Newsletter has been sent! If you have Gmail, make sure to check your promotions folder as well as SPAM. If you still don’t see the newsletter, e-mail me. If you want to sign up, by God do it now. And you definitely want to get a hold of yesterday’s newsletter, as I reviewed, what I believe, to be the #1 Black List script of 2014.
Genre: Comedy/Drama
Premise (from writer): A gambler wins millions on a crazy bet, yet is unable to
tell anyone. Instead, he resolves to secretly use the money to improve the
lives of those closest to him, and win back the love of his long-suffering
wife.
Why You Should Read (from Carson): This script faced off against last week’s “Down to the Wire,” in the Amateur Offerings round-up. Much controversy arose when Down to the Wire got a lot of early love in the comments section then “Chain,” got a lot of votes late. Were those early votes from people in Wire’s writing group, some wondered? According to the conspiracy-obsessed Grendl, yes, although I have no idea if any of that is true. In the end, it’s Evian under the bridge, as “Chain” gets its shot today. Everybody wins! Yay!
Writer: David Braga
Details: 116 pages
Martin Freeman for Steve? (oh yeah, I know my British actors)
Breaking the Chain has become a well-known script over the past few weeks. Grendl has been raving about it ever since he read it a few months ago. And since Grendl hasn’t raved about anything since 1975 (the year Jaws came out), that’s a pretty big endorsement.
The problem is, for some reason, it keeps finding its way into the Comments section, derailing on-topic conversations. Which is fine. I don’t mind, as long as we’re talking about screenwriting, but man, so much has been built up about this script, I’m worried my expectations are going to be too high. Part of me feels like since Grendl doesn’t like anything, that anything he DOES like must be really REALLY weird.
When you combine my devastation over learning that Harrison Ford broke his ankle on the set of Star Wars 7 last night and there’s ZERO information about how bad it is and how it’s going to affect the shoot, you could say I’m in a pretty emotionally fragile state at the moment! I mean does Harrison have to be sitting down in every scene now? Will the climax of the film be a yelling match during family dinner? Forget the Death Star. Try the Death Stir Fry. May the fork with you.
Steve is a small town guy with a big time gambling problem. Poor Steve would like for nothing more than to quit gambling, but the thing with being an addict is, well, no matter how much you want to stop, you can’t. Even if it’s ruining your marriage. Which it is. Steve’s perfect wife, Sarah, an actress at the local theater, is sick of playing the asshole, having to question her husband every night he comes home from work late. Did you do it? Did you gamble again?
After attending a local support group, an old gambling codger tells Steve the trick to quitting is to bet on the worst odds possible. That way, you’re guaranteed to lose. And after a steady diet of losing, you won’t want to play anymore. Steve takes him up on the advice, making the dumbest bet probably in the history of gambling.
He then goes home, where Sarah asks him, yet again, if he was out gambling. No, he lies. He’s quit. For good. This seems to appease her, which is great, except for one little problem. The next day, Steve ends up winning that bet! 3 million pounds!
Of course, he’s ecstatic. But then he realizes if he reveals his winnings to Sarah, it would confirm his lie. So he decides not to tell her or anyone else.
After getting the money, Steve anonymously buys up the floundering general store he works at, then anonymously buys up the playhouse and forces the director to give Sarah the lead in the play! Soon, Steve is trying to solve all the town’s problems with money.
Of course, we know how these things usually end up. As if on cue, Steve’s evil nemesis and Sarah’s ex-boyfriend, Craig, wins the lead role opposite Sarah in the play. Steve tries to puppeteer Craig’s ouster, but it’s fruitless, and soon Craig and Sarah are spending a lot of time together.
Could it be? Steve thought this money would solve all his problems, but it only seems to be making them worse. Will Steve find a way to make it right, or will he have to come clean to the town about his financial secret?
“Breaking the Chain” had a really tough act to follow. Last night I read my favorite script of the year, “Hot Air” (about a talk show host who gets a visit from his teenage niece). The thing about that script was it was really in your face. Edgy. Intense.
Breaking The Chain was more of a “feel-good” script. It was warm and fuzzy around the edges. You knew everything was going to be all right in the end. And I don’t see anything wrong with that. Cameron Crowe and Richard Curtis made a living off these films. But when you go from a script where everyone’s acting realistically to one where everyone isn’t, it’s a hard switch to make.
Let me give you an example. There’s this character, Martin. He’s a bad alcoholic. Both us and Steve learn this in the very first scene. Later, Steve needs a business manager for his newfound wealth. All the other interviewees talk over his head. But when Martin comes in, he’s dumb, but down to earth. So Steve hires him.
That moment, where Steve hires Martin, is funny. I laughed. But after the laugh was over, I sat there thinking, “Is Steve really dumb enough to hire an alcoholic?” I mean he’s a gambling addict. He should know better than anyone how unreliable an addict is. And he’s now trusting him with his 3 million pounds? It didn’t make any sense other than to get that quick laugh.
