Submit your own script for a review!: 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 it gets 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: Action Comedy
Premise: (from writer) A bipolar theater geek heads to school and gets cast in a role he never expected to play: a real-life hero who must battle a band of goons to stop them from kidnapping a fellow classmate.
WHY YOU SHOULD READ: (from writer) The script is a 2013 Nicholl Quarterfinalist, and it’s got a tone all its own. (Big talk, I know, but how else can I get you to read it?) if I were to pitch this is in one second, it would be: “Imagine if John Hughes wrote Die Hard.'”
Writer: Will Hare
Details: 110 pages
I was going to do a French script review today but of all the queries sent in, there was always at least one grammatical mistake in the logline. My experience has been if a writer makes mistakes in the logline, the quality of the script isn’t going to be very good. Now I know English is a second language for a lot of you, so I wanted to be lenient, but the truth is, Hollywood doesn’t provide any leniency, so why should I? Get those loglines and those scripts cleaned up, guys. We have an ESL editor working for us (scroll to bottom here) or just get one of your American friends to go through your script (and your logline!). You’re competing against perfect English so you have to have the same.
That brings us to today. I decided to give Second Place Hero a second chance in the Amateur Friday game. When it debuted during Amateur Offerings, it was getting a few too many rave reviews in the comments. I’ve been running this site for almost five years. I can count the amount of rave reviews for an amateur script on one hand. You commenters are tougher than me. So I went with another choice for AF that week. But a couple of people I trust did vouch for “Second Place.” Therefore I’d rather go with it than diving into the slush pile randomly. So, Second Place Hero, here’s your shot at redemption. Hope you deliver!
16 year-old Billy’s got issues. His mom killed herself. He’s got the same disease that did her in (he’s bi-polar). He uses a sock puppet to convey his feelings. And his only desire in life is to get the lead part in the school’s version of Guys and Dolls (that might be the most concerning of all his problems).
On this particular day in high school, Billy’s showing around Persimmon, a dark and mysterious new girl. He’s kind of digging her, but he’s so pissed off about pretty boy Flynn getting the lead over him, that he’s not really able to concentrate.
Unbeknownst to Billy and the rest of the students, a pair of helicopters land outside the school and a group of dudes in masks storm inside. They take over the main office (promptly shooting the poor principal) and immediately begin searching for a student with a special tattoo.
Our naughty villain is a man simply known as “Pink Suit” and he’s only got a few hours to do his job. In short, the student’s parents will be testifying in a big case tomorrow against his client. He needs to kidnap the student to use him/her as leverage to deter the parents from testifying. Complicating matters is that he doesn’t know the name of the student. All he knows is that they have the tattoo.
At a certain point, Billy figures all this out, and it’s looking like Persimmon is our tattooed mystery student. So he’s got to keep running around, keeping her safe, all while the peanut gallery tags along (the fat kid, the bully, the angsty chick). It’s Breakfast Club meets Die Hard, with Billy playing the part of John McClane, using lessons he’s learned from his police chief dad to take down the baddies. He even uses his acting skills to cleverly stay one step ahead of Pink Suit. But eventually the two are going to have to meet. Can a high school kid really defeat a criminal mastermind and his thugs?
On the surface, Second Place Hero has a lot of things going for it. It has a complex main character. Billy is bi-polar. He’s dealing with his mom’s suicide. He and his father have a huge chasm in their relationship. There’s a lot more going on here than your typical teen movie.
The setup itself is perfect for a film. You have the classic contained thriller structure, modeled after Die Hard. So we have a goal, stakes, urgency, naturally built into the storyline.
And I always tell writers to take chances with their writing. Mixing an action thriller with a teenage comedy-drama (a la Breakfast Club) is really unique. In a sea of “the same,” it was nice to read something that actually felt different.
HOWEVER, just because something’s different doesn’t make it good. And while I respect Will’s strange genre-mixing experiment, I think that may be the first problem I had with the screenplay. I could never quite wrap my head around the mix. You have a theater kid running around, wielding guns, killing bad guys, getting into teenage-y arguments with his crew… I don’t know. I was trying to imagine this onscreen and it all felt too goofy, too ridiculous.
Also, while I loved how much effort Will put into Billy’s character development, I’m not sure I ever really believed it. There’s this fine line whenever you’re developing a character, where if you’re not careful, it comes off more technical than real. I mean I can make my hero a schizophrenic orphan with face blindness and OCD, but if it doesn’t feel honest, if it doesn’t feel truly embedded into the character, then it’s no different than giving your character no depth at all. In fact, it’s worse, because it feels false. I encountered that too many times here. Like with Billy using the sock puppet to discuss his feelings. That felt more like a gimmick than Billy TRULY NEEDEING a puppet to communicate. Once I detect falseness in a script, whether it be through the story or the characters, I start to pull away.
