Genre: Drama
Premise: A circus family attempts to keep its lucrative business going by utilizing a dark and horrifying secret.
About: Katherine Dunn, the author of the 1989 breakout novel, Geek Love, was a single mother working three jobs when her novel became an unexpected best seller. The Portland-based writer was, all of a sudden, thrust into the position of the city’s most recognizable female author. Portland author Rene Denfeld said of her: “She believed the job of a writer is to tell the truth—not the truth that Aunt Mabel wants to hear, not the truth that will sell books. She always said she was waiting for a male writer to write a memoir that was not about all the women he’d slept with, but about having a problem with premature ejaculation.” Geek Love is said to have inspired many artists, including Terry Gilliam and Kurt Cobain. Magician and actor Harry Anderson optioned the book for film rights and wrote this script, which still hasn’t been made.
Writer: Harry Anderson (based on the novel by Katherine Dunn)
Details: 107 pages – 1990 draft

Haven’t you heard? Circuses are all the rage. The Greatest Showman continues to have a strong hold at the box office, finishing in the Top 5 for the 7th weekend in a row. Sounds like Hollywood might be interested in a new circus project. Make no mistake. The misleadingly-titled “Geek Love” doesn’t have any dance numbers. But it does have darkness, secrets, and kids who swear a lot.

I love that truth statement Dunn uses above. As our society moves in a direction where saying anything that doesn’t tow the company line gets you beaten up on social media, it’s become harder for writers to be brave and tell the truth. So what we get instead is a bunch of safe vanilla b.s. with whip cream and cherries on top. The more I read, the more I realize that TRUTH is the secret ingredient that lights up a screenplay. When characters say and do things that REALLY HAPPEN in life, it gives the script an authenticity that can’t be matched.

Which is an odd way to begin this review, since Geek Love is about a freak show circus family. But it’s not so much the situation that’s truthful as it is the characters.

Geek Love introduces us to 40 year-old Oly, a humpback dwarf. Don’t feel sorry for Oly, though. She’s a tough woman who’s managed to become a successful DJ at a local radio station. After we observe her daily routine, we cut back to 30 years ago where we meet the Binewski family and their circus company.

There’s Al, the father, Lil, the mother. There’s Arty, a little boy with flippers for hands and feet. And then there’s Elly and and Iphy, Siamese twins. Arty and Elly and Iphy are the show’s main attractions, while Oly is the operations manager. Her deformity, you see, isn’t flashy enough to make an act out of. She’s just… ugly.

The family, as you’d expect, is an eclectic group. Al seems like a cool guy. Lil is sweet as can be. But Arty is pure evil, the devil incarnate, and has plans to kill off his parents so he can take over the business. Elly and Iphy hate Arty, and the three are always bickering. And when I say bickering, I mean there isn’t a curse word that isn’t used in this story.

When Lil becomes pregnant with another child, we learn the family’s dark secret. Al, you see, is feeding his wife insecticide. Why? Because the more poison his wife ingests, the more likely it is that she’ll have a deformed child, which means one more performer for the show! Al experiments with each pregnancy, having his wife take in a variety of poisonous artificial supplements. And what happens if the child is born normal? I don’t want to say because I don’t think you can take it.

When the new child is finally born – Chick – they realize he’s unlike any of the other children. As in, he has the power to levitate people and heal things. He also ages at a rapid rate, quickly catching up to the other kids. Chick’s powers allow Al to add new acts that he never could’ve dreamed of. But this new attention angers Arty, who sees his star fading.

Suffice it to say, you can only poison your family to create deformed children to work in your circus for so long before it backfires. And boy does it backfire. The only one who makes it out of the mayhem in one piece is Oly, who has some business to settle in the present day before she, too, joins that great big circus in the sky.

Is it possible to write a plotless script that’s entertaining?

That’s the question Geek Love poses (unknowingly).

And the answer is yes. But it’s a complicated yes. I only experience it every so often and it’s always for the same reason – the writer has such a unique voice that that voice overpowers the absence of plot. You read because everything is so fresh and different. Not because you’re trying to find out if the main character’s daughter will be saved.

So I say to all you plot haterz, go ahead and write something without a 3-act structure or GSU… but only if you’ve been told you have a voice unlike any other writer. You are Charlie Kaufman. You are Quentin Tarantino. You are Kurt Vonnegut. You are Katherine Dunn. Otherwise, I would stick to the basics.

