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Genre: Comedy
Premise (from writer): A dysfunctional family must band together to save their outcast daughter from marrying into a cult.
Why You Should Read (from writer): My name is Allison Raskin and I’ve been a fan of the site for years. I graduated from USC’s screenwriting program in May 2011. I’ve been lucky enough to snag a manager (after working as his assistant for a year) but he hasn’t done anything in terms of my writing (instead I go out on audition for roles I’m not pretty enough for because my headshot is misleading). If my logline sounds familiar, it’s because there was a 2008 blacklist script with a similar logline (APOSTLES OF INFINITE LOVE). I wasn’t aware of this until I was halfway through my first draft. I also wasn’t aware that my management company is the one trying to produce it…Despite these obstacles I decide to continue because it was a story I really wanted to tell. Hopefully it will be a story you want to read.
Writer: Allison Raskin
Details: 103 pages

I realize this goes against ethnicity in the script, but Gina Rodriquez for Jenny?

I feel like some of you are holding back on the amateur submissions lately because you’re saving your scripts for The Scriptshadow 250 Contest. Getting your script reviewed here is actually going to IMPROVE your chances of getting into The Scriptshadow 250 since any script good enough to get a review will definitely get into the contest. Also, there isn’t another place on the internet that helps a script get better than Amateur Friday. You not only get feedback from me, but from a group of really smart people who put a lot of time and effort into giving thoughtful notes. After a review here, your script is going to be so much better going into my contest. So keep those submissions coming!

I picked this script today because a few of you personally e-mailed me to tell me you liked it. I also think it’s interesting to review scripts from writers who have representation (“Anonymous” is a huge management company) but haven’t yet broken out. I also love giving female writers a shot since it’s a little harder for them to get a leg up in this male-dominated industry. So let’s take a look!

20 year-old Jenny is going to school at an obscure college in California, light years away from her weird family, which you can probably guess is planned. Jenny is a chubby sci-fi loving nerd who aches for any kind of attention, and secretly wishes that her family will finally wake up and realize how important she is to them.

So it probably isn’t a surprise that when mini-celebrity sci-fi author Bozeltus shows up at her bookstore, she falls in love with him. Unfortunately, Bozletus has a little L. Ron Hubbard in him, and has created his own religion based on his books. Still, when he asks Jenny to marry him, she’s so happy that someone’s finally given her the time of day, she says yes.

When the fam finds this out, they decide to make a cross-country trip to save Jenny, but they’re so ignorant of her life, that finding her proves to be a lot harder than they expected. You’ve got the selfish mom, the selfish hot older sister, the sister who has since had a sex-change and is now the brother, the dad (who’s just been diagnosed with MS), and the pretty sister’s new psychologist boyfriend, the only level-headed member of the group.

The script is really about the family learning who they are during the trip, with the occasional cut back to Jenny at the compound. It’s back there where Jenny learns that Bozeltus keeps everybody high or drunk so they’re easier to control, he’s already married to several other women at the compound, and, oh yeah, the consummation of their marriage is going to happen in front of all the members.

As Jenny becomes more and more nervous about her decision, her family races to get to her before L. Ron makes her his galaxy queen. But can the family figure out their own issues in time to do so? And will they finally realize that it was their fault that Jenny got into this situation in the first place? Read the script to find out!

WHAT I LIKED
The script has a great energy to it. Even if you’re not a fan of the sense of humor being used, you can appreciate the way the comedy pops along. The main character is original – a 20 year old female who loves science-fiction books. I don’t run into many characters like that. Overall, the family was very colorful and unique. A common complaint in most amateur screenplays is that the characters all sound the same. That’s not the case here. Everyone definitely sounds and acts differently. And finally, this isn’t an empty comedy premise. We’re exploring something here – broken families and the importance of love, attention, and support.

THE FIRST ACT
The first act moved too slowly. I’m not sure the opening flashback where a 13 year-old Jenny is bombing at her bat mitzvah is needed. Maybe if it was funnier I’d keep it – but the comedy was very straightforward – a girl is a bad singer at her bat mitzvah. A comedy has to take a funny idea and find a fresh angle on it. This was pretty standard stuff and I don’t know if it deserves the most important section of real estate in the screenplay – the first five pages. I actually tell a lot of writers to get rid of these opening flashback scenes and they often come back to me saying, “But then you don’t know how bad her family life is. I need to establish that” The thing is, we get that her family relationship is bad in the very next scene, when Jenny calls home and the family doesn’t give a shit. In that moment, we can imagine that there was a shitty bat mitzvah (or something like it) without having to spend 3 pages on it. Never underestimate how much you can convey to the reader in a very short amount of time. Getting rid of this scene also allows you to set up Jenny’s adult life better, since you can jump right into it.

