Genre: Comedy
Premise: A successful illustrator finds herself friendless after her best friend gets engaged, forcing her to embark on an epic quest to “date” for new girlfriends — as an adult.
About: Scarlett Bermingham has written on a few small TV shows, including “Epic Night,” and “Damage Control.” She’s also had a few small roles as an actress. This script of hers made it onto last year’s Black List.
Writer: Scarlett Bermingham
Details: 115 pages

Slate for Mimi?

How many big ideas do you need for a concept?

There’s a belief that one isn’t enough. That you need a second one to make it truly original.

For reference, a “single idea” concept would be Top Gun: Maverick. A famous flight instructor comes back to Top Gun flight school to teach a new generation of pilots how to fly. A “double idea” concept would be “Nope.” It starts off as horror-mystery movie. Then it turns into an alien/UFO movie.  Or the recent spec sale, Classified.  It’s a heist movie AND a supernatural Indiana-Jones type movie.

Because my screenwriting philosophy is “keep it simple,” I lean towards one idea. But this topic is open for debate. You can find examples of both types of movies working.

When I read the concept for Mimi on the Black List, I was immediately intrigued. Instead of dating to find a boyfriend or girlfriend, you’re “dating” to find a friend. It was a solid “single idea” concept.

But then you open the script and are attacked by this secondary element of a cartoon world. Every scene involves a break into the cartoon version of what’s happening to Mimi. All of a sudden, you’re in “double idea” territory which means your enjoyment of the script will depend on if you’re a “single idea” or “double idea” person.

30 year-old Mimi works as an illustrator at a billboard advertising center. Mimi is one of those people who’s only ever needed one great friend. And that friend is Caroline. They’ve been BFFs since they were kids.

But, lately, Caroline keeps hanging around her new boyfriend, Kip, who Mimi thinks is a loser. As the weeks go by, Caroline is replying less and less to Mimi’s texts, until Caroline stops texting altogether. A couple months later, Mimi sees on social media that Caroline and Kip are getting married.

It’s around this time that Mimi gets the hint that Caroline is upset about something. But Mimi is too proud to call her and ask what. Which creates a new dilemma for her. Who’s going to be her new best friend? She’s got to find one.

Mimi quickly learns that making friends as an adult is a lot harder than making friends as a kid. She goes to pottery classes, scaring potential friends away with her “Let’s be friends now!” energy. She tries to make friends with her neighbor, who finds her way too overbearing. She even goes as far as to join a “Friend” version of Tinder and go on Tinder Friend dates.

For some reason, Mimi can’t make friends with anyone. She then becomes infuriated when she learns that there’s an actual date for Caroline’s wedding and SHE WASN’T INVITED. So she does what any scorned lover would do – she crashes the wedding!

There, she confronts Caroline, who tells her that Mimi is the embodiment of a selfish friend. It’s always about her. And that Caroline doesn’t want to be her friend anymore. Unfortunately, there is no happy ending here. The two go their separate ways and… that’s it.

Like I was saying earlier, I would’ve liked this a lot better without the animation. I suppose it will add visual flair to the movie itself, which might change my mind. But to me I saw it as a writer admitting that they didn’t believe in their idea enough. The original logline, sans animation, is funny! Trust that. I don’t think you need to add a bunch of bells and whistles to distract people in case it’s not enough.

Also, I felt the script could’ve done a lot more on the comedic side. I kept waiting for that big scene that was going to truly take advantage of the premise, but it never happened. We’d get funny little moments here and there – like Mimi coming on to a potential friend too hard and the friend being scared off. But that laugh takes up 5 seconds of the total screenplay. You need funny set-pieces that last FIVE MINUTES.

The 40 Year Old Virgin is a good example of this. You place a 40 Year Old Virgin on a date with a girl who makes it extremely clear she wants to have sex with him at the end of the night, and then you throw a ton of obstacles at the date (she gets egregiously drunk) which slowly and meticulously destroys the opportunity for said sex. A lot of comedy comes from us watching our main character’s misery.

We didn’t have that scene in “Mimi.”

But there were a couple of things I liked. The first was the choice not to explore the friendship between Mimi and Caroline. In fact, Caroline is absent the entire movie. (Spoilers) Normally, these movies are about repairing the central relationship. But we go 180 degrees in the opposite direction. Not only do we not explore the main relationship, but in the final confrontation, the characters go their separate ways. There is no happy resolution. That’s a very bold choice for a comedy.

I also liked what precluded the confrontation. Once we move away from the muted shenanigans of the first and second acts, we find Mimi truly exploring why she’s unable to have friendships. That was the first time in the script where I actually started to feel something. Cause a lot of what was said was truthful – how friendships are messy and how, if you take more than you give, sooner or later the other party is going to say, “Enough is enough.” Ultimately, Mimi needs to learn how to give more in friendships. That’s her big character journey.

And, to top it off, the script has a nice little epilogue where Mimi learns she’s already made friends with her neighbor without realizing it.

