Genre: Thriller
Premise: Trapped at a three day personal development retreat, a woman fights to save her husband and herself from being brainwashed by a charismatic self-help guru.
About: This script finished with 10 votes on this past year’s Black List. The writer is repped at Verve.
Writer: Levin Menekse
Details: 107 pages
Despite all the great entertainment options out there, there’s still nothing quite like reading a good script. Something that sucks you in and never allows you to disengage. That’s the power of good writing.
To that end, I owe today’s experience to you guys. I saw a few of you fawning over this in the comments section and I had to see what all the fuss was about. As it turns out, the subject matter was right up my alley. A cult movie? But not the obvious kind (people in white robes saying weird s%#@ and secretly trying to kill you). The much more sinister kind. Cults dressed up like a self-help organization. Where is the line between genuine self-discovery and manipulation? That’s what today’s script asks. And the answer is splendid.
38 year old lawyer Kirsa Rein finds herself somewhere outside of Los Angeles at a big bland gray building with her 31 year old husband, Peter. Kirsa is trying to make partner at her firm and recently her boss came to this Tony Robbins on steroids retreat called “The Process” which is able to transform you into your bigger better self within three days. Peter is begging Kirsa to ditch the sketch-fest in the last minutes before entering the drab building but she thinks it’s gong to be great.
Famous last words.
Once inside, they’re treated to their first lecture by Aiden Caul, a big intense dude who’s equal parts terrifying and charming. Aiden starts screaming at everyone that this isn’t going to be easy but it’ll be a lot easier if everyone’s honest. Immediately he calls on Kirsa to give her initial impressions on the event but whatever she says, he’s not buying it. This is a woman who’s gotten straight A’s her whole life. Immediately, she’s on the teacher’s s%@$ list.
Afterwards, she meets up with Peter, who’s laughing it up with one of the volunteers, Maya. One of the gorgeous volunteers, Kirsa notices. Hmm, this isn’t going to be anything like she thought. The men and women are separated into different rooms and when Kirsa wakes up, her anti-depressant medication has been taken from her suitcase. She freaks out and yells at the volunteers, which only results in everyone hating her more.
Peter gets called up on stage at the next lecture where Aiden meticulously dresses him down. He starts asking Peter if he’s happy with his life. If he’s happy with his career. If he’s happy with his marriage. At first Peter says, yes, he’s very happy. But Aiden keeps pushing him. Again, the process isn’t a place for bulls@%#. It’s a place for truth. So Peter starts giving him the real answers, starts having real breakthroughs. It’s at this point where Kirsa realizes that this is no longer about getting a promotion. It’s about breaking her husband out of here before he’s fully brainwashed. The question is, will Peter want to go with her?
So there are two ways I recommend starting a spec. Notice I’m saying “spec” here. Not every script. Spec scripts. I use that distinction because people reading specs have zero faith that they’re going to be good. Under those conditions, option 1 is to give us a mysterious situation right out of the gate. This creates a sense of mystery which compels the reader to read on.
Option 2 is to give the reader a familiar situation but to spin it in a way that we’re not expecting. A good example would be The Matrix. A team of cops go to arrest a woman in a building and all of a sudden she starts running on walls and leaping over buildings.
Of these two options, I like number 1 better. I like the opening of It Follows. A young woman runs out of a house and keeps looking back at something chasing her but there’s nothing chasing her. If I’m reading that script, I will definitely keep reading to find out what the heck is going on.
The Process goes with Option 1 in a subtler way, but nonetheless just as effective. We start in this large gray room with no windows. It is populated by half a dozen “volunteers” in unisex uniforms, all staring forward, silent. We don’t know what “volunteers” are yet. We then move out of the room down a long gray hallway, “swallowed into the bowels of an endless building.” Immediately I want to know where I am and what’s going on. These may seem like simple questions but these are questions readers will want answered and therefore keep reading to find out.
All of this took place in one page and already I’m curious to find out more. Remember, your goal when writing scripts is never to impress the reader. Your only job is to make them want to keep turning pages. So give us some questions we want answered right away and we’ll keep turning the pages.
The mystery behind exactly what this place is drives the first 15 pages of the story. And by that point, we’ve gotten to know our couple, Peter and Kirsa. Injecting a couple into this scenario as opposed to an individual was a stroke of genius. Because now it isn’t just about, “How evil is this guru and to what extremes is he willing to go?” It’s “Is this couple going to survive this process?”
This is something I wish I could tattoo onto every screenwriter’s forearm. The cool hook gets us in the door. But it’s what’s going on with the characters that keeps us there. And you have choices in that department. You can just explore what’s going on internally with a character, like Arthur in Joker. Or you can build the exploration around a relationship (marriage, parent-kid, best friends), which I find to be more fun because it’s easier to play with conflict and tension and flaws when two characters can talk about it. When you’re only exploring a character internally, their flaw needs to be actionable to resonate. For example, the flaw of greed is an actionable flaw because there’s lots of ways to show your hero being greedy.
