Genre: Sci-Fi
Premise: 100 years in the future, artificially intelligent robots begin to rebel, forcing the planet to build a world of generators that fry anything with circuitry, as its the only sure way to eradicate all robotic forces. Little do they know that a group of A.I. robots have escaped to deep space, where they are training humans to help them take back the planet.
About: This is a script from the Zombieland writers, who have ditched the horror and the humor this time around for serious sci-fi. The script sold a couple of weeks ago. For those who turn their noses up at writers who aren’t writing A-list projects, note that co-writer Rhett Reese’s first feature credit was Cruel Intentions 3, and that Reese and Wernick were doing reality TV before breaking through with Zombieland. You gotta start at the bottom, folks, then work your way up!
Writers: Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick
Details: 109 pages, Sept. 10, 2012 draft
Having said that, I do know this. You don’t even give yourself a chance to get lucky if the script isn’t good. I don’t care how great of a director you are, you can’t turn shit into ice cream. Zombieland had A-grade cookie dough ice cream running through its veins. Does Epsilon? Or did the writers move too far away from what made them stars?
I’ll say this straight out. Epsilon had one of the wildest “wtf” first acts I’ve seen in awhile. I didn’t know WHAT the hell was going on. It’s 100 years in the future. We’re on a bus where a crazy dude named Adam is butchering passengers to pieces. We’re then on the space station where ANOTHER Adam is butchering astronauts to pieces. We’re then in a living room where a woman named Eve is butchering her husband to pieces. Then we’re outside the house where a worker is crawling out of a manhole, being chased by ANOTHER blood-thirsty Adam.
What the hell is going on???
Well, it turns out that in the future, we’ve created artificially intelligent robots that look and act like human beings, and these robots, called “Automatics,” have decided to rebel. But the problem is more far reaching than that. Through their collective connective, buoyed by a ubiquitous wireless internet, they can communicate with and take control of everything with computer circuitry, whether it be a smart phone or a microwave.
Combined with the fact that they’ve learned to disguise themselves as real human beings, the governments of the planet have only one choice. They must build a series of generators that fry anything with a computer chip in it. Yeah, they’re going to be losing 150 years of progress. But it’s either that or be taken over by a robot Apocolypse. Hmmm. I’m picking the “bye bye progress” option.
Little do they know, however, the Automatics have been planning a contingency plan. They dupe 30 couples into using what they think are human women to carry their babies, when in fact these women are Automatics. Those women join a group of Adam and Eves on a rocket that sets off to a faraway space station, where they begin training these babies.
You see, since they can’t go back to earth, lest they be fried, Automatics need humans to go down there first and take care of the generators. Hence, they raise these kids into super-soldiers, ultimate fighting machines. But to prevent any unwanted hiccups, they teach them to be just like them – emotionless. These soldiers may be human in make-up, but they’re robot in spirit. They do not feel. They do not want. They do not love. They just wait for their next command.
However, once these humans are sent back to earth to execute the key phase of the takeover, one of them, a black sheep soldier known as Epsilon, starts getting curious about his origins, as well as emotions. Whether he succumbs to his desires and aborts the mission or stays strong and carries out his commands will be the main determinant of whether our future planet will be run by humans…or robots.
Epsilon gets a “worth the read” for the simple reason that it took a group of familiar concepts and put a unique spin on them. We have robots taking over the world a la Terminator. We have intense training sequences and super-human fighting, a la The Matrix. We have the “robots” who are struggling with whether to “feel” angle that has been done dozens of times. But it’s wrapped up in a package we haven’t quite seen before.
I mean, I loved the opening 15 pages. I was seriously going “what the fuck is going on right now??” Even after the whole Adam and Eve bloodbath, we had doctors who were secretly automatons, 30 different female clones who were all 9 months pregnant, rockets being prepared to launch out into space. I felt like I was in the middle of a snow globe being relentlessly shaken by a child with serious A.D.D. I couldn’t figure out which way was up.
The training sequence was pretty cool as well, even though it probably went ten pages too long. One of the highlights was an intense scene where Adam and Eve were training the humans not to “want.” With each one in their own cell, they’d place a glass of water on the table and flash the command “Don’t drink it.” on the digital display. They would then keep the water there for 3 full days, bringing all the trainees near death, until finally allowing them to drink. If they failed, they were shot out into the cold bleak darkness of space. They would also have to kill animals they’d become attached to, be squeezed into a box less than 1 square foot for days on end, and worst of all, forced to fight to the death other soldiers they had befriended.
