Genre: Post-Apocalypse/Zombie
Premise: Set 20 years after a zombie outbreak, an alcoholic teams up with a young girl to find his brother.
About: I have not seen HBO go more all-in on a new show, maybe, ever. They have been promoting the heck out of this thing. As a point of reference, they didn’t tell anyone The White Lotus Season 1 was coming. They just dumped that on the service. For this, they’re blanketing every real, virtual, and conceptual space with ads for THE LAST OF US. Which indicates to me that they think they have something great on their hands. The show is spearheaded by Chernobyl’s showrunner, Craig Maizen. As well as Neil Druckman, who wrote all the video games the show is based on. It stars Pedro Pascal. They’re hoping this is the next big pop culture hit. With a 96% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, it just might be.
Pilot Writers: Craig Maizen and Neil Druckman
Details: about an hour long

Okay, just to give you some backstory here. 

I’ve never gotten more recommendations to play a video game then I’ve gotten to play this one.  Tons of people have told me to play it.  

I think that’s because this is supposed to have the best story to a video game ever.  So, obviously, that intrigues someone like me, who loves storytelling in all its forms.  I don’t care if it’s a script, a book, a short story, a poem, a video game, an oral recounting – if it’s a good story, I want to hear it.

Funny enough, when I heard that a Last of Us project was in development, I decided not to play the game.  Cause I figured: I’ll just watch the story instead!  I won’t have to have put forth any effort.  Little did I know it would take ten years for me to see a Last of Us show.  But better late than never.

The Last of Us starts in 2003 for some odd reason.  That’s when the worldwide plague hits.  Joel Miller, who seems to be some small-town worker guy, is a single parent to his tween daughter, Sarah.  Sarah is sweeter than a brownie sundae which means her lifespan is probably the same as the time it takes for that ice cream to melt.  

When zombies start popping up like a whack-a-mole game, Joel, Sarah, and Joel’s brother, Tommy, make a run for it.  But the army moves in and shoots Sarah dead.  We then cut to 20 years later, aka, 2023, and the world looks a lot different.  Our story is focused on a walled-in version of Boston that can best be described as, The Town Where Nobody Showers.

It’s here where we go from exciting story to Setup City.  We start meeting characters, fast and furious, and hear about something called “FEDRA,” which I think is the current national government.  A lot of people living in this quasi-Boston town, including a now gray-haired Joel, are part of a rebellion trying to take FEDRA down.

This Boston place is pretty brutal, by the way.  When a poor little feral kid comes in from the outside, they take him in, tell him he’s going to be just fine, then EUTHANIZE THE MOTHERF—-ER.  And they don’t even get canceled for it!  This is a very different 2023 than I’m used to.  

The story shifts to focus on the rebellion crew, who I think Joel is a part of.  It’s a little confusing.  The crew is obsessed with this teenaged girl named Ellie, who they are both intrigued and terrified by.  We get the sense that Ellie may be special.  When the rebellion’s current mission falls apart, they call on Joel, his girlfriend, and Ellie, to go outside the walls and grab them some drugs.  Or weapons.  Or both.  Again, it’s a little confusing. 
But off they go! 

There are so many interesting storylines here.  

It’s inspiring to see a video game writer upgrade to a huge Hollywood project.  That almost never happens and says a lot about the value of writing a great story in the video game universe, as opposed to what normally happens, which is that the story is the least important thing to game developers.  

You’ve also got this show trying to exist in a space that is, arguably, beyond dead.  No pun intended.  The Walking Dead has done everything within their power to suck the last millimeters of life out of the melodramatic zombie genre, leaving no other avenues to tread.  How do you come into that space and bring a fresh perspective?  

Then you have the video game curse itself.  Video games never make good adaptations.  Mainly because video games are about interacting and their stories are conceived for such.  TV is a passive viewing experience and requires a completely different approach.

So what does this all add up to?  

Well, the opening 20 minutes of the show are amazing.  I was already dusting off the “genius” stamp, which has been packed away in the back of my closet.  When things start going south and they have to escape town?  There was some A-grade studio-level production value.  I was on the edge of my seat.  And then we get that whopper of a shocker where Sarah’s killed.  Oof!  That was one hell of a first act.

But there was definitely a shifting of the gears once we jumped to 2023.  We started bouncing around to a lot of different people – probably too quickly.  I wasn’t really getting to know them.  I wasn’t caring about them.  Which was surprising because the opening of the show does such a great job setting up the characters.  

