Today, Scriptshadow asks… Is there a script in the last five years that’s this good that falls apart this spectacularly?
Genre: Thriller
Premise: A couple and their adopted daughter have their cabin invaded by four strangers who take the family captive. But they’re not here to kill them. They’re here for something far worse.
About: This is a bestselling book that is now being made into a movie. The book was adapted by Steve Desmond and Michael Sherman, whose Back to the Future like script, “Harry’s All Night Hamburger’s,” finished top 10 on the 2018 Black List.
Writers: Steve Desmond and Michael Sherman (based on the novel by Paul Tremblay)
Details: 100 pages
This is going to be a controversial comments section. I implore you, once again, to read the script first and then read my review.
One look at the Amazon page for “Cabin” shows that it’s got 3 out of 5 stars on 790 ratings. That’s a low score for a book that has that many reads. Usually, if a book is popular enough to get that many purchases, it’s because people liked it and told other people about it, resulting in a higher score.
If you read the reviews, you get an idea of what the problem might be. Here’s a common response: “This is the first of his that I’ve read and although I liked his writing style and found the premise of the book fascinating, I (like many others) felt the tang of disappointment start to form about 2/3rds of the way through the book and then literally threw it on the floor after the final page. Had such great potential, but sadly fails to even remotely live up to itself.”
Yesterday we had a great script that solidified itself with a great ending.
Today we have a great script that destroys itself with a terrible ending.
In a way, a great script with a bad ending is worse than a bad script with a bad ending. Because at least with the bad script, you didn’t have any expectations. Conversely, being let down as badly as “Cabin” lets you down makes you want to “literally” throw the script “on the floor.”
So what’s all the fuss about?
7 year old Wen is outside a remote cabin catching grasshoppers when a giant of a man named Leonard blocks out the sun and introduces himself. Leonard appears to be a sweet man, befriending Wen and talking to her about her grasshopper catching adventures.
But there’s something underneath Leonard’s kindness, a kind of urgency that implies something bad is afoot. We see that badness in the form of his three approaching friends, a nurse, Sabrina, a short stocky cook named Adriane, and a redneck dude named Redmond. They all have homemade Mad Max like weapons with them.
Wen darts inside, telling her two dads, Andrew (liberal) and Eric (conservative) that there are bad people outside. The three of them try and fortify all entrances but Leonard kicks down the door. Once the invaders have cornered the family, they tell them they’re not here to hurt them.
You see, the four of them have been called here by a higher power shown to them through visions to get these three to sacrifice one member of their family. If they don’t do this by sundown, all 7 billion people on earth will die, leaving them to be the last three people on the planet.
Well, naturally, Eric and Andrew call b.s. Clearly you guys are all looney toons. But when the family refuses to kill someone, the invaders place Redmund down and beat him to death with their Mad Max weapons. Leonard then turns on the TV, where we see that a magnitude 9 quake just hit off the coast of Oregon. “This is just the beginning,” Leonard says. “The longer you wait, the more people die.”
Andrew calls the earthquake a coincidence but Eric is starting to waver. During the script, we occasionally flash back to the lives of each participant, both the family and the invaders, before this day happened. It helps provide some context for where each party is coming from. As sunset nears, Leonard does everything in his power to convince Eric and Andrew that this must be done. But they refuse to believe. Or at least Andrew does. Eric however………
This script FLEW.
One of the fastest reads of the year.
Right from the Ode to Frankenstein opening all the way til the death of the third invader, this thing moves like wildfire.
What I always tell you guys to do – no matter how much dead horse beating it involves – is to find a fresh angle on a familiar concept. Here, we have the very familiar setup of a home invasion. However, there’s a twist. The people invading the house cannot harm the family. The family can only harm itself.
At first glance, this doesn’t seem like that big of a change but the more you read and the more desperate the invaders become, you start to sympathize with their situation. What if you could only save yourself and everybody else on earth if you convinced someone to do the most horrible act a human can do? There’s a desperation to that situation because who’s going to willingly kill a family member just because you say the world’s going to end?
