Genre: Action/Thriller
Premise: An army colonel must hunt down a man who has stolen the “football” from the president, the famous briefcase that travels with the President at all times and allows him to access and launch all of America’s nuclear weapons.
About: Back to the 90s, baby, again! This 1994 script sale got John Pogue the assignment to write The Fugitive 2 (a movie that would never get made). Pogue has a classic Hollywood screenwriting story. He showed up in town, assumed he would be writing blockbuster movies within months, instead got nothing but no’s for 7 years. And then he sold two scripts at once to Neal Moritz (Fast and Furious franchise). A couple more after that. He would then end up getting a deal at Fox to produce and write for them. All of this happened quickly. Unfortunately, none of John’s bigger projects got made. But he did write the moderately successful “The Skulls” film which would spurn two sequels.
Writer: John Pogue
Details: 120 pages – 1994 draft

You can see why this script got the writer The Fugitive 2 gig. The two are very similar in the way they’re structured, the way the action is covered, the way they’re paced. But there’s one extremely important difference between the two and I’d guess that it’s the main reason this script never got made. But I’m not going to tell you what that is yet. You’ll have to read to the end to find out.

I always like reading these stories of scripts sold a million years ago because it’s a bit like seeing into the future when you track how the writer’s career went. You can dissect how they came onto the scene and then the subsequent choices they made in their early career, which would then affect the rest of their career. The reality is that those first couple of years when you break in are crucial because you’re so hot when you’re the flavor of the month and everybody loves you because you’re full of potential, possibilities, and probably most important, heat. If you can use that momentum to string a few successful projects together, you can lay the tracks for a 30 year writing career easy.

I’ll never begrudge a writer who’s found any level of success in the industry. Because while we’d all love to be Spielberg, the reality is we can’t be. But if you can grab onto even a small piece of the pie, you can still live the dream, being paid to write while living comfortably in one of the prime pieces of real estate in the world. I’m guessing that Skulls franchise paid better than selling insurance in Idaho.

Colonel Mitch Benedict is a no-nonsense guy. He cares only about the safety of the president. One of his jobs is to carry around the president’s nuclear suitcase, or what some people call, “the football,” so that if the president ever decides to launch a nuclear attack, he can do so from the comfort of lunch at Five Guys (or whatever fast food places were around in 1994).

So one day, Mitch is having a drink at a bar, and some businessman comes up to him and says he recognizes Mitch on TV as the guy who carries the nuclear suitcase. Mitch says he can’t talk about it, goes to the bathroom, and when he comes back, the businessman is gone. For some reason, this freaks Mitch out, so he decides to chase the guy. After a car and footrace, he catches him in an alley, steals the man’s briefcase, but the man gets away.

Mitch and his White House co-workers, which now include Captain Caroline Rice, a new recruit who Mitch doesn’t approve of because she doesn’t have any “confirmed kills,” look through the briefcase and find a secret camera inside that was taping their conversation. They also find some weird stuff in there about nuclear weapons and Mitch becomes concerned that this gentleman is up to no good.

When the president attends a Redskins football game, Mitch thinks the man will be here, so he and Rice perform surveillance during the game. The man does show up, blows up a trashcan, causing chaos, which allows him to run up to the NEW presidential aid who carries the “football,” cut off his hand, and steal the most important briefcase in the world.

The thing is, the football is useless. It requires too many checks and balances for some random thief to use it. It’s gotta be cleared by a satellite, the codes reset every day, and it needs voice authentication from the president and someone else. So nobody’s that worried.

Nobody, that is, except for Mitch! He’s convinced that this terrorist will figure out how to use the codes. And he turns out to be right. The man even calls Mitch and tells him where the final play of the game will happen – at the Washington Christmas Eve Nuclear Non-Proliferation and Aggression Pact! Will Mitch and Caroline be able to stop him!!???

If you ran this script through a computer program that denoted what components were being used to tell the story, that computer would spit out something like this: plot plot plot plot plot plot plot character plot plot plot plot plot plot plot plot plot plot plot plot plot plot plot plot plot plot plot plot plot plot plot plot plot plot plot plot plot plot plot plot character plot plot plot plot plot plot plot plot plot plot plot plot plot plot plot plot plot plot plot plot.

