Two years in the making, the definitive book on writing dialogue is finally here. You can buy the e-book RIGHT NOW over on Amazon. Those of you who receive my newsletter already know this (if you want to sign up, e-mail me at Carsonreeves1@gmail.com). The rest of you? What are you waiting for? It’s only $9.99, which gets you an unheard-of number of dialogue tips. A lot of these tips are things you can start applying immediately to improve your dialogue.
If you’ve already purchased a book, go write a review. Love it or hate it, it helps! I want to share all this knowledge I’ve accumulated with as many people as possible. So go get it!
One more announcement. This month is Tagline Showdown. Every month, I do a logline showdown. You send in your title, genre, and logline for your script. I post the best five loglines on the site. People on the site vote for their favorite. The winning logline gets a script review the following week.
This month we’re adding a twist! In addition to the usual information, you’re also going to send in your movie tagline. A movie tagline is the fun line they put on the poster. For example, The 40 Year Old Virgin tagline is, “The longer you wait, the harder it gets.” Army of Darkness: “Trapped in time. Surrounded by evil. Low on gas.” Memento: “Some memories are best forgotten.”
Start sending in those entries. Here are the details on how to submit!
What: Tagline Showdown
I need your: Title, Genre, Logline, and Movie Tagline
Competition Date: Friday, April 26th
Deadline: Thursday, April 25th, 10pm Pacific Time
Where: Send your submissions to carsonreeves3@gmail.com
Week 13 of the “2 Scripts in 2024” Challenge
Week 1 – Concept
Week 2 – Solidifying Your Concept
Week 3 – Building Your Characters
Week 4 – Outlining
Week 5 – The First 10 Pages
Week 6 – Inciting Incident
Week 7 – Turn Into 2nd Act
Week 8 – Fun and Games
Week 9 – Using Sequences to Tackle Your Second Act
Week 10 – The Midpoint
Week 11 – Chill Out or Ramp Up
Week 12 – Lead Up To the “Scene of Death”
As I was ramping up to write today’s screenplay lesson, I stumbled upon a recent quote from Jonathan Nolan, who’s going through the press tour in the leadup to his new Amazon show, “Fallout.”
Nolan is the writer-director who made HBO’s Westworld.
A big topic of discussion around town is the condensing of television writing jobs because there have been too many shows and nobody’s watching most of them. So they’re cutting down shows and that means less jobs.
So everyone’s trying to learn LESSONS from this “Peak TV” period that just passed. And here’s what Jonathan Nolan had to say about it: “If the lesson was to ease back on complexity or weirdness, I don’t want to learn that lesson.”
I can’t emphasize how angry this quote makes me. Because Jonathan clearly doesn’t understand the difference between complexity/weirdness and making weak creative choices. He thinks, as long as he’s not making the obvious choice, that’s “good.”
But that’s only the first half of the equation. The second half is the quality of the choice itself. The choice actually has to be strong enough to create good story threads! It can’t just be different for different’s sake. The reason Westworld became unwatchable was not because it was too complex or too weird for the average viewer.
People stopped watching that show because the writers, which included Nolan’s wife, repeatedly made weak creative choices that turned the narrative into a slog.
Every story has a “work/reward” ratio to it. As long as the rewards are bigger than the work, we’ll keep watching. But the second the work we have to do becomes bigger than the rewards? That’s when we say ‘seeya.’ Which is exactly what happened with that show.
And this is when it struck me that there’s really only one lesson in the entire screenwriting skillset that matters. There’s only one thing you have to do. What is that thing?
MAKE THEM CARE ABOUT WHAT HAPPENS NEXT.
That’s all that matters. The second the reader no longer cares about WHAT HAPPENS NEXT, they’re out. Whether they physically stop reading or mentally stop investing, they’re no longer interested in your story.
Therefore, every creative choice you make in screenwriting should revolve around that rule: “Does this make the reader care about what happens next?”
Cause if it does, THEY WILL WANT TO KEEP TURNING THE PAGES.
That’s what we want them to do, right? We want them to keep turning the pages.
