As we get closer to the Blood & Ink deadline (that would be Cinqo De Mayo), we’re going to have to, you know, finish our scripts. I could write a book on finishing scripts. There’s actually a lot to it. But for the purposes of today’s article, I want to focus on the final act. Because, chances are, as you approach finishing, the area of your script that’s going to be the least complete is that ending.

It’s an issue I’ve always had with the screenwriting process. We get so caught up in writing that first act (we keep going back to it to improve the opening scene and set up our heroes better and make sure the inciting incident is perfect) that the other two acts don’t get nearly as much of our time. Which equates to an uneven “percentage of time spent on each act in a screenplay” ratio.

Time Spent on First Act: 60%
Time Spent on Second Act: 25%
Time Spent on Third Act: 15%

If you want to know why so many movies fall apart, this is the reason. And it’s why almost every Hollywood movie freaks out about the third act during production and brings in a writer to rewrite it AS THEY’RE SHOOTING THE FIRST TWO ACTS OF THE MOVIE.

It’s because they didn’t put in the time when originally writing the script to make the ending good enough that people wouldn’t question it. Cause people only question bad or average third acts. They don’t question anything when that third act is awesome.

Look at Back to the Future. Arguably the best third act in the history of cinema. They weren’t rewriting that during production, I can promise you that. They notoriously rewrote that script until they got it right and THEN went into production with it.

But how is my saying, “You need to spend way more time on your third act” going to help you now? Well, lucky for you, I’m going to give you a little hack on how to massively improve your third act without having to spend another one thousand hours on it. And Back to the Future is actually the perfect movie to use as inspiration for this screenwriting hack.

The key to massively upgrading your third act is this: PAYOFFS.

Payoffs are your secret weapon for turning a bad third act into an awesome one. Because the mistake that so many writers make is they just write a logical conclusion to their story. It’s enough to get the job done but it doesn’t contain any of those moments that emotionally invigorate the reader.

You can create those moments by simply setting up things throughout the first and second acts, and then paying them off in the third act. And the great thing is? There’s no limit to how many payoffs you can use. Readers and audiences absolutely love payoffs. The setup and payoff formula always feels clever. The reader feels like they’ve earned something because they’re rewarded for paying attention earlier. It makes readers feel smart cause they had to add a couple things up. It’s very rare that a setup and payoff doesn’t work.

And here’s why this is relevant to the position you’re in now. Because you can retroactively add setups. For example, if you’re writing a movie about marines going to a planet to take down aliens and you’re at the end of your story and you don’t know how to end it but you think, “You know what? It would be really cool if I could put my hero inside a big mechanized suit and have her battle the mother alien that way.”

Perfect! All you have to do is write that scene then GO BACK TO THE FIRST ACT and set it up. Write in your hero, in this case Ripley, telling one of the marines that she can operate one of those mechanized loader suits, show her doing it, and now you’ve just set up that ending.

Would Aliens have still worked had there never been a setup scene for that construction loader suit? Sure. But when you create the setup scene, it operates as this line connecting the earlier part of the screenplay to this part of the screenplay, and, therefore, it makes the story feel unified. Or, to put it more bluntly, it doesn’t feel like the writer was just making up the ending as he went along.

I brought up Back to the Future earlier because I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the best third act in history also has the most third act payoffs in history. If there’s ever an argument to be made about how important payoffs are to making a third act great, look no further. It’s one payoff after another here.

1. The Photograph Restoring
2. George overcoming his cowardice to knock out Biff
3. The entire Enchantment Under the Sea Dance Set Piece
4. Marty’s guitar skills required to make his parents kiss again
5. Doc refusing to read the warning in Marty’s letter (then changing his mind)
6. Marty’s mom acting like a slut despite earlier painting herself as a nun
7. The lightning striking the clock tower

And these are just some of the big ones. There are a million smaller payoffs that come into play in that film as well.

So, how do you apply this to your own script and your own ending?

Well, as you’re trying to figure out how to make your third act work, don’t think two-dimensionally. Think three-dimensionally. For example, if you’ve written a slasher film and you’re looking for a final location to create the big showdown between your hero and the killer, don’t just ask, “What’s the best location to have this showdown?” Ask, “Is there a location that’s either already set up, or that I can set up retroactively, that would make the location more powerful?”

I remember a couple of years ago, I was consulting on a slasher screenplay that was dealing with this exact issue. A lot of the backstory revolved around the killer’s years at high school and him getting bullied. Twenty years later, he was taking out his bullies one by one. And the writer placed his big climactic ending in this random place. I think it was a loading dock or something. And I told him, “Are you crazy?? The climax needs to happen at the high school!”

