We’re getting close.

Next week is Scene Showdown!

What: Scene Showdown
Rules: Scene must be 5 pages or less
When: Friday, March 28
Deadline: Thursday, March 27, 10pm Pacific Time
Submit: Script title, Genre, 50 words setting up the scene (optional), pdf of the scene
Where: carsonreeves3@gmail.com

So I wanted to give you one last article to beef up your scene-writing skills. And the concept we’re going to tackle today is something called “The Scene Soundboard.”

I’m going to be upfront with you—I’m not an expert on soundboards by any stretch. However, I do understand that audio engineers work with these giant mixing boards packed with sliders, knobs, and controls. By adjusting specific faders or tweaking certain dials, they can manipulate the audio output.

The same thing is true with scene writing. You have these knobs. And you can either dial them up or dial them down and, by doing so, you change the intensity of the scene.

In order to understand how to do this, you must first understand how 90% of scenes are constructed. You have a character who wants something in the scene then you have a character who stands in the way of them getting it.

That person may actively not want to give it to them, or they may just obliviously be in the way. For example, on the former, a husband may want to hang out with his buddies tonight. Meanwhile, his wife wants him to come to her boss’s dinner party. The hubby’s goal is to hang out with his friends and his wife is actively trying to prevent that.

As for the latter, imagine a bank robber scoping out a bank for weaknesses (his goal) that he wants to rob later. There may be a bank manager who strolls up and starts annoyingly asking him if he wants to open an account at the bank. The manager doesn’t know this guy is casing the joint, yet he’s still in the way of our bank robber achieving his goal.

By the way, note how each situation changes the dialogue. In the first, the conversation is straightforward. The married couple is *literally* debating whether he should get to hang out with his friends. The conflict in the second conversation, meanwhile, is happening below the surface. Neither character is talking about what the protagonist actually wants to do, which means much of the focus of the scene is being conveyed through subtext.

But anyway, that’s not what today’s article is about.

Today’s article is about understanding how to amp up any scene with basic scene structure (a person who wants something and a person who stands in the way). Getting back to our original analogy, I want you to imagine this giant mixing board. On that board are these KNOBS. You can dial these knobs up a little, a medium amount, or a lot, depending on how much you want to juice up the scene.

These four knobs are…

Stakes
Resistance
Urgency
Emotion

The number one way to amp up a scene is, without question, stakes. The more that’s on the line in the scene, the more compelling the scene is going to be. It’s simple math.

Let’s say we have a character who’s going to steal something. Remember that Netflix movie, Emily the Criminal? Let’s say Emily has to steal a random guy’s wallet for her new boss. We have our goal (steal the wallet) and we have our stakes (she’s doing something illegal, which is dangerous, and the mark could potentially catch her in the act, creating a problematic situation).

But let’s say we get on our Screenplay Soundboard and dial up the stakes knob. Instead of having her try and steal a guy’s wallet, she tries to steal… A CAR. Now we’ve got some REAL consequences. Grand theft auto is no joke. And guess what? That’s the scene they went with in the movie and it ended up being the best scene. Coincidence? I don’t think so. That’s the power of dialing up the stakes knob.

Next, let’s look at resistance. Resistance is simply upping the knob that has the opposing character in the scene getting in the way of our hero achieving his goal. The more you turn this knob up, the more intense the interaction gets, which creates more conflict.

Let me use one of my favorite scenes ever as an example – Jerry Lundegaard meeting with the two criminals he’s hiring to kidnap his wife in the film, Fargo. Just like any scene, there was a way to write this scene with the resistance knob turned down. You could’ve made the kidnappers annoyed, but eager to get their money and, therefore, cooperative.

But that’s not the route the Coen brothers went. Instead, they turned up that resistance knob to 11, making the two kidnappers highly resistant to help Jerry. Carl is determined to get Jerry to admit he fucked up about the meeting time, leaving them sitting there around for an hour, and Psycho Gaear intermittently stares at Jerry like he’s going to kill him. This creates all sorts of conflict and makes Jerry’s goal much more challenging.

Again, a lesser writer would’ve made the two kidnappers annoying, but ultimately agreeable, so he could get what he wanted out of the scene and move on to the next one. The good screenwriter ups that resistance knob and makes it very uncertain whether Jerry is going to achieve his goal or not.

Moving on, let’s check out the urgency knob. The urgency knob is effective but, if we’re being honest, it’s the most simplistic of the four knobs. By upping this knob, you condense the amount of time that the protagonist has to achieve his goal in the scene.

