The other day I was reading a script and getting bored. This is not an unusual occurrence. The odds dictate that I’ll be bored by most of the scripts I read. But this one was bothering me because the writer wasn’t bad. The characters were interesting. The world was interesting. The writing itself was vivid and showcased a unique voice. I SHOULD HAVE BEEN into it. But I wasn’t. Why?
It finally came to me. The scenes were all boring. The writer was good at setting everything else up. But the scenes themselves would land with a big dramatic THUD. The main reason for that was that the characters didn’t have anything to do but talk.
Now dialogue is an essential part of any screenplay. There’s nothing wrong with sitting your characters down and having them talk to each other. Dozens of sit-coms have become billion-dollar businesses using that very format. But while it may appear to the untrained eye that characters are just standing around and talking, there’s usually something else going on. And that something is called:
PULLING.
“PULLING” is the act of creating something that’s pulling at some variable within the scene, usually the characters. The best way to explain it is to give you an example.
Imagine a scene where Jake is visiting his friend Charlie at his office job. We cut into the scene with Jake sitting in the corner and Charlie sitting at his desk. The two are talking about whatever the writer wants them to talk about – who’s going to win between the Knicks and Bulls tonight. This scene is going to be boring 99% of the time. Go ahead, try and write the scene yourself. I guarantee it won’t be good.
But if you step back and create something that’s pulling at one of the variables in the scene, you’ll immediately notice improvement. For example, what if Charlie has someone waiting for him in the lobby, preferably someone of importance who makes him nervous. Now when we cut into the scene, it begins when Charlie’s secretary calls in and says “Fred Clayborne is waiting in the lobby.”
Now Charlie and Jake can’t sit there and chat away with all the time in the world. There’s something pulling at Charlie from outside the scene which limits the amount of time he has to talk with Jake. This creates a psychological shift in the audience where they care more about the conversation because they know it’s ending soon.
One of the biggest mistakes I see writers make is believing that their dialogue is so good that it can withstand a static setup. I can tell you from experience that only 1 in every 1000 writers is able to pull this off. You’re better off finding something to pull at your scene.
One of the most well-known examples of PULLING is the “bomb under the table.” If you have a non-dramatic scene of two people talking to each other at a restaurant, you’re probably going to write something boring. But, if at the beginning of the conversation, the camera cranes down to reveal that there’s a bomb under the table that neither of them know about, the conversation all of a sudden becomes fascinating. And all you did was create something pulling at the scene – in this case, a bomb.
And remember that the “bomb” can be anything. It doesn’t have to literally be a bomb. It can be a jealous ex-girlfriend trying to talk her way past the front door hostess to inform her ex’s date how terrible a person he is. It could be we learned in the previous scene that the woman on the date is pregnant and plans to tell the guy later during dinner. It could be that we know this guy is a serial killer but his date has no idea.
In each of these cases, there is something PULLING at the scene. And while it sounds obvious when I use examples, I read a ton of scenes with no pulling whatsoever. Just characters sitting around talking. It’s deceptively easy to overlook.
I was just watching Curb Your Enthusiasm the other night and noticed that Larry David uses PULLING all the time. There’s this hilarious sub-plot in the most recent episode where Larry will be flying everyone back from a wedding in a private plane. Because the plane is so small, the pilot needs to know each passenger’s weight in advance of the flight. But his friends refuse to disclose their weights to Larry, leaving Larry to spend the entire trip trying to trick it out of them.
Eventually, Larry’s out at a local carnival (the wedding is in Mexico) and stumbles across one of those “Guess Your Weight” exhibits where a man tries to guess your weight. Larry pays the guy to discreetly give him the weight of each of his friends when they show up. He’s going to herd them over in the direction of Weight Guy, pretend like he’s just talking to them, when, in actuality, he’s turning and positioning them so the weight-guesser can see them from all angles and properly guess their weight.
The PULL is coming from Larry and the Weight Guy. You have a group of characters at a festival talking. But if that’s all you have, your scene’s going to be boring. By creating the PULL of Larry secretly trying to get all their weights, the scene is all of a sudden alive and interesting.
Another script I read recently had this woman – we’ll call her Jane – who lived across the street from a hunky guy. Every day at exactly 5pm, the guy would come home and immediately undress. Jane built her day around this moment. It was the only thing that mattered – watching him get undressed. Then, in an early scene, Jane’s annoying neighbor shows up to talk about a bunch of boring exposition-related stuff that we’ll need to know for later on.