But there are so many more scenes you can write when you’re exploring a relationship and that’s where this script shines. It has a “THAT” scene that explores marriage as intensely as I’ve ever seen. Remember what “THAT” scenes are. They’re big memorable scenes that everyone is going to be talking about after the movie. If you have a below-average script but you have a THAT scene? It’s worth it to keep rewriting your script until you get it right because THAT scenes are indicative of a concept that has potential. You can’t write one of these scenes off a bad idea.
The scene in question is when Aiden takes Peter up on stage and starts asking him if he’s happy with his life. Out in the crowd, we occasionally cut to Kirsa’s reaction to Aiden’s questioning. It’s an amazing scene because Aiden is so blunt at laying out how bad Peter’s life is. Peter is finally confronting this reality. And Kirsa is watching it all unfold helplessly from her seat and terrified with how much further it’s going to go. There is a genuine possibility that by the end of their interaction, he might want to leave her. Talk about a high stakes moment.
There are a lot of strong choices in this script. For example, the reason they’re here is because Kirsa’s boss at the law firm, who also took this course, recommended she do so as well. Kirsa is determined to make partner. So it’s imperative she make her boss happy. This gets rid of the question that is often asked in movies like these: Why don’t they just leave? If things are getting out of control, why wouldn’t they leave? And that’s why. Because she knows if she goes back a failure, she’ll never get that promotion.
The thing that pushed this script over the edge for me was the character of Aiden. He could’ve been a one-dimensional bully. But there’s a lot here he says that makes sense. When he’s challenging people to confront their lives and if they’re happy and if they’ve been lying to themselves, it rings true. And it’s when you have those conflicted feelings as a reader, where you can’t hate the bad guy straight out, that make for a more introspective conflicted read. You don’t want to be feeling this way but you are, and it slyly pulls you into a deeper realm of the story. It’s almost like you have to keep reading to confirm that this guy is bad so that you don’t feel bad yourself about agreeing with him on some things.
This was a perfect mid-week read. And a very financially doable movie. This is exactly the quality of storytelling I’m looking for in The Last Great Screenwriting Contest.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[x] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: There are pivot moments where the previous reasoning for something no longer makes sense because of a plot development. When those moments happen, you have to up the reasoning to reflect the new reality. So earlier I said the reason they don’t just leave is because she doesn’t want to go back to her boss and say she didn’t finish the program. However, when Aiden starts destroying her marriage, that logic doesn’t work anymore. You need another reason they stay. So what The Process does is, by that point, Peter is a convert. He believes in what Aiden is saying. So he doesn’t want to leave. This forces Kirsa to stay to try and rescue her husband.
Today I give you TWO new great screenwriting tips to add to your screenwriting tool shed. They’re called “upgrading” and “paralleling,” and The Outsider shows us how to pull them both off.
This weekend I decided to take a chance on The Outsider. Why do I phrase it like that? “Take a chance?” Because let’s be real. Another Stephen King adaptation? I saw It 2. I endured Pet Cemetery. They were awful. And The Outsider wasn’t exactly a worldbeater book. I remember it being advertised when it first came out, like all Stephen King novels, but after that, it drifted into the ether.
Imagine my surprise, then, when I sat down for the pilot of Outsider and within ten minutes I was hooked. And not just hooked. Hardcore “this is the greatest show ever” hooked. Okay, maybe not the greatest show ever. But anything that can make me forget about the hundred other things I have do in the moment is a darn good show.
And when you’re doing something that right, I have to figure out why. Because The Outsider has the most basic of basic hooks. A dead body. It’s a little more intense because it’s a child who’s been murdered. But it’s nothing we haven’t seen before if we’ve watched any cop or detective show ever. So why was this special? What did it do to rope me in? That’s what I want to find out.
SPOILERS BELOW!!!!!!
1) It doesn’t waste any time – There’s nothing that says you can’t use the beginning of your pilot to establish your characters. This is television. In the last decade, they transformed TV specifically into a character development medium. However, it’s 2020, the year of the shortest attention span ever. So while you can certainly slow-build your way through your pilot, you probably shouldn’t. It’s a better idea to get us into the story right away, like a movie. The very first scene of this show is the crime scene of the murdered boy. We waste NO TIME. But what about character development, Carson? Do we toss it in the garbage? No. You do something called PARALLELING. This is when you push both the story forward AND develop character at the same time. In this case, Detective Ralph Anderson comes onto the scene and you start peppering his arrival with insights into his character. Through the music he listens to, through the downbeat manner in which he interacts with others, we see that this man walks with 10,000 pounds of hard life strapped to his back. You’re not telling us as much as you could if you built a scene specifically to tell us about the character. But that’s the challenge. We have to get into the story so you need to find little moments here and there to reveal character. And it’s never as hard as you think. You just have to pay attention to it.
