Genre: Horror/Religious
Premise: An inexperienced priest and a charismatic possessed woman form a dark and dangerous bond while on the run from sinister forces within the Catholic Church.
About: This writer has been writing for over a decade. He had some scripts on the Blood List all the way back in 2012 if memory serves correctly. And he wrote one of the more underrated horror/thriller films of the last five years, “The Night House.” This script finished with 9 votes on last year’s Black List.
Writer: Luke Piotrowski
Details: 110 pages
I’m kinda in a religious horror mood because I’m seriously considering watching the Sydney Sweeney religious horror film, Immaculate, this weekend. That one has an interesting development story behind it. Sweeney read the original script all the way back when she was 15! She tried to set it up to star in it but never had the cache.
Once she hit it big, she phoned the screenwriter and asked him if she could buy the script from him. Of course he said yes and then Sweeney recruited her Voyeurs director to direct it.
From everything I’ve heard, the movie is just okay. But it’s supposed to have the ENDING OF ALL ENDINGS. The question then becomes, do I want to go to a movie just for the last three minutes of a film? Normally, the answer would be no. But this is Sydney Sweeney, which makes the answer more difficult.
We’ll have to see. But in the meantime, I’ve got another religious horror script for you, Blasphemous. Ironically, it has a role that could’ve also worked for Sweeney.
When we meet 50-something priest Alan Villars and 30-something priest Ed Kerrigan, they’re picking up a strange woman in a cult compound. There’s a lot of eeriness surrounding their late-night arrival and the compound members who are eager to get rid of this woman.
Villars and Kerrigan throw her in the back of a U-Haul trailer and drive off. They’re taking her to an arch diocese. Although details are sparse in the early-going, we get the impression that she’s possessed.
They don’t get far before they hit a giant bull that happens to be in the middle of the road, crashing their car and trailer. Both of them are fine but when they come out, they see a man in a pickup approaching. The man stops and tells them he’ll help them get their car set back on its wheels but they keep telling him no thanks.
The man gets suspicious, starts poking around, and that’s when the girl, whose name we learn is Paula Jean, starts calling for help from inside the trailer. The man runs to his truck and pulls out a gun but not before Villars shoots him. During the chaos, Paula Jean escapes the trailer and runs into the forest.
Kerrigan runs after her, following her to a gas station food store. Paula Jean puts her hand up and says she’ll gladly go wherever Kerrigan wants to take her. But just not with that Villars guy. There’s something off about him. Kerrigan reluctantly agrees and the two steal the cashier’s car and head off on the rest of the trip.
Villars later catches up to the gas station, where he proves Paula Jean’s suspicions about him correct. Villars shoots the cashier dead. You see, this thing that’s going on with Paula Jean is so top-secret, nobody can know about it. That’s why anyone who sees her must be eliminated. But what is Paula Jean’s deal? Is she just a woman possessed? Or is she much more?
One of the most challenging lessons I ever learned in screenwriting is the concept of my script “feeling written.” You’re reading the script and it doesn’t feel like what’s happening is really happening. Instead, you can feel the screenwriter working it out and forcing his thoughts into the script in a way that comes off as artificial. That’s how Paula Jean felt in this script.
I wish there was a clearer way to explain it because it’s something that every screenwriter has to learn at some point. But I’ll tell you the moment in this script where it became “written” to me.
Paula Jean has cornered Kerrigan in the gas station store and after making him promise that he won’t team up with Villars again, she wants to “seal” the promise with a kiss. So she goes in for the kiss, moves her mouth to his earlobe instead, then BITES OFF his earlobe. THEN she kisses him, pushing his earlobe into his mouth, and then after the kiss is over, telling him he now has to swallow it.
I don’t know about you. But that just feels highly artificial to me. It doesn’t feel natural to the moment at all. It’s a writer who’s deliberately thinking, “How do I write something SHOCKING here?”
To make these moments work, you have to do a ton of backstory work to figure out exactly who this person is. Those details would then creep into each scene and then when the character needed to do something big and shocking, it would be a payoff to all those little things that were set up earlier. It can’t just be, “EARLOBE BITING TIME CAUSE EARLOBE BITING TIME IS SHOCKING!”
I know this isn’t the best example but even if you had Paula Jean mention her love of Mike Tyson in two earlier scenes, NOW having her bite someone’s earlobe off makes so much more sense.
