Genre: Drama/Sort of Supernatural
Premise: When the sequel to a fringe graphic novel masterpiece unexpectedly emerges, the lone copy draws a group of superfans from different walks of life to buy it in a one-day only auction.
About: We have some weird connections to yesterday’s World War Z 2 review. This show is based on a British show written by Dennis Kelly. Who wrote yesterday’s script? Dennis Kelly. This script is written by Gillian Flynn. Gillian Flynn adapted her own book, Gone Girl, for David Fincher, the man who was supposed to direct Dennis Kelly’s script for World War Z 2. Did you follow all that? The show has recruited John Cusack, Rainn Wilson, and Happy Death Day star, Jessica Rothe. It will premiere on Amazon Prime.
Writer: Gillian Flynn (based on the original show created by Dennis Kelly)
Details: 65 pages

When it comes to TV shows that have the potential to be great, HBO has re-taken the pole position. You may remember when AMC and FX had some really great shows. And even Netflix, for a while, until they went algorithm crazy, favoring wackadoodle experiments such as The Floor is Lava, over the next House of Cards. So when they put something into production, I pay attention.

And yet, somewhere along the way, HBO gave up on Utopia. This happens quite a bit. HBO has a TON of shows in development and only lets the cream of the crop into the on-air lineup. Which leaves us to wonder if Amazon Prime is receiving a 1998 Chevy Impala with a bad transmission or a 2020 Tesla with some of them bulletproof windows. Let’s all hope it’s the latter. Cause I need a new show to watch!

After inheriting her grandfather’s cabin, Olivia and her hubby, Ethan, find a dark disturbing graphic novel in his home titled “Utopia.” Ethan looks it up online and realizes that it’s a sequel to the small but fiercely loyal fanbase of a graphic novel titled “Dystopia.” Figuring this might mean some *ka-ching*, Ethan posts online that he’ll be selling Utopia to the highest bidder at FringeCon this weekend.

Over the next 30 pages, we meet all the players. There’s hot Samantha, who’s a super hardcore Dystopia nut. There’s Wilson Wilson, an intense private guy who thinks the whole world is after him. There’s Grant, a 10-year-old kid. There’s Becky, who has a rare disease but is in a relationship with fellow Dystopia obsessive, Ian, who lives with his grandma.

All of these people know each other online due to their intense love for Dystopia. But none of them have met in real life. They don’t even know that Grant is 10. They think he’s a photographer for supermodels. That’s about to change since they agree to all get together at FringeCon and bid on Utopia.

On to FringeCon we go, where Olivia and Ethan have set up a hotel room where bidders come in one at a time, get to look at a single page from the book, then make a bid. Highest bid wins. By the way, this is where I should tell you that everyone in the group believes Dystopia predicts the future. It’s predicted numerous pandemics since it came out. And the sequel is said to have bigger, more dire, predictions.

Everybody makes their bid but no one here is rich. The highest bid doesn’t even crack 1k. So it sucks for them when the well off Carson (as far as I know, no relation) shows up and says he wants to take the comic off the market… for 20 grand! Ethan and Olivia say, “Ka-Ching” and sell it, thinking they just made out like bandits.

Except that a couple of hours later, two sketchy-looking dudes, Arby and Rod, show up demanding to know where the graphic novel is. They inform them Carson bought it. He’s in the penthouse. That’s not enough for them. They want to know everybody who looked at it. (spoilers) Ethan and Olivia get the sense that these aren’t a couple of angry buyers. These are dangerous people. Their sense is correct, cause Arby and Rod kill them. They then head up to the penthouse, where they learn of a disturbing development. Grant, the 10-year-old kid, has stolen it. And he’s getting away. To be continued…

Utopia makes a bold choice here in deviating from the original. In the original, we start out with a gruesome murder. Flynn, however, uses the first 45 pages to set up characters. There’s barely any story or plot. It’s us meeting character after character.

Now you may say, wait a minute Carson. You told us never to do this. Why does Gillian Flynn get to do it? Well, here’s the thing. You don’t have to add any plot to the first 40 minutes of your pilot script either. But if you’re going to go down that road, you better…

a) be really good at character creation.
b) be really good with dialogue.

Gillian Flynn is good at both. Plus, she has an advantage. She’s working with established material which already did some of the heavy lifting for her. It was a character-centric show, so she has the baseline for her characters set. Also, any character who didn’t work in the previous show, she can get rid of and replace with a character she thinks up. That’s a nice luxury to have when you’re writing something. Because, in my opinion, character creation is the hardest part of writing.

