So I watched that Blurry Man Twilight Zone episode you guys recommended last night and now I’m furious with you. That episode was the definition of a “biding time until the twist” script. They literally hit the same beat 50 times in a row. And the big twist wasn’t even a twist. It was more of a shocker. Anyway, you now owe me a suggestion. I’m going to check out at least one Black Mirror episode this weekend. If you see them, let me know which one it should be. And for everyone else – IT’S TIME FOR THE SCREENPLAY SHOWDOWN!!!
If you haven’t played Amateur Showdown before, it’s a cut throat single weekend screenplay tournament where the scripts have been vetted from a pile of hundreds to be featured here, for your entertainment. It’s up to you to read as much of each script as you can, then vote for your favorite in the comments section. Whoever receives the most votes by Sunday 11:59pm Pacific Time gets a review next Friday. If you’d like to submit your own script to compete in a future Amateur Showdown, send a PDF of your script to carsonreeves3@gmail.com with the title, genre, logline, and why you think your script should get a shot.
Good luck!
Title: An Invitation to You
Genre: Dark Comedy
Logline: A bitter empty-nester begrudgingly heads to a secluded resort for solo travelers and is introduced to herself — literally. Awkward dislike gives way to all out warfare when she discovers that only one version of herself will leave at the end of the weekend.
Why You Should Read: The dramatic question at the heart of this story is “Can/should I love myself as I am?” I think it’s a relevant question, because people suck. I know I let myself down all the time. When they first meet themselves, some of the characters in this story detest themselves. Others depress themselves. And others are so infatuated with themselves that they jump right into the sack. I honestly don’t know how I would react if I met myself, which has been part of the fun of writing this story — I get to inhabit every possibility.
One of the big challenges of this story has been figuring out how to present six pairs of “doubles” in a way that isn’t infuriating for the reader (I’m dying to read Jordan Peele’s script for US to see how he did it). I hope I’ve succeeded, but I am very open to feedback!
Also, the action lines of this script aren’t written in first person, so hopefully it will piss fewer people off than my last AOW script. :)
Title: Once Upon a Time in La Mancha
Genre: Western/Comedy
Logline: An old rancher obsessed with dime novels and cowboy stories heads West with his trusting farmhand to offer his own brand of unneeded justice.
Why You Should Read: A Western retelling of Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote, I wanted to translate the chivalric ideals the eponymous character had 400 years ago to a more American and recent setting, transporting the hapless knight near the Mexican-American border to a time when the mythical Old West was dying. Hope you read and enjoy my interpretation!
Title: THE KEEPERS OF THE CUP
Genre: Action/Comedy
Logline: Two die-hard hockey fans thwart a Russian terrorist attack by stealing the Stanley Cup and travel across North America to deliver it in time for Game 7… It’s GET HIM TO THE GREEK meets CELTIC PRIDE.
Why You Should Read: What if I told you amidst a world of boozing, fighting, trash-talking and hockey, there were two men who were the calm within the storm? And what if I told you that these two men were at the center of an outrageously funny story? Would you believe me? Would you believe them? Now if you’re looking for a script with award winning credentials, this won’t be for you. It has too much personality. (Though it did get me named a Universal Pictures Emerging Writers Fellowship finalist if that means anything. (It doesn’t.)) But if you are looking to be entertained, to laugh, and to wonder how on Earth two life-long best friends at the breaking point of their friendship find themselves on the run from Russian terrorists with none other than THE STANLEY CUP, then this is for you. No! This is meant for you. This is the fictional, true story of how these two friends assume the role of “Keepers of the Cup,” a real job where employees of the NHL guard the NHL the legendary Stanley Cup with their lives 365 days a year. This is a story about friendship, this is a story about duty, this is a story about country, and this is a story about becoming the best version of you. This is “The Keepers of The Cup.” I hope you enjoy. If you don’t, well, the Stanley Cup Finals are on.
