Taking a break from Amateur Week because it’s HALLLOOOOWEEEEEEN and that means Scriptshadow must be spoooooooooky for 24 hours and that means a horror script review but since I don’t have any good horror scripts, I’m reviewing a script that is ABOUT a horror film.  Sound fun?  I hope so cause I ain’t giving you another choice here.

Genre: Biopic’ish
Premise: The struggles behind the making of Psycho, the project that would become director Alfred Hitchcock’s most famous film.
About:  Anthony Hopkins will star as Alfred Hitchcock.  Helen Mirren will star as his wife, Alma.  Scarlett Johansen will star as Janet Leigh.  Sacha Gervachi will direct.  I believe this is Sacha’s first feature film as a director (he’s made a documentary).  He’s best known as the writer of Steven Spielberg’s wackadoozy film, “The Terminal.”  John J. McLaughlin adapted the book into a screenplay.  You probably recognize him as the writer of Black Swan.
Writer: John J. McLaughlin (based on the book “Alfred Hitchcock and The Making Of Psycho” by Stephen Rebello.
Details: 104 pages, fourth revision, Oct. 19, 2011 draft

First of all, WTF!!!???

Disney bought Lucasfilm yesterday.  Disney just BOUGHT Lucas.  Lucas doesn’t get bought.  He buys other people!  And now we’re getting another Star Wars trilogy.  And you know what I say to that?  WOOOO-HOOOO!  I love it.  I’ve been dying to get Star Wars into real writers’ hands forever now, and it’s finally going to happen!

How does this tie into today?  Well, George Lucas was a bit of a pudgy filmmaker.  And so was Alfred Hitchock!  Actually, to be serious, I was not looking forward to this script.  I don’t like when entities try and mine a famous event when there isn’t a story there.  Like, oooh, it’s Psycho!  Let’s make a movie about the making of it!  Err, but the making of the movie wasn’t any different from the making of any other  movie.  So what, let’s do it anyway!

I hoped I was wrong.  That there was some fascinating story behind the making of Psycho that I’d never heard about.  But something told me this wasn’t the making of Citizen Kane.

So here’s the story.  Hitchcock is coming off of North By Northwest, which is a monster hit.  But he’s bored.  Everyone wants him to make another North By Northwest but Hitchcock, like his movies, wants to do the unexpected.  Something unlike anything he’s done before.  And when he reads Pyscho, he knows that’s it.  That’s his next movie.

But this is a strange move.  Hitchcock doesn’t do horror.  Only schlocky talentless directors do horror in 1960.  On top of that, it’s not something the studios are interested in.  They think this flick is dead before the end of opening weekend.  But Hitchcock has plans to do something a little different with it. He particularly sets his sights on a shower scene, which he believes he can immortalize.  You see, there wasn’t much nudity in films those days, and definitely not from movie stars.  Yet Hitchock had a plan to imply a ton of nudity without actually showing any.  It was going to be unprecedented.

If only the studios agreed.  They tell Hitchcock there’s a reason everyone in town passed on Psycho and they’re not funding it.  I have to admit, I was a little unclear about this.  Hitchcock makes mega-hit North By Northwest and the studio won’t fund his next movie, which he’s doing for 800,000 bucks?  But whatever.  The movie business was different back then so I’m probably missing something.  Anyway, Hitchcock pulls a Passion Of The Christ and funds the movie himself.

In the meantime, Hitchcock starts fighting all sorts of battles.  He’s the master of suspense, but he’s 60 years old, and the establishment wants to know when he’s going to retire.  Hitch doesn’t like getting old, and he feels that this movie is going to make him young again.  Then there’s his weight problem.  The dude cannot stop eating.  And he hates himself for it.  He sees a monster whenever he looks in the mirror, and that kills him.  But the biggest battle of all is his wife, who becomes the almost-star of the movie.

Alma was Hitch’s right-hand woman throughout his career and, if you believe this script, someone he wouldn’t have been nearly as successful without.  But Alma’s getting sick of Hitch’s lack of attention so starts paying attention to a dashing but not very talented writer named Whitfield Cook.  They start writing a script together while Hitchcock films Psycho and it starts to weigh on Hitch, who realizes that if he doesn’t rekindle his relationship with Alma, she might run off with the hack and Psycho will turn out a disaster.

So what do I think about “Alfred Hitchcock and The Making Of Psycho?”  Well, it’s a good enough script.  It includes some interesting tidbits about the making of.  But after I read it, I found myself asking, “Why did this movie need to be made?”  “What new does it bring to the table?”  I suppose the story of Alma is entertaining, but the script chooses to focus on Hitchcock as the main character even though her story is probably more interesting (mainly because it’s less known).

At times, the writer seems just as unsure as we are about the point of the story.  I mean, we start with two tightly focused scenes regarding Hitchcock’s age.  So naturally, Hitchcock’s inner conflict will be his inability to accept getting older.  However, after those scenes, the age thing is never brought up again.

Instead, we seem to focus on Hitchcock’s food obsession (in particular his foie gras craving), which is unfortunately quite thin.  When things don’t go right, he eats.  There’s really nothing deeper to it than that.