There were other false moments too. Like Billy (because he’s an actor) being able to mimic the voices of the bad guys when talking to Pink Suit on the radio. I know Billy’s an actor. So I can see why the choice was made. But a 16 year old being able to sound like a grown Hispanic man to his boss? I don’t know if I’m buying that.
Or then there’s this whole thing where Billy’s cried wolf too many times to his Police Chief father. Therefore, when he calls the police for help, they don’t believe him and don’t come to the school. That’s one of those things that makes sense to a writer when he’s all alone in a room (“Oh yeah, I’ll just make it so they don’t believe Billy. That’s why no cops show up!”) but come on. This is total movie logic. There is no way, especially in this day and age, that the police are going to take any chances with a potential school massacre. There’s just no way!
As all those little things added up, it took me further and further out of the story. You’re already trying to sell a very delicate marriage of genres. You’re already asking your reader to make a big leap in believing this setup. So anything falseness you add ON TOP OF THAT is basically like putting an industrial fan in front of a house of cards. The script just won’t be able to handle it.
I think Will is a talented writer. But this feels like one of those early efforts we all have to go through. It has its moments, but there are too many things we have to buy into to enjoy it. I’d say to Will, at the very least, take some time away from this script, write your next one, and come back to it with some fresh eyes. You’ll be able to see a lot of these things I mentioned more clearly, and maybe even come up with some solutions. I’ll be keeping an eye on Will as he gets better, but this script wasn’t for me.
Script link: Second Place Hero
[ ] what the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: “The late night writer bubble.” Come on, we all know the place. It’s late at night. You’re in the comfort of your favorite chair. At that moment, you’re the only audience for your script. This can be a very dangerous place. Because when you’re in your late night writer bubble, you’re not as critical as you need to be. You can do things like decide that the reason the cops don’t come to the school that’s under siege by a high-level crime syndicate is because your main character has cried wolf too many times. TOTALLY makes sense in the late night writer bubble. DOES NOT make sense to the 3pm Rushed Reader with 2 other scripts to read besides yours. THAT’S the person your choices have to stand up to, not your cuddly little alter ego who rewards you with a bowl of Frosted Flakes after you’ve made it through a particularly tough scene. That guy isn’t able to criticize properly.
The pre-eminent writer-director
It’s coming off this week that I hate French cinema. Not true. I couldn’t blanketly hate every movie that came out of a country. Like I said, I liked The Intouchables. I liked Amelie. But I do think the majority of French films are pretentious, directionless, and badly written. One commenter had the audacity to say that it’s widely known that French cinema is the best in the world. Uhhh, what?? According to who, the French?
Part of the problem is that France doesn’t seem to think it has a problem. Since it doesn’t acknowledge it has a problem, it can’t fix the problem. So what is the problem? France doesn’t have a screenwriting industry. They don’t have a culture, like the United States, where writers can move up a system. Why? Because in France, it’s all abut the WRITER-DIRECTOR. The people directing the films there are typically the same people writing them. And those people don’t have to listen to anyone (and usually don’t).
Yeah yeah, I know. America’s not perfect either. Any system that can produce a movie like Smurfs 2 probably has some issues. But what Hollyood does right is they have a vetting system. A script must win over a series of people, starting with an agent, then a reader, then a small producer, a bigger producer, a studio exec, and so on up the ladder. Even after the script has been sold, it’s constantly being read during development by people who are trying to make it better. Because the script must constantly stand up to scrutiny, it keeps improving (unless you have a moron calling the shots, which is a different discussion).
In France, the director-writer has all the power, and I’m told will be offended if it’s even implied that the script needs work. There’s no filter. Only the filter within the director’s own sensibilities. Obviously, some directors’ sensibilities will be better than others, which is why some movies are better than others. But overall, because the writing never has to stand up to any outside scrutiny, bad storytelling is always finding its way into the films.
Take a look at a movie like A Prophet, one of the more celebrated films to come out of France in awhile (I know there were other writers on this but the director seemed to be the primary one). I watched this film and about forty minutes in, I was thinking, “Wow, this is pretty good!” It felt real. It felt gritty. Like an honest look at prison life in France. Then, around an hour and a half into the movie, our main character is released and the approach of the movie shifts to a traditional drug/crime film. Wait. Huh? I thought this was a film about prison. What just happened?? It would be like if an hour and a half into The Shawshank Redemption, Andy was released. It felt sloppy and confusing. I didn’t know where I was anymore.