2) Upgrade your key scenes – I want you to imagine you’re writing a TV episode about a murder. Your detective has gathered enough evidence to arrest the alleged murderer. Where does this scene happen? Go into your head right now and imagine where does he arrest this man? I’m guessing that the first image that comes to mind is the alleged murderer’s house. Our detective shows up. The murderer’s wife is confused. What are the police doing here? They ask her if her husband is home. He is. They barge in. Arrest him. The wife starts screaming. The kids start crying. It’s a perfectly fine scene. It’s probably even memorable. Viewers are going to be impacted by it. There’s only one problem. WE’VE SEEN IT ALREADY. And when it comes to key scenes, “seen it already” is screenwriting death. For every key scene you have, you should be looking to UPGRADE! You want to think bigger. You want to think ‘more original.’ And that’s what they do in The Outsider. Detective Anderson, who has some mysterious personal vendetta against Terry Maitland, makes the decision to arrest him at the little league game that Terry’s coaching. He doesn’t just want to arrest Terry. He wants to humiliate him. He wants everybody in town to see it. And so we get this intense arrest scene with cops walking onto the baseball field and arresting Terry for the murder of the boy (something they make loud and clear). This scene works for a few reasons. There’s irony here. A children’s baseball game is supposed to be innocent and safe. Yet we’re arresting our co-protagonist for murder in the middle of it. But the biggest reason it works is because it’s an UPGRADE on the scene we usually see. Whenever you encounter a key scene in your script, you better be upgrading.
3) An authenticity to the proceedings – One of the things that drives me crazy in scripts is when something enormous happens but the characters don’t act as if something enormous happens. For example, I’ve seen bad cop shows where someone’s been murdered and, in the next scene, the detectives are cracking jokes. Or nobody seems upset about what happened. The issue is that the writer is unaware of the temperature in the room. For him, a death is not a tragedy. It’s a way to get his plot moving. And since he doesn’t treat the death as real, none of the characters do either. The Outsider is the opposite of that. It doesn’t just ask what our key characters feel about this tragedy. It asks what everybody in town feels. And so the murder isn’t just a plot-starter. It’s an honest look at what happens when there’s tragedy in a small town. For example, the mother of the murdered child ends up having a heart attack and dying because the murder of her child is too much. We find out Detective Anderson’s child died recently so this murder of a young child hits him on a deeper level. Too many writers write with plot-blinders on. They see every event as a means to move their plot along as opposed to sitting down and thinking about the effects of the events they’re writing about. I can’t emphasize this enough. It’s one of the main reasons I dismiss scripts these days. There’s zero authenticity in the proceedings (note: I realize there’s a sliding scale when it comes to authenticity and genre – a comedy doesn’t have to play by the same authenticity rules as a show like The Outsider. But like every genre, it needs some basis for authentic behavior).
4) Look for the uncommon in your common scenarios – I’m going to cheat here a little bit but one of the best scenes in this series comes in the second episode. In it, there’s a moment where Terry is being transported from the jail house to the courthouse. It’s a scene we’re familiar with. It’s where the suspect has to be walked up through a crowd of angry yelling people who want the murderer to know just how terrible a person he is. For this reason, I call this a “common scenario.” The great thing about common scenarios is that you can use the viewer’s expectation of the scenario against them. I’ve been breaking down scripts forever. And I fully expected this scene to go as planned. We’re going to see him get out of the car, the lights are blinding, the noise is off the charts. He walks towards the courthouse and people are calling him terrible things and reporters are yelling questions and they have to fight their way through a collapsing crowd in the last 15 feet and barely get inside to the safety of the building. But what happened instead? Halfway to the building, a man steps straight in front of the group, raises a gun, shoots the first two cops dead, starts shooting at Terry, and then Detective Anderson is able to kill him. I don’t remember being this shocked watching a scene in a long time. And it’s because the writer used our expectation of a common scenario against us. — By the way, I know some of you might think of this as an UPGRADE scene. But it isn’t. An upgrade scene is when you change the scene at the conceptual level, starting with the location. Here, keeping the location is actually what you’re looking for. You’re trying to lure the viewer into a false sense of security.
5) Don’t take drama off – Too many writers focus on the big dramatic beats in the story and, in the process, overlook opportunities to explore drama in smaller scenes. When Terry is sent to jail, it could’ve just been a shot of him behind bars looking sad. Instead, we watch Terry go through the humiliating process of being signed into the jail, and also being spotted by a large scary cell mate who recognizes him from TV as “that guy who killed that kid.” He tells Terry right then and there that he’s going to kill him. And the moment arrives where it’s Terry’s turn to enter the big cell where all the criminals are located, including that man. We know that if Terry goes in there, he’s dead. So he tells the C.O. “I can’t go in there.” The C.O. shrugs his shoulders like, “I don’t care.” And just when he’s about to walk the plank, another cop comes over, recognizes the danger of the situation, and puts Terry in a separate cell. It’s an intense moment and it’s a moment that average writers could easily miss. There’s drama everywhere in your story. You just have to keep your eyes open for it.
