Genre: Sci-Fi
Premise: In a dystopian society, a government worker recovering from a traumatic accident is rescued by a group of rebels who insist that he’s the leader of their movement.
About: I have to give it to Mattson Tomlin. He’s been scrapping away for a while, occasionally getting scripts on the Black List. I’ve reviewed a couple of his scripts before, a Jason Bourne parody script and a different sci-fi entry. I didn’t dislike either script. But neither one had that extra something that puts a script over the top. Well, apparently, Warner Brothers doesn’t agree with me. As they gave Mattson the most coveted job in town – the latest Batman movie that Matthew Reeves is making. I’m not sure if he dropped 2084 before or after he got this job, but I’m assuming just the mention of him being up for the job helped Paramount snatch up 2084. I heard it was pitched as 1984 by way of The Matrix and Inception. That is a lofty pitch! Let’s see if the script lives up to the hype.
Writer: Mattson Tomlin
Details: 116 pages
You guys know me!
There isn’t a big sci-fi spec I won’t read.
So when I heard Mattson Tomlin was taking on one of the granddaddies of sci-fi literature, writing an unofficial 100-years-later spiritual sequel to 1984, I needed to get my hands on it. Especially since Tomlin’s screenwriting star is rising quickly.
Question to the class before we get started. Has anybody here read 1984 cover to cover? I feel like we’ve all STARTED to read it. But I’m not sure anyone’s ever finished it. Extra points for those of you who did so on your own and not because your high school English teacher told you to.
Malcom Ferrel doesn’t know what’s going on. He’s just woken up in a dentist-type chair. A dude with a Hazmut suit is standing over him. He’s asking Malcom what his name is and if he remembers his “trauma” or not. Malcom does not remember his trauma. Good. Then we can get you back into society, the guy says.
Malcom enters suburbia, which looks like the 1950s for some reason. Except for the fact that everybody has to wear an elaborate super suit that protects them from the air. It’s like Covid on steroids I guess. Malcom is told by his driver that he works for the government and to stop trying to remember the trauma he experienced. It’s better if he moves on.
Once he gets home, there’s a party going on in the backyard, and then WAM BAM POW a van smashes through the fence. A bunch of black clad SWAT like dudes bust out and start slaughtering everyone. Malcom’s buddy Stan confirms to home base that he has “the package” and the next thing we know… Malcom wakes up in the chair again where he must start the process all over again.
This time, he goes to meet with his wife, who, like the last batch of people, tell him to stop thinking of his past trauma. It will only make things worse. Then those SWAT DUDES show up AGAIN and there’s a firefight between the people protecting Malcom and the people trying to steal him. The SWAT guys finally get him, escape, and take him back to a secret base.
At the base, Malcom meets his real wife, Rachel, who informs him that he used to work for the government until he started this rebellion. But the government then stole him back, erased his memories, and tried to reintegrate him back into society. But they kidnapped him back. And then the government kidnapped him back. And then they kidnapped him back. And sometimes, if they can’t get him, they kidnap HER. Which is what happens next!
The government BUSTS into the underground base and while Malcom escapes, they get Rachel. We now follow Rachel in the dentist chair. Her memory has been erased. And we follow her as she’s cluelessly integrated into society. She even marries a dude. Will Malcom come save her. That’s their thing, Rachel told him back at the base. They always save each other. So now Malcom, who still isn’t even sure who he is, must save a woman he sort of is maybe sure is his wife.
I’m not going to beat around the bush. This didn’t work for me.
The number one thing you have to get right when you’re writing a big sci-fi script is sell the mythology. If we don’t buy the rules or the backstory or how your characters interact with this world, nothing else matters because we’re going to be so focused on how weak the framework is. 1950s town? Protection suits? Trauma elimination? There was something incohesive about the variables.
The idea of changing the main character and creating a dramatically ironic situation in that we know Rachel is being tricked but she doesn’t isn’t a bad choice on an idea level. The problem is that we got to know Rachel for two seconds before she’s thrust into this situation. So we don’t care about her. Or, at least, I didn’t. And, to be honest, I never got the best feel for Malcom either. Nothing we learned about him was real remember. It’s a bunch of fake memories taped over fake memories. In other words, even the person we’re hoping will save our damsel in distress is someone we don’t know. So we’re cheering on someone we don’t know to save someone else we don’t know.
That’s not how writing works.
You have to establish strong characters who we care about before you toss them into the mixer that is their screenplay journey. Both Neo in The Matrix and the character Leonardo DiCaprio plays in Inception have extensive introductions where we get to know the characters well before the shit hits the fan.