That’s a microcosm of my bigger issue I had with the screenplay. Which is that I don’t get the sense that the writer truly understands the world he’s writing about. I think he SORT OF understands it. But when you only “sort of” understand your world, the execution of your story only “sort of” works.
I look back to the gold standard of “EFFED UP SH*T” in Silence of the Lambs, and I remember reading the amount of research author Thomas Harris did on serial killers to ensure that both Hannibal and Buffalo Bill came off as authentic. As I read Blasphemous, I felt like the writer had done maybe 1/5th of that work.
With that said, the script has an undeniable momentum to it. It takes place in, virtually, real time. And it’s always propelling forward. That’s the nice thing about a story on wheels, is that it naturally feels like it’s going somewhere.
Never is this more apparent than right after you’ve read a script that stays in place, which I just had. I read a script about a group of people in a small town and it just SAT THERE. It had no momentum whatsoever.
If you can get your story on wheels AND add some urgency to it, which this does, you’re cooking with gas. It’s very easy to keep the reader invested.
I’m just not sure I was ever onboard with these characters. Paula Jean is supposed to be this captivating mystery of a character. Yet I saw her as more of an artificially constructed vessel for the writer to bang out a series of shocking moments, or say a series of shocking things. I suppose that’s what we’re all doing as writers to a certain extent. You’re constructing characters to affect the reader. But you have to do it invisibly. Organically. And Paula Jean was anything but.
Curious what others thought of this one as I get the impression mileage may vary.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: I believe that it’s very difficult to make a scary character who TALKS A LOT. It can be done, of course. But most of the characters we fear in horror films don’t say a whole lot, if anything at all. Michael Myers comes to mind. It’s the mystery of what’s going on in their heads, the things we’ll never know, that make them so scary. The longer this movie went on, the more Paula Jean spoke, and the less I became scared of her.
Is this the genre every writer should be writing in right now?
Genre: Action/2-Hander
Premise: A green FBI agent is sent to Miami to retrieve a criminal for prosecution. During the return trip, the fed and the thug each learn there’s more to the other than expected.
About: Fox bought this script back in 2005 as a vehicle (no pun intended) for Hugh Jackman. But it was not to be, as Jackman eventually backed out to do other projects. Screenwriter Dario Scardapane would go on to have a solid working career in Hollywood, working on The Punisher series and Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan.
Writer: Dario Scardapane
Details: 108 pages
I don’t believe in luck insofar as it determines who “makes it” or not in the industry. If you have the talent, you will “make it.” However, where your career goes once you’re in the industry is a different beast.
I’ve seen so many people become big due to lucky timing or a lucky break. And then I’ve seen people miss out on that big opportunity because of elements outside of their control.
I was thinking of this today because I was reading an article in The Hollywood Reporter about Sydney Sweeney’s latest movie, Immaculate. I didn’t know this but Sweeney was on a show called Everything Sucks! on Netflix but it was surprisingly canceled after one year. It was a blow at the time for Sweeney. But guess what? It opened up the chance for her to be on Euphoria, the show that broke her out as an actress.
Think about that. If Everything Sucks! continued, it’s highly likely there would be no Sydney Sweeney mania right now. And that would make me, and a lot of red-blooded American men, very sad.
When I came across this script, I noticed that it originally had Hugh Jackman attached. But he would later leave the project. This happens all the time in Hollywood and the actor leaving the project drastically changes the paths of the writer who wrote the script. Had this been made, writer Dario Scardapane very well might be an A-list screenwriter.
As it stands, he’s done some TV and had a decent credit with the Liam Neeson thriller, Memory. But, he’s not John Spaiths.
By the way, Hugh Jackman had his own fortuitous lucky break. The original guy who was supposed to play Wolverine, Dougray Scott, couldn’t do it because of a scheduling conflict. Would Hugh Jackman have anywhere close to the career he has today if he hadn’t gotten Wolverine? Methinks no.
And it’s not that that Scott had a bad career. He’s been steadily working ever since then. He just doesn’t have 100 million in the bank.
Then again, maybe this script will tell us that there’s a reason Jackman left. Let’s find out for ourselves.
Antwan “The Swan” Carter is a gangster to the highest degree. He’s one of those dudes who’s spent just as much time in prison as outside of it. When we meet him, he’s trying to get the F out of Miami. But TSA at the airport notice blood on his shoes and start questioning him. He makes a run for it but they catch him and take him in.
