Man, we’ve got a good line-up this week. A lot of times I’ll put a group of scripts together and think, “I don’t see a single winner in the bunch.” But today, we’ve got a few. I can’t share which ones I feel that way about, of course, because I don’t want to poison the voting pool. But this is the first pack I’ve seen in awhile that makes me confident a “worth the read” is on the horizon. For those playing Amateur Offerings for the first time, read as much as you can from each script and vote for your favorite in the comments section. The script with the most votes will receive a review next week!
And if you believe you have a screenplay that’s better than anything Hollywood is making at the moment, submit it for a future Amateur Offerings! Send me a PDF of your script, along with the title, genre, logline, and why you think people should read it (your chance to pitch yourself or your story). All submissions should be sent to Carsonreeves3@gmail.com.
Title: ABORT
Genre: Sci-Fi
Logline: Stranded on a remote planet with no memory of her past, a young woman struggles to fix her ship while trying to outwit a manipulative alien AI whose sole purpose is to repopulate its creator’s species by using her as a host.
Why You Should Read: ABORT is an edge-of-your-seat, unpredictable journey full of deception, twists, turns, and reveals, as our protagonist battles massive monsters, a dangerous climate, and conniving AIs… all while coping with amnesia. Billed as GROUNDHOG DAY meets ALIEN, ABORT provides constant goals and mini-goals, frequent ticking time bomb situations, and the stakes are as high as they could be… life or extinction. — While the use of color in the script has proven quite controversial, we are confident that it adds an extra layer to the read, and provides a much needed sci-fi ambiance necessary to set the mood of the futuristic, but isolated world we’ve created.
Title: A Writer’s Acts
Genre: Satire / Thriller
Logline: After a mysterious writer blackmails her through a pitch that reveals her darkest secrets, a meek female executive must take matters into her own hands to discover the source.
Why You Should Read: I constantly hear about how trendy “female-driven” and “Jane Wick” specs are, so I decided to write a female-driven Jane Wick that resulted in being about as far away from John Wick as possible. — This might be a cutting satire of Hollywood and filmmaking on the surface, but at its heart this is a story of female empowerment, institutionalised misogyny and liberal hypocrisy. So relevant in the era of #MeToo and Harvey Weinstein. And I guarantee you that all of these issues are handled without ever getting preachy or partisan. — Script also made it to the Semifinals of the Script Pipeline Screenwriting competition.
Title: Follow ME
Genre: TV – One Hour Drama
Logline: Follows the life of a cult deprogrammer who uses unlawful methods to liberate individuals believed to be brainwashed by controversial belief systems, all while struggling to find peace within himself.
Why You Should Read: I became fascinated by the world of cult deprogramming after reading strories about Ted Patrick, who is considered the “father of deprogramming”. Deprogramming refers to the act of forcibly removing someone from a cult, holding them against their will in an undisclosed location, and using psychological methods to unbrainwash them. The work of a deprogrammer can be liken to the job of an exorcist. You basically have a person who is under the influence of someone else, and it’s up to the deprogrammer to rid that person of that influence. With groups like NXIVM and Scientology being featured heavily in recent headlines, psychologist Steve Eichel estimates that up to 10,000 cults still exist today…and they are more dangerous than ever. People’s lives are being ruined. People who have families that love, care, and depend on them. These families hire deprogrammers to save their loved ones…no matter the cost. Although “Follow ME” is a fictional story set in present day New Orleans, a lot of what happens in the series is all too real.
Title: DEATH FROM ABOVE
Genre: Action/War
Logline: In WW2, during the darkest days of 1941 when Rommel was overrunning North Africa, a brilliant unorthodox Commando David Sterling singlehandedly recruits and transforms a bunch of unruly, undisciplined commandoes into the world’s deadliest strike force, the SAS.
Why You Should Read: WW2 is a period of military history which I love. For me, some of the greatest movies of all time have a link to this monumental, global fight for freedom. DEATH FROM ABOVE is a product of that passion, an unbelievable, untold, true story about the birth of the SAS in North Africa in 1941. DEATH FROM ABOVE fictionalizes real events to bring alive Sterling’s heroic battle against the stuffy British establish and Rommel’s formidible Africa Korps to form the world’s first strategic guerilla warfare unit — the SAS. It’s also a story of the unique men who formed this elite unit and their disastrous first ever mission OPERATION SQUATTER. DEATH FROM ABOVE has been written with franchise potential in mind, so just deals with the birth of the SAS and covers the period until the fateful first mission. The script also hopefully qualifies as one of the hot selling topics according to Scriptshadow, a based on true events WW2 story.