This does lead to an interesting screenwriting debate, which is that I always tell you to hook the reader right away. Make something happen immediately. Grab us and don’t let us go. Tomlin does that more than any of the scripts I’ve read so far in The Last Great Screenplay Contest. So then what’s the deal? The guy does what you say, Carson, and you’re still complaining?
Well, here’s the catch – and this is why screenwriting is so difficult – if you’re telling your story in a way where we’re meeting your characters “in media res,” you need to figure out quick ways to help us identify with them and like them. Your “save the cat” moments need to be lightning quick. Your glimpses into their humanity and what makes them sympathetic and empathetic need to be tightly executed.
This is where the best writers make their money. They can get you to fall in love with a character in ten lines. Good Time, the Safdie Bros movie they made before Uncut Gems, has a despicable lead character in Connie, who does some terrible things in the film. But we meet him coming to the rescue of his mentally challenged brother while a heartless social worker demeans him by making him take an uncomfortable test. Instantly, after that scene, we’re rooting for Connie.
And then I just didn’t get what Tomlin was going for here. We’re told that Malcom has been stolen by the Fortification dozens of times and that the Rebellion keeps having to steal him back. Malcom asks the same question we’re wondering. “Why don’t they just kill me?” Rachel explains that if the Fortification kills him, society will know their Trauma-Erasure system doesn’t work. To prove they have everything under control, they must erase his Rebellion memories and reintegrate him back into society every time.
I’m sorry but if I was a citizen in this society and I found out one of our main guys had been kidnapped by the Rebellion two dozen times??? I’m probably thinking the system doesn’t work. And just from an objective storytelling perspective, once someone gets stolen back and forth five times, doesn’t it get a little silly? Once or twice, I get. But 20? 30 times? It’s clumsy storytelling.
Another problem with big sci-fi ideas is over-development of the mythology in ways that hurt the story more than help it. Everyone wears these over-the-top super suits to keep them from transmitting diseases to each other (supposedly). But wouldn’t this movie have been better without this component?
Cause it’s hard enough to buy into this memory impregnating slash memory restoring tug-o-war as it is. When you throw in, “and oh yeah, everyone wears big cumbersome bubble suits,” it draws attention to the very lie the Fortification is trying to hide. Wouldn’t it be a lot easier to trick someone into thinking everything was normal if everyone WASN’T wearing a big weird suit? It’s even one of the first things Malcom notices after the Fortification procedure. Why is everybody dressed so weird? They might as well have given him a handbook that listed all the other suspicious things he shouldn’t pay attention to.
The thing is, once the script hits the midpoint, it actually starts to get interesting. We go back into the memory of Malcom as all the memories he forgot are implanted in him by the Rebellion. And we’re experiencing them as he is. So we see when him and Rachel first meet and fall in love and what goes wrong afterwards that leads to the Rebellion. I wish we would’ve started with that. It was so much cleaner and more interesting than giving us 60 pages of exposition and setup.
Unfortunately, it was too little, too late. My suspension of disbelief had been broken so many times that I couldn’t get back into the story bubble I needed to be in to enjoy the screenplay. Which is too bad. Cause the end scene with the Counselor where he’s explaining everything was quite good.
There’s a kernel of a story in here. But I don’t think Tomlin’s found it in this draft.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Make sure the bad guy has a good point. One of the easiest ways to add depth to your bad guys is to give their ideology legitimacy. When Rachel finally meets the big bad guy and he explains why they do what they do, he makes strong points. Their system has resulted in zero poverty, zero crime, zero wealth disparagement, zero war. Yeah, they do some bad things. But wouldn’t any society kill to have those numbers? You want to make your hero’s choices DIFFICULT, not easy. You automatically do that whenever your villain has a strong argument.
Today’s quirky script feels like something that would’ve topped the 2010 Black List.
Genre: Comedy
Premise: A Jewish immigrant accidentally gets brined in a giant pickle barrel, perfectly preserving him for 100 years, after which he’s discovered and must learn to live in the year 2020.
About: What’s that thing I keep telling all of you to do? What’s that thing I keep saying is the new spec script? Oh yeah, SHORT STORIES. Today’s movie is yet another adaptation of a short story, this one titled, “Sell Out,” by Simon Rich, which appeared in the New Yorker in 2013. Rich started writing short stories for the New Yorker in 2007. He would go on to be one of the youngest writers ever hired on Saturday Night Live. He would later become a staff writer at Pixar. He wrote this screenplay adaptation himself. An American Pickle can be seen on HBO’s new streaming service, HBO Max.
Writer: Simon Rich
Details: 90 minutes long
The great thing about the streaming boom is that it allows for non-traditional movies that never would’ve been produced to get made, widening the breadth of options the viewer has so they aren’t forced to watch superheroes and Jedi every day of the week.
