Genre: Sci-fi
Premise: A strapped-for-cash woman agrees to be part of a lab study where participants are placed in a room for a month, but begins to suspect that she’s been in the room for much longer than that.
About: Don’t know much about this one other than that the movie is being made by Vital Pictures and will come out sometime next year.  You can see the writer’s early attempts at a Kickstarter page here, which has a trailer and some cool concept art.
Writer: Seda
Details: 108 pages

Liberace.  Madonna.  Beyonce.

And now…Seda.

Two names is so passé.  These days, it’s preferable to cap it at one.

Okay, am I thrilled that a screenwriter has given himself one name?  No.  Does it scream pretentiousness?  Yes.  But I have to remember that this is the entertainment industry.  You gotta market yourself to stand out.  And maybe I have a teensy bit of sympathy since I’m not using my real name on this blog either.

One name or not, when I started reading Subject 6, a script heavily influenced by Cube and The Matrix, I started to exert all kinds of worriedness.  I’ve read these kinds of scripts before.  And when I say “these kinds of scripts,” I mean scripts with a bunch of fucked up things happening for seemingly no reason.  The fear?  That the “seemingly no reason” is because there IS NO REASON.  The writer’s constructed a setting that allows him to make a lot of cool trippy fucked up things happen without having to come up with that all-important explanation  Which is why I almost universally hate these screenplays.  If you want to know what I’m talking about, read the pointless 2:22.

Now it started off okay, with our heroine, known only as “SIX” (in reference to the number listed on her fatigues), waking up in a bare-bones icy room that carries only the necessitates – bed, toilet, floor, ceiling.  There’s also a TV, which inexplicably allows our subject to watch hundreds of other people in their own experiment rooms.

From what we can gather, the experiment is some sort of psychological test.  Participants are paid 20 grand to come in and simply sit in a room for 30 days.  You can opt out of the experiment any time you want by pressing a big red button in your room, but if you do, you forfeit your payment.

Naturally, there isn’t much to do other than sit around and talk to the other participants.  Yes, for some reason, you have a video phone in your room that allows you to talk to any of the other rooms.  Seems like an odd freedom for the experimenters to allow, but anyway, it introduces Six to 33, a strapping young slacker philosopher type.

The two hit it off and pretty soon they’re planning a rendezvous inside the walls between their rooms (they happen to be placed right next to each other).  But the rendezvous goes bad when these things called “Technicians,” huge men in nuclear-fallout-type suits, intervene and shock Six, who wakes up once again in her room at the beginning of the experiment, as if none of her previous experiences happened.

Six grows suspicious and escapes through a ceiling vent.  It’s there where she’s rescued by a group of people who tell her the truth.  There is no 30-Day experiment.  The people who are here are stuck here forever.  The technicians just keep resetting them over and over again.  Which is why this group has formed.  They’re trying to find a way out – an escape.  But this facility – whatever it is – is ginormous.  So it ain’t going to be easy.

Another issue is that Six keeps flashing back to some psyche ward doctor’s office where a man is evaluating her.  He asks her about this experiment, about these “technicians,” about her escape, and Six begins to doubt whether any of it is real.  Is she crazy?  Is she just a looney chick locked up in a padded room imagining all this shit?  Her fellow escapees tell her “no,” that it’s all a part of the experimenters’ plan – to destroy the mind, to make you lose confidence in your reality.  But Six isn’t so sure.  And neither are we.

Is Six nuts or does this place really exist?  And if it does, how did she get here?  Or, if the psych ward’s real, what happened in her past that led to her insanity?  All those questions are…sort of answered in Subject 6.

Wheel me in and call me Sally cause I don’t know what to make of Subject 6.  There are moments where this script absolutely shines and there are others that left me searching for a bottle of aspirin.  I’ll say this about the script.  I rarely knew where it was going.  And anyone who reads this blog knows that goes a long way with me.  90% of the scripts I read are as predictable as the sun setting, so when one has me genuinely wondering what the next page holds, that’s impressive.

BUT, the thing that kept bothering me was all the silly random stuff, like the repeated religious references that seemed to be there for no other reason than their inherent creepiness.  For example, when we see a dead character in a hallway with the word “Foresaken” scrawled on the wall behind him in his blood?  Commence the eye-rolling.  What the heck does that have to do with the story?  As far as I could tell, nothing other than it looked cool.

