Genre: Comedy
Premise: Best friends and former time travelers Bill and Ted are called back by the heavens to save the world. All they have to do is write a song that unites every single person on the planet. And they’ve got 77 minutes to do it.
About: They have been trying to make this movie forever. I think since the late 90s. But Keanu was becoming a huge star and didn’t have the time. I believe that changed when Keanu hit that rough patch, doing 10 years of DTV work. Finally, he had the time to do another Bill and Ted movie. Ironically, that’s right when his career picked back up again with John Wick. But Keanu kept his promise to his buddy Alex Winter and here we are. These are also the original screenwriters from Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure.
Writers: Chris Matheson and Ed Solomon
Details: 90 minutes
The Keanusance?
Is that what they’re calling it?
Hey, as long as I keep getting Matrix and John Wick movies, I’ll call it whatever you want me to. The Keanuback. Return of the Kean Bean. Kicking it with Keanu. Tune My Piano Keanu. Hmm… maybe not that last one.
Bill and Ted are in their 50s and still plugging away as the group, “Wild Stallyns.” But things aren’t going well. The former Billboard-topping Stallyns can barely get wedding gigs these days. To make matters worse, they were told as teens they would write the song that unites the world. Except they still haven’t written it! Here’s co-writer Solomon on this writing choice (via Daily Dead)…
“I’ve always felt that comedy is best when it comes from one of the more negative, let’s call it emotions: sadness, despair, anxiety, fear, whatever. And the guys were feeling those things. In a weird way, we said from the beginning, “Let’s make a feel-good comedy about failure. Let’s make an absurd, silly, ridiculous, funny movie about dashed dreams and disappointment. And let’s have it end where you feel really good.”
Bill and Ted are then visited by an agent of Heaven (I think Heaven?) and brought to the city in the clouds, where they’re informed by some queen woman that time is up. They must write the song that unites the world… WITHIN 77 MINUTES! Should they fail, time and space, which are already starting to implode, will cease to exist.
Freaked out, Bill and Ted have no idea how they’re going to write a song in 77 minutes that they’ve been trying, and failing, to write for 30 years. But they realize they have a hack. The time machine! They can go into the future and take the song FROM THEIR FUTURE SELVES, who have already saved the world. Isn’t that stealing, wonders Ted. “Not if we’re stealing… from ourselves,” Bill points out.
This begins a trip deeper and deeper into the future to find the Bills and Tedss who have written the song. But the more Bills and Teds they visit, the more they’re lied to. It seems like nobody has the song. Could it be that they actually have to figure it out for themselves??
Meanwhile, Bill’s and Ted’s excellent 20-something daughters, Billie and Thea, who happen to be aspiring musicians, sense that their dads are in trouble and hijack a second time travel machine where they go BACK in time and recruit some of the best musicians ever – Mozart, Jimmi Hendrix, Louis Armstrong, Kid Cudi – to help their dads. Of course, we begin to suspect that this crazy adventure was never about the dads in the first place. It was really about… THEM!
Oh, and let’s not forget that Heaven secretly needs to kill Bill and Ted so they create a killer robot and send him through time to chase and assassinate the Stallyns. You read that correctly. There’s a killer robot in this movie. So, can Billie and Thea save the world and, with it, their dads? By golly, I hope so.
Bill and Ted Face The Music will win you over by the end. But it sure tries its hardest to shoo you away in the meantime.
This was an odd project from the outset.
The fact that Keanu Reeves never makes sequels (that used to be his defining m.o.) yet he wanted to make a Bill and Ted threequel? Odd. Why Bill and Ted of all his properties? It’s not even like he made the first movie then wanted to revisit the fun of it, like Jim Carrey did with Dumb and Dumber Too. He’d already made a sequel.
As one of you pointed out after the latest Kevin Smith debacle (“Moochie and Spoochie Road Trip Shenanigans”), watching 20-somethings curse up a storm is funny. Watching 50-somethings do the same thing isn’t nearly as funny. Same problem here. Bill and Ted talking like dumb 20-somethings when they’re in their 50s makes for an uncomfortable experience.
