I want to remind everybody who pitches their script for Amateur Offerings: DO NOT MENTION THAT YOUR SCRIPT IS OLD! I came across four entries that touted the fact that the script was “an old project of mine,” and “something I’ve been working on for a decade.” No. No no no no no no. That may be true. But don’t tell me that. Don’t tell ANYBODY that. People in Hollywood want THE NEXT BIG SHINY THING. They don’t want the old dusty thing. If you have a problem lying, then just don’t mention the age of the script at all. Present it as is. Come on, you guys should know this by now.
For those of you looking for an update on The Janitor (the last AO script winner, which blew me away), I’ve started sending it out to people. I’ll keep you updated on what happens along the way. Hopefully we’ll have some good news. And I would love for nothing more than to keep the good vibes going. So let’s find another impressive amateur screenwriter!
If you haven’t played Amateur Offerings before, pay close attention! Read as many of this weekend’s scripts as you can and VOTE for your favorite in the comments section. Voting closes on Sunday night, 11:59pm Pacific Time. Winner gets a review next Friday. — If you’d like to submit your own script to compete in Amateur Offerings, send a PDF of your script to carsonreeves3@gmail.com with the title, genre, logline, and why you think your script should get a shot.
Good luck everyone!
Title: Skin
Genre: Sci-Fi, Drama
Logline: Facing pressure from a controversial tech mogul and protests from angry students, an android with dark skin struggles to form a social identity while attending a historically black university.
Why You Should Read: Hey Carson. Have a new script that I plan to submit to competitions but I wanted to get some feedback from the toughest and brightest before going forward. Simplest way to describe my script would be “Dear White People” meets “Ex Machina.” I’m a huge fan of Spike Lee, racial satire and sci-fi with a social commentary and wanted to create a story that reflected all those influences. I also actively wanted to avoid the clichéd comedy-sketch type moments that one might expect from a film with this premise. And the moments of levity in the script are used primarily to enhance the characters. It’s a quick, easy read but it’s also challenging and thought-provoking. Thanks for the opportunity and I hope you enjoy.
Title: OUT OF DEATH
Genre: Thriller
Logline: An innocent prisoner and a compromised federal agent flee from two crooked local cops through the deep woods of Pennsylvania after an attempted frame job goes wrong.
Why you should read: The attached script is a low-budget contained thriller that’s received some great reviews on the Black List website. I’m a huge fan of Richard Wenk and his script for 16 Blocks and The Equalizer. I’ve tried to emulate some of that work here. It’s a fast-paced, sparsely written script, which centers around a female protagonist (ends up being a girl with a gun). I just read Blonde Ambition, which inspired the hell out of me to take some chances to get my stuff out there whenever I can (damn, if Madonna isn’t my own personal hero now). I appreciate your consideration.
Title: Black & White
Genre: TV Pilot – Crime drama
Logline: An outsider becomes the first black police officer in a small Louisiana town in the 1960s and has to navigate he and his family through the growing tensions of being pushed out by both blacks and whites, while tensions also mount because of the Vietnam War and the Civil Rights Movement.
Why You Should Read: I just optioned two scripts, one being the western that was reviewed on this site, and an action movie I wrote quite a while ago that I almost gave up on, both being directed by Chuck Russell who is a director I feel extremely lucky to have on board.
About this script: This is a story and subject I really wanted to tell. I was looking for something period that was relevant to today. I was originally going to write (and I still may) a Downton Abbey of the south, taking place during, or right before, the civil war. During my research I found a true story (in which this is based on) that tickled something inside me that said, “you need to tell this story!” So this is my take. — The first draft of this script made the top 1% of the Script Pipeline contest, though it didn’t make the top ten (super sad by the way!). They said that it was because they thought the subject matter would be a hard sell, though others don’t think that, so who knows. — Billy Ray also just read it and really liked it and we have a lunch set up in a couple weeks to discuss it. This is the draft that Billy read. I was going to make the change(s) he suggested, but decided to wait until he and I meet. I’m curious if the same note(s) comes up. I of course want to make this as good as I can. I want to know if it’s something people like and if it’s something they would keep watching. I’m a little nervous, but thanks for taking a look! — And I also need to say something – even if you don’t have a manager or an agent (of which I don’t have either at the moment) that it is still possible to get your stuff out there, and like me, possibly made. So don’t sit around and wait for an agent or manager to come around, make your own contacts, do your own work, get it out there, and get anybody who is anybody to read it… just please please PLEASE make sure it’s ready before you send it out!! lol Thanks guys! Hope you like it!
