The typical Hollywood reader.

As I read through Cuba Libre yesterday, all I could think was, “This is way too complicated.” As I read through The Strain the previous day, all I could think was, “This is way too simple.” Whereas with Cuba Libre, I never quite knew what was going on or why, with The Strain, I not only knew what was going on, but I was always 30 pages ahead of the writer.

This led to an obvious question – how do you find the sweet spot between these two extremes? How do you keep a script simple enough so that it’s not confusing, but complex enough so that it still intrigues? Unfortunately, there’s no uniform answer to this. Every audience member is different, and by association, so are their demands. Some people like simpler stories. Some demand more meat on their plate.

I used to face this problem all the time when I taught tennis. I’d have a group of eight people to teach, all of whom ran the gamut on skill. This used to frustrate me to no end. If I kept the class really easy, the advanced players would get frustrated. If I made the class hard, the beginner players couldn’t keep up. What the hell was I supposed to do??

It’s a challenge that every teacher faces. What I found, and what most teachers find, is that it’s always better to challenge than to make things overly simple. Force the less experienced students to keep up. What you’ll find is that, more often than not, they’ll rise to the occasion. Whereas if you keep things too easy, you’ll bore the more advanced students, which leads to frustration, which kills the energy, and leads to the rest of the lesson imploding.

Here’s the problem though. Most writers don’t know how to challenge their readers correctly. They think “challenge” means disseminating copious amounts of information (which they erroneously believe is synonymous with “depth”) on their readers, forcing them to take in loads of data, whether it be backstory, exposition, or mythology. Their approach is, “I’m writing for smart patient people. So they’ll be okay if, every 15 pages or so, I set up a bunch of boring plot and character points, as long as I entertain them with the fun stuff afterwards.”

No. No no no no no no no no no no no no no no no.

No no no no no no no no no.

No no no no.

No.

No no no no no no no.

No.

And no again.

This is exactly what I think the writers of Cuba Libre would’ve argued (whoever that may be, since we don’t know who had the most influence on the draft). They gave you tons of characters, tons of sides, tons of story threads, tons of motivations, in the argument that they were pleasing the more sophisticated reader and/or audience member.

I got news for you. Smart patient people still get bored. If all you’re doing is throwing information at them, they’re not happily keeping a mental journal of it all, eagerly anticipating when you’re going to start using it. They’re saying, “Why are you throwing all this boring information at me? Why isn’t anything happening?”

Ah-ha!  Therein lies the trick – and it is a trick.  Stuff needs to happen.  “Happen” means “entertainment.”  You can throw all the information in the world at your reader… AS LONG AS YOU’RE ENTERTAINING THEM WHILE YOU DO IT. Read that sentence 50 TIMES as there is no sentence you’ll read this year that will help your writing more.

You can set up your extremely complicated multi-layered main character. AS LONG AS YOU ENTERTAIN ME WHILE YOU DO IT. You can dish out 15 pages of exposition. AS LONG AS YOU ENTERTAIN ME WHILE YOU DO IT. You can inspect every little blade of grass in your Lord of the Rings-like fantasy world. AS LONG AS YOU ENTERTAIN ME WHILE YOU DO IT.

This has to be one of the biggest mistakes I encounter. Whether it be an amateur or professional script. Writers don’t understand that EVERY SCENE MUST ENTERTAIN. They make excuses. They believe they’ve earned a “scene off.” They think certain scenes are meant to be boring. WRONG!  It can always be done! That doesn’t mean that every scene must have Evelyn Mulwray telling Jake Gittes that her daughter is also her sister. But each scene should entertain the reader on some level.

That’s why the scene from Cuba Libre yesterday where Boudreaux changes up the deal on Ben stuck out to me so much. It was the first time in the script where the writers were actually trying to entertain me!

I want to show you how this works. I’m going to use the example of setting up a protagonist in a script. This is usually done in the first act and encompasses everything from showing us their flaw, their work life, their family life, their social life, and how they fit into the larger world you’ve constructed. But remember, you can do this with ANY scene in your script.

Say we need to set up that our protagonist, Doug, has given up on life. That’s our goal in these scenes, is to show that he’s become an uninspired lonely human being who’s no longer contributing to society.

We might start with a scene that shows Doug sitting in his apartment staring at the television, looking lifeless. We then might show him at the convenience store, late at night, stumbling through the aisles, loading up on junk food. We then might show him walking home, spotting a group of trendy partygoers laughing their butts off across the street. Their presence only makes Doug feel lonelier.

