Genre: Comedy

Thank the Lord for Chris Mulligan.  I was SPENT last night, struggling to keep my eyes open.  These sorts of things happen when you spend 2 unplanned hours of your day defending yourself against Twitter baddies.   So when I saw those two beautiful numbers sitting next to each other, 9 and 0, at the top of the document, I did a Gangnam Style dance that Psy himself would be proud of.  This wasn’t going to be a long read.

But would it be a good read?  I mean, 90 page scripts can easily read like 140 page scripts if the writing’s bad.  However, I had confidence.  This was a script that had been vetted through the first 10 pages process, remember.  I still remember the line that pushed it through.  When a woman asks if it’s true that Everythingman can time travel, he smiles, we back away, and see that the woman is now pregnant.  I thought that was clever.  I was in!

Our superhero, Everythingman, is kind of like a superhero version of Anchorman.  He’s arrogant.  He loves himself.  He drinks too much and bangs chicks.  But hey, he’s saving the world one villain at a time and he’s actually pretty good at it.

But Everythingman’s a bit unethical in some of his practices.  You see, one of Everythingman’s big powers is that he can steal powers from other superheroes and villains.  We see this in the opening scene when Everythingman steals a villain’s fire-generating power in the middle of a fight and then uses it against him.

Thing is, Everythingman has gotten more and more greedy with this ability, and keeps stealing EVERYBODY’S powers. That’s why he’s called “Everythingman.”  However, right after defeating this helpless latest bad guy, Everythingman flies into his standard post-victory press conference, where a 9 year old cancer-stricken “Make-A-Wish” foundation boy is thrust in front of him.  He’s pressured into granting the boy a wish, and guess what, the boy wishes he could have Everythingman’s powers!

Montage our way forward a few months and Cancer Boy is now the dominant superhero in town and Everythingman is a big fat nobody, with emphasis on the “fat.”  So what does Everythingman do about this?  Well, he teams up with his old sidekick, the rather plainly named, “Frank,” and plans to take down Cancer Boy to get his powers back, even though he knows this means Cancer Boy will die.

That is, um…..it.

Readers love short scripts.  But here’s the ironic thing. When they spot a script that’s extra short, 90 pages or less, they get nervous.  They fear there might not be enough meat to the story, or that the characters aren’t fully explored.  The fear is that the story will be too thin.  And I believe that’s what’s happened here.

Now we’re not talking infamous entries Orbitals or Frankenstein 90210 thin, but storywise, there isn’t a whole lot that happens in Everythingman.  Let me try and explain.

The opening is great.  We meet Everythingman in his environment.  We establish his flaw (his arrogance).  The scene is funny.  I’m pulled in.  But then Cancer Boy takes his powers, Everythingman goes into a deep depression, and eventually runs into his old sidekick.

And this segment lasts forever!

I know it couldn’t have been this long since the script is only 90 pages, but it felt like we got 50 scenes of Everythingman and his old sidekick, Frank, talking about nothing.  I remember looking up, seeing that I was on page 45, and thinking, “Jesus, we’re already halfway through this thing and nothing’s really happened.”

Then the two sort of goof around, preparing for their showdown with Cancer Boy and, I don’t know, it just seemed like there weren’t a whole lot of stakes involved.  Everything was so casual.  Not only that, but you could feel Mulligan struggling with the motivation thing the whole way through.  Our hero’s basically planning to kill a young child.  A child who’s doing a great job protecting the city.  Which pretty much makes Everythingman a great big asshole.

Now I’m not completely against this, since this is a comedy and it’s kind of funny how selfish Everythingman is to the point where he’s willing to kill a boy to get his powers back.  But when all the other story components are kind of loose and not working as well, something like that really sticks out. I mean look at Frank, for example.  He’s a good guy.  He always does the right thing.  Why in the world does he agree to kill this boy to get powers back for someone he hates (Everythingman stole his powers a long time ago too).

Something like that would work a lot better if, say, Everythingman needed Frank to help him defeat Cancer Boy and therefore went to him.  It becomes much more dramatically compelling if Everythingman must come grovelling back to the guy he screwed over for help than if that same guy conveniently shows up at his door right when he needs him.  But even if you got that element right, it’s still impossible to understand why this nice guy would agree to kill a boy.  It just doesn’t make sense.

