We are reaching an epidemic in bad set-piece writing. For those of you who don’t know what set pieces are, they’re the big featured action scenes in a script, your Indiana Jones runs through a cave, your airport battle in Captain America: Civil War, that scene in every Mission Impossible movie where Tom Cruise races a motorcycle through a city at 200 miles per hour. The term “set piece” refers to the olden days when the scene was such a major part of the movie, it needed its own special set. Over time, the term “set piece” has evolved to include any featured extended scene in a movie. A group of survivors in a zombie apocalypse walking into a creepy “vacant” supermarket is a set piece, for example.

We used to have tons of great set pieces in movies. You can count a half-dozen in Raiders of the Lost Ark alone. But over time, something funny happened. In the pursuit to one-up the past, writers and directors erroneously believed that bigger was better. I blame the Lord of the Rings trilogy for this. Those movies had some solid set-pieces. But the war scenes kept getting bigger and more cumbersome with each passing film, until at a certain point you had no idea what was happening onscreen. The person who drove the set-piece off a cliff, though, was Michael Bay. Don’t get me wrong. Michael Bay is a great action director, but his set-piece writing sucks. It’s a bunch of outlandish craziness thrown at you from every angle. Of the five Transformers movies, can you name two memorable set-pieces? I can’t.

The thing is, directors have good intentions. You can’t give the audience the same thing they’ve always had. You need something new. But this notion that bigger is better is plain wrong. Bigger is what got us into this mess. There’s a scene in Valerian where Luc Besson has our hero running through a virtual world as well as the real world at the same time that’s so confusing, we can’t enjoy a second of it. Which is too bad because you can tell he was trying to do something innovative. Even the best overly-complex set-piece I’ve seen this decade – the Captain America: Civil War airport battle – is one I barely remember. I don’t remember why they were fighting, why it had to be at an airport, what the ultimate objective was. It was cool to watch but ultimately empty. Just like everything in screenwriting, the answer is rarely to be more complex. Rather, you want to simplify. And today, I want to give you a formula for achieving that.

I call it: TSDD

And here’s what it stands for…

Time
Space
Distance
Directive

Let’s start with the simplest one, time. A good set piece has urgency. A character has to do something within an uncomfortable amount of time. In Spider Man 2 (the Toby Maguire version), that famous runaway train set piece is made all the more exciting by the fact that he’s running out of time to save the train. Very simple rule to follow. This is the easiest way to turbocharge a set piece.

Next we have space. Space, in this context, refers to the overall space involved in the set piece. The better defined your space is, the more focus your set piece will have. The best way to explain the power of space is in highly contained set pieces. The trash-compacter scene in Star Wars. Or the elevator fight in Captain America: Winter Soldier. But it’s not only getting locked in rooms. It’s any situation where there’s structure to the space. Shazam running over and trying to save a bus that’s about to fall off a bridge. The whole scene takes place inside 80 square feet. Neo and Agent Smith fighting in an underground subway stop. John Wick stalking his prey through an active nightclub. The reason you don’t want the space to be vague is that it’s unclear where characters are, where they can escape to, and what the rules of the environment are. This is what Michael Bay is so guilty of in his Transformers movies. We don’t know where the set starts and where it ends. So it’s just a bunch of characters crashing into each other randomly out of nowhere without purpose.

Moving on, we have distance. Distance refers mainly to chase or running scenes. And, like space, it requires you to let us know what the distance is that the character is attempting to travel. The clearer we are on that, the more invested we’ll be. I’m going to use Raiders because it’s one everyone knows. That opening scene has the best use of distance in any set piece ever. We’ve just traveled down that same straight path into the cave, so we know the exact distance (as well as all the little traps along the way) Indiana must run through in order to get out alive. The climax to Star Wars is another great use of distance. We set up that trench and how long you need to fly down it in order to launch your torpedoes at the exhaust pipe. At the end of The Martian, Matt Damon has to go the distance of the ground up to the ship that’s come to rescue him.

