Genre: Contained Thriller

The Last of the DEFINITES.  Sounds like a good title if anyone decides to adapt Twit-Pitch into a movie.

Make no mistake about it: Twit-Pitch and I have experienced some rocky times together.  It wasn’t always spelling-mistake free first pages and freshly polished gold brads.  There was that time where I realized the writer hadn’t written his script before entering the contest.  Oh, and then there was that other time where I realized the writer hadn’t written his script before entering the contest. But through it all, we stuck together.  Maybe longer than a lot of you thought we should.  There were times when Twit-Pitch was downright abusive to me.  But I remember when I broke up with Looper in front of the world.  You know who the first one there for me was?  Twit-Pitch.  That’s who.   I’m kinda gettin’ all…teary-eyed just thinking about it.

As far as where today’s Twit-Pitch script brings us?  Well, here’s the thing.  There’ve been flashier concepts.  There’s been better writing.  But reading the first ten pages of “Guest,” I thought, “This could be the one that actually gets made.”  The contained thriller element – a protagonist with something under the hood – the low-budget price tag?  If this thing were done right, it may be the sleeper that woke this damn contest up.  Let’s find out if that was the case.

Samantha Given is 56 years old.  One look at her and you know whatever roads she’s taken in life, they’re not the same roads you and I drive on.  These roads are the unpaved kind, the backwoods gravel-laden pieces of shit you get lost in.  She wears every wrinkle of that 56 year old face.  And it doesn’t take long to figure out that’s why she’s here, checking in at this hotel.  She’s sick of those f*cking roads.  And she’s finally doing something about it.  Even if it’s just holing up for a few days.

Now this hotel isn’t Hotel Transylvania, but it’s got its fair share of spooky shit going on.  There’s loud thumping noises happening every hour or so.  They actually put that famous Van Gogh Scream painting on the wall (who puts that in a hotel room?).  Oh, and the bellhop, the overly polite but totally sketchy Diego, likes to get a little too personal with his questioning.  Since when do bellhops ask, “So what do you plan to do for the rest of the day?” Not only that, but he seems really keen on getting Sam into a “better” room.

But Sam’s fine with the room she’s in.  That is until those thumping noises start again.  After awhile, Sam decides to do some investigating, listening through the wall, and starts getting this idea that someone’s being held captive in the next room.  Oh, this would be a good time to mention that Sam’s on anti-psychotics.  So yeah, not everything’s kosher at the top of the Christmas tree. But man does she become convinced that something’s up.  So even though she knows it’s going to put her on the hot seat, she calls the cops.

The police come in.  There’s a big hubbub in the hallway.  The guy staying in the next room is obviously pissed.  And when the police check inside, they find nothing.  Not a single trace.  But Sam knows something’s up.  Diego, the bellhop, is always acting weird.  If he were in on it, they could’ve moved the girl they’ve kidnapped.  Assuming there’s a girl.  And assuming all of this isn’t in her head.

If this weren’t bad enough, we’re also learning more about Sam’s past and why she’s here.  Her husband, Charlie, has been treating her like a pinata for the last 30 years, and this is the first time she’s had the balls to do something about it.  But Charlie’s constant calls and texts asking her to come back are starting to break her down.  And Sam’s daughter, completely oblivious to the abuse her mom’s been through, is getting pissed that Sam is being such a baby.

All this leads to an increasingly precarious situation.  If there is someone being held captive in the other room, Sam has to find a way to save her.  If there isn’t, and she’s just imagining it all, then maybe she’s as weak as her husband’s made her out to be.  And maybe her best option is to go crawling back to him, apologize, and continue to live a life of abusiveness.

Something I want to bring to everyone’s attention right away is that readers LOVE reading scripts like “Guest.”  Low character count.  Contained location.  An easy-to-understand situation.  These are easy reads!  Readers know they’re not going to be taking endless notes trying to keep track of who’s who and how they’re related and how those fifteen other subplots factor into everything.  And that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t go to some unexpected places with your story.  It doesn’t mean you shouldn’t have complicated stuff going on with your characters.  Of course you want that.  But the overall story situation is easy to follow and therefore very reader-friendly.

Something else that gave me confidence in “Guest” was that the adjacent room wasn’t the only mystery.  The second mystery was Sam herself.  Whenever you’re writing something that takes place in a contained area, you don’t have as many places to go with your story.  So it’s ESSENTIAL that you make your characters themselves a story.  That way, we’re not just trying to find out what’s going on in the “other room.”  We’re trying to find out what’s going on inside our protagonist.

And to that end, I think Cruz did a good job.  The whole “abused wife” thing can be really cliche if done badly, and I thought Cruz brought a realism to it that made me give a shit about Sam.  I believed she had this past with her husband.  And I liked the parallels of her being trapped in this relationship, needing to be saved, just like this girl (if there’s a girl) is trapped in the next room, needing to be saved.  Watching Sam gradually gain the courage to go from victim to hero wasn’t a perfect transition, but it was convincing enough.

