Genre: Period Drama
Premise: Set in the 1700s, Knifeman chronicles the birth of modern surgery.
About: Knifeman is one of the lucky pilots that survived AMC’s in-house contest where only the best pilots, as voted for by the employees, make it to air. Knifeman is written by Rolin Jones, who created another AMC series, Low Winter Sun, which didn’t make it past the first season. Rolin has also written for Friday Night Lights, Weeds, and the United States of Tara.
Writer: Rolin Jones (created by Ron Fitzgerald and Rolin Jones) (Inspired by the book, “The Knife Man: Blood, Body-snatching, and the Birth of Modern Surgery” by Wendy Moore)
Details: 50 pages (AMC CUT #3, 12-16-13 draft)

We’re reaching a new era in television that I suppose was inevitable. So many damn channels are getting into original programming that the supply is usurping the demand. Shows are paying more and more to advertise their arrival but their premiers come and go without a whisper. Someone told me The Strain debuted a few weeks ago. I had no idea. “Salem?” A pilot I reviewed a while back. I guess that’s had an entire season already? You could’ve fooled me.

It seems like there are 5 “buzz-worthy” shows on TV at any one time and if you’re not one of those shows, nobody cares about you. Those shows, at the moment, appear to be Game of Thrones, The Walking Dead, Orange is the New Black, Scandal, and The Good Wife.

As for why I picked Knifeman today, it’s because AMC cares more about its scripts than any other network besides HBO. So even though I don’t have much interest in 18th century surgery, I knew the script was going to at least be interesting. And it was.

It’s the 18th century and a bad time to be a human being. You get a head cold on Wednesday, you could be picking out your burial plot by Saturday. But you know, doctors are still doing their thing. They’re selling patients on the equivalent of frog blood, but the patients don’t know any better, so everyone goes along with it.

In this medical mediocrity, we follow two doctors. One is Julian Tattersal. He’s an esteemed doctor/surgeon at St. Stephen’s Hospital. Then there’s his brother, John Tattersal. John is technically a barber. But in his spare time, he jacks recently deceased bodies from the local cemetery, cuts them open, and explores the human anatomy, looking for new ways to perform surgery and save people.

John is desperate to get in on this whole St. Stephen’s gig, but for some reason, his brother Julian looks down on him, and refuses to help him get a job. Ya see? Nepotism doesn’t always pay off.

Eventually, the two find themselves fighting for the same client, a man who’s accumulated a nasty blood clot on the back of his leg. Julian says the only way to help him is to amputate the leg. John disagrees. He says he can get in there, tie off the artery, and the circulation will move around the problem spot. No amputation needed.

Even though John is very unofficial, the man chooses him because he wants to save his leg. The finale is the big operation, and – spoiler alert – everything seems to go well until John is finished, when the artery is tied up and the man drops dead. The end.

I’m far from understanding TV pilots as well as I do features, but I know enough to say that Knifeman does not deliver on the pilot front. First of all, the show feels way too small. If you look at a previous AMC pilot, Turn, there’s a bigger overarching storyline about the United States trying to gain independence. It added stakes and urgency to the more personal storylines that the characters were engaged in.

There’s none of that here. This literally has only two storylines. Julian doing work at the hospital and John doing work in his apartment. It’s way too simple and way too general.

You also need a series of hooks in a TV show, whether those hooks are teasing the segment after the commercial break, teasing the next episode, or teasing the entire series. Give us a giant monster walking through the trees (Lost). Give us a potentially deadly cancer diagnosis (Breaking Bad). Give us a sister who was supposedly abducted by aliens (The X-Files). There weren’t any hooks teasing anything here, so I rarely found myself interested in what was going to happen next.

For example, the end of the pilot (spoilers) has John killing this guy during surgery. And that’s it. Where’s the reason to watch the next episode if the question’s already been answered (he’s dead – oops)? We certainly don’t get the sense that killing this man is going to put John in danger. He made it clear to the man (a servant) and the man’s owner that he could die during the surgery.

