then an action script then a thriller. I was all over the place. And when you start out, you might be all over the place too. But while writing in a bunch of different genres can be educational, it’s better to focus on the genres you love.
Because each genre has its own challenges and you want to master the genres you love as soon as possible, which means writing them over and over again. That’s how you get good at a genre. Which increases the chances of you selling one. Which increases the chances that you’re known around town as a good writer in that genre. Which increases the chances you get called in for an assignment in that genre. Which increases the chances that you get the assignment. Which leads to a credit. Which leads to you being a legitimate paid writer. Which is exactly what today’s writer, Christina Pamies, pulled off, when No Good Deed got traction around town and she got the writing gig for Baghead. Okay, enough lecturing. Onto today’s script…
40 year old Amy Sutton is at the end of a long cancer battle. It’s gotten so bad that she and her husband send their 11 year old daughter, Zoey, off to live with Amy’s cousin, Julia. They don’t want Zoey to see how bad things are going to get with Amy.
Zoey moans and complains from the start and lets Julia know that they’re anything but friends. The two head off to Julia’s farm house, which happens to have been in the family for 150 years. Julia has just recently moved into it, and is excited to show Zoey the place where she and her mom spent so many fun summers.
But weird things start happening. The house seems to be a favored spot for injured animals. Zoey immediately starts caring for an injured opossum (which leads to her getting bitten). Then, there’s weird plant problems that are growing out of control underneath the house, to the point where stubby plants are piercing the kitchen floor.
Later, Zoey spots an old timey family of 3 inside the bathroom. But that’s nothing compared to what Julia spots at the edge of the woods – a ten foot tall pale man-demon who spits out a bunch of bones.
You would think that these two would hightail it out of here. But they decide to stay and look into the home’s history. It has two major family slaughters that have happened in the house which include a seven-body scenario of pure human annihilation. A mystery that was never solved.
But when Zoey’s opossum bite starts unnaturally spreading and the local plant life does a full-on assault of Julia, it looks like these two are doomed. (spoilers) What we eventually learn is that the boneeater guy has promised certain people who live here safety if they feed him. Which means you have to feed him other members of the family. That’s what Amy – I think – did. She fed him for a while. But then she stopped. And that’s why she has cancer. So the question is, who made a deal with the boneeater this time? Who’s about to be turned into a lunchables snack?
After reading the very strong horror story that was My Wife And I Bought a Ranch last week, No Good Deed had a tough act to follow.
You really can spot the difference between the better horror entries in how much detail has been recruited into the story. The less detail and the shakier the mythology, the more horror falls apart at the seams. I mean here we’ve got killer plants, 10 foot tall boneeaters, old-timey ghosts, an animal connection, a teaser opener where a family gets slaughtered. It’s a lot of stuff that doesn’t feel organically connected.
Pamies does explain it all in the end in a way that somewhat makes sense. But that’s not the problem. The problem is the 80 pages where everything seems so disconnected that we’re less intrigued by the mystery than we are frustrated. I actually think the boneeater was a good monster. Why not just stick with him? We don’t need killer plants and sinister possums. That guy was scary enough on his own. And the “deal” stuff it makes with family members opened up some really interesting character avenues. You’ve been shown your death. But this guy gives you a way to survive. Unfortunately, you have to sacrifice a family member to do so.
The best part about this script is its almost brilliant ending. That being Zoe offering Julia to save her mom. The problem is, it’s unclear when they decided to do this. From what I understand, Zoey and her mom talk midway through the movie and hatch that plan. This would’ve been SO MUCH BETTER if that was the plan all along. That was the big twist. Her and her mom actually planned this to kill off her cousin so Amy could get better.
But this script has so many logic problems. The house is somehow both the most evil house in the world (so much so that everybody in the community is terrified of it) yet Julia spent her summers here and found it to be the greatest house ever. I struggled to buy into that. It felt like your classic ‘straddle the fence” screenwriter dilemma. You needed Julia to like this place so she’d believably take Zoey here. But you also needed to make it ‘Amityville times a million’ so we’d have a horror film.
