Genre: Thriller/Survival
Logline: A famous former extreme skier attempts to re-ski the mountain that ended his career, this time with the son of his old rival, with the threat of an avalanche looming.
About: If the name Kevin Sheridan sounds familiar to you that’s because he used to visit the site frequently. He’s since become a regular on the Black List. I reviewed his last script about police corruption last year. A strong “worth the read.” Well, he’s back on the Black List with another script, this one more fun.
Writer: Kevin Sheridan
Details: 105 pages

The new script trend is here. Are you ready for it?

Extreme sports!

I don’t think you’re ready.

Free Solo changed the game. We had five big rock-climbing specs (two of which are being made) after that film came out. We had that extreme running spec from Colin Bannon. And now we’ve got an extreme skiing spec.

I ain’t complaining. Anything with the word “extreme” in it is tailor made for storytelling. Nobody wants to watch a movie about “calm” sking. Right? You want extreme!

Brooks used to be the greatest extreme skier on the planet. But then one day, he skied the hardest mountain on the planet, Alder. And it destroyed him. He went flying off the side of the mountain, broke nearly every bone in his body, and was never the same skier again.

Cut to present day and Brooks’ old rival, Rick, comes to him and asks Brooks if he’ll take his 16 year old son, Zack, down Alder mountain. Zack is a rising superstar in the skiing world and if he skies Alder, it’ll be his coming out party. Brooks say, ‘no way.’ Until Rick, a successful real estate developer, offers him a quarter of a million dollars. That money could put his daughter through college. Brooks changes his tune.

Brooks and Zack head to the top of the mountain while Rick, Brooks’ wife Annie, and Annie’s husband, Teddy, stay near the middle, much safer, part of the mountain, so they can be part of the camera crew that’s going to capture Zack’s descent. Ready, set, go.

Despite a few hiccups, everything goes fine. That is until Brooks and Zack make it down to their families. Right then a giant avalanche hits and there’s nothing they can do but prepare their emergency equipment for being swallowed up by this snow tidal wave.

Brooks and Rick get lucky. They don’t get buried that deep and are able to get to the surface. But when they look at the destruction before them, they’re convinced that no one else made it. Still, they’ve got to try. So they waddle up the mountain looking for any signs of their family. And they’ve got to work fast since both of them know… another avalanche is coming.

My whole thing with any movies that pair your hero up with someone else is that that pairing be interesting. What you’re looking for is two things. What pairing generates the most conflict? And what pairing generates the biggest emotional punch?

With Zack, you don’t really get either. Zack adores Brooks. So there’s zero conflict there. And when it comes to any emotional beats to mine, there’s no history between Brooks and Zack. So there’s nothing they get to resolve during this movie that’s going to send our tear-ducts into overdrive.

Also, I can’t tell what to make of the plot. On the one hand, we know what’s going to happen from page 1. We know because before we even get to the story, a title card tells us there were more people killed in avalanches in 2021 than any other year in history. So we know an avalanche is coming.

But then if an avalanche is coming, that means Brooks’ journey to reconquer the mountain that destroyed him means nothing. We know before the story starts that he’s not going to ski it successfully since the avalanche will come first. But then what is the character journey if it’s not about defeating the mountain?

I guess you conquer it in a different way if you survive an avalanche. But is that as satisfying as skiing it successfully? I’m not sure it is. I think this is a better movie if he beats the mountain at skiing once and for all.

All of this changes, however, if you view the script the same way you watched Titanic. In Titanic, we know the ship is going to sink before the first page and that script still works brilliantly. Here, we know the avalanche is coming so, from a dramatic irony perspective, it creates a ton of suspense. We know our group is doomed. And just like in Titanic, the plot is about how the characters handle it. Whose actions lead to survival, and whose actions lead to death?

But since that’s the story engine that’s driving our interest, I’m not sure what all the setup was about. The setup is literally setting up an entirely different movie. If this is going to be an avalanche movie, we should be building the plot around that. Probably a group of skiing friends who decide to challenge themselves on one of the most dangerous ski runs in the world.

I also wanted more uncertainty in this story. For some reason, I knew everybody was going to be okay. Kevin would use these phrases like, “There’s no way someone could’ve lived through that,” which made me certain that that’s exactly what they had done. In a movie like this, you have to kill some people off. And not the least most important character. Cause, to Kevin’s credit, he does kill off Teddy. But Teddy is the character we care least about. If you’re going to kill someone off, kill off Obi-Wan Kenobi. Whenever you kill off a serious character, it tells your reader you mean business. No one is safe.