When you’re writing a pilot, the bulk of your focus should be on creating the best characters possible.  Cause we’re going to have to watch these characters over the course of 60 episodes.  So, if you lose that battle of creating strong characters in your pilot, your show is dead before it’s even started.

Another high profile show that came out last year – La Brea – It pretty much got every single character wrong.  And the show was dead from that point forward.  It had no hope.  

So it was good to see that we got Joel down.  I’m onboard with him.  I like the brother (who, by the way, played the most recent Terminator).  I think I like Ellie.  I’m still trying to figure her out.  I don’t really like this girlfriend character (who, by the way, was the lead in Fringe).    So I guess I’ve got one foot in and one foot out right now.

I know that when a pilot ends, I need to be dying to see the next episode.  I was not dying to see this next episode.  It didn’t even have a good cliffhanger.  They just panned up to a night shot of a dilapidated city.  I don’t know about you but that seems mighty unimaginative to me.    

I’m not even clear what the overall hook of this show is.  I think in Walking Dead, Rick had to find his family?  I guess Joel is looking for his brother here but it’s not nearly as compelling because his brother isn’t lost due to the apocalypse.  He’s been doing just fine for 20 years.  He only recently hasn’t come back to town.  Is that a big enough hook to keep watching?

There’s a minor twist where we find out Ellie might be sort of infected but not really?  So maybe she’s the secret to the cure?  Didn’t Walking Dead do that like a dozen times during its run?

I don’t know, guys.  I was hoping for a lot more.  There’s some fun stuff if your’e paying attention, like the opening nod to Dawn of the Dead.  But it’s far from must-see television.  And since that’s what it wants to be, it’s got a higher bar to clear.  At least for its pilot, it came up short of that bar.  

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

What I learned: The opening of the pilot went full exposition mode, as newscasters debate what it would take to create a worldwide zombie pandemic.  Unknown screenwriters can’t do this.  Not enough is happening to keep the reader reading.  Maizen can do it because he knows the show will be on television no matter what.  So he can open with a guy taking a ten minute nap if he wants to.  But you can’t.  You have to write a scene more like the opening of Dawn of the Dead, which had a similar exposition first act, but then the news station starts violently falling apart in the wake of the zombie uprising.   

 

As I continue to work hard on finishing my dialogue book, I took note of one of the comments from last week which basically said the following: “When’s the last time somebody went to a movie for the dialogue?”

That question got me thinking. Because the truth is, I haven’t gone to see a movie for the dialogue since, probably, Juno. I remember hearing how great the dialogue was in that movie so I was excited to check it out.

But since then? Maybe the occasional Woody Allen or Tarantino movie had me intrigued about the dialogue. But I wouldn’t say that was the main reason I went to see those movies.

This had me wondering, do people even care about dialogue anymore? In the 90s, it was everything. During the indie boom, movies were graded heavily on their dialogue. But movies have changed radically since then. They’re more focused on thrilling you with a great space battle than impressing you with a clever turn-of-phrase.

Then reality slapped me in the face. Of course dialogue is important. It may not be the primary reason someone goes to the movies. It may not even be in the top 5 of their priority list. But I know this. Agents and producers are DESPERATE to find good dialogue writers.

Because they’re so freaking rare!

98% of working writers are able to fake their way through dialogue. By that, I mean, they know all the things you’re *not* supposed to do. So they can avoid those pitfalls and make their dialogue passable.

Only that tiny top 2% can write dialogue that sings. And, for that reason, those writers are very valuable. TV shows, which are more dependent on dialogue, are desperate to hire those writers. Producers constantly need to hire dialogue superheroes to do dialogue passes on their scripts. And those dialogue passes pay big money.

This doesn’t even begin to cover actors, who value great dialogue above everything. These are the lines they’re going to be saying so you bet your plucky pocketbook they’re choosing the scripts with the best dialogue.

That’s the thing you have to remember. The audience might not be showing up for the dialogue. But all the people who make movies? They’re looking for great dialogue writers.

Which is a long way of saying: Keep an eye out Mid-October for the Scriptshadow Dialogue Book! Oh, and I’m currently reading plays for the book. If you’ve got any suggestions for great modern plays, stuff written post-1990, please leave them in the comments.

Okay, moving on!