So, let’s say you have a scene where a wife has a last minute change of plans and needs her husband to take their kid to school tomorrow. So they’re getting ready for bed, the wife puts forth the problem and what she needs from the husband, but he’s got his own big day tomorrow so he’s resistant.

Could you get a good scene out of this scenario? Sure, an okay one. You’ve got a character who wants something. You’ve got a character who’s resistant, which is going to create conflict. The stakes are pretty low, though, and there isn’t an obvious way to dial that knob up. So what can you do? Well, that’s when you bring in the urgency knob.

Instead of setting the scene at night, before they go to bed, where the two have all the time in the world, rewrite the variables so the wife finds out about the problem 5 minutes before she leaves for work. In other words, set the scene in the morning, with 5 minutes before everybody has to leave, and now the URGENCY of the situation is going to dial up the intensity of the scene considerably.

Lastly, we have the emotional knob. Now, the emotional knob is the hardest knob to play with. It’s way way up there in the far corner for a reason. Because unless you know what you’re doing, it can hurt you just as much as it can help you.

The way that you use the emotional knob is to move away from the logistics of the scene (goal, resistance, stakes, urgency) and go internal. Ask yourself what’s going on INSIDE the characters that could up the intensity of the scene.

There was this old teen comedy from the late 90s called Can’t Hardly Wait. It followed a bunch of characters throughout the night at a giant house party. One of the main subplots had these two characters, Denise and Kenny, both of whom were looking forward to the party for their own reasons, get stuck in the bathroom together all night.

Now, the directive for this subplot was, obviously, having these two characters fall for each other over the course of the movie. But let’s say you’re writing that story (or just a scene from that story), and the scene is dull. Whenever you go back to them, there’s something lacking. Stakes aren’t really relevant here. Urgency is a non-factor cause you want them here the whole movie. And resistance isn’t really relevant either cause neither character has the active goal (they’re both stuck in the same situation – neither of them wanting to be here).

Well, this is where you want to reach up as far as you can to the right side of the board and play with the emotional knob. Which is exactly what the writers do. They create this backstory with the characters where they used to be really great friends in middle school and then, when they reached high school, the guy moved on and got a whole new group of friends, leaving the girl behind.

Note how turning up this dial ups the conflict considerably. Now there’s this unspoken thing that one of the characters did to the other lingering under everything that they say. Now we’ve got a storyline we can keep coming back to, one that consistently gives us strong scenes.

And there you go. This is how you use your Scene Soundboard to dial up the intensity of scenes. And remember, like I said, you control the degree to which you turn up the knob. You can dial any of these knobs up a little or, depending on how intensely you want the scene to play out, a lot.

Believe it or not, you don’t always want to dial a scene up to 100. If every scene were 100, then no scene would stand out. But what you don’t want to do is write scenes where all the knobs are set to 0. And I see that far too often. As in, when I read an amateur script, 75% of the scenes are set to 0 on all four knobs. That’s unacceptable.

But that’s often because the writer doesn’t know about these knobs or how much power they have to create great scenes with them. Now you know. So, I give you permission to unleash these powers on the scenes you write for the showdown and the scenes you write for all your scripts going forward!

Genre: Sci-Fi
Premise: In the not-too-distant future, where a new technology allows an individual to project their psyche into the body of another, thus creating a body-sharing gig economy, a financially-struggling married couple accepts a wealthy man’s proposal to use the wife’s body for a single night, but soon that decision causes their relationship and lives to spiral out of control with fatal consequences.
About: Today’s writer, Mark Townend, has been at this for at least 13 years! I know this because he signed up for the newsletter in 2012. He has one feature credit, a movie he co-wrote with Anthony Bourdain titled, Bone in the Throat, about a young ambitious chef who becomes mixed up with the East End London mob when he witnesses a murder. This script finished with 15 votes on last year’s Black List.
Writer: Mark Townend
Details: 99 pages

Rami Malek for Mike?

We’re going high concept today!

And I don’t want to waste any time getting into it.

So let’s go!

Mike and Jodie are a young struggling married couple drowning in debt. Jodie doesn’t seem to like Mike that much, bristling at even the smallest, most mundane, statements he makes.

One day Jodie’s ex-boyfriend, Sean, who’s become rich beyond anyone’s wildest dreams, calls Jodie and wants to have dinner. He’s going to bring his girlfriend, Shelby, and encourages Jodie to bring Mike.

After some reminiscing, Sean hits Jodie with a whopper. Despite looking great, he has Stage 4 cancer. He and Shelby have been discussing what he might want to do in his final days and he told her he would love to have one more night with Jodie. Shelby is game for this, with one stipulation.

