Genre: Drama
Premise: Two lovers/serial killers drive cross-country to Los Angeles in 1974, where they plan to kill Elvis Presley.
About: Scriptshadow favorites Eddie O’Keefe and Chris Hutton are back, with their third script reviewed on the site.  The first was the highly ranked Black List script, When The Streetlights Go On.  The second was the wild and eerie The Final Broadcast.  And today it’s Shangri-La Suite.  I may be mistaken about this, but I don’t believe this script is purchased yet.
Writers: Eddie O’Keefe and Chris Hutton
Details: 105 pages. Draft 8, May 3, 2012

Today was supposed to be that rare day where I actually reviewed a romantic comedy.  Not only that, but it was actually a pretty good romantic comedy!  Starring the Reester (Reese Witherspoon).  That’s why I realized it was good.  Since Reese Witherspoon is the only actress left who can open a romantic comedy, it means all the best rom-com material is competing for her.  So if she’s attached to something, it’s usually pretty good.  But alas, the powers that be got in the way and disallowed a review, so all I can say about The Beard (the script) is that I enjoyed it.

So where does that leave us?  In a much better place as far as I’m concerned!  Cause it means I get to review another script by a couple of my favorite writers, Eddie O’Keefe and Chris Hutton.  When The Streetlights Go On made me a fan.  The Final Broadcast made me the president of the fan club.  So what did Shangri-La do?

I’ll get to that in a second, but before I do, let’s address Eddie and Chris’ critics.  As much as their work is loved around town – and they’ve literally met everyone in Hollywood based on their two scripts – everyone’s concerned that Broadcast and Streetlights AREN’T MOVIES.  They’re great scripts with original voices.  But they don’t fit into any genre.  They don’t have any big movie moments you can put in a trailer.  Producers are afraid to put money behind them because they’re not easy sells.  Which I think is dumb of course.  No, they’re not Transformers.  But with the right director, both movies could tear up the independent market.

Anyway, the reason I bring it up is because Shangri-La is the most “movie-ish” script they’ve written so far. It’s got a goal (kill Elvis), it’s got a love story, it’s got blood, shootouts, murder.  The narrative is much more conventional.  And it’s got Elvis!  If ever one of their scripts was going to be turned into a movie, this would be it.  Which begs the question: Should it be turned into a film?

It’s 1974 and 18 year old redhead Karen Bird has had every opportunity in life to become anything she wants.  She was born into a rich family, went to nice schools, is pretty and likable.  But Karen had a tough time with the whole religion thing and eventually started wondering what the hell the point of life was.  The sun was going to burn out at some point so why bother? This led to drugs which led to screwing a lot of guys (in a cemetery of all places) which led to her parents losing faith in her and sending her to a mental hospital to get better.

25 year old half-Chippewa Jack Blueblood had quite a different life.  His mother died during childbirth. His father hated him for it.  Which meant a lot of drinking and a lot of beatings.  As a result, Jack acted out, doing a lot of drugs and getting in trouble with the authorities.  This led to the state sending Jack to the mental hospital to get better.

This is where Jack and Karen met and fell in love.  It’s where Jack told Karen his destiny – He believes he needs to kill Elvis.  Which doesn’t make a whole lot of sense because Jack loves Elvis more than anything.  It’s Elvis’ music that helped him through all the hard times, all the beatings and the run-ins with the cops.  But Jack is convinced that when he listens to his favorite Elvis song backwards, his dead mother is telling him to kill him.

At first it’s just a fantasy, but when one of the doctors rapes Karen, Jack goes apeshit and kills him.  Now they have no choice but to leave, and once that happens, they need a destination.  It turns out Elvis is playing a concert in Los Angeles on May 11th.  That becomes D-Day, the day Jack plans to fullfill his destiny.

The two aren’t mindless killers like you’ve seen in some of these movies.  They kill because they’re forced to or because the people in the way are really really bad.  They eventually pick up one of Jack’s old friends, Teijo, who’s convinced he was meant to be a girl and that he can fulfill that dream in Los Angeles.  But with the cops in hot pursuit of them and with Karen starting to have doubts, it’s unclear whether they’ll even make it to LA, where a beat-down end-of-his-career Elvis is waiting.  However if they do, you can guarantee it’s going to be one hell of a finale.