I’ve got two big things I’m looking forward to this week. On Wednesday, Andor comes out. And on Friday, Don’t Worry Darling comes out. Now a lot of you might be confused about my excitement for Don’t Worry Darling seeing as it’s got one of the “All Men Are Drowning in Toxic Masculinity” champions of the industry, Olivia Wilde, directing it. Which isn’t surprising since that’s basically what Don’t Worry Darling is about.

But there’s a lot more going on with this movie than just that. It’s a spec script. And I always root for spec scripts. Not just a spec script writer-director. But a spec script that writers wrote, somebody purchased, and then another director made. I love when that happens. It gives me hope that, if the movie does well, it will start a spec resurgence.

It’s got a sci-fi slant, which you know I love. And I particularly love when writers mix subject matter that normally would have nothing to do with sci-fi. The last thing you would expect in a 50s suburban neighborhood drama is a sci-fi twist.

I think the cinematography and vision of this movie look amazing. That shot in the trailer where Florence Pugh is being squished up against the wall by an invisible shield hints at a really creative mythology that I’m totally down for.

And then you’ve got one of the best up-and-coming actresses in the world in the lead role with Florence Pugh. I think she’s amazing. So I want to see what she’s going to do in the role. I also think it’s funny that she hates Olivia Wilde. The movie is about feminism and the two main female talents on the project hate each other. Come on, you have to love the irony.

Anyway, I’m going to be reviewing the movie next Monday. So BUCKLE UP.

Since we’re talking about feminism, let me take a quick detour before we cover Andor. The Woman King not only took in a surprising 19 million dollars this weekend, it got an A+ Cinemascore! Holy coyotes. I used to think that cinemascores were worthless but it turns out they’re the best indicator of how well a movie will do over time at the box office.

The movies with the highest scores have the lowest financial declines week-to-week. Case in point, the number one movie of the year, Top Gun Maverick, had an A+ Cinemascore. Meanwhile, Jordan Peele’s “Nope,” which did lousy in the weeks after its opening, received a B Cinemascore.

I’ll probably wait for this one to come out on streaming before I watch it. I’m having a bit of a suspension of disbelief issue with Viola Davis as an action hero. I mean, what’s next? Paul Giammati as Alexander the Great? Michael Cera as Hercules? Still, we always complain in the movie business that they don’t make anything different anymore. This movie is definitely different. So I’m glad that they found success in a market that isn’t always accepting of new ideas.

Okay, moving on to Andor. We’re just three days away from the Star Wars series that NOBODY thought would happen. This comes on the heels of Lucasfilm officially shoving a thermal detonator into the gullet of Rogue Squadron, which has been jettisoned from the Star Wars line-up, made to rot in perdition along with Rian Johnson’s future trilogy that was going to have every single person in the universe be a Jedi. The tagline, I hear, was: “We’re all special!”

The first reactions from Andor seem to confirm what everyone already assumed, which is that it’s a super serious version of Star Wars. The issue with social media reactions is the same issue that’s happening with these “7 Minute Standing Ovation” stories from film festivals. Once you establish that every single movie is getting one, it doesn’t mean anything anymore.

Those social media reactions claiming that every new Marvel release was the best Marvel film yet numbed all of us to them. Even worse, if your movie DIDN’T have “this was the greatest thing ever” reactions, and only had, “Yeah, it was pretty good” reactions, we knew the film was hogwash in a hand basket.

Andor is coming in with very tepid praise. “Yeah, it’s different from every other Star Wars,” people are saying. Okay, but nobody cares about that. They just care if it’s good. I still think it was an enormous gamble to build a show around a character who didn’t even pop in the original movie he was in. Rogue One made most of its money based on the fact that the average moviegoer thought it was a sequel to The Force Awakens. It didn’t make a bunch of money because it was a good movie. Arguably, it didn’t have a single stand-out character in it.

I’ll pose the question to you guys. Name me, in order, your top 3 characters from Rogue One. I’m guessing that K2SO, the big droid, comes out as number 1. And he was just some side character. He didn’t even have a big role.

The only thing that gives me hope here is Peacemaker. Peacemaker was lame in The Suicide Squad. But his show was absolutely awesome. Maybe once we get Cassian Andor away from the big plot in Rogue One, and let him breathe a little, he becomes a far more interesting character. I sure hope so. Because they’re giving us 12 episodes of this thing. The biggest Star Wars show by far. If it’s great, I’m going to be doing jumping jacks in roller skates.

I’ll review that either at the end of the week or next Tuesday.

