UFOs, hermaphrodites, lizard monks, and just about anything else your mind can dream up appear in today’s screenplay, written by the co-writer of Raiders of the Lost Ark!
Genre: Adventure
Premise: When a movie exec goes missing in the mountains of Tibet, a British agent named Jimgrim teams up with the exec’s wife to find him.
About: Today’s script, written by the co-writer of Raiders of the Lost Ark, was based on a series of 1920s pulp novels by Talbot Mundy and is said to have inspired the character of Indiana Jones. Some even say Spielberg and Lucas – gasp – STOLE! – the idea. I don’t know if I’d go that far. But they were definitely inspired by the novels.
Writer: Philip Kaufman, based on the novel by Talbot Mundy
Details: written in the 80s, 134 pages
I’ll be honest. I chose this script for one reason and one reason only. The title! I like this title so much that if the script isn’t good, I suggest someone get the rights to the title and write their own version of it. Cause there aren’t too many titles that can imply an interesting story all by themselves.
Now, the timing behind Kaufman’s script is a little strange so let me explain. Indiana Jones came out in 1981. This script was written AFTER that. However, I suspect that after Raiders became a hit, Kaufman decided to use the original source material that inspired the idea to create a separate franchise. No idea if this is correct. If there are google sleuths out there who can clear this up, have at it.
Elmer Rait is a movie exec. Or, he once was. These days he spends his time traveling to remote places all over the world. He spends much of his time in Kathmandu, as he’s searching for a fabled group of people known as the “Nine Unknown.” We watch him trekking at the top of a mountain when he sees… A UFO! And then he passes out and wakes up in a cave with a bunch of monks, one of them a lizard man.
Cut to Erika showing up in Kathmandu. Erika is a movie director and Rait’s ex-wife. Rait used to send her movie ideas during his travels and told her about the nine unknown. She suspects that he may have found them, or died trying.
I guess you can’t just waltz up mountains in Tibet on your own so Erika is forced to hire a guide. And that guide is… you guessed it, Jimgrim! Jimgrim is a British agent and actually friends with Rait. So he should theoretically be helpful. OT: That’s how I think of myself, by the way. That I’m “theoretically helpful.”
After we spend way too much time in Kathmandu, Jimgrim discovers that Rait is in a secret town called Shambhala. Which is going to take them to India! How we went from Rait getting lost in Tibet to India, I have no idea. But, anyway, Jimgrim and Erika recruit seven other trekkers to help them. I don’t know if you do math, but that means there are NINE of them. Nine people searching for the Nine unknowns.
After a very long time (the margins on this script are VERY wide – I wouldn’t be surprised if its true page count is somewhere closer to 200) and a side journey to a town full of hermaphrodites, we find the secret city and Rait. There, Rait explains that he’s infiltrated the “nine unknown” and that their job is to recruit all the knowledge on the planet and use it to rule the world or something. Rait is hoping to take over the group and be the ultimate ruler. Which means Jimgrim and Erika will have to do the unthinkable – stop Rait. Even if it means killing him!
First off, let me say that there is DEFINITELY a movie in here somewhere. This world is exquisitely rich with character and place, moreso than 99% of the adventure scripts I read. I think these pulp novels are in the public domain now. Which means anyone can adapt them. But in order to do that correctly, they need to study how this script got it wrong. TimSlim gets so lost in all of its ideas that it isn’t clear what it wants to be.
Problem 1 occurs after the setup. The setup itself is a little long because there are a lot of characters. But I was intrigued enough to want to keep reading. Then, however, Erika shows up and we just chill out in Kathmandu for 45 freaking pages! That’s half a 90 page script. I mean for crying out loud. Move your story along. This is where the script died for me.
Story momentum is important. Once you lose it, it’s almost impossible to get it back. Especially when the setting and genre imply a movie that moves. This is an adventure movie! Why are we chilling out in rooms for 45 minutes?
The other problem is going to be harder to fix for future adapters. You probably shouldn’t put the name of your main character in the title if your main character is boring as f%$@#. Yes, Jimgrim is boring.