There was also one obvious derivative component that bothered me – the Matrix team.  I mean, the group that takes Six in does so in a way that’s so eerily reminiscent of The Matrix that I thought I was watching an aborted take from the film.  And then you have this really HUGE Jabba The Hut like leader man named “One” who weighs 800 pounds.  All I kept thinking was…wait a minute here – this group has to go on super risky scavenger missions for food and one of them is 800 pounds?  How exactly is this possible?  Is he eating the other members when nobody’s looking?

Having said all that, I *did* want to turn the pages.  I mean, the script genuinely had me wondering where the hell it was all going and, more importantly, I wanted to find out.  But the big reason I’d recommend this to others is that the third act really comes together.  Which was surprising.  Because the third act is usually where these scripts fall apart, since the writer can’t answer all the questions he’s been asking.

But as Six keeps flashing back between the Insane Asylum and the Experiment, not only was I wondering which one was real and which one wasn’t, but I genuinely found myself empathizing with Six.  I wondered what it would be like to go “crazy” in this manner.  What if this really was your life?  Is this what people with mental diseases really go through?  Do they live this kind of life every day?  How fucking terrifying.

Once the script crossed that fourth wall, it’d done its job with me.  I didn’t agree with all the choices.  I thought things got a little goofy in the second act when the team was introduced. But the recovery in the third is what saved it.  For that reason, I say check this one out.

What I Learned: The introduction of One (the huge Jabba The Hut leader of the underground) is a perfect example of a writer wanting something so badly (the image of this huge overweight barely moveable leader) that he puts it in there without considering how illogical it is.  I mean, from what we’ve been told, this group has to risk their lives going out to find scraps of leftover food to stay alive.  Yet somehow we have an 800 pound man chilling out?  Does that make any sense?  These are the moments when readers lose faith in writers because they’re not doing their due diligence.  We all want to include cool things in our scripts, but if you’re going to do so, they have to MAKE SENSE.  If they don’t, ditch them or come up with an explanation.

Genre: Sports Drama
Premise: An aging baseball scout who’s losing his eyesight must enlist the help of a daughter who hates baseball to scout a young prospect.
About: This one has a really interesting backstory to it and should give screenwriters everywhere hope that it can happen, if not on the timeframe they planned.  Writer Randy Brown wrote this 15 years ago and actually had Dustin Hoffman attached at one point.  But Hoffman and the producer didn’t get along, so the project went belly-up.  15 years later, Randy’s writing for some MTV shows (and running a cafe).  He met a producer through a mutual friend, who gave it to someone close with Clint who thought it would be great for him.  Now this is where you’re really going to freak out as you realize just how important timing is in this town.  Clint couldn’t do it because he was doing A Star Is Born with Beyonce.  Well, Jay-Z got Beyonce pregnant and all of a sudden, Clint had an opening in his schedule. The script was purchased for a million bucks and the movie is coming out later this year.  How bout them apples?
Writer: Randy Brown
Details: This says it’s a 2011 draft but the references in it clearly indicate it’s the original draft from 15 years ago.

Usually, when a script has been ignored for 15 years, there’s a reason for it.  It’s just not good enough.  Either that or its time has passed it by.  Or sometimes, when there’s a popular script in town that can’t get made for one reason or another, everyone in Hollywood plunders ideas from it, to the point where the original script now feels derivative.  I remember that happened with The Tourist, a famous script that keeps coming up on many people’s “Best Of The Unmade” lists.

So to be honest, I kind of expected Curve to be terrible, some barely-above-average screenplay whose only redeeming quality was a prominent senior role for Clint Eastwood. But boy was I wrong.  Curve is almost textbook in how to write a screenplay.  I’ll get more into that in a sec, but right now, here’s the breakdown.

Senior citizen Gus Lobel is baseball scouting royalty.  Credentials?  Oh, he only found Hank Aaron.  And he was the guy who scouted Micky Mantle and bet his career he would become a hall-of-famer, something many people ignored, only to find out 30 years later how wrong they were.

