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Genre: Psychological Thriller
Premise (from writer): A woman who spent her childhood in a cage, is rehabilitated and given the chance to live a normal life when she moves out on her own, but she meets a mysterious man that threatens to undo her progress.
Why You Should Read (from writer): Okey dokey, gonna keep it simple here… I’m a long time reader of SS. I often lurk in the shadows and comment very rarely, but I absorb all the information like a sponge. I’m a HUGE horror fan and also a lover of character driven films. I wanted to do a new-ish spin on the genre, so I’ve come up with this psychological thriller that I think has a good hook and some complex characters. I’m hoping notes from Carson and the SS community will bring the script to the next level.
Writer: Brittany LaMoureux
Details: 93 pages

A month ago, I laid down the gauntlet. I said, readers of Scriptshadow! I implore you to find me a screenplay heretofore unseen by the Scriptshadow Community, yet still worthy of an Amateur Offerings slot! And so you pitched hundreds of scripts in an endless bid to sway my interest, but only one stood out. Everyone seemed to agree that “Pet” was the script to beat.  And so review it I will.

Now yesterday we talked about the importance of challenging actors with complex roles so you can get financing-worthy attachments to your project. Pet excels in this area, creating two mentally troubled characters trying to carry on their first ever romantic relationship. So the script’s got the characters going for it. But what about everything else? Time to get your adoption papers in order. We’re not leaving here until we find ourselves a pet.

Mya had the unfortunate distinction of growing up in a cage, courtesy of her psycho mother. When said mother commits suicide, leaving her daughter to rot, her uncle, Jake, comes to her rescue. Horrified by the chain of events, he agrees to raise Mya.

Cut to 12 years later and all that cage stuff is in the past. Mya’s a young woman and wants to get out on her own.  Experience the beauties of life.  Like standing in the middle of the cereal aisle at 2 in the morning trying to decide between Lucky Charms and Cocoa Krispies.  Oh yeah, it’s great being an adult.  Jake’s worried about Mya because, well, she’s been sheltered ever since he took her in. To unleash her out into the world now is kind of like dropping a kitten into the middle of New York City.

Mya seems to be doing well though, until she meets Early, a burly intense 30-something who’s a little slow. When Early’s dog gets hit by a car, Mya extends him an olive branch, and all of a sudden they start hanging out. That goes well at first, until Early starts telling Mya that she can’t go to work or contact her uncle.  She has to stay here, with him, all the time.

It appears that our little cage-dweller is once-again, a pet. She’ll have to navigate Early’s increasing paranoia and homicidal tendencies if she stands any chance at getting out of this alive. I guess that means if she doesn’t hurry up, it’ll be too late.  Heh heh.  Get it?

Brittany is a good writer. Pet displays all the qualities of a professional script. The description paragraphs are tight (usually 2 lines or less). There’s a lot of showing instead of telling. The characters are all memorable, even the less important ones (I adored the quirky paint shop owner). The draft is very clean. I don’t think I saw a single spelling/grammar/punctuation error. Which is RARE.

Most tellingly, you see a plan of action here. A lot of times when I read an amateur script, I don’t get the sense that the writer knows where he’s going or what he plans to do. In stark contrast, there’s a deliberate building in Pet, about a girl who escapes from a cage being slowly manipulated into entering another one.  We know that the writer knows where she wants to take this.

The sense of dread that permeates the story is reason enough to keep reading, as we know this is going to end badly and are worried for Mya. A good line of suspense can power the majority of a plot.  But it can’t operate on its own.

At a certain point, I realized how little was going on in the story.  The relationship was developing, and there’s a little side-story about Mya trying to be a better employee at her paint shop.  But other than that, we’re just watching Mya and Early get to know each other.  And since neither of them talk that much (which I’ll get to in a sec), it wasn’t that interesting.

To address this, I thought we needed a twist or two in that middle section – something that changed things around to freshen the story up. The way Hannibal Lecter is released from his cell in the middle of Silence of the Lambs. Something that stirred up the narrative. I actually thought that Brittany was going to trick us. She’d imply that Early was going to be the psycho one, but then pull the rug out from under us and have Mya be the one who cages Early.

