Genre: Comedy
Premise: When their embarrassing, sometimes filthy, possibly cancellable group chat falls into the wrong hands, a group of dudes must go on a madcap scavenger hunt around town to appease a mysterious blackmailer.
About: This script finished on last year’s Black List. The writers got their first big Hollywood job not long ago, writing Hotel Transylvania 4.
Writers: Amos Vernon and Nunzio Randazzo
Details: 120 pages

Donald Glover should be in this movie in some capacity.

I like this idea.

I like ideas that lean into recent culture.

I also like ideas that are relatable. When you read them, you nod your head, immediately understanding what the movie could be.

That’s how I felt when I read this logline. I’ve been on some pretty gnarly group texts. They can get saucy. Sometimes too saucy. What if one of those group texts got out into the ultra-senstive ecosystem that is America in 2024? It wouldn’t be pretty.

So that strikes me as a genuine high-stakes scenario.

Let’s find out what the writers did with it.

Studly Chance, Hipster Wyatt, Trainwreck Mitchell, and Preppy Dennis have been friends since high school. That’s when they started their group chat – Da Boyz. Cut to a decade later and they still have that group chat. It’s their favorite guilty pleasure. Whenever one of them wants to say something inappropriate that they cannot say in the world, they post in Da Boyz group chat, where they know it will be appreciated.

But the Boyz have a problem. Chance, who became an actor, has shot his first big movie, “Robo Zorro.” This is his coming out party. So he invites his friends to Hollywood to party on the weekend of the premiere. Chance has one request: We need to delete the group chat. There’s too much dirty crap on there. It’s the only thing in the world that can destroy his career. So the friends reluctantly have a funeral for the group chat.

They then get absolutely wasted and have the time of their lives at Chance’s house party. The next morning, however, they wake up and get a call. Some psycho has stolen Mitchell’s phone and has the group chat. Turns out stupid Mitchell didn’t delete the chat as instructed. And now texts are being released to TMZ.

Some of them are small: Chance stated in the group chat when he got the Robo Zorro audition that it was the dumbest sounding movie ever.

Some of them big: He only tried to get the role to get into the pants of Hollywood starlet Dipti Bardot, who has since become his girlfriend.

Our phone thief tells them that in order to prevent more leaked texts, they have to do what he says. So he tells them to go to the LA zoo and beat up a Komodo dragon. He tells them to go to the Dodgers game and pierce their nipples behind home plate. All of this while Chance’s publicist tears through the city trying to find the phone thief.

After a little detective work, they find out that the thief is an Andrew Tate type who they ran into at the party. Some crypto-loving gym rat who takes pictures with Bugatis and Samurai swords. Once they figure that out, they target his favorite 10 million dollar sword, thinking if they can steal it, they can make a trade for the phone. But nothing will prepare them for why this weirdo is actually doing this. They may know this man better than they think they do.

Blow Up The Chat starts out strong. I thought this early high school scene that introduces the group chat was funny. The teacher in the class has a rule that when students text, she reads the texts out loud to the class…

After that scene, I assumed the whole script would take place in high school cause why not? You just wrote a hilarious scene with a group of high school kids, proving you know how to make high school dialogue funny. Why move away from that? Stay with what’s working!

Cause once they became adults, their interactions were never as funny as that first scene. We see this a lot, don’t we? Wasn’t this my exact note in the last two comedy scripts I reviewed? The first scenes were funny and then nothing was ever as funny after that.

This is a FIXABLE THING. It happens because we obsess over our first scene and make sure it’s amazing. But the idea is not then to say, “Okay, I can relax now.” No, that scene then has to be the bar by which you try to clear with all your subsequent scenes. You want to try and outdo yourself. Not set your Script Tesla on cruise control.

Most scripts are average purely because the writers don’t have that “bar-topping” attitude.

In addition to this, the script didn’t approach its plot correctly. For a large chunk of the movie, the characters aren’t even going after the goal – which is to find the thief and get the phone back. They’re taking his marching orders and doing wherever he says to do. Reactive characters rarely work. Imagine if, in The Hangover, our characters didn’t spend the first half of the movie trying to find Doug. But rather went off on some other adventure. It would drift. It would feel lost. That’s the equivalent of how this narrative feels.

