Genre: TV Pilot – Cop Procedural with comedic elements
Premise: The most underfunded police department in the state is shaken up when a seemingly perfect FBI agent with unlimited resources moves in across the way.
About: Breaking Bad’s Vince Gilligan’s new show he’s doing for CBS. He originally wrote the script 10 years ago (which is the draft I’m reviewing) but couldn’t get CBS to commit. I’m thinking the success of Breaking Bad might have something to do with their newfound interest.
Writer: Vince Gilligan
Details: 57 pages (12/26/02 draft)

Writer and Creator Vince Gilligan

Like a lot of people, I avoided Breaking Bad at first. Cancer is such a depressing subject matter, it’s hard to get excited about any show or movie that features it. It wasn’t until I heard a couple of DJs talking about the show on the radio and mentioning (spoiler) that Walter’s cancer goes away that my curiosity piqued. I then started, like many, my binge watching obsession with the show.

But Breaking Bad is over and thus begins a new chapter in creator Vince Gilligan’s career. Here’s the scary part about that. It doesn’t matter how high up you are on TV’s power pyramid. If your show ends and you don’t come up with another good one, you become forgotten.

Remember Chris Carter? That man was the king of the world when X-Files was on. Now he’s desperately trying to scrape a sad third X-Files movie together. Yes, the fall in this town can be fast and it can be dramatic. So there’s a lot of pressure on that first show back. At the very least, the show has to stay on the air. And in TV, you just don’t know if that’ll happen or not.

In many ways, it’s even more uncertain than movies because not only are there tons of variables involved, but things happen a lot faster and a lot cheaper. The shooting schedule is tight. You don’t get to do 72 takes like in film. So yeah, audiences will give you a few episodes because you’re Vince Gilligan. But after that, if your show isn’t good, they stop tuning in. I like Michael J. Fox. I was pumped when he came back to TV. But there’s a reason no one watches his show. It’s terrible!

Battle Creek begins in, appropriately, Battle Creek, a mid-sized town outside of Detroit. Russ Agnew, a cop in the town, is pissed. Why? Because it’s impossible to do his job. What, with his department scraping by on a budget meant for the local Sizzler. To give you an idea of how bad it is, when he and his partner, Detective Fontanelle White, set up a fake drug deal to catch a criminal, Russ has to steal his sister’s baby monitor for their snitch’s wire. Yeah, it’s that bad.

Enter Special Agent Milton Bradley, an FBI agent who’s about to make things worse. Milton sets up an FBI satellite office across the hall from the precinct. And he’s got FBI money to back up his high-tech pursuit of local criminals. Plush leather couches. State of the art computers. To make matters worse, Milton looks like a cross between Brad Pitt and George Clooney… only taller.

Russ, the alpha male of the office, is quickly dismissed in favor of this new shiny toy. And Milt quickly makes his mark in the workplace, lucking into a homicide, a homicide that should’ve been Russ’s had he just picked up the phone. Oh, but that’s not the worst of it. The murder victim? His body’s been there for decades. (spoiler) Oh, and it’s JIMMY HOFFA! All of a sudden, a media storm sweeps in and Milt is a superstar. Russ can only watch from the shadows, wondering what could’ve been.

But Russ starts doing some investigating and finds out there’s more to this homicide than meets the eye. And that maybe it isn’t Hoffa. However, he soon learns that the investigation isn’t the job. The job is battling Milton, a man who, we learn, weasels his way into offices, manipulates the people and the evidence around him, and ALWAYS comes out on top. For Russ, the war has only begun.

10 pages into Battle Creek and I was thinking, “Nooooooooooo!”  Early Vince Gilligan was not nearly as good as Breaking Bad Vince Gilligan.  And we would have  to endure a subpar TV show because he’d clung to this old dingy relic.  The opening sequence is an uninspired engagement meant to establish how poor the Battle Creek police department is (zoinks! Russ has to steal a citizen’s camcorder during his daughter’s recital in order to tape the drug bust). I was thinking to myself, “This is going to get old fast.”

