Today we take on the WINNER of one of the tightest Amateur Showdown races yet!  Did you guys do good picking Animosity as the winner??

Genre: Thriller
Winning Logline: After he discovers the body of a murdered 9-year-old girl near his house, a popular horror author’s neighbors decide he must be guilty of the crime and take justice into their own hands.
About: This script won the February Showdown (First Line Showdown) by a mere ONE VOTE. So it was a close one. The first line that helped get the script over the top? “BAM!–ANDY HOLLAND (30s) slams against the passenger window, his eyes wide with fear.” That first line seems to have changed during the rewrite. So let the controversy begin!
Writers: Mark Steensland & James Newman
Details: 93 pages

Joe Alwyn for Andy?

I saw a lot of chatter about this showdown. A good chunk of you thought basing a showdown on a first line was stupid. And you know what? Maybe you’re right. How can one line tell us how good a script is? It probably can’t.

However, the whole reason I did it was to use an inception-like hijacking of your mind to remind you that the reader’s judgment of a screenplay STARTS IMMEDIATELY. Which means you have to impress them with the very first line. I mean, look at how many opinions we got regarding the first lines presented. Managers and agents and producers – they’re looking at those first lines in the exact same way.

But now that we’re past that, we can focus on the next showdown, which is happening Friday, March 22nd. “Movie-Crossover Showdown” will have you using the old 90s way of pitching scripts by crossing over two popular movies. It’s “Titanic meets John Wick.” It’s “Avatar by way of John Hughes.” It’s “Oppenheimer meets Poor Things.” It’s “Mean Girls but with dads.” I have a feeling we’re going to have some really fun pitches so join the club and get your submission ready by March 21st!

MOVIE CROSSOVER SHOWDOWN!!!

What: Movie-Crossover Showdown

I need your: Title, Genre, Logline, and Movie Crossover Pitch
Competition Date: Friday, March 22nd
Deadline: Thursday, March 21st, 10pm Pacific Time
Where: Send your submissions to carsonreeves3@gmail.com

Okay, on to today’s winner!

30-something Andy Holland is his small town’s version of Stephen King. The man likes to write bloody novels. And he’s become quite successful at it. Although, he’s behind on his latest one and it’s adding stress to an already stressful life. His ex-wife, Karen, and his daughter, Samantha, are metaphorically beating down his door to take some responsibility and start spending time with his offspring.

One day, after walking his dog home from the local bookstore, Andy finds the body of a dead girl behind an unused home. He calls the cops, lets them know what happened, and that’s when we learn a little more about Andy. When he was 18, he had a sexual relationship with a 17 year old and he ended up pleading guilty in court for it. This raises the cops’ eyebrows.

Over the course of the next few weeks, Andy notices that his neighbors no longer treat him the same. They walk by his house more. They’re always pointing and whispering at it. His next-door neighbor buddy Ben is all of a sudden asking him more probing questions about his past. And a local reporter named Staci seems to have an axe to grind with Andy and hints strongly in her reports that Andy, being a horror novel writer, is highly suspicious.

After the locals start digging through Andy’s trash at night and poison his dog, Andy has had enough and calls for the police to do something. But the police aren’t interested in helping him. Once the neighbors sense this, they get more aggressive. They start hanging out near his house more. They yell at Andy. They throw things at him. It’s getting bad.

But when a second murder happens, it gets a hell of a lot worse. A lot of the neighbors and even one of the off-duty cops set up shop in front of Andy’s house. When night comes, they start bashing his windows, trying to get in. Andy fights them off as best he can. But things get really crazy when his ex-wife shows up. It’s a moment that will test just how far off the reservation the mob has gone. And it will turn this night into the worst night of Andy’s life.

Well well well.

We’ve got one heck of a dilemma here.

Because half of this script is really good. And the other half is really boring.

Before I get to which was which, let me ask you guys: What’s more important? Writing a good first half of a script or a good second half?

Thoughts please.

Okay, ready for the answer?

Both. Because if the first half is boring, the reader won’t make it to the second half. But if the second half is boring, all that good will you built up in the first half was for nothing. I’d say the ground floor level for what you need to achieve is an average first half and an awesome second half. But any other weak combo won’t work.

This script is tricky as heck because I understand the thought process behind Mark and James’ strategy. They knew that, in order for the house mob to work, they needed to do a lot of setup first. A mob isn’t just going to appear out of nowhere. They need multiple reasons to get to that point. So Mark and James introduced half a dozen plot points in that first half that got the mob to the angry point they needed to be at.

