It’s the movie-nerd team-up of the year. JJ Abrams and Jordan Peele unite for a brand new show on HBO!
Genre: TV Pilot/Horror Sci-Fi
Premise: A young African-American man travels across the U.S. in the 1950s to a mysterious town to learn about where his deceased mother came from.
About: HBO Max is slowly working its way into becoming a legit streaming contender. Last week they gave us a new Seth Rogen comedy. This week they hit us with a JJ Abrams Jordan Peele collaboration. The show is based on the novel of the same name by 55 year old Matt Ruff. Ruff had been writing his whole life but didn’t start to make noise until he published 2007’s Bad Monkeys, which was about a secret organization dedicated to eliminating individuals who are guilty of heinous crimes. Ironically, Lovecraft Country started out as a TV pitch, but when he didn’t get any traction, he wrote it as a novel. It has now become a TV show. The novel was adapted by Misha Green.
Writer: Misha Green (novel by Matt Ruff)
Details: 64 minutes
Excuse me for a second…
I’m currently…
Whoa!
Fighting something…
Hold on….
Ow!
Duck!
Back! Back! Get away!
Phew… made it.
Sorry guys. I was taking on a fire tornado.
And here I thought the riots a few blocks down on Melrose were the worst thing I’d have to deal with all year.
Today’s review is going to be fun. We’ve got a trio of strong creators delivering this entry. First, Scriptshadow crush JJ Abrams, he who can do no wrong. We’ve got Jordan Peele, new kid on the block and torch-bearer for Hollywood’s current diversity push. And then we’ve got old friend of the site, Misha Green, who adapted the novel.
I remember talking to Misha back in the day about how difficult being a screenwriter was. She’d written this great script called Sunflower, which is still in my Top 25. William Friedkin (The Exorcist) was interested in making it. But the whole process felt helpless to her. She was basically hoping Friedkin would make her movie instead of some other movie. If he did choose another movie, she was back to square 1. Another unknown writer just trying to get a job.
Now look at her. She’s working with two of the biggest names in town, JJ Abrams and Jordan Peele. And she’s got this awesome-looking new show. The second I saw the trailer, I had to see it. I even signed up for HBO Max! That despite being subscribed to HBO, HBO Now, HBO Go, and HBO Wowzers. I’m probably funding Peele’s producer fee on the show all by myself.
We start off with our African-American 20-something hero, Tic, in the middle of a World War 2 battle. But this isn’t a normal battle. American soldiers are fighting Romans. UFOs splash spotlights down on the battlefield. And there are giant War of the Worlds alien tripods shooting lasers, killing everyone in sight.
Tic wakes up in the back of a bus (black people have to sit in the back in these days) with a geeky book in hand and we realize he just really likes science-fiction stories. Tic gets back to his old neighborhood in Chicago where he bumps into his Uncle George, who runs a business that helps black people travel across the country (it can be dangerous traveling alone when you’re black in the 1950s).
Tic says he found an old letter that may shed some light on his mysterious mom’s (who’s since passed away) side of the family. Says she came from some place called “Ardham,” which isn’t even on a map. Well, unless you’re looking at a 200 year old map, that is. That crusty ancient map puts Ardham in the middle of the deep south. So away they go.
George and Tic are joined by the rambunctious and multi-talented “Leti.” I say multi-talented because she’s a sci-fi writer, an amazing singer, and a track star with jaw-dropping 40-yard speed. They’re going to drop Leti off halfway to Ardham at her father’s. But when she and her dad get into a fight, she has no choice but to come with Tic and Uncle George.
The group gets all the way to the forest where Ardham is supposed to be. But instead of meeting a bunch of mother’s welcoming descendants, they’re stopped by a really mean white sheriff. Really mean white sheriff informs them that this is a “sundown” town. That means if he finds any black people out after sundown, it’s the law to hang them. Sundown, by the way, is seven minutes away.
So the group get in the car and must reach the county line before those seven minutes are up, all with really mean white sheriff right behind them. This ensures that they can’t go over the speed limit, boxing them into an impossible escape. Will they make it out in time? Something tells me we won’t have a show unless they do. However, their escape is anything but a given.
This was one of the best looking TV shows I’ve seen in a long time. The production value was through the roof. There wasn’t a single shot that wasn’t jaw-droppingly beautiful. There wasn’t an actor lit anything but perfectly. You could replace the show sound with your favorite music and it work as a beautiful audio-visual poem.
