Warning: Spoilers below. Please watch movie before reading this article.  

It seems almost silly that I’ve run a screenwriting blog for five years and never once looked at The Usual Suspects. It’s kind of like writing a football blog and never mentioning Jerry Rice. The Usual Suspects was written in 1994 by a then unknown Christopher McQuarrie when his director buddy, Bryan Singer, called and said he’d been given money to make a movie and needed a script (a problem we all wish we had, no doubt). McQuarrie cooked up this strange little time-bouncing noir mystery about a group of usual suspects who meet during a line-up and quickly find themselves hunted by the most ruthless killer in the world, Keyser Soze. A couple years later, McQuarrie found himself holding an Oscar. This dream ended up in a nightmare, however, as McQaurrie stumbled into a decade long stint of development hell, writing numerous projects that never made it to the big screen (or did with other writers) and watched as his stock plummeted with each failure. It got so bad he considered leaving the film industry. It wasn’t until 2007, when Tom Cruise rescued him to write his film, Valkyrie, that McQuarrie’s career was reborn. He recently wrote and directed the modest hit, “Jack Reacher,” for Cruise again, and has since written a draft or two of the always-scary-to-imagine Top Gun 2. In probably one of the most fascinating things I’ve ever heard about a successful film, McQuarrie recently admitted that he and Singer realized they had completely different conceptions about the plot. “I pulled Bryan aside the night before press began and I said, ‘We need to get our stories straight because people are starting to ask what happened and what didn’t. And we got into the biggest argument we’ve ever had in our lives. One of us believed that the story was all lies, peppered with little bits of the truth. And the other one believed it was all true, peppered with tiny, little lies. … We each thought we were making a movie that was completely different from what the other one thought.”

1) Ignoring the rules only works if you get to make all your movies on an island – McQuarrie didn’t really know how to write when he wrote The Usual Suspects. He ended up breaking a ton of rules due to his ignorance (time-jumping, voice over, too many characters). The result was a hit movie and an Oscar. You’d think, then, that the lesson would be, “Ignore the rules.” Well, sorta. Once McQuarrie moved from the indie world to Hollywood, none of his projects went anywhere. The reason for this is that McQuarrie didn’t really know how to write Hollywood movies. He didn’t understand structure and character and goals and stakes and conflict and all the things that make mainstream movies go. So he kept turning in drafts that nobody liked. He kept doing it HIS way. The lesson here is that if you can pull off a Wes Anderson or Quentin Tarantino or Woody Allen and write and make movies off on your own little island, you don’t need to pay attention to what Hollywood says. But if you plan to work in the system, you better study every screenwriting book out there and understand how this business likes their stories told.

2) Explore concepts that allow you to create characters audiences have never seen before – The coolest thing I took away from The Usual Suspects is that when we finally meet Kobayashi, Keyser Soze’s right-hand man, it turns out he’s white and British. At first, this doesn’t really make sense. But in retrospect, you realize this was because Verbal (Kevin Spacey) was making up the story as he went along. He spotted the name “Kobayashi” on the bottom of his coffee cup, and simply turned him into a British guy in the story. I’m not sure a white British man with a Japanese name would’ve ever made it into a script otherwise. This got me wondering why more writers don’t explore ideas that allow them to introduce unexpected characters into their screenplays. It seems like an easy way to turn stereotypes on their head.

3) Don’t drop your reader into a time-blender in the first 5 pages – The Usual Suspects has an overly confusing opening that bounces all over the place. We start one day ago on a boat, then cut to present day for a split second, then jump back 6 weeks ago. The problem with this is, we don’t know your characters yet. We don’t know what story you’re telling. We’re not yet used to your writing style. We know nothing and you’ve already dropped us into a blender. So the first two times I saw The Usual Suspects, I had no clue what the actual timeline was.  Even watching it this time around, I was a little confused.  Only jump around in time early if there’s NO OTHER WAY for your story to work. And if you do, please pay a tremendous amount of attention to orienting your reader. But yeah, I’d just keep that opening easy to follow.