I’m sorry for being rude but when you’re talking about nepotism, a strong argument can be made that Jonathan Nolan is the biggest beneficiary of nepotism in all of Hollywood. And if I’m wrong? Prove me wrong. Who’s gotten more from less talent out of their Hollywood family connection?
But let’s get back to this concept because I want this to be flashing in your head whenever you’re writing. Whether it be now, in pages 81-90, or any section of the screenplay.
Does what I’m writing make people want to find out what happens next?
Obviously, there’s subjectivity at play here. But you’re better at evaluating weak creative choices than you think. One of the most common things that happens when I do screenplay consultations is I’ll send the notes back to the writer and they’ll say to me, “I had a nagging feeling that this was a problem but I needed to hear it from someone else.”
You know. You always know when you make a weak choice.
What do I mean by weak choices? Well, let’s talk about a key choice that affects the end of a classic script, since that’s what we’re talking about today. Did you know that in the original Back to the Future script, the time machine was a stationary refrigerator in a junkyard?
In subsequent drafts, they turned it into a car.
I want you to think about those two creative choices for a second. Because each version leads to vastly different story endings.
In one, our characters have to run back to a junkyard. How interesting is that?
In another, they have to meticulously time a time machine on wheels to hit 88 miles per hour at the very second that a lightning strike occurs.
It’s the creative difference between night and day.
That’s what strong creative choices can do for your screenplay.
I was just talking to a screenwriter about this. Their ending was pretty good. But it didn’t push the envelope enough. The stakes didn’t feel big enough. The obstacles didn’t feel insurmountable enough. The goals felt sufficient but far from exciting.
The ending is where you have a chance to create MAGIC. You’ve been writing this entire story for this moment so don’t get careless here. This is where you have to land that triple axel. And it starts with writing creative choices that make your ending EXCITING and not just a copy of the endings you’ve seen before.
Cause when I look back at Back to the Future, I never saw an ending like that BEFORE. And I’ve never seen an ending like it SINCE.
All of this is to say that you’re trying to come up with bold exciting creative choices that MAKE US WANT TO SEE WHAT HAPPENS NEXT.
So what does happen next in pages 81-90, since those are the pages we’re on now? As we discussed last week, this is your MOMENT OF DEATH.
In a 110 page script, somewhere between pages 82-86, THERE MUST BE DEATH. I think Blake Snyder’s beat sheet calls this the Dark Night of the Soul? Whatever you call it, it’s got to be the second lowest moment in the character’s entire journey. The lowest moment will come just 15 pages later when they take on the bad guy and the bad guy seemingly defeats them. That will be their ACTUAL lowest point in the story.
But this one’s pretty darn close. The way you want to look at it is, this is the moment where the reader should feel like, “That’s it.” There are no other options. The hero has lost. This should be so convincing that EVEN THOUGH the reader knows there are 25 pages left, EVEN THOUGH seasoned moviegoers sense there are still 25 minutes left, you’re SO CONVINCING in this moment, that we truly think it’s over. If you can achieve that, you have NO IDEA how exciting your ending will be.
Because one of the secret tricks of screenwriting that makes readers feel something deep, is when you bring them ALL THE WAY DOWN and then you bring them ALL THE WAY BACK UP AGAIN.
I remember the moment I learned this lesson – although I didn’t understand it at the time. But when I first watched E.T. as a kid, and E.T. dies in that end of the second act moment… I don’t know if I’ve ever been more devastated in a theater. I was a wreck. So when they then brought him back to life??? That rush I got from going all the way from the depths of story misery to the peak of story euphoria – I wouldn’t be surprised if that feeling I had that day had something to do with me pursuing this art of storytelling. Because I wanted to learn how to make other people feel that way.
So figure out how to bring your hero down to his lowest low. It could be the death of a close family member or friend. It could be their own death. Or it could just feel like there are no other options left. I highlighted Life of Pi last week and that’s a good one. There’s this moment late in that movie where their sails are broken and they’re in the middle of the sea and they’re starving and they’re dehydrated and it’s clear that there’s no one who’s going to save them.
You kind of have to be a sadist in this moment. You have to be cruel to your heroes. To TRULY set the tone of how destitute they were, the writers of Life of Pi added a distant cargo ship. Their LAST HOPE. And they watch helplessly as it chugs on, never seeing them. Think about how hopeless you would feel after that moment.