And that was another thing about this that made it small. There were no stakes! I mean why is John working on a servant? Someone whose life doesn’t mean anything?? If he dies, so what? Why couldn’t it have been someone of importance in the town? Now there’s some real shit on the line. If John fails, his career is over before it starts. If he succeeds, he’ll be a superstar. But no, it’s just a nobody who nobody cares about. And that seemed to be the theme throughout. If there was a choice between making something big and important or small and insignificant, the latter was chosen.

What I was hoping for was that, as both John and Julian worked their way through the surgeries, they’d start noticing some spooky unknown disease inside the bodies, perhaps the start of a plague. And they realized they weren’t equipped to deal with this problem if it spread. That’s the kind of long-standing “problem” or “hook” I was seeking from this episode but never got it.

Honestly, I don’t know where this show goes from here. I don’t know what the episodes are going to be about. A pilot’s supposed to bring up a lot of questions that we want answered. But the only real question seems to be whether John will become an official doctor at the hospital. I’m not sure I care enough about that to keep watching.

The only time the script really came alive was during the surgeries, when the gooey bits of human flesh oozing and pumping inside the bodies were bandied about. I started to wonder – is the only reason they made this show so they could show gross surgeries? They wouldn’t make an entire show just to show that, would they? And yet blood and guts were the big star here.

With all that said, I do see the potential of this world. There’s something weird and unsettling about the imagery in Knifeman. A hack of a barber doing stolen cadaver surgery in his dark apartment, surrounded by jars of brains and hearts and livers – that’s something you can build a show off of.

They just haven’t created a story yet. You need more than incisions to keep people tuning in every week. If they figure that out, Knifeman is going to be a nice offbeat alternative to the bigger shows on television. If not, it’s going to end up like a botched surgery on E.R.

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

What I learned: It’s risky if the only thing going on in your TV show is the immediate on-screen stuff.  It’s better if there’s a bigger overarching storyline or problem to give the show some gravitas.  The big mistake here was that Knifeman was only about these two surgeons and nothing more.  It needed something with some scope that hinted at a bigger story.  If we feel a show is too small in scope, we have a hard time seeing it last.

Genre: Superhero!
Premise: An Amazonian Princess living on a remote island is brought to the real world, where she uses her unique set of powers to take down a mega-corporation with world domination on the brain (basically every comic-hero plot ever).
About: This is the Joss Whedon draft of Wonder Woman he wrote in 2006! Whedon, as many of you know, has left his DC buddies in the dust to become the head directing honcho of Marvel Universe with his Avengers films. To give you some context of the movie business when Whedon wrote this, the two big superhero films preceding this draft were 2005’s Batman Begins and 2004’s Spider-Man 2. Both films were considered dark (Batman moreso than Spider-Man of course) and so the dark realistic super-hero trend was beginning.
Writer: Joss Whedon
Details: 115 pages (2006 draft)

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Yay!!! Michael Bay is a kajillionaire. Can’t say I ever got into the whole mutant turtle thing. But I knew when Dr. Explosion decided to put his particular brand of vapidness on the turtle tale, I definitely wanted nothing to do with it.

I was rooting for Swetnam’s Into the Storm (spec script) to do some hurricane like damage at the box office, but it just goes to show how difficult it is to play with established properties (remember that spec script writers – it’s why your concept has to be really awesome for Hollywood to take notice). Into the Storm needed at least a couple of recognizable faces to sell the movie, like Twister and The Perfect Storm before it. I don’t think a storm by itself can do all the heavy box office lifting.

Speaking of storms, what happens when a Marvelnado and a DCunami meet? You’ll find out today. Whedon, the flagship director for the third biggest movie ever, Marvel’s Avengers, wasn’t always chummy chummy with the Marvel comic book family. He was once playing for the other team, scripting the DC script for Wonder Woman.

