A reminder that if you want to compete for a featured script review on Scriptshadow, e-mail me at carsonreeves3@gmail.com and include the title of your script, the genre, a logline, a pitch to myself and other readers on why we’d enjoy your script, and, finally, an attached PDF of your screenplay. Good luck!
Genre: Western
Premise: As a zombie plague spreads throughout the Old West, a reformed outlaw must escort a sick girl to sanctuary while being pursued by his old gang and the undead.
Why You Should Read: The first scene won the Opening Scene Contest right here on Scriptshadow. Thanks to some helpful feedback, both the scene and the script have come a long way since then. The concept is both simple and marketable: cowboys versus zombies. And Hollywood has yet to produce a feature film to mainstream audiences. With additional help from the Scriptshadow community, this could be that film. Thank you, and hope you enjoy.
Writer: Scott Eames
Details: 114 pages
Today’s writer enters into one of the most competitive genres in Hollywood – zombie horror. Everyone’s writing zombie movies so if you want to get your zombie script read, you have to do something unique. Is mixing zombies and the Old West unique? Not entirely. I’ve reviewed – I think – three Zombie Westerns on the site? But in Eames’s defense, it’s been awhile since the last one. So maybe there’s an opportunity to grab a hold of some market share here.
Let’s check it out…
Harlan Ellsworth is a wanted man. Of course, wanted men were as common as Facebook pages back in 1872. Still, our guy Harlan ran with one of the nastiest gangs in Arkansas, the Four Horseman. During one of their raids, he killed a Marshall. And now the whole of Arkansas wants him to pay.
But Harlan’s after something himself – the Marshall’s daughter, Wendy. Having since abandoned the Four Horseman, he now believes that they’re after Wendy, and wants to save her before they find her. If he can do a little good, it might make up for all the atrocities from his past.
Off he goes looking for her in a little town called Stillwater, but finds that the entire town’s been slaughtered, likely by Apache. Except when he gets a closer look, he realizes this isn’t the signature of the Apache. And that’s when the zombie humans come. AND the zombie animals.
During the commotion, Wendy flees out of one of the buildings, he scoops her up, and they make a run for it. They’re able to escape the zombies (as well as a pursuing sheriff), and later Harlan lies to Wendy, pretending to be someone else, saying he knew her father and promised he would save her.
Wendy says they should head to her Uncle at Fort Shepherd. If there’s any place that will be fortified from zombies, it will be there. Along the way, they run into Harlan’s old gang, the Four Horseman, and their fearless leader, Percival Douglass.
Percival kidnaps Wendy and brings her to his fancy riverboat, where he appears to have all sorts of plans for her. Meanwhile, Harlan’s been bitten, and could turn within hours. He needs to get to the riverboat in time, kill Percival, save Wendy, and ultimately tell her the truth, that he’s the one who killed her father.
I can’t remember the last time an amateur script got so much right. From a pure craft point of view, you’d be hard-pressed to find a single error here. We start out with a great teaser. After our two main characters are introduced, a clear goal is established (get to Fort Shepherd). Eames builds the entire central relationship around some shocking dramatic irony (Wendy doesn’t know that Harlan killed her father).
There are a series of fun and creative set pieces. The circus of the dead. The waterfall with the falling bodies. The riverboat. Later in the script, our protagonist gets bitten, adding a ticking time bomb to the mix. The arrival of the Four Horseman add an important goal that must be met (Harlan must save Wendy). This script feels like it was vetted by 10 of the best readers in Hollywood. Virtually EVERY choice makes sense.
And yet that’s probably the reason I wasn’t fully engaged. While I admired the plotting, something about the format felt too perfect. Like when the Horseman kidnapped Wendy. That triggered the thought: “Of course the bad guys kidnap the girl so that the hero has to save her.” It confirmed to me that I was too ahead of the script. There was nothing in the story that was surprising me.
Don’t get me wrong. This is one of the HARDEST things about screenwriting. A screenplay has a beginning (the setup), a middle (the conflict), and an end (the resolution). You only have so much room to play around with. And what most writers have found is that when they go outside of that room, it’s a fail. Which pushes them back to the safety of the formula. And this script is definitely textbook formula.