But Gus is also a stubborn crotchety old fuck.  And he doesn’t listen to many people besides himself.  So nowadays, with all these fancy-schmancy computers coming around, detailing RBIs and OBPs and OBGYNs, giving new scouts a whole new arena to judge baseball players on, Gus is insistent that none of that shit does anything.

Which is why the upper levels of the team he’s working for, the Atlanta Braves, are starting to have questions about if Gus is stuck in the dinosaur ages.  Sure he knows his stuff, but as one executive points out, “Nobody cares who scouted Hank Aaron anymore.”

But that’s only the beginning of Gus’ problems.  Gus is also losing his eyesight.  He’s had to rearrange his entire apartment, in fact, so that he doesn’t randomly bump into furniture.  Because Gus is so stubborn, he’s in denial about this, but he’s going to have to figure it out fast.  The team is sending him out to scout Bo Gentry, an 18 year old phenom who’s projected to be the next Mark McGuire.

Across town, we’re introduced to Gus’ 30-something daughter, Mickey.  Yes, Mickey was named after Mickey Mantel, even though she’s a girl.  That right there shows you what Gus’ priorities are.  It’s baseball first – daughter second.  And that isn’t lost on Mickey, who loves her dad more than anything, but when you show up for family dinner only to find out you’ll be watching a 3 hour baseball game…well…EVERY SINGLE TIME, you begin to hate baseball more than hell.

But when Mickey catches on to her father’s eyesight problems, she worries for him, and imposes herself on his latest roadtrip, something he’s vehemently opposed to.  But as he follows Bo Gentry from game to game, he realizes it’s impossible for him to SEE whether this guy is the real deal or not.  And that means he has to depend on his daughter, a girl he groomed to love baseball when she was growing up, but who hates it now, to save him.  In the strangest of ways, this dependency brings them together in a way no other experience could.

Okay, to start things off, let me reiterate that you should NEVER TRY TO SELL A SPORTS SCRIPT that isn’t based on a true story (or novel) unless it’s a boxing script or a comedy.  Trouble With The Curve is the rare exception to the rule, although I will say that when this exception comes around, it’s usually with a baseball script.

Okay, now on to the script itself.  The writing here is amazing!  And I don’t mean it’s beautiful to read.  I don’t mean the prose makes my heart sing.  That’s not what a good screenplay should do.  When I say the writing is amazing, I mean that every sentence is carved down to only its bare essence, only the words we need to know, and nothing more.

I bring this up because of a couple of scripts I read recently.  The first was a confusing mess and a big reason for that was that there were too many words.   The writer kept tripping over himself because he was constantly navigating through a sea of alphabetical albatrosses.  He was trying to be too clever by half when he should’ve stuck with the “half,” as that’s how many words you should be shooting for when you’re writing screenplays.

I also compare it to tomorrow’s script, which is well-written and clear, but every page feels like it’s taking twice as long to get through because of the extra verbiage.  This kind of writing gets exhausting to read.  I mean, I’m enjoying the script because it’s an interesting mystery (I’m not finished yet), but I find it hard to get through because of that excessiveness. And I’m not even talking like HUGE BIG PARAGRAPH CHUNKS here.  It’s more that the simplest sentences, something like, “He darts over to the phone,” become, “He peers at the surrounding walls, which seem to be closing in on him, then darts to the phone across the room.”  It’s twice or three times as much reading as the reader needs to be doing.

But what I really liked about this script was the character work, and more specifically the relationship work.  It’s simple but clever, and very well done.  You have a man who thinks a sport is more important than his daughter, who must now depend on that daughter to save his position in the sport, even though she hates the sport because of him.  I don’t know if you can come up with a more beautifully constructed triangle of conflict.  Watching Gus start to reluctantly rely on his daughter, and the ironic way in which that brings them closer – it was perfect.

I could go on about this script.  It’s just really well done.  I don’t know if it’s Oscar worthy. That’ll depend on if it’s directed well.  But the foundation is definitely there.  This one surprised me!