Another way that “Cabin” separates itself is the family involved. At first, I wasn’t on board with the choice of characters. Typically, in these types of scenarios, you’ll make the house owners entitled college kids. This means that you’re kind of rooting for the kids to kill each other. There’s definitely more of a “fun” vibe to the situation.
Whereas here, you have this progressive gay couple and this little girl… it definitely creates a more serious vibe. So I didn’t like that these were the people who were in this situation. It felt too intense.
But then I remembered one of the key tenets of good storytelling: Make things difficult. If we want the characters to die – like some Friday the 13th sequel – that’s not as gripping as if we want them to live.
With that said, I battled throughout the script with whether the execution was sophisticated enough to justify this choice. Had the ending worked, I’d say it was a win. But when the ending crashed and burned, it validated my fear. The writers didn’t have the weight to pull it off.
Despite that, the script is insanely readable.
I have to give it to these guys because they structured this well.
Normally, home invasions get boring in the second act because you’re artificially moving characters from room to room and recycling conversations to fill up pages. But, here, they add this repeating ticking time bomb of, if you don’t do the sacrifice, we have to kill one of our own. That means we’re always 12-15 pages away from another exciting situation. It isn’t just a way to keep your script entertaining. It’s a way to subconsciously create a structure in the reader’s head where they understand where the script is going and that they’ll be repeatedly rewarded for continuing to read.
This might sound like Carson psychobabble until you consider the opposite. Let’s say the bad guys don’t kill one of their own every couple of hours. Now you’ve got the same situation on page 90 as you had on page 10. Nothing is building. Nothing is getting worse. And most importantly, it’s hard to create new situations if everything stays exactly the same. There has to be consistent change in a script for it to remain interesting.
Let’s talk about that ending. Major spoilers ahead. You’ve been warned.
First off, the way one of the family members is killed is by accident. There’s a scuffle for a gun and Wen is accidentally shot and killed. There are a couple of things wrong with this. One, the audience doesn’t want a 7 year old girl to die in a movie that’s supernatural entertainment. They’d accept it if this was “Manchester by the Sea 2: Double Depression.” But this is entertainment here. So it feels off.
But also, it destroys the whole point of the movie – which is the choice. The invaders point out that Wen’s death wasn’t a chosen kill. Which means that Andrew or Eric still have to kill one or the other. But if you lose your 7 year old girl, that choice becomes a lot easier. Most parents, especially right after their kid died, would have no problem dying themselves because they can’t live without their child.
So as Eric and Andrew resist wanting to die, it doesn’t ring true. In fact, you wouldn’t even know they lost their daughter five pages ago.
But that’s not the worst part of the ending. The worst part is that Eric and Andrew hug each other, babble some nonsense about how love conquers all, then drive off into the sunset together, and we never find out what happens.
It was borderline infuriating. Look, I get that some writers like to leave the ending up to the reader. But the engine that drove this script was, is this thing real or isn’t it? And to not answer that question feels like a big F U.
Despite all this, I have to give the script a ‘worth the read’ because I absolutely loved everything up until Wen’s death. And that’s gotta be worth something, right? But I have a feeling this script is going to make a lot of people really angry.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[x] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: In these types of movies, who you choose as the victims will determine the tone of the film. If you choose victims that the audience wants to see die (Friday the 13th), it will play as entertainment. If you choose victims that the audience wants to see live (Straw Dogs), it will play serious. Make sure you know which of these movies you’re writing and don’t mix them up!
Just when we were ready to label the 2019 Black List a joke, today’s script not only earns an “impressive,” but should’ve been the number 1 script on the list.
Genre: (will reveal later)
Premise: A pair of out-of-work immigrant brothers catch a break when they are hired as day laborers to work at a house in the Hollywood Hills. But the job doesn’t go as expected.
About: Here’s writer Jared Anderson’s IMDB bio — Jared Anderson is a Los Angeles based Director from Salt Lake City, Utah. He earned a Directing Fellowship at the AFI Conservatory in Los Angeles where he made his AFI Thesis Film, “Unremarkable”, which in addition to playing at festivals worldwide, was nominated for the 2016 Student BAFTA Award, the 2016 ASC Student Heritage Award, won best dramatic short at the NYC Shorts Film Festival, and was selected as a Vimeo Staff Pick and currently has nearly 80,000 views. He is currently working with the creators of the new FX series, “Snowfall”.