This is one of the primary differences between American and French films. Things can just “happen” in French films that take them in a different direction than was promised, and we’re expected to simply go with it. I suppose we could debate whether this choice was that big of a departure for the story, but to me it was pretty glaring. I was actually watching the film with my brother, who isn’t in the business at all and simply likes watching movies. He has no preferences, no biases. He just likes a good story. I remember looking over at him 20 minutes after this change and seeing that glared over look in his eyes. He was done with the film. He didn’t know what it was about anymore.
To me, a good screenwriter could’ve helped here. This was a structural issue. You don’t just change your movie 2/3 of the way through. But people who haven’t studied the art of storytelling don’t think about that stuff. Which is why that separation between writing and directing is needed. You need someone who can tell you when your script has wandered off into the woods, who understands structure and pacing. Not just character, tone, and style, the strengths of A Prophet.
This writer-director business isn’t just a French thing. It’s present here in the U.S. as well, mostly in the indie scene, and increasingly to disastrous results. Drinking Buddies, Only God Forgives, Somewhere, Monsters, Blue Valentine, To The Wonder, Upstream Color. These are all movies that have some aesthetically pleasing things about them. Some even have moments of genius. But for the most part, they’re all terribly written. There’s no story to back things up. Many are lost in a universe of themes and abstract thoughts, the result of a director not recognizing the importance of having a dedicated writer on the job.
As you can probably tell, the writer-director thing has been bothering me as of late. I’ve stumbled across a handful of really bad movies over the last few weeks, movies that seem to have no focus, no point, that rambled. And it just so happened that in every one of those cases, I checked the credits and, sure enough, it was a writer-director. Again, because the writer-director scenario allows the production to bypass the vetting of a screenplay’s problems, the screenplays in that situation almost always have problems!
Yeah, yeah, I know. This isn’t always the case. There are notable exceptions from geniuses like Tarantino and Woody Allen and, on the big-budget end, James Cameron. But even the best of the writer-directors seem to lose their screenwriting mojo as their careers go on. M. Night is the most classic example of this. Wes Anderson’s films have gotten consistently worse. Robert Rodriquez. Cameron Crowe. Mike Judge. Oliver Stone. Spike Lee. Richard Kelly. The Wachowski Brothers. Even Christopher Nolan began to recognize his writing was suffering and started bringing in his brother to take care of screenwriting duties (thank God there are directors who can still put their ego aside).
I just have too much respect for screenwriting to relegate it to half of someone’s time (and in most of these cases, much less time than that). I think that’s why Tarantino is one of the few writer-directors who consistently delivers. He knows that the script is everything. He knows not a single captivating image will matter unless the audience is invested in the characters and the story. So he hunkers down, often for a year or more, and gets the damn script right. I don’t see the same amount of dedication from most writer-directors out there. Shit, Joe Swanberg, writer-director of the film Drinking Buddies, decided not to write a single line of dialogue in his script and just let the actors improvise them. And the finished product shows exactly what happens when you make a ridiculous choice like that. Would a true screenwriter ever make that mistake? Of course not.
So does that mean the writer-director is dead? Am I advocating that no one should direct AND write their film? No. I think that dual-role is a valuable tool at the beginning of one’s career, a necessity even. Young directors trying to get their name out there don’t have the money to hire good screenwriters and probably don’t even know where to find them (It’s hard for me to find them and I’m as plugged into the screenwriting scene as it gets). So they really have no choice but to write the script themselves. The result will be narratively clumsy (something like Monsters) but the result is a calling-card movie that gets you started in the business.
Ditto for writers. The spec market is a grueling literary rat race that, even when you have something good, can be tricky to navigate. Why not bypass it, then, and direct your own movie? You won’t be the best director in the world. But at least you’ll have a movie to your name, something that should start your career.
My problem comes more from the ego-centered “artists” who, even when they have access to the greatest writers in the world, shun them in favor of doing it themselves. Not recognizing the flaws in one’s own abilities is one of the biggest faults one can have. Coming back to French films, that’s where I have an issue. I mean how can you expect to write good stories if you haven’t even set up a proper system in your country where screenwriters can flourish? Jeez, you thought the screenwriter gets stepped on in Hollywood. It appears that over there, they don’t even have a voice.
In the end, it’s about understanding, respecting, and learning your craft. Screenwriting is its own thing. And it’s one of the trickier forms of storytelling out there. It needs people dedicated to figuring it out. I’m sure all of you who have struggled with the unique challenges of this craft can agree with that. Whether France ever makes that leap, we’ll have to see. But at least for the sake of this article, I’m glad they haven’t yet. It’s allowed me to see screenwriting from a different perspective, and learn to appreciate it even more.
