Short story sale! They’re saying this is the next Gone Girl.

Genre: Mystery/Thriller (Short Story)
Premise: A young woman decides to impersonate a girl who went missing ten years ago, only to walk into a family that knows a lot more about the disappearance than they’re letting on.
About: Make sure to respond to Hollywood people who want to talk to you! If Joe Cote had gone with his first instinct, he would’ve ignored the opportunity that led to a short story sale and now Sydney Sweeney signing on to star in an adaptation of his Reddit story. Here’s some insight from a Daily Mail article: “The teacher [Cote] had been more than a little skeptical when he saw a Reddit message last spring from an alleged LA talent manager about a short story he’d posted four years earlier. He ignored that first query about ‘I pretended to be a missing girl,’ which he’d written in November 2020 in the apartment he shared with his cousin outside of Boston. But the manager followed up. ‘I remember checking with my girlfriend saying, “All right, well, I guess as long as I don’t give him too much personal information or give him my credit card information, I think I could maybe reply,”’ Cote said.
Writer: Joe Cote
Details: about 4000 words

Viral short story. Surprise Hollywood sale. Sydney Sweeney. Please let those three presents be under my tree this Christmas. For Joe Cote, however, Christmas has arrived.

There are a lot of fun details about this sale but one of the biggest is that it took four years for someone in Hollywood to find the story and want to do something with it. That’s right. Joe Cote posted this short story in 2020. It only recently got noticed by someone of significance. Crazy!

Despite the waiting, however, it’s another reminder that you can’t get success unless you put your stuff out there. And the more places you put it out there, the better the chances are of someone seeing it. I’ve seen too many writers who are precious about their material and you just can’t be that way. YOU CAN’T! So get your stuff out there. Start by submitting to Scene Showdown, which happens THIS WEEK.

What: Scene Showdown
Rules: Scene must be 5 pages or less
When: Friday, March 28
Deadline: Thursday, March 27, 10pm Pacific Time
Submit: Script title, Genre, 50 words setting up the scene (optional), pdf of the scene
Where: carsonreeves3@gmail.com

Our story begins in the third person, discussing the disappearance of Mikayla Murray from her Indiana home 10 years ago, when she was 18 years old. She was supposed to hang out with her young brother, James, that night but instead, drove off in her car and never returned.

The operating thesis had her college boyfriend involved somehow but nobody could prove it. After hashing out all backstory details in third person, the writer of the story then says, “She was about to return home after more than a decade. Because I’m Mikayla Murray, and I ran away that night to start a new life.”

It’s a little confusing at first. “Wait, you’re Mikayla, the missing girl?” No, as it turns out. She’s someone who’s about to impersonate Mikayla. Some of you may be making fun of me since the title is literally, “I pretended to be a missing girl so I could rob her family.” But I didn’t read that title going into this cause I wanted to experience the story fresh.

Anyways, Fake Mikayla, who we’re now experiencing in the first person (a distinctive difference from screenwriting, which is always in the third person), explains that she’s a homeless drifter who looks enough like Mikayla that she thinks she can fool the family long enough to get in, rob them, and then get out.

Mikayla shows up at “her family’s” doorstep and the mom immediately bursts into tears. As does the father. They can’t believe it’s true. It looks like Fake Mikayla’s plan is working! That is, until, she gets upstairs, alone, with James, her younger brother who’s now 17. Spoilers follow.

James starts yelling at her. You aren’t effing Mikayla! How do you know that, she replies. Because Mikayla is buried over there – he points outside to a gazebo in the back yard. And their dad put her there! Mikayla doesn’t have time to process this. James is grabbing his things and saying they need to leave NOW. Dad is going to kill them!

They jump out the back window and start running. The dad starts shooting at them. Fake Mikayla finds cover behind the gazebo and uses her lighter to light it on fire (I guess to distract the dad??). James starts freaking out. “WHY WOULD YOU DO THAT!?” But Fake Mikayla doesn’t stick around to argue. She’s GONE GIRL.

Cut to several days later and we get an actual newspaper article explaining that the fire department was called to put out a fire and found the real Mikayla in a small room underneath the gazebo. Oh, and one other small detail. SHE WAS STILL ALIVE before the fire started. Duh-duh-duhhhhhhh.

A lot of writers come to me asking how to write a short story that Hollywood wants. Specifically, how long (short) should it be? The sweet spot seems to be between 4000-5000 words or, roughly, one fourth of a screenplay.

But that’s just a technical spec. The real struggle comes in determining the time frame of the story. How long should the story be in real life days?

Unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be a lot of consistency to that answer. My instinct is that you want a contained portion of time because that’s where you have the most control over the drama. The more you spread things out (over days, months, years) the more the story becomes a ‘montage’ rather than an actual story.

But then you look at another recent short story sale, The Third Parent, and that one spans five years, pausing in time, occasionally, to focus on a particularly gnarly experience with the story’s monster.

I will say this – unique scary monsters and twist endings appear to be good starting points if you want to sell anything to Hollywood, in screenplays or short stories.

Now, as for this particular story, was it any good? I’d say that, overall, yes, it was solid. The twist is fun. And I liked that we didn’t waste any time once she arrived at the house going through this whole “re-initiation” experience. You kinda have to do that sort of thing in the movie version of this. But when you’re trying to get people to turn the page, you gotta keep the story moving. And Cote does. We get RIGHT INTO IT with the brother telling her that they know she’s not Mikayla.

But there are all these little niggles that get in the way of this being much better. Spoilers abound. The dad is the bad guy here. But the writer never sets him up once. I’ll see writers do this thing where, especially with a short story, they don’t want to create any obvious suspects. With so few pages, they don’t want to risk the smart reader sussing things out.

But guess what? That’s your job as a mystery writer – to set up the eventual bad guy without the reader catching on. So for the dad to be his daughter’s captor came out of nowhere.

Also, we’re not clear at first WHY the dad did what he did. Questions are raised in the reddit thread and Joe Cote (acting as if this is a real-life story via /nosleep rules) explains that the dad had been terrified of his daughter running off with this college dude and no longer having control over her life – so he locked her in this secret backyard underground dungeon room to keep her here.

I mean…. That makes sense for six months. Maybe even a year. But ten years???? She’s 28 now and he’s still afraid to let her go out and live her life? I’m not saying that that scenario is impossible to buy into. But it’s such a stretch that it needs more explanation on the dad’s end. The dad has to be batshit crazy and we need to see that so that this ending makes sense.

Well, we know why FROM A STORY PERSPECTIVE. We need the twist ending of Real Mikayla being burned alive underneath the gazebo. But you can’t just make things happen in your story cause you want them to happen. THEY HAVE TO MAKE SENSE. So I would’ve liked a better explanation for that decision there.

Despite all this, I understand why this sold. It’s a cheap production with a marketable component (cold case) and a twist ending. Those SELL. They sell because they’re cheap to make and easy to market.

Read the short story yourself here!

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

What I learned: You have to get your stuff out there! Think about it. Joe Cote could’ve easily decided, “Ehh, what’s the point? No one’s going to read it or care,” and not posted this. If he had done that, there’d be no sale. No movie. No future romance with Sydney Sweeney. It’s easy to not get your stuff out there. But there is literally zero upside to doing so. I want one of you guys to have the next big fun script/story sale. So let’s go!

So, this Friday was the much buzzed-about Severance finale. Word on the street was that it was better than even the beloved first season finale. Well, I binged the last three episodes and have, unfortunately, decided to terminate my show innie and no longer show up at the Severance offices.

There are a couple of reasons why, both screenwriting related. The first is the lack of variation in the tone of the show. It is sad slow scene after sad slow scene after sad slow scene after sad slow scene. Sure, the finale had a lot of craziness. But the three episodes before that made me want to commit show suicide with how slow and depressing they were.

Severance initially struck the perfect balance between ‘serious’ and ‘fun’ in that first season cause it had Dylan, who always provided levity. And it had this fun mystery component to it – a ragtag group of offbeat anti-heroes try to find a way out of a dungeon. But this new season was too slow and sad for my taste. The field trip episode and the “Harmony goes back to her hometown” episode destroyed the series for me. I only watched the last couple of episodes because I heard people saying the finale was so great.

The other reason the show isn’t for me is because it’s too intelligent. It’s rare that anyone says that these days. The Hollywood system seems to be designed to make sure stupidity reigns. But maybe this is why Apple TV is losing a billion dollars a year. Cause they don’t care about following the rules.

I don’t always understand what’s going on in the series or what’s at stake or what the rules are or what the heroes are trying to accomplish, and it takes away from my enjoyment. (Spoiler) In the last episode, I was struggling to understand which Mark was which and why he wanted one girl over the other and which of those versions wanted which of those girls, since every character had two versions of themselves (I think his wife actually had 26 versions of herself) that were constantly switching back and forth. Trying to figure out what was happening began to feel like work rather than fun.

By the way, I don’t begrudge anyone who loves this show. I admire how unique it is. I admire how many creative risks they take. But it’s too sad and too complex for me. That’s all. So say goodbye to Severed Carson. DING!

