Genre: TV Comedy/Sci-Fi
Premise: In a future where your consciousness is uploaded into a hard drive that substitutes for heaven, a young programmer finds himself a new resident of the afterlife after a car accident.
About: One of the most frustrating results of superheroes taking over cinema is the death of the high-concept. I love a great high-concept idea. Hollywood used to be a high-concept battleground. Whoever came up with the best high concept that week won a million dollars. However, the high concept isn’t dead and gone forever. It’s moved over to television, which is why I decided today to review Amazon’s new show, Upload.
Writer: Greg Daniels
Details: First couple of episodes are 1 hour. Rest of episodes are 30 min.

Greg Daniels has been on a roll lately.

He brought back his beloved TV show, Parks and Rec, for a onetime coronavirus benefit episode. He debuted his new big budget comedy, Upload, on Amazon. And he’s got a highly anticipated comedy with Steve Carrell called “Space Force,” on the horizon.

As streaming continues to dig its claws into the theater business, tearing away market share piece by valuable piece, we’ve seen high concepts, which used to be relegated to spec scripts and summer movies, become a prominent force in the streaming space.

15 years ago, Upload would’ve been a movie. Now, when someone comes up with an idea like this, their first thought is ‘TV.’ And I’m still not sure if that’s a good or a bad thing.

Ideas like this always seemed too big for two hours. But they certainly aren’t big enough for 30 hours. That’s the thing that continues to bother me about television. When someone comes up with an idea, they usually have the first season mapped out. And, from there it becomes, “We’ll figure it out.”

Sometimes they do (Breaking Bad). But usually they don’t.

Complicating matters is that Upload isn’t sure what it wants to be. It presents itself as a comedy. But it occasionally delves into serious subject matter, such as how the moral implications of a known afterlife would work. Some of the questions it presents are thought-provoking, but it can be jarring when it moves so fluidly from “What’s the meaning of life?” to Bud the Talking Dog.

Upload is set 50+ years in the future where mankind has set up digital afterlifes you can be uploaded into. Which afterlife you join is dependent on how much money you have. If you have a ton of money, you go to the richest and snazziest afterlife. If you don’t, well, you get the picture.

Nathan Brown is a coder with a beautiful materialistic girlfriend. One night while heading home, his self-driving smart-car crashes and kills him. It’s unheard of for a smart car to crash so we’re suspicious from the start. Due to his rich girlfriend, Nathan gets uploaded into the top afterlife, which looks a lot like colonial Canada.

Seeing as the afterlife is one giant hard drive, you can still communicate via voice or video with the real world, which allows Nathan to stay in touch with his girlfriend. Meanwhile, Nathan is being shown the ropes by his “angel,” which is what they call your tech support helper in the afterlife. Real name Nora, Nathan’s angel develops a quick crush on her latest client.

Back in the real world, Nora is struggling with the fact that her cancer-ridden father still believes in good old God, which means he’s choosing not to be uploaded when he dies. For him, upload is Real Heaven. Nora keeps trying to convince him to sign up for Upload since, if he doesn’t, she’ll lose him forever.

Almost half of the people who get uploaded to the afterlife don’t “take.” They freak out. It’s all too weird for them and they end up committing digital suicide. Nathan is too weirded out by the place and decides to end it all. But Angel/Nora comes racing after him and pleads with him not to end it in a monologue that’s clearly just as much about her father as it is Nathan. It’s enough to get Nathan to stop, for now. But how much longer can he survive in this Groundhog Day hell? Odds are not long.

What I liked most about Upload is that Daniels did a TON of work constructing the mythology. He’s really thought hard about what this world would look like. For example, the third episode focuses on the first “Download,” where someone from the afterlife will be downloaded back into a clone of themselves (a fun cameo from Creed of “Office” fame), paving the way for the afterlife to be joined back with the real world.