That’s where you want your head for all of your creative choices as you’re writing that third act. You’re trying to connect back to as many moments in the story as you can. When you first add these to your script, many of the connections will be clunky. But you can rewrite them quickly, smoothing them out more and more each time. And the next thing you know, you’ve got a third act with 5-10 payoffs and your script feels way more interconnected and planned than your competition. And the ending’s just better. We enjoy it more.

And even if you aren’t struggling with your ending, I can promise you that it would benefit from a couple more payoffs. Again, you can’t add enough setups and payoffs in a movie. Audiences absolutely love them.

So what are you waiting for? Get to it.

Today’s script is a rarity – a script that sold to Netflix without any director or actors attached. Which typically means either the concept is gangbusters or the execution is awesome.

Genre: Serial Killer/Horror
Premise: When several bodies are found along the highways of the American Midwest, a divorced state trooper and her estranged FBI husband must work together to find a trucker murdering young women for his sick wife… a vampire.
About: Today’s writer, Connor McIntyre, is a pretty hot commodity at the moment. He just got hired to write Lights Out 2. He also wrote Ben Affleck’s just completed next directing project, Animals. Here’s the logline on that one: Desperate to pay their son’s ransom, a mayoral candidate and his wife resort to extreme measures, revealing dark secrets they never intended to bring to light. And then this current script seems to be a rare example of a script that sold to a streamer (Netflix) that didn’t have anyone attached – director or actor. I suspect that he sold it on the heat of Affleck directing Animals.
Writer: Connor McIntyre
Details: 121 pages

Emily Blunt for Alissa?

Something we talk about a lot on this site but is constantly misunderstood, is this idea of finding a new way into an old concept. Here’s what writers typically push back on when this is brought up: Everything under the sun has already been done. You can’t generate new ideas anymore. So, this advice is basically useless.

Take the buddy-cop genre. Every iteration of it has been conceived already. You’ve got the OG buddy-cop movie (Lethal Weapon). You’ve got the buddy-cop movie but with a dog as one of the partners (K-9). You’ve got the sci-fi buddy cop movie (Men In Black). You’ve got the buddy cop movie but with two women (Heat). You’ve got the found footage buddy cop movie (End of Watch). You’ve got the animated animals buddy cop movie (Zootopia).

So, yes, it’s true, with these popular genres, that they’ve thought of almost every angle. But you’d be surprised at what’s still available. Just when you think someone can’t update a well-known movie setup anymore, they do it. Arrival comes to mind. An alien arrival movie about language and communication.

But you do kind of have to stumble upon the idea. It usually doesn’t come to you simply by trying to generate fresh new takes out of nothing. But the great thing about when you do this right is that everybody kicks themselves when they hear your idea, saying, “Now why didn’t I think of that?”

That encapsulates today’s idea perfectly. A serial killer movie about a man who abducts victims to feed his vampire wife.

Now why didn’t I think of that??

We meet this trucker, Hud, at a truck diner in the middle of nowhere. He sees a young woman, Natasha, eating as well, and engages in a little bit of pleasant conversation with her before leaving. She makes sure he’s long gone before leaving and getting in her car. Except that several miles down, her car breaks down.

Guess who’s there to help though? It’s Hud! Awww, good old Hud. In no way is this going to end badly for Natasha. Natasha is totally going to walk away from this with all of her intestines in place. NOT. In a tense scene, Hud eventually pulls Natasha back to his truck, and then sticks needles in her and starts extracting blood. It’s our first glimpse into Hud’s unique situation. He constantly needs fresh blood to feed his vampire wife.

The next day we meet Captain Alissa Forrest (45) and her only cop on the payroll, Michael Faro, barely 24 years old. Later we’ll meet Alissa’s 17 year daughter, Clara, who hates her mom. And for good reason. Alissa cheated on her husband, excommunicating the two from the family, and forcing them to live out here in the boonies in a trailer park. Yeah, Clara ain’t happy one bit.

Alissa and Michael are called to a dead body on the side of the road. That would be Natasha’s dead body. And it looks like her insides have been drained from her. Michael’s grossed out. When a few other bodies pop up in adjacent counties, all near the highway, Alissa puts the pieces together that they’ve got a serial killer on their hands. Which means they need to bring the FBI in.

That’s funny because guess what Alissa’s husband, Peter, does? That’s right. He’s an FBI agent. So Peter unofficially comes down to help, which brings the band – the family – back together. But things are far from cool again for the Forrests. Especially because the latest highway killing includes a cop. And he’s not sucked dry, like the others. He’s been slashed up. But by what? We quickly find out that Hud’s wife, Lydia, is like me in the In & Out drive-thru: she’s getting really impatient. Unlike me, though, she’s willing to kill to speed up the process.

