Genre: Sci-fi
Premise: (from IMDB) Set in the year 2154, where the very wealthy live on a man-made space station while the rest of the population resides on a ruined Earth, a man takes on a mission that could bring equality to the polarized worlds.
About: This is Neill Blomkamp’s second feature film. Blomkamp came to prominence when Peter Jackson surprisingly picked him for the gigantic task of directing the Halo movie, at the time the biggest project in Hollywood. That film fell through, but not to worry. Blomkamp would go on to direct the sleeper hit, District 9. He’s since been courted by just about everyone, all of them wanting him to direct their films. But Blomkamp has said he’s only interested in making his own stuff, which is why he went off and made this movie. However, Blomkamp is definitely playing with more money here (and a bigger star) so the pressure is much bigger this time around. The film finished #1 at the box office this weekend with 30 million, which is good. But it is 8 million less than District 9 opened with three years ago. Whereas with D9, Blomkamp co-wrote the film with writer Terri Tatchell, he went it alone on Elysium. Blomkamp is already hard at work on his next project, Chappie, which is said to be a sci-fi comedy.
Writer: Neill Blomkamp
Details: 109 minutes (119 pages)
I love Neill Blomkamp. I want to swap cameras with him. I want to hang out all day on set with him and share a laugh when something goes wrong. I want him to say, “Hey Carson, where are you sitting,” when it’s lunchtime, then follow me to my table. He’ll then ask me, “What did you think about that shot, Carz?” “It was good, Neill,” I’d say, “But you probably could’ve gone a little lower with the angle.” “Jiminy Wax, Carz, that’s exactly what I was thinking. You should be directing these movies. Not me.” “Aww, stop it, Neill. You’re just saying that.” Yeah, I’m a little bit creepy when it comes to Neill Blomkamp, I admit it.
Which is why my Elysium experience was so confusing. It started out great. Matt Damon’s walking through a gritty, ugly futuristic Los Angeles. Robot police are roughing him up. Mood-stabilizing pills are spat out at you if you look even mildly depressed. It’s exactly what I see 2152 looking like. For a good 15 minutes, I was thinking: “This is it. This is his masterpiece. As of this moment, I’m marking this as genius.” There is nobody, right now, who creates a more honest and interesting futuristic world than Neill Blomkamp.
But then little choices here and there began to bother me. Before I get into those though, here’s a quick summary of the story: So there’s this guy, Max (played by Matt Damon) who lives in the slums of LA in the 22nd century. Everybody is poor here. Everyone is struggling. We’ve ripped our planet apart and turned it into one giant trash-bin (without the lavender-scented trash bags).
One of the only ways to make it in a world like this is crime. Which is exactly what Max did for awhile. But now he wants to leave that world. He wants to earn an honest living (likability alert – We like characters who are trying to turn their life around!). But one day at his factory job, a mishap leads to him getting severe radiation poisoning. Which means Max will be dead within five days.
There’s only one way to survive a disease of this magnitude. Get to Elysium. Elysium is a giant space station that houses only the rich people. Realizing the earth was fucked a long time ago, the richies built this utopia for themselves so they could play polo whenever they wanted and build castles for their pets. Oh, and because all these people are so damn rich and it’s the future, they have these MRI like machines that instantly cure them of any disease.
Unfortunately, getting to Elysium requires knowing a person or two, and to hitch a ride, Max will have to do one last job (a data heist). What he doesn’t know is that the heist gives him super sensitive information about an impending coup up on Elysium. Which means that just about everyone with a gun wants a piece of him. This leads to the inevitable question: Can Matt Damon save the world!?
Elysium was over-themed. The theme of this movie was brought up every two minutes, I swear. The poor are fucked. The rich are set. And it’s not fair. This is explored mainly through the fact that if poor people get sick, they die. If rich people get sick, they cure themselves.
Which is fine. It’s important to explore a theme in your script. But we’re just bombarded with this theme throughout the screenplay. A woman escapes onto Elysium, runs her daughter to a medic-machine. It cures her. Matt Damon gets sick. He’s told he’s dead in 5 days. We meet the romantic interest, a nurse, who has a daughter who’s dying of cancer. We have shots inside the hospital of hundreds of minorities dying. Then we have shots of the city, where everyone looks sick and diseased. (spoiler) Then we get the ending, with all the smiling, happy, running kids laughing as their feet splash through the water on their way to the newly distributed medical machines. It’s laid on REALLY thick.
