Genre: Sci-Fi Adventure
Logline: After getting split up from the love of his life, a young and brash pilot joins a group of smugglers and attempts to pull off the heist of the century.
About: Maligned from the moment film started passing through the gate, the Solo Star Wars movie was on a Death Star sized collision with disaster. Now the stuff of legend, Kathleen Kennedy fired the original directors of the film, Phil Lord and Chris Miller, because they were so slow she didn’t believe they could finish the movie on time, then brought in journeyman director Ron Howard to shoot 70% of the film in 3 months. Sounds like a legit story to me! When you throw on a heaping of “Alden Ehrenreich can’t act,” or so the rumors went, it’s a miracle this movie actually made it to theaters. The Solo script was written by the man who understands the character the best, Empire Strikes Back writer Lawrence Kasdan, along with his son, Jon Kasdan, because why not.
Writers: Lawrence & Jon Kasdan (based on characters created by George Lucas)
Details: 2 hours and 15 minutes

There’s only one question to ask before diving into Solo.

Is it time to fire Kathleen Kennedy?

Between all the Star Wars productions she’s screwed up, the endless number of Star Wars side stories and trilogies she keeps randomly greenlighting, and stating that her proudest achievement is the movie that destroyed the most iconic movie hero of the past 50 years, I’d say it’s time to go.

However, I will say this.

She pulled a rabbit out of the hat on this one. Solo is a good movie. It’s not a great movie. But it’s a good movie.

The script follows a young Han Solo on his dirty grimy planet of Correlia, where he’s fallen in love with a beautiful young woman, Kira (it’s really “Qi’ra” but that’s super annoying to write so I’m going to go with Kira). The two plan to con their way onto a ship and fly away together, but get split up at the spaceport.

Han vows to make enough money to go back and retrieve Kira, and so when he meets a dodgy smuggler, Beckett, who’s got a high-paying job, Han is all in.

That job, a train robbery, doesn’t pan out. And Beckett reveals that the gig was actually his way to pay back big-time gangster Dryden Vos. Without the loot, Dryden will find and kill them.

Han’s got a plan. They’ll get the loot from another planet – the spice mines of Kessel – and pay him back that way. In a twist of fate, Kira now works for Dryden, who sends her along with Han and Beckett (and later, Lando Calrissian), to make sure they complete the job.

The first thing that comes to mind when evaluating Solo on a screenwriting level is stakes. They are way lower than any previous Star Wars movie. The only thing at stake is our characters’ lives and while your life is a big deal in the real world, the movie world is different. Movies are larger than life. That’s why we go to see them. So unless we’re watching the Sundance Grand Jury Prize runner-up, we tend to want more.

This definitely affects Solo because as the movie pushes towards its finale, it feels like it’s flatlining. And that’s because there isn’t a big giant “thing” to defeat.

[starts getting spoilery]

To the Kasdans’ credit, they realize this, and they go all in on a character-driven climax. The whole thing takes place in a room with five people. It turns out that Beckett double-crossed Han and maybe Kira did too. Han tries to talk his way out of it, and we continue to get a series of twists and turns until both Beckett and Voss are dead.

Now here’s the thing about this type of climax. It CAN work. But it only works if the characters are firing on all cylinders. Every character needs to be reaching the pivotal moment in their arc. Han, Kira, and Beckett all did a decent, if unspectacular, job. The problem was Dryden Voss. He just doesn’t stand out. He’s neither super scary or super unique or super interesting. He’s just sort of a guy.

Your villain represents the negative energy in your story. If that energy is in any way muted, your climax isn’t going to pop. Let me explain that in more detail because it’s important. For a climax to work, the negative energy must be stronger than the positive energy. The reason for this is that you need the audience to DOUBT that our hero will succeed. That’s what creates the rush of emotion when they win. Because they overcame something you didn’t think they would overcome.

I didn’t see anything in Dryden Voss that made me think he was smarter or more equipped than our good guys, so I never got that feeling. And that’s why, even though it was admirable that they made the climax character-driven, it didn’t work.

Moving on to this incarnation of Han Solo.