I suppose you could argue that this villain has the phone and therefore has the control. So he’s going to use it. But that was another problem. I never felt the stakes of this story. If they didn’t do what he said, he would release more information? But he’s already released a bunch of information. What’s to make us believe that this next bunch of information he releases will be worse? We don’t know for sure. So we don’t feel the stakes.

The best scene in the movie is one where the writers finally recognize the power of their concept and lean into it. This is almost always where you find your best scenes – when you lean directly into your concept.

Once our villain has Da Boyz in front of him, he tells them, sure, I’ll give you the phone back. But first, I want to share with you your SIDE CHATS. Side chats? The guys all look at each other. What’s that mean? The villain then starts reading the chats that are happening without Dennis. Or without Chance. Or Wyatt. Or Mitchell. In these chats, the guys talk behind each others’ backs.

Now we’re actually getting into some conflict. We’re getting away from the surface level stuff and going deeper. It’s the kind of revelation that is specific to this concept – a group of people texting. I wish there were more thoughtful plot beats like this.

Cause I pretty much checked out when a scene was built around them having to pierce each others’ nipples. It just became so overtly goofy that I knew the characters were safe. That nothing mattered anymore. You can make a scene SO MUCH FUNNIER by upping the stakes. I didn’t understand why we went in the opposite direction.

I’m not Captain Delete It with Blow Up The Chat. But like a lot of comedy scripts I read, the writers are more focused on having fun than they are writing the best comedy possible. Comedy needs tight structure to set up the scenarios that are going to make us laugh. And here, especially with the zoo scene and Dodgers game, it felt like the writers came up with the idea a minute ago and wrote one draft and that was it. It didn’t feel like they really thought through all the comedy scenarios and asked, “Is this the funniest scenario I can write?”

So, sadly, it wasn’t for me.

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

What I learned: This is the kind of concept where you need to ask if a dark comedy is a better vessel for the story than a straight comedy. This script always had one hand tied behind its back because it wasn’t willing to expose the kinds of texts that people would REALLY WRITE. The kind of texts that would REALLY CANCEL someone. But if you wrote this as a dark comedy, you could be more realistic about that stuff and have truly horrid texts. It would’ve been a different movie. But it would’ve been A WAY MORE TRUTHFUL MOVIE. And TRUTH is preferred in writing. Readers can tell when you’re fibbing.

This script has GSU for days. But does it have logic for hours??

 

Genre: Action
Premise: Following a severe, soon to be fatal, brain injury during a violent attack, an NYPD sergeant embarks on a harrowing journey of vengeance, which leaves her only a few hours of adrenaline-bursting consciousness to hunt down those who took her daughter and killed her husband before she dies.
About: Today’s writer, who got this script on last year’s Black List, has had some notable success as a TV scribe. He wrote on the Ridley Scott show, Raised by Wolves. He wrote on The Flash. And he wrote 19 episodes of the well-reviewed show, White Collar.
Writer: Julian Meiojas
Details: 110 pages

Alicia Vikander for Izzy?

A long time ago I wrote a time-travel script called “The Jump.”

It was about a guy whose wife disappears and he soon finds out she’s been kidnapped into the future. So he seeks out the people who can time jump and travels into the future to get her back.

For a variety of reasons (many of which weakened the script considerably), my main character was dying of a brain tumor. He only had a couple of days to live. The idea was, not only did he have to go to the future to rescue his wife. He had a limited time to do so, as his tumor was days away from killing him. But I always ran up against this issue of: if he was days away from dying of a brain tumor, how did he have all this energy to run around and save his wife?

These days, I would never have included the stupid brain tumor thing. I’ve realized, after reading thousands of scripts, that stuff like that overcomplicates what should be a simple narrative. If I could time travel in real life I’d go back and tell Past Carson to get rid of the brain tumor immediately.

The reason I bring it up is because today’s script is dealing with the same issue I was dealing with: how do you write a believable action movie around a highly mobile character whose sickness will kill her within hours?

Did Die Fast figure out the solution to that problem? Let’s find out.

