Hey guys, Carson here! Today I’m posting a story from a long-time Scriptshadow reader who went through a harrowing experience to say the least. Those of you who frequent the comment section already know his story. But for those who don’t, get ready. Because this is going to make your blood boil. I did not think there were people like this out there. Here is the latest update on… the Con Queen of Hollywood.
Some of you probably know me already. I’ve been a regular here at Scriptshadow since before it had the dot net. That might have even been before Carson had his very first In-N- Out burger. That’s like the stone age! I’ve also had my fair share of AOWs over the years, so I’ve taken my beatings, and fought the good fight. I can say beyond a shadow of a doubt, that it’s because of Carson, and the incredible community of brilliant commentators he’s nurtured over the years, that I am the writer I am today. I’d also like to thank Carson for the opportunity to write this post. This is coming full circle for me, and it’s very, very surreal.
Those of you who are active or lurk in the comments might be familiar with some of this story, but in recent months there have been some major developments that I promise will blow your mind if you haven’t been keeping up.
In July, 2015, my friend Dave and I wrote a script called “Shadows Below,” and made it onto AOW. But I was young. Naive. A mere level 3 writer on Carson’s writer-scale as indicated by this post.
So when I lost the AOW, I threw down the gauntlet! My submarine script had to be better than that damn music biopic! It just had to be! So Carson, saint that he is, reviewed it anyway… and it wasn’t worth the read.
I was devastated. I was so sure the script was great, and it wasn’t. What was I doing wrong!? But before I knew what to do with it, I got a response from one of my queries, Jing Huilang, a film development executive at a website I’d found: thechinafilmgroup.com (Don’t worry, the site’s defunct now).
After submitting answers to lengthy essay questions, she requested a copy of the script, including a forty page mood board, a synopsis, and a strategy pitch. Everything seemed professional. Legit. And before I knew it, Dave and I were on an airplane on the way to Jakarta, Indonesia, to take a meeting with a panel of producers from the company.
There was just one catch.
We had to book our own airfare, and pay for the expensive driving service employed by the company. In cash. But not to fear! They were going to reimburse us. Suffice to say…
We were about to get conned.
Only one man showed up for our meeting. He went by the name of Anand Sippy, and he was a vice president. The blowoff was masterful. The script wouldn’t get past the Chinese censorship board. Have a nice flight back to New York! That’s exactly how it went for everyone else he lured there. A quick flight in, a quick flight out, and he’d pocket the driving fees. Thing is, he always found his own targets, but this time was different. I had reached out to him. Like a fish that jumped onto his boat. It was the perfect scam. But when he told us the project was dead, I pivoted. Wait! What if it was a sci-fi, I pitched! In a fantasy world, where the politics weren’t real. Then we could get past the board! In retrospect, as I offered him the chance to turn his short con into a long one, the look he gave me was downright diabolical.
Dave and I spent months going back and forth to Indonesia, all with the singular purpose of developing the treatment for Shadows Beyond, a fantasy based on our original screenplay. Every step of our journey was dictated by a detailed daily schedule, one which we had to adhere to religiously. Our pace was grueling. Days and nights packed with work on little sleep. We took long trips all over the country, studying local myths and legends, while meticulously documenting every location with pictures and notes.
It was awesome. It all seemed like the legitimate procedures of a professional film studio. There was a lot of paperwork! All with official CFGC seals and stamps. Nearly a dozen different employees in their own e-mail chains, and each of them diligently keeping track of every aspect of the process. It fooled everybody.
And it was all orchestrated by Huilang, the female voice over the phone. The maestro. She made our schedule, and she checked on us at every opportunity. Calls every morning. Texts while we were out. Nightly development sessions. Her honey-sweet dragon-lady voice is forever engrained in my memory.
She spent hours every day talking with my mom, my dad, and my sisters. She embedded herself into my family, and used them to manipulate me, making false promises of my bright future with the company, while dangling the ever looming threat of our project getting canceled should we make even the slightest misstep. It was a work of genius…
And it ended my friendship with my best friend.
After Anand got the treatment approved, before we’d set up a trip to China to write the script, we were to have one last meeting with him in Jakarta to sign the deal memo.
So when we were both in the hotel lobby, ready to leave, and they changed the plan to have Dave go ahead and meet with him separately before they’d meet with me, it came as a surprise.
I remember it vividly. Staring out the window, listening on my phone to the Mets play the Royals in the World Series as Dave drove away. I don’t remember what day it was, but I remember the Mets lost.
Hours later, when it was finally my turn, I was driven to a fancy office building. My fifth time there. At least. And this wasn’t a run-down shanty where some shady Indonesian con artist was grifting tourists. I might have mistaken it for an attorney’s office on Lexington avenue, if not for the armed soldiers standing guard outside. A secretary escorted me past security up to the fourth floor, where I was greeted by Dave’s bright grin as he exited Anand’s office. It was going well! Green light, baby! Our movie was going to get made.