Writer: Jared Anderson
Details: 101 pages
I’m going to warn you that you should read this script before you read my review. The best thing about this script is its many reveals. The script isn’t going to be a fun read if you already know what happens. So go download this script, come back, read my review, and we can all talk about how awesome it is.
Martin and Aracelli are a 20-something married couple who happen to be illegal immigrants in the United States. And they’re struggling badly. Their infant son has a sore on his forehead so bad it needs to be stitched up. Even then it doesn’t heal. But since they’re illegal, they can’t go to a doctor.
Aracelli tells Martin that today is going to be a special day. He’s going to get a job and bring home lots of money, which will lead to more jobs and more money, and before they know it, they’ll be living the American dream. So off Martin goes with his brother, Enzo, to Home Depot, looking for a labor job.
Enzo’s been in the U.S. a little longer than Martin and therefore speaks some English. That allows them to outmaneuver the other workers and get a job with not just anyone, but Gwyneth Paltrow-like movie star, Robin. Robin is very nice. -too nice, almost – and is thrilled to have the brothers helping her.
They get to her Hollywood Hills home and she explains there’s going to be a political fundraiser here in 48 hours and she needs the grounds spic and span. The main problem is that she invested in a marijuana business, which means she needs to move a bunch of imported dirt (yes, imported) into her basement, which is where the marijuana is going to be grown.
Neither Martin nor Enzo know what she’s talking about half the time (partly because they don’t speak English well and partly because she’s crazy) but what they do know is that something’s not adding up. There are some rather large black birds that fly around in the house, there are certain rooms that are off-limits, and, oh yeah, Robin just shot someone upstairs!
The two run upstairs to see that a migrant worker, not unlike them, is on the ground with a gunshot wound, dying. Robin screams that she opened the door and he just started attacking her. “We need to call the police!” She says. But then “realizes” something. “You two aren’t illegal, are you?” Neither of them answer. “Because the police will question you, they’ll find out you’re illegal, and send you out of the country.” Instead, she offers, you should just leave.
Martin and Enzo run out, wondering what the hell just happened. They decide not to tell their family and forget about the whole thing. But the next morning, Robin shows up at their house! Did either of them tell her where they lived? She says she needs help finishing the job, and to Martin’s dismay, Enzo, who’s been acting strange all morning, says he’s going with her. Martin goes to protect his brother. But, as it turns out, Enzo’s going to need a lot more than his brother’s protection to get out of this alive.
Just to be clear, I deliberately left out some key details to preserve the script’s primary mystery.
There’s always a scene that comes along in a good script that confirms to me, “Okay, I’m in good hands.”
That scene happens in The Laborer when the brothers were at Home Depot trying to get a job for the day. Anderson had already done a great job setting up the dire circumstances the brothers were living in. There are too many people living in their house. They have no money. Martin’s son needs medical attention. It’s not good.
The reason this is important is because when you get to scenes like this one, where your heroes are trying to achieve something, the more that’s at stake, the better the scene will play. We’ve set up that the stakes are very high for them getting this job. So you can feel the suspense as they wait for their opportunity.
But Anderson doesn’t stop there. He uses the R2-D2 trick. What’s the R2-D2 trick? It’s a time-tested guaranteed-to-work screenwriting tip!
What happens is that Robin comes over and looks at all the laborers to try and find one for the job. But she doesn’t pick Enzo and Martin. She picks some other guy. And we watch as she walks away with the guy, to her car, the job lost.
But Enzo doesn’t quit. This is his dream job, working for this woman. So he runs up and he pitches Robin him and his brother. Two-for-one. Robin thinks about it and agrees.
For anyone who forgot, in Star Wars, there’s a scene where Luke Skywalker and Uncle Owen are buying droids from the Jawas. They pick C-3PO and some red droid. We watch in horror as R2-D2 is left behind, splitting up this comedic duo we’ve fallen in love with. Can it be true? R2-D2 is going to be left with these things???