Izzy is a 37 year old Brooklyn cop. She’s got a 14 year old daughter, Lola, who’s inherited her angry teenage rebellion stage a bit early. She’s getting in fights at school (in a very 2024 character beat, they are making fun of her sexuality). And boy would that get worse if she knew the truth about who her father was. He’s a famous bank robber who’s currently appealing a 60 year prison sentence.

Meanwhile, she’s dealing with her stepdad, David, who she kind of gets along with. Izzy and David are actually on the fence about whether they should tell Izzy the truth about her father when the two of them are attacked at their house. Some masked men want money although it’s not clear what money they’re talking about. They kill David and toss her out the window.

Three days later, Izzy wakes up in the hospital. She’s told that she has a critical brain injury and only has 5 hours to live. Even worse, the cops’ operating thesis is that SHE killed David. Luckily for Izzy, this unique brain injury allows for a final burst of energy before death. So Izzy is actually operating in an almost superhuman state. As soon as the doctors leave the room, she’s out of there.

Izzy only wants to accomplish two things before her death. One, go find her daughter, as she assumes that whoever came after her and David will come after Lola next. And two, get revenge on the people who killed her husband. This will be complicated by the fact that Izzy used to run with some sketchy cats before she became a cop. I’m not a psychic or anything but something tells me that bank robber dude had something to do with this. So get ready Bank Robber Dude. Izzy’s coming.

In regards to our “Is it possible to believably create an action character who’s hours away from dying” question, I must admit the writer did a good job.

Let’s be honest. There is no medical scenario on record that would support what happens to Izzy here. But with some fairly convincing exposition based on, what sounds like, sound research, I believed it enough to retain my suspension of disbelief.

So all’s good in the hood, right?

I would say more all’s average in the hood.

This movie is Crank. It’s a woman with a ticking time bomb in her head on a tear. And it’s hard to make a plotline that simple stand out.

However, we do have a recent comp that did stand out! I’m talking about David L. Williams’, “Clementine.”

So what was the difference between these two scripts that made that one so good and this one so average? The answers aren’t sexy. It comes back to nuts and bolts screenwriting.

David wrote a script meant to be enjoyed. Julian is writing a script that he’s trying to impress readers with.

What does that mean in layman’s terms? It means one guy is trying too hard.

Take a look at some of these lines from today’s script…

She finds an UNCONSCIOUS GUARD. Another gorehole mouth — the kiss of a shotgun’s ass. She pulse checks. Got it. Moves on.

Enter DET. OMAR NAZARIAN, 30s, fly-boy swag, but look close and you’ll see spit-up on this father-of-4’s Air Force 1s.

It’s overly specific try-hard too-cool-for-school writing, which often results in reader “double-takes” (the reader has to re-read sentences to understand them). When you’re writing a script like this one that is so reliant on its fast pace, double-take lines are script killers. Cause they create a stuttering effect that destroys the very pacing you’re going for.

The overwriting gets a little better as the script goes on. But not enough for my taste.

Also, I liked the character of Clementine more. Izzy was kind of annoying. She feels too written. Not authentic enough. Clementine felt like a real person.

How much you like the main character has an enormous effect on how you experience the rest of the story. In this case, if I had to give the Izzy character a 1 out of 10 rating for likability, I would give her a 6. With Clementine, I would give her a 9. That difference changes the ENTIRE WAY the reader experiences the script. Because when you like a character that much, you just care more about every story beat, every twist and turn, every character achievement.

Another thing that David did better was he put his characters in these situations that you thought there was NO WAY IN THE WORLD they were going to get out of. So you had to keep reading to find out if they would.

Here, every single time Izzy got in a tough situation, I knew without blinking she would be okay. There’s a scene where she takes on 10 guys in a hallway and I knew before the first one came at her that she was fine.

Look, I know that in 99.9% of movies, the hero makes it to the end. But there’s a special skill in screenwriting wherein, even though the reader inherently knows this, you have the ability to make them constantly DOUBT that it’s going to happen. And the way you do that is to put them in these scenarios that genuinely feel impossible to get out of. This script never passed that test.

Moving on to DIALOGUE…

This month I’m celebrating the release of my new dialogue book, The Greatest Dialogue Book Ever Written. So I wanted to cover some from Die Fast.

