Genre: Horror
Premise: A young married couple move to a remote cabin in Idaho only to learn that the land comes with a spirit that makes itself visible in unique ways every season.
About: He’s at it again! Shawn Levy is arguably running Netflix at this point. Stranger Things, which he produces, is Netflix’s Marvel. They are going to ride that thing for the next couple decades if they can. To keep Levy happy, they buy everything he comes to them with. And this latest score netted 7 figures! It’s a short story that appeared in six parts on Reddit’s famous “no sleep” subreddit which you can read here.
Writer: Matt Query (brother Harrison will help adapt the script)
Details: Roughly the length of a feature screenplay
One of the complaints I hear when I tell screenwriters to consider writing a short story is that it’s hard to get a short story published anywhere respectable. To them I say, this is the 3rd of 4th big sale that has come off of Reddit, which doesn’t require you to win over a single website publisher.
Here’s what I suggest you do. Write your script. Then write a short story version of your script. Put it up on Reddit, and if it’s good it’ll get upvotes and gain fans and now you’re in the game. If you’re lucky enough to sell your short story, you then ALSO sell your services to adapt the script. You know what that’s called? It’s called Double Payday.
And you already have a head start because you’ve written the script. That means you send in your draft after two weeks and the producers say, “Wow, this writer is fast! I don’t want to just work with him on this project. I want him to write that other project I have too!” All of a sudden, your bank is bothering you because you’re depositing too much money.
If you’re secretly a slow writer, well, it’s too late for them to do anything about that. They’ve already given you the job. You can use that time to figure out how to write faster. Rian Johnson notoriously said that he was wary about taking the Star Wars job because it took him so long to write scripts and they needed the script quickly. But he gambled on himself and came up with one of the best screenplays ever writ…. okay, maybe Rian Johnson isn’t the best example. But you get what I’m saying.
Former marine, Harry, and his wife, Sasha, decide to leave the urban rat race and get a cabin in the middle of Idaho. It’s a dream come true. There are beautiful views in every direction you look and you have an unlimited amount of land.
Not long after they move in, Harry and Sasha are visited by old-timers Dan and Lucy, who live on the property nearest them. After sharing pleasantries, Dan and Lucy ask to speak to Harry and Sasha about something serious.
You see, this land used to be Native American land and, as a result, there are spirits who show up every season. The first spirit, which comes in Spring, is the simplest. It’s a light that will appear above the pond. All you have to do to get rid of it is light a fire. But do not, under any circumstances, wait too long. Something terrible will happen if you do.
Next up is summer and while Dan seems to think this is an easy one, I sure don’t. A man will come running out of the forest buck naked being chased by a bear. You must kill that man. Whatever you do, do not allow him to come inside your fenced property. If he does, he will be very dangerous. You don’t even need to worry about the bear. All you have to do is kill the man. It’s preferable to shoot him because if you don’t, the bear will eat him alive and it’s no picnic watching. “Bear Chase” might happen 2 or 3 times a season.
Fall is bad. That’s when the scarecrow comes. The scarecrow will appear outside your yard, slumped over in a sitting position. You must not, under any circumstances, allow him to get within 20 yards of your property. You need to tie him with a rope, drag him away from the house, then burn him. He will occasionally come to life to fight you, but he’s weak. Just burn him as soon as possible.
Finally, there’s winter. Winter isn’t usually a problem for residents because it’s the ghost season. If you killed anyone in your life, those ghosts will arrive on your property and start milling around. Harry killed four people during his service. So that’s going to be no picnic. Unfortunately, you can’t get rid of the ghosts. You just have to suffer through them until they leave.
Looks like Harry and Sasha got more than they bargained for. But Harry doesn’t believe any of this spiritual nonsense. That is until, a few nights later, when the light appears. At first, Harry thinks the neighbors are involved. They planted it somehow. But there’s a part of him that worries all of this may be real. And if it is, what has he gotten himself into?
This was a REALLY GOOD short story.
A couple of things popped out right away. First, usually when you have a horror movie, there’s a single horror element. A ghost. Zombies. Demon possession. As a result, you have a good feel for what you’re getting into and that gives you a sense of safety as the reader. “Cabin” creates four distinctively different horror scenarios that give the story a “4 for the price 1” feel to it. It’s immediately more exciting than your average horror film.
