Genre: Comedy
I open the script.
I see “117 pages.”
For a comedy.
My heart sinks.
“No,” I think.
After all the effort I’ve put into this? After saying time and time again never to write a comedy spec over 110 pages. Comedies HAVE TO MOVE because there’s no such thing as a good slow comedy. If you bloat your script up to 117 pages, I guarantee you it’s going to be slow. We’re going to have a bunch of long scenes, pointless scenes, repetitive scenes, and probably a story that loses itself several times. That’s how scripts become 117 pages – the writers haven’t figured out how to focus the story yet. And we become the unwitting lab rats who suffer through that unfocusedness.
Sigh…
BUT! There are always exceptions to the rule right? Every once in awhile a long comedy comes along that’s good! Judd Apatow’s scripts are like 140 pages, right?
Yeah but his scripts usually suck. He doesn’t start figuring things out until the shooting process. Hmmm…there’s gotta be SOME examples of long comedy screenplays that are good. When Harry Met Sally was a long screenplay! Then again, I’m not sure they formatted it correctly.
What the hell am I babbling about? Well, it’s Friday, so cut me some slack. I’m about to go to something called a “Hollywood Breakfast” and I’m not sure how those work. Are they different from a Hollywood lunch? Do you talk about different things? Is it too early in the day to pitch an idea? Sometimes I wish I was one of those homeless people on Sunset and Vine. They don’t have to worry about anything but acting crazy. Now that’s a life I could get used to.
The year is 1903, and bike-makers Wilbur and Orville Wright are struggling to keep their business above land (get it? ABOVE…LAND??). You’d think bike-making would be pretty lucrative back then, seeing as there weren’t many cars around. But our poor brothers can barely make the monthly payments on their lease.
Of the two, Orville is the business-minded one and Wilbur the creative one. And Wilbur’s got a creative solution for their failing business: start up again on that “flying machine,” they’ve been dilly-dallying with in their spare time, then make a million bucks when they get it to work! Orville not-so-secretly thinks the flying machine’s a bust, so he’s not down, but when some local thugs come around asking for money on a failed invention the brothers sold them, they have no choice but to run off to Kitty Hawk, North Carolina and throw all of their eggs into this flying basket.
Once there, they meet the beautiful but slightly bitchy Hannah Clifford, who’s the daughter of the local mayor. She agrees to find them free housing if they’ll vote for her father in the upcoming election. Jesus, I wish someone would’ve offered me that kind of deal on my apartment.
They begin work on the flying machine but distractions soon arise. The first is Hannah herself, who takes a liking to Wilbur, which threatens to disrupt their building schedule. And the second is the president of the Smithsonian Institute, who wants to stop the Wright Brothers from getting their flying machine airborne before he and his much more prestigious institution are able to do so.
When Orville finds out that Wilbur is shacking up with Hannah, he becomes furious, and begins a blueberry pie-inspired sabotage campaign to keep them apart. In the process, however, Orville takes a liking to Hannah, and she decides two brothers are better than one and sleeps with him K-Stew style! Which, like, is so slutty for back then.
In the end, just about everything that can blow up does, and one of the most heralded achievements in US history is in danger of never happening.
Kitty Hawk has some nice things going for it. It has a clear goal (create a working flying machine), some urgency (the Smithsonian dude and the thugs from back home chasing them), conflict between the two main characters, a love triangle. For all intents and purposes, it should work. And it kind of does at times.
But there’s something missing here that keeps it from ever rising above average. And I’m not sure what it is. I run into these scripts every once in awhile – scripts that are “fine,” but are missing those key ingredients that push them into memorable territory. Maybe more could’ve gone wrong. And, more specifically, could’ve gone wrong sooner. Things are a little too breezy through the first half of Kitty Hawk. The bad guy doesn’t get there until page 70 or something. The second romance (between Hannah and Orville) doesn’t get started until page 75. So there’s a huge portion of the script where there isn’t any tension, suspense, or conflict.