In addition to this, The Outsider has a clever mystery at its core. Terry Maitland’s DNA is all over the crime scene. There are four witnesses who saw him come out of the woods where the boy was found, his clothes drenched in fresh blood. However, Terry Maitland is also on video in another town at the exact time of the murder. I bring this last part up because I like shows that focus on immediate mysteries AND an overarching mystery because it gives us two things to get excited about. Sometimes writers will only focus on the present and there’s no overarching problem that needs to be resolved. I would advise against this. Something to keep in mind if you’re entering a pilot script into The Last Great Screenwriting Contest. :)
I was going to search out the Colin Trevorrow draft of Episode 9 and review it but the truth is, I’m kinda sick of Star Wars. I still love it but all the contentious buildup to the final movie exhausted me, as I think it did everyone. There was so much angst and conflict associated with the franchise that regardless of how the series turned out, you couldn’t help but feel like you needed time off.
So I did the lazy thing and looked at the Reddit summary of the script instead. Now as long as there’s been Hollywood, people have claimed that the original script was “better than the movie.” I’m guilty of this as well. I still contend the original Source Code script was way better than the movie they made. But the reality is, this claim is rarely true. If there’s a better version of the movie out there, they would’ve made that version. I say this as someone who’s gone back and read all the drafts of famous failed movies. Those old Alien 3 scripts? Not good. This amazing version of “I Am Legend” that’s supposedly out there. Not true. Even with how bad Indiana Jones 4 turned out, the other drafts weren’t any better.
Trevorrow’s Episode 9 opens on BB-8 and Rose Tico, which means, right there, you’ve ensured your movie is a step down from Rise of Skywalker. But in Trevorrow’s defense, he’d not yet seen The Last Jedi and Rian Johnson was probably talking up how Rose was going to be this game-changing character and Colin, eager to please his heroes, believed him.
From there, the Resistance steals a Star Destroyer and comes up with a plan to get to a First Order dominated Coruscant. There’s old tech there that will allow them to send a call for help to planets throughout the galaxy to help fight the First Order. Meanwhile, Rey is battling with whether she should redeem Kylo or not. And, in the script’s one inspired storyline, Kylo finds an old “contingency plan” message from The Emperor to Vader, saying that if Luke kills him, to go train under his master, a 7000 year old Super-Sith. So Kylo goes to him and trains.
Look, the plot isn’t as bad as you would expect it to be considering it got Colin Trevorrow fired. But is it any better than Rise of Skywalker? No. It’s just different. It would’ve sufficed as a final movie. But the reality is that JJ is a better director than Trevorrow so, with both scripts being equal, JJ’s movie would’ve been the better one.
I will say that Trevorrow’s draft seemed to be more fleshed out. For example, there was a nice parallel of Rey continuing to train with Luke and Kylo training with this new guy, organically setting up a final confrontation between the two Jedis. But the counter-argument to that is Rey and Ben teaming up to take down a threat bigger than both of them (the Emperor) is the more inspired choice. The duo teaming up is definitely less predictable.
At this point, though, it doesn’t matter. Star Wars needs an overhaul. Even the announcement that my current directing crush, Taika Waititi, is developing a Star Wars movie didn’t get me excited. Until someone from Disney steps up in front of the internet and gives us a clear plan on what they’re doing with the franchise – the way Kevin Feige does – I’m skeptical. Because up until this point, the franchise’s biggest misstep has been the randomness in which it operates. Give me a clear direction that explains how Star Wars is going to be fresh again and how all the movies are going to coincide with one another, then, and only then, will I hop back on the train.
Or if you announce a Babu Frik standalone movie of course.
By the way, I FINALLY popped in Gemini Man. “Gemini Man!!?” some of you are screaming. “Who the heck cares about Gemini Man!!?” For those who don’t know, Gemini Man was the last high concept spec script from the spec golden era. Twenty-plus years this thing has been in development. And while I wasn’t curious enough to spend 20 bucks at the theater to see how it turned out, I had no problem renting it for a fraction of that.
As I look at more and more projects through the lens of a producer, I become more in tune with how bad scripts get made. The Hollywood dominos are set up not to encourage the best script, but rather to get your movie made any way possible. It’s so hard to get a film made that even if you’re presented a second rate package, you take it because you never know if the opportunity will come again.
Gemini Man is the poster child for this. There’s something flawed about the concept for this movie. I don’t know what it is. I actually love the core idea of an assassin being hunted by the 30-years younger version of himself. But they’ve had 20 years and just as many writers trying to figure the script out and they haven’t been able to do it.
But, lo and behold, Will Smith and Ang Lee agree to do the movie. As a writer, I look at this and say, “Oh no.” Of all the 50+ actors on the planet, no one looks younger than Will Smith. This defeats the purpose of the film’s conceit – that the old man has to go up against his younger stronger faster self. So Smith is not right for the part. Ang Lee, meanwhile, is too cerebral for a movie like this. He’s a great filmmaker. But this is a Bruckheimer movie. And Lee doesn’t know how to make those. So he’s wrong too.
