This script has GSU for days. But does it have logic for hours??
Genre: Action
Premise: Following a severe, soon to be fatal, brain injury during a violent attack, an NYPD sergeant embarks on a harrowing journey of vengeance, which leaves her only a few hours of adrenaline-bursting consciousness to hunt down those who took her daughter and killed her husband before she dies.
About: Today’s writer, who got this script on last year’s Black List, has had some notable success as a TV scribe. He wrote on the Ridley Scott show, Raised by Wolves. He wrote on The Flash. And he wrote 19 episodes of the well-reviewed show, White Collar.
Writer: Julian Meiojas
Details: 110 pages
Alicia Vikander for Izzy?
A long time ago I wrote a time-travel script called “The Jump.”
It was about a guy whose wife disappears and he soon finds out she’s been kidnapped into the future. So he seeks out the people who can time jump and travels into the future to get her back.
For a variety of reasons (many of which weakened the script considerably), my main character was dying of a brain tumor. He only had a couple of days to live. The idea was, not only did he have to go to the future to rescue his wife. He had a limited time to do so, as his tumor was days away from killing him. But I always ran up against this issue of: if he was days away from dying of a brain tumor, how did he have all this energy to run around and save his wife?
These days, I would never have included the stupid brain tumor thing. I’ve realized, after reading thousands of scripts, that stuff like that overcomplicates what should be a simple narrative. If I could time travel in real life I’d go back and tell Past Carson to get rid of the brain tumor immediately.
The reason I bring it up is because today’s script is dealing with the same issue I was dealing with: how do you write a believable action movie around a highly mobile character whose sickness will kill her within hours?
Did Die Fast figure out the solution to that problem? Let’s find out.
Izzy is a 37 year old Brooklyn cop. She’s got a 14 year old daughter, Lola, who’s inherited her angry teenage rebellion stage a bit early. She’s getting in fights at school (in a very 2024 character beat, they are making fun of her sexuality). And boy would that get worse if she knew the truth about who her father was. He’s a famous bank robber who’s currently appealing a 60 year prison sentence.
Meanwhile, she’s dealing with her stepdad, David, who she kind of gets along with. Izzy and David are actually on the fence about whether they should tell Izzy the truth about her father when the two of them are attacked at their house. Some masked men want money although it’s not clear what money they’re talking about. They kill David and toss her out the window.
Three days later, Izzy wakes up in the hospital. She’s told that she has a critical brain injury and only has 5 hours to live. Even worse, the cops’ operating thesis is that SHE killed David. Luckily for Izzy, this unique brain injury allows for a final burst of energy before death. So Izzy is actually operating in an almost superhuman state. As soon as the doctors leave the room, she’s out of there.
Izzy only wants to accomplish two things before her death. One, go find her daughter, as she assumes that whoever came after her and David will come after Lola next. And two, get revenge on the people who killed her husband. This will be complicated by the fact that Izzy used to run with some sketchy cats before she became a cop. I’m not a psychic or anything but something tells me that bank robber dude had something to do with this. So get ready Bank Robber Dude. Izzy’s coming.
In regards to our “Is it possible to believably create an action character who’s hours away from dying” question, I must admit the writer did a good job.
Let’s be honest. There is no medical scenario on record that would support what happens to Izzy here. But with some fairly convincing exposition based on, what sounds like, sound research, I believed it enough to retain my suspension of disbelief.
So all’s good in the hood, right?
I would say more all’s average in the hood.
This movie is Crank. It’s a woman with a ticking time bomb in her head on a tear. And it’s hard to make a plotline that simple stand out.
However, we do have a recent comp that did stand out! I’m talking about David L. Williams’, “Clementine.”
So what was the difference between these two scripts that made that one so good and this one so average? The answers aren’t sexy. It comes back to nuts and bolts screenwriting.
David wrote a script meant to be enjoyed. Julian is writing a script that he’s trying to impress readers with.
What does that mean in layman’s terms? It means one guy is trying too hard.
Take a look at some of these lines from today’s script…
She finds an UNCONSCIOUS GUARD. Another gorehole mouth — the kiss of a shotgun’s ass. She pulse checks. Got it. Moves on.
