Genre: Horror/Religious
Premise: An inexperienced priest and a charismatic possessed woman form a dark and dangerous bond while on the run from sinister forces within the Catholic Church.
About: This writer has been writing for over a decade. He had some scripts on the Blood List all the way back in 2012 if memory serves correctly. And he wrote one of the more underrated horror/thriller films of the last five years, “The Night House.” This script finished with 9 votes on last year’s Black List.
Writer: Luke Piotrowski
Details: 110 pages

I’m kinda in a religious horror mood because I’m seriously considering watching the Sydney Sweeney religious horror film, Immaculate, this weekend. That one has an interesting development story behind it. Sweeney read the original script all the way back when she was 15! She tried to set it up to star in it but never had the cache.

Once she hit it big, she phoned the screenwriter and asked him if she could buy the script from him. Of course he said yes and then Sweeney recruited her Voyeurs director to direct it.

From everything I’ve heard, the movie is just okay. But it’s supposed to have the ENDING OF ALL ENDINGS. The question then becomes, do I want to go to a movie just for the last three minutes of a film? Normally, the answer would be no. But this is Sydney Sweeney, which makes the answer more difficult.

We’ll have to see. But in the meantime, I’ve got another religious horror script for you, Blasphemous. Ironically, it has a role that could’ve also worked for Sweeney.

When we meet 50-something priest Alan Villars and 30-something priest Ed Kerrigan, they’re picking up a strange woman in a cult compound. There’s a lot of eeriness surrounding their late-night arrival and the compound members who are eager to get rid of this woman.

Villars and Kerrigan throw her in the back of a U-Haul trailer and drive off. They’re taking her to an arch diocese. Although details are sparse in the early-going, we get the impression that she’s possessed.

They don’t get far before they hit a giant bull that happens to be in the middle of the road, crashing their car and trailer. Both of them are fine but when they come out, they see a man in a pickup approaching. The man stops and tells them he’ll help them get their car set back on its wheels but they keep telling him no thanks.

The man gets suspicious, starts poking around, and that’s when the girl, whose name we learn is Paula Jean, starts calling for help from inside the trailer. The man runs to his truck and pulls out a gun but not before Villars shoots him. During the chaos, Paula Jean escapes the trailer and runs into the forest.

Kerrigan runs after her, following her to a gas station food store. Paula Jean puts her hand up and says she’ll gladly go wherever Kerrigan wants to take her. But just not with that Villars guy. There’s something off about him. Kerrigan reluctantly agrees and the two steal the cashier’s car and head off on the rest of the trip.

Villars later catches up to the gas station, where he proves Paula Jean’s suspicions about him correct. Villars shoots the cashier dead. You see, this thing that’s going on with Paula Jean is so top-secret, nobody can know about it. That’s why anyone who sees her must be eliminated. But what is Paula Jean’s deal? Is she just a woman possessed? Or is she much more?

One of the most challenging lessons I ever learned in screenwriting is the concept of my script “feeling written.” You’re reading the script and it doesn’t feel like what’s happening is really happening. Instead, you can feel the screenwriter working it out and forcing his thoughts into the script in a way that comes off as artificial. That’s how Paula Jean felt in this script.

I wish there was a clearer way to explain it because it’s something that every screenwriter has to learn at some point. But I’ll tell you the moment in this script where it became “written” to me.

Paula Jean has cornered Kerrigan in the gas station store and after making him promise that he won’t team up with Villars again, she wants to “seal” the promise with a kiss. So she goes in for the kiss, moves her mouth to his earlobe instead, then BITES OFF his earlobe. THEN she kisses him, pushing his earlobe into his mouth, and then after the kiss is over, telling him he now has to swallow it.

I don’t know about you. But that just feels highly artificial to me. It doesn’t feel natural to the moment at all. It’s a writer who’s deliberately thinking, “How do I write something SHOCKING here?”

To make these moments work, you have to do a ton of backstory work to figure out exactly who this person is. Those details would then creep into each scene and then when the character needed to do something big and shocking, it would be a payoff to all those little things that were set up earlier. It can’t just be, “EARLOBE BITING TIME CAUSE EARLOBE BITING TIME IS SHOCKING!”