But Carson, this is a screenwriting site. What about the writing!?
The writing was mostly good.
If you’re an aspiring TV writer, a great place to start your story is with your hero coming back home. Lives are usually the most interesting during times of major transition. Coming back home after a long absence tends to be one of the more major transitions you’re going to have in life.
It also acts as a natural accelerant for story engines. If Tic had been living at home all this time, it might seem strange that only now, all of a sudden, does he want to go off on this big adventure. It’s the fact that he’s transitioning that it makes sense that a new chapter in his life is about to begin.
Where the pilot struggles is in everything from Tic’s return home until the last ten minutes. The writers run up against the same issues we talk about all the time on the site. You’ve got to set things up early. Characters, backstory, exposition, how everybody fits into the puzzle. You can get so consumed by cramming all that in, you forget to entertain us. The snore factory was getting warmed up when Leti does her dramatically pointless singing number.
Things do pick up once we get on the road. The problem is the road is mostly filled with cliched scenes. For example, there’s the classic situation of our black heroes going to a diner in a white town and mean nasty white people don’t want to serve them. That’s followed by a car chase with three white people in a pickup trying to shoot them.
They weren’t bad scenes. But they played out so on-the-nose that I found myself getting bored. One thing you always want to play with in storytelling is expectations. Figure out what the viewer expects and give them something different. What if, for example, our trio had walked into the diner and the white people there were extremely nice? But like, OVERLY nice. To the point where it was suspicious. Now you’ve set up an interesting situation without the cliche.
(PRO-TIP: If 9 out of 10 writers would’ve come up with the exact same set piece scenario had they written your premise, you probably don’t want to use that scenario)
Luckily, the pilot ends big. This is Pilot Writing 101, folks. Make those last ten minutes count. Before these last ten minutes, I wasn’t going to watch another episode. But after this climax, I’ll definitely check out episode 2.
The sequence takes place as they’re trying to escape Evil White Sheriff Guy. The scene itself is clever. If you’re going to do car chase scenes, you need to look for ways to make them unique. Ruff and Green achieve this by making it so our heroes have to get to the county line within seven minutes. But they have to stay under the speed limit of 25 mph the whole time. That made for a tense car chase scenario I hadn’t seen before.
But it’s what happened after that moment that elevated the sequence. They just BARELY get to the county line and escape. This results in celebration. They can’t believe it. They barely escaped death. We’re happy for them. And then all their eyes go big. They look up and there are three new cop cars blocking the road. The sheriff simply called the neighboring county and told them they were coming.
This is a VERY powerful tool. The “GET AWAY, BUT NO THEY DIDN’T GET AWAY” device. It works because emotions are most charged at the extremes. When things are really great or when things are really terrible. So if you can find ways in writing to take us from one of those extremes to the other in quick succession, it’ll hit your viewers like an anvil. It’s impossible for them to not have an emotional reaction when you do this.
And, from there, we get a hell of an ending where the group is attacked by something and our heroes must momentarily team up with the police who were just about to kill them. That ending and the stellar production value were just enough to get me to next week. Here’s hoping, now that we’ve got the setup behind us, that this show is ready to kick butt.
[ ] What the hell did I just watch?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[x] worth the stream
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: On the website, “Women Write About Comics,” they asked author Matt Ruff how he’s able to consistently surprise readers with his plot twists. Here’s his answer: “I am basically writing to please myself. The anticipation is that if it works for me, it will connect with enough readers and I’ll be able to make it work. A lot of it is because I have these weird lateral ideas that seem perfectly logical to me, but to other people are surprising. One of my friends has this phrase “The Matt Ruff Non-Sequitur,” where we’re talking about one subject and I will leap over to another seemingly totally unrelated subject where I see the connection but they don’t. I think that’s where the twist and turns and surprises come from, is I have a weird way of drawing connections between different things. Part of the editing process is seeing which of these leaps that a reader will follow and which will be totally bizarre to anyone but me. I’m not trying to be deliberately withholding or surprise people, in fact from my position, by the time I’m writing it I have thought it through and know exactly where it’s going. It’s just that where I see it going is not where anyone else would predict that it would go. I’m just weird.”
The big announcement for the next Amateur Showdown is here. And it comes with a twist!! A true GAME-CHANGER!!!