The point is, if you’re not using plot to hook us, you need to have been told numerous times that your character writing is strong and/or that your dialogue is strong too. Because they’re what’s going to be front and center without plot. And even if they’re “kind of good,” readers are going to tune out. The characters need to be “really good” or better.

Now what I found interesting about Flynn’s Utopia was that it took the opposite approach to Kelly’s pilot. Kelly put the first kill scene in the pilot’s teaser. Flynn puts her first kill scene all the way at the end of the pilot.

Which of these is the better choice? Do you kill right away? Or do you LEAD UP to the kill?

Each has a different effect on the audience. If you kill in the opener, it immediately grabs our attention. But then it’s gone. We can’t use it again. Or, if we do, it’s not as surprising anymore and, therefore, less impactful.

When you lead up to a kill, it gives the reader something to look forward to. If we establish that Arby and Rod are bad guys looking to do bad things and they’re on their way to FringeCon, we the reader are pulled along by a powerful line of suspense. We know that these two bad guys are going to collide with our heroes, which means we’re going to keep reading to find out what happens.

The downside of this choice is, not a lot of exciting things are going to happen prior to this collision. This means the reader is mainly reading setup and exposition. Not exactly the most riveting story experience.

Still, I would say that the second option is better because you get much more out of it. You get all that ongoing suspense. Whereas, if you kill right away, you suck up some of the story’s air. We’ve already seen the worst. It’s like that bad movie, U.S. Marshalls, the unofficial sequel to The Fugitive. They had that amazing plane crash scene in the opener and then nothing else in the script came close to it.

The problem is Flynn’s Utopia doesn’t take advantage of the second option. It never implies that the kill is coming. It doesn’t even imply the bad guys are bad. So we don’t get any build-up of that suspense, of that anticipation. Which means the kill is a surprise.

In screenwriting, you want to get the most bang for your buck out of every plot development. If the only entertainment we get from a scene happens within the scene itself, you’re leaving a ton of entertainment on the table. The right move would’ve been to heavily imply that Arby and Rod were going to do very bad things, which would’ve gotten so much more out of this plot point. As it stands, we get that surprising kill and— then it’s done.

But like I said, the characters are all really strong here. So I still enjoyed the experience. I still want to see what happens next.

Oh, and I wanted to give you guys a THIRD VARIABLE example from Utopia since I talked about that last Thursday. When Olivia and Ethan first find the book, they need to figure out what the book is. So they go on the internet on his phone. Now, we could’ve stopped there. He checks Google. Google tells them. Exposition handled. Scene over. But because they’re out in the middle of nowhere, Ethan keeps losing the connection in the middle of a Youtube explanation of what Utopia is. This is the THIRD VARIABLE that makes the scene more interesting. The explanation keeps stalling, forcing them to keep moving, creating more suspense, and making what could’ve been a boring straight-exposition scene into something a little more dramatic.

This show could be good assuming episodes 4-10 don’t devolve into “running around with your heads cut off” storytelling. I hope Flynn has a plan for that!

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

What I learned: “Olivia, hair now pulled pragmatically back in a bandana…”. This is an early description in the script. The funny thing is that I read it as “dramatically” instead of “pragmatically,” which created a different image in my head. Like she really went all out on putting her hair back. But when I realized it was “pragmatically,” I thought, “Oh, that’s more straight-forward,” and my image of the visual changed. This reminded me how much words matter when describing things, particularly adverbs. And how you can use them to change the tenor of the image. Note how all of these adverb substitutions create different images in your head, as well as make you think of Olivia differently.

“Olivia, hair now pulled lazily back in a bandana…”.

“Olivia, hair now pulled carefully back in a bandana…”.

“Olivia, hair now pulled defiantly back in a bandana…”.

“Olivia, hair now pulled playfully back in a bandana…”.

“Olivia, hair now pulled sharply back in a bandana…”.

“Olivia, hair now pulled joylessly back in a bandana…”.

“Olivia, hair now pulled painfully back in a bandana…”.

I read so many scripts where I never get any sense of the characters at all. Little things such as including the perfect adverb can help solve that problem. Not to mention, it’s a lot of fun trying to find the right adverb.

