Genre: Drama/Period
Premise: In Prohibition-era Kentucky, a moonshiner’s plan to save the family farm goes awry when his brother steals a prized dog from a local mobster.
Why You Should Read: Heck is an inventive retelling of Homer’s Trojan War epic. Instead of Trojans vs. the Greeks, my story takes place in 1920s Kentucky, pitting a family of moonshiners against a local crime boss and his Prohibition Agent brother. Part O Brother Where Art Thou and part Lawless, it’s an epic tale of bootlegging, boxing, and of course, a giant Trojan horse.
Writer: Chris Hicks
Details: 109 pages

Oscar Isaac for… something in this?

I am going to propose the impossible.

The irrational.

The sensational!

I don’t know if you guys are even ready for what I’m about to say.

A moment of silence…………

Okay. Here it is. Is “Heck,” A John Wick prequel?

I know it sounds ridiculous. But let’s look at the author’s name. “Chris Hicks.” Hmmmmm… Hicks? Wicks? Hick? Wick? Notice any similarities?

What am I babbling on about?

Well, you see, both of these movies rely heavily on a dog. You could say both rely heavily on an outrageous dog plotline. Somehow, John Wick made its dog storyline work. Did Heck? Let’s find out together!

It’s Prohibition. No alcohol and all that. Heck makes the best moonshine in Kentucky. Not easy when you consider what’s happened to his family. His mom just died. His dad’s got a permanent broken heart. And his little brother, Perry, is a bit of a weirdo. Oh, and they’re four mortgage payments behind with the bank. They need to start making money fast.

Heck goes to the biggest client he can find, Matthias, a boxing manager and secret bar owner. Matthias wants to buy thousands of bottles of Moonshine from Heck. However, right after they strike a deal, Perry secretly steals Matthias’s cute little puppy. Why? Because he thinks it’s cute!

As soon as they get home, Heck has a fit. What are you doing stealing people’s dogs for?? He demands that Perry give it back. But Perry says no. Fine, Heck says. Wow, that was easy. It doesn’t take long for Matthias to find out his dog has been stolen, so he comes to Heck’s farm and demands it back. They say no. Furious, Matthias teams up with the dirty G-Man, Augie, to take Heck down any way possible. Oh, and if it wasn’t obvious, the deal is off.

This forces Heck to strike a deal with Apollo, a guy who runs an underground bar in the next county. Like, literally. They deliver the moonshine to this guy in underground caves. Unfortunately, Augie and Matthias round up a mob to ambush Apollo’s place and a lot of people are beat to a pulp.

Heck realizes that the only way he’s going to square this situation is to fight Matthias’s best boxer. While Heck ain’t too shabby in a ring, he’s no match for Beast Mode Gideon, Matthias’s guy. Gideon beats Heck to a pulp. It looks like Heck is going to lose the farm and go to prison. It will be up to Perry, who started all this, to come up with a plan to save his brother.

A couple of things I want to say right off the bat. I haven’t read “Homer” since high school. So I have no memory of what it’s about. And I don’t think it’s the best idea to write a script like O Brother Where Art Thou on spec. O Brother is 75% direction and 25% script. It’s too hard to convey semi-humorous offbeat tones on the page. It’s difficult for the reader to know just how funny something was meant to be and just how serious other things were meant to be. This is why these scripts are almost always a package deal with the writer and director being the same.

With that out of the way, how was this?

Heck was really well written. We can start there. Regardless of what you think of this script, it’s the embodiment of professional and easy to read. This isn’t even my jam and, still, my eyes were flying down the page.

However, the second the dog thing happened, my brain left my body. I felt suspended in confusion. Your brother steals a dog of the man who’s going to help you save your farm. And when said brother says he wants to keep it, you let him? How does that make sense?

Somebody might throw this back in my face if it’s a direct plotline from Homer. But even if it is, one of my pillars of screenwriting no-no’s is to NEVER HAVE shaky inciting incidents. The inciting incident is the entire reason the movie exists. So if it’s weak or murky or nonsensical, you’re building your story on a shaky foundation. Not to mention, I don’t think I’ve ever seen a inciting incident that was initiated BY our heroes. Inciting incidents are supposed to happen TO our heroes.

