Well this script sure turned out to be bat#$@% bananas. Get ready for adult fetus mayhem!
Genre: Horror
Premise: A team of military personnel are sent to inspect an abandoned missile silo after a diseased old man emerges from it.
About: S. Craig Zahler! The man. The myth. Zahler’s magnus opus Brigands of Rattleborge is STILL in my top 5. They keep saying they’re going to make it yet it still hasn’t been made. One of these days. I’m not sure when Zahler wrote Silo but I’m surprised nobody’s jumped on it. It’s one of his most marketable ideas. AND it’s actually original. When does that ever happen with horror scripts? I have a feeling this review will renew interest in the script.
Writer: S. Craig Zahler
Details: 112 pages
The other day I decided to celebrate Halloween Candy Week by buying one of those big square packs of single-dose Reeses Peanut Butter Cups. I’m watching the Bears game and I eat one. And then I eat two. And that leads to me eating three and four. Once I get to four, I’m like, why would I stop? At this point I’m covered in a myriad of orange wrappers, brown chocolate holders, and those white cardboard pieces that give the wrapper structure. It was in that moment that I had an out of body experience whereby I looked down at myself covered in this shameful mess of corn syrup debauchery and thought… Why didn’t I buy two of these??
Reeses are the “Dale” of Halloween candy. All other candies can only hope for a few seconds of attention. Sorry if you didn’t get that reference. I promise you it was funny.
Robert Linderman is a 30-something psychiatrist working for the military. He gets a visit from a couple of higher-ups who take him to meet fellow military personnel, Kirstin, Bodell, and Tyler. These three specialize in decommissioning missile silos that the U.S. military doesn’t need anymore. They’re charged with going to silos, taking out the warheads, and closing the place up for good.
Well, this latest job is going to be different. A few days ago, an old man who appeared to be heavily diseased, attacked a woman at a truck stop. That man, it turns out, was thought dead 30 years ago. They’ve traced him back to working at an old missile silo. But here’s the spooky part. The military doesn’t have any records of this silo. Fearing that it might still have active warheads, the team’s mission is to go in there, make sure there’s no one else, and retrieve any warheads.
They’ll be accompanied by Captain Gonnersnson, a man they will later find out is an absolute psycho who shouldn’t be in charge of anything. They head to the silo, go inside, but are immediately met with a wall that’s been welded closed with all sorts of random junk. Whatever’s going on in this silo, it looks like someone (the military??) made sure it could never get out.
The team go down several staircases and hallways until they finally reach the main room. It’s there where they find the first bodies. Mostly military people who have committed suicide. Except for one room where a naked woman has been hanged and, below her, 5 men have been laid out, naked from the waist down, and shot dead. Above the woman’s head, someone’s written, “Traitor.”
The next room they check, there are three old men. Who are alive! They come at our group, trying to grab at them. Our team shoots them dead. Yay for guns. The guys begin to put together the puzzle. Some sort of radiation leak happened here 30 years ago. Instead of exposing the story, the military decided to lock everyone in here and wait for them to die. Except they didn’t die. All of this resulted in something unheard of. Twin fetuses… that grew into a psychotic adult fetus coupling. Try that on at your next Halloween party!
You know you’re reading an S. Craig Zahler script when you encounter the line, “We found the skull of a rat in his feces.”
First, I want to commend Zahler on a cool idea. How many zombie scripts have you read that felt, oh, I don’t know, just like all the other zombie scripts you read!? A lot, right? Silo goes to show that if you can come up with an interesting location (a missile silo), even if it’s in a familiar genre, you can give people something they’ve never seen before.
Zahler isn’t afraid to take chances in his execution either. Once we got deeper into the silo, we started hearing voices. Voices that only some of the characters were able to hear. I was thinking, “Aren’t we getting off track here? Let’s stick with the genre we’ve set up.” But then I remembered, this is EXACTLY what you need to do to stand out in a popular genre. You have to take chances. Do weird stuff. That’s why Hereditary was a hit with so many people.