This script was so technical and so plot-dominant that it was impossible to become emotionally invested on any level.

I felt absolutely nothing for anyone here. This is a prime example of how the absence of sympathy and relate-ability and just plain knowing someone, can make the most cutthroat plot ice cold boring. Pogue is trying to write another Fugitive here. But the reason The Fugitive works so well is precisely because the main character, Richard Kimble, endures the single most sympathetic situation ever. His wife is murdered (sympathy) and he’s then erroneously charged with her murder (exponential sympathy). I mean who’s not going to root for that guy?

Mitch is ice cold. No personality. Never says anything interesting. I know almost nothing about him. And Caroline Rice’s character backstory isn’t just non-existent. It’s weird. Her whole storyline is built around that she doesn’t have a confirmed kill. How is a storyline like that going to make her relatable? Or sympathetic? Why does that make me care? Every character is treated that way here. They are not real people. They are chess pieces to be moved where the plot needs to take them. They’re interchangeable. They’re plastic.

This can be very frustrating for writers who write a good script and yet time and time again they’re told that something is missing but it’s not clear what it is. A lot of times it’s that the writer hasn’t written a character that the reader actually cares about, feels close to, or wants to succeed. I don’t care if Mitch succeeds here. And if that’s not in place, nothing is.

So why did they buy it? Well, the reality of this business is that you weigh the value of the concept against how difficult it will be to clean up the script’s problems. If they really liked this idea, they may have said, “I know we have a character issue here. But I love this idea so much I’m willing to hire a good character writer to clean that issue up.”

I hate pointing that reality of the business out cause writers see that and think, “Oh, my script doesn’t have to be awesome. It can be weak in some areas.” That’s true. But it still needs to be as perfect as you’re capable of making it. Cause chances are your perfect isn’t as perfect as you think, but it might be JUST good enough to get people interested.

This was really well-researched, especially for pre-google days, but I think Pogue got lost in all that research and only cared about making this pass some imagined White House authenticity test. When push came to shove, we just didn’t care about anyone here.

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

What I learned: If there’s a lesson to be learned from this script, it’s that, yes, you always want your plot moving forward. But not at the expense of us being able to connect with the characters. At the very least, give us one scene – ONE SCENE – in the first act that you can point to and say, “That’s going to make people like my hero.” If you don’t have that scene, forget it.

Genre: Biopic
Premise: The rise and fall of the greatest one-hit wonder ever – Vanilla Ice.
About: “Something grabs a hold of me tightly. Flow like a harpoon daily and nightly.” Best lyric in the history of music? If this movie happens, one thing they won’t need is a make-up department. That’s because Vanilla Ice doppleganger Dave Franco is rumored to be playing the lead.
Writers: Chris Goodwin and Phillip Van
Details: 127 pages

You know the deal by now. When I read a biopic, I’m looking at whether I’m reading an author who did a quick wikipedia search and copy-pasted the story into Final Draft, or if I’m reading something where the writer actually thought about telling the story in a creative and moving way. If you do the latter, as very few people do, I’m thrilled. If you do the former, it’s one more bullet to the chest of the biopic. Which I’m okay with also because it means we’re one death closer to this genre never being relevant again.

For those new to biopics, here’s how we got here. Event movies destroyed the movie star. The movie star needed to find other options. The biopic became the go-to genre because it allowed the movie star to do what they do best, be the center of attention. The movie was about the historical figure, of course. But it was just as much about the actor. Even better, these movies became a primary vehicle for big studios to win Academy awards. So they were willing to spend big money on the production, the actor, and the director. Do you get to save the world anymore? No. But you get your close-up. And that’s all movie stars care about.

Anyway, I like the idea of a Vanilla Ice biopic because it opens up some avenues to not take the genre too seriously. Maybe play with the format a bit. Have some fun. Let’s see what route the writers took.