The way it stands now, we have yet another creepy guy potentially killing a woman. Is that an original choice?  Can we do better?  Now that I think about it, I realize that my need for twists may imply a bigger problem. Maybe the second act is too slow because we’re not approaching it correctly. Maybe Mya needs more to do, more directions she’s being pulled in.  More plot!

And about that dialogue. Typically in a script, you’ll have one character who’s the dominant talker, and a second character who’s the secondary talker. These two will take up 60% of the movie’s dialogue or more.  In Pet, you have two “secondary” talkers, and that results in a lot of basic, restrained dialogue.

Whenever your main two characters – the people who talk more than anyone else in a script – have similar ways of talking, you get these huge chunks of dialogue with very little contrast.  Dialogue where both characters sound the same can be brutal.  But if both characters are also introverts and therefore don’t talk much?  Now you’ve really handicapped yourself.  I mean how are you going to make that kind of dialogue consistently entertaining?

Here’s an exchange from the middle of Pet. “Nobody aint gonna lock me up no more.” “It’s okay.” “You don’t get it.” “Yes. I do.” “I need to paint.” This is a small sample size but it’s reflective of how a LOT of the dialogue reads. And you can see how that might get frustrating after awhile. At least with me, I wanted to pick these two up, shake them, and say, “Say something!! Don’t just mumble four-word sentences. Say what’s on your mind, man!!” But that moment rarely came.

And to be honest, I don’t know the perfect solution to this. If you make Mya like Clementine from Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (babbling all the time) it wouldn’t fit the mood or the tone of the story. If I’d spotted this in the outline stage, my solution would’ve been to avoid it altogether. Rebuild the story so you’re not stuck in this pothole in the first place.  But that doesn’t really help us now, does it.

I guess technically you need to bring a little more personality out of one of the characters.  I always start with humor. Every character has their own sense of humor. It’s a little harder to find humor in really serious pieces, but it can be done. And when it’s done right, it can liven that dialogue right up.  Look no further than The Skeleton Twins.  That dialogue could’ve been really depressing.  And it was in places.  But they found ways to make it funny too.  And I realize Pet isn’t that movie.  It’s its own thing.  But I really feel like one of these two needs more personality if we’re going to stick with them for 95 minutes.

All in all, Pet was a solid effort from a writer I’ll want to see more of in the future. If I hear a good logline from Brittany, I’ll definitely ask to read the script. But this one moved a little too slow and the characters were just a little too reserved for me.

Script link: Pet

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

What I learned: Early in the script, one of the characters in Pet mentions dating on Craigslist. I’ve been noticing a new trend in screenwriting where writers depend a little too heavily on internet-related activities for their characters. They go on Craigslist or watch porn or jump on Twitter or check videos on Youtube. The more it happens, the more it sounds LESS LIKE a real person’s life, and MORE LIKE the average day of a certain writer who never leaves his computer. Your writing is a reflection of your experiences. But your characters should have their own experiences. And a lot of those will be real-life stuff. Don’t fall back on the internet because it’s easy and what you know.

So today I read the news that Ben Affleck is thinking about making The Accountant his next project. “The Accountant”?? I wondered, my face pinching up, trying to remember why that sounded familiar. Off I went to my review archives and LO AND BEHOLD, I’d reviewed it! But that’s impossible, I thought. I would’ve remembered it, right? Yet I was drawing a size-10 blank.

But once I skimmed through the review, it all came back to me.  The awfulness.  The sloppiness.  I remember actually thinking at one point that I’d been duped. That’s happened a few times, where I hear about a script, go looking for it, find it, it turns out to be unreadable, then I later learn I’ve read an amateur script with the same title.

So then why was Ben Affleck doing the movie??? Take whatever you think of Affleck as an actor out of the equation. The guy is the hottest thing since sliced bread at the moment. Which means he gets all the best scripts in town. He gets his pick of the litter. So for him to literally choose “litter” to star in was confounding.

