Where screenwriters rise from the ashes to prove once and for all, the voters got it wrong!
I know. A lot of you are angrily checking your e-mail, confused about the lack of a Scriptshadow Newsletter inside when I promised you it was coming at the beginning of the week. What’s going on, Carson!!? Hey, I’m right with you. I want that newsletter to show up, too. The problem is this week has been bumpy and I haven’t had the time to get it written. These things are 10,000 words long so they’re not easy. And maybe it’s good that it’s delayed. The trades are posting about a new script sale every day. Where are all these sales coming from? Maybe it has something to do with the coronavirus and the need for material? It’s 1996 all over again.
But hopefully, this will tide you over. Everyone deserves a second chance to make a first impression. So today we’re going to pit scripts against each other that barely lost out in their respective Amateur Showdowns. I’m hopeful that we’re going to find an undiscovered gem because when I went back and looked at all of these loglines, I thought to myself, “Man, these all sound like good movies.” So now I leave it up to you to find the best of the second best.
For those new to the site, Amateur Showdown is an occasional tournament I hold on the site where I pick five screenplays that were submitted to me. Then you, the readers of the site, read as much of each script as possible and vote for your favorite in the comments section. Voting closes Sunday 11:59pm California time. The winner will receive a review the following Friday that could result in props from your peers, representation, a spot on one of the big end-of-the-year screenwriting lists, a partnership with yours truly, and in rare cases, a SALE!
I am taking submissions for the next Amateur Showdown, which will take place between 4-6 weeks from now. So get your entries in. E-mail me at carsonreeves3@gmail.com. Include your script title, the genre, a logline, and a pitch to myself and potential readers why you believe your script deserves a shot. It could be long, short, passionate, to-the-point. Whatever you think will convince someone your script is worth opening, make your case. Just like Hollywood, the Scriptshadow readers are a fickle bunch. So be convincing.
Good luck everyone!
Title: Emergent (new draft)
Genre: Sci-fi/Thriller/Romance
Logline: A brilliant programmer gets embroiled in a bizarre and dangerous love triangle between a co-worker that saved her life and an artificial intelligence that nearly killed her.
Why You Should Read: Emergent had a good contest run last year, placing as a Quarterfinalist or above in Nicholl, Page, Austin, and Big Break as well as a few others. It landed me a few queries and even a couple meetings with managers, but no bites on it yet. I’ve since made some revisions (based on feedback from said meetings, etc.) and will be sending it out again this year. I’d really love to hear the opinions/advice/feedback from the scriptshadow community and even get it reviewed. Cheers.
Title: The Fire Tower
Genre: Contained Thriller
Logline: When a family on vacation to a remote fire lookout tower rescues an injured female hitchhiker, they wind up in a battle for their lives.
Why You Should Read: When I was 10, we went on a cross-country camping trip out west. One night we got horribly lost on a winding road, high in the mountains. Out of the darkness a hitchhiker jumped in front of our car asking for a lift. We gave her some water and snacks (but my mom wouldn’t let my dad give her a ride). Later, I was told that a whole family had disappeared without a trace not far from there. That was the seed of the story. But I needed a contained space to trap my family.
Lookout towers have been used in the United States for 100 years. At the peak of their popularity in the ‘40s, the U.S. had about 8,000. Today, there remain about 85 fire lookout towers in the U.S. in extremely remote mountain areas in the National Forests which you can rent for $25-$75 a night.
Title: Kamikaze
Genre: Action
Logline: After her creator is killed in a terrorist attack, an emotionally charged android, suffering from a fatal virus, struggles to hunt down the mercenaries responsible.
Why You Should Read: Kamikaze is a non-stop, can’t catch your breath action script. It’s placed very well in screenwriting competitions (finalist), it nabbed me a manager (we’ve since parted), but the script hasn’t gotten much traction. I’m really wanting to know if there’s something I’m missing, and if I genuinely have what it takes to make it. — The main character, Ali, in an android that can’t seem to keep her emotions in check, which is a major drawback to those that created her. The script plays with the concept of logic vs. emotion and how they can help/hinder in various situations. — Thank you for the opportunity to give it a read.