I’m going to tell you why I liked this. These days, I’m not a huge fan of serial killer movies. There’s a darkness to them that puts me off. I can still respect them if they’re written well. But I don’t seek them out like I used to. With American Midnight, the whole vampire angle sort of softens the serial killer angle. Because, we know we’re not in the real world here. We’re in a world with vampires. And that makes this all fiction and, therefore, easier to stomach. I thought that alone was really clever. Cause it made me more interested in the story than I’d usually be.

Also, one of the tougher choices you run into as a writer of the serial killer genre is whether to humanize your villain or not. On the plus side, it makes them more interesting as a character. But, on the flip side, you don’t really want the bad guy who’s chopping up a bunch of innocent people to be human. You want to root against them.

Yet here, the bad guy’s plight is organically sympathetic. I hated Hud but, at the same time, I understood why he was doing what he was doing. Imagine that the person you love more than anything is going to die but you can save them if you do terrible things. I’d imagine that lots of people would do terrible things. I actually think that’s one of the best ways to create a captivating character – put someone in an un-winnable position – a position that we, ourselves, don’t know what we would do – and watch them make choices. Hud: “Nobody knows what they’ll do until it comes knocking. Then everything changes. Everything. Forever and always.”

A quick aside here, though. This is something I’ve never understood about vampires. Part of the whole vampire curse is that they live forever, right? But then, there are all these vampires in movies like this and Let the Right One In, who need blood to survive. So, do they live forever or do they die without blood? Somebody in the Anne Rice book club chime in in the comments and help me out.

Okay, let’s talk about this family because it’s actually a risky creative choice to bring the dad into the mix as an FBI agent. There’s a term a screenwriter used with me the other day that I liked. Too “small world.” It’s when you the writer create this almost “too perfect” tight setup between the characters and his story.

That’s sort of what the Peter situation feels like. It’s a little coincidental that their family is reeling – they’ve fallen apart. And then these serial killings start. Alissa needs an FBI agent. Oh, what do you know? Her husband who she just broke up with is an FBI agent! You could definitely argue that that’s too “small world.”

However, you can make this work if you treat the broken family dynamic authentically. If you make choices between them that feel like they could happen in the world. If, however, you “movie logic” your way through those choices (the characters act like they know they’re in a movie and talk about things or wrap things up in an artificial way), then the movie falls apart. And I thought McIntyre was pretty authentic in the way he treated this family so it ended up working.

The one final thing I liked about this script was the evolution of the Lydia character. Throughout the first half of the script, she’s this helpless character who Hud is out there doing terrible things to save. In the second half of the script, she becomes more active. She starts making choices on her own. Killing people she shouldn’t kill. And now there’s a new problem beyond the original scope of the problem – Lydia.

That’s exactly what you want to do as a feature screenwriter. You want to evolve the story. If this stayed as a traditional serial killer plot, I’m not saying that it wouldn’t have worked. But it might’ve gotten stale as we moved towards the ending because we would’ve felt the familiar beats and been ahead of the writer and that’s never good.

This was a cool concept and strong execution of that concept. If this would’ve come to me through the Blood & Ink contest, I would’ve been very happy. It for sure would’ve contended for the top spot. :)

[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[xx] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius

What I learned: Make your characters have the tough conversations in a place where at least one of them DOESN’T WANT TO HAVE THE CONVERSATION. Not when conditions are perfect. Peter and Alissa haven’t seen each other since she moved out (after cheating on him) and when he comes into town to help her with this serial killer case, they meet up at this diner, and when they’re about to split up into their own cars, Peter says, “I want to talk about what happened.” And Alissa basically says, this isn’t the right time. If a character thinks that, that’s actually a great time to force those characters to have the conversation. Because conversations are always more interesting when someone in the dynamic isn’t comfortable having them. I would’ve actually taken it a step further, though, and had Peter force the conversation INSIDE the diner, which I would’ve made full. Cause now you’ve got a scene. It’s not that having this conversation in the privacy of a living room where no one else is around is going to kill the scene. If the content of what they need to talk about is strong enough, it’ll work anywhere. But why not turbo-boost the scene if you can? Why not upgrade an 8 out of 10 conversation into a 10 out of 10 one?

As you know, I’m always closely watching the tennis world. And, recently, I’ve encountered several top tennis players discussing what’s changed in tennis over the last ten years. How is it different from how it used to be?

