Genre: Gothic Horror
Premise: Two hitmen are recruited by a strange Native American woman to kill a bizarre monster who lives under her basement.
About: This script was written in the mid-70s for Hal Ashby’s production company. Ashby is best known for the weirdest love story of all time, Harold and Maude, a personal favorite of mine. He was obsessed with this project though, coveting Jack Nicholson to play the lead. He had the author of the book, Richard Brautigan, adapt the screenplay himself, but was unhappy with the result. So he got a real screenwriter in Michael Haller to adapt the story, the final product of which he was excited about. But he could never get all the pieces together. Later, Tim Burton would become obsessed with the project, but he also had trouble getting it made. This is the Haller version of the script.
Writer: Michael Haller (based on the novel by Richard Brautigan)
Details: 108 pages

Still getting over that Oscar hangover?

Texting your buddies to remind them when tonight’s Bachelor Finale Viewing Party starts?

I’m right there with ya. Mine starts at 6:30. I invited all my neighbors but for some odd reason, when I approached them with roses and asked, “Will you accept this Bachelor Viewing Party Rose?” 5 of them shut the door in my face, 3 stood silently, and 2 called the police.

The good news is I made bail. So onwards and upwards and let us all hope Ari finds love.

A few of you sunk your teeth into me the other day like a diseased zombie when I eviscerated some script choices in Three Billboards, calling me delusional for blindly following the GSU faith. But anyone who reads this site regularly knows I like a lot of weird scripts. I mean, I liked Meat, which was the anti-GSU. I’m also consistent in saying that how you break the rules is how you will make your script stand out.

Where myself and my critics differ is in intentional rule-breaking vs ignorant rule-breaking. I’m fine when someone breaks a rule with a purpose. But when I sense they made a choice ignorantly, either overall or in a specific area, I’m going to call them out on it. If you overlook a more dramatically engaging choice out of sloppiness, that needs to be discussed. Because while the strength of that film may have masked that particular mistake, aspiring screenwriters need to know that it won’t work if they try the same thing.

How does this tie into today’s screenplay? Because today’s script is a more obvious example of what happens when you abandon structure, instead “writing from the heart” and steering your choices through theme.

The year is 1902. Two hitman, Cameron and Greer, are coming back from a failed job in Hawaii. Greer is the brains of the operation while Cameron’s a bit of an autistic weirdo. Everything is counting for him. He counts footsteps, words, repeated noises, everything.

When these two get back to the mainland, they’re approached by a young beautiful Native American woman named Magic Child. Magic Child hands them a few thousands dollars and says they need to come back with her to Oregon to kill something.

At a time when Coke cost negative 5 cents, a few thousand dollars is a lot of money. So these two don’t hesitate in accepting the offer. However, once they get back to Magic Child’s town, shit starts getting weird. They go back to Magic Child’s mother’s house, Miss Hawkline, and within five minutes, Magic Child and Miss Hawkline become the same person. So there are now two Miss Hawklines.

Sure, why not.

Original Miss Hawkline explains that Cameron and Greer need to kill a monster for them. This monster lives underneath their basement, in something known as the Ice Caves. You see, Miss Hawkline’s scientist husband was working on an experiment, and may or may not have accidentally created the monster before disappearing.

Cameron and Greer are all geared up to go, but as the group of four gets to talking, they become distracted, even confused, about why they’re all here. After several scenes of this, they seem to get their senses back, only for Miss Hawkline to confide that the monster has the ability to make them confused. Which is why they’re confused.

Uh-huh. Okay.

This goes on for many more pages, with the group fucking (yes, fucking), having tea, and eventually realizing that the monster they thought was the monster was never the monster. Or… something. In the end, the missing dad comes back and everything is great again. But not really.

Getting back to my point. It’s easy to say that one’s critique of a story choice is incorrect when the overall screenplay works. But when an objectively awful screenplay makes the same mistake, nobody’s there to defend the same reasoning. The reality is that every script is the sum of its parts and therefore if a script does a few things wrong but a lot of things right, it’s still a success. But that does not mean its mistakes are above criticism. And I’d argue that that’s what this site is about – having a discussion about those choices so we don’t make the same mistakes in our own scripts.