How this directly relates to this script is that a lot of people, like me, are going to say, throughout the movie, “Why don’t you just give the dog back?” It solves every problem. Or, if they’re not going to give the dog back, provide us with a convincing reason WHY they wouldn’t give it back. That explanation definitely never came in “Heck.”

Maybe Chris’s counter-argument would be that it’s supposed to be funny. And that’s my point about quirky humor. We’re not sure how much leniency on plot issues we’re supposed to allow because of humor. Am I just supposed to laugh at the glaring plot hole and go with it? Sorry but I can’t.

With all that said, the dialogue here is good. The structure is top-notch. The characters all have big personalities and therefore pop off the page. So it’s not like Heck doesn’t have anything going for it. But when you plop me down 100 years ago, you’re already at a disadvantage. It’s so not my jam. Therefore, I never quite saw this as anything other than a curiosity. I was interested but I was never invested. So as strong as the writing was, I can’t give it that ‘worth the read.’ I will say that the writer is worth keeping an eye on though. If Chris has got any other scripts set in present day that are more marketable, submit them to Amateur Offerings.

Oh, and one last thing. If Chris is doing a rewrite, I think it would be funny to give Apollo a dog and have Perry steal him too. I’m joking of course. But that would be funny.

Script Link: Heck

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

What I learned: Something every writer should take into consideration when they’re deciding what to write next is: Is this the kind of movie that excites people? Both the kind of people you need to get the movie made and the people who buy the tickets. Because I read a lot of scripts like this one, where I nod my head afterwards and say, “good job.” But the script doesn’t get me excited enough to tell other people about it.

What I learned 2: A fun easy way to spice up dialogue is to use role play. No, not that role play. You create a fun moment where the characters can address each other as something other than themselves. Remember that characters talking directly to each other about what’s in their head is the definition of on-the-nose dialogue. So you should always look for ways to play with the dialogue instead. This is one of the easiest ways.

Genre: Contained Thriller
Premise: A dedicated social worker enters the home of an adoptive father of six children to check on their well-being, only to learn that the family is keeping a deadly secret. Based on actual events.
About: This script made last year’s Hit List and Blood List. Skylar James has been writing for quite some time, penning the 2010 script for Mortal Kombat.
Writer: Skylar James
Details: 117 pages

This has Jake’s sis, Maggie, written all over it.

If God said he was ending your life in six months unless you sold a screenplay, your best bet would be to write a contained thriller. Or, better yet, a contained horror. You probably won’t get a huge paycheck. But you’d sell your script and still be alive. Skylar James knows this formula. So much so that she’s turbo-boosted it with the old “based on actual events,” tag. If you can’t sell a contained horror that’s based on actual events, well then my friend, you are not a real screenwriter (I’m only joking, of course. Well, half-joking anyway).

Anthony Minchin, an obituary writer, is a weird middle-aged man who lives up on 29 Mole Street with his six adopted children, Christopher, Tallulah, William, Irena, Gideon, and Juniper. Anthony loves his kids more than anything and they love him back. Every day Anthony comes home with a new toy and plays games with them. Outside of not having a mother, the children are happy beyond their wildest dreams.

One day there’s an unexpected knock at the door. Hannah, from social services, is here to check on the adopted children to make sure they’re okay. A victim of abuse, Hannah is immediately concerned when she notices bruises on the children. She investigates each of them, but they only speak glowingly of their father. Still, something doesn’t add up.

Hannah’s spidey-sense spikes when she speaks with William. There’s something about him that’s familiar. Was he previously at another adopted home she was assigned to? Hannah shifts her focus from the children to the house, which she investigates with growing curiosity. Anthony has all these rules about what rooms you’re allowed to go in. And nobody, not even the children, is allowed in the basement.

As soon as Anthony is busy, that’s where Hannah goes. After snooping around, she finds a hollow floorboard, which contains an old laptop. She boots it up and finds obituaries for hundreds of children. But more concerning is the police file she finds on her abusive old boyfriend. Why would that be in here? When Hannah goes upstairs to confront Anthony, she realizes that neither this house nor these children are what they seem, and that she could be stuck here forever.