Genre: Zombie/Action
Premise: Humans have found a temporary vaccine that makes them invisible to the zombie enemy. Now they just need to eradicate them with a new biological weapon, a weapon the humans are finding out might make their enemy even more dangerous.
About: For a good year there, David Fincher really wanted to direct World War Z 2 with his buddy, Brad Pitt. It would’ve been the biggest film he’d ever made. For whatever reason, though, Paramount kept waffling. In retrospect, it seems ridiculous to me. Being the smallest of the studios, you’d think Paramount would jump at the chance to trot out a David Fincher zombie movie starring Pitt. I guess they couldn’t make the numbers work though. At least for now. Paramount doesn’t own much flashy IP so you gotta think this is going to get made at some point. I’m sure Fincher would be open to it so just make the call, Paramount!
Writer: Dennis Kelly
Details: April 5, 2016 draft (123 pages)

The original World War Z project went through some interesting iterations. The book the film was based on followed the aftermath of a zombie outbreak. It was a unique take on zombies, to say the least, since it didn’t have zombies in it. It was more about the investigation into how the outbreak happened and who was responsible.

I remember reading an early draft of the script that was loyal to the book and thinking, “Wow, they are taking a gigantic risk making a zombie movie that isn’t about zombies.” The people over at Paramount must’ve agreed cause they ditched that take and went back in time to cover the exciting part – the actual zombie world war!

Mileage varied on whether that film was good or not but I liked it. I especially liked Brad Pitt’s scarf. It’s up in the air as to whether Paramount will ever get back in the World War Z business. Let’s see if they’re overlooking a surefire hit.

Gerry is back! (Gerry is Brad Pitt by the way – points for whoever knew that). The humans have taken a major step in defeating the zombies (called “Z”) after Gerry was able to secure a vaccine in the last film that made humans invisible to zombies by mimicking cancer. The Z only want healthy hosts so they ignore anyone who’s using the “camouflage,” which lasts for about a day before you can use it again.

The sucky part is that there are still Z everywhere. They’ve taken over almost every major city. The humans need a way to fight them and that’s come in the form of something called E29, a biological weapon of sorts that, when sprayed on Z, makes them kill each other. Doctor Morel is putting the finishing touches on the weapon in Geneva. Gerry just needs to grab it from her.

So he flies to Geneva, where everyone now lives underground in the former Large Hadron Collider. Millions of people live down here because the entirety of Europe has been overrun by Z. Gerry can’t help but wonder as he heads to the medical center… “What if someone down here gets infected?” Yeah, we’re thinking the same thing, Gerry.

Once they get to Morel’s office, they find out she’s gone. Locked up shop and vanished. They then break into her lab only to find numerous scientist Zs in there. They need to find out what happened so they all inject themselves with the camouflage and walk inside. Except the Zs don’t ignore them. They attack them!!!

Gerry runs out of the lab and the infection starts spreading VERY FAST. Everyone is getting bit and turning instantly. Soon, tens of thousands of zombies are blocking out the side exits. Gerry is forced with a few others to go DEEPER inside the Large Hadron Collider. They eventually find a shaft that gets them topside, but the damage is already done. This place is toast.

Gerry meets up with his air team and now it’s off to Singapore, where it’s said that Morel is. Gerry gets to the outskirts of Singapore where a rag-tag team of humans is holding Morel hostage and Gerry is able to ask her what the eff is going on! She concedes that E29 doesn’t work. It reverses the camouflage, which is why the Zs don’t sense it anymore. Oh, and there’s a new threat. The Zs have figured out how to transmit the disease THROUGH THE AIR. I mean, WTF!?? As if they didn’t have enough to worry about.

To make matters worse, they need to get to a local UN base on an island, and the only way there is through downtown Singapore, a former city that now houses 5 millions Zs. These Zs haven’t yet been infected by Morel’s faulty biological weapon, which means our team can still walk through the city worry-free, since the camouflage works on them. The only issue is that everyone in the group is already at the end of a previous camouflage cycle. So they can’t re-inject it. They just have to hope they finish their walk before it wears off.

The new plan is to meet up with a second scientist who may know how to counteract the faulty E29. That plan is put in jeopardy, however, when Anna, Morel’s daughter’s, camouflage wears out. Now they have to hurry to the pier that will get them to the island, all without 5 million hungry zombies devouring them. I’m hoping for the best. But it sure doesn’t look good for our tiny team of Singapore sightseers.

Let’s start off by helping the beginners in the audience.

Lesson 1: One of the simplest ways to start a story is to give your hero something they want. That will set them off on a path of action, and the obstacles that will get in the way of the path will provide conflict, drama, and hopefully, lots of entertainment.

