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.

Genre: Drama/Psychological Thriller
Premise: Based on a real life story, the psychotic father of a freshman at a small college moves into her apartment and begins controlling the lives of the 6 other coeds who live there.
About: This is a high-profile “New York” magazine article that got picked up by Hollywood heavyweights Jason Blum and Mark Wahlberg. They haven’t decided whether to turn it into a TV show or a movie yet. Though if they go the movie route, Wahlberg will play the baddie, Larry. This is pretty shocking, as Larry will be one of the most reprehensible characters ever put on screen. I guess Wahlberg is going for that Oscar. But it’ll come at a price as he’ll temporarily lose his 4th of July Middle America family hero image.
Writers: Ezra Marcs and James D. Walsh.
Details: 5000-7500 word article

If you break into this business, there’s a good chance it will be through a Jason Blumhouse production. He’s the guy who specializes in high concept low-budget fare, which is what you should be writing if you want to break in. Therefore, you should always be tracking what Blum is up to. Understanding his taste could be the difference between a writing career and a bartending gig.

Talia Ray is in her first year at liberal arts college, Sarah Lawrence, living with a group of coeds, when she informs them that her father is getting out of prison and needs a place to stay. She assures them that he had “been framed” and was a great guy. As it turns out, Talia was telling the truth. The 50 year old Larry Ray was a quirky but energetic guy who liked to tell tales about his time in the military and CIA.

At first, Larry played the part of dorm dad, laying down a schedule, paying for meals, helping the students study. But then he began holding group therapy sessions at the end of the day, all of which ended, oddly, with Larry convincing one of the students that they were sexually abused as a child.

Things got weird when Larry started sleeping in the same room as one of the students, Isabella. And when another student, Daniel, started dating Isabella, he would instruct them to have sex in front of him under the guise that he could help them achieve a higher sense of clarity (or something). Daniel thought something about Larry was off. But since everyone else in the dorm seemed to think he was great, he figured he, Daniel, must be the problem.

How Larry ended up in prison is hard to sort out because Larry’s so good at lying. Everything he claims has a sliver of truth to it so if you look into it, there’s no proof that it’s definitively a lie. For example, Larry claims to know Robert DeNiro. And Robert DeNiro does actually say he met Larry once. Most of his connections date back to knowing one of Rudy Giuliani’s right hand men, a powerful contact in the years directly after 9/11. But Larry ended up selling him out, which resulted in a revenge mission that put Larry behind bars (according to him).

Things get truly devious when we learn how Larry makes money. In one of the most bizarre schemes I’ve ever heard of, Larry tells people that they “broke” items of his, makes them admit it in written form, and forces them to pay him back. Some of these items, like a window, could go for a couple hundred bucks. But other times he claims his entire house was destroyed and demands half a million dollars. In one of the saddest examples of this guy’s insanity, one of the girls, desperate to pay him back, began working as a high class escort after she graduated. Charging $8000 an evening, all of the proceeds went to Larry.

So how do you get away with all this? As is typical with these psychopaths, they use intimidation, manipulation, and threats to keep their victims in line, and they never do anything they know can put them in prison. They don’t kill anyone. They don’t rape anyone. In every case, the victim makes the decisions. Some of these people have actually escaped Larry’s clutches, and he’s still out there hunting them down, trying to get the money he’s “owed” back. Larry denies any of this happened, of course, and says that it’s actually himself who’s the victim. That Giuliani’s old aid is trying to kill him.

This reminds me a lot of the true life podcast “Dirty John” (which would eventually be made into a TV show). But even though the titular character in that story would end up trying to murder someone, I feel like Larry is worse. This guy is pure evil in every way. He manipulates. He cons you out of money. If you try to run away, he threatens you. And if anybody calls him on it, he claims he’s the victim. He’s literally the worst type of human being you can be.

Which is our first screenwriting lesson of the day. Remember that when you’re conceiving of an idea, you’re looking for something that makes the audience FEEL SOMETHING. If they don’t feel anything, your story is a failure. Now the more popular movies like to make you feel good. Or scared. Or they might make you feel sad-happy in that cathartic “I’ll never let you go Jack” way. But one of the overlooked ways to make an audience feel is through anger.

You saw this, for example, in the documentary, Three Identical Strangers. With each new revelation, we became angrier and angrier. The reason you don’t see this used as much is because people don’t like to go to the movies to be angry. They go to the movies to escape negative emotions. So it’s a risky choice. What you’re hoping for is that the audience (or reader) gets SO riled up, that they have to talk to other people about it. And those people will then have to see it for themselves. I feel like Larry is powerful enough to achieve that.