That’s what you want to do to your heroes at the end of the second act. And that’s the same feeling you want the reader to have. That’s your pages 81-90 homework. :)
JUST TWO MORE WEEKS LEFT!
And then we move on to our rewrite strategy. :)
Genre: Horror
Premise: Monsters that roam in daylight keep a small, rural family confined to a nocturnal existence, but when their son starts to question the monsters’ existence, the entire balance of the family is thrown off.
About: This script finished on last year’s Black List with 8 votes. Screenwriter Nick Hurwitch is the winner of the Nate Wilson Joie de Vivre Award from the UCLA Professional Program and the Austin Film Festival Pitch Competition.
Writer: Nick Hurwitch
Details: 107 pages
Sometimes I think that coming up with movie ideas is the hardest thing to do in the world. Because there seems to be this balance you have to hit that’s so precise, even if you’re a millimeter off, the idea falls apart faster than a Jenga puzzle on a Roomba.
That balance includes coming up with a concept similar to what we’ve seen before. But also is JUST UNIQUE ENOUGH that it feels fresh. And the crazy thing is that you don’t always know if it’s hit that sweet spot until it’s released into theaters.
No movie encapsulates this better than M3GAN. Extremely familiar concept – Kid buys a spooky toy that’s possessed. Then all they did was turn the “possessed” element of the doll into AI. And the movie did gangbusters.
What throws everything off is that, every once in a while, a movie slips through that doesn’t do anything new, and then somehow does great at the box office. The John Wick script (for the original film) still perplexes me to this day. It’s about as basic a “guy with a gun” idea as you get. Those are the ones that keep me up at night.
Today’s script seems to bear some of this same DNA. Based on the logline, I feel like I’ve seen it before. Let’s hope that I’m wrong.
MAJOR SPOILERS BELOW
At the beginning of our movie, we see a farming family having lunch outside and a monster peering through the nearby cornstalks at them.
Cut to another farming family, who’s waking up just as night falls. The mother of this family is Lynne, a nice kind woman. The father is Gary, an intense type who just wants to get work done. And then there’s 16 year-old Caleb.
The family lives in a post-apocalyptic world where monsters roam the land during the day. Therefore, humans can only come out at night. Which frustrates Caleb to no end. Cause he never gets to experience daytime.
Lynne gets a whiff of Caleb’s growing frustration and starts taking him outside in the mornings, when Gary is asleep. Caleb loves these 10-15 minutes of daylight and his mood shifts. He works harder on the farm. He does better with his studies. He’s happier overall.
But then two things happen. Gary finds out Lynne and Caleb are doing this and is not happy at all. And Caleb becomes more and more interested in what’s out there in the sunlight. Finally, Jeanine sneaks Caleb down to the barn and reveals the truth to him (at the script’s midpoint).
She shows him a meteor that they built the barn over – a meteor that carried Caleb here from the stars. They weren’t saving Caleb from monsters. CALEB IS THE MONSTER. When he’s in sunlight for too long, he grows into a human-tree-like thing with superhuman abilities.
Confused about this new identity, Caleb escapes into the world, where he runs into humans. When those humans try to attack him, he has no option but to fight back. He ends up badly injuring a local man and now that man’s family wants revenge. And they know where the monster came from.
I went from meticulously analyzing the choices in the early part of this script to getting completely lost in it. That’s what a good script is SUPPOSED to do. It’s supposed to make you forget you’re reading a story, whether that’s someone like me, who reads for a living, or someone who reads for enjoyment. The goal is to get the reader to forget they’re reading.
This script did that for 53 pages. That’s when the twist arrived. And it was a good twist! I wasn’t expecting it.
But here’s the problem when you introduce a radical twist at your midpoint. Yes, you create a surge of excitement within your reader. But you also burn the bridge that brought you over into this half of the story. Cause nothing that happened before this twist matters anymore.
You’ve reset your story so you have to come up with a new engine. Now that we know Caleb is the monster, what is this story about? Hurwitch comes close to getting it right. But he makes a big mistake. He goes all in on the “Wacky Aunt” character.
