This is your chance to discuss the week’s amateur scripts, offered originally in the Scriptshadow newsletter. The primary goal for this discussion is to find out which script(s) is the best candidate for a future Amateur Friday review. The secondary goal is to keep things positive in the comments with constructive criticism.

Below are the scripts up for review, along with the download links. Want to receive the scripts early? Head over to the Contact page, e-mail us, and “Opt In” to the newsletter.

Happy reading!

TITLE: The Sleeper
GENRE: Political Thriller
LOGLINE: When a lobbyist’s daughter is kidnapped by a rogue group of protesters attempting to get a bill passed his clients vehemently detest, he must find those responsible before his life spirals out of control.
WHY YOU SHOULD READ: Something interesting? I’ll leave you with a quote from a reader on The Blacklist who recently read this: “THE SLEEPER features a taut, propelling pace that makes for a page-turning thriller, and its political themes ground the proceedings in a prescient sense of reality that prevents the story from becoming rote spectacle. Nicholas is an intriguingly flawed protagonist whose dueling desires to both rescue Alison and protect his own career create a fantastic moral quandary that makes him both endearing and morally questionable.”

TITLE: The Fearless Advocacy of the Truth
GENRE: Real life thriller
LOGLINE: The true story of a provincial lawyer seeking to uncover the truth that will ultimately bring down Britain’s biggest newspaper.
WHY YOU SHOULD READ: “If you do have a high BOI [burden of investment], you better have one whopper of a story” – Carson Reeves

Maybe I shouldn’t have chosen the man who owns 21st Century Fox as the villain for my first screenplay, but I think this is a story that deserves to be told. I think this is a whopper of a story.

During the summer of 2011, News International was engulfed in a fire-storm thanks to the phone hacking revelations. I became fascinated by the series of barely believable discoveries, and the actions of one man in particular – lawyer Mark Lewis. This is a script that has a burden of investment, but one which I hope ultimately makes the chain of events that lead to the revelations all the more rewarding. And if not, it also features Prince William rapping to Jay Z.

TITLE: Vampire Rabbits
GENRE: Elevated B-movie Horror
LOGLINE: A whole year after a research rabbit, genetically engineered with the DNA of a vampire bat, escapes from a secluded laboratory-facility, it returns with its spawn, looking for blood.
WHY YOU SHOULD READ: Because I’ve taken this premise and elevated the shit out of it… this is not your average ‘creature feature’, this is a greater work of art, taking all the genre conventions associated with ‘B’ movie horror and illuminating it into something special, something that soars, while also challenging perceptions of this maligned genre with its deeper questions, and profound execution, capturing the spirit of what horror once was, and could still be, it’s so much more about great ideas, and fantastic imagination, than the bleak human suffering we’re served up today in horror. This script is also very topical in its nature, exploring important themes of scientific responsibility, as well as our attitudes to animal welfare and what we’re willing to accept in the pursuit of this science. But of course at its heart this is a horror script, and it’s spooky as hell, imaginative at a level savant, and getting never ending mileage from its brilliant premise. It also features an exciting, volatile, chemistry from its great cast of characters, all with their own conflicting agendas and clashing personalities, this driving the story to an explosive never seen before climax. This is a script of the greatest potential, something that’s worth taking the time to read through and experience for yourself.
P.S. Here’s a cool graphic to go with the script!

TITLE: Black Autumn
GENRE: Found Footage Horror
LOGLINE: A WikiLeaks-type website reveals classified footage of a Marine unit’s horrific encounter with a vampire in the wilds of 1971 Vietnam.

WHY YOU SHOULD READ: They say found footage is dead. I’m hoping the rumors of its demise are slightly exaggerated. This is my first crack at the ff genre, and I found the format to be quite challenging. I tried my best to avoid the common pitfalls of found footage scripts, and write a story with a good mix of action and horror.

TITLE: Firewake
GENRE: Science Fiction, Fantasy, Thriller, Animation
LOGLINE: An uptight detective unicorn and his rookie partner must fight corrupt bosses and deadly minions when their loved ones are kidnapped by a psychotic mastermind on a quest for world domination.
WHY YOU SHOULD READ: I miss the heydays of the action cartoon, and the non-superhero action movie. It’s my dream to create something full of kick-butt action, or at least help others to do so. This is an attempt at doing just that (and I’ve got others down as well, including an unrelated animated pilot that scored a 7 on the Black List).

Yes, it’s a movie about talking unicorns. Wait, don’t go just yet! It’s a movie about talking unicorns that fight a psychotic and godlike villain – and his numerous minions – while rescuing loved ones. In the course of the rescue, not only do they use awesome spells, but also laser guns and flying cars. The weakest of the minions are robot wolves, to boot.

Ambitious? Yes. Maybe a little too much. But it’s a script I absolutely loved working on, and a script I loved revising. I learned quite a bit while writing this, and hope to learn even more from you and Scriptshadow commenters.