I can also see why, out of the millions of articles on the internet, Blumhouse chose this one. You get to tell the story of a cult but the story is already localized for you. What does “localized” mean? Well, one of the challenges of writing about a big event is figuring out what you’re going to zoom in on. For example, if you’re telling a story about the apocalypse, you can’t cover every country and every city and every person and the military and the government and etc. etc. You need to find a small group of people you’re going to follow. “The Stolen Kids of Sarah Lawrence”allows you to tell a story about a cult, but it’s all happening in this tiny dorm room. It’s already localized.

On top of this, “Sarah Lawrence” has a second thread working underneath it, one that’s fascinated people for as long as cults have been around. That being, “How can they be so stupid?” A couple of the girls who come into this story graduated from Harvard and Columbia. And Larry’s got them in a three-way sexual relationship. The fact that nobody can ever satisfactorily answer that question is why cults will always be fascinating. For what it’s worth, I think falling victim to a cult is a combination of things. One, these are often people who feel lost. And when people are lost, it’s easier to spin them a tale. Second, I think being in a cult is a bit like falling for the wrong person. By that I mean someone who’s cruel to you. Someone who takes advantage of you. Someone who psychologically manipulates you. But when you’re in love, you can’t see these things. Your best friend could literally lay out all of the ways this person is terrible to you, and you can’t see what they’re saying. I imagine cults working on a similar level. At least, that’s the only way I can make sense of it.

I could see this being a good TV series. Tell the story through the kids’ point of view and focus on them wanting to get out but not being able to. Cause if you tell the story the way it’s told in this article – that nobody wanted out until the very end – it will be infuriating. We have to have one or two people trying to get away and expose this man.

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

What I learned: The “Liar Liar Pants on Fire” sub-genre. Hollywood loves stories about liars. We just had a prominent Oscar contender liar with Can You Ever Forgive Me. If you can find a true-life story about a liar who got into some deep sh*t because of his lies, consider writing that puppy.

The Scriptshadow Newsletter should be hitting your Inboxes any second now.

I give more screenwriting tips in this Newsletter than any newsletter in history! For all you TV writers, you’re going to love this edition. Lots of TV stuff. I give my opinion on Rotten Tomatoes’ stupid new review policy, that Terminator trailer, the weirdest video game trailer I’ve ever seen, a big new spec sale, and a great big sci-fi spec review.

If you don’t receive the newsletter within the next hour, make sure to check your SPAM and PROMOTIONS folders in your e-mail program. If you can’t find it there, e-mail me at carsonreeves1@gmail.com with the subject line, “NEWSLETTER!” and I’ll send it to you. Enjoy!

p.s. For those of you e-mailing me saying that you keep signing up but don’t receive the newsletter, try sending me another e-mail address. E-mailing programs are notoriously quirky and there may be several invisible reasons your e-mail address/server is rejecting the e-mail.

Genre: Thriller
Premise: A film school dropout with a talent for producing AI-generated “deepfake” videos is caught in a global conspiracy when he receives a disturbing commission from a mysterious online stranger.
Why You Should Read: If you haven’t yet seen deepfakes in the news, you will. This emerging AI-powered technology lets anyone with an average gaming PC churn out eerily lifelike fake videos of people. The social and political implications of this technology are huge, and it has politicians, generals, artists, and celebrities freaking out. Someone is going to make a movie about deepfakes. I hope it’s this one, and I think my background in tech makes for a story that’s plausible and well-researched while still being thrilling, unpredictable, and character-driven.
Writer: Alex Payne
Details: 115 pages

I’ve always said that the only original stories left to tell are the ones that incorporate new technology. I mean, do you really think you’re going to find some new angle on the zombie genre? Or the romantic comedy? Or an action-adventure? Or biopic? People have been telling these stories for decades – arguably centuries. Which means high-profile technology that nobody expected to exist (because if it did, it would’ve already been written about) is the last opportunity to write something fresh (incidentally, this is why “voice” is valued so highly in the industry. With every story already being told, the only way to make a story stand out is via the unique way in which its told). However, just because you’re writing about something new doesn’t mean you can’t descend into tired storytelling tropes. That’s what I’m always worried about when I see a script like this. Is the flashy subject matter a smokescreen for what’s going to be a traditional thriller? I hope not!

22 year old Mo James is essentially squatting in a New York City apartment, promising his friend of a friend landlord that he knows he’s missed the rent the last three months but he promises he’ll have the money soon. Mo’s not the only one in his family having money problems. His once successful father is about to lose his home and business if he doesn’t come into some dough fast.

