Man, I didn’t know there was this whole hidden action writing community within Scriptshadow. Saw a lot of new faces in the submissions. First of all, thanks to everyone who sent in a submission. Picking loglines was difficult. If you didn’t make it, there’s no reason why a souped-up version can’t make another Amateur Showdown down the line.
A quick note on loglines. This is where a lot of submissions lost out. When you’re uncomfortable writing a logline, it shows. I can feel you searching for how to present your story. So make sure you’re getting feedback on these things. As much as you may hate it, it’s a necessary evil. What happens is that the people who stick around the longest in screenwriting figure loglines out because they have to. So by the very nature of learning how to write a good logline, you are displaying that you’ve dedicated yourself to the craft.
Do not forget we have HOLIDAY SHOWDOWN coming up on Friday, December 13th. If you have a holiday-themed script, send it in by the deadline, which is Thursday, December 12th, at 8:00 pm Pacific Time (I’ve given you two extra hours – use them!). It’d be great if we could celebrate an awesome script before the new year. So stop dwelling on not making Action Showdown and get to writing.
Amateur Showdown is a bi-weekly tournament where I pick five screenplays that were submitted to me and then you, the readers of this site, read as much of each script as possible and vote for your favorite in the comments section. The winner will receive a review the following Friday that could result in props from your peers, representation, a spot on one of the big end-of-the-year screenwriting lists, and in rare cases, a SALE!
In order to participate, e-mail me at carsonreeves3@gmail.com. Include your script title, the genre, a logline, and a pitch to myself and potential readers why you believe your script deserves a shot. It could be long, short, passionate, to-the-point. Whatever you think will convince someone your script is worth opening, make your case. Just like Hollywood, the Scriptshadow readers are a fickle bunch. So be convincing!
Good luck to all the writers this week!
Title: Berserker
Genre: Action
Logline: A ruthless bounty hunter, chasing a million-dollar reward, has one night to capture a vicious terror cell before they can exact their mission of vengeance and escape Jakarta.
Why You Should Read: Intelligence agencies have spent hundreds of millions of dollars on terrorist bounties since 9/11. Insider sources suggest vital information in the hunt for Osama Bin Laden was gained after a senior figure in the Pakistani military received a $25 million reward. Despite this, few movies have examined the crooked underworld of terrorist bounties or the men and women who make their living tracking down the earth’s deadliest militants for cash pay-outs. Berserker is a screenplay embedded in this covert mercenary war but it’s also a relentless no-holds-barred action script playing out across a single bloody night. It comes complete with ambushes, raids, knife fights, shootouts and car chases through the neon-lit streets of Central Jakarta! I think the set-pieces are innovative, the tension is constant and the pace is bullet-fast. At 92 cut-down pages it never stops moving.
Title: HEMORRHAGE
Genre: ACTION
Logline: A disaffected NYPD cop visiting her daughter in a state-of-the-art hospital is unwittingly caught in a hostage situation when extremists raid the building seeking the cure of a deadly virus.
Why You Should Read: I got my start writing for B-Movie King Roger Corman, which basically means your creative flexibility gets completely strapped by ultra-low budget constraints. I wrote “Hemorrhage” to break free of such restrictions and focus on telling a story about a hard-pressed mother struggling to mend old wounds between her sick daughter, albeit with armed extremists threatening to rip apart what little bond they have left. I love the thrill of a good action movie, especially ones with compelling antagonists whose motives aren’t simply black or white and make us truly fear for the principal characters’ lives. If you get a kick out of the same thing, then you’ll have a blast reading “Hemorrhage.”
Title: JOHNSTOWN
Genre: Action/Based on true events
Logline: An engineer, hired to inspect a dam owned by Andrew Carnegie’s secret fishing club, falls in love with an aristocrat’s daughter. During a storm, when the dam he’s trying to save fails, he must outrace the floodwaters to JOHNSTOWN to save her.
Why You Should Read: I don’t think the world spent two billion dollars for the Jack and Rose love story, meaning the draw for this story is the flood itself. This is the story of one of the worst disasters to ever befall the United States. There have been numerous documentaries, but not really a feature film. As we all know, it’s a feature film which gives a story both reach and emotional impact. I was born and raised in Johnstown. This story is part of my DNA. There are details in this script you won’t find in any book.
Title: Kamikaze
Genre: Action
Logline: After her creator is killed in a terrorist attack, an emotionally charged android, suffering from a fatal virus, struggles to hunt down the mercenaries responsible.
