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I’m still mega-busy this week, which has eaten into my post time, but I’m determined to get articles up to make sure you guys continue to be equipped to tackle the hardest form of writing in the world! So a few weeks ago, I did a review on an amateur script titled, “Made in China.” At the end of the review, I mentioned that the script fell into that dreaded “pat on the back” category. And I got a lot of e-mails asking me to clarify what that meant.
Before I go into what makes a “pat on the back” script, let me start at the beginning. The worst kind of script you can write is a bad one. That’s the one where there are a lot of errors in the screenplay and little, if any, thought put into the concept, plot, or characters. The writer hasn’t studied screenwriting at all and it shows. From the very first page, everything’s a mess. These scripts constitute about 65% of the scripts I read.
A level up from that is the “finish line” script. This script typically entails a writer at the beginning of his journey who believes screenwriting is a lot easier than it actually is. Therefore, he ends up writing one draft of his script, maybe two, and believes he should win an award just for getting to the finish line. Like, “Hey, I wrote 110 pages. Where’s my million bucks?” This script is a step up from scripts where the writer doesn’t even know how to put a sentence together, but they are what they are: scripts whose only positive trait is that they actually got finished. There’s nothing of substance or interest in these screenplays at all. These scripts constitute 20% of the scripts I read.
That brings us to the “pat on the back” script. The “pat on the back” script typically comes from a writer who’s been putting a lot of effort into the craft. They’ve been at this for a few years at least, and therefore understand the value of a strong structure and a focused story. The strengths and weaknesses of these scripts will vary depending on the strengths and weaknesses of the writer (one might be strong in character while another might be strong in dialogue) but the consensus at the end of the script is always the same. The reader thinks to himself, “That wasn’t bad,” and then he closes the script and moves on to the next thing, forgetting about that script for the rest of his life. These scripts constitute about 10% of the scripts I read.
At first glance, this may seem unfair. You put all this effort into something and you actually managed to keep a reader’s attention for an entire ninety minutes. That’s extremely hard to do. But here’s the unfair reality of the screenwriting business. Producers and agents aren’t looking for “That wasn’t bad.” They’re either looking for “great” or “good enough to maybe make me money within a few years so I’m willing to take a chance on them.” The “pat on the back” script is just below that level, and therefore, despite the writer making it to an extremely high level in this craft (the “I can keep a reader’s attention” level), their skill is not recognized and they don’t get that coveted call back.
So what today’s article is about is getting to that coveted 5%, the writers who actually get representation, options, sales, and assignments. This is how you break out of “pat on the back” territory. It’s important to remember that the main issue with the “pat on the back” script is that nothing stands out. Everything is technically “fine,” but there isn’t a single element that raises the hair on your arms, that gives you goosebumps, that makes you sit up and pay attention. With that in mind, here are the five things you can do to avoid the dreaded pat on the back.
1) A big concept – This is the easiest way to leap frog the competition. And yet it’s probably one of the most ignored pieces of advice I give. I think I know why. Writers tend to think they’re the exception to the rule. They know that a big concept gives them an edge, but they also think their contemplative road trip coming of age story is going to turn the contemplative road trip coming of age genre on its head. So they write that instead. If you want to make things easier for yourself and not get that “pat on the back,” this is the fastest way to do it. Give us a big flashy concept. I’ll be reviewing a script that went into production next week about mass suicides due to scientists learning of proof of the afterlife. That’s what I mean by a big concept. Big concepts are like reader beer goggles. All of the mistakes in the screenplay wash away in the wake of a concept that can make someone money.
2) Something controversial – One of the best ways to avoid a pat on the back is to write something controversial. Controversy stirs up emotions. It gets people talking. And this gets to the core of what’s wrong with the “pat on the back” script. That script stirs up nothing. It’s the literary equivalent of potato soup. So anything you can do to stir up emotions and opinions is a plus. About ten years ago a script about Martin Luther King sold that painted his assassination as a conspiracy. That was controversial. A script that covered that same approach, but with Princess Diana, sold last year and is being made into a film. Controversy illicits a reaction, which is something you do not feel at the end of a bland controversy-less screenplay.
3) Something weird – This is the kind of script you hear about and people will go, “Wait WHAT?” Someone wrote a screenplay about that?” A great example is a script I reviewed a few months ago called “Bubbles,” a biopic about Michael Jackson told through the eyes of his pet monkey, Bubbles. We also saw it with the number 1 Black List script from five years ago, The Beaver, about a CEO who starts communicating with people exclusively through a beaver puppet he wears on his hand. If you can be weird, you won’t have to worry about getting that soul-crushing “thatta boy” pat on the back.
