Genre: TV Pilot – Drama/Sci-Fi
Premise: When a young genius Russian programmer is accepted into a tech company’s top secret program, codenamed “Devs,” he ends up getting more than he bargained for.
About: It’s so like Alex Garland to put his show on Hulu. I mean, who puts any show on Hulu?? They produce 3 shows a year and all of them blow. Garland is one of my favorite writers. He wrote the novel, The Beach, which still holds up today. He wrote and directed Ex Machina. He made the trippy sci-fi flick, Annihilation. He wrote 28 Days Later. Sunshine. Like a lot of creators, Garland is finally making the jump to television with his new show, Devs.
Writer: Alex Garland
Details: 1 hour

One of my favorite quotes came from Alex Garland when he was on the interview circuit for his first directing effort, Ex Machina. The journalist asked him, “You’ve been a writer for so long and here you’ve finally gotten behind the camera. I’d imagine it’s an invigorating change, being able to take your words and translate them to the images you had in you head. What is it you like about directing?” Garland’s response: “Nothing.”

I don’t know if Garland isn’t aware of how the promotional game works or if he just doesn’t care. Either way, I’ll follow him because, the way I see it, Garland is one of the top 5 writers in the business. He has an intrinsic understanding of what a hook is. But he never explores them in obvious ways. He’s like a non-smiling JJ Abrams. Literally. There is a GIANT LITERAL MYSTERY BOX in the show – the Devs building, a building that’s about to change the life of the man who’s been accepted into its program.

(SPOILERS)

Sergei works for a San Francisco tech company led by Forest, a reclusive tech CEO. After Sergei demonstrates to Forest that he is able to predict the movements of a single-celled organism seven seconds into the future, Forest informs Sergie he wants him to join Devs, his mysterious passion project.

Sergei and his girlfriend, Lily, are besides themselves. It’s impossible to get into Devs. That night, Forest takes Sergei to the Devs building, a giant oddly-shaped box in the middle of the forest surrounded by large gold pillars being used as shields to ensure that nothing can be digitally transmitted out of the building.

The inside is even more impressive, with an electromagnetic floating people mover that takes you to the inner offices of the building. There, Sergei is given his computer station and when he looks at the Devs code, he stares up at Forest in shock. “This can’t be real,” he says. Forest assures him that it is.

After Forest leaves, Sergei starts acting strange. He seems to be having an internal breakdown. Finally, we see him position his watch to face the screen. Sergei is digitally recording the code! Late that night, when Sergei leaves the building, he finds Forest waiting for him with his head of security, Kenton. After Forest tells Sergei he knows exactly what he did, it’s lights out for Serge. Kenton throws a bag over his head and suffocates him.

The next day, Lily, who also works at the company, comes looking for her boyfriend. She meets with Kenton, who tells her they’re lucky they have so many cameras all over the place as it will be easy to find out where he went. Sure enough, the cameras show Sergei leaving Devs, coming to the main campus, then simply heading off into the city. Kenton assures Lily that he’ll pop up sooner or later.

Later, Lily finds a strange game on Sergei’s phone. When she clicks it, it becomes clear it’s not a game at all, but rather a covert messaging system. Sergei, it turns out, was working for the Russians. Before Lily can process that, she’s called in to see Kenton again, who shows her a disturbing video. It’s Sergei. He came back, headed straight to one of the on-campus parks, then poured gasoline on himself and lit himself on fire. Lily can only watch with horror as her boyfriend commits suicide.

Garland is a writer who understands screenwriting. Period. He just gets it, man.

I want to draw your attention to two scenes in particular.

The first occurs after Forest’s head of security, Kenton, kills Sergei. The next day Lily comes to Kenton’s office asking if he knows anything about Sergei’s disappearance. Now we watched Kenton kill Sergei. But Lily doesn’t know that, of course. Garland has prepped the perfect scenario for dramatic irony.

As a reminder, dramatic irony is when we know something that a key character, many times the hero, does not. We know this dude killed Sergei but Lily does not, creating an underlying sense of anger and frustration that our hero, this person we care about, is being lied to. Any time you can get the reader feeling emotion – good or bad – you are doing something right. Because the main source of boredom is having zero emotional reaction to what you’re reading.

But Garland doesn’t stop there. He DOUBLES DOWN on the dramatic irony. During their conversation, Forest comes into the office. Kenton “informs” Forest that Sergei, Lily’s boyfriend, went missing after he left Devs last night. Forest feigns concern and asks what happened. Forest and Kenton then go through a little performance whereby they pretend to figure out where he might be. It’s like taking dramatic irony and hooking it up directly to a nuclear reactor.

