Amateur Friday is back! I didn’t like the sound of last week’s “New Writer Friday” but I can’t think of anything better at the moment so back to Amateur Friday we go.  Who knows though?  Next week it could be something else. We’ll see. The drama continues! :)

Genre: Drama/Sci-fi
Premise: A book appraiser working at an old farm mansion finds a diary that implies the family who used to live there 200 years ago may have come in contact with a crashed alien ship.
About: Every Friday, I review a script from the readers of the site. If you’re interested in submitting your script for an Amateur Review, send it in PDF form, along with your title, genre, logline, and why I should read your script to Carsonreeves3@gmail.com. Keep in mind your script will be posted.
Writer: Glenn J. Devlin
Details: 114 pages (This is an early draft of the script. The situations, characters, and plot may change significantly by the time the film is released. This is not a definitive statement about the project, but rather an analysis of this unique draft as it pertains to the craft of screenwriting).

For long-time readers of the site, this premise probably sounds familiar. That’s because it was one of the 25 loglines to make the semi-finals of my “Script/Logline” contest a year ago. If you made the top 25, that meant I read your entire script, so I actually read an earlier draft of this already. While I remember it creating an eerie atmosphere, I also remember it becoming vaguely hokey in the second half when (spoiler) the alien arrives. I mentioned this to Glenn and I was curious to see what he did with the rewrite, as I absolutely love the idea.

Colin Brayton, late 40s, is a book appraiser. As you’d probably expect, Colin’s not exactly “making it rain” every night at the clubs. This guy’s idea of a raucous party is an original second print edition of Tom Sawyer.  In other words, Colin keeps to himself.

One day, an older man named Asher Bradford shows up at Colin’s shop and asks him if he’d like a job. The Dibble Estate, one of the oldest estates in Virginia, has thousands of books that need to be appraised, which Asher is willing to pay a hefty sum for. Of course, this means Colin will have to go out to the estate and live there for awhile, which is the last thing he wants to do, but in the end he knows the job is too good to pass up.

Once there, he meets the caretaker of the house, Madeline Prentice, an attractive woman in her 40s who has more rules than your average grade school gym teacher. Madeline does not like Colin being here and she lets him know it.

So Colin tries to stay out of her hair until he comes across an old diary amongst the books he’s appraising. Shockingly, it’s from a 15 year old girl named Kate who used to live here back in 1781! Her entries are rather mundane at first, but that changes quickly when she recalls a strange vessel flying across the sky and crashing onto the estate.

We then flash back to 1781 and meet our author, Kate, along with her parents and siblings. The script quickly settles into a rhythm of cutting back and forth between the past and the present, dictated by Colin’s need to find out what happened with this ship.

The gist of the story is that Kate and her family inspect the crashed craft and meet a surviving alien who they name Bronte. The family takes Bronte in, but learn that other aliens will be coming after him soon. This results in a tough decision. They either have to kick Bronte out or move far far away with him where they’ll never be found.

In the meantime, Colin is trying desperately to convince Madeline that all of this is true, while she, of course, thinks it’s hogwash. Colin goes out in search of the ship, as well as for other alien artifacts Kate speaks of, trying to find some evidence that this is more than a young girl’s imagination. During this time, the icy chill between he and Madeline begins to thaw, and they develop a friendship with one another, with the hint of something more. But before any of that can be resolved, Colin must find out the fate of Bronte and the family.

Okay, I’m going to do something I rarely do on this site. I’m going to admit that I don’t exactly know what’s wrong with The Alien Diaries. What I do know is that something *is* wrong. The script moves way too slowly and I’m not sure the most interesting version of the story is being explored. However, far be it from me to throw my hands in the air and give up. I’m going to give an analysis of this script whether it likes it or not.

So we actually have two storylines we’re dealing with here. The present storyline and the past storyline. Let’s start with the present. NOTHING IS GOING ON IN THE PRESENT STORYLINE. It’s just a man and a woman with some sexual chemistry observing an event that happened 220 years ago. There’s no problem they’re trying to solve. There’s no immediate issue they need to take care of. There are no stakes to whether they achieve their goal or not. And actually, there’s no goal to achieve in the first place. This makes the entire present storyline….I hate to say it but…pointless.

Whenever you have a script exploring two parallel plot threads, you want to make sure that each thread has something important going on in it. I know this is a completely different genre, but think of Apollo 13. In that movie, when Tom Hanks and crew are up in that ship trying to find a way to survive, are the guys down in Houston just standing around twiddling their thumbs? No! They have just as much to do, with almost as much at stake, as the guys up in the module have. They’re running simulations, slamming together breathing masks, running re-entry calculations. That they have so much to do in this movie is why the ground stuff is almost as exciting as the module stuff. Here, Colin and Madeline have nothing to do, so almost all of their scenes are boring.