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

What I learned:  Let me tell you when I knew I was dealing with a professional here, and not an amateur, or one of these pros who got lucky and cheated their way into the system.  The stakes and the deadlines.  Only the good writers know to contain their screenplays with them.  First, the end of Gus’ contract is coming up (deadline).  So if he doesn’t prove his worth with this prospect, he loses his job (stakes).  Then there’s Mickey, who just got a job at a prestigious law firm.  Now she has to go on this trip with Gus.  They’re upset and tell her, “That’s fine, but you need to be back to meet with the client by Thursday. (deadline)”  The implication is, “If you screw this up, we’re letting you go (stakes).”  From there, we keep cutting back to the Atlanta Braves’ offices, where the club’s brass are pushing harder and harder to eliminate Gus if he screws this up (raising stakes).  Stakes and deadlines need to be everywhere in your script.  They’re the plot mechanics that keep your audience invested in the story.

Genre: Drama/Thriller

Of all the Twit-Pitch First-10-Pages I read, this was tied as far and away one of the best two.  I had high hopes for it.  My only concern?  A wandering story.  The logline piqued my interest but as you can see, it doesn’t exactly tell us what the script’s about.  So I was really hoping this wasn’t one of those scripts that shows kick ass writing skills for the first ten pages and then just…never turns into anything.  Those are always killers as a reader.  You can tell the writer can write.  They just haven’t figured out how to tell a story yet.  Two very different skills.

But this one felt good.  I knew I was putting it in the “Definite” pile within the first two pages.  I mean go ahead and read the first 10 yourself.  Look at how confident the writing is – how self-assured.  You feel like you’re in the hands of someone who knows what they’re doing, which is rare when you read an amateur screenplay.  But it’s one thing to make it last 10 pages.  It’s a whole nother to make it last 110.

So in case you’re wondering, Gunplay is about terrorist bounty-hunting.  It’s kind of cool when you think about it. Those “Reward – $500” mugshots that were everywhere in the Old West days? They STILL do that.  But here, it’s 5 million dollars instead of 500.  And the players aren’t Two-Barrel Terry, but international terrorists who want to kill Americans in the name of Allah.

Our big daddy, the 5 million dollar jackpot (not sure why it’s changed from 10 mil in the logline) everyone’s after, is a man named Musab.  Musab is actually an American who’s turned on his country, zigzagging through the Pakistani/Afghanstan countryside, trying to escape all the newfound attention he’s gotten after becoming the last big paycheck on the Terrorist Most Wanted List.

There are two bounty hunters he’s gotta worry about.  The first one has no name.  He’s known only as “Stranger.”  This is the kind of guy that gives Clint Eastwood the willies.  He’s just a badass aging bounty hunter with one thing on his mind.  MONAY!  And he’ll do anything to get it.  The other dude is 50-something Wyatt, whose face is a “road map to hell and back.”  Wyatt’s got some other business to tend to as well, something about tracking down 25 million dollars of stolen moolah.

The story weaves through their individual pursuits until they eventually come together, as at one point all three men (including Musab) must escape some baddies, namely a corrupt policemen and a warlord or two.  Soon the 5 million dollar paycheck seems like a pittance compared to that big 25 million dollar payday.  But will they find it before it’s too late, or before they all kill one another?

In short, this is the best writing in the contest so far.  However, my biggest fear was realized.  The story starts out great, but becomes less and less coherent as it goes on.  In fact, when I reached the halfway point, I realized I had only a vague sense of what was going on.  You know when you’re reading something and all of a sudden you realize you weren’t paying attention the last two pages and have to go back and read it again?  I had to do that like 5 or 6 times, and I realized at that point that Gunplay had lost me.

So how did it lose me?  Well, let’s see.  It starts with Musab.  Here was this guy who was known as the most dangerous terrorist left on the U.S. Wanted List, and he didn’t seem dangerous at all.  In fact, he seemed like a normal guy.  So the whole time I was wondering, why is this dude worth so much money?  He’s just like you and me.  To be honest, I don’t even know what he did to get that price tag on his head.

So now you have two bounty hunters chasing a villain who isn’t really a villain.  Why do we care if they catch him?  That was another problem.  What’s the urgency here?  Why do they need to catch him now?  He doesn’t seem to have any immediate plans to kill more Americans, at least nothing concrete.  So why the rush?  And what are the stakes?  Again, it doesn’t matter if he escapes cause he’s got nothing planned.  So the stakes are nil.