The problem with 29 Mole Street is that I predicted the twist a quarter of the way in (spoilers follow). There were too many red flags pointing to it. He writes obituaries. The kids are never allowed to go outside. The curtains must always stay closed so the neighbors can’t see in. It was pretty obvious they were dead. And if they were dead, she probably was too. So I spent the rest of the script waiting for the writer to catch up to me.

With that said, I had previous movies like The Others and The Orphanage to guide me towards that conclusion. If you haven’t seen those films, maybe the ending to 29 Mole Street is a surprise to you. But that’s not what I want to talk about today. I want to discuss bulk character descriptions, since this is something that keeps coming up.

Mole Street is a good example of why you don’t want to introduce a bunch of characters at the same time. When you introduce characters in bulk, it is HIGHLY LIKELY the reader will forget most of them. This problem usually comes up with writers who don’t read a lot of scripts. Because they don’t read, they’re unaware of how difficult it is to memorize a group of people.

Mole Street introduces us to six children in the worst way possible: “The children (CHRISTOPHER (4), TALLULAH (5), WILLIAM (5), IRENA (7), GIDEON (8), and JUNIPER (10)) sit side by side in a line on the sofa watching cartoons when Minchin walks in.”

How long do you think it will take before the reader forgets who’s who here? I can tell you how long it took me. A page. From that point on, I was guessing who was who. The good news is, there’s a simple set of rules you can follow to make sure that if you’re introducing a group of characters, the reader will remember them.

1) Don’t do it – It’s virtually impossible to introduce characters in bulk and not have the reader forget some of them. So only do it if you have no other option. If you must bulk intro, try to move some of the intros – hell, even if it’s just one intro – to another scene. The fewer characters you’re introducing in bulk, the better the chance we’ll remember them.

2) Introduce the most important characters first – Generally speaking, readers assume that whoever’s important will be introduced first. So if you’re introducing a group of characters, create a hierarchy of importance and introduce them in top-down order.

3) Write a killer description – Character descriptions become infinitely more important when introducing in bulk. Therefore, you should dedicate lots of time to writing highly memorable character descriptions for everyone. Here’s how Soderbergh described Erin Brokovich: “ERIN BROCKOVICH. How to describe her? A beauty queen would come to mind – which, in fact, she was. Tall in a mini skirt, legs crossed, tight top, beautiful – but clearly from a social class and geographic orientation whose standards for displaying beauty are not based on subtlety.” That’s a tad long, but you get the point.

4) Immediately have them do or say something that tells us more about them – When introducing in bulk, action becomes even more important than normal. The right action can be the difference between us remembering and not remembering someone. So if they’re a dummy, have them do something dumb. If they’re funny, have them say something funny.

5) Intersperse some nicknames – Anything you can do to help us remember who’s who should be used. A little trick is to give at least one character an on-the-nose nickname. I read a war script not long ago with a bulk character intro and one of the characters was named “Sideburns” cause of his insanely long sideburns. I never forgot that character. In general, names that sound like their characters can be helpful in these situations (if you have a character known for her virginity, naming her “Mary” might help).

6) Don’t dine and dash – Whatever you do, don’t abandon bulk intro’d characters right after introducing them. In other words, don’t introduce the characters then cut to some other scene or sequence that lasts ten pages, before coming back to them. I guarantee you we will forget almost all of them if you do this. Stay with the characters as long as you can so we can get to know them and define who’s who.

You follow these six rules, you should be fine.

As for the rest of the script, I don’t know if the reason I picked up on the twist early was because I read so many scripts or if it’s genuinely too obvious. Nor do I know how to judge the overall script in spite of this. It’s not a bad story. But just like anything that depends so heavily on the twist, it’s screwed once you figure that twist out. For that reason, I can’t recommend this.

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

What I learned: When writing scripts that have a big final twist, err on the side of LESS setup for the twist rather than MORE. Audiences are always smarter than you think so you don’t want to make it too obvious. If readers later tell you that your twist “came out of nowhere,” you can add more setup. But I’d always start with less.

