(TOP 25!!!) – One of the cooler crossovers I’ve read in a long time. A History of Violence meets An American Werewolf in London meets Let The Right One In.
Genre: Horror
Premise: A werewolf living on a remote farm with her older sister takes in a thief on the run just 72 hours before the next full moon.
About: This script finished on the Black List. The above logline you read was my logline. But since I’ll reference it in the review, here’s the very un-horror sounding logline from the Black List: “A young woman is determined to protect a thief on the run when he holes up in her small town, even if it means revealing a darker, more violent secret of her own.”
Writer: Michael Burgner
Details: 110 pages
It can be VERY difficult choosing a script to review from the Black List. Make the wrong choice and you could find yourself sifting through 120 pages of high school freshman level writing. Make the right choice, and you may find yourself the next Nightcrawler.
The stakes are high.
For this one, I noticed that Sugar23 represented it. I know they represent creators who did True Detective and 13 Reasons Why. I also noticed that even though the Black List logline made the script sound like a drama, that the writer had a couple of short films to his name that were horror. So I figured… hmmmm, maybe that means this one is a horror film too.
That was enough to seal the deal. And boy did that research pay off!
We meet Liz, who lives in a Kansas farmhouse with her sister, Jean. Liz has ugly scar tissue all around her neck. What’s that about? She walks downstairs where Jean is waiting. The two walk outside, across the yard, to the storm cellar. They go inside. There’s a big rusty chain and collar attached to a concrete wall. Jean and Liz place it over Liz’s neck, lock it, and Jean heads back into the house.
Later that night, a semi-truck screeches to a halt on the nearby highway. Jean sees this. Oh no. Jean runs across the field to the truck, hollering at the driver to get back in his truck. The driver, who thinks he hit something, gets WHACKED by a blur, pulled into the nearby corn field. Jean turns around and sprints with everything she’s got back to her house. It doesn’t take long for us to figure out what happened. Liz is a werewolf and got free from her restraints.
Cut to a medium-sized town several weeks later where Nick and Crispy barge into a strip club to rob it at the end of the night. After Crispy goes rogue and gets shot, Nick is able to get away with the money. But the owner’s security, a Navajo psychopath named Hashke, along with the owner himself, are already planning on how to retrieve his dough and torture this man.
During the getaway on his motorcycle, Nick’s battery was shot. So when the motorcycle dies, he’s forced to hitchhike. This is where he meets Liz, who looks like she’s going to pick him up, but instead tells him to get cleaned up and drives off.
Furious, he walks the rest of the way to town, where he runs into Liz again, ignores her, and heads to the hardware store to get a battery for his bike. The owner says it’s a special delivery and will take 72 hours. When Liz sees Nick throwing around money, she offers him a place to stay at her barn. Realizing that people will talk if he stays in town, he decides to take her up on her offer.
Meanwhile, Ruby, a sheriff, has made her way into town to find out exactly what happened to her husband (the trucker), and Hashke, taking a page out of Anton Chigurh’s book, has arrived in town in search of Nick. Oh yeah, and did I mention there’s a full moon in three days? About the same amount of time that Nick plans to stay at Liz’s? Yeah, I’m starting to think we’re going to get one hell of a climax.
When people talk about the difference between amateur and pro writing, it often sounds arbitrary. A lot of times it just means the reader likes this script better than that one.
So let’s get specific. Cause this script is a a great example of what a truly good screenwriter looks like when they’re putting together a story. I can show you specific examples of what the difference between advanced and intermmediate looks like. So let’s get into it.
For starters, there’s the robbery that opens Nick’s storyline. Nick is robbing a strip joint with Crispy. They get in there, it’s a room full of people, and when the initial threat of a stick-up doesn’t receive the proper fearful response, Crispy slides open his jacket to reveal that he’s strapped with explosives.
Nick stares over at this the same way everyone else does, with a giant “WTF” look on his face. This was the first indication that we’re dealing with an advanced writer. 99% of writers are going to have their robbers in lockstep, cause they’ll think of them as one entity.
But it’s so much more interesting to the story if one of these two go rouge. It instantly turns a black and white situation gray. And that’s where all the fun is.
Cut to a few scenes later. Nick’s motorcycle breaks down and he’s hitching on the side of the road. Liz is driving down that same road, sees him, and stops. Keep in mind, Nick still has blood on his face from the botched robbery.
Now, let me explain to you how an amateur writer thinks in this moment. They know that Nick is going to stay at Liz’s place. They know that’s the next major plot point. So they view things through the eyes of getting to that plot point ASAP. Therefore, they have Liz see this bloody man hitchhiking, pick him up, and take him to her home.