With that said, Harry Anderson, the writer who adapted this, missed an opportunity to build a plot into the story. If you have a movie that takes place in the past, you can give it a “plot” by introducing a present-day storyline with a mystery. You then occasionally cut back to that present day mystery throughout the movie. This allows you to be weird and formless in the past. But the audience still feels like there’s a purpose to everything since there’s that unanswered question in the present.

Here, Anderson starts the story with Oly in the present, secretly obsessing over a strange woman who lives near her. It’s intriguing, but it’s completely abandoned once we jump back in time. It’s only at the end of the screenplay that we revisit the mystery, which does have a nice payoff, but because it’s been so long since the setup, we don’t care.

Anderson should’ve made this mystery storyline a bigger deal, cutting back to it throughout the screenplay. Instead he adds an unrelated present-day storyline that was kind of interesting, but because it didn’t have anything to do with the first one, it made the present-day stuff feel just as random as the past.

Luckily, JUST ENOUGH happens every 20 pages in the past that you keep hanging on. It was the revelation that Al poisons his wife to get freaks for his business that kept me reading a little longer. Then the emergence of Telekinesis Baby that kept me a little longer. Before I knew it, I was invested in all of the characters. They were all so weird and interesting, I had to find out what their fates were.

And that advice Dunn gives about truth is on full display in this story. Parents take advantage of their children in unimaginable ways. We just saw it with basement dungeon family. So as uncomfortable as the Binewski secret is, there’s truth in there. That’s why this book sticks out. And probably why people are afraid to make it into a movie. It’s too close for comfort.

I don’t know if I Geek Loved this. But I Geek Liked it. It’s unlike any script I’ve ever read.

Script link: Geek Love

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

What I learned: (re: truth) Neil Strauss, who wrote The Game, a book about sleeping with a bunch of women, uses the book to chronicle his failures in seduction as well, such as the only time he’d ever had a chance with a Playboy model, but couldn’t get an erection due to performance anxiety. The book went on to become an enormous best seller. I wonder if Strauss knew that Katherine Dunn had predicted his success just ten years prior!

UPDATE: It’s a close race so make sure to vote! It could determine the winner!

Unless you’re a 50 Shades fan (and because you’re on a blog about writing, I’m assuming you’re not) or one of the 50 people who heard about the thwarted terrorist attack Clint Eastwood made a movie about, you’re not going to the movies this weekend. And that means two things. One, YOU’RE GOING TO DO SOME WRITING! But close behind that at two, you’re going to read some amateur screenplays and vote on your favorite!

We’ve got a wily bunch of entries this weekend that take us from Wales all the way to a galaxy far far away. Although some may say that is Wales. BADUM-BUM! I’m just getting warmed up. Try the veal parmegean. But seriously, you know how this works. Download the scripts, read as long as you stay interested, vote for which script you liked best in the comments section, and if you have some time, give the scripts you didn’t like some constructive criticism on why you stopped reading and what they could’ve done better. We’re in the business of helping each other on Scriptshadow. So be generous with your wisdom.

By the way, there’s a reason I say, “Read as long as you stay interested.” Because if you stop being interested, the script has failed. So it’s helpful to the writer to know where exactly you stopped caring. That’s invaluable advice writers never receive. It’s also a good learning experience as writers yourselves, parsing out where you lose interest in a screenplay and understanding why it’s happened. Because if you know why someone else’s script stopped being interesting, you can apply that knowledge to your own writing.

Anyway, 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: STAR WARS: THE NEW REPUBLIC (EPISODE IX)
Genre: Sci-fi/Fantasy
Logline: As Rey searches for the answers to her past, the Resistance makes one last attempt to defeat the First Order and restore peace to the galaxy.
Why You Should Read: Like many people, I walked out of “The Last Jedi” scratching my head — not only asking “What’s next?” but also “What’s missing here?” The answers came to me pretty quickly, and all of them were centered around who these characters were and the potential within them of what they were capable of achieving. — This script was also a personal challenge. I gave myself only 4 weeks to write it, from concept to completion. It’s been a wonderfully maddening month! I had tremendous fun writing this, and perhaps above everything else, that is what I hope is conveyed.