Next, I loved how we get the bare-bones backstory out of the way of who Harry and Sasha are, why they moved here, then AS SOON as that’s taken care of, we go right into Dan providing the rules of the land. No wasted time in the story, just like a screenplay.
What the Dan rules do is create a sense of anticipation. Once we learn about these four things, we have to stick around to see them for ourselves. Of course, it helps that each of the four spirits are unique. That’s part of the intrigue. If the writer had written, “In summer, zombies show up, in the winter, werewolves, the fall, demons, and spring an axe-murderer,” I would’ve been out. It’s the creativity behind the things coming that make them so intriguing.
This is why I always remind you to come up with more creative choices. Nine out of ten writers with a similar idea would’ve used the werewolves, zombies, demon stuff because that’s what everybody chooses. You have to dig deeper to find the cool stuff like this.
There’s also something cool about how the spirits aren’t singular objects but rather objects that require specific actions to take place to defeat them. It adds even more excitement to the dangerous element. Let’s say the scarecrow was just a scary scarecrow. We’ve seen that already. In “Cabin,” it’s not just a scarecrow. It’s a half-alive thing that you need to kill in a specific way. This ensures that the reader isn’t just thinking ahead to what this scarecrow is going to look like. But is Harry going to be able to a) kill it and b) kill it the way it’s supposed to be killed?
Once you’ve created anticipation for anything in your story, you’ve succeeded. Because now the reader has to read to find out what happens. If Harry and Sasha would’ve come here and there were no neighbors and then 25% of the way into the story, the light shows up and we don’t know what it is and they try to figure it out over the next 20 pages and blah blah blah – I’m not saying that wouldn’t work. But this way that the writers did it is much smarter.
This is going to be a weird comparison but this is the same way James Cameron structured Titanic. Once we got everyone onto the prep ship, the characters go through a graphic illustration of everything that happened to the ship that led to its sinking. This makes the viewer want to watch the movie so he can get to these parts and see how Jack and Rose navigate them.
There are only three reasons I didn’t give this a “genius.” One, it seemed like they could’ve done more with the three spirits. I thought for sure they were going to accidentally kill a real person dressed up as one of these things. Or I thought that we’d get a surprise and there’s an additional ghost. It’s revealed that Sasha killed someone and kept it a secret. Next, the ending could’ve been better. It was almost there but it definitely wasn’t the best option. And finally… WHY THE HECK WOULD YOU STAY AND LIVE HERE???? I get that views are stunning but I mean… I’ll take a 1 bedroom basement apartment in Brooklyn any day over this.
This is the first time – I think ever – that I’ve seen a writer inject a Native American angle into a horror story that worked. For me, at least. Usually, the Native American horror thing is explored in a very cliche mumbo-jumbo way that’s never that interesting. The way these spirits attack is so specific and unique, it truly brings the concept alive. I’m not surprised AT ALL that this sold for 7 figures. It’s worth it.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[x] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Another complaint I hear from screenwriters is that they don’t know how to write a short story. Dude, short stories are easy. Remember, all stories have the same basic format. There’s a beginning, the setup, a middle, the conflict, and an ending, the resolution. The only major difference is you’re going to be inside your character’s head more so you’ll be conveying their thoughts. That takes some getting used to. But the coolest thing about short stories is they offer more creative flexibility. You can tell the story through newspaper articles, for example, blog entries, letters, or mix all of them together. Don’t be afraid of the short story format. Embrace it! It allows you to tap into story opportunities that aren’t there in the screenwriting world.
What I learned 2: All good stories amount to dangling juicy carrots in front of the reader. This one had three really juicy carrots (bear chase, scarecrow, ghosts) that I would’ve followed for as long as they were dangled.
As some of you know, I used to play tennis competitively. Before Scriptshadow, I taught tennis for almost a decade. Unfortunately, teaching got me so burned out on the sport that I eventually limited my tennis exposure to raising my fist from the safety of my couch whenever Federer hit a passing shot on TV.
However, I’ve started to play again, and something I found which I didn’t have available to me when I was playing is Youtube. There are now hundreds of tennis pros teaching the sport through the internet. And a handful of them are really good. So good that I’m learning a bunch of new things that nobody ever taught me when I played (i.e. wrist lag, unit turn).