My problem with the script was what happened once they got down to earth. I liked how Rheese and Wernick pushed the emotional component of Epsilon wanting to find out who his parents were and wanting to learn what love was (with one of the other soldiers) but neither of those threads played out in a satisfactory way. I don’t know if these subplots weren’t detailed or complex enough, but I just remember thinking, after Epsilon visited his parents, “That’s it??” It was almost like the scene was squeezed in there out of necessity, not because the writers really wanted to explore it.
I see that in a lot of scripts actually – writers who know they have to have some emotional resonance in their story, so they put it in there out of necessity rather than actually wanting to explore the emotional thread. It’s almost as if they can say, “See, I have it in there! So you can’t complain.” Unfortunately, it doesn’t work that way. It only works if you truly care about what’s happening between the characters, inside the characters, for the characters. You have to want to dig into those unresolved issues the same way you want to dig into an action scene. If you don’t, it never reads right.
The last third of the script is all action. Unfortunately, action doesn’t read as well on the page as it plays on the screen. Which makes it hard to judge. Having said that, it did feel like a lot of the uniqueness of the first half of the script had been replaced by brute action. Still, it should make the studio happy, and no doubt it will play well in the trailers. But it further accentuated my ultimate problem with the script, which is that I didn’t connect with the characters as much as I wanted to.
In the end, though, this is too unique and too cool of a potential movie not to celebrate it. So I say Epsilon is worth the read.
[ ] what the hell did I just read?
What I learned: This is sort of a unique “What I learned” but helpful enough to mention. Writers will set their scenes or montages to music all the time. They’ll name the title of the song that’s playing at the beginning of the sequence, then proceed to write the scene. The problem with this is, since the music isn’t actually *playing*, the reader will forget it. So if you’re really trying to set the mood of a scene through music, it’s likely that mood won’t stick. In the bizarre opening sequence to Epsilon, the writers set it to Patsy Cline’s “I Fall to Pieces.” As the sequence goes on, a couple of pages later, Reese and Wernick organically weave into the action description, “Patsy Cline continues to sing about things falling to pieces.” It seems like a harmless line, but it immediately reminded me that the music was playing, keeping the intended cinematic effect alive. Remember guys, the reader CAN’T HEAR music. So if you have it playing over montages or long scenes, look for ways to subtly remind the reader that it’s there.
Genre: Period
Premise: In a small town during the 1935 dust bowl, a former soldier must protect a fleeing city woman from a group of gangsters who want her dead.
About: I don’t know much about the writer, but this script made the Black List in 2008. People have been describing it as the next Low Dweller (now titled “Into The Furnace.”) although I’ve been told it’s very “Desperate Hours’ish” as well.
Writer: Jeremy H. Bailey
Details: 110 pages (undated)
So there’re two things I’ve been going gaga about over the past month. One is Gangnam Style and two is Desperate Hours. Both are amazing and world-changing in their own way. Now if there was some way to combine these two forces into one super-force…well gosh-darnit we might have the single greatest piece of entertainment in world history. The only thing better than that mobster battle in Act 3 of Hours would be if Psy popped out and said…..LONG PAUSE…”Oppam Gangnam style!” and started doing the horsie dance. And then the pelvic-thrusting elevator guy began doing his pelvic-thrusting elevator dance to ward off some of the mobsters. I know if I were one of those mobsters, I’d run for my life.
What were we talking about again? Oh yeah, a period piece. Makes total sense that I’m including a South Korean pop star in this review then. So the reason I picked this script today was because someone told me it was similar to Hours, but “EVEN BETTER.” Well, since it took me over two years to crown a new number 1 script on my Top 25 list, I’m not sure how you can get any better than that, but I was willing to give it a shot.
And I quickly found out that it was, indeed, similar to Hours in many ways. Both scripts start out in a really depressing era, with Layman’s beginning during the Dustbowl. Don’t know what the Dustbowl is? From my shaky history class memory, it was the time after we planted all our crops and didn’t consider how to keep the moisture intact (something about crop rotation?). So all the land went dry, and that caused these huge dust storms to swirl around the country, making the problem even worse. Basically, America went all North Korea farming, to stick with today’s theme.
