Genre: Adventure
Premise: Pitched as “Indiana Jones for the next generation,” Uncharted follows Nathan Drake, a treasure hunter who may have stumbled upon the location of El Dorado, the lost city of gold.
About: One of the most popular video games of all time is being developed into a film as we speak. But will we ever see it?? You look at the title page of this script and it looks like a WGA gala guest list. This has been written, rewritten, bedwritten. David O’Russell was supposed to be the guy to finally bring it to life, but then he dropped out. Now Joe Carnahan is doing a rewrite (not this draft) and may direct.
Writers: David Guggenheim (previous drafts written by The Wibberlys, Neil Burger & Dirk Wittenborn, and Thomas Dean Donnelly & Joshua Oppenheimer) – Based on the video game by Naughty Dog
Details: 123 pages

Sorry for the late start but, along with the rest of Hollywood, I’m still recovering from that double bomb drop – the end of Brangelina and that not-so-good trailer for Passengers. I’m going to save my full thoughts on the Passengers trailer for my next newsletter. But I’ll leave you with this preview: Every issue in the trailer was an issue I had with the script. Not sure why the rest of the Hollywood didn’t see them until after the movie was made.

Speaking of scripts, we’ve got a wild one today. Or, at least, a script with a wild history. I think Uncharted can best be described by Joe Carnahan’s recent tweet: “The opening scene for UNCHARTED… at least in script form, is really, REALLY GOOD.”

I would agree with that. It’s this great crashed plane scene where a plane keeps slipping down the side of a mountain. Un-forrrrrrrrrchu-nately, the rest of the script is a mess. There’s one moment in particular where I gave up on the screenplay completely, and I’ll get into that in a bit. But if Sony wants my opinion, this script has been way over-developed. I mean you can see the different writers fighting each other on the page. The tone is sharp and gritty one scene then sophomoric and cliche the next. It’s bad. Joe, if I were you, I’d keep that opening scene and blast the rest of the script into space, along with that Passengers trailer.

Let’s cut to the chase. Nathan Drake is a modern day Indiana Jones. He’s got a little more attitude than Indy. He’ll get in your face more. But yeah, he’s basically Indiana Jones.

When Drake was a kid, his parents were looking for the remains of Sir Francis Drake, some ancient rich dude with a lot of gold. They found a few of Francis’s mummified guards, and with them, a special gold ring. Drake’s dad gave him that ring before he was murdered, and Drake sees it as the last connection between him and his explorer parents.

Back to the present. Drake is approached by an evil museum curator named Gabriel Roman who says he’ll give Drake 10 million dollars for his ring. 10 MILLION DOLLARS??? Drake wants to know why. Roman believes that the ring, combined with Sir Francis Drake’s OTHER treasures, will point him to the lost city of El Dorado, an entire city of gold.

Oooooooh.

One problem. Drake kind of already sold the ring a few years back. Luckily, the guy he sold it to doesn’t know it’s worth 10 million dollars and could lead people to a city worth 10 trillion dollars. So Drake goes to get it back. And that’s where our adventure begins.

Drake does get that ring and does deliver it to Roman. But come on. Was Roman ever going to hold up his end of the bargain? Drake is tossed in a car which is ditched in a lake, but because he’s fucking Drake, he escapes, gets back to land, and the race is on – He’s going to beat Roman to El Dorado!

Uncharted can work as a film. I want to get that out of the way first. This is Indiana Jones meets modern day Bond. How does that not sound awesome?

But that awesome is part of the problem. How much of each film is it? That’s what they’re struggling with, I believe. I mean at one point, we’re watching Drake bounce all over the world and it feels eerily like a Daniel Craig Bond film. This might be why Sony’s struggling to make the film a reality. They don’t know how to make it different enough that it won’t feel similar to their only major franchise property.

But the bigger problem here is the script. Or at least parts of it. There’s a particular moment where I officially gave up on the proceedings, and it’s a lesson for aspiring screenwriters everywhere for what NOT to do.

In the scene, Drake sees a bombshell chick drinking alone in a smoky bar. So he approaches her. Now, before I tell you what happens next, I want you to imagine the most generic version of this scene possible. What do you expect to happen in this scene?