These writers had a near impossible assignment. They had to build a character towards the character we know at the beginning of Star Wars A New Hope, but they could only build him one-third of the way, since they were planning to do a Han Trilogy.

How do you build a character one-third of the way towards anything? It’s impossible. And it forces you to create this muted dialed-down character arc. Which, in turn, creates a muted dialed-down character. I’m not even sure what Han’s flaw was in this movie. I think they were trying to make him trusting and naive, and this journey was supposed to teach him that you can’t think that way. But again, you should still kinda think this way because we still got two movies to go?

The character remains fun, and his charm masks some of what’s missing underneath. But the lack of a definitive belief system in Han makes him wishy-washy, and therefore he’s hit or miss.

The plotting has a similar quality. They opt to do a “two-goal” approach to the narrative. The first goal is to steal energy cells from a train. Once that fails, it’s to get energy from the planet Kessel. I have no problems with this approach. I actually think it’s good. If the whole movie focused on one goal – Kessel – it’ll be stretched too thin. With two goals, each goal moves on a tight timeline.

Clearly, they were hoping to make the Kessel Run the star of the movie. That’s the big action-packed sequence.

Unfortunately, they botch it.

The mission they set up, while a little complicated, is actually clever. They’re stealing unrefined energy from Kessel. Unrefined energy needs to be refined quickly or else it becomes unstable. So after they steal the energy, they have to get it to a refinery quickly or else it will blow. This is why Han needs to do the Kessel Run so quickly (as he famously brags about in Star Wars A New Hope).

But then they screw it up. For one, they don’t keep tabs on the energy cells. We should be seeing bars getting lower and lower signaling that these things are going to blow. But outside of one brief glance at the cells, we never see them again.

In addition, we’ve been hearing about how quickly Han did the Kessel Run all these years. So why do we keep stopping and slowing down while it’s happening? I thought in order to do something fast you needed to go fast. At one point they’re getting sucked into a vortex for five minutes.

The last problem is more of a filmmaking one but I had no basis for what I was looking at with the Kessel Run. We’re in these gassy clouds with giant – I don’t know – mini-planets everywhere? At a certain point I started wondering if we were even in the Kessel Run or we were still on some gassy edge of Kessel or we were in some pre-Kessel Run runway area. It was super confusing.

And that starts with the writing. You have to make sure when you’re constructing an elaborate set-piece that happens in an unfamiliar space with unfamiliar elements that you create a visual plan that makes sense. This is why the Death Star run remains one of the greatest set-pieces ever. It’s so easy to understand. They go down into the trench until they get to the end.

And that sucks because that’s the last big action scene in the movie. So we leave that feeling let-down, confused. And then we’re not sure if we’re going to get another last-minute set-piece. So when we don’t, we feel like… that’s it?

A Star Wars movie should never end on “That’s it?”

Okay, what’s left? Lando was a let-down. I don’t know who’s asking for a Lando film after that performance. That droid was annoying as hell. Chewbacca was awesome. I really liked the alien that Jon Favreau played. Of course he dies early. Great job there, getting rid of one of the only memorable characters. Kira was… I don’t want to say lame. But she didn’t leave an impression. Oh, and what was going on with Enemss Nest or whoever that other pirate was? There’s this dramatic moment where they finally take off the helmet and you’re thinking… what? Boba Fett? No. It’s just some random 20 year old chick with freckles. I’m like who the hell is this chick?? Talk about a letdown.

Okay, now let’s get real. And spoilery. And nerdy.

The big shocking reveal at the end. Darth Maul.

I am a huuuuuuuuuuuuuuuge fan of Darth Maul. I believe his death was one of the single biggest mistakes in the prequels. George Lucas failed on such an epic scale to create interesting characters in those movies. And the ONE character with presence in the movie, Darth Maul, he kills off. It just goes to show how out of touch Lucas was when he made those films.

To bring Maul back is really a statement that’s saying, in the boldest way possible, “You effed up, George. And you effed up so bad that we’re going to forcefully correct your mistake.”