Remember when Game of Thrones was at is most unstoppable? It was after the Red Wedding, right? When major characters were slaughtered. We watched that show after that thinking no one was safe, which created an exciting undercurrent to every episode. But in those final seasons? Nobody important died. All of a sudden, the show wasn’t as cool.

Kevin does a good job describing the crappy situations our characters are in. For example, he doesn’t just say that a character is “buried.” He reminds us that they’re buried under snow that has been compressed so tightly due to the pressure of tons of it all racing down the mountain that it is the equivalent of being buried in concrete.

And there’s some cool stuff you learn about avalanche airbags and beacon trackers. It reminded me of James Cameron’s brilliant alien trackers in Aliens. Beep…beep…beep…beep. Except now you’re trying to get to the beacon instead of get away from it. And time is of the essence because they probably can’t breathe under there.

There’s one moment where they track Zack’s beacon, which beeps them to the spot where he’s buried. Brooks digs furiously, finding the airbag and tracker but… no Zack. They realize Zack has been separated from his beacon. He could literally be buried anywhere. It was a harrowing moment.

But what happened next is the epitome of what was wrong with this script. Seconds later, Zack stands up a few hundred feet up the hill and yells out to them. Zack is fine. Not just that. Zack is fine… without our hero’s help. If our hero isn’t solving problems, why even have a hero? Especially in a movie like this, people shouldn’t be miraculously fine without our hero lifting a finger.

Having said that, there currently aren’t any movies like this on the market. Extreme skiing and avalanches are marketable. If I had to guess, I’d say that this script is rewritten to lean into one or the other so it feels more singular. But it could definitely be a film. What’s more cinematic than extreme skiing in the face of an avalanche?

[ ] tumble off the side of the mountain
[x] get stuck on the ski lift for two hours
[ ] A cozy ski down the mountain
[ ] pull off your first ever backflip
[ ] double diamond mastery

What I learned: Be careful that you don’t telegraph what’s going to happen with the way you’re describing things. If you keep writing phrases like, “There’s no way anyone could’ve made it through that,” or “Even if they can get down to her in time, there’s a one-in-a-million shot she’s alive,” trust me when I say that we know the character is alive.

What I learned: When writing about things that have a lot of subject-specific technical terminology, which this had, don’t leave the reader behind. Give them an alternative reading of that stuff we understand. Kevin does that here. After giving us a technical visual of our two skiers barreling down the slope, he says this: “If this means nothing to you, that’s okay. Just know that this is a run no human being should ever attempt to ski.” I bring this up because I always had this issue when writing tennis scripts. I’d think, “Nobody knows what a topspin serve is. Or a slice backhand crosscourt winner.” I should’ve tacked on more sentences like Kevin wrote here.

February Showdown Deadline is THIS THURSDAY! It is the “First Line Showdown.” Details are here at this link. Get those submissions in!

Genre: Thriller
Premise: A Pentester (ethical hacker who plans cyber attacks to help organizations identify security vulnerabilities) is set up in the murder of one of the richest most influential men in the world.
About: This script finished with 12 votes on last year’s Black List. The writer is also a director. His most recent movie is the 2020 film, Cagefighter.
Writer: Jesse Quiñones
Details: 122 pages

On-the-run thrillers are tough to pull off because your hero is doing so much running that it’s hard to add plot beyond the typical, “The cops are getting closer.” “The hero barely escapes them once again.” “Got to get the MacGuffin.” So the scripts end up being front-loaded. The first act where all the espoionagy stuff is happening is fun. Then, after that, it’s run-run-run-as-fast-as-you-can.

It still shocks me how good The Fugitive was at evading this trap. One thing it did better than any chase movie I’ve ever seen is it made Richard Kimble look like he was for sure caught in every set piece. And then, somehow, he would escape at the last second. That image of Samuel Gerard shooting Kimble in the head but the bullets are stopped at the last second by the bulletproof glass – that was movie heaven.

Anyway, let’s see if today’s script can dance on the same floor as The Fugitive.

30-something Kris is a pentester. He’s hired by companies to break into their systems and retrieve data. He’s helped 200 companies expose where their weaknesses are. He’s got his own “Q” in Maria, who guides him through an earpiece whenever he goes into a company. And there’s a budding romance between the two as well.