One of the things I talk about in the book is that certain genres aren’t conducive to writing dialogue. Fast-moving action films are squarely in that department. We see that here. There isn’t a lot of memorable dialogue and that’s because there’s no room for it.

Dialogue, I’ve learned, needs a runway to get going.

It’s hard to write good dialogue if all your dialogue scenes are three-quarters of a page long. There’s not enough runway to build a good conversation.

The only long dialogue scenes you get to write in these action scripts are exposition-driven. For example, there’s a scene late in the script where Izzy tells Lola the truth about her father. It’s a long scene but it’s all backstory. It’s not the kind of dialogue you can add flash or flair to. It’s just expository.

The good news is, if you’re bad at dialogue, then this is the perfect type of script for you to write. Because the dialogue requirements are minimal. You just need to know how to write exposition. Luckily, there’s an entire chapter about how to write great exposition in my book. So go buy it!

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

What I learned: We’ve hit the tipping point for “ass-kicking girl” scripts. They’re done. There are too many of them out there and it’s diluted their entertainment value. Plus, they don’t do very well at the box office. The last hope is Ballerina, the John Wick spinoff movie. If that does well, they may have a second life. But if I were a writer right now who likes the action genre, I’m writing an “ass-kicking guy” script.  Unless.  UNLESS!  You have a totally fresh new inventive take on the “ass-kicking girl” formula.

What I learned 2: How do you deal with difficult-to-buy-into scenarios such as people who can run around like Chris Hemsworth despite the fact that they’re supposedly going to drop dead in 5 hours? This script gives you a pretty good blueprint. Do as much research as possible to find the most convincing explanation for your wild scenario. Write a scene that incorporates that exposition. Then just GET THE F**K ON WITH YOUR SCRIPT. Don’t look back. Just go. Cause the more people think about it, the less they’ll believe it. So it’s best to address it as convincingly as you can, move on to the fun, and never stop. Cause if we’re having fun all the way through your story, we’re not thinking about the medical accuracy of your concept.

Have you been struggling with your dialogue? I have over (that’s right, OVER) 250 dialogue tips in my new book, “The Greatest Dialogue Book Ever Written.” You can head over to Amazon and buy the book, right now!

And I feel fine

The movie we were promised

Alex Garland’s “Civil War” pulled in 25 million dollars this weekend. On the surface, that seems like an average number. But when you look deeper, it’s staggeringly high.

This is independent studio A24’s biggest opening ever. The whole reason it’s an A24 film is that it’s an indie movie. Despite the way it promotes itself, which I’ll talk about in a bit, it’s a character piece about photojournalists. Most of the movie takes place away from the war. So, for a film like that to pull in 25 million dollars is gigantic. It rarely happens.

Now, I love Garland so I very much flirted with seeing this. But I ended up deciding not to. I’ll share with you why later. It does come down to a screenwriting choice Garland made, which is usually how it goes with me.

But before we talk about that, I wanted to discuss the marketing of this film. Cause the marketing is what allowed the film to achieve its unprecedented box office. And yet that marketing is deceptive.

It’s deceptive because this movie is not about a civil war. It’s about photojournalists. The negative reactions coming out of the film almost all revolve around the frustration of thinking they were going to get a movie about a civil war when, in actuality, they got a movie about how difficult it is to be a war photographer.

This is one of Hollywood’s best tricks. They know when they have a movie that if they marketed it honestly, nobody would show up. So they create a marketing campaign that promotes the aspects of the movie that are marketable, even if those elements are barely in the film.

They’ll even go so far as to misrepresent a movie if they fear that the truth will keep people out of the theater. They did this recently with the campaigns for both Mean Girls and The Color Purple. ZERO MENTION in the trailers of the films being musicals. Cause they feared that if people knew they were musicals, nobody would show up.

This becomes relevant to all screenwriters because, once you finish your screenplay, your job will be similar to the marketers’ jobs when promoting a movie – which is, you’ll have to send loglines to people and pitch people to get them to read your script.