Title: Lili & Will
Genre: Black comedy, Drama
Logline:When a 13-year-old social misfit hacks into the financial life of his reclusive 70 year old neighbor and finds she’s being short-changed at her home office job, the two embark on an epic journey to seek justice from the shady for-profit “university” that’s been cheating her for decades.
Why You Should Read: The short version? Lili & Will is dark and funny and has loads of heart, with two very cool parts for an “actress of a certain age,” and pretty much any kid from “Stranger things.” The enhanced version? I’ve been working on this thing for years, and even though lots of people said they loved it, no one ever loved it enough to open a checkbook. At first I shrugged this off to “Nobody wants to make a POKER movie.” Yes, for years this script was about two characters on their way to a poker tournament, and nothing at all like the logline above. But then I got a NOTE I never expected — that my characters were GREAT, but they were drowning in technical b.s. about card playing that bogged everything down. I was DEVASTATED by this, knowing I would have to change pretty much EVERYTHING. But for the first time in my life, I buckled down, took the note, and actually did the work. NEW third act. NEW plot. NEW character arcs. NEW pretty much everything. Anyway, this is the result. I hope you enjoy it.

Title: Hideaway Hills
Genre: Thriller
Logline: Behind the gates of an exclusive community threatened by wildfire, a woman must choose sides when secrets about her new marriage are exposed during a home invasion by three desperate intruders who owe money to the wrong people.
Why You Should Read: Hideaway Hills placed first at the LAIFF for January 2018 and was the 3rd place winner at HIMPFF for the same month. An earlier draft made it as a finalist in the San Francisco Indie Fest, and an even earlier draft made it to the second round at last year’s Austin Film Festival. – After years of frantic scribbling, I’m hoping to have finally produced something worthwhile. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks.

Title: Sleeping Giant
Genre: Dark Comedy
Logline: An introverted doctor takes a road trip across Wales with his mischief-making millennial brother to scatter their father’s ashes, and dispose of the dismembered body hidden in the car boot.
Why You Should Read: I come from that part of the UK that isn’t England, Scotland or Northern Ireland. If you need to consult with our Google overlord about that statement consider this script an irreverent, dramatic and darkly humorous education on the glorious land of Wales. I’ve received great feedback on the characters and dialogue in this script, and if nothing else, I believe it’s original. While I don’t think it will be to 2018 what Jane Wick scripts were to 2017, I have the lofty ambition of it one day being that Netflix hidden gem you tell your friends about. I’ll trade reads and feedback for my eternal gratitude. Cheers.

Title: Dead Man’s Switch
Genre: thriller/action/drama
Logline: A former hacker evades a group of mercenaries while hunting down one of her own to prevent a plot that would bankrupt the crypto-currency market, a move that could bring the entire global economy to it’s knees.
Why You Should Read: Shades of Nikita, part Bourne, hints of Die Hard, and a dash of Salt, Dead Man’s Switch was a fun script to write that was inspired in part by the Arab Spring, the war on Terror, the Crypto-currency boom, and the desire to write a spy/cyber thriller mash-up. It’s both it’s own thing and and familiar enough to make it accessible. Please enjoy, and let me know what you think would make this script better!

Nightcrawler – Watch this movie to understand the power of minimalism. The story here is extremely simple. A guy wants to be good at his job. Everyone’s always trying to write Citizen Kane. You need to learn to write Nightcrawler first. Give us an interesting character and an easy-to-understand story and you can write a great script.

Glengarry Glen Ross – Watch this movie for the way it uses tension to create charged dialogue. After Alec Baldwin gives his famous Always Be Closing speech, the tension in the room is palpable. That tension creates conflict between the characters, a sense of fear, a sense of urgency. All of that comes out in the interactions between the characters, resulting in great dialogue. If you’re looking to turbo-charge your dialogue, build a concept around tension.

American Beauty – Watch this movie to learn how to make characters OTHER THAN YOUR HERO rich and complex. One of the quickest ways to spot a newbie is weak supporting characters. Notice how all the characters in American Beauty have something going on underneath the surface.

Raiders of the Lost Ark – Watch this movie to learn how to write great set pieces. The fallacy behind great set pieces is that they have to be big and elaborate. Raiders proves that the opposite is true. They’re often simple and direct, like running down a tunnel with a giant boulder trailing you. Or being dragged behind a moving car. Or a showdown in the middle of town with a big baddie. One of my favorite set pieces ever is the trash compactor scene in Star Wars. That scene is four characters in a room. Simplicity is your best friend with set pieces.