There were plot choices that didn’t make sense to me either. For example, the first thing Steve does after he gets the money, is anonymously buy the store he works at before it can be sold off. I couldn’t figure out the logic behind this. He hated this store more than anything. Why would he want to buy it to continue working at it? I understand he must keep appearances up that he’s poor, but he doesn’t need to go through the hassle of buying and secretly running a store to do that, does he?
If any business was going to be on the verge of dying with Steve saving it, shouldn’t it have been the playhouse, since that’s where the real stakes were? His wife’s happiness?
Then there was Craig, who became a bigger part of the plot as the script went on. The problem with Craig was, he was so thin as a character, it was hard for me to see him as anything other than a cartoonish persona. When a character is too thin, the reader starts to see through him (call it “reader x-ray vision”) to the hand manipulating him underneath.
The more screenplays I read, the more I learn that every character in a story should have his weaknesses AND his strengths. Craig didn’t have any strengths, any redeeming qualities. And since the last 40% of the script depended heavily on him, it was hard for me to keep my disbelief suspended.
Now I don’t want to discredit what David’s done here. There’s a lot of good stuff in this screenplay. I loved his use of dramatic irony – We know our main character is manipulating everyone, is living a high-stakes lie – but nobody else does. And it was fun seeing if he was going to get away with it.
But I don’t know if I ever truly bought in to the premise. The thing with these scripts/movies is that the reader’s either going to buy into the premise, they’re not going to buy into it, or they’re going to straddle the line. If they don’t buy into it, you’re screwed. Nothing you write afterwards will matter.
But if you keep them on the fence, you have a shot at converting them. That’s where I was through the first half. I wanted to be pulled over. But once the Craig stuff took over, I just couldn’t commit. There was something too inauthentic about his character to me.
Still, I can see why this got recommended by The Tracking Board. It’s better than a ton of the amateur stuff out there. Everything just felt a little too loose, like the glue hadn’t hardened yet. The dad ending up in the hospital late, for example, didn’t seem like it had an appropriate setup. I saw in the comments section that David implemented some suggestions from the Scriptshadow community over the week. So maybe that’s the reason? He didn’t have time to solidify all this stuff? I’m not sure. I still like David’s writing. This one didn’t quite grab me the way I hoped it would, though.
Script link: Breaking The Chain
[ ] what the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Make sure your third-act climax is a payoff of your theme or your main character’s flaw (most of the time, these will be the same). The climax here focused on Steve’s worry that Sarah was going to cheat on him. That’s not the story we signed up for. The story we signed up for was a character who’s lying to his wife, and who then uses money to manipulate her (and the town’s) happiness. His lack of trust in Sarah was never mentioned anywhere until the final act, which is why the sudden focus on it didn’t make sense. – To make this work, you’d probably want Craig to represent the opposite of Steve. He would represent truth and trust, the things Steve hasn’t been able to give Sarah. That way, this ending stays on-theme. As a bonus, that would make Craig a more interesting character – if he’s actually a good guy. Or at least appears to be.
Today I want to talk about opening scenes. You guys have heard over and over again how important the opening ten pages is. That’s true. But I would actually scale it back further to the very first scene. Let me tell you why. Not only does the first scene have to engage the reader, but this is when the reader’s “are you any good” antennae is at its most sensitive. They’re looking at every little word, every little comma, every little detail, to see if you know what you’re doing. The more errors they see, or the more something feels off, the less confident they get in your ability to deliver. For example, if they see this sentence…
How you doing Jake?
Instead of this one…
How you doing, Jake? (with a comma before “Jake”)
…they get worried. Or if a writer uses some weird formatting structure they’ve never seen before, they get worried. If someone doesn’t know basic punctuation or screenplay formatting, how much effort have they really put in to learning how to write? Don’t worry, today’s article isn’t a glorified quiz on Strunk and White’s “The Elements of Style.” I just want to point out that every little detail matters. What I really want to focus on is writing an opening scene that PULLS THE READER IN.
Remember, a screenplay isn’t like a novel, where the reader goes in knowing they have to put in some groundwork to get to the good stuff. A Hollywood reader expects to be entertained right out of the gate. This doesn’t mean that all scripts will be like this. But the vast majority are.
A lot of writers hear this directive and fight it. “Well what if I’m writing a slow-burn drama?” they ask. “What am I supposed to do then? Start with a car chase that makes no sense within the context of my story, just so the reader pays attention?” No, that’s not what I’m asking here. To be honest, starting with a car chase can be just as boring as starting with two people talking, if it’s not constructed properly. What I’m looking for out of an opening scene is something that’s DRAMATIZED, something that pulls you in via the design of the scene.