If you guessed:

A verbal flirtatious battle of words.
The woman conveying her disinterest.
A hard cut at the end of the exchange to the two slamming into the wall of a hotel room, clothes being torn off.

YOU’D BE RIGHT!!!

And it’s this I don’t get. I was actually fucking furious when I read this scene. You are supposed to be a professional screenwriter. Your job is to WRITE WHAT THE AVERAGE PERSON IS UNABLE TO WRITE!!!! If you’re going to write the exact same scene that Joe Six Pack, who goes to 3 movies a year, would write – why are you in this business? What value do you offer?

I don’t care if you write this scene. It’s a staple scene in these types of movies. But do something – ANYTHING – to make it different. Place it in a unique location. Throw an unexpected obstacle at us. Shit, have the bartender with a crush on the girl keep interrupting them – any of that would be better than meeting every fucking standard beat to this scene that’s ever been written. For crimeny out loud.

I don’t know which of the 7328 writers wrote this scene. But they should be ashamed of themselves. I mean right down to the slam cut of them making out in the hotel room. Hmmm, never seen THAT happen in a movie before. C’mon.

The weird thing about Uncharted is that it flips back and forth between these really cliche scenes and really fresh ones. Clearly, a cliche-ridden writer came in at some point and butchered things. Of the list of writers I see above, I have a really strong opinion on who that writer likely is. Not going to name names but those of you who have read the site long enough will know who I’m referring to.

Outside of that, Uncharted follows the tried-and-true adventure formula of giving a hella-big goal (El Dorado!) and a MacGuffin (the ring). As long as you have everybody trying to get the thing that allows them to get the thing, everybody in the script will be active. Everyone’s motivation will be clear, and assuming you can come up with compelling characters, original ideas, and some fresh execution, you’ll be good.

Uncharted achieves this at times and doesn’t in others. It’s overdeveloped to the extreme. Sometimes you’ve written such a convoluted draft that’s so plot-heavy and so beholden to its original trappings, that the best course of action is to open a brand new document and start over. It’s amazing what you can accomplish with 110 empty pages in front of you as opposed to trying to fit and twist and wiggle and turn every word so that the puzzle comes together in the end.

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

What I learned: So let’s talk about why Carnahan liked that opening scene so much. The scene has Drake waking up in a crashed airplane that’s teetering on the edge of a cliff. He’s injured badly, some bad guys are coming to kill him, so he must find a way out of here pronto. This opening approach is known as “in media res,” which is a fancy way of saying, “in the midst of action.” Opening your script in media res is one of the easiest ways to grab a reader’s attention because we’re already in the middle of some action and we want to see how it’s going to pan out.

If you keep track of the things I loathe here on the site, this is your opportunity to say, “See Carson, you don’t know what you’re talking about!” Let’s start with Sully, which just finished number 1 at the box office for the second week in a row. As I’ve stated on multiple occasions, the miracle landing on the Hudson River is not a movie. Nobody on the flight so much as twisted their ankle. And the big moment only lasts a few minutes. What do you do with the other 107 minutes?

Apparently, it’s a moot point, as people clearly want to see that Hanksy splash-tastic miracle! Excusing the fact that the film had weak ass competition (a bizarrely conceived Blair Witch reboot and Bridget Jones having a baby at 57) how does a movie without a story keep raking in the dolla bills? I don’t know because I haven’t seen it yet. But I did hear that they turned the focal point – the crash – into six separate crashes (dreams of what might’ve gone wrong). Whoever that screenwriter is, I’m giving them an honorary Oscar, cause that was some smart fucking shit. When you only have one good thing in your story, clone it!

But yeah, any of you seen this? Is there a screenplay? I’m still curious.

Moving on to the Emmys (which I coulda swore happened last weekend) we have a couple of big wins by shows that I hated on in the past. The first is Game of Thrones winning a writing award. A WRITING AWARD! This is a show that spends half its time in gardens and the other half killing off big characters for social media purposes. There was a purer time when Dargareus was a queen with principles. Now it’s all about them Snapchat likes. Look, I have no problem with Game of Thrones winning directing or general show awards. It’s a beautifully produced show. But writing??? C’mon. Half the show is an exposition dump.