These scripts always mess with my head because I didn’t think much of the first two acts, but the third act really worked for me. And since it’s the most recent act, I’m tempted to give the script a ‘worth the read.’ But that’s still 75% of the script that I wasn’t on board with. So I’m not saying this is worth the read. But it *is* an interesting script in places and should not be easily dismissed.

P.S. Very clever name for a selfish main character – Mimi (“Me” “Me”).

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

What I learned: Any time you feel like you need to add CRAZY VOICE OVER or ANIMATION or YOUR MAIN CHARACTER BREAKS THE FOURTH WALL A LOT or SPEAK DIRECTLY TO THE READER THROUGH THE DESCRIPTION – ask yourself why you’re doing this. If you’re doing it because you genuinely believe it makes the script better, include it. But if you’re just doing it because you’re worried the story itself isn’t enough, you need to take a hard look at your concept and figure out if you really want a write it. No supplemental entertainment factor is going to save a weak premise. And, in some cases, like today’s script, it can actually get in the way of a fun idea.

You guys have been waiting for it!

Maybe “waiting for it” is an understatement. “Angrily demanding it” might be a better assessment?

I do apologize for taking so long but this is one of the realities of a free script contest where one reader reads all the entries. It’s going to take a while.

Reading screenplays is a funny thing. I personally love doing it. People ask me all the time, “How are you able to get through all those bad screenplays? Doesn’t it drive you nuts?”

It doesn’t, actually.

For a couple of reasons. One, I love storytelling. I get a kick out of characters trying to maneuver their way through obstacles to achieve an objective. I have this inherent need to “see what happens next.” Even if it’s not perfect, I like being in an imaginary world and not knowing what to expect. It’s exciting.

Second, there’s a voyeuristic aspect about writing that I love. Every time you read a script, you’re essentially going into someone’s head. They’re bringing you into their universe in a way that you don’t get in any other medium.

You learn about a person’s fears in a way they’ve never told anyone else before. You get to see their bizarre interpretation of the world. And you get reminded that we’re all experiencing the same things together. Like when a character has doubts, it’s a reminder to you that having doubts is okay. Writing connects you with the rest of humanity.

That’s not to say it isn’t frustrating at times. Yesterday’s script was a reminder of how vapid and vanilla many scripts can be. Writers choose ideas that are way too common then execute them in the most obvious fashion possible. That’s the part of writing I don’t like. When writers don’t give you anything new.

I’ve often asked myself why does this happen? Cause to me, it’s obvious that they’re giving us an old concept with a predictable execution.  So why isn’t it obvious to them?

The conclusion I’ve come to is that for a very long time in every screenwriter’s journey, they’re trying to rewrite their favorite movies. They have 3-10 movies they loved growing up. And they’re basically writing and rewriting identical versions of those movies. They don’t realize they’re doing this because, as they’re writing, they feel inspired. And who’s going to say no to inspiration? What they’re not identifying is that their inspiration is coming from a place of replication, of getting to recreate something they love.

I’m not sure you ever truly grow out of this phase. But good writers reach a point where they understand that they’re doing this and take precautions to differentiate their scripts from their favorite movies. They find ways to tweak the concept, tweak the genre, tweak the execution, so that while their script may be inspired by that favorite film of theirs, it becomes its own thing.

Get Out is a great example of this. Jordan Peele clearly loved Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner as a kid. He then tweaked the genre to horror and, all of a sudden, you’ve got a completely different movie.

So that’s what I’m looking for whenever I open a script – writers who’ve gone through this maturation process and realize writing a vanilla execution of a familiar concept isn’t good enough. They have to find a new way to tweak things or not write the script in the first place.

So has this latest contest taught me anything new?

Not really.

But it has reinforced a few things. Reading a bunch of scripts in a row reinforces, to me, the importance of nailing that first scene. If the first scene isn’t entertaining – if it’s just setting up a character’s life or setting up the world – you’re done. Because the script that reader read right before yours?  That one DID entertain them right away. So why would they pick your script over that one?

It also reinforced the cut throat nature of screenwriting. You realize that the person who writes the script doesn’t matter. I know that sounds harsh but I don’t sit here thinking, “Man, this writer has probably been through so much to get to this point where they’re able to write a competent screenplay and they’re really hoping this script is going to be the one that finally breaks down doors for them and I have to respect their work ethic and how hard it was to get to this point and…”.

No!

The ONLY thing that matters is “Am I entertained?” That is it, man. That is f@#%ing it.

I’m telling you. When you read 15 entries in a row, you aren’t thinking about the writer. You’re thinking, “is what’s on the page entertaining me right now?” Better yet, you’re not thinking at all because you’re enjoying what you’re reading so much.

I know this sounds harsh but I say it because I believe it can help you. Once you realize nobody cares about you, you can take yourself out of the equation and simply ask, “Is the reader going to be entertained by this scene I’m writing right now?”