Title: Renaissance Men
Genre: Action, Comedy
Logline: In 16th-century Rome, astronomical badass Nicolaus Copernicus seeks papal approval for his radical new theory about the universe, but after he’s framed for the Pope’s kidnapping, he’ll risk his life and legacy to track down the real abductors.
Why You Should Read: I’ve always loved history. I just wish it could be funnier. If I had a time machine, I probably wouldn’t use it kill baby Hitler. Instead, I’d just swap him with baby Charlie Chaplin who was born a mere four days earlier. But since the latest version of Final Draft is easier to get my hands on than a functioning time machine, I decided to write Renaissance Men. A hilarious adventure that pits some of Renaissance Europe’s biggest egos including Copernicus, Machiavelli, Nostradamus and Michelangelo against each other in a high stakes game of cat and mouse.
I had many reasons why I wanted to write this. First, I knew it would be a lot of fun. Second, I was sure I could generate a ton of laughs. And last but not least, because a story about how the rich and powerful will cover up scientific truth to protect their political interests is even more relevant today than it was 500 years ago.
Title: THE BLACK PETREL
Genre: Horror/Thriller
Logline: A frustrated novelist goes to an old Southern hotel looking for inspiration and finds herself trapped in a nightmare with five strangers and a vengeful ex-slave.
Who am I: A writer trying to feed a hungry audience something delicious.
Why You Should Read: If GET OUT and A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET got pregnant listening to a Nina Simone song, this is the baby that would pop out.
This week I talked to not one, not two, but THREE separate writers who were all having the same problem. They were having trouble coming up with a movie idea to write. Movie ideas are probably the most debated aspect of the screenwriting process. Everyone knows when they see a good one. And yet coming up with your own good movie idea remains the most challenging part of the process.
That’s because we don’t judge our ideas the way we judge others. We judge other ideas with objectivity. If it sounds good, we give it the thumbs up. But we create our own ideas out of emotion. There’s an element within the idea – the main character, the subject matter, the theme – that resonates with us on a deeper level. And that’s the problem. That resonance creates rose-tinted glass we see our idea through.
Emotion is not a bad thing, of course. You want emotion when you’re writing a screenplay. But it does get in the way of conceptualizing your idea. You can be so laser-focused on how you’re going to express this element that you can’t see the rest of the idea for what it really is – confusing, or generic, or maybe plain boring. Which is why you always want feedback on your ideas.
But today I want to make the process a little easier for you. What I’m going to do is give you the ten best ways to generate a movie idea. All of these are legitimate approaches to coming up with a good idea. I’m going to start with the worst of these options and move my way up to the best option. Let’s jump into it.
10) Horror and Guns – If you’re really struggling to come up with an idea, write a horror movie or a Guy/Gal with a Gun movie that contains ONE ELEMENT WE HAVEN’T SEEN BEFORE. Like a horror movie where you can’t make a noise (A Quiet Place). These are the two most marketable genres for spec scripts. So when in doubt, write one of these. Because you’ll have the best chance at actually selling them.
9) Follow Your Heart – This is that idea that won’t go away. It’s been sitting in your head for years. It may not be an objectively good idea. HOWEVER. Passion plays a large part in writing a great screenplay. The more passionate you are about something, the more likely you’ll go the extra mile to make it great. So the idea is that you’ll make up for the lack of a big hook by writing something emotionally earth-shattering. That’s how Titanic was written. That’s how Get Out was written. You have to accept that, when you’re finished, you’ll get less script requests. But, hopefully, the people who do request it will be more likely to enjoy it.
8) Update It – If you straight up suck at coming up with ideas, this is a good option. Go back 10, 20, 30 years ago and look for movie types that were popular then. If they were popular once, Hollywood believes they can be popular again. So just bring that genre back with a little modern update if possible. For example, romantic thrillers like Basic Instinct and Fatal Attraction were big in the late 80s. Goofy horror movies like Scream and I Know What You Did Last Summer were big in the 2000s. It doesn’t take a lot imagination to update these genres so it’s an easy way to come up with a marketable concept.