Stories like this always intrigue me. Because if Joss Whedon wrote a Wonder Woman script today, while he’s on top of the world with the biggest franchise in the world, everyone would be DESPERATE to read it. It would be the hottest script in town, right? So what changes if he wrote it eight years ago? Was Joss Whedon any worse of a writer? He may not have been a household name at the time, but he’s still the same guy. So why not use this script for a wonder woman movie. Say it’s written by Joss Whedon and everyone wins, right?

Well, that’s assuming he overcame the same problems everyone who’s been trying to adapt Wonder Woman over the decades has run into. Which is that her character’s not fit for today’s super hero audience. A lasso that makes people tell the truth? How dumb is that? It looks to me like they finally said fuck it and Zack Snyder is going to change the character to make her a straight-forward ass-kicking female, kind of like how he dropped the whole Clark Kent glasses reporter stuff. Screw history.

But what if Joss Whedon had been in charge. What would he have done? Let’s find out!

I don’t know if you knew this or not. But Wonder Woman is an Amazon. You know that legendary island full of tall beautiful ass-kicking ladies? Well it’s real. At least in this script it is. A pilot named Steve is bringing food and supplies to child refugees when his plane goes down and crash-lands on this Amazonian Island.

At first Steve goes looking for Jeff Bezos, but he ends up running into Diana instead. Diana is the Princess of the island. And when her mother, the queen, finds out that a man has entered the perimeter – a huge no-no on this island – she sentences him to death! (probably why Beznos is hiding)

But Diana’s developed a little bit of a crush on Steve, and challenges her mom to a duel for the right to help Steve get off this island and save the children! She ends up winning, and the two head off, where Diana learns the complicated multitudes of the real world, namely that when you deliver supplies to kids, a local warlord is going to want 75% of the goods for himself.

After the Warlord shoots Diana for questioning his motives, she gives him a taste of his own medicine, beating some ass, and Steve realizes he’s got something special here. So he takes Alice/Wonder Woman back to the U.S., to a crime-ridden city called Gateway, which I guess is Wonder Woman’s version of Gotham.

In Gateway, there’s this super-huge company called Spearhead that poses as a wonderful company that manufactures weapons to help the United States defend itself.

Wonder Woman, pissed that there’s so much lying and corruption in this city, takes it upon herself to work her way up the local gangster ladder to find out who’s ultimately responsible for all this crime. Using her truth lasso (which forces people to tell the truth), it eventually leads back to, you guessed it, Spearhead.

The problem is, Spearhead’s being protected by a super-human of its own, some freaky-faced metallic skull-capped dude named Strife who, oh yeah, just happens to be the nephew of Ares. Ares as in THE GOD OF WAR! Yup, craziness is happening all over. So if Wonder Woman is going to save the day, she’s basically going to have to defeat a God to do it.

I’m going to give Whedon this. He somehow made Wonder Woman cool. I thought there was no way around the whole truth-lasso thing. But Whedon doesn’t use it much, and when he does, it’s with attitude (for example, with one gangster, Wonder Woman slings the rope around his neck like an Indiana Jones whip, before asking him who he works for).

But the biggest reason this worked was that Whedon went all in. He committed to this character, to this world, to the rules of this universe. And I think that’s what you have to do with these scripts.

When amateur writers tackle comic material, they typically have a vague sense of the hero they liked growing up, then they use their own imagination to fill in the gaps, whether it be their heroine taking down a gangster or kicking ass in some big set piece fight. It all feels very thin, like a writer who really loves movies including all his favorite movie moments in one script.

When you read the opening of Wonder Woman, the detail involved in this Amazon tribe, where they came from, the hierarchy, the connections between the characters. It feels like Whedon really immersed himself in the comics and knew this world before he wrote anything. And when you do that, even if the world is silly and weird, the audience believes it, because you, the writer, have committed to it.

That’s one of the biggest differences I see between amateur and pro writers. Pros commit themselves to the world. Amateurs learn a little bit here, a little bit there, and think that’s enough.

I never really knew how good of a writer Joss Whedon was until this script actually. His writing always seems to have this immediacy, yet it never feels rushed. It creates this propelling motion as you’re reading, spinning you down from one paragraph to the next.

