There will be no Thursday article but MAKE SURE TO SUBMIT FOR LOGLINE SHOWDOWN! Entries are due Thursday by 10pm Pacific Time! I’ll post the five winning contestants at 12:01am Friday.

Genre: Thriller
Premise: A high-end courier has three hours to transport a liver from LAX to a Santa Barbara hospital to a dying seven-year-old girl with the rarest blood type on the planet while contending with the head of the Southland’s most dangerous crime syndicate, who needs the organ to survive.
About: I believe these are the writers who wrote “The Shave,” that thriller script from a previous Black List. The thing is, I know I reviewed that script but I can’t find the review. So I can’t be sure. If these are the same writers, then they’re good! Cause I thought that script, which was a thriller about a guy getting a shave (I know!) was fun.
Writers: Tommy White & Miles Hubley
Details: 105 pages

We are going OLD SCHOOL Scriptshadow today.

Say it with me now.

G.

S.

U.

Look, there are many ways to tell a story but when it comes to cinema, the way that best jostles the DNA cinema matrix is to give us a strong character, and give that character a GOAL, some HIGH STAKES, and some EXTREME URGENCY.

Disagree with me?

Well, you’re wrong. Wrong according to who? According to obviousness.

How GSU is this script? It doesn’t even start with FADE IN. It starts with LET’S GO. No, I’m serious!

Hank Malone, 40, is that actor on Reacher. At least that’s who I’m imagining. He’s giant and huge and big and strong and aggressively agitated. Hank is kinda like a fixer. He works for suspect people and takes care of a lot of ‘criminal adjacent’ problems (politicians who need clean up after a big orgy, rich old men who need their exotic birds transferred to their angry ex-wives). But the guy doesn’t kill anyone. He’s your friendly neighborhood ex-SEAL fixer.

Hank then gets a call from his handler, Izzy, to grab a liver from LAX and deliver it to Santa Barbara, about 90 minutes away, where the weather is preventing any planes from landing. That liver needs to get to Santa Barbara within 2 hours or a little girl, Ellie, 7, will die. This is a rare liver blood enzyme type (or something) that only comes around once in a decade. So this is this girl’s only chance.

When Hank gets to the airport, he’s met by Ben, who’s carrying the liver. Ben chats him up as he walks along until Hank finally asks him, “Yo, are you going to give me the liver or not??” Ben says, “Oh, no. I *am* the delivery. I’m the medical courier.” Hank is delivering the deliverer. This is something Hank was not told so he’s already pissed.

But he’s going to get more pissed – don’t worry. Half an hour into their trip, Hank spots an SUV trailing them. Hank’s spidey sense starts tingling and he calls Izzy. What’s going on, dude? Why do I have company? Izzy starts sounding all suspicious and it’s then when we realize Izzy’s under the control of someone else. SOMEONE ELSE WHO NEEDS THAT LIVER. A bad bad criminal man named Damien Gallow.

Damien hops on the phone and says, “Yo, all you have to do right now is stop the car, let us have the liver, and we’re gone. Or…… I kill Izzy.” Hank does about five decades worth of introspection in 10 seconds and decides that he’d rather help a little girl live than whoever this asshole needs the liver for. So Damien delivers on his promise and kills Izzy.

It turns out that Damien’s mom is some psycho crime boss named Donna who ALSO needs that liver in order to live. So Damien’s not going to go quietly into the night just because Hank decided he had a heart. Oh no. Damien is going to get that liver at all costs – Hank and Ben just don’t know it yet.

Runner is an odd duck of a GSU showcase.

Its first 30 pages are spectacular. The way it sets up Hank and the rest of the characters – I got a strong sense of who everyone was. And then it’s written in this fast-paced kinetic style, yet it never skimps too much on detail, preventing it from ever feeling thin.

There’s this scene around page 35 where Hank and Ben are pulled over by these bad guys. The scene just sits there in its suspense, soaking the silence up, as we wait for the bad guys to move. What are they going to do? That was the peak of the screenplay for me. The story AND the writing were firing on all cylinders.

Where things started to sputter was with Ben. I have no idea what this character was doing in the movie! He’s just there to hang around and talk to Hank. It’s very frustrating because the deeper into the script I went, the more I kept waiting for SOMETHING to happen that would indicate why Ben needed to be here. When nothing arrived, I thought for sure Ben was going to be a late 3rd act bad-guy twist. But no. Nothing. He’s literally just there to hold the liver.