Enter DET. OMAR NAZARIAN, 30s, fly-boy swag, but look close and you’ll see spit-up on this father-of-4’s Air Force 1s.
It’s overly specific try-hard too-cool-for-school writing, which often results in reader “double-takes” (the reader has to re-read sentences to understand them). When you’re writing a script like this one that is so reliant on its fast pace, double-take lines are script killers. Cause they create a stuttering effect that destroys the very pacing you’re going for.
The overwriting gets a little better as the script goes on. But not enough for my taste.
Also, I liked the character of Clementine more. Izzy was kind of annoying. She feels too written. Not authentic enough. Clementine felt like a real person.
How much you like the main character has an enormous effect on how you experience the rest of the story. In this case, if I had to give the Izzy character a 1 out of 10 rating for likability, I would give her a 6. With Clementine, I would give her a 9. That difference changes the ENTIRE WAY the reader experiences the script. Because when you like a character that much, you just care more about every story beat, every twist and turn, every character achievement.
Another thing that David did better was he put his characters in these situations that you thought there was NO WAY IN THE WORLD they were going to get out of. So you had to keep reading to find out if they would.
Here, every single time Izzy got in a tough situation, I knew without blinking she would be okay. There’s a scene where she takes on 10 guys in a hallway and I knew before the first one came at her that she was fine.
Look, I know that in 99.9% of movies, the hero makes it to the end. But there’s a special skill in screenwriting wherein, even though the reader inherently knows this, you have the ability to make them constantly DOUBT that it’s going to happen. And the way you do that is to put them in these scenarios that genuinely feel impossible to get out of. This script never passed that test.
Moving on to DIALOGUE…
This month I’m celebrating the release of my new dialogue book, The Greatest Dialogue Book Ever Written. So I wanted to cover some from Die Fast.
One of the things I talk about in the book is that certain genres aren’t conducive to writing dialogue. Fast-moving action films are squarely in that department. We see that here. There isn’t a lot of memorable dialogue and that’s because there’s no room for it.
Dialogue, I’ve learned, needs a runway to get going.
It’s hard to write good dialogue if all your dialogue scenes are three-quarters of a page long. There’s not enough runway to build a good conversation.
The only long dialogue scenes you get to write in these action scripts are exposition-driven. For example, there’s a scene late in the script where Izzy tells Lola the truth about her father. It’s a long scene but it’s all backstory. It’s not the kind of dialogue you can add flash or flair to. It’s just expository.
The good news is, if you’re bad at dialogue, then this is the perfect type of script for you to write. Because the dialogue requirements are minimal. You just need to know how to write exposition. Luckily, there’s an entire chapter about how to write great exposition in my book. So go buy it!
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius’
What I learned: We’ve hit the tipping point for “ass-kicking girl” scripts. They’re done. There are too many of them out there and it’s diluted their entertainment value. Plus, they don’t do very well at the box office. The last hope is Ballerina, the John Wick spinoff movie. If that does well, they may have a second life. But if I were a writer right now who likes the action genre, I’m writing an “ass-kicking guy” script. Unless. UNLESS! You have a totally fresh new inventive take on the “ass-kicking girl” formula.
What I learned 2: How do you deal with difficult-to-buy-into scenarios such as people who can run around like Chris Hemsworth despite the fact that they’re supposedly going to drop dead in 5 hours? This script gives you a pretty good blueprint. Do as much research as possible to find the most convincing explanation for your wild scenario. Write a scene that incorporates that exposition. Then just GET THE F**K ON WITH YOUR SCRIPT. Don’t look back. Just go. Cause the more people think about it, the less they’ll believe it. So it’s best to address it as convincingly as you can, move on to the fun, and never stop. Cause if we’re having fun all the way through your story, we’re not thinking about the medical accuracy of your concept.
Have you been struggling with your dialogue? I have over (that’s right, OVER) 250 dialogue tips in my new book, “The Greatest Dialogue Book Ever Written.” You can head over to Amazon and buy the book, right now!
And I feel fine
The movie we were promised
Alex Garland’s “Civil War” pulled in 25 million dollars this weekend. On the surface, that seems like an average number. But when you look deeper, it’s staggeringly high.