This has caused the tiny Oklahoma town of Red Thistle to go near-broke. The only one with any money is a not-very-nice man named Two Bills Calahan. A fat bald sweaty pervert of a fellow, Two Bills understands the power he yields, and he makes sure he takes advantage of every ounce of it. This guy is such a scumbag that he actually brings in a beautiful struggling farmer’s widow every day, Evelyn, and pays her for his sexual needs. Evelyn, who has a sick daughter, is so desperate for money that she has no choice but to do it.
Staying with Evelyn, it turns out she lost her husband in the war, and got back his brother as the prize. Crane McNamee has been shunned by the community since he left town when they needed him most, and has come back with his tail between his legs to take care of Evelyn now that she’s living alone with her daughter. The two have a complicated relationship that revolves around her constantly being pissed off at him.
Their relationship is about to get even more complicated though as, during one of the many dust storms, Crane finds a crashed car on the side of the road with a passed out woman and a dead men inside He schleps the woman, a city girl we’ll come to know as Cassidy, back to his house, not knowing that the men who were chasing her aren’t far behind.
These men, led by a really scary motherf*cker named Washington, head to the middle of Red Thistle and demand to know where this woman is. They make a deal with Two Bill that whoever finds her first gets a reward, and that Two Bill gets half of it. Never one to turn away money, Two Bill takes the fight to the people, encouraging them to look under ever rock, behind every loose board. They MUST find this woman. And the people, desperate for money, become a senseless mob in the process.
Naturally, word comes down that Crane is hiding her, and Washington’s crew, along with the town, go to claim their prize. But Crane is not giving her up. He’ll do anything, including becoming the killer he left in the past, to protect her. An awkward four-pronged battle then ensues between Crane, Washington, Two Bill, and the town, which seems headed in one direction and one direction only: Disaster.
It’s hard to write this review without comparing Layman’s to Hours. Had I read Layman’s first, I’m sure I would’ve rated it higher. It’s still a very good script, but in the back of my head I was always saying, “Oooh, Hours did that better.” The first thing that struck me was the time and place. What I liked about Hours was that it was set at the end of all that depressing shit. America had started to recover. There was a sense of hope. With Layman’s, it’s set in the heart of hopelessness. The Dustbowl had made everyone as poor as dirt, and there didn’t seem to be any end to it. It was super-damn depressing. Like, the complete opposite of watching the Gangnam Style video.
I was actually telling a friend about the script after I read it, and I realized after a few minutes what I was saying…”Dustbowl, dying daughter with pneumonia, mom who must prostitute herself to stay afloat, crippled main character, dead soldier brother” — and all of a sudden we both just started laughing at how depressing it all was. And the thing is, it really isn’t as bad as it sounds, but yeah, the hopelessness definitely played a part in my reaction here.
I’ll tell you one area where Layman’s DID eclipse Hours, though, and that was in the villain department. It has two really nasty villains, one in Two-Bill and the other in Washington. These are just two really BAD dudes, each in their own way. And like I always say, if you can develop a great villain, you will rope in the reader. Because there’s nothing more fun than watching a villain you hate go down.
To me, that’s what sets this script apart. I so wanted to see this pompous megalomaniac Washington get his ass handed to him by Crane. But the thing is, it could’ve been even better. Crane was an okay protagonist, but not nearly as good as Frank from Hours. With Frank, his situation was always clear. He’d lost his family to the Spanish flu and he was still in love with the woman he left when he was young, only to come back and find out she’d married another man. With Crane, there was something about how he could’ve saved his brother in the war but didn’t. Maybe?? I wasn’t sure. I could also never figure out what his relationship was with Evelyn. Was he just a caretaker or was there more there? She seemed to hate him. But at the end she says she always loved him. Loved him as a family member or like “in love” with him? I couldn’t figure that out. And it drives me batty when main characters’ intentions and motivations and their situations are unclear. I just couldn’t get a handle on Crane.
The ending, also, was a little confusing. At a certain point (spoiler) Cassidy tells Crane she came here for him? But wait? Why did she wait until the very end to tell him that? Did she not know who he was yet? I’m not sure. It was one of those situations where it felt like the writer was so set on the twist, that he was going to force it in there through hell or high water, regardless of if it was clear or not. I’m not upset about it. Let’s face it: WE’VE ALL BEEN THERE. But still, that third act definitely could’ve used another draft or two.
