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Genre: Drama/Crime-Thriller
Premise (from writer): When her older brother — a notorious NYC graffiti writer — is murdered, a teenaged fine arts student must infiltrate this underground world in order to find her brother’s killer.
Why You Should Read (from writer): The script takes place in NYC during the implementation of Mayor Guiliani’s infamous “broken window” theory. I hurried to get this draft done, as I feel it’s only gaining relevance given the current events. Graffiti’s a tough subject to crack (since most people see graf writers as nothing but vandals), but I tried to make the world as human as possible — through the eyes of a strong young woman. Think Point Break in the world of graffiti, with some freaking GIRL POWER!
Writer: ??
Details: 100 pages

Who says we don’t give high ratings to amateur screenplays on Scriptshadow? As long as you bring the goods, you’re going to get recognized. And Ivy brings the goods. Yet it almost wasn’t to be. Ivy went neck and neck with The Multiverse in last week’s amateur offerings and you guys know I prefer a good sci-fi premise to almost anything else. The Multiverse sounded like it could be the next Inception.

But there’s also something to be said for unique subject matter. When’s the last time you saw a movie about graffiti? Well, I guess there was Exit Through the Gift Shop, but that wasn’t so much a movie as it was a strange movie-docu hybrid. This is a straight up screenplay about the underworld of graffiti artists, seasoned inside a nice little murder-mystery. Let’s take a closer look.

The year is 1995. 18 year-old Ivy goes to a prestigious Michigan private school on an art scholarship. Ivy is extremely talented, but too shy about her work. She’s scared to put it out there for others to see, and it’s starting to take a toll on her education. Her professor tells her that if she doesn’t come out of her shell soon, she may not be here much longer.

Tragedy strikes when Ivy gets word that her older brother back in Brooklyn’s been murdered. When she heads home, we learn a little more about her background – abandoned by both their parents, the siblings leaned on one another to scrape by. It appears that since Ivy’s left, her bro, “Jocky,” has become quite the celebrity on the graffiti scene.

When she asks the cops what happened, they tell her, look, we can’t help you unless you help us. Get in with the graffiti gangs and sniff around, see if you can’t get us some names. It isn’t long before Ivy meets Sev, the 24 year-old reining graffiti king. Word on the street is that Sev killed someone a year ago for stepping on his territory. Could he have done the same to Jocky??

Ivy joins Sev’s gang and shows the kind of promise few graffiti artists do, and her and Sev get real close. The more she gets to know him, in fact, the more she questions whether he could have really killed her brother. But when Sev starts to suspect that Ivy may be working with the authorities, all bets are off, and Ivy may find out first hand what Sev is capable of.

If Ivy were graffiti art, it would definitely be the kind you’d stop and look at. However, the closer you looked, the more you’d see some rushed strokes, some clumsy color patterns. You’d take note of the artist though, and keep an eye out for more of their work.

One of the things I liked about Ivy was its attitude towards art. It reminded me a little bit of Dead Poet’s Society. Characters would routinely trumpet the importance of “letting go” and “breaking the rules.” That’s where all the best graffiti came from.

The problem with this is that Ivy doesn’t break any rules itself. It’s a straightforward setup. Ivy must figure out who killed her brother (goal). She gets in with a dangerous crowd (stakes). Her school is only giving her 30 days leave (urgency). Not that I see anything wrong with this. I love a well-structured screenplay and thought Ivy did a great job of it here. It was just funny that what the characters were saying didn’t match up with what the writer was doing.

But it does bring up an issue we don’t talk about enough. And that’s that, when you do stick to the rules, you have to camouflage them. If it’s too transparent that you’re hitting all the standard story beats, the story itself becomes transparent.

For instance, in an early scene where Ivy goes to her brother’s apartment, the cops knock on the door. They come in, discuss her brother for a minute or two, and then say, “We need you to infiltrate these graffiti gangs. Will you do it?” Now, this scene may need to happen to push the story forward, but that doesn’t mean you can just plop it in there with no finesse.