This is a quick reminder that NEXT THURSDAY by 8pm Pacific Time, your Character Piece Showdown entry needs to be in! If you’re going to enter, send me your title, logline, genre, why we should read your script, and a PDF of the screenplay to carsonreeves3@gmail.com.
But now, it’s time for the announcement you’ve all been waiting for.
The next Amateur Showdown genre.
What will it be? Any ideas?
Here’s a clue. Entries need to be received by Thursday, October 15th, 8pm Pacific Time.
That is right, my friends. It’s happening in the month of October. And that can only mean one thing.
Time for the Official Announcement Cue
**ANNOUNCEMENT** **ANNOUNCEMENT** **ANNOUNCEMENT**
The next Amateur Showdown will be……. Horror Showdown.
I’m assuming all of you are dancing in your living rooms, calling your friends, busting out that Joseph Phelps Insignia 2016 wine you’ve been saving for the perfect occasion. I’m sure the media will go crazy once they get a hold of this info so who knows how many entries we’re going to receive. Is tens of thousands out of the realm of possibility?
BUT WAIT! THERE’S A TWIST!!!
Wait, what Carson? Are you trying to give us a heart attack?? How can you add anything more exciting than this?
Are you ready for the twist?
I don’t think you’re ready.
Maybe I should just cancel the twist.
Just kidding!
TWIST: You can submit either a horror screenplay or A HORROR SHORT STORY.
That’s right.
We can’t ignore reality anymore. Short horror stories are getting bought up for 7 figures routinely. So why not jump on that bandwagon?
I know some of you are going to hate this. I can actually see the hate flowing through the internet into my computer screen right now. It has arrived in the form of the ‘Update Now?’ pop-up alert that only allows me to delay the return of said alert for 1 day. I’m sorry, though. The bus has left the station. It’s too late to stop it.
Here’s why this will be fun. A script is 24,000 words. A short story can be 2000 words. It can be 1000 words. That means anyone here can get something written by the deadline. Which means we should have more competition. And more competition leads to a better winner. Game on, my friends.
Same entry process. Send me your title, logline, genre (horror or horror adjacent), why we should read your script/story, and a PDF of the screenplay/story to carsonreeves3@gmail.com any time before Thursday, October 15th, 8pm Pacific Time.
If you want to know how to write a good short story, I’m sure many of you will have suggestions in the comments for what to read. I’m actually interested in hearing about some good short story destinations myself. If you want to get started, buy any of Stephen King’s short story collections. He’s the best.
Outside of that, have fun.
I think this is going to be a blast. You’ve got two months. Time to get started!
We’re going to have some fun today.
I want you to rank, in order of importance, these three screenwriting categories.
Plot
Character
Concept
Tell me which of them you believe is most important to a screenplay’s success. Then rank the other two in order of importance. There ARE right and wrong answers here so don’t screw up. You’re being graded.
Okay, do you have your final answer? Go ahead and display it to the class in the comments. Yes, BEFORE I tell you what the correct order is, go down and leave your order in the comments. Just like any good screenplay, we have to up the stakes. We do that by having you risk public shaming for being wrong. :)
Now before I give you the answer, I want you to either mentally of physically write down ten of your favorite movies. It doesn’t have to be your FAVORITE TEN OF ALL TIME. Just ten movies you liked a lot. Now, what’s the very first thing that comes to mind when you think of any of these movies? Cause I’m willing to bet that in every single case, it’s the characters.
When I think of The Matrix, I think of Neo.
When I think of Die Hard, I think of John McClane.
Shawshank, Red and Andy.
Nightcrawler, Louis Bloom.
Aliens, Ripley
Deadpool, Wade Wilson
The Martian, Mark Watney
Guardians of the Galaxy, Peter Quill (and Rocket, and Groot)
So the top spot on your list should be CHARACTER. Character character character. Character trumps everything. If you get the character part right, nothing else in the script needs to be great. How do I know this? Because you can name plenty of movies with weak concepts or weak plots that you still liked because of the characters.
Swingers, great characters bad plot. Once Upon A Time In Hollywood, strong characters janky plot. The Wrestler, great character weak plot. Yes, even the juggernaut that was The Joker, strong main character, forgettable plot.
But you’d be hard-pressed to think of any movies where you didn’t like the characters but you still liked the movie. I can think of a couple I guess. Mad Max Fury Road. I didn’t dislike those characters but they weren’t memorable to me in any way. The Thin Red Line. I love the feel of that movie but I don’t know a single character’s name. Dunkirk to a certain extent. But it’s rare. You’re more likely to fall in love with a character than a plot.