One thing I tell writers when they’re writing something formulaic is to put in 1 or 2 surprise turns in the middle of the screenplay. Do something we’re not expecting. A recent example would be the movie, Good Time., where at the halfway point, our hero goes to the hospital to jailbreak his face-casted brother, only to realize after he’s gotten him to safety, he jailbroke the wrong guy.
But there may be a bigger problem at play.
The more I think about it, the more I realize I was indifferent to our hero, Harlan. It’s not that his plight was uninteresting. He has a really intense backstory. But I didn’t FEEL anything towards him. Something we talked about a couple of weeks ago is that when you feel negatively (or apathetic) towards a character, it almost always goes back to their introduction. And Harlan’s introduction is strange.
We meet him borderline threatening a priest. So already, I’m not liking this guy. Furthermore, the longer he speaks, the less I’m buying the scene. I guess I understand wanting to repent for your sins. But let’s be real. The scene was created for the sole purpose of Harlan being able to drop a load of exposition on us. So you had an unlikable protag combined with Exposition Man. That didn’t sit well with me and likely colored the way I read the rest of the script.
Compare this to a recent Western I watched, High Plains Drifter, with Clint Eastwood. That movie starts with Eastwood riding into a new town, and everyone’s giving him the stink eye. Everyone’s being an asshole. Everyone’s giving him shit. So OF COURSE we’re going to sympathize with this character.! He’s the underdog to all these dickheads.
So perhaps Eames should try giving Harlan an introduction that creates more sympathy. I can’t promise that will work. But there was definitely something about his intro that didn’t click with me. It was one of the weaker scenes in the script.
I’m so torn about this one. I DEFINITELY recommend Scott as a writer. This guy knows what he’s doing. But if I gave the script a “worth the read,” it would be more for that reason than rewarding the script itself. I’ll finish with this. This is the kind of script that is a pebble’s toss away from pushing an amateur into professional territory. I mean, we’re so close, we can bite it.
Script link: Under The Vultures
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: I love the use of COLOR in description. Color helps readers visualize better. That means they’re more likely to imagine the image up on the big screen. The opening scene here with its WHITE NIGHTGOWN and its YELLOW EYES and its RED BLOOD. I felt that scene more than any scene I’ve read in the past month. The use of color is a major reason for that.
The main reason this movie works so well is that it has a big concept and a simple execution. I will trumpet this advice until the day I can no longer type – keep your stories simple. A group of people get stuck on an island full of monsters. They try and escape. That’s all this is! This is why so many of the Jurassic Park sequels are bad, because they don’t use this format. And it’s why the most successful sequel in the franchise was a reboot, where, once again, a group of people are stuck on an island and try to escape. Here are 10 more screenwriting lessons you can learn from Jurassic Park.
1) Big movies need big teasers – If you’re writing any sort of blockbuster type film (sci-fi, superhero, action-adventure), you need to open your script with a teaser scene worthy of that idea. Jurassic Park has one of the most memorable opening teasers of any film. A group of men are unloading a mysterious caged animal. When they’re nearly finished, the animal is able to grab one of the men, pull him in, and kill him.
2) Exposition needs to be conveyed while something is HAPPENING – I’ve been seeing this mistake too much lately. Writers put two characters in a room or in a boring setting and have them set up the story for the reader. Pro writers convey exposition WHILE STORY IS HAPPENING. The second scene in Jurassic Park has two men discussing the lawsuit that is going to stem from the death we saw in the teaser. But they’re talking about this as they’re called to a cave, where a group of men have found something valuable, a mosquito encased in amber. In other words, the story is moving forward while the exposition is being given.
3) One key word in your character’s description can sell the entire character – “Dr. Alan Grant, mid thirties, a ragged-looking guy with an intense concentration you wouldn’t want to get in the way of.” What’s the key word there? “INTENSE.” That ONE WORD dominates Grant’s entire personality throughout the film. When you’re writing a description, try to find that descriptor that personifies who your character is. It isn’t easy. Here’s another description of Koepp’s, which isn’t nearly as good: “Dennis Nedry is in his late thirties, a big guy with a constant smile that could either be laughing with you or at you, you can never tell.” No key word. A confusing sentence (a smile becomes a laugh out of nowhere?). Find that word, guys. The right adjective can help you nail a character description.
