Genre: Thriller/Survival
Logline: A famous former extreme skier attempts to re-ski the mountain that ended his career, this time with the son of his old rival, with the threat of an avalanche looming.
About: If the name Kevin Sheridan sounds familiar to you that’s because he used to visit the site frequently. He’s since become a regular on the Black List. I reviewed his last script about police corruption last year. A strong “worth the read.” Well, he’s back on the Black List with another script, this one more fun.
Writer: Kevin Sheridan
Details: 105 pages

The new script trend is here. Are you ready for it?

Extreme sports!

I don’t think you’re ready.

Free Solo changed the game. We had five big rock-climbing specs (two of which are being made) after that film came out. We had that extreme running spec from Colin Bannon. And now we’ve got an extreme skiing spec.

I ain’t complaining. Anything with the word “extreme” in it is tailor made for storytelling. Nobody wants to watch a movie about “calm” sking. Right? You want extreme!

Brooks used to be the greatest extreme skier on the planet. But then one day, he skied the hardest mountain on the planet, Alder. And it destroyed him. He went flying off the side of the mountain, broke nearly every bone in his body, and was never the same skier again.

Cut to present day and Brooks’ old rival, Rick, comes to him and asks Brooks if he’ll take his 16 year old son, Zack, down Alder mountain. Zack is a rising superstar in the skiing world and if he skies Alder, it’ll be his coming out party. Brooks say, ‘no way.’ Until Rick, a successful real estate developer, offers him a quarter of a million dollars. That money could put his daughter through college. Brooks changes his tune.

Brooks and Zack head to the top of the mountain while Rick, Brooks’ wife Annie, and Annie’s husband, Teddy, stay near the middle, much safer, part of the mountain, so they can be part of the camera crew that’s going to capture Zack’s descent. Ready, set, go.

Despite a few hiccups, everything goes fine. That is until Brooks and Zack make it down to their families. Right then a giant avalanche hits and there’s nothing they can do but prepare their emergency equipment for being swallowed up by this snow tidal wave.

Brooks and Rick get lucky. They don’t get buried that deep and are able to get to the surface. But when they look at the destruction before them, they’re convinced that no one else made it. Still, they’ve got to try. So they waddle up the mountain looking for any signs of their family. And they’ve got to work fast since both of them know… another avalanche is coming.

My whole thing with any movies that pair your hero up with someone else is that that pairing be interesting. What you’re looking for is two things. What pairing generates the most conflict? And what pairing generates the biggest emotional punch?

With Zack, you don’t really get either. Zack adores Brooks. So there’s zero conflict there. And when it comes to any emotional beats to mine, there’s no history between Brooks and Zack. So there’s nothing they get to resolve during this movie that’s going to send our tear-ducts into overdrive.

Also, I can’t tell what to make of the plot. On the one hand, we know what’s going to happen from page 1. We know because before we even get to the story, a title card tells us there were more people killed in avalanches in 2021 than any other year in history. So we know an avalanche is coming.

But then if an avalanche is coming, that means Brooks’ journey to reconquer the mountain that destroyed him means nothing. We know before the story starts that he’s not going to ski it successfully since the avalanche will come first. But then what is the character journey if it’s not about defeating the mountain?

I guess you conquer it in a different way if you survive an avalanche. But is that as satisfying as skiing it successfully? I’m not sure it is. I think this is a better movie if he beats the mountain at skiing once and for all.

All of this changes, however, if you view the script the same way you watched Titanic. In Titanic, we know the ship is going to sink before the first page and that script still works brilliantly. Here, we know the avalanche is coming so, from a dramatic irony perspective, it creates a ton of suspense. We know our group is doomed. And just like in Titanic, the plot is about how the characters handle it. Whose actions lead to survival, and whose actions lead to death?

But since that’s the story engine that’s driving our interest, I’m not sure what all the setup was about. The setup is literally setting up an entirely different movie. If this is going to be an avalanche movie, we should be building the plot around that. Probably a group of skiing friends who decide to challenge themselves on one of the most dangerous ski runs in the world.

I also wanted more uncertainty in this story. For some reason, I knew everybody was going to be okay. Kevin would use these phrases like, “There’s no way someone could’ve lived through that,” which made me certain that that’s exactly what they had done. In a movie like this, you have to kill some people off. And not the least most important character. Cause, to Kevin’s credit, he does kill off Teddy. But Teddy is the character we care least about. If you’re going to kill someone off, kill off Obi-Wan Kenobi. Whenever you kill off a serious character, it tells your reader you mean business. No one is safe.