Title: A Killer Musical
Genre: Musical Horror Comedy
Logline: In 1985, an eager teen in search of an exciting summer signs up to work at a musical summer camp where counselors are stalked and murdered by an unknown assailant.
Why You Should Read: A Killer Musical is three things: a musical, a slasher movie, and a comedy, in that order. I wanted to have legitimate song and dance numbers to go along with the jump scares and brutal murders of a slasher film, all while keeping the humor from moving into Scary Movie territory where the characters behave as if they are aware that they are in a horror film. — This script is for everyone that has watched Friday the 13th and said to themselves, “Why aren’t there any song and dance numbers in this camp counselor murder romp?” — I’ve only been lurking Scriptshadow’s AOW for a short while and I haven’t seen a musical yet. Perhaps it’s time?
Title: Don’t Do It
Genre: Horror
Logline: Having exhausted all medical avenues to bring his wife out of her two year coma, a desperate husband opts for an illegal solution that will wake her up but with terrifying consequences.
Why You Should Read: We’re told that if we want the best odds of breaking in then it’s with a low budget horror script and so that’s the avenue I have been pursuing since the start of the year. With a small cast, very few locations, and a simple horror concept this is me playing the odds. The idea for this story began while reading about the sad case of Michael Schumacher, the millionaire racing car champion who is now cared for at home after a skiing accident left him in a coma several years ago. I thought about what his house must look like – the medical staff, the machines, and his poor family praying for him to wake up. This gave me the idea for Don’t Do It. . How far would you go to wake up the person you love?
A hot topic after yesterday’s review was how the script was driven by “ex special forces” characters. I read a variety of comments that said something akin to, “Whenever I see “ex” anything in the logline, I’m out.” The consensus was that this was a lazy cliche writing choice that demonstrated an utter lack of imagination. To this I say, “I feel ya.” You can probably find some early reviews on the site with me railing against this very issue. But in time, I’ve come to change my mind. And I want to explain why.
The number one reason you want to use an ex-special forces, or ex-detective, or even active versions of these characters in your screenplay, is that it makes your script a hundred times more marketable. There is no genre Hollywood knows how to market better than “guy with a gun.”
I’ll never forget when this clicked for me. I was reading an interview with Joel Silver, who had talked to Robert Downey Jr., and Downey Jr. was lamenting the fact that he couldn’t break into the larger blockbuster scene. Silver said, as if obviously, “Well yeah, it’s because you’ve never had a gun in your hand in a movie.” In the next movie (“Kiss Kiss Bang Bang”), Downey Jr. strapped up, and it wouldn’t be long before he became one of the biggest movie stars in the world.
You could make the same case for Liam Neeson. Neeson has had a great career. But he didn’t become a household name until his ex special forces character with a particular set of skills, Bryan Mills, flew to France to save his daughter.
I can already hear you saying, “But isn’t it much more original and interesting if the hero DOESN’T possess a particular set of skills?” Not only does he become a bigger underdog, but if he’s not proficient with a gun, he has to use his wits and creativity to get out of situations. That’s so much more interesting than “bam bam, you’re dead.”
There’s some truth to this statement but here’s the thing. You’re limited in how extreme of a situation you can place a character in if they don’t possess the skills to survive that situation. Take John Wick. If John Wick is just a normal guy, he’s dead by the 20 minute mark. You can’t go up against a trained Russian syndicate if you’re a nobody who’s never pulled a trigger before. Any version of that story that has our untrained hero defeating the Russian syndicate is a bold-faced manipulation. And that’s the real issue here. The less skilled your hero is, the less skilled the opposition must be for it to be believable, and, by association, the smaller and less marketable your movie becomes.