Genre: Heist
Premise: An American thief living in Paris (Paris. See?? French Week!) is coerced into pulling off a complex heist in order to save his kidnapped wife.
About: Today’s script finished low on the 2011 Black List. It was originally a pitch that started a bidding war, with Dreamworks delivering the winning bid over Warner Brothers. It’s currently in development at the studio. The writer, John Hlavin, wrote two episodes for the critically acclaimed show, “The Shield.” His biggest credit, however, came last year, when he wrote the latest film in the Underworld series, “Underworld: Awakening.” He also sold a spec to Warner Brothers a few years ago called “The Gunslinger,” which Roger reviewed for me. Oh yeah, baby. It’s a good old-fashioned professional spec script review here on Scriptshadow. ☺
Writer: John Hlavin
Details: 132 pages
I think this has Tom Cruise written all over it.
Wow, after yesterday, I’m surprised some of you are still reading. It’s always funny to me how up-in-arms people get when you criticize any historic pillar of cinema or screenwriting. It’s as if these things can’t be challenged, that just because they’re talked about in film school or influenced great filmmakers, we must all fall in line, nod are heads, and agree that they are great.
Personally, I think that’s a load of b.s. If you think the French New Wave is a bunch of New Wave baloney, say so. If it’s harder for you to suspend your disbelief when you watch a black and white movie, say so. If you believe the latest Oscar contender that everyone can’t shut up about is a boring piece of pretentious hyena vomit, say so.
I can tell you this. The WORST thing you can do is to pretend to like something you don’t. Storytelling and cinema are about finding the truth within yourself and your story so that what you create is real. That was the spirit behind the rebellion that was the French New Wave, and I’d think those guys would be happy to hear people rebelling against them for the same reason.
There’s too much bullshitting in Hollywood, born out of a fear that you’ll sound inferior or stupid if you hate something everyone else loved or don’t believe in something everyone else believes in. Stick by your opinion. It’s what makes you you.
Where does that leave us today? With a heist film, of course! This one a pitch to Dreamworks. The whole pitch sale thing always confused me. It’s so damn hard to write a good script. Even the best screenwriters in the business struggle to do so. And you really don’t know if you have something until you’re finished and the script is out there. So to bankroll a script that hasn’t even been written yet is always a huge gamble (unless it’s based off a well-known pre-existing property of course). I suppose if the writer is proven and has an extremely specific outline, so you know exactly what you’re getting, maybe then it’s worth going for, but in my mind, you just don’t know what you got until those 110 pages (or in this case, those 130 pages!) are printed up. So why risk it??
35 year-old Michael Kitson does one thing really well – he robs banks. He’s been doing it all his life and he’s never been caught. His current city of choice is Paris. Why rob those lame bunker-looking buildings in the U.S. when you can rob a building with some style and history, you know? Then afterwards, you can stroll down the street and grab a fresh pain au chocolate from the café.
But Michael’s getting tired of the grind. And the love of his life, his wife Elise, is starting to nag him about quitting. So Michael makes the call. He’s officially retiring. He and Elise will head off to some island with a pretty name and never come back again. I mean why not? He’s got all the money in the world anyway.
Well not ALL the money apparently. Becker, Michael’s go-to middle-man, has a new job for him. The “French Blues.” The “Blues” are a set of blue diamonds that were thought to be made-up. No one’s actually seen them. But according to Becker, they’re real, and his client wants them badly. Sorry, Michael says, he made a promise to his wife. He’s out for good.
Except when Michael gets home, he learns that he’s not out of shit. Elise isn’t home, and it doesn’t take long for Michael to realize she’s been kidnapped. The call comes moments later. “Do the job. You get your wife back.” Shit. Michael freaks. He’s typically calm under pressure but when his wife is involved, all that goes out the finetre.
He puts together a four-man team and tells the kidnappers he wants to talk to his wife. He specifically wants her to tell him the story of how they met so he knows it’s her. What follows is two weeks of prep to steal the French Blues from a wealthy businessman who happens to be a former MI-5 agent.
During this time, we repeatedly flash back to Michael and Elise meeting, falling in love, him telling her he’s a bank robber, and her eventually accepting it. What begins as a set of mundane memories, however, turns out to be a carefully constructed code the two agree on should Elise ever be taken. Via this code, she’ll be able to communicate to him where she is and who’s taken her.
I’ve said it before. A good heist script is hard to do right because they’ve all been done before. Which is why I tell heist scripters to focus on something besides money. Money is a great motivator in movies, but since we’ve seen heists for 10 million dollars, 50 million dollars, 100 million dollars, there’s really no dollar amount you can throw at us that’s going to get us excited.
