Genre: Comedy
Premise: (from Black List) Four overachieving high school students in Cape Cod reinvent themselves during the summer after graduation.
About: Good Kids finished with 12 votes on the 2011 Black List, the same number of votes as yesterday’s encyclopedia, Cities of Refuge. My love for writer Chris McCoy is growing. I did NOT like his 2009 script “Good Looking,” at all. It had a pretty good premise – you’ve been with someone for 5 years only to find out that an online dating service knows, with 100% certainty, your soul mate, and it’s not the person you’re with – but the execution was weak. Then last year he sold his script “Get Back,” his ode to “Back To The Future,” about a Beatles fanatic who finds a time machine and decides to go back in time and prevent Yoko Ono from ever meeting John Lennon. A little derivative but a big improvement over Good Looking. And today we have his latest spec, “Good Kids,” about one last crazy summer before a group of friends go off to college. This one, it turns out, is his best yet. It’s always nice to see a writer improving. It is a little strange though that all his titles contain two words and start with the letter ‘G.’ I wonder if there’s something deeper going on there. Maybe Chris has done some research and found that two-word titles starting with “G” have the best chance of selling. Scriptshadow Nation, please do some research on this for me.
Writer: Chris McCoy
Details: 101 pages – Oct. 2011 draft (This is an early draft of the script. The situations, characters, and plot may change significantly by the time the film is released. This is not a definitive statement about the project, but rather an analysis of this unique draft as it pertains to the craft of screenwriting).

Good Kids takes places in Cape Cod, Massachusetts and follows four newly graduated high school students. There’s Andy, the “John Cusack” of the group. There’s “Spice,” the slightly pudgy future chef. There’s Nora, the girl who’s always been “one of the guys” but in the last two months has become smoking hot and none of the group knows how to handle it, including her. And finally there’s Lionel “The Lion,” Miller, who’s basically a big fat weirdo.

These lifelong friends are the “good kids.” They actually paid attention in school. They did their homework. They got into great schools. BUT, in the process, they didn’t do anything else. They never went to parties. They never took any risks. They’ve played it safe their entire lives.

And here, on their last summer together, they realize this is going to be the only time in their lives where they can actually have some fun without any consequences. So they make a pact (Hmmm, American Pie anyone?) to say “yes” to any opportunity that sounds like fun this summer.

When the rich summer crowd comes in for their two months of vacation, the good kids find themselves attending parties and making new friends. Andy, a tennis pro, gets his Mrs. Robinson act on and starts sleeping with his MILF students….FOR MONEY. Nora starts dating her much older co-worker at her bio-lab internship. Spice spends every waking second trying to secure his first handjob. And The Lion does a ton of drugs.

Andy also has an online relationship with a really hot Indian girl who’s been dying to come see him, but can’t afford it. This is, of course, why Andy becomes a gigolo, so he can save up enough money to get her a ticket. Ahhh, teenage logic. I used to love rationalizing things like that. – All in all, their plan turns out to be the greatest plan in the universe. They’re all having the time of their lives!

But as everybody knows, anything that’s too good to be true probably is (except for Scriptshadow). And soon these choices start coming back to haunt them, particularly Andy, whose “tennis lesson’s” husbands get wind of the fact that it isn’t tennis balls their wives are playing with. Nora also realizes she may be in over her head with this older guy. Spice manages to piss off more girls than he attracts. And The Lion? Well, he might be too high to realize what’s going on. But in the end, all four of them will have to face the consequences of their actions.

Let’s start with some miscellaneous notes here. Once again, we start with a crazy opening scene…AND THEN JUMP BACK 12 WEEKS EARLIER. I’m not lying to you guys. It’s a disease I tell you. A disease! The flashforward is in almost every script I read now! There’s no stopping it! In Good Kids’ defense though, it was one of the few times where it worked. The opening scene was so weird (Andy in a junkyard wearing war paint running from a bunch of 40 year old men) that I actually wanted to see how we got there.

I liked the “fish-out-of-water” angle of the story as well. Remember, fish-out-of-water situations almost always work! To see the “nerdy” kids tackle all these unfamiliar situations was instant conflict. And as we know, conflict equals drama, and drama equals entertainment!

I also dug the time period McCoy picked. Maybe someone can correct me, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen a major film about this specific time in people’s lives. I’ve seen a lot of movies about high school kids in their last days of high school. But none that focused on the summer between high school and college.

Now, as for the script itself, it’s by no means a traditional story. Let’s put it through the GSU wringer, shall we? Goal. There’s no concrete goal here. The goal is an open-ended one. It’s to “have fun.” As I’ve mentioned before, the less defined your goal is, the harder your story will be to execute. American Pie had a clear goal – for each of the guys to get laid before prom. That’s what gave that movie so much focus.

