Genre: Horror
Premise: Trapped in a strange house, a young woman with a phobia of dogs must escape the jaws of a bloodsucking hound and its master.
Why You Should Read:I find phobias fascinating. The crippling impact they can have on a person’s life. I wanted to take that fear to an extreme level. There seems to be room in the horror universe for an update on Cujo (other than a remake), pitting a protagonist against a vicious, bloodthirsty beast. I set out to write something simpler and more contained than my last work with 100x more blood. Hope you enjoy sinking your teeth into this one!
Writer: Katherine Botts
Details: 91 pages
Katherine is back. If my memory is correct, she’s 3 for 3 on winning Amateur Offerings. When a Katherine script comes in, a Katherine script tends to win. That’s my rhyme for the day. However, there’s some backstory here. Katherine’s been sending this script in for awhile and I wasn’t keen on featuring it. Not because I didn’t believe in her. But because the idea didn’t excite me. A mean dog after a person in a house? It sounded like the most straightforward predictable movie ever. I man Cujo is one of the only Stephen King books I haven’t read (for the same reason). Scary dogs don’t scare me. So I was going into this one with some prejudice. Would the script look up at me with puppy dog eyes and make me fall in love with it? Or would it bare its teeth and run away? Grab the leash and let’s walk this dog together to find out!
17 year old Blair is scarred for life – both literally and figuratively. When she was 7, a dog attacked her at a pool. She’s never been the same since. Also since that time, her father passed away. Her mom’s moved on with some lame-o named Nathanial. Blair’s plan is to save up enough money so she can fix her car and drive away from this place.
So when she gets a last second opportunity to house-sit for some richie riches, she grabs it. She arrives at the remote southern mansion where she meets the strange family – mother, father, son – who are leaving town because the mom’s father has fallen ill. Just before they’re about to leave, they blindside Blair by letting her know that, oh yeah, she has to take care of their new rescue dog, Jumper. Blair tries to back out of the job but gives in when they beg her.
As soon as they’re gone, Blair recruits her goofy boyfriend, Collin, to come keep her company. Collin, a dog lover, bonds with the rescue dog, encouraging Blair to give her a shot. No chance, Blair says. Dogs are evil. After the two raid the fridge, Collin falls asleep, and that’s when Blair sees it. Big scary eyes outside the window. A dog. And not just any dog. A huge beast of a dog.
Blair tries to shake Collin awake but there’s no response. She glances at the leftovers. Could they have been… drugged? As she yells at Collin to wake up, the beast-dog starts banging on the doors and windows. It’s only a matter of time before it gets in. She drags Collin to the old house elevator just as the dog breaks in, and they go up to the attic. It’s there where they meet old man Arthur. But wait, I thought the family was going to visit Arthur. What’s he doing here in the house?
It turns out Arthur is a vampire. That beast-dog thing is his servant. It finds him people, brings them to him, and he drinks their blood. Blair is able to escape this freakazoid, but now she’s right back in the bowels of the house, easy prey for Beast Dog. Blair will need to, ironically, depend on rescue dog, Jumper, to help her defeat this thing. But as the night unfolds, she realizes this entire family has planned everything to make sure she doesn’t leave alive.
First question that, no doubt, everyone will be asking after yesterday’s article. Does Blood Hound pass the First 10 Pages test? It’s hard for me to answer that because I knew I was reading this all the way through no matter what. So I was trying to imagine what I would’ve done if I had no obligation to the script. The answer is I probably would have stopped. But it wouldn’t have been an easy decision.
The opening scene is fun. Little girl at the pool. She wants a dog from her daddy. Sees a dog hiding in the bushes, goes to pet it. It attacks her. It was enough to keep me turning the pages. But I think the suspense could’ve been introduced earlier and drawn out more. The first part of the scene is her in a pool with her dad joking around. It’s not a bad scene at all. But if we’re grading the scene on the “Every word matters” curve, we could’ve hinted at danger earlier, which would’ve, in turn, allowed for Katherine to sneak in the character introductions via a more exciting scene wrapper.
The second scene (“10 Years Later”) is okay but it’s the very definition of “resting on your laurels.” You know you’ve started with this shocking opening scene. So you think, “I can relax now. They’ll allow me to be boring for a few pages while I set the characters up.” You can never rest on any laurels. I’m not asking for two teaser scenes in a row. But you should still be attempting to construct entertaining scenes after your first one.