Title: Sway
Genre: Drama/Sci-fi
Logline: Sway, A talented high school pianist with a hard home life gains the power of mind control but must strengthen it if she hopes to escape the clutches of her abusive, drug-pushing cousin.
Why You Should Read: Hey, name’s Brittany! I may not comment much but I read SS everyday. Been reading, absorbing, mostly writing. I come here with a script I’ve been working on for a little while. I’ve always wanted to write a “superpower” story set in the real, real world with very personal stakes for the main character rather than world altering ones. There’s very little special effects and no over the top sci-fi jibber jabber. It’s pretty contained and written with a low budget in mind. Chiefly, this is a story about how abuse victims grow defense mechanisms to help cope with their abusers. In this case, the victim gains an actual superpower. I look forward to any helpful feedback from Carson and the awesome SS community!
One last note! If you’re going to criticize loglines or first pages, please do so in a way that’s constructive. I’ve seen a lot of bitter responses to loglines lately. We’re all here to help each other, not make each other feel bad. It’s easy to reword a negative critique into something that gets your point across yet inspires the writer to improve. Thanks.
One of the most important factors in getting noticed as a screenwriter is writing a screenplay that Hollywood actually wants to make. This is one of the BIGGEST pitfalls I see writers fall into. I receive an endless number of scripts – scripts I even put in Amateur Offerings – that I know Hollywood will never be interested in. It’s just not their jam to make that movie. The secret to selling anything in life is understanding what your buyer wants. These are the ten movies the buyer (Hollywood) wants right now.
1) Girl with a Gun – It’s still a trend. It’s still marketable. We’ll see what happens when the big studio versions of these films start hitting theaters en mass. Maybe the movies will fizzle and the trend will die. But that time is not now. I’d like to remind you that when a trend hits its downslope, there is still opportunity to pillage its fruits. You simply combine the genre with another genre. A Girl in a Western with a gun. A Girl in a Horror movie with a gun. But the spirt of the original idea has to be there. Don’t give me a Girl in a Western with a gun who shoots her gun twice the whole movie.
Shout Out To: Guy With a Gun! These movies still sell. You just have to be more clever with your premises than Girl With a Gun movies. John Wick and The Equalizer won’t work anymore. You need an idea with a bit more creativity behind it.
2) Biopic – Just to be clear, Biopics refer to long-form character studies, meaning we see the character grow up over several time periods. If you’re only covering a short section of a person’s life (a week or a month) I’d place that more in the “true story” category. Biopics would be movies like the upcoming Bohemian Rhapsody, The Theory of Everything, and The Aviator.
Shout Out To: Clever narratives. To compete in the competitive biopic market, come up with a clever way into the genre. Steve Jobs is a good example of this. Instead of following Jobs’s life continuously, Sorkin focused on his three biggest product announcements.
3) True Story – The true story genre often gets mixed up with the biopic genre because true stories focus on real people and therefore we assume we’re reading a biopic. But true stories are more about covering one specific event in a person’s (or people’s) life. Mayday 109, an upcoming movie about a young John F. Kennedy saving a bunch of people after their boat sinks. The upcoming Pale Blue Dot, about a female astronaut traveling across the country to kill the fellow astronaut she had an affair with. The upcoming I’m Proud of You, about a depressed man who found a new lease on life when he befriended Mr. Rogers.
Shout Out To: Trashy real-life stories. Everyone thinks that if they’re going to adapt a true story, it needs to be serious and say something about the world. Let’s not forget that the infamous Zola The Stripper Twitter novel is anything but serious. That didn’t stop it from selling and getting made into a future film.