These things have allowed me to hit the ball with more confidence than I had even back when I was playing competitively! What sucks, though, is that I’ll never have the speed and quickness I had when I was 21. That’s the downside of sports. True, the older you get, the more knowledge you gain. But also the more athletic ability you lose. John McEnroe knows ten times as much about strategy as Rafael Nadal. But McEnroe is 60 so it doesn’t matter.
Why I am dragging you down this depressing road? Actually, there’s a silver lining to this anecdote. It made me realize that with screenwriting, THERE IS NO PHYSICAL REQUIREMENT. You can learn new things at 40, at 50, at 60, and KEEP GETTING BETTER. Nothing is stopping you from doing so.
There is a caveat to this, however. You have to be willing to be a STUDENT OF THE CRAFT. There is another version of Tennis Carson who thinks he knows everything. Bizarro Tennis Carson would never look up instructional videos on Youtube. He already knows it all. I see this same hubris in writers all the time. They think they’ve eclipsed some skill level that anoints them “learned everything they need to learn.”
The second you think you’ve learned everything, you’re toast. This is why you see wunderkinds come out of nowhere in their early 20s only to become one-hit wonders. Shane Carruth. Richard Kelly. Success gave them the impression that they didn’t need to learn anything else. After Primer, Carruth thought he was God and, as a result, spent the next two decades miffed that nobody understood the 500 page script he’d written about ice dragons.
I hear from writers 50 years old and older all the time concerned that Hollywood doesn’t want them because of their age. That’s not the way to look at it. You have more knowledge about this craft (not to mention, life experience) than 95% of the people out there. That’s a huge advantage.
The real reason most older writers struggle is because the older you get, the more you gravitate towards slow low-concept ideas. I see this a lot. I’ll read a slow moving medium-level concept and when I check the e-mail, the writer either says or hints that he’s older. Their understanding of the craft, their plot execution, and their character writing are always better than younger writers. But you can’t escape an unexciting idea.
Meanwhile, young writers have the opposite problem. They usually come in, guns blazing, throwing out the coolest idea ever. But when it comes to execution, there’s an inherent sloppiness. The writers have somewhat of a grasp on the fundamentals. But you can tell they haven’t been on the ice long enough to land a double-axel.
Just this week, I ran into a great premise for the contest. It was Harry Potter set in an inner city school. But the script only managed a “LOW MAYBE” because the execution was wobbly. And yes, the writer is young.
I’m telling you this so that you always keep trying to learn. There was a time before I started Scriptshadow where I thought I knew everything about screenwriting. I really did. Do you know how many new things I’ve learned about the craft since then? Easily 300. Probably closer to 500. A lot of that from reading screenplays.
One in particular is “dramatic irony.” That’s when you put your hero in a situation where we know they’re in trouble but they don’t. It’s the famous rooftop scene between John McClane and Hans in Die Hard. We know that’s a terrorist. But McClane thinks he’s a hostage. I can’t imagine writing a script without knowing that today. It’s one of the best ways to create suspense and tension in a scene.
I want to finish off today by featuring the first page of a script that made it into my “HIGH MAYBE” pile for The Last Great Screenplay Contest. For those who haven’t been following the contest, I’m in the process of reading the first ten pages of each entry and then I put the script in the “NO,” “LOW MAYBE,” “HIGH MAYBE,” or “YES” pile. The large majority of the scripts are ending up in the NO and LOW MAYBE piles. So if you get into the HIGH MAYBE, you’re doing something right.
This script – to tie it into today’s theme – helped me re-learn something I always forget the importance of. I’ll read two scripts back to back and they’ll be covering the same subject matter. Someone is murdered. Marines out in the battlefield. A meet-cute scene. But one script will be noticeably better. And what this writer demonstrates is the reason. Let’s take a look…
What writer Chris Dennis does so well here is he uses words to create sounds and images that put you inside the story.
“SMOKE billowing out of its open hood.”
“SINGES his hand, jerks it back—“
“The SOUND of tires creeping across gravel…”
“HEADLIGHTS sweep…”
“IDLES ominously.”
“squints, BLINDED by the lights.”
“shields his eyes”
“He slumps to the ground”
“BLACK BOLERO HAT. Leather sport coat. Dark eyes, darker expression”
Even if you only read these snippets I highlighted, you’d feel the intensity of the scene. That’s how effective this type of writing is. You’re seeing these images. You’re hearing these sounds.