4) Extend a mystery with a delay – This is a neat little way to give a cool mystery extra life so you can milk it for a few extra scenes. When the boat blows up at the beginning of the film, there’s a survivor, a man in critical condition suffering from 60% burns to his body. This man knows what happened, which means he can solve our mystery! So the police come to find out what he knows but…oh no! He speaks Hungarian. Now the police have to go out there and find a Hungarian translator! The mystery continues. And we get a couple more scenes wondering what this intriguing character knows.

5) CONFLICT ALERT – As I always tell you guys, the best drama is packed with conflict. And that’s clearly the case with The Usual Suspects. Lots of conflict all over. But I don’t think anyone can deny that the best scenes in The Usual Suspects take place between Kujan (Chazz Palminteri) and Verbal (Kevin Spacey). And the reason for this is their scenes are based on one of the oldest conflict setups in the book: A character who wants something (Kujan), and a character who doesn’t want to give it to him (Spacey). You do that, you have conflict, and you will always have a scene (or in this case, an entire movie full of scenes).

6) A CLEAR MYSTERY can soften the confusion of a dense pot – If you have a dense multi-layered plot like The Usual Suspects, offset it with one big CLEAR mystery the audience can easily follow. Not everyone is able to follow what’s happening in The Usual Suspects. There’s a strange set of time jumps, lots of characters, and an ever-changing story, but you won’t find anyone who doesn’t want to finish the movie in order to solve the big mystery: WHO IS KEYSER SOZE???

7) Characters should speak in their own unique voice – One of my favorite lines in The Usual Suspects is when Kobayashi (Keyser Soze’s Number 2) warns Keaton (Gabriel Byrne) that if he kills him, his wife “will find herself the victim of a most gruesome violation.” I’ve heard so many cliche bad guys dish out over-the-top threats like, “I’ll fuck your wife and make your family watch.” It’s refreshing to hear an uptight, upstanding, proper gentleman threaten in exactly the manner and tone you’d expect a man like him to threaten in. It’s a reminder that you’d like all your characters to speak in a way only they would speak. This is one of the reasons The Usual Suspects is so popular. It had a ton of unique characters who all spoke THEIR OWN way.

8) Always think like an actor when writing characters – Fenster (Benicio Del Toro) was nothing like the character McQuarrie originally wrote. Benicio turned him into an overly-primped excessively-styled unintelligible mutterer, and the result was one of the more memorable movie characters of the decade. It’s a great lesson for writers. Actors are looking to create the most complex interesting characters possible. By simply thinking like one, you can do this for them, and your script will be populated with much more interesting characters as a result. I guarantee it.

9) You must be smarter than the reader in the subject matter you’re writing about – Readers are smart. They have the internet. They know a lot of things. So if you’re going to write a script, make sure you know that subject matter better than the reader. This may seem obvious, but I read tons of embarrassing screenplays where I know more about cop procedure than the writer who’s writing a cop procedural. That’s embarrassing. Cause I don’t know much about cop procedure. The result of this realization is that I don’t believe in the writer anymore, which means I lose confidence in him, which means I lose confidence in the script, which means the script is dead to me. McQuarrie worked at a detective agency for four years before he wrote this. He knew how the  hierarchy of this world worked and it shows. If you don’t have that knowledge going into your script, research the subject matter until you do. I promise it will pay off.

10) When writing a group of characters, make sure to create dynamics WITHIN the group – There is no group of people in this world where everyone knows and likes each other equally. They all have side friendships, people they like and dislike, histories, guys they trust and don’t trust. Here, Fenster and McManus (Stephen Baldwin) are good friends. Verbal (Spacey) engages in a friendship with Keaton (Gabriel Byrne). Hockney (Pollack) kind of knows everyone. By digging in and understanding the dynamics within your group, the group will feel more complex, and by association, genuine.  It’ll also help you know your individual characters better.