4) Use your suspense rope! – When you have something cool at the end of the rope, make us pull on it for awhile. When the island’s creator, Hammond, comes to Grant and Ellie, he doesn’t immediately say to them, “Hey, I’ve got this dinosaur island! Come and take a look.” He remains mysterious, baiting them with, “It’s right up your alley. Why don’t you come down?” This keeps the suspense going.
5) Make sure a character goal is present for everyone – Every character needs to have a purpose in the story. You can’t have Hammond bring our paleontologists there for compliments. It’s not a vacation. Grant and Ellie’s goal is to give their endorsement so that the investors can sign off on the park and Hammond can open it. I see this mistake A LOT. Writers put their characters in a situation simply because that’s the movie they want to write, never asking why they’d actually be there.
6) After getting to the end of a suspense rope, add another one – So the suspense rope we referred to above was finding out that this was a dinosaur park. That rope reached its end when Grant and Ellie see their first dinosaur, a Brachiosaurus. After this, Koepp immediately replaces the rope with a new one, when Hammond says they have a T-Rex. “You have a T-Rex?!” Grant says. “Let’s go look at it.” “Relax, there’ll be plenty of time this afternoon.” This forces the reader to pull on this new rope for awhile before getting what he wants.
7) Simple easy-to-understand set-pieces – One thing I can’t stand about new movies are these overly complicated confusing set-pieces where we barely understand what’s going on. Early Spielberg mastered the art of simple set-pieces. What’s the most memorable shot of Jurassic Park? A T-Rex chasing a jeep. That’s it! That’s the set piece. A T-Rex runs after a jeep in a straight line. And the other T-Rex set-piece is simple, too. Characters stuck in cars with a T-Rex just outside, nudging and trying to get them. Or being stuck in a kitchen with a group of raptors. They’re so easy to understand which is why they’re so effective.
8) Even Lebron needs a breather – Sometimes you want to give your A-story (people visiting a dinosaur park) a rest. You do this by creating a B-story to occassionally cut to. The B-story here is Nedry’s plight to steal the dinosaur embryos and sneak them off the island. Every 4-5 scenes, we cut back to him and his plan. You’re going to gas your A-story if you don’t substitute in your B-story every once in awhile.
9) Be awesome by having your B-Story intersect with your A-Story – Just having a B-Story isn’t enough. If you want to show off your writing chops, look for interesting ways to connect your B-Story with your A-Story. Koepp cleverly has Nedry turn off the safety mechanisms in the park in order to hide his crime. This, in turn, allows for our characters to get stuck during their ride and for dinosaurs to have access to them.
10) External flaws vs. Internal Flaws – A flaw is a character defect that’s holding them back. The movie’s journey is then used to have them overcome this flaw. There are two kinds of flaws. An external one, which deals with stuff we can see (example: fear of heights). And an internal one, which deals with stuff we can’t (example: selfishness). Jurassic Park gives Grant an external flaw – he doesn’t like kids. And if I’m being honest, it’s one of the weaker parts of the movie. I suggest going with internal flaws (arrogance, stubbornness, inability to connect) as they connect on a deeper level.
BONUS TIP: Use weather to add more conflict! Doesn’t matter how bad things are for your characters. A little weather insert can make it even more interesting. Here, they add a storm. But you can throw a heat wave into the mix. Hail. Below freezing temperatures. Humidity. Anything that’s going to agitate your characters more is a good thing.
Genre: Family
Premise: A family grieving a loss hires a local company to help them create a haunted house for Halloween and get more than they bargained for.