Another issue I had was that Dillon didn’t differentiate the brothers when we first met them. This is CRITICAL since these are our two main characters and will make up 90% of the screenplay. All we’re told is that one of them, Wilbur, is bald, and that he’s more the “inventor” of the two. That’s something but it isn’t nearly enough. It wasn’t until the midpoint that I truly knew who was who when they were talking. And this can be traced back to that first introduction. Always try and give your characters a unique introduction that shows exactly who they are and why they’re different from EVERYONE ELSE. So if Wilbur’s the inventor, show him inventing something. This is a movie about the Wright Brothers so I see no reason why you wouldn’t start with him working on a plane anyway.
The character of Glenn Curtis (Smithsonian Dude) was also unclear. I had no idea who he was, what his institution did, why he was trying to find the brothers, what his ultimate plans with them were. It was all very vague. So when we get this giant climax of him showing up at the Kitty Hawk church to announce his own plans to build a plane, I was sitting there going….uhhhhh, huh??? This is another case of a writer not being clear enough. You have to be clear to your audience about who your characters are, what they’re there for, who they work for, what their motivation is, etc. If any of that stuff is murky, then the character is shot. We never get a good feel for them.
The area where I really checked out though was when Orville put together a children’s work force to build the plane. At that point the script just became too silly, and when that happens, it’s hard for me to take anything seriously. It’s hard for me to care about the characters and their situations. So I politely read through the rest of the script but knew it had no chance of reeling me back in.
While one of the better Twit-Pitch entries so far, this is another script that showed plenty of writing skill, but didn’t entertain enough in the story department. :(
What I learned: You don’t want to wait too long to institute the plot points that are the main salable components of your script. This is a script that touts itself as two Wright Brothers going after the same girl. Yet that isn’t fully realized until page 75. PAGE 75!!! I mean come on. This speaks to a larger issue though, which is that too many writers wait too long to get to the good stuff. What are you waiting for? That’s why we came here. The good stuff! So get to those plot lines sooner and you’ll see your script come to life.
So I put the question out there to you guys – What would you like to see a Thursday article about? I got a lot of suggestions, but by far, the one readers wanted most was an article about rewriting. Apparently the claim last week that you should write ten drafts before showing your script to anybody scared a lot of people. Many of you are just starting out and hardly know what to do on a second draft, much less a tenth.
This stems from the beginner assumption that once you’ve written “The End,” you’re done. I mean you put all that work into it! Like four weeks! Why in the world would you need to change anything? I’ll tell you why. Because first drafts suck! Even if you outline, you oftentimes get to the middle of the script and start changing things up, adding new characters, new subplots, paying off stuff you didn’t set up cause you thought of it after-the-fact. The first draft is a draft of discovery. You’re figuring things out. Therefore when you’re finished, you usually have a roaming patchwork of good and bad, something that needs major surgery. Rewriting will get you there. But how does one go about the rewriting process?
Well before we get to that, let’s just make clear that everybody writes differently. There are writers who take the “discovery” aspect of the first draft literally, unafraid to follow any little rabbit hole they find. Then there are writers who outline meticulously, so they know exactly what they’re going to write down to each line of dialogue. The point is that different writers are further along after a first draft than others, which makes it difficult to come up with a “one size fits all” method for rewriting. Having said that, after talking to hundreds of writers, this approach seems to be the most often used. Here are the general steps the majority of writers take.
1) OUTLINE – One of the most common mistakes young writers make is not outlining. Therefore they have no idea what’s going to happen from one scene to the next. They just go with what their gut tells them. This can be an exciting way to write, since you essentially become the reader, discovering the story as it happens. But these drafts are easily the messiest, and it often takes five to six EXTRA DRAFTS just to rein in all your crazy ideas, story tangeants, unnecessary characters, etc. By outlining, you’re structuring (most of) the story ahead of time, which means at the very least, the structure will be in place. Since changing structure is the hardest thing to do (with every structural change, you might have to rewrite up to 30 pages), you’ll save a lot of rewriting by getting this down ahead of time.
2) 1ST REWRITE (STRUCTURE) – When you finish your first draft, you’ll often feel like you’ve just finished your masterpiece. The adrenaline will trick you into believing you need to practice your Oscar speech – NOW! That is until you read it a week later. You realize there are huge gaps of randomness, lots of repetitive scenes, and that the characters aren’t very deep or interesting. Welcome to the beginning of rewriting. There are lots of ways you can go about your first rewrite, but I advise getting the structure fixed first. Even if you outlined, the draft never seems to turn out exactly the way you planned. So make sure your first act turn, your midpoint, and your 3rd act turn are all where they need to be. Make sure your characters always have clear goals and are pursuing those goals. Scripts die when goals are unclear or there are large gaps between the end of one pursuit and the beginning of another. Make sure every 15 pages or so, something important happens, something that raises the stakes (if possible), keeps the script moving, and keeps it interesting.