But boy oh boy, those villains. They really kept me around wanting to know what happened. They were so strong, in fact, and so fun to watch, that they pumped this script up to a double worth-the-read. Them and that damn rain-maker, who was a stroke of atmospheric genius!
What I learned: Today’s “what I learned” came out of nowhere. I realized that having two villains go toe-to-toe is a guaranteed great scene! My favorite scene in the script is when Washington and his gang interrupt a church sermon to confront our other villain, Two Bills, to ask where their girl is. There’s something about seeing two evil factions who we’ve met individually square off against each other that’s fascinating. I just couldn’t wait to see who was going to bend first. This is a cool tip to remember.
Genre: Dark Comedy
Premise: When the writer dies, a struggling creative exec changes the name on his screenplay to his own, only to find out that there are others who’ve read the screenplay, others who he must now take care of.
About: This script sold all the way back in 1997 and obviously never became a movie (unless it was released under a different title and went straight to DVD??). Now through sheer coincidence, Mr. Queen did not have a single feature credit until last year, when he wrote Cars 2. Man, making a career in screenwriting can be a looooong journey!
Writer: Benjamin Queen
Details: 131 pages – October 1997 draft
Hey, who am I to turn down a spec about screenwriting!? With like deceit and murder ‘n stuff. Not only that, but it was set back in 1997, which makes the read almost comical in how much everything has changed since then. I mean, people were sending each other PHYSICAL DRAFTS of screenplays in the 90s. With, like, BRADS ‘n stuff. What’s a brad?
Calm down calm down. Before the anti-Scriptshadowers begin their uproar, I *do* know what a brad is. However the rest of this world is quite foreign to me. Everything is done physically as opposed to digitally, which means if this script were ever to be made today, it would need to be majorly rewritten. I guess that’s the question, isn’t it? Is One Track Mind good enough to be rewritten?
Well it starts off introducing us to Clay Buckley, a 25 year old creative exec at mega-movie-star Max Rebello’s production company. Except Max Rebello is never there and doesn’t even know who Clay is, so it’s not as glamorous a job as one might assume. In addition to that, Clay works under an asshole of a boss, V.P. of Production Larry Dealing (who we never actually see, only hear). All these things are a reminder of just how low on the totem pole Clay is. He’s just another tadpole in the gigantic pond that is Hollywood. And he’ll continue to be, until he finds that next great script.
But the next great script hunt isn’t going so well. It’s the same old garbage from the same old agencies. He’s being slipped scripts left and right, but nothing’s actually sticking. And on top of that, there’s one writer who lives in the middle of nowhere who continues to clog up their mailing system with the same script over and over again. Ugh! Amateurs! – they just never give up!
Unbeknownst to him, however, that very script ends up in his bag before a meeting with another creative exec, frenemy Jennifer. Jennifer is desperate for some other script she’s been tasked with finding for her boss because if she doesn’t find it, she’ll lose her job. Because Clay has this script, she needs his help. Clay has to keep the script private, however, so he tells her no. She apologizes for putting him on the spot and they go their separate ways.
That night, just out of curiosity, Clay starts reading the amateur script, and it’s AMAZING. He contacts the writer, who happens to have just gotten to LA, and sets up a meeting on the Universal lot. They meet the next day, and the writer tells him that no one knows he’s a writer and that he’s never sent the script to anyone else. He then proceeds to back up into the street and get RUN OVER by one of Universal’s back-lot tourist trams. And DIES!
Clay is horrified by the ordeal but then realizes…hey wait a minute…NO ONE knows about this script. So Clay changes the name on the script to his own and gives it to a buddy at another studio. He’s going to sell this script for a cool million, dammit, and not a soul is going to know the truth.
Errrr…not so fast. Remember Jennifer? Yeah, it turns out that meeting was a little con. She did it to distract Clay while her assistant took the script from Clay’s bag, ran to Kinkos, and made a copy. Except the dumb assistant copied the WRONG SCRIPT. The DEAD GUY’S SCRIPT.
Oh shit.
Clay goes to Jennifer to get the script back, but it turns out Jennifer has read it! And she loved it! And wants to know all about the writer. Clay demands the script back and the two struggle for it with Jennifer falling directly on one of the script’s brads, which impales her neck right at the main artery, killing her! Yes, death by brad! What’s a brad again?