About: Today’s script sold back in 2011 to Platinum Dunes. It comes from the writer of last year’s biggest surprise hit, “Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle,” Scott Rosenberg. Talk about a wily old screenwriting veteran. Rosenberg cut his teeth back in the Bruckheimer days, penning such movies as Con Air, Gone in Sixty Seconds, and Kangaroo Jack. It’s a little confusing why a family film sold to Platinum Dunes, a well-known horror outfit, although if I remember correctly, they may have been trying to expand their brand at the time. With the ridiculous success of Jumanji, it wouldn’t be a surprise to see this old Rosenberg project rise from the dead. Hopefully with a new title.
Writer: Scott Rosenberg
Details: 113 pages
Trying to figure out why something sells can be maddening at times. Ideally it’s because the script is awesome. But sometimes it’s because the timing was perfect. Sometimes it’s because the writer and producer have a longstanding relationship. Sometimes a producer will literally tell a writer exactly what to write, semi-guaranteeing a sale. Sometimes it’s a young producer with terrible taste who buys a bad script.
That’s why you’ll sometimes read a script and say, “Why in the world did someone buy this?”
One of the most common reasons for a sale is because the writer’s had previous success. If you’ve got recent credits, virtually everything you write is going to be bought, even if the script isn’t good. Why? Because Hollywood values credits over the unknown. Why would you take a chance on a nobody when you can bet on the guy who wrote several 100 million dollar blockbusters?
Which leads us to today’s script. My first thought was, “This can’t be any good if it got bought seven years ago and I’ve never heard of it.” But I love reading old scripts from writers who’ve had recent success. Let’s see if this project is as lame as its title or if Platinum Dunes botched a potential Jumanji.
At one time, the Truckles were the perfect family. You had Marvin Truckle, who looks like Henry Fonda. Sue Truckle, the quintessential PTA soccer mom. 12 year old Doyle, a future James Corden. 10 year old Antonia (Ant), who puts the preco in precocious. And the Golden Boy of the family, 17 year old football star, Gabe. You’ve never seen a happier family than these five.
But then Gabe dies and the family moves six towns over so they wouldn’t be known as the “the family of that dead kid.” Since then, everyone’s been in a daze, especially Sue, who’s in such a state of depression she can barely operate. It’s unclear if they’ll ever recover.
Marvin gets an idea. When he was young, every Halloween, his family would turn his house into a haunted house and everyone in town would come by and it would be a party. Maybe, just maybe, this could bring the family out of its funk. So Marvin hires the only haunted house decorator in town, some guy named Zornelius Ravensbane, a mix between Beetlejuice and Willy Wonka. Or, as Rosenberg writes, a “whirling dervish of gibberish.”
The babbling insanity of Ravensbane freaks the family out, causing Marvin to ditch the haunted house idea. But after Ravensbane tricks Ant and Doyle to come to his secret warehouse, where they accidentally destroy some of his props, he blackmails Marvin with a lawsuit unless they let him do the haunted house job.
Ravensbane decorates the house, which looks great. But once everyone gets inside (we’re talking Act 3 here), the doors lock and it turns into a REAL HAUNTED HOUSE. The family, as well as the visitors, must defeat vampires and zombies and witches and ghosts and somehow escape the house alive. It’s through this experience that the mother finally wakes up, leading the family to safety, and we’re left to wonder… was this Ravensbane’s plan all along?
Would it be strange if I said I was SCARED of breaking this one down? Get it? Scared?
So here’s the deal. This script suffers from a faulty foundation. And the sucky thing about faulty foundations is that while they’re obvious to everyone else, they can be a blindspot to the writer.
This happens if a writer is so in love with a character or a major plot development that he can’t see his concept through the trees. It’s no different than when you fall in love with the wrong person. You’re so in love that it’s harder for you to notice that they’re selfish or don’t share the same values.
I could never understand why we were creating this haunted house in the first place. The dad having done this as a kid wasn’t a strong enough reason to base an ENTIRE MOVIE on. But even so, we lose that plotline when Ravensbane freaks everyone out, and replace it with this odd “blackmailing” plot, where Ravensbane threatens them unless he can do his job.
What’s frustrating about faulty foundations is that regardless of whether the rest of your script ideas are good or not, everything is going to feel weaker. Take Ravensbane. I could see this character working inside a different setup. But here, I kept thinking, “Why are they going to such elaborate lengths to decorate a haunted house? Hiring this random dude? Why not just do it themselves? Wouldn’t it make more sense as far as bringing the family together?”
