Five amateur screenplays.  Read and tell us which one you liked best in the comments section.  The winner gets a review.  Also, feel free to offer constructive criticism to the writers.  We’re all trying to help each other out here and your one comment could lead to the breakthrough that helps that writer crack his script. 

Title: False Flag
Genre: Action
Logline: A CIA black ops agent hunts down his former partner to find out why he was left for dead and uncovers a conspiracy involving a black market WMD that only he can stop.
Why you should read: I love the action movie genre. More correctly, I love the potential of the action movie genre, and it bugs me that so much of what is released in this genre fails on really basic screenwriting levels – as if the genre itself is an excuse not to put the hard yards in. I want to write smart, surprising films with compelling characters that also happen to contain much kick ass action.

Title: The Multiverse
Genre: Sci-Fi
Logline: A man who can move between alternate universes must protect the secret to his ability from a power-hungry former colleague who wishes to destroy all life in the Multiverse.
Why you should read: I was on a general meeting a few years back when the executive announced that thanks to “Inception”, she could hear original, sci-fi pitches again. Although that rule apparently only applied to writers named Christopher Nolan, it did start my mind on the path that led to this script. It’s a heady, mind fuck of a script – which is just how I like ‘em.

Title: IVY
Genre: Drama/Crime-thriller
Logline: 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: 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!

Title: The Henchman
Genre: Action
Logline: In an action movie universe, struggling blue-collar worker Arthur Goodman takes a job as a mob henchman to support his family. Then finds himself fighting to protect them from his employers, while trying to survive as an expendable character.
Why you should read: With the Expendables 3 coming out, I figured I’d offer my own spin on the action movie genre. It’s gotten some good feedback, including high scores on the Black List. Even if it isn’t voted, I hope people will enjoy the read, and I can get some notes on how to improve it.

Title: Revision
Genre: Thriller
Logline: After being manipulated into covering up the murder of a coworker, a collections agent’s life spins into a frenzy of psychological and physical torture that can only be stopped by the compassionate love of his new crush.
Why you should read: I love movies like Fight Club, Memento, and Shutter Island when the protagonist doesn’t realize that he is the antagonist. You should read Revision because it is engaging, entertaining, and scary. Mix Tyler Durden’s mania with Lenard Shelby’s “condition” and you get the main character, Arthur Graham. He fights off his demons as he struggles to hold on to his new girlfriend; and he does it all with a smile on his face (most of the time.)

A more complex script than you might’ve thought.

So at the beginning of this week, I reviewed a script from Academy Award winner Stephen Gaghan that was fairly complex. There were lots of characters, multiple storylines, heavy flashbacks. And while Gaghan managed to make the whole thing work, I’ve spent far too many reading experiences watching amateurs try to do the same thing and ending up at the bottom of a slugline sinkhole.

Part of the problem is that the new screenwriter comes on the scene and believes he has the answers to Hollywood’s problems. Paul Bart: Mall Cop? Garbage. Taken 7? Trash. The problem, the neophyte screenwriter concludes, is that Hollywood’s movies are all fluff. His solution is to write some big sprawling meaty “masterpiece” that’ll win 12 Oscars.

The intention is noble. But the problem is that, 99 times out of a 100, the writer has no idea how to tell a story yet. They don’t even know that their inexperience in storytelling is a problem in the first place. So the resulting script may certainly be “sprawling” and “ambitious,” but it doesn’t make a lick of sense. People who read it categorize it as “unfocused,” “all over the place,” and “confusing.”

This miscalculation boils down to the fact that the writer has no “complexity compass.” Therefore, he marches unknowingly into the Failure Desert.

So today, I want to present you with the five pillars of complexity. This way, you know where the complexity pitfalls lie, and you can figure out how to avoid them. Let’s go through these pillars one by one, then discuss how we can manage them and keep our scripts easy to read.