I know this isn’t the best example but even if you had Paula Jean mention her love of Mike Tyson in two earlier scenes, NOW having her bite someone’s earlobe off makes so much more sense.

That’s a microcosm of my bigger issue I had with the screenplay. Which is that I don’t get the sense that the writer truly understands the world he’s writing about. I think he SORT OF understands it. But when you only “sort of” understand your world, the execution of your story only “sort of” works.

I look back to the gold standard of “EFFED UP SH*T” in Silence of the Lambs, and I remember reading the amount of research author Thomas Harris did on serial killers to ensure that both Hannibal and Buffalo Bill came off as authentic. As I read Blasphemous, I felt like the writer had done maybe 1/5th of that work.

With that said, the script has an undeniable momentum to it. It takes place in, virtually, real time. And it’s always propelling forward. That’s the nice thing about a story on wheels, is that it naturally feels like it’s going somewhere.

Never is this more apparent than right after you’ve read a script that stays in place, which I just had. I read a script about a group of people in a small town and it just SAT THERE. It had no momentum whatsoever.

If you can get your story on wheels AND add some urgency to it, which this does, you’re cooking with gas. It’s very easy to keep the reader invested.

I’m just not sure I was ever onboard with these characters. Paula Jean is supposed to be this captivating mystery of a character. Yet I saw her as more of an artificially constructed vessel for the writer to bang out a series of shocking moments, or say a series of shocking things. I suppose that’s what we’re all doing as writers to a certain extent. You’re constructing characters to affect the reader. But you have to do it invisibly. Organically. And Paula Jean was anything but.

Curious what others thought of this one as I get the impression mileage may vary.

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

What I learned: I believe that it’s very difficult to make a scary character who TALKS A LOT. It can be done, of course. But most of the characters we fear in horror films don’t say a whole lot, if anything at all. Michael Myers comes to mind. It’s the mystery of what’s going on in their heads, the things we’ll never know, that make them so scary. The longer this movie went on, the more Paula Jean spoke, and the less I became scared of her.

A reminder THIS THURSDAY to get your Logline Showdown entries in. Winner gets a script review the following Friday. The theme this month is “Movie Crossover.” That means that, in addition to sending your logline, you send in the movie crossover that best represents your script (i.e. “Aliens meets The Equalizer”).

If that isn’t incentive enough, guess what! We’re going to add a SIXTH entry (to the traditional five), regardless of how good or bad the logline is, for whoever has the best movie crossover pitch. So make sure your movie crossover pitch is amazing!

Here are the deets on how to enter!

What: Movie-Crossover Showdown

I need your: Title, Genre, Logline, and Movie Crossover Pitch
Competition Date: Friday, March 22nd
Deadline: Thursday, March 21st, 10pm Pacific Time
Where: Send your submissions to carsonreeves3@gmail.com

Moving on to the world of entertainment, let’s discuss some box office.

It’s always tough to get excited when an animated film (Kung Fu Panda 4) tops the box office. It’s like, “yaaaayyyyy! Kids movieeeee!” Not that there’s anything wrong with it. But it’s kinda lame when it’s the third sequel from a second rate animation franchise. Cause it’s not even like you can celebrate a cool movie. You’re celebrating a tired franchise.

I would much rather celebrate the animated film trailer that dropped a week ago, which was so good, I was on the brink of crying. It reminded me that music and imagery are the powerful forces that bring our writing to life. And that, when all three are done well, the effect is magical. Watch this trailer and tell me you don’t get the feels welling up inside.

Sign me up! It’s like Wall-E meets ET meets… Bambi?

I sat there for a while and wondered how this trailer had such an effect on me, especially because it’s become harder and harder for writers and filmmakers to affect me emotionally, only because I can see behind the illusion.  I can see the Matrix code. 

One of the hardest things to do as a writer is to keep the code hidden, to move your story along invisibly. It’s a little easier to do in a trailer because you don’t have to show any plot. Plotting is where the gears are most visible.

Trailers are funny that way. Some of the best trailers I’ve ever seen have been terrible movies because they didn’t have to tell any of their crappy story in the trailer. Cloud Atlas is the best example of this. God, I loved that trailer.

So I hope that doesn’t happen with The Wild Robot. I pray it’s more Wall-E than Hotel Transylvania.