I know these things are hard but you have to figure them out if you want the reader’s suspension of disbelief. Because the whole time I’m reading this, I’m thinking, “Wait, everyone else knows this house is hell except for this one woman who’s actually lived here before?” If I’m always thinking about that, I can’t focus on the story. Plugging up logic holes is the unheralded battle in screenwriting. You never get points for doing it even though it’s one of the most time-consuming things about the craft. But you have to.
Another problem that occurs when you have too much mythology to work into your horror script is that the scares start feeling random. Banging on walls. Scary furry animals. Old-timey ghosts. Killer plants. Boneeaters. You have to understand that, to a reader, randomness is only appealing up to a point. I liked, for example, that in The Ring, we had strange shit coming out of TVs and a weird video tape with a creepy short film on it. But if you start throwing too many different scares at us, it begins to feel like the story is desperate to scare us to the point where it’s willing to not make sense anymore – even if it makes sense eventually.
Like I always say, simplify things. Don’t over complicate it. Adding more complications hurts a story 98% of the time. All we needed here was the creepy boneeater and that shocking twist with Julia being killed (or almost killed but she somehow escapes) and we’re great. But in this current iteration, too much is going on.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Don’t bury your head in the sand on troublesome setup details. Cause I can guarantee you that readers will question them. And those questions will continue in the back of their mind, throughout the script, preventing them from being able to focus on the story in the moment. Another question that I couldn’t get out of my head was, why would a mom kick her daughter out of the house two weeks before she died? I couldn’t buy into that.
Genre: Sci-Fi
Premise: In a dystopian society, a government worker recovering from a traumatic accident is rescued by a group of rebels who insist that he’s the leader of their movement.
About: I have to give it to Mattson Tomlin. He’s been scrapping away for a while, occasionally getting scripts on the Black List. I’ve reviewed a couple of his scripts before, a Jason Bourne parody script and a different sci-fi entry. I didn’t dislike either script. But neither one had that extra something that puts a script over the top. Well, apparently, Warner Brothers doesn’t agree with me. As they gave Mattson the most coveted job in town – the latest Batman movie that Matthew Reeves is making. I’m not sure if he dropped 2084 before or after he got this job, but I’m assuming just the mention of him being up for the job helped Paramount snatch up 2084. I heard it was pitched as 1984 by way of The Matrix and Inception. That is a lofty pitch! Let’s see if the script lives up to the hype.
Writer: Mattson Tomlin
Details: 116 pages
You guys know me!
There isn’t a big sci-fi spec I won’t read.
So when I heard Mattson Tomlin was taking on one of the granddaddies of sci-fi literature, writing an unofficial 100-years-later spiritual sequel to 1984, I needed to get my hands on it. Especially since Tomlin’s screenwriting star is rising quickly.
Question to the class before we get started. Has anybody here read 1984 cover to cover? I feel like we’ve all STARTED to read it. But I’m not sure anyone’s ever finished it. Extra points for those of you who did so on your own and not because your high school English teacher told you to.
Malcom Ferrel doesn’t know what’s going on. He’s just woken up in a dentist-type chair. A dude with a Hazmut suit is standing over him. He’s asking Malcom what his name is and if he remembers his “trauma” or not. Malcom does not remember his trauma. Good. Then we can get you back into society, the guy says.
Malcom enters suburbia, which looks like the 1950s for some reason. Except for the fact that everybody has to wear an elaborate super suit that protects them from the air. It’s like Covid on steroids I guess. Malcom is told by his driver that he works for the government and to stop trying to remember the trauma he experienced. It’s better if he moves on.
Once he gets home, there’s a party going on in the backyard, and then WAM BAM POW a van smashes through the fence. A bunch of black clad SWAT like dudes bust out and start slaughtering everyone. Malcom’s buddy Stan confirms to home base that he has “the package” and the next thing we know… Malcom wakes up in the chair again where he must start the process all over again.