But in what reality would that happen? What woman is going to pick a bloodied hitchhiker up. That’s how the advanced writer looks at it. They look at it more from a perspective of reality. Of course you’re not going to pick him up. So after a few words with the man, Liz tells him that if he expects anyone to pick him up, he’s going to have to get cleaned up first. Then she drives off.
But here’s where the writing goes from advanced to very advanced: That scene does double duty. Not only is it more truthful but it establishes REAL CONFLICT between the two. Nick hates this girl now. The beginner screenwriter just has his two leads hate each other because it works better for what he’s trying to do. Who needs a *reason* for that? Here, the writer actually creates a reason for Nick to dislike Liz, establishing the necessary conflict between the two leads.
Later, the two re-meet at the hardware store. Liz sees Nick throwing money around. Liz’s farm is going under. Money is everything to her right now. So she offers him a place to stay while he waits for his battery to come in (another well-done, underrated, part of the plotting – the time constraint) and when she brings him back to her place, Ruby is sitting there, the wife of the dead trucker.
This is an EXTREMELY strong writing choice and let me tell you why.
Nine of out ten writers would’ve taken a break at this moment in the story. We just went through Liz meeting Nick on the road, Nick buying the new battery, the two negotiating him staying over… it would’ve been easy to take a couple of scenes off with Liz just sort of sitting in her room and looking tired. Or showing a “day in the life” of living on the farm. I know a lot of writers who would’ve done that. Five pages of mush before we get back to the plot.
By having this obstacle waiting for her – the wife of the man she killed sitting on the couch – tells me that this writer gets it. He knows that movies in small towns on farms die a lot quicker on the page than the Mission Impossibles and the Jurassic World’s of the world. So he knows that he has to keep things moving. It was moments like this that elevated this script above 99% of the other scripts out there.
And then, like any good horror film, you have this looming danger that’s coming. We know that the full moon is 3 days away. We know that Nick is the perfect food source. Nobody will miss him if he disappears. So we’re wondering, is he dead meat? Or is she going to start liking him enough that that doesn’t happen? Or maybe still happens?
And then, as if all that isn’t enough, you have not one, but TWO looming obstacles imposing on the central storyline. One is Ruby, a cop who wants to know what happened to her husband. And two is Hashke (and ultimately the strip joint owner), who want to kill Nick and get his money back.
I honestly don’t know if you could’ve come up with a better series of creative choices than was made here.
All of this sitting on top of the best creative choice of all, which was to make this a horror film. Too many writers would’ve written the version of this that the Black List logline implies. Which is a criminal who stays with a woman while avoiding the bad guys chasing him. That story ISN’T SEXY ENOUGH for a screenplay. You need a genre element to make people care (not to mention, make it marketable!). And that’s what we get here. We get the werewolf element.
How do we know that the non-genre version doesn’t work? Cause we’ve seen it. Jason Reitman’s snore-fest, Labor Day. Same premise. But no werewolf. Which equaled 1000x more boring.
This is the kind of script that, if you can internalize all the choices made here, starting from the concept then moving into the plotting itself, you will massively improve your own screenwriting. Every screenwriter should read this script.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[x] impressive (Top 25!)
[ ] genius
What I learned: The “Meet Mean.” We’ve all heard of the “Meet Cute.” But how much more interesting is it when your male and female leads are introduced via a “Meet Mean,” as was the case here? Liz drives up to Nick, asks him a few questions, lets him know there’s no way she’s letting him in her car, then drives off. I find that WAY MORE interesting than if they had an instant obsessive infatuation with one another.
Genre: Heist/Thriller/Period/Romance
Premise: Set in 1962, a male and female jewel thief must put a team together to take down a sinister German business mogul who made his untold riches during World War 2.
About: This newest version of Oceans is being spearheaded by Margot Robbie, who is said to be the creative leader of the direction and feel of the project. She took it to director Jay Roach. And, I’m assuming, Robbie chummed up with Gosling on Barbie, where she asked him to be in Oceans as well. Robbie says she was more interested in the romantic aspects of the story than the heist stuff. I’ve reviewed one other script from newcomer Carrie Solomon, a Black List script titled, “My Boyfriend’s Wedding.” I found that script to be a bit messy.
Writer: Carrie Solomon
Details: A very reader-unfriendly 129 pages
Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling.
Are they the new Audrey Hepburn and Carey Grant?
Cause after Barbie, they’re doing this!
It’s a smart play to make an Oceans movie right now. The number of genres that have the box office potential to risk a theatrical release is shrinking by the month. But this is one of the remaining few that could work – the sexy heist genre.
It’s a simple but powerful formula. Get a couple of hot movie stars, dress them up to look even hotter, write a script that’s dripping with sexual tension, and VOILA. A hundred fifty million domestic buckaroos.
UNLESS…
Unless the script is bad. Let’s (hopefully) learn that that’s not the case.