4) A super-unique voice – Unique voices allow the writer to easily stand out from the pack. The tough thing with a unique voice is you tend to have it or you don’t. It’s hard to craft a voice into something different from what you already have. It’s the equivalent of telling someone to change their personality. With that said, if you can find the more offbeat side of yourself, the side that observes the world a little differently from everyone around you, and write with that side in mind, you can craft something that should sound different from others. The king of the “super-unique voice” at the moment is Brian Duffield. He has an energetic off-beat style that isn’t afraid to go off the beaten path. One of my favorite scripts of his is Monster Problems, about an apocalyptic future where humans hide underground due to monsters taking over the planet. Oh yeah, and it’s told through a John Hughes-like comedic voice. That’s what I mean by “unique voice.”
5) A flashy key character – If you’re not into the whole “big concept” thing and would rather write a character piece, this is a nice consolation to ensure a “no pat on the back” policy. A big flashy character is actor catnip. To a producer, that says, “Ooh, I know [so and so big actor] would die to play this.” So even though your script might not be super marketable, have a huge concept, or even a unique voice, it can fetch a marketable actor, which immediately turns your script into a money-machine. There’s no secret here. Just think of a character that will pop off the page. Someone that’s fun, offbeat, crazy, won’t shut up, bi-polar, intense, unforgettable. Juno is a good example. Nightcrawler is even better. Lloyd Dobler from Say Anything. Clementine from Eternal Sunshine. The male or female lead in Silver Linings Playbook. Readers don’t forget big flashy characters. So even if the rest of your script is lacking, you can still win a reader over with character.
And that’s it, folks. Take one or a few of these tips into your next script and you’ll end up writing something a reader won’t forget. Good luck!
A big new juicy sci-fi spec about gravity-loss just sold a couple of weeks ago. I’ll try to keep my feet firmly on the ground as I review it.
Genre: Science-Fiction
Premise: A gravitational anomaly has sucked four-fifths of the world’s population into the atmosphere. A small team of scientists must travel across San Francisco during the phenomena to find the cure before it’s too late.
About: Visionary filmmaker, Matthew Vaughn (Kick-Ass, Kingsman), is taking a rare step into NON-IP fare. That’s right. A major Hollywood filmmaker is directing a SPEC SCREENPLAY. This should give your little screenplay typing fingers some goosebumps cause it means that the SPEC IS BACK, BABY! Okay, maybe I’m hyperbolizing. But it’s still pretty cool. Screenwriter Shannon Triplett sold the script to Fox for mid-six against seven figures. While he worked in some small assistant capacity on Gareth Edwards’ Godzilla, and has done some special effects for movies such as “Journey 2: The Mysterious Island,” this is his first breakthrough on the screenwriting front. Triplett looks to have used some of those effects skills to market his script, including some concept art, which you can find in the screenplay.
Writer: Shannon Triplett
Details: 115 pages
I know a lot of you screenwriting purists hate the idea of concept art in screenplays, but the way I look at it is that there are so many reasons to say no to a project – Like the fact that this movie will cost 120 million dollars and isn’t based on any IP – you need ways to turn the head-shake into the head-nod. One way is to actually show them imagery from your movie.
Now it’s gotta be professional. And I’m going to make a sweeping statement here that’ll be harsh but hopefully save you from embarrassment in the future. Unless you get paid as an artist, DO NOT try to create your imagery yourself. Even if it’s pretty decent, it will look 19 levels worse than the concept art the average studio exec is used to looking at. So it’s just not a good idea. Trust me. I know you’re talented. But you’re not as good as the guy who does it 9 hours a day 360 days a year.
If you’re going to include concept art, you’re going to have to pay some money to get professional work done. Paying money to write a script may sound counterintuitive. But what you have to remember is it’s an investment. You’re investing in something that IMPROVES your chances of selling your script.
It’s up to you whether you think the investment is worth the potential payoff, but if you’re writing some grand scale summer flick that’s never been done before, it might be helpful for the reader to see a visual example of what you’re going for. Who knows? The right image – something that perfectly encapsulates your movie – might be the thing that tips the script-sale-needle in your favor.
Liam West is a theoretical physicist. And no, I don’t know what that is either. But under these circumstances, that title is really important. You see, after two months of global gravity fluctuation, everything starts shooting up into the sky at once.
Liam is able to get to a military bunker with his wife and kids, but his wife isn’t able to make it inside, and is left out in the unpredictable elements of gravity-less San Francisco. Now that is not a San Francisco treat.
After a couple of months, Liam, a group of scientists, and a group of soldiers, decide to trek across San Francisco to Stanford, where an old colleague of Liam’s may be finishing up a cure for the gravity issue.
The group has to use spiked-shoes and mountain-climbing poles to stay attached to the earth, lest they float into the sky like a bundle of birthday balloons. As you might guess, this absurdly imperfect approach (I thought these guys were scientists!) results in a new phenomena known as “Scientists go bye-bye into sky-sky.”