And the thing is, the family stuff is good! I liked how Rosenberg went dark with this family and the mom who was in full-blown depression. And the daughter is dating losers because she doesn’t care anymore. And the younger brother is doing weird shit like walking around with bubble wrap wherever he goes. And Ant is trying to pretend everything is okay when it clearly isn’t.
If this were a drama, you’d have the foundation for a good story. I’d want to see how this family got out of this rut. And for newbie writers out there, this is what professionals bring to the table that newbies don’t. They get the character stuff right. Or, at the very least, they put a lot of effort into it.
But if I’m asking “What is the point of this movie” throughout the 60 page second act, that’s a concept problem. Let’s compare this to Rosenberg’s other script, Junamji, which has an ironclad setup. Four people, dropped in a video game, they need to get out. We don’t wonder FOR A SECOND what the goal is. There isn’t a single moment in the film where we don’t understand where we are in the journey and where we need to go to get out. That’s when you know your setup is great. When those questions are answered before you’ve even left the first act.
This was the opposite. You could feel the writer pushing us through a vague narrative just to have an excuse to write scenes for this Ravensbane character.
Can this be fixed? I don’t know. I can tell you that the bulk of the script’s problems revolve around the fact that a family is building a haunted house even though none of them want to build a haunted house. It doesn’t make sense. Maybe, then, if the haunted house was elsewhere, and our characters merely got caught up in it, that would work better. I don’t know what that means as far as giving Ravensbane screen time. But I’m sure you could figure something out.
That’s too bad. I was hoping to find a sleeper here.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: A grieving family is a good setup for any family-based movie – the reason being that all of your family members are going to be in a funk. This allows for what movies do best – take your character from a negative place at the beginning of the movie, to a positive place at the end. That’s their “arc.” The character arcs were the best thing about this script and that’s directly related to the choice of beginning the film with a grieving family.
Genre: Dark Comedy Thriller
Premise: (from Black List) A darkly comic crime thriller concerning three groups of people dealing with blackmail gone wrong.
About: Kill Shelter appeared on the bottom half of last year’s Black List. It’s written by newcomers Eric Beu and Greg Martin. The two won the 2015 Script Pipeline TV Writing Contest with a pilot called Beechwood. Martin was originally a composer and has gotten work on some major network shows. Eric Beu mainly wrote short fiction before moving to Los Angeles to team up with his friend Greg and start writing screenplays.
Writers: Eric Beu & Greg Martin
Details: 94 pages
Please be good Please be good Please be good Please be good.
Those are the words going through my mind whenever I open a script.
Why? Because MY JOB IS SO MUCH EASIER WHEN I LIKE SOMETHING. That’s why. Damn. You’re so pushy.
Here’s something you may not know. Screenplays? They’re time machines. No, I’m serious. They are. If you find your way into a bad screenplay? You will be reading for 5 hours and look up to see that you’re on page 12 and only 20 minutes has gone by. Conversely, if you read something good? You can be reading for 10 minutes and you’re already done with the script.
There have been times – times I’d like to forget – where I’ve actually gone backwards in time reading a script. I once read a script for 3 hours only to find out that I hadn’t made it past the title page. Those are the days I hate the world.
So color me Happy Henry when I time-traveled through Kill Shelter fast enough to finish in time for The Bachelorette. And can I just say something? Brett? You’re not there for the right reasons. You need to tell Becca.
Bennett, our shlubby un-hero, is a closed caption transcriber and a loser. But he’s going to be dead in a few minutes so it doesn’t matter. Bennett is visited at his home by an intimidating man named Gordon. Bennet gives Gordon a mysterious thumb drive and Gordon gives him 90 thousand dollars.
Except as soon as the trade is made, Gordon shoots Bennett dead. Gordon must now get this thumb drive, which clearly has some incriminating evidence on it, back to his employer. Except while he was shooting Bennett, he dropped the drive, and now there are four adorable Siberian Husky puppies standing side by side, as if in a picture, staring at him.