But Zahler’s got Ari Aster beat on the weirdo front. He creates a fetus that has, assumingly, continued to grow even after it was out of the body, due to all the radiation madness in the silo. This created an adult fetus (that’s actually twins and still talks like a child) that was running the silo. I mean… not to say ‘mic drop,’ but Ari? You better bring the crazy in your next movie if you want to stay on Zahler’s level.
Another thing I like about Zahler is that he’s not afraid to build up to something. A lot of writers get impatient in this genre. They feel like they need to hit you with a big scare every few pages. If they don’t, you’ll stop reading. Zahler doesn’t have that worry. He’ll take his time getting to a set piece. He’s able to do this for a couple of reasons. One, there’s a sophistication to his writing that makes you trust him. I’ve read a lot of unsophisticated writing and if a writer can’t even make a sentence work, why would I assume that if I stick around fifteen more pages, he’s going to make something interesting happen?
And two, he knows how to build to a moment. Characters are active and moving towards the next goal at all times. We’re getting little clues (a bunch of large furless rats) that something is amiss. Each time we go down a new hallway, it gets a little darker. Every time we go down a new stairway, we hear another strange sound. There’s purpose to Zahler’s sequences that let you know, at the end of the sequence, you’ll be rewarded. If you can do it this way, do it this way. It’s much better than throwing an endless array of scares at the reader. It’s only a matter of time before that scare-a-minute approach stops having an effect.
But the truth is, this is just a cool idea. My feeling with cool ideas is that they do a lot of the work for you. Which means lots of writers could’ve made this work. Zahler’s just got that extra crazy gear he can go to. I’m still not sure what I think about grown twin fetus guys. That may have been a bridge too far for moi. But I’m not telling you it isn’t original. That’s for sure.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[x] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Let me tell you the one particularly genius angle Zahler came up with that got me: The military wasn’t aware of this missile silo. I thought that was so cool! 99 out of 100 writers would’ve had the military aware of it. By making it unknown to the military itself, it made the mystery of what this place was that much deeper, that much cooler. Always be looking for that one extra angle that elevates your idea. This was it for me.
Genre: Horror
Premise: Three women attempt to climb a dangerous mountain only to learn that a giant of a man hunts anyone on the mountain down.
About: This rare script was written all the way back in 1975. John Carpenter was writing the script for Bob Clark, who directed, “Black Christmas.” Clark was skittish about doing another horror film so, as the legend goes, “Prey” became a spiritual prequel of ideas for what would later become Carpenter’s most famous work, Halloween.
Writer: John Carpenter and James Nichols
Details: 97 pages
Old horror movies are funny.
Recently, I re-watched Phantasm. That movie haunted my dreams when I was younger. So I was curious to see how it would affect me today. Haunt me it did not. Instead, I got caught up in how ridiculous the plotting was.
It was a reminder that tons of horror movies in the 80s didn’t care about an overarching narrative. All they cared about was piecing together scenes in such a way that they got the movie to the next big scare.
For example, there was this ridiculous subplot where the hero’s younger brother is obsessed with him. “I don’t know what’s wrong with him,” the hero says to a friend. “He just follows me around.” And then we literally cut to the little brother chasing his brother throughout the neighborhood. Like, his big brother is driving a car and the kid runs after him, for miles at a time, to wherever he goes, lol.
I realized this was the “writer’s” way of getting the younger brother around all the scares. Because if he wasn’t following his brother around, he couldn’t encounter all the horror. All I I could think was, “Why not just come up with a separate storyline and give him his own objectives?” I guess writers didn’t think like that back then.
Anyway, John Carpenter is a cut above whoever wrote Phantasm. So I’m not expecting the plotting to be that bad. But who knows? This is a 40+ year old script!
Newswoman Elaine Macavie, archer Rose Helm, and obsessive jogger Kathy Briggs, are going to attempt something that’s never been done before. They’re going to climb Mount Tobias in 72 hours. How badass is this girl crew? They’ll be the first women to climb the mountain PERIOD.
The locals don’t like it, though. They warn the girls that up there on that mountain, strange things happen. But our crew shrugs them off, thinking they’re climb-shaming them cause they’re women. After they get an okay from the local sheriff, off they go!