Regardless of how you choose to do this, you should always try and jump into your story right away. If you’re making a movie about a killer shark, start with a shark attack. If you’re making a movie about a private investigator, give him a case immediately. If your movie’s about a killer asteroid, start with a stargazer who spots the asteroid in his telescope. You won’t always be able to do this, but you’ll notice from the movie examples I use below, almost all of them fit this criteria.
OPTION 1 – CONFLICT/TENSION
Write a scene using conflict or tension. Look at the opening of Fargo. A guy walks into a seedy bar and sits down opposite a couple of criminals. They immediately start arguing about what time everyone was supposed to be here. This argument leads into a second argument about money, which one side believes was supposed to be delivered today, while the other insists isn’t due until later. It’s a tense scene. — Now personally, I find conflict to be one of the weaker ways to start a story. Conflict works best after you’ve gotten to know the characters and understand their differences and WHY they clash. So if you’re going to use it in your opening, make sure you’re setting up your story as well. That way, you’re killing two birds with one stone. With Fargo, the opening is not only characters clashing, it’s setting up the kidnapping of our main character’s wife, which is the hook of the film.
OPTION 2 – SURPRISE
Use your opening scene to surprise the main character, the reader, or both. Look no further than Source Code and Buried. Source Code starts with our main character waking up in a train with no memory of how he got there. Same with Buried (a man wakes up in a coffin). Note that surprise can lead to mystery, which helps keep the reader hooked going forward. In Source Code, our hero has to figure out what he’s doing here, which fuels the next 10 scenes or so.
OPTION 3 – SHOCK
Using shock as a way to grab a reader can be cheap, but it can also be effective, as long as you’re not just shocking the reader to shock them, but rather setting up your story. Say we’re enjoying a family Christmas with the perfect upper middle-class family. Mother, father, son and daughter are all having a wonderful time opening presents. Then finally the dad turns off camera. “Your turn, Larry. Which present do you want us to open?” Slowly pan over to see Larry, a 17 year old retarded boy naked in a cage wearing a gimp mask, grunting strangely. Cut to black. Shock is perfect for horror films, but can be used in any genre. Maybe your star CEO protagonist who’s just closed the biggest merger in his company’s history gets called into the Board of Trustees where he thinks he’s getting a bonus. Instead, the Trustees sit him down and tell him he’s fired. That’s just as shocking. Well, okay, nothing’s as shocking as Larry the Christmas Gimp Child.
OPTION 4 – MYSTERY (CARSON’S PICK!)
Probably the best way to start a script is via mystery. That mystery can be paid off right there in the scene itself or it can be paid off later. In Back To The Future, Marty walks into Doc’s house, where we see the dog food has gone uneaten for days, there’s a box of plutonium under the bed, and Doc calls to say (in a hushed tone) he needs to see Marty later about something important. Are we going to keep reading? Of course we are! We want to find out how all those things come together. Or, you can create a mystery that pays off right there in the scene. In the above mentioned Fargo scene, in addition to the conflict between the characters, there’s a mystery as to why they’re all here. The Coens wisely don’t tell us right away, which is part of what keeps us hooked. Eventually, Carl says, “You really want us to do this? You want us to kidnap your wife?” And the mystery is answered.
OPTION 5 – SUSPENSE
There’s a little bit of an overlap between mystery and suspense, but essentially, with suspense, you set up a question then draw things out before giving your reader the answer. The more high stakes the question, the more powerful the scene will play. An obvious version of this is a pregnancy test. Show a nervous 17 year old girl sitting on a toilet. Push back to see she’s holding something under it while looking at a pregnancy test box. From this point, the suspense has started. She reads, “Wait 3 minutes,” on the box, gets up, flushes, and waits. Are we going to wait around to see what happens? Of course we are! We want to see if she’s pregnant. And we know that since she’s only 17, this is a big fucking deal. But the real fun in suspense is how you play with the scene(s) in order draw the suspense out! So maybe while our teen is waiting, her annoying MOM bursts into the bathroom. The girl immediately drops the pregnancy test in the garbage before her mom can see it. “Jesus, Mom, ever hear of knocking?” “Sorry dear, just cleaning.” Oh no! The girl watches in horror as the mom picks up the bathroom trash bin and dumps it into her trash bag and leaves! Our teenager then must wait until her mom takes the garbage out. Once she does, she races out and starts digging through the trash. Finally, she spots the test and grabs it. “You one of those freegans now?” comes a voice from behind. She turns around. It’s the hot guy from next door! She hides the test behind her. (Etc., etc. You get the idea).
OPTION 6 – UNCERTAINTY
If all else fails and none of these methods works for you, just come up with a scene where something is HAPPENING (characters are acting or being forced to react), then create a sense of uncertainty about what’s going to happen next. In Star Wars, a weird black-clad character in a cape sucks a tiny ship into his super-cruiser then invades the ship looking for something. Here, we have elements of mystery, of suspense, we’re meeting characters on both sides of the fray, but most importantly, everybody is acting or reacting. You see this same thing in the opening of The Matrix.