Outside of that, I continue to be fascinated by the TV landscape and its desperate attempts to find a new zeitgeist product.

Netflix is going to finally hit us with Benioff And Weiss’ new show, The 3 Body Problem. It’s looking bad for the Game of the Thrones duo. I’m predicting disaster for this one. This is not a new take. I said it was going to be a disaster the second they bought it.

Why?

Cause nobody likes weird inconsistent sloppy mythology. Which is what this book has always been. It’s based in bizarro world Chinese mythology that nobody outside of that country understands. I don’t know why anyone would hitch their wagon to it.

And the trailers have just been AWFUL. They took what was already cheap and cheapified it with cheapy special effects. The only chance this thing had at working was it it felt real and authentic. But every shot looks computer-generated so… they dug their grave. Now they gotta lie in it.

The rest of the recent TV shows haven’t been much better. Shogun seems to be getting universal praise. And it does have amazing production value. But building a show that has to navigate three different languages (Japanese, Portuguese, English) probably wasn’t the best idea in retrospect. I suspect that the audience will dwindle for this film as its subject matter is so sophisticated and requires so much concentration that it’ll become more work than entertainment. Which is the death knell for any piece of writing.

Peacock is trying to create its own White Lotus in “Apples Never Fall.” They even got the actor from the first White Lotus to lead the series! But poor Peacock. They’re still living in 1984. They don’t know how to make a show like this.

HBO’s big new swing, The Regime, with Kate Winslet, looks like a miss. By the way, Kate has to stop complaining about Hollywood whenever she does press for these shows. You want to get people excited to see your show. Not be a big fat downer.

Netflix’s huge gamble on The Last Airbender didn’t work. Hulu’s version of Knives Out, Death and Other Details, isn’t working.

One show I did start watching that I thought was pretty good was Constellation, on Apple TV. If you haven’t seen it, at least check out the pilot. It’s got a crazy opening set piece on the International Space Station. Still, even that show isn’t getting great reviews, which tells me the pilot may be the highlight.

Mr. And Mrs. Smith had a week where it was hot news. And it has great reviews. But audiences don’t seem to agree with the critics (90% to 66%). It’s hard for me to take anything Donald Glover does seriously but I should probably still check this out.

This leaves us with only one TV show left. It is a show that has been so under-the-radar, you haven’t heard about it until now. But I promise you it’s worth discovering. It’s a Korean show called Chicken Nugget. And it’s about a guy’s girlfriend who turns into a Chicken Nugget.

I know that I’ve tapped out my rating system at “genius,” but I may have to add a new designation just for this show: “Super Extraordinary.” I’ve heard of high concept. But this almost invents a new type of concept. It’s as if the Gods all got together and came up with the best TV show idea possible. I will be watching this 682 times this year. Which should take care of my TV needs for the foreseeable future.  See, I knew I’d find a show.

May we all, one day, come up with an idea as good as “Chicken Nugget.”

An excerpt from my upcoming book, “Scriptshadow’s 250 Dialogue Tips”

It has been promised. But as of yet, it hasn’t been delivered.

Over the next month, I’ll be including excerpts from my upcoming dialogue book, which I’m planning on releasing a month from now. Here is the introduction to the book. The world of screenwriting is about to change forever.

What you’re about to read is the introduction to the book…

Not long after I started my website, Scriptshadow, a site dedicated to analyzing amateur and professional screenplays, I was hired by an amateur writer to consult on a script he had written. The writer had completed a couple of screenplays already and was excited about his most recent effort, a crime-drama (“with a hint of comedy”) he felt was the perfect showcase for his evolving skills. Although I won’t reveal the actual script for privacy reasons, we’ll refer to this screenplay as, “Highs and Lows,” and we’ll call the writer, “Gabe.”

Highs and Lows was about a guy obsessed with a rare street drug and, to this day, it is one of the worst screenplays I have ever read in my life. We’re talking 147 pages of unintelligible nonsense, a script so aggressively lousy, I considered submitting it to the CIA as a low-budget alternative to waterboarding.