7) Ripped From The Headlines – This is another option for those of you who struggle to come up with your own ideas. Take a hotly debated issue that’s out there in the headlines and build a GENRE movie around it. That last part is key. If you try and build an on-the-nose drama about the issue, we’re going to roll our eyes. Express the execution through a marketable genre. Invisible Man (horror) was about toxic masculinity. Get Out (horror-thriller) was about racism. The Hunt (thriller/satire) was about the political divide. Don’t Worry Darling (Thriller/Sci-Fi) is about toxic masculinity. Right now, this is a great formula for coming up with a sale-able spec.
6) Twist and Shout – Look through all of the time tested movie types out there and see if you can find a way to twist them. So, for example, the buddy cop sub-genre. One of the most reliable formats in movies. “Bright” takes that format and changes one of the parties into an ogre. It was enough to result in a huge spec sale and Netflix’s most watched movie to date. A bigger example would be “It.” A time-tested formula – a young group of friends coming of age during the summer – set in the horror genre.
5) Fascinating True Stories – Find a true story that sounds good and let it do all the work for you. Some writer found a story about JFK saving a dozen people when his boat capsized during World War 2. These days googling, “Great War stories” could find you hundreds of big screen worthy stories that haven’t been told yet. What are you waiting for?
4) An Underdog Story – Underdogs are the most beloved characters in movies. In a medium where writers struggle to come up with heroes audiences give a s@#$ about, underdogs are a cheat code. Forrest Gump. Rocky. Slumdog Millionare. Luke Skywalker. Deadpool. The Mule. The Social Network. Come up with an underdog at the heart of your story and I promise you, your script will be one of the easiest reads of the year.
3) Irony – A good ironic premise instantly separates itself from the pack. Here’s what I wrote in a previous article: “The most basic form of movie irony is to make your hero the opposite of what’s required of him. So you wouldn’t write a story about an atheist who starts his own atheism support group. You’d write a story about an atheist who takes a job as a Christian preacher to make ends meet.” Here’s a whole post about ironic premises.
2) A Fascinating Main Character – This is for writers who are bad at coming up with plots. If your mind doesn’t think that way, do not fear. Instead, come up with a really interesting character then build the bones of the plot around them. Take a look at Arthur Dent (Joker) or Louis Bloom (Nightcrawler) or Max Fischer (Rushmore). In all three of these movies, I’m betting the writers came up with the character first and then formulated the plot pieces around them. The reason you can get away with writing a script that doesn’t have a big plot hook is because everything in this business still comes down to getting bankable actors on board. So if you’re a reader and you see a logline with a really interesting main character, you know if the script turns out to be good you could get a lot of actors interested.
1) High Concept – The biggest, the flashiest, the cleverest, ideas still always win. This is a NUMBERS GAME. That means a certain number of people need to read your script before someone says yes. Therefore, it is in your interest to come up with ideas that get the most people interested in reading your script. The best way to do this is still the high concept idea. How do you come up with a high concept? The best model I know of is the “strange attractor” approach. You must have that thing in your concept that sounds both big and unlike something we’ve seen before. It’s the thing that makes your idea different from everyone else’s. The good news is you can come up with high concept ideas for big movies (The Meg – A group of scientists exploring the Marianas Trench encounter the largest marine predator that has ever existed – the Megalodon shark), medium-sized movies (Split – Three girls are kidnapped by a man with a diagnosed 23 distinct personalities), and small movies (Saw – Two men wake up in a small room chained to the wall with a saw in between them). So you don’t have any excuses. Still the king of the concept creation pack in my opinion.
One of the problems I see writers make is they try to come up with movie ideas out of nothing. They sit at their computer and try to will a good idea into existence. That kind of thing can work under certain conditions. That’s how Bruckheimer and Don Simpson used to come up with ideas. They’d read through the day’s newspapers and magazines until they found a good idea. But that’s generally not how the best ideas emerge. The best ideas come through organic inspiration. You’re out and you see something interesting and your mind goes into, what if that was a movie? You write the idea down and you don’t go back to it. If that idea is still nudging at you three months later, chances are it’s a good idea. Coming up with a good movie idea will always be hard but hopefully this list makes the process a little easier.
