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

Genre (from writer): Euro Horror
Premise (from writer): A Transylvanian Countess struggles to conceal her dark inheritance from
two investigators when she finds herself drawn to a bereaved English girl. A love
letter to European vampire cinema of the 1970s.
Why You Should Read (from writer): Because I’d love to see Carson plunge into the hypnotic, eroticized world of Euro Horror! Sure, LET US TOUCH THE SUN is a zillion miles and at least 40 years removed from multiplexes and opening weekends; but I’d like to think it can find an audience among the fanatical followers of dvd labels such as Blue Underground, Redemption and Shameless. Indeed, LET US TOUCH THE SUN was my attempt to write something I would purchase myself from one of these labels, a film possessed by its mysterious female vampire, unerring sense of place, and all-pervasive sensuality. —The script also represents my learning and assimilation of craft techniques over the past four years (I’ve been working on other projects in that time, but nevertheless this one has been through 100+ iterations!) Certainly, its pages incorporate elements I probably wouldn’t utilize again in a hurry; but ultimately I hope the reader leaves with something not dissimilar to the feeling expressed by Linkthis83 last time around: “… I’m adrift in realms, and being guided towards moments where I’m privy to exchanges and happenings that once all these moments are totaled I will have experienced something that I can neither quite describe nor possibly express in a manner that exhibits understanding… but a knowing that something occurred because I felt it… and struggle to define it.”
Writer: Levres de Sang (selected dialogue from J. Sheridan Le Fanu’s “Carmilla” (1872)
Details: 102 pages

Scriptshadow Nation has finally been heard! If I had a dime for every time someone asked me to review amateur entry “Let Us Touch The Sun,” I’d have a big jangling jar full of dimes to take to the grocery store to put in that coin machine, which would then return 20% of my money and give the other 80% to orphans and spit out a special receipt which stated that if I did not cash the receipt within 90 seconds, I not only wouldn’t be able to receive my funds, but I would now owe the supermarket money.

I’m not going to lie. I’m a little scared here. I’m not entirely sure what “Euro Horror” is and I’ve never read a script before that included selected dialogue from another source, much less a source from 140 years ago! I feel like Snoop Dog walking into Carnegie Hall. But as has been the case in the past, you can experience a lot of great things when you go out of your comfort zone, so let’s see if Let Us Touch The Sun does so for me……

It’s 1978 and Countess Valerie Kristeva is under suspicion for the disappearance of four young women. Detective David Chang from America and Inspector Rollin from Interpol are closing in on Valerie’s trail of death, but there’s no way to connect her to these women. It’s gotten so weird that Rollin has come up with this cockamamie idea that Valerie might be a vampire!

Valerie, of course, is a vampire, and not a very patient one. She has a weakness for young women and her latest target is a beautiful 19 year-old hottie named Malika. Valerie invites Malika on a voyage across the sea and when you’re 19 and a beautiful woman invites you to travel the world, how can you possibly say no?

While Valerie plots her seduction of young Malika on the boat, David Chang and Inspector Rollin are off following their respective leads in the killings of the previous girls. Valerie will eventually take Malika home to her castle, where she’ll either turn her into vampire lunch meat or Malika will finally figure out that it’s a little weird a random woman has invited her to a castle and run the hell out of there.

This is going to be a tough review because I love how much Levres has contributed to the site. He’s an invaluable part of the daily conversation here at Scriptshadow. But I’d be doing a disservice to him if I reviewed the script with kid gloves and it sounds like Levres understands that this script is a little… offbeat. So I’m going go at these notes like I would any other script and Levres can determine if they’re relevant to what he’s trying to do or not.

I’ll start by saying, I could see this movie in my head. Levres has a very distinct style that echoes a 1970s casualness, an almost presumptuous pace that assumes you’ll spend the rest of your day sipping a coffee in the park and then writing in your diary. There is a patience to the story and boy is that brave in this day and age. I commend Levres for it.

But it should be noted that this style is hard to make work no matter what era you’re in. A story is a story is a story, and stories need to move. If Let Us Touch The Sun were a blender, it would be turned to the lowest setting, and I had trouble waiting for my drink to be ready.