Description – Description’s contribution to complexity can be broken down into two categories. Writers who describe too much. And stories that require a lot of description. Let’s start with the first one. Screenplays are about saying as much as possible in as few words as possible. Readers don’t want to sit there and read a six-sentence paragraph that just as easily could’ve been one. If this is the writer’s style, the script will start to lose clarity simply due to the fact that you’re making the reader read too much unimportant information. The reader has to “dig” to find the useful bits, resulting in reader exhaustion. Exhaustion leads to the brain shutting down, which leads to the reader unable to take in more information. If you’ve ever found yourself going back to re-read a page a third of a fourth time, this is usually what’s going on. And writers, if you’ve ever had a reader come back and say, “I didn’t understand why Danny attacked Lisa,” yet you explained exactly why Danny attacked Lisa on page 47, over-description is usually the culprit. You overloaded your reader with info and their brain shut down.

The second category of over-description is a bit more challenging. Unlike the first, where you can control the amount of description you add, some stories naturally require a lot of description. Sci-fi and fantasy scripts are notorious for needing large chunks of description due to the “world-building” the writer must do. There’s no way you can write The Matrix, for example, without spending a lot of time describing their ship, describing the “real world,” describing The Matrix itself. So whenever you write one of these screenplays, you’re already going in with a bit of a handicap. There’s not much you can do about it.

Exposition – Exposition is sort of the “dialogue-version” of description. These are the words your characters say to steer us through the story. Exposition can entail plot information as well as character information. “We need to be at the park by sundown or the world explodes” as well as “It turns out Diana lied to us. She isn’t from Rockford like she said she was.” The more exposition you have, the more complex your story reads. As you’re starting to realize, the more information (in the form of description or exposition) you throw at your reader, the harder it is for him/her to keep up.

Character Count – This one is self-explanatory, and yet one writers continue to ignore. The more characters you include, the more information you’re asking your reader to keep track of. More characters typically means more storylines (more subplots), which means even more for your reader to remember. I just told you screenwriting is about saying as much as you can in as few words as possible. Well, character count isn’t much different. Good writers tell their stories with the minimum amount of characters they can get away with. With that being said, every story has different character requirements (a movie about the White House is going to have more characters than a movie about two people trapped in an apartment) but you should be wary of including new characters UNLESS you believe the story needs them.

Intricate or Excessive Plotting – Are you writing a spy movie where characters are never who they seem? Are you writing a “Lost” like feature, with lots of twists and turns and reveals? Does your story go through a number of gestations, like Interstellar?  Are you weaving eight subplots in and out of your main plot?  The more plot (plot beats, plot points, twists, reveals, surprises) your script has, the harder it’s going to be for the reader to keep up. Yesterday’s script, The Munchkin, was a perfect example. Because the main character was chasing so many answers (the murder of one person, the disappearance of another, the mysterious person who hired him), the story started to suffocate under the weight of its own plot.

Sophisticated Story Presentation – Whenever you try and tell your story in a unique way, you’re adding a thick layer of complexity to it. 500 Days of Summer mashing up its timeline. Inception creating worlds inside of worlds inside of worlds. Memento telling its story backwards. Pulp Fiction telling its story out of order. To a lesser degree, even movies like The Notebook, which tells some of its story in the past and some in the present and Gone Girl, which tells its stories through different points of view, are sophisticated paradigms to tell stories in. These scripts tend to get noticed a lot and can be fun to write. But they do make your story harder to follow. Keep that in mind.

Here’s the thing with the five pillars. Using one or two is fine. It’s when you try and do three, four, even five, that you virtually ensure failure. Look at 500 Days of Summer. It has a sophisticated story presentation, but a low character count, minor description, manageable exposition, and a simple plot. The Matrix was high in exposition and description, had the right amount of characters for its genre, a straight-forward presentation, and a simple plot.

Good writers identify the degree of difficulty of their script before they write it and – if need be – game-plan for how to keep it easy to follow. I’d like to do the same for you guys. Now, if you’re writing a movie like John Wick or The Hangover, you don’t need to worry about this. But if you’re writing something more ambitious, pay attention.