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: Romantic Comedy
Premise: After Georgia accidentally receives an out of the blue invitation to her on-again, off-again boyfriend’s wedding, she and her best friend Keely make the ill-informed decision to attend.
About: This script finished with 8 votes on last year’s Black List. It’s Carrie Solomon’s breakthrough screenplay.
Writer: Carrie Solomon
Details: 117 pages
The nice thing about reading screenplays is that you can cater the day’s read to whatever mood you’re in. Today, I needed a pick-me-up so I decided to read a comedy. Now if there’s one thing I’ve learned about comedies, it’s that if you don’t laugh on the first page, there’s a good chance you won’t be laughing at all.
I started with a script called “Dude Ranch,” which had a premise I didn’t understand. When his ex-wife starts dating another guy, our hero follows him to something called the “Dude Ranch” where you compete in manly activities, except they’re the woke version of manly activities. On top of this, the first ten pages were all about religion. So I had no idea what was going on. And I didn’t laugh once in ten pages.
I then moved to a Black List script called, “Assisted Living.” Here’s the logline on that one: “When a thief on the run needs to go into hiding, disguised as an 81 year old, she checks into a retirement community shared by her estranged grandmother.” Not the worst idea. And the first page did make me laugh. A young girl is helping her mom steal something by distracting the store owners, pretending to be a lost French girl looking for her parents. She doesn’t actually know French. She’s just throwing out a bunch of random French words together. It’s working until a guard walks over who speaks fluent French.
So I said, okay, we might have something there. But we follow that up with that same girl, now 35 years old, going to a club, noticing a bunch of bitchy 20-something girls making fun of her age, so she goes out on the dance floor and twerks like a maniac to prove she’s still got it. All I could think was, “What does this have to do with the premise?” Talk about random. So I x’d out of that after 15 pages.
That led me to this script, My Boyfriend’s Wedding. The first scene, which had our heroines out clubbing, begging for the defiant DJ to play “Alone” by Heart didn’t make me laugh. But it did make me smile. And I liked the banter between the friends and the DJ. I was getting tired of opening new scripts so I said, screw it, I’m in.
30 year old Georgia is a commitment-phobe. She has this great guy named Adam she’s known since high school who routinely flies out to visit her from Atlanta, and every time they’re together he asks her to become his committed girlfriend. But every time, Georgia resists.
So one day Georgia and her best friend Keely are hanging out and they receive an invitation from Adam’s parents… TO HIS WEDDING! What??? Georgia is confused. This man has spent the last three years proclaiming his love for her. They just had sex a few weeks ago. He’s getting married?? What’s going on???
Determined to straighten this out, Georgia accepts the invitation and makes Keely her plus-one. They fly to Atlanta where Georgia makes a bee-line to Adam at the pre-wedding party. Adam apologizes. He admits he’s been dating his fiance, Missy, for a couple of years. He’s only ever wanted to be with Georgia but since she wouldn’t commit, he decided to finally tie the knot.
Meanwhile, Keely bumps into Missy and the two start a friendship that quickly becomes sexual. When Georgia and Keely reconvene, Keely doesn’t tell Georgia she’s now sleeping with the bride. Georgia then loses control and sleeps with Adam again. It’s a wedding catastrophe!
Keely is determined to break up the wedding because Missy is such a great person and she shouldn’t be marrying a man who’s secretly in love with another woman. Georgia eventually becomes convinced that Adam is selfish and he wanted to keep two girls on the line and tells him as much.
Georgia and Keely then head home where the movie decides to explore their broken friendship for the third act. I guess the movie was about their friendship all along? Maybe? I don’t know. I had a hard time figuring this one out.
“My Boyfriend’s Wedding” needed to nail down the screenwriting basics better. Character, structure and theme.
