Today’s script was written by one of the best directors of all time and was supposed to be his next movie before his death. I don’t know how the movie would’ve turned out, but I certainly have my opinions on the screenplay.

Genre: Period Drama
Premise: When a group of men find silver in a Spanish mine, they begin excavating it, only to realize that the local government wants a controlling interest in the spoils.
About: This was written by famous director David Lean (The Bridge On The River Kwai, Lawrence Of Arabia, Doctor Zhivago) and Robert Bolt (who was a co-writer on a lot of Lean’s films). The script is an adaptation of Joseph Conrad’s novel. This was going to be Lean’s next film after PASSAGE TO INDIA but he died before it could start production. It’s one of several films Steven Spielberg was trying to produce for Lean. Martin Scorsese has expressed interest in making it. In 1998, the Modern Library ranked Nostromo 47th on its list of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century. F. Scott Fitzgerald said, “I’d rather have written Nostromo than any other novel.”
Writers: David Lean and Robert Bolt (based on the novel by Joseph Conrad)
Details: 92 pages (but feels like 192). January 1991 draft

Bardem for Nostromo?

Okay, I want you to imagine a movie where you have a hero WHO DOESN’T DO ANYTHING. Okay okay. I guess you could argue that that’s The Big Lebowski (and it did okay for that film). But now imagine you’re talking about a drama. And imagine, not only does the hero not do anything, but he isn’t in the movie for the first 25 minutes. And when he does show up, he just walks around and people stare at him. While he does nothing. But walk. Around.

Welcome to Nostromo, the most baffling screenplay I’ve read by professional screenwriters in a long time. Now here’s the thing. I didn’t grow up during the Lean era so I’m not as in awe of him as some people. But I do understand that this was a different time in movie-making. It was a lot harder to create spectacle – to create these big ambitious canvases. So if you were one of the few directors who could pull it off, like Lean, you were in high demand.

I also know that there weren’t screenwriting books back then. Storytelling had a lot more freedom. Some people argue this was a good thing. Some people argue it wasn’t. But as I’m looking back at this script…I’m sorry but this could’ve used some hardcore development help. I don’t know if these guys were writing in a vacuum or what but this story is just a mess. It never finds its footing. It never knows where it’s going. It doesn’t know who its main character is, even though his name is on the title page of the script.

I mean this feels like 60 different writers worked on it and someone took a scene from each of their scripts, threw them in a blender, and this came out. And the thing is, it could’ve been good! It has this big treasure at the heart of it. Who can’t make a treasure story good?? Ahhhh! This was so frustrating.

We’re in the Golfo Placido, which I’m guessing is in South America maybe but I’m not positive because it’s never stated. The year is “I don’t know when” because that’s not given either. A man named Charles Gould has come here because he believes there’s a stash of silver in one of the forest mines. He hires a local foreman named Nostromo to guide him to the location, and low and behold, he’s right! There’s lots of silver!

Gould hires a local crew of natives to start excavating the silver while Nostromo, the man we think is the hero because he’s on the title page, disappears. Not like, as a story choice. He just isn’t mentioned for the rest of the first act. In the meantime, Gould gets the third degree from the local authorities, who of course want their slice of the pie.

Now the plan is to excavate all of this silver and ship it back to the homeland. Unfortunately, there’s a government coup, and the new president doesn’t just want a piece of the spoils. He wants the whole damn thing, including the horse we rode in on. Naturally, Gould has put a ton of money into this endeavor so he doesn’t want to just give it away. So he hires Nostromo (this is around the midpoint – before that, we barely see Nostromo at all. And when we do, he’s basically standing around while people admire him. For what reason he’s so admired is never made clear) and a French guy who shows up after Act 1, to transport all the silver on a small boat and get it out of the reach of the government.

So that’s what Nostromo and Decoud (the French guy) do. You’d think they’d go on a lot of adventures along the way and that’s where the story would be. No. Instead, we’re stuck with these two guys who we know absolutely nothing about (except that people like to stare at Nostromo) wading down the river on a boat.

Remember the tip I gave you yesterday which The Big Lebowski pulled off so perfectly? Throw a lot of shit at your characters? Lean and Bolt didn’t get that memo. These characters just stroll down the river without so much as having to swat a mosquito. That is until a random steamboat passes them, tipping their boat over and sinking them. Yes, this is the big “obstacle” that challenges our characters. A wave.

But that wasn’t even the tip of this script’s problems. Who was the main character here? Was it Gould? Was it Decoud? Was it Nostromo? I have no idea. I do know that if they were trying to create three protagonists, it didn’t work. If you’re going to try the impossible and write a tri-protagonist movie, each character must be clear, with clear goals and clear motivations. Outside of maybe Gould, I had no idea what anybody was doing, especially Nostromo.

I mean this guy shows up at his village and he’s some hero there. Like he walks down the streets and people chant his name. WHY??? He’s a glorified assistant. Helping foreigners find their way around a forest. Why would that make you a king in your village? It’s just bizarre. And this isn’t some first draft either. We have numbered scenes and deleted scenes, even references to the score.

And the plot. This plot! What was happening??? Focus on one thing. Focus on the guys trying to get silver out of the country. Focus on the government trying to raid the mine and our heroes defending it. But we’re just all freaking over the place here. At one point we watch the bad guy travel across the Andes mountains. It was like a random game of hot potato. Whichever character caught the potato, that’s who they’d focus the next scene on.

