Today’s script and the film it spawned just became THE big story at Sundance this year, selling for a boatload of money. But is this classic indie drek here to depress us to death, or is it the next Ordinary People?

Genre: Drama
Premise: When his brother dies a long-time-coming death, a janitor beaten down by tragedy learns that he’s reluctantly been made his nephew’s legal guardian.
About: So far, this is the big movie coming out of Sundance. It sold for 10 million bucks to Amazon, and is written by embattled writer-director Kenneth Lonergan. You may remember Lonergan as the guy who wrote and directed the movie, “Margaret,” a film that, even though it had some of the biggest stars in the business in it, was stuck in purgatory because Lonergan refused to edit the sprawling film down. As a result, it wasn’t released until eight years later. I reviewed the script on the site to see if it was, as some had proclaimed, a “masterpiece,” and instead found very good evidence as to why the film wasn’t being let anywhere near a movie theater. It was a sprawling unfocused mess. Manchester-by-the-Sea is supposed to be a lot tighter, and is said to give star Casey Affleck an Oscar-worthy performance.
Writer: Kenneth Lonergan
Details: 134 pages (July 25th, 2014 draft)

Don’t you just love feeling lousy?

I know that’s how I like to start my days.

Well, lucky for you, I’ve got a script that’s depressing as shit!

Look, I like character pieces when they’re done well. I don’t need a huge plot to be happy. But what I do want from my character pieces is some element of hope. I can get through the depression if I feel like there’s hope on the other side.

I just read this dystopian book, actually, The Dog Stars, by Peter Heller, and this book is really depressing. Spolier Alert: The dog dies. And humanity is screwed. And the only people left on earth kill and eat each other. And the main character is lonely as shit. But you know what? The book eventually brings us hope. We see that there’s a silver lining at the end. And it makes the dark journey we invested in worth it.

But if you’re just going to depress me for two hours… we got a problem.

Manchester-By-The-Sea follows Lee, a 40 year-old janitor who sleepwalks through life. This guy’s clearly gone through some heavy shit, and he’s just not interested in fighting anymore. Well, more bad news is on the way for old Lee. His brother just died.

Luckily, this was expected. Joe, his bro, had congestive heart failure and had been fighting it for awhile. So everyone knew it was just a question of when. Even with that though, there wasn’t really a plan put in place for how to handle the situation. All Lee knows is that he has to go pick up Joe’s son, 15 year-old Patrick, to tell him that his dad has passed.

Patrick, who’s not the most likable kid (he has two girlfriends, neither of whom know about the other), is casual about the news. He wants to know what happens to all the money. Does it come to him? Since his alcoholic mom disappeared years ago, he figures that’s the plan. But since he’s only 15, Lee will take the money, as well as become Patrick’s guardian. This is news Lee wasn’t expecting and his first reaction is “no fucking way.”

The two spend the rest of the day doing person-just-died errands, debating where Patrick is going to live, since Lee refuses to let him live with him. During this time, we flash back to previous moments in their lives, most of which are arbitrary. Then, just when we’re getting comfortable, we’re hit with a big one. One night, a drunken Lee started a fire in the fireplace then went to get more beer. When he got back, his house was on fire, and his three young daughters were crispier than overcooked bacon.

Hey, I told you this was going to be depressing, didn’t I! The rest of the story follows Lee and Patrick around with the vague impression that at some point, Lee will officially decide whether to be Patrick’s guardian or not. At the rate things are going here, my guess is probably not.

Let’s start off with the dreaded double-tragedy. Why does it have to be a double tragedy?? Isn’t one tragedy enough for a film?? I guess there wasn’t enough depression so we needed to add more. I mean a grown man dying of heart failure is weak-sauce. Kill three young girls. Now we’ve got a picture, see!

To be honest, I don’t know what to make of this. This kind of screenplay is so out of my comfort zone, it’s hard to analyze it. Lonergan likes real life moments. He likes authenticity. He doesn’t want Hollywood bullshit. I get that.

But you have to realize that you’re making a movie. Movies aren’t life. They’re not 80 years long. They’re two hours long. So just the fact that you’re cutting 79 years out means you’re making choices as to what’s interesting and what isn’t. You’re “Hollywood-izing” your story whether you want to admit it or not.

