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Genre: Supernatural Horror
Premise: (from writer) When an angelology professor and his wife lose their daughter to tragedy, they are invited to a mysterious retreat which promises communion with the dead. The cost? Only one of them will survive.
Why you should read: (from writer): “A lean 87 pages, BETH AVEN is written for the $1 million / limited location model. In style and tone, it is THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT meets THE EXORCISM OF EMILY ROSE. It is intensely character-driven, but delivers the actions and scares inherent to the genre. At its core it is the tale of parents who’ve lost their only child, and the harrowing journey to the gates of death that will mark their lives forever.”
Writer: Sean Whitnall
Details: 87 pages

Christian Bale for Daniel?

I’m not exactly chomping at the bit to read today’s script. I’m just… tired. This would appear to be bad news for Sean. But it’s also a wonderful reminder that writers are writing for human beings. They’re not writing for robots whose sole purpose is to read through screenplays. Readers are tired just like you. They look forward to finishing work, just like you. They look forward to laying down on their beds, just like you.  They dream of being in better places just like you. Which is why nothing less than awesome keeps their interest. Which is why you must write to make the reader forget about the 32 other things they have to do that week. You must dazzle them from the first page and never let go.  It’s your only chance really.  Anything less and a reader sees you as just another script to finish.

Beth Haven challenges all that wisdom by starting out with a dog murder and a four year old girl with cancer. Not gonna lie. Mental check-out countdown began when I saw that. But the thoughtful Sean Whitnall did limit his script to only 87 pages. Which means he WAS thinking about the reader at least a little bit. Maybe it’s not time to give up on Beth Haven yet.

Darma is the name of the young cancer girl. And she dies immediately after the opening scene, leaving her parents, Daniel and Irma Ventriss, to mourn. The two knew this time was going to come, making church a regular part of their routine in order to give Darma the impression that there was a life after this one.

But neither really believed. It was a just a show. And now that show was over. But then Irma starts hearing voices, Darma’s voice in particular, calling to her. She’s convinced that there’s some crossover going on and begs Daniel to look at alternative ideas. After some resistance, he agrees to go to a secluded retreat where a mysterious woman who claims to have contact with the dead will connect them with their daughter.

Once there, they meet others who are hoping for the same, to speak with their loved ones from beyond. The retreat is led by an eerie hippy-ish woman who refers to herself as “Silver.” Along with her equally trippy assistant, “Blix,” these two inform the small group that there will be a contest of sorts. Only one of them will get to speak to their loved one.

What follows is a sort of game where Silver and Blix force everyone to confront their fears, weaknesses, and failures, blunt-trauma therapy, you might call it. There’s a sex addict, for example, who must learn that his addiction to sex is what’s preventing him from becoming whole, with communicating with the other side. I think. The way these two women talk is so abstract that they could literally be saying anything. Not gonna lie. It was tough to follow.

Eventually, Daniel realizes that the strange pair are tearing him and Irma apart. He’s just not sure why. But Irma, being the more weak-minded of the two, is falling for it, and it seems like only a matter of time before she makes this retreat her permanent residence. That is until Daniel learns that Silver and Blix’s plans for all of them is much more nefarious. I’m not going to spoil anything but let’s just say, there’s demons involved. Like Silver’s going to turn into a demon. And then try to kill them. Will Daniel be able to pull his wife back to the light side and get her out of there before it’s too late? Good question. Check the comments to find out.

Okay, I’m going to start with the obvious here. You probably shouldn’t start your script with a dog murder then a 4 year old girl who dies from cancer. I still don’t even know what the opening dog murder was about or what it had to do with the story.

But it led into one of the script’s biggest weaknesses – that being the writing is too on-the-nose. For example, when you’re selling the sadness of a daughter dying, you don’t want to hit us over the head with, “Does this mean I won’t get to go to kindergarten?” Just a sad look between the two parents is enough. There was way too much of this (i.e. the parents would sleep, sadly, in the dead girl’s room instead of their own). You have to trust that the audience is going to get what you’re saying. Then you won’t feel the need to keep telling them.

Now as for the overall script, its’ a script that on the surface, I should like. It takes place in a contained area the characters can’t leave, which ups the tension. There’s a clear goal – try to communicate with their dead daughter. The stakes are relatively high. We get the sense that this is going to be their only shot at this. And while there isn’t a ticking time bomb, there’s a short time frame. So the story escalates quickly.

