Lean times at the box office!

Don’t worry. The good movies are coming.

But they sure are making us suffer in the meantime! A Planet of the Apes sequel? This is like making us eat at the school cafeteria when there’s an In and Out right across the street.

The latest entry in the Lame-O Summer 2024 Movie Olympics is Planet of the Apes Human Girl Says Hi or whatever it’s called. Even if I went to check the actual title of this film, I would forget it by the time I came back to this document. That’s how unoriginal these Apes sequels have become.  Literally 98.123% of the movie is shots of apes in a forest.  I don’t even know who this director is. When I heard “Wes Ball,” I said, “Wes Ball, the actor from American Beauty, is directing now?”

Because the studios are releasing these second banana movies, there’s nothing much to talk about. At least you used to be able to marvel at the motion-cap technology that brought these apes to life. Now the biggest talking point is that the Apes movies do sorta better overseas. Oooooh. Can’t wait to spend  three hours at poker night debating that nugget.

All joking aside, there’s a reason I liked the initial movie in this franchise and why none of the others have made sense to me. The initial movie was simple and I could buy into it. Every other sequel has tried to convince us that a planet which has less than half a million apes, has been able to take over 8 billion humans. It doesn’t make sense on any level.

My whole thing is: If the core concept doesn’t make sense, your script won’t work. It will work enough that if you pour 150 million into it and another 100 million into advertising, it will trick enough people to see it that you can claim a 50 million dollar opening. But nobody cares about this franchise and I honestly believe it’s because the core of the concept doesn’t make sense.

Speaking of animals, my current obsession is Baby Reindeer. Not just the show but the circus surrounding the show. Fiona Harvey, the woman who the stalker character of Martha is based on, was on Piers Morgan over the weekend! She claims she left creator Richard Gadd a total of four voicemails, three e-mails, and a couple of texts. There’s a bit of discrepancy there as Gadd says it was closer to hundreds of voicemails, tens of thousands of e-mails, and an uncountable number of texts.

I have to admit Harvey seemed quite reserved in the interview. So either Gadd did exaggerate this whole thing or she was on a whole lot of meds.

Either way, it does bring up the question of, “How personal can you get in your writing?” I’ve always advocated for truth from screenwriters.  It’s the #1 path to creating a strong original voice.

But there’s clearly a tax to being so truthful. Gadd, who was a nobody for a decade, experienced these events and built a story universe around them (first in his stand-up act, then in his play, now on a TV show). The latter has turned him into a mega-star overnight.

But you can tell when you watch interviews of Gadd how uncomfortable he is getting into the details of the real-life inspirations. He can feel Fiona breathing down his neck. She’s going to sue and who knows what’s going to come of that. But I can’t imagine it’s going to be enjoyable, even if everything he’s said is 100% accurate.

Moving onto lighter fare, Star Wars is about to sign Sigourney Weaver into its far far away galaxy. She’s going to play a substantial role in The Mandalorian and Grogu. Much like The Acolyte brought in Carrie-Anne Moss, it appears that Lucasfilm is all about stunt casting in an attempt to build as much goodwill back into its fractured fanbase as possible.

I know talking about Star Wars these days is the equivalent of kicking the nerd after he’s already been beaten up by the bully. The franchise doesn’t have any future shows or movies that the fanbase is excited about.

We can dog Marvel all we want. But Marvel still has Spider-Man. It still has Deadpool and Wolverine. It still has the new iteration of the X-Men to bring into the fold. There are things to get excited about with Marvel.

Trying to get excited about Star Wars these days is like trying to get excited about getting Amazon gift cards for Christmas.  Sure, there’s value to them.  But they’re not exactly… exciting.  The Acolyte, by all behind-the-scenes accounts, is supposed to be lousy. We have an upcoming Rey movie, which is a tough sell considering the character became less interesting with each sequel. There’s James Mangold’s “First Jedi,” movie, which has a teensy bit of promise but so little is known about it that it’s hard to form an opinion either way. And then, of course, there’s Mandalorian and Grogu.

The problem with our buddy Mandor and his adorable little green partner-in-crime is that they’re building a movie around the franchise on a downslope. You never want to build a movie on a franchise that’s slipping. You want to build it on a franchise that’s rising.

The perfect time to release this film would’ve been after the first season, when everybody loved The Mandalorian. But most Star Wars fans I talk to barely remember what happened in Season 3. So you’re building a movie in an attempt to SAVE the franchise which is an inherently negative motivation.

