Is Killers of the Flower Moon a tour de force worthy of the highest cinematic praise or is it a film that broke everyone working on it?
Genre: Drama/Period/Historical
Premise: A dimwitted soldier returns from the war to a different town than the one he left, one that has been reshaped by the fortunes of the Osage tribe, which discovered a gigantic oil reserve on their land, which has made them the richest people per capita in the world.
About: This is the looooooooong in development movie from Apple/Paramount, the only film left this year that people believe can compete with Oppenheimer and Barbie for Oscars. It’ll be in theaters for a month before hitting the streaming service. Its 9 hour running time seems to be hurting its box office take, as the movie has clocked in only 24 million dollars this weekend. Although Oppenheimer was the same length and took in 82 million. Maybe the film needed a toy movie counterpart to beef up its marketing footprint. “Bratz” maybe? Not sure how that title combo would work. Bratzenflower? Eric Roth (Forrest Gump, Dune, A Star is Born) wrote the movie, along with Scorsese, who reportedly took a crack at a couple of drafts.
Writer: Eric Roth and Martin Scorsese (based on the non-fiction book by David Grann)
Details: 210 minutes!!!
I can’t tell you how excited I was about this movie when it was first announced. I’d read the book and it just sounded like such an interesting story. You had this Native American tribe, who I’d never heard of, that were at one point, some of the richest people in the world. When you combined that with the birth of the FBI, it’s that rare storytelling gold nugget that all us writers are searching for.
But every update to the project since then has been wrapped in tension and consternation.
They originally wrote a script that adhered to the structure of the book (You can read my review of the book here) but DiCaprio started questioning how interesting his character (an FBI agent investigating a series of murders) was and decided he instead wanted to play the villain.
The script was then rewritten to flesh out the villain role for Leo but, again, DiCaprio balked, feeling like something was missing. He also wondered if he had jumped shipped too quickly, and re-entertained the idea of playing the protagonist.
Meanwhile, the town was going through a socio-political revolution, pushing for diversity on a level never before seen. Questions such as, ‘Who has the right to tell which story?’, rattled industry mainstays like Scorsese, and he began wondering if the Native American tribe depicted in his film was being overshadowed. Maybe the Osage should hold the dominant point of view in the story, not yet another Caucasian male lead.
But that might lead to another problem. If the Osage became the protagonists, could Scorsese, a Caucasian male director, still direct the film? Shouldn’t someone who better understood the life experience of the Osage be directing the picture?
But how would audiences feel if they went to see a movie where an unknown director replaced one of the greatest directors in history and where Leonardo DiCaprio played a secondary character as opposed to the lead? And would the studio risk 200 million dollars on such a movie?
DiCaprio would make Scorsese’s life even worse, coming back to him with a demand to scrap the current script they had slaved over. “Where is the heart of this story?” Dicaprio would ask. Back to the drawing board they went, this time with so many roadblocks that it was unclear if there was any path forward that would be both creatively entertaining and non-offensive.
After a stellar showing at the Cannes film festival and a wonderful first trailer, the mega-production finally seemed to find its footing. There is plenty of evidence that the best art comes out of conflict and struggle. Maybe all that tension was worth it.
But then the press tour started and the lead female actress, Lily Gladstone, started taking shots at other productions. Although her comments weren’t exactly out-of-pocket, it seemed like a strange move to announce your breakout lead actress with such negativity. Then things seemed to reach a boiling point this weekend when Scorsese acknowledged that both he and Robert De Niro would ‘roll their eyes’ at DiCaprio’s many adlibs during filming. It was starting to look like Killers of the Flower Moon broke everyone who worked on it.
With all that said, it’s still Scorsese. It’s still DiCaprio. It’s still De Niro. In a world where movies like, “Transformers: Rise of the Beasts” terrorize our collective intelligence, there is no doubt that these three men care deeply about creating great cinema. Let’s see if they’ve created something great here.
Killers of the Flower Moon follows Ernest Burkhart, a dimwitted World War 1 soldier who spent most of his time in the war as a cook, as he returns to his hometown to work for his uncle, and town patriarch, William Hale (who refers to himself as “King”). Hale seems determined to set Ernest off on the right path, and encourages him to marry the Osage woman, Mollie, he drives around.
Ernest does and the two set about having a family. As the years pass, people in, as well as connected to, the Osage tribe, start dying. Some of illness. Others get murdered. A couple of those people are Mollie’s sisters. Strangely, nobody ever looks into these deaths. People shrug their shoulders and move on.
After a while (what feels like hours to be honest), we reveal little slivers of evidence that Ernest and Hale are involved in these murders. Like a lot of things that happen in Killers of the Flower Moon, clarity is absent. If someone is going to be killed, it usually works like this: Hale tells Ernest who tells a second middle man who then tells a final guy, who then goes and kills the target.