It’s 1962. 30 year-old Elsie Brunner, one of the most beautiful women in the world, is at a mansion party trying to steal some really expensive earrings. Once she finds the bedroom where the safe is, she sees 37 year-old safe-cracker Jack Mason. Jack is one of the most handsome men in the world. He also wants these earrings.
After Jack steals the earrings, the two of them (who instantly hate each other) must pretend to be a couple when others from the party find them. They use this ruse to escape, flirt, separate, and for Jack to sadly realize, afterwards, that Ellie took the earrings from him.
A few months later they’re in Monte Carlo because some super-baron named Aristotle Onassis has a jewel worth more than 50 Mona Lisas. It’s here where we learn about Jack’s dark soldier past and his experiences in the war, where the evil Aristotle wiped out his entire team!
That’s the real reason Jack wants the diamond – to get back at him! Elsie wants to join him, not because she has a personal beef with Aristotle: “Because I’m all out of mercy for pathetic men with no concern for what’s right. Their breed has wreaked enough havoc.” Put that through the 2023 movie dialogue translator and you get: TOXIC MASCULINITY
Which means getting the diamond isn’t enough. They want to destroy this man as well. Aristotle wants to buy the Hotel de Paris to stabilize his shaky financial portfolio. But he currently doesn’t have enough money. His plan to remedy this? He’s rigged the Monaco Grand Prix so that his car will win. He’ll bet untold gobs of money on his car, win a small fortune, and use that to buy the Hotel.
Therefore, if they can stop him from winning the race AND steal his diamond, they’ll basically bankrupt him and ruin his life. Of course, if they’re going to pull this off, they need a team. To do so, they’ve decided to use a half-retro Oceans approach (all men) a half-modern approach (all women) and come up with the first Oceans team that has an equal amount of men and women. And we’re off! Oh wait, that’s horse racing. “Ready, Set, GO!”
Let’s start with the good.
I love the setting here. I knew nothing about this script when I opened it. So I wondered, “How are they going to make this different? Why do I want to watch another group of people who like to make a lot of jokey quips with one another try and steal something?” I just didn’t see anything they could do that would make the concept feel fresh.
But the second I learned the script was going to take place in Monte Carlo in 1962, I started reading with a lot more interest. It goes to show that SETTING ALONE can really freshen up a stale concept. Especially with these franchises, since they all feel the same. I remember they did the same thing with X-Men: First Class, and that ended up being one of my favorite superhero movies.
I’ve also realized that movies set in the 1960s give your characters backstory access to World War 2. That war has the potential to come up with some of the most interesting backstories imaginable. So there’s a lot to play with. And they do that here with both Jack and Aristotle.
Although I’m all for peace on earth, the fact that there hasn’t been a big war in the last 75 years has left a lot of writers with nothing to work with on the backstory side. Sure, you can use the Afghanistan War but it doesn’t exactly hold the same weight as a character who participated in the battle for Iwo Jima.
That rich texture can shape characters in really interesting ways and this script is proof of that. I found Jack to be quite generic for the first 25 pages. But the second we learn about his World War 2 roots, along with his connection to Aristotle, I saw him in a whole new light.
Also, a rule I have with heist scripts is that the heist needs to have something in it that isn’t just about money. Money is boring in these types of movies. Who really cares if our heroes score 5 million dollars? Or 50 million? Or 100 million? It’s just monopoly money to a moviegoer. So you want to be creative – find other ways to make the heist fun.
Adding a car race, of all things, is something I haven’t seen in a heist film before. You have to win a race to complete the heist? Count me in!
But I didn’t enjoy everything here. If I have to read another sexy heist team-up where the opening scene has the guy steal something, only for the guy and the girl to go their separate ways afterwards, and the guy realizes that the girl stole the object from him, usually during a kiss, I’m going to sauté myself at 450 degrees in an air-fryer. I’m not exaggerating when I say that I’ve read this scene in 75 different scripts.
C’mon. This is your first scene. You have to show us why you’re a real writer and not just another movie fan who got into screenwriting. Give us something different. Even if it’s just the guy discreetly stealing from the girl! Why is it, in all 75 of these scripts, that the girl steals from the guy? It just shows how unoriginal we all are. Or how lazy we are. Dig a little deeper. Try a little harder. Declare to yourself, “I’m going to give the world an opening scene that they’ve never seen before and I’m going to rewrite it 100 times if I have to to get there.”
Luckily, after that opening, the writing got a lot better. I don’t remember the last time the setting of a movie did so much of the heavy lifting for a screenplay. This 1962 Monte Carlo setting turns another run-of-the-mil heist film into something potentially special.
