It’s June. The month of passion. The month of heat. The month of Wimbledon! I’ve got another doozy for you guys. This month’s newsletter has the latest big spec sale. It contains the “script sale trifecta,” which you can only learn by reading the newsletter. I muse about Steven Spielberg’s new top-secret UAP project. Could it be the long-rumored sequel to one of his earliest movies? I provide Hollywood with my plan to save the box office. I announce the next showdown. And I only contradict myself a couple of times. Feels like a new record.
If you want access to the Scriptshadow Newsletter, all you have to do is e-mail me and I’ll put you on the list.
E-mail carsonreeves1@gmail.com with the subject line, “NEWSLETTER.”
Genre: Suspense
Premise: (winning logline) A recently demoted executive finds himself being harassed by a dangerous thug sitting next to him on the last bus back home to the suburbs.
About: The Short Story Showdown was one of the tightest races we’ve ever had. The top three vote-getters were separated by less than 3 votes. The story that won ended up being the only one of the writers who vetted their logline in the comments section. Could lead to similar strategies in the future.
Writer: Jason Diggy
Details: 8 pages (4800 words)
William H. Macy for Daniel?
Short stories.
They’re ELUSIVE!
What makes a good one?
I don’t know. I think it’s one of those deals where you know it when you see it.
If you’re anything like me, you want to find out if The Empty Seat is one of those ‘know it’ stories. Let’s find out!
Daniel Lowry is an aging office worker with a lousy boss and mostly lousy co-workers. He’s upset because he was told by his boss that he had to work late. This screwed up his transportation so now he has to take the late-night bus home.
A lot of this story focuses on Daniel’s wait for the bus. During that time, we learn more details about how much of an a-hole his boss is. Daniel spots a half-drunk woman from his work who he suspects is trying to get ahead through physical means with her own superior and he hates her for it.
As Daniel laments the late bus, he thinks about how he’s only got a couple more years before his kids are out of the house. Then he’ll have a lot more power at work. He won’t have to kiss the ring every single day and do whatever he’s asked. But right now, the bills are large and they’re frequent which means he has to suck it up and do whatever his stupid boss says.
Finally, the bus comes and it’s almost full. Daniel finds two seats together and semi-straddles the adjacent one to make sure nobody sits by him. We hit another stop, some more people get on, Daniel is antsy about whether his precious adjacent seat is going to be used. But luckily no one takes it.
That changes at the next stop. Some 25 year old punk with long hair gets on the bus and, this time, the seat gods do not bless him. The guy goes straight to Daniel’s seat and sits next to him. As the bus starts up again, the guy starts smoking. The smoke is going right into Daniel’s face. Daniel can also feel a potential weapon (a gun? A knife) in the guy’s pocket as it keeps bumping up against him.
Daniel starts to freak out. But he finally gets to his stop, he leaps up, and slides past this seat demon, then hurries down the block without looking back, convinced that this punk is going to chase him down. Daniel clears a corner, stops, catches his breath, and waits. Was all that just in his mind? Or is Daniel actually in danger?
In the comments section of the Short Story Showdown, ChinaSplash posted their logline which began a discussion about why I didn’t choose their story for the showdown. It came down to that the logline promised a big sci-fi concept, which was what hooked me, yet the story started with a woman who really wanted to eat a donut. My feeling was, “What’s the point of including that? It’s a short story. You don’t have time to waste. Start deeper in when the story is already moving.”
I feel the exact same way about this story.
If you read this logline, you assume you’re getting a story about a guy who deals with a scary, potentially dangerous, individual who sits next to him on a bus.
But that’s not what we get. Our malcontent bus villain doesn’t sit down next to our hero until halfway through the story.
To me, that’s unforgivable. I was even getting antsy that we weren’t in the bus conflict by the end of the first page. Yet I had to read three more pages to get there.
But let’s look at this from Jason’s point of view. I’m guessing he wanted to do some character development first. He wanted to get you in Daniel’s head so we could learn what makes him tick. Because what good is an antagonist if we don’t understand the person he’s antagonizing?
That’s a fair argument.
However, there are ways you can achieve this that are a lot more likely to keep the reader’s interest. For example, when we’re waiting at that first stop with Daniel, introduce the scary rider then. He’s standing over by the side but you can just tell there’s something off about him.
