Week 13 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
Week 8 – Fun and Games
Week 9 – Using Sequences to Tackle Your Second Act
Week 10 – The Midpoint
Week 11 – Chill Out or Ramp Up
Week 12 – Lead Up To the “Scene of Death”

As I was ramping up to write today’s screenplay lesson, I stumbled upon a recent quote from Jonathan Nolan, who’s going through the press tour in the leadup to his new Amazon show, “Fallout.”

Nolan is the writer-director who made HBO’s Westworld.

A big topic of discussion around town is the condensing of television writing jobs because there have been too many shows and nobody’s watching most of them. So they’re cutting down shows and that means less jobs.

So everyone’s trying to learn LESSONS from this “Peak TV” period that just passed. And here’s what Jonathan Nolan had to say about it: “If the lesson was to ease back on complexity or weirdness, I don’t want to learn that lesson.”

I can’t emphasize how angry this quote makes me. Because Jonathan clearly doesn’t understand the difference between complexity/weirdness and making weak creative choices. He thinks, as long as he’s not making the obvious choice, that’s “good.”

But that’s only the first half of the equation. The second half is the quality of the choice itself. The choice actually has to be strong enough to create good story threads! It can’t just be different for different’s sake. The reason Westworld became unwatchable was not because it was too complex or too weird for the average viewer.

People stopped watching that show because the writers, which included Nolan’s wife, repeatedly made weak creative choices that turned the narrative into a slog.

Every story has a “work/reward” ratio to it. As long as the rewards are bigger than the work, we’ll keep watching. But the second the work we have to do becomes bigger than the rewards? That’s when we say ‘seeya.’ Which is exactly what happened with that show.

And this is when it struck me that there’s really only one lesson in the entire screenwriting skillset that matters. There’s only one thing you have to do. What is that thing?

MAKE THEM CARE ABOUT WHAT HAPPENS NEXT.

That’s all that matters. The second the reader no longer cares about WHAT HAPPENS NEXT, they’re out. Whether they physically stop reading or mentally stop investing, they’re no longer interested in your story.

Therefore, every creative choice you make in screenwriting should revolve around that rule: “Does this make the reader care about what happens next?”

Cause if it does, THEY WILL WANT TO KEEP TURNING THE PAGES.

That’s what we want them to do, right? We want them to keep turning the pages.

I’m sorry for being rude but when you’re talking about nepotism, a strong argument can be made that Jonathan Nolan is the biggest beneficiary of nepotism in all of Hollywood. And if I’m wrong? Prove me wrong. Who’s gotten more from less talent out of their Hollywood family connection?

But let’s get back to this concept because I want this to be flashing in your head whenever you’re writing. Whether it be now, in pages 81-90, or any section of the screenplay.

Does what I’m writing make people want to find out what happens next?

Obviously, there’s subjectivity at play here. But you’re better at evaluating weak creative choices than you think. One of the most common things that happens when I do screenplay consultations is I’ll send the notes back to the writer and they’ll say to me, “I had a nagging feeling that this was a problem but I needed to hear it from someone else.”

You know. You always know when you make a weak choice.

What do I mean by weak choices? Well, let’s talk about a key choice that affects the end of a classic script, since that’s what we’re talking about today. Did you know that in the original Back to the Future script, the time machine was a stationary refrigerator in a junkyard?

In subsequent drafts, they turned it into a car.

I want you to think about those two creative choices for a second. Because each version leads to vastly different story endings.

In one, our characters have to run back to a junkyard. How interesting is that?

In another, they have to meticulously time a time machine on wheels to hit 88 miles per hour at the very second that a lightning strike occurs.

It’s the creative difference between night and day.

That’s what strong creative choices can do for your screenplay.

I was just talking to a screenwriter about this. Their ending was pretty good. But it didn’t push the envelope enough. The stakes didn’t feel big enough. The obstacles didn’t feel insurmountable enough. The goals felt sufficient but far from exciting.