Now, as far as the past scenes, those are a little more complicated, and this is where I’m not sure why things aren’t working. Theoretically, initiating an alien into a family should be interesting. I mean, they did it in E.T. right? And that movie was pretty good. But there’s something off about it here.

One issue is that just like the present day storyline, the majority of the 1781 storyline is absent of any problems. There’s no immediacy. That changes later when the other aliens arrive, but that’s really late in the script. Until that point, we’re just watching a family get acquainted with an alien. There’s no real conflict there. And maybe it’s because we’ve seen this play out before in movies like ET – but “just getting to know the alien” isn’t enough. There needs to be a problem, a danger, something to bring the story alive. Otherwise you have a present day storyline where nothing’s going on, cutting to a past storyline where very little is going on.  And that’s a whole lot of not going on.    

Another problem here is that our main character doesn’t have anything going on internally. This script is slow enough where it’s posing as a character piece, but there’s little to nothing going on inside any of the characters. What is it that Colin has to overcome? What is it in this specific journey that challenges his biggest flaw as a human being?

Or let me put it in simpler terms. You know there’s not enough going on with a character when you realize that no actor would want to play the role. Think about it. What challenge would an actor get from playing the role of Colin? All they’re doing is showing up on set and reading a book. If you want to get an A-list actor interested in one of your parts, you gotta work some complex UNSETTLED shit into the character that they need to work through during the course of the story.

So the combination of an uneventful present day storyline, a mostly uneventful past storyline, and a main character who’s got no inner demons or inner conflict to overcome…that’s a super deadly combination right there. That is something that’s going to be really tough to make entertaining.

The thing that’s eating at me is I love this idea. And I’m trying to figure out a story direction that would best take advantage of the premise. You know, one of the most important decisions any writer makes when he sits down to write a script is which direction he plans to take the story. And I don’t think this direction is the most interesting direction Glenn could’ve taken.

But this much I know. The script needs to start with a problem. Every script needs to start with a problem. If your hero doesn’t have a problem, you don’t have a story. And the first real problem that arrives in The Alien Diaries (the other aliens coming for Bronte) doesn’t arrive until, I believe, 70-80 pages into the script. And that’s just too late. Glenn needs to go back, identify a problem that BOTH sets of characters in his story have, and build a story from there.

Now I know I’ve been harsh but the potential of this idea is bringing out the passion in me. There’s some good stuff to build on in Alien Diaries. I liked the book appraiser stuff. I’ve never seen that explored in a movie before, and there’s something mystical about the profession that fits well with this idea. The foundation is also there for an interesting relationship between Colin and Madeline. Their conflict is a little too artificial so far (they hate each other for the sake of needing conflict in the relationship) but that’s how all these relationships start in early drafts. You just keep nuancing them with each successive draft until they begin to feel natural.  But yeah, the idea’s cool enough to keep plugging away at.

Anyway, I appreciate Glenn putting his baby up for some hard core analysis. Hopefully I’ve given him some new ideas for the next draft. :)

Script link: The Alien Diaries

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

What I learned: I think this is a classic case of leaning on your premise. That’s when you’ve got a great premise, and you just try to write enough stuff around it until you have a script. Instead, try to pretend like you don’t have that great hook. Try to make sure your characters are compelling enough that we’d want to watch them regardless of if they were in this story or not. Try to make everything AROUND the premise better than the premise itself, instead of just hoping that the premise is enough.

Genre: Crime/Noir
Premise: A private detective investigating an adultery case stumbles onto a larger conspiracy involving the Los Angeles water system.
About: Chinatown has been called one of the greatest films ever made. It was nominated for eleven Academy Awards in 1974, winning for Best Original Screenplay. In 1971, producer and all around kook Robert Evans originally offered Robert Towne $175,000 to write a screenplay for The Great Gatsby. But Towne came back with a different idea, asking for $25,000 to write his own story, Chinatown. It was the first part of Towne’s planned trilogy about the character J.J. Gittes. The second part, The Two Jakes, was about another grab for a natural resource — oil — in the 1940s. It was directed by Jack Nicholson and released in 1990, but the film’s commercial and critical failure scuttled plans to make the third film. Evans intended for the screenplay to have a happy ending with Cross dying and Evelyn Mulwray surviving. Evans and Polanski argued over it, with Polanski insisting on a tragic end. The two parted ways due to the dispute and Polanski wrote the final scene just a few days before it was shot. The original script was over 180 pages long. Polanski eliminated Gittes’ voiceover narration (hey, see what happens when you get rid of voice over! An Oscar!), which was written in the script, and structured the movie so the audience discovered the clues at the same time Gittes did. (Wikipedia)
Writer: Robert Towne
Details: 123 pages

If you polled every established screenwriter in the business and asked them what the best screenplay ever written was, Chinatown would probably come out on top. The Robert Towne screenplay is considered to be the gold standard of screenwriting. So one day while drinking a glass of Cavasia and watching the tail end of the women’s professional bowling championships, it hit me like a sack of bricks: How come I haven’t reviewed the greatest screenplay ever written? It seemed like an odd oversight.