Something tells me this guy isn’t ready yet.  

Knowing when you’re ready to take that step into the professional world of screenwriting is important. Over time, you will accumulate contacts and relationships in the industry (even if it’s just a friend of a friend of a producer). And the last thing you want to do is burn those contacts by giving them a script that sucks. Every writer I know has done this (I’ve done it several times myself) mainly due to impatience. We want to sell a script NOW NOW NOW. The devastating thing about this mistake is that you usually lose that contact for life. No matter what you do, you can’t change someone’s mind who thinks you’re a shitty writer.

Now I don’t like to use that term (shitty writer). I prefer “writers who aren’t ready yet,” which is the theme of this post. How do you know if you’re ready? Well, we’ve talked about this before, but I wanted to get into a little more detail, since understanding where you’re at in the process is nearly impossible to be objective about. Everyone thinks they’re ready TODAY. And I hope you are! But if you find yourself agreeing to a few of these statements, you may need to spend some more time in the minor leagues before you’re called up. Below are ten signs that you’re not ready for a professional screenwriting career just yet.

1) You’ve never showed your script to anyone – I’m surprised by just how many writers haven’t shown their work to anyone (friends, fellow writers, family). One of the biggest keys to writer improvement is feedback. People knock the development system all the time, but the development system lets the writers know what’s working and what isn’t. You need that help as well.  I guess I understand the fear component here. Writers are terribly insecure people. “What if I’m bad?” they wonder. “What if they tell me my script’s unreadable?” But that’s the wrong way to look at it. Screenwriting should be seen as a continual learning experience where you’re always getting better. The sooner you know what you’re doing wrong, the sooner you can correct it. So send your script to a friend, to another screenwriter, to me. But in order to really move forward with your screenwriting, you have to take that first step.

2) You’ve only written one script – People who only write one script don’t really learn screenwriting. They learn how to write one script. Every script you write is unique and expands your skills and knowledge as a storyteller. Many of the things you learn from successive scripts, you’ll be able to apply back to your earlier scripts, creating a “kill two birds with one stone” scenario. Plus, the more screenplays you have, the more marketable you are as a writer. Every once in awhile, you’ll see an exception to this (Craig in last week’s Amateur Friday), but man are those exceptions rare.

3) Screenwriting is something you do casually – Recently, I met this producer who had an insane work ethic. He was always reading a new book, flying to a new festival, optioning a new script, setting up a new TV show. I was amazed by this and asked him what his secret was. He said that when he first got here, he hung out with a really successful producer who never sat still. And he asked him the same question. The producer pointed out that it’s so competitive in this industry, that unless you are giving 110% at all times, you will be crushed. That’s when he realized that only the strong survived. It’s the same thing with screenwriting. You’re competing against tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of other writers. You have no choice but to outwork them if you’re going to survive. True, not everyone has an infinite amount of time, but if you’re serious about breaking in, you better be using all of your free time to write, read, or study.

4) You’ve entered at least four contests and haven’t placed in any (and by “place,” I mean top 5%) – If you don’t place in a single screenplay competition, you can chalk it up to you and a reader not seeing eye to eye. Four competitions though? That means your writing isn’t up to snuff yet. To add some context, the biggest screenwriting competition in the world, Nicholl, has 7000 entries. 5 of those win, and rarely do any of them go on to sell. That’s less than .1% of the entries. Which aren’t even good enough to compete in the Hollywood market. So if you’re not in the top 5% of a contest, you still have work to do. But don’t fret. Again, think of screenwriting as a constant learning process. Expand your screenwriting knowledge, read more screenplays, watch more movies, then write more scripts. Don’t fret. You WILL continue to get better.

5) You’re driven only by money – Writers who are driven by money tend to write hollow scripts. The reality is, this isn’t the 90s anymore where writers ruled the roost and got a million bucks for a logline. The market has cooled down considerably. Truth be told, most of the writers who give up are the ones who were driven by money and, after writing three Taken or Hangover clones that didn’t sell, convince themselves that the industry is run by nepotism and hightail it back to Oklahoma. The reality is, the people who tend to make it are people who love movies and love telling stories. They are people who want to say something about the world, but say it within the confines of a marketable premise. What I find is that a lot of people come here wanting to sell a million dollar spec, then somewhere along the way, fall in love with the medium and want to learn everything about it. Usually, when they make this mental transition, is when they start to succeed. Do we hope one day to make a living writing? Sure. Would it be nice if the profession helped us buy a house in the hills? Of course. But that shouldn’t be why you’re writing. You should be writing because you can’t think of any other thing you’d rather be doing with your life.

6) You don’t believe – I just did an entire article about this. If you don’t believe in yourself, you are perpetuating a self-fulfilling prophecy which will result in you eventually giving up. I promise you. In many ways, the key to success in any field is belief, because without it, why would one press on? Sometimes I’ll encounter a writer who bitches about lesser writers having agents or who complains that the industry is rigged. I have to remind them not to focus on that nonsense. It’s all noise and has nothing to do with you. The industry is no different from life. It is what you make of it. If you believe that it’s rigged, you’ll focus on getting screwed. If you work hard, dedicate yourself, continue to create, and are positive and respectful towards others, opportunities will present themselves. I promise you!