The biggest mistake I see in opening scenes (and really, opening acts) is writers SETTING UP their story instead of DRAMATIZING IT. The first few scenes will set up the town, the main characters, the rules. A lot of time, these openings are beautifully written, but they’re boring as hell because NOTHING’S HAPPENING. And by “nothing’s happening,” I mean there’s no drama. It’s just a bunch of description (of people, their lives, their places, their things). You have to introduce your world in a dramatized way if you want the reader to keep reading. In general, be wary of opening with any scene that has characters sitting or standing around talking. Preferably, they should be acting, trying to obtain something or going somewhere to do something important. Give them a purpose so that we’re immediately engaged in their pursuit. If you do want to start with people standing or sitting around, create a big mystery or use a lot of conflict. If you don’t, you could be in trouble.
Of course, there may be some things I’ve forgotten here. Anyone else have suggestions on how to open a screenplay? I’d love to hear them in the comments.
note: Been having trouble moderating. Some comments might not appear for awhile but they WILL appear at some point, I promise.
Genre: Thriller
Premise: After nearly dying in a car accident, a mechanic is given an experimental drug while in a coma. When he awakes, his IQ begins to skyrocket.
About: This is not the first Eric Heisserer/Ted Chiang collaboration. For those of you who get the newsletter, you’ll remember when I reviewed their previous collaboration, Story of Your Life (about an alien visitation that requires a linguist to help communicate with the ETs). The project has since secured Amy Adams for the lead role (she’s perfect) and Denis Villeneuve to direct. You may know Villeneuve as the director of another big spec script, Prisoners. Heisserer previously wrote The Thing remake and Final Destination 5. He’s since moved into directing, last year helming the Hurricane Katrina thriller, Hours, which starred Paul Walker.
Writer: Eric Heisserer (based on the short story by Ted Chiang)
Details: 116 pages (undated)
Ruffalo for David?
One of my favorite scripts from the last couple of years is Story Of Your Life. It took a big idea and approached it from a very intimate place. Sort of like M. Night’s “Signs,” but way better (and more original). As a screenwriter, this strategy is one of the best ways to get noticed, as you’re giving producers two things they want – a big concept and a story that can be shot on a reasonable budget.
But they’re not easy to write. Because of the tiny scope, the writer often ends up running out of engaging material. Look no further than one of the WORST movies I’ve seen this year, 2008’s Pontypoole (caught it on Netflix). It’s about a zombie outbreak that takes place entirely inside a radio DJ booth. Somewhere around minute 30, they ran out of stuff to do, and the rest was just, well, awful (they eventually figure out that the zombie outbreak is spread though…VOICE! So just by talking, the DJ is spreading the zombie virus! I’m not kidding!).
If you can prove yourself in that realm (your movie actually gets made), that’s when the gatekeepers trust you with a bigger budget. Which leads us to today’s script, the oddly titled, “Understand.”
30-something David Miller is a lowly car mechanic who, you get the feeling, hasn’t ended up where he thought he would. The one thing he’s got going for him is his beautiful wife, Lauren. One day after work, he picks her up and the two drive home like they always do.
Except before they get there, they get rear-ended into an icy river, where poor David watches his wife drift away. Three months later, David wakes up in a hospital room from a coma. He’s been told by his doctor that in order to get him out of the coma, they had to use an experimental drug.
As the days pass, David starts to feel smarter and starts craving knowledge. But this newfound intelligence comes with a price. The doctors won’t let David leave. Whatever this drug they injected him with is, it’s less about helping him and more about making him their lab rat.
The great thing about being super-smart though, is that you can outsmart the dumbos. And David’s able to escape with minimal effort. Once out in the wild, his intelligence continues to grow, allowing him to do things like learn Taekwando in the time it takes to check your e-mail and fly a Cessna plane with a three-minute prep course.
David quickly realizes why the doctors wanted to watch him so closely. David isn’t just becoming smart. He’s becoming a weapon.
Soon, David learns of a previous recipient of the drug he was given, another escapee named Vincent, who is a month ahead of him in the trials. Being one month ahead means having 30 additional days of intelligence growth. David may be a genius. But Vincent is the equivalent of 20 geniuses. David’s purpose shifts from eluding his pursuers (which now include the FBI) to stopping Vincent, who appears to be prepping an attack that could be the precursor to the end of the world as we know it.
“Understand” is a unique and entertaining piece of material. It’s sort of like Limitless meets The Bourne Identity meets Transcendence meets The Matrix meets Highlander. If there’s a hiccup in the script, it’s just that – it may be trying to do too many things.
For me, the script seemed to set itself up as an intimate thriller, possibly something that took place entirely in the hospital. Then, seemingly out of nowhere, it becomes a traditional “man on the run” Liam Neeson vehicle. It was during this section that I began to lose interest, since we’ve seen a bajillion of these thrillers already. The fact that the rapid-intelligence thing had been done fairly recently in Limitless didn’t help either.