Robbie Van Winkle grew up in Miami Lakes, Florida. He was a little kid with a unique dream as a white boy – to be a rapper. Robbie worked as a used car salesman at 20 years old, and he and his crew would go over to the City Lights Night Club every weekend and watch the rap acts. One night, his friends tricked the booker into getting him up on stage, And Robbie killed it. Tommy Quon, the owner of the club, liked what he saw. To him, Robbie was a young Elvis, just doing it in a different style of music.

Tommy ended up selling his club and going out with Robbie on the road where they played in a bunch of dingy redneck bars that didn’t understand what Robbie was doing. But after a year of touring and Robbie piece-mailing together 10 songs, one of those songs, Ice Ice Baby, which was actually a B-track that Ice and his crew felt was weak, started playing on the radio. This led Tommy and Robbie to LA, where they signed with the record label, SBK, who gave Robbie, now “Vanilla Ice,” a half-million dollar advance.

Ice’s single would shoot to the top of the charts where he’d rub elbows with MC Hammer, an artist who many people felt Ice was copying. The single would then lead to an infamous cameo in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 2, and then Ice’s own movie, Cool as Ice (“Drop the zero and get with the hero”). Quickly, however, the media turned on him, saying that he had stolen the hook from David Bowie’s song, “Under Pressure.” In a famous interview, Ice would explain the difference. “We sampled it from them but it’s not the same baseline. It goes DING DING DING DIGA DING DING. DING DING DING DIGA DING DING. That’s the way theirs goes. Ours goes DING DING DING TING AHH DING DING. DING DING DING TING AHH DING DING.”

But things would get a lot worse. Suge Knight, then an up and coming music producer, threatened Ice’s life if he didn’t give him a percentage of the profits from Ice Ice Baby. Ice was so shaken by the encounter that he hired eight body guards with machine guns to guard his house at all times. Ice then turned to drugs to ease the anxiety, and before he knew it, he was out of money with no prospects. Eventually he would come to the realization that it was time to leave Ice behind and reintroduce himself to Robbie.

The most amazing thing about this script is that the rise and fall of Vanilla Ice is structured so evenly. It’s literally the first half is all about the rise and the second half is all about the fall.

To me, the fall was more interesting. I didn’t know anything about the Suge Knight stuff. What do you do when a thug accompanied by four armed men holds you over a ledge and threatens to drop you unless you give him ten percent of the proceeds to your multi-million dollar hit? I guess you say ‘yes.’

As long as we’re talking about hit records, though, we might as well talk about broken ones. I say this every time I review a biopic. Unless you have the most fascinating person with the most fascinating life ever, to the point where you don’t have to change a thing – that’s how amazing it is. If you don’t have that, you need to make some story decisions that set your biopic apart from all the other ones.

This is your typical rise and fall music biopic. There’s nothing inventive about it at all. There’s even a “descends into the drugs and party life” montage. And while Vanilla Ice is amusing, he’s by no means fascinating. So it’s one of those typical reads where you get to the end and you think, “That wasn’t bad.” But it certainly wasn’t great.

A stronger theme probably could’ve helped. With these biopics, since they’re so furiously focused on one individual, you want to say something about the world through that individual. There were tiny moments that hinted at this theme of Vanilla Ice being the first example of cultural appropriation – a white man trying to act black. But they never went that far with it. I think they also could’ve pushed Ice’s desire to be accepted by the black community more. Let’s face it. In this day and age, the media loves race-bait. They eat it up. So if your movie plays into that, people are going to talk about it. And I truly felt like Ice was hurt that people in the hip-hop community weren’t more accepting of him.

And if you’re wondering how do you manage a theme like that in a screenplay – you start with your climax. Your climax should be the moment where your theme is colliding with your character in the most dramatic way. So, as an example (although there are many ways to do it), you might have Vanilla Ice break down about the fact that this community he so badly wants to be a part of has officially rejected him. And then you move backwards from there and make sure there are ample moments throughout the script that keep that topic at the forefront. If your theme is a huge part of your climax, it’s likely the audience will know that THAT’S what your film is about. If it isn’t, we’re probably going to be confused as to what the movie was about. And that was the case with To The Extreme. I’m not sure what it was about other than a singer’s rise and fall.