However, at the last second, the red droid pops a power converter and C-3PO pitches Luke on taking his buddy R2-D2 instead. Luke agrees and, thank goodness, our droid team is reunited.
Same idea here in The Laborer. Anderson could’ve easily had Robin walk up, look at everyone, point to Enzo and Martin, and off we go to the house. But where’s the fun in that?
Or, the bigger question all screenwriters should be asking is, where’s the fun in certainty? There isn’t any. Drama comes from un-certainty. You have to constantly create doubt as a storyteller. You must make us think, over and over again, in many different scenarios, that our heroes will fail. So when they get their wins, it feels earned, but, more importantly, it was a lot more entertaining to watch.
But here’s the kicker. That was just a normal scene in The Laborer. Things get a lot lot crazier in this movie. If you want to know what readers are looking for, this script is it. We’re looking for familiar stories that are told in ways we’ve never seen them told before.
You have no idea where this script is going. I mean, there’s one scene where Enzo goes to a reclusive gay bathhouse where I was sitting there shaking my head asking if I’d been transported into another reality. And I’ve read some crazy scenes before. They usually go off the rails. But this one culminates in an image that will haunt you for the rest of your life. I promise you that.
This script is so wild and fun that I kept waiting for it to fall apart. It’s one of the bummers of the job. I’ve watched so many great scripts crumble right before they get to the finish line that I don’t want to get my expectations up for a great ending only to be disappointed once again. But this is one of the rare scripts that nails the landing. There’s nothing I like better than a clever twist. And this has one.
It also has a lot of unexpected developments. Every time I thought I knew where it was going, it would surprise me. I’m actually jealous. Cause, usually, I can predict scripts like they’re written on the back of my hand. I watched “Underwater” last night and it was like it was spat out of some rudimentary screenwriter AI. Every single beat was hit at the exact moment it was supposed to hit. And there wasn’t a single surprising moment in the film. I don’t know how this Jared Anderson guy approaches his structuring, but I want to know. It seems like he has a system where whenever the normal path is to go right, he makes sure to go left, and vice versa. The Laborer is a very well-crafted consistently surprising puzzle.
I won’t say more than that. I’ll just say read it and prove to me there was a better script on this year’s Black List. Right now the only four good scripts on the list are The Traveler, The Menu, The Process, and now this.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[x] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: You always want to add layers of difficulty for the hero’s journey, even if a layer makes it JUST A LITTLE BIT HARDER than it usually is. Because the worst thing you do can do for your hero is to make things easy. Easy is boring. So by adding layers of difficulty – and you can add as many as you want – it creates more obstacles that the heroes must overcome. It was really clever making it so that Martin and Enzo only understood 40% of what Robin was saying. It added that one extra layer of difficulty in the communication, which made it that much harder to win in the end.
P.S. If anyone predicted where this script would go, I want to hear from you. But I can promise you, even with me telling you to watch for the unexpected, that you won’t be able to do it. :)
Just like you’re not a real comedian unless you’re looking for jokes in every situation you encounter, you’re not a real screenwriter unless you’re always looking for that next movie idea. That skill becomes even more important in times like these, when you know Hollywood is going to be hot on the Pandemic Express over the next few months, gobbling up the best pandemic ideas it can find.
Well I’m going to make sure that Scriptshadow readers are ahead of the game when it comes to pandemic-inspired concepts.
The trick is to not go with a literal interpretation of the idea. If your concept is, essentially, “2012,” but with a pandemic, nobody’s going to give you money for that. Anybody can come up with a literal interpretation of an idea.
If the news covers a missing plane story, like Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, writing a movie about a plane that flies out of Malaysia and disappears isn’t going to get you anywhere. By the time you pitch that idea, Hollywood will have already been pitched it ten times already. THAT DAY.
As writers, your job is to come up with THE ANGLE.
This is what good writers bring to the table. They exploit the hot subject matter via an angle that the average person isn’t creative enough to think of. Just like Michael Jordan’s turnaround jumper was the shot that made him the most valuable player in the league, your ability to come up with creative angles to common concepts is what will make you valuable.