Speaking of uncomfortable, did Keanu film all his scenes right after doing a day of John Wick stunt work? Why is he limping around half the time? Or struggling to walk from one end of the room to the other? It certainly doesn’t help sell the nonchalant “Yeah dude” persona he’s supposed to be exuding.
Something I realized while watching Face the Music, though, is that time travel works better with comedy than it does straight sci-fi. That’s because time travel never makes sense when you think about it. You go back in time to fix something but, by doing so, don’t you alter the course of history, essentially creating a second timeline? And doesn’t that mean the original timeline still burns? A butterfly flaps its wings and all that?
The nice thing about comedy is the audience doesn’t hold you to that same impossible standard. That’s because, in a comedy, laughing is more important to the audience than logic. In other words, you have more leeway.
But even Bill and Ted leaves you stumped at times with its time travel paradoxes. We’re told they only have 77 minutes to find the greatest song ever (the “U” in GSU – “Urgency”) yet they can travel through time. So doesn’t that mean they have unlimited minutes? Why does every minute that passes during time travel equal an actual minute in Heaven? Isn’t Heaven timeless?
Again, it’s annoying, but if you’re laughing, it doesn’t matter.
And Face the Music starts making you laugh later when it loosens the reigns. The daughters are surprisingly fun to watch, especially the one who plays Ted’s daughter. She somehow both sounds exactly like Keanu circa 1991 and adds her own weird take to the impersonation. I also loved Death’s scenes. One of my favorite lines is when they catch him playing hopscotch by himself and Ted realizes, “He’s cheating!” Death cheating at hopscotch when no one else is around is hilarious. But my favorite character was the one I initially hated the most – the killer robot. Once he fails at his mission and just wants to be one of the guys, I fell in love with him. He was so funny.
Also, some movies are lucky to come out at the exact time they’re needed. And Face the Music fits that description to a tee. Things are a bit charged up in our world to say the least. Having two goofballs go on a mission to unite the planet… well that’s a bit serendipitous don’t you think? Even the subpar “song that unites the world” couldn’t derail the good vibes that flowed from the final scene.
The strangest thing about this movie is that it tells us nothing about the movie business. It’s such an outlier in so many ways that it’s hard to formulate any “larger picture” thoughts on the film. And maybe that’s the point. This movie was made for one purpose and one purpose only – to bring a smile to your lips. And at that, it succeeds.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[x] worth the rental (at 6 dollars, not 20 dollars)
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: When you write comedy, you have to be willing to take chances on the absurd. Comedy is the one thing in writing that you can’t argue with logic. Something is either funny or it isn’t. So if you’re stringently controlling every joke you write so that it works on a technical level, expect audiences to be unimpressed. A killer robot makes ZERO SENSE in this movie. It’s a “way out there” idea. But it ends up being the most interesting and funniest part of the movie. So play with absurd ideas in comedy. That doesn’t mean some of them won’t be stupid and you shouldn’t come to your senses and ditch them later. But if a joke/choice shouldn’t technically be working yet it is? Don’t question why. Keep it in there.
YAAAAAAYYYYY!!!
A Scriptshadow Newsletter Weekend.
What can you expect in this newsletter? All sorts of opinions, that’s for sure. I take on Christopher Nolan and his pretentiousness, I fawn over the new Batman trailer, I ask if Sofia Coppola was ever a good director on the eve of her latest film. I update you on Scriptshadow Productions. I update you on The Last Great Screenplay Contest. I review the latest Blumhouse script. And boy does that review get interesting. And, oh yeah, I do something I’ve never done before! I pitch a movie idea of mine. A movie idea that just happens to exist in the Star Wars universe.
So check your inboxes.
Check your spam folder.
Peek into your promotions folder.
If you still cannot find my newsletter, e-mail me at carsonreeves1@gmail.com with the subject line, “NEWSLETTER!” and I’ll send it to you.
Genre: WW2/Thriller
Logline: In 1942, the sole survivor of an u-boat-destroyed British arctic convoy is paired with a native Inuit hunter on a months-long journey across the frozen wasteland of Northern Greenland. Before reaching civilization, they must survive the unforgiving conditions, an outside threat lurking in the dark — and the fact that one of them is not the person he says he is.