Stakes. What are the stakes if they succeed or fail? Not a whole lot. And this goes back to “goal.” If there’s no concrete goal in your movie, then how can there be any stakes attached to it? However, as the script goes on, the stakes do get higher for each character. Andy, for example, is threatening his job by banging all these women. Nora begins to really like her co-worker. So there’s something at stake if he dumps her. Still, the stakes are pretty low.

Urgency – There’s no real urgency either. And again, this goes back to the goal. If there’s no goal ,then there’s no amount of time our characters will have to achieve it by. There is a “ticking clock” though, always important when you don’t have urgency. Remember, audiences like to have an idea of when the story is going to end. So here, it’s the 12 weeks of summer, indicated right after the opening scene when we see the title “12 weeks earlier.”

So then wait a minute. No GSU? How is this any good? Well, for some of you, it isn’t good. I’ve had a handful of e-mails telling me they didn’t like this script. And the fact that there’s no real plot (no “GSU”) is probably a big part of that. People like characters who are after things. You’re not going to get that in Good Kids.

If you don’t have any of those structural things in place, you’re basically resting your script on the creation of original, interesting, compelling characters an audience will want to follow (other examples of this include Breakfast Club and Dazed and Confused). You do that, and the audience will want to know the answer to this question: “What happens to these guys?” They want to see how their situations are going to end up. You saw this in Swingers as well. Vince Vaughn and Jon Favreau don’t have a goal in the movie other than to find chicks. But we want to see how their situation will end because we like their characters. I’ll continue to warn you though, these movies are incredibly hard to write. If you don’t have a plot pushing the story forward, you better be amazing with character. And I thought McCoy produced three (Spice doesn’t make the cut) really fun characters here. But like I said, I’m already expecting a portion of you to hate this for its directionless story.

[ ] What the hell did I just read? (for Karlos)
[ ] wasn’t for me
[xx] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius

What I learned: Teasers. If you don’t have a structured plot, MAKE SURE YOU HAVE TEASERS. What are teasers? Teasers are events coming up later in the story that you tease. We may not have an overall goal to look forward to. But with teasers we still want to keep reading because we want to get to those events. Here, it’s Andy’s online Indian girlfriend. McCoy teases her later arrival a few times, and therefore we want to see what happens when she shows up. You can also call the opening of the script (with Andy being chased by the 40-year old men) a teaser (we want to see how we get there), although I still think you should avoid the opening flash-forward if at all possible. It’s in every script I read now!

Genre: Drama
Premise: (from Black List) A former FBI psychologist is called in to investigate when a young girl goes missing after the apparent murder of her father and brother by two strangers in a small Oklahoma town.
About: This script finished near the middle of the Black List with 12 votes. It was optioned in September with Charlize Theron coming on to produce and possibly star. Brandon Willer continues a trend of Black List writers who have made this year’s list a harkening back to the Black Lists of yesteryear, when more unknown talent was celebrated. While many have attacked the 2011 Black List for having a below-par selection of scripts, it’s to be expected that if the list caters to younger more unknown writers, the quality of those scripts is naturally going to be lower. Willer is just finishing up his only previous credit, a tiny indie film he wrote, directed and starred in called, “The Racket Boys,” about two men and a woman driving from L.A. to San Francisco.
Writer: Brandon Willer
Details: 111 pages (This is an early draft of the script. The situations, characters, and plot may change significantly by the time the film is released. This is not a definitive statement about the project, but rather an analysis of this unique draft as it pertains to the craft of screenwriting).

Welcome to Cities of Refuge, or as I like to refer to it: “Introduce-A-character-A-Thon.” There were more characters introduced in this script than live in India and China combined. This made Cities one of the hardest reads I’ve ever tried to get through. At one point I hired a second person to take notes for me because my Microsoft Word document – for the first time in history – gave me the error “out of space,” due to all the characters I had written down.

Cities of Refuge begins with 40-something Nathan Spiller, a former marine, hanging out with his two kids, 19 year old Colt and 10 year old Jenny. Nathan clearly loves his daughter more than anything, and even though he and Colt have issues, he loves him too.

Well I hope he loves them in DEATH! Because a group of three bad men sneak into Nathan’s house, apparently looking for money, and kill him and his son. When the cops arrive the next day, they find the bodies, but realize Jenny, the daughter, is missing. Did these thugs take her?

After the FBI gets involved, they recruit former FBI missing persons specialist, Brooke Benedict. This girl used to be the best in the biz. She had a perfect record for finding kids alive. But then one case went bad and she hasn’t investigated a missing child case since. But the FBI give her the hard sell and she decides to make a comeback.

