Would it be blasphemous to admit that I don’t hold Jaws in the same high regard as the majority of the cinema-going public? That’s not to say I don’t like it. I actually enjoy the movie whenever I watch it. I just don’t think it’s AMAAAA-ZING. When you break it down, it’s actually a strange little screenplay. The goal here is to get rid of the shark. However, we have to wait for the final third of the film for the characters to physically go after that goal. I’m not sure we’d be able to wait that long in today’s market. As a result, a lot of the film takes place back in the town, where our police chief (Martin Brody) goes toe to toe with the Mayor on whether to close down the beach or not due to the attacks. While the characters ARE actively trying to solve the problem, they’re basically relegated to waiting for the next shark attack to happen. – The script itself has about as “Hollywood” a path as they come. Peter Benchley, who wrote the novel, was brought on to write the screenplay. Spielberg didn’t love his draft and hired numerous writers to punch it up, basically changing everything that comes before the final shark hunt. He also brought in comedy writers to make it funnier. Even Robert Shaw, who played Quint, rewrote a lot of dialogue. In the end, Carl Gottlieb got the “official” nod, punching up scenes daily on the set throughout the shoot. – The draft I’m reading is the “final” shooting draft, credited to Peter Benchley. Although much of it is what you see in the film, there are some differences here and there, which I may decide to include in the lessons.

1) Bonus points if your character’s fear is the opposite of his goal – Whatever your character’s goal is, make his fear the opposite of that. Here, Brody’s goal is to kill the shark. Therefore, his fear is that he’s afraid of water. It’s a simple yet effective way to create conflict within your hero’s pursuit.

2) I’ve never seen a perfect marriage in a movie – Marriages are wrought with issues. Something’s always pulling on them, creating a problem that needs to be resolved. These problems usually fester underneath the relationship, un-talked about, creating subtext throughout the characters’ conversations. Here, Brody’s wife wants to leave this town. She wants a better life for them in a nicer place. But he wants to stay. And that grinds on their marriage. Always try and add some sort of issue to your hero’s marriage.

3) Use suspense to drive your story – As you know, I prefer a character goal to drive a story. Get the hero out there and after an objective and he’ll take the story with him. While it means a slower story, you can use suspense to drive your story as well. One way to do this is to link together a series of looming disasters. That’s essentially what drives the first 2 acts of Jaws. True, our characters are trying to find the shark and stop it, but what we’re really waiting for is that next shark kill.

4) Conflict is good. Forced conflict is bad. – Conflict is good, WHEN IT’S NATURAL. Audiences can feel when you’re trying too hard though – when you’re pushing some artificial conflict in there to juice up the story. In the book, Benchley had Hooper (Richard Dreyfus) have an affair with Brody’s wife. Everyone felt that would be too much and nixed it for the screenplay. Good choice. It would have detracted from the story instead of added to it. Any conflict that you add should feel organic and natural. If it feels like you’re adding conflict just to add conflict, you probably shouldn’t do it.

5) URGENCY ALERT – It’s a SIN not to include urgency in a blockbuster (popcorn) film. So in Jaws, our ticking time bomb is the 4th of July weekend. That’s the biggest weekend of the year, the weekend all the tourists show up. And it’s coming soon! Therefore, the film’s urgency comes from Brody needing to find and kill the shark before that weekend (even though he eventually fails to do so).

6) Where’s your Quint? – The more scripts I read, the more I realize that the best scripts have one extremely memorable character. Someone who stands out because he acts different, talks different, does his own thing – a character who sort lives in his own world as opposed to the one you’ve created. A character like Quint, or Hannibal, or Han Solo, or Lloyd Dobler, or Clementine, or Rod Tidwell or Jack Sparrow or Alonzo Harris. This character is almost always a secondary character. Find him and put everything you have into making him as unique as possible.

7) Prevent your hero’s task (goal) from being easy – A common mistake new writers make is allowing their heroes to do what they want unimpeded. As a writer, your job is to do the opposite. Look for ways to make your hero’s job tougher. So here, Brody learns that there’s a shark attack. Okay, simple solution. Close down the beach. The bad writer allows this to happen. The good writer introduces the mayor character, who tells our hero, “You can’t do that. That beach is our income.” Now our hero’s job becomes tougher. He can’t just close down the beach. He has to find and kill a shark.