You see, in this near future that the script takes place in, a new technology has swept the nation – Timeshare – where you can rent people’s bodies. Shelby would “rent” Jodie’s body for the night, allowing Sean to be with “Jodie” one more time, but it wouldn’t be cheating because Shelby would be inside that body. Oh, and Sean would pay them 7 million dollars for this rental.

Jodie feels a little weird about the whole thing but Mike gives her the okay and away we go. The very next day, Jodie spends a night with Sean and comes back home. Immediately, it’s clear that Mike is having second thoughts about the whole thing. He keeps imagining the two having sex. And when he catches Jodie sneaking out to see Sean for dinner, he really freaks out.

So Mike does a Timeshare of his own, jumping into some other man’s body so he can be at the restaurant and listen in on the date. It’s inconclusive what the two discuss but, at this point, Mike is in full-on meltdown mode.

Things descend rapidly from there, with Jodie visiting Sean at his highrise condo. But something happens during their meeting and Jodie *supposedly* shoves Sean out the window, where he plunges 40 stories and dies.

(spoiler) I say *supposedly* because we quickly find out that Mike pulled a timeshare and jumped into Jodie’s body and killed Sean. And now he’s letting Jodie take the fall for the murder! When Jodie realizes this, she puts one last plan together to take Mike down. But she’s going to need Shelby’s help to do it.

Katherine Waterson for Jodie?

The pillar that sets up your story – the very concept your script is based on – must be the strongest pillar of all. If it is weak, if will be unconvincing, and the entire script will far apart.

I didn’t believe this setup at all.

It doesn’t make sense. You have an old girlfriend. You’re dying. You want to have one last date (as well as sex) with her, so you tell your current girlfriend this and she agrees to it. Right there, I no longer believe in the story. I mean, come on.  There’s no way Shelby is agreeing to this. The fact that your boyfriend wants to bang the body of his ex would be a non-starter for 99% of the female population.

But even if you go along with that, Sean’s *request* doesn’t make sense either. It’s not like he’s paying 7 million dollars for the body of some gorgeous influencer – Olivia Dunne – who he’s never met before and just wants to have sex with her.

He’s specifically requesting his ex-girlfriend, a person he was (and may still be) in love with. Which means you don’t just want her body. You want HER. You want to spend time with that person again. So getting a Timeshare where you only get her body and not her mind makes no sense.

And those two things create such a shaky setup that anything you build on top of it crumbles.

The next big problem is Mike. I liked Mike’s character description (which I’ll get into in the ‘what I learned’ section) but Mike is an incredibly unrewarding protagonist to follow. He’s dumb. He’s thin-skinned. He’s selfish. We don’t like anything about this guy yet he’s our avatar throughout the story.

Although Jodie has her issues too, she’s much more sympathetic than Mike. So, what happens is, we see this whole story through Mike’s eyes, then when all the secrets are exposed about who was in whose body, we switch over to Jodie as the protagonist for the final act.

I don’t think you can do that. You ask us to watch the movie through one character the whole time, then you say, “Psyche! It’s actually this other person’s story.”

I just watched a movie, Companion, that dealt with this situation much better. Cause it had a similar problem. Due to people not being who they really were, we had to kind of jump around to different characters taking the lead. However, the writer never forgets that we need to see this story through Iris’s eyes. So even though we occasionally jump over to Josh’s POV, we always come back to Iris.

None of this is to say that the script doesn’t have potential. I actually like this idea. I like any idea where you’re playing with different personalities being in the same body. Because it’s high concept, which means the script gets more traction, actors get to play two or more different parts, which means heavier interest from talent, and it opens the door for all sorts of clever plot developments.

But that’s the trick, isn’t it? It’s got to be clever. If you write these types of scripts with a hammer, they get crushed. You have to use a scalpel and a steady hand the whole way through because the audience is expecting the movie to be smart.

For that reason, these types of scripts are the ones that need to be rewritten the most. Cause all of your first ideas (Mike was in Jodie’s body when she killed Sean!) are going to be ideas that the audience predicts. You need to use every draft to throw those first ideas out and go deeper. Go twistier. Go more unexpected!

Companion is a great example of this. It’s a really clever movie where all the reveals come right when they need to. You know this because we never see them coming. Meanwhile, Timeshare was way too clunky in its execution. There was never a plot beat I didn’t predict. And there was never a plot development where I thought, “That was deftly crafted.”