The exemption to this rule is the “run away” narrative. You used to see this a lot in conspiracy thrillers like Enemy of the State. Because the “normal everyday guy” didn’t have the skills to go toe-to-toe with his government trained pursuers, he would run away. And the whole movie, then, would become running. As exciting as some of these films have been, a situation where a character runs away is never as compelling as a situation where a character stands his ground. And you can’t stand your ground if you don’t know how. Remember, guys, you’re going up against SUPER HEROES these days. The coolest and most badass characters cinema has ever seen. The ONLY type of character who can compete against this at the box office is a REAL LIFE SUPERHERO – James Bond and Ethan Hunt and ex special forces dudes such as our heroes in Triple Frontier.
So the question you should be asking isn’t, “How can I have my plumber protagonist believably defeat the Chinese mafia?” It should be, “How can I make an age-old character trope interesting, different, fresh, or all of the above?”
Levres offered up the first answer to this, which is that you can camouflage the cliche-ness of your hero’s background if you place them in a fresh situation. In other words, if you place a bunch of ex navy seals on a mission in Iraq to kill a terrorist, we’re not going to be excited about that. It’s too familiar. But a bunch of ex navy seals being forced to save a high-profile politician who’s been taken hostage with his family by a terrorist inside Disney World? That feels different. It’s a key reason why Triple Frontier worked. The unique locale helped offset the ex-special forces cliche.
But the secret sauce in winning this war is in the character construction. If you write a good character, it doesn’t matter what job they have. It doesn’t matter if they’re the most cliche archetype there is. If you can make them likable, if you can make them relatable, if you can provide them with depth, if you can give them personality, if you can give them a flaw they’re battling, we’re not going to be thinking about their jobs. We’re going to be thinking about them.
So if you’re one of these writers who’s writing an ex-Navy SEAL, your first order of business is to construct a character we like, and look for ways to make them different. Because what critics are really saying when they say, “I hate ex-Special Forces characters,” is “I hate generic ex-Special Forces characters.” One of the best scripts I’ve ever read, The Equalizer, had ex-agent Robert McCall helping an overweight co-worker eat properly so he could pass a fitness test in order to make security guard. Later, we find McCall reading The Old Man and the Sea (he’s attempting to read all 50 books from the “The 50 Books You Must Read Before You Die” list) in a diner. This guy’s a little different. This ensures that we don’t think about the cliche nature of his former job.
Finally, if you’re writing “cliche” main characters like ex-NAVY SEALS, take some chances with your narrative. The idea here is if you’re going to play it safe in one area, you need to take chances in other areas. Because you can’t completely avoid cliche in a movie. It’s impossible. But you can minimize it. I brought this up with Triple Frontier yesterday. I loved how after they rob the house, the final 50 pages cover the logistical nightmare of trying to transfer 600 million dollars out of Paraguay. I’d never seen that before. If you can make narrative choices that give us things we’ve never seen before, they’re going to cancel out the things we have.
Now I’m not saying there’s no way to write a movie where an average guy defeats an organization of trained men. The Matrix figured out a way to do it. But if you can’t find that elusive Matrix-like idea, it’s still possible to write a good movie with cliche FBI agents or cliche ex-special forces agents. Just put them in a new situation, give us characters we care about, and take some chances with the narrative. You’ll be good. :)
Is it possible? Is it happening? Have we achieved the rare DOUBLE IMPRESSIVE Scriptshadow Week? Read on to find out!
Genre: Crime/Action
Premise: A group of ex-special forces come together to steal 90 million dollars from a drug lord in the most criminally potent area of the world, the Triple Frontier.
About: Triple Frontier is one of those projects that’s been impossible to get made. It’s had more starts and stops than my neighbor’s 1999 Volkswagon Jetta. But no matter how much talent has come and gone, the project has always been able to replace them with either equal or better talent. That’s typically the sign of great material. That’s because when you have bad material and A-listers drop out, you never get any A-listers back. Your project is doomed to second-tier status. Well, all that waiting has paid off as the film is now in post-production. It stars Charlie Hunman, Oscar Isaac, and Ben Affleck. J.C. Chandor (Margin Call, A Most Violent Year) directed. Mark Boal (The Hurt Locker, Zero Dark Thirty) wrote the script.
Writer: Mark Boal
Details: 136 pages
The heist is one of the most bankable structures in storytelling. Get a group of contrasting characters together (Act 1), give them something they want to steal (Act 3), then slowly build a plan for achieving their goal (Act 2). It’s almost full-proof. And yet, we don’t get a lot of good heist films. In fact, I can’t remember the last one I saw.