That brings us to the deal that 21 Laps (Stranger Things) and Sight Unseen (Bad Education) just teamed up on.
They purchased the rights to a 2018 Medium article titled, “Survival of the Richest.” The article follows a futurist who travels around the world giving speeches about where the future is headed.
One day he flies out to what he believes will be another one of these conferences but when he gets to his hotel, he’s ushered into a private room and greeted by five billionaires. These billionaires want to get his opinion on where he sees the future going.
It makes sense. If you want to keep your billionaire status, you have to know where the markets are going in the future. Is oil still going to be important in 20 years? Or should I invest in hydrogen-powered cars? Except those weren’t the questions these billionaires were asking.
They were more interested in topics like, “If I own a compound in the apocalypse, how do I prevent my security team from turning on me when money is no longer worth anything?” The question turns out to be surprisingly complex, with no one able to come up with a good answer.
Unfortunately, the rest of the article reads like the author forgot what his point was, rambling on about well-tread topics such as whether robots will eventually replace humans in the work force. But when you’re looking for things to adapt, the concept is more important than the execution. That’s because a good screenwriter can take a good concept and run with it.
And the angle here is an intriguing one. It’s not about what you and I do when the resources run out. It’s about what Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg do. These are people who have built impenetrable capitalistic fortresses – the rest of the world desperately clinging to the jobs and products they offer.
But what happens when we no longer need their products or their jobs? What happens when a billion dollars holds less value than a pair of shoes? That’s a movie angle there.
But it isn’t everything and since Deadline’s announcement didn’t provide enough details on the pitch, we’re left to make some fun guesses as to which direction they might go in. The cool thing about this idea is you can go big or you can go small.
There’s a version of this where our futurist is flown out to a general meeting with a controversial billionaire at his remote home. He then learns he’s here to evaluate the billionaire’s compound to see if he’s properly prepared for the apocalypse.
The futurist eventually stumbles upon a giant secret – that the reason he’s being asked to secure this person’s apocaoypse defenses is because a network of billionaires is planning to incite the apocalypse then become the new global government. When our billionaire learns he’s onto him, our hero has to escape. This would be the low-budget “Ex Machina” version of the concept.
Or we can set things in the apocalypse. A billionaire gets word that a mob of 200 people is on its way to his compound. He has two hours to prepare for the onslaught, depending only on his small security team and high-tech defensive equipment (preferably technology that made him all his money in the real world). Sort of like a modern-day medieval castle takeover – barbarians at the gate.
Finally, we have a futurist who’s flown out to what he thinks will be a conference, only to end up at a remote South American billionaire’s home. He meets several billionaires who pose the same questions mentioned in the article.
They offer him a job. They’ve put together a “Stanford Prison” like experiment whereby they’ve hired several hundred people who are located several miles from a compound. Those people have one goal. Get into the compound and into the control room. Our futurist will consult our billionaires in real time on how to stop them.
However, he soon learns these volunteers have been offered a giant monetary reward for succeeding to ensure they will act as desperately as real people in the apocalypse, and that the preventive measures being used to stop them are deadly. This isn’t an experiment. It’s real.
Good concepts are like bountiful rivers. They offer all sorts of possibilities. It will be interesting to see which idea 21 Laps and Sight Unseen go with. What about you? Where would you take this idea?
Last month, we had Sci-Fi Showdown. The voting was too close to call so last week I reviewed one of the top vote getters. That script didn’t quite hit the mark for me and, as it happens, I’d read Nowhere Girl a long time ago and liked it. Since I wanted a script that celebrated all the hard work people put into submitting to Sci-Fi Showdown, I decided to review Nowhere Girl this week.
Genre: Sci-Fi
Premise: A remorseless killer is given the death penalty, only to wake up 1,000 years later in a spacecraft built for one, with an artificial conscience implanted into her nervous system and a life sentence to serve out.
Why You Should Read: I wanted to write a character who has no redeeming qualities whatsoever, the most horrible monster I could imagine, and still somehow make her worth rooting for. Since my wife is a schoolteacher, and I have received that dreaded text that her school is on active shooter lockdown a couple of times, I knew who that character would be. So now I’d love to know if my fellow writers think I pulled it off.