The CAA coverage department’s first note of Let Us Touch The Sun would likely be: “Overwritten.” And I wouldn’t argue with that. A quick look through the pages and here are some words and phrases I pulled out: Photogravure, Casa Angola, Cossack style, Foster Grants, Noh mask, perspex screen, slimline Dunhill, somnolent lapis lazuli, afga c60 cassette,

I don’t mind a flourish here and there but when there are a 100+ words I’ve never seen before in a screenplay, or that I’ve seen infrequently enough that I have to read them twice to place them, that can take its toll on a read. I like to enjoy a script, not work for it. And too much of the writing here made me work – squinting through the fog of prose to discern what was really being said.

Indeed by page 50, I was only understanding around 60% of the information on the page. For example, I didn’t understand why Valerie was waiting to turn Malika into a vampire. Why not just turn her into one right away? To be honest, I didn’t even know where they were going on their trip. I know that information is in the script somewhere but that’s the danger of stressing purple prose over clarity, is that the reader is more likely to miss important details.

And that’s how this read. Every 10 pages, I felt like I understood the story less instead of more. I knew there was an internal logic to the plot and I knew that Levres knew where he was going. But the fog-like prose really made it hard for me to keep up. I feel guilty about this and I considered going back and re-reading the script to fill in those gaps but I realized that the average reader isn’t going to do this, so I can’t either.

On the story side, I thought Levres could’ve done more with the detectives. Here we had Valerie on the boat with Malika for a majority of the script and the two detectives were halfway across the world doing their own thing. I wanted them to be closer. I wanted Valerie to feel that pressure, of them putting the pieces together. And really, I wanted there to be only one detective. Having two was confusing and spread the inspection storyline too thin.

What about putting the inspector on the boat with them (I know he starts out there but then he leaves early on)? And actually, if we’re using yesterday’s article as a guide for how to improve a screenplay, what about making the victim and the inspector one and the same?

So you make the Inspector a woman, the female version of Michael Douglas’s character in Basic Instinct. Valerie, who would now play the Sharon Stone black widow character, invites (the now older) Inspector Malika on the boat trip to question her about the missing girls. The two then engage in a twisted game of deception where the lines keep crossing.

That’s off the top of my head but still, I guess I’m looking for ways to beef this story up. Everything here comes across so subtle that too much tension is left on the table.

In Levres’ defense, this is not a “screenplay friendly” movie. It’s clearly stylized in a way that only film can capture, like the difference between reading a Terrance Malick screenplay and seeing a Terrance Malick movie. So that has to be factored in here. Still, I think the script is focused more on imagery than story and when I sit down and read a script, I want a good story.

Screenplay link: Let Us Touch The Sun

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

What I learned: There’s a famous story about an agent who told a screenwriter client of his that his script was “too smart.” And that makes for a funny story but I understand what he meant. Hollywood isn’t looking for high art, perfect prose, or the painting version of a screenplay. They’re looking for a great story. Let me repeat that. THEY’RE LOOKING FOR A GREAT STORY. And if anything in your script takes precedence over that, they’re likely to dismiss it. Here, it seems like Levres is more interested in how his script reads than how his story is told. Strip away all the prose here and ask yourself if the story mechanics (what happens and when it happens) are compelling enough. I think everything’s happening too slowly, even for an inherently slow film, and that more plot can be packed into the pages. Of course, this isn’t a genre I understand well so I’ll gladly leave the final decision in Levres’ hands! I wish you the best of luck, Levres, and keep commenting!

Scriptshadow 250 Contest Deadline – 78 days left!

So the other day I was reading a script and while it wasn’t bad, it was missing something. It took me a good 60 pages to figure out what it was, but when I did, I realized how much better the script could be IF the writer became aware of the problem. So what was missing?

CONNECTIVE TISSUE

Connective tissue is the way the individual storylines and individual characters in your script link up. This is where you show your mettle as a writer. You want to connect and interweave as many story threads as you can so that everything works together. Connective tissue is the difference between having tortillas, lettuce, cheese, and beef, and having a taco.

To use a simple example, let’s say your story takes place at a barbershop. Like in most movies, you’ll probably have a love story. That gives us two story threads. The stuff that happens at the barbershop and the stuff that happens in the love story.