Do these scenes set up our character? Sure. We definitely know Doug better after we read them. But nothing’s actually HAPPENED in any of these scenes. Not a single one has entertained the reader. In order to entertain, you must create situations that engage the character, that force him/her to act. Each scene must do this on some level.

So let’s rewrite all these scenes with that in mind. Say in the first scene, our character is watching TV (via a digital antennae), stuffing his sad face with donuts. The feed keeps cutting out as he watches. He stares at this, annoyed. We get the sense that he does NOT want to get up and deal with this. It takes a long inner struggle but we finally CUT to him at the antennae, making minute adjustments to fix the reception. He gets it to work, steps back, it goes bad again, another minor adjustment, it’s good, steps back, it goes bad again. He keeps doing this until FINALLY he gets a clear picture. He very carefully tiptoes back to his chair, desperate not to disturb a single molecule in the room. Sits down. And the feed goes bad again.

Now what about that convenience store scene? Well, while the new TV scene was okay, there weren’t any stakes (who cares if he fixes the reception on a show he’s not really into anyway – I’d probably change that in the next draft). Let’s not make that mistake again. Before Doug goes to the store, we see him struggling with dry mouth after eating all those donuts. He needs to wash them down. So he goes to the fridge, grabs the milk carton… but it’s empty. Fuck! He stares at this as if’s literally the worst thing that’s ever happened to him in his life (now we have stakes – he NEEDS that milk).

Cut to him at the convenience store. He walks straight to the cold drinks, gets to the milk section. Looks inside. ALL EMPTY. There’s no milk. At all. He takes a deep breath, beyond frustrated. Then, on the top shelf, way way way back, he sees one last milk carton. He opens the cooler, reaches as far back as he can, can’t reach it. He has to stand awkwardly on the bottom drink shelf, which feels shaky. He reaches again. He’s almost got it. He finally REACHES it, but just as he grabs it, his weight COLLAPSES the bottom shelf, causing a domino effect where all the drinks SPILL OUT onto the floor, splashing up all over him. During the chaos, he drops the milk, which opens up, spilling everywhere.

Now what about the last scene? The one where he has to walk home afterwards and spots the partygoers? This one’s easy. By keeping the partygoers safely on the other side of the street, there’s zero entertainment value (because there’s no conflict). The scene’s way more interesting if they’re on his side of the street and he has to WALK THROUGH THEM. This is the last thing he wants to do at 11:30pm on a Saturday, drenched in soda.

So he looks for a way out. But there’s no other route to take without being obvious, so he accepts his fate, walking towards the fun-going group with his head down. Just as he’s about past them, he hears, “Doug?” He looks up. One of them is an old girl he knows. “Oh my God,” she says, “I haven’t seen you since high school. What are you…” she just now notices he’s drenched, “…doing?” It’s a nightmare scenario for Doug. There’s no easy way out of this. You’d play up the awkwardness of the conversation for as long as you wanted to until he’s finally able to slip away.

Do you see how we took three lifeless scenes and added an actual story to all of them? All we had to do was add a problem to each scenario. First the antennae wasn’t working. Then the milk was impossible to get. Then he had to get through a group of partygoers.

I know, I know. These scenes weren’t life-changing or anything. But this is the first draft of all of them. I’m playing with the ideas to see what works and what doesn’t. I’d then make adjustments accordingly. The important thing is that I’m trying to add drama to each scene as opposed to only using the scenes to set up my character.

Now some of you might point out that, since the changes, each scene has too much going on. By dramatizing each scene, I’ve made all of them a lot longer. Also, I’m driving the same point home over and over again (this guy’s a loser). Ah ha! You’re exactly right. But this is the beauty about dramatizing scenes. Once you dramatize a scene, it hits the reader harder. They get more out of it because there’s a story involved, something they’re engaged in. Therefore, whatever point you’re trying to make is made more intensely.

Because of this, you might not even need all three scenes anymore. With the way these scenes now sell your character, you could probably get by with just one. So I might drop the store scene and the walk home afterwards. Besides, if I needed one more “sell my character” moment, I could always squeeze one in to a later scene. Like if he’s on the bus on his way to work tomorrow. I could come up with a small problem on the bus he has to deal with.