Title: 48 Hour Token
Genre: Thriller
Logline: Whilst performing an autopsy, a forensic pathologist suspects the body is from the future on a failed mission to prevent a world catastrophe. He must now decide whether to continue the mission, a task that requires bombing a commercial airliner on a transatlantic flight.
Why You Should Read: Money problems. Custody battles. Drinking on the job. A penchant for violence. 48 Hour Token is a high concept thriller that demands a common but deeply flawed man to prevent a world catastrophe whilst fighting to keep his sanity. To save the world, it’s usually expected you must don the spandex to fight the battle between good and evil. In the real world, the protagonists often come with baggage and the room for failure is non existent.
This isn’t a blind submission. In preparation for this Amateur Offerings, I have utilised several coverage services that most followers of this website would be familiar with. 48 Hour Token has been labelled a ‘well constructed thriller’ with ‘multiple, diverse elements’ whilst containing ‘realistic dialogue for the genre’.
Title: Sib
Genre: Psychological thriller
Logline: A young bride’s dream wedding descends into a nightmare after her estranged sister shows up and desperately tries to convince her that the charming groom is actually a sadistic psychopath.
Why You Should Read: One of my previous scripts, an hour long pilot, was optioned to a successful producer out in LA. The project quickly fell into limbo though, so I decided to refocus on my first love of writing features.
My next project, a horror/dark comedy, was chosen to compete in an ‘amateur offerings’ round a few months back, where it ended up finishing in second place. This was slightly heartbreaking but it definitely gave me inspiration to finish up this current project and resubmit, in hopes of potentially landing a review from Carson this time around.
With ‘Sib’, I really aimed to write a concise and continuously moving story. Clocking in at 93 pages, it’s a quick read. I drew inspiration from some of my favorite filmmakers such as Darren Aronofsky and Lars Von Trier, and tried to take the story to some dark and strange places, culminating in an unsettling and hopefully unexpected third act. I’d appreciate the opportunity to participate in another amateur showdown, everyone’s feedback last time was very insightful. Thanks for your time!
Today I want to share with you something I never figured out while I was writing screenplays. This was such a game-changing revelation that had somebody told it to me early on in my journey – as opposed to 15 screenplays in – I’d be writing this entry from the set of a 200 million dollar Disney production as opposed to a couch that has about a dozen uses left in it. I’m talking about understanding what a movie is actually about.
When I started writing, I was under the impression that movies were about the idea. So, in other words, if I came up with an idea about an asteroid that was heading towards earth, I thought my movie was about an asteroid heading towards earth. And you may be thinking, after reading that sentence, that the movie IS about an asteroid heading towards earth. But you’d be wrong. What I’d eventually come to realize is that the prototypical movie idea is only your first act. That’s where you showcase your concept. You have someone discover the asteroid. You have leaders deliberate what to do about the asteroid. You have the planet get wind of the asteroid. You have everybody freaking out. But guess what? That only takes you to page 25.
One of the Matrix moments for me was realizing the movie isn’t about the idea at all. Well, it is. That asteroid is going to be a part of the story all the way through. But the real movie is about what happens once your idea has been established and you’re into the second act. Which is ironic because that’s the act most writers are the least interested in. To them, the second act isn’t a playground to charge into excitedly. It’s a giant wasteland of space that one must “get through” in order to arrive at the more punctual and structured third act.
Let me try and say this another way because Armageddon isn’t the best example for what I’m proposing. It’s possible to have an idea but not have a movie. Let’s say your idea is to have several characters wake up in a mysterious room, each with a different tattoo on their hand and they no idea how they got there. That’s an idea. You can get a first act out of it. But what happens next? I’m sure we could come up with some plotlines. But the reality is that there’s no meat to this story, no second act. So whenever you come up with an idea, you shouldn’t worry about the first act. The first act will take care of itself. You should be thinking about what comes next. That’s going to be your movie. In the spirit of this concept, here are the five questions you should ask yourself when trying to figure out if you’ve got a full blown movie idea.
