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.

Almost all of my “10 Lessons You Can Learn From” posts have dealt with classic, or at the very least, well-respected films. I’m not sure I’d put The Avengers on that list. It was a fun movie. But like a lot of summer movies, it was meant to be viewed once on a Saturday night with a theater full of teenagers. I don’t believe it’s meant to go toe-to-toe with any “respected” film. Having said that, I’m always breaking down films that are critically loved, with the film’s commercial success being secondary. As a commenter brought up the other day, “Why are you always knocking Transformers? It made a billion dollars worldwide. People saw it and enjoyed it.” It’s hard for me to quantify that statement. Yeah, people are going to see the movie, but they’re all 14 years old. I don’t know anyone over the age of 23 who actually enjoyed Transformers. But the commenter was right about one thing. SOMEONE is going to see these movies and enjoying them. So almost as a challenge, I thought it would be fun to look at the highest grossing movie of 2012 (by almost 200 million dollars) and see if we couldn’t extract 10 screenwriting tips from it – maybe figure out some screenwriting tips for the summer blockbuster writer. Here we go!

1) What’s your problem? – In most big budget movies, you want to introduce the problem in your story right away. Once you have a problem, you can begin introducing characters who are going to solve that problem. So here, that problem is the Tesseract. It opens up. Loki (the villain) comes through it. Now we got a problem.

2) Set-pieces are driven by URGENCY – Whenever you write a big action set-piece, you have to incorporate urgency in some way – preferably via a ticking time bomb. So here, after Loki arrives, the Tesseract’s lack of stability causes the building to start imploding, giving them only 2 minutes to get out. This makes the impending chase of Loki even more intense, as they must also escape the area before they’re destroyed along with it.

3) Refocus your script after set-pieces – Set pieces are fun and wild and crazy. But a mistake I find a lot of amateur writers making is that AFTER their set-piece, they don’t re-orient the reader. Remember, we were just in action mode. Enjoying explosions. Enjoying super-heroes fighting. Now that that’s over, we need to be re-briefed on our character goals. So immediately after that first set-piece in Avengers, Nick Fury gets on the phone and says, “The Tesseract’s been stolen by a hostile force. Everybody we know, I want them after it.” The goal has been established. We now know what we’re doing. This may SEEM obvious, but rarely do I see the new writer do it. They often assume you know what the goal is or, in drastic cases, don’t establish a goal at all.

4) Don’t get bogged down in exposition – You should always try to limit your exposition. That’s because exposition is boring. No matter how you dress it up, we’ll be bored by it. If there’s one major fault in The Avengers, it’s that once we get to the airship, we get about six or seven scenes of exposition and discussion. The film slows to a crawl as a result. Remember that your primary focus in any screenplay is to keep the story moving. Don’t get bogged down in exposition. One – or in drastic cases a maximum of two – scenes is enough.

5) Capture your villain – It’s hard to maintain a single unchanged plotline for an entire screenplay. If something’s unchanged for that long, there’s a good chance we’ll get bored with it. To keep things fresh, you want to “interrupt” that plotline with something unexpected. A perfect example is here with Loki. The plot COULD HAVE HAD the Avengers trying to find and destroy Loki the entire time. But Whedon switches things up by having us actually CAPTURE Loki, which adds a fresh new dynamic to the story. In general, you’re always looking to keep things fresh in your scripts, so you want to make unexpected choices whenever possible.

6) Once again, the best dialogue often results from conflict – Some of the best dialogue in Avengers is when Stark is battling it out with Captain America. Why? Because they’re on completely opposite ends of the personality spectrum. Stark is carefree and does whatever he wants. Captain America is uptight and follows orders. If you put any characters like that in a room together, the dialogue’s probably going to be good, so it’s not surprising it works here. Contrast this with the dialogue between Banner and Stark, who both respect each other. It’s not bad, but it’s not nearly as alive and fun as when Stark and Captain America talk.

7) If two characters don’t get along or don’t like each other, put them around each other a lot! – This is an extension of the last tip, and an important one. If you have two characters who don’t like each other, keep them around each other as much as possible. Make them work together! Note that when the airship loses an engine, Whedon doesn’t have Stark and Banner work on it together (they like each other!). He has Stark and Captain America work on it together.

