Genre: Horror/Sci-Fi
Premise: Trapped on a remote North Dakota farm in the middle of a bone-chilling winter storm, a deaf 12-year old girl must try to survive her murderous foster parents, who’ve been influenced to kill by a mysterious radio signal from deep space.
Why You Should Read: Deep came about from my desire to write a story putting the most vulnerable type of person in the most terrifying situation I could imagine. A very early draft of Deep made this year’s Page Quarterfinals. After feedback, it’s since gone through a strenuous rewrite. At 87 pages, and tightly structured, it’s a lean, electrifying read. Looking forward to any critiques from the Scriptshadow Community.
Writer: Dean Brooks
Details: 86 pages
I’m still looking for a good professional horror script to review in the Halloween Newsletter. You guys don’t want me stressed out looking for a script until the last second or I’m going to eat all five bags of Halloween candy that are in front of me. This candy is for the kids! Yet you would have them starve?! You would have them knock on my door only for me to say, I’m sorry, but I don’t have any? Go blame the Scriptshadow readers for not sending me a horror screenplay. Off the top of my head I’m looking for M3GAN and the Jamie Foxx vampire script Slamdance Contest winner, Day Shift. Or if there’s anything else, e-mail it to carsonreeves1@gmail.com.
On to last week’s WINNER! Congrats to Dean Brooks. He not only won Horror Shodown, beating out a couple hundred submissions, but he survived a glitch whereby it was difficult to download his script! I heard some people were never able to download it. So good job to Dean. Now let’s see if his script is all that.
Makayla Brenna is 12 years old and deaf. But her lack of hearing is the least of her problems. Her parents are hardcore meth addicts and extremely abusive. In the opening scene, Makayla sees a cop car outside who’s stopped someone for speeding. Feeling like this might be her only chance to escape her parents, she makes a run for it, just barely evading her shotgun-wielding father.
A few months later, she’s introduced into a new home with foster parents Joe and Adele. Of the two, Adele is more skeptical that they can pull this off. Whereas Joe is excited to finally have a kid to raise. He’s so excited that on their first full day together, he introduces Makayla to his backyard amateur observatory shack where he can watch and listen to the stars. Makayla thinks it’s pretty cool and likes Joe immediately.
The next day, Makayla is enrolled in school and makes a couple of friends right away. However, that night, Joe goes into the observatory and never comes out. The next morning, he’s acting distant and weird. He then has a seizure. Adele takes Joe to the hospital and drops Makayla off at school.
Joe comes home happy and healthy but after going into the observatory again, he comes back acting weird. That night, Makayla hears Joe violently going after Adele in the other room then taking her outside, presumably to the observatory. Sure enough, the next morning, Adele is acting weird and distant as well. It appears that some evil alien entity has found its way into their consciousness and is now controlling them.
Makayla isn’t quite sure what to do. At school the next day, she decides to make a run for it. But Adele, doing her best Robert Patrick impression from Terminator 2, tracks her down, kills the person who helped her escape, and brings her back to the house. It is here where both Joe and Adele will attempt to “make her listen” to the space sounds in the observatory. But Makayla can’t listen. She’s deaf. So what lengths will the parents go to to overcome this problem?
I went on a complicated journey with this one. At times I loved it. At times I doubted it. I’m still not sure where I land on it but it’s definitely worthy of being reviewed so I think you guys made the right choice.
The first scene is a cut above. And that’s saying a lot since I’ve read a TON of first scene Contest entries lately. I think a couple of factors helped it out. Opening scenes with characters in danger is par for the course with horror screenplays. But what “Deep” does is it sets up an EMOTIONAL dilemma as opposed to just a VISCERAL dilemma. This isn’t some random girl being held by a random psycho. This is two parents who have imprisoned their daughter. So, right away, there’s an extra emotional kick to the scene.
Next, the heroine is deaf. Deafness can be cliche but here it was believable. And it made it so the evil parents weren’t just imprisoning a regular girl. Their daughter is disabled. So there’s some extra nasty added to these villains that made us want Makayla to escape even more.
I thought the integration into the new home was also well done. Whenever I’m reading a script, I’m looking for authenticity and specificity. If everything is too familiar, I get bored. I need those differences that make the story unique. So the wife being Native American, for example. It was a nice detail that told me the writer had put more effort into this than the average person.
But then we reach the observatory stuff and that didn’t sit well with me. For starters, it felt like a different movie. We’re going from a deaf foster child escaping abusive meth-head parents to a guy with his own space observatory? Who then, the DAY AFTER THEY ADOPT OUR HEROINE, gets infected with an alien virus?? What are the odds of that happening?
