I’m happy with the way the summer box office has played out so far. We’ve had a few nice surprises – like a non-sequel, non pre-existing franchise, non YA novel doing great amongst a sea of more traditional summer blockbuster flicks (The Great Gatsby). We have a spec script that’s not about super heroes or car races or blowing shit up outperforming a heavy favorite with the world’s biggest movie star in it (Now You See Me beating After Earth). We have ANOTHER spec script, The Purge, occupying a prime-time slot on the summer slate this weekend. Whether it does well or not, getting a spec script turned into a movie that’s released during the most competitive time of the year – that’s a huge accomplishment. This is all good news for screenwriters. It gives producers and executives and studios the confidence that they CAN take chances on spec material.

However, it’s important to remember that there’s a step that needs to happen BEFORE your spec competes for one of those coveted summer slots. You have to sell the damn thing. And in order to sell it, you have to get your script out there for people to read. And typically (unless you bypass the system and get a kick-ass reception on a site like Scriptshadow), that means getting an agent to go out wide with your script. And that’s what led me to today’s article.

You see, I don’t think there are enough amateur writers out there who track the spec market. Sure, many are aware of what sells. But are they actually tracking WHAT GOES OUT WIDE? Are they tracking the scripts agents and mangers are sending out to all the producers in hopes of getting a sale?  Agents are typically looking for two things when they’re repping a script from a new writer.  a) it’s well-written.  And b) it’s a marketable enough concept that studios will actually be interested in buying it.  “a” is, of course, important. But it doesn’t matter without “b.”   This information is invaluable because if you know what agents like to push, you’ll have a much better shot at landing one.

So today I’m going to give you the last 15 scripts that went out wide, along with their genres and loglines. I want you to see with your own eyes what reps are sending out there. I didn’t cherry pick these loglines. I went to the Tracking Board (which you can get a 25% discount on if you sign up through Scriptshadow btw) and simply filtered by specs that have gone wide. If something didn’t have a logline, I didn’t include it. These are the scripts that were listed.

There is a caveat here. Agents have relationships and often know what places are best for a project, and therefore will send certain projects out to a much smaller list of folks. So these are by no means the ONLY scripts being sent around town. But they are the ones agents are sending out wide in hopes of the script either selling, or everyone liking the script enough to want to work with their client. Let’s take a look.

Lewis & Clark: Trial By Fire
Genre: Action/Adventure/Supernatural
Logline: Pitched as “Pirates of the Caribbean” meets “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid”. Story is a re-imagining of the historic expedition. After the United States acquires the Louisiana Territory, President Thomas Jefferson sends Lewis & Clark on a journey to the American West that is believed to be inhabited by fearsome beasts that threaten the entire country.

Bullet Run
Genre: Action
Logline: Kept under wraps but pitched as “Speed” meets “Thief”.

Autograph
Genre: Drama
Logline: Based on a novel, a boy secretly watches his actor/father run a con so the family can survive WWII Shanghai, but the father’s arrested, so the boy applies what he’s learned to survive.

Criminal
Genre: Action/Thriller
Logline: The right man in the wrong body. A dead CIA operative’s memories, secrets and skills are implanted into an unpredictable and dangerous prison inmate in hopes that he will complete the operative’s mission.

Visions
Genre: Horror/Thriller
Logline: A woman begins experiencing terrifying visions when she moves to her husband’s vineyard.

The Uncontacted
Genre: Horror
Logline: Pitched as “Attack The Block” meets “The Descent”. A group of grad students find themselves stranded on an island in the South Pacific. When they attempt to make a contact with an ancient cannibalistic civilization rumored to live there, they accidentally uncover something deadlier, lurking underground.

Pirate Hunter
Genre: Action/Adventure
Logline: In the year 1700 a Naval Lieutenant embarked on a search for the most bloodthirsty ship on the seas, as he sought his revenge. It found him.

Hottest Ass Contest
Genre: Comedy
Logline: With the coastal Florida city they work for on the verge of bankruptcy and their jobs on the line, the hard-partying great-grandson of the city’s founder, along with his coworkers, take matters into their own hands. Setting out to attract thousands of revenue-generating revelers, they transform their city into an epic spring break destination by staging a Hottest Ass Contest that will feature only the finest female derrieres from all over the world.

Beauty and The Beasts
Genre: Fantasy/Adventure
Logline: Two years after the events of the classic tale, Belle’s Prince Edgar mysteriously goes missing after she discovers the truth about his past, that he is actually a prince from a land of beasts. Belle is now thrown into an adventure where she travels to a magical land of fantastic creatures, and must restore order to the ancient kingdom if she is ever to see her love again.

The Asterisk
Genre: Action
Logline: Logline: Kept under wraps but pitched in the vein of “Beverly Hills Cop” and “Lethal Weapon”.

Keeping Time (yay!)
Genre: Sci-fi/Romance/Comedy
Logline: Logline: A for-hire time traveler, who specializes in “preventing” bad relationships, meets a mysterious woman who also claims to be a traveler and is determined to stop him from completing his mission.

Sinbad and the 7 Curses
Genre: Action Adventure
Logline: Sinbad’s crew must battle seven curses hurled at them by an old adversary when a princess gets in the way.