Let me share with you my most recent experience with how important characters are. I have been OBSESSED with the concept for the show, “Beforiegners” ever since I saw the trailer last year. Beforiegners is set in Oslo and follows a strange phenomenon where a bunch of Vikings from 500 years ago begin inexplicably showing up in modern day. We then follow what happens when these inadvertent travelers are forced to integrate into society. I absolutely love this concept. I’ve been impatiently waiting for it to come out on HBO but I was lucky to get my hands on some episodes ahead of time. I’m telling you, I can’t convey enough how excited I was to sit down and watch this.
And it was a total effing bore.
Why was it bore?
Because the characters were lame as hell. The two main characters, one a male cop, the other a female viking who’s become his partner, are beyond boring. They’re both quiet. They’re both methodical. They approach their job in the same way. There’s zero contrast. Zero conflict. But, worst of all, neither of them have any personality. Which killed the show. And it wasn’t the actors faults. It was 100% the writing. They never sat down and tried to create two great characters.
We’ll get back to character in a bit.
But now that we’ve established our top dog, we need to figure out who gets the red ribbon, concept or plot.
My answer might surprise you. But I’m going to say concept. And I know that sounds crazy to some of you because concept is just one overall idea whereas plot is something you meticulously work out over numerous rewrites until everything in your story is woven together in the most entertaining and harmonious way.
But here’s the little secret about concepts. They inform everything about the plot. Let me give you an example. Back to the Future is probably my favorite movie of all time. But for a moment, I want you to imagine if there’s no time travel in Back to the Future. Instead, it’s a high school teen comedy set in modern day called “The Power of Love.” It’s about Marty trying to make it as a singer in a band. Think about how much you just limited your plot. You’ve taken out the opportunity to do so many of the cool things that Back to the Future did. And it’s because you now have a much weaker concept.
Using that logic, you’re always going to have a hard time plotting screenplays with weak concepts. It can be done, of course. Mean Girls was a teen high school comedy and a lot of people liked that movie. But having a good concept is like showing up to a race with a jetpack. It’s going to make things so much easier for you.
None of this is to say that plot doesn’t matter. Even if you have a great concept like Back to the Future, you still have to come up with the plot ideas that elevate that concept, that make the read exciting. Remember that, originally, the time machine in Back to the Future was a refrigerator. That severely limited the time travel plot points of the movie. Once they switched it to a car, however, all sorts of great plot ideas emerged. You will slave away to get your plot right. But I still think it sits behind both character and concept.
So that means we have our order.
1 – Character
2 – Concept
3 – Plot
What does this mean for you, the screenwriter? It means you have to put a lot more thought into your 2-3 main characters. They will be the most critical components to making your script work. And here are some things to consider – things that weak writers overlook.
First and foremost, you must think of your character as their own story, independent of the story in your movie. To understand this best, think of all the challenges and failures and successes and highs and lows you’ve had in your own life. That’s YOUR STORY. You need to give your characters that story as well or else they’ll never pop off the page.
The more you know about your character’s story, the stronger the character will be. Your character story should be divided into two parts. The story that led up to the beginning of the movie, aka the ‘backstory,’ and then the story of your character DURING the movie.
Let’s use the most famous action character ever, John McClane, as an example. He became a New York cop. He married this woman. She got a job opportunity in another city. He hoped she’d fail and come home. Instead she succeeded, which means now their marriage is on the rocks. And I’m sure the writer knew 100 times as much about John McClane as we’re told in the movie. That’s your backstory. And it’s where strong writers separate themselves because they’re willing to do the deep dive into how the character became the person they are even though 99% of that won’t directly show up on the screen.
Once the movie starts, you’re talking about a new character story, a story all of us get to see. You will draw from all the things that happened in the backstory to create the most entertaining John McClane story for the movie. If you realized McClane grew up as a wise-ass who challenged authority in his backstory, you now get to feature that in this story. But if you never did the work and figured that out, it won’t be there in the character. Even if you say to yourself, “This character is going be a wise-ass who challenges authority” but you don’t know how he became that person? Or what led up to that? Then the wise-assery is going to feel cliched.