Or then there’s the fact that there’s only ever 5000 people around. When Nathan asks about this, Nora informs him that, actually, there’s hundreds of millions of people around but the place would be too crowded if it showed all of them at once so it separates the reality into a series of planes, each of which limits the amount of people visible.

One of my pet peeves is when a writer comes up with a big idea but doesn’t put any effort into actually exploring that idea. Greg Daniels is on the opposite end of that. If anything, he became too obsessed with what this world would look like. That’s how you get ideas like talking dogs.

I also liked the injection of a murder mystery into the plot. One of the best ways to keep people watching, not just for a second episode, but all the way through the season, is an overarching mystery arc. In this case, Nathan was murdered. He doesn’t even know it at first. Someone else has to suggest it to him. But now we’re on the hunt trying to figure out who did this to him. He’s got this supposedly perfect girlfriend who’s a little too cutthroat at times. Could she be involved?

Despite the incredibly rich mythology, something is missing here.

I’m not sure what it is but I think it’s the lack of familiarity in a lot of the situations.

Comedy works best when you put characters in a situation that people can relate to and then you play around with that situation. For example, one of the staples of The Office was those boring conference room meetings that are always a complete waste of time. Anyone who’s worked in an office environment can relate to the absurdity and stupidity of those situations.

And then there’s “Upload,” where a featured scene is Nathan attending his own funeral via a virtual conference app. It’s a clever idea in theory. But the situation is so unfamiliar to us that it’s hard to find any laughs in it. The scene plays out with Nathan feeling weird about the whole thing and yelling at everyone, which leaves you wondering what the point of the whole thing was.

It’s frustrating on a writing front because this is actually what I tell you guys to do. Find situations we haven’t seen before. That way you can give us something original. And yet sometimes I’m reminded that there’s a reason certain things haven’t been explored before. It’s because they don’t work.

I don’t want to totally discount this show. It has its moments. The things it gets right – like the chemistry between Nathan and Nora – it gets really right. But the premise ends up being so weird and complex that there isn’t enough familiarity for us to relate to what’s going on. It’s almost like Daniels went one generation too far with his concept. If it was set a little closer to today, maybe in the beginning stages of integrating this technology into life, there would be more we could relate to. But because it’s so far ahead, it’s a future we don’t understand enough to laugh at.

[ ] What the hell did I just watch?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the stream
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius

What I learned: Comedy tends to run into trouble – not always, but usually – when it either a) goes big-budget or b) attempts to push too much drama into the fold. Upload tackles both of these head on and, unfortunately, loses on both fronts.

I’m going to be hard at work all weekend on the newsletter so there’s no time for a Showdown today. But do not worry. I’ll be doing Second Chance Showdown next weekend. As for what to expect with the newsletter, I can confirm now there won’t be any Star Wars in it. For those of you who get angry whenever I talk about Star Wars, rest assured the newsletter is Star Wars free.

However, as long as we’re on the topic of Star Wars, I found out that Leslye Headland is making a Star Wars show for Disney Plus. Headland wrote the movie, “Bachelorette,” about a bunch of mean women being horrible to the soon-to-be bride. More recently she made time-loop show Russian Doll for Netflix. I suppose some people will like this news. But there is nothing in this woman’s work as far as I can see that would indicate she’s right for Star Wars. Star Wars is not mean. It’s not harsh. It doesn’t have angry people walking around being angry at everyone. To be honest, this choice is baffling. What criteria are they using to greenlight stuff over there? And why does Kathleen Kennedy still have a job?? It’s madness I tell you! MADNESSSS111!!!!

Okay, sorry, I had to get it out of the way. I did that so I wouldn’t have to include it in the newsletter so you’re welcome.

Let’s leave you with some screenwriting theory to ponder. A common mistake I encounter in the screenplays I read is the act of convincing yourself versus convincing them. As writers, when we want something to work, it’s very easy to convince ourselves that it works. But you’re not the person you have to convince. You have to convince the reader. And the reader has a much higher bar than you do.