But the plot points were so bland. Even the two killings felt PG. And now that I’m thinking about it, the local reporter implying that Andy had to be involved also felt… how do I put this? Like the way a murder might be covered in one of those Hallmark movies. Like, “Oh no! There’s a murder in town! The local baker ended up dead!”

I feel like Mark and James need to go watch the first season of True Detective or that David Fincher serial killer series on Netflix to get more into that “brutal murder” mindset so you can sell these murders as the horrible things that cause all this chaos.

But man… once we get to the mob part of the script, which begins about halfway through, this script goes from “barely interested” to full-on “impressive.” These two captured mob mentality perfectly. It reminded me of Spike Lee’s Do The Right Thing in a lot of ways. Once the mob feeds off itself, logic no longer applies.

There’s this terrifying moment in the script (spoiler!!) where the ex-wife shows up and the mob rips her to shreds. That’s when I said, “We’ve got a movie now.” Not because every script needs over-the-top violence to be good. More so that you finally knew how bad this had gotten. Cause, up until that point, you were thinking, “Logic has to prevail at some point.” Once that murder happened, it was clear that logic no longer mattered to these people.

I think this script is worth pursuing and fixing. But to do that, we need to get to the mob by page 30. That doesn’t mean they have to start attacking Andy’s house by then. But they should be in their cars parked outside. Maybe a couple of the scarier ones set up chairs on the lawn. Start building that world of this growing mob. Cause you can get through all of those early plot beats a lot faster and it won’t hurt the script a lick.

As for the riot, you need to do some finagling there. I think that once the ex-wife is killed, some semblance of reality would set in for, at least, some of the people. They didn’t come here to hurt anyone other than Andy. And also, there’s a cop involved. Once he saw a murder happen, he’s probably peacing-out so that he doesn’t go to prison. It’s not like the old days where you could hide that stuff. Social media doesn’t allow it. Speaking of social media, the normal people in the neighborhood observing this are probably putting it all over social media within five minutes. There would be real cops there quickly.

The way to handle that is to probably keep everything contained to one night. Don’t wait til morning for the mob to reconvene. It’s gotta all happen during that night so that it’s reasonably believable that other people didn’t come and stop this.

Now, I had an idea for this that James and Mark might want to consider. What if we made Andy black? Then it turns this entire story into a metaphor with a much bigger meaning. I understand that a lot of stuff comes with that change. It becomes a “race” script instead of just a thriller. But I’m pretty sure that it would do better on the reading circuit. Curious what you guys think. Share your thoughts in the comments.

But this is a good script with the potential to be a really good script. And as you know from me talking about it all the time, I rarely encounter any script with the potential to be really good. So that’s a big deal.

Oh, and finally, I think we can come up with a better ending here. The revelation (spoiler) that they already found the killer was cool. But I’m wondering if we need a bigger twist. Anybody have any ideas?

Check out the script here: Animosity

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

What I learned: Earn your introductions! This script introduces a lot of characters. When you introduce characters weakly, you force the reader to remember them. That should never be the case. The reader should never feel “forced” to remember anything about your screenplay. It’s your job to make a character instantly memorable either by the memorable way in which they do something or the memorable way in which they say something. Only when you’ve created a memorable character do you earn the right to introduce your next character. A big issue with the first half of this script is that we RAN THROUGH a bunch of blasé generic character introductions. Put some actual thought into these intros because a screenplay *is its characters.* If we don’t know everyone (as in GENUINELY FEEL LIKE WE KNOW THEM), we’re only half-enjoying your script.

Here’s the introduction of Ben, a fairly major character. This just isn’t cutting the mustard. It’s an okay intro. But it’s far from memorable.

Week 10 of the “2 Scripts in 2024” Challenge

Week 1 – Concept
Week 2 – Solidifying Your Concept
Week 3 – Building Your Characters
Week 4 – Outlining
Week 5 – The First 10 Pages
Week 6 – Inciting Incident
Week 7 – Turn Into 2nd Act
Week 8 – Fun and Games
Week 9 – Using Sequences to Tackle Your Second Act

Every Thursday, for the first six months of 2024, Scriptshadow is throwing you on his sleigh and flying you around Planet Screenplay. Planet Screenplay is a world that, at times, contains love, beauty and wonder. Other times, it is a world of fear, frustration, and uncertainty.

But don’t worry. I got ya! I will make sure you get through every single country of your script with all your limbs intact. Not promising you won’t lose your head. But limbs I’m pretty sure I’ve got.

That’s because I’m offering the easiest way to write a screenplay in the books. All you have to do is write 2 pages a day and you get 2 extra days at the end of the week to catch up if, for whatever reason, Captain Writer’s Block makes a visit to your brain condo.