I get that it’s a movie and, to a certain extent, what happens in the first act is excused from being a coincidence. But you shouldn’t try to cram more than one huge event into your first act. And I felt that this deaf girl escaping her terrifying abusive parents was the hook. Getting introduced into a new family was the hook. To then add this secondary hook – I’m not going to lie – it took me out of the script for the next 30 pages.
Then I started to see what Dean was doing. With the mom and dad becoming possessed by the alien entity, Makayla is essentially right back in the same situation. The problem is, when you do that, you want to construct a scenario by which, with the previous situation, there was a choice to succeed and the hero took the easy way out. That way she can learn and when presented with the same choice again, this time she makes the heroic decision.
This is what The Invisible Man did. She always cowered to her abusive husband. But, then, later in the movie, she chooses to stand up to and kill her husband. In this script, because the main character is so young, you can’t really do that. And, to be honest, Makayla already was a hero by escaping her parents in that opening scene. So there wasn’t anything else to do with her character except repeat what you did in that opening. If a character is repeating stuff they’ve already done, they’re not evolving. They’re not arcing.
But then you’d get these great scenes like when Makayla was at school and her mom is now possessed and she’s picking Makayla up afterwards and Makayla knows if she goes with her, she’s dead meat. So she tries to run away after school and her mom chases her down. It’s a really intense well-done scene.
I just don’t know if this weird deep-space alien virus possession thing can work. It never felt organic to the story. It’s almost as if Dean had two scripts. One about an abused deaf girl and another about an alien virus and then randomly decided one day to combine them into a single script. Cause that’s how much these two concepts were fighting each other.
Early on in the script, when Makayla first sleeps in her new room, there’s a moment where she thinks she sees the spirits of her parents in the corner. I wonder if there’s a version of this where her birth parents die in a police shootout after Makayla is rescued and then their spirits follow her to her new home, and their goal is to try and take over the bodies of her new parents. Makayla tries to tell her new parents this is happening but they, of course, think she’s just traumatized. I’m not sure if that has the same sex-appeal as this concept or if Dean would even want to write a story like that. But the biggest reason this did not get a ‘worth the read’ from me is that I could never marry these two worlds – the alien possession and the abused deaf child. They never felt like the same movie to me.
Script Link: Deep
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: I’m all for moving the story along quickly. But you have to be cognizant of the situation and construct your timeline accordingly. One of the problems with this script is that Dean tried to cram the entire story too closely together, with no time passing in between major plot beats at all. Makayla shows up on Day 1. And on Day 2, she’s already enrolled in school and her new father is possessed by an alien! lol. These plot beats need time to breathe. It’s okay to throw a montage in there of the first week where Makayla is getting used to her new parents and home. It’s okay, after she’s enrolled in school, if we give a montage of her getting used to that environment as well. As much as screenwriting is about moving the story forward quickly, it still needs to feel natural. And if you’re cramming major plot beats too close together, it will feel anything but natural.
In my attempts to finish all the Last Great Screenplay Contest entries by my target date of October 31st, I’ve found myself reading a lot of bad dialogue lately. But not normal bad. Bad in a specific way. A lot of the dialogue I read in amateur work is STILTED. There’s no life to it. It reads rote, logical, robotic.
Which makes sense if you understand screenwriting.
When a writer goes into a dialogue scene, they often have a preconceived notion of how the dialogue is going to go. For example, if Margaret and her husband, Darryl, need to discuss selling the house, you have a sense of what that conversation is going to look like before you’ve written it. Therefore, the dialogue is just a matter of dictation. You place down on the page what’s in your head. “We need to get the house up on the MLS before the end of the month.” “I know.” “Well, then we need to take pictures.” “We have pictures.” “The ones that Joan took? She took those on her iPhone. We need professional pictures.”
Notice how this is logical information being exchanged (and bland information at that). There’s a reason for that. As a writer, you see the scene BEFORE IT’S HAPPENED. But real people experience moments AS THEY’RE HAPPENING. This fundamentally changes how words come out of peoples’ mouths.
As a writer, all you’re thinking about is conveying the information properly so you can get from point A to point B. As such, your dialogue will reflect this. It will almost feel like Character B knows what Character A is going to say before he says it. And that’s because she does. You, the writer, are Character A and B so you’re subconsciously setting up questions and answers that the other character already knows.