Well, wouldn’t it better (and easier) if you could connect these two threads together? Why not make the love interest work at the barbershop with our main character? Or make her the daughter of our hero’s boss? Or make her a businesswoman who’s trying to buy the barbershop?

Why would these connections make the script better? Well, when you connect story threads, then something you do in one thread will AFFECT the other thread, sending ripples through the entire story as opposed to just one part of it.

Let’s say, for example, that the love interest is accused of stealing from the register and gets fired from the barbershop. Furious for being accused of something she (supposedly) didn’t do, she expects our Hero to leave with her. But he doesn’t want to leave because it’s a good job and he likes working here. It’s a sticky situation without an easy solution.

Contrast that with an unconnected storyline, where the love interest works at, say, Macy’s. If she gets fired there, it doesn’t affect our hero in nearly as personal of a way. He consoles her and they move on. The connected situation clearly gives you more drama.

The amateur script I mentioned at the beginning was about a kid who plays for his college basketball team. Because he’s broke, he begrudgingly takes a job managing the books for his criminal father, who’s a local drug kingpin.

The script follows these storylines separately. Over in one lane we have Hero leading his team up the standings. And in the other, Hero struggles through an awkward relationship with his father, whose respect he’s never earned. The two storylines don’t cross over at all. There was NO CONNECTIVE TISSUE.

So I suggested to the writer, instead of the father being a drug kingpin, why can’t he be more of a mobster, with his main business being gambling? That way, he can start betting on his son’s games, eventually asking him to shave points to help him cover the spread. All of a sudden, these totally separate storylines become very connected, offering the writer a story with way more dramatic potential.

The most obvious example of connective tissue is probably Back to the Future. Now you have to take a step back (go back in time, one might say) to imagine this story before it was fully-formed.

On one side of the story, you have this kid who gets stuck in the past and must find a way back to the future. That’s a pretty fun idea, but by itself it’s B-movie material. On the other side of the story, you have Marty’s relationship with his quirky parents, who have sort of given up on life.

The smart writer says, “How can I connect these two storylines so they affect one another?” Well, since Marty’s parents met in this town, what if he’s sent back to the year they met? And what if Marty accidentally meets his mom before his dad does, and she falls in love with Marty instead of him? Now the time travel storyline is directly linked to the parents’ storyline. By utilizing connective tissue, this went from a decent movie idea to one of the best ideas in the history of cinema.

We actually see the reverse of this in Cameron Crowe’s upcoming film, Aloha. The consensus for everyone who’s seen the movie is that it’s incomprehensible (including from the studio head herself, as the Sony leaked e-mails revealed). I remember reading that script and thinking the same thing. And the reason was obvious. There was no connective tissue between any of the storylines.

I specifically remember there was a story about needing to sacrifice something into a volcano as well as a story about launching a satellite. You couldn’t get two more unrelated threads. And when things don’t connect, the audience loses interest, which I’m positive is the reason this film is getting hammered.

So how do you find these connections? Well, first of all, you have to be looking for them. Literally, every story thread in your script, you need to say, “How can I connect that thread with that one?” Sometimes they won’t connect. And that’s fine. But often, you’ll find that just by asking the question, new story opportunities will present themselves.

Most of the time, you’ll find your connections in rewrites. In fact, this should be one of your MAIN GOALS DURING YOUR FIRST FEW REWRITES. That first draft is always the thinnest. Only a few things connect. Reading through a finished draft will help you see things from a bird’s eye view, allowing you to better spot puzzle pieces to connect.

I should note that there is such a thing as OVER-CONNECTING. This is when Joe’s girlfriend is also his father’s step-daughter who happens to own the bike shop that Joe’s best friend works at and the bank Joe is planning to rob is being taken over by his father, etc., etc.

The thing is, I rarely see this. And I don’t think you should worry about it. You can always dial the connections back if people complain. I see way more missed connections than I do over-connections.

You actually know when you’ve got a really inter-connected script when making one change affects MANY OTHER THINGS. If you can just pop a character or a scene or a plot thread out of your script and not have to change anything, then you didn’t do a good job connecting your threads.

And that’s pretty much the gist of it. It’s a simple concept to wrap your head around and it’s one of the more powerful tools in screenwriting. A script where all the story threads are linked together is probably a damn good script.