Remember when Game of Thrones was at is most unstoppable? It was after the Red Wedding, right? When major characters were slaughtered. We watched that show after that thinking no one was safe, which created an exciting undercurrent to every episode. But in those final seasons? Nobody important died. All of a sudden, the show wasn’t as cool.

Kevin does a good job describing the crappy situations our characters are in. For example, he doesn’t just say that a character is “buried.” He reminds us that they’re buried under snow that has been compressed so tightly due to the pressure of tons of it all racing down the mountain that it is the equivalent of being buried in concrete.

And there’s some cool stuff you learn about avalanche airbags and beacon trackers. It reminded me of James Cameron’s brilliant alien trackers in Aliens. Beep…beep…beep…beep. Except now you’re trying to get to the beacon instead of get away from it. And time is of the essence because they probably can’t breathe under there.

There’s one moment where they track Zack’s beacon, which beeps them to the spot where he’s buried. Brooks digs furiously, finding the airbag and tracker but… no Zack. They realize Zack has been separated from his beacon. He could literally be buried anywhere. It was a harrowing moment.

But what happened next is the epitome of what was wrong with this script. Seconds later, Zack stands up a few hundred feet up the hill and yells out to them. Zack is fine. Not just that. Zack is fine… without our hero’s help. If our hero isn’t solving problems, why even have a hero? Especially in a movie like this, people shouldn’t be miraculously fine without our hero lifting a finger.

Having said that, there currently aren’t any movies like this on the market. Extreme skiing and avalanches are marketable. If I had to guess, I’d say that this script is rewritten to lean into one or the other so it feels more singular. But it could definitely be a film. What’s more cinematic than extreme skiing in the face of an avalanche?

[ ] tumble off the side of the mountain
[x] get stuck on the ski lift for two hours
[ ] A cozy ski down the mountain
[ ] pull off your first ever backflip
[ ] double diamond mastery

What I learned: Be careful that you don’t telegraph what’s going to happen with the way you’re describing things. If you keep writing phrases like, “There’s no way anyone could’ve made it through that,” or “Even if they can get down to her in time, there’s a one-in-a-million shot she’s alive,” trust me when I say that we know the character is alive.

What I learned: When writing about things that have a lot of subject-specific technical terminology, which this had, don’t leave the reader behind. Give them an alternative reading of that stuff we understand. Kevin does that here. After giving us a technical visual of our two skiers barreling down the slope, he says this: “If this means nothing to you, that’s okay. Just know that this is a run no human being should ever attempt to ski.” I bring this up because I always had this issue when writing tennis scripts. I’d think, “Nobody knows what a topspin serve is. Or a slice backhand crosscourt winner.” I should’ve tacked on more sentences like Kevin wrote here.

February Showdown Deadline is THIS THURSDAY! It is the “First Line Showdown.” Details are here at this link. Get those submissions in!!!

I think it’s now safe to say that if you’re a Superhero Movie…. “Uh oh.”

I have to give it to the box office media. They will do ANYTHING to spin the numbers.

Madame Web made 26 million dollars this weekend.

There’s a small caveat to that: OVER SIX DAYS.

Somehow, the industry has created a six-day weekend. In all my years of covering this stuff, I’ve never heard of a six-day weekend! Nobody has. Therefore, nobody knows what to make of these numbers. “One Love” made 51 million bucks. Which is a good take. But they had three extra days to do it. So it’s confusing.

However, it does prove that music biopics continue to be one of the safest bets in town.

Now you’re probably wondering, “Why don’t they make a million of them then?”

Well, as I found out, personally, they’re very tricky to produce because you’re usually dealing with bands. And the nature of any band is that they don’t all get along. Therefore, the band members don’t want to make a movie that benefits the other band members. Or they hold up approval just to spite the person in the band they hate.

Imagine writing a script that Paul Simon loves more than anything. But then you send it to Art Garfunkel and Art doesn’t come off as strongly in the script. So he says, “No, I don’t like it.” Now you’ve got to rewrite it to make Art look better. But then in the next draft, Paul thinks he’s being overshadowed by Art so he says no. Now you’ve got to go back and write it again.

And these rewrites take time. Months. And when you send it to each artist again, you may not be a priority. Musicians have other things going on in their lives. So they get to the script when they get to it. Which might be half a year since the last draft. And if one of them says no, now you gotta write another draft.

And you’re a screenwriter so you need to make money so you may have to go work a job before you have time to work on the next draft of Paul & Art. You can start to see why it’s so hard to make one of these movies.