The Do Over
Genre: Comedy/Sci-fi
Logline: Pitched as “Back To The Future” meets “Peggy Sue Got Married”. When a divorced couple is inadvertently transported back in time, they set out to break up their younger selves and change the course of their unhappy lives…only to discover that they are still meant for each other.

Freefall
Genre: Action
Logline: Pitched in the vein of “Fast & The Furious” in the air. An undercover agent, posing as the infamous parachuting hustler D.B. Cooper, infiltrates a group of thieves who are staging elaborate robberies of casino “money planes”; mid-air, mid-flight, jumping from plane-to-plane at 10,000 feet! Next stop, China’s Macau Venetian Casino.

The Remplacement
Genre: Comedy
Logline: When his long-lost identical twin brother shows up, an unhappily married father of two seizes the occasion to swap himself out of his own life.

It’s pretty self-explanatory. Every one of these ideas, save the drama, is marketable. I’m not saying they’re all good ideas (Hottest Ass Contest??). But the writers have made an attempt at creating something for the marketplace. We got four comedies, seven action scripts, a few adventure, a couple of horror, and a couple of thrillers. It’s not a coincidence that these are the genres being pushed by the agents. These are what studios want because these are the genres that have proven to create the best box-office return in the spec market.

This doesn’t mean you can’t write your semi-autobiographical tale about how you learned how to swim in Mexico. What it DOES mean is that you make your chances for selling a script exponentially harder by doing so. When I talk to agents and managers about scripts, I already know what they’re going to say when I tell them I found a feel good piece about a leper colony in the 1930s. They’re gong to ask, “Is it based on a book?” And when I tell them no, they’re going to say, “What else do you have?” Because action and comedy and horror and adventure and thrillers are the only thing they’re confident going out with unless you have the next American Beauty. And unless you’ve been writing for 20 years like Alan Ball had, you probably don’t have the next American Beauty.

I wrote this article as sort of a wake up call to writers because I have been reading a lot of material privately lately where the writers aren’t considering this part of the equation. They’re not asking, “Is this something that an agent is actually going to want to send out?”

Look, I’m not telling you you need to sell your soul. I believe that you should write what moves you. But you have to be smart about it. You can’t write some really low-concept drama with no commercial appeal and say, “Ohh, because it’s coming from that deep unique special place that only I can offer the world,” that everyone will want it. At some point, you have to look at the thing from an investment perspective, from the person’s POV who’s ultimately going to put their reputation and their money on the line. Are they going to buy something that’s going to keep their company in business? Or are they going to gamble on a slow introspective drama? Don’t walk around with your heads in the sand, guys. Be aware not only what’s selling, but what kind of material people are passing around.

And hey, I’m not saying those loglines above are amazing. The loglines themselves are not the point. It’s the TYPES OF SCRIPTS that agents are sending out there: thrillers, horror, adventure, action, comedy. You guys are smart. You can play in this space and come up with much better loglines than those above. Hollywood’s still a place where if you come up with an amazing concept and you’re a competent writer, you can go directly to the front of the line.

Also remember that just because you’re writing a marketable concept, doesn’t mean you can’t explore characters and themes on a deeper level. It doesn’t mean you can’t make your reader think. The concept and genre are meant to get you through the door. Once inside, that’s when you show off your skills. So write something with deep characters who are battling their flaws and fears, but do it inside of a horror movie, or an adventure movie.

And if this article sickens you? If you can’t believe this is what you need to do to get in the game? Don’t complain about it. Grab your camera and make your movie independently. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with that and it’s actually one of the fastest ways to make a career, since you’re bypassing the “wait for someone else to like it” spec stage. In the meantime, if you want to play in the spec world, this is how the game is played. If you want an agent to take you on, give them something they can sell, dammit. Good luck!

David Fincher swoops down to explore his next potential directing assignment. So I decided to check out the book.

Genre: Thriller
Premise: Told from two different points of view, a man’s wife goes missing and he becomes the prime suspect.
About: 41 year old Gillian Flynn is a former Entertainment Weekly TV critic. She’s written three novels, with “Gone Girl” being her most recent. The bestseller got a bump a few months back when David Fincher expressed interest in adapting the book into a film. It’s unclear if he was just circling it or is now officially developing the screenplay.
Writer: Gillian Flynn
Details: Way more than 120 pages long

Why the hell am I reviewing a book? Well, first of all, to prove that I can read books! There’s this rumor going around that I can only read text in courier 12 point font, and that said font can never eclipse 4 lines of continuous text at a time. There have been stretches in my life where this is true. But when someone like David Fincher comes along and says he likes something, my book-reading juices start flowing. And this juice is not made from concentrate.

I can’t remember a single project Fincher’s been attached to that has been bad. Most of the time the script for the project is at least a [xx] worth the read and usually an [x] impressive. What I love about Fincher is that he’s one of the few guys out there willing to take chances. While directors like Jon Favreau and Ridley Scott are pretty much playing it safe, Fincher always wants to push the envelope. Gone Girl is no different. This book is a freaking wild ride. It does stuff I’ve never seen in a novel before.

However, let me warn you, this book is one giant spoiler. There’s a shit load going on and it has one of the best twists I’ve ever seen in a novel or movie. If you have any interest in reading this book or seeing this movie, do not read this review, because I’m going to get into all the spoilers. You’ve been warned.