But then Milton entered the picture and all was good with the world. You had conflict. You had fun. This is where the pros separate themselves from the amateurs. They take an idea and look PAST the obvious execution of it. Anyone else with this idea may have stopped at “Wacky adventures with low-tech outdated equipment.” That’d be good for five episodes. But going a step further and adding irony – a nemesis for Russ who has access to the most advanced equipment and resources in the U.S. – that’s what really transformed this into a memorable pilot script.

And Gilligan kept proving he had the goods. This isn’t the stale rambling True Detective, which was clearly written by someone who was so ignorant to screenwriting that he thought Final Draft had something to do with Vietnam. For example, in the beginning, Russ, via VO, writes a letter to 60 Minutes asking them to come and do a piece on his busted police department in the hopes of getting more funding. Because we’re so focused on the letter, we don’t realize that Gilligan is cleverly using the segement for exposition purposes – to introduce us to the department and its key problems. In essence, he sets up the entire show with that scene.  And we never notice.

What I also liked here was that Gilligan never wasted a character. If someone showed up early – even if they were seemingly unimportant – those characters would find their way back in the script somehow. For example, early on, a lonely old women always called and annoyed Russ about “a man in red shorts and a big mustache from next door who would keep bothering her,” an obvious reference, Russ came to realize, to her favorite TV show, Magnum P.I. Except later on, we learn that she WASN’T, in fact, referring to Tom Selleck, but in fact a key figure in the case. That payoff, then, ends up becoming a key late-script plot point.

Also, these sort-of “Underdog vs. Super Hero” situations, particularly in comedy, almost always work (check out Toy Story to see it done to perfection). We set up Russ as the hard-working underdog who’s trying to get by on the worst police budget in America, and this perfect asshole comes along and does everything Russ ALREADY does, yet gets commended for it because he’s taller, better looking, and has the deep-funded pockets of the FBI behind him.

And this is another example of the unexpected villain. As I’ve said before, asshole in-your-face one-dimensional villains are usually boring. Here, Milton is polite, he’s thoughtful, he’s seemingly always trying to help everyone. But it’s a façade. He manipulates and uses people in order to come out looking like the hero. And for that, we hate him way more than if he was a straight-forward dick.

One thing Battle Creek taught me about TV is that – at least for the kinds of TV I like – the best part of the show shouldn’t be about that episode’s mystery. It needs to be about the people solving the mystery. Because when you think about it, on these cop shows, every single type of murder case has already been done. So the audience is usually ahead of the writer on that front. But the reason they’ll keep tuning in is because of that battle between Russ and Milt. We want to see Russ win. That dynamic between the two is what viewers are going to latch onto.

The only reason this pilot didn’t get an impressive (and it had one until 5 pages to go), is that the ending wasn’t as clever as it could’ve been. Things kind of come together coincidentally and it felt a little too easy. Then again, Gilligan has had 10 years to perfect this pilot, so maybe he fixed this problem. Let’s hope so, because if he does, this show (or at least the pilot for this show) could be perfection.

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

What I learned: Today I learned about the “ADDITIONAL ELEMENT.” Every plot has become cliché, especially on the cop/detective procedural. For that reason, your characters simply “solving the case” isn’t going to be satisfactory enough for the viewer. You need an ADDED ELEMENT to the show/movie/plot that’s going to give the audience something ELSE to look forward to. Here, it’s Russ beating Milton. That’s what’s keeping us watching despite the familiarity. Sure, trying to figure out who killed who is fun. But it’s going to be extra fun if we have something else to keep us entertained, like wondering which man is going to win this episode.