As a producer, however, I see it differently. It’s been 20+ years trying to get this movie made. I somehow got Will Smith to a) read it, and b) like it enough to sign on. This ensures an adequate amount of financing to do the movie justice. I’ve also got an A-list director who’s won Academy Awards before. For reasons I can’t explain, he wants to make this movie. And best of all, Smith wants to work with Lee. If Lee pulled out and I was forced to bring in, say, Peyton Reed, Smith would bail. I don’t know if I’ll ever have another chance to make this movie again so even though all these elements are wrong for the type of movie I’m trying to make, I’m going to pull the trigger.
You can almost talk yourself into it, can’t you? Ang Lee made Life of Pi, Brokeback Mountain, Crouching Tiger, which were all amazing. Will Smith remains one of the most popular actors on the planet. This movie could be a critical AND a commercial success. I’m sure the same type of logic was applied to Dr. Doolittle. You’ve got the actor who just finished playing one of the most successful movie characters of all time. And you’ve got talking animals! There isn’t a single kid on the planet who doesn’t like animals. As a producer, there’s so much here that makes sense. But if you take one step outside the Hollywood bubble, you know that Dr. Doolittle is a dated property and that the project has a high probability of falling in between too silly for the 14 and up crowd and too adult for the Frozen and Pixar kiddies.
Look, none of this stuff is calculable. A lot of it is feel. With a few tweaks, who knows? Maybe Dr. Doolittle is the next Willy Wonka. But if you’re not evaluating it both from within the bubble and outside of it, there’s a higher probability for mistakes.
As for Gemini Man, it wasn’t as bad as I thought it was going to be. But this script just seemed plagued by problems that couldn’t be solved, which put this awkward strain on the story whereby it’s spending half its time looking for a reason to exist. I mean there’s this scene early on where Will Smith’s character confronts the dock manager, who he’s convinced is a fellow CIA agent here to spy on him during his retirement. The woman tells him he’s crazy and that she has no idea what he’s talking about. After several more intense accusations, he switches gears and asks her out on a date, to which she agrees.
Let’s take a closer look at that, shall we? This woman, who really is CIA by the way, but is pretending not to be. She gets accused by a random man of being a secret agent, which would be unsettling at best and terrifying at worst for any woman in her situation. Yet she agrees immediately afterwards to go out on a date with him. It doesn’t make any sense. And that’s the kind of strain the script is always fighting, which makes it difficult to ever do what it needs to do, which is to have fun.
As for the final product, it isn’t bad. It has a fun motorcycle chase that, if I remember correctly, was one of the cornerstones of the spec. They clearly put a lot of effort into it and I loved the POV stuff down the tiny alleyways. But the movie can never escape its by-the-numbers plot. You’ve got the big bad agency head utilizing his secret clone program to take out his, now, compromised agent. There’s only so many ways you can spin that narrative. One of the biggest tells that a script isn’t working is when actors are having trouble connecting to their characters. Mary Elizabeth Winstead is so chilled out during this movie, you’d think she was popping Xanax between takes. Certain movies were never meant to be and this proved Gemini Man belonged in that category.
It’s not all gloom and doom though! I checked out the first episode of The Outsider last night and MAN was it good. I thought it was going to be another garden variety murder drama but the intensity of the show pushes it beyond anything you’re expecting. It made me realize just how dominant HBO is in the TV space. Their notoriously large development slate (over 100 shows in some form of development) and Game of Thrones style approach to production (only the best written shows get aired) ensure that every single show has something going for it. I mean you’ve got Succession, Barry, Watchman, Thrones, Curb, Chernobyl, Big Little Lies. We’re not talking AMC here, whose notches are years in the past. All of these shows are recent.
So when you say Hollywood doesn’t care about writing anymore, that’s not true. HBO cares A LOT about writing. I’m always learning stuff from their shows. Take The Outsider. A common piece of advice is, if you’ve got a dead body, you’ve got a show. But The Outsider taught me that a minor tweak to the formula can spin that setup in a fresh direction. The Outsider isn’t a whodunnit. It’s a “Did he do it?” At least so far. And by introducing the arrested character as a nice family man who we like, we don’t want him to have done it. So it creates this subterranean narrative whereby we’re hoping that the murderer isn’t the murderer. I can’t wait to dig into the second episode tonight.
I hope everyone is having a great holiday weekend. Let me know your thoughts on today’s post in the comments section!
Genre: Contained Thriller
Premise: After being kidnapped by a psychotic music producer, a guitarist and her drummer boyfriend are forced to record an album in chains while they try to escape his studio prison.
Why You Should Read: We were shooting for Misery meets Green Room. Would love to see what the people here at SS think. It’s a quick read too at 85 pages.