Some of you might also say that these scenes are too exaggerated. What if you’re writing a more dramatic script, like, say, The Sixth Sense. The scenes are way too over the top for a script like that. Of course they are. My examples were from a dark comedy, but I’d alter the tone, the intensity, the duration and the situation of each problem to fit with whatever genre I’m writing.

If I was writing the TV scene in The Sixth Sense, for example, the problem would be darker and maybe a little scarier. I’d have the protagonist watching TV, and then have the channel change inexplicably. He looks down at his remote, which is free and clear of anything. He changes the channel back. After a few seconds, the channel changes again. You get the idea.

Here’s the point I’m making. I don’t care if you’re setting a character up, setting your story up, explaining the rules of your world, having your characters convey plot points, getting your characters from point A to point B, you should always be doing it in an entertaining way. And you do that by looking at each scene and asking yourself, regardless of everything else the scene is trying to do, does it entertain? If not, change it. Or else we won’t care.

Genre: Western
Premise: In 1898, on the brink of the Spanish-American War, a bank robber shuttles a herd of horses into Cuba for a big payday.
About: Cuba Libre is based on one of Elmore Leonard’s lesser-known novels. The Coen Brothers then adapted the book in 1997. It was later revised by Jay Cantor, a Harvard educated novelist whose novel about Che Guevara was described by one amazon reviewer as “Weird, disjointed writing and story. Nonsensical at times.” This will come into play later in the review.
Writers: Joel and Ethan Coen (based on the novel by Elmore Leonard) Revision by Jay Cantor
Details: 137 pages (September 16, 1998 draft)

The Coens are an up and down entity. They are capable of genius, but they’re also capable of buying into their own hype, resulting in movies that are too eccentric or personal for anyone but the most artsy moviegoer. For every Fargo, there’s a Ladykillers. For every No Country for Old Men, there’s a Burn After Reading. It can be frustrating, since the two are so talented. But you have to take risks if you want to blow audiences away, and they’ve certainly afforded themselves as many risks as they want.

Cuba Libre was written between the Coens’ two best movies – Fargo and The Big Lebowski. This is when these two were at the top of their game. So you’re figuring it’s gotta be good, right? A couple of problems though. The source material is far from beloved. And the script is revised by someone who had never touched a screenplay before. Might it all still come together? Let us hope.  Cause it’s 137 freaking pages and I don’t want to read a bad 137 page script.

Cowboy Ben Tyler has just stolen 150 horses, which he plans to ship to Cuba, where the going price for a horse is 150 dollars, a ton of money back in 1898, and twice as much as he’ll get anywhere in America.

Thing is, when Ben gets to Cuba, the businessman he struck a deal with, an American sugar magnate named Boudreaux, switches up the terms on him. Says he’s only going to pay 100 a horse. Boudreaux is used to men crumbling in his wake. But Ben isn’t that kind of cowboy. He tells Boudreaux to fuck off and considers selling the horses to the local Cubans instead.

Just to show that there’s lots of hard feelings, he charms Boudreaux’s girlfriend, Amelia, into joining him. Meanwhile, Ben has also smuggled some guns over that he plans to sell to the Cubans in their battle against the Spanish, news that finds its way over to the Spanish camp, making Ben a hot commodity in their eyes as well.

Soon, Ben’s got the Cubans after him (for the horses), the Spanish after him (for the guns), and Boudreaux after him (for Amelia).

This might’ve worked if Leonard, the Coens, and Cantor had stopped there. But they also try to cover the beginning of the Spanish-American War, as well as insert a Fargo-esque fake kidnapping scheme (of Amelia) to get Boudreaux to pay Ben 80 thousand dollars. All of these things come to a head in a final giant train chase for the money, the guns, and the girl.

Cuba Libre is a classic example of trying to do too damn much. Screenwriters – you have to understand the limitations of your medium. You can’t pack a story that needs 480 pages to tell into 120 pages (or, in this case, 137). You have to step back, cut storylines, cut characters, and keep things focused.

We have so much shit going on here. A bank robber smuggling horses into a foreign country. A secret plot of smuggling guns into the country. A sugar empire. Cubans fighting the Spanish. The Spanish preparing to fight the Americans. A kidnapping plot. An assassination plot.

Screenplay-loving Pixar has a saying – Simple story, complex characters. Cuba Libre sure could’ve taken heed of their slogan.