The second – and I mean THE SECOND – you write a scene that could be considered boring in the first 15 pages, you have likely lost the reader.

Enough generalizing, Carson. Give us an example! Okay, so I read a WW2 entry the other day. This is World War 2, mind you. One of the most deadly dramatic intense wars in history. Every human being who was in World War 2 in any capacity has at least one INSANE story about something that happened to them.

I read a World War 2 contest entry where, for the first ten pages, characters are talking to each other and doing chores. I’m sitting there staring at these pages thinking, “What’s even happening right now???” How are you writing about World War 2 and use your first 10 pages as character setup????????????? This is such an immense miscalculation, I can’t even comprehend it.

Conversely, I just reviewed Randall Wallace’s World War 2 script, With Wings as Eagles, and the opening scene has a secret black ops German soldier stumbling into a room full of Russian soldiers and having to find a way out of it.

By the way – I want to make this VERY CLEAR – me needing an entertaining scene does not mean a big splashy action scene. Look at Inglorious Basterds. The opening scene with Hans Landa looking for Jews – not a big flashy scene at all. But one of the most entertaining scenes ever written.

This is what you’re competing with people.

Think of the screenwriting world as an entertainment contest. You are going head to head with people who are trying to write way more entertaining scenes than you. So ask yourself, as you’re writing that first, that second, that third, fourth, and fifth scene, “If these scenes were to go up against 100 other screenplays, do I honestly believe that each of my scenes would beat 97 to 98 of the other scenes on an entertainment level?” Cause if not, you’re not doing this right.

You gotta be the top 1 or 2 out of 100 to make any waves in this business.

This brings me to a secondary issue that I’ve been seeing in many of the entries, which is that the writer WILL BE TRYING to entertain with their first scene. But they’ll do so in too familiar of a way. Kudos to the writer for at least understanding that you have to pull the reader in. However, an entertaining scene we’ve already seen before is still a script killer. True, there are only so many entertaining scenarios to choose from. But there are an infinite number of ways to execute a familiar scenario. And your job, as a screenwriter, is to find one of those angles.

For example, I’ve read a handful of entries so far that start with a female character running from something. Three of those entries happened in the woods. How common is an opening scene of a woman running from something in the woods? Very common. And the writers didn’t do anything different enough with the scenes to pull me in.

What does “different enough” look like? “It Follows.” That movie starts with a woman running. But they’re running in odd circles in the middle of an empty suburban street. They’re looking behind them as if something is following them but we’re seeing nothing. What’s going on here? Why is this woman running from nothing?? That’s a familiar opening that adds a fresh element. I want to know more after reading that. I don’t want to know more after reading a frantic woman in the woods running from a killer. I’ve seen that way too many times already.

Okay, Carson, now that you’ve depressed us to the point of wanting to burn our pirated copies of Final Draft, do you have any good news for us? Any scripts that have actually impressed you? Yes, in fact. Let me share with you the two latest scripts to advance to the next round.

One is a sci-fi script called, The Castle. Here’s the logline: In 1209 a reluctant German crown princess must defend her castle against a brutal group of bandits, consisting of special forces soldiers from the 21st century. Script starts off with a cow-hanging that got my attention. I love seeing fun concepts and then I open the script and get something completely different from what I expected. A cow-hanging??? It was great. And all the characters are really fun so far.

Another is a psychological thriller called Smiley Face. That one is about a popular online influencer’s troll. Admittedly, I’m fascinated by influencer culture. So this one got points just for being the type of idea I’m into at the moment. But I felt that the writer did a good job conveying what an influencer’s life was like and, also, what an influencer’s troll’s life was like. It’s just as demanding of a job as being the influencer. So that one feels promising.

How long is it going to take me to finish all these? I don’t know. Sometimes I read 100 entries a week. Sometimes I read 10. It depends on my mood and my workload. But I’m going to try to incentivize myself to keep charging forward.

Next week I am going to highlight ten entries on the site. I am going to list the script details you sent me, as well as letting you know if your script advanced to the next round or not. Then, I’ll include several hundred words on why I either advanced the script or passed on it. If you want to be one of these ten, e-mail me at carsonreeves3@gmail.com and the first ten of you who e-mail, you will be the ones who get your script highlighted. Bonus points if you allow me to post a PDF of your first act.

To be clear, I’m not going to trash your script if I don’t advance it. This is going to be more of a teaching thing. I want to help you, and others, understand what’s required to write a strong first act.

If you’re game, let me know!

ONE “$100 OFF” SCRIPT CONSULTATION DEAL! – It’s mid-month so I’m giving $100 off one feature (feature only!) screenplay consultation. E-mail me at carsonreeves1@gmail.com with subject line: “100.” I give screenwriting consultations for every step of the process, whether it be loglines, e-mail queries, plot summaries, outlines, Zoom brainstorming sessions, first pages, first acts, pilots, features. E-mail me at carsonreeves1@gmail.com if you’re interested in today’s deal or any other type of consultation.  I’ll be here! 

