Genre: Sci-Fi/Comedy
Premise: (from Black List) An unlikely group is thrown together by mysterious events that leads them to uncover a government conspiracy.
About: Netflix owns the world! This flashy Black List script (which finished in the top 25) was pitched as Friday meets Get Out and got a Netflix green light out of it. I think a better pitch would be Boys In the Hood meets Dude Where’s My Car. But, of course, if you’re pitching anything in Hollywood, it’s always best to use the most recent breakout hit when possible. If you’ve got a cool action script set around racing, I wouldn’t pitch it as “Ben Hurr meets The Bridge on The River Kwai.” They Cloned Tyrone originally attracted Brian Tyree Henry for the lead, but ended up casting John Boyega. The film will be directed by Creed 2 writer, Juel Taylor. Taylor wrote the script with Tony Rettenmaier.
Writer: Juel Taylor and Tony Rettenmaier
Details: 112 pages
The other day you heard me discussing Ghostbusters. There’s a reason Hollywood is so obsessed with that film. It’s because it’s arguably the best film in history to cross comedy over with supernatural. Comedy and Supernatural and Comedy and Sci-Fi are Hollywood crack. There’s something about those combos that audiences love when they’re done well.
What’s unique about They Cloned Tyrone is that it mixes comedy and sci-fi but it’s also R-rated. The reason this is relevant is that this film never would’ve been made by the old Hollywood. The R rating is too limiting. If it’s going to be a comedy, you want 12 year olds to be able to show up. However, Netflix obliterates that equation. It’s something they don’t even have to think about. Part of the reason is they have a loophole, which is that it’s a lot easier for a 12 year old to watch an R-rated movie on Netflix than it is to see one in the theater.
This is good news for movie lovers. It means we’re going to see more content that, in the past, never would’ve been made. The only question left for today is, is the script actually any good? Let’s find out.
27 year old Tyrone Fontaine (I’m assuming his name is Tyrone although he’s only ever called ‘Fontaine’) lives in The Glen, the kind of neighborhood where you need to be on your toes 24/7. Especially if you’re a drug dealer, which Fontaine is.
When Fontaine learns that his latest deal is short on cash and that cash is in the hands of a squirrelly pimp named Slick Charles, he storms over to Slick Charles’ place to get it. Slick Charles is busy telling his top prostitute, Yo-Yo, that her dreams of achieving a real life are hogwash and she needs to embrace being a hooker.
When Fontaine comes in, Slick Charles starts making all these excuses as to why he doesn’t have the money. And that’s when Fontaine’s Rival, Isaac, arrives and pops lots of caps into him. Fontaine tries to stay alive but dies. Or, at least, he thinks he dies. The next morning, he wakes up in his bed. What the heck is going on!
Fontaine heads back to Slick Charles, who says, oh yeah, you died all right. But if he’s dead, then who’s he? Or I? That’s the question he has to answer so Fontaine grabs Slick Charles and Yo-Yo and they head to Isaac’s trap house, seeing as he’s the one who killed Fontaine. Maybe he has answers.
When they get there, they discover that the house is actually a secret hideout with an underground laboratory. There they discover a white guy with an afro who Slick Charles accidentally kills before they can ask him questions. They also find Fontaine’s dead body!
The group is blown away by all this and they need some food to set their minds straight. So they head to Got Damn Fried Chicken, only to find that another white guy with an afro is serving everyone, and that the chicken is laced with something that’s making them all laugh uncontrollably! What’s going on?
The group will go to the barber shop, the salon, the church, and anywhere else they can find until they discover what the heck is going on here. Or, more specifically, figure out who the hell cloned Tyrone!
There’s a lot to like about this script. It’s got a killer title. It’s got a chaotic energy to it. It takes us to places we don’t usually see. The voice is strong. The dialogue pops off the page.
But They Cloned Tyrone is a tale of two halves.
Through the first half of the script, I struggled to stay invested. I was trying to figure out why and then it hit me. The script has a goal. But there are no stakes attached to that goal. The goal is one of curiosity more than requirement. If they fail to find out why Tyrone was cloned, nothing changes in his life. In fact, he can go back to his drug dealing ways and not be affected.
Now the script does get better in the second half. But by that point, I’d already grown bored.