For example, let’s say you’re writing Parasite (spoilers if you haven’t seen the film). You know that you want an ending where Poor Dad kills Rich Dad. So you need to come up with a reason for why that would happen. The “convince yourself” writer writes a single scene before the climax where Rich Dad yells at Poor Dad because he forgot to gas up the car. In the Convince Yourself writer’s mind, he’s done enough to justify Poor Dad raging out and killing Rich Dad.

The seasoned screenwriter, however, knows that that’s not going to fly. So he goes back into the script and writes five separate scenarios where the Rich Dad becomes increasingly disgusted by the Poor Dad’s smell. We see, in each instance, the Poor Dad getting angrier and angrier about the matter. So when he snaps at the final party, it makes sense to us.

This may seem obvious but I run into this issue at least once in every amateur script I read. It’s clear that the writer only worked hard enough to convince himself and didn’t put in the effort to make it believable on the reader’s end. And the reader’s end is the only end that matters.

HAPPY WEEKEND!

Going back through Tuesday’s and Wednesday’s script reviews, I identified a common theme, which was: HOLY SCHNIKEYS, STRUCTURE MATTERS A LOT!

Without structure, you can lose your grip on a good concept by page 20. I actually like the concept of a smart house attacking someone. I know it’s been done before but no one has come up with the definitive version yet. Which means it’s out there for the taking.

But the lazy structuring killed that script.

And a sex VR unit that gets in between the friendship of two couples is also a good idea. Done well, it could be a modern day Sex, Lies, and Videotape.

But the nonexistent structuring killed that script.

So what went wrong? Let’s dive a little deeper.

With “An Aftermath,” a script about a woman whose controlling dead husband lives on in her smart home’s AI, the writer didn’t move the plot along fast enough. For example, it took until page 80 until the house did something even mildly harmful (locking a guest in a freezer).

With “Blur,” about a group of 20-somethings whose lives become entangled after a Sex VR system enters their lives, there was no structure at all because there was no plot. Characters didn’t have anything to do, which left many scenes hanging in the wind, looking for a reason to exist.

Since structure is synonymous with plotting, we can identify part of the problem by looking at the definition of “plot.”

Here’s Wikipedia definition: In a literary work, film, story or other narrative, the plot is the sequence of events where each affects the next one through the principle of cause-and-effect. The causal events of a plot can be thought of as a series of events linked by the connector “and so”.

Ugh. That definition is an enabler for boringness. It’s basically saying that as long as things keep happening one after another, and that they’re connected in even the vaguest way, you’ve properly “plotted” your film. Which is actually what got this week’s scripts into trouble.

When it comes to movies, you want to think of plot as “a character trying to achieve an objective who then must overcome a series of obstacles along the way.”

Almost every good movie follows this model.

It does get tricky in certain situations and if you’re not versed in plotting, you may think some great movies are ‘structure-less’ because they don’t line up with this definition. But they usually do. The formula is just slightly tweaked.

In Shawshank Redemption, for example, Andy Dufrense spends the entire movie hanging out in a prison trying to live a happy life. Where’s the plot in that? Well, as it turns out, Andy Dufresne had a gigantic goal he was trying to accomplish. To escape. It just wasn’t revealed to us until the end.

Or then you have movies like Infinity War where the villain has the goal and all our superheroes are scrambling. That can be confusing since the traditional heroes aren’t the ones going after the primary objective. But the main thing to remember is that somebody wants something really badly and their quest to get that thing disturbs the environment in a way where they’re constantly encountering obstacles that may stop them.

If nobody’s moving anywhere, you can’t throw anything in front of them. That was Blur’s problem.

If characters *are* moving but you’re not throwing enough things at them, you get a script like An Aftermath.

Another reason writers struggle with plotting is because they don’t understand the three act structure. They understand it theoretically. But they don’t know how to put it into practice. Especially when you start having to meet certain page checkpoints. It can be a lot to manage when all you want to do is get your ideas down on the page.