Writer: Chris Cobb
Details: 113 pages
When it comes to script-reading, the only thing that truly matters is, does the script stay with you?
I’ve read plenty of what I’d call “good” screenplays that people have later reminded me about and I had no idea what they’re talking about. On the flip side, I’ve read some scripts that I didn’t like at all but they’ve remained seared into my brain years later (Christy Hall’s, “Get Home Safe” for example).
I’ve come to the conclusion that if a script stays with you, good or bad, it has something going for it.
I read Nowhere Girl over a year ago as a consultation script and I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it. It’s such a weird premise. It’s something that shouldn’t work at all. And yet it digs into you in a way other scripts don’t.
There were some issues with it but I don’t remember what those issues were so I’m excited to read this new draft and, hopefully, whatever problems I had with the script will have been solved. Let’s take a look!
We don’t meet 19 year old Sara under the best circumstances seeing as she’s mowing down anyone she sees at her university with a sub-automatic machine gun. After Sara kills a good chunk of people, a classmate of hers, Amber, pleads for her to stop the killing. She even offers to be Sara’s friend. But Sara wants none of it, gunning down Amber as well.
When a SWAT team rushes in, Sara tosses a bomb at them but it blows up too quickly, the blast hitting her. Cut to months later as a disfigured Sara informs a courtroom that she wants the death sentence. A year later, she gets her wish to die.
Only to wake up in a strange room. Sara learns that she’s on a spaceship far far away from earth. Andrew, an A.I. chip inside of Sara, explains what’s going on. It’s been one thousand years since that fateful day and her job is now to help facilitate an intricate bot delivery system (they drop off bots to bigger bots which then deliver those bots to planets or outposts) in the middle of nowhere.
As time goes on, Sara learns how the system works. She must routinely report to her local outpost (to a man named “The Warden”) and assure him that all systems are running smoothly, while managing the biggest threat to the ship, ion storms, each of which have the capacity to destroy her.
Just as Sara is starting to get the hang of things, Andrew takes on the identity of a familiar voice. It’s Amber, the girl who tried to stop her that fateful day. Sara finds herself drawn to Amber, ultimately befriending her. But when the Warden threatens to shut Amber off forever, Sara will do anything to save the girl whose life she took.
Let me start off by saying I’m a big fan of this script (in case I didn’t already make that clear).
It’s so bold. It’s so unexpected. It’s so different.
You’re not going to have a script experience like Nowhere Girl anytime soon.
I also put a premium on scripts that don’t go where I think they’re going to go. I love turning the page and having no idea what comes next. That’s Nowhere Girl in a nutshell. I mean how do you predict a story that starts off with a teenage female school shooter who then ends up on a ship a thousand years in the future? It’s just such an odd cool setup.
Ironically, Nowhere Girl’s biggest strength is also its biggest weakness. The reason you don’t know where it’s going is because there’s not a lot of structure. Neither Sara nor Andrew have a clear goal. That allows Chris to take the story in a lot of different directions. But it also risks those directions feeling pointless and unfocused.
A loose plot is fine if the character development is stellar but when it comes to Nowhere Girl, it felt like we were always flirting with good character development but never quite getting there. That’s because I don’t know what flaw Sara is trying to overcome and I’m not sure how Amber solves that flaw.
We know Sara doesn’t feel anything. She’s been diagnosed a psychopath. Andrew later shows Sara a replay of the shooting but forces her to feel what Amber felt during the exchange. This allows Sara to feel for the first time but the second the experience is over, Andrew erases the feeling so Sara is back to normal.
In other words, Sara learns how to feel in the first third of the movie. So doesn’t that mean she’s overcome her flaw? She’s learned what feeling is? Or was that meant to warn her up to the sensation of feeling? The real lessons are ahead of her. I’m not entirely sure.
Then when Amber replaces Andrew, she literally becomes Sara’s conscience. Amber actually says that (“I’m your conscience.”). That means that she’s not Amber. She’s Sara’s conscience. So as Sara and Amber build their friendship over the course of the second act, it would seem we’re further exploring the character arc of Sara being able to “feel.” Except we’re not. Because the person she’s befriending isn’t Amber. It’s her own conscience.