With that said, I was never bored by To the Extreme. But like all biopics, it’s sort of like reading a wikipedia page while on a Disneyland ride. It’s slightly more exciting than reading it from your couch. And I suppose if you knew nothing about Vanilla Ice, this might wax your candle. But if you don’t know who Vanilla Ice is, do you wanna know? I don’t know. Word to your mother. Peace in the Middle East.

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

What I learned: Always try to find fun ways into scenes. If you have a meeting between characters, ask yourself if there’s a way into that meeting other than one man walking into a room, sitting down, and talking with another man. In To The Extreme, Tommy (the night club manager) says to Robbie to come meet him tomorrow at 10. This is Robbie’s big shot. Someone likes his music! Now we could’ve had Robbie just show up. But the writers cleverly have Robbie working at the car lot that day. And his boss, Bryon, won’t give him the time off. So Robbie has one of his friends, Chill, show up pretending to be looking for a car. This allows Robbie to give him a “test-drive,” which, in actuality, allows the two of them to get to the meeting.

This weekend had not one, but TWO, spec scripts vie for a bite of that juicy but elusive summer box office apple. We’re going to talk about them in a second, but first we cannot ignore the giant looming money shadow that is The Lion King. I have to say that Jon Favreau has had one of my favorite careers to follow. I remember after he did Swingers, him and Vince Vaughn were the toast of the town. And then he went and did Made which was as forgettable a movie as they come. I didn’t even know what the genre was. I thought that might’ve been it for Favreau. So when I heard that he was doing “Elf,” I thought, “He’s desperate. His career is done.” And then that became an enormous hit.

Flush with Hollywood capital, he then went off to make Zathura, which confused the heck out of me. The creator of Swingers was now doing movies for 10 year olds?? I thought he was squandering his talent. And the movie, which was a less-good Jumanji, didn’t do well either. Again, I thought he was done. Then he gets called up to do Iron Man. And that’s when people had zero expectations for that character. The movie not only became a monster hit but it became the movie that built the House of MCU. However, immediately after that, he was given 2 years to do Iron Man 2 instead of the 3 he knew he needed to make it good and the movie ended up being awful as a result. To add insult to injury, the MCU quasi-discarded him because of it. “Thanks for the 10 billion dollar franchise. Bye!” I thought, “he’s done” again.

Things went from bad to worse as Favreau created his biggest misfire ever in the ill-conceived Cowboys and Aliens. Favreau let his long-time desire to direct a Western cloud his judgement, and the result was a film stemming from an idea that never worked in the first place. Like a Phoenix rising from the ashes, however, Favreau burst back on the scene with the personal film, Chef, which became the little independent film that could.

Believing he was bankable again, Hollywood gave him The Jungle Book, which looked so amazing that Disney handed him one of their crown jewels, The Lion King. Concurrently, he also gets to make one of the flagship shows for Disney Plus, The Mandalorian. Jon Favreau is the guy who’s never quit. He’s always kept fighting. And I think I learned a couple of lessons from him. One is to stay involved with people. When things were tough for Jon, he filmed this show, Dinner For Five, which was way ahead of its time. It was basically a Youtube show before Youtube that covered five people from the business sitting down, eating, and talking about Hollywood. Some of his guests included a young JJ Abrams (long before JJ became the half-billion dollar man), Ben Affleck, Judd Apatow, Will Ferrell. That wasn’t just a show for him. It was an ongoing networking event which would allow him to keep his name in the hat, so to speak. Next, Favreau’s a go-getter. Favreau didn’t just show up to Disney begging them for a Star Wars TV job. He went ahead and wrote The Mandalorian pilot and second episode on spec! He then brought them to Disney and said, “I want to do this.” People know you’re serious when you have skin (all the hours put into those episodes) in the game. Finally, he’s such a curious positive person that you can’t help but leave a conversation liking him. That’s the power of positivity – is it makes you memorable. And in a business where the new hot thing is always coming around the corner, that’s a powerful weapon to have. The Lion King is getting mixed reviews. But I’m really happy for Favreau that he got to make it and that it will likely become one of the biggest movies of all time.

Now let’s talk spec scripts.