The important thing with distance is that we know where we’re going. If you have a group of characters in a zombie apocalypse movie and they’re minutes away from the zombies breaking into their house, and so they have to make a run for it, it’s always better if they say, “We have to make it to the bell tower” – and we know that the bell tower is 5 blocks away – than if they’re like, “Just run.” It might seem like the chaotic nature of “just run” is better, but I’m telling you, we’re more invested if we know where the destination is. An injured girl stumbling through the woods being pursued by a serial killer is a million times better scene if we know her car is parked on the road just up the trail. If she can only get to that car, she’ll survive!

Finally, we have directive. The cool thing about this one is that even if you’re not strictly following the time/space/distance rule-set, you can still manage to write a good set piece AS LONG AS THE DIRECTIVE IS SUPER STRONG. Directive supersedes time, space, and distance because we’re so focused on the character achieving his directive that we’ll go anywhere with him. “Directive” refers to the directive of the principle character(s) in the scene. So in Pulp Fiction, when Mia’s heart stops, the directive is clear: THE OTHER CHARACTERS NEED TO SAVE HER! So the set piece is kind of all over the place with them driving around and then crashing into the drug dealer’s place who pulls out the famous adrenaline needle and plunges it in her heart. But it works because the directive of saving Mia is so strong.

A couple of final things. You can use ALL of these in a single set piece, or you can pick and choose. The Star Wars trench run uses all of them. Time, space, distance, and directive are incredibly clear. Coincidence it’s considered the best action climax ever? You decide. Also, it’s different writing a set piece on spec than it is writing one for a greenlit movie. If a movie is already being made, the director and writer can visualize a set piece in more of an abstract fashion since the concept doesn’t have to make sense to a reader. But with a spec script, your set piece needs to be clear on paper – all the more reason to go with TSDD.

And that’s it. Now go out and write some killer set pieces. Good luck!

Genre: Horror/Comedy
Premise: (from Hit List) A couple leaves city life behind them for a simpler life in a tiny house. But this idyllic paradise is not all it seems when paranormal activity starts to occur.
About: This script made last year’s Hit List with 8 votes. It was co-written by Paul Soter, a member of the Broken Lizard collective, the guys who made the cult classic comedy, Super Troopers. He teamed up to write this with The Gracias Brothers, who operate a small production company in Culver City (Culver City is where Sony Pictures is located, for those outside of LA).
Writers: Paul Soter & The Gracias Brothers
Details: 104 pages

Tiny House Theme Week continues! And yes, if you’re wondering, I did consider writing this entire review in size 8 pt. font. Assuming you made it out of yesterday’s tiny house alive, you won’t find today’s story any easier to escape, and that’s because we’re not just dealing with any tiny house… but a HAUNTED tiny house.

Before we get to the script, let me take you into the mind of a reader who’s seen every idea under the sun. The concept a reader most fears is an inert one. He reads the idea and he doesn’t see a story. Why doesn’t he see a story? Because there’s no clear engine that’s going to push the narrative forward.

Here, we have this couple who moves into a tiny house, and who we know, at some point, is going to be haunted. That’s fine. Characters being haunted is entertaining when done well. But where is the narrative thrust here? What are the characters going to do in the meantime? That’s what scares me most about an idea – characters sitting around not doing anything. Waiting for the story to happen to them.

Another thing you want in your idea is POP. There’s gotta be that element that pops out and gets you excited about the story. When it comes to comedy, the easiest way to do this is through irony. When I read this logline, I didn’t see any irony whatsoever. A tiny house and ghosts are two random things. When you hear them together, you don’t think, “movie.”

Here’s another logline for you: “A star sumo wrestler’s life is turned upside-down when his minimalist wife convinces him to buy and live in a tiny house.” Yes, I know that’s a dumb idea. No need to point it out. However, can you at least see there’s a sense of irony now? We “get” the conflict.

Needless to say, I saw choppy waters ahead for Tiny Haunted House. But plenty of scripts have surprised me before. Maybe this will be another one.

Uly is a famous pickler living in the weirdest city in the United States, Portland. Well, maybe “famous” is pushing it. He has a steady flow of 10-12 customers who like his pickled products. He’s married to Nan, who looks like she should be in a picture of women eagerly awaiting soldiers retuning from World War 2. Nan is a writer who isn’t a fan of the digitized word. If everything could go back to print, she’d be ecstatic.