My guess? Jay Cantor went all “novel” on this. He tried to jam a 5 inch brad story into a 2 inch brad script. Amidst everything I mentioned above, our heroes are also travelling hundreds of miles inside of Cuba, walking around aimlessly and talking about nothing. At one point, so little had happened for so long that I leaned back, squinted my brain, and said, “What the hell is this about anymore!!??”

If I could give screenwriters one piece of advice it would be “Get to the point!” Too often writers get lost in meaningless tangents. The audience isn’t interested in tangents. They want to know what the characters are trying to do, they want meaning behind that pursuit (stakes) and they want there to be some urgency behind it.

It wasn’t until the final act that this actually happened. In a signature Coen Sequence, a late train chase has all the characters going after a bag of money. FINALLY, we understood the goal (money). We understood the stakes (Ben and Amelia needed the money to escape the country together). And we understood the urgency (they only have until the next train stop). Before that, if you quizzed me on what everyone wanted at any particular time, I wouldn’t have had any idea (Yeah, I summarized the plot above, but 50% of that was guesswork based on what I thought the writers were trying to do).

Our scribes didn’t help their cause by creating four character factions (good guys, bad guys, Cubans, Spaniards). It’s not that you can’t do this, but the more groups you add, the more difficult it becomes for the reader to remember who’s who and who wants what, especially in a case like this, where some groups had both good and bad sub-groups. For example, one of the Cuban generals was mean. The other was helpful.

In the cases where I’ve seen multiple-factions work, the writers work tirelessly to keep everything clear. Take Empire Strikes Back, for instance. The bounty hunters (which included Boba Fett) were their own faction, but we met them with the Empire. We see Darth Vader assign them to find Han Solo. So we understand that they’re part of the bad guy alliance. Had we not met them with the villains, but rather flying around looking for Han on their own, we probably would’ve been wondering who the hell they were. Since Cuba Libre was so sloppily executed, every faction oozed ambiguity. Who worked for who? Who wanted what? Who the hell knows!

That’s not to say Cuba Libre was a total bust. The Coens writing would occasionally shine through. Actually, there was a great scene early on that made me remember yesterday’s script, The Strain, specifically what it needed to do more of.

In the scene, Ben finally makes it to Boudreaux, the man who’s agreed to buy his horses, and prepares to collect his money. In The Strain, this scene would’ve gone exactly according to plan. Ben would’ve said here are your horses. Boudreaux would’ve paid him exactly what he was asking for, and Ben would’ve gone on his merry way.

Instead, in this version, Boudreaux looks at the situation – that this man has travelled a thousand miles to his island and has no other options – and says, “You know what. I don’t want to pay 150 dollars a horse anymore. I want to pay 100.” This is how to approach screenwriting. Things should never go according to plan.

Think of movies as the opposite of life. We LOVE for life to go according to plan. It means breezy days and relaxed evenings. But in the movies, if things go according to plan, the audience is bored. Who wants to see a bunch of shit go right? So when you approach an act or a scene or a beat, you need to ask yourself, “How can I screw this up for them?”

And the bonus with this approach? You know how yesterday I was talking about the importance of creating choices for your characters? Giving them difficult decisions that force them to act? When you screw up the hero’s plan, you force them to make a choice. Once Boudreaux changes the terms, Ben now has to make a choice. Does he accept the reduced rate or does he play hardball and leave? Each option has consequences and neither is very good. Whatever Ben chooses, it’s going to tell us a lot about him, right?

Anyway, Cuba Libre was a sprawling mess that had infrequent moments of genius. Swinging for the fences is great. But Holy Chesapeake Bay, don’t fill your script with more than you have to. You can still write something complex without including EVERY. SINGLE. IDEA. YOU HAVE. Screenwriting, in many ways, is about showing restraint.

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

What I learned: If you’re going to include a lot of character factions in your script (not just the good guys and bad guys), make it easier on yourself by having everyone chasing the same thing – or, as George Lucas likes to call it, a MacGuffin. In Star Wars, everyone’s chasing that damn robot with the Death Star plans (R2-D2). So even though there are a lot of different people, we’re always clear on what they want. Cuba Libre’s problem is it had four different factions who each wanted four different things. It was too much information to keep track of. Only storytelling masters with a deft command over clarity can pull that off.