One of the most important things about writing is to be invisible. Whatever you’re pushing, whether it be a setup to a later payoff, a plot twist, a theme, an act break – The audience (or reader) must never know that that’s what you’re doing. They should never think of the writer writing his plot twist or his theme. All of that stuff must feel invisible. Therefore, if you’re sloppy with any of these things or push them too hard, it becomes obvious to the audience what you’re doing and they check out.
What complicates this is that each person is different. Person A might need you to mention your theme four times before they get it while Person B might only need you to mention it twice. It’s why you can’t please all the people all the time. No matter what you do, someone’s always going to say there was “not enough” while someone else will say there was “too much.” So figuring out that balance is always one of the hardest things about writing.
But I just felt Blomkamp got out of hand here. By the end, it was like, “We get it! This is like the Mexico border! Rich Americans have health care. Poor people don’t.” I wish he would’ve played around with the plot more and gone with something a little less on-the-nose.
In addition to this, the script gears had to work way too hard to keep the plot moving. There seemed to be four storylines. Max getting radiation poisoning. The Nurse and her dying daughter. Jodie Foster’s secret coup. And bad guy Agent Kruger. Getting to a point where Matt Damon ALONG with the bad guy would be going up to Elysium WITH this little girl so Max could save her felt like every plot gear on the planet was grinding to make it happen. I could see fingers typing: “Okay, we need to get Max to the nurse’s apartment so Kruger can track them there, take them, use them as bait to draw Max in, then also have Spider set up the reboot process on Elysium since the girl doesn’t have citizenship on Elysium and therefore won’t be accepted by the machines…”
It felt more like a writer trying to find his way to his destination than a smooth, natural story. That clunkiness is something you can only solve with tons of rewrites.
I also had a couple more issues. Agent Kruger, our villain, felt very… cliché. He was just this angry dude. There was no subtlety to him. There was no motivation behind his actions. He was just your garden-variety, crazy, loud, angry villain. Those kinds of characters are fun to play, I’m sure. But I couldn’t even begin to tell you why Kruger was the way he was. Why he had weird metal things in his skin. Why he randomly carried around a samurai sword in the year 2152. Why he gets mad when his face regeneration makes him more handsome. Villains need to be original and make sense. I didn’t get either of those from this character.
And finally, I was so confused by Max’s suit! I thought it was going to turn him into superman. That thing was splashed all over the posters and trailers and for good reason. It looked awesome! So imagine my disappointment when it only made him… a teensy-tiny bit stronger. In fact, there were times where I didn’t even know if it made him stronger. There was this whole unclear, complicated thing with his medication that made him weak. So he was weak from the radiation and medication. But the suit made him strong. So did those two things cancel each other out and just make him regular strength?? The rules of the universe weren’t clear. And that’s one of the first things you gotta get right in sci-fi. The rules of your universe MUST BE CLEAR (that’s one of the reasons Matrix was so good. They worked hard to make sure you understood the rules).
Now it may sound like I hated Elysium. But I didn’t! No amount of writing quibbles could undermine the awesomeness of this world Blomkamp created. It just looked so damn real. I mean, I see those fucking robots policing our streets someday for sure. I see future Los Angeles looking EXACTLY like that.
The story also had a really strong pull to it – Elysium itself! Despite the clunky plot elements, I WANTED them to get to Elysium badly. I wanted to see that awesome spinning wheel and the outrageous mansions and the outright beauty of this artificial world. Also, because the CHARACTERS wanted to get there so badly, I wanted to get there badly. I’m a sucker for a big goal with high stakes and Elysium’s got that (the main character’s dying and must get somewhere to save his life!). It kept us interested until the end. Still, this was a much better movie than script. Neill’s cinematic vision saved a screenplay that probably needed 4-5 more drafts.
Script rating:
[ ] what the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
Movie rating:
[ ] what the hell did I just see?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[x] worth the price of admission
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: The early drafts are where you figure out the logistics of your plot. The rewrites are where you smooth those logistics out. If you stop 4-5 rewrites short, your plot’s going to feel that way. It’s going to feel mechanical and “written.” Keep rewriting until your entire story feels effortless.