So don’t pretend like you’re keeping it real by avoiding flashier plot points. For example, there’s a brief moment where it’s hinted at that Lee’s wife may have left him for Joe, giving us a meatier and more complicated familial drama to sort through. But the hint turned out to be nothing, keeping things straight, and for the most part, uneventful.

There are no plot developments in the present-day storyline. It’s literally like if you and I got in a car, did errands, didn’t really like each other, and then went our separate ways after two hours. That’s this movie. We needed more to happen. We needed drama. We needed an unexpected development or two.

And then there’s Lee. They’re saying Casey Affleck is going to get an Oscar nomination for this. I guess you can get a nomination then for looking really depressed? Cause, honestly, Lee doesn’t do much else. He just drives Patrick around and stumbles over his words a bunch. That’s his main character trait, saying some version of “I can’t do that… I can’t do that,” over and over again.

Which brings me to the dialogue. The dialogue here is probably some of the most realistic you’ll ever read. People don’t really say much. They stumble over their words a lot. Half the script is dual-line dialogue, implying that everyone’s talking over each other. All this gives the dialogue a “real-world” feel. But again, it’s like listening to a real life conversation. Real life conversations are boring. Your job as a writer is to dramatize dialogue, and Lonergan doesn’t do a lot of that. I guess because he’s afraid of “Hollywoodizing” everything.

Finally, one of the things I hate most in stories is one-note characters. The same emotion over and over again. Especially if it’s a negative emotion. Cause then you’re just sucking us into Depressionville. Because the truth is, I wanted to root for this guy. Lonergan did a nice job making us like him at the beginning (he works long hours as a janitor and has to do really shitty stuff just to get by). But the second he picks up Patrick, this becomes a one-note movie all the way.

And that’s my biggest thing. One-note is boring. No matter how you spin it. One of my favorite scripts I’ve reviewed, After Hailey, has a similar set up (guy becomes legal guardian of teenager) and it works because they bring other emotions into it. With even just a teensy bit of humor here, this could’ve been so much better.

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

What I learned: Beware of one-note movies – movies with one emotion throughout. There are examples of them working in the past (Ordinary People comes to mind) but they are rare. Remember that an audience best feels a note when they have another note to compare it against. Depression hits more squarely when it’s juxtaposed against humor. Lonergan got that right in his debut film, You Can Count On Me, but he seems to have forgotten it here.

We’ve just watched a movie make more money at the box office than any other movie in history. There’s a movie in theaters shot by one of the world’s best directors and starring one of the best actors that has garnered multiple Academy Award nominations (The Revenant). We’re a month and a half away from two of the biggest superhero films in history, Batman vs. Superman and Captain America: Civil War.

For those who would rather view their entertainment in the comfort of their own home, Netflix has offered its customers a variety of enormously budgeted high profile shows, including House of Cards, Daredevil, and Jessica Jones. It seems wherever you go, there’s tons of entertainment to choose from.

And yet despite this, when I run into people outside of the movie world, normal people on the street, they all only want to talk about one thing: Making A Murderer. It’s become such a part of the cultural lexicon that “Have you seen Making a Murderer?” is officially the new, “What’s up?”

When anything breaks out of its genre space and becomes a universally known phenomenon, every screenwriter serious about this craft need stand up and pay attention. The world is telling you what people respond to (I believe this to be true for TV, movies, songs, plays, any form of entertainment). And so today, I wanted to look at this show to see if we could glean any screenwriting lessons from it.

Before we start, however, I’ll offer my quick opinions on the show, since everybody has one. Spoilers follow throughout the post, of course. Personally, I think Steven Avery is guilty. I believe the show leaves out a bunch of crucial pieces of information on the prosecution’s side in order to make Steven a more sympathetic protagonist. And when you think about it, they had no choice. If anyone was certain that Steven committed this crime, the entire documentary implodes. We have to want to root for the guy for everything to work. The filmmakers knew this, and so strategically withheld key pieces of evidence so that we’d side with Avery.

As far as documenting a real life case where you’re supposed to be impartial, this was a slimy move. But if you’re looking at this as pure entertainment, it was a genius move, because, again, we want to root for this guy. We want to believe the system is corrupt. We want to see that system go down. And that’s the first of a few lessons Making a Murderer can teach us in regards to screenwriting.