So imagine my shock, when after an uncharacteristic motivational speech from Anand about how I could do anything, highlighted by his history as a poor street sweeper from India who’d overcome adversity, he told me that the deal was canceled, effective immediately. I couldn’t even go back to the hotel. It would be a violation of their company’s security protocols since I no longer worked for them. The driver had already gone to the hotel to collect our luggage, and we were to be taken straight to the airport, never to return…
And never to be reimbursed.
But why, I protested! I was furious. Confused. It didn’t make any sense! “Dave will tell you on the way to the airport,” he told me. “Goodbye.” I looked to my friend for answers, and he was smiling, as if to reassure me all would be well.
In the car he confirmed that unspoken look. It was my sister’s fault! But not to worry! We can fix it! At Huilang’s behest, my brilliant sister, who at the time was a vice president for a major financial institution in Manhattan, was attached as our manager. She had been corresponding with Huilang on a daily basis for months, but somehow that relationship soured, and unless we legally cut her from the project, the deal was off! Oh, no!
I was heartbroken. But fine. If that’s what they wanted, then that’s what they’d get. We always did everything they asked of us. Failure was not an option. It was at the airport, waiting for our flight due to depart in sixteen hours, when the house of cards came crashing down. I called my sister, prepared to break the bad news, when she floored me with news of her own.
It wasn’t my sister they wanted out, it was Dave. They didn’t want him to write the script. They thought he’d cause problems. They even claimed he said horrible things about me and my family in his meeting. What a contradiction! Who was I to believe? I knew in my heart that my best friend would never lie to me. But my sister had it in writing. She even forwarded me the e-mails. Dave was resting peacefully on a bench, arms and legs wrapped around our luggage. He was no Judas.
On the surface it seemed a paradox, but in that moment, I saw it for what it truly was. There was only one explanation.
I was being conned. And this was the blowoff.
The subsequent fallout of the next few months was more devastating than the [x] Wasn’t for me. I was wounded. So was my family. Emotionally. Financially. Dave never spoke to me again. My mom felt humiliated. How could she, a Brooklynite with street smarts, fall for a con artist!?
But I wasn’t left with nothing. I had the treatment. And fueled by both the inspirations of the supportive scriptshadow community, and the occasional mockery, I persevered, and the treatment transformed into a script. A high budget, four-quadrant fantasy, that would be nigh but impossible for an unproduced writer to sell. It felt good to finish it. It was special. A gem that ought never have existed, if not for the glory of the con. And once it was done, I moved on to the next script, and the next.
Over the years, people always told me I should write a movie about my experience. I was in the perfect position. I’d reached out to numerous people who were also conned, and was even involved in group private investigations to track the perpetrators down and bring them to justice. But it wasn’t movie material, I protested. What was so cinematic about a couple writers touring Indonesia while writing. It lacked that x-factor, and I had fancier projects on my mind, determined to put it all behind me.
Until this article dropped in the Hollywood Reporter.
The Con Queen of Hollywood. Hundreds of people conned over the years. Major players in Hollywood impersonated by a mysterious woman over the phone. Big names. And it was all the same scam. She was collecting a fortune in drivers fees. Wow! It was finally hitting the headlines. I immediately called Scott, the article’s author, and started a dialogue with him to discuss my story, and everything I’d managed to learn.
It wasn’t until the following year that the bottom dropped out, when Scott published this article on the Con Queen.
That’s right! It was all one person. But not only that. It was a man! Huilang’s voice, the one that was in my ear, all day, every day, for months, was a man the whole time. But not just any man. Anand Sippy. The vice president we’d met with time and time again. He played every part. All the paperwork. The accountants. The higher ups at the company who were quick to keep us in check with harshly worded emails. The woman who’d turned my family and friend against each other, who’d acted as a creative mentor through a lengthy development process. The woman masquerading as legends like Kathleen Kennedy and Amy Pascal. It was him. All him. He was the mastermind behind it all.
I immediately got on a call with my friend Raza, who I’d co- written a bunch of scripts with, and we both had the same thought at the same time: now this is a movie.
Everything was happening at once. This bombshell information coincided with me being contacted by Jigsaw Productions, Academy Award winning Alex Gibney’s company, who were working on a podcast about the Con Queen and wanted to interview me.
What I found out, surprised me. I was one of the first people who got conned by this guy. Only a few other writers fell victim to the scam in 2015, and since mine was the only long con, I met him, in person, more than anyone else. Mine also had me traveling all over the country, so it meant he made the most money off of me. After I got conned, his scam changed. China Film Group was no more. He moved on from writers, and turned his sights on social media influencers. Photographers. Actors. All done over the phone. As a woman. Never in his real voice. Never with an in-person meeting. All with a new plot in mind. One born from my experience.
He had them go on tours. Via the trusty driver, he made out like a bandit. My determination to turn a no into a yes, had changed the game for everyone.
During this whole process, Raza and I wrote the script and decided to center it around the Con Queen himself. Making it a biopic on him. What drew him to lead this life? Why impersonate these powerful women? Being a victim of his nefarious schemes, and the one who interacted with him the most, I felt confident in telling his story and breaking down his character as I wrote. It was certainly cathartic in a way, but most importantly, it’s an engaging script about a man facing a complete crisis of identity, lashing out his worst instincts on those who would fall into his web of lies.