When they bring in their lead suspect, a former nasty marine named Marcus, they want Brooke to see if she can get anything out of him. But the interrogation proves too much for her and she realizes that maybe she shouldn’t have come back – that she’s in over her head.

During this time, there’s a local drugpin (I think?) named Delgado who seems to be interested in the case for some reason. There’s also some guy who’s pissed off that the police aren’t looking into the case harder so he gets the town all riled up for a possible run on the police station, where Marcus is being held. Marcus starts becoming a lot like Hannibal Lecter. At first he hates Brooke but then he starts liking her for some reason and giving her clues about the case. Eventually all these stories come crashing into each other in the end.

Okay, so look. I’m not going to lie. I’m angry. It’s one thing to have a lot of characters in your story but it’s another to introduce a character per page. Having lots of characters in your screenplay is no sin. The story you’re writing will dictate how many characters you should have. Pirates of The Caribbean, for example, will have a lot more characters than Buried.

However, you have to be realistic about what the reader is capable of remembering. But before we even get into that, let’s deal with the industry side of this. Do you already have a producer on board? If you’re writing for a producer (as I’m assuming Willer was) who will later package your script and sell it to a studio, character count isn’t as big of a deal. You already have a producer on your side who likely knows the underpinnings of the story, so who cares if there are a lot of characters? To that end, Willer is off the hook.

Same thing goes, to a lesser degree, if you’re working with a manager or already have an agent. They’ll be able to get your script to important people so it’s not as big of an issue.

However, if you are an unrepped, unmanaged, un-anything’d as a writer, DON’T WRITE SCRIPTS WITH LOTS OF CHARACTERS! Don’t do it. Because your scripts will be the lowest priority for industry readers. Therefore they will have the LEAST AMOUNT OF PATIENCE for you. If they’re already confused about who’s who on page 20? You’re dead. They’re not going to go back and check who’s who. They don’t have time. They’re going to keep reading through it, subsequently being less and less sure of which characters are which, resulting in more confusion, resulting in more skimming, resulting in a snowball effect that leads to total confusion by the time your script ends. Your script may ACTUALLY make perfect sense. It might even be good! But because you made things so difficult on the reader with the character count, they wouldn’t know.

That’s why most people in the spec sale market favor simple easy-to-understand stories. Because they can easily keep track of who’s who and therefore what’s going on. That’s not to say you can’t have complications and twists and turns. You just have them on top of a story that a reader can actually follow. Source Code is a good example. It has a low character count and yet it has plenty of twists and turns and complications.

So I guess what I’m saying here is: Don’t write a movie like Cities Of Refuge unless you’re working with someone pretty high up in the business. And even THEN, you need to use a smart approach to your character count, your character content, as well as HOW you go about creating characters, so that the reader ACTUALLY has a chance of remembering them. For example, if I know a character is in only one scene, I’m not going to name him Bob Jensen. I’m not even going to name him Bob. This implies that we’ll see him again, which means the reader has to reserve a spot in his memory for when this guy comes back later. One more character in the memory banks means one more character to potentially mix up with ALL THE OTHER CHARACTERS. Instead of doing that, just name the guy, “Slick Guy,” or “Truck Driver.” This indicates to the reader that the person will only be in one scene.

There are about 10 tricks of the trade you can use to make characters memorable amongst high character counts – this being one of them. But even if you do have a producer or manager already on your side, you’re still trying to write the best story possible. You’re still trying to make the read as enjoyable as you can since other actors and producers are going to be reading it to see if they want to be a part of the project. So show some restraint. Look for ways to make it easy on them so they actually enjoy your story.

I suppose I should use this time to tell you what I thought of Cities of Refuge but I can’t. I literally had no idea what was going on by the midpoint. There were too many damn people. Not only did this make the character count high, but it added too many subplots, many of which I also found hard to follow because I couldn’t remember who was who.

I will say that the final act was pretty damn explosive and has tons of twists and turns. It might even be enough to save the movie. But as I preach to you on top of this broken record player, I will say this one more time – I didn’t understand what was going on during it. There were too many characters.

[x] Wait for the rewrite
[ ] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius

What I learned: The best way to handle a story that requires a lot of characters is to ask yourself, “Do I really need all these characters?” You’d be surprised at who you can cut and which characters you can combine. Also, another little trick is to give lesser characters memorable nicknames. For example, instead of calling someone “Jim,” call him “Big Jim.” Jim I won’t remember. “Big Jim,” I will. But the real solution to this problem is the most basic one. Ask yourself: “Do I honestly need all these people to tell my story?” Chances are you don’t.

