This is your chance to discuss the week’s amateur scripts, offered originally in the Scriptshadow newsletter. The primary goal for this discussion is to find out which script(s) is the best candidate for a future Amateur Friday review. The secondary goal is to keep things positive in the comments with constructive criticism.
Below are the scripts up for review, along with the download links. Want to receive the scripts early? Head over to the Contact page, e-mail us, and “Opt In” to the newsletter.
Happy reading!
TITLE: Offline
GENRE: Contained supernatural thriller
LOGLINE: When a bed-ridden teen discovers his online crush is a ghost, he enlists the help of a psychic to investigate her death, leading him on a hunt to stop her killer before he strikes again.
WHY YOU SHOULD READ (from writer): This script is highly recommended by a few longtime Scriptshadow readers. At the very least, give it a shot!
TITLE: Enter the Holy War
GENRE: R-Rated Comedy/Satire
LOGLINE: A washed-up producer struggles with the leader of a religious cult over the rights to an epic script that will surely get him the Oscar he finally deserves.
WHY YOU SHOULD READ (from writer): The script had a five star rating on one website, script of the month on another. I haven’t had a negative review from man, woman or cult member. One reviewer labeled it ‘a once in a generation script that could change everything.’
TITLE: Where the Butterflies Die
GENRE: Action/Adventure
LOGLINE: A missionary’s boat stumbles across an island where stranded American and Japanese forces are still fighting six months after World War II has ended. (inspired by a true story)
WHY YOU SHOULD READ (from writer): A period World War 2 piece taking place on a mysterious island? Hand to hand combat with primitive bamboo weapons? Action, intrigue, romance and revenge? What’s not to like?
TITLE: Z-MAS.pdf)
GENRE: Comedy-Horror/Christmas
LOGLINE: An estranged black family gets a zombie invasion for Christmas.
WHY YOU SHOULD READ (from writer): Because I’m tired of movies with a black cast being called “urban films.” Because I want to prove it’s possible to write a black movie that people will watch that doesn’t involve us being slaves or drug dealers. Because Spike Lee doesn’t own the rights to black cinema. And because I freaking hate Tyler Perry.
TITLE: White Label
GENRE: Dark rom-com
LOGLINE: When a young vinyl music store owner loses everything — love, friendship and vinyl records — he struggles to rebuild his life, hindered by pimp-like friends, a beautiful agent provocateur and an ex-girlfriend who refuses to let their relationship die until she finds a suitable successor. In the vein of HIGH FIDELITY and 500 DAYS OF SUMMER.
WHY YOU SHOULD READ MY SCRIPT (from writer): WHITE LABEL landed me a Blacklist manager for three days when I sent it out last year. We had a weekend love-in, swapped lots of emails, planned a campaign to attach a director and talent — then she emailed back the following Monday and said she was simply too busy to take on another client. The script (under a different name) got a professional rating on SPEC SCOUT, and was ranked on the TOP 10 list of the best scripts of 2012 by a Scriptshadow reader (someone I have never met, honestly!).
Are you confused? Would you like to be? You are not prepared… for Paralleled!
Amateur Friday Submission Process: To submit your script for an Amateur Review, send in a PDF of your script, your title, genre, logline, and finally, why I should read your script. Use my submission address please: Carsonreeves3@gmail.com. Your script and “first ten” will be posted. If you’re nervous about the effects of a bad review, feel free to use an alias name and/or title. It’s a good idea to resubmit every couple of weeks so your submission stays near the top.
Genre: Sci-fi/Thriller
Premise: (from writer) An emotionally unstable neurosurgeon undergoes an experiment with parallel realities and fights different versions of himself to find a dimension where the wife he put in a coma is still healthy.
About: This script won the Amateur Offerings Weekend a couple of weeks ago. Submit your script (details up top) to get on the list. Best of the 5 picked that week will get a review. So make sure to submit a snazzy well-crafted logline and a great query letter!
Writer: Denis Nielsen
Details: 103 pages
Downey Jr. for Angus??
I’m going to give Denis this. He put a LOT of effort into this. This wasn’t something he scraped together over the weekend. This is a mind-bending plot-twisting psychological thriller if there ever was one. But after finishing Paralleled, I think Denis might be his own worst enemy (that’s an inside joke between me and whoever read this script). There are so many moving parts to this plot, it’s impossible to grab onto them all, leaving us scrambling just to keep up. Then again, I would’ve said the same thing about Donnie Darko. So I’m still not sure if I’d call this a big mess or pure genius. And I have a feeling Denis prefers it that way.