Now I have a confession to make. I’ve never been a huge fan of Chinatown. It’s not that I don’t like the film. I think it’s okay. I just never understood the immense love for it. I mean, let’s be honest for a minute. It’s a murder mystery about water corruption. Try pitching that at your next meet-and-greet. For that reason, I’ve never sat down and read the screenplay from cover to cover. But all that was about to change so I could answer the eternal question that has been burning in screenwriting circles for centuries: Is Chinatown really the best screenplay ever written?

I’m not going to summarize the whole plot because the movie is too well-known. But for you youngsters who don’t know what the acronym “VHS” stands for, I’ll give you a quick synopsis. Chinatown is about private investigator Jake Gittes, who begins investigating the murder of Hollis Mulwray, the chief engineer for the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power back in the 1930s. It appears Mulwray was sniffing up the wrong tree in a larger conspiracy meant to protect the DWP’s interest in other parts of the water-starved city. Jake becomes chummy with Evelyn Mulwray, Hollis’ wife, who helps him piece together the mystery behind Hollis’ shocking death. But it soon becomes clear that Evelyn herself is hiding a dark secret, one that will help explain just how deep this conspiracy goes.

Okay so let’s get right to it then. Is Chinatown the best screenplay ever written? The answer to that question is no. Well, at least in my opinion the answer is no. I still think Back To The Future is the best screenplay ever written. But that’s a debate for another time. What surprised me, despite never holding this movie in high regard, was that once I stripped away all the images, once I forgot about the film and Jack Nicholson and just concentrated on the words, how good of a script it really was.

I’ll start with the first 15 pages. A big problem I have with most crime/murder mysteries is that they follow the same boring opening template:  “Dude gets murdered. Time to start looking for the killer.” A monkey could set up that scenario. Here, things are quite different. Mrs. Mulwray hires Gittes to see if her husband is cheating on her. He does a little investigating, finds out that he is. But after the investigation is over, a new woman walks through the door claiming *she* is Mrs. Mulwray. Which means the other woman was a fake.

Okay, when I say that professional writers make more original choices in their stories than amateurs, this is exactly what I mean. This is not a setup I’m used to seeing. Just like yesterday, in my review of Nautica, it passes my murder-mystery test of not just setting up the lazy question of “who killed the dead guy,” but poses a much more complicated series of questions, starting with, why the hell would a woman pretend to be someone else’s wife and hire a private investigator to follow her non-husband? It just doesn’t make sense. Interestingly enough, it isn’t until AFTER this scenario that the principal murder takes place, leaving us really confused about what the hell is going on. This multi-faceted setup is what hooks us. It’s different. It’s unique. We need to know what happened.

Another notable thing about the Chinatown script is its story density. One of the problems I had with Amateur Friday Randy Steinberg’s script (I love you Randy. Just using your script as an example!) was that there was no story density, no subplots, no character development, which led to a very “thin” feeling plot. Here, we have several intriguing threads going on at once. There’s the Hollis murder. There’s the city water conspiracy. There’s the mystery behind Evelyn. And then there’s the Ida Sessions stuff (the mysterious girl who first claimed to be Hollis’ wife). There were even a couple of smaller threads as well, making sure Chinatown always felt rich and complex. Of course, handled shoddily, these multiple threads could’ve led to the story feeling overplotted (read my Die Hard 2 review to see what I mean by “shoddy”), but everything’s been so well thought through here – each thread exists for such a specific purpose – that that’s never the case.

I also love how every key character in Chinatown has a real backstory, and that those backstories are multi-dimensional. Take Evelyn for example. She’s not simply the innocent wife. She’s been having affairs of her own, implying all sorts of things about her marriage. We never find out exactly what happened there, but we get enough of a whiff to imagine a rich full complicated history between the two.  If you can do that in your screenplay, you can make the audience believe that the characters they’re watching are real.  Because backstory implies a life before the movie existed, which tricks the brain into thinking the people they’re watching exist in real life.  Of course, if it’s some cliche generic backstory, we never get that sense, leading to the opposite effect – us not believing the characters are real.

I also thought the way Towne handled the backstories was great. When it came time to tell the story points that mattered, he went into great detail. But when it was time to get into backstory that didn’t necessarily affect the plot, Towne wisely showed restraint, something very few writers are able to do in the same circumstance. For instance, when it finally comes time for Gittes to dish about Chinatown, he doesn’t really tell us anything. He just implies how terrible it was. Such a nice change from the kind of thing I usually see (“Well, my partner and I were walking down an alley. And there was this 7 year old kid dealing drugs. I didn’t want to shoot him, but the gun went off accidently….”)

