In some ways, a script is like a computer game. You’re writing a bunch of code in the hopes of providing the end user with a seamless enjoyable experience. If you get a line of code wrong, you’ll see a small glitch in the game. Get a few lines wrong, the game gets “glitchy.” Get a lot of code wrong and the game becomes unplayable.

How do you fix the game? You troubleshoot. You figure out where the glitch is occurring, what the corresponding lines of code are, and you rewrite them until the glitch goes away. Screenwriting isn’t that different. If the solitary McCall from The Equalizer is singing karaoke, that’s a glitch. All it takes is one reader to note, “That doesn’t match up with how McCall acts for the rest of the screenplay.” This observation helps the writer make a simple fix.  He drops the scene where McCall is singing karaoke. Problem solved.

Unfortunately, you don’t always have the advantage of feedback. It’s hard to get friends to read your script and give detailed notes. And forget about someone doing it twice on the same screenplay. They may not say, “I’d rather kill myself than read this a second time” but you can tell by their expressions that that’s exactly what they’re thinking. Therefore, script reads must be saved. They cannot be burned.  So in the meantime, you’ll be your own troubleshooting your stuff. But lucky you. I’m here to help.

The first thing you want to do when troubleshooting a draft is to get some distance from it. The more time you can spare (1 month is preferable to 1 week), the better. Essential for good troubleshooting is objectivity. And you can’t have that if you just finished a two month rewrite. It’s impossible for you to see anything objectively at this point.

Once you’ve created enough distance, read your script. Now when you do this, don’t worry about technical things (your sluglines or your description). That’s not what’s important. What’s important with any script is how it makes the reader FEEL. If the reader is swept away by the material – if they’re riveted or excited or sad, these are all good things. What you’re trying to do when you read your script, is act as the reader. You’re gauging how it makes you FEEL.

There is one particular feeling you want to pay attention to above all others: Boredom. Boredom is the biggest baddest enemy to writing. Scripts can survive angry readers. Scripts can survive frustrated readers. But no script can survive a bored reader. So every time you feel bored, write it down. Write down your other feelings as well (anger, happiness, shock), but boredom should take a 10 multiple priority over the other stuff.

Now keep in mind, you’re not a true reader of your script, since you’ve already read it dozens of times yourself. There’s going to be some reader-fatigue every time your read your own stuff, making you an imperfect test subject. But generally speaking, you should trust your feelings. If something feels boring or stupid to you, it’ll probably feel boring or stupid to others.

Once you’ve done this, look through your notes, and find the 4-5 biggest reactions you had. Like if a 20 page chunk was boring, that’s important. If you hated a character, that’s important. If a plot point or a plot twist felt really stupid to you, that’s important. We pick the five biggest reactions because we don’t want to be overwhelmed. You don’t want to try and fix every little thing yet. Besides, when you start fixing the big things, you’ll notice that a lot of the smaller things will correct themselves.

Now here comes the toughest part of troubleshooting. Once you’ve identified that a section of your script is boring, you need to figure out why. And why isn’t always clear. For example, let’s say Frank is writing a Die Hard-like movie that takes place on an oil tanker. Somewhere around the midpoint, Frank realizes that he’s bored with his script. The story is lifeless. What’s wrong?

I might read Frank’s “Die Tanker Die” and notice that at the midpoint, there’s a big four-scene chunk, 10 pages in total, of Frank’s hero, McChucker Doogan, talking about his backstory to his French love interest, Nadine Steauxpede. All four scenes are essentially saying the same thing. McChucker lost his family in a fire and he’s depressed about it. I might then tell Frank to combine all four of those scenes into a single one (or tell him to get rid of them completely). Instantly, the pace picks up, and all of a sudden the midpoint isn’t dragging anymore.

But it’s typically not that easy. Usually, a script issue is due to choices made long before the problematic scene (or sequence) was written. To figure our where the problem originated requires you to be a bit of a detective. And you don’t have to be an expert in screenwriting to crack the case. You just have to be perceptive. So let’s get back to that midpoint of Die Tanker Die. The new scene where we realize we’re bored is when McChucker’s hiding in a cabinet in the mess hall to evade the villain, Crooks Caravelli.

Why are you bored? This should be one of the most exciting scenes in the script! McChucker is inches away from being discovered by Crooks!