Now, when we go into Daniel’s head and learn about his day and what makes him tick, we’re doing so underneath a line of suspense. Because we see the antagonist. We know the situation with him is only going to get worse. So we’re more compelled to turn the pages, even though “nothing” is happening yet.
The Empty Seat was struggling in another area as well, which was that Daniel wasn’t a very likable guy.
When I originally heard this pitch in the comments section, I endorsed it! I said, “This sounds good.” But the way it was pitched, I was imagining a weak, potentially cowardly guy, who was being unjustly bullied. In other words, an easy person to root for.
But that’s not Daniel. Daniel is King Complainer. Give this guy a topic and he can give ten hours on things he dislikes about it. He’s complaining about his boss, his co-workers, the women there, the transportation, his bills, the other riders.
But the action he took that killed it for me was when he sat down on the bus and took over two seats to make sure nobody sat next to him. How am I rooting for that guy?
I honestly thought, at that point in the story, that Jason was flipping the script on us. He was making us think Daniel was our hero when, in actuality, he would be our villain. And the guy who sat next to him would end up being the “character who was intimidated by another passenger” – Daniel himself.
But no, Daniel was just a really upset guy who hated his life and wanted to get it all out of his system. It compromised the character to such a degree that it was impossible to root for him.
I actually see this issue occur frequently once writers enter the short story (or long-form storytelling) format. Unlike screenplays, you can now take us directly into the character’s mind. And often, since our characters represent us, we use that character to get out all of our own frustrations.
I’m not saying that there isn’t value in observation and frustration. But you have to be careful with this stuff because when the reader is introduced to your main character, one of the first things that goes on in their head is, “Do I want to go on a journey with this person?” If the answer is no, you’re screwed.
I don’t think Daniel is someone you want to go on a journey with.
One of the most successful character types you can write is not the guy who gets kicked to the ground and complains. It’s the guy who gets kicked to the ground, but gets back up and keeps trying. Audiences LOVE those characters.
The Empty Seat’s potential to redemption was the antagonist. If that interaction was strong, I think we could’ve turned things around. But there’s not much to it. I understand what Jason was doing. He was exploring how we can get lost in our heads and build things up that aren’t there. I do think that’s an interesting topic to explore.
But, in this case, the logline kind of promises conflict and we don’t get much of it. It was too much of a tease.
Story link: The Empty Seat
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: One of the hardest characters to make likable is a complainer. It’s not impossible! But the only times I see it work are in comedies. In one of my favorite movies ever, Office Space, Peter is a serial complainer. But he’s also funny. So be wary of going the complainer route. If you do, make it a bug, not a virus.
Week 1 – Concept
Week 2 – Solidifying Your Concept
Week 3 – Building Your Characters
Week 4 – Outlining
Week 5 – The First 10 Pages
Week 6 – Inciting Incident
Week 7 – Turn Into 2nd Act
Week 8 – Fun and Games
Week 9 – Using Sequences to Tackle Your Second Act
Week 10 – The Midpoint
Week 11 – Chill Out or Ramp Up
Week 12 – Lead Up To the “Scene of Death”
Week 13 – Moment of Death
Week 14 – The Climax
Week 15 – The End!
Week 16 – Rewrite Prep 1
Week 17 – Rewrite Prep 2
Week 18 – Rewrite Week 1
Week 19 – Rewrite Week 2
One of the more frustrating things about rewriting, at least for me, is when you come up upon one of your big story problems and you don’t have a solution for it.
Because what often happens is you get so caught up in the fact that you don’t know how to solve the problem that you allow it to stop production. You feel that until you know how to solve that issue, what’s the point?
A big problem I always ran into in my screenwriting days was the ending. My endings always took the longest to figure out. They felt 5-6 drafts behind everything else in the story.
It drove me nuts cause I knew nothing mattered unless that ending brought it all together. And sometimes my endings would be so generic that I knew I needed to completely reimagine them.
Or sometimes it was a logistical problem. If I was writing a sci-fi thriller where the final act had my hero running through some high-tech underground facility, I would have to figure how he was able to do this considering he’d never been in this facility before and was just a normal guy.
