The Brigands of Rattleborge meets Water for Elephants meets Deliverance?

Genre: Drama/Dark/Thriller
Premise: After a 1976 traveling carnival sets up in a small town in Louisiana, the locals become enraged with the actions of the carnival workers, and set about taking the carnival down.
About: S. Craig Zahler needs no introduction on this site. He is the writer of The Brigands of Rattleborge, one of my top 5 scripts (and soon to become a TV show). Fury of the Strongman is a script that he’s been pushing for quite a while and, according to the trusty source, “the internet,” he’s still actively trying to get it made. I hope he succeeds! This is probably the most interesting of all his projects.
Writer: S. Craig Zahler
Details: 155 pages
Readability: Slow

Feels like a Tom Hardy role to me.

No reason to beat around the bush. If you like Zahler, you’re going to love this script. If you hate Zahler, you’re going to detest this script. Since I like Zahler, you probably know where I stand. :)

The year is 1976. A carnival led by a midget named Nickel is enjoying a long stay in a Wisconsin town. Our cast of characters includes Woodburn, the strongman. Laughy, the clown. Wendy, the pretty girl. Young Mountain and Paloma, the husband and wife knife throwing act. Harry the Human Crab (who looks exactly like you’d imagine him to). As well as a host of other oddballs who specialize in unique skills.

Our main focus, though, is Woodburn, who’s furious that his girlfriend, Wendy, wants to do a topless act. Woodburn has seen one too many women from his past go down that route, and when it happens, they keep going, right into prostitution. Despite Wendy’s insistence that she’d never do that, he breaks up with her.

Later that night, a horny teenage couple gets drunk at the carnival then crashes their car into a tree, killing them both. The dead girl happened to be the daughter of the governor, so they get kicked out of Wisconsin. The only place Nickel knows he can go is Louisiana, so they get the caravan together and drive south.

As it so happens, they set up in the very same town Woodburn grew up in, a town that he ran away from the second he was old enough. When he heads into town to get a drink, he’s spotted, and we learn that before he left town, he gave his father a present – he broke his spine, turning him into a paraplegic. People in town like his dad. Which means they don’t like Woodburn.

Meanwhile, Laughy (in full clown makeup) heads into town to get some whisky but is stonewalled by the angry liquor store owner, Right Hook Ronnie. Ronnie thinks that Laughy is black under that makeup and he doesn’t sell liquor to black people. Laughy refuses to leave until he gets his whisky and things get heated, resulting in Laughy pulling a gun on Ronnie. This ensures that Laughy wins this round. But Ronnie assures him that this fight isn’t over.

Ronnie then gets all the town degenerates together and heads to that night’s show. At first, all they do is heckle. But then they start spreading out, beating up carnival workers in the shadows. And when they find Wendy’s tent, let’s just say things go as bad as they can possibly go. It doesn’t take long for Woodburn to figure out who was responsible for Wendy’s death, and when he does, every single man involved will have to answer to the fury… of the strongman.

Fury of the Strongman is vintage S. Craig Zahler.

A man is wronged. That man wants revenge. And nothing is going to stand in his way.

I’ve tried, over the years, to figure out Zahler’s formula – why his scripts hit harder than others, and there are a couple of things that stand out.

One, he takes his time in the first act to really set up his characters. A lot of writers rush through this part. They’re scared of people like me saying they’re taking too long. Zahler doesn’t care. He makes sure to give every character a proper description (“Lying there upon a bench that is comprised of raw wood and cinder blocks and holding a barbell with two rigid fists is CHAD WOODBURN, a shirtless thirty-nine year-old in jeans who has receding copper-brown hair and the massive muscular physique of a champion weight-lifter. A GRUNT and a thick EXHALATION issue from his mouth as he pushes three hundred and fifty pounds off of his chest and into the air.”)

He then follows that description with an introductory scene that solidifies who the character is. Here, we meet Woodburn breaking up with his girlfriend because he doesn’t agree with her choice to do a topless act. We now have a very good feel for who this character is. The reason that’s important is because the better we know a character, the more we care. I can’t stress this enough. The newer screenwriters always screw this up. They always write vague characters. Maybe Zahler goes too far and gets too specific. But it’s better to know too much about a character than too little.

What’s amazing about Zahler is that he doesn’t just do this for one character. He does it for ten characters. And he doesn’t compromise. Everyone gets a full description. Everyone gets a full scene that solidifies who they are.

