Genre: Sci-Fi
Premise: The United States is in a race with China to become the first country to time travel. When an older pilot cheats his way onto the program, he positions himself to be the first ever time traveler.
About: Being pitched as “Interstellar meets Top Gun,” short story “The Barrier” became a hot package when rising star Austin Butler became attached. Winner of the package? 20th Century Fox, who knows themselves some sci-fi. Writer MacMillan Hedges has been reviewed on the site before with another time-travel script. This man loves himself some time-jumping!
Writer: MacMillan Hedges
Details: About 4000 words

There was some reluctance to check this one out because I’d read the writer’s previous time travel story, a screenplay, and let’s just say I thought there was too much going on.

But Carson, don’t you ALWAYS think there’s too much going on in screenplays? You know what? That very well may be the case. But it’s a valid argument because most of the time, THERE IS TOO MUCH GOING ON.

Screenplays, and short stories, need to have focused stories to truly take advantage of their mediums. And writers just jam too much shit into them. Or, even if they don’t have a lot of shit, they twist and turn the simple stuff they do have in ways that are unnecessarily confusing.

When you combine that issue with the nuclear shitshow that a lazily written time travel story can create, you’re asking for trouble, brother. Time travel movies are HARD TO WRITE.

I’m not saying don’t write them. Deep down in my heart I love time travel as a story device. But it’s hard to get right. So if you’re going to write a time travel story, you have to give 100%. Not 95%. Not 97%. Not even 99%. Cause that extra 1% is the difference between time travel plot holes and no time travel plot holes.

As for today’s story… I’ll say this. For 75% of the story, I had no idea where it was going. Then, out of nowhere, the main character’s purpose arrives and I said, “Oh, okay, that’s actually a story. Why didn’t we make that clear earlier?”

Confused? Let me break down the plot for you.

The Chinese have accidentally discovered time travel during a drone test. This freaks the U.S. military out. If China can develop a reliable Time Machine and send people back in time, they could erase the U.S.

So the U.S. puts all of its resources into making it to the time travel finish line first. The rules are this: Since it requires so much energy, they’re only going to be able to send one person. Pilot Karl Herseht is determined to be that guy. So he goes up against all these other dudes.

A key stage in the hiring process is the psychological evaluation. They put you through a lie detector test specifically to see if you have any past traumatic experiences. We don’t really understand why yet, but they really want to know if someone in your past died.

Here’s where things get a little complicated so stay with me. Karl is pretending to be someone else. How he’s able to trick the U.S. military into thinking he’s another person isn’t convincingly explained. But we realize later on why it needs to happen for the plot.

Karl does the old trick of jamming a nail in your foot to defeat the lie detector. He pretends he’s someone else so they don’t know about his secret past trauma – that Karl’s son drowned in their pool. When it happened, his wife was so devastated, she simply ran away.

When Karl wins the job, he goes through the training and then preps to be placed in some supersonic jet thing that will be dropped from the edge of space and then speed towards the earth fast enough that it will eventually create a time portal. And then he’ll eject and parachute to the ocean.

(Spoilers) Right before launch, the military discovers who Karl is and tries to stop him but he goes anyway. Once back in time, he runs over to his home from 20 years ago and rigs up his son to have a secret breathable mask underwater because Past Karl has to believe that his son dies so that Future Karl will come back to this time and save his son. After he and Past Wife “save” the son, they run away together.

I mean… there’s a lot to get into here if we want to.

We could start with the fact that the U.S. spent every single resource they had to create a Time Machine yet was unable to properly ID a member of their own military. There are some plot holes audiences will overlook. I’d be surprised if they’d look the other way on that one.

But let’s say we can get past that. Does the story work?

The problem I have with The Barrier is that it doesn’t show its hand until too late in the game. This means we’re stuck trying to figure out what’s going on the whole story. This can be a purposeful storytelling device, where you, the writer, are dangling the carrot for the reader way off in the distance. But you have to be careful. If the carrot is too far away, to the point where we can’t make out what it is, we can become disinterested or frustrated.

I began to get frustrated. The short story had these fun little moments where we’d see transcripts from news shows and podcasts, with famous people talking about the event. But while all of that was fun, I kept saying, “What is this about??” I kept waiting for a story to emerge.

