Genre: Drama
Premise: After exhausting all financial options to save their dying daughter, Frank and Abby are forced into a final act of desperation: rob a local bank.
About: This was a script on last year’s Black List. The writer just completed his second feature film, called, “The Integrity of Joseph Chambers.” Here’s the logline for that one: A family man, hoping to prove his survivalist capabilities and manliness to his family, decides to irresponsibly head off into the woods and go deer hunting by himself.  His first film was, “The Killing of Two Lovers” which got into Sundance and was acquired by NEON. It received a 93 Rotten Tomatoes score.
Writer: Robert Machoian
Details: 106 pages

Next Thursday, on the 11th, I’ll be dropping the 2022 Black List Re-Rankings, which means I gotta get through the last of these scripts.

In the spirit of what Scriptshadow does better than anyone else on the internet – give opinions on movie concepts – I’ll share with you why this one never got on my radar. The idea isn’t bad. Usually, in these bank robbery scripts, it’s a group of tough guys. I like that the writer *is* giving us a fresh angle, with the married couple being the robbers.

There’s just something kinda depressing about the set up. This really sad-sounding couple has to rob a bank to pay the bills for their sick daughter. Whenever I read the logline, I felt deflated. That’s not how you want your loglines to go over.

With that said, there are plenty of avenues to make a concept like this work. Just like any script, if we like the characters. If the writer does a good job of evoking sympathy. If the writer brings a unique voice to the proceedings – explores the idea in a slightly different tone than we’re used to seeing – then yes, it can be good.

That’s something all of us are going to be tasked with when we write our passion projects over the first half of 2024 (in the Scriptshadow One For Me One For Them Screenwriting Challenge – don’t worry, I’ll be putting up an official post for this by the end of the year). You’re going to have to turn what, initially, looks like a weak premise, into a great story.

So, let’s see if today’s writer was able to do that.

We begin in the grocery store, where 40-something Frank is staring at some strange woman’s a$$ who’s trying to grab a can of beans at the top of the shelf. The combination of this woman’s awkward plight and four random kids running around, bumping into things, causes the shelves to fall down. Frank makes a run for it with his 10 year old daughter and they check out the produce section.

Several minutes later, the woman comes over to Frank and we learn that they’re married. We also learn that those four kids are theirs. It’s quite the elaborate trip to the store. They all leave, where we then meet ANOTHER girl, 17 year old Ruby, who has some form of cancer and is waiting in the car.

Once home, they make a call, get news they don’t want, and confirm their 2-day “trip” to the city. This is framed to the kids as a vacation for mommy and daddy, but really, it’s so that Frank and Abby can rob a bank to pay for Ruby’s medical bills.

Off the two go, to whatever Utah’s version of a city is, and proceed to have wild explicit sex in their hotel room. The next day they meet up with a couple of friends at Denny’s who are going to act as lookouts for their robbery. This is followed by the robbery itself. Frank gets badly injured but they get the money. They make a run for it. I won’t spoil anything for you but let’s just say, things get gnarly in the last 20 pages. The End.

I want to start today’s analysis talking about scene reversals.

Scene reversals are when you start off a scene making the audience think one thing, then, at some point, there’s a reversal and we realize it’s the opposite (or different from what we were led to believe).

I remember the first time I became aware of this practice. It was in the opening scene of the 1994 movie, When A Man Loves A Woman, starring Meg Ryan in one of her only serious roles. The scene has Meg’s character at a bar by herself and then a man comes up and starts hitting on her. Over the course of the scene, she’s drawn in by him, and then, by the end of the scene, they’re making out. It’s then when we realize, they already knew each other. They were together. This was just a game.

That’s a scene reversal.

But here’s the thing about scene reversals. It’s tricky to pull them off in that opening scene because WE DON’T KNOW ANYTHING ABOUT ANYTHING YET. We don’t know who’s who. We don’t know what’s going on. We don’t know jack s**t. So if there’s any nuance at all to your scene reversal, there’s a good chance we won’t catch it.

The reason that the When A Man Loves a Woman opening scene works is because the scenario is so simple and familiar. Man hits on woman at bar. There isn’t any nuance to that scenario, so we get it immediately.

But here in I Love You Now And Forever, there’s a whole lot going on in the opening scene. And, therefore, when the writer tries to pull a scene reversal, we’re straight up confused. The first beat of the scene has Frank looking at a woman’s butt who’s up on the grocery store shelves looking for something, and saying this: “That a$$, that is a thing of beauty, Noni. Oh the things I could do with that. First the One-Eyed Pirate, then, The Terminator, then I’d climb inside and just take a na…”.