In amateur screenplays, it always feels like the writer is fighting his sentences, writing himself into corners he must clumsily write himself out of.

And I noticed that what Whedon is really good at, is that no matter how intense things get, he’s not afraid to undercut it with a joke to lighten the mood. For example, near the middle of the script, amongst a lot of chaos, a girl stops Wonder Woman and with giant puppy dog eyes says, “My cat’s stuck up in the tree.” Wonder Woman looks up at the cat, then back to the girl. “Climb it.” She then runs off. This is something Christopher Nolan can learn from the Firefly scribe.

The only weakness in the script is that no matter how skilled Whedon is, he can never get too far away from the fact that this is a super-hero movie. There are only so many surprises you can pull on the audience. It’s why I liked X-Men: First Class so much. Because for once, there was something different going on that we weren’t used to in the comic book world. It’s why Batman Begins made such a big splash when it came out. Because it approached the superhero genre from such a realistic place (Nolan’s got Whedon there). It’s why, I believe, Guardians of the Galaxy did so well. Because these weren’t your typical super-heroes and it wasn’t your typical super-hero movie.

Those movies found little black holes to slip into that took them to parallel universes which allowed them to tell a new story.  But Wonder Woman is stuck in the land of garden-variety comic book movies.  It tries to break out (the first act, away from the city, felt pretty unique), but ultimately is pulled back in (giant egomaniacal city villain alert).

I’m actually shocked that audiences haven’t grown tired of the genre yet because, like Wonder Woman here, we’re basically seeing the same movie over and over again.  So kudos to Whedon for writing what really is a cool script. It’s just too bad he was limited by the genre.

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

What I learned: In fight scenes, it’s not as important to detail every punch or sword swing, as it is to give the reader a sense of what kind of fight it is. Tell us how each fighter fights, and we’ll be able to fill in the visual gaps ourselves. So when Wonder Woman fights her mother, Whedon writes: “Everywhere Diana strikes, Hippolyte counters. Diana tries to control the fight through youth and relentless strength, and though she responds with no less, Hippolyte relies on experience over enthusiasm.” Obviously, you’ll detail fight specifics after this, but sentences like this allow you to summarize pieces of the fight so you don’t have to detail. Every. Single. Swing.

TITLE: Lost Continent
GENRE: Action/Adventure
LOGLINE: A treasure hunter is in a race against the man who murdered his father to find the lost kingdom of Atlantis and the incredible power that it harbors.
WHY YOU SHOULD READ: I’m actually shocked there haven’t been as many movies made about Atlantis as there have been about the ancient Greeks, Romans, and Egyptians.  It’s freakin’ Atlantis!  There’s so much story there and it’s ripe for a proper adaptation.  I’ve been reading the site for years (awesome work by the way) and tweaked and improved this script using much of the great advice that’s been doled out.  Recent rewrites have focused on deepening characters and creating people to care about throughout this globe trekking adventure.  This is one of the few scripts of mine that has escaped the dark and deep hole I’ve dug in my backyard where dreams go to die.  If it sucks, please don’t take it as an indictment to the excellence of Scriptshadow.

TITLE: The Tallest, Darkest Leading Man in Hollywood
GENRE: Based-on-a-true story
LOGLINE: The never-been-told, hard-to-believe but nevertheless true story of the making of the original King Kong and the maverick filmmaker who made Hollywood’s first blockbuster.
WHY YOU SHOULD READ: Just the other week, Legendary Pictures announced a King Kong prequel at Comicon. I’ve written a script about the making of the original King Kong and thought it would be a good time to try to shop it around.

