I know, I know. You want to get that new iPad Pro. Or all the ingredients for your Memorial Day Grilled Cheese Hot Dog.  Or that extra-small pair of Speedos so you’ll be beach-ready come June 1st. But if I were you, I’d use that cash on some Grade-A script notes from none other than ME! I’ve read over 10,000 screenplays, which means I’ve seen every problem in the book and I’m the only one who knows how to fix them all.

I’m giving away THREE half-off screenplay consultations this Memorial Day Weekend. If you want one, e-mail me at carsonreeves1@gmail.com with the code ‘MEMORIAL DAY.’

Note: The Short Story Showdown deadline is extended until tomorrow at noon! We’ve got an entire extra day of voting due to Memorial Day Weekend so I’m allowing last-minute entries. Here’s how to enter!

Remember, the Short Story Showdown contest deadline is TONIGHT (Thursday) at 10:00pm Pacific Time. Do you have a short story? You definitely want to enter. If it’s great, it’ll be celebrated here and maybe even sold. Here’s how to submit!

Week 1 – Concept
Week 2 – Solidifying Your Concept
Week 3 – Building Your Characters
Week 4 – Outlining
Week 5 – The First 10 Pages
Week 6 – Inciting Incident
Week 7 – Turn Into 2nd Act
Week 8 – Fun and Games
Week 9 – Using Sequences to Tackle Your Second Act
Week 10 – The Midpoint
Week 11 – Chill Out or Ramp Up
Week 12 – Lead Up To the “Scene of Death”
Week 13 – Moment of Death
Week 14 – The Climax
Week 15 – The End!
Week 16 – Rewrite Prep 1
Week 17 – Rewrite Prep 2
Week 18 – Rewrite Week 1

One of the things you hear me talk about a lot on this site is FIRST CHOICES. So let’s get into what they are and why they’re relevant.

First choices are any creative choices that come to you as you’re writing your script that you feed directly into your screenplay. You need to add a new character and you immediately know who that character should be. You get to a car chase scene and you immediately know how you’re going to write it. You want a big twist and you know which GOOD GUY you’re going to turn into a BAD GUY.

When you’re in the flow of writing, these choices feel great because you don’t have to think about them. They just come out of you. And because they flow out of you so easily, you interpret them as “correct.” Which makes sense. Anything that’s allowing you to write 15 pages a day, you reason, is good.

But what you have to understand is that these choices you’re making are not your own. They are an accumulation of all the movies and TV shows you’ve seen and the most common thing that happens in that specific moment of those movies and shows.

Back in the day, when romantic comedies were huge, every single romantic comedy ended at the airport. Why? Because that’s what the writers knew. When they watched romantic comedies, they ended at the airport! So they didn’t even question the choice. That’s how conditioned they were to make these choices.

I’ve been reading a lot of horror consult scripts lately and, lo and behold, there are a ton of scary kids in these screenplays. Why? Because scary kids are in a lot of horror movies. Therefore, we need to include them in our script!

That’s the real danger. These choices become so common in movies that they actually feel like they’re the only choices available to you.

I remember writing a thriller once where a guy is being chased by the police and I thought, “Let’s make a set piece where he’s downtown and runs around in between the all the buildings, barely escaping them.” And I wrote the heck out of that scene. I used every little trinket available to me in his escape.

But it was forgettable. And it was forgettable for an obvious reason. It was a first choice. It oozed screenwriter comfort. The writer – me – was not challenging himself. He was giving the reader something he’d seen before and figured: “That’s what people want.”

Which is why first choices happen. We think, “This is right because this is what happens in movies.”

Plot twist: Making first choices in first drafts IS OKAY. It’s expected even. You should push yourself to come up with as much originality as you can in that first draft. But the reality is, you don’t know your world well enough yet to come up with frequent unique creative choices. It’s like going to a restaurant for the first time. You don’t know the menu yet so you can’t order the best food. You can only order what you’re familiar with.

The reason I’m telling you this is because identifying and eliminating first choices is a big part of rewriting your script. When you see that cliched character, when you note that boring scene location, when you roll your eyes at that expected plot development that anyone could’ve guessed from a mile away… Change it. Come up with something better.

