Awesome news. I have a JULY 4TH WEEKEND NEWSLETTER coming out later today. I review a top secret script (no, you’ll never guess what it is in a million years) that attempts one of the toughest structural approaches in screenwriting. I then give you a super-hack on an easier rewrite style than the one I laid out for you yesterday. You won’t want to miss it. Check your Promotions Folder if you don’t receive it. I’ll post here on the site once it’s sent. If you’re not already on my list, e-mail me at carsonreeves1@gmail.com with the subject line: “NEWSLETTER.”
Genre: Kids/Adventure
Premise: A trio of misfit kids must work together to protect a supernatural baby sloth from a deranged ex-child star and return it to the Oregon Zoo.
Why you should read (from writer): This is my first script. Awhile back, Carson talked about how we should write what we know. I spent the majority of my childhood outdoors — building forts, climbing trees and catching frogs. I wanted to write a fun live action kids script that captures what it was like growing up in a small town. Also, it’s got a sloth that shoots FRICKIN’ LASER BEAMS from its eyes!
Writer: Alison Parker
Details: 91 pages
From the site that brought you Time Shark and Dude, Where’s My Ferret, comes… LAZER SLOTH! Scriptshadow is definitely addressing the bad concept problem in Hollywood. The town just doesn’t seem to be listening. But that’s okay. If they don’t bite this time, I’m turning the Amateur Friday entries into an Amateur Friday Universe.
That’s right. We’re going to write cross-over scripts, cameos, team-ups. It’s only a matter of time before the ferret in Dude, Where’s my Ferret, and Lazer Sloth team up to ride a time shark into the future, where they’ll hop on a shuttle and visit Orbital, our Amateur Friday space station that only allows families who’ve watched The Shining in its entirety (deep deep inside joke only long-time Scriptshadow readers will understand). All we need now is casting ideas. I’m thinking Jackie Chan for Ferret and Rhianna for the shark.
9 year-old Logan Murphy and his best buddies, Hailey the Tomboy and Goose the UFO enthusiast, are about to experience the strangest day of their young lives. What starts out as your typical 9 year-old lizard-hunting expedition, turns into our crew finding an abandoned crate containing a sloth that shoots lazers out of its eyes. Score!
The group takes the sloth with them, having no idea said sloth was stolen from the local zoo and was to be delivered to Hans Offa, an animal-obsessed evildoer who’s been trying to weasel his way back into the limelight ever since his child star career ended with the cancellation of his show, Adventure Boy.
Hans really needs that lazer-shooting sloth so he can get back on television. So he sends his goons, Max and Toby, who lost the thing in the first place, to get it back. When Max and Toby learn that these grade-schoolers have their job security in their possession, they chase them all over town, even through the local UFO convention, which may or may not have a connection to why our mysterious sloth can shoot lasers out of his eyes.
When you’re writing a kid’s flick, you want to keep the bar in mind. And the bar is Pixar, with Disney Animation not far behind. True, this isn’t an animated film, but you’re competing for the same audience, so a lot of the same rules apply. And these movies require you to nail three things.
Be Clever
You can’t just put cute animals onscreen and call it a day. You have to take it a step further. Since we’re talking about sloths, in Zootopia, the highlight reel scene includes a trip to the DMV where all the tellers are, you guessed it, SLOTHS! Consider that for a moment. Could the tellers have been giraffes and still work? Sure. But would it have been clever? No.
Be Imaginative
Imagination is paramount in kid’s movies. You’re going up against the most active imaginations in the world – children. So the bar is set high. If kids are out-imagining you, you’ve failed. I loved the chase scene in Zootopia that went through Rodentia, a miniaturized city where our characters are running over rooftops that are 1 foot tall.
Character Exploration
Originally, when Pixar surpassed Disney as the top animation studio in the world, people thought it was because of the digital graphics. That wasn’t it at all. It was because Pixar upped the emphasis on character development while Disney was still focusing on witty banter and musical numbers. The reason Pixar films resonated with people was because you left the theater feeling like you’d met a new group of friends. That’s how powerful good character development is.
