Genre: Superhero
Premise: When Bruce Wayne’s new bride is killed, he vows revenge on the killer. But Superman lets him know that if he tries any sort of vigilante justice, he’ll have to step in and stop him.
About: This is the 2002 draft of Batman vs. Superman, code-named “Asylum.” It was written by “Seven” scribe, Andrew Kevin Walker, with revisions made by Akiva Goldsman. The project got fairly close to being made, but then everyone started freaking out about the mixing of these two gigantic superheroes and the movie was nixed.
Writer: Andrew Kevin Walker (revisions by Akiva Goldsman)
Details: 120 pages (June 21, 2002 draft)

So last week I posted an article about how I didn’t think Batman vs. Superman could be done. One of the things that seemed to support my belief is that they’ve been developing this thing for like 20+ years and no one has figured it out yet. The reason they can’t figure it out is the same reason nobody figured out a movie like Cowboys vs. Aliens for its 20 year development period – because it’s an idea that just doesn’t work.

Now there are some who have said that the Batman vs. Superman concept worked just fine in comic book form so why can’t it work in movie form? I must profess I haven’t read these comics, but comics are way way different from movies. With a movie, there has to be a certain baseline reality. Comics allow for much more leniency in that world. For example, in a comic you can have characters like, “Evil Superman.” You can’t make that work in a film.

What I’m reviewing today was the closest Batman vs. Superman got to coming to the big screen (before now). The draft was written by Andrew Kevin Walker, THE go-to screenwriter at the time if you were writing something dark. He was the “come out of nowhere screenwriting story” of 1993 when his spec “Seven” found its way out of the slush pile, became a huge spec sale, and went on the screen with hot young director David Fincher directing and on-the-cusp-of-superstardom Brad Pitt starring. If someone was going to make this work, he was a good choice.

Batman vs. Superman starts out by informing us that Clark Kent and Bruce Wayne are BFFs! No, I kid you not. In fact, Bruce Wayne is getting married to this amazing chick named Elizabeth, and Clark is his best man! Lots of things have changed for Bruce, in fact. He hasn’t been Batman in over six years, retiring the suit for a normal billionaire’s life.

Clark, on the other hand, isn’t doing so hot. The X-Ray visioned one has recently DIVORCED Lois Lane. Yeah, apparently being married to Superman isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, what with your hubby on call 24 hours a day 365 days a year. Not only that, but Supes is starting to doubt his whole purpose on earth. Why should someone who’s not even from this planet get to decide who gets saved and who doesn’t? It’s all very stressful.

Speaking of stressful, Bruce’s honeymoon takes a sour turn when his new wife is KILLED with a poisonous bumblebee dart! This pisses Brucey off, so he re-dons the Batman suit and goes looking for revenge. Superman is NOT cool with that, saying that if Bruce tries his little vigilante justice thing, he’s going to have to step in and stop him. Bruce tells Clark to fuck off. This has nothing to do with him.

Eventually we find out that the person who killed Elizabeth is none other than THE JOKER. But that’s impossible! The Joker is dead. Hmm, maybe this is a good thing. It’s not technically murder if the guy’s already dead. Not sure if that logic is going to work on Superman though. In the meantime, Clark is back in Smallville getting all nostalgic about his teenage years where he was in love with some girl named Lana. But he eventually suspects that his old jailed pal LEX LUTHOR had something to do with this murder. So he goes to visit him and, indeed, Lex is acting mighty suspicious about the whole thing.

Eventually, as Batman goes to take the Joker out in town square, Superman arrives and says if Batman’s gong to kill the Joker, he’ll have to go through him first. And that’s when our little city battle between Batman and Superman begins – indeed with a kryptonite laced Bat-suit. After it’s all over (as I predicted, nobody actually wins), it’s revealed that Lex Luthor planned all this from the start, even training Elizabeth to be Bruce’s perfect woman. He was hoping that Batman would kill Superman for him. But he was wrong. Now Batman and Superman are teaming up, TO KILL HIM! Let the real battle begin!

Okay, I was hoping that this script would make it clear that a Batman vs. Superman movie couldn’t work. However, I’m left more confused than ever. The writers actually do a fairly decent job setting up the reason for Superman and Batman to fight. Batman is all about vigilante justice. Superman stands for a fair trial. Batman is enraged about his wife’s death, and therefore isn’t thinking clearly. So it makes sense that he becomes pissed at Superman for telling him what to do. I can see them brawling over that.