But there is a softer side to him. One that I saw in that final meeting with Anand Sippy. A rags to riches story. A hard worker. A man whose criminal genius one can almost admire.
Although getting conned like this was obviously a rough patch in my screenwriting career, I can only hope that this recent string of publicity can lead to some sort of justice. If not through the retribution of the law, then through the redemption of art.
Verifiable entertainment entities can request a copy of the script by contacting me: gregorymandarano@aol.com
Also, this Monday, March 9th, Jigsaw is releasing the first two episodes of a podcast series entitled, “Lies We Tell.” One of which is about the Con Queen, and features my interview. If you’re interested at all in this story please give it a listen and support the great work they do over there at Jigsaw.
“Lies We Tell,” can be found on the Luminary app.
I finally finally FINALLY got to see Uncut Gems this weekend and, Holy Moses, it did not disappoint. This would have been my number one movie in 2019 had I seen it in the theaters.
After watching the film, I do what I always do when I see something good, which is watch a thousand Youtube videos about the making of the film. And one such video caught my interest because it stated something I’d never heard before.
Until this moment, the script I’d heard had the most rewrites was Good Will Hunting. Nobody kept track. But rumors push it somewhere between 60-100 drafts. Well, it turns out Uncut Gems puts that number to shame. The Safdie Brothers, who directed the film, wrote 160 drafts of the script over a ten year period.
Now before you feel guilty about having submitted your script to The Last Great Screenwriting Contest with only three drafts, it’s important that we distinguish why some of these Uncut Gems rewrites were made.
When you’re directors or you’re a screenwriter working with a team of people trying to get a movie made, you’re constantly sending the script out to talent and every time you do that, it’s advantageous for you to cater the script to the actor you’re sending it to.
The Safdie Brothers point out that they went through numerous NBA stars to try and find the professional basketball player character in their movie. Since they’re Jewish and Howard (the main character) was Jewish, they had Amare Stoudemire as the original character since he is Jewish himself.
But then they heard that Kobe Bryant was looking to do some acting. Kobe is a completely different person than Amare. Not to mention, he existed in another stratosphere of stardom. Naturally, they had to rewrite the character to reflect this difference.
In the end, Kobe decided that he didn’t want to act. He was more interested in directing. So that casting choice fell by the wayside. Now imagine going through that over and over again. Anybody who’s tried to get a movie made understands this hell.
At this stage in the game, though, as an amateur writer trying to get noticed, you don’t have to worry about these kinds of rewrites. But then how many rewrites should you be writing?
I realize this is a gray area. A draft to one person may be quick and dirty while a draft to someone else might be a full-on teardown. One writer may even vacillate between those two kinds of rewrites, depending on what stage the script is in. There are also specific types of “passes.” You can do a dialogue pass where you go in there, read all the dialogue, and try and spruce it up. You might do a character pass where you focus on a specific character in a rewrite and try to make everything about him/her pop more.
But let’s say we’re averaging all of these together – both the long arduous structural rewrites and the quick and dirty dialogue polishes. I’d say that you need at least ten drafts to bring out the best in a script. And it’s probably closer to 20.
But there’s good news. There are things that can knock this number down. For every three screenplays you’ve written, knock one draft off your total number of drafts per screenplay. That’s due to you knowing more and getting more right early on. Knock two drafts off if you do extensive outlines. And one draft off if you do character bios.
The cause for the longest rewrites usually come from structural problems and the writer not having a good feel for the main characters. You can alleviate some of that if you do the work beforehand.
However, there’s a truth about screenwriting that not a lot of people like to talk about that tends to stretch your workload into the 15-25 draft territory. And that’s that the original concept you went into the script with will often change.
At some point, you’re going to realize that there’s a better version of your story. And in order to get to that version, you need to do a page 1 rewrite. It’s one of the worst parts of writing a script. Cause you think that the last five drafts of writing the script were now pointless.
And the sad part is that a lot of times, we’ll hold on to that original idea simply because we don’t want to face reality. But it’s not as bad as you think. Your story is radically changing, yes. You’re starting over, yes. But because of those previous drafts, you know this world WAAAAY better than you did when you first started. So the new version of your script will be more populated with a lot more specificity.
It’s funny because that very topic comes up in the 160 Draft Safdie Brothers video I watched. Josh Safdie talks about how he used to lie as a kid and he learned that the more specific he could make the lie, the more details he could add, the more believable the lie would be. Cause people would think, “There’s no way that could be untrue. There’s just too much detail.” So he incorporated that approach into their movies. The more detail you add, the more we’re going to believe this story is really happening.
But getting back on topic, if there’s no way you can imagine writing 15-20 drafts of a script, you have to adjust your approach even more. For example, you will need a super detailed outline. You will need to pick a subject matter that you’re familiar with. For example, with Jason Gruich who wrote Cop Cam, he *IS* a cop. If he wasn’t a cop, people are going to be pointing out all the errors in procedure and how police precincts don’t work that way. Those things require more drafts to fix.