That’s one of the tough things about writing. You can have strong plot points show up in your script. But if you wait too long, you may have already lost the reader. The general idea is you want to have something every 12-15 pages that ups the stakes and makes the journey feel more important than it did the previous 15 pages. Cause that’s what I was struggling with in the first half. Why do they need to do this? I think Dude Where’s My Car even had stakes attached to finding the car. There was something important in the car they needed if memory serves correctly.
It’s always tough with concepts like this because there’s a tendency to think that because it’s a comedy, you don’t need stakes. But stakes matter in comedies. Look no further than Tag to see how a lack of stakes can make a movie feel utterly pointless (there were zero stakes attached to “tagging” their untaggable friend).
This isn’t the best idea but since drugs and money play a big part in the story, you could’ve created a situation where Tyrone owes a lot of money to someone. And he had that money (or the drugs) on him when he was killed. Therefore, he needs to find his dead body to get the money/drugs back so he can pay off whoever he owes. That way you get your stakes AND your ‘what’s going on here’ mystery.
There’s a scene in the script which could’ve turbo-boosted things if it had done this. Fontaine is at the barbershop and runs into his rival, Isaac. Isaac is pissed and wants to kill him. But he only wants to kill him because it’s Fontaine. Not because there’s any story reason for him to do so. If Fontaine owed him money, now Isaac has actual business with Fontaine. He has a reason to chase him down.
However, if you can stick around past the midpoint, that’s when things get crazy and They Cloned Tyrone kicks into high gear. There’s an old saying that if you’re going to go crazy, there’s no point in going halfway. And these writers FULLY embrace that mantra. (spoiler) The midpoint twist is that there’s this whole underground “Westworld” type lab where white people are cloning black people to keep the Glen a ghetto.
At that point, I was turning the pages solely to find out just how weird things were going to get. You guys know how much I value not knowing what’s going to happen next in a script. In a medium where it’s easy to predict everything the writer’s about to write, it’s rare that I get to experience this level of “what happens next?” So that was appreciated.
However, that feeling of not caring whether Tyrone achieved the goal or not throughout the first 55 pages never left me. One of the hardest things in the world to do is to have a viewer uninterested for half your movie and then come up with some magic trick where they all of a sudden love it. I admired the insanity of They Cloned Tyrone’s second half. But, emotionally, I was just never into it.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Here’s a description of Fontaine:“Late-20s… ripped like vintage denim.” Here’s why I don’t like “clever” descriptions like this. Because they don’t tell you what you’re looking at. “Denim” does not make me imagine someone who’s ripped and strong. It isn’t wrong to use descriptions like this. I know Shane Black made a career out of it. But I always encourage writers to place clear over clever. Clever gets you a nod or a smile. But clear keeps the writer in your imaginary world. Not to mention, there’s a thin line between “clever” and “too clever by half.” If you cross that line, a nod can become a sigh. A smile can become an eye-roll.
Genre: Sci-Fi
Premise: In the future, every man and woman must voluntarily die the day they turn 30. But there are a few who refuse to do so. Instead, they run.
About: There may not be a project in Hollywood that’s been more developed than Logan’s Run. An untold number of drafts have been written over the years and many directors have attached themselves to the project only to eventually move on. The draft I’m reviewing today is special as it was co-written by my writing crush, Alex Garland. One day Logan’s Run will be made. The premise is tailor-designed for a 2 hour feature film. But which combination of creatives will finally get it across the finish line remains unknown. For the ones that do, they might want to use this version of the script as a guide.
Writers: Alex Garland and Michael Dougherty (based on the novel by William F. Nolan and George Clayton Johnson)
Details: 2010 draft
Yesterday’s post got me all nostalgic for long-running projects in development hell and one of the most famous of those unmade movies is Logan’s Run. The project seems to have been greenlit a dozen times in the past two decades, yet it always seems to fall apart.
However, I know it will get made eventually. How do I know that? Cause it’s got the ultimate GSU factor working for it, baby! Goal, get out of the city. Urgency, everyone’s trying to get you. Stakes, you fail you die.