Genre: Thriller
Premise: After being kicked out of the Navy, a cocaine addict is forced to pilot a narco sub to the U.S. carrying one ton of cocaine.
About: This is the third sale from Dominic Morgan and Matt Harvey, who are starting to make a name for themselves in the action/thriller genre. Their scripts The Bridge and The Controller are both being made into films (by Simon West and James McTeigue respectively). Hyperbaric has landed Tomorrow Never Dies helmer, Roger Spottiswoode.
Writers: Dominic Morgan and Matt Harvey
Details: 94 pages

You may not have seen many submarine movies lately. But that’s about to change. Studios are all developing their individual sub flicks for their once-every-five-years foray into the genre (or should I say SUB-genre – heh heh).

So why, with submarine films not being nearly as popular as they used to be, are studios still betting on them? Because they’re cheap! You only have to build one set. Also, unlike a lot of “single location” films, submarines aren’t stationary, which opens up many more story possibilities than, say, a group of people stuck in a bomb shelter.

And as long as we’re talking about submarine movies, I’m going to give you a free submarine idea to write yourself, since I’m never going to write it. You ready?

So a couple of years ago, the U.S. located two nuclear-armed Chinese subs hanging out a few miles off the East Coast. All you need to do is create a modern day “Cuban Missile Crisis” out of the situation. The U.S. spots some Chinese subs hiding off its shore. They send one of their subs to take them down. They hit one, but the other escapes. Tempers flare between the nations and in the meantime, you now have an angry rogue Chinese sub with nuclear capabilities off our coast.

Boom, count the billions. Just give me an associate producer credit.

Conall McGinty is an addict of the highest order. The guy will drink cooling fluid to get a buzz, and I’m not even sure that has alcohol in it. Conall’s biggest weakness though, is coke, and that’s what’s gotten him into his latest predicament.

Conall owes a gang of Mexicans thousands of dollars after snorting more cocaine than he sold. They were set to kill him until they found out he used to pilot subs in the Navy. This makes him a hot commodity on the homemade sub circuit – you know, those crazy motherfuckers who build their own subs to smuggle drugs into the U.S.

So a crazy beast of a man named Gamboa buys McGinty from the Mexcians in hopes that he can pilot 1 TON of cocaine (yes, you read that right, TON) to America. The two are joined by the sub’s creator, an OCD mad scientist type named Ethan Bellhaus.

When Ethan explains to Conall that his sub is made out of fiberglass, Conall nearly falls down laughing. That’ll barely get them 30 feet below sea level, a good 30 feet higher than they need to be to pull this off. Conall says that if they try to go any lower than that, the sub will collapse in on itself, but Ethan insists the sub can take it.

As they head to their destination, they’re bombarded with a series of obstacles: They’re chased by the coast guard, a 19 year old pregnant stowaway has snuck onto the ship, and at one point, the sub takes on so much water that it begins sinking. It’ll take every bit of skill Conall has to pull this off, which isn’t much, since we find out that Conall never even made it out of sub school.

I can’t stress this enough. If you want to sell a spec screenplay, this is the perfect way to go about it. Start with a marketable genre (Thriller), a marketable premise (submarine on the run), keep the action sparse and easy to read (Most action paragraphs here are 1-2 lines), have a low character count so it’s easy for the reader to remember who’s who without having to take notes (this is so important), and finally, make the concept cheap. Like I said at the outset, this is essentially a one location movie.

The nice thing about checking these boxes is that readers will be a lot less judgmental when reading your screenplay. One of the first things a reader asks himself after reading the premise is, “Would my boss want to turn this into a movie?” If the answer is “Yes,” they’re going to read your script with a favorable eye. When they see a lame choice, they’ll say, “That’s an easy fix.”

However, if your premise is boring or, worse, bad, readers are practically hunting for problems. The sooner they can discard your script, the sooner they can start skimming. Checking those boxes is kind of like having a magic shield over your script.

So I’m not surprised that Hyperbaric sold even though it’s far from perfect. For starters, the setup is flawed. You have this man who built this submarine, and yet they need someone else to pilot it? If you can build a submarine, don’t you have a fairly good idea of how to pilot it yourself?