But there was something keeping me from getting on board. Honestly, I think it was the parents’ on-the-nose reaction to the daughter’s death. A screenplay is kind of like putting someone under hypnosis. You, the writer, are the hypnotist, and we’re your subject. If you do your job, we stay “under” the whole time. But if anything distracts us, we’re brought back to the real world. As soon as a reader’s brought back to the real world, the gig is up. It’s impossible to get him under again. And after the kindergarten line and the sleeping in her bed, that was it for me. The spell was broken.

So I can certainly critique the rest of the script, but it’s like critiquing something I experienced from a distance. I guess what I’m trying to say is, for those readers who stayed hypnotized, they may not have been bothered by the rest of the things I did. They still believed.

Keeping that in mind, there was something about the dialogue that I wasn’t connecting with. At first I thought it was the rhythm that bothered me. You know how sometimes you’re reading dialogue and the way people speak makes it difficult to read. Instead of a smooth pour, it’s more like a turbulent plane ride. As I looked closer, though, I think it was a combination of using too many big words as well as characters talking for longer than they needed to.

For example, at one point Silver says to Daniel, “You needn’t worry about the box. Something as simple as holding my gaze and yet you find it full of connotations: fears of exposure rife with secret desires, perhaps.” Daniel replies. “Or questioning a deconstructed retreat scenario meant to disarm your guests.” I understand that both of these characters are smart and speak accordingly, and we have to take into account my tiredness here, but reading through an entire screenplay of this back and forth was tough. I’d constantly have to re-read everything to understand what was being said. And the surest way to end a love affair with a reader is to write something they must go back and read again.

And then, as we get towards the end, a full-on monologue party breaks out. It seemed like every time someone spoke, it was 15 lines or more. It was just too much. And oftentimes, it could’ve been streamlined to a sentence or two. For example, on page 59, one of the other retreat members, an actor, confronts Daniel while he’s trying to steal a box. Towards the end of their argument, he says this, “I got fifty pounds of muscle on you easy, so mad props you got the balls to call me dumb to my face. Second, you’re paranoid. I work with some of the brightest minds in the industry. Folks like these are free thinkers. I get that. You don’t. I’m exposed to fringe concepts all the time. I even tweak the scripts before we shoot’em. I may not be a real detective, but my instincts tell me getting in Silver’s favor ain’t a bad thing at this point. I’m here to break through to my brother. Not your daughter. Lock up when you leave smart guy.” That’s a lot of words for not saying very much at all. And there was a lot of this.

So I want to apologize to Sean that I wasn’t full-on one hundred percent while reading this. But I’m pretty sure I’ll wake up tomorrow and still agree with these points. My big notes to him would be to trust the audience more. You don’t have to drill something into their head five times melodramatically for them to get it. Sometimes just a look will do. Also, chop that dialogue down and smooth it out a bit. In the next draft, I’d like the conversations here to be easier to read. Good luck and happy Labor Day Weekend everybody. :)

Script link: Beth Haven

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

What I learned: Sometimes we writers overcomplicate things. Remember that 95% of the time, saying something the simplest way is usually the best. So in that big monologue of Warren’s above, why not just write something like: “You take that box, you’re going to have to deal with me. I’m not letting you screw up my chances to talk to my brother.” Keep it simple!

I think Warner Brothers is crazy. I do. Because despite their best intentions and all of their efforts to do this Batman vs. Superman thing, there is no way it’s going to work. Just no way. That’s not to say it isn’t going to make money. Zack Snyder’s style results in some of the best trailers in the business. So it’s going to look cool. And of course we’re going to get that 150 million dollar marketing campaign that will subliminally convince us that we will die of Bird Flu if we don’t go see it. But the movie is going to be terrible. Why? Because there’s no way to make the Batman Vs. Superman script work. There isn’t a single variable in the make-up of this pairing that lends itself to a good story. Which leads to a much bigger problem for the franchises than just this film. If it’s as ridiculous as I’m assuming it will be, you end up killing the Golden Goose, just like Joel Schumacher did with the last Batman franchise. Both franchises, then, could be catastrophically injured.

I bring this up not from a place of hate. I’d love to see a great Batman vs. Superman movie. I bring it up from a place of knowing what makes a good story. In an imaginary world where Warner Brothers came to me with this idea and asked me to write it, I would say, “It can’t be done. There are too many things working against it.” I want to get to those things, but first, let’s recap how we got here.