And it’s a good choice because the big problem with this script was the lack of a compelling villain. Both villains in the film were lame. This would ensure that if they made a second film (and I know it’s a big if) that problem would be solved. Because you’d have Jabba the Hut and you’d have Darth Maul. And that would get me to the theater in a heartbeat.

Anyway, this was a fun moviegoing experience. It was a thousand times more enjoyable than my last Star Wars experience, that’s for sure. Check it out, yo.

[ ] What the hell did I just watch?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[x] worth the price of admission
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius

What I learned: It’s so hard to create great characters. 95% of the characters created in movies are forgettable. So when you experience that rare feat of magic of writing a character that’s popping off the page… DON’T KILL THEM OFF. Why would you kill a character off who’s working better than the characters you keep alive? Let the deaths of Jon Favreau’s character in Solo and Darth Maul in Episode 1 be a friendly reminder to keep your awesome characters alive!

Schedule Change Alert! – Tomorrow, I’m reviewing Solo. Monday, Memorial Day, I’ll be off. Tuesday-Friday will be Dialogue Week. That pushes the Amateur Offerings Winner to June 8th.

As we get ready for Dialogue Week, I want to remind you of the basics. Because in order to write good dialogue, you have to first set up a situation that allows good dialogue to be written. The majority of the time, this will boil down to one law:

One character in the scene needs to want something. Another character in the scene needs to resist.

There’s a reason for this. You need “want” in a scene to give the scene direction. If someone doesn’t want anything, then why would we care what they say? In the same way a goal gives your character reason to act. A “want” gives your character reason to speak. The reason you want the other character to be resistant is because this creates CONFLICT in the conversation. And conflict is where dialogue is the most charged.

A simple version of this is a nerdy high school kid going up to ask a popular girl to prom. These scenes almost always work and the reason is that the dialogue “pedestals” holding the scene up are so sturdy. Character A wants something. Character B doesn’t want to give it to him. This is the secret nature of good dialogue. Even if you don’t dress this scene up with Diablo Cody like word magic, it’s still going to work because the situation is so strong.

On the flip side, if you write a scene where two friends get together to have coffee, and neither of them wants anything from the other, chances are the scene’s going to be boring. Audiences have a threshold for listening to conversations that don’t go anywhere, and it’s getting shorter every year. This is why, whenever you see a scene like this, it almost universally segues into, “I need your help with something.” Or the other character might say, “What do you want?” “What do you mean?” “You never ask me to coffee unless you want something. So what is it?” The scene then segues into the proper format for good dialogue. Want + resist = conflict = charged dialogue.

It’s also important to note that a “want” doesn’t have to be on the surface. In fact, most writers will tell you that it’s better if it isn’t. For example, let’s say a married couple who haven’t had sex in awhile are having a dinner night. The husband is hoping to get lucky. The wife isn’t. So the husband has put together this really romantic dinner in the hopes of convincing her.

Of course, he doesn’t say this out loud. He’s just hoping to spark the mood. So you have your want (to get lucky) and you have your resistance (she doesn’t want to). Therefore, when they talk about their day or how good the food tastes or that annoying co-worker, the dialogue’s still charged because we know what’s going on underneath that conversation.

Out of curiosity, I threw on Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle to see if it adhered to this rule. It’s a movie that has a lot of fun dialogue so it seemed like a great test bed. Indeed, it follows it closely. Here are the first seven scenes…

1) Spencer’s mom WANTS to make sure he has everything for the day. Spencer is upset that his mom busted in on him and is invading his space.

2) Fridge’s mom WANTS to make sure her son is studying so he doesn’t get cut from the football team. Fridge is elusive and assures her he’s fine.

3) Spencer uses the favor of doing Fridge’s homework to ask him if he WANTS to hang out this weekend. Fridge resists.

4) A scary old man from the nearby house WANTS to know what Spencer is doing there. Spencer resists, apologizes and walks away.

5) A teacher WANTS to know why Bethanny is on her phone during a quiz. Bethanny resists by saying she deserves to finish the call, ultimately leading to detention.

6) The gym teacher WANTS Martha to join the activities. Martha resists, giving her several reasons why gym is stupid.

7) The principal calls Spencer and Fridge into his office. He WANTS to know if they cheated. The two are elusive at first, but eventually Spencer cops to it.