Back to Outie Carson!!!

And you know what Outie Carson loves? He looooovvveeeees White Lotus.

This night’s episode may as well have been titled “The Aftermath.” The entire episode focuses on the aftermath of the big party last night. For the three women friends, they’re dealing with Jacyln secretly sleeping with Valentin (despite Jaclyn encouraging Laurie to hook up with him all night). For poor Saxon, he’s got to deal with the drunken memory of hooking up with his brother – yikes. For Belinda, she finally slept with fellow masseuse, Pornchai. And Timothy, the father, was seconds away from committing suicide last night.

From a dramatic standpoint within the context of screenwriting, the aftermath is rarely interesting. Why? Because stories fly the highest when characters are going after things and being active. In the aftermath, characters are merely dealing with the memories of being active. And that can never be as compelling as the actual active stuff. Usually.

I say “usually” because there was a little movie called The Hangover built entirely around the aftermath. And I’m pretty sure that movie did okay. But note how it achieved that feat. It placed a ticking time bomb on the story (missing groom 24 hours before the wedding) that forced the characters to be active once again.

You can feel the problems present in this episode due to its dependence on the aftermath format. There’s a laziness to the scenes – a quiet slow pace (a lot of lying around) that doesn’t inspire a ton of plot movement.

The one plot development the show had was Piper’s visit to the Buddhist temple, where she’s hoping to study next year. But first she has to convince her parents, who will come along for the ride and meet the head monk. So, at least here, we have some activity. We have activity because we have a goal – Piper needs her parents to approve of the temple so they’ll send her here.

But let’s be honest. This is probably the weakest storyline in the series. So we don’t care that much. It’s a good reminder that the mechanics of storytelling can only do so much for you. You still have to create storylines we care about. And those boil down to inspired creative decisions, which Mike White is usually great at. But when you’re coming up with a dozen character storylines, some are, naturally, going to end up at the bottom.

What I did like about this storyline, though, was that the monk turned out to be helpful. We’ve been building up to this moment for six episodes and most writers probably would’ve made Piper’s meeting with the monk a disappointment. Maybe make him an asshole, or not care about her, or worse. Mike White does the unexpected, though, and has the monk be supportive, helpful, and even reenergize the dad.

The more I think about this episode, the stranger I find the decision behind episode five to be. Cause Mike White basically creates a mini-climax to the show. A lot happened last week. Which requires him to waste this entire sixth episode on rebooting everybody. I feel like there was a better way to do that. One way would’ve been to make the big party episode 4 instead. Cause that would’ve been midway through the season and a good “midpoint” plot marker. By making it episode 5, it throws the last three episodes out of balance.

There are two other lightweight attempts at adding some activity to the episode. The first is security guard Gaitok needing to get the gun back from Timothy, who covertly stole it a couple of days ago. And the second is Rick’s (Walton Goggins) Beijing trip where he’s attempting to orchestrate the murder of the man who killed his father.

In regards to Gaitok’s storyline, something about it isn’t revving on all cylinders. Technically, when I break it down, the stakes are high. Gaitok needs to retrieve the gun before his boss finds out because if his boss finds out, he’ll surely be fired. And, if he’s fired, there’s no way love-of-his-life, Mook, will go out with him.

And yet it never feels like he’s truly in danger of anything bad happening to him. There’s something missing from that storyline that makes the stakes feel low. One possibility is the “connect-the-dots” approach. This is when you build stakes around a series of dots that the reader must connect in order to understand the severity of the situation. For example: Joe has to let his daughter go to a concert (dot 1) so that he’s in good standing with her (dot 2), because she’s friends with another girl at school (dot 3) whose father happens to be the CEO of a compay Joe wants to work for (dot 4) that’s having an event he wants to be invited to (dot 5), etc. At a certain point, we lose interest in keeping track of the stakes. It’s always better if the stakes are upfront and clear.

As for Rick’s murder plan, that storyline actually has some potential but holy Moses is it developing slowly. Wow is that storyline moving at a snail’s pace.

All in all, it’s a tough episode for my idol, Mike White. He kind of painted himself in a corner, making his job difficult. But in spite of all this, I still think it was a solid episode. I’m fascinated by Saxson’s character and watching him realize what he did last night and how he’s going to mentally deal with that moving forward in his life.

There were also little moments I enjoyed, such as wife Victoria telling Timothy that if they ever lost all their money, she wouldn’t want to live. This is classic Screenwriting 201 stuff here, with dramatic irony driving the exchange. We know what Victoria doesn’t know yet. Which is that they *have* lost all their money. So seeing Patrick realize the effect this realization is going to have on his wife is fun stuff.

