It seems strange to say there’s nothing to watch in the era of 15,000 TV shows but THERE WAS NOTHING TO WATCH THIS WEEKEND! While scrolling through Netflix, I somehow ended up on Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory (1971), a movie I hadn’t seen since I was a kid but remembered loving.
I always find it fascinating to rewatch these beloved classics to see if they still hold up and I was shocked to find that Wonka held my interest from the first to the last frame. A big surprise considering how screenwriting-unfriendly it was.
For starters, almost every single character in the movie is unlikable. Veruca Salt is unlikable. Augustus is unlikable. Violet. Mike. Even Willy Wonka is a smarmy jerk. The only two characters who are likable are Charlie and Grandpa Joe, although they don’t get all that much screen time once we’re in the factory.
How is it the movie still works, then? Well, Charlie may be one of the most likable protagonists in history for one. That helps offset a lot of the negativity. Which is a good lesson for aspiring screenwriters. If there are a ton of unlikable people in your script, make sure your protagonist is extremely likable.
Another cool thing about Wonka is that the whole movie is a series of impending mystery boxes. Which room are we going to next? What will be inside? This ensures we’ll keep watching. We want to see what the next room has in store. This same setup would not have worked if, say, Willy Wonka had taken the five children camping.
Finally, as a kid, I never paid attention to themes. But watching the film now, the theme is very apparent. If you’re mean or selfish or a glutton, bad things are going to happen to you. I used to think of theme as this complex equation that needed to be half-statement half-question and include its own three-page thesis paper when, in reality, the most effective themes are very simple, like this one.
But the big lesson here is when you have a problem in your script, you need to have a gameplan to overcome it. With so many bratty kids and this dark heartless candy factory host, you need to be able to say, “Here’s what I’m going to do to offset that.” The most likable protagonist ever and a series of mystery boxes did the job.
Willy Wonka reminds us that no matter how old a movie is, when it works, it works. Even with its slow-by-modern-standards first act, once you start watching Willy Wonka, it’s impossible to stop. Try it out. It’s on Netflix.
Bringing us into the modern era, there have been a surprising amount of script sales as of late. As for why this is happening now, I’m not sure. Especially because I can’t remember the last high profile script sale before this year. But I’m not complaining. Let’s take a look at what’s selling.
The first is probably the most shocking. Simon Kinberg, whose last spec sale was Mr. and Mrs. Smith (he’s since gone on to produce and write many of the X-Men movies) sold his spec, “Here Comes The Flood” to Netflix for – get this – MID SEVEN FIGURES. That would make it one of the biggest spec sales ever. Frustratingly, there isn’t a full logline. We’re only told it’s an “elevated, character-driven love-story heist movie, with the heist playing out in increments.” It literally sounds exactly like Mr. and Mrs. Smith, but with criminals instead of agents.
Another key detail to this sale is that there is no director or actors attached. This is mighty good news for aspiring writers if Netflix is buying material without elements. The naked spec script is back, baby!
Next up we have Johnathan Stokes, who sold his spec script, Murder in the White House, to Paramount for mid-six to low-seven figures. Although Stokes has made the Black List numerous times, I was surprised to look back into my archive and see that I’d never reviewed one of his scripts. I remember seeing his 2013 entry, TCHAIKOVSKY’S REQUIEM, about a conductor who investigates the great composer’s unnatural death and unlocks the mysteries of the man himself while preparing to debut Tchaikovsky’s final symphony. But I guess I never read it.
The logline for this one is as follows: “The president is murdered during a private dinner, and a female Secret Service agent has till morning to discover which guest is the killer before a peace agreement fails and leads to war.” I’ve always been a fan of people murdered in high profile situations. I once had an idea for a murder in Area 51. Not sure why I never wrote it. It’s an easy way into a high-concept world. Curious if this will be any good.
Next we have “Fast and Loose” from the writing team (Jon and Erich Hoeber) who brought you Meg. This one actually sounds interesting. It follows a man who wakes up in Tijuana after being left for dead with absolutely no memory. As he follows a string of clues to uncover his identity, he discovers that he’s been living two different lives: one, as a super-successful Crime Kingpin, surrounded by beautiful women, expensive toys and a lavish lifestyle, and the other as an undercover CIA agent, but with a puny salary, no family or home life whatsoever and zero trappings of success. The problem is, he can’t remember which of these two personas is his true identity.