In the meantime, I’ll be watching my current favorite show, House of the Dragon. This show is exceptional. I’m completely bought in. I’m a little nervous about the impending time jump and getting rid of Young Rahenyra. But I have so much faith in the writers, at this point, that I’m giving them the benefit of the doubt.

Today we’ve got Get Out meets Rosemary’s Baby meets The Stepford Wives.

Genre: Horror
Premise: A pregnant couple hoping to start their family in the suburbs find themselves embroiled in a decades long mystery which threatens to shatter their American dream.
About: Today’s writers are two of the few on the latest Black List to have a produced credit. They wrote Scouts Guide to the Zombie Apocalypse, in 2015, which, if I remember correctly, I liked.
Writers: Emi Mochizuki & Carrie Wilson
Details: 108 pages

I’ve been thinking a lot about character this week and a common mistake we writers make when it comes to the creation of our characters. There are basically two types of characters in a script. There are the main characters, typically 2-3 in every movie. And then everyone else – the periphery characters.

What I’ve realized is that writers often do a good job with their secondary characters but a lousy job with the main ones – the reason being that a secondary character doesn’t have to be complex. Which allows the writer to create somebody with a much clearer identity. The school bully, the stuck-up judgmental wife, the aging mother who will never be happy until her daughter gives her a grandchild, the over-exerciser, the spiritual hippie.

I’ll read these characters and immediately understand who they are.

Meanwhile, main characters are more nuanced. They have more going on. Which, in theory, is a good thing. But often writers will lean too heavily into that nuance and never actually convey what the core identity of that character is. And therefore we never get a feel for them.

John McClane’s core is a tried-and-true New York cop who doesn’t play by the rules. Arthur Fleck’s core is a guy who just wants to be accepted by the world. In my new favorite show, The Bear, the main character’s core is a workaholic who is determined to succeed at all costs.

Yes, main characters are nuanced. They’re complex. But you still have to give them that core identity that allows the reader to understand who they are. Cause if you spread their identity across too many plates, we’re not going to know what we’re eating.

I bring this up because I saw a little of this problem in today’s script. Let’s get into it.

34 year old Renee Kim has just gotten pregnant with her husband, Mark. The two are still reeling from a stillborn pregnancy a year ago. So Renee moves forward with caution. Cut to half a year later and Mark’s success at work has allowed them to purchase a house in esteemed Carriage Hill, a community of rich people well outside the city.

Right away, Renee starts seeing weird stuff. There’s this hot chick across the way who likes to jump up and down on her trampoline in her dress… with no underwear on. There’s also single Phoebe, a hot mamajama who’s not actually a mama, but someone who’s just really good at flirting with husbands.

Renee and Mark become fast friends with their neighbors across the street, Trevor and Zoe. Zoe, like Renee, is pregnant, which gives Renee someone who knows what she’s going through. Well, that is until one night when Renee sees a naked Zoe across the street in the window with some kind of weird collar on. Freaked out, Renee tells her husband, but he just assumes they’re into kinky sex.

Things get weirder when Zoe disappears. She leaves a text to Trevor that she’s found someone new so sayonara. Renee is not convinced. Not only are Zoe and her soon-to-be-born baby gone, but come to think of it, there aren’t any babies in Carriage Hill. There aren’t any KIDS in Carriage Hill.

As Renee’s delivery date approaches, she becomes convinced that this Carriage Hill place steals babies and does something to them. She alerts the police, who inform her that Carriage Hill used to be a hippie compound in the 70s until a fire burned it all down, killing many of the inhabitants. Renee thinks she’s put the puzzle pieces together to know what’s going on. But she starts to doubt herself because… well because Carriage Hill can’t possibly be inhabited by ghosts, can it?

I know we were talking about character introductions the other day. But we were doing so in the context of, “This is a bad character introduction.” The reality is that an AVERAGE character introduction is almost as bad as a bad one.

Here’s how Renee is introduced: “Effortlessly elegant and a natural beauty, RENEE KIM (34)…”

You may look at this and say, “Eh, it’s not bad, Carson.” And you’d be right. It isn’t bad. It’s average. Let me key in on a very important point when it comes to describing characters. If you only give us generalities, we will perceive your character in a GENERIC manner.

GENERALITIES = GENERIC

“Effortlessly elegant.” That *does* give me information. But it’s a phrase I’ve read hundreds of times before. Which mean this character is now being lumped into that giant group of generic characters in my head who were described the same way. Same thing with “natural beauty.” I’ve read that phrase more times than I can count.