Another thing Zahler does is he’ll include two inciting incidents. He has the early inciting incident that jump starts the movie. And then he has the ‘official’ inciting incident that turns the script from a slow-burn into a full-on thriller. The early inciting incident in “Fury” is the teenaged couple crashing the car and dying. That INCITES the local authorities to kick the carnival out of town, which forces them to set up in another state.

The second (official) inciting incident is when Laughy gets in a fight with a local liquor store owner. After Laughy pulls a gun on him, the owner, Right Hook Ronnie, vows revenge. He rounds up all the scum and heads to the carnival that night to cause trouble. This doesn’t happen until page 70 (!!!), by the way, which is halfway through the script.

Once Zahler gets his two inciting incidents out of the way, the revenge storyline kicks in. From there, it’s all about intense blood and violence. This section of the script isn’t just meant to serve the story, it’s meant to leave an impression on the reader, which is why I think a lot of people can’t handle Zahler. He goes “all in” on his violent scenes.

The weird thing about this script is that it’s very similar to The Brigands of Rattleborge. So similar that if I would’ve read this instead of Rattleborge in 2009, it probably would’ve been the script that I gave an [x] impressive to and placed in my Top 10. But these ultra-violent scripts play differently in 2021 compared to 2009. Something about what’s happened in the world since that time – all the movements, all the craziness – makes what happens in this script feel a little *too* real.

So I found myself wincing more during Fury than I would’ve in the past. Also, I think there’s something to be said about creativity in violence that makes it a little more palatable. That’s what I remember from The Brigands of Rattleborge. There’s that famous scene where our anti-hero cuts a hole in a guy’s body then sends a hamster inside of it to wreak havoc. It was kind of fun in a gross way. Whereas here, we just get brute violence. At least that’s how it felt. Maybe I’m becoming a wimp as I get older.

Despite this, it’s impossible not to be drawn into this story. In a world where we get the same movies packaged in slightly different containers over and over again, “Fury” feels like an original. I’m surprised this hasn’t been more of a priority in Zahler’s extensive screenplay slate. It feels like nothing else out there right now. And it certainly leaves an impression.

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

What I learned: Place characters in situations where they’re not welcome. I know this seems obvious. But it’s one of the easiest ways to generate conflict. When Laughy walks into the liquor store, he’s not welcome there. When Woodburn shows up at the local bar, he’s not welcome there. ‘Not welcome’ means CONFLICT and conflict is the key to entertaining audiences. Any time you’re searching for a scene to jumpstart your story, send your characters into a situation where they’re not welcome.

Sci-Fi Showdown is only ONE WEEK AWAY!!! ENTRIES DUE NEXT THURSDAY!

Guys!

Do I need to remind you that NEXT THURSDAY is the DEADLINE for the Scriptshadow Sci-Fi Showdown? That’s when the five best sci-fi concepts submitted to me will be published here on the site, along with the scripts, and then you, the readers, will read and vote for your favorite screenplay. The winner will then get a review from me the following week. More importantly, if the script is good, we’re going to try and get it made! As in produced! So, if you’ve got a sci-fi script that you think is great, get it tuned up and send it to me by next Thursday.

What: Sci-fi Showdown
When: Entries due by Thursday, September 16th, 11:59 PM Pacific Time
How: Include title, genre, logline, Why We Should Read, and a PDF of your script
Where: carsonreeves3@gmail.com

I was trying to think of the most influential tip I could give you to dramatically improve your sci-fi script in one week, and I realized that if you can write one great sci-fi set piece scene, it can have a gigantic impact on how the script is received. That’s because a great set piece can be the motivator for why someone wants to produce your film. If they fall in love with just that one 10 minute scene, and have this vision of how awesome that scene is going to look in a movie theater, that could be the driving force that leads to a sale.

But before we can identify what makes a good sci-fi set piece, let’s talk about what makes a bad one. The worst set pieces are generic set pieces. A generic situation where people are shooting at each other. A generic car chase or motorcycle chase through a city. A generic fighting scene. There’s no form to these scenes. There’s no creativity to these scenes. They’re unimaginative time-wasters masquerading as entertainment.