The other big winner of the night was The People vs. O.J. Simpson, which if you remember my initial script pilot review, I chastised for being old-hat and stuck in “who the hell cares anymore” land. The writing was fine. I never thought that was the problem. It was the subject matter. We already know this. O.J. did it. The glove. Marcia Clarke. Blah blah blah. How many times do I need to be reminded in my life? They sure put some money behind that show though. It was a top-level production. But I can’t believe it’s gotten as much attention as it has. I tend to judge shows by “Has anyone I know seen it?” And nobody I know watches the thing. I guess the Emmy voters did though. That’s all that matters.

Okay you old curmudgeon, Carson. Is there ANYTHING about the Emmys that you liked? I’m glad you asked. I was thrilled when Alan Yang and Aziz Ansari won for outstanding writing in a comedy series (“Master of None”). I thought that show was great, like a lot of what Netflix does. It goes to show how much a writer can mature as well. Alan Yang wrote a spec that broke him into the business a long time ago called “Gay Dude” that was average and sophomoric and safe. The writing here is so much better in every way and it’s a testament to committing to always pushing yourself – never stop learning! Oh, and I think the reason we didn’t see more Netflix wins is because Hollywood is terrified of them.

I’d like to end today with a huge endorsement for Hunt for the Wilderpeople. They made it available on Itunes this week (for an exclusive engagement?). It’s directed by Taika Waititi, who made the hilarious vampire found footage mockumentary, “What We Do In The Shadows.” What’s interesting is that Wilderpeople got Taika the job to direct Marvel’s next film, Thor 3, which is said to be an intergalactic buddy road trip flick between Thor and the Hulk. You’d think these movies couldn’t be more different. But actually, Wilderpeople has its own quirky “buddy road trip” pairing in its star character (a chubby mischievous boy) and his foster father (who never wanted the boy in the first place).

This is such a great lesson for young writers and directors. What these big studio heads want is they want to see that you can create emotionally compelling relationships. They’ve got plenty of people for special effects. What they don’t have is someone who knows how to make an audience feel something. You definitely feel something between this boy and his foster father and they believe Taika can replicate that in a Marvel movie.

I’ll finish this off by saying, why the hell did anyone think it was a good idea to make an Edward Snowden movie? The days of making movies about these people are over. You want to do Snowden and those like him, you do 6-10 episode docs on HBO or Netflix. Then again, I don’t think Oliver Stone knows what Netflix is.

THE WINNER OF WEEK 2 HAS BEEN LISTED BELOW

The Scriptshadow Tournament pits 40 amateur screenplays against each other that you, the readers of the site, will vote on. Ultimately, YOU will decide the winner. Today we have the second five entries. You can see who won Week One here. Read as much as you can from each of the entries and vote for the week’s winner in the Comments Section. Although it’s not required, your vote will carry more weight if you explain why you chose the script (doesn’t have to be elaborate, just has to make sense). I say “carry more weight” because a vote for a script without any explanation from an unknown voter may be seen as fake and not count towards the tally. I will announce the winner of this week here, in this post, on Sunday, 10pm Pacific time. That script will then go into the quarterfinals. Good luck to this week’s contestants!

Title: A Darker Place
Writers: Andrew Rhodes and Robert Irvin
Genre: Contained Thriller/Sci-fi
Logline: In the home of her latest case, an obsessed social worker fights to save a girl being tortured in the basement of that very house … 24 years in the future.

Title: The Inheritance
Writer: Matt Lopez
Genre: Comedy
Logline: A wealthy man leaves a huge inheritance for his warring and estranged family. But to get a share, they must all agree how they split the money before they attend the funeral.

Title: Shifting
Writer: Jon Ridge
Genre: Horror/Drama
Logline: A teenage girl’s efforts to fit in at school by keeping her lycanthropy secret are tested when a boy from her former pack vows to bring her back and help defeat their rivals.

Title: Dionaea
Writer: Brian Kazmarck
Genre: Sci-fi/thriller/horror/action
Logline: As their ship is rapidly overrun by a malevolent alien intelligence determined to assimilate the entire crew, a biologist discovers a much darker secret she must expose to the world before they all die.

Title: Courageous Man
Writer: Philip Whitcroft
Genre: Family Adventure
Logline: A cowardly boy and his nerd friends have to step up when they get trapped in a comic book world and they can’t find the heroes.