There’s got to be a good Star Wars movie idea out there, right?  There’s got to be something that would get people excited.  Any ideas? 

A couple other things that popped up over the weekend are, one, that JJ ABRAMS IS BACK! Nobody has seen the man since the premiere of Rise of Skywalker. As I mentioned before, I once had a contact inside Bad Robot (she no longer works there) and she told me that when Abrams went to the premiere, the movie had been changed since his final edit and nobody told him. So he was furious. I get the feeling that was the worst professional experience of Abrams’ life, which is probably why we haven’t heard from him. Still, 5 years is a long time to disappear for someone of Abrams’ stature.

He’s teaming up with my buddy Glen Powell. I say “buddy” because, of course, Powell was in the film, “Anything but You.” “Anything but You” also starred Sydney Sweeney. Sweeney and I are tight in that I was a fan of hers before everyone else. So, by association, Glen is my friend.

I have to say I like this team-up. Powell is making a movie, Twisters, that I thought couldn’t possibly work. But it looks cool. So maybe he is the next Tom Cruise like everybody is saying he’s going to be. We don’t know yet what the Abrams movie is about. But I’m just happy he’s back. He needs to work again!

Finally, they’ve announced more Lord of the Rings films, the new ones built around the character of Gollum. Good idea? Look, these studios are scared. And when they’re the most scared, they turn to the IP that made them the most money. They don’t care if it makes sense to add more films to the franchise. They just know it’s a better bet than going with something original. Cause original is the unknown. And the unknown is terrifying. That’s why IP is a blessing and a curse. With that said, I suspect these films will be better than the Amazon Rings series.

Oh, one more thing. Check out the interview Anna Halberg and Spenser Cohen did over on The Hollywood Reporter. Both these two have been huge supporters of Scriptshadow throughout the years. Anna was actually instrumental in getting Alex Felix’s Where Angels Die made (as “The Gateway”). They have a new horror movie out called, Tarot. :)

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!

I have a feeling this review is going to go well :)

Genre: Supernatural Thriller
Winning Logline: A wanted criminal and a recovering addict are forced to smuggle a possessed fifteen year old girl across the Mexican border to a supernatural holding facility in the United States before her terrifying power is unleashed.
About: In one of the most controversial (yes, I am embracing hyperbole in all its glory) showdowns in the HISTORY of Scriptshadow, heretofore known as the “Beckys Debacle,” the winning logline for the April Showdown was disqualified when it was discovered by famed LA script detective, Norwood Remingbone, that a script never existed for the logline. After both Deadline and The Hollywood Reporter wrote scathing detailed breakdowns of the events, it is said that the writer was last seen at a gas station in Amarillo Texas, screaming at the attendant, who was, ironically, named “Becky,” to “Hurry up and give me my Skittles! I’ve got to get out of here, lady!” Hence, the greatest screenplay lesson in the universe was learned: Never EVER enter a Scripthsadow Showdown without a finished script. Amen. — Luckily, we’ve got Patrick McNulty taking the place of the phantom script with Devil In Transit, which scored 22 and a half votes.
Writer: Patrick McNulty
Details: 104 pages

She’s too young to play Luna but trust me they’ll be going after her when this gets made! 

Whoa!

Things just got INTERESTING this year.

Have you seen the latest Quiet Place: Year One trailer? That movie looks AWESOME. And we get a new Mad Max movie this year. And we get Joker 2 this year. AND we get Deadpool and Wolverine??? Could 2024 low-key be the best movie year of the last decade?? I’m starting to think so.

Carson! Carson!

You’ve got to review a script, remember?

Oh yeah. Let’s get to our OFFICIAL April Showdown winning screenplay. I have high hopes for this script. It’s the logline that gave me the best sense that the screenplay would be well-written.

We’re in a place called Durango, Mexico. A young addict named Luna owes her life to the local priest, Father Ramirez. That’s because, years ago, she was high and wasn’t able to save her daughter in a fire. She later tried to kill herself but it was Father Ramirez who came to her and convinced her that her life still had purpose.

Meanwhile, in a town 4 hours away, a bad dude named Shaw betrayed a local gang so, in order to get him back, they burned an entire school bus full of people and made him watch. Now, both the cartels AND the authorities want him. So this dude has a rough life at the moment.