The briefly conveyed backstory of Logan’s Run (by the way, if you’re writing a big sci-fi script, the more briefly you can convey your backstory, the better) is that there was a giant war, so an AI dude named Thinker was created to come up with the best way to keep mankind alive. He constructed a city called Eden where the only rule you had to follow was, when you turn 30, you have to die.
Our hero, Logan, is 29. Or somewhere around 29. Nobody quite knows what their age is. That information is given to them via a color-coded leaf tattoo on the inside of your hand. Your leaf starts at green and by the time it becomes all black, you have to go to the “Sleep Shop” where they terminate your too-old ass.
Logan is a sandman. That means he’s the police for people who try to run after their 30th birthday. He will hunt you down and kill you on sight. You don’t even get the dignity of going to Sleep Shop. Logan isn’t just good at his job. He’s the best, with more kills than any sandman in history.
But things become a little extra real for Logan when his good friend and fellow sandman, Cassie, gets her Sleep Shop marching orders. Logan accompanies her to her death, where he’s allowed to watch as she’s taken into a white room and put to sleep. The event has a heavy effect on Logan. He’s always been told how honorable and amazing volunteering for sleep is. But this felt anything but honorable.
Logan is then called to see Thinker, the “doesn’t even try to hide how evil he is” A.I. dictator of Eden. Thinker says he’s heard of this thing called Sanctuary that some runners escape to. He wants to find out where this place is so he can stop it. Therefore, he artificially speeds up Logan’s hand leaf so his death day is…. TODAY. Uh, say what?? says Logan. You see, Thinker says, the best way to find Sanctuary is to become a runner. So Logan’s all of a sudden running for his life.
He eventually meets up with this chick named Penelope, who explains that she gives every runner a chance, even evil sandmen like himself. “Everyone deserves a shot at Sanctuary” is the underground rule. After lots of evading, Penelope leads them back to Sleep Shop, where you must sneak out of the city with all the dead bodies. Out past the mountains of dead people is where they will find Sanctuary. Or will they?
Last week I highlighted an early scene in Street Rat Allie Punches Her Ticket that leaned into the emotional connection of the characters. The reason I did that is to remind you that even when you’re writing a script that might seem like it’s surface-level summer fare, you still need to write scenes – especially early on – that emotionally connect us to the characters and the situation.
Here we get that scene when Logan accompanies Cassie to Sleep Shop. These two have been told their whole lives what an honor this moment is for the human experience. And yet, when they go through it, it’s anything but. It’s cold. It’s cruel. It’s empty. It’s terrifying. I loved how Garland and Dougherty chronicled every second of it.
Weak action writers shy away from moments like this. They want to get them over with as soon as possible because they feel like they’re betraying what the audience came for. “If the audience comes for a big fun action movie, we can’t give them a sad death scene,” is their fear. “They’ll be pissed off.” But these are the scenes that do the best job of connecting us with the characters early on so that we’re emotionally connected with them throughout the rest of the story.
Another thing I want to bring up is irony.
If there’s one thing where you can clearly recognize, as a reader, that the writer is NOT beginner level, it’s when they incorporate irony in a major way. Let’s say you’re writing Logan’s Run. Everything about your script is the same as it is here. The only difference is you haven’t decided who your main character is yet. They’re a blank slate.
You could’ve easily made Logan a street vendor. You could’ve made him a doctor. You could’ve made him a prominent businessman. And most writers in this situation would pick one of those jobs. I know that because I read all those scripts where they did pick those jobs.
That’s not to say these are bad choices.
But, by making Logan a policeman who specifically chases runners, it means that basing the movie around him becoming a runner himself is ironic. It adds more pop to the story. And where it really helps you is in the logline. Everybody loves a well-crafted ironic concept. A man with a major speech impediment must give the most important speech in history (The King’s Speech). So whenever I see that, it’s a good sign that I’m going to read a solid script.
Here’s the thing with these movies, though. You can’t have 90 minutes of running around. I mean, you could. But you’d be shocked at how quickly action becomes boring when you give us one action scene after another after another after another. So when you’re writing this kind of script (a ‘running away from the bad guys’ script) you want to structure the second act so that the ‘running’ set pieces are spread out. Between those running set pieces, you need planning and execution scenes. Those will actually take up the majority of your screen time.
