Genre: Zombie Thriller
Premise: When a zombie disaster overtakes the city out of nowhere, a family is trapped in their high-rise Miami hotel. With danger closing in fast, they’re left with only one way to go: Up.
About: This script finished with 11 votes on last year’s Black List. The writer, Aaron Sala, wrote a spec sale script called “Beast” years ago that I really liked. But it’s not anywhere online cause it was a newsletter review. Yes, Beast (The lone survivor of a plane crash finds her way to a small island where a monstrous beast lives and becomes intent on killing her) is similar to that other script that got made about a beast on an island. But this was the good version. It wasn’t the bad one that got made.
Writer: Aaron W. Sala
Details: 106 pages
Yesterday’s post had more plot in it than Arlington National Cemetery. Yes, I just made a cemetery plot joke. Welcome to Wednesday on Scriptshadow.
Wait, what is that you have under you, Carson? Is that a… soap box? Indeed it is fellow readers. And it’s here to allow me to say a little something about the nature of screenwriting. Make sure your tray tables are up and your belongings are stashed away because I’m mixing metaphors and this landing is going to get bumpy.
You see, the scripts that do best on the spec market – and when I say spec market, I’m not talking about selling so much as I am getting managers and agents or producers interested in you – are the ones that have easy-to-follow plots. Like today’s script! You read today’s logline and you say, “I understand that. That sounds fun. I’m in.” It’s very simple.
If you want to add complexity, do so on the character end. Make your characters weird or unconventional or wild or deep or have an odd relationship with another character.
If you still have a TON of plot, consider writing a TV show. Cause a TV show will allow you to expand that plot out over 10 to 20 to even 40 hours. That way, all those plot points won’t be crammed up against each other. You might only deal with one of them per episode.
After yesterday’s disaster of over-information, I need some script detox. I need something I can easily follow. I need something to thrill my a-s-s off. Will The Last Tower be that thing? Grab your hotel key cards and hold the elevator for me so we can find out!
Harold, Angela, and daughter Zelda (13) are flying into Miami for a rare vacation. It’s rare because Mommy Angela is always working. Her job is that of a corporate fixer. When the excrement hits the fan, she’s the one who stays calm, grabs a spoon and some paper towels, and meticulously picks said excrement out of the fan.
The fam gets to their snazzy Die Hard-like hotel, which is a whopping 70 stories, and no sooner do they settle in than they see a giant cruise ship crash into the beach right in front of their hotel. Not long after, people with yellow-green gunk on their faces stumble out of the cruise ship and, news flash, they ain’t walking normally.
Barely any time passes before giant swarms of people are attacking everyone in Miami. Angela and Zelda, who are down by the pool, recognize that they need to get away from here ASAP. Before they know it, a swarm of crazed people are attacking others in the lobby. The two run for the nearest elevator and get in it after only a few stories.
They maneuver off the stuck elevator by manually opening the doors and get up a few floors where they find some people giving shelter in their room. Once inside, Angela realizes the truth she cannot yet tell her daughter – that her father is likely dead.
Staying cool as a cucumber per her training, Angela starts figuring out her next move. She realizes that downstairs = death and upstairs = a chance at life. She has no idea if help is ever coming. She just knows that the further she and her daughter are from the insanity of downstairs, the better.
They’re able to get a room a few floors higher with another group waiting things out. But when the zombie hoard start banging on that door, they need to find another way up. The only other way up is outside. Xavier, a bellhop, is three stories up and they’re able to communicate with him the old tied-together-sheets-rope move. One by one, they have to climb up the makeshift rope.
The next challenge is the fact that the upper floors of the building, where the private residences are, can only be accessed via a special elevator with a special key. Xavier has to find that key so they can create some real distance between themselves and the zombie hoard. Naturally, things go wrong. And it becomes clear that, no matter what they do, they’re probably not getting out of this alive.
Unpopular opinion: Starting a script in Antarctica always works.
