Genre: Drama
Premise: (from Black List) A passenger and her cab driver reminisce about their relationships on the way from the airport to her apartment in New York.
About: Today’s screenplay finished NUMBER THREE OVERALL on last year’s Black List. The writer, while a newbie to the screenwriting world, does have two stage plays under her belt. That’s not surprising, since this script feels very much like a play and very much “New York.” I wouldn’t be surprised if Daddio also started as a play and Hall decided to transform it into a screenplay mid-draft. The script already has its female star in Daisy Ridley, who you all know as Rey in the new Star Wars movies.
Writer: Christy Hall
Details: 114 pages

Everyone who’s read this script and reported back to me has been underwhelmed. And I think I know why. There is NOTHING like this script anywhere. The whole story takes place in a cab, focusing on a conversation between an attractive female passenger and an attractive male cab driver, yet it’s NOT a romantic comedy. (spoiler) In fact, there’s no romance whatsoever. Nobody gets together with each other in the end. It’s just two people talking.

It’s for that reason that I found this script fascinating. I’ve never read anything like it. A single location male-female two-hander without romance that’s a drama?? You know what’s funny? This is exactly how the original Pretty Woman script started out. As a drama about a businessman who hires a prostitute for a week. It was the studio who decided to turn it into a romantic comedy. Could the same thing happen here?

Girlie (whose age is never mentioned but she’s around 30) has just landed back in New York City. She’s got a tough New York exterior with a distant hint of Southern hospitality. And right now she needs to catch a cab into the city.

Her cab driver, Clark, is a man’s man. In his 40s, he’s got a tough blue collar handsomeness about him. And you can tell he’s one of those cab drivers who likes to talk. For the first ten minutes, however, he’s stuck glimpsing at a distracted Girlie in the mirror, looking for any opportunity to open up the Conversation Shop.

Girlie, meanwhile, keeps glancing at a text conversation. Someone named “L” misses her. Can’t wait to see her. It’s hard to read how Girlie feels about this. She texts him back, but each text is neutral, the kind you can’t quite read. After awhile, she sours on the activity and Clark strikes, asking her what her deal is.

Girlie needs the distraction, and finds Clark funny. He’s one of those guys that when he starts talking, he doesn’t shut up. And the music of his endless monologues seems to calm Girlie. As Clark notices Girlie occasionally going back to that text conversation, he makes the correct assumption that the man texting Girlie is married.

What follows is a surprisingly honest discussion about how Girlie got into this relationship, and how all of her life choices up to this point probably led her here. Clark gets into the action too, admitting to a life that’s been less than fruitful – I mean, he’s driving a cab in his 40s for God’s sake. But he seems happy enough now. And part of him wants Girlie to be happy too at the end of this ride. Can it happen? Probably not. But he’s going to give it his best shot.

So a lot of you have told me that this script was lame, that it’s just two people talking. But as someone who reads more amateur scripts than anyone, I’m here to tell you that you could learn a thing or two from the dialogue in Daddio.

The first thing I noticed about the dialogue was how natural it was. Usually, in screenwriting, when scenes are 2-3 pages long, the dialogue needs to be laser focused. You have to get out any necessary exposition. Each character has to get to the point quickly so the scene doesn’t lag. It’s why so many screenplay conversations feel unnatural.

But Daddio is one long scene. This allows Hall to let the characters riff for longer than characters would normally do so, which, in turn, makes them sound more like real people. Because that’s how it is in real life. If you meet with someone at a coffee shop, you can chat each other up and the next thing you know, 30 minutes has gone by. Daddio found a conceptual loophole that allows it to get that same realism.

There’s some other things going on with the dialogue as well. The two characters have completely different speech patterns. Clark rambles on endlessly. Girlie chooses her words carefully. One of the best ways to write good dialogue is to create contrast in speech patterns between characters.