It takes Gordon a second to realize that one of these puppies ate his thumb drive. Shit. Now what? He grabs all four puppies and takes them with him.
Little does Gordon know, halfway down the block, pet vets slash scatterbrains Liz and Paola were coming to retrieve those puppies, as they had evidence Bennett was neglecting them (he was – stupid Bennett). Paola, a Game of Thrones enthusiast, brought a real-life Game of Thrones replica sword to intimidate Bennett into giving them the puppies. Except now the puppies aren’t with Bennett. They’re with this other guy. Who’s this other guy? They start following him.
We jump back a couple of days where we meet Bennett before all this happened, and learn that he was lucky enough to overhear a live-mic situation on a news show he was close-captioning where the head anchor, psychopath Grant, was banging an intern who’s not his wife. This, we realize, is how Bennett got himself into this mess. He tried to blackmail Grant with the audio.
We bounce back and forth between Bennett, Grant, Liz, Paola, and Gordon, as well as bouncing back and forth in time, gradually putting the puzzle pieces together just as all five parties (well, four, since poor Bennett’s dead) smash together in one final bloody battle. Of course, the only thing you care about is are those adorable puppies okay? They can’t let anything happen to those adorable puppies, can they? No way a writer would hurt even a fictional puppy, yes? Eh, you’ll have to read Kill Shelter and find out for yourself, sucker.
I really liked this.
For starters, I liked how the script was designed for us to play catch-up. We see Bennett. We see this mean dude. They make an exchange. We don’t know what for. He kills Bennett. We cut to three days earlier when Bennett is alive. Now we’re wondering, “What did this guy do to get into this mess?”
It’s simple but intriguing questions like this that buy you pages. And that’s all you’re trying to do as a writer. You’re buying pages of interest from your reader. If you can come up with one mystery here, another there, you can buy as many as 20-30 pages from the reader. So these guys had me right away.
I loved all the weird choices. I loved how Paola carried around a Game of Thrones sword that was so big and heavy she could barely lift it.
There’s this whole thread where Bennett has this bizarre Joseph and the Technicolor Dreamcoat 30,000 dollar bullshit vest that supposedly cures back pain. It’s got a Siri operating system and it lights up and whines at anyone who enters Bennett’s place to please “plug it in.” How do people come up with this stuff?
And what a GENIUS move it was to take a comedy staple – two stoner dudes who stumble around aimlessly in pursuit of the MacGuffin – and turn them into women. I didn’t realize until reading this script that I’ve never seen that before. These characters have ALWAYS BEEN DUDES. Not only did it freshen up the story. Liz and Paola KILLED. They stole the script.
Usually when I read zany scripts like this, the writers aren’t good with the peripheral stuff. They don’t care, for example, about anybody’s backstory. They’d rather come up with the next zany plot point. But these guys are different. EVERYBODY has a motivation, sometimes elaborately so.
For example, we find out that these puppies came from Liz’s dog. But not just any dog, a dog that was dying. A dog that was able to have these puppies right before death. I mean, how much more motivation does a character need to save puppies?
And Bennett too! He’s got this entire backstory where his mom got in a car accident. There were complications. He had to put her in a home. And that home is costing him a ton of money. Which means he can’t keep up with his student loan payments. Which is why, of course, he has to blackmail the news anchor.
And no – in case you were wondering – it wasn’t endless chunks of exposition that gave us this information. These guys are masters at saying a lot quickly.
I have to give them props. Despite a potentially messy setup (time jumping and multiple protags) I was never confused. A big reason for this is they give each character a strong memorable introduction (remember when we talked about that?). When you DON’T have strong character intros and try to write these “bounce around” scripts, we always forget who’s who. Even if a character was introduced 10 pages ago.