So how did Lazer Sloth fair in these three categories? Not terrible. But I’d be lying if I said better than average. I judge cleverness and imagination on, “Did the writer think of something I couldn’t have thought of?” And there was nothing here that surprised me. The villain who used to be a child star on an adventure show was fun. But there’s a similar plotline in “Up.”
This is where a lot of beginner writers run into trouble. They set the bar too low. And it’s not their fault. They haven’t written enough scripts and gotten enough rejections to know that the next time they submit something, they have to do better. If you’ve never been rejected before, you don’t have a baseline for what you need to exceed.
As for character development, that’s usually the last thing a writer figures out before he/she makes it, not the first. And there just wasn’t enough focus placed on the characters’ internal struggles here (or there struggles with one another). There was some okay stuff with Logan’s dad, but it felt perfunctory, like the writer was adding it more because she was told to rather than because she wanted to. And that never works.
Even in a movie like Finding Dory, which I didn’t like, I can say that their “bad” character stuff is better than the best character stuff on the amateur level. Dory is going through some tough shit. She’s plagued by this terrible affliction. She can barely function in everyday life. And on top of that, we really feel how the loss of her parents weighs on her.
What I mean by “really feel” is that it’s not just a box you check on some Screenwriting Instruction Manual (“If you want to create audience sympathy, hero should lose family member”). It’s integrated into the very fiber of the character. Dory’s every choice in the story is influenced by her desire to be with her parents again. They’re not perfunctory backstory. They’re her everything.
And a lot of screenwriters will say, “Well I just want to write something fun and silly.” That’s fine. But if you’re not moving us in some way, we’re going to tire of the fun and the silly. It’s the emotional peaks and valleys that allow the fun and the silly to stay fresh.
Don’t get me wrong. Lazer Sloth is fun. It’s driven by a tight structure. The combination of the sparse writing style and the chase plot kept it moving. The villain is funny. The lazer sloth itself is adorable. I’m just not sure things got crazy enough to live up to the title, “Lazer Sloth.” For comparison’s sake, one of the splashiest spec sales of all time, “Dude, Where’s My Car?” had people growing into giants. That script lived up to the craziness of its title! So while this was a solid effort for a first script, the laser feature faltered before it could inscribe a “worth the read.”
Screenplay Link: Lazer Sloth
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Understand the expectation your title or logline sets, and make sure your script lives up to that expectation. If your script is titled, “Wacky Jacky and the Curse of the Hackey Sackey,” and it’s a slow-paced drama, you’re going to have one frustrated reader on your hands.
What I learned 2: With every choice you make in an imagination-heavy concept, ask yourself, “Could someone else have thought of this choice?” Be 100% honest with yourself. If the answer is yes, go back and think of something more imaginative. The imagination bar is SUPER HIGH in kids movies.
If you’re new to the Scriptshadow Script Challenge, here are all the previous posts…
WEEK 0
WEEK 1
WEEK 2
WEEK 3
WEEK 4
WEEK 5
WEEK 6
WEEK 7
WEEK 8
YOU FINISHED YOUR FIRST DRAFT!!!!
HOOOOOORRRRRAAAAAYYYYY!!!
First thing I want you to do?
Get drunk. You’re going to need it, trust me. Because now it’s time for the…
REWRITE!
In order to best attack a rewrite, you need to understand what rewriting is. And the way I define rewriting is simple: PROBLEM-SOLVING. That’s what you’ll be doing in your second draft, your third draft, and every draft from this point forward. Identify problems. Find solutions. I call this THE GAMEPLAN, and it has one final step:
THE GAMEPLAN
1) Identify problems.
2) Come up with solutions.
3) Implement solutions into Second Draft outline.
That’s right. You won’t be doing any physical rewriting this week. And you won’t have time to. While before, you could get away with a minimum of two hours a day. You’ll now need at least three. That’s because you’ll be dealing with the most unpredictable step in the process: SOLUTIONS. Solutions can take seconds, hours, days, even weeks to figure out. But before we go there, let’s start with step 1: Identifying the problem.
IDENTIFY PROBLEMS
The first thing I want you to do is put yourself in the mind of a reader. Take your ‘helpful’ hat off and replace it with a critical one. Your goal with this step is to be EXTREMELY HARD ON YOURSELF. Since you’re a writer, that shouldn’t be difficult. Get your mind in as critical a state as possible.