The worst example of this is when you have one army on one side of the screen and another army on the other side of the screen and they race at each other, and in the trailer, they always cut away right before the two sides collide. That’s the epitome of a generic uncreative set piece. The reason I can say that with confidence is because nobody on this board can point to a single memorable moment in any of those scenes – Avengers Endgame, Ready Player One, Aquaman, Attack of the Clones – that occurs after the two sides begin fighting. It’s all a bunch of big boring generic nonsense.

As tempting as it is, never write this scene.

These scenes don’t even play well on the big screen. But they play 100 times worse in an actual screenplay. Because we can’t see what’s going on. For these reasons, I want you to follow a simple formula to create a good sci-fi set piece (or any set piece for that matter)

1) GSU – The key character in the set piece should have a GOAL. If they’re not after something within the set-piece, nothing else will work. From there, you need the goal to be IMPORTANT. The stakes must be high. Everything’s going to feel a lot more important if the character is after a cube that has the power to destroy the universe than if they’re after a crispy chicken sandwich from Chick-fil-a. And, finally, add a time constraint (urgency). At the end of Star Wars, Luke doesn’t have all the time in the world to blow up the Death Star. There are mere seconds before the Death Star will have a clear shot at the planet Yavin. So Luke needs to destroy the Death Star NOW.

2) Based on your concept – This is a must for sci-fi. Figure out what’s unique about your concept and give us set pieces that COULD ONLY EXIST inside your movie. There are very few moments in the chase scenes from Mad Max Fury Road that felt like they could exist in another movie. Every aspect of the chase felt specific to the Mad Max universe. Check out Rossio’s recent “Timezone” spec sale to see another writer write set pieces that are specific to that concept. I would even say that Rossio is a master at that.

3) Contain your space – How you utilize space is the secret weapon for great set pieces. From the quickly condensing space in the Star Wars trash compactor scene to Captain America’s elevator fight in Winter Soldier to the first alien attack in James Cameron’s “Aliens.” A contained space provides structure. Whereas a big spread out area can be harder to manage and, therefore, get messy. The hardest thing about writing set pieces, in my opinion, is conveying to the reader what’s going on, because what’s going on can often spiral out of control. I mean, imagine writing what was going on in one of those giant Lord of the Rings fight sequences. Nine readers out of ten are not going to be able to keep up with the million and one things happening on screen. So utilize contained space where you can with set pieces. It can do wonders. It’s also a lot cheaper!

4) Imagination – Most writers don’t think that hard about their set pieces and, as a result, you get the same freaking set pieces you always get. I can’t stress this enough. Your set-pieces are your key selling point for a sci-fi movie. They’re where you get to show off what a great idea this is. So you really have to invest in them. Don’t stop until your top 3 set pieces feel like something we’ve never seen before. In the newsletter, we talked about the 5 million dollar spec sale for Deja Vu. A big selling point in that script was the car chase scene where the hero was chasing the bad guy but they were both in two different time periods. That’s an imaginative scene.

What’s a successful set piece that utilized most of these things? The Thor vs Hulk fight in Thor: Ragnarok. We have the contained space. We have the goal (fight to get out of here). The stakes (fighting for their lives). I’m not sure if there was a time constraint on that scene but it was so well constructed in every other area that it didn’t need one. It’s also a good example of how powerful a great set piece can be because that scene sold an entire movie. It was the centerpiece of every trailer. Which is a good thing to think about when writing your own set pieces: Would this scene be the centerpiece of a trailer? Could they sell the whole movie on it? When the answer is yes, that’s when you know you’re onto something.

Another one is the famous T-1000 truck chase sequence in Terminator 2. You may have never realized this until now but that was a classic SPATIALLY CONTAINED scene. The chase doesn’t happen out on a highway, like a boring Michael Bay chase scene. It happens in this contained space with these inescapable walls on either side. Which wasn’t just different, by the way. It added to the intensity of the scene because it gave the Terminator and John Connor no way out. It’s why it remains, to this day, one of the top 5 sci-fi set pieces of all time.

A lesser known set piece is the car-attack scene in Children of Men, which is contained in TWO WAYS. We’re cramped inside this car with five characters who are trying to escape. And then the car itself is contained by this tiny road in the forest. When they’re then ambushed and have to reverse out of the attack, there’s only one place to go. Backwards, up the very same road they came down. It works so well specifically because of how much Alfonso Cuarón focused on containing the set piece.

