Today’s screenwriters take on MIT’s obsession with pranking. Is the script the next Real Genius or just a giant prank gone wrong?

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: Comedy
Premise: (from writers) An MIT reject crashes the school and discovers his greatest challenge isn’t getting caught by the administration — it’s surviving the high-tech hazing of a brilliant and jealous rival.
About: According to the authors, this script is inspired by true events. Every week I include 5 amateur screenplays in my newsletter and let the readers determine which one to review (sign up for newsletter here to participate). While the feedback for Crash Course was all over the place, it easily got the most interest of the bunch.
Writers: Steve Altes & Diana Jellinek
Details: 107 pages

I was actually discussing college comedies with a friend the other day and we agreed that if all you do is focus on the basic everyday drunken madness that is college, you’re going to bore your reader to tears. Just like any idea, you need an angle. Drunken madness at MIT? THAT sounds different. Even better when you focus on the unique world of genius pranksters. These guys don’t simply draw a penis on the university president’s picture. They download the picture, animate it complimenting Osama Bin Laden’s thoughts on his jihad, and play it on the basketball jumbotron in the middle of the homecoming game. No doubt, there’s lots of potential for comedy here.

18 year-old Jim Walden is making his way to MIT for his freshman year of college. Well, sort of his freshman year of college. You see, Jim’s not really a student at MIT. He’s a freeloader. Jim plans to get a degree at MIT without paying for it. He’ll go to all the classes. He’ll take all the tests. He just won’t be officially enrolled!

Jim quickly finds out that MIT is a campus full of pranksters. As in, when he makes his way past the main building, he sees that a car has been taken apart and reassembled on top of it (packed full of ping pong balls to boot). It appears that MIT students are so uninterested in doing real work (or so smart that they have tons of extra time on their hands) that they spend all their free time coming up with pranks. Whereas at the University of Texas, the receiver with the most catches might be the most heralded man on campus, here, it’s the guy who’s pulled off the biggest most complicated prank (or “hack” as they like to call it around these parts).

Jim soon finds his way into a local fraternity where he makes a bunch of new friends, plus reconnects with an old one, Luke. The group starts doing a bunch of “hacks” around school (that don’t really have much significance) and Jim is pretty good at them, which starts to make his old pal Luke jealous. At a certain point, word gets out that Jim isn’t really enrolled at the school, which puts all of the fraternity in danger, and gets everyone really mad at him. This delights Luke to no end, who doesn’t like playing second fiddle to anyone.

In the meantime, Nick meets a Shakespeare-obsessed young woman who works at a sperm bank. She helps him overcome all this newfound adversity, but soon she too learns of his lies and wants nothing to do with him. Eventually the story culminates in Luke having to pull off the ULTIMATE HACK at school, which I believe will make all his troubles go away.

Crash Course is a screenplay that FEELS fun. It has all the makings of a hit comedy. You got a bunch of goofy characters thrown into a bunch of goofy situations. Clearly, you’re updating some of those 80s classics like Revenge Of The Nerds and Real Genius. Which I think is a good idea. 80s comedies had an effortlessness to them that we haven’t seen for awhile.

But a few things crashed this course before it could get started, the biggest of which were the dueling concepts. You essentially have two ideas here. The first idea is about a guy illegally sneaking into college. Then you have the concept of a fraternity attempting to create the biggest “hack” of the year at MIT.  Once you try to combine those two, the movie becomes confused. And that’s how I saw it. I was constantly trying to figure out what Jim sneaking into this school had to do with creating a giant school prank. Those two things didn’t organically fit together.

Not only that, but I couldn’t figure out how the “fake degree” thing made sense. Was Jim just coming to MIT to get educated or to get a degree? Because those are two different things. Just illegally taking a bunch of classes so you can learn I guess SORTA makes sense. But isn’t an MIT degree without an ACTUAL MIT DEGREE kind of worthless? You wouldn’t have any official documents to say you that you went to MIT which would severely limit your job options (in this case, becoming an astronaut). Which begs the question, what’s the point of going through this whole sham in the first place? And granted I didn’t go to a big university so I don’t know what it’s like, but I’m assuming it’s difficult to just sneak into a bunch of classes? And even harder to take tests? How does one take a test if they’re not even listed as a student?

A lot of people think this kind of stuff isn’t important since it’s a “comedy.” But it is. The details have to be solid. You can’t skim over the rules. If the rules aren’t clear, the stakes aren’t clear. Most of the best comedies come from stories with high stakes. We have to know what can be gained or lost in order to laugh. If I’m sitting there going, “Uhhh, so wait. He’s taking classes but he’s not really taking classes?” the whole time, I’m not going to be laughing.