Kris is hired by a guy named Noah who is a 3rd party security advisor for a social media site called Kinetic. Kinetic has a unique “Mission Impossible 1” type security system that can’t be breached remotely. So Kris goes in to breach it from the inside, using an unsuspecting employee named Gwen to gain access.

But while downloading data from their server, he hears a scream and runs into the office area to find that the CEO, Milton Metcalfe, has been stabbed. A masked man attacks Kris, trying to grab the jump drive he used for the company server, but is unsuccessful and flees. Kris quickly puts together that he’s been set up and will now be the primary suspect in Milton’s murder. So he hides the jump drive before getting arrested.

When Kris realizes the cops aren’t buying his story, he escapes. From there, it’s a classic Fugitive scenario. He has to evade the pursuing cops while trying to figure out and prove Noah’s ultimate plan. His ace in the hole is that hidden jump drive. If he could get that, he may have the information he needs to prove he had nothing to do with this. But how exactly is he going to get that drive?

The Pentester is one of those script reads that has you gritting your teeth and balling your fists because it’s always on the cusp of being good but then something comes along to hold it back.

The first half of this script is really fun. It’s a little light in the way that it deals with its subject matter. But it’s still fun. And you love the irony. This guy who makes a living by making people look like fools has a fool made out of him. For once, he is the mark. Everything throughout those first 30-40 pages delivered on the promise of that premise.

But then the first hiccup arrived. Kris kills the equivalent of Mark Zuckerberg. And there are… how many cops looking for him? Two cops. Two local cops are hunting down the prime suspect who murdered Mark Zuckerberg?

I remember with The Fugitive that Richard Kimble’s face was all over the news in Chicago because he was a wealthy doctor and it was a salacious story that he “killed” his wife. Well, I would imagine that this story here would be 1000 times bigger? Possibly 10,000 times with social media? But the script never addresses that.

As you’re digesting that oversight, the script pulls you back in. The cops toss his place up and find out he has a father in prison. They go get the father, release him in a trade for information, and the father starts putting together his own little mobile tech station to help out his son. It was cool! I was back in!

But then Kris mopes back into Gwen’s life, Gwen being the one he tricked during a fake date in order to GET access to Kinetic and “kill” the CEO, and she not only lets him into her place… SHE SLEEPS WITH HIM!

Just hang with me for a second on that one. You work for Elon Musk. Some guy cons you into giving you info that allows him to break in and steal vital information from Twitter – a mistake that will come back to you if the police learn you’re involved. And then you sleep with the guy when he comes back later. The guy that the entire world is talking about as the killer of Elon Musk. Put legal ramifications aside. In 2024, with the way social media attacks and cancels people, you wouldn’t be able to do anything for the rest of your life, you’d get raked over the coals so badly. I understand carnal desire. But no one’s that stupid.

We often talk about delivering on the Promise of the Premise. But you also must deliver on the Promise of the Genre. If you’re writing in the comedy genre, you gotta be funny. If you’re writing in the Action genre, you gotta have great action set pieces. And if you’re writing in the espionage thriller genre, you need the plot beats built around espionage to be convincing. The laziness of that plot point was the dagger that made this script stagger (more on this below).

I’m not saying it killed the script. But it wounded it.

That’s what was so frustrating about this script is that it *did* have good thriller moments. You need to shock and surprise readers in this genre. And the writer did so consistently. (Spoiler) He built this really likable character in Kris’s partner, Maria. So when she’s killed off in a quick and brutal way, I didn’t see it coming.

But the writer took too many scenes and plot beats off. “Taking scenes off” means, “Oh, I wrote a good scene there. So the next two scenes don’t have to be great.” Or, “I wrote a great set piece there. So it doesn’t matter that the next one is only kind of good.” You can’t take scenes off in a script. I mean, you can. But you decrease the chances of hitting that home run that wins everyone over.

I was so down the middle with this script that I knew it was going to come down to the ending. If it was good, the script gets a positive grade.  Average or bad, negative grade.  The ending was… okay. A Russian warlord comes in but it makes sense. This movie is about controlling information over social media and a Russian wanted access to Kinetic users in order to manipulate the next election. And we even get an unexpected twist in regards to Gwen that helps us, retroactively, explain A LITTLE of that earlier behavior I bashed. But the ending didn’t feel airtight. And it needs to be airtight in a movie like this.