The couple is the epitome of happy until tragedy strikes. Their pride and joy, Fillmore the Parrot, is boiled to death during a kitchen accident. Uly and Nan can’t stay here any longer. The memories of their time spent with Filmore would make it impossible. So they decide to move across the country to a place in Massachusetts.

Unfortunately, they don’t have a lot of money. So they need to downsize. Using an online real estate service, they buy a cozy little house with cute pictures sight unseen. When they get there, however, they’re shocked to find that it’s a LOT smaller than they thought it was. Ever the optimists, they make the best of the situation, and within a week, they’re living… if not comfortably, manageably.

Then one day a squirrel leads Uly out into the forest (Uly loves animals – he names the squirrel, “Mr. Nutso.”) and digs up an arrowhead. It’s a little spooky but kinda cool! However then strange things start happening in the house. Like the magnet board keeps unmagnetizing. And a stuffed baby goat animal keeps moving around. And the wood beam at the top of the house drips. But the scariest thing is that a disembodied voice keeps whispering to Uly, “PIIIIIIIICCCKKKLLLLLEEE ITTTTTT.” This places Uly and Nan in the age-old predicament: “What do you do when your tiny house is haunted?”

So was this one of those surprise scripts?

I’ll say this. It’s been a while since I’ve read a script that was written this lovingly. I mean that. This wasn’t something these guys whipped together over a couple of months. Every single line has been pored over to make sure it’s perfect. It was a little jarring, to be honest, cause I’m not used to it. Especially in a script like this, which is basically a goofy comedy. That loving quality infuses the script with a pleasant charm.

But just like I suspected from the logline – there isn’t a whole lot of story here. Once the characters get to the house, there’s no inertia at all. I’m ALWAYS wary when a movie is designed for the characters to wait around for the story to come to them. As I’ve said numerous times on this site, movies work best when heroes are active – are going after things. The ‘waiting around’ effect is multiplied if you plop your characters down into a single location. I mean you can argue that “It” is a movie where we’re waiting around for the clown to do his thing. But in the meantime, the characters are out living their lives, meeting each other, growing their friendship. There’s still a sense that the story is moving forward.

Tiny Haunted House starts to pick up when Nan and Uly realize the house is haunted and start to troubleshoot the problem. For those new to screenwriting, there’s a reason for this. This is the first moment where the characters ACT, as opposed to being acted upon. It shows just how powerful the nature of active characters is. I was bored to tears for 50 pages. And then at least when they call a priest to see if the place was haunted, I was curious what would happen.

The script jumps up another peg when the couple begins to look into the history of the house. Not only are the characters being active but these writers are EXTREMELY original and it’s a backstory unlike anything any other writer would come up with. It’s too bad, really. There’s talent and care and originality put into this script but the first half of it so mind-numbingly slow that it killed the script for me. I couldn’t get back into it no matter how hard I tried.

I’m not going to write this script off. I think some people might like it. But when it comes to tiny houses, I think I’ll stick to Youtube videos. :)

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

What I learned: Use comparison to give perspective when describing size. Saying, “The room is small,” does nothing for the reader. Small means different things to different people. Instead, give us a comparison that puts an image in our head. Here’s the writers describing the bathroom: “Nan and Uly peek into a facility where sink, toilet, and shower all insanely share the same square footage as your average airplane lavatory.” You now know EXACTLY how big the bathroom is.

Genre: Tiny House/Documentation
Premise: After meeting through an online dating app, a young woman convinces her new beau to help realize her dream – build and live in a tiny house.
About: This video debuted on the Youtube show “Living Big in a Tiny House” and in just four days has become the fifth most viewed video on the long running series, tallying over 5 million views. While the focus was seemingly on the striking tiny house the couple built, it became evident from the 10,000 plus comments that the video’s quick rise to viral status was due to the odd relationship between the two owners.
Writer: Frank Lloyd Wright’s Home & Studio
Details: 18 minutes, 39 seconds (4th draft)

I’m obsessed with this video.

And I’m fine if you think that’s weird.

There’s just so much going on here, I can’t look away.

To give you a little background, I love the Tiny House movement. I love the idea of going off the grid, finding a beautiful piece of land for cheap, then building a home that is both beautiful and basic. There’s something romantic about going off and living in nature.