Look, Seasons 1 and 2 of The White Lotus are perfect television. I realized that could not be replicated a third time. But it’s still good. I care about a lot of these people and I’m excited to see how this ends.

Two episodes left!

By the way, everyone, THE SCENE SHOWDOWN IS THIS WEEK! You have until Thursday to get your scenes in. Here are the submission details.

What: Scene Showdown
Rules: Scene must be 5 pages or less
When: Friday, March 28
Deadline: Thursday, March 27, 10pm Pacific Time
Submit: Script title, Genre, 50 words setting up the scene (optional), pdf of the scene
Where: carsonreeves3@gmail.com

We’re getting close.

Next week is Scene Showdown!

What: Scene Showdown
Rules: Scene must be 5 pages or less
When: Friday, March 28
Deadline: Thursday, March 27, 10pm Pacific Time
Submit: Script title, Genre, 50 words setting up the scene (optional), pdf of the scene
Where: carsonreeves3@gmail.com

So I wanted to give you one last article to beef up your scene-writing skills. And the concept we’re going to tackle today is something called “The Scene Soundboard.”

I’m going to be upfront with you—I’m not an expert on soundboards by any stretch. However, I do understand that audio engineers work with these giant mixing boards packed with sliders, knobs, and controls. By adjusting specific faders or tweaking certain dials, they can manipulate the audio output.

The same thing is true with scene writing. You have these knobs. And you can either dial them up or dial them down and, by doing so, you change the intensity of the scene.

In order to understand how to do this, you must first understand how 90% of scenes are constructed. You have a character who wants something in the scene then you have a character who stands in the way of them getting it.

That person may actively not want to give it to them, or they may just obliviously be in the way. For example, on the former, a husband may want to hang out with his buddies tonight. Meanwhile, his wife wants him to come to her boss’s dinner party. The hubby’s goal is to hang out with his friends and his wife is actively trying to prevent that.

As for the latter, imagine a bank robber scoping out a bank for weaknesses (his goal) that he wants to rob later. There may be a bank manager who strolls up and starts annoyingly asking him if he wants to open an account at the bank. The manager doesn’t know this guy is casing the joint, yet he’s still in the way of our bank robber achieving his goal.

By the way, note how each situation changes the dialogue. In the first, the conversation is straightforward. The married couple is *literally* debating whether he should get to hang out with his friends. The conflict in the second conversation, meanwhile, is happening below the surface. Neither character is talking about what the protagonist actually wants to do, which means much of the focus of the scene is being conveyed through subtext.

But anyway, that’s not what today’s article is about.

Today’s article is about understanding how to amp up any scene with basic scene structure (a person who wants something and a person who stands in the way). Getting back to our original analogy, I want you to imagine this giant mixing board. On that board are these KNOBS. You can dial these knobs up a little, a medium amount, or a lot, depending on how much you want to juice up the scene.

These four knobs are…

Stakes
Resistance
Urgency
Emotion

The number one way to amp up a scene is, without question, stakes. The more that’s on the line in the scene, the more compelling the scene is going to be. It’s simple math.

Let’s say we have a character who’s going to steal something. Remember that Netflix movie, Emily the Criminal? Let’s say Emily has to steal a random guy’s wallet for her new boss. We have our goal (steal the wallet) and we have our stakes (she’s doing something illegal, which is dangerous, and the mark could potentially catch her in the act, creating a problematic situation).

But let’s say we get on our Screenplay Soundboard and dial up the stakes knob. Instead of having her try and steal a guy’s wallet, she tries to steal… A CAR. Now we’ve got some REAL consequences. Grand theft auto is no joke. And guess what? That’s the scene they went with in the movie and it ended up being the best scene. Coincidence? I don’t think so. That’s the power of dialing up the stakes knob.

Next, let’s look at resistance. Resistance is simply upping the knob that has the opposing character in the scene getting in the way of our hero achieving his goal. The more you turn this knob up, the more intense the interaction gets, which creates more conflict.

Let me use one of my favorite scenes ever as an example – Jerry Lundegaard meeting with the two criminals he’s hiring to kidnap his wife in the film, Fargo. Just like any scene, there was a way to write this scene with the resistance knob turned down. You could’ve made the kidnappers annoyed, but eager to get their money and, therefore, cooperative.

