Genre: Cop/Found Footage
Premise: Two cops (and best friends) begin taping their daily exploits, which include numerous busts and adventures.  But when they’re marked for death by a local gang, they’ll need to count on their friendship like never before to survive.
About: David Ayers (Training Day, The Fast And The Furious, S.W.A.T.) wrote and directed this.  It stars Jake Gyllenhaal and Michael Pena.
Writer: David Ayers
Details: 97 pages

Training Day is one of my favorite cop movies of all time.  I loved the simplicity of it.  I loved the characters in it.  I loved the twists.  I liked it so much, in fact, that it’s one of the screenplays I feature in my upcoming book.  In addition to that, I liked Ayers’ other breakthrough script, The Fast And The Furious.  Not as much as Training Day, but as a fun summer flick with fast cars and faster characters, it was perfect mindless entertainment.  So I guess you could say I’m a David Ayers fan.  Which means I’ve been looking forward to this one.  But you know what they say about expectations.  Bastards can ruin your afternoon.

First thing we’re told in End Of Watch is that this is recorded footage.  Yup, Ayers is jumping on the found footage train.  And “train” is an appropriate metaphor for this script.  In a world where most screenplays fly, End Of Watch takes forever to get where it wants to go.  And to be honest, I’m still not sure where that is.

24 year old Mike Zavala and 23 year old Brian Taylor (or Dan Taylor as an old script fragment labels him) are partners.  Not life partners but cop partners.  However, they could be life partners because these two looooove each other.  I mean they really really REALLY love each other.  They hang together, drink together, and repeatedly tell one another they’d take a bullet for the other.  This is a polmance if there ever was one.

Taylor is trying to get his law degree and one of his electives is a film class so he’s decided to drag along a camera wherever they go to tape their adventures.  Seeing as they patrol South Central LA, there’s usually an adventure around every corner.

What there isn’t, however, is a plot.  Ayers takes the found footage thing literally and doesn’t seem interested in creating a cohesive storyline.  It’s like one of those weekend warrior dads editing together the family vacation footage.  There’s no form to it, no direction.  Just long drawn out clips of the experience.  Taylor and Zavala question a notorious gang leader, talk about wives and girlfriends, and save a girl from a burning building.  Our movie instincts keep telling us to be patient, that this will all come together at some point, but it doesn’t.  The script is devoid of arcs, form, focus, setups or payoffs.

I guess if there’s a plot focus for the story, it’s the aftermath of the heroic fire rescue (which doesn’t happen until the midpoint).  Afterwards, the two are heralded as heroes and even make the paper.  But neither seems comfortable with it.  They don’t do this for the glory.  They do it because they love their job.  But again, this doesn’t really go anywhere.  I label the section “focused” because it’s the only development in the screenplay that lasts more than three scenes.

Eventually, some gang members get irritated with them because (I think) they’re abusing their power.  Word on the street it that there’s a green light on them, which is gang code for “they’re going to get capped.”  They don’t pay it much mind, though, I guess because they’re having too much fun on the job.  But it’s something they’ll have to deal with when it’s all said and done.  Gangs tend not to go away until bizness is taken care of.

I think I know what Ayers was going for here.  He was going for the most realistic cop movie ever.  He didn’t want things to be bogged down by plot points and story conventions.  He wanted it to feel like we were dropping in on these guys and seeing what it was REALLY LIKE to be them.

I admire that approach.  It’s bold.  But there’s a reason writers rarely try it.  Real or not real, we go to the movies to watch a story.  For whatever reason, randomness just doesn’t go over well with an audience.  Maybe it’s because we’re conditioned to expect the opposite, maybe it’s because if we want randomness, we can get it in our everyday lives, but if a story doesn’t seem to be going in a particular direction, we get impatient, and that was happening to me as early as page 20.  “Okay, what’s the story here?” I kept asking.  But one never showed up.

This can sometimes work if the characters are amazing, but that was another problem with End Of Watch.  The characters weren’t amazing.  They were barely even average.  I guess Zavala’s character was fun, but the big problem here is that these two LOVE EACH OTHER.  They stroke each other the whole movie.  They laugh, they celebrate, tell each other how great the other is.