Is it possible for a script about the high school experience to feel original anymore? The Spectacular Now says, hell yeah.

Note, this review was first posted awhile back, but I re-read the script and added some new thoughts to the review in anticipation of its release.

Genre: Dark High School Dramedy
Premise: A popular alcoholic high school student starts dating a nerdy girl, possibly out of pity.
About: The names of today’s writers, Scott Neustadter and Michael H Weber, may sound familiar.  That’s because they broke onto the scene with the structure-defying spec, 500 Days Of Summer.   One of their first jobs after the success of that film was adapting The Spectacular Now, a book by Tim Tharp.  The film recently debuted at Sundance and won awards for both of its leads, one of whom is Shailene Woodley (Clooney’s daughter in The Descendents), who’s gotten a lot of press lately for being completely cut out of the new Spider Man movie.  The Spectacular Now will debut in limited cities this August.
Writers: Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber (based on the novel by Tim Tharp)
Details: 119 pages – July 23, 2009 – first draft

It’s been awhile since I was in high school. I was there before Twitter and Vine. I was there before you knew you were in a relationship (We didn’t have “Facebook status” to confirm that stuff. We had, “Uhh, are we going out n stuff?” “Uhhh, I guess so.” Bam. Sorta-relationship). And the more I think about it, should high school kids even get relationship titles? I mean come on. High school relationships have the same lifespan as a fruit fly. Who cares who’s going out with who? It’ll be over tomorrow.

Oh yeah, NOW I’m remembering. Back then, every single moment was the most important moment EV-ER. If you accidentally walked into Homeroom with a smidge of jam on your face from breakfast that morning, your life was destroyed for the next two weeks. You’d meticulously break down who in the school saw the .1 millimeter of jam. Did Julie see it? Did Claire? Did Kenny? He would surely tell everyone about the glob of raspberry jam pouring down your cranium like blood from a bullet wound.  That image would be stuck in your head.  The giggles that were going on behind your back you didn’t see.  Ahhhh!!!

You have to remember this when reading a high school script. You have to transport yourself back to that frame-of-mind, even though in hindsight, all those things you obsessed over were so ridiculous (although I do wonder sometimes if the reason Becka Madel never went out with me was because she saw the jam on my face that day). Now the bar for high school movies this decade is low. I mean what do we got? Perks of Being A Wallflower? (How exactly was it a perk seeing that again?) So “Spectacular” doesn’t really have a lot of competition. I hope it takes advantage.

Sutter Keely is a complicated individual. He’s somehow managed to become “the popular guy” without carrying the dubious title of being “the popular guy.” Watching him walk into a room is like following Obama into the White House. Everybody knows him. Everyone wants to be around him. So it shouldn’t be surprising that Sutter is dating the hottest girl in school, Cassidy.

But Sutter has some other sides to him as well. First off, he’s a drunk. He keeps a flask and a buzz with him wherever he goes for the explicit purpose of being able to see the world through rose colored glasses. Sutter doesn’t keep any “real” friends either. He’s the guy who knows everyone but nobody knows him. And Sutter doesn’t plan ahead. His life’s goal is to cruise around and bring smiles to people’s faces. Sutter lives his life in the “spectacular now.”

But Sutter’s 18 years old and on the verge of the biggest decision of his life: What does he do next? Does he go to college? Does he get a job? These are things Sutter wishes he never had to deal with. Yet here they are, closing in on him like a coffin, forcing him to do what he hates to do most: commit.

This is probably why Cassidy dumps him. She’s sick of the fact that their relationship holds no meaning to him, and as if to prove her right, Sutter barely blinks afterwards. The way he operates is to never get too close. That way he never feels anything when they leave. Little does he know that that’s the very reason they do leave.

The post-breakup phase doesn’t last long. Sutter randomly runs into a girl from his school, oddball Aimee Finicky. Aimee’s the nerdy girl who sits in the corner of the room, hoping nobody notices her. There’s some cuteness there but Aimee’s complete lack of personal style destroys any chance of it coming through. Out of a combination of pity and curiosity, Sutter starts hanging out with her.