Genre: Comedy/Romantic Comedy
Premise: After committing her first ever one-night stand, a young woman begins her walk of shame, only to realize she’s been snowed in. But the worst is yet to come. When the man she slept with wakes up, she quickly realizes she hates him.
About: 2 Night Stand finished in the middle of the 2011 Black List. This is Mark Hammer’s breakthrough screenplay.
Writer: Mark Hammer
Details: 98 pages (This is an early draft of the script. The situations, characters, and plot may change significantly by the time the film is released. This is not a definitive statement about the project, but rather an analysis of this unique draft as it pertains to the craft of screenwriting).

I really hope today’s writer, Mark Hammer, isn’t the same Mark Hammer who starred as “Old Man” in Meet The Parents, seeing as that Mark Hammer died back in 2007. That would reflect REALLY badly on the Black List, if dead people were making it. Although I guess it would explain all the zombie scripts.

Lame jokes aside, it’s time for some lame jokes INSIDE. As in “Inside” this script. Haha. Actually, that’s not true. Two Night Stand is by no means a bad script. But unless you’re 22 years old, I’m not sure you’re going to like it too much. It’s sort of like Scenic Route but with a vagina. And if I remember correctly, you guys weren’t loving that one (I still stand by it as an interesting piece of screenwriting!).

But I will say this. You are one bold motherf*cker if you try and write a romantic comedy that takes place in one room. This isn’t a contained thriller where you can throw in a bunch of sweet twists and turns the second things go slow. It’s just two people talking about their issues and stuff. Which means if those two people aren’t captivating beyond all reason? And their dialogue isn’t the greatest dialogue in the universe? It’s going to be Bore City. So, is this script Ricky Gervais circa the 2011 Golden Globes or is it Ricky Gervais circa the 2012 Golden Globes? Read on to find out.

22 year old recent college grad (and I’m assuming very cute) Megan spends her days surfing the internet and watching TV. In other words, she’s my hero. Her gorgeous roommate, Faiza, has been enduring this for months and is finally fed up with it. She confronts Megan on why she’s been such a lazy worthless pile of excrement and tells her she needs to get a job!

But see, Megan’s still getting over her devastating breakup with her fiance and, as a result, can’t muster up the enthusiasm to re-enter society. So Faiza gets an idea. Megan needs to get laid. She needs to meet some random dude and take him to the bone zone! This’ll put a period on her mourning and allow her to move on. Megan’s a little reluctant at first but decides, “What the hell?” It just might work. Pause it. If I can just interject here for a moment. WHERE THE HELL ARE THESE WOMEN WHEN I’M OUT ON THE TOWN?? Unpause. Right, so, after Megan can’t get into a bar, she comes home and meets some random guy on the internet and asks him if she can come over and have sex with him.

Pause it again. WHERE THE HELL ARE THESE WOMEN WHEN I’M ON THE INTERNET??” Unpause. Megan goes over, the two get drunk, and we cut to the next morning, after a wild night of sexual escapading. Embarrassed that she’s stooped this low, Megan gets her clothes together and tip toes out the door, trying to disappear before the guy wakes up. Pause it.

WHERE THE HELL ARE THESE WOMEN WHEN I’M…

Kidding! Just a joke there ladies. Sort of. So yeah, Megan gets outside only to realize the biggest snowstorm in New York since Pocahontas and John Smith shared a tent, has trapped her in this apartment. With this dude. Who she doesn’t know. And had sex with.

Up until this point, I kind of liked the script. We were moving towards something. The story was pushing FORWARD. But here’s the issue with one-location scripts. Once we get into that location, there’s no more going forward. Your characters are stuck together. And now, it’s purely about how interesting those characters are and how entertaining you can make their interactions.

Your best tool once you’ve backed yourself into this corner is conflict. And that conflict has to be pretty intense because the whole movie rests on the drama in this room, and if you can’t create drama, you don’t have a movie. The problem with Two Night Stand, at least in my opinion, is I didn’t feel that conflict was authentic. I see this in a lot in romantic comedy scripts, where the writer knows he has to keep things interesting, so he makes the characters hate each other, without really knowing why. He just knows that it needs to happen.

So out of nowhere, these two just started hating each other. I don’t know how. I don’t know why. It just happened all of a sudden. This led to a lot of forced dialogue where they attacked each other about their sexual prowess, their relationship status and everything else in between. Some of it was definitely amusing but the whole time I couldn’t stop wondering what had caused these two to get so worked up about each other in the first place.