Until you look deeper. You see, the main character in The Accountant is autistic. And this is the screenwriting secret that so many writers either ignore or are ignorant to. Outside of the summer tentpoles, actors make a movie go. They lead to financing which leads to a green light. Which logically means that to get a movie made, you have to write a great character that an actor will want to play.

In fact, for 90% of the actors out there, the role they play is more important to them than the script itself. They want to play a part that’s challenging, that’s interesting, that’s going to get them some acting credit. When you look at it that way, it’s not so ridiculous that Affleck would choose this script. He wants to play an autistic hitman. He’ll either fix the rest of the script himself or hire Chris Terrio to do it. But dammit if he’s not going to play that autistic hitman.

This brought me to a realization that I’ve already had several times before, but for whatever reason, didn’t become crystal clear until today’s events. Unless you’re writing a huge summer flick, you need to put more emphasis on the character at the center of your story than the story itself. Cause that’s what the actors are going to do.

Which leads us to today’s article. I’m listing the top 17 “challenging” character-types that actors want to play. If you can fit these into your story in a natural way, you’ll want to consider it. ‘Cause I guarantee you this: If your main character is bland, no A-list actor is going to make your movie.

Autism – Why not start with Affleck’s new love? The disorder did wonders for Dustin Hoffman with his role in Rain Man. Because acting is, in many ways, about emoting, there’s something appealing about a character who does the complete opposite.

Psychopathic – Being a psychopath isn’t just about murdering. It’s about playing anti-social and non-empathetic behavior. Its appeal is that it’s another condition that goes against how we normally act in life. Inevitably, these characters tend to become killers (American Psycho, Monster, Taxi Driver) but it’s all the other tics that get the actors excited.

Going Crazy – Aw man, talk about actor catnip. Write in a character who’s going nuts and watch the A-listers line up, as “going crazy” often leads to an Oscar nomination. A Beautiful Mind, The Aviator, The Shining. These characters are fun to write as well, so it’s an actor-writer match made in heaven.

Robots – Bringing sci-fi into a venue where we’re looking for meaty rolls seems counter-intuitive. But much like playing a psychopath or a sociopath (the psychopath’s little cousin), playing a robot forces you to strip away all your emotions, a challenging feat. We’ve seen great robot characters in the Alien movies, as well as 2001.

The Genius Paradox – Talk about the perfect part to play to actors’ egos! A genius character! We saw it recently with Lucy. Before that, Limitless. As we saw in my recent review, “Brilliance” will be coming to the big screen soon. Thrusting genius into your lead character is a surefire way to get some actor attention.

OCD – OCD got Jack Nicholson one of his Oscars (in As Good As It Gets). We just saw it to a lesser degree with Robert McCall in The Equalizer. They even based an entire show around OCD once (Monk).

Addicts – Many actors have demons. And playing addicted characters allows them to explore and battle those demons, if only for a few months. From Flight to Leaving Las Vegas to Half-Nelson, playing a convincing addict seems to be a badge of honor for actors.

Mentally Challenged – This has been made fun of plenty of times before, most notably in “Tropic Thunder,” but what can you say? Actors love the challenge of playing someone who’s mentally challenged. Forrest Gump. I Am Sam. I mean, if you can pull this off, you’re basically guaranteed an Oscar.

Twins – Imagine you’re an actor and you get the opportunity to play not just one role in a movie, but two? Two completely different characters. What actor isn’t going to take that into consideration? Check out The Prestige or The Social Network to see this in action.

Body-Swappers – Looked down upon by some for being gimmicky, a body swapping movie allows actors to play two roles which are usually polar opposites. We saw it with Face-Off. We saw it in The Change-Up. But don’t limit yourself. I think it’s only a matter of a time before someone comes up with a clever body-swapping drama idea.

Amnesia – Amnesia gets a bad rap for being cliché, but don’t tell actors that. They love playing people who can’t remember jack shit about who they are. That’s a hell of a challenge. Bourne built an entire franchise off this conceit.