That’s because the heist film is one of the most difficult genres to come up with something fresh for. Most of the heist scripts I read involve stealing money from a bank. There just aren’t that many ways to make that premise original. So I was thrilled when I picked up Triple Frontier, which promised to be a new take on the heist genre. Let’s see if it succeeded.
Ex-Special Forces operator Pope has gotten tired of missions to remote parts of the world where he guides local police to take down giant drug dealers. It’s more death, more destruction, and he thought he left all that behind with the special forces. The problem is, a man needs to make a living. And these missions are the only thing Pope knows how to do that pay good money.
Then one day, a Brazilian drug runner discloses to Pope the location of one of the biggest drug runners in the world, Lorea. Lorea has a home in Paraguay right off the criminally infamous Triple Frontier (the nexus of Paraguay, Brazil, and Argentina), where he’s holding 90 million dollars. With Pope’s unique skillset, he believes he can break in the house and get that money. But he’s going to need some help.
Enter his ex special forces buddies: the all-American Redfly, the bipolar Ben, the wily old vet, Ironhead, and the cool-as-a-cucumber Catfish. Some of the men are reluctant and others reared up and ready to go. But in the end, because there wouldn’t be a movie unless they all signed up, they all sign up.
Once in the Triple Frontier, the group begins doing surveillance and planning. And when I say planning, I mean planning. Pope gets his hands on the blueprints for Lorea’s house and builds an EXACT REPLICA in the jungle so that they can practice the heist. But that’s only the beginning of this mission impossible, as they have to figure out shit like how five men can carry away 4500 pounds of money on foot, and how they can escape through a backyard that rings an alarm if anything over 20 pounds steps on it.
After extensively perfecting their plan, they wait out an unexpected rainstorm and sneak in. Everything goes according to plan until they arrive in the money room and… it’s gone. Not a single bill. Just as everyone starts freaking out, Pope notices that the ceiling is leaking. They moved the money during the storm so it wouldn’t get wet! But that means going through every room one by one to find it.
As you’d expect, this leads to them being spotted, and within seconds there are three dozen guards converging on them. The soldiers go into fuck-all mode and start shooting everyone. They know the gig is up. They know they should leave. But they’ve put so much effort into this that they must have that money. So after the money they go. Will they get it? I’m thinking they’ll find a way. But the real test may be what happens AFTER they get the money.
Uhhhh…
This. Was. Good.
Wow.
I’m talking really really good.
Where do I begin? Let’s start with the heist itself. What’s the number rule for writing a good heist film? It’s not what goes right, it’s what goes wrong. Your job, as a writer of a heist flick, is to have your criminals cover all the bases, make sure they’ve found contingencies for every situation, and then when they show up, something goes wrong. And that thing that goes wrong leads to several other things that go wrong. And quickly, the whole damn heist falls apart.
I LOVED when they arrived in the money room and the money wasn’t there. Even when my cynical screenwriting analyst brain kicked in and said, “Of course they were duped. That’s what always happens!” But then Pope looked up and saw the leaking and realized the money had been moved and I said, “oooooooh, that’s good.”
I loved how the script evolved from there. Because what I was expecting to happen is what always happened in these mid-point heist films (a script where the heist happens at the mid point instead of the third act): They get the money home but then the bad guys come and hunt them down.
Triple Frontier instead focuses on the complexity of getting this money out of the country. The special forces guys rent a helicopter, only to find out that the money (which has increased from 90 million to 600 million at this point) will be too heavy. But they decide to risk it anyway, and fly their copter through the endless South American mountain forest. When the mountains start getting too high, they have to make the unthinkable choice of dropping the money and living or keeping the money and likely spiraling into the most hostile terrain in the world.
That was one of the best scenes I’ve read this year, besting even the Mission Impossible Fallout helicopter chase. And I’ll tell you why. It wasn’t just a simple helicopter chase. Difficult choices needed to be made. They MIGHT have been able to make it through the mountains if they kept the money. But they likely wouldn’t have. How do you make that decision? The decision to throw away 600 million dollars?