I don’t think a lot of you realize how important this is. If you want a character to feel authentic, you need to figure out why they became the way they are. The more specific, the better. For example, maybe when John McClane was a young New York cop, he watched as, time and time again, him and his fellow officers were being put into dangerous situations by their Captain, some of which ended in friends of his dying. McClane knew that if he didn’t speak up, nothing would change. He HAD to challenge authority or he’d lose more friends. Once you’re able to ground your character’s identity in real events that you know the specifics of, I guarantee you your characters will come off as more authentic.
A few other things. You want to find character personalities that audiences either like or, if the characters are reserved, that we understand and sympathize with why they’re that way. In that Beforeigners show, they didn’t have either. They were boring people and there wasn’t a lot to sympathize with. You should also have a curiosity about human psychology. In order to get into why we are the way we are, you need to understand how we tick. A person isn’t just a drug addict. Their addiction is their way of coping with something. Find out what that something is. And, finally, you should be fascinated by interpersonal social dynamics – the way human beings interact with each other. Why people are mean to others, why they’re nice, why they’re guarded, why they’re happy.
I read this story recently about this woman who yelled at a random man for not wearing a mask. If you think that this woman is yelling at this man specifically, you don’t understand social dynamics. She doesn’t know this man. She’s spent the last 20, 40, 60 days bottling up her anger at people who don’t wear masks. This man merely represents everyone who’s not wearing a mask in her eyes. To tell him to wear a mask is to tell everyone to wear a mask. That’s what you have to realize about human interaction. It’s rarely about what’s happening on the surface. There’s always something going on underneath and you should have a curiosity as to what that underneath stuff is.
Finally, just to be clear, the ideal situation is that character, concept, and plot are effortlessly woven together so that each one depends on the other equally. You can’t imagine the characters without the concept and you can’t imagine the concept without the plot and you can’t imagine the plot without the characters. That’s the goal. If you’ve done it right, everything is so immaculately connected that it’s all one living breathing organism known as your story.
But just because I like a little controversy, I’ll finish with this: Pay a litttttllllllllleeee extra attention to characters above everything else.
:)
Genre: Horror
Premise: (from Black List) A woman with a troubled past invites her teen niece to live with her in the family’s farm house, but the two become tormented by a creature that can take away their pain for a price.
About: This script found some traction last year, allowing it to sneak onto the Black List. It hasn’t sold but it did get the writer, Christina Pamies, an assignment writing Baghead, a popular short film that they’re turning into a feature.
Writer: Christina Pamies
Details: 86 pages
One thing to remember whenever you’re writing a spec script is that, if the spec gets noticed, or better, purchased, it’s probably not going to get made. I’m not trying to bum you out. I’m just going off the percentages here.
However, that’s okay, because there are a lot of movies that ARE being greenlit that need a writer and, if those movies are in the same genre as your spec, you have a shot at getting an assignment that will turn into a credit. And credit is everything in this business. It not only gives you legitimacy. It ups your quote. It makes you a bankable writer, since you’ve proven that stuff you write gets made. And let’s not forget those glorious residual checks that keep showing up in the mailbox years down the line. You’re going to need them to fend off the bills of your 15 different streaming services.
This is why I always remind writers to write in the genre you love. Because you’ll probably get pigeonholed into that genre, which is great if you love the genre. But a nightmare if you hate it. Not to mention, you’re going to write better scripts in the genres you’re passionate about anyway because you’re naturally going to go the extra mile for them.
I’m only bringing this up because I remember when I first started writing and I would write whatever cool concept I came up with. I’d write a comedy then a sci-fi script then a drama then a dramedy then a horror then a sports movie then an action script then a thriller. I was all over the place. And when you start out, you might be all over the place too. But while writing in a bunch of different genres can be educational, it’s better to focus on the genres you love.
Because each genre has its own challenges and you want to master the genres you love as soon as possible, which means writing them over and over again. That’s how you get good at a genre. Which increases the chances of you selling one. Which increases the chances that you’re known around town as a good writer in that genre. Which increases the chances you get called in for an assignment in that genre. Which increases the chances that you get the assignment. Which leads to a credit. Which leads to you being a legitimate paid writer. Which is exactly what today’s writer, Christina Pamies, pulled off, when No Good Deed got traction around town and she got the writing gig for Baghead. Okay, enough lecturing. Onto today’s script…
40 year old Amy Sutton is at the end of a long cancer battle. It’s gotten so bad that she and her husband send their 11 year old daughter, Zoey, off to live with Amy’s cousin, Julia. They don’t want Zoey to see how bad things are going to get with Amy.