I mean a) why would they think some uppity private school girl would be able to infiltrate a dark dangerous graiffiti world that she didn’t even know about until today? And b) Where are the formalities involved in creating this operation? Police work has to be documented, it has to be approved. Yet here, apparently, two random cops can just be like, “Go infiltrate a gang,” and that’s that.

We needed more camouflage here. We needed the cops to have seen Ivy’s art to get the idea that she could impersonate a graffiti artist in the first place. We needed more formality than 2 minutes of conversation and “Go do something that could get you killed.” Sometimes, as writers, we’re so blinded by what needs to happen in our story, that we don’t think to ask, “Does this make sense?”

Your story has to be seamless, especially when in it’s in a construct where readers are predicting your beats before you write them. If you write a scene that screams: HERE’S A MAJOR STORY BEAT – you can bet that it will take them out of the story.

There were a couple of other rushed decisions at the end of the script too. A new character (and potential brother murderer), Oz, shows up with only 20 pages to go. Although we’d heard Oz’s name before, it wasn’t in any meaningful capacity. So to then make him a major character in the very last act is jarring.

This seems like it would be an easy fix though. Just make Oz more of a rival to Sev. Maybe Oz tags over some of Sev’s work, or challenges him on subway cars – anything to make him more of a presence earlier in the movie.

And finally (major spoiler), I didn’t like the absentee father coming back to save the day. The father had ONE SCENE previous to this, and all of a sudden he’s Superman, arriving at the last second to save the day. I like the IDEA of the father arcing, but once again, if you don’t put in the legwork earlier in the script (aka more than one scene with dad), it reads false.

But this is also an easy fix. When Ivy comes back to the Bronx, why can’t she have two goals? The primary one is to find her brother’s killer, of course. But the secondary goal (and major subplot of the film) is to reconnect with her father. Or at least find out why he left Ivy and her brother. That should give you a few more scenes between the two, and make the father’s arc more believable.

This may sound like a bunch of criticism, but actually, these problems I’m mentioning aren’t big at all. Most of Amateur Friday scripts need major overhauls. This just needs adjustments. Ivy was not only a fun script, but I could see it playing at Sundance. For that reason, it gets the first amateur “worth the read” of the year!

Script link: Ivy

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

What I learned: Camouflage. Camouflage your story beats, people. Think of it this way. Let’s say you want to hit on a girl. Do you walk up to the girl and say, “I’m hitting on you.” No, you walk up, ask her the time, what she’s doing here, what her name is. Hopefully a good conversation follows, and then you ask her her number.  You’re camouflaging your true intention. Same thing with story beats. You can’t have a cop say, “We need you to infiltrate a gang” out of nowhere. You have to build up the situation so that the statement becomes a natural extension of what’s come before.

Last week, we discussed the five pillars of complexity. Some of you had fun with my attempt to break it down into mathematical terms, which is fine. I will hate you forever. But I think I got the point across. As long as you’re aware aware of the things that complicate a script, you’ll be more likely to find a solution.

Well, I had so much fun writing that article that I’m going to write a similar one. Except instead of focusing on negative subject matter (what not to do), I’m going to focus on the positive (what TO do). Today, I’m going to write about screenwriting MASTERY.

Now here’s something you might not know. It takes the average screenwriter seven years to break into the professional ranks (to get paid for their work). How do I know this? It’s a combination of talking to hundreds of screenwriters and reading hundreds of screenwriter interviews. That number seems to be the one that keeps coming up the most.

It’s probably no coincidence then, that there are seven pillars to screenwriting mastery. Now for those freaking out about waiting seven years for success, I have good news for you. Just the fact that you KNOW these seven pillars exist will help you speed up the process. How quickly? That depends on how talented you are and how hard you work.

So what are the seven pillars? They are, in no particular order, concept, plot, dialogue, character, message, story, and writing. Some more good news. You don’t have to master all of these to sell a script or get paid as a writer. But you do need to be proficient in almost all of them. Let’s take a look at each pillar individually and see what they consist of.