But as the script goes on, it gets better. Katherine does a great job adding specificity to her world. Things happen because that’s how they would happen, not because the writer needs them to happen. An example would be the house-sitting. A lazy writer would make that a given. Blair’s housesitting tonight because she has to for the movie to exist. Katherine, however, explains that Blair wants out of this town. She needs money to fix dad’s car so she’s taking as many odd jobs as she can. The housesitting job, then, is a crucial step towards meeting that goal.
I also liked that the family had history. They were weird and mysterious. One of the things I worried about when I originally read the logline was that Blair would go to this house and then a dog would appear out of nowhere and start harassing her. It sounded too simplistic. But from the moment we get inside this house, the family seems interesting. There’s something odd going on with them and you want to keep reading to find out what it is.
The peak of the script for me was when I realized Jumper wasn’t the dog that was going to face off against Blair, but rather food for a bigger dog. That’s when I leaned in and really started reading with an invested eye. Once I figured out that she, too, was meant to be dog food, I was all in. At that point, the script was a double worth-the-read for me.
But then a controversial choice is made that people are either going to love or hate. I didn’t like it. And it comes down to “double mumbo-jumbo.” When I realized the old man, Arthur, was a vampire, my head fell. I thought I was reading a killer dog movie. Now it’d become a killer dog vampire movie. It was a bridge too far. After that, it was impossible for the script to win me back. I thought what Katherine had before this was plenty. It didn’t need a vampire kick.
With that said, I loved one other subplot in the script, which was Jumper going from enemy number one to best friend. I love any well-executed character arc. And Blair’s arc from being the last person in the world who would connect with a dog, to trusting her life to Jumper, was really heart-warming. Kudos to her for pulling that off.
But man, I really disliked the vampire thing. It felt like a writer who didn’t have the confidence that their idea was enough. So they had to add something extra. The irony is that I didn’t think the idea was enough when I started it either. But Katherine did such a good job building up this family and this house, that the original concept DID end up being enough. I mean, that’s some freaky shit. A family lures people into their house and then has their psycho dog eat them. That’s a movie right there.
Script link: Blood Hound
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Be careful with tropes, even if they’re well-regarded. An early scene has Young Blair crawling through the bushes to pet a dog. The dog growls at her. We sense the big attack coming. Then we cut to: “BLOOD flecks onto the old ball.” Yes, the cut away to blood splatter is a more “artful” way to express a violent attack than showing the violence. But if we’ve seen that trope a million times, is it any less lazy than showing the attack itself? I say this because I’ve read three scripts THIS WEEK that have used that trope. So push yourselves. Do something different. Maybe even show the attack. That might be the unexpected thing that makes the scene memorable.
A month ago, I was in the middle of reading a script and I was bored out of my mind. Whenever I’m bored, I instinctually check what page I’m on. So I looked up at the top of the screen and noted that I was on page: Four. That’s right, page four. How bad does a script have to be for the reader to already be bored by page four? Bad. And yet, this is common. Especially with amateur screenplays.
It occurred to me as this was happening that all screenwriting is is time-buying. You’re trying to buy more time with the reader. If you can promise them that that next page is going to be just as entertaining as this one, they will keep turning the pages. And nowhere is this more important than the first ten pages. Because the first ten are where you hook someone. If you can pull them in immediately and not let go, it acts as a promise – a promise to the reader that “I’m going to entertain you.” Once that trust is established, you have them.
This got me wondering: What if I threatened every writer that THE SECOND I was bored, I would stop reading their script? In other words, if I was bored at the end of the first page, I wouldn’t keep reading. If I was bored at the end of the first paragraph, I wouldn’t keep reading. If I was bored AT THE END OF THE FIRST SENTENCE, I wouldn’t keep reading. Would writers change the way they wrote their first ten pages? Of course they would. Every sentence they wrote, they would ask, “Will this keep the reader reading?” And I suspect that everybody using this strategy would become a markedly better writer in the process.
Now some of you are probably thinking, “This is unrealistic, Carson.” All it would do is result in a bunch of scripts catering to the ADD crowd. The literary equivalent of Michael Bay lining up a series of explosions. But here’s the thing – keeping someone entertained doesn’t mean dropping the reader into a firefight or an argument. It can mean that. But there’s more than one way to lead a horse to water.