3) REWRITES 2-6 (TROUBLESHOOTING) – Now it’s time to do some heavy lifting. If you have the time, I advise putting your script down for a couple of weeks. You’re going to need fresh eyes. Once you have that distance, read the script again, taking note of everything that bothers you. Maybe you think a character sucks. Maybe pages 20-35 are boring for some reason and you can’t figure out why. Maybe you hate a set-piece or you think a crucial scene doesn’t hit the emotional beat it needs to. You’ll likely have somewhere between 30-40 issues that need to be dealt with, some big, some small. For that reason, this will be the most time-consuming portion of your rewrite process. It could take a month. It could take a year. All depending on how much time you have, how bad the problems are, and how good you want to make your script. Some writers are okay with subpar solutions to problems. The good ones, though, won’t stop until they’re happy with everything that’s on the page.
Basically what you do is you start with the biggest problems, jot down potential solutions for those problems, and apply the best solution you can come up with. Let’s take yesterday’s script, Dead In The Water, as an example. In that script, Carrie’s segment starts getting repetitive. Her and her group keep running into zombie after zombie. There’s nothing new there. It feels like every other zombie movie. So the question I might ask is, “How do I make this less repetitive?” or “How do I make this segment more unique?” I’d then force myself to come up with ten solutions. Some of them might be bad, but I find that bad solutions spark ideas that lead to good solutions. So just brainstorm and write down whatever you can think of. Now if you remember, the script was divided up into three segments – one that follows Carrie, one that follows husband Brian, and one that follows Suparman. Well, the first solution might be to come up with a FOURTH person. This would cut down Carrie’s segment, getting rid of some of those repetitive scenes. Or, if we wanted a more creative solution, we could include a scene where one of the characters falls into the ocean and the group has to save him, all while zombies are approaching. Not an ideal solution, but if I brainstormed it for an hour, I might be able to come up with a pretty cool scene that ISN’T your traditional “characters in a dark room with zombies nearby” sequence.
This is the hardest section of rewriting because it takes a LOT of thinking. Creativity gives way to brute brainpower – just trying to come up with enough solutions that something cool eventually pops up. You’d do this for the 5-6 main problems, fix them, then you’d start over again for the next couple of drafts, address the 15-20 medium problems and try to come up with solutions for them. After that, you’d do the same for the small issues, until you’ve happily solved all of your script problems and have story solutions you’re proud of. Now if you’ve convinced yourself that you don’t have at least 20 script problems after your first draft, you’re either lying to yourself or you’ve set the bar incredibly low for yourself. Part of rewriting is being honest with yourself about your work. Don’t be satisfied with “okay.” Make sure everything you’ve written is the best you can possibly do.
4) INTERMEDIARY DRAFTS – Intermediary drafts occur because during the rewrite process, you get new ideas. You might realize that the main character shouldn’t be a chef, but rather a ninja warrior! Or it might hit you that there have been 10,000 zombie movies released in the past six months, so maybe it’s better if you make your bad guys aliens instead. Or that coming-of-age movie that takes place in San Francisco? You realize it’d move faster as a roadtrip movie. Whatever the case, these decisions often require massive rewriting, sometimes changing up to 70% of the screenplay. My advice to you is, don’t make a change that big unless you’re POSITIVE it makes your script a lot better. Rewriting takes a lot of time, so you want to make sure that every choice is worth the time it takes to incorporate it.
5) SEVENTH REWRITE (CHARACTERS) – You don’t have to wait until the seventh draft to start rewriting your characters. You could do it right away. You could also include character fixes in the “Troubleshooting” section of the rewrites. But I think characters deserve their own rewrite segment as they are the most important part of your screenplay. Lots of professional writers will even dedicate single rewrite drafts to each key character in the script. Yes, that’s why you hear about scripts going through 30-40 drafts. The idea here is to make sure that the character is as interesting as he/she can possibly be. Are they likable? Are they active? Do they have a flaw they must overcome? Do they have personality? Do they have an unresolved issue with another character? I read so many boring characters in scripts so make sure your characters are dynamic and interesting. Here’s a good place to start.