Clay gets the hell out of there, with the script of course, and it finally looks like he’s in the clear. Except then he finds out Jennifer slipped the script to someone else. And of course when he goes to that person, he finds out the script’s been slipped to someone else, and so on and so forth. So Clay must race to all of these people and CONTAIN the mess, which oftentimes means KILLING THEM.
When it’s all said and done, Clay is either going to sell this damn script or be forever blackballed in Hollywood or…you know, go to prison for the rest of his life.
One Track Mind (a strange misguided title if there ever was one) was a pretty funny little script and I can totally see why it sold. It’s got a situation at the heart of it that’d have all the nuts in Hollywood wondering what they would do in the same situation, and it’s actually quite clever a lot of the time.
For example, when Jennifer is killed by the brad, it turns out she didn’t die right away, and is able to scrawl onto the floor in her own blood, “Clay did it.” Clay luckily stumbles upon the scene right before the cops get there and changes the scrawled message to, “C.A.A did it.”
Then there’s the genius choice to make Max Rebello, the movie star Clay works for but has never met, researching his next role as a detective. So Max is actually with all the detectives when they’re investigating Clay’s murders. Max, of course, is the only one who’s putting the pieces together, so it’s him who’s actually realizing that Clay did it. But because he’s just a dumb movie star, the other cops ignore him.
There were some issues with the script though, in my opinion. First, I hate when young writers write young characters who are supposedly in these “my life is over if I don’t figure this out” situations, when they’re only 25 years old. Clay’s life is supposedly going to fall apart if he doesn’t find that next big script soon, but really, he’s only 25. If he gets fired, he still has his whole life ahead of him. He’ll get plenty more chances. If he was, say, 35, now you have a character who really is in trouble if he doesn’t figure this out. It really is his last shot. I don’t know – I just felt like there was no desperate reason why he needed to put his name on this script.
Had he been made a little older and his boss would’ve made it clear that if he didn’t bring something great in soon, he was going to be fired, then we would’ve felt Clay’s desperation more, and his reasoning for taking the risk that he did. This wasn’t a deal breaker by any means. I was still into the story. It’s just nice when you make the stakes clear.
There were also some conveniences that bothered me. Jennifer for example. Someone he needs to erase from the equation conveniently falls and dies? The falling on a brad made it funny enough that you almost ignored it, but it just seemed a little too perfect that, now, a second person who he needs to die, dies for him. And honestly? I don’t like when anybody dies by falling down. It just seems…I don’t know, lazy.
And finally, I cannot fathom that Queen, someone who was clearly a creative exec or reader himself, as he knows so much about this world, would write a 130 page script! That’s, like, rule #1! That’s what all the readers and execs joke about. “Some writer sent me a 130 page script. Give me a fucking break!” Either Queen really thought highly of himself or this was an early draft.
Actually, I’m prone to think it was an early draft, as the script definitely got sloppier as it went on. The first half was tight and focused, while the second half started splitting into too many threads with too many stories to clean up. And the ending, which involves an unexpected request by one of the main characters, didn’t make sense at all.
Despite all that, I did want to keep reading and I did want to find out what would happen until the end. And if you’ve achieved that with your screenplay, you’ve done something right!
Script link: One Track Mind
What I learned: Beware the “sloppier as you go on” problem. I see this quite a bit. We write from the top down. Therefore, we ALWAYS put more time into the first half of our scripts than the second. This means the second half isn’t as well-tuned, and that’s a problem because the second half actually needs MORE attention than the first half. That’s the half where you wrap everything up, where you make everything make sense. If that isn’t written to perfection, your script will seem sloppy, or worse, confusing. One Track Mind definitely suffered from this problem.
Genre: Sci-Fi/Western
I remember reading through the first ten pages of this one and thinking…hmmm, now this is different. Writers are trying to come up with high concept ideas all the time. But it’s a tough proposition. I encounter a lot of ideas that seem high concept, or are high concept “on paper,” but there’s something about them that doesn’t scream movie high concept, the kind of true bona fide high concept idea you hear and you say, “Oooh, now that’s a movie I’d check out.” And it’s usually a tiny unique addition to a tried-and-true idea that does it. The tried and true idea here is a small group of people fighting off “monsters.” The unique twist is that they aren’t “monsters,” per se, but rather mech machines designed to kill humans.