The ‘want’ here is Doctor Morel. She has the weapon. So we need to go find her.

Lesson 2 is that a “want” should never be easy. If your characters can easily find whatever they’re looking for, there isn’t going to be drama in your story. So you need the unexpected to happen. You need things to go wrong. When Gerry gets to Geneva, Morel is already gone. And not just gone. Gone under mysterious circumstances.

This juices up the story because now we’re not just trying to find her. We’re curious why she chose to mysteriously disappear.

A script is basically a repeating series of this pattern. Your hero will eventually find Morel. From there, you create another “want.” Here, it’s a second scientist, which isn’t my favorite choice. I don’t like repeated plot beats. It’s usually better if the new want is different. But it’s better than nothing.

In The Matrix, the first “want” is to find out what the Matrix is. The second “want” is to go see the Oracle to see if he’s “the one.” The third “want” is that Morpheus has been kidnapped and they have to rescue him.

This script is actually chock full of screenwriting lessons. Another well utilized lesson in WWZ 2 is that you set up rules to break rules. No, I’m not talking about the rules of screenwriting. I’m talking about the rules of your fictional world.

One of the first things we learn (it’s on the very first page, actually) is that camouflage protects the humans from the zombies. The zombies will not pay attention to you if you’ve injected it.

If you go through your entire script and that rule is never challenged, you’re a bad writer. The whole point of creating rules like that is to break them later in a dramatically fun way. They do that when they first encounter the Large Hadron zombies in the underground lab. All the marines are injected, told not to worry, and they walk in there, not a worry in the world. And then… RAHAREHAHJAFHLDK!!!!!IAJLFKDAALAF. Zombie mayhem.

You created the rule to break the rule. Always a strong narrative move.

And the camouflage was the gift that kept on giving in this script. I loved that they had to depend on the camouflage in a city of 5 million zombies, when they’d just seen that it didn’t work and when they know the vaccine in their veins is almost at the end of its cycle. I can only imagine how great a scene it would be onscreen to have to walk through 50,000 zombies hoping that your vaccine still has enough gas in the tank.

Overall, I found this script to be fun. It is similar to the first film. They’re not breaking any new ground. But the new rules (camouflage, N29, air transmission) add just enough of a spark to keep the concept fresh.

Honestly, with a lot of the less-than-stellar content Paramount puts out, I’m shocked that they haven’t made this movie. It’s definitely one of the top properties over there. It’s time to get Fincher back on the phone. After shooting an artsy black and white movie, he’ll be thrilled to make something big and fun like this.

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

What I learned: A match hasn’t started until someone breaks serve. Tennis reference tip! In tennis, you are supposed to win (or “hold”) all your service games. This is because serving gives you an advantage. You are smashing the ball down on the other player, who must struggle to return the ball. This ensures that you almost always win your service games. Therefore, when someone “breaks” serve (the returner wins the game from the server), the match takes on a new energy. It means whoever broke serve has a clear path to win the set if they continue to hold their own serve the rest of the way. There’s a similar saying in screenplays: A script hasn’t begun until something goes wrong. Nowhere is this more evident than in World War Z 2. The script is heavy with exposition and setup all the way up to the Large Hadron Collider location. The script has just barely kept our interest so far. But when they break into the lab only to find that a bunch of zombies are waiting ANNNND these zombies aren’t phased by the “camouflage” vaccine, something has OFFICIALLY GONE WRONG and the script takes on a new energy. That’s the way you do it. Make sure to carefully craft your “break serve” moment as it tends to be the moment that the reader really latches in and commits to the experience.

What I learned 2: Send your characters to the place they DON’T want to go. Not to the place they do. In the Collider scene, they watch as a swarm of zombies block out all the exits. This forces the characters to go FURTHER INTO THE CIRCLE, the exact opposite thing they want to do. Which makes for a more exciting sequence.

Genre: Sci-Fi/Spy Thriller
Premise: (from IMDB) Armed with only one word, Tenet, and fighting for the survival of the entire world, a Protagonist journeys through a twilight world of international espionage on a mission that will unfold in something beyond real time.
About: Tenet has had a complicated release journey. There was all this behind-the-scenes talk about how Christopher Nolan wanted Tenet to be the film that saved the movie business. He wasn’t just releasing this for Warner Brothers. He was releasing it for the world! But it’s said Nolan nearly had a heart attack when it was suggested that Tenet would need to be played in – GASP – drive-in theaters! All of a sudden, Nolan considered waiting until the pandemic was over. In the end, the movie was forced into an unenviable staggered release pattern. Some places would get it, some wouldn’t, which would make box office boasting – a key marketing tool for studios – difficult. Tenet isn’t even playing in my home town, Hollywood. How ironic is that? I had to travel down to San Diego to see the film. But see the film I did.
Writer: Christopher Nolan
Details: 150 minutes

Tenet.