The kind of fix you’re looking for here is one that simplifies the plot. First off, decide which is the more important idea to you. Is it a guy who fakes a college career or the MIT HACK plotline? I feel the MIT HACK plotline has a lot more potential so let’s go in that direction. Now create a plot that exploits that idea. This is admittedly hack-y since it’s off the top of my head but maybe Jim gets to MIT only to find out that his scholarship has fallen through. The school gives him a month to come up with this semester’s tuition, and if he doesn’t, he’s gone. His fraternity puts so much importance on winning the annual hack, that they say if he helps them win it, they’ll take care of his tuition.

That would be DRAFT 1 of the idea. You’d need to smooth it out and not make it so “screenwriting 101,” but that’s pretty much how most comedies work. Give your main character an important goal with high stakes attached within the context of a funny setting (in this case, sophisticated college pranking). Reading this draft of Crash Course, I kept forgetting what the point to everything was. He was trying to get an education. He was trying to help people create a great prank. But why? Why was it so important that he did these? So he could become an astronaut? I don’t know. I just didn’t care if this guy became an astronaut or not. It was so far away. A million things could go wrong between now and then that could derail his astronaut career (in other words, there’s no IMMEDIATE need for him to achieve his goal).

Most importantly, when the reader is focusing on all this unnecessary stuff or asking all these questions, or is confused about the purpose of the script – THEY’RE NOT LAUGHING. And that’s what you gotta remember as a comedy writer. If you set up an easy-to-understand plot with a clear protagonist goal, then you can have fun. Then you can throw all the jokes in there. Then your reader is going to be ready to laugh because they don’t have to think. They can just sit back and enjoy.

Look at the Hangover. They set up the situation – Friends needing to find the groom by x o’clock – and then just had fun.

Since too much of the plot and purpose and stakes were muddled here, I didn’t laugh that much, and obviously, you gotta laugh a LOT in a comedy – I’d say a reader should be laughing between 30-40 times out loud during a comedy-spec for it to be sale worthy. I do think this idea still has potential. A Real Genius update would be nice. But the plot needs to be simplified, as do the stakes and the protagonist goal. I wish Steve and Diana the best of luck!

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

What I learned: Comedy scripts should be the easiest scripts to read OF ALL THE GENRES. They need to be fun. I mean, of course they do – they’re comedies! So keep the prose sparse. Move things along quickly. Keep the reading style relaxed. And just have fun with it. Beware of overly technical writing or too much detail. Those things trip up and slow down a script, which you cannot afford when writing a comedy.

What I learned 2: Always beware of dueling concepts. Movies aren’t good at balancing two strong concepts. They tend to be best when focused on one thing. For example, The Hangover isn’t about guys looking for their missing friend in Vegas AND trying to win the World Series Of Poker tournament. Knocked Up isn’t about a couple trying to deal with an unplanned pregnancy stemming from a one-night stand AND the effects of their sex tape that accidentally got released to the public. In my opinion, you gotta pick one or the other.

Adam Zopf, the man who figured out a way to make every high school graduate in the world fear coming back to their ten year reunion, is back with a darker more personal tale.

Genre: Indie Dark Comedy
Premise: A young man who sees his dead girlfriend wherever he goes tries to start dating again.
About: Many of you remember writer Adam Zopf from his screenplay, Reunion, which I reviewed in 2011. I met with Adam recently and he passed me his latest screenplay, which I was surprised to learn wasn’t a horror film but a dark indie comedy. Dark indie comedies are tricky. You gotta have a unique voice and you gotta be careful not to get too depressing. Sideways is a good example of striking that perfect tone of darkness and hope. I was interested to see what I would get with Adam’s foray into the genre.
Writer: Adam Zopf
Details: 94 pages

Summer Glau as Lily?

After meeting with Adam, I was talking to my assistant and mentioned one of the scripts he had pitched me.  She loved the idea and asked if I could send it to her.  What do you like about the idea, I asked.  It reminds me of one of my favorite movies, Lars And The Real Girl. This is, of course, exactly why I was scared to read it myself. I severely disliked Lars And The Real Girl. I just don’t spark to stuff that’s super depressing and ultra heavy-handed. I like to think of myself as a hopeful optimistic person, and you usually see that in the scripts that I like.

So my assistant got back to me less than a day later and told me she really liked Lily and that I needed to read it. Since she had basically hated the last 20 scripts I’d sent her, this meant something. And I was going to read the script at some point anyway. I know Adam’s a good writer. But it’s scary reading something from someone you like that you have a feeling you’re not going to like.  As much as I dug Reunion, a script about a dead girl staring at our main character for 90 minutes sounded kind of…morbid. So as I flipped open the first page, I heard myself mumbling, “Please don’t be depressing please don’t be depressing please don’t be depressing…”

29 year-old writer Michael Dorsey is going about his daily routine. He’s grabbing breakfast. He’s working out. He’s writing. There’s one difference between Michael’s routine and everybody else’s though. Everywhere Michael goes, he sees his dead girlfriend, Lily, in the corner. Which sucks. Because it’s been nine entire months since she’s died. And that’s not fair. It’s so bad that he’s been ordered to get therapy about it (for what reason, I’m not sure).

