A former Black List topping author whose great script only failed to get developed because it, ironically, got blacklisted by Madonna is back with a new take on Macbeth

Genre: Drama/Comedy
Premise: (from Black List) After beloved movie star Tom Adair is found dead, the outpouring of grief and sympathy quickly elevates his best friend Alec Donavan to movie star status. Now Alec must contend with his newfound fame and success–and the fact that he and his agent/girlfriend Karynn Pieper secretly murdered Tom and are haunted by his vengeful ghost.
About: Today’s writer has topped the Black List before with a Madonna biopic that was awesome. She’s back, and this latest script of hers is an adaptation of one of the most popular stories of all time – MacBeth.
Writer: Elyse Hollander
Details: 100 pages

Perfect casting?

For a long time, it has been thought that scripts about the industry don’t work. The failure of HBO’s The Franchise seemed to confirm that pulling off the subject matter was impossible. But then The Studio came along and proved that it could be done!

Has “Turnaround” also cracked the code on stories based on the industry? Let’s find out!

Set in the early 2000s (why? who knows??), 30-something Alec Donovan, an actor, is struggling to make ends meet. He’s resorted to writing his own script. But all the big producers in town tell him that the only way this script will get made is if he has a movie star in the lead role.

It just so happens that Alec has a movie star best friend! Tom Adair. But he and Tom haven’t spoken in forever. Ironically, the two have the same agent, Karynn Piper. And Alec is sleeping with Karynn. But even she tells him it ain’t happening with Tom, who’s on the set of his latest movie, about Caesar.

As it so happens, one of the actors on the movie ODs on some bad coke, and Tom figures he’ll throw his buddy a bone, hiring him onto the movie. Later on, Alec decides to see if Tom will be in his movie so he goes over to his house. That’s when he sees that there’s a young attractive naked dead guy in Tom’s bed. Another OD!

Soon, Karynn is over and the three are deciding what to do with the body. But when Tom starts commanding them around, Alec loses it and pushes his friend down the stairs, killing him. Alec and Karynn decide to stage the house like it was just these two here and jet out.

Cut to a year later and Alec has used the publicity of his friend’s death to become a hot commodity in Tinseltown. He even stars in the sequel to that Caesar movie. Alec has to deal with all the responsibilities of his newfound position, which include being a sellout, something he vehemently detests.

But that’s not nearly as big of a problem as his dead friend deciding to haunt him. “Haunt” is a strong word. I’d say it’s more like trolling. He doesn’t threaten Alec. He just says a lot of things that make him feel bad. Of course, Alec thinks he’s going insane, which interferes with his movie star life. He eventually has a mental breakdown before realizing he must take care of this problem once and for all.

Oof.

Oof oof.

Double oof.

This was not good.

You can always tell, too.

You know immediately if a script isn’t going to work, even if it’s a good writer, like today.

The second I saw that we were randomly setting the movie in the early 2000s I said, “Uh oh.” If stories are set in random near-past time periods for no reason, that’s a good sign that a crappy script is coming.

And then the structure was… nonexistent. Things just happen like they’re being made up on the spot.

This supporting actor dies of an overdose on the set of Tom’s movie and then Alec replaces him. Then that production ends and we cut to another death, when Tom’s boy toy ends up overdosing at his house. Then, not long after that, we get the THIRD death of the first 30 pages, with Tom himself getting murdered.

That’s what we call “all over the place storytelling.”

We cut to one year later because of course we do. Remember yesterday how I told you that extremely tight time frames were screenplay catnip. This shows you what happens when you go the opposite direction. After that one-year jump cut, all the air left the balloon. The story basically starts over with Alec now being a movie star in Tom’s stead.

Then we just… hang out for a bunch of scenes. At a certain point, I checked the page number. It was page 65 and NO PLOT HAD BEGUN YET! There was no engine underneath the pages. The script existed solely to wait for every instance that Tom could haunt Alec. And he didn’t even haunt him that much!  Want to know what a script that actually has structure and an engine looks like so you can compare good to bad?  Check out any version of A Christmas Carol.