Genre: Drama
Premise: After a priest stumbles across the execution of a Mexican family who were trying to cross the border, he finds himself hunted by the killers.
About: This script sold two years ago in a mid-six-figure deal. The writer, Mike Maples, has been at the game for awhile, with his first and only feature credit, Miracle Run, being made back in 2004. Padre was pitched as being in the vein of No Country for Old Men and A History of Violence. Like I always say, guys, find those buzz-worthy movie titles to compare your script to. Whether it be “Fargo on the moon” or just, “This is the next Seven.”
Writer: Mike Maples
Details: 100 pages – undated

I honestly think Matt Damon would be perfect for this part.

There are two types of screenwriters trying to break into the business. There are the ones who grew up on big fun movies who want to bring those same good vibes to the masses, and there are the ones who want to say something important with their work, who want to make “serious” films.

Take a guess which ones have an easier time getting into Hollywood.

That’s one of the first pieces of advice I’d give to anyone getting into screenwriting. Write something marketable. Yet when I run into one of these serious types, the suggestion of marketability is akin to asking them to copulate with a rhinoceros. They feel like they’re “selling out” if they even consider the masses while writing in their vintage 1982 moleskin notebook. It’s almost as if they’d prefer wallowing in obscurity for the rest of their lives, attempting to push that Afghani coming-of-age story, than break through with a strong horror premise AND THEN write their anti-Hollywood film.

Well if today’s script tells us anything, it’s that it IS possible to sell a thoughtful more serious spec. It doesn’t happen often. But it can happen. Let’s figure out what today’s writer did that was so special.

40 year-old Gideon Moss is a priest who lives just north of the Mexican border. While everyone else in the area is furious about illegal immigrants crossing into their country, Gideon regularly delivers water and food to those at the end of their journey.

One day, while on a run, he stumbles across a recently murdered family of Mexican immigrants. A quick look around and he spots, in the distance, a couple of locals staring at him. Doesn’t take much to add 2 and 2 together.

Figuring they’ve been made, the men, a part of a bigger militia, barge into Gideon’s church later that week during a sermon, round up him and all the Mexicans, take them to the desert, bury them alive, then crucify Gideon on a cross. Gotta give it to these guys for creativity.

Left to bleed out, Gideon escapes, and starts hunting the gang down one by one. Oh, there’s one last problem I forgot to mention. The militia? They’re all cops. So it’s not like our pal Gideon can ask for a helping hand. Lucky for him, and unlucky for the baddies, he has a very military-friendly past.

Okay, so this isn’t exactly an Afghani coming-of-age story, but it fits a rule that I push on writers attempting to write “serious” films. Make sure there’s at least one dead body. While there may be a temptation to mirror real life and call your script ‘realistic,’ the reality is that film is larger than life. You have to have at least one larger-than-life element in your story. A dead body fits that criteria.

Also, if you’re going to write one of these serious scripts, you need to be descriptive. You need to have the power of picture-painting. Your world is decidedly less exciting than 12 superheroes battling each other on an airport tarmac. So you have to make up for that in your ability to place your reader inside your world. A truck can’t just drive. It has to exist, as Maples shows us here: “A rooster tail of dust billows behind the truck and hangs in the still scorched air.”

It should also be mentioned that if you’re going to write this type of script, you have to have the skill to actually pull it off. The most painful scripts to read are the ones where writers without any skill try and weave their way through complex descriptive sentences. For example, they’d re-word the above into… “The truck lampoons the stretch of road with forest trees all around it and shifts into gear like a rocket out of hell.” Honestly, I read a lot of lines like that.

Also, you have to have dialogue skills for these scripts. When someone offers to help Gideon, despite the risks involved, he doesn’t reply, “No, your life is too valuable,” he replies, “Leave it be. Your box is thirty years down the line. No use taking a short cut.” That’s a professional line of dialogue right there. Or later we get this exchange, which takes place between the badass villain and one of his dim-witted minions: “What the fuck is this?” “You just squandered five of the ten words in your vocabulary, son. Keep the rest for later.”