Meanwhile, we cross-cut to some giant man lugging a huge log through the forest. He uses the log as a bridge whenever he encounters big drops he has to cross over. This guy is ginormous, almost 7 feet tall. On the very first night, the girls see him deep in the forest. Or they see someone. A second later and he’s gone.
As they get higher up, Kathy stumbles upon an old civil war canteen. That’s never good. The three have fun with trying to figure out its origins but you can tell they’re starting to have second thoughts about climbing this mountain. And they should. Because late at night our 7 foot log-puller, Otis, and his father, a gray-bearded man named Swain, capture the girls while they’re sleeping by simply zipping up their sleeping bags all the way (so they’re stuck in there) and throwing them over their shoulders. Like logs!
That can only mean one thing. Especially since this was written in 1975. Yup. A Texas Chainsaw Massacre situation. Once the girls are safely tied up in Otis and Swain’s remote cabin, a grandma lady comes up and explains that the Civil War killed off all their women, see. So they don’t have any way to breed. Which means these three ladies will be doing the breeding!
They’re all like, “no thank you,” but Otis and Swain and Grandma don’t seem to be taking no for an answer. Still, an escape attempt is made that Rose doesn’t survive. Elaine and Kathy are thrust back onto a mountain they don’t understand and must outwit their pursuers, who have lived on this mountain their whole lives.
The best part of this script was originally thinking, “Wow, this is such a current script! We’re following three women who are trying to climb a mountain together. This is so timely, I could totally see someone buying this tomorrow!”
And thennnnnnnnn…. Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2. Once you have Old Man Swain ripping womens’ clothes off to rape them, there goes your 2020 buying potential.
To me, this is a lesson in influences-of-the-time and how they can negatively impact your story choices. Texas Chainsaw Massacre had come out a year prior to this. Deliverance had come out a couple of years prior. What that did was majorly influence Carpenter and Nichols to make story choices similar to those films. As a result, something that had a lot of promise at the start turned into something cliche and not very interesting. It’s a good reminder to not use story choices from recent films. Find your own choices.
Another reason this lost 2020 street cred was that, while it had an all-female cast, the character work on that cast was weak. Not a single woman had anything going on outside of this mountain trek. Nobody talked about anything other than plot points (“How much further?” “There’s supposed to be a tree up this way.”).
When readers give you the criticism that your script has no character development, this is what they mean. If characters only have the plot to talk about, you’re going to have a really bored reader. We only connect with stories when we get inside the heads of the characters on some level. We have to know things about them, preferably things that they’re struggling with in life. We want to know what’s holding them back from overcoming those things. And we want the journey to test that part of them so that, by overcoming those obstacles, they can finally overcome the obstacles holding them back in their day-to-day real lives.
You may have heard me say, characters sitting in a room talking about their problems is boring. Which is true. However, when your characters are physically on the move, you can give them some of these same conversations and they’ll work. That’s because at least one of the two lines of progression is being met – the physical line. They’re physically moving forward towards the top of the mountain. So readers don’t mind character-based dialogue during that time.
But when you don’t do the research of your characters’ lives, you won’t know how to write those conversations because your characters’ backstories are invisible to you. How can a character explain the frustrations she’s having trying to get a promotion at work if you don’t even know what she does for work?
And it’s not like Carpenter doesn’t have the capacity to achieve these things. Check out how he describes two women in a cafe during breakfast. “At the counter sit CADY and PRICE, two locals. They are both middleaged with the peculiar kind of hostility that pervades the consciousness of mountain people.” I know EXACTLY who he’s talking about. I know I’m dealing with a good writer when they can describe someone perfectly. And the description of these two was downright perfect. But he didn’t put that same thought into our three leads for some reason.
Despite that, I loved how much SHOWING as opposed to TELLING was going on in the first 20 pages. In that first act, there’s a lot of meeting people while they’re doing things. Nobody’s standing around talking. If someone’s talking, it’s because they need something. That ‘show don’t tell’ skill probably comes from his directing. He knows that characters standing around talking is death. Still, he put SO MUCH focus on it early on, and it was so effective in creating a mood, that I’m reinvigorated for showing. It’s so much more powerful than telling.