For all you TV writers out there, dramatic irony is one of the most important skills you’ll draw upon. The reason for this is that there are lots more talking heads scenes in TV shows than features and dramatic irony is one of the easiest ways to make a talking heads scene interesting.

The next scene I want to draw your attention to is the scene where Sergei is killed. Sergei has just finished his shift in the Devs building, using much of that time to record the code via his secret watch-recorder. Sergei exits the building, which is in the middle of a forest, and is surprised when Forest emerges from the shadows (yes, Forest emerges from the forest).

Now Forest already knows he’s going to kill Sergei (or have Kenton kill him). When he reveals to Sergei that he knows Sergei recorded the code on his watch, it’s pretty much a done deal that Sergei’s going to die.

But where’s the fun in killing off a character the second we learn they’re going to be killed? Screenwriting is about suspending. You want to imply that something bad is going to happen and then you want to draw it out. The fun occurs in the audience squirming around during the ‘drawing out’ process. Which is exactly what happens here. Forest goes on an extensive monologue about how human lives are on rails and that they’re pre-determined to do what they do. Only after finishing his point does he order Kenton to kill Sergei.

But I’m not done documenting Garland’s genius. Garland uses a scene in the second episode to establish a pattern-disruption which ensures that audiences have no idea what to expect moving forward. That’s not talked about enough in dramatic TV writing. Most shows are predictable. The way you hook people is by taking major plot beats and mixing up the pattern of expectation. Sometimes you give them what they expect. Other times you don’t. This ensures that they never know what’s coming, which is key in one’s enjoyment of any story.

(spoiler) In episode 2, Kenton confronts Sergei’s Russian contact, Anton, in a parking garage at night. Kenton informs Anton that he knows he’s trying to get Lily to complete Sergei’s job and he wants him to stop. But unlike Sergei, Anton is not afraid of Kenton, and as the two continue their tense interaction, it’s clear that Anton has done his homework and knows everything about Kenton. By the end of their conversation, you’d think Anton even knew Kenton had followed him here. Then, in a flash, Anton whips out a knife and stabs Kenton in the gut. Shocked, all Kenton can do is flail. In that moment, we know that Kenton is going to die.

Sticking with the mantra that drawing big moments out is one of the keys to good writing, Garland milks the fight for all it is worth. As it teeters back and forth, Kenton surprisingly fights his way back to even ground. Anton is younger and stronger, but Kenton won’t go down easily. When it’s all said and done, Kenton surprisingly emerges as the winner, a bet we wouldn’t have taken at the beginning of the fight.

Why am I telling you all this? Because now Garland has established that you DO NOT KNOW what’s going to happen going forward. Sure, we knew Sergei was a goner. But with this fight, the winner wasn’t who we thought it would be. This means that every tense moment moving forward in the show, you’re going to be anxious. You’re going to be unsure. It can go either way. And that’s what makes any story exciting – the unknown. The main reason why there’s so much boring stuff out there is the predictability of the storytelling. You don’t get that here.

Notice none of what I’ve discussed even includes one of the coolest things about this show – the Devs project! What is it? What is it going to be used for? Is it just a camera into the past? Or can it do the same for the future? Is the goal to be able to travel into other time periods? Another mistake TV writers make is that they only focus on this plot stuff. But the cool plot stuff becomes a lot cooler when you have cool characters moving within it. That’s why this show is so great.

TV feels like the perfect landing spot for Garland. This guy explores complex themes. Complex people. Complex ideas. Film doesn’t do any of that well. Film is more about the ride. Even character pieces can only focus on one or two aspects of character growth in a film. TV allows you to take all those things and dig into them. And whereas many feature writers moving into TV give us shows that burn bright early but die after a few episodes, Garland is ready for this drawn out format. Remember that he started off writing novels. So he understands long-form storytelling better than most.

My only worry with Garland is that his stuff is a little TOO heady at times. Whereas JJ Abrams could learn a thing or two from Garland about sophistication in theme and character development, Garland could learn a thing or two from Abrams about embracing the fun parts of your idea more. The good news is, this show is on Hulu and Hulu has nothing going on so you’d think they’d greenlight a second season just based on that. You have a cool hip cinephile-loved director making a show for you. Keep him happy.

I know I was happy watching this. So much so, I can’t wait for the rest of the season.