Talk about a big concept! Reminds me of that 2011 film with Liam Neeson, “Unknown,” which covered similar territory. That film had a great hook. Our hero shows up to a big conference with his wife, gets in an accident, goes back to his wife, and she says she has no idea who he is. But it kind of fell apart after that. This one comes from John Wick co-director David Leitch’s production company, 87North.
So what can we learn from these sales? Well, they’re all big ideas. Heists are ALWAYS marketable. You don’t even need to come up with that amazing of a heist idea. If it’s exploring a heist in a slightly different way, it’s got a chance at selling (assuming it’s good of course). For the White House spec, if you have a dead body, you have a movie. Especially if that dead body is the president. And the last sale is also based on a time-tested trope: amnesia. I know how much some people hate amnesia concepts but as long as you can find something interesting to do with the amnesia, you’re good.
What’s interesting is that versions of ALL THREE OF THESE IDEAS could’ve been written 30 years ago. 60 years ago. Even 100 years ago. Certain setups just work. Why mess with them?
But this last idea is where I draw the line. It’s the most Hollywood of Hollywood projects and I’m predicting bomb central right here, right now. The project is titled “Ball and Chain” based on a 90s comic no one heard of and here’s the description: “Edgar and Mallory Bulson have decided to throw in the towel. That was the plan anyway, until a mysterious meteor bathed the battling couple in extraterrestrial energies that gave them super-powers. Will their newfound abilities be enough to make their marriage work?”
Meteors giving characters powers is the trope to end all tropes. It’s not allowed to be used anymore. This sounds like a bad version of Hancock which was already bad on its own. It’s got Emily Gordon scripting, who did a great job with The Big Sick. But this is a husband-wife superhero movie. It’s a million degrees removed from The Big Sick. It, of course, is going to star The Rock and Emily Blunt. This feels like one of those ideas that nobody in any creative position was actually a part of. It was all decided upon by suits and agents then delivered to the talent later via e-mail. God does this sound bad.
But other than that, I hope everyone had a wonderful Mother’s Day!
Where screenwriters rise from the ashes to prove once and for all, the voters got it wrong!
I know. A lot of you are angrily checking your e-mail, confused about the lack of a Scriptshadow Newsletter inside when I promised you it was coming at the beginning of the week. What’s going on, Carson!!? Hey, I’m right with you. I want that newsletter to show up, too. The problem is this week has been bumpy and I haven’t had the time to get it written. These things are 10,000 words long so they’re not easy. And maybe it’s good that it’s delayed. The trades are posting about a new script sale every day. Where are all these sales coming from? Maybe it has something to do with the coronavirus and the need for material? It’s 1996 all over again.
But hopefully, this will tide you over. Everyone deserves a second chance to make a first impression. So today we’re going to pit scripts against each other that barely lost out in their respective Amateur Showdowns. I’m hopeful that we’re going to find an undiscovered gem because when I went back and looked at all of these loglines, I thought to myself, “Man, these all sound like good movies.” So now I leave it up to you to find the best of the second best.
For those new to the site, Amateur Showdown is an occasional tournament I hold on the site where I pick five screenplays that were submitted to me. Then you, the readers of the site, read as much of each script as possible and vote for your favorite in the comments section. Voting closes Sunday 11:59pm California time. The winner will receive a review the following Friday that could result in props from your peers, representation, a spot on one of the big end-of-the-year screenwriting lists, a partnership with yours truly, and in rare cases, a SALE!
I am taking submissions for the next Amateur Showdown, which will take place between 4-6 weeks from now. So get your entries in. E-mail me at carsonreeves3@gmail.com. Include your script title, the genre, a logline, and a pitch to myself and potential readers why you believe your script deserves a shot. It could be long, short, passionate, to-the-point. Whatever you think will convince someone your script is worth opening, make your case. Just like Hollywood, the Scriptshadow readers are a fickle bunch. So be convincing.