4) Social Issues – It’s hard to tell what’s going to happen with Social Issues screenplays moving forward. In the past, these movies have been relegated to low-budget indie dramas, like Fruitvale Station. But with The Black List being so liberal leaning, more and more social issues scripts are dominating the list. Just this past year we have a movie about the power of abortion, a Malcom X story, the Civil Rights case of Dr. Ossian Sweet, a second script about a famous abortion clinic, and even a script called “Social Justice Warrior.” With the recent transgender revolution, I’m expecting 3 or 4 scripts about transgenders to hit the 2018 Black List. Might yours be one of them?
Shout Out To: Writers who aren’t using social issues as a means of virtue signaling. Many social issues are complex and require a balanced look at what’s causing the issue. Your script is going to stand out if you respect that complexity.
5) World War 2 – There were no fewer that EIGHT World War 2 themed scripts on last year’s Black List, including two (Ruin and Keeper of the Diary) in the Top 5. World War 2 is a genre that routinely goes up and down but can always be depended on. Eight scripts makes it the most dominant subject matter on the list by far.
Shout Out To: Using real life events in World War 2 as inspiration to create your own story. One of the problems with true World War 2 stories is that the best ones have all been taken. If you use events and people as inspiration for a jumping off point to write a gnarly new take on the war, you have a shot at standing out from the crowd. This is what Ruin, the number one script on the list, did. Likewise with the newest script to make my Top 25, Max Landis’s Shadow in the Cloud (sorry no link – this review can only be accessed on the Scriptshadow Newsletter).
6) Contained Horror – Contained horror is still the NUMBER 1 WAY TO BREAK INTO HOLLYWOOD. If you can, make sure your contained horror movie contains either a ghost or a monster. Horror films without monsters are much tougher sells (though there are exceptions, like Get Out). How easy is it to break in with horror? They made a movie about the game Truth or Dare. It doesn’t take much to impress, guys. As long as your script is scary.
Shout Out To: Event Horror and Creature Features. After the success of It, we’re going to be seeing more big budget event horror in the coming years. Right now, this is an IP only avenue. But I expect that to change if someone writes a really scary big budget horror spec. Creature Features, while not as popular as they used to be, still have huge upside. Hollywood’s going to look at anything that has franchise potential for the next 30 years.
7) Contained Thriller – A Contained Thriller is typically a one-location thriller. Something like Phone Booth, Panic Room, or 127 Hours. This genre does well because it’s easy to market (you see a guy, a gun, a bomb, and time running out, and you instantly know what you’re getting) and doesn’t cost much.
Shout Out To: Limited Thrillers. A Limited Thriller covers more area than a Contained Thriller but is essentially the same thing with a higher price tag. The Commuter, where Liam Neeson is on a train, would be a Limited Thriller. Obviously, since the pool of people who can produce your movie goes down once you increase the price tag, you’ll have less of a chance at a sale with a Limited Thriller.
8) Female-Centered Comedy – I think there are more comedies in development with females at the moment than with males. So the odds are in your favor by writing something with a woman in the lead role.
Shout Out To: Scripts that don’t just take a male-lead idea and switch the lead to a female. Try and build your female comedy idea from the ground up. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that Bridesmaids remains the cream of the crop in this genre.
9) Action Comedy – If you’re thinking of writing a comedy, seriously consider making it an action comedy. Remember, comedy doesn’t travel well. People in Myanmar don’t laugh at Seth Rogen getting high jokes. Central Intelligence, Spy, Tropic Thunder, Rush Hour, the upcoming The Spy Who Dumped Me. That’s where comedy is going right now.
Shout Out To: Male-Female Team-Ups. In the past, all we got for action comedy was male team-ups. More recently, we’ve focused on female team-ups. This leaves one slot left to take advantage of: a team-up with a man and a woman. They’re doing this with the upcoming Night School. Expect more of this in the immediate future.
10) Old IP – Old IP is IP that’s now in the public domain and can therefore be used by anyone. This is one of the biggest cheat codes there is in the business. You get to write about someone that everybody in the world knows and don’t have to pay a dime for it. Last year they made a King Arthur film. Later this year we’re getting a Robin Hood movie. There are several other Robin Hood movies in development. You’ve got Shakespeare. You’ve got The Count of Monte Cristo. The Wizard of Oz, Tom Sawyer, The Three Musketeers. Hollywood will always buy this stuff if you can come up with a fresh take.
Shout Out To: Anyone who can take these characters and place them in the modern day in a cool way. I’ve seen so many Robin Hoods set in 1740. I’m numb to that image. But a Robin Hood set in the present? Or the future? That I would be into.