But then Chiang and Heisserer start to get trippy, with David’s intelligence becoming so advanced that he can actually calculate where bullets are going to go before they’re shot, allowing him to dodge them (or, in some instances, deflect them with a knife blade).
However, once Vincent (the other super-smart guy) becomes David’s nemesis, the script almost becomes a super-hero movie, with the two fighting on top of buildings with super-advanced sparring skills. Heck, they eventually get so smart that they can move things with their minds, throwing yet another influence, Star Wars, into the mix.
What’s happening here is not a unique problem. Sometimes, for a reader to buy into a world, it requires the writer to slowly take us through the steps. In other words, it would be stupid if David could use telekinesis right away. But after we’ve seen him “level up” several times, it makes sense.
But if you take too long before introducing the REAL story (in this case, the emergence of Vincent and his diabolical plan), the reader can become confused. Oh, they say, I thought this was about a guy running away from the government. But it’s actually about a battle between two genius super-heroes.
The thing is, I mostly run into this problem with inexperienced writers who haven’t yet learned how to keep a consistent plot thread going for an entire script. They want to throw in new bells and whistles to keep your interest, not realizing that each one takes us further away from the original story we thought we were reading.
That’s not the problem with Eric’s script. He still knows what he’s doing so he makes it work. I just thought it felt a little unbalanced, with Vincent becoming this huge story agitator too late in the game.
The only other major observation I had was David’s job. David is a mechanic, which I thought was an odd choice since it had nothing to do with the story. There was ONE major payoff of him being a mechanic (he disabled the bad guy’s car), but if David is as smart as we’re led to believe, he should’ve been able to figure this out anyway.
We writers do this a lot. We absolutely LOVE a good payoff. But sometimes we love them so much that we’ll keep the setup to that payoff even if changing it would improve everything else in the screenplay BUT that payoff.
So say I was writing a comedy about an airplane pilot who can’t tell a lie for one day. The reason I made my main character a pilot? It’s a setup to an awesome payoff late in the script where my hero escapes the bad guys by hijacking a plane! Sure, that’s a nice payoff, but if I made my character, say, a lawyer instead, the setup would be a lot more ironic and lead to ton more funny scenes (Liar Liar). So you have to ask yourself, is keeping your main character a pilot so you can have that plane hijack scene really worth it?
I don’t think David being a mechanic is milking the irony of the situation enough. Flowers for Algernon (another “turn to genius” story) made its main character mentally retarded so that the irony level was high when he became smart. I don’t think that’s right for this particular script, but maybe they could do what Good Will Hunting did and make David a low level worker at a place known for the high intelligence level of its employees, like a giant bank or a huge trading firm.
By no means is going with a mechanic a bad choice. I just think if you can milk the irony of a concept, you do it. As a screenwriter, you don’t want to leave any stone unturned when you write a script. Always try to get the best out of every single element.
Anyway, “Understand” was a little schizophrenic but extremely well-written and moved at a speed-train like pace. The weird second half turn did throw me, but it also kept me off-balance, so I didn’t know what would happen next. I’d recommend this one if you can find it!
[ ] what the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[x] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
Number of times I checked the internet during read: 7
What I learned: Ahhh, I do not like numbered montages.
1) Frank works at his desk.
2) Frank and Sara sit at home, reading.
3) Frank goes fishing with his buddies.
4) Frank back at his desk, working.
I’m a big believer in keeping the writing as invisible as possible. The idea is to make someone forget they’re reading so they’re always immersed in your story. Anything you do to disrupt that reminds them it’s just a big fake made-up story. So seeing montages (long ones at that) that were numbered here, took me out of the screenplay. I was more focused on the “shot number” than the images themselves. With that said, Eric may be directing this or writing it for a director. In that case, maybe he wanted to know the specific shots he would have to get.
Genre: TV Pilot – Drama
Premise: The son of an Arab dictator, Barry has fled his past and built a life in the United States. But when his father calls him back for his nephew’s wedding, he will ask Barry to come back into the family.
About: This upcoming FX show has a complicated backstory. The Hollywood Reporter did a wonderful piece on it recently that gets into a lot of the details. Basically, the guys behind Showtime’s breakout show, Homeland, went to market with their next project, Tyrant, and started a bidding war with FX winning due to an on-air commitment. Since then, the writing team, Howard Gordon and Gideon Raff, have split up, due to disagreements over the show’s direction, that eventually led to Raff (the less experienced of the two) leaving. This seems to go back even further, as Raff is the one who came up with Homeland, but had zero day-to-day involvement with the show itself, which, it’s implied, Gordon resented.