The ending is where you have a chance to create MAGIC. You’ve been writing this entire story for this moment so don’t get careless here. This is where you have to land that triple axel. And it starts with writing creative choices that make your ending EXCITING and not just a copy of the endings you’ve seen before.

Cause when I look back at Back to the Future, I never saw an ending like that BEFORE. And I’ve never seen an ending like it SINCE.

All of this is to say that you’re trying to come up with bold exciting creative choices that MAKE US WANT TO SEE WHAT HAPPENS NEXT.

So what does happen next in pages 81-90, since those are the pages we’re on now? As we discussed last week, this is your MOMENT OF DEATH.

In a 110 page script, somewhere between pages 82-86, THERE MUST BE DEATH. I think Blake Snyder’s beat sheet calls this the Dark Night of the Soul? Whatever you call it, it’s got to be the second lowest moment in the character’s entire journey. The lowest moment will come just 15 pages later when they take on the bad guy and the bad guy seemingly defeats them. That will be their ACTUAL lowest point in the story.

But this one’s pretty darn close. The way you want to look at it is, this is the moment where the reader should feel like, “That’s it.” There are no other options. The hero has lost. This should be so convincing that EVEN THOUGH the reader knows there are 25 pages left, EVEN THOUGH seasoned moviegoers sense there are still 25 minutes left, you’re SO CONVINCING in this moment, that we truly think it’s over. If you can achieve that, you have NO IDEA how exciting your ending will be.

Because one of the secret tricks of screenwriting that makes readers feel something deep, is when you bring them ALL THE WAY DOWN and then you bring them ALL THE WAY BACK UP AGAIN.

I remember the moment I learned this lesson – although I didn’t understand it at the time. But when I first watched E.T. as a kid, and E.T. dies in that end of the second act moment… I don’t know if I’ve ever been more devastated in a theater. I was a wreck. So when they then brought him back to life??? That rush I got from going all the way from the depths of story misery to the peak of story euphoria – I wouldn’t be surprised if that feeling I had that day had something to do with me pursuing this art of storytelling. Because I wanted to learn how to make other people feel that way.

So figure out how to bring your hero down to his lowest low. It could be the death of a close family member or friend. It could be their own death. Or it could just feel like there are no other options left. I highlighted Life of Pi last week and that’s a good one. There’s this moment late in that movie where their sails are broken and they’re in the middle of the sea and they’re starving and they’re dehydrated and it’s clear that there’s no one who’s going to save them.

You kind of have to be a sadist in this moment. You have to be cruel to your heroes. To TRULY set the tone of how destitute they were, the writers of Life of Pi added a distant cargo ship. Their LAST HOPE. And they watch helplessly as it chugs on, never seeing them. Think about how hopeless you would feel after that moment.

That’s what you want to do to your heroes at the end of the second act. And that’s the same feeling you want the reader to have. That’s your pages 81-90 homework. :)

JUST TWO MORE WEEKS LEFT!

And then we move on to our rewrite strategy. :)

Genre: Horror
Premise: Monsters that roam in daylight keep a small, rural family confined to a nocturnal existence, but when their son starts to question the monsters’ existence, the entire balance of the family is thrown off.
About: This script finished on last year’s Black List with 8 votes. Screenwriter Nick Hurwitch is the winner of the Nate Wilson Joie de Vivre Award from the UCLA Professional Program and the Austin Film Festival Pitch Competition.
Writer: Nick Hurwitch
Details: 107 pages

Sometimes I think that coming up with movie ideas is the hardest thing to do in the world. Because there seems to be this balance you have to hit that’s so precise, even if you’re a millimeter off, the idea falls apart faster than a Jenga puzzle on a Roomba.

That balance includes coming up with a concept similar to what we’ve seen before. But also is JUST UNIQUE ENOUGH that it feels fresh. And the crazy thing is that you don’t always know if it’s hit that sweet spot until it’s released into theaters.

No movie encapsulates this better than M3GAN. Extremely familiar concept – Kid buys a spooky toy that’s possessed. Then all they did was turn the “possessed” element of the doll into AI. And the movie did gangbusters.