And the answers they gave were, essentially, “Players don’t play defense anymore. They only play offense.” For example, in the past, if you got stuck 15 feet behind the baseline on the far corner of your backhand side (the weaker side for most players), the smart play was to hit a high looping topspin shot deep crosscourt (diagonal), which would force your opponent to back up, and it would give you time to recover back to the middle of the court.

Nowadays, however, the operative play is to try and crush a winner down the line (straight ahead). Or, to put it simply, you are always trying to crush the ball no matter where you are in the court. It’s so prevalent that players don’t even know how to hit topspin lobs anymore if their opponent comes to the net. It’s a class of shot that has simply left the game. Nowadays, if someone comes to net, you try and hit a winner past them every time. Even though they’re expecting it.

This got me thinking of the obvious correlative question: “What’s changed in screenwriting in the last ten years?”

The answer to this one wasn’t as simple. I suppose there are differences in which genres have the best chance at selling. But that always changes. The genres that have been left behind very well may be the ones you want to write five years from now.

The one key change that you can latch onto is that, not unlike the change in tennis, you need to move faster. You need to set things up faster. You need to grab the reader with good scenes faster. The time between your best scenes needs to be shorter.

If you look at Project Hail Mary, we wake up in space and we’re ready to go. Even though that movie is long, the story is constantly evolving and moving forward. There are virtually no slow sections.

And just to be clear, I’m not only talking about “time” here. Not every script needs to be like 1917 or Osculum Infame where there’s this intense ticking clock. But the story needs to constantly have forward momentum, and at a faster pace than it used to. Plot beats need to come more frequently. Interesting developments need to keep happening at a faster pace than in the past.

There is only one exception to this: WRITER-DIRECTOR THEATRICAL PROJECTS. Sinners. One Battle After Another. The Secret Agent. All of those scripts take forever to set their stories up. But those guys are working under a different set of rules than you. And because their movies are shown in theaters, you are a captive audience and, therefore, can’t leave. So they know they can pull this crap. Trust me: If they were writers only, in which case they’d have to win readers over right away and, likely, audiences over right away (since their movies would probably debut on streaming), all of them would learn REAL FAST how to speed things up.

Moving on, I was really bummed to hear that JJ Abrams Bad Robot has gone the way of the dodo bird. One of the coolest meetings I’ve ever taken was at Bad Robot. The interior of that production house was so freaking fun. It literally felt like a movie in there, like someone could pull out a movie camera and start filming and it would look like the inner workings of a production house movie set.

I’ve always been a huge fan of JJ and, therefore, his downfall has been baffling to me. Because it wasn’t like he came out with a string of consistent bombs. He didn’t create ANYTHING for a really long time. And one of the biggest mysteries in Hollywood is that he received half a billion dollars to shuttle in the DC Justice League Dark world, and didn’t make a single film or TV show out of it.

At the time, I got a little bit of info on this and spoke to the person who, arguably, was the closest person to JJ of anyone. And they said that JJ was devastated by Star Wars Episode 9. They said that when he went to the premiere, the cut was not the cut he made as the director. Which is kinda crazy when you think about it. That means that someone else – someone big and powerful enough that they had to be a known director – was secretly putting together another cut of the movie unbeknownst to JJ. And I think he just felt betrayed. And probably hated the industry afterwards.

And it’s not like you or me where, when we get disillusioned, we can disappear for a while until we get our enthusiasm back. JJ was running a business with hundreds of employees.

But, look, I’m not going to excuse JJ completely. I mean, dude. Duster? What year is this? 1994? What kind of lame concept is that? Maybe a show like that works if you can update the look and feel of the genre. But it was produced and shot in such a cheesy way. It was set in the 1970s but it totally looked like 1975 through a 2025 lens. He has to wear that. Cause he knew that they were hemorrhaging money over there at Bad Robot. They needed a hit to stay alive. And they came up with Duster?? This dude used to be THE CONCEPT GUY. And Duster is probably the lowest-concept TV show I’ve come across all decade.

The great thing about Hollywood, though, is that it loves a comeback. And JJ has a couple of projects that could place him back on the Hollywood A-list. He’s produced the dinosaur flick, The End of Oak Street. And he’s directed The Great Unknown, about a young newlywed couple who struggle to survive against a supernatural entity, that one with Glen Powell and Jenna Ortega. I have a lot more hope for Oak Street than Unknown but we’ll see what happens!

Finally, let’s talk some AI. It’s always fun to see what’s going on in that digital sandbox, right? AI took a big hit a couple of weeks ago. Open AI, who created Sora, one of these AI video creation generators, and who had a billion dollar deal with Disney, just gave up on it one day!