But the script isn’t just the heist. Boal made the bold choice of using the entire first act to get the band back together. This is a controversial screenwriting choice because modern screenwriting outlets will tell you to move this section along as quickly as possible. A short burst of scenes that has the band back together and ready to go by page 10, page 15 at the latest. They’re afraid that if you include an entire opening act of characters reuniting and talking and establishing their jobs and lives, that the average audience member will get bored.
But the great thing that happens when you extend your character intros out that far is that we get to know the characters better. I mean, it’s simple math. The more time you spend with someone, fictional or real, the more you’re going to care about them. Therefore, when these guys flew off to the Triple Frontier, I felt like I knew each of them. The extra time really paid off.
Now there’s a caveat to this. You have to be good with character to pull it off. You have to know how to set up a flaw. You have to know how to make your characters unique. You have to give each character a defining personality that’s easy for the audience to understand so they can label him properly (Chris Kyle was the introspective sniper). Each character’s dialogue has to be unique and interesting. If character isn’t your strong suit, don’t spend an entire act getting the band back together.
The fact that this script has been sitting on the shelf for so long is insane. I’m guessing it’s because Ben Affleck has a million projects to do and he’s in rehab half the year and they had to wait for him. I’m just glad the wait is over. Cause this movie is going to be damn good.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[x] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Find a unique place in the world that isn’t well known and build a story around it. What makes Triple Frontier so good is that we’d never heard of the Triple Frontier before. It hasn’t been in any movie. It creates the all important “strange attractor” we can exploit for one hell of a heist film.
Genre: Comedy
Premise: A woman goes on a vacation with her much younger boyfriend’s family.
About: Melissa Stack is a lawyer turned screenwriter, which is funny when you think about it, since most parents of screenwriters wish their children would’ve become lawyers. In one of the most notorious Black List entries of all time, Stack’s breakthrough screenplay, “I Want To _____ Your Sister,” became a lightning rod for debate, with many calling the title desperate and gimmicky. The success inspired a slew of similarly titled scripts over the years, until the trend finally died out. While “Sister” still hasn’t been made (last I heard it had been moved from its Wall Street setting to college), Stack did get that all important major Hollywood credit with 2014’s The Other Woman. I say “all important” because after you get that credit is when you start getting PAAAAAAAA-IIIID. Family Vacation was purchased by Fox. And taking matters into her own hands, Stack will be making the script her directing debut.
Writer: Melissa Stack
Details: 120 pages
You may be looking at this genre and thinking, “Romantic Comedy? Did I just get transported back to 1991?” Ah yes, tis true. I’m reviewing a romantic comedy. But alas! Don’t be dismissive. Word on Sunset Boulevard is that after the success of Crazy Rich Asians and Set It Up on Netflix, that the romantic comedy is alive again. Granted, it’s not a living breathing bipedal animal. It’s a tiny organism floating helplessly in an endless sea. But the point is… it’s alive! It’s ALLLIIIVE!!!
Which means that if you’ve written a romantic comedy, maybe, just maybe, people will take a look at it. And that’s way better than the situation two years ago, where if you even mentioned the words “romantic” and “comedy” in a Hollywood office, you were branded on the forehand with the letters “RC” and never allowed to speak of screenwriting again. It’s a rough town, I tell you.
Mia is 39 years old, single, and loving life. Well, okay, she’s not “loving” loving life. There’s a romantic void there, a void she’s been filling with Ben, her hot younger (31) neighbor. If forced to define their relationship, Mia might call it friends with benefits and a side of feelings. But the relationship gets scheduled for an upgrade when Ben asks Mia to join him on his family vacation so he’s “not bored.”
Mia, not really sure what this means, accepts the invitation. She’s quickly introduced to Ben’s oversharing parents, former marine Gus, a man who proudly refuses to defecate during vacation, and Linda, who covertly drugs her husband with valium whenever she needs something from him. The four of them hop in the car and head to their destination – a giant ranch in Utah.
Once at the ranch, they meet up with Ben’s brother Sam and his “11 out of 10” wife, Heidi, as well as numerous other vacationers staying at the ranch. The group participates in a series of activities that include cliff diving and fishing, all while Mia and Ben attempt to stay sane. This isn’t easy, as is demonstrated by Gus having an accidental shit explosion during his cliff dive due to the excessive buildup from refusing to defecate, and then Mia ignorantly jumping in right after him.