Chinatown is also a great example of how to construct conflict within the central relationship. With Gittes and Evelyn, there are actually two elements of conflict happening at all times. First, he doesn’t 100% trust her. So there’s always a restraint there, a cautious wall he puts up, which adds a nice subtext to their conversations. And also, there’s sexual tension between the two. Both characters are attracted to each other, which also plays into their dialogue, and nicely contrasts with the lack of trust. This is by no means a new device, but it works particularly well in this relationship for some reason.

As far as what’s not in this script, there’s no real ticking time bomb here, which I guess is not surprising since that was less of a concern back in the 70s. Everybody had all the time in the world so who cares if things get finished now or later? Now would it have helped Chinatown? I think yes, it would have. Not dramatically. But there were a few times in the script where we could’ve used some momentum. Also – and you’ll have to excuse me if this is a bigger deal in the movie because I’m just going off the script (it’s been ten years since I saw the film) – but there’s no true villain here. I mean, there are some smaller villains. And of course Cross is pretty bad. But here in the script he shows up late and the extent of his evil is only revealed in the final act. One of my big things is to try to get a great villain in your script. So it was interesting that Chinatown chose to cloak its villain for the majority of its story.

You know it’s funny. If this showed up on my desk for the first time today, I’d probably say, “Change the water conspiracy to something more interesting and get the opening act moving faster.” But otherwise, this script really is a master class in crafting a character-driven mystery. It’s not the greatest script ever written in my opinion, but I can’t fault others for believing it is.  It’s damn good writing.

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

What I learned: Restrained information. There are two instances where big parts of the characters’ pasts are set up, yet both times, very little or the barest amount of information is given. With Evelyn, it’s how she got pregnant. With Gittes, it’s Chinatown. Notice how Evelyn doesn’t go into extreme detail about the experience. “My mom died. He was angry. I was 15. I ran away.” It’s just quick flashes of information. And as I noted before, with Gittes, it’s not any specific thing that happened in Chinatown. It’s more the character’s reaction to the memory than the memory itself. These moments always tend to work better with restraint, and Chinatown is proof of that. Less is more people. Less is more.

Genre: Thriller/Mystery
Premise: An investigator tries to solve a murder case on a ship that involves a handyman, a young stock broker and the stock broker’s girlfriend.
About: Nautica was originally written and sold back in 2001 and was going to be directed by Tarsem Singh. As so often is the case in Hollywood though, things fell apart and the project was quickly forgotten. More recently, however, Summit picked up the pieces and is repackaging the Dead Calm like thriller with a new untainted title – Riptide. Brad Pitt and Shia Labeouf are rumored as possible co-stars. This is the original 2001 script.
Writer: Richard McBrien
Details: 117 pages – 2001 draft (This is an early draft of the script. The situations, characters, and plot may change significantly by the time the film is released. This is not a definitive statement about the project, but rather an analysis of this unique draft as it pertains to the craft of screenwriting).

How the hell this thing has been lingering in obscurity for ten years is beyond me. This is a really fucking good script. It’s not like G.J. Pruss’ Passengers, which hasn’t been made because the script’s appeal doesn’t translate to screen. Or Dogs of Babel, which is an amazing script but tough to market.

It basically has all the ingredients to be made into a movie. It’s got three great characters. It’s got thrills. It’s got mystery. It has gob-stopping suspense. And best of all, it’s told in a slightly unique way, giving it that “something different” factor. Jesus, all you’d have to do is sign Justin Bieber up for a cameo and this movie would print money.

The story goes a little something like this. Investigator Geoff Anderson shows up on a small island in the Pacific to arrest island hopper and all around drifter Max Shilton. Max has been found clinging to life in a yacht belonging to Frank Cotter, a successful stock broker.

500 miles away, Frank Cotter’s body has been found discarded in the ocean, and the barely identifiable sack of bloated pus shows signs of struggle consistent with murder. Anderson believes Max killed Frank for his boat and his money. But he’s about to find out there’s a lot more to this story.

A flashback begins, where Max explains he was a penniless handyman stuck on an island. Out of nowhere, Frank, an old acquaintance of his from high school, shows up on the island in a multi-million dollar yacht and a beautiful woman by his side, Kathy. The two get to talking, and when Frank learns there may be bad storms ahead, he hires Max as a navigator.

Within hours, Max and Kathy begin flirting. There’s clearly a strong sexual attraction here, and the two are stealing passionate kisses whenever the opportunity arises. When Frank starts to sense it, however, tension mounts. In a vulnerable moment, Frank pushes Max off the boat. Max is able to bring Frank down with him and a struggle ensues, climaxing in a life-struggling kick to Frank’s face which accidentally kills him. That, according to Max, is what really happened. It was all just an accident.

