Genre: Indie/Action?
Premise: A psychologically damaged slacker living in a small town with his girlfriend, soon finds that the CIA is trying to kill him for reasons unknown.
About: American Ultra was written by Max Landis, the writing machine who writes like five scripts a year. The Chronicle writer got Jesse Eisenberg and Kristin Stewart attached to this script, and Project X director Nima Nourizadeh to direct. The prolific scribe is set to direct his first feature soon with “Me Him Her,” – which is being described as “Reality Bites on acid.” If that sounds scary, Landis told Variety of the script, “It’s totally insane! The devil is in it,” which seems to be a theme in a lot of his writing. American Ultra was shot earlier this year and comes out in 2015.
Writer: Max Landis
Details: 109 pages – 3/13/2013 draft

Garden State meets… The Bourne Identity?

Bet you haven’t seen that pitch before.

Can something like this actually work?

That’s a good question, and one I’m not sure we’ll be able to answer by the end of this review. And that’s because I heard Max Landis doesn’t write more than one draft. Ever. Like he finishes his first draft and says take it or leave it.

Whether this rumor is true or not, I don’t know, but it’s surely going to affect how our stoner version of Bourne Identity turns out. And if we don’t know what the best version of American Ultra can be, then how can we determine if a mash up of these genres works?

I do think the “never writes second drafts” thing is kind of cool though. Or at least a cool thing to talk about. I mean, how much does a rewrite REALLY mean to a script? And could there be a scenario where writing more than one draft actually hurts a script? Let’s find out.

29 year-old Mike Howell is similar to the small town he lives in: Liman, Oregon. He’s kind of in the middle of nowhere with his life. He doesn’t have a whole lot of motivation. He doesn’t ever leave town. And that makes it hard to understand why his beautiful hippy girlfriend, 28 year old pot-hot Phoebe Larson, is with him. Because Phoebe seems to be everything Mike isn’t, strong, motivated, focused.

Anyway, at the end of a hard day – actually, that’s not true. Mike works at a grocery store – I’ll rephrase. At the end of a medium day, Mike notices two dudes putting something under his car. He asks them what they think they’re doing, and the guys pull guns out and prepare to KILL MIKE.

So Mike takes the spoon from the ice cream he’s eating and KILLS TWO MEN WITH A SPOON (yes, a SPOON!). He looks at himself afterwards. How the hell did he do that? He races back to Phoebe to tell her what happened, only for more evil crazy guys to come after him and try to kill him.

What we eventually learn is that Mike is part of some abandoned mind-altering CIA experiment program that’s being phased out, and Mike has to be eliminated by the government so their tracks are covered. Except Mike doesn’t want to be eliminated. Mike wants to know how he can kill people with spoons!

Pretty soon, an entire section of the CIA descends upon Liman to get rid of Mike, but Mike’s not going down easy, especially because with each person he kills, he gets access to better and better weapons. I mean, if you can kill a man with a utensil, imagine what you can do with a gun.

(spoiler) But Mike is devastated to learn that his girlfriend has actually worked for the CIA these past five years and is his girlfriend solely to keep an eye on him for the government. Normally, when you find out your girlfriend’s been deceiving you for five years and that more than 30 people want to kill you, you’d go into a state of depression and end it all. But Mike decides to use his hibernated skills to teach the CIA a fucking lesson. That no one messes with Mike from Liman, Oregon. Bitch!

They call this kind of script a “tweener.” It’s in be-TWEEN two genres. Tweeners are these anomalies that scare the hell out of producers. On the one hand, a tweener is almost always original. Since it doesn’t fall into a clear genre, it feels like something we’ve never seen before. That’s good!

But that also works against the script, as no one knows how to market tweeners. Audiences (and that includes you, bucko) like to know what they’re going to see. When you’re in the mood for a thriller, you don’t look for a kind-of thriller kind-of indie romance. You look for a thriller. I mean would you see The Skeleton Twins if Kristin Wiig was also an assassin? Probably not.