Like I said at the outset, this is the most traditional script Eddie and Chris have written.  But their unique voice, their talent, and their distinct flourishes are still all over it.  Right away, for example, we’re introduced to Jack, whose mother died giving birth and whose father is a Chippewa Indian.  I mean, who thinks of that??  The average writer will make a protag’s parents two white garden-variety folks and think nothing of it – not realizing that who your parents are shapes everything about you.  A white mother who died giving birth to you and a deadbeat abusive Native American father is such a unique choice that Jack immediately feels unlike any character you’ve ever seen.  That’s why I love these guys.  They don’t do it like everyone else does it.

We also have a narrator for the story, which is usually a big no-no, but these guys manage to weave him into the atmosphere of the piece, making sure he doesn’t feel like your typical exposition-vessel, but rather a necessary component of the quirky story.  These guys love voice overs, and they do it about as well and as naturally as anyone in the business.

Their dialogue also continues to be top-notch.  I don’t know what Eddie and Chris drink before writing their scenes.  All I know is I want some.  Here’s a line of dialogue from a broken-down Elvis in the middle of the script: “When I was young, Colonel, I felt things.  I had long hair.  Thick, long hair and good looks.  Life just tasted better.  Hurt harder.  All neon.  Now life is just a series of airplanes, limousines, and freaks carryin’ luggage up to hotel rooms you ain’t never been before.  Tellin’ lies.”  I mean how do you write dialogue for one of the most popular pop culture figures in history??  And yet these two do it with ease.  I would kill to be able to write something half as good.

On the flip side, the critics of Shangri-La say that the script is too derivative of Bonnie and Clyde and Natural Born Killers.  I guess that’s the danger of writing something commercial.  The more commercial you get, the more likely that movie’s already been done before.  I’ve only watched Bonnie and Clyde and Natural Born Killers once, and both were forever ago, so those viewings didn’t affect my opinion.  However I can understand why it might’ve affected others.

For me, it’s more about comparing Shangri-La with Eddie and Chris’ other work.  What I loved so much about those scripts was that I never knew what was coming next.  I talk about that all the time here.  It’s rare when I genuinely don’t know where the story’s going.  So I love it when a writer’s able to keep me guessing.  Streetlights especially, having that passive uninvolved narrator become the main character for the final act was genius in my book.

With Shangri-La, I knew where the story was going.  I didn’t necessarily know how it was going to end, but I knew where we were headed.  And I guess, again, that’s a byproduct of writing something more traditional.  To be honest, I can’t even call that a fault.  Movies with goals and clear directives are what I’m trying to teach readers of Scriptshadow to write.  I think Eddie and Chris are simply victims of their own voice here.  They’d established a style where you never knew what was coming next, so it was a heavy shift to read something more traditional.

Having said that, I still enjoyed the heck out of Shangri-La.  All the characters were unique and interesting, as is to be expected.  I loved how they tackled Elvis as a character.  I loved the love story.  And even though I knew where the script was heading, I did not expect it to end like it did.  So that was cool.  Once again, I think these two have proven why they’re two of the best writers in Hollywood.  Now it’s a matter of waiting for Hollywood to realize that.

Genre: Crime
Premise: A detective who refuses to follow the rules finds himself in over his head when he tries to determine who robbed a bank, a squeaky clean family man, or his black sheep twin brother.
About: Barry Levy burst onto the scene with his viewpoint shifting spec “Vantage Point,” which went on to become a 2008 film starring Matthew Fox and Forest Whitaker.  Levy has another film in post-production starring Liam Hemsworth, the little brother of Thor himself.  The film, which also stars Gary Oldman and Harrison Ford, is about a boss who blackmails one of his employees to spy on a rival company.  The story behind “2’s” sale isn’t as clear.  Apparently, the spec sold to Universal.  But Universal is now apparently commissioning Levy to write a script BASED on his spec?  I don’t know.  Something weird like that.  Or maybe the people reporting on these things just have no idea what they’re talking about.
Writer: Barry Levy
Details: 111 pages

I don’t know why but I thought “2” was a sci-fi script for some reason.  It turned out not to be, which was disappointing.  But that’s okay, because I eventually realized it had twins!  And having twins is basically the equivalent of sci-fi anyway, right?  I mean, you’re asking the audience to take a pretty big leap of faith once you throw twins into the mix.  And almost every story botches it, because let’s face it: Once twins are pretending to be each other in any high-stakes realistic capacity, it’s almost impossible to believe.

But don’t give up on writing twins into your script just yet!  If you write twins, especially twins who are total opposites, you might just get yourself a great actor who’s excited to play two different parts!  And occasionally – even though it’s rare – these twin scenarios actually work out.  The story has to be tight.  The writer has to really help you buy into his world.  But it can be done.  Was “2” one of those screenplays?