SIMILAR SCENES IN THE OPENING ACT ARE DEATH
There are either two or three scenes in the opening 15 pages with Jenny sitting somewhere alone. They each have something a little different going on in them, but they’re generally the same thing – Jenny is sitting alone proving she’s a loner without friends. We don’t need you to show us that three times, especially since each time is so static (character sitting down being lonely). Especially early on, you want to show movement. For example, if you want to show how much Jenny loves sci-fi books, maybe instead of showing her reading one (boring) she’s at a bookstore trying to hunt down a rare print of one of her favorite books (note: to Allison’s credit, she did have a scene with Jenny in the car listening to a sci-fi audiobook – but the scene still wasn’t necessary. There was nothing going on in it that told us something we didn’t know through these other scenes – that she’s a sci-fi book nerd).  This is actually a great opportunity to combine scenes.  Why not combine the scene where she’s calling her family with the scene where she’s listening to her audiobook in her car?

THE COMEDY
I don’t love to give comedy advice since comedy is subjective and my own sense of humor is a little left-of-center, but I wanted to make a couple of observations about the comedy here. First, I don’t think “on-the-nose” comedy is a great option. I suppose it can be used ironically but I’m not sure that’s what’s happening here. Giving a character the name “Buzzkill Jones?” Wouldn’t it be funnier if he’s got a regular name and, through his actions and dialogue, you show him to be the biggest buzzkill ever? Also, I’d be careful about featuring debilitating diseases in comedy. It’s not that they can’t be funny. And I know 50/50 did okay. But it’s typically something people find more depressing than funny. Remember that you’re a writer. And therefore you have the power to do ANYTHING. That means hitting the same joke without bringing people down. Why, for example, can’t the father go online and self-diagnose himself and become convinced (without any medical knowledge whatsoever) that he has MS? Now you can play with him reacting to what he thinks the disease is doing to him. He can accelerate through all the stages during the trip. That’d be my advice.

JENNY
I wasn’t the biggest fan of Jenny because she seemed so needy. Whenever you write a main character, consider how that character would be received in real life, and you’ll get a pretty good indication of how they might be received by readers/viewers. The way Jenny hangs up the parent phone call after they forgot her birthday and says to herself: “Happy birthday to me.” Or when she hears about how another character’s mom smothered him, you write: “She’d kill to be smothered.” It’s so desperately needy. I understand that you need to convince the reader why she would marry a cult leader, but that doesn’t 100% excuse it. I think you need to calibrate the situation here and look for a way to get the same point across without jeopardizing our support of your hero. For example, you can use “offset traits” – positive traits you can give characters to offset their negative vibe. Or, you can find another personality trait to hit with Jenny (low self-esteem?) that doesn’t turn the reader off so much.

IN SUMMARY
I think there’s something here. This is an inherently funny premise. It was a little too over-the-top for me, but so was Little Miss Sunshine, a similar film. So taste could be playing into that assessment. I think Allison is a good writer and I hope some of these observations help her improve.

Screenplay link: Jenny’s Got a Cult

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

What I learned: Yesterday we talked about “leading,” a very powerful storytelling tool. Today’s script actually used leading IN THE TITLE, which I thought was interesting. The first 20 pages are a little slow, but I wanted to keep going since I knew that Jenny was going to be in a “cult” at some point. So I was committed to, at the very least, getting to that point. The lesson here is, you can use your title as a lead if you want to.

For those of you who’ve been following the site for a long time now, you’ll remember when I first introduced the GSU model (Goal, stakes, urgency). And despite being subjective, I think it’s still a great model for writing a screenplay. You come up with a goal (Liam Neeson needs to rescue his daughter), make sure the stakes are high (his daughter’s life is on the line) and add some urgency (Neeson’s CIA buddies tell him he’s got 72 hours before she’s gone forever).