It’s too bad this script went south so fast. I think if these women would’ve gotten picked off one by one and the final girl had to outwit and defeat the bad guys, I would’ve liked it a lot better.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: John Carpenter once said, “To make Michael Myers frightening, I had him walk like a man, not a monster.” In our eternal struggle to create memorable monsters and villains in our horror script, we try to come up with all these gadgets and overtly creepy things to shape them. When, sometimes (not all the time, but sometimes), the scariest thing is for the monster to be as human as possible.
Genre: Comedy
Premise: Borat comes back to America to improve relations with his country, Kazakstan. But when the stupid daughter he never knew he had hitches a ride, he’s forced to find a way to use her in the plan.
About: This was going to be released in theaters, but then when Covid came around, Amazon Prime bought it for 120 million dollars!
Writer: Sacha Baron Cohen, Anthony Hines, Dan Swimer, Peter Baynham, Erica Rivinoja, Dan Mazer, Jena Friedman, Lee Kern.
Details: 95 minutes
Between murder hornets, Kanye West saying his favorite Star Wars line is, “It’s over, Anakin, I have the high ground!” And the fact that I’m starting to see people wear Speedo goggles on the street, I feel like I’m losing my mind. So thank god we had some some genuine comedic entertainment this weekend.
BORAT!!!
Or should I say, BORAT’S DAUGHTER!
Is the actress who plays Borat’s daughter the biggest comedy find since Melissa McCarthy in Bridesmaids? Methinks yes.
And what’s with Borat using character arcs in his movies now? Am I living on another planet?
Borat Subsequent Moviefilm follows, well, Borat, 14 years after his last American adventure. His Kazakstan president hates his guts for embarrassing the nation but is willing to give him a reprieve. In an attempt to secure a friendship with America, the president wants Borat to deliver the most famous person in Kazakstan (who happens to be a monkey) to Donald Trump.
Borat heads to America but when the monkey crate arrives, the monkey is dead. Borat’s 15 year old daughter, Tutar, who wanted to be with her father, came here and ate him along the way because she was hungry. Borat wants nothing to do with his daughter because all women are second class citizens in his country, but she refuses to leave.
So he comes up with an idea. He’ll give Tutar to Donald Trump instead. Which is Tutar’s dream come true because all she wants is to live in a golden cage, just like Melania. When that plan fails, they go to Plan B. Give Tutar to Donald Trump’s best friend, Rudy Giuliani. But that means making her look pretty. So they give her a complete makeover.
In the process of meeting other Americans, Tutar starts to realize that, in America, women can be anything they want, and when she confronts Borat about this, he refuses to accept these ‘lies.’ What’s next? The Holocaust was real?? So Tutar runs away in pursuit of her new dream. To be a journalist. She’s able to pull some strings and get a big interview with Rudy Giuliani. But will it be enough to save her father from a beheading back home? We shall see!
First off, let me say that I laughed more during this movie than any comedy I’ve seen in a long time. The thing I’ve learned with comedy is that humor is often found in saying the things you’re not supposed to say. Like Bill Burr’s rant on white women hijacking the planet in his recent SNL stint. It was a risky bit but those are the avenues you have to be willing to go down if you’re going to make people laugh. They won’t always work. But they’re better than the safe middle-of-the-road “comedy” late night hosts spew.
Well, Borat takes that premise and changes “say” to “do.” He does the things you’re not supposed to do. There is a father-daughter dance at an upscale ball where the daughter informs Borat that she’s having her period and he says, that’s fine, we need to do the dance anyway. And let’s just say what we see next is both horrifying and hilarious all at once.
The scene where Borat goes to buy a cage for his daughter and openly talks to the salesman about making sure an average sized woman can fit in there – that was hilarious. When Tutar stays with a babysitter and the babysitter drives her into town and Tutar starts having a panic attack because “it’s impossible for women to drive!” Then the whole special Kazakstan book for girls that explains that if your hand gets anywhere near your vagina, your vagina will bite it off. Complete with detailed drawings. It was all so wrong yet so hilarious.