Padre also utilizes two tropes that tend to work well in film. The first is the priest who’s not so priestly, and the second is the cop who’s not so friendly. As we like to preach around these parts, always look for irony in your story. Corrupt cops are as ironic as it gets. So are murdering priests. Usually, you only see one of these in a movie. It was fun to read a script where we got both.

And there were just little professional spikes that set this apart from the average amateur script. For example, a little girl is killed in that scene where the bad guys round up everyone in the church and bury them alive. Now normally, a writer would think that was enough. Nobody likes to see a little girl die. We’ll hate the bad guys even more and want to see them go down.

But Maples makes sure that we SET UP A SCENE WITH THIS GIRL EARLIER. So one of the first scenes is Gideon visiting a nurse friend at the hospital. The nurse gives him drugs to pass to the little girl, who’s sick at home because she’s illegal and can’t afford hospital care. Gideon delivers the medicine to the girl, so that we know her and care about her (not to mention doubles as a Save The Cat moment!). That makes her later death a thousand times more impactful. Amateur writers rarely think to do this sort of thing.

If there’s a knock against the script, it’s that it feels a little familiar. There are usually 3-4 of these kinds of scripts on the Black List each year. And I wasn’t a fan (spoiler) of the revelation that Gideon used to be a Black Ops soldier. It seemed like a lazy choice, and honestly, I don’t think it was necessary. Gideon comes off as badass enough that you don’t need to make him even more badass with some backstory title. But outside of that, this was a strong script.

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

What I learned: If you’re going to write a script like this, be honest with yourself and make sure your writing is at the level required to pull it off. I’m not saying you don’t have to know how to write to write “Neighbors.” But the skill level of putting words together is decidedly less important with scripts like Neighbors or Deeper. With drama, you will be judged more harshly on your writing ability, because your job is to set a mood and a tone with your writing, something that takes a lot of time and practice to master.

Get those pilots ready for Pilot Amateur Offerings Week (March 12th). To get your script into the competition, e-mail me the title, genre, logline, and why you think it deserves a read to carsonreeves3@gmail.com

Genre: TV Pilot – Cop Drama
Logline: A tech billionaire purchases a troubled police precinct in the wake of a loved one’s murder. The series will explore if the eccentric and enigmatic figure’s cutting-edge approach can fix the broken ways of the blue blood veterans.
About: This script was sent to me with some high praise. It comes from David Slack, who was one of the primary writers on CBS’s “Person of Interest.” David’s been writing professionally for over a decade, starting off in children’s television before moving on to more adult fare like Person of Interest, Law & Order, and Lie to Me. The show will air on Fox later this year.
Writer: David Slack
Details: 60 pages – revised network draft – (January 22, 2016)

Out-of-the-box thinking here. What about Elijah Wood for Gideon?

Cop pilots are funny. Everybody’s trying to find that angle that’ll allow them to explore this stale format in a fresh way. Last year we had Vince Gilligan’s Battle Creek which asked the question, “What if you worked in a precinct with no technology?” Fox tried out Minority Report, which asked, among other things, “What does crime-fighting look like with near-future technology?” And now APB comes in and asks, “What if you had an unlimited budget and could use any technology?”

It’s a cool setup. An Elon Musk-like cocky billionaire figures he knows how to fight crime better than the government and puts his money where his mouth is. But the more you think about it, the less convincing the concept becomes. It’s not like our billionaire is saying he knows how to do it better. He’s just saying he could do better since he has more money. But wouldn’t the government do better if they had more money also? That’s one of many questions this pilot had me asking.

APB starts off with a couple waking up to a home invasion. As the woman slips into a back room, she brings up an Uber-like app called “APB” that, just like Uber, shows you all the cop cars driving through streets in your area. She texts that she’s under attack, clicks the button, and immediately all cars on the map turn and start driving towards her. Within seconds (as opposed to the 15 minutes you usually have to wait for cops) police drones AND real cops are there to save the day. Welcome to the next level of crime-fighting.

Jump back a few months where we meet Murphy, the “female version of John McClane.” Murphy is the best cop in the worst precinct in the city. But that’s all about to change. Billionaire Gideon Reed, motivated by the system’s failure to save his wife, decides to buy his own precinct, privatize it, and turn it into the most technologically sophisticated precinct in the U.S. They’ll have drones, they’ll have Teslas, they’ll have body armor, they’ll have apps. And in a Bernsandersion move, everyone gets paid 40% more!