Problems like that require you to do some deep searching. Is this believable that an average Joe would be able to run around a 5 billion dollar secret government facility and not get caught by anyone? Definitely not. So does this mean I need to rethink the character? Should I give him a military background so that performing these tasks makes more sense? But if I make him more of a military guy, doesn’t that change his entire character? He becomes more confident, more active, more assured. Turning him into that character changes the whole dynamic with his ex-wife as well, who I had leaving him because he was so passive. That situation changes now so I’ll have to come up with a different reason why they got divorced, as well as a different dynamic for their relationship.
Do you see how quickly these changes affect the story? That’s why problem-solving is so difficult. Any major change to your story is going to have repercussions and echoes throughout the rest of the story. You have to decide if those changes are worth it.
For a lot of writers, their solution to this is inactivity. It’s easier to do nothing than to do all those somethings. Cause “something” is going to change things and once things start changing, you’re afraid you can’t press rewind.
I get it. I’ve been there.
But writer’s block is not the path around these obstacles. So here’s what I suggest you do if you have these big problems in your script that you don’t know how to solve.
The easiest thing to do is to work on other problems – preferably smaller ones. There are always other things you can fix in your script. You want to keep fixing those things cause it’s going to keep you writing. And, what often happens, is that when you work on these other things, you get ideas on how to solve the tougher problems.
Another thing I like to do is have a book, or a script, that I’m reading concurrently with my rewrite. I suggest a book that’s in the same postal code as your script but not in the same ballpark.
So, if you’re writing Gone Girl, read something like Silence of the Lambs. Don’t read The Girl On The Train.
You don’t want to read something directly like your script because any ideas that you get from that story are going to feel like you’re copying that story. Whereas, when the book you read is in another genre, any ideas you get from it will feel original, since they’re not happening in the same type of story.
As you’re reading this book, have that big problem in your screenplay in the back of your mind. Always have it sitting there because sooner or later something’s going to happen in that book that makes you realize, “Ooh, I could do that. That’ll help solve my problem.”
To be honest, you should be doing that same thing in your everyday life. As you’re walking around, carry that problem along with you in your brain basket. You never know what you’re going to run into that will give you that lightbulb moment to solve the problem.
Another thing to keep in mind is that the second draft does not have to be Chinatown amazing. Some writers try to knock the second draft out of the park. I disagree with that approach because you’re still in a stage where you’re trying to figure out what works and what doesn’t work in your script.
All you have to do is be a little better than the last draft. Even if you only make a scene 5% better because you found a little dialogue exchange within it that was more clever, or funnier – that’s progress. Which is all you’re looking for. You want this draft to be better than the previous draft.
Finally, I want to remind you that there’s no such thing as writer’s block.
There is only fear.
Fear that you will write something sub-par. That’s the only reason you get “writer’s block.”
I’m not saying you should just write down anything even if you know it’s bad. But trust yourself that you understand your story a little better than you did when you started your first draft. And, like I said, use that knowledge to make the script 3% better in this area, and 5% better in that area. Keep making every variable a little bit better and you will have a superior second draft.
Once again, we are rewriting an average of 3 pages a day. We are writing 6 days a week. That means you are rewriting 18 pages a week.
After this week, you will be finished with 54 pages, which is halfway through your rewrite.
Use the comment section below to vent but also to provide support! Writing’s a lonely venture. We’re all here for each other.
Keep punching that carriage return. :)
I originally started reading a script to review today. It was called “Propel.”
It starts off with this ocean diver woman and she goes diving with a partner. Then, out of nowhere, this whale comes screeching by. It’s upset because it’s got a net caught on its head. She somehow ends up in its mouth. And then, not long after, she ends up in its stomach.
The movie is about her trying to get out of this whale’s stomach before she runs out of oxygen.
Does this sound familiar?
It should.
I reviewed THE EXACT SAME STORY last year via a book called “Whalefall,” which is being turned into a movie.
The reason I bring this up is because I get a dozen e-mails a year from writers telling me that someone stole their idea. Usually from movies that have been made. They’ll say, “Nope was my idea! Jordan Peele stole it!” for example.
Propel is proof that nobody stole your idea. 99.9% of these, “someone stole my idea” stories come from newer writers who assume that they’re so genius, even though they don’t have any movie credits, that people are actively looking to take their ideas. Therefore, if someone writes something similar, it clearly must have been stolen.