This isn’t hard, people. Find ONE SPECIFIC THING about your character you can key in on and describe that via phrasing that’s different from what people typically use. That’s going to help your character intro stand out, and therefore, your character stand out.

I know it’s a book but in Gone Girl, here’s Gillian Flynn describing the female cop who comes to the house after Amy’s disappearance: “The woman was surprisingly ugly — brazenly, beyond the scope of everyday ugly: tiny round eyes set tight as buttons, a long twist of a nose, skin spackled with tiny bumps, long lank hair the color of a dust bunny.”

When you are specific, the character becomes special in the reader’s head. The reader can imagine them, see them as a real person.

SPECIFIC = SPECIAL

Let’s stop making the mistake of describing characters with generalities and platitudes (“a bear of a man”).

Okay, onto the script. When it comes to scripts like this, there’s a decision that needs to be made. Are you going to stick to some level of reality? Or are you just going to go completely nuts and include whatever weird idea pops into your head.

I prefer when writers stick to reality as much as they can. Because reality is scarier. And, if they do include supernatural or sci-fi stuff, do so in the context of making it as believable as possible.

I thought Don’t Worry Darling did a good job of this. Some really crazy things happen in that script. But there was always an underlining design to it all. I think what I dislike most is when things get so chaotic that I no longer feel like I’m reading a well thought out story, but rather a writer who’s throwing every idea at the wall.

Which is how this reads. I mean, one second, we’re watching this gorgeous naked woman. The next second that same woman is 100 years old. It’s a creepy image but I wasn’t clear on how their body changed.

We’re got the hippie compound. We’ve got underground tunnel systems. We’ve got everybody under the sun acting bizarre.

I didn’t dislike it but I guess, at a certain point, I could no longer suspend disbelief. There were too many things to keep track of. And I get the conundrum of being the screenwriter in this scenario. You want to keep giving the reader the fun that they came for, so they’ll want to keep turning the pages.

But part of being a good screenwriter is trusting that you can hold the reader’s attention through those slower parts of the story. Sure, I could have a superhero show up in my script on page 10 and then Rome blow up on page 20 and then inter-dimensional aliens arrive on page 30 — I’m giving the reader plenty of reasons to keep turning the pages. But at what cost? At the cost of them not taking the story seriously, which eventually ends in them in disengaging.

Carriage Hill is a fun little script. I just wanted to believe what was happening more. It all got a little too goofy for me.

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

What I learned: If there’s one thing that drives me crazy, it’s when the writer describes the main character generically, but then gives some secondary character a well thought out detailed character introduction. I’ll never understand that. Here’s a description of the Carriage Hill manager: “Real estate agent NANCY TALBOT smiles like a game show host. Dressed in a vintage Diane Von Furstenburg wrap dress, she’s in her forties, but could pass for thirty.” Why wasn’t this level of detail used for Renee????

This isn’t just nit-picking, by the way. One of the most important things in a screenplay is our connection with the main character. The better we know them, the more invested we will be. So you want to do everything in your power to connect us to them. And the character intro is the first of many important steps a writer uses to achieve that.

What I learned 2: If you want to have a pregnant character in your screenplay, we should either meet them when they’re 8+ months pregnant, or, if you show them get pregnant, you want to do a TIME JUMP to 6, 7, 8 months later. And you want to do that time jump as early in the screenplay as possible. Cause you want to start the ticking time bomb to the baby’s birth. You can’t do that if the movie starts with the character at 2 months pregnant and you gradually tell the story over the next 7 months until they conceive. There won’t be enough urgency. There are exceptions to this (Rosemary’s Baby) but for the most part, it’s a good rule to follow.

Genre: Thriller
Premise: A year after her husband’s death, an adrenaline junkie rock climber finds herself being hunted by a serial killer during a canoe run.
About: This script finished in the bottom half of last year’s Black List. Screenwriter Jeremy Robbins did some writing on the TV show version of The Purge.
Writer: Jeremy Robbins
Details: 96 pages

These scripts are strange beasts.

They’re tailor-made for writing on spec because they’re simple, easy-to-understand, and effortless reads. You can basically keep every paragraph at 2 lines or less.

But they’re deceptively hard sells when it comes to turning them into movies. I just read a really good one recently for a consultation and I’ve been helping the writer send it out. And the note that I’ve gotten back is that it’s “too small.” More specifically I keep getting told that when it comes to action, audiences want that action to be bigger. They don’t want small action. They don’t want one person running from nature, or running from someone else.