For some reason, Murphy isn’t having this (because an overfunded precinct and higher pay are bad things??) and wants a transfer. Despite their huge pay-raise, the rest of the cops don’t like it either. Everybody thinks this madman and his weird ideas are going to fail so they’re waiting for him to get bored and go back to launching rockets into space.

But Gideon not only believes in his system, he’s going to stay here and run it! That’s right. He sets up an office right here in the 13th precinct. As pressure mounts, Gideon sees that he can win over the team by stopping a band of home invasion murderers. Using his 24/7 5K video drones, he monitors the city until he finds out the bad guys’ identities. But he’ll need the cooperation of his reluctant team to put them away. And to ensure the future of his new system: APB.

I don’t know about this one. I feel like Olivia Wilde going up to present an Oscar only to see that my co-presenter has secretly transformed into Ali-G and may potentially say something insensitive (it’s true: Sasha-Baron Coen was not supposed to present as Ali-G!).

My issue here is that I don’t know what this show is. At first I thought it was about a rich guy proving to the government that he could do their job better. But then it morphed into a sort of “Minority Report” show that focused on next-level technology in the police force. That was until a key scene where Gideon insisted they switch their guns from lethal to non-lethal. So was this now a political statement show about policemen and gun control? As I settled into that mindset, Gideon starts doing all these zany things (shooting himself with a tazer to see how it feels). So is this now the cop version of House M.D.?

Not only do I not know what this show is about, but its entire foundation is built on a questionable conceit. It tries to make you believe that throwing an extra billion dollars at policing a precinct ISN’T GOING TO WORK. That using better computers, better gear, better cars, better weapons, and, oh yeah, crime-fighting drones, is going to fail when compared to… an understaffed underfunded uninspired badly run precinct. Am I missing something here? Explain to me how the latter option could be better.

Now I admit, I’ve never been a fan of this “one bad guy a week” cop-show format. It’s too generic for me, too restrictive. I’m such a “Lost” and “Breaking Bad” guy, I keep waiting for the story to bust out of its chains and go off into new unexpected directions. But I don’t think David Slack (or Fox) is interested in that. And I think that’s why the networks are dying. They’re terrified of trying anything unconventional. I can’t imagine how many meetings they needed over at NBC just to agree that Ray Liotta’s character in Shades of Blue could be gay. And Fox used to be the outlier of the networks. They used to take chances. I’m not seeing that anymore.

Even some of the basic TV stuff here was uninspired. When we cut to commercial (the end of an act break), you better leave us with a question we want answered. The question we were left with at the end of Act 2 was, “Will Murphy leave the precinct?” No. She won’t. We all know she won’t because then there won’t be a show. Not only that, but there’s no reason for her to leave. She’s now working at the most high-tech police precinct in the country. Why would you leave that?

I’m not saying every commercial break has to come with a Lost-level mystery-box question (why are there polar bears on a tropical island?). Character-driven questions are fine. But they have to leave us genuinely uncertain about the answer. I’ll copy and paste something MulesandMud said the other day that applies:

So many scripts that I read never bother to create a real sense of uncertainty for the future, and so I never actually wonder what happens next. Without that curiosity, I have no reason to read further.

A dramatic question should never be rhetorical. There should be a real possibility of a different outcome than the way your scene eventually turns out. If readers can’t see a spectrum of possibilities, they have no reason to read further. You, as the writer, need to show us those possibilities.

Say your characters are rushing to diffuse a bomb in your opening scene. For that to be interesting, I need to believe that they might not actually succeed. That means I need to see how the story could keep going if that bomb actually does go off. If I can’t see other outcomes, then it’s obvious they’re going to diffuse the bomb, and all of your suspense reads false.