Close to a “worth the read” but not quite there.

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

What I learned: A common piece of advice you hear in screenwriting is to KEEP YOUR SCRIPT MOVING. What does that mean, though, exactly? Here’s a good example of it. We have this fun cold open where Kris steals a security guard’s info in order to break into the company he works for. Now, normally, after a big fun scene like this, the writer will slow down. He’ll cash in on the credit he earned from that fun scene to make you slug through a few character intros or setup scenes. But notice how Quinones doesn’t do that. He keeps the momentum going…

February Showdown Deadline is THIS THURSDAY! It is the “First Line Showdown.” Details are here at this link. Get those submissions in!!!

I think it’s now safe to say that if you’re a Superhero Movie…. “Uh oh.”

I have to give it to the box office media. They will do ANYTHING to spin the numbers.

Madame Web made 26 million dollars this weekend.

There’s a small caveat to that: OVER SIX DAYS.

Somehow, the industry has created a six-day weekend. In all my years of covering this stuff, I’ve never heard of a six-day weekend! Nobody has. Therefore, nobody knows what to make of these numbers. “One Love” made 51 million bucks. Which is a good take. But they had three extra days to do it. So it’s confusing.

However, it does prove that music biopics continue to be one of the safest bets in town.

Now you’re probably wondering, “Why don’t they make a million of them then?”

Well, as I found out, personally, they’re very tricky to produce because you’re usually dealing with bands. And the nature of any band is that they don’t all get along. Therefore, the band members don’t want to make a movie that benefits the other band members. Or they hold up approval just to spite the person in the band they hate.

Imagine writing a script that Paul Simon loves more than anything. But then you send it to Art Garfunkel and Art doesn’t come off as strongly in the script. So he says, “No, I don’t like it.” Now you’ve got to rewrite it to make Art look better. But then in the next draft, Paul thinks he’s being overshadowed by Art so he says no. Now you’ve got to go back and write it again.

And these rewrites take time. Months. And when you send it to each artist again, you may not be a priority. Musicians have other things going on in their lives. So they get to the script when they get to it. Which might be half a year since the last draft. And if one of them says no, now you gotta write another draft.

And you’re a screenwriter so you need to make money so you may have to go work a job before you have time to work on the next draft of Paul & Art. You can start to see why it’s so hard to make one of these movies.

This is why people choose singular artists like Bob Marley because, at least that way, you’re only dealing with one person. However, even singular artists, if dead, mean you’re often dealing with multiple family members who own the rights, which puts you right back in the same position you were in with the bands. Musical artists may have multiple kids with multiple partners, and a lot of those kids don’t like each other. So now you’ve got to make all of them happy.

Then you’ve got to see it from the writer’s and producer’s side. They know that, in order to make a good movie, you have to show the BAD along with the good. But the artists and the families only want to portray the good.

So you have to find a way around that. Luckily, these iconic musicians are so beloved that you’ll have people who show up just to celebrate the music and don’t really care that the movie is, basically, a commercial for that music.

By the way, this is why it’s so much easier to write a biopic about a historical figure. Because you can just base the movie off a book, like Nolan did for Oppenheimer, and not have to get any approval from the family. It’s good PR if you get the family on board, of course. But you don’t have to.

Technically, you could do the same with musicians. You could make a movie based on a book about them without their approval. You wouldn’t get sued either. However, you wouldn’t be able to use any of their music. For anything music-related, you have to get the artist’s permission. That’s why the musicians and bands have you over the barrel versus traditional biopics. You can’t tell a musician’s story without putting their music in the film, which places you in that unenviable position I was just alluding to of trying to win everyone involved over.

To that end, just getting a Bob Marley movie in front of audiences is a monumental achievement. Just to reiterate HOW HARD it is, they’ve been trying to do it for 25 years.

I’m not a music biopic guy, as you know. But based on the trailers, it looks like they got it right. They cast it perfectly. That actor, who I’ve never heard of before, looks great in the main role (ironically, he looks nothing like Marley in real life). And I’m always happy when any movie outside of the studio superhero machine does well. Which brings us back to superhero talk.

Madame Web’s disastrous box office is the result of several things.