The second this script went away from its structured setup – find and kill the monster – to an unstructured one – reality dissolves and everyone talks to each other for long periods of time trying to figure out where they are and what’s happening – it completely falls apart. It’s a terrible choice. And it’s a terrible choice specifically because it abandons structure.

It just so happens that this script is so appallingly bad after that choice that I doubt any of you would disagree with me after reading it. But while the critique of a similarly bad choice in an otherwise good movie (Three Billboards) makes for a more interesting discussion, a bad choice is still a bad choice. Sam Rockwell’s racist character in Three Billboards not becoming the deputy under a new black sheriff was the wrong choice. Period. Dramatically, it was way more interesting than sending Rockwell home to do nothing for the next 30 minutes. And writers need to know that.

Getting back to The Hawkline Monster, the bigger problem here is that poor screenwriters working before the internet had little to no resources for how to structure a screenplay. So you got a lot of scripts like this, which charged strong into the midpoint, only for the writers to run out of ideas. Their solution, then, was to write whatever came to mind for the next 50 pages until they got to the climax.

Sadly, a lot of writers still write this way.

The way to prevent this is to KNOW YOUR ENDING. Once you know what you’re writing towards, it’s the same as picking a vacation destination. You can now look up prices, book the plane, book hotels, study the place you’re going to visit, pack, go to the airport, and show up at your destination. Imagine if you hadn’t picked a vacation spot? You just winged it. You might show up at the airport with a suitcase full of t-shirts and land in Juneau, Alaska during a time of year when all the hotels are booked.

Once you have your ending, you just have to make sure your characters are always moving towards that ending, that there are obstacles getting in the way, and that each ten pages we’re feeling a little less certain that they’re going to succeed. That’s what provides that sense of purpose you need in a story.

If you want to write purely through theme and leave your pacing and purpose up to the powers that be, go right ahead. But don’t be surprised when people look at you sideways after they’ve read your script.

Script link: The Hawkline Monster

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

What I learned: Screenwriting is a mathematical writing medium and is therefore heavily dependent on structure. I know people hate to hear it. But it’s true. Until you see it that way, you’re always going to have a hard time pacing your scripts correctly.

Are you ready for some politics!? Wait. I mean. Are you ready for the Oscars!? The Oscars is still about movie awards, right? I guess we’ll find out tomorrow. Use this thread to make predictions, heap praise upon your favorite films of the year, and wonder out loud why the heck everyone loves that one movie only you seem to know is terrible.

Here is who I’d like to win the major awards (not to be confused with who I think will win the awards)

BEST PICTURE – Three Billboards

LEAD ACTOR – Daniel Day Lewis

LEAD ACTRESS – Francis McDormand

SUPPORTING ACTOR – Sam Rockwell

SUPPORTING ACTRESS – Haven’t seen enough of these to make an educated choice

DIRECTOR – Christopher Nolan for Dunkirk (he won’t win but he definitely did the best job)

ADAPTED SCREENPLAY – Aaron Sorkin for Molly’s Game

ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY – Emily Gordon and Kumail Nanjiani for The Big Sick

Genre: College Rom-Com/Heist
Premise: To get the girl of his dreams, a spoiled momma’s boy enlists the help of a feisty cat burglar who needs help blending in with their elitist law-school classmates, but her criminal antics put both of their careers at risk.
Why You Should Read: I like to combine genres that don’t often appear together, and so American Pie and Ocean’s Eleven collide to form The Cat Burglar. I also like to create stories with two polar opposite main characters who require each other’s help in some sort of symbiotic relationship that forces them both to overcome their flaws, so here we have a spoiled timid young man who is too afraid to talk to the girl he likes, and a stubborn female cat burglar who is trying to blend in with the rich and wealthy and funding that lifestyle by stealing from them. He can help her with her problem and she can help him with his, but because of their contrasting personalities there are fireworks and much needed drama. At least that’s the plan! Right now I’d love to hear the wisdom of the SS community. Thanks in advance.
Writer: Paul Clarke
Details: 100 pages

Naomi Scott for Alice?