As someone who does around 300 logline consults a year, I am particularly savvy in this department of deception because, often, writers will come to me wanting the sexiest logline possible even though the script itself isn’t sexy. And I’ll help them because I know that a better logline means more read requests.

But I do have the conversation with each and every one of them where I say, “Next time, before you write your script, don’t write the boring version of the script then try to come up with an exciting logline afterwards. Write the exciting version of the script to begin with so that your logline will be an accurate representation of your script. That way you get the best of both worlds.”

Because, inevitably, what happens, is that even if you are able to trick the potential reader into reading your script, there’s a high likelihood that they will leave disappointed because the screenplay you promised them never materialized.

That’s why some people are coming out of this movie disappointed. The negative reviews are almost all the same: “What I was promised never showed up.”

On the flip side of this, this movie shows you the power of concept – and more specifically: TITLE. How the title of a script or a movie can have so much influence over potential readers/viewers.

If you’re an indie writer and you’re tired of writing your indie scripts that no one seems interested in, do what Garland does here: Find a big sexy subject matter then hide your indie story within it.

Imagine, for example, that Garland had written a movie about news photographers trying to get the perfect photograph of drug addicts in drug-infested cities in an attempt to bring attention to the problem and hopefully make a change.

Sounds very noble. Sounds very indie. Sounds like 5 people would show up.

So you can see the difference by changing “drug infested city” to “civil war.” That’s what smart indie writers do. They find that sexy subject matter so that their character-driven scripts have an actual shot at getting noticed.

Ironically, the reason I decided not to see the film was that I heard, ahead of time, that it was not about a civil war. That it was about photographers who just happened to be operating within a civil war. That didn’t sound like an interesting enough movie to me.

The movie we got

And the more I think about it, the more I think Garland made a mistake. This is a movie that, if it would’ve committed to the Civil War angle, it would’ve made twice as much money this weekend.

It’s a reminder that point-of-view is SO IMPORTANT when writing screenplays. Think about it. You have a modern-day American civil war movie. Think about how many points-of-view you have at your disposal. Is a photographer really the most interesting?

You could’ve gone with a suburban mother, a soldier on the front lines, an abandoned child, a spy, a medic, the president of the United States, a drone pilot, a hacker, a farmer, a survivalist, a drug addict, a black market trader, an Uber driver driving people out of the city to safety.

All of those options would’ve been more interesting than a photographer. I’m not even convinced photographers are a thing anymore. We’re way more enamored with videos taken on peoples’ phones in 2024 than we are some amazing picture. This isn’t 1968 yo. The more I think about it, the more flummoxed I am by Garland’s choice.  He’s probably just really interested in photographers. 

But my point is, whenever you’re writing a screenplay, that needs to be one of your primary objectives: figure out what point-of-view is best for this story. Cause, often, we’ll go with what feels easiest to us, or the most familiar. And those aren’t the best options.

I’m still happy for Garland. His movies, while always artistically challenging, rarely connect with audiences. And here, with his last movie ever, he gets his biggest box office payout.

Now Garland is going back to writing, re-building one of his original franchises: 28 Years Later. But don’t count Garland’s directing career out just yet. When you have a clear number 1 movie at the box office, some big people start knocking on your door. However, from what I understand, Garland hates directing more than anything. So he may be able to withstand these mega-offers.

Did any of you see Civil War? What did you think?

Have you been struggling with your dialogue? I have over (that’s right, OVER) 250 dialogue tips in my new book, “The Greatest Dialogue Book Ever Written.” You can head over to Amazon and buy the book, right now!

Week 14 of the “2 Scripts in 2024” Challenge

Week 1 – Concept
Week 2 – Solidifying Your Concept
Week 3 – Building Your Characters
Week 4 – Outlining
Week 5 – The First 10 Pages
Week 6 – Inciting Incident
Week 7 – Turn Into 2nd Act
Week 8 – Fun and Games
Week 9 – Using Sequences to Tackle Your Second Act
Week 10 – The Midpoint
Week 11 – Chill Out or Ramp Up
Week 12 – Lead Up To the “Scene of Death”
Week 13 – Moment of Death

Okay, so, just to remind you, this entire surgical procedure we’re calling “writing a screenplay,” is approaching the endpoint. We’ve opted for the 110-page version. Which means that, after this week, we only have 10 pages left.