TITLE: The Cargo
GENRE: Action, Thriller
LOGLINE: Wrongfully accused of treason, a disgraced soldier earns a shot to clear his name. His task? Protect a passenger train and its mysterious cargo from anarchist terrorists.
WHY YOU SHOULD READ: I wasn’t alive when the first “blockbusters” came out in the late 70s and early 80s, but to me, they represent the filmmaking ideal: crowd-pleasing genre pieces that boast edgy, cerebral themes. “The Cargo,” my first feature script, is me emulating that format. It’s a topical, politically astute action story that weaves recent cybersecurity controversies into its set pieces. It’s also my first time opening my work to public judgment, and I’m ready to do whatever it takes to improve as a writer.

TITLE: Swedish Lesbian Vampire Wonderland
GENRE: Comedy
LOGLINE: To save his scandal-plagued career, a sex-addicted footy star enters an experimental Swedish rehab facility that is actually a castle of machismo-draining vampires.
WHY YOU SHOULD READ: You’ve read the title, right?

TITLE: CODE BLACK
GENRE: Action/Thriller
LOGLINE: When a vicious crime boss seizes a hospital to secure a heart transplant for his dying father, an aging firefighter must leap into action to save the chosen donor — his daughter.
WHY YOU SHOULD READ: I have an interesting problem for someone who loves to write — I’m dreadfully bored by about 85% of the amateur screenplays I delve into. They’re usually top-heavy and don’t muster much in the way of forward momentum. CODE BLACK is intentionally lean, barreling forward as much as possible. If a psychotic JOHN Q was the villain in DIE HARD I think it’d look a little something like this, and I hope your readers enjoy it.

The market is changing. Because this is America, a company isn’t doing well unless it’s growing. Stock prices must continue to rise. Dividends must continue to… … divvy.  And that’s putting pressure on Hollywood to deliver product with more upside. Obviously, there’s only so much a single film can do. Only so many toys it can produce. Only so many tie-ins it can manufacture.

For awhile, the studios had a solution for this. They called them “sequels.” Clever idea, right?  Sequels allowed a studio to keep making money off the same property. But sequels can take 2-3 years to make. Growth, once again, was stagnated by a seemingly insurmountable obstacle.

Enter the “universe” phase. Universes not only allow you that original movie plus its sequels. But now you can have SPINOFF films. Have a super-hero or secondary character everybody loved? Give him his own movie! Conceivably, you can now release a movie from your franchise EVERY SINGLE YEAR. Marvel proved this was a viable business model with their Avengers franchise. Pretty soon, Star Wars jumped on the bandwagon, then Universal with their horror characters, and DC/WB with the Justice League, though they seemed a little confused by the whole notion (“Universe? Ohhhh-kaaayyy.  Yeah, we’ll do that.”).

Now whether this model will work for an extended period of time is another question. The reason they didn’t do this kind of thing before was because they assumed people would get sick of seeing the same old shit. But with Marvel’s dominance, we’ve surprisingly witnessed the opposite. People want more of this shit!

The result is that intellectual property drives the majority of studios’ decisions now. And if your intellectual property can spurn more intellectual property, even better.

Nipping at the heels of the “universe” IP approach are YA novel adaptations. Twilight, The Hunger Games, Divergent, The Maze Runner, The Giver. Publishing houses are starting YA novel brands with the explicit purpose of getting movie deals out of them. So crazy has the YA novel craze gotten, you can’t even option YA books that have 5 reviews on Amazon anymore. Desperate producers have already beaten you to the punch!

After that, you have the toy properties (Transformers, G.I. Joe, The Lego Movie), the traditional sequel franchises (Planet of the Apes, Fast and Furious), high-profile book adaptations (Lord of the Rings, World War Z) the animation properties (mainly Disney and Pixar), and the occasional ultra-concept film (Godzilla, Super 8).

So what does over-dependence on IP mean? It means fewer and fewer slots on the calendar for original spec screenplays. Which is why you’re seeing less and less screenplays being purchased. Now I’ve been reading a lot of the specs out there, the ones making big enough waves to get noticed, and the biggest reason they’re not doing well, in my eyes, is because they’re not good enough.