I know this is going to sound like blasphemy to suggest Lean and Bolt take a screenwriting lesson from James Cameron, but this script could’ve been great with a Titanic structure. The ending of the script, as it stands, (spoiler) has Nostromo burying the treasure in a secret hiding spot, then dying. So no one ever finds out where it was stashed.

What if you started on a modern day treasure-hunting team looking for the Nostromo treasure, then cut back to the past in pieces as we get closer and closer to finding out what happened to the treasure? It would give this script some desperately needed structure and we’d actually have a reason (a point!) to keep watching.

And then focus on freaking Nostromo in this new draft! Follow him! Not these other losers. And explain to us why he’s a damn hero instead of cryptically showing everybody infatuated with him. And please, make him active! Have him doing stuff and going after stuff as opposed to taking baths in villages.

I wish I could say something nicer about this script but it really was a mess. I think it could be reworked into something worth making, but it would definitely need a page 1 rewrite.

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

What I learned: I continue to notice that one of the best ways to describe a character is to describe their eyes via an adjective. Notice how wildly the impressions of these characters vary in your imagination as I use different adjectives: “Innocent eyes,” “Wild green eyes,” “Cautious grey eyes,” “Dark dead eyes.” Doesn’t that tell us so much more than had you just written, “Green eyes?”

Believe it or not, I didn’t like this movie for a long time. I’m not really into the whole stoner culture and this film was basically a promotional tool for the Toke and Tug crowd. But I watched it again recently (sans the close-mindedness) and I was kind of blown away. The character work here is amazing (not that I should be surprised. It’s written by the Coens) and the dialogue is top-notch. And that’s the main reason I wanted to give it the Tuesday treatment.  I wanted to see if I could snag a few dialogue tips. You know, the more I study dialogue, the more I realize it’s less about the actual writing of the dialogue, and more about all the things you do before the dialogue. In other words, the characters, the relationships, the situation. If you get all those things right, the dialogue writes itself.  That observation is on full display here.

1) Introduce your hero in a way that tells us EXACTLY who he is – I know I put this tip in my book, but I couldn’t dissect this script without bringing up how perfectly it’s executed here. We meet “The Dude” (Jeff Bridges) at the grocery store, shopping in the middle of the night, wearing a bathrobe. I mean, how do you NOT know who this character is after this scene? And yet I continue to see writers introducing their characters in unimaginative situations that tell us little to nothing about them. Come on guys! This is a fairly simple tip to execute!

2) CONFLICT ALERT – You’ll notice that in pretty much the entire script for The Big Lebowski (almost every scene) people are in disagreement. Walter and The Dude have two completely different philosophies on life. Walter thinks Donny (Steve Buschemi) is a total moron and is always yelling at him. Walter pulls guns on bowlers who cheat. The Dude and Mr. Lebowski never agree. The Dude and the Nihilists don’t agree. The Dude and the thugs don’t agree. Since there’s zero agreement in every scene, there’s always conflict. And guess what conflict leads to? That’s right, good dialogue.

3) Use passionate characters to distract us from exposition-heavy locations/scenes – The bowling alley where our characters always meet up has NOTHING to do with the story. It’s merely there for expositional purposes.  Technically, our characters could be discussing this stuff anywhere (a coffee shop, a workplace, a restaurant). Here’s why the Coens are clever though. They know if the location is random, the exposition will stick out like a sore thumb.  So they create this bowling alley setting and have one of their characters be the most DIE HARD BOWLER EVER (Walter).  This is no longer a random setting.  It’s an institution.  Discussions here matter because this place matters to our trio (particularly Walter).  I see too many scripts where writers lazily place their characters at coffee shops to dish out exposition.  These scenes ALWAYS smell like exposition.  This tip is a great way to avoid this issue.

4) Give someone in a position of power a handicap – The irony behind this make-up always works. The extremely rich Mr. Lebowski is in a wheelchair.

5) (DIALOGUE) Conversation Diversion – An easy way to write some good dialogue is to create a diversion for one of the characters in the conversation, so that he’s dealing with someone else at the same time he’s dealing with the primary character. So in “Lebowski,” we’re at the bowling alley and the The Dude is asking Walter what the fuck they’re going to do about losing the money. At the same time, Donny informs Walter that the semifinals of the tournament are on the Sabbath. Walter freaks out because he’s not allowed to bowl on that day. So he’s yelling at Donny to change the day at the same time that he’s explaining to The Dude that they have nothing to worry about.  A conversation diversion is a great way to spice up dialogue.

6) Always try and escalate the stakes around the midpoint – Readers get bored quickly.  The key to preventing their boredom is to keep them on edge. A great way to do this is to make the second half of your story BIGGER than the first half. You do this by raising the stakes in the middle of the script. Here the stakes are raised when Mr. Lebowski tells The Dude that because The Dude took his money, he told the kidnappers to do whatever they wanted to to get it back from him. He then shows Dude a severed toe the kidnappers sent. This isn’t a game anymore. The stakes have been raised.