This is independent studio A24’s biggest opening ever. The whole reason it’s an A24 film is that it’s an indie movie. Despite the way it promotes itself, which I’ll talk about in a bit, it’s a character piece about photojournalists. Most of the movie takes place away from the war. So, for a film like that to pull in 25 million dollars is gigantic. It rarely happens.
Now, I love Garland so I very much flirted with seeing this. But I ended up deciding not to. I’ll share with you why later. It does come down to a screenwriting choice Garland made, which is usually how it goes with me.
But before we talk about that, I wanted to discuss the marketing of this film. Cause the marketing is what allowed the film to achieve its unprecedented box office. And yet that marketing is deceptive.
It’s deceptive because this movie is not about a civil war. It’s about photojournalists. The negative reactions coming out of the film almost all revolve around the frustration of thinking they were going to get a movie about a civil war when, in actuality, they got a movie about how difficult it is to be a war photographer.
This is one of Hollywood’s best tricks. They know when they have a movie that if they marketed it honestly, nobody would show up. So they create a marketing campaign that promotes the aspects of the movie that are marketable, even if those elements are barely in the film.
They’ll even go so far as to misrepresent a movie if they fear that the truth will keep people out of the theater. They did this recently with the campaigns for both Mean Girls and The Color Purple. ZERO MENTION in the trailers of the films being musicals. Cause they feared that if people knew they were musicals, nobody would show up.
This becomes relevant to all screenwriters because, once you finish your screenplay, your job will be similar to the marketers’ jobs when promoting a movie – which is, you’ll have to send loglines to people and pitch people to get them to read your script.
As someone who does around 300 logline consults a year, I am particularly savvy in this department of deception because, often, writers will come to me wanting the sexiest logline possible even though the script itself isn’t sexy. And I’ll help them because I know that a better logline means more read requests.
But I do have the conversation with each and every one of them where I say, “Next time, before you write your script, don’t write the boring version of the script then try to come up with an exciting logline afterwards. Write the exciting version of the script to begin with so that your logline will be an accurate representation of your script. That way you get the best of both worlds.”
Because, inevitably, what happens, is that even if you are able to trick the potential reader into reading your script, there’s a high likelihood that they will leave disappointed because the screenplay you promised them never materialized.
That’s why some people are coming out of this movie disappointed. The negative reviews are almost all the same: “What I was promised never showed up.”
On the flip side of this, this movie shows you the power of concept – and more specifically: TITLE. How the title of a script or a movie can have so much influence over potential readers/viewers.
If you’re an indie writer and you’re tired of writing your indie scripts that no one seems interested in, do what Garland does here: Find a big sexy subject matter then hide your indie story within it.
Imagine, for example, that Garland had written a movie about news photographers trying to get the perfect photograph of drug addicts in drug-infested cities in an attempt to bring attention to the problem and hopefully make a change.
Sounds very noble. Sounds very indie. Sounds like 5 people would show up.
So you can see the difference by changing “drug infested city” to “civil war.” That’s what smart indie writers do. They find that sexy subject matter so that their character-driven scripts have an actual shot at getting noticed.
Ironically, the reason I decided not to see the film was that I heard, ahead of time, that it was not about a civil war. That it was about photographers who just happened to be operating within a civil war. That didn’t sound like an interesting enough movie to me.
The movie we got
And the more I think about it, the more I think Garland made a mistake. This is a movie that, if it would’ve committed to the Civil War angle, it would’ve made twice as much money this weekend.
It’s a reminder that point-of-view is SO IMPORTANT when writing screenplays. Think about it. You have a modern-day American civil war movie. Think about how many points-of-view you have at your disposal. Is a photographer really the most interesting?
You could’ve gone with a suburban mother, a soldier on the front lines, an abandoned child, a spy, a medic, the president of the United States, a drone pilot, a hacker, a farmer, a survivalist, a drug addict, a black market trader, an Uber driver driving people out of the city to safety.
All of those options would’ve been more interesting than a photographer. I’m not even convinced photographers are a thing anymore. We’re way more enamored with videos taken on peoples’ phones in 2024 than we are some amazing picture. This isn’t 1968 yo. The more I think about it, the more flummoxed I am by Garland’s choice. He’s probably just really interested in photographers.