7) You’re a comedy writer who hasn’t studied screenwriting extensively – Comedy scripts signify the epitome of how the outside world views screenwriting. They think screenwriting is easy. And they think being funny is easy. Therefore there is little to no effort from these writers to actually LEARN THE CRAFT. Comedy screenwriting is a lot like stand-up. It LOOKS easy. But that’s only because the people who do it have been working at it so hard. Jonah Hill, who I think is one of the funniest actors around, had to do stand-up for Funny People. He said he was TERRIBLE. He rambled. Nothing he said got a laugh. He realized that there’s a real craft to setting up and executing jokes that takes time to hone and perfect. The same thing is true for screenwriting. To those genuinely funny people out there who want to write comedy scripts – I promise you – If you dedicate your life to learning the craft of screenwriting (structure, character empathy, character flaw, character conflict, escalating tension, sequencing, stakes, purpose, urgency, theme, etc.), you will be unstoppable. There are so few genuinely funny comedy writers out there who know how to write a good story. The ones who do come up with stuff like The Hangover. The ones who don’t come up with stuff like Jack and Jill.

8) You don’t yet understand what “show don’t tell” means – “Show don’t tell” is one of the first things you learn in screenwriting. Instead of characters saying things, you use actions or images to convey those things instead.  If you don’t master this technique, you’ll receive one of the worst critiques a writer can hear on their script: “It all felt so… on-the-nose.”  It starts with dialogue. Instead of a character saying “I think we should break up,” have them standing by the door with their stuff packed up in suitcases holding out their apartment key. “Show don’t tell” also extends to descriptions. I can’t stand reading lines like, “Joe is elated.” This is boring, sloppy, and un-cinematic. Show us this feeling instead! For instance, Joe could pump his fist or high five a random stranger. And did you know you could even use dialogue to “show don’t tell?” For example, instead of Frank, who has a crush on Mary, telling her, “I’m nervous,” you could have him babble on nonsensically about how he adores penguins. The ACTION of babbling implies nervousness, so he doesn’t have to say it directly. Pro writers are way more adept at showing actions, and therefore this is one of the easiest ways to distinguish amateur from professional screenplays.

9) You focus more on the surface of your script than what’s happening underneath – Flashy description, mystery boxes, surprise revelations, clever dialogue, unexpected twists. These things are all great, but they’re all surface level. To provide a truly rich reading experience, you need to focus on what goes on underneath the surface. Show your hero battling something internally (an inability to love due to fear of rejection), your characters conveying their feelings between the lines (subtext), make a statement about people or life via a recurring theme (“Seize the day”– Ferris Bueller’s Day Off). Understanding plot is incredibly important. But it’s just the first part of the journey. Your scripts really start to resonate once they say something about your characters and about the world they/we live in.

10) You’re not confident in your writing – Have you ever heard someone say, “Wow, the writing in that script was so confident?” It’s kind of intimidating. “Well wait a minute,” you ask. “Do I write with confidence?” Typically, if you’re asking that question, the answer is no. That’s okay. It just means you haven’t developed your writing method yet. A writer’s method is born out of all the screenwriting books (or sites) he’s studied, out of all the scripts he’s read (what he’s liked, what he’s hated), and out of all the trial and error that’s gone into his own screenplays. He uses this knowledge and experience to develop a method (an approach) that works best for him. Once a writer has a method, their scripts really take on a confidence that was previously absent. This is why the combination of reading, writing, and studying is so powerful.

Wow, that list is kind of intense. So let me be clear. I’m not saying you have to be 10 out of 10 here. But if you’re looking up at this and going, “Oh boy, I’m guilty of most of these,” then you probably want to take a step back and study screenwriting for six months. Dedicate yourself to being a scholar of the medium. There are so many books out there, and a lot of them are so good (including my own!), there’s really no excuse not to educate yourself and put your best foot forward.

Oh, but there’s one last question I wanted to address. What if you’ve already done all this? What if you’ve been writing for 10-15 years and you’re still struggling? What’s the plan then? Well, first, look in the mirror and ask yourself if you still love writing. As long as the answer’s yes, there’s no reason to stop. Writing is one of the most convenient extracurricular activities you can do. So there’s no reason to stop unless you hate it.