Yesterday’s script is a perfect example. Promising Young Woman starts with a group of men leering at a hot drunken woman in a bar. Right away, we know something very bad has the potential of happening. So guess what? We keep reading to find out if it does. It’s a very simple dramatic storytelling device. And it’s ensured we will at least read until the end of this scene. No ADD-catering required.
Contrast this with the opening of Monday’s script. We’re in the aftermath of a giant accident and our hero’s daughter has died. The scene creates a little bit of mystery (“What caused this?”), which creates just enough momentum for me to begrudgingly read on. But as an opening scene, it’s weak. Nothing is happening. There’s no tension. There’s no suspense. There’s no conflict. All of that happened before the scene. All sorts of alarms go off when I see this. If there isn’t a single well-developed story skill in the opening scene, why would I think this writer had the skills to entertain me for the next 100 pages? And guess what? I was right. There were no storytelling skills on display for the rest of the script. The script was boring.
But let’s get back to my idea. What if you knew that the reader would stop reading your script the second they were bored? Would you become a better writer in those first ten pages? Would you focus more on entertaining the reader? I say you would. One of the best examples of this is a script that sold all the way back in 1994. It was the hottest spec of the year. Everyone was talking about it. And it went on to become a hit movie. Here’s the first page of that script…
Is there anyone here who can honestly say, “I was bored, I stopped reading?” A show of hands. That’s right. Not a single hand raised. This first page, from the script for “Scream,” is the embodiment of my philosophy. The script grabs you from the very first sentence, and there’s never a point after that where you can stop reading.
“ON A RINGING TELEPHONE.” Well duh, we have to find out who’s calling. Establish a 16 year old girl. “Innocent eyes.” Why point out she’s innocent? Might she be in danger in the coming lines? “Hello.” “Hello.” Silence. Bam, this conversation is already interesting. The person calling isn’t following normal protocol for a phone call (“Hi, is Jake home?”). They just say, “Hello.” Then silence. “Yes,” she asks. “Who is this?” he replies. Okay, now you really have me. The person who’s calling doesn’t get to say, “Who is this?” That’s the answerer’s duty. What’s going on here? I have to read more.
The conversation continues with the man asking questions he shouldn’t be asking. “What number is this?” Then answering her questions in a creepy way. “What number are you trying to reach?” “I don’t know.” “I think you have the wrong number.” “Do I?” Casey, trying to act above it, hangs up on him. “The phone RINGS again.” Casey answers the phone again. “Hello.” HOW CAN YOU NOT TURN THE PAGE after this? How can you not want to find out what happens next? This is how you write to keep the reader’s attention.
I know. I can already hear you zipping around the internet looking for examples of movies that start slowly. “Roma doesn’t start fast, Carson! Roma was nominated for an Academy Award!”
Come on, you’re smarter than this. Roma isn’t a spec script that needed to win over readers. If you are a writer-director, if your movie’s development is already paid for, if your movie is being fast-tracked, if you’re adapting a book, you do not need to worry about this problem. The irony is that all of these writers would do well to still abide by this philosophy. But they don’t, which is partially why so many of these movies are boring. Don’t forget your unique circumstance. You are a nobody whose only influence on someone is the words you write in this document. You’d be smart to use every one of those words wisely. Hook them and never let them go.
Okay, Carson, you’ve made great points as always. But how do we actually execute this plan? What’s the trick to writing an amazing first ten pages? Unfortunately, there’s no trick. But there are certain setups that work better than others. One of the best things you can do is identify all your favorite movie openings – movies that hooked you right away – Then ask, “How did they do that?”
One thing that we’ve identified that works is to place someone who’s helpless in harm’s way. That worked for us in Promising Young Woman. And it worked in Scream. It doesn’t have to be a woman. It can be a kid. Or, if you create a situation whereby a grown man is helpless in a situation, that might work as well.
Another theme of good early scenes is that we’re dropped into something important happening. We’re not dropped in afterwards (like Absence of Courage). We’re not dropped in five hours before (characters going about their everyday lives). We sense right away that something important is happening and therefore we want to find out what happens next. For example, if you opened on a woman in a boardroom sweating bullets, trying to act like she’s not sweating bullets, and we pull back to see she’s in an intense job interview, getting hammered with hard question after hard question, that could hook a reader.
Conversely, you can hook us in the build-up TO that interview. You could place that same job applicant in the waiting area, sweating bullets, going over her notes, trying to remember everything, eyeing the other applicants sitting nearby, all of whom are better looking and better dressed. If I’m dropped into that moment, I’m going to want to keep reading to see how that woman performs.