CONCEPT – We were just talking about this yesterday. Concept seems like it shouldn’t be a pillar, because a concept literally takes 5 seconds to come up with. But it is a pillar. In fact, it might be the most important pillar of all. That’s because a lousy idea negates everything that’s written after it. And when I say that you need to come up with a good concept, I don’t mean you need to come up with some huge monsters vs. aliens premise. There’s nothing wrong with a small story. But just like any idea, the concept must have specificity, it must have elements that intrigue, there must be conflict inherent, the stakes must feel high, and if you can add irony, all the better. Let’s say, for instance, that I wanted to write a movie about high school. Here are two potential concepts for the subject matter. “A bullied teenager who struggles to make friends tries to make it through his first year of high school.” “A bullied teenager with a speech impediment finds success when he becomes the unexpected hero of the debate team.” Look at how much more specific the second idea is. A random teenager is now a teenager with a speech impediment. Instead of dealing with just “school,” we’re dealing with the world of the debate team. Because it’s the debate team, stakes are implied (competition). There’s even some juicy irony there (someone who can’t speak joins the debate team). Coming up with a good concept is tough. Some of us are better at it than others. The best thing to do is ask others about your ideas. If they don’t like your ideas, ask them to be candid as to why. Sometimes you need to hear out loud what’s not working about your ideas in order to change your approach (I offer this service by the way – but be ready, I will be honest).

PLOT – Plot is the sequencing of events that tell your story. If you have your main character, Joe, buy apples and then, in the next scene, break up with his girlfriend, you’re plotting. You’re taking one sequence and following it up with another. The reason plotting is so difficult is because you have to do it over 110 pages. And, unfortunately, just showing Joe go from one task to the next for an entire movie isn’t going to keep our interest. You need to show him pursuing something important. You need to show him run into unexpected obstacles. You need to decide when the bad guys catch up to him. This is why the 3 Act structure was created, to give you a sense of where to put these things. But as you’ve all figured out by now, the 3-Act structure only guides you. In the end, it’s your creativity that’s going to dictate how you plot your story.

STORYTELLING – Contrary to popular belief, storytelling and plotting are not the same thing. There is some overlap, but whereas plotting is the art of sequencing events, storytelling is the art of coming up with events (or ideas, or characters). So when you say, “Ooh, what if my main character is actually a ghost and he doesn’t know it!!??” you’re coming up with your “story.” Still confused? Let me try and clarify. There’s a scene in Psycho where Norman Bates pushes the car of the woman his “mother” has killed into a lake. “Storytelling” is coming up with that idea in the first place. “Plotting” is deciding where to place that scene in the screenplay. Let’s try another one. Storytelling is the idea that people in the Matrix can bend space-time, allowing them to have special “powers,” and the subsequent distribution of those powers to all the relevant characters in the movie. Plotting is figuring out where in the movie to best introduce these powers. To that end, storytelling is the art of creation, of coming up with a series of ideas to buff up your story. The mastery of storytelling comes from understanding when an idea is cliché or subpar, and pushing on until you come up with something better. Most new screenwriters have a low bar for their ideas, and go with whatever comes to mind. Veteran screenwriters have a high bar and therefore keep searching until they find an idea good enough for their story.

DIALOGUE – Here’s the thing with dialogue. On the one hand, it’s not as important as the story itself. What do I mean by that? Let’s say you met someone who witnessed and told you the story of Pearl Harbor. The guy may not be the best talker, but the story would be so fascinating that you wouldn’t care. With that said, the most obvious sign of a rookie writer is bad dialogue. Unfortunately, dialogue is one of the hardest things to teach because it’s based more on feel than any other screenwriting component. I can give you a head start though. Here’s a recent post I made on improving dialogue.

CHARACTER – In my opinion, character is the single hardest component of screenwriting. Hands down. I say that because 95% of the characters I read in a script don’t feel like real people. And the reason they don’t feel like real people is because the writer hasn’t created any depth to them. And the reason the writer hasn’t created any depth to them is because they didn’t do the work. Creating characters that feel real requires tons of work on the front end (character biographies) and the back end (rewriting). I rarely read a character that feels honest and fully formed in a first draft. It’s only through the writer getting to know their character over drafts and drafts that they finally become a real person to them, and by extension, us. Character is where the true pros make their money. You can get lucky with a good premise. You can fake your way through a plot. You can have some natural talent when it comes to dialogue. But it takes hard work and dedication to the get the characters right. And only the best writers are willing to do that work.