Even outside of the Lily thing, Michael’s not a very happy dude. He hates his job as a telemarketer and is annoyed by just about everyone he runs into. Well, almost everyone. When Michael moves into a new place, he meets the handyman, the pint-sized Randy White Washington, who will tell anyone within shouting distance that he’s the main drug dealer in town.  Big drug dealer or not, Randy’s a pretty cool dude.

As Randy and Michael become friends, Randy encourages Michael to get back out there. Start dating! Michael takes his advice and after a couple of false starts meets Anita, an aspiring British actress. The two hit it off and all of a sudden, Michael’s life is starting to find purpose again. Kick ass!

Well, that is until Dead Lily begins to realize that Michael likes this girl. This seems to launch her out of her cryogenic staring state and actually start COMMUNICATING with Michael. This fucks poor Michael up to no end, who’s now unsure whether to keep pushing for Anita or “go back” to Lily. As you can imagine, the situation becomes so intense that everything in Michael’s life starts crumbling apart again. Michael realizes that unless he does SOMETHING to get Lily out of his life for good, he’ll never live a normal life again.

One of the things I like about Adam is that he writes with this simple easy-to-read compact prose. Never is there a word in one of his scripts that shouldn’t be there. I could see a lot writers taking a script like this to 105 or 110 page territory. Adam knew exactly how much space he needed and didn’t write a single word more than that.

What I also liked was the IDEA behind closure here. I’m not going to spoil anything but the revealed backstory that explained why Michael hadn’t gotten over Lily, and the subsequent extremes he had to go to to find closure, while utterly ridiculous, made sense within the context of the script. I liked what Michael had to do to move on. That part was really cool.

However, my biggest fears going into the read were realized. And again, I believe this is more me than Adam. I’m just not into these really downer stories. I need hope. I need laughs. I need life. I always say the “woe-is-me’ character is the most dangerous character to write because nobody likes someone who feels sorry for themselves. Michael doesn’t quite seem sorry for himself, but he is a pretty miserable guy. He’s a downer. And I understand why. It’s motivated.  Who’s not going to be down after losing their girlfriend?  But I just personally have trouble latching onto and rooting for those characters.

I actually think Adam might’ve sensed this, might’ve known this could be a problem, and so he brought in the character of Randy. He’d be our comic relief. He’d be our “fun.” And he almost achieved that but, I don’t know – he wasn’t humorous enough in my opinion. He wasn’t Thomas Hayden Church in Sideways. He was more a ball of misguided energy. I would’ve liked to have seen more humor pulled from this character.

Another issue for me was the plot. These super light plots always leave me wanting more. There aren’t enough characters, enough twists, enough subplots. You gotta look somewhere to spice up the pages and i didn’t see that. I think I knew pretty early on what this was about, and most of the script just reinforced that. For example, I knew Lily was always going to be there. That aspect of the story didn’t change until page 80. PAGE 80! A lot more mystery could’ve been culled from that subplot. Or maybe you do a series of flashbacks throughout the script to their relationship so we can get to know Lily, so we can better understand why Michael was so obsessed with her. The only thing we know about Lily now is that she’s a creepy chick who stares at our hero. Ultimately, everything was played very straight forward with the story, so you always knew where the script was going before it did. And I’m a guy who likes to be kept off-balance.

This is why I get nervous whenever I’m sent a more personal piece from someone. I always get scared that it will be too “indie,” if that makes sense. And Lily In The Corner felt too indie to me. What does that mean for Adam’s script? Well, as I pointed out, I don’t think I’m the audience for this. My assistant was and she loved it. I think the real audience you’re trying to win over here are the people who loved Lars and The Real Girl. If they tell you that Lily kicked ass, you’re in good shape. So I guess I’ll turn it over to you guys. What’d you think?