Number 1 is the danger of trends. There was this period 2-3 years ago where it was female superheroes or bust. You didn’t even think of introducing a new male superhero. This is why The Marvels was greenlit and it’s also why Madame Web was greenlit.

But the viewing landscape changes quickly and people got tired of being pandered to and told what to like.  People want movies that their creators are passionate about. They want the people involved to say, “I’ve got an amazing idea for a superhero movie.” Madame Web is clearly designed to fit into the “all-female” superhero trend. And it paid the biggest price for doing so. This is a mega-bomb.

How does it affect future superhero movies? At this point, only two types of superhero movies are going to work. Sequels to mega-franchises with already beloved actors playing the superheroes. That’s why Deadpool 3 is going to be the biggest movie of the year. Or fresh ways into the superhero genre – movies that disrupt the typical formula and tone. The latter is getting harder and harder to do. Movies like Ragnarok, Dark Knight, X-Men: Days of Future Past, Logan.

I noticed they just announced a new Fantastic Four movie. It sounds like they’re TRYING TO DO something different with it, as it will be set in the 1960s. But let’s be real here. This franchise has never worked. It’s failed on three separate occasions (yes, there’s a little-known 1994 Fantastic Four film that turned out so bad, they never released it!).

I don’t know why it doesn’t work. Having the main guy have the lamest powers (stretchy power) probably factors into it. But Johnny Storm is rad. Silver Surfer was my favorite superhero ever growing up and just oozes cool. And who wouldn’t want to watch a Hulk vs. Thing fight?

But, like I said, you’re releasing the film during the most competitive time in box office superhero history.

The big wildcard remains James Gunn. James Gunn has made a name for himself for doing things differently. So we know that he’s going to bring something different to the DC films. But, I mean, how different can you be? To be clear, I’m not giving up on him. I’m only saying that the job is going to be SOOOOOO hard.

I think he’s got the right idea, though. He’s doing what Christopher Nolan did when he revolutionized comic book movies with Batman Begins, which is going in the opposite direction of what everyone else was doing. Everybody else was making these off-the-wall superhero characters who could do anything. Nolan grounded his hero in reality, which made him more relatable than any other superhero character.  Technically, anyone could be *this* version of Batman.

It sounds like Gunn is going away from this ridiculous multi-verse insanity that’s quietly destroying the Marvel universe and basing his first film, Superman, on that purity and idealism that made the movies so popular in the 80s. I don’t know if it’s going to work. But it’s the best route for success.

So, did anyone see Madame Web or One Love over the weekend? What did you think?

Week 7 of the “2 Scripts in 2024” Challenge

Every Thursday, for the first six months of 2024, Scriptshadow will be 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.

The first month and a half of these posts have gotten you to page 20 of your screenplay. But don’t worry if you’re just stumbling upon the challenge now. You can easily catch up. We’re writing an average of 1.5 pages a day. Which is nothing. So check out the previous posts, which I’ve included below, and spend 2 hours a day writing instead of 1. You should be caught up within two weeks. Here are those links…

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

The major thing we’re going to focus on today is the “Turn Into Act 2.” But before we get there, we have to talk about page counts because your major plot beats are going to take place on different pages depending on how long your screenplay is.

The desired length of a spec screenplay in 2024 is between 100 and 110 pages. The more simplistic your concept is, and the less characters you have, the lower the page count will be. So if you’re writing a movie like Gerald’s Game, about one woman in a bedroom the whole movie, that’s a simple story with a tiny number of characters. So it probably won’t be more than 90 pages. If, however, you’re writing Napoleon, which may take place over 20 years and have a cast of 30 characters, your script could be as long as 130 pages.

Once you have your page count, you’re going to divide it into four sections. So, if you have a 100 page script, it’ll look like this…

Act 1 – Pages 1-25
Act 2 (First Half) – Pages 26-50
Act 2 (Second Half) – Pages 51-75
Act 3 – Pages 76-100

If it’s 110 pages, it’ll look like this…

Act 1 – Pages 1 – 27.5
Act 2 (First Half) – Pages 27.5-55
Act 2 (Second Half) – Pages 55 – 82.5
Act 3 – Pages 82.5-110

Don’t get your tighty-whiteys in a bunch and complain that this is too restrictive. These numbers are GUIDELINES. You don’t have to abide by them exactly. But the majority of scripts operate best with an Act 1 (Setup), an Act 2 (where all the conflict and struggle happens) and an Act 3 (Climax). So it’s nice to have an idea where those major plot beats occur.