I’m actually excited to analyze this with you today because these novels inspired Indiana Jones, who is considered to be one of the top five movie heroes ever. So we can directly compare the two and, hopefully, learn how to construct a compelling hero in the process. A boring hero is a script killer. This is something you have to get right. So what happened here?
The answer is simple. Indiana Jones is a superhero. He’s a mild-mannered professor during the “day” and a reckless treasure hunter at “night.” We love the duality of the character, not to mention that he’s cool, funny, sarcastic, a rogue, a badass, and lots of other things audiences gravitate to. Meanwhile, Jimgrim is just a guy! He’s a British agent. There’s literally nothing more to him than that. THAT is how you create a boring character, folks.
That’s not to say an agent can’t be interesting. Last time I checked, the James Bond franchise is doing all right. But you have to infuse your hero with some other component if they’re going to be compelling. Bourne figured it out with the amnesia stuff. Which is kind of cliche but it’s better than nothing. The point is, you need to include SOMETHING. I would rank Jimgrim as the 4th or 5th most interesting character in this script. Even Erika is more interesting and she’s just some clueless chick.
Ultimately, this script falls victim to something a lot of big Hollywood adventure scripts fall victim to which is that they think they need to be huge, and in the process of trying to be huge, it becomes impossible to keep the story moving. They’re covering too many people, too many bases.
The beginning of this script had someone killing a man for a map (that Rait used to find the Nine). 80 pages later, that man returns and all I’m thinking to myself is, “Dude, why??” I’m trying to keep track of nine major characters right now. Why are you bringing this guy back? His story is over.
There’s something called SCRIPT MOMENTUM that you must monitor at all times. The more information that needs to be injected into your script, the more you’re impeding on your script’s momentum. Sometimes it’s worth it. Most times it isn’t. If we’re sitting around for too long or sticking with a stagnant plot point for too long, that is often where you’ll lose a reader. Keep things moving. Keep the characters’ eyes on the ball.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: 8 key characters. Assuming you introduce them all in memorable ways – 8 key characters is how many the average reader can remember without keeping notes. I would suggest staying under this number but I realize with some movie ideas, it’s not possible. In those cases, tread carefully. Know that every extra character you include makes it harder for the reader to remember everyone. So make sure those characters are a) necessary and b) extremely extremely memorable. Otherwise, it’s more trouble than it’s worth.
p.s. Notice how I said “if they’re all memorable.” We won’t remember a character introduced this way: JANE, 19, dirty blond, walks into the room.
Genre: Action/Thriller
Premise: When an assassin who works from home discovers that a secret organization is killing all the assassins from *her* secret organization, she must find out who’s in charge and stop them.
About: Amazon just bought this script for low six figures. This is not Kat Wood’s first sale. She sold a couple of scripts to Amy Pascal, one called Envoy and the other, Genus. Born in England, Wood is a former BBC broadcast journalist. David Leitch will be producing “Ruby.” Carson will be retitling the script. It should be titled, “Ruby Tuesday.” Sequels can then be titled, “Ruby Wednesday,” “Ruby Thursday,” etc.
Writer: Kat Wood
Details: 103 pages
Guess what?
The girl-with-a-gun genre is not dead! We’ve got yet another sale in the genre. I’m a little surprised since, of the girl-with-a-gun flicks that have gotten produced so far, none of them have done that well. Heck, Angelina Jolie’s “Salt” did better than all of them and that movie came around long before this trend started. I’m interested in today’s sale because I want to see how this genre is evolving. Because, make no mistake, it’s going to need to evolve if it wants to stick around. Let’s get into it.
Ruby is a Gemstone, an agent for a secret agency. And Ruby is a special type of agent. She works from home. In the opening scene, we watch Ruby assassinate another man — WHO’S CURRENTLY IN INDIA. That’s right, Ruby tracks him and communicates with him via a series of hacks, sending him into the warehouse he owns, which was laced with explosives. Boom!
In her spare time, Ruby does something kind of weird. She stalks her ex-boyfriend, Scott. Now before you judge, you have to understand that Ruby’s handler, Mellor, told her she had to leave her boyfriend because it increased the chances that her identity would be discovered. Ruby then argued for a compromise. She’d still be able to monitor Scott (via phone, webcams and security cameras) so that if anyone came to hurt him, she’d know.