It’ll open the right doors.

Some of the wrong ones too.

That’s a line from the movie. Which is apropos considering Christopher Nolan himself has opened some of the right doors with Tenet, but also many of the wrong ones.

The Protagonist (yes, that’s our hero’s name) is a CIA agent who tries to kill himself via a suicide pill rather than give up his men. But it wasn’t a suicide pill. It was a test. To see who was willing to go the distance. Now that he’s proven his worth, he’s been recruited into a next level mission. It’s called Tenet. Unfortunately, that’s all he’s told. I guess the Protagonist will have to figure out the rest on his own!

He eventually meets up with a female version of Morpheus who explains what “tenet” is – it’s time inversion. The secret tenet gatekeepers keep finding these small artifacts – such as bullets – that do things backwards. So instead of shooting the bullet, you “receive” the bullet back into the gun. Female Morpheus doesn’t know where these artifacts are coming from. That will be the Protagonists’s job.

A lot of stuff happens here but, long story short, the Protagonist bumps into a sloppy drunk named Neil, who may or may not work for a secret organization, and the two interrogate the manufacturer of the inverted bullets, a billionaire Indian woman named Priya. It turns out these bullets are being manufactured in the future. So Priya doesn’t even know she’s manufactured them yet (or does she? Tenet).

All signs of these inverted weapons point to a Russian oligarch named Andrei Sator. Sator is so big time that the Protagonist’s only way in is through his wife, Kat. Kat hates Sator, so there’s an opening there. She’s only still with him because he refuses to give her her son if she leaves. To prove his value to Kat, the Protagonist steals a painting for her. Okay, she says, she’ll introduce him.

The details are complicated, but to sum it up, Sator is secretly receiving gold and inverted weapons from his future self. This is what’s allowed him to become so freaking rich. He has also been searching for seven deliberately hidden pieces of a super weapon in the past from the future (Tenet). Once he finds all seven pieces, he will activate them, creating a super-inversion situation whereby the present and future will collide and the world will be destroyed.

Sator momentarily lets the Protagonist into his inner circle when he learns that he knows about tenet. Meanwhile, the Protagonist’s buddy, Neil, is looking for that seventh and final piece to the Wand of Inversion. They must get that final piece before Sator does. It’s the only way to stop the extinction level event. But then everything is complicated when it’s revealed that Sator has rigged himself so that if he commits suicide, the inversion event will happen automatically. I think. You think. Maybe. Maybe not? Tenet.

The one inarguable thing I’ve always said about Christopher Nolan is that he’s a great filmmaker.

He shoots everything in camera. There are no special effects. He’s said in numerous interviews that he believes the audience can feel when something has been done for real as opposed to with computer graphics. And I agree with that.

He casts his movies well. Everybody here is awesome. John David Washington is the perfect 2020 movie star. He’s got that screen presence a movie star needs yet he’s not too masculine. He almost has this cool feminine side to his demeanor that balances him out, making him easily accessible to audiences. I’m in love with Elizabeth Debicki. On the contrary, there’s something almost inaccessible about her that makes her alluring. She may be the perfect female star for a Christopher Nolan film. Kenneth Branaugh is over the top here, but my desire to see Sator go down proves that whatever he was doing was effective. Even Robert Pattinson was solid. He certainly looks good in those suits they dressed him up in.

And just the production value of a Christopher Nolan movie is so impressive. There was this moment around the halfway point where the characters are all out on one of those double-pontoon sailing skiffs. That scene did a better job of transporting me to another place than anything I’ve seen so far this year. Cause, to me, that’s what a Hollywood movie should do. It should take you to places you’ve never been. Show you things you’ve never seen.

And as much grief as I give Nolan for his pretentious film school approach (I mean who titles their main character “The Protagonist” other than an insufferable pretentious film school student? Come on.), he’s literally the only mega budget filmmaker making his own stuff. Without him, it’s all Disney and Marvel folks.

Maybe that’s why it’s so frustrating that Tenet didn’t work.