Warner Brothers, who has much of the DC Universe under contract, has been watching the way Disney/Marvel’s been methodically parading out solo movies for their characters (Iron Man, Thor, Hulk) and making a lot of money off them. They said, “Hey, why can’t we do that? We have other superheroes besides Batman and Superman.” So they kept developing the Wonder Woman project. They gave us Ryan Reynolds as The Green Lantern. And the results of these experiments were… not good to say the least. It was then that Marvel took over the movie world with its orgasmic super-hero fest, The Avengers.  Warners had had enough. They wanted to do their version of The Avengers, Justice League, but, as we already established, didn’t have the characters. But gosh. That Avengers made so much money. We have to have an answer to it. Batman vs. Superman has been kicking around Hollywood forever, and this seemed like the perfect time to bust it out, so they pulled the trigger. Their argument was, “We got the two best superheroes around. We don’t need anybody else.” And hence we got Batman vs. Superman. With Ben Affleck to play Batman to boot (that casting choice is a whole other discussion).

Here’s the problem though. Famous Character X vs. Famous Character Y movies never work. In fact, they actually work against the franchises because all of them carry a whiff of desperation. As a studio, you bring these out when the characters are stale or dying. Freddy vs. Jason? Oh yeah, that was a good one. Alien vs. Predator. Does anyone even remember what that was about??  Why are we bringing together two franchises that are just fine?  Here are a few more thoughts I’d like to add.

It’s a gimmick, not a movie.

“Versus” movies are always gimmicks. Instead of being able to create a journey for the main character that will end up being our main plot (i.e. Lex Luthor holds America hostage and Superman must stop him), the whole script must be geared towards figuring out a way to get these two to fight. So you’re already starting from an artificial place. You’re trying to push something on the audience that isn’t natural and therefore will never feel natural, no matter how many writing tricks you use. I’m sure Goyer and Snyder will do their best, but I’m willing to bet my right hip that while you’re watching this film, you’re going to notice a ton of really ridiculous exposition that sets up why Superman and Batman will have to fight.

Tone mixing

The tone between the two universes is too different. Batman’s darker, more realistic. Superman has super powers and aliens. Superman’s also set in a more idealistic world, despite Zac Snyder’s best efforts to eliminate that idealism. In Superman, you still get cheesy lines you’d NEVER see in Batman like, “The world’s too big mom.” Or an overly-melodramatic death where someone’s father perishes in a Level 5 tornado. Combining super human heroes with mortal human heroes and keeping the tone universal is going to be a bitch to do right. I guess The Avengers somehow mixed a Norse God into their story, but I’m guessing Batman and Superman are always going to feel like they’re in different movies. The tonal bubble that surrounds each is too different.

Neither character can win –

This is probably the biggest challenge they have in the script. Neither character can defeat the other. Both are too big and too important to the studio to lose at the end of the movie and the fanbase for each is too passionate to take on when said favorite loses. That means we’re going to get the mother of all cop-outs where both characters battle each other with all their hearts, then come to a truce at the end. It will be monumentally unsatisfying. You know that great feeling you get when the hero defeats the bad guy at the end of the movie. Batman vs. Superman can’t have that, which is going to leave you feeling confused. “Wait, a tie? Well then what was the whole point of the movie?”

False Character Motivation

How do you motivate this fight? Like motivate an all-out “to-the-death” battle between Superman and Batman? There’s nothing you can do. Superman won’t want to kill Batman. And Batman doesn’t kill good guys who have made their mark by doing good and saving thousands of lives. Any motivation you give these two to fight each other is going to feel entirely fabricated.

It’s not a fair fight, so anything they do to make it fair will feel like cheating.

As a writer, the actual battle between these two is impossible to write. This comes down to geek obviousness.  There’s no way for a mortal man to defeat a superhuman. True, we have the whole kryptonite thing, but what’s Batman going to do? Lace himself with kryptonite? Would Nolan’s Batman ever do something like that? Of course not. It’s too silly, too bizarre, bringing us back to the tone issue. These two don’t work in the same universe. They operate in completely separate worlds. The writers (I’m assuming someone will come in to help after Goyer) will have to design all these artificial elements to even the fight out, and it’s going to make everything feel fake and manufactured. I could see this working in the broad universe of a cartoon. But live in a dark supposedly “realistic” world? It’s going to feel silly.

This leaves us with one obvious question: What WILL they end up doing? Well, I’m not in their heads, but the best way to approach this is to probably create some nasty villain that Batman and Superman are both going after. They may even have to team up since you want these characters around each other as much as possible. But they don’t see eye to eye and something goes wrong. Batman splits off and decides to do it his own way, and much like The Dark Knight, he goes too far. In fact, Batman’s been going too far in his street-cleaning crusade for awhile now. But local law enforcement can’t stop him, so they have to bring in Superman. There would also have to be some secondary plot where Bruce and Clark are interacting as normal people, possibly in a reporter-interview capacity so you can get a lot of dramatic irony in there via their interactions. But I contend it’s just going to be stupid and cheesy and forced when they fight. Why would these two fight each other than nerds wanting them too???