8) Fights and battles must have high stakes or we won’t care – A lot of people complained that the Thor Iron Man fight in the forest was pointless, just an excuse to have Iron Man fight Thor. To a certain extent this was true. I mean, Thor did want to take Loki back to be tried on his planet and Iron Man refused to allow that unless Loki gave them the Tesseract. So there was SOME motivation to the fight. But let’s face it. It was weak. We didn’t really feel the stakes of the fight. So it was nice eye candy, but left us feeling empty. To fix this, always keep the stakes high in every fight/battle. In The Matrix, when Neo fights Smith in the subway, we know that if Smith kills him, the world is doomed. Neo is THE ONE, the only hope mankind has. So the impact of that fight hits us much harder and we’re therefore way more invested.

9) Set-pieces are about BUILDING – You don’t want to throw the kitchen sink at your characters right away during a set-piece. You want to slowly build it up. The set piece should feel like things are getting worse and worse for your heroes at every turn. So in that final battle in Avengers, where the portal opens up and the aliens arrive, first the small guys on speeders show up. When they’re handled, the big worm thing shows up. When they defeat that, MULTIPLE worms show up. There’s something about struggling to defeat something only to see it get much worse that really pulls an audience in.

10) Yup, even big summer movies (minus Transformers) have character arcs – Not everyone has to arc, but a couple of your characters should. Here, Stark needs to learn to buy into the team as opposed to only care about himself. Bruce Banner must learn to embrace his dark side instead of focusing his entire life on avoiding it. When these characters learn to overcome these issues, that’s how the Avengers win in the end.

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

Warm Bodies flips the zombie genre upside-down. But is it enough? Or is this organ-centric horror-comedy another screenplay emperor without any clothes?

Genre: Horror Comedy
Premise: (from IMDB) After R (a highly unusual zombie) saves Julie from an attack, the two form a relationship that sets in motion a sequence of events that might transform the entire lifeless world.
About: Writer-director Jonathan Levine broke onto the scene with his 2008 film, “The Wackness,” which chronicled life in the 90s for a young New York drug dealer and won that year’s Sundance Audience Award. He followed that up by directing the Seth Rogan Joseph Gordon Levitt cancer comedy, 50/50. Itching to get back into the writing game, he adapted Warm Bodies for his third film, a novel Isaac Marion wrote. Mr. Marion self-published 3 novels before getting “officially” published with Warm Bodies. So far, Warm Bodies has grossed 60 million domestically.
Writer: Jonathan Levine (based on the novel by Isaac Marion)
Details: 120 pages (undated)

So last night we celebrated a couple dozen of the best movies of 2012. What better way to follow that up than to review the screenplay for… Warm Bodies? Okay okay. That was a cheap shot. The truth is, I wanted to review this movie this week but chose Dark Skies instead and, well, that turned out to be a mistake. Dark Skies could’ve best been summarized this way: Pointless cereal box structure found in kitchen, husband in yard with his mouth open, conspiracy theorist dude talks about alien stuff that would be considered dated during The X-Files run. Ending that makes zero sense because the writer wrote himself into a corner.

There wasn’t enough meat there for a review so I decided to read Warm Bodies instead, as I heard it was actually good. Was it? Well, it was certainly better than Dark Skies. Although that’s kind of like saying you can sing better than One Direction. Not exactly a huge accomplishment.

But what this script does right (which I tell all of you to do) is it takes an established genre and it adds a new spin to it. In this zombie flick, we’re rooting FOR the zombie. How many zombie movies have we watched where our humans are fending off numerous flesh-eaters and we’re hoping against all hope that they get away? Well here, we’re thinking, “Our zombie protagonist needs to eat or he’ll starve! I hope he catches up with one of those humans and makes a meal out of him!”

I also liked that Levine added some heart to his screenplay. Literally! This movie is about zombies turning BACK into humans when they start “feeling” which means their hearts start working again. Unfortunately, it’s not very clear how this whole process works. But I’ll get into that in a sec. First, let’s find out what Warm Bodies was about.

Warm Bodies follows 20-somethng “R.” Yes, that’s our hero’s name. “R.” “R” is “R” because he’s a zombie and zombies can’t say anything. They can only mumble out sounds. And when you ask R anything, he answers “Rrrrrrr.” So naturally, his name is “R.”

Luckily for us, R is quite articulate in voice over, which is how he communicates with us. R informs us that some years back, the plague hit, and now the world’s been overrun by his kind, zombies. The thing is, R is a little different. He can think, which the others aren’t really able to do. And he can talk! Well, not “talk” talk, but he can say a few words. And that’s pretty impressive when you’re undead.