Meanwhile, in real life, Character A doesn’t know what Character B is going to say. They might have an idea. But they don’t know exactly what they’re going to say. This is why real-life conversation tends to have more energy than movie dialogue. It’s alive. It’s evolving second by second. Therefore, you want to try and capture truthful exchange in your dialogue by any means possible.
One of the ways to do this is through a “free dialogue pass.” This is where you erase all of the artificial motivations that you, the writer, are imposing on the scene, and think of the scene more as how it would occur in real life. In other words, Character A doesn’t need an overt goal going into the scene. There shouldn’t be any time restriction on the scene (most dialogue scenes are about 2 and a half pages long. You’d get rid of that). And, most importantly, don’t have any preconceived notions about what the characters need to say to each other or where the scene needs to go. It’s going to go WHEREVER THE CHARACTERS TAKE IT. That’s a scary thought for a lot of writers. They want to control what the characters say. But your need to control the dialogue is what’s resulting in it being so stilted. I mean, when has anything that’s overtly controlled ended up feeling natural?
Your “free dialogue pass” can last as long as you want it to. It can last 20 pages. The idea is to get a natural flow of dialogue that you can then mold into something more structured. If you find a six-line exchange between two characters that’s really clever in your “free dialogue pass,” and that’s the only part of the exercise that makes it into the final scene? That’s a win. Because the other option is only having the boring structured exchange of information that comes from controlled dialogue.
In order to get the most out of this exercise, I want you to understand just how many options are open to you when Character A says something to Character B. Because I think that most writers believe there are only a couple of responses. And, usually, those responses are responses they’ve seen characters say in other movies. If you really want your dialogue to feel fresh, you need to open your mind to the fact that there are thousands of potential responses to every line of dialogue. And if you’re only going with the two or three most obvious ones, I got bad news. Readers think your dialogue sucks. You need to get out of your comfort zone. You need to take more chances.
So, I’m going to give you a single line of dialogue. Character A says to Character B, “What’s your favorite color?” Okay. Now. What’s the first response that comes to mind for that question? Well, let’s see just how many ways another character can respond to this.
1 – The character can simply answer the question. “Blue.” This is usually the least interesting answer.
2 – They can reject the question. “None of your business.”
3 – They can respond with a question of their own. “What if I like more than one?”
4 – They can ignore the rules. “Blue, Yellow, Aqua Green, and the Rainbow.”
5 – They can flirt. “The color of your eyes.”
6 – They can flirt better. “That’s personal information you’re requesting. What do I get if I tell you?”
7 – They can choose not to answer at all.
8 – They can lie. “Orange.” (Knowing that the other person’s favorite color is orange)
9 – They can make an assumption about why the other character is asking the question. “Ooh, are you psychologically evaluating me? You want to know my sign next?”
10 – They can call the other person out. “Really? That’s the best question you can come up with?”
11 – They can answer with a song. “Blue mooooooooon. You saw me standing alooooone.”
12 – They can get irrationally upset. “Why the f%#@ would you ask me that?”
13 – They can be playful. “Well that’s offensive.” “Why?” “Cause I’m colorblind.”
14 – They can make a demand. “You tell me first.”
15 – They can tell a story that leads to their answer. “Earlier this year I was driving up PCH at sunset and it had just rained. The clouds were parting right as the sun was setting and it caused this filtered orange-purple glow to settle over the coast for all of 30 seconds. It was the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen. Whatever that color was? That’s my favorite color.”
16 – They can make a joke. “The color of money, of course.”
17 – They can be preoccupied with something else. “Did I leave my wallet in the car?”
18 – They can misunderstand. “Your favorite color? Why would I know your favorite color?” “No, YOUR favorite color.”
19 – They can opt out of the conversation. “Can we talk about something else?”
20 – They can become Movie Trailer Voice Guy. “IN A WORLD OF ENDLESS COLOR, ONE WOMAN MUST KNOW HER DATE’S FAVORITE FOR SOME REASON.”
The idea here is to break out of the logical thinking trap that is required to map out a screenplay. We’re often in “structure” mode when screenwriting and that’s the last place you want to be with dialogue. Allow yourself to be free. And when you’re inside of those scenes, stay away from common answers. Dialogue tends to get the most interesting when something unexpected is said. I’ll give you the perfect example because it happened last night on The Bachelorette.