Dennis Davison, or Double D as his friends call him (they don’t call him that. I just made that up), must have watched too many 80s cop movies growing up, because the pushing-40 detective refuses to work with a partner.  This man doesn’t fly a Dreamliner.  He flies a Cessna.  And if that doesn’t make Eddie Murphy or Chris Tucker proud, they’ll be happy to know that Dennis NEVER listens to authority either.  In fact, whatever he’s told to do, he does the opposite!

Well Dennis is going to wish it was Opposite Day when he stumbles upon the crime of his career.  A man has broken into the Bank Of America, killed his three accomplishes, and fled into the city, somehow escaping capture.  Oh yeah, and he didn’t take anything either!  Or at least that’s what it looks like.  Upon closer inspection, the man, who we’ll come to know as Noah Hayes, stole a lockbox from the bank containing the top secret ingredients to the paper the U.S. Treasury prints their money on.  Theoretically, this could be worth billions of dollars on the couterfiet market.

It shouldn’t be a problem catching Noah though.  There were cameras everywhere, taping him at multiple angles inside the bank.  He even left his DNA on the scene.  Open and shut case, right? Ehhhh, not so fast.  We soon find out that Noah has a TWIN BROTHER!  JORDAN!  Whereas Noah is the squeeky clean one, Jordan is the hardened criminal.  Which means Jordan probably did it, right?  Except Jordan wasn’t anywhere near the scene.  Or wait, was it Noah who wasn’t anywhere near the scene??

It doesn’t take long for our detective to figure out that he’s being played Full House style, and that the punchline to the joke isn’t as simple as one of the twins marrying Justin Bartha.  With the clock ticking down to when he must make his case to the grand jury, Dennis’ going to have to find out which twin to convict, or risk letting both of them go free.  Momma always told me not to get into a bank robbery case with twins.  Looks like Double D is about to learn that lesson the hard way.

Couple things I noticed right off the bat.  This script is written in a smaller font or something.  Can someone confirm this?  There is a ton of dialogue in this thing and it was mostly entertaining (which is when scripts read the fastest), yet it took FOREVER to get through.  So bad Barry Levy!  Stop trying to cheat on your page count.  I was getting frustrated by the slow-factor, which affected my enjoyment of the script.

Next, the beginning of the script moved too slow.  Maybe that was due in part to the squished text, but I just felt like it was taking forever to get going.  I was kinda dozing off a few times until we got to the heist, and more specficially, when we found out there was a twin involved. That’s when things got interesting and I was curious to see where the script was going to go.

Levy decided to take it in the legal direction, which is always dangerous if you’re not, yourself, a lawyer, due to the “this sounds like made-up law” problem bogging most legal films.  But of what little law I know, he seemed to be playing by the rules.  I did question why, however, they needed to find out which twin did it within 4 days, when the Grand Jury Indictment was, or else they both went free.

You know me, I’m all about the ticking time bomb.  But is this true?  My experience with courts is that they take forever to do shit.  Since when do they only give you 4 days to solve a crime?  Then again, I’m not a lawyer.

I think the strength of the script comes in the interaction between Dennis, Noah, and Jordan.  The tough talking one-up’ing machismo made for a lot of fun conversations and a hell of a lot of conflict. When (spoiler) Noah and Jordan reveal that they’re in on this together and that even with that knowledge, Dennis can’t stop them, it becomes a full on war, and I enjoyed every little battle.  Did it always make sense?  Probably not.  I had a hard time believing that the courts couldn’t find a way to arrest these two for something.  But as long as you allowed that suspension of disbelief to keep flowing, you had a fun time.

What I DIDN’T like was the whole Dennis/Lindsay relationship.  Lindsay plays his lover who Dennis is afraid to commit to and there was just something…I don’t know…too light about their problems for a movie like this.  It was almost like Levy was trying to cram in a rom-com relationship to a legal crime thriller.  I appreciated what he was trying to do (there was a nice little thematic thru-line of closeness and trust explored in this relationship as it compared to Noah and Jordan) but again, I just kept thinking, “This love story doesn’t feel right for some reason.”  Maybe it was the tone?  I’m not sure.

In the end, I gotta say this, Levy knows how to approach a spec script.  What I mean by that is he knows how to throw a catchy little angle into the story that can be marketed to get butts in seats.  I never read Vantage Point, but I can see why it sold and, ultimately, got made.  It had a fun little setup and execution that was unique and that kept the story moving.  The twins thing here will accomplish the same.  I didn’t LOVE this script, but I liked it.  What did you think?