The problems I had with the script mainly fell on the technical front.  When you’re doing a contained thriller, I’m not sure you should ever take us outside of that setting.  I believe it’s important that we feel stuck here, even if we technially aren’t.  When Sam went to have coffee with her daughter, that carefully constructed fabric of danger was instantly ripped apart. I wanted to stay in that hotel. Or actually I didn’t.  Which is exactly why the writer should’ve kept me there.

Also, one thing I’m always on guard with with these scripts is the writer biding time.  Most writers get these ideas for contained thrillers, think they’ve struck gold, but then realize they have these huge chunks of time to fill up between the main scenes.  And since the sparse setting offers little in the way of choices, these writers come up with shit for the sake of coming up with shit instead of giving us scenes that actually matter, scenes that are actually entertaining.  As a result, the script slows to a crawl.  Overall, I thought Cruz did a good job avoiding this but there were a good 10 pages early in the second act where Sam didn’t seem to be doing much and I started to get bored.  It picked up afterwards but still, you can’t have ten slow pages in a thriller.  Especially one that’s only 80 pages long.

(Spoiler) My last issue is I would’ve liked to have known more about Danielle.  Why was she kidnapped?  The few hints that we got indicated that this wasn’t your average kidnapping.  There was more of a story to this.  I was waiting for that story to be revealed but it never came, and I was disappointed by that.  That could’ve been a nice final twist, if Danielle’s kidnapping wasn’t exactly what we thought it was.

But all in all, this is EASILY one of the best Twit-Pitch scripts.  It probably needs to come in longer than 79 pages, but the writing here is really strong.  And more importantly, the STORYTELLING here is really strong.  Check this one out for sure!

Script Link: Guest

What I learned: In contained low-character count screenplays, make sure your main characters are dealing with some kind of inner conflict, some kind of troubled back-story that needs to be resolved.  Because your story choices are limited in contained situations, you need an additional interesting story going on within your main character to keep us entertained.

I recently caused a minor fracas by suggesting that screenwriters aren’t “writers,” per se, but rather “storytellers,” and that if you want to become a successful screenwriter, your focus should be on telling stories rather than writing.  I’m afraid that some of you took me a little too literally and assumed I meant that there’s no actual “writing” involved in screenwriting.

Writing is, of course, an essential part of telling any story on the page.  If I write, “Jason, bloodied and wheezing, stumbles through the airplane wreckage, blinded by the smoke,” that’s a hell of a lot more descriptive and exciting than “Jason walks through what remains of the airplane.” To that end, writing is essential.  It’s our job to pull a reader into our universe, and how we weave words together to create images and moments is a large part of what makes that process successful.

However, here’s the rub.  Unless you’ve created an interesting enough situation to write about in the first place, it won’t matter how well you’ve described that moment, because we’re already bored.  And that’s what I mean by “storytelling.”  One must create a series of compelling dramatic situations that pull a reader in for the writing itself to matter.

So to help clarify this, here is how I define writing and storytelling and how they relate to screenwriting.  Because this is my own theory, I’m not saying these are universal definitions, only definitions to help explain the points I’m making in the article.

Writing – When I refer to “writing,” I mean the way in which everything in the story is described, the way in which the picture is painted.  While important, you can give me the greatest description ever of a character, the greatest description ever of that character’s house, the greatest description ever of the way he goes about his nightly routine, and the greatest description ever of a car chase he gets into later…and I can still be bored out of my mind because you haven’t preceded any of these things with a story I care about.

Storytelling – “Storytelling,” on the other hand, is the inclusion of goals and mysteries that create enough conflict, drama, and suspense to pull an audience in and make them care about what they’re watching.  For example, that immaculately described car chase above is boring unless, say, the character driving has 10 minutes left to get across town and save his daughter, with the cops, the mob, and the government trying to stop him.  

So how does one “tell a story?”  What’s the secret to storytelling?  Well, I feel storytelling can be broken down into a couple of simple components.  The first is G.O.C.  (Goals, obstacles and conflict).  In most stories, you have a character goal – a hero who’s trying to achieve something.  In order to make their pursuit interesting, you must throw obstacles at them, things that get in the way of them achieving their goal.   Naturally, because obstacles prevent our hero from doing what he wants, conflict emerges, and conflict is what leads to entertainment, since it’s always interesting to see how the conflict will be resolved.  If a character wants something and gets it without having to work for it, there’s a good chance your story (or at least that part of your story) is boring.  John McClane’s goal is to save his wife, but the terrorists in the building provide obstacles to doing so, which creates conflict.

The other major component of storytelling is mystery.  If you don’t start with a character who has a goal, you should be working to create a mystery.  “Lost” built an entire show around this.  From the “Others” to the “Hatch” to the “numbers entry.” We kept watching that show because we wanted answers to those mysteries.  Note, however, that mysteries always eventually lead to character goals, since sooner or later a character will be tasked with figuring out that mystery (their goal).  “The Ring” is a good example.  A mystery is created with this video tape which kills people in 7 days.  Naomi Watts’ character, then, has the goal of finding out the origins of the tape, and seeing if she can stop it from killing people.

A writer’s mastery of these two components, the goal and the mystery, are often what defines him/her as a good storyteller and determines whether their screenplays will be any good.