What throws everything off is that, every once in a while, a movie slips through that doesn’t do anything new, and then somehow does great at the box office. The John Wick script (for the original film) still perplexes me to this day. It’s about as basic a “guy with a gun” idea as you get. Those are the ones that keep me up at night.

Today’s script seems to bear some of this same DNA. Based on the logline, I feel like I’ve seen it before. Let’s hope that I’m wrong.

MAJOR SPOILERS BELOW

At the beginning of our movie, we see a farming family having lunch outside and a monster peering through the nearby cornstalks at them.

Cut to another farming family, who’s waking up just as night falls. The mother of this family is Lynne, a nice kind woman. The father is Gary, an intense type who just wants to get work done. And then there’s 16 year-old Caleb.

The family lives in a post-apocalyptic world where monsters roam the land during the day. Therefore, humans can only come out at night. Which frustrates Caleb to no end. Cause he never gets to experience daytime.

Lynne gets a whiff of Caleb’s growing frustration and starts taking him outside in the mornings, when Gary is asleep. Caleb loves these 10-15 minutes of daylight and his mood shifts. He works harder on the farm. He does better with his studies. He’s happier overall.

But then two things happen. Gary finds out Lynne and Caleb are doing this and is not happy at all. And Caleb becomes more and more interested in what’s out there in the sunlight. Finally, Jeanine sneaks Caleb down to the barn and reveals the truth to him (at the script’s midpoint).

She shows him a meteor that they built the barn over – a meteor that carried Caleb here from the stars. They weren’t saving Caleb from monsters. CALEB IS THE MONSTER. When he’s in sunlight for too long, he grows into a human-tree-like thing with superhuman abilities.

Confused about this new identity, Caleb escapes into the world, where he runs into humans. When those humans try to attack him, he has no option but to fight back. He ends up badly injuring a local man and now that man’s family wants revenge. And they know where the monster came from.

I went from meticulously analyzing the choices in the early part of this script to getting completely lost in it. That’s what a good script is SUPPOSED to do. It’s supposed to make you forget you’re reading a story, whether that’s someone like me, who reads for a living, or someone who reads for enjoyment. The goal is to get the reader to forget they’re reading.

This script did that for 53 pages. That’s when the twist arrived. And it was a good twist! I wasn’t expecting it.

But here’s the problem when you introduce a radical twist at your midpoint. Yes, you create a surge of excitement within your reader. But you also burn the bridge that brought you over into this half of the story. Cause nothing that happened before this twist matters anymore.

You’ve reset your story so you have to come up with a new engine. Now that we know Caleb is the monster, what is this story about? Hurwitch comes close to getting it right. But he makes a big mistake. He goes all in on the “Wacky Aunt” character.

This wacky Aunt/nurse thinks that Caleb was sent here to save the planet — re-plant it or whatever. We’re not interested in that. We’re more interested in the Frankenstein angle of this story. You’ve got this local group of rednecks, one of whom Monster Caleb nearly killed, determined to get revenge.

That alone would’ve been enough to power the second half (them trying to find where this monster lived and then attacking). But if you wanted to, you could’ve grown that group and added 50-100 townspeople and now you’ve got a mob chasing Monster Caleb. That’s all you need. That will give you your second half of the movie.

The Aunt Wackadoodle plot wasn’t script-destroying. But it just wasn’t the right creative choice. Which is one of many hard things about screenwriting. You have to make these crucial creative choices throughout the script and the closer you get to the ending, the more those choices matter. Cause if you don’t make the right ones, we start losing interest during the most critical part of the story. The ending is when you need us obsessively turning the pages, not curiously turning the pages.

I’m Mr. Big Midpiont.

Because what a good midpoint does is it makes the second half of the movie feel different from the first half. That’s exactly what Sundown does. It’s two completely different stories.

However, you can’t come up with a plot-changing midpoint like this unless you have a GREAT plan for the second half of the script. It can’t be one of those scenarios where you shrug your shoulders and say, “I’ll figure it out somehow.” No, you need a plan.