7) Give your character a plan then find a way to fuck it up. – Really, you should approach every story you tell this way. Give a character a plan (he has to achieve something) then fuck it up for him. The result is entertainment. This tool should not only be used for the macro, but for individual sequences as well. For example, The Dude plans to do a money drop with the guys who kidnapped Mr. Lebowski’s wife, Bonnie. Before you write that sequence, ask yourself, “How can I fuck this up?” Well, Walter asks The Dude if he can come along. He does, and halfway there, Walter says he’s got his own plan. He’s going to give them a fake suitcase of his dirty underwear and keep the ransom money for themselves. Adding Walter fucked things up.

8) (DIALOGUE) The One-Sided Conversation – This is another dialogue scene that always works. Create a “conversation” where only one person is talking the entire time. The audience is so used to a back and forth, that the lack of one is somewhat jarring and ignites the scene. Here we have the famous scene where Walter and The Dude go to the house of the guy they THINK stole their money. It turns out to be a 16 year old kid. Walter proceeds to grill the kid for the entire scene. The kid just looks back at him the whole time and does nothing (this is followed by the classic moment where Walter destroys his car).

9) Keep throwing shit at your protag – Just keep throwing terrible things at your protag. That’s all this movie is. Someone steals The Dude’s rug. Walter botches the drop, putting The Dude in danger. The Nihilists come after him. Mr. Lebowski comes after him. His car is taken. The suitcase is stolen. Hurl the worst things imaginable at your protag and watch him react. It’s always interesting.

10)  Do everything in your power to avoid writing two slow scenes in a row. ALWAYS KEEP THE STORY MOVING – The cool thing about this movie is that after every “slow” scene (which are usually the bowling scenes), something YANKS The Dude back into the story. In other words, there’s never two slow scenes in a row. All of these things happen after a slow scene: Mr. Lebowski wants to meet. Jackie Treehorn (the porn king) wants to meet. The Nihilists show up when he’s taking a bath. Maude Lebowski (Julianne Moore) needs him to come over right away. They walk out of the bowling alley and their car is on fire. Lots of young writers think they need three or four scenes of detox before throwing the reader back into the story. This script proves that you only need one.

Bonus tip – For good dialogue, create an opposite dynamic between your two main characters – Whichever two characters talk to each other the most in your script, create the most exaggerated dynamic between them possible.  Because at their very core, they will be the opposite, their conversations will be filled with conflict.  And conflict = good dialogue.  Walter is a war vet.  The Dude is a Pacifist. I mean, how can these two NOT have great dialogue together?

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

I’m not sure what I was expecting from a January horror film. But it certainly wasn’t what I got. Everybody say it with me: “MA-MA.”

Genre: Horror
Premise: (from IMDB) Annabel and Lucas are faced with the challenge of raising his young nieces that were left alone in the forest for 5 years…. but how alone were they?
About: “Mama” seems to be the result of a growing trend of directors showing their chops via short films, then expanding those short films into full features or feature assignments. Mama started out as a 2008 short and has now been brought to the big screen, at least in part by Guillermo del Toro (it’s unclear how involved he was with the production). Co-writer Neil Cross is the creator of the show “Luther,” with everyone’s famous Prometheus captain in the lead role, Idris Elba. Andres Muschietti is the co-writer with his wife, and also the director of the film, which stars Jessica Chastain, the Academy Award nominee from Zero Dark Thirty.
Writers: Neil Cross and Andres Muschietti & Barbara Muschietti

Warning.

This movie is scary.

This movie is really scary.

But this movie will also make you cry.

It will hit you on an emotional level that you were not prepared for.

You will be in the theater doing your best to suck back tears before those dreaded lights come on in the end and everybody can see how much of a wuss you are.

In other words, it’s the ideal screenplay that I always ask for in the horror genre but never get. I get cheap scares. I get cheap thrills. I get cheap characters. I never get horror that makes me feel something. And I sure didn’t expect it from this film. I remember seeing the preview in the theater a month ago and laughing. You had kids crawling around like spiders while the word “Mama” was echoed theatrically in a child’s voice. I didn’t see any way this could be anything other than awful.

Boy was I wrong. Mama is the best movie I’ve seen in half a year. It would’ve been in my Top 5 of 2012 easily. Instead, it was released in the studio dumping ground of late January and February. But this is far from a piece of studio trash.

Mama starts with a harrowing opening scene featuring a deranged suburban father breaking down after the 2008 financial meltdown. He kills his wife, a couple of his co-workers, then grabs his two young daughters and starts driving. Where? He doesn’t know. He just needs to get away from here. His disorientation eventually results in his car shooting off a ledge in the mountains. The family survives the fall and starts marching through the woods, looking for shelter.

They find it in a small dilapidated cabin. But soon after going inside, they realize that somebody else lives here. And when Daddy decides to take the rest of the family with him to that big suburban block party in the sky, that house host (who we only see parts of) rips his head off and starts raising the girls herself.

Five years later, the father’s brother, who thankfully still has his head on straight, is desperately looking for the family. Miraculously, after looking everywhere in those mountains, he finds them. Except the girls are anything but the ones who left on that fateful day. They’re alone, malnourished, dirty, and, well, “feral” would be the only way to describe it. They scamper about on all fours and haven’t seen a bottle of Head & Shoulders in quite some time, as you can confirm below.

Over the next three months, a psychiatrist and his team carefully work the kids back into society and eventually the daughters are able to move in with their Uncle and his girlfriend, the too-cool-for-school Annabel. Annabel has her own shit going on. She’s a guitarist in a rock band. She’s used to living life on her terms. She was just dating this guy cause he was fun. Now she finds herself in the unenviable position of playing mother, a role she’s clearly not ready for.