Genre: Music Biopic (Nooooooooooooo!!!)
Premise: A young Kanye West goes up against impossible odds to make his first album.
About: This script finished Top 20 on last year’s Black List. The writing team worked together contributing on two TV shows, Instinct and L.A.’s Finest. They realized if they wanted to break out of writing for run-of-the-mill television shows, they needed to do what every smart writer with big dreams does – WRITE A MUSIC BIOPIC BECAUSE ALL MUSIC BIOPICS ARE GUARANTEED TO MAKE THE BLACK LIST!
Writers: Michael J . Ballin & Thomas Aguilar
Details: 117 pages

As I was staring at the title page of The College Dropout, trying to decide if I was going to review it, I took a deep hard look at my dislike of biopic screenplays and asked myself a simple question: Why?

Why I do I hate them so much?

Shouldn’t I like scripts that are unabashedly and deeply about ‘character?’ Isn’t that what I preach on this site? Write big memorable characters and everything else will take care of itself? What genre explores character more than a biopic??

And yet I dread these things. Even when they chronicle someone as complex and strange as Kanye West, I dread them.

I think it boils down to a couple of things. One, biopics are the laziest form of subject matter in all of screenwriting. The story is already written for you. It’s also built-in name recognition, which means you don’t have to do any work at all coming up with a good concept. You’re going to get reads regardless.

Which means it takes zero creativity to write a biopic. And that’s what I enjoy most in screenwriting. I love when somebody comes up with a clever premise. Or takes a story in an interesting direction.

Biopics are the antithesis of that. There is no clever premise. The story is already laid out for you and, assuming the subject is famous enough, we already know what direction things are going.

Wow, I’m really hyping this review up, aren’t I?

Well, as they always say, if you go in with zero expectations, the experience can only exceed them.

It’s 1997 and a 19 year old Kanye West is in his freshman year at Chicago State University. His mother, Donda, is a faculty member there. So Kanye gets a sweet deal for his college degree. There’s only one problem. Kanye hates college. He wants to produce music and rap.

So that’s what he does. All day long every day. He’s got a mentor named NO ID, who eventually helps him make some contacts in New York. Except that Kanye is young and a bit odd. When he gets into rooms with big people, he starts babbling about how he’s going to be the best ever and they quickly dismiss him.

But Kanye’s beats, which are so unique, keep getting him more meetings. They all want to use his beats. They just don’t want to talk to the guy. And they definitely don’t want him rapping on any of these songs, which is what Kanye really wants.

Kanye hustles to the point where he gets an album contract with Columbia. But then Columbia backs out at the last second. So Kanye switches over to Roc-a-Fella. But then Roc-a-Fella goes broke and THEY can’t release his album. Kanye, who’s put every cent he’s saved into this album, has one more outside shot to break through – get in front of the biggest rap star in the game, Jay-Z.

You know when your friends drag you somewhere that you don’t want to go to and you’re standing at this place and you want to make it clear you don’t want to be there so you cross your arms and refuse to engage in conversation and refuse to smile because you’re so determined to follow-through on your original feelings, even though, if you’re being honest with yourself, the place isn’t all that bad.

That’s how I felt reading this.

I didn’t want to be at the Kanye party.

But after things got going, I noticed the script was doing a lot of things right.

Remember yesterday when I said that they didn’t even bother creating any doubt that Thor would succeed? How good stories always build in a strong level of doubt?

This script does a lot of that.

There’s this moment deep in the screenplay when Kanye’s sunk every bit of his savings into his first album and then Columbia tells him they’re reneging on his deal. Then he goes to Rock-a-Fella and signs with them but they run out of money so THEY can’t release his album either. What is he going to do???

I know what you’re thinking. It’s no different than when Obi-Wan and Vader had their lightsaber duel in that abomination of a TV show, “Obi-Wan Kenobi.” There’s zero stakes cause we know they both live. Same thing here. We know Kanye becomes one of the biggest music artists in history. So is it really that dramatic that he’s struggling?

Yes.

We know that Kanye overcomes this, obviously. But we also know that hundreds of thousands of music artists over the years have been in a similar situation and things *didn’t* work out.

Which gets you wondering just how important it is to never stop stopping. In any artistic pursuit. Because when that moment came up and it looked like Kanye’s debut album was going to get swallowed up in the same music industry sinkhole that claims so many new artists who never recover from that trauma, I realized that the reason Kanye survived while so many others didn’t was because he was relentless.

He figured out a way to get into a Jay-Z recording session and play his CD for him, which is the moment that led to Kanye becoming a superstar. There are a lot of people who would’ve been so devastated by signing a contract and then being told the studio had changed their mind and then went to another studio and they couldn’t release the album either that they would’ve moped around for years feeling sorry for themselves. Kanye got right back up and kept hustling.

That’s what I liked about this script. Is the way it makes you think about being an artist. How the world doesn’t like struggling artists. They like the successful ones. But nobody wants to be around when the sausage is being made. They want the artist to do all the ugly stuff in quiet obscurity.