Liam decides, mid-trek, that he wants to see if his wife is still earthbound. So the group detours, only to get attacked by a gravity surviving militia. They somehow escape these gravity bullies, and eventually make it to Stanford. But barely anything there still works, and Liam’s friend only has one risky experiment left to try. If that doesn’t pan out, everyone’s going to be spending their next vacation dodging 747s.
This is how you sell a script if you’re a beginner to intermediate screenwriter. You can tell Triplett is still learning the ropes here. Not enough big shit happens. There isn’t enough urgency. And while there are attempts to create character depth, those attempts are scattered and unfocused. I never had a sense of who Liam was or what his flaw was as a human being. This was even more evident with the supporting characters.
Okay, you say, Carson, so if I’m working my ass off for an entire year to give each of my characters emotionally captivating character arcs, why does his script sell and mine is sucking up viruses on my hard drive?
Quite simply, it’s the concept. This is a big idea concept that gives audiences something they’ve never seen before. And that’s a valuable commodity in the movie business because you just don’t see that kind of opportunity often when you’re buying screenplays.
A way to look at it is like this. Let’s say you’re a basketball GM. And you need to figure out who you’re drafting next. It’s come down to two guys. The first guy is 5’10”, scores 23 points a game, shoots 90% from the free-throw line, and is superb at dishing the ball. The second guy is 6’8”, scores 8 points a game, shoots 60% from the line, and is able to jump out of the gym when he dunks. Who do you choose?
It seems easy. The first guy is a much better all-around player, right? Okay, so what’s the hold-up? I’ll take the first guy. Ehhh, except there’s one problem. The other guy is 6’8”. And 90% of the time, the GM is going to pick the 6’8” guy because even though he’s not as good as 5’10” guy, he has a much higher ceiling. Hollywood sees screenplays the same way. Ascension is not as good as an amateur script I read just last week about a used-car salesman. But Ascension is 6’8”. It has way more upside.
And you have to remember: Hollywood can always hire somebody to beef up the character stuff. This is actually the number one reason you see a script sell for so much money and then a new writer gets hired. That always used to seem ridiculous to me (“You just paid all this money! Now you want to change it??”). But after reading all these script sales over the years, I’d think studios were crazy NOT to do this.
This is why guys like Scott Frank and Allan Loeb and Brian Helgeland make so much money. Because they’re the only ones who truly know how to go in there and add depth to the characters (which is why I told you last week that if you want to break into this business, learn character!).
Which brings us back to Ascension as a script. Was it any good? You know, it was all right. But it was also frustrating. I didn’t get the sense that Triplett really researched what this phenomena would be like. It seems like the planet had months to prepare before the actual gravity-strike hit. So why didn’t they fortify the underground city structures to house the general populace?
Why is it that the best travelling arrangement five of the smartest scientists in the world could come up with was wearing spiked boots? There was a lot of stuff that felt like it was thrown onto the page without much thought (another common thread with young screenwriters – they rarely challenge themselves to go deeper). After watching how far The Martian went to make sure all of its science was spot on, Ascension was stumbling around like it was wearing beer-goggles.
I also felt that not nearly enough obstacles were thrown at our characters. The worst they had to deal with was a steep cliff and a tiny local militia. We just talked about this the other day. If you want to get the most drama out of your idea, you need to hit your hero with “Holy shit how are they going to get out of this?” type obstacles. Not a few stray bullets from people who have never shot a gun before.
So yeah, I had some problems with the script. But I understand why it was purchased. Triplett made the wise decision to enter the draft with the 6’8” guy as opposed the 5’10” one. How tall is your concept?
[ ] what the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Become an internet troll to make your script better! Internet trolls care about one thing and one thing only: tearing things down. While that can suck on the internet, it can actually be helpful when you’re writing a screenplay. After you’ve finished your script, put your internet troll hat on, and go through your screenplay with a troll’s mentality. The idea here is tear your script apart. You do this because the screenwriter side of you is too afraid to face the script’s problems. He’d rather live in ignorant bliss. Internet troll you? He’s relentless! And we need relentless. After the troll’s done, you’ll be able to fix all those weak nonsensical things you were ignoring. Had Triplett used his inner troll, he would’ve spotted a few curious problemos with Ascension.
1) Why aren’t there a lot more people still alive? It seems like all you’d have to do is stay in your home. When you needed to go out, you just wear spike-shoes like the scientists did.
2) If the world knew this was going to happen months ahead of time, why wasn’t a better infrastructure put in place to keep society going?
3) Why is all communication down? Again, they knew this was coming.
4) Why can’t people just live underground? Especially in San Francisco, which has a huge underground metro system.