(I’d like to ask the writer, Denis, to please excuse any mistakes in the plot summary. It was hard keeping up!)
Dr. Angus Williams, 48 years young, is working on a very special scientific project. In it, he’s attempting to bring doppelgangers from parallel universes over to our current universe. It’s kind of like cloning, except your clone isn’t created on the spot. He’s been living this entire life, just like you, in another reality, but making different choices from you, and therefore is a different person.
So one day he puts his wife and co-worker, Madeleine, into the machine, only to have her emerge in full freak-out mode. Her body starts breaking down and the lab team has to put her in a medically induced coma. Once this happens, Angus starts constructing a plan to find ANOTHER Madeleine in one of these other alternate realities so he can be with her (why he’s leaving this poor Current Reality Madeleine to lie in a coma, I’m not sure).
So he starts ushering in versions of himself, hoping that they’ll have a Madeleine in their lives he can go and be with. (This confused me as well. What was his plan if they did have a Madeleine? Was he just going to ask them politely if he could steal their wife?) Eventually he finds one in Number 4 (Angus Number 4), who says Madeleine 4 is doing well and fine in his reality.
So Angus jumps to that reality, only to find out that he (or Number 4) is being kept in a nearby barn by his wife. For some reason Number 4 has jumped with him (it’s not clear to me why Angus couldn’t simply jump himself) and because he wants this Madeleine for himself, he kills Number 4 and buries him. When Madeleine comes along to retrieve him from the barn, he learns that he’s on an extended time-out from the family because his Number 4 version nearly beat their boss to death.
Why would he do such a thing? Because he found out that Madeleine had slept with him. But this turns out to be the least of his worries. It turns out Number 2 (back in the Angus’ original world) is conspiring to do something terrible to him. What would that be? To be honest, that’s where I lost track of the story. It just became too complicated, which is where our analysis begins.
You know, I admire Denis’s ambition. He clearly wasn’t interested in writing some run-of-the-mill spec. He set out to challenge the audience. The problem is, it just got too complicated. And I tried. I mean I was re-reading scenes constantly (which I never do) to make sure I kept up. But at a certain point, I couldn’t do it anymore. We have four versions of our main character, we have two versions of our boss character, we have two versions of the wife character, and we have two versions of our assistant character (who I didn’t mention in the synopsis). We have separate mysteries in two timelines, some that intersect, some that don’t. And we have multiple double-crosses in the final act.
Now Denis was challenging us from the very first page (he had voice overs, off-screen talking from characters we didn’t know yet, AND overlaps – I’m not sure I’ve ever seen that happen all on the same page before) but I survived that. However, I can tell you exactly where I gave up on trying to figure out what was going on. It was at this line, around page 70-something.
“This is another REPLAY of Madeleine’s trauma surgery, administered by Number 2 – But we don’t know that yet, because at this point he looks exactly like our main Angus.”
Now Denis might be arguing that that’s exactly what he set out to do. He’s trying to twist your mind. And maybe he’s right. But I think he went one Angus too many, one mystery too many, one double-cross too many. Just because you’re trying to bend people’s minds doesn’t mean you can throw the kitchen sink at them. Part of making an audience think is knowing when to show restraint. And I never saw that here. Problems were solved with exorbitant twists rather than clever writing. It’s not that all of these twists and turns couldn’t have worked. But the more false realities you place in your script, the more skill it requires to inject those in a way the audience can follow them. And even though Denis was up to the task of trying (I could FEEL the effort on the page), I just think he wrote himself into a place he couldn’t write himself out of.
The thing you gotta remember is that if the audience can’t follow your plot, it doesn’t matter what you write. They’ve already mentally checked out. And what you ALSO have to remember is that the more confusing your plot is, the more mental focus the reader has to give to straightening all that out. Because we’re focusing on all the confusing stuff, we miss the other more obvious plot points. I’ve had this happen every once in awhile, where I’ll miss a plot point and the writer will be like, “What are you talking about! It was right there on page 64!” And I’ll try to explain to them, “Well yeah, but at that time I was trying to figure out why the 7th doppelganger of the Grandfather’s ghost’s son had his daughter travel to Klongor to find the Mogshire Suit.” So there’s this compound effect. It’s not just the complex plot the reader isn’t getting, it becomes the simple stuff too.