I mean we’re talking this needs 7 to 8 more drafts to fully unlock its potential. You need to go down some dead ends in a few drafts. Figure out what the story is really about in the next couple of drafts. And then bring it all together in the final three drafts. It may be worth that investment, though. This *does* feel like a movie to me. But it’s just not where it needs to be yet.

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

What I learned: On page 5, we get this description of Mike: “Mike likes the world to see him as a nice, enlightened guy. But he’s also frustrated, insecure, and desperately wants to “matter.” And sometimes those things get the better of him.”

I love this description because it doesn’t bury itself in writerly phrases and metaphors that hide who the character is. It just tells you who Mike is in simple clear terms. So many times, I get writers trying to be writers in their character descriptions and, in the process, describe some totally vague person. For example, someone else might write Mike’s description like this….

“Mike, a speeding train of a man with a ten-ton glob of frantic gray matter pulling at his nervous system 24/7 is always trying to be a man’s man when he’s more like a half-inflated basketball…” Like, what does that even mean?

Look, there are some writers who can put together the perfect metaphor to describe their character. But, if you’re not one of those writers, just TELL US WHO YOUR CHARACTER IS IN SIMPLE TERMS. I promise the script will benefit.

Did I just read… a good comedy script???

Genre: Comedy
Premise: An unemployed doofus who lives with his mother is asked to pose as a couples therapist for a sports agent to covertly manage the agent’s wife, only to stumble into a new career as a shrink.
About: This was a big spec sale that came together earlier this month. Miramax beat out a bunch of other suitors. The production company is Boulderlight, who just produced the awesome, “Companion,” so let’s keep an eye out for them in the future, since someone over there seems to have an eye for good writing. Writer Brandon Cohen has actually been writing in Hollywood for over ten years. Most of his work has been on kid’s shows.
Writer: Brandon Cohen
Details: 110 pages

My choice for RJ is Ben Schwartz

I met with a producer recently and we were talking about how bad comedy scripts have gotten. We racked our brains to try and remember even one good one from the last five years.

Well, I got news for you. TODAY I FOUND ONE.

I don’t know how it happened. I don’t know where this writer came from. I’m just happy to have been able to laugh out loud for two hours.

RJ is one of those 30-something lovable losers who’s so self-involved that he doesn’t even realize that his relationship is crumbling around him. His girlfriend forces him to take couples therapy sessions which confirms what she already knows – this guy sucks – so she leaves him.

RJ Doordashes and lives with his mother, giving him few prospects for a next romantic adventure, but gets lucky when an old friend invites him to a UFC event. It’s there where he meets Jordan, a manager for a UFC superstar named Sean (think Connor McGregor). While in his friend’s suite, he meets Izzy, a beautiful perfect girl he instantly falls for. But she leaves before he can shoot his shot.

Later, RJ and Jordan get to talking about his recent therapy sessions and, jokingly, how he believes that his girlfriend was giving the therapist extra money under the table to side with her. This is a lightbulb moment for Jordan, who’s been having problems with his wife. He comes up with this idea where RJ can pretend to be a couples therapist and side with him during their sessions so his wife gets off his back.

RJ is reluctant at first until Jordan offers him 500 bucks a session. Therapist it is! RJ has no idea what he’s doing but, of course, does any therapist know what they’re doing? RJ fakes his way through a bunch of mumbo-jumbo advice, always siding with Jordan, and soon he’s getting referrals from other guys in the UFC agent/manager space.

All of this is going great until Sean comes to him for a session. And who is Sean’s girlfriend? IZZY! RJ must now make Sean believe that he’s supporting him in the sessions while, at the same time, not piss off Izzy, who he’s secretly in love with. There is literally no way this can end well. Which is exactly why we keep reading until the end! :)

I’ve been reading a lot of comedies lately.

And I’ve learned that comedy, in screenplay form, boils down to getting five things right. Those are….

SET PIECES
FUNNY CHARACTERS
CONFLICT
MINING THE UNIQUENESS OF YOUR PREMISE
and
VOICE

If you can nail three of these five things, you’ll write a funny script. Nail four of them, you’ll write a really funny script. Nail all five and you’ll write a hilarious script.

Set pieces are the showcases of your comedy so that’s where you need to focus most of your efforts. Sure, you can spend time trying to come up with funny lines spread throughout your screenplay. But it’s the set pieces that audiences will remember so that’s what you want to spend most of your time on.

And a set piece doesn’t need to be some big elaborate thing. It just needs to be concept-relevant and funny. My favorite set piece in this script was RJ’s first therapy session. He has no idea what he’s doing. He’s making things up as he goes along. We’re waiting for him to screw up and get caught. It’s hilarious.