But my point is, whenever you’re writing a screenplay, that needs to be one of your primary objectives: figure out what point-of-view is best for this story. Cause, often, we’ll go with what feels easiest to us, or the most familiar. And those aren’t the best options.
I’m still happy for Garland. His movies, while always artistically challenging, rarely connect with audiences. And here, with his last movie ever, he gets his biggest box office payout.
Now Garland is going back to writing, re-building one of his original franchises: 28 Years Later. But don’t count Garland’s directing career out just yet. When you have a clear number 1 movie at the box office, some big people start knocking on your door. However, from what I understand, Garland hates directing more than anything. So he may be able to withstand these mega-offers.
Did any of you see Civil War? What did you think?
Have you been struggling with your dialogue? I have over (that’s right, OVER) 250 dialogue tips in my new book, “The Greatest Dialogue Book Ever Written.” You can head over to Amazon and buy the book, right now!
Week 14 of the “2 Scripts in 2024” Challenge
Week 1 – Concept
Week 2 – Solidifying Your Concept
Week 3 – Building Your Characters
Week 4 – Outlining
Week 5 – The First 10 Pages
Week 6 – Inciting Incident
Week 7 – Turn Into 2nd Act
Week 8 – Fun and Games
Week 9 – Using Sequences to Tackle Your Second Act
Week 10 – The Midpoint
Week 11 – Chill Out or Ramp Up
Week 12 – Lead Up To the “Scene of Death”
Week 13 – Moment of Death
Okay, so, just to remind you, this entire surgical procedure we’re calling “writing a screenplay,” is approaching the endpoint. We’ve opted for the 110-page version. Which means that, after this week, we only have 10 pages left.
Where that leaves us is in the sweet spot of the climax.
It took me a long time to figure out how to approach the climax of a screenplay. Then, one day, it became as clear as the springs from which Evian gets its water.
A climax IS ITS OWN SCREENPLAY.
For that reason, it has its own beginning, middle, and end.
For those of you who don’t know what each of these sections stands for, let me remind you:
Beginning – Setup
Middle – Conflict
End – Resolution
For anyone who’s intimidated by this information, think of it this way. Almost every story you’ve ever told anyone – even if it was just a story to your husband about what happened to you at work – chances are you SET IT UP for them (“My boss called me into his office”), you then explained THE CONFLICT (“He said that Karen had accused me of stealing her work and taking credit for it”), before finally giving them the RESOLUTION (“I told him that Karen was a lying psycho who’s been trying to make me look bad to everyone. He apologized and said he’d have a long talk with her.”).
It’s the easiest way to tell a story. So it makes sense that we’re depending on this formula for our climax as well.
Therefore, almost everything you used to map out your 110 page screenplay, you’re going to use to map out your climax.
The first thing you have to do is figure out how long your climax is going to be. Since your third act in a 110 page screenplay is around 27 pages, the climax has to be less than that.
Because, before you get to the climax, you have three main beats that you’re trying to hit.
First beat: “Stop Crying and Get Up Off Your Keister”
Remember, at the end of the second act, your hero had fallen to his lowest point. Some level of death, either literal or metaphorical, had occurred. So, it wouldn’t make sense to jump from that to a big flashy climax.
You need a beat where they pick themselves up, dust themselves off, and shift their internal momentum from “defeated” to “I’m going to give this one more shot.”
Second beat: “I Love It When A Plan Comes Together”
After they’ve defeated their whiney b**ching and are ready to fight again, they need to come up with an actual plan. You don’t roll up on the Death Star hoping to figure it out on the way. You need that moment where everyone sits down and they explain how to destroy the Death Star.
Third beat: “The Calm Before The Storm”
Most good stories give the audience one final beat before the climax that works as the “calm before the storm.” For example, in Avatar, before the Na’Vi go off and fight the humans, they convene at the big tree of life. They have a little pow-wow where they mentally prepare for what’s about to come and then off they go.
How long should these scenes be? Pretty short, but it will all depend on the movie and the story you’re telling. But I would say 2 pages tops each. So 6 pages in total.
Cause the way you gotta look at it is, you need a few beats after the climax as well, which is going to add pages to your third act. Maybe we have 6 pages AFTER the climax is over.