This is why people choose singular artists like Bob Marley because, at least that way, you’re only dealing with one person. However, even singular artists, if dead, mean you’re often dealing with multiple family members who own the rights, which puts you right back in the same position you were in with the bands. Musical artists may have multiple kids with multiple partners, and a lot of those kids don’t like each other. So now you’ve got to make all of them happy.

Then you’ve got to see it from the writer’s and producer’s side. They know that, in order to make a good movie, you have to show the BAD along with the good. But the artists and the families only want to portray the good.

So you have to find a way around that. Luckily, these iconic musicians are so beloved that you’ll have people who show up just to celebrate the music and don’t really care that the movie is, basically, a commercial for that music.

By the way, this is why it’s so much easier to write a biopic about a historical figure. Because you can just base the movie off a book, like Nolan did for Oppenheimer, and not have to get any approval from the family. It’s good PR if you get the family on board, of course. But you don’t have to.

Technically, you could do the same with musicians. You could make a movie based on a book about them without their approval. You wouldn’t get sued either. However, you wouldn’t be able to use any of their music. For anything music-related, you have to get the artist’s permission. That’s why the musicians and bands have you over the barrel versus traditional biopics. You can’t tell a musician’s story without putting their music in the film, which places you in that unenviable position I was just alluding to of trying to win everyone involved over.

To that end, just getting a Bob Marley movie in front of audiences is a monumental achievement. Just to reiterate HOW HARD it is, they’ve been trying to do it for 25 years.

I’m not a music biopic guy, as you know. But based on the trailers, it looks like they got it right. They cast it perfectly. That actor, who I’ve never heard of before, looks great in the main role (ironically, he looks nothing like Marley in real life). And I’m always happy when any movie outside of the studio superhero machine does well. Which brings us back to superhero talk.

Madame Web’s disastrous box office is the result of several things.

Number 1 is the danger of trends. There was this period 2-3 years ago where it was female superheroes or bust. You didn’t even think of introducing a new male superhero. This is why The Marvels was greenlit and it’s also why Madame Web was greenlit.

But the viewing landscape changes quickly and people got tired of being pandered to and told what to like.  People want movies that their creators are passionate about. They want the people involved to say, “I’ve got an amazing idea for a superhero movie.” Madame Web is clearly designed to fit into the “all-female” superhero trend. And it paid the biggest price for doing so. This is a mega-bomb.

How does it affect future superhero movies? At this point, only two types of superhero movies are going to work. Sequels to mega-franchises with already beloved actors playing the superheroes. That’s why Deadpool 3 is going to be the biggest movie of the year. Or fresh ways into the superhero genre – movies that disrupt the typical formula and tone. The latter is getting harder and harder to do. Movies like Ragnarok, Dark Knight, X-Men: Days of Future Past, Logan.

I noticed they just announced a new Fantastic Four movie. It sounds like they’re TRYING TO DO something different with it, as it will be set in the 1960s. But let’s be real here. This franchise has never worked. It’s failed on three separate occasions (yes, there’s a little-known 1994 Fantastic Four film that turned out so bad, they never released it!).

I don’t know why it doesn’t work. Having the main guy have the lamest powers (stretchy power) probably factors into it. But Johnny Storm is rad. Silver Surfer was my favorite superhero ever growing up and just oozes cool. And who wouldn’t want to watch a Hulk vs. Thing fight?

But, like I said, you’re releasing the film during the most competitive time in box office superhero history.

The big wildcard remains James Gunn. James Gunn has made a name for himself for doing things differently. So we know that he’s going to bring something different to the DC films. But, I mean, how different can you be? To be clear, I’m not giving up on him. I’m only saying that the job is going to be SOOOOOO hard.

I think he’s got the right idea, though. He’s doing what Christopher Nolan did when he revolutionized comic book movies with Batman Begins, which is going in the opposite direction of what everyone else was doing. Everybody else was making these off-the-wall superhero characters who could do anything. Nolan grounded his hero in reality, which made him more relatable than any other superhero character.  Technically, anyone could be *this* version of Batman.

It sounds like Gunn is going away from this ridiculous multi-verse insanity that’s quietly destroying the Marvel universe and basing his first film, Superman, on that purity and idealism that made the movies so popular in the 80s. I don’t know if it’s going to work. But it’s the best route for success.

So, did anyone see Madame Web or One Love over the weekend? What did you think?

Happy Valentine’s Day!

Genre: Comedy
Premise: After his girlfriend dies, a guy who hates cats begins an unexpected bromance with her widowed cat, who reveals himself to be an alien that is here to save the world.
About: This one comes from a new screenwriter. The script made the Black List and is in development over at 21 Laps.
Writer: Andrew Nunnelly
Details: 107 pages

I was paws-itively looking forward to this one.