The greatest thing about all this is that when it’s over, WE HAVE A COMPETITION. The biggest Showdown in Scriptshadow history will take place: Mega Showdown (Imagine those giant echoing voices they used to use for those monster truck commercials: “Megaaa-ahhh-ahhh-ahhh Showdown-down-down-down!” It’s going to be stupendous.

But first, we have to get through one of the toughest parts of the screenplay: THE MIDPOINT.

A lot of that initial excitement you had when you first came up with your idea and wrote those first few scenes of your script? Yeah, that’s long gone. Reality has set in. And with it, its mistress: frustration.

You’re starting to question certain plot points, certain characters. And, if you’re a real writer, you’re starting to question if you should give up screenwriting altogether. The “Give-Up” Dragon becomes a constant companion on this journey.  And he breathes failure-fire, that bastard.

One thing that helped me learn to finish screenplays (as opposed to abandon them) is to stop thinking of screenwriting as something that has to be fun all the time. If you’re a screenwriter, screenwriting IS YOUR JOB.

For your regular 9 to 5 job, are you allowed to stop showing up? No. You have to go. Even when you feel like crap. Even when there are seven fires you’ll have to put out that day.  Even when Annoying Bill is going to ask you to play racketball with him for the sixth time this month.  Even when you just plain don’t want to go. You still go.

Which is how you need to approach screenwriting. The real screenwriters are not the ones who can write when everything’s going well. They’re the ones who keep writing even when things are going badly.

A big part of the reason things go badly is judgment. Your brain is constantly judging your writing. Even as you’re writing stuff down, you’re thinking, “This doesn’t work. This is stupid. I don’t like this.” So you stop.

You can’t do that. The first draft will always be the messiest draft. It will be your worst draft. AND THAT’S OKAY. Cause the goal of the first draft is not to write something great. It’s to get it done.

I went on a sneaky little family vacation to Cancun a couple of weeks ago and my brother and I got in a long discussion about writing. He’s not a writer but he’s interested in what I do. He said, “All I know is that, in college, when I had to write a paper, rewriting it was going to be easy. So I knew that all I had to do was get a first draft done as fast as I could.  No matter how bad it was, from that point on, it was easy.”

That’s great advice for screenwriters as well. Get it down on paper so you can start rewriting it. Cause rewriting is easier than conjuring stuff up out of thin air.

Now onto more specific advice. We have arrived at your script’s MIDPOINT.

The midpoint is a critical checkpoint in your screenplay because the audience needs to feel some sort of SHIFT in the story in order to stay interested. This shift, when done well, works like a rogue wave in the ocean. There’s our screenplay, floating along, and then this giant wave picks it up and pushes it all the way to shore (our ending).

There are multiple ways to approach the midpoint. Some writers like to insert a surprising twist. Some writers like to up the stakes. Some writers like to kill a character off. Some writers like to introduce a new character. There’s one common denominator here and that’s that something bigger needs to happen.

In the original Top Gun, the midpoint has Maverick lose his wing man and best friend, Goose.

In the midpoint of Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle, the four characters who are stuck in the game run into Alex, a mysterious character who has been stuck in the game for years. He then sets them on the proper path in order to get home.

In everybody’s favorite punching bag of a movie (but one I like), The Force Awakens, the midpoint is the demonstration of Starkiller Base, which uses its power to destroy dozens of planets at once. The stakes have been raised. We now know why it’s so important to defeat the First Order.

In Zombieland, the midpoint’s effect is a little more complex. It has our crew arriving at their destination, California. This doesn’t necessarily up the stakes. There’s no big twist. But since the first half of the movie was a road-trip, the arrival in California changes the make-up of the movie considerably. The conflict will now be contained to one area. That’s important: You don’t want the second half of your movie to feel exactly like the first half or we’ll get bored.

The midpoint of Equalizer 3, which has our hero Robert McCall hiding out in an Italian town, has him move from avoiding detection and staying undercover, to actively going after the evil crime syndicate there.

Steven Spielberg, the king of the action set-piece, uses his midpoint in Jurassic Park to mark the arrival of the T-Rex, which attacks our poor protagonists who are helplessly stuck in their jeep. It’s not so much a plot development as it is an antagonist arrival. The stakes have been raised considerably now that we know what we’re up against.

In the almost brilliant “Leave the World Behind” (Netflix), which follows two families stuck in a remote house as World War 3 begins, the midpoint has that amazing remote-Tesla driving attack scene, where Tesla cars shoot at our driving heroes at 130 miles per hour, crashing into each other at the highway entrance, gumming up the highways so that people can’t escape. Like the T-Rex scene, this scene upped the stakes and let us know just how dangerous this threat is.