Anderson’s not buying it. Luckily, he also has Kathy in custody. So he goes to get her side of the story. Surprisingly, she defends Max. It’s true, she says, that he didn’t kill Frank. But Max also left out some key details. There’s much more to this story.

Kathy and Frank used to live in New York, with Frank being a successful foreign exchange trader. However, Frank was secretly skimming money off the top. When some investors found out, they stormed the offices and killed a couple of his co-workers. Frank was able to escape with 15 million bucks, but had nowhere to hide. So he and Kathy bought a boat and headed out to the middle of the Pacific, where they could never be found.

When Frank spotted Max, the old friend he grew up with, he feared that word would get out where he was hiding. Which is, of course, why he hired Max as a navigator, so he could kill him.

Naturally, this is just the beginning. Each time we go back, more and more details are revealed, molding and shaping our story into something increasingly elaborate. Suffice it to say, you’ll be guessing what happened all the way up to the end.

Nautica is a great little script for a lot of reasons, and it starts with the mystery at hand. Of all the things that drive an audience’s interest in a story, a good mystery is near the top of the list. Think about Monday’s script, Red Harvest. The mystery (who killed Willsson) started us off, and wasn’t bad, but it was solved quickly. So what’s left? Nothing. Kill the mystery, kill the interest.

Now there have been thousands of movies and TV shows that have started off with a murder. So what makes Nautica different? Simple. The mystery inspires multiple questions. First, our “killer” is clinging to life on this boat when we find him. Why? Second, the owner’s body was found 500 miles away. Why? Third, the wife of the murder victim is siding with the supposed killer instead of her husband. Why? Our brain is bouncing around like a room full of ping pong balls on mouse traps trying to link these events together. From the very first page, we’re actively engaged, which is what every writer in the world is trying to accomplish.

Here’s the thing about Nautica though. It’s a pretty messy narrative. We’re jumping back from past to present, present to past, different points of view, piecing together the story. I’d be hard pressed to identify a three act structure here. And as someone who believes strongly in the three act structure, I had to sit back and ask, “Okay, why is this still working then?”

And I remembered that if the central element that’s driving your story is strong enough, the structure isn’t as important. In this case, the mystery of what happened is so powerful that the usual story beats an audience craves aren’t necessary. It’s a distraction thing. We’re so distracted by the mystery that we’re not focusing on the nontraditional way the story’s being told.

Now I’m by no means advocating a free-for-all when it comes to structure. Only that it’s possible to have a messy structure if your script is focused in other ways (in this case, with the mystery). Here’s the thing though. The lack of structure does eventually come back to bite this script in the butt. There’s a portion of the story between pages 60 and 90 where the lack of focus results in a series of scenes that feel redundant and or unnecessary. This kind of thing happens when the structure isn’t in place because structure is what dictates the scenes you’re going to write next. Without it, you’re like a ship lost at sea. You think you’re going the right way – and maybe you are – but it’s taking you longer to get there than you’d like. It’s why this script is 117 pages – when a thriller with three characters probably shouldn’t run over 100.

My only other beef with Nautica is the ending, and I’m going to allude to but not give away a spoiler here, so turn away if you don’t want to know. A good twist ending should jolt you, make you think for a few seconds, then have the “Ohhhh” moment. The Sixth Sense is the perfect example. It confuses you for a brief second, but then you’re like, “Ohhhhh.” I think Nautica’s twist ending works, but you have to think about it and work things out in your head a little too extensively before the “Ohhhhhh” comes. And it’s not a very long “Ohhhhh.” It’s more like, “Oh yeah, that works,” which isn’t as satisfying.

Still, I loved this script. I know a script is working when I keep getting duped and immediately afterwards think, “How the hell did I just get duped by that?” Nautica has a lot of those moments. I thought long and hard about whether to give this a double worth-the-read or an impressive. I really am stuck in the middle. But in the end, the question is, “Did this script entertain me all the way through?” And the answer is yes. So impressive it is.

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

What I learned: A good murder mystery starts off with a murder that has the reader asking multiple questions, not a single question. A single question is good enough for a weekly cop show (“Who killed this guy?”). But a film should have your mind racing on several fronts. If you look at movies like Seven for instance, when they come across that first body, it isn’t as simple as, “Who killed this guy?” It’s “What the hell happened here?” There’s a bigger picture involved. And it’s our need to figure out that big picture that makes us want to keep reading.

NOTE: I notice people are discussing spoilers in the comments. This is one of those scripts where even the mention of similar movies hints at what the spoilers are, so please note all spoilers, and readers please traverse the comments at your own risk!