Hlavin’s Heist script does a good job in this regard, making these mythical diamonds the centerpiece of the heist. And when you think about it, the heist is really about the girl. That’s what we’re hoping he gets back.
However, this is where Hlavin’s Heist runs up against the same problem all of these kidnapping scripts do: How to make us care about the person kidnapped. You only have a few options. You can do it the Taken way. Spend the entire first act setting up the person who’s going to get kidnapped so we know and care about her. Knowing the character for this long, it’s almost certain we’ll care about her. The downside of this is that we might get bored waiting an entire 30 minutes for the person to be set up.
This leads us to option 2, giving the kidnapped character a really quick 1-2 scene intro before they’re kidnapped. This keeps the story moving along, but you risk us never really getting to know the victim and therefore not caring about her. You have to be a really good writer and write a set of perfect scenes to get us to give a shit about a girl we’ve known for 5 minutes. But it can be done.
The third option is to keep cutting to the person once they’ve been kidnapped, like they do with Silence of the Lambs. We can get to know them that way. However, this way you’re only getting to know them AFTER they’ve been kidnapped. You’d like the audience to care about them before it happens if possible. We’ll be more invested if we care initially.
This leads us to the final option, which is always the least desirable in my opinion: flashbacks to the victim’s past throughout the story. A heist film is about prepping the heist. That takes a long time and has the potential to get boring if you don’t keep things bopping along. Interspersing flashbacks has the potential to slow things to a crawl, since you’re stopping the story completely to go backwards all the time. For this reason, this option rarely works.
So it was surprising to see Hlavin’s Heist make that choice. We kept getting these on-the-nose flashbacks of Michael and Elise getting to know each other. Sure, it made us care about Elise more, but at what cost? Boring scenes. A story that was stuck in reverse for 2-3 minutes at a time. I hated that.
Luckily, Hlavin redeemed himself. Cleverly, I may add. Eventually, after the 7th or 8th flashback, once Michael’s revealed to Elise what he does and she’s accepted it, he says, “Now there’s something we have to talk about. There’s a chance, however small, that one day they’re going to take you in order to get to me. If that day ever comes, we’re going to create a code so that you can tell me exactly where you are. You’ll be telling me the story of how we met, but what you’ll really be telling me is how I’m going to find you.”
And so we realize that this whole thing where Michael has Elise tell him the story of how they met is actually a cleverly designed code between the two. They’re fooling the bad guys, and he uses the information to get the jewels AND save the girl, in one hell of a finale.
You see, in THIS specific case, the flashbacks worked, because they were working towards a cool payoff. However, you’re still dealing with a pretty substantial tradeoff. It took us 80 pages to GET to the point where we realized the flashbacks had a point. That means for 80 pages, this was your average run-of-the-mill Heist script. And I was getting bored as a result. That twist changed everything, and the last 50 pages were non-stop craziness as a result (there are a few more twists and double-crosses), but it’s a big risk to write something that straightforward for that long before you reveal all your magic tricks.
Hlavin’s Heist is a tale of two screenplays. There’s the decent by-the-numbers first two-thirds of the script, and then there’s the exciting “nothing-is-as-it-seems” final third of the script. If you can get through the first part, you’ll probably find it was worth the ride.
[ ] what the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[x] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: With heist scripts, you HAVE to make the heist impossible. If we don’t think it’s impossible, we’re not going to wonder how our hero is going to pull it off, and if you don’t have that element, you don’t have a heist script. So if I were you, I’d write yourself into a corner with your heist. Write the most impossible situation you can think of. Then figure your way out of it. The heist here had a former MI-5 agent at the helm, a house with all the latest MI-5 security measures, only one way in, a personally designed safe that there were no blueprints for in the entire world, 1/20th the prep time they’d typically have, etc., etc. Make it impossible. Then try and find a way out of it.
Genre: Crime/Drama/Foreign (French)
Premise: (from IMDB) A young car thief kills a policeman and tries to persuade a girl to hide in Italy with him.
About: “Breathless” was one of the most famous films of the French New Wave. The French New Wave was a movement in the 1960s where filmmakers began rejecting the traditional straight-forward methods of writing and directing a story. Essentially, before this, most movies were told in a very linear obvious predictable way. Directors were encouraged to be unpredictable in their methods of cutting and storytelling. Francis Truffant (the writer of this film) and Jean-Luc Godard (the director) were both film critics for the French magazine, Cahiers, which is where they first formulated their ideas for the French New Wave.