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: Dead Woman Walking Free
GENRE: Drama/Suspense
LOGLINE: A teacher’s obsession with a boy who is the spitting image of her recently-deceased son escalates into a deadly confrontation with the boy’s mother – a former midwife with a dark secret.
WHY YOU SHOULD READ (from writer): “You’ve been complaining lately about writers ‘rehashing their favorite movies in one form or another, copying their favorite writer’s style, instead of looking for new ideas and telling stories in new ways.’ Point taken. Dead Woman Walking Free attempts something different. You be the judge of it.”
TITLE: The Twin
GENRE: Crime, Thriller
LOGLINE: After looting one of two priceless statuettes known as the Twins in Iraq, a couple of down-on-their-luck veterans must traverse the U.S. criminal underworld on a quest to sell it — not realizing that the owner of the other Twin is a high-ranking intelligence official who will stop at nothing to get his hands on their statue.
WHY YOU SHOULD READ (from writer): “Ever since uploading my short “J-W-G” at the tail end of Shorts Week, I’ve been fielding a surprising number of requests from ScriptShadow readers for a feature-length script of mine. So here it is — a classic crime road movie in the vein of “True Romance” or the original “Getaway.” I don’t think there was a single decent example of the subgenre written in the 2000s, let alone in the 2010s.”
TITLE: CROSSFIRE.pdf)
GENRE: Action/thriller
LOGLINE: A thief discovers a mysterious girl in the trunk of a stolen car and must help her escape from a relentless pursuer who wants her dead.
WHY YOU SHOULD READ (from writer): “I’ve flirted with success but haven’t quite been able to get over the hump. I had a short stint with The Onion News Network. Placed in the 2011 PAGE Awards. Landed a low-level manager. The PAGE winning script went out to the town and did absolutely nothing – no sale, no option, no meetings – which crushed me because I thought I was ready when I was still a long way off. It took me a long time to pick myself back up off the floor and start writing again, but here I am — better than before but wondering if I’m better enough.”
TITLE: Soul Catcher
GENRE: Horror, Supernatural, Thriller
LOGLINE: A wayward priest hunts menacing souls by exploiting a woman in a constant vegetative state. The woman serves as an empty vessel for spirit possession but morality is questioned when she becomes conscious and aware.
WHY YOU SHOULD READ (from writer): “This story plays out like a more serious version of Ghostbusters. In addition, the Soul Catcher role would be a challenging part for an actress to play with all the different spirit possession characters. Finally, exorcism/horror scripts are typically easier to produce and generally have a higher return on investment.”
TITLE: Didact Twelve
GENRE: Sci-fi
LOGLINE: As he fights to preserve the legacy of the human race, a peacekeeper on a generational starship experiences a devastating personal crisis.
WHY YOU SHOULD READ: Writer didn’t provide one, but his email claims he holds a PhD. That’s gotta mean something, right?!
Amateur Friday Submission Process (read – slightly new!): 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: Drama
Premise: When a man involved in a fatal hit-and-run accident learns the victim is his brother’s wife, he must decide whether coming clean and appeasing his conscience is worth the risk of shattering his family.
About: Since the last time Recovery was up for AF consideration, back in November 2012, it’s undergone a page-one rewrite. The resulting draft garnered a quarterfinal placement in this year’s still active Page Awards, and I feel it’s ready for another shot at AF glory.
Writer: Harj Bains
Details: 90 pages
I don’t know why, but I see Joel Edgerton in this for some reason.
So what is a “page-one rewrite” (mentioned above in the About section) anyway? A page-one rewrite is when you scrap everything in your story and start anew. There are times where we write scripts that have inherent problems, and no matter how many times we rewrite them and rewrite them and rewrite them, it’s like adding a new shade of lipstick to a pig. It cleans’em up a little, makes them prettier. But the rewrites never seem to fix the underlying problem in the script.
Now most of the time when this happens, you eventually move on to the next script. At a certain point it just becomes so tiring trying to fix something you can’t figure out, that the best thing to do is to move on. But occasionally you have an idea that’s so good, or that you love so much, moving on isn’t an option. In these cases, where you refuse to give up, the best thing might be a page one rewrite. You see, one of the reasons it may be so hard to fix things is because you’re obsessed with some character or plotline or sequence that’s actually crippling your story. It made sense in that first draft. But as the script evolved and become something else, it doesn’t anymore. However, you’re so close to the material you can’t see what that troubling element is and therefore don’t know to eliminate it.