Finally, we move to Hitchcock’s issues with his wife.  He rarely pays attention to her, despite all she’s done for him.  This is what leads her on this quasi emotional affair (one which she never physically acts on) and while I guess it’s kind of interesting, it’s also kinda not.  Nothing really scandalous happens.  It’s just a bunch of stares and devilish thoughts, leaving the storyline without a satisfying climax.  And that summarizes my feelings about the script.  It just kind of stands there with little to say.

What saves it are the few behind-the-scenes looks at Psycho’s famous scenes and stars.  A heavy emphasis is put on the shower scene, which had never been done before in Hollywood.  The most interesting thing about that storyline was the Censors Board.  I guess before you even shot your movie back then, you had to go to a “Censors Board” and get approval from this dreadful stickler who decided whether everything was okay to shoot or not.  For example, toilets weren’t shot back then. So you couldn’t shoot a toilet!  Wtf???

And with the shower scene, every freaking angle had to be approved of.  And it wasn’t.  They wanted Hitch to shoot Janet Leigh from the neck up.  How boring would that have been?  So Hitchcock ignores the censors and shoots the scene the way he wants it, because he knew that scene was going to be the one everyone talked about.

I have to admit, there is something cool about being behind the scenes of one of the most famous films of all time, and it is enough for me to give this script a pass.  But I’m left with the very same question I had at the beginning of this review.  Is there a compelling enough story here to build a movie around?    I’d probably say no.

What I learned: This is mentioned in the script as one of Hitchcocks’ staples and a scene that always works – A character needs to get someplace but is held up by someone who wants to chat (Marion Crane just wants to buy that car but the salesman keeps talking to her).  Write this scene into your script.  It always works!  

Genre: Sci-fi/Comedy
Premise: A hapless and broken hearted barista is visited by two bad-ass soldiers from the future who tell him mankind is doomed, and he alone can save them.
About: This script from British writer Howard Overman sold in March of last year and made it onto the middle of the Black List, right next to Desperate Hours!  Overman has been a longtime British TV writer, writing such shows as “Merlin,” creating the show “Vexed,” and winning a 2010 BAFTA Television Award for Best Drama Series for “Misfits.”
Writer: Howard Overman
Details: 116 pages – February 2011 draft

Wait a minute.

Hold up here.

Are you telling me that I just read a comedy script…that was funny?  And that I liked?  Has Scriptshadow slipped into Bizarro World??

Not only that, but a good comedy that was low-brow (the longest running joke in the screenplay is literally a shit joke)??  I always complain about low-brow comedies.  Scripts that have nothing to offer other than jokes.

Aha! But Slackfi DID have more to offer.  It had a story (with unexpected twists and turns ‘n stuff!) and even some character development.  By the way, what does that mean exactly?  “Character development?”  I see that phrase thrown around a lot and I’m not always convinced that the people who throw it would know how to catch it if it was thrown back.

Character “development” is any instance of your character developing into a different person.  This can be through overcoming a flaw, overcoming the past, or in the case of The Slackfi Project, overcoming a relationship.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.  Which is fine, I suppose, since there’s time-travel in Slackfi.  However, I don’t get the nicest responses when I dislike time-travelling scripts these days.  So thank God I enjoyed this one.

20-something Josh sleepwalks his way through his coffee shop job.  The guy can whip up a mean vienttia grand-aye half-whip double-sauce cinnamon-style frappe mocha-chino (apologies to all if I’m getting the terms wrong. I’m not a coffee person) but is bored out of his gourd while doing it.  Josh is the kind of person where smiles go to die.

But at least he has a reason for it.  His girlfriend, Zoe, dumped his stupid ass a few months ago and now toys with him.  She wants to hang out, but then she doesn’t.  She wants to go on dates, but then she cancels.  She wants to have sex, but then the next morning thinks it was a bad idea.  God was not a nice dude for creating people like this but they’ll be around for as long as people don’t have the balls to walk away from them, and unfortunately, Josh’s testicles haven’t grown to “walk away” proportion yet.

So how does one deal with devil-chicks like this in the meantime?  By playing video games with one’s apartment-mate of course!  Josh and his buddy, Apollo, are quite a team, getting high while ridding the alien planet Tressor of the dangerous race: Plekisaurians.  But when Apollo says he’s grown up and wants to do more adult things with his life, poor Josh finds himself with only one friend left, his overweight guinea pig, Mr. Tibbs!

Until one night when he’s visited by the duo of Wolf and Tiger, a badass male-female team who claim to be from the future! They tell Josh the world is a week away from a pandemic that will kill 6 billion people.  Josh is the only one who can save them because he delivers sandwiches to the lab where they test guinea pigs, who are responsible for the virus.  “Deliver sandwiches?” Josh responds.  But he’s a barista.  Wolf and Tiger look at each other, then double-check the address.  Oops, they’re in the wrong apartment.  They meant to go to Apollo’s apartment!

“Sorry,” they say, and leave.  Bummed beyond all reasonable definitions of the word, Josh happens to run into Wolf, Tiger and Apollo the next day, when they’re attacked by micro-chipped bad guys from the future called Replicants.  Apollo is killed, leaving Wolf and Tiger with no choice but to go with Plan B, Josh!

Unfortunately, while gearing up for the big attack on the lab, the police get a hold of Josh and explain to him that Wolf and Tiger are a couple of whack-jobs who escaped from the nuthouse.  They made up this whole thing about the future based on their obsession with the Terminator and Matrix franchises, and right now, they’re being escorted back to Crazy City.