Genre: Action/Drama/Thriller
Premise: A veteran covert operative seeks redemption for his dark deeds, devoting himself to helping others where injustice has been done.
About: This first draft made a lot of noise in Hollywood for being so amazing for a…well, a first draft! The project has Denzel Washington attached to star (who’s perfect for the role by the way) but took awhile to get its director.  It started with Nicholas Winding Refn hot off his “Drive” success.  But rumors swirled he wasn’t thrilled with the direction they were pushing the project in and bailed.  More directors came and went, including Rise of the Planet of the Apes director Rupert Wyatt.  The studio finally decided to team up a proven combination, bringing back Denzel’s “Training Day” director, Antoine Fuqua, to do the job.  They’ve also since rewritten the female lead (the waitress) to a younger girl, which Chloe Moretz will play.  I found that to be a strange choice but it looks like they’re going the Taxi Driver route, and since this has the same kind of tone, it shouldn’t affect the script much assuming the part is written well.   I have to admit I’m kinda shocked Wenk wrote this, as he’s the screenwriter of one of my least favorite scripts of last year, The Expendables 2. He also wrote The Mechanic and 16 Blocks. Wenk was born in 1952 in New Jersey and went to NYU.
Writer: Richard Wenk (based on the TV show created by Richard Lindheim)
Details: 106 pages – 1st draft

Something strikes you right away when you open The Equalizer. The writing is so sparse it borders on anorexic. Yet somehow it still contains a ton of information. To me, that’s the essence of great screenwriting. You want to convey a ton of information but you don’t want the reader to have to dig through a mountain of text to get to it. It takes years to perfect that, and still to this day, there are only a few dozen writers who can pull it off. Add Richard Wenk to that list.

I mean here’s his opening scene:

AN ALARM CLOCK

Hits 5:30 AM and goes off.

BEDROOM

Grey morning light. Alarm still BUZZING because the room’s empty.

Bed already made. Tight enough to flip a quarter. Room Spartan and immaculate.

(We then cut to the bathroom where we’ll meet our hero)

This miniature scene gives us key information about our main character. It’s 5:30 AM and he’s already up. Not only that, but his bed has been made. Not only that, but it’s “tight enough to flip a quarter” on. The room is also “Spartan” and “immaculate.” Our character clearly has his shit together getting up this early and keeping his room this nice. And with that tightly made bed, it’s a good bet he has a military background. We also get a little visual flair: “Grey morning light,” to give us a better feel for the room. All of this takes an eighth of the page to say. Wow.

So what’s The Equalizer about?

Robert McCall (“Middle aged, middle class, middle of the road looks.”) works at the local Home Depot. He’s one of those guys who keeps to himself, and it isn’t hard to figure out why. This dude’s got a dark history. Except we don’t know what that history is yet. That’ll come up later. In the meantime, we see McCall helping an overweight employee, Ralphie, with his lunch choices. He seems genuinely interested in helping Ralphie kick his unhealthy eating habits.

After work, he goes to his usual diner where he spots his only friend, if you can call the local hooker who offers a few nice words before going to earn her paycheck every night a “friend.” But McCall sees something different in Teri. He knows there’s more going on there and if she can just get out of this profession somehow, she can reach that potential.

Naturally, then, McCall is devastated when he finds out Teri was beat to within an inch of her life by her pimp, a local Russian crime boss who’s got “Don’t Fuck With Me” written all over his face. Unfortunately for him, McCall fucks with those kinds of faces.

To McCall’s credit, he offers a fair deal. 5 grand. To give Teri her freedom forever. But the boss and his half dozen thugs just laugh at McCall. Boy was that a mistake. This is the first moment where we see what McCall is capable of. With unimaginable speed and beauty, he dismantles and kills everyone in the room within 45 seconds.

The next day he sees how happy Teri is to be free of that world and he realizes – for the first time in a long time – the kind of power he wields. There are so many people out there just like Teri who are being used and taken advantage of. There’s nobody out there to stand up for them. Until now that is. McCall has just found his McCalling.

What McCall doesn’t know is that he just wiped out the Russian mafia’s entire east coast team. And that makes the mafia’s CEO, Valdimir Pushkin, very very angry. He wants this McCall taken care of to send a message to any rival families not to fuck with Pushkin’s people. Which naturally means there’s going to be a monster showdown. The Russian mafia’s biggest baddest men versus one man. The only man who can take them on all on his own. The Equalizer!