Why You Should Read: Kamikaze is a non-stop, can’t catch your breath action script. It’s placed very well in screenwriting competitions (finalist), it nabbed me a manager (we’ve since parted), but the script hasn’t gotten much traction. I’m really wanting to know if there’s something I’m missing, and if I genuinely have what it takes to make it. — The main character, Ali, in an android that can’t seem to keep her emotions in check, which is a major drawback to those that created her. The script plays with the concept of logic vs. emotion and how they can help/hinder in various situations. — Thank you for the opportunity to give it a read.
Title: The Third Wonder
Genre: Action
Logline: An art recovery specialist is sent to Iraq on the eve of Shock and Awe to determine if a missing drone’s last transmission proves the existence of the Hanging Gardens of Babylon.
Why You Should Read: I suppose the best way to answer this question is to first explain why I wrote it and what makes me believe that a year+ of my life is worth only the prospect of an hour+ of yours. Well… since a kid, I’ve always been fascinated with the Seven Wonders of the World, in particular, the Hanging Gardens of Babylon (meh, true and kinda nostalgic, but who really cares what I was into as a kid). With fact-based fiction as a guide, and since Babylon is only 60 miles from Baghdad, it seems logical that if the Gardens were ever to resurface it would’ve happened during the exhaustive search for WMD leading up to the Iraqi invasion (yep, tough to argue, but a 118 pages of this). The main character’s questionable moral compass and haunting family legacy make him better at his job, but will it cost him a chance at redemption? (intentionally vague—okay, but an art guy as the protag in an action flick?). A socially conscious look at the ownership of art and how it corresponds to a country’s cultural identity (it’s there, but seriously??). The sweeping geographical locations and the recreation of the only lost wonder of the world will be a feast for the eyes (yep, this will cost a fortune to make). With seven wonders come seven storylines (one down, six to go:).
Sometimes I’ll read an AO script because I like the logline, sometimes I’ll read one because of the genre, sometimes I’ll read one just to get an idea of what the competition is up to, but I always fall back on this one fundamentally basic reason—reading makes you a better writer.
You still have until tomorrow (Thursday) night at 8pm Pacific to enter your action spec for Amateur Action Showdown!
One of the most frustrating things about pursuing screenwriting for a majority of people is screenwriting contests. A lot of these feel like a crapshoot. Who knows who’s reading your script. That horror script you wrote that’s going to make IT’s box office look like Charlie’s Angels could end up in the hands of someone who detests horror movies. And who knows what order a reader reads your script in. Is it his second script of the day, where he’s alert and hopeful? Or his sixth script, where he’s exhausted and thinking about the three chalupa special at Taco Bell? And the whole thing just seems so SUBJECTIVE amirite? Does the best script win? The best idea? The most woke socially conscious biopic concept? Navigating this world can be equal parts frustrating and depressing. But I’m here to help you do better in these masochistic merry-go-rounds of mayhem. With a few tips and the right outlook, you’re going to start seeing results. Let’s get to it!
1) Most screenwriters enter contest scripts that aren’t ready – Look, I’m all for deadlines. Without deadlines, I’d never post anything on this site. But there’s a difference between a realistic deadline and a deadline where all you’ve done is put words a page. Nobody is going to give you points for getting a messy rushed script in on time. And I was guilty of this too. I would use the Nicholl deadline to finish a script and literally send the script on the final date at the last mailing pickup time of the day. And then I’d be mad when my script didn’t win. You are up against 100 to 7000 other scripts in a contest. Do you really think your rushed first draft of a script is going to do well? Nicholl gets rich off of people like you. While story will always be subjective, sloppiness is not. I want you to tattoo what I’m about to say to the inside of your eyeballs because it might be the best advice you’ve ever received: Contests are not about showing the world that you can write a screenplay too. They’re about writing something that STANDS OUT from the pack.
2) Tell a great story with your first scene – While contests are different from “real life” in that the reader will read the entire script, that doesn’t mean they’ll pay attention the entire script. If they’re not impressed with your first scene, their overworked reader brain will switch into skim-mode. Notice I’m giving you a very specific directive for the first scene. I’m not just saying, “Write a great first scene.” I’m saying: “Tell a story.” In other words, hook the reader with something, then make them have to keep reading the rest of the scene to find out how that hook concludes. A female hacker must escape a group of men who have come to capture her (The Matrix). A man calling a babysitter and telling her he’s going to kill her then hanging up (Scream). A man wakes up on a train with no idea why he’s there or who he is (Source Code). The reason to do this is because it’s one of the easiest ways to pull someone in quickly. And contests readers are exhausted so you want to pull them in quickly.
3) Professional presentation – Correct formatting, no misspellings, no grammar mistakes, no punctuation mistakes, no light text from cheap screenwriting programs, no ultra-wide dialogue margins, no “condensed” mode to turn your 130 page script into a 110 page script regardless of the fact that all the lines overlap each other vertically. This one seems obvious but as someone who’s read a lot of amateur screenplays, I can tell you that a lot of you who think you’re being professional aren’t. If you’re someone who has written under three screenplays, you are probably making some mistakes in your presentation. Become OCD about your presentation. It’s one of the most reliable ways for us readers to spot bad scripts.