The only gripe I have about this script is that they don’t know what to do with these movies anymore – the zany dark ensemble comedies. They’ve never done well at the box office outside of the Coen Brothers. But these days it’s even worse. They get discarded onto Netflix with barely any marketing, and you never hear about them again. I just don’t know that I would recommend writing a script like this unless you’re using it as a writing sample. With that said, I hope this one bucks the trend because it’s a darn good script.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[xx] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Read this script STRICTLY for character introductions. Note how you know exactly who each character is after their first scene. I read too many scripts with boring, vague, or weak character intros and it’s always those scripts where I have to keep checking my notes. “Who’s this again?” “Wait, who is this person?” Once you learn how to write strong character introductions, you make the reading process a thousand times easier for the reader.
Many have called The Truman Show the best spec script ever written. Today I’m going to remove the film from memory, read the script fresh, and determine if that’s true.
Genre: Drama/Fantasy
Logline: A life insurance salesman slowly discovers that his entire life is actually a television show.
About: In 1997, hot upstart screenwriter Andrew Niccol, whose first feature film, Gattaca, was about to hit theaters, had just finished a new script called The Truman Show. The script, which was being read in every Hollywood circle as fast as they could get a copy delivered (no PDFs back then), was getting the kind of coverage that no script before it had received. We’re talking geniuses across the board. Many people were calling it the greatest screenplay ever written – easily the best spec ever written. With Scott Rudin producing and Peter Weir directing, the film would make the controversial choice to cast Jim Carrey in the lead. The movie did all right, and had its fans. But many remember it as a slightly-better-than-average film that couldn’t live up to the potential of its premise.
Details: 128 pages – Draft that sold
The Truman Show, whether you believe it’s a great script or not, was castrated by the one thing I hate most about Hollywood. That the town is more interested in putting together a great package than they are making a good movie. People want to parade their production around town, claiming they have “this” super hot director and “this” A-list actor. They don’t care if any of these people are actually right for the movie. As long as they can throw the perfect package in their rival agency’s (or studio’s, or productions company’s) face, they’re happy.
Jim Carrey doomed this movie. Doomed it. Look, I don’t know how much better the film would’ve been without him. But you could tell they saw an actor on one of the hottest streaks in Tinseltown history and allowed THAT to dictate their decision. As opposed to someone who was a better fit for this description: “TRUMAN BURBANK, thinning hair, a body going soft around the edges, appearing older than his thirty-four years sits at the wheel of his eight-year-old Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme.”
People tried so hard to believe Jim Carrey was a good actor. There was that whole weird method acting Man on the Moon thing that cinephiles fell for for some reason. But Carrey has proven himself to be, at best, an average dramatic actor. And this movie needed someone who could act.
Luckily, I have a Forgetachine. It allows me to go back in time and forget certain things. So what I’m going to use it for today is forgetting The Truman Show movie. Everything about it. Jim Carrey. Ed Harris. All of it. This will allow me to read the screenplay the way Hollywood first read it back in 1997, and determine if it’s really the greatest spec script ever written. Wanna come with?
The Truman Show follows a 34 year old Truman Burbank, who lives in Queens, New York. Truman lives an average life as a life insurance salesman whose daily highlight is perusing magazines at a local magazine stand.
His wife, Marian, seems to be bored by his very existence. His best friend, Marlon, who he’s known since high school, is the only person he can share anything with. Lately, he’s been complaining that he’s never done anything daring with his life, never gone anywhere. He wants to change that.
Meanwhile, we see strange things start to happen around Truman. For example, a giant light just… falls in front of his car one day. Seemingly from nowhere. And whenever Truman isn’t looking, nearby people watch him, whisper about him.
Eventually we arrive in a giant room where a man named Cristof observes a series of people answering a single phone, one by one, each telling the person on the other end that, no thank you, they’re not interested in insurance. We then cut to Truman at work, and we realize that he’s the one making these calls. What the heck is going on?
Truman starts having bigger suspicions that something is up. And things go nuclear when his father, who he watched drown when he was seven, turns up looking like a homeless man. The father seems to be about to tell Truman something before men in uniform grab him and haul him away.
Truman begins walking into buildings he’s always passed by in his life, only to find out that they’re hollow shells. Finally, he gets on a boat, determined to get the hell out of this place, only to get to the edge of a city he now realizes is a giant movie set. He walks into the control room, confronts Cristof, the man who’s controlled his entire life, before storming out of this facade existence for good.