Two writers break out of their pigeon-holed careers to give us a prestige flick.
Genre: Drama-thriller
Premise: A Jim Kramer-like TV personality is held up on live television by a man who lost his life savings investing in one of the show’s stock tips.
About: This one stars George Clooney and Julia Roberts and will be directed by the underrated Jodie Foster, who unfortunately got screwed over in her last directing effort, The Beaver (with the whole Mel Gibson meltdown and all). The writing brain-trust behind this one is interesting in that they’re not the typical guys who land high-caliber talent. Jim Kouf hit it big with Rush Hour, but would later hit rock bottom with the Jimmy Fallon/Queen Latifah comedy, Taxi. Alan DiFiore is known mostly for TV movies, although he’s found some recent success with the TV show, Grimm. Sony looks to have been as nervous as I was going into this, so they brought in hot writer Jamie Linden, who wrote one of my favorite scripts, Dogs of Babel, to hammer out a production-ready draft.
Writers: Alan DiFiore & Jim Kouf (most recent draft by Jamie Linden)
Details: 120 pages – July 15th, 2014 draft
Check it out. Yet ANOTHER original property. We’ve reviewing more and more of these these days. I don’t know about you, but that tickles me in places I’m not supposed to talk about.
What’s great about today’s script is that it proves writers can change the industry’s perception of them. A writer’s IMDB page can be like Jacob Marley’s ball and chain, a visual rolodex of all the failures he’s had. If someone doesn’t know you and sees the “Taxi” link on that chain, you’re probably not pitching them American Sniper. The blessing of making it in this business can also be a curse.
However, we’ve learned with today’s script, and the recently reviewed “Elvis and Nixon,” that there’s a secret formula to getting out of “Hack Time Out.” Know what it is? Anybody want to guess?
WRITE A BIG CHARACTER.
For Kevin Spacey, he got to play one of the biggest caricatures of all time – Richard Nixon. Clooney gets to play JIM KRAMER, one of the wildest TV personalities on air. Actors can’t resist big characters because they allow them to have fun AND show their acting chops to boot.
So if you’re stuck in a rut or feel like you’re being pigeonholed, I’ve given you your flashlight to freedom. Write a big fun character that an actor would want to play.
After getting our obligatory George Clooney opening voice over, we meet his character, Lee Gates, the “Money Monster.” Lee Gates has a popular over-the-top stock-tip show where his sole job is to hyperbolize about MONEY. There is no such thing as a “good” or a “bad” stock. It must be “A stock I would make love to every second of every day for the rest of my life if I could,” or “the single most toxic stock in America.” Lee looooovvvves the entertainment side of his job.
The money advice side? Ehh. Not so much.
And that’s what gets him in trouble.
During the daily taping of his show, while Lee prattles on about some stock tip in India, a guy named Kyle sneaks onto the live set and puts a gun to Lee’s head. He explains that last week, Lee trumpeted a stock called “Eden Capital.” Told everyone to throw their entire life savings into it. And that’s exactly what Kyle did.
Problem is, Eden Capital tanked yesterday. Lost 400 million dollars. The company’s excuse? It was a “glitch” in their trading algorithm. But see, simple-minded Kyle doesn’t understand that explanation. He wants something that these billion dollar companies never seem to give out: THE TRUTH.
As it so happens, Lee was scheduled to interview the CEO of Eden this morning to get an explanation about what happened. But the company’s globe-trotting CEO can’t be found. Speaking for him in his stead is the buttoned up Diane Lester, the head of PR for Eden. But that isn’t enough for Kyle. He wants answers. And he’s only going to accept them from the company’s founder. So what happens if the founder doesn’t show up? Lee’s going to get a stock-tipped bullet to the skull.
It took me awhile to figure out what kind of movie this was. In the end, I settled on a cross between Network, Dog Day Afternoon, Man on a Ledge, and Tower Heist. Yes, I can hear what you’re thinking. You hope it’s a lot more like the first two than the last two. And it is. Just maybe not as much as you’d like it to be.
But there are some nice things to celebrate here, starting with how cozily the concept fits into the spec-script mold. It’s a contained setup: man gets held up live on the air. That keeps the majority of the script focused on one event, in one location, with a contained time frame. Those are elements that screenplays love.
What do I mean by that? When you build a storyline that has clear boundaries, both geographically and time-wise, it’s like coloring. You’ve given yourself the lines already, now all you have to do is color them in.
When you don’t set up clear boundaries, you’re coloring on a giant canvas with no lines at all. Now this can be a good thing. You might come up with the next Being John Malkovich. But more often than not, your script turns into a sprawling mess.
How do you color an object that isn’t there? How do you know which objects to introduce in the first place? A perfect example of this was Jupiter Ascending. That movie had some beautiful colors. But we never saw what they added up to because they were all the hell over the place.