And that’s exactly what happens. Two intruders invade Scott’s place. Ruby immediately races across town to stop them but by the time she gets there, Scott’s been stabbed and the second intruder has escaped. Ruby races Scott to the hospital and then, in a savage move, locates the intruder online and lures him to a building pretending to be his employer. There, she traps him in an elevator, which she’s remotely controlling, and forces him to tell her what the plan was. After she finds out, she slams the elevator into the ground at a hundred miles an hour.
The intel was that somebody named Atlas is going after all the Gemstones. Mellor says he already knew this. But that there is new information. A former Gemstone named Sapphire is selling all the Gemstones out! Ruby will have to find Sapphire and figure out who these Atlas folks are, all while making sure they don’t invade Scott’s hospital and kill him. Can Ruby do it? What do you think?
So, yesterday, I pointed out how Jon Favreau gave us a Western bar showdown scene that was so cliche a six year old could’ve predicted what happened. I said if you’re going to include cliche situations, you need to find a fresh angle. “Ruby” shows us how to do this with its first scene. How many assassination scenes have we seen in movies? 50,000? 100,000? There are only so many ways you can have one person assassinate another. So the average writer is going to do what? Do it the way it’s always been done. I mean, there’s no possible way to create a new assassination scene, right? And even if there was, it would take too long to come up with. Much easier to surrender to the trope. NOPE! Kat Wood’s main character executes her assassination from 8000 miles away. Remotely. That’s how you do something differently, folks. That’s how you catch a reader’s attention.
To achieve this, you must go against traditional screenwriting teachings, which tell you that if there’s going to be an interaction between your hero and someone else, it should happen face to face! You would never want your hero interacting with someone on a phone or a computer. And yet the entire scene in Ruby is constructed around that conceit. This is the thing with fresh ideas. They’re often hidden in the things you’ve been told not to do. That’s why people rarely think of them. They’ve been brainwashed to never consider such ideas. This is also why, every once in a while, you’ll see a really original scene from a beginner. It’s because they’ve never been taught not to do these things. Of course, they don’t know anything else about writing either so despite the occasional original scene, their screenplay is a giant mess.
For about forty pages of Ruby, I had my fist raised in triumph. I liked the remote assassination scene. I loved the elevator torture scene. I was in! This is exactly what I needed out of my agent action movies. Fresh ideas. Fresh set-pieces. However, every ten pages after the elevator scene, Ruby got more and more generic. It was literally as if Wood decided to put away her “originality” magic wand. Because literally everything that happened next was textbook girl-with-a-gun secret agent storytelling. The mysterious secret organization – Atlas. The one-on-one kick-punch-pow fights with the other agents. We even – gasp – have her handler turn on her. Literally the same thing that happens in EVERY SINGLE ONE OF THESE MOVIES.
I don’t get it.
I honestly don’t get it.
And I’m not talking to just Wood here because I see this in every script. It’s like the writer reaches this point after which they stop being creative. They stop caring about making interesting choices. And they just follow the handbook. Whatever the handbook says should happen here, that’s what they’re going to do.
I think I at least kind of know why this happens. The first half of your script is operating under a different set of rules. Things don’t need to be explained anytime soon. This allows for more freedom in the storytelling. You can write in crazy things and, for the most part, not worry about the consequences. But the closer you get to the end, the more everything needs to make sense. This limits the number of creative options you have because if you decide to, say, kill off the main character at the end of the second act, you have to confront questions like, “Well then who’s going to take over the story? And why would we still care?” It’s much easier to toe the company line and do it the way everybody else did it.