I was willing to let this go but then there’s this entire day where Conall is chained up in the engine room while the sub floats along. If that doesn’t prove how little he’s needed, I don’t know what does.

The script also lacked urgency. There wasn’t a ticking time bomb on WHEN they needed to get to the U.S. by. Let me give you a script-related example of why that’s a big deal. One of the scenes in Hyperbaric had the engines dying. So Conall and Ethan had to go back to the engine room and fix them.

The scene plays like drying paint because there’s no reason for them to finish quickly. They can finish in 2 hours. They can finish in 2 days. It didn’t affect their mission either way. You can’t have that in a movie, especially in a thriller. You have to feel tension in every single scene. I recently heard a saying, “Your characters shouldn’t be able to sit down in the second act,” and it’s so true. If characters can “sit down” or hang out without anywhere they have to be, there’s a good chance there’s something wrong with the underlying structure of your screenplay.

But it wasn’t all bad. Morgan and Harvey did some interesting things with Conall, making him a coke-addict stuck on a tiny submarine with 1 ton of cocaine he can’t touch. That was a crafty choice.

And the script had some exciting sequences as well, such as the coast guard battle. I’m going to give you another tip here that ALWAYS WORKS in a movie. It doesn’t have a name so I’ll just call it the SET NUMBER TRICK.

What you do is you set a number that the heroes absolutely positively cannot go beyond. And then later in the script, you write a scene where they have no choice but to GO BEYOND that number. So here, Conall makes it clear that if this sub goes down to 50 feet below water, they’ll be crushed. However, when the coast guard starts dropping water grenades on them, their only chance for survival is to dive to 100 FEET! Since all of us know that that’s TWICE AS DEEP as this vessel is capable of diving, we feel an intense amount of fear for our characters when they perform the dive.

Hyperbaric is a perfectly conceived spec screenplay. I just wish its execution was a little more consistent. For those of you just starting out wanting to see how a saleable spec reads, though, you’ll want to find this one for sure.

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

What I learned: Conveying distance is something a lot of writers ignore, which can kill the tension during an important moment. Say, for example, that you have one character spying an another character in a bookstore. If you don’t tell us how close the spyer is, we’re forced to guess, and we might guess wrong. Whereas you imagined your character to be just several feet away, we might think they’re all the way on the other side of the room, creating a much less exciting scene. So make sure to always convey this information. In Hyperbaric, there’s a scene where our sub is approached by the Coast Guard. And for a moment, I didn’t know if the Coast Guard was 30 feet away or 1 mile away. But then the writers say that our characters can “see the faces” of the Coast Guard. That immediately oriented me to how close (and therefore how dangerous) the Coast Guard boat was.

Scriptshadow 250 Contest Deadline – 80 days left!

Genre: TV Pilot – Drama
Premise: A group of Appalachian rednecks declare war on the local government when they’re told they must leave their mountain.
About: WGN continues their slow move into scripted television. They’ve been happy with Salem and Manhattan (liked the Salem pilot, Manhattan, not so much) and now want to add another player to that list, with Titans getting a 13-episode order. Titans comes from Rescue Me’s Peter Tolan and Paul Giamatti, as well as playwright Peter Mattei, who wrote this first episode.
Writer: Peter Mattei
Details: 70 pages (6-3-14 draft)

One of the nice things I’ve noticed about television’s reinvention is the 13-episode order. As you know, networks have always ordered 22 shows, which is an insane amount of television to write in such a short period of time when you think about it. This is why old-time television was so boring. You had to have a procedural or recurring format (cops, detectives, medical, law) in order to keep the episodes easy to write (it’s easy to have a new murder every week, a new emergency, a new court case).

10 and 13 episode orders are way more serial friendly. Since you don’t have to come up with so much product, you can move away from the pre-formatted dynamic and start telling more long-form stories. This is why TV has gotten so good. It’s basically become a bunch of long movies.

Today’s show is no different. It’s about Appalachian rednecks. Would you have been able to make that show in 2002? No way. Every network exec with a beamer would have said, “Where’s the show past episode 5?” And the thing is, there may not BE an episode past 5 but at least these same execs now know that it’s possible with all these past successes. I mean when you think about how long Breaking Bad ran without a single set-structure episode, it’s kind of amazing.

So does Titans have that kind of longevity?