Because the first part of this script was really good. It’s powered by two big story engines. One, the question: Are the parents being truthful with Caleb? And two: Caleb’s conflict. Whenever our hero is stuck in a place they don’t want to be in, it creates this underlying tension that drives the narrative since we know that conflict needs to be resolved.

Once those two story engines are jettisoned by the midpoint, what are you replacing them with? An annoying Aunt who wants to use Caleb’s powers to save the world. I guess that’s technically a story engine because it’s a goal. But we have to care about the character with the goal in order to be interested in the pursuit of that goal.

Then you have this family that wants to kill Caleb. That’s a real story engine but it’s not pushed hard enough. It feels too casual.

But, with all that said, this script still has more good than bad. Hurwitch does a really nice job with the mystery aspect of the story. He integrates a lot of compelling flashbacks that add more fuel to the mystery. And he makes us think he’s going in one direction (the parents made the whole monsters thing up) to then using that against us, pulling the rug out from beneath our feet, and giving us this great reveal. That alone is worth a “worth the read.”

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

What I learned: Making gigantic thematic statements in your script (i.e. about race, about climate crisis, about the 1%) is not something you can do casually. You have to go all in and make your entire movie about that. You have to meticulously weave all of that stuff into every part of the story and characters. Because if you try to make some statement about the climate crisis in your script, it’s not going to affect us if it’s half-baked. This whole thing about the Aunt and him being half-plant — there wasn’t nearly enough there for us to understand the point that was being made. I bring this up because I see it quite a bit in scripts. Focus on telling a great story first. If you want to go that extra mile and make some grand statement about the world, that’s fine. But understand that it is going to be AN EXTRA MILE. It’s not going to be 8 or 9 feet. Which is the length of effort that most writers offer.

I’m out of it, guys. I’ve got no energy left. That book release added a good 60 hours to my work week last week. This is how out of it I am. For the last two days, I believed that Luca Guadagnino and Yorgos Lanthimos were the same director. Would’ve bet my life on it.

So I can’t do a review today. Instead, I’m just going to tell you what I’m thinking for as long as my fingers will type. Cause I wanted to get a post up. The first thing I want to talk about is American Fiction. It won the screenwriting Academy Award so I had to watch it and I must say, it was a tale of two movies. One great movie, one terrible movie.

Everything that had to do with the fake book and his fake persona was AWESOME. By the way, that isn’t easy to do in 2024. In the real world, people would sniff this out in a second. Social media will bust anybody lying. They somehow got around that issue by ignoring it. And it worked!

But you know what didn’t work? EVERYTHING ELSE. I’m going to spoil this for you so you’ve been warned. Our main character has a father who committed suicide by shooting himself in the head. He has a mother who has Alzheimer’s. He has a sister, who we spend several scenes with, who then DIES OF A HEART ATTACK. And he has a gay drug-addicted brother too.

I just talked about this in my dialogue book (not too exhausted to get that link up apparently!). Melodrama. Going with the extreme version of every choice. Could ONE family member just be a normal person… alive!? That aspect of the script was so bad I actually expected it to be some meta thing that was part of the satire which would be explained in the end. “This is how you write a bad script!” That was going to be the theme or something and they were going to point out all the melodramatic choices that were made during the script. But NOPE. They didn’t do that. That was genuinely what the writer chose. AND HE WON AN OSCAR FOR IT!?

Can we even trust Oscar anymore? That shiny gold faceless liar.

By the way, in the end, when Jeffrey Wright’s character comes to the producer to do the adaptation of the fake book, is he coming to him as the real author or as his fake persona author? They didn’t make that clear.

I want to know why Scarlett Johansson is going to be in a Jurassic World movie. I thought she was done makin dat money and was entering a part of her career where she was going to do whatever artsy roles she wanted. Jurassic World is for a brand new up-and-coming actor, like Chris Pratt when he first signed on. It’s not for people like Scarlett. Scarlett don’t need monay. Help me out here. What she doin?