With that said, the hope with a tweener is that the originality of the idea is strong enough to outweigh the murkiness of the genre. This is exactly what we were dealing with yesterday actually. The Babadook is kind of a horror film but also a drama. Yet it was unique enough that its tweener-ness helped it stand out from the competition.

Does the same thing happen for American Ultra? Well, here’s why that’s hard to answer. This is clearly a first draft. And if that’s because Landis only writes first drafts, then I guess it is what it is. I’m just trying to figure out if the first-draft-ness here works FOR the script or AGAINST it.

The thing that a first draft gives you that no other draft gives you is UNTAMED ENERGY. Your first draft is always raw. And while you may not have the structure or the characters worked out in the story, the script is alive in a way it can’t be after you’ve diddled with it for 20 drafts.

American Mayhem takes off about 15 pages in (when Mike kills the CIA agents) and then never lets up. And Landis’s writing style, which is very confident and excitable, works well with this uncapped energy. You’re not sure where he’s going, but the writing is so damn fun that you go with it.

I mean how else do you explain coming up with dialogue like: “You’ll be detained and tortured to reveal your source, indicted as a traitor and locked away forever, even if you found out I didn’t have proper sanction or protocol you’d still be in a bureaucratic catch-22 where you’re the bad guy. You’re my fucking dog here, I could walk you, behave.”

The thing is, whenever you’re putting the onus on a first draft to carry the story, you’re walking the line between RAW and MESSY. Raw is good. Messy isn’t. And while good writers can keep a script feeling raw for 30, 40, even 50 pages, nobody I know can keep an entire script in their head, perfectly structured, for 110 pages.

Just simple things like setups and payoffs require lots of rewriting. How many times have you come up with a cool idea, like Doc using a bullet proof vest so that the Libyans can’t kill him (Back to the Future) knowing that the only way it can work is if you set it up earlier? That’s where subsequent drafts really help. Is going back and prepping those late-script ideas.

But a bigger problem with writing only one (or even two or three drafts), is that the characters always seem murky. I’ve found that you need to write a lot of drafts and see your characters through a lot of situations before you get a sense of them, a sense that you can then go back and make clear for the reader.

While American Mayhem sets Mike and Phoebe up well (Mike is an unmotivated loser – Phoebe is the good girlfriend who’s trying to help him see his potential), once the shit hits the fan, all that character development goes out the window. It’s just the two running around trying to stay alive.

Now obviously, once you’re fighting for your life, your future career choices don’t seem that important. But that’s the challenge of a screenwriter. Is you have to figure out a way to still focus the story on the characters, the characters overcoming their flaws, and the characters overcoming their relationship issues. That’s what a screenplay is supposed to be about, is your characters transforming. And since good character transformations are some of the trickiest threads to pull off, they typically take a lot of rewriting.

Personally, from what I’ve seen from Landis, I think he’s a good writer. His voice is chaos mixed with childlike fun. He’s like Brian Duffield in that way, just a little more reckless. That gives his scripts an electricity that’s very hard to match. I just wish I saw a little more focus in his stories. They’re fun, and yet they kind of feel like the passionate guy at the party telling you about how he stole the pizza guy’s delivery car last weekend. It’s entertaining for awhile, but once you realize he’s wasted, you kind of wanna go somewhere else.

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

What I learned: This isn’t so much a tip as it is a warning that you can’t fool a reader. I can always tell an early draft when I see a lot of monologues in it. This is especially true when I see the monologues increase in frequency and length the further into the script we go. That’s because in early drafts, we don’t quite know our characters or our story yet. So we have our characters talk a lot as a way to figure things out. Over the course of rewriting, we move a lot of that “telling” dialogue into “showing” action and we focus what our characters are saying into smaller more concise snippets. In American Ultra, there were a TON of monologues, and they got bigger and more frequent as the story went on, contributing to its messy feel. Landis is a good enough writer that it didn’t become too much of a problem (his monologues were usually quite funny), but usually this is a death knell for screenplays, and proof positive to the reader that you didn’t put enough work into your script.