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

What I learned: One of the most misunderstood aspects of screenwriting is when to write monologues. There are two assumed places where one must do so. The first is when a character explains some deep affecting story from their past that shaped them. These monologues tend to start like this: “When I was a kid, my dad used to say…”. The second occurs near the end of the movie where the main character says to either the co-lead or a group of people what they learned and try to encapsulate the message of the movie in one big speech. While the latter is preferable to the former, I’d advise avoiding both. They’re cliche-traps that scream “Newbie writer here!” The best time to use monologues is in the example I used above. Create a sense of impending doom then draw the scene out. Whatever you want to say, have the controlling character (in this case, Forest) deliver it in a monologue during that moment. The issue with monologues is that they are inherently inorganic. People rarely stop and give some grand sweeping speech about something. The impending sense of doom hides that inorganic component better so you don’t notice it as much.

Can I just say, has there ever been a more cursed movie than The Hunt? This is a film that was bullied into pulling its release for accusations against the plot that weren’t true. It gets stuck in Purgatory. Blumhouse finally gets the cajones to make another run at it, setting it up for release this weekend and… the corona virus is in full force, leading to a likelihood of empty theaters. I can’t remember a movie being hit by two huge separate media onslaughts before… ever. I guess some things weren’t meant to be.

But you know what couldn’t be shut down? Not by a Corona N1-Nuclear-Defcon-5 Virus? Sci-Fi Showdown, that’s what. This is the perfect weekend to cozy up to your nearest pet, brew a warm mug of hot chocolate, and read some science-fiction screenplays. This showdown is a special one in that these are coming around less often. That means more submissions and higher stakes. I’ve read one of these scripts already and I can tell you it’s very good. One of my favorite amateur scripts that I read last year. Not going to disclose which one it is cause I don’t want to influence the voting. But I’d be surprised if it didn’t win.

I’m still deciding on what the next Showdown genre will be. Feel free to offer suggestions in the comments. I’ll announce the winning genre sometime this week. But for now, here are your five science-fiction showdown contestants. I don’t know about you. But I’m excited!

Title: The Dying One
Genre: Sci-fi Drama
Logline: Twenty-six year-old Leigh Steinman is dying. Except, no one dies anymore. Not at her age. Now she must adjust to life as the only person in the world dying, while making an impossible choice, take one last shot at a cure or build a legacy in her remaining days.
Why You Should Read: I’ve always loved sci-fi. I was raised on it. And it always drove me crazy how much, at least on film, it fell into predictable patterns. Action and adventure. Special effects. But couldn’t it be more? This is science fiction built on theme and character. I know that’s not easy to pull off, but I’ve spent two decades learning how to. This may not be the flashiest entry, but I promise you, it has depth. It’s unique.

Title: On This Day In History
Genre: Sci-Fi (Pilot)
Logline: Within hours of learning from an otherworldly source that his upcoming flight is destined for disaster, a would-be Good Samaritan highjacks Northwest Orient flight 305 in order to prevent it from crashing – so begins the saga of history’s most elusive fugitive, D.B. Cooper.
Why You Should Read: To be entertained. You could simply read to page 2, at which point you’ll hopefully buckle up and enjoy the ride. For those familiar with D.B. Cooper, great. For those who aren’t, a quick review of his wiki page may interest you.

Title: Nowhere Girl
Genre: Sci-Fi
Logline: A remorseless killer is given the death penalty, only to wake up 1,000 years later in a spacecraft built for one, with an artificial conscience implanted into her nervous system and a life sentence to serve out.
Why You Should Read: I wanted to write a character who has no redeeming qualities whatsoever, the most horrible monster I could imagine, and still somehow make her worth rooting for. Since my wife is a schoolteacher, and I have received that dreaded text that her school is on active shooter lockdown a couple of times, I knew who that character would be. So now I’d love to know if my fellow writers think I pulled it off.

Title: The Shell
Genre: Sci-Fi/Action
Logline: After learning his virologist sister is still alive and being held captive after being thought dead, a retired special forces soldier must infiltrate a secret bio-weapons facility to rescue her and steal the cure to a global pandemic.
Why You Should Read: None

Title: Emergent
Genre: Sci-fi/Thriller/Romance
Logline: A brilliant programmer gets embroiled in a bizarre and dangerous love triangle between a co-worker that saved her life and an artificial intelligence that nearly killed her.
Why You Should Read: Emergent had a good contest run last year, placing as a Quarterfinalist or above in Nicholl, Page, Austin, and Big Break as well as a few others. It landed me a few queries and even a couple meetings with managers, but no bites on it yet. I’ve since made some revisions (based on feedback from said meetings, etc.) and will be sending it out again this year. I’d really love to hear the opinions/advice/feedback from the scriptshadow community and even get it reviewed. Cheers.

