Genre: Comedy (I think?)
Premise: At 6.30am on December 21st 1970, the King of Rock’n Roll showed up on the lawn of the White House to request a meeting with the most powerful man in the world, President Richard Nixon. He had a very urgent request: to be sworn in as an undercover Federal Agent at large.
About: Elvis and Nixon was acquired by Amazon at the Cannes Film Festival and will star stellar actors Kevin Spacey and Michael Shannon as Nixon and Elvis respectively. The script was written by Joey Sagal, Hanala Sagal, and, in his first screenwriting gig, actor Cary Elwes (presumably off the buzz of his book, “As You Wish.”). This is, indeed, a strange writing team. Joey Sagal is best known for acting in a bunch of cheesy movies (Not Another Celebrity Movie, Anna Nicole, Redline). He’s also played Elvis Presley a number of times in his career, making you wonder if he originally wrote this for himself? Wife Hanala purportedly has over 90 million Youtube viewers and, according to her IMDB page, seven other films in development. I have to admit, this isn’t your typical “hot young writer” scenario we usually see with a buzzed about movie. But hey, why can’t that be a good thing?
Writers: Joey Sagal, Hanala Sagal & Cary Elwes.
Details: 123 pages

I’m telling you right now, the cables and networks and theater chains better watch out. Because the entertainment world is changing faster than you can say Blockbuster Video. Internet giants Netflix and Amazon are digging into their Lord Of The Rings-sized caves of gold to disrupt the whole paradigm.

And while Amazon is putting Elvis and Nixon in theaters first, you get the feeling that the next Elvis and Nixon will be made exclusively for Amazon’s site. And once that happens, coupled with Netflix doing the same, expect a tsunami effect to follow. We’ll never look back.

A note to Amazon though if they expect to compete with Netflix. Rebrand your TV and movie arm. Every time I go to your site to watch a show or a movie, I have to navigate a weird chain of links to do so. It’s so annoying that I’ve found myself avoiding going back because I know how much of a chore it will be. With Netflix I just go to: NETFLIX. It’s pretty damn simple. Make your entertainment arm simple as well and watch the money start rolling in. You’re welcome. I only want an associate producer credit.

Well, the plot of this one pretty much goes how it says in the logline. Elvis is watching TV one night. He sees all the drugs and the flag burning and the Black Panthers and he decides that America has gone to shit.

So he enlists his buddy Jerry Schiller, the only true friend he has in the world, to head to Washington with him so he can meet President Richard Nixon and request to become a “Federal Agent At Large,” even though there’s no such thing – the idea being that he can then help clean up America or something.

Jerry’s tired of being Elvis’s bitch. Every time this happens he upends his life to help the King. Yet against everything telling him to say no, he says yes, and off they go. As soon as the two land, they head straight to the White House. Elvis has written a letter to Nixon detailing his need to become a Federal Agent at Large right away.

Unfortunately, the White House guards tell him that even though they love blue suede shoes, there’s not much they can blue suede do.

Luckily, word of Elvis’s wish meets two young White House aides who happen to be Elvis fans. They ask Nixon if he’ll meet Elvis but Nixon says he thinks the guy’s an idiot. So hell no.

They break the sad news to Jerry, who’s pissed for about five minutes before remembering that Nixon’s daughter is a fan. So he gets word to her that Elvis wants to meet her father, and the next thing Nixon knows, he’s a slave to the demands of his spawn.

The movie ends with the 20-minute long meeting, where a pissy Nixon gradually warms up to Elvis, realizing he’s a great guy who shares a lot of the same political views as the V-fingered figurehead. Nixon surprisingly requests a photo of the pair which would go on to become the single most requested photo from the National Archives in history.

I don’t think I’ve encountered anything this light and fluffy since tripping over my neighbor’s Pomeranian. That’s not necessarily a bad thing. But you’re kind of encouraged, when writing screenplays, to write something with weight, with actual stakes. And the whole time I was reading Elvis and Nixon, I kept asking myself “What are the stakes here?”