The very fact that you’re changing your first choice is going to improve the script. The rest of your rewrites, then, are about pushing deeper, changing your second choices, your third, your fourth, all the way until you can honestly read that choice and be happy with it. Cause once an idea has been battle-tested enough to withstand an honest critique from you, that’s when a script really starts to shine.

By the way, you don’t have to reinvent the wheel to come up with a strong creative choice. A lot of the time, it’s about changing some variables around so that the common scenario feels fresh. Take my thriller script I mentioned above. The Fugitive had Richard Kimble running around the city in one sequence as well.  But they added the St. Patty’s Day parade to the set piece and, all of a sudden, the chase felt more specific. Which is what you’re looking for. You’re looking to create a specific experience as opposed to a generalized one.

I cannot emphasize that enough so let me say it again.

When you write a screenplay, you’re looking to create a specific experience as opposed to a generalized one.

The more specific you can make each variable, the more original your script will read.

As a reminder, you are rewriting 3 pages a day, 6 days a week. We should be 18 pages into our rewrite today. By next Thursday, I need you to be 36 pages into your rewrite. Keep at it!

The reward?

Entering the first ever Mega Showdown……..

I may come off as a homer here but that sounds like the single greatest reward in earth’s history.

Genre: Horror
Premise: A young couple who perform rituals to raise people from the dead get more than they bargained for when they attempt to re-animate a young girl who doesn’t remember how she died.
About: This script finished with 8 votes on last year’s Black List. The writer is brand new!
Writer: Mike George
Details: 98 pages

Rising star Dominic Sessa for Ryan?

As I’ve pointed out before, you can really up your chances of breaking into the business if you come up with either a HIGH or MARKETABLE concept that can be shot in a single location.

Here’s the difference between the two. A high concept is something that has that all-important ‘strange attractor.’ The upcoming The Watchers is an example of this. A group of people get stuck in a looped forest that’s impossible to get out of, forcing them to live together in an isolated cabin in the woods.

Absent a high concept, you can still break through with a MARKETABLE concept. That just means you’re writing an idea in a genre that’s marketable and the idea itself lives in the same marketable space as other movies studios have released.

And yes, you can achieve both of these with the same idea. I’m just saying that if you don’t achieve the high concept, you can still write a script that people want to buy as long as it’s marketable.

Today’s script lands in that high concept space, albeit right at entry level: A couple attempts to raise the dead at an isolated AirBnB to disastrous consequences.

27 year old Shay and 25 year old Ryan are trucking it out to a remote house. We’re not sure why yet. We just know that Ryan is a little more smitten with Shay than Shay is with him. In fact, early on, Ryan attempts to propose to Shay, who steadfastly refuses. She’s not where he is yet.

The two get to a remote AirBnB farmhouse and start unloading their stuff. And that’s when we see a body bag. With a body in it! The couple lugs the dead body into the home. From there, we start to get hints about what’s going to happen. They’re going to perform a seance to bring this dead girl back to life.

The reason we’re bringing her back to life is explained soon after. They’re working for a client. This is his daughter. What they do is bring people back to life for clients so that they can have one last conversation with their loved ones before they move on.

However, the process for bringing people back to life is complicated. It requires writing out detailed pentagrams on the ground, writing in ancient languages on the walls in blood. Oh, and there’s a lot of sacrificing. One of them always has to sit within the pentagram and give a lot of blood in order to bring the dead person back to life.

Once they prep everything, the client, 40-something Mark, shows up. But the second he walks through the door (spoiler) Shay looks at him in shock. Shay knows this man. And he knows her. If this is the client, she knows, then chances are their dead girl is not his daughter. And that begs the question: Who the hell is she?

The first half of this script was awesome.

I was on the edge of my seat.

Two things I absolutely love in a screenplay are 1) Show me something I haven’t seen before. And 2) Give me a deep compelling mythology that I know you know intimately.

This script nailed both.

I’ve read ideas sort of like this before. But nothing quite like this. A couple who work as spiritual necromancers rent a home to perform a resurrection.

And then you have the mythology… this writer went all in on this mythology! I got the sense that he must’ve dabbled in witchcraft at some point in his life. He knows way too many details about the practice not to have been a part of it somehow.

Those two things powered the first act of the screenplay.