So here’s a basic 2-rule hack to give your script structure. One, give your main character a goal they’re after. That’s imperative. And two, make something big happen every ten pages.

If you want to know a secret about how The Disciple Program was written, it was written during an interactive contest where the writers had to write ten pages at a time, then submit them for feedback before writing the next ten pages. What that did is it forced the writer to make something cool or exciting happen at the end of every ten pages. It basically ensured that the plot kept moving.

Or if you want to make it even simpler on yourself, HAVE BIG PLOT POINTS HAPPEN A LOT FASTER THAN YOU THINK YOU HAVE TO MAKE THEM HAPPEN. What I’ve found with beginner screenwriters in particular (but this can happen to any screenwriter) is that they believe their script is more interesting than it is. This gives them permission to allow their plot to unfold verrrrrrry slowwwwwwwwly. You need to constantly disrupt your story with new obstacles, new information, and new developments.

95% of screenplays are boring because they don’t follow this simple principle.

That would’ve helped “An Aftermath.” But Blur is a tougher case because it doesn’t fit into that neat structural box.

That’s because you have four protagonists instead of one. The reason this is a challenge is because it prevents you from doing the “Main character has a goal they go after” approach. How do you address this?

You do it by applying the same approach, but split up between four characters. That means each character should have a goal they’re trying to obtain during the story.

For one it might be getting into law school. For another it might be getting a job in the city they always dreamed of living in. For another it might be breaking up with their significant other, something they want to do but haven’t had the courage to do. These goals don’t have to be Avengers-level goals. They just have to be important in relation to the story you’re telling.

Once you give these characters goals, something magical happens. They’re now going to have places to be. They’re now going to have things to do. They’re now going to have more interesting things to talk about. You now have obstacles to throw at them because there’s finally something to throw an obstacle at (Character A gets admitted into law school but then is denied a student loan. They can’t afford school without that loan. What are they going to do?).

You may say, what does this have to do with a VR sex machine story, Carson? This is the beauty of adding purpose to your characters’ lives. You get to tell the exact same story you’re telling – these characters get intertwined with an addictive new sex technology – but it’s now happening inside a life that has more detail, has more interesting developments, has… well… HAS MORE SH#% GOING ON!

But most importantly, these new objectives in your characters’ lives provide the script with STRUCTURE. The reader now has a sense of where your characters want to be so they feel like we’re all on a purposeful journey together.

You need to provide the reader with a series of rewards along the way for them to feel satisfied. “If you read just a little bit longer,” you promise them, “you’ll get to find out if Jane convinced the bank to give her that student loan.” But if you don’t integrate these purposeful journeys for each of your characters, your script won’t have these rewards. And if we, the reader, aren’t being rewarded, we’re getting bored.

So yes. Character is important. Dialogue is important. Theme is important. But if your structure is limp, or worse, non-existent, none of that matters. So make sure your structure is on point.

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!

What? A new feature on Scriptshadow? A full 10 years after the site started? How does that even happen??

Genre: Sci-Fi/Drama
Premise: (from Hit List) When new technology allows people to have realistic sex in virtual reality, a man begins to suspect that the avatar he’s been digitally hooking up with behind his girlfriend’s back might belong to his best friend’s girlfriend. Secrets and lies come to the surface, jeopardizing both relationships in the process.
About: I’m SUPER PUMPED about this script. One of the best unknown directors out there is making his directorial debut with this film. I don’t know anything about the writer other than he made the Hit List in 2018 with this script. But director Saman Kesh is amazing. You can watch his short film, Controller, here.
Writer: Jacob Colman
Details: 107 pages

Bridget Regan for Amy?

Writing is so interesting.