It’s sort of a more audience-friendly version of the independent film boom of the 90s. That era also gave us a bunch of unique options when we went to the theater. But there’s more of a commercial spirit to today’s offbeat choices. An American Pickle feels like a weird hybrid between a Charlie Kaufman movie and Pineapple Express.
It begins with Herschel Greenbaum, a Jewish man who, with his wife, escaped poverty and war to immigrate to the United States in 1919. When he accidentally falls into a pickle brining barrel at his work, he is preserved for 100 years and wakes up in the year 2020.
The good news is that Herschel has a great-great-grandson, Ben, who allows him to stay at his place in Brooklyn. After getting used to all the creature comforts of the 21st century (Herschel has a particular affinity for seltzer water), Herschel finds out that Ben has spent the last five years trying to perfect his big idea app which tells you whether a company is ethically responsible or not.
Herschel asks why hasn’t he actually, you know, started the company? Ben makes excuses, saying it still needs work and blah blah blah. Herschel is confused. It looks ready to him. Later that day, the two get in a fist fight with two guys on the street due to a misunderstanding by Herschel, which leads to their arrest. Just like that, all Ben’s work has gone down the drain. How can you have an app that rates how ethical you are if you, yourself, have been arrested for assault and battery!
Ben kicks Herschel out, who now sees Ben as his nemesis. He decides to start a business in what he knows best – PICKLES! Herschel finds hundreds of daily discarded cucumbers and jars in the dumpster behind a supermarket and begins making pickles. When a hipster Brooklyn blogger stops to have a taste and learns that these are the world’s most natural pickles (Herschel even uses God’s water – rain!), Herschel becomes a social media sensation.
Ben becomes furious that Herschel has found success when he’s failed and makes it his mission to sabotage Herschel. After getting the New York Health Board to shut Herschel down, Herschel somehow becomes even more popular via his brash antiquated views on society. Women belong in the kitchen, he insists (keep in mind, he’s from 1919 Eastern Europe), and before he knows it, he has millions of conservative Americans thanking him for challenging the restrictions on free speech.
But when Herschel finally gets canceled, he’s forced to crawl back to Ben and ask for help. Ben decides to help him get to Canada and, along the journey, realizes that Herschel is the only family he has. The two apologize to each other and begin their friendship anew.
I have a bad habit whenever I start a movie where I check the running time. There’s an industry secret when it comes to running time. If a film is exactly 90 minutes, there was trouble somewhere along the way.
Outside of some super contained thrillers and pared down horror films, nobody sets out to make a 90 minute movie these days. There’s no need to. Sure, back when you had to pay for film, it made sense. But not when you shoot on unlimited storage drives. So when you see a 90 minute run time, the unofficial shortest running time the feature format allows, it’s an indication that the producers had so little faith in the movie they shot that they cut as much of it out as possible.
Which is exactly how American Pickle felt at first. After Herschel gets to the future, we get a 12 minute two guys talking in an apartment scene, which was odd considering this movie had the kind of budget that allowed it big special effects time-lapses of New York changing over 100 years. It felt like we’d missed something, a whole other subplot that had been axed, maybe.
But American Pickle picks up once Herschel and Ben become enemies. No doubt the ‘rivals’ plotline was manufactured. But you quickly overlook that because Herschel’s pursuit to become a pickle magnate was so funny. The idea of making pickles you found from the garbage and selling them for 12 dollars a piece in Brooklyn rides the line between reality and satire so perfectly, you can’t help but laugh when customers eat Herschel’s schtick up.
What I also liked about American Pickle is that it was ambitious. Simon Rich wanted to make a statement about where we were as a country and he used Herschel in every way possible to put a mirror up to ourselves. When Herschel learns about Twitter and starts making controversial statements and getting canceled for it but then also supported for it, it was a way to look at our current situation without ever getting into the annoying angry argumentative side of things. You could laugh no matter which side you were on. That takes a lot of skill in this environment.
The only reason I’m not rating this movie higher is the clumsily explored religious plot line. There’s this subplot about Herschel wanting Ben to take ownership of his Jewish heritage and Ben resisting. But it’s so scattered and inconsistent that it never works.
I suspect this is where the cuts happened that resulted in the 90 minute runtime. I feel like there were lots of extra religious-focused scenes and they determined those scenes either weren’t working or weren’t funny enough.
The problem is the climax is all about Ben accepting his religion. That meant they were locked into that storyline. So they had to include at least one other major scene about religion, which they did in the first act, and then ditched it until the end. So if that storyline felt off to you, that’s probably why.