The biggest letdown of the weekend by far was Stuber (my script review here), which barely cleared 8 million dollars. The lone giant comedy entry in the summer never exhibited that “must see” quality in its marketing that gets people to rearrange their schedules to go see a movie. Here’s my take on what a comedy spec needs in order to be successful in 2019. For starters, you need a big concept (The Hangover) or a big situation (being a Bridesmaid) that hasn’t been seen in theaters for at least the last 20 years. That gets people charged up. Well-known new technology – in this case, Uber – is what I’d consider a “big situation.” So they got that part right. But there were a couple of things wrong with it. First, it was a few years too late. If this would’ve came out in 2014? It would’ve done four times what it did over this weekend easily. Second, the technology is too similar to previous situations we’ve seen in movies. This is basically, “Two mismatched guys in a car.” We’ve seen that setup hundreds of times before. Changing the car to a ride-share service isn’t enough to get people excited. All they see in the previews is two guys in a car. They don’t see “Uber.” And so it just didn’t look that original.

Once you’ve got a great concept or a great situation, you need to nail the casting. That’s what I’d say are the two biggest factors for success with comedies. Great idea and casting. Hollywood continues to make this mistake where they get inside their little echo chambers about who the best “up and coming” actors are and because all their agent and producer buddies are parroting the names, they think the actors are bigger than they actually are. The average person has no idea who Kumail Nanjiani and Dave Bautista are other than, “Hey, that’s that guy from that one movie.” Instead, you should cast a) the best actors and b) the actor combo with the best chemistry. That’s what they did with The Hangover. Nobody knew who any of those guys were. But they were perfect for their parts. In Kumail and Dave’s defense, they seem to like each other a lot. But chemistry isn’t just getting along. It’s about projecting the dynamic required to make the film believable. In this case, these guys WEREN’T supposed to like each other. So it just didn’t pop enough in the trailers. I’ll point to one of the best casting decisions of all time, when Sylvester Stallone cast Carl Weathers as Apollo Creed in Rocky. He hated Carl in his audition. Hated him. Carl was loud, crude, insulting, and mean to Stallone. However, that’s exactly who Apollo Creed needed to be in Rocky. So he cast him.

It’s crazy to me that the last two break out comedy hits were The Hangover and Bridesmaids. I still have faith though, my friends! The cool thing about the comedy spec space right now is that unlike horror and thrillers, where you have to think about containing them to keep the budget down, comedies need to be big and action-packed these days. So you can come up with big premises and have fun with big wild set pieces if you want. And if your concept is awesome and your script is hilarious, you can sell one of these.

Meanwhile, Crawl made 11 million dollars. I’ve read some conflicting reports on whether this take should be considered a success or not. Some people believe the film bombed. Others think it did well considering it had such a tiny budget and was competing in the lion’s den known as the summer movie season. I’m hard-pressed to say that any film whose marketing budget only allowed them to make people aware of the movie the week of its release is a failure if it made over 10 million dollars. People didn’t know this movie existed last Monday. And on top of that, you’ve got two actors who nobody recognizes. I think Crawl did solid business all things considered. And like I said, this is one more bullet in the chamber for Team Spec Sale.

Michael Rasmussen, who wrote the script with his brother Shawn, tells Final Draft how they came up with the idea: “ It’s just so crazy how you live side-by-side with alligators. You’re side-by-side with these predators and they’re walking across your golf courses; sometimes they’ll get stuck under your house. You just peacefully coexist with these things that can turn on you at any moment. One of the years I was there, there was a hurricane and people were being kind of casual about that, too. Not so much now, but at that time they were like, “ah, a hurricane is coming. I’ll just ride it out. It’s not a big deal.” There’s just this attitude down there that I wanted to capture. I sat down with Shawn and said, “I have this idea and we should just write it before someone else comes up with it.” That started about two years ago.”