Because whenever you write a story, you’re writing about problems. This is a necessity because if everything is okay, it wouldn’t be interesting. That means when you write about a marriage, it typically has to be a marriage in disarray so that we want to keep reading to see the problems resolved. If the marriage is fine, there’s no reason for us to stick around.

However, if you aren’t careful with the way you present the problems with your characters, you risk things feeling depressing or sad. Did anybody see that Mike Nichols movie, Closer? It didn’t do very well for that specific reason. You watched that movie and just felt… depressed.

A little of the same thing is happening with Blur.

These are people with problems which SHOULD MEAN that I want to see their problems get resolved. But I don’t. Why? Because I don’t like the characters. That’s another tricky thing with writing. You have to write about people in bad situations but you have to present them in a good enough way that we like them.

“Blur” follows four people. There’s TV editor and self-esteem poor Liam. There’s ladies-man who’s never had a job in his life Bobby. There’s wholesome but boring Amy. And there’s hot but detached from life Lydia.

Liam and Amy, both on the verge of 30, are married and have known each other since college. They also knew Bobby in college. And the group is close enough that Bobby and Amy had a brief fling before Liam and Amy got together.

Bobby has now brought his latest girlfriend, Lydia – who you could buy a diamond ring for while walking a puppy as the two of you were experiencing Disney World for the first time and she would still find a way to be bored – to spend some couples time together.

Independently, Liam and Lydia learn about this thing called Tryst VR where you can participate in realistic VR sex. The two each secretly buy a Tryst, keeping it from their significant others. The experience is particularly intense for Liam, who’s had a limited sex life. He meets another virtual person in the program and she rocks his world. Little does he know, it’s Lydia.

Liam begins to re-request this girl, named Eve in the program, and they engage in a myriad of sexual acts. Liam obviously feels guilty about the whole thing. But not guilty enough to stop! Meanwhile, Bobby secretly discovers Lydia’s Tryst VR and hops on it to see who she’s virtually banging. And the next thing you know, he’s rage-banging Liam, although neither of them are aware of it.

Will Tryst VR destroy these two couples? Or is it actually solving their relationship issues?

As much as I wanted this script to work it just doesn’t.

For starters, there’s no plot – nothing moving anything forward here. We’re just watching characters talk. Then watching characters go to work. Then watching characters use the Tryst headset. Then watching characters talk again. There isn’t a single active character or plot event pushing anything forward.

I guess there’s the VR stuff. Liam is technically being active by using it. But somehow even that storyline is stillborn. If you’re crafting a movie that’s all about sexual VR experiences, then each time you go in, the experiences should escalate. They should get either more intense or more dangerous. But they mostly stay the same in Blur. In a movie, things need to escalate and evolve, not stay the same.

It’s disappointing because this is the second script in two days that didn’t exploit its premise.

Quick tip for everyone. Be wary of writing a story where characters have miserable lives and don’t do anything interesting. Even if that’s the point you’re trying to make – that life is unfulfilling – there’s a high probability we’re going to be bored by your characters. Why wouldn’t we be? THEY DON’T DO ANYTHING AND THEY’RE ALL MISERABLE. Who wants to watch that? Especially when you don’t have a plot to fall back on. At least with a plot, we’d have something to look forward to.

American Beauty is a movie that played with unhappiness. A guy was unhappy with his life and so he made a drastic change to stop doing what the world told him to do and, instead, do whatever he wanted. It covered the same themes as Blur but it did so in a way that was much more active and entertaining.

Key in on that word – ACTIVE. Lester in American Beauty was ACTIVELY pursuing his dream of living life on his terms. Amy, Liam, Lydia, and Bobby just sit around and complain about their lives.

Based on this director, here’s what I know. This is going to look amazing. And I feel like he’s going to give us sex scenes that we’ve never seen in a movie before – really weird visceral fun shit.

But no matter how good of a director you are, you can’t save a script that a) has no forward-moving plot and b) fails at the main thing it’s trying to do.