Cut to New York where we meet uptight youngster FBI agent Miles Vreeland. Vreeland is shocked when he gets the orders from his boss to go down to Miami to pick Carter up. Usually, they’d send a senior officer. And the method of delivery is odd as well. They’re going to be taking the train (the ‘Fed-X’) instead of a plane.
Vreeland shows up with two US Marshalls, picks Carter up, and begins the delivery. Vreeland doesn’t like Carter. He challenges him on the fact that his MO for his crimes is to recruit 15 year old kids. That’s what led to Carter making a run for it. He and four kids robbed a Brinx truck but the robbery went sideways. All four of the kids were killed.
Just as the two finish talking about that, one of the Marshalls pulls a gun and starts shooting… AT VREELAND! WTF?? Vreeland and Carter improvise and take the guy down. But then the other Marshall comes in guns-a-blazing as well. This right after he sabotaged the train, which goes spinning off the track and crashing.
Once everything settles, some black ops dudes in Yukons storm into the train wreckage, ALSO SHOOTING at Vreeland. What’s going on here!!?? Vreeland and Carter make a run for it, hurtling into the forest. Carter keeps demanding that Carter free his handcuffs so he has a fighting chance but Vreeland says there’s no way I’m letting you free.
They make it to a store and Vreeland calls his boss to tell him what happened. His boss says not to worry about it. He’ll have men pick him up in 15 minutes. Hold tight. Except his men don’t pick him up. Those Yukons come back. That’s when Vreeland realized that this goes way deeper than he thought, and that, ironically, the only person he can trust right now is the killer he’s escorting. Will the two be able to work together and get out of this? Or are these forces too big to escape?
You know what I realized while reading this script?
The market is ripe for a 2-Hander. That’s when you have two people – a team if you will – leading your script in some sort of crime related storyline. This is a movie blueprint Hollywood has been printing money off of for 50+ years. But, for whatever reason, there hasn’t been a big one for a while now.
There are two main ways to break into Hollywood with a script. One is to write something completely new and fresh. The other is to figure out what successful genre is lying dormant at the moment and write a script in that genre. The 2-Hander is lying dormant right now. So, whoever comes up with a good one could have a sale on their hands.
One of the things I love best about the 2-Hander is when it incorporates the “reluctant team-up.” The good guy and the bad guy will often have to work together. And it’s just so much fun when that happens! And this script does a good job building that relationship. The key is, we have to like them together. And we definitely like these two together.
The script does get bumpy in places. I wasn’t exactly thrilled that the bad guys were Bolivians. Although I guess back in 2005, that choice would’ve been on brand. It’s funny how hard it’s become to come up with a country for villains these days. But this tells me that it’s always been a challenge.
Most of the story revolves around a plot that had Carter stealing this money and then hiding it. These bad guys seem to be after that money. Although for the majority of the movie, Carter keeps those details from Vreeland.
This script is an example of: if you get the main variables right, you’ve got a lot of leeway to make average choices. I personally push writers to make as many strong creative choices as they can. But you don’t have to if you get the main character right, his partner right, their relationship right, the mystery of why they’re being chased right. And all of that was solid. Which resulted in a solid script!
Which you can read for yourselves: Screenplay for Fed-X
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[x] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: An action scene is always more exciting when you can add a second front. Normally, in gunfight scenes, it’s our guys versus the bad guys. But in that early train-crash scene where Vreeland is taking on the fake US Marshalls, he’s also having to deal with Carter. A second front. A lot of times, writing is about building complications into scenarios that are too familiar. That’s what the “second front” does.
A reminder THIS THURSDAY to get your Logline Showdown entries in. Winner gets a script review the following Friday. The theme this month is “Movie Crossover.” That means that, in addition to sending your logline, you send in the movie crossover that best represents your script (i.e. “Aliens meets The Equalizer”).
If that isn’t incentive enough, guess what! We’re going to add a SIXTH entry (to the traditional five), regardless of how good or bad the logline is, for whoever has the best movie crossover pitch. So make sure your movie crossover pitch is amazing!
Here are the deets on how to enter!