This seriously unbalanced relationship goes the way most of these relationships do. Aimee falls madly in love with Sutter, while Sutter goes along with it only because he’s got nothing better to do. At a certain point, he realizes he either has to stay in or get out, and he decides to stay in. Aimee’s love eventually seeps through the walls he’s put up, helping him get to the root of his issue, which is that his father left him at a young age.

Aimee encourages him to go see his father, and while initially reluctant, he realizes that if he’s ever going to grow up, this is what needs to happen.

The biggest trap you can fall into with these teenage high school scripts is cliché. Since most real-life high school kids mimic pop-culture, they actually live a life of clichés, making cliche movie versions of themselves “technically” authentic (everybody’s using the same catch phrase, kids identify themselves via film stereotypes). Regardless, you want to avoid any kind of cliche you can when writing these scripts.  Cliche equals flat and flat equals boring.

What you have to do then, is move away from the high school and see what defines these characters as people, as individuals. You need to find out what parts of their lives make them unique, what specific challenges are theirs and theirs only. Once characters start to feel like individuals (real people!), it doesn’t matter where you place them, high school, a Fortune 500 Company, or a job at the local 7-11,  the story will be interesting because we’re interested in THEM.

Take Cassidy for example, Sutter’s ex-girlfriend. The easy way to write this character would be to make her the “hot popular bitch.” And to a degree, she is. But when she and Sutter break up, she doesn’t fuck the first dude she sees to piss him off. She’s still concerned about him, about his drinking, about his choices. She still has feelings for him, but has met someone else as well, and isn’t really sure what to do. Or take her new boyfriend, the popular jock, Malcom. When Malcom finds out that Cassidy’s still talking to Sutter, we think he’s going to kick his ass. And at first, that’s the plan. But he ends up breaking down to Sutter and admitting that he wishes he could be more like him, more relaxed, more fun. He’s afraid that if he doesn’t do so, he’s going to lose Cassidy. In other words, the characters aren’t acting like stereotypes.  They’re breaking those stereotypes and acting like people.

The Spectacular Now also does a great job with dialogue. Whenever Sutter and Aimee were having conversations, I believed what they were saying. And that might not seem like much but most of the time when I’m reading words on a page, that’s exactly what I’m feeling: words on a page. It takes a lot to break that spell.

So I spent a few minutes trying to figure out why these particular words (which weren’t mind-blowing by any means), felt so real. This is what I realized: The more real you make your characters (their goals, their flaws, their backstories, etc.) the less convincing the dialogue has to be. The most important thing about dialogue is that we believe it. So if the audience accepts the characters, it doesn’t matter what they’re saying. They could be bumbling morons. But since you already believe in their existence, the words themselves are an extension of that existence. I’m not saying dialogue doesn’t matter, of course. I’m saying develop your characters and your dialogue will emerge naturally.

And the last thing that really surprised me was how well the father stuff worked. The “father who deserted his family” thing can be quite the cliché in movies. But I liked how Neudstater and Weber gently weaved that storyline in here. Usually these things hit us with the subtlety of a church bell, but Sutter’s father isn’t even mentioned until the second half of the script. It had a real-life feel to it. Nobody blurts out their family problems to you on the first day. It takes time to open up. And I like how these guys mirrored that approach here.

Don’t have a lot of bad stuff to say here. I guess Sutter is such a complex character that I never understood exactly what his problem was. He drank too much? He lived in the present too much? He was too nice to people? He never allowed himself to get close to people? These flaws overlapped each other at times and made him a little confusing. Luckily, we like the guy enough to overlook it.

I thought the plot could’ve been a little stronger (it’s really threadbare), his relationship with Cassidy wasn’t all that clear to me, and the final father meeting was maybe a little too on-the-nose. But hey, it’s a first draft. You can’t ask for the moon. This was really well done. If you like your screenplays character-driven, check this out.