In other words, there’s NO CONFLICT in the central relationship of the movie!  Therefore, all of their conversations are boring.  I don’t care how good of a writer you are.  If you don’t have some element of conflict in your scenes, it’s almost impossible to write good dialogue. And that’s where End Of Watch suffered.

I mean look at Training Day.  Because of the heavy amount of conflict between lead characters Alonzo and Jake, the dialogue was a blast!  Alonzo was always pushing Jake.  Jake could never impress Alonzo.  Jake was always nervous around Alonzo.  Alonzo would tell Jake to do things he didn’t want to do.  Go watch that movie again.  Every single scene is steeped in some kind of imbalance, in some kind of conflict between the main characters.  Which is what made it so fun.

End Of Watch doesn’t have that.  And if you don’t have a plot and you don’t have any conflict between your leads…that’s a big hole to pull yourself out of.  I hope Ayers’ directing vision is able to override some of these weaknesses, but in script form, “Watch” is a disappointment. :(

What I Learned: One of the easiest ways to juice up dialogue is through conflict.  Create an imbalance between two characters (one wants one thing, the other wants another) and you’ll find the dialogue writes itself.  If you have two characters without that imbalance, you’re forced to try and write clever fun “chummy chummy” dialogue between them, which can work for a scene or two, but rarely has the weight to last an entire screenplay.

Genre: Crime/Period
Premise: A gang lord in 1949 Los Angeles becomes so big that the only way the cops can handle him is to go off-book and wage a war against his empire.
About: I think Gangster Squad is based on a bunch of real articles from 1940s Los Angeles newspapers.  But it may also be a book, as the script says it’s based on “Tales Of The Gangster Squad” by Paul Lieberman.  Either way, the story is adapted by author Will Beall, who burst onto the screenwriting scene with his script L.A. Rex (another LA war script – this one set in the present), which one of my other reviewers, Roger Balfour, loved, and which made the 2009 Black List.
Writer: Will Beall (based on the book by Paul Lieberman).
Details: 3/11/2011 draft.  (It should be noted that this draft is newer than the main one that’s floating around out there.  So this script might be slightly different from the one you’ve read).

I’ve been hearing about this one forrrrrrever.  And the word on it?  GREAT.  But I haven’t read any scripts by Will Beall yet because peripherally (hearing about him through others) his writing sounds like a bit of a loose cannon.  He makes up rules as he goes along, bolds, underlines, italicizes way too liberally, delves into the dreaded dual-line dialogue more than a fat man hangs out at Mickie D’s, and generally favors style over substance.

BUT…I admit that’s my take from afar.  And forming opinions on people before you meet them?  That’s so high school.  So it was time to see what Beall was about on my own  And time to see if this script was as good as everyone said it was.

Mickey Cohen is a naughty naughty guy.  When he doesn’t like someone, he ties them up to the back of two Cadillacs and has each drive in the opposite direction.  Why?  Because Mickey wants it all.  And he wants to instill fear in every single entity in LA so he can have it all.  He’s got the cops.  He’s got the judges.  No one fucks with Mickey Cohen.

And if you do manage to catch him in the act?  Well, he’s got the best lawyers money can buy too.  Guys like Mickey NEVER go down.

Which is what the LA police realize.  They see that this man is slowly turning Los Angeles into a steaming pile of trash.  And if they wait around any longer, they’ll be driving the dump trucks.   The guy who knows this more than anybody is Sergeant John O’Mara, one of the only clean cops left in the city.  He and his superiors come up with an idea.  If they can’t stop Cohen legally, why not attack him at his own game?  Why not put together a vigilante police unit, one that doesn’t have to abide by the rules and regulations cops are bound to, to, pardon my french, fuck them up Old Testament style?