What: Movie-Crossover Showdown
I need your: Title, Genre, Logline, and Movie Crossover Pitch
Competition Date: Friday, March 22nd
Deadline: Thursday, March 21st, 10pm Pacific Time
Where: Send your submissions to carsonreeves3@gmail.com
Moving on to the world of entertainment, let’s discuss some box office.
It’s always tough to get excited when an animated film (Kung Fu Panda 4) tops the box office. It’s like, “yaaaayyyyy! Kids movieeeee!” Not that there’s anything wrong with it. But it’s kinda lame when it’s the third sequel from a second rate animation franchise. Cause it’s not even like you can celebrate a cool movie. You’re celebrating a tired franchise.
I would much rather celebrate the animated film trailer that dropped a week ago, which was so good, I was on the brink of crying. It reminded me that music and imagery are the powerful forces that bring our writing to life. And that, when all three are done well, the effect is magical. Watch this trailer and tell me you don’t get the feels welling up inside.
Sign me up! It’s like Wall-E meets ET meets… Bambi?
I sat there for a while and wondered how this trailer had such an effect on me, especially because it’s become harder and harder for writers and filmmakers to affect me emotionally, only because I can see behind the illusion. I can see the Matrix code.
One of the hardest things to do as a writer is to keep the code hidden, to move your story along invisibly. It’s a little easier to do in a trailer because you don’t have to show any plot. Plotting is where the gears are most visible.
Trailers are funny that way. Some of the best trailers I’ve ever seen have been terrible movies because they didn’t have to tell any of their crappy story in the trailer. Cloud Atlas is the best example of this. God, I loved that trailer.
So I hope that doesn’t happen with The Wild Robot. I pray it’s more Wall-E than Hotel Transylvania.
Outside of that, I continue to be fascinated by the TV landscape and its desperate attempts to find a new zeitgeist product.
Netflix is going to finally hit us with Benioff And Weiss’ new show, The 3 Body Problem. It’s looking bad for the Game of the Thrones duo. I’m predicting disaster for this one. This is not a new take. I said it was going to be a disaster the second they bought it.
Why?
Cause nobody likes weird inconsistent sloppy mythology. Which is what this book has always been. It’s based in bizarro world Chinese mythology that nobody outside of that country understands. I don’t know why anyone would hitch their wagon to it.
And the trailers have just been AWFUL. They took what was already cheap and cheapified it with cheapy special effects. The only chance this thing had at working was it it felt real and authentic. But every shot looks computer-generated so… they dug their grave. Now they gotta lie in it.
The rest of the recent TV shows haven’t been much better. Shogun seems to be getting universal praise. And it does have amazing production value. But building a show that has to navigate three different languages (Japanese, Portuguese, English) probably wasn’t the best idea in retrospect. I suspect that the audience will dwindle for this film as its subject matter is so sophisticated and requires so much concentration that it’ll become more work than entertainment. Which is the death knell for any piece of writing.
Peacock is trying to create its own White Lotus in “Apples Never Fall.” They even got the actor from the first White Lotus to lead the series! But poor Peacock. They’re still living in 1984. They don’t know how to make a show like this.
HBO’s big new swing, The Regime, with Kate Winslet, looks like a miss. By the way, Kate has to stop complaining about Hollywood whenever she does press for these shows. You want to get people excited to see your show. Not be a big fat downer.
Netflix’s huge gamble on The Last Airbender didn’t work. Hulu’s version of Knives Out, Death and Other Details, isn’t working.
One show I did start watching that I thought was pretty good was Constellation, on Apple TV. If you haven’t seen it, at least check out the pilot. It’s got a crazy opening set piece on the International Space Station. Still, even that show isn’t getting great reviews, which tells me the pilot may be the highlight.
Mr. And Mrs. Smith had a week where it was hot news. And it has great reviews. But audiences don’t seem to agree with the critics (90% to 66%). It’s hard for me to take anything Donald Glover does seriously but I should probably still check this out.
This leaves us with only one TV show left. It is a show that has been so under-the-radar, you haven’t heard about it until now. But I promise you it’s worth discovering. It’s a Korean show called Chicken Nugget. And it’s about a guy’s girlfriend who turns into a Chicken Nugget.
I know that I’ve tapped out my rating system at “genius,” but I may have to add a new designation just for this show: “Super Extraordinary.” I’ve heard of high concept. But this almost invents a new type of concept. It’s as if the Gods all got together and came up with the best TV show idea possible. I will be watching this 682 times this year. Which should take care of my TV needs for the foreseeable future. See, I knew I’d find a show.