One final thing before I go. If you have THE GREATEST MOVIE IDEA EVER and it doesn’t fall into any of these categories, you should still write it. A good movie idea is a good movie idea. But do me a favor and run the idea by a couple of friends (or me, if you want someone who’s heard every idea imaginable) first. At least one of them should be bonkers excited and agree that the idea is amazing.
Carson does feature screenplay consultations, TV Pilot Consultations, and logline consultations. Logline consultations go for $25 a piece or 5 for $75. You get a 1-10 rating, a 200-word evaluation, and a rewrite of the logline. If you’re interested in any sort of consultation package, e-mail Carsonreeves1@gmail.com with the subject line: CONSULTATION. Don’t start writing a script or sending a script out blind. Let Scriptshadow help you get it in shape first!
Genre: Murder-Mystery
Premise: When a sex-obsessed single woman visits her estranged married twin in Italy, she’s asked to impersonate her, leading to a string of unfortunate events.
About: This script finished with 10 votes on last year’s Black List. It’s based on a book by first-time author and Londoner Chloe Esposito, who received her BA and MA in English from Oxford University. Screenwriter Jade Halley Bartlett adapted the book. This is her breakthrough screenplay.
Writer: Jade Halley Bartlett (based on the novel by Chloe Esposito)
Details: 140 pages!!!
I noticed a few comments about how this site used to be so upbeat! So inspiring! Yet now you come here and every single script gets a “wasn’t for me” rating. What kind of inspiration is that, Carson?!
Here’s the funny part. Whenever I like a script, everybody else trashes it. I get the feeling that if the commenters were reviewing scripts, they’d all get “what the hell did I just reads.” Therefore, it it wasn’t for me, we’d have no positive reviews at all!
All jokes aside, there’s probably something wrong with your analysis skills if all you do is hate everything or all you do is love everything. If you hate everything you watch, you probably shouldn’t be in this business. Right? What’s the point? Are you trying to depress yourself to death? And if you love everything, you don’t have the critical gene necessary to identify problems in your own screenplays.
I’m definitely closer to the former than the latter. And I have to remind myself to loosen up sometimes. Entertainment doesn’t work if you’re not open to the possibility of being entertained. So I’m glad this script came along when it did. It’s messy. It’s weird. It’s over-the-top. But you can’t deny that it’s entertaining.
27 year old Tinder-obsessed Alvina Knightly has two best friends – a poster of a shirtless Channing Tatum and a giant dildo named Mr. Dick. After getting fired for watching porn at work and kicked out of her flat because she’s a nuisance to the flat’s safety, Alvina gets a call from twin her sister, Beth. In a series of asides to the audience, Alvina explain that she hates her sister and her rich perfect life more than anything.
And usually, that feeling is mutual. But today Beth is insistent that Alvina come visit her and her husband in Italy. Alvina’s got nothing else to do, so she arrives in their beautiful countryside home, where she’s reunited with Beth’s hot husband, Ambrogio, who she, oh yeah, happened to have sex with once (Ambrogio swore to Beth he thought Alvina was her).
Anyway, once Alvina’s settled, Beth asks her to pretend to be her for a day while she goes off and takes care of some mystery business. Alvina reluctantly agrees, and then that night Beth comes home, drunk, berates her sister, leading to a tussle, and Beth falls, hits her head, and falls into a pool. Alvina decides, in that moment, not to save her. So Beth dies.
When Ambrogio appears, he assumes Alvina is Beth, and says something shocking. “You weren’t supposed to murder her here!” Realizing she was summoned here to be killed, Beth gets revenge by killing Ambrogio the next day, only to learn that he was involved in a 20 million dollar painting heist. Alvina must now make the difficult decision to nope the hell out of Italy, or embrace the life of her gangster sister and get dat money.
Let’s get the obvious stuff out of the way first. This script is too long. This plot is too messy. And a lot of the plot points read like a Spanish soap opera.
However, the reason you’re still entertained is that the voice of the writer is bananas. Remember, guys and gals. Voice is the x-factor. Voice can take a seemingly boring premise and make it fun. Voice can take a seemingly cliche premise and make it shine. Voice is the screenplay hack that supersedes the rules.