Corona Virus.

Media creation or legitimate threat?

Who knows.

The only thing I can tell you is that I thought this would thin out my gym floor so I could FINALLY use the squat rack but that hasn’t been the case. Humph.

Today we’re going to shamelessly use this virus to learn how to construct a movie idea. Often times, when writers get big ideas, they don’t know how to exploit the idea to create an actual movie.

I’ll give you an example.

Let’s say you had an idea about dinosaurs coming back to life in the present day. Conceptually, it’s a great idea. So you think, ooh, first I’ll have the dinosaurs show up in Japan. And then Russia. Then Brazil. Then the U.S. And each country is dealing with them in their own way. One country is killing them. Another is trying to protect them. Others are trying to herd them towards a central location. I’ll also cover the internal government discussions about what they should do. We’ll bounce around left and right and right and left so we can cover every angle of this phenomenon.

I’m sorry but that’s not a movie.

Jurassic Park is a movie.

My job today is to explain how to get a Jurassic Park idea as opposed to a Dinosaurs All Over The World idea. And we’re going to do so by using topical subject matter. A studio has just come to us and said, “We want to make a movie about a pandemic. Pitch us your best idea.”

FIND AN ANGLE

The first thing you need to do once you’ve got that big idea is to find an angle. The Walking Dead may have started off as, “The entire world is overrun by zombies.” But that’s just an initial concept. There isn’t yet an angle.

The angle is the plan of attack through which your story takes place. And it could be anything. It could be a group of people holed up in a house fighting off the epidemic. It could be following three separate families dealing with the crisis, each living in different parts of the world. It could be three survivors who have to make it from the bottom to the top of Manhattan, which happens to be the most heavily infected zombie city in the world. It could be a doctor who hunts and captures the infected, then brings them back to his lab in the pursuit of finding a cure.

The key question you’re asking when searching for an angle is “Does this fit well into the feature film format?” And I’m going to tell you right now that the more focused your angle, the better your movie is probably going to be. A group of people holed up in a house is likely to be a better movie than cutting between three families in three different parts of the world.

Why?

Because films work best when the boundaries are strong. It’s easier to manage a group of people in a house than it is people in three different locations on the planet. The more contained the space and the time frame is, the better feature story mechanics will work.

Let’s go back to Jurassic Park for a second. It isn’t taking place in all of America. It takes place ON AN ISLAND (contained space). It doesn’t take place over a full month. It takes place over a couple of days (contained time).

Jurassic Park has always flirted with – and even tried – the idea of moving the dinosaurs onto the never-ending geographic location of the United States. But it’s failed because the boundaries are gone. And with that, the structure has weakened.

Look no further than Steven Soderbergh to see what happens when you have a bad angle. Remember that movie Contagion that he made? Of course you don’t. Unless you’ve seen it pop up recently in the wake of the Corona Virus news. But before it started getting marketed again, I’m going to bet that you can barely remember anything about that movie.

That’s because its angle wasn’t feature-friendly. Soderbergh decided to cover multiple people getting infected all over the world. As a result, we didn’t get to know anyone that well, care about anyone that much. And by disjointing the narrative, it becomes harder to engage in each separate storyline.

Does that mean this omniscient angle can never work? No. It’s just not feature-friendly and therefore the difficulty level is higher.

Close Encounters of the Third Kind is one of the few movies I’ve seen that took a scattered angle, covering the alien invasion from numerous different points of view across the globe, and still worked. But even Close Encounters eventually zoomed in on Roy Neary’s storyline of getting to the ship landing.

So we have our directive.

Pandemic. Movie idea.

How do we obtain our angle?

START ASKING QUESTIONS

To find the angle, start asking big questions.

WHEN? When is our story taking place? Does it take place right at the early stages of the pandemic, before full panic has set in? Does it take place when the first stages of fear are setting in? Does it take place as things are starting to get scary? Does it take place AFTER the worst has already happened? Or does it take place long after the pandemic occurred (making it a post-apocalyptic idea)? Each of these is a different movie.

WHAT? What is the threat? Is the threat the flu, then death? Or does the threat turn people into raging killing machines, a la 21 Days Later? Obviously, the answer to this question will vastly change what your movie is.

HOW LONG? How long do you want the movie’s inner timeline to be? Is this like “The Road” which takes place over weeks? Or is like my Manhattan idea above, which takes place in one day? If you’ve been paying attention, the tighter the timeframe, the more movie-friendly your concept is going to be.