It’s an interesting dilemma for screenwriters for sure. These are the kind of subplots that give our scripts meaning. It’s what makes a movie like this more than an Adam Sandler movie. Yet in a comedy, these are always the first scenes to get cut. The producers are looking at that edit every day nervous about the script losing momentum, nervous about 2-3 minutes going by without a laugh. And because they’re watching it over and over and over again, they have even LESS patience than the audience. So bye-bye religious plot.
But, as screenwriters, I believe we need to leave these plots in the script. If they don’t make the final cut, th e’s nothing we can do about that. But these are often the scenes that make the reading experience more potent and, therefore, our scripts more memorable.
On top of everything else, Seth Rogen does a great job as both characters, especially Herschel. I would often forget they were the same person. I’m usually wary of these “one actor two roles” movies because they’re always vanity projects. When was the last time one of these “one actor two roles” things genuinely worked? The Social Network? And that wasn’t even a vanity project. Armie Hammer was just trying to get a job. But yeah, as crazy as it is to say, the chemistry between Rogen and Rogen was really good.
If you have HBO Max, check this out!
[ ] What the hell did I just watch?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[x] worth the stream
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: This movie doesn’t take off until Herschel has his goal – create a successful pickle business. Before that moment, I was sitting there thinking, “What the heck is this movie about??” So if your movie is wandering, or you’re getting that note from people, just have one of your main characters establish a STRONG GOAL. And he’ll bring the movie with him. That’s the thing about a character goal. It’s not about saying, “Screenwriting books say I need a goal so I must include one!” No no no. The reason you include a goal is because every goal requires ACTION to obtain it. In other words, a goal instantly makes your character ACTIVE (ACTION = ACTIVE). And characters who are active are always more interesting than characters who are not.
With all this free time in quarantine, I’ve been thinking a lot about Star Wars. I recently ran into a “video essay” – I guess these are a thing now – about what was wrong with the new Star Wars trilogy. One of the easiest things in this world is to do, by the way, is tear something down. And if there’s a list that ranks “takedownable things,” from easiest to hardest, Star Wars sequels and prequels would be near the top. It takes no brain power to say, “Rose was dumb.” “Rey was a Mary Sue.” “Luke was too cranky.” (all things I’ve said by the way – oops!)
Where you catch all these “video essayists” is when they start offering their own solutions to the Star Wars universe. When they’re forced to create instead of destroy, the Emperor has no clothes. One of this guy’s suggestions for fixing The Force Awakens was to evolve Han Solo instead of making him so similar to Young Han Solo. For example, he said, instead of going into Maz Kanata’s bar with Rey, Han should’ve said he was too tired to walk that far. Yes, because we all saw how well, “I’m getting too old for this” lines worked for Indiana Jones in the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.
Star Wars is in no different of a position than any other idea. IT’S HARDER TO TELL GOOD STORIES THAN IT LOOKS. We all know that. That’s what this site is about. It’s about dissecting storytelling in a way that gives us the best possibility of writing something good. It’s not that Star Wars is out of ideas. Gimme a break. Star Wars is still one of the coolest most expansive properties out there. But you’re not going to come up with six good hours of Star Wars movies writing a script on the fly for three months. Which is what happened when JJ and and Lawrence Kasdan ditched the originally planned sequel scripts and wrote their own.
In that respect, a failed trilogy may be the best thing that could’ve happened to Star Wars. Throw in a pandemic and, all of a sudden, we don’t have a Star Wars movie on the schedule until 2023. That means you have a good year to write a great Star Wars movie and a proper outline for the second and third films in a new trilogy.
Where this story is going to come from, however, is still a mystery. Star Wars has put a lot of time and money into something called Project Luminous, which revealed itself, this year, to be “The High Republic.” The High Republic is a time period 200-400 years before the prequels when the Jedi were at their strongest. The era is supposed to focus on something called “The Great Disaster,” which threw the galaxy into disarray, forcing the Jedis to go out on a bunch of missions to get things back in order.
The High Republic plan is to start all stories out in written and comic-book form. Head of Lucasfilm, Kathleen Kennedy, has been on record saying the problem with trying to make a bunch of Star Wars movies is that Star Wars doesn’t have well-known superheroes who have had 80 years worth of written work behind them, like Marvel. This is her solution to remedy that. Write a bunch of High Republic novels and comic books and see what people gravitate to. The big winners and story ideas will get movie treatments.
There are a couple of things wrong with this approach. First, you’re still going to run into prequel-itis problems. Prequel-itis problems are when you have to limit your creative options due to already established canon. Lucas had to engage in a years-long mental gymnastic obstacle course trying to figure out how to keep Obi-Wan Kenobi away from R2-D2 and C-3PO since, in the original Star Wars movie, Obi-Wan Kenobi has no idea who R2-D2 and C-3PO are.