What you’re going to do is read your script from start to finish, and take notes in two areas.
1) Boring parts.
2) Characters.
For the first area, you’re going to be monitoring your enjoyment level during the screenplay. Are you engaged? Or are you bored? When you get bored, backtrack to where the boredom started, then continue on until you become engaged again. Mark that section down in a separate document and write down why you were bored. Don’t overthink it. Go with the most honest answer. So if I were, say, George Lucas, and I were applying the Scriptshadow Rewrite Model to my first draft of The Phantom Menace, this is what I might write:
Pages 5-11: Something feels off about this Jedi scene. Jedis waiting around in a room? Is that exciting enough?
Pages 23-32: The underwater Gungan City is cool, but why does it feel so boring? A lot of standing around. No action. Jar Jar’s great though. People are going to love him.
Pages 40-47: Dinner scene in Anakin’s hut is long with a lot of talking. We need to get so many plot points across that there’s no time left to entertain the audience. Maybe they’ll be distracted by how funny Jar Jar is.
You’ll have more sections than that, and in some cases, you’ll go into more detail than I did. The more detail you add, the more information you’ll have to solve the problem. Don’t get too verbose though. You don’t want your future self to have to wade through 20 lines of random thoughts to try and find the point.
While you’re assessing your boredom frequency, you’ll also want to gauge how strong your characters are. For every character who has more than two scenes, rate how satisfying they are on a scale from 1-10. Then tell us what you liked or disliked about the character:
Qui-Gon Gin (6): Stoic. But is he too stoic? Not much personality.
Obi-Wan Kenobi (5): Trying to have fun with him but he can’t be too fun since he’s a Jedi. Having a tough time finding the balance and it’s showing.
Anakin Skywalker (2): Boring, whiney. If I ever write a second draft, I’ll fix that.
Jar-Jar Binks (10): Perfect all around. Funny, engaging, charming, sophisticated. People are going to love this character. No changes!!!
SOLUTIONS
The reason you wrote all that stuff down is so that you can methodically go through it, point by point, and come up with solutions. Start with the boring sections. Some people like to re-order this list so that the biggest problems are on top. Some like to keep it in chronological order. It’s up to you. And now is where the fun begins. For every problem, figure out why it’s a problem and try to come up with a creative solution. Here’s an example:
Pages 5-11: Something feels off about this Jedi scene. Jedis waiting around in a room? Is that exciting enough?
Solution: Maybe move the scene to the hanger bay. When they first arrive, no one comes out to greet their ship. It’s eerie, odd, and more suspicious as each second ticks by. Obi-Wan and Qui-Gon decide to go out and inspect. They see a couple of dead Mandelorians in the hallway. Someone got here first. But who? Are they in danger? Maybe include a flash-forward Jedi dream of Jar-Jar. Additional note: Remember to add Jar-Jar stepping in dookie scene. Forgot if I included that.
Remember that, in some cases, the issue may not be fixable. The solution, then, could be eliminating the sequence. Or replacing it with an expanded subplot, or a new subplot altogether. Or moving the section to a more desirable place in the story. Everything is in play. Just remember the ultimate mantra, which is that if it doesn’t push the story or the characters forward, you don’t need it. Could you include a scene in The Phantom Menace where Queen Amidala is practicing her blaster shooting skills? Sure. Does it get her closer to the story’s ultimate destination? It does not. So you don’t need it.
HOW TO RECOVER FROM A SCRIPT DISASTER
I should take a moment to acknowledge the possibility that NOTHING IS WORKING IN YOUR SCRIPT. This is why the outlining stage was so important. You got to see your script in macro form and tackle potential structural problems before they happened. But if you didn’t outline or you went way off the reservation during your first draft, there’s a chance that, structurally, the majority of your script is unsavable. If you deem that to be the case, figure out where you went off the rails, go back to your outline, and re-outline everything after that moment. Your “2nd draft” is going to be more like a “1.5 draft,” but thats okay and it happens a lot. The good news is that it’s better than starting from scratch.