I realize that’s a very “Screenwriting Professor” thing to say, and that art shouldn’t be boxed into such restrictive ideologies. So let me put it another way. What happens if Elvis doesn’t get his meeting with Nixon? I’m pretty sure nothing in his life changes. For that reason, this trip, this goal, doesn’t matter. So it was hard to get emotionally invested in the movie.

I mean, the trip obviously matters to Elvis, who’s obsessed with meeting the president and getting this secret badge thing, and that accounts for something. Sometimes you can distract the audience from the low stakes of your story by making the matter so important to the hero that we simply don’t pay attention to the bigger picture.

The problem is, Elvis is painted as such a one-dimensional character here, it’s hard to care about him caring. The King is pretty much played as a joke throughout. Most of the time, he acts like a 12 year-old who wants the hot new cowboy costume for Halloween in order to impress all his friends at school.

He truly honestly wants this secret agent badge so he can infiltrate bad groups of people. Elvis Presley. Infiltrating people UNDER COVER. Which I suppose is funny, and the joke they’re going for, but it comes at the expense of taking your hero seriously. And I personally can’t stand when writers make a joke at the expense of character.

Which leaves “Elvis and Nixon” feeling like one giant curiosity. I spent most of the read trying to understand why such top-level talent would want to make this. And then it hit me. Elvis and Nixon are two of the most iconic caricatures in pop culture history. To get to play one of them must be a dream for an actor. You really get to have fun.

I guess my next question would then be, does Michael Shannon have fun? I’m pretty sure the last time the guy smiled was when he was 8, after watching a school bus full of children drive over a bridge. And this only brings up more questions. Like what is the tone going to be here? I’m guessing they’re going for FULL WEIRD – Charlie Kaufman style – as that’s the only way I can see them justifying this lightweight concept. If you play this straight there’s simply not enough meat on the bone.

In fact, I think this script could’ve been a lot better had it taken its protagonist more seriously. There are these hinted-at moments of Elvis’s complex childhood, as well as repeated mentions of the handlers who control his life. I would’ve liked to have seen his character arc around those issues. See him stand up for himself or something. Instead, we get a pseudo-airhead who believes he’s a secret agent, which just wasn’t meaty enough to justify a feature film in my opinion.

Not saying it won’t work for others. But this was too thin for me. Elvis in his 20’s thin.

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

What I learned: Just say NO to your hero. A lot! — Throughout this script, Elvis keeps getting a “No,” in response to his desire to meet the president. But he keeps fighting and fighting until he finally gets his “Yes.” And really, that’s how every story should work. You give your protagonist a goal, and then you spend the majority of the screenplay saying “No” to him. But he keeps fighting and fighting until he finally gets his “Yes.”

No Amateur Offerings this week, sadly. Next Friday I’ll be reviewing last week’s Amateur Offerings winner, Sessions of Lead Belly. The consensus seems to be that the writing’s a bit raw but that the unique voice makes up for it. You can download and read it here.

In the meantime, remember that there are just 19 days left to enter the Scriptshadow Screenwriting Competition. Feel free to use today’s talkback to discuss box office this weekend (Minions and Self/Less – a script I reviewed a couple of years ago) and any loglines you want to try out. As you know, if something’s not working in logline form, it’s going to be tough to make work in movie form. So make sure that logline’s solid!

Just 20 days left, folks. The contest is FREE. Winner gets their script optioned by Grey Matter. There’s no better contest deal on the planet! Submit now!

So a few months ago this writer wrote into me hyping up his TV pilot. Without getting too specific, it was about a future world in the mold of that new show “Humans” on AMC – the “A.I.” like show about robots being used as slaves. Hearing the writer discuss his script, I don’t think I’d ever been more excited to read something. Not only was it a cool idea, it tackled intense themes like mortality and survival and the power of family. It sounded really good.

And then I read it.

And the script was… not what I had been told it was. It was just so damn… cheesy. There’s no other way to put it. It was a freaking cheese-fest. Like it needed its own display in a Wisconsin supermarket.

But I’m not just an observer at the corner of Swiss and Gouda. I’m a client. I once wrote a tennis script that I thought was going to change tennis forever. It was this deep intense look at a troubled doubles team scraping by on the tour. I gave it to a producer and he didn’t really respond to it. When I pressed him for details on why, he said it reminded him of “that movie Side Out.” I’d never heard of that movie so I looked it up. Here’s the still that I found.