Ramirez brings Luna in and explains that there’s a priest who’s been possessed by a demon. That priest needs to be transferred to another town so the demon can be destroyed. If it isn’t destroyed within the next day, it will find another host, transfer to that host, and then it’s basically game over.

The demon has power over the weakest people. If you’re weak-minded, it starts to pull you in. I think you’re getting an idea here. Luna and Shaw are going to have to transfer this thing and they’re both addicts. So this demon is going to be playing all sorts of mind games on them.

But before they can get going, the mob of degenerates outside the church hoping to be the next host of this demon, charge in. One of those people, 15 year old Mya, gets there first and the demon is able to slide into her. So now they’re not taking this old decrepit priest on this journey. They’re taking a young crazy girl.

So they grab her, hurry to the car, tie her up, and they start their journey. But Mya is going to do everything in her power – including feeding visions to these two of their worst most tragic moments – to get away and wreak havoc on the world!

One of the harder things to teach in screenwriting is mythology (or world-building). Because, as many times as I’ve told writers that they have to put more effort into the mythology of their story, very few are able to execute the note in a satisfying way.

I think that’s because mythology is busy-work. I guess it’s kind of fun to come up with a whole new world and rules and powers and languages if you’re into that stuff. But, when it comes down to it, it’s a lot of work that happens OFF THE PAGE. And most writers don’t like to spend time on things that aren’t going to directly make it onto the page.

Why learn about the history of your killer demon if nobody is ever going to mention it in the story?

Well, the reason you do all that work is so that you can WRITE ABOUT YOUR STORY WITH CONFIDENCE. If you’ve created this giant mythology and you’ve written down every single corner of it, it comes across in your writing in the form of confidence. Because when writers KNOW their world, they write with certainty. When they don’t, they write in this unsure way where you can see them trying to figure out their world on the page.

That never works.

And look, I’m fine if you don’t want to do that work. But then don’t write scripts that require deep mythology. Cause if you write them and you try to figure out your mythology on the page, I promise you your script won’t work.

Today’s script, Devil in Transit, has a baller mythology. The moment it clicked for me was when I saw all these desolate weak people (homeless people, drug addicts) outside the church where the demon was being kept, desperate to become its next host. When a character explained that it was the weak-minded who were the most susceptible to this thing, and I remembered that both Luna and Shaw were addicts with dark pasts, I could see how intricately woven the mythology was into the character development and plot. And that’s when I knew I was reading a good script.

I don’t read stuff like this often, guys. Where you can tell that the writer has thought through every angle. So when it happens, I’m like a sneakerhead at the Nike store. It’s so fun for me because I know the writer put the work in.

That doesn’t mean it will end up good. There are still other things that can kill a screenplay. But it starts you in pole position, which gives you a major advantage in your storytelling race.

So, was the rest of the script good?

I’ll answer this way. Whenever I see a road trip script, I know that repetition and been-there-done-that scenes are coming. Cause there are only so many scenes you can write on a road trip (the car breaks down! Zoinks! What do they do!?).

And when they had to stop at a hospital because Shaw was still bleeding profusely from the violent church scene, I was like, “Here we go! We’re going to get that scene where they sneak into a room and Luna bandages him up and they tell each other their backstories and then we’re in the car again.”

But that’s not what happened. When they go in, someone finds Mya tied up in the car and lets her go. She gets into the hospital and when Luna and Shaw find her, she grabs a freaking baby from a woman and holds a knife to its throat goading Shaw into killing her (the demon possesses the new body of the person who kills the current host). It was a freaking INTENSE scene. That’s when I knew this script was playing on a different level. A level Beckys could never hope to play on!

My only beef with the script is that I wasn’t entirely clear who Shaw was and who he harmed and why both sides, good and bad, wanted him. I didn’t even know if he was Mexican or American. Or if he lived in Mexico or America. There’s this whole theme of crossing the border here that would’ve worked a lot better if Shaw’s storyline was clearer.

But this was a really fun script. It did something I never considered because, usually, when people write possession scripts, they keep them in one location because a one-location possession script is the single cheapest type of marketable movie to produce. So that’s where writers’ minds always go with possession – they keep the story in one place.

I never realized how adding movement opens up the creative options for telling this type of story. I loved, for example, the fact that, whenever someone weak-minded was around, they would sense Mya and try to get to her so they could be the next host. It added this chaotic energy wherever our characters went.