A great movie where you can study this is The Fugitive. But Garland and Dougherty do a good job also. You’ve got Logan and Penelope, and they have to plan some objective (they need to find a guy who can help them, for example). The planning phase is figuring out where he might be and how they’re going to get in contact with them. Then they have to go try and do it. This is the execution part. And, of course, when they do it, something will go wrong, and they’ll be chased. But it’s really the planning and the execution that take up most of the screen time.
Some writers might be scared of that. I NEED TO GIVE THEM ACTION, CARSON! THIS IS AN ACTION MOVIE. Let me ask you this. What’s more enjoyable? The lead up to the roller coaster ride or the roller coaster ride itself? I’d say the anticipation of getting on the roller coaster is pretty darn exciting. That’s what you’re doing with your plan and execution scenes. You’re making the reader wait in line for the ride. They’re not going to be bored if they know there’s a ride at the end.
I didn’t have many issues with this script. The biggest mark against it is that it feels familiar. We’ve seen this format before. Oblivion did it. And I’m sure you guys can think of a dozen other movies with similar plots in the comments. So while the execution was good, it was working within a trope-heavy format that limited just how fresh and cool it could be. I mean, let’s be honest. This is a 50-year-old story.
Despite that, I found it to be really fun. And Alex Garland continues to be one of the most impressive writers around. This was such an easy read. 125 pages read like 95. His writing is so clear and unobtrusive. It’s designed to never have you stop and read a line twice. I love it. The crush remains.
Check this one out. Good stuff!
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[xx] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Two things you can play with that create really solid movie ideas are TIME and SPACE. When you limit those two things, it organically sets up a scenario that is easy for the audience to understand. Time here = 30 years. You have to run before you hit 30. SPACE is this contained city. It’s got walls. It’s got barriers. So it’s very easy for us to understand what the objective is. Logan needs to get out of the city. If your concept feels murky or unclear, use time and space to make it clearer.
I was thinking of all these movies that have been invading my streaming services as of late. As we get further and further away from top-level Hollywood films, I’ve gotten used to “average” being the new “good.”
A lot’s been made of Netflix’s new “Top 10” list, which I admit I like. It helps me spot movies every once in a while that I, otherwise, would’ve missed. Like The Platform. But mostly what it’s told me is that America’s bar is getting lower by the day. Big splashy headlines touted The Old Guard taking the number 1 slot on Netflix a couple of weeks ago. “A sequel is coming!” we’re told, emphatically. But should we really trust a system that has The Kissing Booth 2 as its current champion?
I’ve even seen articles trying to convince me that a Dave Franco directed movie about an AirBnB rental that stars his wife is worth checking out. I don’t wanna be mean here so I’m just going to say, I’m not checking out a bored married couple’s weekend filmmaking experiment.
All this got me thinking about what projects are floating in the Development Hell netherworld that would be SO MUCH BETTER than anything we’re getting at the moment. It might surprise you that I wouldn’t put many of my [NEWLY UPDATED!!] Top 25 scripts on that list. The reason a lot of those scripts remain unmade is because they have certain challenges that are hard to overcome.
Desperate Hours is stuck over at Johnny Depp’s production house and will only ever get made if he decides to make it. Executive Search is a thousand years old and people in Hollywood always assume old scripts that never made it through the system have something wrong with them. Origin of a Species is a really weird script that doesn’t fit into any marketable genre. The writer of Dogs of Babel told me himself that it’s such an oddball premise, everything has to line up perfectly if it’s ever going to get made.
Hollywood is such a weird place that you never know what’s going to get a project through the system. The only reason a movie about a kid who idolizes Hitler got made is because the writer became the hottest name in Hollywood. Would we have ever seen JoJo Rabbit had Waititi not directed Thor: Ragnarok? My guess is no.
This leads us to today’s question, which is, what script have I read in my ten years at Scriptshadow that I am still SHOCKED hasn’t been made into a movie yet? We’re talking a movie I’m POSITIVE would make at least 750 million worldwide. Does that help any of you? It’s likely only Scriptshadow OGs know the answer to this one.
This clue might help. There are three famous movies/franchises that EVER SINCE THEY CAME OUT, Hollywood readers have been desperately looking for the “next” version of. Those three franchises are Goonies, Raiders, and Ghostbusters.