R lives in an airport with the rest of his brethren. In fact, he even has his own 747. Not bad. But his life is going to get a lot worse if he doesn’t eat human flesh soon because the next step down from a zombie if a “Boney,” and you don’t want to turn into one of those guys. In the zombie food chain, you look a lot better if you still have your flesh on you, however gray and mangled that flesh may be.

So a bunch of zombies head into the city due to the munchies, and it’s there where R meets Julie, a human. For some odd reason, R doesn’t want to eat Julie. He wants to help her! So he pulls her away from the zombies and the boneys and takes her home, back to his 747! She’s a little confused by the fact that a zombie won’t eat her, but after some terrific conversation (that’s a wee-bit one-sided), she starts to like R.

But more importantly, she notices he’s getting better. He’s actually becoming more human as the days go by. It’s not enough to make her want to set up camp at Air Zombie for the next few years, but when she goes back home (to a stadium where all the humans are staying) she tries to convince her ditzy friend and gung-ho father that maybe the plague is turning.

In the meantime, R gets wind that a huge group of boneys are heading for the stadium to take out the remaining humans. So he grabs his best friend “M” and sets off to get there first so he can save his new long-distance girlfriend, Julie. Of course he’ll have to deal with a lot worse than that when he gets there, as Julie’s father is hell bent on killing anything that even winks like a zombie.

Warm Bodies reminded me in a lot of ways of The Wackness, even though it’s been five years since I’ve seen that film. There was a lot going on on the surface of “Wackness” but very little actual depth. It was like a celebration of the 90s with two sorta interesting characters and that was it.

While Warm Bodies flips the script and makes the zombies the good guys, it’s still basically a celebration of the zombie genre following two sorta interesting characters and that was it. I know you can’t get too deep when one of your characters can’t even talk, but I found the relationship between R and Julie to be borderline boring. Levine added a cool little thing where Julie didn’t know that R had killed her ex-boyfriend (providing some nice dramatic irony during their conversations). But it was so sloppily written (I actually thought HE was Julie’s boyfriend for a while) that I didn’t figure it out until way too late in the script.

And really, there isn’t much of a plot at all when you think about it. Zombie takes girl. Girl goes back home. We hear boneys are going to attack. So we head to girl’s home to warn her. It’s enough to keep things moving along, but just barely. Truthfully, it felt like one of those scripts that was just thought up on the fly with no outlining. Kind of like, “Hmm, he’s let the girl go back home. But there’s still 50 pages left. What now? Uhhhhh, what if the boneys were going to attack her home and he had to warn her! Yeah!” If you’re writing your script like this, where you’re thinking up solutions and coming up with major story directions on the fly, it’s going to FEEL like you’re coming up with major story directions on the fly!

I will give Levine credit though. He knew that if he had a zombie main character with a 5 word vocabulary, we probably wouldn’t relate to him very well. So he has R dishing out voice over the whole script, telling us what he’s thinking, which I thought was a nice contrast. Remember, while voice over is hard to get right, it’s one of the easiest ways to create a connection between the audience and the character. Once we have someone speaking directly to us, no matter who it is, we feel a connection with them, and that definitely helped here.

But yeah, when it was all said and done, this was a really thin zombie story that thought its fresh take on the genre would give it enough juice to turn it into the next Zombieland. Unfortunately, that didn’t happen. It has its moments. But Warm Bodies typically finds itself in cold territory.

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

What I learned: When you’re writing flashbacks, it’s important that the reader KNOW they’re in a flashback. I’ve seen too many writers not make their flashbacks clear enough, leading to a lot of confusion. In my opinion, the best way to inform the reader that a flashback has begun is to include it at the end of a slugline and BOLD it. Like so…

INT. VACANT HOSPITAL – FLASHBACK

Welcome to Amateur Offerings Weekend!

This is your chance to discuss the week’s amateur scripts, offered originally in the Scriptshadow newsletter. The goal for this discussion is to find out which script(s) is the best candidate for a future Amateur Friday review.

Below are the script loglines and links so you can read them for yourself in order to join in on the festivities! Want to receive the scripts early? Head over to the Contact page, e-mail us, and “Opt In” to the newsletter.

Happy reading!