I fear that Nolan is approaching George Lucas level bubble territory. That elusive world where nobody says ‘no’ to you because of how successful you are. And this is the type of movie that requires a strong “no” person. It’s such a heady concept that if you don’t have people in your circle saying, “I don’t understand that, it needs to be clearer,” the movie isn’t going to work. And that appears to be what happened.

I mean there’s this moment early on where Female Morpheus is explaining to the Protagonist how inversion works. She hints at this idea of a Matrix like situation. That you can control this power. He tries to make the bullet come up to his hand but it won’t. “You have to drop it first” she says. He tries again, this time the bullet comes into his hand. But he didn’t drop it. She literally said, “You have to drop it first.” And he didn’t drop it and it still came up to his hand. The fact that nobody stopped to ask if the audience would be confused after that moment encapsulated what was wrong here.

The insurmountable issue with Tenet is that “inversion” is a difficult concept to understand. The more you think about it, the less it makes sense. That’s why you’re getting so many reactions that describe the film as “frustrating.” Because people don’t understand how the central concept of the film works.

One of the reasons the Matrix was so great was because its central concept was so easy to understand. “We’re unknowingly living in a virtual reality.” Boom. Understood! Tenet is the opposite. Even right now, as I’m writing this, I’m trying to figure out if inverted objects work under a different set of rules than inverted people. Aren’t inverted people on a pre-set tape? They’ve already gone that way (backwards), so there’s nothing you can do to stop them. These objects, however, you seem to be able to do unique things to them on a repeatable basis. Make them go backwards into your gun over and over again, for example. How does that make sense?

Nolan only makes things harder on himself with a borderline incomprehensible plot. I could take a UCLA course on why the Protagonist needed to a) steal a painting and b) do it by crashing an airplane and still not understand the logic, or what it had to do with the rest of the movie. He only exacerbates this issue by extending the film out to two and a half hours. It gives the audience even more time to get lost.

Maybe the best representation of what went wrong with this movie was the climax. In theory, it was a fun idea. You’re using both regular and inverted soldiers to obtain the final piece of the staff. I love that idea. But that’s all it ended up being, an idea. The actual execution was bizarre. We’re seeing soldiers head onto the battlefield while, simultaneously, soldiers leave the battlefield via the inverted timeline. They had already been through the mission.

So my first thought was, “Well then you already know you were successful, right?” But then I thought, “Wait, those are the different soldiers. Not the same ones.” “Or wait, are they the same soldiers?” The fact that I was still asking these questions this late in the game confirms how poorly the rules were explained to us. Because, at this point, I should be enjoying the moment. Instead, I’m trying to make sense of it all.

Nolan needs a “No” man moving forward or he’s in danger of becoming a parody of himself. A lot of us saw this as far back as Inception, which relied too heavily on exposition. Then came Interstellar, which had a lazy wonky structure. And now this. An idea that doesn’t even work at the concept stage.

Look, Nolan is a great filmmaker. Nobody argues that. But he needs to take a hard look in the mirror when it comes to his writing. He’s not doing himself any favors there. The one clean narrative he’s had out of his last four films was Dunkirk and the reason for that is that the timeline was simple. Everything happened on the same day. Moving forward, focus on what you’re good at – the directing side. But when it comes to writing, unless you’re going to hire people whose professional job it is to write, don’t do any more of these overly complicated concepts with sprawling narratives. They don’t hold together.

[ ] What the hell did I just watch?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the price of admission
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius

What I learned: You want your ending to be the biggest exploitation of your concept of the entire movie. Tenet got this right. The movie is about time inversion. So what better an ending than throwing both regular AND inverted soldiers at the enemy? Sort of an “attack on the Death Star” but with multiple timeines happening at once. The only reason it didn’t work was because the concept was weak to begin with. But this is the right move as a screenwriter. If your movie is about dinosaurs on an island, your climax better deliver the best dinosaur versus human situation we could possibly imagine. It shouldn’t feature a plane crash.

I’m not in the mood to bash movies these days. As I scroll through all my streaming services desperately looking for ANY movie to watch, I’ve realized more than ever the power of Hollywood entertainment. All it takes is one minute of I’m Thinking of Ending Things to appreciate big-budget high production value cinema.

Which is why I’m so bummed after the Dune trailer. Something about it left me feeling empty. “That’s it?” I thought. Even the money shot, a giant worm, feels tiny in comparison to the giant creatures we’ve become accustomed to in movies. Oh, um, cool. It’s in sand which makes it different, I guess?