What I need you to do is spend the next three hours thinking up a big fun set piece THAT COULD ONLY HAPPEN IN YOUR MOVIE due to the fact that it’s so organically connected to your concept. And then apply as many of these above rules as you can. You might not be able to use all of them. But you should be able to get most of them in there. If you do it right, you’re not only going to come up with a great scene, you’re going to come up with a scene that SELLS why your movie should be made.

Good luck! ONE WEEK LEFT!!!

Genre: Sci-Fi/Horror
Premise: A woman is recruited to participate in an experiment where she’s digitally inserted into her comatose mother’s mind. Once inside, she must come to terms with her mom’s homicidal past.
About: Demonic is the latest entry from writer-director Neil Blomkamp, of District 9 fame. Blomkamp, who was once anointed the next great science-fiction director, followed up surprise hit District 9 with two disappointing films, Elysium and Chappie. After becoming momentarily attached to two gigantic 80s properties, Alien and Robocop, he retreated back into his filmmaking cocoon, choosing to make short films. “Demonic” is his first feature film in six years. It is currently at 14% at Rotten Tomatoes.
Writer: Neil Blomkamp
Details: 104 minutes

One of the things I’m fascinated by is artists who create something amazing then never replicate their success again. Because it taps into this fear that I think a lot of artists have, which is: “What if it’s all luck?” You come up with a masterpiece like The Sixth Sense only to then make a dozen terrible movies in a row. Why is it you can’t tap into that reservoir again?

That’s the question that comes up with Blomkamp. But, with Blomkamp, it goes a step further. Because his latest film isn’t just “not as good as District 9.” It’s a legitimately terrible movie. It doesn’t work on any level. So you have to start asking tough questions. Was Blomkamp involved with the screenplay for District 9 at all? Because it doesn’t make sense that the same person who constructed that universe constructed this one.

I know that he had a co-writer on District 9 in Terri Tatchel. And I remember Peter Jackson was shepherding the project, which means he was bringing two decades’ worth of storytelling experience to the table. So maybe it’s as simple as Blomkamp took care of the visuals while everyone else wrote the story. Otherwise, Demonic’s existence doesn’t make sense. It plays like a 23 year old film school student shooting his first movie.

And I’m not talking about just the writing. I’m talking about the acting. Who are these people? You’ve never heard of anybody in this cast. Blomkamp’s career may not be what it was after District 9. But he can get name actors if he wants to. The fact that he’s choosing not to indicates he has at least some propensity for self-sabotage.

30-something Carly, who lives out in the wilderness as far as I can tell (any sense of geography in this movie is non-existent), is contacted by her ex-boyfriend, who informs her that he recently signed up for an experiment at a local medical company only to find out that the company has Carly’s mom there, who’s in a coma and on life support.

Carly heads over there to see what’s up and they explain that her mom fell into a coma and the only way to get in touch with her is by digitally entering her mind. They would love it if Carly could go into her mind to see what she’s thinking. Carly reluctantly agrees and heads into her mother’s brain, which has her waiting for Caarly inside their old house.

It’s here where we learn that Carly’s mom burned an entire building full of people, killing them all, which is why Carly hasn’t seen her in forever. Carly takes this opportunity to tell her mom how much she hates her. Carly’s mom is apologetic, but there’s something else bubbling underneath the surface with her. The company (which amounts to 2 guys) thinks it’s worth sending Carly in for a second visit.

Eventually, we learn that Carly’s mom may be possessed and it was the demon who killed all those people, not the mom. Meanwhile, Carly starts experiencing incidents where she’s out in the real world only to realize she’s actually still in her mother’s, aka the demon’s, mind. The movie’s only scene that approaches halfway decent territory takes place when her best friend transforms into the demon and comes after her.

We eventually learn that the two company men are exorcists, complete with military Vatican gear (I’m not kidding). And they’ve been using Carly to pull the demon out of the mother’s mind so they can kill it. At least I think that’s what they were doing. Carly then runs around the woods a lot until she defeats the demon, I believe. The end.

Blomkamp just did a three hour interview with Joe Rogan which brought up even MORE questions because, when you listen to Blomkamp, you note how smart he is. He’s smarter than me. He’s smarter than anyone in this comment section. He’s smarter than 99% of the people in Hollywood. And yet he made this terrible movie. How can that be?