This time, he goes to meet with his wife, who, like the last batch of people, tell him to stop thinking of his past trauma. It will only make things worse. Then those SWAT DUDES show up AGAIN and there’s a firefight between the people protecting Malcom and the people trying to steal him. The SWAT guys finally get him, escape, and take him back to a secret base.
At the base, Malcom meets his real wife, Rachel, who informs him that he used to work for the government until he started this rebellion. But the government then stole him back, erased his memories, and tried to reintegrate him back into society. But they kidnapped him back. And then the government kidnapped him back. And then they kidnapped him back. And sometimes, if they can’t get him, they kidnap HER. Which is what happens next!
The government BUSTS into the underground base and while Malcom escapes, they get Rachel. We now follow Rachel in the dentist chair. Her memory has been erased. And we follow her as she’s cluelessly integrated into society. She even marries a dude. Will Malcom come save her. That’s their thing, Rachel told him back at the base. They always save each other. So now Malcom, who still isn’t even sure who he is, must save a woman he sort of is maybe sure is his wife.
I’m not going to beat around the bush. This didn’t work for me.
The number one thing you have to get right when you’re writing a big sci-fi script is sell the mythology. If we don’t buy the rules or the backstory or how your characters interact with this world, nothing else matters because we’re going to be so focused on how weak the framework is. 1950s town? Protection suits? Trauma elimination? There was something incohesive about the variables.
The idea of changing the main character and creating a dramatically ironic situation in that we know Rachel is being tricked but she doesn’t isn’t a bad choice on an idea level. The problem is that we got to know Rachel for two seconds before she’s thrust into this situation. So we don’t care about her. Or, at least, I didn’t. And, to be honest, I never got the best feel for Malcom either. Nothing we learned about him was real remember. It’s a bunch of fake memories taped over fake memories. In other words, even the person we’re hoping will save our damsel in distress is someone we don’t know. So we’re cheering on someone we don’t know to save someone else we don’t know.
That’s not how writing works.
You have to establish strong characters who we care about before you toss them into the mixer that is their screenplay journey. Both Neo in The Matrix and the character Leonardo DiCaprio plays in Inception have extensive introductions where we get to know the characters well before the shit hits the fan.
This does lead to an interesting screenwriting debate, which is that I always tell you to hook the reader right away. Make something happen immediately. Grab us and don’t let us go. Tomlin does that more than any of the scripts I’ve read so far in The Last Great Screenplay Contest. So then what’s the deal? The guy does what you say, Carson, and you’re still complaining?
Well, here’s the catch – and this is why screenwriting is so difficult – if you’re telling your story in a way where we’re meeting your characters “in media res,” you need to figure out quick ways to help us identify with them and like them. Your “save the cat” moments need to be lightning quick. Your glimpses into their humanity and what makes them sympathetic and empathetic need to be tightly executed.
This is where the best writers make their money. They can get you to fall in love with a character in ten lines. Good Time, the Safdie Bros movie they made before Uncut Gems, has a despicable lead character in Connie, who does some terrible things in the film. But we meet him coming to the rescue of his mentally challenged brother while a heartless social worker demeans him by making him take an uncomfortable test. Instantly, after that scene, we’re rooting for Connie.
And then I just didn’t get what Tomlin was going for here. We’re told that Malcom has been stolen by the Fortification dozens of times and that the Rebellion keeps having to steal him back. Malcom asks the same question we’re wondering. “Why don’t they just kill me?” Rachel explains that if the Fortification kills him, society will know their Trauma-Erasure system doesn’t work. To prove they have everything under control, they must erase his Rebellion memories and reintegrate him back into society every time.
I’m sorry but if I was a citizen in this society and I found out one of our main guys had been kidnapped by the Rebellion two dozen times??? I’m probably thinking the system doesn’t work. And just from an objective storytelling perspective, once someone gets stolen back and forth five times, doesn’t it get a little silly? Once or twice, I get. But 20? 30 times? It’s clumsy storytelling.
Another problem with big sci-fi ideas is over-development of the mythology in ways that hurt the story more than help it. Everyone wears these over-the-top super suits to keep them from transmitting diseases to each other (supposedly). But wouldn’t this movie have been better without this component?