Who would’ve thought that two scripts would’ve been written about a diver getting caught in a whale’s stomach and needing to get out before their air ran out? And yet that’s exactly what we have.
The truth is we’re all slurping from the same bowl of ideas. If you come up with an idea that was inspired by something you read ANYWHERE, chances are other people read that too and a portion of them likely came up with the same idea you did.
I’ve seen this TIME AND TIME again, where very specific movie ideas appear in two different scripts.
The only way you can convince me that someone stole your idea is if you had a relationship with this person and you talked a lot about your script with them. Or their script has the exact same dialogue as your script.
But even if you tell me some scenes are similar, that’s not enough. Because certain movie ideas lead to common scene ideas. If 100 people came up with an idea about a dinosaur theme park, I’m guessing 70 of them would’ve thought up the T-Rex car chase set piece. Cause it’s obvious.
Dueling ideas are a reality of this business.
However, if you don’t want to deal with that reality, there are ways around it. The number one way to avoid this problem is to NOT COME UP WITH AN IDEA that is inspired by something you read in the news. Hundreds of thousands, possibly millions, of people have read the same thing. Which means of course someone else is going to come up with the same idea.
I would also avoid ideas inspired by any place on the internet that gets a lot of views. Forget about coming up with movie ideas based on Reddit posts. Those posts have been read to death. Other people are going to write the same movies.
The number one place to find an original movie idea that nobody else will write is YOUR OWN LIFE.
What are the 2 or 3 most original compelling stories from your life? Chances are that there’s a movie there and it’s going to be so specific to your life experience that you won’t have any competition.
That’s why Baby Reindeer has become so huge. It’s a show based on this guy’s own personal experience. And that experience is SO specific that no one else can come up with something similar.
The number two way – STORIES FROM PEOPLE CLOSEST TO YOU.
Again, what we’re looking for are stories that are not publicly available. Once they get online, they’re there for the picking. But if only your friend knows about this crazy story, that’s the perfect story to turn into a screenplay. Cause you two, and maybe a few others, are the only ones who’ve heard it.
Which leads me to the third best way to come up with an original movie idea.
Which is to be okay with coming up with an idea that others might write BECAUSE you’re a good enough writer that your version is going to be better than anything anybody else can come up with.
Let’s go back to Jurassic Park for a second.
70 out of 100 writers would’ve come up with a T-Rex car chase.
But how many writers would’ve come up with the scene where the water in the cup starts vibrating? Where the jeep gets turned upside down? Where the people are stuck in the jeep as the T-Rex’s big snout spins the upside-down car around like a top?
Maybe 5 out of 100? Maybe 3?
That’s all EXECUTION. It’s the writer coming up with a unique scene within that larger movie idea. If you can do that consistently, you’ll write a great script and it won’t matter that other people are writing their version of it as well.
Execution is the primary currency that screenwriters offer in Hollywood.
So, to be clear, find a great story from your own life and write that. If you don’t have that, think back to the stories friends have told you over the years. Is there a movie in one of those ideas? If yes, write that. If you don’t have either of those things, find the best idea you can come up with and then execute it in a way that YOU KNOW nobody else could match.
The only other option I can think of is to be an idea historian. You’ve seen every movie. Every TV show. You track all the scripts that are being sent around town (which you all basically do since you read this site). If you’ve heard of the top 100 movies of each of the past 50 years, then chances are you know when you’ve come up with something truly original.
But even then, it’s difficult. Cause I probably have heard more movie ideas than anyone in Hollywood. Seriously. I can’t think of anyone who would’ve heard or read more than me. And even I sometimes learn that ideas I’ve come up with have been used before.
It happened not long ago. I came up with this idea about violent criminals being forced to endure the exact crimes that they committed on their victims and a friend of mine was like, “Yeah, they did that 70 years ago in The Twilight Zone.” 70 years ago! I thought I’d come up with this brand new idea and someone used it SEVENTY FREAKING YEARS AGO.