5) EIGHTH REWRITE (SMOOTH IT OUT) – The thing with rewriting is that it’s a very segmented process. You work on individual segments to make them better, whether it be a character, a scene, or a portion of dialogue. Then, when you go back and read the screenplay as a whole, it has no flow. All the parts look pretty, but you haven’t connected them yet. That’s what this draft is for. And it can be really annoying because it’s the least creative stage of rewriting. For example, you may have a scene where a character gets attacked while walking from the grocery store to her car, only to realize that the same character was at the grocery store just three scenes ago. So now you have to put her at another store (and come up with a reason for why she’s there) or move those scenes further away from each other so the second grocery store trip makes sense. There are tons of little annoying things like this but if you don’t figure them out, then smooth them out, your script will feel choppy and lazy.
6) NINTH REWRITE (DIALOGUE PASS) – Yup, you’re waiting ALL THE WAY UNTIL NOW to do your dialogue pass. Why now? Because very few scenes from your original draft actually remain in the final draft. Which means you spent countless hours perfecting dialogue for scenes that aren’t even around anymore. I don’t know what you call that but where I’m from that’s called ‘wasting time.’ You want to wait until your script is as solid as possible before doing a final dialogue run so that you know all this dialogue is actually going to be in the script. Also, we tend not to really know our characters until we’re almost finished. Therefore, we have a much better feel for what they’d say or do late in the game. Hence the dialogue should be more authentic and fun.
7) TENTH REWRITE (SPELLING, GRAMMAR, TECHNICAL) – The easiest way to tell you’re dealing with an amateur is to read a script where the writer doesn’t give a shit about these things. So make sure there are no mistakes here. “Technical” refers to things like sluglines and name changes. You might have originally put “DAY” in your slugline but changed the scene to “NIGHT” at some point and forgot. Somewhere in the rewrite process “JOE” became “RANDY” and you still have both names scattered about (this will drive a reader crazy btw, so make sure you fix it). Or your protagonist may be working at a store called “INITECH” but you have all your characters referring to it as “INICORP.” These things happen over the course of months of writing. So make sure all that stuff is fixed!
What I’ve written above is just a guideline. Everybody has their own process that works for them. Some write less drafts. Most write more drafts. But if you don’t have a process yet, this is a good template to start with. The main thing I want to convey is the idea of breaking down the problems in your screenplay and really making an effort to come up with solutions for them. This is where a bad script can turn into a good one, or a good script can turn into a great one. The more time you dedicate to rewriting, the more time you dedicate to coming up with the best possible choices for your story. I’m sorry, but one or two drafts just isn’t going to cut it in the competitive professional world of screenwriting. Good luck guys. Now go rewrite that jumbled mess of a first draft!
Genre: Horror/Zombie
Premise: A married couple goes on a cruise to heal their wounds after losing their son, but when the ship rescues a strange sick man, they soon find that their own lives are in danger.
About: Hey, how often do we get to read a script by TWINS? Touchstone bought this spec back in 2010. Alexi Hawley scripted the 2004 Exorcist prequel, Exorcist: The Beginning, and more recently was story editor on the Nathan Fillion show, Castle. Brother Noah was a writer on the TV show, Bones.
Writers: Alexi and Noah Hawley
Details: 110 pages
In all honesty, had I known this was a zombie script, I wouldn’t have read it. Dead In The Water was a random script I had in my screenplay pile which I knew nothing about, which is exactly why I wanted to read it. I was hoping for another Ends Of The Earth or Dead Of Winter. But didn’t get it. I got a zombie flick.
I’ll tell you what, though. Before I knew this was a zombie script – in other words throughout the first act – it was pretty damn good. And once it became a zombie flick, the darn thing kept going. It took some chances along the way – did things a little differently – and therefore, gasp, kept me fairly entertained. I’m still not sure what to make of it on the whole. There’s a character called Suparman who feels like he’s been beamed in from a different movie…on a different planet. But all in all, I think there’s more good here than bad.
