Genre: Thriller
Premise: Whilst performing an autopsy, a forensic pathologist suspects the body is from the future on a failed mission to prevent a world catastrophe. He must now decide whether to continue the mission, a task that requires bombing a commercial airliner on a transatlantic flight.
Why You Should Read: Money problems. Custody battles. Drinking on the job. A penchant for violence. 48 Hour Token is a high concept thriller that demands a common but deeply flawed man to prevent a world catastrophe whilst fighting to keep his sanity. To save the world, it’s usually expected you must don the spandex to fight the battle between good and evil. In the real world, the protagonists often come with baggage and the room for failure is non existent. — This isn’t a blind submission. In preparation for this Amateur Offerings, I have utilised several coverage services that most followers of this website would be familiar with. 48 Hour Token has been labelled a ‘well constructed thriller’ with ‘multiple, diverse elements’ whilst containing ‘realistic dialogue for the genre’.
Writer: Branko Maksic
Details: 115 pages

Leo?

I always like Branko’s insights in the comments section so I’m excited to see what he has in store for us. Let’s check it out…

41 year old Patrick Crawley is an alcoholic pathologist who’s going through a messy divorce. After a particularly nasty argument with his ex-wife, Esmeralda, he goes to determine the cause of death of his latest dead body, only to find a bloated corpse that was discovered in the sea with its face smashed in. Yummy. While poking around, Patrick finds a key for a safe deposit box in the dead dude’s stomach!

Hoping by some miracle this key will lead to cash that will nab him the best lawyer in town (which will allow him to get custody of his daughter), Patrick instead gets a USB drive and two tokens. He plugs the drive into his computer to find a movie file where some woman claiming to be from the future is talking about saving the world from a terrorist attack. Feeling its his civic duty to find out more, he seeks this woman out, but she ends up dead.

Soon after, Patrick is cornered by the Chinese, who administer a toxin that paralyzes his body but not his other senses. Patrick is carried into a hotel room where a woman performs fellatio on him to secure his sperm, and then tells him that if he continues to snoop around, they’re going to kill his daughter and insert the semen into her rectum to make it look like he assaulted and killed her. Not nice people these terrorists.

Patrick ignores this warning for some reason, possibly because he’s beginning to believe that mankind is truly in danger. The Chinese’s plan seems to revolve around having a doctor carry a super-toxin on a flight to America and then letting it free so that everyone in America dies. Somehow, Patrick has to stop that from happening. Unfortunately, he finds out that he was duped and the doctor is a decoy. A separate woman with the real toxin is on a different flight that has already left for America.

Luckily, Patrick gains access to a time machine that allows him to go back in time and try again. And this time he has the help of Past Patrick, allowing the two to divide and conquer. Will they stop the decimation of America in time? Or is this all happening whether they succeed at their plan or not?

(A quick apology to Branko if I missed anything here. The plot was a little hard to follow at times)

This is an interesting one because Branko clearly knows what he’s doing. He knows how to hook us with a dead body teaser. He knows that that’s going to give him time to thoughtfully introduce his characters. His first scene with our lead, Patrick, is packed with conflict, like all good scenes should be. We get to see Patrick at his job, allowing us to grow closer to him. And before we get bored, Branko introduces a mystery – a key inside the body. While we eagerly await that mystery box to be opened, Branko uses the time to develop Patrick even more. We see him interacting with his daughter. We see him talking with his dead dad at the cemetery. If this were a test on writing first acts, Branko would ace it.

Yet something was bothering me and I couldn’t figure out what it was.

Then it hit me.

How you introduce your hero is one of the most important scenes in a script. Some might argue it’s THE most important. The reason for this is that the first scene has a huge impact on how we view that character. Therefore, if we don’t like the hero in that first scene, it doesn’t matter if you ace the first act test. A part of us checked out after that intro. And that’s where the problem was here.

Patrick is introduced as an angry aggressive person. He’s saying a lot of bad things to his ex-wife. He admits to clocking her in the face for cheating on him. While movies are all about exploring character flaws, anger is a tricky one. It’s hard to identify with someone when our first impression of them is pure rage. I mean, think about if you met someone in real life who’s going off on some angry tirade. Would you be like, “Hey dude, what are you doing later? Want to hang out?” Because that’s what you’re asking us to do here. Hang out with Angry Yelling Man for the next two hours. I would never say something’s impossible. But I was never 100% Team Patrick in this script, and I think meeting him this way was why.

But even that wasn’t the whole reason. There was something else bothering me about the first act so I went back and reread it. Eventually, I figured it out. The storytelling was too technical. You could see the writer’s mind at work in each scene. “This is the scene where I set up what he does for a living.” “This is the scene where we show he loves his kid more than anything.” There wasn’t enough flow. It didn’t feel organic enough.

