Genre: Science Fiction
Premise: A biologist and her team travel into a mysterious cancerous-like bubble in the forest where the laws of biology no longer apply.
About: Celebrated novelist and screenwriter Alex Garland made waves with his first feature film in 2016, Ex Machina. This is his follow-up, which stars Natalie Portman. The film has endured some internal controversy at its embattled studio, Paramount, as they tried to get Garland to recut the film into something more mass-audience friendly, and he declined.
Writer: Alex Garland (based on the book by Jeff VanderMeer)
Details: 115 minutes
Before I get into my Annihilation review, I have to talk about Netflix. Because I tried to watch Mute, Duncan Jones’ laughably awful excuse for a film, and thought… Netflix is in serious trouble.
Blockbuster Video never anticipated its demise. And if Netflix continues on this track, where whenever anyone hears, “A Netflix Production,” they immediately associate it with trash, they too will be wondering how they went from global leader to asset-selling bleeder. Are you crazy, Carson? Predicting the demise of Netflix? They’re the biggest thing in entertainment right now. Yeah well the brand is only as good as the product. And Netflix seems to be on a mission to make some of the worst movies ever.
Netflix makes money on three fronts – the media they license, the media they buy, and the media they produce. As the streaming market matures and the studios realize that a quick money infusion from renting their movies to Netflix is harmful to their long-term sustainability, they will start pulling those licenses away. Netflix is already anticipating this, which is why they’re putting so much money into buying and making their own content. The problem is that they have no idea how to develop movies. So what they’re doing is telling any filmmaker who will take their call, “Here’s a chunk of money. Come make your movie with us.”
The problem with this plan is that they’re getting all of these filmmakers’ passion projects – the junk that everyone else in Hollywood rejected. As a result, we get movies like Mute, one of the worst scripts I’ve ever read and now… one of the worst movies ever made – a cheap Blade Runner ripoff with the most boring main character you’ll ever come across. I didn’t make it that far in the film. Maybe 30 minutes? Because I was at the point where I’d rather be shaving my skin off with a potato peeler than continue watching.
Netflix has to be careful. Of the 50 movies they’ve made so far, they’re batting around 3%. They need to get some people in there who actually know how to develop material. They need some people who know how to say no. They need people who understand the movie business. Because all they’ve shown that they can do at this point? Is throw money around. That’s the only reason they’re getting all this press. Is because they’re really good at throwing around money. And I don’t know about you? But I’m pretty sure that if you gave me money to throw around, I’d be good at it too.
Anyway…..!
On the flip side of all this, I want to talk about the future of science-fiction. Because there is a filmmaker out there who, if he wants to be, can be the next big thing in sci-fi.
With Annihilation, Alex Garland has promoted himself from intriguing curiosity to the most interesting up-and-coming science-fiction voice in the industry.
I mean, WHOA. I walked out of this movie stunned. It’s such a unique film that I don’t even know how to describe it. It’s like Aliens by way of 2001 set in the Deep South. Just by that description alone, you get a sense of how original this movie is.
The story follows Lena, a biologist whose husband, Kane, a marine, comes back from a mysterious mission unannounced. The military shows up soon-after, taking Kane and questioning Lena, asking her what Kane told her about his mission.
The next thing you know, Lena is being flown to a remote state park in the deep south and shown “The Shimmer,” a slowly expanding virus that’s altering the biology of everything inside of it. If it keeps expanding like this, it could take over cities, states. Everyone who’s gone into it hasn’t come out… except for Kane.
Lena is asked to join the next mission into the Shimmer with four other women. And it’s as weird and unpredictable as advertised, with gaps of missing time, an earth that seems to be intelligent as it grows plants that look like people, and, of course, giant freaking animal hybrids. As her teammates die, one by one, Lena is determined to get to the center of the Shimmer and find out what it wants.
To understand the extent of this film’s originality, you need to see the ending. It’s one of the trippiest things I’ve ever witnessed in a theater. In it, Lena encounters the heart of the Shimmer and coaxes out a sort of tin clone of herself. This clone is “born” and quickly becomes infatuated with Lena, mirroring and mimicking her, not letting her escape.
The two engage in this weird mirror-dance, and while that may sound stupid, the way it’s choreographed and the way this pounding beautiful score accompanies it, it’s like you’ve been transported into another dimension to see the alternate version of the film’s finale. I absolutely loved it.