Same thing with Stranger and Wyatt.  Why do they need the money so bad?  What’s so important about having 25 million dollars?  I mean sure it makes them “rich,” but who cares?  That’s such a boring reason for needing to do something.  Why can’t the pursuit be personal, for at least one of them?  What if Musab killed one of their daughters in an attack?

On top of this, Wyatt’s storyline was murky.  He was working for someone who wanted to recoup 25 million dollars that some thieves swindled from him.  But I could never really decipher the specifics of what happened.  And again, since Wyatt’s working for someone else who wants the money, the stakes were low.  Why couldn’t he have lost the money himself?  Or maybe he’s not hunting a terrorist, but rather someone who said they’d pay him if he killed a terrorist, but disappeared once the deed was done.  Now it’s personal.

Maybe this is the nature of going with bounty hunters as your protags.  Bounty Hunters go after things for money, not personal reasons.  But I guess I just wanted more.  At least somewhere.

But what really killed Gunplay for me was that the further the script went on, the less clear it became.  All of a sudden we’re in some compound with men using little boys as sex slaves and I’m thinking, “How did we get here?  What does this have to do with the rest of the story?”  None of it was set up very well so it all came out of nowhere.  To be honest, it felt like yet another script that was rushing to meet a deadline.  The best pages were the first 30, since they’d been worked over so many times.  And then you could tell that the last 70 didn’t get nearly as much attention, which is why they got so murky.

To me, this comes down to good old fashioned stakes and urgency.  A storyline needs to be written in that Musab is trying to get somewhere, and if he gets there, people are going to be killed.  That way, there’s some immediacy to the story.  Cause the way it stands now, nothing really happens if he gets away besides our bounty hunters not getting their money.

Since stakes and urgency are always intertwined, you have the same problem on the stakes end.  There’s nothing Musab is trying to do other than escape, so nothing bad happens to anyone if he gets away.

Another thing I’d consider doing is making Musab REALLY BAD.  This guy’s a terrorist.  Let’s find out what he did and hate him for it.  The worse of a person he is, the more we’ll want him to get caught.  That was part of the problem.  Since he was a normal guy, I wasn’t invested in whether Stranger and Wyatt caught up to him.

If you want to make Musab a hero – someone we root for – then make it so he’s been wrongly accused.  He’s not a terrorist.  He’s just been tabbed as one because of bad information or a mix-up.  Audiences love rooting for wrongly-accused characters (The Fugitive anyone?), and now we’ll be invested cause we’ll want to see him get away.  I mean when it comes down to it, I didn’t care if Musab was caught, and I didn’t care if Stranger or Wyatt caught him.  And that just can’t be the case.

Script Link: Gunplay

What I learned: In a chase movie, you want to show the bad guy do something bad, so we’ll want him to go down (Darth Vader chokes a man to death while interrogating him).  If you can’t do that, then show the good guy do something good, so we’ll root for him to succeed (Obi-Wan saves Luke from the Sand People).  In Gunplay, we don’t get either, so we never become interested in the chase.

Hello my fellow Scriptshadowians.  So I’ve wanted to write an article about theme for the longest time now but the truth is, it’s not one of my strengths.  I understand the broad strokes but there are times when theme flat out confuses me.  For that reason, I’ve brought in a tag-team partner, Tawnya Bhattacharya from Script Anatomy, to help me out.  She’s a theme guru and I figured if I had her, I could at least hide some of my ignorance.  The way I thought we’d do it is this – Tawnya will give you her breakdown on theme and then afterwards, I’ll give you mine.  For the most part, we’re on the same page, but I feel like my approach is a little less strict.  Afterwards, I’d love to hear your own thoughts on theme.  I often learn just as much from you guys as you do from me. :) With that said, let’s bring in Tawnya!

I’m feeling punchy and maybe slightly ornery. It’s hot as hell even with the AC on. I don’t feel like I’m dropping enough L-B-S’s with my latest fad work out. And my writing partner and I have been waiting all summer to hear if “Fairly Legal” is getting the pick up (Magic 8 Ball says, “Outlook not so good”) and lately, we’ve been on pins and needles waiting to find out if we’re going to land a new gig after a series of meetings. I even offered to do a cartwheel during the last meeting to seal the deal. I’m not talking any old cartwheel but an aerial in honor of the recent Olympics. A private closing ceremony, if you will, starring me. This is no small feat as I haven’t done one since 1989, but I’m willing to take one for the team, people! Anyway… The. Wait. Is. Brutal. It’s been 72 hours and counting… One of the fun things you have to try to get used to, because it should happen over and over again in your career if things are going well. If it’s not then something’s wrong.