Sure, I knew we were trying to win the time travel race, but I wasn’t sure why. There was this vague threat that if China beat us to the punch, they could erase us. But not long after that threat was mentioned, it evaporated, and then, out of nowhere, we were in a time travel race with India??

Why the messiness? You want your story to be cohesive. You want all the parts to come together harmoniously. It felt like new parts of the story were being added all the time without thought.

Such as: where we were even going when we traveled in time? It was determined by the U.S. military that they wanted to go back and stop the Iraq War. So they were sending Karl back to the year 2002.

Why was this even in the story?? It’s a setup that’s never paid off. Clearly, it was just put there because that was the approximate time the author needed to send the main character to to save his son. If you’re the U.S. military creating time travel, your first goal wouldn’t be to stop a war. It would be to – you know – TIME TRAVEL! Let’s figure that out first and we’ll move on to the war stuff later. It’d be like trying to win the race to the moon and, hey, while we’re up there, let’s build a lunar skyscraper.

It was weird choices like that that gave the story an unsophisticated polish. And time travel needs to be as polished as it gets. There can’t be any rough edges as those edges always feel 10x as sloppy as they do in normal stories.

Much like the last sci-fi short story that sold, I sense that this sold because of the concept/pitch. That one was about the first human alien hostage exchange. This one was about the time-travel race, an update to the space race. That’s a good pitch. Good pitches/concepts put blinders on producers which is why I constantly drill it into your head how important they are. Good concepts don’t require great writing to sell sometimes.

With that said, once you come up with the concept, you have to execute it. And with these short stories, they’re limiting in the way you can explore big ideas. We’re talking about one of the biggest ideas ever here – a time-travel race. Can you really explore that in 20 pages? That’s where this story gets derailed. It’s the biggest story ever for 15 pages and then it’s the smallest story ever (save son from drowning) for 5 pages.

I don’t know, guys. I don’t think any screenwriters have a handle on this short story thing. They’re all just winging it. The one excellent short story sale that I’ve read so far, Big Bad, is a small story that takes place in a small town with a condensed time frame. It’s a perfect setup for a short story. And it still had marketable content as it was about werewolves. But I have to concede that writers like MacMillan have a better feel for how to exploit this market, since they’re the ones selling these things.

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

What I learned: The short story revolution has come upon us for a very specific reason. Back in the day, spec scripts with giant concepts were the biggest currency in town. However, 99% of those scripts had a concept and nothing else. So after a bunch of them bombed, Hollywood stopped buying them, which was a big reason for the fall of the spec sale.  Nobody thought we’d ever be able to con Hollywood with our big concepts and weak execution again.  Enter the short story.  The short story is actually BETTER at the shoddy execution delivery than the spec script because the stories are so short, you have a built in excuse as to why you can’t pull them off.  The buyers all understand this limitation so they don’t penalize you for it.  What does this mean for you, the aspiring screenwriter? It means write short stories with giant concepts. They are your best shot at selling something for a lot of money right now. Now, if you can write one of these big concepts AND ALSO MAKE IT GOOD you will literally control Hollywood for an entire week as the town desperately attempts to buy your script. It hasn’t happened yet. Which means one of you could be the first. Short Story Showdown is happening later this year. :)

One of Hollywood’s young talents attempts to recover from his previous failed film.

Genre: Drama?
Premise: Set in 2020 in the small New Mexico town of Eddington, Covid restrictions begin to wreak havoc on the mental state of a sheriff, who tries to run for mayor to save the town.
About: We talked about this movie in the most recent newsletter. Eddington is Ari Aster’s (Hereditary) latest movie. It stars Joaquin Phoenix, Emma Stone, Austin Butler, and, of course, Pedro Pascal. The film premiered at Cannes and was one of the few, surprisingly, that failed to get a standing ovation.
Writer: Ari Aster
Details: 147 pages!

I was on the fence about reading this because I don’t like to read scripts anymore that I know I’ll hate. It gives off that Critical Drinker vibe where you’re trying to be a hater. And I don’t like being a hater in reviews. I like reading great scripts. That’s one of the best experiences in the world for me.