The first 40 or so pages of Gone Girl are pretty boring. In them, we meet Nick and Amy Dunne, former Manhattanites who have to relocate to Nick’s home town in Missouri when he loses his job. Nick has since used Amy’s money (that comes from her wealthy parents, authors who made a fortune writing books about her childhood) to open a bar that only barely breaks even, and is one of several factors that have driven these two lovebirds apart.

You see, Nick and Amy used to really love each other. Like “love has no boundaries” love. The kind of love Double Rainbow guy would have for a Triple Rainbow. We know this because interspersed between Nick’s present, is Amy’s past, told in firsthand through her journal entries. It’s a devastating dichotomy as we cut back and forth between the wonderful love story Amy offers up and the cold clinical realization of their relationship now, told through Nick’s POV.

Just as we’re getting to know these two, something unthinkable happens. Someone breaks into Nick’s house while he’s away and takes Amy. The crime scene is violent and bloody and while there’s certainly a chance Amy’s still alive, it doesn’t look good. What also isn’t looking good is Nick. You see, Nick fell out of love with his wife a long time ago. And even though she’s been taken, there’s something deep inside of him that doesn’t really care. And therein lies the problem. When Nick goes on national TV to ask for his wife back, there isn’t a shred of emotion in his voice. To any and everyone who watches Nick, they have no doubt that he killed her.

Nick looks for solace from his twin sister, Go. She’s the only one who believes him. But even that’s looking shaky as Nick can’t give the cops an alibi for the time his wife was taken. The book then keeps cutting back and forth between Nick’s worsening nightmare and Amy’s love-sick journal. However, as the story continues, and the journal’s timeline catches up to the present day, we see that Nick has been hiding some secrets. He’s got some demons. And those demons are so bad that as early as last week, Amy went to buy a gun to protect herself from him. It’s looking really bad for Nick. Even we’re wondering if he did it.

And then comes the twist of all twists.

It was a lie. Every word we heard in Amy’s diary was a lie, right down to the personality we thought we knew for the last 250 pages. Amy isn’t bubbly and sweet and good and caring. She’s evil. She’s the definition of hate and bitterness. The diary was a plant, something she’d been working on for a year to lead up to this moment to work as the smoking gun that would send her husband to the chair for her murder. Why would anybody do something like this? For that you’ll have to read the novel. But let’s just say that Amy is the single most vindictive person on the planet.

Once we realize we’ve been scammed, we realign ourselves with Nick, hoping against hope that he can find Amy to prove he didn’t kill her. This task is getting harder by the second as Amy leaks sordid details of Nick’s past anonymously to the press, which means that the cops are probably going to pounce and arrest him soon. Only time will tell how or if Nick will get out of this. If he doesn’t find out how his girl got gone, he’s going to be gone himself.

Okay, I just have to say it. The twist here fucking ROCKED. I mean I was blown away. For 250 pages, we’re given a person, a backstory, a personality, someone we like and trust. We love Amy. To see the “mid-point twist,” then, where we realize it was all a setup? That she made up this version of herself and was really the complete opposite? It’d be like if your best friend of 20 years showed up one day and revealed that he was a completely different person. The way that twisted the story, realigned our sympathy, reversed the polarity of who we were rooting for? It was nothing short of genius.

And really, that’s where a lot of the genius occurs here – the way Flynn frustrates us with who we’re supposed to root for. She makes us hate Nick and love Amy at the outset. Then she shows us Nick’s point of view, and we like Nick and hate Amy. Then we find out something about Nick, and we hate him again, falling back in love with Amy. This constant “switching of allegiances” was masterful, and something we just don’t see in movies, probably because we don’t have enough time. Being yanked back and forth between these two is a big reason this book was able to stay so interesting for so long.

Also, Flynn does an amazing job keeping you guessing who the killer may be. At different points we wonder if Nick himself did it. If an old friend of Amy’s did it. If someone from town did it. At one point we even wonder if Nick’s twin sister is secretly in love with him and killed Amy to get her out of the picture. Flynn is really good at making you think you have things figured out, only to pull the rug out from under you.

What makes Gone Girl so difficult to read though, is that it destroys all hope you have in humanity and relationships. Amy is a vindictive bitch who will go so far as to stage her own murder to take down her husband. And Nick just doesn’t care about Amy anymore. These were two people who were madly in love. So to watch them become these hateful human beings, to see the severity of their relationship’s collapse, kind of makes you want to slit your wrists. It’s really depressing!

But despite snagging an elusive [xx] genius rating through the first half of the story, Gone Girl completely falls apart in its final act. Embarrassingly so. Running out of money and options to survive, Amy comes back to Nick. Amidst all the news coverage and the circus surrounding her disappearance, she just starts living with him again. Amy points out that because they’ve gone through what they’ve gone through, they can’t possibly be with anyone else. They may be miserable, but they’re stuck with each other. And that’s how the book ends, with both of these miserable people deciding to stay together and hate each other til the day they die.

WHAT???

I was so upset with this ending that I went online and researched Flynn to figure out why she would do such a thing. What I found made everything clear. Flynn, it turns out, doesn’t outline. She just writes whatever comes to her. WELL JESUS! NOW IT MAKES SENSE! She wrote a bunch of crazy shit then had no idea how to pay it off. This is EXACTLY how the last act felt. Like someone who had no idea how to end their story.