1) What does your hero do after page 25? – This will simply determine if there’s something to do in the story. And this is all tied back to the goal. Essentially, page 26 is when the journey begins. So you need a character (or characters) who are going after something. I don’t remember exactly what happens in Armageddon but I think one of the characters goes out to put the team together. Later on, the recruited characters become the drivers of the story. But as long as we’ve got someone going out and trying to accomplish something on page 26, that’s a sign you have a movie. It’s not everything. But it’s the first piece.
2) Does your hero or a main secondary character have a flaw? – Your second act isn’t always going to be “go go go.” You’re going to have slow spots, which is why the second act is so challenging. You have to know how to keep those slower moments engaging. One of the ways you do this is with a character whose internal life is at odds with the external circumstances. So to use a basic example, if a character is closed off to life and prefers to stay in his little bubble, then you want a narrative where that character is forced to do a bunch of crazy stuff. Therefore, before every scene begins, you’ve already got a compelling situation lined up. The classic example of this is Cameron in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. He hates doing things, being out, challenging himself. And yet every scene is forcing him to do this stuff. This is really powerful when you get it right and it makes second acts a lot more entertaining.
3) Do you have at least three unresolved relationships you’re exploring? – Now we’re getting to the meat of it. This is what your movie is REALLY ABOUT. It’s about characters interacting with each other. And if those characters are getting along, watching them interact will be boring. It’s only fun when they’ve got unresolved stuff with one another. Maybe it’s unresolved problems from their past, maybe it’s a disagreement on how to do things, maybe it’s fundamentally different worldviews – whatever it is, there’s got to be conflict there. But there’s a catch to this. It can’t be surface level “follow the rules” conflict. It has to be genuine. You, the writer, must be genuinely emotionally invested in these conflicts. This is why so many famous authors will tell you to draw from real life. Because if the broken friendship between your heroes Axe and Clay is really about your own broken friendship with your former best friend, then everything you write with those characters is going to have an air of authenticity to it. But if you’re just doing it because I’m saying you have to or because William Goldman said you had to, it’s not going to work. This is the crux of this whole article, guys. It’s not about whether the ship sinks. It’s about what happens to Jack and Rose. If exploring your characters and their issues doesn’t excite you, then, I’m sorry, but your second is going to suck.
4) Is there enough journey for the journey? – Despite the fact that the real focus should be on the characters, you obviously still need plot to push the story along. And one of the most common errors writers make is getting to that second act and realizing that they don’t have as much plot as they thought they did. So what you want to do is make sure you’ve got (at least) three big things that are going to happen in the second act. If you’re writing a straight up Hero’s Journey, this should be easy. Just come up with three big places that your hero will need to get to along the way and spread those plot points out equidistantly. But if you’re writing a drama or a contained horror movie, this will be more challenging. The three things are more likely to be (although they don’t have to be) things you throw AT you characters. So, if you’re writing a contained zombie movie where our heroes are inside and a bunch of zombies outside? One of your three big moments might be a door breaking down and 10-12 zombies getting in. The bigger point here is to make sure that you’ve got enough for your characters to do. I can promise you that if you head into your second act without this figured out, you’re not going to make it to the finish line.
5) Is there a force that’s always aggravating our hero(es)? – Remember that the second act’s nickname is the “Conflict Act.” So your mind should always be on, “What can I do to provide the most conflict in my story?” The idea with this tip is to make sure you have a constant aggravating factor working against your hero at all times. The most simplistic version of this is a villain. But it can be weather. It can be time. The reason you want this figured out is that whenever you’re struggling in your second act, one of the easiest ways to get the story moving again is to pit your main aggravating force against your hero. If your bank robber heroes have robbed yet another bank on page 67 and you don’t want that scene to feel like all the other bank robbery scenes, you have your “villain” cop show up and he and the hero have a little showdown. I would go so far as to say if you don’t have a great aggravating force figured out ahead of time, you’re not ready to write your script.
If all of this sounds confusing, I’ll try and simplify it. A movie idea isn’t worth writing unless you’re excited about writing the second act. And the second act is about character and conflict. If you don’t have a passion to explore those two things, then the heart of your screenplay is going to be dead. :) Good luck!