I want to make something clear. Dialogue doesn’t fit into this perfect formula every time. Just most of the time. And that was on display in Jumanji as well. For example, after Spencer and Fridge leave the principal’s office, they start arguing with each other. There’s no apparent “want” here. It’s more of a reaction to something that already happened. But there was CONFLICT, which is why the dialogue still popped. It’s going to be fun discovering more of these variations next week.

But this is your starting point. Make sure a character wants something. Have there be some level of resistance from the other character, and you’re bound to write, at the very least, DECENT dialogue. As for writing great dialogue? Well, gosh-darn, you’ll just have to wait until next week for that. :)

Genre: TV Pilot – Drama
Premise: A group of Boston friends’ lives are changed after a member of their group unexpectedly commits suicide.
About: Today’s pilot comes from former comedy writer DJ Nash, who took a chance in writing his first drama. That chance paid off when ABC made it their first pickup of the season, positioning it as a This is Us counterstrike. Nash formally created Growing up Fisher and Truth Be Told. Ron Livingston and Romany Malco star in the show.
Writer: DJ Nash
Details: 57 pages

TV pilots are funny things. The shows with the longest staying power tend to have the weakest concepts. That’s because TV shows are character-driven as opposed to concept or plot-driven. Why is that? Well, if you’re writing 20 hours of television per season, that’s 18 hours more than a feature film. Seeing as it’s hard enough coming up with a series of cool plot points for a feature, you can imagine how hard it must be when you multiply that by ten.

Therefore, TV has no choice but to focus on character.

But this is what’s always confused me about TV. How do you get anybody’s attention with a lame character-driven concept? Like if you pitched me, “Four Boston friends have their lives uprooted when their friend dies,” I’d be like, “Annnnnnnd???” With a movie pitch, you know what you’ve got after the logline. With these things, it seems like a crapshoot.

Anyway, I’ll continue to stir fry that thought in my head while I dish out today’s review.

Rome, an almost-30 commercial director with the perfect life, is two minutes away from ending it. He’s got the pills. He’s prepping the deed. It’s only a matter of time. But before we watch him kill himself, we cut to his friend Jon, who has an even better life. The master of the deal and a real estate titan, Jon is currently on the phone, closing a deal in his kick ass high-rise office. How easy is it to love life when you’re killing it?

Cut to friend numero 3, Gary. Gary is getting the results from his doctor about whether his cancer’s back. His breast cancer. Yes, Gary is in the one percent of males who have breast cancer. But the good news is, he’s making it work for him. Gary bangs a new breast cancer survivor every week at his breast cancer support group.

Finally, there’s Eddie. Eddie hates his wife. Every day she drags him deeper into the pits of married hell. And while Rome’s about to off himself and Gary’s ready to get his results and Jon is ready to close the deal, Eddie is throwing all of his clothes into a suitcase. Eddie’s about to run away with another woman.

But then he gets the call from Gary that changes everything.

Jon just committed suicide.

That’s right. Not Rome. Jon. After he closed that deal, he leapt out the window.

The rest of the script has the guys coming together for Jon’s funeral and the gathering afterwards. The wives are all there, including Maggie, the latest girl Gary banged from his support group. Yes, their first date is officially a funeral.

As the group ponders the impossibility of someone like Jon, who had everything, ending his life, little hints pop up that there may be more to the story. When the guys go get tonight’s Bruins tickets from Jon’s office (going to Bruins games is a long-standing tradition), they get into Jon’s phone and find out that he made one call before he jumped. To Eddie.

The guys turn to Eddie, who looks back cluelessly. He never got a message. But later that night (major spoiler), when Eddie is alone, we see why he’s being so coy about that call. We finally find out who Eddie’s been planning to run away with. It’s none other than Jon’s wife.

I had mixed green feelings about this script.

I loved the early misdirect. Nash totally got me with Jon’s death. And I liked the ending twist, that Eddie was running away with Jon’s wife. Not only for the twist. But because you’re setting up a line of dramatic irony that can be drawn out for 5-6 episodes. Us and Eddie know that Jon may have killed himself because he found out that Eddie was sleeping with his wife. But the other friends don’t know that. And like any good line of dramatic irony, it’s the kind of thing that viewers will stick around for to see what happens when that bomb explodes.