So let’s do our math = 27 pages – 6 pages (lead up to climax) – 6 pages (post climax).
That leaves us with about 15 pages for our climax. Which is optimal in my opinion. 15 pages gives us an adequate amount of time for a great climactic sequence.
I know some of you hate math but we gotta use it in order to understand how to set up our climax. Remember, like I said, the climax is its own miniature movie. It has a setup, a conflict, and a resolution. Since we now know our climax is 15 pages, we can divide that in the same way we divided our script = 25% for the setup, 50% for the conflict, and 25% for the resolution.
While this is a good guide, I’ve found that setups and resolutions in climaxes tend to be shorter, percentage-wise, than their full-script counterparts. So instead of being 25% in setup, it might be 15%. Instead of 25% for the resolution, it might be 10%.
That’s because the climax is really about the showdown between the protagonist and the antagonist. So that middle section of your climax — the CONFLICT – is the meat.
With that in mind, here’s what we get…
Climax Setup – 3 pages
Climax Conflict – 10 pages
Climax Resolution – 2 pages
I’m already hearing some of you groan. Carson! You can’t possibly distill art down into such a mathematical formula. You’re right. I’m not saying you have to follow this to a T. What I’m saying is, this is the way it’s done in most movies. Therefore, you should use it as a template. How much you want to stretch or condense or twist the template is up to you. But there’s one constant here I can promise you that you need: Which is that your climax needs form. It needs shape. And this is the best way to shape it.
In all the internet hype about an upcoming Happy Gilmore sequel, I watched the original movie recently and the climax follows this formula very closely. The final tournament day between Happy and Shooter is roughly 17 minutes, so a couple of minutes extra.
And that’s why I say these page-counts do have some flexibility to them. I mean, Titanic has a 45 minute climax. The film itself is also twice as long as a regular movie but, the point is, each movie will have its own needs.
The only other thing I want to highlight is that, within your climax, it needs to look like your hero LOST. Just like at the end of your second act, your hero had a “lowest point,” the same thing is going to happen at the end of your climax’s second act.
For example, in Happy Gilmore, as he lines up his final putt, which he needs to win the tournament, one of Shooter’s minions forces a giant TV stand to fall directly in the way of his shot, making an already difficult shot impossible.
In that moment, we think Happy Gilmore is dead. There’s nothing he can do to win this tournament anymore. You need that same moment in your climax.
Okay, we’re almost there, people! We conclude the writing of our first draft next week! Congrats to everyone who’s made it this far! :)
More dialogue tips in today’s review!
Genre: True Story
Premise: The true story of the most insane Broadway production of the modern era, where visionary director Julie Taymor attempted to make a Spider-Man musical and had everything go wrong in the process.
About: This script finished on last year’s Black List. It’s written by Hunter Toro, who wrote on Pete Davidson’s show, Bupkis.
Writer: Hunter Toro
Details: 107 pages
Although I’ll probably never do it, I’ve always wanted to write a musical about tennis. I think it would be funny to have this big Broadway singing-dancing play that revolved around tennis balls flying everywhere and people wearing Wes Anderson-inspired Lacoste bodywear singing about double-faults and drop shots.
But that’s the extent to which I’m interested in anything that has to do with Broadway. It’s not my jam. It’s not my jelly. It’s not even my almond peanut butter. Which is why even the craziest story to come out of Broadway in decades – this one – never landed on my radar. I heard about it peripherally. But I didn’t care.
Then a few people told me, “No, Carson, this story is ABSOLUTELY NUTS. It’s worth checking out.” Normally, I don’t like real-life stories. But if you throw a doozy my way, I’ll give it a go.
Glen is a PBS writer for a children’s show when he gets the call every writer dreams of. Julie Taymor, the creator of the Broadway sensation, “The Lion King,” is putting together a musical about Spider-Man, and none of the previous writers worked out. Mainly cause they couldn’t deal with the insanity that is Julie Taymor.
Glen goes in for the interview where he not only learns that Julie is directing, but that freaking U2 is doing the music. As far as New York Broadway musicals go, this is the top of the top. It’d be like Christopher Nolan calling you tomorrow and asking you to write him a sequel to Memento.