Once you’ve found all your plotting solutions, it’s time to tackle your characters. Go through each one, figure out what’s wrong with them, and make decisions on whether to a) improve them or b) get rid of them. If a character is anywhere below a “4,” you either have to get rid of them or reimagine them. Let’s take a look at George Lucas’s Anakin note for the second draft of The Phantom Menace which he’ll be getting to any day now.
Anakin Skywalker: Boring, whiney.
Solution: The big problem here is that Anakin is one-dimensional. It’s resulted in him being boring. One way to add some spark to him is to make him more mischievous. Give him an edge. That’ll immediately add some personality to a character in desperate need of it. A goody-two-shoes who whines all the time is going to put people to sleep. Also, add a scene where Jar-Jar juggles Anakin.
Now you won’t be able to solve every problem right away. That’s okay. Some solutions will come faster than others. What I’ve found is that if something’s not coming to you, it’s best to move on to the next problem. Cause every problem you solve has the potential to give you ideas to solve other problems. So if you’re having trouble figuring out how to make Anakin more compelling, sitting there and staring at the wall won’t do much good. But if you’re working on solving that boring Anakin Dinner Hut Scene, your solution may lead you to realize that Anakin’s at his most interesting when he’s manipulating others for his own gain, which allows you to go back and integrate that into your character solution.
Once you’ve written all of your potential solutions down (plot and character), resist the temptation to jump in and start the rewrite. Instead, it’s time to integrate all of your solutions into a SECOND DRAFT OUTLINE. What a lot of writers will do is take their first draft outline, save it as a new document titled “Second Draft Outline,” then use it as a template, pasting their new ideas (their solutions) into the already numbered slots. The outline can be as general or as specific as you want. So for the opening Jedi ship scene I highlighted, you can paste in exactly what you wrote as your solution, or you can expand on it, explaining how you want the scene (and subsequent scenes) to go. My belief is that the more detail you add to your outline, the better, as it’ll make the actual script-writing part easier.
And that’s it for this week. You want to solve your plotting problems as extensively as you can. You want to solve your shitty character problems as extensively you can. And you want to add all of that stuff into your Second Draft Outline with as much detail as possible. This will become the blueprint for your second draft rewrite, which starts next week. It will also be your most time intensive week to date. So get started NOW!
Sorry. Extremely busy day. Can’t post a new review. So here’s the Landis review from my newsletter!
Genre: Thriller/Supernatural
Premise: A former astronaut dives deep into the ocean in an attempt to journey to the lowest point on earth, only to find that there may be other things on the bottom of the sea that don’t share his enthusiasm for record-setting.
About: This script recently sold for seven figures to MGM with Bradley Cooper attached. It was originally sent out to studios last year but didn’t get any bites. That changed when Landis sold his script, Bright, to Netflix for 3 million dollars. Speaking of bright, Landis has been the only bright spot on the spec sale landscape lately, leaving many writers desperately trying to figure out what his secret formula is. No better time to get into that than the present!
Writer: Max Landis
Details: 89 pages
The way I see it, Max Landis is the poster child for millennial screenwriting. His social media savvy and fearlessness in attacking pop culture has allowed him to rise above writers who – some would argue – are more talented than him. You could say that he’s the Kardashian of screenwriters. He sells scripts because he sells scripts.
Another millennial trait that defines Landis is the way he works. Millennials are used to getting what they want RIGHT NOW. If they want to go somewhere and they don’t have a car, they get an uber. If they’re hungry for their favorite food but don’t want to get off their couch, they tap up Grubhub. And when Max Landis gets an idea, he writes it – RIGHT NOW. According to Landis, Deeper was written in six hours (spread out over a couple of days). I’m not kidding.
Landis has a history of writing scripts fast. He wrote 60 pages of his recent digital release, Mr. Right, one morning while in bed with his girlfriend. He claims to have written 20 scripts before he turned 20, and I believe his script count is currently north of 80 (although I wouldn’t be surprised if it was higher). Max Landis writes scripts. And he writes them very very fast. He doesn’t outline. He doesn’t believe in screenwriting theory. He just gets an idea and writes it. Which is a nice segue into what we get in today’s script.