What’s cool about this is that he never overuses the description. That’s the reason most writers shy away from this sort of thing. They think it bulks up the description. But there’s only a single paragraph on this page that reaches three lines. You can do this and still keep the writing lean.
So those of you self-professed students of the craft – which should be all of you – you now have a new skill to try out. Get to writing!
Genre: Sci-Fi/Comedy
Premise: (from Black List) An unlikely group is thrown together by mysterious events that leads them to uncover a government conspiracy.
About: Netflix owns the world! This flashy Black List script (which finished in the top 25) was pitched as Friday meets Get Out and got a Netflix green light out of it. I think a better pitch would be Boys In the Hood meets Dude Where’s My Car. But, of course, if you’re pitching anything in Hollywood, it’s always best to use the most recent breakout hit when possible. If you’ve got a cool action script set around racing, I wouldn’t pitch it as “Ben Hurr meets The Bridge on The River Kwai.” They Cloned Tyrone originally attracted Brian Tyree Henry for the lead, but ended up casting John Boyega. The film will be directed by Creed 2 writer, Juel Taylor. Taylor wrote the script with Tony Rettenmaier.
Writer: Juel Taylor and Tony Rettenmaier
Details: 112 pages
The other day you heard me discussing Ghostbusters. There’s a reason Hollywood is so obsessed with that film. It’s because it’s arguably the best film in history to cross comedy over with supernatural. Comedy and Supernatural and Comedy and Sci-Fi are Hollywood crack. There’s something about those combos that audiences love when they’re done well.
What’s unique about They Cloned Tyrone is that it mixes comedy and sci-fi but it’s also R-rated. The reason this is relevant is that this film never would’ve been made by the old Hollywood. The R rating is too limiting. If it’s going to be a comedy, you want 12 year olds to be able to show up. However, Netflix obliterates that equation. It’s something they don’t even have to think about. Part of the reason is they have a loophole, which is that it’s a lot easier for a 12 year old to watch an R-rated movie on Netflix than it is to see one in the theater.
This is good news for movie lovers. It means we’re going to see more content that, in the past, never would’ve been made. The only question left for today is, is the script actually any good? Let’s find out.
27 year old Tyrone Fontaine (I’m assuming his name is Tyrone although he’s only ever called ‘Fontaine’) lives in The Glen, the kind of neighborhood where you need to be on your toes 24/7. Especially if you’re a drug dealer, which Fontaine is.
When Fontaine learns that his latest deal is short on cash and that cash is in the hands of a squirrelly pimp named Slick Charles, he storms over to Slick Charles’ place to get it. Slick Charles is busy telling his top prostitute, Yo-Yo, that her dreams of achieving a real life are hogwash and she needs to embrace being a hooker.
When Fontaine comes in, Slick Charles starts making all these excuses as to why he doesn’t have the money. And that’s when Fontaine’s Rival, Isaac, arrives and pops lots of caps into him. Fontaine tries to stay alive but dies. Or, at least, he thinks he dies. The next morning, he wakes up in his bed. What the heck is going on!
Fontaine heads back to Slick Charles, who says, oh yeah, you died all right. But if he’s dead, then who’s he? Or I? That’s the question he has to answer so Fontaine grabs Slick Charles and Yo-Yo and they head to Isaac’s trap house, seeing as he’s the one who killed Fontaine. Maybe he has answers.
When they get there, they discover that the house is actually a secret hideout with an underground laboratory. There they discover a white guy with an afro who Slick Charles accidentally kills before they can ask him questions. They also find Fontaine’s dead body!
The group is blown away by all this and they need some food to set their minds straight. So they head to Got Damn Fried Chicken, only to find that another white guy with an afro is serving everyone, and that the chicken is laced with something that’s making them all laugh uncontrollably! What’s going on?
The group will go to the barber shop, the salon, the church, and anywhere else they can find until they discover what the heck is going on here. Or, more specifically, figure out who the hell cloned Tyrone!
There’s a lot to like about this script. It’s got a killer title. It’s got a chaotic energy to it. It takes us to places we don’t usually see. The voice is strong. The dialogue pops off the page.
But They Cloned Tyrone is a tale of two halves.
Through the first half of the script, I struggled to stay invested. I was trying to figure out why and then it hit me. The script has a goal. But there are no stakes attached to that goal. The goal is one of curiosity more than requirement. If they fail to find out why Tyrone was cloned, nothing changes in his life. In fact, he can go back to his drug dealing ways and not be affected.