Genre: TV Pilot – Horror
Premise: A vampire strain makes its way onto a flight from Germany to the United States, threatening to unleash a plague that could wipe out humanity.
About: FX series “The Strain” is aiming to be the next big thing, FX’s answer to The Walking Dead. It’s got the pedigree to pull it off. With former Lost Exec Producer Carlton Cuse and Guillermo del Toro shepherding the show, geek blood is dripping off this thing by the bucket load. The Strain’s source material is a three-book trilogy co-authored by Del Toro and Chuck Hogan, whose 2004 book, Prince of Thieves, was turned into Ben Affleck’s, The Town. Man, self-publishing must be the way to go if even Del Toro has to do it to get something made!
Writers: Guillermo del Toro & Chuck Hogan
Details: 91 pages (June 26, 2013 draft – Production Draft).

I’ve been hearing some not-so-good things about The Strain. I’ve heard the source material isn’t so good. I’ve heard the script isn’t so good. But the talent involved gives one confidence. Del Toro’s working within the genre he’s most comfortable with (he felt a little out of sorts with Pacific Rim) and I’m a fan of novelist Chuck Hogan, who’s moving into screenwriting for the first time here. Plus, when you have low expectations, the only way to go is up.

40 year-old epidemiologist Ephraim Goodweather just got the call of his life. A plane just landed at JFK that’s “gone dark.” It’s sitting at the end of the runway without any signs of life. They need Ephraim to come in immediately and tell them what’s going on.

Problem is, Eph is in the middle of a court-appointed therapy session with his wife, who’s looking for any excuse to end their marriage. Eph having to leave in the middle of their appointment will likely be the last straw. But Eph can’t help it. In this case, he has to break the camel’s back.

But hey, it’s not like Eph’s running off to buy the latest Playstation. Lives are at risk here. Heck, this is a man who, if he screws up, an entire planet could die! So off to JFK he goes where he meets up with his sexy partner, Nora Martinez. The two board the plane to find that everyone’s dead. No signs of struggle. They’re all just sitting in their seats.

Then someone moves. Across the cabin, another body moves. 4 people have survived this mysterious phenomenon, and now Eph is hurrying to get them into quarantine. In the meantime, they trace some black light goo to the cargo bay, where there’s an old empty “cabinet” (aka, coffin) that has a lock ON THE INSIDE! Uh-oh.

Meanwhile, a crazy old man shows up begging Eph to burn the plane, the dead bodies, AND the living bodies, before “it” spreads. If doctors and scientists made decisions off the insane rantings of crazy old men, we probably wouldn’t have a planet to live on anymore. So they ignore him. Which is going to turn out to be a big mistake, methinks.

We hop back into New York where we meet Eldritch Palmer, the 3rd richest man in the world. Palmer is cavorting with pale people who don’t breathe, an indication that he’s up to something nasty. Indeed, he’s practically giddy with excitement about the news of the plane’s landing. Apparently, a long overdue event is about to occur. An event that will change the world forever.

The Strain is a competent pilot. That’s my problem with it. I want more than “competent.”

I mean we have all the ingredients for something cool, no doubt. We’ve got a mysterious plane landing where everyone is dead. We have implications of a demon/vampire unlike other iterations of vampires we’ve seen. We’ve got a conspiracy that starts with some of the richest men in the world.

While I was reading all this, I was thinking to myself, “I SHOULD be into this. So why aren’t I?”

Well, let’s start with the opening. A miscalculated opening is hard for a script to recover from. If readers are turned off immediately, they tend to keep that position throughout. Think about the last time you read a bad opening but ended up loving the script. It doesn’t happen often, does it?

The Strain’s opening wasn’t bad. But I’d seen it before. The pilot episode for Fringe was almost exactly the same, so right from the start, the story felt lazy.

From there, there were so many characters that there was no time to meet or get to know anybody. And the pilot was 30 pages longer than your average TV script. So it should’ve had plenty of time to set people up. The only person I got to know on any level was Dr. Ephraim. He was the only character who engaged in anything human, anything identifiable, via the therapy session he had with his wife.

One thing to remember is that TV is about characters. I get that the pilot has to set up the plot, but first and foremost, you have to hook us onto the people taking us through the story. Of the 20 characters introduced here, Ephraim is the only one I can visualize in my head. Everyone else was limited to a few lines of dialogue or a few adjectives of description.

One reason this may be the case? Ephraim was the only character who had to make a tough choice in the script. He’s in the middle of a marriage therapy session and he gets a call about the plane. There’s a potential disease outbreak on one side, and his marriage on the other. He’s gotta decide what’s more important. He picks the disease.