Try it. Start your script in Antarctica and I guarantee it begins better than if you didn’t start in Antarctica. In The Last Tower, a bunch of richies took a cruise to Antarctica and a kid ate some tainted snow. Snow laced with an alien microbe!!!! Hence the craziness. Let this be a lesson to kids everywhere. Stay away from alien microbe-laced Antarctic snow. I feel like this should be obvious but, apparently, idiot children are still making the mistake.
The Last Tower is one of those concepts that’s going to work no matter what. No matter how loose and soggy the execution is. It’s the special power that a good concept gives you. It creates an imaginative state in the reader where, even when the writing stinks, they can IMAGINE the good version of that scene. Or that another writer is going to come in and fix the scene once it’s officially slated for production.
The Last Tower only messes up in a couple of places. The first is that the set pieces are too expected. A stopped elevator scene where they open the door and they’re split between two floors and people have to jump out hoping to god that the elevator doesn’t decide to start up again all of a sudden, slicing your body in half.
Remember, you always want to envision the “average” screenwriter writing your script and ask yourself, “Would Average Screenwriter write this set piece?” If Average Screenwriter would, that’s a good indication you need to do better. Average Screenwriter would definitely write a stopped elevator split between two floors escape scene. So it’s not the best way to go.
The sheet-rope one is better because, even though it’s familiar, it creates a genuinely tension-filled sequence. But it still felt like a top-tier screenwriter – one of these studs hired by the studios to come in and knock out a final better draft 3 weeks before shooting – would come up with something more original than this. Or at least add something new to the set piece to make it unique.
Since we dinged our Logline Showdown winner on the site a few weeks ago with his island zombies, how do I feel about the zombies in The Last Tower? Well, the zombies were not original. They’re basically the same type of zombies used in 28 Hours Later. They seem to be stronger, which allows them to knock down doors that protect our heroes. So that was good. They also swarm together, which was kind of a twist. But they weren’t special.
However, it didn’t matter that much because the ascent up the hotel to escape them created a “combo” strange attractor. Sure, I would’ve been mad about the familiar zombies if our characters were running around on the streets of Miami. But because we’re doing something more specific and interesting – painstakingly moving up this skyscraper – it does feel different from your average zombie movie.
The bigger mistake the writer made was not executing this in real-time. That was a really poor creative choice. When we’re at the midpoint and, already, 24 hours has passed?… that’s screenwriting malpractice right there.
Think about it. What is your script’s most valuable asset? It’s these relentless zombies that don’t stop coming up after you. If they stop? If our protagonists have time to catch their breath? You’ve just killed ALL THE MOMENTUM in your story. You can’t do that, man. This concept is screaming for a real-time story, giving you a capital “U” (for Urgency) in your GSU.
Despite this, the concept’s fun-factor overrides the negatives. This is definitely a movie. And, unlike yesterday’s script, it’s actually enjoyable to read.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[x] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: A “fear flaw” doesn’t work when the situation overwhelms that flaw. In this movie, Zelda is afraid of heights. It’s established heavily throughout the first act. Now, on a basic writing level, this seems like a good idea. You have characters who are going to be up high. Why not give one of them a fear of heights? Well, here’s the thing. If this movie was about a serial killer chasing Zelda and her mom through the building, placing Zelda in a situation where she would need to traverse over something when she was way up in the air, that would work well. But when you have a zombie swarm that has just killed 3 million people, who the f$%# cares about your fear of heights? You’ve got way bigger fish to fry. Nobody’s looking at the 20-story high metal beam they have to tightrope-walk across to get to safety, then looking back at the vicious zombie hoard who you just saw rip up 70 people in less than 30 seconds and saying, “You know what? Fear of heights wins today. I’d rather just let the zombies turn me into cornmeal mush.”
Genre: Spy Thriller
Logline: No idea.
About: Only thing I know about this script is that one half of the writing team wrote Adam Sandler’s “Hustle.”