Because if I’m enjoying myself, I don’t care if Character C didn’t have a proper arc or not.
One of the most effective ways of displaying voice is to focus on the bad as opposed to the good. There’s something real about the messiness of life. For example, when Alvie wakes up at the opening of the script, she swings her feet to the floor where they land on an open pizza box. She then lifts her foot up, which now has a pizza slice attached to it, and eats it.
You can’t write that scene in studio movies like Rampage. Every scene has to be carefully considered so that the characters are coming off the right way. This character needs to be perceived as good. This one as greedy. This one as the “funny friend.” And if you deviate from that by writing a weird scene, the studio makes sure that scene is axed. Mad Bad and Dangerous, for better or worse, is one long string of stepping on open pizza boxes.
Not to mention the main character is so savage that even if you hate her, you always want to know what she’s going to say next. Here’s a conversation with Alvie’s roommate, Gary, who’s had it with her. “Did you put that hole in the ceiling? I don’t actually care. We’d like you to move out. Tomorrow. So…good luck in your- (he gestures to Mr. Dick) -endeavors.” “Did you say tomorrow?” “It’s not personal. No, it is.” “You’re hideous and you smell like white wine vomit.” “You look like a gang-raped fox.” “Get out of my room, dickcheese. It’s mine for one more night.” “Leave your keys in the kitchen.” “I’ll leave them up your arsehole.”
So if you want to write a script that shows off your voice, the best way to do it is to create a hero who’s your evil alter-ego, the one who thinks all those awful things but never says them. Your script is an opportunity to create a character who finally says all that stuff. And while half the people reading that will absolutely hate your hero, the other half will love him.
The only downside to a script like this is that it’s hard to make movies work that are built entirely around negativity. Our main character is evil. Her sister is evil. Her husband is evil. The sexy handyman is sort of nice but still has sex with Beth behind her husband’s back so he’s evil. When everybody has an angle, there’s no one to latch onto and root for. And screenplays can be empty experiences when you go this route. You enjoy everything in the moment. But afterwards you feel empty.
With that said, this writer has talent. She definitely has strong dialogue skills. She takes chances. Every once in awhile the main character will start singing or belting out a haiku. Which is bizarre, but it works in a weird way.
Now she has to work on the basics. How to structure a screenplay. How to focus a narrative. How to edit out stuff that doesn’t matter. This script becomes twice as good with a more streamlined narrative. But hey, these things will come with practice. The voice is strong enough to hold her up in the meantime.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[x] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: If your script is too long, you need to cut it down. Start by cutting scenes that aren’t absolutely necessary. To do this, ask yourself, “If this scene was taken out of the movie, would the movie still make sense?” If the answer to that question is “No,” then keep the scene. If it’s “Yes,” get rid of the scene. For example, when Alvie travels to Italy, we get an entire scene where she’s at the airport and has to go through security. And there’s the old vibrator-that-goes-off-in-the-bag joke which is sort of funny, I guess. But the point is we don’t need it for this movie to make sense. You just cut to Alvie arriving in Italy. This is what movies were built for: cutting out the unimportant stuff. Make sure you’re doing that.
Genre: Drama/Supernatural (TV Pilot)
Premise: Working on a top secret project to eliminate sickness and aging, the US Defense Department inadvertently creates vampires.
About: Today’s novel, “The Passage,” was adapted into a pilot by Liz Heldens, whose paid her writing dues by working as a staff writer for over a decade. She’s also created a couple of shows that didn’t make it to a second season, “Camp,” and “Deception.” Don’t let that fool you. Creating a show that stays on the air is the chupacabra of this business. It’s so hard to do, especially when you’re writing for a network. They’ll execute a top-rated show if they think it’ll help lunch get there faster. Stephen King called The Passage books “a trilogy that will stand as one of the great achievements in American fantasy fiction.” The pilot debuts this fall on Fox.
Writer: Liz Heldens (based on The Passage trilogy by Justin Cronin)
Details: 49 pages – Shooting draft
I looked at the title page of The Passage and saw a list of drafts off to the side (Production Draft, Blue Draft, Pink Pages, Green Pages, Goldenrod Pages, 2nd Blue Pages, Reshoot Pages, Revised Reshoot Pages). And let’s not forget however many drafts were written before the production draft.