30-something Eddie Breen is a former astronaut who lost his job due to something bad happening, information we’re not privy to. Suffice it to say, he’s depressed. Which is probably why he takes this latest job – navigating a one-man submarine down the Ni’hil Trench, which is the deepest part of the ocean.
His goal? To reach the lowest point on earth. Why? Because why not? He’s also going to live-stream his adventure. Why? Because why not! So he hops in his little submersible, starts going down… and that’s when things get fucked. Around 4000 feet he spots a group of 50 divers playing around. A hallucination, we think? Nope, his control boat up top says they’re getting the same video feed!
Most people would stop there and try to figure that shit out. But remember, we gotta keep going deeper, man! And as we do, we learn that somewhere around this area, a famous French woman named Marion lost her ship to the sea. When Eddie eventually comes upon the shipwreck, he sees all of the ship’s crew, all ghosty and disgusting, hanging out on the ship waving to him. Uhhhh, that’s not good. But we need to go deeper! So Eddie keeps going.
Eventually, Eddie makes it to the bottom of the sea, where he finds a house. No, I’m not kidding. In the house is Marion, and she’s alive – or thinks she’s alive – and when a screw in the sub gets loose, he asks Marion to bring him a wrench so he can fix it. She doesn’t think she’ll be able to – seeing as they’re at the bottom of the ocean and all – but he’s very persuasive and she eventually comes over.
Eddie fixes the loose screw and back up they go. When they get to the top, Eddie pops out, tells his story, and as if on cue, Marion pulls herself out as well! As in WTF?? The crew is shocked. They don’t know how to handle this bizarre event, which is okay because it’s the end of the movie. Cut to black.
Okay, look, I can go on for days about this script’s problems, but the truth is, they all come back to the same thing. The script was written too fast. Every mistake is clearly a “this was written too fast” mistake. For example, if a control boat has confirmation that 4000 feet down, you’ve just discovered a band of mer-men, they’re going to get people out here immediately and look into this school of man-maids.
There are dozens of issues like that. But instead of getting into all of them, let’s highlight what Landis did right. First of all, he picked a great story for a spec screenplay. This is actually a huge talent Landis has. He understands that spec screenplays need a hook, they need to be splashy (no pun intended), and they need to move fast. A trip to the bottom of the ocean that’s going to take a couple of hours is perfect for the spec screenplay format.
And Landis does make some interesting choices along the way. For example, the surprise divers. 95% of screenwriters would’ve had the control boat up-top claim that “we aren’t seeing anything.” To have them confirm what he was seeing was a completely unexpected development. Now it was never paid off. But I was genuinely surprised he went there.
After that, things begin to fall apart. There wasn’t any consistency in the things Eddie was seeing. At first it’s a strange group of divers playing around in the ocean. Then we see disgusting zombie-sickly ghosts. Then we see Marion, who looks completely normal. Are people ghosts, normal, mer-men? What’s up??
This leads to Landis’s biggest weakness. Once the reader realizes he doesn’t have a plan – that he’s just making all this up as he goes along and has no desire to patch up the holes through rewrites, you stop believing in the story. You feel like, “Well you clearly didn’t invest a lot of time in this. So why am I obligated to?”
To this, you’re probably asking the inevitable question: If this isn’t any good, how did he sell it? And how did he sell Bright? And how did he sell any of his scripts? Well, I do think there’s a big lesson to learn from Max Landis that answers these questions.
Create content and get it out there.
While I don’t advocate turning an idea that just popped into your head into a fully formed screenplay by lunch time, there’s something to be said about a writer’s obsessive desire to write as much as possible. Contrary to popular belief, Landis didn’t start selling scripts the second he complained about Superman on Twitter. He’s been sending scripts out for a decade. And for six of those years and dozens of those scripts, everyone told him to fuck off.
But he kept writing and he kept sending stuff out. And as his stuff started getting better, people started to option it. And as people saw that others were giving him a shot, he started getting sales.
That’s something we don’t talk about a lot here. People in Hollywood are terrified to pull the trigger on unproven writers. But if they see someone else take a chance on a writer, they feel better about taking one themselves. And that opportunity only came for Landis because he created SO MUCH CONTENT. He kept churning it out and sending it out, and it got to the point where, out of sheer volume, some of it began hitting.