However, about five pages later, this woman finds Frank in another part of the store and calls him by name. They then start talking. And now we realize they know each other. They’re married. It was suuuuper confusing, especially when you consider that there were all these kids around who are presented as random, who we then learn are Frank and Abby’s kids! It’s what I call “unnecessarily confusing” writing. And so many beginner writers are guilty of it.

Because you have to consider the bang you’re getting for your potentially confusing buck. In When A Man Loves a Woman, the payoff is fun. It’s fun when you find out these two already know each other, so we leave the scene satisfied. With this scene, all we think is, “Why did you make it unnecessarily challenging for us to understand that these people are related?” What’s the payoff for that? Particularly when, if we lose the thread at any point, we’re lost and frustrated.

Clumsy or confusing or overly complicated first scenes are a huge pet peeve of mine because they start scripts off on the wrong foot. And I’m reading these mistakes CONSTANTLY. In the last 10 consultations I did, half of them had this problem: writers trying to be too clever by half with their openings and just making them confusing as a result. So watch out for this. Only do opening scene reversals if you’re a REALLY SEASONED WRITER and know how to navigate the pitfalls. Or if the scenario is super simple, like When A Man Loves a Woman.

So, does I Love You Now And Forever recover after that?

I’ll tell you this. You probably don’t want to waste 10% of your screenplay on a grocery store run. That’s valuable real estate that you’ve turned into a real-world errand. Unless there’s dramatic value to a scene, it should not be long. So that started the script off on a weak note.

A lot of the script feels like it’s spinning its wheels. The writer knew he had a bank robbery scene. He knew he had a getaway scene. And to his credit, both work well. But before that, it doesn’t feel like there’s a plan. For example, there’s an oddly specific sexual undercurrent to the screenplay so there’s this giant emphasis placed on the two getting jiggy with it the night before. And then they’re sort of enjoying the town the next day.

You need narratives that give your characters purposeful things to do throughout the movie. Not just during the big obvious set pieces.

It’s not necessarily a bad script. There’s a theme here about the struggle that the average American family is going through financially. There’s a theme about how crappy health care is. There’s a theme about family sticking together no matter what. And all of these are noble things to write about. But, in the end, all that matters is, “Are we entertained?” I was confused by the opening. I was bored by the second act. And then the end was pretty good. But this script needed much better plotting for it to do what it was trying to do.

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

What I learned: Unless it’s a true story and you’re locked into it, avoid giant families. Giant families, in the screenwriting world, translate to: A TON OF CHARACTERS BOTH YOU AND WE HAVE TO KEEP TRACK OF. They’re more trouble than they’re worth. One child is fine. Two is fine. You only want to go three and above if you absolutely need to to tell your story. Otherwise, I promise you, they’ll get in the way.

It’s only 4:30pm and it’s already dark in my place??? What the F&%$ is going on????

Sorry, had to get that out.

I’m getting oh-so-close to my end-of-the-year movie rankings so I’ve been trying to catch up on everything I’ve missed. I don’t know what I was expecting when I watched Dumb Money because nobody was talking it up. Yet it was still getting decent reviews.

So I was as surprised as anyone when I was so pulled into it. If you don’t know anything about the film, it covers the “Gamestop” stock-buying fiasco from a couple of years ago, when a ton of personal investors got together to try and bankrupt a giant hedge fund that had put all of its money into “shorting” the dying company of Gamestop. In doing so, it left itself vulnerable on the .000001% chance that Gamestop didn’t go bankrupt.

This plucky little personal investor named Keith Gill, who not only foolishly buys 50,000 dollars worth of stock in Gamestop, but runs a Youtube channel where he explains his elaborate thought process for doing so, inspires a movement over on a Reddit site when a few of the bigger personal investors on the site latch onto his advice once they realize they can bankrupt one of the biggest hedge funds in the world.

This creates a revolution where people just keep buying more and more Gamestop stock, putting Citadel into bigger and bigger trouble. There’s this great little scene late in the screenplay where Keith Gill’s wife asks him, “How much did we make today?” “5 million,” Keith responds. “How much did we make yesterday?” “4 million,” Keith responds.

We then cut to Citadel employee Gabe Plotkin, whose wife asks him, “How much did we lose today?” “1 billion,” Gabe replies. “How much did we lose yesterday?” “1 billion,” Gabe replies. It perfectly wrapped up how insane this was.