Which begs the question: How the hell does Fincher plan to adapt this? Why would you adapt something if the greatest thing about it is un-adaptable? We’re fooled by a journal, by a character writing directly to us, who it turns out is lying to us. How does one pull that off in a movie? We have to see Amy. We must show her writing these entries. And since her writing is a façade, something she’s making up, one would presume we’d pick up on her deception as it’s happening.

I suppose you could tell the first half in Amy’s voice over, with her journal entries read out loud over the life she’s describing, but I’m just not sure that would be as convincing (or even make sense). If they do decide to make this, though, I’d look into making the genius twist the ending, as opposed to the mid-point. You don’t really have time to go through an entire relationship and then an entire aftermath of the twist anyway, in a film. This way you’d also eliminate that dreadful ending. That would be really cool if they figured it out, but it will be a challenge.

What an unforgettable reading experience “Gone Girl” was. It has amazing highs and devastating lows. It has “holy shit” twists and an indefensible climax. It’s such an imperfect piece of art, it’s hard to categorize. But I’m not surprised Fincher became interested. It’s so dark and different. If there’s anyone who can figure it out, it’s probably him.

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

What I learned: Know your ending before you start your story, if possible. You can come up with all the cool twists and turns in the world, but if you can’t bring everything together in the end, it won’t matter.

Michael Bay goes indie on us. Does he finally realize what a screenplay is in the process?

Genre: Action/Comedy/Crime
Premise: Based on a true story, a fitness trainer kidnaps one of his rich clients, eventually taking over his life. He must then fend off the man’s attempts to claim his life back.
About: This is Michael Bay’s version of an indie film – something he’s talked about doing for over a decade. It stars Mark Wahlberg and The Rock and comes out April 26th. Bay and Wahlberg got along so well during filming, Bay convinced Marky Mark (the busiest actor in Hollywood) to be in the next Transformers movie. P&G is written by big-budget scribes Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely, who scripted the three Narnia screenplays, the first Captain America script, and are doing the next Thor and Captain America scripts respectively. However, because it’s Bay’s baby, and he was shepherding pretty much the whole writing process, I’ll be looking at this, basically, as his script.
Writers: Christopher Markus & Stephen McFeely (revisions by Jerry Stahl) (Current Revisions by Christopher Markus & Stephen McFeely)
Details: 116 pages – 1/21/11 draft

Awhile back, I heard that Michael Bay wanted to make a “smaller” more “personal” movie. Which was a little surprising. I mean this is a guy who was infamously quoted as saying, “I make movies so I can buy Ferraris” (which I can confirm is 100% true – I saw him out in one of these Ferraris once!). But you figure even the master of the ‘splosion would get tired of his 10,000th Transformer movie, even if they were paying him upwards of 100 million for each one.

So what does a “personal” Michael Bay film look like? Hmmm, well…you aren’t going to be getting Upstream Color 2, if that’s what you’re hoping for. If Bay can’t have big explosions, he’s going to have big somethings. And in this case it’s the big bulky frames of Mark Wahlberg and The Rock! You’re also going to have big soundtracks, like the irresistibly funky Top 40 hit, Thrift Shop! I guess we shouldn’t be surprised, then, that Bay’s smaller personal films are still basically big snazzy films, dressed down slightly.

Where Bay has always faltered in his movies, though, has been the script. He just doesn’t give a shit about it. Either that or he doesn’t understand storytelling. That’s what keeps him from the heights of guys like JJ Abrams, Peter Jackson and James Cameron. True, the Transformers movies have made a ton of money, but they’ve come at the cost of respect. Audiences just don’t take Bay seriously because his stories are a mish-mash of clichés, huge leaps of logic, and good old fashioned bad writing. They are the epitome of style over substance. One would think, then, that if he was telling a smaller story without all the pressures 250 million benjamins brings, that he’d like to get a little more into the story, a little more into the characters. Well, let’s jump in and see if that’s true.

The year is 1995. The town is Miami. The man is Daniel Lugo. Daniel Lugo believes in America. He believes in the notion that hard work pays off. And he’s chosen to do his hard work in the fitness sector, a place where he can milk his charm to make others believe that if they work hard enough, they can look just as big and strong and buff as him.

But Daniel also realizes that there’s a ceiling to what he does. There wasn’t any reality TV back in 1995, so you couldn’t turn your fitness charm into a Bravo show just yet. You worked your butt off 12 hours a day and you earned 50-60 Gs max. Daniel believes that America rewards you for your time. But that reward wasn’t big enough in his opinion.

So Daniel comes up with a plan. Why not kidnap one of his rich clients, kill him, and take all his stuff? Sure, sounds like fun to me. All he has to do is recruit his Mimbo trainer friend Adrian (The Rock) and a former drug addict named Paul Doyle (desperate to be a part of, well, ANYTHING). The three kidnap one of Daniel’s rich clients, Marc Schiller, a slimy piece of work who made his fortune fucking over all kinds of people, then try to kill him.