So just do your best to come up with the idea and then spend all that energy and effort on the execution. Cause that’s what really matters. :)
Of the many discussion points that have come out of this movie, the one I care most about is that Tom Burke (Praetorian Jack) now needs to be in every single movie going forward for the next 50 years
Genre: Action/Sci-fi/Epic
Premise: A young girl is taken from her people, grows up in a desolate desert city, and learns to become a great road warrior, an essential job in a post-apocalyptic world where everything of value that is transferred between towns will be attacked by outsiders.
About: Director George Miller loved the character of Furiosa so much that he immediately went about creating another movie for her after Fury Road. Ten years later, a new Mad Max movie is born. The plan was to do a Mad Max prequel for Tom Hardy’s character as well. But with Furiosa coming in at just 35 million over the 4-day holiday weekend, it looks like that movie, sadly, will never happen. Miller wrote Furiosa with longtime collaborator, and mainly actor, Nick Lathouris.
Writers: George Miller and Nick Lathouris
Details: 150 minutes!
Furiosa is going to go down in history as a symbol of change in the public’s consumption of theatrical movies. On Hollywood’s biggest movie weekend, it scored the lowest opening of that weekend in 30 years.
I find that unfortunate because Furiosa shouldn’t be the movie that represents theatrical box office’s fall. It should’ve been a movie like Transformers 9 or Fast & Furious 11. Cause those are the movies that have gotten us into this muck.
Furiosa is the kind of movie Hollywood SHOULD be making, which is bigger budget movies that actually have ideas and take risks. It’s not a perfect movie but it’s a very good one. And it could’ve been iconic if not for a couple of factors working against it.
The main factor is expectation. You can’t put this movie after Fury Road. Fury Road was pure adrenaline. To follow that with a years-long character-driven epic is confusing. Whereas, if they put this movie FIRST and Fury Road SECOND, it would’ve been one of the best one-two combos ever. EVER.
For those who haven’t seen it, and apparently there are a lot of you, Furiosa is a complex movie that follows a little girl, Furiosa, who’s taken from a hidden “Eden” if you will, to become the de facto daughter of a rising menace in a post-apocalyptic desert world, Dementus (Chris Hemsworth).
Dementus wants to conquer the big swinging d**k in the region, Immortan Joe, so he can have his cool rock water town. When his initial efforts are thwarted, he goes about a years long plan of taking over Gas Town, where all the region’s gas is kept, and Bullet Town, where all the weaponry is made.
During this time, Young Furiosa gets transferred over to the care of Immortan Joe (in one of the few sloppy plot beats) and is able to escape the high society slavery there to live secretly amongst the townspeople, where she gets a reputation as a fearless go-getter.
This gets her a position as a truck-protector for whenever Immortan Joe needs to get gas or weapons from the two other towns. Through this process, she becomes close with Joe’s star driver, Praetorian Jack, and soon the two are riding together (and kissing together! – well, offscreen at least). Everything’s going fine until Furiosa’s nemesis, Dementus, makes an aggressive bid to take over everything, forcing Furiosa to square off against him in one final battle.
Furiosa is a script you could never write as a spec.
Which is both a strength and a weakness.
It’s a strength because the script is unlike anything you’ve seen from a studio in two decades. It’s basically a period piece masquerading as a sci-fi action movie. Years upon years pass in several different places within the script. It’s not just one time jump and we’re done. We move through time gradually, and Hollywood movies just don’t do that. Hollywood movies, and spec scripts for that matter, like urgency. They like their time to be contained because it makes everything feel like it needs to happen right now. Which adds a ton of energy to the story.
So that choice alone makes this script feel unique.
It’s a weakness because we’re never quite sure where we are in the story. A couple of times in this movie I kind of sat up and asked myself, “Where are we going here?” It wasn’t clear.
The reason it wasn’t clear was because George Miller would focus on one particular time period within this multi-time-period epic and not give us any goals, stakes, or urgency to work with. One section was just about building Furiosa’s relationship with Praetorian Jack. There wasn’t really a goal within the sequence, which was frustrating.
But once you figured out that this was an epic, you sat back and let it happen, instead of trying to control it. Which is when the movie really started showing its mettle. Cause I can’t remember an epic sci-fi movie that has done it better than this one. I remember certain writers trying. Christopher Nolan tried with Interstellar. But that movie comes nowhere close to this one in both quality and vision.