So how does Money Monster separate itself from the aforementioned movies? Well, unlike Dog Day Afternoon, which focused on two sides – the cops and the robbers – Money Monster adds a third element – a mystery. This B-story, which is Diane’s story, takes us outside the studio to hunt down why this supposed “algorithm glitch” occurred.
This infused the script with an added layer of suspense. This is a tool available to all of you in every screenplay you write. You can always add a mystery. Money Monster could’ve easily kept everything in-studio and focused on Lee and Kyle. And maybe we would’ve gotten a good script out of that. I don’t know. But there was something intriguing about this mysterious “glitch,” to the point where it became the main reason I was turning the pages.
My only problem with the script was that I thought they could’ve done more in the studio. I thought Lee Gates was going to be a lot crazier. Maybe I’d been pre-conditioned by the “Attica!” and “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take this anymore!” bombs dropped by Lee’s predecessors, and that expectation got in the way. Still, the Gates character seemed to be playing on an acoustic guitar when he should’ve been thrashing an electric.
And Kyle, the man who takes Lee hostage, was really boring. He didn’t have anything going on. And maybe that’s why Lee didn’t shine as brightly as he could’ve. He didn’t have anything to work against. Whatever the case, because these two were the focus of the script, and they didn’t bring the house down with their battle, the script never reached the heights it aspired to.
Despite this criticism, there’s plenty to celebrate here. I like Linden a lot and have a feeling he probably addressed some of these issues in further rewrites. Obviously, a lot will depend on Clooney’s performance. Does he elevate what’s on the page? If so, who knows? This could be a sleeper hit.
[ ] what the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[x] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: If one of your characters is coming off as too plain or too reserved, it may not be the character himself that’s the problem. It may be the character playing opposite him for the majority of the movie. If that character is reserved or boring or uninteresting, he may not be giving your main character enough to work with. One of the reasons the dialogue between Jules and Vincent in Pulp Fiction is so good is because BOTH characters are interesting and vibrant and pushing each other. Neither is some boring lug. Kyle here was a boring lug. And that indirectly hurt the character of Lee.
How could I have been so wrong about a screenplay?
Genre: Biopic
Premise: We follow Apple co-founder Steve Jobs through three of the most important presentations of his life.
About: This film’s history is almost as storied as Steve Jobs himself. The infamous Sony hack revealed that David Fincher never really connected to the script. When he declined, so did leading Steve Jobs candidate Christian Bale. Sony head Amy Pascal didn’t really like the script either, waffling every time she was encouraged by producer Scott Rudin to put it into production. Eventually, the project had to move to Universal, where B-team Danny Boyle and Michael Fassbender came to the rescue (give me that B-team any day of the week!). But would it be enough to make the film a must-see? It’s looking promising. The film opened in only four theaters this weekend, but grossed a staggering 500k per screen. For comparison, American Sniper, released via the same strategy, grossed 600k per screen.
Writer: Aaron Sorkin
Details: 2 hours and 2 minutes long (off of a 177 page screenplay)
I gave the Steve Jobs screenplay a “wasn’t for me.”
Can I have a redo?
Hello. (Again).
Steve Jobs: The Film, knocked me on my ass, held me down, and tickle-tortured me until I couldn’t breathe anymore. And yet I couldn’t shake that “love-hate” relationship a proper tickle-torture leaves you with.
This movie works. And it shouldn’t have. It’s too different. Too repetitive. Led by too big of an asshole.
But somehow, “Steve Jobs” avoids the spinning pinwheel of death and replaces it with a Spotlight engine that always finds the exact PDF script you’re looking for. And that’s thanks to two people. Danny Boyle and Michael Fassbender.
I’m always the first to say that no director or actor can overcome a bad script. But every once in awhile, this proclamation bites me in the ass. If you find a chunk of ass on Sunset Boulevard, please return it to me.
“Steve Jobs” follows Apple co-founder, Jobs, through three of the most important Apple announcements in history – when Jobs announces the original Mac, when he announces the NEXT system, and when he announces the original iMac. Each mini-story centers on the half-an-hour leading up to his presentation, leaving Jobs to spar with all his nemeses in the meantime. These include: his boss John Sculley, his programmer, Steve Wozniak, his marketing director, Joanna, his other head programmer, Andy Hertzfeld, and his daughter, Lisa.
If you remember, my problem with the script was two-fold. First, the 3-act structure was too repetitive, with every act taking place right before a big presentation.
This got tiring when it was just words on a page (in a 177 page tome, mind you), but Danny Boyle did an EXCELLENT job translating those pages to images. He constantly moved us through the buildings so that most conversations took place in new environments. And most of the time, he’d make sure those environments added something extra to the scene.