Now the script does get better in the second half. But by that point, I’d already grown bored.
That’s one of the tough things about writing. You can have strong plot points show up in your script. But if you wait too long, you may have already lost the reader. The general idea is you want to have something every 12-15 pages that ups the stakes and makes the journey feel more important than it did the previous 15 pages. Cause that’s what I was struggling with in the first half. Why do they need to do this? I think Dude Where’s My Car even had stakes attached to finding the car. There was something important in the car they needed if memory serves correctly.
It’s always tough with concepts like this because there’s a tendency to think that because it’s a comedy, you don’t need stakes. But stakes matter in comedies. Look no further than Tag to see how a lack of stakes can make a movie feel utterly pointless (there were zero stakes attached to “tagging” their untaggable friend).
This isn’t the best idea but since drugs and money play a big part in the story, you could’ve created a situation where Tyrone owes a lot of money to someone. And he had that money (or the drugs) on him when he was killed. Therefore, he needs to find his dead body to get the money/drugs back so he can pay off whoever he owes. That way you get your stakes AND your ‘what’s going on here’ mystery.
There’s a scene in the script which could’ve turbo-boosted things if it had done this. Fontaine is at the barbershop and runs into his rival, Isaac. Isaac is pissed and wants to kill him. But he only wants to kill him because it’s Fontaine. Not because there’s any story reason for him to do so. If Fontaine owed him money, now Isaac has actual business with Fontaine. He has a reason to chase him down.
However, if you can stick around past the midpoint, that’s when things get crazy and They Cloned Tyrone kicks into high gear. There’s an old saying that if you’re going to go crazy, there’s no point in going halfway. And these writers FULLY embrace that mantra. (spoiler) The midpoint twist is that there’s this whole underground “Westworld” type lab where white people are cloning black people to keep the Glen a ghetto.
At that point, I was turning the pages solely to find out just how weird things were going to get. You guys know how much I value not knowing what’s going to happen next in a script. In a medium where it’s easy to predict everything the writer’s about to write, it’s rare that I get to experience this level of “what happens next?” So that was appreciated.
However, that feeling of not caring whether Tyrone achieved the goal or not throughout the first 55 pages never left me. One of the hardest things in the world to do is to have a viewer uninterested for half your movie and then come up with some magic trick where they all of a sudden love it. I admired the insanity of They Cloned Tyrone’s second half. But, emotionally, I was just never into it.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Here’s a description of Fontaine:“Late-20s… ripped like vintage denim.” Here’s why I don’t like “clever” descriptions like this. Because they don’t tell you what you’re looking at. “Denim” does not make me imagine someone who’s ripped and strong. It isn’t wrong to use descriptions like this. I know Shane Black made a career out of it. But I always encourage writers to place clear over clever. Clever gets you a nod or a smile. But clear keeps the writer in your imaginary world. Not to mention, there’s a thin line between “clever” and “too clever by half.” If you cross that line, a nod can become a sigh. A smile can become an eye-roll.
Genre: Sci-Fi
Premise: In the future, every man and woman must voluntarily die the day they turn 30. But there are a few who refuse to do so. Instead, they run.
About: There may not be a project in Hollywood that’s been more developed than Logan’s Run. An untold number of drafts have been written over the years and many directors have attached themselves to the project only to eventually move on. The draft I’m reviewing today is special as it was co-written by my writing crush, Alex Garland. One day Logan’s Run will be made. The premise is tailor-designed for a 2 hour feature film. But which combination of creatives will finally get it across the finish line remains unknown. For the ones that do, they might want to use this version of the script as a guide.
Writers: Alex Garland and Michael Dougherty (based on the novel by William F. Nolan and George Clayton Johnson)
Details: 2010 draft
Yesterday’s post got me all nostalgic for long-running projects in development hell and one of the most famous of those unmade movies is Logan’s Run. The project seems to have been greenlit a dozen times in the past two decades, yet it always seems to fall apart.
However, I know it will get made eventually. How do I know that? Cause it’s got the ultimate GSU factor working for it, baby! Goal, get out of the city. Urgency, everyone’s trying to get you. Stakes, you fail you die.