Ouch.

That was not what I was going for AT ALL. But it shows just how pervasive this problem is. And why everyone fears it. I mean, I think we’re all trying to avoid making the next Side Out. James Gunn, the writer-director of Guardians of the Galaxy, had a mini-breakdown in the middle of shooting that film when he became convinced he was making the next Pluto Nash.

Point being, I run into this problem a lot. Writers who go for these really intense dramatic stories that end up coming off super-cheesy. And they don’t know it. And the question becomes, how do you recognize this and fix it before you send your script out and embarrass yourself?

So I got to thinking about that question: What makes a show/movie cheesy? And I came up with a handful of observations. Now to understand what I mean by cheesy, we’re going to look at both extremes, intense drama and cheeseapocalypse. On the “non-cheesy” side, you have something like the Todd Field film, “In the Bedroom.” Here’s a clip from that movie.

As long as we’re talking about rooms, why don’t we hop into an adjacent room for what some consider to be the cheesiest movie of all time. Here’s a scene from, “The Room.”

Now here’s the scary part. Tommy Wiseau, the director of “The Room,” was trying to make a movie like In the Bedroom – something with that kind of power, with that kind of gravitas. What went wrong? That’s an article for another day. But the cheese-factor here can be attributed to a few things, as can most unintentionally cheesy efforts.

1) False Reality – “False Reality” is when you move away from how characters would act in real life and start substituting actions that work specifically for your movie. So if you look at this scene from The Room, Tommy Wiseau reasoned that he needed this scene for his plot. But a big reason why it feels so cheesy is because the scene would never happen in real life. A guy doesn’t sit down on a roof and immediately start talking to someone about girls cheating then leave. Nothing about it feels honest and therefore it screams, “False Reality.” Everything in In The Bedroom’s scene feels honest, like this is the way it would really go down. That authenticity is what wards off the cheesiness.

2) Bad dialogue – The words “cheesy” and “dialogue” go together like peanut butter and jelly. That’s how easy it is to write cheesy dialogue. To avoid this age-old trap, apply the same “false reality” logic to your dialogue as you would your scenes. Ask the question, “Would the characters really be saying this?” Because a lot of times as a writer, you make characters say things in order to move your plot forward or to slip in your observations about life. But you don’t stop to consider if that’s what they’d say in the real world. Now the conversations are never going to sound exactly the same, of course. You have to abbreviate movie-conversations to keep the story moving. But the essence of what they’re saying needs to be necessary. It needs to be truthful. And it needs to be believable. That’s what you need to nail. Also, avoid on-the-nose dialogue at all costs. People rarely say exactly what they’re thinking so when they do, it draws attention to itself, and cheesiness is a by-product of that. So Tommy Wiseau saying, “I’m so happy I have you as my best friend and I love Lisa so much.” Nobody says that kind of thing. That’s why the line is so cheesy.

3) Two-dimensional characters – This one isn’t as easy to spot because it’s less about what’s happening in the moment and more about how much time you put into constructing your characters. The less you know about a character, the more likely it is that they’ll respond to situations in a generic manner. And “generic” is cheese-fuel. Have you ever known someone who speaks in generalities and catch-phrases? “You working hard or hardly working, John?” “That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.” “Looks like somebody’s got a case of the Mondays.” They come off as cheesy right? It’s because they have no depth. Everything they say is surface-level. An act. The same thing goes for your characters. The better you know them, the more specifically you’ll have them act, which in turn makes them more authentic, which is the opposite of cheesy. So write out those extensive backstories, give your characters unique ways of speaking, create complicated relationships for them, give them goals in life, give them unique hobbies, weird stuff they’re infatuated with. Give them that flaw that holds them back. Make sure that flaw dictates everything they do. Make them specific!

