Genre: Zombie/Action
Premise: Humans have found a temporary vaccine that makes them invisible to the zombie enemy. Now they just need to eradicate them with a new biological weapon, a weapon the humans are finding out might make their enemy even more dangerous.
About: For a good year there, David Fincher really wanted to direct World War Z 2 with his buddy, Brad Pitt. It would’ve been the biggest film he’d ever made. For whatever reason, though, Paramount kept waffling. In retrospect, it seems ridiculous to me. Being the smallest of the studios, you’d think Paramount would jump at the chance to trot out a David Fincher zombie movie starring Pitt. I guess they couldn’t make the numbers work though. At least for now. Paramount doesn’t own much flashy IP so you gotta think this is going to get made at some point. I’m sure Fincher would be open to it so just make the call, Paramount!
Writer: Dennis Kelly
Details: April 5, 2016 draft (123 pages)

The original World War Z project went through some interesting iterations. The book the film was based on followed the aftermath of a zombie outbreak. It was a unique take on zombies, to say the least, since it didn’t have zombies in it. It was more about the investigation into how the outbreak happened and who was responsible.

I remember reading an early draft of the script that was loyal to the book and thinking, “Wow, they are taking a gigantic risk making a zombie movie that isn’t about zombies.” The people over at Paramount must’ve agreed cause they ditched that take and went back in time to cover the exciting part – the actual zombie world war!

Mileage varied on whether that film was good or not but I liked it. I especially liked Brad Pitt’s scarf. It’s up in the air as to whether Paramount will ever get back in the World War Z business. Let’s see if they’re overlooking a surefire hit.

Gerry is back! (Gerry is Brad Pitt by the way – points for whoever knew that). The humans have taken a major step in defeating the zombies (called “Z”) after Gerry was able to secure a vaccine in the last film that made humans invisible to zombies by mimicking cancer. The Z only want healthy hosts so they ignore anyone who’s using the “camouflage,” which lasts for about a day before you can use it again.

The sucky part is that there are still Z everywhere. They’ve taken over almost every major city. The humans need a way to fight them and that’s come in the form of something called E29, a biological weapon of sorts that, when sprayed on Z, makes them kill each other. Doctor Morel is putting the finishing touches on the weapon in Geneva. Gerry just needs to grab it from her.

So he flies to Geneva, where everyone now lives underground in the former Large Hadron Collider. Millions of people live down here because the entirety of Europe has been overrun by Z. Gerry can’t help but wonder as he heads to the medical center… “What if someone down here gets infected?” Yeah, we’re thinking the same thing, Gerry.

Once they get to Morel’s office, they find out she’s gone. Locked up shop and vanished. They then break into her lab only to find numerous scientist Zs in there. They need to find out what happened so they all inject themselves with the camouflage and walk inside. Except the Zs don’t ignore them. They attack them!!!

Gerry runs out of the lab and the infection starts spreading VERY FAST. Everyone is getting bit and turning instantly. Soon, tens of thousands of zombies are blocking out the side exits. Gerry is forced with a few others to go DEEPER inside the Large Hadron Collider. They eventually find a shaft that gets them topside, but the damage is already done. This place is toast.

Gerry meets up with his air team and now it’s off to Singapore, where it’s said that Morel is. Gerry gets to the outskirts of Singapore where a rag-tag team of humans is holding Morel hostage and Gerry is able to ask her what the eff is going on! She concedes that E29 doesn’t work. It reverses the camouflage, which is why the Zs don’t sense it anymore. Oh, and there’s a new threat. The Zs have figured out how to transmit the disease THROUGH THE AIR. I mean, WTF!?? As if they didn’t have enough to worry about.

To make matters worse, they need to get to a local UN base on an island, and the only way there is through downtown Singapore, a former city that now houses 5 millions Zs. These Zs haven’t yet been infected by Morel’s faulty biological weapon, which means our team can still walk through the city worry-free, since the camouflage works on them. The only issue is that everyone in the group is already at the end of a previous camouflage cycle. So they can’t re-inject it. They just have to hope they finish their walk before it wears off.

The new plan is to meet up with a second scientist who may know how to counteract the faulty E29. That plan is put in jeopardy, however, when Anna, Morel’s daughter’s, camouflage wears out. Now they have to hurry to the pier that will get them to the island, all without 5 million hungry zombies devouring them. I’m hoping for the best. But it sure doesn’t look good for our tiny team of Singapore sightseers.