Next requirement – the characters who have the most screen time in your story need to be as funny. That sounds obvious but a lot of writers screw this up. They create sort of funny characters then try and force funny lines into their mouths. This makes sense when you consider that writers are also trying to create fully fleshed-out characters who arc over the course of the story. So they end up prioritizing that over making them funny. In the process, they’re fighting that character the whole script trying to make them act funnier than they are.

This is a comedy. You have to focus on laughs. Prioritize a hilarious character over a deep character. Cause when you do that, you don’t even have to try to be funny when you write scenes for that character. They just naturally say funny things. RJ naturally says funny things because he’s a lovable doofus who’s pretending to be an expert in something he’s a moron in. So every single thing that comes out of his mouth is funny.

Next we have conflict. When it comes to conflict, your bread and butter comedy comes from two-handers where the characters constantly bicker, like Deadpool and Wolverine. But conflict can also come in the form of anything that is out-of-balance. In this case, RJ is lying about who he is. So, in every scene, there’s potential for him to get caught. He’s always having to talk around things, which creates conflict.

But also we have some traditional conflict in that Sean is an a-hole and is constantly putting pressure on RJ to do what he wants, which, of course, hurts Izzy.

Next up we have mining the uniqueness of your premise. Too many comedy writers write a movie with a premise – say, two geeky teens build a robot version of a popular kid to make them popular at school too – then write up a bunch of jokes that have nothing to do with that premise. There will be jokes about aliens, about weddings, about prison, about sexual preference, none of which focus on the core concept’s conceit – that two guys have built a fake popular guy in robot form and are trying to use him to ascend the social hierarchy at school.

Cohen did it right. A good 75% of the comedy in I Can See You’re Angry is built around RJ pretending to be a therapist.

Finally, you have VOICE, which boils down to “a funny way to see the world and talk about it.” To understand comedic voice, watch comedians. Note, specifically, the STUFF THEY TALK ABOUT and HOW THEY DELIVER IT. Nate Berghatze likes talking about really basic everyday stuff, such as ordering DoorDash and hiding it from his wife. Meanwhile, Ryan Long has built his entire routine around political hypocrisy. Two very different subject matters.

Then you have delivery. Aziz Ansari is known for his energetic almost manic delivery style. Whereas Anthony Jeselnik speaks verrrrryyy slooooooow. He’s not afraid to pause for an eternity before he delivers a punchline.

Conveying voice in comedy scripts is similar. What do you like to talk about and how do you like to talk about it. The style in which you combine those two things should feel different from the way others do it. Cause if you sound like everyone else, telling the same jokes in the same manner, you won’t make readers laugh and everyone will forget your script quickly.

The only thing I didn’t like about I Can See You’re Angry was the last third of the script. There was something forced about going to Sean’s lake house. When you start to exert too much of your agenda on the plot, you lose that organic feel that made things so originally effortless. Organicness is especially important in comedy because the best comedy comes from natural situations.

But even with that, this was still a good script and it’s given me hope that, as long as a good writer is writing it, good comedy is possible.

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

What I learned: A great comedy tool is exaggeration. And it’s simple to use. You just dial things up to a 1000. A trick on how to get the most out of it is to give an exaggerated line to someone who’s, otherwise, even-keel. It will then come out of nowhere, which is what makes it funny. When RJ is starting to make a lot of money as a therapist, he comes home to tell his mom that he’s finally going to change their lives for the better.

RJ: 
Listen, Ma, things are about to
change around here.

LORRAINE: 
If you take away my internet, I’ll
burn the house down with me inside.

I talk about exaggeration and other comedy tools in my dialogue book. If your dialogue is weak, DEFINITELY spend 10 bucks on my book. It will change how you write dialogue forever. That, by the way, is not an exaggeration. :)

Genre: Sci-Fi/Action
Premise: In a [sort of] post-apocalyptic world, a young woman teams up with a truck driver to traverse through a robot wasteland to retrieve her brother, who has been taken by an evil CEO and used as the brains of his internet company.
About: This was the 320 million dollar big swing from the Russo Brothers for Netflix and they brought back their Avengers screenwriters, Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely, to help them write it. The movie is based on the iconic sci-fi art of Simon Stålenhag and stars Netflix superstar, Millie Bobby Brown, and worldwide superstar, Chris Pratt.
Writers: Christopher Markus & Stephen McFeely
Details: 2 hours long

I’m going to be straight up with you. This review’s going to get ugly. So, before it does, let me cast some compliments on The Electric State. Hollywood is obsessed with IP to the point of making a generation of moviegoers bored out of their minds.