Carson does feature screenplay consultations, TV Pilot Consultations, and logline consultations. Logline consultations go for $25 a piece or $40 for unlimited tweaking. You get a 1-10 rating, a 200-word evaluation, and a rewrite of the logline. If you’re interested in any sort of consultation package, e-mail Carsonreeves1@gmail.com with the subject line: CONSULTATION. Don’t start writing a script or sending a script out blind. Let Scriptshadow help you get it in shape first!
In celebration of the Ad Astra trailer being released today, here’s my old review of the script, which was previously only available in the newsletter. Enjoy!
Genre: Sci-fi
Premise: In the future, an autistic astronaut goes on journey into the solar system to find his father.
About: This was a top secret project that came together a few years go. James Gray, the director of The Lost City of Z, co-wrote Ad-Astra with Ethan Gross, who, before this opportunity, had only written four episodes of the TV show, Fringe. Gray, who will also be directing the film, was able to convince Brad Pitt to hop aboard, and the movie was off to the races. This is one of those rare big-budget projects that’s totally original, which is why I’m so excited to read it!
Writers: James Gray & Ethan Gross
Details: 108 pages – 8/11/16 draft
It takes a lot for me to get excited about a script these days.
I’ve always veered towards imaginative storytelling, writers who take me to a different world, a different time, a different place. But not only take me there. Find a really good story to tell once I get there.
That’s something I didn’t know as a young writer. I thought, just by taking the audience 500 years into the future, or just by taking them to another planet, I’ve done 75% of my job!
But time and place is only the beginning. You still have to find a really great story to tell in that world. Don’t just strand your hero on Mars. Figure out a great story to tell us about the guy who’s stranded on Mars. Everything else is just setup.
What little I’ve heard about Ad Astra sounds like it’s right up my alley. Brad Pitt has a history of attaching himself to good genre projects. James Gray is a thoughtful writer. And whenever good dramatic writers tackle sci-fi, the stories are richer and deeper than what we typically get. And then there’s that title: Ad Astra. It carries with it so much mystery. I want to know more.
It’s 100 years in the future and one of the primary goals of humanity is to find intelligent life elsewhere in the universe. They’re even putting the finishing touches on a giant telescope that reaches 100,000 feet into the sky (20 miles!) to try and find signals from alien planets.
Roy McBride, a 40-something autistic technician, is working on the top of this telescope one day when it’s rocked by a massive energy burst, hurling Roy off to certain death. Luckily, Roy is wearing a parachute and survives. But many others on the project weren’t so lucky.
After getting out of the hospital, Roy is pulled into an ultra serious meeting where officials tell him that the burst came from Neptune. Oh yeah. 20 years ago, Roy’s father and his crew were supposed to establish a base on Neptune to help look for alien life. They were never heard from again. Until now, that is. The government officials tell Roy that they think his dad is still alive and that he’s behind this Neptune burst. They want Roy to go find his father.
This begins a long journey where Roy travels first to the moon, then to Mars, and then to Neptune. 100 years from now, we’ve established outposts on all of these places. So we have an established transport system in place.
However, the further out you get, the smaller and more raggedy the outposts are. And when Roy finally finds what he’s looking for – which isn’t what he expected – he learns that the search for extraterrestrial life and his father’s place in it is way more complicated than he could’ve ever imagined.
Wow.
Okay.
So…….
Yeah.
I don’t know, guys. This was a weird script. Not weird like a Quentin Tarantino script is weird. Weird in that I could never get a handle on where things were going weird. And I’m still trying to figure out if that’s a good thing or a bad thing.
The best way for me to categorize this script would be: The depressing version of Contact.
And “Contact” is a good place to start comparison-wise, because that script does so many things better than this one.
The problem with Ad Astra is its main character, Roy McBride. This may be the most forgettable main character in recent memory. Hell, I’d forget him between pages! As a character, Roy’s issues are two-fold. For one, he’s autistic. And therefore, whenever he speaks, he’s robotic and practical. This results in predictable and lifeless behavior.