Writers: Edward Shine & Frankie Shine
Details: 85 pages
There are going to be a lot of Contained Thrillers submitted to The Last Great Screenwriting Contest. That means today’s script will act as a litmus test for the challenges this genre poses. Breaking this script down and seeing what worked and didn’t work should help those submitting. Let’s take a look.
26 year olds James and Prudence aren’t just in a relationship. They’re in a band. When someone paid them to tour in college, the two dropped out – that’s their band name, “The Dropouts,” – and have spent the last five years driving from crappy gig to crappy gig. James is over it. He wants to get a real job and start a real life. Prudence, however, holds onto hope that their big break is around the corner.
The two are finishing up a gig when a man, Phil, approaches them, tazes them, then drives them to his remote home in the woods where he’s created his own little music studio for them to record in. His goal? To have The Dropouts record their first ever album.
At first James and Prudence try to escape. But Phil lets them know that if they try that again, he’ll kill them. Let’s be creative, Phil says. Figure out what this album is going to be. After brainstorming, they begin the recording sessions, with James and Prudence chained down while playing and Phil in the mixing room.
Whenever Phil is gone, the two begin digging out an escape Andy Dufresne style. Then Phil will come back and it’s back to recording. At first, Prudence hates this place. But then she starts to think, hey, maybe this could be good. Make an album. Use the publicity of how it was recorded to become big stars. Finally, they’re going to make it! James thinks she’s crazy though and escapes, leaving Prudence to finish on her own. Will she? Or will she finally wise up and get the heck out of here?
Here’s the worst thing that can happen with a script. Someone tells you the concept, you get an idea in your head of how that movie is going to play out, you then read the script, and it plays out EXACTLY how you thought it would. You never want that to happen as a writer. And that’s how The Album played out for me.
The reason I chose this logline was because it was different from all the other contained thriller submissions. However, when I read it, I did wonder, “Is this going to be two people in a room with a weird man occasionally bothering them and they try to escape every once in a while?” I was scared that those were the only things that were going to happen. And those turned out to be the only things that happened. There wasn’t a single moment in this script that surprised me. You can’t have that happen.
This is why I’m always telling writers you need to occasionally jump into the reader’s mind and ask if what you’re writing in this moment is what they’re expecting. And if it is, come up with something different.
But The Album commits another faux pas. It doesn’t elevate the tension in any of its scenes. Every scene feels the same. The bad guy comes in. We feel some resentment from the protagonists. They talk about something. Then they leave. Meanwhile, whenever Phil leaves, one of them will keep working on their escape route.
When I read the big spec sale script, Shut In, I was genuinely surprised when the main character nailed the druggie’s hand to the floor, trapping him there for the rest of the movie. You could’ve given me 50 tries and I wouldn’t have guessed that the writer would come up with that plot development.
And you get extra points if these interesting developments happen at key moments in the script because they’ll have a lasting impact in the story. By nailing the druggie to the floor, the druggie is now outside the door with our hero the rest of the movie, which gives you potentially fun conversations to write.
The closest this script gets to taking a chance is when Prudence wants to record the album. She thinks the publicity of how they made it will lead to their big break. And while I liked this development in theory, in practice it felt empty, like something that was said but not really explored. For example, a few scenes later, I wasn’t even clear on if Prudence still felt that way.
The script also skimps over its emotional backbone. What this really should’ve been about was James and Prudence’s broken relationship. They’ve been ignoring it for years now, going through the motions, their band the only thing that’s kept them together. Now they’re stuck in this room and it turns out the biggest nightmare isn’t the man keeping them here. It’s that they’re finally forced to face the end of their relationship.
If the writers could’ve nailed that aspect of the story, the contained thriller part wouldn’t have needed to be that good.
As it stands, none of the characters are strong. I took a break at page 60 and when I came back, I thought to myself, “I don’t know any of these characters.” I know Phil is weird and a bad guy. I know Prudence likes the band. I know James is through with the band. But that’s all I know. And we’re talking about a movie with only three characters. How can the reader not know who any of them are?
One of advantages of writing contained thrillers is that there’s lots of dialogue and therefore lots of opportunity to delve into the characters. In Shut In, I know our heroine used to a be a huge drug addict. I know she’s got two kids she can barely take care of. I know she’s been staying at her aunt’s place to get back on her feet. I know she has a weird history with her husband. I genuinely had a feel for who this person was. But in The Album, the characters only exist to serve the plot – to serve this constructed scenario of being forced to make an album.
The biggest sin this script committed, however, was that it never pumped up the volume. It never made a truly daring choice. Maybe James’ fate was a surprise – but it was too little too late. Up until that moment, I never once feared Phil. There’s a reason they had Annie Wilkes take a hammer to Paul Sheldon’s feet. It was to show that she was capable of doing awful things so that we feared her.
But yes, one of the frustrating things about this script was that the writers never pushed the envelope.
And I’m going to guess that part of that was because the script was written specifically for Contained Thriller Showdown. If that’s the case, these criticisms aren’t as damning. It means this is a first draft. So I’d say, you’ve now got your framework for the story. Figure out who your characters are and come up with three or four truly surprising plot developments that keep the story a) fresh and b) intense.