Later in the interview, brother Shawn noted the challenge of writing on spec: “It’s interesting when you’re writing a spec because you’re really writing it to maximize it to the full effect; everything has got to be really perfect. In the spec market it’s so hard to get something that generates interest so we worked super hard for six months to make it the best script we could.” Later still, Shawn gave his advice to aspiring screenwriters: “I would say write. If you want to be a screenwriter, you need to write a screenplay. You need to sit down and do it. Sometimes your first three, four, five scripts are going to be not so good, maybe even awful. But you’re going to get better by doing it. You need to sit down and just write. I think that’s the most important thing.” I’ll definitely be checking Crawl out once it comes to digital.

The 2019 box office shows just how big Disney has become. This kind of dominance has never happened before. Avengers: Endgame, Captain Marvel, Toy Story 4, Aladdin. Only at number 5 do we get another studio, Sony’s Spider-Man. And we still have Disney behemoths The Lion King and The Last Jedi coming. I know I just wrote a newsletter about how Disney has to fall at some point. But who’s going to topple them? Universal’s biggest properties are Fast and Furious and Jurassic Park. Warner Brothers is Batman and Wonder Woman. Paramount’s is Mission Impossible and Sony’s is the Spider-Man universe. Do you see any of those taking down Pixar, Marvel, or Star Wars? Good gosh, these studios might have to actually, you know, come up with some NEW IDEAS if they want to challenge Mouse Head. Will any of them have the stones to take a chance? We’ll see!

Last week we talked about how to set up a scene in order to create the best dialogue. Today we’re going to go back even further than that and talk about how to create characters that lead to good dialogue. How important is character creation when it comes to dialogue? Well, you know that guy Quentin Tarantino? The screenwriter who many believe writes the best dialogue in town? All Tarantino does is he creates a series of larger-than-life characters and simply lets them talk. You could argue that unless you’re constructing some of your characters with the larger-than-life gene, you’re dooming your screenplay to bad dialogue. Think about it, how many average characters do you remember in all of the movies you’ve seen who spit out memorable dialogue? I’m guessing none.

So my first piece of advice to you when it comes to character and dialogue is to create a character who’s larger than life in some way. Now when I say, “larger than life,” I don’t mean Melissa McCarthy in Bridesmaids. I mean there’s something about your character’s personality that’s bigger than the average person. Juno is a good example. That character was talkative and opinionated, slightly larger than life. But she was still able to exist in reality. Steve Jobs in Aaron Sorkin’s “Jobs,” is another example. Big and opinionated and intelligent and thoughtful. He had that larger than life quality.

So the next question becomes, how do we vary these characters? Not everyone should be Juno. The good news is, it’s not as hard as you think. Personality comes in many different flavors. There’s the motormouth, the joker, the know-it-all, the b.s.’er, the opinionated, the walking thesaurus. Write out a list of all the people you know in your life and next to them write down what their most dominant trait is and you’ll get a sense of what types of people are fun to listen to and what types aren’t. You can also watch sit coms (Seinfeld is a good one) where characters, especially guest characters, are highlighted by a particular trait (the soup nazi is militant, for example), and get ideas that way. It’s important to note that every trait is scaleable to the tone of the movie you’re writing. There’s a version of the Soup Nazi for a move like “The Mule.” You’d just have to dial the goofiness back and make him one of the drug dealers, not a soup dealer.

One of the things that really gets in the way of good dialogue is, believe it or not, the main character. This is because your main character is often the most grounded variable in your story. Their goals and desires need a certain element of truth to them for us to care about their journey. Unfortunately, this often makes them an un-engaging conversationalist. And normal conversation isn’t as fun to read as larger-than-life conversation. This is why people remember Han Solo over Luke Skywalker, Jack Sparrow over Will Turner.

There are a couple of ways to deal with this. The first is to buck the trend of writing a grounded main character and center your story around someone larger than life. A good example of this is The Narrator (Edward Norton) in Fight Club. The guy is very thoughtful and has lots of opinions on work, love, and life, and he’s giving us a rundown of these thoughts throughout the story. He’s anything but your average grounded main character. Christy Hall’s angry man-hating heroine, Skylar, in her spec, “Get Home Safe,” is another anti-grounded character who says what’s on her mind and doesn’t care how you feel about it.