Good luck everyone!
Title: Emergent (new draft)
Genre: Sci-fi/Thriller/Romance
Logline: A brilliant programmer gets embroiled in a bizarre and dangerous love triangle between a co-worker that saved her life and an artificial intelligence that nearly killed her.
Why You Should Read: Emergent had a good contest run last year, placing as a Quarterfinalist or above in Nicholl, Page, Austin, and Big Break as well as a few others. It landed me a few queries and even a couple meetings with managers, but no bites on it yet. I’ve since made some revisions (based on feedback from said meetings, etc.) and will be sending it out again this year. I’d really love to hear the opinions/advice/feedback from the scriptshadow community and even get it reviewed. Cheers.
Title: The Fire Tower
Genre: Contained Thriller
Logline: When a family on vacation to a remote fire lookout tower rescues an injured female hitchhiker, they wind up in a battle for their lives.
Why You Should Read: When I was 10, we went on a cross-country camping trip out west. One night we got horribly lost on a winding road, high in the mountains. Out of the darkness a hitchhiker jumped in front of our car asking for a lift. We gave her some water and snacks (but my mom wouldn’t let my dad give her a ride). Later, I was told that a whole family had disappeared without a trace not far from there. That was the seed of the story. But I needed a contained space to trap my family.
Lookout towers have been used in the United States for 100 years. At the peak of their popularity in the ‘40s, the U.S. had about 8,000. Today, there remain about 85 fire lookout towers in the U.S. in extremely remote mountain areas in the National Forests which you can rent for $25-$75 a night.
Title: Kamikaze
Genre: Action
Logline: After her creator is killed in a terrorist attack, an emotionally charged android, suffering from a fatal virus, struggles to hunt down the mercenaries responsible.
Why You Should Read: Kamikaze is a non-stop, can’t catch your breath action script. It’s placed very well in screenwriting competitions (finalist), it nabbed me a manager (we’ve since parted), but the script hasn’t gotten much traction. I’m really wanting to know if there’s something I’m missing, and if I genuinely have what it takes to make it. — The main character, Ali, in an android that can’t seem to keep her emotions in check, which is a major drawback to those that created her. The script plays with the concept of logic vs. emotion and how they can help/hinder in various situations. — Thank you for the opportunity to give it a read.
Title: Renaissance Men
Genre: Action, Comedy
Logline: In 16th-century Rome, astronomical badass Nicolaus Copernicus seeks papal approval for his radical new theory about the universe, but after he’s framed for the Pope’s kidnapping, he’ll risk his life and legacy to track down the real abductors.
Why You Should Read: I’ve always loved history. I just wish it could be funnier. If I had a time machine, I probably wouldn’t use it kill baby Hitler. Instead, I’d just swap him with baby Charlie Chaplin who was born a mere four days earlier. But since the latest version of Final Draft is easier to get my hands on than a functioning time machine, I decided to write Renaissance Men. A hilarious adventure that pits some of Renaissance Europe’s biggest egos including Copernicus, Machiavelli, Nostradamus and Michelangelo against each other in a high stakes game of cat and mouse.
I had many reasons why I wanted to write this. First, I knew it would be a lot of fun. Second, I was sure I could generate a ton of laughs. And last but not least, because a story about how the rich and powerful will cover up scientific truth to protect their political interests is even more relevant today than it was 500 years ago.
Title: THE BLACK PETREL
Genre: Horror/Thriller
Logline: A frustrated novelist goes to an old Southern hotel looking for inspiration and finds herself trapped in a nightmare with five strangers and a vengeful ex-slave.
Who am I: A writer trying to feed a hungry audience something delicious.
Why You Should Read: If GET OUT and A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET got pregnant listening to a Nina Simone song, this is the baby that would pop out.
This week I talked to not one, not two, but THREE separate writers who were all having the same problem. They were having trouble coming up with a movie idea to write. Movie ideas are probably the most debated aspect of the screenwriting process. Everyone knows when they see a good one. And yet coming up with your own good movie idea remains the most challenging part of the process.