I think I understand what the writers were doing. They thought, “If we have Hank in the car alone, there’s no dialogue. So we have to have someone there for exposition and to introduce important plot beats.” But that’s not how screenwriting works. You can’t just put a character in your script ONLY to provide an expository function. He needs to be his own character. He needs to justify his own existence. He needs to have a storyline of his own.

That’s another area where I felt the script could’ve improved. There’s this early moment where Hank and Ben are driving and Hank’s talking to Izzy on the phone and Izzy’s acting confused about why Ben is there and I thought, “Hmm, wait, is Ben bad?” And then I thought, “How cool would it be if Ben is the wrong guy and he’s taking him in some completely opposite direction?” It felt like a situation was brewing where Hank couldn’t trust anyone and every 15 pages of the story was going to have a surprise reveal. But after that initial, “Bad guys are after us” moment, the script didn’t have any huge twists, which was a missed opportunity.

In the continued spirit of assessing dialogue this month, we get an example of Tip 137 from my dialogue book, which is, “Have one person who wants to talk and another who doesn’t.” That resistance creates conflict within the conversation and conflict is one of the major keys to writing good dialogue.

By the way, one last point here about this script because it relates to problems I’m seeing in a lot of the scripts I’ve been consulting on lately: If you have a character like Hank, who’s grumpy and tough and negative – traits that commonly lead to an unlikable character – do what these guys did at the start of their script.

They send Hank out a montage of his daily activities – which amounts to the errands he does daily in his job. One of them includes taking an exotic bird from one person to another. So you have this huge Jack Reacher thug walking around with a cage that has a rare bird inside. The ridiculousness of that image (and that job) makes him easy to cozy up to. We kinda like this guy now because of all the silliness he has to deal with every day.

It’s taking a page out of Rocky’s book when he has to go collect money from that guy and he ends up being nice to him. These are small things in screenwriting but they have a big impact. Character likability is REALLY IMPORTANT, especially when you’re dealing with an inherently cold or mean protagonist. So you have to figure out little ways for us to connect with them.

Overall, I thought this script was good, not great. But it will definitely finish Top 15 on my 2023 Black List re-rankings.

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

What I learned: Backboard characters (characters whose only purpose is to give the main character someone to talk out loud to – like hitting a ball against a backboard), are inherently thin.  When producers complain about one-dimensional characters, this is one of the varieties they’re talking about.  Never create characters JUST for expositional purposes or just to give your hero someone to talk out loud to. Once you create a character (in this case, “Ben”), regardless of their function in the script, you must give them a purpose for being in the story and some sort of arc over the course of the script if you can.

Have you been struggling with your dialogue? I have over (that’s right, OVER) 250 dialogue tips in my new book, “The Greatest Dialogue Book Ever Written.” You can head over to Amazon and buy the book, right now!

Who says Civil War gets to be the only film about a modern day civil war?

Genre: Black Comedy
Premise: A recently heartbroken resident of LA hipster neighborhood, Los Feliz, is called into battle when the civil war that has been ravaging America finally reaches his doorstep.
About: Today’s writer, Sam Zvibelman, is best known for creating the highly niche yet beloved “Pen15.”  I’d heard about the show, which follows two 7th graders trying to make it through those tough years of junior high.  But I couldn’t for the life of me get past the bizarre decision to have full-grown adults play the 7th graders.  I know that people who love this show claim that’s why it’s great but some creative choices are too weird for me and this was one of them.  I’m open to people convincing me otherwise in the comments, though.  So if you loved Pen15, give it your best shot!
Writer: Sam Zvibelman
Details: 96 pages

Pat-attack for Neil?

Welcome to Civil War meets 1917 meets Edge of Tomorrow meets Juno.

Today’s script asks a question that I don’t think has ever been asked in movies before. A question so deep, so poignant, that the answer could rip apart the very fabric of space and time.

What would a hipster war look like?

There are a handful of ways to write a good script. But one of the best ways is to find a new spin on something old. War has been around forever. But nobody’s seen a war come to Los Feliz.

Los Feliz, by the way, is a giant hipster paradise in LA. You need 3 of the 5 to be able to enter the area: ripped jeans, tattoos, a handmade bag, those earrings that stretch your earlobes to quadruple their size, and a cynicism so deep that you can only pet puppy dogs ironically.

Los Feliz is in this weird section of the city, about 20 minutes east of West Hollywood, that feels like a dozen giants mashed up 50 blocks of space into 20. Half of it is crammed into the hills, and the streets up there are so twisty turny that nobody knew how to make it out of them until GPS arrived.

30-something Neil Mudd hasn’t gotten off his couch in weeks. This EVEN THOUGH a civil war began in the country three months ago. The thing is, the war was mainly relegated to the east coast and midwest. Up until this point, California’s been able to stay out of the fray.