I’m always on the lookout for the next version of those. But there’s a reason we haven’t gotten one. It’s because if you veer too close to the star that is Raiders/Goonies/Ghostbusters, you’re accused of copying. “This is exactly like Raiders,” the reader tells you. I cannot convey the sheer number of Goonies-wannabe scripts that have come across my desktop. And they’re all exactly the same – they’re “Goonies.”
On the flip side, if you write something *too* different, people don’t associate it with the original film, which is the whole point of writing something similar, so that people can say, “This is the next Raiders!”
Well, in all the years I’ve been reading, one spec script has managed to do it. And that script is… DRUM ROLL PLEASE… anybody know? Anyone? Anyone?
Roundtable by Brian K. Vaughn.
The logline is, “Merlin assembles a group of modern-day knights to battle a resurrected ancient evil, but all that’s available are an alcoholic ex-Olympian, a geriatric actor, a grumpy billionaire, and a nerdy scientist.”
This supernatural comedy has the goofy sensibility of a team of inexperienced guys tasked with achieving something otherworldly. But it substitutes fantasy in place of ghosts. This allows it to fall squarely into the “the next Ghostbusters” bullseye without being exactly like Ghostbusters.
So why hasn’t it been made? I don’t know. I once spoke with a prominent director who looked into making it and he told me there were too many people attached due to lapsing rights and a new team coming on and then that team leaving then a new team coming on. So it had eight million people attached to it. It gets hard to make a movie when you have that many people who have a say and that many people you have to pay.
Still, this seems like such a slam dunk to me, I’m surprised it’s still languishing in Development Hell. I mean, with all these Streamers now in the picture, you would think it’d be a drop in the bucket to commit $150 million to the film. All Apple has to do is announce a new iPhone and they’ll have that money in five minutes. Five minutes gets you the next Ghostbusters!
Getting back to the original question I posed above – about how the bar has gotten so low – I’m sure many of you are frustrated that you continue to struggle. “If Hollywood is so comfortable with average,” you’re probably thinking, “how come my average (or slightly above average) screenplay isn’t getting noticed? Shouldn’t what I’m writing be good enough for their low bar? My script is certainly better than The Kissing Booth 2.”
And this is where aspiring screenwriters get it wrong. You don’t get noticed by writing something just as average as that average film you saw last week. Hollywood doesn’t reward, “I can do that too” writing. They only notice when somebody is above and beyond the other writers.
Think about it. Let’s say you’re in fashion. And you’re standing in a crowd of other fashion hopefuls. If you’re dressed like them, why would anybody notice you? The only way to be noticed is to dress in a way that’s above and beyond what everyone else is wearing.
You have to STICK OUT.
You have to blow people away.
Do it with your voice (Christy Hall). Do it with your concept (Roundtable). Do it with your mythology (Street Rat Allie). Do it with your excellent plotting (Fargo). Do it with your dialogue (Diablo Cody). Write a script that takes advantage of that big strength of yours and then show us why you’re so much better than everyone else.
Because as someone who is currently reading a lot of amateur screenplays, I continue to see the same critical mistake. Writers are aiming for too low of a bar. But it’s even more specific than that. There are two types of people who make this mistake. The first type don’t know any better. They’re newer writers who’ve written less than three screenplays. These writers haven’t gotten enough feedback or studied the industry enough to learn that the goal of a script isn’t to be “just as good” as the lowest common denominator.
The second type, however, do know the bar is higher for those trying to break in. And therefore, they’re the ones I’m worried about. Because if you’ve heard me say this before and you’ve discovered on your own that it’s the case, yet you’re still trying to break in with average material – shame on you. You should know, at this point, that that won’t get you anywhere.
I just finished a screenplay consultation and I only noticed afterward that I had used the phrase, “liked it didn’t love it” in the notes. “Liked it didn’t love it” aren’t bad scripts by any measure. But they’re not what you’re aiming for because it’s rare you’re going to get people interested in “like.” In my experience, people only ever get excited about “love.” And if they do like a “like,” it’s usually not long before they’ve moved onto something else. Cause it’s a lot easier to fall out of like than fall out of love. Just ask all my ex-girlfriends.