One of the more interesting choices Miller made was to stay away from dialogue in regards to his main character. This is something I get into in my amazing dialogue book – this concept of showing as opposed to telling. And Furiosa is definitely a show-don’t-tell character. She rarely speaks.
There are two reasons to take this approach. Number one is that you don’t feel confident in your dialogue-writing ability. Which is fair. If you don’t feel great about your dialogue-writing, then write stories where your characters don’t talk much. It’s a legitimate strategy.
The other point is that delivering believable dialogue is notably challenging. I’ll give you a quick assignment to see what I mean. Go to Youtube and search for short movies. Not the best ones. Ones with 50,000 views or less. What you’ll find is that a lot of these short films actually look quite professional. However, the second one of the characters starts speaking, the suspension of disbelief is lifted and we’re aware of how fake everything feels. It’s because the dialogue is lousy. Which you can hide if characters don’t speak much. Even at the professional level.
Cause let’s be real: No writer has ever lived in a post-apocalyptic world before where guys ride around on giant stages in full hair-band makeup playing guitar. Any dialogue you try to create for that world risks sounding ridiculous.
This is why almost all of the dialogue in Furiosa is centered around big speeches (Dementus screaming up to Immortan Joe how he plans to take over his town). Big speeches are theatrical in nature, which hides the potential ridiculousness of what’s being said. Big speeches also often contain logic, which is less susceptible to sounding stupid. “You will adhere to our demands or we will attack you!” That’s a much less tricky line to pull off than something that contains emotion, such as, “You complete me.”
Which is why when we’re outside of these speeches, the characters rarely say much. And I think that’s by design due to what I just said.
But the thing that really surprised me about Furiosa was the character work. Ironically, not with Furoisa herself. Furiosa was solid. But the stand-out characters were Dementus and Praetorian Jack.
The thing you always have to worry about when you’re doing prequels is finding villains that are worthy of the villain precedent you set in the original movie. Literally nobody has figured that out yet. Which makes sense. If the villains in these prequels were so awesome, *they* would’ve been the big villain in the next movie.
As a result, a lot of these prequel villains are middle-management types. Orson Krennic in Rogue One, for example. Who was scared of that guy? Nobody.
Miller was actually in a tricky spot because, while he had a cool villain already in Immortan Joe, there was no way to make him the villain of the movie. Why? Because Immortan Joe had to live. He has to survive to make it to Fury Road. That means Furiosa can’t defeat him. She would have to lose to him. Which would’ve led to a weak ending.
So Miller created this other character named Dementus, giving Furiosa somebody she could defeat, making her victorious at the end. And because of the “period piece” format, Miller was really able to explore this character on a deep level.
He wasn’t your average villain. He’s kind of dumb. He’s a terrible organizer. Everything falls to sh*t that he tries to manage. But he’s aggressive and he’s determined. So he’s always moving forward. He’s always trying to get to the next level, which is what you want out of your villain AND your hero. Because that means, inevitably, the two are going to run into each other, which is exactly what happens.
The other standout here was Praetorian Jack and it’s SOOOOO depressing that this movie bombed because, if it didn’t, this guy would’ve had his own movie. He’s so cool! He’s basically the original Mad Max (Mel Gibson) but more in control. He’s like the guy who walks into the bar and every single guy inside wants to be friends with him. He’s just cool! There’s no other way to put it.
It’s hard to write one really good character. This movie had three of them: Furiosa, Dementus, Praetorian Jack.
And those characters were bolstered by that unique George Miller flair. Like George Lucas, he never just puts characters in front of the frame. He’s always got all this other stuff going on in the background. Like Dementus’s “mimicer.” There’s this guy who hangs around Dementus and mimics everything he says and does. It’s hilarious! It’s just like Rock Star Guy. You wonder how he comes up with these things.
This movie proved to me what I thought was impossible. That a prequel can be good and not just backstory.
I’m fine if you didn’t go out to the theater to see this. But for all that is good and holy, watch this when it comes out on digital. For people who love sci-fi? It’s one of the best movies in the genre ever made.
[ ] What the hell did I just watch?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the price of admission
[x] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: It’s amazing how easily you can make a character likable by showing how kind they are to your hero. The main reason we like Praetorian Jack is because he’s so kind to Furiosa. It’s simple but so very effective.