I’ve never been the biggest fan of the Ocean’s movies, especially as they’ve only gotten worse with each new entry. But I honestly think this could be the best of the series. It may not have the charm and star power of that original remake (what a funny phrase to type), but it has a way more interesting plot, a more creative heist, and the romanticism of the 1960s at its back. This movie could be the real deal.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[xx] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: From this point on, when I am imagining a potential project, I’m going to imagine what the concept looks like in the 1990s, 1980s, 70s, 60s, 50s, 40s, to see if any of those options is better. Take, for example, the logline we were kicking around yesterday: “A disgraced airline pilot turned plane crash investigator is hired by a mysterious outfit to investigate a recent crash in a remote part of Siberia, only to learn, when he gets there, that the crashed vehicle is alien.” Imagine that scenario set in 1957. Or 1943. Or 1969. Each of those movies is completely different.
For one day only, we’ll be talking about the shocking interview UFO whistleblower David Grusch just did!
First of all, I promise I’ll tie this all into screenwriting by the end of the post. But before we get to that, I want to talk about these latest UFO allegations that have hit the news in detail because I know a lot of people don’t believe in UFOs or aliens. I’m not here to convince you that they exist. But I do want to make the case that this latest allegation, which claims that the U.S. is in possession of at least a dozen non-human craft, is a bigger deal than what we’ve seen in the past.
To be fair, it does feel like every five years, some big UFO news comes out, and us UFO fanatics are excited because we’re finally going to get the answers we’re looking for, only for no evidence to emerge, the government to poo-poo the sighting, and the media to quickly move on.
There was the release of these “Go Fast” and “Gimbal” UFO videos several years back, both of which were confirmed by the government to be UFOs. However, because the videos are so shoddy, it’s not convincing enough to be confirmed as the real thing.
You had the Stephensville, Texas sightings in 2008. Many people saying they saw a giant craft. You had the famous Phoenix Lights case, with an enormous craft that hovered over Phoenix in 1997, which the mayor, Fife Symington, would later admit he saw and believed was an alien craft.
Before Phoenix, you had the controversial Bob Lazar story, where Lazar said that he worked at Area 51 where they had, in their possession, alien craft, which they were trying to back-engineer. Lazar is the one who put Area 51 on the map for the general populace.
You had the 1980s Hudson Valley flap, with UFOs ripping through the area over a series of several years and numerous people claiming they’d seen these ships. Not just lights. Actual ships. And if you go back even further, you have the grandaddy of them all, Roswell.
Now, the reason Roswell (as well as Bob Lazar’s story) is so significant today is because this newest news has a whistleblower named David Grusch, who is verified to have a high level ranking inside the government that allows him access to 200 classified programs, and by talking to a lot of the high-ranking officers in these circles, he’s found that there’s a secret program that has possession of a dozen (or more) UFOs which they are trying to back-engineer.
Some of them have crashed. Some of them have been abandoned. But they’ve been able to get a new one once every 10 years or so. Funny enough, the first retrieved UFO was not at Roswell, but actually in Italy in 1933. Mussolini even talked about it with the Pope (documented in the linked article). The Pope fell out with Mussolini during the war and would eventually reveal the UFO to the U.S., which is how the US became aware of it and would end up snatching it up after the war.
Now all of this sounds crazy to people outside of the UFO community. But those who, like me, have been following this topic forever, know that there’s been a ton of smoke around these retrieved craft forever now. It’s almost an open secret at this point.
The reason Grusch’s claim is different from all the UFO stories from the past is because he’s a very well-respected member of the government who a lot of people vouch for. Also, the media has meticulously verified every single job position he claims to have had within the government.
One of the ways that the government and media were so easily able to dismiss Bob Lazar’s story (which is now starting to look true – the Roswell craft is one of the craft that Grusch says the US has in their possession) is that Lazar couldn’t prove that he worked for the government. David Grusch has enough documented proof of his employment to fill a warehouse.
Another major factor here is that the US has just recently put into practice a whistleblower law that allows government officials to finally talk about this stuff without going to prison. This is why Grusch has come forward. And it’s why other whistleblowers with even more information are going to come forward as well in the coming months.
I’m aware of what the skeptics are thinking.
Okay, great. But, where’s the evidence? Where are the pictures? Where is the video? Why is every picture that’s ever been taken of a UFO blurry?
This is a complicated question so I want to tackle it with a certain level of nuance. I’m 90% sure UFOs are real and aliens are here. That 10% that’s holding me back are the questions I just asked above. It definitely feels convenient that all the pictures that have ever been taken of UFOs are just out of reach.
When I get too deep into this stuff, I think about the topic of ghosts. I don’t believe in ghosts. When I see all these TV shows and videos and pictures that purport to show ghosts, I’m aggressively dismissive. Yet, for some reason, I don’t put as much emphasis on the burden of proof for UFOs as I do ghosts. I think it’s because I just believe, in my heart, that UFOs are real. But clearly I’m not treating the two topics equally, which implies that I’m looking at the UFO topic through belief-colored glasses.