You’ll also want to pick simpler stories. John Wick is going to be an easier script to write than Mission Impossible. Why? Cause there are less moving parts. That’s where screenwriting gets tough – when you’re managing multiple storylines, when you’re managing multiple character threads. But the real time wasted is having all those plot and character threads come together in an invisible way.
I suspect one of the reasons Uncut Gems took so many drafts to write was it’s a very dense plot (even though the movie is good at hiding it). Howard loans out the “uncut gem” to Kevin Garnett, who leaves his championship ring for collateral. Howard then pawns that ring in order place a bet on a basketball game. He needs the uncut gem back from Garnett the next day in order to enter it into the auction where he hopes to cash it in for a million bucks. Howard has a wife who’s pushing for divorce. He’s got a mistress who he can’t decide if he wants to run away with. And he also has outstanding debts with three different bookies around town, not to mention a side business of employing a dude to bring rich athletes to his jewelry store. I don’t care who you are. You do not figure that out all in one draft.
And I think that’s the way you have to look at it. Yeah, draft-writing is mainly problem-solving. You’re fixing plot developments that don’t work. You’re adding texture and depth to your weaker characters. You’re juicing up your final act with a better location. But draft-writing is also the primary process for discovering new ideas. Every time you write a new draft, you get new and better ideas that you can put into the script. The more you do that, the better the script gets.
And believe me, I can tell. I can tell when a writer hasn’t put a lot of work into a script. Yesterday’s script was a clear four-draft script to me. It’s that point where the writer understands what his movie needs to be but he hasn’t been with the script long enough to integrate all the changes needed to execute that vision.
With all this being said, if you’re 20+ drafts into your script, you have to start asking if you’re making the script better with each new draft. Sometimes writers write drafts that only make things different, not better. And that’s a dangerous pitfall to fall into.
How do you know when you’re finished? When there are no more drafts to write? That’s never an easy question to answer. For each writer, it’s different. For each SCRIPT it may be different. But for me it was when the time it’d take to write a draft was more laborious than the percentage of improvement a new draft would bring. And that was usually around 15 drafts. So I think that’s a good gauge to start asking if the script is good enough to keep rewriting. Cause sometimes it isn’t and you have to let a script go. But if something feels good and you have that feeling that it’s almost there, then by all means, keep writing those drafts.
I’ll throw the question to you guys. How many drafts do you write?
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: Thriller
Premise: Told in documentary style with clips from her Youtube channel, a social media influencer mysteriously disappears.
About: This is the second runner up script from The A-List, which is not an actual list but a screenwriting contest set up specifically for entertainment assistants. The scripts are judged by the assistants and, in order to prevent any favoritism, have anonymous title pages. I reviewed the runner up script, The Mermaid, last week.
Writer: Kyle Tague
Details: 91 pages
I love forgetting I’m reading something. It always gives me a high. That’s why I read so much stuff. I’m searching for that next high! You go through a lot of junk to find the pearls. What is a pearl in the screenwriting world? That’s the question everyone wants the answer to, right? The truth is, you don’t know until you see it. From there, it’s easy to backwards analyze why it works. And yet if you follow the exact formula that made that script good, it doesn’t work when you apply it to your own script. It’s almost as if each good script exists inside an impenetrable bubble, a bubble Hollywood’s been trying to pop for 100 years. The only thing they’ve come up with is to make a second bubble and to hire the person who made the bubble in the first place.
I will tell you that one successful element I see in a lot of these breakout scripts is when a writer tells a familiar story in an unfamiliar way. It sort of jolts you. Missing person. Big deal. Oh, wait. I’ve never seen this specific type of missing person in a story told this way before. Okay, now you’ve got me. “Follow Her” is that kind of script. And it had me from ‘hello.’ But that doesn’t mean we stayed together. I’ve seen plenty of scripts start strong and end weak. Would this be another one?
We’re informed on the first page that everything we see will be told in documentary form. We’ll be notified where each piece of footage came from at the start of the scene. So, for example, if this is an uploaded Youtube video, we’ll be told it’s an uploaded Youtube video.
We’re then informed by the documentarian team, Chris and Danielle, that Ali, the subject of the documentary, is missing and presumed dead. We then jump into an explanation of what a social media influencer is, and that Ali was an aspiring actress who tried to expand her marketability by being an influencer.
Cut to a few of Ali’s influencer videos, where we see she’s obviously following the Influencer 101 template. She’s not being herself. She’s being some chippier happier version of Ali. She’s doing grocery hauls and mascara reviews. Boring stuff that isn’t getting her any new followers.
In Skype conversations with her actor boyfriend, Drew (who’s on location shooting a show), Ali laments how difficult it is to gain followers. He tells her to keep at it so she does. One day, Ali receives a stalker video of her which was uploaded to an anonymous linked site. It’s video of her shopping. Ali links the video to her followers and goes on a rant about men and creepiness. It’s raw and unfiltered and it goes viral, getting 3 million views.