What I often run into on the amateur level is the opposite.  I read tons of scripts where writers put all their efforts into immaculately describing their worlds, their characters, their scenes, and everything involved in painting the picture for the reader, but without any conflict or drama or suspense.  It’s the kind of stuff that makes you go, “This person is a great writer!!” But in the end, there’s no immediate goal, there’s no compelling mystery.  So it’s just boring shit happening.  Really well described boring shit happening, but boring shit happening nonetheless.  I know a lot of writers send their scripts out and get this recurring note back: “We loved the writing but the script wasn’t for us.”  It confuses the hell out of the writer.  “If the writing is great,” they ask, “Why the hell wouldn’t the script be for them??”  It’s because your story is boring as hell!  There’s not enough storytelling!

What you must do to prevent this is make sure you’re storytelling on three different levels: on the concept level, the sequence level, and the scene level.  What I mean by this is that your overall concept must have a story built into it, each sequence in your script must have a story built into it, and your scenes themselves must have stories built into them.  The second you’re not telling a story on one of these three levels, you’re just writing.  You’re describing shit or recounting shit or laying out shit.  You’re not storytelling.  Let’s take a closer look at these three levels using the film, “Aliens,” as an example.

CONCEPT LEVEL – The concept of Aliens has a great story behind it.  There’s a mystery: A remote base on a faraway planet has gone silent and they suspect that there may be aliens involved.  This mystery leads to a goal.  Ripley and a team of Marines must go in and figure out what’s happened, possibly having to wipe out the aliens.  An intriguing setup for a story.

SEQUENCE LEVEL – Having a strong overall story concept is great, but you need to find a way to keep that concept interesting for 120 pages.  If the characters in Aliens just go in and kill the aliens, your story is over within 30 pages.  This is where sequences come in – 10-20 page chunks that have their own little stories going on.  These sequences are going to have their own goals and their own mysteries.  In other words, you must be telling stories within these 15 page segments.  For example, the first goal is to get into the base and find out what happened.  They get in there, find out everyone’s gone, and discover some traces of a battle.  In the next sequence, the aliens attack, and the goal is for Ripley to get to the soldiers and save them. The next sequence introduces a new goal – figure out what to do about this.  They decide to go back up to the ship and nuke the place.  Except when the ship comes down to get them, it’s sabotaged by the aliens, leaving them there.  — The point to remember is: with each sequence, introduce new goals and new mysteries to keep the story entertaining.  If you’re not doing that, you’re just writing.

SCENE LEVEL – Storytelling at the scene level is where I can tell whether I’m dealing with a pro or an amateur.  Good writers work to make every scene have some sort of mystery or goal driving it.  There’s a situation that needs to be resolved by the end of the scene, and the scene isn’t over until that happens.  Again, we’re talking about the same tools here.  Goals and mysteries.  The goal could be as simple as “making sure the area is secure,” which is what the Marines’ initial job is when they go into the base.  Or the mystery can be as simple as “what happened here?” which is what drives the following scene – the characters trying to put the pieces of what happened together through the clues they find.

Each of these levels of your screenplay should be telling compelling stories or we’re going to get bored.  I run into really interesting story concepts all the time that turn into boring screenplays because the writer doesn’t know how to tell stories on the sequence or scene level.  It’s like they figure, “I came up with a cool idea for the movie.  I’m finished.”  NO!  You have to come up with a cool idea for every sequence!  Every scene!  Think of each of those as MINI-MOVIES, all of which have to be just as compelling as the overall idea.  Because I’ll tell you this: if you write three boring scenes in a row in a screenplay, you’re done!  The reader’s officially given up on you.  Try to tell a story every time you walk into a scene.

There are obviously smaller tools you can use to enhance your storytelling as well.  You can throw unexpected twists in there, suspense, dramatic irony, a character’s inner journey.   But if you’re a beginner/intermediate, focus on the basics first.  Goals and mysteries.  Goals and mysteries.  Always  remember: No matter how good of a writer you are, how strong your prose is or how well you can describe a scene,  unless you’ve set up a story where we give a shit about the characters in that place, it won’t matter.  Screenwriting is not a writing contest.  It’s a storytelling contest.  The sooner you realize that, the faster you’ll succeed in this business. I PROMISE YOU THAT.

Genre: War/Thriller/Conspiracy
Premise: A grizzled contract driver in Iraq stumbles upon a conspiracy to kill a U.S. soldier who holds information regarding a cover-up that threatens an 8 billion dollar corporation.
About: This script was one of the five winners of last year’s Nicholl Fellowship!
Writer: John MacInnes
Details: 111 pages

Usually, when I see “soldier” and “Iraq” in a logline, I cringe.  Iraq war scripts are the equivalent of death by potato peeler to me.  There’s an old saying that nobody wants reality when they go to the movies.  They want to escape.  If we want Iraq, all we have to do is turn on CNN.  It’s why Hurt Locker, which won a freaking Oscar, couldn’t muster up 20 million bucks at the box office.  So I’m not going to lie.  I saw Iraq here and groaned.  However, I had to take into consideration that this script beat out 7000 others, and therefore had to have something going for it.  As long as it wasn’t another soldier returning back from the war trying to integrate himself back into a society scenario, then maybe, just maybe, Outside The Wire had a chance.