I’ll tell you something else that powered it. The word “No.” In my dialogue book, one of my big dialogue tips is utilizing the power of “no” in conversation. “Yes” rarely leads you anywhere interesting in a conversation. But the word “no” almost always leads you there.

Early in the script, Ryan, who clearly likes Shay more than she likes him, proposes to her. And what does she say? She says, “No.” The reason that answer is so important is because it lays a thick claptrap of conflict over the rest of the story. Every conversation they now have is affected by this new jilted dynamic.

Think about what their conversations would be like if she had said yes. I’ll give you a hint. They rhyme with ‘boring.’ With Ryan now wondering what he’s done wrong, why she doesn’t like him as much as he likes her, there’s subtext in every conversation that’s had.

So we’ve got an [x] impressive here, right?

Well, let me say this. I admire whenever a writer takes a big creative swing. Whenever they make a daring choice, there’s value in that. Unfortunately, I think George made the wrong choice and it kind of destroyed the rest of the screenplay. Spoilers ahead.

This Mark guy comes in and he’s supposed to be the dead girl’s father. He wants to reunite with her one last time. But then we see him and Shay giving each other eyes. We’re wondering what’s going on. What we find out is that he and Shay used to work together as “con men” bilking people out of money, pretending to raise the dead.

Mark then heard that Shay was doing her business with someone new. And she still owed him money or something. So he pretended to be a client in order to find her and get that money back.

The reason the choice doesn’t work is because it took a small intimate story with a really fun idea and made it both too silly and too complex. Once you introduce con men into other genres, it never feels right. It’s the kind of thing that only works when you establish it at the outset: This is going to be a con man movie.

But the bigger issue is that if George would’ve stuck with what got him here, he was on the verge of writing a great script. Because you’ve got this really cool mystery. When they’re slowly bringing this girl back to life, they’re realizing that she’s different. There’s some sort of mystery to her. That had me turning the pages.

But, also, you destroy your most emotionally impactful storyline before it ever had a chance to breathe, no pun intended. A father getting an opportunity to say goodbye to his daughter one last time… I wanted to see that. Especially after all the effort Ryan and Shay put into bringing her back alive. I felt that George really robbed the story of a great moment there.

Also, we should’ve left Mark in the ‘former or current lover’ category. We’ve already established that Shay doesn’t want to marry Ryan. You’ve built a compelling conflict between them via that storyline. Her sleeping with Mark would’ve been a natural extension of that storyline and now you’ve got this other layer of b.s. the three of them have to deal with as they bring this daughter back to life.

This happens sometimes. We get overzealous as writers. We get bored with our stories. We feel like we have to do more than we actually do. So we come up with big wild plotlines when a smarter smaller more emotional plotline would’ve been better.

I’m going to give this script a [x] worth the read because its first half is so good. But it’s one of those ‘hanging on for dear life’ worth the reads. Cause the second half was way too messy.

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

What I learned: Build your relationship backstories from elements organic to your concept. In other words, sure, you could’ve had Ryan and Shay begin their relationship at a coffee shop. But a coffee shop is generic. Instead, use the organic elements of your story to explain how they met. Which is what George does. Ryan and Shay met because Shay was originally working alone, Ryan hired her after his mom died, and they started dating after that. Not only does it make more sense but it feels genuine because it’s original. It stems from the core of your idea as opposed to some generic place that anybody in any movie could’ve met.

Does this red-hot project deliver? Load up those arrows and let’s find out!

Genre: Drama/Period
Premise: Robin Hood, who in this iteration was a robber and serial killer, is seriously wounded after a battle, forcing him to get his injuries treated on an island led by a nun.
About: This script/package just came together a couple of weeks ago. It will star Hugh Jackman and Jodie Cormer. It’s written and directed by Michael Sarnoski, who made that Nicholas Cage movie, “Pig,” and just finished “A Quiet Place: Year One.”
Writer: Michael Sarnoski
Details: 98 pages

When a new Robin Hood movie is announced, there’s a symbolic meaning to it that digs deep into one of the many issues within Hollywood. Which is that the town cannot ignore free IP. They would rather make a bad movie and lose a ton of money off publicly available IP than leave the IP alone and keep their money.