Here’s an idea (spoiler alert). Later in the script, Megan finds out that Alec (oh yeah, that’s the guy) has a girlfriend. Instead, she should’ve found that out right away, like as soon as she woke up. She finds some piece of evidence that proves he has a girlfriend. She’s disgusted with him. Tries to leave. And when she has to come back and face him, she just starts going off on him about it. THAT I could believe. Now the conflict has some basis in reality.

OR possibly she doesn’t tell him she knows, which could lead to all sorts of dramatic irony during their conversations.  He could tell her that he’s one of the most loyal men in the universe.  His middle name is loyalty.  And Megan is just stewing inside, waiting for the right moment to pounce on him about what she knows.  

I also would’ve looked for ways to involve the rest of the building somehow. You may not have the luxury of space to play with. But you do have, presumably, a building full of potentially interesting characters. Have a few memorable people you can shift in and out of the apartment. The creepy maintenance guy. The hot neighbor Alec formally had a fling with who does NOT like Megan at all and who Alec never officially “ended” it with. If the Koreans next door were also the managers, and Alec was late on rent, that could lead to some interesting conflict when Megan had to go over there to use the bathroom (the bathroom in Alec’s apartment has overflowed). Alec begs her not to go but she does anyway, which leads to the manager storming over and, of course, demanding Alec’s rent. I don’t know, it just seemed like there was so much more opportunity to play here, and instead we stayed focused on these two talking to each other for 60 straight minutes. It’s not that it’s bad. It just gets a little…stale. I mean usually when you pull out the “You wanna get high?” scene, it means you’re plum out of ideas.

I also had a bit of a problem with the tone. Parts of it felt like an indie-comedy (especially the premise), with a 500 Days Of Summer vibe to it. Other parts (like scaling the building) were broad enough to be outtakes from How To Lose A Guy In 10 Days. But I don’t think you can write a movie like that that takes place in a single apartment. I mean, this isn’t a part a Matthew McConaghey type would play. Not that there are rules to that sort of thing. But I just felt the indie vibe lent itself to a slightly more realistic tone.

Anyway, I’m probably over-thinking this. Like I said, the script wasn’t bad. It’s just that the forced conflict threw me and the single location got stale after awhile. I was hoping for a little more out of this one.

[ ] Wait for the rewrite
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius

What I learned: Do not repeat in your description what your characters have just said or done. In Two Night Stand, when Megan and Alec first wake up, they make a few jokes to defuse the awkward situation. Right afterwards, we get this line of description: “They’re making the best of the awkward situation with humor.” You don’t need to tell us that. We just saw it ourselves.

What I learned 2: Scriptshadow Moratorium. I am disallowing, from this point on, female character backstories that include finding out their old boyfriend/husband was gay. I have read this in possibly over 200 screenplays. I’m begging the writing populace out there. Stop using this. Please!

You may remember Adam. He wrote my favorite amateur script I’ve ever reviewed on the site, “Reunion,” about a bullied kid who decides to enact revenge on his tormentors at their high school reunion. You can check out the original review here, where you can also download a copy of the script. A lot of people have been e-mailing me asking what happened after all the buzz the review created, so I thought it would be fun to catch up with Adam as well as learn a little about his approach to screenwriting. Adam is currently looking for a buyer for his new comedy script, What If It Was, about a ghost writer forced to pen an outrageous fake memoir. I haven’t read it yet but am looking forward to it. You can download the script yourself here. Adam’s also always open to answering questions so feel free to e-mail him at adamzopf@gmail.com or ask him anything in the comments.

SS: First of all, for those not familiar with what you’ve been doing since the Reunion review, can you fill us in on what’s happened since then? You found a production house for the project, right? How did that all happen?

AZ: After the review, I got emails from a few managers but mostly a lot of independent producers and production companies. I then took meetings and half were interested in doing something with Reunion and the other half wanted to know about other stuff. Since then I’ve still been talking to them about other scripts, including the one I’m outlining now. And overall, everyone was very cool and I really didn’t have any bad experiences. But I settled on Two Ton Films for Reunion about a month ago. Two Ton’s Justin Zackham (writer of “The Bucket List”, creator of F/X’s “Lights Out” and writer/director of “The Wedding” starring Robert DeNiro, Diane Keaton, Susan Sarandon, Robin Williams, Amanda Seyfried and Topher Grace which will come out in the Fall) was incredibly up front through the entire process, telling me to take my time and ask him any questions I had. And through that I really got the sense that, as a writer, he was treating me the way he thought writers should be treated, which led to a certain amount of trust that that would continue if I went with them. He had his own war stories and in the short time I’ve spent with him, I’ve learned an incredible amount. At some point it came down to “I just like this fucking guy and more importantly I believe in him, his company and their vision for the movie and how to get it actually made.”