At this point, Josh doesn’t know what to believe.  Are these two really crazy, in which case he should move on with his life?  Or in doing so, is he killing six billion people?  It isn’t until Josh confirms that his own guinea pig – MR. TIBBS – is a secret spy for the replicants, that he shifts into high gear!  He must find a way to break Wolf and Tiger out of the nuthouse, come up with a plan to get into the lab, and then….well and then massacre hundreds of guinea pigs so they can’t spread the disease.  All while his annoying ex-girlfriend keeps trying to ruin his life!

Okay, so let’s get back to that character development thing I was talking about.  When you write a script, you want to ask yourself, “How is my main character going to develop?  How are they going to change?”  If they’re not developing into anything new or different, that means they’re staying stagnant.  And for the most part, stagnant is boring.

Overman uses a relationship to develop his hero, Josh, coupled with a flaw.  The relationship is obviously his one with Zoe.  He allows her to treat him like shit and is afraid to move on.  Overman cleverly creates a scenario at the end of the script, then, where Josh is at the lab with Zoe outside the contamination door.  He has a choice of either letting her in, which saves her but kills 6 billion people, or leaving her out there to die and moving on with his life.

Remember, this is one of the best ways of conveying development in your character.  You give them a choice near the end of the story that basically asks: “Have you overcome your flaw or what?”  (Spoiler) In this case, Josh leaves Zoe out there (thank God!) and he’s officially developed into a better person.

BUT, I have a suspicion some of you don’t care.  Why?  Because I know how a large reading contingent HATES loser wimpy main characters.  That’s an issue that’s long escaped me – how to straddle that line.  In order to develop  your character into a strong person, he must first be a weak person.  So how do you make someone weak but still likable?  I have to admit Josh was a little too much of a loser for my liking, but the rest of the story was so clever and funny that I still rooted for him.

That’s the other thing I liked here – the story.  Most comedies I read have a VERY thin premise that’s stretched to the gills.  A joke that should’ve ended on page 7 has been beaten to death for 110 never-ending pages.  Slackfi actually had a story that was carefully plotted.

Which reminds me – one of the telltale signs of a good writer is what they do with their midpoint.  The midpoint should shift things around a bit, turn what was essentially one story into a slightly different story.  I always use the example of Star Wars.  It starts out being about some people delivering a message, but then turns into those same people trying to destroy a huge base.  In the midpoint of Slackfi, we find out everything Josh has been told is a lie, and that Wolf and Tiger are in the nuthouse.  It changes from Josh following along to Josh having to come up with a plan to break out Wolf and Tiger and then save the world.

Anyway, this was a funny little script, and evidence of what I was saying Friday about storytelling being more important than writing.  The writing in Slackfi is nothing to write home about.  Many of the sentences are stilted and simplistic.  Overman also has a bad habit of doubling up on beats, making many moments redundant (i.e. we’ll see Josh get rejected by Zoe and Overman will follow the action by writing something like, “Josh is stung by getting rejected by Zoe” – an unnecessary sentence).  But the STORY ITSELF for Slackfi is fun and keeps you reading.

So I recommend this script.  It’s a cool little sci-fi project that’s marketable enough to be brought to the big screen.  And I couldn’t help but think it would be a perfect double-feature with amateur favorite Keeping Time!

[ ] what the hell did I just read?

What I learned: The midpoint is a great place for passive characters to become active.  — Preferably, your hero will be active from the outset (like Indiana Jones).  That’s because movies like active characters.  But some stories necessitate that the hero start off passive.  Starting off passive is fine.  What you don’t want is for your hero to be passive for the entire script.  At some point, you want them to start driving the story.  Through Slackfi and Star Wars, I realized that the midpoint is a great place to do this.  Luke doesn’t start taking charge until the midpoint (when he comes up with an idea for how to save Princess Leia) and Josh doesn’t start taking charge until the midpoint (when he has to rescue Wolf and Tiger and come up with a plan to save the world).  So consider this option the next time you write a story that begins with a passive hero.

So as I was reading Laymen’s Terms earlier this week and going ga-ga over all the great villainy in the script, I realized that I hadn’t yet breached the subject of villains in any extensive way on the site.  And there’s a reason for that.  I hadn’t developed an extensive enough take on the matter!  Which is strange, because I’m a huge proponent of having great villains in your screenplay. Audiences often like to root against the villain just as much as they like to root for the hero.  So if you’re only including a hero in your script, you’re depriving the audience of half the fun!  I don’t care if you’re writing a romantic comedy, an indie drama, or a period piece.  99% of the time, there better be a villain involved!

So who are some of the great villains in cinema history?  Well of course there’s Darth Vader, Buffalo Bill, Longshanks (Braveheart), Hans Gruber, Michael Myers, The Joker, Hannibal, Apollo, the T-1000.  There’s also Agent Smith (Matrix), Annie Wilkes (Misery), Drago, Mr. Potter (It’s A Wonderful Life), Tommy Devito (Joe Pesci – Goodfellas), Hans Landa (Inglorious Basterds), Anton Chigurh (No Country…), Max Cady (Cape Fear), Alex Forest (Fatal Attraction), John Doe (Seven), Alonzo Harris (Training Day) plus many many more.

Strangely enough, I’ve found that what works as villainy in one movie may not work in another.  Sometimes you need your villain to be calculated, other times you need him to be terrifying.  It all depends on the situaiton, the genre, and the type of story you’re telling. So before we go into what makes a good villain, let’s first identify the different kinds of villains.