4) Your dialogue is thin, obvious, and on the nose – While there’s plenty of debate about what constitutes the difference between good and great dialogue, everybody knows what bad dialogue is. Bad dialogue is characters saying exactly what they’re thinking in simplistic uncreative ways. It is characters espousing exposition like robots. It is characters who are speaking directly to the reader as opposed to the other character in the scene. It’s a long road to become good at dialogue but the starting point is your characters. If the characters are fun talky types, they’re going to have more interesting dialogue. If you know the character well, you’ll be able to write more specific dialogue for them (example: If you know your character once lived in France, they may occasionally throw a French word into a sentence). And if you know how to inject conflict into a scene, your dialogue will improve exponentially.
5) Know your audience – There’s an old documentary with Vince Vaughn where he takes a group of young comics out on the road to do stand up. One of Vince’s comedian’s central bits was about how real men don’t wear sandals. At their first show, he went on about how sandals are for wussies. The problem? They were at a Colorado college campus where 90% of the college men in the audience were wearing sandals. The boos from that crowd still echo in his ears to this day. What’s the lesson here? STOP SENDING GENRES TO CONTESTS THAT DON’T CELEBRATE THOSE GENRES. The Nicholl doesn’t celebrate horror scripts just as The Tracking Board doesn’t celebrate two American Indians trying to start a rug business in 1865. You live in the age of the internet. Do not send your script ANYWHERE until you go to their website and find out every script that has won and placed in their contest for the past five years. You’re going to save yourself a lot of wasted money. Trust me.
6) Contests tend to reward ingenuity – Most scripts read like every other script. The contained thrillers, the biopics, the Westerns, the guy with a gun, the buddy cop, the heist movie. There isn’t anything wrong with writing one of these scripts and executing it well. You can start a career with a great version of any of these genres. But in contests, these scripts blend into the background because they’re so common. The scripts that rise up tend to be those that try something different. For example, Shimmer Lake, which won Austin years back and later became a Netflix movie. That was a mystery that was told backwards. Stuff like 500 Days of Summer. Or yesterday’s and Tuesday’s scripts. There’s so much of the same in these contests that you stand out with a creative storytelling take.
7) You need at least 5 contests (with a single script) to know where you stand – A single contest not liking your script isn’t enough to identify where the script is or where you are as a writer. There are too many variables involved. However, if you send your script to five contests and it doesn’t advance in any of them (even to the second round), there’s likely something wrong with THE BASICS OF YOUR SCREENWRITING. We’re talking bad presentation, a huge page count, a vague concept, misspellings and grammatical errors, not understanding the basics of scene-writing (beginning, middle, end), lack of clarity in the writing, an inability to set up your hero effectively, no concept of what conflict is or how to use it. Good screenwriters have all the basics down. If you’re not advancing at all in contests, I can almost guarantee you it’s because you don’t know all of these things. So learn them and get back in there with your next script.
8) If you’ve written more than six scripts and still aren’t placing in any contests, GET FEEDBACK – I know I’m expensive so you don’t have to use me. But find SOMEBODY who understands screenwriting and can be honest with you. Otherwise you’re flying blind. You have no idea what to work on or what to improve. About five years ago, this writer came to me with this very problem. He’d been writing for 15 years and had never placed in a contest before. So he ordered a consultation and his script was this completely zany out-there concept. It was so weird. Out of curiosity, I asked him to send me the loglines for his previous five scripts. They were all really weird and out-there. It would be the equivalent of writing Armageddon and adding a cannibal storyline where one of the cannibals was a ghost. I said to him, dude, you’re all over the place. You need to simplify your concepts and stop trying to be so zany. And the next script I read from him was a major improvement. And he admitted to me that he would’ve never known his ideas were too weird had he not gotten feedback. He had been told early on that you have to write something that’s unique to get people’s attention and he mistakingly took that advice and applied it 1 million percent. The point is, you could be making the most obvious mistake with your script but if you don’t get feedback every once in a while, you’ll never know.
9) If you’ve consistently placed in contests (top 10 or 20%) but can’t get any further, you’re probably in one of two positions – a) You’re extremely talented but raw. Half your script has flashes of Tarantino but the other half feels like a compilation of Donald Trump’s tweets. b) You’re a screenplay technician who’s mastered the formula, but your script lacks big risks and stand out moments. There’s not enough creativity in your storytelling. If you’re the former, put aside six months and learn the nuts and bolts of screenwriting (especially structure). If you’re the latter, watch all of the weirdest (good) movies you can find and study the choices the screenwriters make that result in such a unique viewing experience.