Genre: Cop-Drama
Premise: An unorthodox Irish policeman with a confrontational personality is teamed up with an uptight FBI agent to investigate an international drug-smuggling ring.
About: The Guard was written and directed by John Michael McDonagh. This is his first directing effort. McDonagh’s one other credit is for writing 2003’s “Ned Kelly.” The Guard stars Don Cheadle and Brendan Gleeson and was purchased at Sundance this year by Sony Pictures Classics. John Michael is the brother of Martin McDonagh, whose film “In Bruges” became an instant cult classic. The two started their career together, with John writing and Martin directing a short film called “Six Shooter” that starred none other than…Brendan Gleeson.
Writer: John Michael McDonagh
Details: 109 pages – shooting draft (This is an early draft of the script. The situations, characters, and plot may change significantly by the time the film is released. This is not a definitive statement about the project, but rather an analysis of this unique draft as it pertains to the craft of screenwriting).

Since I put the word out that I was reviewing this script, I’ve been surprised at the nearly one dozen e-mails I’ve received celebrating it. The consensus seems to be that this is really good. Either this isn’t my choice of paint or I’m at the wrong house because while The Guard certainly has its moments, I felt that the story gets lost in too many places and, when it’s all said and done, has too bland of a plot.

Location: The west coast of Ireland.

Where we meet: Gerry Boyle

You wouldn’t call Boyle a corrupt cop. But if he spots a bag of coke in the pocket of a murdered civilian, he’ll stuff it in his own pocket and save it for a rainy day. That pretty much sums up Boyle. He has no problem mixing business with pleasure. Boyle is the heart and soul of The Guard, the blood pumping through its veins. When he’s doing his thing (which consists mainly of giving his unfiltered opinion of you) we’re dancing at the most exclusive party. When he’s not, the script is deader than a body once rigor mortis sets in.

Since Boyle’s way of doing his job is so, um, “specific,” he’s none too pleased to be set up with a new partner, city boy Aiden McBride. McBride’s greener than an Irish postcard and his dogged idealism bugs the hell out of Boyle. It sure is a buzzkill when your partner won’t let you get trashed before the day’s rounds begin.

But the partnership doesn’t last long. After looking into a possible serial killer murder, poor McBride is gunned down by some nasty Irish criminals during a routine traffic stop. Boyle’s later visited by McBride’s wife, who’s concerned that he never came home, and now instead of just having to worry about this murder, he’s got to worry about finding his annoying partner (who he doesn’t know is dead).

During this time, a drug task force blows into town led by FBI agent Wendell Everett, an African American. Apparently there’s a boat with half a billion dollars worth of cocaine on it that’s going to land somewhere along the coast of Ireland in the next few days. They need all local cops to keep a look out

This is pretty much the breaking point for Boyle. For a man who’d prefer to build a bed under his desk, a la George Costanza in Seinfeld, and sleep all day, this is turning out to be quite the heavy workload.

Eventually, Boyle and McBride’s wife start to hang out and he finds out that McBride was gay and the marriage was for a green card, which leaves the door open for a little romantic soiree. But McBride is devoid of emotion and uninterested in human contact, preferring to fuck hookers a la Charlie Sheen over, you know, opening up about his feelings n stuff.

It only gets more frustrating when Boyle’s forced to deal with Everett and his obsession with this coke boat. He takes it out on Everett with his racially charged observations, assuming that since Everett is black he grew up in the hood and probably danced with a gang or four.

But it turns out Everett grew up privileged, receiving an Ivy-League education and making his way up the ranks cause he’s damn good at his job. The two butt heads in their approach (Everett’s by the book, Boyle blows the book up) but need to work together to take down these drug dealers, a job that gets harder by the day considering how much corruption dominates the small Irish town.

The Guard, for me, didn’t do enough differently with the genre, had too un-compelling of a central case, and didn’t maximize the conflict between its leads enough. Combined with a host of other questionable choices, the script didn’t click for me.

It starts with McBride, Boyle’s initial partner. I have no idea why this character is in the script. He shows up for five minutes, dies, and then we’re supposed to be interested in the search for him even though a) we never knew him, b) he was a boring character c) our main character has no interest in finding out what happened to him, and d) it has absolutely nothing to do with the main plot.

The truth is, we didn’t need this character. He has nothing to do with the story. The first character to show up should’ve been Everett and we should’ve dived right into the drug-plot. We already had another death (the supposed serial killer murder) to look into in order to keep the plot complex. McBride, then, only serves to take up precious screenplay real estate.

I’m assuming his death was a device to introduce his wife into Boyle’s life, so we have a romantic interest. Not only were there other options for doing this, but the wife doesn’t really affect Boyle’s life anyway. Their interactions are short and devoid of conflict, so to go through all that trouble just to get this girl in the story who’s barely involved anyway and has little to offer in Boyle’s character transformation…I just didn’t see the point of it.