I know Branko is going to kill me for this comparison, but if you read the beginning of Juno, you’re not really aware that a movie is being set up. We feel like we’re organically following this girl around during a particularly disruptive time in her life. I don’t want to confuse Branko by pretending that Juno and 48 Hour Token are anything alike. However, I think he could benefit from a looser more organic storytelling style and not this mathematical dissection of scenes where it’s too obvious what he’s doing. Just because a scene passes the Screenwriting 101 Test doesn’t mean it’s connecting emotionally with the audience.

Despite all this, I still felt the logline teased some juicy ideas, particularly the stuff with the plane, so I was confused when I got to page 35 and we still weren’t on the plane. And then page 45 and we still weren’t on the plane. And then the halfway point passed and we still weren’t on the plane. They keep talking about a plane. Why aren’t we on a plane?

At a certain point, I realized we weren’t getting on that plane, and once I realized that, I had a hard time grasping what kind of movie I was watching. It didn’t seem to fit inside of any known template. Some people will argue that this is a good thing. If a movie isn’t fitting inside a template, it’s original! You’re not going to know what happens next! And while that’s a valid argument, it all depends on if you’re actually enjoying the ride. I wouldn’t say I WASN’T enjoying the ride here. But I was only casually invested.

I suppose if I were to pitch this, I might call it a sci-fi version of Chinatown. And if you’re reading it through that lens, you might enjoy it. But for me I was too often lost in this story. Even though there was a clear goal (stop the world-ending killer virus), the plot points seemed to arrive in a way that was at odds with the plot. Our Chinese super-villains didn’t show up until the midpoint. Our time-travel didn’t get used until the final act. The plane, which is the whole point of the story, doesn’t arrive until the very very end. If you were a fly on my wall while I was reading this, you would’ve repeatedly heard me say, “Earlier.” “Earlier.” “Earlier.” I wanted everything to happen earlier.

Having now read the script, I would advise Branko to take the plane out of the logline. Just make clear that it’s a whodunnit with a sci-fi time travel twist. At least this way, you won’t have anyone going in thinking this is a plane thriller then be disappointed that it’s a traditional sci-fi noir procedural.

Curious to see what others thought. Share your reviews in the comments section!

Script link: 48 Hour Token

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

What I learned: Stay away from “try-hard” descriptions. They always take readers out of the story. When it comes to description, it’s better to be clear than clever. One character here is described as, “Possesses skin so healthy that it radiates its own moral laws.” Another one is described as, “A hummingbird of naked nerve endings.” Neither of these really make sense.

Genre: Fantasy
Premise: The King’s nephew must travel into the countryside and defeat a giant green knight if he is to become a knight himself.
About: David Lowery made his first short film, Lullaby, at 19 years old. He continued to make lots of short films before breaking into features in 2009 with his movie, St. Nick, about a brother and sister who escape into and begin living in the woods. He has since directed A Ghost Story, Pete’s Dragon, The Old Man and the Gun, and is rumored to be involved in, gasp, another big budget studio adaptation of Peter Pan. Slumdog Millionaire’s Dev Patel will play the aspiring knight. The Green Knight is originally a character in a 14th century Arthurian poem. Talk about going back a ways for some free IP!
Writer: David Lowery
Details: 75 pages

When I saw this in the trades, I did a double take.

“A24” and “Fantasy Epic?”

“Studio that spends less than 2 million dollars on movies” and “Most Expensive Genre Ever?”

Something wasn’t lining up.

There were other questions as well. David Lowery directing?

The guy who goes off and shoots a film in 7 days with, “A Ghost Story,” and also makes giant studio fare like Disney’s, “Pete’s Dragon.”

Now that I’m writing it, it actually makes sense. Who better to make A24’s first big budget film than the guy who’s directed both extremes? Of course, maybe it isn’t a big budget film. I have no idea. I haven’t opened the script yet. Wait, I’m opening it now. 75 pages? A micro-script? What’s going on?? Am I living in a parallel reality?? Is this Thanos’s doing? I’m predicting one heck of a review.

Gawain is the 13th century equivalent of the 31 year old unemployed manchild who lives in his mother’s basement. The only thing he’s got going for him is that he’s the King’s nephew. This allows him to spend his money on hookers and booze, waking up every morning in various back alleys. Everyone feels sorry for Gawain.

