Sorry for the late post. I was just at Grey Matter and we’re finalizing everything for the Top 5 Scriptshadow 250 Announcement. It’s going to be a big deal. I can’t wait. We’ll be making that announcement here on Monday, May 30th. It’s a tight race too. We had a lot of discussion on who should be the winner and it was freaking close. So mark your calendars folks!
Genre: Comedy/Romance
Premise: When a broke kingdom gets a second chance with a sponsored contest to find the “next Cinderella,” a common girl who competes to help her family must decide if all the drama and a charmless prince are really worth it.
About: A while ago, I was watching Shrek with my toddler niece, and thinking “I would’ve loved a whole movie on the funny fairy tale kingdom stuff.” That thought led to: “imagine if after the Cinderella story, Fairy Godmother became a washed up drunk”…and “imagine if another kingdom tried to find the next Cinderella through a “Bachelor” like competition”…those were just a couple of the “imagines” that resulted in this script, and if it’s something that might appeal to you, I hope you enjoy whatever you have time to read! (as for me: my background began in narrative fiction, and after publishing 3 novels, I started learning all I could about screenplays, as it seemed natural given my love of writing dialogue. A previous script was a top 20 finalist with Script Pipeline in 2014, and with this new one I’m just trying to see if readers find it interesting and fun!)
Writer:Romi Moondi
Details: 103 pages
Every once in awhile I’ll read a comment here that states something like, “If you have this kind of script, don’t put it on Scriptshadow. The community doesn’t like those types of scripts.” Today is the perfect example of that simply not being true. The LAST genres we tend to celebrate around here are comedy and romance, and yet that’s the script that beat out the competition last week. It just goes to show that as long as you’re a good writer with a solid concept and a strong take on that concept, you can write a script that people will notice.
Speaking of good, Cyrielle isn’t doing so good. She’s got a name that sounds like breakfast, she’s on the wrong side of 20 for the Middle Ages, and since it’s the Middle Ages, we’re about 500 years from female empowerment. Which means if you aren’t married by 18, you’re an old maid.
If that isn’t sucky enough, Cyrielle lives in the Enraptured Kingdom, a kingdom so racked by debt that they can barely afford food. That’s not to say King Gastronso isn’t getting his daily share of carbs. In fact, if you judged this kingdom by him alone, you’d think they were doing quite well.
But when King Gastronso is told that a revolt is coming, he teams with celebrity author, Gianni, that of the recent non-fiction bestseller, Cinderella, and a drunken Fairy Godmother, both of whom represent the Enchanted Kingdom.
Gianni’s idea is this. Why not hold a Cinderella Contest, just like his book, to marry off the king’s handsome but arrogant son? With a princess, the spirits of the kingdom will be lifted, which will boost tourism, and the Enraptured Kingdom will be up and running again in no time.
At the announcement ceremony, Cyrielle and her younger siblings sneak in to steal a bunch of food, only to be spotted by the prince, which results, somehow, in Cyrielle being added to the competition. The thing is, nobody believes Cyrielle can win – not even Cyrielle! Yet week after week, in this “Bachelor” like competition (you need to earn a lily to stay another week), the bumbling Cyrielle keeps on keeping on, always barely making the cut. This is ironic since her and the prince appear to have no chemistry whatsoever.
Will Cyrielle win the competition, become the princess, save her family and the kingdom? We’ll find out after this commercial break. I’m Chris Harrison.
I find fairy tales to be the perfect genre to play with. As I like to constantly sear into your eyeballs, every idea has been done before, but not every angle of every idea has been done before. That’s where you earn your mettle as a writer. You find new angles into old ideas.
Since fairy tales have been around for so long, you really have no choice but to find a new angle into them. And one of the easiest ways to do this is to play against the formula. Do what Shrek did. However, because Shrek exists, you need to find an even more disruptive angle, less you look like you’re copying.
Does The Other Princess achieve this?
Sorta.
I liked the reality show stuff. My problem with The Other Princess is more with the nuts and bolts of the story – the motivations of the characters themselves.
For example, I couldn’t figure out why this asshole Prince who despised Cyrielle kept bringing her along. We’re repeatedly told she’s too old. She keeps screwing up in the challenges, looking like a bumbling idiot. And every interaction the Prince has with her goes badly. For the first 70 pages, he appears borderline disgusted with her.
Whenever this sort of thing happens, I’m pulled out of the story because I’m thinking, “This isn’t happening because it’s logical. It’s happening because the writer needs it to happen to move the story forward.” If Cyrielle falls out of the competition, the movie is over.