After I put together the notes on Highs and Lows, I spent a good portion of the day debating whether I should call Gabe and aggressively suggest he pursue a different career path. I’d never done such a thing before. But, in my heart, I knew that if this man pursued this craft, he may very well end up wasting a decade of his life. If it wasn’t for my girlfriend ripping the phone out of my hand and telling me there was no way I was going to destroy this writer’s dreams, I would’ve made the call. Instead, I sent him his notes, detailing, as best I could, what needed to be improved and how to do so, and moved on.

Cut to five years later and I was contacted by a different gentleman (we’ll call him “Randy”) for another consultation. In stark contrast to Gabe’s script, I experienced what every reader prays for when they open a screenplay, which is a great easy-to-read story with awesome characters. But it was the dialogue that stood out. Randy wasn’t ready to challenge Tarantino just yet but the conversations between his characters were always clever, always engaging, and always fun.

I sent his script out to a few producers and one of them ended up hiring him for a job. He wrote back, thanked me, and mused that he’d come a long way since our first consultation. “First consultation?” I said to myself. “What is this guy talking about?” I looked back through my e-mails to see if we had corresponded before and nothing came up. But then I dug deeper and discovered that I *had* worked with Randy before. Under a different e-mail address.

The owner of that e-mail?

Gabe. Which was a pen name he had used at the time.

This was not possible. Randy wrote with confidence. Gabe wrote like he’d accidentally fallen asleep on his keyboard. I went back and re-checked, checked again, checked some more, only to return to the same baffling conclusion. This page-turning Tour de Force was written by the same writer who had written one of the worst screenplays I’d ever read!

After my denial wore off, I got in touch with Gabe and asked him the question that had been eating at me ever since I confirmed his identity: “What in the world did you do differently this time around?” I especially wanted to know how his dialogue had skyrocketed from a 1 out of 10 to an 8 out of 10. His answer is something I’ll share with you later in the book, as it’s one of the most important tips you’ll ever learn about dialogue.

But for now, I want to emphasize the lesson Gabe’s dramatic improvement taught me, something I remind myself whenever I read a not-so-good screenplay: You are always capable of improving as a screenwriter. If Gabe could go from worst to first, so can you.

Which is why I want to share with you one of the biggest lies you’ll encounter when you begin your screenwriting journey. I heard it a bunch when I first started screenwriting and I still hear it today: “You either have an ear for dialogue or you don’t.” This faulty statement, which you’ll hear mostly from snobby agents, jaded executives, and impatient producers, is dead wrong.

Writing good dialogue can be learned.

Let me repeat that:

Writing good dialogue can be learned.

To be fair, doing so is challenging. More so than any other aspect of the craft. Aaron Sorkin, who many believe to be the best dialogue writer working today, admits as much. In an interview with Jeff Goldsmith promoting his film, The Social Network, Sorkin confessed that while storytelling and plotting are built on a technical foundation, making them easy to teach, writing dialogue is more of an instinctual thing, and therefore hard to break down into teachable steps.

Indeed, dialogue contains elements of spontaneity, cleverness, charm, gravitas, intelligence, purpose, playfulness, personality, and, of course, a sense of humor. This varied concoction of ingredients does not come in the form of an official recipe, leaving writers unable to identify how much of each is required to write “the perfect dialogue.” Which has led many screenwriting teachers to throw up their hands in surrender and label dialogue, “unteachable,” which is why there hasn’t been a single good dialogue book ever written.

When screenwriting teachers do broach the topic of dialogue, they teach the version of it that’s easiest on them, which amounts to telling you all the things you’re NOT supposed to do. My favorite of these is: “Show don’t tell.” Show us that Joey is a ladies’ man. Don’t have him tell us that he’s a ladies’ man.

“Show don’t tell” is actually good screenwriting advice but why do you think screenwriting teachers are so eager to teach it? Because it means they don’t have to teach dialogue! If you’re showing something, you’re not writing any conversations.

Or they’ll say, “Avoid on-the-nose dialogue.” Again, not bad advice. But how does that help you write the dialogue that stumbles out of the mouth of Jack Sparrow? Or sashays out of the mouth of Mia Wallace? In order to write good dialogue, you need to teach people what *to* do, not what *not to* do.

If you ever want to test whether a self-professed screenwriting teacher understands dialogue, ask them what their best dialogue tip is. If they say, “go to a coffee shop and listen to how people talk,” run as far away from that teacher as possible because I can promise you they know nothing about dialogue. If someone is giving you a tip where there’s nothing within the tip itself that teaches you anything, they’re a charlatan.