You could take that same character, however, and start with her waiting outside school to pick her daughter up, and you’ve lost us. It’s not the most boring thing you could start on. But there’s no importance attached to it. Where’s the suspense? Where’s the “reason to keep reading?”
Then again, with a little finagling, you could turn this scene into an interesting one. Focus on the woman waiting while all the other children come out and meet their parents. And with each passing kid that isn’t hers, there’s a looming sense of dread in our protagonist. She’s craning her neck. Looking at a few groups of girls chatting. Her daughter has to be around here somewhere. All of a sudden, a teacher approaches, a concerned look on her face. “Maggie?” she says to our protagonist. “What are you doing here?” “What do you mean? Where’s Tracy?” “You don’t remember? You called an hour ago. To say her uncle was picking her up.” We can see from Maggie’s eyes that she did not call an hour ago to say Tracy’s uncle was picking her up. And now we have to keep reading.
The real trick here is creating an interesting situation. Don’t plop us into some boring mundane scene. Come up with something that’s got some stakes attached to it. Someone’s in danger. Something’s gone wrong. There’s conflict involved. There’s mystery. Give us something that’s impossible to stop reading. And when you finish that first scene and you still have five pages left in your first 10, don’t rest on your laurels. Give us another scene we can’t stop reading. Hold yourself to the same standards you hold other writers to. You’re bored out of your mind reading other writers’ work. Well, then don’t do the same things they do.
So here’s how this is going to work. We’re having a First 10 Pages Contest. The one rule of this contest is that THE SECOND I’M BORED, I WILL STOP READING YOUR PAGES. If I’m bored in the first paragraph, I will stop reading. I have no problem giving up on your pages 20 seconds into them. Knowing this, will you become a better writer? That’s the experiment here.
I don’t know what the prize will be other than featuring the winners on the site. But I can tell you this. I’m not going to feature bad work. If not a single entry results in me reading the full ten pages, there will be no winner. I’m genuinely curious to see if anybody get can me to read the full ten. Because 99% of the time, I wouldn’t read past the first scene if I didn’t have to. I want you to really internalize that. Writing a screenplay isn’t this giant complicated process of navigating readers and agents and staying updated with trends and blah blah blah. It’s writing a series of words that make the person reading it want to keep reading. If you do that, you will be successful.
Submissions will be due a month from now on Sunday, February 10th, 11:59pm Pacific Time. Send a PDF of those pages to carsonreeves3@gmail.com with the subject line: FIRST TEN PAGES. No logline or synopsis needed. You can include a title page if you want. Up to you. You can send them starting today.
Let’s see who can pull this off. Oh, and one last reminder…
MAKE IT IMPOSSIBLE FOR ME TO STOP READING
Genre: Drama/Thriller
Premise: (from Black List) Still hurting years later from the suicide of her mistreated best friend, a woman is torn between seeking vengeance on the lost friend’s behalf and moving on with her life.
About: Emerald Fennell hardly came out of nowhere. The English actress/writer graduated from Oxford, is the daughter of famous jeweler Theo Fennell, played the Duchess on the Netflix series, The Crown, and is writing on the hot series, Killing Eve. This script finished with the sixth highest number of votes on last year’s Black List.
Writer: Emerald Fennell
Details: 106 pages
What’s the theme for this week? It appears to be revenge! Of all the scripts in the top 10, this one seemed the most unlikely. It’s not a biopic. It’s not a true story. It’s not an adaptation. It’s not a popular genre. It’s not high concept. Going off the logline, it sounds like we’re about to read a glorified Lifetime movie. For all these reasons, it’s gotta be great, right?! I mean, if a script can leap to the top of the Black List ranks without doing any of the things the Black List loves, it must be awesome. This year’s Daddio, maybe? Join me and let’s find out.
29 year-old Cassandra is not in a good way. The med school dropout works at a coffee shop and lives with her parents. Worse still, she spends her nights getting blasted in bars and dance clubs. That’s where we meet her in fact, alone, sloshed, her skirt riding up so high you can see her underwear. A group of guys see her, one of whom decides to take her home. Once there, he takes her to his room, starts to pull her panties down, when, all of a sudden, Cassandra sits up, stone cold sober, stares into the man’s eyes and says, “What are you doing?”