Writer: Francis Truffant
Details: 90 minutes
I’ve never really been a fan of the French New Wave. I think that’s because it’s one of those things in film school that they tell you you HAVE to appreciate. And, of course, being young and rebellious, that makes you want to NOT appreciate it. Ironic since The French New Wave was created in part by young filmmakers rejecting a film industry they were told they HAD to appreciate.
Also, a lot of the techniques the French New Wave films had introduced (such as jump cuts) had become so widespread by the time I saw it that seeing them used in an old black and white French film didn’t have much of an effect on me.
Also, I don’t care what kind of techniques you’re using in your film, whether they’re revolutionary, weird, different, what have you. All that matters to me is: WAS IT A GOOD STORY? Did I enjoy the characters and the journey they went on? That’s what bothers me whenever people try to do something different, is they’re more focused on doing the thing that’s different than they are telling a compelling story.
I have to admit, after watching Breathless, I needed Wikipedia’s help to flesh out my understanding of the plot, but basically the story is about a Frenchman, Michel, who for whatever reason is obsessed with Humphrey Bogart. He dresses like him, tries to act like him, and tries to bed as many ladies as possible, presumably like him.
After stealing a car in Marseilles, Michel ends up shooting and killing a policeman. He heads to Paris, where he hits on as many women as possible. There is one woman who he actually likes though, an aspiring journalist from America named Patricia. They slept together a few months ago but she’s not sure she wants to sleep with him again because she’s afraid to fall in love.
But Michel doesn’t give up easily. He tells Patricia he wants to run away with her to Italy. She goes back and forth on the idea, culminating in a 30 minute bedroom scene where the two discuss life, love, sex, and running off together. Eventually, the police catch up to Michel, who must dart around the streets of Paris to avoid them. That is until Patricia gives up his location, all because she’d rather not fall in love. She hates that feeling. And poor Michel’s going to take the fall for it.
Fin.
Oh man, I hated this movie so badly in film school. But it wasn’t as bad as I remembered it this time. I mean, if you know what you’re in for (zero plot, lots of experimentation, endless scenes) you provide yourself with a sort of shield of bearability. I wouldn’t say I enjoyed Breathless, but it had its moments, and could be strangely charming at times.
Now I realize that the French New Wave movement was more about deconstructing the way movies were directed, but by association this affected the screenwriting side as well. If you’re going to be making jarring jump cuts all over the place, you are affecting the story whether you intend to or not. However, from what I understand, Godard and Truffant took that a step further here. They almost relished the lack of a plot in their script. Boy, would they not be fans of Scriptshadow.
And again, this is because, before the French New Wave, France only celebrated these very straight-forward linearly-constructed period pieces. These guys wanted to turn all of that on its head. No more period. No more linear. No more obviousness. The foundation of the story would work to unseat the audience’s expectations.
I normally like that. But only if the story you’re telling is an engaging one. There is no story here. There’s a freaking THIRTY MINUTE SCENE with a guy and a girl in an apartment talking about nothing! It’s pretty ridiculous how long this scene goes on for. Ironically, it’s the biggest thing the movie brings to screenwriting. The dialogue here is completely unstructured and non-mechanical, a problem in many movies pre-1960. It encourages a more natural approach to characters conversing, which gives the scenes a new kind of energy previously unseen in film. And it’s something you still see in film today.
Of course, it’s important to note that it’s REALLY EASY to make dialogue realistic and natural when you have a 30 minute scene and your movie has no plot. The characters don’t have to push any story along, discuss any backstory, or inform the audience of anything important (exposition). On top of there being no time limit, they can literally talk about anything they want, so of course it’s going to feel naturalistic. Try to do that in a 3 minute scene in a movie with an actual story and you’re going to run into trouble. Still, the spirit this approach invokes is a great one for screenwriting.
The other thing Breathless brings to the screenwriting world is its encouragement for storytellers to take more chances in the how they structure their narratives. Not everything has to be “A happens then B happens then C happens then D happens.” It’s okay to start with D first, then move to A, then C, etc. Not that Breathless is told out of order, but its randomness promotes that approach.
Again, however, introducing this option to screenwriters has been both a blessing and a curse. Many think that randomly jumping around in a story automatically makes their movie “cool.” They don’t know enough about movies or haven’t studied enough about screenwriting to understand that there must be a REASON one chooses this route. If you’re doing it just to do it, your script/movie will feel empty. If there’s a purpose to jumping around in time (like the awesome script, Nautica), it’s going to come out much better.