For starters, nobody’s sympathetic here. Every time Adam has professed his love for Georgia, she blows him off. So we don’t like her. It turns out Adam has been hiding this whole other girlfriend from Georgia. So we don’t like him. Missy moves in on Keely, so we don’t like her. And Keely is straight up annoying. So we don’t like her.
Who are we rooting for here?
I prefer you have more than one sympathetic character in your script. But at the very least, your hero needs to be sympathetic. Everybody else do whatever you want with them as long as they’re funny. But Georgia has to be sympathetic. And she isn’t. We’re not even sure why she’s mad at Adam. She friend-zones him whenever he tries to make her his girlfriend so why is she getting all angry that he has someone else?
You may have been able to get away with this if Adam was a HUUUUUGE a-hole. Like he was super-manipulative and is banging three other women on the side. Sometimes you don’t need a sympathetic hero if the audience is obsessed with taking the villain down. But Adam and Georgia are high-school sweethearts. So it’s odd. We’re not sure if we’re supposed to hate the guy or like him, root for them to get together or stay apart.
If the audience isn’t sure what they’re supposed to root for, you don’t have a story.
The structure was odd as well. It’s a movie titled My Boyfriend’s Wedding yet the final act takes place after the wedding in another city. Not only that, but the movie becomes about Georgia and Keely becoming friends again after their wedding fallout. That would be okay if you’d established that there was a deep-rooted problem in their friendship through the first two acts. But they were fine in the first two acts. They disagreed on a few things but were otherwise great.
Your third act is the act that needs to resolve all of the things you’ve set up in the first two acts, both in the plot and with the characters. So for you to all of a sudden say, “Oh, this is about friends now,” is jarring.
The characters also had motivation issues. You establish in the first scene that your hero doesn’t like someone. Adam tells Georgia he loves her and she tells him she’s not interested. So why would that person care about breaking up his wedding?
This is what a lot of comedy writers don’t understand. They only focus on the jokes. But if the fundamentals don’t make sense, the jokes won’t land. You have to set everything up so that we go into each scene understanding where each character is coming from. That’s why we laugh. When we see their plans get screwed up and turned around.
Take Bridesmaids, for example. Look at how clearly they set up the main dynamic. Kristin Wiig’s character is jealous that this other woman has become best friends with her best friend. So in every one of their scenes, she’s trying to out do her. Like the toast scene. She will not be topped. She has to keep going and giving a better toast. The motivations in My Boyfriend’s Wedding were never clear and therefore we weren’t sure when we were supposed to laugh.
I guess the argument for this as a script is that it’s a romantic comedy that takes a look at female friendship. We don’t see a lot of those. But if that’s what this movie is going to be, there needs to be a lot more focus placed on the friendship. You can’t throw all that in at the last second. It’s thematically inconsistent.
Unfortunately, I couldn’t get into this one. What did you guys think?
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: In comedies, you need to define who it is we’re rooting for to win and who it is we’re rooting for to lose. In other genres, you can play around more in the gray. But even then, I advise you give us clear good guys and bad guys. If it’s muddy, like it is here, it leaves the audience unsatisfied. They’re not really sure who won and who lost.
Today’s screenplay isn’t like anything else out there at the moment, setting the stage for another exciting read.
Genre: Thriller/Action
Premise: When the underprivileged John Unger is invited to spend the summer at the mansion of his peculiar classmate, his thirst for grandeur leads him down a dangerous exploration of greed, morality, and the secret horrors of the ruling class. Based on the F. Scott Fitzgerald short story.
About: This script finished with 8 votes on last year’s black list. It was smartly plucked from a 1922 F. Scott Fitzgerald short story collection. Just a reminder to those looking for material. The 95 year public domain statute allows you rights to anything written up until 1923. Cody Behan clearly had his eyes on this one as he wrote it last year, when the statue was up until 1922. Something to keep your eyes on, guys. Fitzgerald’s early works (The Beautiful and the Damned included) are out there for the taking.
Writer: Cody Behan (based on a short story by F. Scott Fitzgerald)
Details: 126 pages
Movie announcements in the last few days have become bizarre. Tom Cruise and Elon Musk are filming an entire movie in space? Unless that movie is titled, “Hanging out with the International Space Station Crew and Eating Food Sludge Packets Together,” I can assure you this will never happen.