Eventually, Mia starts to question why she’s on this trip and what she wants from a guy she never expected anything from more than sex. But when Ben starts throwing words like “marriage,” “babies,” and “love” around, Mia realizes that she’s not getting off this ranch without making a choice that will determine the rest of her life.
Family Vacation is an okay script with a couple of big weaknesses. The first is the hook. This is pitched as a woman going on an awkward family trip with her much younger boyfriend. That sounds like a fun movie to me. We typically see the reverse of this – older guy, younger girl – so by flipping that cliche on its head, this already had a fresh feel. The problem is, Ben isn’t that young. She’s 39 and he’s 31. Therefore, once they’re on the trip, there aren’t any situations to exploit their age difference. They’re all fully grown adults. This would’ve been funnier if Ben was 24 or 25 and the parents were only 50, ten years older than Mia. Now that would’ve been awkward.
The bigger issue, however, is the lack of conflict between Mia and the parents. If we go back to the blueprint for this type of comedy – Meet The Parents – you’ll notice that the reason that script works so well is because the main character, Greg Focker, was so desperately trying to win the approval of his fiancé’s father, Jack. But Jack hated him. That conflict and need to change Jack’s mind is what drove the whole film.
In Family Vacation, the parents like Mia immediately. So there’s zero conflict. Nobody to win over. As a result, there isn’t a lot of conflict to exploit. And let me be clear – conflict is the lifeblood of comedy. It’s where all the laughs come from. The pushing and the pulling, the disagreements, the back and forth. It’s hard to make things funny when everyone’s happy and agreeable. And when you don’t have conflict, you’re forced to come up with nonstop hijinx, like a dad shitting in a lake and our heroine jumping in afterwards. I’m not saying that isn’t funny. But you can’t sustain a hijinx-only approach for very long.
To the script’s credit, things get a little more interesting when Mia and Ben begin to struggle with what they want out of their relationship. The problem was this only highlighted the fact that neither character had a strong motivation to begin with. I never knew what Mia wanted out of this relationship and I didn’t know what Ben wanted either. Contrast this with Greg in Meet The Parents. The only thing in the world he wanted was Pam. Pam was his life. He was willing to die for her. Which is why winning over her father was so important to him. That’s the power of a strong motivation.
That’s not to say you can’t explore not knowing what you want in a script. I actually think indecision is a universal flaw that lots of people relate to. But if you’re going to do that, you need to make it clear, in big bold letters, that that’s your heroine’s fatal flaw. She’s always been indecisive. And once again, she’s being indecisive with this guy. That way, we understand what the endgame for the character is and can play along. Mia’s either going to learn to be decisive or she isn’t.
I’m going to make a wild guess here and assume that the writer, Melissa Stack, is basing this script on her own experience. It reads like someone did something and thought, “This could be a movie.” And it can. But when you’re writing about real-life experiences, you have to change things to make the story better. To me, the hook here is the girlfriend joining the much younger boyfriend on a family vacation. But you have to exaggerate that for a movie. So if Stack’s boyfriend was really 8 years younger, you shouldn’t be afraid to double that.
I like Stack’s writing. Her dialogue is fun. And sometimes her hijinx are funny (Heidi getting bit by a snake in the vagina and Mia being forced to suck the poison out was a highlight). But the lack of a genuine hook here combined with barely any conflict left this one feeling light.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Set your scenes up in a distractive environment. The opening scene of Family Vacation is Mia and her three best friends chatting. Stack could’ve placed this scene in a restaurant or a coffee shop. But she instead placed it at a kid’s birthday party. This allowed for kids to be running around, popping their head in, “I have to pee,” and generally giving the scene a more chaotic unpredictable feel. So if you’ve got a stale scene, consider placing it in a more distractive environment.
It’s a wonderful and rare day here on Scriptshadow. We get to celebrate one of the very few IMPRESSIVE amateur scripts I’ve read for the site. Grab your popcorn and notepad. This should be fun!
Genre: Crime/Drama
Logline: A mob rib breaker turned high school janitor seeks to redeem his violent past by preventing a young girl from making the same mistakes he did, but when drugs and gangs overrun her school, he must risk his cover to clean it up.