But the main reason I liked this movie so much is because it creates this impossible internal dilemma for the main character, Keith. Remember, in the newsletter, when I talked about making things as hard as possible for the main character? But, in that example, I was referring to externally. For example, if your hero gets in a gunfight, have his gun lock up. How do you win a gunfight without a gun? That’s the sort of stuff you want to do to your main character.

But if you want to take that to a nuclear level, make things impossible on your hero INTERNALLY AS WELL. That’s what this movie does. Keith becomes the face of this movement. He bought 50,000 dollars worth of stock when the stock was 3 dollars. The stock gets up to 450 dollars. Which means Keith has holdings of over 50 million.

Now, if you were smart, you’d cash that out. At least some of it.  But because Keith is the face of the movement and because he’s live-streaming every night, every move he makes is symbolic. If he sells even a tiny bit of his stock, he is admitting to everyone that he no longer believes in the movement. Which would cause everyone else to sell their stock and the whole house would crumble. So he’s under this enormous amount of pressure to not sell. And you could see it on him. This guy was scraping by his whole life and then, over the course of a month, he has 50 million dollars. BUT ONLY IF HE SELLS.

It was an impossible situation. And then, of course, the banks and hedge funds start conspiring to destroy the personal investors (really rich people call personal investors “dumb money,” cause it’s so easy to take their money), creating an impossible external challenge as well.

In addition to this, Dumb Money handles exposition like a champ. When you write this type of movie – one that requires so much education for the audience to understand what’s going on – it’s easy for the script to drown in that exposition. But Dumb Money spreads its key educational scenes out, so they’re never overbearing, and has fun with them, so that there’s a playful enjoyable aspect to hearing how all this works.

Oh, and as we always say here on Scriptshadow: Underdog movies always work. And this is a pretty big underdog story.

Now, is it the best movie or screenplay of the year? I don’t know. I’ve been letting the film marinate in my head for the last couple of days. It’s certainly more entertaining than those high-profile Oscar-thirsty yawners that the studios are releasing. I’m curious to hear why people haven’t been talking this up more. Am I alone on Dumb Money Mountain?

I also have something very sad to report. This weekend, the Marvels officially bowed out of the box office race, tapping out at 80 million dollars. To give you a little perspective on where this places the film, Solo: A Star Wars Story, the biggest box office disappointment in Star Wars history, made 84 million dollars on its opening weekend.

The Marvels represents, to me, the pinnacle of message-over-matter. And when I say “matter,” I mean, “that it matters” to the audience. It was written to drive a message. It was cast to drive a message. The director was hired to drive a message. At no point was a creative decision made with the goal of making the best movie they could possibly make.

At first I was like, “How could a company this big with this many smart people make such a mistake?” But it’s much more complicated than that. Disney made a series of decisions over four years that opened up the opportunity for the patients to run the asylum. Honestly, I don’t know if they can go backwards. That’s why they brought Bob Iger in – to fix all this. But Iger is learning that even in the quick four years since he left, the game has completely changed. If you go backwards, you get attacked. If you keep doing what you’re doing, you get attacked. It’s one of the more unenviable jobs in the world, I’d say. Well, I guess the 50 million dollar compensatory package at the end of each year helps.

The big positive story coming out of this weekend’s box office is the performance of the oddly titled, “Godzilla Minus One.” I didn’t know that titles could also be math problems. Can’t wait for “Aquaman Divided by 12” and “The Cosign Purple.” Anybody up for “Dune Part Two Multiplied by Nine?”

Godzilla Minus One is getting crazy good reviews. Which we’re not used to with Godzilla movies these days. I checked out the trailer to find out why and I can see why critics are going gaga. They set it right after World War 2, which is origin time for when Godzilla was born. So we’re going back to the beginning. It looks kinda cool but I don’t know if I understand the message. These people just endured this terrible war where 3 million of them were killed and now you’re going to have a monster show up and kill even more of them? How bout give them a chance to breathe, sheesh.

I will say that it looks a LOT BETTER than the latest U.S. Godzilla movie. That trailer was so poor that I actually thought it was fan-made. I’m still not convinced it isn’t. Maybe the Godzilla nerds can come in here and straighten me out. What’s going on with these two films? And why so much math?

Finally, please pay your respects in the comments section to The Marvels. I know we’re all hurting. But maybe, if we lean on each other, we can get through this.