The Rom-Com.

Is it dead?

Most seem to think so.

However, if there is a space for it, this is where it would be, in that 16-22 demographic. Either a rom-com set in high school or a rom-com set in college. And maybe that segment just out of college, since there’s some inherent conflict in dating in the real world for the first time.

Paul Clarke won last week’s Amateur Offerings rather handily and continues to be one of the strongest contenders come Amateur Offerings Weekend. It makes me want to have a Super Amateur Offerings Weekend, where we get the perennial AO All-Stars to all submit their latest script on the same weekend. That could be fun. Let me know if that’s something you’d be interested in in the comments and maybe we could set it up. Also, who would be in it?

Anyway, how is Paul’s latest? Let’s find out.

19 year-old George isn’t exactly a loser… eh, check that. He is a loser. The Stanford College freshman still lives at home and spends his days climbing the tree in his backyard and taking pervy pictures of his beautiful neighbor Julie, who he used to go to grade school with. While George’s alpha-male father is trying to prep him for a job at his law firm, George would rather become a nature photographer.

Across town we meet Alice, a fellow student at Stanford who doesn’t have the family financial backing that George has. So, being the entrepreneur that she is, she burglarizes homes. And one day, she burglarizes George’s home, stealing that juicy multi-thousand dollar camera he uses. The one that still has a memory chip in it with pictures of Julie. Uh-oh.

When George recognizes Alice at school (through the sounds she made when she robbed him that night), the two face off. Actually, that’s not accurate. George is such a spineless wimp that he lets Alice dictate the negotiation. It starts off as, “I’ll return your stuff and not tell anyone you’re a peeper if you don’t tell anybody what I do,” but later turns into, “I’ll help you get this Julie girl if you get your dad to hire me as an intern at his law firm.”

Alice holds up her end of the bargain, beating George into submission until he asks Julie out. But George’s evil father is a tough nut to crack. He doesn’t hand out favors easily. So George lies to Alice, telling her she’s got the job, despite that not being the case. Meanwhile, George gets a date with Julie to the ball, and Alice convinces George to help her scope out her last big job, the one that’s going to fund the rest of her college. How is this all going to end? Check out the script to find out!

As is always the case, when you read a Paul Clarke script, you know you’re dealing with someone who understands the craft.

The problem is that Paul’s fighting an invisible demon. And he doesn’t know it.

The single biggest issue with romantic comedies is that their structure is too obvious. We’re going down the same beats we’ve seen time and time again. And that was prevalent here. I remember being 60 pages in and thinking, do I even need to finish this? I already know what’s going to happen.

The only way to fight this is through the characters. If the characters are special, the reader doesn’t care as much about the Save The Cat structure. And when you look back at all of your favorite romantic comedies, that’s what sticks out the most. It’s that you loved those characters.

Which leads us to the obvious question – are the characters in The Cat Burglar special? To answer, I’m going to put each character through the Scriptshadow-Special-O-Meter, which rates character specialness from 1-10. Ready? Beep-beep-boooop-chuckuchuchuchchucah…

George: 3 out of 10
Alice: 5 out of 10

Let’s look at each rating in more detail. My big issue with George was that he was suuuuuccchhh a wimp. He was so spineless and so weak and so afraid to do anything… that I didn’t root for him. I was actually thinking, this guy deserves to fail. I mean he doesn’t do ANYTHING. In one of the biggest moments in the plot – him needing to ask Julie out – he doesn’t do it. It’s done off-screen by Alice.

Now it’s true that you usually have to start your rom-com male lead in a place of weakness so that they can arc to a place of greatness. But they can’t have NOTHING going for them. I’ve found that the best way to make a character like this pop is to MAKE THEM FUNNY. You see it with Ben Stiller in There’s Something About Mary. You see it in all the Judd Apatow rom-coms. If they’re not funny, we feel like we wasted our money.