In one of my favorite comedies ever, Dumb and Dumber, our two favorite morons break-up! Lloyd accidentally drives 600 miles in the wrong direction and it’s the straw that broke the camel’s back for Harry. He’s out. He leaves (and starts walking home!).

A Quiet Place has one of the better midpoints in recent memory. It’s the moment when Emily Blunt’s character’s water breaks and she has to have her baby in silence, alone. Not only is it the best scene in the movie, but it ups the stakes considerably. Now there’s a baby involved for the second half of the movie. And babies like to make noise.

That’s something I only noticed by doing this research. For some of these movies, the midpoint includes the best scene (or one of the best scenes). So, if you don’t know how to raise the stakes or how to change the fortunes of your second half so that it doesn’t feel like the first half, or you don’t want to introduce a new character or kill one off, one thing you know you can do reliably is write a great set piece scene. That alone can JOLT a reader back to attention.

So there you have it. I’m excited that we’re crossing the halfway point of our scripts this week. We’re going to be finished with this thing in no time.

See you next week!

My friends, we actually have a good script today. A very good script.

Genre: Action/Period
Premise: Set in the 14th century, a shepherd watches as a group of mercenaries assault and murder his employing family, setting him on a path of revenge.
About: Today’s writer, Will Dunn, has been writing for a long time. He first made strides by getting into the Twentieth Century Fox writing program back in 2011. Since then, he’s sold a few scripts, including one called “Ion,” about a man who travels to other planets and dimensions in search of his reincarnated lover. The Peasant also made last year’s Black List.
Writer: Will Dunn
Details: 98 pages

This role seems tailor-made for the fast-rising Alan Ritchson

Katt Williams, my new muse, said something interesting in a recent interview. He said, “People think stand-up comedy is easy because you’re just talking. And everybody thinks they can talk and be entertaining. The irony is that the better I get at my craft, the easier it looks. But those people aren’t considering the 30 years of work I put in to make it look this easy.”

It’s the same thing with screenwriting. The better the screenplay, the easier it looks to write a screenplay. There’s no place that better represents this issue than the Black List. We’ve gotten a ton of bad scripts from the list and, one would think, it is partly due to the delusion people have of thinking this craft is easy.

It’s not. It’s hard.

But lucky for us today, we finally have a screenwriter who knows what he’s doing.

It’s the 1300s in Tuscany, Italy. War is so prevalent at this time that even when there’s no war going on, bored soldiers will join together in teams and just rape and pillage towns in order to accumulate as much wealth as possible.

We meet Oliver, a 40-something shepherd, as he’s teaching a young boy, Luca, how to use a sling. Oliver is staying with Luca’s family, including Luca’s father, Gio, after having shown up a month prior. It’s clear that Oliver has some sort of shady past but, at least at first, it’s unclear what.

That changes when a group of mercenaries show up, knock Oliver out, then go kill the family he’s staying with. A brutal “Patrick Bateman (American Psycho)” like leader named Janick revels in the destruction. But what he’s really taken by is the knight’s sword that was hidden in the barn. It is highly unusual for a peasant family to have a sword like this.

When Oliver comes to and learns of the family’s demise, he has one goal and one goal only. Go find Janick and kill him. Oh, and kill anyone Janick knows as well. Janick is staying at a castle town called Volterra nearby. His mercenary crew lobbed off the head of the king there and turned the place into their own little vacation villa.

After a brief detour, Oliver heads to Volterra, breaks in, and kills a bunch of mercenaries. But Janick and his men get the upper hand, forcing Oliver to retreat into Volterra’s only church. Here, the bad guys aren’t allowed inside, giving Oliver an intermission to recover.  It’s also here where we learn of Oliver’s true roots – that he was the Pope’s assassin!  It’s only a matter of time before he comes back out swords-a-blazing. But will the evil Jannick ignore God’s will and break into the church to get the upper hand? We’ll have to see.

Today’s screenplay highlights a little-known screenwriting hack.

What you do is take a thriller/action/revenge type scenario, add a dash of urgency, and place it in olden times. The reason this works is because audiences don’t associate period pieces with these genres. They associate them with movies like Titanic or Shakespeare in Love or Legends of the Fall.

That’s a gigantic reason why 1917 did so well. It took this hack and exploited it to the extreme (going so far as to set the movie in real-time).

Today’s movie is a Wick-type setup but set in the 14th century. So, right away, it had my attention.

However, the setup has the same challenges as the Takens and the John Wicks do in modern day. They’re working with a cliched template. Cliched templates have an increased likelihood of creating cliched screenplays.

But I’m going to tell you how to get around that.