Look deeper into the scene. Instead of focusing on your general feeling of boredom, ask yourself, “What specifically is making me bored?” I don’t mean in “screenwriting-speak.” Speak plainly. What’s making you bored? You might realize after awhile that, “You know what? I don’t really like McChucker in this scene.” Okay, now we’re on to something. Just like a good detective, keep asking questions. Why don’t you like McChucker in this scene? Think hard. After a few minutes, you realize that it’s because McChucker’s hiding.  But it’s not just that.  It’s because so far, that’s all McChucker’s been doing throughout the script – is hiding.   Unlike John McClane from Die Hard, who goes out there and actively kills the terrorists, McChucker is a hide-o-holic.  He’s an inactive hero.  Oh my god, you realize.  No wonder I don’t like McChucker.  He’s a wimp!

Now you have your first directive on the rewrite – Rewrite McChucker’s character. Make him more active. Make him braver. What’s important to note here, is that the scene where you realized you were bored wasn’t the reason you were bored. You were bored because of choices you made a long time ago – in the design of McChucker’s character.

But let’s say McChucker wasn’t the problem. Heck, McChucker’s your favorite part of the script!  What then? Here’s something that might help. Try to locate that exact moment when you became bored. What was the exact scene that did it in for you? Treat it like a murder mystery. Look for the clues to solve the murder.

Say for instance the scene that really did you in was when Crooks Caravelli went on a three page monologue to his cronies about the parallels of their plight to the Greek Gods. Something bothered you about that scene but what was it??  Was the monologue badly written?  Not really.  Then it hits you.  Why does Crooks have so much time to ramble on for three pages???  Shouldn’t he be, you know, enacting his plan??  Aha, you realize. If he’s got all that time, it means he’s not in a hurry. If he’s not in a hurry, then three’s not enough urgency in the story.  That’s the problem.

So you go back to the drawing board and you add a plot point where the coast guard is on their way to the oil tanker. They’ll be there in 30 minutes. That’s how long Crooks has to finish his plan. Under this new setup, the writer realizes Crooks doesn’t have time to spout out empty 3-page monologues because he needs every second he’s got to complete his plan. Problem solved.

It’s important to remember that there’s never any ONE WAY to solve a problem. I could look at this same problem and come up with a completely different solution. For example, maybe McChucker sneaks into the bridge when Crooks isn’t there and notices that they’re heading towards a small unidentified body of land, land that shouldn’t be there. Before McChucker can find out more, Crooks comes back, and McChucker has to sneak out. We may not have the urgency of the Coast Guard on our tail in this version, but we now have some good old fashioned suspense driving the story. What’s this mysterious body of land?? Why are they going there??

Keep in mind that extended feelings of boredom (like beyond 20 pages) are indicative of much deeper problems that are usually due to one of three things: concept, structure, or character. If your concept is boring (2 guys fishing on a Sunday afternoon), it’s going to be hard for even the best writers to find 2 hours of drama in it. Make sure you have a concept that’s constantly putting your characters in trouble, is constantly forcing them to act.

If concept’s not a problem and large swaths of script are still boring, check your GSU. Make sure your hero and villain always have a goal, that there are high stakes attached, and that there’s a sense of urgency behind the objective. It’s fine if the goal keeps changing as long as it continues to meet the GSU criteria (every new goal is coupled with stakes and urgency – or the previous stakes and urgency are still in play).

If your structure is fine, ask yourself if your characters are interesting. Do they have compelling personalities? Are they fighting something inside of themselves (a flaw, a vice, good vs. evil). Are they fighting something with another character (can this marriage work, can this broken father-daughter relationship be salvaged, can we win this battle even though we have completely different opinions on how to fight it). Are the characters unique? Are they likable? Are they unpredictable? A lot of times a plot isn’t working because the characters inside that plot are boring as shit.

You’ll find that if you fix the 5 biggest problems in your script, your script will instantly be better. But note that with these new changes come new ideas, new additions to your script. And therefore, after you make the changes, you’ll go right back to the troubleshooting stage again. Figure out the five biggest new problems in your new draft, come up with solutions, and write a new draft. You’ll keep doing this for however long your process is (for some people it’s 5 drafts, for others it’s 20), until you finally feel confident that the script is the best you can make it. Now, my friend, you can send your script out there for the world to see and hope all that hard work paid off. I’m betting it will have.