You could tell that something happened during the filming that messed the story up though. It was probably Covid. But it might have been that they couldn’t get a few of the people they wanted on-camera. Because, the next thing we know, Tutar is interviewing Rudy Giuliani and she’s a completely different person. She’s not acting at all like she was before in the movie. She’s got a different accent. A different demeanor. We’re not clear what the interview is about or how she was able to secure it.
And then there’s the talked about moment where, after the interview, Giuliani lays down on the bed supposedly to remove his microphone but some people are saying it was to masturbate. I don’t know. I was expecting a lot more after all the online talk. But I’ve seen enough reality TV to know there was a ton of audio snipping going on. They were clearly muting parts of the conversation that would’ve given more context to what was happening. And once you do that, I can’t trust that what you’re showing me is accurate.
Either way, Borat 2 is hilarious. Of all these former comedy characters who try to come back after a long time (Dumb and Dumber, Bill and Ted), Borat runs laps around them. It doesn’t catch the lightning-in-a-bottle perfection of the first film. But the daughter was so freaking good that she, alone, elevated this into a must-see film. Imagine trying to match, line for line, one of the greatest comedy characters ever created. As a nobody actress!! That’s insane. Yet she pulls it off.
What did you guys think?
[ ] It was great! NOOOOTTT.
[ ] This is Urkin, the town rapist. Naughty, naughty!
[xx] niiice
[ ] very niiiice
[ ] My wife is dead? High Five!!!
What I learned: What Borat Subsequent Moviefilm taught me is to not worry about writing funny. Don’t worry about writing funny moments. Don’t worry about writing funny dialogue. Worry about WRITING FUNNY CHARACTERS. If you write funny characters, they will naturally say funny things. They will naturally find themselves in funny situations. That’s what we had here with Borat and Tutar. After you come up with them, the funny writes itself.
Genre: Horror/Sci-Fi
Premise: Trapped on a remote North Dakota farm in the middle of a bone-chilling winter storm, a deaf 12-year old girl must try to survive her murderous foster parents, who’ve been influenced to kill by a mysterious radio signal from deep space.
Why You Should Read: Deep came about from my desire to write a story putting the most vulnerable type of person in the most terrifying situation I could imagine. A very early draft of Deep made this year’s Page Quarterfinals. After feedback, it’s since gone through a strenuous rewrite. At 87 pages, and tightly structured, it’s a lean, electrifying read. Looking forward to any critiques from the Scriptshadow Community.
Writer: Dean Brooks
Details: 86 pages
I’m still looking for a good professional horror script to review in the Halloween Newsletter. You guys don’t want me stressed out looking for a script until the last second or I’m going to eat all five bags of Halloween candy that are in front of me. This candy is for the kids! Yet you would have them starve?! You would have them knock on my door only for me to say, I’m sorry, but I don’t have any? Go blame the Scriptshadow readers for not sending me a horror screenplay. Off the top of my head I’m looking for M3GAN and the Jamie Foxx vampire script Slamdance Contest winner, Day Shift. Or if there’s anything else, e-mail it to carsonreeves1@gmail.com.
On to last week’s WINNER! Congrats to Dean Brooks. He not only won Horror Shodown, beating out a couple hundred submissions, but he survived a glitch whereby it was difficult to download his script! I heard some people were never able to download it. So good job to Dean. Now let’s see if his script is all that.
Makayla Brenna is 12 years old and deaf. But her lack of hearing is the least of her problems. Her parents are hardcore meth addicts and extremely abusive. In the opening scene, Makayla sees a cop car outside who’s stopped someone for speeding. Feeling like this might be her only chance to escape her parents, she makes a run for it, just barely evading her shotgun-wielding father.
A few months later, she’s introduced into a new home with foster parents Joe and Adele. Of the two, Adele is more skeptical that they can pull this off. Whereas Joe is excited to finally have a kid to raise. He’s so excited that on their first full day together, he introduces Makayla to his backyard amateur observatory shack where he can watch and listen to the stars. Makayla thinks it’s pretty cool and likes Joe immediately.
The next day, Makayla is enrolled in school and makes a couple of friends right away. However, that night, Joe goes into the observatory and never comes out. The next morning, he’s acting distant and weird. He then has a seizure. Adele takes Joe to the hospital and drops Makayla off at school.