Take Madeleine going into a coma, for instance. Why did she go into a coma? I’m still confused about that. And why is our main character searching other realities for a new Madeleine when he has another one? Sure, she’s in a coma. But you’re a doctor. It seems like it’d be easier to try to get her out of a coma than go kill someone in another reality that’s completely foreign to you and take their place. It also makes your hero look bad. He’s ditching Vegetable Wife to go find a hotter more mobile version. These questions may be answered in the script somewhere, but there was so much going on, they apparently flew right past me.
Really intricate mind-fuck scripts require a lot of practice to write. It’s not just about logistically mapping everything out. It’s about writing a lot of scripts and learning when readers understand the stuff you want them to understand and when they miss it. It takes a writer a couple of tries, for example, to learn that when a main character SAYS he has a phobia of spiders, that a reader doesn’t always remember that. It’s only when the writer SHOWS the main character being attacked by spiders and freaking out, that we understand he doesn’t like spiders. There are a lot of little things like that that you only learn through trial, error, and feedback.
In Denis’s defense, movies like this have been made before. Primer. Donnie Darko. The Jacket. There is an audience out there for them. And an actor would LOVE to play the part of Angus, obviously (actors love to play multiple characters to display their range). But I just think there’s too much going on here. I’d recommend to Denis that he seriously dial the script back. Simplify this plot. You already have so much going on with the multiple Angus’s. The rest of the plot shouldn’t be so complicated. Good luck!
Script link: Paralleled
[ ] what the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: “Too-far-in-your-own-head” script. Sometimes we writers get a little too far into our own heads when we write. We write multiple plotlines, multiple twists, multiple mysteries, and we just keep piling it on because, why not, we’re in our own little world. But when the reader gets the script, he hasn’t been through the 15 drafts you wrote. He wasn’t there when you created the first clone of your character, the second, the third. He just doesn’t have all that information in his mind that you do, so he loses track quickly. As a writer, it’s your job to step out of your writer’s hat occasionally and into the reader’s. You have to ask, “Does this make sense to someone who’s reading this for the first time?” If you don’t do that, you’ll be stuck too far in your own head, and your script will remain a mystery to the world forever.
Tis the day when the Americans and the Brits split up. A proud day for America, maybe not so much for our brothers to the East. Whatever the case, it’s a reason to celebrate. And I need a day of celebration. The downside of being an American is that the ideology of the country is built to make you feel terrible if you’re not working 16 hours a day. I often fall victim to this practice. But today, I’m going to grill a dead animal, light some cheap firecrackers, and feel good about doing nothing. I WILL repost my newsletter screenplay review of White House Down though, for those interested in discussing it. And with that, I’m out. See you Friday!
Note: This review was originally posted in my Newsletter a few months ago. When I originally read this script a long time back, I thought it was pretty darn good. Then I found out the casting and my excitement died immediately, which is reflected in this more recent review. Jaime Foxx as the president?? The ubiquitous Channing Tatum in the title role? That eliminated any chances that I’d go to the theater to see this. Anyway, I decided to re-post it today since it’s the Fourth of July and I’m not putting a new post up. Interested how the big spec sale translated to the scene so if you saw it, chime in. To get early reviews of screenplays, sign up for the Scriptshadow Newsletter, which is sent every Thursday.
Genre: Action
Premise: (from IMDB) A Secret Service agent is tasked with saving the life of the U.S. President after the White House is overtaken by a paramilitary group (which I assume means terrorists).
About: Pitched as “Die Hard in the White House,” James Vanderbilt sold his spec to Sony for the biggest sale of 2012, at 3 million bucks! You know when you can make even Dan Fogelman jealous, you’re doing a good job. A few things to note here. Vanderbilt has written some huge screenplays, including Spider-Man 3. Also, he writes for Sony (Spider-Man is a Sony film) which means he has a pre-established relationship with the studio, and likely had been informed of exactly the kind of movie(s) they were looking for. All of this plays into the paycheck. But even that combination doesn’t guarantee a 3 million dollar payday. There are plenty of other top-notch writers trying to pull off a sale like this and failing. So what was the secret to this one? It must be a pretty good script, right?