Whatever genre you’re writing in, you want to look for unique ways into it. We’ve got a quasi-rom-com here. Perfect for Valentine’s Day. But instead of some cliched boy meets girl rom-com clone, the movie is about a bromance between a guy and a cat. How much more unique can you get?

And to make matters better, Taylor Swift is in it! That automatically bumps the script up two notches.

But will the script be the cat’s meow? Or will it be claw-full?

Jeff, an assistant professor at UCLA, meets his dream woman in Emma. I mean check out this description: brunette, unconsciously pretty, unwittingly charming, infinitely empathetic. We’re all in love with this woman!

There’s one small issue. Emma is a giant cat-lady. She’s got her old black cat, Yugen. She’s got 10,000 cat toys and cat beds and cat pictures around the apartment. Jeff is not a cat person. It’s clear Yugen knows this. But Emma and Yugen are a package deal and there’s nothing Jeff can do about it.

Their relationship is built around their mutual obsession with finding alien life. Hey, I can relate to that. But before they can answer the eternal question of “Are we alone?” Jeff becomes alone cause Emma is killed in a car accident.

Jeff wallows in their apartment for weeks until, all of a sudden, Yugen talks to him. It takes Jeff a while before he believes he hasn’t gone crazy. That’s when Yugen hits him with a shocker: All cats are aliens. They are here to prevent humans from destroying the earth. Emma was The One and now that she’s dead, earth is doomed. UNLESS Jeff can take her place.

Jeff resists for a while but eventually comes on board. He must accomplish a series of steps that include things like rubbing Yugen’s belly, liking cat photos online, visiting cats at a Cat Cafe, and clipping Yugen’s claws. Once Yugen deems him “The One” ready, he reveals to Jeff that the final step is critical because if they can accomplish it, they will go back in time and save Emma’s life.

In order to explain my reaction to this script, I have to talk about another animal… Daaaaaa Bears.

As in, the Chicago Bears. Ditka. Sweetness. Da Fridge.

Don’t worry. This is all going to make sense.

The Chicago Bears are in a very unique position. They have this quarterback on their team named Justin Fields. Justin Fields is a solid quarterback who’s slowly getting better.

Now, due to a lucky break, the Bears have the number 1 pick in the draft this year. And the number 1 quarterback prospect, a guy named Caleb Williams, is, by all accounts very very good. Let me try and make some screenwriting analogies here. Caleb Williams is like a young Tarantino. Whereas Justin Fields is like Zak Penn (Ready Player One).

Just like lots of people in the NFL like Justin Fields, lots of production houses in Hollywood like Zak Penn. They would love to have him working on their scripts. However, if you have the option between getting Zak Penn or Quentin Tarantino, you go with Quentin Tarantino. Which is what it looks like the Bears are going to do. They like Justin. But they can’t pass up the opportunity of hiring a once-in-a-generation talent like Caleb Williams.

How does this relate back to today’s screenplay? Good question. I’m starting to wonder that myself.

Toxoplasmosis desperately wants to be Caleb Williams. But it can only muster up being Justin Fields. In other words, it so clearly wants to be great. But there’s a ceiling on the talent attempting to make it great.

The problem is that there’s an unhinged quality to the writing. It gets so untethered at times that you stop believing in what’s going on. Not in a “movie-logic” way, like we were talking about yesterday. This script is *supposed to be* zany. It’s supposed to push logic boundaries.

But in order for this approach to work, it still has to be clever. And having a cat drone on about the Cat Code and the Cat Planet and its 10-Step plan to bend time and space so that Jeff can travel back in time and prevent his girlfriend’s death — it’s just too goofy for its own good.

Luckily, we have the perfect comp for how to pull this concept off. It’s one of my favorite scripts of all time and it’s called Dogs of Babel. Here’s the logline for that one: “When a dog is the only witness to a woman’s death, her husband tries to teach the dog how to talk so he can find out what happened to her.”

Notice how even the logline promises a more structured story. There’s a mystery behind her death. So we have a goal: Find out what happened. That’s the impetus for him attempting to connect with the dog – so he can find out what happened.

In Toxoplasmosis, it’s more like Zach Galifianakis voicing a cat and just saying all this crazy weird stuff. “Jeff, you need to understand cats don’t socialize like humans. There is too much going on in our highly intelligent minds to just stop what we’re doing and have water-cooler chit-chat with someone using a fraction of their brain capacity.”

I remember, in Dogs of Babel, I wanted so desperately for the protagonist to succeed. Cause I could tell how heartbroken he was and how much he needed those answers in order to move on. In Toxoplasmosis, it didn’t really seem like it mattered.