The second way to tackle this problem is to identify which character in your script shares the most screentime with your grounded lead and make sure they’re a larger-than-life character. A recent example of this is Hell or High Water. In that film, Toby Howard (Chris Pine) is our muted reserved down-to-earth lead and Tanner Howard (Ben Foster), his brother, is our alcoholic rambling joking threatening larger-than-life character. What this does is it creates contrast between the characters. Contrast results in a steady wave of conflict. And conflict is where you’re going to find all of your best dialogue. And the reason, of course, that you do this with the second biggest character is because you’ll have a ton of scenes with those characters throughout the screenplay, which guarantees you a lot of good dialogue exchanges.

One of the most dangerous things you can do in a script is create two down-to-earth grounded leads who aren’t big talkers. I’m sure a few cinephiles here can name a movie or two where that’s worked. But I’m guessing those examples are few and far between.

How many larger-than-life characters should you include in your script? That’s obviously going to depend on genre and what kind of script you’re writing. Every character will have a function in the screenplay that may or may not jive with being “larger than life.” However, one of the nice things about supporting characters is that their lives don’t have to be as fully-shaped and grounded as your leads. Therefore, you can have more fun with them. A movie with great dialogue is Good Will Hunting and pretty much every supporting character in that movie is larger than life. Chuckie (Ben Affleck) was a big goofball. Morgan (Casey Affleck) was the willing butt of the joke. Skylar was big and humorous and always ready to have fun. Lambeau (the math professor) was this fevered tortured soul desperate to see this young man reach his potential. And of course Sean the Therapist was the most animated character of them all. If there ever was a movie to prove the point of this article – that larger-than-life characters are the key to good dialogue – Good Will Hunting would be it. To summarize, there’s no limit to how many of these characters you can add. But there are situations where you have to be very judicious about adding multiple larger-than-life characters. I probably wouldn’t have a ton of them in Moonlight, for example.

I want to finish this off by saying that one of the consistent threads in the scripts I read that contain lifeless dialogue is the lack of interesting characters. It’s hard to make someone sound unique who isn’t. This is the reason for another big dialogue faux-pas, which is try-hard dialogue – characters saying big outlandish things that they would never say. This happens when writers construct uninteresting characters and then try to shove interesting words into their mouths. It doesn’t work because it never feels like the real character. It feels like the writer.

In the coming weeks, we’re going to learn how to apply these tools to actually write good dialogue. Should be fun!

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Genre: Horror
Premise: A family must fend off a relentless vampire attack during one of the most famous storms in American history, Hurricane Katrina.
About: You may not be a fan of Lionsgate’s recent output, but if you’re a screenwriter, you should be a fan of their studio. That’s because these guys still buy scripts. And they purchased Jaswinski’s latest last year. Kenya Barris (who’s looking to expand beyond his sit-com roots) will produce the film.
Writer: Anthony Jaswinski
Details: 86 pages

Is there a screenwriter who knows how to craft a simple high concept idea better than Anthony Jaswinski? If so, Jaswinski isn’t far from the top. In a business full of superheroes, live action Disney characters, and IP, Jaswinski continues to steadily belt out original specs that always get bought up and turned into movies. The box office for those movies has been spotty. But The Shallows showed what kind of damage his specs can do. Today, however, he’s really going out there. We’re talking floods and vampires. I don’t know how those two things go together. But I’m eager to find out.

It’s 2005. We start on a fire crew walking into a French Quarter townhouse bedroom where a woman has been burned to death on a bed. We then cut to three days earlier, where we meet Adam, Shannon, and their 10 year old daughter, Sadie, who arrive in downtown New Orleans from Florida.

Shannon’s mother died recently and they’re going to stay in her townhouse for the time being because they’re having all sorts of money problems. Shannon was a star dancer but recently had an injury that cut her career short. And then Adam recently lost his job. So yeah, things aren’t going well, you could say. They pull up their “new” house which, oh yeah, happens to be the same house we saw the fire crew walk into in the teaser.

Shannon, who’s a recovering drug addict, quickly hooks up with some bad people who she knew growing up. And even though there’s a huge storm on the way and the city is recommending evacuation, the family stays, and Shannon slips out to get her fix. She comes back looking sickly and pale. Assuming she’s on some drug, Adam wants to take her to the hospital. The problem is, with the storm worsening, hospitals and police aren’t an option.