Next, I didn’t like the wishy-washy relationship with Everett. There’s nothing really forcing these two to interact with one another. They’re part of two different factions investigating two different things. This forces the script to have to come up with situations where the two would talk, but they never pop off the page because we know they’ll be free and clear of each other within ten minutes. These movies tend to work best when the people involved are forced to work together so in my opinion, the solution to this is simple. Drop McBride and have Everett come in and be Boyle’s partner from the get-go. It’s so obvious it’s painful.

The thing that really works for The Guard is the character of Boyle. He’s got two major things going for him as a fictional character. First, he says and does what’s on his mind. He has no filter. Those characters are always fun to watch. Also, he’s borderline corrupt. He abuses his power, and the irony of someone who’s supposed to be protecting us, taking advantage of us, is a compelling one and a dynamic we’re inherently drawn to (check out The Shield as an example).

My problem with these kinds of characters is that they work for awhile because they’re fun to watch, but at a certain point, they’re going to be called on to “save the day” and unless you’ve built a carefully nuanced transformation into the character over the course of the story, then them all of a sudden wanting to “do the right thing,” will feel artificial, and that’s exactly what happens here.

(Spoilers) Boyle finds out where the boat is landing and decides to go down by himself, a la Die Hard Bruce Willis, and single-handedly take out the entire group of bad guys.

Why? I don’t know.

He hasn’t given a shit for 100 pages. Why does he all of a sudden give a shit now? Yeah they killed his partner but he didn’t even know his partner. He has no reason to do this other than that it’s the climax of the movie and you need your hero to be involved in the climax somehow.

Needless to say, I wasn’t a fan of the script. I thought Boyle was a good character and that was about it. Motivations needed to be stronger. Needless plot points needed to be stripped. Relationships needed to be solidified. It’ll be interesting to see what Gleeson does with this character. No doubt he’ll have some fun and make this film watchable, but I can’t recommend the screenplay.

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

What I learned: Use action to create a history between two people, not conversation. One of the problems I had with The Guard was that all of Boyle’s and Everett’s scenes together were them sitting around talking about their pasts. It was boring. Therefore, when they’re forced to team up in the end, you didn’t have any sense of history between the two. It was like I barely knew who these two were in relation to each other. So instead of trying to create history via dialogue, put your characters in situations that require action. Look at Heat. Remember the famous bank robbery scene where they’re out in the middle of downtown L.A. firing AK-47s at police officers? You really got the sense that those guys WENT THROUGH SOMETHING TOGETHER, so that later on, you felt the history between them. I didn’t see that here so the final pairing between Boyle and Everett lacked depth. It was almost like they were meeting for the first time. In short, SHOW don’t TELL. The Guard could’ve benefited from this.

Genre: Comedy/Drama
Premise: A once-prominent public school teacher tries to get three students into college in order to win over a hot new teacher.
About: Was on the ’06 Black List with six votes. While the script is still stuck in development, Eric Gravning, the writer, used it to get assignment work on the Halle Barry project, Class Act, about a Nevada school teacher who enlists the help of her sixth-grade students in her congressional campaign (based on the true story of Tierney Cahill). He also worked on the film adaptation of Tom and Jerry.
Writer: Eric Gravning
Details: 122 pages – draft that made the Black List (This is an early draft of the script. The situations, characters, and plot may change significantly by the time the film is released. This is not a definitive statement about the project, but rather an analysis of this unique draft as it pertains to the craft of screenwriting).

I’m an unabashed fan of Mr. Holland’s Opus. I know it’s super sentimental and uses industrial sized rope to tug at your heartstrings, but in my opinion, it’s the best “inspiring teacher” movie of all time. When Mr. Holland walks into that auditorium at the end? Oh man. It never fails to get me.

Mr. Burnout isn’t that movie. In fact, I don’t know what Mr. Burnout is. It’s such a strange combination of films from this genre, you don’t know what to make of it. Is has some Mr. Holland in it. It has some “Hamlet 2” in it. It adds a dash of Alexander Payne’s “Election.” It even has a little “Bad Teacher,” in there, the Cameron Diaz project I reviewed last year.

This script’s biggest strength is also its biggest weakness, and that’s that you’re never quite sure which direction it’s going to go.

Right away you know something’s different when we’re introduced to our hero, Eddie Burnett, via a voice over from a character who doesn’t show up until halfway into the script. This character, Charity, tells us that there was a time when our hero, Eddie, used to be an idealistic young teacher, signified by his star pupil, Laura, who used Eddie’s guidance to get into Princeton.

Since then, however, schools have become overpopulated, students uninterested, and budgets cut drastically. The kids, the parents, the government…nobody cares anymore. So a decade later, Eddie’s now a disinterested drunk teacher trying to make it through the day.