This is a classic example of a scene that could’ve been boring. Two characters talking about plot. But the writer had the annoying neighbor show up at exactly 4:57pm, walk past Jane into her apartment, and start talking. Now, boring exposition becomes exciting! Because we know that all Jane cares about in this moment is getting Annoying Neighbor out of her apartment before Hunky Guy gets home. Time is one of the most reliable types of PULLING. Put a time crunch on a scene and it immediately becomes more interesting.
One of the reasons Parasite won Best Picture is because it was jam-packed with PULLING. In one of the early scenes, Kim Ki-Jung, the sister from the poor family, must come in and convince the rich mother that she’s the right art tutor for her son. There’s only problem. Kim isn’t an art teacher. She knows nothing about art. She’s tricking the family in order to get on the payroll. So in the first scene where she’s tutoring the son, Kim herself is the PULL. Her deception is what’s pulling at the scene.
In order to understand that better, imagine if Kim really was a great artist. That she really did tutor children in art for a living. And she came in to interview for the job. There’d be a little bit of pull in that she still has to prove herself. But the pull is much more powerful if she’s lying. That’s what makes the scene exciting.
Another thing to note is that you can save yourself a lot of trouble if the PULL is built into the concept itself. Parasite is about a poor family who is secretly infiltrating a rich family. Almost every scene contains some element of deception. And deception is a powerful PULL. So when you do that, you don’t have to think hard about how to make every scene exciting since the PULL is baked into the equation.
To simplify that down even more, the most common PULL is a limited time frame. If characters always have somewhere to be, then in every scene they’re being pulled to someplace else. Therefore, films like 1917 are the ultimate PULL movies. The characters can never sit down and be boring because they’re always being pulled somewhere else. And even in the moments where they’re not – where they take a break or catch their breath – the lack of time is always looming over them, creating a natural PULL that looms over the scene.
Let me finish this up by saying the hardest scene to write is characters in a location, with nothing to do, nowhere to be, and all the time in the world. This is the ANTI-PULL. And while there are examples of some writers who can pull it off, it’s way more likely that you’ll write a boring scene. Add a good PULL and problem solved.
Genre: Horror/Comedy
Premise: (from Black List) With one last chance at a promotion, a down-on-her-luck real estate agent returns to her rural hometown to sell the impossible – a haunted house where countless couples have been murdered. As the bodies of new residents continue to pile up, our real estate agent will stop at nothing to rid the house of evil – no matter what the cost.
About: This script finished number 17 on last year’s Black List.
Writer: Roy Parker
Details: 115 pages
I’m going to keep this simple. This concept sounded fun! And it was Top 20 on the Black List. Let’s see how it turned out.
29 year old junior real estate agent Annette is prepping for her agency’s once-a-year contest whereby all the junior agents compete to sell a tough listing. Whoever sells a house first becomes a senior agent. Annette does a solid job, selling a place with a giant glob of dirt in the middle of the floor, but finds out she lost to Douchebag Don.
Not to worry, her boss tells her. They’ve got a sister agency two hours from here with a really difficult-to-sell property – the “Kaufman House.” If she can sell that house, he’ll give her that promotion. Annette grabs an Uber to get there, only to realize her driver, Roxxy, is an old high school acquaintance.
When Annette tells Roxxy about the house, Roxxy knows of it and informs her that it’s haunted. Annette doesn’t believe her until she gets a couple to bite during an early open house and the couple comes running out of the house screaming a few minutes later. This is followed by four college kids buying the house, who, on their first night, kill each other with a shotgun. This is followed by several other people buying the house and getting killed in gruesome ways.
Determined to sell the house, Annette asks Roxxy if she has any out-of-the-box ideas, and Roxxy comes up with a promotion for people who love haunted houses. Bring them in from all over the country and drive up a bidding war. The problem is, whatever they do, people keep dying. So if Annette is going to pull this off and get that promotion before she turns 30, she’ll need to come up with a way to un-haunt this house.
I’ve had some problems with entries on this year’s Black List. The number one script was not number 1 quality. And there were a few others that weren’t necessarily bad, but didn’t possess qualities you would associate with a Top 20 Black List script. “The House is Not For Sale” is the first time I’m shocked a script made the list.
You know how I talk to you guys about red flags? These are things I’ve seen a bunch of times as a reader that indicate we’re in for a rocky read. And the more red flags that pile up early in a script, the rockier the road is going to be. I came across a lot of red flags in “House.”
For starters, the opening teaser has a real estate agent showing a couple the Kaufman house. At the end of the showing, the couple says, “We’ll take it,” and the agent hands them the keys and leaves.
Um… that’s not how selling houses works, lol. You don’t get the keys right after you say you want the house. At the very least, there’s a little thing known as payment that needs to happen.