Where that leaves us is in the sweet spot of the climax.

It took me a long time to figure out how to approach the climax of a screenplay. Then, one day, it became as clear as the springs from which Evian gets its water.

A climax IS ITS OWN SCREENPLAY.

For that reason, it has its own beginning, middle, and end.

For those of you who don’t know what each of these sections stands for, let me remind you:

Beginning – Setup
Middle – Conflict
End – Resolution

For anyone who’s intimidated by this information, think of it this way. Almost every story you’ve ever told anyone – even if it was just a story to your husband about what happened to you at work – chances are you SET IT UP for them (“My boss called me into his office”), you then explained THE CONFLICT (“He said that Karen had accused me of stealing her work and taking credit for it”), before finally giving them the RESOLUTION (“I told him that Karen was a lying psycho who’s been trying to make me look bad to everyone. He apologized and said he’d have a long talk with her.”).

It’s the easiest way to tell a story. So it makes sense that we’re depending on this formula for our climax as well.

Therefore, almost everything you used to map out your 110 page screenplay, you’re going to use to map out your climax.

The first thing you have to do is figure out how long your climax is going to be. Since your third act in a 110 page screenplay is around 27 pages, the climax has to be less than that.

Because, before you get to the climax, you have three main beats that you’re trying to hit.

First beat: “Stop Crying and Get Up Off Your Keister”

Remember, at the end of the second act, your hero had fallen to his lowest point. Some level of death, either literal or metaphorical, had occurred. So, it wouldn’t make sense to jump from that to a big flashy climax.

You need a beat where they pick themselves up, dust themselves off, and shift their internal momentum from “defeated” to “I’m going to give this one more shot.”

Second beat: “I Love It When A Plan Comes Together”

After they’ve defeated their whiney b**ching and are ready to fight again, they need to come up with an actual plan. You don’t roll up on the Death Star hoping to figure it out on the way. You need that moment where everyone sits down and they explain how to destroy the Death Star.

Third beat: “The Calm Before The Storm”

Most good stories give the audience one final beat before the climax that works as the “calm before the storm.” For example, in Avatar, before the Na’Vi go off and fight the humans, they convene at the big tree of life. They have a little pow-wow where they mentally prepare for what’s about to come and then off they go.

How long should these scenes be? Pretty short, but it will all depend on the movie and the story you’re telling. But I would say 2 pages tops each. So 6 pages in total.

Cause the way you gotta look at it is, you need a few beats after the climax as well, which is going to add pages to your third act. Maybe we have 6 pages AFTER the climax is over.

So let’s do our math = 27 pages – 6 pages (lead up to climax) – 6 pages (post climax).

That leaves us with about 15 pages for our climax. Which is optimal in my opinion. 15 pages gives us an adequate amount of time for a great climactic sequence.

I know some of you hate math but we gotta use it in order to understand how to set up our climax. Remember, like I said, the climax is its own miniature movie. It has a setup, a conflict, and a resolution. Since we now know our climax is 15 pages, we can divide that in the same way we divided our script = 25% for the setup, 50% for the conflict, and 25% for the resolution.

While this is a good guide, I’ve found that setups and resolutions in climaxes tend to be shorter, percentage-wise, than their full-script counterparts. So instead of being 25% in setup, it might be 15%. Instead of 25% for the resolution, it might be 10%.

That’s because the climax is really about the showdown between the protagonist and the antagonist. So that middle section of your climax — the CONFLICT – is the meat.

With that in mind, here’s what we get…

Climax Setup – 3 pages
Climax Conflict – 10 pages
Climax Resolution – 2 pages

I’m already hearing some of you groan. Carson! You can’t possibly distill art down into such a mathematical formula. You’re right. I’m not saying you have to follow this to a T. What I’m saying is, this is the way it’s done in most movies. Therefore, you should use it as a template. How much you want to stretch or condense or twist the template is up to you. But there’s one constant here I can promise you that you need: Which is that your climax needs form. It needs shape. And this is the best way to shape it.