Writers: Taylor Materne and Jacob Rubin (story by Damian Chezelle)
Details: 120 pages
We’re going old-school Scriptshadow today, back to the days when I’d have no idea what I was about to read. I’d get a script, see the title, shrug my shoulders, and off to the races I went. These reads have the potential to be the most rewarding when the script turns out great. But they also have the potential to be complete and utter wastes of time. In the ultra-niche screenplay reading world, the stakes are high.
However, it’s a nice reminder that, as unknown screenwriting entities, this is what all of you are facing as well. You are sending a script to someone who has no idea who you are and you are saying, “Please read this.” Think about that for a second. When have you ever read something from someone you’ve never heard of before and a script that you have zero context for? Probably never. So why would you expect someone else to do the same for you?
The only way is if your concept sounds really good to them. Then, and only then, will they be willing to take a chance on your script. It’s not because of some noble reason – that they feel like they owe it to their moral conscience to give people a chance. lol. Not even close. They will read your script if, and only if, they think it will make them money down the road. That’s because 90 minutes of their time is 90 minutes that they could be spending on something else that makes them money. That’s why it’s so important to have a strong concept.
There’s a bonus round to this. If they don’t like your script, but they like you as a writer, then they can still make money off you, which means they’ll sign you or hire you to write another project. But, again, they can’t find out you’re a good writer if they don’t read your script. And they won’t read your script if you send them some dull logline (“An Alabama fisherman tries to keep his fishing business afloat while confronting old demons.”). Which is why you always want to be working with loglines that have some bite to them – the kind of logline where if you saw it floating around, you’d say, “I need to read that script!”
While it’s true that you can write a low-concept script and run into an industry person who ALSO happens to like that subject matter (lo and behold, the manager you sent it to is an Alabaman who loves fishing!) resulting in them requesting a read, you’re still putting yourself in what I call “the screenplay lottery.”
Putting yourself in the screenplay lottery is the act of writing a script that doesn’t have a strong concept. Of course it’s possible to sell that script. It’s possible to sell a script about anything. But the tamer your concept, the more you’re depending on that random lucky serendipitous connection. If you’re armed with a strong concept, you skip that line and go straight to the front, where you’re competing with a way smaller pool of scripts.
Long intro for this script! Let’s see what it’s about.
Diego Agen is what’s called a “language officer.” To be honest, I was never entirely sure what that was, but I think it’s a type of secret agent for the French government who specializes in knowing a lot of languages. If you’re confused, just do what I did. I imagined Diego as earth’s version of C-3PO.
Diego works a desk job, which he’s perfectly content with considering he’s got a wife and young child. But his world is disrupted when an old friend from the agency, Telander, tells him he’s got a field job for him. Diego doesn’t want to do it which pisssssssses Telander off. He talked this guy up to his superiors and now Diego is dissing him? So Telander says if he doesn’t do the job, he’ll demote him. Diego has no choice. He’s in.
Diego flies to Marseille where he must get in close with a woman named Saveria, a local kingpin. Her assistant was killed recently, which has led to more crime in the area (I guess the assistant used to curtail crime) and that means French citizens are getting killed. The government doesn’t want that so they want Diego to get in there and patch things up somehow (no, I don’t know how).
First, Diego must befriend a local night club promoter named Paulu. Paulu will take him to meet a tough dude named Roccu. Roccu is the son of Saveria, the head honcho he needs to meet. But within 24 hours, Roccu kidnaps Diego and says that Paulu stepped out on him. He gives Diego a gun and tells him to kill Paulu. If you don’t kill Paulu, we kill you. So Diego has no choice. The desk agent brutally murders Paulu.
This gets Diego in with Saveria, who tells him about her murdered assistant. She thinks this dude named Walid did it. So she needs him to get close to Walid. Diego uses his lawyer skills (I guess he’s a lawyer as well?) to win Walid an important court case, so now Walid is his buddy. Walid even introduces Diego to his hot sister, giving him his blessing to have sex with her. All this happens by page 60 by the way. Yeah, to say this script is filled with plot is the understatement of the millennium.