Going back 400 years keeps you away from plot problems like that. But it doesn’t keep you away from other limitations, such as the fact that there can never be anything during that time that’s more dangerous than the Death Star. And if every threat is smaller than something we’ve already experienced, how big are the stakes going to feel? Also, you can’t introduce any cool new Jedi things because then, why wouldn’t those things still be in play in the later films?
As much as I dislike Rian Johnson’s Star Wars movie, he had the right idea. For his canceled Star Wars trilogy, he wanted to go to some other part of the galaxy or maybe even another galaxy entirely so that he wasn’t beholden to any of this stuff. To truly get the most out of Star Wars, you need to take the handcuffs off. And whatever you do in the past is going to be restricted by the big looming chunks of story in the later Star Wars films.
The other problem is that people don’t care about Star Wars novels and comic books. I know there’s a hardcore sliver of superfans who do. But even major Star Wars fans like myself don’t read those things. They’re all clumsy and goofy and feel like fan fiction. So I don’t know how you’re going to judge whether a novel is “good enough” to make a movie out of. Is the criteria going to be whether the Bantha Lube Podcast gives it five out of five parcec tokens?
Complicating this is that Kennedy has given people like Kevin Feige and Taika Waititi, and even J.D. Dillard if you believe the rumors, Star Wars movies, with no indication of whether they’re going to be directing movies in this new “High Republic” era or they’re going to be doing their own things. Logic would imply they’re one-offs. Or one-offs with trilogy potential. Cause when you want the big names in the business, the price you pay is releasing creative freedom over to them. They get to do their own movie. And if you allow these guys to make whatever movies they want, aren’t you right back where you started? JJ Abrams telling you he doesn’t want to direct the George Lucas conceived idea for Episode 7 and he’s going to do his own thing, thank you very much?
Ever since Disney acquired Lucasfilm, there have been two legit good choices. The first was Rogue One. Saw Gerrera’s mysterious changing hairstyles or not, that idea is still one of the best Star Wars ideas they’ve had. And then The Mandalorian. I can pontificate all evening on the things in that show that drive me bonkers, but Baby Yoda was a genius move. And maybe, just maybe, bringing back Boba Fett in the second season will get me watching again.
So what does this teach us?
Funny enough, it teaches us the same thing screenwriting books have been telling us for years. Give us something familiar, but make it different enough that it feels fresh. Rogue One gave us taking down the Death Star, but with all new characters. The Mandalorian gave us someone who looked like beloved Star Wars bounty hunter Boba Fett, but he’s a completely different character. It gave us one of the best movie characters in history, but in baby form.
In addition to giving us the same but different, Star Wars needs to reintroduce something that’s been forgotten over the years. They need to make Star Wars mysterious again. That’s the one ingredient I never hear anyone talk about and it was one of the most important ingredients in making the original so beloved. Everything from the Force to lightsabers to the Death Star to someone named Jabba the Hut Han Solo owed money to. There was this mystery behind them that made us want to learn more.
To that end, Star Wars should bring in George Lucas’s idea of the Whills – this idea that there’s something bigger than the Force out there. That there are beings more powerful than Jedi. This is a great starting point to reintroduce mystery into the series again.
I admit it’s not going to solve every problem. You still need to create great characters. And as we’ve seen with all the new Star Wars movies, this remains their Achilles heel. It just goes to show how much of a genius George Lucas was in that he somehow created a dozen iconic characters in a single movie when most writers are lucky to create a single iconic character in their entire career.
These next few years are going to be interesting. Sooner or later, they’re going to have to officially announce a movie because these movies take time and 2023 comes at you a lot faster when you’re a Star Wars production. But I personally can’t wait. I’ve learned to love the drama behind this franchise almost as much as I enjoy the franchise itself. And at least it sounds like I’m getting a Taika Waititi Star Wars movie. JoJo Rabbit is one of the best movies of the decade for me. So that alone will put a smile on my face. As for everything else, we’ll just have to wait and see. :)
Guys, it was not a good contest entry week.
Barely any scripts got into the top 2 piles.
One of the biggest factors on whether a script advances in my contest or not is if there’s a dramatically compelling situation in the first ten pages. That means there’s a problem and characters need to resolve it. The more interesting the characters and the more unique and powerful the situation, the better.
Yet very few writers do this. Monday, I read a script about the restaurant business. The restaurant business is one of the most emotionally charged businesses out there. There is so much opportunity for conflict and drama. But all the first ten pages did was set up that the restaurant was struggling. Set up the sale of the restaurant. Then introduce a bunch of characters in non-dramatic situations.