Then one day while visiting the king, a giant green knight on a giant green horse storms through the castle’s front doors. He says that anyone who can strike him down with one blow can have his really cool axe-weapon. When nobody offers, Gawain uncharacteristically yells, “I’ll do it!” He walks up, the Green Knight gets down on one knee, puts up no defense, allowing Gawain to swing away and decapitate him. Except that seconds later, the Green Knight’s headless body goes and picks up his still living head, who informs Gaiwain that he must come to his home in a year’s time.

Gawain spends the next year basking in his celebrity, drinking, and dreading his upcoming journey. When the day comes to leave, he tries to hide, but the king throws him out of the kingdom, forcing him to go. And so off Gawain goes, meeting many unique people. A thief, a ghost woman looking for her head, a battlefield of dead knights, a talking fox, a swinger couple who plays games with his head, and a group of mountain giants.

Barely alive, Gawain finally makes it to the Green Knight’s quarters. The knight tells him to kneel down, just as he did. He will now chop Gawain’s head off. Gawain freaks out. He doesn’t want to do this. He leaps up, runs out of the knight’s home, jumps on his horse, rides all the way back to his home, where people assume he’s defeated The Green Knight. However, something is off. Something about our poor Gawain isn’t right. Indeed, what Gawain doesn’t realize is that he was doomed the second he ran from the Green Knight.

This one started off clunky.

We set up that Gawain is a cowardly drunk loser. Then when The Green Knight shows up and challenges someone to swing at him, Gawain hops up and says he’ll do it. This was in no way consistent with anything he had done up to that point.

But once Gawain goes off on his journey, the story picks up considerably. One of my favorite moments was when he found an abandoned home, took a nap, then was woken up by a woman asking him to find her head, which was “in a nearby river.” Confused, he dives into the river, swims to the bottom, finds an old skull, brings it back, and is greeted with a rotten headless skeleton in a dress on the bed. We learn via a few other details that this woman was murdered by her husband, who decapitated her, threw her head in the river and left. It was one of the more haunting things I’ve read in awhile.

And there was a lot of great imagery here. The field of a frozen dead knights after a long ago battle, each of them rotting inside their armor, is a trailer image if I’ve ever read one. Or there was a moment where Gawain had been tied up and left to die by a thief. As he stands there, pondering his situation, we pan slowly around 360 degrees to the rest of the landscape, as seasons pass, and when we make it around, we see Gawain’s rotted corpse, still tied there. We then pan back the way we came, reversing the process, to the alive Gawain again. We realize the shot was him looking into the future if he didn’t find a way out of this. Quite clever.

There are also some strange choices that I don’t know what to make of. Early on, Gawain looks directly into the camera and winks. Never again is the 4th wall broken. Only in that moment. It was bizarre. And then when he stays with the swinger couple, they have a book of photographs. Yes, photographs in the 1300s. Later still, the fox who’s been following him the entire journey starts chatting with him. Talking foxes. Why not!

Looking at all of it in retrospect, the weirdness was a net positive. Lowery looks to be creating a world of uncertainty here, and he’s willing to pull in some 21st century devices to do so, even if it doesn’t completely make sense.

The real head-scratcher, though, is the ending.

I don’t know if they hadn’t figured out the whole “stories need to make sense” thing back in the 14th century. If there’s some old school fairy tale logic going on here. But I didn’t understand the climax at all. Gawain shows up to the Green Knight’s place. The Green Knight tells him to put his head down and he’s going to decapitate him……. Uh, what’s the lesson here? There doesn’t seem to be a compelling choice for our hero to make. He’s supposed to allow himself to be decapitated? Why? What does that accomplish? Does that make him “brave?” Okay, so you’re brave now. Good for you. You’re dead.

I’d get it if he was way overmatched and he still chose to fight. Then he still gains the bravery tag and has a chance to win. But to just get on your knee and let someone kill you?? I don’t understand what the logic is there. Maybe somebody can clue me in.

I bring thing up because we were just talking yesterday about giving your hero a difficult choice at the end of the movie. They get something they really want, but lose something they really want in the process. Here, he loses either way. It doesn’t make sense.

Still, this is a very imaginative and intriguing story. There’s something unquantifiable about the journey that digs into you and won’t let go. I suspect that if Lowery nails the direction, this could be a breakout indie hit. I know one thing. It’s going to make one heck of a trailer.

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

What I learned: The purest story is the hero’s journey. It is one of the easiest stories to make work because there’s always a sense of forward momentum inherent in the setup. Your character is literally trying get from point A on the map to point B. It’s still up to you to come up with interesting characters and interactions and set pieces along the way. But this structure, when done well, will always work. And this is proof of it. This story was written 700 years ago and it still works.

It grossed more money than the GDP of France. But is Avengers: Endgame a good movie??