8) “DON’T GO IN THERE!” – Again, dramatic irony is when we know something the characters do not. Any time you can create a scenario where the audience wants to get up and scream, “No, don’t go there!” Or “Get out of there!” or “Don’t do that!” to warn the characters, you’ve essentially created a great dramatic irony situation. The reason Jaws is inherently dramatic is because it’s driven by dramatic irony. We know the shark is coming to kill these unsuspecting beachgoers, but they have no idea.

9) Always place your problem at the worst possible time it could be – These shark attacks aren’t happening at the tail end of summer with a few scraggly beach-goers getting a last-second tan. It’s happening at THE BUSIEST TIME OF THE YEAR, making it the worst time this problem could’ve happened.

10) If a character is going to tell a story, it better be one hell of a story – Movies are about characters DOING THINGS. They’re not about characters TALKING ABOUT DOING THINGS. Therefore, don’t have your characters tell stories. I see so many amateur writers have characters tell stories that are so boring I want to cut my eyes out. So if you dare to bring your screenplay to a grinding halt while a character tells a story, it better be the best f&*%ing story in the universe! Quint’s famous monologue here about sitting in shark infested waters for 110 hours while everyone around him was eaten by sharks worked because it was a damn good story. Please don’t bother having your character tell their own story unless it’s as good as this one.

These are 10 tips from the movie “Jaws.” To get 500 more tips from movies as varied as “Aliens,” “Pulp Fiction,” and “The Hangover,” check out my book, Scriptshadow Secrets, on Amazon!

How to screw up a Hollywood film and an indie film all in one weekend.

Genre: Fantasy/Adventure
Premise: (from IMDB) The ancient war between humans and a race of giants is reignited when Jack, a young farmhand fighting for a kingdom and the love of a princess, opens a gateway between the two worlds.
About Giant Slayer: This film was directed by Bryan Singer, trying to get out of director jail after Superman Returns and Valkyrie. It was written by an interesting trio. Christopher MacQuarrie, who of course has been a big part of Singer’s career since The Usual Suspects. Dan Studney, a TV writer (he wrote the TV series version of Weird Science) who’s big feature credit is “Reefer Madness,” the musical. And finally Darren Lemke, who wrote Shrek: Forever After, which I believe is the fourth film in the series, though I called Dreamworks for confirmation on this and even they weren’t sure. While I can’t give you a timeline of every writer’s participation, my guess is that Lemke wrote the initial draft, Studney wrote another draft, and then when Singer was brought on as director, he used his go-to writer, McQuarrie, to get the script where he wanted it. The film came out this weekend and grossed an underwhelming 26 million dollars, a disastrous take for a product that cost 200 million to make.
About Stoker: Stoker was a hot script from 2011 that got everyone in town riled up. Imagine their surprise when it was revealed to be written by Wentworth Miller, the doofy lead actor in the 3 seasons too long Fox thriller, “Prison Break.” He’d written the script under a pseudonym so as not to be discriminated against (Oh, another actor who thinks he can write, eh!). It paid off as the script sold for mid six-figures. And if that wasn’t enough, legendary Korean director Chan-wook Park decided to make Stoker his first American film! Park is responsible for such classics as, “Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance” and “Oldboy.” The film stars Matthew Goode (Watchmen), Mia Wasikowska (Alice In Wonderland) and Nicole Kidman (Celebrities Addicted To Plastic Surgery).
Writers (Giant): Darren Lemke, Dan Studney and Christopher McQuarrie.
Details (Giant): 114 minutes long

What do you get when you couple Jack The Giant Slayer with Stoker?

A lot of disappointment.

However, that disappointment may not be distributed in the way you’d think it would be. We have some high quality craftsman working on both projects here (Singer and McQuarrie on one, Park on the other), yet you’d assume that the bedroom swallowing sinkhole would reside with the picture celebrating CGI giants. Not so fast. Stoker was easily the worst film I’ve seen all year. And “Giant Slayer” was kinda okay (even if Miss Scriptshadow called it “a flat piece of trash” – hey, what do girls know about giants, right?).

“Giant Slayer” follows our plucky peasant hero, Jack, sticking up for a young bullied woman (who turns out to be – SURPRISE! – the princess). He then gets swindled into trading some beans for his horse at the market, and comes home to get yelled at by some angry old dude with really bad teeth (his great uncle maybe?).