After the girls move in, strange things start happening. The couple begins to hear noises, and the girls can be heard playing and laughing with somebody. One night, the disturbance becomes so intense, the Uncle gets up to see what he can find. He sees something that can’t be explained, stumbles backwards, over the railing, and slams headfirst into the stairs below, the force so great it sends him into a coma.

You know what that means . Annabel is now stuck on her own with the kids. And I don’t care if you’re mother of the year. No one wants to get stuck with kids who scamper around on all fours and tell you things like, “Don’t hug me. She’ll get jealous.” At least no one I know. While Annabel’s simply trying to make it through each day, the children’s psychiatrist has been studying the children’s tapes, and becomes interested in the girls’ repeated references to a woman who raised them in the cabin. At first he assumes that woman is part of their imagination. But the more he looks into it, the more it looks like this woman may in fact be real. And that she’ll stop at nothing to get her kids back.

Ma-ma.

The structure behind this screenplay was exceptional . I can’t remember reading a horror script that had this much forward momentum – that never got boring – that never got weak. There were a lot of things that contributed to that. Let’s see if we can identify some of them.

As you all know, I like screenplays with strong character goals. And that doesn’t change when it comes to the horror genre. I love Naomi Watts desperately trying to solve the “7-Days” tape in The Ring. I love the family trying to get their daughter back in Poltergeist. I love the mother trying to exorcise the demon inside her daughter in The Exorcist. But with the horror genre, you occasionally get the type of movie where a force is haunting our characters and we just sort of sit back and watch it happen. You see this, for the most part, in movies like, “The Others” and “Rosemary’s Baby,” and more recently in the Paranormal Activity franchise.

These are much harder stories to pull off because nobody’s going after anything. By including a character goal, your story gets pulled along the track by someone seeking to solve a problem. When you don’t have anyone pulling, your’e obviously stuck in one place.  And how interesting is that?

So what Mama does is really cool. It does both. Within the house, Annabel is taking care of these girls while all this crazy shit is happening. That’s the “haunting” section. Then the psychiatrist has a goal. He suspects that the “mother” these girls are referring to wasn’t made up, as he originally suspected, but that she might be real. So he starts investigating that possibility. This works really well since we’re able to cut back and forth between the haunting and the investigation, allowing a sort of “cheat” where we get the best of both worlds.

Another real strength of Mama is its main character, Annabel, and the situation it places here in. We establish early on that she’s a terrible parent and is only in this thing for the Uncle. So when the twist comes with the uncle falling into the coma, the story switches gears to place the worst character for the job in a position where she has to do the job. What a great story choice! I mean how much more compelling is that than having the loving doting perfect Uncle around all the time?  If that were the case, there would be no conflict, because Annabel would never be forced to deal with the children. This was one of several really slick story choices I give the writers credit for.  Get the fucking uncle out of the picture.

Then there was the brilliant integration of the subplots. You had the psychiatrist. You had the Uncle in the hospital. You had the grandmother, who wanted custody of the kids. Then, of course, you have the girls’ own interactions with Mama herself.

And the reason I’m going gaga over all of this is because I read the bad versions of these screenplays every day. Where there are no subplots. It’s just people in a house with something weird attacking them. And that gets boring after 30 pages. Here we have so many subplots to keep weaving in and out of the main plot, that the story always remains fresh.

I also loved the decision to use two children. 99 out of 100 writers would’ve made the more predictable choice of going with one child, because one spooky child is what we always see. Of course, one spooky child is also cliché and therefore boring. By adding a second child, it opened up all these new avenues, and boy did the writers take advantage of it. One of the most brilliant choices in was to have one of the children pull away from Mama (and gravitate towards Annabel) and the other prefer Mama.

(spoiler) This created the all important CONFLICT that you want in every character dynamic (even if the dynamic is two young children) and led to a shocking, emotionally satisfying climax, one that you never could’ve achieved with a single child. And it’s why I keep going on about this same old advice – AVOID THE OBVIOUS CHOICE. Not only is it boring, but when you push yourself to go with the non-obvious, it almost always opens up new story directions that you never could’ve predicted. Why? Because nobody else has gone down that path before!  so they’ve never found those choices.

There were only a few minor things that bothered me. I didn’t understand how this thing could travel from house to house through the walls. That was vague. The moths seemed more spooky than story-relevant (although I did like their payoff). And there was a laughably clumsy moment late in the story where Annabel is driving to the forest and nearly runs over the Uncle, who just happened to be stumbling onto the road at that moment. But other than that, this was a GREAT cinematic experience, the kind you dream of having every time you pay 18 bucks. Top-notch storytelling, top-notch movie-making. I will go to see this one again!

[ ] What the hell did I just watch?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the price of admission
[x] impressive (go see it now!)
[ ] genius

What I learned: I absolutely LOVED the execution of the character flaw here and it fits in perfectly with the article I wrote the other day. Annabel’s flaw is that she doesn’t want to parent. She doesn’t want that responsibility. You’ll notice that the entire story, then, is designed to challenge this flaw. Annabel is thrust into the position as the sole parent of two young girls. They’re resisting. She’s resisting. But as the script goes on, she starts to change, begins to care for them, and in the end, (spoiler) she’s willing to fight an otherworldly creature with her life in order to save them. It’s the ultimate character transformation, and it’s a big reason why this ending was so emotional.