Cause it’s hard enough to buy into this memory impregnating slash memory restoring tug-o-war as it is. When you throw in, “and oh yeah, everyone wears big cumbersome bubble suits,” it draws attention to the very lie the Fortification is trying to hide. Wouldn’t it be a lot easier to trick someone into thinking everything was normal if everyone WASN’T wearing a big weird suit? It’s even one of the first things Malcom notices after the Fortification procedure. Why is everybody dressed so weird? They might as well have given him a handbook that listed all the other suspicious things he shouldn’t pay attention to.
The thing is, once the script hits the midpoint, it actually starts to get interesting. We go back into the memory of Malcom as all the memories he forgot are implanted in him by the Rebellion. And we’re experiencing them as he is. So we see when him and Rachel first meet and fall in love and what goes wrong afterwards that leads to the Rebellion. I wish we would’ve started with that. It was so much cleaner and more interesting than giving us 60 pages of exposition and setup.
Unfortunately, it was too little, too late. My suspension of disbelief had been broken so many times that I couldn’t get back into the story bubble I needed to be in to enjoy the screenplay. Which is too bad. Cause the end scene with the Counselor where he’s explaining everything was quite good.
There’s a kernel of a story in here. But I don’t think Tomlin’s found it in this draft.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Make sure the bad guy has a good point. One of the easiest ways to add depth to your bad guys is to give their ideology legitimacy. When Rachel finally meets the big bad guy and he explains why they do what they do, he makes strong points. Their system has resulted in zero poverty, zero crime, zero wealth disparagement, zero war. Yeah, they do some bad things. But wouldn’t any society kill to have those numbers? You want to make your hero’s choices DIFFICULT, not easy. You automatically do that whenever your villain has a strong argument.
Today’s quirky script feels like something that would’ve topped the 2010 Black List.
Genre: Comedy
Premise: A Jewish immigrant accidentally gets brined in a giant pickle barrel, perfectly preserving him for 100 years, after which he’s discovered and must learn to live in the year 2020.
About: What’s that thing I keep telling all of you to do? What’s that thing I keep saying is the new spec script? Oh yeah, SHORT STORIES. Today’s movie is yet another adaptation of a short story, this one titled, “Sell Out,” by Simon Rich, which appeared in the New Yorker in 2013. Rich started writing short stories for the New Yorker in 2007. He would go on to be one of the youngest writers ever hired on Saturday Night Live. He would later become a staff writer at Pixar. He wrote this screenplay adaptation himself. An American Pickle can be seen on HBO’s new streaming service, HBO Max.
Writer: Simon Rich
Details: 90 minutes long
The great thing about the streaming boom is that it allows for non-traditional movies that never would’ve been produced to get made, widening the breadth of options the viewer has so they aren’t forced to watch superheroes and Jedi every day of the week.
It’s sort of a more audience-friendly version of the independent film boom of the 90s. That era also gave us a bunch of unique options when we went to the theater. But there’s more of a commercial spirit to today’s offbeat choices. An American Pickle feels like a weird hybrid between a Charlie Kaufman movie and Pineapple Express.
It begins with Herschel Greenbaum, a Jewish man who, with his wife, escaped poverty and war to immigrate to the United States in 1919. When he accidentally falls into a pickle brining barrel at his work, he is preserved for 100 years and wakes up in the year 2020.
The good news is that Herschel has a great-great-grandson, Ben, who allows him to stay at his place in Brooklyn. After getting used to all the creature comforts of the 21st century (Herschel has a particular affinity for seltzer water), Herschel finds out that Ben has spent the last five years trying to perfect his big idea app which tells you whether a company is ethically responsible or not.
Herschel asks why hasn’t he actually, you know, started the company? Ben makes excuses, saying it still needs work and blah blah blah. Herschel is confused. It looks ready to him. Later that day, the two get in a fist fight with two guys on the street due to a misunderstanding by Herschel, which leads to their arrest. Just like that, all Ben’s work has gone down the drain. How can you have an app that rates how ethical you are if you, yourself, have been arrested for assault and battery!