You have to first make us like the person or people who is going to be killed in the first act. Here, Dunn doesn’t just casually introduce us to the family. He creates a specific bond between Oliver and Luca. Oliver teaches Luca how to use his slingshot. He then imparts wisdom on him in a heartfelt exchange.

The amateur writer often screws this up because they speed through it. They don’t find any specific moment between the two. They just sort of show our hero saying, “Good job, champ.” But the point is, if you can nail that first part, you’re golden. Cause if we loved the person who was killed, we will want them avenged.

Next, you want to create a bad guy who we hate. And as simple as that sentence is to write, it’s frustratingly hard to do. Cause you figure, just make him really mean! Then we’ll hate him! But it doesn’t work like that for whatever reason.

What you have to do is make the bad guy mean in a way that feels a little more complex. Dunn does that here. Janick doesn’t initially come up to Oliver and start berating him or kicking his ass. He actually offers an exchange of goods. He says to Oliver, “I’ll buy your flock of sheep from you.” Oliver then politely discusses why he can’t sell him the sheep, which ends in Janick knocking him out.

It’s a small thing. But that sort of stuff is important when creating a villain because we don’t normally assign rationale to villains. So when they’re being reasonable, it makes them more of a real person in the reader’s eyes.

Of course, after Oliver refuses, Janick kicks him in the face and goes and kills the family, establishing his true awfulness. But our first impression of him is of a reasonable man, even if we sense that sinister element beneath the surface.

The reason this is important is because when you combine the killing of a person we genuinely liked with a villain who we genuinely hate, that right there can power an entire screenplay. You can make all sorts of mistakes along the way and it won’t matter. Because the core of your story is so solid. And this script does make mistakes. It makes several of them.

There’s this silly little side-quest where Oliver has to go into the forest to find two forest-women warriors who dress like demons because they know the secret way into the castle. Just have him find his own way into the castle.

And then there’s a period of the script after he takes out a bunch of mercenaries where he’s pulled into the church and we just hang out in the church for like 20 pages and Oliver talks to a bunch of people. It’s fine to take a breather after an intense sequence. But 20 pages? Come on, man.

But in the end, these missteps don’t have much of an effect on the story because the core is so strong.

It’s why I always say, spend the majority of your script-writing on the PILLARS of your story – the things that affect how the audience experiences the movie the most. Is it a nice little subplot in Titanic that the captain is mad that the powerful figures on the boat bully him into going faster than he wants? Sure. But getting that subplot right holds 1/1000th the power of making sure that we believe in and care about the love story between Jack and Rose.

I don’t say that lightly. If you had written Titanic, I would beg you to show it to at least five people and ask them, “Do you care about the love story between Jack and Rose?” Cause if they don’t, that means your biggest pillar is weak, which means you don’t have a script yet, no matter how good the rest of the script is written.

It appears that this script was (smartly) written to become a franchise. There are so many John Wick clones these days, how do you separate yourself? You separate yourself in the way that I told you to at the beginning of this review. Jump back 800 years or so. That world is so different from ours today that you can literally copy the exact same template as John Wick and it feels like a completely different movie.

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

What I learned: When you’re writing a big long action sequence, consider underlining the truly important moments to draw the attention of the reader towards them. Because, often, readers will skim through repetitive action. It’s the unfortunate nature of script-reading in Hollywood. Therefore, let them know the important beats by underlining them. Just don’t do it too often or the underlining will lose its power.

Today I share with you the single best way to write a great ending to your script. And barely anybody knows it.

Genre: Rom-Com (Friend-Com)
Premise: When her best friend since childhood falls in love and starts spending all her time with her new boyfriend, a selfish codependent career woman will do anything to get her back.
About: This script finished fairly high on last year’s Black List. The writer, Gaelyn Golde, has one produced credit for an episode of the animated TV show, Praise Petey.
Writer: Gaelyn Golde
Details: 98 pages

Alison Brie for Bridget (since Sydney Sweeney is too young to play the part)?

I’m going to take you into the mind of someone who has to read a lot of scripts for a second.

Most people in this town – at least the ones who matter – are super busy.

They’ve got calls to make. They’ve got e-mails to return. They have meetings they have to go to that they don’t want to be in. And they probably have 3 or 4 fires they have to put out that day.

That speaks nothing to their personal lives, which also take up a lot of time, especially if they’re married with kids.

These people have a pile of scripts to read.

When that is the case, the script they will most commonly seek out is the one that’s under 100 pages with a simple concept. Why? Because they know the read isn’t going to take up their entire night. They know they’re going to be able to get through it easily.

You know how I know this? Cause it’s how I picked today’s script. I was running around town all day, having to do a bunch of things. And by the time I was able to sit down and work on today’s post, it was 8pm.