Alice is a much better character. But Paul doesn’t push her enough, and when measured against similar characters, she seems fairly average. I’ll give you an example from Wednesday’s script – June from The Great Nothing. If you go back and read June’s dialogue and you read Alice’s dialogue here, you’ll notice that June’s dialogue is flashier, more clever, more untamed. Alice has some nice lines and moments, but not enough of them. This character type really needs to stand out. And as written, she dances somewhere between okay and good. “Okay” and “Good” are fine for compliments. Not so much for readers wanting to pass on your work.

Also, this script needs to be more populated. It’s too isolated on Alice and George. These two go to a college and yet we never meet anyone from college (save for a professor – sort of). When you do that – when the bulk of your characters’ lives revolve around one place (college) – and yet we never see them engaging with other people from that place, something feels off. It feels like pages are missing. Combine that with the fact that George lives at home, and it’s almost like the whole college thing is a lie. So I would definitely add more college time and more college characters (students or professors) to this.

Finally, the plot points here were too artificial. Whenever you’re resting on the “Let’s make a deal” plot-forwarding technique, you’re asking for trouble. And it seemed like every 20 pages, the two were striking a new “I’ll help you if you help me” deal. I’ll help you get a date if you get me a job. I’ll help you learn how to dance if you help me scope out this place. It’s too contrived.

So when you add all of that up, the script was pleasant and well-written, but it wasn’t pushing the boundaries in any one area. It needed some unexpected plot turns or some wilder characters or for Alice to be a bigger character (crazier maybe). You know what it is. It’s like Paul doesn’t want to be offensive. He wants to write a safe sanitized rom-com. And I don’t think that’s the right way to go. He mentions American Pie as an inspiration. One of the reasons American Pie was a breakout hit was because it pushed boundaries. It was racy for its time. For a movie about stealing, this felt way too safe.

Script link: The Cat Burglar

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

What I learned: I don’t think enough writers ask themselves the question, “Why would STUNNING MODEL GIRL A want to be with LOSER WEAK PATHETIC MALE CHARACTER A?” Cause if you don’t have an answer to that question, then the only reason the girl goes for the guy is because the writer needs it to happen so his story works. I had no idea why Julie was interested in George at all here. It didn’t feel honest. And in a movie about relationships, you have to be honest with why your characters are doing what they’re doing.

If you go back to my Three Billboards script review, you’ll see that I gave it the worst rating on the Scriptshadow scale – the dreaded [x] what the hell did I just read? And I stand by that rating. I honestly had no idea what I’d read. It was a cacophony of bizarre choices surrounding an unlikable hero built on a draft that read like it was written in a week. Things would happen for no rhyme or reason, and the central question posed in the script was never answered.

Let me detail the worst part of the script for you so you understand the depths of my frustration. Deputy Dixon (Sam Rockwell) is a drunk racist cop. There are no moments in the script where racism is a part of the story. So already, his character is confusing. But the one good thing Dixon’s got going for him is that he’s a loose cannon with a mean streak. You get the sense that if this guy ever became Sheriff, everyone in town was in trouble, especially Mildred (Francis McDormand).

Chief Willoughby (Woody Harrelson) committing suicide at the midpoint was a WTF choice in its own right. However, it opened the door up for that Dixon explosion. We were finally going to see what happened when a crazy person who doesn’t play by the rules is in charge of this town. And we get it! In the movie’s best scene, a drunk Dixon, flush with power, charges over to the second floor advertising business that sold Mildred the billboards, beats the salesman senseless, then hurls him out the window, then goes back down to the street, and beats him some more.

This script was about to go LOCO and I was all in.

Then one minute later Dixon gets fired.

Holy shit. Talk about letting the air out of the balloon. Everything that was about to be so awesome had been replaced by a bottle of script poison.