But that doesn’t mean you can advance her because you need her to be moved forward. There have to be reasons behind it. This is something so many writers get wrong. They have something happen because they want it to happen, not because it would happen.
Yes, there is creative license in storytelling. You do get to do things that people wouldn’t normally do in real life. But it’s a slippery slope. The more severely or frequently you do it, the more you risk the audience calling you out.
Also, while I can forgive the writer for fudging the fringe parts of the story, you can’t fudge anything that’s a part of the story’s engine. This is what’s making the story go. If even one cylinder collapses, everything collapses. And her being chosen to continue is smack dab in the middle of the engine.
Still, I liked certain aspects of the script. As long as we’re talking about finding new angles, don’t just do it for the story, do it for the characters as well. Ask, “What has this character always been, and how can I change that?” I’ve never seen a bumbling drunk fairy godmother with no powers before, and that incarnation of the character was hilarious. Probably the best part of the script.
I also liked how Gianni was secretly listening to every conversation in the competition (like cameras in a reality TV show), writing it down, sending it back to the Enchanted Kingdom, where it was then copied onto numerous scrolls and sent out to everybody in the land, effectively creating the world’s first reality show. That was clever.
However, this should serve as a warning that scripts aren’t just about ideas. Ideas like the above are the fun part. We all love writing them. But once you have that down, you need to make sure the structure is sound, the character arcs are sound, the character motivations are sound. That’s the hard stuff, the boring stuff, but the stuff that brings it all together, that makes your story seamless.
I thought The Other Princess was a solid Amateur Friday entry. It just needs a bit more craft and technique to tidy up those edges. I hope Romi works on it because I think it has potential.
Screenplay Link: The Other Princess
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Creativity is just one part of screenwriting. You can come up with a great character, a clever scene, or a hilarious joke, but if the craft side isn’t there, your script isn’t going to pop. So just keep working on the craft (structure, GSU, suspense, plotting, pacing). And the reverse is true as well. There are a lot of great craft screenwriters out there who aren’t being creative enough, who aren’t pushing the limits of their imagination or trying unique things. So it goes both ways. You have to be proficient at both.
Welcome to Week 2 of the 13 Week “Write a F#&%ING Screenplay” challenge. Here’s a link to Week 1. If you’re coming into this late, you might be able to catch up. But once we get past this week, I recommend you follow the proper time frame. Give each assignment 7 days. We’re already going fast as it is, so I don’t want you going any faster.
Last week was all about the character bios and the outline. This week, you’re going to be drawing on both, but mainly your outline. Your outline is going to work as a series of checkpoints. You now always have a checkpoint 15 pages away or less.
That’s how I want you to start seeing your script. Not as a giant void of empty space, but a series of manageable sequences, each no more than 15 pages. Each scene averages 2 to 2 and a half pages. So every 15 pages, you’ll be writing 5-8 scenes.
Okay, now let’s get to the nitty gritty. You will be writing THREE PAGES A DAY MINIMUM. It is CRITICAL that you write at least these three pages a day. And that shouldn’t be difficult. You have an outline so a lot of the guess-work of “Where do I go next?” is taken care of. And writing three pages of double-spaced non-paragraph-intense script takes most people between 30 minutes and an hour.
If writing that many pages is hard for you, it usually means you’re being too hard on your writing. One of the most common mistakes new screenwriters make is they become obsessed with the actual written word and want to make every sentence something their English professor would be proud of.
You don’t need to worry about that. Your scene will be rewritten so many times, it won’t resemble what it was when you first wrote it. Therefore, all those extra hours you put into making your sentences perfect will have been a waste. Since nobody saw them anyway.
Perfecting your presentation is something you only want to worry about when you’re putting the finishing touches on a script you’re sending out. That stuff means nothing when you’re the only one reading it. Just write clearly and have fun doing it. The first draft should be the draft that’s the most exciting to write. Because it’s the draft where you’ll discover the most about your story. Don’t stifle that because you can’t decide if you should use a comma or a semicolon.
Three pages a day at 7 days a week means that next week, you will have finished 21 pages, which is kind of a weird place to stop since it’s right between the inciting incident and the end of the first act. But whatever. We’ll work with what we’ve got.
Our main concern is your inciting incident, and since every story is different, I can’t give you a one-size-fits-all solution for this. A script someone just sent me had the inciting incident on the very first page. And they did the same thing with my favorite script, Source Code. Our hero wakes up in the middle of his problem – he’s on a train that has a bomb about to blow and he must figure out who the bomber is.