I think writers are also scared of coming up with an ending like Tenet. Sure, it’s unpredictable and weird, two things I’m advocating for here. But it doesn’t make sense. What more writers need to get used to is writing a lot of drafts where they play with different endings. It takes longer but you’re more likely to notice just how generic your script is if you’re writing a lot of drafts of it. That’s how they came up with the Delorean in Back to the Future. Remember that, for a lot of drafts, the time machine in that film was a refrigerator. It takes longer but it’s worth it. Cause the last thing you want your reader thinking when they finish your script is, “Wow, those last 50 pages felt exactly like 20 other movies I’ve seen.” You’re better than that.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: I’m willing to bet that the reason this script got purchased was because of the first 40 pages. Not the last 60. It should not surprise you, then, that the first 40 pages were when Wood was giving us scenes we hadn’t seen before. I mean, I just read an amateur script EXACTLY LIKE THIS two weeks ago. Literally, the writing is the exact same. The only difference is those first 40 pages of Ruby were more unique. Now imagine if you did that FOR AN ENTIRE SCRIPT. You wouldn’t be getting low six-figure offers from Amazon. You’d be getting low seven-figure offers form Paramount or Sony.
A quick Last Great Screenplay Contest Update here!
Genre: Sci-Fi Fantasy/Televsion
Premise: Mando and Baby Yoda must travel back to Tatooine in search of a fellow Mandalorian.
About: It’s baaaaaa-ack. The Mandalorian is back along with a fresh batch of rumors, the biggest of which is that Pedro Pascal, who plays The Mandalorian, left production midway through the season due to an ongoing dispute about not being able to show his face onscreen (the Mandalorian mythology states that you can never take off your helmet). It’s unclear what this means for the show but it, supposedly, altered some storylines in the second half of the season. We will have to see. I’m currently in a “mostly” Star Wars boycott (based on Wesley being “mostly” dead in The Princess Bride). Until they get rid of Kathleen Kennedy and get a real leader in there who understands the Star Wars universe, this is the only show I’m watching and I’m watching it with my arms crossed. Jon Favreau is directing a few of the episodes this season for the first time. He also wrote a ton of them.
Writer: Jon Favreau
Details: 56 minutes (longest episode yet!)
GSU has been coming up a lot lately in my consultations. Either the writer is asking me how it works or I’m suggesting how to utilize it better. It’s a common conversation piece when discussing screenplays. Well, this week’s episode of The Mandalorian taught me something. And that is that GSU is not a magic wand. You do not wave it over your unfinished document and all of a sudden it becomes great.
If anything, GSU is what makes your script OKAY. It’s there to give your screenplay a framework so that it works. It’s rare that GSU actually elevates a script into greatness. For that, you need a unique voice. Or you need a killer concept. Or you need some amazing plot twists that no one saw coming. Or you need an insane command of some major element of the craft – Hitchcock with suspense. GSU is a frame. It conveys to everyone, “This is a painting.” But you still have to paint the painting.
Mando is back at it again – trying to figure out what to do with Baby Yoda. I guess we’re extending that storyline out for two seasons then. That’s not going to cause repetition issues in the storytelling or anything
He hears of one mysterious Mandalorian hiding out on Tatooine so that’s where he goes. There he runs into a sheriff of a small town who’s wearing the Mandalorian armor (but is not a Mandalorian)! After a standoff, the sheriff tells Mando that he can have the armor if he helps him defeat a giant sand worm that’s terrorizing his town.
Mando agrees but explains they can’t do this alone. They’re going to need the help of some locals – SAND PEOPLE! Nobody on Tatooine likes sand people so there’s a lot of resistance. But they eventually form a temporary pact to kill this thing so they can all be happy. Spoiler alert – they succeed. And at the end of the episode, we see a man standing on a cliff watching. That man? Boba Fett.
First, let’s get to the obvious. This is a rerun. We had an episode early in the first season with the Jawas where they had to kill a giant bulldog lizard thing. We had an episode later in the season where they had to kill an AT-AT that was terrorizing a village. This is the same episode. I mean, what’s going on here? We’re not even 12 episodes into this show and we’re already repeating ourselves a second time?
This, if anything, is why they need to ditch this “villain of the week” format and start making the show serialized. Because there are only a set number of “missions” you can send your hero on. We need some nuanced story development. We need to get into these characters’ lives. Why make a Star Wars TV show if you’re just going to give us a series of mini-movies, all of which aren’t nearly as good as, you know, the ACTUAL MOVIES.