I don’t know. It was confusing. No matter how many times I tried to make sense of it in my head, it didn’t work. It seems like Chris is overcomplicating this. Maybe he can shed some light on what he was attempting to do so we can help him.
If you ask me, a better plot would be a good starting point. Plot equals structure and structure helps dictate where your characters need to go, both internally and externally.
You have these remote delivery vessels scattered throughout the sector to play with. And we know about these outposts where there are physical human beings. If Sara and Amber could get to a delivery vessel which, in turn, could get them to an outpost, with the ultimate plan being to escape or convince the bureaucrats to let them go, that could give you the strong goal this story needs.
I could imagine an ending where Sara gets to the outpost, is escaping in the halls, guns at her side, being pursued by others. And she essentially has the same choice she had at the beginning of the story. She can kill or she can stand down. And this time she chooses to stand down.
Another option is that maybe the goal is rehabilitation, plain and simple. Sara has two jobs. Job 1 is to perform the deliveries. Job 2 is she has to do her rehabilitation exercises for hours every day, which amount to Andrew helping her learn how to feel. That will be done through reliving certain life experiences. And it will also be providing lessons that challenge one to to feel emotion. At the end of a certain time period, she will get an audience with the Warden to prove she’s changed. If she has, she wins back her freedom. If she hasn’t, she’s got to wait another (5? 10? 30? years?) for her next chance.
Neither of these suggestions are perfect but the point is they provide structure. So if not them, find something else that can give this script a plot. Because it can’t be a character floating in space talking to herself the whole time. There has to be more to it.
With that said, Nowhere Girl was unlike anything I’ve ever read. There’s a movie in here somewhere and I think if we all gave Chris our suggestions, it would help him find that movie. Intrigued to hear what all of you thought cause I enjoyed this!
Script link: Nowhere Girl
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[x] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Whenever I encounter a script issue, the best solution is usually the simplest one. So when I look at Nowhere Girl’s issue of Sara’s conscience being an AI chip inside her body who later takes on the form of Amber and it being confusing what Sara is really bonding with in her pursuit to change (befriending Amber or befriending her conscience) my solution is to massively simplify it. Why can’t Andrew be the ship’s AI? Not a chip inside Sara. He creates a digital replica of Amber and Sara must learn how to feel through the friendship she builds with this entity? That’s a lot simpler, isn’t it?
If you asked 100 of Hollywood’s top producers, directors, actors, and writers, who the hottest screenwriter in the world was at the moment, the majority of them would say Phoebe Waller Bridge.
Bridge is killing it all areas of screenwriting but the thing she’s best known for is her dialogue. It’s been a long time since we’ve had a screenwriter whose dialogue was this celebrated, so I thought, why don’t we break some of her dialogue down?
And what better scene to dissect than the opening scene of the Fleabag pilot. Do not worry if you’ve never seen the show. I’m going to include the pages here for you to read.
The first lesson for why this dialogue is so great is our most important one. Fleabag is a talker. She’s the definition of a dialogue-friendly character. One of the biggest mistakes writers make is they try and inject punchy dialogue onto characters who wouldn’t say those things. Imagine putting John Wick in this scene. He’s not going to give you anything close to what Fleabag is saying because John Wick operates with his gun, not his tongue.
So if you’re ever anxious about writing good dialogue in your script, the job starts long before you’ve written a word. You want to conceive of a primary character – it doesn’t have to be your hero but it does have to be a key charcter – who likes to talk or who says interesting things or who says controversial things or who’s clever or who’s funny or who’s weird or who talks first and thinks later. This decision will dictate 90% of the quality of your dialogue.
The next thing we’ve got going here is that Fleabag talks directly to the viewer. Now some people hate characters who do this. I get it. My feeling has always been, if you’re going to do something that ballsy, you better have the skills to back it up. There’s nothing worse than a “clever” character talking to the camera who’s a big fat ball of lame.