It turns out Cassandra is a faker. She pretends to be drunk at clubs to teach men a lesson about preying on wasted women. Even keeps count of every man she’s successfully conned in a diary she keeps under the bed. Outside of this, Cassandra lives a joyless life. She comes into work late every day, lies to her parents to keep them from questioning her, and glares at any man who even considers smiling in her direction.
That’s until Chris shows up. Chris was her classmate back in med school. He’s shocked to see Cassandra, and instantly flirts with her, somehow convincing her to go out with him. When Chris starts reminiscing about school, we learn why Cassandra does what she does. Back then, a friend in their group, Nina, was sexually assaulted by another mutual friend of theirs, Al. Nina reported it, but nobody in their group or at the college believed her. She eventually dropped out and committed suicide.
Chris was only a periphery friend so he only barely remembers the incident. However, this reminder lights a fire under Cassandra, who begins a “project” to enact revenge on everyone involved. First she lures the now-married friend who most vocally didn’t believe Nina into a hotel room with a predatory man. She kidnaps the daughter of the school administrator who didn’t believe Nina and places her in a room full of drunk frat boys. She even shows up to the rapist’s bachelor party for a final get-even play.
Poor Chris has no idea any of this is going on. But when shocking new evidence emerges that peripherally ties him to that fateful night, he must figure out a way to cut ties with Cassandra and keep his career in tact. Because Cassandra is her own worst enemy, he just might pull it off. Of course, never underestimate Cassandra (MAJOR SPOILER). Even in the afterlife, she’s savage.
Okay so now that I’ve read the script, it’s obvious why it made the Black List. It pushes 2018’s most pronounced narrative – that all men are evil rapists. For this reason, I was so ready to bail. There was only problem. The writing was really good. And the more I resisted, the more I got pulled in.
The script’s biggest strength is its main character, Cassandra. One of the harder things to do in screenwriting is create complex characters. Unlike books, you can’t get inside a character’s head and hear why they’re doing the things they do. Instead, you must convey who they are through action. And if their actions are contradictory (one second they’re an asshole and the next they’re sweet), the character comes off as confused. To avoid this, most movie characters are on the nose. Captain America is the embodiment of selflessness. John Wick really wants revenge. John Krasinski lives solely to protect his children.
In contrast, Cassandra is really complicated. Here’s a girl who quit med school to work at a coffee shop, who still lives at home at 30, and who goes out every night pretending to be drunk to teach predatory men that they’re assholes. Watching her do something as simple as go on a date is fascinating. Will she open her heart and have a good time or will she crack, spewing all her demons out at her unsuspecting foe? The big reason why you have to keep reading Promising Young Woman is to figure out who this girl is.
Yesterday, one of my big criticisms was that we didn’t get to meet the daughter who was the motivation for our hero’s journey. How can we care if we never connect with that person ourselves, I argued. Today’s script reminded me that the real problem with that script was that it sucked. And when you’re a bad writer writing bad screenplays, every choice is wrong.
We never meet Nina in this script yet I was captivated by Cassandra’s journey. And that’s because Cassandra herself was such a great character. And it’s because you never knew where the script was going next – the complete opposite of yesterday, where you might as well have tacked the climax onto the first act because we all knew it would happen. I didn’t know Nina was going to wait outside a high school and lure a teenager into her car under false pretenses and then threaten her mom with her safety later. And don’t get me started on the ending. I definitely didn’t see that coming.
Another great thing about this script is that Fennel never lets one side take over. This is a mistake lots of writers make. They don’t show the other side of the argument. Fennel gives us plenty of scenes where we ask, is this right? What happened to Nina was terrible but is this the best way to handle it? Is Cassandra justified, or is she a full-on nutcase? If Fennel only played to one side of the narrative (all women are perfect, all men are awful), it would’ve been boring.
Everybody should read this script. It’s a great example of how to keep the reader’s attention. At the very least, read the first 10 pages because I’m going to be referencing them tomorrow in the First 10 Pages Article. Finally! A genuine spec script – not a biopic or adaptation or period piece – that’s actually good. This is what the Black List used to be known for!