Whenever you stoop to a “fan-fiction” level with your story, you run the risk of killing it. Because you’re making the movie for the wrong reasons. You’re not trying to tell a good story. You’re trying to answer a geeky question. Who wins if Superman and Batman fight (we already answered this, of course: neither). Which is why these things need to be kept to dorm rooms at 2 a.m. after the final strand of weed has been toked. The idea “Batman Vs. Superman” sounds rad for two seconds, but when you really think about it, how they would actually make it happen, it falls apart immediately. The trailer for this will be great, but mark my words, there’s no way for this script to survive. Which is exactly why, despite them developing the idea for 20 years, no one’s cracked it yet. With that said, I leave it up to you guys to prove me wrong. How would you write Batman vs. Superman?  Is it, indeed, impossible?

Genre: Drama
Premise: The members of a small Irish town housing a supposed Lochness-like monster in their lake find their world turned upside-down when an American documentary crew arrives to find out if the monster is real.
About: For those of you who don’t visit Scriptshadow regularly, there’s a commenter named Grendl who has basically spent the past year terrorizing every writer who’s ever had a script reviewed on the site. He angrily bashes everybody’s work. To his credit, though, despite blasting almost every screenplay written after 1979, he’s always been game to having his script reviewed on the site. In the past, I’ve declined because I didn’t want to reward the class bully (and because he used to send me rambling e-mails about how I was the world’s worst person). But Grendl’s exhibited some good behavior recently, so I finally said, why not? Let’s give him a shot.
Writer: Grendl
Details: 126 pages

Many of you may think this is an opportunity to finally say to Grendl, “See, you don’t know everything after all! [x] part of your story is boring. [y] subplot doesn’t make any sense. The dialogue in scene [z] was on-the-nose.” Indeed, there will be a large contingent of readers who have been sharpening their knives for this moment, and they plan to use them. And I won’t begrudge them of that. He’s earned every attack he’s going to get.

But I’m not going to be one of those people. I haven’t even read the script yet (I’m going to after I write the intro). But I can promise I will try my best to put all the baggage aside and judge the screenplay on its merits alone. If it’s good, I’m going to say it’s good. If it’s bad, I’m going to say it’s bad. There is no agenda here. More than anything, there’s curiosity. What does the man who hates everything write about? What kind of story will he tell? It’s time for Scriptshadow Nation to find out!

[Carson reads script]

Real Monsters is about the town of Delphi, a tiny dot on Ireland’s map. The town folk here don’t do much other than drink beer and talk shit about each other, mainly because the town is dying. Liam McIntyre, the town’s lone pub owner and therefore, its unofficial spokesman, spends the majority of his days coming up with excuses for why he can’t pay the bills.

This angers his 26 year-old spitfire of a daughter, Katelyn, to no end. The woman’s been cleaning up his messes for long enough now and she’s just about fed up with him. One more mishap and she’s off to America, a place where someone can actually make something of themselves.

Her plan is interrupted by two visitors, however. A newly married couple and a documentary crew, both – ironically – from America. Heading up that crew is 38 year-old Michael Weiss. He’s got a bit of dashingness left in those 38 years and decides to use it to snag the unobtainable Katelyn. But she rebuffs him like a Scientology pamphlet, leaving him with little left to do in town other than drink Guinness at room temperature and work.

The reason the Americans are here is the only reason anybody still comes to Delphi – Haddy. Haddy is the local Lochness-like legend who lives underneath the huge lake adjacent to downtown. Michael’s documentary team is the first to come here and give the legend a serious scientific look. That’s making some of the locals nervous, especially Liam and his buddy Jerry, two men who know the truth about Haddy– that she ain’t real. Therefore, they sneak out to the lake late-night and throw in a homemade rubber “lake monster hump” in hopes of keeping the lie alive.

Except when someone’s got a boat with a dozen industrial-level lights on it, hoaxing becomes a lot tougher, and Team Liam gets caught. The jig is supposedly up. Until town-members stumble upon the real reason for the Americans’ visit, a shocking twist that will force them to make a choice about the town that just may cause its demise.

If you’re like me, you were half-expecting some sort of weird viral thing to happen mid-way through Real Monsters. 17% of me honestly believed that Grendl might be the monster living underneath the lake. And that the monster had written a script. And there was going to be some Youtube link at the end of the screenplay that led to a video of a sea-monster twerking to Miley Cyrus’s latest song telling me that unless I gave his script a “genius” he was going to road-trip it to the Pacific Ocean and eat me.

But that didn’t happen. What I was left with instead was a quiet character-driven script about a beautiful Irish town trying to stick together when they’re invaded by rich Americans. The $64,000 question then: WAS IT ANY GOOD!?