Why You Should Read: Writing is the reason I get up in the morning. I have been a Nicholl Fellowship quarterfinalist multiple times, a Page semi-finalist and was the 2016 winner of Screamfest with my screenplay “Plum Island”. My day job working with troubled youths allows a consistent reservoir of unique experiences that I draw upon when creating realistic and fleshed out characters. Why read? “The Janitor” perfectly portrays human complexities in a gritty urban setting and creates cinematic characters that are both mythic and believable.
Writer: Matthew Lee Blackburn
Details: 113 pages
If you’ve been away from Scriptshadow for a few days, you missed that Friday I read a killer amateur script. It’s so rare that we get a great amateur screenplay, I didn’t want to rush a review out. I wanted to take my time, think about the script, then do it justice. Hence why you’re getting the review today.
The biggest surprise about The Janitor is that I’d almost given up on it by page 10. The script started out in a clunky manner, and since past experience tells me these scripts don’t get better as they go on, my mind began powering down. I was still going to read the script. But I wasn’t going to be 100% present.
And then something magical happened. We did a little time jump, began a new storyline, and introduced some of the most realistic characters and situations I’ve encountered in a screenplay all year. Another reminder that it’s possible to turn any reader around, no matter how tired or distracted they are, if you write a great script! Let’s take a look!
Despite his boss’s assumptions, Marty isn’t about to rejoin the criminal life that put him behind bars in the first place. Therefore, when he gets out, the first thing he does is steal a chunk of his boss’s money, buys a new identity, and disappears into rural America, where he eventually finds a janitorial job at Redimere Days, a high school that’s been racked by gangs and drugs.
After living with her grandmother for years, 14 year old Juliet Lloyd’s been sent back to her junkie mom and abusive stepdad’s house, where every day is an assault obstacle course. Her only escape is the 7 hours a day she spends at Redimere High. But as a new student who doesn’t know anyone, even that’s a rough experience.
So it’s nice when one of the popular kids, 18 year-old drug-dealer Mickey Kerr, takes an active interest in her. It’s clear to us that Kerr’s a no-good piece of shit. But with no positive life references, Juliet ends up trusting him. That trust nearly gets her raped by Kerr’s friends at a party. So the next day at school, Juliet beats the shit out of him in front of everyone.
The event puts her in line to be expelled, a decision Ruth, Juliet’s teacher and lone champion, begs the principal to reconsider. A compromise is made. Juliet can remain at school if she does a work study with the understaffed janitor, our friend Marty. Marty, the only person at this school who wants to be left alone more than Juliet, resists, but in the end, both must accept the arrangement.
You wouldn’t think that Juliet would enjoy cleaning toilets, but Marty is so kind, so helpful, that he quickly becomes the only person on the planet she can trust. When Marty learns that Juliet is getting beat up at home, he drives over to her house and frightens her stepdad so bad he pisses himself. Just as it’s looking up for Juliet and Marty, Marty’s old criminal gang finds out where he’s run off to. They show up in town with a simple goal: make Marty pay for ever thinking he could steal their money.
I’m sure a lot of you are asking the question: Why did Carson respond so well to this script as opposed to mine? What is this writer doing that I’m not? One of the things I’m constantly looking for in a screenplay is authenticity. Does what’s happening on the page feel like it represents real life? Or is it a facsimile of real life, a writer’s attempt to conjure up a reality he knows nothing about? 9 times out of 10, it’s the latter. Most writers are throwing characters and sequences on the page that are carbon copies of their favorite movies. They’re not digging into their own lives and giving us their own reality.
What I loved so much about The Janitor is that it feels like real life. For example, in a lot of screenplays, when there’s a kid who’s getting abused, writers will play it safe. Wherever there’s an abusive parent, they’re countered with a protective parent. That’s a very “movie-like” thing to do. You’re considering how the audience is going to respond. You’re considering the resistance producers might have to a 14 year old girl getting abused so intensely. So you wrap things in a buffer, a Hollywood safety net that lets everyone know: “It’s okay, everybody. This is just a movie.”
The Janitor doesn’t do that. The step-dad is an abusive lunatic. But the mom is just as bad. She doesn’t give a shit about Juliet. She’s high all the time. She screams at her nonstop. If the stepdad is swinging the bat, the mom’s placing the ball on the Tee. It was that setup that let me know, this world isn’t “Hollywood safe.” This is the real world, where sometimes people are placed in terrible situations where there are no lifeboats.