But when I do read a script where I think that the writer is being lazy or pretentious or that prioritizes the creator more than the product… that’s when I go hard at scripts. And I sensed that that was going to happen here.

My worries were not alleviated when I read that first page. My pretentious antenna went on full alert when I saw: “A Covid-19 Western.” But, hey, Jaco said he thought the script was interesting and I may be pleasantly surprised. So I’m giving it a shot!

“Eddington” is about the town of Eddington, New Mexico, which is home to 3000 people. It’s early 2020 when Covid is at its height and the talk of the town is about wearing masks and how businesses aren’t allowed to be open.

Sheriff Joe Cross is sick of this. He doesn’t wear masks and he wants people to be able to work. So he decides to run for mayor. Meanwhile, the actual mayor, Ted, is conspiring with the upper crust of the town to bring in a big tech company, which will make all of them richer.

In addition to getting to know Joe, we hang out with some of the kids in town. There’s 18 year old Brian (white) and his best friend, 19 year old Eric (Latino). The two are both trying to land the attention of the super cute, Sarah, who is obsessed with BLM. So they both become BLM spokespeople in hopes of getting laid. There’s also a young cop named Michael who used to date Sara, who hasn’t gotten over their breakup.

(Spoilers) When the locals, led by Sarah, begin a defund the police movement, something snaps in Joe and he kills a local black homeless man and buries the body.

He then sniper kills both Ted, and Ted’s son, Eric, in their home, and tabs the murder on Michael. When a local Native American cop starts suspecting that Joe is the real murderer, Joe will have to improvise in a desperate attempt to save himself.

Let me start by stating the obvious: DON’T WRITE A SCRIPT ABOUT COVID. For many, it is the most frustrating time of their lives. So why would you want to remind them of that? It’s like creating a family night called, “Hey Dad, let’s talk about that year you had cancer.”

So, I don’t get why Aster would pick this as his subject matter. This goes back to something I preach on the site all the time and something all of you should be slurping up in the run-up to Mega-Showdown — Concept is the most important thing of all.

It’s not just that a weak concept results in less people wanting to read your script. A weak concept bleeds its crappiness into every aspect of your screenplay – the characters, the plot, the scenes. Its badness is impossible to escape.

Okay, let’s move on to the screenplay because there’s actually some interesting stuff to discuss. This screenplay is built on top of a delayed first major plot point. This is a long way of saying the first big plot point – the one that introduces the plot of the movie – doesn’t take place for a very long time. In fact, it takes 90 pages for us to get to Joe killing Ted and Eric.

Here’s the thing with delayed first major plot points – the more you delay them, the more powerful they are. This is because the further into the script you get before a major plot point has arrived, the less the audience believes one *will* arrive. Therefore, they’re always shocking.

And this was shocking! I literally jolted my head back and said, “Whoa!” Out loud.

So why not do this all the time if they’re so effective? Because then you gotta fill up all the space ahead of that with enough interesting stuff that we stick around for that plot point. And if you haven’t introduced a plot, like Eddington, this is incredibly difficult. Cause you’re not providing the script with enough form to keep readers invested.

Sure, if Aster places this plot point where it’s traditionally introduced – at the end of the first act – he won’t get that late-script shock. And the script will be more traditional, which Aster hates. But the script will actually have a plot to it. Which means the reader has an actual reason to keep turning the pages.

Moving onto the content, I sort of now understand why Cannes didn’t like this film. It’s low-key conservative. And France is, of course, obsessively progressive. There are so many moments throughout the second act where Aster leans into how ridiculous the militaristic operation was during Covid. I’m guessing that put off a lot of the Cannes audience who are probably still wearing masks to this day.

But it’s a better sign for this movie because I thought the weak Cannes response was because the movie was so bad that even the artiest audience in the world didn’t like it. Turns out it’s more of a political preference. Cause this is easily Aster’s most interesting film.

I’m not saying it’s going to do well. It doesn’t have a single marketable element to it. Aster seems to have forgotten that a huge reason why Hereditary did so well was because it was centered within the most marketable low-budget genre in Hollywood – Horror.

The ONLY way a movie like this does well is if the lead performance is out of this world and it gets Oscar traction. Which is difficult to count on.