TechCrunch reported that it cost too much to run the servers for these things and OpenAI is already operating at billions upon billions of dollars of loss. So, they didn’t think it was worth it.

But the sneaky hidden news that they’re not talking about here is that Sora, which was a leader in this space, had a giant initial flash of users using it when it debuted. But that usage plummeted after a week, when everyone realized the limitations of what this thing could do.

Why is that relevant? Well, because all we hear is that this technology is taking over the industry. And yet people don’t seem to be that interested in it. They liked posting goofy videos on social media for a week. But once those videos got lost in the millions of other AI videos that looked exactly the same, they left. Maybe AI is not the savior of Hollywood after all.

But don’t tell that to David Ellison, the guy who bought Paramount and Warner Brothers. Ellison has an interesting approach to AI. He thinks it’s going to revolutionize the quality of films.

How?

Ellison points out that Pixar movies have such a good track record because they can make their movies 8 times before the final cut. Animating allows them to test their films almost immediately with temporary animation. And then they just keep making new cuts, continually testing them with audiences, so that, once they get to the final animated version, the story is airtight.

Ellison believes that AI is going to allow Paramount to do the same with live-action movies. He didn’t go into detail about the process but what I gathered from his explanation was that, let’s say you make Top Gun 3. Well, you can have AI turn the script into a movie right away. You can even have Tom Cruise come in and record all the lines in the way he wants to say them. And then you can test that movie. And, if it sucks, you can then start rewriting it, just like they do at Pixar.

Once you have the perfect movie, you go and actually shoot it. And you just do exactly what the proven AI movie did. So it’s kind of like an advanced version of pre-viz.

I have to admit I’m a little skeptical of how AI’s “proven version” is going to translate once you shoot it. Because quirky little things happen along the way when you’re shooting a movie that you didn’t plan for. I mean, Benecio Del Toro notoriously came up with this wacky character out of nowhere in The Usual Suspects. Nobody, including the director, knew it was coming. But he became a scene-stealer. Well, how is AI going to know to include that unique performance in the pre-movie?

This is where the whole, “AI is going to take over Hollywood” argument loses steam. AI doesn’t seem capable of understanding unique human choices when it comes to performances. And those are things we latch onto the hardest as film lovers. So, if you can’t mirror that, then all you’re really good for is creating cool backgrounds.

But I like that, in Ellison’s vision of this new Hollywood, the screenplay is still needed. That part needs to be written by a human. Lucasfilm’s Kathleen Kennedy was just talking about this in a recent interview. How does AI account for taste? Taste is a bargain that’s made exclusively between the writer and the audience.

Of course, it’s silly to think that they’ll be able to master this process right away. There’s going to be a lot of trial and error. But that seems to be their plan and, I think it’s a good starting point. If a movie isn’t working, you’ll at least have a shot at being able to fix it. Whereas, before, if you had a bad film, like The Running Man, you were basically screwed.

Thoughts on screenwriting in 2026, JJ Abrams, or AI? Share them below!

I hate when Hollywood promotes terrible films. And today, I’m speaking my truth!

I’m tempted to spend the next 1500 words unloading on the atrocity of a movie that was The Secret Agent. Let me explain why. People were trying to tell me this movie was good. People were hyping this movie up. But all I needed to do was see the poster, see 10 seconds of the trailer, and I was willing to bet my life that this movie would be terrible.

You know how I knew that? Because I’ve seen this song and dance for decades now. An indie distributor picks up a movie specific to another country where the production value is competent enough that you can distribute it in the US and not get laughed at. They then rev their spin machine up, throw out words like, “masterpiece,” “brilliant,” and “auteur director,” and I’m pretty sure the trades are co-opted into this wool-over-the-eyes tomfoolery, resulting in high RT scores, convincing everyone under the sun that this movie is amazing.

What’s The Secret Agent about?

I DON’T KNOW!

I watched 50 minutes of it and I STILL DON’T KNOW WHAT THE MOVIE IS ABOUT.

“You can’t judge a movie if you’ve only seen 50 minutes of it, Carson.”

YES YOU CAN.

IF THE AUDIENCE DOESN’T KNOW WHAT A MOVIE IS ABOUT AFTER 50 MINUTES, THAT MOVIE SUCKS.

One of the truest screenwriting rules there is: SET UP WHAT YOUR MOVIE IS ABOUT AS SOON AS POSSIBLE.

This is such basic screenwriting advice, it’s on the verge of no longer needing to be taught. Cause people just know. Duh, tell the audience what your movie is about.