There are also movies that need to establish multiple characters, like The Force Awakens, so it’s harder for that movie to set up its main character (Rey) and hit her inciting incident right at page 15. I’m guessing the inciting incident there is when Finn shows up at her doorstep with the bad guys in pursuit, and that happens on page 30. Others may say that Rey’s inciting incident is when BB-8 shows up on page 15, though I don’t think that’s a big enough problem to be considered an inciting incident.
The point is, the definitions for these screenwriting terms are fluid and dependent on the unique circumstances of your story. So don’t get too caught up in them if they’re confusing. Just make sure that you have those checkpoints marked. And between now and next week, the only checkpoint we’re worried about is between page 12-15. Something needs to happen there to kickstart your movie or we’ll get bored.
So what do you do in the meantime? Well, the first 15 pages are about setup. You’re setting up your characters. In the old screenwriting books, they’d say we want to meet our hero in their everyday lives. If we don’t see who they are to begin with, we won’t appreciate who they have to become when the shit hits the fan. So again, you saw this with Rey in The Force Awakens. We see her everyday life of scrapping and trying to survive.
If you’re like me, you like movies that start in motion. And in those cases, we won’t always be able to see who your character is in their everyday life. They may not even be in their environment when we meet them. Jason Bourne doesn’t start off in a cozy house in the suburbs making breakfast for his kids. He wakes up in unfamiliar territory.
Regardless of where we meet your character, you have to tell us as much as possible about them in a very short amount of time. If they’re in their environment, that’s easy. By seeing their everyday lives, we’ll get a sense of who they are and what their weaknesses are. If you start them in an unfamiliar environment, go back to that character bio I asked you to write, figure out what their flaw is, and write a scene that exposes that flaw, if not in their introductory scene, then soonafter. So in Trainwreck, we immediately establish that Amy Schumer is…. you guessed it, a trainwreck.
And again, don’t get too caught up in your beats. Every screenplay is like a snowflake. It’s different. It has its own quirks and needs. Okay, maybe that’s not like a snowflake at all but you get what I’m saying. Sometimes you want to start your script with a flashy teaser that has nothing to do with your hero. If that feels right for your script, DO IT! Don’t resist creativity because you’re trying to meet technical checkpoints. Those are there as a guide. And since this is the first draft, it’s okay to color outside the lines a bit.
After you write your inciting incident scene (the scene where a big problem alters your main character’s life forever and forces them to make a choice whether they’re going to fight that battle or throw in the towel), we have 6-7 pages left until next week’s assignment.
The Hero’s Journey, which is a template a lot of professional screenwriters use, identifies this section as “The Refusal of the Call.” Preferably, the problem that your hero is faced with is a big scary one. If it isn’t, you probably don’t have a movie. Because it’s big and scary, your main character will resist it. And that’s what this section of scenes is for. The hero wants to go hide, get away from this, not deal with it. But in the end, of course, they have to. Because otherwise we wouldn’t have a story to tell.
Each genre tends to have its own blueprint for this section, and there’s no way I can cover them all here. But think of this section as a push-pull situation. Write scenes that pull him, “You need to do this,” a mentor might say. Then scenes that push. Another character says, “You need to stay here and help with the farm.” It doesn’t have to be dialogue-based. These can be action scenes – in a sci-fi film, someone’s base can get attacked. Point is, this is a turbulent time where your hero’s every fiber is being tested.
Eventually, something will happen to push your character towards his adventure, sometimes by choice, sometimes by force. In The Hunger Games, Katniss chooses to swap herself for her sister. In Edge of Tomorrow, Tom Cruise never chooses anything. They MAKE HIM go. So just know that you have options and there’s no such thing as ONE WAY to do it.
Finally, writing is a fluid thing. Your best stuff comes when you’re inspired, and you can’t always predict when that’s going to happen. So don’t limit yourself to 3 pages if you’re on a roll. If you write 10 straight pages, GREAT! If you pull a Max Landis and write all 21 in a single day, GREAT!
But if you get to 21 before next Thursday, you don’t get to chill. You have to work on your script for at least 3 pages or 2 hours every day. Part of what I’m trying to instill in you here is discipline. The more writing becomes a daily thing, the more you’ll keep up with it. If you write 20 pages one day and take the next 5 off, it’s harder to come back.