But getting back to the photographic evidence question. Part of this answer is obvious. UFOs are almost always seen at night. And you’re never going to get a good picture of anything at night that’s more than 200 feet above you. Try and take a picture of a helicopter flying overhead at night. It’s blurry. It’s tiny. It’s unclear. At the very least, you’re not going to get a sharp enough image of a craft that’s going to convince anyone that it’s a UFO.
With that said, there are a lot of sightings that have happened during the day. Why haven’t any of these supposed sightings resulted in pictures? I want you to listen to a phone call of a guy in 1967 calling in to what was, at the time, a national UFO hotline that was set up for anyone wanting to report a UFO sighting.
This guy calls and frantically talks for 15 minutes about these UFO sightings that he had over the course of three days. And the operator gets noticeably agitated at the end and says, “Well, wait a minute here. You didn’t take ONE SINGLE picture in all that time?” At one point, there was a giant craft directly over the caller’s house in the middle of the day. Why not take a picture then?
To the caller’s credit, he shares the operator’s frustration. He wished he would’ve taken pictures! He seems almost confused as to why he didn’t get pictures. And I’ve found this to be a very common response from the thousands of people who have had these same sightings. When they’re asked about pictures, they seem baffled or confused. They don’t seem to know why they didn’t take pictures.
Now, if you think every one of these 30,000 – 50,000 people who had sightings are lying about what they saw and that’s why they don’t have pictures, that’s fine. Just listening to the authenticity in this man’s story alone, I’m convinced he saw the things he said he saw. But I understand if that’s where the conversation ends for you. I would respond the same way if this was a post about ghosts.
But I personally think that something’s stopping these people from taking the picture – or thinking to take the picture. Many of these stories about people getting up close to these craft or actually seeing the aliens, talk about being frozen, being unable to move. So these things seem to have some sort of control over you. Could they be preventing people from taking these pictures? I know it sounds crazy but if these things are 100 or 500 or 1000 years ahead of us technologically, that’d probably be something fairly easy to do.
What I’m hoping is going to happen with this latest round of whistleblowers is that it’s going to cause a wave. And, unlike in the past, the government and the media aren’t going to be able to sweep that wave under the rug. There hasn’t yet been a gigantic UFO story in the age of big social media. Maybe the uproar is so intense and so constant that they’re going to have to finally give us something. I don’t think they’ll give us everything. But I think they’ll give us something.
Now, I promised to tie this back into screenwriting. So here we go. I thought it would be fun for the Scriptshadow community to come up with the ultimate alien or UFO movie concept. That concept would then be for everyone here. Assuming we made it good enough that people would actually want to write a movie from it, it would be an “open source” movie concept. Anyone could take it and run.
The way we do this is I’ll give you a starting point concept, which I’ve already shared on the site before, and we can build on it. OR, you guys could come up with something better and we could build off that concept. I have no ego here. It’s been a long time since anyone has come up with a cool UFO or alien concept. So I just want to find one!
I will gladly jump into the comments and participate in helping guide our “ultimate alien idea” into the perfect alien/ufo concept. None of us should have any ego here. Tell someone if an idea isn’t any good. But also try and make it better. Or come up with a better concept yourself. Upvote those who are coming up with the best concepts so we know which loglines to focus our efforts on.
I’ve found that creating a concept is a lot easier (and more fun) with a bunch of people. So, here’s my original idea… which, ironically, after today, is starting to look like non-fiction. Improve on it. Tear it apart. Use it as inspiration to come up with a cooler idea. Anything goes!
A disgraced airline pilot turned plane crash investigator is hired by a mysterious outfit to investigate a recent crash in a remote part of Siberia, only to learn, when he gets there, that the crashed vehicle is alien.
While the box office helps screenwriters keep track of industry trends, which helps inform them when it comes time to write something, the majority of that data is useless. To screenwriters, I mean. There isn’t anything the average screenwriter can learn from Super Mario Brothers making a billion dollars. All movies in the top 10 live in Studio IP La-La Land, a destination reserved exclusively for the titans of the industry.
In order to learn something from the box office as a screenwriter, you want to track ORIGINAL projects. Projects that you could’ve written yourself, had you the foresight to do so. These are the projects that savvy screenwriters should be emulating and inspired by, as these are the scripts from screenwriters that actually get made.
Today I’m going to list the top 10 original projects, ranked by worldwide box office take, and tell you what you can learn from each of them. I’m sure there will be some comments about the underwhelming box office take of some of these films. But let’s keep things in perspective. M3GAN, the number one original movie of the year, cost 1/20th the budget of Super Mario Brothers, the number one overall movie of the year. When you take that into consideration, you realize these box office performances are a lot better than they first look.