May we all, one day, come up with an idea as good as “Chicken Nugget.”
An excerpt from my upcoming book, “Scriptshadow’s 250 Dialogue Tips”
It has been promised. But as of yet, it hasn’t been delivered.
Over the next month, I’ll be including excerpts from my upcoming dialogue book, which I’m planning on releasing a month from now. Here is the introduction to the book. The world of screenwriting is about to change forever.
What you’re about to read is the introduction to the book…
Not long after I started my website, Scriptshadow, a site dedicated to analyzing amateur and professional screenplays, I was hired by an amateur writer to consult on a script he had written. The writer had completed a couple of screenplays already and was excited about his most recent effort, a crime-drama (“with a hint of comedy”) he felt was the perfect showcase for his evolving skills. Although I won’t reveal the actual script for privacy reasons, we’ll refer to this screenplay as, “Highs and Lows,” and we’ll call the writer, “Gabe.”
Highs and Lows was about a guy obsessed with a rare street drug and, to this day, it is one of the worst screenplays I have ever read in my life. We’re talking 147 pages of unintelligible nonsense, a script so aggressively lousy, I considered submitting it to the CIA as a low-budget alternative to waterboarding.
After I put together the notes on Highs and Lows, I spent a good portion of the day debating whether I should call Gabe and aggressively suggest he pursue a different career path. I’d never done such a thing before. But, in my heart, I knew that if this man pursued this craft, he may very well end up wasting a decade of his life. If it wasn’t for my girlfriend ripping the phone out of my hand and telling me there was no way I was going to destroy this writer’s dreams, I would’ve made the call. Instead, I sent him his notes, detailing, as best I could, what needed to be improved and how to do so, and moved on.
Cut to five years later and I was contacted by a different gentleman (we’ll call him “Randy”) for another consultation. In stark contrast to Gabe’s script, I experienced what every reader prays for when they open a screenplay, which is a great easy-to-read story with awesome characters. But it was the dialogue that stood out. Randy wasn’t ready to challenge Tarantino just yet but the conversations between his characters were always clever, always engaging, and always fun.
I sent his script out to a few producers and one of them ended up hiring him for a job. He wrote back, thanked me, and mused that he’d come a long way since our first consultation. “First consultation?” I said to myself. “What is this guy talking about?” I looked back through my e-mails to see if we had corresponded before and nothing came up. But then I dug deeper and discovered that I *had* worked with Randy before. Under a different e-mail address.
The owner of that e-mail?
Gabe. Which was a pen name he had used at the time.
This was not possible. Randy wrote with confidence. Gabe wrote like he’d accidentally fallen asleep on his keyboard. I went back and re-checked, checked again, checked some more, only to return to the same baffling conclusion. This page-turning Tour de Force was written by the same writer who had written one of the worst screenplays I’d ever read!
After my denial wore off, I got in touch with Gabe and asked him the question that had been eating at me ever since I confirmed his identity: “What in the world did you do differently this time around?” I especially wanted to know how his dialogue had skyrocketed from a 1 out of 10 to an 8 out of 10. His answer is something I’ll share with you later in the book, as it’s one of the most important tips you’ll ever learn about dialogue.
But for now, I want to emphasize the lesson Gabe’s dramatic improvement taught me, something I remind myself whenever I read a not-so-good screenplay: You are always capable of improving as a screenwriter. If Gabe could go from worst to first, so can you.
Which is why I want to share with you one of the biggest lies you’ll encounter when you begin your screenwriting journey. I heard it a bunch when I first started screenwriting and I still hear it today: “You either have an ear for dialogue or you don’t.” This faulty statement, which you’ll hear mostly from snobby agents, jaded executives, and impatient producers, is dead wrong.
Writing good dialogue can be learned.
Let me repeat that:
Writing good dialogue can be learned.
To be fair, doing so is challenging. More so than any other aspect of the craft. Aaron Sorkin, who many believe to be the best dialogue writer working today, admits as much. In an interview with Jeff Goldsmith promoting his film, The Social Network, Sorkin confessed that while storytelling and plotting are built on a technical foundation, making them easy to teach, writing dialogue is more of an instinctual thing, and therefore hard to break down into teachable steps.