Script link: Lily In The Corner

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

What I learned: I’m usually wary of any script centered around a writer. I just feel that writers and their lives are boring. So it always feels to me like a lazy choice. If the writing is tightly integrated into the plot (i.e. Stranger Than Fiction) then it’s okay. But I didn’t see how Michael’s writing played into the plot at all. If the story focused more on how he hasn’t been able to write since Lily died, then it would make more sense. But I really didn’t see any particular reason why Michael needed to be a writer. Am I off base on that assertion? Adam? I’m sure you’ll have an opinion on this. ☺

Genre: Sci-Fi
Premise: Stranded on a strange planet, a group of marines must fight off an alien enemy while trying to discover the origin of giant artificially constructed halo orbiting the world.
About: Oh boy does this one have a backstory. The Halo movie was one of the surest things in Hollywood. This thing would’ve broken box office records everywhere. And with Peter Jackson taking point as the producer of the series, you might as well have started opening Halo Banks around the Jackson household that just spat out money. Jackson made a controversial choice to helm the the mega-movie, hiring little-known director (at the time), Neil Blomkamp, but that controversy subsided quickly when people saw his jaw-dropping sci-fi short films (one of which is included below). So as everyone eagerly awaited the next big Halo movie news, they were blindsided when the project was abruptly canceled. Why was it canceled? MONEY, of course. The studios are used to having a lot of leverage in these situations. But this time they were going up against a company bigger than they were, Microsoft. Microsoft just wasn’t going to give up all the profits the studios wanted. So they said, “Fuck you.” And that was that. The film was dead. Which is really too bad. It had a great producer, a great director, and a great writer (Alex Garland). All the pieces were in place. But I guess we’ll never get to see that place. What did we miss? Let’s find out.
Writer: Alex Garland
Details: 2/6/05 draft (127 pages)

I remember playing the first Halo game. It was like nothing I’d ever experienced before on the video game front. My favorite moment was weaving my way through a huge cave, coming out into a valley, and seeing this huge war going on in front of me, with each side lobbing missiles and grenades at each other – the kind of thing you were used to seeing in a cut-scene. I finally realized that it was my job to go INTO that battle. I was about to become a part of it. It all felt so seamless, so realistic, so organic. Video games just hadn’t done that before then. And on top of that, there was this really cool story going on the whole time about this “Halo” thing floating up in the sky. A big reason I kept charging through the levels was to find out more about that giant mysterious object. The combination of that seamless lifelike playability and the great story made Halo one of the best video games I’d ever played.

Naturally, like everyone else, I couldn’t wait for the sequel. And when it finally arrived, I was quietly devastated. Gone was the focus on story, replaced by a focus on multi-player. I’m not going to turn this into a debate about which is better. All I can say is what’s more important to me. Since you guys read this blog, you already know the answer to that. Story story story. I don’t remember anything about the Halo 2 story and checked out afterwards. I never even played Halo 3.

Which brings us to the Halo movie. It’s gotta be one of the most interesting video game adaptation challenges ever. The game itself is inherently cinematic, which should make it an easy base for a film. However, it’s also heavily influenced by past films, particularly Aliens, which essentially makes it a copy of a copy. How do you avoid, then, being derivative? Also, which story do you tell? Do you retell the story of the first game in cinema form? It’s got the best story in the series by far, but don’t you risk the “been there, done that,” reaction? Or do you try to come up with something completely new? And if you do come up with something new, how does that fit into the chronology of the other games? Oh, and how do you base an entire movie around a character who never takes off his mask? That’s going to be a challenge in itself.

I had all of these questions going on in my read in anticipation of reading Halo. Let’s see how they were answered…

The year is 2552. A species of nasty aliens known as The Covenant are waging an all-out war against the human race. A “holy” war they call it. “Holy” code for “turn every single human into red pulp.” In the midst of a large scale space battle, the largest of the human ships, the “Pillar of Autumn” is able to make a light speed jump out of the action.

They arrive outside a unique planet with an even unique(er) moon – A HALO (“You can be my Halo…halo halo!”). This artificial HALO moon thing is fascinating but before the humans can start snapping cell phone pictures of it, the Covenant zips out of lightspeed behind them and starts attacking their ship!

Captain Keyes senses that his ship is about to be shredded into a billion slivers of steel so he wakes up his secret weapon, and our hero, Master Chief. Master Chief is part of a supreme soldier project called the “Spartans” (apparently their creator was a Michigan State fan). He’s insanely tall, insanely strong, and is coated with some super-armor that could probably deflect a nuclear bomb.

Keyes tells Master Chief he needs him to take the ship’s AI, a witty little female thingy named Cortana, to the safety of the planet below. If the Covenant catch her, they’ll have access to all sorts of revealing stuff, including the location of Earth, which would allow them to deliver their final blow to mankind.

Master Chief obliges because that’s his job, to oblige. So Cortana is wired into Master Chief’s suit and down they head to the planet for safety. Once there, they encounter a couple of problems. The first is that the Covenant are coming down to the planet to blow their asses out of the jungle. The second is that there seems to be some long-since-left-behind alien structures all over the planet, tech that belonged to a previous species much more advanced than both the humans and the Covenant. And this tech looks to have been created for nefarious purposes.

Somehow, they realize, this all ties back to Halo, and it’s looking like the only way they’re going to get out of here AND save the universe from these spooky ancient aliens, is to blow Halo up, something that isn’t going to be easy with the oblivious Covenant trying to kill them at every turn.