For example, in the script, it felt like every Jobs-Wozniak conversation was the same. But in, for example, Jobs and Wozniak’s third act confrontation, Boyle has the two barking at each other in the auditorium with Jobs on stage and Wozniak 20 seats deep. By forcing the two to hash things out in front of numerous Apple employees, it gave the conversation an energy you just couldn’t feel on the page.
The second problem with the script was our unlikable main character, Steve Jobs himself. The man was a total prick on the page. But Michael Fassbender gave the character life. And you know what? He didn’t exaggerate Steve’s positive traits in some desperate bid to make him likable. He played him like a real guy who understood his flaws and did his best to manage them.
His scenes with Joanna (Kate Winslet) were particularly persuasive for a couple of reasons. First, he respected her. And second, he had a LOT of scenes with her. So a lot of the movie is Steve talking to a woman that he respects the hell out of. This evened things out when Steve belittled other characters. We knew there was a good side to this man. He merely had a hard time finding him.
Also, he was so sweet to his daughter. In the script, it felt like he was merely tolerant of her. But here, he clearly connected with and loved this girl. That one-two punch (his connection with Joanna and also with his daughter) made me see that Steve Jobs could be good, and even wanted to be good.
Now let’s get to what the script did REALLY right. When you read an Aaron Sorkin script, the first thing you want to talk about is DIALOGUE. It’s what he’s known for. It’s what he does best. So you’re always seeing what you can learn from the master. I learned a lot.
First, almost every single conversation was laced with a ton of conflict. Jobs battling with Lisa’s mom over whether she deserves his money. Jobs battling with John Sculley about the reason he was fired from Apple. Jobs battling Andy Hertzfeld about making sure the Mac said “Hello” during the inagural presentation. Jobs battling with Joanna about whether he should pay for his daughter’s Harvard tuition. Jobs battling with Woz over acknowledging Woz’s Apple II team.
Remember, heavy conflict dialogue is some of the easiest dialogue to write because it’s clear what needs to happen in the scene (each character must try and “win” the argument). When your dialogue is conflict-less — when there’s nothing to “win” – that’s when you’ll find characters struggling to say interesting or meaningful things.
I’d say 75% of the scenes here involved heavy-conflict. That’s not by accident. Sorkin knows that’s where dialogue thrives.
Sorkin is also known for his obsession with the walk-and-talk. He uses it so frequently that it’s become a walking joke. And we see a lot of it here, where Jobs is moving throughout the buildings, taking on character battles every time he’s on the move.
Well, the walk and talk is not just a way to keep the scene moving. It’s also great for dialogue. When you have characters walking, you create a journey, and a journey isn’t over until the characters reach their destination. Until that happens, you have your audience on a line, which means you have their attention. Simply put, your audience is more focused on dialogue when your characters are moving since their attention will be heightened until the destination is reached.
That’s not to say you can’t make a conversation interesting when characters stand in one place. There’s plenty of that going on here as well. But the next time you watch a film, all else being equal, keep tabs on how attentive you are when characters are walking and talking as opposed to when they’re stationary. You’ll find that you’re a little more tuned in when they’re on the move.
It’s similar to putting time-constraints on dialogue, which, not surprisingly, Sorkin does as well. This whole movie is a time constraint. There isn’t a single conversation that takes place where Jobs isn’t in a hurry – where his presentation isn’t a few minutes away. And Sorkin always saves the most important conversations for right before the presentation.
THIS IS NOT BY ACCIDENT.
We naturally feel more anxious the closer we get to a deadline (in this case, Jobs’s presentation). So if you place a big conversation right before a deadline, we’re LOCKED IN. We’re worried about our character making the impending time constraint, so we’re secretly pushing for him to hurry his conversation up. The problem is, the conversation is important, so we’re tuned into that as well. This means we’re tuned in on all frequencies, creating a sense of extreme focus.
It’s no coincidence then that the biggest conversation of all (between Jobs and his daughter before the final presentation) occurs AFTER Jobs’s presentation is supposed to start. That’s right, for the first time in the film, Sorkin pushes us PAST his start deadline, heightening our awareness beyond any and all previous levels so we’re super-tuned in. The dialogue sizzles in part because there is so much weight placed on every word. I mean, Jesus, the whole world is impatiently waiting for our hero downstairs! Does it get any more intense than that?
For contrast, imagine Jobs trying to have the same conversation with his daughter on a lazy Sunday afternoon, at his house, with all the time in the world, each character perfectly relaxed. Sound like a conversation that’s going to knock your socks off? My guess is probably not.
These are all things I’ve talked about before, though. You’re probably looking for more in-depth tips this Sorkin go-around. What does Sorkin do that makes his dialogue crackle where so many others fizzle? I noticed a few things. Once Sorkin sets up the basics (heavy conflict, a time constraint, characters on the move), he weaves in a variety of conversational variables. Here are some of the big ones I noticed.