Taken – For GSU (goal, stakes, urgency). As yesterday’s script taught us, you have to learn to crawl before you can fly. Learn the basics. And there’s nothing more basic than the foundation of this screenplay. Goal – find his daughter. Stakes – The loss of his daughter. Urgency – She’ll be shipped into oblivion within 48 hours.

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind – Watch this movie to learn how to create out-of-the-box concepts that allow for unique storytelling experiences. Anything that explores time and memory creates opportunities to jump around in time in interesting ways. But you never want to do this arbitrarily. You need to come up with a concept that allows for you to do so organically. Eternal Sunshine, Memento, Groundhog Day. Find the concept and these weird funky movies will write themselves.

Sideways – Watch this movie to learn how to build conflict into a relationship. Lots of movies are two-handers – two characters going on the same journey. It’s essential that you build conflict into that relationship so that the interactions between these characters stay entertaining. If you have NO CONFLICT AT ALL, I guarantee you, your characters will be boring. What I like about Sideways is it doesn’t use the on-the-nose “characters hate each other” approach to conflict, but rather the “world-view” approach. One character sees the world as a fun exciting positive place. The other as a nasty untrustworthy shithole out to get him. That worldview difference allows two friends who otherwise love each other to have lively interesting conversations throughout the movie’s running time.

Back to the Future – Watch this movie to learn how to create setups and payoffs! There are more setups and payoffs in Back to the Future than in any other film. The idea is that a big moment always lands more powerfully if it’s been set up beforehand. It’s a lot cooler to learn that the dance is going to be Marty’s savior if we already heard his mom and dad talking about that dance in the first act. Never underestimate the “Oh yeah! I remember that from earlier” factor.

Juno – Watch this movie to learn how to write a flashy likable main character. A big-personality main character is one of the easiest ways to write a memorable screenplay and can also cover for your plot if it ends up stinking. A good way to determine if you’ve written a super-memorable big personality character is if the character’s name could double as the movie’s title (Juno, Jerry Maguire, Good Will Hunting, Forrest Gump).

The Big Short – Watch this movie to learn how to spice up boring subject matter. This will be more important once you break in and start adapting material. You’ll be surprised at how dull some of the material you get pitched is. The Big Short had to figure out how to make sub-prime mortgages fun. In that respect, it’s the gold standard for how to do this right. Before anything, start by writing big memorable characters. From there, you can begin to play with form, breaking convention, that kind of thing. But as we discussed yesterday, this is a lot harder than it looks. Never make any choice to look “cool.” All choices should feel organic and right for the story.

Before you attack me for all the movies I left out, I did that for a reason. So you can tell us what your favorite “screenwriting lesson” movie is! Not to mention there are movies that are so good, they didn’t seem right for this article. How do you highlight just one lesson in Pulp Fiction, Chinatown, or The Godfather. And then there are movies, particularly ones before my time, that I don’t know as well. So I’d be doing a disservice to try and break those down from memory. Anyway, I’d love to throw a couple of new movies in the queue that I could watch with a purpose, so go ahead and share your screenwriting lesson flicks below.

Genre: True Story
Premise: (from Black List) Google’s Larry Page, Sergey Brin, and Eric Schmidt struggle with their corporate motto, “Don’t Be Evil,” in the face of their meteoric rise to a multi-billion dollar valuation and a major Chinese hacking incident.
About: This script finished with 10 votes on last year’s Black List, putting it in the top 25. It’s based on a couple of books, the more popular being “In the Plex,” about Google. The three writers who adapted this are all newbies. Two of them, Diani and Devine, have mostly focused on acting.
Writers(!): Gabriel Diani & Etta Devine & Evan Bates, based on “In The Plex” by Steven Levy & “I’m Feeling Lucky” by Douglas Edwards
Details: 122 pages (June 2017 draft)

The Big Short and The Social Network ushered in a new quasi-genre I like to call the Tricked Out Geek True Story. They take what should be nerdy subject matter and INFUSE it with a hip style, cool characters, and loads of energy. The reason the genre’s worked so far is that it orders up a powerful item on the screenwriting “secret menu,” that being irony. They present a GEEKY story in a COOL way. If you present a geeky story in a geeky way, that’s kind of on-the-nose, isn’t it?