WINNER OF WEEK 2: “DIONAEA” by Brian Kazmarck. Congratulations to Brian for winning a tight race and advancing to the QUARTERFINALS! And congrats to Andrew and Robert and Matt for making him earn it. Despite one commenter’s observation that my contest is a “shit show” (it’s too bad – I liked that commenter), I’ll continue to bring attention to as many writers as possible with the tournament. I’m figuring out a way to keep “almost winners” in the hunt. Stay tuned. Let’s meet back here next week!

After my last dialogue post some of you expressed the need for even MORE dialogue advice. Cue today’s post, baby! It’s time to conjure some magic dialogue spells! Shoozazah!

Remember that at the heart of all good dialogue is conflict, but more specifically some kind of imbalance in the interaction. Something is unresolved and the characters haven’t come to an agreement yet. This necessitates conversation, which is where good dialogue is born.

For example, let’s say that my girlfriend, Jane, was driving me to the airport. If we spent the entire conversation agreeing to all the things we needed to have done by the time I got back from my trip, the dialogue would be boring.

But what if last night, at 3am, I got a text from someone named “Lisa.” My girlfriend and I argued about it and left it at, “We’ll discuss it in the morning.” Here we now are, in the car, driving to the airport, and that text is still lingering. Our dialogue is going to be way more interesting cause there’s an unresolved issue dominating the conversation.

So that’s the main thing you need to keep in mind. Conflict will be at the heart of most good dialogue. Also, feel free to combo these tips up, bitches!!!

Each character should want something in the scene – This is the basic tenet for any meaningful conversation. Each person in the conversation should want something. If they don’t, they’re just babbling. And while the babbling will feel realistic at first (since that’s what we do in real life), it will quickly grow tiring, as we’ll drift further and further into aimlessness. It is sometimes okay for only one character in the scene to want something. But I’ve found that the more people with definitive goals there are in a scene, the better the dialogue gets. In the above scene, my girlfriend wants to know who the hell Lisa is and why she’s sending me a text at 3am. I, on the other hand, want to get to the airport without having to answer that question.

Contrast (character) – One of the easiest ways to create good dialogue is to place contrasting characters together. One character is selfless, the other selfish. One character is arrogant, the other modest. One character is smooth, the other a klutz. A stud, a dork. Intelligent, an idiot. The reason this works on the same level conflict does is that there’s an imbalance. Except this time the imbalance is in the characters themselves. Also of note: the goofier the movie, the further away the polarity should be. The more serious a movie, the differences between the characters will be more subtle.

Contrast (scene specific) – This is when you create contrast via a specific scenario. It doesn’t require that your two characters be permanently on opposite sides of the spectrum. Just temporarily. This could mean that one character is calm about something while the other is freaking out. One character is furious while the other is laughing. One character thinks something is a big deal while the other doesn’t think it’s a big deal at all. The opening scene in Fargo when Jerry Lundergaard walks into the bar to hire the kidnappers highlights this well. They’re pissed that Jerry’s late. Jerry believes this is incidental. That contrast leads to a scene laced with killer conflict (as the kidnappers become agitated that Jerry isn’t even acknowledging their anger).

Dialogue-Friendly Characters – No amount of dialoguing will help if you don’t have at least one dialogue-friendly character in a scene. You gotta have a character in a scene who’s witty or thoughtful or weird or manic or an arrogant prick or overly friendly or anything that necessitates an above-average output of words. It’s not impossible to write good dialogue without dialogue-friendly characters. But it’s hard.

Dramatic Irony – One of the easiest ways to write good dialogue. Place a character in a conversation where we know more than he knows. If Joe is reuniting with his high school friends in a remote cottage for the weekend and we previously had a scene showing that the friends plan to murder Joe, the dialogue is going to be great. A scene as simple as Frank (Joe’s best friend) welcoming him and showing him around the house, can result in riveting dialogue. Also, dramatic irony allows you to play around with and have fun with the dialogue! Joe: “This is going to be a memorable weekend.” Frank: “It sure is.”