Heldens probably needed a second computer just for all the notes she received on this project. I bring that up because yesterday I reviewed a movie from Netflix, How it Ends, whose notoriously hands-off approach led to zero notes.
Which begs the age old question about development: Is studio interference good or bad?
We love hearing quotes from directors of successful films such as: “We were so small they just left us alone.” The implication being that execs and producers are the real problem. If they’d just leave us artists alone, we’d all be painting the Mona Lisa.
But then how do you explain movies like How it Ends? If they had someone looking at those dreadfully boring dailies, they might’ve been able to come in actually save that film. Or at last try.
On the flip side of this you get network TV pilots like today’s, which are notes’d to death. Which is better? I don’t know. But maybe today’s pilot may get us a little closer to the answer.
Dr. Jonas Lear is with a team in the jungles of Bolivia searching for a legend – the 250 year old man. When he finds him, the man turns out to be a monster, leaping onto fellow doctor Tim Fanning and biting into his neck. Fanning survives, and after they take him to the hospital, he’s miraculously healed.
Cut to three years later and we’ve got Project Noah, a secret military operation where they take murderers on death row and experiment on them with medicine created from the blood of Fanning. Oh, Fanning’s still around, by the way. He’s being held in a cell due to the fact that he’s NOW A VAMPIRE MONSTER.
Running the lab is Major Nichole Sykes. When a Chinese outbreak of avian flu threatens to wipe out 15% of the world’s population, Sykes has to make a tough choice about Project Noah – which has the potential to save those 15%. Her scientists believe that the only way to come up with medicine that doesn’t turn its hosts into monsters, is to experiment on a child.
So Sykes finds a 10 year old orphan, Amy, and orders local agent Brad Wolgast to pick her up. Agent Wolgast, who lost his own daughter a few years ago, takes a liking to Amy. Sensing that a life in their lab will lead to years of pain, he decides to kidnap her and make a run for it. It doesn’t take long for the government to find out. And when they do, they put their entire might behind finding Wolgast and retrieving that girl.
Let me preface this by saying I haven’t read this novel. So I don’t know if this problem is addressed in it. But how is it that the story is built around retrieving a girl who has no special value whatsoever? She doesn’t have superpowers. She can’t see the future. She’s not injected with the virus. Her power is that she’s an orphan.
I think they’re implying that Amy could expose their secret and that’s why they have to find her. But she doesn’t know their secret. She doesn’t know anything about the experiments at this point. And, for that matter, neither does Wolgast. He’s making a guess that bad stuff happens in the lab but he’s never been there himself.
So half this show is about running after a girl who holds no special value at all? That’s strange.
Especially when you consider that they have a fun idea back at the lab. You have these weird variations on vampires that could escape at any second and then wreak havoc on the world. Vampires as far as the eye can see. Why not just stick with that?
I suspect this has to do with the A, B and C storyline TV formula. You have your A story, the Noah Project. The B story becomes finding the girl. And the C story is something else. I understand wanting to stick with this formula. TV is built with more characters, more plotlines, and therefore more jumping around. But you shouldn’t create storylines to meet quotas if they don’t work. No B story is better than a bad B story, right?
More concerning is how written everything feels here. Things were happening because the writer needed them to, not because they would really happen. Take, for example, the fact that Wolgast and his partner, Doyle, spot a carnival on the side of the road after picking up Amy for a military transfer. Amy points out the ferris wheel and, out of nowhere, Wolgast says, let’s stop there! So the three of them just stop at a carnival for an hour.
This makes zero sense. No professional agent on a mission for the government would do this. Especially since Wolgast hadn’t connected with Amy yet. It’s the writer making something happen so that Wolgast and Amy can become closer. I don’t know why so many writers continue to make this mistake. All you have to do to stop it is ask yourself, “Would it really happen this way?” If it wouldn’t, it means you’re cheating. Which means you need to move things around – do the hard work that most writers don’t want to do – to make the decision believable.