Writer: James Vanderbilt
Details: 142 pages – March 1, 2012 (This is an early draft of the script. The situations, characters, and plot may change significantly by the time the film is released. This is not a definitive statement about the project, but rather an analysis of this unique draft as it pertains to the craft of screenwriting).
You might have recently seen the Olympus Has Fallen trailers. “Olympus” is a competing project to “White House” that sold at around the same time for 600k. They then raced that sucker into production as it’s on its way into theaters in a few weeks. While the early bird catches the worm, it doesn’t always catch the quality film. “Olympus” looks like a frat house bathroom at the end of a clean-cycle. There isn’t a single original shot in that trailer. The helicopter shots and explosions alone look like they were pulled from a stock video website.
Well, turns out White House Down caught the “rushed into production” bug as well, as it’s debuting this summer, landing Channing Tatum and Jaime Foxx in the lead roles. Not sure a few extra months will make a difference in quality control. But I can tell you this: “White House Down” is the better script.
Low-level security agent slash divorcee John Cale’s life isn’t going so well. He’s divorced. Doesn’t see his daughter very much. Doesn’t have a job. Yup, not good times. Luckily, he’s landed a rare day with his daughter, 10 year old Emily, whose claim to fame is being a CNN buff (it’s her favorite Ipad App). He’s decided to finally give her the gift of her dreams – a tour of the White House.
Cale’s also being a little sneaky, as he’s doubling up this tour with a job interview at the house. Hey, why not kill two birds with one stone? Although this two-for-one special pretty much encapsulates why Cale’s flying solo. Dude needs to start paying more attention to his family. Well, he’ll get his chance soon enough.
That’s because while taking a stroll through the White House, a series of explosions start rocking the wings. In another section, fun-loving president James Sawyer is rushed to the White House equivalent of a panic room. But before he can get inside, his head of security turns a gun on him. It turns out HE’S orchestrating this! Just as he’s about to put a bullet in the president, Cale comes screeching out of nowhere, providing just enough of a distraction to grab the prez and Harlem Shuffle it to another area.
In addition to protecting the president, Cale’s got to find his daughter, who was in the bathroom at the time of the attack. But the options are limited. With the head of security knowing just about everything there is to know about the White House, he’s able to bring backup mercenaries in, leaving all the major rooms occupied by gun-wielding trouble-makers!
Outside, everyone’s trying to figure out what the hell is going on. When they hear that the president is alive, being guarded by some secret service reject, their confidence is shaken. But they come up with a plan whereby the president and Cale will head to a little known escape hatch that leads to a series of secret tunnels Roosevelt built hundreds of years ago or something.
Naturally, things don’t go as planned, and in a spectacular firefight in the White House backyard (spoiler) the president is killed! Or at least, that’s how it LOOKS. It turns out the president actually escaped and is able to get back inside with Cale. Except now they don’t have any communication with the outside. And since the outside believes the president to be dead, they order a missile strike on the White House to take out the terrorists in 45 minutes. YIKES! Talk about a tight ticking time bomb. So will Cale get the president out alive? Will he save his daughter as well? Locate this 3 million dollar spec and find out for yourselves or get ready to line up in June.
White House Down was a cool spec. It’s got problems. Like that it’s way too long. And you don’t always know what’s going on. And the ending is a little confusing (“Ehhh, wait, what was the bad guy’s plan again??”). But it got the “fun” part right. And when you compare it to all the other Die Hard clones that have come out since the original film debuted 25 years ago, White House Down ranks up there with the best of them script-wise. I mean, it’s a thousand times better than “A Good Day To Die Hard,” that’s for sure.
There’s just some really good writing for a “blockbuster spec.” I noticed this early on in the scene that takes Cale into the White House for a job interview while ALSO setting up a tour with his daughter. Amateur writers probably would’ve separated these scenes, having Cale go somewhere else for a security detail interview, then after that, bring his daughter to the White House for the tour. The problem is, separating those scenes takes up more space. Which is why you want to combine scenes whenever possible – to keep your story moving swiftly. But what’s really cool about this scene is that Vanderbilt uses it to set up the distance between Cale and his daughter.
Most amateur writers, when writing huge action specs, avoid the emotional component. But these relationships are what anchor the story, what make it relatable and real, which is why you want to incorporate them. I particularly found the sentence from Cale’s ex, “She doesn’t even like you,” (in reference to their daughter) to be affecting. It sets up how far apart these two are, and it makes us want to stick around until they’ve made up.