Let’s start off by helping the beginners in the audience.

Lesson 1: One of the simplest ways to start a story is to give your hero something they want. That will set them off on a path of action, and the obstacles that will get in the way of the path will provide conflict, drama, and hopefully, lots of entertainment.

The ‘want’ here is Doctor Morel. She has the weapon. So we need to go find her.

Lesson 2 is that a “want” should never be easy. If your characters can easily find whatever they’re looking for, there isn’t going to be drama in your story. So you need the unexpected to happen. You need things to go wrong. When Gerry gets to Geneva, Morel is already gone. And not just gone. Gone under mysterious circumstances.

This juices up the story because now we’re not just trying to find her. We’re curious why she chose to mysteriously disappear.

A script is basically a repeating series of this pattern. Your hero will eventually find Morel. From there, you create another “want.” Here, it’s a second scientist, which isn’t my favorite choice. I don’t like repeated plot beats. It’s usually better if the new want is different. But it’s better than nothing.

In The Matrix, the first “want” is to find out what the Matrix is. The second “want” is to go see the Oracle to see if he’s “the one.” The third “want” is that Morpheus has been kidnapped and they have to rescue him.

This script is actually chock full of screenwriting lessons. Another well utilized lesson in WWZ 2 is that you set up rules to break rules. No, I’m not talking about the rules of screenwriting. I’m talking about the rules of your fictional world.

One of the first things we learn (it’s on the very first page, actually) is that camouflage protects the humans from the zombies. The zombies will not pay attention to you if you’ve injected it.

If you go through your entire script and that rule is never challenged, you’re a bad writer. The whole point of creating rules like that is to break them later in a dramatically fun way. They do that when they first encounter the Large Hadron zombies in the underground lab. All the marines are injected, told not to worry, and they walk in there, not a worry in the world. And then… RAHAREHAHJAFHLDK!!!!!IAJLFKDAALAF. Zombie mayhem.

You created the rule to break the rule. Always a strong narrative move.

And the camouflage was the gift that kept on giving in this script. I loved that they had to depend on the camouflage in a city of 5 million zombies, when they’d just seen that it didn’t work and when they know the vaccine in their veins is almost at the end of its cycle. I can only imagine how great a scene it would be onscreen to have to walk through 50,000 zombies hoping that your vaccine still has enough gas in the tank.

Overall, I found this script to be fun. It is similar to the first film. They’re not breaking any new ground. But the new rules (camouflage, N29, air transmission) add just enough of a spark to keep the concept fresh.

Honestly, with a lot of the less-than-stellar content Paramount puts out, I’m shocked that they haven’t made this movie. It’s definitely one of the top properties over there. It’s time to get Fincher back on the phone. After shooting an artsy black and white movie, he’ll be thrilled to make something big and fun like this.

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

What I learned: A match hasn’t started until someone breaks serve. Tennis reference tip! In tennis, you are supposed to win (or “hold”) all your service games. This is because serving gives you an advantage. You are smashing the ball down on the other player, who must struggle to return the ball. This ensures that you almost always win your service games. Therefore, when someone “breaks” serve (the returner wins the game from the server), the match takes on a new energy. It means whoever broke serve has a clear path to win the set if they continue to hold their own serve the rest of the way. There’s a similar saying in screenplays: A script hasn’t begun until something goes wrong. Nowhere is this more evident than in World War Z 2. The script is heavy with exposition and setup all the way up to the Large Hadron Collider location. The script has just barely kept our interest so far. But when they break into the lab only to find that a bunch of zombies are waiting ANNNND these zombies aren’t phased by the “camouflage” vaccine, something has OFFICIALLY GONE WRONG and the script takes on a new energy. That’s the way you do it. Make sure to carefully craft your “break serve” moment as it tends to be the moment that the reader really latches in and commits to the experience.

What I learned 2: Send your characters to the place they DON’T want to go. Not to the place they do. In the Collider scene, they watch as a swarm of zombies block out all the exits. This forces the characters to go FURTHER INTO THE CIRCLE, the exact opposite thing they want to do. Which makes for a more exciting sequence.