I just did a little online sleuthing. It costs $10,000 to put ONE POUND in space. An Arri Alexa camera is 15 pounds. All decked out it’s closer to 30 pounds. That’s 300,000 for your camera. Oh, and let’s not forget the 170 pound camera man. He’ll cost you 1.7 million dollars to put into orbit. That’s not counting the half a million dollars you’ll have to invest in training him to become an astronaut.
And then what’s your plot when you get into space?? A Tom Cruise zero gravity spinny circles contest? You could make the exact same movie with special effects that will cost you 1/10th the price and look 10 times as good.
What does this have to do with today’s script? Actually, a lot. It turns out F. Scott Fitzgerald had some zany high concept ideas of his own back in the day. This is not The Great Gatsby. This is Fitzgerald if he hired Edgar Rice Burroughs to write one of his ideas. It’s weird. It’s kooky. And for a story I’d never heard of before, it’s better than you’d expect!
16 year old John Unger has escaped his lower-class mining town to become one of the rare poor people admitted to Connecticut’s prestigious St. Midas school. When he arrives, he’s immediately given the cold shoulder by all the richy riches. All of them except for one.
The mysterious Percy shows up like a baller at a party, busting out a ONE THOUSAND DOLLAR BILL and then burning it to ash in front of everyone. John becomes enamored with Percy, and the two find themselves hanging out constantly.
When summer rolls around, Percy invites John to stay at his home with him. The two travel across the country to the middle of nowhere, where John is shocked to see the coolest most isolated compound in America. Percy, last name Washington, as in, yes, great great grandson to George Washington, lives in the richest home in the United States.
That’s because the land rests on a diamond that is LITERALLY as big as the Ritz Hotel. And here’s where things get interesting. Back in 1922, nobody had Google Maps. This means that you could, theoretically, hide your land from everyone. But times they are a changing. World War 1 has birthed the war plane. And there are rumors drawing a lot of these pilots out to this area, where they could see the family’s secret. If that were to happen, Percy’s father Braddock is convinced the government will take it from them..
This is why Braddock has purchased two spanking new gigantic anti-aircraft guns. When you have more money than God, anti-aircraft guns are a drop in the bucket. Meanwhile, John meets Percy’s smoking hot sister, Kismine, who is thrilled to have a boy to talk to for once. She and John strike up a quick romance, which plays a number on the family dynamic.
A few weeks into the summer, John stumbles across a deep pit, populated with a dozen ragged pilots. It turns out Braddock has been shooting down every plane he sees then throwing the injured pilots down here, where they will spend the rest of their lives so they don’t tell the world Braddock’s secret.
And then it gets worse for John. Turns out this isn’t the only friend Percy’s brought back to the house. Turns out this isn’t the only guy Kismine has developed a crush on. And what happened to these young men? They weren’t in the pit. That’s when John realizes the terrifying truth. He’ll be murdered. But now that he knows the gameplan, can he be the first to survive?
I was surprised by just how zany this script was. We get all these big idea cameos, like Braddock’s radium stockpile, which he is convinced will be the cure to cancer. Or that his family is related to George Washington. Or that they have giant anti-airplane guns… in the year 1922! It honestly reads like the 1922 version of a Marvel movie. It has that big budget popcorn feel to it. And it’s full of these fun twists and turns.
The only problem with the script is that it combines two things that don’t gel well with screenwriting. The first is that we’re putting our hero at a static location where he waits around for the story to come to him. It still manages to work because the reveals are so fun. But there are definitely times where it feels like we’re waiting around for the next plot point to arrive. Active characters always work better. And John is not active.
The other problem is that the story spans a long period of time. I believe six months in total. If you were to write this movie today, it would take place over a weekend. To Behan’s credit, he uses the same device that allows movies like Fight Club to cover a long span of time – VOICE OVER NARRATION.