Why You Should Read: It’s World War 2, and you and your partner are on a patrol in one of the coldest, remotest, most desolate parts of the world — months of travel from the nearest outpost, in the deadly cold of a polar night, with only your 13 dogs for company. — To survive on the ice riddled with deadly traps of open-water “leads”, with white-coated terrors stalking just out of the view of your fading headlamp and the constant threat of a submarine Nazi incursion looming behind the icebergs, every “day” of the endless night you put your life in your partner’s hands — and him in yours. You get to know the other man closer than your own brother or a lover. One night, in your tent… he starts speaking German in his sleep.
Writer: Alexander Bashkirov
Details: 112 pages
It’s finally here! Our Character Piece Showdown winner!
Everything about this review is going to be the same except we’re going to be zoomed in on character. That’s the main thing I’m judging this script on.
By the way, if you want to participate in the next showdown, that would be Horror Showdown and entries need to be in by October 15th. So get writing.
I noticed the spirited battle last weekend but despite the tight race, it seemed like everyone had an opinion on Dog Sled Patrol. That’s typically the mark of a strong script. Even if you don’t like it, you have an opinion on it. So what’s my opinion? Read on to find out!
We’re on the northeast coast of Greenland in 1942. There’s just been some sort of attack. A U-Boat has tried to sink a British ship and the coast is littered with dead soldiers from both sides. One of those soldiers (from which side??) – we’ll call him Jack – survived. But he’s in bad shape. He scavenges what he can then walks into the endless snowy darkness that is Greenland.
Jack barely makes it to an outpost where he meets Ib Poulsen, the Eskimonaes Chief of Police and Captain of the Army of Greenland. After Jack explains that he’s American, Poulsen recommends a two month dogsled journey to a port that American ships routinely visit. Poulsen gives Jack a guide, Ernin, who we’re not told much about other than his eyes look “feral.”
Off the two go and immediately run into problems, such as a polar bear that’s tracking them. Then, one night, Ernin hears Jack speak German in his sleep. He isn’t quite sure what to do with this information. The next day they come across a German weather station, which aids the process of helping German U-boats sink ships. Fortuitously, as they’re scoping the station out from afar, an American bomber appears and destroys the station.
Jack and Ernin head into the wreckage and it’s there that Ernin confronts Jack about his lie. Jack confesses that, yes, he is a Nazi but, you see, he’s a good Nazi. He’d been forced onto a U-boat led by the Hitler of U-Boat captains, an evil entity named Richter. Richter had put the Suicide Squad equivalent of a submarine team together and their reign of terror was so horrifying that Jack literally dove into the ocean and swam away. The story has holes but Ernin trusts him. Okay, he says, they’re still a team.
Soon, they come across a SECOND weather station. But this one is way bigger than the first. And to make matters worse, it’s currently being visited by Jack’s old U-boat!!! Yes, Richter and his team are here! They capture Jack and Ernin and Richter uses them to find the eskimo towns that are aiding the Allies and destroy them.
Jack is able to escape but he and Ernin get split up. Knowing that if Richter and his team get away, they’ll keep setting these weather stations up along the Greenland coast turning the ocean into an Allied graveyard. Jack isn’t leaving until he kills every single member of his old crew, including Richter himself!
The big fear a reader has when picking up character-driven material is that they’re going to be bored. If there isn’t a larger plot engine or juicy concept driving the narrative, it increases the chances that the narrative is going to be slow and, potentially, boring.
So as a “character-first” writer, you have to prove early on that you’re different. You have to assure the reader that while they’re not getting John Wick, they’re still going to be entertained. You achieve this using tools that don’t depend on plot and urgency. Mystery. Suspense. Conflict. And, most important of all, interesting characters.
That’s where I think Alexander made his first mistake.
He initially focused on the wrong guy. Jack.
Instead, we should’ve started with Ernin. We should’ve set up his life, his situation, his personality, who he is, what his flaws are. Then this mysterious person, Jack, should’ve showed up out of nowhere, nearly dead. And here’s why it should’ve been done this way. Because 25 pages in, once Ernin suspects that Jack is German, all I could think to myself was, “So what?”