Well, yes and no. Grendl does a nice job establishing not only this town, but the relationships within the town. I never once questioned the authenticity of any of the town or characters (or their dialogue), and even believe that Grendl may now live in this town. That’s how specific and detailed it all felt.

I also liked what he did with the main character, Katelyn. We really feel this woman’s need to pull away from her deadbeat bar owner dad and spread her wings before it’s too late. And that push-pull relationship was the main reason I rooted for her. Once you have a reader rooting for your main character, you’re in pretty good shape.

Here’s my issue with the script though. There’s not enough story here. Outside of Katelyn and her father’s relationship, and Katelyn and Michael’s relationship (to a lesser degree), there weren’t a whole lot of things to keep you invested. I didn’t dislike any of the locals. Like I said, many of them exhibited genuine authenticity. But I didn’t really care about them. I got to about the 80 page mark and thought, “Man, I’m tired. I wanna go to sleep.” And that’s always the true test of a writer. When they’ve got you late in the second act – one of the most difficult places to keep a reader invested – that’s when you truly know you have a great script.

Now Grendl offered at the last second to send me a hastily revised 111 page version – presumably because the backlash that was sure to come from a 126 page script finally hit him – but hurriedly cutting 15 pages at the last second never resulted in anything good, so I advised against it. Still, I think that version would’ve played much better.

The opening voice-over with Liam floating Gaelic prose over shots of the lake may have seemed like a good idea when you had an entire day of writing ahead of you. But that kind of stuff plays differently when a reader is barreling through your script. I was bored by it. And then every dialogue scene felt like it went 15-20% too long. Characters always felt like they were repeating themselves instead of just getting to the point and moving on. “You gotta do this.” “No, I can’t, you do it.” “No, I don’t want to do it. Shouldn’t you do it?” “I did it last time.” “Maybe I should do it.” This isn’t literal dialogue from the script, but that’s how it felt a lot of the time – people just carrying on conversations that should’ve ended long ago.

I was just about to hit “skim” mode on page 85 (or 90?) when we have a big twist that launched us into a much bigger final act than I was expecting. That kind of jolted me awake and carried me to magical number 126. The twist (or double-twist) wasn’t bad but I’m not sure it totally worked. There was something a little safe about it. You know how those good twists get you all revved up and excited, eager to mentally go back through the story to see how it all plays with this new information? This twist never made it that far back. It was kinda like, “Ooh, cool, a twist,” and then you moved on.

If I were Grendl (and dammit, am I happy I’m not), I’d bring this down to 110 pages. Focus on the love story between Katelyn and Michael more. Get to that way earlier than page 50. Downgrade the involvement of some of the less important characters, like Paul, so you can spend more time on this relationship. And I’d say take a few more chances. This is that cute little script you read and say, “Not bad,” at the end, then put it down and forget about it. You never recommend it to anyone because there’s nothing big enough or exciting enough in it to recommend. It’s a well-told story, if a little long, but that’s it. In order to stand out from the pack, you need more than that.

In the end, I’m a little surprised by this effort. I guess I was expecting something… more Grendl? Darker? Riskier? Controversial? This is such a soft story. I never would’ve predicted that. But Grendl’s got some talent. It’s hard to argue against that. And that talent nudges Real Monsters up to a “worth the read.”

Script link: Real Monsters

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

What I learned: Soft, kind, gentle stories are tough to sell on the spec market. Even the best of them. Not many people are looking for that middle-of-the-emotional-ladder type screenplay. They want the kind of stuff with more extreme emotions, whether it be crying, fear, thrills, or anger. That’s generally what I’ve found.

Genre: TV PILOT – one hour procedural drama/thriller
Premise: One of the FBI’s most wanted men mysteriously turns himself in to help the bureau take down a secret list of international criminals that he’s been compiling over the last four years. He calls this list “The Blacklist.”
About: The Blacklist was one of the early pilot scripts that was getting a lot of buzz. The writer, Jon Bokencamp, has done most of his work in the feature world. I’m not sure what area of the business he originally hails from, but he has a few story credits (The Call, Perfect Stranger) which implies he may have worked in a producer or manager capacity? Coming up with ideas and bringing in writers to write them? Or maybe he just got rewritten to death and retained the story credit. His most recent credit is a “story by” credit on The Call, that Halle Berry movie that they made look ridiculous in the trailers but is actually one of the better thrillers of the past year. Definitely worth checking out if you like a good thriller. The Blacklist stars James Spader and debuts this fall on NBC.
Writer: Jon Bokenkamp
Details: 57 pages

Okay okay, I give up. NBC has been promoting this Blacklist show so heavily that I’ve finally broken down and read it. Now I’ll be honest – while I can tell you with 98% certainty which movies are going to bomb and which will do well, TV is more of a crapshoot for me. And a big reason for that is the unique model. TV doesn’t have movie stars to bring in a built-in audience. They also aren’t as dependent on concepts as films are. TV is more about the characters, which ironically works against the very thing they don’t have access to – BIG STARS.