The briefly conveyed backstory of Logan’s Run (by the way, if you’re writing a big sci-fi script, the more briefly you can convey your backstory, the better) is that there was a giant war, so an AI dude named Thinker was created to come up with the best way to keep mankind alive. He constructed a city called Eden where the only rule you had to follow was, when you turn 30, you have to die.
Our hero, Logan, is 29. Or somewhere around 29. Nobody quite knows what their age is. That information is given to them via a color-coded leaf tattoo on the inside of your hand. Your leaf starts at green and by the time it becomes all black, you have to go to the “Sleep Shop” where they terminate your too-old ass.
Logan is a sandman. That means he’s the police for people who try to run after their 30th birthday. He will hunt you down and kill you on sight. You don’t even get the dignity of going to Sleep Shop. Logan isn’t just good at his job. He’s the best, with more kills than any sandman in history.
But things become a little extra real for Logan when his good friend and fellow sandman, Cassie, gets her Sleep Shop marching orders. Logan accompanies her to her death, where he’s allowed to watch as she’s taken into a white room and put to sleep. The event has a heavy effect on Logan. He’s always been told how honorable and amazing volunteering for sleep is. But this felt anything but honorable.
Logan is then called to see Thinker, the “doesn’t even try to hide how evil he is” A.I. dictator of Eden. Thinker says he’s heard of this thing called Sanctuary that some runners escape to. He wants to find out where this place is so he can stop it. Therefore, he artificially speeds up Logan’s hand leaf so his death day is…. TODAY. Uh, say what?? says Logan. You see, Thinker says, the best way to find Sanctuary is to become a runner. So Logan’s all of a sudden running for his life.
He eventually meets up with this chick named Penelope, who explains that she gives every runner a chance, even evil sandmen like himself. “Everyone deserves a shot at Sanctuary” is the underground rule. After lots of evading, Penelope leads them back to Sleep Shop, where you must sneak out of the city with all the dead bodies. Out past the mountains of dead people is where they will find Sanctuary. Or will they?
Last week I highlighted an early scene in Street Rat Allie Punches Her Ticket that leaned into the emotional connection of the characters. The reason I did that is to remind you that even when you’re writing a script that might seem like it’s surface-level summer fare, you still need to write scenes – especially early on – that emotionally connect us to the characters and the situation.
Here we get that scene when Logan accompanies Cassie to Sleep Shop. These two have been told their whole lives what an honor this moment is for the human experience. And yet, when they go through it, it’s anything but. It’s cold. It’s cruel. It’s empty. It’s terrifying. I loved how Garland and Dougherty chronicled every second of it.
Weak action writers shy away from moments like this. They want to get them over with as soon as possible because they feel like they’re betraying what the audience came for. “If the audience comes for a big fun action movie, we can’t give them a sad death scene,” is their fear. “They’ll be pissed off.” But these are the scenes that do the best job of connecting us with the characters early on so that we’re emotionally connected with them throughout the rest of the story.
Another thing I want to bring up is irony.
If there’s one thing where you can clearly recognize, as a reader, that the writer is NOT beginner level, it’s when they incorporate irony in a major way. Let’s say you’re writing Logan’s Run. Everything about your script is the same as it is here. The only difference is you haven’t decided who your main character is yet. They’re a blank slate.
You could’ve easily made Logan a street vendor. You could’ve made him a doctor. You could’ve made him a prominent businessman. And most writers in this situation would pick one of those jobs. I know that because I read all those scripts where they did pick those jobs.
That’s not to say these are bad choices.
But, by making Logan a policeman who specifically chases runners, it means that basing the movie around him becoming a runner himself is ironic. It adds more pop to the story. And where it really helps you is in the logline. Everybody loves a well-crafted ironic concept. A man with a major speech impediment must give the most important speech in history (The King’s Speech). So whenever I see that, it’s a good sign that I’m going to read a solid script.
Here’s the thing with these movies, though. You can’t have 90 minutes of running around. I mean, you could. But you’d be shocked at how quickly action becomes boring when you give us one action scene after another after another after another. So when you’re writing this kind of script (a ‘running away from the bad guys’ script) you want to structure the second act so that the ‘running’ set pieces are spread out. Between those running set pieces, you need planning and execution scenes. Those will actually take up the majority of your screen time.