This is definitely going to have a shot at winning Scriptshadow Showdown script of the year. Great job from, Patrick. Now go read it yourself and tell me what you think!

Script link: Devil In Transit

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

What I learned: Place a common concept trope inside a different setting and you get a fresh movie idea. Taking possession out of its typical stillness and into this active kinetic environment of a road trip really gave the genre a boost.

By the way, I still have one discounted script consultation available. 40% off. You want notes that are going to be a game-changer for your screenplay?! First person who e-mails me gets it! Carsonreeves1@gmail.com

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

Writing is rewriting.

That’s what they tell us, anyway.

I think of writing more as problem-solving.

You write a script. You read it back. There are parts of it you don’t like. Now you gotta figure out how to fix those parts.

Usually, one of three things happens when you write a script.

The first is that you write something very close to what you imagined the script would be. This is the ideal situation and requires the least amount of rewriting.

The second is that the script becomes something different from what you imagined. You realize that this new direction is more interesting and your rewrites focus on detouring the script towards this new idea. The first draft of The Sixth Sense was about a kid who paints images from the future. It obviously became something much better than that.

The third is that your script becomes something different from what you imagined but you DON’T like this new version. This can happen because a script is a living breathing thing. It wants to take you where it wants to take you. So it’s very easy to lose control of it. In this case, your rewrites work to get the script back on track.

Regardless of which of these issues you run into, your job is to troubleshoot what the main problems are and then write up a plan to fix them. I’m partial to creating an outline for rewrites. I like the guidance that they give me. You can rewrite off memory and feel but, in these early stages, when you’re on your first or second draft, there are so many issues with the script that it’s advantageous to give yourself as detailed a fix-it-up guide as possible.

After last week, you should have identified the major problems in your script. When it comes to script problems, there is a hierarchy of the worst problems you can have. These are problems that, if they are present in your script, it’s going to be a loooong rewrite process. In some cases, it may be a rewrite you don’t want to do. These top things are…

Conceptual problem – This is the hardest script problem to fix in the business. If your concept is weak or isn’t working, the only way to fix it is to come up with another concept and rewrite the entire script. A good example of this is Megalopolis, the upcoming Francis Ford Coppola movie which I did a script review on years ago. The concept is so confused and nebulous that the story never knows what it is. Which is why everyone who’s seen the movie has hated it.

A boring main character – This is the guide who’s taking the reader through your story. So if we don’t like him, or don’t care about him, or don’t find him compelling in some way, it doesn’t matter if you have a great concept and a great plot. We won’t care. And the thing with character problems is that they’re very hard to fix. Because characters are based on people and people are complex. So there is no perfect recipe to create a character people love. Believe me, Hollywood has tried. I’ve helped writers through rewrites where we’ve tried 10 different versions of a character that wasn’t working and none of them fixed the character. So this one is, indeed, a toughie.

Weak structure – The main thing that good structure provides is an ENGINE underneath every section of the story so that the story always has pace. The second your structure weakens, the reader will find it difficult to stay interested. They won’t feel like there’s a reason to keep reading. This happened with a script I consulted on not long ago where the story’s major question was resolved at the end of the second act. So then why do we need to keep reading the third act?

If you’re dealing with any of these things, it’s going to be a tough rewrite. But, as long as you know what the problem is, you can start putting effort towards solving it.

To give you an idea of some other problems you may encounter, here is a list of script problems from consultations I did this year…

1. A weak villain.
2. A major character who doesn’t tonally match the rest of the screenplay (all the other characters are operating in a drama while this character is operating in a thriller).
3. The writer makes the path way too easy for their main character, giving them no major obstacles to overcome. This results in very little drama.
4. Little-to-no setup. We’re thrust into the story before we know or care about any of the characters.
5. (Specific Example) Two characters know each other well. Years later, one of them is going to try and con the other. He gets plastic surgery so he doesn’t look like his former self. They then spend hours upon hours together for the con and, somehow, the mark never suspects that this is his old friend he used to know.
6. Script lacks detail and specificity in both the world and the characters, leaving the story feeling thin and surface-level.
7. Doesn’t exploit the uniqueness of the concept enough.
8. Major moments lack authenticity. They all feel artificially manufactured rather than something that would happen in real life.
9. Script covers way too many characters and subplots, leaving no time for the plot to move forward, resulting in a slow stale narrative.
10. Script follows only two characters on a repetitive journey, so we get restless quickly.