It’s early on in the season so the Bachelorette, Clare, doesn’t know anybody yet and one of the guys, Brandon, sits down with her for the first time. These carefully orchestrated sit-downs are usually boring because the conversations are decided upon ahead of time. So I was falling asleep, not really paying attention. Then Clare asks, “So why did you want to meet me?” And Brandon says, in a completely sweet and innocent manner, blushing as he says it, “Well, I thought you were gorgeous.” And there’s this pause before Clare’s eyebrows furl and she says, “That’s the only thing you’re interested in? How I look?” In a split second, a boring conversation became contentious, with Brandon trying to dig himself out of the hole he’d just dug.
That’s what you’re trying to do with dialogue. You’re trying to find those lines and those moments that bring an energy to the conversation. You can’t do that if you already have pre-established conversations in your head or your characters are always responding to each other with expected responses. Dialogue will always be difficult. But it becomes less so when you stop trying to control it. Try these suggestions out and watch your dialogue come alive!
Carson does feature screenplay consultations, TV Pilot Consultations, and logline consultations. Logline consultations go for $25 a piece or $40 for unlimited tweaking. You get a 1-10 rating, a 200-word evaluation, and a rewrite of the logline. They’re extremely popular so if you haven’t tried one out yet, I encourage you to give it a shot. If you’re interested in any consultation package, e-mail Carsonreeves1@gmail.com with the subject line: CONSULTATION. Don’t start writing a script or sending a script out blind. Let Scriptshadow help you get it in shape first!
Genre: Sports/Period/True Story
Premise: (from Black List) A law school graduate devises a betting system that exploits the glamorous, high-stakes sport of Jai Alai in 1970s Miami. Based on a true story.
About: (from his IMDB page) In 2008, Zachary Werner founded Bodega Pictures with Josh Ackerman and Ben Nurick. Together they produced over one hundred hours of television for top channels such as HGTV, Spike TV, and Food Network, as well as branded content. Zachary left Bodega in 2016 and partnered with his sister, Katharine Werner, to pursue scripted TV and film projects. This script finished in the 25th slot of the 2018 Black List.
Writer: Zachary and Katherine Werner
Details: 113 pages
A sports movie is one of those things that should always work. The goal is clear (win the game!). The stakes are easy to figure out (lose the game, lose everything). There are rules in each sport that provide clarity in what the characters are trying to accomplish. And there’s a structure to sports that intertwines pleasantly with the structure of screenwriting.
And yet, so many sports movies are AVERAGE. They’re never horrible (well, a few are). But they’re never amazing either. I mean, when’s the last great sports movie? Has there been one this century? Top contenders include The Blind Side, Million Dollar Baby, The Wrestler, and Creed.
I mean, you can make the argument that any one of those movies is “good.” But I don’t think anyone’s throwing them into the VCR for a repeat viewing in 2020.
Your lone defense against the cliche nature of sports movies is finding an angle that hasn’t been done before. And today’s script throws a sport at us that I hadn’t even heard of until I read this logline. So it has that going for it. But does it embed that sport inside a strong narrative? That’s what we’re going to find out.
It’s Miami, 1975. 26-year-old Ronnie Weiss has just graduated from law school and is ready to begin his life as a lawyer. But something’s bothering Ronnie about his career choice. Law is so boring.
Luckily, a new sport is taking over Miami – jai alai. It’s impossible to describe the sport but I’ll try. It’s like racketball meets Cricket meets a George Miller fever dream. But here’s the important part. Local bookies have started to accept bets on jai alai and since nobody understands the intricacies of the sport, that opens the door for a super-smart guy like Ronnie to exploit the numbers, allowing him to come up with a surefire way to win every time.
Ronnie can’t do it by himself so he recruits his crazy childhood best friend, Looney. He also enlists his new Cuban girlfriend to help, as well as a small army of bettors (so he doesn’t have to draw so much attention to himself). At first, Ronnie does this to pay off his dead father’s 250k gambling bet. But he takes care of that easily and now it becomes about making as many dollar bills as possible.
When there’s a fire at one of the betting boxes, the cleanup reveals how much Ronnie is raking in during these matches. That gets the Feds’ attention, forcing Ronnie and his core crew to flee to Connecticut, the only other place on the planet where you can bet these games. They start strong but Hartford doesn’t have the volume that Miami had and it isn’t long before the gig is up. And that’s pretty much it. End of movie!
This was a weird reading experience. On the one hand, you have this sport that we’ve never seen in movies before. On the other, you have a blatant Scorsese clone. From the main character narrating everything in that classic Scorsese-flick tenor to the voice over swap to the girlfriend happening at the exact same minute it happens in Goodfellas.