In addition to this, Clark swears a lot. Girlie never swears. Clark descends into slang a lot. Girlie speaks in proper English all the time. All of these things bring life to the interactions. To convey just how important this is, I was watching that Adam Devine Netflix Comedy that ripped off the Groundhog Day premise. In that movie, him and the girl sound like the exact same people. Their jokes are similar. Their speech patterns are similar. It makes their interactions less interesting.

On the structural end, whether Hall planned this or not, the film has a perfect ticking time bomb – the end of the ride. We know things are coming to an end when he drops her off. And even though there’s no true goal to the story (other than Clark trying to get Girlie to see that she shouldn’t be with this man), there’s a pervasive anxiety underneath the ride since we know it’s going to end soon. In other words, this movie doesn’t work if it’s set in a static location. The car ride is everything.

Another thing to keep in mind is that Daddio is a spec-friendly idea. It’s two characters, a car, and a destination. These are very easy to read scripts. Just like Beast (which I reviewed in the Newsletter). Just like this weekend’s The Quiet Place. Simple stories that don’t require a reader to keep notes. While I’ll still say to write the best idea you got, it improves your chances of getting more reads if the script is easy to read. Which Daddio is.

Finally, I applaud the writer for giving me an unexpected reading experience. Once I realized that I had no idea where this was going, I gained a lot of respect for the writer and allowed myself to be taken away. For example, our texter, “L,” is introduced as this scumbag who only cares about fucking Girlie. Naturally, then, Clark is going to be the good guy, right? The romantic? The guy Girlie SHOULD be with? NOPE! As the story progresses, it turns out Clark is even worse than the guy she’s texting! And that’s the rest of the script, too. Pretty much all the major beats you expect from a setup like this? The script goes in another direction.

And that leads me to my final FINAL thought. While I DID like the unexpected journey, I didn’t like where the journey ended. It made me feel like… not that I wasted 2 hours… but that more of a climax was needed. There’s a desire from some writers to stay as true to life as possible. And this is VERY true to life. But you gotta make us feel like we came all this way for something. And if that means tweaking the ending so it’s a little more “Hollywood,” I think you’ve got to do it. You never want anybody leaving the theater going, “That’s it?” And I’m afraid that’s what’s going to happen here.

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

What I learned: Beware the lure of “indie street cred” choices. These are choices that get you credit with industry folks. But that leave real moviegoers confused and frustrated. That frustration means bad word-of-mouth and a quick box office death. (spoiler) I’m not saying that Clark and Girlie had to end up together here. But the ending needed to be a lot bigger. For example, I thought Girlie was going to be dropped off at L’s house and we were going to have a 3-way final talk between these characters. Instead, Girlie is dropped off at her own house. And that’s it. That’s it??

Any second now, you should be receiving a hot-off-the-presses Scriptshadow Newsletter! Today’s newsletter includes a sneaky secret spec review that may involve one of my favorite directors on the planet trying to pull a fast one on the industry.

If you’re on my mailing list and didn’t receive the newsletter, make sure to check your SPAM and PROMOTIONS folders. It should be in there. If you don’t see it there, feel free to e-mail me at Carsonreeves1@gmail.com with the subject line: “NEWSLETTER” and I’ll send it to you. If you’re not on my mailing list and want on, do the same. Send “NEWSLETTER” to the above e-mail. Enjoy the newsletter, guys!