So, for these to work beyond getting recognition as a script, they need to have some super marketable angle. A good example would be “The Shallows,” that script about the surfer on the private beach who gets stuck on a rock with a shark swimming around. The shark angle made that marketable.

But hey, who’s to say what anyone will fall in love with, right? Maybe there’s a rock-climbing production head out there dying to make a movie like this.

When we meet 30 year old Sasha, she’s climbing a rock face that would make Alex Honnold anxious. She’s doing so with her husband and I don’t think I need to get into specifics for you to know what happens next. Anybody seen Cliffhanger?

Cut to a year later, after her hubby, who’s name was Tommy if anybody cares, died, and Sasha has become the female version of Alex Honnold, riding around solo in a van, doing the things that adrenaline junkies do. But one thing she doesn’t do anymore is climb rock faces. She’s retired that sediment of her adrenaline-infused life.

Currently she’s about to do a 30 mile solo canoe ride through a very dangerous river. About a mile into the route, however, she notices something very wrong with her canoe. She pulls herself onto shore and sees that someone DRILLED HOLES into her canoe. What in the heck? An hour later, she’s heavily vomiting. Someone poisoned her water!

Sasha comes to the conclusion that while she was camping last night, somebody sabotaged her stuff. And it isn’t long before the saboteur shows up. It’s our Caucasian male villain, Ben, who either is a park ranger or pretended to be a park ranger when Sasha ran into him a day ago. And now he’s hunting her!

Eventually, Ben captures Sasha and makes her climb a rock face with her, before entering a hidden cave. It’s here where Ben keeps his victims, a sort of beautiful cavern with drawings on the walls that have to be thousands of years old.

To make sure she doesn’t escape, Ben handcuff-connects the two with a chain. But that doesn’t stop the feisty Sasha from trying. When he least expects it, Sasha makes a break for the exit, pulling the stumbling Ben along, then leaping off the rock face into the river below.

Ben is eventually able to subdue Sasha once more. But now they’re both injured and need to get medical attention. After deducing where they are, Ben calculates that the fastest way out of the gorge is up a nearby rock face that the two will have to free-solo to the top, connected by rope that ensures if one of them falls… both of them fall.

Today’s script is an interesting comparison piece to yesterday’s script. Because while I did like Apex, I didn’t like it as much as The Bee Keeper.

I asked myself why. Because today’s script is actually a lot more believable than yesterday’s script. I mean yesterday’s script was about bee keeping assassins who use pollen and honey as weaponry.

It goes right back to emotion. Emotionally, I cared more about the characters in The Bee Keeper than I did Sasha.

But why? The entire first scene shows Sasha losing her husband, the person she loves more than anything in the world. Why would I feel more emotion towards a bee keeper getting revenge for a dead neighbor than I would a grieving widow?

The first answer came to me quickly. Unlike in The Bee Keeper, there wasn’t a single reason to show the opening scene of Sasha losing her husband OTHER THAN to make us feel sympathy for her. The trick with mining emotion is that it cannot be obvious that you are manipulating the audience. And this was so so so so so obvious. “PLEASE LOVE MY MAIN CHARACTER! LOOK AT HER LOSE HER HUSBAND RIGHT IN FRONT OF YOUR EYES!”

The reason The Bee Keeper works better is because the opening scene doesn’t just mine emotion from Eloise’s death. It ALSO sets up the plot. Eloise loses money to this company. So that’s the company that the bee keeper goes after. That’s the advantage of doing 2 to 3 to 4 things in a scene, is that it makes the scene more relevant to the overall movie, and therefore less susceptible to looking like a blatant attempt to mine emotion.

It’s no different than when you have a lot of exposition to get out, so you write a scene that’s ONLY ABOUT THAT EXPOSITION. Every reader who reads your script knows you only wrote that scene to get all that exposition out because that’s the only thing the scene focuses on.

As a screenwriter, you have to learn to hide those things.

This goes back to my theory I was positing yesterday. If we’re not hooked emotionally, we’re not going to love your script. We might still LIKE your script. As was the case here. But rarely in the history of movies do people love movies that they’re not emotionally connected to.

The reason I still liked this script is because the technical execution was very strong. I particularly liked that the writer kept changing things up. For example, Sasha evades Ben for a while, then is captured by Ben for a while, then she tries to escape with Ben attached to her (something I’ve never seen before), and finally she and Ben have to work together.