So if you get to 21, go back and start rewriting your earlier scenes. Specifically, ask if your choice of scene is original. Have you seen that scene before in other movies? If the answer is yes, try to come up with a new angle into the scene – a more original choice.
I’ll give you an example. In yesterday’s script, two assistants trying to make their bosses fall in love trap them in an elevator together, hoping they’ll connect. The writer added a THIRD PERSON, a UPS delivery guy, in the elevator as well, who flipped out once the elevator stopped. It added another layer to the scene to make it feel more original. That’s what I want you to do if you have time to rewrite scenes.
If you have gobs of time or your parents are supporting your career, use the rest of your free time to KEEP FILLING IN YOUR OUTLINE. The more scenes you can figure out, the easier future writing sessions are going to be. And you know now that 15 pages is roughly 5-8 scenes. So you know how many scenes you need to fit in between each checkpoint.
Okay, that’s it for this week. Time to get some writing done. 21 pages, people. Good luck!!!
Genre: Romantic Comedy
Premise: Two assistants for high-profile workaholic bosses decide that the only way they’ll ever have free time again is if they get their bosses to fall in love with each other.
About: If I see one more article about Jon Freaking Snow on the internet, I may have to murder the season of winter. He’s alive. No he isn’t. Yes he is. No he isn’t. I even had to suffer through an SNL Jon Snow skit! I don’t watch Game of Thrones anymore after I realized that nothing ever happened on it. Why am I bringing this up? Because none other than Denareus Targarian (no, not spell-checking) is playing the lead in Set It Up, a script that made the Black List last year, was purchased by MGM this year, and is the break through screenplay for its scribe, Katie Silberman
Writer: Katie Silberman
Details: 111 pages
A couple of years ago, female comedies were the hottest thing in town. It was the trend that kept on trending. As long as you had a reasonably fun concept and a woman in the lead role, your script vaulted to the top of the pile. This is how Hollywood works, folks. All scripts are not given equal treatment. They are given a priority status that aligns with what the industry is looking for at the moment.
Biopic – top of the pile
Torture Porn – bottom of the pile
Pure action – top of the pile
Dramas not based on a book – bottom of the pile
We are now at a fork in the road with female-led comedies, in the female-led film in general. Even the bread-and-butter female-led films – the young adult novels – are showing weakness. With the last Hunger Games stumbling. With nobody going to see these Divergent movies anymore. And with the next 5th wave not even being a blip on the radar…
So where will this all come to a head? Ghostbusters. Ghostbusters is the crown jewel of this movement. It is the film, the franchise, that is holding the torch for the female comedy. It’s betting a story that doesn’t dramatically or creatively need four women in lead roles – they’re just there because of this trend – will entertain audiences. And if this movie isn’t received well, prepare for the studios to re-think things. Maybe not on the action front yet (I hear that Star Wars movie with a female lead did okay). But definitely on the comedy front.
27 year-old Harper Hall is a sports enthusiast who works at one of the most popular online sports blogs, run by her evil obsessed boss, 39 year-old Kirstin. To give you an idea of how evil Kirstin is, after making Harper spend two days returning an expensive dress and somehow getting them to refund the full amount, despite not having a return policy, Kirstin tells her she’s changed her mind and wants the dress back.
Working in the same building across from Harper is 26 year-old Charlie, who works for the devil incarnate, Rick, a 45 year-old psychopath who loves to hurl things at his window, even if they’re giant and cost a lot of money, like computers. Like Kirstin, Rick doesn’t allow Charlie a single second to spend on his own life.
One night, when Harper and Charlie bump into each other after desperately trying to get late-night food for their bosses, they exchange horror stories and come up with a solution. If they could somehow set their single bosses up with each other, maybe they’ll fall in love, get on normal schedueles, which would free up real-world time for Harper and Charlie!
The two coordinate the old “stuck in the elevator” trick, and are amazed when the two bastions of bitchiness somehow make a connection, all while a freaked out unhealthily claustrophobic UPS guy strips off his clothes, opens the package he’s delivering and pees in a bowl (hey, elevator claustrophobia is real, my brother has it).
Naturally, things start to go wrong. These are two terrible people, their bosses. So they’re going to get in irrational arguments, do irrational things, and this requires Harper and Charlie to manipulate the relationship in the background to keep the bosses together. And wouldn’t you know it, along the way, the two start to like each other. Maybe this is all going to work out after all……. yeah right.