The next step is being honest with yourself about a harsh reality: WHAT YOU’VE BEEN DOING SO FAR ISN’T WORKING. Once you’ve accepted that, my advice would be to knock down the house and start all over again. I was reading Peter Bart’s comments over on Deadline this week and he noted that when TV started to pull away market share from movie theaters in the 60s, the studios were freaking out. They realized they were delivering the same old crap and the audiences weren’t buying it anymore. So they basically tore down the whole industry and said to its creators, “There are no rules anymore. Go do what you want.” And that’s how we ended up with the second Golden era of cinema with all those great innovative 70s films. You need to do the same thing. You’ve studied screenwriting long enough to understand all the tropes. You know the formulas. So you’re probably the most qualified to break away from them and try something different (or, if you’ve been trying something different all these years, maybe it’s time to try a more traditional approach). Good luck to you. And good luck to everyone else pursuing this heart-wrenching but wonderful craft. Every day you write, you’re one step closer to the finish line. ☺

Genre: Drama-Comedy
Premise: In a dimension where turtle people are movie stars and miniaturized people fight to the death, a speed-addicted alcoholic gambling private investigator must find out who kidnapped a miniature pop star.
About: This script was on The Black List all the way back in 2007. Since then, co-writer Tom Kuntz has gone on to be one of the most successful commercial directors in the business (he did that famous Old Spice ad with the guy walking around without a shirt). He also directed 2008’s The Onion Movie. Currently, I can’t find anything on co-writer Griffin Creech. Hope he’s still around!
Writer: Griffin Creech and Tom Kuntz
Details: June 8th, 2007 draft (126 pages)

Devito for Turtle Man?  I think so!

Turtle Man!

Half-turtle. Half man.

That’s all you need to know going into this one.

Actually, that’s not true. FWIW, I read The 37th Dimension 6 years ago. Believe it or not, it was once in my Top 25. Of course, back then I hadn’t read many scripts, but still. It was different. It was weird. It was the kind of script you still thought about after you put it down.

But the kinds of scripts I respond to today are different. I’m less impressed with flashy gadget-y scripts with a bag full of tricks and nothing else. I need some meat. There was this script called Fiasco Heights, for example, that wowed the reader out of me, purely because of its writing style. But that doesn’t happen much anymore. These days I need depth, I need character, I need something to dig my teeth into. Always a challenge in the minimalistic writing arena that is a screenplay.

So, naturally, I was curious what this new Carson would think of The 37th Dimension. Especially because I spend most of my time in this lame-o 7th Dimension. Take a trip with me 30 floors up, will you?

TOP 40 (that’s the name of a character by the way) is a beautiful pop star who just happens to be 10% the size of a regular person. Upon making a private appearance with a Japanese businessman, the businessman starts masturbating, leading to her trying to escape. But all of a sudden the lights go off, and when they come back on again, Top 40 is gone.

Enter Smith Dangerous Smith, a talented private investigator who see-saws between speed and booze to make it through what his more optimistic brethren refer to as “life.” He’s brought into Top 40’s music label to handle the case. See, it appears that whoever kidnapped Top 40, is now demanding a 20 million dollar ransom for her. Since Smith owes 700 grand to a gang of Haitian bookies, he agrees to the case faster than Selena Gomez breaks up and gets back together with Justin Bieber.

I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention Turtle Man, an advanced age half-turtle, half-man, who also happens to be a great actor. Well, WAS a great actor. Now he’s lucky to get a car dealership commercial. So upon backing his car up, ironically, into the van of those Haitian gangsters, he finds himself the recipient of the wrong kind of attention. They follow him home, try to kill him, only to see him duck into his turtle shell. Such is the goings-on of the 37th Dimension.

Also occurring in this dimension are 10% super ultimate fighter fights. This is when these 10% mini-people fight each other in a match to the death. J.T. Monahan, a Texas billionaire, carries the best of these fighters, Champ, around in a bowling bag. They’re so close that he even lets Champ watch him have sex (from his bag), which his lady friends naturally find kind of weird.

Smith, in the meantime, vacillates between getting utterly blasted and following up leads, which typically lead nowhere. From the Japanese man Top 40 did a private show for, to the little people collector, J.T. Burnham, to a plastic surgery doctor who’s so good he does his boob jobs in the back of his Bentley (which has built-in anesthesia) – everywhere he looks turns out to be a bust. When the music company bumps up the pressure and the Haitians start threatening death, it’ll be up to Smith Dangerous Smith to work a miracle and save Top 40 before it’s too late.

Depp for Smith Dangerous Smith? Double thinks so!

This is how you do crazy.

A couple of weeks ago, I reviewed “The Lobster,” which was a mess from its pincher-shaped beginning to its crustaceous end. The rules were murky. The urgency was non-existent. It wasn’t even clear what our main character was trying to do other than stumble around his hotel and avoid getting in trouble.  That’s not how you do crazy.

The best way to do crazy is to add non-crazy. In other words, you need a “normal” spine to hang crazy on. If you try to hang crazy on top of crazy, the spine won’t hold. There’s too much weirdness and everything buckles.

So yeah, even though we have a turtle man, Top 40, fight-to-the-death little people matches and weird Haitians (delightful bad guys, who are asked by Turtle Man, “What are you doing here?!” when they break into his house. Their answer? A polite, “Clearly we have gained unauthorized access to your dwelling.”), it works because they orbit around a stable narrative: Smith Dangerous Smith is trying to find and rescue Top 40.