As you can see, there are tons of issues that can pop up in a screenplay. I can’t go over every major one and tell you how to fix it. That would make this a 250,000 word post. But I can take you through the big three.

Conceptual problem – You usually can’t fix this. Which is why I tell writers to get logline consultations from me BEFORE THEY WRITE THEIR SCRIPTS (Just $25 – e-mail me at carsonreeves1@gmail.com if you want one) so I can save them a lot of time. A conceptual problem is a page 1 rewrite so just make sure that if you *do* adjust your concept that, THIS TIME, you get confirmation from other people you trust that it’s a good movie idea. I’ve watched writers spend, literally half-a-decade trying to make a script work that will never work due to its weak concept.

Boring main character – The most common reasons for a boring main character are that they are PASSIVE and they have LITTLE-TO-NO PERSONALITY. So start by making them more active. And then give them some personality. Make them funnier, more intelligent, more eccentric, more polarizing, more conflicted, stranger. Too many writers overlook personality when it comes to their protagonists. Don’t be one of them.  But honestly?  Audiences LOVE active characters.  So just making your character more active can accomplish a LOT.

Weak structure – Make sure your major beats are happening where they should. In a 120 page screenplay, the inciting incident happens on page 15. The first act break at 30. The midpoint at 60. The second act break on page 90. From there, make sure there is always a GOAL, PROBLEM, MYSTERY, or COMPELLING UNRESOLVED ISSUE driving each section of the screenplay. So, for example, if you’re bored reading your script on page 50, ask yourself, “Do my characters have a goal in this section? Or is there a mystery they want the answer for?” Or is there a problem that needs to be resolved? These are the things that create an engine underneath the story. If there are no goals, no mysteries, no problems, no unresolved issues… of course that section of your script is going to be boring.

So, your homework for this week is to write out your plan of attack for your rewrite. You can do this in a couple of ways. For those of you who hate outlining, just write up the 3-5 biggest problems in your script so that you can see those problems with your own eyes. If you want to write quick solutions to them, that’s fine as well. This “lazy man’s” outline approach can be confined to a single page.

For the rest of you, I would try to write up a detailed outline for how you’re going to fix this thing. You can divide this up however how you want. For example, you can say, “Pages 1-15” and then write out what you’re going to do inside those pages to address the problems. Or you can get really detailed and break it down by individual scene. Then write out what you need to do in that scene that will address the script issues that you have.

Here’s a snippet from an old novel outline I wrote up (a missing girl narrative). It’s not going to make sense but you can see how detailed I get.  The different color text is to visually keep track of a subplot.  When you write a novel, you’re dealing with 100,000 plus words so it’s infinitely harder to track everything.  You should be happy you only have to manage 20,000 words!

The more you have written down, the more ready you’re going to be for the rewrite. Cause next week, we start writing again. So this is your last chance to get all your thoughts together. And, by the way, the Mega Showdown where you’ll be able to enter this script is going to be on July 25th. So we’re going to be moving through this rewrite pretty quickly.

All right, get to work!  Oh, and please share your own tips and tricks for rewriting in the comments!

“Pop Quiz. You’re been told by two Hollywood stars exactly what they want to make next. You’re a screenwriter capable of writing an action thriller. What do you do? What. Do You. Do?”

Genre: Thriller
Premise: Confined to “the nest,” a Secret Service Sniper gets a strange call on the radio from a deranged mastermind who’s holding his family hostage in a box suite during America’s biggest game– The Super Bowl.
About: Despite the surface-level concept, this script finished very high on last year’s Black List, with 17 votes.
Writer: Aaron Benjamin
Details: 106 pages

We talk a lot about how to sell a script and get it made on this site.

The most consistent advice we give is: Write a great script.

And that’s true. If you write a great script, Hollywood is your oyster.

But what if you’re not a great writer and can’t write a great script? Well, in that case, you have to be more strategic.

A little-talked about way to sell a script and get a movie made is to GIVE A HOLLYWOOD PERSON THE EXACT SCRIPT THEY WANT.

You know that movie, No Hard Feelings, with Jennifer Lawrence? You know how that movie got made? The writer was friends with Jennifer and watched her fall down laughing when she read the real-life advertisement where parents were hiring someone to sleep with their virgin son.

That writer, Gene Stupnitsky, went home and, unbeknownst to Jennifer, wrote a script about that advertisement. And of course Lawrence agreed to star in the movie. She’d basically already told Gene that she loved the idea.