That’s because we don’t judge our ideas the way we judge others. We judge other ideas with objectivity. If it sounds good, we give it the thumbs up. But we create our own ideas out of emotion. There’s an element within the idea – the main character, the subject matter, the theme – that resonates with us on a deeper level. And that’s the problem. That resonance creates rose-tinted glass we see our idea through.
Emotion is not a bad thing, of course. You want emotion when you’re writing a screenplay. But it does get in the way of conceptualizing your idea. You can be so laser-focused on how you’re going to express this element that you can’t see the rest of the idea for what it really is – confusing, or generic, or maybe plain boring. Which is why you always want feedback on your ideas.
But today I want to make the process a little easier for you. What I’m going to do is give you the ten best ways to generate a movie idea. All of these are legitimate approaches to coming up with a good idea. I’m going to start with the worst of these options and move my way up to the best option. Let’s jump into it.
10) Horror and Guns – If you’re really struggling to come up with an idea, write a horror movie or a Guy/Gal with a Gun movie that contains ONE ELEMENT WE HAVEN’T SEEN BEFORE. Like a horror movie where you can’t make a noise (A Quiet Place). These are the two most marketable genres for spec scripts. So when in doubt, write one of these. Because you’ll have the best chance at actually selling them.
9) Follow Your Heart – This is that idea that won’t go away. It’s been sitting in your head for years. It may not be an objectively good idea. HOWEVER. Passion plays a large part in writing a great screenplay. The more passionate you are about something, the more likely you’ll go the extra mile to make it great. So the idea is that you’ll make up for the lack of a big hook by writing something emotionally earth-shattering. That’s how Titanic was written. That’s how Get Out was written. You have to accept that, when you’re finished, you’ll get less script requests. But, hopefully, the people who do request it will be more likely to enjoy it.
8) Update It – If you straight up suck at coming up with ideas, this is a good option. Go back 10, 20, 30 years ago and look for movie types that were popular then. If they were popular once, Hollywood believes they can be popular again. So just bring that genre back with a little modern update if possible. For example, romantic thrillers like Basic Instinct and Fatal Attraction were big in the late 80s. Goofy horror movies like Scream and I Know What You Did Last Summer were big in the 2000s. It doesn’t take a lot imagination to update these genres so it’s an easy way to come up with a marketable concept.
7) Ripped From The Headlines – This is another option for those of you who struggle to come up with your own ideas. Take a hotly debated issue that’s out there in the headlines and build a GENRE movie around it. That last part is key. If you try and build an on-the-nose drama about the issue, we’re going to roll our eyes. Express the execution through a marketable genre. Invisible Man (horror) was about toxic masculinity. Get Out (horror-thriller) was about racism. The Hunt (thriller/satire) was about the political divide. Don’t Worry Darling (Thriller/Sci-Fi) is about toxic masculinity. Right now, this is a great formula for coming up with a sale-able spec.
6) Twist and Shout – Look through all of the time tested movie types out there and see if you can find a way to twist them. So, for example, the buddy cop sub-genre. One of the most reliable formats in movies. “Bright” takes that format and changes one of the parties into an ogre. It was enough to result in a huge spec sale and Netflix’s most watched movie to date. A bigger example would be “It.” A time-tested formula – a young group of friends coming of age during the summer – set in the horror genre.
5) Fascinating True Stories – Find a true story that sounds good and let it do all the work for you. Some writer found a story about JFK saving a dozen people when his boat capsized during World War 2. These days googling, “Great War stories” could find you hundreds of big screen worthy stories that haven’t been told yet. What are you waiting for?
4) An Underdog Story – Underdogs are the most beloved characters in movies. In a medium where writers struggle to come up with heroes audiences give a s@#$ about, underdogs are a cheat code. Forrest Gump. Rocky. Slumdog Millionare. Luke Skywalker. Deadpool. The Mule. The Social Network. Come up with an underdog at the heart of your story and I promise you, your script will be one of the easiest reads of the year.
3) Irony – A good ironic premise instantly separates itself from the pack. Here’s what I wrote in a previous article: “The most basic form of movie irony is to make your hero the opposite of what’s required of him. So you wouldn’t write a story about an atheist who starts his own atheism support group. You’d write a story about an atheist who takes a job as a Christian preacher to make ends meet.” Here’s a whole post about ironic premises.