Do you think I’m going to open the equivalent of Dune: Messiah under those circumstances? A 145 page tome of a gigantic universe with a million characters and a ton of mythology to learn before I can accurately understand what’s going on in the story? No way.

I’m going to pick the script that I know is going to go down easy.

Don’t worry. I’m not saying you can never write your version of Dune. I’m only saying, these variables factor into how people choose to read scripts.

Okay, let’s rock!

Bridget is in her 30s, lives in New York, and works at a publishing house. Uh oh. Uhhhhhh ohhhhhh. Did I just summarize the single biggest movie character cliche in history? Not a good start!

Bridget is best friends with Rae, whom she’s known since they’ve been in diapers. The two are so inseparable, they even have a rule whereby they have to kick guys to the curb after having sex with them three times. That way they don’t get attached.

But Bridget is noticing that Rae’s latest guy, Hank, has been over at the apartment, err, MORE THAN THREE TIMES. She shrugs it off, uses some denial logic, and continues to spend every waking second with her best friend. That is until she goes to the bathroom one morning and HANK IS TAKING A SHOWER!

Taking a shower is NEVER allowed, which is how Bridget knows this is serious. She attempts to talk some logic to her friend but that’s when Rae hits her with a terrifying truth-bomb. She LIKES Hank. This liking thing has never happened before so it’s the equivalent of an atom bomb going on inside Bridget’s diaphragm.

As Rae starts spending more and more time with Hank, Bridget is forced to find her own friends, a couple of co-workers at the publishing house, player Adam and defiant lesbian Monica. But they’re not really Bridget’s friends, as she uses them as chess pieces to try and make Rae jealous so she’ll understand how she feels and dump Hank.

Predictably, that doesn’t work. Rae only ends up liking Hank more, which means she spends less time with Bridget. In a last desperate attempt, Bridget destroys everything about Hank in front of Rae, hoping she’ll realize Hank can’t give her what Bridget can. When that doesn’t work, Bridget must face reality: that her best friend is gone for good. But can she grow enough to figure out a way to live in a world without her life muse?

Today, I want to talk about the power of 3.

It took me a long time as a writer to figure out the power of 3. In fact, I don’t think I truly understood its power until I started reading tons of scripts.

When I wrote, I focused very heavily on binary conversations. Character 1 talks to Character 2. Character 2 talks back. Then Character 1 speaks again.

I did that because it was easy.

But one of the themes of this review is that: If it’s easy, it’s probably the wrong thing to do.

We see the value of that here when Hank enters the equation. When it was just Bridget and Rae, sure, they had a fun back-and-forth. They said some funny things. But their interactions became infinitely more interesting when Hank entered the equation.

Why?

Because Hank forces the characters TO THINK WHEN THEY SPEAK. And when you have to start thinking, that’s when conversation gets fun.

Just today I was at a lunch with a friend and we were talking about some fairly risqué subject matter when the waiter showed up. He took the plates away and cleaned the table for way too long and, the whole time he was there, our conversation changed. We had to avoid what we wanted to talk about, which is how you create subtext. That’s a huge benefit that comes from the power of 3.

Now, the trick to get the most out of this is to make the third character as intense a force of conflict as possible. That’s why Hank’s arrival into the story is so fun. He is literally a wall in this friendship. He is preventing it from thriving. So, whenever he’s around, we feel that tension.

Therefore, whenever you yourself can add a third character to one of your scenes, do it. Watch how the scene comes alive in a way that it never could have with just two people.

Another thing that caught my eye here was the ending. I’m going to spoil this so feel free to skip to the What I Learned. This ending had the opportunity to be very good but it dropped the ball. Bridget and Rae hadn’t talked for a week after their big fight. So then Bridget runs into Hank on the street. Hank tells her that Rae dumped him.

Now, this might seem like an innocuous plot beat to the seasoned moviegoer. A moment like this always happens. But what you have to understand is that, THIS MOMENT IS THE ENTIRE MOVIE. This is where the movie either WORKS or DOESN’T WORK. It’s where your hero must make their final ULTIMATE CHOICE.

The whole movie, Bridget has wanted her best friend back. She’s wanted Hank out of the picture. What screenwriter Golde did was perfect. She gave Bridget a REALLY REALLY HARD CHOICE. Most writers screw this up. They give their hero a choice that *seems* hard but that we all know is easy. In this case, the choice is actually hard.

Bridget can do what she wants – finally have her friend back. Or do what’s right – help Hank get Rae back.