Holy shit was this a good screenplay. I have so many good things to say about this script, I don’t know where to start. First of all, the dialogue was great! I’ve read so much bad dialogue this week and it’s usually because characters are talking to each other in literal, obvious, on-the-nose, saying-what-I’m feeling, sentences. What’s cool about the dialogue here is that characters talk around things, even though they’re talking about them.

Like how McCall and Teri are talking about the book he’s reading (The Old Man And The Sea) but what they’re really doing is flirting, getting to know each other better, trying to see if the other likes them as much as they like the other.

And speaking of McCall’s reading habits, The Equalizer had this perfect little quirk that McCall is trying to conquer the “100 books you should read before you die” list. Not because it makes his character more interesting. But because his wife died and SHE was doing the list. He’s trying to accomplish what she never could. I just thought that was such an interesting way to get into backstory about one’s wife dying. Usually characters will come out point-blank and say something like, “My wife died six months ago,” and that’s it. It’s so generic that it never registers. We never feel the pain because no specificity has been put into it. Those books were that specificity that made the backstory of his wife dying real.

And then there was the character of McCall himself. He was just so damn likable! Who doesn’t love a guy who goes around evening the score for the people who can’t do it themselves? Hero-likability (or dare I say “loveability”) was hardwired into this script, which made you want to follow McCall through anything.

When he takes down that room of Russians, mark my words, that’ll be one of the coolest crowd-pleasing scenes of the year. Just the moment when he’s about to walk out of the restaurant with the Russians taunting him, and instead of opening the door, he LOCKS IT – that has to be one of the most badass moments ever!

I’ve heard a few people complain that McCall never really encounters any resistance in the script. There’s “no doubt” that he’s going to win every time. What’s strange is that I’ve had this same complaint about a lot of scripts. But it didn’t bother me here for some reason and I don’t know why. I think it’s because I liked McCall so much and I hated all these lowlifes so much, that all I cared about was them getting their due. I didn’t need resistance. I needed him to put them in their place.

This is such a surprising script in that the setup is so generic. I mean, give this to 999 other writers, they would’ve written a generic piece of garbage. But Wenk is that one in a thousand screenwriter who knew what to do with it. This is cream of the crop screenwriting here. I don’t have anything bad to say about the script. Find it if you can and read it now!

[ ] what the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[xx] impressive (Top 10!)
[ ] genius

What I learned: Notice the double dose of likage Wenk hits us with right away to make sure we’ll love McCall. At first, his co-workers make fun of him (we’re always sympathetic towards people who get put down/bullied by others). Then McCall goes to lunch and helps an overweight co-worker stay on his diet (we’re always sympathetic towards people who help others). Remember guys, don’t just make your hero likable.  Make him double-likable.

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: Surviving Life
GENRE: Comedy
LOGLINE: An angsty older woman, with money woes, fakes being timid to attract a rich fiance who insists she toughen up by completing a survival cruise with his maladjusted sister.
WHY YOU SHOULD READ: Surviving Life is a lowbrow comedy, with heart. There’s no poop or fart jokes but crudeness and profanity abound. It’s a female buddy movie with older protagonists. Some might find my main character, Helen, to be unsympathetic, but I wanted her to be her own worse enemy because the story is about making bad choices. The characters are older because I tried to explore how fear can shrink our lives as we age. I’m submitting to AF in the hopes of finding out what works and what doesn’t. Thanks ahead of time for any feedback.

TITLE: Vegas Trio
GENRE: Dark Comedy
LOGLINE: Three master pick up artists find themselves in way over their heads after they become criminals in order to keep up with their drug and sex fueled Vegas lifestyle.
WHY YOU SHOULD READ: I won’t waste your time describing how good I THINK this script is. You’ll decide that for yourself. You should read this script because it will give me exposure. I can’t get anywhere as a screenwriter if I’m not exposed on sites like Scriptshadow. I mean, I’m in the middle of Arkansas with a wife and baby. I’m not going to sell a spec in this ultra competitive industry unless websites like yours know I exist. So I need your help. I’m out of money, out of patience, and out of options. If this screenwriting thing is EVER going to happen for me, it needs to happen within the next year. It would be an honor if Scriptshadow got the ball rolling on my career.