10) Your script is only going to be as good as its concept and main character – Lame uninspired concepts do not turn into good scripts. Boring/weak/lame main characters don’t all of a sudden become interesting on page 90. You can be a good screenwriter but if you’re entering contests with one of these two problems, your script isn’t going to do well. Period.
I hope this was helpful. Leave your favorite contests in the Comments Section and I’ll put together a master list here.
SO FAR
Nicholl
Austin
Page
The Tracking Board
Genre: Sci-fi
Premise: In a place distant from our normal reality, a reclusive man charged with interviewing prospective candidates for the privilege of being born must choose between an applicant he likes and one he considers tough enough to survive in the real world.
About: Edson Oda is a 2017 Sundance Screenwriters Lab Fellow from São Paulo, Brazil. Like the great John Hughes, he started his career in advertising. Not only did he write Nine Days but is slated to direct it for Mandalay Pictures as well. The script finished with 7 votes on last year’s Hit List.
Writer: Edson Oda
Details: 113 pages
Ahhhhhhhhhhh!!!
We were so close!
So close to three impressives in a row. Nine Days had me all the way up to the last 20 pages. But it didn’t stick the landing. And I’m really torn up about it because just like yesterday’s masterful script, Nine Days is a high concept premise that doesn’t feel like anything else out there. I don’t know where all these cool ideas are coming from all of a sudden but I’m not complaining.
Will is a 40-something lifeless individual who lives way off in the middle of the desert. We realize quickly that Will’s existence situation is different. He spends all day, every day, watching a series of TVs in his living room. These TVs aren’t playing the latest episodes of The Mandalorian. They’re playing lives. Real lives, down on earth, in real time. We realize that Will is somehow connected to these people, although we don’t yet know how.
Will’s favorite life to watch is Amanda’s, a 28 year old master violinist. Amanda has maximized every opportunity in life. And tomorrow, she’ll be rewarded with the biggest concert of her career. Will preps for the big day like he’s about to watch the Super Bowl. He sees Amanda practicing in her room, sees her getting her things together, hopping in her car, driving downtown… and promptly slamming her car into the concrete wall of an overpass.
Will is devastated. What happened?? He doesn’t have time to mourn the loss, though. The next day, “candidates” start showing up at his house. These candidates are people who Will will interview over a nine day period and the “winner” gets to be born. There’s the goofball, Alexander. The romantic, Maria. The introvert, Mike. The a-hole, Kane. And then there’s Emma, a strange woman who doesn’t have any interest in following Will’s rules.
The competition revolves mostly around the candidates watching the same lives Will watches every day. Will will then ask them questions about what they watched. For example, someone will watch the life of Rick, a 9 year old boy who gets bullied every day and Will will ask, “What would you do if you were in Rick’s position?”
After each day of interviews, Will speaks to his neighbor, Kyo, who, unlike Will, is a never-lived. His only job is to make sure Will does his job confidently. Will also rewatches tapes of Amanda’s life, trying to figure out what led her to suicide. He’s convinced that if he watches every moment, he’ll identify what led her to her decision. The last remaining contestants are Kane and Emma. While Kane is mentally the strongest of the bunch, there’s something special about Emma Will can’t quite put his finger on. Who will win a chance at life? You’ll have to read the script to find out.
I love ideas that help you see common things in new ways. If one character says to another character, “You’ve done nothing with your life since you graduated high school,” that line disappears the second it reaches a reader’s head. But if you show us a woman working in a factory, robotically packaging one product after another every single day and a man watching her, writing down, “7789 days since selection. No significant/relevant new event,” – that’s the kind of perspective that makes you think about life. When was the last significant event in my life? What does my life look like from someone else’s perspective? That’s what this concept brought to the table.
Oda also sets up a nice structure for his story. We know there’s nine days til the decision. It’s right there in the title. We get a good feel for how the contestants are being interviewed – what information we’re trying to get out of them in order to make the decision. But Oda doesn’t stop there. Understanding that sitting in a house for 2 hours is going to get repetitive, Oda adds two strong subplots to break things up. The first is his nosy neighbor, Kyo, who Will is annoyed by but who keeps coming around anyway. And the second is the mystery of what happened to Amanda.
It’s important when you’re writing a screenplay that has a really clean structure like this one, to BREAK THINGS UP with subplots. You don’t want the story to get into too much of a rhythm because what happens is the audience starts being able to predict things. If the pattern is never disrupted then we’re eventually going to be ahead of the writer. Subplots can be used as pattern breakers. You can also use plot twists or character twists. But subplots are nice because you can bring them in and out of the story throughout the script.