M3GAN
Genre: Horror
Domestic: 95 million
Worldwide: 176 million
Lesson: I confess I did not see M3GAN’s success coming. I thought the living doll horror story had been done to death (see what I did there?). They couldn’t even get a better known doll franchise, Child’s Play, to drive ticket sales. Why would I think rando M3GAN would be able to? But if there’s anything M3GAN’S success reminds us, it’s that horror is the go-to genre if you’re a spec screenwriter who actually wants to make money. It honestly can’t be beat. And looking back at previously successful horror templates is a great starting point for coming up with an idea that gets buyers salivating.
AIR
Genre: Sports Drama
Domestic: 52 million
Worldwide: 90 million
Lesson: Yet another savvy business idea is to mine true sports stories for concepts. They usually do well. Weirdly, they all do well on the Black List (I guess because all those assistants are big sports fans), further improving the chances of them getting purchased. Air was a departure from the usual formula, though, since it was less about the on-field stuff and more about what happens behind the curtain. The hack the writers are using here is that they know a lot of actors love sports. And they know those same actors are either too old or not in good enough shape to play professional athletes. But anybody can play a schlub in a suit. If you make that schlub talk a lot, you’re going to find a big actor who wants to play him. That big actor is the start of a flashy package that’s going to make sure your movie gets a big marketing push.
COCAINE BEAR
Genre: Comedy/Horror
Domestic: 64 million
Worldwide: 87 million
Lesson: Cocaine Bear is an example of a low-key growing trend in concept creation: viral concepts. These are concepts that either already went viral on social media (“Zola”) or the ideas are so wacky, the producers are banking on the fact that the movie itself will go viral, which achieves that all-important awareness, and also saves some money on the back end of the marketing budget. That was the plan here, although it’s difficult to tell if it was successful or not. Cocaine Bear landed in that monetary zone where you can’t call it a success or a failure. Which means even these newer flashier ways to construct concepts are susceptible to the same roll of the roulette wheel that movies have had to deal with since day 1 of the business: You never know what’s going to click with audiences.
THE POPE’S EXORCIST
Genre: Horror
Domestic: 20 million
Worldwide: 74 million
Lesson: This was based on a book but I included it because it’s still an idea any writer could’ve come up with. You don’t even need the book to write about it, since it’s based on a real person. One of the most dependable horror specs you can write is an exorcist script. If I had any interest in exorcisms, I would be writing one of these every month. How dependable is the genre? Well, the script doesn’t really have a hook. I guess it’s kind of cool that the exorcist works directly for the Pope. But it’s not like the Pope is possessed. That would be a hook. Our exorcist still exorcises normal people, like every other exorcist. In other words, even without a hook, this movie made 74 million worldwide, and that’s all because of one word: EXORCIST.
65
Genre: Sci-fi
Domestic: 32 million
Worldwide: 60 million
Lesson: When people think of this film, they think, “Loser.” But it’s actually a winner. Every movie on this list is a winner because it’s an original idea that got made. Which is what most of you are trying to accomplish. 65 was actually a good idea. A couple of people crash land on earth during the dinosaur era just hours before the famous dinosaur-destroying asteroid arrives. Unfortunately, it made a couple of critical creative mistakes that tanked its RT score (main characters were, inexplicably, aliens and the tone was too dour). Since original movies are more dependent on good reviews than studio-backed mega-franchises, 65 didn’t survive its weak critical reception. To really take advantage of mid-budget sci-fi, you have to keep things here on earth and in the present. District 9, Arrival, and the upcoming The Creator. I still contend that 65 was a cool idea. But mass audiences tend not to like this story setup for some reason (they rejected “After Earth” as well).
PLANE
Genre: Action/Thriller
Domestic: 32 million
Worldwide: 52 million
Lesson: The great thing about these movies is that they always get made. These Thriller-Action B-movies might as well be printed on the same documents that authorize the financing transactions for production because that’s how dependable they are. With that said, you are going after the same group of actors here (Gerard Butler, Liam Neeson, Jason Statham, etc.) and it DOES help if you can give them anything unique. It’s very common for them to say, “I already played this part.” It’s why Statham got so excited to do The Beekeper. Sure, in the end, money talks. Neeson has done the same role for the last 20 movies. But what I’m saying is, you gain yourself a little bit of an edge if you not only come to the actor with an offer, but come to them with an offer and a role they haven’t gotten to play yet. Gerard Butler had not played a pilot yet. And that was all he needed.