Why is this a red flag? Well, I’m about to read a script about real estate from a writer who doesn’t know one of the most basic things about real estate.
In the opening teaser, the couple who bought the house dies that first night. Then we cut to the next day with the real estate agent in her car facing a lake. She then slowly, as if in a trance, drives her car into the lake until it is fully submerged in the water. I went back and read the scene three times and I still couldn’t figure out if she was possessed by a ghost from the house who was killing her or if she was committing suicide because she couldn’t sell the house. A lack of clarity in the first five pages of a script is one of the most reliable measurements of script quality.
Later, Annette is talking but her dialogue is in italics. I was confused why this was happening so I circled back to look for clues as to why the italics and eventually realized it was her talking to herself in her head. Why the writer would assume we’d know that, I’m not sure. I just read a script two days ago where italicized dialogue represented another language. Never assume we know what something is. You have to tell us. We can’t read your mind.
Once we get to the Kaufman House, things get sloppier. Everyone who buys the house is able to move in that day. Maybe there’s an “IOU” form of payment in real estate that I’m unaware of. But I’m almost positive this is not how it works.
And then, when the people in the house are killed, it’s never mentioned what happens to them. Is Annette burying them in the backyard? Are they being given funerals? Wouldn’t 20 people being killed in a house in the span of 2 weeks be cause for a police investigation? Some media scrutiny? None of this is ever explained. We’re expected to go with it.
I’m guessing the writer would chalk the answers up to “this is a comedy.” And this is something that’s worth discussing because lots of comedy writers have this approach. They don’t think logic is relevant when it comes to funny. In some cases, that’s true. If you write a really broad comedy, you can get away with a lot of illogical things. In Dumb and Dumber, Lloyd and Harry kill a guy in the middle of a busy restaurant and are back on the highway five minutes later.
But the writers still went through the process of creating a logical progression as to why they got away with it. Lloyd didn’t know that all the extremely hot sauce they snuck on the ailing hitman’s burger would give him a heart attack. It looked like an accident. Conversely, there’s no attempt at logic in “House.” Four frat boys blow each other’s heads off and Annette chalks it up to a bad day at the office and preps the house for the next showing.
I’ll give the writer this. He put some real effort into the character of Annette. He gave her this whole backstory with a family that put a lot of pressure on her and was so ashamed at her lack of accomplishments that they made up a success story about her so that the rest of the town didn’t pity their family. That feeds into the pressure Annette feels to sell this house.
But the lack of research and logic was so overwhelming, it was all I could think about. I can’t focus on what’s happening in the current scene when I don’t know what happened to the three people in the previous scene who were brutally killed. To have the reader go with that as if it’s not a big deal is asking a lot. The overall approach to this story felt lazy so, unfortunately, I couldn’t get into it.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: “Sweeping under the rug.” We all do it even though we know we shouldn’t. When you encounter a fallacy in your script, something without an easy solution, you simply… sweep it under the rug. We hope that if we don’t pay it any mind, the reader won’t either. In “House,” it’s not explained what happens to the people who are killed in the house. The writer knew that if these people had public deaths, he’d have to write that into the storyline (media and police would need to be called in). On the flip side, Annette burying the bodies created its own set of problems. You’ve got this giant body count and no friends or family are coming around to check on what happened to the victims? Since neither option is ideal, the writer just sweeps the problem under the rug. I can tell you from experience and from reading thousands of screenplays, sweeping stuff under the rug never works. Just like real life, when there’s an issue in your script, deal with it.
Genre: Science-Fiction/Fantasy
Premise: A ragtag group of resistance fighters infiltrate the First Order-ruled world of Coruscant in an attempt to ignite an ancient communication beacon that will recruit thousands of worlds to come join the fight and defeat the First Order.
About: Before Rise of Skywalker, there was what was supposed to be the original 9th movie in the Star War franchise, Colin Trevorrow’s, “Duel of the Fates.” But Kathleen Kennedy ain’t being Kathleen Kennedy if she’s not firing a Star Wars director so she canned Trevorrow right as the film was about to start shooting. She then called up JJ Abrams, the director of mega-hit, Episode 7, and asked him to come back and direct the final film, which he did. Many seemed confused by the fact that Derek Connolly and Colin Trevorrow received half of the writing credit on Rise of Skywalker considering Kennedy so publicly cited a bad script as the reason Trevorrow was fired. Will that mystery be solved today via a Scriptshadow review? Grab your brooms, channel the force, and let’s find out together.