That’s something we don’t usually talk about on the site: Just because you have a goal doesn’t mean that the reader will care or be invested in that goal. We technically have a great goal here. Jeff is trying to go back in time to save his girlfriend. But it’s dealt with in such a casual way that we never really care if he succeeds.

That’s why I always say, even if you’re writing a comedy, make sure you take the pillars of your story (Goal, Stakes, Urgency) seriously. You can have fun and get wild with everything else. But make sure those are solid. Go re-watch The Hangover if you want to see this done well. Some of the zaniest s**t you’ve ever seen happens in that movie. But the GSU is airtight.

Still, there were some funny things in this script. There’s this funny moment where Jeff wakes up out of a haze in the Petco line with 943 dollars worth of cat food in his cart. He has no idea how he got here. It turns out Yugen is controlling his mind now, making Jeff his own personal walking Amazon account. There’s an early scene where Jeff is still unsure if Yugen is talking to him. He goes to work and heads to a room filled with testing cats in cages, makes sure no one is around, and asks them if they can understand him.

I recently suffered a terrible tragedy, and… And since then, perhaps understandably, things have gotten a little… strange.
(beat)

Long story short: I need your help. You might know my cat Yugen? Well, he’s not really my cat, but… He started talking to me and I’m just a little worried that maybe I’m losing my mind so…
(pause)

If you can understand me, please just say something?
(beat)

And if you can’t — honestly I hope you can’t — then no worries at all and I can move on.
(beat)

Anyone? Anything? It doesn’t need to be anything profound.

There were moments like this throughout the script that made me laugh. But, in the end, the mythology of the cat world felt shaky and rushed, like the writer was making it up on the fly. I used to think you could do that as well when writing these wackier scripts. But nothing could be further from the truth. You have to create a strong mythology where you’ve thought through everything. Only then can you go nuts. I know it sounds like overkill but I promise you it makes a difference. The reader can tell when the writer knows their world intimately and when they’re just making s**t up on-the-fly, whether that be a movie about Napoleon during his greatest battle or a movie about talking cats from another galaxy.

I just wasn’t feline this one, guys.

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

What I learned: People! You have to stop spending 80% of your effort on your first scene. This is yet another script where the best scene is the first scene. It’s a clever scene. Nunnelly uses Carl Sagan’s pursuit of life in the universe to explain his love for Emma. It’s very well done. But then… there’s never a scene after that as clever or as good. Yes, your first scene is important so you want to put a ton of effort into it. But if every other scene you write, you put in 50% of that effort, we’re going to notice. I guarantee you we will notice. So, once again, use that opening scene as the bar. Don’t use it as your “SALE” sign to get us into your crummy clothing store on Melrose Boulevard.

Today, I discuss literary agents and how to know if they really like you. Also, is death by shin guard possible?

Genre: Thriller
Premise: A woman who’s moved into a new home and is buying a lot of things from a giant delivery company learns that she is being used for a new delivery scam.
About: Today we have a director who directed a short film and used that film to create buzz for the feature script, which allowed him to get 25 votes on last year’s Black List, which was good enough for a Top 10 finish. I did not watch the short film because I didn’t want to spoil the script. I wanted the writing to do all the work.
Writer: Russell Goldman
Details: 94 pages

Gillian Jacobs for Julia?

Time to take a small detour to talk about something we don’t typically talk about on the site. This has come up because I’ve talked to several repped writers recently who are frustrated with their reps.

I want writers who think the end all be all is securing an agent to know that it’s more complex than you think. Here’s how it typically works. When you sign up with a rep, they will be your best friend. They will parade your script – the one that got them to sign you – out to the entire industry.

How that script is received will determine how your rep treats you from that point forward. If the script gets a lukewarm response around town (no sale, no options, no assignments), the rep will cool on you *a little bit*. But, you still have one more script to prove your worth to them. So the next script you write is super important. It needs to get sold or secure a big option or lead to an assignment or get genuine A-B level talent attached if they’re going to keep promoting you going forward.

But if that script also fails to make a dent in the industry, your rep isn’t going to do much for you going forward. You will have to do all the work yourself. There is one exception to this, which I’ll share with you in a minute. But first, we’ve got a script to review!

38 year-old Julia Day seems to have just lost her father and has bought a new house. I say “seems” because a lot of details in this script are vague. Julia is a recovering alcoholic and spends the majority of her time trying to fix up her house.

As a result, she’s constantly buying ‘building stuff’ online from an Amazon stand-in called “Smirk.” One of her early packages contains a ski mask by accident. But she’s a self-admitted weirdo and likes it. So she adds it to the many decorations she’s making for her home.