Indeed, dialogue contains elements of spontaneity, cleverness, charm, gravitas, intelligence, purpose, playfulness, personality, and, of course, a sense of humor. This varied concoction of ingredients does not come in the form of an official recipe, leaving writers unable to identify how much of each is required to write “the perfect dialogue.” Which has led many screenwriting teachers to throw up their hands in surrender and label dialogue, “unteachable,” which is why there hasn’t been a single good dialogue book ever written.
When screenwriting teachers do broach the topic of dialogue, they teach the version of it that’s easiest on them, which amounts to telling you all the things you’re NOT supposed to do. My favorite of these is: “Show don’t tell.” Show us that Joey is a ladies’ man. Don’t have him tell us that he’s a ladies’ man.
“Show don’t tell” is actually good screenwriting advice but why do you think screenwriting teachers are so eager to teach it? Because it means they don’t have to teach dialogue! If you’re showing something, you’re not writing any conversations.
Or they’ll say, “Avoid on-the-nose dialogue.” Again, not bad advice. But how does that help you write the dialogue that stumbles out of the mouth of Jack Sparrow? Or sashays out of the mouth of Mia Wallace? In order to write good dialogue, you need to teach people what *to* do, not what *not to* do.
If you ever want to test whether a self-professed screenwriting teacher understands dialogue, ask them what their best dialogue tip is. If they say, “go to a coffee shop and listen to how people talk,” run as far away from that teacher as possible because I can promise you they know nothing about dialogue. If someone is giving you a tip where there’s nothing within the tip itself that teaches you anything, they’re a charlatan.
What the heck is good dialogue anyway?
Good dialogue is conversation that moves the scene, and by association the plot, forward in an entertaining fashion. “Entertaining” can be defined in a number of ways. It could mean the dialogue is humorous, clever, tension-filled, suspenseful, thought-provoking, dramatic, or a number of other things. But it does need those two primary ingredients.
• It needs to push the scene forward in a purposeful way.
• It needs to entertain.
What prevents writers from writing good dialogue? That answer could be a book unto itself but in my experience, having read over 10,000 screenplays, the primary mistake I’ve found that writers make is they think too logically.
When they have characters speak to one another, they construct those characters’ responses in a way that keeps the train moving and nothing more. They get that first part right – the “move the story forward” part – but they forget about the “entertain” part. Don’t worry, I’ve got over a hundred tips in this book that will help you write more entertaining dialogue.
Yet another aspect missing from a lot of the dialogue I read is naturalism – the ability to capture what people really sound like when they speak to each other. You are trying to capture things like awkwardness, tangents, authenticity, words not coming out quite right. You’re trying to mimic all that to such a degree that the characters sound like living breathing people.
And yet, while being true-to-life, you’re also attempting to heighten your dialogue. You’re trying to make every reply clever. You’re trying to nail that zinger. You’re giving your hero the perfect line at the perfect moment. How does one combine realism with “heightened-ism?” That’s one of the many paradoxes of dialogue.
So I understand, intellectually, why so many teachers are terrified of dialogue. The act of writing movie conversation is so intricate and nuanced that the easy thing to do is leave it up to chance and tell writers that they either have an ear for it or they don’t (or to go to a local coffee shop and “listen to people talk”).
But dialogue is like any skill. It can be learned. It can be improved. And I dedicated years of my life looking through millions of lines of dialogue, ranging from the worst to the best, to find that code. And I believe I’ve found it. By the end of this book, you’ll have found it as well.
It won’t be easy. This is stuff you’ll have to practice to get good at. But, once you do, your dialogue will be better than any aspiring writer who hasn’t read this book. That much I can promise you.
So let’s not waste any more time. I’m going to give you 250 dialogue tips and I’m going to start with the two biggest of those tips right off the bat. If all you ever do for your screenwriting is incorporate these two tips, your dialogue will be, at the very least, solid. Are you ready? Here we go.
TIP 1 – Create dialogue-friendly characters – Dialogue-friendly characters are characters who generally talk a lot. They are naturally funny or tend to say interesting things, are quirky or strange or offbeat or manic or see the world differently than the average human being. The Joker in The Dark Knight is a dialogue-friendly character. Saul Goodman in Breaking Bad is a dialogue-friendly character. Deadpool is. Juno is. It’s hard to write good dialogue without characters who like to talk.