WHERE IS THE DRAMA????
You need to include dramitized situations – problems, dangers, mysteries, conflicts – to keep readers invested. If all you’re doing is saying, “Here’s relevant story point A.” “Here’s relevant story point B.” “Here are characters C, D, and E.” “Here’s a location.” “Character D moves from this location to this location.” That’s not storytelling. That’s a screenplay grocery list. Anybody can lay down ten story variables. Writing is when you take those variables and create DRAMATIC SITUATIONS.
Look at the pilot episode of Succession. It starts with a 60 second teaser of a rich confused old man waking up and going to the bathroom on the floor. Immediately, we’re curious. What was that all about? But even if you’re not curious, it’s a 60 second scene. We’re moving on. We cut to his son, the successor to this man’s billion dollar business, as he tries to close a deal with a hot tech company that doesn’t want to be bought.
This is an important moment for the son. He needs to prove that he can handle the daily high-pressure environment of this position. However, in front of a conference room of all his guys and all their guys, no matter what he offers this pesky CEO, the guy keeps saying no. We can see our character’s confidence slipping. This was supposed to be easy. Yet it’s falling apart. Even worse, it’s happening in front of the whole company. They’re seeing him fail.
It doesn’t matter if you like this scene or not. You can be the biggest Succession hater in the world. But what you can’t argue is that this isn’t a highly dramatized situation. We have a problem. Our hero needs to buy a company that doesn’t want to be bought. The stakes are high. If he fails, it could cost him the position of company successor. There is drama and conflict and tension playing out in a major way.
To highlight how strong this opening is, let’s rewrite it from the perspective of a bad writer. Same concept. Same general characters. This time, however, instead of the opening 1-minute teaser where the old man embarrassingly pees on the floor, the writer wants an entire 4-minute breakfast scene with the old man. This way, we can hear him talk. We can get to know him. Get some exposition in about what he does. It’s going to be great! Audiences are going to know this character so well after this breakfast!
Then, it’s time to set up the son. What? A high stakes conference room deal? Why would I write that? We don’t even know this guy yet. Let’s show him getting a spray tan first. That way, the audience will know he’s vain. Ooh, now that’s good writing! Afterwards, I’ll have him call his dad. Yes! That way we can establish that they’re father and son and I can set up their frayed relationship and maybe even slip in some stuff about the family dynamic. Exposition taken care of! Wooo!
You know what I forgot to do? Set up the sister. So we should do a scene with her. Yeah, I’ll have her on the phone closing a deal for a new house she’s buying. That will show that she gets things done. Things are happening in my story! My characters are buying houses! Okay, where are we at? About ten pages into the story? Okay, the son should be getting to work now. I can show him heading upstairs, talking to everyone, and that way we can show that nobody really respects him. Man, I’m good at writing.
What’s so bad about this altered Succession pilot opening? Truthfully, it’s fine. Things are kind of happening. We’re getting to know people. We’re learning about the world of the super-rich. Here’s the problem, though. FINE ISN’T GOOD ENOUGH. If I read 10 contest entries, 5 of them will be “fine.” And every one of them will go into the “no” pile. Because I’m not interested in “fine.” I’m interested in “very good.” In “great.” In “compelling.” In “suspenseful.” In “exciting.” In “creative.”
Nothing in that altered Succession pilot was dramatized. It was ALL SETUP. It was ALL INFORMATION. Here’s this character. Here’s that character. Here’s how they know each other. Here’s some extra info about this character so you know them even better. It’s resume shit. I’m not reading scripts to get a resume on relevant story information. I’m reading to be entertained. And unless you’re creating a series of dramatized situations, you’re not entertaining me.
When is it okay NOT to write a dramatized situation? I’m tempted to say never to force you guys to always think in terms of dramatizing scenes. But, the truth is, you can use sequences (sequences are a series of scenes) to BUILD UP to a dramatized situation. “Building” is harder than dramatizing because you’re writing a series of scenes that are “technically” not that entertaining on their own, but which are hinting at, implying, or straight up telling us that the bigger juicier dramatized scenario is coming. You’re sort of using your scenes to tease. Which is better than straight setup because, again, the only thing straight setup is doing is providing information. It’s not providing the reader any entertainment value.
Take Palm Springs, the former ‘time-loop’ Black List script that went on to become the highest selling movie ever at Sundance (and which can now be seen on Hulu). There isn’t a whole lot of dramatizing in the first 15 minutes. Our hero, Nyles, wakes up in a Palm Springs hotel with his annoying girlfriend who we find out are attending a wedding. We then show the wedding and meet a girl that Jake is interested in.