That all changes when a plane crashes into a bunch of houses just down the street from Neil. The war is finally here. By the way, the whole reason Neil’s been moping around is that his ex-girlfriend, Emma, doesn’t want him back. Oh, and Emma just so happens to be the leader of the Resistance, aka the “Union.” So everywhere Neil goes, Emma’s face is all over the place.

Neil writes for a local Los Feliz paper but ever since the Emma breakup, he’s got writer’s block. His boss, Jacob, keeps begging him to come back and write. “People need to hear your voice right now!” “I’ve got writer’s block,” Neil proclaims. “During a war??”

As the war around Los Feliz heats up, Sean Penn and Jane Fonda, both major figures in the Union, come to Neil and ask him to head across enemy lines to deliver a critical message to the Union leader (aka, his ex-girlfriend). Neil resists at first, but when an abandoned horse named Guernica starts randomly hanging outside his place, he decides to join forces with the horsie and deliver that message!

Neil and Guernica unexpectedly become best friends as they endure their adventure across war-torn Los Feliz. Neil runs into a midget who fights for the other side (the Founders) and becomes temporary frenimies with him. He runs into his ex, who claims to know nothing about the mission he’s been sent on. And he also runs into his best friend from childhood, who’s become this script’s version of Civil War’s Jesse Plemons. As his journey winds down, Neil will have to figure out his most important battle – breaking free of his writer’s block. That way, he can write the words that just may save the Union, at least in Los Feliz.

Love and War and Guernica is kind of like Civil War in that it doesn’t really take a political side. It definitely demeans the evil conservative empire but it also makes fun of the fact that if war ever came to California, it would be up to a bunch of “liberal snowflakes” to defend the state and maybe that isn’t encouraging. In the end, I liked that it kept it all funny and light. It never gets mean-spirited. And that’s due to the writer’s voice, which is strong throughout.

This script reminded me of the value of adding HUMANITY to a screenplay. I’ve been reading so many paint-by-numbers thin-charactered scripts lately and you know EXACTLY where they’re going to go within the first ten pages. You see the entire movie in your head and don’t even need to read on.

But this script was different. There’s soul here. The writer is leaving his heart on the page. That’s worth something. And, as far as the plot goes, Neil achieves his goal (delivering the message to Emma) by page 65. So I had no idea where the script was going next. In fact, I didn’t know where it was going before that.

Sam Zvibleman keeps us entertained with a steady diet of offbeat humor. There’s this funny ongoing joke about how unsympathetic everyone is to Neil’s writer’s block. “How can you have writer’s block during a war?!” Neil is so devoid of any warring skills that he has to search YouTube for how to ride a horse. You’ve got Sean Penn showing up in the movie. On the one hand, I dislike celebrity cameos, but I think Sam is dead-on accurate with this one. Sean Penn would definitely be the face of the Union should a civil war come to Los Angeles.

In fairness, the script is messy. But it’s messy in the good way. Not the bad way. What do I mean by that? Most messiness comes from sloppiness and laziness when putting a plot together. The messiness here comes more from a lot of ideas. Our hero is trying to get over his ex. His ex is the leader of the resistance. We’ve got the writer’s block thing. There’s this “Paul Revere” theme running throughout the movie. There’s this relationship with this horse. We’re not sure if Sean Penn and Jane Fonda are real.

The reason it still works though is because each individual idea is fun. And Sam writes with this charming energy where you forgive all of the bumps and bruises. Also, the way he connects certain threads are quite clever. For example, our hero isn’t just delivering an important message a la 1917. He has to deliver it to HIS EX-GIRLFRIEND who he still pines for. That gives the objective extra stakes. Extra emotion.

Not to keep ripping on Rebel Moon Part 2 but when I said it was thin and that it reeked of a first draft, that’s what I meant by it. Zack Synder could never, in a million years, connect two plot threads like that in a clever way because he can’t be bothered. It’s not interesting to him to go deeper, to find those more exciting story avenues.

Continuing my month-long crusade of highlighting script dialogue (I encourage you to buy my new book on dialogue, the best dialogue book available in the world!), today’s script has a wonderful example of tips number 132 and 133, which cover dialogue “agitators.” Agitators are anything you place in a scene that complicate the conversation your characters are having. I talk about how a strategically chosen location can be a great agitator, which is exactly what Sam does here.

Our hero, Neil, finally gets to his ex-girlfriend, Emma. Note how this scene could’ve happened anywhere. They could’ve put it outside at a coffee shop, inside a bedroom, in the back of a car. But no. We use AN AGITATOR to give the scene more life. In this case, that agitator is A WAR GOING ON IN THE BACKGROUND.