MISSING
Genre: Thriller
Domestic: 32 million
Worldwide: 49 million
Lesson: Timur Bekmambetov is THE GUY for these computer-based movies. I know a writer who’s writing one for him right now. And since they’re so cheap to make, I see Bekmambetov’s production company continuing to spit them out until they squeeze every dollar out of the sub-genre. Just make sure that you keep the story moving, which Missing does an AMAZING job of. It isn’t just a thriller in name. It’s thrills every second. Remember that the main character is sitting down the whole movie (or most of it). Which is why you want the story to have extreme urgency and stakes. Cause if someone is sitting down the whole movie in front of a computer and their goal is weak and they have as long as they want to achieve that goal? That’s a script disaster waiting to happen.
80 FOR BRADY
Genre: Comedy
Domestic: 40 million
Worldwide: 40 million
Lesson: It may not be my thing. It’s probably not your thing either. But the 65+ female demographic has been known to come out for these movies. The formula right now is comedy + several older women. But that could change and be centered around 2 older women, or even 1, if she’s interesting enough. If you have a really good comedy idea for the older female demographic, it may be worth writing it just because this is one of the least competitive sub-genres out there. Very few writers are writing them. So if you had something good, you could sell a script.
RENFIELD
Genre: Comedy/Horror
Domestic: 17 million
Worldwide: 25 million
Lesson: What I’ve found with horror comedies is that there’s a segment of writers who love to write them and a segment of readers who love to read them. But when you get to the actual theater, not a lot of people like to come to them. The target demo for this genre combo is usually people bored at the end of the weekend who just want to throw on something mindless. Which is why this movie bombed. Plus, I think it was too weird. The comedy angle was odd – that Dracula’s assistant had powers of his own. It didn’t really make sense. That’s script suicide right there – when your main character’s unclear.
THE COVENANT
Genre: War/Action
Domestic: 16 million
Worldwide: 18 million
Lesson: These movies tend to play well to conservative audiences. This one was about a guy carrying another guy across the battlefield for a long distance. But it’s a tough genre to hit the bullseye with. American Sniper showed what was possible at the box office. Lone Survivor did well. Hacksaw Ridge did solid. So you would think this would’ve done better. What was the difference? Out of these four films, only The Covenant was not based on a true story. The thing with these conservative-leaning war stories is that the Rust Belt idolizes these soldiers. They’ve been celebrating them long before anyone made a movie about them. You could say that they’re conservative IP. So I think that’s the trick if you’re going to write one of these. Making it completely fiction, especially with such a weak hook (carrying a guy across a battlefield), was the stake in this movie’s box office heart.
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Genre: Horror/Action
Premise: A lonely bounty hunter trying to improve his life goes around LA killing secret monsters hiding inside human bodies. His job gets a lot more complicated when he’s forced to team up with his first partner.
About: This one sold for a bunch of money in a competitive bidding war that ultimately went to Netflix. David F. Sandberg is directing.
Writers: Gregory Weidman and Geoff Tock
Details: 92 pages
I’ll be honest.
All I care about right now is aliens. I’ve been following this story about the U.S. having possession of crashed alien ships for the last 24 hours. If it was up to me, I would spend the next ten Scriptshadow posts talking about it. I actually looked for an alien ship outside my place this morning. So far, one hasn’t stopped by.
But I understand not everybody here is as enlightened as I am and that you don’t care that the aliens are coming (or have they always been here??). So I’m going to restrain myself from turning this into UFO Shadow. FOR NOW.
The cool thing is that we have a script worthy of its own headlines today. “Below” resulted in a serious bidding war and sale. It’s going to be directed by David F. Sandberg. I’ve met Sandberg two times now, once on the set of Lights Out and another time randomly in the aisle of a supermarket. He’s an excessively sweet guy. He just emanates positive energy and we don’t have enough of that in this town.
So I’m really rooting for this script.
“Our Man” is our hero. He lives alone in LA in a tiny apartment, listens to self-help podcasts all day long that preach things like, “You can’t depend on anyone. Only you can move up in the world by your own actions.”
Which is exactly what Our Man is trying to do. He’s a bounty hunter of sorts. He gets text messages every week for a new job. “5% above normal rate” they say, then gives him a location. Off he goes and kills these monsters, tentacled creatures hiding inside human bodies called “dregs.” Afterwards, he takes the dreg skull to a buyer who pays him cash.
Our Man’s dream is to open his own karaoke bar. And he only needs a few more jobs to start that dream. But when he gets a text for his next job, it’s accompanied by, “Now you have a partner.” Our Man tries to ignore it, but after doing the job, his new parter, a woman slightly older than him named “Boxer,” shows up.
Boxer attempts to befriend Our Man, who does everything within his power to stay alone. He doesn’t do the whole “connect with people” thing. But she keeps chipping away at him and soon they’re drinking beers and eating food truck tacos together. To his surprise, Our Man likes Boxer.
