A re-posted old review of the screenplay that recently played at 2013 Sundance with Natalie Portman and Shia LeBoeuf in the leads.

Genre: Comedy/Crime
Premise: After his mother dies of cancer, Charlie takes a trip to Budapest. On the flight, he meets a man and promises to deliver a gift to his daughter, who, when he meets her, he promptly falls in love with.
About: Matt Drake has been writing a long time for someone who’s just now breaking through. He wrote the 2000 independent film, “Tully,” as well as an episode of “Spin City” in 2002. But for the next five years, Drake disappeared off the radar. Then, in 2007, all that persistence paid off when he landed on the Black List with this script, which received 14 votes (Top 15). Another 3 years went by where Drake presumably did a lot of assignment work, then a week ago made noise by writing Todd Phillips’ mysterious new super-comedy known only as “Project X.” I’m reviewing today’s script in hopes of getting someone to send me that script. So if you’ve got it, dammit, send it!
Writer: Matt Drake
Details: 119 pages – June 2007 draft (This is an early draft of the script. The situations, characters, and plot may change significantly by the time of the film’s release. This is not a definitive statement about the project, but rather an analysis of this unique draft as it pertains to the craft of screenwriting).

It isn’t often you open up a script and meet your main character dangling upside down off a bridge in Eastern Europe to the sounds of a Zsa Zsa Gabor voice over, who’s pontificating about love, specifically the woman this man has fallen in love with, who’s standing in between two gangsters, pointing a gun at our hero’s heart, which she then proceeds to pull the trigger on in order to kill said hero. Then again, there’s nothing quite like reading “The Necessary Death Of Charlie Countryman,” a script as unique and unpredictable as a 3 a.m. visit to Jack In The Box. Whether you’re into this kind of thing or not, “Necessary Death” is a script you’ll be compelled to finish, and that’s, at the very least, a big achievement in this distraction-plagued world.

Charlie Countryman is a confused young man to begin with. But when he and his stepfather are forced to pull the plug on his brain dead mother, his grip on reality slips into the ether. And if that soap opera hasn’t fried enough circuits, Charlie’s better half hightails it out of Relationshipville, citing Not-interested-itus (I hate when girls come down with this btw). And so, lost, the last traces of normalcy and home sucked away by that cruel darling called Life, Charlie makes the perfectly valid decision to fly off to Bucharest, a country he knows nothing about, in hopes that the foreign-ness of it all will make his memories disappear.

However, on the plane to Budapest (the first leg of the trip to Bucharest), Charlie meets a jolly old man whose combination of broken English and unbridled enthusiasm make him adorable on eight levels. The man just spent a week in Chicago courtesy of his daughter – a gift which allowed him to fulfill a lifelong dream, to see the Cubs play at Wrigley field. Despite Charlie’s attempts to ignore him, the man continues to tell Charlie about his beautiful daughter, and shows him the gift he’s purchased in return, one of those silly batting helmets with beer cup holders attached. Finally the man shuts up, clearly petered out by his nonstop chattering, and falls asleep on Charlie’s shoulder. And doesn’t wake up. Ever. Yes, the old man dies napping on Charlie. When Charlie informs a stewardess about this little snafu, he’s told they’re in the middle of the Atlantic and there’s not much they can do. And since the flight is full, Charlie will have to remain this dead man’s pillow for the next five hours.

As if the trip weren’t weird already, just before they land, the old man turns to Charlie and asks him if he can deliver that wacky beer hat to his daughter. Oh, I didn’t mention? Charlie can occasionally speak to the dead.

Now in Budapest (he didn’t make it to Bucharest), Charlie goes searching for this young lady. And when he meets her, well, she’s so gorgeous he can barely form words into coherent sentences. The two are drawn together by their recent tragedies, and somewhere within the first ten minutes of the conversation, Charlie falls in love.

Unfortunately, Gabi turns out to be a little more than Charlie bargained for. When she was 17, she fell in love with a man named Nigel who operated a business which, although unspecified, seems to involve killing people. The relationship didn’t last, but Nigel never technically accepted the resignation papers. Besides all the killing he engages in, he also makes it a priority to ensure that no men get to enjoy the company of his quasi-wife. So obviously, when Nigel sees Charlie following her all over the city with his tongue lapping up street debris, he pops in to warn Charlie to go find some other avenue of entertainment. But what Nigel doesn’t realize is that it’s already too late. Charlie is in love, and he’ll go to the ends of the world – or, in this case, Budapest – to be with her. And that includes enduring the ongoing Zsa Zsa Gabor voice over chronicling his misfit adventures. But wait, how the hell did this love affair end up in Gabi killing Charlie? That is the reason, my friends, to read the screenplay for yourselves.

“Necessary Death” was tailor made for the Black List. It’s odd. It has a strong voice. You’re never sure what’s around the corner. And it’s well-written. But at a certain point the script struggles to decide if it wants to embrace its oddness, or salvage some kind of traditional storyline. I love scripts that are different. I love scripts that are weird. But I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. The weirder your script is, the harder it is to finish. Because the whole point of structure, is that it sets the story up for a proper climax. Without said structure, it’s all just a lot of crazy wacky sequences. This almost always results in the writer trying to be even crazier and wackier in the final 30 pages, and the third act subsequently comes off as desperate as a result. “Necessary Death’s” saving grace is that it eventually commits to the love story, which gives the screenplay a purpose, but it still feels like it has one foot squarely in each of the two worlds (traditional and crazy) and that lack of commitment had a neutering effect.

I really went back and forth on this, trying to decide how much this bothered me. Then I remembered – I’m a story guy, first and foremost. I like a good well-crafted tale. And only having that single thread – Why does Gabi kill Charlie – to look forward to, wasn’t enough meat for me. I wanted the two tacos, the chili fries, IN ADDITION to the Jumbo Jack, you know? But for those writers out there who want to see how to stand out, how someone emerges with a unique voice, they may want to check “Necessary Death” out. It’s definitely interesting. It just wasn’t for me.

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

What I learned: One of the more heavily debated mechanical details in the screenwriting world is the use of the word “We” in your description paragraphs. Such as “We turn around to see…” or “We slide forward where it’s revealed…” There are writers out there whose heads will explode at the mere mention of another writer using this style. Some will want to murder you. They will argue with you in screenwriting messageboards until you hit triple-digit thread replies. Trust me, I’ve seen it happen. And the thing is, I don’t have the slightest idea what the big stink is. I suppose it’s because it puts the reader in the position of the camera (“we” implies the “camera”) and that’s technically a no-no. But I’m here to tell you, I see this style in professional screenplays ALL THE TIME, including in this one. So rest assured, if you like to do it, keep doing it, and ignore anyone who tells you your script has no chance of selling if it’s included.

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

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

Bardem for Nostromo?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Warning.

This movie is scary.

This movie is really scary.

But this movie will also make you cry.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ma-ma.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Amateur Friday Submission Process: To submit your script for an Amateur Review, send in a PDF of your script, a PDF of the first ten pages of your script, your title, genre, logline, and finally, why I should read your script. Use my submission address please: Carsonreeves3@gmail.com. Your script and “first ten” will be posted. If you’re nervous about the effect of a bad review, feel free to use an alias name and/or title. It’s a good idea to resubmit every couple of weeks so your submission stays near the top.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Script link: Way To The Cage

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

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