UPDATE: First off, thank you to everyone who applied for free notes!  Sometimes, when I’m doing this, I forget that these are all real people with real lives struggling to do this thing that they love.  That happens because it’s the internet and I see all these names but never any faces.  Hearing your stories sort of helps put a face to those names.  And it reminds me I have a duty to do as much as I can to help you guys, which makes moments like these a little harder.  I wish I could read everybody’s script but I just don’t have the time.  Which means, despite all of your wonderful e-mails, I can only pick one.  And I’ve decided to pick…

BEN PICKLES’ SCRIPT!

Ben’s been a fairly regular contributor in the comments section but the reason I picked him is because he seems to have a unique way of seeing things.  As a reader, you’re always looking for writers who have a unique take on the world, and a unique way of conveying that take.  Ben feels like he could potentially be that writer.  His script is titled, “Of Glass And Golden Clockwork” and the logline is: “On the eve of the Third World War, a conflicted young soldier goes AWOL to pursue one final lead towards his father’s mysterious murder.”  I’ll let you know when I finish the notes and post them in the Script Notes section. :)

ORIGINAL POST BELOW:

For Christmas I’m offering one Scriptshadow reader a free five page consult on their script (script notes).  The only catch is that I might use the notes as my “sample” on the Script Notes page.  If you’re okay with that, all you have to do is write down in the comments section why I should give you the notes.  You can make me laugh, make me cry, make me confused.  It’s up to you.  And if you’re not keen on blasting out personal reasons for reading your script, e-mail carsonreeves3@gmail.com and in the subject line put: “FREE NOTES” and make your case there.  I’ll read everything and post the “winner” on Wednesday morning.  Merry Christmas everybody! :)

The controversy over this film is at Mach 5. But Scriptshadow doesn’t care about any of that nonsense. I just want to know if it’s a good screenplay!

Genre: War/Action/Drama
Premise: A CIA agent who experiences countless failures in her search to find Bin Laden, finally becomes convinced she knows where he is. With her superiors doubtful, she must put everything on the line to finally take down the most wanted man in the world.
About: This Oscar-contender has been catching some flak lately as, according to the CIA, it doesn’t accurately depict how they found Bin Laden (something about how the CIA doesn’t use torture). The film is written and directed by the same team that made the Oscar best-picture winner The Hurt Locker, Kathryn Bigelow and Mark Boal.
Writer: Mark Boal
Note: I watched this as a film but am critiquing its screenwriting elements.

If I’m being completely honest (and why wouldn’t I be), I kind of wanted to hate this movie. Let me tell you why, as I feel quite justified in my pre-hatred. Zero Dark 30 is one of those movies that tells you it’s an Oscar winner before you’ve even seen it. And I don’t like when marketers tell me what to think of a movie. I like to decide things for myself. But hey, that’s the name of the game, right? If you don’t have a big hook or a big actor, something to market your movie around, the only way to make money is to convince everyone your movie is award-worthy. So I get that. But what bothered me was that Zero Dark 30 started promoting itself as an Oscar winner before they even shot the thing! Aren’t we getting a bit presumptuous here? Is this what Oscar jockeying has become? We’re now promoting our movies as Oscar-winners before anyone turns on the camera? Ick. I’m not a fan.

The opening scene didn’t do much to quell my animosity. We watch on uncomfortably as CIA agents torture a Middle Eastern man via water-boarding. Ugh, they’re now stooping to this level? Throwing in a controversial topical torture technique that dominated the press for a year? They might as well have shot the scene on the Oscar stage. By the way, I have to get this off my chest. I’m sure experiencing water-boarding is really terrible. But it sure doesn’t LOOK terrible. You’re basically pouring water on a guy’s face. I can think of 10,000 torture techniques that look a hell of a lot worse than that, so whenever I see someone water-boarded in a film, it doesn’t have any effect on me.

Whoa whoa whoa. What’s with the grump stump Carsonigin? It’s Christmas Eve! You’re supposed to be jolly n stuff! You’re supposed to be caroling or baking cookies for Santa that somehow disappear before they’re ever put over the chimney.

Okay, fair enough. The truth is, Zero Dark 30 is a good movie. In fact, it WILL probably win the Oscar. Mostly because it’s one of those movies people feel like they’re supposed to vote for. But also because it has the best third act of any film this year. And as I like to say, if you give them a great ending, it can make up for a lot of problems earlier in the screenplay. And there were some problems here. Let’s explore what they are after the synopsis.

Zero Dark 30’s main character is a young innocent-looking fair-skinned CIA agent named Maya. Maya’s recently been assigned to the Middle East to help interrogate those who had ties to 9/11. She gets a wake-up call when she realizes these men are being tortured for their information. But instead of cowering in the corner like a little girl, she puts her big girls’ shoes on and tells the terrorists they better get with the program and start spitting out names because that’s the only way they’re getting their lives back. Yes, Maya is a hardass.

Maya’s research eventually leads her to a courier who she believes might have ties to Bin Laden. Unfortunately, nailing down this courier is next to impossible. He never uses the same routes twice. His cell phone use is erratic at best. And no matter how hard the U.S. tries, they can’t seem to figure out the naming system here in the Middle East. Whenever they think they’ve got someone, it turns out to be someone else.

Years pass and Maya’s superiors encourage her to focus on other potential terrorist attacks, but she can’t get her mind off that damn courier, the one she’s sure has something to do with Bin Laden. So she does some more digging and eventually finds the REAL courier, the one she thought she had all along but who, it turns out, was someone else. She traces this man back to a compound in Pakistan. She tells her bosses about her theory, but the compound is so well-designed, it’s impossible to know who, for sure, is in there. To Maya, it’s obvious, but you have to understand, the CIA gets hundreds of these tips a day. Who’s to say it isn’t a drug dealer living there? There’s just no way to know.

But Maya won’t stop. She demands her superiors keep looking. And tells them to have THEIR superiors keep looking. And after what seems like forever, even though there’s only a 50% chance that Bin Laden is actually living here, they get the call from upstairs that the president has okay’d a raid. Maya must now leave the final piece of the puzzle up to Seal Team 6, who are less than thrilled to be going on yet another [sure to be] bogus chupacabra hunt. What they don’t realize is that this is the real deal. This is the moment that will make them famous.