“Don’t Be Evil” is Google’s introduction into this genre and boy does it want you to love it. This script is so intent on winning you over that it will do whatever it takes. Ongoing hip voice over narration. You got it. Staring into the camera and breaking the fourth wall. You better believe it. Recklessly cutting between six different time periods. You bet your ass we’re not stopping at five. Characters constantly referencing screenwriting terminology. Oh, hell yes. We got that too. How does this overcranked CPU stack up? Let’s find out.

It’s 2009 and Google’s just been hacked by the Chinese. At least that’s what Larry Page, the co-founder of Google, believes. Larry is our eyes and ears in this story, our “Ferris Bueller” if you will. That’s a good way to think of him because… well because the script tells us to think of him that way.

The story uses the Chinese hack as a starting point into how Google was born. We jump all the way back to Larry’s childhood, when he read a biography on Nikola Tesla, the famed inventor. The moral of Tesla’s biography was – you can’t just be a good inventor. You have to be good at business too.

Larry’s right hand man is Sergey, a programmer who grew up in communist Russia and therefore hates other communist countries, like China. He’s joined by Google’s head of security, Heather Adkins, and Google’s CEO, Eric Schmidt, a man who was forced upon Larry by his investors since Larry didn’t know jack about running a business.

Amidst this Chinese hack, the team desperately tries to hold onto its company motto: Don’t Be Evil. After jumping back through a million time periods, we learn that this motto came about due to Larry’s belief that all corporations put their profits in front of their customers and he wanted Google to be the first company that didn’t do that.

The Chinese hack is the first time Google is faced with a decision that threatens their fabled motto. The quandary goes like this. The group feels they have a moral obligation to let their users know that their data has been compromised by China. However, if they do this, it would expose the Chinese, who would likely then kick Google out of their country. Since China represents billions of dollars in potential profits, this is an extremely hard decision.

As we get closer to the decision, we continue to take more diversions into the past, where the characters self-referentially remind us that they know they’re relying heavily on backstory and flashbacks, but that it will all make sense in the end. That end comes with Larry making the final call on the hack, which will inform the path that Google takes from this point forward.

Something we haven’t talked about in awhile is level of difficulty. If your routine incorporates six triple-axels and this is the first time you’ve ever skated, you’re probably not going to execute your routine. Don’t Be Evil was like three skaters trying to win the Olympics their first time out. Not even a brand new Zamboni could clean up the aftermath.

My newbie antennae goes up whenever I see FLASH. If a script is dominated by flashiness – talking to the camera, lots of self-referencing, tons of flashbacks, etc. – it’s usually an indication of a new writer. Here’s an example of what I’m talking about. After an NSA agent is introduced, we get: “She’s completely fictional because there’s no way anyone is giving the screenwriters any information about Google’s very real relationship with the NSA.” Seasoned writers have failed enough times to know that flash is fool’s gold and that substance – deep characters, a well-designed plot, conflict-filled scenes, etc. – is your best bet at writing a good script.

What complicates this analysis is that the theme of this story is actually pretty strong, this question of is it possible for a corporation not to be evil? So it masks, at times, the attention deficit disorder writing that surrounds it. But, in the end, the script can’t escape this obsessive need to make you love it. It wants to be The Big Short. But it’s like The Big Short written by Max Landis, if that makes sense.

For example, the creation of deep characters. Outside of that first Larry Page flashback scene where he reads Tesla’s biography, I can’t remember a single scene where we actually get to know someone. And that’s because the script was so intent on never staying anywhere for any amount of time. It was like BAM, time to jump to the next flashback!! Contrast this with The Social Network, which gave you 8 entire minutes with our main character in the film’s very first scene (the breakup scene). We learned so much about Mark Zuckerberg in that scene.

Not to mention, reading a book is a lazy way to introduce a character. If you want to introduce a character in a way where we get to know them, do it through action. Preferably, give them a tough choice. We learn so much about characters when they’re faced with a choice. If you try and jump the line and never write the 4-5 scripts that teach you this, you’ll never know how to properly introduce a character, which is one of the most influential moments in a screenplay.

And I couldn’t for the life of me understand why the writers kept referencing screenwriting! Here’s a real exchange between characters in the story: “I found something important.” “I thought you were in New Zealand?” “I came over during that flashback.” It was bizarre. This story had nothing to do with screenwriting. It’s about Google and hacking. Maybe had they referenced movie cliches, that would’ve made more sense. But for some reason screenwriting became this huge theme in the script.