What about you guys?  How do you trouble shoot your scripts?

Genre: Sci-fi
Premise: In the near future, where a secret group of humans have been genetically upgraded, a young girl holds the key to stopping these “synthetics” from taking over the world.
About: This is the new thing I was talking about. A spec script can’t just sell alone. It has to be like the recently sold “The Eden Project,” which is the beginning of a trilogy, the promise of a franchise, something that might even turn into a universe. Christine Hodson is an up-and-coming writer who was a former development exec, and has sold a few scripts now (none have yet made it to the big screen). This is clearly her most ambitious one, and sold for three quarters of a million bucks. It includes another new trend of giving your big expensive action movies female leads.
Writer: Christina Hodson
Details: 117 pages

Jessica Chastain for Eve?

Talk about a script slump. What was the last feature script I flipped over? Hot Air? When was that? Four months ago?

I’ve been giving a lot of feedback to writers lately, and after giving one writer some particularly harsh (albeit kind) feedback, he asked me if I’d reached a point where nothing was fresh to me anymore. If it didn’t matter what a writer wrote in my eyes, because I’d already seen it a million times due to the sheer volume of scripts I read.

That question has lingered with me since. Could it be true? Might all these scripts and movies I haven’t liked lately actually be due to my unnaturally high read volume? I mean aren’t there only so many ways to tell a story? Am I asking too much by telling writers to give me something new, different, unique and not the same ole same ole?

While there’s no question that reading a lot of scripts dulls the read senses, I came to the conclusion that this answer would be an excuse, and I’ll tell you why. Because while it’s true there are only so many ways to tell a story, there are an infinite number of ways to create characters. No two people on this earth are exactly alike, and the same should be said for the people in screenplays.

If you put that extra effort into birthing a unique character who feels real and complex, and you do the same with all the other characters in your story, then you should be able to write something good, regardless of if the story feels familiar.

I know this because usually, when I don’t like a script, it starts with the characters. Either I don’t connect with them, identify with them, like them, or see anything unique in them. So I may be on page 10 by that point, not even at the doorstep of the actual plot, and I’ve already decided I don’t like the screenplay.

I think this is the skill that truly separates the good from the bad screenwriters. The good not only do the extra work to create these complex individuals, but they find compelling ways to explore the collective of those individuals, how they interact with one another. The writers who hunker down and commit to doing this typically reap the rewards. Let’s hope we get some of that today in The Eden Project.

Laura Walker, your average soccer mom, has a perfect husband, John, and a bright 7 year old daughter, Ruby. She also has a secret. She’s not human. Or at least, not a hundred percent. And when she steps on a plane to Tokyo, she’s well aware that her chances of making it to her destination are small.

Indeed, she’s attacked on the plane by a man with superhuman strength, who then who puts the plane down, killing Laura and the other 200 other people on board.

In the meanwhile, a woman named Eve, who’s like the female version of The Terminator, walks through the desert until she hits Vegas. Eve is looking for Ruby, Laura’s 7 year old daughter (who looks 15 – but we’ll get into that later). Ruby’s been keeping a secret from her father. She and her mom are “synthetics,” advanced next-gen versions of humans.

But it’s a little trickier than that. You see, the real synthetics, who we’ll call the “bad” synthetics, are planning to take over the world. Laura was a synthetic escapee who was developing a virus to kill the bad synthetics. She was on her way to Japan to give the virus to a man who could inject it into the synthetic mainframe. But the synthetics figured it out and stopped her before she could.

Now Eve, a “good” synthetic who was working with Laura, must get Ruby (and her dad), who also has the virus inside of her, to their Japanese contact before the bad synthetics get to them first.

Take 1 part Terminator, mix with 2 parts Matrix, add in a “Lucy” like female lead (actually dual-female leads), and you have a movie that’s able to capitalize on all the elements of those films, while still being its own thing. Put frankly, this is EXACTLY how you sell a spec. Find out what worked before you, do the same, but give it a slightly unique spin.

Conceptually (and by that I mean all the elements that went into making this saleable – like the female lead thing), I give this an A. But execution-wise, it never reaches that lofty bar. And that’s partly because it’s existing within a framework where we already know what happens next. I mean the GSU is here in spades (get to Japan, fate of the world is at stake, bad guys are closing in), which makes for a lean-mean ask-kicking spec machine. But it’s so firmly rooted in the DNA of Matrix and Terminator that it doesn’t take a futurist to predict what will happen next (although I give it props for a daring unexpected late plot development).