I know this all sounds harsh and depressing but don’t think of it that way. All I’m trying to do is be that voice in your head that says, “push harder.” There are so many times I read a scene and I think, “This scene could’ve been so much better if the writer had just pushed themselves.” Cause that attitude of not settling for average is the starting point for success in ANY endeavor. Not just screenwriting.
So keep on writing, my friends. And if you have the next Raiders, Ghostbusters, or Goonies, send it my way. :)
I was having a rough go of it with the Last Great Screenplay Contest entries this week.
There was one point where I read 23 “no’s” in a row.
One of the biggest mistakes continues to be starting with the wrong scene. I say “wrong scene” because you can write a scene that’s technically well written and shows that you’re a good writer, but if it’s a boring scene, it was the wrong scene to start with.
An example of this would be a scene that sets up a location. So if you’re writing about a small town in the middle of nowhere (think “It”) and you want your first scene to describe this town, you might describe the general setting (it’s hidden inside a vast forest), the main strip (all the cute buildings along the street), the people (what people in this town generally look like and how they act). As well as any other interesting details.
Here’s the problem with that, though. That’s a MOVIE first scene. It’s not a SCRIPT first scene. The scene I just described would be perfect for an opening credits scene in a film, the kind of scene you see at the beginning of a lot of movies.
But you don’t want to do that in a script. Because readers lose interest quickly. A bunch of description – unless we’re talking about an INCREDIBLY UNIQUE world – is only going to lure the reader into a bored state.
Look at Street Rat Allie Punches Her Ticket. You could’ve written ten pages of description on that city alone it was so unique. But, instead, the writer starts with a scene where something is happening. Our hero’s best friend is leaving her forever.
So I want to remind everyone that your best bet for capturing the reader’s attention is to write a SITUATION. What is a situation again? I’ll tell you in a second. But it just so happens that after those 23 “no’s” in a row, just as I was about to give up for the day, a script came around and pulled me in. Here is the first scene from that script…
**THIS** is a situation.
We have a deliveryman who’s hiding inside his truck. We have a cop outside that truck who wants to break in for some reason. That’s a situation, folks. It’s a situation because the character has been presented with a problem that they must deal with. It’s an interesting situation because the stakes seem to be high. Our deliveryman’s life may be in danger.
Also, this scene has some interesting questions attached to it. Why is a presumably American Amazon truck in Mexico? Why is this cop so lackadaisical at first? Why is a cop threatening this person? What does the cop want? When he gets into the truck, we expect an immediate attack but instead the cop starts looking through the packages. This tells me the writer is going to constantly surprise me. Cause I thought for sure he was breaking in there to immediately kill the driver.
There are a lot of reasons why this opening scene caught my interest. But the main reason was that the writer set up a situation.
Does that mean this is the only way to pull a reader in? Of course not. Some readers are more patient than others. They’re more willing to sit through non-active description. And if you have an amazingly original voice, you can probably rope readers in just on that alone.
But my question to you would be, why risk it? Why not pull ALL your readers in as opposed to just the patient ones?
And remember, a situation doesn’t always have to be this pulse-pounding explosion of a scene. All you have to do is create a situation that has some sort of problem for somebody, and pull us in by making us wonder how they’re going to deal with that problem.
The very first script in the contest that got a “Yes” from me had a little girl walking along a field, and she stumbles upon a naked bloodied pregnant woman who has been hanged from a tree and is desperately trying to get down. It’s a problem. It’s a situation that the girl now must deal with.
The thing that frustrates me so much is the ego in a lot of writers in that they believe they’re above that. They believe they’re above a splashy situation. They’re such good writers that they’re going to describe their world and their characters and any other exposition they need to get to and you, the reader, are going to take it because you owe them that. You owe them, the writer, that attention because they worked hard on this script and they deserve it.
I got news for you. That’s not how the real world works. It’s definitely not how Hollywood works. People don’t owe you anything. It’s the other way around. You owe them entertainment or they’re moving on.
By the way, I am not saying you have to write some whiz-bang real-time thriller where something’s happening every second to keep the reader invested. You can write a slow story and as long as you understand how to create a series of situations that are interesting, we’ll be right there with you. Even in the first scene.