Each pillar will represent a number value from 1-10. Take your script idea, and plug it into the Pillar equation. Be honest with yourself. No cheating. Assign a number value (10 for most complex, 1 for least) to each pillar as it pertains to your idea, then add all the numbers up. If you end up between 40-50, I wouldn’t write the script unless you’re extremely experienced. To be honest, I can only think of two movies that would score higher than 40 at the moment: 2001 and Cloud Atlas. So yeah, stay away from this. 30-40 is doable, but hard. Most professional screenwriters still wrestle with screenplays this complex. 20-30 is a nice place to be and where a lot of good Hollywood films operate. The Imitation Game, for example, is probably around a 30. 10-20 is where most mainstream Hollywood movies live. Being in this category does not mean a weak script by any means. Rocky is somewhere between 10-20. Nightcrawer is somewhere between 10-20. The Equalizer is between 10-20. Simple films can still be great. 0-10, however, is probably an indication that your script is too simple and actually needs  more complexity.

Here are a few sample movies to get a feel for the numbers…

The Hangover

Description: 2
Exposition: 3
Character Count: 3
Plotting: 6
Presentation: 4
Total: 18

Frozen

Description: 5
Exposition: 4
Character Count: 5
Plotting: 4
Presentation: 2
Total: 20

Memento

Description: 2
Exposition: 9
Character Count: 3
Plotting: 7
Presentation: 10
Total: 31

Guardians of the Galaxy

Description: 8
Exposition: 7
Character Count: 8
Plotting: 7
Presentation: 3
Total Score: 33

Pulp Fiction

Description: 4
Exposition: 6
Character Count: 7
Plotting: 9
Presentation: 10
Total Score: 36

Again, complexity is NOT an indication of quality. It’s an assessment of how difficult the routine is to pull off. The higher the number, the harder it’s going to be for you to convey your story to the reader. Pulling off bigger routines usually results in a more satisfying experience, but you run a higher risk of failing. So it’s a gamble.

Now, let’s say you don’t want to listen to me. You’re going to write a complex story no matter what. If you’re going to do this, simply look for ways to pare down the complexity of each pillar. So, for description, say in one sentence what it takes you to say in three. For exposition, focus only on the key points that need to be made. If Harry Potter’s hiding a wand in a tree, don’t have him say, “I hid Gobblestorf’s wand in the tree by the 3 Valleys – where Griffindill used to take us when we were in 2nd Year.” Say, “I hid the wand in our favorite tree.” Little changes like that can really make a script easier to follow (and read). For character count, there are usually one or two characters who are pointless in a script. Find out who those characters are in your script and get rid of them. Then combine a couple of others. For plotting, twists and double-crosses are great, but don’t depend on them. One awesome twist is better than three so-so ones. And finally, presentation. There’s nothing you can really do to change this since it’s embedded into the concept of the movie. But you can be aware that it makes your script harder to read. To that end, hold the reader’s hand more than you normally would. Reading an ambitious time-twisting narrative can be a little like walking into a fun house of mirrors. We need you to orient us from time to time.

And really, that’s the best advice I can give you. You don’t have to do all these number-adding things to know that your idea is ambitious. If that’s the case, just being aware of it puts you in front of the problem. You can guide the reader along rather than leaving them on an island with a blindfold and a Da Vinci Code codex. The writer-reader relationship is a symbiotic one. You need to work together to get to the finish line.