But the more relevant issue is that Roy is achingly passive. He never makes any choices of his own. The whole movie is him doing what someone tells him to do. Go to the Moon. Okay. Go to Mars. Okay. Time to go to Neptune. Okay.
When you write a character who’s never active, who never makes their own decisions, they disappear on the page faster than a magic trick. It doesn’t matter if you have the carved granite features of Brad Pitt to distract audiences. We’re still sick of how inactive the hero of the movie is!
Contrast this with Jodie Foster’s character in Contact. The reason that character got Foster an Oscar nomination was because she was SO FREAKING ACTIVE! She was one of the most active characters ever in a major motion picture. She was the polar opposite of Roy. When someone told her, “You’re fired,” she would start up shop somewhere else and start looking for alien signals again.
That’s not to say all characters have to be super active. But when your hero is this passive, you better have something else up your sleeve to make them compelling. Forest Gump was passive and did what he was told, but he had such an intoxicating optimistic view of life that we overlooked it. Roy doesn’t have anything approaching an offset quality.
I think what Gray and Gross were banking on was that Roy’s inability to feel emotion (due to his autism) would make for a compelling exploration of his relationship with his father. There’s a scene early on where they tell Roy that his father, who he assumes has been dead all these years, is actually still alive. Roy kind of shrugs his shoulders in a, “Okay and?” manner.
The character journey then becomes: Will Roy start to feel something for his father?
This was a noble pursuit, but it was handled poorly. The whole movie Roy is unaffected by his father’s complicated plight. Then, BAM, in the end he cries. There’s no nuance to it. We don’t get there naturally. It feels manufactured. And because his character is so boring, it’s hard for us to care whether he cries or not in the first place.
I have no doubt that this will have a killer trailer. Brad Pitt is going to look great as a planet hopping sci-fi hero. That giant satellite is going to look great, along with Brad Pitt falling twenty miles off it. Cities on the moon. Outposts on Mars. An eerie base on Neptune. It’s going to look tremendous.
Unfortunately, Ad Astra cannot overcome a huge miscalculation on the main character front. And here’s the irony. I think that’s the only reason Brad Pitt signed onto this film – so he could play an autistic character. If this character would’ve been more traditional, more like the male version of Jodie Foster in Contact, Pitt probably would’ve passed. So go plug that into your Hollywood secrets-to-selling-a-script calculator.
I’m still rooting for this. Maybe Pitt will pull off a miracle and make the character come alive in some way that I’m not seeing on the page. But my experience has been, if it doesn’t work on the page, it doesn’t work on the big stage.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Richard Russo, one of my favorite writers, once said that a character who isn’t making choices cannot be an engaging character. If Russo is in need of material to back up that hypothesis, he may want to get a copy of Ad Astra. Roy makes so few choices in this script that it’s nearly impossible to be engaged by him.
Genre: Comedy
Premise: A jewel thief reconnects with her sister, who’s just gotten out of prison, and the two get a team of women together to steal a bunch of diamonds at the always weird and wild Met Gala.
About: This script was sold to New Line in 2015 during the female comedy goldmine era where you could write on your first page, “Two women are introduced,” then, on the second page, “funny stuff happens for the next 99 pages,” and you’d sell the script. But hey. I’m not mad at these writers for cashing in. If Hollywood’s handing out money, by all means take it. The script was written by Gregg Rossen & Brian Sawyer, who made their mark writing Christmas TV movies.
Writers: Gregg Rossen & Brian Sawyer
Details: 111 pages
I didn’t even know what the Met Gala was until a month ago. I guess it’s a fashion event where people dress up in the most ridiculous – but FAB-ULOUS – outfits they can find. Getting on the list is next to impossible, as it’s 11k a head. Normally, this subject matter wouldn’t interest me. But I’m so desperate to read something good and the recent Black List scripts have been so bad that I had to think outside the box. I like heist movies. This isn’t the traditional setting for a heist movie. That promises at least some originality. Right?