But that’s not the route the Coen brothers went. Instead, they turned up that resistance knob to 11, making the two kidnappers highly resistant to help Jerry. Carl is determined to get Jerry to admit he fucked up about the meeting time, leaving them sitting there around for an hour, and Psycho Gaear intermittently stares at Jerry like he’s going to kill him. This creates all sorts of conflict and makes Jerry’s goal much more challenging.

Again, a lesser writer would’ve made the two kidnappers annoying, but ultimately agreeable, so he could get what he wanted out of the scene and move on to the next one. The good screenwriter ups that resistance knob and makes it very uncertain whether Jerry is going to achieve his goal or not.

Moving on, let’s check out the urgency knob. The urgency knob is effective but, if we’re being honest, it’s the most simplistic of the four knobs. By upping this knob, you condense the amount of time that the protagonist has to achieve his goal in the scene.

So, let’s say you have a scene where a wife has a last minute change of plans and needs her husband to take their kid to school tomorrow. So they’re getting ready for bed, the wife puts forth the problem and what she needs from the husband, but he’s got his own big day tomorrow so he’s resistant.

Could you get a good scene out of this scenario? Sure, an okay one. You’ve got a character who wants something. You’ve got a character who’s resistant, which is going to create conflict. The stakes are pretty low, though, and there isn’t an obvious way to dial that knob up. So what can you do? Well, that’s when you bring in the urgency knob.

Instead of setting the scene at night, before they go to bed, where the two have all the time in the world, rewrite the variables so the wife finds out about the problem 5 minutes before she leaves for work. In other words, set the scene in the morning, with 5 minutes before everybody has to leave, and now the URGENCY of the situation is going to dial up the intensity of the scene considerably.

Lastly, we have the emotional knob. Now, the emotional knob is the hardest knob to play with. It’s way way up there in the far corner for a reason. Because unless you know what you’re doing, it can hurt you just as much as it can help you.

The way that you use the emotional knob is to move away from the logistics of the scene (goal, resistance, stakes, urgency) and go internal. Ask yourself what’s going on INSIDE the characters that could up the intensity of the scene.

There was this old teen comedy from the late 90s called Can’t Hardly Wait. It followed a bunch of characters throughout the night at a giant house party. One of the main subplots had these two characters, Denise and Kenny, both of whom were looking forward to the party for their own reasons, get stuck in the bathroom together all night.

Now, the directive for this subplot was, obviously, having these two characters fall for each other over the course of the movie. But let’s say you’re writing that story (or just a scene from that story), and the scene is dull. Whenever you go back to them, there’s something lacking. Stakes aren’t really relevant here. Urgency is a non-factor cause you want them here the whole movie. And resistance isn’t really relevant either cause neither character has the active goal (they’re both stuck in the same situation – neither of them wanting to be here).

Well, this is where you want to reach up as far as you can to the right side of the board and play with the emotional knob. Which is exactly what the writers do. They create this backstory with the characters where they used to be really great friends in middle school and then, when they reached high school, the guy moved on and got a whole new group of friends, leaving the girl behind.

Note how turning up this dial ups the conflict considerably. Now there’s this unspoken thing that one of the characters did to the other lingering under everything that they say. Now we’ve got a storyline we can keep coming back to, one that consistently gives us strong scenes.

And there you go. This is how you use your Scene Soundboard to dial up the intensity of scenes. And remember, like I said, you control the degree to which you turn up the knob. You can dial any of these knobs up a little or, depending on how intensely you want the scene to play out, a lot.

Believe it or not, you don’t always want to dial a scene up to 100. If every scene were 100, then no scene would stand out. But what you don’t want to do is write scenes where all the knobs are set to 0. And I see that far too often. As in, when I read an amateur script, 75% of the scenes are set to 0 on all four knobs. That’s unacceptable.

But that’s often because the writer doesn’t know about these knobs or how much power they have to create great scenes with them. Now you know. So, I give you permission to unleash these powers on the scenes you write for the showdown and the scenes you write for all your scripts going forward!

Genre: Sci-Fi
Premise: In the not-too-distant future, where a new technology allows an individual to project their psyche into the body of another, thus creating a body-sharing gig economy, a financially-struggling married couple accepts a wealthy man’s proposal to use the wife’s body for a single night, but soon that decision causes their relationship and lives to spiral out of control with fatal consequences.
About: Today’s writer, Mark Townend, has been at this for at least 13 years! I know this because he signed up for the newsletter in 2012. He has one feature credit, a movie he co-wrote with Anthony Bourdain titled, Bone in the Throat, about a young ambitious chef who becomes mixed up with the East End London mob when he witnesses a murder. This script finished with 15 votes on last year’s Black List.
Writer: Mark Townend
Details: 99 pages

Rami Malek for Mike?