MESSAGE/THEME – Do you subscribe to the theory of, “If you want to send a message, try Western Union.” I feel you. I was once like you. Until I realized that theme UNIFIES a screenplay. It brings it all together. Don’t believe me? Go read a bad amateur screenplay (we’ve posted a few here on the site). The commonality you’ll find in all of them is that they’re lost and unfocused. Why? Because they have nothing to unify them. They have no theme! When you have a message you’re trying to convey in your script, you have a story with purpose. Theme can easily be overlooked in screenwriting, but it shouldn’t be.

WRITING – Last but not least, let’s not forget the actual WRITING. I wasn’t going to include this one but as I looked back at all the amateur scripts I’ve read, I found a major trend: sloppy writing. Overly complicated sentences, sentences that were too long, sentences that were too short, misuse of words, trying to be too cute, dependence on SAT words, bad grammar, purple prose, clunky sentence structure, endless description, you name it. A reader can’t appreciate your story if they can’t get through one of your sentences without wanting to gouge their eyes out with a rusty spork. Each genre will have its own tone, each screenwriter his/her own style, but for the most part, you should write simple clean easy-to-read sentences. If you need help, find a screenwriter you love and read all their scripts over and over again. Pay close attention to how they write and use their style as blueprint for your own.

And that’s it my little screenwriting rapscallions. It’s a good idea to rate yourself in all these categories and, wherever you’re weak, do something about it. For example, if you’re weak in plot, watch a bunch of movies and ONLY focus on plot. If you suck at dialogue, read a bunch of scripts by great dialogue writers and figure out why their dialogue works. For most of you, your screenwriting education is self-taught. Blindly writing screenplays over and over probably isn’t going to help. You need to identify your weaknesses and specifically work on them. These seven pillars are a great place to start. Good luck!

Genre: Drama/Thriller/Sci-fi
Premise: In the near future, the police department has developed a device that replays sound from the past, which allows them to listen in on murders after the fact.
About: Here we have another Top 10 2014 Black List script. Writer Krysty Wilson-Cairns is from Scotland and this script also placed on the Brit List earlier this year. She’s also adapting “The Good Nurse” for Darren Aronofsky, about “The Angel of Death” nurse who killed over 300 patients.
Writer: Krysty Wilson-Cairns
Details: 119 pages – February 2014 draft (this is the draft that landed on both the Brit and Black List).

Rory Kinnear as Harry?

Today I want to talk about ideas. A good idea is one of the easiest things to bring to the table as a writer. It doesn’t take a year of meticulously outlining and plotting and character work and drafting and re-drafting. An idea can come to you in a split-second and is therefore one of the least time-intensive components of the process.

It’s also one of the easiest ways to set yourself apart. For example, let’s say you want to write a murder-mystery. Okay, you’ve just joined 6000 other murder-mystery scripts. Hallelujah to that scenario. Are you sure your murder-mystery is going to be better than every one of them? The odds say no.

BUT… what if you could change something in the IDEA that made your murder mystery stand out from all the others? What if you had a concept that allowed you to explore that murder-mystery in ways that nobody else who was writing a murder-mystery could? You have just – without even writing a single word of your screenplay – separated yourself from the pack.

And that’s exactly what’s happened today. Aether is an okay screenplay. It moves a little slow for its own good and the characters aren’t as exciting as I’d like them to be, but because we have a unique concept – a specialized audio device that allows you to re-listen to the crime scene – it makes the read a lot more interesting than had this been yet another straight-forward murder mystery.

So what’s Aether about? Homicide Detective Harry Orwell was part of a prized team that recently created a device that could take sound waves in a room, collect them, and play them back long after they were made. This evolved naturally, then, to the homicide world, where it’s become a tool for detectives to figure out who the killer was.

Harry’s a troubled dude though. Like a lot of other “listeners,” he’s traumatized by the desperate last pleas and gulps and breaths of the murder victims who he must listen to over and over again. It’s become so bad that his department has actually hired a shrink to work through these issues with each audio-detective.