This isn’t just an example of a great way to introduce a character, but a reminder of how much more memorable someone is when they have to make a choice in a scene.

Outside of Ephraim, I’m not sure anyone here ever has a difficult choice to make. People tell other people what to do and they follow orders. No one finds themselves in a dilemma or a tough situation. It’s as if the plot is unfolding in raw form, before the writers came along and added drama to it.

Here’s what I mean. Take the scene where Eph and Nora have to check out the plane. As it’s written, they simply walk onto the plane, no problem. There’s no choice involved.

What if, instead, the airport Hazmat suits were damaged, left in a bad storage container. So Eph and Nora don’t have the proper protection to go inside. However, there are signs of life in the plane. If they don’t move fast, those people could die. Thus, a choice is presented. Go in with only threadbare protection, even though they’ll be at risk for exposure, or remain safe until better equipment comes, even though it probably means the remaining passengers will die.

And I’m not saying you have to write that scene. But you have to write “choice scenes” somewhere. You need choices. Or else there’s no drama.

In the Strain, everything’s laid out too perfectly. There aren’t enough obstacles making our characters’ lives difficult. Little troubles happen here and there (the coffin creature escapes) but it’s hard to tell how that affects things since we don’t understand what’s happening yet. In the end, I never felt that afraid or worried for anyone, which is strange when you consider that the fate of the world is at stake.

So, sadly, The Strain didn’t work for me. It’s not bad. But it left me wanting more. It needed more originality, better character setup, and more going wrong for the characters. Adding 5-6 more tough choices for people would’ve helped a lot.

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

What I learned: Repeat offender. Don’t use an adjective in your description, then quickly follow that with the same adjective in the dialogue. It reads lazy. So in The Strain, one of the characters is described as having “waxy” hands. Then, half a page later, one of the characters says, “Anything happens to her, I’ll find your waxy ass.” The repeat use of the word gives the text a lazy and uninspired feel.

What’s the quickest way to get a writer riled up? Bring up your writing process. There is nothing writers are more protective over, or feel more passionate about, than what is the proper way to write a script.

Go ahead, invite a few writers over and ask their opinion on outlining. Make sure to hide anything sharp beforehand. One writer will tell you outlining is essential and that there’s no possible way to write a good script without one, while the next will angrily defend the natural process of discovery that comes from free-form writing.

This kind of debate extends to structure, to theme, to characters. Writers always have strong opinions about these things and will fight other writers tooth and nail to prove that they’re right and you’re wrong.

If you ever find yourself in this situation and need to defuse it quickly, I have a solution. There is one thing that every single screenwriter in the world can agree on. That the Transformers movies are the worst written movies ever.

I don’t like to rail on films. I really don’t. But something about this franchise angers me. Transformers is the epitome of what’s wrong with the Hollywood system. The films are the poster-children for style over substance and a black eye for a trade that already struggles to be taken seriously.

How can you be proud to be a screenwriter when your peers are pushing this garbage onto the masses? Transformers is the leading generator of the all-to-familiar line: “I could’ve written something better than that.” It makes us all look like fools.

The crazy thing about all this? Transformers 4 is going to be the biggest movie of the year. If I’m a producer reading this entry, that’s exactly what I’m saying. “Yeah? Well if it’s so terrible, why is everyone going to see it?”

That’s a good question. And I don’t think we’re doing our jobs as screenwriters unless we’re trying to answer it. Because those producers are right. People are eating these movies up. And I don’t think it’s as simple as saying, “Yeah, that’s because people are idiots.”

There are idiots out there. But audiences vote for quality more often than they vote for crap. The Avengers, Toy Story 3, Avatar, The Dark Knight, were all #1 movies from years’ past. Those films were loved by both critics and audiences. But Transformers 4 is rolling by on a mere 17% Rotten Tomatoes score. So why is this happening? What is this film doing that’s making its awful script so insignificant?

Bonus Question: Is Shia better or worse off without the Transformers franchise?

Believe it or not, Transformers DOES do something right. You’ve heard it a million times from me but it never hurts to hear it again, since it’s the most crippling mistake a writer can make.

Write something that people will actually want to see.

Transformers is one of the coolest straight-up ideas ever. Note I didn’t say “concept.” There’s no concept here. This is an idea. But it’s such a great one, that it alone is responsible for 50% of the film’s success. Cars that turn into robots? Boys love cars. Boys love robots. Having the two transform into one-another? It’s genius. It’s the only toy idea that’s ever been announced as a movie where I’ve gone, “What took them so long?” The idea alone is a billion dollar idea.