A great movie where you can study this is The Fugitive. But Garland and Dougherty do a good job also. You’ve got Logan and Penelope, and they have to plan some objective (they need to find a guy who can help them, for example). The planning phase is figuring out where he might be and how they’re going to get in contact with them. Then they have to go try and do it. This is the execution part. And, of course, when they do it, something will go wrong, and they’ll be chased. But it’s really the planning and the execution that take up most of the screen time.
Some writers might be scared of that. I NEED TO GIVE THEM ACTION, CARSON! THIS IS AN ACTION MOVIE. Let me ask you this. What’s more enjoyable? The lead up to the roller coaster ride or the roller coaster ride itself? I’d say the anticipation of getting on the roller coaster is pretty darn exciting. That’s what you’re doing with your plan and execution scenes. You’re making the reader wait in line for the ride. They’re not going to be bored if they know there’s a ride at the end.
I didn’t have many issues with this script. The biggest mark against it is that it feels familiar. We’ve seen this format before. Oblivion did it. And I’m sure you guys can think of a dozen other movies with similar plots in the comments. So while the execution was good, it was working within a trope-heavy format that limited just how fresh and cool it could be. I mean, let’s be honest. This is a 50-year-old story.
Despite that, I found it to be really fun. And Alex Garland continues to be one of the most impressive writers around. This was such an easy read. 125 pages read like 95. His writing is so clear and unobtrusive. It’s designed to never have you stop and read a line twice. I love it. The crush remains.
Check this one out. Good stuff!
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[xx] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Two things you can play with that create really solid movie ideas are TIME and SPACE. When you limit those two things, it organically sets up a scenario that is easy for the audience to understand. Time here = 30 years. You have to run before you hit 30. SPACE is this contained city. It’s got walls. It’s got barriers. So it’s very easy for us to understand what the objective is. Logan needs to get out of the city. If your concept feels murky or unclear, use time and space to make it clearer.
I was thinking of all these movies that have been invading my streaming services as of late. As we get further and further away from top-level Hollywood films, I’ve gotten used to “average” being the new “good.”
A lot’s been made of Netflix’s new “Top 10” list, which I admit I like. It helps me spot movies every once in a while that I, otherwise, would’ve missed. Like The Platform. But mostly what it’s told me is that America’s bar is getting lower by the day. Big splashy headlines touted The Old Guard taking the number 1 slot on Netflix a couple of weeks ago. “A sequel is coming!” we’re told, emphatically. But should we really trust a system that has The Kissing Booth 2 as its current champion?
I’ve even seen articles trying to convince me that a Dave Franco directed movie about an AirBnB rental that stars his wife is worth checking out. I don’t wanna be mean here so I’m just going to say, I’m not checking out a bored married couple’s weekend filmmaking experiment.
All this got me thinking about what projects are floating in the Development Hell netherworld that would be SO MUCH BETTER than anything we’re getting at the moment. It might surprise you that I wouldn’t put many of my [NEWLY UPDATED!!] Top 25 scripts on that list. The reason a lot of those scripts remain unmade is because they have certain challenges that are hard to overcome.
Desperate Hours is stuck over at Johnny Depp’s production house and will only ever get made if he decides to make it. Executive Search is a thousand years old and people in Hollywood always assume old scripts that never made it through the system have something wrong with them. Origin of a Species is a really weird script that doesn’t fit into any marketable genre. The writer of Dogs of Babel told me himself that it’s such an oddball premise, everything has to line up perfectly if it’s ever going to get made.
Hollywood is such a weird place that you never know what’s going to get a project through the system. The only reason a movie about a kid who idolizes Hitler got made is because the writer became the hottest name in Hollywood. Would we have ever seen JoJo Rabbit had Waititi not directed Thor: Ragnarok? My guess is no.
This leads us to today’s question, which is, what script have I read in my ten years at Scriptshadow that I am still SHOCKED hasn’t been made into a movie yet? We’re talking a movie I’m POSITIVE would make at least 750 million worldwide. Does that help any of you? It’s likely only Scriptshadow OGs know the answer to this one.
This clue might help. There are three famous movies/franchises that EVER SINCE THEY CAME OUT, Hollywood readers have been desperately looking for the “next” version of. Those three franchises are Goonies, Raiders, and Ghostbusters.
I’m always on the lookout for the next version of those. But there’s a reason we haven’t gotten one. It’s because if you veer too close to the star that is Raiders/Goonies/Ghostbusters, you’re accused of copying. “This is exactly like Raiders,” the reader tells you. I cannot convey the sheer number of Goonies-wannabe scripts that have come across my desktop. And they’re all exactly the same – they’re “Goonies.”