Diego eventually learns that Walid is the killer (of the original assistant) but that Roccu ordered him to do it and didn’t tell his Gangster mama. This means the mom and her son both wanted the opposite result. Eventually, though, a Godfather-like war erupts and many people are killed. Did our boy Diego survive? Unfortunately, you’ll never find out unless they adapt this into a TV show cause I can promise you nobody’s ever going to make this film (he lives).
This is the kind of script that if your mind drifts for even a second, you’re lost. For that reason, readers hate these scripts. Let me rephrase that. If the script is really good, readers love these scripts. But if you’re requiring 5x the attention from us as the average script and you don’t deliver something awesome, we will get very very mad at you.
I mean consider this. A guy is hired to go on a job. The job is to get close to this woman. But before he gets close to the woman, he must meet up with a local connection. The connection then connects him with the son of this woman he’s trying to get close to. He must do a job for the son and that allows him to be introduced to the mom. The mom says we had this guy working for us and someone killed him. We think it’s this guy. So go get close to him (are you following this – we got close to a guy to get close to a woman to get close to another guy).
Now, Diego is something called a language officer. But when he gets to the guy connected to the woman connected to the guy, he’s all of a sudden a lawyer. Like, a real live lawyer. We see him win a case in order to win the trust of the 3rd guy (Walid). Did he just happen to luckily also be a lawyer? Or was this all in the plan from the get go? Cause how would he have known that the guy he was introduced to from the woman introduced to him from the guy who introduced her would’ve needed a lawyer?
Confused? Yeah, welcome to how it was reading this script.
In the writers’ defense, I don’t want to work to understand this story. Some readers love spy films and they love the 15 dots they must connect in order to understand a plot point so if they’re confused, they’ll go back in there and re-read everything until they figure it out. My mom is one of those people. Maybe she should’ve reviewed this script. She watched all five seasons of Fauda and somehow understood all of it. But for me, I don’t want to do the work unless the story surrounding the work is amazing. And, in this case, it is not.
It’s not bad. But as I like to remind writers, the goal is not to write a “not bad” script. It’s not even to write a “good” script. Both those scripts will be rejected. Takes me back to that old screenwriting book, “Liked it Didn’t Love it.” A producer wrote that book to remind writers that readers need to LOVE something in order to do something with it. “Like” doesn’t cut it.
And by the way, I’m not saying these writers aren’t trying to write something we’ll love. We’re all trying to write something great. I’m just reminding you that this is the reason you can never half-ass anything. Cause even when you try your best, you’ll still, most likely, write something average. Any level of effort less than that? You’re guaranteed to write something bad.
The script has its moments and is best when it’s pushing the envelope. There’s a scene where Diego is forced to kill his connection in Marseilles that’s intense as hell. The best scene in the script by far. And then Diego also ends up sleeping with and getting involved with Walid’s sister, which is a choice that 99% of writers wouldn’t have made (due to Diego having a wife and newborn). Writers are terrified of making their hero unlikable and will do anything to avoid it.
I also liked that the writers took their time setting up Diego. A lot of writers would’ve sent Diego off to Marseilles the second Telander asked him. But by staying with Diego longer – seeing him at home with his wife and kid – it helped him feel a lot more relatable and real. It also made those later moments, like sleeping with Walid’s sister, more impactful.
Unfortunately, the script has enough plot for – I’m not even exaggerating here – 10 seasons of TV. The story takes place over 14 months! So much for the “U” in GSU. At a certain point I was like, “Stop. Stop making me memorize 6000 things to enjoy your story!” For that reason, it wasn’t for me.
[ ] what the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: This is not a one-size fits all lesson but I have found a definite correlation between broader titles and weak scripts. Usually, if you don’t know what your script is about – if you don’t have a clear story you’re telling, you become unsure what your title is. You start to pull up higher and higher until your title is so macro that it’s borderline generic. “Marseille.” If I told you only that title and nothing else, would you be able to imagine this movie? My guess is no. Using yesterday’s movies as a baseline, Mean Girls, The Beekeeper, and Anyone but You all have titles that more specifically reference their stories.