This is important to note because a script is the sum of its parts. Assuming each part is given a number value from 1-10, your goal is to get as many high numbers for those parts as possible. If one part is a 2, that doesn’t necessarily mean your script is screwed. You could get a couple of 10s, and you’ve still got something pretty good. What nobody ever talks about, though, is that “idea” or “concept” is a weighted number. It’s more important than all the other numbers combined.

So when you go through the number values of Transformers’ parts, you get this: story = 0, characters = 3, dialogue = 1, structure = 2. You’d think the film couldn’t possibly survive numbers that low. Except when you get to “idea,” Transformers is a 100. Which means the sum of the parts is still high.

Another thing Transformers has going for it is it’s the ultimate “edgy” family movie. There aren’t too many movies that an entire family can go to and enjoy. Pixar films are the gold standard. But what if you have a 14 or 15 year old who thinks those movies are too sweet and saccharine? They’re not “cool” enough. Transformers is the perfect “next step up.” It’s edgier, yet still light enough that you can bring your 9 or 10 year old as well. I don’t have kids. But if I did, I could see my son wanting to see this movie and me shrugging my shoulders with a, “Hey, at least I get to see some awesome special effects.”

Here’s what I don’t understand though. Why CAN’T Transformers be a good story as well as a great action film? What’s preventing it from being both? Isn’t it a screenwriter’s job to take an idea and figure out a way to create a fully-fleshed out compelling story?

Look at Phil Lord and Chris Miller, the writers of The Lego Movie. That source material had WAY less to work with than Transformers, and they turned in a fun heart-warming action movie. What’s preventing Transformers from doing the same?

Besides the obvious (the director, Michael Bay, isn’t interested in the script), the reason they haven’t been able to do this is because of the mythology.

Mythology is the set of rules and backstory you create for your artificial worlds. It’s a crucial, often under-discussed, component in writing sci-fi or fantasy. If you don’t set up a set of rules for your world that makes sense, nothing you write on top of those rules will matter.

The mythology behind Transformers has never made sense. A group of alien robots come to earth to… turn into cars? Why?? It’s so silly, it’s ridiculous. By trying to stick with that mythology, the writers screwed themselves. Everything you build on top of “ridiculous” will be even more ridiculous! Screenplays need to be built on stable ground, not fault lines.

If you want to see mythology done right, watch The Matrix. There’s a lot of exposition in that movie. But after it’s all over, you understand why all the characters can do what they do. We know Neo can defy gravity but can’t breathe fire. The mythology has made that clear to us.

Once your mythology is set up, the next step is structure. Transformers fails spectacularly in this area as well. First off, each of its movies is well over 2 hours long. That alone tells you how little the writers (or producers and director) understand structure. The whole point of structure is to generate form, to give its subject a container. If you ignore it, your characters and story go off on numerous tangents.

Yesterday, Miss Scriptshadow confessed she’d been struggling with structure and wanted to know how I defined it. I explained it this way. Imagine Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. But all you have is Ferris and Cameron. You don’t have the “day off” part. You just have two characters who are friends.

An “unstructured” script would show these two going to class, eating lunch, maybe getting into trouble after school. It would be a series of unconnected scenes. “Structure” is when you add the “day off.” Now your characters have purpose, have a goal, have something to do. They must try to outwit the principal and get away with ditching school for a day. That simple addition of a container is what gives the script structure.

From there, you create little mini-movies (mini-goals) inside of the script to keep the story focused. First, Ferris must get Cameron on board for his plan. Then he must find a way to get his girlfriend out of school. Then they must have lunch at the best restaurant in town without getting caught. These little mini-movies keep everything contained and focused, and consequently, give the script momentum.

Nobody seems to know this in Transformers. Instead of clear focused goals, multiple characters have loads of unclear foggy goals, which continue to stack up on top of each other without clear resolutions. Characters do things without a point. There are long passages where we’re not sure why things are happening. The whole point of structuring something (typically through outlining – ahh! Sorry! I know you non-outliners hate that) is to prevent this. To give the story direction.