Genre: Detective Noir
Premise: (from Black List) A little person private eye investigates the disappearance of a young actress in 1930s Hollywood, leading him to uncover conspiracies involving THE WIZARD OF OZ and Metro Goldwyn Mayer brass.
About: This script finished fairly high on last year’s Black List. Will Widger is not yet a household name in the screenwriting community, but if you do some digging, you’ll find some bread crumbs he’s left on his way to Oz. He recently co-wrote an animation script called “Wish” for director Cory Edwards (Hoodwinked) with co-writer Patrick Burleigh. He also wrote a script with Patrick in 2011 called “Silverfoxes” about a guy who loses his girlfriend to an older man, so he decides to “Big Momma’s House” himself up as a silver fox to get her back. I get the feeling that Widger and Burleigh co-write a lot of comedy, and Widger wanted to get away (at least temporarily) to write something serious. Kind of like when a lead singer does a solo album so he doesn’t have to go through all that collaboration stuff.
Writer: Will Widger
Details: 121 pages

You have to be a little weary when the first slugline in a script reads “CONTINUOUS.” But as I stated on my Black List breakdown, I liked this premise a lot, and therefore I don’t care if the slugline continues a story that hasn’t started yet. I was trusting my earlier instincts.

With that said, it’s been a tough week. I’m not reading a whole lot of good material. I find myself whispering “Please surprise me please surprise me please surprise me” every time I open a script because I’m tired of reading a logline, reading the genre, then getting EXACTLY what I expected – down to the acts, down to the characters, down to the story beats.

I’m still trying to recover from yesterday’s script, Forbidden Planet, which didn’t include a single plot point, character or storyline that surprised me. This is one of the pivotal things every writer should be thinking about when they write a script! “How am I going to surprise someone whose job it is to read screenplays?” I’m not saying you have to reinvent the wheel. But you need that mindset going into every single scene if you expect your script to get noticed.

The Munchkin did end up surprising me. But not in the ways I expected. More on that in a bit.

40-something Vic Shea (or, let’s just come out and say it, Peter Dinklage, since his casting is the only way this movie gets made) is a little person private investigator. One day, a mother comes in and hires Vic to look for her little person daughter, Claudette, a 15 year-old girl who was cast in The Wizard of Oz as one of the munchkins, but who hasn’t been heard from since.

Vic and his half-assistant half-girlfriend, Doris, reluctantly take the job, expecting to find nothing. But boy are they wrong. Claudette’s landlord, an actress named Anne, tells them that she took Claudette to an MGM party when she first moved into the building.

After some heavy sleuthing, Vic finds out that Claudette was raped at that party, and was pregnant at the time of her disappearance. The prevailing thought is that notorious scumbag and MGM fixer Eddie Mannix did the deed. But upon closer inspection, Eddie never got close to the girl.

As Vic starts digging deeper, Doris starts demanding more from their relationship. And as guys are wont to do, Vic does everything in his power to postpone these discussions. When Doris then dumps him, Vic realizes how much she means to him (this is another thing guys are good at). It becomes clear that he can’t run his life or his business without her.

So Vic must reconcile with Doris in time to figure out what happened to this poor innocent girl. And since the murderer has caught on to their investigation, time is definitely running out.

I was about to give up on this 20 pages in. Something was really off about the tone. In retrospect, now that I know Widger is a comedy guy, it makes sense. The first act felt too light. In addition to some romantic-comedy-like scenes between Vic and Doris, we have Vic in a Chinese doctor’s office begging for herbal treatments to make him taller. It felt a little like Audrey Hepburn’s racially-insensitive apartment manager in Breakfast at Tiffany’s.

Tone’s a big deal. You don’t want to be too goofy in a script where someone gets raped and murdered and I definitely felt that, for the subject matter, this script wasn’t taking itself seriously enough.

But, once we got into the actual investigation, things started clicking. It’s almost as if Widger came eye to eye with what kind of story he was telling and transformed his approach accordingly. In fact, The Munchkin kicked ass in the second act. I was genuinely interested in finding out who killed Claudette, and I didn’t have the slightest idea who did it. Widger had me right where he wanted me.

Unfortunately, the third act rolled around and a million plot points started coalescing and I have no freaking clue what happened next.