Writers: Derek Connolly & Colin Trevorrow
Details: 130 pages
Yesterday’s post ended up being pretty divisive so I asked myself, “What can I do to bring everyone together again?” The answer came to me like a beam of light. What brings people together more than STAR WARS?
So I clicked open the script that was originally meant to be Episode 9 to definitively find out if Kennedy made a crucial mistake, allowing the superior Star Wars movie to be lost forever in the pages of a screenplay.
After the opening crawl tells us that things are, like, REALLY bad for the Resistance, we settle in on something called the “Kuat Orbital Ring.” Our good buddies Poe, Finn, Rose, and BB-8 have snuck into a migrant worker site run by the First Order hoping to free all the slaves. Unfortunately they get sniffed out and have to run for their lives. As they’re fighting, Rey appears out of nowhere with her two-sided lightsaber. She then gets the idea to steal one of the Imperial Starships hovering over the planet.
Rey’s able to take the ship using a stronger version of Obi-Wan Kenobi’s Jedi mind trick, informing the ship operators to do what she says. They then fly the ship back to the Secret Resistance Base that Hux is trying to sniff out from the First Order’s new headquarters on Coruscant. Leia is waiting for them and, after a little chat, someone brings up that there’s this Old Republic technology underneath the Jedi Temple on Coruscant that, if used, could alert all the planets in the galaxy to come and fight for the Resistance. The whole clan agrees to try and activate it except for Rey, who’s having visions pulling her towards Kylo.
Speaking of Kylo, he’s in the Remincore System being trained by 7000 year old Master Sith Lord Tor Valum, a dude so versed in the dark Jedi arts that he taught Master Plaegius! Valum teaches Kylo a new trick that allows him to suck the life out of other life forms. So what does Kylo do? HE SUCKS THE LIFE OUT OF TOR VALUM, turning Jedi knowledge into a form of fast food. Kylo still needs to learn some dark secret underneath the temples of this planet, however, to become all-powerful. If that happens, he will be more powerful than 1000 Death Stars, able to crush planets from anywhere in the galaxy. Yikes!
Back on Coruscant, Finn is running around the sewers, looking for this darn beacon thing. He eventually stumbles upon an underground society of displaced Coruscant residents. He asks them if they’re ready to rise up and fight and they say, you bet we are! Hux learns about their plan, though, and orders his troops to find and squash these cellar dwellers. But that’s going to be difficult, since Leia has just shown up with the stolen First Order starship – a starship filled with Resistance fighters and tons of ships and AT-AT walkers to attack the First Order with.
Rey finally arrives on the Dark Jedi planet to stop Kylo. But Kylo ain’t having any of it. The two fight and Kylo easily has the upper hand. Rey tries to recruit all her Jedi powers to stop him, but then Kylo uses Tor Valum’s life-sucking power to suck out Rey’s soul! It’s not looking good for the Resistance either, as they’re getting pummeled by the First Order on Coruscant.
Luckily, at the last second, Leia force-calls Kylo, tells him to stop being such a meanie, and Kylo gives Rey her soul back, sacrificing his own life in the process. And on Coruscant, Finn finally got that message out, so all the planets come to help the Resistance. Hux is really upset that he lost so he goes over, grabs one of the many lightsabers he’s collected over the years, ignites it (it’s a purple one!) and sepaku’s himself. The Resistance wins and Rey comes back to teach a new generation of Jedi. Oh yeah and Rey’s blind now. I don’t remember why.
Let’s deal with the obvious question first. Is this a better script than Rise of Skywalker? No. Not by a long shot. It’s not bad. It’s actually decent most of the time. But the knock against Tervorrow has always been he doesn’t surprise you. He doesn’t make any bold choices. And you can see that here. People who complained about Rise of Skywalker being generic and safe – read this script. You’ll see what actual generic and safe looks like.
The first moment I knew the script wasn’t going to be great was the opening. It wasn’t clear why we were at this Orbital Ring place. I think it was to save slave workers but I’m not positive. One of the reasons the Jabba the Hut sequence in Return of the Jedi is so strong is because the objective is so strong – rescue Han Solo. And clear! We know why they need to infiltrate Jabba’s palace. We didn’t know anything like that here.
Then there was the stealing of the Star Destroyer. In screenwriting, the bigger the objective is, the bigger the plan needs to be, the more convincing everything needs to be, the harder everything needs to be. You’re stealing a giant ship here. It can’t be as easy as waving your hand at the captain and saying, “You’ll do what we say now.” There’s even a moment where Hux asks his side general what’s going on with the ship and he says, “Oh, everyone from that ship is on leave. Only the bridge crew is inside.” In other words, they made stealing an impossible-to-steal element the easiest thing to steal in the world. Storytelling works best with the opposing logic. You want to make stealing something the hardest thing in the world because that means your characters will need to overcome genuine obstacles to succeed. Everything your characters are after in a story must be earned, not handed to. So that was a major faux pas right away.