This wacky Aunt/nurse thinks that Caleb was sent here to save the planet — re-plant it or whatever. We’re not interested in that. We’re more interested in the Frankenstein angle of this story. You’ve got this local group of rednecks, one of whom Monster Caleb nearly killed, determined to get revenge.
That alone would’ve been enough to power the second half (them trying to find where this monster lived and then attacking). But if you wanted to, you could’ve grown that group and added 50-100 townspeople and now you’ve got a mob chasing Monster Caleb. That’s all you need. That will give you your second half of the movie.
The Aunt Wackadoodle plot wasn’t script-destroying. But it just wasn’t the right creative choice. Which is one of many hard things about screenwriting. You have to make these crucial creative choices throughout the script and the closer you get to the ending, the more those choices matter. Cause if you don’t make the right ones, we start losing interest during the most critical part of the story. The ending is when you need us obsessively turning the pages, not curiously turning the pages.
I’m Mr. Big Midpiont.
Because what a good midpoint does is it makes the second half of the movie feel different from the first half. That’s exactly what Sundown does. It’s two completely different stories.
However, you can’t come up with a plot-changing midpoint like this unless you have a GREAT plan for the second half of the script. It can’t be one of those scenarios where you shrug your shoulders and say, “I’ll figure it out somehow.” No, you need a plan.
Because the first part of this script was really good. It’s powered by two big story engines. One, the question: Are the parents being truthful with Caleb? And two: Caleb’s conflict. Whenever our hero is stuck in a place they don’t want to be in, it creates this underlying tension that drives the narrative since we know that conflict needs to be resolved.
Once those two story engines are jettisoned by the midpoint, what are you replacing them with? An annoying Aunt who wants to use Caleb’s powers to save the world. I guess that’s technically a story engine because it’s a goal. But we have to care about the character with the goal in order to be interested in the pursuit of that goal.
Then you have this family that wants to kill Caleb. That’s a real story engine but it’s not pushed hard enough. It feels too casual.
But, with all that said, this script still has more good than bad. Hurwitch does a really nice job with the mystery aspect of the story. He integrates a lot of compelling flashbacks that add more fuel to the mystery. And he makes us think he’s going in one direction (the parents made the whole monsters thing up) to then using that against us, pulling the rug out from beneath our feet, and giving us this great reveal. That alone is worth a “worth the read.”
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[x] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Making gigantic thematic statements in your script (i.e. about race, about climate crisis, about the 1%) is not something you can do casually. You have to go all in and make your entire movie about that. You have to meticulously weave all of that stuff into every part of the story and characters. Because if you try to make some statement about the climate crisis in your script, it’s not going to affect us if it’s half-baked. This whole thing about the Aunt and him being half-plant — there wasn’t nearly enough there for us to understand the point that was being made. I bring this up because I see it quite a bit in scripts. Focus on telling a great story first. If you want to go that extra mile and make some grand statement about the world, that’s fine. But understand that it is going to be AN EXTRA MILE. It’s not going to be 8 or 9 feet. Which is the length of effort that most writers offer.
I’m out of it, guys. I’ve got no energy left. That book release added a good 60 hours to my work week last week. This is how out of it I am. For the last two days, I believed that Luca Guadagnino and Yorgos Lanthimos were the same director. Would’ve bet my life on it.
So I can’t do a review today. Instead, I’m just going to tell you what I’m thinking for as long as my fingers will type. Cause I wanted to get a post up. The first thing I want to talk about is American Fiction. It won the screenwriting Academy Award so I had to watch it and I must say, it was a tale of two movies. One great movie, one terrible movie.
Everything that had to do with the fake book and his fake persona was AWESOME. By the way, that isn’t easy to do in 2024. In the real world, people would sniff this out in a second. Social media will bust anybody lying. They somehow got around that issue by ignoring it. And it worked!
But you know what didn’t work? EVERYTHING ELSE. I’m going to spoil this for you so you’ve been warned. Our main character has a father who committed suicide by shooting himself in the head. He has a mother who has Alzheimer’s. He has a sister, who we spend several scenes with, who then DIES OF A HEART ATTACK. And he has a gay drug-addicted brother too.