Another part of the script that needs work is the explanation behind the powers.  It was all rather confusing.  Not only does Everythingman have all these superpowers, but there’s also this mysterious Genie in his past who gave him all these powers or something?  So in this universe we now have superheroes and…..genies???  Is this The Incredibles or is this Aladdin?

So he stole the genie’s ability to grant wishes, which is what allowed him to give Cancer Boy a wish – I think.  But did he only have 3 wishes to give away since he was a genie??  Was this his last one?  Why would he waste it on a random boy?  I don’t know.  It all seemed harder to follow than it should’ve, particularly for a movie like this, where things should be fairly straightforward.  So that will have to be fixed.

Moving forward, I think it’s important for Mulligan to pack more into his story.  Never take 10 pages to say what you can say in 5.  That was the big problem here.  It always took Mulligan twice as long to say what he needed to.  The first 30 pages could have easily been packed into 15 with a keen eye for cutting and a focus on short crisp scenes and no repetition.  This will allow more room for relationship exploration and subplots.

I think Mulligan had the right idea when he started delving into relationship stuff with Frank and his sister, but Frank was such a thin and confusing character (him just showing up to wish someone well who he hated made no sense) and the sister came in so late, that it was tough to care about whether they fixed their relationship or not.  I’d much rather get into Everythingman’s character flaw (his arrogance/ selfishness) and bring in a relationship that explored that.  We’re way more interested in him changing than Frank.

So yeah, this felt too thin to me.  There were some funny lines and some funny moments.  But you always need more than that in a screenplay.  You need a compelling story that involves you the whole way through.  This kinda felt like one long extended joke.  :(

Script Link: Everything Falls Apart

What I learned: You want a lot of “plot points” in your script.  A plot point is anything that pushes your characters through a relevant barrier in the movie.  In Avengers, each time we brought one of the superheroes into the story, that was a plot point.  When the bad guy shows up on earth, that was a plot point.  When all the superheroes finally get together to plan what they’re going to do, that was a plot point.  When they’re attacked, that was a plot point.  The less plot points you have, the thinner your story feels.  And that’s how Everything Falls Apart felt to me.  There simply weren’t enough plot points to make this feel like a full move.

Genre: Thriller(?)

Don’t worry you Twit-Pitch fanatics.  I haven’t forgotten about you.  In fact, I was so excited about bringing a Twit-Pitch script back for a review, that I’m posting it a day early!  How bout them apples?  I figured since we dealt with some American history yesterday, why not extend it into a 48 hour American history marathon?!  Scriptshadow Textbook Reviews?  Coming soon!

I remember when I originally picked this up.  The writing was so crisp, so clean, that I wanted to replace my bedsheets with it.  I mean, the script starts out with some of the best descriptions of Civil War battle I’ve ever read.  Karpala can detail a battlefield kill like no other.  And then for us to realize that it was all just a reenactment via a Lady Gaga ringtone going off?  Brilliant!

Now, before going forward, I should point something out.  When I picked this up yesterday, I’d completely forgotten the logline.  Which turned out to be a good thing because it meant reading the script clean.  That lack of context allowed me to identify a huge issue that needs to be dealt with in the next draft.  So, grab your Confederate flags Scriptsoldiers, it’s time to take a trip back in time…for the second day in a row.

During Reenactment’s opening reenactment, we meet 45 year old Doug Abbot, a fearless leader on the battlefield, but your average Joe with an ex-wife and a teenage son off it.  You get the feeling that Doug’s life didn’t turn out the way he wanted it to, and these reenactments are the only moments of joy he has left.

So when he’s invited by another re-enactor to a secret reenactment known as the “Battle Of The Wilderness,” Doug is in.  In fact, in order to salvage his deteriorating relationship with his son, Will, he invites him to come with.  Will isn’t exactly keen on reenacting, but the fact that he gets to shoot guns, even if it’s with fake ammunition, is enough to get him onboard.

So Doug and Will, along with a few hundred other participants, are bussed into the middle of some nowhere forest where they’re introduced to their commanders and where they get ready for battle.  They march through the forest, encounter the opposing army, and engage in the first volley of gunfire.  But strangely, nobody from the Confederate side falls.  Per the rules of reenacting, at least a portion of the other side is supposed to “die.”  Nobody does.