And what about that whole character thing I was crooning on about earlier? What about that?

Well, Eve is essentially the Terminator in Terminator 2. She’s all 1s and 0s, no understanding of emotion whatsoever (she coldly offers to kill John for Ruby – Ruby’s like, “What?? He’s my fucking dad.”), and her journey is about learning to feel. So there’s definitely some character development going on, but once again, it’s character development we’ve seen before.

The far more interesting character scenario is John. He finds out that his wife and his kid have been lying to him this whole time. That his whole life has been a lie. How do you handle that kind of fallout? However, the script makes it clear that it’s way more interested in spending time with the girls than the boys, so John’s fascinating little character issue is only grazed.

A couple of other observations I had. Adam, our synthetic baddie, trashes his secret station after taking down Laura’s plane so no evidence is left, but decides to leave Eve there. This us quite the lazy oversight. The only reason Eve appears to be left alive is because the story needed it. It would’ve made a lot more sense to either bring her with or get rid of her. It made zero sense to let her out into the wild.

Also, Ruby (the daughter) is a 7 year old who looks 15. John’s spiel about being tricked by his wife doesn’t hold up if he never noticed that his 7 year old daughter looked like a sophomore in high school. That’s usually Red Flag Numero Uno. More on these two problems in the “What I learned” section.

Finally there were the fights. Which were fun. They had a very “Matrix-y” feel to them. But they were a little “been-there-done-that.” This is something I’m noticing more and more with this “repackaging male-as-female” trend. The writers think changing the gender is all they have to do. All the action beats can be exactly the same.

Except you NEVER want to think that way. No matter whether you’re updating a genre or a gender, you always want to look for ways to take scenes and ideas within the movie to a new level. The reason James Cameron made The Terminator was because he imagined a metallic skeleton chasing a woman and he thought, “I’ve never seen that in a movie before.” That’s always gotta be your bar as well. You need to think up those moments that audiences have never seen before. Especially in the ultra-competitive action genre.

Besides these problems, The Eden Project was an easy read. Rarely does Hodson go over 2 line-paragraphs, which is smart when you’re writing an action script. We’re always on the move, always hurrying to get to that next checkpoint. There’s no breaking new ground here. But there’s enough to make it work and, more importantly, we have a concept that studios will want to turn into a movie.

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

What I learned: As writers, one of those great feelings you have is getting your script to the 98% point. That’s where you’ve finished all the heavy-lifting. All the big plot points make sense. All the scenes look good. The character work is strong and seamless. 98% feels damn nice. BUT, 98% is deceiving. You tend to think, “You know what. All the important stuff is finished. Let’s just get this out there.” As a result, you expose your script to the world when it still has mistakes. Here, we have the “Let Eden roam free” oversight along with your father character not being more curious about his 7 year old daughter looking 15. Is it annoying to have to figure out a solution for these things when you can gloss over them in the script with cheat lines like, “I just thought she had a weird disease?” Sure, but getting that final 2% figured out makes a difference. It makes the script whole. True, it didn’t affect The Eden Project’s sale. But I read the hundreds of scripts where the writers didn’t take care of the last 2% (or 5%, or 10%) and those scripts don’t always have the strong conceptual backbone that a script like The Eden Project has. And therefore the 2% becomes a lot more important. So no matter how exhausted you are, get your script to 100%. It’s worth it.

Genre: TV Pilot – Sci-fi Comedy
Premise: In the early 22nd century, when space travel is commonplace, a young ship commander accidentally flies his crew into a parallel dimension.
About: Paul Feig (Bridesmaids, The Heat) is one of the new faces for Yahoo’s recent infatuation with comedy half-hours. Yahoo and Amazon are looking for ways to differentiate themselves from the Netflix original programming dynasty and since Netflix loves its one hour dramas, the two media giants are going after comedy instead. Feig, who started in TV with the universally acclaimed “Freaks and Geeks,” a show that’s spawned every comedic actor working right now who didn’t come out of SNL, is coming back to television with Other Space, a show he originally conceived of ten years ago. That’s the draft I’m going to be reviewing today, the old one. Let’s check it out, yo.
Writer: Paul Feig
Details: 50 pages (but it’s in that old TV format where everything is double-spaced) – 1/12/04 draft

This would probably be the best female Ghosbusters trio

If you’re anything like me, you’re equal parts intrigued, worried, skeptical, and fascinated by this whole “All-Female” Ghostbusters thing Paul Feig is putting together. It has the potential to be really funny or REALLY bad. I mean, if the only reason you have an all female Ghosbusters team is because a director is really good with female actors, might that not be the best way to approach a story?