Meanwhile, Ernest, who takes care of his ill wife, who’s having a hard time with diabetes, starts injecting her with insulin laced with poison, as he’s looking to eventually off his wife, presumably for her money, even though he already has access to her money seeing as he’s married to her.
Finally, two hours and forty-five minutes into the movie, the FBI shows up, determined to figure out who’s killing the Osage. It doesn’t take Agent White long to sniff out who’s responsible for the carnage. But can he get Ernest to turn on his Uncle? And will Ernest even be able to last until the court case, as his Uncle appears to have unlimited access to killers?
I have to be careful what I say here because my initial reaction when the movie ended was not positive. I was borderline furious, mainly because 4 hours (with AMC’s previews) is a big time commitment and you want to feel like that was time well spent. I didn’t think this was time well spent at all.
With that said, I have to acknowledge the filmmaking side of the equation. It’s a beautiful movie. The production value was insane. I never once felt like I was on a set. I never once got pulled out of the movie because of something I saw onscreen. And then you have these titan actors working together who can make you forget everything just through their interactions.
It’s funny because one the things I tell you guys is to never just sit two characters down in front of each other and write a scene. It’s the least interesting way you can possibly write a scene. So what’s the first scene we get when Ernest comes back from the war and visits his Uncle? The two sit down across from each other in two chairs and talk for seven minutes.
I quickly leaned that that rule doesn’t apply when you have Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert De Niro. That was actually one of my favorite scenes in the film and it was mostly backstory.
But the movie quickly fell out of favor with me due to several screenwriting issues. They were…
No active protagonist
Weak protagonist
Major motivation issues
Inconsistent story engines
Let’s go through that list one by one. Your main character in this movie – Ernest – is not proactive. He’s reactive. He waits for orders. He waits to be told what to do. While this type of character can work in unique situations, it almost never does. Stories work better when your hero is pushing the narrative forward themselves. Cause then they’re taking us on the journey.
They may have been able to get around this had we liked the character of Ernest. But we don’t. He’s weak. He’s dumb. He’s a weasel. He’s cowardly. Just read those adjectives back for a second and then ask yourself, has there even been a non-comedy movie where a main character with those traits has worked? No. Of course not. Nobody likes a weasel.
There’s this saying that arrived in the late 90s that rebuffed the studio executives’ constant demand for “likable characters.” The screenwriters pushed back with: “No, my main character doesn’t have to be likable. He just has to be interesting.” This movie proves that that is wrong. Cause Ernest is an interesting character. But we don’t want to have anything to do with him. And he’s the one taking us on this journey. How are we going to enjoy a movie with a weasel leading us?
But the real problem with Killers of the Flower Moon is motivation. I have never seen a movie with murkier motivation throughout. Everywhere you look, you’re not sure why people are doing things.
Take Hale. Hale is desperately coveting every single cent he can get a hold of. He opens a new insurance scam every month to claim an extra 25 grand (800,000 dollars in today’s money). And he’s killing all these Osage people so that he will eventually inherit their money though his nephews. The dude is 75 YEARS OLD!!! He’s already sickeningly wealthy. He has a super successful ranching business. And he’s making a million bucks an insurance scam multiple times a year.
WHY DOES HE NEED MORE MONEY?????
What’s the end game here? He’s already suuuuuuper rich. You may say, “Because even if he dies, then Ernest gets the money. So the money stays in his family.” Except that Hale is ready to sell his nephew out to the feds! To save himself, he’s going to send Ernest to prison for the rest of his life.
In movies, money needs to have a point. It’s never about stealing a million bucks from the bank. It’s that obtaining that million bucks allows the character to retire for the rest of their life. What was Hale’s motivation for trying to upgrade from “really rich” to “really rich plus more rich?”
But the motivation that infuriated me the most was the insulin poison story. First of all, what does Ernest achieve by killing his wife? He already controls all of his wife’s money. And the script does a terrible job explaining how the poisoning is working. Cause Mollie starts off as having serious health issues from diabetes. Then she starts taking insulin. The insulin makes her worse. Then, many scenes later, the poison is introduced. Ernest starts putting a little bit of poison in her insulin. So Mollie continues to get sick. But she was already getting sick before the poison so we’re not even clear on if he’s poisoning her or not. It’s so unnecessarily confusing that it made me officially give up on the script. The plot of this movie must have flown through the Bermuda Triangle. Cause it was lost and never found again.
I understand why Leo resisted the FBI agent version of this story. There’s something too obvious about it. If you find a less obvious character to lead the story, you’re more likely to write an original movie. Which they did. This is definitely more original than had they gone the FBI agent route.