Genre: Sci-Fi/Spy Thriller
Premise: (from IMDB) Armed with only one word, Tenet, and fighting for the survival of the entire world, a Protagonist journeys through a twilight world of international espionage on a mission that will unfold in something beyond real time.
About: Tenet has had a complicated release journey. There was all this behind-the-scenes talk about how Christopher Nolan wanted Tenet to be the film that saved the movie business. He wasn’t just releasing this for Warner Brothers. He was releasing it for the world! But it’s said Nolan nearly had a heart attack when it was suggested that Tenet would need to be played in – GASP – drive-in theaters! All of a sudden, Nolan considered waiting until the pandemic was over. In the end, the movie was forced into an unenviable staggered release pattern. Some places would get it, some wouldn’t, which would make box office boasting – a key marketing tool for studios – difficult. Tenet isn’t even playing in my home town, Hollywood. How ironic is that? I had to travel down to San Diego to see the film. But see the film I did.
Writer: Christopher Nolan
Details: 150 minutes

Tenet.

It’ll open the right doors.

Some of the wrong ones too.

That’s a line from the movie. Which is apropos considering Christopher Nolan himself has opened some of the right doors with Tenet, but also many of the wrong ones.

The Protagonist (yes, that’s our hero’s name) is a CIA agent who tries to kill himself via a suicide pill rather than give up his men. But it wasn’t a suicide pill. It was a test. To see who was willing to go the distance. Now that he’s proven his worth, he’s been recruited into a next level mission. It’s called Tenet. Unfortunately, that’s all he’s told. I guess the Protagonist will have to figure out the rest on his own!

He eventually meets up with a female version of Morpheus who explains what “tenet” is – it’s time inversion. The secret tenet gatekeepers keep finding these small artifacts – such as bullets – that do things backwards. So instead of shooting the bullet, you “receive” the bullet back into the gun. Female Morpheus doesn’t know where these artifacts are coming from. That will be the Protagonists’s job.

A lot of stuff happens here but, long story short, the Protagonist bumps into a sloppy drunk named Neil, who may or may not work for a secret organization, and the two interrogate the manufacturer of the inverted bullets, a billionaire Indian woman named Priya. It turns out these bullets are being manufactured in the future. So Priya doesn’t even know she’s manufactured them yet (or does she? Tenet).

All signs of these inverted weapons point to a Russian oligarch named Andrei Sator. Sator is so big time that the Protagonist’s only way in is through his wife, Kat. Kat hates Sator, so there’s an opening there. She’s only still with him because he refuses to give her her son if she leaves. To prove his value to Kat, the Protagonist steals a painting for her. Okay, she says, she’ll introduce him.

The details are complicated, but to sum it up, Sator is secretly receiving gold and inverted weapons from his future self. This is what’s allowed him to become so freaking rich. He has also been searching for seven deliberately hidden pieces of a super weapon in the past from the future (Tenet). Once he finds all seven pieces, he will activate them, creating a super-inversion situation whereby the present and future will collide and the world will be destroyed.

Sator momentarily lets the Protagonist into his inner circle when he learns that he knows about tenet. Meanwhile, the Protagonist’s buddy, Neil, is looking for that seventh and final piece to the Wand of Inversion. They must get that final piece before Sator does. It’s the only way to stop the extinction level event. But then everything is complicated when it’s revealed that Sator has rigged himself so that if he commits suicide, the inversion event will happen automatically. I think. You think. Maybe. Maybe not? Tenet.

The one inarguable thing I’ve always said about Christopher Nolan is that he’s a great filmmaker.

He shoots everything in camera. There are no special effects. He’s said in numerous interviews that he believes the audience can feel when something has been done for real as opposed to with computer graphics. And I agree with that.

He casts his movies well. Everybody here is awesome. John David Washington is the perfect 2020 movie star. He’s got that screen presence a movie star needs yet he’s not too masculine. He almost has this cool feminine side to his demeanor that balances him out, making him easily accessible to audiences. I’m in love with Elizabeth Debicki. On the contrary, there’s something almost inaccessible about her that makes her alluring. She may be the perfect female star for a Christopher Nolan film. Kenneth Branaugh is over the top here, but my desire to see Sator go down proves that whatever he was doing was effective. Even Robert Pattinson was solid. He certainly looks good in those suits they dressed him up in.