This movie is trying to explore relationships but the dynamics that have been set up are aggressively uninteresting. Both of these are lame-duck relationships. They’re doomed. So why do I care if two people cheat? It’s just speeding up an inevitable process. And it’s not even real cheating. It’s computer cheating.

If these couples were in a good place, or even if only one of the couples was in a good place, now you have something to ruin because the character who cheats is potentially destroying the only thing that matters to them – their marriage.

In Blur, there are no consequences. Even if you make the argument that virtual cheating is still cheating, and therefore getting caught means breaking up, THAT WOULD BE A GOOD THING FOR EVERYONE INVOLVED because they were all miserable to begin with!

This was frustrating. Was hoping for more.

[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius

What I learned: We’re going to add a new feature in script reviews. A Character Description Ranking. Every script I read, I will take a character description and give it a ranking. Black Star – terrible. Bronze star – Barely okay. Silver Star – Good. Gold Star – Great. Platinum Star – Superb. The reason I like this below description is it takes us out of the static two dimensional world of words and pulls us into a real live environment. It’s not just adjectives. We’re in a bar looking at this person.

GOLD STAR CHARACTER DESCRIPTION! – “Amy does her makeup in the mirror. She’s exceedingly cute. That wholesome look that emboldens shy guys in bars.”

Today’s screenplay poses the question, “What if you could date Hal 9000?”

Genre: Thriller
Premise: After a whirlwind long-distance online romance, a once-cynical writer inherits a remote smart-house from her newly deceased new husband and discovers he might not be entirely gone after all.
About: Lauren Caris Cohan is a writer-director and this is going to be her directorial debut. This script finished with 8 votes on last year’s Black List.
Writer: Lauren Caris Cohan
Details: 112 pages

Last week was Fun Script Review Week.

We had two interesting scripts to talk about.

Will that trend continue this week?

Only time will tell. However much time it takes to get through the plot description.

The evil smart house concept is not a new one. About 15 years ago, the concept of a smart house entered the media, igniting many screenwriters to write Smart House horror scripts. I think a few of them even became movies.

But when the smart house the world promised us never came to be, people forgot about the idea. Until now. To Cohan’s credit, it’s a good time to explore this idea as we really are moving towards those concepts first imagined 15 years ago. I can turn on the lamp over by the window by yelling at Alexa to do so. And my bedroom Alexa tells me every morning how many people died from Corona virus in the last 24 hours. And some argue technology hasn’t made the world a better place.

I’m a little wary, though. How much danger can a smart house really create? I’m pretty sure by walking to the middle of the living room, Crazy House AI can’t touch you. But isn’t that the challenge of writing? Every idea has limitations. Good writers are able to find solutions to those limitations. Other writers are not.

Sheila is a 42 year-old British woman who may have stolen my quarantine to-do list since she’s apparently been watching a lot of 90 Day Fiance. Without ever having physically met Michael (she’s only talked to him online for the last 6 months) Sheila flies over to the U.S. and marries him. Immediately they head off to Michael’s lovely home in Big Sur.

Michael is rich, retired, and really into nerdy stuff. His entire house is automated. Sheila, a writer, starts working on her latest book, only to get a surprise visit from the cops. Michael’s car flew off a cliff and he died. Poor guy.

A week later, Sheila receives a white box from a company called OUROBOROS. The Ouroboros module allows Michael, whose consciousness has been downloaded to a computer, to come back to life as the home’s AI!

Sheila is weirded out at first. But after visiting Ouroboros and being assured that this is all above board, she allows Michael to come back, because what woman wouldn’t want her husband looking over her shoulder 24 hours a day? Sheila is happy for a while. But then she meets the studly local convenience store owner, Caleb. Yumma yumma.

The two clearly have chemistry but because Creepy AI Michael watches everything Sheila does, she can’t spend any meaningful adult time with him. But when she can’t ignore the need for physical connection any longer, she turns Michael off and Caleb comes over for dinner.