But it was something else I couldn’t put my finger on which was bothering me. It hit me after I watched the below side-by-side 1984 Dune movie comparison trailer. The two movies looked nearly identical. And everyone knows how bad that original Dune was. It was lengendarily awful.

Could it be that the real problem here is the source material? That it doesn’t matter how much you throw at Dune or who directs it. That it’s always going to be bad. Cause if you’re looking at this trailer objectively, it’s pretty darn uninspiring. It’s a bunch of sand. A bunch of good actors. A bunch of cool costumes. And… what? At least David Lynch took some chances and did some weird things with his take. This looks like a pretty garden variety adaptation.

I’m sincerely worried for Dune, a movie that was really high on my expectations list. Now I’m just hoping it’s a little better than Blade Runner 2049.

Yesterday was all about the strong dialogue.

Conversations were popping off the page throughout Voicemails for Isabelle. They were fun. They were vibrant. They were clever. Easily top 5 dialogue I’ve encountered all year.

What’s frustrating, though, is that a lot of what you saw yesterday is God-given talent. Some writers understand how people speak better than others.

I know this because I’ve read hundreds of scripts that have tried to do what McKendrick did yesterday and not even come close.

You know in movies where the characters have been friends all their lives but the actors just met a day ago because it was their first day on set? They’re supposed to act effortless and natural around each other but how can they when they barely know each other? That’s called forced camaraderie. And it’s the same feeling a reader gets when a subpar dialogue writer is trying hard to write witty dialogue between characters. It doesn’t feel honest.

So what should you do under those circumstances? Quit screenwriting?

No, of course not. That would be silly. Like I said yesterday, only 20% of the scripts I read have awful enough dialogue or awesome enough dialogue that I notice (and most of that 20% is the awful kind). The other 80% is decent enough that it doesn’t bother me either way.

As long as you still know how to tell a great story or still know how to write interesting characters or still know how to come up with a strong concept and execute it solidly, you don’t need to knock your dialogue out of the park. Especially if it’s in a genre that doesn’t need stand-out dialogue, such as horror.

But luckily, there is a trick you can use to create better dialogue scenes, even if dialogue isn’t your forte. I call it the Third Variable.

Naturally, gifted dialogue writers only need two characters and a keyboard – or “two variables” – to write great dialogue.

While us not-as-gifted writers may not be able to play at that level, we can add a THIRD VARIABLE to the scene which intrudes upon the predictable two person interaction to, in turn, elevate it.

The most obvious example of this is to add a third character to a scene. Say your husband and wife characters are arguing with each other one morning. We’ve seen a million arguments in movies so it’s difficult to do anything special with that dialogue. But let’s say you add a maid to the scene. She’s cleaning in the same area that they’re fighting in. This would then result in them speaking around some things. Or being more selective in what they say.

You may not realize it yet, but this is the secret to good dialogue. Characters who can say whatever they want is rarely interesting. I guess for certain sitcom characters, like Sheldon from Big Bang Theory, it works. But in movies, you want to restrict your characters in some way so that they have to dance around the things that they would normally say. This is where you find more creative choices in dialogue because you’re not allowed to use default responses.

By the way, I’m calling it the third “variable” rule as opposed to the third “person” rule for a reason. Because an extra character isn’t the only way to exploit the Third Variable. You could also exploit it, for example, with a TIME RESTRICTION.

Let’s say our same husband character is taking his daughter to school. The two get in an important discussion. The dad wants to explain to his daughter that he and her mother are fine. The problem is, they’re a minute away from school. And the daughter is getting more upset by dad’s explanation, not less.

Time now plays a critical role in the dialogue because the dad has to rush the explanation when this is clearly a discussion that needs more time to be explained productively.

You notice the common factor here? Once again, the third variable is keeping our hero from being able to say the things he wants to say in the way he wants to say them. That’s where you want your characters to be in a dialogue scene. You want them unable to say the things they want to say, which forces the writer to come up with more interesting choices.

Yet another third variable could be the weather. Romeo and Juliet having a conversation on a sunny afternoon is going to look different than if it’s 10 below zero outside. They’re going to be a lot less interested in exchanging love soliloquies than they are jamming their fingers on their frozen iPhones to get their Uber to show up faster.

Same idea, guys. The weather is keeping our characters from saying what they would normally say.