As some of you may have noticed, however, the “GSU” model doesn’t work as well when you’re writing a slow-building drama or a biopic or a period piece. In particular, the “goal” aspect isn’t as much of a priority. So if you look at something like American Sniper, what’s the main goal in that screenplay? It doesn’t really emerge until halfway through the story, where Chris Kyle heads up a team that’s trying to take down the number two man in Al-Qaeda.

Personally, I think goal-focused writing is great. You can use it for the whole meal (“You must find the Ark of the Covenant, Indiana Jones!”), or as an occasional snack (In Nightcrawler, one of Lou’s goals is to find his first footage and sell it).

And this leads into our topic of the day, which actually began last week, when I found myself on Youtube watching Vitaly TV at 3 in the morning, procrastinating my ass off. After watching Vitaly proposition a man to spread nutella on his butt, I noticed a recommended video on the side for ballroom dancing. Now I have about as much interest in ballroom dancing as Grendl has for complimenting screenwriters. But for that very reason, I clicked on it, wondering if Youtube knew something about me that I didn’t.

I started watching the clip, and, as I predicted, I was bored. But then something happened. I started to become mesmerized by the structure of this dance, specifically how commanding and powerful the man was in leading it. There was a moment, even, when the woman looked in his eyes, and she was swooning just because of his command. Whether he was pulling or twisting or charging, he led with a confidence that was, quite honestly, inspiring.

It just so happened that I was reading an amateur screenplay at the time. Like a lot of amateur screenplays, it was all over the place. The writer didn’t know how to focus our attention. And it was at that moment that I married these two observations. A screenplay is like dancing. As the writer, it’s your job to lead.

It was a light bulb moment for me because up until that point, I thought you could only pepper your screenplay with goals to keep it focused. But actually, as long as you lead the reader – as long as you let them know where you’re going – they’ll trust you and stay with you.

Let me give you an example of this. I was sent a romantic comedy script and the writer told me up front that the script was boring and he couldn’t figure out why. So I read it and he was right. It was boring. It just didn’t have any life to it. Generally speaking, it was about a self-help guru who falls in love with a woman.

So I put the script down and thought about why I was bored. And the main reason was, the characters just sort of wandered through their experiences together. There was no endgame to their interactions or their lives. Now, in the past, I might’ve told the writer, “Okay, there’s no clear GSU here. We need to give the main character a clear goal that lasts the entire narrative. Maybe he’s got a deadline for a book he’s writing or something.”

But after watching that ballroom video, I’d probably say to the writer, “You need to lead better. You need to let the reader know that we’re going somewhere important, even if it’s just for the time being.” So I asked the writer about the self-help universe and he mentioned that in his research, he found out about these big self-help expos, and I told him, “You have something there.”

What if we have our hero performing on a panel at an important self-help expo in the middle of the screenplay (we could even make it the mid-point)? Now, a scene like that could end up being good or it could end up being horrible. It’s up to the writer to deliver. However, the effect this had was way more far-reaching than the expo sequence itself. By mentioning near the beginning of the script that the expo was happening, the reader now felt like THEY WERE BEING LED. They trusted the writer because the writer was telling them that he had a plan for this journey. It was no longer just two people babbling to each other.

Leading can encompass all sorts of things. In fact, a goal like “finding the Ark of the Covenant” is leading in a sense. But leading can also be much more subtle. I remember in the movie Dazed and Confused – which is one of the looser narratives you’re ever going to find – Richard Linklater is constantly throwing in little leads here and there.

The football coach comes up to the quarterback and tells him he has to sign a “I won’t do drugs” form by the end of the day. We’re being LED because we want to see if he signs it. Mitch, the 8th grader, is told repeatedly by his friends that the high schoolers are going to paddle the shit out of him after the last day of school. So again, we’re being LED towards an event – Mitch getting paddled.

The idea behind leading is simply to indicate a future event with some importance behind it. You can lead within a scene, you can lead within a sequence (6-12 scenes), you can lead something that happens all the way at the end of the screenplay. As long as you’re giving us a future to look forward to.

So say your main character is in high school and he’s about to walk into class but the teacher stops him and says, sternly, “I need to talk to you after class.” That’s leading. During the entire classroom scene, we know that the teacher confrontation is coming. Or maybe two roommates are chatting and one mentions that his sister is coming to stay with them in a few days. Subconsciously, the reader is now thinking, “Well I at least have to read to find out about this sister.” If you don’t lead, they’d never know the sister was coming and they’d get bored.