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

What I learned: Whenever your main character is gearing up for a big moment (a speech, a confrontation, a race, whatever), throw something unexpected at them. If it’s a speech in front of a hundred people, have them get there to find out it’s now in front of 10,000 people. If they’re confronting their girlfriend about cheating, have them bang down the door only to find her parents with her. If it’s a bike race, have them get there only to find out their bike is broken and they’ll have to ride a shitty second rate bike. – You want to make things difficult for your characters. It’s always more interesting. (spoiler) After Sutter sets up the big meeting with his dad, he gets there to find out his dad’s forgotten about it. Now the dad wants to meet a friend and drag Sutter along. You see how much more interesting the dynamic becomes as opposed to if they’d sat down and had a predictable boring heart-to-heart? Think about real life. Everything that goes according to plan is uninteresting. It’s only a story when the unexpected happens. You need to think that way in your screenplays.

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: Offline
GENRE: Contained supernatural thriller
LOGLINE: When a bed-ridden teen discovers his online crush is a ghost, he enlists the help of a psychic to investigate her death, leading him on a hunt to stop her killer before he strikes again.
WHY YOU SHOULD READ (from writer): This script is highly recommended by a few longtime Scriptshadow readers. At the very least, give it a shot!

TITLE: Enter the Holy War
GENRE: R-Rated Comedy/Satire
LOGLINE: A washed-up producer struggles with the leader of a religious cult over the rights to an epic script that will surely get him the Oscar he finally deserves.
WHY YOU SHOULD READ (from writer): The script had a five star rating on one website, script of the month on another. I haven’t had a negative review from man, woman or cult member. One reviewer labeled it ‘a once in a generation script that could change everything.’

TITLE: Where the Butterflies Die
GENRE: Action/Adventure
LOGLINE: A missionary’s boat stumbles across an island where stranded American and Japanese forces are still fighting six months after World War II has ended. (inspired by a true story)
WHY YOU SHOULD READ (from writer): A period World War 2 piece taking place on a mysterious island? Hand to hand combat with primitive bamboo weapons? Action, intrigue, romance and revenge? What’s not to like?

TITLE: Z-MAS.pdf)
GENRE: Comedy-Horror/Christmas
LOGLINE: An estranged black family gets a zombie invasion for Christmas.
WHY YOU SHOULD READ (from writer): Because I’m tired of movies with a black cast being called “urban films.” Because I want to prove it’s possible to write a black movie that people will watch that doesn’t involve us being slaves or drug dealers. Because Spike Lee doesn’t own the rights to black cinema. And because I freaking hate Tyler Perry.

TITLE: White Label
GENRE: Dark rom-com
LOGLINE: When a young vinyl music store owner loses everything — love, friendship and vinyl records — he struggles to rebuild his life, hindered by pimp-like friends, a beautiful agent provocateur and an ex-girlfriend who refuses to let their relationship die until she finds a suitable successor. In the vein of HIGH FIDELITY and 500 DAYS OF SUMMER.
WHY YOU SHOULD READ MY SCRIPT (from writer): WHITE LABEL landed me a Blacklist manager for three days when I sent it out last year. We had a weekend love-in, swapped lots of emails, planned a campaign to attach a director and talent — then she emailed back the following Monday and said she was simply too busy to take on another client. The script (under a different name) got a professional rating on SPEC SCOUT, and was ranked on the TOP 10 list of the best scripts of 2012 by a Scriptshadow reader (someone I have never met, honestly!).

Are you confused? Would you like to be? You are not prepared… for Paralleled!