The Nasty Villain – I’d say this is the most common villain of all.  If you want a villain that gets the audience all riled up with hatred, this villain is your pick.  They seem to be driven by an unseen evil force that will stop at nothing to destroy our hero. Annie Wilkes, Mr. Potter, Anton Chigurh, even the blond haired baddie in The Karate Kid.  These are bad bad guys.  However, these villains can backfire on if you if they’re too thin, and a lot of amateurs make this mistake.  They make the villains nasty just because they’re the bad guy in the story.  To combat this, make sure to add a solid motivation behind their actions.   Anton wants his money.  Annie is obsessed with Paul Sheldon’s books.  Mr. Potter wants every last piece of this town.  Even super-thin Karate Kid Blondie hates Daniel because he’s stolen his girl.  Your villain can be a really bad person.  Just make sure they have a little motivation behind their badness.

The Complicated Villain –  “Complicated” is usually code for a villain with some backstory.  I remember this gained popularity after the 80s Batman movies.  Tim Burton started showing the complicated histories behind why these baddies became bad.  All of a sudden, our villains obtained depth.  They had a past.  We could almost sympathize with them in a way.  This created a more complicated reaction to the character for the audience – shades of gray instead of straight black and white.  Max Cady from Cape Fear, for example, endured years of rape and degradation inside a prison because the man he’s now stalking put him there.  I’m not going to say I like Max Cady because of this, but I definitely understand him better.  The danger in writing this type of villain is that they become too sympathetic.   If we start sympathizing with the villain too much because of their troubled past, we don’t want to see them go down.  So be careful!

The Sorta Likable Villain – These villains are bad, but there’s also something alluring, interesting, or cool about them that makes us sort of like them.  Apollo Creed, Darth Vader, and Hannibal Lecter are all “Sorta Likable” villains.  I find that a lot of the time, sorta likable villains exist in a film where there’s a villain worse than them.  This allows us to root against someone while still kinda rooting for the cooler villain.  With Darth Vader in Star Wars, the real villain is Grand Moff Tarkin.  With Darth Vader in Empire and Jedi, the real villain is the Emperor.  In Lambs, Hannibal isn’t the top villain.  That title goes to Buffallo Bill.

The Comedic Villain – Seen only in comedies, these villains can be tough to get right.  They must be funny, but not so funny that they aren’t threatening.  I read a lot of comedy scripts where the villain is funny, but also such a goofball or so stupid that I don’t see them as a serious threat.  Therefore, you have to find that perfect balance.  Matt Dillon’s character in There’s Something About Mary is a great comedic villain.  Shooter McGavin in Happy Gilmore is a great comedic villain.  As much as I love Dumb and Dumber, those two villains were so bumbling that I was never scared of them, and that may have hurt the movie just a tad.  One of the most surefire traits to add to a comedic villain to ensure we’ll want to see them go down is arrogance.  Arrogance gets an audience riled up every time.  And it just seems to mix perfectly with comedy bad guys.

The Hidden Villain – Sometimes stories dictate, due to your bad guy being a mystery, that you not reveal your villain until the third act.  If you’re going to do this, you’re going to need an antagonistic force to challenge your hero in the meantime.  While an antogonist can be a villain, in these cases, they’re usually not.  Take The Fugitive for example.  (spoiler alert!) Dr. Charles Nichols is the surprise villain in the third act. But Tommy Lee Jones’ character is the antagonist for the first two acts.  It’s important that the hero always have an antagonist force pushing against him in the screenplay or else there’s no conflict.  Which is why a hidden villain can be a dangerous move.  However, if you substitute another antagonistic force in the meantime, you should be okay.

No Villain – I strongly discourage writing a script without a villain.  But if you’re going to do it, you better have a great antagonist pushing up against your character for the entire movie.  In most cases, if there is no villain in the script, the antagonist is nature.  Take Castaway for example.  That movie is villain-free.  But it has a strong antagonist – the island.  The Grey is another example.  The antagonist is the weather and the wolves. Those are the forces relentlessly pushing against our characters.  So sure, the no-villain approach can be done, but you better have some kick ass antagonistic nature if you’re going to pull it off.

Okay, we’ve identified the kind of villains in a script.  Now it’s time to determine what actually makes a good villain? Once again, not all of these things will work all of the time and certain combinations may work in some situations while not in others.  You have to assess what kind of story you’re telling and add the appropriate villainous traits.

Pompous – Like I mentioned above, a pompous character is a hated character.  There’s just something about people who are full of themselves that riles us up.  We NEED to see them go down.  Look at Apollo Creed in Rocky.  That man LOVED himself.  So we were dying to see Rocky beat him.

Stronger than our hero – This is a big one.  If a villain is weaker than our hero, we’ll have no doubt as to who will win in the end.  That’s bad.  What makes movies fun is when we think our hero has no shot because the villain is too strong.  Hans Gruber in Die Hard is the perfect example.  The man just oozes confidence and intelligence.  You really think he has his shit together, and that makes us seriously doubt if John McClane is going to win in the end.