But guess what, there’s more! I found an even more powerful way to lead, which I call LEADING WITH STEROIDS. It includes a familiar friend of ours – STAKES. If you want your leads to really hook the reader, raise the stakes on them. So in the example I just gave you about the roommate who said his sister was coming – Let’s say in the next scene, the roommate goes online to check what this sister looks like. And she’s GORGEOUS. Now he’s FREAKING out and for the next few days, ALL HE CAN THINK ABOUT is this sister and how she’s coming to stay with them. A simple curiosity about this sister now becomes a big event, because one of the characters is infatuated with her, so we can anticipate entertaining scenarios. If you don’t include this second scene, though, the lead isn’t going to be as powerful.

I always thought that a big goal was the only way to give a script focus. But as long as the writer is consistently and cleverly using leads to keep us invested, they don’t even need a giant goal dominating the story. Of course, studios are still going to prefer the big goals for their big movies. But when you’re writing something a little smaller or more experimental, leading is a great way to keep the reader invested. Use this new screenwriting power wisely. With great power comes great responsibility!!!

Genre: Thriller
Premise: A “Gone Girl” like tale where a young girl goes missing and the father becomes the number one suspect… but not for what you’d expect.
About: One of the hottest young writer-directors out there is Damien Chazelle. Chazelle started off with a movie I still think explored the most ridiculous premise of that year (Grand Piano – about a pianist being texted by a killer during his concert performance). Then, of course, he broke through with last year’s Sundance hit, Whiplash, which has since gone on to nab five Oscar nominations. Nice! This script is a recent Black Lister.
Writer: Damien Chazelle
Details: 120 pages (undated)

Chazelle (middle) with his Whiplash team.

One of the things I’ve noticed a lot lately while reading screenplays is that they’re very “screenplay-y.” What the hell is that supposed to mean? It means that I’m very aware that I’m reading a screenplay and, because of that, it’s hard for me to suspend my disbelief.

Now screenwriting has always carried this handicap of forcing writers to write inside the most writing-unfriendly format there is. There are ugly capitalized lines at the top of scenes that say things like “INT.” You’ve got weird and varied margins. The writing style is often clipped and abrupt.

All these things castrate any chance a screenplay has at naturalism.  And if I’m being honest, it’s started to bother me. FRANK. Dashes forward. Gets to Monica. Boom. They tumble.  Whatever happened to sentence structure???

I understand that sometimes you’re writing an action scene and writing in bursts helps convey energy. But every once in awhile I’ll see a writer use a full clean well-written sentence, and I’ll feel like I’m actually reading again. There’s something to be said for words flowing into one another – for us to take a journey through a sentence.

Frank dashes forward. He catches up to Monica only to have their legs collide. They tumble like clothes in the washing machine before crashing to the pavement.

I’m not going to step on anybody’s style here. Write how you want to write. But just know that you have the option to write complete sentences every once in awhile. And when you write them well, they can be quite pleasing! That doesn’t mean I’m giving you a green light to go prose-heavy. But go ahead and give us a beginning, a middle, and an end to a sentence every so often.

What does this have to do with The Claim? Well, Chazelle’s script does adopt that staccato writing style for the most part. And I get it. This is a thriller. I’m not saying what he’s doing is wrong. I suppose I’m just on the hunt for good-old fashioned REAL WRITING at the moment.

28 year old Harry Novak is trying to make ends meet as a mechanic but only barely getting by. And if it were only about him, he could handle the struggle. But he’s also got a 4 year old angel named Sophie he’s got to provide for. And he’s doing everything he can. In fact, when we meet him, he’s picking her up from swim practice.

When Harry and Sophie get home, Harry’s shocked to see that his place has been broken into. He looks around, however, and notices that not a single thing has been taken. Strangely, that makes the event even more terrifying.

When Harry gets a call for a quick shift change, he heads to work with his daughter, only for the car in front of him to stall. A huge bumper to bumper traffic jam follows. Luckily, being a mechanic, Harry’s able to fix the car quickly.

But when Harry looks back to his car, Sophie is GONE! He starts freaking out, but the cars start driving around him and there’s nothing he can do but head to the cops. They put an Amber Alert out for Sophie, and that’s when things get weird.