I would place The Passage at the other end of the development spectrum from How it Ends. It feels over-managed. Which is too bad because somewhere at the core of this show is a cool idea. If they got rid of this girl and focused on the vampires, they could have something.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Sometimes you have to be on the nose in TV writing. When Wolgast calls his ex-wife during the kidnapping, they must speak covertly, as there’s an agent in the room with her. Here’s how that’s described:
“Their voices are low and there’s an intimacy to the coded conversation that’s almost sexy. Despite everything, Wolgast gives a small smile for his cool-under-pressure Lila — despite everything, he is overcome with longing for her.”
This is VERY on-the-nose. I wouldn’t recommend ever writing a line like it in a spec. If you’re doing your job, the reader should be able to pick up on this themselves. However, when you’re dealing with multiple executives, as well as directors and other creatives, I’ve learned that sometimes a writer has to go against their instincts and be VERY ON THE NOSE about certain beats to make sure the direction is understood. You don’t have to worry about this as an amateur. But when you get into the game, you’ll sometimes have to write lines like this, unfortunately.
Today I take a look at one of my Top 25! scripts and how it translated to the Netflix screen.
Genre: Action/Thriller
Premise: (from IMDB) When a mysterious disaster turns the country into a war zone, a young lawyer heads west with his future father-in-law to find his pregnant fiancée.
About: How It Ends shot into my Top 25 back in 2011. Since then, it’s gone through many “almosts” in getting made. It took the determination of the Netflix machine to change the project’s fortunes. The film debuted this weekend on the streamer. It stars Theo James (The Hunger Games) and Forest Whitaker. It was directed by David Rosenthal, whose previous credits include The Perfect Guy and A Single Shot. Brooks McLaren was an unknown writer when his script made The Black List back in 2011. He’s currently working on the “Rambo: New Blood” script.
Writer: Brooks McLaren
Details: 113 minutes
Some of you may remember this script from a looooong time ago. I read it and instantly fell in love with it, enough to clear room in my Top 25. Finally, after seven long years, the movie’s been made. And thank goodness for Netflix. I have no doubt How it Ends wouldn’t have seen the light of day without the service.
I may have issues with Netflix. But you have to love the fact that they’ve single-handedly brought back the mid-budget film. They don’t make these movies for theaters anymore. Especially if they don’t have a marketable genre component to them – like zombies. Every time I dog Netflix, I have to remind myself of that.
For those who don’t remember, How it Ends is about a lawyer, Will Younger, who’s on a business trip in Chicago, talking with his fiancé back in Seattle on Skype, when all of a sudden a loud banging noise occurs off-screen. Scared, his fiancé says she needs to check it out and then – FWIP – the feed cuts out. And it’s not just the Skype feed. All feeds from the West Coast cut out. Nobody knows what’s going on over there.
It just so happens that Will’s fiancé’s dad, Tom, lives in Chicago. Will’s been avoiding Tom because Tom doesn’t like him. But he has to see him now. As the West Coast situation worsens, Tom and Will decide to drive to California to get to the fiancé. Along the way, their car breaks down near a Native American reservation, and they’re forced to ask for help from a young Native American woman, who ends up coming with them. However, the closer they get to the coast, the more chaotic the world gets. Will they be able to overcome these odds and get to Seattle in time???
Before I get into the script stuff, I’m going to say some things that are going to make it sound like I’m making excuses for a script that some people thought was never that good in the first place. And I’m okay with that. Because I know I’m right. :)
Never has it been so apparent how much a movie suffers when it doesn’t have a good director. This film was terribly directed. For starters, the cinematography was awful. Every shot had the background blown out and the actor’s faces in darkness, making it impossible for me to see basic things like facial expressions.
But the silent killer was the sound design. The entire movie was done through ADR. ADR (additional dialogue recording) can work as a patch. The problem with doing it the whole movie is that nobody sounds real. The voices are too smooth, too calm. And the reason they’re too smooth and too calm is because the actors are in a quiet comfortable booth recording their lines. In addition to there being a disconnect between the true performance and the more relaxed audio performance, the audio quality is too slick and too clean to not draw attention to itself.
I can’t convey enough how much this pulled me out of the movie. It was like watching one long lip-sync.
There were other problems with the direction as well, such as the fact that the night-time car scenes looked like they were shot on an iphone with a 3-point Lowell lighting kit from BP Photo. And I get it. This movie doesn’t have a huge budget. But part of your job as a director is to make stuff look better than the budget you’ve been given. Can you imagine what Coralie Fargeat would’ve done with a movie like this? Her film looked amazing and it was shot for a lot less than this one.