Genre: Sci-Fi
Premise: (from IMDB) When the creator of a virtual reality world called the OASIS dies, he releases a video in which he challenges all OASIS users to find his Easter Egg, which will give the finder his fortune.
About: Time to answer that question I asked a couple of months ago. Which movie will do better at the box office? A Wrinkle In Time or Ready Player One? RP1 took in 53 million this weekend. If you look at percentage return on investment when compared to A Wrinkle in Time, (Wrinkle’s budget was 100 million, RP1’s was 175 million), Wrinkle actually fared better on its opening weekend. We called that movie a bomb. So this has to be a bomb too, right? I would say that RP1 isn’t so much a bomb as it is a grenade. The reason being that RP1 is going to do way better internationally than A Wrinkle in Time, which should make the film profitable. Wrinkle in Time, however, will be a loss for Disney. That’s not to say RP1 hasn’t used some trickery to make its less-than-stellar opening weekend look better than it is. RP1 opened a day earlier than usual (on Thursday) AND got an extra day after the weekend with the holiday (Monday). This helped them to claim a “weekend” haul with two extra days’ worth of money lumped in. Looks like the Easter Bunny isn’t the only one hiding a few extra eggs around the yard. The reality is, when WB did their pre-film projections, they were banking on a 75 million dollar opening weekend AT LEAST. And if you look at it that way, RP1 is a financial disappointment. But is the movie actually good!? That’s the ultimate question. Let’s find out.
Writer: Zak Penn (based on the novel by Ernest Cline)
Details: 140 minutes

I’d heard some disappointing things leading up to the release of Ready Player One, the most frustrating of which was that Steven Spielberg went off and shot The Post while Ready Player One was being edited.

Some of you may see this as a non-story. But to me it’s everything. One of the biggest issues with Ready Player One is that it’s all over the place. And because its subject matter made it particularly susceptible to being “all over the place,” it needed someone who was 100% committed to keep it on track. If Spielberg was shooting The Post while Ready Player One was being edited, it meant he was also involved in pre-production and casting and scheduling and meetings for The Post while Ready Player One was being shot. His mind was in two places at once. Which is why this movie feels so scattered.

Problem #2: Spielberg gave a Ready Player One promotional interview where he was asked about getting the rights to all the properties in the rights-heavy film. Spielberg responded with a befuddled, “Oh yeah, I didn’t deal with that. The studio people were in charge of all that.” I’m sorry but whhhhuuuhhh did you just say? Shouldn’t you be the one leading the charge on this!? Not just because getting the rights was everything with Ready Player One, but because you’re STEVEN SPIELBERG and can get anything you want.

Because here’s the thing. The novel for Ready Player One was all about Halliday’s love for the 80s. I know nostalgia is controversial right now but the 80s were the heartbeat of this book. Halliday built the Oasis as a way to live forever as a child in that decade. So there was thematic unity – From Pac-Man to Back to the Future to Tears for Fears – in every pop culture reference. By contrast, this movie is a mish-mash of whatever the hell pop culture references you can think of over the last 40 years, which contributes to the pervasive messiness. I mean Iron Giant missed the 80s by a decade! Why is he featured in this??? It’s so random.

A more dedicated director would’ve put his foot down and said, “No. It doesn’t make sense if it’s ALL pop culture. It needs to be pop culture from ONE SPECIFIC time period.” There’s some SUPER GEEKY screenwriting history connected to all this. Zak Penn, the screenwriter who adapted RP1, is forever enshrined in screenwriting lore for losing his shit after his breakthrough spec, The Last Action Hero, was rewritten to expand the 80s pop culture movie references Penn had based the movie on, to movie references from every era. I’m getting off track though, just like Spielberg! So let’s loop back.

For those of you who don’t know anything about Ready Player One, it’s set in 2040-something, and focuses on a world that spends the majority of its time inside the “Oasis,” basically the virtual version of the internet.

Wade (or “Parzival” as he’s known in the Oasis), our plucky teenaged hero, is one of millions who are hunting for three keys inside the Oasis by its since-deceased creator, Roy Hallidy. Hallidy wrote into his will that whoever finds these three keys will inherit the Oasis itself, which is worth in the neighborhood of a trillion dollars.

With his two best friends, the super-hot Art3mis and the super-cool “H,” Parzival must hold off the evil organization, IOI, from finding the three eggs first and turning the Oasis into a heartless money-thieving conglomerate.