There is another genre that goes to the bottom of that depressing priority pile that I didn’t mention. Romantic Comedy. There are a lot of theories on why the rom-com has died a slow painful death, but it may just be that there are no actors who currently fit the rom-com archetypes. We had Tom Hanks, then Hugh Grant, then Matthew McConaughey, and that was pretty much the end of it for the boys. When Julia and Sandra got too old, that was it for the girls.
If they can find actors that audiences love in these roles, the rom-com could have a comeback. And it looks like they’re pushing Emilia Clarke as one of those actors. She’s doing Me Before You before this. And then this one. Hey, she’s pretty damn adorable so who knows.
Okay, the trick with the rom-com is – since it’s THE MOST CLICHE OF ALL THE GENRES – to look for an angle that hasn’t been explored yet. Personally, I think you need to turn this genre upside-down to get any traction out of it. But absent of that, don’t give us what we’ve already seen.
I was watching a reality show recently and one of these clueless reality women wanted to start her own “online magazine.” And because she had connections, she was able to pitch a huge tech investor in New York. After she pitched it, he stared at her with these impatient “I’m-losing-money-every-second-I’m-in-this-room-talking-to-you” eyes and said, “So, how is it any different from other online magazines?” She stared back blankly, clearly only expecting praise for her idea. She then stumbled out something like “Well, um, well, it’s like… well, it would be me who’s doing it. So nobody else is me…” It went downhill from there.
The point is that too many screenwriters (especially new ones) approach screenwriting the same way. They aren’t thinking, “How is this different from what other people are doing?” And therefore they give us the same old shit.
Now do I love the idea of two assistants setting their bosses up so they have more time in their life? It’s a bit of a forced concept. But I haven’t seen it before. So at the very least, I know the writer is approaching things from an angle that’s going to provide us with some new situations.
And that’s something that writers don’t realize. Coming up with a fresh concept or new angle isn’t just about possessing a shiny new object. It’s using the object to shine a light on scene-options we haven’t seen before. Because that’s one of the hardest things to do in screenwriting – come up with scenes we haven’t seen before.
If you go with a standard premise (Man’s wife gets kidnapped and he has to get her back within 24 hours), you’ve ensured that you’re going down a road that doesn’t provide any unique new scenes. Because there have been too many writers there first.
But once you come in with a new angle… Maybe the man is deaf. Maybe it’s the wife who has to find her husband. Maybe this takes place on Mars in the future. Now your script goes down different roads where other writers haven’t been before and therefore, there are all these new scenes available to you.
Getting back to this script, coming at it from a fresh angle is just the beginning. It’s an important beginning. But you still have to execute. I’ve seen writers come up with killer comedy concepts who just didn’t have the comedy DNA or the experience to pull off the idea. Silberman is not one of those writers.
The structure here is very tight. The characters always have some checkpoint to reach. That’s important, and it’s something we talked about last week with our “13 Week Script Challenge.” If you have checkpoints in the script, you’re always writing towards something, which means the characters are going to be active, they’re going to have a purpose, and the script doesn’t feel like one of those, “Writing by the seat of my pants” thingeys where you can tell the writer’s going to run out of gas (ideas) at any moment.
With the structure in place, it’s now about writing tight scenes with sharp witty dialogue. And this, unfortunately, is one of the hardest things to teach in screenwriting. I actually go back and forth on whether it can be taught. Sharp witty dialogue has an innate personal quality to it. You have to almost be that way in real life to pull it off.
Some of that is understanding how to set up and pay off a joke. Some of it is knowing how to come into a scene late and leave early. Some of it is knowing how to move the plot forward while your characters are making jokes. But in the end, it’s really about, “Are you funny on the page?” And unfortunately, most screenwriters aren’t.
So how do you solve this? I don’t have a universal answer. But what I noticed with Silberman is that she seems like she’s having fun. When comedy isn’t working, the writer tends to be focusing on the technical aspects of the script – if we’re arcing the character correctly, moving this piece of exposition along invisibly. And while that stuff does need to happen, we can’t see you making it happen. This is comedy. You have to have fun on the page and really let yourself go. This script is available on the internet so you can check it out yourself. Just notice how Silberman feels like she’s having fun and letting go.
Ironically, that’s the whole point of the outline and the checkpoints we talked about in our Week 1 Post. Because if you can get those out of the way early, you don’t have to think about them. You can think about making the scenes as funny as they can be.