Writer: Gideon Raff (executive produced by Howard Gordon, Craig Wright and Gideon Raff)
Details: 68 pages – November 27, 2012
After reading that Hollywood Reporter piece, I was wondering if I could read this pilot objectively. On the one hand, it sounds like they’d repurposed the show seven times before it finally hit the cameras, then added two more for good measure! So you’re thinking, there must have been a lot wrong with it.
On the other hand, you’re rooting for the underdog tale of the little show that could. Tyrant has so many things working against it – the biggest of which is, will an American audience care about a show centering around a Middle Eastern family? – that you can’t help but hope that it beats the odds and succeeds.
Of course, the terrifying reality of the entertainment business is that the bored consumer who’s just jostled through a 14-hour work day and put the kids to bed, doesn’t give a shit about how your show (or movie) came to be. They could care less that you had Ang Lee and lost him, or that the show had to be moved to five different countries to shoot. All they care about is if it’s a good show or not. Well, if they stay close to the pilot draft I just read, Tyrant isn’t going to be good. It’s going to be great.
40 year-old Barry is a struggling optometrist who works out of a ratty mini-mall in Orlando. Barry has a secret though. His family runs the country of Asima (a fictional stand-in for a Middle Eastern country), and are some of the richest people in the world. You get the feeling that if Barry left that life for this one? There’s gotta be a damn good story there.
Barry’s married to an American woman, Molly, and has two teenagers, the artsy 17 year-old Emma and the excitable 15 year-old Sammy. Unfortunately for Barry, his brother’s son, who lives back in Asima, is getting married, and even Barry, with his myriad of excuses, can’t get out of this one.
So he and the family fly to Asima where they meet the family Barry grew up with. There’s the father and president/dictator of the country, Hassan. Then there’s Barry’s older evil brother, Jamal. The Ferrari-driving philandering Jamal is probably the most evil person you’ll ever see on TV – he rapes underage women with guards in the room to make sure he’s not attacked, he molests his son’s fiancée, and he orders death to anyone who opposes him.
It’s clear Jamal doesn’t want Barry here, which is fine by Barry, ’cause he wants to get out of Asima as soon as possible.
Barry’s son, Sammy, however, can’t get enough of Asima. Instead of living in the strip-mall dominated middle-class suburbs, he’s hanging out in a palace! Not only that, but the brash, confident Jamal is everything Sammy wished his own father could be, and he immediately sees him as a role model. Oh, but Sammy has a secret. He’s gay. And in a world where homosexuality is punishable by death, maybe staying in Asima isn’t the best idea.
I think we all see where this is going. Barry’s father unexpectedly falls ill, and the family has no choice but to discuss who gets the throne once he dies. Everyone assumes it’ll be Jamal, of course, but Hassan shocks everyone when he says he wants Barry to succeed him. Barry wants nothing to do with leading this corrupt country, though. He wanted to get out of here yesterday. The problem is, it may not be up to him anymore.
Okay, let’s just get something out of the way first. This IS The Godfather, the Arab version. We have a wedding, we have a dying leader. A reluctant heir is chosen. I mean, it’s not a beat for beat remake or anything. But it’s the same auditorium with the seats rearranged. The thing is, it didn’t matter. Because it was awesome.
When you’re talking about TV shows, you’re talking about interpersonal conflict – conflict between characters. Since you don’t have the advantage feature films have (huge exterior conflicts to drive the drama like reptilian giants, robots, Loki, Apes), the best way to keep the drama flowing is via conflict between characters.
For that reason, you want one main heavy conflict duo you can keep coming back to. In Breaking Bad, it’s Walter White and Jesse Pinkman. Here, it’s Barry and his brother, Jamal. Not only is Jamal the most evil person in existence, but he has a completely different idea of how to rule the country from Barry. Barry wants to rule through diplomacy. Jamal wants to rule through terror. On top of that, you have a deep history between the two and you have their basic sibling rivalry. As a result, every scene they’re in together is potent.
Speaking of Barry, I loved the complication behind his character. See, when you write a character, you don’t want to craft him too heavily in one direction. Well-constructed characters are complicated. They have other sides to them than the side they generally show the world.
(spoiler) In Tyrant, there’s a series of flashbacks of Barry and Jamal as children. Jamal is athletic and tough. Barry is nerdy and withdrawn. In the pilot’s final scene, their father wants a seemingly innocent man killed, and he asks Young Jamal to do it. Young Jamal points the gun, but he’s too scared to pull the trigger and runs away. As the father goes to deal with this, Young Barry picks up the gun and shoots the man five times. Barry may be against the way his father rules the country, but when he’s called upon to make complicated decisions, he delivers.
Now, since we know that Barry has the capacity to be bad, there’s an unpredictability to him that’s exciting. I think it’s always more interesting if we’re not sure what a character is going to do from situation to situation. Think about it. How boring is it if a character always does the right thing? Or always does the wrong thing? It’s when you’re unsure that the scene is truly charged. Pay attention to “The Governor” in Seasons 3 and 4 of The Walking Dead to see how effective this approach can be.