I knew the writing was strong in Nine Days early on. There are rules to learn about this world. These people coming to Will aren’t exactly alive. It isn’t clear why they’re the ages they are. We don’t know who Will is or what his exact job is. So Oda writes this montage sequence on the first day of interviews where the contestants ask him these very questions. “And if I’m selected. Am I still gonna look like this?” “And what’s the difference between being here and being alive, besides the time duration?” The best exposition is the exposition the reader isn’t aware of. And because these characters genuinely wanted to know the answers to these questions, you don’t think for a second they’re exposition.
Oda was also good at setting up these little mysteries. For example, after a day at Will’s, we’d see Kyo walking to some unknown house we hadn’t seen before. He walked up to the door, which opened, but Oda wouldn’t show us who was inside. Only Kyo greeting them and walking in. That’s one more little mystery that I have to keep reading to discover the answer to.
But the script wasn’t perfect. The big problem was Emma. Emma is the most important character in the script. And yet she’s given the least amount of screen time of all the candidates. Which didn’t’ help since she was a poorly constructed character as is. Her defining trait was smiling like she knew something you didn’t. I’m not sure what I was supposed to do with that info.
What often happens when you don’t understand the character you’ve created is you build a mystery into them and convince yourself that it’s okay if they’re mysterious to you, the writer, as well. Sorry but that never works. The writer is God. The writer has to know everything. And the reason this ending is a mess is because Oda never figured this character out.
(MAJOR SPOILER) Will ends up picking Kane over Emma. Then learns Emma left him a bunch of notes of things she noticed in his house (????). So he ran after her in the desert and performed some sort of Shakespeare sonnet for her (it was unclear what he was reciting but it sounded like Shakespeare). It was supposed to show us Will finally being vulnerable, something he’d long ago stopped doing. But his lack of vulnerability wasn’t set up well. The Shakespeare sonnet wasn’t set up well. And since I still didn’t understand Emma, him performing this for her didn’t move me at all. So the ending was a huge bummer.
BUT this concept has tons of potential. And the script is 80% there. I think Oda can get it there if he completely reworks his third act. It’s not going to be easy cause I don’t think this works until you figure out who Emma is. And figuring out characters is always some of the hardest work you do as a screenwriter. But if he can conquer that, this movie could be great.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[x] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: A trap many screenwriters fall into is overthinking their bigger characters and, in the process, creating someone messy and unfocused. That’s how I would define Emma. And yet, the same screenwriter is easily able to figure out their secondary characters, like Kane. Kane is a guy who has tons of confidence and who we know will be able to handle life on earth, but will his selfishness do him in? That’s the question we’re trying to answer in Kane’s journey. So my advice to screenwriters is to not overthink your bigger characters. Yes they will have layers and yes they will have nuance. But first, identify exactly who they are and what holds them back. I promise you that the simpler their core essence is, the easier they’ll be to write.
Wait a minute hold on. Are you telling me you’re giving 2 IMPRESSIVES in a row? On Scriptshadow? Have you gone mad, Carson???!!
Genre: Sci-fi
Premise: (from Blood List) At the same time every morning, Scott Treder has started jumping forward in time. First a day, then two, four, eight, etc. He struggles to keep his family together and find a cure, all as his secret spreads throughout the world.
About: This script made the recent Blood List last month. The Blood List is a list of the best horror, sci-fi, and thriller scripts of the year. MGM picked up the script which is adapted from a novel that may or may not be published yet (I can’t find any info on it online).
Writer: Austin Everett (based on the novel by Joseph Eckert)
Details: 118 pages
This premise isn’t entirely new to me. I know someone else who’s working on a similar concept. I found that person’s idea full of potential as I do this one. But we both wondered what it’d look like when executed. That’s the thing with these high-concept ideas. They all sound great in theory until you start writing them, in which case you discover all sorts of challenges. Then again, that could be said for all screenplays. Either way, I’m eager to find out how this translates to the page. Let’s check it out.
47 year old biology technician Scott Treder has a simple life. He loves his wife, Amy, and his perfect 7 year old son, Lyle. There isn’t much Scott needs to worry about other than getting to work on time and helping his son with the occasional homework problem. Until one day when he’s driving his car and it disappears from underneath him, sending his body shooting down the street. Baffled, he gets to the side of the road and calls his wife, who asks where he is. She tells him he never came home last night.
After a long talk that ends in him convincing Amy he’s not having an affair, Scott goes to sleep, gets up the next morning and goes to work at Madison University. At exactly 7:52 am while working in the labs, the world speeds up and one of his co-workers asks him where he came from. That he wasn’t there a second ago. As impossible as it sounds, Scott realizes he jumped forward in time 2 days. Which means whatever’s happening has officially become a “thing.”