Sam even took my tip to the next level. The agitator creates a layer of irony over the scene. Their talk is thick with subtext and “elephant-in-the-room” conflict (Tip #134!). That heaviness plays humorously as those heavy pauses are accompanied by people dramatically dying in the background.

This scene is a great representation of this writer and of his script. It’s more thoughtful than the average script on the Black List for sure and should’ve finished way higher than it did. In my annual end-of-the-year Black List re-ranking post, I predict this will finish in the top 10.

The only reason it doesn’t score that elusive “impressive” that I rarely award these days is that there were a few threads in the story that annoyed me. There’s way too much emphasis placed on Neil’s friends’ religious book. I had no idea why someone else’s book mattered in a script that had much more pressing goals to accomplish (winning a war, getting back your ex-girlfriend). Yet this book (that wasn’t even Neil’s!!) gets the third biggest storyline in the film. Come on.

To get that ‘impressive,’ I would’ve needed a simpler more streamlined narrative where we focus on the things that matter and nothing more. But it’s still way above most of these other scripts on the Black List. I tried to read that fruit one (where every woman’s name is a fruit) and it was borderline unintelligible. Yet somehow it got 13 more votes than this? Time for the Black List to rework its rating system or it will continue to be up to me to fix it at the end of every year. :)

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

What I learned: Know when to hold’em, know when to fold’em (subplots). Subplots are necessary in every script. But one of the worst things you can do is put too many in your script. Because what happens is every subplot TAKES TIME AWAY from the bigger plotlines. So when the reader is stuck reading some second-rate subplot that doesn’t have a huge effect on the story, they get restless. Or even angry. So choose those subplots carefully. Only include them if they’re REALLY DOING SOMETHING for your script. We could’ve gotten rid of Jacob’s religious book here and this script loses nothing. It actually gains something since we’d no longer have to endure it.

Have you been struggling with your dialogue? I have over (that’s right, OVER) 250 dialogue tips in my new book, “The Greatest Dialogue Book Ever Written.” You can head over to Amazon and buy the book, right now!

This script has GSU for days. But does it have logic for hours??

 

Genre: Action
Premise: Following a severe, soon to be fatal, brain injury during a violent attack, an NYPD sergeant embarks on a harrowing journey of vengeance, which leaves her only a few hours of adrenaline-bursting consciousness to hunt down those who took her daughter and killed her husband before she dies.
About: Today’s writer, who got this script on last year’s Black List, has had some notable success as a TV scribe. He wrote on the Ridley Scott show, Raised by Wolves. He wrote on The Flash. And he wrote 19 episodes of the well-reviewed show, White Collar.
Writer: Julian Meiojas
Details: 110 pages

Alicia Vikander for Izzy?

A long time ago I wrote a time-travel script called “The Jump.”

It was about a guy whose wife disappears and he soon finds out she’s been kidnapped into the future. So he seeks out the people who can time jump and travels into the future to get her back.

For a variety of reasons (many of which weakened the script considerably), my main character was dying of a brain tumor. He only had a couple of days to live. The idea was, not only did he have to go to the future to rescue his wife. He had a limited time to do so, as his tumor was days away from killing him. But I always ran up against this issue of: if he was days away from dying of a brain tumor, how did he have all this energy to run around and save his wife?

These days, I would never have included the stupid brain tumor thing. I’ve realized, after reading thousands of scripts, that stuff like that overcomplicates what should be a simple narrative. If I could time travel in real life I’d go back and tell Past Carson to get rid of the brain tumor immediately.

The reason I bring it up is because today’s script is dealing with the same issue I was dealing with: how do you write a believable action movie around a highly mobile character whose sickness will kill her within hours?

Did Die Fast figure out the solution to that problem? Let’s find out.

Izzy is a 37 year old Brooklyn cop. She’s got a 14 year old daughter, Lola, who’s inherited her angry teenage rebellion stage a bit early. She’s getting in fights at school (in a very 2024 character beat, they are making fun of her sexuality). And boy would that get worse if she knew the truth about who her father was. He’s a famous bank robber who’s currently appealing a 60 year prison sentence.

Meanwhile, she’s dealing with her stepdad, David, who she kind of gets along with. Izzy and David are actually on the fence about whether they should tell Izzy the truth about her father when the two of them are attacked at their house. Some masked men want money although it’s not clear what money they’re talking about. They kill David and toss her out the window.