4) Stay consistent with your tone – In military parlance, there’s an old saying: “Hold the line.” It’s when you’re shoulder to shoulder in the trenches with your army, shooting down the approaching enemy. Your job is to make sure those guys don’t get past your line. Tonal consistency is a similar idea. You choose a tone for your story and you try and stick to it. The problem is, you get all these goofy, funny, or weird ideas you want to add (the approaching enemy soldiers), and you’re so tempted to just duck down and let them through. You can’t. You’ve chosen this tone so you have you to stick with it. I can’t take your dark funeral drama seriously if one character’s farting all the time. I can’t take your blood diamond action film seriously if one character cracks wise every time he gets in a fight. I can’t take your Leaving Las Vegas type romantic drama seriously if you include the animal cracker scene from Armageddon. Whatever your tone is, hold the line until you get to “The End.”

Like a lot of things in screenwriting, avoiding the cheese tag comes down to truth. If you convey your story and characters and dialogue in a way that feels truthful, we’ll surrender to your world. But if characters are constantly doing things or saying things that they’d never say or do in that situation (or in real life), that’s when shit starts feeling like a big ball of Velveeta. And with that, I leave you with a challenge. Here’s a scene from the zombie show “Z Nation,” which I consider to be really cheesy. I want you to tell me WHY this scene is cheesy. In doing so, consider the show’s polar opposite – “The Walking Dead.” How would THEY have done this scene? Feel free to add your own reasons beyond the four I’ve brought up. The more cheesy rules we end up with by the end of the day, the better.

Genre: Fairy Tale/Family
Premise: When Prince Charming gets his ass kicked by a former girlfriend, the Kingdom must entrust itself to his doofus twin brother, a man who can barely tie his own shoes.
About: This script sold… well, yesterday. Doesn’t get much hotter off the press than that. Disney continues its desire to turn its stable of historic cartoons into live-action counterparts. We saw it with Malificent, Cinderella, Beauty and the Beast is in the works, and now Prince Charming. You may be asking, “Why?” Well, contrary to popular belief, there still isn’t a guaranteed formula for turning out profitable movies. So if a studio sees something that even remotely works, they hop on that trend until it stops working. The big difference with today’s script is that the writer wrote it on spec. Which means that the studio wasn’t involved. And this is good news for YOU GUYS as it demonstrates a writer identifying a studio need and filling it. That’s what all of you should be trying to do. Writer Matt Fogel was an assistant to Phil Lord and Chris Miller on their film, Cloudy With A Chance Of Meatballs. He also worked on the upcoming Tom Cruise project, Bob: The Musical, an earlier draft of which I reviewed last month.
Writer: Matt Fogel
Details: 100 pages

So yesterday I learned they’re doing a Han Solo origin story. Phil Lord and Chris Miller have finally been entrusted with a legitimate property and I couldn’t be happier for them.

But you know who I’m not happy for? Me.

The cool thing about Star Wars is that it’s this entire universe. It dates back thousands of years (where some of the video games take place). Disney bought this universe and their solution is to give us… a Han Solo origin tale? That seems so… risk-averse. Which I guess studios are. But I thought the whole point of these anthology movies was to take chances. Play it safe in 7, 8, and 9, but with these other films? Get a little wacky. Wear a dress for the night. Eat a box of brownie mix without baking it.

I suppose there’s too much money for them to take risks. But I’m telling you. There’s a reason your protagonist is typically the straight-man. It’s so he can anchor the movie. Once you try and make the “disruptor” character the lead, you end up having to neuter him to keep the movie grounded. I’m just not sure Han Solo or Boba Fett were ever meant to lead a film. I guess we’ll see, though.

So Prince Charming really isn’t about Prince Charming at all. It’s about Prince TREMBLING, Prince Charming’s lesser-known twin brother. You see, Prince Charming’s problem is he’s a little… too charming. Or, to be less vague – the guy bangs a lot of chicks.

At a certain point, he’s alienated so many women that he gets attacked by one, sending him into a coma. This is not a good time for the Kingdom to have a prince in a coma. The King is dying and the princess has just been kidnapped by their rival, King Antagony.

The King’s cabinet feels that if they don’t rescue the princess, King Antagony will sense their weakness and take over their kingdom, Game-of-Thrones style. This leaves them with only one choice, to pass Prince Trembling off as Prince Charming.

This is not an easy task as Prince Trembling is a coward who stumbles through life like a 16th century drunk Michael Cera. So Prince Trembling is put through a crash course of charm school and fight school in order to appear as the real Prince Charming.