But the killing doesn’t go as planned and Schiller survives. Here’s the catch though. Schiller’s scared to provoke Daniel because Daniel knows about all his secret illegal doings. If he goes to the police, the police will just find out about all his criminal activity. Daniel figures this out and just moves into Schiller’s place and starts living his life. I mean, what’s to stop him? Eventually Schiller gets fed up, though, and hires a private investigator to collect evidence on Daniel’s shady doings so he can take him down in court. Daniel will probably survive the investigation if he lays low, but when he’s presented with an opportunity to take another high-flying businessman down, he lets greed get the best of him. And that’s when things really start spinning out of control.

Oh boy.

Okay, I want you to imagine Fargo………………..directed by Michael Bay.

Are you imagining that movie?

Okay, well, that’s the exact movie you get with Pain and Gain.

A story dependent on its intricately woven plot and characters directed by someone who doesn’t understand plot or characters.

Now I’m of the belief that there’s no single template for a good script, just as there’s no single template for a bad one. However, there are a number of things you can do to sway the odds in or out of your favor. Here you have a main character who’s kidnapping someone so he can steal all his money, after which he’ll kill him. Okay, got it. We’re rooting for a character to kill people for his own selfish interests. That’s typically not going to go over well with audiences.

Now this can sometimes work in a comedy setting IF the character doing the kidnapping is really funny. But that’s not the case here. At most you get a few hollow chuckles out of Daniels’ antics. There’s a mastery of tone required in this situation, tone that bounces back and forth between seriousness and humor, that is so hard to pull off. It’s a tone the Coens have perfected over time. And it’s something so alien to Bay that I’m surprised he chose to do this film in the first place. I mean, is Bay a secret Coen Brothers fan?

Another problem here is that there are only two interesting characters, Daniel Lugo and Marc Schiller. Daniel works because he’s a walking hypocrite. He says he believes in America and working hard, yet he’s constantly looking for the shortest shortcut to the top. Schiller works because he’s over the top and fun. But everyone else here is boring as hell. I mean The Rock’s character (Adrian) has absolutely nothing going on. He just jumps whenever Daniel says jump. Ditto Paul Boyle, whose only twist is a barely-there drug addiction. The reason this matters is because the script presents itself as an exploration of a bunch of wild weird people caught up in a crazy plot. But there were only two wild and weird people worth watching. Everyone else was boring.

Then there were just things that didn’t make sense. Schiller wanted his life back but couldn’t tell the police because he had too much to hide. So he hires a private investigator to put a case together against Daniel stealing his life. But wait a minute…If he’s putting together a case against Daniel, wouldn’t he eventually have to go to the courts to get his stuff back anyway? Doesn’t that put him in the same position he was in from the get-go? Having to go to the cops? Since that didn’t make a whole lot of sense, and since most of the plot rode on the assumption that it did, you just didn’t care much what happened. When you add on top of that the fact that you hated everyone in the movie, both bad guys and “good,” there wasn’t much left for Pain and Gain to offer.

This script was a hot mess!

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

What I learned: Instead of using “We see,” try to convey your imagery and action through description. Pain and Gain opens with our main character doing sit-ups on a roof. The description reads like so: “He crunches toward his knees and sees the parking lot. When he lies back down, he sees the sky. – Up, parking lot. Down, sky.” With this description, we can tell what the camera is doing (showing the crunches from Daniel’s POV), without physically saying, “The camera shows…” or “WE SEE the parking lot from his point of view, then the sky as he comes back down.” The reason this is important is because it keeps us inside the story. The second you say “POV” “the camera” or “We see,” you remind the reader that they’re reading a movie. Now I still see professional writers using these terms (especially writer-directors, who like to write specific shots into their scripts), and they’re by no means script-killers. But, preferably, you want to be as invisible as possible about your script being a script. You can’t whisk your reader away if you’re constantly reminding them that they’re reading a screenplay.

John Carter is one of most extensively developed projects in Hollywood history. You know how non-Hollywood folks are shocked when you tell them that a movie took ten years to get to the big screen? Try 80 years! While it’d take forever to go through the details of all this development, more recently the project saw itself as a Go picture when famed Aint-it-cool-news film lover Harry Knowles came on as an advisor. Through his influence, “The Cell” and “I Am Legend” screenwriter Mark Protosevich was brought on to write the script. Harry showed the finished draft to his buddy Robert Rodriquez, who then signed on to direct the film. But everything fell apart when Rodriquez angered the Director’s Guild (and the Hollywood community in general) by giving the directorally uninvolved Frank Miller a co-directing credit on his film Sin City (the Director’s Guild hates giving out co-credits in general. They’d prefer every movie be directed by one person). Forced to drop out of the Director’s Guild, it became difficult to clear certain production hurdles without a guild signatory. Rodriquez dropped off the project and a slew of new writers came in over the next seven years (as well as the project going back to Disney), until we got the current draft, written by Andrew Stanton, Mark Andrews, and Michael Chabon. The film went on to dramatically underperform at the box office ($73 million domestic on what was reportedly a $250 million dollar budget), resulting in the ouster of Disney Studios chairman Rich Ross. For all these reasons, we’ll be studying John Carter for how NOT to write a screenplay. The biggest problem with the story is clearly its overly complicated plotting, so that’s where I’ll be spending most of my focus on.