On the flip side, if you write something *too* different, people don’t associate it with the original film, which is the whole point of writing something similar, so that people can say, “This is the next Raiders!”
Well, in all the years I’ve been reading, one spec script has managed to do it. And that script is… DRUM ROLL PLEASE… anybody know? Anyone? Anyone?
Roundtable by Brian K. Vaughn.
The logline is, “Merlin assembles a group of modern-day knights to battle a resurrected ancient evil, but all that’s available are an alcoholic ex-Olympian, a geriatric actor, a grumpy billionaire, and a nerdy scientist.”
This supernatural comedy has the goofy sensibility of a team of inexperienced guys tasked with achieving something otherworldly. But it substitutes fantasy in place of ghosts. This allows it to fall squarely into the “the next Ghostbusters” bullseye without being exactly like Ghostbusters.
So why hasn’t it been made? I don’t know. I once spoke with a prominent director who looked into making it and he told me there were too many people attached due to lapsing rights and a new team coming on and then that team leaving then a new team coming on. So it had eight million people attached to it. It gets hard to make a movie when you have that many people who have a say and that many people you have to pay.
Still, this seems like such a slam dunk to me, I’m surprised it’s still languishing in Development Hell. I mean, with all these Streamers now in the picture, you would think it’d be a drop in the bucket to commit $150 million to the film. All Apple has to do is announce a new iPhone and they’ll have that money in five minutes. Five minutes gets you the next Ghostbusters!
Getting back to the original question I posed above – about how the bar has gotten so low – I’m sure many of you are frustrated that you continue to struggle. “If Hollywood is so comfortable with average,” you’re probably thinking, “how come my average (or slightly above average) screenplay isn’t getting noticed? Shouldn’t what I’m writing be good enough for their low bar? My script is certainly better than The Kissing Booth 2.”
And this is where aspiring screenwriters get it wrong. You don’t get noticed by writing something just as average as that average film you saw last week. Hollywood doesn’t reward, “I can do that too” writing. They only notice when somebody is above and beyond the other writers.
Think about it. Let’s say you’re in fashion. And you’re standing in a crowd of other fashion hopefuls. If you’re dressed like them, why would anybody notice you? The only way to be noticed is to dress in a way that’s above and beyond what everyone else is wearing.
You have to STICK OUT.
You have to blow people away.
Do it with your voice (Christy Hall). Do it with your concept (Roundtable). Do it with your mythology (Street Rat Allie). Do it with your excellent plotting (Fargo). Do it with your dialogue (Diablo Cody). Write a script that takes advantage of that big strength of yours and then show us why you’re so much better than everyone else.
Because as someone who is currently reading a lot of amateur screenplays, I continue to see the same critical mistake. Writers are aiming for too low of a bar. But it’s even more specific than that. There are two types of people who make this mistake. The first type don’t know any better. They’re newer writers who’ve written less than three screenplays. These writers haven’t gotten enough feedback or studied the industry enough to learn that the goal of a script isn’t to be “just as good” as the lowest common denominator.
The second type, however, do know the bar is higher for those trying to break in. And therefore, they’re the ones I’m worried about. Because if you’ve heard me say this before and you’ve discovered on your own that it’s the case, yet you’re still trying to break in with average material – shame on you. You should know, at this point, that that won’t get you anywhere.
I just finished a screenplay consultation and I only noticed afterward that I had used the phrase, “liked it didn’t love it” in the notes. “Liked it didn’t love it” aren’t bad scripts by any measure. But they’re not what you’re aiming for because it’s rare you’re going to get people interested in “like.” In my experience, people only ever get excited about “love.” And if they do like a “like,” it’s usually not long before they’ve moved onto something else. Cause it’s a lot easier to fall out of like than fall out of love. Just ask all my ex-girlfriends.
I know this all sounds harsh and depressing but don’t think of it that way. All I’m trying to do is be that voice in your head that says, “push harder.” There are so many times I read a scene and I think, “This scene could’ve been so much better if the writer had just pushed themselves.” Cause that attitude of not settling for average is the starting point for success in ANY endeavor. Not just screenwriting.
So keep on writing, my friends. And if you have the next Raiders, Ghostbusters, or Goonies, send it my way. :)