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Genre: Horror
Premise: A single mother starts to turn against her developmentally challenged young son when he insists that he’s being visited by a mythical fairy tale creature named “The Babadook.”
About: The Babadook first took the movie-going world by storm during a midnight screening at Sundance, where it instantly broke through and became a buzz-worthy hit. Originally released in Australia, it’s just now coming to the U.S., where it’s in limited release and available on Itunes. Inspired by filmmakers such as David Lynch and Lars Von Trier (whom she worked for once), writer-director Jennifer Kent went into her first directing experience terrified but confident. She felt that if the offbeat and unorthodox Von Trier could direct a film, that she could probably pull one off herself. Of course, she had to make SOME concessions. She originally wanted to shoot the movie in black and white, but was talked out of it by her understandably wary producer.
Writer: Jennifer Kent
Details: 93 minutes

One thing becomes clear as you start watching The Babadook: It’s different. There’s a subdued understated quality to the filmmaking that’s mildly off-putting. I don’t know how to describe it other than to say it’s “lonely.”

Sometimes that works for the movie and sometimes it doesn’t. Because The Babadook really is its own thing. A contained thriller almost, it locks you into this house with a mother and son and keeps you there against your will. For that reason, the film always feels a little claustrophobic. Normally that would be a good thing for a horror film. But is this a horror film?

Some could argue that The Babadook is more of a drama than anything. And Kent seems to support this take when she says she never overtly tried to create a scare in the movie (although I might argue that point with the terrifying Amelia-hiding-under-the-covers “Baaaaa-baaaaaa-doooooook” moment).

But while the movie struck a chord in me in a way that the “Ouijas” of the world could never accomplish, I’m still not sure how I feel about Baba. Maybe expectations have crippled my ability to see the film objectively. I wanted to be scared but instead I was kind of tricked into watching a troubled mother-son story. But isn’t that what all good movies do? Lure you in with the hook then keep you there with the characters? Uggghhhh, my mind says yes but my horror-loving heart says that wasn’t enough!

The Babadook is a simple story. Amelia is a single mother trying her hardest to raise her 6 year old son, Samuel. Samuel’s kind of a troubled kid. He’s prone to bouts of screaming and delusions, making the already difficult task of raising a child THAT much more difficult.

Well, it’s about to get even more difficult. Amelia starts catching Samuel in his room talking to someone, except there’s no one there. When she asks him about it, Samuel says he’s talking to the “Babadook,” the spooky imaginary character from one of his children’s pop-up books.

We eventually learn that the reason there’s no father in this picture is because he died when their car crashed while racing to the hospital during Amelia’s labor. Samuel’s birth literally killed his father, and there’s some deep buried resentment from Amelia because of it.

As Samuel becomes more and more insistent that Mr. Babadook is real, Amelia finally starts to crack, and all those extra hours taking care of her troubled child turn her into a monster hell-bent on killing her son. Thus the question arises. Who’s the real Babadook? The man in the book or Amelia herself?

What’s that old saying? “Be careful what you wish for?” Not long ago after watching Doll Shit – I mean, Annabelle – I complained that horror movies were getting too light. Writers weren’t delving into their characters and those characters’ psyches and finding those evil nooks and crannies that bring true horror to life.

Well, that’s exactly what The Babadook is. It’s a heart-wrenching EXTREMELY intense look at a fractured and complicated mother-son relationship, one where the mother starts to lose it, and becomes convinced that her child must pay the ultimate price. But if this is what I wanted, why don’t I feel satisfied?

I mean this IS what memorable horror movies do. They’re so realistic that you’re afraid they could actually happen. Look at The Exorcist and how realistically that whole situation was portrayed. You didn’t get characters opening bathroom mirrors to look for toothpaste, then closing them, only to see a skeleton face behind them in the reflection. You got those terrifying trips to the hospital with shock therapy, where a mother watched helplessly from outside the room as her daughter was tortured.

That’s the same way The Babadook approached its horror.

And yet… and yet… it felt TOO raw. TOO intense. There’s a scene late in the movie where the mom is so hell-bent on killing her kid that I thought to myself, “This isn’t a horror movie any more. This is just a fucked up mom who wants to kill her child.” It was… disturbing.