I want to go through five storytelling lessons derived from this series that we can apply to our own screenplays, to give them a similar chance to break out and become mainstream hits.

1) The system makes you play by one set of rules, while they get to play by another (aka “corruption”) – This setup ALWAYS WORKS folks. As members of society who are constantly nickled and dimed by the system (taxes on everything, parking tickets for being a minute late to your car, police harassment), when that very system makes a mistake and doesn’t cop to it? It makes our blood boil. We want them to pay just like we’ve had to pay our whole lives. This is the crux of why Making a Murderer works. These guys screwed up by putting an innocent man in prison, and then, to avoid paying for it, they framed him for murder.

2) We hate bullies – It doesn’t matter if it’s the bully at the schoolyard or a giant corporation throwing all its legal resources to bury the little guy who’s come up with a better way to do what they do. We hate when the big guy picks on the little guy. And that’s why we react so strongly to the state bullying Steven Avery.

3) We love the underdog – We always root for the underdog. And the more of an underdog they are, the more we’ll root for them. A simple and powerful way to come up with a story is to start with a small fry being pitted against a giant fry.

4) Wrongly accused – We HATE when our main character has been wrongly accused. We want to scream out to the system, “They’re innocent!” Harrison Ford and The Fugitive started this trend back in the 90s and it hasn’t failed to deliver since. We’ll always get heated when someone who’s innocent is thrown in prison.

5) Add a twist to your murder-mystery – This is probably the most important tip coming out of this show. Murder is everywhere in storytelling. But a dead body and a few suspects is too generic. We’ve seen that setup too many times already. You have to find a twist that makes your murder-mystery FRESH. The genius of Making A Murderer is its unique twist on the genre. What if someone who was accused of murder had already spent years in prison for a crime they didn’t commit? That adds a whole new dimension to the murder, one that makes you prone to believe the man, no matter how extensively the evidence is stacked against him.

When you put all these things together, you can see why this show has taken off. For me, the first 5 episodes of the show were genius. I loved 6-8 as well. But I found myself passively watching once I got to 9 and 10. I’m a huge believer that when you hit the end of your main character’s plight, the story’s over. And after episode 8, we knew Steven Avery’s fate. The stuff with his son or nephew or whatever (the focus of 9 and 10) was never that interesting to me. He wasn’t as sympathetic of a character. I know he was taken advantage of but for some reason I didn’t care. And just from a storytelling perspective, you want to wrap up your secondary character’s storyline before you wrap up your main character’s storyline. Making a Murderer did it the opposite way, sending the show out on a whimper instead of a bang. What did you guys think?

This week we have a couple of familiar faces. A writer whose last script got noticed by a Chinese production company as well as a writer with one of my favorite amateur scripts ever reviewed (Patisserie). Throw in another earth, a little birdie, and some PTSD, and we have ourselves a Saturday. A quick note before we get to the scripts. Guys, don’t tell me in your “Why You Should Read” that you’ve got GSU or arcing characters or any other technical terms. Those things are for you, not others. Talk about what drove you to write the script, why you think the script’s fresh or different, or something interesting about yourself. Those are the things myself and others are going to respond to. Okay, read away and vote for your favorite script in the comments!

Remember, you can submit your own script to challenge your peers by sending me an e-mail (carsonreeves3@gmail.com) with your TITLE, GENRE, LOGLINE, WHY YOU THINK IT DESERVES A SHOT, and a PDF of the screenplay. A good review tends to get writers some industry contacts. So who knows, maybe you’ll be the next “The Last Alchemist.” Keep’em coming!

Title: Evolution’s Eve
Genre: Action / Sci-Fi
Logline: When a sick little girl becomes the final component in a mad scientist’s plan to become a god, her parents must race against the clock to save her, before the world, and all humanity, is destroyed.
Why I think it deserves a shot: With my previous Amateur Offering outing, I had submitted the script Shadows Below after a mad dash to complete it in under a month. Scriptshadow’s savvy readers, and your review, recognized the early development of the draft, and were quick to point out its flaws that could be worked out in future drafts. In stark contrast, my script Evolution’s Eve is the product of years of work, and it has been edited and re-edited time and time again. In its previous form it existed as two separate screenplays, but as time goes by and we put in the work, every writer improves. This afforded me the wisdom to recognize that it needed to be a single script, and over the past two months I performed a page 1 rewrite of the project to create this screenplay’s final draft. While the tone and execution of each script may vary, a writer’s colors always shines through. I believe that this draft of Evolution’s Eve represents where I’m currently at in my skills as a screenwriter, and I feel that it is worthy for consideration in a shot to win an AF review.