O’Mara is in.  Now it’s a matter of finding his team.  He grabs: A tech expert, the first black lieutenant in the department, the “deadliest cop in LA,” a young Mexican cop eager to prove himself, and a wild card dude who isn’t sure which side he wants to play for.  The team goes in hard, hitting up Micky’s deliveries and anything else he has his dirty paws in.

Mickey, along with everybody else, is just confused.  I mean, who the hell attacks Mickey Cohen??  The most feared man on the West Coast!!  But after he gets over his shock, he realizes these mystery dudes are a real threat, and he gets all his little horses and all his little men riled up for one specific purpose – to take them down.

Who’s going to win this one?  Mickey?  Or the Gangster squad?

I know this is going to upset people, but this script was kinda designed for me to hate it.  Period crime dramas aren’t really my thing, but a good story is a good story, no matter where it’s set or who it centers around.  Case in point.  I’ve been reading Ken Follet’s novel, “Pillars Of The Earth,” set in the year 1100, about a mason looking for work in a world that doesn’t have any for him.  If there’s ever a subject matter I was designed to dislike, it would be this one.  And yet, it had me from the first page.

The novel starts with the hanging of an innocent man.  It’s a heartbreaking and heart-pounding scene.  This is followed by the mason and his family losing their only lifeline, a pig they saved up for all year, stolen by an outlaw, who belts their daughter with a hammer to complete the crime.  Subsequently, the family follows him to town and comes up with a plan to attack the man to get their money back.  After another heartbreaking failure, the now homeless family is forced to live in the woods as outlaws.  The pregnant wife soon gives birth to a child and dies in the process.  The mason decides to leave the newly born baby in the woods to die, since there’s no way to feed him.  Every once of these sequences just grabs you and yanks you in.

The point being, Follet uses basic character-focused storytelling to transcend subject matter, to make you connect with and care for the characters.  After someone belts a little girl with a hammer, who doesn’t want to see the family get the villain back?  Take them down?  I never saw any of that with the characters in Gangster Squad.  I mean, they’re much better written than yesterday’s entry, “Oz The Great And Powerful.”  But even the big dog, O’Mara – I only knew the basics about the guy. He was a clean cop and was in the war and…well, that’s it.  He was a clean cop who was in the war.  Not exactly a five star motivation.

But the real problem here is the endless number of characters.  I stopped counting but I’m guessing there’s somewhere around 40.  How am I supposed to keep track of 40 characters??  All the obvious problems popped up as a result.  I’d constantly forget who was who and have to go back and check, leading to dozens of read interruptions, a cardinal sin in writing (A reader should never feel like he’s working to figure out what’s going on).  After awhile I got sick of having to stop every two pages so I just kept reading, even though I wasn’t 100% sure who I was reading about (writers should know this happens all the time.  At a certain point, a reader just gets sick of having to check back on stuff, and barrels forward without exactly knowing who’s who – At this point, your script is usually screwed.  So always make sure every character is distinct and memorable!)

The real problem with this though is that the more characters you add, the less time you have to develop the key characters in your story.  A character is going to come off a lot more interesting if you have 40 pages to develop him as opposed to, say, 15, which is what I’m guessing the 6-7 key characters in Gangster Squad got.

This can be done (and needs to be done with Gangster movies, which are usually character heavy), but it basically amounts to figuring out ways to make characters relatable and interesting and deep in 1/4 the amount of time you usually have.  And only the most skilled writers can pull that off.

The thing is, the idea for GS is cool.  I love the notion of a team of cops putting down their badges to wage a war against a kingpin because that’s the only way they can defeat him. That’s a movie I want to see.  If we only would’ve focused MORE on that group, and not the thousands of other little subplots and characters instead.  Get to know each of those guys intimately, care about them, and then send them off against Cohen.  I mean that’s how they did it in The Godfather and that worked out okay.

BUT! As we all know, this is a preference I get attacked for all the time.  It’s the reason I didn’t like Dark Knight Rises.  I like clean narratives where I’m not confused 30% of time about what’s going on.  Some writers like to take the more ambitious “epic” route and some readers/audience members enjoy the larger canvas as they like having to work for their meal.  I dig that kind of story if the writing’s clear enough to handle the larger tapestry.  But I didn’t personally see that here.