As I alluded to yesterday, Happy Gilmore 2 is coming. This is arguably the greatest comedic character ever created. And I know these 20-year gap sequels always suck but can a guy just hope? Because the actor who plays Shooter McGavin revealed to the world that when he last saw Adam Sandler, Sandler pulled out the script for Happy Gilmore 2.

Now, when I first saw this story, I thought two things. I thought, “Okay, that doesn’t mean anything. Sandler is making a million movies.” Second, I thought Shooter was doing Adam dirty. Cause announcing movies like that is a gigantic deal. If you betray a star’s trust who gives you that information as a secret, you could be blacklisted.

That’s when it hit me. There’s no way he would’ve done that unless he had Sandler’s permission. And the more I thought about it, the more I realized, IT WAS ALL PLANNED. They came up with this idea together. Not that I care. Because it means the movie is really coming. But I didn’t like to have to do all those mental gymnastics to get there.

Anyone want to give the plot of Happy Gilmore 2 a shot in the comments. Pretty sure at least half of you can come up with a better idea than Sandler’s writers. Ooooh, dis. Why you gotta be so mean, Carson?

What else is going on? Godgilla vs. King Kong – which already came out two years ago – just came out again and made 80 million bucks. This goes to show you that all you really need in a screenplay is a giant monster. Cause they re-released a movie that just came out 2 years ago and nobody noticed! They all went back to the theater. That tells me that every screenplay now needs a giant monster.

Giant Monster Showdown 2024? Hmmmm…. me shall think about it.

Finally, the most important news in all of Hollywood right now. Shakira saw Barbie with her sons and they all found it emasculating. And you know how I respond to that? “Finally somebody said it!” Cause it’s true of course. I’m just glad that somebody had the cajones to say it. Thank you Shakira.

And thank you to all of you!

And good night.

Cause I’m exhausted.

This is a game-changing newsletter. There is a special link within the newsletter that will change your screenwriting lives. I’m not going to spoil it. But let’s just say whoever receives this newsletter has a gigantic advantage over any screenwriter who doesn’t receive this newsletter. That’s how valuable the info inside that link is.

I also review a hot new spec screenplay that just sold to Warner Brothers. It is of the coveted “high concept low concept” variety. If you don’t know what that means, don’t worry. I explain it in the newsletter. But the short of it is that it’s a narrow sliver of the spec market that not many people know about. It includes scripts like “The Menu” and can lead to a quick sale.

You know I have to break down that Acolyte trailer, which received an unheard of 500,000 dislikes. Methinks Kathleen Kennedy might want to reevaluate her approach to Star Wars. Maybe go back to what the original fans loved about it? Just a thought. I also take on a bunch of other trailers, including my FAVORITE TRAILER OF THE PAST YEAR. This one warmed my heart. We also got a couple of surprise trailers, with Yorgos and Emma Stone reteaming for a new movie. And Jerry Seinfeld came out of nowhere to release his Pop-Tart movie trailer.

It’s a wonderful newsletter. If you’re not already signed up for my newsletters, my only question is, “Why?” E-mail me at Carsonreeves1@gmail.com and I’ll send it over to you.

Genre: Supernatural Thriller
Winning logline: A young war widow awakens naked on an Alaskan military base and fights for survival as she’s hunted by her father’s vengeful soldiers after a whole platoon was ripped apart overnight.
Winning Movie-Crossover Pitch: American Werewolf In London eats Memento
About: Not only did this logline + movie-crossover win the Showdown, it is the payoff of an earlier setup (to use a couple of screenwriting terms). You may remember that David sent in this logline for a consult and I published the process via an official post.
Writer: David Laurie
Details: 99 pages

Excellent job by David. He didn’t actually make it into the traditional showdown. For this showdown, I added one entry for the best movie-crossover pitch regardless of logline. That’s how David got in. And boy did he take advantage, winning the competition!