Now does all of this mean you should never use too-cool-for-school writing techniques? No. The Big Short obviously proved that it’s possible. But The Big Short was written by one writer, Charles Randolph, whose credits dated back over a decade, and another, Adam McKay, who had over 30 credits. These guys know how to navigate the potholes that come with this kind of writing style.

Figure out how to write simple stories first. Introduce a big problem, which results in a strong goal, for a compelling main character, with some urgency and high stakes. There wasn’t a single compelling character in this movie. The problem the characters are dealing with is arguably compelling. But we know nothing about anyone so it doesn’t matter. And that’s the kind of thing writing a simple story forces you to learn – how to construct a compelling character.

Reading my review back, it sounds harsher than I meant it to. This is the kind of thing everybody who jumps into a new medium does. They go for big and flashy because big and flashy gets noticed. And with this making the Black List, you can say that it worked. But if you want to work in this business a long time, you gotta learn the basics. And no basics were on display here.

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

What I learned: If you jump around in time too frequently, the reader never gets pulled in. I’d say this script jumped to a different time period, on average, once every 5 pages. I couldn’t get invested in the story because the story never slowed down enough for me to understand what I was investing in.

The Queen of Dialogue is here. A new Diablo Cody script. We’ll be learning a few dialogue tips today as well as whether Cody is back.

Genre: Drama
Premise: An overworked borderline depressed mother of two is forced to hire a “night nanny” to take care of her newborn.
About: Tully is Diablo Cody’s latest. But don’t close your browser window while simultaneously rolling your eyes just yet. Cody is teaming up with the director responsible for her two best efforts – Juno and Young Adult – Jason Reitman. Charlize Theron, who starred in the latter film, will be joining the two again.
Writer: Diablo Cody
Details: 91 pages

I was going to review Cloverfield today but everyone’s saying it’s terrible. That’s a bummer because the Super Bowl release strategy (“Here’s our trailer – go watch the movie now!”) was possibly the greatest of all time. Here’s my old review of the script. Keep in mind this is before they Cloverfielded it.

Not to worry because we’ve got the latest Diablo Cody script. Let’s jump right into it!

Marlo has an 8 year-old daughter, Sarah, and 5 year-old son, Jonah, who is autistic. She’s also nine months pregnant. Already overworked and under-slept, Marlo is afraid of what this new baby is going to do to a life that’s already in Stage 3 survival-mode. Even with a loving husband, she knows she’ll be testing the limits of human ability.

While at her brother’s house for dinner, he tells her of this thing that helped his wife – a night nanny. The night nanny shows up in the evening and stays with the baby all night, bringing her to you when it’s time to nurse, then whisking her away when it’s over. It’s the perfect solution, according to her brother, and saved his marriage.

Marlo is resistant at first, but comes around when her sleep deprivation hits the breaking point. Tully, a 20-something cool chick, arrives a night later, and wins Marlo over immediately. Not only does Tully remind Marlo of herself when she was younger, but she’s so damn calm. She can handle anything. Within days, Marlo’s life turns around. She’s getting sleep now. She has more energy. She’s the life of the dinner party.

But Tully isn’t just here for the baby. She wants to help Marlo. She wants to get to know her. And so Marlo confides in this perfect yogi-like presence about what her life used to be like (fun!), about what her life is like now (not fun!), about her sex life (nonexistent!). This leads to the script’s most controversial scene. Marlo, disgusted by her worn down baby-bearing body, has Tully have sex with her husband as a “gift” to him.

Things take a turn when Tully confesses she’s thinking about quitting. Marlo sensed this was coming, and the two decide to have one last crazy night out. Unfortunately, that night ends in disaster.

They say write what you know. But what if what you know is boring? Clearly, Cody is writing about her ongoing experience with motherhood. The question is, does she find a way to make it interesting? The answer is mostly yes. We know that something is up with Tully and we’re willing to go through this journey to find out what it is.

But before I talk about the plot, I want to talk about dialogue. I don’t care what any of you say. Cody is still one of the better dialogue screenwriters in the business. I’m sure she’s made a ton of money doing uncredited dialogue polishes for huge movies. And while I don’t have time to get into all the reasons her dialogue rocks, I’ll highlight a couple of things.