As they go over the uptick in jobs lately, Boxer theorizes that something big is about to happen. And when they catch a dreg kidnapping a person instead of killing him, like they usually do, she knows something is up. That’s when they get a shocking text. Their next job is 700%(!!!) above normal rate. Could it be the Queen Bee? Our Man doesn’t want to find out. But they don’t have a choice. And off they go.
There are a couple of big things that come to mind when you read “Below.” The first is that this is the third version of this story that’s been on Netflix. People hunting down supernatural creatures in Los Angeles. You had Bright. You had Day Shift. And now you have Below.
That surprises me. But maybe there’s an executive at Netflix who just loves these types of movies. I get it. If I was an exec, every other movie I greenlit would have aliens. But it did catch my eye because you’re always looking for something fresh. So I was surprised that this was so similar to other stuff on the streamer.
The other big thing going on in this script is the Walter Hill writing style. That’s where you write sentences vertically instead of one after the other. It’s tough to endure if you read a lot of scripts because you’re used to getting that line in between every paragraph. And here, you don’t get that breather. So I’m not a fan of it. But I suppose if you don’t read a lot of scripts, it doesn’t disrupt your reading pattern much.
As for the story, I was on the fence for a while.
I should bring this up because I JUST TALKED ABOUT IT in the newsletter and here it is, being done in all its glory, not once but TWICE WITHIN FIVE MINUTES. I mean, I was shocked.
25 pages in, Our Man gets stopped by a cop. The cop is seconds away from discovering that our man just killed a “human.” And then a kid drives by and throws a bag of urine at the cop, so the cop jumps in his car to chase him. This is the worst thing you can do as a writer – SAVE YOUR HERO FOR HIM. A hero must save himself. That’s when we fall in love with heroes!
Go watch when the T-1000 shows up to take on the Terminator in T2. You get a 20 minute series of attacks. Not once does James Cameron save the Terminator. The Terminator has to earn every single victory over the T-1000.
So then, less than 2 seconds later, Our Man is walking back to his car and gets surprise-jumped by a dreg. They battle. The dreg has the upper hand. It’s easily about to kill Our Man. And then, what do you know, BLUE LIGHTNING appears from the side. It kills the Dreg. It’s Our Man’s new partner, who came in to save the day!
That is twice – TWICE – that the writer saved the hero.
You’re probably asking, well, wait a minute Carson. If this is so bad, why is the script selling for so much money?
I’ll tell you why. Because it’s better than both Bright and Day Shift.
Something happens to this script when Boxer arrives. Because, before Boxer, this was a cold sad depressing world. She then comes in with this enthusiasm that not only gives Our Man hope – it gives US hope! I loved that she was older, which is a different kind of dynamic than we’re used to with these pairings. I loved that all she wanted to do was be friends with Boxer. And she wouldn’t let him off the friend hook.
And of course, once she wins that battle, we’re a HUGE FAN of them. We now want them to succeed together. What this does is that when they get into trouble, we feel a lot more fear due to our strengthened emotional attachment to the team. This is what screenwriting is all about – it’s mining real emotion from fictional characters. It’s the hardest thing to do in the world and it’s always a minor miracle when it happens. These writers make it happen with that relationship.
Plus you have this mystery with these monsters. What are they? Who’s in charge of them? What do they want? Why are they being asked to kill them? With the vampires in Day Shift, it was all straight forward. With Bright, you had some dumb super-fairy that we didn’t care about. The things in this script genuinely have you curious what the bigger mystery is and that keeps you turning the pages.
I even got used to the annoying writing style after a while. Very curious to see what David Sandberg does with this. I hope the directing style feels different from Bright and Day Shift.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[x] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Early on in the screenplay is when you make the impression on the audience of your main character’s defining trait – the thing that’s holding him back in the world. If you don’t make that impression loud and clear, the reader isn’t going to ever know your hero. The mistake a lot of writers make is to be too subtle about this defining trait in the fear of being too “on the nose.” I can’t tell you how many times I’ve given this note and the writer has said, “Yeah but I didn’t want to be on the nose.” When it comes to who your main character is, you want to be clear. And Weidman and Tock take five separate moments in the opening 15 pages to highlight that our hero is ALONE. He’s LONELY. He’s BY HIMSELF. It ingrains in the reader’s head that this it the thing that our hero needs to overcome in this story.
What I learned 2: Give your hero a life goal that’s a little surprising and a little against type. It adds more depth to the character. One of the best creative choices in the script was that this downbeat loner loved karaoke. So much so that his dream was to open a karaoke bar! Something about that choice made Our Man feel real. You could’ve easily done the cliche thing of having his goal be to retire to a small house on a beach in Mexico. But by adding this more unexpected choice, he stands out from all the cliched characters before him.