What’s my point? I almost forgot. Theme! Carson asked me to write an article on theme and I was giving you a little preface (I’m feeling punchy) on why I’ve decided to basically interview myself. So, here goes.

WHAT IS THEME?

1) Theme is Structure. It is the foundation on which your story is built. In fact, it’s like the gravity of your script holding everything together and in place. Without it, nothing’s anchored and scenes, moments, characters, setpieces will just drift off into space.

2) Theme is not only the spine and core of your movie but the Heart and Soul of your story. It’s the moral and lesson of your story that gives your screen or teleplay universal meaning. Ultimately, it’s what unifies your story and makes it emotionally significant. It’s your “voice” – it’s what you want to say. Stories teach us how to be human through symbolic experiences.

3) Theme is your “Voice” because it is your reflection of humanity – what you have to say with regard to your core beliefs and values. Someone said there are only 7 stories. And we know writers use the same themes over and over again. But it doesn’t matter. It’s all about how YOU tell that story from your unique point of view.

HOW DO YOU APPROACH THEME IN YOUR WORK?
When thinking about theme, I think it’s important to start with yourself. What do you feel strongly about? What are your core beliefs and values? What stories are you drawn to – are there common themes in those stories? Write down a list of all of your story ideas and see if common thematic patterns emerge. Think about your life experiences – maybe start with the major moments of your life – the good and the bad – and see what comes up there. Your passion and voice are stronger when you are writing what is personal to you – what’s “close to the bone.”

HOW DO YOU ILLUSTRATE THEME IN A SCRIPT?
Theme is kind of like the subtext of the overall story. You are expressing it through character, relationships, conflict, dialogue, symbolism and visual imagery… but hopefully you’re being subtle about it so you aren’t hitting people over the head. Samuel Goldwyn said: “If you want to send a message, call Western Union.” I think that’s why it’s important to explore different facets of theme. If you are proving the opposite thematic point of view through a secondary character or storyline as well as your main thematic point with primary characters, then you are giving us perspective and will hopefully steer clear of becoming preachy.

I think the most important and effective way to illustrate theme is through your main character. Theme is expressed through your main character’s transformational arc during the journey. How do you show this transformation? To express transformation, the need for transformation has to be established – hence the Character FLAW. Remember this: Theme is the opposite of the character’s flaw.

Theme is the lesson the character learns from going on the journey. Theme, therefore, must be illustrated through the character’s experience: The character is one way in the beginning of your movie (fully living in their flaw), but the relationships and conflict during the journey of the movie will lead the character to change/grow and end up a different way at the end (cure flaw to a degree) to get to the theme.

Many people have asked me over the years: Can my character be his own opponent? No. They are, in a sense, their own worst enemy because ultimately it is the Character’s flaw that is stopping them from getting what they want. And they will have to cure that flaw to some degree to get the goal in the end. This is why we are on the journey in the first place. This makes sense in life too. We all have certain flaws and misbehaviors that have a way of recurring and creating obstacles on our path, preventing us from getting what we want. In order for us to stop coming up against the same blocks – the same bad relationships, the same job issues, the same insecurities – WE HAVE TO GROW AND CHANGE! If you don’t have an external antagonist (someone or something) you lose the opportunity for your character to grow and change because conflict and obstacles and relationships are what force the character to confront their flaw and either remain the same or grow and change (arc) to get to the goal and the thematic lesson. Conflict and obstacles give your story stakes and momentum. Conflict comes from the fact that there is a FLAW. So…

Theme is directly related to FLAW, BECAUSE FLAW IS OPPOSITE OF THEME. Again, flaw is what the MC (main character) has to confront along the way to get to the breakthrough place, which is the THEMATIC LESSON. Here’s an easy way to approach character flaw, theme and the transformational arc. Think of it in terms of a logline.

