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”.

Get Your Script Reviewed On Scriptshadow!: To submit your script for an Amateur Review, send in a PDF of your script, along with the title, genre, logline, and finally, something interesting about yourself and/or your script that you’d like us to post along with the script if reviewed. Use my submission address please: Carsonreeves3@gmail.com. Remember that your script will be posted. If you’re nervous about the effects of a bad review, feel free to use an alias name and/or title. It’s a good idea to resubmit every couple of weeks so your submission stays near the top.

Genre: Crime/Drama
Premise (from writer): Having been kidnapped in South Africa, a resilient young traveller is forced into criminal activity by his captors in order to repay the ransom his family could not afford.
Why You Should Read (from writer): I got notes for this [from Carson] about a year or two back. Following some rewrites, it’s had a couple of producers on and off the project, getting closer each time. I’m looking to find out why this script hasn’t gone beyond getting interest into getting made.
Writer: Ned Kilgannon
Details: 112 pages

Alex Pettyfer for Cassius?

Today’s writer, Ned, asks a great question. A question that thousands of Hollywood insiders and outsiders ask all the time. Why hasn’t my project, which has gotten interest from a lot of people, been able to take that next step and get made?

It’s a frustrating question for people particularly because they see so many bad movies getting made. And then they have their project, which they think is pretty darn good, and for some reason it can’t cross the finish line.

Well, I have some theories about this, which I’ll be glad to share in a second. But before I do that, let’s take a look at the script at the center of our question… Devil In You.

22 year-old Cassius Ramsey is just another spoiled rich kid who’s got money to burn.  He chooses to use that money to roam the earth while he figures out what to do with his life. His travel partner, Max, may not have the same deep pockets as Cassius, but he’s got the same spirit for adventure.

Somewhat bored with the typical touristy places kids travel to, the duo decide to check out South Africa, thinking they’ll have a more “original” experience. But as soon as they land, they notice some sketchy men targeting them. Then, on the bus ride out of the airport, they’re stopped and kidnapped by a ruthless gang of criminals.

When the criminals find out Max’s family is penniless, they kill him. But the criminals’ kidnapping-for-cash job doesn’t go as planned when Cassius’s estranged father tells the kidnappers to fuck off. Facing death himself, Cassius pleads with the crew to let him join them. He promises he’ll pull his weight.

The intimidating but pragmatic leader, Jacques, gives Cassius a test to rob a local woman, and he passes with flying colors. Soon, Cassius finds himself moving up the gang’s ladder as he excels at every job and continues to impress Jacques. There’s something exciting about this life that plays to Cassius’s sense-of-adventure. But at a certain point, he starts to yearn for home again, and ultimately must decide whether he wants this life, or his old one.

Before I can answer Ned’s question, I first want to provide what, in my opinion, are the four types of ways movies get made.

The first tier are the sure-things. These are the projects that are so good, either through concept or execution, that nothing can stop them from getting made. These are the Jurassic Parks, the Hangovers, the Transformers, the American Beautys. Everyone knew these movies were going to get made as soon as they heard the concept or read the script. These projects are forces of nature.  Nothing can stop them.

The second tier are the studio mandated movies, the ones that are created solely because the studio believes they’ll make money. These are typically spearheaded by producers who don’t really care about the quality of movies so much as what they do to their bottom-line, and the results reflect that. Sometimes you get your Sex Tapes and sometimes you get your Snow White and the Huntsmans. Somteimes you get your Blendeds and sometimes you get your Lego Movies.

The third tier are the writer-directors out there who have the power to make films just on their name. This is actually where a lot of the bad movies – the ones where you wonder “How the hell did that get made?” – come from. There are no checks and balances on these scripts since the writer-director can make whatever they want. And while sometimes that can be a good thing. Other times it can be a disaster. Sofia Coppola’s “Somewhere.” Jason Reitman’s “Labor Day.” These are Tier 3 films.