And that’s when the Confederates fire on them.  Which is when they figure out something is very VERY wrong.  Dozens of men fall to the ground in a bloody pulp.  These guys are using REAL AMMUNITION!  Let the slaughter begin.

Once Doug realizes this, he grabs Will and a few others and hightails it into the forest.  They’re getting the hell out of here. The problem is they’re so deep in the middle of nowhere that there’s nowhere out.  At a certain point, Doug and his son get split up, and now it’s not just about escaping these crazy psycho REAL Confederates, but about Doug finding his son amongst this endless battlefield.  Will he able to do it in time?  And even if he does, how the hell do they plan on getting out alive?

Like I said, the writing here is pretty great.  It’s that perfect mix of powerful description and lean paragraph packaging – the way screenplays are meant to be written!  I mean check out this opening line: “A maze of white oak trees, holding up canopies of rich, green summer leaves.  There is an early morning light, bringing with it an early morning stillness.” I know a lot of writers who would turn that opening description into 4 to 5 paragraphs!  All we need is one here and the scene is set.

However, once we get into the meat of this story, some cracks, not unlike the cracks in the Confederate army, start to show.  The first issue was simply what the hell was happening!??  I couldn’t for the life of me figure out if we had gone back in time or if this was occurring in the present day.

Here’s why.  Karpala makes a huge deal out of how “similar” all the Confederate leaders look to their real life counterparts.  Eerily similar.  To me that meant we’d gone back in time and were dealing with the real versions of these people.  Also, there were numerous references to how things weren’t where they were supposed to be on the map, which was another hint to me that they were 150 years in the past, where the landscape was much different.  So for about 75% of the screenplay, I thought we were in the past, which is of course a completely different kind of movie.

Another issue for me was the tone.  The non-battlefield stuff had this light, almost goofy family movie quality to it.  Oh, there’s the goofy but annoying new boyfriend of the ex-wife.  Lady Gaga ringtones.  A boy and his dad trying to find common ground together.  Yet once we got onto that battlefield, people’s heads are decapitated by cannon balls.  Bodies are exploded into a dozen pieces by land mines.  And there’s more blood in your average battle scene than in an entire Quentin Tarantino movie.  I don’t know about you guys, but I couldn’t marry those two extremes together.

Also, once I started thinking about the story, there were certain things that didn’t make sense.  Apparently these REAL reenactments were put together once a year.  And during each of them, somewhere between 400-500 men were killed.  Now I’m not a math major, but doesn’t the FBI start getting suspicious when 500 men who went on a reenactment trip don’t return?

Story-wise, the one thing I felt needed strengthening was the father-son stuff.  If the central objective of the script is for the father to find and save his son, we have to really care about that relationship.  I didn’t NOT care about that relationship, but there was nothing exceptional about it  either.  Therefore I was only mildly interested in whether Doug would find Will.  Since that’s pretty much the whole movie, that area needs to be beefed up.

I think Karpala needs to create more of a divide between Doug and Will.  Something more deep-seated that’s been at the core of their relationship for awhile.  For example, maybe Doug bailed on his wife, and Will’s never forgiven him for it.  Now that we have a strong unresolved issue between the two, we as an audience will be rooting for them to reunite so they can finally resolve that issue.

So yeah, the writing in this one was great, as I expected it to be after those first 10 pages, but there were too many little issues that added up.  Not bad, but not good enough to get me all smiley and happy.  :(

Script Link: Re-Enactment

What I Learned: Beware the forced plot point!  Readers know!  Look, we all WANT things to happen in our screenplays to move our story along the way we want it moved along.  But it still has to make sense!  If it doesn’t, it feels forced, and we readers shake our heads in quiet dismay, muttering to ourselves, “That would so never happen.”  Clearly, Karpala needed to split Doug and Will up so Doug could be looking for Will the whole movie.  The problem is, it makes absolutely NO SENSE WHY THEY SPLIT UP.  Doug says something like, “You’re going to wait here while I go do this thing.”  So wait, this father who loves his son more than anything is going to leave him alone in this insanely dangerous and unpredictable battle zone instead of take him with him???????  No way.  Come on guys.  Make sure all your plot points make sense.