Amateur Friday Submission Process: To submit your script for an Amateur Review, send in a PDF 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 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: Sci-fi/Thriller
Premise: (from writer) An emotionally unstable neurosurgeon undergoes an experiment with parallel realities and fights different versions of himself to find a dimension where the wife he put in a coma is still healthy.
About: This script won the Amateur Offerings Weekend a couple of weeks ago. Submit your script (details up top) to get on the list. Best of the 5 picked that week will get a review. So make sure to submit a snazzy well-crafted logline and a great query letter!
Writer: Denis Nielsen
Details: 103 pages

Downey Jr. for Angus??

I’m going to give Denis this. He put a LOT of effort into this. This wasn’t something he scraped together over the weekend. This is a mind-bending plot-twisting psychological thriller if there ever was one. But after finishing Paralleled, I think Denis might be his own worst enemy (that’s an inside joke between me and whoever read this script). There are so many moving parts to this plot, it’s impossible to grab onto them all, leaving us scrambling just to keep up. Then again, I would’ve said the same thing about Donnie Darko. So I’m still not sure if I’d call this a big mess or pure genius. And I have a feeling Denis prefers it that way.

(I’d like to ask the writer, Denis, to please excuse any mistakes in the plot summary. It was hard keeping up!)

Dr. Angus Williams, 48 years young, is working on a very special scientific project. In it, he’s attempting to bring doppelgangers from parallel universes over to our current universe. It’s kind of like cloning, except your clone isn’t created on the spot. He’s been living this entire life, just like you, in another reality, but making different choices from you, and therefore is a different person.

So one day he puts his wife and co-worker, Madeleine, into the machine, only to have her emerge in full freak-out mode. Her body starts breaking down and the lab team has to put her in a medically induced coma. Once this happens, Angus starts constructing a plan to find ANOTHER Madeleine in one of these other alternate realities so he can be with her (why he’s leaving this poor Current Reality Madeleine to lie in a coma, I’m not sure).

So he starts ushering in versions of himself, hoping that they’ll have a Madeleine in their lives he can go and be with. (This confused me as well. What was his plan if they did have a Madeleine? Was he just going to ask them politely if he could steal their wife?) Eventually he finds one in Number 4 (Angus Number 4), who says Madeleine 4 is doing well and fine in his reality.

So Angus jumps to that reality, only to find out that he (or Number 4) is being kept in a nearby barn by his wife. For some reason Number 4 has jumped with him (it’s not clear to me why Angus couldn’t simply jump himself) and because he wants this Madeleine for himself, he kills Number 4 and buries him. When Madeleine comes along to retrieve him from the barn, he learns that he’s on an extended time-out from the family because his Number 4 version nearly beat their boss to death.

Why would he do such a thing? Because he found out that Madeleine had slept with him. But this turns out to be the least of his worries. It turns out Number 2 (back in the Angus’ original world) is conspiring to do something terrible to him. What would that be? To be honest, that’s where I lost track of the story. It just became too complicated, which is where our analysis begins.

You know, I admire Denis’s ambition. He clearly wasn’t interested in writing some run-of-the-mill spec. He set out to challenge the audience. The problem is, it just got too complicated. And I tried. I mean I was re-reading scenes constantly (which I never do) to make sure I kept up. But at a certain point, I couldn’t do it anymore. We have four versions of our main character, we have two versions of our boss character, we have two versions of the wife character, and we have two versions of our assistant character (who I didn’t mention in the synopsis). We have separate mysteries in two timelines, some that intersect, some that don’t. And we have multiple double-crosses in the final act.

Now Denis was challenging us from the very first page (he had voice overs, off-screen talking from characters we didn’t know yet, AND overlaps – I’m not sure I’ve ever seen that happen all on the same page before) but I survived that. However, I can tell you exactly where I gave up on trying to figure out what was going on. It was at this line, around page 70-something.

“This is another REPLAY of Madeleine’s trauma surgery, administered by Number 2 – But we don’t know that yet, because at this point he looks exactly like our main Angus.”