Early on, Marlo’s brother, Craig, and his wife, Elyse, visit her in the hospital after she’s had the baby. One of the best ways to gauge whether your dialogue is working is if the characters are reacting to things differently. If they’re reacting the same, there’s no contrast, and contrast is where you’re going to find a lot of good dialogue.

So Craig apologizes that they can’t stay but their daughter “is in the middle school musical tonight.” Marlo asks what show they’re doing. Elyse answers, proudly, “Rent.” Craig then says, “I don’t get it. It’s like, just pay your fucking rent. Problem solved.” As you can see, these two react to the same information differently. It would’ve been easy (and lazy) to have Elyse say, “Rent,” and Craig respond, “She’s been working so hard on it.” Losing that contrast instantly softens the dialogue, making it boring.

Another dialogue tip is to steer away from absolutes. When Marlo first meets Tully, she’s shocked by how young she looks. This woman is about to take on an immense amount of responsibility. So the first thing Marlo asks is, “How old are you?” Tully smiles. Marlo ‘checks herself,’ then says, “I’m sorry; I just wasn’t expecting—“ “Don’t apologize,” Tully says. “I get that a lot. I’m older than I look.”

In this exchange, most writers would’ve had Tully answer the question, “How old are you?” with her age. That’s boring. Steer away from absolutes. As you can see, Tully doesn’t even answer the question! She just smiles, forcing Marlo to respond to her own question. Already this exchange has become more interesting. Then, to top it off, Tully doesn’t directly answer the question. She just says, “I’m older than I look.” By avoiding the absolute, you write better dialogue.

One of the hardest parts about writing good dialogue and what Cody excels at is sprucing up responses. Not all the time, but sometimes when a character says something, the other character gives us a clever or “spruced-up” response. After Tully unexpectedly cleans the house one night, Marlo thanks her. “I just wanted to thank you for cleaning the house. You really, really didn’t have to do that.” Okay, now think for a second. The other character in this scene, Tully, is going to respond. What is she going to say? 9 times out of 10, the writer is going to have her say, “Oh, it was nothing.” I know because I read everything. That’s what everyone writes. But if you have in your head, “I’m going to spruce this response up a bit,” you come up with something more interesting. Tully’s response in the script is, “I enjoyed it. I have an energy surplus. Like Saudi Arabia.”

Now that’s pretty clever. But here’s the real trick in writing a line like that. You have to create a character who says interesting things (or says things in an interesting way) to begin with. Cody gave Tully two qualities. One, she was ultra-mysterious. And two, she had an endless storage of high-school-like facts at her disposal. So this line wasn’t created in a vacuum. It was something Cody integrated into the character from the start.

As I wrap this up, I’m going to talk some BIG SPOILERS. So if you don’t want to know, turn away now. Okay, so the big reveal is that our night nanny, Tully, isn’t real. This whole thing has been happening inside of Marlo’s head. I have to give it to Cody. I didn’t figure it out until page 75. I knew something was up, obviously. Tully was just too weird not to have something going on. But for some reason my mind didn’t go there. I kept waiting for her to kidnap the baby or something.

Does the twist work? Sort of. It’s set up well. We know that Marlo already had a mental breakdown. So it makes sense that she would have another one. The blowback might come from the husband character. He conveniently goes straight to the bedroom every night at exactly the same time so he never sees Tully. I think Cody sensed this, which is why she created the free sex with our hot nanny scene. But that scene was so weird and so out-of-place, it only got my spidey sense tingling more.

But who knows, this ending might dupe audiences. And a great twist ending is word-of-mouth gold. We’ll have to see if that happens with Tully.

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

What I learned: Script Bait – You guys all know what click bait is, right? You give’em an article title that’s impossible not to click on. Well scripts have that too. It’s called “Script Bait,” and what it is is a line of bait that makes it impossible for the reader not to read on. Script bait is ESPECIALLY IMPORTANT in character driven scripts where you don’t have a ton going on plot-wise. So early on, when Marlo’s brother is encouraging her to get the night nanny, he lays out this script bait line: “I don’t want what happened last time to happen again.” We’re not informed what he’s referring to. But you bet your ass we want to know. Which means we’ll keep reading until we find out. Script Bait baby. Make sure you’re dropping it.