So Spielberg didn’t get the big picture stuff right. What bout the characters? Let’s start with Parzival. In the book, Parzival was a walking nobody in the real world. So when he gets that first key and becomes an instant Oasis celebrity? It felt like something huge had happened. Imagine being no one and then becoming the most famous person in the world overnight. The book documented that transition beautifully. In the movie, this was lost. Parzival’s introduction is used strictly to dish out narration and set up the rules of the universe. As a result, we never feel like we know Parzival. And that’s been reflected in how people have reacted to Tye Sheridan’s performance. It’s all very polite. “Yeah, it was okay.” And that’s because they botched the setup for this kid.

One of the oldest screenwriting tips in the book is to “establish your character’s normal world before throwing them into the crazy world.” Look at one of the inspirations for Parzival, Marty McFly. In Back to the Future, we see Marty McFly at school, we experience his aspirations to become a rock star, we get to know his girlfriend, we hang out with his weirdo family. We see HIS NORMAL LIFE. Therefore, when he’s thrown into the crazy world (the past), we have something to contrast it with.

That never happens here. Parzival’s “normal life” is limited to a quick slide down a pole and a giant glob of narration that has nothing to do with him. We’re into the Oasis before I even know if Parzival goes to school or this is summer break or what he does with his average day. This is an admittedly different situation from Back to the Future. An argument can be made that the Oasis IS the “normal world” of this reality. But if I was guiding this project, I would’ve established more of Percival’s real world life first. I never truly connected with him and I have a sneaking feeling that was the reason.

Where Ready Player One really falls apart, however, is in the second half of its second act. The characters are all having realizations that none of us are in on (the equivalent of: “Halladay’s pocket protector wasn’t protecting his pocket. It was protecting the planet.” “So you’re saying we need to go to the Zanzibar System?” “Yes!”), the muddy rule-set of the mythology is getting muddier with every scene (If a bad guy dies in the Oasis, his perfectly healthy real-world counterpart has to be replaced with someone else??), and a climax is birthed out of thin air (Uh, I guess we’re all trying to stop the bad guys from playing Atari 2600!).

It’s a shit show.

And looking back on it, Spielberg’s visualization of the Oasis itself is a metaphor for the screenplay. The virtual world of the Oasis is dark, muddy, and unflattering. Which is exactly how this story is treated. You could never quite see what was going on through all the haze. I mean that opening car race scene, which I featured in my screenplay review as having the potential to be legendary, was a giant piece of Transformers-inspired tomfoolery. You never knew what was going on because the camera was always zipping between every street corner, wrecking ball, giant gorilla, and T-Rex it could find. There isn’t a SINGLE CLEAN SHOT of the action. And it made me sad. Steven Spielberg taking his directing cues from Michael Bay? What has this world come to?

There’s a moment deep in the script where our five heroic avatars meet each other in the real world for the first time. In an INSTANT the movie came alive. Gone were upside-down gravi-dancing set pieces and in their place were simple medium and close up shots of REAL PEOPLE. Who were playing off each other. Who were having REAL MOMENTS. You could feel how comfortable the director was. It was like, “Where the hell has this been all movie?”

I get it, guys. It’s a movie that takes place in a virtual world. You can’t have a ton of real-world scenes. But the reason those scenes popped was because they were based in simplicity. There was no nonsense going on. It was pure character-driven storytelling. And that’s what we needed more of in the movie, whether that meant more real-world scenes, or applying that ‘simple’ mindset to the Oasis.

I’ll finish off with something that’s going to nip your belt buckle but who am I if I’m not being honest? This is trigger-bait folks. Read at your own risk. Ready? I didn’t like the Shining sequence. This is the sequence everybody’s talking about and I know firsthand people loved it cause audience members were going crazy for it in my screening.