Title: Canary
Genre: Thriller, Drama
Logline: A prostitute inducted into a spy organization must stop an impending terrorist attack while struggling to hold her family together.
Why You Should Read: I was born in a village in a third world country. I grew up without electricity, good schools, police, hospitals, or indoor plumbing. Though I speak and write fluent English now and am an actor, playwright, and theater & film director, I have not forgotten the feeling of living without power, hope, and control over one’s own destiny. An SS article about a year back talked about putting the audience in the characters’ shoes, making them ask “what would I do if I were in that situation?”. All of this informed my writing of CANARY, my seventh script, as it explores a character who achieves power after never having had it. How that changes her and how she deals with the world will lead her to either grow as a person (have an arc) or not (a tragedy). Oh and there’s also some terrorists looking to start a war!

Title: Earth 2.0
Genre: Sci-Fi/Thriller
Logline: A mercenary is investigating a vast global conspiracy when he discovers four rogue preachers he must stop within twenty four hours who intend to release a secret that will alter mankind forever.
Why You Should Read: It’s been a long time since an amateur spec caused a stir like the way “The Disciple Program” did. I believe this could be that spec that will excite everyone again. — What sets it apart is a number of elements within it have started to become actual reality…so you have to ask yourself…do I know something you don’t know? And most importantly…do you want to be the first to know what that is? It’s a story that is fast paced, well not skipping out on character. Also, it has the rarest of all things to Sci-Fi stories, emotion. If you enjoyed Davinci Code or if you are a fan of dark Sci-Fi conspiracy stories…this is for you. I hope you will fully engage with it and follow the mysteries to their inevitable fun point. Carson, let’s give the world something to talk about.

Title: Paradise Falls
Genre: Horror, Mystery, Thriller
Logline: A detective, who suffers from PTSD, relocates to a small town where she soon gets roped into an investigation involving a string of kidnappings in which the victims return seven days later, only to go on a murderous rampage.
Why You Should Read: I once read that as a writer you should stick to one genre. Especially if you’re new on the scene. Be the funny guy, or the scary guy, or the one studios call when they want s*** to blow up. Well, as a writer I hate this advice. I write the kind of movies that I want to see, and I love to watch pretty much every genre of film. In the past I submitted and had three scripts put on display in the the weekly Amateur Offerings. All of them were comedies. I wanted my next script to be different, and show my range as a writer. “Paradise Falls” is a horror film. No, it’s not filled with the “jump scares” or paranormal activity ghosts. It’s filled with evil. Both figuratively and literally. I would say that I was influenced by such films as “Se7en”, “Silence of the Lambs”, “Deliver Us From Evil” (in terms of tone), “Angel Heart”, and “The Devil’s Advocate”. I think this can and will be a great film. Tell me what you guys think.

Title: Not a Prayer
Genre: BioPic
Logline: Non-believers saw her as a heroic warrior crusading to enforce the separation of church and state, but to the believers she delighted in tormenting, she was the devil incarnate. This is the true story of the irreverent, at times poignant, and always controversial Madalyn Murray O’Hair.
Why You Should Read: I’m the writer of ScriptShadow’s #2 winner Pâtisserie, and after watching Trumbo recently, the acclaimed biopic on the Communist screenwriter starring former TV star Bryan Cranston, I dusted off this screenplay I wrote before Pâtisserie that can’t seem to get any traction. Is it the subject matter? The timing? The writing? The jackboot of religion keeping it down? :) I wrote Not a Prayer with another TV star, Roseanne Barr, in mind believing she’s due for a resurgence as a dramatic actress. She even expressed an interest, but nothing has come of it…so far.

Get Your Script Reviewed On Scriptshadow!: To submit your script for an Amateur Review, send in a PDF of your script, along with the title, genre, logline, and finally, something interesting about yourself and/or your script that you’d like us to post along with the script if reviewed. Use my submission address please: Carsonreeves3@gmail.com. Remember that your script will be posted. If you’re nervous about the effects of a bad review, feel free to use an alias name and/or title. It’s a good idea to resubmit every couple of weeks so your submission stays near the top.