David is best known around these parts for the killer logline he won with in his last Amateur Showdown review. You can read the review of that script here.

Call of Judy didn’t blow us away but maybe She’s Got Claws will. Let’s find out!

A woman named Ivy in Afghanistan turns into a cat werewolf thing and kills a bunch of people. We then cut to Alaska where we meet Holly, who we will later find out is Ivy’s sister.

Holly wakes up outside some guy’s place. She walks in, looks at herself in the mirror, and sees a lot of blood. She stumbles outside and finds people looting apartment buildings. She meets up with some cops who take her to the station.

Once there, the Marines (or special forces) show up and claim to be looking for something dangerous. The head of the group is Holly’s father, whom Holly avoids. Although we don’t know why, we get the sense that she needs to stay as far away from this man as possible.

Figuring that whatever happened last night that resulted in her waking up naked and bloody is probably related to this marine infiltration, Holly slips out and meets up with one of the cops, Miguel, at his house. It’s unclear if Miguel knows she’s a cat-werewolf or if he just senses she wants to get away from these marines.

As the seemingly amnesia-ridden Holly tries to put the puzzle pieces of what happened back together, we occasionally jump back in time, where we meet other players. There’s Elizabeth, who hates Holly. We get the sense that Cat-Holly may have killed her husband. And then there’s Ivy, who Holly had some massive sibling rivalry with courtesy of their father. There are also some sinister scientific labs in their past.

When we jump back to the present, the Marines are hunting down Holly, who, taking a page from The Hulk’s book, is forced to become the cat once again to kill them off. Then Ivy herself arrives in town, turning this sibling rivalry into a primal to-the-death showdown. Or will Holly team up with her sister to take down the real problem here – Daddy? That’s the ultimate question that must be answered in.. She’s Got Claws.

The aim for this review is to be constructive because I know how much time and effort David has put into this craft. There’s an aspect to David’s writing that’s holding him back. And if he doesn’t fix it, he’s not going to advance to the next level.

That issue is LACK OF CLARITY in the writing. It’s what I experienced reading his last script. It’s what I experienced in our e-mail exchanges. And I experienced it again here.

It’s such an important issue that it’s hard for me to even diagnose today’s story because I probably only understood 60-70% of what was happening due to the lack of clarity in the writing.

What’s frustrating is that it’s hard to explain *why* there’s a lack of clarity. It’s not immediately apparent when you’re reading the script. David obviously knows how to construct sentences and paragraphs and he has a very active vocabulary and a vivid writing style.

But there are two areas in particular that kept causing problems.

One, sometimes there will be something in a sentence that either is highly unclear or, at the very least, unclear enough that I had to re-read it. This is fine if it happens a few times during the script. But it happened a few times every page.

Two, whenever a new situation arrived in the script, it wasn’t set up clearly enough. Again, there’s some gray area here. I *mostly* understood what was going on. But it always felt like the situations were presented clumsily. You could never quite see them as clearly as you wanted to.

Let’s go into some examples of both of these issues. We’ll start with the first one. Here are a series of sentences from the script.

-“Ali is still upright. Staring with one eye. Ivy pulls a face.”

What does “pull a face” mean? I *kind of* understand it. But I could be wrong. And that’s the problem. You want your reader to *definitely* understand. Not kind of understand.

-“He shoots. THREE RAPID. We SQUEAL. Jump back from the edge.”

Is “three rapid” referring to the shots? Then why not say, “THREE RAPID SHOTS?” It’s a small thing but it makes a big clarity difference.

-“We pad slowly round toward the front—“

I don’t know what this means. What does it mean when you “pad?”

-“He always nods hi to his reflection and has not exactly gelled with Alaska’s low key ways.”

This is in reference to a character intro. I don’t know what to make of this. You’re saying that this character, EVERY SINGLE TIME HE EVER WALKS NEAR A MIRROR, nods hi to the reflection? A) Why would someone nod hi to themselves? And B) Why would you nod hi to yourself in every mirror for the rest of your life?