1) Asides – A character will all of a sudden take us on a tangent. They’ll say something like, “When I was eight, do you know what the most important thing in the world to me was?’
2) Jokes – Characters crack jokes, sometimes self-deprecating, sometimes at the other character’s expense. A good joke relieves tension, preventing the dialogue from getting too melodramatic.
3) Zingers – Sorkin loves Zingers. Have a character say something derogatory to another character, then have the other character come back with a clever burn.
4) Teachable moments – This is one of Sorkin’s favorite things to do. Have your characters teach the audience something. So a character will say something to the effect of, “Did you know the Romans refused to feed their soldiers after a battle?” The character will go on to explain why this is, before eventually bringing it back to how this relates to their problem.
5) Analogies – Characters will constantly say things like, “It’s like putting together a stereo. You want to choose the parts on your own.” Lots of analogies in a Sorkin script.
6) Set-ups and payoffs – Whereas a lot of writers like to set plot points up and pay them off later (Marty McFly plays guitar in high school. This pays off later when he’s asked to play guitar at his parents’ Fish Under the Sea Dance), Sorkin likes to set up DIALOGUE and pay it off later. So Jobs might call Woz a dickwad. Then 15 minutes later, Jobs will need Woz’s help for an unexpected problem, and Woz will say something like, “I didn’t know dickwads were capable of that.”
On their own, each of these things might seem obvious. But from a person who reads a lot of screenplays with a lot of bad dialogue, I can assure you that the biggest problem with amateur dialogue is how plain and uninspired it is. Characters say exactly what they’re thinking in a monotone matter. By mixing in all of these tools, Sorkin’s able to write a lot of vibrant dialogue. Of course, on top of these tools, you still need imagination, creativity, and talent. Just because you know to use analogies doesn’t mean you can think up an analogy as clever as Aaron Sorkin. But just knowing that you should bring that into the mix in the first place puts you well ahead of the majority of your competition.
Steve Jobs shocked me. I thought this was going to be just like the script. But Danny Boyle elevated it to something more. And he NAILED the Jobs-daughter relationship, which was the heart of the screenplay. Jesus, man. The ending? On that rooftop? These eyes don’t lie. I was tearing up. I want to go find my old iMac and give it a big fat iHug.
[ ] what the hell did I just watch?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the price of admission
[x] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: What I learned had nothing to do with the actual screenwriting side of this movie. What struck me is how much Steve Jobs failed in his career. The Mac was a failure, the Lisa (the computer before) was a failure, the NEXT was a failure, Jobs was fired from Apple. It wasn’t until the iMac hit that Jobs truly succeeded. The next time you’re worried about a bad writing day or a script that didn’t get received as well as you’d hoped, remember that a man who many consider to be a genius failed repeatedly in his first 12 years in the business. Failures didn’t stop Jobs. So they shouldn’t stop you.
I get questions from writers all the time on things as varied as how to make a serial killer likable to how to end writer’s block. And what I’ve found is that all of these questions are stupid, just like the people who ask them.
I’m kidding! There’s no such thing as a stupid question. Most of the time at least. One of the things I’ve been asked about a lot lately is backstory. Now backstory, as most screenwriters know, is a bad word. We’ve all read or watched that mind-numbing scene where an unprompted character decides that he just has to tell the supporting character how daddy touched him when he was 19.
Backstory is the ugly cousin of exposition, a kid who’s already ugly as it is. And since exposition is often boring, the rule of thumb is to only include it when you absolutely have to. You want to extend that rule over to backstory. It is likewise evil, and therefore to be treated like a pimple on prom night. It MUST be eliminated.
I’ve found, by and large, that the longer screenwriters write, the less backstory they include. There are very successful writers, in fact, who believe that you don’t need any backstory at all. Since a movie takes place in the present, anything in the past is irrelevant.
And someone might argue, “But how can we really get to know a character if we know nothing about their past?” And Backstory Hater would reply, “The only tool you need to reveal character is choice.”
We figure out who people are by the choices they make. This is true in real life just like it is in the movies. If you’re on a first date and an elderly woman falls down in front of you, the choice your date makes is going to tell you a lot about them. If they walk around the woman, we know they’re an asshole. If they jump into action to help her, we know they’re good.
To these veterans, the idea is to create dozens of choices (small and large) throughout the script that your main character will encounter, and to tell us who he/she is through those choices. A small choice might be if your protagonist is given the option to order salad or a one pound greasy cheeseburger. Whichever one he chooses will tell us a lot about him. Ditto if he opens the door for his date or waits for her to open it while he texts away on his phone. Ditto if he chooses to drink 8 martinis or just one.
