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.

A good blogger never lies.  So I’m not going to lie to you today.  Last night I watched the video for Gangnam Style 213 times.  I just…I just couldn’t stop.  I memorized the lyrics.  Practiced the dance moves.  Wikipedia’d “Psy.”  And you know what?  I feel like I’ve learned something.  So much so that I almost ditched today’s script review to review the Gangnam Style video instead.  However, I realized that the video was so amazing that no amount of analysis could do it justice.  It would get a [xx] genius rating without question.  I mean the video not only makes a profound statement about horse dancing (one that puts the Chik-Fil-A debate to shame), but also the power of “sexay lady.”  It teaches us that when you have a “sexay laday” dancing next to you, you can act like a total lunatic and it doesn’t matter.  These are life lessons we’re learning here, kids.  Life lessons.

Where does that leave us today?  With a script that has a really tough act to follow, that’s where.  The last 12 hours have brought me so much joy, that La Mujer would have to take me through a life’s worth of emotions and back again if it was going to have a shot at “worth the read” status.

I will now channel the elevator shot from Gangnam Style to review La Mujer.

La Mujer is about…well…La Mujer!  A beautiful “sexay laday” who walks around South America whispering profound statements into people’s ears that change their lives for the better.  We don’t hear any of these profound statements – not yet anyway – we just see people’s eyes light up and their world’s rocked.

In the meantime, we meet Thomas Kemp, a journalist for the New York Times who seems to be going through some mid-life crisis.  Despite having tons of work to do, he’s obsessed with finding his birth records, to the point where he assigns an intern to take care of his work while he heads down to South America to find them.

Unfortunately for Thom, his boss, Clara, doesn’t have…what are those called again?  Oh yeah, FEELINGS!  She could give a shit about Thom’s soul-searching.  It just so happens that a prominent Ecuadorian ambassador, one who was best friends with the U.S. president in college, has been slaughtered, along with his family.  Clara wants Thom in Ecuador now to get the story.

Thom begrudgingly goes, and along the way hears about this La Mujer woman.  She’s becoming a sort of traveling celebrity, instantly changing the lives of everyone she comes in contact with.  Thom thinks that sounds like a much better story than the slaughtering of a prominent family for some reason, and unofficially decides to focus on her.  Maybe she can clear up this whole birth certificate thing he’s been obsessing over while he’s at it.

Problem is, there are some people who don’t like the fact that La Mujer’s alive.  I’m a little unclear on the specifics, but I think she was supposed to be killed some time ago, along with her daughter.  The bad guys who did this, then, are shocked to learn she’s not only alive, but going around whispering in people’s ears!!  So they regroup to find La Mujer and kill her off for good.  Which means if Thom’s going to get the birth certificate thing figured out, he’ll have to move fast!

In the immortal words of Psy, the genius behind the greatest song ever conceived: “Beautiful, lovable, yes you, hey, yes you, hey, beautiful, lovable, yes you, hey, yes you, hey. Now let’s go until the end.  Oppa is Gangnam Style.”

That actually has nothing to do with this review.  I just wanted to quote Gangnam Style.  Anyway, while La Mujer gets some points for its mystery elements, such as who this La Mujer lady is and why is it that everyone freaks out when she whispers in their ear, the script as a whole suffers from two tried and true beginner mistakes which I harp on all the time here at Scriptshadow…

Clarity and Focus.

The story is unclear. The plot is unfocused.  Add those two mistakes together and it’s hard for a script to recover.  Let’s start with the clarity thing.  I couldn’t for the life of me figure out what Thom was looking for.  Something about his birth certificate?  But his birth certificate was being kept from him for some reason?  Maybe because he was adopted?  Did he just find out he was adopted?  Does he only suspect he was adopted?  Or has he always known and just now decided to look into it?  I have no idea.  Because the script is unclear about it.

And because it’s unclear, there are no stakes attached to his success or failure.  If he doesn’t find out who his parents are, what happens to him?  As far as I can tell, nothing.

La Mujer’s storyline is also unclear.  She seems to be roaming the countryside, telling people secrets about themselves that are impossible for her to know, which was a little intriguing.  But where is she going?  What’s her goal?  In the end, she ends up at the home of one of her attackers, but I can’t tell if that’s where she was always going or if she was just wandering around aimlessly and eventually ended up there.

This leads us to the issue of focus – if we don’t know what your characters are doing – what their goals are – then the story is going to seem random to us.  I never knew what La Mujer was doing.  I never knew what Thom was doing.

The only time the script took on any type of focus was when Thom’s boss ordered him to investigate the massacre (which happens around the midway point).  FINALLY, the story seemed to have a clear objective.  Unfortunately, that storyline was dealt with in the same unclear manner as everything else.  There was some confusion as to whether 8 people or 6 people were murdered, but I couldn’t ever figure out what that had to do with anything.  In addition to that, Thom didn’t even care about the investigation, so we had an unclear set of circumstances and an unmotivated protagonist.  Not exactly the stuff great stories are made of.