In my little pretend world of TV knowledge, I believe a hit show comes down to four things. One: is the show written well? You have a lot of guys faking their way through this business. But when a good writer writes a show, you know it.  Next, the casting.  Since you don’t have star power, you have to find faces that excite potential viewers when they see the promo for the show. Three, how the show is promoted. This is huge. A bad promotion means nobody watches the first week and then, even if your show is good, it doesn’t matter because no one’s around to tell anybody about it.

Finally, I think every show has to have something a little sexy going for it. Not “sexy” in the literal sense, but just something that makes it stick out from the pack. Lost had that. Once Upon A Time, House, Person of Interest, Heroes, they all had some “sexiness” factor going for them, some fun thing that stood out.

Like I pointed out the other day – the people who buy TV pilots seem to be really into the “teaser” of your show – the opening scene that sucks the audience in. And The Blacklist doesn’t skimp in that area. 55 year old Raymond “Red” Reddington walks into FBI Headquarters and proceeds to tell the guard that he’s there to see Agent Harold Cooper. The annoyed guard makes the call, and the reaction he hears on the other end when he mentions Red’s name turns his expression into the Scream mask.

Red casually gets on his hands and knees EVEN BEFORE the FBI swarms in and grabs him. Red happens to be the FBI’s fourth most wanted man. Once they’ve secured him, they inundate him with questions. You see, Red used to be an agent himself. Until he disappeared under mysterious circumstances and was found selling United States info to every country with an “I hate America” complex.

Now the FBI wants answers. Unfortunately, Red won’t talk to them. In fact, he states he’ll only talk to one person – Elizabeth Keen. Keen is, ironically, starting her first day as a profiler, and she’s never crossed paths with this Red guy before. So she’s as baffled as anyone that he’ll only talk to her. But if you’re expecting Red to tell us why he’s chosen our heroine, both of you are gonna be disappointed. Red is keeping that secret close to the vest, and he enjoys toying with her about that mystery, which only enrages her (Keen’s got a little bit of a anger issue).

But Keen’s gotta play ball because Red happens to know of a terrorist, Ranko Zamani, who just entered the U.S. and is planning to kidnap the daughter of U.S. General David Ryker. Red doesn’t know all the details behind Zamani’s plan, but enough that the FBI has to let Keen take point on the job, since she’s the only one Red will speak with.

Keen ends up thwarting the kidnapping, only to be attacked by Zamani in transit. The girl is kidnapped as planned, and now Keen will have to figure out what he plans to do with her. All signs point to a big terrorist statement attack, but what that plan is eludes her. Her only chance is to turn to Red, who’s been bunking with criminals for four years now and understands their unique non-American motivations. He will teach her how to take down not only Zamani, but every other terrorist on his secret blacklist.

Hmmm…

This pilot was pretty good I suppose. It was very “feature-like” in its execution. We have a classic movie set-up. Terrorist. Going to detonate a bomb. Our heroes have to stop it.

Pardon the pun, but it was EXPLODING with GSU.

My problem may have been the rather excessive borrowing from one of our favorite FBI movies of all time, Silence Of The Lambs. I mean, at one point, Red, probing for details about Keen’s life even offers the line, “You tell me, I tell you.” The relationship was so reminiscent of Clarice and Hannibal that it became overbearing at times.

And this is where we, once again, run into that oft-used phrase, “Same but different,” which seems to drive every producer’s magic formula for material they buy. For those who have crossed into the sea where we actually understand this phrase, you know that there’s still a giant question mark within it. That is, “How different or same does it need to be?” If you go too far, you risk coming up with something bizarre. If you don’t go far enough, your story feels derivative. I’m still not sure where The Blacklist lies but it feels kissing-cousins close to Lambs. You’ve replaced a serial killer with terrorists. That’s the big change. But the central relationship IS, basically, Hannibal and Clarice.

Another thing that bothered me was the safeness of it all. I was asked after I finished it, “What did you think?” That’s usually when you’re the most honest. When someone asks you point-blank what you thought. And I answered, “It was good but it all felt so…safe, like the exact kind of been-there-done-that show you always see on network television.”