Later that night, the princess comes by to thank him, and one of those beans falls through the floor, landing in dirt. A storm follows and the roid bean sprouts. Like REALLY sprouts. The resulting gigantor plant shoots up into the air, taking the house, AND THE PRINCESS, with it! The king shows up the next day, wanting Jack to tell him where his daughter is, seemingly blind to the fact that there’s a thousand-feet in diameter bean-stalk behind them. Jack tells him the princess is up there with it, so the king sends his best climbers, and Jack, to go get her.

They make it to the top, where they discover a secret land in the sky that is home to giants. Not only do the giants capture our pint-sized crew, but learn that the bean stalk they came on heads down to Human-Land. Since everyone knows giants love the taste of humans, they decide to head down there to satiate a serious case of the human-munchies. The only problem is that Jack is one crafty little individual. And once he falls in love with the princess, he’ll do anything to save her, even if that means taking down giants, mother*&%er.

It’s funny. Last Thursday I was going to do an article about “writing the blockbuster.” Blockbusters are unique beasts. You approach them slightly differently from “traditional” scripts. Set-pieces become a huge part of your approach, so that was going to be a big part of the article.

But sadly, this blockbuster made the same mistake at script level as pretty much every other blockbuster I read. The setup is the best part. And then it falls off a cliff (no pun intended) becoming a mediocre, occasionally amusing piece of fluff. I’m not going to lie, I was excited to get to the giants. From what I’d seen in the previews, they looked amazing. That anticipation made the first act suspenseful, even if it amounted to your basic setup scenario of peasant-can’t-be-with-princess-cause-he’s-a-peasant.

However, once we get to Giant-Land, it becomes Boring Central. Remember, since the second act no longer has the advantage of anticipation (you’ve basically shown your cards, a.k.a. the Giants), the reader/audience must love the characters in order to stay interested. None of the characters here were lame. But none of them stood out either. If I was giving grades, almost every one of them would’ve received a “C.” They were all average.

This is a deadly combination when writing a screenplay. It’s the equivalent of a pilot losing access to his hydraulics as he comes in for a landing. A second act has WAY MORE slow moments than a first act does. So for those moments to be entertaining, you need interesting characters engaging in strong conflict. We had the conflict part (there was a bad guy wreaking havoc within the human team. Jack couldn’t have the princess because of the class difference) but BECAUSE THE CHARACTERS WERE SO AVERAGE we just didn’t care.

What nearly saved this movie was the ending. It was high caliber action set-pieces at their best. When the giants come down to our world and start hurling trees and windmills at our puny little counterparts, I was in awe. The giants looked great and the battle was inspired. The problem was, as I already mentioned, there was no one worth rooting for. Nobody stood out. Even the always good Stanley Tucci plays a boring villain. This simply isn’t worth your time unless you have a 12 year old son. Oh well.

BUT!

But. If someone’s put a gun to your head and told you you HAD to either watch Stoker or Giant Slayer, for the love of all that is holy, go see Giant Slayer. Stoker is abysmal. It’s terrible. It’s got an interesting backstory, a great director, but it’s just terrible. It’s the very definition of style over substance, which is what you’d assume I’d say about Giant Slayer. But here we obviously have a director who’s more interested in visual tricks and award-winning cinematography than, well, AN ACTUAL STORY!

That’s assuming there was a story. I haven’t read the script. I know Roger reviewed it a long time ago, but I skipped the synopsis due to spoilers. I mean, nobody in this movie utters a line that someone would say in real life. Everyone acts like they know they’re in a movie and therefore must say something poignant or eerie. That is when they DO talk. Because 95% of this movie is dedicated to Matthew Goode staring at people! I swear to you. That’s almost the entire movie. Someone says something, then cut to Matthew Goode staring at them in a really eeire way for 5 minutes.

What’s it about? The short answer is nothing. The long answer is… Disturbingly reclusive India has just lost her father, who’s mysteriously died in a car accident. So his brother, an uncle India never knew she had, shows up to offer the family support. He takes a particular interest in India, whom he tells, “I just want to be your friend.” Except there’s nothing friendly about his rape-stares, which would make even a Catholic priest uncomfortable.

People close to the family, like the grandma and an aunt, start dying mysteriously, and eventually India learns that her dear uncle is a crazy serial killer. Except India isn’t put off by this. She’s turned on by it! Like SERIOUSLY turned on. And she wants in. Complicating matters is her alcoholic mother, who makes daily shameless advances at her dead husband’s brother. When India sees this, she gets jealous, and we get a mother-daughter cat fight. Rreow!