It’s weird that they keep making this mistake over and over again. Cause let’s be real. The Robin Hood IP is deader than Blockbuster Video.

Luckily, there are still three ways to revive dead IP. The first is to come up with an angle so fresh, it reinvents the material. The second is to execute the script so well that we’re captivated by the story. And the third is to hire a director with a really unique vision who presents the story in a fresh new way.

I can tell you whether the first two criteria are met as I just read the script.

1246

A young girl walking through the countryside dressed as a boy to avoid attacks, stumbles upon a 50-something hermit who gives her food & shelter and tells her to be careful on her journey. That night, the girl attempts to slit his throat while he’s sleeping. But he was still awake, knowing she would do so, and mercilessly kills her.

The next day, an old friend of his, the burly Edward, comes by and says that a family stole his farm and kicked him out. He wants it back but he needs help. Robin and Edward head to the farm, where they kill everyone, unfortunately losing Edward’s wife in the battle.

When word gets to the local warlord that Robin Hood is around, he and his men head to the farm and engage in battle with them. Both Robin and Edward barely defeat them. But Robin is on death’s doorstep.

Edward puts him on a boat and takes him to an island run by Sister Brigid, a sort of hybrid healer/doctor/nun. She takes in whoever comes and nurses them back to health. So, for the next 80 minutes, Robin does just that. The end. No, I’m not kidding. That’s the whole movie.

To this script’s credit, it nails Revival Option #2.

It completely reinvents Robin Hood. That cannot be disputed. So kudos for doing that because it’s clear that that was why this movie got greenlit.

Another thing the screenplay did was help me discover a new type of screenplay opening.

Actually, the opening has always been around but I’m just now realizing that it can be categorized.

I call it the “We mean business” opening.

Basically, what you do is you write something so shocking that the reader has no choice but to sit up and pay attention. Now, I want to be clear here. You can’t fake a “We mean business” opening. Remember the opening of The Sixth Sense? A former patient breaks into Bruce Willis’s home and stabs him.

I read that type of opening all the time. It’s not a bad opening but it’s not a “We mean business” opening.

A “We mean business” opening is what they did here. They had Robin Hood, one of the most beloved heroes ever, violently kill a 14 year old girl. That’s a freaking “We mean business” opening. It’s the kind of opening that makes the reader go, “Whoa.” It stuns them.

And it worked! You can tell by my review intro that I was skeptical of this script. But that opening scene made me think, “Okay, maybe this is going to be better than I thought.”

By the way, note the skill involved in executing the “We mean business,” opening. It wasn’t just following an old Robin Hood through the streets, seeing some girl, then killing her. Sure, that would’ve met the criteria for We mean business, but it also would’ve felt forced and artificial.

Instead, we get this little story of this lost girl and she meets this hermit and asks for his help. Then, when they’re asleep, she sneaks up on him to kill him as it turns out she came here to assassinate him all along. But he was ready for her and able to turn the tables. It gave us the We mean business moment yet we don’t despise our hero afterwards. He’s still worth rooting for.

This “We mean business” vibe continues for another 15 pages. And, at that point, I was sharpening my pen, getting ready to anoint another [x] impressive.

But then this script falls off a freaking cliff.

And oh how spectacularly it falls.

It fell so far so quickly, I had whiplash.

How could this have happened, I asked myself.
And that’s when I saw it:

Writer-director.

As I’ve chronicled before, very few directors can also write. I mean… we’re talking a narrative engine so inert here that the script stands in place for the last 80 pages. It’s stunning how boring the story that follows is.

What sucks is that this is Michael Sarnoski, who directed one of my most anticipated movies of the year: Quiet Place Year One. Now I’m worried that movie’s going to disappoint too!

So why, specifically does this script fall apart? Well, for one, it becomes a “waiting around” script. These are scripts where your characters just wait around the whole time. These narratives are incredibly difficult to make entertaining. Because movies are great at celebrating active-ness. They like when characters charge forward and take the story with them.

A hero can’t do that if he’s lying around for 80 minutes.

Your one respite in that situation is conflict. If we’re waiting around in a situation ripe with conflict, it can still be entertaining. Heck, we just saw this YESTERDAY! In my review of The Last Stop in Yuma County. Characters were all waiting around for a fuel truck to show up. But the difference was, there was an insane amount of conflict due to the hostage-situation.