Also, I thought it was clever how the writer exploited his premise. The hook here is the rock climbing aspect. And he gives us some fun rock climbing set pieces, the highlight of which was the free-solo climb with the two connected together so if one screwed up they were both goners.

The writer was also very good at creating suspense. Ben doesn’t just show up out of nowhere. We see a drone that Sasha doesn’t see 10 pages before he arrives. We experience the deliberately drilled holes in her canoe. A lot of writers don’t have the foresight or the patience to slowly build towards an arrival. They just want to jump to the good stuff! YEEHAW! And that’s not as interesting, in my opinion.

But like I said, these are weird scripts. They’re actiony enough to read fast on the page, but put them toe-to-toe with a film like Nobody and its cool-as-f**k bruiser bus battle and they feel small. And as much as I’d like to say I’m not one of those people, I do occasionally run across these “thriller in a forest” posters when I’m scrolling through Netflix or Prime and I think, “Ehhh… feels kind of small potatoes.”

Let me turn the question over to you guys. Do you watch these films? Or do you find them too small?

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

What I learned: When you’re describing a character, try to find at least ONE VERY SPECIFIC THING that can give us insight into the character. Because if you describe a character too generally, like with one of these types of descriptions – “JOE, 27, is a bear of a man who looks like he’s had a rough life,” – we don’t get a good sense of what’s unique about that person. Check out how Robbins describes Sasha’s husband: “Inside the second sleeping bag is TOMMY (30s). A SF GIANTS BANDANA is wrapped over his face, a makeshift eye-mask.” Even without describing Tommy himself, we get a sense of this guy. He’s from San Francisco. He’s a sports dude. That’s telling me more than some generic cut-and-paste description that I see in 90% of all other scripts.

John Wickan?

Genre: Action/Supernatural
Premise: When an elite assassin is sent to the haunted Harz Mountains in Germany on an extraction job she intends to be her last, she quickly learns that the local legends about witchcraft are true and must face a sinister supernatural threat.
About: Colin Bannon is quickly climbing the Hollywood literary ladder, unleashing tons of big idea scripts into the machine, which is gladly snatching them up. He already sold that Squid Game-inspired spec about a secret Russian marathon where only the best runners are invited, and then killed off over the course of the race. Will John Wickan be his next sale?
Writer: Colin Bannon
Details: 112 pages

Peacemaker’s Jennifer Holland for Six?

You gotta give it to Colin Bannon. The guy is a high concept generating machine. We already looked at one super high concept 2021 Black List entry of his. This is the other one.

While I love Bannon’s infatuation with big ideas, I think he gets a little too crazy as his scripts go on. They feel like chaos. And it becomes harder and harder to see through that chaos to find the story.

There’s something to be said there about writer blind spots. Every writer has them and I used to think that if you told a writer over and over again that Issue X was a blind spot of theirs, they’d eventually fix it.

But an argument can be made that every writer *is* their blind spot. Has Christopher Nolan ever shored up his excessive exposition? Is Joss Whedon capable of not writing quippy dialogue? Is it possible for Judd Apatow to write a movie that stops at 3 acts?

I remember one of my giant weaknesses that never seemed to go away was when I got a man and a woman in a scene — didn’t matter the genre — it would always end up reading like romantic comedy banter. Even though I *knew* it shouldn’t read like that, it still read like that. The price of growing up in the Romantic Comedy Golden Era I suppose.

While these weaknesses tend to be a part of our “voice,” I do think that, as an artist, you should always be trying to improve, and one of the best ways to improve is addressing recurrent criticism.

With that in mind, let’s check out The Devil Herself.

Six is an assassin in her 30s who lives in the middle of nowhere for reasons we’ll find out have to do with her former organization wanting to kill her. But Six is tired of living a life of seclusion and wants to move to “The Island,” a place where “Numbers” go to retire (and subsequently, can’t be assassinated).

So she catches up with an old friend, Two, who tells her that he can get her to the Island, but she’ll have to do something for him first. A 7 year old girl has been kidnapped by some creepy people who are currently holding her in a church on the highest mountain in Germany. Go get her, return her to her mom, and you can go to the Island.

Six zips up the mountain, charges into the church, and finds some crazy Pagan ritual going on, the center of which is the young girl, Petra. Six starts firing away like Rambo, scattering the witches, which include the freaky High Priestess, grabs Petra, and drives her back to her mother.