What I learned: Make sure everything your characters talk about or run into is RELEVANT to the rest of the script! – You shouldn’t write anything in your script that only works on its own.  It should be tied into the rest of the script somehow.  There are 2 instances of this in “2” (how ironic!!!).  Early on, Dennis discusses a Portuguese restaurant with Noah during the bang robbery.  Seems like a bunch of random dialogue, but later becomes a relevant plot point when Dennis uses that conversation to determine which twin is which.  There also seems to be an unimportant capture of a Vietnamese programmer that happens early on.  However later, Dennis uses that programmer to help him take down the twins.

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: Action/Thriller
Premise: (from writer) A reformed hitwoman must return to the world of bullets and bloodshed she left behind, to take on the organization she helped build, in order to avenge the death of her younger sister.
About: We’re going to take a week off from Twit-Pitch so we can get an amateur Friday script in.  Lots of you are submitting and haven’t had an outlet lately, and I feel you deserve that.  Why did this week’s script get chosen?  Because Brandon is persistent!  He’s been sending in queries for over a year, and my assistant, Sveta (svetshadow@gmail.com) read his first ten pages and liked them enough to recommend him to me.  So here we are!
Writer: Brandon McFall
Details: A lean 96 pages.

I just tweeted yesterday that in all of my meetings, one piece of information that keeps popping up is Buyers are looking for action scripts!  I’m not sure why.  “Taken” came out like four years ago.  What is this immediate need for action scripts all of a sudden?  Do studios just get together and decide, “The genre we want to make now is…………..ACTION.”  Is there any rhyme or reason?  Is there any logic to it all??

I consider this a problem for me because action is not a genre I gravitate towards.  It’s often the thinnest genre out there.  The characters lack depth.  The stories are obvious. It’s just a lot of action sequences, which is often the most boring stuff to read.  “He jumps to the side and unloads an entire clip before he hits the ground.”  None of the action is ever inventive.  It’s all stuff I’ve read a million times before.

I want drama.  I want twists and turns.  I want characters who are trying to figure shit out about themselves.  If someone can write an action movie with THOSE elements, count me in.  Which is probably why everyone’s STILL looking for action scripts.  As someone pointed out to me the other day, “The reason they’re so desperate to find good action scripts is because all the action scripts out there suck.”

Guggenheim just sold action script Black Box for seven figures, which everybody is telling me is a “not as good Enemy Of The State,” (although to be fair, a few of you LOVED IT).  What’s next?  Is there someone out there sitting on a cool action spec with characters and a story and, gasp, some unexpected twists and turns we haven’t seen before?  If so, send it in for an Amateur Friday submission.  If it’s good, I’ll help you sell the damn thing.  Of course, you may be too late.  Because Brandon McFall might’ve beaten you to it with his action thriller…”Hail Mary.”

Hail Mary has one of those unabashedly simple plots, which can work if you nail every single dramatic element.  Look no further than Taken as proof.  That story was as simple as it gets – “Save daughter.” But you loved Taken because of its main character.  And Hail Mary will live or die on whether you love Mary.

Mary used to be the baddest hitwoman on the planet.  But to be fair, the pool of hitwomen is a lot smaller than the pool of hitmen.  Still, that’s a pretty impressive title to hold.  Mary is pissed to high hell because her little sister’s been raped and murdered.

Actually, let me back up.  Mary was chased out of town a long time ago for killing too many of the wrong people.  What nobody knew for a long time was that she had a little sister.  Well, someone finally figured that out, then killed the sister to bring Mary out of hiding so they could settle a score.  Mission accomplished!  Mary is back, and mad as ever!

She recruits her little sister’s boyfriend, thug Tony, and her old boyfriend, weapons specialist George, to give her just enough firepower to wreak havoc.  After hitting up a corrupt cop, she finds out the person who raped and killed her sister was a crime boss she has a lot of history with named Dominic.  Mary has little problem busting Dominic up then shooting him between the eyes.

Unfortunately, that doesn’t end the problem.  The leader of The Syndicate, the crime organization that runs the city, finds out about what’s happened.  His name is Constantine, and he can’t have little girls making his organization look weak.  So he orders everybody in town to take down Mary.