Here we just… wait for Robin Hood to get better. And he doesn’t even have a goal he’s trying to achieve after he gets better. He’s just… trying to get better.

But this script violates a much bigger issue: It pretends to be a reimagining of Robin Hood but I have the sneaking suspicion that the original drafts of this script had nothing to do with Robin Hood and that, in the last couple of drafts, Sarnoski changed his main character’s name to Robin Hood to capitalize on the IP and have a better chance at getting it made. Which, to his credit, is exactly what happened. Talk about a “What I Learned.”

But yeah, I kept waiting for Robin Hood mythology to work its way into the story in clever ways but that never happened. There are a few moments where minor Robin Hood lore is brought up, but it’s presented in a manner by which it’s conceivable it could’ve been thrown in there at the last second.

I have to say, this is one of the most spectacular nosedives I’ve seen in a screenplay. It starts off SO STRONG and then it’s as if someone who’s never written a story before mumbled out 80 pages of jibberish.

And it’s not like it couldn’t have been saved! That’s the frustrating part. Late in the script, we learn that Sister Brigid’s family was killed by Robin Hood. Why not learn that earlier and then play up the suspense of whether she’s going to kill him? At least then we’re building towards a showdown.

But Sarnoski, oddly, runs away from conflict whenever the possibility presents itself. Brigid tells Robin she knows he killed her parents but, you know what, she’s okay with it. She still wants to heal him.

Wow.

Just wow.

It sticks a dagger into the center of my body when I see writers making these giant movies who possess so little storytelling ability. It sucks! Because what it means is we’re going to get this beautiful-looking movie with this cool trailer that’s going to focus on those first three violent scenes and then people are going to show up to the movie and say, “What the f**k was that???” Cause nothing happened for the last 80 minutes. Literally nothing.

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

What I learned: Take a well known beloved hero and make them bad (Robin Hood). Or take a well known beloved villain and make them good (Wicked). Tried and true method for reinventing classic stories.

When a movie nobody knows about is actually one of the best movies of the year

Genre: Contained Thriller
Premise: A knife salesman is holed up in a diner in the middle of nowhere when two bank robbers show up, loose canons who are a beat away from killing anyone who could ruin their score.
About: First time writer-director Francis Galluppi has talked about the challenges of getting his movie made. At first, he was going to direct a 5 million dollar version of the film but he quickly learned that when you go that high, the financiers demand that you use certain actors in the main roles, as they are proven in foreign sales. Those actors, unfortunately, carry the sheen of a “straight-to-digital” vibe (aka John Cusack) so Galluppi decided he was going to shoot the movie for 1 million instead. That way, he’d be able to choose all the actors he wanted. The difference is a buzzy movie that will be a calling card that should send Gulluppi up the Hollywood ladder quickly, compared to sending him into the doldrums of straight-to-digital purgatory.
Writer: Francis Galluppi
Details: 90 minutes

The best way to experience this movie is the way I experienced it, which is to not know anything going in. Because I really didn’t know where this thing was going. And that was exciting because that rarely happens to me with movies anymore.

However, in order for me to convey just how strong the writing was in this script, I need to unleash a ton of spoilers. So, again, go watch this first THEN COME BACK. Otherwise, you’re going to be robbed of a really cool experience.

We’re in the middle of Nowhere Arizona. A well-dressed knife salesman pulls up to the last gas station for the next 100 miles, only to learn from Vernon, the attendant, that they’re out of gas. But the gas truck is on its way. So just sit tight in the diner and you’ll be on your way soon.

One of the first clever things about this script is that the opening title sequence is a bunch of close ups of that fuel track flipped upside-down off the highway, post-accident. In other words, it’s the first of many uses of dramatic irony in the script. We know that truck is never coming but the characters do not know that.

The pretty waitress at the diner, Charlotte, is married to the town sheriff, who dropped her off. We keep hearing through the radio something about a local bank robbery. And then, what do you know, two nasty looking dudes, Beau and Travis, show up for gas only to find out the same thing – there is no gas yet. So they head to the diner as well.

Not long after Beau (the older bank robber) susses out that Charlotte may be onto him, he pulls out a gun and tells everyone not to do anything stupid, like call the cops. Just do as he says and once the fuel arrives, it’ll be like they were never here.