Three days later, Izzy wakes up in the hospital. She’s told that she has a critical brain injury and only has 5 hours to live. Even worse, the cops’ operating thesis is that SHE killed David. Luckily for Izzy, this unique brain injury allows for a final burst of energy before death. So Izzy is actually operating in an almost superhuman state. As soon as the doctors leave the room, she’s out of there.

Izzy only wants to accomplish two things before her death. One, go find her daughter, as she assumes that whoever came after her and David will come after Lola next. And two, get revenge on the people who killed her husband. This will be complicated by the fact that Izzy used to run with some sketchy cats before she became a cop. I’m not a psychic or anything but something tells me that bank robber dude had something to do with this. So get ready Bank Robber Dude. Izzy’s coming.

In regards to our “Is it possible to believably create an action character who’s hours away from dying” question, I must admit the writer did a good job.

Let’s be honest. There is no medical scenario on record that would support what happens to Izzy here. But with some fairly convincing exposition based on, what sounds like, sound research, I believed it enough to retain my suspension of disbelief.

So all’s good in the hood, right?

I would say more all’s average in the hood.

This movie is Crank. It’s a woman with a ticking time bomb in her head on a tear. And it’s hard to make a plotline that simple stand out.

However, we do have a recent comp that did stand out! I’m talking about David L. Williams’, “Clementine.”

So what was the difference between these two scripts that made that one so good and this one so average? The answers aren’t sexy. It comes back to nuts and bolts screenwriting.

David wrote a script meant to be enjoyed. Julian is writing a script that he’s trying to impress readers with.

What does that mean in layman’s terms? It means one guy is trying too hard.

Take a look at some of these lines from today’s script…

She finds an UNCONSCIOUS GUARD. Another gorehole mouth — the kiss of a shotgun’s ass. She pulse checks. Got it. Moves on.

Enter DET. OMAR NAZARIAN, 30s, fly-boy swag, but look close and you’ll see spit-up on this father-of-4’s Air Force 1s.

It’s overly specific try-hard too-cool-for-school writing, which often results in reader “double-takes” (the reader has to re-read sentences to understand them). When you’re writing a script like this one that is so reliant on its fast pace, double-take lines are script killers. Cause they create a stuttering effect that destroys the very pacing you’re going for.

The overwriting gets a little better as the script goes on. But not enough for my taste.

Also, I liked the character of Clementine more. Izzy was kind of annoying. She feels too written. Not authentic enough. Clementine felt like a real person.

How much you like the main character has an enormous effect on how you experience the rest of the story. In this case, if I had to give the Izzy character a 1 out of 10 rating for likability, I would give her a 6. With Clementine, I would give her a 9. That difference changes the ENTIRE WAY the reader experiences the script. Because when you like a character that much, you just care more about every story beat, every twist and turn, every character achievement.

Another thing that David did better was he put his characters in these situations that you thought there was NO WAY IN THE WORLD they were going to get out of. So you had to keep reading to find out if they would.

Here, every single time Izzy got in a tough situation, I knew without blinking she would be okay. There’s a scene where she takes on 10 guys in a hallway and I knew before the first one came at her that she was fine.

Look, I know that in 99.9% of movies, the hero makes it to the end. But there’s a special skill in screenwriting wherein, even though the reader inherently knows this, you have the ability to make them constantly DOUBT that it’s going to happen. And the way you do that is to put them in these scenarios that genuinely feel impossible to get out of. This script never passed that test.

Moving on to DIALOGUE…

This month I’m celebrating the release of my new dialogue book, The Greatest Dialogue Book Ever Written. So I wanted to cover some from Die Fast.

One of the things I talk about in the book is that certain genres aren’t conducive to writing dialogue. Fast-moving action films are squarely in that department. We see that here. There isn’t a lot of memorable dialogue and that’s because there’s no room for it.

Dialogue, I’ve learned, needs a runway to get going.

It’s hard to write good dialogue if all your dialogue scenes are three-quarters of a page long. There’s not enough runway to build a good conversation.

The only long dialogue scenes you get to write in these action scripts are exposition-driven. For example, there’s a scene late in the script where Izzy tells Lola the truth about her father. It’s a long scene but it’s all backstory. It’s not the kind of dialogue you can add flash or flair to. It’s just expository.

The good news is, if you’re bad at dialogue, then this is the perfect type of script for you to write. Because the dialogue requirements are minimal. You just need to know how to write exposition. Luckily, there’s an entire chapter about how to write great exposition in my book. So go buy it!