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[x] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Mix up the alphabet. You don’t always have to be logical (First comes A, then comes B, then comes C). You can play around with the order. In an early scene, Chris comes into the coffee shop and has a meet-cute with Cassandra. There’s clearly electricity between the two. At the end of the scene, Chris asks her out. We hold on Cassandra. She likes him. Cut to later that night, her putting make-up on, getting ready for the date. But we…. CUT TO THE CLUB, Cassandra pretending to be sloshed in the corner. Noooo… she’s opted for yet another night out. A few scenes later, Chris comes in again and they eventually go out. But, as you can see, it doesn’t happen in this perfect logical progression. Instead of A then B then C, you can do A then C then B. This helps keep the narrative unpredictable, lest you slip into Inevitability Syndrome.
Genre: Superhero/Procedural
Premise: (from Hit List) A grief-stricken mother sets out to murder the world’s only superhero when he accidentally kills her daughter while battling his nemesis.
About: Today’s script finished NUMBER 1 on the 2018 Hit List. As a reminder, the Hit List is a list of the year’s best SPEC scripts, not to be confused with the Black List, which includes mostly assignment work (writers getting paid before they write the screenplay). As such, Hit List screenplays tend to be a little more raw. Still, there are plenty of scripts that make both lists, which is why it’s so peculiar that this – the top script on the Hit List – didn’t even appear on the Black List. One hint may be that it’s being produced by Joel Silver. Silver isn’t interested in managing social justice quotas or biopicing cineplexes to death. He just wants to make fun kick ass films, something the Black List has mostly moved away from celebrating. The writer, Russian-born Yaroslav Altunin, got his MFA in screenwriting from UCLA, where the script won that school’s Screenwriting Showcase. Screenwriters Showcase is an annual UCLA event at the end of Spring Quarter designed to introduce outstanding student work to the industry. Students can submit feature-length and TV scripts which are read and critiqued by industry experts.
Writer: Yaroslav Altunin
Details: 92 pages
Identify a popular genre and find a new way into it.
Today’s writer takes the most popular movie genre in the world – Superhero – and asks, “What if an everyday person wanted revenge on a superhero?”
Chop out all the pomp and circumstance and instead focus on the real-life human emotions of grief and anger? Make it personal instead of pyrotechnic? Sounds interesting. Sounds like the kind of script that, if written well, could finish number one on a screenplay list. That makes me excited to check out Absence of Courage.
When we meet her, police officer Maggie Temple is inside the wreckage of her car, staring at the dead body of her teenage daughter, Alex. The Guardian, a stoic superman-like superhero, has just laid waste to downtown Los Angeles while trying to kill super-villain, Nemesis. Over 100,000 people were killed during the carnage. And Maggie blames The Guardian for it all, especially the death of her daughter.
A month later, Maggie yells at her husband for encouraging her to sit around and do nothing. She wants to get back on the beat. So she puts on her new special bionic leg (she lost a leg during the attack) and heads to work. Maggie’s thrilled to see her partner, Ray, and the two are assigned to clean-up duty. Lots of fake superhero vigilantes are running around town and it’s the cops job to keep them in order.
But work doesn’t quench Maggie’s real thirst, which is to find the real identity of the Guardian and kill him. One day, while mourning in front of the wall of casualties, Maggie meets a mysterious religious doctor named Henry, who keeps all the candles lit in front of the dead’s pictures. Maggie feels like she can trust this man and the two quickly become good friends.
But Maggie can’t shake the anger inside of her, and slowly descends into the female version of Travis Bickle. Investigating the whereabouts of the Guardian, she learns that the commissioner may have orchestrated the downtown battle to gain popularity (or something). Finally, Maggie charges into the off-limits center of the city, where she finds The Guardian waiting there (just hanging out I guess?). With the help of Nemesis, she fights him, only to learn that he’s… yeah, you’re pretty dumb if you didn’t figure this one out… Henry. Maggie, then, has to come to terms with her anger and decide if killing this man is really going to make her happier.
You can probably tell how I felt about Absence of Courage from the way I phrased my plot summary. Look, I can see how this script gained traction. It’s IP Appropriation. It’s a different way to explore superhero movies.
But man, there’s so much wrong here.
For starters, the script is achingly slow. We’d get scenes like Maggie moaning to her husband about the loss of their daughter and then, 30 pages later, we’d get that exact same scene again. There was a lot of that, where scenes either echoed or repeated stuff that had already been established. The plot had virtually zero momentum, which is hard to do when your subject matter is superheroes.
The script also suffered from something I call Inevitability Syndrome. If you’ve ever watched a sporting event – a soccer, football, tennis, basketball game. – and right from the start, one team is destroying the other, you’ve experienced this. You know, even though there’s two hours left of the game, what’s going to happen. The result is inevitable.