After this happens, more people start showing up – a young wanna-be Bonnie & Clyde couple, an older couple, and a Native American man. None of these newer people know what’s going on here. But the knife salesman and waitress do.

As the tension builds and people start putting two and two together, Beau decides to pre-empt any uprising and pulls out his gun. Beau seems to forget, however, that this is America. And, in America, everybody has guns. This begins a wild Mexican standoff, the result of which will blow your mind.

I LOVED the directing here. It was so simple yet still stylish.

However, it’s the WRITING I was the most impressed by. I see so many upcoming directors debut with these films that everybody says show “PROMISE.” The reason they say “promise” and not “this film was great” is because the script is always bad. And that’s because young directors don’t put any stock into the script. It’s an afterthought compared to the directing.

This is the first time in a LONG TIME that a new director genuinely put just as much effort into the script as the production.

There are two places in particular where this script excelled.

1 – Dramatic Irony

2 – Setups and Payoffs

This is a dramatic irony masterclass here. Dramatic Irony is so important that I dedicated an entire section of my dialogue book to it.

Most writers who understand dramatic irony only do so on a basic level. This writer understands that it has multiple facets and if you can learn those facets, you can make a simple premise like this one play out with more power than your average Marvel film.

I mentioned the crashed fuel truck. Normally, with dramatic irony, the character and the audience know a secret together. But you’ll notice here, we’re given the crashed truck information on our own. We’re the only ones who know it. Not a single person in the diner knows it. This ostensibly adds a layer of drama before anything has even happened, which was such a rad creative choice.

But you’ll also note that Galluppi doles out the information about the bank robbers being in the diner to only two other characters, the knife salesman and the waitress. This introduces what I call in my dialogue book “superior” and “inferior” points of view, which is what really brings dramatic irony to the next level.

Because when Beau is talking to the Old Man and his wife, there are different ways in which his dialogue is affecting people. To the Old Man, his words are harmless. But the knife salesman is sitting right next to the Old Man, and he (as well as we) interpret his words much differently, since we know he’s a bank robber and that he has the capacity to kill.

Another thing Galluppi nailed was the setups and payoffs. Setups and payoffs are one of the easiest ways to tell if a writer put a lot of work into a screenplay. Because good writers connect the early parts of their scripts with the later parts.

(Big spoiler so don’t read this until you’ve seen the movie) My favorite setup and payoff was when the Knife Salesman is getting away in his car but then he runs out of gas (due to a separate clever setup and payoff) and he’s stranded in the middle of nowhere. And we know the cop is coming after him (another example of dramatic irony).

So he’s screwed. Sooner or later, someone is going to find him out here with the bag of money. And he sort of stumbles to the other side of the road, over to this dip down from the highway. And there he sees… the crashed fuel truck! This fuel truck had been talked about the entire movie. What better way to end the movie than to pay it off? Ironically, he ran out of fuel at the very place where he could get more fuel.

And yet, as this screenplay did over and over, it didn’t go in the direction you thought it would.

I only had two minor issues here. One, Galluppi cheats with the whole cell phone angle. He puts us in an unidentifiable year, almost in a different dimension, where it’s both the present and the past. This was clearly to take cell phones out of the equation.

And two, the knife salesman is introduced as someone who clearly has a secret. So when that secret never emerged, I was disappointed. The only explanation I can come up with is that the actor misplayed the role. He was supposed to play a coward but his eyes and his actions tell us the entire time he’s hiding something. But it turns out he isn’t hiding anything.

Still, this was such a fun movie. If you’re a screenwriter or a director, go watch this now. You will learn something, be inspired, or both!

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

What I learned: If your story takes place in one location, which almost always requires you to have a lot of dialogue, dramatic irony is practically a must. Because without location changes, you need changes in the conversations themselves. Which you can achieve by building superior and inferior points-of-view regarding key information. Character A and G know that Character X is a bank robber. But characters B, C, and D don’t know that. And character E suspects he might be the bank robber but isn’t sure. So you can even play with the middle-ground there. But the point is, if all of your dialogue is on the surface and none of it requires the reader to think at all, your one-location story’s going to get boring fast.