With that said, The Babadook is still a film worth seeing because it does something so few horror movies actually do. It dares to be different. As Kent says in one of her interviews, she had no interest in creating any jump scares. This is a movie where the horror gets under your skin and lives inside of you. Maybe that’s why it’s troubling me so much.

But yeah, I mean, look at the way Kent dealt with the story’s monster, which I thought was really clever. We never get a completely clear look at the Babadook, but from what we do see, it’s got this paper-mache design to it, as if it’s being plucked right out of the pop-up Mister Babadook book. How often do we get a unique monster in a horror script? Not often.

Another thing I noticed here was that this was a female writer. You could really tell that. And I don’t say that in a good way or a bad way, but a way in which you could tell this was a different point of view from what we’re used to seeing in horror, where the scares are less foreplay and more “straight to the deed.”

Kent inhabited her lead female character in ways I just don’t see men do. I mean, I see good male writers inhabiting their male characters. But The Babadook was a great reminder that the female characters need just as much of your infatuation as the male ones. You can never BE female if you’re a male. But you can do your best to ask yourself, “What would a woman do in this situation?” “What would a woman think in this situation?” You need this approach if you’re going to add even a fraction of authenticity to your female characters.

Lastly, I just wanted to say that it’s okay to include things in your horror script that people have seen before. For example, The Babadook is built on the age-old conceit of the child who talks to an invisible person. How many times have we seen that before? But it’s okay as long as you’re making a concerted effort to actively avoid cliché in as many other of your choices as possible. The core of this story is an intense honest unique relationship between mother and son that we haven’t seen before in a horror film. And since that’s such a dominant part of the script, we don’t see the “kid sees invisible people” moment as cliché. We only see that sort of thing as cliché when all the rest of your choices are cliche.

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

What I learned: One of the ways to make your script stand out – and horror is a great place to do this – is to tackle taboo or dangerous subject matter. A big reason The Babadook has risen above all these other lame wanna-be-horror movies, is that it presents a truly terrifying situation – a mother who wants to hurt her child. That’s not a comfortable or safe situation to document in a story. Which is why this movie hits the viewer so hard.

What I learned 2: Make sure the creature in your horror film is born out organically from the story. This will ensure that you create something unique. Too many writers only care about creating a cool scary-looking monster. Instead, figure out where your creature is from, and build the monster from there. So if it’s from underground, it might be draped in weeds. If it’s from a giant farm, it might have an Scarecrow-like appearance. In this case, the monster came from a pop-up book, so it had a pop-up paper mache look to it.

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No reviews Thursday or Friday (Thanksgiving and Black Friday). So I’m giving you the Thursday article early. There will be a little surprise post tomorrow that you’ll want to check out for sure though. Wish I could tell you more. :)

Say you have a great concept. No, say you have a great concept and a great main character. Say you’re also good with structure and pretty nifty with dialogue as well. You’re rolling into your script like a pitcher on a 15 game win streak. If screenwriting success is a game of odds, you’ve stacked them in your favor.

Why, then, is this scenario not a slam dunk? How come so many writers dribble down the floor, only to get weak knees as they approach the basket? How come those gimme points all of a sudden look like a half-court heave? The answer may surprise you.

I want you to think back to your most memorable movie-going experiences. What is the common denominator? What is it that stays with you from your favorite films? Chances are, it’s emotion. I still remember seeing E.T. as a kid and crying my ass off when he died. At the time, I didn’t know movies were capable of emotional punches like that. Likewise, I’ve never felt so elated as when E.T. came back to life! I was sobbing like the little boy that I was.

The way you can still fail with a great concept and a great character, is if you don’t make your reader FEEL anything. That’s what today’s post is about. If you can make a reader or a moviegoer cry, you’ve given them something they’ll remember for the rest of their lives. It’s the ultimate suspension of disbelief achievement. You’ve done such a great job fooling this person into thinking your story was real, that they actually sobbed about it.

So the question becomes, how do you achieve this? A lot of writers assume that emotional giving is the same as emotional receiving. They think that if you have a character cry, that means the audience will cry too. Think about how many times you’ve watched characters crying in movies. Did you cry too? Usually not.