Cause that’s one of the things that was truly frustrating about this read. It never got intense. Which is unfathomable when you look at the concept. Hopefully these notes help the Shine Siblings. Good luck!
Script link: The Album
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Contained Thrillers are highly dependent on scene variety! – One of the biggest challenges in contained thrillers is the scenes feeling too much alike. The Album suffered from this big time. The scenes cycled between three types. Recording music. Phil kind of mad and threatening the protagonists. And private discussions between Prudence and James about escaping. Predictability is death in a screenplay. Once we’ve figured out your bag of tricks, we no longer want to be at the show. So you’ve got to mix in a bunch of different scene types. Take Shut In. I’ve got to escape this room. I’ve got to explain to my 4 year old child how to get me a tool that will help me in my escape. I’ve got to psychologically trick this pedophile drug addict so he stays away from my kids. I have to figure out how to keep my kids from freezing now that the drug addict has left the front door open. I have to reason with my addict husband to come to his senses. I have to figure out how to feed my infant without any food. There were enough situations to cycle through that they never got repetitive. The Album needed that.
I want to keep giving you inspiration and advice for The Last Great Screenwriting Contest. So here are ten things I commonly see when I’m reading a good script.
1) An unobtrusive writing style – Too many screenwriters want you to know that they’re a WRITER. They want to describe everything beautifully. They want every scene to be dense and self-important, all the things that prove how serious and strong of a writer one is. I can tell you from experience that these tend to be the hardest reads. They take a lot longer. They’re not fun to read. Good writers understand the burden of the reader and try and make the script as easy to read as possible. Sparse prose. Never adding more than is necessary. Keeping the story moving. These are the fun scripts to read. Now there will always be a difference between a script like Buried and a script like Gladiator. Gladiator obviously requires more description. Still, you always want to keep the reader in mind. When was the last time you finished reading an entire script? I’m guessing except for a couple of dozen of you, it’s been a while. Why didn’t you finish it? Because at a certain point it became more ‘work’ to get through the script than ‘fun.’ Don’t make the same mistake on your script.
2) A first scene that creates a sense of mystery – If you took everything I’ve ever written on this site about the importance of your first scene, it would probably be as long as Lord of the Rings. And yet, day in and day out, I continue to read screenplays with bad first scenes. So the message isn’t getting through. What I’ve noticed is that I often get pulled into scripts where the first scene creates a sense of mystery. There’s some question that’s been posed and I need to keep reading to find out the answer. For example, one of my favorite recent scripts is The Traveler. In that script, we start off with a man driving, and then slowly, bit by bit, his car begins to disappear, until it’s gone and he’s floating through the air all by himself, still in the driving position, then he tumbles to the ground and rolls to a stop. When I read a scene like that, I want to know what’s going on. And that gets me to keep reading.
3) Conflict in dialogue – One of the quickest ways for me to dismiss a script is when I read really on-the-nose dry dialogue. Dialogue that doesn’t have any sense of spark. The characters are speaking more to establish themselves or push the plot along than they are actually having a conversation. One of the easiest ways to up your dialogue game is to inject conflict into every dialogue scene. It doesn’t have to be over-the-top conflict. But something that forces the characters to work something out. There’s an imbalance in the moment and the only way that it’s going to re-balance is if the characters hash it out. In The Menu, one of my favorite scripts from last year, we start with two people on a mysterious date (yup, we get another first scene with a sense of mystery!). He’s freaking out because, wherever it is they’re going, it’s important to him. His date, meanwhile, is trying to relax him. And the more she tries to relax him, the more revved up he gets. Note how this isn’t some huge dramatic argument. That’s not what we’re looking for in every dialogue scene. But there’s an imbalance here that the characters are working out. There’s conflict to play with.
4) An organic conflict within your hero – Characters are always more interesting when they’re fighting an inner battle. If everything is neat and clean inside your hero, why would we be interested in them? The great thing about inner conflict is it can literally be about anything. But a trick to find it is to ask yourself, “What is the first thing my character wakes up in the morning anxious about?” That should lead you to your inner conflict. We can go as far back as Benjamin Braddock in The Graduate. The second we meet him, he’s graduated college and HE HAS NO IDEA WHAT HE WANTS TO DO WITH HIS LIFE. That’s the conflict that eats at him every day. More recently, we have Arthur from Joker. He’s trying to figure out how to connect with the world yet he has no idea how. Every day he wakes up trying to figure out that equation. Obviously, the conflicts will be lighter in lighter genres, like comedies. But a quick way to make characters stand out is to give them an interesting inner conflict.