Also, the sequence that held the most promise ended up being the biggest dud. Kylo Ren learning from this 7000 year old Sith Master. We’ve already seen Jedis learning from masters in past Star Wars stories. But we’d never seen Siths learning from Sith Masters. So there was potential to really have fun with that. But we only get a couple of scenes with this Master Tor guy before Kylo kills him. You can’t build someone up as surviving 7000 years worth of Jedi obstacles and then kill him in two scenes. It’s inconsistent.
Also, I’d heard that Luke’s ghost was going to haunt Kylo in this. That’s another cool idea that we hadn’t seen in Star Wars before. But that happens for all of one page. So it was another letdown.
There was one set piece that stood out in the script. When everyone is trying to escape the Rebel Base as its being attacked by the First Order, the First Order shoots this giant laser beam down and blows this big chunk of planet up just as Poe and Rey have left in their ship. And the Knights of Ren come in, chasing them in their ship, in a sequence that has all this floating planet debris in the way. So, for example, they’re having to zip up the side of mountains that are floating in space. One of the hardest things to do in these giant event movies is come up with original set pieces. They’ve all been done. So any time someone comes up with a fresh idea, I give them props.
Now that I’ve read the script, I think I know what happened with the firing. The thing studios and executives and producers are most terrified of is the ending. The ending has to be great. Why? Because that’s what the viewers leave with. If you have 90 minutes of a good movie and the last 30 minutes are bad, that’s what the audience remembers. So that’s what they tell everyone else ( “The ending blew.”). This is why they did a 50 million dollar reshoot of Rogue One’s ending. They wanted to get that right.
I suspect that Kennedy fired Trevorrow because of the script’s ending. It’s weak. For starters, Rey and Kylo are off on some planet in the middle of nowhere fighting each other while the war was going on on Coruscant. So it felt insignificant. Especially because they didn’t do a good job establishing the power Kylo would gain and what he would do with it. There’s a reason the ending of Star Wars is so great. We see the Death Star rounding that moon. And we know what it’s capable of once it clears the moon and has a shot at the Rebel planet. We were told earlier in Duel of Fates that Kylo will have the power to crush planets from anywhere in the galaxy, but there’s no visual representation of that to scare us. The implication is that maybe it’ll happen some day. That’s not nearly as scary as seeing a Death Moon seconds away from blowing up a planet.
We may have forgiven this if Rey’s personal battle with Kylo would’ve been great. But all the fight beats, with the exception of him taking out her soul, were lackluster. For example, we learn the real reason Rey was left on the planet was to be hidden from Kylo. It wasn’t exciting. And fights are supposed to build. It should feel like air is being pumped into a balloon that’s getting bigger and bigger. But Rey and Kylo’s fight was more like, she got tired and beaten down and the two of them sort of limped their way to the end. And then Kylo deciding to give Rey’s soul back because his mom Skyped him didn’t feel earned at all.
So I’m guessing that when Kennedy hired JJ back, her primary directive was, “We need a huge ending.” And while I don’t have inside information, I’m guessing that was the motivation for JJ bringing the Emperor back. He knew he had to make that ending huge and the Emperor offers you that opportunity. And I will say this. You may not have liked that Emperor-Rey-Kylo finale in Rise of Skywalker. But I promise you that it was a hundred times better than the Rey-Kylo ending in this script.
I’m still confused about why Connolly and Trevorrow got half-credit for Rise of Skywalker. The only connection I see between the two films is that Leia does a lot of force-Skyping in this. She’s leading the Resistance. And then the life-force grab at the end of Rey and Kylo’s fight inspired the Emperor’s life-force grab at the end of Rise of Skywalker. But outside of that, the plots are very different. I guess that mystery will have to be solved another day.
Next Star Wars we’re going to see is October, when Mandalorian Season 2 debuts. In the meantime, there is no official Star Wars movie on the Disney calendar. Will we ever see a Star Wars feature film again?