My problem with A Million Little Things was the rest of the script, the middle part.

It’s mainly just a bunch of characters being sad, talking to each other, remembering things. And I think the problem here is that Nash didn’t use a good old fashioned goal. There are some writers who don’t think you should use goals in TV one-hours. That it’s more about “covering the bases” of each subplot. But I find that when there’s an overarching goal pushing the characters along, it gives the narrative an engine. We feel like there’s a PURPOSE to the story.

It’s not to say you HAVE to do this. If we’re inside of a particularly dramatic portion of a season, then each storyline (the A, B, or C) in an episode can be powerful enough that a uniform goal isn’t required. But my theory with pilots is that you can’t take any chances. You can’t even RISK a 3-5 minute down period. Because 3-5 minutes is all it takes these days for someone to decide your show is boring and never watch it again. TV viewers are not a forgiving bunch. I’ve met them.

With that said, there are still plenty of good things to talk about. When you’re writing a character driven pilot (as opposed to concept-driven pilot), you want to get an inciting incident into the story ASAP. Usually within the first 5 pages. This is to alleviate any suspicion that your show will be a group of characters talking for an hour. You need that “thing” to happen so that they know you mean business. A character dramatically killing themselves, via a misdirect, was a great way to get audiences hooked.

Building off of yesterday’s character development talk, we see again today how important it is to establish characters immediately. The first scene we meet each character in A Million Little Things is a scene where we learn the essence of who they are at this moment in their lives. Gary has breast cancer. Eddie is about to leave his marriage. Rome is suicidal. One of the biggest mistakes I see amateur writers make is they take 3, 4, 5 or MORE scenes to tell us what professional writers can tell us in one.

That’s not to say you can’t have characters of mystery, like John Locke in Lost. That’s a different discussion. But when dealing with straight-forward characters, you want to start developing them from their first frame.

A Million Little Things is obviously ABC’s attempt at a This Is Us killer. But it’s not as good as that show. One thing Dan Fogelman is great at it is he knows exactly how hard to press the melodrama pedal in each scene. He knows when it’s too far. He knows when it’s not enough. He knows when to alleviate tension with a joke. He knows the right tone that joke needs to be.

A Million Little Things is more hit and miss in these categories. There’s a scene late where they’re at the hockey game and Rome reveals out of nowhere that he tried to commit suicide. It’s an odd moment for the admission and the aftermath is too heavy-handed (“With nothing to say, Gary does the only thing he can do. He puts his arm around Rome and gives his friend a hug. Rome cries harder. So Gary just squeezes harder.”)

But hey, Fogelman’s the master at this stuff so let’s not hang any competitors out to dry here. The pilot isn’t great but it’s got just enough presence to make it worth your time.

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

What I learned: Whether it’s a movie or a TV show, the simplest plotline you can use that uniformly works is to start with a dead body. In other words, I don’t think this pilot gets picked up if it’s this same group and we don’t get a suicide at the beginning of the show.

Genre: Horror
Premise: A young teacher who’s recently moved into a small blue collar town tries to help a lonely boy, only to find out that he’s harboring something terrible in his home.
About: Antlers director Scott Cooper is on the verge of becoming the next big mainstream auteur. He’s got a really interesting resume, with movies like Black Mass and Crazy Heart, and most recently, Hostiles. It’s only a matter of time before he’s hired onto one of these mega-projects. And congrats to screenwriter Nick Antosca. His last movie, The Forest (a horror film with Natalie Dormer), wasn’t received well. To jump from that to this is a major coup. It’s the kind of jump that sets you up for those big studio gigs. A lot has been made over the years of how screenwriting is the one profession in Hollywood where people fail upwards. They have a box office bomb or a critically “rotten” film, yet they keep moving up the ladder. I see it the opposite way. How great is it that you can bomb with one movie yet, if you follow that up with a really good script, they don’t hold that previous movie against you? Antosca’s co-writer on this film, Henry Chaisson, is just coming into the business. Up until this point, he’s only written shorts.
Writers: Henry Chaisson & Nick Antosca (based on the short story by Nick Antosca)
Details: 95 pages (3/3/17 draft)

One of the things I’ve been telling you guys is that you can’t think linearly. It doesn’t work like that in this business anymore. Sometimes you need to go backwards to go forward, sideways to go up, and inside to make it back out. It’s why I wrote that article about fiction podcasts last month. And today we have an example of the buzziest version of that philosophy at play – short stories.