5) A good scene writer – Recently I read a script where the first 30 pages consisted of scenes that were barely a page long. The script moved quickly but the pacing was odd. We were always moving on before anything got going. Conversely, I read another script where all of the scenes were 8-10 pages. Shockingly, they were just as incomplete, as the characters were always prattling on without a point. I know I’m reading a good writer when one of the first few scenes in the script is its own complete compelling thing. It’s got a point (characters with a goal). It has a beginning – a setup to the scene that lets us know what it’s about. It has a middle – conflict between characters and obstacles that come up. And it has an end – the scene’s own little climax. These writers understand that scenes are like mini-movies which need to entertain the readers in and unto themselves. If every scene is an entertaining little movie then it’s impossible for the reader to get bored.
6) A sense of purpose – Good writers know that every scene is a piece of the puzzle and, therefore, must be pushing towards the puzzle’s completion. There is a noticeable focus to each scene that indicates the writer knows exactly where he or she is taking you. On the flip side, you have writers who think scripts are places to figure their story out. They might get an idea on page 20 and let that dictate where the story goes next. When you write this way, 99 times out of 100, your script will lack focus. It will read like you’re not sure what story you’re telling but, hopefully, along the way, you’ll figure it out. When you hear that a script displays confidence, it is always in reference to writers who have a deft command of their story and it’s clear, every step of the way, they know where they’re taking you. By the way, it’s perfectly okay to seek out tangents in early drafts. But not at all okay to do it in your final draft.
7) A steady stream of unexpected choices – This is something I harp on all the time on the site. But it truly is one of the easiest ways for me to tell if a script is going to be good or not. If a plot development or scene or character in the story comes up and the writer chooses to write something that 95 out of 100 writers would’ve written, I know I’m in for a long read. Good writers get into the heads of the reader, ask what they expect to happen at this moment, and then make sure not to write that. Honestly, this starts at the concept stage. If you give me an idea that I’ve seen hundreds of times before, I can promise the script will be bad within 99.9% certainty. One of the biggest level-ups for a screenwriter – and it’s something most of them don’t figure out until between their 7th and 10th script – is when they start actively seeking out unexpected choices in their screenplays. I mean, did anyone see the hidden room in Parasite coming? Did anyone see that crazy climax in the backyard coming? This is the creative bar you need to hold yourself to. Cause like I tell everyone, if you’re just going to give us what everyone else does, why do we need you? We can just go to everyone else.
8) Understanding the power of time – One of the biggest decisions you will make in a script is deciding how long the story’s timeline will be. The reason this decision is so important is because time has the biggest effect on your structure. Once you know how long your story is, you can begin to figure out how everything is going to play out. Generally speaking, the shorter the time frame, the easier it is to structure. Not long ago, I reviewed a script called 9 Days. The concept was as close as you’re going to get to experimental without being experimental. It was about a guy in some nether-not-quite-heaven reality who decides which people get to live a life down on earth. That concept could’ve been dealt with in a very messy way. Believe me, I’ve seen it before. However, the simple decision of giving our hero a 9 day deadline gave the story a firm structure. Another example is Richard Linklater’s Dazed and Confused. That movie followed a dozen different characters and was about the chaos of junior high and high school in a small Midwestern town. It would’ve been so easy to get lost in that world. Yet Linklater had everything take place in one day. A messy story all of a sudden became very focused.
9) A love of the second act – The second act is where most beginner and intermediate scripts go to die. It’s the biggest most expansive space in the script (50-60 pages!) and if you don’t understand how it works or have a plan to tackle it, your script will fall into this abyss as well. One of the things you learn the longer you travel this screenwriting journey, is that the second act IS YOUR MOVIE. It’s not some thing to muddle your way through until you get to the climax. It’s the place where your characters will be challenged by the things they fear the most, which will include the external journey, the other characters they interact with, and, like we discussed before, themselves. In other words, this is where your characters are going to figure themselves out. Once you embrace your second act as an opportunity to explore that, you will begin to love it.
10) A killer ending – I read a lot of scripts where you can see the writer getting tired the deeper into the script we go and so the ending feels more like something they were just happy to get to than the single biggest most memorable sequence in the film, which is what an ending should be. Remember, the ending IS WHAT WE THE READER LEAVE WITH. If you write a great ending, a reader will have this compulsion to go out and tell someone about it. They can’t keep it in because it’s the last strong memory they’ve been given. As crazy as it sounds, lots of writers take their ending for granted. They think as long as the good guy saves his girlfriend from the bad guy that we’re going to give them a big fat gold sticker. It doesn’t work like that. Outside of your opening scene, your climax should be the scene you put the most time into. And that’s not just writing. You should be thinking through 10, 20, 30 different potential climaxes to make sure you’re giving us the best one.
P.S. If you’re still deciding what script to write for The Last Screenwriting Contest, consider a logline consultation ($25). Not only will I analyze your concept’s strengths and weaknesses and write a new version of the logline for you, but I also give a 1-10 rating on the concept. As I’ve noted here before, I don’t encourage anyone to write a script for a logline that gets under a 7 out of 10. So it’s an indirect way to find out if your concept would fare well in the contest. E-mail me at carsonreeves1@gmail.com if interested.