The rest of the movie isn’t as crazy, but has weird touches like that all around. And when I got home, I had to know how Garland wrote this thing, as it was so different from anything I was accustomed to.
It turns out he used two methods – a funky adaptation approach and theme.
So the first thing he did was he read the book, sat on it, and when it came time to adapt it, instead of rereading the book and plotting out the movie like most writers do, he decided to adapt it from memory. His argument was that the novel itself played out like a dream. So he should adapt it like a dream. Therefore, all of the big memorable moments from the book are in the film. But the stuff he didn’t remember, he just made up along the way. That’s a big reason why the movie feels so different.
Also, Garland focused heavily on theme, specifically self-destruction. When you write from theme, the plot points aren’t as sharp and the story doesn’t feel as written. There’s more of a stream-of-consciousness to the proceedings and when you combine that with the dream approach, you can imagine how off-kilter everything’s going to feel.
In a medium where structure is king, what Garland did was brave. It’s what every artist wants to do – let go and just “write.” But we all back off from it because it’s too scary. The story becomes too unfocused. To see him commit to that all the way through is admirable. And when Paramount’s new head David Ellison tried to get him to change it, Garland stood strong and said no. He believed in that direction. And he was right, from an artistic standpoint.
With that said, Alex Garland has been writing for 20+ years. He’s written so many structured screenplays that even when he’s not trying to structure, he’s still structuring. I mean we have a clear goal in this movie at all times. They’re trying to get to a certain point on the map. So it’s not like all logic is thrown out the window and there’s no point to the proceedings.
This is important to note for any new writers who attempt this approach. When you’ve never structured before and you try to do what Garland did, it’s HIGHLY LIKELY it’s going to end in disaster. And I can say that because I’m the one who reads all those disasters. Learn how to do it right first. THEN you can play around.
I want Garland to direct a huge sci-fi movie next. The problem is, I don’t know if he will! Going off his interviews, he seems to detest directing, stating that he will never get involved in a franchise because after three years of working on something, he’s sick of it. But to me, Garland has surpassed Villeneuve as THE best up-and-coming sci-fi director in the biz. If there’s a knock on Annihilation, it’s that it feels small. And the reason for that is obvious. They didn’t have a lot of money. I want to see what happens when Alex Garland gets a lot of money.
[ ] What the hell did I just watch?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the price of admission
[x] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Weirdness is susceptible to the law of diminishing returns. One of the things Garland talked about in interviews was that he wanted this to be weird, but he knew that every scene couldn’t be some sci-fi version of a Big Lebowski acid trip dream sequence because weirdness is susceptible to the law of diminishing returns. And he’s right. If you keep throwing a bunch of crazy weird shit into your script, sooner or later the reader gets used to it. So by the end of the film, nothing you can show them will shock them anymore. So you have to be deliberate and careful about the way you unravel weirdness. It has to be a little bit more each time.
Is it possible to love a title as much as I love “Neptune Beach?” No idea if the script’s any good. I’ll leave that up to you guys. If it isn’t, I may just buy that title from the writer. We’ve got a pretty nice variety of scripts this weekend, so I hope you guys check them all out. If you’re new to Amateur Offerings, read as much as you can from each script and vote for your favorite in the comments section.
As always, winner gets a review next Friday. And if you believe you have a screenplay that the world will fall in love with, submit it to Amateur Offerings! Send me a PDF of your script, along with the title, genre, logline, and why you think people should read it (your chance to pitch your story). All submissions should be sent to Carsonreeves3@gmail.com.
Title: The Cat Burglar
Genre: College Rom-Com/Heist
Logline: To get the girl of his dreams, a spoiled momma’s boy enlists the help of a feisty cat burglar who needs help blending in with their elitist law-school classmates, but her criminal antics put both of their careers at risk.
Why You Should Read: I like to combine genres that don’t often appear together, and so American Pie and Ocean’s Eleven collide to form The Cat Burglar. I also like to create stories with two polar opposite main characters who require each other’s help in some sort of symbiotic relationship that forces them both to overcome their flaws, so here we have a spoiled timid young man who is too afraid to talk to the girl he likes, and a stubborn female cat burglar who is trying to blend in with the rich and wealthy and funding that lifestyle by stealing from them. He can help her with her problem and she can help him with his, but because of their contrasting personalities there are fireworks and much needed drama. At least that’s the plan! Right now I’d love to hear the wisdom of the SS community. Thanks in advance.