Warrior may not have made the splash it had hoped to, but that doesn’t mean MMA-themed movies are dead. Someone out there is going to write an MMA-centered classic. The question is, is it today’s writer?

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 effect 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: (from writer) Action
Premise: (from writer) Way To The Cage chronicles the fictional formation of ultimate fighting when an underdog brawler fights his way off the streets and forces his way onto the world stage to challenge the international no holds barred champion in the first Mixed Martial Arts match ever sanctioned in the United States.
About: Says the writer, “ I’ve been on the mat with some of the best fighters in the world and choked unconscious. But I’m just a writer. What if I had set out on a journey to discover myself, and along the way…created the perfect fighting style?” Also: “Way To The Cage placed in the 2nd Round of the Austin Film Festival Competition 2012 (Top 10% out of 6,500). You should read it because of my personal experience watching Mixed Martial Arts blossom in the early years. I also wanted to treat reoccurring themes in “fighting” movies with more respect. And didn’t want to fall victim to using sex & violence as cliches.”
Writer: Richard Michael Lucas
Details: 114 pages

This is sort of an offbeat choice for a script review. I’m not really into the MMA. I’m a lover, not someone who jumps into a cage and fights to the death. But I also recognize that if you only stay within the genres that you like as a reader, reading can get boring. You miss out on some potentially cool experiences. “Desperate Hours” is not a script I would’ve normally picked up. Ditto “The Ends Of The Earth.” And both of them turned out to be great.

Also, I like to occasionally review a script that’s placed in a well-known contest. It’s important for a writer to not only know the level of quality required for a script sale, but the level of quality required to be a Nicholl finalist, or a Nicholl quarter-finalist, or, in this case, a top 10% finisher in the Austin Screenplay Competition. So what *is* the difference? Probably consistency. You often find SOME good things in these scripts, but there are just as many things that need work.  I’m hoping that that’s not the case here, though. I’d love it if the competition got it wrong and we found a gem.

Way To The Cage places us back in 1992 and introduces us to 19 year-old Philly local, Josh King. Josh is an odd duck, someone who’s not interested in pursuing the well-traveled blue collar path of his fellow Philadelphians. He wants to fight for a living. Which is hard enough as it is. I don’t know how many people make a living at fighting, but it’s probably less than the number of people who make a living at screenwriting, so it’s a tough gig.

But Josh has managed to make things even tougher on himself. He doesn’t want to box or wrestle. He wants to be a part of a new Japanese/Brazilian movement of free-form fighting known as Mixed Martial Arts. In other words, Josh has made his goal about as impossible as it can be.

After studying the fighting styles of these unique fighters through a series of underground bootlegged tapes, Josh perfects his own unique approach to mixed martial arts before heading off to Los Angeles where this free-form fighting style is in its infancy. It’s there where he becomes obsessed with finding and fighting the current face of MMA, Brazilian mega-fighter, Merco.

Josh fights his way up through a series of former Merco opponents and gains enough respect to get invited to Japan to fight on the MMA circuit there. At first he gets pummeled. But Josh’s strength is his ability to invent his own moves and figure out his own solutions. So soon he’s defeating the very fighters he was losing to, and finally gets the big showdown he’s been waiting for – a one-on-one with Merco.

I can see why Way To The Cage made it to the second round at Austin. It looks like a screenplay. It smells like a screenplay. The writing is clean. There’s none of that stopping and needing to re-read sentences that plagues so many amateur scripts. From a bird’s eye view, Way To The Cage looks like a professional piece of work. Richard deserves credit for that.

However, when you take a closer look, when you start to dissect the scenes and the characters, you find that, unfortunately, there are some issues here. And I’m hoping Richard will indulge me. This isn’t meant to disparage what he’s accomplished. It takes a lot of work to get to this point in your writing. But in order to take the next step, just like all the work Richard had to put in to get to the top of the fighting game, he’ll have to put in to become a top writer.

The biggest problem is that there isn’t any drama. Remember, drama emerges from resistance, from conflict. Forces and obstacles colliding against each other. Like we were talking about the other day with The Graduate. Mrs. Robinson desperately wants to seduce Ben. Ben desperately wants to escape Mrs. Robinson. Each character is the other’s obstacle, and the resulting collisions are what make the scene so electric.

There’s very little drama or conflict in Way To The Cage at all. In fact, in the first 30 pages – the entire first act – there isn’t a single scene that I’d say has conflict (except for maybe the Bronco fight). Usually it was Josh easily defeating some street fighter. Josh talking with his father. Josh talking with his best friend. Josh talking with his ex-girlfriend. Josh sitting outside his mother’s grave at the cemetery.

Compare that to Rocky. In the first act we get a great scene where Rocky finds out his gym locker’s been revoked. He barges into the gym and challenges Mick, the owner, about it. Mick fights back with a vengeance and the two go at it in front of everyone. THAT is conflict. THAT is drama. THAT’s a scene we remember.

We don’t get anything like that here. It just feels like Josh is drifting through his days. That’s not to say setting up Josh’s everyday life isn’t important. But you have to do it in a way that ENTERTAINS US. And the key to doing that is giving your characters goals (find out why my locker’s been taken from me) and putting obstacles in front of those goals (Mick refuses to give him his locker back).