I also liked some less-obvious touches, like the physical tour itself. The scene is designed as a way to establish the father-daughter relationship. Her bursting enthusiasm for the experience convinces us that maybe there’s hope for these two. But what the tour’s really doing is laying out the White House blueprints for the audience to set up what will happen down the line. There are certain details about the house we’ll need to know so we’re oriented when the shit hits the presidential fan.
There were some cool story choices as well. I liked how it was unclear if the president was dead half the time, leaving it unclear who had the authority to do what and how much authority they had. The Vice-President assumes the role of Commander-In-Chief if the prez bites it. But what happens when you’re not sure if the prez bit it or not? It’s the kind of uncertainty that I could see really happening in that situation, and I loved that attention to detail.
On the downside, there are way too many freaking characters here. Do we really need to see what happens to the Speaker Of The House? I mean we’re bouncing all over the place to a character list bigger than the entire Chinese population. Snippy snip snip all those characters away and you won’t have a 140 page spec (more important for you guys, of course, than guys like James Vanderbilt). There were one too many set-piece scenes as well, which could’ve lowered the page count. I was constantly confused about the geography of that backyard battle in particular, and didn’t see it as an ideal setting for the primary action scene. I would’ve K.O.’d it.
Still, this is really good stuff as far as blockbuster spec writing. I wouldn’t mark it as an “impressive,” but I’d tell you to read it if it showed up at your door.
[ ] Wait for the rewrite
[ ] wasn’t for me
[x] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: You ever notice that main character’s lives aren’t going so well when we meet them? That’s because if their lives WERE going well, there’d be nothing to fix. Who wants to watch a character who already has everything figured out? Start your movie with a protagonist whose life is in the shitter then use your story to fix them.
Now a lot of you are probably asking, “Carson, why the hell did you pick Cast Away for a script breakdown?” I’ll tell you. Because it’s different. Because it took chances. Because it’s something that shouldn’t have worked. And I love breaking down scripts that shouldn’t work. I love exploring the deviations and figuring out why they succeeded (when so often else, they fail). The film itself famously teamed up Robert Zemeckis and Tom Hanks and took a YEAR BREAK in the middle of production so that Hanks could lose weight and look like a real castaway for the second half of the film. That story overshadowed screenwriter William Broyles Jr.’s own escapades to get the script right. The Apollo 13 and Planet of the Apes scribe deliberately stranded himself on a beach in the Sea of Cortez for a week to force himself to search for food, water, and shelter. For today’s tips, I’ll be reading an earlier draft of the script in order to see some of the changes they made.
BUY WILSON HERE! – Wilson
1) If your protagonist cares about something enough, so will we – The success of Wilson The Volleyball defies just about all rationale. Many people actually cried when he was swept out to sea at the end of the film. Although rumors persist that I was one of those people, I steadfastly deny my involvement in any Wilson-related crying. The question is, why did this happen? Well, if your protagonist really really cares about something, whether it be a family member, a goldfish, or a volleyball, we will too. And you can use that tool to create moments like this one, where you rip that something away from the hero to provoke an emotional response from the audience.
2) The Set-Up World needs to be exciting – The “Set-Up World” is that 10-15 pages BEFORE the inciting incident. The inciting incident, of course, is when something happens to throw your character’s world into disarray (in Cast Away, this is when the plane crashes, obviously). Here’s the problem I see in a lot of scripts. Writers believe that because they’re just “setting things up” and the exciting inciting incident is right around the corner, that The Set-Up World can be boring. They can show their protagonist doing boring things and it’ll all be okay because the fun is coming soon. NO. It’s very important that during The Set-Up World, you set up your character in the most interesting way possible. So here, we show Chuck (Tom Hanks) running all over the world, desperately trying to ensure that Fed-Ex packages arrive on time. He’s yelling at people, busting his ass to get all the packages on the trucks. Things are HAPPENING. You can intersperse a few slower scenes in this section, but be careful. Too many and we’ll get bored before your inciting incident even arrives.
3) Know what you need to set up in the Set-Up World. Set up those things and nothing more – Make a list of the ESSENTIAL THINGS you need to set up about your main character. Come up with those scenes and don’t include ANYTHING MORE. This will keep your setup streamlined. In the early draft of Cast Away I read, there was all this extraneous stuff about the FEDEX headquarters and Chuck’s family that JUST WASN’T NECESSARY. Broyles Jr. and Zemeckis figured out they needed to set up Chuck’s job, his relationship with Kelly, and that was it. So those other scenes were excised.