What we’re seeing now is the next iteration of that. Because he’s been selling specs regularly since Chronicle, because everybody knows who he is in part due to his social media presence, his scripts have gained more weight and their prices have gone up. But remember, this doesn’t happen if he wasn’t obsessively writing and obsessively pushing product out for years. You have to keep in mind that Landis has been told no on dozens of his screenplays.
Think about that. I know writers who quit after one of their scripts went wide and no one liked it. Max Landis would’ve never made a 3 million dollar sale if he approached the business that way.
When you think about it, Landis has exploited the system’s one loophole. What is the most common response you get when you send out a screenplay? It’s “no.” Even if people like the script, it’s often “no.” Hollywood is a numbers game. You need to get a bunch of nos before you get your ‘yes.’ So Landis came up with a solution. He sped up the “nos.” He pushed tons of product out to get to the “yes” faster.
So that’s the best lesson I can make of this. The more product you create and the more product you deliver, the quicker you’re going to get your ‘yes.’ That doesn’t mean write a bunch of 6 hour scripts. But it also doesn’t mean you should wait forever to make your script perfect. =
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: At the bottom of the ocean, Eddie and Marion get into some deep philosophical discussions. Whenever characters get into philosophical discussions, it’s usually an indication that your plotting/structure is weak. Your story should always be moving somewhere, your characters always pushing towards something. When there’s nothing to push towards, writers aren’t sure what to do. So they turn to meaningless dialogue to fill up space. Since normal dialogue is boring, they think if they add a philosophical element to it, it will be more interesting. Cause, they’re like, talking about serious shit, man. There are exceptions to this, of course. But in instances like this, it’s clearly a space-filler. Make sure in your script, if your characters are having philosophical discussions, that they aren’t doing so just to fill up space.
Genre: Thriller
Premise: After a young girl is kidnapped on a remote island off the west coast, her mother teams up with a local mysterious older woman to get her back.
About: Tried out a few scripts before committing to one today. I’ll be honest – the only reason I tried this one was because JJ’s company bought it. If Lord JJ thinks it’s good enough, I’ll probably like it. The script also finished on last year’s Black List AND it was written by a female writer. Female writers represent!
Writer: Maggie McGowan Cohn
Details: 114 pages – 6/9/15 draft
With thousands of unread scripts at my disposal, it’s hard to choose what to read. So sometimes I’ll read the first page of several scripts to see what grabs me. Usually, I’m not grabbed. But when it does happen, it’s usually because an expectation is flipped on its head.
Expectation-flipping’s not just good storytelling. It establishes a desired precedent that we find in all well-told stories: unpredictability. As I’ve said here plenty of times, if the reader gets ahead of you for too long (even as few as four scenes), they get bored and they tune out.
So the way that “Lou” starts is we’re introduced to this beautiful little deer. Oh, what a pretty little cute deer. And then – BAM! – the deer is shot dead. Cut back to the shooter, a grizzled old woman who doesn’t give a shit about how pretty deers are.
And with that, you’ve gone against the expectation, against the stereotype. Old people are supposed to be, well, old. Sit down a lot. Nice. Not do anything to upset the status quo. We’re told in a single action that Lou is none of those things. And that’s why I wanted to keep reading. If this is what we’re learning about this person on page 1, I wonder what else she’s got going on.
It’s 1985, San Juan Island, which is off the state of Washington. It’s here where we meet Hannah and her five year-old daughter, Vee. Hannah isn’t exactly living the life of dreams out on Nowhere Island, but she’s got a few friends and seems to be happy. That is until her daughter is taken by her ex-husband who – fyi – was supposed to be dead.
Enter Lou, a woman on the northern side of 50, though how north is difficult to tell, seeing as she kicks ass and only takes names when she feels like it. Lou is seen as the island weirdo, but she’s about to become the island Hero. That’s because Hannah’s ex didn’t just kidnap her daughter, he blew up the airport and cut out all communications on the island. And Lou’s the only one who knows how to navigate through all that.
Somehow, the local police are able to contact the FBI, who, when they find out they’re dealing with Lou, call the CIA, who, when they find out they’re dealing with Lou, call Special Forces, and within a day, all of them come flying in. Apparently, this Lou woman is a really big deal. And this appears to be our government’s only shot at getting her.