You may not know this but the box office whispers to us. Sometimes it whispers softly. Sometimes it whispers loudly. But it’s always trying to tell us something. As I scrolled down through this year’s releases, I could feel the list massaging new thoughts and opinions directly into my abgudala-medula. The first two months of the box office has given us four main successes and four main failures. They are…
Successes
1. Anyone But You ($88 million)
2. Mean Girls ($71 million)
3. The Beekeeper ($63 million)
4. One Love ($71 million)
Failures
1. Madame Web ($37 million)
2. Argylle ($35 million)
3. Lisa Frankenstein ($9 million)
4. Drive Away Dolls ($3 million)
What is the box office telling us with these movies? Well, first of all, let’s make something clear. Just because a movie bombs doesn’t mean that all movies that are like that movie will also bomb. That’s because there’s still something called “execution” in play. Your execution can be bad or it can be good, and that will obviously play into how much audiences want to see your movie. Air and Jerry Maguire are very comparable movies. But while Jerry Maguire hit a grand slam, Air hit a double. It didn’t have that sizzle-factor you want when you see a trailer.
I bring this up because Madame Web will end up being one of the biggest box office failures for a superhero film ever. And while I pointed out the other week that it was plagued by an all-female cast at a time when audiences are starting to rebel against that casting approach, the more likely reason for its failure is that it simply doesn’t look good. Going by the trailer, it literally brought nothing new to the table. And if there’s any theme to this list, it’s the act of RISK. You have to put something on the line if you want audiences to show up. Madame Web put nothing on the line.
Ironically, Sydney Sweeney, who has a part in Madame Web, also stars in the biggest hit on this list, Anything But You. Anything But You is about as old school a concept as it gets. It’s an assembly line romantic comedy. Ah, but here’s the irony: studio released romantic comedies are so rare these days that Anything But You IS a risk. The last 20 studio rom-coms failed. The prevailing thinking was you could only release these on streamers these days and you had to skew super young with the casting. Apparently not.
By the way, side note. Sydney Sweeney promotes the hell out of everything she’s in. All she did for Madame Web was show up at the premiere. That shows you her people were trying to distance her as far away from the movie as possible. But hey, some moviegoers are saying this film is in the ‘so bad it’s good’ category, a la Showgirls. I *will* check it out when it hits streaming. Which, at this rate, will probably be by the time I finish writing this post.
Mean Girls is the biggest anomaly on this list, a wild card if I’ve ever seen one. The film is a sequel, a remake, and an adaptation, all wrapped into one, whose genre (musical) was purposefully hidden in the marketing. Huh?? Chalk this one up to passionate fans who just wanted some nostalgia. Steven Spielberg once said, “The only sure thing in Hollywood is a sequel. Everything else is a gamble.” He may want to add “nostalgia” to the sure-thing list.
Okay, prepare for some box office logic hoop-jumping cause we’re about to discuss Argylle. Argylle is a super-bomb. Depending on who you talk to, it cost around 150 million to make, and it’s only brought in 35 million. Now, if we’re going off our previous talking point – RISK – Argylle is pretty darn risky. It’s a weird action-comedy combo that seems to be based around a cat. So, Carson, you said risk was good, right? Why was it not good for Argylle?
Well, unfortunatley, risk doesn’t only have positive outcomes. It has negative outcomes as well. That’s the risk. And from everything I’ve heard, this is a baaaaad movie. It’s a movie built around fun that isn’t fun. But I think the biggest reason for its poor (first weekend) box office was the fact that, when you watched that trailer, you didn’t get the plot. All you got was that there was a crazy cat in a backpack. True, you’re focusing on the element of your movie that’s the most unique. But if we don’t understand the plot, it doesn’t matter. Check out Sandra Bullock’s The Lost City, which had a similar premise. Their marketing did a way better job conveying the premise (which is a fun premise!).