But Glen instantly learns that Julie has… shall we say STRANGE ideas for a Spider-Man story. She’s never read the comics. Never saw the movies. And that’s the way she likes it. She wants to bring something completely original to the IP. And believe me, this is IP. There are many meetings with Marvel over the course of the story about what you can and cannot do with Spider-Man throughout the script.
The biggest thing Julie wants to do is, instead of using the endless number of comics to find a villain for the story, she wants to create her own: a Greek Goddess with spider-like powers. Actually, that’s not everything. She also wants to make Spider-Man sexy and dangerous. She envisions the Jacob Elordi version of Spider-Man. And it freaks Marvel the heck out. Julie likes that. Julie likes that a lot.
What happens next is insane. Julie wants the aerial spider battles to happen above the audience’s heads, which is basically impossible. We see how impossible when Stunt Spider-Man Actor falls 60 feet and becomes semi-paralyzed. Then U2 goes on tour and decides to not work on the musical at all. Bono’s never even watched a musical and hates all the music in them. And then you have poor Glen who has to leave his wife and kids to be next to Julie 24/7 so that he can always be nearby when she has an idea.
The Marvel company does everything in their power to convince Julie to make Spider-Man less sexy and to get rid of the terrible villain that makes no sense within the mythology of Spider-Man. But Julie does as Julie wants. And even when their producer dies of a stroke, Julie demands that Glen come over and write new pages on the day of his funeral.
When it’s all said and done, the production costs 65 million dollars. But it becomes a semi-must-see musical due to all the press calling it the biggest disaster in Broadway history. It’s somehow enough to give the play 3 years. But, in the end, it would lose over 75 million dollars and tarnish the legacies of everyone who worked on it.
Reeve Carney, who played Spider-Man, just oozing innocence here.
As I pointed out yesterday, in the coming weeks, with every script I review, I’m going to be focusing on dialogue. I just wrote a book about dialogue so I want to talk about this stuff while it’s fresh on my mind.
Today, we’re going to cover Tip 105 in the book:
Use dialogue to reveal character – What a person says tells us a lot about who they are. So, when applicable, try and write dialogue that reveals something about your character.
Too many writers use dialogue as a means to move the plot (or scene) forward and nothing more. They’re not taking advantage of the fact that every time a character opens their mouth, it’s an opportunity to tell us who they are.
Why is this important? Because a common weakness in screenplays is characters who we have no feel for. We don’t understand them. What is their defining characteristic? What is their worldview? We can never truly understand a person unless we know these things. So, here’s a scene on page 23 of today’s script where Julie explains to Glen why she chose him to write her play.
How do we know that the writer has revealed character in this scene? Because we know more about Julie after it! We know that she’s a risk-taker. We know that she fears nothing. We know that she pushes the envelope and is willing to fall on her face and we know that she expects the same from others in her orbit. That’s HUGE information about the character and we learn it within a single page.
You’ll also note within this scene that there’s another major dialogue tip covered in the book. Actually, it’s THE VERY FIRST TIP.
Create dialogue-friendly characters – Dialogue-friendly characters are characters who generally talk a lot. They are naturally funny or tend to say interesting things or have a unique perspective on the world, are quirky or strange or offbeat or manic or see the world differently than the average human being. The Joker in The Dark Knight is a dialogue-friendly character. Saul Goodman in Breaking Bad is a dialogue-friendly character. Deadpool is. Juno is. It’s hard to write good dialogue without characters who like to talk.
Julie Taymor is our dialogue-friendly character in this story. She’s weird. She’s unpredictable. She’s demanding. She says a lot of strange things. Dialogue cheers from the mountaintops when it finds out a character like this is in the script. Which is why you want to give your script the gift of dialogue-friendly characters as often as possible.
What about the rest of the script?
The great thing about crazy true stories is that they do a lot of the work for you. You don’t have to go looking for great scenes, like stuntmen falling 60 feet to their near-deaths. They come to you.
But I have found that, when you have a wild story and you have a wild character, like Julie, you must be cautious that your main character doesn’t disappear on the page. And that’s exactly what happens here. The Glen character gets swallowed up by all the craziness and leaves little to no impact, despite being the main character.