Uhhh, does this plot sound familiar to you? That’s because it is! It’s the exact same plot, beat for beat, as the video game. Sigh. Yup, Halo: The Movie was just a direct adaptation of Halo 1. I don’t know if I wasn’t into it because I always knew what was coming next or if the story didn’t translate well, but I often felt impatient and bored while reading Halo. Garland did a solid job visualizing the story for us. But I still felt empty afterwards.

A big part of that had to do with Master Chief. I was worried about him beforehand because in the video game, like a lot of video games, you don’t know much about your hero, mainly because the hero is you! You’re doing all the running around and the jumping and the shooting and the thinking, so regardless of whether the guy has any backstory or not, you feel a deep connection to him because you’re controlling him.

A movie is different though. We need to have some sympathy or empathy for the hero, and a good portion of this is built on your main character’s life, what’s happened to him before he’s reached this point. There’s a recurring dream sequence where Master Chief is on some battlefield and gets saved by a marine that’s SUPPOSED to make us feel something for him, but I’m still unclear as to what that was. His haunting backstory is that someone had to save him on a battlefield? Not exactly the stuff that wins writers Oscars.

But what really hurts Halo is how damn reactive Master Chief is. He doesn’t do anything unless someone tells him to do it. “You have to bring Cortana down to the planet.” “You have to go back up and save Captain Keyes.” “You have to go find the map that will lead us to the Halo Control Room.” Again, that kind of stuff works in a game because IT’S NEEDED. If there wasn’t someone telling us what to do, we wouldn’t know where to move our character. We wouldn’t have any direction.

But in movies (ESPECIALLY action movies), we need a character who’s active, who makes his own decisions. Or at least we usually do. There was this overwhelming sense of passivity in Halo, like we’re being pulled along on a track, at the mercy of a conductor announcing, “We will be arriving at the midpoint in twelve minutes. Midpoint in twellll-ve minutes.” Why can’t we be in the cockpit of a plane, making our decisions on where the hell we want to go?

And so the story quickly brought on this predictable quality to it. Every section was perfectly compartmentalized. Here’s mission 1. Here’s mission 2. Here’s mission 3. There was no freedom to the story like there was in, say, a Star Wars, where something unpredictable would happen every once in awhile (the planet they spent the first 45 minutes preparing to get to is gone upon their arrival!).

I DID like the idea of adding a MacGuffin here (Cortana) but unlike other movies with strong Macguffins (Star Wars – R2-D2, Raiders – The Ark, Pirates – the gold coin) I never really got the sense that the Covenant wanted Cortana that badly. If everybody isn’t desperately trying to get the MacGuffin, then there’s no point in having one.

But I think whichever incarnation the Halo movie takes (assuming it gets made), they need to focus a lot harder on the character of Master Chief. Really get into who he is and what he is and how he got here and how he’s going to overcome whatever issues he’s dealing with.  That stuff matters in movies.  There was a hint in the script of Master Chief being this genetic anomaly, a non-human. Why not explore that? This feeling of not fitting in? It’s one of the most identifiable feelings there is and has worked for numerous other sci-fi franchises (Star Trek, X-Men). Not that any of this will affect box office receipts, of course. But if they want to actually make a GOOD MOVIE, something that lives beyond opening weekend and brings new fans to the game itself, more attention to character ain’t going to hurt.

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

What I learned: I think there are three kinds of characters. There’s the active character, the reactive character, and the passive character. The active character is almost always best (i.e. Indiana Jones) since it’ll mean your hero is driving the story. The Reactive character is the second best option (i.e. Master Chief). “Reactive” essentially means your character waits for others to tell them to do something, and then the character does it. I don’t prefer this character type but at least he’s doing things. He’s still pursuing goals and pushing the story forward. The passive character is the worst option. The passive character is usually doing little to nothing. They don’t initiate anything. They don’t react to anything. They’re often letting the world pass them by. The most recent example I can think of for a passive character is probably Noah Baumbach’s “Greenberg” with Ben Stiller. Didn’t see it? Exactly, nobody did. Because who wants to watch a character sit around all day doing nothing?

The Thing is probably one of the scariest movies ever made. People haven’t always seen it that way since it’s not set strictly in the horror genre. But man, I remember watching this film as a kid and being freaked the hell out. When the spider-legs grew out of that man’s decapitated head and began walking around? That image is still burned into my brain. The screenwriting situation behind “The Thing” is kinda interesting. Bill Lancaster, the writer, is Burt Lancaster’s son. His credits include only 2 other movies, “The Bad News Bears” (the original), and “The Bad News Bears Go To Japan.” He also wrote the Bad News Bears TV series. That was back in 1979. He didn’t write anything after that and died of a heart attack at the age of 49 in 1997. I’m baffled as to why Bill didn’t write anything else when he showed a clear mastery in two completely different genres. Was this his choice? Hollywood’s choice? Did the pressures of having a famous Hollywood father play into it? I’d love to know more. But since I don’t want to depress the hell out of all of you, I’m going to break down The Thing.