Genre: Drama/Thriller

Of all the Twit-Pitch First-10-Pages I read, this was tied as far and away one of the best two.  I had high hopes for it.  My only concern?  A wandering story.  The logline piqued my interest but as you can see, it doesn’t exactly tell us what the script’s about.  So I was really hoping this wasn’t one of those scripts that shows kick ass writing skills for the first ten pages and then just…never turns into anything.  Those are always killers as a reader.  You can tell the writer can write.  They just haven’t figured out how to tell a story yet.  Two very different skills.

But this one felt good.  I knew I was putting it in the “Definite” pile within the first two pages.  I mean go ahead and read the first 10 yourself.  Look at how confident the writing is – how self-assured.  You feel like you’re in the hands of someone who knows what they’re doing, which is rare when you read an amateur screenplay.  But it’s one thing to make it last 10 pages.  It’s a whole nother to make it last 110.

So in case you’re wondering, Gunplay is about terrorist bounty-hunting.  It’s kind of cool when you think about it. Those “Reward – $500” mugshots that were everywhere in the Old West days? They STILL do that.  But here, it’s 5 million dollars instead of 500.  And the players aren’t Two-Barrel Terry, but international terrorists who want to kill Americans in the name of Allah.

Our big daddy, the 5 million dollar jackpot (not sure why it’s changed from 10 mil in the logline) everyone’s after, is a man named Musab.  Musab is actually an American who’s turned on his country, zigzagging through the Pakistani/Afghanstan countryside, trying to escape all the newfound attention he’s gotten after becoming the last big paycheck on the Terrorist Most Wanted List.

There are two bounty hunters he’s gotta worry about.  The first one has no name.  He’s known only as “Stranger.”  This is the kind of guy that gives Clint Eastwood the willies.  He’s just a badass aging bounty hunter with one thing on his mind.  MONAY!  And he’ll do anything to get it.  The other dude is 50-something Wyatt, whose face is a “road map to hell and back.”  Wyatt’s got some other business to tend to as well, something about tracking down 25 million dollars of stolen moolah.

The story weaves through their individual pursuits until they eventually come together, as at one point all three men (including Musab) must escape some baddies, namely a corrupt policemen and a warlord or two.  Soon the 5 million dollar paycheck seems like a pittance compared to that big 25 million dollar payday.  But will they find it before it’s too late, or before they all kill one another?

In short, this is the best writing in the contest so far.  However, my biggest fear was realized.  The story starts out great, but becomes less and less coherent as it goes on.  In fact, when I reached the halfway point, I realized I had only a vague sense of what was going on.  You know when you’re reading something and all of a sudden you realize you weren’t paying attention the last two pages and have to go back and read it again?  I had to do that like 5 or 6 times, and I realized at that point that Gunplay had lost me.

So how did it lose me?  Well, let’s see.  It starts with Musab.  Here was this guy who was known as the most dangerous terrorist left on the U.S. Wanted List, and he didn’t seem dangerous at all.  In fact, he seemed like a normal guy.  So the whole time I was wondering, why is this dude worth so much money?  He’s just like you and me.  To be honest, I don’t even know what he did to get that price tag on his head.

So now you have two bounty hunters chasing a villain who isn’t really a villain.  Why do we care if they catch him?  That was another problem.  What’s the urgency here?  Why do they need to catch him now?  He doesn’t seem to have any immediate plans to kill more Americans, at least nothing concrete.  So why the rush?  And what are the stakes?  Again, it doesn’t matter if he escapes cause he’s got nothing planned.  So the stakes are nil.

Same thing with Stranger and Wyatt.  Why do they need the money so bad?  What’s so important about having 25 million dollars?  I mean sure it makes them “rich,” but who cares?  That’s such a boring reason for needing to do something.  Why can’t the pursuit be personal, for at least one of them?  What if Musab killed one of their daughters in an attack?

On top of this, Wyatt’s storyline was murky.  He was working for someone who wanted to recoup 25 million dollars that some thieves swindled from him.  But I could never really decipher the specifics of what happened.  And again, since Wyatt’s working for someone else who wants the money, the stakes were low.  Why couldn’t he have lost the money himself?  Or maybe he’s not hunting a terrorist, but rather someone who said they’d pay him if he killed a terrorist, but disappeared once the deed was done.  Now it’s personal.