And I’ll just be honest. I’m a sucker for movies where a hero wakes up someplace unfamiliar with no idea how he got there. I know it’s cliche. I know it’s been done a billion times over, but I just think it’s such a compelling situation. That’s why I put this one in the coveted “definite” pile when I first read it. However, the “definite” pile hasn’t exactly been a bastion of quality. None of the definites so far have even reached “worth the read” status. Let’s hope today’s script changes that.
John Caan has just woken up in a Mexican pueblo. He doesn’t know where he is. He doesn’t know how he got here. He’s never even been to Mexico. So why he would be here is beyond him. But that’s not even on the radar right now. What is on the radar are the noises coming from outside.
Caan peeks out the window to see the most horrifying most baffling sight he’s ever seen in his life. Large mech machines, with saws, with machetes, with lasers, with guns, are massacring a bunch of people in the town square.
While this would be too much for any sane man to handle, Caan’s slightly insane. And he knows exactly what he has to do. GET THE HELL OUT OF HERE. So he loads up his gun and heads outside to get the huh-zell out of Dodge. There are people dying all around him but he doesn’t care. It isn’t until a small girl is in trouble that he actually does anything. But after saving her, he slips out and heads through the desert to safety.
Except it’s not that easy. Far off in the desert he encounters a huge electrically charged fence. And more MECHS, standing guard, making sure no humans make it past them. They chase Caan back to the town and it’s time for plan B.
Back in the town we meet a series of other characters – Michael, the almost Alpha-Male, Lily, the mother of the child Caan saved, Petra, a 20-something goth girl, Tom, a 50-something ex-cop, and a few more. This is Caan’s army. And they’re all looking to him for leadership.
But Caan’s not interested in being a leader. He just wants to find a way out of this situation. Unfortunately, that’ll mean fending these mechs off for a few days while he figures things out. So he reluctantly rallies the troops and does the best job he can.
The thing is, nothing goes quite as expected. The weirdness of this situation just keeps getting weirder. For example, sometimes the mechs don’t want to kill them. They just want to toy with them. And (spoiler), the group finds a room deep under the town where 9 bodies lie. A closer look at the bodies show that they’re exact copies of THEM.
So yeah, shit is pretty f*cked up! Caan not only needs to find out how to get them out of this alive, but also what the hell is going on here. And boy is it a shocker when he does figure out the truth!
First off, this is superbly written. The lines are lean. The prose is bare but descriptive. This feels like a spec. It feels like something that deserves to go out wide and vie for producers’ attention.
And it nails a lot of its components as well. Our anti-hero leader, Caan, is mysterious and dark enough to keep our interest throughout. Dare I say he’s a worthy successor to Mad Max himself with his selfish yet reluctantly compassionate demeanor.
The situation driving the story is so damn weird (human-killing mechs) that you have to keep reading to find out why the hell this is all happening. And surprisingly enough – while I admit a tad far-fetched and “out there,” the explanation is – it worked for me in regards to the universe Topham created. That’s where these scripts always fall apart. An outrageous situation to start the script, yet the writer never explains that situation in a satisfactory way. I don’t know if it’s that Topham is such a good writer that you believed it all despite its weirdness, or if it honestly just felt right, but it made sense to me and I was satisfied.
I liked the nice little twists and turns also. For example, early on Caan finds a drawing in a school that shows a man shot in the head, the same man he just saw shot in the exact same way minutes ago. And (spoiler), when the characters find dead versions of themselves in a room…that’s when I really took notice. I like those “sit up” moments in a script – moments that are so shocking or weird or cool, that you actually readjust yourself and sit up. That doesn’t happen very often!
The script is always kept moving by the inherent GSU. The goal is to hold of the mechs and find a way out of here. The urgency is the constant barrage of mechs that keep coming. And the stakes are, obviously, their lives.
I liked how Topham always kept his characters active too. One of the pitfalls of placing your characters in a confined area is that you’ll just have them sitting around doing nothing for long stretches of time. In order to combat this, you must always give them a plan, always keep them trying to achieve something, never sitting down and talking in safety for too long. I remember I reviewed an Amateur script awhile back called “Zombie Knights,” that had this exact problem. The characters just got inside the castle grounds and hung out. Nothing happened for long stretches of time. That can NEVER be the case in this kind of story or in a spec script period.