Zoey moans and complains from the start and lets Julia know that they’re anything but friends. The two head off to Julia’s farm house, which happens to have been in the family for 150 years. Julia has just recently moved into it, and is excited to show Zoey the place where she and her mom spent so many fun summers.
But weird things start happening. The house seems to be a favored spot for injured animals. Zoey immediately starts caring for an injured opossum (which leads to her getting bitten). Then, there’s weird plant problems that are growing out of control underneath the house, to the point where stubby plants are piercing the kitchen floor.
Later, Zoey spots an old timey family of 3 inside the bathroom. But that’s nothing compared to what Julia spots at the edge of the woods – a ten foot tall pale man-demon who spits out a bunch of bones.
You would think that these two would hightail it out of here. But they decide to stay and look into the home’s history. It has two major family slaughters that have happened in the house which include a seven-body scenario of pure human annihilation. A mystery that was never solved.
But when Zoey’s opossum bite starts unnaturally spreading and the local plant life does a full-on assault of Julia, it looks like these two are doomed. (spoilers) What we eventually learn is that the boneeater guy has promised certain people who live here safety if they feed him. Which means you have to feed him other members of the family. That’s what Amy – I think – did. She fed him for a while. But then she stopped. And that’s why she has cancer. So the question is, who made a deal with the boneeater this time? Who’s about to be turned into a lunchables snack?
After reading the very strong horror story that was My Wife And I Bought a Ranch last week, No Good Deed had a tough act to follow.
You really can spot the difference between the better horror entries in how much detail has been recruited into the story. The less detail and the shakier the mythology, the more horror falls apart at the seams. I mean here we’ve got killer plants, 10 foot tall boneeaters, old-timey ghosts, an animal connection, a teaser opener where a family gets slaughtered. It’s a lot of stuff that doesn’t feel organically connected.
Pamies does explain it all in the end in a way that somewhat makes sense. But that’s not the problem. The problem is the 80 pages where everything seems so disconnected that we’re less intrigued by the mystery than we are frustrated. I actually think the boneeater was a good monster. Why not just stick with him? We don’t need killer plants and sinister possums. That guy was scary enough on his own. And the “deal” stuff it makes with family members opened up some really interesting character avenues. You’ve been shown your death. But this guy gives you a way to survive. Unfortunately, you have to sacrifice a family member to do so.
The best part about this script is its almost brilliant ending. That being Zoe offering Julia to save her mom. The problem is, it’s unclear when they decided to do this. From what I understand, Zoey and her mom talk midway through the movie and hatch that plan. This would’ve been SO MUCH BETTER if that was the plan all along. That was the big twist. Her and her mom actually planned this to kill off her cousin so Amy could get better.
But this script has so many logic problems. The house is somehow both the most evil house in the world (so much so that everybody in the community is terrified of it) yet Julia spent her summers here and found it to be the greatest house ever. I struggled to buy into that. It felt like your classic ‘straddle the fence” screenwriter dilemma. You needed Julia to like this place so she’d believably take Zoey here. But you also needed to make it ‘Amityville times a million’ so we’d have a horror film.
I know these things are hard but you have to figure them out if you want the reader’s suspension of disbelief. Because the whole time I’m reading this, I’m thinking, “Wait, everyone else knows this house is hell except for this one woman who’s actually lived here before?” If I’m always thinking about that, I can’t focus on the story. Plugging up logic holes is the unheralded battle in screenwriting. You never get points for doing it even though it’s one of the most time-consuming things about the craft. But you have to.
Another problem that occurs when you have too much mythology to work into your horror script is that the scares start feeling random. Banging on walls. Scary furry animals. Old-timey ghosts. Killer plants. Boneeaters. You have to understand that, to a reader, randomness is only appealing up to a point. I liked, for example, that in The Ring, we had strange shit coming out of TVs and a weird video tape with a creepy short film on it. But if you start throwing too many different scares at us, it begins to feel like the story is desperate to scare us to the point where it’s willing to not make sense anymore – even if it makes sense eventually.