I was discussing this movie with a friend and I was going on one of my typical rants about how there “wasn’t enough urgency in the movie.” And I had a good point (if I don’t say so myself). I mean we start the story 10 years before the killing of Bin Laden and there are just all these scenes through the years of people talking in rooms about finding terrorists who might lead them to other terrorists who might lead them to someone who knows someone who might know Bin Laden.

While I’m sure if you broke these down scene by scene, you’d be able to make a case that they were all PUSHING THE STORY FORWARD (remember – every scene in your script must push the story forward!) but I couldn’t help but feel like we could’ve consolidated and streamlined the hunt more. For example, there was a cool scene near the middle of the movie where Maya and her co-worker are chatting about boys at an Afghan Hotel when a bomb BLOWS UP. Fun scene. But afterwards all I could think was, “Ummm, was that scene really necessary?”

But here’s what my friend said. She said, “True, but starting with this girl 10 years before she finds Bin Laden makes us care a lot more about her and her goal when she finally gets close to finding him.” And she was right. As we watch Maya go year after year chasing red herrings and losing friends and being blocked by red tape, we become heavily invested in her journey in a way that wouldn’t have been possible had we started the story 2 weeks before the raid.

In this case, urgency would’ve actually worked AGAINST our story. And that got me thinking. As you all know, I’m obsessed with GSU – that stories work best when they have a GOAL, high STAKES, and URGENCY. However, if you were only able to use two of these and one had to go, I’ve realized that urgency is the easiest one to drop. That’s because if the goal is REALLY BIG and the stakes are REALLY HIGH, the audience will want to stick around whether there’s a time limit on the characters’ actions or not.

And what do you know? Zero Dark 30 fits the bill perfectly. The goal is about as big as you can get! Find and kill Bin Laden! And the stakes are immense as well! If you don’t, he keeps sending out orders and more and more people get killed. Add the personal stakes are high as well (Maya dedicating a decade of her life to this hunt). It’s no wonder we’re willing to stumble through ten years to finally get to this ending.

Another thing I found interesting was that this is being marketed as this super serious big important movie. Yet they use one of the oldest tricks in the book to get you onboard – the underdog. Audiences LOVE underdogs. They will follow underdogs anywhere because who doesn’t want to see the little guy who nobody gave a shot to score the big touchdown in the end? Maya is the ultimate underdog. She’s a woman in a male-driven business. Nobody gives her a chance. Nobody believes her. So at its heart, this is really about a character overcoming adversity and disbelief to win in the end. That’s a universal story that anybody will love.

My biggest problem with Zero Dark 30, however, was that there were sooooo many scenes with guys in rooms talking. Granted there was usually a lot of tension and conflict in those scenes, I suspect these scenes are what made the slow parts of this screenplay feel so slow. And while Maya’s underdog status made her easy to root for, there was something cold about her character. I’m not sure if that was Jesscia C’s performance or if that’s how it was written but I suspect it was how it was written because there’s very little if any background into who Maya is outside of the agency – what brought her here, why she’s so obsessed with capturing Bin Laden. I mean I knew more about Claire Danes’ character after 20 minutes of the Homeland pilot than I did about Maya in this entire movie. The only reason you should have a 2 and a half hour movie is if you’re doing some major character exploration, and strangely enough, only the minimum was done here.

But despite its flaws, it all came together in the end. So much had been built up before going into this raid, (not to mention our own REAL-LIFE feelings about Bin Laden), that the compound sequence was gripping. I particularly loved how messy it was. I guess I thought that the SEAL team just barged in there, ran upstairs, and shot Bin Laden. But there was so much more uncertainty here, with a lot of unknown variables chiming in: The downed helicopter. Compound doors not opening. Hundreds of neighbors moving in. The threat of the Pakistanis finding out and sending their military over. You really felt that if they didn’t find Bin Laden right away, they’d have to leave and squander the best opportunity they’d ever have at getting him.

I’ll probably never watch Zero Dark 30 again. It’s not a movie you can pop in on a Sunday afternoon and just enjoy. It’s deep, it’s dark, it’s intense, and it’s serious. You feel at times like you’re obligated to watch it as opposed to volunteering your time to watch it. But that ending. Oh that ending. It makes all the warts go away. And it’ll probably win the film an Oscar.

[ ] I want to return this Christmas present
[ ] This Christmas present wasn’t for me
[xx] good enough to re-gift
[ ] just what I wanted
[ ] best gift ever!

What I learned: At some point in your story, there needs to be urgency. I know I just said urgency isn’t as important as goals or stakes, and that may be true. But you cannot go an entire screenplay without eventually adding urgency to the mix. In Zero Dark 30, this happens as soon as Maya positively identifies Bin Laden’s compound. Every day they don’t act is a day he could possibly move. And we feel that tension (as a good ticking time bomb will do) as days turn into weeks turn into months. We’re sitting there going, “Jesus! You’re losing what may be your only shot!” So avoid urgency if you dare (I still think you should incorporate it if possible), but if you don’t use it to frame your story, you’ll almost certainly need it for the final third of your script.

My favorite writer is back!  John Jarrell.  You may remember him from the awesome interview I did with him a few months ago.  The guy has a ton of screenwriting knowledge and unlike us hack bloggers, the man’s actually been in the thick of it for 20 years, fighting the good screenwriting fight, landing those six figure jobs we all dream of.  Which is why I’m more than happy to promote his new screenwriting class – Tweak Class — starting this January. Who better to learn from than the guy who’s seen it all?  Goddamit, he’s even taken his pants off for a publicity shot (that’s really him above!).  This man is dedicated.  And today, he’s going to share with us a couple screenwriting stories from Hollywood Hell.  I enjoyed this piece so much I told John he needs to write a whole book of this stuff.  Let him know if you feel the same in the comments!

“Will You Please Buy My Script Now, Please?” — One Writer’s Journey Into the Troubling Bowels of Development.

By John Jarrell

Back in 1995, I wrote a Horror spec called The Willies.  It was essentially Carrie with Evil Twins.  People are constantly abusing and shitting on these orphans, until at last, after making a pact with the devil, they take their bloody revenge.

My agent went out with it and immediately got a sadistically low-ball pre-emptive bid from a smaller studio in town.  By that point in my life, my dream of becoming a legitimate screenwriter was nearing extinction.  I’d been struggling in L.A. for four years, was stone-cold broke, about to lose my apartment, and my girlfriend and I were subsisting solely on the 49-cent value menu at Taco Bell.  Facing even more of that ugliness, I did what struggling young writers have to do sometimes — I sucked it up and took the shit money, simply glad to survive and hopeful I would live to fight another day.