But to me the sequence confirmed why Spielberg doesn’t get the material. The Shining, while released in 1980, is considered by everyone to be a 70s movie. That’s how it identifies. And it’s not what Cline had in mind at all (the sequence wasn’t in the book). Because I’ve read a million articles on Spielberg, I know he’s a Kubrik fanatic, and that this sequence had nothing to do with what was right for the movie, and everything to do with a director who selfishly wanted to recreate one of his directing crush’s famous sets.

Don’t get me wrong. The sequence works in a vacuum. But it doesn’t fit into the whole. It contributes to the “anything goes” mentality where nothing in this film needs to connect, either logically or thematically. The Shining in the same movie as Iron Giant? What??

So is the movie bad? No, the movie isn’t bad. What it is is average. It has a few moments. The stuff in the real world where you could actually see people interacting and expressing emotion was when the film worked best. But the Oasis should’ve been crisper. And cooler! Parzival should’ve been better-constructed. And the screenplay needed to be simplified. The more I think about this, the more I think it should’ve been a TV series. It needed time to breathe and the feature format wasn’t going to allow that. There were a couple of fun scenes here. But Ready Player One was a mess in the Scriptshadow notebook.

[ ] What the hell did I just watch?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the price of admission
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius

What I learned: Establish your “normal” world before sending your hero and the audience into the “crazy” world.

You asked for it, you got it. Another post for you to update each other on your 2018 screenwriting goals. Have you been writing every day? If not, tsk tsk! Even if it’s just one page – ONE PAGE! – you must write every single day. Why? Because it’s not the number of pages you write that matters. It’s that you establish a routine. For each day you don’t write, it becomes easier not to write the next day, and the day after. By writing every day, you establish a routine, which ensures that you’ll be more productive in the long run.

It’s a three-day weekend so you won’t be seeing me until Tuesday. But that’s when I drop my juicy Ready Player One review. It’s going to be the review of the CENTURY!!! Well, that’s not true. It’ll just question whether Spielberg’s still got it. Can’t wait to share. See ya then…

Genre: Western
Premise: When his wife is murdered and baby taken, a young Preacher in 1880’s Colorado forsakes his calling to become a bounty hunter and get his son back.
Why You Should Read: This script is a cross between Taken and the Dark Knight but set in the old west. Authentic to its time period, it has a grittiness that is prevalent with this genre. Westerns are glorious to look at on the big screen, with sweeping panoramas and intimate close-ups. The stories are personal but feel larger than life. At its heart, On the Sparrow is a tale of two pathways. The story of a father desperate to get his baby boy back and fighting the darkness that descends on him and the villainous couple that ripped his family apart and seeks to settle down and live a good life resulting from the fruits of their wickedness. In the end the pathways must cross.
Writer: RW Hahn
Details: 121 pages (this is a slightly updated draft from the one that appeared on Amateur Offerings)

I’ll be honest. I had a long week. I’m tired. My brain is functioning at quarter-capacity. All I wanted to do was get to Friday, head up to the Arclight on Sunset, zone out, and watch some Ready Player One.

So when I saw that my last remaining duty before the week ended was to read a 121 page (121 page!!) Western that started with a horse drawn cart rolling through the Colorado countryside, I wasn’t exactly yelling from the rooftops, “YAHHOOOO!!! I LOVE MY LIIIIIIIFE!”

I’m hoping that slow-rolling cart isn’t a metaphor for this script. Let’s take a look.

Foster and Sassy are a couple of criminals who come across a Reverend and his wife horse-carting their way to the town of Dolor. They kill them both and pose as them in town. There they meet the local young handsome Reverend, Sparrow, and his wife, Marjorie. After Sparrow gives a sermon, he entrusts Foster (whom he believes is the real Reverend) to take the collection money to another town.

Foster and Sassy are greedy, however. When Sparrow goes hunting with friends the next day, Foster kills Marjorie and Sassy steals their young son. They set fire to the house and leave. Sparrow comes home as the house is still burning, runs inside, and in the process gets third degree burns all over his body.

