We interrupt our regularly scheduled program (dialogue) to talk about character. Why character? Because yesterday some interesting conversations picked up AND I DISAGREED WITH EVERY SINGLE ONE OF THEM! Okay, that’s an exaggeration. My contention was that the script I reviewed, which sold back in 1994, never got made because the main character was so gosh-darn forgettable. He had ZERO going on. We knew NOTHING about him. Therefore, we had no emotional attachment to the story whatsoever.

One of you was quick to point out that Alien, one of the best movies of all time, tells us next to nothing about its characters and it didn’t seem to hurt the film at all. Others pointed out that action movies are often WORSE when the writer tries to jam a bunch of manufactured character development into them. Rose Tico has this deep tragic backstory in The Last Jedi. But she’s still one of the lamest characters ever.

So is character development overrated? Is it all just a matter of casting? I would answer that with a big fat NO. Not even close. In fact, character construction is still the most in demand writing skill in Hollywood. Put 10 guys in a room and ask them to come up with a cool plot or a killer set piece, and they’ll give you something that’s, at the very least, decent. Ask that same group of people to come up with a handful of great characters and nothing they give you will be useable.

There’s no question in my mind that if Man with the Football had a great main character, it would’ve been made. Why do I say that? Because good characters don’t come around often in Hollywood. So if an actor encounters one, they’re going to want to play them. That character was lame. I wouldn’t know a single actor in Hollywood who’d want to play him.

Now there’s a couple of things at play here that most writers aren’t aware of. When they hear “good character” or “make a character likable,” they think in terms of Adam Sandler movies or cheesy romantic comedies where the main character hands a homeless person a hundred dollar bill or, in the case of the most recent Sandler movie, Murder Mystery, Sandler busts a kid trying to steal something – BUT HE DOESN’T RAT HIM OUT! He lets him correct his mistake without arresting him. Gosh that Adam Sandler guy is nice, isn’t he?

That’s not real character development. It’s not real “character likability” development. It’s a hacky studio note that even the interns at CAA could give. And it’s not what we’re talking about today. The truth is, character development is varied. You will not use the same amount of it in every screenplay. Some stories require less character development. Some require more. Some GENRES require less character development. Some genres require more. A straight drama will always require the most character development of all the genres whereas an action movie might contain very little.

But hear me know, believe me later and understand me next week – YOU MUST ALWAYS add character development to your hero. And YOU MUST ALWAYS give us a hero that we want to root for. That doesn’t mean they have to be likable. But we have to want to root for them. Nobody liked that Hannibal Lecter ate a bunch of human beings to death. But, oddly, we still rooted for him to escape in the end. So today, I’m going to provide you with the eight most important things that affect how the reader perceives your character. I’m going to call this “care-achter” development. Because these are the things that make us CARE about your hero.

Backstory – Backstory is anything that’s happened to your character before the events of the movie took place. Backstory can be presented through flashbacks or alluded to through dialogue. Backstory is actually one of the least effective ways to influence a reader’s emotional response to a character. Movies are about what’s happening NOW, in the present, and therefore people don’t care all that much about what happened in the past. If I hear you lost your kid in a car crash – I’m sorry but big whoop. That’s every movie. We’re too desensitized to that stuff. Now if you start your movie with a flashback that SHOWS us the crash the kid died in, we’re definitely going to have a deeper emotional connection to that loss. But I would only rely on this sort of thing if that’s what the movie is really about. In other words, if the film is about a mother trying to recover from the loss of her child, that can be very powerful. But if you try to throw dead-child backstory into Independence Day 3, the audience is too smart to buy into that nonsense.

Actions – This is one of the single most important ways to influence how the audience thinks of a character – their actions. It’s also one of the primary character development tools in an action movie. Does your character step up to the plate and act when times are tough? If your character, Dan, is picking his 10 year old son up from school and sees Jake, 11, bullying him, does Dan walk up to Jake’s father and say something? That simple action can have a HUGE influence on how we perceive Dan. One of the easiest ways to get readers on your hero’s side is to write an early scene where your character acts in a strong manner. Or rights a wrong. That’s all I was asking from yesterday’s script. Not some big goofy backstory. But ANYTHING that gave me some insight into the hero and made me want to root for him.