This got me wondering if being too intelligent is actually a detriment to creativity. Because to create great art, you have to have a strong connection with the non-logical side of your brain. That’s the side that comes up with the weird interesting shit. The logical side helps when it comes to structuring and plotting. But, in every other facet, logic gets in the way.

A steel skeleton cyborg limping down the street chasing a woman named Sarah Conner – that’s not a logical idea. That’s pure creativity. Listening to Blomkamp, he seems stilted and logical when he’s explaining his work. And, unfortunately, that’s not how you create great art.

Another issue Blomkamp has to contend with is that he’s never studied screenwriting. The most blatant example of this is Carly. Carly does not have a job. We have no idea what she does for a living. We have no idea how she makes money, how she survives, what her daily list of tasks is.

That’s because Blomkamp doesn’t know. As a result, the character is just waiting in her room for the writer to call on her. This is one of the most common beginner screenwriting mistakes there is – not knowing what your character does for a living. Thinking that that’s not important. As I’ve stated here before, a person’s occupation makes up half their life. It has tons of influence on who somebody is. Imagine a coder’s daily life compared to a fisherman’s. Do you think those jobs aren’t going to lead to those two people being drastically different? So why would you ever write someone without a job?

But it’s not just that. A job structures a character’s day. If a character doesn’t have one, they have nothing to do. Which makes them inactive, which makes them boring, which makes them unclear. Yet that’s the character leading this story. And the fact that nobody told Blomkamp to fix this indicates that he has zero people giving him feedback. Which is a recipe for disaster.

Where does Blomkamp go from here? I don’t know. Spike Lee ran into a similar problem back in the early 2000s. He was making a lot of bad movies that nobody saw so he was forced to make a studio film. That ended up being The Inside Man and giving his career new life. Of course, it only led to him making more bad movies that nobody saw but at least he was working. Blomkamp will now have to consider making a studio film in order to keep the lights on.

Unless someone pays him to make District 10. But I’ll be honest with you. It’s starting to look like the *other* people involved in District 9 had more of a creative impact than we thought. I still think Blomkamp is an excellent technical director. He has some shades of Lucas in him in how he comes up with interesting sci-fi imagery. But if this guy is going to keep making movies, he needs a collaborator who understands storytelling. Swallow the ego, find a screenwriter you love, and let him write your movies. If you don’t do that, your career might be over.

[x] What the hell did I just watch?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the stream
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius

What I learned: ‘Sitting down and talking’ scenes are the real demon in “Demonic.” I’ve told you before that you should never choose to write sitting down and talking scenes in your script. Ever. The only time you should write a sitting down and talking scene is when you’re on set, you’ve just lost your location, you have to get the scene shot, and the only option is to sit your actors down and shoot the scene quickly. That’s it. That’s your only excuse for writing a ‘sitting down and talking’ scene. But, believe it or not, there’s something even worse than sitting down and talking scenes. And that’s sitting down and talking scenes AT THE BEGINNING OF YOUR MOVIE. When you sit your actors down to talk, you are promoting stagnation. You are promoting inactivity. You are taking the “move” out of “movie.” It’s a terrible precedent to set for your story because it starts things off on a lifeless uninspired note. Of the first three scenes in Demonic, TWO of them are ‘sitting down and talking’ scenes – one with Carly’s best friend, the other with her ex-boyfriend. It was in those moments that I knew this movie was screwed.

Genre: Biopic
Premise: (from Black List) Sex, money, and one schoolyard fad that took a nation by storm. Based on the true story of Ty Warner, the enigmatic entrepreneur behind a ‘90s toy craze that sparked madness, murder, and a billion-dollar empire.
About: This script finished with 8 votes on last year’s Black List. I do not know if the writer, Alexandra Skarsgard, is related to the famous Skarsgard family of actors, but my guess is that she is. Skarsgard is repped by UTA and managed by Kaplan/Perrone. From what I can tell, this is her first big screenplay break.
Writer: Alexandra Skarsgard
Details: 126 pages
Readability: Fast

Ryan Reynolds for Ty?

We’ve been talking all week about the battle between positive material (which tends to make a lot of money) and negative material (which tends to struggle at the box office). A not inaccurate way to characterize Hollywood is it’s a bunch of people trying to become that one artist a year who writes a negative movie that goes on to make a lot of money. That makes them the artist who can do it all.