Getting a reader to cry comes down to one thing: DEATH. Or, more specifically, the “Death-Rebirth” formula. But death doesn’t always have to be literal. As you’ll discover below, any loss can have a death-like effect. However, we’ll start with the literal definition first so you can learn the basics for turning grown men into cry-babies. Then we’ll get to the advanced stuff.

LITERAL DEATH
The most obvious way to get those tear ducts flowing is through a character death. But the journey starts a lot sooner than that, all the way back when we first meet your character. Your first job is to make us like this person. This may seem obvious but in a world where more and more writers are afraid of the word “likability,” it’s important to remember that nobody cries for jerks.

Look no further than E.T. to see this in action. What character in history is more likable than E.T.?? Obviously, the more we like someone, the more we care about them. And once the audience cares about someone, it’s easy to manipulate their emotions. We love E.T. so much by the time he dies, of course we’re sobbing.

To see how the antithesis of this works, look at the recent hit film, Gone Girl. Gillian Flynn has gone on record as saying she hates the word “likable” in relation to characters. And you see that with her characters. Amy is a terrible person and Nick is not a very good one. So guess how you’d feel if either one of these characters died? Would you cry? Would you get emotional like you did in E.T.? No. Because despite the characters being interesting, the fact that you don’t like them prevents you from getting emotional should they perish.

To really ensure that those tears come, though, you need another character who cares deeply for the person who dies. Death alone is not a sad thing. It’s our empathy for the character who’s lost someone that gets us. We saw that with E.T. and Elliot. And we saw it at the end of Titanic, with Jack and Rose.

NON-LITERAL DEATH
Now that you see how that works, let’s look into non-literal deaths. Non-literal deaths include anything that dies. A friendship, a dream, a job, one’s faith. At the end of Casablanca, we have the DEATH of a relationship – Rick and Ilsa, which has led to quite a few tears over time.  There’s a trick to this however.  Whatever dies has to have meant something to the characters.  You can’t kill a trivial job and expect the reader to care.  But if you kill a job that we’ve seen a man put his blood, sweat, and tears into for 40 years, like in the film, Mr. Holland’s Opus, then you better believe we’ll get emotional when it’s ripped away.

But I’m not going to talk about death itself because that’s pretty straightforward. The heavyweight emotional moments come from the belief that death is permanent, only for our subject to be reborn again. It’s the non-literal equivalent of E.T. dying before coming back to life. It’s that one-two punch that always gets the reader.

LOVE
Let’s take love as an example. Watching two people fall in love does not make one cry. We need the relationship to suffer before that can happen.  We need it to DIE.  So just like before, start with a main character we like.  Couple that with a romantic interest we like.  We should want to see these two end up together.  Throughout the movie, throw obstacles at them that prevent them from being together. Maybe they’re involved in a rocky relationship, a la Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Maybe they’re in relationships with other people. Maybe they’re stuck in a friendship, a la When Harry Met Sally. At some point, you KILL the relationship. This is the death part. This happens when Harry dumps Sally after sleeping with her. This destroys us because it feels like death to us, like there’s no coming back from it. How elated are you, then, when the writer brings the relationship back from the dead (Harry tells Sally he loves her and she accepts him)? The REBIRTH moment is what really triggers the emotional response here.

CHARACTER FLAWS
It’s the same thing when you’re dealing with character flaws. Again, start with a character we like. Then give them a flaw. Let’s say it’s that they don’t believe in themselves. Make that flaw a HUGE obstacle in their lives – something that holds them back from their hopes and their dreams. Now create a high-stakes scenario that will directly challenge that flaw. The movie scenario I’m thinking of is Rocky. Rocky never believed he was good enough. The high-stakes scenario that will challenge this flaw is the Heavyweight Boxing Title. How do we get the most out of this moment? If you’ve been paying attention, you know we have to KILL any hope of Rocky overcoming his flaw. We see this when Rocky starts severely doubting himself before the fight. There’s no way he can beat this guy. Rocky doesn’t think he’s good enough. Then, in the fight, Rocky goes toe-to-toe with Apollo, believing in himself more with each round. In the end, he goes the distance with a champion, allowing him to overcome his fear. We thought Rocky’s belief was dead, which is why it’s so emotionally cathartic to see that belief REBORN, to have him conquer that fear. That’s why we tear up.