Scott must now convince his skeptical wife that he’s jumping forward in time so the next morning, he shows her. Scott is in the dining room, then disappears and appears 4 days later. While Amy is freaking out, Lyle is curious. He’s one of the first to recognize that the jumps are doubling each time. Scott decides to recruit some physicists at the university to help. But when he disappears and reappears 8 days later, they think he’s pulled a trick on them.
So he does it again. And this time, when he jumps 16 days, there are dozens of students and professors and scientists and media waiting. The secret has gotten out. Scott’s not sure how to handle this, but he knows he needs to start finding safe places to be when he jumps. That gets complicated when it isn’t days he’s jumping, but months, and it isn’t months he’s jumping, but years.
Amy can’t handle it. Three years after the first jump (yet only 10 days for Scott) Amy asks for a divorce. Lyle is different, though. He’s both sympathetic to his father’s plight and curious. He wants to help his father stop this. So he builds his entire life around solving the Traveller problem. Scott sees him next when he’s 13, then 19, then 27, then 51.
As Lyle changes, so does the world around us. Society has descended into a splattering of militias on the latest jump, and Scott is famous. There are believers and disbelievers alike. It takes faith to wait 24 years to see if your belief is true. But there are those who now want to kill Scott, which means he must go on the run.
There’s another more sinister truth he must face: That he may only have one more day with his son. Indeed, he makes the next jump and Lyle, a frail old man, brings Scott to his life’s work: a giant computer lab created specifically to stop the future from snatching Scott away anymore. Will it work? Or is Scott doomed to live this curse out til death?
Man , I did not expect this.
I saw the premise and I thought it was going to be one of those goofy half-baked explorations of a high-concept like that script “Furlough” that I reviewed a few years back. But boy was I wrong. Everett and Eckert go all in on this concept, opting to explore the truth of the situation.
That’s the first thing I want to bring to the attention of aspiring writers out there. If you’re going to explore a heady concept, be prepared to bring some sophistication to the script. I’m not saying there isn’t an “Independence Day” version of this idea that couldn’t do well. But by focusing instead on a father-son relationship that’s attempting to withstand 20 year long breaks, it allows the writers to cover broader universal themes.
There’s this moment where Lyle is 27 and Scott jumps and a second later, Lyle is 51 and Lyle doesn’t flinch. He’s been waiting for this moment, preparing for it, for the last 24 years. He knows he’s only got hours both to be with his father and figure out why this is happening to him. It’s a shockingly effective way of demonstrating just how little time we have with the ones we love. As a testament to this, I teared up several times during this screenplay. Cause something told you they weren’t going to be able to stop it.
That became my next question for the script. How deep are we going to go? And Everett and Eckert go deep. They expand this concept way beyond any version of the story you can imagine. Just when you think they can’t jump him forward any more, they jump him. And you’re like, whoa, when is this going to end??
There’s a more-than-obvious nod to 2001 in the story. Maybe too much. The son builds a computer suit to help Scott in future jumps and the suit is named Hal. Here’s my thing with that. We all have the movies that made us want to become screenwriters. And those movies will never stop inspiring us. But when you literally inject pieces of them into your script, you rob yourself of creating your own independent work of art. This could’ve easily been the same movie without any mention of Hal. And we wouldn’t have been reminded at so many steps of another film.
But I’m nitpicking. I really liked this a lot. It had the two most important things that a script like this needs to have. Explore the concept to its absolute limit and give me a character based relationship to care about. When you do just the first one, you get a solid movie. When you do just the second one, you get a solid character piece. When you do both, you get greatness.
I would be shocked if this didn’t snatch up one of the biggest movie stars in the world. People said Ad Astra was the last adult sci-fi movie there will ever be made on a large scale. They’re wrong. Somebody will make this movie because as soon as this gets into the hands of a Chris Pratt or a Bradley Cooper or a Robert Downey Jr, they will sign on. In fact, I’m willing to bet that the first A-lister to read this screenplay immediately attaches himself. It’s too unique of a role. And I’m also expecting this to finish top 5 on the Black List. It’s that good.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[x] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned 1: The bigger the concept, the flashier the opening needs to be. You can’t promise someone a great concept then start your script with a lame talky scene. Show us what’s awesome about your idea! Here, we get a scene where Scott is driving his car to work at approximately 27 miles per hour… and then his car just disappears. Scott momentarily continues to shoot forward in a driving position, only for his body to unravel, scrape, and then tumble forward across the concrete. What a fun way to introduce us to this concept!
What I learned 2: Avoid parentheticals if at all possible, but one time you definitely want to use them is where there’s a strong belief that a line is going to be interpreted in the opposite manner in which it’s intended. So after the 3rd time jump, Scott’s wife Amy is freaking out, marching through the living room in denial and there’s a lot of fear in the house. Lyle says, “So next time it’s eight?” Without a parenthetical, we’re going to assume that the emotion behind this line is sticking with the main emotion in the house: fear. But that’s not how Everett means the line. So it’s important he clarify it with a parenthetical. Here’s how the line reads in the script.