And Matthew, the writer, never shies away from this reality. There’s a scene in the script where the dad and Juliet are in his car and he’s mad at her and he just mashes her face into the window. It’s raw and unfiltered and real. And that’s what makes it resonate. But normally, I’d see this scene played safe. The stepdad might verbally abuse her instead. Or the violence might be off-screen. And I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with those choices. But the reason The Janitor works where so many other scripts don’t, is that it’s never afraid to be real. It’s not trying to hide anything.
A great side effect of authenticity is that it does wonders for your dialogue. If you’re mining the reality of a situation as opposed to making it up, characters talk more like real people. They’re more passionate, thoughtful, raw, unfiltered, genuine. And the great thing is, is that a lot of this dialogue writes itself. Remember, you only struggle to come up with words for your characters if you’re trying to artificially force words into their mouths. If you just let them speak, they’ll speak truthfully.
In this scene where Juliet’s mom accuses her of stealing her pills, you’ll see that there are no flourishes to anything anybody’s saying. It’s just one person wanting something and another person resisting. And when you have that, there are no long discussions. It’s a series of brutal clipped statements.
And this scene represents just how unflinching this script is. Juliet is living in a hellhole and we’re never given a break from that. We experience things as she experiences them. She gets attacked at school and needs to regroup? Tough cookies. She comes home and has to deal with her meth-head mom.
Now if you’ve been reading my site for awhile, you know the effect this has on the audience. Readers will always root for characters who are being harmed or taken advantage of. For that reason, we fall in love with Juliet immediately. We want to see her get out of this mess. It’s the driving force for why we must read til the end. To see that she escapes this hell on earth.
One of the tougher challenges with a script like this is finding a way to frame the plot. This isn’t a traditional goal-driven story. Sure, Juliet has to complete her work-study with Marty in order to remain at school, but that’s hardly a plot worth building a script around. So Matthew does something really clever. He creates this looming confrontation. We know that those guys from the beginning are coming back. You don’t get to steal a bag of money from a crime boss and not have to deal with it. So the fact that we know Marty’s going to have to fight off those guys at some point provides the script with a stealthy plot frame.
Remember, as long as we feel like we’re moving towards something big in a story, we’re engaged. GSU may be the easiest model to use. But it’s not the only model out there. It can be argued that The Janitor’s plot is a series of looming confrontations.
Speaking of the opening, that’s the only thing here Matthew has to fix. I noticed a few of you mention he should ditch the opening. But without the opening, we don’t have that looming threat anymore. So the opening needs to stay. But it has to be simpler. The problem is that a man we have no reference for is speaking in voice over. Three characters are introduced quickly afterwards. Everyone’s referring to backstory that we don’t understand. It’s no wonder we’re confused.
In these cases, I always tell the writer: What are the key pieces of information you’re trying to convey? Focus on those things and strip away everything else. All we need to know is that Marty just got out of prison, he used to work for these guys, he wants out, and he sees a way out with the money. Build a scene around that and strip away all the confusion.
But outside of that, I thought this script was spectacular. One of the best amateur scripts I’ve ever read on this site. It bumped right up against my Top 25, almost squeezing in. It very well may get there in the future. I’m going to be talking to Matthew tomorrow and I hope to help him take the next step in his writing career because he deserves it with this script.
Script link: The Janitor
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[x] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: The earlier in the script you are, the more hand-holding you have to do. The Janitor’s only slip up is this opening, where four characters we don’t know and who have a complicated backstory, are thrown at us in the middle of a murder. Something this complicated can’t be rushed through. You need to slow down and hold our hand more, walk us through it so we know what’s going on.
What I learned 2: You don’t have to hold our hand if you simplify the situation in the first place. I just want you guys to know that the simplifying option is always out there. If you’re having trouble explaining an intricate situation to the audience, such as this one, the solution might be to strip out the extraneous elements in order to make everything easier to explain.
What I learned 3: It’s important to note the marketing angle to this idea. The crime aspect. Without it, this is a straight drama, and therefore way more difficult to market. The crime angle makes this a movie as opposed to a screenplay.