Pathological Liars – A character whose every day survival depends on lying can be fascinating for an actor to play (and for an audience to watch!). We saw William Macy do it in Fargo, and Hayden Christensen nail it in Shattered Glass.

Self-destructive – This is usually tied in with addiction, but can exist on its own as well. Some of the most tragic characters in our history did themselves in due to being self-destructive. Most recently, we watched this play out in Wolf of Wall Street.

Depression – Depression is sad. But it sure makes actors happy. Punch Drunk Love, Revolutionary Road, Silver Linings Playbook, Little Miss Sunshine. It’s a clever way to lure in comedy actors hoping to play against type (Skeleton Twins).

Any extreme limitation (blindness, wheelchair-bound, deaf, cancer) – The Book of Eli. Sea of Love. Born on the Fourth of July. The Fault In Our Stars. Dallas Buyers Club. It goes without saying that actors love to play these roles where they’ve been handed an impossible limitation.

Discriminated Against – One of the greatest 1-2 punches for drama is to set a movie in a time where a subset of people are being heavily discriminated against, then make your main character one of those people. A black man in the 1960s. A gay man in the 1950s. A Jewish man in Germany in the 1940s. You’ll have to fight actors off from taking these roles.

Get creative – Look for any way to create a challenging lead role in your script. Benjamin Button got made because Brad Pitt got to play every age in life, from a newborn to an old man. In the Black List script, What Happened to Monday, an actor will get to play septuplets! I seem to remember a movie awhile back that centered around a Jewish Nazi. Create something that, at its core, is challenging. These are the roles actors are drawn to.

Now there are a couple of caveats to this business. The character you’re writing has to fit into the story you’re telling. A meth-addict protagonist may increase interest from actors, but it’s not going to work if you’re writing a romantic comedy produced by Mark Burnett. In other words, don’t slap a fancy character into any old idea and expect miracles. The two must co-exist organically.

Also, none of these suggestions will work unless you convey them in a truthful manner. In other words, research the shit out of them so that you know what you’re talking about. If you try to write an autistic lead and all you know about autism is what you’ve seen in movies, I guarantee you the character’s going to suck. Do tons of research and find out what everyday life is like for these people. The more you know, the more convincing they’ll be, the more likely an actor will be attracted to them.

And, as always, take these suggestions as a starting point. They won’t work on their own. They need your own personal spin to pop. A great way to do this is through irony. Make a sex addict the new church pastor. Make your protag, who suffers from depression, a Barney-like character on a new kid’s show. I hope that helps.

What do you guys think? Anything I should add to the list?

Genre: Western
Premise: A group of cave-dwelling cannibal Indians abduct a woman. The race is on to rescue her before she’s turned into lady-stew.
About: S. Craig Zahler wrote an amazing script five years ago called “The Brigands of Rattleborge” that is still unmade. Blimey! My understanding is, like a lot of projects, it’s stuck in some development snafu that, even though the company who has it isn’t able to do anything with it, they’re not going to allow anyone else to do anything with it either. And this is why some great movies never get made. While Zahler’s written a handful of scripts since, it looks like he’s tired of the waiting game. So he’s doing what more people in this town should do – he’s taking his career into his own hands and directing Bone Tomahawk himself. This is one of the sweetnesses of being a great writer. Sooner or later, you’ll have the opportunity to hold people hostage with your talent. You say to them, “You get my hot script, but only if you let me direct it.” The project has secured a nice looking cast that includes Patrick Wilson, Kurt Russell, Matthew Fox, and Richard Jenkins. It comes out next year.
Writer: S. Craig Zahler
Details: 125 pages

Kurt Russell is bringing his Western-perfect face to Bone Tomahawk

Despite my being far from the biggest Western fan, Westerns always seem to end up in my Top 10. It’s doubly surprising that a script like “Brigands” would find its way there because it commits one of the cardinal sins of screenwriting – the rule everyone agrees you don’t break. And that’s excessive description.