This is the 7th or 8th short story being turned into a feature this year. This is a legitimate way in, guys. I’m guessing this trend is rising because short stories are less of a commitment than scripts. In a world where everyone’s looking to cut time out of their day (as long as it isn’t the 2 hours they waste on the internet every morning), spending 20 minutes on a short story is a welcome break from the usual feature script commitment.

And the bar isn’t that high. I STILL can’t believe that terrible Mars short story sold. And it was like 800 words (a screenplay is 20,000). You guys are all capable of writing 800 words. Anyway, let’s check out if today’s short story fares better than that one.

Julia Grey is a 23 year old teacher who’s just moved into a small conservative poor town in the south. Like a lot of young teachers, Julia is full of hope and eager to change the tide of this place. She believes she can make a difference!

But the truth is, the kids who grow up here aren’t interested in learning anything. Kinda like their parents. The principal tells her as much. Your only job, he says, is to make sure they don’t light themselves on fire when they’re at school.

But Julia takes an interest in a young boy in her class named Lucas who is a talented artist. The problem is that he’s a social outcast and any attempt to communicate with him ends with him running out of the room. Julia senses there’s something wrong at home and decides to make a visit.

Lucas’s house is a disaster. It’s all boarded up. It’s rotted. It doesn’t take long to discover that Lucas doesn’t even live in the house. He lives in a tent out back. But if he’s living outside the house then… who’s living in it?

Even Julia’s not naive enough to find out on her own. But when she hears a child crying inside, she rips open the boards and runs in. What she finds are the corpses of two people on the floor, long since dead, a man and a child. It looks like the mystery of Lucas’s weirdness is finally solved. But not the crying child. That’s something Julia will find out about soon enough. You see, Julia just inadvertently released a monster…

This was a really well-written script. A couple of things stuck out to me right away.

In the first scene, we see Julia teaching a class of 4th graders. I want you to think about this scene for a second. Imagine you’re writing it yourself. How do you make a teacher teaching 4th graders interesting? It’s harder than it seems, right? And yet, I was totally into it. I had to stop reading to figure out why. And then it hit me.

Chaisson and Antosca introduced a third party into the scene – the principal. As Julia is teaching, the principal slides into the room and starts observing. She notices him and becomes nervous. What we realize is that he’s judging her. Specifically, he doesn’t believe she has control over her students. And as the kids get more and more out of control, that belief is proven. So the reason we’re into the scene is because we’re rooting for Julia to get this class back under control.

All of this is happening while the writers are slyly setting up the characters, as well as the main myth that will become the story’s centerpiece later on – the Wendigo. That’s good writing, folks.

From there, we cut to Julia sitting across from the principal in his office. This scene teaches us the value of SETTING UP AN INTERACTION with your description. Remember, you have the option not to set up anything before an interaction. We can just cut to these two talking. Or we can prep the situation and use that to add tension to the scene before it even starts. That’s what Chaisson and Antosca do with this brilliant setup paragraph:

He’s staring at her, hard to read. All kinds of distances between them – age, gender, culture. He was born and raised in this town — and it is significant to him that she wasn’t.

I mean WOW. We already know from this paragraph – before a word has been spoken mind you! – that this moment is CHARGED. I can’t wait to read what happens next. That’s good writing!

Yesterday I brought up character development and I want to expand on that because Antlers is an example of a story we’ve seen before, and therefore could potentially be boring. But it’s not because it creates two really great characters.

And it does this by following a simple rule: Establish what you want to establish about the character early, and hit it hard. Don’t tiptoe around what you’re trying to say. This is the time when you want to be blunt.