When we meet 30 year old Whitney (we’re told to “think Anna Kendrick”), she’s giving a rich couple a chakra makeover for their apartment so that all the chi is properly aligned. But really, Whitney’s installing a pretend “energy panda” that later gets up, steals the couple’s very valuable diamond, and takes it to her. I’m not even sure what to say about that but, yeah, that’s the first scene.
Later, Whitney overhears that the Met Gala, which will be incorporating Elizabeth Taylor’s jewel collection, is going to be insuring the party for 100 million dollars. Whitney doesn’t think much of it until her wily sister, Gemma, who just got out of prison (for taking the fall for Whitney) wants to get back out there and steal stuff. When she hears about the Met Gala, she wants in.
But they need a team, so they call army girl Maya, excellent climber turned suburban mom, Melinda, and tech-girl who’s not above stealing money from churches, Kristine. I think there are a few other girls but at this point, my mind was so numb from the choice I’d made to commit to this script that I couldn’t be sure. Yeah, so they all come together, argue for awhile, and begin practicing for the big Met Gala heist.
Oh! I forgot to tell you. Whitney’s boyfriend is a cop. And he knows that she’s a thief. However, he tells her that with this particular job, he can’t look the other way. It’s too big. So even though she’s going to be pursued by her OWN BOYFRIEND, Whitney still heads off to steal 100 million dollars from the Met. And, in case you were wondering, Whitney SWEARS this is the last heist. She’s retiring after this.
You may have noticed that after I review a comedy spec, I rarely address whether the script was actually funny or not. The reason is that mileage varies with comedy. Even if I told you this script was hilarious, you might read it and think it was the unfunniest thing in history. That’s how different everyone’s taste in humor is.
But today I’m going to try. The three areas I’m looking at in comedies are — 1) Are the characters funny? 2) Is the dialogue funny? And 3) Are the situations clever? Of those three, the first one is the most important. The mistake most people make in comedy is giving us copies of characters we’ve already seen. Alan, from the Hangover, who took a lack of self-awareness to a whole new level, was a character I hadn’t seen in a comedy before. Which is a big reason why he broke out and became a classic character.
But if you really want to be a comedy writer, you have to have funny dialogue. Give me something clever like Woody Allen or Fleabag. Or give me more straightforward humor, like Superbad or South Park. Again, if all you’re giving us is a bunch of stock uninspired interactions, you shouldn’t be writing comedy. Here, the girls argue if there’s ever been a female thief to look up to for inspiration.
Finally, there are situations. And this is where, if you’re bad at the first two, you can make up some ground. All you have to do in a comedy to make people laugh is deliver on the promise of your premise. Put us in situations that we could ONLY experience in your movie. So if you’re writing The 40 Year Old Virgin, we better get some scenes where our main character has a chance to get laid and screws it up in a variety of funny ways.
Of these three areas, Met Gala Heist fails at every one. Well, maybe fails is a strong word. It doesn’t excel in any of these areas. If I gave any writer who follows this site a writing challenge where they had to write a scene with two sisters, one of whom was a planner, the other impulsive, you would all be able to write dialogue as good as this. That’s how standard the dialogue is.
And the only thing unique about this idea is the wacky dress-up that occurs at the Met Gala. If you’re going to mine your concept for unique comedy opportunities, that’s the place to do it. You could give one of the characters a giant elaborate dress where they’re able to hide all of their surveillance equipment inside. As I’m writing that, I’m realizing that it’s too broad. But you get the point. That’s where your unique comedy opportunities are. And we don’t get any of that for the first 70 pages. And once the heist starts, we only get a little of it at the Met.
So where does that leave us? Ocean’s 11 but without the IP.
In Met Gala Heist’s defense, the writers do try and create real characters here. Our main character is flawed with how obsessive she is. Her sister is flawed in how reckless she is. Their relationship is complicated because Gemma took the fall for her. So Whitney owes her. I get on comedy writers all the time for only focusing on the comedy while ignoring the characters. And these writers DID try with the characters. But the thing with comedy is it doesn’t matter unless we’re laughing. Nobody gives you points for nice characters arcs or proper structure in comedies. That stuff is only acknowledged if we’ve laughed our butts off.