Mo heads to the dark web hoping to find a job that will pay for all this. Oh yeah, Mo is a deep faker. He takes home porno videos and fits celebrity heads on the girls’ bodies. There ain’t enough money in it for a New York City lifestyle, though, so Mo is desperate to find something that pays more. That’s when he comes across a 1.3 million dollar deep fake job. He thinks it’s fake, but after a little research, he learns the client is legit.

Mo accepts the job but when he receives the video, he realizes why it pays so much. In it, a militant Asian woman is speaking to an entire crowd of people, trying to rile them up. Mo’s job is to deepfake every single face in the crowd! There’s no way he’s going to be able to pull this off by himself, so he contacts his sister who has a relationship with a high profile transgendered hacker named Darby. Darby thinks what Mo does for a living is disgusting but decides to help him anyway.

As Darby tries to solve the mass-deepfaking algorithm, he becomes curious who hired Mo and suggests they find out. This leads the two on a wild goose chase around town as they track down remote computer servers connected to other remote computer servers that connect back to where the client actually lives. Of course, when the client finds out that they’re snooping, they try to kill Mo and Darby. It will now be up to them to expose the bad guys before they perish under mysterious circumstances.

I can see why this script won Amateur Showdown last week.

It has a really strong first 10 pages, which is what most voters base their vote on. If I would’ve read the first 10, I would’ve voted on Deepfake as well. What’s most impressive is the knowledge the writer has, not just in regards to this subject matter, but with computers in general.

However, little red flags began popping up that the strong start would be temporary. And I want to make clear that I’m not out there actively searching for these flags. They pop up subconsciously. I’ve read so many scripts at this point and have become so aware of patterns that when they happen, a natural, “uh oh, I’ve been here before” warning pops into my brain, like a low altitude warning on a jetliner.

The first flag is that everybody in this script is 23 years old (or 21, or 22, or 24). Why is this a flag? Because, in my experience, it means that’s how old the writer is. And while 23 year old writers can be extremely talented, they haven’t failed through enough screenplay experiences yet to truly understand what works and what doesn’t. More specially, they’re weak with structure and struggle mightily with second acts.

On top of this, while their voice can be exceptional, they often don’t have the life experience to convincingly portray grown-uphood. And this won’t matter as much if you’re writing, say, a romantic comedy about two 23 year olds. But when you’re bringing in giant organizations and global firms and military stuff and the real job world, a lot of young writers don’t know that world well, which results in them, well, ’deepfaking’ them (using approximations based on previous movies and TV shows they’ve seen). You can feel that as a reader. It’s no different than George Lucas writing about love. Him not knowing that world is why we get Anakin and Padme rolling around in waterfalls in Attack of the Clones.

Indeed, those are the two main problems here. On the structural front, the second act gets messier and messier. It feels like the characters are running around with their heads cut off. It feels like the story is running around with its head cut off. It feels like the writer is struggling to keep this thing on the rails. Half the time, I didn’t even know what Mo and Darby were trying to do! It seemed like they wanted to find out who the client was, but all I kept thinking was, “Why??” Cause they’re curious? Should 50 pages of a script be driven by two characters’ curiosity?

And then there was the video itself. The writer never gave us a convincing reason to care about this militant woman talking to a group of admirers. In fact, I still don’t know what the point of deepfaking the crowd was. In the end, the video’s lack of substance was confirmed when we were told it was some random terrorist in some random part of the world attempting to do some vague “bad” thing. Here’s a question writers need to ask more often. Why should we care? Why in the world do I, the reader, care that some fringe terrorist group is going to do some fringe terrorist act 10,000 miles away from my existence? Change number one for this script needs to be to tie it in to where our characters are actually located. The terrorist act needs to affect New York.

I hate to pile on, but every 10 pages was worse than the previous 10 pages. And that happens A LOT(!!!) with young writers. They nail the first act and then they give what they feel is a decent exploration of the idea going forward. DECENT ISN’T GOOD ENOUGH. Let me give you an example. Late in the script, Darby and Mo get into a fight about Mo’s deepfaking job, specifically the fact that he’s taking these girls and putting celebrity heads on them. “Do you get their consent!?” he hells at Mo. “Do you get their consent!?” It’s not that Darby’s concerns aren’t valid. But this isn’t what the story is about!!! It wasn’t about how Mo deepfaked an innocent girl and the rest of the movie is the fallout from that situation. They’re battling an organization that sends out drones that fire missiles at them! Who cares about the moral consequences of what Mo does at this point? You have to understand your theme and what you’re actually trying to say when you’re writing scenes like this. Otherwise, it feels like a grab bag of drama, a writer desperately looking for any conflict he can latch onto.