KILL ME IF I EVER HAVE TO SEE THIS MOVIE AGAIN.

It was so bad. There was no plot, nothing driving the story forward besides the mystery uncle, which got boring after 10 minutes. That didn’t stop Miller and Park from stretching that mystery out for another 40 minutes though. But the real problem here was that nothing felt connected. Each scene felt like Park experimenting (a 5 minute trip down to the basement for ice cream becomes a celebration of dancing lights), and once he was done, he’d go on to the next experiment, regardless of whether those two scenes fit together. There’s a moment around the midpoint, for example, where India is at school. Since when did India attend school??? Nothing from the first 50 minutes indicated that India was in school at the time. That was a microcosm of the entire movie. No progression of story. No point to the story. Random shit popping up out of nowhere. Weird scenes completely dependent on mood and lighting.

Stoker is a mess of the highest order. At best it’s a master filmmaker making his dream student film. At worst it’s a distracted director trying to make sense of a pointless script. I would strongly recommend avoiding this film. It’s awful.

JACK THE GIANT SLAYER
[ ] what the hell did I just watch?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the price of admission
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius

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

What I learned: (from “Giant Slayer”) Remember this. DO SOMETHING UNIQUE WITH YOUR CHARACTERS. Make them stand out in some way. Give them something we haven’t seen before in from movie characters. Or else they will be generic. And no matter how awesome your plot is, we won’t care because your characters are boring. Anticipation and story build-up might help us ignore this during the first act, but once the second act comes around – the act that depends on your characters – your story will die a quick death.

What I learned 2: (from “Stoker”). Make sure there’s a well-thought-out and compelling plot to your story. Your characters might be interesting as hell. But if we don’t know what the hell’s going on half the time or understand what their goals or motivations are, we’ll quickly get bored and check out on you.

Welcome to another round of Amateur Offerings Weekend, everyone!

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: The Last Bash
GENRE: Comedy
LOGLINE: Disenchanted husbands, unsatisfied with their married lives, make up a fiancée for their last remaining, single friend in order to throw the ultimate bachelor party, but the scheme goes awry when they’re forced to battle their reluctant pal and satisfy their suspicious wives who insist on meeting her.

TITLE: NOTHING BUT THE TRUTH
GENRE: Action/Thriller
LOGLINE: When a corrupt narcotics detective wakes up strapped to a polygraph-triggered bomb, he must navigate the web of his own deceit for one day, without telling a lie.

TITLE: Hardcore 84
GENRE: Coming of Age/Drama
LOGLINE: In 1984 Los Angeles, teenage punk rockers come of age in an era when music and style were more than a trend, but a way of life. When Trench falls for London, a skinhead from Orange County, his attempts at romance fall short, sending him into a vicious circle of self-destruction.

TITLE: Song Bird
GENRE : Contained Thriller
LOGLINE: An agoraphobic woman begins to suspect her apartment neighbor is a killer.

TITLE: Social Media Ruined My Life (SMRML)
GENRE: High School Comedy
LOGLINE: A High School loser makes up an online girlfriend in order to
get revenge on his social media obsessed school.

They are as elusive as Adele snacking on carrots. And yet, they’re probably the most important part of your script. As you all know, a bad ending cancels out a good movie. And a bad movie can actually be saved by a good ending. That’s because the ending is the last thing the reader (or audience) leaves with. It’s the feeling they will take with them when talking to friends, when talking to co-workers, when going online. If you write a great ending, people will tell other people about your movie, and word-of-mouth will turn your film into a box office star. I still remember when The Sixth Sense came out. The ending of that film was so strong, the movie had virtually ZERO fall-off from week to week at the box office, which is basically unheard of for a wide-release.

So what’s the secret to these stress-inducing third act monsters? Gosh, I wish I knew. Then I could write an article about it and we could all become millionaires. While I may not have all the answers, I’ve got a pretty solid understanding of what makes an ending stick. And while it’s more difficult than following an IKEA instruction booklet, it isn’t as complex as one might think.

Basically, great endings can be broken down into two categories.

1) Something unexpected happens.
2) Our protagonist (or one of the other main characters) overcomes his flaw.

If you go back through your favorite endings, you will inevitably see the incorporation of one of these two techniques. The Sixth Sense – we find out that our hero is dead (unexpected). Star Wars – while trying to destroy the Death Star, Luke learns to believe in himself as Han learns to be selfless (overcoming flaws). The Shawshank Redemption – Our protagonist breaks out of prison (unexpected). In When Harry Met Sally, Harry realizes that the love of one woman is more rewarding than being with many women (overcoming flaw). In Silence Of The Lambs, Hannibal escapes (unexpected).