Well, one day Harry is listening to a murder, and he hears the exact same scream that he heard in a previous murder. He eventually deduces that the murderer has access to one of these audio devices (AMPS) and, after killing his victim, likes to sit around and re-listen to his kills (if this is a little confusing, I’m right with you. I didn’t entirely understand it either).

What makes things worse is that the latest victim is a bartender who was serving Harry drinks the night she was killed. And Harry, who was wasted, has no recollection of how he got home. Both the department and Harry start to wonder if he’s involved in the killings. When a woman from inside Harry’s department is killed next, the witch-hunt is on. So if Harry isn’t the killer, he’s going to have to find some evidence to clear his name quickly.

At the beginning of this review, I talked about finding an original idea. Now, I’m going to talk about EXPLOITING that idea. Because an unexploited original idea is no better than an unoriginal one.

What does it mean to exploit an idea? It means finding things about the idea that the average Joe never would’ve thought of and then implanting those ideas into your script in interesting ways. Think about that. You’re the screenwriter. That’s your job! You can’t be just like everyone else who comes up with an idea. You have to be exceptional. You have to find things that others can’t. Or else what makes you so special?

Take Back to the Future. A guy accidentally goes back in time and must figure out a way to get back home when the time machine breaks. That’s a fun idea. But a lousy writer’s going to come up with a bunch of surface-level hijinx (oh, gas used to be 5 cents!) and that’s it. Zemeckis and Gale dug deeper. They said, “Well wait a minute. What if, when he went back in time, he accidentally screwed up the meeting between his parents? And now he has to figure out a way to get them together before he goes back home or he’ll never be born?” THAT’S exploiting your premise. THAT’S digging deeper than the obvious.

One of the problems with Aether is that it doesn’t exploit its premise enough. Beyond listening in on these past murders, the only deeper exploration of the idea is that the killer has one of these audio devices too. There’s SOMETHING to that but it’s still just a seed of an idea. It needs to grow or else you’re going to get yet another of those murky executions of a cool concept.

Another thing I want to talk about is how our investment as an audience is almost always tied to the main character’s investment in the story. So look at a movie like American Sniper. For all the problems I had with the script, Chris Kyle is steadfast in his desire to keep going back to the war, to save his people, and to win the war itself. His DESIRE motivates our DESIRE to see if he succeeds.

In Aether, the big dramatic question is: Is Harry the killer, and is he going to get caught? That’s an interesting question and one that would typically keep an audience riveted. The problem is, Harry is such a sad-sack, such an introverted uninvolved character, he doesn’t really seem to care one way or the other. You get the sense that he’d be fine with getting caught because then he wouldn’t have to deal with any of this mess anymore.

In other words, because Harry wasn’t interested in his own self-preservation, I wasn’t interested in it either. And that’s what was so weird about reading Aether. You have a serial-killer mystery on your hands, and yet I never felt completely concerned or involved.

With that being said, this is not an American movie. This script screams Scottish indie flick all the way. And I know the films over there are a lot more laid back, so maybe people won’t have these same issues with Aether. But I still think this premise needs an industrial grade drill to dig much deeper into the concept itself. We’re only scratching the surface here. We must go deeper.

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

What I learned: So when you come up with a unique concept for a screenplay, I want you to do something before you write a word. Write down the first five ideas you come up with as far as the direction you want to take the movie, then consider erasing them all. I’m not going to say to definitely erase them all, because one of them might be brilliant. But chances are, the first five things you think of are exactly what everybody else would think of. And you’re a screenwriter. Which means your job is to dig deeper than everybody else.

Genre: Thriller
Premise: An ambitious retelling of the Pinocchio tale, a man builds the first computer that can think, only to have the government take it away and use it for its own nefarious purposes.
About: This spec sold back in 2013. The writer, Kurt Wimmer, is a shining knight in the bleak spec script market, someone who knows the tricks of the trade when it comes to getting studios to bite on original material. He wrote SALT, a great spec that changed quite a bit when its lead character, a male, was rewritten as a woman (to get Angelina Jolie on board). The script never quite recovered from that. But hey, getting a film made is the freaking bonus. The first goal is to sell the damn screenplay. Matthew 21 will be produced by Basil Iwanyk, who produced “The Town,” and Bill Block, who made “Alex Cross.”
Writer: Kurt Wimmer
Details: 122 pages (October 2nd, 2013 draft)

Nicholas Hoult for David?