You see, the main reason why people in Hollywood are able to get movies made while you’re stuck in your apartment twiddling your thumbs to the beat of the latest Taylor Swift album, is that they HAVE INFORMATION.

They know what every bankable actor and director in Hollywood is looking for. So they can tailor the scripts they send to these people. Whereas, with you, you’re just shooting bullets in the dark. You may envision Tom Holland as the PERFECT star for your skydiving script. But you have no idea if Tom Holland likes skydiving. You’re literally throwing pages into the wind.

It’s so unfair. That they know what you don’t know. It gives them a gigantic advantage.

BUT! Every once in a while, Hollywood will tell you EXACTLY what it wants. And Keanu Reeves and Sandra Bullock just told y’all they want to work together again, particularly if they’re given a great Speed 3 script.

So there you have it! Go write Speed 3.

Today’s review is inspired by this Hollywood gift. Not because it could be Speed 3. But it’s very much in that 90s vein of fun thrillers with over-the-top villains. Let’s find out if the script is a Super Bowl winner… or a Super Bowl loooooooooser….

40-something Secret Service sniper, Jackson Hackett, is an American hero. He’s just shot a would-be assassin who tried to kill the president of the United States. And he’d be happy… if he didn’t just learn he’s got early-onset Parkinson’s!

One year later, Jackson has been hired for his farewell job – to occupy “The Nest” – a small room in the top level inside the Super Bowl stadium. He must shoot anyone who’s causing a deadly ruckus. What he’s about to find out is that HE will be the ruckus.

Oh, I forgot to tell you. Jackson’s ex-wife and deaf daughter are at the game. As is Jackson’s sniper partner and cousin, Bobby. But when Bobby heads off to the bathroom, he doesn’t come back. And that’s when Jackson gets a call on his headset from this dude named Gordon Webb.

Gordon has taken hostage one of the suites where he’s kidnapped Jackson’s ex-wife and kid. Gordon explains to Jackson that he’s working for him now. He’s going to be asked to kill someone and, if he doesn’t do it, he can say bye-bye to his immediate family.

Jackson tells his partner, Agent Kiera, what’s going on and the two begin a low-key investigation into who this Gordon Webb is and what he’s planning to do. After a while, we learn that Webb is here to kill a Saudi Prince. The Prince, who’s going to be down on the field during the halftime show, will be shot by Jackson in the most dramatic way possible so that the whole world can see it.

Jackson doesn’t want to kill anyone but Webb’s got him by the deflated balls. Not only has Bobby been killed by this point, but his partner, Kiera, is working with the baddies! The plan is that, after Jackson kills the Prince, he’ll be framed by the U.S. Intelligence to look like he did this on his own. Unless, that is, he can find a way to foil the plan!

Mine the things within your concept that can only happen in your movie. That’s what makes a script unique. That’s what makes a script clever. And that’s what Benjamin did here. He asked, “What’s the worst thing you can do to a sniper?” Well, something that would make his hands shake. So, Jackson is diagnosed with Parkinson’s.

That’s good, right? By creating an obstacle that directly disrupts our hero’s “power,” you’re doing something you can only do in your script.

HOWEVER.

You still have to assess the residual effects of each creative choice you make. Parkinson’s is a very traumatic sad disease. So, sure, you give your hero an obstacle unique to him, but you also place this sad umbrella over the story, since we know our hero can never recover from this.

As the screenwriter, you gotta ask, “Is that worth it?” Am I GETTING MORE from this creative choice than I’m LOSING from it? I think you’re losing more. And when you lose more than you gain, you have to abandon the choice.

Despite this misstep, I found the script to be better than I expected.

The moment I committed to the story – cause I was on the fence for a while – was when Webb told Jackson that Jackson would be killing people today. I’m a sucker for when good people are forced to do bad things. I just think it gets to the heart of compelling character conflict. Whenever the external action does not match the internal belief, you’re watching nuclear inner-conflict.

And it helped that Webb was a good villain. He wasn’t Dennis Hopper in Speed good. But I liked a lot of his dialogue. And he gets a lot of dialogue here.

Hey, isn’t there a screenwriting guy who can’t stop talking about the importance of dialogue-friendly characters in scripts? Who’s that guy again? OH YEAH IT’S ME! That’s what Benjamin did here. He created Webb, who can’t shut up. And, most of the time, we’re the beneficiaries of it.