John is constantly giving us updates on what’s going on. This allows John to say things like, “Even with the blazer, the first few weeks were brutal.” In a single line, we’ve jumped forward three weeks. And it doesn’t feel forced. With that said, this probably would’ve played better with a tighter time frame.
Remember that the more condensed the timeframe, the more tension you’re going to have in every scene. When you have months and months to cover, it’s like a hall pass to take scenes off. To relax. And you don’t want to relax in a screenplay. Especially in a thriller.
The final thing of note is that boy do you have an advantage when your source material is F. Scott Fitzgerald. The dialogue and description throughout “Diamond” was a cut above what the average reader is used to. Here’s a monologue from Kismine: “You see how they look at me. How they treat me. How they dismiss and condescend my every thought. As a daydream. A fantasy. I’m a daughter of Washingtons. I’m expected to dress in pretty dresses, drape myself in pretty jewels, speak in pretty tones, smile pretty smiles, think pretty thoughts, dream pretty dreams, and bite my pretty little tongue. And a year from now, when they present me at court, I’ll be expected to make a pretty match to preserve the stability of the sterling Washington name. I am a show pony trapped in a pretty stable. So don’t scold me for being “a part of” anything. The only thing I’m guilty of is being the only Washington with a conscience.”
Or take this description of John and Kismine’s first kiss: “The distance between their lips vanishes. And again appears.” That’s a lot better than what I usually read, which is some version of, “They kiss passionately.”
I’m really curious about this script. It first presents itself as some hoity-toity 1920s rich vs. poor moral tale, not unlike Gatsby, but then morphs into good old fashioned fun. I haven’t read anything like it. Ever. What do you guys think?
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[xx] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Here’s a fun little dialogue trick you can use. It almost always works. Have a conversation where each character is having their own conversation. There is no overlap between the two. Here’s an early scene between John and Percy…
Genre: TV Comedy/Sci-Fi
Premise: In a future where your consciousness is uploaded into a hard drive that substitutes for heaven, a young programmer finds himself a new resident of the afterlife after a car accident.
About: One of the most frustrating results of superheroes taking over cinema is the death of the high-concept. I love a great high-concept idea. Hollywood used to be a high-concept battleground. Whoever came up with the best high concept that week won a million dollars. However, the high concept isn’t dead and gone forever. It’s moved over to television, which is why I decided today to review Amazon’s new show, Upload.
Writer: Greg Daniels
Details: First couple of episodes are 1 hour. Rest of episodes are 30 min.
Greg Daniels has been on a roll lately.
He brought back his beloved TV show, Parks and Rec, for a onetime coronavirus benefit episode. He debuted his new big budget comedy, Upload, on Amazon. And he’s got a highly anticipated comedy with Steve Carrell called “Space Force,” on the horizon.
As streaming continues to dig its claws into the theater business, tearing away market share piece by valuable piece, we’ve seen high concepts, which used to be relegated to spec scripts and summer movies, become a prominent force in the streaming space.
15 years ago, Upload would’ve been a movie. Now, when someone comes up with an idea like this, their first thought is ‘TV.’ And I’m still not sure if that’s a good or a bad thing.
Ideas like this always seemed too big for two hours. But they certainly aren’t big enough for 30 hours. That’s the thing that continues to bother me about television. When someone comes up with an idea, they usually have the first season mapped out. And, from there it becomes, “We’ll figure it out.”
Sometimes they do (Breaking Bad). But usually they don’t.
Complicating matters is that Upload isn’t sure what it wants to be. It presents itself as a comedy. But it occasionally delves into serious subject matter, such as how the moral implications of a known afterlife would work. Some of the questions it presents are thought-provoking, but it can be jarring when it moves so fluidly from “What’s the meaning of life?” to Bud the Talking Dog.
Upload is set 50+ years in the future where mankind has set up digital afterlifes you can be uploaded into. Which afterlife you join is dependent on how much money you have. If you have a ton of money, you go to the richest and snazziest afterlife. If you don’t, well, you get the picture.