The fourth and final tier is where everyone else lives. The rest of the projects get made through good old fashioned passion. Because think about it. Nobody wants to make any movies outside of the first three tiers. Therefore, the only way to get a movie made is if you cheerlead your project into existence, if you send it out to everyone, if you push it through wall after wall, if you pester anyone you know to read it, no matter how uncomfortable that pestering becomes.

A movie like The King’s Speech is a perfect example. Nobody wanted to make that movie. Seidler sent it everywhere. Thinking Geoffrey Rush would be the perfect actor for the part of the teacher, he went through his agent. The agent told him to fuck off, that Rush would never have any interest in the part. So Seidler actually found out where Rush lived and sent it there. Rush read it and loved it. Seidler’s passion for his material got the movie made.

Here’s the thing with passion though. People don’t get passionate about shit. You can try using a bunch of smoke and mirrors but if your script’s bad, no amount of cheerleading’s going to get you followers. So having success in the fourth tier usually dictates a minimum amount of quality. The higher the quality your script is, then, the more likely your passion will catch on with others, and the easier it will be to get your script through the system.

Which brings us back to Devil In You. Devil in You, I believe, meets the minimum level of quality required for a Tier 4 project. It’s a solid script, in the vein of movies like Goodfellas and The Godfather, about a guy moving up inside a crime organization, with a unique spin in that it’s set in South Africa and has an unlikely hero.

So why isn’t it a sure thing yet? My feeling is that it’s not big enough. If you look at films like The Godfather and Goodfellas, you got the feeling that our characters were moving up higher and higher into a bigger and bigger world. Just the other day I was talking about how you never want the word “small” in your logline. Nobody makes a movie about “small.” And yet that’s how this feels to me. It’s a relatively small gang and it never grows. With some minor exceptions near the end, I never felt like the crimes they pulled got any bigger, any badder. Cassius definitely moves up within the gang, but I’m not sure that matters if the gang’s influence within the community itself doesn’t grow.

Also, I didn’t really know where the script was going. It didn’t seem to be driving towards that big climax. Again, it felt stagnant, like the gang was just going from one average robbery to the next. For example, your typical heist movie will have the “big last heist.” So we have something to look forward to. Or if you don’t have that, then you at least have to have the feeling that things are getting bigger and that they’re coming to a head. Like I was saying the other day, you need to feel like the balloon’s blowing up. I’m not sure I ever felt that here.

So if I were advising Ned on this particular project – helping him find a way to get this made, I’d tell him to think bigger. Have this gang grow more with each robbery. Just like all these crime movies, show Cassius move his way up the ladder until he’s a serious badass. I guess that’s another problem I had. I never saw Cassius as anything other than that traveller. I never saw him truly lose himself in this world. And I think that’s because Ned was constantly pumping the breaks.

As far as some personal opinions, I’d make Jessica Jacque’s girlfriend, and have her and Cassius have to sneak around.  I’d also ditch the Robin Hood stuff.  If we’re going to make these guys bad, let’s make them bad.  Let’s have Cassius truly have to cross over into a brutal world.  True, the Robin Hood stuff makes Jacques and his outfit more interesting, but I think it limits the gang in how far they can go.  That’s how I’d attack it if I were him.

So to summarize, the less impressive the script is, the more passion will be needed to get it made. You can either try to supply that passion yourself and be the biggest cheerleader in the world, or you can get back to work on the script and let it do the work for you. I think Ned’s a really good writer. I just think this script needs to feel bigger. It needs to build more. What do you guys think?

Script link: Devil In You

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

What I learned 1: It’s hard to cast 20-somethings (especially early 20-somethings) to carry a movie.  Studios are reluctant to do it unless it’s a high school or college film.  It’s not that it’s never done, but in genres like crime, they typically like someone older.

What I learned 2: You want to make your writing easy on the eyes. You want to make it a pleasing read. The excessive use of dashes and capitals made for a harder read than usual here. As someone who had just read two really easy-to-read scripts, this stuck out. Here’s a sample of what I mean.  This hurt my eyes.