Title: Apex Predators
Genre: One Hour TV Pilot
Logline: After ruthless insurgents destroy his family and raise him as one of their own, a man is recruited by a band of misfits that uses counter-insurgency tactics to take down the city’s worst criminals by any means necessary.
Why You Should Read: Apex Predators is intended to be an ensemble counter culture show in the tradition of ‘Miami Vice’ and ‘The Mod Squad’. The key theme is the impact of our past on our present. The team is filled with good people, bent into shadows of themselves by circumstance. I hope to get feedback to turn this into a polished sample.
Title: Powers
Genre: Action/sci-fi
Logline: In a world where most of the population have low-level superpowers, an estranged husband and wife must come together to save their wayward daughter from a dangerous gang who are exploiting her for her powerful abilities.
Why You Should Read: You’ve talked a lot about specs needing to be elevated to get attention, and I believe this script may be that unique combination of similar but different enough to grab readers’ attention. It takes a trope we’re all familiar with — superpowers– but makes it unique by creating a whole new world where everyone has superpowers and the majority of them are rather weak. Inside of this unique world, I tried to create an emotionally resonant story. Imagine Carrie but told through the POV of the parents. I feel that this story is strong enough for managers/agents to take notice, but I have no doubt the SS faithful will tell me if I’m wrong.
Title: Neptune Beach
Genre: Post-Apocalyptic Murder Mystery
Logline: A reclusive detective with a haunting past returns to his rebuilding hometown, following a flu pandemic that crushed society, to solve the first murder in three years with the begrudging help of a younger, wannabe policeman.
Why You Should Read: I’ve been writing as a hobby for a few years now and have entered and won some local competitions and the likes. I’ve written a handful of scripts but I’m really happy with how this one turned out. I aim to create meaningful stories that connect with the heart and mind of the readers, Neptune Beach has been compared to films such as Mystic River and Silence of the Lambs. It’s a tale of justice and redemption that will, hopefully, hold the reader’s attention throughout.
Title: Chased
Genre: Action-Thriller
Logline: After seeing a dead man kill a federal witness then getting dismissed by the authorities, a teenager must use her circus-background skills to save herself and her family from a similar fate.
Why You Should Read: CIRCUS based films are back babeee (or so I heard, even though nobody knows nothing in Hollywood). CHASED is a fast-paced, tense, taut thriller that has our protagonist scrambling to stay alive while being – ahem – chased by scumbags intent on not-very-good-things. — A Female Protagonist – Circus-Related Skillset – Exciting Circus Scenes – Unusual Chase Scenes…with such spicy ingredients stewing in the pot, CHASED hopefully pulls off the rollercoaster thrill-ride I intended it to be.
What’s in a description?
Character descriptions (or “character introductions”) are one of the easiest ways to know if you’re dealing with a seasoned writer or a newbie. So what I did was I went back through 9 scripts to find you 10 protagonist introductions. What I discovered is that, as you’d expect, different writers have different approaches to character introductions! Some are overly-descriptive. Some get to the point. This proves that there’s no “right” way to write a character intro. But I’m hoping that by seeing ten character introductions yourself, you’ll have a good idea of what works best.
AS GOOD AS IT GETS
MELVIN UDALL
in the hallway… Well past 50… unliked, unloved, unsettling. A huge pain in the ass to everyone he’s ever met.
Analysis: I love this character introduction because there’s no bullshit. It tells you exactly who the character is in very blunt easy-to-understand language. Too many character introductions are vague or tell you barely anything at all. Which is why I’m a big fan of this give-it-to-us-straight approach.
THE MATRIX
NEO, a man who knows more about living inside a computer than living outside one.
Analysis: Oooh, I love this description. It’s so damn clean and we immediately understand the character after reading it. Notice that there’s more of a poetic angle to the description, which, if nailed, can take your description to the next level.
THE BREAKFAST CLUB
A strange girl, Allison Reynolds, is staring out the passenger window at the school. She’s thin and plain-looking. No makeup, no style to her long, straight hair, no attempt to look like anything. A pale invisible human being.
Analysis: A few of you may have noticed that the character name isn’t capitalized. Don’t worry about that. This was written in the 80s when John Hughes was still new to screenwriting. Not all of the rules were well-known. — This description is longer than the others, but I don’t mind long as long as the words count. I have an extremely good feel for this character after this introduction so I’d call it a success.