With the money they’ve stolen, Foster and Sassy hightail it off to another town, buy a ranch, and start living the good life. It takes Sparrow a good two years to recover from his injuries. When he rips off the gauze, he looks like a monster. But he doesn’t care. All he wants is to find the people who killed his wife and stole his son.

So Sparrow gets deputized and decides he’s going to start, I guess, hunting down random killers first? Or maybe he hopes that by hunting down killers, he’ll come across the people who killed his wife. Either way, he spends the next 12 years (12 YEARS!!!) bringing in random baddies until, at the very end, he finds and has an encounter with Foster.

Okay.

I’m going to try and keep myself from getting angry as I break this down because I don’t think Randy was interested in writing the script that I wanted to read.

Still, I think this script has major structural flaws.

Let’s start with the obvious one. Go up and re-read the logline. I want you to imagine what page (or minute mark) you would expect our main character – Sparrow – to start the journey promised in that logline on. What would be an acceptable spot for you. Page 15? Page 25? Page 30? Page 40?

Well in this script, Sparrow doesn’t get deputized to go out on his mission until page 60!!!! That means that we have to endure 60 pages before the script’s main engine is ignited. I’m sorry but that’s unacceptable. And, to be honest, it’s a little bit insulting. All I do on this site is tell you guys over and over to KEEP YOUR STORY MOVING. Keep it moving. Keep it going! In fact, whatever you think is an acceptable pace for “keeping it going?” Go twice as fast as that. Readers get bored fast. Faster than ever these days. And to think that this most basic of structural tenets was ignored. I don’t know. I feel like I’m talking to myself sometimes. Waiting til page 60 to start the journey?? Come on. This is a Screenwriting 101 mistake here.

And then!

Once Sparrow actually does go out on his journey, he doesn’t even go after Foster! He just goes after random criminals who we know nothing about and therefore don’t care if they’re brought to justice or not.

As I got towards the end of this, I began to think maybe this was the whole point of the movie. Like Zodiac. It was more about a person going crazy in the search for revenge than it was the actual revenge? [Deeeeeep breeeeeaaaath]. I don’t know though, man. With that film it didn’t matter as much because our hero was a reporter with no personal connection to the killer. But in Sparrow our hero is the one whose wife is murdered. So I think we want to see him find and get his revenge. It needs to be more straight-forward.

I mean I could honestly make the argument that nothing happens here between the pages of 20 and 100. It’s just characters diddling around. A full decade passes of this. And it’s not interesting. I want to see my characters going after things (being active) that matter (going after the person who killed your wife, not randos who shot the local bartender).

I have a gut feeling that Randy became so enamored with the visual of this character – a sheriff whose entire face was burned off – that he lost sight of the simple and basic practices that build a good story. And that visual wasn’t even utilized properly. Had Sparrow been vain, or had he knowingly used his looks to manipulate others and get ahead in his profession, then losing those looks means something. If you burn him just to burn him, it’s an empty transformation.

Look, this is a good logline. It won a lot of people over. And that’s because it promises an exciting movie! This iteration that I read, though, is the opposite of exciting. To fix that, Sparrow needs to go off looking for Foster on page 25, not 60. He shouldn’t go on any detours to kill other people. His focus should always be on finding Foster. The timeline should be under a month, as opposed to 10 years long. This should be a 90 page script. Not a paragraph longer. And that’s that.

I don’t see the point in overcomplicating this narrative. It’s a simple story.

Script link: On The Sparrow

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

What I learned: I thought this was a known thing here on Scriptshadow but it’s obviously not so I’m going to repeat it for today’s What I Learned. The main journey that your character goes on – the one that’s promised in your logline – needs to start immediately after Act 1. Which is between pages 25-30. It should never start on page 60.

P.S. For the people who voted for this, I want to know why the 60 page setup didn’t bother you. It could lead to some interesting discussions about structure. So please give your thoughts in the comments. Thank you!