The way this plays out in movies is when the writer follows a genre’s tropes too closely. In this case, we’ve got a cop procedural. Maggie is attempting to find the identity of someone. So there’s a lot of “talk to this person,” “threaten that person,” “lose yourself along the way.” I felt like after page 15, I could turn to page 85 and still have a good idea of what had happened. That’s not good.
I mean even the villain was the most obvious reveal ever. When a character appears out of nowhere, befriends your protagonist for no reason, and acts really mysterious every time they’re around each other, chances are the audience is going to figure out something is up.
A little red herring action could’ve solved this problem. Add a few more characters. Have those characters acting weird too. Keep the audience off-balance. The way to defeat Inevitability Syndrome is to keep the game close. One team goes up, the other team goes up. We should have no idea how the game is going to end. And Absence of Courage might as well have plastered a giant sign at the top of the title page telling you how it was going to end because that’s how obvious it was.
To be honest, I was worried from the very first scene. We meet Maggie right after her daughter has died. There’s nothing technically wrong with this choice, but it’s a choice that has consequences. If you kill off Alex before we meet her, we never have an emotional tie to her. We never see, ourselves, what was so special about their relationship. What this forces the writer to do, then, is create that emotion via Maggie’s emotion. So we have to see Maggie complain to her husband that she can never get over her daughter. We have to see her tear up when she sees her daughter’s picture on the wall of remembrance. And that’s never EVER going to be as powerful as if we’d met Alex.
And all it needed was a two minute scene between them right before Alex was killed. That would’ve done the trick. Or you need to take advantage of the visual medium that is cinema and SHOW us that emotion, not tell us. The most recent version of this is Three Billboards. I mean who doesn’t know how painful Mildred’s loss is after putting up those billboards?
This script was an odd duck. Even beyond the things I’ve mentioned, there were these awkward choices, like the fact that Maggie had a bionic leg. Except the leg played no part in the movie whatsoever. It gets a ton of coverage as a leg of the future but it didn’t give her superpowers or anything. So why include it at all?
I don’t know, guys. I suppose I can see how this script might impress a panel of people coming out of nowhere. But when you read it with all the hype that comes from topping a major screenplay list, it’s a big letdown. Which is too bad because it’s got an interesting premise. However, this thing needs a professional grade punch-up if it’s going to be the next Hancock.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: If you’re hiding someone’s identity, and that person’s reveal is a major part of the plot, you need plenty of red herrings. You need at least four other characters who garner suspicion from the reader. Otherwise, we’re going to know who the killer (or, in this case, superhero) is with an hour left to go.
Genre: Sci-Fi/Interactive
Premise: In 1984, a young programmer, determined to create the best video game ever, begins unravelling during the programming process when he suspects that an unseen force is dictating his actions.
About: How cool it is to be Charlie Booker? You’ve created a show that allows you to tell ten new science-fiction movies a year. I’d sign up for that every day of the week. Today’s film, like a lot of Netflix titles, came out of nowhere, arriving on the service the last week of 2018. Its choose-your-own-adventure narrative has created a lot of discussion – some negative, some positive. But everyone seems to agree that it’s worth talking about. Bandersnatch was directed by David Slade, who has an interesting Scriptshadow connection in that he’s attached to direct, “Meat.”
Writer: Charlie Booker
Details: 90 minues
Choose-your-own-adventure stories were always more appealing in theory than they were in practice. Even as an easily entertained kid, I remember awkwardly jumping back and forth through these books and feeling like I was doing a lot of work for not a lot of payoff.
So I was skeptical when Black Mirror announced a choose-your-own-adventure movie. It’s hard enough to write a screenplay using all your best choices. Multiple-choice narratives force the writer to incorporate options he wouldn’t have otherwise chosen. Which begs the question: How do you write a good story if you’re not always using your best stuff?
But Black Mirror is the one property I’d trust with this setup. Their brand is designed to take chances and, more specifically, incorporate technology into the story. The rules are simple. Every 5-10 minutes, a character will ask a question (Therapist: “Do you want to talk about your mother?”), and two choices will appear on the bottom of the screen (“Yes” or “No”). An unobtrusive white line appears, casually shrinking inward, signifying the amount of time you have to make your choice.