However, there’s a clear sense that something is off here. Jake seems oddly detached from his girlfriend. Then, at the wedding, he gives a lights out toast despite knowing nothing about the bride or groom. He’s able to move through wild dancing crowds with Matrix-like precision. And he doesn’t give a shit about anything. As a reader, you get a sense that we’re building towards something – an explanation as to what’s going on with Nyles. And we finally get it at the 15 page mark. Nyles is attacked by a strange man with a bow-and-arrow, barely escapes him, then wakes up at the beginning of the day again. You’ve provided us with enough curious moments to build towards an explanation. Now you can start dramatizing things.
You should write a dramatized situation in your first ten pages for sure. From there, try to dramatize as much of your script as possible. And if you’re not dramatizing, you should be clearly building towards an impending dramatized situation soon. Cause if you’re not dramatizing and you’re not building, you’re just conveying information. You’re explaining characters and locations and relevant story info to the reader. We’re bored when you do that.
And yes, just like all screenwriting advice, there are exceptions. If you’ve created two lights out amazing characters, sure, we might just want to hang out with them and listen to them talk. Arguably, When Harry Met Sally, one of the best movies ever, did this. But you probably shouldn’t assume that you’re writing two iconic movie characters in your script. Just in case you haven’t, dramatize dramatize dramatize.
If you have questions about this, ask me in the comments and I’ll try to answer. Cause clearly, a lot of writers aren’t getting this even though I talk about it all the time on the site. In fact, there’s a writer who sent in an entry who’s been on these boards before. And this writer was always one of the first commenters to tear down any script that got a good review on the site. Knowing how high their bar was, my expectations were sky high when I saw their name. And what do you know, they didn’t even make the “Low Maybe” pile. The pages were fine. But the lone attempt at a dramatic situation was so bland and so low-stakes, I wondered why they would think anyone would be interested in continuing to read their story.
I don’t understand why writers aren’t holding themselves to higher standards. People get bored SOOOO FAST these days. A reader can get bored within 30 seconds. I know you can’t make every single second of your script level-10 entertaining. But you should at least make your first ten pages highly entertaining. A high stakes dramatized situation isn’t that difficult to come up with. And it’s one of the easiest ways to pull a reader in.
With the arrival of today’s spec, we must ask the question, is the real-time war film going to become its own genre??
Genre: Action/War
Premise: Near the tail end of World War 2, an American POW escapes certain death at a concentration camp and makes a run for the southern Allied border, but is pursued by a determined Nazi soldier.
About: Today’s screenplay comes from an interesting writer named Henry Dunham. You might recognize the name because I reviewed a previous script of his called, “Militia,” which was a clever take on the contained thriller genre where a rural militia are forced into a local warehouse to figure out who’s responsible for a rapidly growing series of domestic terrorist attacks. The film was too dark for most to handle but I never forgot the writer. Well, he’s back and he’s teamed up with Thunder Road, who are responsible for John Wick, Sicario, and The Town. It looks like Dunham will be directing his script as well.
Writer: Henry Dunham
Details: 96 pages
This is one of the best sub-genres to get into right now. The fast-paced (or high-concept) simplistic major war sub-genre. We just saw this with 1917. We saw it with Black List script, “Helldiver,” about American and Japanese war pilots stuck in the middle of the ocean on one of their shot down planes. We saw it with the number one Black List script of 2017, Ruin, about a former SS Captain and a Jewish woman who travel through war-torn Germany to find and kill a Nazi officer.
Not many possess the skill required to create rich nuanced screenplays about complicated wars. But that’s okay. You can still come up with a simple easy-to-understand concept that plays within World War 1 or World War 2 and knock our socks off. And that’s what we get today.
It’s winter. American soldier Alfred Bergen is in some sort of Danish concentration camp near the end of World War 2. When we meet him, he’s being rounded up with the rest of his POWs by a hurried German army. They’re ditching this camp, and therefore everyone needs to be killed. They take the Americans, line them up, and shoot them all dead.
Alfred wakes up in a mass grave. He survived somehow. And, as luck would have it, the Germans are gone. So he squeezes out, grabs some food in one of the buildings, and finds a map on the wall. 50 miles down is the Allied line, in Luxembourg. If he can get there, he’s golden.
But first Alfred must grab warmer clothes and dog tags from his dead friends. While he’s doing this, new Germans roll up. Alfred makes a run for it into the endless Southern forest, but a perceptive Nazi soldier named Otto Ziegler notices the footsteps in the snow and goes after him. Alfred has a few hours head start but Otto has a horse.