But for some reason, Golde didn’t seem to realize that this moment is the entire movie! It’s her protagonist being confronted with succumbing to her flaw or changing. And Golde rushes through it. Bridget doesn’t think twice. “Let’s go get Rae back!” No! This moment needs to breathe. You need to milk this moment as a writer. Again, THIS IS THE WHOLE MOVIE. For everyone writing screenplays, this is often the most important moment in your script. So don’t rush it. And Golde rushed it.

The final thing I want to say about this script is that it does something I see a lot of rom-com writers do. Which is, they write the “run through the airport” climax but they do so in a slightly different way so as to convince themselves (and the audience) that they’re not actually being cliche.

So, here, both Hank and Bridget run to the airport together to stop Rae from getting on the plane. First, Hank stops her and they have a moment. But then Rae spots Bridget and runs over and talks to her.

So, technically, is it different from your typical rom-com airport ending? Yeah, a little bit. The fact that the guy stopping her wasn’t the big focus, but rather the scene with the best friend AFTER that was the big focus. Yeah, you can convince yourself of that as a writer.

But dude come on. Do you want to write something that’s a little different or do you want to exercise some actual creative muscles and try something new? This is your ending. This is what you’re leaving your audience with. If 95% of it is familiar and only 5% is original, how do you think audiences are going to remember that moment? The barely original part or the mostly cliche part?

I’ll give you the solution to this problem in the What I Learned section in a second.

I thought that, for the most part, this script was solid. It didn’t blow me away. But the dialogue was fun and I found the character of Bridget compelling enough that I wanted to see where she ended up. For that reason, this gets a ‘worth the read,’ but it’s one of those hanging-by-a-thread ‘worth the reads.’ Like, if there was a 2.9 magnitude earthquake before I finished this review, it would fall down to a ‘wasn’t for me.’ So, I’ll wrap this up before that can happen! :)

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

What I learned: How do you avoid ‘run to the airport’ endings in romantic comedies? The way you do this is to LEAN INTO YOUR CONCEPT. What’s unique about your concept? That will give you your ending. Look at one of the greatest rom-coms of all time: Notting Hill. In that movie, Anna (Julia Roberts) is a movie star. All she DOES is fly around the world. There would’ve been no easier ending for writer Richard Curtis than to write a cliched ‘run to the airport’ ending. But because Curtis always pushes himself creatively, he leaned into his concept to find his ending. Anna is a movie star. What does a movie star do? A movie star does a lot of press junkets. So that’s the final scene. Anna is speaking in front of the British press about her latest movie and William is forced to get her back imitating one of the reporters and asking her questions in front of everyone. It’s very clever. And it shows you what the possibilities are if you push past the obvious.

One of my weaknesses when it comes to watching movies is I put almost the entire onus of whether a movie works or not on the screenplay. So if the screenplay fails to deliver, I’m let down. Whereas, the average moviegoer and a lot of you guys are better at taking in the entire experience of the movie. You’re moved by the imagery, the acting, the sound, the music. That creates a stronger impression on you than me, which is why I feel that there’s a disconnect between myself and audiences when it comes to movies like Dune.

Dune 2 looks absolutely epic. The costumes alone are some of the best I’ve ever seen for a sci-fi movie. But that first screenplay, man…. That screenplay was so slooooooooooooooooooooooow. And I just can’t get over that. That and the fact that the movie is 90% world-building and 10% story. Maybe the first film was solely a setup so that this second film could fly. But Blade Runner 2049 (also directed by Villeneuve) had pacing issues as well. So my assumption was that I was going to get more of that in Villeneuve’s latest which is why I didn’t spend 20 bucks on it.

It’s weird because I run into people who absolutely loved the first movie. I remember I was walking on Larchmont (a fun little community-driven street in Los Angeles) and I saw this guy with the Dune book in his hand. I asked him if he’d seen the movie and he couldn’t stop raving about it. His love for it was so infectious I decided not to share how I thought the government should consider offering the film as the definitive solution for sleep apnea. But it was just a reminder that I’m seeing this film differently from everyone else. I mean, the movie has amazing critic and audience scores.

Despite my disinterest in the franchise, I’m thrilled that Dune 2 made 81.5 million dollars, doubling what the first film made on its inaugural weekend. What that means is we’ll get more adult sci-fi. And more adult sci-fi is better than whatever the heck the last five Marvel movies have been.

Those of you who didn’t watch Dune 2 probably stayed home and watched the other big epic release this weekend, Shogun, on FX. Just like Dune, the critics are infatuated with it. And, although it’s too early to rely on the audience scores, they seem to love it as well.