This stems from the majority of writers assuming their scripts only have to be as good as the movies they see on a typical summer weekend. Unfortunately, that’s not how it works. The top films at the box office were all born out of intellectual property. In other words, the people on the other end of the pitch already knew what the writer/producers were talking about. When someone hears, “Godzilla,” they know who Godzilla is. They don’t have any idea what your script, Chocolate Frank and the Huckleberry Dancers, is about. It’s just a pile of digital paper.  That means the big IP project shoots to the top of the priority list while Huckleberry Frank gets stuck up chocolate creek without a paddle.  The only way your script is going to get picked over a project like Godzilla is if it’s exceptional, not simply “as good as.”

Intellectual property has taken over and you, the screenwriters with original ideas, are being pushed out. Should you throw in the towel? Give in? Of course not. Adversity is the harbinger for some of the greatest creations in history. We must adapt! We must change our tactics. But I shall warn you. Not all of this advice here is sexy. We’re looking at cold hard facts so we need to consider cold hard solutions. Throw all your preconceived notions about how to make it in this industry in a box and slide it under the bed. It’s time to put on your reality pajamas and make some tough decisions.

How to compete with IP…

Solution 1: Make your own movie – Far from earth-shattering advice. But this continues to be one of the fastest ways to break in because you bypass all the bullshit gridlock Hollywood’s famous for. Movies are getting cheaper and cheaper to make. The amazing Blackmagic camera can be had for under two grand. And since you’re on this site, you already have a HUGE advantage over your competition. One of the biggest weaknesses in any low-budget film is a bad script. But you guys are writers! You know how to write a script. So write something cheap and shoot it cheap and get it out there!

Solution 2: Write comedies or thrillers. These two genres seem impervious to the IP plague. The great thing about thrillers is you can write them in multiple genres (horror, sci-fi, action, psychological), so you have a lot of range there to find subject matter you like. And comedies don’t need IP to be funny. Again, if you can come up with a clever concept (Neighbors), you can be looking down at the rest of us from your house in the hills at this time next year. These two genres are the best genres to write in if you’re writing specs, point blank.

Solution 3: The “spec universe” – The next option is one that hasn’t been proven yet, but with the “universe” approach gaining steam, I think it’s only a matter of time before it becomes the next big thing in spec screenwriting. It’s basically what “Moonfall” writer David Weil did. Off the buzz of Moonfall’s success, he used his meetings to pitch a 7 movie franchise based on The Arabian Nights.

Now there’s two things going on here. First, Weil is using an “IP” property that’s in the public domain. This allows the studio to get all the benefits of IP without having to pay for it. Secondly, he’s using the “universe” approach here to pitch the property. He didn’t come in with a single tiny spec to sell. Remember, studios have to think bigger now. They need more to bring to their investors. They want properties that are going to deliver over a longer period of time.

So look back through those public domain properties and see if anything sparks your imagination. The Count of Monte Cristo, a great book, is a popular older property that keeps getting remade. Can you come up with a franchise version of that? Of something else like it? I mean obviously you don’t want to force a “universe” onto an idea that can’t support it. But if the opportunity’s there, why not take it?

Solution 4: True stories, known quantities and IP sneak-arounds – Hollywood loves true stories. They love’em! So go out there and find a captivating true story to tell. You have 10,000 years of recorded history to draw from. I guarantee there are a few thousand amazing true stories that haven’t been told yet. Another option is a “known quantity IP sneak-around” approach. You find something that’s real and that everyone is familiar with, and you build a story around that. This is how Aaron Berg sold Section 6 for a million bucks (about the origin of MI-6), and I’m sure it played a role in F. Scott Frazier’s recent sale about an agent who worked for the agency that would later become the CIA. The idea here is to find sexy subject matter that people have heard about, and build a story around it, so it’s an easier sell, both from writer to studio, and studio to moviegoer. Once again, this is a way to write about something known without paying an IP price for it.