With that said, there’s some good stuff in here. One of the areas where a lot of writers rely on cliche is in the backstories of their characters. Every backstory is kind of the same. Something to do with drugs. A car crash. Cancer. I read more backstories about those three subjects than you could possibly imagine.

Here, for Joe’s wife, Louise, we get this really interesting backstory about how Joe had to arrest her (his own wife!) because she tried to steal someone else’s baby. And this ties into Joe and Louise’s current relationship which is uneven to say the least. It’s clear that that arrest destroyed the marriage in a way it could never recover from.

I’m on the fence here about what I should rate this script. It definitely comes together in the end. But the whole second act is so rambling due to it operating without a plot that I don’t think I can endorse it. At the very least, the second act needed to be shortened, even if you are going to introduce your main plot point late. Because Aster is so reckless in that respect, I can’t give this a worth the read.

But it’s definitely an interesting script that takes risks. So, if you like offbeat stuff, check it out.

Screenplay link: Eddington

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

What I learned: The way you have to write about politics is through metaphor. Otherwise, nobody’s going to care. If you want to write a movie about systemic racism, you don’t write a true story about the BLM movement. 4 people will show up. You write Get Out. That’s what’s going on here. Aster is directly taking on Covid and BLM as opposed to writing a horror film that explores those things through metaphor. Which is surprising. Cause I think of Aster as an intellectual who would naturally lean into metaphor.

But Mega-Showdown is Ready to Rise!

It was not a good weekend to be any writer who liked ballet. Etoile, on Amazon, didn’t even make it to its second season. And now we’ve got Ballerina, toe-scuffing its way to a 25 million dollar opening.

I don’t think you need to look far to figure out what happened here. The issue is two-fold. You can’t just create a brand new character in a universe and hope we’re going to love them. It doesn’t work that way. The way it works is you prove yourself as a secondary character in a bigger franchise. The audience falls in love with you. Then you go make your own movie (or TV show).

This formula has worked for decades. I don’t know why you think you can change it. It speaks to the value of great character writing. Creating a strong character that audiences resonate with remains the hardest thing to do in screenwriting. Which we’ll talk about more in a second.

The other problem was that Ana De Armas is not a movie star. It’s not even that audiences don’t like her. It’s that they don’t REMEMBER her. She doesn’t have that “must see” quality that only a dozen people in this profession have. The combination of those two things doomed this movie.

It’s too bad because Ballerina, as some of you remember, started out as a spec sale. This was one of those dream scenarios for a screenwriter. Most spec sales get stuck in forever-development. For your script to be pulled into a billion dollar franchise is the stuff dreams are made of. The fact that the movie has now flopped means less of that will happen in the future.

But I’m not here to dwell on the negative. I want to focus on the positive: What can we learn from this? Especially considering that the greatest screenplay competition is coming back to Scriptshadow. How can you use the lessons from Ballerina to create better characters and win the Mega-Showdown?

One of the tougher lessons I’ve learned over the years is that you come into every script with a handicap. With studio scripts, your hero must be grounded in reality. They can’t be wacky or wild or untethered. Why is this problematic? Because grounded people are boring. How’s that for a challenge: With every studio script, you must figure out a way to make your boring hero compelling.

The default solution to this is to make them likable. There’s only one problem with this. Likable people are still boring. We want to find a way to make these characters COMPELLING.

Lucky for you, I know how to pull this off.

You have to lean into real life and create a flaw for your hero that’s relatable and that resonates with others. You have to see grounded characters as an advantage. It allows you to explore the “real shit” and the “real shit” is what everyday people relate to.

Let’s say you want to write about someone who’s stubborn, someone who only sees the world the way they want to see it. It is their way or the highway. They are such a prisoner to their world-view that they cannot accept the views of anyone else around them, even their closest friends and family.

That may seem like a relatively boring flaw on the surface. But if you truly commit to it and explore it like you were researching a real person in real life, that character is going to feel REAL to the audience.

Once you achieve that reality in their eyes, they can now compare that person to people THEY KNOW. This is the trick to getting audiences to become obsessed with a character – when the character becomes a stand-in for real people.

This means that reading your script, or watching your film, offers the viewer the chance to CHANGE THEIR LIVES by reading your script to the end. You see, to them, if your hero can change, it means their friend or family member can change too! So they have no choice but to read to the end.