Isn’t the idea of a storytelling to grow ideas organically? Not because you’re trying to meet some mandate that will allow the movie to get a green light? Then you tack on this whole thing about how the previous Ghostbusters installments never happened, and we’re in hot slime. That’s a very curious position to take. You’re erasing from the archives some of the most lovable characters in cinema history. Is your core audience really going to be okay with that?

And how do you even begin to explain an all-female Ghostubsters team in a script? Are they going to have a sign on the front door that says, “Female applicants only?” What would be the logic in eliminating males from becoming Ghostbusters? I suppose you can write it in that the three main characters are friends from graduate school, just like the original Ghostbusters, but this setup is already feeling a mite forced.

I wouldn’t be surprised if, at some point, Feig said, “Uhhh, nothing about this feels natural,” and they ditch it again. Why does this project have to be so complicated? Make it so that, since 1989, the old Ghostbusters cleaned up the ghost problem in New York so that nobody’s seen a ghost in 25 years. But recently, a couple have been spotted, and some new Ghostbusters bring the old business back to life? People aren’t clamoring for a world-class set-up to a story about taking down ghosts. Just get us to some ghosts wreaking havoc and let’s have some fun!

And you know what, I like Feig as the director of an all-female OR all-male Ghostbusters reboot. I thought Bridesmaids was hilarious. The Heat was a perfectly conceived concept with some funny moments. This guy knows funny and seems to have the sensibilities to take on this project. But you can’t put the vice grip on this. Let the story breathe and don’t limit yourself. Here’s to hoping his pilot does the same…

Stewart Lipinsky may only be 21 years old, but he’s an ace with a star ship, and nails the toughest space simulator test the Space Federation’s got, the “surprise asteroid” test (all he had to do was run a fuel clean-out burst through the forward venting tubes). This allows Stewart to win command of his very own star ship, the USS Cruiser!

This would be wonderful if the rest of Stewart’s crew wasn’t so miserable. There’s his 24 year old sister, Karen, who’s pissed off that SHE’S not the new captain. There’s Navigator Tina, Stewart’s secret crush, who’s bummed out that she’s leaving her boyfriend. There’s best friend Michael, who’s upset HE didn’t win the captain position. And then there’s Kent, the allergy ridden science advisor who’s dad forced him to take this position.

As the crew heads out on their first deep space trip and Stewart tries to pump up crew morale, they accidentally float through a ripped pocket of the space-time continuum. It doesn’t take them long to realize they’re in a whole new dimension now where the laws of their previous universe don’t apply anymore.

In fact, the miserable crew all of a sudden starts being really nice to Stewart, encouraging him to celebrate this unheralded discovery by opening up all the air locks. Opening up all the air locks? That doesn’t sound right. Stewart snaps out of it and realizes that some sort of evil amoeba has slipped into the ship, creating a bunch of illusions in order to trick the crew into killing themselves!

This is the new universe they live in, one where they’ll have to adapt quickly if they plan to survive. And while it kind of sucks that they’re stuck here, they figure as long as they are, they might as well fly around and document it all in the unlikely event that they find a way back to their universe. And that, my friends, is our pilot.

Paul Feig

I’ll tell you what I was hoping this wasn’t going to be. I was hoping it wasn’t going to be some uber Star Trek geek’s excuse to geek out about Star Trek scenarios for 30 minutes a week. So what happens in the very first scene? Stewart pops up from behind his command chair holding a metal Star Trek pin. “I found my Star Trek pin,” he says. “My dad would have killed me if I lost this.”

Oh boy.

I’ve made the disclaimer hundreds of times before that comedy is subjective, but I’m not sure anyone’s going to disagree on this one. There isn’t anything funny here. There are some amusing moments. There are some smiles to be had. But I’m not sure a single joke landed. When General Malarky confirms to Karen, Stewart’s sister, that he’ll get to be captain over her, her response is, “Permission to kill myself, sir.” Yeah, I smiled. But haven’t I seen that line uttered 10 billion times already? That’s the level of humor to expect here. Very middle-of-the-road safe stuff.