I’m not saying it’s easy to deal with this imbalance. But if you’re aware of it, you can take steps to offset it. You probably need to make your hero bigger than you originally planned. If all Glen is here to do is stare up at Julie in utter amazement, audiences aren’t going to play nice.
They want heroes that charge forward and have their own agency. At least at some point in the script. Glen has that moment but it’s so late in the story that it might as well be nonexistent.
As I said, I don’t like true stories. Yet if you’re going to write one, this is the exact type of story you want to re-tell. It’s big, it’s weird, it’s chaotic, and let’s be honest – it’s funny to watch something fail so spectacularly. For that reason, this is definitely worth the read. It’s too fascinating of a story not to be entertaining.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[xx] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: When you’re creating your two main characters (the characters who are going to be in your script together the most), you have to imagine each of them on a scale. One on one side, the other on the other. On that scale, does one character clearly weigh down their side of the scale? If so, you’re going to need to add more to the other character. You have to make them more active, or talk more, or be funnier, or be tougher, or be smarter, or bring SOME WEIGHT to the table. Because if they’re getting overshadowed in EVERY SINGLE SCENE, readers will consider the character to be weak. And that’s what happened here. Glen comes off as a very weak character since he can never hang in any of the scenes he and Julie are in.
If today’s dialogue talk intrigued you, I have over (that’s right, OVER) 250 dialogue tips in my new book, “The Greatest Dialogue Book Ever Written.” You can head over to Amazon and buy the book, right now!
Today’s script would’ve easily won Tagline Showdown!
Genre: Horror
Premise: A group of friends find their lives disrupted after experimenting with a new drug that first makes them hear something, then see something, then become hunted by something.
About: This script finished pretty high on last year’s Black List and comes from new screenwriter, Sean Harrigan.
Writer: Sean Harrigan
Details: 110 pages
Halle Bailey for Shae?
I would say that if everyone in Hollywood were told that they could only market one genre and their paycheck would depend on those movies doing well, they’d choose Horror. Cause Horror is the most dependable genre in the business.
With that being said, there still seems to be an underlying ignorance to which of these films is going to do well and which will do poorly.
Big marketing campaigns were put together for Immaculate and The First Omen and both of them tanked.
Whereas this nothing little Australian horror film, Talk to Me, comes out of nowhere and becomes a mini-hit.
What gives?
The answer is more complicated than I’d like to admit. I know that the studios test all their horror movies ahead of time and if they get a certain score, they release them theatrically. In essence, they already know if the movie is going to play well. This is why Talk to Me got a wide release. Cause they saw how well audiences were responding to it.
But then you have stuff like The First Omen and Immaculate, which the studios had decided they were going to release wide even before they made them – one because of its rising star and the other because it was a franchise – despite the fact that their test screenings told them they were duds.
Whenever I get confused, I go back to basics. Come up with an original idea and then write a script that exploits that idea as much as possible. That’s why I loved The Ring. That’s why I loved The Others. That’s why I loved The Orphanage. That’s why I loved the original Scream.
Does “First You Hear Them?” achieve this? Let’s find out.
24 year old Shae Howland is so focused on dealing with her mother’s struggles with addiction that she hasn’t been able to begin her post-college career. In the meantime, the African-American aspiring nurse spends her nights with her Filipino roommate, Poppy, and gay Mexcian best friend, Javier (talk about a writer who knows what the Black List wants) spend their nights going out and having fun.
One night, while out at the club, the group tries a new drug – a sort of mangy brown pill. The clan has no idea where the drug came from or what it does but who cares! They’re young and invincible. It turns out it doesn’t do much. They get an average high, dance around, then everyone goes home.
But the next morning, Shae starts hearing a tapping noise, like someone nearby is tapping on a window – this, even when Shae’s nowhere near a window. The others confess to hearing the same thing but when they take another of the mangey pills, the sound goes away.
Soon, Shae’s ex-boyfriend Carson (cool name) comes into the mix. He seems to have a beat on this new drug and tells everyone that they have to keep taking the drug. “Or else what?” Or else they’ll not just hear them, they’ll see them. And if they don’t take the drug again, they won’t just see them, they’ll be hunted by them.