TITLE: GIDEON
LOGLINE: In the Mid-Twentieth Century a mysterious boy with Christ-like healing powers must bring together a racially charged town before the vindictive Mayor’s son murders him.
WHY YOU SHOULD READ (from writer): It just won the $25,000.00 GRAND PRIZE at KairosPrize Screenplay Competition sponsored by www.movieguide.org.

TITLE: Fool
GENRE: Comedy
LOGLINE: Showbusiness today might be a snake-pit of jealousy and backstabbing, but once upon a time, it wasn’t even that nice.
WHY YOU SHOULD READ (from writer): “I’m an WGA Award-winning comedy writer. You should read my script because you recently said: ‘Ahhhhh! Why aren’t there any good comedy specs anymore!’ Obviously I’m not the most reliable source to decide if my own script is funny or not, but it won ‘Screenplay Of The Month’ at Talentville.com, so it must have something going for it.”

TITLE: 0/1 (”Hyper Zero, Super One”)
GENRE: science-fiction
LOGLINE: While refining his relationship with a groundbreaking home-made A.I. prototype, a reclusive young hacker falls in love with an inquisitive girl next door.

TITLE: FRAGMENT
GENRE: Psychological Thriller
LOGLINE: A high-school senior tries to solve his sister’s murder aided by the apparition of a ten-year-old boy.

TITLE : Super Robbers
GENRE: Action Adventure, Family Drama
LOGLINE: A returning war veteran struggles to make peace with
his family—who happen to be a group of super-powered thieves.

Today’s script made some noise in the Scriptshadow Newsletter, but does it pass the Carson Screenplay SAT? Read on to find out.

Amateur Friday Submission Process: To submit your script for an Amateur Review, send in a PDF of your script, a PDF of the first ten pages 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: Horror
Premise: (from writer) A mysterious drifter with a dark past stumbles into a small town where he rents a room in the attic of a strange couple’s home, but he may not be alone up there.
About: Today’s amateur script got the best response from the amateur script entries in last week’s Scriptshadow Newsletter. To be a part of the Scriptshadow Newsletter, contact me through the site and “opt in” to the newsletter at the bottom the submission box.
Writer: Chris Rodgers
Details: 92 pages

I’ve read scripts like this before. Scripts that are so sparse, you’re almost searching for the words between the words, like they may have gotten lost in the transfer from the writer’s computer to yours. Emma is better than most scripts that come through the Amateur Friday pipeline, but I don’t know if it’s at “worth the read” status. It’s got too many quirks. The voice contains an extra dose of bizarre. People don’t speak like real people. At times I almost thought this thing could be animated, its cartoonish qualities shined through so aggressively.

And yet through it all, I had to keep reading. I said this to Miss Scriptshadow at one point: “I don’t know if I like this script. But I sure as hell want to find out what happens.” Have you ever read scripts like that before? Where finishing them basically becomes a grudge match? I don’t mean to devalue Rodgers’ script. He’s got a funky interesting style to him. But Emma is one of those scripts you finish with a startled look on your face.  Like you’ve just woken up in a room you don’t recognize.

20-something Johnny has scoot-dazzled his way into a small town in the middle of nowhere. This town’s so sparse you can walk into a restaurant and not find a single patron. Except for today that is. Because Johnny’s our single patron, and it’s here where he meets short-order cook Darrell, a local idiot with an asshole older brother and a hypochondriac mother. After some small talk, Darrell tells Johnny that if he’s looking for a place to stay, he should check out Chuck and Mary’s place. They usually rent rooms out.

So away Johnny goes where he meets 30-something Chuck, who’s plagued with burns all over his body, and 50-somethng Mary, who can’t stop yelling at Chuck about whatever the hell comes to mind. They seem like a strange couple, but not half as strange as the place they live in. That’s because the place they live in is HAUNTED!

Johnny figures this out early on when he sees the ghost of a girl named “Emma” sneaking around. A little research reveals that Emma used to be a model and was best friends with Mary. But then Emma went off to California to pursue her modeling career and disappeared. She now haunts this house for some reason. Even Chuck admits to seeing her.

These two aren’t the only ones with some backstory. It turns out our buddy Johnny has escaped a mental institution, making these Emma spottings suspect. Is he really seeing her, or is he just having an episode? And what about these rumors that Chuck’s hiding a huge stash of millions in the house? Could that be Johnny’s ticket to freedom for the rest of his life? And how far will he go to get that freedom? These are the haunting questions Emma asks.