LYLE
(casually)
So next time it’s eight?
Welcome to The Mandalorian Teleplay Chronicles. I will be reviewing every episode of The Mandalorian’s first season with an eye towards helping writers learn TV writing. Whether the show is a breakout hit or a Jar Jar Binks level bust, we’re going to be focusing on how to become better TV writers. Here’s a link to my review of the first episode here.
Genre: Sci-fi (Half-Hour TV Drama)
Premise: After securing his bounty, The Mandalorian readies to head home. But when he finds his ship stripped, he’s forced to find and recover the parts.
About: Disney Plus’s Mandalorian release strategy is shrouded in mystery. The first episode was available 2 full hours before midnight. This latest episode was released 2 hours after midnight. Walt likes to keep us guessing, I suppose. While the first episode of The Mandalorian was directed by Dave Filoni, who was directing live-action for the first time, Episode 2 was directed by Rick Famuyiwa, who directed the underrated Sundance breakout, “Dope,” in 2015.
Writer: Jon Favreau
Details: only 30 minutes long??
***SPOILER HEAVY******SPOILER HEAVY******SPOILER HEAVY***
Baby Yoda.
Is.
The.
Most.
Genius.
Thing.
In Star Wars.
In 25 years.
Actually, I’ll go further than that. “The Child” is the best Star Wars related story since the original trilogy. As you may remember, I did not like the first episode of The Mandalorian. I was so upset, in fact, that I figured the show was doomed. But after getting some rest, I decided to treat The Mandalorian like a playoff series with your favorite team. Got blown out in Game 1. But that doesn’t mean you can’t win Game 2. And The Mandalorian didn’t just win Game 2. It obliterated the competition.
So what changed?
That’s a good question. Obviously, the directing is much better. Rick Famuyiwa understands how to construct a visual narrative much more effectively than first-timer Filoni. A good way to tell if someone knows how to direct is to see how they do in the quiet moments. Good directors can tell a story without the crutch of dialogue. And the first 10 minutes of “The Child” is silent. There’s a great shot in particular where the Mandalorian is in a rocky valley and he senses he’s about to be attacked. The camera slowly pans across his face to build tension right before the attack occurs. You never saw anything like that with Filoni, who you could tell was just putting the camera back on a wide shot in every location in a desperate attempt to make his days.
But the writing is improved as well. Episode 1 was all about setting up the character and the world and, in the process, they forgot about Rule #1 in storytelling: ENTERTAIN. “Entertain” should always be your number one priority as a screenwriter. It doesn’t matter if you write the most seamless exposition dialogue scene in the world. If you weren’t entertaining us in the process, you failed.
The first episode was also clunky. The humor was off-key (that dreadful annoying alien in the first scene). The moments they decided to focus on, like the weird horse-riding scene, were corny. And then when we got to the scene that mattered the most, they rushed through it! If anything, we should’ve been there earlier, prepped for the attack, and then slowly built to the shootout. Which brings up another oddity about this show, which is that the episodes are so short. I would’ve gladly spent another five minutes building up the danger of this town. I don’t know why they’re zipping through these moments. This is TELEVISION. Unlike movies, you’re allowed to sit in moments longer. So I’m not sure what the thinking there was other than Filoni doesn’t know how to direct OR these two episodes were actually a single episode that they chopped up.
But all of that is forgotten after watching, “The Child.” This really was the first Star Wars story since the original trilogy that I felt captured the magic of Star Wars. It follows The Mandalorian, who’s just secured his bounty (Baby Yoda), as he heads back to his ship to, presumably, return the bounty. Except when he gets there, his ship has been stripped apart by Jawas.
If you’re like me, you’re asking, “Wait, are they on Tatooine?” But it turns out they’re on Avala-7, a planet in the Outer Rim. This is where Filoni comes in handy. He knows all the planets in the galaxy and he also knows what creatures are on those planets. So I’m sure, as Favreau was writing this episode, he asked Filoni, “What kind of aliens would the Mandalorian encounter on Avala-7?” Filoni immediately shot back, “Well you know Jawas can be found on any dusty planet in the Outer Rim.”
This led to an extremely fun sequence where the Jawas hurry off in their giant sand crawler and, just like in the old Western movies, the Mandalorian hops on the “train” and tries to make his way inside, only to get attacked at every step. The best part about this sequence is that Baby Yoda is hovering along behind him, casually watching the events unfold with childlike curiosity.