TITLE: The Fireseed
GENRE: True Crime Drama
LOGLINE: Based on real events, The Fireseed tells of a deeply closeted governor on the brink of re-election who must stop a network of twelve serial killers before they expose him and kill his nephew.

WHY YOU SHOULD READ: The events on which The Fireseed is based have never been brought to the screen. Between 1974 and 1983 a network of serial killers known as The Family were thought responsible for 300 abductions and five murders in my hometown of Adelaide, Australia.

TITLE: The Devil’s Teardrop
GENRE: Crime thriller
LOGLINE: A master thief must confront betrayal in his crew and overcome a brutal gangster as he steals four of the world’s most valuable diamonds in order to get his hands on his ultimate quarry: the 1,000-year old red diamond known as the Devil’s Teardrop.
WHY YOU SHOULD READ: I lived in Saudi Arabia for a year and Colombia for three. (More broadly, I’ve spent a lot of time overseas, and that matters for the script because it features a number of overseas locations.)

TITLE: Canary in a Coal Mine.pdf)
GENRE: Animated comedy with dark overtones
LOGLINE: When a young canary discovers the true purpose of canaries in a 1930s coal mine, he teams with a boy miner to improve working conditions for birds and boys alike.
WHY YOU SHOULD READ: Canary in a Coal Mine is a Nicholl Fellowship semi-finalist and Austin Film Fest Second Rounder. It was discussed on John August’s ScriptNotes podcast as part of their 3-Page Challenge, and it’s garnered attention from Disney and Sony Animation. So it’s got that going for it, which is nice.

As for me, I’m a persistent writer who has submitted to ScriptShadow 8 or 9 times, but this is the first in 2014. I love the website and the scripts. However, I’ve noticed one thing missing — CANARY MINERS. You need canary miners wearing tiny helmet lamps and speaking Scranton lingo to be complete. Trust me.

Get Your Script Reviewed On Scriptshadow!: To submit your script for an Amateur Review, send in a PDF of your script, along with the title, genre, logline, and finally, something interesting about yourself and/or your script that you’d like us to post along with the script if reviewed. Use my submission address please: Carsonreeves3@gmail.com. Remember that your script will be posted. If you’re nervous about the effects 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: Biopic
Premise: (from writer) The true story of Bobby Riggs, The Battle of the Sexes, and how the mafia may have influenced the most famous tennis match in history.
Why You Should Read: (from writer) Rigged combines something you love (tennis) with something you hate (biopics). Like chocolate covered raisins. It’s also tailor-made for an A-list actor (Paul Giamatti?), has clear GSU and features some of the most intense tennis scenes this side of Bridesmaids. Is this the first amateur biopic to get a “Worth the Read” by Carson?”
Writer: Andrew Parker
Details: 94 pages

As I was a tennis nerd in another lifetime, I’m very familiar with this match. It’s one of the most important events in sports history. It showed that the girls could hang with the guys. Well, sort of. I mean, throwing an aging out-of-shape weirdo (as Riggs was) to compete against one of the best women in the world in her prime wasn’t exactly the best way to prove anything. But when King won, it really helped people take women more seriously in the sport and gave Women’s Rights a healthy push as well. Now, women’s tennis is the most lucrative female sport in the world. In all the major tennis championships, women and men get paid the same amount of prize money. There is no other sport that does that.

Now if you’re looking for a heavy facts-driven honest interpretation of the “Battle of the Sexes” spectacle, writer Andrew Parker would probably suggest you look somewhere else. “Riggs” is light and fluffy most of the way through, which is both an advantage and a fault.