Secondly, there were way too many obvious and cliché choices in the story. I say this all the time but when I’m 30 pages ahead of the script, when I’m never surprised, when every choice is something I’ve seen in a previous movie before, I have no choice but to check out. And the writer shouldn’t be surprised about that. He would do the same thing if he were me reading a script like this. Which brings up an interesting conundrum. Too many writers believe that when THEY’RE writing the cliché, it’s somehow different, because THEY’RE different, and therefore the cliché will come off differently.

I mean here we have the dad who wants his son to give up on the fighting thing and come work with him on the docks (make the “safe” choice in life). We have a dead mother. We have scenes where dad and son are remembering how great mom was while sitting at her grave. The romantic interest “doesn’t date fighters.” I just wasn’t getting anything that I hadn’t seen in these kinds of movies before.

The one area where I saw some potential was with Tommy, Josh’s friend. Although it’s unclear exactly what happened, it appears that six months prior, Josh crashed a car with Tommy in it, destroying his legs and putting him in a wheelchair. That storyline could’ve gone to some interesting places. Strangely, however, Tommy seemed to have no problem with Josh whatsoever. And when Josh moves to LA, Tommy’s storyline is pretty much done. Again, there was zero conflict in their relationship, zero issues that needed to be resolved.

The thing that was so great about Rocky was that it hinged on three really fascinating relationships. There was Rocky and Adrian. Rocky and Paulie. And Rocky and Mick.  None of those relationships were easy.  That’s why we remember Rocky. We don’t remember Rocky because of the fighting. And unfortunately, that’s all Way To The Cage seems interested in. There are tons of fights and they’re all meticulously detailed. Which is great. It’s fine. But as a reader, I’m not interested in how well a writer can execute the description of a reverse choke-hold. I’m interested in who the character in that choke-hold is. What are his demons? What are his flaws? What’s holding him back? What needs to be resolved with the other people in his life?

I mean what needs to be resolved with any of these characters here? Nothing really. Him and his dad are fine. Him and his friend are fine. Even him and his ex-girlfriend get along well. The only people he doesn’t get along with are a few of the people he fights. And since we barely know those people, we don’t really care if Josh defeats them or not.

To Richard’s credit, he does a really good job building up Merco, the villain, so that when he finally enters the picture, we’re intrigued to see how it will play out between him and Josh. But even there, there were some strange choices that lessened the impact of their collision. There was something about others wanting Josh to become an artificial “villain” to Merco so promoters could create a rivalry. It was really murky and didn’t make a whole lot of sense.

Moving forward, the number one thing I’d recommend Richard do is study conflict. You have to learn how to create conflict in every scene so that you can have drama in those scenes. If all your characters are doing is talking through stuff, that’s not a scene. And three or four of those in a row and your script is dead. When I see that, I know the script’s not going to be any good. Injecting drama is a MUST so you HAVE to learn how to do it.

I’d also probably re-work the structure. Nothing really happens in Philly for 30 pages. The LA section also wanders a lot. It isn’t until we get to Japan that it feels like our character is beginning his story. That’s where he encounters the most conflict, the highest stakes, his first true setbacks.  It’s where we get some actual CONFLICT.  Yet it’s the shortest part of the script.

I’d start the story a few years later as well, when this kind of fighting had already taken off. And Josh (whose unique style has made him a local celebrity in Philly) realizes that if he’s going to make a living off MMA, he’s going to have to go where the big boys are, in LA. Then get rid of Japan. It’s too weird to cram a whole other country into the final act. Establish some big tournament in LA as soon as Josh lands (the first ever MMA tournament), and Josh struggles as soon as he gets there. Unlike Philly, there are fighters coming in from all over the world. It’s a different league. But in the end, preferably through overcoming his flaw (more on that in “What I learned”) he wins the tournament and establishes himself as the best.

I realize that’s a bit cliché but the big problem with this script is that it wanders. It NEEDS FOCUS. An announced tournament early on does that. That’s why the underrated Warrior worked. That’s why Rocky worked. It’s why The Karate Kid worked. I mean you can take a chance and focus on a more understated “street” like finale. But Sylvester Stallone found out what happens when you do that when he made Rocky 5. It didn’t work out.

Anyway, I’ve been pretty harsh here. But I’m sure Richard has endured much worse on the mat. Improvement is the name of the game in screenwriting. Learn from your mistakes, figure out how to get better, then use what you’ve learned in the next script. Good luck! :)

Script link: Way To The Cage

[ ] Wait for the rewrite
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius

What I learned: “Way To The Cage” is a good example of what happens if you don’t give your main character a flaw. Like we discussed yesterday, no flaw typically means no depth, and I definitely felt that here. Josh was a pretty straightforward uncomplicated character (he just wanted to be a fighter) so he was kind of boring. Looking back at the flaws I highlighted yesterday, we could have added any number of those to Josh to give him some meat. Maybe fighting was more important to him than friends and family (Flaw #1). Maybe he’s too reckless, using his fighting for the wrong reasons, which keeps getting him in trouble (Flaw #8). Or maybe he can’t move on from his mother’s death (#11). A solid character flaw here would’ve added a lot to the hero and a lot to the story.