Now a couple of French folks I spoke to have explicitly told me that the French New Wave ruined French film forever. I haven’t watched enough French films to say whether this is an accurate statement or not, but the ones I have watched have definitely pushed me in that direction. The New Wave basically stated that the director is an author, and therefore must leave his IMPRINT on the films he tells. He must enforce his style on the film so that you know it’s his.
The problem with this is that each film then is LITERALLY more about style than substance. The “substance” we’re referring to here is, of course, the screenplay. It’s the story that’s either going to captivate the audience or not. If the French film system continues to operate like that, then you’re never going to get any well-written films. You’re just going to get a bunch of directors jacking off, trying to be the most stylistic douche on the block.
I actually have some well-respected film folks in my corner on this. Jean-Pierre Jeunet, director of Amelie, when asked about if the French New Wave influenced his film, replied, “Fuck the French New Wave” (to which the press junket he was in cheered). And Martin Scorsese, when asked about Breathless, cryptically responded, “I like it” (unconvincingly), then followed that up with an ass-covering, “I don’t understand it. But I like it.”
And actually, Martin Scorsese is a perfect example of a director with a very recognizable style who STILL places emphasis on the script. And that seems to be where the French are still stuck in the mud. They love leaving their marks as directors on a film, but haven’t been able to admit the importance of the screenplay in the equation, leaving much of their films in the “rambling unfocused mess” category. Whether that’s because of the French New Wave is debatable, but that’s certainly what it looks like from here.
[ ] what the hell did I just watch?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth seeing
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Breathless reminded me to be more playful with your dialogue. Unlike a story, dialogue doesn’t always have to make sense. When people speak, the combination of mood, distractedness, sense of humor, sarcasm, weirdness, etc., should result in some fun/playful/strange exchanges, such as this one from Breathless: “I saw a man die.” “How’d he die?” “It was an accident.” “Take me out to dinner?”
Note: If you are a French screenwriter and want to prove that your script is so much better than the kind of films France is making, send it to me at carsonreeves3@gmail.com. I’ll review whatever query best catches my interest. Include the title, logline, and script attachment!
Genre: Dramedy (foreign)
Premise: (from IMDB) After he becomes a quadriplegic from a paragliding accident, an aristocrat hires a young man from the projects to be his caretaker.
About: The Intouchables became the highest grossing non-English-speaking movie in France’s history, taking in 166 million dollars. But what’s really surprising is how well it did internationally, taking in 281 million dollars, unheard of for a French film. The film won many awards, including the Cesar for co-lead Omar Cy. In short, it’s the best film to come out of France in years. The film is available for free on Netflix streaming right now!
Writer: Olivier Nakache and Eric Toledano
Details: 112 minutes
Bon Appetit!
Oui, you read that right. It’s FRENCH WEEK. I’ve been so inspired by the Musee D’Orsay, the Tour D’eiffel, the Metro, the patisseries, the boulangeries, the pan au chocolates, that I couldn’t NOT do a French week. I mean take a stroll through Montmartre (where Amelie was filmed) and tell me you wouldn’t trade your eldest son to live there for just one day.
Also, while in France, I learned a lot about the French movie industry and why they make such crappy movies. I’m going to save those discoveries for Thursday but let’s just say it’s a LOT easier now to understand why French movies are so terribaux.
Which makes the success of today’s movie all the more confusing. The Intouchables was that rare French film that got it right. Despite seemingly taking the same approach as most other French films (a fairly plot-less drama focusing on the lives of people with the occasional touch of comedy). For that reason, I had to look closer. What made this film break out of a formula that, according to most moviegoers, doesn’t work? Because I’ll be honest, I haven’t been the biggest French film fan. But this one was good. And I believe it comes down to the script (doesn’t it always!). It may behoove the French to take a better look at this script, then, to understand why The Intouchables found so much success.
For those who haven’t seen it, The Intouchables is about a very rich Frenchman, Philippe, who was paralyzed after a hang-gliding accident. Years later, he lives in his beautiful mansion, bound to a wheelchair as a paraplegic, millions of dollars in his bank account, yet not a single penny can give him what he wants most, to move again. To put it bluntly, Philippe’s life is at a standstill.
To make matters worse, everyone who does come in contact with Philippe (his business associates, his lawyer) treat him with pity. And there’s nothing Philippe hates more than pity. Enter Driss, a blunt African immigrant who’s applying for a job as Phillipe’s caretaker. The funny thing is, Driss doesn’t want the job. He just wants his application signed so he can claim that he APPLIED for the job, which will allow him to keep collecting welfare.
Of course, Driss’s casual reaction to Philippe’s disability is exactly what Philippe’s been looking for! So Driss quickly finds himself hired. The two become friends almost immediately, with Driss not afraid to make fun of Philippe’s shortcomings. Driss teaches Philippe to not be so uptight all the time and Philippe teaches Driss about art and culture.