Which is fine if you’re writing a sitcom for CBS. Some might even argue it’s REQUIRED to write a sitcom for CBS. But this is Yahoo man! This is the internet! The place where you need not worry about crusty old men in suits questioning every joke. You get to take chances. Of course, Past Paul Feig did not know that Future Paul Feig would sell this to Yahoo in 10 years. I’m not even sure there was a Yahoo ten years ago. So I’ll give him a pass on that. But I won’t give him a pass on the safety of these jokes.

Now I don’t usually review half-hour pilots on the site, but an eye-popping number arrived on my internet this weekend which I’ve been unable to forget since. Did you guys know that The Big Bang Theory is worth 2.5 billion dollars! Not a typo. B. Bee. Beeeeeeee. Beeeeeeee-illion. That’s gotta mean that shows like say, Community, which get 1/4 or 1/5 the ratings are work HALF A BILLION dollars, right? Half a billion dollars for a 1.5 rating??  Sign me up!  If you’ve got a good comedy idea, you should definitely be writing yourself a half-hour comedy show.

This brings up a question I’ve been battling with lately as far as the TV world. With SO MANY places to sell to these days, and with each of those places being so different (some need commercial breaks, some don’t, some have time constraints, some don’t, some want a 10 episode season, some 24, some are safe networks, some are riskier), how do you know how to write your pilot anymore? I’d write a CBS sit-com completely differently than I’d write an HBO sitcom. But then am I limiting myself? Should I split the difference? With movies you just write what you want to write. Ironically, TV shows, which are supposed to give you so much more freedom, are becoming harder and harder to tab with all these options. Maybe you TV experts can help me out. This industry is changing so darn fast, I can’t keep up with it, even when I’m hanging on to the tail of the USS Cruiser.

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

What I learned: If you have a wild premise, you can’t deliver a safe execution. If you’re going to rev up our expectations with a show about a space crew that gets lost in another dimension, you can’t be delivering standard jokes like: “Permission to kill myself, sir.” You’ve made a promise to the reader that you’re going to do something unique. Playing it safe with the execution is breaking that promise.

It’s turned into a Mish-Mash Monday, which may sound depressing but I just couldn’t bring myself to read and review The Last Witch Hunter this evening. I’m actually having an existential crisis with this script. How do you make witches scary to grown men? I know how you make them scary to little girls. But how do you make them scary in a Vin Deisel movie? Is Vin Diesel one of the witches? That could be scary. This is the catastrophic conundrum I’m in, is that this simply doesn’t make sense, this project. It’s the reason I’ve been so on the fence about reading it. One side of me says there’s no way it could ever be any good. Another wonders, what if they’ve found an ingenious clever way to make witches badasses? And that’s why this movie is getting made? Cause they found the secret! And I’m missing out on it because I’m being a little wuss-boy who refuses to crack open a screenplay. I’ll ask you guys. Are any of you interested in this project? Does this sound like a good idea or a disaster? Because right now I’m kind of imagining this is going to look exactly like Dracula Untold (???), where they had a 25 million dollar budget but tried to make it look like they had a 125 million dollar budget? Can’t say I’m wanting to see that movie.

Speaking of movies people shouldn’t see, I saw Annabelle this weekend. You know, the horror movie with the doll? I am now convinced that there are a group of writers studios call on in Hollywood that are specifically brought in to borify a script. There have been a handful of times where I’ve walked out of a movie feeling absolutely ZERO emotion from a film, but this one trumps them all. Annabelle wins the prize for the most boring 90 minutes of story ever created. I mean the screenplay was uninspired. The casting was uninspired. The directing was uninspired. They even found a way to make that creepy-looking doll uninspired. Did you know that the doll doesn’t even move the whole movie? Like it doesn’t do anything. It just lays there? I thought this was supposed to be a movie about a scary doll. How can that happen if the DOLL ISN’T SCARY? Somebody bring back Chucky.

But I did learn something from the experience. Scary movies need to be scary. That’s not a facetious line. I know I talk a lot here about the importance of a good story and good characters with “depth” and “backstory” and “flaws.” But after watching Annabelle, I realized that none of that actually matters if you don’t put a single thought into creating good scares. There were no good scares here. NONE! In an entire horror movie. You’d think you’d get one just by accident. But this entire movie amounts to waiting for the doll to do something scary and that moment never happening.