Genre: Action-Adventure
Premise (from writer): After witnessing the slaughter of her village by a rival clan, a woman warrior treks across Japan in search of revenge.
Why You Should Read (from writer): This script came out of my love for sword fighting. In every samurai film ever made, it’s always by far the highlight of the story, which is why I set out to make the plot of Onna-Bugeisha so simple. The characters have no spoken dialog. I thought it would be a great experiment to write a film in which the battles, the duels and the score were the dialog. — Uma Thurman aside, rarely do we see a woman take center stage in a samurai action film. The main protagonist in this story is not only a woman, but a mother of two. Women of the households, defending their families at sword point, is ingrained in the samurai culture, but to the best of my knowledge, I haven’t seen that story play out on film. — Please note: Although the page count is low for a feature film, I’ve timed it at around 1 hr 50 min.
Writer: Jon Sanhueza
Details: 48 pages (yes, 48 pages!)

I had a feeling you guys would dig this one. There’s something about martial arts and movies that goes together like Silver Lake and hipsters. Now I’ve never been leading the martial-arts charge. Maybe it’s because, as a kid, my karate instructor used to make me hold two books out with my arms until they fell off. But, hey, what 13 year old doesn’t go through their “Enter the Dragon is the best movie ever!” phase. I know I did.

Still, we’ve got a writer who’s taking a huge chance here. I’ve read a few scripts over the years that have been dialogue-free, and while telling a story without anyone speaking is one of the purest forms of storytelling, it tends to work best in short spurts, and not for 90 minutes at a time. Let’s see if Onna-Bugeisha is an exception to the rule.

Lord Mori is dead. And that’s never a good thing. This thrusts his son, Lord Jiro, and his daughter, Lady Takara, into the kingdom-running spotlight. And with Lady Takara running off to get married, it means poor Lord Jiro will have to do everything by his lonesome. And how does he celebrate this? With a concubine, of course! Oh man. Who wouldn’t have loved to live in feudal Japan.

There’s only one problem. That concubine? She’s kind of a secret assassin. And after giving Jiro a little sexy time, she strangles him to death. Meanwhile, Lady Tanaka is riding to her new hubby’s place with her number 1 bodyguard, the Samurai, “Katsuro.” But when their carriage is attacked, not even a samurai can take on a couple dozen gun-slingers. Maybe this is the moment in time when samurais realized, “You know? This gun thing might be an issue for our longevity.”

Katsuro’s beautiful wife, Maiko, is back at home using her residual samurai knowledge to take down the raiders destroying Jiro’s kingdom. In the process, both of her children are killed. But somehow, Maiko escapes, and heads into the woods after her man. She finally finds him in a cave, rescues him from the nasty raiders, and heads to the nearest village for some food.

Unfortunately, Katsuro wants to kill himself. Something about tradition for being a failure or something. Maybe I wouldn’t have wanted to live in feudal Japan. He succeeds when Maiko’s away, and now Maiko is all alone with no home, no children, no husband, and no In and Out. So she does what anyone in her situation would do: She plots some revenge, muthufuka!

Eventually she finds out that Lady Takara and her new hubby were responsible for this whole thing, probably so they could rule more land. So Maiko heads to their kingdom, now looking like a haggard beggar, and slices her way to a local tournament, where she takes down her competition, and finally, the couple responsible for her family’s death.

Writing a script without dialogue is like eating a pizza without cheese. It’s not that it can’t be good. But you’re going to have to come up with some bomb-ass recipe to make us forget about that cheese.

One of the lesser-talked about things in screenwriting is the way dialogue helps a reader’s eyes move down the page. It’s ironic when you think about it because we’re all telling you, “SHOW! DON’T TELL!” And yet secretly, we like you to tell because a page of dialogue moves about four times as fast as a page of description.

I remember getting to what I thought was at least page 25, and I looked up and saw that I was on page 8. That’s never a good sign. The goal in any script should be for the reader to look up and NOT BELIEVE it’s already page 40 or page 70.

And it’s not that Jon deluges us with endless paragraphs. Actually, the majority of his paragraphs are 1 line long!

So it led me to wonder, is the problem here that there’s no dialogue? Or is the problem that the story isn’t very compelling?