And just the production value of a Christopher Nolan movie is so impressive. There was this moment around the halfway point where the characters are all out on one of those double-pontoon sailing skiffs. That scene did a better job of transporting me to another place than anything I’ve seen so far this year. Cause, to me, that’s what a Hollywood movie should do. It should take you to places you’ve never been. Show you things you’ve never seen.

And as much grief as I give Nolan for his pretentious film school approach (I mean who titles their main character “The Protagonist” other than an insufferable pretentious film school student? Come on.), he’s literally the only mega budget filmmaker making his own stuff. Without him, it’s all Disney and Marvel folks.

Maybe that’s why it’s so frustrating that Tenet didn’t work.

I fear that Nolan is approaching George Lucas level bubble territory. That elusive world where nobody says ‘no’ to you because of how successful you are. And this is the type of movie that requires a strong “no” person. It’s such a heady concept that if you don’t have people in your circle saying, “I don’t understand that, it needs to be clearer,” the movie isn’t going to work. And that appears to be what happened.

I mean there’s this moment early on where Female Morpheus is explaining to the Protagonist how inversion works. She hints at this idea of a Matrix like situation. That you can control this power. He tries to make the bullet come up to his hand but it won’t. “You have to drop it first” she says. He tries again, this time the bullet comes into his hand. But he didn’t drop it. She literally said, “You have to drop it first.” And he didn’t drop it and it still came up to his hand. The fact that nobody stopped to ask if the audience would be confused after that moment encapsulated what was wrong here.

The insurmountable issue with Tenet is that “inversion” is a difficult concept to understand. The more you think about it, the less it makes sense. That’s why you’re getting so many reactions that describe the film as “frustrating.” Because people don’t understand how the central concept of the film works.

One of the reasons the Matrix was so great was because its central concept was so easy to understand. “We’re unknowingly living in a virtual reality.” Boom. Understood! Tenet is the opposite. Even right now, as I’m writing this, I’m trying to figure out if inverted objects work under a different set of rules than inverted people. Aren’t inverted people on a pre-set tape? They’ve already gone that way (backwards), so there’s nothing you can do to stop them. These objects, however, you seem to be able to do unique things to them on a repeatable basis. Make them go backwards into your gun over and over again, for example. How does that make sense?

Nolan only makes things harder on himself with a borderline incomprehensible plot. I could take a UCLA course on why the Protagonist needed to a) steal a painting and b) do it by crashing an airplane and still not understand the logic, or what it had to do with the rest of the movie. He only exacerbates this issue by extending the film out to two and a half hours. It gives the audience even more time to get lost.

Maybe the best representation of what went wrong with this movie was the climax. In theory, it was a fun idea. You’re using both regular and inverted soldiers to obtain the final piece of the staff. I love that idea. But that’s all it ended up being, an idea. The actual execution was bizarre. We’re seeing soldiers head onto the battlefield while, simultaneously, soldiers leave the battlefield via the inverted timeline. They had already been through the mission.

So my first thought was, “Well then you already know you were successful, right?” But then I thought, “Wait, those are the different soldiers. Not the same ones.” “Or wait, are they the same soldiers?” The fact that I was still asking these questions this late in the game confirms how poorly the rules were explained to us. Because, at this point, I should be enjoying the moment. Instead, I’m trying to make sense of it all.

Nolan needs a “No” man moving forward or he’s in danger of becoming a parody of himself. A lot of us saw this as far back as Inception, which relied too heavily on exposition. Then came Interstellar, which had a lazy wonky structure. And now this. An idea that doesn’t even work at the concept stage.

Look, Nolan is a great filmmaker. Nobody argues that. But he needs to take a hard look in the mirror when it comes to his writing. He’s not doing himself any favors there. The one clean narrative he’s had out of his last four films was Dunkirk and the reason for that is that the timeline was simple. Everything happened on the same day. Moving forward, focus on what you’re good at – the directing side. But when it comes to writing, unless you’re going to hire people whose professional job it is to write, don’t do any more of these overly complicated concepts with sprawling narratives. They don’t hold together.

[ ] What the hell did I just watch?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the price of admission
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius

What I learned: You want your ending to be the biggest exploitation of your concept of the entire movie. Tenet got this right. The movie is about time inversion. So what better an ending than throwing both regular AND inverted soldiers at the enemy? Sort of an “attack on the Death Star” but with multiple timeines happening at once. The only reason it didn’t work was because the concept was weak to begin with. But this is the right move as a screenwriter. If your movie is about dinosaurs on an island, your climax better deliver the best dinosaur versus human situation we could possibly imagine. It shouldn’t feature a plane crash.