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

What I learned: We’ve hit the tipping point for “ass-kicking girl” scripts. They’re done. There are too many of them out there and it’s diluted their entertainment value. Plus, they don’t do very well at the box office. The last hope is Ballerina, the John Wick spinoff movie. If that does well, they may have a second life. But if I were a writer right now who likes the action genre, I’m writing an “ass-kicking guy” script.  Unless.  UNLESS!  You have a totally fresh new inventive take on the “ass-kicking girl” formula.

What I learned 2: How do you deal with difficult-to-buy-into scenarios such as people who can run around like Chris Hemsworth despite the fact that they’re supposedly going to drop dead in 5 hours? This script gives you a pretty good blueprint. Do as much research as possible to find the most convincing explanation for your wild scenario. Write a scene that incorporates that exposition. Then just GET THE F**K ON WITH YOUR SCRIPT. Don’t look back. Just go. Cause the more people think about it, the less they’ll believe it. So it’s best to address it as convincingly as you can, move on to the fun, and never stop. Cause if we’re having fun all the way through your story, we’re not thinking about the medical accuracy of your concept.

Have you been struggling with your dialogue? I have over (that’s right, OVER) 250 dialogue tips in my new book, “The Greatest Dialogue Book Ever Written.” You can head over to Amazon and buy the book, right now!

And I feel fine

The movie we were promised

Alex Garland’s “Civil War” pulled in 25 million dollars this weekend. On the surface, that seems like an average number. But when you look deeper, it’s staggeringly high.

This is independent studio A24’s biggest opening ever. The whole reason it’s an A24 film is that it’s an indie movie. Despite the way it promotes itself, which I’ll talk about in a bit, it’s a character piece about photojournalists. Most of the movie takes place away from the war. So, for a film like that to pull in 25 million dollars is gigantic. It rarely happens.

Now, I love Garland so I very much flirted with seeing this. But I ended up deciding not to. I’ll share with you why later. It does come down to a screenwriting choice Garland made, which is usually how it goes with me.

But before we talk about that, I wanted to discuss the marketing of this film. Cause the marketing is what allowed the film to achieve its unprecedented box office. And yet that marketing is deceptive.

It’s deceptive because this movie is not about a civil war. It’s about photojournalists. The negative reactions coming out of the film almost all revolve around the frustration of thinking they were going to get a movie about a civil war when, in actuality, they got a movie about how difficult it is to be a war photographer.

This is one of Hollywood’s best tricks. They know when they have a movie that if they marketed it honestly, nobody would show up. So they create a marketing campaign that promotes the aspects of the movie that are marketable, even if those elements are barely in the film.

They’ll even go so far as to misrepresent a movie if they fear that the truth will keep people out of the theater. They did this recently with the campaigns for both Mean Girls and The Color Purple. ZERO MENTION in the trailers of the films being musicals. Cause they feared that if people knew they were musicals, nobody would show up.

This becomes relevant to all screenwriters because, once you finish your screenplay, your job will be similar to the marketers’ jobs when promoting a movie – which is, you’ll have to send loglines to people and pitch people to get them to read your script.

As someone who does around 300 logline consults a year, I am particularly savvy in this department of deception because, often, writers will come to me wanting the sexiest logline possible even though the script itself isn’t sexy. And I’ll help them because I know that a better logline means more read requests.

But I do have the conversation with each and every one of them where I say, “Next time, before you write your script, don’t write the boring version of the script then try to come up with an exciting logline afterwards. Write the exciting version of the script to begin with so that your logline will be an accurate representation of your script. That way you get the best of both worlds.”

Because, inevitably, what happens, is that even if you are able to trick the potential reader into reading your script, there’s a high likelihood that they will leave disappointed because the screenplay you promised them never materialized.

That’s why some people are coming out of this movie disappointed. The negative reviews are almost all the same: “What I was promised never showed up.”

On the flip side of this, this movie shows you the power of concept – and more specifically: TITLE. How the title of a script or a movie can have so much influence over potential readers/viewers.

If you’re an indie writer and you’re tired of writing your indie scripts that no one seems interested in, do what Garland does here: Find a big sexy subject matter then hide your indie story within it.

Imagine, for example, that Garland had written a movie about news photographers trying to get the perfect photograph of drug addicts in drug-infested cities in an attempt to bring attention to the problem and hopefully make a change.

Sounds very noble. Sounds very indie. Sounds like 5 people would show up.

So you can see the difference by changing “drug infested city” to “civil war.” That’s what smart indie writers do. They find that sexy subject matter so that their character-driven scripts have an actual shot at getting noticed.

Ironically, the reason I decided not to see the film was that I heard, ahead of time, that it was not about a civil war. That it was about photographers who just happened to be operating within a civil war. That didn’t sound like an interesting enough movie to me.