Excessive description is saved for novels (which Zahler writes as well). In the screenwriting world, the goal is to move the reader’s eyes down the page as fast as possible. The huge distinction that so many writers forget is that while novels are the end of the line for that writing process, screenplays still have one step to go. They’re the “proof of concept” for the end of the line. Because so many other scripts are ALSO vying to get to the last step, readers and producers need to get through screeplays quickly, so they can go on to the next one.

But here’s why Zahler seems to get away with breaking this rule. A) He’s a writer who excels at description and B) he writes in the genre ideal for description – Westerns. Westerns require the writer to set a mood, a tone, to pull them back into that time and into that world. You need a little extra description to do that.

With that said, I’ve watched a lot of writers try to pull off the same thing and they’re just bad at it. They don’t focus on the right words or the right phrases. They’re clunkier, less imaginative. Description is about finding those power words that provide a perfect conduit to the moment and if you don’t have that talent, you don’t want to play in that sandbox. Which is fine, because for almost every other genre, you want to keep the description short and sweet.

Bone Tomahawk begins with two pieces of shit named Buddy and Purvis, who have just murdered a group of people. When they believe they hear others coming, they retreat to a nearby mountain to hide. Weaving their way through the mountain crevices, they find a bone-laden graveyard. Spooked, they try to get away, but not before an arrow pierces Buddy’s neck, an arrow with a tip made from a bird’s beak.

Purvis, the dumber of the two, hightails it out of there to the nearby town of “Bright Hope.” He’s immediately tagged as a suspicious character and, in a confrontation with the sheriff, shot. Samantha O’Dwyer, the local nurse, is brought in to clean the wound, but when a group checks on the two, they find them gone. In their place is another one of those bird-tipped arrows.

Samantha’s husband, Arthur, is pissed and wants to go after the kidnappers, but due to a recent accident is on crutches. Still, he convinces the local sheriff, an Indian hunter, and an older gentleman, Chicory, to let him come along and get his wife back.

So that’s what the four do. Well, sort of. The next 60 pages take our heroes through the endless plains of the old West as they track these cannibals back to their home. Along the way, they lose their horses, which means Arthur must stay behind. But as the others continue on, Arthur never gives up, vowing to save his wife.

To give you an idea of what I was saying earlier, here’s the first paragraph of Bone Tomahawk.

That’s a sure way to send the average reader packing. But I’m going to tell you why it works, at least in this instance. Read the first sentence again. That’s not just a description. That’s a story. Three men are dead, the blood still draining from their throats. Now had this only been description for description’s sake (no deaths), the paragraph would’ve been a tougher sell. But this is far from a boring paragraph.

Alas, I wish I could say the same about the rest of Bone Tomahawk. The script truly does start out great, with the murder, the emergence of these mystery cannibals, and with Samantha abducted. You’ve got all the elements in place for a classic GSU tale.

But Zahler went ahead and forgot the “U.” Once our characters are on their way, very little happens for a long time. It’s a strangely pedestrian exploration of the West, with most scenes limited to characters yapping away about trivial topics. For example, one scene centers on Chicory’s confession that he’s lousy at reading books in the tub, as the books keep getting wet. Far from edge-of-your seat storytelling.

When you send a group of people off on a journey, the drama needs to come from one of two places. Outside or inside. As cool as our bone tomahawk cannibals are, we see them a few minutes in the beginning, twenty minutes at the end, and that’s it. Bone Tomahawk runs into the most classic pitfall in all of screenwriting – the boring second act. And that’s because there isn’t enough happening. Not to our characters from the outside (their horses are stolen but that’s it) and not from the inside either.

Every once in awhile, characters would have a minor disagreement about something (“Why did you shoot at the Mexicans?”) but other than that, everyone seemed to be on the same page. If you’re not going to throw a lot of plot twists and plot points at us (exterior stuff), you need to create problems between your characters (interior stuff), either unresolved things arising from their pasts or issues that develop as they go (challenge to authority, differences in philosophy, people having breakdowns, etc.).