WHERE? Where this takes place is probably the second most important question of all. It can take place in a house, in multiple houses, in multiple countries, on an island, on a boat, in a city, at the top of a skyscraper, in a locked down medical facility where the virus seems to be spreading to new departments every hour.

WHO? Who’s involved is usually the most important question. Is it a group of people who don’t know each other? Or is it a family? Is it two people on their honeymoon? Is it four people out on a double blind date? Is it a group of kids in a limo who just left their prom?

FIGURE OUT YOUR CHARACTERS

Once you have your location and a general feeling for the length of the journey, you need to find your characters. This is going be HUGE. I have seen so many good concepts destroyed by forgettable characters. We don’t want that to happen to you. Something to keep in mind is that if you create compelling characters, they’ll work regardless of their surroundings. Even if your concept loses its steam or the plot gets predictable, strong characters keep audiences invested throughout. That’s why Contagion didn’t work. It didn’t allow us to spend enough time with any particular group of characters to ensure that we cared about them. So you really want to get this part right.

IRONY – Usually with big ideas comes the opportunity to inject irony into the characters. And irony is one of the superpowers of storytelling when done well. Look at Guardians of the Galaxy. These are literally the guardians of our galaxy and the leader is not a strong mature natural leader, but rather a zany goofball who makes it up as he goes along. Irony is surprisingly hard to get right outside of comedies. But if you can make it work, it’s the thing that puts your movie over the top.

A HERO WITH A STRONG CONNECTION TO THE IDEA – Your hero and your concept need to be connected, both conceptually and thematically, if possible. If you make a movie about a man who’s forced to tell the truth for 24 hours, you don’t want him to be a farmer who’s thinking of moving to the big city. You want him to be a lawyer who has the biggest case of his life on the day that he can’t lie. If you’re making a movie about Hollywood in 1969, centering it on a struggling actor as opposed to a brain surgeon is probably a good idea.

RELATIONSHIPS THAT NEED FIXING – Emotion is your friend when creating characters. Ideally, you bring people into your story who have some unresolved issue with each other. This is why choosing characters who have history with one another (often family) is better than picking people who have no connection whatsoever. That doesn’t mean you can’t do the latter. But turning that relationship into something emotion-based at some point in the story is a good idea. Maybe your two main characters just met and, over the course of the story, fall in love (Brokeback Mountain). Or they form a friendship (Jerry Maguire and Rod Tidwell). Or they come to an understanding with one another (Fury Road). But to center on a storyline with characters who don’t know each other, and you never breach any sort of emotion-driven character subplots, it’s going to be hard for the audience to invest in your movie on anything other than a surface level. A big reason why A Quiet Place did so well was because it followed a family fractured by the death of their son as opposed to four random people.

SO WHAT’S OUR MOVIE?

Okay, so we’ve identified our criteria for coming up with a full movie concept. What’s our movie about the pandemic going to be?! Here’s my take. The movie will be titled, “Catalina.” It’s been 3 months since Patient 0. The virus, which has an 88% kill rate, has obliterated most of the cities, which have descended into chaos. Catalina Island, a small island just off the coast of Los Angeles, has become the one remaining medical center fighting to find a cure. Getting on or off the island is near impossible due to fear of the virus. The movie focuses on the lead doctor at the facility who finds out that his 11 year old daughter, who’s also on the island, has just tested positive for the virus. Knowing she’ll be killed if found out, he must figure out a way to get her off the island to safety.

Hmmm… it’s an okay idea. I think it could be better though. Feel free to improve it. Or pitch me your best idea for a pandemic movie in the comment section!

Genre: Thriller/Period
Premise: After finding themselves stranded on the wreckage of a Helldiver bomber in the middle of the ocean, an American aviator and a Japanese Kamikaze pilot must work together to survive their greatest threat yet — a 22-foot great white shark.
About: This script finished with 9 votes on last year’s Black List. Like a lot of writers on last year’s agency-absent Black List, this is writer Ben Imperato’s breakthrough screenplay.
Writer: Ben Imperato
Details: 91 pages

If you’re anything like me, you’re still reeling from the beating Barb put on Madison last night. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, that would be because you have a life. If you do know what I’m talking about, OMG CAN YOU BELIEVE THAT HAPPENED? I thought the whole family was going to break up by the end of the night. I think we can all agree that the real winner was Hannah Anne.

Anyway.

World War 2? Sharks? Hero and Antagonist working together? Sounds like the perfect spec script to me. Let’s find out if it’s any good.