The reason we divide Act 2 into halves is because Act 2 is large and we’re trying to make it more manageable. By dividing it in two, you create 4 equally long chunks of screenplay. And, also, something big usually happens at the midpoint of a story. So I like to use that as a divider between the first half of Act 2 and the second half of Act 2.

Bringing this back to today, we will be writing pages 21-30 this week. Which means that, for those of us writing 100 or 110 page screenplays, we’re going to be writing our “Turn into Act 2,” which is just a fancy way of saying: it’s the end of Act 1 and the beginning of Act 2.

Now, last week we left off at the inciting incident. Things got a little contentious in the comments section as people debated where the inciting incident was, particularly as it related to Star Wars. Don’t worry about that. Star Wars has a deceptively tricky inciting incident due to the fact that the main character doesn’t even show up until page 15.

It’s usually easy to identify the inciting incident, which is the incident that destroys the main character’s day-to-day life and forces them to address a problem. A simpler example would be Free Guy, when Ryan Reynolds puts on the glasses that show him that the real life he thought he was living in is actually one big video game.

We’re going to assume that you’re writing a 100 page screenplay. That means your Turn into Act 2 is going to occur at page 25 (exactly 25% of the way into your script). Since we’re starting this week on page 21, we first must know what to write BEFORE we get to the Second Act.

Well, remember what I said last week. Around page 15, you get the inciting incident. This creates a scenario by which a problem must be solved. Solving that problem is your hero’s goal for the movie. Barbie is having thoughts of death. She must go to the Real World to figure out why she’s having these thoughts.

But your hero is NOT YET READY to leave their normal life. As human beings, we are rarely told YOU MUST CHANGE NOW and then immediately we start changing. No. We resist it. We run away from it. We pretend it isn’t a problem. We ignore it. Whatever we have to do to NOT change, we do it. Which is how this section between pages 15-25 works. The character isn’t ready to go on their journey yet so they resist.

But a few of you are already thinking, “Wait a minute, Carson. So we’re supposed to write 10 full pages of resisting?” Good question. The answer is no. That would be a waste of space.

What I’ve found about pages 15-25 is that a number of things can be going on. Yes, resistance is one of them. Ryan Reynolds trying to ignore the fact that he’s just learned he’s living in a video game in Free Guy is an example of that.

But, also, there can be education going on in this section. In Barbie, Barbie must go visit Weird Barbie, who educates her on what she must do. In Raiders of the Lost Ark, Indiana Jones talks to Brody about what he must do before he officially sets off in search of the Ark. So education (aka “exposition) is one part of this section.

You may also wrap up certain storylines from the first act. If you have a young character going on a big journey, he might have a scene with his parents where he says goodbye.

You may also use this section to cut to the subplots of your secondary characters.  You see this in Barbie.  Before she heads off, we cut to Ken and figure out what’s going on with him.  If you have a major villain, like Kylo Ren, you might cut to him as well – see what he’s up to and push his story along a little further.

In other words, you’re not just gearing YOUR HERO up for this journey, you’re gearing YOUR ENTIRE STORY up for this journey. You’re putting everything in place so that the screenplay is prepared to move forward.

This brings us to page 25, which is our Turn Into Act 2 and this is going to be the simplest plot beat you write in your entire script. Your Turn Into Act 2 is just your hero leaving on the journey. They’ve officially accepted the fact that they must go off and do this. And so here they go.

Now, what if you don’t have a traditional “Hero’s Journey” screenplay where your hero leaves their “home world” and goes off on a larger adventure? What if you have a movie like Killers of the Flower Moon or Coda or Parasite or Silver Linings Playbook?

So, this is where things get tricky. But, generally speaking, the moment your main character begins pursuing the goal that will drive your entire screenplay is the moment the second act begins. I say “tricky” because take “Parasite.” In Parasite, the family acts as one character. So the second they decide that their goal is to take over this rich family’s home is when Act 2 begins. In Coda, the moment the main girl decides that she’s going to enter this singing competition is the moment Act 2 begins. With Silver Linings Playbook, Bradley Cooper wants to be in the dance competition because his ex-wife is going to be there and he hopes to use the opportunity to win her back. It’s not as strong of a goal as, say, Promising Young Woman (take everyone down involved in my friend’s sexual assault). But it does the job of giving the narrative a clear spine.