Kids these days – at least the ones I know – don’t watch movies. And why would they? Studio films don’t have any soul left in them and I suspect they don’t have many people making them who actually love movies. They’re just doing a job. And when everybody is just “doing a job,” you get really bland product.

So I respect the Russo Brothers for, at least, trying something new. This is tricky material here. It’s a weird world with weird rules and a hard-to-wrestle-down mythology. I love that they’re trying to explore uncharted territory.

But there’s the irony.

Within that exploration, they went back and based almost all of their choices on the very IP they’re running away from. So the most original big budget movie of the year feels like the most cliched.

I still want Hollywood making weird sci-fi movies. But they have to bring in the kind of talent who can guide those movies to strong places. I used to think the Russo Brothers were that talent. But I’m not sure anymore.

It’s the 90s. Errr….. sort of. Because in these 90s, there was a robot uprising. Except I lived through the 90s and I don’t remember any robot uprisings. So I’m not sure what “period” we’re setting this movie in. Anyway…

A young woman named Michelle lost her younger brother in this robot war. But several years later, the government has squashed the rebellion and now keeps all robots inside designated fenced-off areas.

One night, a robot appears in Michelle’s backyard, just like E.T. (and I mean *just* like E.T. – as in they steal the exact same shot from that movie) and the robot claims to be Michelle’s dead brother. Well, sort of. You see, for reasons that are never made clear, the robot can’t speak normally. He can only speak in pre-programmed soundbites. Every other robot can speak normally. But not this one. Kind of convenient since, if he could speak normally, he’d be able to tell Michelle where his real-life body was and that would’ve cut 90 minutes out of the movie.

Anyway, Michelle pairs up with the robot to travel across the country to find her brother. Along the way, she’s forced to utilize the help of a truck driver named Keats. Keats is a rebel in that he often teams up with robots, even though robots are bad! So he and Michelle go into the Restricted Zone, despite it being littered with violent robots and, what do you know, win them over.

An entire team of robots then joins the duo in attacking Sentre, the big bad internet company that is holding her brother and is also the primary entity keeping the robots down. Michelle wants her brother back and the robots want their life back. Final battle. The end.

This is a great time to remind everyone that writing screenplays is a series of creative choices. One of the reasons it’s so difficult is that if you make the wrong creative choice regarding a couple of the key pillars in the story, there’s no way to save the script. You’re done.

For example, if you create a really unlikable main character, that creative choice is going to be in our face every single scene.

The problem with The Electric State is that it gets nearly all of the key creative choices wrong, starting with the setting. It doesn’t make sense to create a period piece about a time that never happened. I’ve never seen a successful movie that’s done this and I have no idea why anyone would think it’s a good idea. Because what you’re doing is you’re saying, “Nothing matters because none of this really happened.” If you would’ve, simply, set this 5 years in the future, it would’ve solved so many problems with the script.

The next creative choice The Electric State screwed up was the tone. If there’s one good lesson that came out of the superhero era, it’s that you don’t betray the source material. The further you stray from it, the worse the movie usually gets. So, by turning Stålenhag’s dark art into a plucky fun action-adventure movie, the movie never stood a chance. That wasn’t the story that Stålenhag intended to tell. And you can see that in every frame of the movie, which is fighting itself, trying to turn a cat into a dog.

Next up, the amount of borrowing in this movie is next-level embarrassing. From E.T. to Transformers to Guardians of the Galaxy to The Phantom Menace. It’s one movie after another where you recognize a character or a plot beat.

If you’re writing something and you’re constantly saying to yourself, “Yeah, it’ll be just like [that great movie]” and “Ooh, this character will be like that character from [that great movie.],” that’s BAD. Cause people are going to see those things and think of those movies, which are better by the way, than your movie. And the more you do that, the less your movie becomes your movie anyway. Instead, it becomes a pastiche of movies.

You get one clean rip off another famous movie and that’s it. But even then, you have to be careful. For example, you can’t base your hero off of John McClane in a terrorist action-thriller. The setup is too similar to Die Hard. But if you made a sci-fi movie about a cop on another planet, *that* character you can base on John McClane, because it’s a different genre and different setting.

What you don’t want to do is what Electric State did, which was make a sci-fi movie that borrowed from a bunch of other sci-fi movies.

On top of that, there was a whole lot of stuff in this script that didn’t make sense. Why couldn’t the E.T. robot – the one who says it’s got Michelle’s brother inside of it, speak when every other robot spoke?