I’d go so far as to say, I don’t think this script did a single thing right. Even the humor wasn’t funny. “Some would say, thirty-five is too old to die young, you know?” Is that a funny line? I know it “presents” as funny. But does it make you laugh?

“Hanging around funny” is not the same as funny. A lot of writers forget that. They think that if they can place some jokes near funny, that will be enough. But funny needs to actually be funny.

The thing is, we’ve got a comp for this on how to do it right. “The Studio.” The Studio is covering the same ground but it’s doing it in a way fresher and funnier way. Note that The Studio does what I was teaching everybody yesterday – using The Big U for all of its episodes.

It also had much clearer characters with clear characteristics, which is imperative to the humor hitting. You have the new studio head who loves artsy movies yet is forced to make brainless big-budget shlock. You have the “That Guy” producer, a talentless douchebag who knows it’s only a matter of time before people figure out he doesn’t know what he’s doing. You have the overly ambitious assistant. And you have the over-the-top marketing girl.

Here in Turnaround, Alec’s character is pretty clear. He’s living in his friend’s shadow. Karynn is clear – she’s the cold-blooded agent. But she’s so cliche that everything she does is boring and obvious. But the real difference in these two character groups is that we don’t like either of the characters in this script. Whereas we like all of The Studio characters.

Here’s one certainty I have learned over 20 years of reading – If you have unlikable leads and no plot engine, there is NO WAY your script will work. It is literally impossible to pull off.

And I think that the pushback to my criticism would be that this is an adaptation of one of the most successful stories of all time in MacBeth. But there’s a slight difference in the time periods that the two versions of the story are released in. And I’m pretty sure that in 1606, Shakespeare didn’t have to compete with an infinite-scrolling app of endless entertainment.

You gotta change with the times, baby. A stronger structure. More urgency. And characters we can actually get behind. This was very close to a “What the hell did I just read.”

The sad thing is that those improvements would probably only make this script average. The DNA here is full of too many cobwebs to turn this into a winner.

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

What I learned: It is VERY DIFFICULT to make a big time jump after the first act and have the script work. I’m not saying it’s impossible. But in all the scripts I’ve read that have done it, I’d say 99.9% of them sucked. So, don’t do it unless you absolutely know what you’re doing and you have a good reason to do so as well as a strong game plan for executing it.

How to hack the spec screenwriting game – “The Big U”

Genre: Drama/Thriller
Premise: Through a maddening day of mediation for an office harassment claim she filed,
the clock is ticking on Dana as she questions the price of her silence, sanity, and
the truth.
About: Audrey Ellis Fox is a writer-director who has directed a lot of videos and shorts. This script finished on last year’s Black List with 9 votes.
Writer: Audrey Ellis Fox
Details: 100 pages

Emma Corrin for Dana?

Don’t worry. We’re going to get into what “The Big U” is soon. And no, it’s not what some of your dirty minds are thinking. Get your heads out of the gutter! Especially with today’s subject matter. We have to be respectful. Oh, who am I kidding? When am I ever respectful.

You know, I’m actually surprised to learn that today’s writer is also a director. Normally, writer-directors over-direct on the page. They put in way too much description, as they care more about aiding themselves for the shoot rather than writing an easy-to-read story. Props to Fox for thinking of the reader. No doubt that contributed to how this got on the Black List. Now let’s talk about the plot.

We meet 24 year old Dana as she gets on an elevator. Seconds later, 29 year old Patrick steps on. We can tell, despite there being other people in the elevator, that Dana feels very uncomfortable in Patrick’s presence.

Once Dana gets to her destination floor, she encounters her lawyer, Scott, and we start to get a sense of what’s going on. This is an agreed-upon mediation between Dana and Patrick for something Patrick did to her at work. We don’t know the details yet. But we understand that the goal is to get this mediation done TODAY or it will likely go to court, which neither party wants.