If you want to see this play out in a movie, check out Hoosiers. When Gene Hackman died last month, I watched a few of his old movies, including this one. Sure, it’s a formulaic sports movie about a tiny basketball team trying to win the state championship.

But what elevates it beyond the traditional sports flick is this stubborn coach at the center of the story – this guy who only does things his way. The writer and Hackman committed to that flaw so thoroughly that the character became real to the audience. I knew people like that Coach. Seeing him gradually bend and listen to others gave me hope that the people I knew could change as well.

Do you see what’s happening here? Your script is connecting the imaginary world (yours) with the real one (theirs). Now you’re playing in 4-D space and this is when movies become magical.

Absent a flaw, the other thing you can do to make us care about your main character is to create a genuine relationship in their life that contains an issue that is unresolved in some way.

I use the word “genuine” aggressively. If it’s not genuine, it won’t work. You have to dig into your own life and find these unresolved relationships that you can draw from and transplant onto the hero of your script. Only then will this work.

If you have never had your heart broken and try to write about a relationship where one character breaks another character’s heart, I guarantee you it’s not going to work. We won’t care. It will feel disingenuous. You have to draw from real life to pull this off.

The trick is to pinpoint WHAT, in the relationship, is unresolved (in a marriage one person does all the work, in a friendship there’s zero communication). If you don’t know, you won’t know what to build their scenes around. But once you know, it becomes extremely powerful because to explore any unresolved issue, your characters must push through conflict, and conflict is where all the drama is.

More importantly, the audience again gets to compare what they’re seeing onscreen to their life. And if it’s genuine enough, they will be able to mentally work through those same issues with the person they share that problem with. Whenever the character onscreen does something, they will be able to think, “I could do that. And maybe that will fix the issue we have.” Or, “Ugh, that’s what my person always does! I hate that.”

When they are thinking these things, they are EMOTIONALLY INVOLVED in your movie as opposed to casually involved. And once you’ve got them emotionally, they are captivated.

But it’s not easy! You have to draw from real life and you have to make sure the characters’ actions reflect how things would genuinely go down in the real world. The second you start cheating and making up reactions or lines based on what you want to happen rather than what would happen, you will lose them. Which is why so few writers are able to pull great characters off.

But the point is, when you’re writing these bigger movies, and you’re forced to ground that main character, you don’t have many avenues to make that character interesting. Is that why Ballerina didn’t work? I don’t know. I didn’t see it and it’s been forever since I read the script. But if I had to guess, I’d say that nobody’s coming out of that movie feeling like they’ve connected to the Ballerina character for the reasons I just brought up.

So, to summarize. If you like to write wacky heroes, write an indie movie that costs less than 5 million bucks to produce. Or use the secondary characters in your studio scripts to have fun with. But if your script depends on a hero that must be grounded, the main ways you’re going to make those characters compelling to an audience are to explore a genuine flaw or explore a genuine broken relationship.

Remember this when writing your Mega-Showdown screenplay.

VIVA LA MEGA SHOWDOWN!!!

Mega Showdown is back, baby! The 2-Week event is coming to your doorstep in roughly two months, which gives you plenty of time to tighten up your screenplay. Unlike the 700 dollar price tag that the Nicholl Fellowship charges, Mega Showdown is completely free! So there’s literally NO reason not to enter.

HOW TO SUBMIT
What: Mega Showdown
When: Friday, August 1
Deadline: Thursday, July 31, 10pm Pacific Time
Send me your: Script title, genre, logline, and a PDF of the script
Where: carsonreeves3@gmail.com

Now that it’s been officially announced, you’re probably wondering how you’re going to win the Scriptshadow Mega-Showdown. Well it turns out I have an inside guy at the site and may be able to help. Here’s what he told me.

STEP 1 – A GOOD CONCEPT

We’re going to start with the obvious. You need a concept that pops, something that grabs the reader’s attention. Not just for me. If your script gets picked, it will be standing along with nine other entries and the readers of the site, aka, the voters, are not going to read every entry. They’re going to pore over the loglines and decide on which scripts to open depending on the concept. So if you have a boring logline in a sea of sexy loglines, you’re toast.