It’s 1971 and Bobby Riggs, a former Wimbledon champion now in his 50s, is bored with life. He works for some big boring company. His boss is his step-father. In order to get through the days, he comes up with inventive games and calls his bookie to put money on all the major sporting events. Yup, Riggs is both a lazy bum and a gambler. A winning combination!

At some point, Riggs realizes “real work” isn’t his thing and decides to head west to have fun with his life again. So he leaves his wife and son to… well, hustle people I guess. Riggs isn’t the kind of guy who’s always got a plan. That is until he watches a women’s tennis match on TV and realizes that he could probably beat the socks off of them. And people would probably pay to see him do so.

So Riggs puts on his promoter shoes and starts telling any TV network that will have him that women suck. They need to stay in the kitchen and work on being pregnant. And that any man, even an aging old grandpa like himself, could beat them on a tennis court. He backs up his talk when he beats the number 1 female player in the world, Margaret Court (One of the best tennis names ever). And then he challenges Billie Jean King. Fearing that if she loses it will set women’s rights back 20 years, King is reluctant at first, but finally comes around.

In the meantime, Riggs’s betting is getting out of control, and some shady mafia buddies are on his case for the 100 grand he owes them. This forces Riggs to go out and promote the hell out of the match in order to get as many people to watch it as possible (it is reported that over 90 million people eventually watched the match), so he can get them their money.

But in a twist, his mafia buddies tell him at the last second that they want him to throw the match. They figure they can make a hell of a lot more than the money Riggs owes them that way. Riggs starts to buckle under all the pressure and goes into a tailspin, drinking and partying. By the time the match arrives, he’s not in shape, and ends up getting embarrassed in straight sets by King. He wanted a re-match, but King wouldn’t give him one. The two remained friends until Riggs’s death in 1995.

Ahhh! I long for the days when tennis was relevant, when the sport actually took chances and put together stuff like this to drum up interest. Now we got bore-snores like Azarenka and Novak Djokovic. Also, all the players like each other. They’re all best buds. They hug and hang out after the match. I wouldn’t be surprised if they showered together and scrubbed each other’s backs. Back in the old days, with McEnroe and Conners, after a match you threw your racket at your opponent’s face! It was fun to watch people play because people didn’t like each other dammit!

Where were we? Oh yeah! This script. So I thought Rigged was pretty good. The first thing I noticed was that it didn’t read AT ALL like a biopic. You know how I am when I see that word. “Biopic.” It’s the equivalent of a deadly thirsty man hearing the words “desert.” I just see insurmountable blocks of text and thousands of overly dramatic scenes about daddy didn’t hug me enough. Double fault on that.

This script is really clean. The writing is so sparse you find yourself 20 pages in within minutes. And for the most part, that approach worked. I love how Parker made Riggs funny. He’s a hustler. He’s a bit of a slimeball. And he doesn’t take life too seriously. So when he’s fucking around with his co-worker or trading barbs with his older bro, I was usually smiling.

But this was also the script’s biggest problem. When we did want there to be meat, it wasn’t there. And big moments were relegated to half-page snapshots. For example, Riggs just decides to leave his family to go hang out on the West Coast. He tells his wife and is out of his family’s life within five lines. WTF????

I’m thinking there’d probably be a little more build-up, conflict and thought involved before making that decision, particularly because he’s not just leaving his wife. He’s leaving his son! Speaking of, the son here is just a-okay with everything! Dad can’t hang out but wants to drink with his friends instead, no problem! Dad wants to leave him and his mom for years, no problem! I mean this kid was the most well-adjusted cool-with-anything kid I’d ever met! We clearly needed to dig into that more. I usually see these types of problems with sub-100 page scripts. There’s not enough fleshing out. “Rigged” was no exception.