The Secret Agent starts off with a decent scene. It’s 1970s Brazil and a man is getting his car filled up at a gas station in the middle of nowhere. There’s a dead body covered up with cardboard off to the side. The gas station attendant says the man was a thief who tried to rob the place a few days ago so they shot him and the police haven’t come to pick up the body yet.

Then a cop car shows up and very methodically inspects our hero’s car. The scene is tense. It’s suspenseful. I thought, “Maybe I’ll be wrong about this movie. Maybe it will be good.”

Nope. It’s all downhill from here.

We then follow this random dude, our main character, driving this car across Brazil. He shows up at some random collection of apartments and starts staying there. Why? No idea. It takes the writer 20 minutes to, literally, set up arriving at an apartment.

Oh, you know what comes with the apartment? A cat with two heads. I’m not kidding. This is a serious movie by the way. It wants to be taken very very very seriously.

Cat with two heads though! Gotta throw that cat with two heads in there.

Why?

Because that’s the kind of random bullshit hack screenwriters think is good writing. Throw in random nonsense that does nothing for the story.

By the way, quick screenwriting tip. This is the easiest way to judge a creative choice as a screenwriter: Does it do anything for the story? This did nothing. That’s how you know it’s a garbage choice.

Then our hero goes and retrieves his son, who he hasn’t seen in a long time. It’s not explained who’s taking care of his son. Maybe it’s our hero’s parents? This screenwriter has no interest in helping us understand even the basic beats of what’s going on in this story.

Seeing his son again is treated like a really heavy deal.

BUT NOBODY TELLS US WHY!!!

God forbid the writer, Hacky McHackems The Screenwriting Wonderboy, share information that might help us enjoy the story.

Randomly, we cut to another plot about a shark with a human leg in it. No, I’m not kidding. It’s a shark story now. Then we come back and hang with our hero as he lounges around at his apartment complex, carelessly stripping away minutes that could be used for, you know, SETTING UP AN ACTUAL STORY.

Oddly, his son isn’t with him anymore. It’s never explained why. We literally just had this super intense scene where he comes and gets his long lost son back.  But now he’s banging some chick up in Apartment 2C and I guess Little Johnny doesn’t matter anymore.

We’re getting to about the 45 minute mark of the movie and NOTHING HAS HAPPENED! Just complete randomness with no character goals set up or overarching story set up. Atrocious screenwriting on full display.

Then, without any context, we cut to our hero…. WHO NOW WORKS AT A NEWSPAPER! How did this happen? Nobody tells us. Actually, it’s worse than that. We just see him at some work and are expected to know he’s a journalist now and this is a newspaper.

You don’t move a character to a brand new location in life and then just cut to him working. You have to SHOW HIM GET THE JOB, lol. There has to be a progression so that we understand a) what kind of job he wants, b) why does he want that job, c) what are his options, d) how difficult is it to get the job? e) show a freaking interview and the aftermath so we can build suspense around whether he gets the job or not. You know, basic drama.

This just cuts to him working. I didn’t even know this guy was a writer until 50 minutes into the film!

You’re probably wondering, at this point, why I’m so angry.

Here’s why.

Because I spend my life trying to teach people how to be good writers. It consumes most of the minutes in my day.

So when Hollywood unleashes this trash on us and brainwashes young ignorant writers into believing that this is good storytelling, it pisses me off. Because now you have young writers believing that randomly introducing cats with two heads into an extremely serious drama is great writing. And that writer is going to go off and write a bunch of garbage and be confused why nobody likes his screenplays. And he’ll give up because nobody ever taught him the correct way to write.

With that in mind, let’s try and use this failure of a film for good. Let’s at least learn a lesson here. So, here’s the big lesson I want you to take away from this film.

SET UP WHAT YOUR STORY IS ABOUT AS SOON AS POSSIBLE

The more “Hollywood” a film is (by that I mean: a film made by a major studio) the earlier that setup should be. This means that if you’re writing a spec script, you want it to be very clear what your movie is about as soon as possible. This doesn’t mean you have to state the exact plot. But we should have a very good idea of what the movie is about within ten minutes.

We know we’re going to have people on an island full of dinosaurs in Jurassic Park within ten minutes.

You have more leeway with setup time in an indie-type script. But you’d be surprised at how quickly you’ve known what your favorite indie movies were about when you first watched them. It was likely within 15 minutes. And, at the very latest, it would’ve been 25 minutes in, by the end of the first act.