However, it’s really hard to get past the setup. Clark and Bruce are best friends?? What is this, Judd Apatow’s version of Superman vs. Batman? And Superman doesn’t get divorced. Steve Carrell in his latest dramedy gets divorced. Nor does Superman go back home to think over his life. Zach Braff does. And when Bruce is getting married and he turns for the ring, only for us to see it’s Clark Kent who’s his best man… I closed my eyes and shook my head. It was exactly as I feared. As artificially plotted as one could imagine.

However, you eventually get used to their friendship. Never completely, but enough to keep reading. And actually, Bruce’s storyline is pretty interesting. This whole thing with him gradually learning that the Joker has come back to life is pretty cool. I wouldn’t mind seeing that as a standalone movie.

Unfortunately, the writers have no idea what to do with Clark in the meantime. After his divorce (ugh, it just sounds wrong. Superman doesn’t get divorced!), he heads back to Smallville and literally hangs out doing nothing for 50 pages. It’s scene after scene of him and this girl saying things like, “Remember when we went to prom?” Superman doesn’t hang around feeling bad for himself. Superman goes out and saves people. So this entire portion of the story sucked.

But I must admit, once we get to the Superman vs. Batman battle, I was more convinced than I thought I would be. Walker and Goldsman do their job setting up the motivations for each. That’s not to say the fight was perfect. In fact, it was a little confusing. Batman’s suit was laced with kryptonite, so Superman couldn’t “come within five feet” of Batman unless he wanted to get his ass kicked. So Superman does stuff like use his x-ray vision to attack him. Lame-o.

Eventually, the two do physically fight, with Superman even flying around with Batman on top of him. But if Batman is wearing kryptonite, how can Superman fly around with him on top? These are the kind of little details that don’t seem important, but the nerds are going to be out in full force with this battle. If there’s even one cheat, they’re going to call you on it.

Also, Zak Snyder may have unintentionally painted himself into a corner with Man of Steel. One of the reasons this draft kind of works is because Superman keeps righteously telling Batman “You can’t just kill people.” Except didn’t Superman kill thousands of people during his fight with General Zod in Man of Steel? So Batman kind of has a one-up on him with that argument.

All in all, this was better than I expected it to be. Maybe not “worth the read” level. But still okay. I don’t know if they’ll be using this draft as a template or a cautionary tale or what, but if they do, Batman’s journey is really fun. They just need to give Superman the same level of shit to do. And if they do ever go with this “Joker comes back to life” thing, they need a better explanation from a guy like Lex Luthor than, “You’d be amazed at what DNA splicing and a billion dollars can do.”

You can find the script yourself here.

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

What I learned: You can’t just leave a character on the shelf and pick him back up when you need him. We’ve all done this. We have our main storyline (here, it’s Batman investigating his wife’s murder) and then a key character who we don’t quite know what to do with in the meantime. So we “put him on the shelf” (give him a boring stagnant storyline) until we need him again. Never put a character on the shelf. Always have him/her pushing towards something so they remain active, relevant, and interesting.

Scriptshadow is not dead! Between Labor Day Weekend and preparing for my upcoming vacation (next week), time has been scarce. Speaking of, what are you guys going to do while I’m gone? Maybe you should write a script in a single week. You can then post the results (or a summary of the experience) on the site. I’ll call it the Scriptshadow Is Gone Write A Screenplay In A Week Contest. If you need inspiration, go watch this video. As for today, we’re taking a time machine back to the 80s. Seeing as Michael Douglas cheating on Catherine Zeta-Jones with Matt Damon has led to their divorce, it’s only natural that we take a look at one of his earlier marriage screw-ups, when he cheated on his wife with Glenn Close. The reason I chose this script was because thrillers remain one of the three go-to genres to sell a spec screenplay. They’re lean, high on intensity, take you through a range of emotions, and are relatively inexpensive to make. If I were starting my writing career today with the knowledge I have now, I would write either a comedy, an action script, or a thriller. That’s where the money is. While it didn’t win any Oscars, Fatal Attraction was nominated for six Academy Awards, including best picture, best actress, and best adapted screenplay.

1) Thriller titles must be visceral – With straight thrillers, the title should illicit a strong visceral reaction. It must imply the extreme emotional gamut it will run the audience through. The original title for this movie was “Divergent.” I think we can agree that doesn’t have nearly the same punch as “Fatal Attraction.”

2) Start where you need to start – With thrillers, there’s a temptation to start the script with a very “thriller-like” scene, or a “teaser.” Our femme fatale eerily cutting herself in the darkness of her apartment while listening to opera music, for example. But it’s more important to start the script where it needs to in order to set up the story. In order to convey that our main character would seek out an affair, we need to establish that he’s bored with the married family life. So the first scene, then, is about Dan (Michael Douglas) muscling through an evening with the family.