Normally, when you have an entire city of people who want to kill you, you leave town.  But Mary doesn’t do “normally.”  She does Mary.  And Mary says, “If you’re going to try and kill me, I’m going to try and kill you first.” This is Amuurica.  Where if you don’t like someone, you shoot’em.  So she gathers all her resources together and – despite Tony and George thinking she’s crazy – heads straight to Constantine’s stronghold where she plans to put an end to her problems once and for all.

First thing I’ll say is that this was written like an action script.  An action script has to move.  The paragraphs have to be nibble-sized (no more than 3 lines) and you can’t get too wrapped up in miscellaneous description.  You only want to tell us enough to set up the scene, to create a little bit of atmosphere, and then focus on the action at hand.  To that end, Hail Mary was nearly perfect (The only writing mistake I found was the constant misuse of apostrophes like “want’s” and “get’s” which is a mistake I see in a lot of screenplays for some reason).

We also have a clear goal – Mary is avenging her sister.  She first has to find out who did this and then kill that person.  So there’s a little bit of mystery then some hardcore old fashioned action.  A clear and motivated storyline = good. I also liked how the midpoint changed things up.  Mary kills Dominic, forcing Constantine’s hand to come after her.  It maybe didn’t change the story ENOUGH for my taste (it was still basically – “Kill someone”) but you want your midpoint to change the game so the second half isn’t exactly like the first half, and Hail Mary achieved that.

Now with these revenge scripts, you really have to a) like the main character and b) want the main character to get revenge.  I think that’s why Taken was so popular.  You loved Liam Neeson.  And because you saw how much he loved his daughter and how much he wanted to repair that relationship, you wanted him to save her.  By no means did I *not* want Mary to avenge her sister’s death, but I didn’t know her sister.  Outside of a couple of quick flashbacks, she was just a name to me.  So I was never THAT into Mary getting revenge for her.

This is always the tricky part about these revenge movies. Do you start the story AFTER the character’s death so you can jump right into it?  Or do you start out slow, get to know the character, and THEN kill her, making for a slower opening, but one in which we care about the dead character and therefore are more interested in avenging her death?  I’m not going to say I know the definitive answer to this question.  All I can say is that I didn’t know Elizabeth (the sister) and therefore was mostly detached from Mary achieving her goal.  Obviously, this affects one’s opinion of the entire story.  If you don’t care about the main goal, how can you care about what happens?  Unfortunately, that’s where I found myself.

Another issue here was the character of Tony.  Who the hell was Tony??  He starts the movie as our narrator, implying he’s a key character, then disappears for 90 pages, occasionally offering disembodied voice overs with lines like, “But that wasn’t all Mary needed to do.”  I just felt like Brandon didn’t know what to do with this character.  Either that or he used to be a bigger part of a former draft and Brandon hadn’t yet phased him out.  Remember, if you change direction in subsequent drafts, you gotta put things out to pasture from the previous drafts.  I don’t see the purpose of Tony at all, so he probably shouldn’t be in the script.

Another problem: My biggest gripe when reading action scripts is that they’re thin and they’re always a bunch of pointless action scenes.  So you have to try your hardest not to fall into that trap.  When Hail Mary has an entire late sequence where Mary infiltrates Constantine’s compound, then follows that with a final sequence of Mary infiltrating Constantine’s casino, it was basically like watching the exact same sequence twice. That’s what I’m talking about.  You have to be inventive.  You have to use your imagination.  Action is one of the oldest genres out there.  So if you’re not trying to make yours unique, if you’re just repeating action sequences over and over again, you’re going to bore us.  Each action sequence in an action movie should be DIFFERENT!

As for the characters, I had a couple of ideas while reading this.  If you want to keep Tony, why not create more of an unresolved relationship between him and Mary?  She detests him but needs him.  She always looks down at him, thinks he’s incapable, doesn’t trust him.  Really play into that relationship, not unlike the relationship between Ripley and Bishop in Aliens.  Then, over the course of the story, the two begin to find common ground, learn to fight together.  And in the end, she ends up putting her life on the line to save him, creating a legitimate arc to her character.  You don’t have to use that exact scenario, of course, but I think that’s something that was missing.  True emotion.  Mary was cold.  I wanted to see her change, to find that warmth, learn to feel.  I didn’t see that, further distancing me from her.