Genre: Superhero
Premise: The Avengers team must go back in time to prevent the Thanos snap in Infinity War from ever happening.
About: Avengers Endgame made 350 million dollars this weekend at the box office. That’s 100 million more than any movie ever. I’m going to try and cut through the hype and give you a balanced review of the movie.
Writers: Christopher Markus & Stephen McFeely (based on the comics by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby)
Details: 3 hours

SPOOOOOOOOILLLLLLRS!!!!! YOU’VE BEEN WARNED!!!!

Let me start off by saying I realize this is the most unique writing assignment maybe, ever. No writer ever has or ever will have to write a script quite like this again. So I’m not going to pretend like there’s some obvious way to do things. The whole screenplay is operating in unchartered waters.

But I mean… a little Screenwriting 101 could’ve gone a long way here. Whatever happened to the Screenwriting Bill of Rights rule “come into the story as late as possible?” Basically, the first hour of this movie is backstory. And I don’t know how you even do that since it’s a sequel. But I’m getting ahead of myself. First, a quick plot breakdown.

In the last movie, Thanos snapped his fingers and half of all living beings in the universe disappeared. Endgame starts with Captain Marvel showing up and saying she wants to go kill Thanos and get the infinity stones back. They do kill Thanos, but unfortunately, he destroyed the infinity stones. We then cut to five years later, where the world is really depressed because half the population is gone and people dock their boats at the Statue of Liberty.

Ant-Man then gets spit out of the Quantum Realm and rejoins the team, which now, for reasons I cannot understand, include a smart Hulk, destroying the entire point of the character. But anyway. Ant-Man says to Tony that the Quantum Realm is sort of like time travel and you’re smart so maybe you can figure out how to time-travel back and stop Thanos’s snap before it happened.

Tony tells Paul Rudd time travel is impossible but that night he’s bored so he plays with some numbers and in a couple of hours, figures out time travel. Yes, that happens. The plan is to go back and retrieve all the infinity stones before Past Thanos can get his hands on them. This splits them into several teams that must cover several planets. Of course, Thanos, who’s alive again because it’s the past, learns of their plan and goes to stop it. Big battle. The end.

I’m going to say the last thing I expected to say coming out of this movie: The only good thing to come out of Avengers: Endgame is Captain America. He was my least favorite character of the Big 5. But the only moments myself or anybody will remember about this movie in six months are the ones with Cap.

I wondered why that was and then it came to me. Cap’s weakness as a character, which is that he’s so one-dimensional, is actually an advantage in this film. There are so many characters and so much time travel sorcery nonsense that Cap acts as a stabilizer. We always know where he stands. We always know what he wants. So whenever he’s onscreen, we feel a sense of purpose, like the story’s on track. Not to mention, he’s got the best scene in the movie, when he fights himself.

As for everyone else, I’m disappointed. Everything is too messy. Yes, Tony’s death was a powerful moment. But it had nothing to do with the movie. You’ve already proven in this franchise that death means nothing. Loki is alive again after dying in Infinity War. Gmorrah is back after her dramatic death. Hell, you kill Thanos and bring him back IN THE SAME MOVIE. Death in the Marvel universe might as well be a nap. My emotions were more a reaction to this being the end of Robert Downey Jr. playing the role. Because if I’m going off the movie only, Tony’s storyline was awful. Who the hell cares if he goes back and sees his dad? I don’t know his dad. I don’t care about him. This is the reason this movie was so freaking long, because everybody had to meet their dead dad.

Then there’s the Hulk stuff, which infuriated me. It’s a total cheat so that they don’t have to do the hard work of writing a controllable Hulk. Ant-Man was only there to eat tacos and crack jokes. The Big Lebowski Thor joke should’ve lasted one scene. But for some reason they decided to make him Jar Jar Binks for three hours. Captain Marvel only shows up when she wants to, I guess. Then flies away on space vacations to get bad haircuts.

Maybe the worst choice was giving Blue Chick, literally the most unlikable character in the history of the universe, more screentime than Thor, Hulk, Ant-Man, or anybody else not named Tony or Steve. I’m not sure what they were thinking on that one.

I’m still trying to figure out why everyone’s giving this movie a pass. Nothing happens for the first hour! It’s just superheroes sitting around talking about stuff! If this were any other movie, there would’ve been a revolt. Then I realized that Endgame had a secret weapon that no other movie in history had – the biggest superhero battle ever put to screen. When everyone knows they have that waiting for them, they’ll watch anything. They’ll watch Thor picking his nose for two hours, which is basically what we got.