Now if you’re ambitious, you can try to do both of these things and get a real killer ending. Back To The Future has George McFly learning to stand up for himself (overcoming flaw) as well as Doc dying…then coming back to life (unexpected). That one-two punch of an emotional catharsis stacked on top of a “Holy shit!” surprise leaves us feeling about as charged as a human being can feel leaving a movie theater.

However, those are just the broad strokes. When you get into the nitty gritty, there’s a lot more you have to plan for. First and foremost, you want to know your ending before you start writing your script. Michael Arndt (Toy Story 3, Star Wars VII) says he never writes a script without knowing his ending beforehand and I agree that that’s the way to go. The reason for this is that everything in your script should be pushing us towards our ending. And you can’t write that way if you don’t know what your ending is. Essentially, an ending is a series of payoffs for everything that’s come before it. So we need to know how it all concludes before we can set the stage for that moment.

In addition to this, you must understand the structure of the third act, as it is basically the container for your climax. In most scripts, your character is at his lowest point going into the third act. Whatever he’s been trying to do (his goal), he’s failed spectacularly at it. In other words, everything he’s been chasing has ended in disaster. So in Apollo 13, they’re stuck in this tiny capsule with barely any oxygen and all their controls destroyed. It’s as low as it can get. In that sense, you should look at the third act as a rebirth. It’s an opportunity for your character to regroup from his “lowest point” and give it one last shot.

As you may have expected, it’s also important that you have a strong character goal driving your story. And you’d like for that goal to be stated in the first act. In Indiana Jones, we establish in the first act that the goal is to get the Ark. In The King’s Speech, we establish in the first act that the goal for Birdy is to overcome his stutter so he can speak to his nation. Once you establish a strong character goal, an audience will be interested in seeing if your character can achieve that goal. But the real power in this is that a strong goal maps out your ending for you. That’s because the ending is the conclusion to the question: Does he achieve his goal or not? This is extremely important to understand. Strong character goals lead to the best endings.

Whenever you don’t have a clear goal driving your story, you won’t know what to do with your third act. That’s because nobody’s going after anything. And if nobody’s going after anything, it isn’t clear how the journey is supposed to resolve. Miss Scriptshadow and I rented “Liberal Arts” the other night and it was the perfect example of this. There was no goal in the movie. It was just characters talking to each other. So the writer, Josh Radnor, had no idea what to do with the ending. As a result, it just kind of petered out. That’s not the case with ALL goal-less scripts. When Harry Met Sally is a notable exception. But typically, without that clear goal, you’re not going to have a clue what to do with your climax.

Another important reason to incorporate a goal is that it allows you to place obstacles in front of it. These obstacles make the ending more interesting because they put our hero’s success in doubt. For example, in The Karate Kid, Daniel’s goal is to win the tournament. In the semi-finals, one of the Cobra contestants takes out his leg. This way, in the finals, he must fight on only one leg! That’s an obstacle! You’ll want to throw a few big whopper obstacles at your characters during the climax. The more you can put our hero’s success in doubt, the more entertaining the ending will be.

In addition to this, you’ll want to build an ending that specifically challenges your hero’s flaw. So if your hero’s flaw is that he’s a coward, build an ending where he’s challenged by a bully. If your hero’s flaw is that he’s selfish, build an ending where he can either save himself or save others. This is really important. If your ending doesn’t in some way challenge your hero’s fatal flaw, it will feel random. And if you don’t have a fatal flaw for your hero in the first place, your ending will feel empty. This of course requires that you know how to give your main character a flaw in the first place. There’s not enough room to go into that here, but I’m sure somebody will explain how to do it in the comments section if asked.

From there, as stated earlier, you’d like to come up with that one final unexpected surprise in your climax. This is something I can’t teach you. It’ll come down to you making a unique and interesting choice that the audience didn’t see coming. It doesn’t have to be a twist ending like The Sixth Sense. But SOMETHING unexpected should happen. The Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man in Ghostbusters wasn’t a twist ending. But it was definitely unexpected and fun. Your ending should never be exactly what your audience expects. Even if they know your hero will win in the end, you should add something unique that makes getting to that point a surprise.

So let’s summarize the keys to writing a great ending.