And I don’t know if that’s an insult or a compliment. Because network TV is only going to go so far. They’re not going to have Walter White in primetime. Knowing how far they’re willing to go, and writing a show that fits that criteria is a talent in itself. The fact that this made it to air and is NBC’s biggest bet this season is proof of that. Whereas with features I know how safe or risky you can be in every genre, I still don’t have a feel for that in the TV world. My gut feeling is that if I would have sent this out as an agent, I would’ve gotten the response, “Too derivative.”

Moving on, I may have actually learned something today about pilots!  We had one, and only one, giant set-piece. Is this the standard allotment, due to time and money constraints, whenever you write a pilot? You only get that one big set-piece (I’m asking you, commenters). Because if that is the case, I learned that since you’ve only got one, you gotta make it count. And The Blacklist did.

The scene in question is when the bad guys kidnap the girl from Keen in transit. It happens on a car bridge that’s lifting and splitting as our bad guys are rappelling up from below to get to the top where Keen and the girl are. As the grade gets steeper, cars are falling down one by one, all with people inside of them. A very cool and well-written scene (the best set-piece scenes I can always picture in my imagination as I’m reading them. This scene had that).

I guess this was a helpful read in order to figure out what kind of stuff networks are looking for with their one-hour dramas. It’s clean. It’s fast-paced. It’s packed with stakes and urgency. There are twists and turns and reveals and questions. The writing’s very crisp.

It’s just not very original. I guess you gotta go to the cable channels if you want that.

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

What I learned: Don’t over-telegraph your twists. Over and over again, we get these blatant hints that Red is Keen’s dad. He calls her Lizzie. He knows everything about her past. We never get the answer to this question in this episode, but it looks like that’s going to be a huge reveal somewhere in the future. If that’s the case, I beg the producers to change it. It would be the single most over-telegraphed twist in the history of TV.

In general, overly-telegraphed twists are rookie stuff. You never want the reader to be ahead of you.

Un-LESS! Unless you’re over-telegraphing cause you’re tricking the reader/audience. If The Blacklist keeps selling this obvious “He’s your dad” subtext and then turns the tables on us only to reveal a completely different twist we had no idea was coming, then the writer has successfully outwitted us.

So don’t over-telegraph your twists. Unless you’re going to use the audience’s expectations of that twist to pull one on them!

Genre: Horror/Slasher
Premise: (from imdb) When the Davison family comes under attack during their wedding anniversary getaway, the gang of mysterious killers soon learns that one of victims harbors a secret talent for fighting back.
About: This film has taken a strange journey. It actually debuted at a film festival over TWO YEARS AGO. Everyone at the festival loved it, getting the indie horror scene all goosed up to see the film. But then it just sat, and sat, and sat. Why? I have no idea. Maybe the producers believed they had something better than what they were being offered. It more recently played at SXSW, repeated the hype there, and Lionsgate finally picked it up. The studio that brought us “Saw” saw another bloody horror opportunity, and released the film this weekend. It didn’t really light up the scene (it had no stars to sell it) bringing in about 7 million bucks, but neither did any of the other opening films (which all made less than 10 mil). And this modestly budgeted (2 million budget I’m guessing?) film will definitely make a nice profit. Director Adam Wingard is best known for directing the “wraparound” storyline for VHS. In an unrelated story, director-actor Joe Swanberg, who starred in the film as “guy who gets arrow stuck in his back,” also released his directing effort, “Drinking Buddies,” this weekend, meaning he had the unfortunate job of competing against himself!
Writer: Simon Barrett
Details: 94 minutes

Let’s have a discussion, shall we?

So a couple of weeks ago, I downloaded this movie on iTunes called “Would You Rather.” It was a contained horror film that (as far as I know) was never released in theaters. It starred Brittany Snow in a story about a young woman, who, in order to save her dying brother, agrees to participate in a contest at a mysterious rich gentleman’s home. That “contest” ends up being a life-or-death game of “Would You Rather.”

How was it? Pretty silly. Not terrible but not good either.

Flash-forward to this weekend, where I went out to see You’re Next, another contained horror film with no stars that takes place in a wealthy person’s home. And here’s where I begin the discussion. How is it, that of these two movies, one gets a wide release on 2000 screens, and the other goes straight to digital? Because to me, you have two very similar films, both with “Fresh” Rotten Tomato scores. So I don’t understand what makes one theater-worthy and the other not.

I ask this question because a movie that plays in theaters will always make more than a movie played digitally. So producers are, obviously, going to look for scripts that they can put up on the big screen. And with horror being such a popular genre, I want to know the answer to that so that you, the writers, can exploit it and get your script on the big screen.