Nathan Brown is a coder with a beautiful materialistic girlfriend. One night while heading home, his self-driving smart-car crashes and kills him. It’s unheard of for a smart car to crash so we’re suspicious from the start. Due to his rich girlfriend, Nathan gets uploaded into the top afterlife, which looks a lot like colonial Canada.
Seeing as the afterlife is one giant hard drive, you can still communicate via voice or video with the real world, which allows Nathan to stay in touch with his girlfriend. Meanwhile, Nathan is being shown the ropes by his “angel,” which is what they call your tech support helper in the afterlife. Real name Nora, Nathan’s angel develops a quick crush on her latest client.
Back in the real world, Nora is struggling with the fact that her cancer-ridden father still believes in good old God, which means he’s choosing not to be uploaded when he dies. For him, upload is Real Heaven. Nora keeps trying to convince him to sign up for Upload since, if he doesn’t, she’ll lose him forever.
Almost half of the people who get uploaded to the afterlife don’t “take.” They freak out. It’s all too weird for them and they end up committing digital suicide. Nathan is too weirded out by the place and decides to end it all. But Angel/Nora comes racing after him and pleads with him not to end it in a monologue that’s clearly just as much about her father as it is Nathan. It’s enough to get Nathan to stop, for now. But how much longer can he survive in this Groundhog Day hell? Odds are not long.
What I liked most about Upload is that Daniels did a TON of work constructing the mythology. He’s really thought hard about what this world would look like. For example, the third episode focuses on the first “Download,” where someone from the afterlife will be downloaded back into a clone of themselves (a fun cameo from Creed of “Office” fame), paving the way for the afterlife to be joined back with the real world.
Or then there’s the fact that there’s only ever 5000 people around. When Nathan asks about this, Nora informs him that, actually, there’s hundreds of millions of people around but the place would be too crowded if it showed all of them at once so it separates the reality into a series of planes, each of which limits the amount of people visible.
One of my pet peeves is when a writer comes up with a big idea but doesn’t put any effort into actually exploring that idea. Greg Daniels is on the opposite end of that. If anything, he became too obsessed with what this world would look like. That’s how you get ideas like talking dogs.
I also liked the injection of a murder mystery into the plot. One of the best ways to keep people watching, not just for a second episode, but all the way through the season, is an overarching mystery arc. In this case, Nathan was murdered. He doesn’t even know it at first. Someone else has to suggest it to him. But now we’re on the hunt trying to figure out who did this to him. He’s got this supposedly perfect girlfriend who’s a little too cutthroat at times. Could she be involved?
Despite the incredibly rich mythology, something is missing here.
I’m not sure what it is but I think it’s the lack of familiarity in a lot of the situations.
Comedy works best when you put characters in a situation that people can relate to and then you play around with that situation. For example, one of the staples of The Office was those boring conference room meetings that are always a complete waste of time. Anyone who’s worked in an office environment can relate to the absurdity and stupidity of those situations.
And then there’s “Upload,” where a featured scene is Nathan attending his own funeral via a virtual conference app. It’s a clever idea in theory. But the situation is so unfamiliar to us that it’s hard to find any laughs in it. The scene plays out with Nathan feeling weird about the whole thing and yelling at everyone, which leaves you wondering what the point of the whole thing was.
It’s frustrating on a writing front because this is actually what I tell you guys to do. Find situations we haven’t seen before. That way you can give us something original. And yet sometimes I’m reminded that there’s a reason certain things haven’t been explored before. It’s because they don’t work.
I don’t want to totally discount this show. It has its moments. The things it gets right – like the chemistry between Nathan and Nora – it gets really right. But the premise ends up being so weird and complex that there isn’t enough familiarity for us to relate to what’s going on. It’s almost like Daniels went one generation too far with his concept. If it was set a little closer to today, maybe in the beginning stages of integrating this technology into life, there would be more we could relate to. But because it’s so far ahead, it’s a future we don’t understand enough to laugh at.
[ ] What the hell did I just watch?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the stream
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Comedy tends to run into trouble – not always, but usually – when it either a) goes big-budget or b) attempts to push too much drama into the fold. Upload tackles both of these head on and, unfortunately, loses on both fronts.