Soon after, an older woman named Colette comes in. She is the mediator. Her job will be to walk back and forth between Dana’s and Patrick’s room and attempt to come to an agreement that both parties are satisfied with. And, almost immediately, there’s tension in the air. That’s because a mystery person is texting our heroine, sending her racy pictures of herself.

The incident in question was sort of a Harvey Weinstein situation. Dana, a software engineer, was drinking with her co-workers on a Vegas road trip, and when the night went late, found herself in an elevator with a friend and Patrick. For lack of a better expression, Patrick pulled his Johnson out and ejaculated on her. The two sides are trying to decide how much that’s worth to Dana.

But Dana doesn’t have the cleanest life. Before she was working as a software engineer, she had an OnlyFans page. Gotta git that money. Not only that, but she has some history with Patrick. They’ve known each other since they were kids. He’s the one who gave her the job. They had several dinners leading up to him giving her the job, all of which she claims were business dinners. But were they?

The first offer from Patrick’s team is a low-ball. Less than six figures. To get them up, Colette says, she’s going to need Dana to convince her how bad this was. The thing is, Dana has a witness to all this – her co-worker – who was in the elevator at the time. But her friend is MIA and doesn’t seem to want to get involved. However, she calls at the final hour, and her testimony is either going to help Dana, or destroy her entire case.

Okay, so let’s get into it.

What’s The Big U?

The Big U is BIG URGENCY.

Big Urgency is not the same as urgency. It’s urgency on steroids, and it’s one of the biggest hacks in spec screenwriting. The objective is to build your story around a really tight timeline.

Want to tell a story about high school? Set it over one day.

Want to tell a story about an Amazon delivery worker? Set it between sun-up and sun-down.

Want to tell a story about a family trip to the beach? Set it over the course of two hours.

The condensing of time creates constraint, which creates tension, which creates conflict. Urgency forces the story to move along quickly, which can make anything entertaining to watch.

I’ll prove to you just how powerful this tool is.

“NDA” is not a movie if it takes place over a week. It’s not even a movie if it takes place over 72 hours. This only works when you condense the timeframe to one day. Think about it. People are more interested when the problem at hand needs to be figured out NOW. Not in a month. Not in a week. NOW!

I expect at least two entries in the Mega-Showdown to be scripts containing The Big U.

And by the way, I’m not saying that The Big U is NECESSARY to write a good script. But I do consider it to be a secret weapon, especially in the highly competitive space of spec script writing. Spec script readers have the shortest attention span of all readers. So they respond well to these scripts.

How was the actual script though??

Funny you ask. Because I think this shows the power of The Big U even more. You don’t see the weaknesses in the script nearly as clearly as you normally would because the urgency is catapulting us through the story.

But I did see some issues. This whole “keeps getting texts” plot development is one I’ve seen frequently lately. I’d say I’ve seen it four times in the last three months in similar scripts I’ve read. That tells me it’s low-hanging fruit – an easy creative choice. Typically, you want to push past the easy creative choices and come up with the ones that nobody would have thought of.

The rules of this mediation were also shakier than a knockoff Cuisinart. It wasn’t clear how things worked. There were no absolute rules or guidelines to be followed. Colette only seemed to leave the room and go see Patrick when the writer felt it was necessary (i.e. she needed to have Dana go off on her own and regroup). This ate into the script’s realism, weakening the suspension of disbelief. I wanted the rules to be more sophisticated. I wanted to be convinced this was really happening.

Finally, I want to mention the ending but it requires me to get into spoilers. So stay away from the below if you want to read the script fresh. After the mediation, which Dana has won for nearly 200k, she follows Patrick down the hallway. When he gets in the elevator, she dips in after him.

She then proceeds to step into his space, so he turns around and backs up. Presumably, she is trying to make him feel just as uncomfortable in the elevator as he made her feel that night. But, also, the writer indicates that there’s a “charge” here, leaving open the possibility that these two were in cahoots all along, bilking the company out of 200k that they would now, presumably, split?