I wish I could give you some clear reason why this sold. But the only thing I can come up with is that these writers probably heard from people in the industry (since they’d worked in the industry for awhile) that studios were looking for a female comedy heist, so they wrote one up quickly and – boom – sale. Sometimes it’s being in the right place at the right time.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: X-Factor character. When you’re writing something this formulaic, it helps to throw an unpredictable element into the mix. An x-factor character is a great option. Here, we have this character, Omar, who is a diamond thief that’s always undercutting them. Showing up at their jobs, then swooping in and stealing the jewels at the last second. Because they always have to worry about this guy and never know where he is or when he’s going to appear, he adds a necessary element of unpredictably to the story.
Genre: Horror
Premise: A yuppie couple and their daughter move into a long-standing Portland neighborhood that doesn’t like how gentrification is changing their city.
About: Very little is known about this co-writing team that snuck onto last year’s Black List with this script, which tallied 8 votes.
Writers: Ross Lazar and Sebastian Shepard
Details: 111 pages
Before we get started, I want to talk about populating. Populating, as it pertains to screenwriting, is the act of creating the world around the world that we see on the page. So, for example, let’s say your script takes place in a house. It’s your job to populate that house with as much detail as you can. You should know what every room looks like, what’s in it, why it’s in there, if there’s any history behind that room, etc, etc.
Populating is not limited to physical spaces either. You’re going to populate your character’s job, for example. You need to know what your hero does, what his daily routine is like, who he works with, what the dynamic is with those people, where his office is, how he gets there, and as many other details as you can.
Now I’m going to throw a curveball at you. 90% of populating occurs in the background. It’s stuff that the writer never writes about, that the reader never sees. But why would you write down a bunch of stuff that the reader is never going to see? Isn’t that a big fat waste of time? Let me answer that with an analogy. Let’s say a friend is lying to you. They say they were at the movies but you suspect they weren’t, so you start asking them questions. What was the movie? What time was the showing? What were the previews? What actors were in it? The more vague the answers are, the more you get the feeling that something is off. You can’t definitively prove that they’re lying. But you know something doesn’t feel right.
That’s the same feeling a reader gets when a writer hasn’t properly populated their script. They can’t help but feel like something is off. And the reason something is off is because the writer doesn’t know much about their world. And the longer this goes on, the less engaged the reader becomes. Because without the detail that populating brings, the story has more of a “made up” feel to it. Which is the opposite of what you’re trying to achieve with storytelling. Your goal is to make the person forget they’re reading a story.
I’m bringing this up because on page 84, one of the major plot points is Marissa, our wife character, saying they can’t leave this haunted house of theirs because of Peter’s, the husband’s, job. Yet I have no idea what Peter’s job even is. I haven’t seen him do any job. I haven’t heard him talk about any job. And now you’re going to use that as a major plot point? In these moments, I’m convinced that the writers don’t know anything about Peter’s job. All it is to them is a chess piece to be moved to achieve a plot point that they need. And this is a HUGE amateur screenwriting tell. The big dogs – the professional writers with half a million dollar quotes – they don’t make this mistake.
I’m getting ahead of myself, of course, but I had to bring this up because it’s so frustrating to see. Especially with a Black List script. These are supposed to be the scripts that the community looks up to as to what we should aspire to. I guess I’m confused on that front for several reasons, since I’m not even clear what the unique hook is with this movie.
In it, we follow San Franciscoans’ Peter and his new wife, Marissa. They drive a Tesla. Peter has a 12 year old daughter named Lyla who hates Marissa. Her real mom, Peter’s wife, died four years ago from cancer. And now she’s stuck with this woman who doesn’t have a clue how motherhood works.
The family move to Portland for reasons that aren’t really clear to me other than it gets the movie started. In the script’s best scene – its teaser, which takes place before the family arrives – we see a woman flee the house that they’re about to own, screaming at the neighbors for help. But the neighbors all just stand around and do nothing while men in Hazmat suits emerge from the same house, grab her, and drag her back in.