I also know I’d never do it. I’m someone who needs people around me, a city of swirling insects above and below me at all hours of the day. Being in a city that’s always alive makes me feel alive. I could manage living in a tiny house for a month, maybe two. But I know I’d eventually crave the electricity that only a city full of millions can provide. And in that sense, Youtube has filled a nice hole in the market – which is to allow people to escape for 20 minutes into fantasies like tiny homes before returning back to real life.

This Tiny House video is unlike any I’ve seen before, though. Sure, the house itself is awesome. But as the video pushes forward, an underlying tension between the two principle characters begins to emerge. On the one hand, you have the overly excited host, doing his best to be upbeat and cheery. And on the other you have this girl who we’re learning has an unhealthy obsession with tiny houses. In fact, when the couple tells the story of how they met (through a dating app), the guy explains that the entire date consisted of her talking about how she wanted to live in a tiny house.

Mind you, THIS IS THEIR FIRST DATE.

Now I’m not going to make any assumptions here. But I’m going to make some assumptions here. This guy clearly saw a proposition in his head – I can be with this attractive girl… but it’s going to cost me moving out of my place, with my cats, and building and then moving into a tiny house. Beauty is man’s achilles heel. It causes him to lose all rationale and thought.

Flash forward to now where we have this woman’s crowning moment. The whole reason she wanted a tiny house was because of this show. Now she was getting to show her own tiny house to them. This may explain why she’s so happy during the tour. All of this is captured in one of the most shocking exchanges I’ve ever seen in a show like this. When the tour is all over and the girl is beaming, claiming that her “dream” has finally “come true,” the dead-inside house builder replies, “It’s a dream come true for you… it’s an achievement for me.”

Ouch.

So why am I reviewing this video today?

The first reason is because the idea of reading another Black List script about clickbait social issues makes me nauseous. But I actually believe there are a lot of lessons in this video about character and dialogue.

For starters, I love the relationship from a screenwriting point of view. When you’re coming up with your characters in a story, one of the first questions you should ask is, “Where’s the conflict?” Every relationship in your script should have some level of conflict, and the more prominent the relationship is in the story, the more important identifying that conflict is. The last thing you want is two agreeable characters who see everything the same way. That’s going to lead to a lot of boring conversations. If you’ve ever felt that every dialogue scene you’re writing lacks spark, this is often the reason. You didn’t do the work ahead of time to make sure there was an adequate amount of conflict between the characters.

Take yesterday’s script, for example. Billy and Freddy’s relationship started with a clear line of conflict. He wants nothing to do with Freddy while Freddy wants a friend more than anything. He doesn’t quite know how to get one, but that’s what feeds the conflict in their early interactions. The conflict changes when Billy becomes Shazam, and that’s okay. Relationship conflict can shift as the story evolves.

Getting back to today’s couple, you can see why there’s so much conflict. They have completely different world views. She’s active, takes charge and is used to controlling the relationship, whereas he’s passive and weak and doesn’t stand up for what he wants. This creates the key conflict within the relationship – resentment. You can see it in every glance. You can hear it in every response. He regrets this and he blames her for it. Now if you want to get deep, who he’s really mad at is himself for not having the balls to say no. This is a quagmire of his making. And he’s taking that out on her.

But what’s so insane about this relationship is that she’s completely oblivious to this resentment. She’s not picking up on his frustration at all. And so you have this weird tension whenever they interact, where he’s passive-aggressively responding to every question, and she’s echoing him, but in an euphoric manner. It reminds me a lot of the Jason Bateman – Jennifer Gardner marriage in Juno. He was clearly unhappy, being pushed into an adoption he didn’t want, yet she assumed that because she was ecstatic, he was as well. You see the exact same type of conflict when you watch the scenes with those two as you do here.

And the best thing about getting that conflict right is that the dialogue writes itself. You won’t even have to think because the dynamic has already been set up for you. The reason so much of the dialogue we write is bad is because we don’t yet understand the dynamic of the characters. We don’t know where each character is coming from. When you find yourself in that “no man’s land,” every line is forced. Every line feels written as opposed to said. So get that conflict figured out and a lot of your dialogue problems disappear.