Like I always say, simplify things. Don’t over complicate it. Adding more complications hurts a story 98% of the time. All we needed here was the creepy boneeater and that shocking twist with Julia being killed (or almost killed but she somehow escapes) and we’re great. But in this current iteration, too much is going on.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Don’t bury your head in the sand on troublesome setup details. Cause I can guarantee you that readers will question them. And those questions will continue in the back of their mind, throughout the script, preventing them from being able to focus on the story in the moment. Another question that I couldn’t get out of my head was, why would a mom kick her daughter out of the house two weeks before she died? I couldn’t buy into that.
Genre: Sci-Fi
Premise: In a dystopian society, a government worker recovering from a traumatic accident is rescued by a group of rebels who insist that he’s the leader of their movement.
About: I have to give it to Mattson Tomlin. He’s been scrapping away for a while, occasionally getting scripts on the Black List. I’ve reviewed a couple of his scripts before, a Jason Bourne parody script and a different sci-fi entry. I didn’t dislike either script. But neither one had that extra something that puts a script over the top. Well, apparently, Warner Brothers doesn’t agree with me. As they gave Mattson the most coveted job in town – the latest Batman movie that Matthew Reeves is making. I’m not sure if he dropped 2084 before or after he got this job, but I’m assuming just the mention of him being up for the job helped Paramount snatch up 2084. I heard it was pitched as 1984 by way of The Matrix and Inception. That is a lofty pitch! Let’s see if the script lives up to the hype.
Writer: Mattson Tomlin
Details: 116 pages
You guys know me!
There isn’t a big sci-fi spec I won’t read.
So when I heard Mattson Tomlin was taking on one of the granddaddies of sci-fi literature, writing an unofficial 100-years-later spiritual sequel to 1984, I needed to get my hands on it. Especially since Tomlin’s screenwriting star is rising quickly.
Question to the class before we get started. Has anybody here read 1984 cover to cover? I feel like we’ve all STARTED to read it. But I’m not sure anyone’s ever finished it. Extra points for those of you who did so on your own and not because your high school English teacher told you to.
Malcom Ferrel doesn’t know what’s going on. He’s just woken up in a dentist-type chair. A dude with a Hazmut suit is standing over him. He’s asking Malcom what his name is and if he remembers his “trauma” or not. Malcom does not remember his trauma. Good. Then we can get you back into society, the guy says.
Malcom enters suburbia, which looks like the 1950s for some reason. Except for the fact that everybody has to wear an elaborate super suit that protects them from the air. It’s like Covid on steroids I guess. Malcom is told by his driver that he works for the government and to stop trying to remember the trauma he experienced. It’s better if he moves on.
Once he gets home, there’s a party going on in the backyard, and then WAM BAM POW a van smashes through the fence. A bunch of black clad SWAT like dudes bust out and start slaughtering everyone. Malcom’s buddy Stan confirms to home base that he has “the package” and the next thing we know… Malcom wakes up in the chair again where he must start the process all over again.
This time, he goes to meet with his wife, who, like the last batch of people, tell him to stop thinking of his past trauma. It will only make things worse. Then those SWAT DUDES show up AGAIN and there’s a firefight between the people protecting Malcom and the people trying to steal him. The SWAT guys finally get him, escape, and take him back to a secret base.
At the base, Malcom meets his real wife, Rachel, who informs him that he used to work for the government until he started this rebellion. But the government then stole him back, erased his memories, and tried to reintegrate him back into society. But they kidnapped him back. And then the government kidnapped him back. And then they kidnapped him back. And sometimes, if they can’t get him, they kidnap HER. Which is what happens next!
The government BUSTS into the underground base and while Malcom escapes, they get Rachel. We now follow Rachel in the dentist chair. Her memory has been erased. And we follow her as she’s cluelessly integrated into society. She even marries a dude. Will Malcom come save her. That’s their thing, Rachel told him back at the base. They always save each other. So now Malcom, who still isn’t even sure who he is, must save a woman he sort of is maybe sure is his wife.
I’m not going to beat around the bush. This didn’t work for me.
The number one thing you have to get right when you’re writing a big sci-fi script is sell the mythology. If we don’t buy the rules or the backstory or how your characters interact with this world, nothing else matters because we’re going to be so focused on how weak the framework is. 1950s town? Protection suits? Trauma elimination? There was something incohesive about the variables.