Intelligent – This doesn’t ALWAYS have to be the case, particularly in comedies, but I love villains who can go toe-to-toe with our hero intellectually.  It creates the same effect as strength.  You always fear that they just might outthink our hero.  Prince Humperdink from The Princess Bride (who’s MAJORLY ARROGANT by the way) is actually a really smart guy.  He looks over the battleground after the Man In Black and Inigo Montoya’s sword fight and knows exactly how it went down and which direction the Man in Black went.  Smart villains are worthier villains.

Deceitful – Everybody hates deceitful people, people who go back on their promises.  Therefore this is a great trait to give your villain.  One of the scenes in Star Wars where our hatred for Grand Moth Tarken goes through the roof is when he asks Princess Leia where the Rebel Base is, promising he’ll spare her planet if she does.  She ends up telling him, and he goes ahead and blows the planet up anyway!  Or in Up.  Charles Muntz pretends to be all nice and friendly to our heroes.  Until his true colors come out later.  We hate deceitful people!

Emotionless – Sociopaths are REALLY SCARY.  Cold and collected, villains who feel no remorse for killing are as terrifying as it gets.  They just have that blank emotionless look on their faces?  Ugh, creeee-py!  Look no further than the flagship villain for this category, Anton Chigurgh in No Country For Old Men.  This dude is terrifying because he doesn’t have a single feeling bone in his body.  John Doe from Seven is another one.

Motivated – Most villains only work if they have a strong motivation behind their actions.  Take the T-1000 in Terminator 2 for example.  He’s been programmed to come here and eradicate John Connor in order to make sure the machines win the war in the future.  It’s a simple motivation, but it’s also dead solid.  We understand why he’s obsessed with killing John Connor at all costs.  You can certainly try writing an unmotivated villain, like The Joker in The Dark Knight, but be careful.  Villains who do bad shit just to do bad shit often confuse and frustrate the reader.  Also, it’s likely your villain won’t have 80 years of built-up audience awareness behind him to get an audience to go with it, such as the case is with The Joker.

Villain is strongest where hero is weakest – This is often tied into a hero’s fatal flaw, and therefore can be quite powerful if applied correctly.  The idea is that whatever your hero’s flaw is – whatever his biggest weakness is – make the villain extremely powerful in that area.  Take Luke Skywalker for example.  His flaw is that he doesn’t believe in himself.  Darth Vader, on the other hand, is the epitome of belief.  He’s the most confident motherf*cker in the galaxy (buoyed by his expertise in The Force).  Because Vader is so strong in the area that our hero struggles with the most, it creates a sense of doubt in whether Luke will be able to defeat him, and those situation tend to be the most compelling to watch.

Backstory – This is a choice.  You don’t have to do it.  But backstory adds depth to your villain, and readers/producers/agents tend to favor depth.  They want some info on why your bad guy turned into a bad guy.  Well, here’s my take on that.  I think what they really want is to know is something about your villain before the story began.  It doesn’t have to be WHY they became a bad person (i.e. daddy used to beat me when I was a kid), it can simply be fucked up pieces of that character’s past.  For example, the backstory we get on Hannibal is that he tore people’s faces off and used to be a therapist who preyed on his victims.  It doesn’t really tell us why he’s the way he is, but it adds depth to his character since we know more about him.  I will also say this about backstory.  Be careful about making your villain’s situation too sympathetic.  At a certain point, if we’re sympathizing with them too much, we don’t want to see them go down.  And we have to want to see the villain go down.

And there you have it!  My take on how to create a great villain.  However, like a lot of these articles, I feel like I’m only scratching the surface.  I know you guys have some thoughts of your own on how to create great villains, so throw’em at me.  If there’s anything really good, I’ll add it to the article! :)

Genre: Fantasy
Premise:  Before Dorothy, the great Oz himself had to get to Oz.  This is his story.
About: Directed by Spiderman director Sam Raimi and starring his villain in that film, James Franco, as Oz, this film debuted its trailer a few weeks back.  This draft made it on the 2010 Black List, although I think it was fairly low.  Screenwriter Kapner was an interesting choice for the material.  His most previous credit was 2009’s “Into The Blue 2,” although he’s probably best known for his 2000 screenplay, “The Whole Nine Yards.”
Writer: Mitchell Kapner (based on the books of L. Frank Baum)
Details: 4/08/10 draft

You know, moving to LA last week, I kinda felt like Dorothy.  I rode a tornado of sorts (my car) from a state right next to Kansas.  I crash-landed on a witch (Oklahoma City).  I had to follow a yellow brick road the rest of the way to a magical land.  I met some strange characters along the way (Oklahoma City Hotel Guy – which you’d know if you were following me on Twitter – for the record, I usually update my Twitter followers on when I’m going to post.  So on the days I’m late, that’s a good resource to know when the post is coming).  And now I’m finally here.  Trying to find the man behind the curtain.

Which is probably where we should start today’s review.  You see, everybody knows the story of Dorothy.  But how many people know the story of the man Dorothy goes looking for?  How did *he* get here?  And once he got here, how come he never went back?  And how did he go from a guy who looked like James Franco to a guy who looked like Sam Kinison?

It might be fun to find out. Or just plain stupid.  Just because you can look back at a well-known fictional character’s life doesn’t mean you should.  A big part of the reason some characters are so memorable is because the writer showed us just the right amount of them.  No more, no less.  So I have to be honest.  I’m curious why it’s so important that we learn Oz’s origin story.