Now Denis might be arguing that that’s exactly what he set out to do. He’s trying to twist your mind. And maybe he’s right. But I think he went one Angus too many, one mystery too many, one double-cross too many. Just because you’re trying to bend people’s minds doesn’t mean you can throw the kitchen sink at them. Part of making an audience think is knowing when to show restraint. And I never saw that here. Problems were solved with exorbitant twists rather than clever writing. It’s not that all of these twists and turns couldn’t have worked. But the more false realities you place in your script, the more skill it requires to inject those in a way the audience can follow them. And even though Denis was up to the task of trying (I could FEEL the effort on the page), I just think he wrote himself into a place he couldn’t write himself out of.

The thing you gotta remember is that if the audience can’t follow your plot, it doesn’t matter what you write. They’ve already mentally checked out. And what you ALSO have to remember is that the more confusing your plot is, the more mental focus the reader has to give to straightening all that out. Because we’re focusing on all the confusing stuff, we miss the other more obvious plot points. I’ve had this happen every once in awhile, where I’ll miss a plot point and the writer will be like, “What are you talking about! It was right there on page 64!” And I’ll try to explain to them, “Well yeah, but at that time I was trying to figure out why the 7th doppelganger of the Grandfather’s ghost’s son had his daughter travel to Klongor to find the Mogshire Suit.” So there’s this compound effect. It’s not just the complex plot the reader isn’t getting, it becomes the simple stuff too.

Take Madeleine going into a coma, for instance. Why did she go into a coma? I’m still confused about that. And why is our main character searching other realities for a new Madeleine when he has another one? Sure, she’s in a coma. But you’re a doctor. It seems like it’d be easier to try to get her out of a coma than go kill someone in another reality that’s completely foreign to you and take their place. It also makes your hero look bad. He’s ditching Vegetable Wife to go find a hotter more mobile version. These questions may be answered in the script somewhere, but there was so much going on, they apparently flew right past me.

Really intricate mind-fuck scripts require a lot of practice to write. It’s not just about logistically mapping everything out. It’s about writing a lot of scripts and learning when readers understand the stuff you want them to understand and when they miss it. It takes a writer a couple of tries, for example, to learn that when a main character SAYS he has a phobia of spiders, that a reader doesn’t always remember that. It’s only when the writer SHOWS the main character being attacked by spiders and freaking out, that we understand he doesn’t like spiders. There are a lot of little things like that that you only learn through trial, error, and feedback.

In Denis’s defense, movies like this have been made before. Primer. Donnie Darko. The Jacket. There is an audience out there for them. And an actor would LOVE to play the part of Angus, obviously (actors love to play multiple characters to display their range). But I just think there’s too much going on here. I’d recommend to Denis that he seriously dial the script back. Simplify this plot. You already have so much going on with the multiple Angus’s. The rest of the plot shouldn’t be so complicated. Good luck!

Script link: Paralleled

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

What I learned: “Too-far-in-your-own-head” script. Sometimes we writers get a little too far into our own heads when we write. We write multiple plotlines, multiple twists, multiple mysteries, and we just keep piling it on because, why not, we’re in our own little world. But when the reader gets the script, he hasn’t been through the 15 drafts you wrote. He wasn’t there when you created the first clone of your character, the second, the third. He just doesn’t have all that information in his mind that you do, so he loses track quickly. As a writer, it’s your job to step out of your writer’s hat occasionally and into the reader’s. You have to ask, “Does this make sense to someone who’s reading this for the first time?” If you don’t do that, you’ll be stuck too far in your own head, and your script will remain a mystery to the world forever.

Tis the day when the Americans and the Brits split up.  A proud day for America, maybe not so much for our brothers to the East.  Whatever the case, it’s a reason to celebrate.  And I need a day of celebration.  The downside of being an American is that the ideology of the country is built to make you feel terrible if you’re not working 16 hours a day.  I often fall victim to this practice.  But today, I’m going to grill a dead animal, light some cheap firecrackers, and feel good about doing nothing.  I WILL repost my newsletter screenplay review of White House Down though, for those interested in discussing it.  And with that, I’m out. See you Friday!