The idea of changing the main character and creating a dramatically ironic situation in that we know Rachel is being tricked but she doesn’t isn’t a bad choice on an idea level. The problem is that we got to know Rachel for two seconds before she’s thrust into this situation. So we don’t care about her. Or, at least, I didn’t. And, to be honest, I never got the best feel for Malcom either. Nothing we learned about him was real remember. It’s a bunch of fake memories taped over fake memories. In other words, even the person we’re hoping will save our damsel in distress is someone we don’t know. So we’re cheering on someone we don’t know to save someone else we don’t know.
That’s not how writing works.
You have to establish strong characters who we care about before you toss them into the mixer that is their screenplay journey. Both Neo in The Matrix and the character Leonardo DiCaprio plays in Inception have extensive introductions where we get to know the characters well before the shit hits the fan.
This does lead to an interesting screenwriting debate, which is that I always tell you to hook the reader right away. Make something happen immediately. Grab us and don’t let us go. Tomlin does that more than any of the scripts I’ve read so far in The Last Great Screenplay Contest. So then what’s the deal? The guy does what you say, Carson, and you’re still complaining?
Well, here’s the catch – and this is why screenwriting is so difficult – if you’re telling your story in a way where we’re meeting your characters “in media res,” you need to figure out quick ways to help us identify with them and like them. Your “save the cat” moments need to be lightning quick. Your glimpses into their humanity and what makes them sympathetic and empathetic need to be tightly executed.
This is where the best writers make their money. They can get you to fall in love with a character in ten lines. Good Time, the Safdie Bros movie they made before Uncut Gems, has a despicable lead character in Connie, who does some terrible things in the film. But we meet him coming to the rescue of his mentally challenged brother while a heartless social worker demeans him by making him take an uncomfortable test. Instantly, after that scene, we’re rooting for Connie.
And then I just didn’t get what Tomlin was going for here. We’re told that Malcom has been stolen by the Fortification dozens of times and that the Rebellion keeps having to steal him back. Malcom asks the same question we’re wondering. “Why don’t they just kill me?” Rachel explains that if the Fortification kills him, society will know their Trauma-Erasure system doesn’t work. To prove they have everything under control, they must erase his Rebellion memories and reintegrate him back into society every time.
I’m sorry but if I was a citizen in this society and I found out one of our main guys had been kidnapped by the Rebellion two dozen times??? I’m probably thinking the system doesn’t work. And just from an objective storytelling perspective, once someone gets stolen back and forth five times, doesn’t it get a little silly? Once or twice, I get. But 20? 30 times? It’s clumsy storytelling.
Another problem with big sci-fi ideas is over-development of the mythology in ways that hurt the story more than help it. Everyone wears these over-the-top super suits to keep them from transmitting diseases to each other (supposedly). But wouldn’t this movie have been better without this component?
Cause it’s hard enough to buy into this memory impregnating slash memory restoring tug-o-war as it is. When you throw in, “and oh yeah, everyone wears big cumbersome bubble suits,” it draws attention to the very lie the Fortification is trying to hide. Wouldn’t it be a lot easier to trick someone into thinking everything was normal if everyone WASN’T wearing a big weird suit? It’s even one of the first things Malcom notices after the Fortification procedure. Why is everybody dressed so weird? They might as well have given him a handbook that listed all the other suspicious things he shouldn’t pay attention to.
The thing is, once the script hits the midpoint, it actually starts to get interesting. We go back into the memory of Malcom as all the memories he forgot are implanted in him by the Rebellion. And we’re experiencing them as he is. So we see when him and Rachel first meet and fall in love and what goes wrong afterwards that leads to the Rebellion. I wish we would’ve started with that. It was so much cleaner and more interesting than giving us 60 pages of exposition and setup.
Unfortunately, it was too little, too late. My suspension of disbelief had been broken so many times that I couldn’t get back into the story bubble I needed to be in to enjoy the screenplay. Which is too bad. Cause the end scene with the Counselor where he’s explaining everything was quite good.
There’s a kernel of a story in here. But I don’t think Tomlin’s found it in this draft.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Make sure the bad guy has a good point. One of the easiest ways to add depth to your bad guys is to give their ideology legitimacy. When Rachel finally meets the big bad guy and he explains why they do what they do, he makes strong points. Their system has resulted in zero poverty, zero crime, zero wealth disparagement, zero war. Yeah, they do some bad things. But wouldn’t any society kill to have those numbers? You want to make your hero’s choices DIFFICULT, not easy. You automatically do that whenever your villain has a strong argument.