For example, maybe it’s not the hero who’s diffusing the bomb; maybe it’s his brother, and our hero is feeding him instructions over the phone. Now I’m thinking about what life would be like for this dude if he gets his brother killed, and how brutal that would be, and I’m genuinely relieved when they both survive. A question with only one answer isn’t a real question. Your story path needs to constantly arrive at forks in the road, and you need to show us both paths, then prove to us that you’ve chosen the more interesting direction every single time.

I was thinking that a lot during APB. None of the questions had me uncertain. I was always ahead of the writer. The plot went according to plan. Even the obstacles (an angry sergeant who says Gideon has 24 hours left to prove himself or else) were expected. I was really hoping for something more here. We live in the age of 500 television shows. You can’t get away with decent anymore. You have to push yourself. You have to take chances. You have to do things that are unexpected. Or else you’re going to get swallowed up. Hopefully David Slack and Fox course-correct here. There’s something in this idea. It just hasn’t materialized yet.

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

What I learned: You are playing with fire when you cut to commercial after a soft question. You can get away with soft questions in episode 8, when your show has established itself. But not in your pilot, when trigger-happy viewers with a million choices are looking for any reason to watch something else. Think long and hard about every act break in your script. Make sure to put something there that makes it IMPOSSIBLE for your viewer to not stick around and find out the answer.

Can one of the biggest sci-fi screenwriters in town infuse some life into Universal’s vaunted monster franchise?

Genre: Horror/Fantasy/Action
Premise: After a black ops team awakens a 2000 year-old mummy, they must prevent him from opening the gates of hell.
About: Many of you may have read how Universal was going to create a universe/franchise (a la Avengers) out of their monster IP. This project, The Mummy, was going to be their flagship film. Then, for whatever reason, they slowed the train down, and while it appears they’re still going to unleash these monsters onto the world at some point, they’ve decided to hit the pause button for the time being. What this means for the Spaihts’-written script of The Mummy, we’ll have to see. Jon Spaihts, as many of you have heard, broke into Hollywood with his Black List topping script, Passengers, and then went on to write an early version of Prometheus. Sony just recently decided to take a chance on that Spaiht’s marketing-challenged script, with The Imitation Game’s Morten Tyldum directing and Jennifer Lawrence and Chris Pratt attached to play the leads.
Writer: Jon Spaihts
Details: 125 pages – 7/11/2013 draft

I know some of you wanted me to review Friday the 13th, but I asked a few industry folks about it and they said it was one of the worst scripts they’ve read all year, which makes sense, since the studio decided to scrap the script entirely and start over again. So alas, there will be no goalie masked Jason Voorhees love today.

While Jon Spaihts’ last name may be impossible to spell, his particular brand of sci-fi is some of the best in the business. If there was a sci-fi film you watched within the last five years, chances are he wrote a draft of it. That makes Spaihts’ move to the Mummy franchise a little surprising, but as you’ll see with the direction they went, it may not be that surprising after all.

Navy Seal Tyler Colt was just following orders while on a secret mission in Iraq. But when his team stumbles upon an ancient tomb, they all inexplicably go crazy and start killing each other. Tyler escapes, but for the next two years is haunted with specific nightmares about ancient kings and armies killing each other in terribly brutal ways.

Eventually, Tyler is approached by Colonel Gideon Forster, a member of a special weapons group that does the same kind of stuff as they chronicled in that bad George Clooney movie. Forster wants to go back to that tomb because he thinks there’s something valuable in there. Tyler resists, but in the end goes along with it because this is the movies.

Forster also brings along Jenny Halsey, a sort of female Indiana Jones, except instead of raiding tombs, she uses her female assets to con greedy billionaires into giving her their ancient amulets and such (which she then returns to museums). Needless to say, Tyler and Jenny don’t see eye to eye.

The group goes and raids the tomb once more, stealing the coffin inside, then hopping on a plane back home. Everything seems great until their plane hits an unexpected storm and crashes into the middle of Rome (later it looks like the storm wasn’t an accident). The mummy within the coffin (who we’ll later learn was King Ashurbanipal, the most violent king in history – he made Genghis Khan look like a girl scout), gets loose and – this is the first time I can use this phrase literally – all hell breaks loose.