1) Concepts need to make sense, even in the sci-fi world – Your concept has to make sense, as it is the pillar responsible for holding your entire story up. John Carter is about a guy who magically travels to Mars where he becomes mixed up in an alien war. Except everyone on Earth knows that Mars is dead. There’s no air, no water, no alien factions running around. So we know this couldn’t happen. Since we know this couldn’t happen, we never believe in or care about anything that happens after it.

2) The more overly complicated your world, the simpler your plot should be – Star Wars may be a complex world, but it always kept its plotting simple. They needed to get the stolen plans to the good guys. The bad guys were chasing after them to stop that. John Carter has a complex world AND a complex plot – a deadly mix. There are parallel storylines in John Carter, four different planetary factions (two human and two alien), a weird sub-race of cloaked bald men, a secret arm weapon, something called “helium” that’s dying, a princess refusing to get married. We never really know what anyone is trying to do. Most sci-fi movies that succeed, even if they have extensive world building, counteract that complexity by having very simple plots.

3) There’s a fine line between intrigue and confusion– This is a mistake I see amateur writers make way too often. They’ll introduce a ton of weird stuff, but be unclear what the weird stuff is or why it’s being included, indicating that if you “stay tuned,” you’ll find out. Here, the weird bald-headed dudes who can shape-shift into different people (for no reason) hand Angry Flying Ship Guy a laser-wrist cannon. It’s supposed to be this huge moment, but the writer doesn’t imply why or how this changes anything besides the fact that Angry Flying Ship Guy can now shoot people with his wrist in addition to shooting people with his ship cannon. The writer mistakes this as “intrigue,” a curious twist in the plot that the audience will want to know more about. But the audience instead is confused by it, which leads to annoyance and eventually, rejection of the story. Intrigue is often simple (what are these mysterious plans inside R2-D2?). Confusion occurs when you try to cram too many jumbled elements together.

4) There is often a single dominant problem in a bad script that is leading to all its other problems. Find the problem and the other issues disappear – Here, it’s the over-plotting. There’s just too much damn plot. Had they fixed that, maybe focused exclusively on John Carter trying to get home, it would’ve erased so many of the script’s other issues.

5) Beware Unclear Urgency – If you’re going to write a sci-fi spec, it’s preferable that urgency is woven tightly into the plot. Star Wars has its heroes being chased throughout. District 9 had its hero turning into an alien, giving him only a few days to stop the transformation. John Carter of Mars has no urgency because its focus changes so many times. Without urgency, a story slows to a crawl, and you can’t get away with that in a summer action film. We need to feel like time is running out, that objectives need to be reached RIGHT AWAY. John Carter never achieves this, which led to one of its biggest criticisms – that it was “way too slow.”

6) The more convoluted your plot, the more scenes of exposition you will have. The more scenes of exposition you have, the more boring your script will be — John Carter suffers greatly from this. It has multiple plotlines (Helium being needed, alien baby harvesting, princesses who need to get married, multiple aliens, a confusing war, a character who needs to get home, etc). This puts a lot of stress on the writer to keep all this stuff clear for the audience, which means constantly stopping and reminding them what’s going on via exposition scenes. Which of course leads to boredom. Keep your sci-fi plot simple, as it allows for more time spent entertaining your audience.

7) A dramatic score isn’t going to magically fix a scene that isn’t working – I think us writers get carried away, imagining our key scenes on the big screen with that epic swelling score playing. When we do this, the amazing music starts to cover up all the problems inherent in the scene, problems we then become blind to. There’s this ridiculous scene in John Carter where he jumps into a group of 500 warrior aliens and, with the score rising dramatically, starts killing all of them. Uhhhhh, what??? Our hero can kill an entire army on his own??? Errr… no. But it sure looks like the writer thought it worked, as the score is practically willing us to believe. Stop using future scores to solve your issues and solve them on the page instead.

8) Reactive characters result in “yanked around” stories – Remember, reactive characters are pushed and pulled, yanked this way and that, slaves to the actions and desires of others. Therefore when you tell a story with a reactive hero, we feel the same way, like we’re being pushed and pulled, yanked and tugged, a slave to something beyond our control. While skilled writers can sometimes make this work, it more often results in a story that feels unfocused and all over the place. So it’s no surprise that’s how John Carter feels. Carter is reactive for most of the story, being pulled along by one alien faction or another, told what to do most of the time. As a result, the story never quite gains a foothold on what it wants to be. An active character on the other hand, one who chooses his own destiny, often results in a clean, focused, easy-to-follow story. This is why I think they should’ve made the plot much simpler here: John Carter tries to find his way home. That way he always stays active. He always drives the story.

9) When building your set-pieces, don’t try and survive on spectacle. Instead, rely on cleverness – For all its huge budget, there really isn’t a single memorable set-piece in John Carter, and that’s because the set-pieces amount to a bunch of basic fighting sequences. Oftentimes, a clever offbeat set-piece can be a thousand times more interesting, such as the simplistic trash-compactor scene in Star Wars.