Ali is surprised by the success of the clip. Then, a few days later, there’s another one! Except this one feels a little… off. Some internet sleuths figure out the truth. The second video is linked to her boyfriend’s e-mail address, proving Ali and Drew conspired to fake the stalking. Ali and Drew then make an apology video, admitting that she did it for the views. But that the first one was not fake.
Ali’s “Smollet” moment is picked up by right leaning Youtube channels and a Ben Shapiro wannabe, Nicholas, takes Ali to the woodshed as representing everything that’s wrong with the left. They’re all victims. And yet when you get down to it, their victimhood is a lie.
Nicholas’s audience then begins to REALLY stalk Ali, who no longer has the support of the public on her side. In fact, with every new video Ali posts of someone stalking her, the internet makes fun of her, calling her mentally disturbed and desperate for attention.
Then things get really weird, as videos start appearing online of Ali’s stalkers dressing in cloaks and sneaking into her house where they video her sleeping. It’s not too long after that that Ali disappears. The police have no leads to go on. The public accuses Drew. But what our documentarians, the ones who have told us this story, are about to find out, is that Ali’s disappearance may be due to something… otherworldly.
Oh man how I was rooting for this one!
It started off strong. Like I said – we’ve got a familiar story told in an unfamiliar way. And the writer seemed to understand the world he was documenting. Influencers have a very unique and weird life. And I felt Tague did a good job of capturing that. For example, when Ali gets caught for faking the second video, the solution isn’t to come clean. It’s to “come clean for the views.” She’s more than happy to apologize, but only because apology videos get a lot of views.
Likewise, the Right-Leaning Conservative channel stuff felt dead-on. I’ve seen these guys make these videos before, where they chastise influencers like this. Then when they realize that the chastising gets THEM more views, they drum up the chastising and make that public figure their personal punching bag.
Here’s where things started to go south for me, though. Once Nicholas sends all these followers to harass Ali, we venture into some pretty serious stuff. Numerous characters, both online and in person, threaten to rape and kill her. And yet it’s all dealt with in a sort of Happy Death Day tone. It’s supposed to be goofy entertainment. I’m not sure once you aggressively bring rape and death into a script that you can get away with that. I suppose some writers who are extremely sophisticated in how they handle tone can pull it off. But this isn’t that. So it leaves you in this weird viewer purgatory wondering if you’re supposed to be horrified or entertained.
And then it really falls off the rails (spoilers) when we’re asked to accept a late-arriving supernatural element. At first we think these people slipping into Ali’s home are creepy alt-right trolls. But then it’s inferred that they might be demonic.
I’m all for adding supernatural elements WHEN THEY’RE ORGANIC. But when they’re not, it can be a script killer. Especially when you add those elements late in the story. It seemed like the writer wasn’t sure what to do with his ending. So he did a quick rewrite where he inserted a few setups in the last 25 pages in order to infer that Ali’s disappearance was due to supernatural factors.
When you have a strong concept on its own, you don’t need to desperately add a supernatural component to make it even more marketable. This is a good idea without the supernatural. It’s already inventive. It’s already unique. It’s a good murder-mystery. Just keep it that way. There was no reason to throw this other random storyline in at the last second.
I guess I should’ve seen it coming. Whereas the beginning of the script felt sure of itself, you could feel the writer searching for his narrative once he crossed the halfway point. It became more about gimmicky plot developments than staying with what got you there. What got you there was a job we don’t normally hear about in movies (influencer) and a unique way of telling the story (documentary-style). Once you begin descending into the kind of tone they use in Child’s Play, you know your script is toast.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: I’ve read a half dozen scripts over the last 4-5 months where the concepts were great all on their own but then the writers introduced unneeded horror or supernatural elements. A late supernatural twist can sometimes put a movie over the top (Cloverfield Lane) but it more often sinks the movie, as it breaks the contract you and the reader made when you first presented the idea. Whenever you say, “I’m giving you Movie A,” and then in the end you give them “Movie B,” expect disappointment.
Genre: Drama/Comedy
Premise: Life as a single dad hasn’t been a challenge for Las Vegas blackjack dealer Mike Klein, until his ex resurfaces after walking out on the family six years ago.
About: This script finished with 10 votes on last year’s Black List. The Black List hasn’t been holding up its end of the bargain lately. You know, since it isn’t providing us with a list of quality screenplays. Lots of duds lately. Will the losing streak continue? Apropos question since this movie takes place in VEGAS.
Writer: Derek Elliott
Details: 104 pages
Before we get to this script, we need to talk about the logline. Keep in mind that loglines that end up on the Black List are often written by managers or agents who have no experience writing loglines. Those same reps may ask the writer to come up with a logline and since this version of the logline isn’t required to hook potential readers, the writers may treat it more as a generic one-sentence summary as opposed to what a traditional logline should be, which is a marketing hook.