I know NOTHING about Ernin. And he seems to be the only one in danger from Jack being a Nazi. Yeah, sure, I don’t want Jack to kill Ernin. But I certainly haven’t built up any sort of closeness to Ernin, not enough to care if Jack kills him.
Because another problem I had with Jack is that you don’t gain anything by introducing him after the opening crash. In fact, it hurts the story more than helps it. We have a crash with Germans and British and it’s unclear which one Jack is. So, already, we’re 50% considering he’s German.
This ruins the big hook of the script, Jack sleeptalking in German. We’re not surprised by that because we knew there was a 50% chance it was the case. Wouldn’t it have been better if it was a complete shock? That’s what you would’ve had had we met Jack second.
Even if you didn’t want to do it that way, you could’ve focused a lot more in the early scenes on bringing out Ernin’s personality. I felt nothing towards him because he wasn’t interesting at all. In fact, I felt I knew the Eskimo Police Cheif better, the guy who wasn’t even in the movie anymore.
This is a character piece. Why is one of the main characters so invisible? Why doesn’t he have any presence on the page? In the form of personality, dialogue, action, opinion, or unique attributes? In a character piece, the characters have to stand out.
All of this led to me falling asleep on page 35. Now, to provide context to that statement, I didn’t sleep well last night so I was tired. But it’s never good news when someone falls asleep reading your script.
And here’s the crazy thing about that: after that moment, the script gets way better. Everything changes when Jack gives us the backstory on his Suicide Squad U-boat team. Actually, while I was listening to him talk about them, I thought, “Why aren’t THESE characters in the movie??? These characters sound way more interesting!” So I was more than happy when they showed up in the story a few scenes later.
Unfortunately, this is the problem when your scripts starts weak. It’s hard to get the reader back. And while some of me came back, Dog Sled Patrol couldn’t get all of me. I was so bored by those first 30 pages. And then, on top of that, Ernin was an incredibly weak character. He had zero personality.
If I was Alexander, I would approach this like a buddy cop movie. And I don’t mean you should turn Ernin into Jackie Chan. But I do think you could have more fun with him. You give us this descriptor early on: “feral.” I didn’t get any sense of feralness. My only sense was “plain guy, uninteresting, brings nothing to the table.” Honestly, what does Ernin bring to the table? Instead of saying he’s a black sheep, why can’t you SHOW US why he’s a black sheep. Give him a weird sense of humor. Have him do things normal people wouldn’t do. This character was begging for you to give him something to make him stand out but you left him standing out in the cold instead.
Those are the two reasons this just missed [x] worth the read for me. Boring first act and a weak link in the main character pairing. If you can solve those two issues, this script gets a lot better. Cause once Richter enters the scene, the script finds a whole new energy. Good luck!
Script Link: Dog Sled Patrol
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: The Richter payoff comes a littttttlllle too soon. You just told us this dramatic 8 page backstory on the guy who you last saw in the middle of the ocean and now, 10 pages later, there he is, in the exact same five mile square radius of Greenland that you’re on! The heavier the payoff, the more distance you want between it and the setup.
As you guys know since I constantly talk about it on the site, one of my screenwriting obsessions is scene-writing.
The reason for that is, I have a theory that everything in screenwriting comes down to writing good scenes. If a scene is entertaining, we’re going to want to read til the end of it. And if the next scene is entertaining, we’re going to want to read til the end of that. And so on and so forth.
The fastest way to me bailing on a script is three boring scenes in a row. If I read three boring scenes in a row, there’s a 99% chance that I’ll dislike the script. I know that from experience. And, again, that’s because good writers know how to write good scenes. Bad or new writers don’t.
That’s why I always talk about making every scene as entertaining as you can make it.
More recently, I was working on a theory that there are roughly two dozen types of scenes that work. And I wanted to give a name to all of them. The idea would be that when you were about to write a scene, you could cross-check it against this list of 24 Scene Types and make sure you were using one of them. If you weren’t, there’s a good chance the scene would be boring.
Some examples…
Dramatic Irony Scene – A girl walks into a room with a killer hiding in a closet. The audience knows the killer is there. The girl does not.
Straight Conflict Scene – Two characters don’t see eye to eye about something and hash it out until a resolution is found (or not).