The reason I harp on this stuff is because clarity is one of the most overlooked elements in screenwriting. Writing that isn’t clear, characters who aren’t clear, plots that aren’t clear, scenes that aren’t clear. Loglines that aren’t clear. We can’t enjoy stories if we don’t know what’s going on. That extends to marketing as well.
The Beekeeper’s success is more complex than a block long honeycomb. Here’s what shocked me about The Beekeeper. Late last year, Expendables 4 came out. Jason Statham was in that movie as well. That movie has a long list of famous older action stars (wait a minute, did this just turn into the botox office report?) as well as being part of a franchise. You know how much money that movie made? 17 million. Not even a third of this film. Why is that? I know some of you hate to hear this but I’m going to argue it comes down to simplicity. The Beekeeper has a simple easy to understand concept with a simple easy to understand plot. Expendables is big and unwieldy and there’s a thousand different things going on. The Beekeper is clean. Throw in just enough of a twist on the secret agent trope – the bee stuff – and you have that requisite “risk” you need.
That’s another trend I noticed with these eight films. Three of the four successes (Anything But You, The Beekeeper, One Love) are easy-to-identify genres that audiences clearly understand. The stories are simple. Even Mean Girls was marketed as a simple genre (teen comedy), despite the fact that it was secretly a musical. With the busts, Argylle exists as some weird action-comedy hybrid that’s hard to categorize. It’s also big and unwieldy with a lot going on. Lisa Frankenstein exists in a genre that’s an incredibly tough sell (horror-dark comedy). Has there been a successful horror-comedy since Zombieland? Drive Away Dolls is a black comedy lesbian road trip? It’s completely out of the purview of mainstream audiences (good script though!). And Madame Web… it has too many issues to count.
So the lesson I’m getting here is: Pick a genre that audiences are familiar with. Try to find just enough of a spin to make it different. And then write a simple story. If you want to add complexity, add it to your characters, not the plot. Hmm, interesting. This is the same advice I’ve been giving you for TEN YEARS!
What else has been going on out there? The Iron Claw ($32 million) has slowly creeped up to a respectable cume. These dark dramas are touuuuuughhh sells and one of them getting to 30 million is the equivalent of a romantic comedy in 2024 getting to 100 million. It’s a huge accomplishment. A couple of people have told me it’s great but I’m just not in the headspace for depressing movies these days.
Next week we’ve got Dune 2. Guys, I really want to be a Dune-Head. I promise you I do. But that 35 minute scene with Timothee Chalemet and his mom in the tent in Dune 1 broke me. I’ve had better experiences at the DMV. Maybe if every single person who sees the movie says it’s the greatest movie they’ve ever seen, I’ll go see it. But I’m guessing nobody here wants to spend next Monday hearing me complain about how boring Dune is. That’s the thing about Dune. It’s not bad in a “make fun of it” way. It’s just boring.
March 21 is Roadhouse and Freezy McTicklebottoms (Ghostbusters). Apparently Doug Liman is furrrrrrrrrrious that Roadhouse isn’t coming out in theaters. I’m right with him. That movie would pull in 50 million easy. It’s got nostalgia oozing out of its booze-soaked pores. The movie I’m most curious about, however, is Civil War. I love Alex Garland but I admit his movies are inaccessible to those outside the industry. Will this be the movie that breaks him out as a director? It’s a realistic look at how a civil war in the United States might go down. It may hit that sweet spot of being both politically charged AND entertaining. The latter is most important though. That goes for everyone. I don’t care how important your message is. Your script must be entertaining first!
What are you guys looking forward to?
I kind of wrote myself into a corner here. I created a Showdown month that was just like every other Showdown month (send in your logline and the best 5 get picked) except that I told you you’d also be judged on the first line of your script. Thus, it became confusing for me to choose which writers to highlight this weekend. Am I basing their entry on the logline or am I basing it on the first line?