2) A Fascinating Main Character – This is for writers who are bad at coming up with plots. If your mind doesn’t think that way, do not fear. Instead, come up with a really interesting character then build the bones of the plot around them. Take a look at Arthur Dent (Joker) or Louis Bloom (Nightcrawler) or Max Fischer (Rushmore). In all three of these movies, I’m betting the writers came up with the character first and then formulated the plot pieces around them. The reason you can get away with writing a script that doesn’t have a big plot hook is because everything in this business still comes down to getting bankable actors on board. So if you’re a reader and you see a logline with a really interesting main character, you know if the script turns out to be good you could get a lot of actors interested.
1) High Concept – The biggest, the flashiest, the cleverest, ideas still always win. This is a NUMBERS GAME. That means a certain number of people need to read your script before someone says yes. Therefore, it is in your interest to come up with ideas that get the most people interested in reading your script. The best way to do this is still the high concept idea. How do you come up with a high concept? The best model I know of is the “strange attractor” approach. You must have that thing in your concept that sounds both big and unlike something we’ve seen before. It’s the thing that makes your idea different from everyone else’s. The good news is you can come up with high concept ideas for big movies (The Meg – A group of scientists exploring the Marianas Trench encounter the largest marine predator that has ever existed – the Megalodon shark), medium-sized movies (Split – Three girls are kidnapped by a man with a diagnosed 23 distinct personalities), and small movies (Saw – Two men wake up in a small room chained to the wall with a saw in between them). So you don’t have any excuses. Still the king of the concept creation pack in my opinion.
One of the problems I see writers make is they try to come up with movie ideas out of nothing. They sit at their computer and try to will a good idea into existence. That kind of thing can work under certain conditions. That’s how Bruckheimer and Don Simpson used to come up with ideas. They’d read through the day’s newspapers and magazines until they found a good idea. But that’s generally not how the best ideas emerge. The best ideas come through organic inspiration. You’re out and you see something interesting and your mind goes into, what if that was a movie? You write the idea down and you don’t go back to it. If that idea is still nudging at you three months later, chances are it’s a good idea. Coming up with a good movie idea will always be hard but hopefully this list makes the process a little easier.
Carson does feature screenplay consultations, TV Pilot Consultations, and logline consultations. Logline consultations go for $25 a piece or $40 for unlimited tweaking. You get a 1-10 rating, a 200-word evaluation, and a rewrite of the logline. They’re extremely popular so if you haven’t tried one out yet, I encourage you to give it a shot. If you’re interested in any consultation package, e-mail Carsonreeves1@gmail.com with the subject line: CONSULTATION. Don’t start writing a script or sending a script out blind. Let Scriptshadow help you get it in shape first!
Genre: Romantic Comedy
Premise: After Georgia accidentally receives an out of the blue invitation to her on-again, off-again boyfriend’s wedding, she and her best friend Keely make the ill-informed decision to attend.
About: This script finished with 8 votes on last year’s Black List. It’s Carrie Solomon’s breakthrough screenplay.
Writer: Carrie Solomon
Details: 117 pages
The nice thing about reading screenplays is that you can cater the day’s read to whatever mood you’re in. Today, I needed a pick-me-up so I decided to read a comedy. Now if there’s one thing I’ve learned about comedies, it’s that if you don’t laugh on the first page, there’s a good chance you won’t be laughing at all.
I started with a script called “Dude Ranch,” which had a premise I didn’t understand. When his ex-wife starts dating another guy, our hero follows him to something called the “Dude Ranch” where you compete in manly activities, except they’re the woke version of manly activities. On top of this, the first ten pages were all about religion. So I had no idea what was going on. And I didn’t laugh once in ten pages.
I then moved to a Black List script called, “Assisted Living.” Here’s the logline on that one: “When a thief on the run needs to go into hiding, disguised as an 81 year old, she checks into a retirement community shared by her estranged grandmother.” Not the worst idea. And the first page did make me laugh. A young girl is helping her mom steal something by distracting the store owners, pretending to be a lost French girl looking for her parents. She doesn’t actually know French. She’s just throwing out a bunch of random French words together. It’s working until a guard walks over who speaks fluent French.