Not sure how many redneck clans you know but these Appalachian gypsies run a different kind of operation than you and me. While we might, say, go to a movie with our dads, fathers and sons in the Kentucky Mountains like to beat each others’ brains in for entertainment. And that’s how we meet Big and Lil Foster, members of an extended backwoods clan known as the Farrel’s.

The group is both infamous and above-the-law in these parts (we get to know them doing a Walmart run where the workers watch them steal a thousand dollars worth of items, their mouths agape like they’ve just seen Justin Bieber) but their dominance is coming to an end.

The state of Kentucky sees dollar signs under the mountain they’re squatting on in the form of coal. The Farrel Clan has faced threats like this before. But this one is official. It’s coming straight from the government.

The Farrels turn to their group elder, 75 year-old wheezing wheelchairing cancer sufferer Lady Ray Farrell. Lady Ray is not one to claim that violence solves all, but this appears to be a declaration of war, and so, she announces, that’s what they must prepare for.

Speaking of Lady Ray, it’s no secret her time on earth is as limited as toothpaste in a redneck supermarket. So a mix of power-hungry hillbillies are squaring up to take her place. Big Foster is the leading contender, but he’s no favorite of Lady Ray and getting her endorsement seems to be the key to winning the election.

Instead, it’s Asa Farrel, a dark horse, who has the inside track. The only Farrel to have gotten an education, it was just a week ago that Asa tried to kill himself. But having seen the light, he’s back with something the Farrel clan has never had on its side before – knowledge. Big Foster is quick to sense Asa as a threat and puts him on his shit list. The question is, how far will Big Foster go to become the new leader? For a community that basically prides itself on being inbred, I’m sure the answer is: far enough.

Titans is a pilot with a lot of potential that’s about as messy as the redneck clan it follows. With that said, it’s so different from everything else out there that you can’t look away.

The script’s strong-point is the set-up of an impending redneck-versus-our-necks war. You sense that these gypsies will do anything to keep this mountain, and that’s the kind of suspense that’ll keep an audience coming back week after week.

Strangely, as soon as that war is mentioned, which is around the midpoint of the pilot, the script switches gears to a set of new storylines and gets totally lost in the process. It gives us a scene where the Farrel’s rob a random old man in town, followed by the beginning of a Farrel moonshine business followed by a kid killing his father after getting drunk on said moonshine.

On the one hand, it makes sense to start setting up story threads for future episodes. But it seems weird that we’d set up this giant war in the first half of the script only to move on to more mundane stuff in the second half. Every script should build to its finale, whether is be a feature or a TV episode, with the biggest event coming at the end. We needed the announcement of war to come at the episode’s conclusion. Sure, we get a murder, but since it’s born out of a moonshine storyline that only commenced 10 pages ago, it felt tacked on and anti-climactic.

Another frustrating thing about this episode is that there are all these hints that things are going to turn supernatural, yet they never do! Half the time I’m waiting for the group to turn into werewolves (wolves are a big thing on their mountain) and the other half for someone to perform a magic spell. In the very end of the episode (spoiler) we see the ground rumbling above a grave. Does this mean we’re now going to get a zombie show???

I think you owe it to the audience to tell them what your show is about in the pilot. I don’t see how it works if you keep your main hook a secret. At the very least, have the ending shot tell us, and let that be the cliffhanger. A rumbling ground isn’t enough. Audiences don’t have the patience these days to be dicked around. They have too many options.

It’s also interesting to note that we’re seeing yet ANOTHER sitting king who must choose his/her successor storyline. We saw this with Game of Thrones, Empire, Badlands, Tyrant, and now Titans. Some of you may be wondering WHY everybody’s picking this storyline. Are they all just copycats who can’t come up with their own ideas?

The answer is CONFLICT. This concept sets up a group of people fighting for the crown, and when you have that, you have conflict, deception, betrayal, and DRAMA built into the premise. You always want to come up with an idea that does the work for you. If you set up a story where a bunch people are all fighting for the same thing, the story is going to write itself. If you set up a story where a group of people are all trying to be better people, you’ll have to work a lot harder to find the drama since it isn’t naturally there. That’s why this setup is so popular.