Carson tells the group that they need to secure more pills. Unfortunately, they’re expensive. So everyone’s going to need to get as much money as possible out of their bank accounts ASAP. Cause if they don’t get product soon, they’re going to move into the second phase (“Then you see them.”). From there, they’re only hours away from entering the third phase, which is when these things come after them. Once that happens, it’s game over.
In the upcoming weeks, I’m going to be placing a lot of focus ON DIALOGUE. I just wrote a book about it. It’s fresh in my mind. So I want to explore when writers excel at dialogue and when they falter.
If you’ve read my dialogue book, you know that I say, every single decision you make BEFORE you write your script is going to affect the dialogue. That includes genre. If you remember, I point out that Horror is one of the “non-dialogue-friendly” genres. It’s not known for birthing good dialogue.
So you already have an uphill battle ahead of you.
However, I also point out that if you’ve got a young cast, you can supercede this issue. People between the ages of 14-25 tend to have more colorful creative conversations. They’re using slang more often. They’re more playful with each other. And when you have younger characters, you’re looking to be more creative with the dialogue in general.
So I was disappointed with the lack of memorable dialogue here. It was all standard stuff. Not a single character had any unique identifiable phrases they used (something I talk about in the book). Every conversation was used strictly to push the scene forward and nothing more. Which is exactly what I told you not to do. You have to add some flair! You have to entertain, not just exposit.
Here’s an example on page 20.
Note that the only purpose of this dialogue is to get to the next scene. It has no beginning, no middle, no end. It is a scene fragment. Not a scene. It’s almost impossible to create good dialogue from scene fragments. The dialogue doesn’t have a chance to grow.
The only scene in the entire script where the dialogue is actually built to entertain is in the scene I’ll use for today’s “What I Learned.” But even that scene didn’t milk the dialogue for everything it could’ve been.
To be fair, as I said in the book, Horror is not built for dialogue. Every genre has the thing that it’s best at. Horror is best at scaring. So all that really matters is, does the script scare us?
It does. Just not enough.
The script leans almost too heavily into its premise in that the first rule (“First you hear them”) of the three doesn’t allow for a whole lot of scariness. We don’t even get our first “SEE THEM” moment until more than halfway into the screenplay. That’s a looooong time to wait to be scared.
That leaves the first 60 pages as basically “sound scares.” Are you scared by sounds? I suppose if I thought those sounds could turn into a killer monster, I might be. But here, I just felt that the sounds were annoying. It’s annoying that I want to brush my teeth but I have to hear tapping while I’m doing it. My preference is a non-tapping teeth-brushing evening.
Of course, once we get to the SEE THEM part, it gets scarier. And there is this naturalistic suspenseful arc to the game. Sort of like how, in The Ring, we knew that in 7 days, we were screwed. Here, we know that, after we hear them, after we see them, they come for us. So that suspense somewhat makes up for the inactivity.
I just wanted more to happen.
And it goes back to the dialogue. If your characters would’ve had more interesting conversations and weren’t muttering perfunctory things to get through the scenes, I would’ve been more entertained in the meantime. But if you’re giving me weak dialogue and no big scares for 60+ pages in a horror script, I’m going to complain.
I’m not saying this movie won’t be good. It’s got a great tagline (“First you hear them. Then you see them. Then they come for you.”). In fact, it would easily win Tagline Showdown this month. It even has a little depth to it. There’s a message here about how, when you become addicted to drugs, the high is your “normal.” So you have to keep doing drugs just to feel “normal.” If you stop, you descend into misery.
But I still gotta be entertained, man. And this script was only entertaining in spurts.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: In my dialogue book, I talk about the importance of situational writing. Situational writing is when you build your scene around a familiar situation that has rules, which, in turn, gives the scene structure. In one of the better scenes in the script, we see situational writing in practice. Our group, who is moving into the second phase of the rule (“Then you see them”), gets stopped by a couple of cops. Here’s how the scene plays out.
If today’s dialogue talk intrigued you, I have over (that’s right, OVER) 250 dialogue tips in my new book, “The Greatest Dialogue Book Ever Written.” You can head over to Amazon and buy the book, right now!