“Sooo… we met online. It was one evening at the pub with my best friend and she wanted to play with my phone and my online dating apps and it sort of sparked from there. We had a date at a very seedy pub.”

“That was her idea.”

“Yeah, I needed a getaway plan.”

“Yeah, it was close to the station.”

“Yeah.”

“Yeah, just in case.”

“Yeah, annnnnnd… yeah, she really just wouldn’t shut up about these tiny houses and I really hadn’t seen much about them and she’s showing me all these Instagram accounts and I sort of really didn’t think much of it at the time but, yeah, she kept on about it so…”

The level of subtext in this exchange is nuclear. She didn’t choose him. Her friend did, possibly as a joke. She talks about meeting at a ratty pub, which he quickly makes sure to say was not his idea. She then tries to make a joke about bailing but he doesn’t laugh at it.

“Yeah, so I guess I convinced you to build a tiny house… to build me a tiny house actually.”

He grunts non-committedly

“Yep.”

“She did give me full disclosure.”

“I even gave him points and time to bail out. I was laying in bed and I was saying, are you SURE you want to do this?”

He puts on a clenched smile.

“Are you absolutely positive you want to do this?”

“After the trailer was bought,” he clarifies.

“Yeah.”

“Yeah.”

I mean, you can cut the tension with a knife. I haven’t seen this much subtext since the Crane-Merry book burying movement of 1873. It’s like a 90 Day Fiance episode without someone trying to move to America.

What I want you to take away from this is the importance of character creation. Both these “characters” are incredibly well-defined. From there, ask yourself where the conflict in the relationship is coming from. If you can’t come up with that, you probably don’t want to use those characters. You’re going to be pulling your hair out trying to make their scenes interesting. And the dialogue will blow. Most of the time, when there’s a “perfect” relationship in a movie, one of them dies within three scenes. That’s not a coincidence. Had they kept those characters together the whole movie, we’d be bored out of our minds.

I hope this offbeat post was useful. Now who wants to buy a tiny house?

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

What I learned: A fun exercise to help your dialogue is to play real conversations from Youtube videos and write them down as they’re being said. When you write your own dialogue, your fingers are habitual. They work in conjunction with a stubborn mind that wants to go to the same places, type the same words. For this reason, your dialogue always sounds similar. When you do this exercise, you’re forced to write dialogue you wouldn’t normally write, and it’s an eye-opener in that you see you have the potential to create voices you never knew you had in you.

What I learned 2: While you can do this same exercise with actual movies, it’s not as effective. All you’re doing is writing down finely crafted rewritten-to-death fake conversations. The reason I advise using real life videos is because you’re writing own what people actually say, as opposed to a writer’s interpretation of what people say.

Genre: Superhero/Family
Premise: (from IMDB) We all have a superhero inside us, it just takes a bit of magic to bring it out. In Billy Batson’s case, by shouting out one word – SHAZAM! – this streetwise fourteen-year-old foster kid can turn into the adult superhero Shazam.
About: While Shazam may not be the official starter meal of this summer movie season, it’s the ideal appetizer. Warners has been thrilled with how the film turned out, so much so that they showed previews of it in a thousand theaters two weeks ago! In a social media landscape where bad word of mouth can turn a goldmine into a piece of coal faster than you can say Fyre Festival, this shows a ton of confidence in the product. However, the film’s opening weekend wasn’t all that shazammy. It made a respectable 53 million bucks locally, but Warners was hoping for something in the 70s. The film was directed by David F. Sandberg (Lights Out, Annabelle: Creation) and written by Earth to Echo scribe, Henry Gayden.
Writer: Henry Gayden (story by Gayden and Darren Lemke) – Shazam comic created by Bill Parker and C.C. Beck.
Details: Two hours and 12 minutes long!

When it came to 2019’s movie-going theme park, Shazam was high up on my list of rides to try. It wasn’t in the rarefied air of Avengers Endgame or Star Wars Episode 9. But it was a movie I felt could be one of those sleeper hits (as much as a 100 million dollar film can be a “sleeper”). The comp for this movie was Jumanji, another film people were aware of but Hollywood didn’t take seriously. And then the film took off, outlasting even The Last Jedi, a movie that had four times its budget!