Titans is a little like the moonshine its characters produce. It’s not the most pleasant way to drink, but in the end, it still gets you drunk. There’s a messiness here, for sure. But the subject matter is so unique, I can’t help but see the potential in the show.

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

What I learned: Titans only did this for a page, but it was enough to frustrate me. The end of your script should be the FASTEST PART OF THE SCRIPT TO READ. Everything’s coming together so our eyes should be racing down the page. I don’t understand, then, why writers write some of their thickest paragraphs in the final 10 pages (4 and 5 line paragraphs when the rest of their script is 2-3 line paragraphs). Minimalize your action lines in the final act. If there’s a lot that needs to be explained, rethink the act until there isn’t a lot to be explained. And if you absolutely need a lot of words to tell the reader what’s going on, break your paragraphs up into smaller pieces.

Scriptshadow 250 Contest Deadline – 81 days left!

It’s a strange Monday in the movie business as we’re looking at one of the PRIME weekend slots of the calendar year, the second weekend in May, having no big flashy releases. This is usually where you’ll see a 250 million dollar titan shake its fists and wiggle its belly as it prepares to gobble up your hard-earned dollars, yet there was nary a big-budget flick to be found as every studio was terrified of Captain Iron Man Hulk’s second weekend.

Those same suits are kicking themselves now as the king of all franchises isn’t doing nearly as well as Mickey would’ve hoped. This could’ve been a prime opportunity to not just take over a vacant weekend, but steal some paper from the biggest studio in town. While Avengers touts a lot of big numbers in its press releases, the reality is, the film’s box office is down 30 million from the last entry’s second weekend. In a world where franchise sequels regularly make more than their opening counterparts, the most underrated box office nose dive of the decade is leaving some to wonder the impossible: Are super hero movies in trouble?

That sounds absurd, and let’s keep in mind that Avengers 2 is making more globally than the last film did (due to ever-expanding markets, but still), but I’ve gotten some strange e-mails this past week stating that Avengers 2’s lackluster domestic performance is the beginning of the end for the oversaturated super hero market. The film had EVERYTHING – literally EVERYTHING – that a moviegoer could want. And yet 45 million dollars worth of people (counting the smaller box office take in the film’s first weekend) have disappeared from the theaters.

From what I’m hearing, the reason for this is superhero-itis. Avengers is the culmination of every super hero movie that came before it. It is the biggest most expensive piece of digital celluloid money can buy. Yet its trailer doesn’t show anybody anything they haven’t seen before. In fact, it looks an awfully lot like the first film. No thanks, says today’s youth, I’d rather spend that money on a video game.

While I’m not ready to announce the death of the superhero film just yet, I do think studios will have to reevaluate the genre. It doesn’t matter how much people love superheroes. If every superhero movie is just a slight variation of the last one, Avengers is the beginning of the end. But if they find new exciting ways into the genre, it’ll have legs. That’s why I’m curious to see how the exceptionally unique Ant-Man does. And an even bigger crisis will occur when Marvel has to reboot all its superheroes after the end of Avengers 3 and 4. Will audiences get on board for all new films that aren’t new at all? Ask Sony and Spider-Man about that.

That’s not the only story this weekend as Warner Brothers put forth the first film in another hot trend, the female-led big-budget comedy. Hot Pursuit sees Hollywood capitalizing on the female comic craze, but if the film is any indicator of what’s to come, this pursuit could end up behind bars. Pursuit barely made 13 million this weekend. I thought the film looked fun and I like both Reese Witherspoon and Sofia Vergara, but the average ticket buyer doesn’t agree with me. Granted, neither of the two are major comedy stars, which had something to do with the less-than-stellar b.o., but the film scored terrible reviews as well (7% on Rotten Tomatoes!) and bad word of mouth can kill any comedy that doesn’t star Will Ferrell.

We’ll have to see if this is a blip on the radar or a real issue when the next female-dominated comedy comes out later this summer, the Paul Feig – Melissa McCarthy collaboration, “Spy.” I’m not going to lie. The movie looks horrible. Massively over-produced and maybe one level up from Paul Blart. Watching the trailers has given me flashbacks to Big Momma’s House. But McCarthy is lovable and on the comedy circuit, lovable actors/actresses are often more important than the quality of the film (see McCarthy’s last offering, the absolutely awful Tammy, which still managed to make 85 million dollars).