Edward Moretti’s plane spirals out of the sky and into the Pacific, landing upside-down. He and his gunner, David, are barely able to get out of the cockpit without drowning. But within minutes of their miraculous survival, David realizes he was shot during the air battle. He dies within minutes, leaving Edward all alone.

Not to worry because Edward has his good friend, Flashbacks, to keep him company. We cut back to right before the war where Edward and his perfect pregnant wife talk about how great their future is going to be.

Four days into this nightmare, Edward receives another guest, Hiro, a 17 year old Kamikaze pilot who happens to be the one who shot them down. Unfortunately, he got hit during the battle and ditched his plane as well. Furious that Hiro killed his friend, Edward battles Hiro, who takes him on with his katana sword. The fight ends in a stalemate and the two draw a line along the bottom of the plane and make a rule that each person has to stay on their half of the line.

Just after things calm down, a giant angry shark begins circling the plane. At one point, it’s able to grab onto Edward’s leg and tear half of it off. Feeling bad for Edward, Hiro starts to work with him, trading some water he has for a fish Edward caught. We flash back to Hiro’s past as well and learn that he was kinda conned into sacrificing his life to help the Emperor win the war.

After a few more battles with the shark, three Americans in two rafts pick Edward and Hiro up. These men have long since gone crazy. And if you needed proof, they’re carrying along with them the head of a Japanese soldier they killed. When they try and go after Hiro’s head as well, Hiro fights back and Edward helps him defeat his own men! The two head back to the plane, and after a couple of final flashbacks, take on the shark in a climactic battle.

This is a good idea for a movie.

I like whenever two people on opposing sides have to work together. And like I always tell Scriptshadow readers: If in doubt, add a shark.

But a setup is just that. It sets the concept up. From there, it’s up to you to execute.

I want to highlight an early line in the script because it was a telling moment for what was to come.

David, the gunner who’s been shot, is dying in Edward’s arms. This is what he begins to say: “Hey Eddy… My wife. My kids. Tell them…”

When these moments come up early in a script, my ears go up like antennas. Because it’s a common scenario. The soldier who’s dying in another soldier’s arms and wants the other soldier to tell his wife/girlfriend/family/kids one last thing. It’s here where I learn whether this writer understands how to give me something new or whether he’s going to repeat the same lines that we’ve always heard.

So how does David’s line end? Here’s the full exchange: “Hey Eddy… My wife. My kids. Tell them… Tell them I tried to get back.” “Tell them yourself.”

Sound familiar? Yes. It’s the same exchange we always hear in these interactions. And when I read that, a small part of my script-reading self died. Because I know from experience that if a writer can’t even give me a fresh take on a line, then how are they capable of giving me a fresh unexpected story experience?

How SHOULD you handle a line like this? First off, I would avoid writing the exchange in the first place. If there’s a moment in your script that’s so cliche that comedy films have made fun of it, that’s a good indication you should avoid writing that moment. Didn’t they have an entire scene making fun of this in Tropic Thunder?

Anyway, moving on.

The flashbacks confirmed to me that this wasn’t going in any direction that was going to be entertaining. Flashbacks are always a sign in movies like this that the writer can’t think of enough story to fill up the present so they pad it with flashbacks.

That’s not to say flashbacks couldn’t have worked. If each character’s past would’ve been engaging and unique and shocking, I would’ve been all for them. But both Edward and Hiro’s flashbacks were as straightforward as you get. Blah blah blah wife has a miscarriage. Blah blah blah, Hiro’s too young to join the Navy but does anyway. It’s clearly padding.

What this script probably needed was to focus on this relationship on the plane. That’s your concept. That’s what brought people to see the movie. So the more time we’re spending with these two facing problems and troubleshooting them together, the better.

The best moment in the script happens when the crazy American officers arrive because it was the only time in the script that went off the obvious narrative path. If you were making a short film from this movie, that’s the sequence you would build the short around.

With that being said, I can still see this getting made. I can still imagine the trailer. I can see people watching the trailer and getting excited over the movie. But this needs an A-List screenwriter who knows what he’s doing to put in a full-on rewrite to bring out the parts of this story that make it such a fun idea.

I will say one thing. Years ago, there weren’t a lot of places that could make a movie like this. It would’ve been a mid-budget 40-50 million dollar deal because you’re shooting on water. And water is both unpredictable and expensive. If you shot on a real body of water, it’s a logistical nightmare and you’re constantly at odds with the weather. If you shot in a tank, you’d have to fake the backgrounds and that never looks realistic in the daytime.