The Mummy is looking for his crown and his sword, ancient artifacts that are somewhere in Rome, which forces Tyler and Jenny to find these items first. As Jenny tell us, if the Mummy gets these items, he will open up the gates of hell. And once that happens, it’s game over, insert new coin.

Let’s get this out of the way. This ain’t your Brendan Fraser’s father’s Mummy. Universal has decided to go with the darker edge that made all those superhero films between 2006-2012 so popular. It worked for superheroes. Why can’t it work for monsters?

Of course, 2013 was right when the audience tone pendulum started swinging in the other (lighter) direction. This may be why Universal pushed its planned monster franchise back. They want to wait and see how the tone dust settles before investing 175 million dollars into something.

With that said, I liked the more serious tone. Those old Mummy movies played like they were written by a third grader, especially the last couple, which were borderline embarrassing. What Spaihts has done is he’s brought the same attention to detail that he brought to his sci-fi offerings and made you believe in this mummy.

I’ve said this before about screenwriting but that’s where the men leave the boys behind. An amateur screenwriter will fill in the mummy’s backstory with his imagination. The pro will actually research their mummy and make him a real person. And that’s what Spaihts did. Ashurbanipal is a badass mummy with this entire history of being the most violent king in history and being obsessed with the underworld. Therefore when he gets loose in the present, he actually carries some weight. It’s not just a guy wrapped in toilet paper.

I also liked how the backstory for Ashurbanipal was handled. It wasn’t like, “Oh, he ruled the land in 300 B.C. and first found his Caniful Sword in the Battle of Rysaficus when he was seven…” Our characters HAD to learn his backstory in order to figure out how to defeat him, in order to understand what he was doing. So any backstory we were given was relevant, as it held clues as to how to take down the villain.

Spaihts also does a good job keeping all characters goal-oriented, including the villain. Remember, a character with a goal is an ACTIVE character. So you want as many characters with goals as possible. And, as you can see from this synopsis, it’s okay to give the heroes and the villains the same goal (the crown, the sword). As long as the characters are after something and being active, they can be after the same thing, different things, whatever.

If the script has a problem, it’s that Spaihts focused TOO MUCH on the Mummy. I mean, I get it. The movie is called “The Mummy.” But because the Mummy is so fucking cool, our heroes, Tyler and Jenny, get overshadowed.

The two KIND OF have something going on. For Tyler, he’s been haunted by these terrible mummy nightmares for a couple of years after the Iraq invasion and that’s made him unable to function in society (a commentary on PTSD maybe?) and for Jenny, she’s paid a ton of money to run around with billionaires and coerce them into giving away their artifacts, so she’s burdened with the stigma of putting money ahead of duty.

But I’m not sure either of those things registered with me. For a character to pop, I feel like he/she needs to have a flaw that the masses can relate with. To bring up one of Spaihts’ favorite movies, Aliens, Ripley was racked with distrust, which drove the majority of her actions and really made her accessible. It was more of a human emotion than a script-created screenplay 101 “problem.”

And it’s not like Spaihts doesn’t know how to do this. His best script – the one he broke in with, Passengers – is all about human emotion. I think there’s just a pressure with these action-adventure popcorn movies to keep the leads light and fluffy. Make them dislike each other a bit so there’s a lot of conflict-fueled banter (Jurassic World anyone?) and the studio heads will be happy. Still, I would’ve liked a little more depth to these two. I mean, having a great villain is great and so few writers put enough thought into their villains. But if the audience doesn’t love their hero (ahem, Indiana Jones) then they’re not going to be as engaged.

So despite the fact that we probably won’t see this version of The Mummy, I thought Spaihts wrote a solid draft. If you can find this one, check it out. It’s a good blueprint for how to write a PG-13 studio-friendly family-friendly film with just a teensy bit of edge.

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

What I learned: If you want an unconventional way to grab your reader, start your script with a scene that’s the complete opposite of your subject matter. That’s what I liked about The Mummy here. I’m sure when I say “The Mummy” to you, the first thing you think of is being in an Egyptian pyramid somewhere 2000 years ago. Spaihts’ version of The Mummy starts with a team of Navy Seals invading Iraq through an underwater oil pipe. That caught my interest immediately, making me sit up and pay attention.