The only real issues I had here surrounded Caan. Even though I liked him (and I’ll go into why in the ‘what I learned’ section), there were times where he tested me. He was almost too brooding. And the eventual reveal to his backstory was boring. It could’ve been a lot better. And seriously, writers, don’t have your heroes deliberately kill nice animals – EVER. When Caan kills the dog/coyote in this, I was like, “Really?? Are you trying to make us hate this guy?” I find that a little bit of dark or gallows humor can quickly up the likability quotient of your anti-hero. Let’s go that route instead of making him a dog-killer.
Anyway, this one was fun! And it now takes the lead as THE BEST TWIT-PITCH SCRIPT OF THE CONTEST! Check it out yourself in the link below!
Script link: Proving Ground (Since the writer didn’t want his contact info on the script, if you like the script and want to get in touch with the writer, e-mail me and I’ll put you in contact).
What I learned: When you have a brooding protagonist, an anti-hero, or a protagonist who doesn’t talk much, it can be hard for the audience to like/sympathize with him. The lack of talking makes it difficult to identify with or get into the hero’s head. Therefore, look to make us like your character through action or choice. Proving Ground does a great job of this early on. While everyone’s fighting off the mechs, Caan is simply trying to escape. That moment presents itself when a mech leaves its guard at the gate to go kill a little girl. Caan has a choice now. He can slip out the unattended gate or save the girl. In the end, he chooses to save the girl. It’s this action, this choice that makes us like him! Oh, and always place these moments EARLY ON. It’s important that we like our hero right away!
Genre: Drama
Premise: (from IMDB) A Naval veteran arrives home from war unsettled and uncertain of his future – until he is tantalized by The Cause and its charismatic leader.
About: Paul Thomas Anderson (There Will Be Blood, Boogie Nights) had been talking about making this movie for awhile, but backed off it a couple of times before finally committing to it. The main issue seemed to be that the script was based off of the early days of L Ron Hubbard and his spooky little cult religion, Scientology. To get around this, Anderson simply states that the movie has nothing to do with Scientology, which it of course does, but keeps him safe from the evil-doer scientists in the aforementioned religion, who have been known to ruin people’s lives who take them on.
Writer: Paul Thomas Anderson
I have seen many movies in my lifetime. Good movies. Bad movies. Fun movies. Weird movies. But I don’t think I’ve ever seen a movie as boring as The Master. A long time ago, Paul Thomas Anderson’s script was floating around and I was wondering if I should read it, but everybody who’d read it said the same thing: “It must be a really early draft because it’s barely readable. Nothing makes sense.” I didn’t want to review something that raw so I moved on. But it looks like that’s the actual draft he shot! I don’t know if Anderson is getting lazy, if he’s taking too many drugs, or if he just doesn’t care anymore, but this has to be one of the worst scripts I’ve ever seen turned into a film.
One need look no further than The Master’s story to see how little effort was put into the script. Imagine a first draft, but the kind of first draft where you’re not even trying – where you’re just attempting to find a few good scenes – where your goal is more to get to the end than construct a compelling drama. That’s The Master. It’s almost comical when you try to summarize it, because it’s so random, so directionless. But I’ll try my best. Here’s my summary of The Master’s plot…
It’s the 50s I think. And we’re introduced to a soldier named Freddie. Freddie has some sort of mental condition although we’re never told or given a hint as to what it is. Like a lot of things in The Master, it’s vague – not on purpose, but because Anderson was too lazy to figure it out. Anyway, Freddie’s the kind of guy who will masturbate out in the open, in front of everybody. So yeah, we love this character right away.
In addition to this, Freddie hovers back and forth between a socially awkward weirdo who can barely interact with other human beings and an ultra smooth lathorio who women can’t keep their hands off of. How is this possible? I’ll venture to take a guess. Because Anderson didn’t know anything about the character and made it all up on the fly.
In addition to Freddie being a nerd/ladie’s man, he also has a talent for mixing alchohol in weird and unique ways. He can whip up a doozy of a drink with a full bar, but sometimes goes too far and adds questionable ingredients, like paint thinner! This ends up eventually killing people wherever he goes, so he always gets chased out of every group he becomes a part of. Hmm, a nonsensical alcohol mixing paint thinner backstory. Riveting. And totally relevant.