Joe comes home happy and healthy but after going into the observatory again, he comes back acting weird. That night, Makayla hears Joe violently going after Adele in the other room then taking her outside, presumably to the observatory. Sure enough, the next morning, Adele is acting weird and distant as well. It appears that some evil alien entity has found its way into their consciousness and is now controlling them.
Makayla isn’t quite sure what to do. At school the next day, she decides to make a run for it. But Adele, doing her best Robert Patrick impression from Terminator 2, tracks her down, kills the person who helped her escape, and brings her back to the house. It is here where both Joe and Adele will attempt to “make her listen” to the space sounds in the observatory. But Makayla can’t listen. She’s deaf. So what lengths will the parents go to to overcome this problem?
I went on a complicated journey with this one. At times I loved it. At times I doubted it. I’m still not sure where I land on it but it’s definitely worthy of being reviewed so I think you guys made the right choice.
The first scene is a cut above. And that’s saying a lot since I’ve read a TON of first scene Contest entries lately. I think a couple of factors helped it out. Opening scenes with characters in danger is par for the course with horror screenplays. But what “Deep” does is it sets up an EMOTIONAL dilemma as opposed to just a VISCERAL dilemma. This isn’t some random girl being held by a random psycho. This is two parents who have imprisoned their daughter. So, right away, there’s an extra emotional kick to the scene.
Next, the heroine is deaf. Deafness can be cliche but here it was believable. And it made it so the evil parents weren’t just imprisoning a regular girl. Their daughter is disabled. So there’s some extra nasty added to these villains that made us want Makayla to escape even more.
I thought the integration into the new home was also well done. Whenever I’m reading a script, I’m looking for authenticity and specificity. If everything is too familiar, I get bored. I need those differences that make the story unique. So the wife being Native American, for example. It was a nice detail that told me the writer had put more effort into this than the average person.
But then we reach the observatory stuff and that didn’t sit well with me. For starters, it felt like a different movie. We’re going from a deaf foster child escaping abusive meth-head parents to a guy with his own space observatory? Who then, the DAY AFTER THEY ADOPT OUR HEROINE, gets infected with an alien virus?? What are the odds of that happening?
I get that it’s a movie and, to a certain extent, what happens in the first act is excused from being a coincidence. But you shouldn’t try to cram more than one huge event into your first act. And I felt that this deaf girl escaping her terrifying abusive parents was the hook. Getting introduced into a new family was the hook. To then add this secondary hook – I’m not going to lie – it took me out of the script for the next 30 pages.
Then I started to see what Dean was doing. With the mom and dad becoming possessed by the alien entity, Makayla is essentially right back in the same situation. The problem is, when you do that, you want to construct a scenario by which, with the previous situation, there was a choice to succeed and the hero took the easy way out. That way she can learn and when presented with the same choice again, this time she makes the heroic decision.
This is what The Invisible Man did. She always cowered to her abusive husband. But, then, later in the movie, she chooses to stand up to and kill her husband. In this script, because the main character is so young, you can’t really do that. And, to be honest, Makayla already was a hero by escaping her parents in that opening scene. So there wasn’t anything else to do with her character except repeat what you did in that opening. If a character is repeating stuff they’ve already done, they’re not evolving. They’re not arcing.
But then you’d get these great scenes like when Makayla was at school and her mom is now possessed and she’s picking Makayla up afterwards and Makayla knows if she goes with her, she’s dead meat. So she tries to run away after school and her mom chases her down. It’s a really intense well-done scene.
I just don’t know if this weird deep-space alien virus possession thing can work. It never felt organic to the story. It’s almost as if Dean had two scripts. One about an abused deaf girl and another about an alien virus and then randomly decided one day to combine them into a single script. Cause that’s how much these two concepts were fighting each other.