Remember, a concept doesn’t have to be gigantic (Jurassic World) to create curiosity in a reader. But it must at least be thoughtful – clever, fresh, or original. Here are some loglines that would probably do well in the contest…

When a group of teenagers repair an old clock with a mysterious 13th numeral, they are granted an extra hour where their actions have no consequence.

A group of workers at an Ikea-like store find themselves lost within its maze-like interior after a late-night seance goes wrong.

In a claustrophobic race against time, a woman must unravel the mystery behind a malevolent crowd before she succumbs to their relentless pursuit.

A team of financially desperate hotel employees embark on a deadly treasure hunt to recover priceless diamonds from a wrecked yacht in the middle of “The Red Triangle,” the world’s most dangerous hunting ground for great white sharks.

When their embarrassing, sometimes filthy, possibly cancellable group chat falls into the wrong hands, a group of dudes must go on a madcap scavenger hunt around town to appease a mysterious blackmailer.

And here are ones that would not do well…

Eve and Anders dated for a decade. Now, Eve is going to see Anders for the first time in years… at his dad’s funeral. Together, they confront their shared past and the infinite nature of love, even after it dies.

Nothing says “It’s complicated” like breaking your crush’s arm. Set in rural Spain against the backdrop of a passionate soccer rivalry, the story follows young protagonists Sophie and Gloria as they navigate their relationship.

Three people at different points of the immigrant experience come together when the mother of a 10-year-old musical prodigy is arrested in an ICE raid.

A family doctor in East Cleveland juggles his personal life, as he reconnects with an old flame, deals with his teenage daughter’s problems, and selling his family’s medical practice.

Note the difference. The first ones are sexier. They have higher concepts or bigger ideas. The second group chronicles more day-to-day stuff. That’s not to say you can’t write good stories about everyday events. But they have to be way better to get noticed because they get 1/10 to 1/20 the amount of script requests.

Also, beware the “big idea” that feels dated (A trio of sassy, elderly women receive a unique offer from Death for a week of youth in exchange for their lives) the flashy concept that feels random (A struggling screenwriter’s life spirals into chaos when he becomes obsessed with telling the true* story of a mermaid’s life and death.) or the big big concept that lacks a clever angle (A young dad revives his 24-year-old cryogenically frozen mom, unleashing terror and forbidden tension that haunt his family and threaten to unravel his marriage).

STEP 2 – A GOOD FIRST PAGE

The first page is even more critical in a Scriptshadow Showdown than it is in the real world. The reason a first page is important is that this is the page where you are being evaluated on whether you can write. Are your sentences clean and clear? Is the style of your writing pleasant? Is your writing lean and concise? Is there a confidence to your writing? Is there a polish to your writing? Is there a voice to your writing? The second the reader determines any of these things aren’t up to par, they will bail. It’s actually much easier for a reader to bail on page 1 than page 7. So they will do it more often. This is why a good first page is so critical.

STEP 3 – A GOOD FIRST FIVE PAGES

The first five pages are important because they will contain your first full scene. And it is in a scene that readers are able to evaluate whether you are capable of telling a story. As I’ve pointed out many times before, you want to show that you can write a scene with a clear beginning, middle, and end, that it is dramatic, and that makes readers want to turn the page. This is a very difficult skill to master, which is why 95% of writers cannot do it. Cause if you can’t tell a story in one scene, there’s no chance in a million years you can tell a good story over the course of 100 pages. A great recent example of this is the Skyview Restaurant opening scene in the new Final Destination movie. A riveting story-within-a-story. If you write an opening scene like that, I guarantee you, you will hook the reader.

STEP 4 – AT LEAST ONE CHARACTER WE REALLY WANT TO ROOT FOR

A character that the audience loves is a cheat code. Because falling in love with a character isn’t that different from falling in love with a real person. What happens when we fall in love in real life? All of that person’s faults disappear. We are unable to see anything but hearts. Same thing in a script. If we love that character of yours, we don’t see any of the plot’s weaknesses. We don’t need the scenes to be perfect. Mark Watney in The Martian, Ani in Anora, Nate in Novocaine, Roz in The Wild Robot, Deadpool, Willy Wonka in Wonka, or Robert McCall in The Equalizer. A cheat code on top of that cheat code is to ask if an extremely likable or charming actor would want to play that part. If you could imagine Glen Powell wanting to play the role, it’s probably a very likable character.