What the heck is good dialogue anyway?

Good dialogue is conversation that moves the scene, and by association the plot, forward in an entertaining fashion. “Entertaining” can be defined in a number of ways. It could mean the dialogue is humorous, clever, tension-filled, suspenseful, thought-provoking, dramatic, or a number of other things. But it does need those two primary ingredients.

• It needs to push the scene forward in a purposeful way.
• It needs to entertain.

What prevents writers from writing good dialogue? That answer could be a book unto itself but in my experience, having read over 10,000 screenplays, the primary mistake I’ve found that writers make is they think too logically.

When they have characters speak to one another, they construct those characters’ responses in a way that keeps the train moving and nothing more. They get that first part right – the “move the story forward” part – but they forget about the “entertain” part. Don’t worry, I’ve got over a hundred tips in this book that will help you write more entertaining dialogue.

Yet another aspect missing from a lot of the dialogue I read is naturalism – the ability to capture what people really sound like when they speak to each other. You are trying to capture things like awkwardness, tangents, authenticity, words not coming out quite right. You’re trying to mimic all that to such a degree that the characters sound like living breathing people.

And yet, while being true-to-life, you’re also attempting to heighten your dialogue. You’re trying to make every reply clever. You’re trying to nail that zinger. You’re giving your hero the perfect line at the perfect moment. How does one combine realism with “heightened-ism?” That’s one of the many paradoxes of dialogue.

So I understand, intellectually, why so many teachers are terrified of dialogue. The act of writing movie conversation is so intricate and nuanced that the easy thing to do is leave it up to chance and tell writers that they either have an ear for it or they don’t (or to go to a local coffee shop and “listen to people talk”).

But dialogue is like any skill. It can be learned. It can be improved. And I dedicated years of my life looking through millions of lines of dialogue, ranging from the worst to the best, to find that code. And I believe I’ve found it. By the end of this book, you’ll have found it as well.

It won’t be easy. This is stuff you’ll have to practice to get good at. But, once you do, your dialogue will be better than any aspiring writer who hasn’t read this book. That much I can promise you.

So let’s not waste any more time. I’m going to give you 250 dialogue tips and I’m going to start with the two biggest of those tips right off the bat. If all you ever do for your screenwriting is incorporate these two tips, your dialogue will be, at the very least, solid. Are you ready? Here we go.

TIP 1 – Create dialogue-friendly characters – Dialogue-friendly characters are characters who generally talk a lot. They are naturally funny or tend to say interesting things, are quirky or strange or offbeat or manic or see the world differently than the average human being. The Joker in The Dark Knight is a dialogue-friendly character. Saul Goodman in Breaking Bad is a dialogue-friendly character. Deadpool is. Juno is. It’s hard to write good dialogue without characters who like to talk.

TIP 2 – Create dialogue-rich scenarios – Dialogue is like a plant. It needs sunshine to grow. If every one of your scenes is kept in the shade, good luck sprouting great dialogue. A scene where a young woman introduces her boyfriend to her accepting parents is never going to yield good dialogue. There’s zero conflict and, therefore, little chance for an interesting conversation. A scene where a young woman introduces her boyfriend to her highly judgmental parents who think their daughter is too good for him? Now you’ve got a dialogue-rich scenario!

I need you to internalize the above two tips because they will be responsible for the bulk of your dialogue success. Try to have at least one dialogue-friendly character in a key role (two or three is even better). Then, whenever you write a scene, ask yourself if you’re creating a scene where good dialogue can grow.

Don’t worry if these two things are confusing right now. We’re going to get into a lot more detail about how to find these dialogue-friendly characters and how to create these dialogue-rich scenarios.

A pattern you’ll notice throughout this book is that good dialogue comes from good preparation. The decisions you make before you write your dialogue are often going to be just as influential as the ones you make while writing your dialogue.

There’s more to come next week! If you want to hire me to take a look at your script and help you with your dialogue (or anything else), I will give you $100 off a set of feature or pilot notes.  Just mention this post.  You can e-mail me at carsonreeves1@gmail.com

Today I share with you the single best way to write a great ending to your script. And barely anybody knows it.