We’re going high concept today!

And I don’t want to waste any time getting into it.

So let’s go!

Mike and Jodie are a young struggling married couple drowning in debt. Jodie doesn’t seem to like Mike that much, bristling at even the smallest, most mundane, statements he makes.

One day Jodie’s ex-boyfriend, Sean, who’s become rich beyond anyone’s wildest dreams, calls Jodie and wants to have dinner. He’s going to bring his girlfriend, Shelby, and encourages Jodie to bring Mike.

After some reminiscing, Sean hits Jodie with a whopper. Despite looking great, he has Stage 4 cancer. He and Shelby have been discussing what he might want to do in his final days and he told her he would love to have one more night with Jodie. Shelby is game for this, with one stipulation.

You see, in this near future that the script takes place in, a new technology has swept the nation – Timeshare – where you can rent people’s bodies. Shelby would “rent” Jodie’s body for the night, allowing Sean to be with “Jodie” one more time, but it wouldn’t be cheating because Shelby would be inside that body. Oh, and Sean would pay them 7 million dollars for this rental.

Jodie feels a little weird about the whole thing but Mike gives her the okay and away we go. The very next day, Jodie spends a night with Sean and comes back home. Immediately, it’s clear that Mike is having second thoughts about the whole thing. He keeps imagining the two having sex. And when he catches Jodie sneaking out to see Sean for dinner, he really freaks out.

So Mike does a Timeshare of his own, jumping into some other man’s body so he can be at the restaurant and listen in on the date. It’s inconclusive what the two discuss but, at this point, Mike is in full-on meltdown mode.

Things descend rapidly from there, with Jodie visiting Sean at his highrise condo. But something happens during their meeting and Jodie *supposedly* shoves Sean out the window, where he plunges 40 stories and dies.

(spoiler) I say *supposedly* because we quickly find out that Mike pulled a timeshare and jumped into Jodie’s body and killed Sean. And now he’s letting Jodie take the fall for the murder! When Jodie realizes this, she puts one last plan together to take Mike down. But she’s going to need Shelby’s help to do it.

Katherine Waterson for Jodie?

The pillar that sets up your story – the very concept your script is based on – must be the strongest pillar of all. If it is weak, if will be unconvincing, and the entire script will far apart.

I didn’t believe this setup at all.

It doesn’t make sense. You have an old girlfriend. You’re dying. You want to have one last date (as well as sex) with her, so you tell your current girlfriend this and she agrees to it. Right there, I no longer believe in the story. I mean, come on.  There’s no way Shelby is agreeing to this. The fact that your boyfriend wants to bang the body of his ex would be a non-starter for 99% of the female population.

But even if you go along with that, Sean’s *request* doesn’t make sense either. It’s not like he’s paying 7 million dollars for the body of some gorgeous influencer – Olivia Dunne – who he’s never met before and just wants to have sex with her.

He’s specifically requesting his ex-girlfriend, a person he was (and may still be) in love with. Which means you don’t just want her body. You want HER. You want to spend time with that person again. So getting a Timeshare where you only get her body and not her mind makes no sense.

And those two things create such a shaky setup that anything you build on top of it crumbles.

The next big problem is Mike. I liked Mike’s character description (which I’ll get into in the ‘what I learned’ section) but Mike is an incredibly unrewarding protagonist to follow. He’s dumb. He’s thin-skinned. He’s selfish. We don’t like anything about this guy yet he’s our avatar throughout the story.

Although Jodie has her issues too, she’s much more sympathetic than Mike. So, what happens is, we see this whole story through Mike’s eyes, then when all the secrets are exposed about who was in whose body, we switch over to Jodie as the protagonist for the final act.

I don’t think you can do that. You ask us to watch the movie through one character the whole time, then you say, “Psyche! It’s actually this other person’s story.”

I just watched a movie, Companion, that dealt with this situation much better. Cause it had a similar problem. Due to people not being who they really were, we had to kind of jump around to different characters taking the lead. However, the writer never forgets that we need to see this story through Iris’s eyes. So even though we occasionally jump over to Josh’s POV, we always come back to Iris.

None of this is to say that the script doesn’t have potential. I actually like this idea. I like any idea where you’re playing with different personalities being in the same body. Because it’s high concept, which means the script gets more traction, actors get to play two or more different parts, which means heavier interest from talent, and it opens the door for all sorts of clever plot developments.