There weren’t really any question marks going into the movie for me. I’ve always thought Zachary Levi was talented and couldn’t figure out why he wasn’t a movie star yet. Both of David F. Sandberg’s previous films (Lights Out and Annabelle) exceeded expectations. And the two main kids looked great in the trailer. If you want to quibble, the suit was kind of cheesy. But it made sense in the context of how a kid might design a superhero suit. And since that’s what the movie is about – a kid becoming a superhero – I was down with it. As the lights dimmed in the theater, I thought, “What could go wrong?”

Billy Batson was just a little boy when he got separated from his mother at a carnival. Eight years later, he’s still looking for her, even breaking into police cars and searching databases to do so. Unfortunately, all this bad behavior has gotten Billy kicked out of numerous foster homes. After that police car incident, a social worker informs him that he’s gotta chill out. There are good families out there who want him. In fact, there’s one outside right now! And they’re taking him home without having a conversation with him. Sounds realistic to me!

Billy goes home with his new parents, a Samoan guy who’s nice and funny and caring, and a Latina mother, who’s nicer and funnier and more caring. Back at the house, Billy meets his new brothers and sisters, all fellow foster kids. We have a Latino boy, an Asian boy, an African American girl, an older sister of indeterminable race, and a disabled kid. Disabled Kid is Freddy, a superhero fanatic whose prized possession is a crushed bullet that hit Superman which he bought off Ebay. He’s also a weirdo who doesn’t have any friends.

One day after school, Billy magically finds himself in a cave where an old man tests him to see if he’s the only person in the world who’s pure of heart. Billy passes the test and therefore receives the ability to turn into a superhero whenever he says, “Shazam.” Billy realizes he needs expert Freddy’s help if he’s going to harness his new powers, and the two go out and start testing what he can do.

What Billy doesn’t know is that there’s a man named Thaddeus Sivana who went through that same test Billy did and failed. He needs Billy’s purity (or something) if he’s going to become an ultimate superhero himself. One day, while Billy’s playing in the park, taking selfies and showing off his powers to everyone, he’s confronted by Sivana and they fight. Billy’s only able to survive by turning into his secret child identity and running away. But it’s only a matter of time before Sivana figures out who Billy is. And once he does, it’s bye bye Billy and his foster care family.

Shazam is a solid movie. Heck, I’d go so far as to say it’s a good movie.

Unfortunately, it’s not nearly as good as it could’ve been. And that’s frustrating because the sky was the limit for this concept. It’s the idea of screenwriting dreams. “Big” but with a superhero?? How can you go wrong with that??

I can tell you the exact moment where it went wrong for me. That would be when Billy moves into the foster home. First of all, the parents didn’t even talk to him before he came home. They adopted him sight unseen. Once home, they dropped him in the middle of the house like an alley cat and said, “Have fun.” I’ve never been a foster kid but is this realistic?

Then you had the kids. Oh heavens, the kids. This is the most unrealistic family I’ve ever seen a movie. I’m talking ever. Every single major ethnicity is represented. Show me one family in the entire U.S. as diverse as this one. It rang as so removed from reality as to be offensive. Angelina Jolie would be offended by how unrealistic this family was.

But there was a much bigger problem with the family, which was that the plot now had to lug a giant 800 pound sub-plot wherever it went. The movie couldn’t have fun like Big because they had to keep finding ways to bring the family back into the story.

I’m going to go off on a tangent here but stay with me. I have a point. I’ve been watching Parks and Rec on Netlflix lately. That show is about the Parks and Rec. department in a small Indiana town. In addition to the Parks and Rec staff, the show introduces the character of Ann Perkins, a nurse. At first Ann is tied to the story through her boyfriend (Chris Pratt), who fell into a construction plot that was the Parks and Recreations’ responsibility. But eventually, Chris Pratt gets a job at the Parks and Rec office, while Ann continues to be a nurse, working on the other side of town.

As the show grows up, it becomes painfully obvious that Ann is a suitcase the writers must figure out how to carry into the story each week. Since she doesn’t work at the Parks office, it’s a constant struggle to come up with plot reasons why she would be there. As a result, she’s routinely the worst part of each episode. She has no organic place in the story.