So I said, okay, we might have something there. But we follow that up with that same girl, now 35 years old, going to a club, noticing a bunch of bitchy 20-something girls making fun of her age, so she goes out on the dance floor and twerks like a maniac to prove she’s still got it. All I could think was, “What does this have to do with the premise?” Talk about random. So I x’d out of that after 15 pages.
That led me to this script, My Boyfriend’s Wedding. The first scene, which had our heroines out clubbing, begging for the defiant DJ to play “Alone” by Heart didn’t make me laugh. But it did make me smile. And I liked the banter between the friends and the DJ. I was getting tired of opening new scripts so I said, screw it, I’m in.
30 year old Georgia is a commitment-phobe. She has this great guy named Adam she’s known since high school who routinely flies out to visit her from Atlanta, and every time they’re together he asks her to become his committed girlfriend. But every time, Georgia resists.
So one day Georgia and her best friend Keely are hanging out and they receive an invitation from Adam’s parents… TO HIS WEDDING! What??? Georgia is confused. This man has spent the last three years proclaiming his love for her. They just had sex a few weeks ago. He’s getting married?? What’s going on???
Determined to straighten this out, Georgia accepts the invitation and makes Keely her plus-one. They fly to Atlanta where Georgia makes a bee-line to Adam at the pre-wedding party. Adam apologizes. He admits he’s been dating his fiance, Missy, for a couple of years. He’s only ever wanted to be with Georgia but since she wouldn’t commit, he decided to finally tie the knot.
Meanwhile, Keely bumps into Missy and the two start a friendship that quickly becomes sexual. When Georgia and Keely reconvene, Keely doesn’t tell Georgia she’s now sleeping with the bride. Georgia then loses control and sleeps with Adam again. It’s a wedding catastrophe!
Keely is determined to break up the wedding because Missy is such a great person and she shouldn’t be marrying a man who’s secretly in love with another woman. Georgia eventually becomes convinced that Adam is selfish and he wanted to keep two girls on the line and tells him as much.
Georgia and Keely then head home where the movie decides to explore their broken friendship for the third act. I guess the movie was about their friendship all along? Maybe? I don’t know. I had a hard time figuring this one out.
“My Boyfriend’s Wedding” needed to nail down the screenwriting basics better. Character, structure and theme.
For starters, nobody’s sympathetic here. Every time Adam has professed his love for Georgia, she blows him off. So we don’t like her. It turns out Adam has been hiding this whole other girlfriend from Georgia. So we don’t like him. Missy moves in on Keely, so we don’t like her. And Keely is straight up annoying. So we don’t like her.
Who are we rooting for here?
I prefer you have more than one sympathetic character in your script. But at the very least, your hero needs to be sympathetic. Everybody else do whatever you want with them as long as they’re funny. But Georgia has to be sympathetic. And she isn’t. We’re not even sure why she’s mad at Adam. She friend-zones him whenever he tries to make her his girlfriend so why is she getting all angry that he has someone else?
You may have been able to get away with this if Adam was a HUUUUUGE a-hole. Like he was super-manipulative and is banging three other women on the side. Sometimes you don’t need a sympathetic hero if the audience is obsessed with taking the villain down. But Adam and Georgia are high-school sweethearts. So it’s odd. We’re not sure if we’re supposed to hate the guy or like him, root for them to get together or stay apart.
If the audience isn’t sure what they’re supposed to root for, you don’t have a story.
The structure was odd as well. It’s a movie titled My Boyfriend’s Wedding yet the final act takes place after the wedding in another city. Not only that, but the movie becomes about Georgia and Keely becoming friends again after their wedding fallout. That would be okay if you’d established that there was a deep-rooted problem in their friendship through the first two acts. But they were fine in the first two acts. They disagreed on a few things but were otherwise great.
Your third act is the act that needs to resolve all of the things you’ve set up in the first two acts, both in the plot and with the characters. So for you to all of a sudden say, “Oh, this is about friends now,” is jarring.