Oscar Zoroaster Phadrig Isaac Norman Henkle Emmanuel Abroise Diggs (or “Oz” for short) is an illusionist, which in the early 1900s held some entertainment weight.  Without countless Youtube videos to waste their time on, people needed something to pass the time.  And these illusionist dudes did just that.

But not unlike today’s entertainment industry, unless you were one of the top dogs in your profession, you needed something else to pay the bills.  For Oz, it’s booze.  So after his show (from which no one seemed to enjoy) he busts out his very own homemade moonshine and sells it to the audience, who we realize only ever came here for the booze in the first place (in a really cheesy choice, the acronym for the liquor is “H.O.M.E.”).

Afterwards, Oz unwisely hooks up with one of his audience members, the irresistible Mrs. Hamilton, only to be found by Mr. Hamilton!  Oz is chased through the circus, leaps onto a hot air balloon, thinks he’s safe, until he spots the biggest storm in Kansas history.  I think we know where this is going.  Yup.  The next thing Oz knows, he’s awaken in Oz.

And boy, you thought Oz was wild before.  That doesn’t even come close to what’s going on in this dysfunctional countryside this time around.  Besides the munchkins, there’s the Hammerheads, the Dainty China army, Whimsies, Gnomes, Growleywogs and Mist Maidens.

But the biggest presence here in pre-Dorothy Oz?  Deceit!  Everyone’s lying!  So it’s hard to figure out who to trust.  At first Oz befriends a witch named Theodora, who seems like a cool chick.  Theodora tells him they’ve been waiting for his arrival, that he’s here to save Oz.  Which means he has to follow her to Emerald City to meet her sister, Evanora, so they can plan out how they’re going to kill the Wicked Witch Of The South!

But when they get there, Evanora is convinced that Theodora sent Oz to kill her!  So she wants Oz to kill Theodora!  If that isn’t confusing enough, one of the flying monkeys, Kala, wisps Oz off to the “Wicked” Witch Of The South, Glinda, who you may remember as Bubble Witch from the original Wizard Of Oz.  She tells Oz the “real” story, which is that Theodora and Evanora are the wicked witches, and Glinda is a good witch!

Not really knowing who to trust, Oz goes with his instincts and gets behind Glinda.  But if it were only that simple.  Theodora and Evanora are putting together an army to squash them.  Glinda, as well as the people of Oz, turn to Oz for direction.  He is, in their minds, their savior.  So Oz will have to piece together an army of creatures that were never meant to fight, to take over Oz and save it, once and for all, from the evil witches.

When you think about it, Wizard of Oz is one of the most f*cked up stories ever.  It’s weird.  It’s odd.  It’s actually kinda creepy.  Those flying monkeys?  Wuddup with that??  However, in that classic first film, everything just seemed to magically come together.  It’s rare that you make that many unique choices and they all fit.  The only other movie I can think of that did it (off the top of my head) is Star Wars.  So to try and replicate that weirdness and hope lightning strikes twice…that’s asking for trouble.

And we see that trouble all over the place here.  I mean, there’s a lot of weird shit happening, but none of it gels together in the same way that original did.

I think the biggest problem is Oz himself.  He’s just not very interesting.  And it all started with his introduction.  I couldn’t tell *who* Oz was supposed to be.  Was he the terrible illusionist blind to his lack of ability, or was he genuinely good at what he did?  It was never clear.  One second he’s doing a cool trick and the next a lame one.

If your main character is wishy-washy, your script is dead.  I’m sorry but it’s dead.  If we don’t know the main character’s exact problem, then he’s just confusing the whole way through.  And we won’t care about him.

What I’m trying to say is that in a script like this, you need to identify Oz’s fatal flaw, since this is a story ABOUT HIM and therefore you’re writing a character piece.  Maybe his flaw is that he doesn’t believe in his own abilities.  Or maybe you go in the opposite direction and it’s that he overestimates his abilities.  From there, you throw tests at the hero that challenge that flaw.  If he doesn’t believe in his abilities, for example, then you write a scene where he must prove his worthiness for the Queen.  Everybody’s looking at him.  He must perform.  But he buckles under the pressure because DEEP DOWN he doesn’t believe in himself yet.  Then, in the end, when it finally matters, he’s able to push past those insecurities and prove his worth.  That’s how you create a character arc.

Here, it was just…I don’t know.  Oz would do a magic trick every once in awhile, and some people would believe he was a wizard and some wouldn’t.  It was just never clear.

The idea of a war in Oz with all these weird creatures is a tantalizing one, especially for a director, who gets millions of dollars to show audiences something they’ve never seen before.  So I could see the climax being fun.  The problem is, none of the characters – and I mean not a single one – was unique or interesting or compelling in any way.  Which was strange since this is such a unique interesting compelling world.  With that being the case, the final battle comes up empty.  We don’t really care who wins.  It’s just eye candy, without the candy since it’s still in the script stage.

Oz was never able to wrangle in all of its strange parts.  I’m sticking with the original.

What I Learned:  The power of a good character arc is the most influential emotional component you can add to your screenplay.  Audiences like to see characters learn and change for the better.  It makes them feel good inside.  The original Oz film based its entire story on that.  You had a scarecrow who didn’t think he was smart enough, a lion who wasn’t brave enough, and a tin man incapable of feeling love.  The changes (“arcs”) those characters went through is what was so memorable about that film.  With that aspect never defined here for any character – especially Oz – there was zero emotional attachment to the story.