His classes are populated by morons and we focus on three in particular. There’s Roberto, a Hispanic kid who may or may not be a gangbanger. There’s Rose, who spends most of her classes sleeping instead of learning. And there’s Matthew, a privileged kid with every opportunity in the world, who just doesn’t put forth the effort.

What’s so frustrating about these three is that they’re all smart. They just don’t apply themselves. And, shit, Eddie sure isn’t going to put in the extra effort to change that.

Well…until now anyways. Charity, our voice from above, replaces one of the retired teachers and when she sees Eddie’s despicable behavior, tells him that she’ll sleep with him if he gets three of his students into one of the top colleges in the country.

To me, this is the weakest part of the screenplay and it’s a big problem in that it’s the hook of the movie. As we talked about the other day, when you’re dealing with logic in a script, you can get away with sketchy logic in the lesser plot points, but on the single most important section of the screenplay – that which dictates the story – you can’t be wishy-washy.

First of all, as Charity points out, we’re not even sure if she’s serious about the offer. Second, he just met this girl. Or more importantly, she just met him. So her offering is absurd. It would be like if a girl approached you at the bus stop and said, “I’ll sleep with you if you get me a job at the aquarium.” It just comes out of nowhere.

Anyway, with sex on the brain, Eddie transforms into an unstoppable teaching force. He helps his three students ace their SATs. He helps them ace their final. And he starts helping them in their real lives as well. This is where Mr. Burnout becomes most interesting, when we learn about Rose’s exhausting home life (thus why she’s sleeping in class), and Matthew’s overbearing father (thus why he’s so aloof). Nothing here is quite what it seemed on the surface, including Eddie himself, who’s got his own baggage exposed in a way that makes us completely reevaluate him.

Eventually, some teachers who never liked Eddie lobby to get him fired, and just when Eddie’s finally getting that teaching spark back, it turns out to be too late.

Mr. Burnout is messy. That would be the word of the day if Eddie asked me to write one on the board. There’s a good movie in here somewhere, particularly in the way these characters are explored and the thought that went into their backstories. But there are just too many elements fighting against each other to bring it all together.

Take Charity for example. I understand the advantage of viewing Eddie through a third person. How if *he* had been doing the voice over, we would’ve learned too many things about him that we didn’t want to know yet. But Charity is like an unapologetic plot-bot, there to feed us information on command and nothing else. Even when she gets into the story, it’s to artificially influence the plot with her “sex for kid’s college” trade.

Now had Charity and Eddie gone on a few dates, gotten to know each other, developed a friendship, and then she told him that, morally, she couldn’t continue a relationship with someone who didn’t care about the people he was teaching, and he then changed his ways in order to save that relationship – now that’s something I would be on board with.

The problem is, we don’t have time for them to start a relationship. And the reason we don’t have time for them is we spent way too much time in the first act setting up that Eddie was a terrible teacher. We’re told again and again and again through numerous scenes that Eddie’s a lazy lousy teacher, when all we needed was one. When writers do this, overwrite their first acts, and oversell their hero’s weakness, it leaves them with less time to deal with key relationships later on, which is what you should be using your second act for. Which is exactly what happens with Eddie and Charity.

This should probably be the key relationship in the entire script. Yet it’s barely explored and only later does it turn into something real. Unfortunately by then it’s too late and we simply don’t believe it.

This carries over into the kids as well. All three kids, while having interesting backstories and interesting individual relationships with Eddie, don’t have any sort of relationship with each other. It’s almost as if Eddie is tutoring each of them on their own, since they rarely interact. In the one instance where we do see that interaction – Matthew’s crush on Rose – it starts so quickly and ends even more quickly – that it doesn’t feel real. I wouldn’t have minded a couple more students in the mix and we have more of a Breakfast Club vibe, where they actually acknowledge and deal with the issues they have with each other.

That said, there were some really nice emotional moments. Learning Eddie’s backstory was tough. It added another dimension to him that he needed, and transformed an unlikable frumplehorn into a sympathetic figure. The late reveal of Laura’s fate, Eddie’s prized pupil from the past, was also a punch in the gut. But even with these warmer goosebump-worthy touches, there was too much messiness, too much unfocused energy, to bring it all together in a satisfying way. I would love to see the version of this script with a coherent theme – specifically about the deterioration of the American school system. I don’t think that’s been done before, and seen through the filter of a dark comedy, it could really be fascinating. But since I’m not grading on potential, I probably can’t recommend this.

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

What I learned: You don’t usually need as much setup time as you think you do. We don’t need five scenes to show how much Eddie hates teaching. A lot of writers make this mistake. One strong scene or a couple of medium scenes is all you need to show your character’s big problem. Then move on. Feel free to remind us, but don’t block out full scenes to keep telling us what we already know. You’re going to need that time later to build up your characters and relationships.