The reason the script doesn’t finish higher than “worth the read” is because Webb’s plot wasn’t as interesting as it could’ve been. Who cares about some Saudi Prince? It felt like it came out of left field. We needed someone bigger in play here. Particularly because the opening scene in your script is the hero saving the president of the United States. A Saudi Prince is ten steps down from that in importance. You needed to come up with something bigger.

But look – this script is Randy Moss sprinting down the sidelines. It never stops to catch its breath. It’s very “spec-y” in that way and I found that energy to be enjoyable.

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

What I learned: The big downside to writing a script that could only be used in one scenario (you’re writing Scream 3 solely for Keanu and Sandra) is that if either Keanu or Sandra says no, your script is worthless. You can’t do anything else with it. Well, there’s a way around that. You write a script that’s CLEARLY Speed 3, but you title it something else (“Fast Release”), and change the character names. That way, if the script catches fire, people will send it to Paramount and tell Sandra and Keanu that they have the perfect script for Speed 3. But if those two pass, you still have a spec that could be made into another movie. You win both ways!

Today I examine why this controversial episode was never made.

Genre: TV episode
Premise: As Elaine contemplates buying a gun, Kramer comes back from vacation, claiming to have slept with the stewardess on his plane, prompting Jerry and George to bet on whether he’s telling the truth.
About: This is the infamous unmade episode of Seinfeld that featured a gun. It looks like this would’ve aired in season 3 or 4. The episode spiritually died in the table read, when Julia Louis Dreyfuss read a line about shooting Jerry. After the table read was over, the producers and creators huddled up then came back and told everyone to go home. They wouldn’t be making the episode. You can hear the cast talk about the episode here.
Writer: Larry Charles
Details: 52 pages

When you run a screenwriting website, you’re constantly coming up with ideas for things you can do on the site. I remember an early morning, while still in bed, half-asleep, where I became convinced that I needed to have a contest to write a modern-day episode of Seinfeld. For a good hour of half-asleepness, I had convinced myself it was the greatest idea that had ever been invented.

Then I fully woke up and, within five minutes, reality slapped me in the face, as it became clear that a website dedicated to feature screenplay writing probably wasn’t the best forum to do a contest for a sitcom that had been off the air for 20 years. So even though my love for Seinfeld remained unparalleled, I put the sitcom to rest. Finally.

That was until today when I learned that there was a Seinfeld episode that had never been filmed! Based on a script that had actually been written! This was like a dream come true. I knew these characters so well that a script might as well have been a filmed episode since it was so easy for me to envision these characters in that world.

In The Bet, Elaine shows up at Jerry’s apartment and claims that someone she knows got robbed and she’s thinking about getting a gun for protection. Jerry tells her she’s not a gun person but Elaine makes a strong case about being a woman in a big city with a lot of crime. You need to be able to defend yourself.

A sunburnt Kramer barges in, recently back from Puerto Rico, and tells Elaine that he knows a guy who can get her a gun. His old buddy, Mo. Elaine is thrilled. Then Kramer shares a secret with the crew – he slept with the stewardess coming back from Puerto Rico.

As Kramer and Elaine leave, a frustrated George, bemoaning his lack of opportunities with women, is convinced that Kramer is fibbing. Jerry, however, thinks Kramer is telling the truth. Therefore, they make “The Bet.” They bet 1000 dollars on whether Kramer was telling the truth or not.

We then head over to Mo’s, where Kramer, Elaine, and Jerry, go to buy the gun. Mo is a weird loser who lives with his clueless mother. He has several guns for Elaine to choose from. It all becomes too overwhelming for Elaine and she decides not to get a gun. Instead, she goes down the street and buys a fake gun so she can at least scare people away.

The group, minus Kramer, then head to the airport to find the stewardess who supposedly slept with Kramer. They locate her and ask, in a myriad of ways without being direct, if she joined the mile high club with Kramer. The woman is freaked out and in the pandemonium, Elaine accidentally pulls out her gun from her purse, and the group gets swarmed by security.

A couple of months later, they’re all back in their homes and everything is fine. Kramer shows up at Jerry’s and reads the group a letter from the stewardess who hints at, in no uncertain terms, that they did have a physical tryst on the plane. So Jerry wins the bet and George loses at life, once again.