Emma’s not one of those scripts you can just synopsize. You kind of have to read it to understand it. Take the first dialogue exchange in the script for example. It sets the tone for everything you’re about to read. Johnny’s just walked into the diner where he meets Darrell.  J: “Um, can I just have a cheeseburger combo with a Coke?” D: “I’m sorry, we don’t have combos.” “Oh. Well, can I get a cheeseburger, a medium French fry, and make the drink a large.” “What kind of drink sir?” “Coke.” “Is Pepsi O.K.?” “Pepsi?” Darrell nods. “Come on. I just walked—never mind, give me a root beer.” “Good choice, sir.” “You don’t have to call me sir.” “Okay.” “Why would you say that root beer is a good choice? What makes root beer so great?” “I just like it.” “Oh.” “That will be four dollars and twelve cents.”

I don’t know about you but that dialogue feels awkward. And not purposefully awkward. Just awkward. The stuff about the root beer at the end is random. It doesn’t seem to have a point. And the early Pepsi challenge takes up a lot of time and doesn’t have a payoff. When you’re exchanging dialogue, especially early on when we don’t know your characters yet, you want to use that dialogue to teach us about your characters.

Take The Equalizer, which I review in this week’s newsletter (which you can sign up for here). In one of the early scenes, the main character is talking to a woman at the diner (so a similar location). The conversation centers around the book our hero is reading (The Old Man And The Sea). This tells us a little about our character. He reads old books. Which leads to the question: WHY does he read old books? We want to find out so we keep reading. The point is, we’re learning about the character through his exchange with someone else. I’m not sure we learn anything about these two characters in this conversation.

I think that’s something a lot of young writers don’t know. When you write dialogue, you’re either trying to reveal story or reveal character. It may seem to the audience that the conversation is casual. But what they don’t know is that you’re secretly passing along key information to them through the characters’ “casual” exchange.

Another thing that bothered me here were the flashbacks. I wasn’t sure what the point of them was. They pretty much kept telling us the same thing over and over again – that Johnny was in the nuthouse. That meant each subsequent flashback was extraneous. It was information I already knew. If there was an evolving storyline to these flashbacks, a mystery we wanted answered (aka, Johnny wakes up in a cell with a stabbed cell mate – and each scene gets us closer to why that happened), I would’ve been fine with them. But they didn’t evolve, leaving me to wonder what their purpose was.

With those things said, there were some interesting things going on in Emma. I thought some of the characters were pretty well drawn. Well-drawn characters typically evolve from well thought-through backstories. And this whole backstory where Chuck was burned during his electrician job and won a multi-million dollar lawsuit against his company – that was admirably constructed.

I also thought the mystery behind Emma was strong. How Johnny would see her with plastic wrapped around her face and body. That was creepy. And while the reveal for how she ended up that way wasn’t perfect, it wasn’t bad either.

Here’s where we run into a problem though. You have a haunted house script titled, “Emma,” and it really isn’t about Emma. It seems to be more about Johnny running away and hiding in this town. The Emma storyline is more of a subplot. If I were Chris, I’d give Emma a much bigger role. This movie has to be about her. I’d also create more of a conspiracy around her death. Possibly expand the amount of people inside the town who know what happened, and then place Johnny around more of those people. I didn’t like how we basically had two locations in the movie – Chuck and Mary’s house and the diner. It made the script feel too small. Let’s explore this town more, get to know more people, and this will start to feel like a movie.

I wouldn’t tell someone NOT to read this script but I probably wouldn’t go around recommending it either. I will say this though. I’d read Chris’ next script for sure. I feel like he’s still learning the craft and will continue to get better. I’d focus on adding more layers to his future stories. This one felt TOO simple. With a little more town exploration – bringing in a few more characters – he might’ve struck gold. I wish him luck.  His voice is unique enough to make me think he’s got a future.

Script link: Emma

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

What I learned: Treat character reveals like commercial breaks. When you’re writing mysterious protagonists, you want to give a little info about them in each scene, but also tease a mystery about them for later. If there continue to be mysteries about our hero, we’ll want to keep reading to find out what they are. So in The Equalizer, via that scene I mentioned above, we give the audience a little piece of the protagonist by revealing that he reads old books, but we don’t tell the audience WHY he reads those books yet. We “cut to commercial” and reveal that info later. If you answer all the little mysteries about your character right away, why the hell would we keep reading?