First day working, I go into a story meeting with the company’s “Creative” VP and Head of Development.  We dug in and spent several hours doing notes starting Page One — discussing what they thought worked, what didn’t, and what I’d need to address in my rewrite.

At one point, the VP looks up at me and says, “Wow, John.  This description on page fifty-two is really good writing.  Would you mind reading it out loud?”

Flattery will get you everywhere with a screenwriter, and I’m sure I flushed with pride as I found the page and paused to clear my throat.

The set up was simple — a grieving daughter (our protagonist) looking through her deceased Mother’s belongings, which have been boxed up and stored in the attic.  The beat offered a brief respite from all the genre action, gave us a further glimpse into our lead’s character, and prompted her discovery of an important clue at the end.

This was the description I wrote, verbatim —

“She rifles several of the boxes, finding little more than old letters and checkbook stubs, key chains and their forgotten keys.  The meaningless remnants of our too brief lives.”

There was a long pause after I finished.  The VP and Head of Development were nodding their heads in synchronized approval.  Then the VP says —

“Yeah, it’s really great.  Great stuff.”

(HARD BEAT)

“Lose the poetry, John, cut it all out.  It’s slowing down the script.”

I’d never been quite so close to crapping my pants.  Did he just say LOSE… THE… POETRY?  a.k.a. LOSE THE GOOD WRITING?  Wantonly kill off two short sentences — two sentences he actually likes — which perfectly sell the moment?  And replace them with what, Mr. Hemingway?  “She opens her dead mom’s shit and finds a mysterious clue!”

Like every other indignant scribe in Hollywood history, I sat hooded in a queasy half-smile, cerebral cortex locking up.  Surely “development” couldn’t be like this everywhere?  Surely this exec must be a nutter, a lone gunman of sorts, some soulless script assassin who didn’t value lightweight artistry over the groan-inducing stock lines which had been stupefying readers for decades?

But I was wrong.  He wasn’t the slightest bit insane.  In fact, Mr. Company VP was the Gold Standard — an Industry veteran and Number Two guy at the whole company!  And if I didn’t “lose the poetry” voluntarily, believe me, he would have no qualms hiring another low-ball writer to lose it for me.

Way back at NYU, an older studio vet had once shared a bit of sage wisdom with me — “It’s better for you to fuck up your script the way they want then have ’em hire somebody else to fuck it up for you.”

As baffling and counterintuitive as his advice had seemed, now I grabbed onto it like a life vest.   I labored at “losing the poetry”, beat after tight beat, good scene after good scene.  For nine agonizing months, they “developed” the script this way.  Any nugget of goodness was ruthlessly ferreted out, any clever turn of phrase or interesting character tick was quickly sandblasted into beige.  My reward, such as it was, was being kept onboard on as sole writer.

Finally, they were ready to go out with it.  And they did.  And in a matter of three short weeks, the company blew a sure-thing co-financing deal, flatlined similar offers via absurd distribution demands, then shelved the project out of self-loathing and/or shame, never to see daylight again.  Their epic fail also left The Big Question still looming — Had sacrificing all my poetry to the Commercial Film Gods made my script better… or worse?  Now, tragically, there was no way I’d know for sure.

Instead of my project — and I’m totally NOT kidding here — the company produced the urban side-splitter “Don’t Be A Menace to South Central While Drinking Your Juice in the Hood” in its place.  It survived three demoralizing weekends before being euthanized and laid to rest in the VHS market.

During what I thought a poignant last ditch appeal, before all the lights had been turned out, I’d made the case to the company that horror was an American genre mainstay, essentially a license to print money when well-executed.  This is what that same VP told me —

“Horror’s dead, John.  Nobody wants horror anymore.  It’s all about the urban audience.”

Scream opened that same December and made $173,046,663 worldwide.  In its wake, an uninterrupted avalanche of extremely profitable low-budget horror pics overran the coming decade.

And me?  Exactly one year after the sale, my girlfriend and I found ourselves back at Taco Bell.

* * * * *

Those first professional cuts for any young writer are excruciating.  Everything about your script — every flat character, every lousy throwaway line, every unnecessary parenthetical — feels personal and inviolate, gifted from the heavens and written in stone, like some multimedia take on Moses’ holy tablets.

“Change something?  Why?  It was plenty good enough for you to buy it in the first place, wasn’t it, douchebag?”

Some version of this is what the working writer yearns to bark in his benefactors’ (read: torturers’) faces.  If you loved it enough to put real money behind it, why in the fuck do you want to change every last thing about it now?  Why date a tall, skinny brunette if you really wanted a short, squat redhead?  Where’s the logic in that?

This mentality is, of course, completely understandable.  The script is quite literally your baby, your winning Powerball ticket, the lone vehicle by which you hope and pray to escape the nagging self-doubt and just-getting-by poverty of a middle class kid with a mountain of student loans.   This is your shot — perhaps the one and only shot you’re gonna get — and if it’s mishandled somehow, if somebody shits the bed and drops the ball, you and you alone will pay the ultimate price for that.

On the other hand… there’s a couple big problems with sticking by your guns every damned time.  One, without question, you’ll be replaced as soon as your steps are up, and most likely won’t work for that company or any of those people again.  Producers hate writers as it is, see them as largely unnecessary evils.  Certainly nobody wants to work with a “difficult” one sitting in meetings with his or her fingers jammed in their ears.

Two, and this can be a tough one for us writers to swallow, what if all these developmental numbskulls are actually right???  What if a few of those “shitty notes” you keep bad-mouthing to friends turn out to be gems, pure gold, BIG IDEAS that help take your script to that hallowed “next level”?   Some writers are so busy being defensive that they’re throwing away the very ideas which can dramatically increase their odds of success… and survival.

So John, you ask, how in the hell do I know when to do what?   How do I discern between the gold and the gravel, the shit and the pony?  How can I insure I do the right thing creatively while traversing such treacherous industry tundra?

And that, my friends, is the eternal question every writer faces, every time they book a gig.  Because there aren’t any right answers one-hundred percent of the time.  The whole endeavor is entirely subjective, a complete crapshoot, with the looming possibility of some ravenous tiger waiting to bite your head off behind every corner.

Your creative action — or inaction — affects not only this project, but the possibility of the many unseen projects yet to come.  Of prominent producers and execs putting in a good word, greasing the skids for a full-freight first draft at 100% of your quote… or not.  Of you being able to pay off those loans, buy your hard-working parents a house of their own, live the creative lifestyle you’ve always dreamt of and suffered so damned much trying to actualize…

Best advice I’ve heard?  “You’ve got to choose your hills to die on.”