The other major problem is that Rigged looks at the less interesting side of this battle. I mean, Riggs has so little at stake compared to King. King was playing for half the world. Riggs was playing to pay back his bookie. There was something so empty about that. And I’m not saying Parker should spin around and cover King instead, because that would make this a much more serious script and I liked how Rigged was sort of a light-hearted comedy. But if you are going to focus on Riggs, we need a better reason why winning this match is so important to him. He doesn’t have to figure it out right away. But he needs to figure it out at some point so that when he steps on that court, we care about him.

Then also, this ending makes Billie Jean King look TERRIBLE. I mean this basically says, “The only reason Riggs lost this match was because he tanked for his bookies.” I know there’s that moment in the match where Riggs decides, “No, I’m going to try to win,” but it was practically a throwaway moment. There was no conviction to it. So we didn’t believe it.

You also point out that Riggs was really out of shape and hadn’t practiced at all. Again, this takes everything away from King’s win. And you have to understand that the people who are going to see this movie are the people who love the fact that King won this match and changed the world. To finish with a finale that basically says, “Riggs gave her the match,” isn’t going to go over well. This needs to be rewritten SOMEHOW to emphasize that Riggs gave this his all and tried 100%. I don’t know if that means getting rid of the bookies or what. But it needs that ending.

And maybe you can kill two birds with one stone here. Riggs was known as an ultra-competitive guy who hated to lose. I’d love to see more of that infused into his character. Make it this guy’s fatal flaw, his Achilles heal. Not only will you get some of that depth I’m asking for, but then you can really highlight this in the final match, and emphasize how this guy is giving it his all.

I’m going to give this script a BARELY worth the read because I think it has a lot of upside and I like Parker as a writer. I just want him to infuse a little more meat into his work. It needs that meat if we’re going to care during the final match.

Script Link: Rigged

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

What I learned: When you’re conceiving a concept, look at every angle of the concept to make sure you’re exploring the most interesting one. For example, you might have your mind set on a movie about a cop who’s hunting down a drug dealer who’s wreaking havoc on the town. But maybe telling the story from the drug dealer’s point of view, making him an underdog who’s trying to provide for his family, might make the better story.

So tonight American Idol had its season premiere (go J. Lo!) and I have a pretty good idea of what your response to that is. Who the f— cares! That show had its heyday a decade ago. It doesn’t have any influence in the music industry anymore. There’s 10 million other singing shows competing against it, depleting the talent pool and dimming the luster of anyone who wins the competition. Who gives a crap, right?

I’ll tell you who gives a crap. ME. Now you’re probably wondering why someone obsessed with screenwriting would give a rat’s melody about a reality show highlighting a bunch of caterwauling Katy Perry wannabes. Well, it’s the same thing that drew me to screenwriting in the first place. The idea of going from a nobody to a somebody. Just like how if you sing something amazing in front of the world, you become an instant superstar, if you write a great screenplay and the right person reads it, you can sell it for a million bucks. It’s one of the coolest things about this business.

Ah, but that’s not the real reason I’m obsessed with American Idol. No no no. I’m obsessed with it for a much darker reason. I watch it because the auditions so closely resemble the amateur audition process in screenwriting. Every time someone comes up to sing, it’s the same as when a script lands in an executive’s lap. This is their chance. This is their shot to prove to the world they’ve got it.

The big difference is that when you sing, it’s all out there for everyone to hear. Within seconds you know if the person’s good or not. With writing, the process is a little more complicated. It takes a few pages to figure out if the person’s got it. And if they don’t, the writer doesn’t get that direct feedback a singer does. They’re left in the cold, forced to interpret things through a quick e-mail or no reply at all. It’s one of the reasons writing is so tough. It’s difficult to get any quality feedback on your work.

But the thing that gets me so infatuated with Idol, is that the process for determining who’s got it in singing and who’s got it in writing is the same. It all comes down to the voice! Think about any singer you’ve fallen in love with. Think about your favorite singer right now. What first drew you to them? It was something different and unique about their voice, right? Maybe it’s the tone. Maybe it’s the pitch. Maybe it’s the way they emphasize certain phrases or play with certain chords. But mostly it’s something in their voice you hadn’t heard from any other artist before. From Eminem to Louis Armstrong to Adele to Lorde. You would never mix them up with any other artist, right?