This leads us to the unique challenge of writing an investigation-focused screenplay. How complicated should the investigation be? If the case is too easy to predict, we’re bored. But if it’s too complicated, we get confused, which ultimately leads another kind of boredom. Ideally, you want to write something right down the middle. But how do you know where the middle is?

In that second act, Widger knew exactly where it was. But then, during the last 25 pages, things started getting too complicated. (spoilers) We had already captured the killer, but we still hadn’t figured out who hired Vic in the first place (Claudette’s “mother,” it turned out, was a hired actress). If we’d already found the killer, why did we still care about the fake mother?

I think this goes back to how many elements you’re throwing at your reader – elements being characters, twists, major plot points, objectives, etc. Include too many and it becomes too hard for the reader to remember them all. I don’t know if there’s a perfect number, but my instincts tell me there were too many here. You had Claudette’s landlord, Louis B. Mayer, Eddie Mannix, Claudette, a major casting director, Claudette’s fake mom, Claudette’s real mom, Claudette’s friend, Judy Garland, Judy Garland’s mom (there were a lot of moms here), and Claudette’s magician boyfriend. On top of that we were trying to solve four separate things – a rape, Claudette’s disappearance, Claudette’s boyfriend’s murder, and who hired Vic in the first place. Add some twists on top of that (i.e. the landlord being in cahoots with the casting director) and you can see why following The Munchkin was no easy task.

On top of this, your allotted number of elements will vary depending on how good you are with presenting information. Chinatown is packed with tons of elements. But Robert Towne does an amazing job of conveying information. He explains each element clearly so we’re always in the loop. I’m not sure the same can be said for The Munchkin. Sometimes I was in the loop and other times I wasn’t.

I went back and forth on The Munchkin. It kept me at arm’s length at the beginning, pulled me in for its second act, then it pushed me back out during the climax. The story is a good one and when it’s cooking, it’s cooking. But these screenplays always come down to their endings. The whole reason you’ve invested all this time and mental energy is to be wowed and surprised at the end. I didn’t entirely understand the ending and for that reason, I couldn’t give it a ‘worth the read.’

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

What I learned: Here’s my blueprint for writing an investigation script. Err on the side of complicated with the investigation. Add more elements and twists than you think you have to. You can always dial it back if you need to. Then, when you’re finished, get “clarity” feedback. Have someone read it and specifically ask them to note where they were “confused” about the investigation. After they give you notes, go back and rewrite it. Then go to someone new for your next set of clarity notes. Investigation scripts are “hard burn reads.” The same people can’t read them twice because they already know what comes next. Once you’ve burned a reader, they’re out. Find the next guy, figure out what confuses them, go back and rewrite again. Keep doing this until it’s perfect.

Genre: Sci-fi
Premise: When a distant civilization calls out to earth, humanity sends a ship to the planet to make contact. But all they find is a deserted world.
About: The original 1956 film is a classic and the first film to portray humans travelling together in a space ship. As recently as six years ago, James Cameron was intrigued with the possibility of making Forbidden Planet. Furthermore, the writer, J. Michael Straczynski, in typical Hollywood fashion, wanted to make a trilogy out of the property. While the project died not long after, we must remember that nothing in the movie business ever really dies. I’m sure the project will rise again.
Writer: J. Michael Straczynski
Details: 122 pages

Confession time. I’ve never seen Forbidden Planet. A lot of people will tell you that the 1950s film “holds up,” but come on. It’s 1950s special effects with cheesy 1950s acting. You might as well take out the sound and add dialogue cards.

Now from what I understand, in the original film, this ship the “Bellerophon” went to this mysterious planet but disappeared, and so earth sent a second ship to go figure out what happened to the Bellerophon. Well, with Straczynski turning this into a trilogy, he’s decided to follow the Bellerophon’s journey first, and that’s what this draft focuses on. I didn’t find out about the trilogy plans until after I read the screenplay, but it makes a whole lot of sense now, for reasons I’ll get to a bit. But first, a summary of the story…

The plot is pretty straight-forward. Aliens send earth a signal, along with instructions to build a ship and come visit them. There’s one small glitch though. The end of the signal cuts out, indicating that something may have happened while sending it.