Ben kicks Herschel out, who now sees Ben as his nemesis. He decides to start a business in what he knows best – PICKLES! Herschel finds hundreds of daily discarded cucumbers and jars in the dumpster behind a supermarket and begins making pickles. When a hipster Brooklyn blogger stops to have a taste and learns that these are the world’s most natural pickles (Herschel even uses God’s water – rain!), Herschel becomes a social media sensation.
Ben becomes furious that Herschel has found success when he’s failed and makes it his mission to sabotage Herschel. After getting the New York Health Board to shut Herschel down, Herschel somehow becomes even more popular via his brash antiquated views on society. Women belong in the kitchen, he insists (keep in mind, he’s from 1919 Eastern Europe), and before he knows it, he has millions of conservative Americans thanking him for challenging the restrictions on free speech.
But when Herschel finally gets canceled, he’s forced to crawl back to Ben and ask for help. Ben decides to help him get to Canada and, along the journey, realizes that Herschel is the only family he has. The two apologize to each other and begin their friendship anew.
I have a bad habit whenever I start a movie where I check the running time. There’s an industry secret when it comes to running time. If a film is exactly 90 minutes, there was trouble somewhere along the way.
Outside of some super contained thrillers and pared down horror films, nobody sets out to make a 90 minute movie these days. There’s no need to. Sure, back when you had to pay for film, it made sense. But not when you shoot on unlimited storage drives. So when you see a 90 minute run time, the unofficial shortest running time the feature format allows, it’s an indication that the producers had so little faith in the movie they shot that they cut as much of it out as possible.
Which is exactly how American Pickle felt at first. After Herschel gets to the future, we get a 12 minute two guys talking in an apartment scene, which was odd considering this movie had the kind of budget that allowed it big special effects time-lapses of New York changing over 100 years. It felt like we’d missed something, a whole other subplot that had been axed, maybe.
But American Pickle picks up once Herschel and Ben become enemies. No doubt the ‘rivals’ plotline was manufactured. But you quickly overlook that because Herschel’s pursuit to become a pickle magnate was so funny. The idea of making pickles you found from the garbage and selling them for 12 dollars a piece in Brooklyn rides the line between reality and satire so perfectly, you can’t help but laugh when customers eat Herschel’s schtick up.
What I also liked about American Pickle is that it was ambitious. Simon Rich wanted to make a statement about where we were as a country and he used Herschel in every way possible to put a mirror up to ourselves. When Herschel learns about Twitter and starts making controversial statements and getting canceled for it but then also supported for it, it was a way to look at our current situation without ever getting into the annoying angry argumentative side of things. You could laugh no matter which side you were on. That takes a lot of skill in this environment.
The only reason I’m not rating this movie higher is the clumsily explored religious plot line. There’s this subplot about Herschel wanting Ben to take ownership of his Jewish heritage and Ben resisting. But it’s so scattered and inconsistent that it never works.
I suspect this is where the cuts happened that resulted in the 90 minute runtime. I feel like there were lots of extra religious-focused scenes and they determined those scenes either weren’t working or weren’t funny enough.
The problem is the climax is all about Ben accepting his religion. That meant they were locked into that storyline. So they had to include at least one other major scene about religion, which they did in the first act, and then ditched it until the end. So if that storyline felt off to you, that’s probably why.
It’s an interesting dilemma for screenwriters for sure. These are the kind of subplots that give our scripts meaning. It’s what makes a movie like this more than an Adam Sandler movie. Yet in a comedy, these are always the first scenes to get cut. The producers are looking at that edit every day nervous about the script losing momentum, nervous about 2-3 minutes going by without a laugh. And because they’re watching it over and over and over again, they have even LESS patience than the audience. So bye-bye religious plot.
But, as screenwriters, I believe we need to leave these plots in the script. If they don’t make the final cut, th e’s nothing we can do about that. But these are often the scenes that make the reading experience more potent and, therefore, our scripts more memorable.