I quickly realized that people who sent in the best loglines were not always the ones who sent in the best first lines, and vice versa. If I was to try and find entries that only had good loglines AND good first lines, there would probably be only one entry this month. So I went back to the tried and true – best loglines get featured, then whatever first line they gave me, they gave me. I’ll let you guys decide if those first lines are dealbreakers or not.
If you haven’t played Logline Showdown before, the rules are easy. I give you five loglines and you vote for your favorite one in the comments section. Votes will be tallied and the logline with the most votes gets a script review next month. You are encouraged to give reasons for why you chose your winner and feedback to the losers (but neither is necessary). Just so we’re clear: You’re voting for the best logline. But if you think the best logline has a weak first line, you’re free to let that influence your vote.
Let’s do it, shall we? It’s time for… FIRST LINE SHOWDOWN.
Title: RAZORBACK
Genre: Action/Thriller
Logline: After his only daughter dies of a fentanyl overdose, a vengeful Arkansas hog farmer purges his town of drug dealers and then ventures into the jungles of Sinaloa to dismantle the lab and confront the drug lord responsible for her death.
Title: Mal — War-dog
Genre: Action adventure
Logline: After stealing a traumatized K-9 from the army, a washed-up veteran battles a relentless posse through an inhospitable mountain range to give her a new life in the wilds.
Title: Bunker Mentality
Genre: Zombie comedy/satire
Logline: At the outset of a zombie plague, a group of high-ranking government officials struggle to manage the emergency response and petty feuds after they inadvertently trigger an overnight lockdown and seal themselves inside a secret military bunker – with zombies inside.
Title: Animosity
Genre: Horror
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.
Title: Tomorrow Never Knows
Genre: Thriller
Logline: In the aftermath of the Roswell crash, a hardboiled mortician who’s fallen for an army nurse must rescue her from being lobotomized by the military after she witnesses an alien autopsy.
Week 8 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
Every Thursday, for the first six months of 2024, Scriptshadow is guiding you through the process of writing a screenplay. In June, you’ll be able to enter this screenplay in the Mega Screenplay Showdown. The best 10 loglines, then the first ten pages of the top five of those loglines, will be in play as they compete for the top prize.
We are moving into week 8 today. But we’re still at a stage where, if you haven’t started writing your script, you can catch up. We’re only through the first 30 pages. So, if you can manage 5 pages a day, you’ll be all caught up within a week. Again, we’re taking our time with this one. It only requires 45 minutes a day, writing 2 pages, and then you get two days at the end of the week to catch up or rewrite stuff.
Some of you have expressed confusion about including these extra days. “Why not just charge through the script and never look back?” You ask. That’s totally fine if you want to charge through. But what I’ve found whenever I’ve written anything is that, because you’re learning about your script as you’re writing it, you’re constantly changing direction. You thought you were going down this street when it turns out it was better to take the alley. If you stop, go back, and change a few things, you can better set up that alley.
Of course, you can wait all the way until you’re finished with the script, then start addressing issues in the next draft. But I find that, personally, if a first draft is too messy? If it zigs and zags and drops characters and adds characters randomly throughout the story due to my changing moods and changing ideas, the read is discouraging. And if I read a draft that’s straight up dreadful, I’ll never go back to it. It’s too depressing.
One of the things nobody talks about when you start this screenwriting insanity is that every good script gets crafted over an elongated series of rewrites. With every rewrite, you become more and more numb to your story and its charms. The screenwriters who can stay inspired in spite of these lulls are the ones who end up writing world-beating scripts.
One of the best ways to stay inspired is to write good drafts. If you pick up a script after a break and you read a great scene or a great character or some particularly awesome dialogue, you get pumped! You realize that there’s a reason to keep working on the script. You need those moments because inspiration creates motivation.
But it works in reverse as well. If you read a draft and it sucks, you’re uninspired and less likely to go in there and try to fix it. At no time is that a bigger deal than after the first draft. Tens of millions of screenplays have died because writers have read that first draft and said, “Nope. This straight up blows.” So I say, if you have the time while writing that first draft to go back in there and make some positive changes that help your script read smoother, do it!