I don’t mean to get on my soapbox here but this sort of thing drives me nuts. Whenever you write in the exact same style as a famous storyteller with a unique voice – Tarantino, Sorkin, Diablo Cody, Martin Scorsese – the highest achievement your script can ever reach is a poor man’s version of that writer. A poor man’s Tarantino. A poor woman’s Diablo Cody. A poor man’s Scorsese.
This is not to say you’re incapable of writing well. But you have to realize that when you’re going up against the titans in the industry and trying to do exactly what they do BUT BETTER???? That’s a writing suicide mission. You can only do worse. Let me repeat that. YOU CAN ONLY DO WORSE.
If you sense my frustration, it’s because we all have this opportunity to write our own stories and tell those stories in our own unique voice. So why would you copy-paste the template of another well-known writer/movie to tell your story?
I get it. There have been 100+ years of movies. How much originality can we really bring to the table? I’m willing to have that conversation because I admit it’s difficult and one of the biggest challenges in screenwriting is bringing true originality to the page. But you have to TRY. Cause when you try, you come up with things like Parasite. You come up with things like 1917. You come up with the most heartbreaking movie of 2019, JoJo Rabbit.
So why do writers continue to write with the Scorsese template? Simple. Actors love playing these roles. You have two guaranteed “get a big actor” parts if these scripts are competently written. One for the flashy main character, who gets double the lines cause he’s narrating on top of leading the story. And two, the wacky friend, in this case, Looney. If you can get two big actors interested, you can get a huge director interested. And there ya go. So I get it. I get why writers do this.
But it’s a pet peeve of mine. I’m very much of the philosophy that you create things other people want to copy. Not copy things others have already created.
Despite that sidebar, the script wasn’t bad. It didn’t blow me away due to the aforementioned familiarity. But I enjoy stories where the main character has discovered a magic formula that nobody else has figured out yet. It’s why I liked the Moneyball script. Because you know the fall is coming – you know they’re going to figure you out sooner or later – and you have to keep reading to see how bad the crash is going to be.
Every once in a while, I’ll get behind a formulaic script. But only if the characters are amazing. And these characters were all characters we’ve seen before if you watched even one Scorsese film. So this definitely wasn’t for me.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: In a tragedy, the main character does not obtain his goal at the end. He will often lose everything, up to and including his life (Uncut Gems). But if he lives, make sure he learns something about being a good human. When it comes to these specific tragedies that deal with greed, the thing the character often learns is the value of those closest to him in his life. The people around you are always more important than a giant bank account.
Genre: Sci-Fi
Premise: The leaders of a planet journey to a new planet in a quest to gain control of a rare powerful substance called “spice.”
About: Dune is one of the biggest gambles in movie history. A 250+ million dollar production based on a 50 year old novel catered heavily to adults. It is dense and heady, two words studios detest. Nevertheless, they gave the film to “Blade Runner: 2049” director Denis Villeneuve and stacked it with the best cast this side of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. Oscar Isaac, Timothee Chalamet, Zendaya, Jason Mamoa, Josh Brolin, Dave Bautista. The film was supposed to come out next month. But they were forced to push it to next fall due to the Corona virus. The original adaptation was done by screenwriting superstar Eric Roth. In a strange Hollywood twist, Jon Spaihts left a separate Dune TV series to write the final draft of the feature film.
Writer: Eric Roth and Denis Villeneuve (current revisions by Jon Spaihts) (based on the novel by Frank Herbert)
Details: 134 pages
My oh so conflicted Dune heart.
There isn’t a property I haven’t wanted to like more than Dune. A serious sprawling sci-fi fantasy story is something I should theoretically love. And yet every time I’ve tried to read the novels, I fantasize about getting a lobotomy.
But here’s what I’m hoping with the Dune script. I’m hoping that Roth and Spaihts have stripped away all of that boring muckety muck from the novel so that we get a cool stripped down enjoyable story. I don’t need 50 pages of backstory on how Greta Mogf’flox came to find her love for the art of noxela, that of the space ballet.
Give me a clear story, make it entertaining, and I’m in. Did that happen?
16 year old Paul belongs to a House that, I think, runs his planet. But Paul, along with his father, Duke Leto, and his mother, the prostitute Lady Jessica, only care about one thing – the SPICE! The spice is, essentially, a drug that allows for you to live a heightened life. It makes you healthier, smarter, even supernatural, since some people can use it to see into the future.