Subtext Conflict Scene – A married couple is having dinner, talking about normal things, when, in actuality, one or both of them is frustrated with the other, creating an underlying current of subtext in the conversation.
Sexual Tension Scene – Two characters who clearly like each other but who haven’t yet been together stuck in a situation with one another. The sexual tension tends to give the dialogue in these scenes a spark (assuming we actually like the two characters and want them to be together, of course).
Straight Suspense Scene – Two detectives arrive at a murder scene and a cop comes out of the house looking like they’ve seen a ghost. “That’s the most horrifying murder scene I’ve ever encountered,” he says, stumbling away. For the next however many minutes our detectives talk before seeing the death scene, the reader is under the spell of suspense. They must find out what that horrifying murder looks like.
Problem Needs To Be Resolved Scene – Rocky shows up at his gym only to find out his locker has been cleaned out. Furious, he darts out to confront the gym manager, determined to get his locker back.
Straight Mystery Scene – Why is this man running like a crazed psycho in the back yard in the middle of the night (Get Out)?
While I do believe that knowing these scene types will make you a better writer, I stumbled upon the Safdie Brothers, “Good Time” again recently, and I noticed that while the scene-writing didn’t always utilize one of my “Scene Types,” they were always good. In fact, if you’re struggling with writing entertaining scenes, The Safdie Brothers “Good Time” and “Uncut Gems” are great movies to watch and learn from. Virtually every scene in those movies is entertaining.
But it became clear to me that something else was going on in this movie and it didn’t take me long to figure out what it was.
PURPOSE
At least one character in every scene of Good Time had a strong purpose in the scene. But it went beyond even that. It wasn’t like the Safdie Brothers sat there desperately looking for ways to make all 40 scenes in their movie amazing and therefore found 40 different ways to create purpose in each of those scenes. It turns out they didn’t have to. And this, I believe, is the secret sauce for writing good scenes and a good script. Are you ready for it?
PURPOSE IS BAKED INTO THE CONCEPT
Good Time is built around Connie, the main character, needing to do very important things right now. Mostly, rescue his brother or protect his brother from being taken. Because Connie’s purpose is baked into the concept, it means every scene will automatically have purpose.
Connie needs to get his brother out of the mental institution.
Connie needs to convince his ex-girlfriend to give him money to bail his brother out of jail.
Connie and his brother need to rob a bank to pay off a debt.
Connie needs to convince a girl to let him stay at her place until the cops leave the area.
Connie needs to bust his brother out of the hospital.
If your concept organically creates purpose for your character throughout the story, like Good Time, scene-writing is easy. Where scene-writing gets hard is when you have more passive concepts. Or inert concepts. Concepts where characters don’t need things as much or don’t need them right away.
Look at Juno for example.
Juno is about a girl who gets pregnant and has to make a decision of what she’s going to do with the baby. Pregnancy is a 9 month process. So, already, we know she doesn’t need to make a decision RIGHT AWAY. And just the nature of a nine month timeline allows for purpose to dissolve away.
However, Juno is still a good movie. Why?
Well, I didn’t say it was impossible to write a movie without purpose baked into the concept. Just that it’s more challenging. The reason for that is you now have to find individual purpose for each individual scene. Whereas Good Time has purpose already set up for every scene before you write it, Juno does not. So you have to figure all those purposes out.
One strong scene that comes to mind is when Juno first meets the Jennifer Garner Jason Bateman family to decide if she wants to give her baby to them. There’s a lot of purpose in that scene. There’s purpose from Juno who must decide if this is a good couple for her child and from Jennifer Garner, who desperately wants a child. Which is why it’s one of the better scenes in the movie.
A couple of other strong purpose scenes from that movie are Juno has to go to the convenience store to take a pregnancy test to see if she’s pregnant. And Juno has to tell her parents that she’s pregnant.
Almost always, when a character has strong purpose in a scene, the scene will work. If they don’t, that doesn’t mean the scene *can’t* work. It just means you need to recognize the lack of purpose and understand that you need to bring something else to the table to make the scene entertaining.