That’s because if you push the setup of your movie past the first act, it’s the equivalent of a drunk guy telling you a story at a party and they never get to the point. They’re telling you about all these little things (a shark with a leg in it, a cat with two heads, and then I was at this gas station and there was this dead body in front of my car covered up by cardboard) but you don’t know what it is they’re trying to say. This movie, The Secret Agent, is the cinematic equivalent of the drunk babbling party guy.

Now for those of you who will inevitably tell me that if I just kept watching, I would’ve gotten to the “good part.” Try telling a producer that the next time you don’t reveal the point of your story until page 50. “Well, Mr. Producer, if you just would’ve kept reading, you would’ve gotten to the good part!”

Yeah, tell me how that goes. Cause I don’t think it’s going to go like this: “Ohhhhhhh! You mean the good part came after the first hour!!?? Why didn’t tell me! If I would’ve known that, I would’ve kept reading!”

My final message to use is this: Don’t let Hollywood brainwash you. They try to tell you that every movie is great. They’re lying the majority of the time. And it’s up to you to use your own discernment to evaluate these movies. Don’t listen to other people. Pay attention to how the story is affecting you. Pay attention to if it’s propulsive or if it’s wandering. Pay attention to how the main character makes you feel and if you care about their journey. If it’s providing good feelings in those areas, it’s a good movie. If not, it’s probably bad, like The Secret Agent.

How to write a bland screenplay

Genre: Thriller
Premise: When eco-terrorists attack Los Angeles’ power grid and orchestrate a cascading citywide blackout, a jaded former Secret Service agent and a brilliant but unassuming engineer must fight their way across the metropolis – in the dark – to restore power before the city collapses.
About: This script made last year’s Black List. Kevin Yang made a movie called The Puppeteers last year, which is about the hidden world of transnational repression. Not sure what that means. It looks like Yang will also direct this film.
Writer: Kevin Yang
Details: 113 pages

My new plea to Black List writers? Hire me.

Not for my sake.

For your sake.

I can save you so much embarrassment from some of these really basic script errors, errors that are destroying your script from the inside out. I don’t know how you write a script about the fall of LA that feels this neutral, this devoid of energy.

32 year old Riley Smith is a Los Angeles Department of Water and Power junior engineer who’s inspecting some sort of electrical glitch at LAX which almost causes two planes to crash into each other. This near crash is the height of the script. It’s all downhill from here.

After doing some investigating, she sees that there’s a similar electrical problem at the Culver Electric Station, which is in a different part of the city. The problem is, none of her bosses think this is an issue. But she senses the connection could lead to a much bigger electrical issue across the city.

When LAX’s head of security, Magnus, learns of Riley’s theory, he tells her to join him because he’s headed over to a dam in the Hills which he believes might be linked to this electrical issue. The two head over there and find out that the dam has been messed with and that someone may be orchestrating these small infrastructure invasions to unleash a bigger attack on Los Angeles.

Indeed, Riley and Magnus run into a dude named Drake who is the “Hans Gruber” of this plan. When they ask Drake what the hell he’s doing, he tells them that he wants to show Los Angeles for what it really is, or something, and then vanishes. But he leaves behind henchman, who are constantly attacking Riley and Magnus.

Riley and Magnus continue to run around the city to prevent an attack of which we never really understand and are never clear on how bad it will be. The end.

Blackout is a good example of a script that shows what happens if you don’t know the basics. And, by basics, I’m not talking about likable main characters, start scenes late and leave them early, get to your second act on page 25.

There are a secondary set of basics that are just beyond the primary set. And here’s one of them…

Your stakes can’t be general. They have to be specific. The big thing that haunts this script is that it’s implied that something terrible is happening. But we don’t know exactly what it is, and, therefore, we don’t care.

First, we’re told the power is about to go out. Well, I’ve been in LA when the power is out. It’s actually one of the easiest cities to survive a lack of power in because the weather is rarely too hot or too cold here. So, all I’ve ever experienced during a power outage is inconvenience. If this version of a power outage is different, it’s your job as the writer to tell us that. It’s your job to lay all of that information out for us.

Having Riley and Magnus run around LA like chickens with their heads cut off is not enough to keep us engaged. We need to know what a successful mission for them looks like. Or a failed mission, for that matter. Nobody tells us what either of those things look like so we don’t care what happens.

Compare this to Independence Day. That movie is not the greatest. Like, its wacky cheesy tone nearly destroys it. But do you know why it works? Because the stakes are clear. Once we see the aliens blow up the White House, we know that if we don’t solve this issue, we’re goners.