So at least we know the house has some naughty plans for our family. Anyway, once they move in, Peter desperately tries to get Lyla and Marissa to like each other. But Lyla just stays in her room all day playing Fortnite. After a few days of this, Marissa forces Lyla to befriend the neighborhood boy across the street, Desi.
Lyla’s not a huge Desi fan but when a scary old woman ghost that looks like every scary old woman ghost in every horror movie ever starts haunting Lyla, she goes to Desi for help. The two do some research and find out that the woman is a special type of ghost that is summoned specifically to scare people. It appears that our family is being scared in the hopes that they’ll leave.
But in a shocking twist, we learn that the real reason the family is being targeted is to be sacrificed to some female God creature, and that Desi’s own father is leading the charge! By the time the family figures this out, it’s too late, as they’re knocked unconscious and tied up. Will they be able to get free in time? Or will they fall victim to Portland’s version of The Wicker Man?
I talk about red flags a lot. So I’ll tell you what the first red flag in this script was for me.
In an early scene, after we meet Peter, Marissa, and Lyla, the characters indicate that something tragic happened four years ago. And the writers follow that with this line, “We’ll learn more about “four years ago” later.”
I’ll cover the “We’ll learn more about that” thing in the “What I learned” section. But in this specific instance, there is no reason to use this. It kills me when writers think readers are dumb. Readers and audience members are ALWAYS smarter than you think they are. They pick up on things like *that.* You’ve just conveyed that Lyla used to have friends and now she’s an introvert. Marissa and Peter are newly married. This means Lyla’s real mom is no longer in the picture. I can say with certainty that 99.9% of the readers are going to be able to figure out that Lyla’s mom died four years ago. To treat that like some sort of major suspenseful hook – oh, we have to keep reading to find out what happened four years ago! – indicates that you think the reader is an idiot. So as soon as I saw that, I knew the script was in trouble.
Also, as I continued reading, I kept thinking to myself, “This isn’t bad. It’s got a scary situation. It had that fun hazmat teaser. There’s conflict with the neighbors. And yet I’m bored. Why?”
Plug and play characters is why. Instead of the writers having something to say about these people and their experience of moving into a new home, it felt like the template of “husband, daughter, evil new stepmother” was chosen first, and the characters were plugged into those roles.
While plug and play can work in plotting situations (the common plot point of your hero charging off on their adventure at the beginning of the second act, for example), character creation is something that needs to be more organic. Which is why character creation is so much harder than plotting. Since I never felt like these were real people, none of the drama worked. I couldn’t get past the fact that everybody felt fake.
When conceiving of characters, you should try to anchor those characters in something from your own life. When you do that, the characters and the situations they’re in have an extra spark because the level of truth that you’ve added has made their situations more genuine. I know, for example, Steven Spielberg’s parents’ divorce had a huge impact on him. So you see him exploring divorce in many different ways throughout his movies. And that authenticity gives his movies an extra kick.
There might be a movie in here somewhere but I can’t see it, at least not in this draft. There isn’t an original hook. There are no original characters. There’s no original monster. It never felt like the writers were trying to do anything new. So this was “been here, done that” Portland style.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: “We’ll learn more about that later.” The old “We’ll learn more about that later” thing is something writers do to offset something that’s happened which is currently unclear. Since I see this device being used more and more, I want to share my thoughts on it. It’s basically a gimmick. The writer is speaking directly to the reader, which you’re not supposed to do in a screenplay. And whenever you’re using the same gimmick more than once in a script, it’s an indication that the writer lacks confidence in their story. They have to hoodwink you via a series of gimmicks to get you to keep reading. The only time I’d use, “We’ll learn more about that later” is if there’s something genuinely confusing that’s occurred which, for story reasons, you can’t explain right now. And you feel that if you don’t let the reader know that this will make sense later, they’ll think it’s some kind of mistake or screw-up. In that instance, “Don’t worry. This will make sense later,” actually has an important purpose.