One of the reasons we’re not getting this expanded, epic type of storytelling is that the show is 99% told through one character’s POV. When you do that, it’s the very definition of non-epic. How can we get a sense of the biggest universe if we’re only ever seeing things through one character’s eyes? Look at Game of Thrones. We might cut to 7 different storylines in a single episode. Mando doesn’t do that which is why it’s being forced to repeat itself less than a dozen episodes in.
The funny thing is, this is exactly what feature films were made for. Since they’re only two hours long, you tend to want to tell the story through one character’s POV. You don’t have the time to bounce around to a lot of people. Yet Star Wars films have always bounced around. So in the movies, they’re doing the opposite of what they’re supposed to do and in the TV show they’re doing the opposite of what they’re supposed to do. Classic Star Wars.
Another thing I noticed was that Favreau has a strong case of genre blindspotting. This is when you love a genre so much that you lean into all its cliches without realizing it. Favreau is obsessed with Westerns. I’ve reviewed a Western script he wrote. He also directed Cowboys vs. Aliens. He loves the genre. When you’re obsessed with certain stories, it’s easy to fall into the habit of “I want to do that too.” So when you have two guys in a Western bar, you’re going to want to write that face-off showdown the way you’ve seen it in every other Western. Which is what happens between Mando and the Sheriff.
Now you may say, “C’mon Carson. It’s a Western. Those scenes are part of the language.” They are part of the language. But that doesn’t mean you can lazily script exact replicas of scenes we’ve already seen a million times. My rule with genre blindspotting is two-fold. One, limit the number of cliche moments as much as possible. If you want to throw a couple of tropes in your script that you’ve seen in other Westerns, be my guest. But if you do that three or four times in a single episode/movie, I promise you, your script will be labeled cliche.
Two, always look for a way to twist the cliche. It should never go down exactly as expected. In fact, one of the biggest advantages of using cliches is that the audience believes they already know what’s going to happen. You can use that expectation against them. A good example of this is the bar scene in the Cohen Brothers’ Ballad of Buster Scruggs. Between Buster’s small stature, laid back demeanor, propensity to talk a lot, and lack of a gun, the showdown between him and the other cowboy plays out anything but predictably.
If you made a list of all the things that I didn’t like in screenwriting, somewhere in the top 5 would be a script that goes exactly how you thought it would. That is the WORST. Cause it exposes you as a storyteller. You either a) don’t know what you’re doing. Or b) are so effing lazy that you’re not willing to do the hard work and find better options to all your story choices. Literally an 8 year old could’ve told you exactly what was going to happen in every minute of this episode. That’s how obvious it was.
So to say I’m frustrated would be correct. To say I’m surprised? Not really. Outside of Baby Yoda, Mandalorian has kept things so vanilla and so predictable that spotting an original plot point is akin to spotting John Boyega at Rian Johnson’s birthday party.
I’m not mad, though. Star Wars is facing much bigger questions, such as what it’s going to do with its movie division. They literally have zero plans going forward. Until they let us know what their next trilogy is going to be, we might as well all be stuck in the Sarlac Pitt, as my Star Wars fandom feels like it’s being slowly digested over a thousand years.
I’m not against setting a trilogy in the New Republic Era (200-300 years before the Prequels). Anything that forces writers to be creative and come up with new stories and new characters – I’d love that. But, honestly, I think Kennedy is so scared to make a decision right now that I wouldn’t be surprised if we didn’t get a feature Star Wars announcement for a couple of years. Which means I’m stuck with 700 more “creature of the week” Mandalorian episodes. Yay.
[ ] What the hell did I just watch?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the stream
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Tension comes from uncertainty. It comes from us not knowing what’s going to happen next. Is there a single person in the universe who didn’t know, when Mandalorian and the Sheriff squared off at the bar, that nothing bad was going to happen to either? If you don’t have genuine uncertainty in a situation, it’s extremely difficult to create tension.
What’s that old saying? Fool me once, shame on me? Fool me twice, shame on Carson? Well, I know I promised you that I would be done reading all the Last Great Screenplay Contest entries by today but I’m not done reading all the entries today. I’m trying. As soon as I finish putting up this post, I’m going back in to read more entries. My new finish date is November 15th! Hang tight and thank all of you for your patience!!!!!