TIP 2 – Create dialogue-rich scenarios – Dialogue is like a plant. It needs sunshine to grow. If every one of your scenes is kept in the shade, good luck sprouting great dialogue. A scene where a young woman introduces her boyfriend to her accepting parents is never going to yield good dialogue. There’s zero conflict and, therefore, little chance for an interesting conversation. A scene where a young woman introduces her boyfriend to her highly judgmental parents who think their daughter is too good for him? Now you’ve got a dialogue-rich scenario!
I need you to internalize the above two tips because they will be responsible for the bulk of your dialogue success. Try to have at least one dialogue-friendly character in a key role (two or three is even better). Then, whenever you write a scene, ask yourself if you’re creating a scene where good dialogue can grow.
Don’t worry if these two things are confusing right now. We’re going to get into a lot more detail about how to find these dialogue-friendly characters and how to create these dialogue-rich scenarios.
A pattern you’ll notice throughout this book is that good dialogue comes from good preparation. The decisions you make before you write your dialogue are often going to be just as influential as the ones you make while writing your dialogue.
There’s more to come next week! If you want to hire me to take a look at your script and help you with your dialogue (or anything else), I will give you $100 off a set of feature or pilot notes. Just mention this post. You can e-mail me at carsonreeves1@gmail.com
Jiminy Crickets! We’ve got our first [x] impressive of the year!
Genre: Drama/Thriller
Premise: In a small town, a high school math teacher on the verge of having his first child with his wife, must manage a rapidly unraveling sexual relationship with a student.
About: Today’s script finished with only 7 votes on last year’s Black List. Proof yet again, Mr. Leonard needs to reevaluate his scoring system. Or else he’s going to have to start paying me to do these end-of-the-year re-rankings where I tell everyone how the scripts ACTUALLY should’ve been ranked. Screenwriter Drake Wootton has no previous writing credits although he did make it on as one of the hundreds of crew members on John Wick 3.
Writer: Drake Wootton
Details: 116 pages (long scripts are getting good scores lately!)
Today, I wanted to read something that pushed boundaries.
I know you’re tired of me saying it but, as someone who reads everything, I’m always searching for that writer willing to go beyond what is expected. He’s not the daily 9:45am LAX to ORD United flight. He’s Malaysia Airlines Flight 370.
Mr. Carter is just a normal high school math teacher living in a medium-sized town. He’s married to his high school sweetheart, Alyssa, who’s seven months pregnant. The first thing we think about when we see Mr. Carter is that he’s living the typical American life. He seems happy.
But then we note, when he goes to work, that there’s a girl in the back of the class, named Teva, who’s silently crying. And unlike how teachers are supposed to react to such situations, Mr. Carter is highly agitated by this. Once class is over and all the other kids have left, Mr. Carter slams the door and lays into Teva, telling her to “get over it.”
“It” is the brief sexual relationship they had. Logic finally arrived for Mr. Carter when it hit him that, in two months, he’s going to have a kid. The problem is, he’s made a 17 year old girl fall in love with him. She’s confused. She’s sad. All she wants is to be with him.
Meanwhile, back at home, Alyssa hires someone through an app to take care of house chores since she’s becoming less and less mobile. The person who takes the job is Ponce, a normal dude who, coincidentally, also happens to be in Mr. Carter’s class.
What starts off as innocent chores becomes more and more charged as Alyssa begins to have sexual fantasies about Ponce. Although, on paper, Alyssa has had the perfect life, she’s always been a bit of a rebel and is frustrated that that side of her has been curbed. However, unlike her husband, Alyssa seems to have some level of control. She walks up to the line with Ponce but never crosses it. At least not yet.
Teva continues to be a problem for Mr. Carter at school but it gets a lot worse when she finds out she’s pregnant. When she tells Mr. Carter, all he can think about is getting rid of the kid as soon as possible. But Teva isn’t game. She likes the idea of having a child – his child in particular.
Mr. Carter goes nuts trying to talk Teva off that ledge. “You realize,” he says, “That if you have that child, my life is over.” But the more he protests, the more determined she is to have it. Mr. Carter convinces himself that he needs to take this into his own hands. So he ambushes Teva when she’s home alone one night. Except nothing – and I mean nothing – about what happens next goes according to plan.
I’m so happy that when I first saw this logline, I thought, “That sounds like it could be something. The ingredients are there!” And I turned out to be right. This is something. This is really something.