I mean… huh?? This is serious enough subject matter that we should know, definitively, if he did what it was alleged he did. You can’t play both sides of the fence and leave it up to the reader with a script like this. I’m fine if it’s a twist and they were in it together. But that has to be crystal clear as we leave the script. This reveal was way too vague and left me feeling frustrated.

Even with its weaknesses, however, this is a good script to study if you’re an aspiring screenwriter. Shouldn’t be hard to find on the internet but comment below if you want the script and I’m sure someone will send it to you.

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

What I learned: Once you come up with your screenplay idea, ask yourself if it is a Big U idea. It may not be. Which is fine. But if it can be turned into a Big U idea, seriously consider it. Average ideas can morph into high concept ideas with this hack. :)

We’re now officially a month and a half away from the only screenwriting competition decided by REAL PEOPLE – aka YOU. Not these clueless fancy contest readers with their big contest price tags and questionable taste. I’d say that the average Scriptshadow reader is way more capable of judging a screenplay than those wannabes. So fine-tune those scripts. I have the utmost confidence that we’re going to find a killer screenplay.

HOW TO SUBMIT
What: Mega Showdown
When: Friday, August 1
Deadline: Thursday, July 31, 10pm Pacific Time
Send me your: Script title, genre, logline, and a PDF of the script
Where: carsonreeves3@gmail.com

Let’s discuss what occurred over the weekend. Despite my AI post sparking some controversy, with critics labeling me as the devil for supporting AI, this weekend’s box office results make one thing clear: AI just received some great news.

If movies are, indeed, in danger of being created completely by AI (I don’t think they are, btw), the first movies it’s going to happen with are these Disney and Universal live-action remakes.

Why? Because the scripts have already been written for these former movies. So all AI has to do is make a few modern changes and the script is taken care of. And then AI loves to generate these live-action video images, which is all they’re doing with these live-action remakes. They’re photo-realistic animation basically.

So anybody in the business is kind of in a pickle. On the one hand, you want to celebrate any cinematic success, as it keeps the lights on. But if you’re an artist, movies like How To Train Your Dragon are bad news. Cause these will soon be the testing grounds that Hollywood uses to experiment on AI.

The other big release this weekend comes from A24. “Materialists” is Celine Song’s follow-up to her well-received debut romantic drama, “Past Lives.” Her newest film opened solid for an A24 film (12 million bucks) but low for a romantic comedy.

Regardless of where it landed on the Success-O-Meter, I count it as a success. Getting to double digits as an A24 film is always a big achievement. The indie production company understands that if you don’t have IP, you have to try something fresh. Song is making the world’s first sad rom-com. The muted tones. The apathetic lead. It’s a combo that shouldn’t work but pulled in enough bodies to validate the risk.

Still, these movies have to be great to have legs. And, when I watch the trailer, I see too much lightness to pull in the requisite amount of bodies to make this a hit. But at least it feels original. In that sense, it’s the “Anti How To Train Your Dragon” – a film that could not have been conceived through AI.

Speaking of trying something different, Neon is crashing and burning with The Life of Chuck (2.5 mil opening). I tried to tell them that this was one of the worst stories I’ve ever read in any form in my life but they didn’t listen. But even if you disagreed with my review, the real lesson here is that you cannot write a movie that doesn’t have an identifiable genre and expect people to see it.

What is the genre for The Life of Chuck? Nobody knows! Cause it doesn’t have one. And people DO NOT SHOW UP TO MOVIES WHEN THEY DON’T KNOW WHAT THE GENRE IS. I know artists hate to hear this but it’s the truth. And the irony is that these very same artists do the same thing.

Moving from the past to the future, everyone is moviegasming over the July To Die For. We’ve got three huge movie releases happening in July. Marvel is trying, for a third time, to make Fantastic Four a thing. Warner Brothers is restarting the DC universe with Superman. And Universal couldn’t even wait the minimum amount of time for a reboot – 5 years – to begin another Jurassic Park adventure.