After getting booted off the crawler, the Mandalorian heads back to his buddy, Nick Nolte Alien, who tells him they can barter with the Jawas. So they go to meet the Jawas, who, after several rejected trade scenarios, offer the ship parts if Mandalorian gets them “the egg.” The egg? What is the egg? Cut to a cave where a big beast most definitely lives and now we know why they’re willing to give so much for this egg. Getting it will be impossible.
The Mandalorian fights the rhinoceros-like creature, but only wins because Baby Yoda uses the force at the last second to stop it. This allows The Mandalorian to kill the beast and retrieve the egg for the Jawas…. At which point the Jawas break open the egg in celebration and start eating its gooey insides. That’s all they wanted this whole time. Was a yummy treat. It was hilarious. This allows the Mandalorian to put his ship back together and off he and Baby Yoda go. The End.
Okay! Let’s talk TV.
In the pilot episode of a television series, you’re hamstrung by the fact that you have to set up a lot of things. The good news is that when you get to the second episode, much of that weight has been lifted. You’ll still need to set up things (new characters and such) but for the most part, you’re released from this burden. What that means is that your second episode needs to be about WHY THIS SHOW IS AWESOME. Give us a great story in the second episode – something that highlights why this specific TV show concept is so great. And that’s exactly what The Mandalorian does. This second episode is ALL STORY.
For those wondering how to create a story for an episode, one of the easiest ways is to introduce a PROBLEM. Because then you have something to do for the next 45 minutes: Show your hero trying to solve the problem. Now in more conventional TV episodes, you’ll be following three main storylines. So you’ll need to come up with a problem for three different characters. But The Mandalorian is unique in that it’s only following a single character. So they only needed to come with one problem. And that problem was that he couldn’t leave the planet because his ship was stripped.
From there, it’s pretty standard storytelling procedure. Your job is to create DOUBT that the hero will achieve his goal. Favreau does this immediately when The Mandalorian runs after the sand crawler, tries to infiltrate it, only to be defeated by the Jawas, which there are too many of.
This leads to a broader discussion about heroes in stories. It tends to be more interesting when the hero isn’t superman. A lot of people went into this series believing that this Mandalorian guy was going to be bad-a$$ and take out everyone with a glance. But it hasn’t been that way. He’s not perfect. He messes up. The key factor to pay attention to here is that if he’s not perfect, there will be MORE DOUBT. And that’s what you want. Because think about it. If you know he’s going to win, how compelling is that?
And you see how this pays off when your character goes up against the bigger problems. We saw this guy lose against Jawas. 3 feet tall Jawas! So when he’s fighting the egg beast, we’re genuinely unsure what’s going to happen. And it turns out he doesn’t defeat the beast. He needs help from Baby Yoda.
That’s what I liked about Episode 2 the best – it’s Back to Basics storytelling. There’s no trickery or overly complicated nonsense. It’s straight-up Hero has a goal and encounters obstacles along the way. If you master that simple formula, you can write a lot of great TV episodes. The only difference you’re going to find if you get staffed on a “normal” show is that you’ll have to balance A, B, and C storylines. That gets trickier. But you’re essentially doing the same thing. Each of the three storylines should have a clear goal and then a number of obstacles that get in the way of achieving that goal. Also, your A story (which will follow your biggest 1 or 2 characters) will have the most amount of screen time, B story the second most amount of time, and C story, obviously, the least amount of time.
“The Child” has reinvigorated my enthusiasm for this series. What’s so great about Baby Yoda is that it’s the first Star Wars mystery nobody knows the answer to. We know Rey is either connected to nobody, Luke, the Emperor or the Solos. We know Kylo will get redeemed and probably die. The internet has kind of destroyed a lot of the fun of Star Wars in that way. But Baby Yoda has stumped them and I believe that’s a big reason why this series is so exciting. Nobody knows where it’s going to go. And that brings me back to the feelings I had between Empire and Jedi where the only way I was going to find out how this ended was to see the final movie.
And by the way. I would be ALL ONBOARD for a Rick Famuyiwa Star Wars feature. Put this guy in charge of the Kevin Feige Star Wars project and I’ll be the first to commend the choice. He did an excellent job.
[ ] What the hell did I just watch?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the stream
[x] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Have your character fail early to create doubt later. When your character goes up against the big bad villain, we’ll be more invested if we SAW HIM FAIL EARLIER. Had the Mandalorian wasted the Jawas easily, we would’ve been too comfortable when he fought the beast. The fact that he lost increases the doubt-factor that he’ll be able to beat this thing. And fights/battles are always more compelling when we have serious doubts about our hero winning. This goes all the way back to the original Star Wars when Luke Skywalker is in that trench. We’ve just seen 10 other much more seasoned pilots die. How is this farm-hand who’s in his first battle ever going to figure it out?