And you know what?  John MacInnes capitalized on that chance.  The first act of Outside The Wire was stupendous, pulling me in like a warm blanket.  A warm blanket of death and destruction!  (Whoa,  I was trying to add emphasis for effect there and it didn’t turn out the way I planned.  Writing fail.  Let’s move on.)

“Wire” begins in Iraq with Private Lavena Torres video-chatting with her little boy, Antonio.  It’s a tender heartfelt moment, with Antonio showing his mother a picture he drew of her.  But more importantly, it instantly gave me confidence in the writing.  I thought I was getting that “returning from home” 25 year old male soldier storyline that I always read, but instead I’m introduced to a female soldier. That was different.  That told me this writer knew how to avoid the obvious, the cliche, and 9 out 10 times when I read amateur scripts, that’s not the case.

After the chat, Torres goes back to her quarters, only to find military police searching her bed. They snatch her up, and she begins asking what she’s done wrong.  But no one tells her.  No one tells her a damn thing.

Afterwards we meet Larry Schmidt.  I was a little upset regarding Larry’s intro because his age wasn’t given.  This is a huge pet peeve of mine.  A 33 year old is different from a 43 year old is different from a 53 year old.  Whichever one of those ages we start with indicates a completely different person in a completely different stage of their life.  You don’t tell us that, and now I have no idea who I’m dealing with.  Later on we figure it out, but we shouldn’t have to wait until later on.

Anyway, Schmidt’s not what you’d call the most social dude.  He’s got an ex-wife and an ex-daughter who he doesn’t talk to anymore.  He used to be a marine, but now contracts himself out for big money driving through the streets of Iraq.  It ain’t easy doing errands in a war zone, but if that’s what you want, Schmidt is your homie.

So Schmidt signs himself up for another contracting tour of duty, and on his second route, finds his men picking up a mystery passenger with a bag over his head.  They head to some alley, pull the guy out, take off the bag and we see…Lavena Torres.  One of the contractors puts a gun to her head, about to pull the trigger, but Schmidt sees that she’s one of theirs and shoots the contractor first.  A firefight with the other contractor ensues, and Schmidt is able to grab Torres and get away.

Being the veteran that he is, he’s able to find them shelter for the time being, but it isn’t going to be long before the military finds them, and if Schmidt’s going to get out of this, he’s going to need to know what  Torres did.  The short of it is that she knows that one of the U.S.’s targeting programs has been malfunctioning and killing U.S. soldiers.  The corporation that creates this software, who’s about to go “all in” in Iraq, doesn’t want this little girl ratting out their mistakes, so they’ve ordered her to be killed.

Schmidt’s already too deep in to bail out now.  He knows the only way they’re staying alive is to get out of the country.  So he sets his sites on Jordan.  But in order to cross the border to safety, he’ll need to overcome a priority APB form the U.S. military, bounty hunters, roadblocks, IEDs, and a hell of a lot of local bad guys.  He’ll also have to overcome that hard shell he’s placed over himself and get to know this Torres chick on a level that he’s never known another human being before.

Okay, a couple of things right off the bat here. I loved starting with a female character.  I also loved that we were dealing with contractors.  Immediately, this felt different.  It felt unique.  It didn’t feel like that super-generic movie, Green Zone, with Matt Damon.  In fact, if they would’ve substituted this script for that one, Green Zone would’ve been a thousand times better and actually made some real money. This is a story.  That script was a hot mess.

But I digress.  Another thing I want to point out was the choice to start on Torres talking with her son, Antonio.  This was a BRILLIANT choice.  Through it, we saw that this woman loved someone.  We saw that she had someone to come home to.  It established stakes.  It established a relationship that we cared about.  This way, when that bag is torn off the soldier’s head early in Act 2 and we see it’s Torres, we care.  This is the girl with the child.  This is the girl who we want to see get back to that child.

Ask yourself this question.  If we hadn’t had that scene with Torres and her son?  And we just saw her get taken by the military police?  And then we saw her in this same situation, about to get shot by the contractors?  Would we have cared?  No.  Because she’s just some woman.  We don’t know who she is in the world.  We don’t know if she has kids or a family or anyone who cares about her.  She’s just a face.  So we would’ve shrugged our shoulders and went, “Yeah, sure, shoot her.  I don’t give a shit.”  It’s sad but true.

It’s your job as a writer to establish reasons why we should care about your characters.  If we don’t have those reasons, then they’re just names on a page.  A great way to do this is through relationships.  Establish that there’s someone to come home to at the end of the day, that there’s someone who cares about your character.  We see this at the beginning of film Training Day.  Ethan Hawk’s character has a quick scene with his pregnant wife before his first day at work.  That scene is why we want to see Hawk’s character come home.  Because he has somebody.