So, we’re going to play a brand new game here on Scriptshadow: Bang, Marry, Kill. Which of these movies am I going to bang? Which will I get down on one knee for? And which will I mercilessly slaughter? Go make your guesses down in the comments section before you continue (and make sure to offer your own BMK choices).

Okay, let’s start with Bang. I’m going to bang Superman. Wait a minute. I was not thinking before I wrote that sentence. Oh well, too late. Superman looks like something I could have a great night out with. It’s exciting, new, handsome. Of the three options, it will definitely make me laugh the most. Yeah, I’m banging Superman all night long. None of the other movies come close.

As for marriage. Ooh, this is a tough one. But I think I have to go with Fantastic Four. Why? Because it looks harmless. It looks like someone I can trust. I’m definitely not going to have the best whoopee of my life with Fantastic Four, but I can see us cuddling all night long after the physical fireworks. Will there be times during our relationship where I’m bored? Definitely. Will she annoy me at times? You bet. But overall, Fantastic Four is the lady I’ll be the most comfortable with.

This leaves… I’m sorry Scarlett Johansen… but this leaves Jurassic World as my murder victim. Literally the ONLY thing this movie has going for it is how Johansen is a super fan of the franchise and finally gets a chance to be in it. But outside of that, this reeks hardcore of a money grab. Three years after the “conclusion to the Jurassic World franchise?” THREE YEARS??? You couldn’t wait any longer? If you had some amazing fresh dinosaur idea, then sure. Fine. But this is such a “par for the course” concept that it’s slotting itself in the pole position for “most unnecessary movie of the year.” I’m sorry Jurassic World. But I need to kill you.

We have one more dark horse entry to throw into the mix. 28 Years Later. I can bang it, marry it, or kill it. Is there any way we can add a fourth option? Date it? I’m not going to lie. I’m scared to death of this movie. It looks to go beyond typical horror and more like something that haunts your nightmares for months on end. It looks… relentless. But I have no choice but to date it. It’s written by one of my favorite writers, Alex Garland. In that respect, it has a shot at being better than all of these films. So, assuming I don’t chicken out, expect a review next Monday.

Get back to writing your scripts. Mega-Showdown is coming!

I just read an article that said AI had already reached a “soft singularity.” The singularity was supposed to be the point when artificial intelligence surpassed human intelligence, triggering rapid, uncontrollable technological growth and change. I guess the soft version of that is just more pettable?

I continue to explore AI’s connection to screenwriting tentatively. It would be stupid for me not to. I have to stay up-to-date on this thing. And I will say that the latest thing I’ve learned about it is that it’s amazing at combating writer’s block.

Writer’s block is a weird thing because, on the surface, it’s this blockage that happens when you can’t come up with what to write next – whether that be a paragraph, a scene, an act, a screenplay. You’re creatively blocked from imagining what to write.

But, over the years, I learned that writer’s block is actually more complex than that. It wouldn’t be wrong to term it as, “Writer’s Mental Block.” Because it often takes the form of a lack of belief in one’s self. You don’t feel like writing matters because you don’t believe that your best will be good enough. So you don’t write at all.

This is something I’ve battled with in the past. I’ve read so many screenplays that I know exactly where that “professional” bar is. And if I’m writing something that’s below that bar, I tell myself, “What’s the point?”

So, there are other components to this than simply not knowing what to write next. However, if you can put those aside and tackle the problem of what to write next logically, AI becomes a huge help.

Here’s all you have to do. Let’s say you’re writing a short story. It’s about a guy who’s looking for his missing brother. You start writing a scene from the story but, immediately, you don’t like where it’s going. We’ve all been there. The scene feels off. We’re not coming into it the right way or we’re relying too much on a cliched situation. So we stop writing. And we don’t want to go back in because we know it’s only going to get worse. This is always how long bouts of writer’s block begin.

Instead of letting the dark cloud of writer’s block overtake you, throw what you have into your favorite AI and ask it to write the rest of the scene for you. You can give it parameters as well. You can say, “make it weird.” “Have something unexpected happen.” “Make the main character come across a clue he wasn’t expecting.”