Genre: Rom-Com (Friend-Com)
Premise: When her best friend since childhood falls in love and starts spending all her time with her new boyfriend, a selfish codependent career woman will do anything to get her back.
About: This script finished fairly high on last year’s Black List. The writer, Gaelyn Golde, has one produced credit for an episode of the animated TV show, Praise Petey.
Writer: Gaelyn Golde
Details: 98 pages

Alison Brie for Bridget (since Sydney Sweeney is too young to play the part)?

I’m going to take you into the mind of someone who has to read a lot of scripts for a second.

Most people in this town – at least the ones who matter – are super busy.

They’ve got calls to make. They’ve got e-mails to return. They have meetings they have to go to that they don’t want to be in. And they probably have 3 or 4 fires they have to put out that day.

That speaks nothing to their personal lives, which also take up a lot of time, especially if they’re married with kids.

These people have a pile of scripts to read.

When that is the case, the script they will most commonly seek out is the one that’s under 100 pages with a simple concept. Why? Because they know the read isn’t going to take up their entire night. They know they’re going to be able to get through it easily.

You know how I know this? Cause it’s how I picked today’s script. I was running around town all day, having to do a bunch of things. And by the time I was able to sit down and work on today’s post, it was 8pm.

Do you think I’m going to open the equivalent of Dune: Messiah under those circumstances? A 145 page tome of a gigantic universe with a million characters and a ton of mythology to learn before I can accurately understand what’s going on in the story? No way.

I’m going to pick the script that I know is going to go down easy.

Don’t worry. I’m not saying you can never write your version of Dune. I’m only saying, these variables factor into how people choose to read scripts.

Okay, let’s rock!

Bridget is in her 30s, lives in New York, and works at a publishing house. Uh oh. Uhhhhhh ohhhhhh. Did I just summarize the single biggest movie character cliche in history? Not a good start!

Bridget is best friends with Rae, whom she’s known since they’ve been in diapers. The two are so inseparable, they even have a rule whereby they have to kick guys to the curb after having sex with them three times. That way they don’t get attached.

But Bridget is noticing that Rae’s latest guy, Hank, has been over at the apartment, err, MORE THAN THREE TIMES. She shrugs it off, uses some denial logic, and continues to spend every waking second with her best friend. That is until she goes to the bathroom one morning and HANK IS TAKING A SHOWER!

Taking a shower is NEVER allowed, which is how Bridget knows this is serious. She attempts to talk some logic to her friend but that’s when Rae hits her with a terrifying truth-bomb. She LIKES Hank. This liking thing has never happened before so it’s the equivalent of an atom bomb going on inside Bridget’s diaphragm.

As Rae starts spending more and more time with Hank, Bridget is forced to find her own friends, a couple of co-workers at the publishing house, player Adam and defiant lesbian Monica. But they’re not really Bridget’s friends, as she uses them as chess pieces to try and make Rae jealous so she’ll understand how she feels and dump Hank.

Predictably, that doesn’t work. Rae only ends up liking Hank more, which means she spends less time with Bridget. In a last desperate attempt, Bridget destroys everything about Hank in front of Rae, hoping she’ll realize Hank can’t give her what Bridget can. When that doesn’t work, Bridget must face reality: that her best friend is gone for good. But can she grow enough to figure out a way to live in a world without her life muse?

Today, I want to talk about the power of 3.

It took me a long time as a writer to figure out the power of 3. In fact, I don’t think I truly understood its power until I started reading tons of scripts.

When I wrote, I focused very heavily on binary conversations. Character 1 talks to Character 2. Character 2 talks back. Then Character 1 speaks again.

I did that because it was easy.

But one of the themes of this review is that: If it’s easy, it’s probably the wrong thing to do.

We see the value of that here when Hank enters the equation. When it was just Bridget and Rae, sure, they had a fun back-and-forth. They said some funny things. But their interactions became infinitely more interesting when Hank entered the equation.

Why?

Because Hank forces the characters TO THINK WHEN THEY SPEAK. And when you have to start thinking, that’s when conversation gets fun.