In all the internet hype about an upcoming Happy Gilmore sequel, I watched the original movie recently and the climax follows this formula very closely. The final tournament day between Happy and Shooter is roughly 17 minutes, so a couple of minutes extra.

And that’s why I say these page-counts do have some flexibility to them. I mean, Titanic has a 45 minute climax. The film itself is also twice as long as a regular movie but, the point is, each movie will have its own needs.

The only other thing I want to highlight is that, within your climax, it needs to look like your hero LOST. Just like at the end of your second act, your hero had a “lowest point,” the same thing is going to happen at the end of your climax’s second act.

For example, in Happy Gilmore, as he lines up his final putt, which he needs to win the tournament, one of Shooter’s minions forces a giant TV stand to fall directly in the way of his shot, making an already difficult shot impossible.

In that moment, we think Happy Gilmore is dead. There’s nothing he can do to win this tournament anymore. You need that same moment in your climax.

Okay, we’re almost there, people! We conclude the writing of our first draft next week! Congrats to everyone who’s made it this far! :)

More dialogue tips in today’s review!

Genre: True Story
Premise: The true story of the most insane Broadway production of the modern era, where visionary director Julie Taymor attempted to make a Spider-Man musical and had everything go wrong in the process.
About: This script finished on last year’s Black List. It’s written by Hunter Toro, who wrote on Pete Davidson’s show, Bupkis.
Writer: Hunter Toro
Details: 107 pages

Although I’ll probably never do it, I’ve always wanted to write a musical about tennis. I think it would be funny to have this big Broadway singing-dancing play that revolved around tennis balls flying everywhere and people wearing Wes Anderson-inspired Lacoste bodywear singing about double-faults and drop shots.

But that’s the extent to which I’m interested in anything that has to do with Broadway. It’s not my jam. It’s not my jelly.  It’s not even my almond peanut butter.  Which is why even the craziest story to come out of Broadway in decades – this one – never landed on my radar. I heard about it peripherally. But I didn’t care.

Then a few people told me, “No, Carson, this story is ABSOLUTELY NUTS. It’s worth checking out.” Normally, I don’t like real-life stories. But if you throw a doozy my way, I’ll give it a go.

Glen is a PBS writer for a children’s show when he gets the call every writer dreams of. Julie Taymor, the creator of the Broadway sensation, “The Lion King,” is putting together a musical about Spider-Man, and none of the previous writers worked out.  Mainly cause they couldn’t deal with the insanity that is Julie Taymor. 

Glen goes in for the interview where he not only learns that Julie is directing, but that freaking U2 is doing the music. As far as New York Broadway musicals go, this is the top of the top. It’d be like Christopher Nolan calling you tomorrow and asking you to write him a sequel to Memento.

But Glen instantly learns that Julie has… shall we say STRANGE ideas for a Spider-Man story. She’s never read the comics. Never saw the movies. And that’s the way she likes it. She wants to bring something completely original to the IP. And believe me, this is IP. There are many meetings with Marvel over the course of the story about what you can and cannot do with Spider-Man throughout the script.

The biggest thing Julie wants to do is, instead of using the endless number of comics to find a villain for the story, she wants to create her own: a Greek Goddess with spider-like powers. Actually, that’s not everything. She also wants to make Spider-Man sexy and dangerous. She envisions the Jacob Elordi version of Spider-Man. And it freaks Marvel the heck out.  Julie likes that.  Julie likes that a lot.

What happens next is insane. Julie wants the aerial spider battles to happen above the audience’s heads, which is basically impossible. We see how impossible when Stunt Spider-Man Actor falls 60 feet and becomes semi-paralyzed. Then U2 goes on tour and decides to not work on the musical at all. Bono’s never even watched a musical and hates all the music in them. And then you have poor Glen who has to leave his wife and kids to be next to Julie 24/7 so that he can always be nearby when she has an idea.

The Marvel company does everything in their power to convince Julie to make Spider-Man less sexy and to get rid of the terrible villain that makes no sense within the mythology of Spider-Man. But Julie does as Julie wants. And even when their producer dies of a stroke, Julie demands that Glen come over and write new pages on the day of his funeral.