But that’s the trick, isn’t it? It’s got to be clever. If you write these types of scripts with a hammer, they get crushed. You have to use a scalpel and a steady hand the whole way through because the audience is expecting the movie to be smart.

For that reason, these types of scripts are the ones that need to be rewritten the most. Cause all of your first ideas (Mike was in Jodie’s body when she killed Sean!) are going to be ideas that the audience predicts. You need to use every draft to throw those first ideas out and go deeper. Go twistier. Go more unexpected!

Companion is a great example of this. It’s a really clever movie where all the reveals come right when they need to. You know this because we never see them coming. Meanwhile, Timeshare was way too clunky in its execution. There was never a plot beat I didn’t predict. And there was never a plot development where I thought, “That was deftly crafted.”

I mean we’re talking this needs 7 to 8 more drafts to fully unlock its potential. You need to go down some dead ends in a few drafts. Figure out what the story is really about in the next couple of drafts. And then bring it all together in the final three drafts. It may be worth that investment, though. This *does* feel like a movie to me. But it’s just not where it needs to be yet.

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

What I learned: On page 5, we get this description of Mike: “Mike likes the world to see him as a nice, enlightened guy. But he’s also frustrated, insecure, and desperately wants to “matter.” And sometimes those things get the better of him.”

I love this description because it doesn’t bury itself in writerly phrases and metaphors that hide who the character is. It just tells you who Mike is in simple clear terms. So many times, I get writers trying to be writers in their character descriptions and, in the process, describe some totally vague person. For example, someone else might write Mike’s description like this….

“Mike, a speeding train of a man with a ten-ton glob of frantic gray matter pulling at his nervous system 24/7 is always trying to be a man’s man when he’s more like a half-inflated basketball…” Like, what does that even mean?

Look, there are some writers who can put together the perfect metaphor to describe their character. But, if you’re not one of those writers, just TELL US WHO YOUR CHARACTER IS IN SIMPLE TERMS. I promise the script will benefit.

Did I just read… a good comedy script???

Genre: Comedy
Premise: An unemployed doofus who lives with his mother is asked to pose as a couples therapist for a sports agent to covertly manage the agent’s wife, only to stumble into a new career as a shrink.
About: This was a big spec sale that came together earlier this month. Miramax beat out a bunch of other suitors. The production company is Boulderlight, who just produced the awesome, “Companion,” so let’s keep an eye out for them in the future, since someone over there seems to have an eye for good writing. Writer Brandon Cohen has actually been writing in Hollywood for over ten years. Most of his work has been on kid’s shows.
Writer: Brandon Cohen
Details: 110 pages

My choice for RJ is Ben Schwartz

I met with a producer recently and we were talking about how bad comedy scripts have gotten. We racked our brains to try and remember even one good one from the last five years.

Well, I got news for you. TODAY I FOUND ONE.

I don’t know how it happened. I don’t know where this writer came from. I’m just happy to have been able to laugh out loud for two hours.

RJ is one of those 30-something lovable losers who’s so self-involved that he doesn’t even realize that his relationship is crumbling around him. His girlfriend forces him to take couples therapy sessions which confirms what she already knows – this guy sucks – so she leaves him.

RJ Doordashes and lives with his mother, giving him few prospects for a next romantic adventure, but gets lucky when an old friend invites him to a UFC event. It’s there where he meets Jordan, a manager for a UFC superstar named Sean (think Connor McGregor). While in his friend’s suite, he meets Izzy, a beautiful perfect girl he instantly falls for. But she leaves before he can shoot his shot.

Later, RJ and Jordan get to talking about his recent therapy sessions and, jokingly, how he believes that his girlfriend was giving the therapist extra money under the table to side with her. This is a lightbulb moment for Jordan, who’s been having problems with his wife. He comes up with this idea where RJ can pretend to be a couples therapist and side with him during their sessions so his wife gets off his back.

RJ is reluctant at first until Jordan offers him 500 bucks a session. Therapist it is! RJ has no idea what he’s doing but, of course, does any therapist know what they’re doing? RJ fakes his way through a bunch of mumbo-jumbo advice, always siding with Jordan, and soon he’s getting referrals from other guys in the UFC agent/manager space.

All of this is going great until Sean comes to him for a session. And who is Sean’s girlfriend? IZZY! RJ must now make Sean believe that he’s supporting him in the sessions while, at the same time, not piss off Izzy, who he’s secretly in love with. There is literally no way this can end well. Which is exactly why we keep reading until the end! :)

I’ve been reading a lot of comedies lately.

And I’ve learned that comedy, in screenplay form, boils down to getting five things right. Those are….