SS: You had expressed to me that you wrote for a long time without any success. What are some of the mistakes you think you made in regards to how you approached the industry? Things that might have hindered your progress?

AZ: I don’t think it was anything I did or didn’t do but really just circumstance that befall a lot of people here. If you don’t luck out, you will go through every stage of the process before something happens. And that’s fine because it’s just more battle testing for when it actually counts. It really doesn’t get any more straight forward than 1) I took about a year to write my first script, 2) I wrote 3-4 more super personal scripts that were hot messes, 3) I wrote about four pretty okay, finally looks like a movie scripts, 4) Wrote another 5-6 that were actually enjoyed by people but just weren’t good enough to get made, 5) Wrote five scripts that could conceivably get made but I just didn’t get the right break for a few years and now 6) One of those gets noticed and here we are. And I still haven’t sold anything or even have representation yet but once I’m in a room I can talk scripts and ideas all day. I know my process inside and out and can deliver on opportunities rather than where I might have been say four years ago, which is still green. So I guess – and this is super hard when you just can’t express the ideas you have in your head or you keep almost getting the right script with the right opportunity – but I would have had more patience overall. Just don’t get frustrated. But that’s easy to say and hard to do.

SS: If you could do it all over again – if you were just arriving in Los Angeles today – what would you do differently?

AZ: Outside of writing, I would’ve come to LA sooner. Get on a set quicker. Get on multiple sets quicker. I moved here in 2003 at 25 and hadn’t seen a single film shoot until 2005 at 27. And this was on a truly awful indie movie but it was a gigantic deal to see someone say action and cut in person. So just demythologizing movie-making and getting the dream out of my head and a plan into it. You aren’t going to win an Oscar or write a $100 million movie your first time out. There isn’t anyone who’s going to give you the key to “Show Business” and a million dollar check. Start looking at things practically earlier. If I met someone who just got here, I’d say get the traditional way out of your head because that’s just a byproduct of your “dream.” Write stuff and shoot it. Work at a production company. Find a director working in small films or even commercials and offer to do whatever as long as you can see them work. Get an entire vision of the process from script to actual product. It makes it more real. It puts stuff like budgets, locations, casting etc. in your head just as someone who could actually make your script has it in theirs. You are miles ahead of the masses slaving away at their laptops if you know what it takes to actually make a movie.

SS: What inspired you to write Reunion and how long did it take you from first draft to last?

AZ: I was rewriting a comedy I’d gotten a director attached to (a talented person who was getting a lot of notice at the time) but I was having to wait on him a lot and I had to get something else on paper or I was gonna pull my own Fat Pig. I put up the antenna for a new idea and there was a new $5-$10 million horror movie coming out every week. Which makes total sense. Those movies are the safest bets in entertainment. And if one hits, not only do you get that but it’s an immediate property. But most of them suck, so alright smart guy, come up with one then. Then it just Stay-Puft-Marshmallow-Man’d into my head one night. Guy who gets revenge at a reunion. And nobody had done it. And it’s totally something that someone will do in some form in actual, real life. By that I mean bring a gun into the Holiday Inn because they’re drunk and their high school sweetheart is married but still… But if I took that basic revenge idea and movie’d it up? There you go. And I’d also wanted to write a movie that took place in a condensed time period for a while so that also helped. But from there it went much faster than usual because there’s just no other place for the story to go. Have to show him plan, have to show the actual reunion, he has to get them back there, has to get them in the collars, have to have the scene where he lays it all out for them and then what places in a school would make the best set pieces? Pool, library, shop class, gym, lunch room… People have to start getting picked off. The flashback story took a bit to plan out but all told it was 6 weeks from idea to having essentially what it is now. Not the usual but I had a lot of structural factors because of the genre and the idea I picked that combined to make it a pretty quick process.

SS: One of my favorite parts about Reunion, as you know, is the character development, particularly the character of Fat Pig. Can you tell us what your approach is to character development and was for that character in particular? How do you craft a character like that?