Maybe this is the nature of going with bounty hunters as your protags.  Bounty Hunters go after things for money, not personal reasons.  But I guess I just wanted more.  At least somewhere.

But what really killed Gunplay for me was that the further the script went on, the less clear it became.  All of a sudden we’re in some compound with men using little boys as sex slaves and I’m thinking, “How did we get here?  What does this have to do with the rest of the story?”  None of it was set up very well so it all came out of nowhere.  To be honest, it felt like yet another script that was rushing to meet a deadline.  The best pages were the first 30, since they’d been worked over so many times.  And then you could tell that the last 70 didn’t get nearly as much attention, which is why they got so murky.

To me, this comes down to good old fashioned stakes and urgency.  A storyline needs to be written in that Musab is trying to get somewhere, and if he gets there, people are going to be killed.  That way, there’s some immediacy to the story.  Cause the way it stands now, nothing really happens if he gets away besides our bounty hunters not getting their money.

Since stakes and urgency are always intertwined, you have the same problem on the stakes end.  There’s nothing Musab is trying to do other than escape, so nothing bad happens to anyone if he gets away.

Another thing I’d consider doing is making Musab REALLY BAD.  This guy’s a terrorist.  Let’s find out what he did and hate him for it.  The worse of a person he is, the more we’ll want him to get caught.  That was part of the problem.  Since he was a normal guy, I wasn’t invested in whether Stranger and Wyatt caught up to him.

If you want to make Musab a hero – someone we root for – then make it so he’s been wrongly accused.  He’s not a terrorist.  He’s just been tabbed as one because of bad information or a mix-up.  Audiences love rooting for wrongly-accused characters (The Fugitive anyone?), and now we’ll be invested cause we’ll want to see him get away.  I mean when it comes down to it, I didn’t care if Musab was caught, and I didn’t care if Stranger or Wyatt caught him.  And that just can’t be the case.

Script Link: Gunplay

What I learned: In a chase movie, you want to show the bad guy do something bad, so we’ll want him to go down (Darth Vader chokes a man to death while interrogating him).  If you can’t do that, then show the good guy do something good, so we’ll root for him to succeed (Obi-Wan saves Luke from the Sand People).  In Gunplay, we don’t get either, so we never become interested in the chase.

Genre: Comedy

Details: 117 pages

I open the script.

I see “117 pages.”

For a comedy.

My heart sinks.

“No,” I think.

After all the effort I’ve put into this?  After saying time and time again never to write a comedy spec over 110 pages.  Comedies HAVE TO MOVE because there’s no such thing as a good slow comedy.  If you bloat your script up to 117 pages, I guarantee you it’s going to be slow.  We’re going to have a bunch of long scenes, pointless scenes, repetitive scenes, and probably a story that loses itself several times. That’s how scripts become 117 pages – the writers haven’t figured out how to focus the story yet.  And we become the unwitting lab rats who suffer through that unfocusedness.

Sigh…

BUT!  There are always exceptions to the rule right?  Every once in awhile a long comedy comes along that’s good!  Judd Apatow’s scripts are like 140 pages, right?

Yeah but his scripts usually suck.  He doesn’t start figuring things out until the shooting process.  Hmmm…there’s gotta be SOME examples of long comedy screenplays that are good.  When Harry Met Sally was a long screenplay!  Then again, I’m not sure they formatted it correctly.

What the hell am I babbling about?  Well, it’s Friday, so cut me some slack.  I’m about to go to something called a “Hollywood Breakfast” and I’m not sure how those work.  Are they different from a Hollywood lunch?  Do you talk about different things?  Is it too early in the day to pitch an idea?  Sometimes I wish I was one of those homeless people on Sunset and Vine. They don’t have to worry about anything but acting crazy.  Now that’s a life I could get used to.

The year is 1903, and bike-makers Wilbur and Orville Wright are struggling to keep their business above land (get it? ABOVE…LAND??). You’d think bike-making would be pretty lucrative back then, seeing as there weren’t many cars around.  But our poor brothers can barely make the monthly payments on their lease.