Choice – Choice is action’s little cousin. It’s basically the same thing, but you add a little more weight to the action so that there’s not just a choice involved, but a difficult choice. Take the exact same scenario I mentioned above but change it so that Jake’s dad also happens to be Dan’s boss. So for Dan to go up and say something to Jake’s father is actually jeopardizing his relationship at work. If Dan’s already on shaky ground at his job, the choice becomes even harder. However, if Dan does the right thing (mentions Jake’s behavior to his boss), we’ll like him A LOT.

How They Treat People – This technically falls under the action umbrella as well, but I’m separating it because character interaction is such a major component of a screenplay. So if your character is treating everyone badly, you can guess how we’re going to perceive them. Conversely, if they treat people well, we’ll like them. These are the tiny slivers of character development that writers overlook. And yet in an action script where we want to convey as much about a character as possible in as little time as possible, paying attention to the way your hero treats others might be all you need to get him on the audience’s side.

Personality – A favorable personality can do a majority of the work for you. If we like a character because of their general disposition, we don’t need any save the cat moments or yell at bully’s dad moments. The magnetism of that personality is going to drive the majority of our support. Marvel has become a master at this. From Tony Stark to Peter Parker to Thor to Peter Quill, we like positive charismatic people. So if you’re writing a character like this, you don’t even have to worry about doing anything else. We like the character from the second they start talking.

Their situation in life – A character’s current lot in life has a huge effect on the level of sympathy we have for them. A character who lives in a tiny place in a bad part of town and barely makes ends meet is higher on the sympathy scale than a billionaire who owns a penthouse on Fifth Avenue. — BUT if you give the billionaire an A+ personality, it can override our negative perception of their privilege (Tony Stark). There used to be a belief in Hollywood that rich people couldn’t be main characters for this reason. We’d reject them because their life was great. But I think you’re starting to see how this works. You assess who your character is, how they’re likely to be perceived, and you adjust accordingly. Some characters have so much working against them that you need to add a lot of these tools to make us like them.

How others treat them – A lot of writers trying to make their heroes likable assume they can only do so by looking inwards, at the character themselves. But actually, you can make characters likable through the way others treat them. Look no further than Cinderella. One of the reasons Cinderella is so insanely likable is that her stepmother and two step-sisters are so mean to her. When we see people being mean to others, our sympathy immediately goes out to them. I actually leaned this lesson by watching the reality show, Survivor. On that show was this guy named Russell. He was one of the worst human beings you could imagine. He was duplicitous, mean, vengeful, a liar, and just plain not a good person. He also holds the title of being one of the show’s all time favorites. He has tens of millions of fans. But how can that be? Well, the thing was, everybody hated Russell so much that they were constantly trying to get him off the show. They tried everything in their power. And they would say it right to his face. “We don’t like you. We will do anything to get you out of here.” They were so awful to him that audiences gradually found themselves rooting for Russell. So never underestimate the influence of how others treat your hero.

Whether or not they get back up – Movies are about knocking your hero down. It will happen over and over again. In fact, if your hero isn’t constantly being knocked down by obstacles and conflict, there probably isn’t enough happening in your movie. But the critical thing here is HOW YOUR CHARACTER DEALS WITH BEING KNOCKED DOWN. Do they give up? Or do they get back up? One of the most likable types of people on the planet are people who get knocked down but get back up with a positive attitude. They keep trying. Failure is an obstacle to them, not an end destination. So an early scene where your hero gets their butt handed to them badly but they still get back up and want to keep going – that will have a huge positive effect on how we see that character.

I’ll finish off by repeating what I said yesterday. If I’m not rooting for your hero, I don’t care what happens in your script. So make sure that when you’re writing that first act, you’re thinking about how the audience is perceiving your hero. Cause the flip side of what I just said is that if you can make us fall in love with your hero, you don’t need to write the best story in the world. We’re going to care so much about that person that we’ll be willing to follow them anywhere.

Hey, do you have a logline that isn’t working? Try out my logline service. It’s 25 bucks for a 1-10 rating, 150 word analysis, and a logline rewrite. I also have a deluxe service for 40 dollars that allows for unlimited e-mails back and forth where we tweak the logline until you’re satisfied. I consult on everything screenwriting related (first page, first ten pages, first act, outlines, and of course, full scripts). So if you’re interested in getting some quality feedback, e-mail me at carsonreeves1@gmail.com and I’ll send you a quote!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Now let’s talk spec scripts.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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