Julia tries to get a job (what that job is is unclear) while occasionally hanging out with her brother or sister, Tat (the gender is unclear), and developing a little crush on her Smirk delivery man, Charlie.

Things get weird when Julia starts receiving things that she didn’t buy – a blender, protein powder, a corkscrew – and she complains to the Smirk people. She’s eventually told that this is a developing scam where people send stuff to customers in order to game the Smirk review system. She should just send the stuff and not worry about it.

But Julia isn’t letting it go that easy. She thinks this is the beginning of an identity theft scam. She starts telling everyone she knows that she’s being targeted but there isn’t enough evidence for her claims to be convincing. One of her windows is broken, for example. She claims someone was trying to get in. But it looks like a harmless accident. As she dives deeper into online delivery scams, Julia becomes obsessed with proving she’s right. But at what point does she accept that this may all be in her head?

Okay, back to the secret to getting a rep who will ALWAYS fight for you.

The one exception to the “2 Script Rep Rule” is if the rep genuinely loves you as a writer. If they really really love your writing, they’ll keep pushing every script you write because they believe in you. Most reps only sign people because they think they can move that script. But if that script doesn’t move, they sour on them quickly.

So always gauge a potential rep to see how much they like your writing. Ask them questions about what they liked in your script(s) and gauge how genuine and thoughtful their responses are. If there’s real enthusiasm and attention to detail in the way they respond, that’s a good indication that they believe in you as a writer. Those are the reps you want. Cause those are the reps who are going to stick with you even if you’re not a shooting star right out of the gate.

I’ll talk about this more in the next newsletter if you guys want me to. Just give me a heads up in the comments.

Back to today’s script.

I’m not going to lie. This one was tough to get through.

I wasn’t surprised to learn that the writer is a director. Cause I sense they’re a director first and they only write because they have to.

Go ahead and take a look at this script. It’s that kind of writing where if you even drift off for a second, you have no idea where you are or what’s going on, forcing you to go back to the top of the page and start reading all over again. The problem is, that the writing isn’t clear enough to prevent you from drifting off again. Which means you keep having to go back to read the pages all over again. As anyone who’s read anything knows, after doing this five or six times, you just give up on trying to re-understand the page and charge forward, accepting you’re going to be ignorant about some things.

I mean, I wasn’t even sure why Julia was home throughout the first half of the script. I wasn’t sure if she had a job or not. When you’re not a screenwriter first, you make the mistake of assuming too much. You assume the reader is in your head with you so you don’t have to make things clear. You may know the protagonist is a teacher so you just *assume* that the reader will figure it out as well.

There *were* some interesting ideas in here. For example, the script covers something called “brushing,” which is a scam where Amazon users will send you an item you didn’t order so that it ships as a “verified” purchase and then they use your account to write up reviews for those products they shipped, since verified purchases push you up higher on Amazon’s “featured” list.

But it isn’t explored in an interesting way. It’s mentioned. Characters seem upset. Julia complains. But it was more annoying than curiosity-inducing. In other words, it didn’t make me want to keep reading to find out what happened next. All it did was make me think, “Oh, I’d never heard of that scam before.”

This is how a lot of things played out in the script. Julia gets a mask in the mail from Smirk. So we think that’s going to be important. But nothing happens with it for half the script until another one shows up. And that one’s just as impotent as the first. We keep waiting for something to HAPPEN in this story and nothing ever does.

Ironically, the best scene in the script is the opening scene. It’s a cold open where this woman receives shin guards in the mail and proceeds to shove one down her throat and use the other one to try and choke herself to death. I’d never read a scene like that before. So it definitely pulled me in.

But then we just get 50 pages of Julia being annoyed. You promised us something and then completely backed away from it.

I see this mistake a lot where writers write their best scene as the first scene. They do this because they don’t need to connect it to anything and, therefore, they can do whatever they want. Which is why it’s so good. But you need to keep the spirit of that first scene in the writing of the rest of your script. Sure, it’s tougher to write engaging material like that if you’re setting up characters and a plot and having to make everything connect. But you have to try!

There may be something to the idea of random stuff being delivered to you. Each item is increasingly weirder. You don’t know how they connect but there’s clearly some message to them. That could be a movie. But the script I just read doesn’t have that clarity of purpose. It’s murky. It stumbles. It has moments but those moments are followed by ten pages that put you to sleep. It needs a writer-writer to come in and add that definition.