Personally, I think Alex approached this story from the wrong angle. Late in the script, Mo threatens to frame a journalist he dislikes by deepfaking their face onto an incriminating video. “That’s not me,” the journalist says. “I’ll prove it’s fake. I’m a reporter. People trust us.” That should’ve been your theme. Fake news. Journalists using this deepfake technology to back up their own narratives. Have a journalist hire Mo to deepfake a video that ends up going viral and changing the political landscape of the country. Sort of like the next step up from what Louis Bloom was doing in Nightcrawler. I don’t see how anyone’s going to get excited about a deepfake story that’s centered around an unknown province in India.

Script link: Deepfake

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

What I learned: Last Second Villain Syndrome never works – We literally meet our villain in the final scene of the script. Come on! You either have to introduce the villain earlier or one of your good characters has to turn.

What I learned 2: Make things hard for your hero. Not easy. Especially when it comes to stakes. Mo’s landlord is a friend of a friend who’s SUPER understanding that Mo is late with his rent. That’s not interesting at all. Make it someone Mo doesn’t know. Make him scarier. And make him demand money now, not whenever it’s convenient.

Is Barry Season 2, Episode 5 (“Ronnie/Lily”) really the best episode of television since 2010? I don’t know. But it’s in the conversation. I resisted discussing the episode until now because I figured only a small percentage of you watched Barry and to best appreciate the episode, you needed to watch the first 8 episodes of Season 1, and the four preceding episodes of Season 2. Did I really expect all of you to do that? No. But then I realized Ronnie/Lily is basically a standalone episode. As long as you understand Barry’s character and past, you can enjoy it.

Barry is a former hitman who’s moved to LA and joined an acting class. The problem is, he keeps getting pulled back in to do jobs, despite the fact that he desperately hates killing people. Due to a string of circumstances, Barry is “hired” to kill a guy who’s sleeping with another man’s wife. But Barry’s got a plan. He’s going to show up at the man’s house, he’s going to explain the situation, and he’s going to help the guy disappear so that they both get what they want. As Barry is helping the man pack, they walk into a giant trophy room. It turns out this guy is a freaking Taekwondo master. Barry’s a little freaked out by this, but they continue to pack. Then, just when Barry lets his guard down, the guy attacks. A long drag-down fight ensues.

It’s best if you actually watch the episode. But if you don’t have time, here’s what happens. Barry somehow manages to defeat the guy, who dies. But as Barry’s leaving, the front door opens and an 11 year old girl in a karate outfit appears. The two freeze, both look at each other, and the girl darts past Barry. Barry heads to the door, opens it, is about to leave, stops, closes the door. Oh no! We know that Barry now has to kill the daughter as well! So Barry goes searching through the house to find the girl when… she appears out of nowhere and attacks him. The girl is like a feral Taekwondo monster. She’s relentless, diving and scraping and biting and growling as she attacks Barry from every angle. Barry does everything he can to stay alive before the girl darts out the window and disappears into the neighborhood.

Barry goes back to his handler, Fuches, who’s waiting in the car. Fuches asks if he took care of business. Barry tells him about the girl. Fuches says, “Well she’s seen you. We gotta kill her.” The two go driving through the neighborhood until they come across her again. But instead of attacking her, she attacks them! The girl’s moves are almost inhuman and the guys don’t understand what they’re dealing with. That’s the gist of the episode and I won’t ruin the ending. But let’s just say it continues to unfold in an unexpected entertaining way.

If that sounds too bizarre to be good, I promise you this. They make it work. You can complain all you want in the comments about, “WHAT??? A LITTLE GIRL ATTACKS A GROWN MAN AND SHE LIVES???” or whatever other complaint you have based on my synopsis. It’s pointless. The only way to understand the genius of this episode is to watch it. Cause they take a lot of things that shouldn’t have worked and they not only make them work, they combine the ingredients into an all-time classic meal. You gotta understand how hard that is. The show that precedes this one HAS DRAGONS in it. It has zombie monsters. It has production value that rivals most 1960s war epics. Barry has people. That’s it! It reminds me how powerful a single writer with a few characters and a room can be. With that in mind, here are 7 screenwriting lessons to learn from Barry, Season 2, Episode 5.