Had Smith been, say, an alien, who ran around the city collecting butterflies, none of this would’ve worked. We needed him and his plotline to be normal so that everything else could be batshit insane.

With that said, I think the non-Smith elements of 37th Dimension could’ve been even crazier. Once you have that solid spine, you have to take advantage of the wacky rules governing your universe. There were really only two anomalies here – a turtle man and 10% people. And Turtle Man was, sadly, killed off early (R.I.P. Turtle Man). Two is such an odd number. At minimum you have to have three (everything comes in threes). And I’d probably go even further. Have other animal people. Have people who can perform magic. Do weird shit with the weather. This is the 37th Dimension. Not the 9th Dimension. Let’s get loopy!

Dimension was also way too long (126 pages). Maybe the writers thought for every extra dimension they got to write an extra page, but that’s not how it works.  For these kinds of stories, it’s 110 pages tops. We ain’t watching William Wallace conquer England here.

I’m kinda sad that these guys split up, because I’ll see this a lot when talented writers first start out. They have a ton of weird ideas, which make their scripts memorable, but they haven’t yet learned the basics of structure – how to cut useless characters out, how to get rid of unimportant scenes, how to combine scenes, how to keep scenes focused so they don’t run on 2 pages too long. Cause if you write three scenes in your script that each run 2 pages long, that’s 6 extra pages you’ve added. That’s how you get up to 126 pages.

Over time, you learn how to curb these mistakes and your scripts get tighter, until you’ve segued from a “script that gets people talking” to a “script people want to buy.” Sadly, many writers don’t stick around that long, quitting before they figure out the magic code.

There’s a moment early on here, for example, where the music label brings in Smith to give him the info on what’s happened to Top 40. Afterwards, there’s a nearly identical scene where the police tell him what they know. These two scenes should’ve been combined, or the police scene should’ve been eliminated altogether. You could have easily fed in the info from the second scene into the first and cut out 2 pages.

Also, later in the script, a detective rails on Smith for being so inadequate. He keeps saying the same thing over and over again (that Smith’s inadequate) in several different ways. It takes up an ENTIRE PAGE. He could’ve easily gotten his point across in four lines, which means you’ve saved an entire page of screenplay real estate. True, there are times when you need your character to say more than 4 lines to get their point across, but those moments need to be big and worth it, which this one wasn’t.

Despite those problems, I think this could’ve been a movie. I don’t know if it can now because I don’t think these writers work together anymore and this would need a rewrite. But it’s different enough that I think it would bring in a big indie audience and possibly even break through into something bigger, especially if it got someone like Johnny Depp involved, who seems to have been created by the acting Gods for this kind of film.

We can only hope!

R.I.P. TURTLE MAN!

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

What I learned: John Favreau was doing an interview for Jeff Goldsmith’s podcast, and Favreau was asked about his propensity for letting his indie films “breathe.” Why, Goldsmith wanted to know, didn’t he do the same for his bigger films? “Because audiences don’t like breathing,” Favreau replied, one-quarter joking. He went on to say that in a studio setting, they want the script to be tight. They want you to get to the point. In indie films, you can play around a little bit more. – There’s no right or wrong way to write a movie, of course. But if you want to get studio money, you have to learn to tighten your scripts. If not, the best you can hope for is a writing sample.

A busy day at Scriptshadow so this is a repost from the newsletter.  Enjoy! 

Genre: Thriller
Premise: A joint American-Chinese task force enlists the help of a jailed hacking legend to look into a mysterious cyber attack on the Chicago Stock Exchange.
About: Cyber (or “Untitled Cyber Story”) is Michael Mann’s newest directing project, which has already been shot and is now in post-production. The most surprising thing about this project is that it’s written by a writer without a produced credit, Morgan Davis Foehl. To see someone of Mann’s stature working with an unknown writer is quite a shock. Foehl’s industry experience up to this point has been as an assistant editor. He worked on a couple of Adam Sandler flicks, Click and I Now Pronounce You Chuck & Larry. So… yeah. That’s pretty exciting for any young writer looking for a big break. “Cyber” will star the new Channing Tatum, aka Chris Hemsworth, whose goal is to star in every movie from now until 2016.  Unfortunately, that still won’t beat Tatum’s record, who was able to star in 617 movies between 2012-2014.  This marvelous feat was achieved despite there only being 602 movies released during that period.  An investigation found that he achieved this by studying Mark Wahlberg and advancing his techniques, occasionally playing two roles in the same movie, and changing his name in order to secretly secure other parts in the films.  In fact, he was kicked off of 22 Jump Street when it was discovered he was impersonating Jonah Hill through the first week of shooting (he’d conned Hill into not showing up, telling him the production had been moved to next year).  After apologizing, he was able to come back to the movie.
Writer: Morgan Davis Foehl (story by Michal Mann & Morgan Davis Foehl) – Current revisions by Michael Mann
Details: 127 pages – THIRD DRAFT – 7/13/12

The great Michael Mann hasn’t been as crazy great as he once was. After directing a couple of my favorite films of the 90s (Heat and Last of the Mohicans), his more recent films (Public Enemies and Miami Vice) have been okay, but not as good. Of course, they’re Michael Mann films, so you always find something good in them (this guy can combine an image with a score like no other), but they just don’t contain that same magic his earlier films had.