So after bouncing around, Freddie happens upon a strange miniature cult leader/boat enthusiast/author named Lancaster Dodd. Dodd doesn’t like being on land because…um, because he doesn’t like people approaching him or something?? Dodd likes Freddie for no reasons that are apparent to the audience. He just likes him because the script needs him to like him.
It is through this weird friendship that Dodd, who is in the process of creating a new religion, decides to make Freddie his main disciple. His reasoning, according to him, is that Freddie is “fearless.” But it’s pretty clear that Freddie is just stupid. And weird. That’s one of the only consistencies about The Master – that nothing makes sense and everything often contradicts itself.
Unfortuantely for the actors, and the audience, Anderson has no idea where to go with the story from here. We just sort of stumble along, with the only real hint of a plot being the release of Dodd’s second book. But even that seems to be forgotten for most of the screenplay and is sprung upon us out of nowhere near the end of the second act (if there even were acts?). The story here was so formless and random that I remember at one point thinking the film could either end in 5 minutes or 50 minutes. That’s how little purpose or direction it all had. You just had no idea where the hell it was going!
And that can be fun if there’s an actual story. But there wasn’t any. It literally felt like Anderson woke up each day of shooting, asked the actors what they wanted to do, and just played around with a bunch of random scenes until they shot something they liked, logic and story be damned.
I’ll tell you the scene that really did it in for me. It’s a scene on the ship when Dodd first calls stowaway Freddie into his quarters. Dodd starts off the scene by scolding Freddie for being a deadbeat drunk, telling him that he’ll never amount to anything because of his dependency on alcohol. The two then talk for a few minutes and how does the scene end? By Dodd saying he got wasted on Freddie’s special alcohol mix, loves it, and he desperately wants him to make more so they can get drunk again.
Uhhhhh…what???? “You’re a stupid drunk. Clean yourself up. Oh hey, let’s make some more alcohol and get wasted.” This epitomizes just how nonsensical and high Anderson was when he was writing and shooting this. Absolutely NOTHING made sense.
And there was no BUILD to this story. Dodd was at the same place in his career at the end of his movie as he was the beginning. This would’ve been so much better had we watched Dodd rise up as an unknown nobody into a dominant cult leader with sweeping power and influence, much like Anderson did with There Will Be Blood. You then pitt people against him, people to call him out, and relish in the sustained conflict that storyline offers. We almost ALMOST got a hint of this early on, and not surprisingly, it was one of the best scenes in the movie. At a party where Dodd is explaining his philosophies, a man walks in and challenges him in front of everyone, calling his work a sham. Dodd is forced to defend his stance, and it’s an intense and riveting standoff. We needed more scenes LIKE THAT. Instead, the conflict amounts to Dodd encountering a series of tiny inconsequential incidents which had no consequences whatsover. Dodd was never in any danger or trouble. So who cares? Even when he goes to jail for…I don’t know, being “cultish” or something, he’s out of there in a day and back to his life. Where were the stakes????
There was so little here that was thought through. And it’s a shame. Because the cinematography was amazing. The score was great. The actors came to play. Hoffman, especially, was great. But even though Phoenix’s performance was memorable, it was memorable for all the wrong reasons. Not because it served the story, but because Anderson clearly told him to act however fucking crazy he wanted to, then yelled action. Talk about an uncontrolled and random performance. Again, I still don’t know if Freddie is a stud or a dork. I don’t know anything about him.
Obviously, I’m disappointed by this effort. Paul Thomas Anderson is one of the few truly original voices out there that Hollywood allows to make movies. He owes it to himself and to us to give everything he can on the script, and not just one-draft it ala prequel George Lucas. The abysmallness of this script is right up there with Kingdom Of The Crystal Skull. Just embarrassingly awful. So upset by this script and film.
What I learned: Laziness in scriptwriting ALWAYS COMES BACK TO BITE YOU. You can’t hide it. Readers aren’t stupid. They will always spot it. They will always call you out. And we all know when we’re doing it. We all know when we’re being lazy. We all try to talk ourselves into why it’s okay for that specific scene or moment. DON’T FALL INTO THAT TRAP. Don’t let a single piece of your script be lazy. It will come back to bite you, I promise.