That was one of the great things about Aliens. Nobody agreed on anything. These disagreements caused tension and conflict which resulted in drama. This amongst a story that already had one of the most intense EXTERIOR conflicts in history – those terrifying aliens. That’s the way I’d prefer writers do it. Create conflict in both places, interior AND exterior.

Then again, I understand that this is a Western, and Westerns move at a different pace. That’s something I’ve never been completely comfortable with. I know, technically, that you’re supposed to allow Westerns extra time to build. But you have to put a limit on it at some point, right? There has to be mark on the dial where you say, “We need to go faster here.” I’m sure Western purists are going to be more forgiving of the pacing here. But for me, not enough happened in the allotted time.

Another curious aspect of Bone Tomahawk is that we’re not sure who the hero is. That’s a very “studio-ish” note. That you have to have a single hero. But it truly did hurt the read for me.

I assumed that Arthur (Samantha’s wife) was going to be our hero. But then he barely speaks on the journey, to the point where we often forget he’s there. The character who spoke the most and acted the most was the sheriff. So you’d think he might have been the hero. But his is the least personal journey here. He seems to be acting only out of duty.

Arthur does make a late push to lead the charge, but he’d been so absent by that point, that I was no longer invested in him.

I’m super-curious what Zahler is going to do as a director. He seems like a deep intense guy, sort of the screenwriting equivalent of Cormac McCarthy. With that being the case, I know he’s going to bring something extra to his vision. As a screenplay, though, Bone Tomahawk moved too slow for me, and didn’t have exciting enough characters to keep those slow sections entertaining.

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

What I learned: Yesterday we talked about the value of adding uncertainty to your story. The more certain the audience is of what’s going to happen, the more bored they’ll get. To me, these plains gave the story such an opportunity to create an endless thread of uncertainties. But everything pretty much went according to plan. Even the surprises (their horses getting stolen) were predictable. It’s really hard to keep the audience entertained when you’re not giving them anything they don’t expect.

No, Robert McCall didn’t get me in my sleep last night.  But sleep is definitely the main suspect in today’s mystery.  For the first time since I began Scriptshadow, I actually fell asleep while reading yesterday’s review script.  Apparently reading and giving notes on four scripts in a single day is my limit.  Boy did I have some sweet dreams though.

Since there’s going to be no review today, I can tell you something big I learned after reading all of those scripts.  I started to notice early on in the 4-pack that 80% of the scenes in these scripts had zero drama.  They were all straightforward, all executed on the surface.  Surface-level scenes are almost all catastrophes for being so boring.  For example, “Don” might need to tell “Judy” that they need to take money out of the bank.  So we’d have a 2 page scene where Don told Judy that they needed to take money out of the bank.

The more of these scenes I read, the more I realized why they were so bland.  In every situation, we were certain what was going to happen.  There are lots of ways to make a scene work, but one of the best ways is to through uncertainty.  Let me give you an example.  Let’s say that “Frank” wants to break up with “Ellen.”  If Frank goes into the scene and says “Hey, I had something to talk to you about.”  “Oh really, what’s that?” “Well, it’s a big deal.” “Okay, tell me.”  “Umm, I think we should break up.”  If you write the scene that way, with everything going according to plan, it turns out to be a boring scene.

But if you go into the scene with the intent of creating uncertainty, of not doing the expected, you can bring life and drama to the scene.  So say Frank comes in and says, ‘Hey, I had something to talk to you about?” and Ellen says, “Oh?  I had something to talk to you about as well.”  Frank is momentarily thrown.  “You do?” “Yeah.”  Whereas in the first example, we knew where the scene was going, by unleashing uncertainty into the re-mix, we created a more interesting scenario.  Frank’s plan is now all messed up.  He’s forced to reevaluate his approach.  We, the audience, are the benefactors because now we have no idea where this scene is headed, which means we’re paying more attention.

As I kept reading the scripts, I noticed that you can create uncertainty before the scene starts (let’s say, before Frank gets to Ellen’s, he gets a text from her: “We need to talk.”) or you insert it as the scene is going, kind of as a surprise.  A situation where we think we know what’s going to happen that turns into one where we have no idea what’s going to happen is an exciting scenario.  The ultimate take-away here is that a scene plays out in a more suspenseful manner if we don’t know where it’s going.  If we think we know where it’s going and you take us there?  You’ve failed to entertain us.