10) Don’t construct your set-piece scenes before the movie and then fit your story around them. Create your story first, and let your set-pieces emerge naturally from that story – There’s a trailer-friendly set-piece where John Carter is pulled into an arena and must fight against two giant alien apes to the death. Problem is, it’s forced into the script unnaturally. John Carter is captured by a random “bad” alien and the next thing we know he’s being tossed into an arena to fight for his life. Why this is happening is beyond us, but it feels like someone said they wanted a “Giant Ape Fighting Arena Scene” and were going to get it into the movie through hell or high water. Yes, you want trailer-friendly scenes, but not at the expense of taking the audience out of the story. They must fit into the movie organically. To achieve this, focus on your character’s goals and where they take you, then look for set-pieces to emerge naturally through that journey. Whenever you’ve thought of a set piece ahead of time and try to unnaturally squeeze it in, it always feels out of place.

So there I am, watching “A Good Day To Die Hard” this weekend, and asking myself the question that moviegoers across the world ask a dozen times a year at their local cineplexes: “Who writes this shit?”

Terribly written movies with dreadful dialogue are a huge reason why people all over the country move to LA to pursue a career in screenwriting. They’re convinced that, “I can do better than that!” And yet, thousands of these “I can do better than that,” screenwriters show up in Hollywood every year and the same dreadful terribly-written movies still get made.

Is it a conspiracy? Is Hollywood purposefully keeping good writers out of the business for some reason? Are there thousands of amazing screenplays that have been buried under a Los Angeles landfill somewhere, a conspiracy headed up by 20th Century Fox so they can keep making more “A Good Day To Die Hard” movies without having to worry about competition?

I can answer that question easily. No. The truth is, there are only a dozen great screenwriters out there, and maybe less than a hundred truly good ones. Since a few hundred movies are released each year and countless TV shows with multiple writers are produced on the networks and cable, there are more spots to fill than there are good screenwriters.

And it’s not for lack of trying that the average screenwriter isn’t very good. Screenwriting is just REALLY HARD. A lot harder than it looks.  Moviegoers assume all screenwriting is is coming up with a cool hook and some witty dialogue. But screenwriting is way more complicated than that. Outside of learning how to write within its unique bastardized format, there’s a ton of stuff under the hood that audience members never think about.

The most obvious of which is creating a seamless story. That’s something most people outside the business take for granted. They assume seamless stories are a given. However, when those same people come to Hollywood and give screenwriting a shot then send their screenplays to people like me, they learn the hard way that their stories are borderline incoherent and that it actually takes years of hard work to create a seamless story.  Not even a GOOD story.  Just one that makes sense from beginning to end.

But we’ve established that there ARE good screenwriters out there. As many as a hundred of them. That should be enough to take care of most of the movies we see. So why do movies still suck? Why are films like Transformers so badly written? Or Dark Shadows? Or John Carter? Or Battleship? Or Mirror Mirror? Why are these embarrassingly written projects given hundreds of millions of dollars? The answer to that question isn’t simple. In fact, it’s very complicated. But if you want to know, read on.

TIME – Unless you’re writing a spec, you’re usually up against the gun in a project. And since only one out of every ten produced movies is a spec script, most writers are racing to beat a deadline. The faster you’re forced to work, the lower the quality that work tends to be. That’s because creativity takes time. It takes trial and error. It takes seeing what works and what doesn’t. It takes rewriting and rewriting and then more rewriting. Without time, you’re likely to write something lousy, no matter how good of a writer you are.

DIRECTOR AND ACTOR ARE STILL SUPERIOR TO SCREENWRITER – When putting a project together, studios know that the two most important elements are the director and the lead actor. A good director is going to give you the best chance for making a good movie, and a big actor is going to give you a large enough budget to get a wide release. When looking at the director, the actor, and the screenplay, then, it makes sense that a studio would pay the least amount of attention to the script. With that said, most actors and directors won’t sign onto a project without a good script (or good source material). So the screenplay is still important. The problem is…

DIRECTORS COME ON LATE THEN SCREW SHIT UP – While there are directors who will shepherd projects over a long period of time, a lot of times a director will come onto a project as it’s greenlit and given a production date. Since directors are creative people, they’re going to want to play with the script and get it the way they want it. Which means if a writer has been perfecting that script over three years, they now have to rewrite the whole damn thing to the director’s vision – a vision they may not entirely agree with – within a matter of months. More times than not, this results in a worse screenplay.

PASSION – You want to know the truth about Hollywood? Passion may be the most important factor in getting a movie made. That’s because this business is designed to KEEP movies from getting made. It’s much easier and safer for people in all factions of the business to say no to a project than yes. Yes means their ass is on the line if the movie fails. Why put yourself in that position? For that reason, the stuff that gets through is often the result of a producer or group of producers who will stop at nothing to get their movie made. These producers, who may be experienced vets or total newbs, will gladly go to every shop, every studio, every production company, and keep racking up ‘no’s’ until they find that one yes. And guess what, it’ll have nothing to do with how good the script or project is. It will just be because these guys refused to take no for an answer. This means, ironically, a lot of badly written projects get made because of passion.