By starting over, by accepting that nothing in the previous script is necessary and you can take the idea anywhere you want again, you open up the potential of where the script can go NOW. Since today’s script is called “Recovery,” the proper analogy might be to see your script as a drug addict. And one day he wants to change. He wants to get off drugs. The problem is, all his friends are drug addicts too. It’s impossible for him to stop because he’s surrounded by drugs ALL THE TIME. It’s only when he eliminates those friends from his life that he can actually move forward and change.
Okay, enough with analogies. I’m not even sure Recovery is a true page-one rewrite. I just saw the author mention it and felt it was a good topic to bring up since we haven’t discussed it before. Now on to the script!
Recovery follows two 30-something brothers, Tommy and Daniel. Tommy is a functioning heroin addict. He’s got a job and everything, but he lives solely for his next high. Daniel is the brother who’s got his shit together. He’s got a nice job and a nice wife, Anna, who he loves with all his heart.
Well one morning, Anna wakes Daniel up because the treadmill isn’t working. He promised to fix it yesterday and she wants to get a run in before work. She asks him to please fix it but he’s too tired. He tells her to take a jog and he’ll fix it later today. He promises. She’s pissed but heads out for a jog.
In the meantime, Tommy, who’s exhausted coming off the high of one of his many shoot-ups, is forced to drive across town dead tired to sign a stupid form for work. On the way back, he’s falling asleep at the wheel, and wouldn’t you know it, there’s Anna running, and there’s Tommy not seeing her and BAM, he gruesomely slams into her.
Tommy’s awake now. At this point, he doesn’t know it’s Anna (we don’t know Tommy and Daniel are brothers yet, either). So he shoots off, freaking out and wondering how the hell he’s going to get his car fixed without someone reporting it. It’s a small town. If he’s not careful, the wrong people are going to know that the front of his car has a person-indent in the front, and then it’s only a matter of time before he goes to jail.
Not long after, Tommy is called over by his and Daniel’s parents. They’re all mourning the loss of Anna by a hit-and-run driver. Of course, they don’t know that their own blood, Tommy, was the hitter-and-runner. And it doesn’t help that Daniel is beating himself up over it. If he just would’ve taken the time to fix that damn treadmill, none of this would’ve happened. His wife would still be alive. Not to mention the fact that exercise is supposed to extend your life. What a lie that was.
After an elongated game of Tommy feeling awful as everyone around him curses this “anonymous” hit and run driver, Tommy decides to come clean. He tells Daniel that he did it. Daniel’s outraged at first, but realizes it was an accident. The event actually becomes the impetus for Tommy getting clean. He goes to rehab, even meets a girl he falls in love with, and a few months later he’s drug-free and ready to start a new life with this woman.
Uhhh, Daniel is NOT cool with that. His brother kills his wife, then gets a wife of his own out of it!!?? No, that’s not cool at all. Daniel’s rage takes him to the darkest of dark places, and we get the feeling he’s going to take care of this problem his own way. All of this is happening while detectives get closer and closer to finding out who hit Anna. But will they find out before Daniel decides to get revenge for his wife’s death?
I can see why you guys wanted me to read Recovery. Its first ten pages are kind of awesome, culminating in a brutal and memorable hit-and-run. But the rest of the script is kind of hit-or-miss. It’s actually quite the unorthodox story. It starts off as this thriller of Tommy trying to hide this dark secret, which is the section that had the most potential.
But then he actually tells his brother he did it. And when that happened, the story lost something. I mean, it was a brave choice. It was totally unexpected. And I love when writers take stories in an unexpected direction. But every choice must be the best choice for the story dramatically. It’s good to surprise the audience, but not if that surprise results in a loss of tension or conflict, which is what this choice did (in my opinion).
Harj tries to keep that tension up by cutting back to the detectives, who are trying to find the person who hit Anna. But there was something that didn’t quite work with that. We’re constantly reminded that if Tommy gets caught, he’s only going to jail for a year. In other words, the stakes aren’t very high.
The script ramps up a little towards the end when Daniel becomes enraged after finding out that Tommy’s getting married. We know that’s going to come to an explosive head. But that still left this big chunk in the middle of the script where the tension is non-existent.