Again, the studios are all in on this thing. We have an all-female Ghostbusters film coming. A female version of 21 Jump Street. The Judd Apatow-Amy Schumer collaboration, Trainwreck, and whatever else McCarthy attaches herself too. So people are going to be looking closely at how “Spy” does. If it does badly, expect everyone to freak out and reevaluate the comedy genre, a genre that’s already in trouble due to comedies not fitting into the studios’ new global game plan.

Speaking of female-led movies, I checked out the black comedy, Welcome to Me, this weekend, starring Kristin Wiig. For those who don’t know this, Kristin Wiig is in my top 5 female celebrity crushes. I know that won’t make sense for some but there’s something just… I don’t know, sexy about her. There’s an honesty and rawness there, so I really wanted to like this film. Unfortunately it just… it didn’t work.

Black comedies are a strange beast. They’re the genre most likely to get a new writer noticed, and that’s because they’re the easiest genre to demonstrate a unique voice in. But when you try and turn them into films, the results are less-than-stellar. From The Beaver to Better Living Through Chemistry to Take This Waltz (yeah it was reviewed well but nobody watched that movie), the track record is rarely positive and that’s because the tone required to get these movies right is razor thin. Make it a little too goofy or a little too serious and the whole thing crumbles apart like a stale cupcake, which is why producers hate these scripts unless a proven director (like Spike Jonez) is attached.

Welcome to Me follows Kristin Wiig, who plays a mentally unstable loner who wins the lottery and uses the money to fund her own talk show, which is all about… herself. Comedies about mental illness are particularly tricky to navigate with how sensitive to mental illness the public is these days. With fewer people laughing about the subject matter, it eliminates any opportunity for Welcome To Me to have fun with its premise. And if you can’t have fun with a premise about a woman who buys her way into a talk show about herself, then is there any reason to even write the movie anymore? Comedy is hard enough as it is. If you’re dancing around your premise to placate the P.C. police the whole time, you probably want to move onto a premise less restrictive. After watching this, I’m not sure I’d ever get excited over a mental illness comedy. The genre simply has too many landmines that come with it.

Speaking of illness, the last big release of the weekend was the zombie flick, Maggie. For those who’ve been reading the site for awhile, you’ll remember that Maggie was a huge spec script sale from four years back. The project took all four of those years to finally get to the big (and small) screen, coming together when Arnold Schwarzenegger agreed to play the father in the film.

I still think Maggie is a great example of finding a way to sneak a drama through the system. Too many writers try writing straight-forward dramas where some 28 year old good-lucking white guy is trying to make ends meet after his middle class parents cut him off. Boo-hoo. Writer John Scott wrapped his drama inside a marketable genre (zombies), and redefined the genre in the process – creating new rules for the zombie’s incubation period (it takes months, not minutes). If you’re a dramatic writer, this is how you get your script noticed. Hide your heartfelt storyline inside a genre that sells.

Unfortunately, when you redefine a genre, you risk alienating fans of that genre, and unlike the zombies themselves, that was always the fear with Maggie. Would people come see a zombie film where zombies weren’t chasing the protagonists? Even the ultra-somber Walking Dead has the occasional blood-curdling zombie attack.

It’s a classic screenplay conundrum. The very thing that makes your idea unique is the thing that handicaps it. But that’s the movie game. You have to gamble a little in order to have a shot at breaking through. Unless you want to compete with the other 5 million people who are all writing the same thing, that is.

“Maggie” endured the purist movie test there is in my household. I only had time for one movie and I needed to make a choice. It came down to it or Welcome to Me. In the end, Maggie looked too depressing. And after a long week, I wanted to enjoy myself. So I went with “Welcome.” That movie ended up depressing me in a different way, but there was no going back. I’d made my choice.

That’s something you want to be thinking about as a writer. You’re creating a product. And someone, somewhere, is going to be sitting in their house watching a trailer for that product, trying to decide if they should pay for it. Are you giving them a product that they’ll be excited about? As complicated as people like to make screenwriting and filmmaking, that’s what it comes down to. If you can be honest with yourself and come up with something that you genuinely believe people will say “Yes” to when asked that question, then you probably have yourself a screenplay. So go write it!