There’s a key moment in the middle of the script where Kanye’s mom points out that he hasn’t made any money from music for over two years. He has this opportunity to get a college degree because of her association with this college. Kanye’s professor says the same thing. You have an opportunity here and you’re wasting it while trying to win the lottery.

These are the thoughts that constantly invade an artist’s mind and they can be crippling, because they sow the seeds of doubt. And the older you get, the more you wonder if everyone was right and you were wrong. That this whole pursuit was stupid.

That’s not easy to handle. And the artists who succeed have to find ways to conquer those voices.

Speaking of the college angle, that was another thing that made this biopic different. I can’t tell you how many rap biopic screenplays I’ve read that take place in the projects. Whereas Kanye actually has a pretty financially stable life. The other guys in the industry make fun of him because he alway dresses preppy. He doesn’t look at all like any of the other rappers.

That could’ve easily hurt the screenplay because the good thing about a movie like 8 Mile is that your character, who lives in the projects, is poor and desperate, and that makes him the ultimate underdog. Conversely, who’s rooting for the polo-wearing middle-class kid?

But I think what they did that was clever was they leaned into Kanye’s “outsider” status, which made it look like he wasn’t the kind of person who succeeds in this industry, at least in the eyes of the people who held the keys.

The script does struggle with some typical music biopic things. They do the whole thing where, when the artist is making music, we cut to how he sees the world, and the world is, of course, full of magical crazy colorful imagery. Literally every artist biopic does this so I don’t know why you’d join the club. But, to their credit, they went all in. When one of these moments happens, they don’t half-ass it.

I also thought they missed an opportunity to really explore a unique character flaw in Kanye. The one they focus on is Kanye’s obsession with being a rapper and not just a producer. Which was fine. The only problem with it is I’ve seen it before. The producer or instrument player who really wants to sing. It’s just sort of played.

What they should’ve done was leaned into Kanye’s awkwardness. He’s a super socially awkward guy. He says weird things at inappropriate moments (as we all know). And it loses him a couple of major wins early on in his career. For example, he blurts out to a major music exec that he’s going to be way more successful than Michael Jackson when he hasn’t even had a song on the radio yet. That’s the end of that meeting.

But these moments are explored casually. The fact that Kanye has some sort of social connection issue that could potentially prevent him from ever succeeding would’ve been a juicy character flaw to explore in my opinion. And one that I don’t remember ever being explored in a movie like this.

Which is what I’m asking when I open any screenplay. Try to find those little detours into a back alley that nobody’s explored yet in this genre. When you find those hidden trails, they’re like gold. If you can string enough of them together, you’ve got a screenplay cave bursting with treasure.

As it stands, The College Dropout never stood out. But it created enough dramatic doubt that I wanted to see how Kanye succeeded. And I wasn’t let down. He takes a big chance at the end that ends up giving him a career.

When it comes to music biopic screenplays, Blonde Ambition is still the gold medal standard for me, which was that biopic about Madonna. It was the top rated Black List script in 2016.

The reason it was so good was because it wasn’t a commercial for the artist. It was cruel, it was relentless, it dug deep, and exposed Madonna for the ruthless businesswoman who would do anything to succeed that she was. That realism is what made the script so surprising and unpredictable, the very things that make any story fun to read.

(By the way, that is NOT the Madonna pic they’re making. They’re of course putting together a celebration of the artist’s life, which will be guaranteed awful)

The College Dropout isn’t in the Blonde Ambition category. But it’s still pretty snazzy.

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

What I learned: I love when writers establish early on in a script that they’re going to try. Here, we see that ON THE TITLE PAGE. The title is listed as: “the college dropout” – No capitalization for a script about someone who rejects education was a clever choice.

Genre: Superhero
Premise: Thor must team up with his ex-girlfriend, also Thor, to save a bunch of children who’ve been kidnapped by an evil supervillain who is moodily flying around the universe killing gods.
About: Thor 4 opened with 143 million this weekend which is a number the industry doesn’t really know what to do with. They like giant or minuscule numbers that fit into easy narratives but as we’ll talk about today, this isn’t an “easy narrative” movie. The film is the biggest opening ever for a Thor film (good) but 45 million short of the last Marvel film, Dr. Strange (bad). An overlooked story with Thor, which admittedly has a lot of much bigger headlines to talk about it, is Taika’s screenwriting choice. Nobody’s ever heard of screenwriter Jennifer Kaytin Robinson before. So good on her for convincing the director to give her a shot.
Writer: Jennifer Kaytin Robinson and Taika Waititi
Details: About 2 hours long

I’ve noticed that people have been pounding their fists in the internet sand demanding for the magical ‘batsh#t crazy’ (as Chris Hemsworth called it) now mythical 4 hour cut of the film that was originally edited together.