But assuming you’re good at breaking the 4th wall, doing so achieves a unique effect. It both breaks the monotony and it breaks up the predictability of the conversational flow. You’re no longer dependent on His Turn to Talk, Her Turn to Talk, His Turn to Talk, Her Turn to Talk.
This is why I’ll tell writers that just because Character A asks a question, that doesn’t mean Character B has to answer. They can say nothing and Character A can move on to the next line. At least that way, you’re breaking up SOME of the monotony of the conversation. But outside of a few other tricks, you’re relegated to His Turn, Her Turn, His Turn, Her Turn.
Once you throw this new option into the mix of your protagonist talking to a third person that the second character can’t see, that gives you a rare opportunity to do all sorts of creative things with the dialogue, which is exactly what Bridge does here. I mean you have two characters exchanging dialogue who aren’t even talking to each other. He’s talking to her. She’s talking to us. It’s creativity like this that opens the door for a slew of new options.
The next thing Fleabag does is she talks about things you’re not supposed talk about. Again, this doesn’t come out of nowhere. It’s baked into the character so you have to make that choice early on. But once it’s there, it’s powerful because there are very few things left that are taboo. And the fact that Fleabag consistently finds the taboo subject and talks about it so openly provides something very rare in movie and TV dialogue, which is that you don’t know what the character is going to say next.
You know how in 90% of movie conversations, you can approximately predict what the next line is going to be? Those moments never happen on Fleabag. You’re always unsure of what she’s going to say next and that’s a major key to keeping people watching. As soon as audiences figure out what’s coming next, what’s their incentive to continue?
I don’t want to overlook the technical side of dialogue here so I want you to go back to the first page and reread Fleabag’s opening monologue. Notice that IT’S ONLY ONE SENTENCE. It’s not grammatically correct. It’s not aesthetically perfect. It’s a big messy run-on sentence. However, it fits the character and it fits the situation. She’s someone who rambles on, especially when she’s drunk and horny. If this monologue had been broken into four proper sentences, it wouldn’t have felt right.
Finally, the dialogue is honest and authentic to the character who’s speaking. It isn’t movie-logic dialogue where the writer is attempting to imprint their cool lines or relevant thoughts onto the character. “But you’re drunk, and he made the effort to come all the way here so, you let him.” I don’t know a lot of writers who would be willing to go to this place. It’s borderline uncomfortable to hear. But that rawness, that realness, is what makes it authentic.
One of the best ways to study dialogue is to find a scene that has good dialogue then imagine what the scene would’ve been if written by an average writer. Because those are the scenes I read thousands of times over and have become bored by.
I mean think about how many scenes have been written where a guy or girl comes over for a booty call. Now try and think of any that are as good as this scene. Go ahead. I’ll wait. It doesn’t matter. You won’t find one.
I bet you the scenes you tried to find have the obvious funny initial text exchange. Maybe some clever quip about boning. Cut to the guy showing up. There’s some drunk dialogue. Then they smash. It’s just so… predictable.
When you can take that common of a scenario and twist it into something we’ve never seen before, that’s what’s going to set the stage for a good dialogue exchange. Because you can only do so much with the standard setup.
To summarize everything: First we have a dialogue-friendly character. Fleabag says whatever she’s thinking. She has zero tact. Next, the fourth wall option provides an opportunity for dialogue creativity. This makes the scene read different from what we’re used to. The dialogue is risky in places. It’s authentic to the main character. And, overall, there’s a desire to explore and be playful. You’re not going to find good dialogue the way you find a good plot. You have to be more open and relaxed and allow the words to flow through you. If you try to control them or you try and logically build a great dialogue exchange, it’s not going to work. Conversation is often illogical.
It’s funny. Despite Hollywood universally agreeing that Bridge is an amazing dialogue writer, whenever I post one of these breakdowns, there are always commenters who scream out, ‘THIS IS THE WORST DIALOGUE EVER, CARSON! YOU’RE WRONG.’ I welcome these comments. I only ask that you back up your claim. Give us some analysis on why the dialogue is bad. Dialogue is always one of the more polarizing screenwriting topics so I expect some fiery debates.