So what’s happened to the spec script? Is it dead? Should we all pull a Jason Dean Hall, look for an autobiography that nobody knows about (originally, no studio wanted to touch Chris Kyle’s story. They’re probably not feeling too good about that now), and come to producers and studios with an adaptation package?

Or should we hold dear to our spec script dreams and write something original? I shall answer this question for you right now. It all depends on what kind of movie you want to write. If you want to write a slower dramatic character piece – if that’s what floats your laptop buttons – then yeah, finding a true story is your best bet. But if you want to sell a spec – and it can be done folks – you gotta pick a tale that moves a little faster.

Fear not because both avenues are open to you. With the unexpected success of Lucy and American Sniper, the box office has proven that there’s an audience out there for each side of the spectrum. So pick up that sniper scope and peer back into Scriptshadow past, when thriller screenwriter Kurt Wimmer got Hollywood’s nether region’s wet with a script called SALT.

Wimmer knows where his bread is buttered, and it ain’t in dreary bars that play, “My Tractor Ate My Dog.”  He writes where the lights are a little brighter and the music faster. Let’s see what he’s up to with his latest.

We start the story with the 12 page POV of a baby, or I should say, a baby who grows up to be 10 years old. Even though that baby’s actually only 10 days old. Confused? That’s because it’s not really a baby whose POV we’ve been in. It’s the first Mathematical Heuristic Learning Machine in existence. Or, in layman’s terms, the first A.I.

The A.I.’s name is Matthew, and his “father,” David, is his creator. David lovingly created Matthew because his own boy died in a tragic drowning when he was just a toddler. Matthew, in many ways, is his way of taking another chance, of caring again, of loving.

So David’s world is rocked when, after Matthew turns 15 years old (15 days old), the Department of Defense comes in and takes Matthew away, making him the new designated controller of the United States’ nuclear arsenal – what we learn was the purpose for David’s creation all along.

Our DoD is run by a nasty calculating man named Ronald McKellan, and once McKellan starts playing with his new toy, he realizes that he’s capable of SO MUCH MORE. Most notably, he realizes that Matthew, with his access to every corner of the web on the planet, can be a digital super spy.

As McKellan teaches Matthew how to spy, Matthew develops a dark side and begins to question what his real purpose as a “person” is. Through some subterfuge, McKellan realizes that Matthew has been trading information with a potentially identical Russian super-computer. Knowing that Matthew’s risks now outweigh his rewards, McKellan orders Matthew terminated. And so he is.

Or is he? What McKellan, David, and the rest of the world are about to learn: Once you open Pandora’s Box, you can’t close it. Especially if Pandora’s pissed.

The jury is still out on this subject matter. We’ve had Transcedence, which was a total bomb, both in box office and as a movie. We’ve had Her, which was enjoyed by critics, but got a lukewarm response at the box office. We had A.I., which was predicted as a surefire hit, but which mostly confused people. So I can see Hollywood being resistant to taking another shot at this.

With that said, this was one awesome little script.

I’ll tell you what Wimmer does here. He mixes some very thought-provoking ideas and has a shit-ton of fun with them. And how often do you get to watch movies that are both fun AND make you think? It’s pretty rare.

And he’s a gambler, this Wimmer guy. The first 12 minutes of the movie is a POV shot in a single room. That’s bold. And while I started to question it, I later realized how essential it was. You see, this whole script is built on the relationship between David (the father) and Matthew (the son). Watching David teach Matthew and connect with him and “raise” him, makes us pull for the two later when we get out of that room and into more of a thriller setting.