The Truman Show screenplay is a classic example of a killer concept that doesn’t stick the landing.
This specific concept, where the hero lives in a false reality, is tricky, because it’s hard to expand that storyline out for 120 minutes. Once we realize that we’re in a false reality, it isn’t clear why we should care anymore. We need the story to mature into something else.
A good example of this is another 90s movie, The Matrix. Once Neo realizes he’s in The Matrix, they don’t then spend the rest of the movie having him wonder if he’s really in the Matrix or if it’s all a figment of his imagination. He gets transported into the real world, maturing the storyline into something else entirely.
We don’t do that here. And you can feel Niccol stressing to extend his concept out for as long as possible. There’s a good 40 pages where we’ve clearly established that Truman knows the city isn’t real. The outside world knows this. Truman’s aware of it. The actors know he knows. Yet the story doesn’t evolve. Truman walks around a bunch, challenging everyone to admit that this is a facade (in one scene, which I’m almost positive was ditched for the movie, he takes a woman’s baby from her and threatens to slam it into the pavement if she doesn’t admit that she knows his name).
While I don’t remember how much of this was changed for the film, I do remember leaving that movie disappointed with the ending. Because the thing with these high concepts is that they generate bigger expectations, which makes it even harder to stick your landing, because you’re not just trying to write a normal great ending, you’re trying to write a great ending worthy of a great concept.
I’ll tell you this, though. Reading this script reminded me of how different writing was in the 90s, back in the spec age. In those days, because concept was king, writers were trying to keep your interest with story. You had people adding twists and turns and surprises into their screenplays. The Truman Show – a man finds out that his whole life is a TV show. The Sixth Sense – Our main character is dead. The Matrix – we’re living in a computer. Tarantino – every one of this scripts was built on surprising plot developments.
These days, we’ve supplanted this with spectacle. Studios are more interested in a giant set-piece than a clever plot development. And I think that’s the reason a lot of movie writing has gotten stale recently. Writers have lost the “unexpected story development” muscle because it’s no longer required of them.
And that’s where The Truman Show shines the brightest. I can imagine reading this for the first time, seeing a giant light fall from the sky in front of our protagonist’s car and thinking, “What the fuck is going on right now??” Seeing random men in an unidentified room answering Truman’s life insurance phone calls. “Who are these men?” “Where is this going??” It would’ve been exciting.
And the script has a dream lead role situation. A character who’s been lied to his whole life then one day awakens, no longer willing to to stick to the script. I could see actors everywhere wanting to play that part. And there’s some really interesting thematic questions as well – how much control do we have over our lives? Is there such thing as fate? Can we change the world around us if we exert our will to such a degree that it has no choice but to submit? These are universal questions that resonate with a lot of people. So if I’m reading this script, I’m not just thinking “clever concept.” I’m thinking, “Oh, this is addressing some deeper questions here.” And you don’t usually get that in a spec – both of those things. You get one or the other.
So it makes sense why this script made so much noise at the time. But you still have to stick the landing. Niccol probably needed to take this through a few more rewrites to figure out a midpoint twist that brought new life into the plot. Because while I was determined to see Truman overcome and expose what was being done to him, I got bored watching him spin his wheels while doing so.
It was an interesting reading experiment nonetheless. For those of you interested, here’s a copy of the script. Make a screenwriting course of it. Read the script and watch the movie and figure out why this never became anything more than an average film.
Script link: The Truman Show
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[xx] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: We’ve forgotten how to use surprises in screenwriting. We’re being conditioned to believe that spectacle is the most important thing moving forward. I’ll prove this to you. What’s the biggest surprise in the last five Marvel superhero movies? Don’t look. Close your eyes and try to figure it out. Okay ready? It’s when The Vulture turns out to be Liz’s father in Spider-Man: Homecoming, right? That’s the plot development that got a big “whoooaaa” from the audience. And that’s not because it was the greatest twist in the world. It’s because audiences aren’t used to that sort of thing anymore – where they’re entertained by a story development as opposed to an action scene. So note to writers. If someone can write a script with a series of good surprises or one great surprise, your spec will probably make some noise.