The problem is that the spice only grows on one planet – Arrakis. So all the surrounding planets come there to mine it. This is where things get confusing so I apologize if I get this wrong. I believe the people of Arrakis extend an invite to Duke and Paul, to come have a bigger controlling interest in the spice. They’re actually inviting a lot of Houses from neighboring planets there, including the House of Harkonnen, led by Duke’s rival, the 600 pound BARON VLADIMIR HARKONNEN.
Once they get to the planet, everything seems cool, if a little tense. When Duke and Paul learn that some spice miners are stranded in the desert with a potential giant Dune worm after them, they grab a hover ship and go save them. This is where they learn that mining spice is dangerous. At any moment a super worm can eat you up. I guess they like spice too!
Eventually, Paul, Duke, and Lady Jessica, learn that they’re being played by Baron Harkonnen! Harkonnen throws Paul and Jessica out in the middle of the desert while torturing Duke. He wants Duke to know that he’s eliminating his bloodline so that the Harkonnen can be the sole rulers of the spice! Talk about a spicy offer.
Back in the desert, Paul and his mom must avoid giant worms in the middle of the night. They barely survive until their clan’s top warrior, Duncan Idaho (Jason Mamoa), rescues them. They must get back to the city to stop the Harkonnen (along with the evil Emperor’s bloodthirsty army) from turning the planet of Dune into their own personal spice playground. Will they succeed? No one knows except for Timothee Chalamet!!!
I’m going to be straightforward with you here. This movie is in a LOT of trouble.
The issue is simple. It’s boring. At least for the first half of the movie it is. From there, it has some moments but mostly stays boring.
This was always my worry with Dune. I could never get into the book because I’d get bored quickly. The 1984 movie version of Dune was also boring. And now we have this film, which, even with the talent in front of and behind the camera, is stuck drawing from the same source material. So you have to wonder, is this story just boring?
Maybe we can answer that by asking what the screenwriting definition of boring is. Well, boring is in the eye of the beholder, of course. But there are certain concepts and setups and narrative choices that lend themselves to a more objectively boring experience. And Dune checks a lot of those boxes.
One, you have a ton of mythology and world-building. The more mythology there is, the more exposition you’re going to need. That means characters explaining things. The more your characters are explaining things, the less they’re ACTING UPON THINGS. Movies are about character ACTIONS. Not about WHAT THEY SAY. So if you’re doing something that’s keeping your characters from acting upon the world, you’re keeping them from engaging in a good story.
Next, you have a plot that moves slowly. There aren’t a lot of significant plot beats in your script. We cut from scene to scene without much forward movement in plot. Another way to put it is, after reading the tenth scene, a reader shouldn’t feel like they’re no closer to the purpose of the story than after reading the first scene.
Next, you have a lot of SAT scenes (Standing Around Talking). You guys know much I hate SAT scenes. It’s nearly impossible to keep an audience engaged when the only thing characters are doing is standing around talking to each other. And that’s the first 15 scenes of this script. It’s one SAT scene after another.
The only way this is going to work for audiences is if you’re one of those people who really loves deep rich mythologies. To you, it’s fun learning about this world. You don’t need a story to keep you engaged. But that’s a small percentage of moviegoers. Most moviegoers want a story.
Look no further than Dune’s fantasy movie cousin, Lord of the Rings. That film does it right. It sets up the mythology but it establishes the stakes, what the goal is, the journey ahead, how dangerous it would be, who needs to be involved, all very quickly. We then move into the journey, which ensures that the plot is always bopping along.
The first action scene in Dune doesn’t happen until the mid-point and I couldn’t even tell you what it was about. They hear some miners are in trouble. So they race out and save them. Encounter a sand worm. And survive.
Um, okay. That’s a scene. But here’s the problem. When they come back from that scene, EVERYTHING IS EXACTLY THE SAME. The story hasn’t moved forward. All that’s happened is they went off on this little side quest to save some people and now it’s back to bickering with the bureaucrats. Why am I 65 pages in to a 130 page script and I still don’t know the goal of our main characters??
Once Barron Von Fatso starts deceiving Paul and his family, things get a *little* more interesting. But not much. At least someone is finally acting (it’s a villain instead of a hero but, hey, something is better than nothing). But this plotline had its own issues. For example, we’re told from the start that Barron is up to something. So his deception was the most predictable twist ever.