I’ll say this about Set It Up. It’s not perfect. But it’s a lot better than our last comedy spec, Stuber. So you can read those two and get a sense of what good comedy looks like on the page.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[x] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: One of the joke types that gets the easiest laugh in a comedy script is the adjective-character. You just name a character “funny adjective [Name].” So “Weird Frank” or “Clepto John” or, in this script, “Creepy Tim.” Not only does it get a chuckle, but these characters, because they’re just a name, tend to be the easiest for the reader to understand and remember. They don’t need any description. You immediately get them.
Genre: Period Political Thriller
Premise: Set in one of the most volatile cities during one of its most volatile eras – Beirut in the 1980s – High Wire Act follows a bottomed-out alcoholic diplomat who’s called upon to negotiate the release of a CIA agent who used to be his best friend.
About: From the writer who brought you Michael Clayton and FOUR of the Bourne scripts (Tony Gilroy) comes this hot project, which will star Jon Hamm and Rosamund Pike.
Writer: Tony Gilroy
Details: 120 pages
High Wire Act got me thinking about the types of movies Hollywood makes these days. Cause it ain’t movies like High Wire Act. Unless you have a prestige director and an Oscar campaign ready to roll, I know execs who’d be more welcoming to the Zika Virus than an obscure period political thriller.
Remember when they used to make movies like Boiler Room? Or Rounders? You didn’t even need a concept! All you needed was a subject matter. Uhh… traders on Wall Street. Uhh… poker players! We’ll figure out the story later.
Truth be told, I’m kinda glad those movies don’t get made anymore. They sucked. I mean go back and try and watch one of them. You’re sitting there going: This is basically about a guy named Matt Damon playing poker. They didn’t even try and hide it.
Luckily, High Wire Act is more sophisticated than those scripts, plus it has the benefit of being written by someone who actually understands screenwriting.
Mason Skiles, an American diplomat in 1972 Lebanon, has managed the rare feat, along with his wife, of becoming friends with many of the locals. There’s one boy in particular, 15 year old Kamir, who Mason has personally mentored and will soon send to school in the United States.
Unfortunately, however, school will not be in session for Kamir. A group of masked men crash one of Mason’s parties and take Kamir, who it turns out is the brother of a high profile terrorist. During the scuffle, Mason’s wife is shot and killed.
Cut to 10 years later and Mason is a drunk back in the states with a bargain basement arbitration practice. Just when things can’t sink any lower, he gets a call. It’s the CIA. They want him on a plane to Beirut pronto. But they won’t tell him why.
Mason reluctantly goes, where he finds out that his former best friend and fellow diplomat, Desmond, has been taken. And the kidnappers are requiring they deal with Mason only. Hmmm… that’s interesting.
So Mason goes to meet them and wouldn’t you know it, guess who the kidnapper is? That little boy, Kamir, is all grown up and ready to make a deal. The Israelis have kidnapped Kamir’s troublemaker brother. If Mason can get him back, Kamir will deliver Desmond.
And that’s where things get REALLY complicated. Kamir’s brother is essentially Osama Bin Laden to the Israelis. There’s no WAY they’re going to give him up. Which means Mason is going to have to pull off the greatest negotiation of all time in order to save his friend. Can he do it?
This script starts with a bang and never lets go. My issue with these scripts is that the writer will get too wrapped up in the politics side of things. That stuff isn’t interesting to me. Nor is it interesting to most. What audiences care about are people. If you can set up a cast of characters who are interesting and put them in dramatic situations that are compelling, it doesn’t matter what the overarching storyline is. WE WILL CARE.
And that’s what Gilroy does. He opens with a flashback that introduces us to our happy main character, his happy wife, his happy best friend, and the happy teenage boy he mentors.
Immediately after making us fall in love with them, the terrorists arrive and kill Mason’s wife. I was devastated. And why? It’s just words on a page. But this is the power of good screenwriting. You create moments between characters, make us care about them, then take those characters away.
Even more brilliant? PERSONAL STAKES. What bad writers do in these scripts is they introduce a bunch of random people with random ranks who we don’t know, and expect us to give a shit if one of them is kidnapped.
What Gilroy does is he makes the kidnapped guy our main character’s best friend (PERSONAL STAKES). And who’s the kidnapper? The kid Mason mentored (PERSONAL STAKES). Everything here is personal, which makes the bonds and thus the plotlines stronger.
Gilroy doesn’t stop there. He utilizes what I’ve deemed the “mystery goal.” The mystery goal adds flavor to a goal, it adds a spike. When Mason is called upon 10 years later to go back to Beirut, he isn’t told why. It’s a MYSTERY. So you’re not just sending your character somewhere (their goal) but strengthening it with a mystery along the way. Of COURSE we’re going to want to keep reading. Just like Mason, we want to find out what the fuck they want him for.