But you know what a plot becomes when it’s led by an FBI agent looking into a murder? It becomes a FOCUSED PLOT. It becomes a plot with an actual story engine. We feel like there’s a purpose to every scene and to the movie in general. Without that, this narrative was blowing in the wind the entire time. It was desperately trying to find anything to make the story matter.
The pinnacle of this was in the final 20 minutes when one of Ernest’s kids dies of a sickness. I threw up my hands at that point. You had already made us suffer for 3 hours straight with depressing story beat after depressing story beat and now you’re going to randomly kill off a kid who we hadn’t even met????
It’s desperation. This is what you do when you don’t have a plot. You reach for melodramatic story beats that artificially jolt the film.
The supposed reason for the death was so that Ernest, who was in prison, could decide that now he needed to raise his family. Which meant that he had to testify against Hale so he (Ernest) would stay out of prison. But wait a minute. Are you saying that when he had three full kids he didn’t need to raise them then?? Now that he only has two, he does??? It’s so nonsensical, I don’t even know how to react. I’m so frustrated by this screenplay.
It seems to me that Leo was putting pressure on Scorsese and Eric Roth to figure it all out. He kept telling them to change things and, at a certain point, Scorsese and Roth had to concede logic to make their star happy. Not that Leo was doing this maliciously. I think he honestly wants to make great movies. But sometimes he’s so obsessed with the complexity of his character – and this dates all the way back to his frustration with the Jack character in Titanic – that he doesn’t realize how it affects the rest of the script.
If I were judging this on just the script, it might be a “what the hell did I just read?” Since I’m looking at the whole movie, though, I do think there’s some good stuff in here, De Niro’s performance being the most notable. This script, though. This script was not good.
[ ] What the hell did I just watch?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the price of admission
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Identify the character in your concept who has the strongest goal. That should probably be your main character. In this movie, the person with the strongest goal is the FBI Agent White. He’s the one who’s trying to solve these murders. Leo should have just played him. I know White was boring in real life. Okay, so then rewrite him and make him interesting! It would’ve been a far better move than to play a passive weasel. There is no screenplay in history led by a passive weasel that has been good.
Waaaaahoooooooo!
Greetings, you potion-brewing witches. The hour for spilling blood is upon us! I’ve done the hard work of decapitating a hundred-plus potential loglines so that only the eight best remain in the crimson-soaked moonlight. Now don your spookiest Halloween attire and choose which four loglines are your tricks, and which cherished logline is your treat.
By the way, if anyone wants to reward me for all my hard work, my favorite Halloween candy is Reeses Peanut Butter Cups. If all goes well, I will be spread eagle on the floor of my abode, too sick to move after inhaling an ungodly number of these incantations. Thank you in advance.
If my uber spooky language is too coded for you, THIS is Logline Showdown. A bunch of writers sent in their loglines. I picked the best eight. It’s now up to you to choose your favorite. Simply read all the loglines and log your vote by writing it in a comment.
If you have extra time, it’s helpful to writers if you explain why you passed over their logline, as well as why you liked the one you picked. As fun as these showdowns are, they’re ultimately about helping everyone become better writers by learning which concepts work and why.
Don’t worry if you missed this month’s showdown. We do a logline showdown every month so you can still enter in November or December. I’ll be announcing the theme of the next showdown in the newsletter which should hit your inboxes by the 27th. Just four TERRIFYING days before Halloween. If you want to get on the newsletter mailing list, send me an e-mail at Carsonreeves1@gmail.com.
Good luck to this month’s contestants. Voting closes at 11:59pm Pacific Time this Sunday night.
Title: Bacchantes
Genre: Folk Horror
Logline: Two competing brothers from a vintner lineage find themselves entrapped in a secluded vineyard. There, enigmatic women, under the guise of adoration, manipulate and intensify their rivalry, all to crown the brother who survives as the chosen vessel for Bacchus, the god of wine. Set in the misty mountains of Georgia, a country in the Caucasus.
Title: SERIAL KILLER SLUMBER PARTY
Genre: Horror
Logline: A high school outcast attending a Halloween party in a secluded mansion where the guests cosplay as history’s most notorious serial killers finds himself under attack when a real killer begins taking out the guests one by one.
Title: Sus
Genre: Thriller
Logline: A washed-up former child star who once played an iconic scream queen battles a psychopathic killer while filming Stalk Slash Repeat, a throwback horror movie intended to revive her career.
Title: Scaring Shelley
Genre: Horror
Logline: Up-and-coming, untrained actress Shelley Duvall flies to England to star in eccentric and obsessive Stanley Kubrick’s, “The Shining”. What starts as a potentially career-making role turns into a fight for sanity as a despotic Kubrick gaslights and emotionally tortures Shelley until her on-camera fear is justifiably and frighteningly real.