Humanity builds a big giant ship, headed up by Captain Thomas Stearn. There’s like a 70 man crew, but the other two important players are Dr. Edward Morbius, a linguistics expert, and his wife (in title only), Diana Morbius. We sense a wee bit of tension between these three as Diana may or may not be secretly involved with Stearn.

So anyway, they fly to this planet, Altair-4, and the entire planet is one big city. But an abandoned city. There isn’t a single life-form around. However, when we see them leave the ship, we zoom in to notice little nano-robots entering their mouths as they breathe.

They then find an old museum where a robot named RBI (who they nickname “Robbie”) explains what he knows about the planet. Unfortunately, he’s been shut down for 800 years, so he can’t tell them why no one’s around.

Eventually, our emerging villain, Morbius, goes AWOL, and due to some connection with the nano-robots inside of him and this fully automated city, starts to actually control the planet, and quickly works to prevent the Ballerophon from leaving. Stearn will have to figure out how to stop Morbius if he’s going to save his crew, a task that’s looking less and less likely by the minute.

Concept Art for the film.

So when I started reading this, I noticed something pretty quickly. It was a cool idea. I was into it. But the story started to drag. Despite actually getting to the planet by page 30, our crew was still exploring it on page 70.

There’s a period after your characters get to the “problem spot” in your story where they start looking around and trying to figure out what’s going on. Blake Snyder of Save the Cat fame liked to call this the “Fun and Games” section, but that doesn’t really apply outside of comedies and family fare. Instead, I like to call this the “Discovery” section. This is where characters try to “discover” what’s going on in the environment they’ve been sent to.

“Discovery” should really only happen for about 15 pages (which is the same amount of time, I believe, Blake Snyder gives for his “Fun and Games” section). After that, the audience/reader starts to get restless and wants change. Imagine, for instance, in Alien, if our excavation crew went down on the Alien planet for 40 pages as opposed to 15. We’d get bored, right? We need to get to the next phase of the story, which is to bring the alien back to the ship.

But even if you’re required to stay in the location with your characters, you need to start introducing some heavier plot developments than simply finding a robot and chatting with him (as was the case here). I know there are a lot of Prometheus haters out there, but you’ll notice that the Discovery phase didn’t go on for long before a series of intense plot developments started to occur.

And that was my big problem with Forbidden Planet. It was that classic issue where you can sense that the writer is spreading his story out. He doesn’t have enough meat to cook with. At first I was confused about this. I knew Straczynski was a good writer. So why was he doing this?

Then I read about the planned trilogy and it all made sense. And hence, we have one of the biggest writing problems plaguing Hollywood today. It’s hard enough to come up with a great two hour story. But if you tell the writer, before he writes a word, that he actually has to write a SIX hour story, this is what you’re going to get. Long-drawn out plots with not enough happening.

This is the same thing that happened with the Hobbit trilogy. I remember watching the second Hobbit movie, and there came a point in the middle of the film with this big water-rafting barrel floating set-piece – and I thought to myself, “Yeah, this is a big set-piece but where are the stakes? Why is this important for the story?” It was empty because you could tell the writers were trying to cover the fact that they didn’t have a lot of story to begin with. The strategy, then, was to distract you with a big fat set-piece.

The solution to this problem is to always think of your script as a single script, even if you do plan to continue it with additional movies. Try to make it the best actual story on its own.

But there’s a bigger lesson here for screenwriters. And that’s to keep your story moving quickly. One thing I’ve found with young writers is that whatever you think is “fast-paced” is actually a lot slower on the page. It takes years and years for writers to actually understand how fast their story is coming across on the page.

So focus on moving the story along faster than you believe you have to. And that means introducing major plot points that push the story in new directions (a dangerous face-hugging alien on one of your characters) rather than small plot advancements that only have a minor effect on the story (finding a museum on your mysterious new planet).