I’m not in the mood to bash movies these days. As I scroll through all my streaming services desperately looking for ANY movie to watch, I’ve realized more than ever the power of Hollywood entertainment. All it takes is one minute of I’m Thinking of Ending Things to appreciate big-budget high production value cinema.

Which is why I’m so bummed after the Dune trailer. Something about it left me feeling empty. “That’s it?” I thought. Even the money shot, a giant worm, feels tiny in comparison to the giant creatures we’ve become accustomed to in movies. Oh, um, cool. It’s in sand which makes it different, I guess?

But it was something else I couldn’t put my finger on which was bothering me. It hit me after I watched the below side-by-side 1984 Dune movie comparison trailer. The two movies looked nearly identical. And everyone knows how bad that original Dune was. It was lengendarily awful.

Could it be that the real problem here is the source material? That it doesn’t matter how much you throw at Dune or who directs it. That it’s always going to be bad. Cause if you’re looking at this trailer objectively, it’s pretty darn uninspiring. It’s a bunch of sand. A bunch of good actors. A bunch of cool costumes. And… what? At least David Lynch took some chances and did some weird things with his take. This looks like a pretty garden variety adaptation.

I’m sincerely worried for Dune, a movie that was really high on my expectations list. Now I’m just hoping it’s a little better than Blade Runner 2049.

Yesterday was all about the strong dialogue.

Conversations were popping off the page throughout Voicemails for Isabelle. They were fun. They were vibrant. They were clever. Easily top 5 dialogue I’ve encountered all year.

What’s frustrating, though, is that a lot of what you saw yesterday is God-given talent. Some writers understand how people speak better than others.

I know this because I’ve read hundreds of scripts that have tried to do what McKendrick did yesterday and not even come close.

You know in movies where the characters have been friends all their lives but the actors just met a day ago because it was their first day on set? They’re supposed to act effortless and natural around each other but how can they when they barely know each other? That’s called forced camaraderie. And it’s the same feeling a reader gets when a subpar dialogue writer is trying hard to write witty dialogue between characters. It doesn’t feel honest.

So what should you do under those circumstances? Quit screenwriting?

No, of course not. That would be silly. Like I said yesterday, only 20% of the scripts I read have awful enough dialogue or awesome enough dialogue that I notice (and most of that 20% is the awful kind). The other 80% is decent enough that it doesn’t bother me either way.

As long as you still know how to tell a great story or still know how to write interesting characters or still know how to come up with a strong concept and execute it solidly, you don’t need to knock your dialogue out of the park. Especially if it’s in a genre that doesn’t need stand-out dialogue, such as horror.

But luckily, there is a trick you can use to create better dialogue scenes, even if dialogue isn’t your forte. I call it the Third Variable.

Naturally, gifted dialogue writers only need two characters and a keyboard – or “two variables” – to write great dialogue.

While us not-as-gifted writers may not be able to play at that level, we can add a THIRD VARIABLE to the scene which intrudes upon the predictable two person interaction to, in turn, elevate it.

The most obvious example of this is to add a third character to a scene. Say your husband and wife characters are arguing with each other one morning. We’ve seen a million arguments in movies so it’s difficult to do anything special with that dialogue. But let’s say you add a maid to the scene. She’s cleaning in the same area that they’re fighting in. This would then result in them speaking around some things. Or being more selective in what they say.

You may not realize it yet, but this is the secret to good dialogue. Characters who can say whatever they want is rarely interesting. I guess for certain sitcom characters, like Sheldon from Big Bang Theory, it works. But in movies, you want to restrict your characters in some way so that they have to dance around the things that they would normally say. This is where you find more creative choices in dialogue because you’re not allowed to use default responses.

By the way, I’m calling it the third “variable” rule as opposed to the third “person” rule for a reason. Because an extra character isn’t the only way to exploit the Third Variable. You could also exploit it, for example, with a TIME RESTRICTION.

Let’s say our same husband character is taking his daughter to school. The two get in an important discussion. The dad wants to explain to his daughter that he and her mother are fine. The problem is, they’re a minute away from school. And the daughter is getting more upset by dad’s explanation, not less.