Early on in the script, when Makayla first sleeps in her new room, there’s a moment where she thinks she sees the spirits of her parents in the corner. I wonder if there’s a version of this where her birth parents die in a police shootout after Makayla is rescued and then their spirits follow her to her new home, and their goal is to try and take over the bodies of her new parents. Makayla tries to tell her new parents this is happening but they, of course, think she’s just traumatized. I’m not sure if that has the same sex-appeal as this concept or if Dean would even want to write a story like that. But the biggest reason this did not get a ‘worth the read’ from me is that I could never marry these two worlds – the alien possession and the abused deaf child. They never felt like the same movie to me.
Script Link: Deep
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: I’m all for moving the story along quickly. But you have to be cognizant of the situation and construct your timeline accordingly. One of the problems with this script is that Dean tried to cram the entire story too closely together, with no time passing in between major plot beats at all. Makayla shows up on Day 1. And on Day 2, she’s already enrolled in school and her new father is possessed by an alien! lol. These plot beats need time to breathe. It’s okay to throw a montage in there of the first week where Makayla is getting used to her new parents and home. It’s okay, after she’s enrolled in school, if we give a montage of her getting used to that environment as well. As much as screenwriting is about moving the story forward quickly, it still needs to feel natural. And if you’re cramming major plot beats too close together, it will feel anything but natural.
In my attempts to finish all the Last Great Screenplay Contest entries by my target date of October 31st, I’ve found myself reading a lot of bad dialogue lately. But not normal bad. Bad in a specific way. A lot of the dialogue I read in amateur work is STILTED. There’s no life to it. It reads rote, logical, robotic.
Which makes sense if you understand screenwriting.
When a writer goes into a dialogue scene, they often have a preconceived notion of how the dialogue is going to go. For example, if Margaret and her husband, Darryl, need to discuss selling the house, you have a sense of what that conversation is going to look like before you’ve written it. Therefore, the dialogue is just a matter of dictation. You place down on the page what’s in your head. “We need to get the house up on the MLS before the end of the month.” “I know.” “Well, then we need to take pictures.” “We have pictures.” “The ones that Joan took? She took those on her iPhone. We need professional pictures.”
Notice how this is logical information being exchanged (and bland information at that). There’s a reason for that. As a writer, you see the scene BEFORE IT’S HAPPENED. But real people experience moments AS THEY’RE HAPPENING. This fundamentally changes how words come out of peoples’ mouths.
As a writer, all you’re thinking about is conveying the information properly so you can get from point A to point B. As such, your dialogue will reflect this. It will almost feel like Character B knows what Character A is going to say before he says it. And that’s because she does. You, the writer, are Character A and B so you’re subconsciously setting up questions and answers that the other character already knows.
Meanwhile, in real life, Character A doesn’t know what Character B is going to say. They might have an idea. But they don’t know exactly what they’re going to say. This is why real-life conversation tends to have more energy than movie dialogue. It’s alive. It’s evolving second by second. Therefore, you want to try and capture truthful exchange in your dialogue by any means possible.
One of the ways to do this is through a “free dialogue pass.” This is where you erase all of the artificial motivations that you, the writer, are imposing on the scene, and think of the scene more as how it would occur in real life. In other words, Character A doesn’t need an overt goal going into the scene. There shouldn’t be any time restriction on the scene (most dialogue scenes are about 2 and a half pages long. You’d get rid of that). And, most importantly, don’t have any preconceived notions about what the characters need to say to each other or where the scene needs to go. It’s going to go WHEREVER THE CHARACTERS TAKE IT. That’s a scary thought for a lot of writers. They want to control what the characters say. But your need to control the dialogue is what’s resulting in it being so stilted. I mean, when has anything that’s overtly controlled ended up feeling natural?
Your “free dialogue pass” can last as long as you want it to. It can last 20 pages. The idea is to get a natural flow of dialogue that you can then mold into something more structured. If you find a six-line exchange between two characters that’s really clever in your “free dialogue pass,” and that’s the only part of the exercise that makes it into the final scene? That’s a win. Because the other option is only having the boring structured exchange of information that comes from controlled dialogue.
In order to get the most out of this exercise, I want you to understand just how many options are open to you when Character A says something to Character B. Because I think that most writers believe there are only a couple of responses. And, usually, those responses are responses they’ve seen characters say in other movies. If you really want your dialogue to feel fresh, you need to open your mind to the fact that there are thousands of potential responses to every line of dialogue. And if you’re only going with the two or three most obvious ones, I got bad news. Readers think your dialogue sucks. You need to get out of your comfort zone. You need to take more chances.