So why is this logline weak: “Life as a single dad hasn’t been a challenge for Las Vegas blackjack dealer Mike Klein, until his ex resurfaces after walking out on the family six years ago.”
It just feels bland. An ex resurfaces? Who cares? That’s a subplot in any other movie. However, now that I’ve read the script, I see that that’s actually what the script is about. Which means we don’t have a lot to work with. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t look for ways to make your logline sexier.
When you write a low-concept script, one word here or there could make the difference. So in “Klein’s” case, you want to look for the splashiest moment you can weave into the logline. The first sequence of the script has our hero, Klein, getting a frantic call from his girlfriend. He jumps in his car and screeches across town to find his drugged-out girlfriend, Ali, standing next to a car in the middle of a 104 degree Vegas day with their 18 month son locked inside. Klein smashes the window to get their son out. But the damage is done. Ali knows she’s incapable of parenting in her condition and leaves the next morning.
That’s a pretty intense scenario and since it’s a pivotal part of the plot, that’s what I would try to inject into the logline. Therefore, the new logline might look something like this:
A Vegas dealer’s life is turned upside-down when his ex-girlfriend, who almost killed their son six years ago in a drug-fueled accident, attempts to re-enter his life.
Is this perfect? No. But it’s a lot sexier than “Life as a single dad hasn’t been a challenge for Las Vegas blackjack dealer Mike Klein, until his ex resurfaces after walking out on the family six years ago.” Look, I’m all for scripts like this. These are actually the kinds of scripts that put The Blacklist on the map. Low-concept high-execution character pieces.
However, you have to live in Reality Land. The only way for a script like this to become big is you gotta be a really strong writer. And then you have to nail the execution. And then you have to get enough people to read it so that it makes the Black List. All of that starts with your pitch – and most of the time, your pitch will be one sentence in an e-mail. If that doesn’t draw someone’s attention, they’re not going to read the script. And then nothing else I just listed can happen.
So if you have a low-concept screenplay, you have to have an A+ logline. Don’t settle for anything less.
Back to “Klein.” Where did we leave off? Right, so after the opening sequence we flash forward six years and Mike Klein is now 28. His son, who he saved in the car that day, is now 8. The two live together with a low-level Jazz band that plays around the sketchier joints in Las Vegas.
One day while at his job dealing blackjack, Mike gets a call. It’s Ali, his ex. She swears things are different. She has a stable boyfriend. She’s gotten better. She wants to meet her son. Mike hems and haws but finally allows it. And even though his son, Vinny, is weirded out seeing his mom, he likes her and wants to hang out with her more.
Mike, meanwhile, meets a cool girl, Kate, who he plans to have sex with and never talk to again, because that’s how much he trusts women after what happened with Ali. However, the more Vinny spends time with his mom, the more time Mike has to himself. And he actually starts to like Kate.
Complicating matters, he and Ali still have a ton of chemistry, leading to a couple of sexual slip-ups. At a certain point, Mike realizes while he thought he was a good father all this time in Ali’s absence, he’s actually been hanging on by a thread. He needs Ali in his life. Not as his lover or his wife. But as his son’s mother. It takes him a long time before he can trust Ali in that role. But when he does, it’s like his life has finally clicked into place.
This was a really good script.
I learned a number of things reading it. The first is you can use mental labels to help write relationships in your movie. Take Mike and his 8 year old son, Vinny. They do not have a normal father-son relationship. Vinny has to hang around the casinos all the time. He plays casino games with Mike’s adult friends. The two lay bets together. They talk like FRIENDS. And that’s THE LABEL. They are not father-son. They are friends. Now that you have that label in your head, you know how to write all of their interactions. Mike is never going to say, “Brush your teeth and wash your hands then go to bed.” He’s going to say, “Hey, did the Golden Knights cover the spread tonight?”
By labeling relationships, your dialogue is going to be so much easier to write. So this is a powerful tool to use.
And you can do it for individual characters as well. Look at The Office. Michael Scott. He never grew up. He’s a perpetually 15 year old dorky kid who just wants friends. So every reaction and interaction he has with others will go through that label. Go ahead. Turn on any episode of The Office on Netflix right now and watch it with that in mind. You’ll see that every thing Michael says is said through that filter.
Another thing I realized was that if you’re going to write a low-concept idea, it helps if there’s a large element within your concept that’s specialized. Here, that’s Las Vegas. There are lots of references to specific things about Vegas, the way dealer jobs work, the off-strip casino world, being a band trying to get gigs in Vegas, everybody in this movie is always betting. When your subject matter is weak, you need something to pick up the slack. So whether that’s a unique place or a unique setting, it helps when you’ve got something that the reader is learning about throughout the story.
I always remind writers that you’re trying to give your readers a new experience. If everything in your script is something common or generic, it’s extremely hard to keep readers invested.