On top of everything else, Seth Rogen does a great job as both characters, especially Herschel. I would often forget they were the same person. I’m usually wary of these “one actor two roles” movies because they’re always vanity projects. When was the last time one of these “one actor two roles” things genuinely worked? The Social Network? And that wasn’t even a vanity project. Armie Hammer was just trying to get a job. But yeah, as crazy as it is to say, the chemistry between Rogen and Rogen was really good.
If you have HBO Max, check this out!
[ ] What the hell did I just watch?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[x] worth the stream
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: This movie doesn’t take off until Herschel has his goal – create a successful pickle business. Before that moment, I was sitting there thinking, “What the heck is this movie about??” So if your movie is wandering, or you’re getting that note from people, just have one of your main characters establish a STRONG GOAL. And he’ll bring the movie with him. That’s the thing about a character goal. It’s not about saying, “Screenwriting books say I need a goal so I must include one!” No no no. The reason you include a goal is because every goal requires ACTION to obtain it. In other words, a goal instantly makes your character ACTIVE (ACTION = ACTIVE). And characters who are active are always more interesting than characters who are not.
With all this free time in quarantine, I’ve been thinking a lot about Star Wars. I recently ran into a “video essay” – I guess these are a thing now – about what was wrong with the new Star Wars trilogy. One of the easiest things in this world is to do, by the way, is tear something down. And if there’s a list that ranks “takedownable things,” from easiest to hardest, Star Wars sequels and prequels would be near the top. It takes no brain power to say, “Rose was dumb.” “Rey was a Mary Sue.” “Luke was too cranky.” (all things I’ve said by the way – oops!)
Where you catch all these “video essayists” is when they start offering their own solutions to the Star Wars universe. When they’re forced to create instead of destroy, the Emperor has no clothes. One of this guy’s suggestions for fixing The Force Awakens was to evolve Han Solo instead of making him so similar to Young Han Solo. For example, he said, instead of going into Maz Kanata’s bar with Rey, Han should’ve said he was too tired to walk that far. Yes, because we all saw how well, “I’m getting too old for this” lines worked for Indiana Jones in the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.
Star Wars is in no different of a position than any other idea. IT’S HARDER TO TELL GOOD STORIES THAN IT LOOKS. We all know that. That’s what this site is about. It’s about dissecting storytelling in a way that gives us the best possibility of writing something good. It’s not that Star Wars is out of ideas. Gimme a break. Star Wars is still one of the coolest most expansive properties out there. But you’re not going to come up with six good hours of Star Wars movies writing a script on the fly for three months. Which is what happened when JJ and and Lawrence Kasdan ditched the originally planned sequel scripts and wrote their own.
In that respect, a failed trilogy may be the best thing that could’ve happened to Star Wars. Throw in a pandemic and, all of a sudden, we don’t have a Star Wars movie on the schedule until 2023. That means you have a good year to write a great Star Wars movie and a proper outline for the second and third films in a new trilogy.
Where this story is going to come from, however, is still a mystery. Star Wars has put a lot of time and money into something called Project Luminous, which revealed itself, this year, to be “The High Republic.” The High Republic is a time period 200-400 years before the prequels when the Jedi were at their strongest. The era is supposed to focus on something called “The Great Disaster,” which threw the galaxy into disarray, forcing the Jedis to go out on a bunch of missions to get things back in order.
The High Republic plan is to start all stories out in written and comic-book form. Head of Lucasfilm, Kathleen Kennedy, has been on record saying the problem with trying to make a bunch of Star Wars movies is that Star Wars doesn’t have well-known superheroes who have had 80 years worth of written work behind them, like Marvel. This is her solution to remedy that. Write a bunch of High Republic novels and comic books and see what people gravitate to. The big winners and story ideas will get movie treatments.
There are a couple of things wrong with this approach. First, you’re still going to run into prequel-itis problems. Prequel-itis problems are when you have to limit your creative options due to already established canon. Lucas had to engage in a years-long mental gymnastic obstacle course trying to figure out how to keep Obi-Wan Kenobi away from R2-D2 and C-3PO since, in the original Star Wars movie, Obi-Wan Kenobi has no idea who R2-D2 and C-3PO are.