Within minutes, a family up in San Francisco calls to claim that this is THEIR baby who’s been missing for two years. The cops question Harry, who it turns out WAS up in San Francisco when this baby was abducted. Not only that, but Sophie’s mother (Harry’s ex) claims she has no idea who Harry is.

Harry’s able to escape custody and go on the run, where he searches for his daughter. What he finds out along the way is that this kidnapping goes far deeper than he could have ever imagined.

The Claim is fun. It really is. It’s the kind of script that readers like to read because there’s a new reveal or a new twist every 7-10 pages. Which gives it that roller coaster feel.

But here’s the most important thing Chazelle did to get this script noticed and it’s something all of you need to remember every time you write a screenplay. He adds a SECOND family claiming that the girl was kidnapped from them 2 years ago.  Now you don’t just have Liam Neeson chasing bad guys. You have a mystery. And not a simple one either. Who kidnapped Sophie? How is this other family in on it? Why isn’t Sophie’s mom (who Harry had her with) claiming to know who Harry is?

Any story where you can explore two genres at once (a thriller and a mystery) has the potential to be a lot more fun than your basic straight-forward genre tale.

But did Chazelle pull it off? For the most part, yes. I was unapologetically wrapped up in whether this San Francisco family really lost their child or if they were pulling a scam. And if they weren’t pulling a scam, then who orchestrated this kidnapping? And what did they want??

I do think Chazelle has a problem with something I call “Page Reality” though. Sometimes, a writer will take advantage of the fact that the reader can’t physically see the scene, and they’ll use that to cheat. So here, the critical scene has Harry helping fix this man’s car in front of him for 5 seconds. When he turns around, his daughter is no longer in her seat.

Now we’ve been told that this is a traffic jam and there are cars everywhere. How in the world does a man steal a child from a car in broad daylight during a traffic jam in under five seconds, and nobody sees it? It doesn’t make sense. And it’s a pristine example of a writer using the page to camouflage reality.

This was the same problem I had with Grand Piano. I read so many moments of that character texting where I was like, “There’s no way the audience can’t see this.” It drove me nuts.

The Claim isn’t perfect. It gets a little lost in its twists sometimes. It probably stays around longer than it should. But it’s the kind of script that’s hard to put down. And achieving that with any screenplay ain’t too shabby.

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

What I learned: “But what if I did this?” Every time you come up with a concept, particularly one that feels familiar or simplistic, you owe it to yourself to ask the question “But what if I did this?” a dozen or more times to see if there’s more you can do with the idea. Kidnapped girl scripts are a dime-a-dozen. Kidnapped girl scripts where a second couple is claiming that the daughter is theirs – we’ve never seen that before. That’s usually when you know you’ve got an idea. When you approach, “I don’t think I’ve seen that before” territory.

Genre: Biopic
Premise: In the 80s, a rogue pilot becomes Ground Zero for the majority of the cocaine being smuggled into the US. The crazy thing? He’s being funded by the United States government.
About: This was a huge “spec” package early last year. Sold for 7 figures with Ron Howard attached to direct. It’s since nabbed Tom Cruise as the lead to play Barry Seale and Doug Liman (who teamed with Cruise on Edge of Tomorrow) to take over directing duties. The script also finished in the top 10 of the most recent Black List. I remember reading Spinelli’s breakthrough spec five years ago – a clever idea about a man who kidnapped criminals and auctioned them off to rival crime bosses. It didn’t put him on the top of any studio’s list, but it got the town’s attention. He kept writing and, five years later, nabbed one of the top 3 spec sales of the year. It just goes to show that you’re playing the long game here. Break through with a cool spec, don’t celebrate, put your nose back to the grindstone, keep writing, keep generating material, get more and more people familiar with your work. Then one day, that opportunity presents itself for a huge payday and the ultimate goal of being a produced writer.
Writer: Gary Spinelli.
Details: 128 pages – 10/26/13 draft

It’s a new world. A biopic world. After American Sniper, scripts like Mena, Jobs, and that McDonald’s movie are top priority for studios sick of working on the next actors-in-tights SFX fiasco (I mean seriously – is anyone really that excited to work on Wonder Woman?). Now I could go on my rant about why I’m not a huge fan of biopics, but the first half of Mena makes my argument for me.

There isn’t a single dramatized scene in the first 67 pages of this screenplay. The entire first half of the script is voice over and exposition. This doesn’t seem to bother some people and I can’t for the life of me figure out why. It’s nice to learn fun tidbits about how we stole weapons from Palestine, then sold them to secretly win wars in South America. But unless you give me a few scenes with some actual suspense mixed in, I’m going to have a hard time staying awake.