But hey, no pressure, right?  Best of luck on those pages.

* * * * *

Spring of 1999, I was coming off saving a film for a big studio.  My stock was high and I was starting to make my first legitimate splash.

After years of obscure, unpaid laboring, I was really feeling it, finally discovering my groove.  All that “woodshedding” had vastly improved my writing.  It was becoming much better crafted and far more intuitive.  Better still, proof of this breakthrough was now coming across on the page, for anyone and everyone to see.

A hungry young agency saw it and took me on, and they had enough juice to start getting me into the right rooms.  As every artisan in Hollywood knows, if you can’t get into the room, you sure as hell can’t get the job.  My new agents totally had my back in that department and very quickly it became plug and play — they’d send me out, after that, everything else was on me.  As you might imagine, this was a really good time for a young writer.

So… as a last ditch effort, the big studio had hired me, and against all rational odds, I’d saved their movie.  Not only that, but to everybody’s further surprise, it became a big hit.

In this town, you always strike while the iron’s hot.  My agents quickly set me up with a very famous director, one of the old school legends, in fact.  There was a new company in town spending real money, and he’d set up a project there.  All they needed now was a writer.

We met on his studio lot, the Director and I immediately hitting it off.  This guy was a blast, regaling me with wild tales of ’70’s Hollywood, each more x-rated hilarious than the last.  These were the classic movies I’d grown up with and deeply loved, back to front I knew them all.  Now here I was talking to the guy who’d actually made some of them!  For a good hour we jawed warp-speed, then spent maybe ten minutes talking broad strokes about his project.  It was to be a modern-day Robin Hood — the big twist was casting a famous Brazilian MMA fighter as the lead and setting it in the violent ghettos of inner city L.A.

Now remember, this is ’99, way before the whole MMA/UFC thing fully turned the corner.  But within two years, Dana White and Co. would radically reinvent the marketing of that world and find themselves sitting on a multi-billion dollar business.

So in a way — even though it wasn’t on purpose — the Director’s idea of casting an MMA superstar with international appeal in a kick-ass action film was perfectly timed.  By the time it was ready to roll out, the U.S. would be beginning its new love affair with the UFC.  And we’d be standing there waiting with lightning in a bottle, boffo box office certain to ensue.

I drove back home.  Two hours later (just two hours!) my agent calls.   Business affairs from this new company had called and made an offer — $100K against $275, or 100/275 in film biz parlance.  The Director was crazy about me and knew immediately I was the perfect guy for the job.  Just like that it became a spontaneous four-way love fest; Company, Famous Director, Agents, Me.  My cup runneth over with this highly-addictive first burst of adulation.

It was pretty hard to wrap my head around.  A guaranteed ONE HUNDRED THOUSAND DOLLARS for drinking a free bottle of Evian and listening to one of Hollywood’s most successful filmmakers tell epic war stories?   For just being (GASP!) me???

Abruptly, the lightbulb went on.  So THIS is what everybody was chasing.  Everyone knew there were heaps of money to be made — Monopoly money, from where I was standing.  But what about having all the heavyweight ego-stroking a film-addled shut-in like myself could desire?  Wasn’t that shit awesome, too?

Next came a company meet-and-greet to discuss our collective vision for the project.  My honeymoon continued unabated.  We were all on the same page! We all agreed EXACTLY what this film should aspire to!  From the top down, everybody on-board was euphoric with developmental glee!

Our homage to Robin Hood would be set in the impoverished jungles of East L.A. Our Lead, forced to flee Brazil because of his heroic actions against homicidal police, would join his Uncle in L.A. to start building a new life for himself.  But after witnessing dehumanizing oppression in the sweatshops, and running afoul of local gangsters who violently extorted and terrorized the good-hearted (but powerless) immigrants who had befriended him, our Lead is compelled to take the law into his own hands, seeing justice done, whatever the cost.  I was urged to think of the story as gritty, raw and realistic — “Robin Hood ’99” if you will, with someone like Jay-Z playing Friar Tuck.

Robin Hood is one of the oldest legends in all of Western Civilization, and for good reason.  The timeless themes of rich vs. poor, the corrupt haves vs. the honest have-nots, still speak as loudly to audiences today as they did in Medieval times.  So our ripped-from-the-headlines take involving sweatshops and immigrant labor, oppression and cultural inequality, would fit perfectly alongside the honorable intent of the original.

After a few frenzied white-guy high-fives (“I love this guy!” from one goofy exec), and another complementary bottle of Evian, I was sent off to knock out a treatment so we could quickly proceed to first draft.

* * * * *

Ensconced back in my bungalow, I set about creating my masterpiece.  Like I said, I was totally in my wheelhouse at this point, doing the very best writing of my young career.  I buckled down and poured my heart and soul into the idea.  I skipped concerts, cancelled dates, ate nothing but bad Chinese and Mexican delivery.  Day and night, I labored to make the story not just a kick-ass MMA thrill ride — the essential dynamic of the entire project in the first place — but a film which would actually have something to say as well.

I saw it as a classic have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too opportunity — killer action and ultra-cool, franchisable genre characters, with a timely message to the contemporary audience nestled behind all the head-butting and hard talk.

Listen, end of the day, if all you wanted was to see somebody’s trachea stomped into tomato soup, or some asshole’s nutsack blown off, yeah, you would get that in spades.  I mean, this was a MOVIE afterall, mass escapist entertainment.  But for the more discerning genre lover (like myself) there would also be a legitimate subtext they could hang their hats on.  A little something… more.

One month later I submitted my twelve-page, single-spaced treatment.  I was anxious, but extremely confident.  Never had I felt better about the work and what I was trying to accomplish.  I believed it awesome that Hollywood execs were willing to push for a meaningful story, even within the confines of a tiny little genre pic like this.  Maybe the self-serving, head-up-ass development stereotypes I’d been brutalized by before would be proven wrong this time around.

A week passed.  Then a second.  Neither my agent nor myself heard so much as a whisper.

Believe me, if there’s anything a writer learns in Hollywood, it’s this — the silence is deafening.

Silence is never good.  Silence says disinterest, displeasure or — scariest of all — disappointment.  When you put finished pages someone paid for in their impatient little palms and they don’t get back to you a.s.a.p. something is terribly and irrevocably wrong.  In my experience, there are no exceptions to this rule.