After reading Silo, I realized how important it is to create a unique horror concept. I read horror concepts all year long. Unending numbers of horror loglines. And my thoughts are always the same – I’ve seen this already! Usually, multiple times! So when someone comes up with a unique horror idea, it stands out simply due to the fact that it happens so rarely.
While it’s easy to say, “Just give us an idea we haven’t seen before,” the reality is that coming up with an original idea is HARD. So today I’m going to give you some tips on how to stay fresh while writing in screenwriting’s most cliched genre – Horror. There are four main areas you want to focus on. If you come up with a unique option for ANY ONE OF THESE FOUR THINGS, that should be enough to differentiate your horror script from others. But if you can incorporate two or more of these variables, you should have something extremely unique.
1 – LOCATION – Where you set your horror script is going to help set your horror idea apart. If you’re setting a horror story in a house, you are in trouble. Houses aren’t original. Yesterday’s script, Silo, had a unique location. An abandoned missile silo! You’re not picking a unique location just to stand out in your logline. You’re doing it because unique locations lead to unique stories. Most houses are the same so there are only so many original things you can do inside of them. But a missile silo? With a radiation leak? That gives you story options galore. One of the best movies I saw this year was The Platform. Talk about a location – two people on a mysterious platform with half-eaten food that comes down every day. Another thing to keep in mind with location is that you want your heroes to be stuck there. The easier it is for them to walk away, the less tension there will be in the story.
2 – MONSTER – This should be obvious. But the more original your monster is, the more your horror concept will stand out. Yes, a unique mask for your monster will help. But I don’t know a single mask that hasn’t already been used in a horror film at this point. Something that gestates inside of you then bursts out of your chest (Alien) is a high quality unique monster. But monsters can be anything. In It Follows, the monster keeps taking the form of whoever is currently cursed. The Quiet Place monster had large ears since it needed great hearing to track its prey. Get creative. If it’s a ghost, come up with a new kind of ghost. If it’s a vampire, come up with a new kind of vampire. If it’s a scarecrow or a clown, you’re not trying very hard.
3 – CHARACTERS – It should come as no surprise that the characters at the heart of your story are paramount to making your horror script work. So try to construct a character we haven’t seen before. A mother who resents her special needs child (The Babadook). An author’s unhinged superfan (Annie Wilkes in Misery). A split-personality motel owner (Pyscho). A child who sees ghosts nobody else can see (Sixth Sense). I want you to think less about the physical (a character in a wheelchair – although that can work) and more about the psychological. A 150+ year old man in a little girl’s body (Let The Right One In) is an extremely unique character.
4) TIME – When you set your horror movie has a significant effect on how it will play to readers. A haunted house in 2020 is different from a haunted house in 1980 is different from a haunted house in 1870 is different from a haunted house in the 1500s. Setting a horror movie during World War 2 will play differently than setting a horror movie during the Bubonic Plague. If you just move down the timeline, you can find an endless number of eras that would make for interesting horror movies. The concept of time can be played with as well. We could have ourselves a loop movie (Happy Death Day). We could have a real-time horror movie. Lots of options available to you.
Once you have all these things, try to tie as many of them as possible to the situation in your story. For example, look at Get Out. If the girlfriend had brought home a white boyfriend, the family and community still could’ve been crazy and tried to sacrifice him in some weirdo climax. But by making the boyfriend black and the community white, it created a more interesting logline whereby it felt like, because of his skin color, the boyfriend was going into a potentially dangerous situation. It makes the logline sexier, which is what you’re looking for with horror concepts.
And, finally, in horror narratives, you start with a problem. Your heroes are living their lives and then this thing – usually a bad thing – arrives, and the movie becomes about solving this problem. In Poltergeist, the family buys a new house. Everything is wonderful. And then the TV takes their daughter. That is the “Problem.” Now how do you solve it? Trying to solve it becomes the goal (goal!) Preferably, the stakes are high (stakes!) and time is short (urgency!). There will be many obstacles along the way (the house starts attacking the other occupants!). If you’ve written strong characters, we’ll want to see them overcome all those obstacles and achieve the goal in the end. Easy peasy, right? Now get to writing!