Which means that in addition to Hannah and Lou trying to get Vee, every United States government organization is trying to get Lou. And that’s only the beginning. After some sleuthing by the Feds, it appears that Lou and Hannah’s ex know each other. But how well? And what does that mean? Could these two actually be working together? So many questions. So few answers!
That opening page was definitely a teaser of things to come. This script did NOT go as expected. I thought this was going to be a gritty indie tale where a hardened mysterious older woman befriends a clueless struggling single mom and the two work together to get her daughter back.
It was sort of like that. But I had no idea that the FBI would get involved, the CIA, special forces. That airports would be blown up. That there’d be this elaborate plan with trees being cut down ahead of time to create road blocks. That there’d be a game involved where messages would be left for our hunters.
And to be honest, I don’t know what to make of it. It’s so batshit wild, that you’re constantly questioning what the writer’s going for. Is this supposed to be like Taken? Or is it supposed to be like Red? I mean at times, I thought this may have been a comedy. The FBI agent shows up on a kayak. And yet, because you had no idea what the hell would happen next or how all of this madness was connected, and you really wanted to fucking know, you had no choice but to keep turning pages.
In the end, though, I don’t think it meshed, and here’s why.
For these movies to work, the relationship at the center of the story needs to be compelling. If that’s not there, it doesn’t matter how well the story is plotted. It doesn’t even matter how compelling the characters are individually. If we don’t care whether that relationship at the center gets resolved, we’re not invested.
So what does that mean? How do you create an unresolved compelling relationship at the center of your story? Well, the most basic version of this is romance. So in Romancing the Stone, the sexual tension between the male and female leads is what makes us want to keep watching. We want to see if they’ll get together.
But even in something as basic as the first Rush Hour, that was about embracing differences in cultures in order to achieve a common goal. And I didn’t see anything like that in “Lou.” Where was that clear ISSUE between Lou and Hannah? Why not explore the age thing, for example? Methodically thinking through things (Lou) versus jumping right into them (Hannah).
A few of you might be groaning about at this, thinking, “That’s what they always do.” But the truth is, the most compelling debates and problems between people are the universal ones – the ones that have been debated since the beginning of time.
And yeah, if you hack through the age-youth debate in a “Screenplay 101” way, it’s going to suck. But if you explore it honestly – if you really CARE about the debate – then it will work.
On the flip side, if the main relationship is ill-defined, we’ll always feel off-kilter around the characters. We won’t truly “get” them. And you’ll receive a bunch of notes to the effect of, “Something felt off about the characters. Can’t pinpoint what.”
So that’s why Lou never lou-red me in. Every time we came back to Lou and Hannah I was like, “These two are boring together. They need something clearer going on.” Which is too bad. Because the story definitely surprised me and kept me off-balance. And that’s really hard to do to someone who’s read a lot of screenplays.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Use other characters’ reactions to tell us about your protagonist. When Lou goes to her hometown bank and there are two open tellers and she picks the first teller, Cohn (our writer) highlights the second teller letting out a relieved sigh. That tells us so much about Lou. Writers don’t do this enough. They don’t create specific moments to inform the reader of who their character is. They just hope the reader understands them through their “general essence.” It doesn’t work that way.
What I learned 2: “This is Who My Character Is” moments. Building on that, you want to include 3 or 4 “this is who my character is” moments early on in your screenplay. If they’re eternal fuck-ups, show us a big “fuck up” moment. They screw something up at work, for example. Then have them come home and realize they didn’t pay their rent on time (another fuck-up!). Drive that shit home because unless you’re deliberately trying to keep your character mysterious, you want to be clear about who they are. If you can’t think of any of these moments? There’s a very real possibility that you either don’t know your character well enough or they’re not very interesting.
I don’t know what to make of Finding Dory’s success or what it means to screenwriters. There have been few sequels less necessary than this one. How do I know this? Because in ten years, I’ve never heard someone say, “I wonder when they’re going to make a Finding Nemo 2.”