Sure enough, start of week three we finally got word.  It wasn’t good.  Let’s just say nobody loved it.  The company didn’t hate it initially, per se, but the Director’s people did.  They loathed it with a passion.  Which meant the company had to start hating it as well.

Judgment Day came in the company’s flagship conference room.  Picture a Hudsucker Proxy-sized oak conference table, all five of my company inquisitors massed at the far end, and me — best of intentions, isolated, confused — docked in a half-mast Aeron chair at the other.

The Head of Development led the prosecution.  He was a real trip, an IMAX D-Guy Cartoon, 3D cells brightly penciled in by Pixar.  We’re talking Aliens level development exec here, with him playing the egg-laying Queen, not one of the day-player xenomorphs.   For the safety of all involved, let’s call him Producer X.

“This treatment is too preachy, too grim, too goddamn G-L-O-O-M-Y,” his first salvo whistled across my bow. “Where’s the fun in this world, John?  The Lethal Weapon III of it all?  The wink-wink, the hijinx, the Wow Factor?”

Where’s the fun in… illegal immigration?  In the callous rich taking advantage of the struggling poor?   Is that what he was asking?

“Look, John, trust me — it’s not THAT BAD down there.  There are plenty of happy stories to tell.  Happy stories which give those people plenty of hope.”

Whoops.  My Spidey Sense began an ugly twitch.  “Down there.” “Those people.” This couldn’t be going anywhere good.

“To some, you know, this might sound controversial.  But I’m going to go ahead and say it anyway, ’cause frankly I’m not a P.C. person and I don’t give a damn,” Producer X leaned forward now, Sunday smile, as if confiding in me.  “You know what?  I have a maid, and she’s an illegal.  That’s right.  An illegal.  And guess what, John?   She LOVES working for me.  Loves it!  She couldn’t be happier!”

“Me too.” The famous director’s D-Girl piped up. “My husband and I have an illegal nanny.  Always smiling, that woman.  Very Zen.”

“In fact,” Producer X blazed on, “Recently I had a bit of a funny conundrum.  My maid’s daughter was having her quinceañera, and she told me they didn’t have enough decorations for it.  So guess what I did?  This is great — I let her go around the house and gather up all the old flowers that had been there a few days and take those to the party!  Isn’t that terrific?  She was soooooo happy.”

There was one exec in the room I’d met before, a good guy, coming from the right place.  I watched the same horrified shockwave blitzkrieg across his face that I already wore on mine.  So they weren’t all Replicants, I thought.  Thank Christ.

Oversharing kills.  No doubt, I’m every inch as white boy as the next white motherfucker out there.  But there was one huge problem.

I wasn’t that kind of white.

Both my mother and father had Ph.D.’s from Teachers College at Columbia.  Their specialties?  Education for Gifted Minority Students.  My girlfriend was Hispanic, a social worker born literally — true shit — in a dirt-floored shack in Pacoima. So yeah, this probably wasn’t going to work out too well.

All this time, Scriptshadow Reader, I’d been racking my brain, trying to figure out why they hated my treatment so much, why everyone was acting like I’d totally butt-fucked the pooch on this one.  Now it hit me full-force — my pages were too, well, Robin Hood.  I’d done exactly what we’d agreed upon, gotten it pitch perfect… which was criminally out of tune for these folks.

Class struggle?  Rich vs. Poor?  What was I thinking?  They envisioned our heroic Brazilian as a grubby street urchin, crashing Beverly Hills parties, stuffing his shirt with hors d’oeuvre and stealing thick wads of cash from mink coat pockets.  Which is precisely the take they pitched me.

Everything quickly became a vague blur, Charlie Brown’s teacher shot-gunning syllabic nonsense.  The only part I remember was Producer X’s take on our protagonist — “It’s like Ché Guevara.  He was sexy, he was hot, did a couple of cool killings.  Cinematic stuff, right?”

Talk about mind-fucks.  Their collective brainstorm now was to take the Robin Hood out of Robin Hood.   Regrettably, it was kind of, well, getting in the way.

Meeting over, we shook hands with the nauseous smiles of strangers who’d eaten the same rotten shellfish.  I grabbed my ’66 Bug — the same car I’d driven out to L.A. eight years earlier — and puttered straight up Wilshire to my agent Marty’s office.

When I walked in, I just unloaded.  Play by play, line by line, vomiting up details of the nuclear winter I’d just lived through.  From Marty’s expression, I could see he was having trouble making sense of it all.  He knew my background, knew the guy I was, but still.  After I’d slaked my desperate need to rant, I punctuated things with this cute little gem —

“They can keep the money,” I said.  “I don’t want it.”

In Marty’s entire life, I don’t think a single client had ever told him that.   And why would they?  Idealism and moral outrage are the privilege of a rarified few in this Biz.  At the grunt level, the level I was at, those concepts played worse than kiddie porn.  Besides, who the fuck was I?  Claude Rains in Casablanca?  “I’m shocked, shocked to find that half-baked racism is going on here!”  It’s not like I’d signed up for the Peace Corps or anything.

Still, I had my principles, and I was willing to put all that Monopoly money where my naive pie-hole was.  Marty’s advice was to go home, cool my tool and let him do some reconnaissance.  Once he’d sussed things out, he’d get back to me.

Two things bailed me out.  First, the exec I knew called Marty and totally vouched for my eyewitness testimony (told you he was a good guy).  Second, Producer X himself knew how badly he’d fucked up and called trying to smooth things over.  “Listen, Marty,” he told my agent, “This is a big misunderstanding.  Nobody over here wants to make an… irresponsible movie.”

They scheduled a second meeting trying to salvage things, but in many ways it was worse than the first.  My time was spent daydreaming about putting Producer X in a chokehold and pulling a Sharky’s Machine — pile-driving us through the plate glass and then plummeting 200 feet straight down to the pavement below.

So that’s it.  The deal died.  They paid for the treatment, and I — insisting on principle — left the other $65,000 sitting on the table.   SIXTY-FIVE THOUSAND DOLLARS.  Just walked away from it.  And yeah, it kinda stings to write this, even now.

You may have wondered — what about the Famous Director, the one guy who surely would’ve had your back?  Predictably, after that first, glorious filmic dry-humping, I neither saw nor heard from him again.  No phone call.  No nothing.  To this day, I don’t know if he actually hated it, or his D-Girl with the illegal nanny had cut my throat without giving him the real scoop on any of what went down.