Wimmer also may be the king of the Thriller twist. I know this guy’s writing (I’ve read four of his scripts now) and therefore I know he’s going to throw some twists at you. And yet he gets me 75% of the time. This coming from someone who’s read 6000 screenplays. I’ve seen every twist imaginable. And Wimmer’s twists don’t come out of nowhere either. He sets them all up. The breadcrumbs are there. Which makes you even more baffled that you didn’t see it coming.

There’s one twist in particular (major spoilers – I suggest finding the script and reading it first – because this is the moment in the script where the fun really starts), where Matthew is “killed” (shut down), only to later pop up inside a self-created body that he put together on the sly and then used to physically infiltrate and impersonate the very department enslaving him. David and McKellan had no idea that Matthew had been working right next to them all along. I was like, “whoa.”

There’s also some geeky reasons I’m into this, as I’m partially obsessed with the whole singularity movement and the question of whether artificially intelligent machines are going to want to keep us around or get rid of us. It’s a heated debate in that community that centers around whether to insert a fail safe “be nice to humans” program into all artificial intelligence, as well as if that’s even possible.

Matthew 21 gives us a fun look at how things might play out since Matthew was originally created as a “good” computer. But once he was taken over by a “bad” man, his code was simply altered. Does that mean no matter what we do, machines are going to eventually get rid of us. You can’t help thinking about that question while reading Matthew 21.

Now if I were a producer, I’d still be worried about this subject matter, since it hasn’t exactly proven fruitful. But just as a script alone, it’s a hell of a read.

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

What I learned: Pull SNEAK ATTACKS on your characters. Characters should never be on solid ground for too long. If they’re cruising along and nothing unexpected is happening to them, we get bored. So you pull a SNEAK ATTACK, something unwanted by our characters which they don’t expect. This gives the story a fresh jolt and it forces your characters to act. Here, we’re getting kinda bored by this first 10 pages of our POV character learning and “growing up.” So, out of nowhere, David is told that a Senator is here to see him and that he wants to start using Matthew immediately. It’s a total shock to him, and us. And that reaction was the direct result of the writer pulling a sneak attack on the characters.

What I learned 2: Using the framework of a known fairytale to shape your screenplay can be both fun AND help guide your story in a way you know is proven. One of the reasons this script’s narrative stays so focused is that whenever the script feels like it might go off the rails, Wimmer uses the similarities to Pinocchio to bring it back.

Genre: War/Drama/Biopic
Premise: The story of Chris Kyle, the most lethal sniper in the history of the United States army.
About: The real life story and biography of Chris Kyle probably would’ve become a decent movie package no matter what. However (spoiler!), the unexpected shooting and death of Kyle the day after writer Jason Hall turned in his first draft, morphed the script into one of the hottest projects in Hollywood. Unknown writer Jason Dean Hall all of a sudden found himself with Steven Spielberg and Bradley Cooper on board. But then Spielberg dropped out, and it looked like Cooper might drop out too. Clint Eastwood to the rescue. Eastwood coming in was seen as a serious downgrade, considering his previous four films were all bombs. But in retrospect, the ultra-conservative and pro-war advocate was the best fit to direct the film. It certainly worked out at the box office, where the film became the biggest box-office shock since Lucy, with 90 million dollars (and an estimated 105 million over the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday). Movies that don’t have capes just don’t make money like this anymore. Especially over one of the slowest box office weekends of the year. So what the hell happened? Let’s take a look.
Writer: Jason Dean Hall (adapted from book by Chris Kyle, Scott McEwen, and James Defelice)
Details: 2 hours and 15 minutes running time.

For those who receive my newsletter (sign up here), you’ll remember I didn’t much care for this script. It was a first draft, but I was expecting more from a script that snagged Spielberg and Cooper (in retrospect, I doubt they even read the script – and were probably signing onto Kyle’s story based on the recent tragedy). The script felt “drifty,” with us watching Chris Kyle (our “American sniper”) stumble his way into a military career and then stumble his way through a bunch of sniper kills.

What bothered me was that there was no BUILD to the story. It just WAS. And while maybe that’s more realistic, more “true to life,” I found it dramatically boring.