The script starts out with a great opening scene. A group of doctors are out for a spin on their sailboat when they spot a couple of men on a trawler dumping bags into the ocean. The trawler speeds away and the doctors decide to investigate, only to find that the bags aren’t just bags. They’re body bags. And as they move up to get a closer look, one of the bags…STARTS MOVING.
They open the bag up to save the individual but it turns out it’s not him who needs saving. Blood splatters. There are screams. And we CUT to a cruise ship. This is where we meet Brian and Carrie Lake, a couple grieving over their dead son. Both are devastated but Carrie’s ready to move on. Brian, a cop, can’t let go however, and would rather sleep in their room all day than go out and “have fun.”
So Carrie heads out on her own, and while up on deck, spots something in the water that stops her cold. It’s a man! Drifting along on a piece of debris! She calls out to the ship’s crew and the next thing you know they’re lifting the man up on deck. Well waddaya know? It’s one of the doctors! And he’s not looking good. In fact, he starts vomiting blood all over the place! Mmmmmm…blood vomit.
Carrie relays the experience to Brian, who continues his bed brigade, so Carrie goes to take a nap on deck. When she wakes, however, something is off. There’s…nobody around. It’s like everyone from the cruise just disappeared. Oh, until she sees a man with a blood-stained mouth coming after her. And then another one. And then another one.
Carrie runs off, where she’s able to find a few more people, and the group quickly realizes that a virus has spread throughout the ship, bringing the dead back to life, dead who are hungry for human flesh. Let this be a lesson about picking up strangers.
Carrie now has a single-minded goal – finding her husband, and this is where the script does something different. It starts out with a segment called “Carrie,” which follows Carrie’s journey as she tries to find Brian. Then, when that’s over, we cut to the “Brian” segment, where we show Brian trying to find Carrie. If that were it, the script still may have been too predictable for me. But then, for some odd reason, we also have a final segment titled, you guessed it, “Suparman.” Suparman is a 22 year old Indonesian man who is some sort of circus acrobatics expert, able to wield duo-machetes which allows him to slice and dice zombies like they’re tomatoes. I honestly have NO IDEA what Suparman was doing in the script, and yet, I was glad he was. It gave the story this slight level of absurdity that differentiated it JUST ENOUGH from typical zombie faire to give it an edge.
The first thing I want to point out is what an advantage CONTAINING a horror scenario is. For those who read or saw Contagion – if you were like me, you saw a movie trying to cover so many countries and so many scenarios that it eventually lost itself. It’s hard to sell mass death when there are so many places to hide, so many islands and areas safe from contamination. On something like a cruise ship, however, there’s nowhere to run. You’re trapped. And that makes the situation a thousand times scarier.
I thought the cutting to different people was a smart move too. It broke up the conventional zombie structure of a group trying to move from point A to point B (while avoiding zombies). That’s where I think a lot of these scripts die. Because once the mystery is over, once the group knows they’re zombies and have to get to [some location] to survive, the scripts become very technical. They’re just moving on rails while avoiding zombies. All the creativity is gone. Now I’m not saying Dead In The Water completely eliminated this, but the structure break-up was just enough to keep us on our toes.
As far as the characters here….hmmmm… I guess they were okay. The whole “dead child” thing is a little stock. I’ve seen it before. In fact, it was the main storyline for another “dangerous person comes aboard a boat” flick, Dead Calm. I don’t know what it is about this backstory but I’ve never been a fan of it. First, there’s something just too sad about a dead child. It doesn’t translate well to screen. And second, it’s almost impossible to avoid melodrama with it. The couple has to be sad, they have to discuss how sad they are, and it always comes off as too much. I’d avoid this backstory unless you have a fresh take on it.
Anyway, the ultimate point is this – if I were a producer, I would buy this script. It’s a money-maker for sure. Zombies on a cruise ship? Never been done before (at least to my knowledge). You got the contained setup, nowhere to run. Zombies on a cruise has potential for a lot of fun scenarios, as proven here with the unforgettable shark climax. And then of course, you get to top it all off with Suparman – the machete-wielding alien from another planet. What’s not to like?