Of the two, Orville is the business-minded one and Wilbur the creative one.  And Wilbur’s got a creative solution for their failing business: start up again on that “flying machine,” they’ve been dilly-dallying with in their spare time, then make a million bucks when they get it to work!  Orville not-so-secretly thinks the flying machine’s a bust, so he’s not down, but when some local thugs come around asking for money on a failed invention the brothers sold them, they have no choice but to run off to Kitty Hawk, North Carolina and throw all of their eggs into this flying basket.

Once there, they meet the beautiful but slightly bitchy Hannah Clifford, who’s the daughter of the local mayor.  She agrees to find them free housing if they’ll vote for her father in the upcoming election.  Jesus, I wish someone would’ve offered me that kind of deal on my apartment.

They begin work on the flying machine but distractions soon arise.  The first is Hannah herself, who takes a liking to Wilbur, which threatens to disrupt their building schedule.  And the second is the president of the Smithsonian Institute, who wants to stop the Wright Brothers from getting their flying machine airborne before he and his much more prestigious institution are able to do so.

When Orville finds out that Wilbur is shacking up with Hannah, he becomes furious, and begins a blueberry pie-inspired sabotage campaign to keep them apart. In the process, however, Orville takes a liking to Hannah, and she decides two brothers are better than one and sleeps with him K-Stew style!  Which, like, is so slutty for back then.

In the end, just about everything that can blow up does, and one of the most heralded achievements in US history is in danger of never happening.

Kitty Hawk has some nice things going for it.  It has a clear goal (create a working flying machine), some urgency (the Smithsonian dude and the thugs from back home chasing them), conflict between the two main characters, a love triangle.  For all intents and purposes, it should work.  And it kind of does at times.

But there’s something missing here that keeps it from ever rising above average.  And I’m not sure what it is.  I run into these scripts every once in awhile – scripts that are “fine,” but are missing those key ingredients that push them into memorable territory.  Maybe more could’ve gone wrong.  And, more specifically, could’ve gone wrong sooner.  Things are a little too breezy through the first half of Kitty Hawk.  The bad guy doesn’t get there until page 70 or something.  The second romance (between Hannah and Orville) doesn’t get started until page 75.  So there’s a huge portion of the script where there isn’t any tension, suspense, or conflict.

Another issue I had was that Dillon didn’t differentiate the brothers when we first met them.  This is CRITICAL since these are our two main characters and will make up 90% of the screenplay.  All we’re told is that one of them, Wilbur, is bald, and that he’s more the “inventor” of the two.  That’s something but it isn’t nearly enough.  It wasn’t until the midpoint that I truly knew who was who when they were talking.  And this can be traced back to that first introduction.  Always try and give your characters a unique introduction that shows exactly who they are and why they’re different from EVERYONE ELSE.   So if Wilbur’s the inventor, show him inventing something.  This is a movie about the Wright Brothers so I see no reason why you wouldn’t start with him working on a plane anyway.

The character of Glenn Curtis (Smithsonian Dude) was also unclear.  I had no idea who he was, what his institution did, why he was trying to find the brothers, what his ultimate plans with them were.  It was all very vague.  So when we get this giant climax of him showing up at the Kitty Hawk church to announce his own plans to build a plane, I was sitting there going….uhhhhh, huh???  This is another case of a writer not being clear enough.  You have to be clear to your audience about who your characters are, what they’re there for, who they work for, what their motivation is, etc.  If any of that stuff is murky, then the character is shot.  We never get a good feel for them.

The area where I really checked out though was when Orville put together a children’s work force to build the plane.  At that point the script just became too silly, and when that happens, it’s hard for me to take anything seriously.  It’s hard for me to care about the characters and their situations.  So I politely read through the rest of the script but knew it had no chance of reeling me back in.

While one of the better Twit-Pitch entries so far, this is another script that showed plenty of writing skill, but didn’t entertain enough in the story department. :(

Script link: Kitty Hawk  

[ ] what the hell did I just read?

[x] wasn’t for me

[ ] worth the read

[ ] impressive

[ ] genius

What I learned: You don’t want to wait too long to institute the plot points that are the main salable components of your script.  This is a script that touts itself as two Wright Brothers going after the same girl.  Yet that isn’t fully realized until page 75.  PAGE 75!!!  I mean come on.  This speaks to a larger issue though, which is that too many writers wait too long to get to the good stuff.  What are you waiting for?  That’s why we came here.  The good stuff!  So get to those plot lines sooner and you’ll see your script come to life.