Going back 400 years keeps you away from plot problems like that. But it doesn’t keep you away from other limitations, such as the fact that there can never be anything during that time that’s more dangerous than the Death Star. And if every threat is smaller than something we’ve already experienced, how big are the stakes going to feel? Also, you can’t introduce any cool new Jedi things because then, why wouldn’t those things still be in play in the later films?
As much as I dislike Rian Johnson’s Star Wars movie, he had the right idea. For his canceled Star Wars trilogy, he wanted to go to some other part of the galaxy or maybe even another galaxy entirely so that he wasn’t beholden to any of this stuff. To truly get the most out of Star Wars, you need to take the handcuffs off. And whatever you do in the past is going to be restricted by the big looming chunks of story in the later Star Wars films.
The other problem is that people don’t care about Star Wars novels and comic books. I know there’s a hardcore sliver of superfans who do. But even major Star Wars fans like myself don’t read those things. They’re all clumsy and goofy and feel like fan fiction. So I don’t know how you’re going to judge whether a novel is “good enough” to make a movie out of. Is the criteria going to be whether the Bantha Lube Podcast gives it five out of five parcec tokens?
Complicating this is that Kennedy has given people like Kevin Feige and Taika Waititi, and even J.D. Dillard if you believe the rumors, Star Wars movies, with no indication of whether they’re going to be directing movies in this new “High Republic” era or they’re going to be doing their own things. Logic would imply they’re one-offs. Or one-offs with trilogy potential. Cause when you want the big names in the business, the price you pay is releasing creative freedom over to them. They get to do their own movie. And if you allow these guys to make whatever movies they want, aren’t you right back where you started? JJ Abrams telling you he doesn’t want to direct the George Lucas conceived idea for Episode 7 and he’s going to do his own thing, thank you very much?
Ever since Disney acquired Lucasfilm, there have been two legit good choices. The first was Rogue One. Saw Gerrera’s mysterious changing hairstyles or not, that idea is still one of the best Star Wars ideas they’ve had. And then The Mandalorian. I can pontificate all evening on the things in that show that drive me bonkers, but Baby Yoda was a genius move. And maybe, just maybe, bringing back Boba Fett in the second season will get me watching again.
So what does this teach us?
Funny enough, it teaches us the same thing screenwriting books have been telling us for years. Give us something familiar, but make it different enough that it feels fresh. Rogue One gave us taking down the Death Star, but with all new characters. The Mandalorian gave us someone who looked like beloved Star Wars bounty hunter Boba Fett, but he’s a completely different character. It gave us one of the best movie characters in history, but in baby form.
In addition to giving us the same but different, Star Wars needs to reintroduce something that’s been forgotten over the years. They need to make Star Wars mysterious again. That’s the one ingredient I never hear anyone talk about and it was one of the most important ingredients in making the original so beloved. Everything from the Force to lightsabers to the Death Star to someone named Jabba the Hut Han Solo owed money to. There was this mystery behind them that made us want to learn more.
To that end, Star Wars should bring in George Lucas’s idea of the Whills – this idea that there’s something bigger than the Force out there. That there are beings more powerful than Jedi. This is a great starting point to reintroduce mystery into the series again.
I admit it’s not going to solve every problem. You still need to create great characters. And as we’ve seen with all the new Star Wars movies, this remains their Achilles heel. It just goes to show how much of a genius George Lucas was in that he somehow created a dozen iconic characters in a single movie when most writers are lucky to create a single iconic character in their entire career.
These next few years are going to be interesting. Sooner or later, they’re going to have to officially announce a movie because these movies take time and 2023 comes at you a lot faster when you’re a Star Wars production. But I personally can’t wait. I’ve learned to love the drama behind this franchise almost as much as I enjoy the franchise itself. And at least it sounds like I’m getting a Taika Waititi Star Wars movie. JoJo Rabbit is one of the best movies of the decade for me. So that alone will put a smile on my face. As for everything else, we’ll just have to wait and see. :)