However, with this new Stagecraft technology you can probably shoot a movie like this for 3-5 million dollars. The reason that’s important to note is because when you write a screenplay, your odds of selling it are directly linked to how cheap it would be to make. The cheaper your script is to make, the more production houses there are you can sell to. Go study how Stagecraft works because it’s opening up opportunities to make movies that used to be pipe dreams. Certain conditions have to be met (A central still location like a floating plane is perfect for Stagecraft) but as long as they are, there are huge opportunities for indie filmmakers that were not there 10 years ago.

Helldiver wasn’t a bad script. The execution was just bland and predictable. The idea needed to be pushed and it was only nudged.

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

What I learned: “I love you.” Another cliched line we’ve heard a million times in movies. So how do you make it work? Also, how do you make the response work? Shall we take a trip down Star Wars memory lane to find out? When Princess Leia says, “I love you,” the original response from Han Solo was written as “I love you too.” They tried to shoot it. It didn’t work. So they tried rewriting the line. Didn’t work. Rewrote it again. Didn’t work. Take after take after take, new lines written, same reaction. Didn’t work. Finally, Director Irvin Kershner told Harrison Ford to say whatever. Ford, exhausted by this point and wanting to go home, hears “I love you” and replies, “I know.” The line becomes one of the most famous film lines of all time. But it would’ve been boring and cliche had the line been delivered as originally scripted. How they came about “I know” is the same way you should go about your writing during common moments. Whatever you come up with first is probably going to be lame. Whatever you come up with second is probably going to be almost as lame. It’s only when you keep digging deeper and deeper that the response becomes something totally unexpected, maybe even nonsensical, and yet it will be a million times more original than your first pass. That was my issue with the “Tell my family I tried to get back,” “Tell them yourself,” exchange. It is the epitome of a first pass. Seasoned writers don’t make that mistake.

Genre: Japanese Manga – TV Pilot (One Hour)
Premise: Based on the manga comic, numerous pirates sail the seas in search of the famed treasure known simply as “One Piece.”
About: I’m told One Piece is the most successful selling manga comic in Japanese history. And since only Disney and Sony have superheroes, everyone else needs to find their fantastical subject matter from elsewhere. It was only a matter of time, then, that someone, in this case, Netflix, would take a big-budget chance on a manga comic. And if you’re going to go for it, you have to go big. So of course they have to adapt the best manga of all time.
Writer: Matt Owens (based on One Piece by Eiichiro Oda)
Details: 57 pages

So far, I am yet to understand any Japanese adaptation of anything I’ve ever read or seen that is not horror. The Cowboy Bebop script was indecipherable from a phone book written with sluglines. When the Wachowskis adapted Speed Racer, I stared at the screen in bafflement for 30 minutes before dropping a five ton brick on my remote control power button to make sure I would never risk seeing the film again. For a while, I tried to get into famous Japanese novelist, Haruki Hurakami. I reluctantly traversed past the 200 page mark in a couple of his novels before I realized that there was no point to either of them (I dare anyone to make an argument that IQ84 makes sense). Most recently, I made the mistake of watching the movie, “Your Name,” and found it the most hackneyed simplistic boring piece of cinema that anyone had made that year.

Clearly, the Japanese view storytelling in a different manner from the rest of the world. My theory is that they care more about the animation than the story. And when they do tell stories, they’re not interested in goals or points. It’s more about the experience of the people’s lives. Which is great if you love boredom. But someone’s going to have to explain to me why people like these movies. If you could give me anything I could latch onto to help understand the popularity of this comic and every other Japanese comic or animated film, I’m game to learn. While you do that, I’m going to review One Piece.

One Piece begins with a pirate being marched through the Town of Beginnings on a remote island. This man is brought to an execution platform in the middle of town. The Mayor wants to make an example of him that pirates are bad people. Just as he’s about to be killed, someone in the audience yells out, “Where’s your famous treasure!?” And the pirate says that every treasure he’s ever found was put together into “one piece” and just before he can reveal where this one piece is, they kill him.

This sparks a massive pirate uprising where everyone now wants to be a pirate so they can search for the “One piece.” 12 years later we meet Shanks, a red haired pirate who is the leader of the Red Haired Pirates. While his crew drinks at a bar, a little 7 year old kid named Monkey D. Luffy pleads to be part of Shanks’s crew. Shanks keeps telling him he’s got no shot and to stop bothering him.

While no one’s looking, Luffy eats a weird fruit in Shanks’ storage chest and then – get ready for this – becomes super-stretchy kid. If you hold onto his arm and walk around the room, his arm will follow you, stretching out endlessly. Yeah, that’s what we’re working with here. Shanks is furious that Luffy ate this prized super-powers fruit cause now he can’t sell it. But before he can yell at him, a criminal named Higuma shows up with his crew and start yelling at Shanks’s guys.