I am happy to say that Taika has finally responded to these people demanding the “Taika Cut,” telling them what I’ve been telling everyone for the past two decades, which is that directors cuts are always terrible and that the theater cut is the best cut of the film.

Which begs the question: Is this cut actually good?

A quick plot recap first. This God named Gorr, played by Christian Bale, is hunting down a bunch of Gods because they’re responsible for killing his daughter. And Thor is next.

So Gorr heads to a place called New Asgaard, which, if I’m to understand this right, is a tiny theme park on earth that simulates where Thor is originally from? I think. Anyway, Gorr kidnaps all the children who are there that day and takes them to his planet.

Thor, then, teams up with Valkyrie, rock-monster Korg, and Jane, his old girlfriend, who now happens to be Thor, because she was dying of cancer and read somewhere that the Thor hammer makes you super-healthy or something. So she goes to New Asgaard to get the hammer and, in doing so, becomes Thor and cures her cancer.

Now when Captain America was able to pick up the Thor hammer, he didn’t automatically become Thor so… I’m not sure what’s going on there. But the point is, Jane, aka Thor, joins Thor, Valkyrie, and Korg on their journey to rescue the children.

On the way there, they try to recruit Zeus, since, you know, Gorr’s going to be coming after him next. But that fails miserably. Which means they’re going to have to go it alone. I’ll leave it up to you to guess whether they succeed or not.

I know that in this love it or thunder it era, you’re not allowed to have nuanced feelings about films. But I don’t know how you discuss Thor: Love and Thunder without having a nuanced take. Because there are some really bad things in this movie. But there’s also really good stuff too! So it’s hard to lay it over the “terrible” barrel and give it a spanking. It hasn’t misbehaved enough to do so.

Let’s start with the really good, which is Christian Bale. I feel bad for Bale because this may be the best acting job he’s ever done. I mean that. And it’s going to be lost in a mid-tier Marvel movie. The opening scene where he loses his daughter is heartbreaking. The following scene where he kills a God is mesmerizing. And any scene he was in after that was captivating.

However, Christian Bale is in a completely different movie from everybody else, starting with Thor. Thor is in Dumb and Dumber. That’s really what I would compare this to. It’s Marvel’s version of Dumb and Dumber. Except instead of Jim Carrey and Jeff Daniels, we get Chris Hemsworth and Natalie Portman.

What’s so baffling about Natalie Portman is how bad she is in this movie. But what’s even more baffling is that any of us thought that wouldn’t be the case. Portman had zero chemistry with Hemsowrth in the FIRST two Thor movies. Did we all think that Taika had some magical dust he would be able to sprinkle over them that would change that?

You can’t change bad chemistry.

And it’s weird how Portman’s delivery of this fast-and-free go-with-the-flow character comes off so forced. This is how she came into the industry, playing a can’t-shut-up 13 year old temptress who belts out non-stop dialogue like air (Beautiful Girls). Why does she seem so uncomfortable doing it here? She basically destroys any scene she’s in.

As for Thor, I guess they’ve gone full comedy with him. There are no more attempts to even pretend this character should be taken seriously. He’s cracking jokes no matter how close to death he gets. And it undercuts any tension that desperately tries to help this movie work. I felt higher stakes in The Hangover than I did Thor: Love and Thunder.

For example, Takia made this bizarre decision to give Thor a hologram video call ability whereby he could pop into the captured kids’ cage whenever he wanted and crack a bunch of jokes so they stayed calm. And Im thinking, “Do they realize how much suspense and fear and tension this choice destroys?” By showing us a visual of him and the kids hanging out, making jokes, you are showing us that the protagonist has succeeded a full hour before he’s succeed. It’s like you don’t want us to worry even a little bit.

I’m not going to lie. That threw me.

As a screenwriter, one of your mandatory jobs — especially in big budget Marvel movies — is to build as much doubt as possible into your story. The goal must seem impossible. When you do this correctly, we are desperate to keep watching because we have no idea how our characters are going to succeed. We watch to see them figure it out against all odds.

So I don’t know why you would deliberately eliminate all doubt. I suppose I understand that Thor is a full-on comedy at this point. But like I said, I had more doubt that Stu, Allen, and Phil, would find Doug than I did Thor would save these kids.

If you look back at Indiana Jones – the first one – Indiana Jones cracked jokes. It’s part of what made that character so charming. But he didn’t do it EVERY SINGLE LINE. He did it every few scenes or so. That way, when he *did* do it, it had impact.

If we know a joke is coming out of a character’s mouth every single time they speak, you lose that impact that a good joke has. Which means that, now, the jokes have to be EXTRA GOOD to land, because they’re competing against hundreds of other jokes. And that was another problem with this movie. The jokes just weren’t landing.

I will give it to Taika, though. He took big swings. He did so with a major character having cancer. He had a magical mystery tour bus that flew on rainbows and was driven by giant screaming goats. One of his characters was a rock man who lost his entire body and his face was taped to the back of another character. He’d do weird things like crash his characters into a 1960s model of a planet, breaking the filmmaking 4th wall.