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: You don’t get points for connecting the dots – The problem multi-narrative scripts (like Duel of the Fates) have is that there are a lot of plot points and a lot of plot points that need to intersect. For example, you have Rey over on one planet, Poe over on another planet. And you know that by page 60, you need them to meet up. This forces you to create some dots that must be connected in order to get the characters to the place where you need them. This can be tough to do. And what happens in a lot of the scripts is that the writer is so happy to JUST GET ALL HIS DOTS CONNECTED, that he thinks he’s done once that’s finished. This is especially true of beginner writers who just want to be applauded for bringing everything together in a way that makes sense. Unfortunately, this is just the beginning of your work. Once you’ve connected all the dots so that they make sense, you must go back into the individual narratives and make them as strong as they can be. Duel of the Fates had a very “happy I’ve connected the dots” feel to it. Technically everything made sense. But none of the individual storylines, nor the larger storyline, were as good as they could’ve been.
Genre: Comic Book
Premise: Harley Quinn tries to figure life out after the Joker dumps her and gets caught up in a diamond theft that ignites Gotham’s newest baddie, Black Mask, to try and kill her.
About: Harley Quinn was projected to make 45-55 million dollars this weekend. That was down from the projections Warner Brothers had when making the movie, which were closer to the 75-85 million dollar range. Sadly, the film finished with a measly 33 million bucks and is considered a full-blown box office disaster.
Writers: Christina Hodson
Details: 110 minutes
Harley Quinn.
I’m not here to dance on this movie’s grave. A lot of people worked on this film and, unlike a lot of movies that come out of this town, these people really cared. It’s said that there was a woman heading up every major department in the film. And all of them felt they had something to prove.
Nobody was more determined to make Harley Quinn work than its star and producer, Margot Robbie. I saw an interview where Margot was asked what her favorite Harley Quinn tattoo was and she didn’t skip a beat, going into an extensive explanation about Harley’s first tattoo and how she got it and what it meant to her. All I could think was, “Wow, Margot really cares about this character.”
Unfortunately, somewhere along the way of this film’s development, they decided to embrace an anti-male slant. In retrospect, I guess this makes sense. The movie was being written and prepped during that rabid six month stretch where everyone thought Twitter was real life and if you were Caucasian and had an xy chromosome, you were the devil incarnate.
The first white man to enter this story is a drooling bald-headed creepy pet salesman who says he accepts sex for payment. Harley feeds him to her hyena. The next white man is an a-hole who calls Harley a slut. Harley breaks his legs. The next four white men introduced are gunned down while eating dinner by the Huntress. They don’t even have time to protest their death. The next two white men introduced try to rape Harley after a long night out.
Put simply, if you are white and a man in the Harley Quinn universe, it ain’t going to end well.
Finally, about 15 minutes into the film, we see that Harley has one Caucasian male friend – the cook who makes her daily greasy egg sandwich. The two are smiling and jovial. I thought, okay, I’m glad they’re at least portraying one white guy as cool. And then as Harley’s leaving, her voice over reveals that the man is Armenian.
Look, anybody can make any movie they want. If you want to portray an entire demographic in a negative light, you are well within your rights to do so. It’s art. It has no rules. However, you have to then be accepting when the demographic you’re destroying has no interest in seeing your movie. I mean who wants to spend two hours being told that people who like you are bad?
I guess I’m surprised because it’s such an odd business choice. You’re hating on the demographic that spends the most time in movie theaters. It’s weird. Why didn’t somebody come in and say something? “Maybe we should be inclusive and positive about all races and genders?” In the immortal words of Dana Carvey as George Bush: “Neht gunna dew it.”
Eventually, a movie emerged out of this. Sorta. The plot follows Harley Quinn as she’s coming out of a bad breakup with the Joker. The film shamelessly attempts to be this year’s Deadpool, with Harley Quinn bee-bopping her way through an endless “listen to how clever I am” voice over narration, all of which could’ve been distilled down to a single sentence (“The Joker and I broke up.”).
The plot then decides to take a bathroom break, forcing the audience and the characters to wait around for him. In the meantime we learn something about mobsters in Gotham and that someone’s going around shooting people. None of it ties into anything that you would call “relevant” but we do meet club owner Black Mask, played by the only person who comes out of this movie unscathed, Ewan McGregor. He has a few funny lines.
Finally, after a good twenty minutes, the plot waltzes back in the room with a theatrical, “fiiiiiiiiiine!” and gives us some direction. A young Korean pickpocket girl inadvertently lifts a million dollar diamond off of Black Mask’s second-in-command and Black Mask, who has captured and is about to kill Harley Quinn, for some reason hires her to go after the girl and get the diamond back.
Harley finally finds the girl, who by this point has swallowed the diamond. This means Harley can’t turn her in until the diamond passes through her system. So Harley takes her back to her hideout where, within the span of five minutes, she becomes best friends with the girl, and now she’s not so sure she wants to give the diamond or the girl up to Black Mask. Unfortunately, that doesn’t matter because Black Mask is coming to get them.