I know this isn’t a black and white issue. The industry will argue that any hit movie is good for the movie business. And studios will say that the Transformers’s on their slate are what allow them to make more challenging films like Black Swan and Silver Linings Playbook (although I wonder about this, since they were able to make these types of movies just fine well before Transformers came around). So I’m curious which side you come down on here.

Are there any screenwriting lessons to be learned from Transformers doing so well (you’re not allowed to say “That people are idiots)? And do you think these films are necessary for studios to make the more meaty stuff? Or is that BS?

Read this week’s Amateur Offerings collection and offer constructive criticism below, plus your vote for which script should be reviewed on Friday!

TITLE: ADAM
GENRE: Sci-fi Thriller
LOGLINE: A bio-mechanical man wakes with one memory: he must bring the woman he loves back to life. But his creator is on the hunt to catch his experiment, before the secret gets out.
WHY YOU SHOULD READ: A biologically engineered superhuman whose mind is half computer on the run through a post World War Three metropolis. Chased by cannibals, a cyborg with an identity crisis, a mysterious thin man, and corporate kingmakers. Helped only by an apathetic news anchor with hedonistic tendencies. — This is a story about the inevitable melding of man and machine, the digital world and the real one. The future of the internet and the human body. It questions how we will maintain our human identity in the face of exponential technological growth. — It’s Bourne+Blade Runner+Frankenstein with a hint of Hitchcock style thriller, Cronenberg and the Matrix.

TITLE: Haves and Have Nots
GENRE: Noir
LOGLINE: An investigative reporter returns home, delving into Las Vegas’ underground of addicts, prostitutes, and degenerates, to find her missing brother.
WHY YOU SHOULD READ: Carson writes that a lot of great specs are derived from the concept of taking a “seen-it-before” story and flipping it on its head. I took a noir, threw in a female protagonist and set it in Las Vegas. I integrated all of the set pieces of Vegas (casinos, strip clubs, pimps, vast expanses of emptiness) with the hallmarks of the noir genre: (tight, stylized dialogue, grittiness, femme fatales, a troubled hero with a cross to bear). I hope I did well.

TITLE: Tuesday’s Gone
GENRE: Dark comedy, meta-horror.
LOGLINE: Tuesday Wilson is a new mom. She spends her free time on Facebook. Uploading pics and bragging about her baby. When an ornery high school girl and her friends leave bad comments about said baby…she tracks each commenter down and takes their lives in funny, horrific ways. All the while a famous Hollywood actor and an old broken Detective are hot on her trail.
WHY YOU SHOULD READ: My name is Derek Williams. I had a pretty fucked up script called Goodbye Gene reviewed on AF early last year.

I’m now submitting my next script. It’s called Tuesday’s Gone. Nobody gets raped. No child molesters pop up. In the AF review Carson said, “the next thing this guy writes is probably going to get made. That’s what my gut is telling me.” Well…here it is. Let’s see how well you know your gut, sir.

This is a satire about “Facebook Moms.” Come on. We all know an annoying Facebook Mom.

TITLE: Big Bear
GENRE: Action/Thriller
LOGLINE: Two married elite special operatives infiltrate a southern California terrorist cell in order to thwart a major terrorist attack and ultimately take out Bin Laden’s successor– a man who is under increasing pressure to carry out a fresh act of headline-grabbing terror to cement himself as the new #1.
WHY YOU SHOULD READ: This script placed in the top 15% of the 2012 Nicholl Fellowship Screenwriting contest. (Somewhere between 720-1080 out of 7200 scripts!!) Considering that this script is far from a Nicholl-style script, I believe it fared pretty well. And since then, it’s been optioned, and undergone a few rewrites. BIG BEAR is an independent action movie. I personally wanted to focus more on the struggle between two married special operatives on the mission of their lives than blowing shit up. Bottom line: It’s different. I’d love to put the script out to your readers to see if it can be upgraded further.

~*COMEBACK SCRIPT*~
TITLE: THE HARVESTER
GENRE: Horror
LOGLINE: Murdered to advance the construction of an exclusive golf resort, a mountain man is resurrected by Death himself to take revenge as an undead killing machine.
WHY YOU SHOULD READ: I’m a lifelong horror fanatic and very much a product of the VHS generation. This is my sincere attempt at horror the way I lovingly remember it; gruesome and gory, but also imaginative, cinematic and, most importantly, FUN! THE HARVESTER is a high-concept, blood-soaked blast of old-school carnage with an ending so wild and explosive that it needs to be read to be believed. Hope you enjoy!