Also, I always feel like a parent’s protection of a child is more compelling than a sibling’s protection of another sibling.  Might we make Mary a mother?  Elizabeth her daughter?  Not only would that make us more interested in seeing Mary get revenge, but I’m not sure I’ve seen a 40+ year old female hitwoman driving the entire story before.  I suppose it makes the script less marketable, but it would create a more interesting situation, no?  Instead of Mary being unstoppable, she’ll have lost some of her edge.  She’s older, slower.  Which means she’s more vulnerable.  I was kind of bored by the fact that Mary never had to sweat.  You never had any doubt that she was going to kill everyone in the room and come out alive.  I’m not sure that’s very compelling.

That’s all I got for today.  Action has to be great to get me onboard, and this was too familiar for my taste.  Still, I commend Brandon for writing a solid quick read!  :)

Script link: Hail Mary

What I learned:  We just talked about villains yesterday.  I HATED how Constantine was afraid of Mary.  Your big main bad guy is AFRAID of the hero???  How scary is that?  How much do we fear Constantine after that?  How much do we want him to go down after that?   We don’t care.  Cause he’s a weakling!  Your villains in this genre need to be arrogant.  They need to be fearless.  Is Hans ever scared of John McClane?  No.  And if he was, Hans would’ve sucked balls.

What I learned 2: The late-villain intro who’s also the mastermind is almost impossible to pull off.  (spoiler) We find out Vance is our real villain here.  Who’s Vance?  I met him on page 80.  I barely know the guy.  Now I’m supposed to be excited because he’s our mastermind?  If you want to throw a late twist at us with the final villain, I advise that villain be fairly prominent during the entire screenplay.  Dr. Charles Nichols in The Fugitive has around 5 scenes scattered throughout the script before his ending reveal.  We need that here too.

So as I was reading Laymen’s Terms earlier this week and going ga-ga over all the great villainy in the script, I realized that I hadn’t yet breached the subject of villains in any extensive way on the site.  And there’s a reason for that.  I hadn’t developed an extensive enough take on the matter!  Which is strange, because I’m a huge proponent of having great villains in your screenplay. Audiences often like to root against the villain just as much as they like to root for the hero.  So if you’re only including a hero in your script, you’re depriving the audience of half the fun!  I don’t care if you’re writing a romantic comedy, an indie drama, or a period piece.  99% of the time, there better be a villain involved!

So who are some of the great villains in cinema history?  Well of course there’s Darth Vader, Buffalo Bill, Longshanks (Braveheart), Hans Gruber, Michael Myers, The Joker, Hannibal, Apollo, the T-1000.  There’s also Agent Smith (Matrix), Annie Wilkes (Misery), Drago, Mr. Potter (It’s A Wonderful Life), Tommy Devito (Joe Pesci – Goodfellas), Hans Landa (Inglorious Basterds), Anton Chigurh (No Country…), Max Cady (Cape Fear), Alex Forest (Fatal Attraction), John Doe (Seven), Alonzo Harris (Training Day) plus many many more.

Strangely enough, I’ve found that what works as villainy in one movie may not work in another.  Sometimes you need your villain to be calculated, other times you need him to be terrifying.  It all depends on the situaiton, the genre, and the type of story you’re telling. So before we go into what makes a good villain, let’s first identify the different kinds of villains.

The Nasty Villain – I’d say this is the most common villain of all.  If you want a villain that gets the audience all riled up with hatred, this villain is your pick.  They seem to be driven by an unseen evil force that will stop at nothing to destroy our hero. Annie Wilkes, Mr. Potter, Anton Chigurh, even the blond haired baddie in The Karate Kid.  These are bad bad guys.  However, these villains can backfire on if you if they’re too thin, and a lot of amateurs make this mistake.  They make the villains nasty just because they’re the bad guy in the story.  To combat this, make sure to add a solid motivation behind their actions.   Anton wants his money.  Annie is obsessed with Paul Sheldon’s books.  Mr. Potter wants every last piece of this town.  Even super-thin Karate Kid Blondie hates Daniel because he’s stolen his girl.  Your villain can be a really bad person.  Just make sure they have a little motivation behind their badness.

The Complicated Villain –  “Complicated” is usually code for a villain with some backstory.  I remember this gained popularity after the 80s Batman movies.  Tim Burton started showing the complicated histories behind why these baddies became bad.  All of a sudden, our villains obtained depth.  They had a past.  We could almost sympathize with them in a way.  This created a more complicated reaction to the character for the audience – shades of gray instead of straight black and white.  Max Cady from Cape Fear, for example, endured years of rape and degradation inside a prison because the man he’s now stalking put him there.  I’m not going to say I like Max Cady because of this, but I definitely understand him better.  The danger in writing this type of villain is that they become too sympathetic.   If we start sympathizing with the villain too much because of their troubled past, we don’t want to see them go down.  So be careful!