I wish I had anything good to say about this movie.
But I don’t.
Most of the badness here is baked into the script itself.
The narrative is uber-weak. It’s Harley Quinn whining for half an hour about I don’t even know what. Then, out of nowhere, a random girl steals a diamond, a diamond we only learned about two minutes prior, and then everybody is after the diamond and that’s the plot. I bring up the fact that we only learned about the diamond two minutes prior because it shows how low the stakes are in this movie. The thing everyone is after had zero significance in the audiences’ eyes. The only reason it exists is to engineer some semblance of a plot.
Then there are all these little things that conveyed how amateurish the writing was. At one point, in the middle of the first act, Harley’s getting beat up, and, while talking to us in voice over, says, “In the storytelling world, this device is known as a complication.”
Um, no it isn’t.
A complication requires that your character have an objective to complicate. At this point in the story, there is no goal. Nobody is after anything. It was just Harley Quinn rambling in voice over while we meet a bunch of people we’d later learn had nothing to do with the story. So if you’re going to try and be clever and fourth-wall breaking and bring up screenwriting vocabulary, you might want to actually learn what the device is you’re talking about.
But there’s a much bigger problem at the heart of this movie and it’s something I’ve been asking ever since it was announced that Harley Quinn would get her own movie. What is it that Harley Quinn DOES? What makes her special? In other words, why does she deserve her own movie? I spent two hours with this character this weekend and I still can’t answer that question. As far I can tell, she’s just some loudmouthed eccentric person who likes to play dress up. What is it about that that makes someone think she deserves her own movie? I don’t get it.
And then there was the directing, which vacillated between generic and extra generic. The action scenes felt like the director was learning on the job. Many sequences came across as if the crew ran out of time and had to stick in a bunch of those garden-variety stunt moves you can see in a thousand 1985 B-action movies. There were occasional flashes of inspiration, like a couple of shots where Harley beats someone up with a bat. But they’d be surrounded by tons of locked down wide-angle shots that any second year film school student at USC could’ve pulled off. Where is the vision here? Where is the specialness that separates the good directors from the wannabes – that makes you say, “Oh, I understand why this director got the job over everyone else.” Cause those qualities were not evident in the finished product.
This was a misfire on every level.
And the problems started at the conception stage. Nobody ever asked the question, “What makes this character special?” You then coupled that with an aggressive campaign to exclude a group of people. So should you really be surprised that no one showed up to your movie? Maybe there are a few lessons to learn from this if the people involved are willing to have honest conversations with themselves.
If you’re looking to watch a good female-driven movie this week, go to Netflix instead and watch Horse Girl. It’s weird and trippy and unique and it doesn’t try to paint any one demographic as bad.
Finally, props to the two screenwriting Oscar winners this year. The Academy got it right! JoJo Rabbit and Parasite were my top two favorite screenplays of the year!
[x] What the hell did I just watch?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the price of admission
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Make sure your title and your movie line up. I know this seems obvious. But it’s a mistake I encounter fairly often. And it happened with today’s film. This movie is titled “Birds of Prey,” but it’s not about this “group” known as the Birds of Prey at all. They’re barely in the movie. This movie is 98% Harley Quinn doing Harley Quinn stuff. Have the title reflect that.
You know how when everyone tells you you have to watch something and it gets to the point where it’s so annoying how obsessed everyone is with that something that you’re determined to never watch it as some sort of spiteful point to be made that you’re not as weak-minded as all these sheep who only like something because everyone tells them to like it and then one day you finally sit down to watch that something, determined with every bone in your body to hate it so you can storm back to the masses and tell them they were all wrong only to get five minutes into the first episode and cancel everything you’re doing that day so you can watch the show all in one sitting?
That’s what happened when I watched Cheer, the new Netflix docu-series about a top-flight junior college cheer team in the middle of Texas. Soon I was yelling through the television to assure Morgan that, no, people do care for you, and to Jerry, for always being positive despite all the negativity surrounding him (#beaJerry), and leaping up with my hands over my mouth when someone forgot to catch Sherbs and she cracked her arm in half.
How did this happen? I’d went through my entire adult life without so much as sniffing a cartwheel. Then for six hours, my entire life revolved around cheerleading. This may seem insignificant for a screenwriting site. But there are actually screenwriting lessons to be learned here and it all starts with the concept itself. What do I always tell you guys? One of the best ways to turbocharge a concept is by adding irony.