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

What I learned: If you give a reader a wall of text, they will revolt. Readers don’t have the patience. So, please, going forward, pages like this should be condensed to 1/4 of the space. Paragraphs, also, should be a lot slimmer.

As a means of comparison, here’s a page from Mercy, which got Chris Pratt to sign on and sold to Amazon. By the way, Mercy is a script that has 10 times the amount of mythology it needs to explain to the reader. So, if anything, Mercy should be the script that’s overwritten. Instead, the writer understands how important it is to keep the reader’s eyes moving down the page.

One of my favorite characters from 2023 (Duncan Wedderburn in Poor Things)

Week 1 Post
Week 2 Post

Okay, it is WEEK 3 in our WRITE TWO SCRIPTS IN 2024 Screenwriting Challenge. Week One was playing with possible concepts. Week Two was solidifying a concept. And now we’re on to Week Three – FIGURING OUT YOUR CHARACTERS.

Usually, when writers write scripts, they start writing IMMEDIATELY after they’ve come up with their idea. This is almost always a mistake. When you jump into a script too quickly, you burn out fast. You’ve got a runway of about 20-40 pages but you never build up enough speed to take off.

You erroneously figure your premise is too weak and you abandon your script like an alcoholic abandons their family. Whoa, that just got dark. Disregard that. Actually: REGARD IT. This post is about character. And character flaws are crucial to understanding your next steps.

This is the part of script-writing NO ONE WANTS TO DO – the character work. It’s boring. It’s hard. It doesn’t allow you to have any fun, since it’s all backstory and, therefore, doesn’t fill up any pages. Yet, it’s probably the most important work you can do for your script.

In my experience, getting the characters right is the single most important aspect of a screenplay. You can have a bad plot, but if you have great characters, you can write a good screenplay. Meanwhile, if you have bad characters, even if you have a great plot, the screenplay will suck. The reader will not care what happens unless they care about the people taking us there.

If you create a character who we like, give them some kind of resistance within them that they’re battling, and show them succeed – if you get that right, NOTHING ELSE MATTERS.

However, we need to do a deep dive to get there. I don’t need to know when your character had their first kiss (unless it’s relevant to the story) or what their favorite food is. That stuff does help. And if you want to do that work, I’m all for it. But I’m looking for something more important.

Here’s what I want you to do this week. You’re going to make a list of your 4-5 major characters – the ones who have the most screen time. You’re then going to figure out the five major character pillars of each. These five pillars are…

Likability

Personality

Flaw

Arc

Central Relationship

Let’s go through these one at a time.

LIKABILITY
I got news for you. If we don’t like your main character, there’s a very good chance we won’t care about ANYTHING they do. Which means you can write the greatest story ever and we’ll still hate it because we don’t like the person. Go back through all your least favorite movies and I can pretty much guarantee you didn’t like the hero. So you have to figure out why your character would be liked by others. And no, you don’t get to ignore this one if you’re writing a dark comedy and your hero is a tough pill to swallow. You then have to figure out how to make your hero sympathetic. If they can do it for Joker, you can do it for your script. You want to have such a solid reason for why your hero is likable or sympathetic that, if you were taken to court on the matter, you would win the case hands down. That’s how persuasive your argument should be.

Here are a few recent movies and why their characters were likable or sympathetic. Willy Wonka – The nicest kindest person you’ve ever met. Ken in Barbie – All he cares about in life is getting this one person to notice him but she won’t. We can all sympathize with that since we’ve all had that person (people) in our own lives. John Wick – He’s sympathetic cause his wife died and they took his dog. He’s also likable because he’s a nice guy with good morals. Robert McCall (The Equalizer) – One of the most likable characters in movies because all he cares about is helping people who can’t help themselves, to the point where he’s willing to risk his secret identity to do so. Louis Bloom (Nightcrawler) – He’s the ultimate underdog in this night-crawling business (audiences love underdogs) and he’s obscenely driven (audiences love characters who are driven, cause driven people are active, and audiences love activity).

PERSONALITY
This is one of the most overlooked aspects of character creation in screenwriting and if you don’t pay attention to it, you are likely to have a boring main character. This happens ALL THE TIME in the amateur scripts I read. The writer makes all the surrounding characters fun and interesting but they assume that their main character needs to be so grounded that they don’t have any defining traits whatsoever. Which is a huge mistake. You have to give your character some personality.

The best way I know how to do this is to figure out your character’s sense of humor. Your sense of humor dictates the majority of your personality. Are they sarcastic? Do they like gallows humor? Are they goofy? Are they the “dad joke” type? Are they deadpan? Are they quick-witted?