4) If your protagonist’s life is boring and therefore uninteresting to document, get to your inciting incident sooner. – If your protagonist is someone who doesn’t have an interesting life to set up, such as The Dude in The Big Lebowski, try to get to your inciting incident even sooner. We establish The Dude in a robe at the grocery store. Then in the very next scene, when he gets home, two thugs attack him and piss on his rug, which is the inciting incident that starts the story. Exciting characters can have longer Set-Up Worlds. But do NOT give us 6-7 scenes of a stoner being stoned before the inciting incident arrives. We’ll give up on the script before it happens.
5) IRONY ALERT – Remember, always add irony to your script if possible. Double points if it’s a part of your premise! Chuck is the man who’s always on a tight schedule, who never has a second to spare. All of a sudden he’s on an island with all the time in the world.
6) Recognize when you have a good character and expand his role – Surprisingly enough, Wilson was barely in the draft of the script I read. But someone recognized how powerful he could be and so majorly expanded his role. If you have a show-stopping (or interesting or memorable) character, make sure to give him as much time as you can in your story. An example of a writer missing the boat on this was George Lucas in Episode 1. He had a badass villain in Darth Maul, but didn’t recognize it, didn’t expand his role, and therefore missed an opportunity to do one of the only things right in that script.
7) MID-POINT SHIFT ALERT – Remember, a good mid-point shift SHIFTS the second half of the movie in a slightly different direction so it’s not the same as the first. We have a pretty clean mid-point shift in Cast Away. We cut to 3 years later, with Chuck no longer being the green timid survivalist, but an aged vet of the island who’s figured out how to survive.
8) If you are going to jump forward in time, use an event to motivate it – Staying on that topic, I always see writers insert huge time-jumps into their scripts that come out of nowhere. We’ll be sitting with a family watching TV, and then the next line I read is… “8 months later.” If you’re going to make a big time jump in your screenplay, try to create a weighted moment to initiate it. Cast Away does this with Chuck’s tooth, which has been killing him for weeks it hurts so badly. He finally has no choice but to take it out. He does so with a rock, and the pain causes him to pass out, which leads perfectly into a FADE IN and a “3 years later.”
9) We need to be constantly reminded of the motivation if we’re to care about your hero succeeding – In this draft, Chuck did not have a picture of Kelly (his girlfriend) that he kept looking at to keep him going. I was shocked by the effect it had. In the movie, I so wanted him to get off the island. In this draft, I definitely didn’t care as much. The more I thought about it, the more I realized how big of an effect that picture of Kelly had. Because I was reminded of her, I constantly wanted Chuck to get back to her. Getting off the island to survive is selfish. Getting off the island to get back to Kelly is selfless.
10) The 10 Draft Rule – Every script should go through at least 10 drafts. The Sixth Sense had 20+ drafts. Good Will Hunting had over 50. And by ‘draft,’ I don’t mean going through a script and casually rewriting scenes you don’t like. An official ‘draft’ is where you read through your script and assess all problems (what is and isn’t working) in order to come up with solutions to apply to those problems. I read way too many scripts that feel like early drafts, such as this Cast Away draft which includes ten early pages of family scenes that are totally unnecessary to the story. That unfocused stuff drains its way out of the screenplay after ten drafts.
BONUS TIP – Good Chuck, Bad Chuck, Fuck Chuck – Here’s proof of the above. In this draft of the script, Chuck starts going crazy and is therefore split into two personalities, Good Chuck and Bad Chuck. Clearly, this was a method designed by Broyles Jr. so that Chuck could logically speak out loud and we could learn what was going on in his head. It was also a very cliché EARLY DRAFT choice. By going through many more drafts, he eventually realized that Wilson The Volleyball could take on the roll of someone for Chuck to talk to. I read too many scripts where writers don’t get past Good Chuck, Bad Chuck. And the script suffers for it.
These are 10 tips from Cast Away. To get 500 more screenwriting tips from movies as varied as “When Harry Met Sally,” “Pulp Fiction,” and “The Hangover,” check out my book, Scriptshadow Secrets, on Amazon!