And let me take this moment to explain, at least partly, why this was the case. “Annabelle” was following a rule-set it had established in its backstory, which is that the doll itself doesn’t become a thinking moving thing. It’s merely being manipulated by a demon that has attached itself to the doll. So the invisible demon can do things like pick it up and move it, but the doll is never going to do anything beyond that.

I HATE when writers create rule-sets that prevent their movie from becoming a better movie. If you have a rule-set you’ve established, and that rule-set prevents your world from functioning in a way that’s going to make your movie more entertaining? You have to re-think the rule-set. And that’s definitely what happened here. I’m not saying the doll had to have facial expressions. But it needed to do more than get dropped on the ground. I mean come on.

I also saw myself some “A Million Ways to Die In the West,” on Itunes, a script that I actually liked. But boy did the movie not work. I mean, Seth McFarlane, bless his heart, is not an actor. He is awkward to look at. He’s awkward to listen to. He has an awkward gait when he moves. He’s also so vain that he kept his same haircut and 2014 look despite being in a movie set in the year 1880.

But the big takeaway from the film was that McFarlane spent way too much time on the relationship. There were a half dozen scenes at least where him and the romantic interest (Charlize Theron) would go do something together that had nothing to do with the plot. For example, they’d go to the fair and just hang out there for 10 screen time minutes. What did this have to do with anything? Beats me. As you all know, every scene should push the story forward, should get your characters closer to their objectives. If that’s not happeing, you probably don’t need those scenes. And if your characters don’t have any objectives in the first place, then you have much deeper structural problems.

I call these scenes, which I see ALL THE TIME in amateur scripts, “Pause Scenes.” Because it’s literally like the writer pauses the story so his characters can engage in a scene he thinks might be cool or funny. Then, when the scene is over, he unpauses the story and we continue moving forward again. This should never be the case. The idea with screenwriting is to always combine these scenarios into one. If you want to include a fun scene, find a way to make it an essential part of the story.

So earlier in A Million Ways To Die In The West, there’s a scene where our hero has to square off against some guy he owes money to. If you really want to include the Fair scene, then make it so that our hero is supposed to meet that guy there to settle their debt. Our hero also gets dumped by his girlfriend in the first act. Maybe the Fair is his first chance to talk to her again. He’s hoping to go there and get her back. This way the scene has an actual point to it, instead of it feeling floaty and unimportant.

Finally, I caught Chef, yet another directed-written by-acted vehicle and boy did it start out great. I mean I was like, “This is that fun easy-going movie you throw on on a Saturday to feel good about life.” But that structural problem I saw in the screenplay way back in my review (we don’t get to him starting the food truck – the actual PREMISE of the movie – until after the halfway point) came back and bit this thing in the ass.

Favreau is so good with dialogue and he knows he’s so good with dialogue that he thought he could dialogue us to Marmalade Heaven and we’d forget all about the plot beats. But if we watch a movie about a famous chef who decides to start a food truck and he doesn’t actually start selling food on that food truck until the final act? We’re going to be a pretty impatient audience, aren’t we?

The big killer with the script is that Favreau gave us two of the exact same set pieces. The opening act is about him serving the biggest food critic in the city, and it turning into a disaster. So how does he follow that? By giving us THE EXACT SAME SCENE. He again prepares to serve the same food critic and it again turns into a disaster. 15 minutes were put into each sequence, totaling 30 minutes of screen time. Youch!

I heard Favreau likes to write fast and that he didn’t rewrite this too much, wanting to capture that “energy” you only get with a first draft. But there’s no doubt that a couple of rewrites would’ve caught this problem and made the script a lot better as a result. Because the truth is, we needed the hero to fall hard in those first fifteen minutes, be down on his luck for the next 12-15 minutes, and then have that Food Truck option open up. Since he’s un-hirable, he gives it a shot, and you can now focus more on the core reason we came to the movie in the first place, which is to watch this down-on-his-luck chef reinvent himself.

I was actually talking with Miss Scriptshadow about the movie afterwards because she had the same issue. “Why did it take so long to get to the truck?” I told her I’d listened to an interview with Favreau where he’d made a point to say he wanted to change up the structure because whenever he goes to a movie, he knows what’s going to happen at every stage. He wanted this movie to be unpredictable even to the more seasoned movie-goers.