1) Know your ending before you start.
2) Understand where your character’s at at the beginning of the third act (he should be at his lowest point).
3) Write a strong character goal into your central plot.
4) Introduce tons of obstacles into the climax.
5) Make sure your character has a fatal flaw.
6) Build in an ending that specifically challenges that fatal flaw.
7) Add something into the climax that the audience isn’t expecting.

There you have it. Now go write your kick-ass ending!

Pick up a copy of my book Scriptshadow Secrets for more structural breakdowns and over 500 screenwriting tips!

Today’s ghost story is a project Hitchcock always wanted to make but couldn’t get the funding for. The big question, however, is…has the script itself become supernatural?

Genre: Ghost/Suspense
Premise: A young girl goes missing for three weeks on a secluded island. When she returns, she doesn’t remember being gone.
About: What an interesting little project. This is a film Hitchcock was dying to make. He even had all the lighting figured out for the film. But apparently studios were horrified (no pun intended) by the supernatural elements of the script and refused to make it. Now whether that means supernatural movies didn’t make money back then or these elements were contrary to some widely held religious belief the country had, I don’t know. But here’s the best part. When Hitchcock signed with Universal, his contract stated two things: that he could make any movie he wanted as long as it was under 3 million dollars, and that he could never make Mary Rose. Writer Jay Presson, who adapted the work for Hitchcock, was born Jacqueline Presson, but changed her name to Jay as it was a lot harder to make it as a female writer back then.
Writer: Jay Presson Allen (based on the play by J.M. Barrie)
Details: 1964 draft – 111 pages

Have you ever heard of a GHOST screenplay? A screenplay that doesn’t exist in the realm of reality? Remember when, after Three Men And A Baby had been on video for years, someone spotted a small boy behind one of the curtains during a scene? And how that went 1990s viral? A lot of effort went into explaining the anomaly, with producers selling the idea that one of the crew member’s children simply snuck behind the curtain before the shot. Uh, yeah right. Everyone knows that kid was a ghost.

And then there was that 1920s Charlie Chaplin film outtake where one of the extras is clearly seen talking on his cell phone (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y6a4T2tJaSU). Don’t let anyone tell you differently (that the woman was carrying a listening device). Without question, that woman is carrying a cell phone! Time traveller!

Why do I bring this up? Because today’s script has some odd anomalies in it. Remember, it was written in 1964. And what does one of the characters say? Well, in reference to the fact that they want to send a letter to their grandson in the military, someone points out that soon they’ll be able to send things “wireless.” Oh yeah, you heard that right. Somebody used the term “wireless” in 1964! Spooked yet?? It gets better. Later on, Mary Rose’s father uses the phrase, “We have your back.” WHAT!?? We have your back?? That phrase wasn’t invented until 1995! Clearly, something’s going on with this script. Something time or space or science cannot explain. I’ll leave that up to you guys to figure out. Feel free to e-mail me (e-mail is on the side bar) for the script if you didn’t receive it in the newsletter.

Outside that mystery, how does this Hitchcock project stack up? Well, I can tell you this. It’s better than many of his produced movies. It may not have been one of his classics. But it’s definitely a good script. And since it’s horror, someone may even be able to update it today and make it work. Or, just set it in the time period that it’s set, 1964, as it jumps back in time a lot anyway, and is therefore essentially a period piece.

18 year-old Mary Rose is the apple of her parents’, Mr. and Mrs. Morland, eye. She’s beautiful and inquisitive and bursting with optimism – someone you just know is going to have a big future. Unfortunately, back in the 1940s, that still boiled down to what kind of man you were able to snag. And Mr. Morland is not happy when he finds out Mary has the hots for 33 year-old Simon. Sure, Simon’s a nice enough guy, but the disparity in their ages throws him.

So one day, Simon comes over to introduce himself, and makes a good enough impression that the Morlands feel better about the arrangement. However, when Mary Rose is upstairs, they decide to tell Simon a deep secret about Mary Rose’s past. When Mary was but 9 years old, Mr. Morland used to take her to a small island. One day, while fishing on that island, Mary disappeared. For 20 days. Nobody could find her. Then she just showed up. Right in the exact place she disappeared. She didn’t seem to know she was gone. She believed the time was instantaneous. After much debate, they decided not to tell her what happened. The whole thing has been a secret the family has kept from her since that day. And they don’t want Simon to mention it to her. They just wanted him to know.