A Quiet Place starts out very slow. It’s a family going to get things from a store. The big OMG moment doesn’t come until five minutes into the movie. But the writers knew how to create a suspenseful mysterious situation, they knew how to hint at danger even if we didn’t yet understand what that danger was, and hence, we were pulled in.
Look at the beginning of Parasite. I mean how much more artsy can you get than a subtitled Korean movie. And yet that script starts out with a problem the characters have to solve (the wifi they were stealing doesn’t work anymore so they can’t get internet and they need it to do their job). That then segues into another problem, which is that the family needs to hurry up and fold a bunch of pizza boxes.
The scene isn’t going to win any opening scene awards but something is HAPPENING. There are issues that need to be resolved which put your characters into action. And characters in action will lead to more interesting situations than characters who don’t have to act.
The reason screenwriters continue to struggle with this is that sometimes you go to movies and the first scene ISN’T a situation. The scene might even be agonizingly slow. And you get to say, “See Carson! You’re wrong!” But, remember, not all movies start as a spec script. A lot of them don’t need to go through the process of grabbing a reader. So they don’t have to worry about that part of the story.
There’s a reason that one of the most famous spec scripts of all time, Scream, starts with one of the greatest scenes of all time. The writer, Kevin Williamson, knew he had to do that because he’d spent years upon years sending scripts out to people, getting no traction, and through that process, learning how important it was to grab a reader right away.
I think it was William Goldman who said the thing that kept him up at night most was, “Are they bored?” He said in every scene, at every juncture in his scripts, he is thinking, “Are they bored?” It’s a good mindset to have as a writer. Cause we can trick ourselves into thinking that anything we write is necessary. But if you take that second to put yourself in the reader’s head and ask if there’s a possibility they’d be bored by this scene, and the answer is yes, you should go back and rewrite the scene to make it better. That’s true for every scene. But there’s nowhere it’s more true than the first scene. I know that because it was proven to me 23 times in a row.
It’s time to find out what that 200 million dollar Russo Brothers Netflix project is all about!
Genre: Action
Premise: The world’s number one killer, The Gray Man, is targeted by a giant European corporation when their business model is threatened by one of his hits.
About: Last week, the Russo Brothers signed a deal with Netflix to make their highest budgeted project yet, The Gray Man, which will star Chris Evans and Ryan Gosling. The movie is based on a relatively successful series of novels by Mark Greaney. To be clear, the Russo Brothers are rewriting the script for their iteration of what, they hope will be, a major franchise for Netflix. The script I’m reviewing today was written by Adam Cozad and made the Black List in 2010. Yes, that’s how long they’ve been trying to get this made. By the way, this is why so many people quit Hollywood. They don’t have the patience!
Writer: Adam Cozad (based on the book by Mark Greaney)
Details: 122 pages (Cozad 2010 draft)
Yesterday was awesome.
A great Top 25 script came out of nowhere. Not only that, but it’s one of the rare Top 25s that didn’t have people rushing to the comments declaring, “This sucks. You’re so wrong Carson!” Imagine that. A good script that people actually agree on. A true rarity in this business.
Point is, I was riding a script high. And The Gray Man was the comedian who comes out after Jerry Seinfeld. There are tough acts to follow. And then there is Street Rat Allie Punches Her Ticket. Could this 200 million dollar behemoth and hopeful franchise starter hang with yesterday’s Nicholl winner? Let’s find out…
A mysterious super-assassin takes out the Nigerian president on a visit to Syria. The president’s brother, under Nigerian law, assumes his position. But he knows he won’t keep the presidency long unless he demonstrates an act of power. So he calls up Madame Laurent, a businesswoman who has billions of dollars of interest in Nigeria and informs her that if she doesn’t find and kill the assassin who killed his brother in seven days, he will denounce her business, effectively destroying the company.
So Laurent enlists her fixer, Kurt Reigel, a nasty German man, to find the assassin. Reigel traces the assassin to Iraq and puts in a call to a CIA rep there named Trent Archer. Reigel suspects the assassin is CIA so he needs Trent’s help. Trent does everything in his power to figure out the killer’s identity and comes up with a theory that turns to be right – he’s Court Gentry, a former CIA agent who went ballistic on his superior, killing him.