But hey, I was singing the same uninspired tune after reading American Sniper. And look how that turned out. This could be a very good omen for Ron Howard and Co.

Mena follows our adrenaline junkie hero, TWA pilot Barry Seale, through the 1980s, when he realizes he wants something more out of life. Being a commercial pilot pays well. But “light rain” on the runway is hardly enough excitement to get Barry up in the morning.

So when Barry gets an offer from the CIA to fly small planes through South America to track revolutionary movements there, he takes it. Being opportunistic, Barry then uses the contacts he makes in South America to smuggle cocaine back into the U.S.

Thinking he’s sly, Barry is shocked to find out that the CIA knew what he was doing all along. In fact, they orchestrated it! By having someone in tight with the cartels of South America, it allows them to influence the factions of government that run things down there. They also start using the money Barry makes from the drug running to purchase stolen weapons from the Palestinian war and sell those weapons to U.S. friendly forces down in South America.

Confused? I sure as hell was.

Anyway, a local cop in the tiny town Barry lives in starts to suspect that Barry is a shady character (could it be the giant mansion he’s built in the cash-strapped town?) and begins looking into his suspicious activities. To make matters even more complicated, the president at the time, Ronald Reagan, declares a war on drugs, seeking to destroy operations like Barry’s, despite the fact that he’s unofficially funding him!

The next thing Barry knows, the FBI is moving into town. The attorney general wants to know what’s up. And Barry’s supposedly untouchable operation is at risk of imploding, bringing down himself, the South American drug trade, and the CIA. You can bet your ass though, that when those organizations are threatened, the last person they’re going to be thinking of protecting is Barry Seale.

Clearly, this was written with the hopes of getting Scorsese to direct. It’s got his signature “Mythology Breakdown” opening, where he over-examines the intricacies of the subject matter via copious amounts of voice over.  Instead of Scorsese, though, we get Doug Liman.  Which, while no Scorsese, is still an upgrade over Ron Howard.  Ron Howard trying to pull off a Scorsese film is a little like Nicholas Sparks trying to write Fight Club.

Here’s my big issue with Mena, regardless of who’s making it. Barry’s external life is an interesting one. He’s robbing the very government he’s working for. He’s using his drug connections to make himself rich. He’s delivering weapons that are shaping the future of South America.

But go ahead and read back those accomplishments. They’re all EXTERNAL. It’s not Barry who’s interesting. It’s the situations he finds himself in that are interesting. Barry himself is a pretty basic dude. There’s no real conflict within him. He’s not battling any demons. His relationship with his family is practically an afterthought (at least in this draft). So what is Barry dealing with on an internal level?

At least with Chris Kyle in American Sniper, you could feel a battle raging inside of our protagonist. He’s been made a hero for killing people –in some cases children. And he struggles to come to terms with that. I guess I wanted more of a character study in Mena and not just two hours of “look at all this crazy shit that’s happened to me.” Especially because we’re not so much being SHOWN this crazy shit as we’re given an audio play-by-play of it.

Earlier I was talking about the lack of a dramatized scene until page 67. What did I mean by that? Well, the first 67 pages of Mena consist of Barry laying out the bullet points of how he smuggled drugs and ran weapons back and forth between the Americas. There wasn’t a single scene between characters that consisted of an unknown outcome.

Finally, on page 67, Barry is tasked with having to kill his brother-in-law and partner, who’s been captured by the police. After getting him out on bail, Barry plans to take his partner out to the desert and kill him. FINALLY! A SCENE WITH SOME FUCKING SUSPENSE! It was the first time I actually leaned in and was excited to see what happened next. For once, there wasn’t a Wikipedia voice over yapping away at me.

And that’s how I like my stories told. I like when writers set up uncertain situations that hook us into wanting to read more. I get that we have to set SOME story up first but, man, 67 pages is an awful long time to set up story.

There’s definitely something to Barry Seale. There are too many wacky components to his life to call this an ill-informed project. But we must remember that while the external stuff is always fun, it’s not what’s going to emotionally hook an audience. If you’re writing a biopic, you’re saying that first, and foremost, this is a character study. So give us a study of the character.  Not just the shit he gets into.