1) Use Clip-Writing to spice up action sequences – Clip-Writing is when you write in clips, highlighting primary visual queues. Clip-Writing can be very effective in action scenes as it helps the reader focus on the centerpieces of the battle, fight, or chase. We see it in The Thing when a Scandinavian crew has followed an infected dog into an American base.

CLOSE ON A .357 MAGNUM

As it efficiently breaks through a windowpane and into the cold. A steady hand grips it firmly.

THE SCANDINAVIAN

Getting closer. Kablam! Suddenly, his head jerks back. He falls to his knees and then face down into the snow.

NORRIS AND BENNINGS

Stare blankly, but relievedly at the fallen man. The dog whimpers in pain.

2) If Dialogue isn’t your strong suit, look to show more than tell – There’s actually some good news if you’re not a great dialogue writer. It means you’ll be forced to SHOW rather than TELL us things, which is really what you should be doing anyway. I noticed from reading and watching “The Thing” that a lot of the dialogue from the script was cut. Carpenter chose instead to focus on the visuals and the actions. For example, there was a scene early in the script where they’re walking to the helicopter and there’s a lot of explanation going on of what they’re doing. Carpenter cut a lot of that out, focusing instead on them simply getting in the helicopter and leaving. We know what’s going on. We don’t need a big long talky scene to explain it.

3) Only have your characters speak if they have something to say – This is an extension of the previous tip, and an important one. Your characters should be talking because they have something to say, not because you (the writer) have something to say. You might want to write a big monologue about how your character lost his sister or your opinion on the earth’s eroding ecosystem. That’s great. But would YOUR CHARACTER say that? I don’t think enough writers really ask that question. There’s nothing worse than reading a bunch of words coming out of a character’s mouth that you know are only there because the writer wanted to include them.

4) ALWAYS WORKS “There’s something else you should see” – I don’t care how bad of a movie or script it is, variations of this line ALWAYS work: “There’s something I need to show you.” You will have the audience in the palm of your hand until you show them what that character is referring to.  With The Thing, that line brings us to a giant mutated gnarled mass of a body. If you can milk the time after the statement until the actual reveal, even better, as our anticipation will grow.

5) MID-POINT SHIFT ALERT – The Thing has a great midpoint shift. The first half of the script is about the discovery of this alien organism invading the base. Remember, a good midpoint shift ups the stakes. So the shift here is when they learn that any one of them could be the alien entity. It’s no coincidence that this is when The Thing really gets good. A great mid-point shift will do that.

6) Carefully plot how you reveal information – Always be aware of what order you reveal your information in and how that affects the reader. One omission or one addition can completely change the way the next 30 pages reads. For example, here, the movie starts with an alien ship crashing. This gives us, the audience, superior knowledge over the characters. We know they’re dealing with an alien. This means we’re waiting for them to catch up. Now imagine had Lancaster NOT included this opening shot. Then, everything that happens is just as much a mystery to us as it is the characters. I don’t want to rewrite a classic, but the opening act may have been a little more exciting had we not received the spaceship information. We’d be equal amounts as baffled and curious as the characters.

7) SHOW DON’T TELL ARLERT – In the script, the characters have about a page and a half dialogue scene talking about how if the alien makes it to civilization, it could destroy the entire world. It’s not a bad scene. But they replaced it in the movie with a simple shot – Blair staring grimly at a computer chart that states: If the organism reaches one of the other continents, the entire world population will be contaminated within 27,000 hours.

8) Foreplays not Climaxes (Aka Don’t reveal all your fun stuff right away) – I see this all the time with amateur writers. They’re so excited about the cool parts of their script that they can’t wait to write them! So when it’s time, they drop all their reveals on you simultaneously, like a giddy kid who’s been waiting to tell you about his trip to Six Flags all day. For example, the Americans find the Norwegian crew’s video tapes from their destroyed camp and start watching them to figure out what happened. An amateur writer might have slammed us with all the crazy reveals immediately (alien ship, alien body). But Lancaster takes his time with it, showing the Norwegians having fun on the tapes, basically being boring. It isn’t until a handful of scenes pass that we see the Norwegians blow up the ice and discover the alien ship. If you throw all your climaxes at us at once, we get bored. Give us some foreplays beforehand.