Eventually, Driss learns that Philippe has been exchanging letters with a woman he’s never met. The two have formed a close relationship, but she doesn’t know about Philippe’s disability. Driss encourages Philippe to send her a picture, which Philippe does, though he secretly sends one of himself before the accident. Eventually, the moment comes where the woman wants to meet, and Philippe will have to decide whether to take what he learned from Driss and show up or throw a shot at happiness away.
At first, it’s hard to determine why this movie works. From a traditional standpoint, it’s kind of strange. In these stories where there’s a central coupling, there’s almost always a clear conflict between that couple. For example, when you have a love story, the conflict might come from the two butting heads (The Proposal). Or if it’s a buddy comedy, the two might hate each other (The Other Guys). Here, Philippe and Driss become best friends almost immediately.
There is Driss’s initial reluctance to take on the job, but it ends quickly, and a couple of scenes later, the two are laughing it up. It took me awhile to figure out why I was enjoying the movie still, despite the lack of conflict, and I realized it’s because we tend to enjoy watching friendships develop, especially friendships where the two parties would normally never interact with one another. I know it sounds silly, but darn it if it doesn’t make you feel all warm and fuzzy inside.
But what sets this script apart from all those other French films is that it adds structure to its story. A plot thread emerges that gives the story focus. That thread is, of course, the woman Philippe writes letters to. Now that Philippe has a GOAL (the eventual meeting with this girl) and that goal has STAKES attached to it (he’s fallen in love with her, tied all his future hope to her), we have something to look forward to. If not for that, we would’ve been stuck watching a couple of guys laughing for two hours. That would’ve eventually gotten boring, no matter how much we liked the two of them.
I recently watched a French movie on Netflix, for example, called Russian Dolls, that was one of the worst movies I’ve seen all year. And, not surprisingly, it had all the French trappings embedded in its fiber. We watched multiple people simply “experiencing life” in France. There was no rhyme or reason to who we cut to or why. There was a main character, but it was never clear what he was doing. He may have been writing a book, but why and for what purpose, I don’t know. That film failed, in my opinion, because it didn’t have that structure, it didn’t have that overriding central plot thread that the audience looked forward to.
I come back to it again and again on the site, but that’s because it works. Give your character a GOAL and the reader starts caring. Even if you’re writing a drama centered around “characters experiencing life” that doesn’t involve the mafia, or bank robberies, or robots. Give you main character something he’s going after. It’ll pull what are otherwise a bunch of drifting characters into a plot orbit.
Part of the problem here – and this seems to be very much a French problem – is that the French writers and directors (who are often the same person, which is part of the problem) believe that if they just explore life’s randomness, that their movies will be entertaining because they’ll be “lifelike” and “real.” Nothing could be further from the truth. If we don’t feel like we’re pushing towards something, if we don’t believe that all of this has a purpose, we lose interest. If we wanted “real life” we wouldn’t be at the movies, would we? We can get real life from…err… REAL LIFE! Movies are “exceptional life.”
Another reason the script works is because there’s a fascinating irony at the heart of the main character. Here is a man who “has” everything (all this money!). And yet he can’t enjoy any of it. For whatever reason, audiences love watching that. This movie doesn’t work, for example, if Philippe is poor. It’s only because he’s rich that we’re captivated. This is why it’s important to really think about your main character before you write your script. Is there something fascinating about him/her? Are you getting everything you possibly can out of his character? If not, rethink the character.
The Intouchables proves that whatever kind of script you write, a summer blockbuster or a character-driven drama, at the heart of your story should be some sort of objective to tie all the loose strands together. A lot of these French films would be better served by following this simple advice!
[ ] what the hell did I just watch?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[xx] worth watching
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Add an Element of Danger – You can enrich your story by adding an element of danger to one of your characters, the possibility that they might do something or are capable of something bad. Here, Driss has a criminal record, which Philippe’s lawyer points out to him. This choice lines the story with an impending payoff of this danger, something that because we’re told to anticipate, we pay more attention. In other words, it’s yet another subtle trick to keep a reader focused.
What I learned 2: Beware the car crash backstory! – Beware giving any character who was in an accident in your script the “car crash backstory”. It’s the easiest and most obvious of all the accident backstories and therefore draws rolled eyes from experienced readers. Instead, go with an accident that more organically represents your character. Here, Philippe injured himself during a hang-gliding accident, very much a “rich man’s” leisurely activity. That’s the kind of backstory that feels organic and honest, so it’s no surprise that it adds even more to Philippe’s character.