Cheerleading is a happy peppy smiley sport. When you think of cheerleading, you think of joy. You think of people being positive. Yet one of the first things we see when we dolly in on a Navarro practice session is how serious everyone is. They’re practicing their routine, which involves lots of flipping and throwing people up 20 feet in the air. If one person isn’t paying attention, someone could snap their neck. As series favorite Morgan says in the second episode, “Whoever thought of chucking someone into the air and seeing how many times they can flip them… that person is psychotic.”
But it isn’t just the seriousness. A lot of the people who come to this sport have had really difficult lives. Star team member Gabi Butler has parents who have built the family business around her, with Gabi having no say in the matter whatsoever. She is not a daughter to them. She is a paycheck. And you can see how much strain this has put on her and her family relationship. In one of her segments, before an 8 hour practice day, they force her to get up at 4am to shoot a commercial. Then yell at her for not doing more to promote “their” brand.
Or then there’s Morgan, who has the most heartbreaking story of them all. While she was in high school, her dad just left her to start another family. She lived in a barn with her brother. And then her brother left too. So she was literally living all by herself with no income and no food until she was 18. She says she began to believe during that time that nobody cared about her and that things as simple as a passing smile at school were the only things that kept her going.
That irony, that contrast between what we expect cheerleaders to be like and what they actually are is a huge reason the show works so well. For example, if you followed a cheerleading team where everyone was happy and excited all the time, you’d get bored of it immediately. On the flip side, if you wrote a show about grave diggers and they were all the happiest people in the world, it’d be great. The contrast is what makes the product so alluring. That’s the power of irony.
There was another lesson I learned from the show in one of the press interviews. Several featured cast members were asked “Why them?” There were 40 people on the team. Why did these seven people get all the focus? And one of the cast members answered, “The director interviewed every one on the team. We were the ones they thought had the most interesting lives.”
For example, one of the most popular characters is Jerry. Jerry is unlike any cheerleader you’ve known. He was 300 pounds at one point in high school and still cheering. His mother died unexpectedly when he was young. He got lucky that a family adopted him. He’s relentlessly optimistic no matter how many terrible things happen in his life. Let’s take a step back and pretend we’re a writer looking for a character to put in our screenplay. Are we going to pick Jerry? Or are we going to pick Bob, an enthusiastic cheerleader who’s really trying to kick butt at nationals so he can impress some folks in LA in order to pursue his real passion, acting?
The same way these documentarians look for the most interesting people to document, that’s how you should be looking for characters for your stories. Are you just giving us the standard formula character? Or are you giving us someone who’s unique and who’s lived a full life, a life that’s going to affect them in your story, give them flaws and weaknesses they have to overcome. Since Jerry wants everyone to be happy, he doesn’t stick up for himself. When he gets kicked off mat, he doesn’t go up and ask the coach why. He accepts it. That’s a lesson he has to learn during the season. And you only get that kind of stuff when you start off with a deep character to begin with. Their past will inform their present flaws.
Even from a traditional plotting standpoint, Cheer is screenwriting’esque. One of the first things we’re told in the show is that “NATIONALS IS IN TWO MONTHS.” Right there we’ve got our goal, our stakes, and our urgency. From there, they do a great job creating obstacles via injuries. One of the most surprising things about Cheer is how often people get injured. They’re falling and slamming into the floor constantly. So when you only have a few girls who can manage the trickiest parts of the routine – being at the top – and one of them is all of a sudden done for the year because of an injury, we’re wondering, “How are they going to overcome this?”
Remember, once you set the goal for your story, the only job you have is CREATING DOUBT that your characters will achieve it. And Cheer was really interesting in that it has the same problems as Friday Night Lights or some of these other “top dog program” shows. Navarro always wins the championship. They’re the best team in the nation. So if you have a storyline where the goal feels like a foregone conclusion, the obstacles must be bigger. The setbacks even more daunting. And the show does an amazing job at that. People are constantly getting injured. Monica, the coach, is seen in back rooms convinced that the replacement cheerleader doesn’t have what it takes, that they’ll screw up come game time. And if she thinks that, it must be true. So our doubt that Navarro will win is solidified when we walk into that final episode.
I recommend that everybody watch this show. I know. It seems like something you wouldn’t be into. But I promise you if you give it ten minutes, you’ll change your mind. And pay attention to the simplicity of the formula because that formula has a lot of crossover with screenwriting. A simple goal – win the championship. But a complex cast of characters. Each person is struggling in their own unique way, which adds to the doubt that they’ll be able to achieve their goal as well as achieve success in their life after cheering. Afterwards, tell me what you think! Unless you think it’s bad. In that case, you’re wrong.