INCEPTION
The speaker, COBB, is 35, handsome, tailored.
This is a terrible description and one you want to avoid at all costs. What you want to be wary of is any description that could apply to millions of people. A description should give us a sense of who the character is in a way that makes them feel unique. So why was this awful introduction used by one of the most successful filmmakers in the business? Because some writer-directors already have the character in their head and don’t feel the need to “sell” them on the page. Simple as that. But that NEVER applies to writers writing on spec. Plus, it’s just good practice to write strong descriptions.
THE SHAWSHANK REDEMPTION
ANDY DUFRESNE, mid-20s, a wire rim glasses, three-piece suit. Under normal circumstances a respectable, solid citizen; hardly dangerous, perhaps even meek. But these circumstances are from from normal. He is disheveled, unshaven, and very drunk. A cigarette smolders in his mouth. His eyes, flinty and hard, are riveted to the bungalow up the path.
Analysis: Ideally, you want to introduce a character in their natural habitat, performing an action that tells us who they are. But sometimes, due to the story, you have to introduce them as the opposite of who they are. Andy is a great guy. But we need to see him as a possible murderer for the story to work. You’ll notice how this complicates things, since the writer is forced to write two opposing descriptions. It’s not preferable but sometimes you gotta do what you gotta do.
GET OUT
CHRIS WASHINGTON, 26, a handsome African-American man shuts the medicine cabinet. He’s shirtless and naturally athletic. He scrutinizes his reflection with a touch of vanity.
Analysis: This isn’t a very good description. The only thing that truly tells us something about this guy is the action at the end. That he has a touch of vanity. I’d rather have more to work with. And Peele does do a little better with Rose’s description…
ROSE ARMITAGE, 28 – Caucasian, brunette with freckles – cool and beautiful like an old Summer Camp crush. Rose looks at pastries through the glass. She can’t help but smile.
Analysis: The Summer Camp crush comparison gives this description a little more pop, makes it a little more fun. Any clever comparison can do that.
JUNO
JUNO MacGUFF stands on a placid street in a nondescript subdivision, facing the curb. It’s FALL. Juno is sixteen years old, an artfully bedraggled burnout kid.
I don’t love the fact that we have some non-character related description placed between the character name and character description, but it does create a less formal feel to the format, which some people like. The important part is the end: “artfully bedraggled burnout kid.” That’s a great description in that it gives us a really good visual of this girl. All the more impressive when you see that Cody achieved it in just four words.
AMERICAN SNIPER
CHRIS KYLE lays prone, dick in the dirt, eye to the glass of a .300 Win-Mag sniper rifle. He’s a Texas boy with a shitty grin, blondish goatee and vital blue eyes.
Analysis: Shitty grin. Does he mean shit-eating grin? Vital? Does he mean vibrant? The only thing in this intro that gives me any insight into the character is that he’s from Texas. And that’s because Texas is such a unique state. But it’s still asking me to generalize a lot about the person. This is why I tabbed this script a failure. The writing was not every good. This whole movie is about this one character and yet we start off that journey with a below-average introduction.
THE BIG LEBOWSKI
It is late, the supermarket all but deserted. We are tracking in on a fortyish man in Bermuda shorts and sunglasses at the dairy case. He is the Dude. His rumpled look and relaxed manner suggest a man in whom casualness runs deep.
Analysis: I looooooooovvvve this introduction. My favorite of the list. Bermuda shorts and sunglasses in a supermarket at night already gives me a great feel for the character, but then the Coens top it off with, “His rumpled look and relaxed manner suggest a man in whom casualness runs deep.” I mean how great of a line is that? The Big Lebowski is the big character introduction winner!
Carson does feature screenplay consultations, TV Pilot Consultations, and logline consultations. Logline consultations go for $25 a piece or 5 for $75. You get a 1-10 rating, a 200-word evaluation, and a rewrite of the logline. I highly recommend not writing a script unless it gets a 7 or above. All logline consultations come with an 8 hour turnaround. If you’re interested in any sort of consultation package, e-mail Carsonreeves1@gmail.com with the subject line: CONSULTATION. Don’t start writing a script or sending a script out blind. Let Scriptshadow help you get it in shape first!
Genre: Sci-fi/Comedy
Premise: (from Black List) In the 1950s, a manufacturing company stirs up controversy when they publish a user’s manual to a time machine called the Gadabout TM-1050.