The family in Shazam is Ann Perkins. I didn’t come to this movie to learn about foster care. If I wanted to do that I’d rent that awful looking Mark Wahlberg thing that came out last year. I came to Shazam to watch a boy turn into a superhero. Just like I went to Big to see what it was like when a boy becomes an adult and can do whatever he wants. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the trailers don’t cover the foster family. They focused on Zachary Levi and the other kid having fun and it looked great. Why aren’t you giving me that?

The script also makes the mistake of giving way too much time to its villain. He gets this gigantic early scene in the film. And then we keep coming back to him over and over and I just wanted to scream, “WE DIDN’T COME HERE TO WATCH VILLAIN ORIGIN STORY PORN!” We came to watch a kid become a superhero. It was baffling that the story kept avoiding its biggest selling point.

And even when it did, it didn’t seem to know what to do with it, or what to do with Billy in general. What Big did that was really smart was give Tom Hanks’s character a mission once he grew up. He became an executive in this toy company and you could build a plot around that that added structure to everything. Here, there is no structure once Billy turns into Shazam. He’s just stumbling around the city. At one point, he is dancing for quarters in the park, I kid you not. That’s how unsure they were of what to do with Billy.

To the movie’s credit, the foster care stuff eventually pays off. (spoilers). The big reveal occurs at the end when Billy finally accepts his foster family, and when they all touch the staff that turned him into a superhero, they all get turned into superheroes themselves. It was a surprise I did not see coming. So it wasn’t like the foster family wasn’t thought out. The problem, like I said, was that this family was so fake (I’m talking parody fake, like this is the kind of casting you would do to make fun of how Hollywood casts families) I wasn’t emotionally invested in them. Had the family been even SLIGHTLY realistic, it would’ve worked.

But they should’ve stayed with Freddy and Shazam. That’s where the movie was at its best. That’s where the chemistry was. It’s where the irony was (a kid who’s the exact opposite of a superhero must watch as his brother gets to be a superhero). It seems so obvious yet they insisted on pushing their fake family nonsense onto the story.

I’ll finish by saying the second you try and make a family film, you’re toast. Families know when you’re pandering to them and they stay home. A family movie has to be two things. It has to be that level just above a typical family movie where the kid feels like he’s getting away with something, but also, safe enough so that the parents feel comfortable letting their children see it. The perfect example of this is Jumanji. Shazam wears its “bring the family out” badge on its sleeve (it’s even set during Christmas!), and, in the process, feels too precious to leave an impact on either kids or adults.

What’s that old saying? “Blessed is he who expects nothing, for he shall never be disappointed.”  I still liked this movie. I really did. But I was hoping for more than this.

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

What I learned: Shazam got its concept from combining an old movie from another genre (Big) with the superhero genre. This is a great way to come up with a movie idea that’s relevant today. So I challenge you, Scriptshadow community, to come up with ideas combining older films from non-superhero genres with superheroes. 12 Angry Men but with superheroes deliberating whether to convict another superhero to death? :)

We’re only a week away from the most critical moment in all Star Wars history – Star Wars Celebration. What was once thought to be the most impenetrable franchise of them all looks more like a wounded taun-taun these days. Star Wars Celebration 2019 is a public boardroom meeting to convince the world that this product is still worth investing in. While I’m hoping for a couple of great trailers, what I’m really looking for is a sense of direction from Kathleen Kennedy. The rumor is Kennedy was out if they could convince JJ to take over Star Wars. But JJ was too busy taking over the world. So Kennedy was spared.

In Kennedy’s defense, her job’s been difficult. She’s trying to expand the biggest franchise in the world without a blueprint for how to do so. She’s had some hits. Rogue One was a risk that paid off. But she’s made some bone-headed mistakes, such as not creating a roadmap for the most valuable piece of the Star Wars pie – the final trilogy in the Skywalker saga. Once audiences realized there wasn’t a plan in place, they made it known laziness would not be tolerated, shunning Star Wars’s next big release, Solo.