NEW Amateur Friday Submission Process: To submit your script for an Amateur Review, send in a PDF of your script, a PDF of the first ten pages of your script, your title, genre, logline, and finally, why I should read your script. Use my submission address please: Carsonreeves3@gmail.com. Your script and “first ten” will be posted. If you’re nervous about the effect of a bad review, feel free to use an alias name and/or title. It’s a good idea to resubmit every couple of weeks so your submission stays near the top.

Genre: Sci-Fi
Premise: (from writer) In the year 3000, the husband and wife survivors of an elite black ops unit are on a mission to infiltrate a rebelling orbital state, resolve a tense hostage situation and avenge their fallen teammates. As the only people admitted Upstairs are kids and their parents, the operatives have to adopt a 13-year old girl as their cover.
About: A year ago, a brave young Scriptshadow reader subjected himself to an Amateur Friday Review that might have been the most infamous ever if not for a certain Trajent Future.  If you don’t feel like reading that review, I’ll boil it down for you.  I laid into the script for not having a plot, structure, or characters.  It felt like it’d been written in a week. Well, Sweden, who took a beating in that review and in the talkback, ingested all that feedback, went back to the drawing board, and approached the story from a whole new angle.  This is his rewrite.
Writer: John Sweden
Details: 99 pages

Instead of doing the intro on this one, I’ll let Mr. Sweden do it himself!  Here was his e-mail to me about why I should read his script: “One year ago in the talkback for my hilariously offensive script “Orbitals” some kind commenter suggested that the concept would be perfect for a PG-rated Disney summer blockbuster. I replied that I’d actually pay to see such a big budget version of my story. “Why don’t you write it yourself? — asked the commenter. — This way you won’t have to pay — you’ll see it at the premiere!” So I spent a year researching, writing and re-writing my own brand of a summer sci-fi adventure movie: as realistic, action-packed and — most of all — human a story as I could possibly imagine. I think it would be fairly interesting to do an anniversary Friday — a sort of “a year in life of an amateur screenwriter” thing.”

Okay then John, let’s see how you did!

Orbitals 2: Orbital War, begins by taking us through many centuries until we get to modern day, which in this story is the year 3000 (I think – more on this in a moment).  During all that time, mankind has sent a ton of satellites and space stations up into space, creating many rings of debris around the planet, similar to Saturn.

There also appears to be a war or two going on.  The first war is happening down on earth (I think – more on this in a moment) between…well, I’ll be honest, I’m not sure who it’s between.  But there’s definitely some sort of war going on!  Actually, that’s not true.  I’m not sure there’s a war going on.  But there are people firing weapons at each other.  That I can tell you with certainty.  I think.  No, I know.  Yeah, I know that for sure.  I think.

So in one of these warring factions/teams is some sort of orphanage – I think.  I say “I think” because I couldn’t figure out why any army would also carry with them a bunch of orphans.  Anyway, in that orphanage is a 13 year old girl named Haley, who’s had a rough life, as indicated by the huge scar on her face.  When the bad guys (I’m assuming they’re bad since the orphanage army has to be good, right?) successfully take down Orphanage Army, two soldiers, Jonathan and his beautiful wife Stellar, light up when they find Haley amongst the wreckage.

That’s because Jonathan and Stellar need a kid if they’re to make it up to Orbital Station, which has a requirement that only full families (with children) are allowed on the premises.  Oh yeah, I almost forgot to tell you about Orbital Station!  Besides these two warring factions, there’s this really evil dude up on this station who’s housing…ALIENS.  Yes, he’s got a couple of aliens on the ship and is using them to threaten earth, even going so far as to ignite a tidal wave that destroys San Francisco.  I’ll be honest, I’m still not sure if he’s affiliated with one of the factions on earth or not.  But after making his Tidal Wave point, he tells the earthlings his demands are….NOTHING.  He doesn’t want anything.  I guess he just wanted to test out his cool tidal wave weapon.

Anyway, Jonathan and Stellar tell Haley she has to pretend to be their child since they want to go up to the Orbital station and blow up the aliens.  Haley shrugs her shoulders – “Sure, why not?”  It’s not like she has anything better to do.  So the trio develop aliases and hop onto the next transport to Orbitsville.  Once there, their cover is blown quickly, and everyone on Orbital wants them dead…..I think.

Okay, John did address one of my main concerns.  His previous script felt like it was whipped up in 3 days after a Reno bender.  This script, however, is bursting with effort.  Remember, readers can tell when a writer isn’t putting in the effort.  In these cases, your script isn’t a script.  It’s Al Qaeda.  And we will do everything in our power to rip it to shreds.  Never EVER waste a reader’s time.

The problem with John’s rewrite is, a lot of this effort is misguided, starting with a really confusing plot.  I mean right from the outset, I was confused.  We start out in the year 2020.  5 paragraphs later we’re in 2312.  Five paragraphs later we’re in 2750.  And five paragraphs after that, we’re in the year 3000.

Now there’s no rule that says you can’t jump through time in your screenplay.  But John doesn’t prepare us for this.  He never informed us that this was going to be a montage.  So we’re just sort of watching these huge chunks of time go by without understanding why.

This is followed by an introduction to a group of characters known as the Archangels.  Cool name.  But what the hell are they?  It’s not clear what their place in the story is.  I actually thought they were like the stars at the beginning of It’s A Wonderful Life, since they start telling us a story.  The story appears to be about the long ago past.  However, later in the script, we’re told that we’re still in the year 3000.  Very confusing.