But that’s not all. The guy Dixon is fired by, the new replacement sheriff, is black. So this whole movie you’ve been talking about Dixon’s racism despite the fact that it has nothing to do with the story. Now you FINALLY HAVE A WAY TO MAKE IT PART OF THE STORY! If Dixon doesn’t get fired, he has to serve under a black sheriff. How ironic is that? But no. He’s fired instead and spends the rest of the movie drinking at home. And as for that sheriff? He and Dixon never interact again.

That’s why I despised this script so much. It would make these gigantic crucial story-killing mistakes over and over again.

But then I watched it last night. And lo and behold I was freaking ENTERTAINED. It was a baffling experience as the screenwriting analyst in me was saying, “Wrong, wrong, wrong,” the whole way through, and yet I was engaged. I cared about what was happening. So afterwards I sat back for an extended moment and tried to figure out why I liked the movie. I came up with five reasons. Here they are.

REASON 1 – IT WAS ORIGINAL
I complain about Save the Cat beat sheet page-specific writing all the time. So I have to give props to a script that went against every obvious story beat a script like this would usually take. The story keeps you guessing, and that’s hard to do with the over-saturation of content these days. Everything’s been done already and yet here McDonagh comes along and says, “Has it?” I almost feel like McDonagh initiated a coda to himself before writing this, saying that every time he had an instinct to do something, he was going to do the opposite. Because that’s honestly the way the story plays out.

REASON 2 – MILDRED WENT FROM HATEABLE TO LIKABLE
In the script, the main character is so damn unlikable, it’s nauseating. She’s a bitch. She’s arrogant. She doesn’t listen. She has no empathy for how this affects people. I hated her. However in the movie, I loved her. Frances McDormand did the impossible. She made this character likable. It was the still moments with her that resonated the most. Scenes where Chief Willoughby was stating his case and you could see Mildred (McDormand) actually listening and understanding him. You didn’t see that in the script. I would still implore screenwriters to stay away from writing characters this unlkable in specs. Keep in mind McDonagh is a writer-director and didn’t need to win over any readers. His plan was obviously to find an actress who could offset the unlikability. And for this film, the plan paid off.

REASON 3 – THE HUMOR
I didn’t see any humor in this script. It would’ve been nice if I had because you needed something to offset all the darkness and anger. I don’t know if the humor was always there and I missed it, if it was added in rewrites, or if it was brought out by the actors. But Dixon is fucking hilarious. I definitely didn’t see that in the script. And Mildred is funny too. I mean, there’s this whole scene where she’s wearing bunny slippers and the bunny slippers, getting their own close up, start chatting about the whole billboard fiasco. That was SO ESSENTIAL for this movie because otherwise it would’ve been a huge downer.

REASON 4 – THE CHARACTERS
I always say that if you can write one memorable character in your script, you’ve succeeded. Writing one big memorable character is a huge accomplishment and much more difficult than people know. If you can write two, you’re flying in rare air. And if you can get to three? You’re going to be in the Oscar race. Which is what happened here. It’s the one glimmer of praise I gave the script when I reviewed it: “If the script has a saving grace, it’s that it’s an actors’ wet dream. Whoever plays Mildred gets to act like a crazy lunatic bitch for 2 hours, which should surely earn then an Oscar nom. Someone gets to play a racist cop when racist cops are all the rage in the news. And every character seems to have a larger backstory, some legitimate depth.” I hated the story so much that it trumped the strong character writing. But having seen the movie now, I can say that every time Mildred, Dixon, or Willoughby was onscreen, I was mesmerized. It just goes to show how important focusing on characters is.

REASON 5 – THE SCENE-WRITING
The scene-writing in this movie is OFF THE CHAIN. Yes, I’m bringing back “off the chain.” That’s how impressed I was by the scenes. I mean, there’s got to be 12 great scenes in here. The Dixon window scene. Dixon getting fired. Mildred burning the police station. The guy who threatens Mildred in her store. McDonagh seems to approach his scene-writing like Tarantino, where he makes each scene a mini-movie. As a result, they all have these big beginnings, middles, and ends. It’s funny that he structures his scenes so well when he structures his story so poorly.