AZ: Inevitably story and the main character go hand in glove. Most likely story idea first, then “What would be the optimal character to put through that story?” Kind of like how you need music first to write lyrics to. And then supporting characters, whether they be with the main character or opposing them, have differing viewpoints that bring about the most conflict. So I have the idea for Reunion. Now: “Who is the best main character for this?” Well, making him fat is kind of a stock approach. However, it’s that way because it’s true. Society as a whole feels comfortable judging fat people, especially 10 years ago. It also gives me a visual character and someone who I can change physically to not only differentiate his past and present, but that also shows character. He has turned himself, through rage, into a Discipline Machine built for revenge. Which gives me most of how he is in the present. Exact. Calculating. Patient. Vicious. It’s all gonna pour out during that night. So where did it come from? Now I work through the flashback story and think about what could be his goal. Acceptance. Just a day that isn’t hell. How does he do that? Etc. And as I start to build that story, I think of these small moments. Terror (the popular kids, the sea of regular kids, swim class, the bus, etc.) mixed with any relief he can find (food and someone, anyone who is nice to him… Then I have Maria). Now I have who *she* is. So who is her husband? And all the way down the line. Everything is hopefully an organic reaction and that includes the characters and their dynamics. And once you get that process going of what would work with this (oh wait, if I did *that* then I could do *this*) and so on and so on, it takes on a life of its own. You just let the story become what it wants to and the characters who they need to be to tell it.

SS: What about the rest of your approach? What are the three most important things you focus on when you write a screenplay?

AZ: 1) The main idea. What is the essential story and am I serving it at absolutely all times? Anything that doesn’t add, subtracts. (Carson note: VERY IMPORTANT!!!)
2) External and internal goals and them being extensions of each other. This is a HUGE lesson to learn. You get this solid and follow it through and your script is automatically going to be halfway there. A 60 year old man tries to climb the highest mountain in the world. Eh… A 60 year old man grieves for his dead 25 year old son. Eh… BUT… A 60 year old man sets out to climb the highest mountain in the world because his 25 year old son died 200 feet from the top? You still got to write the fucking thing, but it’s at least an actual potential movie.
3) Entertain these fucking people. Once you’ve figured out your structure and done all the work, you owe it to yourself to nail down each scene with the best possible execution. You can have the right scene and intent and it’s just kind of lying there, so maybe toss something in out of the blue and see what happens. I dunno… It’s a feel thing, but you get as many chances as you want so don’t be happy until you’re actually happy. And even then, there’s always gonna be a few things you still feel you’re only 80% there on.

SS: You do something in this script a lot of screenwriters are told to avoid: Flashbacks. Are you aware of the resistance to this technique and how did you approach the flashbacks in your script to avoid this?

AZ: It’s one of the first rules you learn because 99% of the time it’s done poorly as a lazy way to “show” and not “tell” exposition. But there is a reason flashbacks exist, because on occasion you need them. If I hadn’t put them in Reunion, it would’ve felt flat. “How hard could it have really been for this guy?” the audience is asking. So I have to show you. And I think a key in doing flashbacks well is committing to them as an actual plot line rather than a momentary cheat to get information out. Like if you have a character just appear and then you never see them again, it feels like a cheat. But other than that, two other things worked in my favor. One, the juxtaposition of the two types of brutality, torture and bullying, are both painful in their own ways, so it helps to ground the violence in something we’ve all experienced or witnessed or even participated in. And by the time Fat Pig’s high school story reaches an apex with the attack on him, it feeds right into the violence of the story 10 years later, so it really is one whole series of events cut in half and then shuffled together like a deck of cards. And two, the flashbacks serve as a way to break up the “horror” stuff and allow me to reset characters spatially in the present. So you have something I could’ve easily fucked up five years ago but now, because it happened naturally, I could use it as a way to structurally fortify the script rather than take away from it.

SS: One of the most popular genres on the spec market is contained thriller/horror. Unfortunately that’s led to a lot of people writing boring “been there/done that” contained thrillers, a problem you’ve managed to avoid. What do you think the key is to making a contained thriller work?

AZ: I think you wrap yourself in the warm blanket of the structural advantages the genre offers: Keeping it as short as possible. Only a certain amount of characters. A need to develop characters on the fly, because, you won’t have time to do it otherwise. And a place that they can be trapped in but also explore. Now what circumstances bring these together where I can also give a strong reason for someone to put all of this into motion? A lot of these scripts fail basic logic tests right there. Then, you probably need a device to bounce out of the main story. It helps visually and also pacing-wise because A) you can balance action with quieter moments (otherwise everyone is dead in 45 minutes) and B) you can jump ahead a little time-wise when you need to move characters around/do basic stuff that keep the script from being 25% longer than it needs to be. I had present and past. Someone could do present and future. A classic is inside the bank with hostages, outside with the negotiator – whatever it is… It only has to be a contained movie in that people are stuck in a bad situation. Alien, Predator, Speed, Die Hard… They all boil down to a bug in a jar and your hand is on top of the lid. But each finds a way to open the movie up and give you different looks so that it feels like a nice big meal while also keeping the screws on the characters tightened.

SS: Something I don’t talk about enough on this blog is rewriting. Can you take us through your rewriting process?