SET PIECES
FUNNY CHARACTERS
CONFLICT
MINING THE UNIQUENESS OF YOUR PREMISE
and
VOICE

If you can nail three of these five things, you’ll write a funny script. Nail four of them, you’ll write a really funny script. Nail all five and you’ll write a hilarious script.

Set pieces are the showcases of your comedy so that’s where you need to focus most of your efforts. Sure, you can spend time trying to come up with funny lines spread throughout your screenplay. But it’s the set pieces that audiences will remember so that’s what you want to spend most of your time on.

And a set piece doesn’t need to be some big elaborate thing. It just needs to be concept-relevant and funny. My favorite set piece in this script was RJ’s first therapy session. He has no idea what he’s doing. He’s making things up as he goes along. We’re waiting for him to screw up and get caught. It’s hilarious.

Next requirement – the characters who have the most screen time in your story need to be as funny. That sounds obvious but a lot of writers screw this up. They create sort of funny characters then try and force funny lines into their mouths. This makes sense when you consider that writers are also trying to create fully fleshed-out characters who arc over the course of the story. So they end up prioritizing that over making them funny. In the process, they’re fighting that character the whole script trying to make them act funnier than they are.

This is a comedy. You have to focus on laughs. Prioritize a hilarious character over a deep character. Cause when you do that, you don’t even have to try to be funny when you write scenes for that character. They just naturally say funny things. RJ naturally says funny things because he’s a lovable doofus who’s pretending to be an expert in something he’s a moron in. So every single thing that comes out of his mouth is funny.

Next we have conflict. When it comes to conflict, your bread and butter comedy comes from two-handers where the characters constantly bicker, like Deadpool and Wolverine. But conflict can also come in the form of anything that is out-of-balance. In this case, RJ is lying about who he is. So, in every scene, there’s potential for him to get caught. He’s always having to talk around things, which creates conflict.

But also we have some traditional conflict in that Sean is an a-hole and is constantly putting pressure on RJ to do what he wants, which, of course, hurts Izzy.

Next up we have mining the uniqueness of your premise. Too many comedy writers write a movie with a premise – say, two geeky teens build a robot version of a popular kid to make them popular at school too – then write up a bunch of jokes that have nothing to do with that premise. There will be jokes about aliens, about weddings, about prison, about sexual preference, none of which focus on the core concept’s conceit – that two guys have built a fake popular guy in robot form and are trying to use him to ascend the social hierarchy at school.

Cohen did it right. A good 75% of the comedy in I Can See You’re Angry is built around RJ pretending to be a therapist.

Finally, you have VOICE, which boils down to “a funny way to see the world and talk about it.” To understand comedic voice, watch comedians. Note, specifically, the STUFF THEY TALK ABOUT and HOW THEY DELIVER IT. Nate Berghatze likes talking about really basic everyday stuff, such as ordering DoorDash and hiding it from his wife. Meanwhile, Ryan Long has built his entire routine around political hypocrisy. Two very different subject matters.

Then you have delivery. Aziz Ansari is known for his energetic almost manic delivery style. Whereas Anthony Jeselnik speaks verrrrryyy slooooooow. He’s not afraid to pause for an eternity before he delivers a punchline.

Conveying voice in comedy scripts is similar. What do you like to talk about and how do you like to talk about it. The style in which you combine those two things should feel different from the way others do it. Cause if you sound like everyone else, telling the same jokes in the same manner, you won’t make readers laugh and everyone will forget your script quickly.

The only thing I didn’t like about I Can See You’re Angry was the last third of the script. There was something forced about going to Sean’s lake house. When you start to exert too much of your agenda on the plot, you lose that organic feel that made things so originally effortless. Organicness is especially important in comedy because the best comedy comes from natural situations.

But even with that, this was still a good script and it’s given me hope that, as long as a good writer is writing it, good comedy is possible.

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

What I learned: A great comedy tool is exaggeration. And it’s simple to use. You just dial things up to a 1000. A trick on how to get the most out of it is to give an exaggerated line to someone who’s, otherwise, even-keel. It will then come out of nowhere, which is what makes it funny. When RJ is starting to make a lot of money as a therapist, he comes home to tell his mom that he’s finally going to change their lives for the better.

RJ: 
Listen, Ma, things are about to
change around here.

LORRAINE: 
If you take away my internet, I’ll
burn the house down with me inside.

I talk about exaggeration and other comedy tools in my dialogue book. If your dialogue is weak, DEFINITELY spend 10 bucks on my book. It will change how you write dialogue forever. That, by the way, is not an exaggeration. :)