Speaking of that middle, part of the problem is that Tommy’s girlfriend never felt real. Even now, 12 hours after reading the script, I can’t remember her name. She’s barely in a few scenes, and when it became clear to me what was going to happen (Tommy was going to fall for her and Daniel was going to get mad), I was disappointed. The girlfriend was a tool, a plot point. She was there to get Daniel mad. But she was never a REAL PERSON.
I see writers do this a lot. They need to create a plot element to advance the story, but they don’t make that element real. For this to work, we have to see Tommy FALL IN LOVE with this girl. We need long scenes showing these two losing themselves to one another. We need to give her her own hopes and dreams and problems and backstory so she feels like an actual person. Not just a plot point. Because the ending is based on this idea that (spoiler) Daniel’s going to kill Tommy for the love that he has and we don’t believe in this love. This moment needs to be TRAGIC. We have to die at the idea of this love being destroyed. But since we never get to know the girl, we don’t really care.
I think Recovery is an interesting script but it needs a little more meat. It’s only 90 pages long and it’s a drama. I always push for shorter scripts but dramas are typically the longest scripts out there because the genre DOES allow you to get into your characters more. And that requires more space and time. So this script should be at least 110 pages and those 20 extra pages should probably be dedicated to building the relationship between Tommy and his girlfriend into something more real. And making HER more real! I don’t think that’s going to fix everything. But it’s definitely going to give the script more weight. I wish Harj luck with it. ☺
Script link: Recovery
[ ] what the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Don’t just lay down an empty plot element. Every element in your story must feel real and authentic. If it doesn’t, we’ll see through the façade and know it’s only there for some plot reason. So with Tommy’s girlfriend, since she was never really explored as a character, we became keen to the fact that she was going to be used for something. And she was – Daniel’s motivation for revenge.
Carson here. Okay, a little background. I have this friend who recently broke into that oh-so exclusive “Hollywood Screenwriting Club.” In other words, people actually started paying him for his work. It was exciting to watch him finally get that recognition, go to meetings, officially tell people that he had representation. But as the months rolled by, I saw that he’d gotten a little down. So I asked, “Yo, Good Friend. What’s wrong?” And he assured me that while there wasn’t a day he didn’t wake up pinching himself for the opportunity to write for a living, he was a little crushed by some of the realities that go into the profession. As he started explaining them, I said, “You know what? Why don’t you write this all out and I’ll post it on the site? It’ll be like, a way for you to exorcise your demons.” He agreed that’d be a wonderful idea. So why am I posting this? To remind everyone that getting to the “spec sale” finish line is really just the start of a new race, a much longer and tougher race. Because now, instead of trying to be the king of the amateurs, you’re competing shoulder to shoulder with the heavyweights, writers who can all tell a good story (something you didn’t have to worry about in the amateur camp). You gotta work your way up. You gotta take jobs you may not necessarily like to pay the bills. It’s not easy. This is what he wrote…
Necessary dance for when you sell your first script.
When you sell your first script, you will cry.
I know that seems dramatic. It might be. But you’ve worked for this moment. Whether it’s for two years or twenty, writing is hard work—it’s impossible work. Squeezing your brain till it’s dry like brittle, staring at a glowing screen for hours until your eyes sting red, forgetting what it’s like to shower (or interact with other human beings). Writing is hard. Which is exactly what makes opening that email from your agent or manager and reading the words, ‘We got an offer’ so much sweeter.
So when you sell your first script, you will cry.
Because it feels amazing. This thing that you’ve been slaving over—outlining, emailing to trusted friends, fixing the outline, sending out again, fixing it one more time, scene-writing, banging your head against the keyboard, character work, act one is done (hurray!) oh wait it’s shit (boo!), rewriting, sending out, head-banging, writing, writing, writing, napping, read a professional script that makes yours look like a Hallmark Channel D-movie, writing, writing, almost there, final scene, DONE, sending out, rewrite rewrite rewrite, ignore these notes, apply those notes, rewrite rewrite, send to manager or agent and wait a million years until—someone actually LIKES it.
Liked it enough to, um, pay you for it.