This is not to say that you can’t write challenging characters – characters like Oppenheimer, or Mad Max, or Bella from Poor Things, or Arthur Fleck from Joker, or Driver from Drive. But your command of character must be VERY VERY HIGH to pull this off. Honestly, all you have to do to make people like your character is give them a good ‘save the cat’ moment and then make them sympathetic in some way (they’re blind, such as in Bring her Back).

But challenging characters require a deft knowledge of character equilibrium, which is the process by which you balance your character’s negative traits against their positive ones, and always have them at a net +1. So: one more positive trait than however many negative traits they have. You must also be obsessed with human psychology to pull off these characters. You have to want to dig into the depths of what makes humans tick. Cause if you don’t love that stuff, it’s very hard to create the depth you need to make these characters three-dimensional. But, the good news is, if you can’t, you can always just make the character likable, which as I just pointed out, is relatively easy.

STEP 5 – A SCRIPT WITH A PLAN

If you can do all of the above, you will be in the top 10 of the Mega Showdown. But if you want to win, you have to know how to write a good script. Obviously that takes more explanation than the last few paragraphs I’m going to write in this article. But a key component of any great script is an engine that’s always running underneath the story. Whether you create that engine with a compelling goal (“Companion” – survive everyone trying to kill you) or a compelling mystery (who’s sending all these drops in “Drop”?), the degree to which we will want to turn the page will be dependent on how strong that engine is. If it peters out at any time, we will lose interest. So there must always be something pushing your characters forward with force.

From there it’s a matter of throwing a lot of obstacles in the way of the objective. Throwing some curveballs at the characters that twist the plot in unexpected ways. Showing your characters grow by fighting through their flaws (and ultimately overcoming them). Creating compelling broken relationships that you eventually resolve in satisfying ways. And putting 100% of your effort into every scene. There shouldn’t be a single scene in your script that you don’t rate at least a 7 out of 10. And the large majority of them should be at 8 out of 10 or higher. Effort alone will get you ahead of most of the screenwriters out there.

Do these things and you will have a winning script. But remember, it all starts with that concept. If that’s weak, the reader will never get to steps 2-5.

Good luck!

Genre: Dark Comedy
Premise: When a lonely and socially-stunted young woman mistakenly receives a severed thumb in the mail, she makes it her life’s obsession to return it to the hand it once belonged to–putting her on a collision course that will upend her world forever.
About: This script got on last year’s Black List, with 10 votes. Screenwriter Cesar Vitale has one TV credit, a show starring Peyton List (Cobra Kai).
Writer: Cesar Vitale
Details: 104 pages

Jessica Gunning for Addie?

The other day I said you either need to give us a strong concept or a strong character. Your script cannot survive without either. Today’s script shows that you can actually include BOTH if you want. We’ve got a flashy plotline as well as a flashy character. Let’s see how it worked out.

Addie has a serious case of antisocial personality disorder. In other words, she’s a psychopath. It’s not her fault. Her parents were drug addicts who both overdosed, which means Addie got tossed around the foster care system for years.

These days, she lives alone and works as a bagger at a local grocery store. Every day is a battle with Addie because she doesn’t feel empathy. If someone spills their groceries in front of her, she will not help. She just watches them pick their own groceries up right in front of her.

One day, Addie receives a thumb in the mail. The thumb is from a rich guy named Tyler. Tyler’s been kidnapped by his drug dealers, Dakota, Shawn, and Bug. They want a million bucks from his father to return him. Which is why they sent the father the thumb. Except they’re so stupid, they messed up the address and the thumb went to Addie’s address instead.

Excited about figuring out the thumb’s origins, Addie heads to the money drop-off point where Bug is waiting. She tasers him and brings him back to her apartment and starts questioning him. Unfortunately, Bug hit his head hard when he fell and soon dies. Addie then cuts him up and puts him in her fridge.

After some more investigating, she locates the business where Tyler is being held and heads there. She kills both Dakota and Shawn to save Tyler. But there’s a caveat to releasing Tyler. She wants to be his friend. She’s tried to make friends her whole life and she figured, if you save someone’s life, they HAVE to be your friend.