We even see it here with Schmidt, if on a lesser level.  Schmidt’s doing this job because the life insurance will set his daughter up for life.  Even though he hasn’t spoken to her in years, he carries a picture of her wherever he goes, and we see how much she means to him.  He may have been a bad parent, but he wants to make sure his little girl is going to be secure.  If we don’t have those reasons to see your characters succeed or survive, then it’s harder for us to root for them.

On the downside here, I thought Torres became less interesting as the script went on.  She had that great opening that really connected us to her character, but then you gotta keep building on that. You have to peel back layers so we can learn more and more about the character.  Torres just stayed the same after that point, and as a result, I kinda became bored with her.

Contrast that with Schmidt, who we’re learning new things about all the time.  We’re learning he took a bullet for a very important man once.  We’re learning that he’s befriended a lot of people in Iraq because of how much time he’s spent out here.  His character keeps evolving, where I felt that Torres’ character stopped.

And also, I wasn’t thrilled with the climax.  It all seemed rather clumsy to me.  (spoiler) Basically, Schmidt has to jump on the windshield of the car of an ambassador to get his attention so he’ll save Schmidt and Torres from the bad guys.  The lead-up to that moment was a little confusing, the idea itself felt unimaginative, and it really didn’t allow our hero to be the hero that he was.  Schmidt was a badass this whole time, always knowing what to do.  Having to leap onto a windshield felt like something the local idiot might think up.  So I wish that ending would’ve been as good as the beginning.

Still, all in all, this was a solid screenplay.  I loved that opening so much and I loved a lot of the second act.  For that reason, it’s worth a read.

[ ] what the hell did I just read?

What I learned:  If your hero is going to be going through a life or death situation in your story, use relationships to establish something for them to come back to.  If you do this well, our need to see our hero get back to that person/people will drive our need to see them survive.  This happens here with Torres and it happens in classics such as Die Hard, with McClane needing to get back to and save his wife.

Genre: Sci-fi/Comedy
Premise: A hapless and broken hearted barista is visited by two bad-ass soldiers from the future who tell him mankind is doomed, and he alone can save them.
About: This script from British writer Howard Overman sold in March of last year and made it onto the middle of the Black List, right next to Desperate Hours!  Overman has been a longtime British TV writer, writing such shows as “Merlin,” creating the show “Vexed,” and winning a 2010 BAFTA Television Award for Best Drama Series for “Misfits.”
Writer: Howard Overman
Details: 116 pages – February 2011 draft

Wait a minute.

Hold up here.

Are you telling me that I just read a comedy script…that was funny?  And that I liked?  Has Scriptshadow slipped into Bizarro World??

Not only that, but a good comedy that was low-brow (the longest running joke in the screenplay is literally a shit joke)??  I always complain about low-brow comedies.  Scripts that have nothing to offer other than jokes.

Aha! But Slackfi DID have more to offer.  It had a story (with unexpected twists and turns ‘n stuff!) and even some character development.  By the way, what does that mean exactly?  “Character development?”  I see that phrase thrown around a lot and I’m not always convinced that the people who throw it would know how to catch it if it was thrown back.

Character “development” is any instance of your character developing into a different person.  This can be through overcoming a flaw, overcoming the past, or in the case of The Slackfi Project, overcoming a relationship.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.  Which is fine, I suppose, since there’s time-travel in Slackfi.  However, I don’t get the nicest responses when I dislike time-travelling scripts these days.  So thank God I enjoyed this one.

20-something Josh sleepwalks his way through his coffee shop job.  The guy can whip up a mean vienttia grand-aye half-whip double-sauce cinnamon-style frappe mocha-chino (apologies to all if I’m getting the terms wrong. I’m not a coffee person) but is bored out of his gourd while doing it.  Josh is the kind of person where smiles go to die.

But at least he has a reason for it.  His girlfriend, Zoe, dumped his stupid ass a few months ago and now toys with him.  She wants to hang out, but then she doesn’t.  She wants to go on dates, but then she cancels.  She wants to have sex, but then the next morning thinks it was a bad idea.  God was not a nice dude for creating people like this but they’ll be around for as long as people don’t have the balls to walk away from them, and unfortunately, Josh’s testicles haven’t grown to “walk away” proportion yet.

So how does one deal with devil-chicks like this in the meantime?  By playing video games with one’s apartment-mate of course!  Josh and his buddy, Apollo, are quite a team, getting high while ridding the alien planet Tressor of the dangerous race: Plekisaurians.  But when Apollo says he’s grown up and wants to do more adult things with his life, poor Josh finds himself with only one friend left, his overweight guinea pig, Mr. Tibbs!

Until one night when he’s visited by the duo of Wolf and Tiger, a badass male-female team who claim to be from the future! They tell Josh the world is a week away from a pandemic that will kill 6 billion people.  Josh is the only one who can save them because he delivers sandwiches to the lab where they test guinea pigs, who are responsible for the virus.  “Deliver sandwiches?” Josh responds.  But he’s a barista.  Wolf and Tiger look at each other, then double-check the address.  Oops, they’re in the wrong apartment.  They meant to go to Apollo’s apartment!