You’re Next follows a family getting together for dinner at their well-off parents’ house located in the middle of nowhere. All three brothers and one sister bring along their significant others. The main couple is Crispian and Erin. Crispian is sort of an uptight young professor type. And Erin is more of a relaxed “go with the flow” kind of gal. Besides them we have Felix (Black Sheep Brother), Drake (Funny Brother) and Aimee (People Pleaser Sister).

The family isn’t any more dysfunctional than any other family of this make-up would be, but there appears to be some animosity between Drake and Crispian, as Drake believes Crispian’s more interested in banging his students (as Erin used to be) than actually doing something with his life. Whatever the case, everyone lives under the shadow of the mother and father, who are wildly successful. This adds a layer of tension to most of the interactions in the script.

So anyway, dinner begins, and after an argument breaks out, an arrow comes flying through the window, hitting and killing poor Aimee’s date. A group freak-out begins, until the family realizes that the arrows are still coming. As others get hit (like Drake, who hilariously walks around with an arrow in his back for half the movie), they’re eventually able to escape to the safety of the master hallway.

What follows is equal parts “what the fuck is going on” and “we’re all gonna die,” but there’s one person who seems impossibly calm during the ordeal – Erin. As we’ll find out later, Erin grew up on a survivalist compound, so she knows a few things about protecting herself. After wrapping Drake’s wound, she gives instructions to everyone on what their best chance for survival is. Pretty soon the family is blocking doors, locking windows and setting traps.

But the hopeful vibes don’t last long. Not only does the killer get in the house, but it turns out another of the killers has been in the house ALREADY. Like, for days. This thing apparently had been planned out extensively. The question is, what is the plan? Why are they doing this? And who’s involved? As the family members die one-by-one, Erin’s killer instincts allow her to put together the pieces, until she realizes the unfathomable truth.

(Would You Rather)

This movie is about as well made as a movie of this type can be. Sure it was cheesy at times. Sure there was some bad on-the-nose dialogue in places (since when does a conversation start: “So your parents are, like, really rich right?”). But it got right what it needed to get right, starting with the main character. Erin was ACTIVE! And I bring this up because it’s the biggest difference between this film and Would You Rather. Brittany Snow, in that film, does just enough to get us into the house (and therefore, the meat of the movie) and then simply disappears on-screen. She doesn’t do a thing except for watch everyone die for the rest of the film! And this is our main character!

You’re Next’s Erin takes charge, gives everyone shit to do, puts together traps, outsmarts the villains, kills the villains – SHE’S A HERO. And I know we’ve discussed this plenty of times before, but the extreme contrast between Erin’s “go-get-em” attitude and Britney’s “sit and stay quiet” approach made a HUGE difference in how much we a) rooted for the hero and b) by association CARED about what happened.

And, in general, You’re Next spent a lot more time setting up its characters before they started getting killed. We see everyone come in, get to know a little about them, about their significant other, about the relationship dynamics between them and the rest of the family members, then the dinner scene comes, AND ONLY THEN does the killing start.

In Would You Rather, we start out getting to know Brittany Snow and her dying brother – so there IS some character setup – but we don’t know ANY of the other characters at the house. Britney shows up, receives a couple of expositional setup lines about each person, then the game starts. Since we didn’t know any of these people, why should we care? That was another huge difference between the two movies. And the craziest thing was that the one person we DID know becomes a virtual mute. So not only do we not know anyone else, but we’re bored by the one person we do know!

Now what does this mean for our original question? What is it that makes one movie a theatrical release and another a homeatrical release? I might be a little biased here being Scriptshadow and all but I’m going to say THE SCRIPT. The script (nice character set up, strong active fun main character, clever twists and turns) is what allowed them to make something more than a typical slasher movie. People loved it at the festivals, which gave a studio the confidence that they could release it theatrically. Would You Rather’s script didn’t have nearly the energy or character development that You’re Next had.

Are there other things involved? Sure, probably. The ease in which one can market masks in a horror film probably helped. And this movie had a lot more MOVEMENT than Would You Rather. We’re jumping around from room to room, experiencing a lot of intense kills. That’s way more theatrical than the static deaths that happened in Would You Rather (most of the film takes place in a single room). But those are script decisions as well.

So in my opinion, as I’ve always contended: write a good script, good things will happen!

[ ] what the hell did I just see?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[xx] worth the price of admission
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius

What I learned: This so so SO reminded me of the importance of an active main character. You don’t realize how important they are until you watch two movies back to back, one without an active character, the other with one. We love people who take charge, who do things, who fight back, who come up with ideas, who cleverly outwit their opponents. These active people always feel like heroes to us. That was Erin here.