And then we finally get that battle. Was it worth the wait? Sadly, no. There’s only one good moment in these giant cinematic army battles, and that’s the moment right before the fight. The line-up of the armies. The shots of all of our favorite heroes preparing. But once they start fighting, it’s a giant mess. I had no idea what was happening. Not only was the CGI bad, but there was too much going on to appreciate any of it. I can’t remember a single memorable moment from the final battle. If you pinned me down and forced me to pick something, I’d say the Scarlet Witch – Thanos fight. But is that why I came to Avengers Endgame? To see Scarlet Witch fight Thanos?

There’s a bigger discussion to be had here about where high budget filmmaking is going. It’s becoming increasingly clear that actors aren’t in scenes together. You could tell in this battle that many of these characters were on their own, no other actors, green screen behind them, a low-energy set, with a tired director telling them, “Okay, now yell to Iron Man, who’s going to be up and to your left.” Everybody is copy-pasted in and it leaves the action scenes feeling emptier than I ever remember them.

And then, on top of that, everybody’s getting de-aged and re-bodied. If you don’t like your actor clean-shaven, give him a digital beard! Why not? So everybody looks weird. Their eyes are floating around on their faces in the wrong place. Or their skin is too smooth. It’s like watching an animated movie. This is the stuff everybody warned us about when Lucas started doing it in the prequels. And they were right. I don’t feel like I saw a single shot in this movie of the actual world. Every single frame was altered in some way.

Could this screenplay have been fixed? Well, they definitely overthought things, particularly the time travel. They have something in their mythology called the “Time Stone.” I’m assuming that’s because it can alter time. So just build the story around that. They get the Time Stone, which allows them to go back in time, and then you don’t have to spend hours expositioning the Quantum Realm. From there, I wouldn’t have sent our characters off to different planets in the past. That was a bad choice. The stuff on Thor’s planet was some of the weakest in the script. The stuff on the dark planet was even worse. This is what happens when you try and make a story too complicated. You get all these messy threads that nobody cares about. The cool stuff was in New York. That’s where we should’ve spent all of the past scenes.

In the end, I wasn’t entertained by this movie. Sky-high expectations didn’t help. But I liked Infinity War waaaaay better. This was messy. It had too many unnecessary scenes early on. The final battle payoff was weak. You go to this movie for two reasons. Captain America and Tony’s death. Outside of that, this was a disappointing end game for the Avengers franchise.

[ ] What the hell did I just watch?
[x] wasn’t for me :(
[ ] worth the price of admission
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius

What I learned: Big battle scenes are almost always big boring scenes. We think we want them, but once they begin, it’s just a bunch of context-less action. — For battle scenes to work, you must bring structure to them. You do this by having your characters lay out a plan ahead of time. This plan gives the audience a series of steps to engage in, which provides the sequence with structure. One of the best movies to do this is Braveheart. Braveheart has several giant army battles and in each one, William Wallace has a plan beforehand that he lays out for his army. And they’re often very simple. For example, one of his plans is to tell his cavalry to flee right as the battle begins (“And let the English see you do it,” he tells them). He then says, once the entire English army has committed to the battle, to ride around and flank them. And that’s what happens. The armies clash, and then the Scottish cavalry comes around and flanks them, putting the finishing touches on the English. This is so much better than sending two armies at each other and having a big generic battle.

Genre: TV/One-hour Drama
Premise: A low-level MI5 operative is tasked with looking into a murder orchestrated by a female assassin.
About: Today’s show has an unexpected Star Wars connection. It was created by Phoebe Waller-Bridge, who many people know as the voice of the doomed L3-37, Lando’s favorite droid, in the movie, “Solo.” Killing Eve has become one of the few shows to rise above the tens of millions of shows being produced, and I plan to find out why. The show has been such a hit that it landed Waller-Bridge a rewrite gig on, get this, the latest Bond film! How many female writers can say they’ve written a Bond film? My guess is not a lot. The second season of Killing Eve debuted a couple of weeks ago. But because I’m behind the times, I’ll be reviewing the pilot episode for the series.
Writer: Phoebe Waller-Bridge

Who knows what TV is anymore??

I don’t.

Mini-series, short seasons, limited engagements, anthologies.

The format seems to be getting less defined by the day.

For awhile, that was exciting. And yet with more TV show choices than ever before, I can’t find a single show to watch.

I stopped watching Game of Thrones a few seasons ago. One too many serious talking scenes in small rooms for my taste. Although I enjoyed looking at the pretty costumes.

While a couple of shows have caught my interest since then, The Bodyguard and Escape at Dannemora being the two most memorable, I lost interest during the second episodes. The prospect of settling in for an endless second act felt more like an exercise in masochism than entertainment.