So I challenge you all.  Go find an “expected” scene in your script, one where everything goes according to plan, and add an element of uncertainty.  Either before the scene or during it.  I’m betting the scene becomes a lot better.

Genre: Drama/Thriller
Premise: (from IMDB) A man believes he has put his mysterious past behind him and has dedicated himself to beginning a new, quiet life. But when he meets a young girl under the control of ultra-violent Russian gangsters, he can’t stand idly by – he has to help her.
About: As you can see just by looking at my Top 25 list (over to the right), I hold this script in high regard. So I was more than curious how it would play out on the big screen. The project had a bouncy development process. Denzel was always attached, but it kept switching directors, moving from Rupert Wyatt (Rise of the Planet of the Apes) to Nicolas Winding Refn (Drive – another favorite script), and I want to say one other director before it eventually reteamed Washington with Antoine Fuqua. Let’s be honest here. Fuqua hasn’t been hitting it out of the park lately. But anyone who directed Training Day is an okay choice by me. The film opened this weekend at number 1, surprising a lot of industry analysts, who thought it would land in the 23-25 million dollar range. Instead it finished with 35 million.
Writer: Richard Wenk
Details: 2 hours and 12 minute runtime

Writer Richard Wenk initially passed when he was offered The Equalizer. But the second time he was approached, the assignment came with a new piece of play-doh. Denzel Washington. Wenk, who had promised himself to only write for directors from this point forward (if you write something without a director attached, you’ll likely have to start all over again once one does join, so why bother?), changed his tune once the name “Denzel” was uttered.

But that still didn’t guarantee anything. Denzel has lots of people “officially” writing projects for him. If you don’t deliver, if the script doesn’t excite him that first time it hits his eyes, you’re SOL. So Wenk and the producers worked really hard to get it right. The result was one of the best scripts I’ve ever read.

It really is a master class in writing. Everything is so sparse, from the description to the dialogue. And that’s not surprising when you hear Wenk talk. He claims his m.o. as a writer is looking for ways to eliminate all the unnecessary words from his work, to slim the script/story down to its bare essence. And you see that here.

The question with The Equalizer script was always, is it too generic? The story is SO simple that it risks being a retread of lots of stuff we’ve already seen before. I didn’t see that happening. But you never know. If the director doesn’t pay attention to those little details the writer worked so hard to integrate, an “Equalizer” can easily turn into an “Abduction.”

For those who don’t know anything about the film, it’s about a 50-something “nobody,” Robert McCall, who lives by himself and works at Home Depot. He develops a friendship with a young hooker (Chloe Moretz), who’s nearly killed by her Russian pimps. We learn that McCall used to be a CIA officer, and knows about 7000 ways to kill a man. He takes down the pimps to set the hooker free, only to learn that the biggest Russian mafia boss in the world has put a price on his head.

So what did they change from the original first draft? And how did it affect the film? They didn’t change much. The most well-publicized switch was changing the 30-something hooker to a 17 year old. Here’s the thing you gotta remember when you make a key change in your script. Since you’re going to both lose something and gain something, you have to make sure that you gain more than you lose.

What they lose by going from a 30-something to a 17 year old, is a more flirty love-interest type of relationship. Audiences like these relationships, even in a script like this, where the romance doesn’t take precedence, because they like the idea that our main character and this woman might get together in the future.

You don’t get that when the girl is 17. It’s more of a friendship. What they were banking on, and this was specifically a note from Sony studio head Amy Pascal, was that we would sympathize and care more about Teri (the hooker) if she was just a girl. It’s a solid argument. The entire script hinges on us buying that McCall would kill five random men to save this one girl he barely knows. And if we’re seeing a girl in danger as opposed to a grown woman, we’re more likely to believe McCall will stick up for her.