Then, the plot is still static. Everything is happening in this one 50 mile range. Nobody’s going anywhere. We’re all standing around, ordering things, yelling at each other, people are sent out to the desert, they come back in from the desert. Contrast this with Star Wars or Lord of the Rings or even yesterday’s film, Love and Monsters. We’re moving forward in these movies. Dune, this purportedly giant universe, keeps all its characters in this tiny little area and has them play hide and seek with each other.
Ultimately, Dune is doomed by an old Scriptshadow mainstay. Burden of Investment. A high Burden of Investment is when the amount of information the reader is required to remember so outweighs the reward of remembering that information, that the experience doesn’t feel worth it. Or a more simplistic way to put it is, when a screenplay feels more like work than play, you’ve failed.
I will always respect the world-building that Frank Herbert did. I know how long that takes. But you still have to know how to tell a story. I’m not convinced that Herbert knew how to do that. Which is why everyone has such a tough time adapting this material.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Side-quests. Avoid “side-quests” in screenplays. They may be fun to do in video games. But if you’re sending your characters off on a 15 page sequence (12% of your entire movie), it better move the story forward. Here, we get Paul and his father going to save some stranded miners. Sure, it’s an okay scene. Yay for our heroes being heroic. But it didn’t move the plot along one inch. Contrast this with Obi-Wan and Luke going to Mos Eisley. That sequence moves the story forward because they’re trying to find a pilot in order to get to Alderaan. It actually gets them one step closer to their final goal. Maybe that’s why this script is a big fat fail. There’s no goal!!! Or, if there is, it’s buried underneath so much gobbledy-gook that only hardcore Dune lovers have put in enough effort to figure it out.
YAY! A GOOD MOVIE! FINALLY!
Genre: Action/Supernatural
Premise: A young man goes on an 85-mile journey in a post-apocalyptic wasteland filled with monsters to reunite with his true love.
About: This was shaping up to be a big Paramount release until Covid hit. The script comes from Brian Duffield, who’s having a moment. He’s got his first major studio release in Love and Monsters and his directorial debut is coming out soon, Spontaneous (about a world where people spontaneously combust for no reason). I told you about Brian forever ago. Looks like people just now are realizing how talented he is.
Writer: Brian Duffield (and Matthew Robinson)
Details: 2 hours
I have never hidden my screenwriting love for Brian Duffield. At one point – maybe it’s even still the case – I had three of his scripts in my top 25. Monster Problems was one of those scripts. When I saw the trailer for the film (a full eight years after the script was written!) I didn’t recognize the script that I had read. That script was small and meditative and character-driven and clever. This trailer gave me a Monster Problems meets Zombieland vibe. It just felt like a different movie.
But then the reviews started coming in and they were good! Hmm, I thought. Maybe the heart of that way-back-when first draft survived all those studio rewrites. Sometimes that’ll happen. A concept is so good that no matter how much you mess with it, it will always work. Let’s get into the plot.
Joel lives in a bunker five years after a complex series of events led to the world being taken over by monsters. Joel’s a coward. Whereas the rest of the team in his bunker routinely goes out and kills monsters to keep the bunker stocked, Joel’s relegated to making the minestrone. That’s cause he locks up whenever he encounters a monster.
But Joel is done playing the loser. Right before the world fell apart, Joel had fallen in love with Aimee. The two were perfect for each other. But now Aimee is located 85 miles west of Joel in another bunker of people. You have to understand that 85 miles of travel on this monster-infested planet would be a suicide mission for a NAVY SEAL, much less a tiny scared dork. But Joel doesn’t care because he’s lonely and he wants to be with Aimee again.
Immediately after leaving the bunker, Joel is attacked by a giant frog monster hiding in a backyard pool. At the last second, Joel is saved by a dog named “Boy,” who pulls him away. Joel is happy to have company and asks Boy to join him. Boy says “bark!” and off they go.
Not long after that, Joel runs into an older man named Clyde and an 8 year old girl named Minnow. The two are experts in monster survival since they live above ground. Eager to get some tips, Joel asks if he can join them for a while. They’re reluctant, since Joel is basically a monster magnet, but figure he can stay with them until they turn north.
Along the way, they meet some big (and well-designed!) monsters, which reinforces just how crazy Joel was for going on this journey. The two eventually grow a liking to Joel and ask him if he wants to come north with them instead, where he’ll be safer. But Joel doesn’t hesitate. He has one goal and one goal only – get to, and be with, his soul mate, Aimee.
Before we get into the delicious details of this film, let’s talk about that title change (since we just had a big article on titles last week). “Monster Problems” to “Love and Monsters.” Which do you think is better? Personally, I don’t think it’s close. Monster Problems is a much better title. It’s both edgier and more fun.