And that’s the key phrase: “SOMETHING YOU HAVEN’T HEARD BEFORE.”

I would love it every aspiring screenwriter would equate their writing to singing and ask themselves that question: “What is it about my voice that’s different?” What can I do with my voice that’s unlike any other voice out there? Because here’s the thing I see on American Idol. There are a TON of singers that are “good.” They’ve trained most of their lives. They’ve taken lessons. They’ve practiced their asses off. So when they sing, you nod your head and you say, “That was pretty good.”

But “that was pretty good” is the kiss of death. Nobody pays for “that was pretty good.” Nobody goes to a concert for “that was pretty good.” Nobody’s going to tell their friends about “That was pretty good.” You know it when you see these guys on American Idol. They’re forgettable. They’re aping artists we’re already heard and because they’ll never be as good as those artists, why would anyone want to hear them?

Aspiring screenwriters don’t seem to realize this for some reason. That they’re no different from these singers. They’ve done the training. They’ve read the books. They’ve written a bunch of screenplays. And still they’re getting no traction and they don’t know why. The reason is because they’re the writing equivalent of these guys going up for that audition in front of J. Lo, Keith Urban, and Harry Connick Jr., that are “pretty good.”

Being the screenwriting-obsessed megalomaniac that I am, whenever I see these singers on Idol, year after year, I ask myself, “What can a writer do to make sure he isn’t the equivalent of that guy?” And the answer is: you gotta sound like the dudes/gals who are unique! You gotta establish your own voice! Just like that unique tone you hear in your favorite artist, you have to find that tone in yourself, that unique combination of prose, humor, subject matter, theme, dialogue, rhythm that makes your scripts sound like nobody else’s out there.

In order to make this analogy work, you kind of have to imagine walking in front of three judges and having them read your script out loud, then judging you. Would they read through the first five pages and think, “You know what? I’ve never heard something quite like this before?” Or would they say, “You know what? I’ve seen over a hundred movies with this exact same scene in them?” “I’ve read a hundred writers that write just like this?” Yesterday is a perfect example. Wes Anderson’s script, “My Best Friend.” If I read that out loud, myself and two other judges would remember it. It’s different. What’s different about you!?

You can apply this across all competitions. If you were a chef, what kind of dish would you make that’s unlike any other dish out there? You could make something as simple as mashed potatoes. But if you added a certain spice or a hint of some fruit or vegetable, that dish could go from ordinary to unforgettable. And that’s what you have with a screenplay. You literally have millions of ingredients to play with. So you don’t have an excuse for not trying to be different in some way.

Or, to make a more relevant comparison, think about your favorite directors. Go look at this trailer for Divergent. Quite possibly the most generic execution of a sci-fi film ever, right? Now look at this one. How much more memorable is that? If you were an executive and these two clips popped up in your e-mail, which director would you call back? It’s all about voice. It’s about somebody putting their unique interpretation on the direction of the film. That’s what you’re trying to do with a script – offer your own unique interpretation.

Maybe the best example of voice is this short movie I saw the other day. I will guarantee, 100%, that after you watch this movie, you will never ever forget it. Ever. Go ahead, watch it and tell me differently.

Unforgettable right? A unique voice, right? That’s what you want to do. You want to make it impossible for people to forget about you.

Okay, so to reiterate, what is it, not just in your current screenplay, but in ALL of your work, that makes you different? That makes your screenplays read differently than everything else out there? And I’m not saying it has to be like that short – 100% balls to the wall weird. It can be subtle. But it has to be SOMETHING.  Or else you’re one of the thousands of people who get up on that stage in front of those judges for their big moment, and give a technically fine but ultimately forgettable performance.  Identify that thing that’s unique in you (you might need to ask someone who knows you well to do this) and find a way to infuse that into your scripts.  Remember, the worst thing you can be in art is forgettable. So please don’t let that be you.