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

What I learned: A great way to write a suspenseful (dramatized) scene is to follow this formula:

a) Create a problem that results in a difficult choice for your main character.
b) Make the stakes of that problem as high as you can.
c) Have the outcome of this issue completely unknown.
d) Draw the scene out as long as you can.

This is why that scene on page 67 brought my full attention to the script for the first time.

a) Barry knows the only way to keep his step-brother quiet is to kill him.
b) If Barry doesn’t kill him, the CIA and the Columbians will come after Barry.
c) We sense Barry is going to kill his step-brother but we don’t know for sure.
d) This all plays out over a long car ride from the jail to the desert.

Hey guys, sorry for no Amateur Offerings Saturday and the re-post of a Newsletter review today (sign up for the newsletter here). Busy at work putting the Scriptshadow 250 Contest together. So hang tight and discuss all the goodness that directors like Matthew Vaughn bring to the world…

Genre: Action/Spy
Premise: A young British hooligan is recruited into a top secret agency founded on the principles of the Knights of the Round Table.
About: This is Matthew Vaughn’s (Kick-Ass, X-Men: First Class) upcoming film, which he wrote with longtime collaborator Jane Goldman. It’s based on the comic book, “The Secret Service.” Vaughn was offered pretty much every major movie property in town, but the director likes to challenge himself and so avoids working on the same kind of movie twice. That may change with The Secret Service, which is clearly set up to be a major franchise in the vein of James Bond. Rising star Taron Egerton will play the lead role of Eggsy.
Writer: Jane Goldman and Matthew Vaughn (based on the comic book by Dave Gibbons and Mark Millar)
Details: 125 pages – April 2013 draft

If you’re looking to write the next breakout franchise, this is one of the most franchise-friendly formulas you can use. You take a nobody. Have him recruited into a secret organization of some sort. Show him training and getting better. Then have him take on the bad guys. He’ll fail at first, then get stronger, and in the end, he’ll finally defeat the villain. It worked for The Matrix. It worked for Wanted. It worked for Harry Potter. It worked for Remo Williams.

Well, wait. Okay, it didn’t work for Remo Williams. But that wasn’t Remo’s fault.  It was Chiun’s fault.

There are so many qualities about this setup that make it work. You have the underdog conceit (everyone loves an underdog), the training (we love watching someone train and get better at something), and the revelatory mythology that goes with all these stories (all the little nooks and crannies of how the organization came to be).

The setup is so ideal for storytelling, in fact, that you wonder why there aren’t more of these films being made! Well, the one trick in getting them right is coming up with a fresh enough take on them. All the examples I used above felt fresh at the time. Except for Remo Williams. So how does The Secret Service fare?

Jack Lincoln – call him our Galahad – starts off the film leading a group of secret agents (with names like Merlin and Lancelot) to take down a nasty terrorist. But once they capture the terrorist, one of Jack’s men, Lee, notices that the terrorist has a bomb. Lee jumps on him as the bomb goes off, and is killed instantly so that the rest of the group can live.

In a token gesture, Jack goes to Lee’s family (his wife and young son) and tells them that if they ever need a get-out-of-jail-free card, to call. 17 years later, Lee’s son, Eggsy, a hooligan who spends most of his days burglarizing cars and drinking pints of Guinness, needs just that. After getting arrested, he calls to get out of a looming prison sentence, and Jack keeps his promise.

But Jack doesn’t stop there. Jack sees a lot of Lee in Eggsy, and invites him into his top secret organization, Huntsman and Sons. The thing is, Huntsman typically only recruits the best of the best, people from the best backgrounds and the best educations. So Eggsy is a bit of an outsider.

But while everyone else is smarter than Eggsy, Eggsy has that street experience that makes him tougher than his fellow private school recruits. And he’s going to need it. There are some nasty little men the Hustman have to take on, such as “Gazelle,” a guy with  Olympic running blades for legs (I see they’ve changed this character to a female in the final film), except his blades are razor sharp, allowing him to chop up his prey with a Michael Jackson swish of his knee. Woo-hoo! Jam-mone!

Eventually, a true villain arises in the form of a Mark Zuckerberg’esque tech giant who’s unhealthily obsessed with earth’s well-being. Huntsman and Sons begin to suspect that his next product may give him a little too much control over the people who use it. Therefore, Eggsy and his band of merry men will have to put on their big boy secret agent pants to take down Zuckerberg and save the world.