It’s a scrumdiddlyumptious Logline Showdown this weekend.  If this is your first time experiencing a Showdown, you check out the below loglines and then vote for your favorite one in the comments section.  Whoever gets the most votes gets a script review next week.  It’s also a great opportunity to tell writers what you like or dislike about their loglines so they can improve.  So get to it!  Here are November’s loglines…

Title: Down In Los Lunas
Genre: Horror
Logline: When a traveling book salesman discovers a slaughtered family and a lone survivor–a deaf teenage girl–at a remote farmhouse, together they must survive the night when the cult responsible for the murders returns to complete their sacrifice to an ancient deity.

Title: Jenkins and Watts: Paranormal Attorneys at Law
Genre: Comedy/Horror (30 minute pilot)
Logline: In a world where ghosts exist and have rights, Jenkins and Watts defend them against overzealous law enforcement, organized crime, and literal demons from hell…for fair market price.

Title: The Mentor
Genre: Thriller
Logline: An emotionally fragile executive failing to live up to his potential in life hires a mysterious personal development coach whose unorthodox, life-threatening tactics push him to the brink of death.

Title: Splashdown
Genre: Thriller
Logline: After their reentry goes wrong and they splashdown hundreds of miles off course, five astronauts and two space tourists must await rescue from shark-infested waters.

Title: A Chinese Vampire Story
Genre: Horror/Action
Logline: An elderly shop owner in San Francisco’s Chinatown sacrifices himself to become a goeng-si–a Chinese hopping vampire–so that he can get revenge against the gangsters terrorizing his neighborhood.

Title: 121.5
Genre: Thriller
Logline: A wanted man looking to flee the United States must put his trust in a radio operator to help him land a small plane safely after his flight instructor dies midway through his first lesson. Locke meets Buried

A HUGE announcement in this month’s newsletter. I’m hijacking your entire 2024. Also, out of left field, I read an amazing screenplay. Was not expecting that at all. So I reviewed that. There’s a Scriptshadow connection with the writer, by the way. I haven’t talked about Star Wars in a while, so I had to pass on some deep Star Wars thoughts. I also get into Back to the Future, Speed, and The Fugitive, all of which provide some screenwriting lessons for us. And then, of course, I can’t have a newsletter without some Sydney Sweeney. Who can? Oh, and there’s a great deal on script notes inside too!

If you want to join my newsletter, e-mail me at carsonreeves1@gmail.com

P.S. I’m posting November Logline Showdown tomorrow morning to give this post time to breathe.

*******
NOVEMBER LOGLINE SHOWDOWN – DEADLINE TONIGHT!
What: November Logline Showdown
Send me: the logline for any script you have (features will take precedence over pilots but if you’ve got the best tv show idea ever, send it in)
I need: The title, genre, and logline
Also: Your script must be written because I’ll be reviewing the winning entry the following week
When: Deadline is Thursday, November 30th, 10:00pm Pacific Time
Send entries to: carsonreeves3@gmail.com
********

As many of you know, I’m a UFO nut. I love UFOs. I love them so much, in fact, I get angry when the internet tries to make me call them UAPs. I kick it old school. Don’t ruin my high, Internet. Don’t ruin my high, AI.

The UFO community long needed a way to identify UFOs. So they came up with something called “The five Observables.” If something you see in the sky displays these traits, it’s likely an alien space ship. The five observables are anti-gravity lift, instantaneous acceleration, hypersonic flight without signatures (no ‘sonic booms’ for example), low observability (cloaking), trans-medium travel (can move from space to ocean effortlessly).

This reminded me of something I’ve been thinking about in regards to screenwriting. With screenwriting, there are a bunch of things you can teach. You can teach a writer how to break their screenplay into acts. You can teach a writer how to set up and pay off things. You can teach a writer how to create obstacles that your protagonist must overcome.

But there are also things that are next to impossible to teach. These are what I call the “screenwriting unobservables.” They are, mostly, the innate talents that one is blessed with, and, therefore, you either have them or you don’t. You’ll notice that I said, “next to impossible.” I’m going to list these unobservables and then offer some advice on how you can still improve in each category.

UNOBSERVABLE 1 – CONCEPT CREATION

Concept is elusive even before we assign it ‘unobservable’ status. We know this because even the best concept creators strike out. Anyone remember Tenet? For whatever reason, ‘concept’ seems to elude a large percentage of writers. No matter how hard they try, they don’t seem to understand what makes for a good movie idea. So they shoot themselves in the foot, repeatedly writing screenplays that have no shot at being good because they were doomed by their concept from the get-go.