3) Just make sure the scene’s interesting – If you aren’t going to wow us with a teaser (such as the one I mentioned above), remember that you still have to hook the reader right away. For that reason, you want your first scene to convey a sense of purpose, a sense of activity, a sense of forward momentum. Fatal Attraction does not begin with a family sitting at home eating pizza watching a movie, for example. It begins with mom and dad getting ready for a dressy work event. This gives everyone something to do. We are propelling forward towards something. As a reader, I want to find out what that “something” is. Which is why I keep reading.

4) If your main character is going to do something horrible, try to have someone else instigate it – Our hero, Dan, cheats on his beautiful amazing wife and adorable daughter. Ouch. Talk about a tough character to like. If you’re going to have your hero do something as reprehensible as this, make sure it wasn’t his idea. If he instigates it, we’ll hate him. It’s Alex Forrest (Glenn Close) who moves in on Dan here. She’s the one pushing him for lunch. She’s the one who suggests they’re “adults” who can make their own decisions. She’s the one who’s trying to make this happen. I’ve read a lot of scripts where a married or committed man goes out and fucks other women without a second thought. I immediately hated all those characters.

5) Give the wife something to do – Oh boy. If I had a dollar for every time a writer forgot about the wife character, I could buy a new car. Amateur writers write only with the actions of their protagonist and antagonist in mind. Pro writers give ALL OF THEIR CHARACTERS something to do. Fatal Attraction has wife Beth spearheading the big move from the city to the suburbs. She’s visiting potential new houses as well as prepping the sale of this apartment. This ensures that a second storyline is going on underneath the main storyline, which gives the script a more dynamic and realistic feel.

6) Sometimes, the absence of damage is worse than actual damage – Alex boiling the rabbit is one of the most memorable scenes in movie history. But if all you do is fill your thrillers with “boiling rabbit” scenes, they lose their effect. One of the creepier scenes in Fatal Attraction is when Alex picks up Dan’s daughter from school and spends the day with her. She doesn’t do anything to the little girl, dropping her off at Dan’s home unharmed, and yet it’s a horrifying scene.

7) STAKES ALERT – Remember that it’s your job to raise the stakes of your story wherever possible, ESPECIALLY in a thriller. The more there is to lose, the more compelling the situation will be. For example, this movie doesn’t pack the same punch if there’s no child involved. If the writer would’ve only written in a wife, we wouldn’t have been as involved. It’s the fact that he has a daughter, that he has a family, that gives our hero so much to fight for.

8) Don’t get so lost in the point of the scene that you forget the reality of the moment – I see this A LOT with amateur writers and even with good writers. We can get so set on achieving a scene’s purpose, we don’t stop to find the truth in the moment. For example, there’s an early scene in Fatal Attraction’s script where they need to set up the babysitter before the parents leave. This could’ve been a very perfunctory moment. “Okay, there’s the food in the fridge.” “She likes when you read to her.” “We’ll be home by ten.” That sort of thing. However, your job is to stop thinking of the moment as a movie scene, and to find its inner life, its “truth” if you will. So the writers add this nice little exchange where Dan says to the babysitter, teasingly, “And no partying, d’you hear?” The babysitter replies, “But I’ve already sent out the invitations.” Dan responds. “Can I come?” This exchange takes what easily could’ve been a straight boring “get through it” scene, and adds life to it. Make sure you go through all your scenes and find their reality.

9) Look for ways to cleverly intersect storylines – There are typically several storylines going on in every script (here we have the affair, the potential move to the suburbs, his job at the publishing house). It’s your job as a writer to look for fun ways to bring these storylines together. A great example of this occurs in Fatal Attraction. Because they’re moving, they must sell their own place, which means potential buyers coming in to look at it. Who better to be one of those “potential buyers” than… Alex Forrest! Not only that, but the way this scene is written, Dan comes home to find none other than Alex IN HIS HOME talking TO HIS WIFE. It’s a shocking reveal (and one of the most memorable moments in the script). Finding great intersecting moments like these are what really elevate a script.

10) In a thriller, your protagonist and antagonist must square off – In the much publicized original ending for Fatal Attraction, Alex Forrest kills herself and makes it look like Dan murdered her. That ending didn’t test well. Why? It’s hard to say. But a good bet is that when you have a battle like this going on for 110 minutes, the audience wants to see the hero and the villain square off against one another. So that’s exactly what they did with the reshoot. They had Alex come to the home and try to kill Dan’s wife. Dan battles her to defend his family. It was a much bigger and more satisfying ending.

Wanna submit your 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: 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.