Time now plays a critical role in the dialogue because the dad has to rush the explanation when this is clearly a discussion that needs more time to be explained productively.

You notice the common factor here? Once again, the third variable is keeping our hero from being able to say the things he wants to say in the way he wants to say them. That’s where you want your characters to be in a dialogue scene. You want them unable to say the things they want to say, which forces the writer to come up with more interesting choices.

Yet another third variable could be the weather. Romeo and Juliet having a conversation on a sunny afternoon is going to look different than if it’s 10 below zero outside. They’re going to be a lot less interested in exchanging love soliloquies than they are jamming their fingers on their frozen iPhones to get their Uber to show up faster.

Same idea, guys. The weather is keeping our characters from saying what they would normally say.

I’ll give you a personal account of how I accidentally stumbled upon a third variable moment without realizing it. I once wrote a script where the two main characters, an older man and a woman, were roommates. One night, he had to come home and explain to her that he couldn’t afford his half of the apartment anymore and was going to have to move out.

I wrote the scene 5-10 times and it was always boring. Boring on-the-nose dialogue. It was like the reader already knew the conversation so what was the point in me writing it? I might as well have written “You know what they’re going to say here so fill it in yourself.”

In the next draft, I did more work on the female roommate and realized she was a big book reader and that she had a book club that met at their apartment every week. So in the next pass of the script, I thought to myself, “why not put her book club meeting in the scene?”

This time, the male roommate comes back to a big book club meeting. The book club then BECAME THE THIRD VARIABLE. All of a sudden, the scene became a lot more interesting. You had weird, funny, and one horny, book club members chiming in, and just like that, the dialogue came alive.

Just being aware of the Third Variable Tool is going make you a better dialogue writer. But the power of the Third Variable works best when the variable itself is creative and when the way you implement is creative.

To this day, one of the best THIRD VARIABLES I’ve ever come across was the first date scene in Notting Hill. 99% of writers would’ve written Hugh Grant and Julia Roberts’ first date at a fancy restaurant with a lot of people gawking. It’s such an obvious setup for their situation (which should always act as a red flag that you shouldn’t write it).

Instead, Julia Roberts has Hugh Grant unknowingly come to the PRESS JUNKET for her latest movie. The press junket then becomes the THIRD VARIABLE. Every time he tries to talk to her, someone gets in the way. A curious fellow journalist. An actor who needs to be interviewed. The junket coordinator who keeps peeking in on their only private conversation (“Three minutes left!”). That’s what I mean when I say a creative third variable.

An uncreative third variable in that circumstance would’ve been – oh I don’t know – Hugh Grant’s parents or something.

What I mean about how creatively you implement your third variable is how cleverly it interrupts the scene’s key interaction. Let’s go back to my first example from this article. A married couple with a maid is in the room. In a pinch, this can get the job done. But there’s no connection between the variable and the primary characters.

What would be better is if our married couple was having troubles due to the husband’s recent infidelity. From there, you would make the maid extremely attractive. Now, we have this wife who’s very sensitive to her husband’s interest in other women and, to make matters worse, while they’re hashing this problem out, there’s a very attractive female in the room. It’s going to give you that little extra kick to the conversation.

How often should you use the Third Variable? Technically, you can use it for every single dialogue scene as long as you do a good job varying the third variable. If you only ever add a third person, it’s going to start to feel manufactured. You have to throw in time. Or weather. Or a party. Or have one of your characters deliberately stop in the middle of an intersection clogging up traffic so that all of the cars are honking at you to move – write us a conversation in that environment (Training Day).

But you should definitely mix in straight dialogue scenes. I was just watching The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel because I remembered the dialogue being so memorable in that show. And while they do use a lot of Third Variable scenes, there are plenty of one-on-one conversations as well.

You just have to make sure you’re doing the basics right in those scenes so that you’re giving yourself the best chance to write good dialogue. One character wants something in the scene. Usually, the other character doesn’t want to give it to them. This creates conflict within the interaction, which in turn leads to dialogue with more pop to it.

And just try not to write the dialogue exchange that 99 out of 100 writers would write. Every time you walk into a scene, you’re writing a situation that has been written thousands if not millions of times already. Figure out what the most common version of that conversation looks like and make sure you don’t write that.