And not just pay you. They want to make it. Into a movie. That people will watch. You IMDb the interested party immediately. Good resume, a few films under their belt, a couple you’ve heard of but have never seen. Netflix them—not too shabby, your script is better so you’re not worried because the movie’s getting made. The dream is here. In a year’s time you’ll be on a red carpet, smiling awkwardly for the cameras, right? Friends come out of the woodwork to ask about free screening passes, can you read their work, who is your manager—the uphill battle is over. You’ve made it, you’ve sold a script. Your bank account will go from $1.17 (checking AND savings combined) to some number that allows you to shop for actual groceries instead of driving thru Taco Bell for the 9th time this week. You’re gonna be sitting pretty in a dark theater with strangers laughing (or screaming, or crying, or ooh-ing and ahh-ing) at words YOU WROTE, watching actors saying things YOU MADE UP. Life. Is. Grand.
Except that doesn’t really happen.
Or maybe it does. Maybe for some people that’s really how it goes. But as far as I know, that’s like Supermoon Rare, an anomaly akin to Ahab’s white whale. That doesn’t mean selling your script isn’t awesome—it is, it’s just not the perfect, smooth sailing, seven-figure life changing event people make it out to be. But here’s what it does change:
It makes you hirable. Or, more hirable than you used to be. So you’ll get meetings. Sometimes generals, where people with a lot of power offer you a free water bottle (always take the free water bottle) and ask questions about the script you sold that they may or may not have skimmed over last week. Sometimes generals with baby producers who talk a big talk and name-drop every other sentence and try to get their talons into you early before a studio notices you. Let me just get this out now: BEWARE OF BABY PRODUCERS.
What’s a baby producer? That rando with one short film IMDb credit who blows up your inbox with questions about the script you sold, where’d it find a home, what are you working on now—that’s a baby producer. And they’re slick because the high of selling your script is just that—a very cool, ego-inflating high, and people will not hesitate to exploit it. You’ll think, Great! People want to hire me and read more of my stuff and having two produced scripts is CLEARLY better than selling one so why not?! I’m gone ride this wave of attention to the Academy and never eat Taco Bell again!! It’s easy to think this. It’s easy to assume that these people just want to make a good film and they read your work and loved it and trust your voice. It’s so, so easy.
It’s also incredibly stupid.
Baby producers are the worst. They’re dangerous. Because they’re inexperienced and because they’re inexperienced they’ve had to learn how to talk to get into rooms they have no business being in. So they’ll talk to you. But you’ll be naïve (well, you won’t because you read this article but anyways). So you’ll work. On insane timetables, too, because you’re riding that momentum from your script sale and don’t plan on losing steam anytime soon. You’ll work on their terms, with their ideas, and always with the understanding that you should be grateful for this opportunity to be writing for pay. You will write the first draft in less than a week. And the pay will be shit.
Meanwhile, you’re in rewriting hell from your own spec. There’s that saying, “Writing is rewriting.” That’s never truer than when you sell your script—because the studio or producer or independent prodco owns you. And they want a quality product. Oh, they liked your script, your ideas. But they like theirs better. So you’ll rewrite your precious baby into Kingdom Come to get their stamp of approval. After all, they are the gatekeepers here—they don’t like what you do, you get paid out and a shared credit with whomever they bring in. Which, as a new writer with an original spec, is not good news.
And you’ll learn that the feature world is harsh. That the writer is not the revered king but the lowly fool. That staying afloat in this pool requires some serious stamina—this is a marathon, not a sprint (and how many metaphors was that? yeesh!). You’ll learn that the producers are really the writers and most of the time they really aren’t writers but just think they are and they’ll tell you what darlings to kill. You’ll kill your darlings. You’ll do it reluctantly but you’ll do it.
You will question your own sanity. Notes will start to look circular—isn’t that how I had it in the original draft? why are we circling back??—and this script that you’ve lived with for months, years, will begin to haunt you. And you will despise it. It’s important, though, to realize exactly why this happens, why you might hate your own work so much at this point in the process: This is your baby. It’s been your baby since its conception. You know it inside and out, forwards and backwards and upside down. You saw it take its first steps, lose its first tooth. Then you sell it and someone else joins the family. Except they haven’t been living with the script for months or years—it’s new to them. This is both a blessing and a curse. Their perspective is fresher than your own, but it’s also not your own. Some ideas these new eyes have will be great, like Why didn’t I think of that?! ideas. Others will be awful, like, There’s a reason I didn’t think of that. Whatever the case, you’ll spend hours slogging through producer notes and draft after draft after draft until your eyes bleed from reading notes that tear your precious script apart piece by piece, slugline by slugline. And maybe, if you’re lucky, if you’re working with a producer who maybe kinda sorta knows that they’re doing, it won’t be so bad.