On the flip side, the dialogue in GS is top-notch, and I’m guessing that’s why a lot of people love it so much.  It is SO HARD to create authentic fun crackling dialogue for period crime pieces.  Believe me, I’ve read plenty of scripts where the writer couldn’t come up with a single convincing sentence of dialogue from that era, so I know.  Unfortunately, that wasn’t enough for me to join the Gangster Squad.  I think I’m going to go see what Mickey Cohen’s doing.

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

What I learned: I will say this until the day I die.  The more characters you add, the less time you’ll have to develop your protagonist (and other key characters). So think long and hard before adding that new character.  Do you really need him?  Can you use one of the characters you already have instead?  We’d much rather learn more about your hero than endure two scenes of Random Dude #5.

Genre: Fantasy
Premise:  Before Dorothy, the great Oz himself had to get to Oz.  This is his story.
About: Directed by Spiderman director Sam Raimi and starring his villain in that film, James Franco, as Oz, this film debuted its trailer a few weeks back.  This draft made it on the 2010 Black List, although I think it was fairly low.  Screenwriter Kapner was an interesting choice for the material.  His most previous credit was 2009’s “Into The Blue 2,” although he’s probably best known for his 2000 screenplay, “The Whole Nine Yards.”
Writer: Mitchell Kapner (based on the books of L. Frank Baum)
Details: 4/08/10 draft

You know, moving to LA last week, I kinda felt like Dorothy.  I rode a tornado of sorts (my car) from a state right next to Kansas.  I crash-landed on a witch (Oklahoma City).  I had to follow a yellow brick road the rest of the way to a magical land.  I met some strange characters along the way (Oklahoma City Hotel Guy – which you’d know if you were following me on Twitter – for the record, I usually update my Twitter followers on when I’m going to post.  So on the days I’m late, that’s a good resource to know when the post is coming).  And now I’m finally here.  Trying to find the man behind the curtain.

Which is probably where we should start today’s review.  You see, everybody knows the story of Dorothy.  But how many people know the story of the man Dorothy goes looking for?  How did *he* get here?  And once he got here, how come he never went back?  And how did he go from a guy who looked like James Franco to a guy who looked like Sam Kinison?

It might be fun to find out. Or just plain stupid.  Just because you can look back at a well-known fictional character’s life doesn’t mean you should.  A big part of the reason some characters are so memorable is because the writer showed us just the right amount of them.  No more, no less.  So I have to be honest.  I’m curious why it’s so important that we learn Oz’s origin story.

Oscar Zoroaster Phadrig Isaac Norman Henkle Emmanuel Abroise Diggs (or “Oz” for short) is an illusionist, which in the early 1900s held some entertainment weight.  Without countless Youtube videos to waste their time on, people needed something to pass the time.  And these illusionist dudes did just that.

But not unlike today’s entertainment industry, unless you were one of the top dogs in your profession, you needed something else to pay the bills.  For Oz, it’s booze.  So after his show (from which no one seemed to enjoy) he busts out his very own homemade moonshine and sells it to the audience, who we realize only ever came here for the booze in the first place (in a really cheesy choice, the acronym for the liquor is “H.O.M.E.”).

Afterwards, Oz unwisely hooks up with one of his audience members, the irresistible Mrs. Hamilton, only to be found by Mr. Hamilton!  Oz is chased through the circus, leaps onto a hot air balloon, thinks he’s safe, until he spots the biggest storm in Kansas history.  I think we know where this is going.  Yup.  The next thing Oz knows, he’s awaken in Oz.

And boy, you thought Oz was wild before.  That doesn’t even come close to what’s going on in this dysfunctional countryside this time around.  Besides the munchkins, there’s the Hammerheads, the Dainty China army, Whimsies, Gnomes, Growleywogs and Mist Maidens.