About: Today’s script finished number 37 on last year’s Black List with 9 votes. The idea came through Safe House (“Edge of Tomorrow”) and Sony, and newbie Ross Evans was brought in to write it.
Writer: Ross Evans
Details: 121 pages
Most of the Black List scripts these days are World War 2 stories, book adaptations, whatever the current trend is (Jane Wick this year), and biopics, biopics, and more biopics. Man are there are lot of biopics. So it was a nice change of pace to see amongst all that sameness, a classic Spielbergian story aimed squarely at the family crowd. We don’t usually get that in Blacklistville.
Don’t worry, this isn’t another 80s nostalgia bomb with four precocious 12 year-olds making vaguely inappropriate jokes about boobs n stuff. I think that trend’s about to die. Instead, Gadabout is more inspired by Back to the Future. And it does so better than most of the scripts that are inspired by Back to the Future in that it isn’t a beat-for-beat remake of Back to the Future. That’s the good news. But have the 80s Gods blessed it with a totally tubular story? That’s yet to be determined.
After his grandmother, Gennie, dies, a distraught 10 year-old Henry asks his mom if he can stay with Grandpa Wilbur for the night to help him deal with the pain. Grandpa Wilbur’s a bit of a weirdo and says that Henry can do anything he wants while he’s here, except go into his shed. That’s his sacred place.
Being a 10 year-old boy, that’s the first place Henry goes, and it’s there where he finds a manual for the Gadabout TM-1050 time machine, written by… his grandpa! No sooner has he found it than Wilbur appears, upset that Henry broke his one rule. But after Henry puts on the charm, Wilbur decides to tell him the story of the Gadabout.
Flash back to 1958, when Wilbur was a young inventor, trying to make his way. Wilbur was a classic scatterbrain inventor – good at inventing, terrible at explaining. So when he pitches his giant box called “The Go-Backer” to the bank in hopes of securing funding, they laugh him out of the room.
Once home, a young Gennie tells Wilbur she can’t wait for him to follow his dreams anymore and walks out on him. Only minutes later, Don, a sketchy vacuum salesman, arrives at the door and notices the time machine. Curious, he wants to know how it works. After Wilbur proves to him it’s the real deal, Don tells him that all it needs is a new name, a shiny makeover and they’ll make millions.
True to his word, it isn’t long before everyone in town owns a Gadabout. But there are limitations. Due to power restrictions, you can only go back 30 minutes in time. And traveling to the future requires more power than anyone can produce. So you can forget about that. Still, that’s enough for people to do stuff like re-run their dates if they go bad, or pick up an extra 30 minutes around the house if they’re running late.
It’s when Don wants to go national that things become a problem, particularly because the machine is faulty. For example, a local Gadabout addict has over 20 versions of herself living in her house. All of this leads us to the ultimate question, and the one Henry himself wants to know: If all of this really happened, how come nobody’s ever heard about it?
I’ll never forget a note I received on one of my first screenplays. “It’s all rather… easy.” I must’ve sat on that note for a month. Easy? Easy?? I’ll show you “easy” you ignorant mother&*%$#. It took time. And Bob’s Corner Liquor Store. But I eventually figured out what he meant. There wasn’t a whole lot of conflict in my screenplay. There weren’t any obstacles. If the script were a rollercoaster, it was one that went in a straight line with a few mildly high rises and a few mildly low dips.
For the majority of its running time, that’s how Gadabout felt to me. It was all very pleasant and sweet and nice. But it was one hell of a straight roller-coaster ride. Nothing went too well and nothing went too bad. Eventually, things do get out of hand and the blood starts pumping. But that isn’t until page 80. And that’s a really long time to wait for the good stuff.
Cause that’s all storytelling is when you think about it. It’s the storyteller manipulating the emotions of the story reader. And it’s not a bad kind of manipulation. The reader WANTS to be manipulated. They want those high highs and low lows. I mean look at a film this script was clearly inspired by, The Princess Bride. That movie probably has more highs and lows then any family film ever. Within the first 15 minutes, our princes is kidnapped by three bad men. The emotional manipulation starts immediately.
And that was my frustration here. I never felt anything throughout the first 80 pages of the script.
Part of the problem is that it wasn’t clear what was at stake. The only question that’s being asked is, if all this time machine stuff happened, how come there’s no record of it? And while that’s a fun mystery, it’s not enough to carry an entire movie.