Title: Surrogate
Genre: Sci-Fi/Thriller
Logline: With the promise of a huge payday, a penniless woman agrees to be a surrogate mother for a renowned physician, only to discover she’s the first test subject of a diabolical medical experiment to raise the dead.
Title: Id
Genre: Horror
Logline: A burnt-out, aging novelist finds the inspiration to write again with an antique typewriter only to learn that every evil subconscious thought he writes on it comes to life.
Title: The Feast
Genre: Horror/Dark Comedy
Logline: When an orphaned social worker finally gets to meet her boyfriend’s wealthy meatpacking family at their annual reunion, she discovers that she and the other guests aren’t there for a feast, they are the feast, and must band together to try and survive the night as they’re hunted by famished vampires.
Title: LAST TO LIVE
Genre: Horror
Logline: When six influencers perform a stunt that inadvertently kills the daughter of a cartel boss, he forces them to undertake a deadly series of their own YouTube challenges. SAW meets MR BEAST
DEALS DEALS DEALS! – This weekend, I’m offering a $150 discount on both my feature script consultations and pilot script consultations. I’m also offering a 3-pack of logline consultations for just $50! If you’re interested, e-mail me at carsonreeves1@gmail.com and mention this article!
Today, Thursday, is the last day to send in your logline for the Halloween Logline Showdown. If you have a great horror script, get that logline in! I’m determined to find a great horror screenplay before this Halloween month is over.
What: Halloween Logline Showdown
Send me: Logline for either your Horror or Thriller script (Pilot scripts are okay!)
I need: The title, genre, and logline
Also: Your script must be written because I’ll be reviewing the winning entry the following week
When: Deadline is Thursday, October 19th, by 10:00pm Pacific Time
Send entries to: carsonreeves3@gmail.com
So what will I be looking for when I review the winning horror script next week?
To answer that question, we need to understand why writing a horror script is so tricky. Horror is one of those genres that’s primarily director-driven. Case in point, when was the last time you heard of a great horror screenwriter? Yet you know the names of John Carpenter, Wes Craven, James Wan, George Romeo, and the list goes on. The only horror screenwriters you’ve heard of are the ones who direct.
I’m not trying to scare you. I’m only saying that writing a good horror script is a bit like cooking a pizza. We all know what makes a good pizza. Great crust, lots of cheese, a delicious tomato sauce. And yet when we try to make pizza, it’s a far cry from what we eat at the restaurant.
So what I thought I’d do is provide you with the ten things that I find most important in a horror script, starting with the most important and ending with the least important. Let’s get into it.
One – It’s got to have three scary-AF scenes – Nothing else matters in your horror script if it’s not scary. And the place you scare people the most is in your set pieces – the big featured scenes in your script. I’m talking about the girl emerging from the well in The Ring, the “Do you like scary movies” opening scene from Scream, the sister decapitation from Hereditary. You need three of these in your horror script. These are so important that even if you have a terrible screenplay, there’s a good chance that by including these three great horror scenes, someone will want to make your movie. Because a truly scary scene can live on forever regardless of the quality of the movie (see the hospital scene in Exorcist 3). Producers know this. So use all your time to come up with these scenes.
Two – This is an extension of number one. You must draw your scares from what’s unique about your script. One of the biggest problems with horror movies is that they’re all cliche. Everybody uses the same ten scares (creepy dream sequence, someone behind you in the bathroom mirror, the injured woman running away from the killer, etc). The best way to avoid this is to utilize what’s unique about your concept because those scenes are less likely to be in other people’s horror films. A great example of this is the foot-breaking scene in Misery. Annie is obsessed with this man. She’s imprisoned him in her house. He tries to escape. So, in order to make sure he doesn’t try again, she violently breaks his feet with a hammer. That scene is very specific to that situation. Whereas, if you’re writing a cat jumping out of a cabinet, that’s a scene that can literally be in any horror movie. If your horror scene could be in any horror movie, DON’T INCLUDE IT!!!
Three – Strong Characters – I’m going to drop a controversial Carson-bomb here. But I think character development in horror films can go too far. The Babadook is a good example. I liked The Babadook. It’s a solid movie. But it places so much emphasis on character development that it ends up overshadowing the horror. That movie is 70% drama and 30% horror. Whereas a good horror movie should be 70% horror and 30% drama. With that said, too many writers make the mistake of putting nothing into their horror characters. This is a script-destroying move because if your horror characters are too thin, we won’t be afraid for them when they’re in scary situations. And having the audience care for your characters when they’re in danger is the whole ball of wax when it comes to horror. The reason horror works is because we sympathize with the characters! Therefore, when they’re in danger, we feel like we’re in danger. So make sure we like the characters, we care about them, they’re going through something internally (struggling with self-acceptance, for example) as well as externally (they’re getting bullied at school). They have some sort of unresolved relationship with another character. And that’s it. Keep it simple.