If I were Steve, this is what I’d do.  Have the massacre happen RIGHT AWAY.  Maybe it’s the first scene of the movie.  Then, have Clara assign the story to Thom, who goes down there to investigate it.  Drop the weird birth certificate stuff.  It was confusing and not very interesting anyway.  What this will do is tell the audience from the get-go that THIS is the story’s focus – the investigation of the massacre.

From there, you can weave in the mysterious La Mujer.  Maybe, on the day of the massacre, a lot of people claim to have seen her around town.  So Thom wants to talk to this girl for his investigation.  Now we’re not playing “Guess the motivation.”  Every plot point is clear from the get-go.  You can still keep La Mujer’s goal a mystery to the audience.  The reason it was a problem before was because both her AND Thom’s objectives were mysteries and it just led to a whole lot of confusion.  Since you’ve established Thom’s goal right away, the audience will be more tolerant of a secondary character being a mystery.

However, make sure that YOU know where La Mujer is going and what she’s doing.  Her ending has to make us go “Ohhhh, of course!” instead of, “Uhhhhh, what??” which is unfortunately how I responded to her climax in this draft.

Script link: La Mujer

What I Learned: When someone complains that your script is “unfocused,” it usually boils down to one of two things – the goal for the main character is unclear, OR, there’s no goal in the first place.  Think about it.  If your main character has a clear objective (or “goal”) then the story automatically stays on track, since the character is focused on achieving that goal.  In La Mujer, Thom does have a goal – to figure out who his parents are I think?  But it’s unclear as hell, so we’re not really invested in it.  This makes the story seem unfocused and we eventually check out.

So as you know, last week was kind of a disaster.  Actually, I wouldn’t say “disaster.”  But when I put together the Twit-Pitch competition, I had these grand illusions of finding the next great undiscovered talent.  And hey, it might still happen.  I’ve only reviewed the “maybes” so far, not the “definites,” and the definites are the best of the bunch.

But what upset me was the general lack of quality in the screenplays entered.  I get that everyone is at a different point in their journey, but with the exception of Fatties, none of these scripts was even close to good enough.  As I battled with that, I began to understand one of the biggest issues facing aspiring screenwriters – They don’t know what level of quality is expected of them.  How can you jump over the bar if you don’t know how high the bar is?

The simple answer to this is AIM AS HIGH AS YOU CAN.  Never EVER give out one of your screenplays unless it’s legitimately (no lying to yourself) the best possible screenplay you’re capable of writing at that stage of your career.  If you follow that one rule, you’ll put yourself ahead of 80% of the writers out there, even if you’re just starting out.

Now I wish that was all you needed to do but it isn’t.  This is still a craft.  Effort isn’t the determining factor. There are character-related rules to learn, story machinations to ingest, plotting to grasp, basic dramaturgy you need to know.  That’s why you gotta read as many scripts as you can and write as many scripts as your little fingers will allow.  With that said, here are seven mistakes that popped out at me from reading the amateur scripts from the last two weeks.  Avoid them at all costs!

BEWARE OF FORCED PLOT POINTS – What Man Of Your Dreams reminded me was that you can never allow the plot machine to become visible to the reader.  Your plot MUST BE INVISIBLE.  One of the challenges of writing a good screenplay is that it NOT FEEL LIKE A SCREENPLAY!  It has to feel like real life.  The reader must become so wrapped up in it that they forget they’re reading.  If you’re pushing contrivances and coincidences on us, we become acutely aware that a story is being written.  For example, in Dreams, our main character has a dream that she’s at the altar marrying a doctor named Tom.  Since she’s convinced her dreams come true, she’s spent her entire life looking for a doctor named Tom.  As a reader, however, I’m going, “Okay well how does she have this dream and not see the guy’s face?” It’s, of course, a plot contrivance.  If she knows what he looks like, there’s no movie.  And how is it exactly that she knows he’s a doctor?  Is he dressed in doctor’s scrubs at the wedding?  Does the priest say, “Do you marry…Doctor Tom?”  The fact that I’m thinking about all this stuff and not just enjoying the story is a perfect example of the plot being too visible.

MAKE SURE THERE’S ENOUGH PLOT IN THE FIRST PLACE – The Last Rough Rider was a big reminder of what happens when you don’t pack enough plot into your story.  Plot can be boiled down to a series of story developments.  It might be a side mission your hero has to go on before he can tackle his main mission.  It might be that the bad guys catch him and throw him in a dungeon.  It might be the wife getting captured, so that he now has to save her IN ADDITION TO stopping the villains.  It might be that the villain who we thought was dead reemerges.  It might be subplots with other characters.  It might be an unexpected twist, where we learn an ally is actually a spy.  If all your character is doing is trying to get from point A to point B, as is the case in Rough Rider, your plot will feel too thin.