The characters also had motivation issues. You establish in the first scene that your hero doesn’t like someone. Adam tells Georgia he loves her and she tells him she’s not interested. So why would that person care about breaking up his wedding?
This is what a lot of comedy writers don’t understand. They only focus on the jokes. But if the fundamentals don’t make sense, the jokes won’t land. You have to set everything up so that we go into each scene understanding where each character is coming from. That’s why we laugh. When we see their plans get screwed up and turned around.
Take Bridesmaids, for example. Look at how clearly they set up the main dynamic. Kristin Wiig’s character is jealous that this other woman has become best friends with her best friend. So in every one of their scenes, she’s trying to out do her. Like the toast scene. She will not be topped. She has to keep going and giving a better toast. The motivations in My Boyfriend’s Wedding were never clear and therefore we weren’t sure when we were supposed to laugh.
I guess the argument for this as a script is that it’s a romantic comedy that takes a look at female friendship. We don’t see a lot of those. But if that’s what this movie is going to be, there needs to be a lot more focus placed on the friendship. You can’t throw all that in at the last second. It’s thematically inconsistent.
Unfortunately, I couldn’t get into this one. What did you guys think?
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: In comedies, you need to define who it is we’re rooting for to win and who it is we’re rooting for to lose. In other genres, you can play around more in the gray. But even then, I advise you give us clear good guys and bad guys. If it’s muddy, like it is here, it leaves the audience unsatisfied. They’re not really sure who won and who lost.
Today’s screenplay isn’t like anything else out there at the moment, setting the stage for another exciting read.
Genre: Thriller/Action
Premise: When the underprivileged John Unger is invited to spend the summer at the mansion of his peculiar classmate, his thirst for grandeur leads him down a dangerous exploration of greed, morality, and the secret horrors of the ruling class. Based on the F. Scott Fitzgerald short story.
About: This script finished with 8 votes on last year’s black list. It was smartly plucked from a 1922 F. Scott Fitzgerald short story collection. Just a reminder to those looking for material. The 95 year public domain statute allows you rights to anything written up until 1923. Cody Behan clearly had his eyes on this one as he wrote it last year, when the statue was up until 1922. Something to keep your eyes on, guys. Fitzgerald’s early works (The Beautiful and the Damned included) are out there for the taking.
Writer: Cody Behan (based on a short story by F. Scott Fitzgerald)
Details: 126 pages
Movie announcements in the last few days have become bizarre. Tom Cruise and Elon Musk are filming an entire movie in space? Unless that movie is titled, “Hanging out with the International Space Station Crew and Eating Food Sludge Packets Together,” I can assure you this will never happen.
I just did a little online sleuthing. It costs $10,000 to put ONE POUND in space. An Arri Alexa camera is 15 pounds. All decked out it’s closer to 30 pounds. That’s 300,000 for your camera. Oh, and let’s not forget the 170 pound camera man. He’ll cost you 1.7 million dollars to put into orbit. That’s not counting the half a million dollars you’ll have to invest in training him to become an astronaut.
And then what’s your plot when you get into space?? A Tom Cruise zero gravity spinny circles contest? You could make the exact same movie with special effects that will cost you 1/10th the price and look 10 times as good.
What does this have to do with today’s script? Actually, a lot. It turns out F. Scott Fitzgerald had some zany high concept ideas of his own back in the day. This is not The Great Gatsby. This is Fitzgerald if he hired Edgar Rice Burroughs to write one of his ideas. It’s weird. It’s kooky. And for a story I’d never heard of before, it’s better than you’d expect!
16 year old John Unger has escaped his lower-class mining town to become one of the rare poor people admitted to Connecticut’s prestigious St. Midas school. When he arrives, he’s immediately given the cold shoulder by all the richy riches. All of them except for one.
The mysterious Percy shows up like a baller at a party, busting out a ONE THOUSAND DOLLAR BILL and then burning it to ash in front of everyone. John becomes enamored with Percy, and the two find themselves hanging out constantly.
When summer rolls around, Percy invites John to stay at his home with him. The two travel across the country to the middle of nowhere, where John is shocked to see the coolest most isolated compound in America. Percy, last name Washington, as in, yes, great great grandson to George Washington, lives in the richest home in the United States.