How are we on a post-apocalyptic journey when the world is fine? Everything is running smoothly. Yet the movie is treating the journey like it’s happening in the “Quiet Place” universe.

And the movie didn’t even get the BASIC stuff right. The most basic thing you need out of a movie like this is to create an interesting unresolved dynamic between the two characters who are around each other the most – in this case, Michelle and Keats.

Yet I couldn’t tell you the first thing about their relationship. They have so little to actually discuss that they could’ve existed on their own separate journeys and nothing would’ve changed.

You have to build a compelling storyline into any character combination that has a lot of screen time together. There wasn’t a single issue between Michelle and Keats other than they occasionally annoyed each other. Compare that to Deadpool and Wolverine, who seemed to have generations of beef with each other that they had to bury in order to work together. That’s how you create a compelling unresolved relationship.

What happened to the Russo Brothers, by the way? I started to wonder if they were always this bad. But that Captain America sequel they directed was awesome. That was a great movie with great set pieces. And the two Avengers movies were good too.

But since then, they made The Gray Man, Cherry, and Citadel. And now this, their worst movie of all.

So, if this silly version of the story was so bad, what should they have done to fix it? Well, there was this sci-fi book published in 1972 called Roadside Picnic about how time stops and then when it starts again, humanity realizes that aliens came here and lived here for a long time before finally leaving. They’ve since left all these remnants and the book follows people who go looking for those remnants.

Just like Stålenhag’s work, it’s dark post-apocalyptic stuff and fits the same vibe as his drawings. I know the budget would’ve had to have been lower. But I’m positive the movie would’ve been better. Because even with 320 million, the Russos didn’t create one memorable set piece. Not one! In a big sci-fi action movie! That’s crazy. At least with the darker version, you could’ve explored better characters and thematic elements that connected with people. This was just silly garbage.

How bad are we talking here? Here’s how bad. If you told me you had Netflix and you wanted to know which movie you should watch tonight, The Electric State or that Meghan Fox is a robot Hand that Rocks the Cradle ripoff, I would tell you that you would have an infinitely more entertaining time watching the Meghan Fox movie.

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

What I learned: Use previous great movies as inspiration. But don’t steal actual elements from them. For example, if you have a time machine in your script, don’t make it a car, cause people are going to think of Back to the Future. Be inspired by the broad strokes, never the key individual elements.

It uses an age-old tool to keep you invested in every scene, one that not many screenwriters depend on.

Outside of the Mega-Showdown, which is happening at the end of June – so everybody make sure you’re keeping up with your writing cause you’re going to want to have a script for that contest – I consider this month, Scene Showdown, to be the most important showdown of the year.

What: Scene Showdown
Rules: Scene must be 5 pages or less
When: Friday, March 28
Deadline: Thursday, March 27, 10pm Pacific Time
Submit: Script title, Genre, 50 words setting up the scene (optional), pdf of the scene
Where: carsonreeves3@gmail.com

Why?

Because if you can’t write a good scene, you can’t write a good script. All a scene is is a mini-feature screenplay. It’s got its setup, its conflict, its resolution. So you have to be able to master the small-form version of telling a story if you expect to be able to master the long-form version of it (aka a screenplay).

I chose Companion for a scene to feature because I knew it came from the same people who made Barbarian, and Barbarian had some good ass scene-writing in it. So I knew we’d learn something about scene-writing today.  And we did!

First of all, this is a really good movie. It will easily make my 2025 Best Movies of the Year list. Unfortunately, it’s a very difficult movie to talk about without spoiling its many surprises. So I would encourage you to watch this movie first then come back to this post. Cause I’m going to spoil a lot.

The movie follows a regular dude named Josh who takes his new girlfriend, Iris, to meet his best friends at a secluded mansion in the wilderness. The friends are Eli, a proudly pudgy dude who’s in a relationship with the gorgeous Patrick. And there’s catwalk modelesque Kat, who’s in a situationship with the owner of the house, 40-something Russian “businessman,” Sergey. A weird group for sure!

Once everyone is situated, Iris goes down to get some sun by the lake and Sergey follows. Sergey starts getting handsy. Then he starts to force himself on her, telling her things like, “This is what you are. Just go with it.” And Iris flips out and cuts Sergey up with a knife, killing him.

When she walks inside, dazed and drenched in blood, everyone flips out.  But then Josh says, “Iris go to sleep,” and she shuts down. That’s when we learn that Iris is a companion robot. She’s not real. We also learn that Josh and Kat planned all this. It was a setup so they could steal Sergey’s money.