Because everyone here knows it’ll be impossible for Prince Trembling to actually rescue someone, he’s sent to recruit a crazy pirate named Peter Wild, a man the real Prince Charming is quite chummy with. Prince Wild will facilitate the rescuing, get the princess back home, where she’ll marry the real Prince Charming once he wakes up, and everyone will live happily ever after.

But a problem arises when Peter Wild isn’t Peter Wild at all, but Snow White in disguise! Because Snow White is Prince Charming’s ex, she has a hankering to kill him. But when she realizes he’s actually Charming’s twin brother, she starts to like him.

Will the two be able to rescue the princess and save the kingdom? I’m not a betting man but I’d probably bet every cent I own on yes. Especially since I’ve read the script and know how it ends.

I’m not sure there’s much to learn from this script, to be honest. I mean, we’ve got our GSU in place, which is ESSENTIAL in any mainstream studio film. Goal – save the princess. Stakes – if they don’t, King Antagony takes their kingdom. Urgency – they have a few days to pull the rescue off.

You also have a dramatic irony storyline in place, which works well in these kinds of movies. The audience knows that Prince Charming isn’t really Prince Charming. However, everyone else thinks he is. They didn’t do a very good job selling this unfortunately (I was never convinced that if he was caught, it would change anything), but it was there.

My biggest issue with the script was Prince Trembling. I guess I assumed that if they were going to use a twin storyline, they’d make Charming’s twin his polar opposite. He’d be off-putting, socially awkward, and a miserable guy. You know, the opposite of charming!

Instead he’s just scared and goofy. Which didn’t make a whole lotta sense. I suppose it allows him to slip and fall a lot but slipping and falling, while allowing the character to get some cheap laughs, doesn’t do much in the way of character development. And Disney movies are all about character development.

I guess we get to see him go from cowardly to brave but, again, what do fear and bravery have to do with Prince Charming? It feels like we’re exploring themes that are a million miles away from our title character. Let’s explore issues that revolve around charm or womanizing or how our society is obsessed with looks. These are the talking points Prince Charming brings to the table.

These aren’t things I’d be harping on if this were more of a general fairy tale. But this movie is titled “Prince Charming.” We should be breaking down what that name, what that persona, means.

You may also be asking, “How do you do anything different with these kinds of movies?” They’ve been done to death. And I was asking the same thing. Well, the way you evolve these fairy tales is to integrate progressive ideas, and issues we’re dealing with today that we weren’t dealing with the last time this movie (or this type of movie) came out.

The hot topic right now, of course, is feminism. So it turns out the pirate Peter Wild isn’t a male pirate at all, but Snow White in disguise (yes, I groaned as well). This allows Disney to make an ass-kicking female character who thinks saving princesses is lame, which in turn allows us to explore some territory we haven’t explored in fairy tales before.

But the big takeaway from this sale is clearly Fogel’s business-savvy. He not only knew that Disney was looking for live-action versions of their famous characters. He also recognized that Disney wouldn’t need spec scripts for its well-established film properties (Beauty and the Beast, The Lion King). They’d be developing those films in-house for sure. So he went for one of their peripheral characters, someone they likely hadn’t developed a script for. Smart!

While I would probably take my imaginary daughter to this movie, the character of Prince Trembling was a little too lame for me. And thusly, I can’t recommend it.

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

What I learned: When you write movies in the fairy tale universe, don’t limit yourself to just characters and ideas that have been explored before. Look for lesser known characters, or even completely new made-up characters, to add to the mix. These additions are what’s going to help your script stand out from the competition. So, for example, Fogel introduced this character named “White Knight.” We’ve heard that name before, of course. We have vague ideas of what that it means. But Fogel built an entire storyline around White Knight whereby he was a suit of armor with nothing inside. He was an ideal as opposed to a real person. I’m not sure Fogel hit the character out of the park, but the effort to create that type of character in the first place is exactly what you want to do. If you’re only sticking to the basics (Prince Charming, Snow White, a princess who needs rescuing), your script is going to be really generic. Those new unique characters are what’s going to make your fairy tale yours.