The last two shows I watched where I genuinely had to see the next episode as soon as the current episode was over, were 13 Reasons Why and The Karate Kid. That’s a whole year without a show to get hooked on!

What’s going on? Has spreading the TV writing industry so thin destroyed any chance at getting quality written episodes anymore? You figure that has to play a part in at least some of this.

The only TV series I’m looking forward to at the moment is The Mandalorian. And that has less to do with how the show looks than it does it being Star Wars.

One show that keeps needling me to watch it is Killing Eve. I gave it a shot a few months back but I fell asleep during the pilot. Not a good sign. But there’s no denying the show has become a legitimate hit. And there’s one particular screenwriting lesson Killing Eve teaches that’s so important, I decided to watch it again, if only to share this lesson with you! We’ll cover that in a minute. But first, let’s break down the plot for the pilot.

Eve is a low-level American MI5 agent working in London whose loosey-goosey approach to her job doesn’t jibe well with her uptight British counterparts. During an important meeting about an assassination in Vienna, Eve offers her opinion on the situation without being asked. Her take is that whoever killed this dude must’ve been a woman because she was able to get close without him suspecting anything. Their response: Thanks but we got this covered.

Eve, convinced she’s right, seeks to talk with the only witness to the murder, the victim’s Polish girlfriend. Unfortunately, because the woman is Polish, she’s wasted, and therefore unintelligible. Meanwhile, we meet Villanelle, the assassin who took out the dude in Vienna. After she kills a poor old man in Italy who I’m assuming did something bad, her handler informs her that the Vienna assassination witness (the girlfriend) could cause trouble down the line. So Villanelle must kill her, too.

Back to Eve, who’s informed by her co-workers that they screwed up. New evidence proves it WAS a woman, and that she’ll probably come after the Polish girlfriend, who’s currently in the hospital. So Eve goes to watch over her, but while she’s in the bathroom, Villanelle comes out of one of the stalls in a nurse’s outfit! She has no idea this is the killer and watches as she leaves. Minutes later, when she returns to the girlfriend’s room, she, along with several other hospital workers, have been brutally murdered! Game on!

So what is this mythical screenwriting lesson you cannot succeed without?

It’s something we’ve talked about before. And yet, there probably isn’t a more commonly made mistake in screenwriting.

Are you ready?

WHAT ARE YOU BRINGING TO YOUR CONCEPT THAT IS DIFFERENT FROM WHAT WE’VE SEEN BEFORE?

That’s it. That question can save you years of heartache. I see so many writers, especially young writers, make this mistake over and over again, even after I’ve brought it to their attention. I suspect part of it isn’t their fault. When you’re young, you haven’t watched as many movies and shows. So you’re not even aware when you’re giving us something familiar.

But it’s getting harder to use that defense. We live in a time when you can easily look up if someone has written a movie/show similar to your idea.

Assuming a writer does their due diligence, knows their film history, has researched to make sure no one else has done their idea (at least not how they plan to do it), yet their idea STILL isn’t fresh, it’s an issue of not understanding how to tweak ideas to bring something new to them. Their “something new” is too lateral. It needs to be elevated.

For example, if you’d just seen John Wick and you went and wrote a screenplay about a hitman who takes down a Russian mob cell… but unlike John Wick, your hero was more of a joke-cracker, like John McClane, would that be enough of a change to warrant a “fresh” stamp? I would say no.

With that said, the line where “stale” ends and “fresh” begins is admittedly hard to nail down. If it were clear, we’d all be millionaires. There is an art to finding that line. Ideally, you want to be just far enough over where what you’ve given us is familiar, but not so far that it’s inaccessible. Sense 8, the Wachowski show on Netflix, was certainly unique. But it was so far over that comfort line that general audiences didn’t know what to do with it.

Killing Eve gives us the familiar, a tag-team assassin vs. agent concept, but places two women in the lead roles. Normally, I don’t think gender-swapping roles is enough. But in this case, it’s clever in that both parts have been given to women in an arena that has never seen that before. Like, ever. We’ve had female assassins and female agents, but never as the principle characters in the same show. A big reason I became curious about the show is that I saw a poster with both of them on it and instantly thought, “I haven’t seen that before.”

I admit there’s no way to measure exactly where that conceptual sweet spot lies. But just by asking yourself the question, you are a million times more likely to create something fresh. Because the large majority of writers out there are rewriting their favorite shows/movies and slapping a new title on them.

Obviously, getting the concept right is only half battle. You still have to execute it. And this is where Killing Eve really shines.