Cut to a few years later. Simon and Mary Rose have had a child and are happily married. But Mary Rose is itching to go back to that island that she and her father used to have such a good time on. Simon, remembering the story Mary’s father told him, tries to convince her otherwise, but she’s adamant.

So they hire an awkward and slightly strange servant named Cameron to take them there, and the three have dinner together on the island. It’s there where dumb Cameron starts talking about the island’s strange history, saying bizarre things have happened to people here over the years. Oblivious to Mary’s history, he tells the VERY story of what happened to the little 9 year old girl who disappeared on the island then appeared 20 days later. Pissed off, Simon tells Cameron to leave them be, but once he and Mary are alone, he turns around for a second, and she’s gone. Gone gone. Not 20 days gone. Mary Rose has vanished for good.

Cut to 20 years later back at the Morland house, and Mary’s parents live a pretty dismal life. Not only is Mary gone, but Mary’s son has been lost at war! But all that’s about to change. Mr. Morland gets a phone call. It’s Cameron. They’ve found Mary. She was on the island. They’re both flabbergasted and call Simon, who rushes over to the house. An hour later, Mary arrives. And none of them are prepared for what’s happened to her. Or what HASN’T happened……

Mary Rose is yet another old script based on a stage play, and boy is that evident. In many of the scenes, we’re plopped down and stay in that location for 10-20 pages at a time. There’s lots of dialogue here. LOTS. And when you have that much dialogue, your script is dependent on the strength of that dialogue to survive.

Luckily, Mary Rose does survive. And a big reason for that is because Hitchcock is the master of suspense. If you can build suspense into a scene, it’s a lot easier to write dialogue. For example, the script opens with Mary’s grown up son, Kenneth, coming back to the house he grew up in, which is now owned by an old woman. Kenneth is a little too curious about this house of secrets, so the woman hides a knife as she shows him around. Is she going to use it? Will she kill him? The suspense is on. Then there is talk of the ‘hidden room’ – a room in the house that the woman refuses to let Kenneth go into. Ahhh, we NEED to know what’s in that room. The suspense is on.

When we flashback to the Morlands living in the house, we hear the story about Mary and her disappearing time on the island. We’re desperate to find out what happened during that lost time. Again, suspense. We’re even told at the very beginning of the movie in Cameron’s (the servant’s) voice over, that something terrifying happened on this island. The suspense kills us as we must find out what that “thing” was. I finished this script really respecting the fact that Hitchcock IS the king of suspense, as all of his tricks were on display, and they all worked.

The script itself is kind of funny to read in that so much has changed in the screenwriting craft since it was written. Parentheticals would sometimes go 20 lines deep (lots of parentheticals in Mary Rose!) and paragraphs would hit the 20-line mark easily. There’d be lots of camera directions in the writing. It reminded me that screenplays really did used to be more blueprints than movies told on the page. Nowadays, you have to make the reader suspend their disbelief as much as possible. A camera angle or shot description destroys that, so it’s best not to use them. Today’s screenplays are pure stories on the page. Let the director figure out how to shoot them.

As for the story itself, I was riveted pretty much until the end. I’ve never read something quite like Mary Rose before. I wanted to know more about this island. I wanted to know more about what happened to Mary Rose in those missing 20 days. Outside of some long scenes back at the Morland house where the father had, what I’d consider to be, pointless scenes with a guy named Mr. Amy (the only scenes in the movie, coincidentally, that didn’t contain suspense), I was tearing through the pages to see what would happen next.

(Spoiler) Unfortunately, what was aiming to become a double worth-the-read or higher downgraded into a ‘worth the read’ because of an unsatisfying ending. When Mary comes back from her 20 year absence, Hitchcock and Pressman believe they’re building their most suspenseful scene yet, with Mary being shrouded in shadow at all times on her way home. It’s quite obvious to us what’s happened (she hasn’t aged), so when that’s revealed to be “it,” we’re a little disappointed. I wanted more. I wanted to know what happened during that first abduction and I wanted to know where the heck she was for those 20 years. Playing the ambiguous card is an interesting choice, but I think the audience wants answers in a story like this.

However, this script is pretty darn good and definitely worth the read, if only for studying how Hitchcock uses suspense. Check it out. It’s in your newsletter. Now what did you guys think?

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

What I learned: If you’re going to write a long scene, integrate some element of suspense into it so we stay invested. Just about the only reason all these long dialogue scenes work is because we’re focused on some unanswered question that we must keep reading to find the answer to.