Elephant in the room conflict – Elephant in the room conflict is when there’s an issue between characters that they’re not discussing. This issue then permeates whatever conversation they’re having, adding an extra layer to it. If a married couple loses a child and keeps their pain buried, they’re going to have a lot of “elephant in the room conflict.” They may be talking about taking their car in to get fixed. But you can feel that both characters have something much bigger on the brain. Elephant in the room conflict is not reserved for tragedies, by the way. Will Ferrell and John C. Reilly could’ve just had a big unresolved fight in Step Brothers and then were called in for dinner. That dinner scene will be laced with the elephant in the room, the fight they just had.

Stakes – If there are no stakes attached to the conversation, we won’t care about the conversation. I watched this awful awful movie the other day called “The Intervention.” It was about a group of friends who spend a weekend together with the plan to tell two of the friends (who are engaged) not to get married because they’re terrible for each other. So what are the stakes here? If they fail at their goal, the friends get married. SO WHAT!!! Do we care if this couple gets married or not? No. So, of course, every single conversation in the movie fell flat. Stakes are not just movie-specific, but scene-specific as well. The bigger the stakes are for a scene, the better the dialogue. Let’s take that earlier example of Jane driving me to the airport. Let’s say that now my flight is taking me to the job interview of a lifetime – my dream job. Let’s move our conversation to right outside the airport entrance. My flight is leaving in 15 minutes. But Jane wants to know who the fuck Lisa is and why she’s texting me at 3am. We argue and argue some more, and all the while that plane is getting closer to leaving. Do you see how stakes (the job interview of a lifetime) beefs up the intensity of this scene? And by association, the dialogue? This is a great segue into our next dialogue booster…

A time constraint – Just like I showed you there. A time constraint is one of the easiest ways to juice up your dialogue. Simply make it so that one of the characters has something immediate they have to get to or has to leave in a few minutes, and instantly, the dialogue takes on a whole new intensity.

Specificity Over Generalities – The dialogue should seem specific and unique to the characters saying the words. The more general the details are, the less realistic the interaction seems. There’s a moment in Annie Hall where Alvy recounts his school days. He could’ve easily said. “I hated school. Everyone was a jerk-off. Those were some of the worst days of my life.” Talk about general!!! Instead, here’s what he says: “I always felt my schoolmates were idiots. Melvyn Greenglass, you know, fat little face, and Henrietta Farrell, just Miss Perfect all the time. And-and Ivan Ackerman, always the wrong answer. Always.” Specific!

Characters should be talking to each other, not to the audience – This is one of the easiest ways to spot an amateur. Even a lot of newer professional writers do this. Don’t write scenes where characters are only saying things to convey information to the audience. My Red Widow review (in the newsletter) is the perfect example. The married couple would reminisce about when and how they first met. None of that conversation was for them. It was strictly for us so that we understood their backstory. Hence, it felt unnatural. It’s true that sometimes you will need to fit exposition or backstory into a scene. But keep massaging the scene until you can legitimately say that this is a conversation your characters would have EVEN IF there was no one watching them.

In addition to the ten tips above, there are the intangibles. Wit, jokes, bullshitting, setting up and paying off lines, the ability for a character to go off on an interesting tangent. I’ve nicknamed this skill “small talk” as it mirrors the ability to converse in real life and it’s one of the skills most responsible for your dialogue feeling natural. It is also the part of dialogue most dependent on talent. The good news is, even if you’re bad at small talk, you can still master the ten tips above and do your best to sprinkle in enough “small talk” to write solid dialogue. You may not be Tarantino, but nobody’s going to dock you points for your dialogue either.

What about you guys? Any more game-changing dialogue tips???

Hey guys. No review today but that’s okay because the Scriptshadow Newsletter should be appearing in your Inbox any second now. I review a major new spec script sale that Hollywood’s been looking for forever. I’ve also got some writing links such as the intense debate behind Donald Glover’s all-black writing room. And I address that rewrite time issue with the Scriptshadow Tournament.

If you don’t see the newsletter in your inbox, check your SPAM and PROMOTIONS folders. It should be in there. If it isn’t, e-mail me at Carsonreeves1@gmail.com with the subject line “NO NEWSLETTER” and I’ll send it to you personally. If you want to be added to the newsletter, e-mail me at the same address with the subject line “NEWSLETTER” and I’ll send. And hurry up if you want a shot at the half-off consultation trivia!