It was as if he said, “Every time we come to a fork in the road, we are always going to pick weird.” I love that attitude. It’s better than the other route, for sure.

The most important question to come out of all of this, of course, is “Has Taika lost his magic touch?” Since I’m resting the future of Star Wars on his shoulders, that answer matters to me. I was terrified, after hearing some bad reviews of Love and Thunder, that the Taika train had been relegated to the maintenance track. But I think I understand what happened here. He made Ragnanok. And Ragnarok was perfect. But he didn’t want to repeat that. He had to have a challenge to stay interested in the franchise. So he said, “I’m going to push things further than I’ve ever pushed them before and treat it as a giant experiment.” And that’s why I feel safe with Taika and Star Wars. I think this was an experiment for Taika and he had a blast.

I didn’t have a blast with him. But I left the theater entertained.

[ ] What the hell did I just watch?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[x] worth the price of admission
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius

What I learned: There was a clever use of exposition here. Taika and Robinson had Korg tell a story to children about where Thor was in his life to deal with a lot of information that the audience needed to know (you can hear an abbreviated version of this in the Thor trailer). This is way better than trying to force expositional dialogue into a casual conversation. But what I really liked about this choice was that they used it to set up another important expositional chunk of information. When Jane shows up into the movie, we immediately go back to Korg now telling the story of Jane. When I say they used the first story to set up the second, what I mean is, this Jane exposition story scene doesn’t work if we didn’t have the first one with Thor. The audience would’ve been confused. So I thought that was really clever that they got a 2 for 1 there. The other day I was talking about how you can tell a writer’s improving by how invisible his exposition is getting. And this is a good example of that.

Genre: Drama/Action/WW2
Premise: At the tail end of World War 2, a German war hero is tasked with exterminating 8000 American POWs… but instead helps them escape.
About: Today’s screenplay takes us back to the fruitful screenwriting decade that was the 1990s. Randall Wallace was one of the hottest screenwriters in the world. Just two years previous, in 1995, his movie, “Braveheart,” would capture audiences everywhere and go on to win the Oscar for Best Picture. Today’s 1997 Wallace script had Arnold Schwarzzeneger eagerly ready to commit. However, after Arnold changed his mind, the project never picked up enough steam again to make it to the finish line.
Writer: Randall Wallace
Details: 109 pages

Randall Wallace remains one of the most perplexing screenwriters ever.

He wrote one of the most celebrated, quoted, and memorable war films of all time in Braveheart. But he’s never written anything good since. After Braveheart, which came out in 1995, he got the opportunity of a lifetime in writing The Man In The Iron Mask. That movie, which starred Leonardo DiCaprio, came out on the heels of the most successful film in history, Titanic. It was the biggest box office sure thing that you could’ve attached yourself too, and it was a gigantic bust.

Next up came Michael Bay’s attempt to be taken seriously with Pearl Harbor. That movie, starring an overly eager but still raw Ben Affleck, was also a disaster. Wallace got one more chance to bat, agreeing to write Mel Gibson’s “We Were Soldiers.” But that movie was quickly forgotten almost as soon as it came out.

Wallace hasn’t written any movies since. And the reason I seem so flustered chronicling that reality is because I have this irrational fear that writers only get lucky once. They only have that one story that they perfectly connect with and are able to tell spectacularly, whereas everything else they write is average muck.

This isn’t true, of course. There are plenty of examples of writers who’ve written multiple great screenplays. But Wallace certainly isn’t helping me overcome my fear.

The year is 1944 and things are NOT looking good for the Germans. They’ve already started recruiting 16 year olds into their military ranks. Despite that, Hitler refuses to give up, and any German who even whispers that Germany could lose the war is executed on the spot.

One of the Germans’ last hopes is Nicholas Von Ostermann, a colonel of the Black Eagles, one of the most ruthless special units in the German army. Ostermann is notorious for going into battle against impossible odds and coming out alive.

Ostermann has a 12 year old son, a wife, and a polio-stricken brother, Reinhold, who’s a preacher. Reinhold is secretly working with a military unit to assassinate Hitler before all that’s left of Germany is ashes.

Despite Russia closing in on every front, Ostermann is determined to protect his country and heads north to stop the Russians from invading Berlin. He succeeds but in the process is shot and killed. Or so we think. Ostermann wakes up in some field being mass-buried with other deceased German soldiers. Ostermann kills the Russians, steals their truck, and drives home.

But he gets home to a Berlin that’s being bombed to smithereens. And his poor son is dead. Like REALLY dead. Although devastated, Ostermann is immediately ordered to travel to a POW camp that’s holding 8000 captured American bombers and then exterminate them. I didn’t know it was possible to capture that many bombers but okay.

Once there, Ostermann realizes he doesn’t want to kill anyone anymore. So he tells the prison brain trust that he’s going to separate the strong from the weak. He’ll tell the strong soldiers he’s rescuing them, but really, he’s leading them to an ambush where they’ll be wiped out. From there, they’ll slaughter all the weaker soldiers without any resistance.