9) Lack of Trust = Great Drama! – Once characters stop trusting each other, the drama in your story is upped ten-fold. You now have characters who are guarded, suspicious, not saying what they mean, probing. This ESPECIALLY helps dialogue, since it’ll create a lot of subtext. Whether it’s because they think another person is secretly a shape-shifting alien or because they think their husband cheated on them with their best friend, it’s always good to look for situations where characters don’t trust one another.

10) Use Cost/Value Ratio to determine whether a scene is necessary – There was an entire cut sequence in The Thing where the dogs escaped the compound and MacReady went after them with a snowmobile. It was a nice scene but it wasn’t exactly necessary. Producers HATE cutting these sequences after they’ve been shot because it’s cost them millions of dollars. Which is why they try to cut them at the script stage. This is where you can benefit from pretending you’re a producer. Simply ask yourself, “Is the VALUE of this sequence worth the COST of what it would take to shoot?” But Carson, you say, why should I care about the budget? I’m not the director or producer. That’s not the point. The point is, you’ll start to see what is and isn’t necessary for your script. If you say, “Hmm, would I really pay 5 million bucks to shoot this chase scene that doesn’t even need to happen?” you’ll probably get rid of it, and your script will be tighter for it.

These are 10 tips from the movie “The Thing.” To get 500 more tips from movies as varied as “Aliens,” “When Harry Met Sally,” and “The Hangover,” check out my book, Scriptshadow Secrets, on Amazon!

Warning: This is a rare “flu-written” Scriptshadow entry. There are only a few of these in existence. Which means they’ll be worth a lot of money someday. Save yours in expensive laminated paper please. Thank you.

Genre: Cop/Found Footage
Premise: Two cops (and best friends) begin taping their daily exploits, which include numerous busts and adventures.
About: David Ayers (Training Day, The Fast And The Furious) wrote and directed this. It starred Jake Gyllenhaal and Michael Pena. 
I did a script review over a year ago and kind of hated it, expecting it to be a huge box office dud. But the movie ended up doing okay (41 mil) and getting a lot of love from critics (85% on Rotten Tomatoes). Hmm, I thought, now I have to watch the movie and figure out how he saved that dreadful script. It was time for some Scriptsahdow script-to-screen analysis!
Writer: David Ayers
Details: Script was 97 pages

I had this grand idea of how I was going to tackle my End Of Watch script-to-screen review. There were going to be charts. There were going to be witnesses. There was going to be a celebrity guest and possibly a spin-off reality show. Something like Storage Wars.

But the thing with the flu is that it doesn’t allow you to think until you restrain it with a large bottle of Nyquil. I call this practice, “Quilling,” and it brings whatever you’re working on into Hubble-like focus. Behold. Beware. Be afraid. What I write below may not be used against me in a court of law.

When Larry David was pitching his “show about nothing” (Seinfeld) to a group of studio execs, the execs focused excessively on the dynamics of the friendships. “Well we need them to not like each other,” they said. “Why?” an annoyed Larry David asked. “Because you need conflict,” the execs said. “You need drama, and drama comes from conflict. If there’s no conflict within the group, then the conversations between everyone are going to be boring.” Furious that the execs were all hung up on this detail, Larry stared them down and said, “Why the hell would you be friends with someone you didn’t like?” The execs stammered about, looked at one another for an answer, but nobody had one. So Larry got his way. There’d be no “conflict” between his core group of characters.

I bring this up because conflict IS a necessary component of drama. We do need it in some capacity in order to make our stories interesting. However, there’s an antithesis to conflict that can actually be worse than having no conflict at all. MANUFACTURED CONFLICT. This is when the writer goes into a movie  proclaiming “I’M GOING TO ADD CONFLICT!” Two cops who hate each other for no reason. Two romantic leads who hate each other for no reason. A mother and daughter who hate each other for no reason. No reason, that is, other than that the writer wants to ADD CONFLICT!

Is having no conflict better than that?  Probably.  But you’re picking between two worst-case-scenarios. Which leaves you severely limited in the storytelling department – the department of “actually keeping people entertained.” These two cops looooooved each other. They’d take a bullet for each other. They pat each other on the back whenever the other makes progress in his love life. They give each other man-hugs and nose-to-nose Whale Rider kisses.

True, you’ve stripped down all the artificial bullshit. There’s nobility in that. I mean in real life, a lot of partners probably love each other. So it’s real. Raw. True. I admire Ayers trying to get to the core of this. But when your Subway fresh take puts you at a dramatic disadvantage in the storytelling department, you better be able to pay up at the end of the line. Those five-dollar footlongs don’t include the meatball sub.

Which is a nice way of saying, “What else ya got here?” And End of Watch didn’t really have anything. I mean, the whole reason I wanted to do a script-to-screen breakdown of the project was that I hated the script and heard the movie was great. I was hoping to see a great movie so I could see what changes they made to save the film or just see how a strong directing vision can save a bad screenplay. I got neither.