Alfred survives the night but then runs into another German unit. Germans in front, Germans behind! Alfred discovers a nearby clearing where an Allied unit has been slaughtered. So he sneaks over and plays dead amongst the soldiers. Except there’s a problem. The clearing isn’t land. It’s a frozen over lake. So when Otto discovers him and starts shooting, it’s cracking the ice. Alfred goes under, swims underneath the ice to the southern shore, and is back on the run.
He eventually makes it to a farm where a young Danish woman is living. She doesn’t believe he’s who he says he is and tells him to leave. He explains if he does that, the evil Nazi following him will surely come here and kill her for aiding him. Their only shot at surviving is to stand their ground in the house and kill Otto. So they prep. Otto will be here soon and they need to be ready. Little do they know, this mano a mano battle is far from over.
So here’s the thing.
When you’re writing something that’s action based – something that doesn’t have a lot of dialogue, you need to write in a stripped-down minimal format that’s as fast to read as possible. The reason for this is that readers like dialogue. Why do they like dialogue? Cause they’re big fans of the artistry of conversation? No. Because dialogue reads three times as fast as action.
So when all you have is action, the read is much longer. Which means the reader hates you. Not literally but kind of, yes, they do. Your script might be your baby but to them it’s time taken. You are taking time from them. Readers are fine with this when you respect their time. But if you try and write some all action all description script and don’t keep the action lines short, the reader will want to kill you.
I don’t think there’s a single paragraph in “Perdition” that’s over two lines. And while that might seem like overkill, that’s how you should be thinking when you have minimal dialogue.
Speaking of dialogue, our first scene with dialogue doesn’t happen until page 35. It took me a moment to figure it out but I realized that this scene was pulling double-duty. It wasn’t just providing a conflict-filled scenario between our hero and a skeptical home-owner. It was answering a few big questions we had.
The first one was why Alfred was so obsessed with these freaking dog-tags he was carrying around. You’d think they were newborn puppies he was so protective of them. The second was why the heck is this man chasing you? Doesn’t he have better things to do than follow a random American trying to find safety?
I bring this up because this is one of the most common challenges you’ll face in screenwriting. You’re trying to make a scene look like it’s only there for entertainment value when, in reality, you’re using it to slip in relevant exposition. The writers who do the latter but make it look like the former are the ones who are usually the most successful.
Luckily for Dunham, this is a naturally entertaining scenario. You’ve just snuck into someone’s house. They found you. They have a gun trained on you. They know they must doubt everything in order to survive. So when the woman, Louise, starts interrogating him, it’s only natural that she asks him the same questions we’ve been wanting answers for. Why the heck do you care about a bunch of pieces of metal? Why would some psychopathic soldier follow you all the way across the country? Hence, we don’t realize that exposition is being given. But that’s the catch. You need to create scenarios that hide exposition within entertainment. As long as we’re more focused on the tension or the intrigue of the moment, we won’t catch your sleight-of-hand exposition drops.
So what rating do I give this script?
I believe when a script poses a premise to the audience, it must deliver on two promises. The first one is to deliver on the promise of the premise. If you tell us your movie is about dinosaurs on an island, don’t give us a political story about land rights.
The second promise is to deliver something above and beyond what we expect. If you only give us what we’ve imagined in our heads, why did we need you? We could’ve imagined that ourselves. A professional writer must go above and beyond the call to give us MORE. More could mean a major plot twist we weren’t expecting or it could mean amazing characters that were authentic and interesting and made us feel something.
“Perdition” definitely delivered on the first. And it just barely delivered on the second. There were enough strong moments that I found myself excitedly turning the pages. I loved, for example, that our hero finds safety in a sea of dead soldiers. But that the safety is an illusion. He’s on a frozen lake. And with every gun shot that comes his way, that ice is cracking. Stuff like that put this over the ‘worth the read’ edge for me into ‘double’ territory.
I also like that the ending here is NOT what you’d expect at all. AT ALL. Yet it’s somehow immensely satisfying. I don’t want to spoil it but it’s got “movie moment” written all over it.
I could see this being marketed as the WW2 version of 1917 and making a lot of money.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[xx] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: We had three different stories this week. A horror movie. A heist film. And a World War 2 flick. Coincidentally, all three of them had soldier stories. I used to think anything involving soldiers (especially backstory) was cliche. Everyone uses it. But I came around to it when I realized there are no higher stakes than war. War is where every moment is life or death. So if you can tap into the most extreme component of humanity – survival – why wouldn’t you? You still have to come up with scenarios that feel specific and authentic for your soldier story to resonate. But when it’s done well, it most certainly feels bigger than your average character drama.