Here’s how the scene in question might start off on my end…

Nick walked into his brother’s apartment. A single dim light from an old lamp was still on in the corner. The small one-bedroom apartment was unusually clean, as if a cleaning service had just come through here yesterday. Nick began to look around.

Let’s say that’s all I came up with. Normally, I’d say, “That’s cliche and boring. I’m going to go order DoorDash and watch Love Island.” But now, with AI, you can fight that stranglehold of writer’s block by placing this in the AI and tell it what I just mentioned above. When I do that, this is what it comes back with.

**************
Nick walked into his brother’s apartment. A single dim light from an old lamp was still on in the corner. The small one-bedroom apartment was unusually clean, as if a cleaning service had just come through here yesterday. Nick began to look around.


The air smelled faintly of lavender and bleach. Nick opened a drawer in the kitchen and found utensils perfectly arranged, like a stock photo. Even the junk drawer was spotless — every battery, rubber band, and crumpled receipt was gone.

He moved to the living room. No dust. No crumbs. No dirty socks curled under the couch. His brother was messy, always had been. Jake once let a banana rot in the sink for a week just to see what color it would turn. This? This wasn’t him.

Something crunched beneath his foot.

Nick stepped back. A dry leaf. Brown and brittle, like it had blown in from some forest trail. But Jake lived on the fourth floor. No balcony. No plants.

Weird.

He crouched down and noticed something else: the edge of a rug near the entertainment center was slightly curled up. Not by much, but enough that it looked… lifted. Recently.

Nick pulled it back.

A hole.

A perfect square cut into the floorboards, maybe two feet across. Covered by a sheet of black metal with a single strip of duct tape sealing one edge.

His stomach tightened. Jake didn’t own tools. Or duct tape.

With a breath, Nick peeled back the metal. Beneath it wasn’t another floorboard. It was a box. Or a safe. No—some kind of old tin container, like an ammunition case. Green, scratched, military-looking. On the top was a sticker, faded but legible:

PROPERTY OF: J. KENDRICK
RETURN TO BASE OR DESTROY

Nick’s heart thudded. Kendrick was their mother’s maiden name. Jake had never used it. And what “base”? What was this?

He reached for the latch.

Then something buzzed behind him. Loud and fast.

Nick spun around.

The bathroom fan had just turned on.

No one had touched it.
**************
Now, here’s the irony of the next step of this process: DON’T USE THE SCENE THAT AI GAVE YOU. Why? Because it’s always the version of the scene that most writers would write. Something hidden under the rug? Really? How many millions of times have you seen that trope? You want to look for ways into scenes that ONLY YOU CAN WRITE.

The purpose of having AI flesh out a scene you had writer’s block on is to see if it comes up with anything that can generate new ideas. You’re trying to jumpstart your writer’s engine again so you’ll keep writing. Continuing to write is always better than not writing.

So, when I look at AI’s scene, I try and identify anything that I wouldn’t have thought of. Then I see if I can spin any of those things into story beats that I like. The dry leaf, for example. I definitely wouldn’t have thought of that. I probably wouldn’t use the leaf in my story. But I like the idea of a seemingly normal object that shouldn’t be there.

Maybe, if this was set in Portland, Nick finds a New York City subway token on the floor. His brother has never been to New York. This now gets me thinking about his brother’s past, which I may realize I don’t know enough about. What if his brother lived in New York briefly? What was he doing there? Why did he leave? Already, my story’s world is building in my mind.

None of this has to stick right now. It just has to get you back into writing mode. Anything that gets you thinking – that gets you excited to go back into the scene – is a plus. If it doesn’t work, that’s fine. Again, writing is better than not writing. So the fact that you’re rewriting the scene trying out this new direction is a huge plus.

As for the mystery box under the rug, I’m not interested in a military conspiracy so this is a no-go for me. But might there be a small box of something else his brother kept in his closet? Something more personal? Again, the AI is making me think of other potential story beats, which is all it needs to achieve success.