The Sorta Likable Villain – These villains are bad, but there’s also something alluring, interesting, or cool about them that makes us sort of like them.  Apollo Creed, Darth Vader, and Hannibal Lecter are all “Sorta Likable” villains.  I find that a lot of the time, sorta likable villains exist in a film where there’s a villain worse than them.  This allows us to root against someone while still kinda rooting for the cooler villain.  With Darth Vader in Star Wars, the real villain is Grand Moff Tarkin.  With Darth Vader in Empire and Jedi, the real villain is the Emperor.  In Lambs, Hannibal isn’t the top villain.  That title goes to Buffallo Bill.

The Comedic Villain – Seen only in comedies, these villains can be tough to get right.  They must be funny, but not so funny that they aren’t threatening.  I read a lot of comedy scripts where the villain is funny, but also such a goofball or so stupid that I don’t see them as a serious threat.  Therefore, you have to find that perfect balance.  Matt Dillon’s character in There’s Something About Mary is a great comedic villain.  Shooter McGavin in Happy Gilmore is a great comedic villain.  As much as I love Dumb and Dumber, those two villains were so bumbling that I was never scared of them, and that may have hurt the movie just a tad.  One of the most surefire traits to add to a comedic villain to ensure we’ll want to see them go down is arrogance.  Arrogance gets an audience riled up every time.  And it just seems to mix perfectly with comedy bad guys.

The Hidden Villain – Sometimes stories dictate, due to your bad guy being a mystery, that you not reveal your villain until the third act.  If you’re going to do this, you’re going to need an antagonistic force to challenge your hero in the meantime.  While an antogonist can be a villain, in these cases, they’re usually not.  Take The Fugitive for example.  (spoiler alert!) Dr. Charles Nichols is the surprise villain in the third act. But Tommy Lee Jones’ character is the antagonist for the first two acts.  It’s important that the hero always have an antagonist force pushing against him in the screenplay or else there’s no conflict.  Which is why a hidden villain can be a dangerous move.  However, if you substitute another antagonistic force in the meantime, you should be okay.

No Villain – I strongly discourage writing a script without a villain.  But if you’re going to do it, you better have a great antagonist pushing up against your character for the entire movie.  In most cases, if there is no villain in the script, the antagonist is nature.  Take Castaway for example.  That movie is villain-free.  But it has a strong antagonist – the island.  The Grey is another example.  The antagonist is the weather and the wolves. Those are the forces relentlessly pushing against our characters.  So sure, the no-villain approach can be done, but you better have some kick ass antagonistic nature if you’re going to pull it off.

Okay, we’ve identified the kind of villains in a script.  Now it’s time to determine what actually makes a good villain? Once again, not all of these things will work all of the time and certain combinations may work in some situations while not in others.  You have to assess what kind of story you’re telling and add the appropriate villainous traits.

Pompous – Like I mentioned above, a pompous character is a hated character.  There’s just something about people who are full of themselves that riles us up.  We NEED to see them go down.  Look at Apollo Creed in Rocky.  That man LOVED himself.  So we were dying to see Rocky beat him.

Stronger than our hero – This is a big one.  If a villain is weaker than our hero, we’ll have no doubt as to who will win in the end.  That’s bad.  What makes movies fun is when we think our hero has no shot because the villain is too strong.  Hans Gruber in Die Hard is the perfect example.  The man just oozes confidence and intelligence.  You really think he has his shit together, and that makes us seriously doubt if John McClane is going to win in the end.

Intelligent – This doesn’t ALWAYS have to be the case, particularly in comedies, but I love villains who can go toe-to-toe with our hero intellectually.  It creates the same effect as strength.  You always fear that they just might outthink our hero.  Prince Humperdink from The Princess Bride (who’s MAJORLY ARROGANT by the way) is actually a really smart guy.  He looks over the battleground after the Man In Black and Inigo Montoya’s sword fight and knows exactly how it went down and which direction the Man in Black went.  Smart villains are worthier villains.

Deceitful – Everybody hates deceitful people, people who go back on their promises.  Therefore this is a great trait to give your villain.  One of the scenes in Star Wars where our hatred for Grand Moth Tarken goes through the roof is when he asks Princess Leia where the Rebel Base is, promising he’ll spare her planet if she does.  She ends up telling him, and he goes ahead and blows the planet up anyway!  Or in Up.  Charles Muntz pretends to be all nice and friendly to our heroes.  Until his true colors come out later.  We hate deceitful people!