Now don’t get me wrong. This didn’t go from worst to first, like the Los Angeles Rams. The choices McDonagh makes lead to a bizarre and unsatisfying ending, one where the characters maybe-sorta want to kill someone who maybe or maybe not raped someone who has nothing to do with Mildred’s daughter. That’s what happens when you stray too far from a structured narrative. But the characters were so great and the scenes were so good that I left this one thinking, “It looks like I was wrong.” It does happen every once in awhile. :)

Let me know what you guys thought of Three Billboards in the comments.

Genre: Dramedy
Premise: (from Black List) A grieving thirteen-year-old girl hires a terminally ill, acerbic philosophy professor to prevent flunking the seventh grade. What begins as a homework assignment blossoms into an unlikely friendship and a new appreciation for life that neither will forget.
About: This script finished with 17 votes on last year’s Black List (which puts it in the Top 10) and ALSO won the 2017 Nicholl Fellowship. Amazingly, English is not the writer’s, Cesar Vitale, first language. He lives in Brazil. But the reason he got so good at it was that he loved screenwriting. He says he used to read Syd Field’s How to Write a Screenplay book for fun. He would later take a screenwriting course at UCLA’s Extension Program. When asked by Scott at Go Into The Story how important mentors and teachers were, Vitale had this to say: “Oh, I think it’s essential. Maybe not for every writer, but, for me, certainly it was essential. The sense of…How do I put this? Just the fact that you have…First of all, you have to force yourself to write new pages every week, because otherwise you don’t have anything to show for in the next class. So you have people to hold you accountable and force you to write every day, or at the very least every week. That’s great if you’re not very organized, like me. Also, you get some outside perspective on your work. I think a lot of amateur writers don’t realize how important feedback is and how it’s easy to get too close to your work to really analyze it objectively. To have someone with experience and someone who has been produced and has been working with this for 20, 30, 40 years, however long, just read your work and give their feedback on it, it makes all the difference in the world. At least it did for me.”
Writer: Cesar Vitale
Details: 109 pages

I know he’s young for it but Driver would be perfect!

I’m tempted to not even write a review about this script and just tell you to read it. You won’t want to. Not after reading that logline. I know I didn’t. Not only are these cancer-dying scripts where two people teach each other lessons nauseating to think about, but they have to nail a very specific tone to work. Can’t get too melodramatic. And can’t get too fluffy or heartwarming. Finding that sweet spot is like trying to find the famed Monkey Burger from In and Out, the mythical double cheeseburger stuffed with animal style fries.

But The Great Nothing does it. I mean, I was in tears by the end of this. And I got so lost in the thing, I wasn’t paying attention to why I liked it so much. Which I need to do now if I’m going to pass on the knowledge of what worked in this script to you.

June is a 13 year old spark plug whose photographer mother died in a car crash six months ago. June’s been riding the “dead mommy benefits” train at school for awhile now. But the teachers are starting to toughen up. June’s doing so poorly that there’s a good chance she’ll have to repeat the 7th grade.

Meanwhile, across town, we meet Dan, a Pulitzer prize winning author for his book, “The Great Nothing,” which is basically an ode to Nietzsche and nihilism. Dan is a few months away from dying of cancer and also a prick. The only thing that gets him out of bed every morning is the heroin he buys from his 14 year old neighbor.

Which is the beginning of how these two lives collide. Dan is broke so he can’t buy heroin anymore. In a serendipitous turn, June’s father, Bill, and Dan used to know each other. In fact, June’s parents used to rave about what a genius Dan was. So June gets his info from her dad’s records and heads to Dan’s apartment.

Her plan is simple. I pay you money. You write me papers so I don’t flunk 7th grade. Dan’s annoyed by this presumptive girl, but he needs the money so he agrees. At first, it’s just a business relationship. The problem is that June’s father is in such denial about his wife’s death that he loses all capacity to parent. This leads to June spending more and more time with Dan, and a friendship developing.

Things go smoothly for awhile. But when you have a recently de-mothered 13 year old whose father won’t pay attention to her and a nihilistic heroin-addict with terminal cancer, the road can only stay smooth for so long. When Dan forgets to submit one of her assignments, June’s 7th grade re-do is sealed, and their friendship deteriorates. Can it be fixed before Dan bites it? Only this script can tell.