Going beyond the humor, what other aspects do they bring to the table that help them stand out in a conversation? Are they sexy, like James Bond, who has that twinkle in his eye whenever he speaks to a woman? Are they intimidatingly smart, like Robert Downey Jr’s Sherlock Holmes? Are they cocky? Are they charismatic, like Ferris Bueller? Are they quirky, like Bella Baxter (Poor Things)? These are just some ways to identify your character’s personality. Define it as tightly as you can because if you don’t, your character is going to sound untethered. We’re never going to have a good feel for them.

FLAW
This is obviously a big one because it’s the thing that most defines your character within the context of your movie. Writers can get tripped up by flaws. But they’re easier to figure out than you think. The character’s journey in the movie will determine how you identify their flaw. For example, if the movie is about a banker trying to get rich, the flaw will probably be greed. If the movie is about being the best at something (Nightcrawler), the flaw will revolve around recklessness or perfectionism. If someone wants to be the best at all costs, that’s their flaw – they don’t know when to stop. If the movie is about a “my way or the highway” coach who’s trying to take a basketball team to the championship, the flaw would be stubbornness. He’s not able to listen to anyone else but himself.

Think of the flaw as the NEGATIVE part of your character’s personality. They have good things. But this is their one bad thing. And it’s usually the most dominant part of their personality. Some writers have asked me if addiction is a flaw. It can be. But it’s usually what leads to the addiction that’s the flaw. So if someone struggles to connect with others but can connect with them when they’re drunk, then they might develop an alcohol addiction. But it’s not the alcohol that’s the flaw. It’s their fear of connection. That’s what they need to overcome. Not the alcoholism.

ARC
Now that you know the flaw, you have to figure out how you’re going to arc your character over the course of the story. A well-constructed character arc is one of the most satisfying storytelling experiences an audience can have. We audiences love to see that broken character overcome that flaw that’s been holding them back the whole movie (which we extrapolate to mean ‘their whole life’) and finally change. It’s not the good guy beating up the bully at the end that gets us. It’s that our good guy’s flaw was that he was a coward and he’s finally overcome that cowardice to become brave, which gave him the strength to stand up to bully at the end. THAT’S WHAT GETS US. When George McFly punches Biff after being Biff’s punching bag the whole movie, we cheer because George has finally overcome his flaw, his cowardice.

Unfortunately, an arc isn’t just about establishing a flaw at the beginning and having them overcome it at the end. There’s all that in-between time as well. This is your second act and you want to set up three to four big scenes where your hero is faced with the opportunity to overcome their flaw but they fail. We need to see these little failures along the way for the big final change to feel genuine. So, as you’re constructing the arc, I want you to think about these 3 or 4 scenes in your script where you’re going to challenge your character’s flaw. And then, also, figure out what that final climactic scene is going to look like where your hero is faced with that opportunity to change once more and he finally does.

CENTRAL RELATIONSHIP
There are no characters in a vacuum. You can’t express a character unless they’re bouncing off other characters. So you want to figure out what the central relationship in your movie is, then strategize how to get the most out of it. For example, in Titanic, the obvious central relationship is Jack and Rose. You don’t want to wait until you start writing to figure out how that relationship is going to work. You want to identify what the major source of conflict is in that relationship so that whenever the characters are together, they’re dealing with that conflict.

In that movie, Jack’s the kind of guy who lives by the seat of his pants. He does what he wants to do whenever he wants to do it. Rose is the kind of person who plans 8 moves because she has to. She’s in a prison – a bunch of rich people who live a highly structured life. And that’s what makes their relationship interesting. Their worldviews are opposite. If James Cameron had envisioned Rose as this cool chick who is more of a rebel, then Rose and Jack are too similar and you don’t get as much conflict. More recently, you can look at Tony Stark and Steve Rogers. Stark is willing to get dirty to get the job done. Rogers plays by the rule book. Those worldviews are what creates the conflict that drives that relationship.

Figure out these five pillars for, at the very least, your hero and your biggest secondary character. If you can extend it out to more characters, even better. I promise you that the more you know these five pillars, the more confident you’ll be going into your script. What you have to remember is that there’s the story being told by your plot (Save Barbie Land) and the stories being told within your characters themselves (Ken – must overcome his feelings of worthlessness and find purpose if Barbie doesn’t want him). If you can create a great character story, your script will be impervious to plot issues. I know that sounds crazy but it’s true. To this day, Swingers is one of my favorite movies. It also has one of the worst plots I’ve ever seen in a script. But it works because the characters all have their clear through-lines.

Okay, get to it! Next Thursday, we’re outlining our plot. Which means that, yes, you finally get to start writing your script in Week 5. Can’t wait!