“Sorry,” they say, and leave.  Bummed beyond all reasonable definitions of the word, Josh happens to run into Wolf, Tiger and Apollo the next day, when they’re attacked by micro-chipped bad guys from the future called Replicants.  Apollo is killed, leaving Wolf and Tiger with no choice but to go with Plan B, Josh!

Unfortunately, while gearing up for the big attack on the lab, the police get a hold of Josh and explain to him that Wolf and Tiger are a couple of whack-jobs who escaped from the nuthouse.  They made up this whole thing about the future based on their obsession with the Terminator and Matrix franchises, and right now, they’re being escorted back to Crazy City.

At this point, Josh doesn’t know what to believe.  Are these two really crazy, in which case he should move on with his life?  Or in doing so, is he killing six billion people?  It isn’t until Josh confirms that his own guinea pig – MR. TIBBS – is a secret spy for the replicants, that he shifts into high gear!  He must find a way to break Wolf and Tiger out of the nuthouse, come up with a plan to get into the lab, and then….well and then massacre hundreds of guinea pigs so they can’t spread the disease.  All while his annoying ex-girlfriend keeps trying to ruin his life!

Okay, so let’s get back to that character development thing I was talking about.  When you write a script, you want to ask yourself, “How is my main character going to develop?  How are they going to change?”  If they’re not developing into anything new or different, that means they’re staying stagnant.  And for the most part, stagnant is boring.

Overman uses a relationship to develop his hero, Josh, coupled with a flaw.  The relationship is obviously his one with Zoe.  He allows her to treat him like shit and is afraid to move on.  Overman cleverly creates a scenario at the end of the script, then, where Josh is at the lab with Zoe outside the contamination door.  He has a choice of either letting her in, which saves her but kills 6 billion people, or leaving her out there to die and moving on with his life.

Remember, this is one of the best ways of conveying development in your character.  You give them a choice near the end of the story that basically asks: “Have you overcome your flaw or what?”  (Spoiler) In this case, Josh leaves Zoe out there (thank God!) and he’s officially developed into a better person.

BUT, I have a suspicion some of you don’t care.  Why?  Because I know how a large reading contingent HATES loser wimpy main characters.  That’s an issue that’s long escaped me – how to straddle that line.  In order to develop  your character into a strong person, he must first be a weak person.  So how do you make someone weak but still likable?  I have to admit Josh was a little too much of a loser for my liking, but the rest of the story was so clever and funny that I still rooted for him.

That’s the other thing I liked here – the story.  Most comedies I read have a VERY thin premise that’s stretched to the gills.  A joke that should’ve ended on page 7 has been beaten to death for 110 never-ending pages.  Slackfi actually had a story that was carefully plotted.

Which reminds me – one of the telltale signs of a good writer is what they do with their midpoint.  The midpoint should shift things around a bit, turn what was essentially one story into a slightly different story.  I always use the example of Star Wars.  It starts out being about some people delivering a message, but then turns into those same people trying to destroy a huge base.  In the midpoint of Slackfi, we find out everything Josh has been told is a lie, and that Wolf and Tiger are in the nuthouse.  It changes from Josh following along to Josh having to come up with a plan to break out Wolf and Tiger and then save the world.

Anyway, this was a funny little script, and evidence of what I was saying Friday about storytelling being more important than writing.  The writing in Slackfi is nothing to write home about.  Many of the sentences are stilted and simplistic.  Overman also has a bad habit of doubling up on beats, making many moments redundant (i.e. we’ll see Josh get rejected by Zoe and Overman will follow the action by writing something like, “Josh is stung by getting rejected by Zoe” – an unnecessary sentence).  But the STORY ITSELF for Slackfi is fun and keeps you reading.

So I recommend this script.  It’s a cool little sci-fi project that’s marketable enough to be brought to the big screen.  And I couldn’t help but think it would be a perfect double-feature with amateur favorite Keeping Time!

[ ] what the hell did I just read?

What I learned: The midpoint is a great place for passive characters to become active.  — Preferably, your hero will be active from the outset (like Indiana Jones).  That’s because movies like active characters.  But some stories necessitate that the hero start off passive.  Starting off passive is fine.  What you don’t want is for your hero to be passive for the entire script.  At some point, you want them to start driving the story.  Through Slackfi and Star Wars, I realized that the midpoint is a great place to do this.  Luke doesn’t start taking charge until the midpoint (when he comes up with an idea for how to save Princess Leia) and Josh doesn’t start taking charge until the midpoint (when he has to rescue Wolf and Tiger and come up with a plan to save the world).  So consider this option the next time you write a story that begins with a passive hero.

Genre: Period

Is Nez Perce the next “Last Of The Mohicans???”

The Flight of the Nez Perce is a spec script that, by Hollywood standards, should not work. It’s more than 130 pages. It’s an extremely violent period piece, where half the dialogue is subtitled. It also asks for a cast of hundreds, and probably couldn’t be produced for less than $120 million. Normally, these are all choices I would suggest screenwriters avoid. And yet, I still hope that a miracle happens, and this movie gets made.