I can give you one last tip to avoid that. In the middle of your dialogue scene, have one of the characters say something that nobody expected them to say (even you, the writer!). That will send your dialogue down an unexpected direction, and that’s when dialogue comes alive. Dialogue is rarely interesting when everyone says what we expected them to say.

This happened in the episode of Mrs. Maisel that I researched. Mrs. Maisel was in court about her lewd stand up routine that sent her to jail. All she has to do, her lawyer tells her ahead of time, is nod and say thank you. So the first half of the scene goes according to plan. But when the judge brings up how stupid it was for Mrs. Maisel to do what she did, she can’t hold back and explains why there was nothing wrong about what she did at all. The dialogue in the rest of the scene was great. All because a character went in an unexpected direction.

I love the Third Variable tip. Whenever you’re struggling to make a dialogue scene work, try this out. I guarantee it will improve the dialogue. Go ahead and share your favorite third variable scenes in the comments. I want to learn about as many of these examples as possible.

Check out my interview with writer Leah McKendrick here!

Genre: Rom-Com
Premise: (from Black List) A low-level TV writer struggles to cope with the death of her little sister by continuing to leave her voicemails chronicling the shitshow that is dating in LA. When the phone number is unknowingly transferred, a cocky New York real estate agent begins receiving the hilarious and confessional voicemails, and feels pulled to California to find this stranger he feels intimately close to.
About: This spec script squeezed onto last year’s Black List with six votes. It’s become a hot project over at Sony, which preemptively purchased the script. They’ve added Hailee Steinfeld to play the lead and Sharon Maquire (Bridget Jones) to direct. Leah McKendrick is an actress and writer. She appeared in Bad Moms and she’s writing the upcoming Grease prequel.
Writer: Leah Mckendrick
Details: 117 pages

When you look through all the remaining 2019 scripts (that I haven’t read), Voicemails for Isabelle is the best concept left. And it has some high-level talent attached to it. The director of the Bridget Jones movie is helming. Hailee Steinfeld is playing the lead. That’s better than what I usually see with Black List scripts, which often don’t have anyone attached. Will this be good? If so, I promise to leave a voicemail to the writer.

Jill and her sister, Isabelle’s, relationship has always been wonderful except for one thing – Isabelle has cystic fibrosis. But she’s a fighter and she fights her way through elementary school, through high school, through Jill’s college, and even through the first part of Jill’s adult life.

But when Jill turns 29, her sister finally dies, and all of a sudden everything in the world is pointless. After the funeral, Jill heads back to LA, where she’s chasing her dream of becoming a TV writer and trying to find a boyfriend 4 life. That’s where the comedy begins. Because every man Jill runs into is a disaster.

So Jill uses her sister’s old voicemail account to leave her LA writer dream dating disaster life play-by-play. It’s the perfect coping mechanism. It allows her to still connect with her sister as well as get out all of her frustration of trying to make it in this city.

What Jill doesn’t know is that Isabelle’s number gets changed and that a real estate agent back in New York named Austin is now receiving the voicemails. At first he finds them funny. But then he starts getting invested in all the stories, particularly the latest one, where Jill thinks she’s found the love of her life in British dating coach, Chad.

But when Chad ghosts Jill, she decides to confront him at one of his book readings. And since Jill told “Isabelle” about this, Austin knows where she’s going to be. So he flies to LA to meet Jill under false pretenses, telling her “that was amazing!” after she tells off Chad, and the two start dating.

But this puts Austin in an awkward place. He now has insight into his relationship situation with Jill because she’s now talking about HIM to her sister. Unfortunately, this doesn’t help matters because Jill is super duper in love with Austin and that scares him off. Will he get over this fear? Will he tell Jill the truth about the voicemails? We’ll have to find out when the movie’s made!

Wow.

This was… unexpected.

Like unexpectedly awesome!

And not just normal awesome. Really awesome.

Let’s figure out why it worked because ideas like this have huge cringe-potential so if you don’t have a strong voice and a solid plan, they can fly south quickly. I know because I’ve read all those fly-south-for-the-winter screenplays.