Tyler realizes that this girl is batshit insane and that he still has to escape, just like he had to before. But before he does, the cops show up, confused about who’s good and who’s bad. They start shooting and not everyone survives.

A quick side story regarding this review. The logline created a different expectation from what the story ended up being. The logline made it sound like us and the main character were on this journey together, trying to solve the mystery of where this thumb came from and why.

But that’s not the script. The script starts off in the villains’ lair, so to speak. We’re there when they cut off the thumb. As the story evolves, we’re with the bad guys just as much as we’re with Addie. In that sense, we’re waiting for Addie to catch up with what we know.

It’s a slight difference but an important one. Because you want your logline to convey what the accurate experience is going to be when the reader reads the script or else you risk disappointing them. I was disappointed for a while because I liked the logline version of the story better.  Eventually, the new way won me over. But just be careful about that as screenwriters. And, by the way, I do logline consults. They’re just 25 bucks (carsonreeves1@gmail.com). So I can help you with this.

Moving on to the script itself – the other day I was talking to a producer because a writer had sent me a good dark comedy. I asked the producer if he’d want to read it and he said, “Too hard to get off the ground. They never make any money.” I bristled at the response but after reading this script today, I understand where he’s coming from.

When I finished “Thumb,” I wasn’t sure if I was supposed to be crying, laughing, or satisfied that the goal had been achieved. In other words, these scripts can be hard to track. They’re riding a finer line than a straight comedy or a straight drama. Sure, when you ace the test, they’re great. But when you don’t, you always leave the reader a little confused about what they were supposed to feel.

I will say this, though – dark comedies are great canvases to create memorable characters. Whether you like Addie or hate her, you will remember her. Some of the strongest characters you can write in movies are characters who react the opposite to how normal people react.

There’s this funny yet heartbreaking scene where Addie goes on a date for the first time and has no idea what she’s doing. All she knows is that she hates sushi and that’s where the guy invited her. So, in her world, if you don’t like something, you simply bring your own food, which is what she does.

Addie’s every move is counterintuitive to normal human beings, which makes her fun to watch. You may not like what she does at times, but you’re always on the edge of your seat anticipating what she’ll do next. For all the fireworks behind The Hider’s recent sale, Robert Downey Jr. probably would’ve done better securing this role and playing Addie. She’s a more interesting character than The Hider for sure. :)

But I think this script breaks down as we move into the third act. I was not convinced I was viewing the authentic actions of a psychopath. It felt like sometimes we chose laughs (Addie’s obsession with Jack in the Box) or buzzy imagery (Addie watching TV with the decapitated head of Bug on her lap) as opposed to more genuine actions.

That’s one of the tricks when you write about mental disorders. You have to do a ton of research to make sure that the character stays consistent with their mental disease. Cause once you start guessing what they’d do or have them do something for a laugh instead, we lose faith in the character. The suspension of disbelief cracks.

Once we make it into the third act, Addie becomes obsessed with finding a friend. Every third sentence  is some variation of, “I want friends.” And I don’t think psychopaths want friends, right? Or they don’t care? Maybe I’m wrong but it didn’t feel honest. Which contributed to an already shaky tone that had been bee-bopping its way around throughout the second act.

WITH THAT SAID, I still thought the script was fun. I liked not knowing what was going to happen next. The plotting was pretty tight – it evolved in a pleasant way. And Addie was such a weirdo that anytime she was in a scene, you were at least entertained. For those of you who want a story with a better version of this character, check out the book, Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine. But, otherwise, this is still pretty good.

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

What I learned: When relevant to the story, we need to know whether your character is attractive or unattractive. Addie works as a bagger at a grocery store. A handsome man named Nathan asks her out. Which was confusing. Addie is clearly strange. She doesn’t seem to wear nice clothes. She doesn’t work out. Her daily diet consists of coke, ice cream, burgers from Jack in the Box, chicken nuggets, and potato chips – which means she’s probably severely overweight. Why in the world would this handsome shopper ask her out? UNLESS she’s just a genetic beauty. In which case WE NEED TO KNOW THAT. In almost every story where there’s romance or dating involved, it’s important that we know how attractive the characters are.