Waller-Bridge gets all the important things right. When we meet our characters, they perform actions that immediately tell us who they are. If you’re not doing this in a TV show, stop writing and go read a screenwriting book. This is Screenwriting 101 here, folks. When we meet Villanelle, she’s in an ice cream shop, she smiles at a little 10 year old girl who’s eating ice cream across from her, and then, when she leaves, she discreetly slaps the bowl of ice cream onto the girl’s lap. We know who Villanelle is within 90 seconds.

Ditto with Eve. One of the easiest ways to convey who someone is quickly, is to contrast their actions with other characters in the scene. So Eve comes to a meeting. Everyone is uptight and methodically going through the day’s schedule. Meanwhile, Eve is leaned back, loudly unpacking a croissant from a bag that she then chows down on.

Some writers frown upon this over-the-top introduction of characters but, I’m telling you, if you try to be too clever and subtle, we’re not going to know who your characters are. I’ll prove this to you once and for all. Think about your favorite characters of all time in movies or TV shows. The ones that left a huge impact. Got it? Okay, now go back to their introductory scene in that movie/show. I’m betting they did something pretty powerful right away that established them as a memorable character, right?

Another key thing you want to do, especially in TV shows, is create contrast between your main pairing. If your two leads are too alike, you’re screwed. You’re better off leaning towards polar opposites than slightly different. Villanelle is an icy sociopath. Eve is a goofy ball of fun. The only time I’ve ever seen the “too alike” thing work was in the sitcom, Frasier. Frasier and Niles were very similar. So I guess it can be done. But I wouldn’t go there.

I liked Killing Eve. I don’t know if it impressed me enough to seek out a paid second episode. I would probably keep watching if it was on Netflix though. Maybe that should be a new selection in my rating options. “Would keep watching if it was on Netflix.” Anyway, if you’ve seen the show, be sure to share your thoughts!

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

What I learned: I think it’s important in TV to establish right away that you’re willing to go to places other shows aren’t. The worst thing you can do is create a comfortable story. Comfortable is boring. So by throwing something harsh at the reader right away, you let them know that things aren’t going to be business as usual. At the beginning of Killing Eve, Villanelle slaps a bowl of ice cream on a little girl. It’s jarring. It’s unexpected. It puts us on notice that the unexpected could happen at any moment in the next hour. That makes us want to keep watching.

Genre: Family/Fantasy
Premise: An eccentric old clown tries to cheer up a disabled boy by telling the story of his magical adventures on a lifelong quest to win the heart of a beautiful mime.
Why You Should Read: A massive THANK YOU to the commenters of Scriptshadow who read my first draft of this script and offered their valued thoughts and notes on it, and a special shout-out to Carson for his excellent notes and advice. All helped to propel this script to the next level. Booboo The Clown is an original, entertaining, and visually-appealing family-friendly movie. This one has it all. It has a larger than life lead character – a classic underdog – and a novel supporting cast with genuine arcs that actors will queue up to play. It has adventure. It has adversity. It has smiles, laughs and tears. It has scenes you have never seen before. And, most importantly, it has a fucking heart. I have poured my heart into this script and now I’d love to read your thoughts. I send it out as words amidst the wolves. Be ravenous.
Writer: Brian McHale-Boyle
Details: 118 pages

Danny DeVito as Booboo?

Real talk.

Friday is the final day of the week. Like everybody else, I can’t wait to put aside the computer and enjoy the weekend. For that reason, Amateur Friday reviews often feel like a wall, a final obstacle I must climb in order to get to the promised land. If this is to change, if I’m going to look forward to Amateur Friday as opposed to fear it, I need better scripts. I need stuff where the writer’s trying to blow me away. Not stuff that’s pleasant. The worst thing a screenplay can be is pleasant.

Now I’ve already read BooBoo once. I gave Brian notes on it many moons ago. The fact that he’s still working on it tells me he’s very passionate about the story. Passion can work for you or against you. It can be the fire that stokes a once-in-a-lifetime visionary piece of fiction. Or it can blind you to fact that readers aren’t experiencing the story the way you believe you’re presenting it. Let’s find out how this new draft fared.

Booboo is 70 year old clown who’s still hustling. He’s out there doing the kids birthday party circuit, no hair-smelling involved. It is through one of these parties that he meets Myron, a 9 year old boy in a wheelchair. Myron has a dastardly absentee father as well as a non-judgmental mother who welcomes Booboo into her son’s life with open arms.

As their unlikely friendship begins, Booboo tells the story of how, as a kid, he was an orphan, until he was recruited into a magical clown school on a far away island. There he learned the art of clown and also fell in love with an aspiring mime, Marianne. Marianne is so devoted to the art of miming that she refuses to talk. Ever.