I confess the main reason I picked up this script was because one of the author’s other works, Desperate Hours, currently holds the No. 1 spot on Carson’s top 25 list. But, after I finished it, I read it a second time because I loved it. Despite its flaws, The Flight of the Nez Perce is an excellent piece of writing. Let’s find out how this script breaks through the chains of industry expectations.

The year is 1877, and it’s a time of cultural unrest in America. The Civil War may be over now, but there are still people in this country fighting and shedding blood, to protect their way of life. After living in balance with the natural world for hundreds of years, everything is changing for the Indian people. The white men have come to these shores to stay, and their presence spreads across the land like a sickness. The symbol of the white man’s reach is the steam locomotive, which the Indians call “the iron monster.” The Indians have come to learn that, when they see thick plumes of train smoke rising above the trees, it means the white man has arrived, to take them from their homes. Sometimes never to be seen again. Through their actions, the white men stir a combustible mixture of fear and anger inside the Indians’ hearts. Until one day, beside the waters of the Little Bighorn River in Montana, the match is lit.

The Battle of the Little Bighorn arguably becomes the worst Indian-related massacre in American history. Chief Sitting Bull and his Sioux tribe kill Captain George Custer and all his men, winning a major victory against the U.S. army. The outcome of the battle does a couple noteworthy things. First, the army takes a more aggressive stance on handling Indian affairs. As General William Sherman says at one point, they cannot afford another Little Bighorn. The other thing that happens is, warriors from other Indian tribes hear of Sitting Bull’s victory, and become even more determined to defeat the white man. Basically, relations between the two cultures just got a whole lot worse.

This all adds up to bad news for Chief Joseph and his Nez Perce tribe, which has lived in relative peace, in the Wollowa Valley of the Pacific Northwest. Joseph sees war as a failure of mankind, and will do anything he can to stay clear of it. This seems impossible, though, when Red Grizzly, a Nez Perce warrior, brings news of the Little Bighorn massacre. Red Grizzly wants to follow Sitting Bull’s example, and take the fight directly to the white men. Joseph turns down the suggestion, not wanting to put the tribe in harm’s way. But Joseph soon understands he can’t stop the inevitable.

Soon after Little Bighorn, General Sherman receives orders from the U.S. president to remove the Nez Perce from the Wollowa Valley, and send them to a reservation in Idaho. And, if the Nez Perce refuse to leave, then the army has permission to use any means necessary. Why is the government suddenly interested in the Nez Perce? Aside from wanting to keep the Indians under control, it turns out there could be significant gold deposits right under the tribe’s feet. And the white men want to get their hands on that gold at any cost. So, Sherman sends Civil War veteran General Howard and his regiment to run this campaign against the Nez Perce.

Meanwhile, tensions are heating up near the Nez Perce settlement. The white people have built a town nearby, and it’s been difficult for everyone to be neighbors. For example, one of the tribesmen, Eagle Rock, comes across a riderless horse during a walk in the forest. Eagle Rock tries to befriend the horse, thinking it doesn’t have an owner. But it turns out that it belongs to an unfriendly white man named Larry Ott. Larry sees Eagle Rock touching his horse, and he doesn’t like it one bit. Because they don’t understand each other’s language, a fight breaks out between Eagle Rock, Larry, and Larry’s friends. Eagle Rock is shot to death.

Eagle Rock’s murder sparks rage among some of the Nez Perce warriors. The warriors, led by Red Grizzly, go out one night to kill Larry Ott for revenge. The only problem is, once they get to Larry’s cabin, no one’s there. Larry probably knew he was in trouble and left his home for good. Not happy with this situation, the warriors find another white home close by. At this point, it doesn’t matter who they kill, as long as their victims have pale faces. The warriors kill several men at this house, and Red Grizzly rapes a young mother. The mother escapes and notifies the authorities of the horror that just happened. She also asks General Howard to kill all the Indians.

Chief Joseph and the rest of the tribe learn of the atrocities that Red Grizzly and the other warriors committed. Joseph takes these men into custody and plans to deliver them to the white people, so they may determine the punishment. The next morning, Joseph meets with white army, to turn over the warriors and talk about moving his tribe to Idaho. Unfortunately, during this meeting, a snake startles one of the Indian’s horses. When the horse rears up, one of the U.S. soldiers thinks it’s an attack, and fires at the Indian sitting on the horse. This causes a bloody battle to break out. In the end, the white men are soundly defeated, and the Nez Perce didn’t suffer a single casualty. It’s a victory, but the damage is done. The Indians think there’s no chance for peace now, so they begin a 1,300-mile run for Canada, in hopes of finding sanctuary with Sitting Bull’s tribe. General Howard and his army have no intentions of letting the Nez Perce escape, so they chase them every step of the way. The Nez Perce win several battles on their flight North, using tactics that are studied to this day. But because their hardships become too much to take – the loss of life, the starvation – they finally surrender to the white men, just forty miles away from the Canadian border.