Well, today, I’m going to give you one of the best templates for achieving this plan: THE TRAGEDY TEMPLATE. The tragedy template requires your movie to star an anti-hero, someone with a series of flaws.

You spend the first two-thirds to three-quarters of your screenplay showing the RISE of this character. The “rise” is important because these movies don’t always have clear goals. Nobody has to save their daughter in a tragedy.

The reason the “rise” works is because everyone likes to watch a character’s rise to prominence, regardless of whether they’re good or bad. There’s something about seeing them get bigger and bigger that’s addictive. Because we know that there’s no drama unless there’s eventually a fall. So there’s a natural desire to get to the fall.

Pro-Tip: All screenwriting effectively is is creating reasons for the reader to keep reading. You do this by injecting a series of “checkpoints” that the reader wants to read to. Certain narratives have those checkpoints built in, such as the tragedy. The reader always wants to get to the “fall.” That means that when you write a tragedy, readers are going to at least want to get to this point in the screenplay.

The fall itself is all about our hero’s main flaw getting the best of them. In a script like this, where someone amasses a lot of money, that flaw is usually greed. Their greed blinds them until they can’t see straight anymore, and it all comes tumbling down. The Wolf of Wall Street is a recent example of this.

The problem with tragedies is that no matter how well they’re written, they always end sadly. It’s built into the formula. Now how many times in your life, when a movie has ended on a down note, have you recommend it? It happens every once in a while if the movie moves you emotionally, such as Titanic. But it’s hard to recommend a movie that you know is going to make people feel down afterwards. So you usually recommend movies with uplifting endings.

That’s why this negative movie thing is so hard. No matter how well your script is written, it’s hard to make a “down” movie go viral.

“Plush” introduces us to real life figure Ty Warner. Ty originally wanted to be an actor, mainly as a way to escape his father, who worked as a salesman for a middling toy company called Dakin. But after realizing that being an actor is actually difficult, he comes back to his old Chicago suburb and reluctantly follows in his father’s footsteps.

But unlike his father, Ty is an amazing salesman. He actually enjoys selling stuffed animals. One day, he comes across a specialty stuffed animal that looks realistic in a way stuffed animals never have before. A lightbulb goes off in Ty’s head. He wants to marry the “realistic” stuffed animal with mass production. He then begins selling these mass produced animals to his Dakin contacts.

When Dakin finds out about this, they fire Ty, and Ty starts his own business, pulling a Jerry Maguire and hiring his old secretary, Carol, from Dakin to build the operation. The company is successful but by no means a phenomenon. That is until something funny happens. It’s the mid-90s when the internet is first coming around. Ty realizes that suburban moms are buying up his discontinued beanie baby units and selling them to the tune of thousands of dollars on the open market.

Ty gets the genius idea to strategically introduce and retire certain beanie babies every month, incentivizing people to buy as many as possible in the hopes of snagging a winning lottery ticket. The strategy is so successful that it turns Ty’s company from a tens of millions of dollars business to a billion dollar business.

Of course, this can’t last forever, and beanie babies are eventually supplanted by Pokemon. As the ship was sinking, Ty hid a lot of his money overseas, which got him into a bunch of tax trouble. Many people thought that he’d be going to prison for several decades. But the judge decided to let him off with 2 years probation. Ty’s public image never recovered after that, but he still runs a successful business to this day.

“Plush” wants to be “Steve Jobs” meets “The Social Network” but it’s not as sophisticated as either of those screenplays. It has the lawsuit framework like Social Network. But its implementation is haphazard. It comes and goes unpredictably. It doesn’t sandwich the narrative in a nice balanced manner.

Nor does it have the clever device at the heart of “Steve Jobs” whereby instead of the lazy cradle-to-grave style most biopics use, Sorkin explored Jobs’s life via Apple’s three biggest public announcements. “Plush” jumps around in time at first before eventually becoming completely linear. It didn’t really feel thought-through to me. Like a building that was built without blueprints.

With that said, two parts of the script worked. The first is Ty. Ty is a strange dude. His mother is schizophrenic and required hospital care for most of her life. That seems to have messed with his perception of reality and at least partly leads to an insane addiction to plastic surgery.

The real Ty Warner

The second is the beanie baby craze moment. It’s interesting seeing how that came about. Nobody had ever done with stuffed animals what Ty did here – creating purposefully discontinued animals in order to create a sales frenzy whereby everybody needed to have all of them. That was fascinating to read about.