I just talked about this in my dialogue book (not too exhausted to get that link up apparently!). Melodrama. Going with the extreme version of every choice. Could ONE family member just be a normal person… alive!? That aspect of the script was so bad I actually expected it to be some meta thing that was part of the satire which would be explained in the end. “This is how you write a bad script!” That was going to be the theme or something and they were going to point out all the melodramatic choices that were made during the script. But NOPE. They didn’t do that. That was genuinely what the writer chose. AND HE WON AN OSCAR FOR IT!?
Can we even trust Oscar anymore? That shiny gold faceless liar.
By the way, in the end, when Jeffrey Wright’s character comes to the producer to do the adaptation of the fake book, is he coming to him as the real author or as his fake persona author? They didn’t make that clear.
I want to know why Scarlett Johansson is going to be in a Jurassic World movie. I thought she was done makin dat money and was entering a part of her career where she was going to do whatever artsy roles she wanted. Jurassic World is for a brand new up-and-coming actor, like Chris Pratt when he first signed on. It’s not for people like Scarlett. Scarlett don’t need monay. Help me out here. What she doin?
As I alluded to yesterday, Happy Gilmore 2 is coming. This is arguably the greatest comedic character ever created. And I know these 20-year gap sequels always suck but can a guy just hope? Because the actor who plays Shooter McGavin revealed to the world that when he last saw Adam Sandler, Sandler pulled out the script for Happy Gilmore 2.
Now, when I first saw this story, I thought two things. I thought, “Okay, that doesn’t mean anything. Sandler is making a million movies.” Second, I thought Shooter was doing Adam dirty. Cause announcing movies like that is a gigantic deal. If you betray a star’s trust who gives you that information as a secret, you could be blacklisted.
That’s when it hit me. There’s no way he would’ve done that unless he had Sandler’s permission. And the more I thought about it, the more I realized, IT WAS ALL PLANNED. They came up with this idea together. Not that I care. Because it means the movie is really coming. But I didn’t like to have to do all those mental gymnastics to get there.
Anyone want to give the plot of Happy Gilmore 2 a shot in the comments. Pretty sure at least half of you can come up with a better idea than Sandler’s writers. Ooooh, dis. Why you gotta be so mean, Carson?
What else is going on? Godgilla vs. King Kong – which already came out two years ago – just came out again and made 80 million bucks. This goes to show you that all you really need in a screenplay is a giant monster. Cause they re-released a movie that just came out 2 years ago and nobody noticed! They all went back to the theater. That tells me that every screenplay now needs a giant monster.
Giant Monster Showdown 2024? Hmmmm…. me shall think about it.
Finally, the most important news in all of Hollywood right now. Shakira saw Barbie with her sons and they all found it emasculating. And you know how I respond to that? “Finally somebody said it!” Cause it’s true of course. I’m just glad that somebody had the cajones to say it. Thank you Shakira.
And thank you to all of you!
And good night.
Cause I’m exhausted.
This is a game-changing newsletter. There is a special link within the newsletter that will change your screenwriting lives. I’m not going to spoil it. But let’s just say whoever receives this newsletter has a gigantic advantage over any screenwriter who doesn’t receive this newsletter. That’s how valuable the info inside that link is.
I also review a hot new spec screenplay that just sold to Warner Brothers. It is of the coveted “high concept low concept” variety. If you don’t know what that means, don’t worry. I explain it in the newsletter. But the short of it is that it’s a narrow sliver of the spec market that not many people know about. It includes scripts like “The Menu” and can lead to a quick sale.
You know I have to break down that Acolyte trailer, which received an unheard of 500,000 dislikes. Methinks Kathleen Kennedy might want to reevaluate her approach to Star Wars. Maybe go back to what the original fans loved about it? Just a thought. I also take on a bunch of other trailers, including my FAVORITE TRAILER OF THE PAST YEAR. This one warmed my heart. We also got a couple of surprise trailers, with Yorgos and Emma Stone reteaming for a new movie. And Jerry Seinfeld came out of nowhere to release his Pop-Tart movie trailer.
It’s a wonderful newsletter. If you’re not already signed up for my newsletters, my only question is, “Why?” E-mail me at Carsonreeves1@gmail.com and I’ll send it over to you.