The central storyline of Bandersnatch places us in the year 1984. 20-something game programmer Stefan Butler wants to turn his favorite choose-your-own-adventure book, Bandersnatch, into a video game. He interviews at the best company in town, Tuckersoft, where his programming hero, Colin Ritman, works. The president loves the Bandersnatch pitch and asks Stefan to develop the game.
Quickly, however, Stefan runs into gamer’s block. Something is missing to bring the game to that next level. Part of the problem is Stefan feels like he’s being controlled. Seconds after we’re asked whether we want Stefan to bite his nails and we answer yes, Stefan slams his hand down, refusing to engage in the activity. A new theme begins to permeate the story – that of free will. Stefan doesn’t believe he has it.
Stefan eventually goes to Colin for help with his gamer’s block, and Colin regales him in a story about how Pac-Man is a metaphor for how we’re all stuck in a maze, consuming, with no way out. The good news is, we can jump to parallel realities to alleviate the resulting insanity. Colin insists that they both get high, and we know Booker wanted this scene because we don’t get the option to say no. After they get really high, Colin suggests jumping off his high-rise to prove his parallel realities theory. We get to choose which of them jumps. I chose Colin, who jumps and dies.
The trippiest moment in Bandersnatch occurs when Stefan starts screaming to the skies that he knows someone is controlling him and wants to know who they (you) are. We’re given the choice of saying “Netflix” or a story relevant symbol. I couldn’t resist choosing Netflix, which results in “me” explaining to Stefan that I’m from the 21st Century watching him on Netflix and controlling his actions.
When Stefan brings this up to his therapist, she replies, “If you were really in a movie, wouldn’t there be more… action?” The movie then asks you if you want more action (you can only answer “yes”) and the two proceed to beat each other’s ass.
Stefan goes deeper down the rabbit hole, embracing the insanity of what’s happening to him, which results in him brutally murdering his father (or maybe I was responsible for that, since I told him to). Eventually, he creates the perfect game, which becomes a cult hit that 35 years later is turned into a Netflix show.
Ten minutes into Bandersnatch, I suspected I’d stumbled into a big waste of time. I’m choosing which cereal Charlie eats. Whether to talk about his mom or not. Borrrrr-ing. But the movie picks up once we start breaking the fourth wall.
One of the things I keep telling you guys it that when you come up with a concept, you want to explore everything you can that’s unique about that concept. Most writers don’t do this. The concept is their way into the story. But once they’re in, they write a bunch of characters and scenarios and action that we’ve seen before. If you’re going to make a “choose your own adventure” movie, you want to ask what you can do with that format that hasn’t been done with traditional movies before. If all you’re going to do is offer the viewer a bunch of fake choices that lead us to the same ending, there’s no reason to make the film.
By connecting you directly to the characters to the point where they’re recognizing that you’re controlling them fully immerses us in the experience and makes Bandersnatch unlike anything we’ve seen before. I mean think about. You couldn’t do this five years ago, much less twenty years ago. There’s no way to do this in a movie theater since everybody’s choice would be different. And movie theaters don’t have the necessary technology to be real-time interactive anyway. So all that was great.
Was the story good?
That’s tougher to answer. I was engaged throughout the movie. But a lot of that had to do with the format. I started to enjoy the fact that I was controlling this person’s decisions, which made me more focused on that than whether character arcs were being fulfilled or the pacing was on point.
But the core plot point kept things focused. By setting up the goal of Stefan needing to create the game, we always knew where we were going. And it wasn’t just that. It was that Stefan was highly motivated. We could tell that this game meant everything to him. And that’s something that’s always going to supercharge a protagonist – if they’re obsessed with achieving their goal.
It also sounds to me like there’s a lot more to this show. Some people have been obsessively watching it and choosing every different direction so as to experience every version of the movie. I’d be interested to hear if your plot breakdown is different from mine. I suspect they can only offer so many alternative storylines, or else they’d be shooting for years. But I’d love to hear if someone watched a completely different movie than I did.
That’s what’s so cool about this project. It’s different. And not only different. It took a gimmick and it did something with it. The gimmick didn’t stop at the conceptual phase, which is what happens with so many gimmicky ideas. All in all, Bandersnatch was a refreshing film. I was pleasantly surprised.
[ ] What the hell did I just watch?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[xx] worth the stream
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: While it kind of worked here due to the unique format, I strongly discourage writers from using the “Kid’s Mistake Led To Mommy/Daddy’s Death” flashback. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve read this trope. Let’s get rid of it once and for all.