One of the things I’m constantly telling you guys to do is TAKE RISKS. But “risk” is a nebulous word. A risk to one writer may not seem like a risk at all to the next writer. So it’s important to identify when real risks are taken. That way, you guys know what I mean by “risks.”

This was a big risk for Larry Charles, the writer. He admits as much in the accompanying interview. He says that he was always looking to take darker subject matter and find a way to make it funny. Building an episode of Seinfeld around a gun is pretty dark, relatively speaking. This wouldn’t be risky for an episode of It’s Always Sunny in Philidelphia. But that’s a show that got 1/20th the viewership of Seinfeld. It’s not mainstream so of course it can be darker.

The consensus from the Seinfeld group seems to be that Charles’s script was too risky. “You can’t make guns funny,” they concluded. I think that’s b.s. And I’ll tell you why. Suicide is way darker than guns. And suicide came up several times throughout Seinfeld. There’s one episode where Newman keeps threatening to commit suicide.  They even have a couple of episodes dealing with sexual assault (the masseuse and the woman with the toys), which turned out to be two of the funniest episodes in the series.

So I don’t buy that they couldn’t make guns funny. They just couldn’t make this episode work. The plot didn’t lead to funny situations. Going to buy a gun from a random guy who lives with his mom? Where’s the funny in that? I guess it’s ironic in that you’d normally expect to buy a gun from some sketchy hustler on the street. But they needed another angle. Mo was a dead-in-the-water character who didn’t generate a single laugh.

What I was really hoping to find in this episode was some classic Seinfeld dialogue, even if it was only one stand-out exchange. That’s where Seinfeld excelled, was in its dialogue. Because Seinfeld was the only show able to create funny dialogue out of nothing.

What I mean by that is, in most sit-coms, the scenes always had a point. For example, if you watched the first season of The Big Bang Theory, they’d have a scene where Penny was coming over to have dinner with our protagonist roommates for the first time, and Leonard would tell Sheldon, “Your job tonight is to just be normal. Don’t do or say anything weird!” And so the whole scene would be about Sheldon trying to be normal. And because Sheldon isn’t normal, he would end up saying and doing weirder stuff than usual. That’s where the comedy would come from.

But Seinfeld would just have the characters talk about nothing and it would still, somehow, be funny. So I was hoping to catch a glimpse of that here and learn something from it. There was a little bit of it and what I learned is that this brilliant team of people at Seinfeld had a particular voice that understood the minutia of everyday life in a way that the average person couldn’t articulate.

So when they picked apart that minutia (“I hate that guy. He stands so close to you when he talks. He’s a close-talker”), it was usually amusing. The lesson here is: pay attention to details in life. It’s those details – it’s those things that seem insignificant – that allow your characters to converse about things that you don’t usually see conversed about in movies and TV shows.

For example, if you’re on a plane and there’s a person sitting nearby who’s not doing anything – they’re not sleeping, they’re not reading, they’re not watching a movie, they’re not on their phone – they’re just sitting up straight and staring forward. You might see that, shrug your shoulders, think “That’s weird,” then never think about it again.

But Seinfeld used that premise for one of its plotlines. When Elaine is dating the dimwitted Puddy and the two are flying back from their trip to Europe, Elaine notices that Puddy is staring forward doing nothing. “You’re just going to sit there and do nothing?” “Yup.” “You’re not going to read?” “Nope.” “You’re not going to sleep.” “No.” Elaine is so flabbergasted by this bizarre behavior that she breaks up with him on the spot. She can’t handle it!

Paying attention to details, as a writer, pays off.

Speaking of dialogue (go buy The Greatest Dialogue Book Ever Written!), I wanted to share another dialogue tip with you. Here’s the scene with the tip.

The tip is: not every character in your scene needs to be participating in the same conversation. You can have fun with the fact that one or more people are having their own conversation. We see that here with George. George weaves in and out of the conversation, occasionally having a conversation with himself, obsessed with finding the punchline for his joke.

Everyone says this episode was TOO DARING FOR TV. I think it just wasn’t funny enough and they didn’t want to put a dud on the air. But they could’ve made guns funny. I’m sure some commenters will come up with some funny plotlines they could’ve used.

Script link: The Bet

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

What I learned: You never want dialogue to be too perfect. In real life, conversations are messy. That’s why you want to do things like have one character in the room having a completely different conversation from everyone else. It adds that “messiness” that mimics the kinds of interactions people have in real life.