Solution 5: “If you can’t beat’em, join’em.” – Basically, throw out the idea of selling a spec. Instead, figure out which kinds of movies you love above all others, the kind of movies you’d die to get paid to write the rest of your lives, and write a script in that genre. So if you love movies like Guardians of the Galaxy, write a big crazy space opera. If you like Godzilla, write or make a movie about big monsters. The script will serve more as a writing sample for what you’re capable of doing, and get you out on meetings with the kinds of people who make the movies you want to write. You may not get that big splashy sale, but you get to play in the sandbox you always dreamed of playing in, and isn’t that the ultimate goal?

Solution 6: If you can’t join’em, leave’em. And write a pilot. – Pilots are so much easier to sell than specs these days. Everybody wants them. I heard even the Weather Network is jumping on the original programming bandwagon. Anybody have a spec titled “Light Rain?” As a movie lover, this used to be unthinkable to me. Who cares about TV! But TV keeps getting better and they treat writers like kings compared to the feature world. So pour through all of your movie ideas and see if any can be adapted into TV shows.

Solution 7: Write a great script. – No, I’m serious. If all else fails and you don’t like any of these options, write an awesome script about anything you want and I PROMISE you, you’ll get noticed.  Just keep in mind that if you go this route, the script has to be better than if you go any of the other routes.  You have to knock it out of the park.  To achieve this, make sure you are BEYOND PASSIONATE about your idea. Because if you’re not passionate, you won’t pour your soul into it, and if you don’t pour your soul it, there’s little chance of it being great.  If it’s not great, you’ve got no shot at competing with all those big IP properties.  Also, make sure there’s a good story here. Don’t write about an entitled 25 year old white male who’s depressed because his trust fund was taken away from him (unless it’s a comedy!). Give us a real story and tell it well.

What about you folks? What do you think writers should be writing in this new era? Is there something I’ve forgotten? A future trend you see coming around the corner? Share and debate in the comments section!

Genre: Horror
Premise: When a family moves into their new home in the country, they find a hidden room with a terrifying secret.
About: If you’re anything like me, you were there every Monday night for another episode of Prison Break. Imagine The Great Escape meets Lost meets Orange is the New Black with men. At the head of it all was our hero, Wentworth Miller.  But once Prison Break ran out of prisons to break out of, Miller disappeared, and didn’t reappear until a couple of years ago when he came out with two super-specs that took over the town. To ensure he didn’t taint anyone’s opinion, he sent the scripts out under an alias. The first script, Stoker, went on to a not-so-successful indie run.  The Disappointments Room is Miller’s second script, and supposed to be more traditional. The last I heard, it will star Kate Beckinsdale and be directed by DJ Curoso.
Writer: Wentworth Miller
Details: 126 pages (1st Draft)

Wentworth Miller

The Disappointments Room was about to be one big disappointment until Wentworth Miller went all Travis Bickle on us the last 20 pages. Rarely have I witnessed a script go from so average to so memorable in such a short period of time.

I’m not saying this script is great. I’m just curious why Miller played it safe for so long before he channeled his inner serial killer. Instinct tells me it may be a first draft issue, although everything else in the script is so polished, it’s hard to see why the structure isn’t.

The Disappointments Room starts out a lot like The Conjuring. You have a normal family, led by wife Dana, with husband David and son Jeremy rounding out the cast.  They’re moving into a giant house in the middle of the country with plans to start anew.

But something about the house’s energy is off. At least to Dana. An architect who’s trying to get back in the game, Dana notices an attic window from outside the house that isn’t there on the inside. She goes up to inspect it, and finds a hidden room that only locks from the outside. Someone was kept here.

She starts doing research on the house and learns it was home to a prominent couple known as the Blackers. The Blackers never had any kids. But Dana’s noticing some strange things around the house that indicate otherwise.

She eventually realizes this room is a “Disappointment” room. Back in the day, if you were a prominent family and had a freak child (with like Elephantitus or something), it was too embarrassing to bring your kid into the community. So these families would lock up these “disappointments” in their own little room where they’d live out their entire lives.