Just two minutes into the reunion, there’s a knock on the door. They answer and and see Aunt Alice. Except Aunt Alice looks a lot like the High Priestess. Six scans her up and down. Is it the High Priestess?? It’s hard to say without all the blood and robes she had on before. But Six wants to get to that island so she heads out.

She doesn’t get a mile before slamming on the breaks, turning around, and burning rubber back to the house. By that time, the entire family is dead or near-dead, and “Aunt Alice” and Petra are gone. Six hurries after her, shooting Aunt Alice’s van off the mountain with a sniper rifle, then going to retrieve Petra from the wreckage (yes, you read that right).

Once she has Petra again, she realizes that those crafty witches were able to put a demon in her. This means Six will have to transport Petra to a White Magic expert who can exorcise the demon from the girl. Complicating matters is that Six’s old boss, One, has found out where she is and sent every assassin in the area to kill her. Talk about a rough day at work!

Last week I lamented the creative choice to build a show around a man who strangled a goose. This week says hold my beer, and also my shot of tequila, and also this liquor store I just happen to be carrying in my backpack, and proceeds to start with a woman shooting dead a baby deer.

Why do I get the feeling Bannon will not be called in for Disney’s inevitable live-action remake of Bambi?

Bannon: “Okay, so hear me out. We start on Bambi right? And she’s sipping water from the lake. It’s serene. There’s not a cloud in the sky. And then BAM!!! An alligator bursts out of the water and decapitates Bambi with one chomp of his mouth. What do you think? Cause it doesn’t have to be an alligator. Maybe Bambi just falls into the lake and drowns? That could be good?”

Okay, so Six shot the fawn by mistake but still. Not sure you want to start your movie on your hero killing a baby deer.

What follows is, what I’ve come to now know, as “The Bannon Factor.” The Bannon Factor is when you take whatever would normally happen and multiply it by 100. For example, every day in her little shack, Six works out. And she’s got a picture of the Island on her wall. This is what’s written in the scene: “She’s doing sit-ups now. There’s only one decoration pinned to the wall — A lone photograph of a TROPICAL ISLAND. With every rep, she glances at the photo.”

Does she have to look at the picture *EVERY* rep? Can’t she just look at it a few times and get back to focusing on her form? It’s a little on-the-nose to have her look at her island picture for 200 sit-ups in a row… EVERY DAY.

This excessiveness bleeds into his overall style of writing as well. And it’s there on every single page. You don’t get any breaks. Here’s a typical page from The Devil Herself:

The act of reading is not unlike the act of living. People like variety. They like to work out intensely for an hour, then veg out in front of their TV for a little bit. They like to party with friends at night. They like to go on serene hikes in the mountains during the day. If you do the same thing every day all day, with zero variety, you eventually go insane!

And I realize there may be some confusion here because spec scripts are supposed to move fast. But “fast” doesn’t mean non-stop action. I can read a script with two characters falling in love that’s mostly dialogue that reads “fast.”

Yes, you want to move your plot along. But unless you add some variety to your scenes, everything starts to look the same. Predictability is a script-killer. It really is. The second the reader knows where things are going to be 10 pages from now, and 10 pages after that, and 10 pages after that, that’s when they check out. Because what’s the reason to keep reading if you already know what’s going to happen?

Now are there “all-action” movies that work? Yeah, sure. Mad Max Fury Road comes to mind. But just because a handful of movies have pulled off the impossible over the last 75 years doesn’t mean you’re going to be able to do it.

With that said, I do like strange genre combinations. I don’t know many action movies that include witchcraft. And I actually think it’s pretty cool to mix those two things. Bannon could’ve even gone further, in my opinion, and made Six a witch. A witch assassin would be awesome. But whether she’s a witch or not, it doesn’t fix Bannon’s blind spot, which is that the script is all chaos all the time. We need some cool down periods and we need more variety. Until that happens, I will always be in conflict with Bannon’s scripts.

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

What I learned: I love it when writers use time-tested movie moments, then take the piss out of them. How many times have we seen, for example, a character about to kill another character, that character freeze before they can kill them, then fall over dead to reveal another character behind them who’s just killed them? If you’re going to put those moments in your script, look for ways to either have fun with them or do something a little different. Here, Bannon tackles a very familiar moment we’ve seen in a lot of movies, and adds an unexpected funny twist to it…