Emotionless – Sociopaths are REALLY SCARY.  Cold and collected, villains who feel no remorse for killing are as terrifying as it gets.  They just have that blank emotionless look on their faces?  Ugh, creeee-py!  Look no further than the flagship villain for this category, Anton Chigurgh in No Country For Old Men.  This dude is terrifying because he doesn’t have a single feeling bone in his body.  John Doe from Seven is another one.

Motivated – Most villains only work if they have a strong motivation behind their actions.  Take the T-1000 in Terminator 2 for example.  He’s been programmed to come here and eradicate John Connor in order to make sure the machines win the war in the future.  It’s a simple motivation, but it’s also dead solid.  We understand why he’s obsessed with killing John Connor at all costs.  You can certainly try writing an unmotivated villain, like The Joker in The Dark Knight, but be careful.  Villains who do bad shit just to do bad shit often confuse and frustrate the reader.  Also, it’s likely your villain won’t have 80 years of built-up audience awareness behind him to get an audience to go with it, such as the case is with The Joker.

Villain is strongest where hero is weakest – This is often tied into a hero’s fatal flaw, and therefore can be quite powerful if applied correctly.  The idea is that whatever your hero’s flaw is – whatever his biggest weakness is – make the villain extremely powerful in that area.  Take Luke Skywalker for example.  His flaw is that he doesn’t believe in himself.  Darth Vader, on the other hand, is the epitome of belief.  He’s the most confident motherf*cker in the galaxy (buoyed by his expertise in The Force).  Because Vader is so strong in the area that our hero struggles with the most, it creates a sense of doubt in whether Luke will be able to defeat him, and those situation tend to be the most compelling to watch.

Backstory – This is a choice.  You don’t have to do it.  But backstory adds depth to your villain, and readers/producers/agents tend to favor depth.  They want some info on why your bad guy turned into a bad guy.  Well, here’s my take on that.  I think what they really want is to know is something about your villain before the story began.  It doesn’t have to be WHY they became a bad person (i.e. daddy used to beat me when I was a kid), it can simply be fucked up pieces of that character’s past.  For example, the backstory we get on Hannibal is that he tore people’s faces off and used to be a therapist who preyed on his victims.  It doesn’t really tell us why he’s the way he is, but it adds depth to his character since we know more about him.  I will also say this about backstory.  Be careful about making your villain’s situation too sympathetic.  At a certain point, if we’re sympathizing with them too much, we don’t want to see them go down.  And we have to want to see the villain go down.

And there you have it!  My take on how to create a great villain.  However, like a lot of these articles, I feel like I’m only scratching the surface.  I know you guys have some thoughts of your own on how to create great villains, so throw’em at me.  If there’s anything really good, I’ll add it to the article! :)

Genre: Sci-Fi
Premise: 100 years in the future, artificially intelligent robots begin to rebel, forcing the planet to build a world of generators that fry anything with circuitry, as its the only sure way to eradicate all robotic forces. Little do they know that a group of A.I. robots have escaped to deep space, where they are training humans to help them take back the planet.
About: This is a script from the Zombieland writers, who have ditched the horror and the humor this time around for serious sci-fi.  The script sold a couple of weeks ago.  For those who turn their noses up at writers who aren’t writing A-list projects, note that co-writer Rhett Reese’s first feature credit was Cruel Intentions 3, and that Reese and Wernick were doing reality TV before breaking through with Zombieland.  You gotta start at the bottom, folks, then work your way up!
Writers: Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick
Details: 109 pages, Sept. 10, 2012 draft

What I learned: This is sort of a unique “What I learned” but helpful enough to mention.  Writers will set their scenes or montages to music all the time.  They’ll name the title of the song that’s playing at the beginning of the sequence, then proceed to write the scene.  The problem with this is, since the music isn’t actually *playing*, the reader will forget it.  So if you’re really trying to set the mood of a scene through music, it’s likely that mood won’t stick.  In the bizarre opening sequence to Epsilon, the writers set it to Patsy Cline’s “I Fall to Pieces.” As the sequence goes on, a couple of pages later, Reese and Wernick organically weave into the action description, “Patsy Cline continues to sing about things falling to pieces.” It seems like a harmless line, but it immediately reminded me that the music was playing, keeping the intended cinematic effect alive.  Remember guys, the reader CAN’T HEAR music.  So if you have it playing over montages or long scenes, look for ways to subtly remind the reader that it’s there.