I read How it Ends at a time when I was in full GSU mode (Goal, stakes, urgency). It was one of the best embodiments of the formula I’d read up to that point. We’ve got a clear goal – get to the fiancé. Clear stakes – if we don’t, she dies. Clear urgency – Every passing moment society is falling more and more apart.
On top of that, we have a turbo-boost to the GSU formula: a giant mystery at the center of the film. What’s happened that’s causing all of this? Even if you’re not totally invested in the pursuit itself, you can’t help but wonder what’s going on.
On top of THIS, you’ve got a central character pairing that’s packed with conflict – the dad who doesn’t think the fiancé is good enough for his daughter. When you’re sending a character out on a long journey, you need a way to build drama into each scene. Stuffing two characters who don’t see eye-to-eye into a tight space for two hours is guaranteed drama.
All of these things were in the script yet I felt none of them onscreen.
Why?
That’s hard to figure out. I’d begin with the situation itself. In the script, the implosion of society and threat of an unseen menace was way more intense. Whereas in the script, things were ramped up to a 9. In the film, they were around a 5 or a 6. Wherever they went, things seemed calm. There weren’t a lot of crazies running around. You were convinced they could handle any problem.
For example, there were two major roadblocks early in the film. And they were able to get through simply by asking. In screenplays, you gotta make everything tough for your hero. Especially in a movie like this, where the world is falling apart. This idea is built for making things tough.
Then, later, in the one roadblock scene that wasn’t easy – a bridge they needed to cross – they turned it into this really cheesy Karate Kid scene with a couple of guys on dirt bikes who chased after our heroes. You gotta WIN each scene as a filmmaker. And in three of the biggest scenes, they lost.
Then there were little problems that added up. Such as the fact this entire icy relationship between the father and the fiancé-in-law is built on the idea that the son isn’t good enough for his daughter. Yet the son was a) strong and chiseled out of stone, an ideal protector, b) smart, c) presentable, and d) had a good job. This is the kind of man any normal father would be ecstatic his daughter was marrying. Yet we happened to have the one dad who didn’t like him.
Why is this an issue? Because when there’s a disconnect between what the audience is seeing and what the father is seeing, it feels like the only reason the father is acting that way is because the writer needs him to to act that way for his story to work. They could’ve solved this by casting someone who looked more like the kind of person a father didn’t think deserved his daughter. A Shia LaBeouf type, for example. Untamed, rough around the edges, a wild card.
And there were these tonal missteps. At one point, the group gets to an abandoned water park and the Native American girl jumps out of the car with a giant smile on her face and leaps into the pool, laughing excitedly at the chance to cool off. It was supposed to be the scene equivalent of a drink. Something to take the edge off after a long day.
Except that in every scene up to that point, Native American Girl had been the most dire, sad, miserable, human being in the world. The act disobeyed the very essence of her character make-up. You can’t just change who people are to fit a scene. You have to stay consistent. And the irony is, the movie could’ve used a sense of humor. It would’ve been smart to have more scenes where the characters were laughing so as to break up the enormously intense heaviness that permeated the movie.
I always try to remind writers that. The reader can’t appreciate the bitter unless they get the sweet. And vice versa. You can’t go crazy of course. You shouldn’t be putting Anchorman scenes in a movie like this. But you need the occasional bright spot if only to jolt the reader out of their malaise.
I’m not sure how to categorize this one. It’s on Netflix so it won’t cost you any money. So is it worth a free watch? I suppose it is if you’re doing background watching. But if you’re setting aside time just to watch a movie, you’ll probably be bored.
[ ] What the hell did I just watch?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth your time on Netflix
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: As much as it pains me to say this, movies like this struggle to get made because they don’t have a clear monstrous presence that can be marketed. In other words, there are no aliens. There are no zombies. There are no monsters. When audiences see trailers like this, it’s confusing for them. Because they ask, “Where’s the threat?” The threat, of course, is us (humanity). But people who just want to watch a fun movie don’t see it that way. They see a hole that hasn’t been filled. Anyone who watched this probably left saying, “That’s it?” The reason is the lack of that marketable element.