Four – A killer (terrifying) monster/villain – For a lot of horror films, the monster is the concept (Mama, Freddy Kreuger, Pennywise, Slotherhouse). So you want to spend a significant amount of time coming up with your monster. Not to mention, a great monster takes care of the marketing all by himself. Just look at The Nun. All you have to do is put the Nun’s face on a poster and you’re finished. To find your horror script’s monster, I suggest you look to the past. Look up monsters and scary stories from all parts of the world throughout time and you’ll find some really gnarly things. I’ve found that building your horror monster from the ground up (figure out their past and let it inform their present) works better than trying to come up with a scary image (a clown with no eyes) then trying to retroactively shape their origin. But that’s just me.
Five – Be shocking – This is a bit controversial as I know not everyone will agree with me. But I read enough scripts to know that if you don’t do anything above and beyond the usual, it’s likely your script will be forgotten. And with horror, the way to be remembered is to be shocking. As someone brought up the other day, the girl in The Exorcist has a scene where she stabs herself in the vagina with a crucifix. How do you not leave that script never forgetting that moment? And if you doubt that, ask yourself, who is the most talked about horror director at the moment? It’s Ari Aster. And that’s Ari’s whole strategy. He shocks you. Look up his first short film if you don’t believe me. To shock readers, you have to be willing to write about things that make you uncomfortable. But I promise you if you shock us, as long as it’s organic to your story, you’re going to leave an impression.
Six – A unique setting – Again, what you have to remember is that horror is the most ubiquitous genre there is. You’re competing against more scripts than in any other genre by far. So you need to look for any way you can to separate your script from their scripts. The setting is a great way to do this. Because if you can come up with a unique setting, you won’t be operating in the same locations and situations as all the writers before you, which will give you new avenues to find unique scares. “The Thing” is a great example of this. It’s not set in a cabin in the woods like 10 million other horror scripts. It’s set on a remote base in Antarctica. That immediately gives it opportunities to find fresh scares.
Seven – Effort – You might be noticing a theme here. Horror scripts get swallowed up in cliche for a number of reasons. To combat this, you need to exhibit outsized effort when venturing into this genre, something very few writers do. You are not going to be able to zip through the writing process of a horror script and write something good. I guarantee your script will be littered with cliches if you do. You need 7, 8, 9, 10 drafts to weed out all the familiar stuff and add those deeper more imaginative ideas that come from having a high bar and pushing your creative limits. You should be treating your horror script like Martin Scorsese treated his Killers of the Flower Moon script. He did not stop rewriting until he found something he liked.
Eight – Build tension slowly – A lot of great horror does not come from the act of the [scary thing] jumping out at you. It comes from the build-up to that moment. So, when it’s applicable, cue the reader that a scary moment is coming then draw out the lead-up to that scare for as long as possible. If there’s something in the corner of the dark bedroom, for example, don’t have it scurry over right away. Have your character try to make out its features, unsure of it’s a monster or just clothing, have them turn on their lamp only to see that there’s nothing there. Have them turn the lamp back off and turn over to go to sleep. But then they hear a skittering and shoot back up, looking around. There, in the other corner… is that a body? Are my eyes playing tricks on me ? You get the idea. The lead-up is what super-charges the scare.
Nine – Concept is nice, but not essential – In my experience, a horror script does not have to have a great concept. This is because horror is the only example where the genre itself is the concept. People come to horror movies to be scared. So as long as your trailer looks scary, you’re good. A scary nun. A scary doll. A haunted house. An invisible evil husband. Taking your boyfriend home to meet the weird parents. A girl is possessed. A spooky entity follows you around. Zombies. More zombies. Lots and lots of zombies. This is not to say a clever horror concept (The Sixth Sense) is bad. Quite the opposite. If you can come up with a great concept in the horror genre, you’re unstoppable. But you don’t NEED a great concept to write a good horror script.
Ten – Plot don’t matter as much as you think it does – I want to be clear when I say, you would like to have a solid plot in your horror script. But it’s not mandatory. We know this because nobody has ever watched a horror film in their lives and come out saying, “Man, I loved that plot.” It’s just not a part of the genre’s lexicon. I told you last year when I watched Friday the 13th for the first time in two decades how shocked I was at the lack of any noticeable structure. It was just a barely-cobbled together string of scenes where a killer tried to kill teenagers at a camp. And that went on to become a half a billion dollar franchise. Again, if you have a great plot – AWESOME. It’s only going to help your horror screenplay. But you should be spending more of your time on scary set pieces and likable characters than an amazing plot.
DEALS DEALS DEALS! – I’m offering a $150 discount on both my feature script consultations and pilot script consultations. I’m also offering a 3-pack of logline consultations for just $50! If you’re interested, e-mail me at carsonreeves1@gmail.com and mention this article!