There was also this underlying theme of whether Ty was a good person or not. This is a man who kicked his own sister out of his life while making sure his sick mother was always cared for. This man was an asshole to every person he worked with yet he’d help random people he met on the street get major surgery when he found out there were dying. All of this comes together in the final court case scene when the judge is trying to decide what Ty’s sentence should be, and that decision is tied to what kind of person he’s been throughout his life. He has to weigh the good against the bad to make a decision, which makes the stakes very personal.

The big problem that the script can’t overcome, though, is that it’s not as salacious as it wants to be. The logline says there’s murder. There was no murder in this script. The fact that this is a tragedy implies that Ty’s life fell apart. But I just looked online and it appears Ty is still a billionaire and doing just fine.

It seems like the script is taking liberties in assessing how much of a downfall Ty actually had.

All of this left me confused as far as to what to rate the script but I’d say the main character is interesting enough to warrant a ‘worth the read.’

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

What I learned: If you don’t have a traditional goal-driven narrative (for example, Fury Road – get to the promised land), choose a narrative that KEEPS YOUR HERO ACTIVE. The nice thing about tragedies is that your hero is typically spending the first 70% of the movie trying to build something. That act of building keeps them active and that’s a huge reason we keep watching even though you don’t have the traditional dramatic setup of saving something or delivering something or avenging something.

What I learned 2: This tip comes from the main character himself! One of the reasons Ty became so successful is that he REALLY FREAKING CARED ABOUT EVERY DETAIL OF THOSE STUFFED ANIMALS. He would stare at them for hours. If the eyes were just a little off, he wouldn’t produce that beanie baby. All artists should be this way. They should be obsessed. If you write John Wick, you have to care about the specific gun he uses. About what his suit measurements are. About how he got his training. The audience doesn’t need to know this stuff. But YOU DO. When you don’t know specifics, you use generalities. Generalities, I shouldn’t have to tell you, lead to GENERIC movies.

Is this the script Christopher Nolan should’ve directed instead of Interstellar?

Genre: Sci-Fi
Premise: After NASA sends a crew of astronauts into deep space to find another habitable planet, the crew is unexpectedly woken up from hyper-sleep and must survive a mysterious new threat that comes from the one place they never expected – Earth.
About: This script appeared on last year’s Black List. The writers, John and Thomas Sonntag, are repped by Gersh. About five years ago, they sold a show called “Blackmail” with Aaron Paul attached to NBC but it never went to pilot. They’re still looking for that big produced credit break we all are!
Writers: The Sonntag Brothers
Details: 100 pages even

Claire Danes for Morgan?

Sci-Fi Showdown is coming!!!!

You still have a month and a half to finish your script. You should be writing every single day.

After finishing Generation Leap, I thought to myself, “Would this script win Sci-Fi Showdown?” I came to the conclusion that the answer is yes. It’s not a great script. But it’s got an interesting premise. It’s got a plot that moves fast. And I haven’t seen this movie before.

Some of it is sloppy but that’s the case with almost every script. So, if you’re entering Sci-Fi Showdown, read this screenplay (someone from the Comments section should be able to send it to you). Cause this script is the bar you’re trying to beat. Let’s take a look at it…

At the beginning of our story, our heroine, Morgan, explains the Wait Calculation to us. “Imagine a nest of birds and they’re out of worms. Dire stuff. So one brave bird volunteers to fly out across the land and save the nest. But while she’s out on her perilous journey, the R&D department back in the nest creates a jetpack. They strap that sucker on a second bird, and suddenly the second bird passes the first bird, gets the worm, and returns to the nest a hero.”

She continues with the foreshadowing monologue: “How long should someone wait to leave so they won’t get lapped by something better? It’s the hardest question for an explorer to get right because there is no answer.”

Cut to 120 years later where Morgan, along with former surgeon Isaiah Wilkins and elder statesman Leland Wong, are the three astronauts tasked with traveling to the planet of Meliora to see if it can sustain life. NASA wants another planet to go to when the ozone completely collapses. We’re currently in the middle of the 300 year journey.