And look, I understand that there is no perfect formula. Not every good idea takes care of purpose all the time. So there are going to be scenes that lack purpose in them. I was just rewatching Groundhog Day and there’s a scene where Phil is with his producing team driving to Puxatawny and there isn’t a lot of purpose in the scene. They’re just chatting. But the sexual tension with Rita and Phil’s dislike of cameraman Larry allow for just enough conflict to make the dialogue fun.
The purpose (pun intended) for this article is two-fold. One, it’s to encourage you to choose concepts that have purpose built into them. By doing so, you’re making your scene-writing a million times easier. And two, if you don’t choose a purpose-driven concept, understand the challenge that’s ahead of you and have a plan for it. Know that the scenes will be harder to write and that you’ll have to keep coming up with new ways to inject purpose. As long as you know that, you’ll be good.
Tomorrow is Amateur Showdown Review Day. Hopefully, we’ve found another great script. Seeya then!
Genre: Comedy
Premise: After a 30-something female thief is framed for stealing a 2 million dollar piece of jewelry, she dresses up in an old woman suit and hides out in an assisted living facility.
About: This script finished low on last year’s Black List and sold for NEARLY 1 MILLION DOLLARS to Paramount. Writer Kay Oyegun wrote on the NBC show, This is Us.
Writer: Kay Oyegun
Details: 112 pages
If you’re a spec screenwriter – and by that I mean, if you’re someone who writes original screenplays that you hope to sell to Hollywood – the studio you want to be paying attention to is Paramount. They’re buying a bunch of stuff. The reason for this is Paramount has the smallest library of BIG IP of all the studios. Therefore, they have no choice but to take chances on original material. And that’s why you see them buying stuff like Assisted Living.
Today’s script continues this week’s theme of: to find the future, look to the past. Monday’s entry harkened back to cheesy 90s thrillers. Yesterday’s pilot took us all the way back to the 60s. And today is about going back to the wonderful world of over-the-top 90s disguise comedies. Hold on, do you hear that? Me too. It’s Martin Lawrence calling his agent setting up a Big Momma’s House reboot!
Amber is a thief. She grew up learning the trade with her mother, a drug addict who used to run with a guy named Dragon. Mom and Dragon would use Amber’s “lost child” routine to create a diversion and steal jewelry. So Amber never had any choice but to get involved in the crime trade.
But these days, in her 30s, Amber is finally ready to go on the straight and narrow. Her boyfriend slash local crime boss, Jamie, tries to pull her in on his latest job – stealing a two million dollar piece of jewelry known as “the golden bird” – but Amber tells him no. Unfortunately, it doesn’t matter. Jamie not only goes through with the robbery, but frames Amber, using Amber’s former friend Pam who looks just like Amber! Once video footage of Pam stealing the golden bird hits the web, the police are convinced that the woman in the footage is Amber.
Oh no! Amber charges over to Jamie’s place to yell at him. He tells her tough luck. You should’ve come with us. A fight ensues, and during the pandemonium, the golden bird falls to the ground. Amber pockets it and runs off. Once home, Amber realizes she needs to hide from the cops. So she gets her good friend Nell, who’s a costume artist, to design an old person’s suit for her then heads over to Meadow Lane Assisted Living where her grandma is staying.
Amber is still mad at her grandma for allowing her crime-ridden mother to ruin her life, so she tries to stay away from her. Meanwhile, she spends most of her time walking around the place trying not to look conspicuous. She makes friends. She develops a crush on a 40-something doctor who she can’t have (because she’s an “old woman” in his eyes) and generally hopes this whole Golden Bird thing blows over. But will it blow over? Or is Amber just delaying the inevitable?
Okay, so here’s the deal.
I’m not sure it’s worth going into all the things that are wrong with this script. Cause there are a lot. For example, Amber grabs the golden bird during the fight with Jamie. Later, she’s asked by her friend why she took it. “I don’t know,” she says. When your character doesn’t know why they’re executing a major plot point, that’s a strong indication that the script is a mess. That sort of stuff needs to be on lock. And there’s a lot of that here.
I still don’t understand why a freeze framed picture of Pam stealing the golden bird has convinced the police that it’s Amber who’s done it. Yes, it’s established that the two look alike. But no matter how similar they look, THE PERSON IN THE VIDEO LOOKS MORE LIKE PAM BECAUSE IT’S PAM.