Speaking of, I always felt like Mann’s early pioneering of video hurt him. The technology wasn’t up to snuff when he used it on Miami Vice and Collateral, which is an issue when part of what made Mann’s films so cool was that smooth rich palette only 24 fps can provide. Public Enemies looked particularly strange to me, as it was the first period piece to be shot on video. Something about that aesthetic didn’t jibe with the period, so it always felt like an awkward film.

Of course, all that is moot now. Everything’s shot digitally and they’ve figured out 99% of the glitches. Which means “Cyber” will depend entirely on its story. Let’s see if that story’s any good.

Unbeknownst to the computers at the Chicago Stock Exchange, a Trojan horse has invaded their system and begins raising the price of soy beans four-fold. Half a world away, a ship carrying soy beans is turned away from a port because its insurance only covers ¼ the cost of its newly affected payload.

Cut to China, specifically the Peoples Liberation Army, who own a ton of soy bean stock. We quickly learn that soybean affects the price of a lot more than soy beans. Most notably, it’s a protein filler in animal feed. Which means food prices everywhere are skyrocketing. The Chinese send their best man, Chen, to America, to find out what the fuck is going on.

Clearly, allowing the Chinese access to sensitive financial market data is not in the U.S.’s best interest, but with trade between the two countries being so vital, they don’t really have a choice. They must work with Chen. But things are about to get worse when Chen demands his old college roommate, the best hacker in the world, be brought in to help. Problem? His roommate is serving 20 years in jail for cyber crime.

After a lot of arguing, Chen gets his buddy – Nicholas Hathaway – out of jail. Hathaway quickly realizes how bad the U.S. needs him and makes them a deal. If I figure out who did this, you free me. They reluctantly agree and Hathaway’s motivation is established.

They eventually track the hack to a Middle-Eastern Man named Kassar. Kassar raised the prices of soy beans in order to make a quick 150 million dollars for… what? That’s the question. He’s clearly going to use the money to fund something terrible. A later hack by Kassar of a nuclear reactor raises those stakes even higher. This Kassar guy is up to no good. So Hathaway, Chen, and the rest of the special team chase Kassar all around the globe in hopes of finding him before he’s able to unleash his plan of destruction.

Anybody who made this movie gets a lifetime pass for any bad movie they make.

“Cyber” was a very ADULT thriller. In other words, this isn’t Taken. You’re going to do a lot more thinking as you make your way through this story. You’re going to find yourself challenged. At times, that’s a blessing, but other times it’s a curse. Throughout the first half of the story, I was right there. I loved the intrigue and mystery of this soy bean hacker (that’s a weird phrase: “soy bean hacker”). It seemed like such an innocuous thing. But then that innocuous thing kept leading to bigger and scarier realities.

I just don’t think the payoff (at least in this draft) was any good. Somewhere after the mid-point, the story began to get murky. We needed to go to Turkey, and that felt like one country too many. We’d been hopping all over the globe, and at some point I got tired of the chase and just wanted answers.

And when those answers were finally given, they didn’t pay off. 150 million bucks. Funding for an attack. A nuclear reactor breached. We’re thinking something REALLY BAD is going to happen, right? But without spoiling anything, the big “attack” is something done halfway across the world in a place I didn’t care about. I wanted Americans to be in danger – the country that was actually doing the investigation. Not some random country we only learn about at the very last second.

Outside of the plot, I liked the stuff Foehl added inside the task force. Chen’s sister is part of the task force, and Hathaway ends up falling for her. When Chen finds out they’re fooling around, he’s not happy. So there’s conflict within the group, which is good.  That was one of my big problems with yesterday’s script.  The two main characters on this trip were perfectly fine with each other.  There was no conflict whatsoever, and therefore very little drama.

But Cyber didn’t go as far as it could’ve in that respect. Chen’s mad about his sister, but he eventually gets over it, and I don’t think it affected the investigation that much. I actually wondered if the script would’ve been better had Chen and Hathaway NOT known each other, had NOT been friends (and possibly even been enemies).

Think about that for a second.  A huge hack in the financial system that potentially threatens the two biggest countries in the world, China and the U.S., forces them to work together.  The American character wants to do things his way. The Chinese character is obviously going to want to do things differently.  Talk about the perfect concept to explore the current lukewarm relationship between these two behemoth countries.  By making Chen and Hathaway former friends, any potential exploration of that dynamic was destroyed.  These two needed to distrust each other and have a world of secret motives coming from their respective countries to really make this investigation pop.