Or, if you want me to put it simply: More shit needs to happen.

It’s kind of funny that we’re discussing this in the wake of a review about scripts that are ‘too complex.”  But that’s not really what we’re talking about here.  Complexity has little to do with writing bigger plot points that happen more frequently, which was the problem with Forbidden Planet.  This script needed more meat.  Maybe in future drafts, they’ll slaughter more cows to get it.

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

What I learned: If you feel like you’re biding time in your script, you probably are. Think about that for a moment. If you ever feel like you’re adding scenes to just keep the story alive and keep it going, those scenes will be dead on the page. Every scene should move the story forward in some purposeful way. If you ever feel like you’re biding time, go back to the point in the script where that “biding” started, and start over again.

Genre: Crime/Drama
Premise: When a young prostitute double-crosses some dangerous gangsters, she must team up with a mysterious seizure-ridden ex-KGB agent to escape them.
About: This is a writer-director project from Academy Award winner Stephen Gaghan (Syriana, Traffic) that he’s been trying to put together for a few years now. It’s had everyone attached from Robert De Niro to Chris Hemsworth. There was a time when Gaghan was the hottest writer in town. From 2000-2005, he was THE screenwriter to go to. Superstardom is impossible to maintain forever, though, and more recently Gaghan has been making money doctoring scripts (After Earth was one of the more recent projects he worked on). Gaghan has also jumped on the TV gravy train and has a new series on Fox premiering this year with Rainn Wilson (The Office) called Backstrom.
Writer: Stephen Gaghan
Details: 119 pages

Poor Crime-Dramas. They don’t fall into the new studio paradigm. Think about it. When was the last big-budget high-grossing crime-drama? What happened to movies like Heat? My guess is that the genre is too concept-light. You don’t have that big hook that gets butts in seats. These movies are more execution-dependent, which is the equivalent of saying to a studio, “I want to shoot my movie in black and white.”

I think the last big Crime-Drama was The Town, but that was sort of a magic act by Ben Affleck, as he marketed it as a heist movie, a much more marketable genre than Crime-Drama. Studios favor the “kissing cousins” of Crime-Drama, lovingly known as the “Crime-Thriller.” Stuff like Taken and The Equalizer – stuff that moves fast.

This is why I stress the “U” in GSU so much. Movies powered by urgency – the need to get the job done immediately – thrill audiences more. On the flip side, you don’t get the intelligence of a crime drama, the plot machinations that make you work harder for the answers, which can be more rewarding in the long run.

All of this, I’m guessing, is why The Candy Store has struggled to find financing. But it should be noted that everything comes back in Hollywood. If someone would’ve told me that the religious blockbuster would make a comeback three years ago, I would’ve told them to go part the Red Sea. So who knows, maybe The Candy Store will be the return of crime cinema.

Suki is a beautiful teenage Estonian girl who’s been trafficked across seas to Brooklyn, New York, where an opportunistic pimp named Chiddybang employs her. When Suki’s about to be killed for undercutting Chiddybang, some Transnistrians (I guess this is a real place) buy her away just in time.

It turns out that one of Suki’s clients is the president of one of the biggest Credit Unions in America. This Union fucked over the Transnistrians in a deal, and they want revenge. Using Suki’s access to the president, her job is to kill him, for which she’ll get her freedom.

Suki, not trusting that she’s going to walk out of this alive, seduces her handler, kills him, and makes a run for it. When the Transnistrians catch up to her, she’s saved by Swann, a former Russian agent who suffered a crippling brain injury leaving him seizure-ridden.

The two go on the run together, and the Transnistrians put together their A-team to find and kill them both. As Swann and Suki fall in love, he has to make a tough decision. Does he stay with Suki even though he knows it increases their chances of getting caught? Or send her away, giving her a chance to survive. Whichever route he takes will change his life forever.