So, I’m going to give you a single line of dialogue. Character A says to Character B, “What’s your favorite color?” Okay. Now. What’s the first response that comes to mind for that question? Well, let’s see just how many ways another character can respond to this.
1 – The character can simply answer the question. “Blue.” This is usually the least interesting answer.
2 – They can reject the question. “None of your business.”
3 – They can respond with a question of their own. “What if I like more than one?”
4 – They can ignore the rules. “Blue, Yellow, Aqua Green, and the Rainbow.”
5 – They can flirt. “The color of your eyes.”
6 – They can flirt better. “That’s personal information you’re requesting. What do I get if I tell you?”
7 – They can choose not to answer at all.
8 – They can lie. “Orange.” (Knowing that the other person’s favorite color is orange)
9 – They can make an assumption about why the other character is asking the question. “Ooh, are you psychologically evaluating me? You want to know my sign next?”
10 – They can call the other person out. “Really? That’s the best question you can come up with?”
11 – They can answer with a song. “Blue mooooooooon. You saw me standing alooooone.”
12 – They can get irrationally upset. “Why the f%#@ would you ask me that?”
13 – They can be playful. “Well that’s offensive.” “Why?” “Cause I’m colorblind.”
14 – They can make a demand. “You tell me first.”
15 – They can tell a story that leads to their answer. “Earlier this year I was driving up PCH at sunset and it had just rained. The clouds were parting right as the sun was setting and it caused this filtered orange-purple glow to settle over the coast for all of 30 seconds. It was the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen. Whatever that color was? That’s my favorite color.”
16 – They can make a joke. “The color of money, of course.”
17 – They can be preoccupied with something else. “Did I leave my wallet in the car?”
18 – They can misunderstand. “Your favorite color? Why would I know your favorite color?” “No, YOUR favorite color.”
19 – They can opt out of the conversation. “Can we talk about something else?”
20 – They can become Movie Trailer Voice Guy. “IN A WORLD OF ENDLESS COLOR, ONE WOMAN MUST KNOW HER DATE’S FAVORITE FOR SOME REASON.”
The idea here is to break out of the logical thinking trap that is required to map out a screenplay. We’re often in “structure” mode when screenwriting and that’s the last place you want to be with dialogue. Allow yourself to be free. And when you’re inside of those scenes, stay away from common answers. Dialogue tends to get the most interesting when something unexpected is said. I’ll give you the perfect example because it happened last night on The Bachelorette.
It’s early on in the season so the Bachelorette, Clare, doesn’t know anybody yet and one of the guys, Brandon, sits down with her for the first time. These carefully orchestrated sit-downs are usually boring because the conversations are decided upon ahead of time. So I was falling asleep, not really paying attention. Then Clare asks, “So why did you want to meet me?” And Brandon says, in a completely sweet and innocent manner, blushing as he says it, “Well, I thought you were gorgeous.” And there’s this pause before Clare’s eyebrows furl and she says, “That’s the only thing you’re interested in? How I look?” In a split second, a boring conversation became contentious, with Brandon trying to dig himself out of the hole he’d just dug.
That’s what you’re trying to do with dialogue. You’re trying to find those lines and those moments that bring an energy to the conversation. You can’t do that if you already have pre-established conversations in your head or your characters are always responding to each other with expected responses. Dialogue will always be difficult. But it becomes less so when you stop trying to control it. Try these suggestions out and watch your dialogue come alive!
Carson does feature screenplay consultations, TV Pilot Consultations, and logline consultations. Logline consultations go for $25 a piece or $40 for unlimited tweaking. You get a 1-10 rating, a 200-word evaluation, and a rewrite of the logline. They’re extremely popular so if you haven’t tried one out yet, I encourage you to give it a shot. If you’re interested in any consultation package, e-mail Carsonreeves1@gmail.com with the subject line: CONSULTATION. Don’t start writing a script or sending a script out blind. Let Scriptshadow help you get it in shape first!