I’m not sure what this says about Jamal though. This guy is so over-the-top bad and if there’s one criticism I had with the screenplay, it’s that Jamal is so two-dimensional. I’m betting that this is one of the first things they addressed moving forward though.
Another thing Tyrant did well was it made sure there were a lot of memorable moments in the pilot. It’s rare that I see one inventive or original scene in a pilot these days – something you truly haven’t seen before, but Tyrant had 5-6 of them. (spoilers) There was the bite-off-dick scene, the molestation of the daughter-in-law scene, the Young Barry shoots a man dead scene. Raff was not afraid to push the boundaries and write some pretty boundary-pushing stuff.
In another great scene, Barry’s family gets on the their plane to go to Asima, only to find out it’s completely deserted. Barry learns that his brother has bought up every seat on the plane for them. Sammy is thrilled. He flops down in first class, thinking this is the greatest thing ever. What does Barry do? He heads right back to seat 18c in Coach, the seat he was assigned to.
That’s what really sets Tyrant apart. Not only was this a memorable scene, but it used the scene to TELL YOU ABOUT THE CHARACTERS. By staying in his assigned Coach seat, Barry shows us how much disdain he has for his family and the way they go about things. Whereas by showing Sammy take a first class seat, we know he will be susceptible to the excesses of his grandfather’s family.
Will all this mean a big hit? I don’t know. I don’t know how much Gordon has changed the script. And we still don’t know if an American audience will care to watch a show about an Arab family. But I sure hope they do. This series has the potential to be a classic. Without a doubt, I’ll be checking it out when it airs. This is the most excited I’ve been for a TV series in forever.
[ ] what the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[x] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: When you write a TV pilot, you’re trying to set up as many little threads of conflict as you possibly can, so that the people watching the show will want to tune in week after week to see how those conflicts play out. If you don’t set up any threads of conflict, nobody will care about your show. Nobody will want to see the next episode. I guarantee it. So here, we have the base conflict between Barry and Jamal. We have conflict between Barry and his son (who doesn’t like his father’s style of ruling). We have conflict between Barry and the country he’s ruling. We have conflict with Sammy being gay, and how dangerous being gay is in this country. Barry’s daughter hates the country and doesn’t want to be here. Barry has a former girlfriend he still holds a candle for who’s now married to Jamal. Barry’s wife finds out about this, setting up a conflict between these two women. Probably the biggest conflict of all will be between Barry and himself. Much like how Walter White struggled with his moral compass as a drug dealer/family man, Barry will struggle with all the morally questionable decisions he’ll have to make as a dictator. You look at the future of this show and it’s just drowning in unresolved conflict, which is exactly the way you want it to be.
It’s Monday morning and the talk of the town is how a little movie about cancer kids beat Tom Cruise in the middle of Blockbuster Season. The little film that could (The Fault In Our Stars) grossed 48 million to Tommy Boy’s (Edge of Tomorrow) paltry 28 million. That’s not just a beating. That’s a slaughter. Twenty years ago – heck, even ten years ago – this never would’ve happened. So why is it happening now? Anybody who tells you they know for sure is a liar. And I don’t know either. But what’s so interesting about this particular battle is that there are a ton of factors involved. And they’re all so damn juicy that I can’t wait to get to them!
1) Is Tom Cruise a movie star anymore?
If you’re going to put your money on one horse for Tomorrow’s lackluster showing, it’s probably that Cruise isn’t a movie star anymore. His last three films (Oblivion, Jack Reacher, Rock of Ages) failed to hit 100 million here in the States. Whether this has to do with Cruise getting older, Cruise going through his crazy streak, or people just losing interest in the actor isn’t clear. But it’s looking like his glory days are over. The question is, is this representative of a much larger trend?
2) Is the movie star dead?
As people stood on the hilltops and claimed the death of the movie star these last few years, I didn’t buy it. But a look at this year’s crop of summer films says otherwise. From X-Men to Godzilla to Spider-Man 2 to Rise of the Apes. The star in all these movies is the property. The owners of these properties then plug in the casting holes with whomever they deem worthy. You’re seeing less and less movies being made like Die Hard, where the star’s the star. With that being said, this is mostly (at least for now) a symptom of the summer season. As we get into the last quarter of the year and ACTING is actually required to make the movie good, movie stars are needed. How long that lasts, we will have to see.
3) Was the concept too weird?
Even though I loved the script for Tomorrow, the one thing I worried about was whether a mass audience would buy into the concept. I get nervous when you mash two big ideas into a single film, because, typically, audiences will only buy into one. They can accept aliens invading. They can accept time-travel. But can they accept an alien time-travel movie? I’m still not sure.
4) The title sucked.