For starters, it gets off on the right foot. If you’re going to deal with a horrible disease, it’s hard to do so when you lean into the sadness and depression of it. Yes, that tends to be more authentic. But it doesn’t go over well in movies. In movies, cancer (or in this case, cystic fibrosis) plays better when you go against the expectation. “Voicemails” gives us that. All mentions of the sister’s disease are placed within humorous or “humorous-adjacent” situations.

That immediately got rid of my worry that this was going to be a Depression Fest.

You know something’s working when, even though you know the death is coming, you still tear up. This had me before we even got to the second act.

The other big gold star goes to the dialogue. This writer is really good with dialogue. I get dinged a lot because I don’t talk about dialogue much in my reviews. But that’s because I only notice dialogue when it’s really good or really bad. And with the large majority of scripts, it’s somewhere in between.

But McKendrick has that extra something special in her dialogue. She knows exactly how to use humor to defuse moments that get too serious or too sad. Her timing in that area is impeccable. Combine that with a clear knowledge of the subject matter and a lot of specific detail in the dialogue – not to mention she’s been blessed with a movie-perfect sensibility for humor – and you get this script.

Here’s an early exchange.

And here’s one of her voicemails.

If you’re a writer who wants to know exactly what Hollywood is looking for in their theatrical release comedy or romantic comedy departments, read this script. This shows you where the bar is. The dialogue here is so solid throughout. Hats off to McKendrick.

There were also a lot of little impressive things about the script. For example, it has this great underlining angle of dramatic irony in that we know Austin is receiving the voicemails but our protagonist does not. This makes his courting of her that much more interesting because we know he’s got to tell her the truth at some point.

What’s really clever that McKendrick does, though, is that Austin chickens out on telling Jill, which then turns dramatic irony into ULTRA DRAMATIC IRONY. Cause Jill is now unknowingly giving Austin a play-by-play on what she’s thinking. I don’t think I’ve ever seen someone turbo-boost an already established dramatically ironic plotline like that before.

The script isn’t perfect.

There’s a teensy too much generalizing with the male characters here. Not all guys are white privilege jerkaloos who think women are playthings. You want to treat every character on an individual basis, man or woman. Generalizing against either gender is only going to hurt the authenticity of the story.

The second issue was more technical. In every rom-com you have the boy loses girl moment late in the second act (or, in this script, the ‘girl loses boy’ moment). These are deceptively difficult scenes to write. Nine times out of ten, with the scripts I read, these moments are poorly written. The writer orchestrates a totally unbelievable reason for why the girl loses the boy, and it ends up ruining the whole third act.

“Voicemails” had one of the best options for an authentic “girl loses boy” scenario. All you had to do was have Jill find out Austin was listening to the voicemails this whole time. INSTANTLY everyone in the audience would understand why Jill left him.

Instead, though, Jill leaves a voicemail to “Isabelle” (aka, Austin) about how into Austin she is. As a result, Austin gets scared by her intensity and doesn’t feel like he’s “ready” for such a strong relationship so he breaks up with her. We then save the “I was listening to the voicemails” moment for later.

Hmm… I’m having trouble with this.

The guy who’s spent the last five months breathlessly listening to every voicemail of this woman while falling in love with her and then traveling to LA to sneakily meet up with her is all of a sudden scared that things are “moving too fast.”

Plot points aren’t as believable when they’re inconsistent with the characters you’ve developed. And the thing is, you already had the great ‘breakup’ plot point written for you! So that was the one frustrating choice to me.

The good news, however, is everything else here is top-notch.

This is Hollywood level dialogue. The main character is super-likable. I love the fresh update on an old proven Hollywood formula (You’ve Got Mail). But most of all, I really like this writer. She’s funny and fits perfectly into this type of film. Looks like I have a voicemail to leave. Anyone know Leah McKendrick’s number?

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

What I learned: Call out the elephant in the room. I have a feeling that McKendrick started this script a long time ago. Voicemails are somewhat outdated. When this happens – and it *will* happen with any idea that has a technology component – there’s a little trick you can use to get away with it. Basically, you need to have a character call out the elephant in the room. So, here, in a scene where Jill goes to Apple to try and recover some voicemails she lost during a software update, as she’s pleading her case to the Apple employee, the woman behind her comically yells out, “Who the f- uses voicemails anymore!” She literally calls out the elephant in the room. It’s not a perfect solution. The better solution is to stay away from ideas that will date quickly. But if you’re already there, this helps you a little bit.