Right away, with Julia, it’s established that she’s not from here, she doesn’t get the class’s attention despite desperately wanting to, the principal hates her, and she’s an outcast in this town. All of this is conveyed in her first couple of scenes. I can’t tell you how many scripts I’ve read where I don’t know one-tenth this much about a character AFTER READING THE ENTIRE SCRIPT!

Moving onto Lucas, we know he’s a loner. We know he’s a weirdo. We know he’s sad. We know he’s good at drawing. All of this in his first three scenes. To me, both of these characters are 80% developed and we haven’t even made it out of the first act! So if there’s a lesson here, it’s that you can tell us so much about your characters in their first few scenes. And if you do that well, we’re going to care what happens to them regardless of how the plot turns out.

Because the truth is, the plot to this is almost too simple. Once we find out that the Wendigo is out there looking for them, it’s your basic “try to survive” horror film. But it works because of that heavy dose of character development early on.

Really enjoyed this one. A great example of how to write a marketable spec script.

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

What I learned: In general, bringing in a third party to any stale situation usually spices it up. That opening classroom scene went from a 3 out of 10 to an 8 out of 10 due to that ONE DECISION to bring the principal in and have him watch. So if you have two characters in a scene and it’s boring, you now know what to do!

Genre: Superhero
Premise: When a time-traveler comes back from the future to kill the boy who murdered his family, it will be up to Deadpool and his new super duper team to stop him.
About: There’s a sneaky sub-story regarding today’s film that the trades are trying to sweep under the rug. Deadpool 2 made 125 million dollars this weekend. That’s 7 million dollars less than the first Deadpool made on its opening weekend. The trades hate when one of their darlings underperforms because it means they have to come up with an angle that excuses the performance despite a history of tearing apart films with similar results. The spin they’re going with here is that Deadpool did better globally in its first weekend than the first film did. But that’s largely because they opened on more screens this time around. The thing is, Deadpool 2 does deserve a pass. It’s a better film than the first one. Its underperformance is the doing of its studio, which placed it between Avengers and Star Wars, possibly the worst release date in the past 10 years. Why not place Deadpool in June where the waters are calmer? I don’t know. But Deadpool 2 will leave between 100-200 million dollars on the table due to this bizarre decision.
Writers: Rhett Reese & Paul Wernick and Ryan Reynolds (based on the comic by Rob Liefeld & Fabian Niciza)
Details: 2 hours long

BEEEEP BEEEEP BEEEEP. Backing up the Spoiler Truck guys. If you get run over, it’s your fault.

I have a lot to say about this one so let’s jump right into it!

Deadpool 2 starts in typical Deadpool fashion, with Deadpool blowing himself up. But the curse of being Deadpool is that he can’t die. So like Humpty-Dumpty, they put him back together again. A few scenes later, Deadpool shows us the reason he killed himself. A bad guy pops into his apartment and shoots Vanessa in the heart. Yes, Vanessa, from the previous film is dead.

Meanwhile some dude named Cable, who’s from the future, is also suffering from family tragedy. His wife and son were murdered by a firestarting super-villain. So Cable time-travels back to 2018 to kill the offending villain, a mutant 12 year old boy named Russell, before he can begin his decades-long killing spree that ends in the murder of his family.

Deadpool is reluctantly recruited into the X-Men, which means he has to do good, and his first order of goodness is to save Russell. But being Deadpool, he has to do things his way. So he recruits a team of the worst superheroes imaginable, calling them X-Force. It’s then a race for X-Force and Cable to see who gets to the boy first.

To stand out amongst an entertainment machine that pumps out thousands of hours of content every day, millions if you count the internet, when you write a script, you must give us things that we’ve never seen before.

That doesn’t mean you have to give us a movie concept we’ve never seen before. It’d be nice. That’s what the original Deadpool did. It gave us a fourth-wall breaking R-rated superhero. But it’s hard to find those ideas.

So the next best thing is to give us moments WITHIN YOUR SCREENPLAY that we’ve never seen before. One great original moment is nice. Two is better. And anything over two is awesome. Deadpool 2 gives us three moments.