The Candy Store is complex. The above summary is way streamlined. There are also entire flashbacks of characters in Transnistria. There’s a heroin-laced-with-Chernobyl-radiation subplot. There’s a storyline with a cowardly cop named Davis who loses his partner in a traffic-stop. And there’s some time manipulation too.

This weekend was a class in complex storytelling, as I read another screenplay, this one amateur, that was also dense and complicated. Here’s what I learned. Overly complex plots are the triple-axle routines of the screenwriting world. They’re extremely difficult to nail. If you’re going to go down this road, you have about ten pages to earn the benefit of the doubt. If you fail at earning this trust, we pull away the second things get confusing.

Gaghan earns the benefit of the doubt with a sophisticated persentation. There isn’t a single formatting or style issue in his script (for example, sometimes a writer will introduce a character without capitalizing their name – suicide in a complex script). The writing itself (phrasing, sentence structure, vocabulary) is strong.  He knows to put heavy emphasis on orienting the reader (since it’s easy to get lost in complex stories). And characters all have strong memorable introductions.

For example, when Davis (the cop whose partner is taken) is introduced, Gaghan repeatedly hits on the fact that Davis is too cautious. He’s not brave enough. A lesser screenwriter introducing a cop will tell us nothing distinguishing about him. So we’ll never feel like we know the guy. When you’re writing a complex script with lots of characters, it’s essential that we remember all those characters.  Strong distinguishing introductions are the key to that.

With that said, I can see why this is a hard sell. Audiences like puzzles. But The Candy Store is a 3-D puzzle. At one point we’re connecting two storylines from two different time periods in a very complex way.

There was this geeky kid in my high school who would always be on the computers day in and day out. And one day I asked him what he was working on. He told me he was developing a program of all the possible ways a human being could juggle 14 objects. At times, The Candy Store felt like it was written for that guy.

With that said, I was a big admirer of Gaghan’s scene-writing. I noticed ample use of some staple Scriptshadow techniques, such as the scene-agitator! When Davis approaches the stopped Transnistrian car, he commands his partner, Mahoney, to stay 30 degrees behind the rear-right wheel while he questions the driver.

As the driver starts giving Davis trouble, Mahoney keeps creeping up to look inside the back window. So Davis keeps having to turn and say, “Behind the wheel, Mahoney!” A lesser writer would’ve written this scene straight up, with Davis just talking to the driver. Adding the scene agitator amped up the tension another notch.

Also, from a technical standpoint, you can tell why this guy used to be the highest paid screenwriter in Hollywood. He really knows how to write. Ironically, that’s hurt him as of late. Hollywood is less and less interested in making these kinds of thoughtful movies, so you could argue that Gaghan is marginalized by his talent.

It reminds me of a couple of lines uttered by Hollywood execs. One famously said to a writer who turned in a draft: “Can you make it less… smart?” And then another exec warned the producer of The Princess Bride while he was pitching the project, “You gotta watch out for those William Goldman scripts. He’ll trick you with good writing.” As shocking as those quotes are, I can kind of understand them. The average moviegoer is not a Harvard grad. The average moviegoer doesn’t write juggling programs. The 1 percenters may love your movie. But there’s only 1 percent of them. What are you doing for the other 99?

Since we need balance in the marketplace, I hope The Candy Store gets made. It’s a solid script. But it’s definitely one that requires every ounce of your concentration.

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

What I learned: ”CUT TO” – CUT TO is one of those screenwriting phrases that isn’t used much anymore. If you write one scene and then write another scene, “cutting to” that other scene is assumed. However, the CUT TO can still come in handy when you’re writing scripts like The Candy Store, which follow multiple storylines. If you’re in a Brooklyn storyline for 15 pages, and then you need to cut to a completely separate storyline in Russia for 15 pages, a CUT TO can help the reader realize that a bigger jump is taking place. Without it, the jump can seem jarring. Like, “Whoa, how the hell did we end up in Russia so quickly?” Gaghan uses this to great effect in The Candy Store.