I can pinpoint one area that might help answer that question. After Maiko’s family has been killed, she finds some sort of piece of paper that highlights a contest with Lady Takara. And it seemed to me like this was supposed to be a key plot revelation. Like it was telling us who had raided the kingdom. And yet, it wasn’t clear if that’s what was happening, leaving me to wonder if I’d just read a major plot twist (Lady Takara betrayed her brother!) or if this was some run-of-the-mill exposition to get Maiko to the contest.

If there had been dialogue in this script, I’m sure there’d be zero confusion here. You’d have that scene where a character literally said this out loud. But there wasn’t, and that left me wondering who was responsible for this attack, a major plot point in the story lost due to the vagueness of a voice-less screenplay.

On top of this, I’m not sure this would be a 90 minute to 2 hour movie. That’s another problem you run into when you don’t follow proper page-protocol. 1 page = 1 minute of screen time. That’s how Hollywood’s been doing it since the beginning. They’ve even go so far as to keep certain dead fonts alive during the personal computing font revolution of the 80s so they could accurately determine a script’s length.

This may seem trivial but remember, you’re talking about a business that wants to know EXACTLY how much something is going to cost, down to the thousand dollar mark. Warner Brothers will force you to write scripts for them in their specific template so they can have a better understanding of this number.

I don’t know if this movie is 30 minutes long. 100 minutes long. I have no idea. And if I don’t know, I’m guessing a studio exec won’t either.

All of this overshadows the fact that Jon is a really good writer. You can tell he loves this subject matter. The way he describes things is very simple and elegant (“A ninja drags the samurai onto the roof and plunges the sickle into his chest.”). There’s just something about this no-dialogue format that’s interrupting my enjoyment. I wish I felt differently but that’s the truth. And as Will Smith likes to say, “Tell the trust.”

Screenplay link: Onna-Bugeisha

[ ] what the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me (but writer is definitely someone to watch out for)
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius

What I learned: Despite my reaction to this specific story, today is a reminder to write about what you love. It really makes a difference in the product. Readers can tell when you care. Everything feels more detailed, more vibrant, more thought-out. You can’t fake that. It’s like a born and bred country singer being asked to sing R&B. If he’s talented, he can do it. But you’re never going to feel the same passion in his voice as when he’s singing country.

A few of you e-mailed me after yesterday’s review asking about this “Noise” thing. What the hell is noise, Carson? Well my dear reader, let me do my best to explain. Because if there’s one thing that drives me INSANE when reading actions scripts, it’s the over-abundance of noise.

In an action movie, your characters will constantly be on the move and engaged in conflict. “Noise” is when that conflict is so generic and formless, that it can be boiled down to noise. Guns shooting. Tires screeching. Men yelling. Robots clashing. There is nothing else going on onscreen other than a lot of noise.

The antithesis of noise is SITUATIONS. Situations have form, they have focus, and they set up a scenario whereby everything from the character goals to the stakes involved are clear to the audience. You may not have been aware of it, but when you’ve seen a great action scene, it was very likely a situation.

The reason why noise is so prevalent in amateur screenwriting is because it creates the illusion of entertainment to the writer. He or she believes that if the script is slowing down, they can put a gun fight in there or a car chase or some vampires attacking zombies, and that that will be entertaining because, technically, some kind of action is happening.

That’s not true, unfortunately. What action fans like are action scenes where the purpose of the scene is clearly laid out, where we understand the rules, and where we know what our characters are trying to achieve.

One of the genres that abuses this mistake the most is drug-action movies. You know how many scenes I’ve read of bad guys and good guys shooting at each other in a warehouse or on “the docks?” Countless. And all it is is shooting. There’s nothing else going on. So let’s look at how someone might craft more of a SITUATION in a drug action film.

One of my favorite scenes of the year is the border-crossing scene in Sicario. In the scene, our FBI agents are coming back out of Mexico after securing some important information. The Cartels don’t like this, and want to take the agents out before they get back to the U.S.

Now you could’ve approached this the “noisy” way. Simply write a scene with our agents on the highway and the Cartels in pursuit of them. They’re shooting at us. We’re shooting back at them. Original right? Haven’t seen that one ever. Sarcasm tag.