The first is the opening credits scene. For those who haven’t seen the film, Deadpool’s wife, Vanessa, is killed in the fourth scene of the movie. It’s an emotional moment. I was genuinely shocked. These two were set up as the perfect couple in the first film.

The title sequence that follows, a James Bond parody set to a surprisingly catchy Celine Dion song, begins listing the credits. Except they aren’t what we expect. “Produced by: Wait a minute, did you just fucking kill her?” “Directed by: Are you insane?” Director of Cinematography by: “Holy shit, you really fucking killed her.” (paraphrased).

This was clever, not just because we’d never seen it before. But what you probably don’t know is that credit sequences are unionized. It’s hard to change them. Unions did this to prevent situations where producers kept their credit on screen for 60 seconds. Or say the studio hated the job the costume designer did. This would prevent them from simply not including her credit.

I bring this up because there’s a bigger issue at play here. There are things that we believe are “set.” That can’t be changed. So we don’t even consider it. I’m assuming the reason it took so long for someone to think of this was because everyone assumed you can’t change a title sequence. You had to accept them. This is a reminder that everything is open for change. There should be no avenue closed off from your imagination.

The second moment was the X-Force fail. This was my favorite sequence in the movie. I knew something was up because the superheroes looked super cheesy, even for a movie that made fun of superheroes. But I didn’t think they were going to kill them off before they fought a single battle! That was brilliant, and the one time in the movie where I couldn’t stop laughing.

Finally we had baby legs. I wasn’t a fan of this scene. A lot of people think the baby-adult hybrid thing is funny. They’ve done a lot of Super Bowl commercials covering it. But it’s too weird for me. Regardless, there’s a lesson to be learned here as well. This is one of the most talked about sequences in the film, and it’s six people in an apartment. This is what I remind writers who think that the only way to catch a reader’s attention is to go bigger. No. This scene proves that the smallest scenes can be the most memorable. You just have to be creative.

But maybe the biggest surprise of Deadpool 2 was how character-driven it was. I’d just done a screenplay consultation for a writer who wrote an action film. And my big note to him was, “You need to give us more character development so that we care about these characters during the action.”

As I was writing that, I realized that the average screenwriter has no idea how to do this. Their understanding of character development in an action film is to write one scene every 30 pages where two characters are in a room, resting, and one of them gives the other a monologue about their troubled childhood.

Deadpool 2 is about 30% action. This means 70% of the film is covering character. Seeing Cable’s reaction to the aftermath of his dead family is character development. Deadpool whining to a bartender after his wife died is character development. Seeing quick flashes of Russell being tortured is character development. Seeing Deadpool rage-kill the man who killed his wife is character development. Deadpool and Cable having a difference of opinion on how to treat Russell is character development. Cable carrying around his boy’s burnt stuffed bunny is character development. Deadpool’s dreams where he’s back with his wife are character development. Russell desperate to find a friend he can trust is character development. In fact, Russell’s entire character (a boy who’s been abused his whole life and is now taking it out on the world) is character development.

I reminded the writer that anybody can write action. But very few writers can develop character. That’s the hot commodity in screenwriting. If you can do that? Hollywood will hire you from now until the end of time.

As much as I admired the crafting of Deadpool – the chances it took and the overall writing – I did have one problem with it. Its biggest strength – Ryan Reynolds – is also its biggest weakness. The fourth-wall-breaking joke-a-minute schtick is tiring. It’s so tiring. Yes, Deadpool does it better than anyone. But it’s still a gimmick. And gimmicks have short shelf lives. Note how in Ferris Bueller, Ferris only does the fourth wall breaking in that opening sequence. During the rest of the movie, it happens only a handful of times. And that’s because John Hughes knew that the audience would get tired of it. Deadpool’s commentary started to irk me towards the end. And that’s the only reason this movie doesn’t finish with an impressive.

[ ] What the hell did I just watch?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[xx] worth the price of admission
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius

What I learned: Action films have way less action than you think they do. It’s roughly around 30% of screen time, usually less. Let this be a lesson that you need to learn to develop character if you’re going to be a successful writer in this genre.