Advice: As a Scriptshadow reader has noted, try to write a come up with a new logline every week. If you have 50 loglines a year, there’s probably a good one in there. Pay attention to movies (not sequels or franchises) that end up having mass appeal and dissect why. Conversely, pay attention to what bombs and ask why. And, finally, send your loglines out to as many friends as possible and listen to their feedback. If no one is excited about your idea – even if they only say it’s ‘good’ – don’t write that script. Keep going, keep logging feedback, and keep challenging yourself to come up with better, more unique, ideas, until others start telling you “That’s a great idea.” Concept creation is no different from writing a screenplay. It takes time to master.

UNOBSERVABLE 2 – CREATIVE CHOICES

I can teach writers how to craft a story with a beginning, middle, and end. But it’s much harder to teach writers how to come up with interesting creative choices within their stories. Creative choices are the things that happen in your screenplay, either through the characters or the plot, that make your story stand out from all the other screenplays out there. Andy Dufresne’s amazing escape plan in The Shawshank Redemption is a masterful creative choice. Getting rid of a body by chopping it up in a woodcutter, a la Fargo, is an interesting choice. John McClane running into Hans on the roof and thinking he’s a hostage is a great creative choice. Most writers make boring or predictable choices throughout their screenplays. The writers who stand out are the ones who come up with the clever stuff. And you’ll know that you’ve got the clever stuff when it’s clear audiences will be talking about it afterwards.

Advice: Remind yourself that you’re boring. This will work even if it’s not true. If you’re convinced you’re a boring writer who writes boring stuff, you will constantly strive to come up with better creative choices. You’ll take more creative risks. Also, use every rewrite as an opportunity to find a new strong creative choice in your script. Don’t leave that rewrite until you’ve come up with a choice that clearly makes your script better.

UNOBSERVABLE 3 – VOICE

This is the big one. The big Kahuna. The writers with a unique voice have a huge advantage over every other writer because they don’t need strong concepts to make their scripts work. Their talent is in finding the unique within the mundane. “Voice” is, essentially, the comedic way in which you see the world. It’s your own sense of humor. Almost all of the best “voice” writers (John Hughes, Woody Allen, Larry David, even Aaron Sorkin) have varying degrees of offbeat humor that power their writing.

Advice: The thing with “voice” is that you can’t create it. So don’t try to write a script with voice. It won’t work. Your voice is already within you. Your job is, simply, to find a concept that aligns with that voice and then your voice will come out naturally. So if you have a dry sense of humor, write an indie concept with dry main characters.

UNOBSERVABLE 4 – CHARACTER REALITY

When I talk ‘character reality,’ I’m not talking about flaws and likability and internal conflicts and vices. Those are all part of creating characters but they’re not the most important part. The most important part is creating a character WHO FEELS LIKE A REAL PERSON. We’ve all experienced this when reading scripts – a character who just feels so incredibly real. Lester Burnham’s character in American Beauty felt like this real burnt-out suburban loser whose family didn’t respect him anymore. More likely, we’ve experienced these characters in television, where there’s more time to flesh characters out. But if you don’t have characters that feel like real people, you’re always keeping your reader at arm’s length.

Advice: Take an intense curiosity in other human beings. Figure out what makes them tick. If you don’t have that curiosity – if you don’t desperately want to know the inner workings of why people are the way they are – it is highly difficult to write a character that readers connect with. If you do this well, you will write your descriptions of characters with more detail. The things they say will contain more specificity. They’ll always act from a place of realism, as opposed to doing things only because the writer needs them to. This is the hardest unobservable to achieve. But boy does it pay dividends for those who can do it.

UNOBSERVABLE 5 – DIALOGUE

There is an innate divide between how the majority of writers make their characters speak (perfunctory, on-the-nose, devoid of personality) and how people actually speak. There is an elusive ability that some writers have whereby they can channel this actuality, as well as make their characters say charming, clever, funny, or intelligent, things effortlessly. And this is a skill that the large majority of writers don’t have. The good news is, you don’t need it to become a professional screenwriter. You can learn to write strong functional dialogue. But boy does it help if you have this special dialogue ability.

Advice: A lot of weak dialogue stems from writers who are afraid to let go. They don’t want their characters to sound weird or odd so they keep a muzzle on them, not unlike they do when they interact with people in the real world. They’re afraid to say something out loud that someone else thinks is strange. You have to let that go because when it comes to speaking, we only ever say interesting things when we’re not holding back. The great thing about writing dialogue is that you can write the craziest s**t imaginable and then, if it’s too much, you just edit it down. But if you’re a dialogue muzzler, it’s going to be hard for you to ever write memorable dialogue.