But here’s the thing about Hollywood. There are two worlds. There’s the “Get a script into the theoretical best shape it can be in” world so it has the best shot at attracting interest. I remember Ben Ripley, who wrote Source Code, telling me that. That he kept going back and applying notes over and over every draft until it was perfect. And then they went out with it.
But then there’s another side of the business that’s all about THE MOVIE. A studio wants to make a certain movie and if your script comes along at the right time and it checks most of the boxes, they don’t care if it’s any good. They just know they have a type of movie they want to make and this concept is similar enough to that theoretical movie that they slot it into that production lane and off they go.
To them, it’s the overall sweeping ideas of the script that appeal to them. A woman dressing up in an old person’s suit hiding from cops and bad guys at an assisted living facility. They can SELL THAT IDEA. They know how to market that idea. Hell, they already have a mockup of the poster on some computer in a back room on the Paramount lot. To these people, the “wouldn’t they be searching for Pam, not Amber?” plot hole is insignificant to them. Some writer down the line will fix that.
Yes, we all would prefer to be in the “LET’S MAKE A MOVIE” lane. It’s a much wider faster lane. You see all those cars bunched up together in four lanes to your right? SUCKERS. You’re in the movie lane where things actually happen. When a studio decides to put a project in the movie lane, it’s like being in first class. And yes I know I’m mixing metaphors. But that’s what it’s really like. You not only are assured of getting to your destination. But you’re going to get treated like a God along the way. Need Kevin Hart? Why of course you can have access to an offer of 20 million dollars.
I remember when Mark Guggenheim wrote the spec, Safe House. Very average script. But, for whatever reason, it was awarded access to the “LET’S MAKE A MOVIE” lane. Denzel and Ryan Reynolds were contacted within days of the sale. Sony was making that movie NOW and nothing would get in the way.
And what’s so frustrating is that nobody knows how to consistently make it into the Let’s Make a Movie lane. You don’t know that you’ve done it until you’re in the lane. Safe House was Mark Guggenheim’s first industry sale. And yet I know his next 4-5 scripts got sold but none of them were allowed in the elusive “Let’s Make a Movie” lane. It’s crazy. You just don’t know.
But one clue I do know is that the types of projects that are granted access into that lane tend to be safe simple ideas that are based on templates that have worked before. Safe House was your basic buddy-cop setup, but adjusted for the FBI and centered around a safe house. This script is just like those goofy 90s comedies where people dressed up in fat suits all the time.
And I think that’s why a lot of writers struggle to get into the elusive “project fast lane.” These ideas are as sexy as a half-empty 2-liter bottle of Diet Dr. Pepper. Who wants to write these movies? And even if you do write one, it’s a game of luck. There’s nothing in these scripts that distinguish them from each other. There’s no voice. Diablo Cody would’ve never written Assisted Living or Safe House.
But if you can get these projects to the right person right when they’re looking for it, you’ve found the golden ticket.
So in defense of the writer, you can say they’re smarter than we are. Here we are trying to break in with our dark comedy about the furniture sales world while they’re getting an e-mail from PayPal telling them their balance has just broken the double-comma barrier. Sure, the furniture sales comedy is a better script by everyone’s measurement. It’s better written. It’s got better characters. The dialogue is way better. But Paramount doesn’t have a box in their “success generation computer algorithm” for “dark furniture comedy.” They do have one for “the next Mrs. Doubtfire” though.
I’ll be honest, these types of sales depress me. I know the industry likes to make them and I know they make money. They’re just not the reason I got into screenwriting.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned : Where’s the irony? Concepts like this need irony to work. For example, if you made Amber a really depressed hateful person, an ironic premise would have her hide in a clown school, a place where she’d be required to act happy and helpful, the last things in the world she’s comfortable doing. There is zero irony in a 35 year old woman hiding in an old person’s home. It’s random. She could be hiding anywhere. She could pretend to be a fireman hiding in fire station. She could pretend to be a chef hiding at a culinary school. She could pretend to be a teenager hiding at a high school. Without any irony, a comedic premise isn’t comedic.