I’ll give you a personal account of how I accidentally stumbled upon a third variable moment without realizing it. I once wrote a script where the two main characters, an older man and a woman, were roommates. One night, he had to come home and explain to her that he couldn’t afford his half of the apartment anymore and was going to have to move out.

I wrote the scene 5-10 times and it was always boring. Boring on-the-nose dialogue. It was like the reader already knew the conversation so what was the point in me writing it? I might as well have written “You know what they’re going to say here so fill it in yourself.”

In the next draft, I did more work on the female roommate and realized she was a big book reader and that she had a book club that met at their apartment every week. So in the next pass of the script, I thought to myself, “why not put her book club meeting in the scene?”

This time, the male roommate comes back to a big book club meeting. The book club then BECAME THE THIRD VARIABLE. All of a sudden, the scene became a lot more interesting. You had weird, funny, and one horny, book club members chiming in, and just like that, the dialogue came alive.

Just being aware of the Third Variable Tool is going make you a better dialogue writer. But the power of the Third Variable works best when the variable itself is creative and when the way you implement is creative.

To this day, one of the best THIRD VARIABLES I’ve ever come across was the first date scene in Notting Hill. 99% of writers would’ve written Hugh Grant and Julia Roberts’ first date at a fancy restaurant with a lot of people gawking. It’s such an obvious setup for their situation (which should always act as a red flag that you shouldn’t write it).

Instead, Julia Roberts has Hugh Grant unknowingly come to the PRESS JUNKET for her latest movie. The press junket then becomes the THIRD VARIABLE. Every time he tries to talk to her, someone gets in the way. A curious fellow journalist. An actor who needs to be interviewed. The junket coordinator who keeps peeking in on their only private conversation (“Three minutes left!”). That’s what I mean when I say a creative third variable.

An uncreative third variable in that circumstance would’ve been – oh I don’t know – Hugh Grant’s parents or something.

What I mean about how creatively you implement your third variable is how cleverly it interrupts the scene’s key interaction. Let’s go back to my first example from this article. A married couple with a maid is in the room. In a pinch, this can get the job done. But there’s no connection between the variable and the primary characters.

What would be better is if our married couple was having troubles due to the husband’s recent infidelity. From there, you would make the maid extremely attractive. Now, we have this wife who’s very sensitive to her husband’s interest in other women and, to make matters worse, while they’re hashing this problem out, there’s a very attractive female in the room. It’s going to give you that little extra kick to the conversation.

How often should you use the Third Variable? Technically, you can use it for every single dialogue scene as long as you do a good job varying the third variable. If you only ever add a third person, it’s going to start to feel manufactured. You have to throw in time. Or weather. Or a party. Or have one of your characters deliberately stop in the middle of an intersection clogging up traffic so that all of the cars are honking at you to move – write us a conversation in that environment (Training Day).

But you should definitely mix in straight dialogue scenes. I was just watching The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel because I remembered the dialogue being so memorable in that show. And while they do use a lot of Third Variable scenes, there are plenty of one-on-one conversations as well.

You just have to make sure you’re doing the basics right in those scenes so that you’re giving yourself the best chance to write good dialogue. One character wants something in the scene. Usually, the other character doesn’t want to give it to them. This creates conflict within the interaction, which in turn leads to dialogue with more pop to it.

And just try not to write the dialogue exchange that 99 out of 100 writers would write. Every time you walk into a scene, you’re writing a situation that has been written thousands if not millions of times already. Figure out what the most common version of that conversation looks like and make sure you don’t write that.

I can give you one last tip to avoid that. In the middle of your dialogue scene, have one of the characters say something that nobody expected them to say (even you, the writer!). That will send your dialogue down an unexpected direction, and that’s when dialogue comes alive. Dialogue is rarely interesting when everyone says what we expected them to say.

This happened in the episode of Mrs. Maisel that I researched. Mrs. Maisel was in court about her lewd stand up routine that sent her to jail. All she has to do, her lawyer tells her ahead of time, is nod and say thank you. So the first half of the scene goes according to plan. But when the judge brings up how stupid it was for Mrs. Maisel to do what she did, she can’t hold back and explains why there was nothing wrong about what she did at all. The dialogue in the rest of the scene was great. All because a character went in an unexpected direction.

I love the Third Variable tip. Whenever you’re struggling to make a dialogue scene work, try this out. I guarantee it will improve the dialogue. Go ahead and share your favorite third variable scenes in the comments. I want to learn about as many of these examples as possible.