-“Same Frankensteins. Same table. SNOW BLOWER THRUM drifts in.”

This is one of the easier lines to discern what’s going on. But still, “Snow blower thrum” is not an everyday phrase so when it’s presented in this quick staccato manner, it requires a re-read.

-“He cups his hand around his phone and rolls a die onto it.”

I’ve read this one a ton of times and I still don’t understand what it means.

I would implore David to stop writing in this style. I understand why he’s doing it. It’s part of his voice. But it’s undermining the clarity of the story. I would try to write a couple of scripts in proper English. Full sentences with subject, verb, and object. “John ate the taquitos.”

Cause I don’t think that these scripts are going to be clear enough until that change is made. Then, once you master that, you can start to pepper your voice back into your storytelling. Remember, your unique voice doesn’t matter if the reader can’t understand what you’re saying.

The second issue is an inability to clearly set up your major plot beats. For example, in Titanic, you don’t start with the ship hitting the iceberg. You have to set everything up first.

We meet Holly waking up from something bad happening. She walks into this apartment of a guy and sees herself bloody in the mirror. So my assumption was she slept with this guy then inadvertently turned into a were-cat and killed him. Then we go outside and, out of nowhere, the marines (or special forces) are in town cleaning the town out, supposedly to find this killer were-cat. But… she literally *just* killed someone and nobody knows about it yet. How are the marines there?

Later in the script, it’s mentioned that they came because she slaughtered a bunch of military people the previous night. So I go back and re-read that part of the script and realize that before we introduce Holly, we show glimpses of this animal killing people. So I thought, “Oh, okay. She didn’t kill the guy in the apartment. She killed people before she got to that apartment. But then where was the guy in the apartment? Did she kill him too? Was he gone on vacation?” It just seemed like it could’ve been set up clearer.

Holly is then taken to the police station, although I wasn’t entirely sure why. I think because she needed to be evacuated from town like everyone else?

From there, she sneakily exchanges texts with cop, Miguel, for some reason. I’m not sure why. I don’t know if she knows Miguel from before or if she just showed up in town yesterday? I don’t know! To be honest, I didn’t even know this was a military base UNTIL AFTERWARDS when I re-read the logline. When I was reading the script, I assumed it was a town.

She then sneaks away when the cops and marines aren’t looking and travels to Miguel’s house, where they meet up. I’m not sure why she goes there. I’m not sure why they need to team up.

This is what I mean when I say it’s like reading through fog. I would always feel as if I *mostly* understood why things were happening. But it was shaky enough that I was always doubting whether I was comprehending the moment.

As frustrating as this is for David to hear, it’s just as frustrating for me to explain because I want to fix this for him and I don’t know how. I wish it was as easy as “Do A, B, and C.” But there are minute details I haven’t identified that are playing into my inability to follow along.

All I know is that when I’m reading a good script, everything is crystal clear. Every word, every sentence, every beat, every action, every plot development, every character motivation. That’s not an issue that ever even comes up when I’m reading a good script. Clarity and presentation are a given. And that’s not happening here. It wasn’t happening in Call of Judy either.

Which means I can’t even assess the overall story.

I’m going to call on you guys here cause some of you are better at this than me. Read the first ten pages of She’s Got Claws. Tell me if you experience the same issues I had. If enough of you didn’t, I will concede I’m bad at reading. But, if you do, explain what you think is going on as specifically as possible. Because I want to help David. And I want to be better armed to help writers in the future who have this issue.

I still think this has movie potential. These dual-cat-human killers running around and ripping up Marines – I could see people paying for that. The script does have some gnarly imagery. But we need a way clearer AND cleaner story.

Script link: She’s Got Claws

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

What I learned: You have to be aware of what your weaknesses are as a screenwriter and write around them. David has lack-of-clarity issues. When you have lack-of-clarity issues, you don’t want to write Memento, something with a lot of intricate flash-backing (which I didn’t get into in the review). We’re having a hard enough time following the present storyline. Prove you can tell a clear concise simple story first. Then you can get fancy.