When it’s all said and done, the production costs 65 million dollars. But it becomes a semi-must-see musical due to all the press calling it the biggest disaster in Broadway history. It’s somehow enough to give the play 3 years. But, in the end, it would lose over 75 million dollars and tarnish the legacies of everyone who worked on it.

Reeve Carney, who played Spider-Man, just oozing innocence here.

As I pointed out yesterday, in the coming weeks, with every script I review, I’m going to be focusing on dialogue. I just wrote a book about dialogue so I want to talk about this stuff while it’s fresh on my mind.

Today, we’re going to cover Tip 105 in the book:

Use dialogue to reveal characterWhat a person says tells us a lot about who they are. So, when applicable, try and write dialogue that reveals something about your character.

Too many writers use dialogue as a means to move the plot (or scene) forward and nothing more. They’re not taking advantage of the fact that every time a character opens their mouth, it’s an opportunity to tell us who they are.

Why is this important? Because a common weakness in screenplays is characters who we have no feel for. We don’t understand them. What is their defining characteristic? What is their worldview? We can never truly understand a person unless we know these things. So, here’s a scene on page 23 of today’s script where Julie explains to Glen why she chose him to write her play.

How do we know that the writer has revealed character in this scene? Because we know more about Julie after it! We know that she’s a risk-taker. We know that she fears nothing. We know that she pushes the envelope and is willing to fall on her face and we know that she expects the same from others in her orbit. That’s HUGE information about the character and we learn it within a single page.

You’ll also note within this scene that there’s another major dialogue tip covered in the book.  Actually, it’s THE VERY FIRST TIP.

Create dialogue-friendly charactersDialogue-friendly characters are characters who generally talk a lot. They are naturally funny or tend to say interesting things or have a unique perspective on the world, are quirky or strange or offbeat or manic or see the world differently than the average human being. The Joker in The Dark Knight is a dialogue-friendly character. Saul Goodman in Breaking Bad is a dialogue-friendly character. Deadpool is. Juno is. It’s hard to write good dialogue without characters who like to talk.

Julie Taymor is our dialogue-friendly character in this story. She’s weird. She’s unpredictable. She’s demanding. She says a lot of strange things. Dialogue cheers from the mountaintops when it finds out a character like this is in the script. Which is why you want to give your script the gift of dialogue-friendly characters as often as possible.

What about the rest of the script?

The great thing about crazy true stories is that they do a lot of the work for you. You don’t have to go looking for great scenes, like stuntmen falling 60 feet to their near-deaths. They come to you.

But I have found that, when you have a wild story and you have a wild character, like Julie, you must be cautious that your main character doesn’t disappear on the page. And that’s exactly what happens here. The Glen character gets swallowed up by all the craziness and leaves little to no impact, despite being the main character.

I’m not saying it’s easy to deal with this imbalance. But if you’re aware of it, you can take steps to offset it. You probably need to make your hero bigger than you originally planned. If all Glen is here to do is stare up at Julie in utter amazement, audiences aren’t going to play nice.

They want heroes that charge forward and have their own agency. At least at some point in the script. Glen has that moment but it’s so late in the story that it might as well be nonexistent.

As I said, I don’t like true stories. Yet if you’re going to write one, this is the exact type of story you want to re-tell. It’s big, it’s weird, it’s chaotic, and let’s be honest – it’s funny to watch something fail so spectacularly. For that reason, this is definitely worth the read. It’s too fascinating of a story not to be entertaining.

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

What I learned: When you’re creating your two main characters (the characters who are going to be in your script together the most), you have to imagine each of them on a scale. One on one side, the other on the other. On that scale, does one character clearly weigh down their side of the scale? If so, you’re going to need to add more to the other character. You have to make them more active, or talk more, or be funnier, or be tougher, or be smarter, or bring SOME WEIGHT to the table. Because if they’re getting overshadowed in EVERY SINGLE SCENE, readers will consider the character to be weak. And that’s what happened here. Glen comes off as a very weak character since he can never hang in any of the scenes he and Julie are in.

If today’s dialogue talk intrigued you, I have over (that’s right, OVER) 250 dialogue tips in my new book, “The Greatest Dialogue Book Ever Written.” You can head over to Amazon and buy the book, right now!