I tend to agree with Backstory Hater on this approach. I think backstory is troublesome even in the best case scenarios. The revelation of it rarely feels natural and any time we move into the past, we’re halting the present.
So are you telling us never to use backstory, Carson? Like, ever? Can we still visit our childhood friends? Reminisce about our first kiss?
No, you can’t do those things. I forbid it. But you can use backstory in one key instance: When defining what led your main character to inherit their FATAL FLAW.
A reminder on “fatal flaws.” This is the internal “flaw” that holds your character back from being whole. Even if they succeed at obtaining their goal (“Deliver R2-D2 to the Resistance to destroy the Death Star”), they will still have failed if they haven’t overcome the flaw within themselves. Why? Because there’s still imbalance within them. They’re the same person – still unhappy. Luke Skywalker’s flaw was that he didn’t believe in himself. He finally did in the end, which is what allowed him to destroy the Death Star and be happy.
Once you know your character’s flaw, you can target the specific moment from their past (their backstory) that brought it about. So in Good Will Hunting, Will Hunting’s flaw is his inability to let others in. Now that we know that, we can ask ourselves, “What happened when he was younger that stopped him from letting people in?” Well, his father used to beat him regularly. That had some impact. So that’s potentially something we could bring up in the story (which they did).
It doesn’t do the script any good if your hero babbles on about his former life as a male stripper if stripping has nothing to do with what he’s struggling with now. It’s just noise and can actually work against you, as your reader will try to find meaning and importance in a detail that contains neither. Now if your main character’s flaw is that he’s sexually promiscuous and it’s ruining his life, then maybe that stripper backstory becomes relevant.
So to summarize, avoid backstory at all costs. Try to tell us who your character is through their choices instead. But if you must include backstory, only include the details that inform your character’s fatal flaw. Since character transformation is one of the keys to emotionally engaging your reader, information about why your character is suffering from his flaw can strengthen our understanding of that transformation.
And with that, I’ll leave you with a few other tips on how to convey backstory in your script. If you must do it, do it right!
1) Have your character be forced into telling their backstory – If your character is forced into talking about their past, we’re more focused on them being forced than we are on the artificiality of a character discussing their backstory. If your character is being tortured, for example, and asked about his past, we’re not thinking, “Oh, backstory moment!” We’re hoping the poor guy lives.
2) Always keep backstory as short as possible – Just like exposition. Try to disseminate backstory in bite-sized nuggets. Instead of Indiana Jones going on a one-page monologue about the time he was almost killed by a snake, we see him react to a snake in the plane and scream, “I hate snakes.” That’s it!
3) Backstory-as-mystery is often more powerful than literal-backstory – You don’t have to tell us everything. You can hint at things. And this is actually more powerful because it forces the audience to fill in the gaps themselves. Remember in Alien when we saw that giant stone structure of an alien manning some kind of gun/telescope? Our minds were racing trying to figure that out. How boring would that have been if one of the characters knew what it was and explained it in detail to us?
4) Show your backstory. Don’t tell your backstory – The old show-don’t-tell movie rule is multiplied ten-fold when it comes to backstory. It’s always more powerful if you show us. In Bridesmaids, our two main characters walk past our heroine’s failed cupcake shop. There was tons of backstory in that one image.
5) Have others bring up backstory, not your hero – The less your hero is talking about their own backstory, the better. Always think of a way where someone else brings it up. This is why the “resume” scene works so well in movies. It’s an easy way for the interviewer to read off your hero’s backstory without the viewer getting suspicious.
6) Some genres are more accepting of backstory than others – Backstory doesn’t work well inside the faster-moving genres like Thriller and Action. But in a slower drama, it’s expected that some backstory will be offered.
7) A good place to include backstory is the first scene – The biggest problem with backstory is that it INTERRUPTS the present story. Therefore, if you give us a flashback before your present-day story’s begun, you’re not interrupting anything. This is why you see so many movies start with flashbacks and then cut to: “15 years later.” If you’re going to do this however, cover ALL of your backstory in that single scene. Don’t keep giving it to us 70 minutes later.
8) If you can find a way to make backstory entertaining, you now have super powers and all bets are off – This is what the pros do. They’ve figured out all the tricks to hide backstory inside of entertainment. And if you can do that, none of these rules matter because you’ve learned to make backstory just as entertaining as present story. Look at the scene where Clarice goes down to talk to Hannibal Lecter for the first time in “Silence of the Lambs.” Remember the moment when they show Clarice a picture of one of Hannibal’s victims? That’s a writer giving us Hannibal Lecter’s backstory. But we’re so focused on the anticipation of seeing this monster that we never consider for a moment that the writer is doing this. Master this technique and you will be unstoppable!