This is a really solid character piece, guys. Every character here felt honest. I liked that we never went down the obvious path. Mike and Ali do not end up together. The climax is them agreeing to co-parent their son. It’s messy. It’s a little awkward. But, guess what? That’s life. Life doesn’t always get wrapped up in a bow. And this script does a really good job nailing that.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[xx] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: JUST SAY NO!!! In one of their first meetings, Ali asks Mike: “Do you think maybe I can have a day along with him this weekend?” “Maybe,” Mike says. “I might be able to arrange that.” —- WRONG!!!! — Mike doesn’t say that. I lied. What does Mike really say? He says, “No.” When one character asks another character for something, have them say, “No.” In movies, “yes” is boring. Meanwhile, “no” forces a character to overcome obstacles, to try harder, to be more clever, to come up with a solution. “Yes” may be the easier answer to keep your plot humming along without having to think. But “no” is almost always the more interesting answer.
Genre: Horror
Premise: After her abusive boyfriend commits suicide, a woman begins to think he’s found a way to haunt her from the grave.
About: Leigh Whannell directed a cool little sci-fi movie that nobody saw called “Upgrade.” Jason Blum was impressed enough with the result that he gave him this film, a new take on Universal’s monsterverse character, the Invisible Man. The film beat out expectations this weekend, taking in a “monster” 29 million bucks. The film is also getting very high praise from critics, snatching up a 90% score on Rotten Tomatoes. Oh to be Jason Blum. One weekend, you’re dodging calls after Fantasy Island tanks, and a brief month later you’re back on top of Hollywood again.
Writer: Leigh Whannell (based on the novel by H.G. Wells)
Details: 2 hours long
You’ve been invisibly penetrated with hyperbole everywhere you turn.
“Elizabeth Moss in the greatest female role in a decade.” “Horror will never be the same after The Invisible Man.” “Is The Invisible Man a modern masterpiece?”
You guys come to this site because I’m not in the pockets of the studios. I don’t have anyone to answer to. In an increasingly “my team vs. your team” business, I’m one of the last reviewers who can look at a movie objectively and tell you whether it’s good or bad.
So is The Invisible Man good?
The answer is: !!!
You like that? I made the answer invisible. If you want the uninvisible answer, you’ll have to get through the plot summary.
The Invisible Man starts with our heroine, Cecilia, escaping a big rich Tony Stark like home on the bluffs of an ocean. She dashes for a remote road where she’s scheduled her sister to pick her up and whisk her off to freedom. Just before they leave, Cecilia’s scientist boyfriend, Adrian, crashes into the car window screaming at Cecilia. They drive off and we realize that Cecilia has just escaped from a living nightmare of a relationship.
Two weeks later we catch up with Cecilia at her African-American friend, James’, home. James lives with his daughter, Sydney, and are acting as a hideout home since Adrian doesn’t know that Cecilia knows them. But that turns out to be a moot point because a few days later, Cecilia gets the news that Adrian committed suicide. She’ll never have to deal with him again.
At least that’s what she thought. Cecilia begins to see and hear strange things in the home, like when she drags a blanket along the floor only to have it stop mid-stride. She looks down to see what appears to be a footprint holding the blanket in place. After several of these unexplainable moments occur, Cecilia believes that Adrian has found a way to cheat death and is now haunting her. Unfortunately, when she shares her opinion with James, he kiiiiiin-da thinks she’s losing it.
When Cecilia receives a large sum of money in Adrian’s will, she suspects it’s another form of control. And Adrian’s creepy brother, Tom, is doing nothing to dispel that notion. When Cecilia’s sister gets e-mails that Cecilia never sent telling her she hopes she dies and Cecilia gets blamed when Sydney gets punched out of nowhere, Cecilia realizes what’s happening. Adrian is slowly and meticulously driving her insane. The question is, how is he doing this? And can Cecilia stop it?
I posed the question before the plot summary? Does this movie live up to the hype?
The answer, without question, is yes!!!
There’s a whole lot of good going on here, specifically on the screenwriting front. Whannell makes a lot of great choices that elevate this beyond typical horror fare.
Let’s take the opening scene. I always tell you guys you gotta have a great opening scene that pulls the reader in. This movie has that. Cecilia is trying to leave Adrian and must do so at 5 in the morning in this big empty echo-y house without making any noise. It’s a very tense scene. But the reason I liked it is because it wasn’t the typical teaser scene I see most writers write.
Most writers either do the flash-forward thing to get a cheap scare in, before writing, “2 weeks earlier.” And jumping back in time to before everything that led to that moment happened. It’s so lazy and overdone. I love when a writer can give us a tense teaser that organically fits into the beginning of the movie’s timeframe. All Cecilia is doing here is leaving a house. And yet it’s one of the best scenes in the film.
The moment I knew this movie was going to be good happened during this sequence. The house has a complex security system. She needs to turn the security off in order to escape without any alarms going off. Now we could’ve easily had her covertly snag Adrian’s laptop right there in the adjacent room and turn off the security system that way.
But here’s what Wahnnell does instead. He has Cecilia go downstairs into Adrian’s “Iron Man” like lab and access the security system from a computer in that room. Why am I telling you this? Because good screenwriters look to achieve multiple objectives in a scene. We needed to explain to the audience that Adrian was a high-level scientist. One look at this lab and we now know that. So by accessing the computer in this lab as opposed to upstairs, allows us to multitask. We’re giving the reader more info in less time.