1) Chase down weird unexpected ideas – The only reason this episode exists is because the stunt coordinator on Barry told Bill Hader (the co-creator and actor who plays Barry) after a long day that he knew of this young girl who was a karate master and if Bill ever had a story idea that included a young karate girl, he thought this girl was talented and would kill it. Hader says he then wrote down the idea of Barry getting into a fight with this girl. Later, when they were writing Season 2, he decided to make that the centerpiece of an episode. What’s important to note here is that Bill didn’t just come up with this idea. A person suggested it to him, which got him wondering if a character like that would work on Barry. This makes me wonder how many great ideas I’ve missed over the years because a random person didn’t come up to me and drop a bizarre idea. So my tip here is, instead of waiting for this to happen to you, be the person who suggests weird ideas yourself. At the beginning of the day’s writing session, suggest five weird ides to yourself and chase those ideas down to see if anything interesting comes of them. They very well may yield nothing. But if there’s a chance that one of them will lead to a creative explosion and something even half as good as Ronnie/Lily, it’s worth a try.

2) Look for components in a scene that you can play against type – When you imagine a scenario where a hitman comes into a guy’s house and tells him he’s here to kill him, you’re thinking the house owner is probably freaking out. He’s probably talking a mile a minute. He’s nervous and scared and jumpy. That’s how most writers would write this scene. The father character in this scene is the complete opposite. He has no reaction whatsoever. He’s as calm as calm can be. Playing this character against type creates a slow unnerving subtext to the scene. Because he’s being so non-reactive, we know something is up with him.

3) What’s the worst thing you can do your character in this moment? – This is the question Bill Hader asked when Barry showed up at this guy’s house. He thought, “What if, as they’re packing, they walk into a room, and it’s filled with Taekwondo trophies?” It’s a brilliant moment as it completely shifts the dynamics of the scene. A second ago this was just a guy. Now he’s a man capable of killing you with his hands. Always ask what the worst thing is you can do to your character in this moment. You won’t always use it. But it’s a quick way to find a great scene.

4) Once you open a line of suspense, let it ride – Remember that with suspense, you can add an insane amount of tension to a scene even during periods where little is going on. Too often I see writers create a suspenseful situation then ruin it by immediately jumping to the action. Here, when they walk in the Taekwondo room, Bill Hader has opened a captivating line of suspense. This is not an ordinary man. He’s a dangerous adversary. But Hader doesn’t jump the gun. He allows the man to slowly pack, to slowly walk back into the other room, and to continue packing. This is one of the most powerful sections of the episode even though, technically, nothing is happening. Let those lines of suspense ride!

5) Ground your episode with an emotional anchor – When co-creator Alec Berg read Bill Hader’s script for Ronnie/Lily, he had one note. Ground it in emotion so it’s not just this big wacky fight episode. In the show, Barry has a complicated relationship with his handler, Fuches. The man saved him when he was at his worst, but then turned him into a contract killer, a life Barry’s trying to leave. Hader decided to give us a little more on their relationship, so there are a series of flashbacks (never too long) of Fuches rescuing Barry from his tour in Iraq, and he ties those in with the present scenes of Fuches helping Barry find this girl. It’s a surprisingly emotional payoff, and a huge shift in their relationship going forward.

6) Don’t always start the scene on the obvious character – In Hader’s first draft of the episode, we follow Barry into the house all the way until he confronts the father. One of the writers suggested that this was boring. Instead, start by following the father instead. It was a game-changing choice because it resulted in us watching this random guy drive up to this random house, go inside, put his stuff away, and the whole time we’re thinking, “Who is this guy???” It totally changed the dynamic of the scene, where only later does Barry come in. Even then, we don’t see Barry. We only hear him off-screen. Nothing about this episode plays out the way traditional TV does. The DP even challenged Hader on this moment. “Why are we only hearing Barry? It doesn’t make sense.” “I don’t know, it just feels right,” Hader answered. And he was dead right. Way more interesting.

7) Add complications to fight scenes so they’re not like every other fight scene we’ve seen – One of the conscious choices Bill Hader and Alec Berg made early on about the Taekwondo dad fight was that it was going to be realistic. It wasn’t going to be perfectly choreographed. It was going to be messy to look at and the guys were going to be tired. They’d take breaks. More specifically, Barry gets an early hit on the guy’s windpipe, damaging it to the point where the guy is barely able to breathe. That wheezing breath becomes a centerpiece of the fight, helping to differentiate it from all the other onscreen fights we’ve seen. It was like the anti-John Wick and extremely refreshing.

Ronnie/Lili represents the power of “What if?” Pose that single question to yourself while you’re writing. It can be the dumbest “What if…” question in the world. But you’d be surprised at how often terrible ideas turn into great ones. “What if Barry was attacked by an 11 year old female Taekwondo master?” isn’t a scene you’d imagine in a show like Barry. Which is exactly why it’s become the most buzzed-about TV episode of the year. At least in a show without dragons. :)

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!