And that’s when things get really bad. Three druggies in rain coats and hoods, one tall man, one woman covered in tattoos, and a third guy, come to their door and demand to see Shannon. Adam tells them to get lost but they say if you don’t let us see her, we’re going to see her our own way. Adam screams at them to leave, and they do, for awhile. But then they come back. And this time, they’re getting in.

Shannon mentally deteriorates until she commits suicide by burning herself to death. From there, Adam does everything in his power to protect his daughter. They fend off the vampires in the townhouse for a bit, and then they run to a neighbor’s house and hide out there. However, one thing remains clear – these vampires aren’t stopping until they take out all of Shannon’s family.

One of the first things that struck me about this script was just how much character development there was. If I’ve had a beef with Jaswinski’s writing, it’s that his characters all seem so thin. But here we get tons of backstory about this family and their problems with each other and their connection to this city and issues with jobs and addiction and money — I mean, I felt like I really knew this family by the time the s&*% hit the fan.

But when you think about it, this is how every contained horror slash home invasion movie should start. The challenge with contained horror is that it’s such a limiting narrative. Once the bad guys are in the house, there’s only about 20 pages of attacking you can do. The rest of the time you have to figure out something else to keep the audience entertained.

For that reason, you should utilize your entire first act to set up your characters. This helps push back the entry point of the invaders which means you don’t have as much time to fill up. And the nice thing about it is that we’ll care more because we know the characters better. And that’s what happened here.

Jaswinski was also aware of the trappings of this genre and made a couple of clever choices to combat them. First, he had Shannon get sick (bitten) first. This meant that even though the home invaders hadn’t technically gotten in yet, they were effectively in, since Shannon was turning into a vampire. This allowed for a 8-10 page sequence where Shannon turns and ultimately needs to be killed.

That was followed by yet another sequence where police come to the door but they’re acting suspicious and we eventually learn that they’re the vampires. It’s little sequences like this that eat up pages before you get to the actual home invasion. And even with this stuff, Jaswinski recognizes that there’s not enough house to spend 30 pages creeping from floor to floor in while avoiding the bad guys. So he has the characters flee the house, and go to another character’s house across the street, George, who was set up earlier.

Another strange thing about these movies is that your best scenes aren’t necessarily going to be the brute physical battles that take place when the characters confront each other. The most tense scene in “French Quarter” for me was when they got to George’s house and Adam’s covered in blood, and the “police” show up outside George’s door and they yell inside to open up, that the man George is harboring “just brutally murdered his wife!” Adam makes his case that they’re lying and that they’re not really police, but George isn’t sure. That moment of: “What is George going to do?” is the single most suspenseful moment in the script.

My main issue with the script is that it was so freaking dark and depressing. Right from the start, nothing is going right for this couple. They’ve about given up on life. Then they get caught in one of the worst storms in the country’s history. Then Shannon goes and basically commits suicide by giving herself to the vampires. Then it’s 60 minutes of hardcore unimaginable horror. That’s the trick with horror films is that you want to stay true to the horror element. But you also want people leaving the theater feeling a rush. I left this feeling mega-depressed. It just wasn’t a happy story.

I remember Jordan Peele bring up this very topic when he talked about the challenges of writing Get Out. On the one hand, he wanted to make this very serious movie about race. But he also wanted it to be fun. And he was constantly struggling to marry those two extremes. I suppose this is something that can be debated either way. I’m not sure anybody leaves The Exorcist feeling a rush. But personally, for me, I need that in my horror films.

Still, this was a well-written script that’s a good template for those of you looking to sell one yourself.

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

What I learned: I just consulted on a horror script recently and I was telling the writer that one of the biggest mistakes newbie horror writers make is they come up with a HORROR SITUATION and then pepper in some real life around it. But you want to look at it the opposite way. Once you have your idea, you need to come up with a LIFE SITUATION and then build the horror around that. This is a really good example of that. Clearly, Jaswinski thought long and hard about this family and then built the scary stuff around them.