Love and Monsters feels generic and try-hard. As in, “Please like this movie.” My guess on why they changed it cuts deep into the DNA of how studios think. Studios want you to have a good time at their movies. Good times means more money. So their inclination is go with titles that have a positive slant. “Monster Problems” has a negative connotation. “Love and Monsters” is more upbeat and positive. What are you gonna do? Studios are always going to be studioing.
This studioing continues into the very first scene. In the script, Duffield gave you the pieces to the puzzle about what’s happened to the planet and lets you put them together yourself. Paramount lays out exactly how we came to be dominated by monsters with an in-depth narration accompanied by fun animated drawings. Normally I hate this kind of thing as it strips the mystery out of the world before the movie’s even begun. But when it’s done well – the animation is both fun and funny – it can work. And Love and Monsters pulls it off. Actually, it was while watching this opening narration that I knew the movie would be good. You get a feel early on if a film is working or not. The humor and editing and animation all came together nicely so I knew I was in good hands.
Another change they made was to start our movie with a dozen characters living in a bunker as opposed to just Joel. One character works when you’re going for something more indie and edgy. But if you’re working in the studio film space, they’re going to want more characters cause they’re going to want everything to feel bigger. Duffield was able to retain the core element of the hero though – his loneliness. You could argue that this version sold the loneliness even better because nothing’s lonelier than being around a bunch of people that you don’t connect with.
Paramount goes all in with the on-the-nose storytelling when it then gives us a flashback to Joel and Aimee making out in a car right before all of this happened. That’s right. We get a FLASHBACK! Booo, flashbacks evil! Flashbacks are for loser screenwriters who don’t know how to write!
In the original script, not only was there no flashback but Joel and Aimee had never met in the real world. He only knew her from the ham radio in his bunker. This was a big change so why did they make it? I suppose the argument is that if Joel and Aimee met and fell in love beforehand, both the motivation would work better (that he would brave sure death to get to her) and the connection between the characters would be stronger in general. I don’t think this was necessary but it wasn’t a bad thing.
Here’s the little secret I occasionally share with everybody here at Scriptshadow. IF YOU GET THE CHARACTERS RIGHT, YOU DON’T HAVE TO ACE ANY OF THE OTHER SCRIPT TESTS. Joel is a strong character. Aimee is a strong character. Therefore, it would’ve worked either way (them knowing each other beforehand or only meeting on the radio). I guess this version creates a little more of a “connectedness” in the story.
Another reason this movie works so well is that it’s a classic formula. You send a guy out on a journey. That’s it. From there, if you’re smart, you add GSU. Goal – Get to his girlfriend’s bunker. Stakes – True love is on the line! And while the script doesn’t have traditional urgency, urgency can be replaced with a timeline and constant danger. We know it takes 7 days to get to the bunker. And the whole time he’s on this journey, he’s in danger of being killed by monsters.
The whole idea with urgency as a storytelling device is that it creates a sense of forward momentum. We feel like things need to happen NOW. But if you create a scenario where your hero is always being chased by something – whether it be a monster or the cops – the audience is tricked into that same mindset. That we’re “running out of time.” So that’s a trick you can use if you don’t have the perfect ticking time bomb for your movie.
What’s unique about this script-to-screen is that it’s the opposite of what usually goes down. In almost every screenplay development situation, the studio is telling you to cut things down. Less car chases. Less CGI set pieces. Less glitz and glamour. It looks like they told Duffield to do the opposite. More more more. Whatever your big nerdy ideas were for the script when you never thought it would get made, let’s include those! In that sense, it’s an outlier.
But, hey, I gotta give it to everyone involved here. They somehow took this small little quirky idea and made it into this giant movie yet still retained the heart and soul of that script, which was so good. This movie made my weekend!
[ ] What the hell did I just watch?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the price of admission
[x] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Here’s one of the most confusing things for aspiring screenwriters. Hollywood movies embrace on-the-nose storytelling. That’s why we get the opening narration here. And that’s why we get the flashbacks with Joel and Aimee. They do this because they want everybody to “get it.” Not just seasoned moviegoers but 12 year-olds too. The irony is YOU DON’T WANT TO WRITE YOUR SCRIPT THIS WAY. You want to write more subtle, like Duffield’s original draft. Your audience for a screenplay does not include 12 year-olds. It’s readers, agents, and producers. So be subtle when you’re writing movies. On the nose will come when your movie gets made.