But his real plan is to sneak a bunch of guns out with the Americans, and when they encounter the Germans, they’ll kill them all, and then make a run for the border, where American forces will be waiting. What makes things interesting is that the Americans don’t exactly trust this guy. So they have to decide if they should kill him the second they’re free. What will happen? I don’t know but I’m guessing a lot of chaos is going to be involved!

I’m trying to figure out how this script was put together. Because I get the sense it was majorly over-developed, with Wallace taking on and trying to incorporate a bunch of conflicting notes. This can happen during any development process. But it was especially prevalent in the 90s when there was a ton of money in development, and studios would put screenplays through the meat-grinder in search of creating that perfect link of screenplay sausage.

The script starts off with this German officer randomly running around Germany getting into conflicts. There’s no real direction to the story. It’s not bad. Wallace is a solid writer and every page reads well in a vacuum. But at one point, Ostermann dies, and then he comes back to life, and then he runs back to Germany, but literally the second he gets there, his town is bombed and his son is killed. It’s like we’re in a salt shaker and the writer can’t stop shaking it.

There are a lot of discussions with his brother, who’s an interesting character, but who, if we’re being honest, has no reason to be in the movie. This is where Hollywood seems clueless at times. You can get hung up on a cool character (he’s got polio! An actor will love to play him!). But everything interesting this character does, like put together a plan to kill Hitler, happens off-screen. He’s nowhere near the main plot.

The film eventually focuses in once Ostermann gets to the POW camp. Finally, we have ourselves a clear narrative. But why all the willy-nilly 40 pages of nonsense to get there? I get that if we see Ostermann’s son die, we’re going to feel more compassion for him than if his son’s death is backstory. But if you’re weighing 40 pages of setup to get that one death? I’m sorry but getting to the meat of the screenplay is way more important.

With that said, Ostermann is a strong character and I understand, from a studio’s point of view, why they made a few of these holding-up-the-narrative choices. At one point, Ostermann dies heroically in battle only to wake up as the Russians are mass-burying truckloads of dead Germans.

I can see an actor like Arnold Schwarzenegger flipping out for that scene. Which is one of the many paradigms of the business of screenwriting. Sometimes you have to detour your entire story to get a cool scene in because the star actor wants it in. As hard as that is for me to accept as a lover of writing, I do understand it from a business point-of-view.

And in Wallace’s defense, he creates two really fun characters here. Ostermann is this war hero who just won’t die. And then the other guy is Crane, the American bomber whose plane crashes and eventually is sent to the POW camp.

I always tell writers how important it is, especially in big movies like this, to give your main characters a whopper of a character introduction. And boy do we get one with Crane. He’s in the back of the bomber plane, watching as all of the bombs are being dropped when, all of a sudden, they get clogged together, in the drop-hole. And the bombs are active! So if they don’t do something fast, their plane will be blown to smithereens.

So Crane leaps on top of these active bombs and starts stomping on them to unclog them. It’s a great scene and immediately makes him a stand-out character.

On top of all this, the script nails one of the Screenwriting 101 tenets, which is to give us a new spin on something familiar. World War 2 scripts are a dime a dozen. But there aren’t many World War 2 movies where the main character is a Nazi. That’s a unique take and immediately makes the script stand out.

I would say that With Wings as Eagles could still be made today. But it needs to better establish what it is – which is basically a prison-break movie – and build its narrative around that from the get-go. Give us an opening scene showing Ostermann kick a$$ on the battlefield. Then have him receive the orders to go to the POW camp. Then cut to the POW camps so we can meet all the American prisoners. Establish all of them. Ostermann shows up. And we’re off to the races.

It’s endlessly annoying reading all these screenwriters overcomplicating their screenplays. It’s what kills 7 out of every 10 scripts I read. Get all the gunk out of the way and just give us a simple narrative with some really great characters and I guarantee we’ll be satisfied.

Despite all this, maybe because I’m feeling that July 4th holiday fireworks goodness exploding around me, I think this is a light “worth the read.” Check it out yourself with the script link NOW!

Script link: With Wings As Eagles

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

What I learned: The “Make Up For Lost Time” Character Intro — You already know that when you want to create a strong character, you have to give them a big memorable introduction. However, there’s an even more important time to do this. Let’s say that your story forces you to spend a ton of time setting up your main character, not unlike the way Ostermann is set up here. Then, you only have one scene to set up a major secondary character. In these times, it is ESSENTIAL that you give them a memorable introductory scene because they don’t have the benefit of the audience spending a lot of time with them like they have your main character. That’s why the Crane ‘bomb stomp’ introduction works so well in With Wings as Eagles. Notice they did this in Star Wars as well. They couldn’t introduce Han Solo early. So they needed to give him a big entrance in order to make up for lost time. They did this with him killing Greedo.