Maybe it’ll be good. Great, even. Awesome.
Because you sold your first script—the key word being “first.” I cannot stress this enough: This is a snapshot, not the whole picture. The trailer, not the movie. Somewhere along the way, this becomes clearer. You might complain about how hard the work is, how harsh and pointless the notes seem, how ridiculous and unprofessional the baby producers are, but you’ll realize that many people have this dream, and for you it’s now a reality. So you will shut up with the negativity and start to tell people when all that gratitude and excitement finally sinks in. And their reactions will be priceless. You’ll spend a lot of time answering questions from friends and family about when your movie is coming out (this will never stop until, I’m guessing, your movie actually comes out). And then you’ll smile—because that’s actually a very likely outcome to all of this. Your movie will come out.
Unless it doesn’t. In which case, it’s time to sell your second script.
Genre: Sci-fi e-book
Premise: Set during an unknown time, Wool follows a select group of workers inside an expansive 100-story underground bunker who begin to suspect that the world they live in is a giant lie.
About: Writer Hugh Howey initially wrote Wool as a stand-alone short story. He published the work through Amazon’s Direct Publishing system. After the story began to do well, he started writing more entries for it (the entries are now combined into a single book). 20th Century Fox bought film rights for the book last year, and Howey just signed a print-only deal with Simon and Schuster for half a million dollars.
Writer: Hugh Howey
Details: 530 pages
One of the things I’ve been keeping an eye on of late is Hollywood’s interest in self-published material. It used to be that, on the book end, there was only one chance of getting your work adapted. You had to get a book published! And to publish something, you had to crack into an industry that was just as hard to break into as this one.
Times have changed. The burgeoning E-book industry has allowed that “nobody” writer to finally bypass a system previously designed to keep you invisible. Having published an e-book myself (yeah, yeah, the physical copy is coming), one of the things that baffled me was how easy it was. I mean you literally go to Amazon, upload your document, and it’s on the site 6 hours later.
Now, of course, you still have to get noticed. You still have to find ways to get people to know about your book. But the tools are in place, especially with the pricing flexibility you have. You don’t need to compete with those huge books because you can price your book at 1/10 their price (99 cents), making it an easy gamble for hungry readers looking for something new to try.
Not to mention you’re not beholden to any page count. A lot of e-writers are selling serialized novellas, allowing them to write a quick 150 page book, charge 99 cents, gain some fans, then write three more 150 page novellas (each a dollar) to finish the series (which is similar to what Wool did). This is a great way for screenwriters to dip their toes into the medium and see if they like it.
I bring this all up because Hollywood is obsessed with adaptations. They want to see things proven before they take a chance on them. And this is a way for you to exploit that business model without having to convince a publishing industry to print half a million copies of your debut book. You can create a small tremor in the book world and turn it into a big splashy sale that way as opposed to the spec route. Which brings us to today’s book, Wool.
Note: Wool is the kind of story that plays best when you don’t know all its little surprises. I recommend you read it if you don’t want to know what happens. There will be spoilers below.
Wool is about an immense underground “silo” (almost 150 levels deep) that houses a community of people doing various jobs all focused on one thing – keeping the silo running smoothly. Although it’s never explicitly stated, it’s implied we’re in the far off future and that something terrible happened that destroyed the atmosphere and made earth inhospitable. In fact, if you’re lucky enough to be on the top floor of the silo, you can see giant monitors displaying the outside’s rolling lifeless hills, as well as the decrepit remains of a city in the distance.
The story centers around a young machine welder named Juliette who becomes an unwitting sheriff of the silo. She received the job after the previous sheriff was picked for the “lottery.” While winning the lottery may sound wonderful to you, the lottery of this world means you’ve been designated to clean the cameras outside the silo. Because the atmosphere is so harsh, this ensures your death, even with the most technologically advanced suits available. This is actually considered an honor in the silo. Wining the lottery allows you to do your duty for your people.