HOPE
You can apply this death-rebirth model to almost anything. In Toy Story 3, we’re incredibly sad when, at the end of the movie, the toys are designated for a life in the attic. Their hope to ever be toys that are played with again is officially DEAD. So what happens? They’re donated to the sweet little next door neighbor. A REBIRTH. We’re crying because, darn it, we were sure those toys were dead in the water. But now they have a whole new life again.

The more you can convince us of the death part – that there is no chance whatsoever that our character is coming back from it – the more powerful the tears will be when the rebirth occurs. I don’t know about you, but I didn’t see any way that our Toy Story 3 toys were going to be played with again. I thought those chances were dead. So that donation to the girl shocked me, creating a hell of an emotional response.

Of course, this isn’t the only way to make a reader enjoy a story. There are all sorts of emotions to draw upon. There are thrills, for example, like riding dragons through the sky in Avatar. There are scares, like in any good horror movie. There are laughs, of course. There’s shock, like when you find out Bruce Willis is a dead person. All of these emotions should make their way into your story. But there’s nothing quite like making the reader cry. I guarantee you, if you make the reader cry, he will recommend your script to other people.

I’d love to hear what storytelling practices you guys use to elicit emotion from your reader. If you don’t know, go find the movies that made you cry growing up and reverse engineer them until you find the cause. Again, nothing stays with a reader more than a good cry. So it’s in your best interest to figure out how to get them there.

Genre: TV Pilot – Drama
Premise: A young Pakistani New Yorker stumbles into the best night of his life, only to have it fall apart in the worst way imaginable.
About: I don’t know where writer Richard Price has been hiding for the past 15 years. His last official writing credits include a bunch of episodes from the acclaimed HBO show, The Wire, back in 2002. Maybe it’s appropriate, then, that Price has come back to HBO for his current gig, Criminal Justice. HBO is high on this series and expects it to be the next “water cooler” show, which is a bold statement for a show that doesn’t include white walkers or zombies (none in the pilot at least!). Criminal Justice, which is based on a BBC show, was a passion project for James Gandolfini.  Gandolfini’s death led to Robert DeNiro taking the role.  But a scheduling conflict led to the role ultimately going to John Turturro.  Strangely enough, the pilot for the series was directed by Steve Zallian, who wrote yesterday’s “Exodus.”
Writer: Richard Price
Details: 59 pages

Gandolfini’s passion project

The great thing about reading is that one day you’re learning about queens from 1500 B.C. And the next day you’re riding shotgun with a character from Queens.

I was excited when I heard about this one. While I don’t always like the pilots coming out of HBO, I can’t argue that they’re often the deepest and most thoughtful in the business, even more so than AMC (which used to lead the pack but has been faltering as of late). And the buzz behind this one is big.

Criminal Justice introduces us to two Pakistani best friends living in Queens – Nasir “Naz” Khan and Amir Farik. Naz and Amir are as Americanized as it gets. They go to college here. They have an unhealthy love for basketball. At 19 years old, both hope to graduate, work hard, and do something with their lives.

But Naz is a little more experimental than Amir. And when one of the basketball players from their team invites them to a party in the city that night, Naz doesn’t hesitate.

Problem is, Amir backs out at the last moment and Naz doesn’t have a ride. So he steals his father’s cab at the last second. This leads to some funny situations where he keeps having to turn people away trying to get into his cab. That is until a beautiful young African American girl, Andrea Cornish, pops in.

Andrea doesn’t really have a destination. She’ll go anywhere there’s adventure. And after some flirty conversation, the two find themselves back at her apartment. Ecstasy is downed. Alcohol is consumed. And one thing leads to another.

After sex, Naz leaves the room and passes out. When he wakes up and comes back, he finds that Andrea has been stabbed to death. Naz freaks out, leaves, but is so drunk he crashes his cab. Over the next hour, police gradually put together that their DUI arrest may be Andrea’s murderer. And just like that, Naz’s life is changed forever.