A MAIN CHARACTER with a FLAW embarks on SECOND ACT with a CATALYST CHARACTER (S) and because of CONFLICT AND RELATIONSHIPS, CHANGES and GROWS ALONG THE JOURNEY, thus LEARNING LESSON “X” by the end.

If you know the character flaw, you know the theme. If you know the theme, you know the character flaw.

CARSON’S TAKE

Genre: Period/Epic/Sci-Fi
Premise: (from IMDB) An exploration of how the actions of individual lives impact one another in the past, present and future, as one soul is shaped from a killer into a hero, and an act of kindness ripples across centuries to inspire a revolution.
About: Wachowskis again!  This script was adapted by the Wachowskis as well as Tom Tykwer of Run Lola Run fame.  The three also directed the film together.  Cloud Atlas is a 2004 novel written by British author David Mitchell, who had written two books previous to Atlas.  The film stars Tom Hanks and Halle Berry.
Writers: The Wachowskis and Tom Tykwer (from the novel by David Mitchell)
Details: 230 pages

A PDF script is usually compressed in two different ways.  There’s the “smart” way, where the program compresses it down to a computer friendly 200 kilobytes.  And then there’s the “dumb” way, where the program creates a big lumbering 4-6 MB file.  I hate the big 4-6 MB files.  They take longer to download.  They take longer to send.  And they just obliterate your hard drive space.  So whenever I see the 5 megabyter, I roll my eyes angrily at whoever originally compressed the thing.

Naturally then, I was pissed off when I saw the 6.7 MB file size of this one.  Another dumb compression.  That is until I opened it and realized Cloud Atlas was 2 million pages long!  This wasn’t a dumb conversion, just a really long freaking screenplay!

The question that comes to mind when analyzing Cloud Atlas is, “What do you get when you try and tackle every question humanity has ever had since the beginning of time?”  Yes, Cloud Atlas is ambitious.  Maybe the most ambitious movie ever attempted.  There are six storylines spanning four different centuries.  And two of those centuries haven’t even happened yet.

Many of you have probably assumed I’ll give this one a thrashing.  I complain about the length on 120 page scripts.  Surely it would be impossible for me to like a 230 page one.  Well, a couple of things about that.  First, this was written by the Wachowskis.  Not Joe Beginner from Proudfoot, Wyoming.  Is it unfair that I give a pro more leeway than a newbie?  I don’t think so.  If someone has an established track record, you’re going to give them more rope than someone you’ve never heard of before.  Also, it was adapted from an extremely ambitious novel.  So I’d been prepped going in for what I was up against.  I knew I was going to have to reallllly focus.  Joe Beginner doesn’t have that luxury.  Nobody knows anything about his spec until they start reading it.

With that being said, the Wachowskis…I mean they just…they’re really going for something spectacular here.  And when you see the trailer, it makes you a believer.  I mean how often do we get thoughtful sci-fi, something that’s well done and actually makes us think?  Every 7 years maybe?  Still, it’s gotta work on the page.  Those images are beyond beautiful, but the black pixels must be formulated on the white screen in a way that makes sense and that moves us.  Does Cloud Atlas succeed?

Like I said, there are six storylines.  Some of them are clear, others not so much. The first is set in 1846 with a lawyer named Adam Ewing.  He’s on a boat crossing the Atlantic and finds an African-American stowaway.  The captain wants to kill him, but Ewing fights for his life, and the stowaway proves his worth.  Ewing is also keeping a diary that I believe is being read in one of the other time periods, which is how it’s (very loosely) connected to the other storylines.

The next story occurs in 1931.  A young closeted homosexual composer named Foshbinder leaves his lover, a man named Sixsmith, to train with the greatest composer in the world, a genius named Ayrs.  Ayrs is old and sick and therefore needs an assistant to help him.  Foshbinder secretly falls in love with him, and must decide whether to tell him the truth or keep it a secret.

In 1974, a reporter named Luisa Ray is investigating a nuclear power plant when she runs into Sixsmith – yes Foshbinder’s lover from the 1931 storyline.  Sixsmith seems to be holding a big secret, a secret he’s being chased for, and after meeting Luisa, wants to offload it on her.  Unfortunately he’s shot and killed before he can tell her, but he does leave behind the letters between him and Foshbinder, which she begins obsessively reading.