It worked. I’m not sure how much less I would’ve sympathized with Teri as an adult, but that additional layer of her being a scared little girl affected me.  A smart call.

Some of the other changes were more subtle, but interesting nonetheless. In the script, McCall was a tidy dude, born out of his upbringing in the military. But in the film, McCall is OCD. He has to make sure things are lined up properly. He’s always rearranging things on desks and on tables. In the script version of the famous “Take-Down Russians” scene, McCall walks back to the door and locks it. Here, he opens and closes the door three times, the echoes of an OCD tick.

There’s no doubt in my mind that this is something Denzel Washington brought to the character. As an actor, that’s your job. You have to find ways to play the character that make them original, make them truthful. But that’s not how it should’ve gone down. And I’ll tell you why in the “What I Learned” section later.

Seeing the finished product also helped me notice a few things I missed in the script. First, you guys know how much I love underdog heroes. They are the heroes audiences root for the most. Audiences also love badasses. They love John McClane and Iron Man.

Therefore, I realized how genius it was that they somehow created a hero in The Equalizer who was both. They got a 2-for-1 deal! McCall is the most unassuming man in the room.  Couldn’t win an arm-wrestling contest with a 5th grader.  And that’s why we fall for him. He’s one of us. And yet it turns out he can take down the entire fucking Russian Mafia! How rad was that choice? Could you have created a more perfect likable combo?

Lastly, I noticed a unique structural choice that I wanted to discuss, as it’s something Miss Scriptshadow was curious about after the film. Usually, you want your main character to have a big goal once the first act is over. He’s got to kill the terrorists or win the Hunger Games – whatever. Equalizer doesn’t have this. McCall kills the local Russian Mob Ring, and for the next 20-25 minutes, he doesn’t have a clear goal.

He’s sort of drifting between helping people when his help is required. His storyline is directionless. Which can kill a script dead if it goes on for too long. I mean it’s great McCall is helping random people, but sooner or later the audience is going to be like, “Wait, where is this going???” So Wenk does something really clever, and something you should take a cue from. During that 20-25 minutes, he switches the goal over to the villain.

You can do this in your script, when, for whatever reason, your main character’s story is stagnant. Switch the focus over to the villain and his goal, and in this case that means our villain investigating who killed his Russian gang. The story is still moving forward because we feel him getting closer to discovering our buddy, McCall. Once he finds him, the story hits a new beat. McCall has to take these guys down before they take him down, giving both sides an overarching story goal that effortlessly drives the story for the last hour.

There was really only one big thing that bothered me, and it bothered me in the script as well. The Home Depot climax felt too safe. The script was so good up until that point, that to conclude things with a generic cat and mouse game in a glorified warehouse – it was lightweight.  Using the tools from his store to defeat the bad guys gave the impression of cleverness, but in reality, we were never at his work, so who cares if he’s using his unique knowledge of his workplace against the bad guys. Plus, McCall can kill people with anything. He doesn’t need tools. The tools ended up being cheap gore.

Because I loved the first 95% of the script so much, I didn’t penalize the script for that ending. Here, in movie form, it was more evident that it didn’t work, which brought it down a notch for me.

With that said, I still think this script is fucking amazing and should be studied in all screenwriting classes and read by all screenwriters. You can see Wenk’s philosophy at work in every scene – always looking to take words out, minimizing anything that’s unnecessary, keeping the read sparse and focused. It’s great stuff.

[ ] what the hell did I just watch?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[xx] worth the price of admission
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius

What I learned: Do the actor’s job for him – Like I was saying earlier, Denzel brought the OCD angle to McCall to make him more distinctive. Learn from this as a writer. When you’re writing a character, think about them from the actor’s point of view. Think about what the actor is going to say about your character after they read the script and how they might want to improve him/her. Then, write all that stuff into the character before it gets to the actor. I believe, that if an actor feels like they need to improve their character, that the writer didn’t do his job. You should build all that stuff into the character ahead of time, and you can do this, at least partially, by anticipating the weaknesses an actor might see in the character, and addressing them yourself.