And Producer X?   Was there any Bad Karma due a producer like that?   Would the bold heavens take a stand and angrily smite down what the film industry itself would not?

You’re fuckin’ kidding, right?  This is the Film Biz.

A few years later, I was over at some friends’ place watching the Oscars on auto-pilot.  About ten hours in, after two dozen absurd dance numbers, they finally got around to Best Picture.

And who should win but Producer X.

This go ’round I did crap my pants.  Openly and without restraint.   But this wasn’t even rock bottom.  Because up next was his acceptance speech —

“I’m soooooo happy you’ve taken my movie into your hearts, this wonderful little film about compassion, racial harmony, the end of prejudice of all kinds, and, of course, hope.  Always hope, for all those people less fortunate than ourselves.”

Producer X had just won an Oscar.  That’s right.  A fucking Academy Award.  By playing the “Can’t we all just get along?” card.

Before he even left the stage, I was stumbling into the backyard, begging the hostess for a frenzied bong hit.  A writer can only take so much, you see, and my mind was dangerously close to snapping.  My only real hope of retaining any sanity now lay in a bright, protective sheen of cannabis.

As I slipped into oblivion, a single thought ran roughshod through my mind —

“I wonder if Producer X’s illegal maid is back at his house watching this, too.”

Carson again.  Naturally, I’m asking the same question you are.  Who the hell was the producer??  John refuses to name names, but I will find out.  Mark my words!  In the meantime, head over to John’s Tweak Class Page and sign up for his screenwriting class that starts this January.  It truly is a unique opportunity to study with a produced, working writer.  You won’t be disappointed!

Amateur screenplay Scion had a promising first ten pages, enough to get a few dozen e-mails of endorsement. Let’s find out how the rest of the script held up.

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: Supernatural/Drama
Premise: (from writer) A naive young man’s dreams of a normal life is hijacked by a charismatic “faith healer” and a powerful media tycoon when both become hell bent on exploiting the young man’s amazing gift…the power to raise the dead.
About: Picked this script as it was one of the few amateur scripts I’ve sent out in my newsletter that I’ve gotten positive responses on. Most of those were based on the first 10 pages. Intrigued to see if the story was sustained afterwards.
Writer: Scotty Davis
Details: 128 pages

Andrew Garfield for Caleb?

There’s a chorus from an old popular sitcom that goes, “You take the good, you take the bad, you take them all and then you have…the facts of life.” That’s sort of how you have to approach amateur screenplays. You’re only going to find that home run every 2-3 years. In the interim, you’re going to find a lot of screenplays that do some good things, but also some bad things. So as Scion started to lose focus, I had to remember that I wasn’t judging an Aaron Sorkin script here. This was a writer still learning the craft, and therefore he was going to make some mistakes.

Just the fact that so many people were able to read his first 10 pages and recommend the script to me was a great achievement for Scotty. But, unfortunately, it’s not the true mark of a good writer (or I should say, “a good writer YET.”). For that to be the case, you have to be able to tell a story all the way through. And that mainly means understanding structure. To tell a story, you need to know how to set up, how to build, and how to conclude, and that’s where I felt Scion fell short. Let’s take a look.

We open on Charlie Thompson racing his wife, Charlotte, to the hospital. She’s gone into labor and it’s one of the ugly kinds. Lots of bloooood. It doesn’t help that there’s a massive thunderstorm fighting them on their way there, and when they get to the hospital, it takes out all the electricity. The doctor does his best anyway, however as he’s helping Charlotte, a lightning flash COMES THROUGH the roof and grabs hold of her. Charlotte dies, but the baby, who we’ll come to know as Caleb, survives.

Turns out that lightning strike left some after effects. Caleb has the power to bring the dead back to life with just his touch. He uses this at first with animals, but eventually starts saving people as well. It doesn’t always work for some reason. But either way, his father, a religious man, tells him he has to be careful with his power. It’s not up to him to decide who lives and dies.  That’s God’s decision.

Across the country there’s an up-and-coming 7 year old preacher named Levi Hawkins (yes, 7). Levi heals people too, in front of hundreds every week at church. He’s got a gift for turning people into believers but unlike Caleb, Levi’s healing isn’t real. His father manufacturers backstage deals with fake cripples to be “cured” and it’s made Levi a hot commodity, so much so that he gets his own TV show.

But that show falls apart when it’s clear these Healing specials aren’t getting the ratings they used to. Both Levi and Caleb continue to grow up, and then, when they’re young men, happen to be driving on the same road at the same time and crash into each other. Levi dies a bloody death but Caleb jumps out and pulls one of his life-gripper moves, bringing Levi back to the light. Aha, Levi thinks.  This gives him an idea.

Levi whips up a new type of sermon, enlisting a reluctant Caleb as his helper. Levi isn’t just going to heal people this time around. He’s going to bring them back from the dead! Folks are naturally skeptical, but discreetly using Caleb’s touch, Levi’s able to back up his claims. Soon reality TV comes calling. They want to put his show on the air, and they think it’s going to be so big, they want to put it on post-Super Bowl, the biggest time slot of them all! The question is, will the reluctant Caleb do the show? Or will Levi be standing out there on his own?

First I want to point out the good things about Scion. Like I said, there’s a reason this was chosen off its first 10 pages. The writing is really crisp, really visual. I love how Scotty sets a mood and a sense of place. I was right there in that scene with Charlie rushing his pregnant wife to a hospital with a raging thunderstorm outside. It felt authentic. And it was CLEAR. I can’t stress how important that is. I was talking with a friend the other day about how some writers have clean easy-to-read writing styles and others have clunky styles, the kind where you have to read a paragraph twice every half page or so to understand what was said. Scotty’s writing was smooth and strong.

I liked his dialogue too. The thing with dialogue is you don’t always know why you like it. And some dialogue that people love, others hate. But I guess I liked this dialogue because it felt right. It felt like that’s the kind of thing these characters would say. For example, when the Sheriff comes to Charlie’s house looking for Caleb, this simple exchange follows: “I’m here about the boy, Charlie.” “My boy ain’t none of your business.” “Charlie, ain’t a soul in this county laid eyes on your boy in over three months. Folks around here just worried ‘bout him, that’s all.” This may seem like nothing special, but I read tons of scripts where writers would’ve written something like: “I’m here about your son.” “You don’t have permission to check on my son.” “I’m just doing what the office tells me, Charlie. Now let me in.”  Small differences, but those difference MAKE a difference.  It just goes to show how delicate dialogue can be.