That’s because the land rests on a diamond that is LITERALLY as big as the Ritz Hotel. And here’s where things get interesting. Back in 1922, nobody had Google Maps. This means that you could, theoretically, hide your land from everyone. But times they are a changing. World War 1 has birthed the war plane. And there are rumors drawing a lot of these pilots out to this area, where they could see the family’s secret. If that were to happen, Percy’s father Braddock is convinced the government will take it from them..
This is why Braddock has purchased two spanking new gigantic anti-aircraft guns. When you have more money than God, anti-aircraft guns are a drop in the bucket. Meanwhile, John meets Percy’s smoking hot sister, Kismine, who is thrilled to have a boy to talk to for once. She and John strike up a quick romance, which plays a number on the family dynamic.
A few weeks into the summer, John stumbles across a deep pit, populated with a dozen ragged pilots. It turns out Braddock has been shooting down every plane he sees then throwing the injured pilots down here, where they will spend the rest of their lives so they don’t tell the world Braddock’s secret.
And then it gets worse for John. Turns out this isn’t the only friend Percy’s brought back to the house. Turns out this isn’t the only guy Kismine has developed a crush on. And what happened to these young men? They weren’t in the pit. That’s when John realizes the terrifying truth. He’ll be murdered. But now that he knows the gameplan, can he be the first to survive?
I was surprised by just how zany this script was. We get all these big idea cameos, like Braddock’s radium stockpile, which he is convinced will be the cure to cancer. Or that his family is related to George Washington. Or that they have giant anti-airplane guns… in the year 1922! It honestly reads like the 1922 version of a Marvel movie. It has that big budget popcorn feel to it. And it’s full of these fun twists and turns.
The only problem with the script is that it combines two things that don’t gel well with screenwriting. The first is that we’re putting our hero at a static location where he waits around for the story to come to him. It still manages to work because the reveals are so fun. But there are definitely times where it feels like we’re waiting around for the next plot point to arrive. Active characters always work better. And John is not active.
The other problem is that the story spans a long period of time. I believe six months in total. If you were to write this movie today, it would take place over a weekend. To Behan’s credit, he uses the same device that allows movies like Fight Club to cover a long span of time – VOICE OVER NARRATION.
John is constantly giving us updates on what’s going on. This allows John to say things like, “Even with the blazer, the first few weeks were brutal.” In a single line, we’ve jumped forward three weeks. And it doesn’t feel forced. With that said, this probably would’ve played better with a tighter time frame.
Remember that the more condensed the timeframe, the more tension you’re going to have in every scene. When you have months and months to cover, it’s like a hall pass to take scenes off. To relax. And you don’t want to relax in a screenplay. Especially in a thriller.
The final thing of note is that boy do you have an advantage when your source material is F. Scott Fitzgerald. The dialogue and description throughout “Diamond” was a cut above what the average reader is used to. Here’s a monologue from Kismine: “You see how they look at me. How they treat me. How they dismiss and condescend my every thought. As a daydream. A fantasy. I’m a daughter of Washingtons. I’m expected to dress in pretty dresses, drape myself in pretty jewels, speak in pretty tones, smile pretty smiles, think pretty thoughts, dream pretty dreams, and bite my pretty little tongue. And a year from now, when they present me at court, I’ll be expected to make a pretty match to preserve the stability of the sterling Washington name. I am a show pony trapped in a pretty stable. So don’t scold me for being “a part of” anything. The only thing I’m guilty of is being the only Washington with a conscience.”
Or take this description of John and Kismine’s first kiss: “The distance between their lips vanishes. And again appears.” That’s a lot better than what I usually read, which is some version of, “They kiss passionately.”
I’m really curious about this script. It first presents itself as some hoity-toity 1920s rich vs. poor moral tale, not unlike Gatsby, but then morphs into good old fashioned fun. I haven’t read anything like it. Ever. What do you guys think?
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[xx] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Here’s a fun little dialogue trick you can use. It almost always works. Have a conversation where each character is having their own conversation. There is no overlap between the two. Here’s an early scene between John and Percy…