I read about one-third of the famous novel that the show is based on a decade ago. It’s one of those novels, ironically, like Dune. It’s world-building after world-building. There’s more building in this thing than Manhattan and Dubai combined. So it’s slow-going. What surprised me about the pilot episode was how quickly it brought me back to the novel. When a big scene popped up, it was as if I was right there in the book again. That’s how true it was to the novel.

The show also achieves something that’s critical to any show working – which is to get a lead actor that, whenever he’s onscreen, it’s impossible to look away. The second Cosmo Jarvis, who plays the lead character, John Blackthorne, showed up (he was being held in an underground prison with his fellow sailors) I was laser-focused on him. His eyes are mesmerizing. But he also has a really unique voice. Hey, maybe I’m better at focusing on the stuff outside screenwriting than I thought! Actually, hold tight, cause we’re going to get to the writing.

Here’s where I’m worried.

In a lot of ways, these new giant TV shows have become modern day “movies.” They may not have the presence of a feature film. But their longevity gives them a heavier weight when it’s all said and done. And therein lies the unique challenge of writing these series. They mimic movies with their sequential storytelling, but do so over a much longer period of time, which requires a much higher level of skill than the feature screenwriter.

I mean imagine writing an Avatar movie compared to writing eight seasons of Westworld. Which one do you think is harder?

Westworld by far. Which is why it fell apart and why a lot of these shows fall apart. They require a level of writing that only a few people in the world are capable of delivering. I don’t know a whole lot about Justin Marks, who created this series, but I do know that he wrote one of the worst screenplays of all time. That would be 2009’s Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li.

This is where things get tricky because there’s this entire sub-level ecosystem when it comes to the screenwriting industry that makes it hard to know who’s responsible for what and how much they’re responsible. I’ll never forget when this producer who gave me too many extremely specific details for him to be lying, laid out why the credited screenwriter of Groundhog Day, Danny Rubin, was only responsible for the unreadable early drafts of the script, which is why you never heard from the guy again.

My point is, Justin Marks may not be responsible for how bad Chun-Li was. Maybe it was even worse and he made it “readable.” But even with that, his IMDB page doesn’t get my samurai sword extended, so to speak. He has The Jungle Book, Counterpart, and a ‘story by’ credit on Top Gun: Maverick. That last one is obviously huge. But Top Gun is a 180 degrees different universe than Shogun.

But the big thing that tweaked me was Marks hiring his wife, Rachel Kondo, to co-write and run the series. Rachel Kondo has zero writing credits. We all know how big nepotism is in this town. But this is one of the most outrageous examples of it I’ve ever seen. Would Marks have hired Kondo, someone with zero writing credits, to help him write a 300 million dollars show if she WASN’T his wife? I’ll let all of you guys answer that one. If you’re truly invested in creating the best series possible, you need people who have done this before.

Why am I bringing this up when the first episode was a solid 7 out of 10? Because, to me, this is why shows like this fall apart all the time. Cause the people writing them don’t have the developed skill to write a long-running complex series. Westworld is one of the best examples of this ever. And that had two pretty big names running it itself (ironically, another husband and wife team, Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy). I saw the wheels falling off the writing for that in the fifth episode. And every episode got worse from there. And that’s because it was this big giant story and the writers didn’t have the talent to visualize it and tell it.

This all stems from this new hybrid form of storytelling that streamers have created which is the “never-ending movie.” It used to be it didn’t matter that TV shows didn’t end because they were episodic. Each episode was contained to a murder or a group of people in an apartment yukking it up. But now, with the story continuing, you need to realllllllyyyyyy understand what you’re doing as a storyteller to make a story last 40-50 hours. The last show I can think of that achieved this was Breaking Bad. No show has done it since.

Maybe there’s a bit of a defense mechanism going on with me here. I’m saying this so that I won’t be hurt, once again, when Shogun gets sloppy in episode 5 and starts dovetailing. But it’s really a bigger issue. We’ve created this new TV genre that we don’t know how to wrangle. It’s the world’s biggest bucking bronco and no writer knows how to stay on it. Does that mean that it’s impossible to write these long-form movies? Should we even try since 95% of them fail?

The solution may be to do what Benny Safdie and Nathan Fielder did. Just write one contained season of a show (The Curse). It starts and finishes within eight hours. Even THAT’S really freaking hard to do, though. It’s harder than writing a traditional feature. But it’s certainly easier than writing a 50 hour movie when you’ve only got 8 hours of story in your head and a history of average creative choices on your IMDB page. Give me The Mare of Easttown. One great season and you’re out. Or The Bear. Keep your episodes short so you don’t have to tell as much story. And focus more on the characters than some giant plot the writer can’t keep up with.

What are your thoughts on Dune 2 and Shogun? Did either of them blow you away? If so, put me in my place!