But the three are woken up from hyper-sleep by a giant ship that engulfs them. Inside that new ship, they meet Hunter, Yuri, and Alyx, also from NASA. Hunter, the captain, explains that they left earth just *twenty* years ago, also to fly to Meliora, and part of their mission was to pick these three up. Had they not, by the time Morgan, Isaiah, and Leland made it to Meliora, it would’ve already been settled.

Hunter is a bit hoity-toity about the whole thing. And when Morgan and Isaiah attempt to give their opinions on matters, the “future” group rolls their eyes. Morgan and her crew are from a lost generation. It’d be like someone from 1930 telling you how to handle stress.

While the two teams butt heads, they’re alerted by the ship’s A.I. to an object up ahead. It turns out there’s a *third* clunky-looking ship ahead of them. As they come up on it, they learn it was a ship sent to Meliora from the Reagan era! Our ship has just overcome THIS ship via the Wait Calculation. Unfortunately, the technology of that ship is so dated that when they try to de-thaw the pilots, the entire ship malfunctions and the astronauts die!

Back on the big ship, the two 3-person generations get to talking and realize that, if the Wait Calculation has already been met twice, it will surely be met again. Which means a fourth ship is coming! Lo and behold, that’s what happens. The group go back into hyper-sleep but a few years later, get woken up and boarded by the fatest of the Wait Calculation ships yet.

The big difference is that these new astronauts are angry and militaristic. It turns out that after the third group left earth, there was a world war. Which has shaped this latest mission by NASA, which is more territorial in nature. The two original teams will have to unite to take on the military team. But it may be for nothing. Because even if they defeat them, who says another ship isn’t coming?

What a weird script that’s also kind of a good script.

First off, I’ve never heard of this principle before. But as soon as it was explained to me, I thought, “Huh, that’s cool.” I like sci-fi ideas that make you think. And this one kept me thinking.

Let’s go through it together. You can get in a shuttle now in order to reach another planet in 300 years. However, if you wait 50 years, the technology could theoretically advance to a point whereby you make it to the planet in 200 years. Even with a 50 year head start, you would still beat the first ship to the planet by 50 years. But it gets better. If you wait 100 years, the technology might advance to the point where it only takes you 50 years to make it to the planet, in which case you beat the first ship by 150 years and the second by 100 years.

If that’s the case, why leave now? Why not wait until technology advances and you can get there faster? But if technology is always advancing, you should technically never leave (since waiting is always going to get you there faster).

Ugh, my head hurts.

The Wait Principle isn’t the only neat idea in Generation Leap. The script also poses the question of how generations 100 years apart would work together. The ideologies that defined each generation would be night and day. Imagine the mindset of someone who risked their lives to defeat Germany in World War 2 working with someone whose entire existence has been defined by social media posts. Could those two vastly different mindsets work together effectively? I find that an interesting question.

Unfortunately, the script doesn’t have enough time to get into those deeper questions. The first generation is basically about being the first humans to visit another planet. They want all the glory. The second generation doesn’t care about prestige. They just want to get the job done. And the third generation is hardcore militaristic.

As a result, with a few fleeting exceptions, the debates are surface level.

Despite this, the script’s relentless plotting keeps it entertaining. We’re woken up from hyper-sleep by something mysterious. It’s the next generation ship, swallowing them up. After they come to terms with this new team, they discover another ship. It’s the ship that left before them. As soon as that’s over and they go back to sleep, we cut to the military ship showing up. These guys are so combustible that they create enough problems to keep the plot firing on all cylinders until the end.

This is the kind of script I could see becoming a movie. That’s why I’m making it the bar for Sci-Fi Showdown. Yes, it’s messy. Yes, it doesn’t explore its premise as intelligently as I would’ve hoped. But there’s more good here than bad. And when you have more good than bad, you have the foundation for a movie. Generation Leap was a fun, if imperfect, script.

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

What I Learned: I’m putting an end to one of the most overused science-fiction tropes out there right now. You cannot use it anymore. I’m talking about when the ship (or base) doesn’t have enough oxygen to keep everyone alive for the remainder of the mission, so now they have to decide who to get rid of. I’ve read this in maybe 50 science-fiction scripts. I’ve written it before in my own science-fiction script. Science-fiction is one of those genres where you don’t want to pick the low-hanging fruit. The way to stand out with science-fiction is to dream up things that we haven’t seen before. So no more ‘oxygen is running out’ subplots. Every time you think of that as an option, remember that the reader has probably encountered it a dozen times.