Has today’s writer conquered one of Hollywood’s screenwriting chupacabras? Written “the next Goonies?”
Genre: Ghost/Adventure
Premise: A Wisconsin high school girl teams up with her friends to look for a ghost ship she believes is connected to her mother’s disappearance.
About: This script finished with 6 votes on last year’s Black List. So far the writer, Nicole Ramberg, has made a few short films. She is repped by Bellevue. She graduated from Northwestern as well as the NBCUniversal Page Program. She won the 2020 ScreenCraft Action and Adventure category. She is a fellow Chicago suburbian. So I hope this script is good!
Writer: Nicole Ramberg
Details: 120 pages
What separates a top 10 Black List script from a bottom 10 Black List script? Is there any difference between the two? We’re going to try and answer that question in today’s review.
The year is 1993 and 15 year-old Riley Halbeck is living in the American equivalent of hell, aka, Wisconsin (I can say that because I went to college there). Riley and her young sister, Emma, live with their aunt, Annie, because several years ago, their mother disappeared.
Riley, who’s best friends with chatty Ash and sweet Wyatt, has heard rumors that multiple disappearances, not just her mother’s, are tied to the mysterious La Salle Island, which is just off the coast. It is said that near La Salle, people have seen a ghost ship floating around.
Wyatt convinces his pals to head out to that very island on Halloween and, when they get there, they find a girl named Danielle Keller unconscious on the beach. Danielle disappeared eight years ago! And she hasn’t aged a day!
Hoping for a break in her missing mother’s case, Riley encourages Danielle to tell the cops everything she knows. Instead, Danielle says she ran away, ran out of money, and came back. It appears that Danielle would rather lie than have everyone call her a kook. It usually doesn’t go over well when you tell people you were abducted by a ghost ship.
Through the process of deduction, Riley realizes that whoever is manning the ghost ship is looking for a treasure on La Salle Island. If they can find that treasure first, they can lure in the ghost, and, in the process, find Riley’s mom. So the band heads back out to La Salle. But not everything goes as planned.
So, let’s answer that question. What separates the scripts at the top of the Black List from the ones at the bottom? In my experience, top level scripts tend to take more creative chances, tend to be darker, and tend to have more interesting voices. Whereas scripts at the bottom of the pack are often safer, more formulaic, and less likely to offend. They’re sanitized.
There’s some irony to this in that Hollywood likes making more of those bottom level scripts than the top ones. It’s the conundrum all screenwriters face when they put pen to paper. They can impress the young cool assistant crowd or they can impress the people who actually make movies.
But formulaic screenplays have their own set of challenges, namely that it’s incredibly hard to write a sanitized script that’s memorable. The Goonies is a great example of how to achieve that feat. It’s such a fun creative adventure that it doesn’t bother us that it’s so formulaic.
Craigshaven never reaches that level of creativity, unfortunately. The characters are dialed back so as to be ultra safe and impossible to dislike. And while that *seems* like the right thing to do, it’s the fastest way to writing bland characters.
I realize that when you watch Goonies today, there are some parts of it that are offensive. Watching the friends make their fat friend, Chunk, do an embarrassing “fat boy” dance would never make it into a 2023 movie theater. But, at the same time, that lack of fear to offend is what makes the character (and the friendship) more honest and memorable. Kids really did that sort of thing to their friends. And you know what? They still do. Cause kids are kids and they don’t know any better.
So if you erase all of that truth and just have everyone be perfect and inoffensive, I guarantee you, you’ll write boring characters. You would think that each friend in this story has never done a single bad thing in their life. They’re perfect little people. I can’t stress this enough. If your characters have no faults, they are uninteresting.
I’m not saying you have to have a “Chunk dance” in your script to make it good. But you have to figure out the 2023 version of what kids would really do to each other and give us some of that. Because without authenticity, you have an idealized version of the world. But guess what? The world is imperfect.
Another, more obvious, issue with this script is that it doesn’t have a villain! That’s what Goonies was famous for! It’s villains. The scary-looking guy. The mother with her criminal kids. The lack of any villains tells me the writer is scared to do anything hurtful to her characters. What have I told you about this? NEVER PROTECT YOUR CHARACTERS. Do the opposite! Put them through the wringer! Make their lives miserable.
Here’s the thing with screenwriting. When we come up with a script idea, we always have one major thing we want to focus on in the script. If you’re writing “Barbie” for example, maybe you’re obsessed with Barbie Land and really wanting to make that great.
But, in the process of focusing so much on Barbie Land, you may not care enough about the plot. You may not care enough about the message of the film. You may not put a ton of effort into Ken. And if you make that mistake, you don’t create an entire movie. You only create part of a movie. If Greta Gerwig would’ve done that, she would’ve missed out on creating the most iconic character of 2023 – Ken.