The movie we got

And the more I think about it, the more I think Garland made a mistake. This is a movie that, if it would’ve committed to the Civil War angle, it would’ve made twice as much money this weekend.

It’s a reminder that point-of-view is SO IMPORTANT when writing screenplays. Think about it. You have a modern-day American civil war movie. Think about how many points-of-view you have at your disposal. Is a photographer really the most interesting?

You could’ve gone with a suburban mother, a soldier on the front lines, an abandoned child, a spy, a medic, the president of the United States, a drone pilot, a hacker, a farmer, a survivalist, a drug addict, a black market trader, an Uber driver driving people out of the city to safety.

All of those options would’ve been more interesting than a photographer. I’m not even convinced photographers are a thing anymore. We’re way more enamored with videos taken on peoples’ phones in 2024 than we are some amazing picture. This isn’t 1968 yo. The more I think about it, the more flummoxed I am by Garland’s choice.  He’s probably just really interested in photographers. 

But my point is, whenever you’re writing a screenplay, that needs to be one of your primary objectives: figure out what point-of-view is best for this story. Cause, often, we’ll go with what feels easiest to us, or the most familiar. And those aren’t the best options.

I’m still happy for Garland. His movies, while always artistically challenging, rarely connect with audiences. And here, with his last movie ever, he gets his biggest box office payout.

Now Garland is going back to writing, re-building one of his original franchises: 28 Years Later. But don’t count Garland’s directing career out just yet. When you have a clear number 1 movie at the box office, some big people start knocking on your door. However, from what I understand, Garland hates directing more than anything. So he may be able to withstand these mega-offers.

Did any of you see Civil War? What did you think?

Have you been struggling with your dialogue? I have over (that’s right, OVER) 250 dialogue tips in my new book, “The Greatest Dialogue Book Ever Written.” You can head over to Amazon and buy the book, right now!

More dialogue tips in today’s review!

Genre: True Story
Premise: The true story of the most insane Broadway production of the modern era, where visionary director Julie Taymor attempted to make a Spider-Man musical and had everything go wrong in the process.
About: This script finished on last year’s Black List. It’s written by Hunter Toro, who wrote on Pete Davidson’s show, Bupkis.
Writer: Hunter Toro
Details: 107 pages

Although I’ll probably never do it, I’ve always wanted to write a musical about tennis. I think it would be funny to have this big Broadway singing-dancing play that revolved around tennis balls flying everywhere and people wearing Wes Anderson-inspired Lacoste bodywear singing about double-faults and drop shots.

But that’s the extent to which I’m interested in anything that has to do with Broadway. It’s not my jam. It’s not my jelly.  It’s not even my almond peanut butter.  Which is why even the craziest story to come out of Broadway in decades – this one – never landed on my radar. I heard about it peripherally. But I didn’t care.

Then a few people told me, “No, Carson, this story is ABSOLUTELY NUTS. It’s worth checking out.” Normally, I don’t like real-life stories. But if you throw a doozy my way, I’ll give it a go.

Glen is a PBS writer for a children’s show when he gets the call every writer dreams of. Julie Taymor, the creator of the Broadway sensation, “The Lion King,” is putting together a musical about Spider-Man, and none of the previous writers worked out.  Mainly cause they couldn’t deal with the insanity that is Julie Taymor. 

Glen goes in for the interview where he not only learns that Julie is directing, but that freaking U2 is doing the music. As far as New York Broadway musicals go, this is the top of the top. It’d be like Christopher Nolan calling you tomorrow and asking you to write him a sequel to Memento.

But Glen instantly learns that Julie has… shall we say STRANGE ideas for a Spider-Man story. She’s never read the comics. Never saw the movies. And that’s the way she likes it. She wants to bring something completely original to the IP. And believe me, this is IP. There are many meetings with Marvel over the course of the story about what you can and cannot do with Spider-Man throughout the script.

The biggest thing Julie wants to do is, instead of using the endless number of comics to find a villain for the story, she wants to create her own: a Greek Goddess with spider-like powers. Actually, that’s not everything. She also wants to make Spider-Man sexy and dangerous. She envisions the Jacob Elordi version of Spider-Man. And it freaks Marvel the heck out.  Julie likes that.  Julie likes that a lot.

What happens next is insane. Julie wants the aerial spider battles to happen above the audience’s heads, which is basically impossible. We see how impossible when Stunt Spider-Man Actor falls 60 feet and becomes semi-paralyzed. Then U2 goes on tour and decides to not work on the musical at all. Bono’s never even watched a musical and hates all the music in them. And then you have poor Glen who has to leave his wife and kids to be next to Julie 24/7 so that he can always be nearby when she has an idea.