Another key tip is to make your mystery goal IMPORTANT. Typically, when you lay down a mystery, you can keep that mystery going for 10-15 pages and the reader’s going to stay invested. People naturally will stick around until the mystery is solved. But the more IMPORTANT you make that mystery, the longer you can stretch out the reveal.
The way the CIA talks to Mason about this Beirut trip, they make it sound like a really big fucking deal. Like this is one of those things you can’t pass on. As a reader I’m going, “Ooh, this seems big time. I have to know what this is about.” If the same person had come to Mason and said, “I heard these people are sorta interested in talking to you. Maybe you should check it out.” Does that sound important enough to make you care? Of course not.
Lots of great scenes here too. Bad writers take common scenes and play them out the way they alway play out. Good writers take common scenes and they TURN THEM in a way where they play out unexpectedly. So when Mason goes to meet with the kidnappers for the first time, there are two men in masks he’s talking to. The main one, the older guy, is screaming and yelling at Mason, telling him that Mason’s going to play by their rules. After about 3 minutes of this, the other masked man calmly raises his gun and shoots the man in the back of the head for being difficult. He then takes over the negotiation.
WHAT THE FUCK?? Wasn’t expecting that.
After all this, you’re probably expecting me to give this an impressive. I was actually going higher than that at the midpoint. This was going Top 25. But then the script started doing exactly what I said you shouldn’t do at the beginning. It started focusing on the politics, the web of lies, the world of the impersonal as opposed to the personal.
One of the issues here was that Beirut had a dozen warring factions inside of it in the 80s. So there were SO MANY bad guys. So many different clubs who were part of the problem. Add onto that people double-crossing each other and after awhile, you couldn’t keep track of it anymore.
It’s the double-edged sword with these types of scripts. As they move towards their climax, they have to get bigger. But the bigger they get, the harder it is to keep track of what’s going on. So you have to either deftly calibrate how much the audience can take, or be an expert at keeping loads of information clear and easy to digest.
I eventually got lost in all the madness. And that’s too bad, cause this script had a hold on me for a big portion of its page count.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[x] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: One of the oldest writing tricks in the book. Place your hero where he least wants to be. The last place Mason wants to be after his wife was murdered there is Beirut. So where is he sent to? Beirut. You do that and I’m telling you, most of your movie will write itself.
What I learned 2: You’re never going to write the perfect screenplay. The goal is simply to do more good than bad. If you can achieve that, you’ll have a script worth reading.
Genre: Superhero
Premise: When the government attempts to gain control over the Avengers, it fractures the team, leading to an inevitable battle between those who believe they should be contained, and those who want freedom.
About: People in the industry have been calling this Avengers 2.5 for awhile now, not just in scope, but in budget. Apparently this was one of Marvel’s toughest productions, with the top brass complaining that way too much money was being spent on something that wasn’t an official Avengers film. Maybe the 180 million dollar opening (just 11 million less than the more heavily hyped Avengers 2) has alleviated some of those fears. The script was written by the top writing duo at Marvel, Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely. The two also wrote the upcoming Avengers 3 & 4, which will be filming back to back.
Writers: Christopher Markus & Stephen McFeely (comic by Mark Millar) (characters by Joe Simon and Jack Kirby)
Details: 147 minutes long!
Whenever I write about these superhero movies, people say, “These movies have nothing to do with screenwriting.” And while I can understand where they’re coming from, they’re wrong. In fact, scripting a superhero film, especially one like Captain America: Civil War, is one of the hardest things a screenwriter will ever have to do.
Because you’re not just trying to please 20 different people who all have their own ideas of how the script should go. You’re balancing a ton of characters. And that’s probably the hardest thing to do in screenwriting, is balance a huge cast of characters.
I’m still of the old-school belief that movies are best served with a single dominant hero. It’s the formula that works best for the feature film format. Indiana Jones, John McClane, shit, even the recent Deadpool.
Every scene where you focus on a character who isn’t your hero, you are taking time away from your hero. And when you do that, it becomes difficult to develop the hero, to arc the hero, to give them any sort of meaningful journey. And with a movie like this, you’re jumping around to so many damn people, all Captain America has time to do is say, “I don’t like what’s going on.” And how fucking interesting is that?
But franchises like Harry Potter and Marvel and Fast and Furious have made this the new norm for summer films. It’s not about character development anymore. It’s about character variety. And I’ve come to realize how they’ve handled this change.