What’s interesting about this script is that it doesn’t have a lot of traditional dramatic scenes, such as the scene I highlighted Tuesday in “Vanished.” There are a few in the late second act and third act.  But many of its better scenes are exposition scenes, which is rare. The reason why is because there are so many reveals in the script. And in order to get to those reveals, we must go through a considerable amount of exposition to understand what’s happened.

For example, when Josh wakes Iris back up, he tells her that she’s a robot, something she didn’t know. She responds by saying that’s not possible because she has all these memories. She even has the memory of when they met. Josh explains why all that is not true, telling her about her programming, even explaining that their introduction was just a “meet cute” option on a computer (she bumped into him at the supermarket produce section and he accidentally sent all the oranges tumbling to the floor).

“Reveal” scenes depend on both the exposition and the reveal itself to be interesting.  Nobody wants to sit through information that isn’t fun to listen to.  Drew Hanock is a master at making sure everything he’s revealing is fun to listen to.

The closest we get to a traditionally dramatic scene in the first half of the script is when Sergey tries to sexually assault Iris. But I actually thought Hancock sped through that scene too fast. That was a moment where you could really play with the suspense. It wasn’t a bad scene but Albert Hitchcock would not have been impressed.

Instead, many scenes in Companion hinge on the “reveal,” a template where new information emerges—either enlightening and fun to uncover, impactful to the plot, or both.

To be honest, this is more “gimmicky” than writing traditional dramatic scenes because it doesn’t require you to understand dramatic writing. Revealing information can be done in a basic linear manner and, therefore, is easy to pull off.

However, the art of the reveal is in how and when the reveals are layered into the story. Because you can reveal something in a boring way or you can reveal something in a clever way. And if you’re weaving all these reveals in in a way that tells me you’ve thought endlessly about your plot, that’s just as difficult as writing a traditionally dramatic scene.

I’ll give you an example (spoilers).

The original plan to use Iris to kill Sergey was thought up by Josh and Kat. Eli and Patrick knew nothing about it. That way, Josh and Kat get all of Sergey’s money. But since the killing, Iris has escaped from the house, forcing Josh and Kat to bring Eli and Patrick in on what they did.

It’s, again, an exposition scene. Because we’re going over what Kat and Josh planned, why they planned it, etc. Also, there’s plot-related exposition. We get the plot advancement of Josh offering Eli a third of the cut if he helps them capture Iris.

Eli looks at him and says, “You mean a fourth of the cut,” motioning to Patrick. “Are you crazy, no way. A third of the cut,” Josh says. Eli argues back that if he’s coming in, it will be a four way split. As that argument heats up, Eli turns to Patrick and says, “Patrick, go to sleep,” and Patrick goes into sleep mode.

That’s our reveal. It turns out Patrick is a companion robot as well.

Do you see how writer Drew Hancock did that? Most writers would’ve brought that reveal out in a less dramatic way. Maybe late at night when Eli and Patrick are in bed and Patrick is annoying him, wanting to talk, Eli then says, “Patrick go to sleep,” and we get our reveal there.

But it’s a way less dramatic version of the reveal. And that’s how you know you’re a good “reveal” scene writer. You’re dishing out these reveals during intense plot moments – in this case, when discussing the percentage split of 12 million dollars. The whole reason Eli fought Josh on the split was not because he wanted it split four ways, but because he was terrified that his robot would find out that he was a robot (since Josh was treating him as one, not bringing him in on the cut).

So the lesson here is that I’d rather you become great at traditionally dramatic scene-writing. It’s a way more valuable skill. But if you’re writing a script where you’re keeping a lot of information from the reader, you can definitely write a strong screenplay with “reveal” scene-writing.

Companion also reminded me that screenplays are very context-heavy. Scenes don’t live off on their own islands. If you can write a scene that requires zero story context, it probably isn’t the best scene for your movie. A good scene should always be pulling in earlier setups from your script, which is why, in Scene Showdown, I give you the option to set your scene up (the only time you shouldn’t need this is if you enter the first scene of your script).

Still, Companion is one of those rare screenplays where literally no scene works without the knowledge of all the other scenes. That’s something we’re SUPPOSED to do in every script we write. But we never completely do it. And this script did.  Impressive!

Ironically, it’s the reason why it bombed at the box office. There’s just no way to sell this movie without massively spoiling its awesomeness. However, I have no doubt that Companion will make a killing in digital rentals and when it’s later released on Netflix. It will for sure become a cult classic and it deserves it!