Let me start by saying that this script nails the most important thing that I keep harping on over and over on this blog. What I believe to be the KEY FACTOR in writing a great script. It keeps. Things. SIMPLE.

KEEP IT SIMPLE! (in case you missed it)

This is a script with five characters. That’s it. Dan, June, the dad, Dan’s pregnant ex, and the 14 year old neighbor. When you keep things simple, you keep the story on point. You don’t get dragged off to all these corners of your vast tapestry of ideas. The goal is simple. Help June pass 7th grade. The stakes are simple. If they fail, she repeats 7th grade. The urgency is simple. The end of the school year is approaching. Boom bam, easy-peazy chicken squeezy.

If I could reach out to all the aspiring screenwriters out there and tell them, “Stop trying to write The Godfather meets 2001,” I would. Maybe you’ll be able to tackle that one day. But today, learn how to write “Character A has a problem and attempts to solve it.” Cause that’s all this is. Joy has a problem. She needs to solve it. Dan is her only option. Boom bam. That’s the movie right there.

As far as this subject matter, something where death is the prominent theme, you’re much better off exploring the story with humor than seriousness. But there is a caveat to that. You have to actually be funny. You have to be good with dialogue. This is another thing I tell you guys. Play to your strengths. Write the kinds of scripts that highlight your best writing features. And Vitale is really funny. The dialogue is kick-ass. June is hilarious. Here’s her first day at Dan’s. She’s trying to make a drink as they chat.

Besides this dialogue popping off the page like Rice Krispies, you can see real skill on display here. Notice that the characters aren’t having one of those “A asks B question. B answers question.” “B then asks A question. A answers question” conversations, which is the kind of dialogue you’ll see in most beginner scripts. June’s not really listening to Dan. Dan’s distracted so he’s less focused on what she’s asking than what’s going on. So the conversation is less stilted. It feels like something more akin to the real world.

And like I said. The dialogue stays humor based so it doesn’t descend into melodrama. Here’s an exchange during June’s second visit. “DAN: I have terminal cancer.” “JUNE: Oh, shit. Really?” Dan sits on the couch. Throws the Ziploc on the coffee table. “JUNE: Like. How terminal?” June sits too, eyes on Dan. “JUNE: Like. Do you have time to finish today’s assignment?”

I love that shit. When these scripts go the opposite way and take themselves too seriously? I’m not saying they always end in disaster. But it’s usually somewhere disaster-adjacent.

If the script has a weakness it’s that June starts to dominate the conversations. It’s weird because it’s also one of the script’s strengths. In a script where dialogue is a featured component, you want contrast between your characters in as many ways as possible. So if June talked a lot and Dan talked a lot also, there’s no contrast there. So Vitale has it so June is the blabbermouth and Dan speaks when he needs to. And it makes sense that a nihilist with terminal cancer probably isn’t going to be a chatterbox. But I wish Vitale would’ve found a way to give Dan a little more talking time. Cause during that second act, he disappears for awhile.

Luckily, the script always stays simple. There are no stupid weird forced plot points, like writers sometimes create when they don’t trust the material. So it survives its few mild hiccups.

I used to think writing these scripts was a waste of time. A script about someone with terminal cancer. A nihilist at that? Talk about bummersville. Who’s going to watch that? But the success of movies like Me, Earl, and the Dying Girl and The Fault in Our Stars prove that if you add comedy and you keep the budget low, someone will finance the script if it’s good. And this isn’t just good. It’s damn good!

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

What I learned: Remember how we talked about in Black Panther that at the end of your second act, you want a “lowest point,” or “death” moment? That poses an interesting problem for this script, doesn’t it? How do you incorporate a lowest-point death moment at the end of the second act when your movie is built to end with the main character’s death? You can’t kill him off or your third act is going to be hella-boring. So the way Vitale did it is he created the death of the friendship. Very clever!