What’s the easiest way to tell the difference between an amateur and a pro script? That’s easy: CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT. The pros know how to do it. Amateurs don’t. Most amateurs don’t even attempt to add character development. And the ones who do usually use something like addiction or the death of a loved one to add depth. It’s not that you can’t or shouldn’t add these traits. But if you really want to delve into your character and make him/her three-dimensional, you want to give them a flaw, then have them battle that flaw during their journey, only to overcome it in the end. This is called a “transformation,” or an “arc.” It’s when your character starts in a negative place and finishes in a positive place. If you really want to boil it down and get rid of the fancy-schmancy screenwriting terms, it’s called “change.” And the best movies have central characters who go through a big change.

Now I don’t have 50 hours to write about character development so I can’t get too detailed here. But I should tell you a few things before I get to the meat of the article. Character flaws are more prominent in some genres than others. For example, you should ALWAYS include a character flaw in a comedy. Our inability to overcome our flaws is essentially what leads to all the laughs in the genre. Action movies, on the other hand, often have heroes who don’t change. The story moves too fast to explore the characters in a meaningful way. Thrillers are similar in that respect, although a good thriller will find a way to squeeze in a character flaw (I remember that movie “Phone Booth” with Colin Farrel and how it dealt with a selfish character). With horror, it depends on what kind of horror you’re writing. If you’re writing a slasher flick, character flaws aren’t necessary. A thinking-person’s horror film, though? Yeah, you want a flaw (the lead’s flaw in The Orphange was that she coudln’t move on with her life – she was obsessed with the past). In dramas, you definitely want flaws. Westerns as well. Period pieces, usually.

In my own PERSONAL opinion, you can and should ALWAYS give your characters flaws, no matter what the genre. People are just more interesting when they’re battling something internally. Without a flaw, without something holding them back, characters don’t have to struggle to achieve their goal. And that’s boring! Think about it. I always tell you to place obstacles in front of your hero so that it’s difficult for them to achieve their goal. Well what if while your character’s battling all these EXTERNAL obstacles, he also has to battle a huge INTERNAL obstacle?? Much more interesting, right??

You just need to match the kind of flaw and level of intensity of that flaw to the kind of story you’re telling. For example, Raiders is a fun action flick, so we don’t need a big deep flaw for Indy. Hence, Indy’s flaw is his lack of belief in religion and the supernatural. He doesn’t care about the Ark’s supposed “powers,” because he doesn’t believe it has any. But in the end, he finally believes in a higher being, closing his eyes so the spirits from the Ark don’t kill him. It’s a very thin and weak execution of Indy’s flaw, but the story itself is fun and light so it does the job.

The problem I always ran into as a writer was that nobody gave me a toolbox of flaws that I could use. That’s why I wrote today’s article. I wanted to give you eleven (the new “ten”) of the most common character flaws that have worked over time in movies. Now when you read these, you’ll probably say, “Uhh, but that’s too simple.” Yeah, the most popular flaws are simple. And the reason they’re simple is because they’re universal. That’s why audiences find them so moving – they can relate to them. Remember that – the more universal the flaw, the more people you’ll have who can identify with that flaw.

1) FLAW: Puts work in front of family and friends – This is a flaw that tons of people relate to, especially here in the U.S. where our country is set up to make us feel like losers unless we work 60 hours a week. Balancing your personal and professional life is always a challenge. It’s something I personally deal with all the time. I work a ton on this site. And when I’m not working on the site, I’m working on future ideas for the site. That leaves me with very little time to go out and have fun. The question then becomes, over the course of the story, “Will the hero realize that friends and family are more important than work?” We see this explored in movies time and time again. Most recently we saw it in Zero Dark Thirty (in which Maya never overcomes her flaw). Or last year with Billy Beane (Brad Pitt) in Moneyball. Again, it has to match the story you’re telling, but it’s always an interesting flaw to explore.

2) FLAW: Won’t let others in – This is a common flaw that plagues millions of people. They’re scared to let others in. Maybe they’ve been hurt by a past lover. Maybe they’ve lost someone close to them. Maybe they’ve been abandoned. So they’ve closed up shop and put up a wall. The quintessential character who exhibits this trait is Will in Good Will Hunting. Will keeps the world at arm’s length, not letting Skylar in, not letting Sean (his shrink) in, not letting his professor in. The whole movie is about him learning to let down his walls and overcome that fear. We see this in Drive, too, with Ryan Gosling’s character refusing to get close to anyone until he meets this girl. We also see it with George Clooney’s character in Up In The Air.

3) FLAW: Doesn’t believe in one’s self – This should be an identifiable flaw for anyone in the entertainment industry. This business is full of doubters, especially when you’re still looking for a way in. It’s tough to muster up the confidence in one’s self to keep going and keep fighting every day. But this doubt isn’t limited to the entertainment industry. Billions of people lack confidence in themselves. So it’s a very identifiable trait and one of the reasons a main character overcoming it can illicit such a strong emotional reaction from the audience. It makes us think we can finally believe in ourselves and break through as well! We see this in such varied characters as Rocky Balboa, Luke Skywalker, Neo, and King George VI (The King’s Speech).

4) FLAW: Doesn’t stand up for one’s self – This flaw is typically found in comedy scripts and one of the easier flaws to execute. You just put your character in a lot of situations where they could stand up for themselves but don’t. And then in the end, you write a scene where they finally stand up for themselves. The simplicity of the flaw is also what makes it best for comedy, since it’s considered thin for the more serious genres. I also find for the same reason that the flaw works best with secondary characters. We see it with Ed Helms’ character in The Hangover. Cameron in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (afraid to stand up to his father). And George McFly (Marty’s dad) in Back To The Future.