In 2009, an older gentleman named Cavendish, who used to be one of the biggest publishers in the world, checks into a hotel only to wake up the next morning and realize it’s an “elderly care” center.  It isn’t clear whether Cavendish is suffering from dementia or he was really wrongfully placed here.  Either way, he gets a group of fellow seniors together to try and escape the prison-like building.

In the year 2144, a clone named Sonmi-451 is being interrogated about being the first clone to break away from what she was programmed to do, which is be a slave to man.  We go back in time (as if jumping around to six different storylines wasn’t enough!) to see her story, which amounts to a human named Chang bringing her to a resistance movement in the 22nd century where she will become a key piece in the plan to free all the clones.

In the year 2346, your guess is as good as mine as to what’s going on.  The original author really went crazy here, imagining a world where people talk like insects might if they gained intelligence.  People are spitting out gibberish in copious amounts, but basically, a guy named Zachary who sees an imaginary Golum-like creature wherever he goes (I’m assuming Leprechaun up above?) is coupled up with, I think, an alien, who’s taking him to a place that can save his dying daughter???  Beats me.  This storyline, by far, is the most wacky.

So how did it all fit together?  Well, if you ever saw that movie Red Violin, you’ll love this, because Cloud Atlas is Red Violin on crack.  In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if Mitchell was inspired by that Canadian film.  But just like Red Violin, it suffers from a lot of the same problems, namely that you’re trying to find out why these six different stories really need to be told together and you come to the conclusion that they probably don’t – or at least most of them don’t.

There’s two ways to connect the stories in a movie like this.  One is with plot and the other with theme.  Plot tends to be the more audience friendly because everything ends up making sense.  With plotlines from one story intersecting plotlines from another, it’s sort of neat to see how it all comes together.  Cloud Atlas is NOT that kind of screenplay.  I mean, there’s a little plot overlap, but it’s vague and doens’t really go anywhere.

That leaves us with theme, and unfortunately, that doesn’t really work either.  Why?  Because it felt like Cloud Atlas was exploring every theme in the book.  Just watch the trailer.  At the end when the titles proudly claim, “Time, love, death, birth, hope, courage, everything is connected.”  This script REALLY IS trying to tackle every single one of these themes.  And as a result, it just never finds its footing.

But here’s the strange thing.  I still liked it.  While I’m against epics in principle because they’re so hard to get right (all but the best writers fail at them), I have a place in my heart for when they’re done well.  They’re the most emotionally rewarding of all the genres.  And if there’s one thing Cloud Atlas has, it’s a sweeping epic scale.  We’re just taken to so many different places and are following so many interesting disparate characters that you have to read on if only to experience the grand scale.  And to look at the trailer and see that they actually had the money to pull off what they were going for – I mean it’s pretty damn inspiring.

I will take this time to point out, however, why writing these kinds of movies is so challenging.  The reason this is 230 pages is not because the story wanders.  It’s 230 pages because they covered six different stories.  And when you do that, you NEED MORE SPACE.  I mean think about it, following one normal movie storyline takes 110 pages.  So had you told Cloud Atlas’ six tales in any less than the 40 pages each section received, it probably wouldn’t have been enough.  For the epicness and scale of this movie to work, those storylines needed to breath.  So attempt these multi-storyline scripts at your own risk!  Your scripts WILL get fat.

I would not encourage anybody other than experienced screenwriters (10 years of writing or more) to try something like this.  It’s just way too challenging, so I don’t want you to interpret my “worth the read” as some kind of endorsement to go write your own epic.  I just thought this script was so unique and so weird and so ambitious, that I enjoyed reading it.  So say it is and it shall be.

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

What I learned: I was JUST dealing with this in an amateur script. If you jump around in time a lot in your screenplay, it’s INCREDIBLY IMPORTANT that you KEEP US ORIENTED TIMEWISE.  The amateur script I read didn’t, and I was constantly unclear about where we were in the story, what year it was, if this was a flashback or flashforward.  At the end of every slugline in Cloud Atlas, they put the year (aka “YEAR – 1931”) – so we ALWAYS know exactly where we are.  Again, this is a huge mistake beginners make.  They think you’re in their head with them so if they decide to randomly jump back to 1912, they don’t need to tell you.  Nothing could be further from the truth.