James Cameron, who’s probably the best at writing giant stories, shows you how to do this correctly at the beginning of his opus, “Titanic.” In the present-day storyline, he has a computer tech take us through a simulation of how the Titanic ship went down. It lays out how the water gets in, where it gets in, and how it eventually overwhelms the ship. That way, later on, when we see people in the lower decks, we know, because of that computer simulation we saw, that they’re dead if they don’t find a way out of their soon.

This script didn’t give us anything like that. There’s one vague monologue early on that warns of terrible things that happen during a city-wide blackout. But, again, it’s not specific enough for us to understand the stakes. In a power outage, things get worse and worse the more time the power is down. But, how long before you have serious deaths? Cause I think, based on my own experiences, we’re talking weeks. Well then what’s the rush? It seems the rush is to prevent the inconvenient type of power outage. The kind where you’re mad your wireless is out for a few hours. Not the killer type. So, again, I ask: What are the stakes here? Cause they don’t seem that bad.

The script is also riddled with a lot of techy talk that we don’t understand. “We’re observing de-sync between automated signals and field status. Latency like this is unusual but we’re trying to figure it out.” “Something upstream took the power I redirected. And it’s not stopping.”

These create the illusion that something important is happening. But what good is it if we don’t understand what it means? I’ve already established that the stakes are unclear. Now we have unclear exposition. So it’s a double-dose of ambiguity, which is going to send us further into a state of boredom.

On top of that, your main character pairing has vanilla-as-hell chemistry. They both feel like characters we’ve seen before. There’s nothing unique about either of them. There’s no big likable quality for us to latch onto. And so, together, they’re just going through the paces of your basic “conflict-filled” coupling. Which is one of the quickest ways to bore a reader.

How do you prevent this? Go watch Project Hail Mary. One of the more common notes I give on a screenplay consultation is to GIVE YOUR CHARACTERS PERSONALITY. It’s strange the way writers think. They’re so focused on making their characters a product of the plot moving forward that they forget to stop and ask who this person is when there is no plot. What’s their baseline day to day personality? Are they fun, sarcastic, witty, weird?

Go watch the trailer for Send Help. Those two have PERSONALITY.

We’ve already got stakes problems. We’ve already got exposition problems. Now the people taking us through the story aren’t that interesting. Nor do they have any chemistry. I mean, at that point, I’m not sure anything can save the script.

The other day, I said that it would behoove young action screenwriters to go back to those 80s action classics, like Commando, and watch them to see how they were constructed. Because you learn things. And one of those things is: BE CLEAR ABOUT THE ACTUAL SETUP OF THE MOVIE so that we understand what the main character is doing, why he’s doing it, and where he is in relation to achieving or failing the objective at every stage of the journey.

And from there, you just make things as hard on him as possible so he has to overcome a lot of obstacles. I talked about the importance of saying “NO” to your character and how that creates better scenes.

There’s this really fun scene in Commando around the middle of the movie. Matrix and Cindy figure out the island Matrix’s daughter is being held on and come up with a plan to get there. But Matrix says, “First we need to go shopping.” And he goes to this giant closed gun store, breaks in, and starts loading up on all these insane weapons. It’s a fun montage. We’re into it because we can already imagine Matrix going crazy with these weapons.

And then, out of nowhere, you hear, “FREEZE!” And it’s a bunch of cops. And Matrix is arrested. It’s the ultimate “NO” to your character. He’s not able to do what he wants to do. We don’t get any “No’s” in this script. Sure, there are a few bad guys who cause some bumps in the road to Riley and Magnus’s investigation. But never anything that makes us say, “Oh no, how are they going to get out of this?”

When Matrix got arrested and placed in the back of an armored police vehicle, I literally had no idea how he was going to get out.

I don’t know, guys. Reading these scripts these days is frustrating. Most writers give you what I call “I finished it” scripts. These are scripts where the writer wants validation just for finishing the script. That should never be the goal of the writer. Nobody gets a gold star for finishing a script. You get the gold star for writing a great story. Finishing the script should almost feel like it’s getting in the way because your story is so damn awesome that nobody wanted it to end.

This script is an “I finished it” script. It wants accolades for getting to page 114 and not embarrassing itself. That is not, nor should it ever be, the criteria for writing a screenplay.

[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius

What I learned: Readers respond to the personal, not the general. If Commando was about a guy taking down bad guys because it’s the right thing to do, nobody would’ve cared. It was about saving his daughter from the bad guys. So we cared. Similarly, if Grace and Rocky aren’t trying to save each other in Project Hail Mary, nobody would’ve cared. Blackout could’ve used that tip before it was written. Instead of just trying to save a bunch of faceless souls in Los Angeles (of which, as I mentioned, we don’t even know if it’s that many), try to save one soul who we actually care for.