5) FLAW: Too selfish – This flaw I’m sure goes back to the very first time two homo sapiens met. There’s always been someone who puts themselves in front of others. Everybody in the world has someone like this in their life, so it’s extremely relatable and therefore a fun flaw to explore. It does come with a warning label though. Selfish characters are harder to make likable. Just by their nature, they’re not people you want to pal up with. So you need to look for clever ways to make them endearing for the audience. Jim Carrey in Liar Liar for instance – an extremely selfish character – would do anything for his son. Seeing how much he loves him makes us realize that, deep down, he’s a good guy. But it’s still a tough flaw to pull off. I can’t count the number of scripts readers or producers or agents have rejected because the main character “isn’t likable,” and usually it was because of a selfish asshole main character. A few more notable selfish characters were Han Solo in Star Wars, Bill Murray’s character in Groundhog Day, and Mark Zuckerberg in The Social Network.

6) FLAW: Won’t grow up – This is another comedy-centric flaw that tends to work well in the genre due to the fact that men who refuse to grow up are funny. We see it in Knocked Up. We see it in The 40 Year Old Virgin. We saw it with Jason Bateman’s character in Juno. We even see it on the female side with Lena Dunham’s character in the HBO show, Girls. I’ll admit that this flaw hit a saturation point a couple of years ago, so either you want to find a new spin on it (like Lena did – using a female character) or wait a year or two until it becomes fresh again. But it’s been proven to work because of how relatable a flaw it is. Who isn’t afraid to grow up? Who isn’t afraid of all the responsibilities of being an adult? That’s what I want to get across to you guys. These flaws all work because they’re universal. Everybody has experienced them in some capacity.

7) FLAW: Too uptight, too careful, too anal – You tend to see this flaw in television a lot. There’s always that one character who’s too anal, the kind of person you want to scream at and say, “LET LOOSE FOR ONCE!” We all have friends like this as well, so it’s another extremely relatable flaw. Joel Barish (Jim Carrey) in Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind is plagued with this flaw. Jennifer Garner’s uptight hopeful mother in Juno is driven by this flaw. And you’ll see this flaw in Romantic Comedies a lot, in order to give contrast to the fun outgoing girl our main character usually meets (Pretty Woman).

8) FLAW: Too Reckless – You’ll usually find this flaw in more testosterone-centered flicks. Like with Jeremy Renner’s character in The Hurt Locker, Martin Riggs (Mel Gibson) in Lethal Weapon, or James T. Kirk in the latest incarnation of Star Trek. The flaw dictates the character enter a lot of big chaotic situations in order to battle his flaw, so it makes sense. I’m not a huge fan of this flaw, though, because I believe the best flaws are universal. That’s why they emotionally manipulate audiences, because people in the audience have experienced those flaws themselves. Recklessness isn’t something people emotionally respond too. That’s not to say it isn’t effective and doesn’t allow for a satisfactory change in an action flick. It just doesn’t hit that emotional note for me like a lot of these other flaws do.

9) FLAW: Lost faith – This is a bit of cheat because questioning or losing one’s faith isn’t necessarily a flaw. But it’s an incredibly relatable experience. Something like 97% of the people on this planet believe in a higher being. But a majority of those people question their faith because now and then something terrible happens to shake it. Which is why you’ll see a ton of characters enduring this “flaw.” We saw it with Father Damian Karras in The Exorcist after his mother dies. We see it with Mel Gibson’s character in Signs after his wife is killed in a car accident. Again, losing someone close to us is a universal experience, so it’s one of those “flaws” that works like a charm when executed well.

10) FLAW: Pessimism/cynicism – This flaw isn’t used as much as the others, but you’ve seen it in movies like Sideways with Miles (Paul Giammati has actually made a living out of this flaw), Terrance Mann ( James Earl Jones) in Field of Dreams, and Edward Norton’s character in Fight Club. I always get nervous around flaws that make characters unlikable and pessimism tends to do that for me. For example, I never warmed to Sideways as much as others because Miles’ pessimism was so grating. But on the flip side, tons of people relate to that character for the very same reason. They’re just as frustrated with life as he is. Which is why the movie has its fans.

11) FLAW: Can’t move on – This is one of the lesser-known flaws but a powerful one. It’s basically about people who can’t move on, who are stuck on someone or something from the past. Their obsession with that past has stilted their growth, and brought their life to a screeching halt. Most famously, you saw this in Up, with Carl Fredricksen, who hasn’t been able to get past his wife’s death. But you may also remember it from the movie Swingers, where Mike (Jon Favreau) is still obsessed with the girl who dumped him. He keeps waiting for that call. With relationships being so fickle, people are experiencing this flaw ALL THE TIME, so it’s very relatable and therefore very powerful when done right.

So there you have it. You’ve now got eleven flaws to start applying to your characters. And remember, those aren’t the only flaws you can use. They’re just the most popular. As long as you start your character in a negative place and explore how they get to a positive place, you’re creating a character with an arc, a transformation. There’s more to character development than this, which I discuss in my book, but getting the character flaw down is probably the most important step.   Feel free to offer some of your own character flaw suggestion in the comments section. I’ll be watching closely so I can steal the best ones. :)