Well, here’s the good news. They fixed a lot of the problems I brought up in the script. And you know what? The end result isn’t bad. That may sound like a backhanded compliment, but this is coming from someone who doesn’t like these movies at all. I wrestled a long time with paying 16 bucks to see this film, convinced I was going to be bored out of my mind. But I wasn’t.

For those who don’t know the story of Chris Kyle, he was a NAVY SEAL who served four tours in Iraq and became the most deadly sniper in U.S. military history. This story covers him going through all four of those tours, while occasionally coming home to raise a family. The main source of conflict in the story is that Kyle seems to be more comfortable on the battlefield than he does at home.

So let’s look at some of the changes that were made. Either through the screenplay itself or through Eastwood’s direction, a lot more emphasis is put on The Butcher in the final film, our main “villain” in the story. Why is this a big deal? Because it gives our screenplay FOCUS. If Kyle is just out there shooting random Iraqi after random Iraqi, racking up kills, we’re going to get bored.

But if we’re killing people to get closer to a villain, now the story has more purpose. The viewer can see the point of these killings, and they’re pulled in by the question, “Will Kyle get The Butcher or not?” Never underestimate the importance of a high-stakes question in your story. High-stakes questions create suspense, since the audience is forced to ask a question they want an answer to.

Another thing I liked that they did is they added a rival sniper. This may have been in the draft that I read, but if it was, it was only barely touched upon. Once again, by giving Kyle an adversary, we again create the same type of question: “Will he kill him?” This provides focus and suspense, as we’ll want to stick around to see if he kills the other sniper.

One of my biggest issues with the script was the fact that Kyle was always a million miles away from the action, perched up in his sniper den, shooting away, safe as can be. There was very little tension up there, except for when he had to make a tough decision or impossible shot, and there were only so many times you could do this.

What surprised me is that they just ditched the whole sniper thing for the second half of the movie. Well, maybe not ditched it entirely. But someone realized, “Hey, we need to put Kyle in some fucking danger or else this movie’s going to be boring as hell.” So Kyle just started joining teams infiltrating cities and was right there in the thick of things. This was a really good choice on their part.

Finally, I had issues with them not really exploring Kyle’s mindset when he was home. Eastwood actually puts a much bigger emphasis on this in the movie. Kyle is a distracted mess whenever he comes home and his inability to live a normal life, makes for a very complicated character exploration. This is exactly what I’m guessing Cooper was drawn to, and maybe it was even him who demanded more of it in the screenplay.

While I wouldn’t say Kyle was a fascinating character, there was something about his inability to cope with being a “legend” that made him compelling to watch. There’s a scene where a man approaches him in a gas station back in America and thanks him for how many lives he saved, and you can just see Kyle squirming to get the hell out of there.

With all this said, I thought this movie would be lucky to make 25 million when I first read it. And all weekend, I’ve been trying to figure out why I was so off on that estimation. I look back to an e-mail I received after I wrote the initial review from a man who lived in flyover country, and the crux of his e-mail was, “Carson, you don’t understand, this guy is a hero to everyone in the service.”

And I realized that this is a world that I just don’t understand. I didn’t grow up in the service. I didn’t grow up around anyone who actually joined the service. So there’s something to be said for not being able to predict what you don’t know.

Still, I’ve always operated on the assumption that the public doesn’t want to be bummed out when they go to the movies. They want to be entertained. And so seeing a sad movie about a sad man – I just couldn’t understand why anyone would want to experience that. However, I learned a valuable lesson. There are certain “truths” that trump other “truths” when it comes to the elusive box office formula. America LOVES their real-life heroes, especially ones who fight in the military. And seeing their story on screen trumps any resistance to being bummed out.

(Spoiler!) And you will be bummed out. This is a sad movie about a man who was never really comfortable with who he was, who ends up being killed as far away from the war as one can get. Seeing the real-life footage of people lined up along overpasses on the highway with American flags draped down, while Kyle’s body was driven to his funeral, it was powerful stuff. Maybe, had I seen that before I read the script, I would’ve realized just how big this movie was going to be.

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

What I learned: I’m going to be paying a lot more attention to real-life hero stories from this point forward. If you have the rights to one of these stories or know of a real-life hero story, now would be a damn good time to write it.