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[x] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: The isolated character name is a good way to imply the screenplay equivalent of a close-up during a key moment. — Remember guys, you don’t want to write “CLOSE-UP” in your script. It’s too technical. So the isolated character name is a great way to imply that the camera is on the character. Here’s an example from page 40…
They turn and run as the infected flood the stairs behind them.
ERYN
reaches a doorway. Ducks through it and onto…
EXT. PROMENADE DECK – DAY
Genre: Dark Thriller
Premise: A wayward aspiring chef moves into a homeless shelter only to learn that the food they cook here is a little more…exotic than he’s used to.
About: The Wachowski Brothers’ first script sale was “Assassins.” But they’d actually written plenty of scripts before that, including this one, which, after The Matrix, landed at Trimark. In fact, many moons ago, George Romero was rumored to be directing it. Unfortunately it never went anywhere, which is too bad, cause it was certainly better than those Matrix sequels.
Writers: Andy and Larry Wachowski
Details: 113 pages
Wachowskis!
Where have you been all my life? Or at least since The Matrix.
My Chicago brethren have been lost at cinema sea since that amazing classic, scuttlebutting out two Matrix sequels that didn’t make any sense, something bright and shiny called Speed Racer, a gay military project called Jupiter Ascending, and adapting the most unadaptable book ever, Cloud Atlas, which just debuted its trailer a couple of weeks ago.
To say these two have been squandering their amazing talent is an understatement. These Chicago hot dogs have all the talent fixings, including tomatoes, pickles, mustard, peppers, and celery salt. The problem is they’ve set up their hot dog stands in the wrong locations. Hey, I’m all about taking chances, senor. But if you travel too far away from the epicenter, you lose everybody, and I think that’s what’s happened to this duo.
Now the way I understand it, before the Wachowskis got their big break with Matrix, they were big name writers, hired to pen a lot of the hot jobs in town. Carnivore was written before their Matrix success, which I’m hoping indicates a team still trying to prove their worth. Let’s check it out.
John Bunyan, who, no, does not carry an axe, stumbles into Chicago with nothing but the clothes on his back and a deep fried dream of becoming a chef. Speaking of food, he stops at a dingy old diner to grab some grub, where he runs into the insanely beautiful but broken down Ophelia. Ophelia is being escorted by her total asshole of a date, Roman Links, a weasel of a human being who’s forcing her to eat a dinner she doesn’t want to eat.
John steps in, sticking up for the damsel in distress, and the two get into a fight, with John barely registering a TKO. Feeling terrible, Ophelia tells John she knows of a place where he can stay, and takes him to “The Mission,” a homeless shelter run by a creepy dude named Rex Mundi and an older woman who likes to be called “Granny” even though she’s nobody’s grandma.
John enjoys the place about as much as someone can enjoy a homeless shelter but what he’s really surprised about is the food. It’s DELICIOUS! Granny makes some sort of Granny Stew that puts even the freshest In and Out cheeseburger to shame. Mmmmmmm…
In the meantime, Ophelia and John start hanging out. You get the feeling that this girl has reallllly low self-esteem because I don’t know many hot women who date homeless dudes. But I guess after you’re with Roman Links, the elephant man would seem better. Speaking of Roman, he’s not taking their break-up too well. In fact, he sneaks into Ophelia’s apartment late at night wearing nothing but a flasher jacket and pees everywhere. Yup, a real winner this guy is.
John wants to do something to this asshole but he’s getting more and more preoccupied by Granny’s cooking. It’s just so delicious. Unfortunately, it has some troubling side effects, such as a hefty sexual appetite for biting human flesh. I think we know where this one’s going boys and girls. Yup, it turns out that stew John’s been eating (spoiler) has a certain special ingredient. Human flesh!!! And now John’s making Ethan Hawke and those Andes plane crash victims look like they were dining on baked beans and cheerios. Much like Twilight before the K-Stew betrayal, John NEEDS Ophelia’s flesh. He needs human meat to survive!
So what’s going to happen here? Is John going to be able to pull away from his newest craving? Or is he going to make Ophelia a Taco Ten Pack? Lucky for everyone here, you get to find out. There’s a link to the script at the bottom of the review!