I don’t talk about movie titles much because it’s one of the most objective parts of the business. But if Hollywood isn’t given a property that already has a name, they almost always fuck it up. “Edge of Tomorrow??” What the hell does that even mean?? It’s the most generic title ever and reeks of compromise. Edge of Tomorrow dudes, let me help you out here. When you have a property that nobody knows about and you’re trying to compete against properties (X-Men, Spider-Man) that have been around for decades?? You don’t want a title that’s going to make you MORE invisible. You have to take a chance and use something that stands out. The script’s original title, “All You Need Is Kill,” would’ve been so much better. It’s way edgier, and probably would’ve brought in more of the key demo you wanted – teenagers.
5) Does this fuck things up even further for spec writers?
While “All You Need is Kill” was based on a graphic novel, for the most part, it was a spec script. Nobody knew about the graphic novel. And it was written on spec (and sold for a million bucks). With the failures of high-profile specs this year like Transcendence, Draft Day and now, to a lesser extent, Edge of Tomorrow, is Hollywood going to be further terrified of betting on non-IP? Also, if the movie star system is dead, what are screenwriters supposed to write about now? It used to be, write a male lead inside a marketable genre. If that’s gone, and the studios are only dealing with high-profile IP anyway, then what’s the strategy of the average screenwriter? Should he even write original material anymore? Will it be like TV used to be, where you write a spec episode of your favorite show? So writers would write a feature in a long-standing franchise, like X-Men or Batman, in order to break in? Probably not, but it’s not clear where this is going yet. So we’ll need time to figure it out.
6) Did Fault really win the weekend?
Ah-ha, now we get to the part of the box office that the media still hasn’t figured out yet. Fault did beat Tomorrow at the domestic box office, but it’s not going to come anywhere NEAR Tomorrow internationally. Tomorrow has already racked up 80 million dollars internationally, putting it at 110 worldwide. When it’s all said and done, it should make close to 300 million. Fault will be lucky to make half that. The thing is, for the last 20 years, the media has put so much focus on domestic, they still think that’s the race to talk about. They understand that race. But movies make more overseas now than they do at home. Sometimes a hell of a lot more. But how do you write that definitive worldwide box office column when one of the key movies hasn’t even hit all of the available territories? It’s kind of a confusing byline (“Edge of Tomorrow maybe won the world box office this weekend…as it was in 65% of the territories but hasn’t hit the major European circuit yet and still hasn’t bowed in Peru, where Tom Cruise is enormous” doesn’t have the same ring to it as “Shailene takes down Tom!”). Since the domestic box office is definitive, I’m guessing they’ll continue to use it in stories. But at some point, this has to change.
7) People still read?
Probably one of the most confusing things about the modern-day box office is this whole reading thing. Studio heads, executives and producers claim the sky is falling because young people don’t want to spend two hours to see movies anymore when they can play on the internet, watch all that awesome TV, and play video games. It sure sounds logical, except that one of Hollywood’s biggest sources of income over the last 15 years has been book series adaptations. Harry Potter, Twilight, Hunger Games, Divergent, now Fault in our Stars. Movies are becoming antiquated but people still have time to engross themselves in a 2000 year old medium for 10 hours a story? Clearly, if people are spending that much time reading to the tune of adding billions of dollars to the box office, producers can’t bitch that it’s getting too hard to compete for people’s time.
8) Cancer curse.
Hollywood is TERRIFIED of cancer. People don’t want to be reminded of death when they go to the movies. They generally want to be happy. They want to be reminded of why life’s awesome. So how did Fault in Our Stars overcome that prejudice? Well, partly because it IS a movie about life’s awesomeness. The characters here have a lot of fun together. It goes to some dark places, but for the most part, there’s lots of positive energy here. The reason it beat the curse though is because it’s a really well-told story. It’s got a nice narrative drive (with the Amsterdam goal) and the characters rarely do or say the obvious thing, which gave it a fresh feel. The thing is, it was able to prove this in book form first, so people already knew it was good. I’d go so far as to say this wouldn’t have made 10 million opening weekend if it wasn’t a book first. I’ll say this though. I’ve never seen a movie this aggressively market itself as a cancer flick and do so well.
9) Tomorrow is good!
The big tragedy here is that Edge of Tomorrow is a really good movie! Not that I can say that myself yet (I was home sick all weekend), but a dozen site readers e-mailed me to say it was awesome, some going so far as to say it was the best movie they’ve seen all year. Usually, when a movie’s good, even if it doesn’t open well, it’ll make up for it with a long healthy run. But Edge of Tomorrow is planted right smack dab in the middle of the Summer Season, where even monstrous movies can disappear on their second weekend. Then again, it’s only real demographic competition the next two weeks is 22 Jump Street and Jersey Boys, and neither of those films directly crosses over with Tomorrow. So let’s hope that word-of-mouth spreads and the movie rebounds. If not, it might be the fault in Tom Cruise’s star.