I suppose we can chalk it up to a couple of things. Number 1, there is NOTHING good out right now. Nothing. And there hasn’t been in months. People are desperate for something good – heck, even AVERAGE will do. And boy is this movie average. The plotting and exposition are some of the laziest in Pixar’s library. And it feels like entire sections were borrowed from Toy Story 3.
Which leads us to number 2: Never underestimate family films, particularly animated ones. The hardcore screenwriters don’t think much of them. But these are the movies that keep studios afloat, no pun intended. It’s the Parent Principle. Leaving young kids at home while you go see a movie is a major hassle for parents. Which means no one shows up. But give parents a movie they can take their kids to, and both of them show up.
So what’s the secret to getting nobody to show up? Ask Independence Day 2, which squeaked into the box office number 2 slot with a little over 40 million bucks. The irony here is that Will Smith just gave an interview where he admitted that studios can’t fool audiences anymore. You can’t go seven days at the theater before word gets out that your movie sucks. These days it happens on social media instantaneously.
The studios are still trying to control things though. Fox wouldn’t screen this for critics before its release. Here’s the funny thing about that. People are using social media to talk about how the studio isn’t letting critics see the film, which actually creates more of a negative buzz than had they just let critics see it in the first place.
Now this may seem like a weird vendetta I have against the film. But I’m really happy this happened. The original film ended with someone uploading a mac virus into the alien computer system. To me, that’s highway robbery. You pulled us in with this fun invasion story, and you concluded it with an ending a 3rd grader could’ve written. You are stealing money when you do that. I’m serious. It’s borderline unethical. So I’m happy that they’re paying the price for that now. I guarantee you, if that movie had ended strong – or just where it was clear that they tried, people would’ve begged for a sequel.
I know I sound like a broken record. But you need to start writing better scripts if you want us to show up. There’s no summer that’s proven that more than this one. Audiences aren’t responding to your lazy concepts (part of writing) and lazy execution (the nuts and bolts of writing). People in positions of power are going to have to look at themselves in the mirror come Labor Day and ask if they’re still okay with churning out risk-averse product. Sure, they can keep throwing ancient IP at us, like Tarzan and Universal’s upcoming monster universe, but they’ll pay the price if they do.
And let me be clear about something. Writers, directors, producers – these people are DYING to create original content. The only reason they’re not is because the studios won’t let them. The studios hold the keys to all movies that cost north of 40 million bucks. If you want to play in that sandbox, you have to make the movies they want to make. So the people that need to be targeted for the garbage we’re seeing are the studio heads and their executives.
The one highlight from the weekend is the showing of The Shallows. This is a spec script that made 16 million dollars on a 19 million dollar budget in its opening weekend in the heart of summer. For comparison’s sake, that’s a little less than half of what Independence Day 2 made, yet Independence Day 2 had a budget NINE TIMES that of The Shallows. It goes to show that if you choose a juicy subject matter (sharks always sell), and create a clever storyline that keeps the budget low, you could see your spec script opening strong against major tentpole franchises in the heart of summer. Pretty cool.
Before we wrap up, I want to share a conversation I had with a professional screenwriter this weekend. And he vocalized something I’d always considered but never had a term for. He calls it “burning reads.” And I thought it was apropos with our script rewrites coming up this Thursday.
The idea is this. Every time you read your script, you become one step more numb to it. More numb to the plot machinations, to the characters, to the dialogue exchanges, to the jokes, to the emotional beats. This becomes dangerous because, after a certain amount of reads, you feel nothing when reading your script. You know everything so well that it’s just words on a page. And how can you continue to improve your script if you can’t feel anything while writing it?
Because of this, this writer rarely reads his script from start to finish. He’ll identify a problem section (say, the sequence after the mid-point) and work on that individually. And he’ll do that for a number of other sections as well. Then only once he’s applied changes to everything does he go back and read the script all the way through.
And when you think about it, it’s a good strategy, because the more you can mimic the experience of a reader reading your script for the first time, the better. Now I realize this is an imperfect and somewhat tricky science. But I do believe in the principle of it. Only burn full reads when you absolutely have to. Otherwise, you’re numbing yourself to everything that works so well in your screenplay.
We’ll discuss more about rewriting on Thursday!
Until then, eat a crumb cake.