I really like what Goldman and Vaughn are doing here. It’s smart. They’re bringing back the fun to Bond movies without the baggage of Bond. It allows them to create a less kitchsy version of 007, and play with a lot of the humor that the ultra-serious new films are so devoid of. As a kid, my favorite part of the Bond movies was always the gimmicky weapons introductions, and we get plenty of that here (Jack fights with an umbrella with about 50 different gadgets attached to it).

Connecting the Secret Service to the Knights of the Round Table fable was also a clever idea, although I thought this would’ve been so much cooler had the agency literally still have been the Round Table. That the Knights never went away and this was their modern incarnation. But hey, beggers can’t be choosers.

But The Secret Service does have one major problem. It whiffs with its main character. I’m talking about Eggsy. In every one of the movies I mentioned above, the formula is the same. We get to know our underdog hero’s shitty and/or normal life, before they’re recruited into the super-secret organization.

With The Secret Service, the first act is dedicated almost exclusively to everyone BUT Eggsy (our main character). We get to know Jack. We get to know Jack’s boss, the head of the agency. We get to know our Mark Zuckerberg bad guy. When Eggsy does come around, he’s usually gone before you know it.

I think I understand what Goldman and Vaughn were thinking. They wanted to use that time to sell the agency. And there’s no doubt, it’s a cool freaking agency. But the problem with not establishing your hero early, is that the audience feels lost. They don’t have that character whose hand they can hold onto. They don’t have anyone to lead them through the story.  In many ways, the reader in the writer-reader relationship is kind of like a child.  They need the reader to show them the way.  And that’s hard to do if there isn’t a character who steps up to play the “follow me” part.

Granted, this approach has worked before (there’s a ton going on in Star Wars early on outside of Luke), but just because an unorthodox approach worked in another movie doesn’t mean you can just port it over and expect similar results. Every time Eggsy came around, all I could think was, “I don’t know this guy!” When the other recruits made fun of him, I didn’t have a good enough sense of him to know what they were making fun of him about.

Think of another recent film that did this – Godzilla. Now Godzilla was kind of fun. But they spent the first 20 minutes on two characters (the hero’s mom and dad) who both died! They weren’t even in the rest of the movie. That time could’ve been spent getting to get to know our hero!! And what was one of the biggest complaints about Godzilla? That its main character was the most boring part of the movie. Why? Well, there were a few reasons. But not spending the first 20 minutes of the movie getting to know him certainty didn’t help.

Another thing that happens if you don’t feature your hero early is that, when he finally gets his moment, you’re rushing through it.  You’ve lost out on pages and pages of screenplay real estate and now you’re playing catch-up.  It can be done.  In fact, I think Star Wars does this brilliantly.  That one dinner scene with Luke, his aunt and his uncle, conveyed everything we needed to know about Luke (that he had bigger dreams and that he wanted to leave the farm and make a greater impact on the universe).  But what I usually see when writers get themselves in this situation is a lot of on-the-nose statements about the character because the lack of time prevents the use of any subtlety.

This can have a catastrophic effect on the script moving forward.  Since a reader/audience will rarely care about a story in which they don’t connect with the hero, this false rushed set-up of the hero eliminates any chance of connection.  And once an audience makes that choice, they don’t change it.  They will feel that way about the character for the rest of the movie.

With that said, The Secret Service is saved by its pure celebration of fun. This is a world where villains with Olympic blades for legs can slice you in half at a moment’s notice. It’s a world where the training exercises include real bullets. It’s a world where people can kill other people with a text message.

We’ve been missing a film like this. Guardians of the Galaxy proves that people are ready to laugh again. I just wish The Secret Service was more than a fun escape. I wish Goldman and Vaughn gave us a lead with more meat. This could’ve easily been a double worth-the-read or an impressive with a great protagonist.

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

What I learned: Another great reminder that one of the best ways to approach ideas is to look for a previously established idea and update it. Knights of the Round Table? Let’s set in in the present day. Boom, you have yourself a movie.

What I learned 2: There are two people your characters are talking to during dialogue. They’re talking to the other character in the scene (one) and they’re talking to the reader/viewer (two). If you want to excel in dialogue, make sure your characters are first and foremost talking to each other.  The second your characters are talking more to the audience than each other, is the second you’re writing bad dialogue.