While everyone fights, Higuma steals Luffy away and takes him on his boat to… I don’t know what. Yell at him on the sea? But before he can yell, a giant sea monster swallows Higuma whole. Meanwhile, Luffy falls in the water and sinks because – I’m not making this up – the super powers fruit contains a “can’t swim” curse. So Luffy is about to die before Shanks scoops him back up and saves him.

Cut to 10 years later cause, of course, and we meet the beautiful but mean Pirate Avida, who takes special pleasure in yelling at some teenager she found, Koby. Koby wants nothing more than to escape Avida. Lucky for him, he finds Luffy stowing away in one of their barrels! Luffy, who’s now 17, is really brave and determined to find the “one piece.” He tells Koby to stand up to his slave owner so Koby does and then the new BFFs Koby and Luffy go off to look for one piece together! Yay!

Holy Moses kill me now.

All right, so, it became clearer to me why there’s such a disconnect between myself and a lot of these Japanese animated movies/shows. They feel like they were written by a 10 year old boy. I’m not kidding. A kid eats a purple fruit and gains super-stretchy powers. When faced with death by a pirate, a giant sea monster appears and eats the boy’s captor. We also get dialogue like this: “Whatever. I don’t care what powers you have. They’re nothing compared to mine. I’m not gonna let some no- name punk stand in my way.”

This is stuff I would – no hyperbole here – expect to come out of an elementary school writing contest.

Which is too bad because the pilot actually starts strong. With every TV pilot, you want to come in with a scene that grabs the reader/viewer. Even more so than movies. Because in movies, the audience can’t leave. But with TV, the audience can leave any time they want. So to start this with a perp walk through an old island town, then have an execution, only for the executed man to scream out that there’s a treasure to find – that’s the beginning of a good show.

Then, when we get into the bar and Shanks encounters Higuma and we have a good old-fashioned standoff, I was thinking, “This is good so far.” Especially when Shanks backed down. In 99% of these early-script standoffs, they’re used to show the hero getting picked on and then beating the bigger badder guy up so we know he’s awesome. So to go the opposite direction and have Shanks wimp out was a refreshing choice.

I’m thinking, “This could actually be good.” And thennnnnnnn – purple fruit that turns kid into mr. stretchy pants happens. My head literally fell into my lap. I shook it several times. And I thought – yup, now you’re officially a Japanese adaptation.

But it wasn’t just the nonsensical lost-in-translation issues that made this a bad read. On page 28 we get our second large time jump. There is maybe no better indicator that a feature script or a TV pilot script is going to be bad than the double major time jump. We jumped forward 12 years. More story plays out. Then we jump forward 10 years.

First of all, it’s pure laziness. I understand why it was done. You wanted to see the pirate introduce the one-piece. And you wanted to show Luffy get his powers and then also grow up. But if you’re pushing us through multiple time periods to set up your story, you’re not working hard enough. Time jumps destroy the rhythm of the pilot. It’s hard enough to get the rhythm right when there are zero time jumps. So to start and stop your story TWO TIMES in a single pilot, you’re begging the viewer to turn the channel.

It’s the equivalent of that guy at the party who tells the story who keeps stopping and saying, “Oh, I forgot to tell you. That guy who gets the girl? He wasn’t always rich. He once worked at a dry cleaners and he had to work for a long time and save up money… where was I? Oh, right so he gets the girl and he’s about to ask her for her hand in marriage but first he’s got to meet her parents. Oh, I forgot. These parents? They’re from old money. So they grew up in New Orleans…” That’s the rhythm you’re creating when you’re doing double time jumps.

I give these guys props for taking something that’s so specific to its medium and trying to turn it into live action. I honestly don’t know how you even start to go about executing a goofy manga in live-action form. Something tells me you’re going to get a mix between the 1980 Robert Altman version of Popeye and the first Sonic The Hedgehog trailer. But we’re in a content-desperate industry and that means more chances need to be taken. We’ll see how this one turns out.

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

What I learned: I would avoid the scene in your Western, Superhero, Sci-fi, or any combination thereof, where our hero is challenged early on by the bad guy and then the hero kicks his butt. Usually in a bar. I admired One Piece for not doing that. It reminded me that some beats in a story are so common, writers are incapable of visualizing any other option. But these are the story beats you need to question the most! Because these are the moments where you’re best able to show that your script is going to be different from everybody else’s.