The Marvel company does everything in their power to convince Julie to make Spider-Man less sexy and to get rid of the terrible villain that makes no sense within the mythology of Spider-Man. But Julie does as Julie wants. And even when their producer dies of a stroke, Julie demands that Glen come over and write new pages on the day of his funeral.

When it’s all said and done, the production costs 65 million dollars. But it becomes a semi-must-see musical due to all the press calling it the biggest disaster in Broadway history. It’s somehow enough to give the play 3 years. But, in the end, it would lose over 75 million dollars and tarnish the legacies of everyone who worked on it.

Reeve Carney, who played Spider-Man, just oozing innocence here.

As I pointed out yesterday, in the coming weeks, with every script I review, I’m going to be focusing on dialogue. I just wrote a book about dialogue so I want to talk about this stuff while it’s fresh on my mind.

Today, we’re going to cover Tip 105 in the book:

Use dialogue to reveal character – What a person says tells us a lot about who they are. So, when applicable, try and write dialogue that reveals something about your character.

Too many writers use dialogue as a means to move the plot (or scene) forward and nothing more. They’re not taking advantage of the fact that every time a character opens their mouth, it’s an opportunity to tell us who they are.

Why is this important? Because a common weakness in screenplays is characters who we have no feel for. We don’t understand them. What is their defining characteristic? What is their worldview? We can never truly understand a person unless we know these things. So, here’s a scene on page 23 of today’s script where Julie explains to Glen why she chose him to write her play.

How do we know that the writer has revealed character in this scene? Because we know more about Julie after it! We know that she’s a risk-taker. We know that she fears nothing. We know that she pushes the envelope and is willing to fall on her face and we know that she expects the same from others in her orbit. That’s HUGE information about the character and we learn it within a single page.

You’ll also note within this scene that there’s another major dialogue tip covered in the book.  Actually, it’s THE VERY FIRST TIP.

Create dialogue-friendly characters – Dialogue-friendly characters are characters who generally talk a lot. They are naturally funny or tend to say interesting things or have a unique perspective on the world, are quirky or strange or offbeat or manic or see the world differently than the average human being. The Joker in The Dark Knight is a dialogue-friendly character. Saul Goodman in Breaking Bad is a dialogue-friendly character. Deadpool is. Juno is. It’s hard to write good dialogue without characters who like to talk.

Julie Taymor is our dialogue-friendly character in this story. She’s weird. She’s unpredictable. She’s demanding. She says a lot of strange things. Dialogue cheers from the mountaintops when it finds out a character like this is in the script. Which is why you want to give your script the gift of dialogue-friendly characters as often as possible.

What about the rest of the script?

The great thing about crazy true stories is that they do a lot of the work for you. You don’t have to go looking for great scenes, like stuntmen falling 60 feet to their near-deaths. They come to you.

But I have found that, when you have a wild story and you have a wild character, like Julie, you must be cautious that your main character doesn’t disappear on the page. And that’s exactly what happens here. The Glen character gets swallowed up by all the craziness and leaves little to no impact, despite being the main character.

I’m not saying it’s easy to deal with this imbalance. But if you’re aware of it, you can take steps to offset it. You probably need to make your hero bigger than you originally planned. If all Glen is here to do is stare up at Julie in utter amazement, audiences aren’t going to play nice.

They want heroes that charge forward and have their own agency. At least at some point in the script. Glen has that moment but it’s so late in the story that it might as well be nonexistent.

As I said, I don’t like true stories. Yet if you’re going to write one, this is the exact type of story you want to re-tell. It’s big, it’s weird, it’s chaotic, and let’s be honest – it’s funny to watch something fail so spectacularly. For that reason, this is definitely worth the read. It’s too fascinating of a story not to be entertaining.

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

What I learned: When you’re creating your two main characters (the characters who are going to be in your script together the most), you have to imagine each of them on a scale. One on one side, the other on the other. On that scale, does one character clearly weigh down their side of the scale? If so, you’re going to need to add more to the other character. You have to make them more active, or talk more, or be funnier, or be tougher, or be smarter, or bring SOME WEIGHT to the table. Because if they’re getting overshadowed in EVERY SINGLE SCENE, readers will consider the character to be weak. And that’s what happened here. Glen comes off as a very weak character since he can never hang in any of the scenes he and Julie are in.

If today’s dialogue talk intrigued you, I have over (that’s right, OVER) 250 dialogue tips in my new book, “The Greatest Dialogue Book Ever Written.” You can head over to Amazon and buy the book, right now!