GIVE US SOMETHING WE HAVEN’T SEEN BEFORE – The lone Twit-Pitch success so far, Fatties, is a great reminder that readers respond to uniqueness.  One of the big mistakes writers make is they assume the reader has read or seen the exact same amount of scripts or movies they have.  They erroneously believe, then, that if something is unique to them, it will be unique to the reader.  Wrong.  A typical reader has read way more scripts than you have, and probably seen tons more movies as well.  For that reason, you have to go beyond what you think is “new” or “different” and push yourself to find something that’s truly beyond what anybody else has thought of.  Even if a reader doesn’t like a script, he’ll usually commend you for coming up with something unique.  Unfortunately, almost all writers keep typing up the same stories.  And us readers have to keep reading them.

PLAY TO YOUR STRENGTHS AS A WRITER – Most young writers aren’t yet aware of what their strengths are.  If you’re writing in a genre that doesn’t suit your kind of writing, it’s like Clint Black trying to sing opera. The two just don’t go together.  Crimson Road reminded me that if you’re not a dialogue king, then you don’t want to write a movie like Scream, or any teenager-driven film, as they tend to rely heavily on clever and punchy dialogue.  Be honest with yourself.  Identify what you’re good at and what you aren’t.  Then, cater the genres and stories you choose to highlight those strengths.

REWRITE!!!! – I said it above but I’ll say it again: The one thing that should never be in question when you write a screenplay is effort.  Yet it’s one of the most common mistakes I see new writers make.  They think as long as they throw something together that mildly resembles a movie, they’ve done their job, and you should praise them.  Yet these are the scripts readers laugh at, or cry about, or complain to one another about.  We say to each other, “Why the hell would he send this out to anyone?  There are five spelling/grammar mistakes in the first ten pages.”  “There are three scenes out of the first six that convey the exact same thing.” “In the first act, no story emerges.”  “Characters just babble to each other about nothing.  No one’s pushing the story forward.”  “There are no scenes here.”  “This feels like it was thrown together on a Saturday night.”  If your’e a new screenwriter, don’t show your script to anyone unless you’ve done at least ten drafts.  You heard that right.  Ten drafts.  Every draft should be better than the previous one.  A lot of work?  Yeah.  But you’re going up against professional writers who know how to craft a story a lot better than you do and they’re putting in twenty drafts.  So your doing ten is just to ensure you don’t embarrass yourself.  Screenwriting takes just as much effort to master as brain surgery.  If you’re not willing to put in that effort, do something else.

PAINTING YOUR WORLD IS GOOD – PAINTING YOUR STORY IS BETTER – One of the more common things I see is writers with a lot of talent who focus on the wrong thing.  The Mad Dogs writers are a good example.  These guys created this big sprawling imaginative world that was admittedly cool, yet they didn’t spend half as much time on the story itself.  All of the imagination and focus went into the bells and whistles – the visuals and the mythology.  I’m not saying that stuff isn’t important.  It is.  But the story itself is WAY MORE IMPORTANT. Characters going after goals we care about.  A story that pulls us in immediately and never lets go.  Relationships with issues we want to see resolved.  Fun story twists to keep us guessing.  People we like and want to root for.  The truth is, an imaginative world should always be the backdrop to the more important element, which is the story itself.

AMATEUR COMEDIES ALMOST ALWAYS SUCK – DON’T BE ONE OF THEM – One thing I’ve found is that the comedy genre is the easiest genre to come up with a movie idea for yet the hardest for amateurs to execute.  Everyone thinks they’re funny.  Everyone has friends who laugh at their jokes.  So they think, “Why can’t I be a comedy writer?”  It’s a lot tougher than that.  You have to learn how to structure a story, how to pace a story, how to extend a story premise out to 110 pages.  You have to learn how to build a story around real characters with real problems as opposed to coming up with a string of jokes or a series of funny scenes.  Start with your main character and his flaw.  In 95% of comedies, the hero should have a fatal flaw he needs to overcome, whether it be arrogance or fear or he’s too wound up or he doesn’t take things seriously.  If a character is fighting some kind of a flaw in a comedy, I immediately know that the script is going to be ten times better than the average amateur comedy.  Do that and I promise you, your script won’t be taken as a joke.

Look, I want everyone who reads this site to become a great screenwriter.  But it’s not just going to “happen.”  It takes work and effort and trial and error and patience and failure after failure after failure until you finally come into your own.  Take this craft seriously.  Every free second you have, do something screenwriting-related.  Whether it be studying or reading or writing.  Hold yourself to higher standards.  Rewrite the shit out of your scripts.  Send your scripts to friends or consultants before sending them out into the world and ask them, point blank, “Is this any good?” I’ve saved a lot of screenwriters from losing key contacts or embarrassing themselves because they or their scripts just weren’t ready.  Screenwriting is a profession.  Be professional.  Stop giving out your work unless it’s legitimately the best you’re capable of.  You can do better!  

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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