Sheila doesn’t realize it. But she’s just Microsoft Dossed her lover. The next day, while Sheila is out, Creepy AI Michael locks him in the freezer! And when Sheila returns, he locks her in the house as well, informing her that unless she changes her behavior, he’s going to provide the cops with irrefutable evidence that she murdered him for his money. Will Sheila wise up? Or will she burn this place to the ground?

“Aftermath” wasn’t a bad screenplay.

It just didn’t do anything exceptional in the execution.

I knew the script was in trouble when I saw a 7 line paragraph on the first page. In Cohan’s defense, I’ve seen good scripts with 7 line paragraphs in them. But even most beginner writers know that you don’t pull out a 7 line paragraph on the very first page.

The bigger issue with Aftermath is that the structure isn’t there.

When you go to a movie about a controlling killer house, what do you expect to see? I’m guessing you expect to see a controlling killer house. But the house doesn’t do anything controlling or killing until page 80.

That’s partly because Cohan had to do a lot of setup here. We had to establish this complex relationship where they met online and got married and they’re going to Michael’s house for the first time and the house is a smart house. That took a while to explain.

But the rest of the structural problems are on the writer. We spend a lot of time with Sheila heading to the city to meet with Ouroboros and asking them questions. You have a confined thriller set up. You shouldn’t be allowing your heroine to run around, willy-nilly anywhere on the planet. That’s the opposite of what you want to do with this setup. It creates a sense of freedom. It makes the audience think that Sheila can leave safely whenever she wants. Not to mention, you’re sending her out for the least dramatic reasons possible – so you can feed more exposition to the reader. If you’re going to break protocol in a screenplay, you want to do it because you have an entertaining scene idea. Not 20 Questions with a Scientist.

Another problem is there’s no sense of Sheila’s life before she moves here.

This is a common mistake beginners make so I want to discuss it. We often pick characters who don’t have a lot of friends or family because we just want to focus on our main characters. But that usually catches up to you. Take Sheila, for example. We’re supposed to believe that Sheila has no family, no friends, nobody she talks to. Her job history is limited at best. That’s not a real person. That’s a lazy writer.

That’s someone who doesn’t want to give the character a real job because that means figuring out what that job is. Which means it may shape our hero in a way we don’t quite like. It means figuring out how long she’s had that job. If she likes that job. If getting that job was part of her life plan. If it wasn’t, where did things go wrong? It means knowing who she worked with. Some of those people would likely be friends. Why do all that when you can just not do it? Not doing it is easier, right?

But I promise you this. If you’re making a decision in a script because it means less work for you, 99% of the time your script will be worse for it.

I especially get suspicious when a character’s job is writing. A writer will often make this choice for two reasons. One, the writer knows this job well. And two, you don’t have to give a writer any responsibilities or have them need to be anywhere ever. This provides a false sense of security because now you don’t have to worry about a character’s schedule or have them be anywhere. You have total freedom. Which is also why it’s a bad idea. Total freedom is the opposite of everyone who’s going to watch your movie. They all have jobs. They all have lives. They all have friends. So watching some person who’s sitting around all day doing nothing is going to be both un-relatable and unentertaining.

Stephen King makes all his characters writers but Stephen King would be the first to tell you he does this because he’s lazy. And also, he’s one of the most creative people ever. So he’s able to make up for it.

All of these things resulted in a script that was too laid back. This thing never got out of third gear and spent most of its time in second. You have to at least hit fourth gear in your movie. And, preferably, you should have a couple of fifth gear moments.

[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius

What I learned: One of the biggest sins you can commit as a writer is promising a cool concept then not exploiting what’s unique about that concept at all. This is a movie about an evil smart house. The most original thing the smart house does to attack its occupants in “An Aftermath” is lock someone in a freezer. That’s like if Jurassic Park had a single dinosaur scene where a stegosaurus stole the hero’s spaghetti.