Another challenge for Kennedy has been giving the old school fans what they want while trying to build Star Wars for a new generation. Here, she seems confused. Her plan boils down to including more diversity in the casting and behind the camera (the behind the camera stuff is more on the upcoming television side) but she may have overcorrected, resulting in the OG fans feeling left out. And the OG fans are the ones who made Star Wars the juggernaut that it is. Whether or not it’s right for these fans to be upset, the reality is, they are. And you have to decide what you’re going to do about that. Do you Brie Larson it and say, “You’re living in a bygone era, old white guys. Either you’re with the new vision or we’ll see you later.” I suppose you could. But what if after they leave, you learn that the younger fans don’t care about Star Wars all that much? That they’d rather spend their dough on Snapchat, Fortnite, and Marvel? What then?

Let’s talk about those two big trailers likely to drop because they’ll be shaping a lot of the Star Wars narrative coming out of Celebration. The Mandalorian could go in a lot of different directions. Favreau (who’s showrunning The Mandalorian) loves Westerns. He once wrote a Western and not getting it made was a big reason why he did Cowboys vs. Aliens. Also, for old school Star Wars fans, the top of the Star Wars wish list has always been a story about bounty hunters. Despite massive demand from fans, Star Wars has never been able to figure this story out. The infamous unfinished 1313 video game was supposed to be about bounty hunters. Rogue One was initially conceived as a potential bounty hunter vehicle (but axed in favor of more likable versions of rogue characters). Since the Mandalorian armor is associated with the most famous bounty hunter of them all, Boba Fett, and the promotional shots appear to show him on a desert planet, logic would tell you that we’re getting a bounty hunter western TV show.

Yet another piece of the puzzle is that Jon Favreau loves Game of Thrones. You don’t have to be Stephen Hawking to deduce that Favreau will be looking to add the same level of scope as that show. Which means it won’t be just a bunch of bounty hunters being naughty, but there will be a larger mythical force encroaching on their missions. Since the Force is too obvious, I would love to see him bring in George Lucas’s upgrade of that mythology – the Whills.

What will be most interesting about the celebration is what they don’t tell us. If we go through an entire four days and Kathleen Kennedy never once mentions Rian Johnson’s new trilogy, or dodges questions about it, that would throw fuel on the fire of what many have been speculating for a year now – they’re scrapping it. The reason we’re morphing into Assumption Mode here is because they won’t come out and say it’s canceled. You don’t hold funerals during a celebration. But you know Kennedy’s going to be asked so we’re all going to have to pay close attention to the words she uses, as well as the micro-expressions and non-verbals, so we can hopefully put an end to one of the most unfortunate chapters in Star Wars history, right there behind Jar Jar Binks and Jake Lloyd. And to quote good old Jake, if that happens: “YIIIIPPPPPPEEEEEEE!!!”

If they do premiere an episode 9 trailer, what am I hoping for? AN ENTIRELY NEW MOVIE. I want new plot points and new characters and a brand new adventure. I don’t care if it has nothing to do with the other two movies because the truth is, there is no 7, 8, and 9 trilogy. 7 and 8 weren’t connected so to try and “conclude” that story with 9 would be pointless. The best thing they could do is create a new super-villain and have both sides team up to beat it. That’s the most interesting direction they could go, and it would forego having to manipulate the plot in a ton of artificial ways to make sense of the broken direction in the 8th film. George Lucas said one of the most annoying scenes he ever had to write was when Luke tells Leia that they’re brother and sister in Return of the Jedi. He did not want to write that scene because it stopped the whole movie to tell audiences something they already knew. But since it wouldn’t make sense if Luke didn’t tell her, he had to do it. I don’t want a whole movie of that in 9, where JJ includes a dozen exposition scenes to steer everything he set up in 7 back to a place where he could pay them off the way he originally intended to. Just make a new movie.

I also hope they announce they’re giving us one Star Wars movie a year as opposed to one every two years. I know certain people don’t like this because it lessens the “event” feeling of Star Wars. I don’t care. If you hire the right people and give them plenty of time to write the script and shoot the movie, you can make one good Star Wars movie a year. In my personal opinion, Second Guess Kennedy probably doesn’t have the Star Wars chops to pull that off. But maybe she’s learned a thing or to from Last Jedi and Solo. And you could always lower the budgets and make one “experimental” Star Wars movie a year. It would be unfortunate if the only chances you took were in TV. Let’s get some weird Star Wars movies!! I want a healthy franchise again. Expect opinions after this thing is over.