I do think there’s enough good here to recommend the script. It just could’ve been better. I’d love for it to be tightened up but I’m not sure that’s going to happen. Mann likes to run his films a little long and he’s shown he knows how to do that so I’m not going to question him. But something tells me this had the potential to be something much bigger.

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

What I learned: Don’t let your story linger at the end. Don’t take us on that one extra journey if you don’t have to. Nip it in the bud and get to the good stuff. Remember that the end of the script must feel like it’s building, not deflating. By going off to Turkey late in the story, this script lost all its momentum. I think it needed to clip that section and get us to the climax.  Of course, that very well might’ve been something they did in subsequent drafts.

Genre: Drama/Comedy
Premise: (from IMDB) After losing her job and learning that her husband has been unfaithful, a woman hits the road with her profane, hard-drinking grandmother.
About: Today’s script was written by Ben Falcone, a character-actor who happens to be married to the biggest female comedy actress in the world, Melissa McCarthy, who also happens to star in Tammy. The two enjoyed working together on Bridesmaids so much (Falcone played the air marshal on the plane), that they wanted to extend that into a full-on feature. This looks to be Falcone’s first produced screenwriting and directing effort. Tammy comes out this summer.
Writer: Ben Falcone
Details: 90 pages – (undated draft)

Recently, I gave an amateur writer notes on his comedy script which, he hoped, would become a future acting vehicle for Melissa McCarthy. The general gist of my notes was that it wasn’t ready. I told him he needed to exploit the concept more, improve the co-lead, and move things along quicker. The writer came back frustrated. He had seen and read “The Heat,” McCarthy’s film with Sandra Bullock, and didn’t see how his script was any worse than that one.

I didn’t agree. The script wasn’t delivering on the promise of the premise, and the co-leads weren’t active enough until way too late in the story. But then I looked at The Heat. That screenplay wasn’t lighting the world on fire either. It was a bit sloppy. The story lagged in the middle. And while it was an above-average execution, there was nothing exceptional about it. In short, the writer had a point. “Hey, mine’s not perfect. But neither was theirs.”

This is the part of the business that frustrates me. I tell writers to write something exceptional, then something mediocre (like, say, Ride Along) gets purchased and made. And does well! I’ve seen Ride Along. I wouldn’t say it’s “bad” but it sure is generic. Which leads us back to that question: If that’s getting bought, why isn’t yours?

Well, I want to get into that. But first I should probably tell you a little about today’s script, another McCarthy vehicle. I fully intended to bring Tammy into the conversation, but it turns out this is an indie film (which are made under different circumstances) and was directed by McCarthy’s husband. So I’m pretty sure we know how it got made. So let’s get into Tammy and then we’ll get back to that troublesome question.

Tammy is a woman approaching middle-age who doesn’t have her shit together. She drives a piece-of-shit car, which she ruins when she plows into a deer. This makes her late to work, which results in her getting fired. To top it all off, she comes home to find her husband cooking a meal for another woman (her husband’s never cooked a meal for her ever).

Tammy stomps out and decides she needs to take a road trip. Where? Anywhere that’s not here. So she goes to her parents’ house to get another car, which also happens to be where her Grandma lives. Her Grandma is sick with diabetes and a major alcoholic. A winning combo. And she’s tired of being cooped up so she demands that Tammy take her on the trip.

Away they go, off to Mr. Rushmore of all places (because Grandma was supposed to go there as a kid but never did). Along the way, the grandma drinks a lot, Tammy eats a lot, and they occasionally experience some hijinks, like Tammy picking up a guy in a wheelchair only to find out he’s a total douchebag.

Anyway, things end up exactly how you’d expect them to, which is the kiss of death in any screenplay, as Tammy and Grammy come back home, both slightly better off spiritually than they were when they began. The End.

I don’t like to knock indie films because they’re more a labor of love than their big shiny Hollywood counterparts. But since we’re trying to learn screenwriting here, there’s a lot to be said about Tammy’s misgivings.

Tammy violates rule #1 in any movie, but especially road trip movies – give your protagonist a strong goal. The only goal here is to get to Mount Rushmore. But there’s no importance attached to it so it doesn’t resonate with us at all. We don’t care if they achieve the goal or not, which means we’re not onboard with anything that happens along the way.

An easy way to know if you have a good goal driving your story is to ask, “If my characters don’t achieve their goal, are they any worse off than when they started?” In this case, if they never get to Mount Rushmore, their lives are no different than if they did. That’s the kiss of death. If there are no consequences to failing, than the goal is too weak for the story.

Occasionally, these movies can survive IF their characters are great. Sadly, Tammy’s characters are only marginal. Grandma has diabetes and is an alcoholic, which provides some character depth. But it’s a pretty standard execution of alcoholism, so nothing feels very new or enlightening about it.