I want to talk a little bit about structure today because we can learn a lot about structure from the Criminal Justice pilot. Remember that for every moment in your script, there needs to be an engine underneath the surface, something driving not just the story, but our interest in the story.

Here, we start off with an introduction to Naz and his life. Nothing technically needs to be happening at this point in the story. Readers will give you time to introduce your main character in his element (show us the world he lives in). You can’t keep this going for too long though. Sooner or later, an engine has to be added.

The first engine is when Naz gets invited to the party. Now we have direction – a place to go – something to look forward to. So we’re going to stick around to see what happens when Naz gets to this party. The next 10-15 pages are about that preparation, about the obstacles that pop up which throw the party in doubt, and how Naz overcomes them.

The next engine is when Andrea arrives in the story. You hear me talk about it a lot – a looming sense of dread. We get the sense right away that Andrea is a dangerous harbinger for things to come. I mean how many times do you meet a gorgeous girl in the middle of the city and she just throws herself at you? If it’s too good to be true, it probably is. So our curiosity for how this is going to end up keeps us reading.

The next engine is when Naz goes back to Andrea’s place. The car’s practically driving itself at this point. We’re at the climax of their adventure together. Of course we’re intrigued to see what will happen. And we’re not disappointed. What happens is murder.

The engine for the rest of the script, then, revolves around a question: Will Naz get away? As the police catch him and, piece by piece, put him at the crime scene, we’re wondering how the hell Naz is going to get out of this.

A lot of writers will tell you that they want to create a “slow build” with their script, but beginner writers will often misinterpret this to mean, “I can write 20 slow scenes in a row and you just have to deal with it.” There’s a lot more to it than that. This pilot may seem like a slow build, but as I’ve shown you above, there are carefully created engines running underneath every section of the story designed to keep you interested.

Despite that, Criminal Justice was still missing something. It was good. But something was keeping it from being great. I thought some missed opportunities may have been the issue. For example, early on, Naz uses Mapquest to map out his trip to the party. Since nobody uses Mapquest anymore, I thought this was a hint that the story was taking place in the past.

To that end, I thought Naz was going to get arrested for a murder he didn’t commit, then the very next day, the payoff would be that it was 9/11, 2001. And Naz was going to find himself going through a court system set on making an example out of him. Basically, the show would chronicle the worst time ever and worst place ever to become a middle-eastern man implicated for the murder of an American.

Once that wasn’t the case, I thought Naz was going to get away that evening, the cops missing the connective tissue that would tie him to the murder, and the subsequent episodes would chronicle Naz tiptoeing around his secret as the police investigation got closer and closer to finding him.

Instead, the end of Criminal Justice’s pilot has them realizing Naz is the killer and arresting him, which gave the pilot a finality that almost made you think, why do I need to tune in anymore? I suppose we’re meant to wonder if someone else killed Andrea. But for some reason, Price didn’t make that option exciting enough. I don’t know if it’s that he skittered past it too quickly or didn’t put enough emphasis on it. But this mysterious “other person” scenario wasn’t given enough weight.

Finally, I’m left to wonder why is there all this emphasis on race when race doesn’t really play a part in the story? Again, if this was happening closer to 9/11, the Pakistani angle would feel more relevant. But there’s nary a mention about Naz’s nationality by any of the characters except a random black witness. The main character just as easily could’ve been a white guy and nothing would’ve changed. If you’re going to play with race, go full steam ahead.

Then again, maybe these are questions that will be answered in the coming episodes. And let me reiterate that I think this is a good pilot. I’m just not sure some of the choices in the episode’s second half were as strong as those in the first.

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

What I learned: A slow build can work – even 20-30 pages of story where not a whole lot is “happening” – as long as there are engines underneath the story pushing our interest forward. Here we had a destination (the party), an impending sense of dread (Andrea) and a powerful question (would Naz get out of this terrible situation?). These are not the only engines you have at your disposal. But the point is, when you’re starting slow, have a plan for how to keep those slow parts interesting. You can’t just set characters up for 30 pages and expect the reader to stay interested. It ain’t going to happen.