And this is where I want to make the big distinction with AI. It’s not good at writing stories. It’s okay at writing cliched ‘seen it before’ scenarios. But you don’t want to trust it to write scenes for you. However, it can be great at getting you thinking about your stories in ways you weren’t expecting. Which is why it’s the perfect tool for writer’s block.

So, the next time you come to me and say, “I can’t finish my script in time for Mega Showdown, Carson. I can’t figure it out.” You’re not going to get any sympathy from me. I just gave you the tool that eliminates the writer’s block excuse. Now get back to writing!

Genre: Sci-Fi
Premise: The United States is in a race with China to become the first country to time travel. When an older pilot cheats his way onto the program, he positions himself to be the first ever time traveler.
About: Being pitched as “Interstellar meets Top Gun,” short story “The Barrier” became a hot package when rising star Austin Butler became attached. Winner of the package? 20th Century Fox, who knows themselves some sci-fi. Writer MacMillan Hedges has been reviewed on the site before with another time-travel script. This man loves himself some time-jumping!
Writer: MacMillan Hedges
Details: About 4000 words

There was some reluctance to check this one out because I’d read the writer’s previous time travel story, a screenplay, and let’s just say I thought there was too much going on.

But Carson, don’t you ALWAYS think there’s too much going on in screenplays? You know what? That very well may be the case. But it’s a valid argument because most of the time, THERE IS TOO MUCH GOING ON.

Screenplays, and short stories, need to have focused stories to truly take advantage of their mediums. And writers just jam too much shit into them. Or, even if they don’t have a lot of shit, they twist and turn the simple stuff they do have in ways that are unnecessarily confusing.

When you combine that issue with the nuclear shitshow that a lazily written time travel story can create, you’re asking for trouble, brother. Time travel movies are HARD TO WRITE.

I’m not saying don’t write them. Deep down in my heart I love time travel as a story device. But it’s hard to get right. So if you’re going to write a time travel story, you have to give 100%. Not 95%. Not 97%. Not even 99%. Cause that extra 1% is the difference between time travel plot holes and no time travel plot holes.

As for today’s story… I’ll say this. For 75% of the story, I had no idea where it was going. Then, out of nowhere, the main character’s purpose arrives and I said, “Oh, okay, that’s actually a story. Why didn’t we make that clear earlier?”

Confused? Let me break down the plot for you.

The Chinese have accidentally discovered time travel during a drone test. This freaks the U.S. military out. If China can develop a reliable Time Machine and send people back in time, they could erase the U.S.

So the U.S. puts all of its resources into making it to the time travel finish line first. The rules are this: Since it requires so much energy, they’re only going to be able to send one person. Pilot Karl Herseht is determined to be that guy. So he goes up against all these other dudes.

A key stage in the hiring process is the psychological evaluation. They put you through a lie detector test specifically to see if you have any past traumatic experiences. We don’t really understand why yet, but they really want to know if someone in your past died.

Here’s where things get a little complicated so stay with me. Karl is pretending to be someone else. How he’s able to trick the U.S. military into thinking he’s another person isn’t convincingly explained. But we realize later on why it needs to happen for the plot.

Karl does the old trick of jamming a nail in your foot to defeat the lie detector. He pretends he’s someone else so they don’t know about his secret past trauma – that Karl’s son drowned in their pool. When it happened, his wife was so devastated, she simply ran away.

When Karl wins the job, he goes through the training and then preps to be placed in some supersonic jet thing that will be dropped from the edge of space and then speed towards the earth fast enough that it will eventually create a time portal. And then he’ll eject and parachute to the ocean.

(Spoilers) Right before launch, the military discovers who Karl is and tries to stop him but he goes anyway. Once back in time, he runs over to his home from 20 years ago and rigs up his son to have a secret breathable mask underwater because Past Karl has to believe that his son dies so that Future Karl will come back to this time and save his son. After he and Past Wife “save” the son, they run away together.

I mean… there’s a lot to get into here if we want to.