After that, you hit the most fun part of the entire screenplay which is the “Fun and Games” Section. This is where you get to show off your concept. For example, when Barbie goes to the Real World, you get to show her clashing with people who are the complete opposite of her. Or in Star Wars, you get to see Luke and Obi-Wan go into an alien bar.

As always, this is just a guideline. There’s no such thing as the perfect blueprint for a script. So, if you don’t know what to do, follow your gut. Or take some risks. One of the reasons I’m slowly pacing us is to allow you to make mistakes and still have time to go back and try something else.

Okay, here’s this week’s assignment…

Friday = write 1 scene (Your main character resists going after his goal)
Saturday = write 1 scene (Prepare the script for the Journey)
Sunday = write 1 scene (Turn Into Second Act)
Monday = write 1 scene (Fun and Games)
Tuesday = write 1 scene (Fun and Games)
Wednesday = go back and correct any issues with your five scenes
Thursday = go back and correct any issues with your five scenes

Happy Valentine’s Day!

Genre: Comedy
Premise: After his girlfriend dies, a guy who hates cats begins an unexpected bromance with her widowed cat, who reveals himself to be an alien that is here to save the world.
About: This one comes from a new screenwriter. The script made the Black List and is in development over at 21 Laps.
Writer: Andrew Nunnelly
Details: 107 pages

I was paws-itively looking forward to this one.

Whatever genre you’re writing in, you want to look for unique ways into it. We’ve got a quasi-rom-com here. Perfect for Valentine’s Day. But instead of some cliched boy meets girl rom-com clone, the movie is about a bromance between a guy and a cat. How much more unique can you get?

And to make matters better, Taylor Swift is in it! That automatically bumps the script up two notches.

But will the script be the cat’s meow? Or will it be claw-full?

Jeff, an assistant professor at UCLA, meets his dream woman in Emma. I mean check out this description: brunette, unconsciously pretty, unwittingly charming, infinitely empathetic. We’re all in love with this woman!

There’s one small issue. Emma is a giant cat-lady. She’s got her old black cat, Yugen. She’s got 10,000 cat toys and cat beds and cat pictures around the apartment. Jeff is not a cat person. It’s clear Yugen knows this. But Emma and Yugen are a package deal and there’s nothing Jeff can do about it.

Their relationship is built around their mutual obsession with finding alien life. Hey, I can relate to that. But before they can answer the eternal question of “Are we alone?” Jeff becomes alone cause Emma is killed in a car accident.

Jeff wallows in their apartment for weeks until, all of a sudden, Yugen talks to him. It takes Jeff a while before he believes he hasn’t gone crazy. That’s when Yugen hits him with a shocker: All cats are aliens. They are here to prevent humans from destroying the earth. Emma was The One and now that she’s dead, earth is doomed. UNLESS Jeff can take her place.

Jeff resists for a while but eventually comes on board. He must accomplish a series of steps that include things like rubbing Yugen’s belly, liking cat photos online, visiting cats at a Cat Cafe, and clipping Yugen’s claws. Once Yugen deems him “The One” ready, he reveals to Jeff that the final step is critical because if they can accomplish it, they will go back in time and save Emma’s life.

In order to explain my reaction to this script, I have to talk about another animal… Daaaaaa Bears.

As in, the Chicago Bears. Ditka. Sweetness. Da Fridge.

Don’t worry. This is all going to make sense.

The Chicago Bears are in a very unique position. They have this quarterback on their team named Justin Fields. Justin Fields is a solid quarterback who’s slowly getting better.

Now, due to a lucky break, the Bears have the number 1 pick in the draft this year. And the number 1 quarterback prospect, a guy named Caleb Williams, is, by all accounts very very good. Let me try and make some screenwriting analogies here. Caleb Williams is like a young Tarantino. Whereas Justin Fields is like Zak Penn (Ready Player One).

Just like lots of people in the NFL like Justin Fields, lots of production houses in Hollywood like Zak Penn. They would love to have him working on their scripts. However, if you have the option between getting Zak Penn or Quentin Tarantino, you go with Quentin Tarantino. Which is what it looks like the Bears are going to do. They like Justin. But they can’t pass up the opportunity of hiring a once-in-a-generation talent like Caleb Williams.

How does this relate back to today’s screenplay? Good question. I’m starting to wonder that myself.