Any writer can set up 17 different important story points in 17 different scenes. It’s the good screenwriters who can take 17 things and convey them in 3-4 scenes.
But the biggest achievement of this movie, by far, was its ability to take a premise where the novelty could die off quickly and extend it into an exciting piece of entertainment that lasted two hours.
How did it achieve this?
This is one of the most problematic things I see in contained and horror specs. For example, I read a lot of home invasion screenplays. And, at a certain point, it becomes silly that the bad guy hasn’t killed our good guys yet. The only reason it hasn’t happened is because the writer is pulling out every trick in the book to try and extend the story out for a full feature-length running time.
It took me a minute to figure out how Invisible Man wasn’t suffering from that. But then it hit me like a bolt of lightning.
Adrian wasn’t trying to kill Cecilia. He was trying to drive her insane.
Note the difference. If all he cared about was killing her, he could’ve done that within the first five minutes of entering her friend’s house. Movie over. Therefore, if he didn’t kill her within those five minutes, we, the audience, would know that it’s only because the writer is stalling to draw out the running time.
But if you’re trying to drive someone insane, you do that over time. It’s like a chain where you’re adding one link after another. This character’s motivation is control. He wants to get her into her weakest mental state so he has total control over her. This was the key to this screenplay working. It makes sense that the villain was taking his time.
But even by doing that, the story is still too simple to extend to a full 2 hours. So the writer had to do ONE MORE THING that would justify the length. And that thing is something all screenwriters have to do at least once in their screenplay. We’re all terrified of it. Most of us instead take the safe route. But you need to do this if you’re going to keep the audience interested.
And that’s to create, either at the midpoint or a little after the midpoint, a big moment that the audience never saw coming. (Major Spoiler by the way). That occurs here after Cecilia breaks into Adrian’s home and hides a physical piece of his cloaking technology just as Adrian returns home. Cecilia gets her skeptical sister to meet her at a restaurant and explains to her that Adrian is invisible and she’s got the proof.
Right at that moment, a steak knife lifts all on its own, slits the sister’s throat, and then slams into Cecilia’s hand to make it look like she did it. It’s a completely shocking moment cause we didn’t think the sister was gonna die. And especially not here in this safe public place.
But there’s more going on here than meets the eye. The reason people are afraid to make choices like this is because they’re afraid to deal with the consequences of that choice. If you don’t kill off the sister here, you have a clear path to the climax. She and the sister team up, break back into the house to steal the technology, of course Adrian will be there in his invisible suit and attack them. Will they or won’t they get out alive? Blah blah blah. Cecilia somehow tricks him and kills him. The End.
But when you have your hero murder someone in public, there’s no way out of that. You have to deal with the real world consequences of that action. Cecilia has to get taken to jail. She’s not Sara Connor so it’s not like she’s going to break out of prison. So now you’ve got your hero stuck in a prison with no way out. If I went down that potential road in my head, I would’ve seen a narrative dead end. I just couldn’t see a believable way of getting Cecilia out of prison. She can’t escape herself (without the writer’s help). Everyone saw her murder her sister so a judge isn’t going to release her (unless the writer cheats). And if she does manage to escape, every cop in the city is going to be after her. It almost becomes a different movie that we didn’t pay to see.
But here’s the thing. When you put your hero into tough situations, it forces you to be creative and come up with ideas to get them out. Whannell embraces the setting of the mental holding facility, eventually bringing Adrian there to continue his torture of Cecilia, then using the conflict between those two to cleverly create a break-out situation that was believable.
At that point, I was really impressed with what I was seeing. This is good screenwriting. And it continued to kick butt all the way to the climax.
Finally, Whannell did the right thing when it came to making his “message” movie. HE PUT THE MOVIE FIRST AND THE MESSAGE SECOND. When you put the message first, it’s a commercial for your beliefs. When you put the movie first, it’s a good movie that gets you thinking about the social message later.
Yes, there were a few “message” things that bothered me. For example, no white man comes away unscathed in this film. Even the throwaway job interview character had to make some inappropriate remark about how hot Cecilia looked. As if none of us white dudes are capable of getting through a conversation without being an a-hole. But I didn’t care because Whannell so clearly put the focus on making a great movie first. I mean, this was a high-quality riveting suspenseful screenplay. And Elizabeth Moss does a great job in the role of Cecilia.
In other words, the hype train was right about this one. It’s one of the best movies of the year so far.
[ ] What the hell did I just watch?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the price of admission
[x] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: If your hero is not active, your villain must be EXTREMELY active. Cecilia spends the majority of this movie in rooms thinking she sees things. It’s as passive a character as you can write. If you’re writing this kind of storyline, you MUST make your villain active or else there’s nothing pushing on the narrative. The villain, her boyfriend, is always on the hunt, always planning his next deception. That ACTIVITY keeps the plot moving along.