Fast and Furious and Avengers films have become giant TV shows. What do TV shows do? They stuff their shows with lots of characters and each scene moves along a couple of those characters at a time. That’s what Civil War was. We’d jump to Cap and Buckey, then Scarlet Witch and Vision, then Iron Man and Spider-Man.
The difference is, movies weren’t built for that. With TV shows, you always have a new episode next week. So you can afford to go 15 minutes without mentioning a key storyline between characters because we know we’re going to see those guys next week. With movies, everything has to be figured out by the end of the film.
So we get this weird hybrid movie-TV structure that never feels comfortable with itself, like a dress that doesn’t fit right. And that was my beef with Civil War. We’re jumping around so damn much that I’d forget what the fucking movie was about.
Honestly, I think that’s why they called it Civil War. So that anytime you forgot, you’d go, “Oh yeah, this is called Civil War. So the superheroes are going to fight each other. That’s what this is about.”
But is it what it was about? Not really. Captain America: Civil War is about the latest trend in superhero films – PUBLIC DESTRUCTION. It’s as if everyone’s just figuring out now that when Iron Man knocks over a skyscraper, there may be a few hundred people inside that just died. Which is kind of cheap when you think about it. Because the whole reason you placed your characters in a city in the first place was because it looks cool. Superheroes fighting in the Sahara is never going to be able to convey as much visual awesomeness as an 80-ton metal slab colliding with the Hulk.
So for them to conveniently just be figuring this out now? Come on.
Anyway, Tony Stark (Iron Man) gets all emotional about these real-world people dying and wants to sign a treaty with the United Nations where they would hand over control of the Avengers. Strangely, this takes everything about Stark that’s cool and fun and emasculates it, turning Tony into a depressing little whiner. Captain America, for no other reason than the plot requires it, steadfastly disagrees, and the rest of the Avengers are forced to take sides.
This leads to what is probably the best action scene in superhero history, the showdown at the airport. These Russo Brothers guys are incredible directors and, in many ways, saved a script that was burdened with trying to do too much for too many.
My favorite moment was when the tiniest superhero (figuratively and literally), Ant-Man, became the most influential in the whole battle. And it reminded me that right now, Ant-Man is probably the most interesting thing Marvel has going for it. He’s the only character that allows you to do things that you haven’t previously done in these movies.
The problem was, once that scene was over, you wanted to go home. I mean, isn’t that why we came? It’s not like we were on the edge of our seat, desperately wondering where the story was going to go next. Especially because you needed a spreadsheet to keep track of all the storylines.
With that said, the writers tried. There was this Buckey storyline – a superhero from Captain America’s past who was either good or bad, we couldn’t tell – that Civil War kept coming back to. But a) how are we supposed to care about little old Buckey in a movie where there’s going to be a full on war between the Avengers, and b) Buckey as a superhero is fucking lame.
The dude has a MECHANICAL ARM. That’s your superhero? A strong arm? Ooooh, what’s next? A superhero with a disease-free toe? One with a leg that has 70% more endurance than the other leg?
And why don’t we make this a call out to Marvel. Marvel: GET RID OF ALL YOUR LAME SUPERHEROES. Guy with mechanical wings? Not a superhero. Guy who shoots arrows? Not a superhero. Girl who jumps on people with her legs and twists them onto the ground really hard? Not a superhero. The only people who should be onscreen in these movies are real superheroes. Seriously now.
Captain America: Civil War has confirmed a truth I’ve found to be correct 90% of the time. The bigger a script gets, the more it suffers. That’s why the previous Captain America was better than this iteration. Simpler story. And it’s why Deadpool, a super-simple story about revenge beat out Batman vs. Superman, which got lost in its dense and unfocused storyline.
I understand that going lower-budget scares the hell out of executives. There’s pressure to give the audience a visual experience that they’ve never had before. And you can’t do that without lots of money. But they need to keep the simple storytelling spirit. They need to ask what makes a good movie. Because, believe it or not, it is possible to have a big movie also be a great story.
I thought this movie was okay. But superhero fatigue, a forced superhero war, and a lame b-story with Buckey the one-armed bandit, kept this out of recommend-territory.
[ ] What the hell did I just watch?
[x] wasn’t for me (except for the airport fight)
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: For those of you resisting those character bios I’m making you write, every superhero in this movie has at least 30 years of backstory/biography to draw from. In essence, these characters have lived entire lives already. This is what you’re competing against so figure out as much about your characters’ pasts as you can.