In Craigshaven, I see a writer hyper-focused on this boat mystery. By the way, you can always tell when a writer likes one element of their story above all others because whenever that element arrives, the writer spends way more time describing it. You can feel a change in their enthusiasm when it’s around.
But in being so hyper-focused on this ghost ship plotline, everything else falls by the wayside. Not just the characters but the plot. It’s too standard and basic. With screenwriting, you have to do it all. Or you at least have to try. From the concept to the voice to the characters to the storytelling to the dialogue to the relationships to the plot to the structure. You can’t half-ass any of those if you want to write a great script. You can half-ass some of them if you want to write an okay script. But I’m guessing you want more.
I do find something marketable about this concept, the writing is easy to read, and I thought the relationship between Riley and her aunt had a nice arc. It just didn’t push the envelope enough for me. I needed at least one area where it pushed the envelope. It’s hard for me to get on board a script where everything is written so safely.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: You need balance in a screenplay. If every character is sweet as candy, your reader’s going to get sick. You need to balance that out with some nasty characters.
Genre: Action/Thriller
Premise: A man wakes up in a hospital, no memory of who he is, with a bullet lodged in his head. Over the next 48 hours, he learns of his ties to a nefarious pharmaceutical company and the billionaire owner who wants him dead.
About: This is an older spec script that sold for $300k against $700k to Universal. It was purchased through Davis Entertainment, which is the same outfit that made the Predator movies (more recently, Davis has produced Game Night and Jungle Cruise). Half the writing team, Phoebe Dorin, has carved out a very successful acting career.
Writers: Christian Stoianovich & Phoebe Dorin
Details: 1994 draft
Will Poulter for Decker?
No Taylor Swift jabs today, I promise.
Instead, we’re going back to a time when Swiftie fans didn’t exist. It was a darker time. It was a grungier time. But if you were a screenwriter, it was a wonderful time. Cause Hollywood was buying everything with a brad attached. You may not know this. But screenwriter Lachlan Perry once sold a napkin with the words “Fade In” on the front, and three words inside, “Under Water Lion,” for 2.5 million dollars.
I totally made that up. But the fact that you almost believed me shows just how crazy those 90s were. Now let’s find out if “Bulletproof” warranted a sale.
We meet a mystery man as he’s running down a subway tunnel, chased by two men with guns. Our poor mystery man gets shot in the forehead. Normally, this is a death sentence. But, for some reason, our runner only passes out.
He wakes up 8 days later in the hospital, where he’s told that the bullet lodged in his head nearly killed him. In fact, if it had hit just a millimeter more in either direction, he’d be a goner. So he should feel lucky that he only has amnesia.
A cute doctor who specializes in amnesia, Kelly Chapman, comes to check him out. She gives him the typical “movie amnesia” spiel (“Memory is weird. Sometimes it comes back right away. Other times it takes a while) and informs him he should stay at the hospital as long as possible.
But the doctors let our mystery man go and that’s when he runs into Yuri Volkov, who tries to snuff him out in the elevator. Our bullet maestro somehow gets away and runs into Chapman in the parking lot. He unofficially takes her hostage, forcing her to drive him to safety.
After following a few leads, Bullet Man learns his name – Sam Decker. Decker realizes that he’s a scientist who worked for a gigantic pharmaceutical company called “Biotek.” It was there where he created the first ever medical male contraceptive. Aka, GOLDMINE.
For reasons we don’t know yet, he’d tried to sneak his research out of the lab, which is why everyone wants him dead. Did Decker know that his research was faulty and would kill millions? My guess is yes. But there’s one last twist to Decker’s research. It’s a twist that would make every act of sex an act of murder.
Something I often run into is flowery prose. What you have to understand about flowery prose is that when you start off as a writer, you think it’s more important than it actually is. So you put a lot of emphasis on. I’ll give you an example. Here’s a paragraph from early in the script.
Shadows scar the cobblestone driveway to the dilapidated hospital. White helmeted SOLDIERS, in a convoy of Jeeps roar past, belching black oily plumes of exhaust. A mongrel DOG pants in the doorway next to walnut-faced MEN playing dominoes. A legless MAN on a cart wheels past.
There’s a difference between trying to prove you’re a good writer and using your description to paint a picture. The line is thin but if you’re on the wrong side of it, readers will write you off.
It’s admittedly confusing because you do want your writing to appear strong. You don’t want to just write nouns, verbs and five-word sentences. But if your sole purpose for writing a sentence is to impress the reader, you’ve already got one foot in the proverbial grave. You should be writing paragraphs that do one thing and one thing only: serve your story.
And the point of description is to mimic, as best as you can, what the viewer is going to see onscreen.