Or you can do what writer Tyler Sheridan did. Wait til the traffic jam at the border crossing, where our agents are in their cars, stuck in place, and start to show us, one by one, the armed Cartel members in different cars, surrounding our agents, carefully getting into position to attack. Then show our agents realize the threat and build the tension, build the suspense. Who’s going to act first?

Look at the form in this scene. Instead of aimless noise, you’re using storytelling devices like suspense to lure the reader/viewer in. When I see writers write scenes like this, I know they’re good writers. I know they’re ready. When I see yet another straight-forward car chase shootout, I know I’m dealing with amateurs.

Let’s stay within a single franchise for this next example. What is the scene in Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skull that best embodies how bad that film was? I’d probably say the Shia LaBeouf swinging on trees with monkeys scene. Wouldn’t you? Now besides it being a dumb moment, the reason that action sequence was so terrible was because it was the embodiment of noise. We weren’t sure what was going on. We didn’t know who wanted what. All we knew was this was a car chase in the woods and nutty wacky things were happening along the way. It was formless. It was unstructured. It was noise.

Now look at one of the most memorable action scenes ever – the opening scene of Raiders of the Lost Ark. Indy gets the idol in the cave – AND NOW HE MUST GET OUT OF THE CAVE AS IT’S FALLING APART. Do you see how clear that situation is? Even though we only have 8 minutes of movie context to go on, we’re fully invested in this sequence. It’s because it’s a clear situation. Get out of the cave to live. And there’s only one way to go – back the way you came. This allows stuff like the rolling boulder and having to jump over the hole without the whip all the more exciting, because it’s clear to us what needs to happen.

Even if you want to more directly compare action by pitting the monkey swinging chase scene with that famous “Indy getting dragged along by the car” chase scene in the first Raiders, that first Raiders scene had a much clearer situation. The Nazi cars had taken the Ark. So Indy naturally had to get to the cars with the Ark to get it back!

I hope you’re starting to see a theme here. Great action situations are often simple. The simplicity is what makes it easy for the audience to understand what needs to happen, which is what keeps them engaged. When all we see and hear is noise, it’s like being at a fireworks event where they’re shooting off fireworks on all four sides of us. You don’t know where to look. Your job as a writer in action sequences is to show the reader where to look.

That’s not to say you can’t have big action sequences in movies. You can. But you have to make the goal clear, you have to make it big, and you have to keep coming back to it so the audience always knows what we’re doing and doesn’t get lost in the noise. A great example of this is the opening scene in Saving Private Ryan. This could’ve easily been noise. But as soon as Spielberg establishes the layout, a goal is introduced. We need to get up to that shooter in that bunker there and take him out. Once we take him out, we can take over the beach. This takes the scene from random noise to a clear situation we can understand and get behind.

In my experience, action scenes come in four flavors.

Pure Noise – These is literally the worst kind of action scene there is. No form. No focus. Just action for the sake of action. Most of the Transformers action scenes fall into this category. Robots are fighting each other but we have no idea why other than they don’t like each other.

Semi-Noise – These are scenes that have the barest amount of form to them, but are still essentially noise. A good example would be yesterday’s script, Unmanned. The characters start off in battle-torn Somalia trying to find a building. There was a goal (find the building), so we kind of understood what was going on, but it was essentially a bunch of soldiers yelling and shooting at the bad guys.

Situation – This is when the writer has sat down and mapped out a scene with clear form, clear goals, clear stakes, where we know all the rules and therefore can play along. Neo and Trinity need to go into the building where the Agents are holding Morpheus and get him back. How easy is that to understand? Go in building, get our friend.

Clever Situation – These are the situations where the writer has come up with something original, offbeat, or adds a twist to the sequence that makes it a truly unforgettable scene. I’d put that border crossing scene in Sicario in this category. I’d put the climax of Back to the Future – trying to time racing a car with a lightning bolt to send our hero back to the future – in that category as well.

The biggest point I want to get across is that when you’re about to write an action sequence, ask yourself if there’s any form to it, or if it’s just a bunch of noise. The more you can build a clear goal and rules around your action scenes, the better it’s going to be. And if you’re stuck, note that a lot of great situations start with a physically closed-in area (stuck in a cave, stuck in a trash compacter, stuck in a traffic jam). Once you have physical boundaries, it’ll be easier to locate the scene’s boundaries. Good luck. Now go write some kick ass actions scenes.