AZ: I tend to have pretty comprehensive first drafts due to outlining a lot and also taking breaks from writing to edit during the first draft, so once I’m done with it, it’s pretty much what it’s going to be. Then a few days later I take it out and just read it. This is where experience helps a lot because some stuff will feel off and some stuff I know will stay almost-as-written throughout. But mostly I’m looking for ways to do things quicker. Cutting little ‘back and forths’ that aren’t adding anything to a conversation. Beginnings and endings of scenes. One thing I learned through the years is that when you rewrite, you want to be doing what’s already in the script but better, and that means planning out ahead of time so you’re only doing the cutting afterward. Adding characters or plot lines after the fact is just gonna put stress on parts of your script that weren’t conceived with those things in mind. That’s why I really consider writing outlining. Your time writing the actual script should be it just flowing out of you.

SS: Tell us a little more about your outlining process then. When did you start outlining in your screenwriting journey and why?

AZ: Outlining is where I’m actually creating the story. I didn’t do it my first script (which promptly took about 10 months). Second script I went to note cards which really helped me see the entire movie for the first time. I did that for the next eight scripts and then at some point I went over to outlines because there got to be too many note cards and too much detail. Now I do about a 15 page outline and note cards just for scene headings (but even that’s kind of fading out of my process). The outline can contain any random thought I come up with, and as I start to get to the 5 or 6 page mark, I begin to organize and delete things that new ideas have made obsolete. That’s when I start organizing the scene ideas into an order and then group those by sequences and acts. So the movie is being assembled at the top while I have a section for Random Bits (random story pieces – scenes, lines of dialogue, cool moments – that haven’t found a home yet), Characters (notes on them, their arcs, etc.), Themes/Big Stuff (Movies my idea shares DNA with. For example, Reunion is structurally similar to Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory). And as I vomit out all the ideas I have, they eventually find a home and then the top of the movie starts to take shape so I start writing those scenes. And as I write them, I delete everything from the outline I’ve used. The outline then gets shorter at the front, longer at the back and like a conveyor belt it just feeds scenes into the script. So as I’m writing at the computer, I have everything pretty well planned out and then when I get bored of writing, I work on the outline and back and forth until I have like a four page nub of an outline full of unused ideas. But I’ll outline for about two months and write a script in about six weeks. And for anywhere between a couple of years to a few weeks I could be kicking around the idea before that process begins.

SS: What do you think is the hardest thing about screenwriting and how do you tackle it?

AZ: It varies at all stages of your path but personally, now, it’s coming up with an idea that’s worth writing. You get some crappy scripts out of you and then an under-discussed longer stage is when you write a lot of simply “good scripts.” They make perfect sense, have laughs or thrills or whatever, but aren’t good enough to get noticed. And once you get past that, you really need to focus and come up with something cool no matter how high or low concept it is. It just has to get you hyped to write it and do all the work that at this point, you know is going to be a pretty thorough process. It’s a struggle to get to the point where you can express what’s in your head and heart on the page. But once you get there, it’s just as much of a struggle with each script because you know how good you can make it. I get done with something now and I’m not smiling as it comes out of the printer. I’m fucking exhausted. So you really have to find something you’re into to make it worth it. That takes time.

SS: Just for kicks, let’s say we compared two horror scripts, one written by Adam from eight years ago and one written by Adam today. What would be the biggest difference?

AZ: The one eight years ago would’ve been flat out ‘shoulder shrug’ material. A big fat, “Eh.” It would make sense and be cool in spots but it would be the equivalent of me going on the internet for a lasagna recipe and making it versus someone who spent 12 years learning to be a chef making it. Edible does the job but not much more.

SS: What’s next on the horizon?

AZ: Well, Two Ton and I will kick into gear on Reunion shortly – going through the script and ironing out anything they might want to take a look at. They’ll also be trying to put the movie together on their end. I’m taking meetings on my new project, a supernatural thriller that’s a step up in budget. People are responding well so far, so I’m hoping to find a home for it before I sit down so I can involve them in the process. Then it’s finding a home for comedy stuff which is my actual bread and butter. Whether that’s a manager or someone interested in a specific script, who knows? And I probably need to solve the representation question at some point. Right now, I’m just dealing with people myself which is kind of cool as I’m relying on word of mouth that’s built from SS and being good in the room to foster relationships. It seems to be working which is a good confidence builder. But it is a bit of a job on top of my writing job on top of my actual day job, which I still have. So hopefully soon someone will step forward who I feel comfortable with and can take some of this off my plate. Other than that, just keep writing. Got me this far. Seems like a good plan.