But the biggest presence here in pre-Dorothy Oz?  Deceit!  Everyone’s lying!  So it’s hard to figure out who to trust.  At first Oz befriends a witch named Theodora, who seems like a cool chick.  Theodora tells him they’ve been waiting for his arrival, that he’s here to save Oz.  Which means he has to follow her to Emerald City to meet her sister, Evanora, so they can plan out how they’re going to kill the Wicked Witch Of The South!

But when they get there, Evanora is convinced that Theodora sent Oz to kill her!  So she wants Oz to kill Theodora!  If that isn’t confusing enough, one of the flying monkeys, Kala, wisps Oz off to the “Wicked” Witch Of The South, Glinda, who you may remember as Bubble Witch from the original Wizard Of Oz.  She tells Oz the “real” story, which is that Theodora and Evanora are the wicked witches, and Glinda is a good witch!

Not really knowing who to trust, Oz goes with his instincts and gets behind Glinda.  But if it were only that simple.  Theodora and Evanora are putting together an army to squash them.  Glinda, as well as the people of Oz, turn to Oz for direction.  He is, in their minds, their savior.  So Oz will have to piece together an army of creatures that were never meant to fight, to take over Oz and save it, once and for all, from the evil witches.

When you think about it, Wizard of Oz is one of the most f*cked up stories ever.  It’s weird.  It’s odd.  It’s actually kinda creepy.  Those flying monkeys?  Wuddup with that??  However, in that classic first film, everything just seemed to magically come together.  It’s rare that you make that many unique choices and they all fit.  The only other movie I can think of that did it (off the top of my head) is Star Wars.  So to try and replicate that weirdness and hope lightning strikes twice…that’s asking for trouble.

And we see that trouble all over the place here.  I mean, there’s a lot of weird shit happening, but none of it gels together in the same way that original did.

I think the biggest problem is Oz himself.  He’s just not very interesting.  And it all started with his introduction.  I couldn’t tell *who* Oz was supposed to be.  Was he the terrible illusionist blind to his lack of ability, or was he genuinely good at what he did?  It was never clear.  One second he’s doing a cool trick and the next a lame one.

If your main character is wishy-washy, your script is dead.  I’m sorry but it’s dead.  If we don’t know the main character’s exact problem, then he’s just confusing the whole way through.  And we won’t care about him.

What I’m trying to say is that in a script like this, you need to identify Oz’s fatal flaw, since this is a story ABOUT HIM and therefore you’re writing a character piece.  Maybe his flaw is that he doesn’t believe in his own abilities.  Or maybe you go in the opposite direction and it’s that he overestimates his abilities.  From there, you throw tests at the hero that challenge that flaw.  If he doesn’t believe in his abilities, for example, then you write a scene where he must prove his worthiness for the Queen.  Everybody’s looking at him.  He must perform.  But he buckles under the pressure because DEEP DOWN he doesn’t believe in himself yet.  Then, in the end, when it finally matters, he’s able to push past those insecurities and prove his worth.  That’s how you create a character arc.

Here, it was just…I don’t know.  Oz would do a magic trick every once in awhile, and some people would believe he was a wizard and some wouldn’t.  It was just never clear.

The idea of a war in Oz with all these weird creatures is a tantalizing one, especially for a director, who gets millions of dollars to show audiences something they’ve never seen before.  So I could see the climax being fun.  The problem is, none of the characters – and I mean not a single one – was unique or interesting or compelling in any way.  Which was strange since this is such a unique interesting compelling world.  With that being the case, the final battle comes up empty.  We don’t really care who wins.  It’s just eye candy, without the candy since it’s still in the script stage.

Oz was never able to wrangle in all of its strange parts.  I’m sticking with the original.

What I Learned:  The power of a good character arc is the most influential emotional component you can add to your screenplay.  Audiences like to see characters learn and change for the better.  It makes them feel good inside.  The original Oz film based its entire story on that.  You had a scarecrow who didn’t think he was smart enough, a lion who wasn’t brave enough, and a tin man incapable of feeling love.  The changes (“arcs”) those characters went through is what was so memorable about that film.  With that aspect never defined here for any character – especially Oz – there was zero emotional attachment to the story.