From there, we’re all of a sudden thrown into this desert with someone named Gareth.  Gareth and his team are preparing to attack an army – drones of some sort (I think).  But we’re just thrust into it with no explanation of what’s going on.  Who’s Gareth?  Why’s he talking to a 13 year old girl?  Why are they in a desert fighting a drone army?  What is the objective here?  Who’s trying to attack what and why?  What do orphans have to do with any of this?

It’s just really damn confusing.  I mean we’ve started out with three segments here – A thousand year montage, an introduction to a strange unexplained group, and a random desert attack.  As if that’s not enough, we then get the president of the Orbital Station destroying San Francisco, claiming he has aliens, then telling the Earth that he has no demands.  So he just wanted to blow something up and brag that he had aliens???  What’s going on???

There are two mistakes here and they’re mistakes I see a lot of beginners make.  Plot complexity and writing clarity.  Sometimes writers simply over-plot their story.  Here we have a thousand years going by.  Some sort of war on earth.  Archangels.  An Orbital Station Maniac.  Aliens.  A military couple who wants to blow up the station but can’t do so without kidnapping an orphan and pretending she’s their daughter.  It just feels like too much.

Then there’s clarity.  John consistently keeps key information from us.  He doesn’t explain why the Orbital Leader destroys San Francisco.  He doesn’t explain why he doesn’t have demands afterwards.  He doesn’t explain why we’re in the desert in the middle of a war.  He doesn’t explain who the sides are.  He doesn’t explain why one side has an orphanage in its possession  He doesn’t explain why Haley appears to be special within this orphanage.  He doesn’t even explain basic logistical things well – like who’s shooting at what.  For example, there’s this big turret gun featured at the beginning of the desert battle.  But I have no idea whose it is or what it’s shooting at.

Both of these issues are big, but when you combine them – plot complexity AND lack of clarity – it’s a script-killer.  There’s no way to recover from it.  ESPECIALLY when you’re writing sci-fi, which requires a lot more from the reader, since they also have to learn your world and memorize the rules and characters that govern it.  So it’s like a trifecta of script-destroying.  And unfortunately that means everything that comes after it – good or bad – is irrelevant.  We can talk about how good Scene 45 was, but what does it matter if we already checked out in Scene 5?

Having said that, this script *is* better than John’s earlier effort.  You can tell right away that he’s put a ton more effort into it.  It’s unfortunate the story is so murky, to be honest, because the universe itself is extensively detailed and pain-stakingly explored.  John didn’t come up with this on a Saturday night after smoking a pound of weed.  He really pushed himself.

But that’s the shitty reality about writing sci-fi (or fantasy).  And it’s a mistake I see writers make all the time – particularly advanced beginners for some reason.  You can create an amazingly detailed Star Wars or Lord Of The Rings-like universe.  But if the story sucks or is confusing, it doesn’t matter one iota.  I don’t care if you know the history of Planet Nebular down to the year of the last ice age if the whole time I’m scratching my head going, “Uhhhh, why the fuck are we on this planet again??”

So I think John’s learned a valuable lesson.  He’s learned how much effort it takes to write a screenplay.   Which is important, because some writers never learn that lesson and keep scribbling out half-assed “final” drafts.  But there are still some huge lessons he must take from this.  Don’t make your plot any more complicated than it has to be – especially sci-fi plots, since you’re already asking a ton of your reader.  Remember, Star Wars, at its core, has a very simple plot.  Bad guys chase good guys.

And then, of course, John must learn the value of clarity.  Stop worrying so much about writing the perfect poetic sentence.  Instead, just convey what’s going on and why it’s going on as clearly as possible.  I don’t care about the way the asteroid vessel gleams in the distant sunlight if I don’t have the slightest clue why the hell we’re focusing on an asteroid vessel in the first place.

This skill unfortunately takes many scripts to master.  It takes most beginning screenwriters forever just to realize they’re not conveying themselves clearly.  There’s a difference between the scene in your head and the scene that’s written.  You must master the language which allows your reader to not only see what you’re seeing, but understand what you’re saying.  One of the best ways to speed this process along is to give your script to a good friend and go through it afterwards, asking them what made sense and what didn’t.  You’ll start to see patterns in where you’re being unclear, lessening the chances you’ll do it again.

I hate to do this to John but this script still isn’t up to “wasn’t for me” standards.  When, as a reader, you’re not even sure what’s happening half the time, that’s a major problem.  So unfortunately, Orbital War still gets the dubious lowest Scriptshadow rating.

Script link: Orbital War  (p.s. If you want to get the Amateur Friday scripts early, e-mail me with subject line: “EARLY”)

What I Learned: Clarity over poetry.  Poetic prose is something advanced beginners obsess over.  They think that if every sentence is perfectly written, the reader will fall in love with the script.  But when a writer favors this approach, it almost always comes at the expense of clarity.  A reader would rather read, “David ducks under Linda’s swing and crushes her nose with a stiff elbow” than, “David’s shirt echoes his acrobatic duck as the clothesline of flesh soars an inch above his head.  His shadow displays a quickness even cheetahs would envy, turning the nose of his victim into a sprinkler of crimson.”  Enough already.  Just tell us what’s f*cking happening!