Okay, onto this week.
Pages 31-40 have always been some of my favorite script pages to write. That’s because they’re smack dab in the middle of the “Fun and Games” section. What is “Fun and Games?” Whenever you come up with a concept, what you’re doing is you’re making a promise to the reader that if they come to your script, you are going to give them what you said you would give them.
One of the more unfortunate script experiences I have is a writer will send me a script about a really specific premise – like a time-traveling ballerina who yields nunchucks – and the first set piece rolls around and it has nothing to do with time-traveling, ballet, or nunchucks. The Fun and Games section is literally for you to show off your premise. So show it off.
Using the Hero’s Journey as a template, this is the moment in the script when they first go out on their journey. So, obviously, they’re going to start experiencing the very thing you promised in your concept. If it’s a dinosaur movie, our heroes will first meet the dinosaurs. If it’s Barbie, it’s Barbie’s first foray into the real world. If it’s Poor Things, it’s Bella’s first foray into the world of sexuality. It’s sex sex sex all the time. If it’s Cocaine Bear, you’re going to give us a gnarly set piece where Cocaine Bear attacks and kills people in a way that only a bear high on cocaine can.
If your script is a brand new Porsche, this is the first time you get to take it out on the open road and rev that engine. So rev it!
Now, what if you’re writing a non-traditional script. Does the Fun and Games section still apply? Not really. If you’ve got a scooter, I don’t want you driving on the Autobahn.
But, if you are writing a slower script or something that’s more character-driven, this section of the script should feel like *THINGS ARE RAMPING UP*.
So if you’ve written Anatomy of a Fall, you don’t even really have a concept to deliver the promise of the premise on. But that doesn’t mean you can just make up your own structure and think it’s going to fly. Chances are it will crash and burn.
When you hit page 30 on Anatomy of a Fall, a movie about a woman whose husband suspiciously commits suicide by jumping off their home’s roof, this is the period of the script where the first walls should start closing in on the wife. The cops have questions about what happened. It’s clear they’re less and less convinced it was a suicide. It might be time to get a lawyer, which are heroine does. In other words, you’re beginning to tell us what this movie is going to be about. What we can expect.
Another non-traditional movie was Coda, which won best picture a few years ago. That movie started off being about a high school girl who was the only person in her family who could hear. Everyone else was deaf. The family made money by fishing. That was the first act and while it was all kind of interesting, we’re sitting there going, “And?”
The movie begins ramping up when the daughter starts pursuing her singing at school. She’s really good but she’s going to have to work at it. That emerging storyline of her singing teacher laying out what would be required of her to compete for a scholarship was the “ramping up” process that, all of a sudden, gave the script direction, and by association, energy.
Some writers think I’m too restrictive when I talk about this stuff. But nothing could be further from the truth. I don’t care how you get it done as long as you get it done. I once told this extremely talented but unorthodox professional writer, “I don’t think you should follow what I teach. You come at writing in such a unique way, that way is probably going to serve you better.”
All I’m doing is laying out the way 95% of working writers do it in Hollywood. I promise you there isn’t a working screenwriter in town who doesn’t intimately understand the 3-Act structure. Or character arcs. Or personal vs. overall stakes. Or what on-the-nose dialogue is. Why? Because they have to! They get notes on it from someone at the studio. “Your second act doesn’t move fast enough and there’s zero shift at the midpoint.” You’ve gotta know what that means if you’re going to address the note.
So as long as you know that “doing it your way,” is dangerous and untested, that’s fine. You have to take risks somewhere. You have to do things different somewhere. That’s how you create a script that feels unique. But almost all of your favorite movies have followed the formula I’ve laid out so far. And the ones that haven’t, I can almost guarantee that the writer was also the director on the film (aka, they weren’t spec’ing their script out on the market). Let that marinate. :)
5 days to write 10 pages
2 days to do rewrites of those pages or catch up