We could start with the fact that the U.S. spent every single resource they had to create a Time Machine yet was unable to properly ID a member of their own military. There are some plot holes audiences will overlook. I’d be surprised if they’d look the other way on that one.

But let’s say we can get past that. Does the story work?

The problem I have with The Barrier is that it doesn’t show its hand until too late in the game. This means we’re stuck trying to figure out what’s going on the whole story. This can be a purposeful storytelling device, where you, the writer, are dangling the carrot for the reader way off in the distance. But you have to be careful. If the carrot is too far away, to the point where we can’t make out what it is, we can become disinterested or frustrated.

I began to get frustrated. The short story had these fun little moments where we’d see transcripts from news shows and podcasts, with famous people talking about the event. But while all of that was fun, I kept saying, “What is this about??” I kept waiting for a story to emerge.

Sure, I knew we were trying to win the time travel race, but I wasn’t sure why. There was this vague threat that if China beat us to the punch, they could erase us. But not long after that threat was mentioned, it evaporated, and then, out of nowhere, we were in a time travel race with India??

Why the messiness? You want your story to be cohesive. You want all the parts to come together harmoniously. It felt like new parts of the story were being added all the time without thought.

Such as: where we were even going when we traveled in time? It was determined by the U.S. military that they wanted to go back and stop the Iraq War. So they were sending Karl back to the year 2002.

Why was this even in the story?? It’s a setup that’s never paid off. Clearly, it was just put there because that was the approximate time the author needed to send the main character to to save his son. If you’re the U.S. military creating time travel, your first goal wouldn’t be to stop a war. It would be to – you know – TIME TRAVEL! Let’s figure that out first and we’ll move on to the war stuff later. It’d be like trying to win the race to the moon and, hey, while we’re up there, let’s build a lunar skyscraper.

It was weird choices like that that gave the story an unsophisticated polish. And time travel needs to be as polished as it gets. There can’t be any rough edges as those edges always feel 10x as sloppy as they do in normal stories.

Much like the last sci-fi short story that sold, I sense that this sold because of the concept/pitch. That one was about the first human alien hostage exchange. This one was about the time-travel race, an update to the space race. That’s a good pitch. Good pitches/concepts put blinders on producers which is why I constantly drill it into your head how important they are. Good concepts don’t require great writing to sell sometimes.

With that said, once you come up with the concept, you have to execute it. And with these short stories, they’re limiting in the way you can explore big ideas. We’re talking about one of the biggest ideas ever here – a time-travel race. Can you really explore that in 20 pages? That’s where this story gets derailed. It’s the biggest story ever for 15 pages and then it’s the smallest story ever (save son from drowning) for 5 pages.

I don’t know, guys. I don’t think any screenwriters have a handle on this short story thing. They’re all just winging it. The one excellent short story sale that I’ve read so far, Big Bad, is a small story that takes place in a small town with a condensed time frame. It’s a perfect setup for a short story. And it still had marketable content as it was about werewolves. But I have to concede that writers like MacMillan have a better feel for how to exploit this market, since they’re the ones selling these things.

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

What I learned: The short story revolution has come upon us for a very specific reason. Back in the day, spec scripts with giant concepts were the biggest currency in town. However, 99% of those scripts had a concept and nothing else. So after a bunch of them bombed, Hollywood stopped buying them, which was a big reason for the fall of the spec sale.  Nobody thought we’d ever be able to con Hollywood with our big concepts and weak execution again.  Enter the short story.  The short story is actually BETTER at the shoddy execution delivery than the spec script because the stories are so short, you have a built in excuse as to why you can’t pull them off.  The buyers all understand this limitation so they don’t penalize you for it.  What does this mean for you, the aspiring screenwriter? It means write short stories with giant concepts. They are your best shot at selling something for a lot of money right now. Now, if you can write one of these big concepts AND ALSO MAKE IT GOOD you will literally control Hollywood for an entire week as the town desperately attempts to buy your script. It hasn’t happened yet. Which means one of you could be the first. Short Story Showdown is happening later this year. :)