Since the love of Wilbur’s life, Gennie, dies at the beginning of the story, why not build a high-stakes storyline around that? Maybe he never got to tell her something. And if he still had a Gadabout, he’d have the chance to go back and have one last conversation with her. But the Gadabout doesn’t work anymore. It’s permanently damaged. And so the flashback storyline is setting up a present-day storyline that actually matters, because maybe Wilbur realizes how to make the fix that gives him one more time-travel.
I admit that’s clumsy because I’m thinking it up on the spot. But this script needed something LIKE that. Where something BIG matters. Because there wasn’t once here where I said, “Ooh, I HAVE to find out what happens with that.” And with every screenplay, you want to have four or five of those things.
None of this is to say the script is bad. It’s fine. The last act is actually balls-to-the-wall crazy, as we start jumping all the hell over time. The question is, will people be able to muscle through a day-long walk in the park to race the Indy 500? I guess that depends on how much you like walking in the park.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: When it comes to time travel scripts, you need restrictions so every time your hero fails at something, the audience doesn’t say, “He’s got a time machine. Why can’t he go back and try again?” One of the best ways to combat this plot hole, and it’s something we see in Gadabout, is POWER RESTRICTIONS. You can always say that the time machine takes up so much power that it has limitations in how much it can be used and for how long. It’s logical and it saves you from having to deal with a bunch of “But why didn’t they just…” questions.
What I learned 2: If you’re going to write a time travel movie, I recommend doing a time-travel comedy. Time-travel is a complicated concept that, the more you use it, the more plot holes it creates. When you write a comedy, people are more forgiving of these holes as they don’t need everything to make perfect sense.
Genre: Thriller
Premise: A murderous couple in hiding is discovered by the FBI and must take their teenaged son, who has no idea about their past, on the run.
About: Andrew Marlowe has the right idea. Write a few big blockbuster features (Air Force One, End of Days), then, when you realize that surviving the feature world is like trying to survive the opening scene of Saving Private Ryan, ditch that nonsense and create a successful TV show (Castle), which turns your bank account into a money printer, then buy a 10 million dollar house in the hills. You won’t live next to Ryan Murphy. But you’ll be doing all right for yourself. Today’s script, In Hiding, was a Marlowe spec from 1998 (a year before End of Days came out) that sold to Arnold Kopelson, the producer of The Fugitive and Seven. It didn’t get made. Let’s find out why.
Writer: Andrew W. Marlowe
Details: 121 pages – 1998 draft
Today we’re talking about premise. (reference: meant to be read in Allen Iverson’s voice)
Specifically the promise you make to your reader with your premise, and delivering something that stays true to that promise.
Okay, parameters set. Scriptshadow machine calculating. Bee-bee-boop-boppppppp, chuckuhchuckuhchuckuh, leeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeevlop. Real-time plot summary code activated…
A group of mysterious people invade a warehouse, which turns out to be a storage facility for nuclear warheards. A second group of people confronts the first group, a gunfight ensues, and the whole place blows up, with only a handful of people from both sides escaping.
Cut to 14 years later. Jake and Carolyn Brighton are two normal suburban parents. Jake owns a paint shop and Carolyn works in a department store. Everything’s dosey-doe until the FBI charge into Jake’s paint shop. Jake’s on pins and needles until the FBI tells him his employees are running the biggest Drug Ring in the area. That news seems to… calm Jake?
Wait a minute. Who relaxes after they’ve been told their business is a front for a drug ring?? Immediately we know Jake is hiding something. And the lead FBI agent, Irene, senses it. She brings Jake down to the field office for questioning.
In the script’s best scene (seriously – you should all download the script and read it to see what a taut exciting suspenseful thriller scene looks like) Jake contacts his wife to tell her they’re “running his prints.” Based on Carolyn’s reaction, that’s bad. As the prints are running, Irene gets into an argument with her superior about keeping Jake here. He doesn’t think Jake’s done anything wrong and orders her to release him.
She reluctantly does, only to find out when the prints come back that he and his wife are wanted for 7 murders. Cut to Jake and Carolyn, who are racing to pick up their 14 year old son, Travis, from school. With the cops and FBI closing in, they grab Travis and narrowly escape, leaving them with a new problem. Explaining to their son they’ve been lying to him his entire life.