Tammy starts off with a vice of her own, overeating. But for some reason that stops early on and never comes back. Outside of that, the character is hard to tab. She’s vulgar sometimes. Swears a lot. Unpredictable. Then out of nowhere she’ll become really dialed back and straight-laced.  Massive unexplained tonal shifts in characters is a huge sign of amateur screenwriting.

But Tammy’s failure can mainly be attributed to two “must-haves” that it didn’t have. First, the characters in any “buddy trip” or “buddy cop” scenario must contrast. The heavier the contrast, the more entertaining their interactions will be. Almost always, one of the characters is a version of conservative, and the other is a version of “crazy/weird.”

Here, Grandma was the crazy one, and Tammy was the crazy one. There was so little contrast between them that there was zero conflict, and therefore no drama. Go watch The Heat to see this done right. Sandra Bullock was uptight. Melissa McCarthy was loose and crazy. They clashed on every decision, which made them a funny pair.

The second must-have is the central relationship in the movie. These only work if there’s a significant unresolved issue between the characters that needs to be resolved. This is ESPECIALLY important if there isn’t a strong goal, because the resolution to that conflict will probably be the only “goal” we’re looking forward to.

Tammy and Grandma didn’t have any problems. Tammy was a little concerned about Grandma drinking too much, but it was explored with kid gloves. Other than that, they seemed to be pretty cool with each other. Agreeable people going on an unimportant trip with zero consequences if they fail isn’t a movie. No matter how you look at it, it isn’t a movie.

I’ll circle back to the original question now. If your script is just as good as an average Hollywood movie, why doesn’t it sell? I don’t think Tammy can help here, since the writer/director is married to the star. But what about The Heat or The Other Guys, two movies with imperfect plotlines and hit-or-miss jokes that didn’t always stay story-relevant?

The answer to this question is extremely complicated, but I’m going to try and simplify it for you.

Say a producer knows that Seth Rogen just went on a canoeing trip and had the time of his life. And the next day, he hears about a canoeing script from an agent friend. He reads it. It’s not very good. But he knows how much Seth loves canoeing, so he sends it to him. Seth’s a good writer and knows the script’s lame, but the bones of the structure are there and there’s a few funny scenes. He can easily buy the script then hire some guys to rewrite it and a year or two later, have a project ready to go.

There are also times where a studio is dying to make a certain kind of movie but doesn’t have a script for it yet. So say Warner Brothers needs to fill that vacancy left by the Harry Potter franchise. And they find a script about a young girl who goes to a Ghost Academy. The script is average, but they see this filling that same Harry Potter demo, so why not take a chance and develop it into something good?

Then of course there are actor attachments. A big actor likes a script and attaches himself to it. At that point, the studios can’t say no because any project an A-list actor is in has the potential to make money. The catch is, the script sucks. Maybe because the actor’s ability to judge material sucks. Maybe the actor loves the character he’d play, despite the rest of the script sucking. Maybe the script was written by one of his friends. Who knows. But that’s the scenario. In those cases, a studio will almost always buy the script because it comes with the potential of a movie that will make them money.

Here’s the problem with these scenarios. First, this almost exclusively happens to people who are already repped, which you aren’t. Why? Because those writers have agents sending their scripts out to a wide berth of people with buying power. You, on the other hand, have nothing. You don’t have any control over something like that happening to you.  Second, bad-to-average scripts selling are almost always luck-based, a script getting in the right hands at the right time (like Rogen’s canoeing scenario).  And unless you know what everyone in Hollywood wants at every moment, selling a script this way is a crap shoot.

So forget these scenarios. Put them out of your mind. Never think “I’ll write something as good as that average movie I saw and then sell it” because you’ll have a better chance at winning the lottery. Seriously, you will.

The world you’re operating in is much different. You’re competing against all the guys trying to break into Hollywood. And because there are between 50,000 and 75,000 scripts being written a year, an average script isn’t going to stand out. You’ll have to write something much better than average. Typically, if you look at every year like a giant screenwriting contest, you have to finish in the top 30-40 of those 75,000 to get a SERIOUS look from Hollywood (the kind of look that leads to a script sale).

If you’re writing something that’s just “okay,” nobody will care. EVEN if it’s as good as a movie that made 40 million at the box office last weekend, like Ride Along. I know that thinking sounds backwards, but that’s the reality. Like I always say, the only thing you can control in writing is writing the best script you can possibly write at this point in your life (not 60%, not 70% not 80% – but 100%!). If you’ve honestly done that, you’ll have a shot. If you’re writing anything less than that, you shouldn’t expect much.

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

What I learned: If you’re writing any sort of road trip movie, build conflict in one of two ways. 1) If your characters already know each other, create a deep unresolved problem between them that they need resolved by the end of the movie (Little Miss Sunshine). 2) If they don’t know each other, create a deep fundamental difference in their philosophies on life (Due Date, Rush Hour). If the opportunity presents itself, do both (Sideways).