“Well that’s stupid,” she replied. “So he made his movie worse just so it would be harder to predict?” It was a sound observation that brought up a deeper question. As writers, in our eternal quest to keep the audience guessing, should we make a plot beat or a character different JUST TO MAKE IT DIFFERENT? Sure, Favreau’s movie would’ve been more predictable had we gotten to the food truck sooner, but wouldn’t it have been more satisfying? Wouldn’t the story have moved along quicker and therefore kept the audience more entertained? I think so. What do you guys think?

Well, that about does it for me. I’m gonna conk out. In the meantime, I’ll dream about my new movie obsession. Star Wars 7? No. Batman vs. Superman? Not a chance. I’m talking about John F&*%ING Wick. Me and Keanu have a date for October 24th. Goddamit, that dog was a gift from his dying wife!

Who’s coming with me???

NOTE: The Scriptshadow Newsletter just went out and includes a review of that new Shark Spec that sold for almost a million bucks.  Check your SPAM and PROMOTIONS tabs if it isn’t in your Inbox.  If you didn’t receive the newsletter, let me know.  Also, if you want to sign up for the newsletter, head on over here and send me your e-mail.  Hope you guys enjoy it!

Now, on to this week’s Amateur Offerings.  Read as far as you can and tell us which script you liked best in the comments!

TITLE: The Followed
GENRE: Action Thriller
LOGLINE: An amnesiac security officer must solve the mystery of the night he and his daughter went missing in order to find her before the rogue network of sophisticated criminals tracking him.
WHY YOU SHOULD READ: What I did here is set out to write a script that used the gothic surroundings of Prague as a noir character. While the thematic elements of both Bourne & Taken somewhat inspired what I did here, this is designed for an A-list actor to sink their teeth into because it’s largely the story of one man, who remains the focal point throughout, and his struggle to get his memory back and find his daughter. It’s not conventional in its approach and I’ve been told the ending is wickedly un-Hollywood. Because it’s not exactly conventional, I thought this may be a good discussion piece for the variety of writers on your site.

TITLE: The Log in Your Eye
GENRE: Dark Comedy
LOGLINE: When a pastor’s wife suspects her husband is having an affair she hires someone to follow him and find out if her suspicions are true…
WHY YOU SHOULD READ: This is a script I’ve been working on for almost five years. I have only shown it to a few friends/family so it’s hard to gauge how good (or bad) it really is. I’m hoping the ScriptShadow community can help me by giving me their expert opinion.

TITLE: Misfire
GENRE: Comedy
LOGLINE: A desperate neophyte screenwriter must do everything in his power to prevent the collapse of his first produced movie, an ill-fated Western titled “Janice Got a Gun”.
WHY YOU SHOULD READ: Do you like werewolves, zombies, aliens and found footage? Neither do I. That’s why I wrote a relatively grounded comedy that will never get made. But all of my effort won’t be in vain if you read this and enjoy some of it or even laugh once or twice. Are you an aspiring screenwriter? If you answered yes, this might just be the script for you

TITLE: Sins of The Father
GENRE: Crime/Drama
LOGLINE: An innocent assignment leads a young man on an investigation in which he ultimately discovers the awful truth of his father’s hidden past.
WHY YOU SHOULD READ: Reminiscent of Mississippi Burning the story takes place in the deep South in the early sixties when social change was in the air. Except, in one small town controlled by a Wealthy Cotton Mill owner with an insidious past. Carl Henderson was not only a Bigot but a War Criminal serving in the German Army as an SS Commandant in a concentration camp. His son Todd, doing an innocent college assignment, unwittingly discovers this truth, but in doing so completely destroys his family.

TITLE: Judgement
GENRE: psychological thriller/drama
LOGLINE: A grief-stricken doctor must decide whether to seek the ultimate vengeance, and kill the man that murdered his family
WHY YOU SHOULD READ: I had just read a newspaper article about a home invasion, where two scumbags murdered just “for fun”, just to see what it felt like. My response to this was pretty visceral, so I wanted to get it down on paper. One of my favorite ways to tease/pitch the script is to pose this scenario: “Imagine the worst physical thing that could happen to a human…now imagine rooting for it to happen”.