On the downside, there are quite a few things that need to be shored up here. Not to beat a dead horse, but 129 pages on an amateur script raises red flags. It almost always means that the writer doesn’t know how to focus his story and that a lot of unnecessary scenes or subplots will be included. I hate to make that generalization, but it’s almost universally true, and lo and behold, it was the case here in spades.

There’s no real goal in Scion. It’s structured more like an artsy character study, with us following two characters’ lives, Caleb and Levi (as well as a TV producer, who I didn’t get into in the plot breakdown). There’s no rule that says you have to abide by popular dramatic structure, of course, but when you’re building your script around a high concept idea, such as this one, you probably want to play close to the rules. Goals, stakes, urgency. And there really wasn’t any of that here. It wasn’t until late in the story that a true destination was introduced, that being the Super Bowl show, and that had its own series of problems.

As I’ve said on this site before, no matter how good you are with structure, character, and dialogue, the strength of your story usually boils down to interesting and smart choices. You can have a character with a perfectly executed character arc. But if he’s an uninspired boring character, we won’t care. I felt Scotty made a lot of strange choices here that ultimately derailed the story. I thought the whole car crash between the characters was too coincidental. I thought a 7 year old preacher seemed far-fetched. This whole subplot about twins was unnecessarily confusing and never fit in. And then the Super Bowl show felt way too big for a story that had previously existed on an understated plain. At one point in Scion, even the CIA showed up.

If I were Scotty, I’d try to ground this more. Stop trying to infuse it with strange twin twists and the Central Intelligence Agency and Super bowl shows. It smells like you got bored with your own story and tried to throw in a lot of whammies in hopes that it would spice things up. But all it’s done is ruin the story’s focus.

I also think a lot of things could’ve been explained better. Scotty’s actual writing is clear. But there were certain story-related points that were left out or weren’t explained. I was constantly confused about how old the characters were as they aged, for example. I still don’t know if they’re 16 or 25 by the end of the story. Or Caleb’s power. I thought the whole reason he had that power was because the lightning struck his mom as she was giving birth. But then it turns out Charlie has the power too? And I’m still not clear on what the little snake birthmark meant.

Which leaves us in a difficult place. There’s clearly talent on display here, but also a lot of messiness, and more importantly, a lack of focus. Moving forward, I would suggest we come up with a simple goal, or at least individual goals driving each of the characters. Maybe Charlie left Caleb in a lot of debt, and Caleb has to find a way to save his chicken farm before [x] date. Maybe the fallen Levi has a one-shot pitch opportunity with a network for a show in [x] amount of days. He needs something to knock their socks off, and he hears about Caleb’s powers, so he goes and recruits him. With Caleb desperate for money, he has no choice but to join Levi.

These are off the top of my head, and admittedly generic, but they’re a good place to start. We need some sort of form to the story, because right now there isn’t any. And all of this stuff needs to be set up sooner. We can’t dwell too much on their growing up. I would get us further into their lives much faster so we can introduce these goals early on and set the story on track as soon as possible.

Scotty could be a force to reckon with in a couple of years. But he’s gotta work on the structure side of things before he can get there. I wish him luck! :)

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

What I learned: Beware the big late arriving plot point. I’ve seen these in a few scripts recently and I saw it here too. When you try to introduce a big idea as a plot point late in the movie, it never feels natural. That’s because you don’t have time to nurture and grow the plot point, and therefore it feels crammed into the final act. That was the case with the Super Bowl development (in my opinion). It just seemed to come out of nowhere late in the script. The bigness of a plot point like this requires a lot of set up to justify its existence, and you don’t have the time to do all that set-up so late in the story. That’s probably why it felt so out of place.

Keeping in mind that adapting The Hobbit is probably one of the tougher screenplay jobs this side of the slugline, how did Jackson and his co-writers fare?

Genre: Adventure
Premise: Bilbo Baggins reluctantly joins a band of dwarves who go on a quest to reclaim their kingdom, which has since been taken over by a dragon.
About: After lots of legal battles and one giant director fallout, the first of three Hobbit films finally comes to the big screen. The talk about these films seems to be Peter Jackson’s pioneering use of 48 frames per second as opposed to the traditional 24. This new frame-rate is supposed to make the movie a lot more enjoyable in 3-D. We’ll see about that.
Writers: Fran Walsh & Philippa Boyens & Peter Jackson & Guillermo del Toro (based on the novel by J.R.R. Tolkien)

I’ve been to the Shire. I saw Ryan Gosling there and he said he didn’t want me to review his script today. So I decided to review the Hobbitses instead.

Before I get into the writing side of this movie, I first have to address the 48 frames per second phenomenon. Now maybe I’m wrong and in 10 years every movie will be in 48 fps and we’ll look back at this 24 frames stuff as ancient history, the way my generation looked at Black and White films. And the way that generation looked back at films without sound. But I don’t know. I understand we’ve been conditioned on this frame rate for over a hundred years, and we’ve been led to believe that anything 30 frames per second or higher looks like home video, but that’s what this looked like to me. It looked like home video.

No, you know what it looked like? It looked like those History Channel reenactments, but with like 100 times the production value. I mean for the first half of the movie, I couldn’t stop thinking about it. All I kept saying was, “This looks so cheap.” Not only because it looked like video but because it was so smooth and crisp you could see the make-up on the actors. You could see all the imperfections. Now I did start to get used to it as the movie went on, but I’d be surprised if James Cameron decided to shoot Avatar this way after seeing the footage (as he’d been hinting at).

But what about the actual movie!!? Well, I always had a problem with going back and doing a Hobbit trilogy as it seemed like a pared down version of the Lord Of The Rings. If the world were made of truthful marketing campaigns, this one would read, “Everything you got before, but smaller.” And that’s what this felt like. There wasn’t that grand scale that dominated the earlier (later) films. This felt more intimate. At times that was good but since this is a spectacle movie, it was mostly bad. Wanna know what the film was about?

Okay, I’ll tell you, but not in Middle Earth-speak. That would take me an extra two hours of name-checking in the Hobbit encyclopedia. I’m going to tell you in layman’s terms. Basically, these dwarves lose their kingdom to this really evil dragon who wants it because there’s a lot of gold stored there. I’ll admit, I was confused right off the bat on this one. Why would a dragon need gold? What can a dragon possibly use gold for? He can’t make gold dragon clothes. He doesn’t need it to buy anything. His currency is breathing fire on people. But whatever. Point is, all the dwarves got kicked out of their home.