BIG IDEA WRITERS AREN’T OFTEN THE BEST WRITERS – Lots of “big idea” writers who are good at coming up with concepts and trailer-worthy set-pieces will slip past the Hollywood gates and into the system. These writers aren’t necessarily “bad,” but they didn’t make it to the top because they’re experts at character or theme or structure. They made it because they came up with some big futuristic time-travel spec that got some pub all over town. These writers then get big-movie assignments due to their spec and the best of these subpar writers become premiere summer tent-pole movie scribes – scripting such classics as Battleship and Transformers. Sure, you could bring in someone like David Mamet to write Transformers and the script would be better in areas like character and dialogue. But it would probably lack a lot of the fun and “bigness” that you want from these movies. So you’d be gaining something but you’d lose something as well. Since an executive knows that the last thing a 14 year old in Kansas cares about is theme, he’s likely to go with the big idea writer over Mr. Mamet.

MO MONEY MO PROBLEMS – The other day a producer told me that this one well-known indie writer-director who’s had a hard time breaking into Hollywood called him and basically said, “I want 20 million dollars to make my movie and I don’t want you or anyone at your company to bother me.” Unfortunately, that’s not the way it works. Money comes from a bunch of different places these days (foreign financing, private investing, production houses, studios, etc.) and the bigger the pot, the more people want to be involved in the decision-making. If you’re making a movie like Transformers, with a budget of 250 million, you will have TONS of people sticking their finger in the pie. And chances are, a lot of these people won’t know jack-shit about writing. In these cases, the screenwriters aren’t even really writing a script. They’re MANAGING a dearth of strange and sometimes terrible ideas and trying to turn them into a story that makes sense. This is one of the main reasons why these giant movies are so terribly written. Too many cooks in the kitchen.

There are, of course, other reasons for badly-written films. Endless development. Foreign financing that puts little emphasis on the screenplay. Producers who hire their friends instead of good writers. And the bar for sequels, like “A Good Day To Die Hard,” just isn’t that high.

So what’s the solution here? Is there a way out of this mess? The thing that studios don’t realize is that it’s in their best interest to write a good screenplay. Not only does a well-written movie encourage positive word of mouth, which means more audiences members and repeat business, but the film has a better life in the post-theatrical market. It also increases the likelihood of building that all-important franchise everyone’s chasing.

In order to get scripts in better shape, Hollywood needs to make some sacrifices, stuff that they probably don’t want to do because it goes against everything they’ve done up to this point. First, they should look closer at the Pixar approach. Pixar screens multiple storyboard previews of their movies in order to get a feel for how the story is playing. The writer, who’s usually on the project for years, is then able to see what isn’t working and fix it. This perk is available because it takes so long to make an animated movie, time live-action films don’t have. Live action films are usually backed into tighter schedules, giving the writer less freedom to figure things out. But you do find the occasional live-action project that takes its time, like the Batman films and anything directed by James Cameron.  And we see the results when those films finally come to screen. I realize studios have corporate commitments and need to meet certain financial forecasts, but with a little more planning, they should be able to take that extra time and get the script right.

Producers and studios also need to keep the same writer on the project if possible. I realize this means less work for writers (since only one writer will be on the job), but if you want to make good movies, you need to keep writers around who understand the project. A huge reason movies feel so unfocused and disjointed is because Writer F had no idea what Writer A was trying to do when he wrote the original screenplay and therefore changed everything that made everyone fall in love with the script in the first place!

If agents and writers hate this idea because it means less jobs, what about doing what the studios did back in the old days where they kept 20-some writers under contract every year? Those writers would then be available to come in to give notes on the studios’ key projects. This is essentially what Pixar does and it’s proven to be an effective model. In addition to this, hire smart producers who actually understand storytelling and screenwriting. A reason a lot of writers get replaced is because the producer who hired them doesn’t know how to get the most out of them. Therefore when the script stops improving, they just hire someone else. A good producer will guide a writer into overcoming any problems a script may encounter.

Production companies and studios also need to take more chances on scripts that are ready to go, even if they’re afraid of them because they don’t fit into their proven paradigm. When The Streetlights Go On, After Hailey, Desperate Hours. Everyone loves these scripts but they’re still not being made. If you already have a script that people love, don’t fuck with it. Just make the damn thing. I’m not saying you have to put a hundred million dollars into these projects. You have to make them for the right price. But moviegoers out there want better writing. You have it. All you have to do is greenlight the film and make it.

Let the scripts be critiqued online. It always makes me laugh when studios spend 50 million bucks to fix movies they’ve already shot, usually because of story problems. Why not put your scripts online and let the fans critique them? Let them spot what’s wrong ahead of time so you don’t have to pay the price later. Your everyday moviegoing audience won’t pay attention to this, so you won’t spoil the film for the masses. And your core cinephile fan who participates is going to see the next Spiderman or Guardians Of The Galaxy film anyway. In all likelihood, being a part of the development process, even indirectly, is going to get them even more excited to see the film. This has gone on on a smaller scale on Scriptshadow for years. I’ve been told from numerous producers that they made changes to their scripts based on the comments from people who read them here. So I know it works. The question is, will studios put their egos aside to do that for their bigger projects? That remains to be seen.

As you can see, there are no easy answers here. There are a lot of things working against good writing. In many ways, you can consider it a minor miracle when a well-told story DOES reach the screen. But I think with a few changes, we could make sure good screenplays happen more often. And besides, by treating America (and the world) to better movies, our industry wouldn’t be the butt of so many jokes across the country about how they “could’ve written something better.” And with that, I’m out of here. What do you guys think?