There are a lot of reasons why this script is so good. One of the biggest reasons is that the author knows how to create empathetic characters. Without empathy, the character probably won’t connect with the audience. This doesn’t mean the character has to be likable at all times. But, it does mean that we, as readers and viewers, should be able to see the world through that character’s eyes. I think the writer accomplishes this goal. For example, it would’ve been easy to make the U.S. Army the indisputable villains. But the author is too generous to leave it at that. He paid special attention to the army’s high-ranking officers. I came to respect General Howard, in particular, because he eventually grieved for Joseph and the Nez Perce, and wished he could atone for his behavior. That kind of nuance is missing in a lot of antagonists I’ve seen. So when I find one that’s still in touch with his humanity, it stands out. Having said all that, my favorite character turned out to be the most likable of all. Chief Joseph brought tears to my eyes. He meets my definition of a good man. He wanted to live the rest of his life with his friends and family in peace. The last thing he wanted to do was hurt another human being, but he was willing to, if that’s what it took to save his people. Even in his defeat, he was dignified, courageous, and true to himself. Joseph has a place in my heart, and he’s welcome to stay there as long as he wants. I’d love to see more scripts use characters like this.

Another element that made this demanding script more enjoyable was the massive scope of the story. We get epic battles, forbidden love, fellowship, betrayal, and, just when we need it most, mercy. And it all takes place on the vast, untamed landscapes of the American West. So, if there are some elements in your script that are obscure or complex, you can balance those things with a few mainstream qualities. Especially if you’re writing a period piece, it can’t come across as a dusty history lesson. The audience, above all, needs to be moved and entertained.

Perhaps the most important reason why this script works so well is the way it’s structured. A lot of scripts these days hit the ground running, and they never stop. The writer, E. Nicholas Mariani, structures his scripts in a way I don’t see many other people use. He implements a slow buildup that eventually explodes into a breathtaking third act. In “Flight,” he uses the first act to introduce us to the many people of the Nez Perce tribe. He also introduces us to the U.S. Army, and explains why they plan to move the tribe off their land. A lot of story points are setup in the first act, so the first 20 or 30 pages are a bit slow. But Mariani is willing to take that risk because he knows the ending will mean more, if we feel something for these people. The next two acts are constructed around the battles between the Nez Perce and the U.S. Army. The beauty of this approach is that each battle sequence requires greater and greater sacrifices from both sides of the war. The losses of the Nez Perce become more meaningful, as the order of deaths starts at the less important people, and moves up to the most beloved. The environmental obstacles also become more dangerous with every step. In one scene, the Nez Perce have to climb a mountain during a mudslide. And then in a later scene, they have to fight the army in a blinding snowstorm. The conflict is elegantly designed like a rollercoaster; it’s always moving up the hill. And with the third act, we come careening down the other side.

Act three is what really made the script for me. If you’ve ever taken an American History class, you probably know what happened to the Indians. The story of these people is almost unbearably sad, and that’s how I felt when I watched Joseph surrender his tribe to the army. By this point, the Nez Perce are completely exhausted and miserable. After the final catastrophic battle, the “flight” is over and they lost. When Joseph gives his immortal speech of surrender, I felt his pain deep in my bones, because Mariani structured his script to build up to that final climax. It was glorious to behold. Because of this script, I find myself supporting the slow build. If it’s done right, it helps setup the ending more effectively than a shallow first act would.

Of course, no script is perfect, even this one. I’d argue that the dialogue could use some more sepia tones. Like his other script, Desperate Hours, the characters sometimes sound too modern for the times they live in. My humble suggestion is to focus a rewrite on giving more period flavor and texture to the voices of these amazing people.

And, of course, there’s the issue of the large cast. I’m honestly torn on this one. I kept a head count, and there were at least thirteen characters introduced by name in the first five pages. In most cases, I’d highly recommend keeping the cast list down to five or six major characters. Not only is it hard for the reader to keep track of so many people, it’s hard for the writer to develop all of them with such a limited page count. But this script has the one exception for a big cast that I can think of. The third act would not be as good without it. It just wouldn’t. The power and devastation of the third act is largely achieved from realizing how many people died since the first page. If the cast had been smaller, the effect would have shrunk, as well.

In the end, The Flight of the Nez Perce was more than just another script to read. It was a full-blown experience. I was so tied up in the story that, when I finished the last page, I felt emotions I couldn’t quite explain. I was bruised, heartbroken, and appreciative all at once. Is there a name for such a thing? Yes, there are problems in this draft worth fixing. But, to paraphrase Maya Angelou, the problems aren’t what I’ll remember. What I’ll remember is the way this script made me feel. Unless something better comes along in the next couple months, this is my script of the year.

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

What I learned: If your concept is expensive and noncommercial, be very sure that it’s an idea you’re passionate about. The Flight of the Nez Perce was on the Black List two years ago and, to my knowledge, hasn’t sold yet. Sadly, it’s not too surprising because the logline is a hard sell. In his 2010 Black List commentary, Carson himself said that this script “takes the cake for being the most boring sounding script on the list.” And yet this script is amazing. The author obviously had a strong feeling about the idea and put everything he had into it. So, at the very least, this is an incredible calling card script. But if your goal is to write a spec that’s an easy sell, it makes sense to use a concept with a mainstream hook and a modest budget.