Many years later we meet Bilbo Baggins, a hobbit, who’s minding his business when Gandalf and a bunch of dwarves show up telling him he has to go on a mission with them, a mission to get their castle back. This confused me as well because I couldn’t understand why they needed a hobbit to help them. From what I understood, Bilbo was scared, inexperienced, didn’t want to go, and didn’t bring anything advantageous to the table other than it’s harder for dragons to smell hobbits. Maybe this is explained in the books or the sequels somewhere, but at least in this story, I couldn’t understand why Bilbo was even part of this adventure. Even Obi-Wan says to Luke, “I’m getting too old for this.” So it made sense why Luke needed to come on that journey.

Anyway, off they go to take on that bad dragon with an irrational gold fetish. However, mid-way through, we begin to realize that them taking on the dragon ain’t going to happen in this movie. Nope. We’re going to have to wait til the third film for that one. Which leaves us feeling empty. Luckily, Jackson helps us forget this with a wagon-full of orc attacks! Orcs and trolls. Every 20 minutes or so, some orcs would find them and we’d get a big set-piece. These set-pieces ranged from cool to really cool, but never quite awesome (however running across bridges in the underground orc lair got close).

Our good buddy Golum does make an appearance in the film with his and Bilbo’s “Battle of Riddles (?)” and it’s the one thing I remembered from the book as a kid so I was excited to see it play out on the big screen. I was disappointed. The rules of this riddle game seemed vague, and it appeared that you could ask the most nonsensical question ever and it would be considered “fair.” “Trust and trout and beetles and stout. Seven tigers drink six cups of milk. What’s the answer?” Errr, what? More concerning was the way Bilbo won. “What’s in my pocket?” That’s the question he won with? You can just ask a question that there’s no way for someone to know the answer to? “How many centipedes live underneath the big rock in my garden back home?” I don’t know! I wanted to feel like Bilbo cleverly outwitted Golum. Instead, I’m left wondering what the hell the rules were to that funky game.

Eventually, Bilbo escapes Golum and the dwarves escape more Orcs and they all get away. But then they have to fight one last battle against the King Orc, who our Prince Dwarf supposedly killed many years ago, but who has come back for revenge. Oh, and then there’s a guy who rides around on a sled pulled by rabbits.

To “The Hobbit’s” credit, we do have a clear story here. We have our goal (Get to and reclaim the Dwarf Kingdom), we have our stakes (the dwarves will be without a home until they get their kingdom back), and we have our urgency (they’re constantly being chased by orcs). Despite all that, The Hobbit takes its time in too many places. Jackson knows he’s got you stuck there in the theater and boy does he take advantage of it, giving you a twenty minute opening scene in Bilbo’s house, and a 15 minute exposition-laden scene at the Elf kingdom. There are a lot of talking scenes in this script and that almost dooms it.

Luckily, Jackson (and Tolkien obviously) throw tons of obstacles at our heroes to keep the entertainment level high. Just when the story’s about to run out of gas, orcs show up, or trolls show up, or giant raving mad rock monsters show up, or Bilbo falls into the dark crevices of a cave with no way out. Remember, as long as you give your characters a goal, you can place tons of obstacles in front of that goal. And as long as we care about them achieving their goal, we’ll be entertained by them trying to overcome those obstacles. Jackson adds several nice touches where we see how important getting their home back is for the dwarves. So we’re entertained by the obstacles that get in their way.

Character-wise, Bilbo, our main character, is a tough call.  He’s very passive for most of the screenplay, and for that reason he’s one of the least interesting characters in the bunch. There’s an old saying that your main character should be the most interesting person in the movie. I don’t know if that’s always possible because a lot of times the hero has to play the straight man, but it would’ve been nice if Bilbo was a LITTLE more interesting.

With that said, he did have a flaw, and therefore an arc. And it’s one of the better flaws you can give a character, since it’s so identifiable. Bilbo lives a safe life. He doesn’t take any chances. He’d rather stay holed up in a tiny hobbit shack than deal with the dangers of the outside world. This journey is about him learning to step out of his safety bubble and do something different and new and scary. Haven’t we all felt that way at one point or another in our lives? Always add a flaw to your hero if you can, guys. It’ll provide your story with a more dynamic, and therefore more interesting, character.

One thing that KILLS this movie for me, though, is the trilogy format. This tale is lighter than Lord Of The Rings as it is. And now you’re telling me that the goal your characters are after isn’t even going to be pulled off in this film? Not only is that a big tease, but it throws the entire rhythm of the script off. In a story, the whole point is to build to the climax, the thing you’ve been telling us is our heroes’ objective. If there’s no objective, there’s no climax, and that’s exactly how the Hobbit felt. I didn’t know where we were going after awhile or what the ultimate point of THIS MOVIE (not the entire trilogy) was. I don’t think any script should end with the reader saying, “Oh, that’s it?” And that’s how this one ended. I honestly wouldn’t have been surprised if The Hobbit had gone on for another 30 minutes, and that’s sloppy storytelling as far as I’m concerned. The audience wants the payoff. We got it a bit with the King Orc showdown, but that felt like the appetizer to the big meal, a meal we won’t be eating for another two years.

I don’t know where I come down on this one. It held my attention, but sometimes for the wrong reasons. I just couldn’t comprehend why they’d put something onscreen that looked like it had been shot on a Best Buy video camera. However, I suppose the script had just enough thrust to keep my attention til the end. For that, I guess it’s worth a matinee ticket.

[ ] Run for your life
[ ] Wait for video
[x] worth the price of admission
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius

What I learned: How much time is too much time to build up your characters in a screenplay? Peter Jackson takes his sweet time in this area, giving us 30-some minutes with our hobbits and dwarves before they get on the road. This can work if a lot’s happening (we don’t get on the road til the 30 minute mark in Star Wars, for example, but a TON of stuff happens before that – evil villains chasing, forgotten hermits reemerging, droids running away, aunt and uncle killed), but if you just have people sitting around at tables talking, the script is going to drag. I see this sometimes with established writer-directors. They know they don’t have to keep a reader’s interest. They already have you in the theater. So they take forever to get going. I think established or not, all writers should try and keep the story moving. Don’t waste a line of screenplay space if you don’t have to, especially in the opening, when it’s imperative you hook your audience. The Hobbit could’ve moved a lot faster.