I want to use this opportunity to talk about the many creative choices you are forced to make when writing a screenplay and how important it is to think through those creative choices so that each one gives you the most bang for your back.
The first creative choice Wootton makes is introducing us to a loving Mr. Carter and his pregnant wife, Alyssa. We see the love between these two as they hang out in bed and talk about their child. It’s cute. It’s sweet. We like them.
Then, in the very next scene, we find out Mr. Carter is sleeping with one of his students. The reason this is a smart creative choice is because Wootton could’ve easily started us with the classroom scene. But by first meeting Mr. Carter in this loving moment with his pregnant wife, it makes that second scene hit a lot harder. It changes our perception of Mr. Carter as opposed to immediately shaping it.
The next smart creative choice was to introduce Teva and that relationship AFTER IT HAD ENDED. Wootton could’ve brought us into this relationship at the peak – as it’s going hot and heavy. But by starting it at the end, with one side wanting that end and the other resisting it, it creates a much better launching pad for conflict throughout the story.
If he’s trying to get away and she’s trying to get him back, you’ve got this constant “threat” or “problem” that needs to be resolved, as opposed to the less interesting option of them sneaking around and not thinking all the much about the potential consequences of their actions.
These choices extend to the characters as well. Wootton didn’t need to make Alyssa pregnant. But by doing so, he raises the stakes of the story considerably. A teacher-student relationship that has the potential to destroy a marriage is one thing. A teacher-student relationship that has the potential to destroy a family is much worse.
And when you’re writing these scripts that are entirely character-driven, you need to make creative choices that raise the stakes as much as possible.
The final thing I loved about this script was the nuance. Most of the time when I read these scripts, they’re written with a hammer. Go watch the latest Tyler Perry movie, Mea Culpa, on Netflix, to see what I mean. Every moment is on-the-nose. Every plot development is accompanied by the town herald blowing their trumpet. Here, our writer is working with a 4mm 32 gauge sewing needle.
Alyssa’s relationship with Ponce is a great example of this. That could’ve become its own affair. Instead, it only dances around the potential affair.
But the biggest example of this is the ending. I’m not going to spoil it but Mr. Carter goes to Teva’s house at night with a kitchen knife. He’s planning to kill her. But a few things go wrong and she catches him before he can act. So, before she can figure things out, he quickly hides the knife inside his pants and pretends to be there cause he wants to talk to her.
They sit down and have this sweet moment and then they decide to go upstairs and, he starts seeing that he’s trailing blood everywhere. That really sharp kitchen knife that he stuffed in his pants has cut him. And cut him badly. This begins a final sequence that nobody reading this script could’ve predicted.
That’s what I love!
I love these scripts that seemingly shouldn’t work because they’re just four people in a small town with absolutely nothing new on the concept front. And yet the writer still finds a way to create new unexpected moments at the most important of times.
Most writers would’ve sent Mr. Carter to Tea’s house with a gun. There probably would’ve been a scramble for the gun at some point and it’s just the exact same ending we’ve seen a billion times already. I haven’t seen Mea Culpa. But I’m willing to bet all my tennis rackets that the ending is some variation of that.
The crazy thing about this script is that it’s going to be even better after a couple more drafts. It’s implied that this is a work in progress and I could see that. There’s this Romeo and Juliet play that Wootton clearly didn’t write the full subplot for yet. Both Teva and Ponce are the leads in the play. The way the ending plays out is going to cross-cut with that Romeo and Juliet play beautifully.
This is the closest script I’ve seen to matching the power, the character-exploration, and tone of one of my favorite movies, American Beauty. It has the potential to be that good. Will it be? You need to find the next Sam Mendes and maybe it will. :)
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[x] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: If you’re going to slowly boil your script, make sure to put your hero in the water right away, even when it’s still cold – “Slow builds” or “slow boils” work a heck of a lot better if we can already see our hero starting to cook from the beginning. This is a slow build type of script. But the reason we stick around during that slow-moving first part is because the writer has placed Mr. Carter in the pot by the second scene. We see that ending things with Teva is not going to go smoothly. It’s going to cause problems down the line. Which gives us a reason to turn the pages. We want to see how she applies pressure and how he will react to it. If you had started with things going well between these two, there’s not as much incentive to turn the pages of this slow-moving character study.