Anyway, while running across some of the old sheriff’s e-mails, Juliette finds out that he had begun questioning the purpose of the silo (a huge no-no in the community). Even worse, he found that some silo truths didn’t add up. Maybe the lottery wasn’t a “privilege” after all. Maybe it was a backdoor way for the silo leaders to get rid of those who were onto their secret? But what was it the silo leaders were covering up exactly? And why did all trails seem to lead back to IT, the secluded computer hub of the silo?
Juliette does some more digging and learns of something called “the uprising,” something that happened many years ago in the silence, and finds evidence that there wasn’t just one, but maybe many uprisings. Dozens! Her curiosity finally causes her downfall though, as IT catches her snooping, and announces she is the next “lottery” winner.
Before she goes down, Juliette learns that there is a much bigger world out there with many secrets, and that IT is entrusted with keeping those secrets. If she’s going to find out what those secrets are, and she’s going to survive “cleaning,” a procedure that not a single Silo member has ever survived, she’ll need to call on her friends, her unique skills, and her intelligence to identify exactly what this Silo is.
I mean, is it any surprise at all that I liked this? It’s right up my alley in just about every category. And I don’t know if Fox only bought it for a feature adaptation, but this would be an even better TV show. That’s all I kept thinking while I was reading it. “This is the next fucking Lost.” It’s got such a vast mythology (mythology I’m still learning about in the sequel, Shift) and such a great environment for characters, you could just see this thing taking over the geek community.
But this could just as easily be a film. And that’s one thing I admired about Hugh’s writing. Taking a page out of screenwriting books, he always kept the mystery high and the story moving. We always had a clear goal – much of which was based on Juliette’s desire to figure out what was really going on in the Silo – investigating mysterious murders, looking into mysterious e-mails, following up mysterious rumors.
That’s a great tip for all you young writers out there. Put your character in some sort of investigative position. That way, they’ll always have a goal. They’ll always have something to solve, something to look up, something they must find out. This keeps your character active and active characters are almost always the most interesting to watch. Wool doesn’t play nearly as well if, say, Juliette is a stay-at-home mom. She has no reason to investigate any of the cool stuff she had to investigate as a Sheriff. And if you DO send a stay-at-home mom off to investigate a bunch of things, you have a very confused reader on your hands wondering, “Uhhhh, why is she doing this?”
In addition to its TV and feature qualities, I also enjoyed Wool doing certain things you can only do in a book. For example, we originally start off following the sheriff (whose death Juliette looks into later). So he’s our main character. But then he walks outside for the lottery, experiences something mind-boggling, and dies. So our main character’s dead! Then in the next section, we meet the mayor, who we follow for awhile. She too starts to dig into some silo inconsistencies. She’s then picked for a cleaning and dies too. So our SECOND main character is dead. This finally leads us to Juliette, who becomes our hero throughout the rest of the book.
Now in retrospect, of course, this makes sense. Howey originally wrote this as a standalone short story. So the need for a new hero to replace the dead hero from that original novella was obvious. And he probably didn’t know yet if he was going to write an entire book, so again he followed that storyline to its logical conclusion, ending up in the dead Mayor. Once he realized he was going to turn this into an entire book, he knew the next hero would have to be the protagonist for good.
But I love reading stuff like this because it’s easy, after immersing yourself in screenplay land for years, to think the Hollywood beats are the only beats available. Try killing your main character off twice in a script. We wouldn’t meet the third real main character until at least page 40 and by then it’s too late to start your story.
But I still love seeing this because it REMINDS me that there are other ways to do it. You don’t HAVE to do it the way it’s always been done. I don’t know how you’d do two fake-out main character introductions in a major Hollywood movie but MAYBE it could be done with the right approach and the right writer. And knowing that’s an option, no matter how far-fetched, keeps you on your creative toes. You can do anything you want to with a screenplay. Wool reminded me of that.
Getting back on track, I just think it’s cool that these other options are popping up for screenwriters. You no longer have to have a best-seller to get your script adapted. Just put a great story up on Amazon. Heck, start with a simple short story and charge 99 cents. You could be the next High Howey!
[ ] what the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[x] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: People do judge a book by its cover. If you’re going to self-publish, pay the extra dough and get a professional cover done. I saw the old (before a publishing company came in) cover for “Wool” and I would’ve never read it off that cover. It just looked so cheap. The much more professional one I placed at the top of this review is actually how I first spotted the book. It got me to click on it, learn about it, and actually buy it.