Reigel is able to identify Court’s handler, an older rich British gentleman named Fitzroy, and raids his house to kidnap Fitzroy, his adult daughter, and his two granddaughters, aged 7 and 6. Reigel takes them all to a command center and teams Fitzroy with Archer to find and kill Court Gentry. If they fail, Reigel kills the grandkids.
Fitzroy immediately enlists four kill-teams with a ten million euro reward for whoever gets the kill. These teams include the Lebanese, the Serbs, the Russians, and The Korean (yes, this guy’s so good they only need one of him).
Problem is, Court Gentry is next to impossible to kill. When he gets to his excavation team in Iraq and they fly out, he realizes that they’ve all been told to kill him. So he has a battle to the death with them on the airplane and, of course, Court wins. Court now knows that Fitzroy set him up. Fitzroy setting him up can only mean one thing. That Fitzroy’s granddaughters are being used as leverage. And this is when we’re hit with a shocking twist. Court is their father!!!
The plan changes. Instead of running away from Reigel’s plan, Court’s going to find where they are and save his daughters. This is a challenge Reigel enjoys. He’s got tens of millions of dollars worth of the world’s best assassins at his beck and call and he knows exactly where Court is headed. Of course, Reigel has never dealt with someone as lethal as Court Gentry before.
I’ve always struggled with the straight action globetrotting genre (Bourne, Mission Impossible, Bond). I just find it cliche and obvious and there’s nothing new anyone’s brought to the table in 30 years. That’s why I favor Fast and Furious over these franchises these days. I know that, at least with them, I’m going to see something new every movie.
But I decided that since this project has such big players attached, I wanted to give it a real shot. I want to know what makes an entry into this genre special enough that it gets a 200 million dollar price tag.
I’ll tell you the first thing I noticed about The Gray Man, and it’s something I love. The plot is simple. Kill Court Gentry. One of the reasons I dislike these movies so much is because I can never keep up with what’s going on. I think there were 974 double-crosses in the last Mission Impossible movie. If I had to explain that plot to save my life, I would be dead.
But The Gray Man keeps it simple. Kill Court Gentry. Even when they start talking about Nigerians and Syria, things that typically put me to sleep, I’m able to follow what’s going on because they made the goal clear. And when the goal changes at the midpoint, it also remains clear. Court Gentry is now coming to save his daughters.
I also like how Cozad and Greaney built up the legend of Court. We see him kill this Nigerian president in an impressive way. But we never quite see his face. We hear about his past – killing his superior. He both left the CIA but is so good they hire him for big jobs like this. He seemed like such a badass that I couldn’t help but root for him.
And they take a page out of what worked for John Wick 3 here (despite this being written eight years earlier, lol) where they assign these awesome international kill teams to come after Court. I mean we talk about making things difficult for your hero. There isn’t a step that Court takes in this movie that isn’t dangerous. He can’t trust anybody.
The only thing that disappointed me was that there weren’t any fresh set pieces. But I will tell you this. And this is a screenplay secret here folks so pay attention. If you get your protagonist right – if we like him and want him to succeed – your set pieces won’t matter as much. You still want to do the best you can. But if you can’t think of anything new, it’s not going to be a script killer because we’re so attached to your hero’s journey. Court is a cool character, no doubt. So I let the set piece issue slide for the most part.
So what do I think they’re going to change in the Russo version? Clearly, they’re going to make Trent Archer a bigger presence. Archer is the third most important guy in the control room. And even if he was the number 1 guy, he’s still in a control room. That’s boring. I’m guessing they’re going to get Archer out of that room and after Court, maybe even turn him into a fellow assassin. Or else I don’t know why Chris Evans or Ryan Gosling would take that part.
But the good news is, this should be a fun movie. And that’s all you’re looking for. It doesn’t have to be awesome. It just has to be fun. And it definitely has the makings for it.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[xx] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Another thing that they’ll probably change is the ticking time bomb in the movie. Right now, the Nigerian brother has given Laurent one week to get the job done. That sort of timeline works in a novel. But a movie is only two hours. So, usually, whatever your gut instinct is on your ticking time bomb, you should probably cut it in half. I am willing to bet six months of not being able to eat In and Out that the new ticking time bomb length in The Gray Man will be 72 hours. Mark my words!