Just today I was at a lunch with a friend and we were talking about some fairly risqué subject matter when the waiter showed up. He took the plates away and cleaned the table for way too long and, the whole time he was there, our conversation changed. We had to avoid what we wanted to talk about, which is how you create subtext. That’s a huge benefit that comes from the power of 3.

Now, the trick to get the most out of this is to make the third character as intense a force of conflict as possible. That’s why Hank’s arrival into the story is so fun. He is literally a wall in this friendship. He is preventing it from thriving. So, whenever he’s around, we feel that tension.

Therefore, whenever you yourself can add a third character to one of your scenes, do it. Watch how the scene comes alive in a way that it never could have with just two people.

Another thing that caught my eye here was the ending. I’m going to spoil this so feel free to skip to the What I Learned. This ending had the opportunity to be very good but it dropped the ball. Bridget and Rae hadn’t talked for a week after their big fight. So then Bridget runs into Hank on the street. Hank tells her that Rae dumped him.

Now, this might seem like an innocuous plot beat to the seasoned moviegoer. A moment like this always happens. But what you have to understand is that, THIS MOMENT IS THE ENTIRE MOVIE. This is where the movie either WORKS or DOESN’T WORK. It’s where your hero must make their final ULTIMATE CHOICE.

The whole movie, Bridget has wanted her best friend back. She’s wanted Hank out of the picture. What screenwriter Golde did was perfect. She gave Bridget a REALLY REALLY HARD CHOICE. Most writers screw this up. They give their hero a choice that *seems* hard but that we all know is easy. In this case, the choice is actually hard.

Bridget can do what she wants – finally have her friend back. Or do what’s right – help Hank get Rae back.

But for some reason, Golde didn’t seem to realize that this moment is the entire movie! It’s her protagonist being confronted with succumbing to her flaw or changing. And Golde rushes through it. Bridget doesn’t think twice. “Let’s go get Rae back!” No! This moment needs to breathe. You need to milk this moment as a writer. Again, THIS IS THE WHOLE MOVIE. For everyone writing screenplays, this is often the most important moment in your script. So don’t rush it. And Golde rushed it.

The final thing I want to say about this script is that it does something I see a lot of rom-com writers do. Which is, they write the “run through the airport” climax but they do so in a slightly different way so as to convince themselves (and the audience) that they’re not actually being cliche.

So, here, both Hank and Bridget run to the airport together to stop Rae from getting on the plane. First, Hank stops her and they have a moment. But then Rae spots Bridget and runs over and talks to her.

So, technically, is it different from your typical rom-com airport ending? Yeah, a little bit. The fact that the guy stopping her wasn’t the big focus, but rather the scene with the best friend AFTER that was the big focus. Yeah, you can convince yourself of that as a writer.

But dude come on. Do you want to write something that’s a little different or do you want to exercise some actual creative muscles and try something new? This is your ending. This is what you’re leaving your audience with. If 95% of it is familiar and only 5% is original, how do you think audiences are going to remember that moment? The barely original part or the mostly cliche part?

I’ll give you the solution to this problem in the What I Learned section in a second.

I thought that, for the most part, this script was solid. It didn’t blow me away. But the dialogue was fun and I found the character of Bridget compelling enough that I wanted to see where she ended up. For that reason, this gets a ‘worth the read,’ but it’s one of those hanging-by-a-thread ‘worth the reads.’ Like, if there was a 2.9 magnitude earthquake before I finished this review, it would fall down to a ‘wasn’t for me.’ So, I’ll wrap this up before that can happen! :)

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

What I learned: How do you avoid ‘run to the airport’ endings in romantic comedies? The way you do this is to LEAN INTO YOUR CONCEPT. What’s unique about your concept? That will give you your ending. Look at one of the greatest rom-coms of all time: Notting Hill. In that movie, Anna (Julia Roberts) is a movie star. All she DOES is fly around the world. There would’ve been no easier ending for writer Richard Curtis than to write a cliched ‘run to the airport’ ending. But because Curtis always pushes himself creatively, he leaned into his concept to find his ending. Anna is a movie star. What does a movie star do? A movie star does a lot of press junkets. So that’s the final scene. Anna is speaking in front of the British press about her latest movie and William is forced to get her back imitating one of the reporters and asking her questions in front of everyone. It’s very clever. And it shows you what the possibilities are if you push past the obvious.

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