In fact, I found the movie to be even more boring than the script. Let’s start with the plot. Oh yeah, there isn’t one. I think I understand the motivation behind this. We’re going for “real.” We’re staying away from common cop-movie tropes. If you add a plot, it all starts feeling manufactured, manipulative. There’s no story in real life because real life is random! Therefore we can add no plot!

Again, I applaud the fresh take. But you’ve already given me two cops who spend three-quarters of the movie telling each other they love each other. So there’s no conflict – and now – NO PLOT! I mean what’s next? Are you going to shoot this as a silent film? Are you going to shoot the whole thing in one take? I mean how many handicaps do you want to give yourself?

Lots of talking and laughing in this one.  Lots.  

I’m DYING to figure out what people saw in this movie. Cause I missed the cruise ship. Is it cool because it felt “real?” I might be able to buy this argument but the acting was so fake-y. There wasn’t a moment in this movie where the actors weren’t doing the “faux-reality” thing. Those wacky off-screen moments we never see in cop films? Like the noogies cops give each other? We get those here! And they feel like they’re trying soooo hard to be spontaneous home video captured moments. It may be that found footage and famous actors aren’t meant for each other. I mean a big reason the found footage format works – and this dates back to Cloverfield – is that you’ve never seen the actors in it before. They were all new faces. So it really did feel like real people.

Speaking of found footage, I’m not sure Ayers ever decided if this was a found footage movie or not. It was found footage in the script (we’re told at the beginning of the script the footage was “found”), but in the movie, it was vague, something like, “These are the lives of two LA PD cops caught on camera.” It still starts, however (like the script), with Jake Gylenhall carrying a camera around the station, claiming he’s taking filmmaking as an elective at night school (one of the lamest motivations for found footage I’ve ever read – there was NOTHING about Jake’s character that made you think he’d be interested in filmmaking). The partners then add pin-cameras to their uniforms and now we have our basis for why this footage was captured.

Except a quarter of the way through the film, we start getting random third-party shots of the character. For example – Jake doing a work-out on the roof, shot from about 100 feet away. Was this another “real person” who just happened to be taping Jake working out and the police later happened upon this footage (Guy comes into police station: “Hey guys. You know that cop here who was in the papers? I taped him working out on the roof the other day! Wanna see the footage?” Errr, noo-oooo.

Look, it’s not a huge deal. I don’t want to present myself as (super nerdy voice) “Every shot must be motivated and make sense” Guy. But it speaks to a larger suspicion, which is that Ayers didn’t really know what he was doing here. He didn’t know what movie he wanted to make. By the third act, we’re seeing almost as many “third-party” shots as we are “found footage” shots. And it just seemed lazy. Like he stopped trying to figure out how to make it found footage, because he realized it would take too much effort.

(MAJOR SPOILER) There was also a major change from the script to the film. In the script, both characters die at the end. In the script, only Jake’s partner dies. Jake holds on and lives. This was about the only positive change I could find about the script to screen transformation. By leaving Jake alive, we have someone to grieve, someone to feel the loss. If they’re both dead, it’s kinda pointless. Neither of them know the other’s dead. Who cares? You needed one of them to grieve so we could grieve with them.

But that wasn’t enough to save this. I was rubbing my eyes 15 minutes in knowing that everything I’d read was pretty much kept intact. And it kept going and going and going. And not in that fun Energizer Hominid way. I need fans of this film to explain it to me. Why did you like this? What in the world was good about it? I was bored to tears!

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

What I learned: Manufactured conflict is your evil enemy. Avoid it at all costs! Say you want to add conflict between two characters. There’s Joe, a Central Park birdwatcher, and Frank, his bird-watching pal of 30 years. Manufactured conflict would manifest itself like this for our hack writer: “These two hate each other just because.” You figure that will lead to all sorts of awesome dialogue because they hate each other!  And hate is conflict and conflict is good say screenwriting teacher!  No, it will feel false and we’ll see through it. Instead, dig into Joe and Frank’s relationship more. Maybe they’ve been friends for 30 years, but just recently Joe spotted a rare never-before-seen Flying Spotted Nested Canary at the park and he’s become a bit of a celebrity because of it. He’s had a few articles written about his discovery. He was given the “New York Bird Watcher Of The Month” award by the city as well. And guess what? It’s gone to his head a little. So now he speaks from a place of superiority (as opposed to equals) around Frank, inadvertently giving him tips on how to spot rare birds, and overall just becoming  annoying. This has gotten to Frank, who’s holding  his tongue every time the two get into a conversation, as he just wants to scream out at Joe to SHUT THE HELL UP! You see how this conflict emerged from a natural backstory between the two characters?  Therefore it makes sense!  As opposed to just being slapped on there. Big difference!