Maybe it’s because I’ve been reading sooooo many bad scripts lately, but I actually enjoyed this delicious mess. It was kind of like eating a Chipotle burrito right after a few Sprinkles cupcakes. Together, they make you feel sick. But you liked each of them at the time of consumption.
First of all, the Wachowskis have a great style of writing. They’re flashy enough so that you’re impressed by their writing, but they never let it get in the way of the story. It’s always about providing atmosphere and bringing you into their fucked up universe. A lot of amateurs make the prose the star. They try to wow you with their wordsmithing ways, to the point where you’re wading through an ocean of syllables simply to figure out that a character has walked from his car to his house.
You can really see the power of the Wachoskis in their scene transitions, one of which I’ve highlighted here. In the scene, a nameless character is running for his life. He’s barely able to get to his car. This is what happens next…
He jumps into the car, locking the door and jams the key into the ignition. // Suddenly, a baseball bat arcs down so that the twisting of the key seems to shatter the windshield. The explosion of glass becomes–
INT. DINER – NIGHT
The crash and tinkle of dirty plates being thrown into a bin by a busboy clearing them from the table of an old diner.
The visuals here practically scream cinema. You’re not reading. You’re seeing the movie up on the screen. That’s one of the goals of screenwriting, placing your readers in the movie theater. You have to admire how the Wachowskis are consistently able to pull that off.
From a geek standpoint, one of the more interesting things about the script is how obsessed the Wachowskis were with dreams even back then. There are a ton of dream sequences and you can practically smell the inspiration for The Matrix. I’m not sure they were entirely necessary for the film, but they were fun nonetheless, especially since the Wachowskis are so strong visually. The nightmare where Ophelia (a vegetarian) eats meat for the first time and catches a rare disease where one’s cellulite calcifies into thick gobs of bone underneath the flesh had me squirming in my seat.
But in the end, what set this script apart for me is something I always preach here on Scriptshadow. It was different. I didn’t know what was coming next. It was a horror film without the cliche horror trappings. The Roman Links character – when he sneaks into Ophelia’s place and pisses all over it, then growls at her like an animal as he attacks her – I was like, WTF??? There were enough weird moments like this where I had to keep reading.
It goes to show that this medium truly celebrates writers with a unique voice. If you’re not blindly following the crowd or trying to ape your favorite movies, but rather writing something only YOU can write, then assuming you have some talent and skill as a writer, you’re going to make it in this industry. And if that doesn’t come naturally to you, you have to work at it. You have to push yourself away from your inspirations and focus on what you can bring to the table that nobody else can. I felt like this was only a movie the Wachowskis could make. I’d like to see that same individuality from more screenwriters!
You can find the script here in text form! – Carnivore
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[x] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: One of the EASIEST ways to make us like your protagonist is to have them stick up for somebody. When Ophelia is getting attacked by her date in the opening diner scene, John comes to her rescue, telling Roman Links to lay off. We instantly like John from that point on.
Genre: Cop/Procedural
Premise: (from Black List) Four hardened New York detectives race to apprehend a relentless spree-killer who’s executing victims from Queens to Southampton in the span of a single day.
About: This script finished in the middle of the 2011 Black List with 10 votes. Co-writer Alex Paraskevas has one produced credit, the 2005 Jason Patric movie, Walker Payne. Jordan Goldberg has a bit of a more interesting past. He wrote on the animation series, Batman: Gotham Knight, and seems to be in tight with Christopher Nolan, as he co-produced and associate produced The Prestige, The Dark Knight, Inception, and The Dark Knight Rises.
Writer: Alex Paraskevas and Jordan Goldberg
Details: 116 pages
One of the problems with watching the Gangnam Style video 642 times in a weekend is that you begin to lose touch with reality. Nothing you do or see is quite good enough when compared to a deranged Korean pop star sitting on a toilet belting his heart out. This has particularly hurt my reading, as I find myself bored by the simplicity of black words on a white page. I want color. Lots and lots of color! And grown men having dance-offs in underground parking lots.
Which is probably why Gun Eaters was the worst possible script for me to read this weekend. I do this thing where I pick out a Black List script without knowing anything about it. I’ve found some really awesome scripts this way – namely because it’s fun to figure out the premise as I go along. But as soon as I realized this was a cop procedural, I deflated.