Now, with this except above, you get a little bit of both so let’s go through it. “Shadows scar the cobblestone driveway to the dilapidated hospital.” This is a try-hard line. It’s the exact type of prose you don’t want to use. The more like poetry your lines sound, the less you want to use them. If you want to write poetry, go write poetry. This is a completely different medium.
“White helmeted SOLDIERS, in a convoy of Jeeps roar past, belching black oily plumes of exhaust.” This sentence is what you want in the first half and what you don’t want in the second. “White helmeted SOLDIERS” puts a relevant image in my head, as does a convoy of Jeeps roaring past. I feel like I’m watching a movie now.
But “black oily plumes of exhaust” is a try-hard description. I’m not going to stop reading if I see this. But if the writer has purple prosing me on every page and then I get another line of purple prose like this, I’m officially annoyed.
The description that really frustrates me, though, is “in the doorway next to walnut-faced MEN.” I don’t know what this means. A walnut-faced man? I’m literally imagining men with walnuts for heads. Is that what you want me, as a writer, to imagine? I would hope not.
You’re overthinking things. Use your description to describe, not to impress. Cause any time you’re *trying* to impress – I’m talking about in life, not just in writing – you’re usually doing the opposite.
Here’s an excerpt from the screenplay, “Seven,” by Andrew Kevin Walker. It takes place early in the story, with Somerset riding a train back to the city.
The train is almost full, moving slower. Somerset has his suitcase on the aisle seat beside him. He holds a hardcover book unopened on his lap. He still stares out the window, but his face is tense. The train is passing an ugly, swampy field. The sun has gone under.
Though it seems impossible it ever could have gotten there, a car’s burnt-out skeleton sits rusting in the bracken. A little further on, two dogs are fighting, circling, attacking, their coats matted with blood.
Note the clear imagery in the description. An almost full train. Moving slowly. His suitcase on an aisle seat. Hardcover book on his lap. A tense look on his face. An ugly swampy field. The sun has gone down. A burnt-out skeleton of a car in a field. Two dogs fighting nearby.
These are all things that we can clearly visualize. And if we’re visualizing them, it simulates the act of watching the movie in the theater. The only line I have a problem with is, “The sun has gone under.” We sometimes do this as screenwriters – write lines that are too sparse. But you probably needed one extra detail for this sentence: “The sun has descended below the horizon.”
Okay, onto the story itself. Was it any good?
Funny you ask. Something occurred to me as I was reading this script. It was sold in 1994. Around 1992-3 is when the industry had its biggest push towards formulaic writing. If you followed the beats you were supposed to follow and you had three acts and you wrote the plot reversal at the right time and your characters were likable and you had the requisite love story, then you could sell a script, even if you didn’t have a lot of talent.
Over the next couple of years, that belief grew. All you had to do was follow a formula and you’d win the script lottery. 1994 was the ‘culmination year’ of this belief. And you can see that on display here in Bulletproof. This thing feels like it was written by Syd Field.
That’s not necessarily the worst thing. I’ve read too many scripts with no adherence to formula and 99% of them are awful. But if you stick too close to formula, then nothing about your screenplay is going to stand out. Bulletproof unapologetically embraces Hollywood screenwriting.
Starting with the amnesia concept. It was one of the most popular concepts at the time. The set pieces here are all very cliche (escape the hospital, subway chase, chase by foot through city). A love story for no other reason than Hollywood required them at the time. The two even have sex just because you did that in scripts back then, regardless of if it made sense. Biotech companies were all the rage at the time. Heck, it even has one of the most cliche lines you can add to a script: “Who are you to play God!!”
There’s another way to look at this, of course. That the writers were smart. They saw what the industry wanted and they gave them EXACTLY THAT. Lots of writers who visit this site could do well following that advice. What is the industry looking for right now? It’s no secret. Look at what movies Hollywood gives all the promotional dollars to. That’s what they want. So, if you want to make money, that’s one avenue to do it.
But as a script, there’s nothing new here. It feels way way waaaaaaaaaay too familiar. One of the things I hate most about my job is that I’m always so far ahead of the writer. Writers rarely keep me guessing. I wanted this to keep me guessing just a little.
This is yet another reminder to take risks in your screenplays. Don’t do what you’re seeing every other writer do in their movies. When they zig, you zag.
Script link: Bulletproof
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: If you are doing an amnesia or memory-loss screenplay, YOU MUST KNOW THE RULES of your character’s amnesia and stick by throughout the script. You can’t just say, “Memory’s a funny thing. It could come back all at once. Or not at all.” If you don’t know how the rules of your movie’s memory loss works, you’ll take advantage of the ambiguity and have your character forget or remember things whenever it’s most convenient for you and your plot. Readers hate that. If you follow an established rule-set, however, the reader will trust you.