Many years later, after graduating from clown school, Booboo decides to look for Marianne. First he goes to San Francisco, then to Vegas. There, he runs into Ginger, a friend from clown school who’s now a dancer. After saving Ginger from an ugly pimp-like situation, Booboo heads to New York, where he magically runs into Marianne miming in Central Park! He tells her he loves her. She says nothing back cause she’s a mime. And then they enter into a relationship. Unfortunately, Marianne eventually leaves Booboo to be with another former student from their school.

We cut back to present day, where Booboo finally takes Myron to a hospital. It is there where we learn that the reason Booboo is still hustling is that he takes care of Marianne! She’s dying in a hospice care center. He’s spent the last few years paying her medical bills because that jerky guy who stole her from him ditched her. The dedicated Booboo sits there until her dying breath.

It’s been a long time since I’ve read this but I remember enough that I’m surprised how similar it is to the previous draft. I thought that more would’ve changed over the years. I have to give it to Brian, though. He swung for the fences here. This is the clown version of Big Fish meets Forrest Gump. So if you liked those movies, there’s a good chance you’ll like this. But the script is burdened with a deep fatal flaw.

The biggest problem here is that the plot revolves around a love story where we never experience the two characters falling in love. Because Marianne can’t speak, there are no extended interactions between the two. We just talked yesterday about the importance of using dialogue to get inside a character’s head. The ONE scene I used as an example in that article told me more about those two characters than I know about Marianne after an entire script.

And there’s no plot here to alleviate that. Usually, love stories are ancillary to the main plot. Titanic for example. The plot is finding the diamond on a doomed ship. The love story happens along the way. But here, the movie is the love story. And how can we be involved in a love story if a) we never hear one of the characters in that relationship speak, and b) if we don’t know why they love each other. As far as I can tell, Booboo loves Marianne because she’s beautiful. That’s a pretty shallow reason to love someone. And I don’t think there’s any moment in this script where Marianne shows love to Booboo.

The most successful movie that’s ever been made where the plot solely revolves around “Will they get together or not?” is When Harry Met Sally. And one of the reasons we kept watching and kept caring whether they got together or not is because they had these amazing memorable hilarious conversations. They’d go back and forth with each other on the most mundane of topics. Now imagine that movie where Harry talks and Sally never says a thing. We wouldn’t care whether they ended up together because you erased any opportunity to explore chemistry between the two. I’m pretty sure I brought this up in my notes so I’m disappointed that it wasn’t addressed.

Brian may have fallen victim to something all of us writers fall victim to. Which is that we become so in love with an idea that we refuse to budge from it regardless of how damaging it is to our story. In this case, Brian has romanticized the mime stuff (a clown falling in love with a mime has a nice ring to it) to the point where he doesn’t realize how it’s affecting the story. Sure, the big death bed moment where she finally talks is powerful. But is it worth 99% of your love story not working?

This is such a huge issue, I don’t even think it’s worth it to examine the rest of the script. Because without a solution to this problem, nothing else matters. And look, I feel terrible saying this because I know how crazy attached Brian is to this script. But it doesn’t do me or him any good to sugarcoat this issue. That’s how writers go insane – trying to make something work that can’t.

I will say this. Silent characters work better on screen because we can see them. And if you cast the part right and the acting is stellar and the wardrobe is perfect, yeah, we can fall in love simply by seeing Marianne, just like Booboo did. I’ve never watched The Artist (a silent film) but I think that’s a love story, right? And people enjoyed that. But that’s the thing. This isn’t a movie. It’s a spec script. A spec script has to convince through the page, not through the screen. So even if you could make that argument, it doesn’t matter.

This is why I always tell writers to stay away from mute characters in major roles. They are the most unmemorable characters I read by far. I made this case with Duncan Jones “Mute.” I said that script was a disaster for the same reason. We didn’t care about the mute hero because we didn’t know him. So that’s my issue. I don’t know if Brian’s going to listen to me. I hope he does. Because I think he’s a good writer. I think if he moved on to other scripts with this knowledge, he could write something great. But Booboo would need a major rewrite to even SEE if it would work with that note adjustment. And there’s no guarantee it will. So let’s see what else you got. Worst case scenario, you become a huge screenwriting star off another script and you pull Booboo out as you next project.

Screenplay Link: Booboo The Clown

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

What I learned: One of the primary ingredients in making a love story work is convincing us that the characters are in love. That typically occurs through shared experiences, conversations, memorable events, and a clear connection between the two. And it has to come from BOTH SIDES. Not just one. There wasn’t nearly enough of this in Booboo to convince me that these two were meant for each other.