Procedurals have become such a staple in the television world that it’s nearly impossible to do anything new with them. Therefore, if you’re going to write a movie procedural, it better have some unique-ass angle to it – something that warrants people paying 10 bucks for it instead of just staying home and watching one of the two-dozen procedural shows they can see on TV.
Sadly, Gun Eaters was not the exception to the rule. The script follows two cops, 29 year old Detective Berendan Byrne and 48 year old vet, Detective Warren Salvo. The two cops couldn’t be more different. Byrne is young and idealistic, the kind of cop that makes all the other cops look bad, and Salvo is the grizzly vet who gave up that idealism a long time ago. As he puts it, he’s learned that you’re never going to be able to win this war. Your goal is simply to break even.
The two get put on a case where a man’s body parts have been dropped all over the city. That’s usually…not good. They soon find out that the man was an employee of Youngerman Health Incorporated, a company that went belly up after it was revealed that their CEO, Quentin Youngerman, was embezzling lots of money.
Blahbity blah blah, more people start dying, also employees of this company, and it’s eventually revealed that Youngerman was the main health insurance provider for all the city workers. Once he went bye-bye, all these families started going bankrupt because they couldn’t pay their medical bills. One would suspect, as our cops do, that their killer was probably one of these city workers.
BUT! It turns out it goes much deeper than that. When Salvo gets attacked one on one by the killer (who’s behind him so he doesn’t see his face), he notices that the gun he’s using is police issued. Our killer’s a cop! Duh-duh-duh-duhhhh!!! Not only that, but he appears to be working with OTHER COPS. Once Salvo and Byrne realize this, they’ve gotta find a way to get Youngerman to safety since he appears to be the ultimate target. But how do you find safety for someone if you can’t use any of your police resources? And the even more frightening question: Can Byrne and Salvo trust each other??
So to be straight up here, my biggest fears were realized. I just didn’t think this plot was worth writing about. It’s a very average. Very unspectacular. A killer’s out there killing people. And his reason is…something about health insurance??? I mean is it just me or is that uninspired?
And I’m still trying to make sense of it. The people who were affected by the company going under were government workers, right? Okay, so, if a company insured by the government is responsible for someone’s health benefits and they go belly-up, doesn’t the government still pay those benefits? I mean they don’t just say, “Oops, we trusted the wrong company. Wish we woulda done better research. Sorry guys!” They still pay the medical bills, right? So is anybody really affected here?
On top of that, the cop pairing was forced conflict to the extreme. The two cops hated each other because…because that’s how these movies work! The partners have to hate each other! I’m not opposed to conflict, of course. Conflict is good! I just pointed out how much End Of Watch sucked because the partners had no conflict with one another. But the conflict has to feel organic. It can’t just feel like they hate each other because the writer knows it’ll make for better scenes.
If you look at Lethal Weapon, you saw two guys with completely different lives. One lived in a trailer and grieved every day over his dead wife, a loss that’s made him suicidal. The other had a huge family with a loving wife and great children. You could tell why these two wouldn’t get along. And the cool thing about that Lethal Weapon pairing was that it wasn’t one-note. The two had issues with each other in the field but actually got along quite well off it. Their relationship was dynamic as opposed to one-note, as was the pairing here in Gun Eaters.
I guess I was just waiting for something unique to happen and it never did. People have noted that I’ve been giving tons of “wasn’t for mes” lately and the reason is…well…I haven’t been reading any good scripts! It seems like everything I read is either sloppy or really predictable. And the scary thing is, these are both elements that can be addressed with EFFORT.
Sadly, this is yet another subpar script. Hopefully the Wachowskis bring some game tomorrow. I’m STARVING for a good screenplay.
What I Learned: In regards to the two issues I mentioned above. Sloppiness (which wasn’t a problem in Gun Eaters, but in other screenplay I’ve reviewed recently) is mainly about lots of rewriting and making sure your reader always understands what your characters are going after at all times. And predictability comes down to challenging yourself – constantly asking yourself, “Have I seen this choice before?” “Have I seen this idea before?” “Have I seen this scene before?” “Have I seen this character before?” If you’re answering “yes” to a lot of those questions, chances are you’re writing another “been there, done that” script.