Toxoplasmosis desperately wants to be Caleb Williams. But it can only muster up being Justin Fields. In other words, it so clearly wants to be great. But there’s a ceiling on the talent attempting to make it great.

The problem is that there’s an unhinged quality to the writing. It gets so untethered at times that you stop believing in what’s going on. Not in a “movie-logic” way, like we were talking about yesterday. This script is *supposed to be* zany. It’s supposed to push logic boundaries.

But in order for this approach to work, it still has to be clever. And having a cat drone on about the Cat Code and the Cat Planet and its 10-Step plan to bend time and space so that Jeff can travel back in time and prevent his girlfriend’s death — it’s just too goofy for its own good.

Luckily, we have the perfect comp for how to pull this concept off. It’s one of my favorite scripts of all time and it’s called Dogs of Babel. Here’s the logline for that one: “When a dog is the only witness to a woman’s death, her husband tries to teach the dog how to talk so he can find out what happened to her.”

Notice how even the logline promises a more structured story. There’s a mystery behind her death. So we have a goal: Find out what happened. That’s the impetus for him attempting to connect with the dog – so he can find out what happened.

In Toxoplasmosis, it’s more like Zach Galifianakis voicing a cat and just saying all this crazy weird stuff. “Jeff, you need to understand cats don’t socialize like humans. There is too much going on in our highly intelligent minds to just stop what we’re doing and have water-cooler chit-chat with someone using a fraction of their brain capacity.”

I remember, in Dogs of Babel, I wanted so desperately for the protagonist to succeed. Cause I could tell how heartbroken he was and how much he needed those answers in order to move on. In Toxoplasmosis, it didn’t really seem like it mattered.

That’s something we don’t usually talk about on the site: Just because you have a goal doesn’t mean that the reader will care or be invested in that goal. We technically have a great goal here. Jeff is trying to go back in time to save his girlfriend. But it’s dealt with in such a casual way that we never really care if he succeeds.

That’s why I always say, even if you’re writing a comedy, make sure you take the pillars of your story (Goal, Stakes, Urgency) seriously. You can have fun and get wild with everything else. But make sure those are solid. Go re-watch The Hangover if you want to see this done well. Some of the zaniest s**t you’ve ever seen happens in that movie. But the GSU is airtight.

Still, there were some funny things in this script. There’s this funny moment where Jeff wakes up out of a haze in the Petco line with 943 dollars worth of cat food in his cart. He has no idea how he got here. It turns out Yugen is controlling his mind now, making Jeff his own personal walking Amazon account. There’s an early scene where Jeff is still unsure if Yugen is talking to him. He goes to work and heads to a room filled with testing cats in cages, makes sure no one is around, and asks them if they can understand him.

I recently suffered a terrible tragedy, and… And since then, perhaps understandably, things have gotten a little… strange.
(beat)

Long story short: I need your help. You might know my cat Yugen? Well, he’s not really my cat, but… He started talking to me and I’m just a little worried that maybe I’m losing my mind so…
(pause)

If you can understand me, please just say something?
(beat)

And if you can’t — honestly I hope you can’t — then no worries at all and I can move on.
(beat)

Anyone? Anything? It doesn’t need to be anything profound.

There were moments like this throughout the script that made me laugh. But, in the end, the mythology of the cat world felt shaky and rushed, like the writer was making it up on the fly. I used to think you could do that as well when writing these wackier scripts. But nothing could be further from the truth. You have to create a strong mythology where you’ve thought through everything. Only then can you go nuts. I know it sounds like overkill but I promise you it makes a difference. The reader can tell when the writer knows their world intimately and when they’re just making s**t up on-the-fly, whether that be a movie about Napoleon during his greatest battle or a movie about talking cats from another galaxy.

I just wasn’t feline this one, guys.

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

What I learned: People! You have to stop spending 80% of your effort on your first scene. This is yet another script where the best scene is the first scene. It’s a clever scene. Nunnelly uses Carl Sagan’s pursuit of life in the universe to explain his love for Emma. It’s very well done. But then… there’s never a scene after that as clever or as good. Yes, your first scene is important so you want to put a ton of effort into it. But if every other scene you write, you put in 50% of that effort, we’re going to notice. I guarantee you we will notice. So, once again, use that opening scene as the bar. Don’t use it as your “SALE” sign to get us into your crummy clothing store on Melrose Boulevard.