What we learn is that Jake and Carolyn were there that day of the warehouse explosion and were framed by the government to cover up the real reason they had a bunch of warheads stashed there. Due to the nuclear fallout, the government covered the destruction up with concrete. That leads to Jake getting an idea. Some of the military guys that day got buried in the mess. What if they go back and dig them up to prove their innocence! It’s a long shot, but it’s the only shot they’ve got!
Okay!
I want you to imagine something for me. Imagine I tell you I have a movie idea: “The Fugitive… but with a family.” I even do that thing with my hands where I hold them in front of my face then expand them out, for effect. Granted this pitch would’ve worked better 20 years ago, it still ain’t half-bad today. Okay, you’ve heard the premise. Now you ask me to pitch the plot. So I tell you, “It’s about this family who has to go on the run from the FBI which we later reveal is because they murdered 7 people!” You’re nodding your head furiously. “Ooh, I like that,” you say. “Murder is good.”
I continue on: “So what we find out is that our couple was framed for going to this warehouse where it turned out there were secret nuclear weapons and then they were shot at, barely got out, but the government needed to make sure they didn’t give the secret away so they told everyone that they murdered seven people! Now they have to go back there, dig into the wreckage, pull out one of the bodies, and take it to the FBI to prove their innocence!”
RECORD SCRATCH.
“Say what?”
This is my long-winded way of saying that the payoff of this premise doesn’t match up with the promise. The promise is cool. Family on the run from the FBI. The Fugitive with a family. They killed 7 people. Who were those people? Why did they kill them? Great mystery. I’m all in. But warheads? Nuclear fallout? What?? That doesn’t sound anything like what I imagined when you pitched me the movie.
One of your jobs as a writer is to deliver what you promised. I’ll give you a recent example of a failed promise. Book of Henry. You had this kid who was a genius and he’s quirky and smart and then he gets cancer. I’m not saying that’s a good idea, but it’s an idea. What the movie delivers instead is a dark murder revenge flick??? Giving the audience something other than what you promised is one of the quickest ways to piss them off.
There’s no set method for avoiding this mistake. It’s a “feel” thing. For every big choice you make (a major plot development), you need to ask yourself if that choice lines up with the movie you promised or if it makes the script feel like a completely different movie. Some writers will argue that an ‘out there’ choice makes their script unpredictable. And there are a few examples of that working. But I’m telling you as someone who reads all these scripts, 99 times out of 100 it ends up in The Book of Henry.
This speaks to a bigger problem with on-the-run thrillers, which is that while they’re easy to set up, and often have killer first acts (again, read that early scene I told you about), they can easily deteriorate into a series of mindless running around scenes. Inventive set pieces can help spice things up. But how many never-before-seen-set-pieces are you going to think up? Considering you’re competing with tens of thousands of thrillers, not many. The golden solution, like a lot of solutions in screenwriting, is character. It’s why Taken and The Fugitive remain the gold standards for this genre. In both cases, there was a very emotional and personal goal for the hero. Save my daughter. And find out who killed my wife to prove my innocence.
It’s no different from why Black Panther had one of the best villains in the Marvel Universe. His plight was PERSONAL. The current king’s father killed Killmonger’s dad and left Killmonger to rot in the streets of Oakland. It wasn’t like Ultron in Avengers, who nobody knew what the hell he wanted.
So that’s my big lesson. Thrillers are Thinners. They’re inherently thin plots. The best way to thicken them up is to build a storyline around complex characters with personal goals.
May this help Thriller writers everywhere!
Bee-beep-boooooops. Scriptshadow machine powering down….
Script link: In Hiding
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: It’s okay to use age-old cliches in your script, as long as you execute the cliche differently than what’s expected. When Jake is first brought to the station, they put handcuffs on him. While they’re distracted, he sees a paper clip. He slyly reaches over and palms it. AGE-OLD CLICHE ALERT!!! I audibly groaned when I read this. As Irene is chatting with her co-worker about whether to keep Jake there, we’re cross-cutting to Jake fiddling with his cuffs. As the conversation reaches a climax, Irene is told she has to release Jake. Cut to Jake, just as he’s uncuffed himself. As soon as he hears this, he clamps the cuffs closed again. I’d never seen that before. In all the scrips I’ve read, every time someone with cuffs uses a paper clip, they uncuff themselves. It’s a little thing but every time you go against expectation, you impress the reader.