Naturally, Dana wants to find out who lived in the room and so continues her sleuthing. Her journey reveals a dark secret from Dana’s own past, that is so horrifying, it makes disappointment rooms look like 80s arcades. But it isn’t Dana’s shocking reveal of this secret that does her in. It’s what her husband tells her after the revelation. That’s the true shocker.

I experienced déjà vu today, as it was JUST YESTERDAY we were talking about not exploiting your premise properly. Once again, we have this strong uique set up (a “disappointments room,”), but very little is mentioned about it.

There’s the reveal of it as a disappointments room, which happens halfway through the script. Then it works its way back into the plot at the very end of the screenplay. But between all that, we have your typical “something’s making a spooky noise in the other room, let’s go check it out” generic horror flick.

I started to wonder if Miller made Fatal Screenwriting Mistake Number 7. Did he pick a concept that didn’t have enough meat on it to build an entire movie around? Admittedly, the disappointment room is a scary idea, but there’s only so much you can do with one room.

Actually, when Dana got stuck in the room early on and nobody could hear her screaming, I thought we were going to stay there with her for the entire movie. She’d be stuck in the creepy Disappointments Room, where she’d almost certainly die. I’m not sure that would be a better script, but at least we’d be exploiting the premise. But she gets out immediately, and it’s back to your typical procedural storyline. Head to the scary library, look up books on who these Blackers are, and see if you can figure out who this child was.

Then I realized this was probably an exploratory first draft. Miller’s figuring things out as we are. It’s the only excuse for why we don’t find out until page 90 that Dana lost a daughter six years ago. That doesn’t work as surprise information. It needed to be known earlier.

Which is why we rewrite. Rewriting is often the practice of moving the exciting things up earlier and earlier in the story so that your script stays exciting the whole way through.  In the next draft, Dana’s lost baby will probably be moved up to page 60. The next draft, page 30. And I’d bet in the next draft still, we’d open on it, sort of like they did in Dead Calm (Nicole Kidman). A dying baby is the perfect inciting incident to get them to move to a new home. And it sets up the ending better.

Outside of the glacially paced story, I can see why this got Hollywood all hot and bothered. Miller’s got a talent for pulling you into the page, forcing you to hear and feel the things he’s describing, then spitting you back out. In particular, he’s got a strong sense of atmosphere he builds into his prose (“It’s now pitch black and pouring rain. The car SLIPS and SLIDES along a muddy single-lane road, branches SCRAPING the sides as they pass. David hunches forward, squinting through the wipers”).

Or take the opening scene, a presumably boring packing scene that reads anything but boring.  We hear the SQUEAL of the packaging tape as it rolls. Miller increasing the pacing by compressing the description with each box packaged, giving the scene an almost frantic feel. Faster and faster it goes, until BOOM, we’re done. You can’t believe it but you actually feel exhausted. After boxes being packed! That’s good writing, my friends, when you can make boxes interesting.

But if Miller is going to compete with the likes of The Conjurings, he can’t just depend on atmosphere and a creepy hook. He needs to look at this script (if he hasn’t already) as an accordion. The whole thing is stretched out from end to end. He’s got to SQUEEZE it together as tight as he can, pushing the first 100 pages into 30, and then he’s got to give us a second act that’s more concept-focused. Jump scares are fun, but Miller’s proven he can knock your socks off with his ending. He’s got to bring that imagination to the middle act as well. I hope he gets there. Because this could be a really good film if he figures it out.

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

What I learned: When trying to come up with scares in your haunted house movies, instead of focusing on the house itself, look to other characters – characters eccentric or unique or who make your hero uncomfortable in some way. One of the most memorable threads in The Disappointments Room is they hire a plumber to fix a mysterious leak in the home. The plumber is intense and scary, but Dana finds herself strangely attracted to him. He senses this, and aggressively puts her in uncomfortable situations, letting her know that if she wants it, he’ll give it. And while she doesn’t do anything with him, she hates that she considers it. That to me is a memorable situation, something I haven’t seen before. It sticks with you a lot longer than, say, the 630th creepy girl in a horror movie trope.