So as I was reading Laymen’s Terms earlier this week and going ga-ga over all the great villainy in the script, I realized that I hadn’t yet breached the subject of villains in any extensive way on the site.  And there’s a reason for that.  I hadn’t developed an extensive enough take on the matter!  Which is strange, because I’m a huge proponent of having great villains in your screenplay. Audiences often like to root against the villain just as much as they like to root for the hero.  So if you’re only including a hero in your script, you’re depriving the audience of half the fun!  I don’t care if you’re writing a romantic comedy, an indie drama, or a period piece.  99% of the time, there better be a villain involved!

So who are some of the great villains in cinema history?  Well of course there’s Darth Vader, Buffalo Bill, Longshanks (Braveheart), Hans Gruber, Michael Myers, The Joker, Hannibal, Apollo, the T-1000.  There’s also Agent Smith (Matrix), Annie Wilkes (Misery), Drago, Mr. Potter (It’s A Wonderful Life), Tommy Devito (Joe Pesci – Goodfellas), Hans Landa (Inglorious Basterds), Anton Chigurh (No Country…), Max Cady (Cape Fear), Alex Forest (Fatal Attraction), John Doe (Seven), Alonzo Harris (Training Day) plus many many more.

Strangely enough, I’ve found that what works as villainy in one movie may not work in another.  Sometimes you need your villain to be calculated, other times you need him to be terrifying.  It all depends on the situaiton, the genre, and the type of story you’re telling. So before we go into what makes a good villain, let’s first identify the different kinds of villains.

The Nasty Villain – I’d say this is the most common villain of all.  If you want a villain that gets the audience all riled up with hatred, this villain is your pick.  They seem to be driven by an unseen evil force that will stop at nothing to destroy our hero. Annie Wilkes, Mr. Potter, Anton Chigurh, even the blond haired baddie in The Karate Kid.  These are bad bad guys.  However, these villains can backfire on if you if they’re too thin, and a lot of amateurs make this mistake.  They make the villains nasty just because they’re the bad guy in the story.  To combat this, make sure to add a solid motivation behind their actions.   Anton wants his money.  Annie is obsessed with Paul Sheldon’s books.  Mr. Potter wants every last piece of this town.  Even super-thin Karate Kid Blondie hates Daniel because he’s stolen his girl.  Your villain can be a really bad person.  Just make sure they have a little motivation behind their badness.

The Complicated Villain –  “Complicated” is usually code for a villain with some backstory.  I remember this gained popularity after the 80s Batman movies.  Tim Burton started showing the complicated histories behind why these baddies became bad.  All of a sudden, our villains obtained depth.  They had a past.  We could almost sympathize with them in a way.  This created a more complicated reaction to the character for the audience – shades of gray instead of straight black and white.  Max Cady from Cape Fear, for example, endured years of rape and degradation inside a prison because the man he’s now stalking put him there.  I’m not going to say I like Max Cady because of this, but I definitely understand him better.  The danger in writing this type of villain is that they become too sympathetic.   If we start sympathizing with the villain too much because of their troubled past, we don’t want to see them go down.  So be careful!

The Sorta Likable Villain – These villains are bad, but there’s also something alluring, interesting, or cool about them that makes us sort of like them.  Apollo Creed, Darth Vader, and Hannibal Lecter are all “Sorta Likable” villains.  I find that a lot of the time, sorta likable villains exist in a film where there’s a villain worse than them.  This allows us to root against someone while still kinda rooting for the cooler villain.  With Darth Vader in Star Wars, the real villain is Grand Moff Tarkin.  With Darth Vader in Empire and Jedi, the real villain is the Emperor.  In Lambs, Hannibal isn’t the top villain.  That title goes to Buffallo Bill.

The Comedic Villain – Seen only in comedies, these villains can be tough to get right.  They must be funny, but not so funny that they aren’t threatening.  I read a lot of comedy scripts where the villain is funny, but also such a goofball or so stupid that I don’t see them as a serious threat.  Therefore, you have to find that perfect balance.  Matt Dillon’s character in There’s Something About Mary is a great comedic villain.  Shooter McGavin in Happy Gilmore is a great comedic villain.  As much as I love Dumb and Dumber, those two villains were so bumbling that I was never scared of them, and that may have hurt the movie just a tad.  One of the most surefire traits to add to a comedic villain to ensure we’ll want to see them go down is arrogance.  Arrogance gets an audience riled up every time.  And it just seems to mix perfectly with comedy bad guys.

The Hidden Villain – Sometimes stories dictate, due to your bad guy being a mystery, that you not reveal your villain until the third act.  If you’re going to do this, you’re going to need an antagonistic force to challenge your hero in the meantime.  While an antogonist can be a villain, in these cases, they’re usually not.  Take The Fugitive for example.  (spoiler alert!) Dr. Charles Nichols is the surprise villain in the third act. But Tommy Lee Jones’ character is the antagonist for the first two acts.  It’s important that the hero always have an antagonist force pushing against him in the screenplay or else there’s no conflict.  Which is why a hidden villain can be a dangerous move.  However, if you substitute another antagonistic force in the meantime, you should be okay.

No Villain – I strongly discourage writing a script without a villain.  But if you’re going to do it, you better have a great antagonist pushing up against your character for the entire movie.  In most cases, if there is no villain in the script, the antagonist is nature.  Take Castaway for example.  That movie is villain-free.  But it has a strong antagonist – the island.  The Grey is another example.  The antagonist is the weather and the wolves. Those are the forces relentlessly pushing against our characters.  So sure, the no-villain approach can be done, but you better have some kick ass antagonistic nature if you’re going to pull it off.

Okay, we’ve identified the kind of villains in a script.  Now it’s time to determine what actually makes a good villain? Once again, not all of these things will work all of the time and certain combinations may work in some situations while not in others.  You have to assess what kind of story you’re telling and add the appropriate villainous traits.

Pompous – Like I mentioned above, a pompous character is a hated character.  There’s just something about people who are full of themselves that riles us up.  We NEED to see them go down.  Look at Apollo Creed in Rocky.  That man LOVED himself.  So we were dying to see Rocky beat him.

Stronger than our hero – This is a big one.  If a villain is weaker than our hero, we’ll have no doubt as to who will win in the end.  That’s bad.  What makes movies fun is when we think our hero has no shot because the villain is too strong.  Hans Gruber in Die Hard is the perfect example.  The man just oozes confidence and intelligence.  You really think he has his shit together, and that makes us seriously doubt if John McClane is going to win in the end.

Intelligent – This doesn’t ALWAYS have to be the case, particularly in comedies, but I love villains who can go toe-to-toe with our hero intellectually.  It creates the same effect as strength.  You always fear that they just might outthink our hero.  Prince Humperdink from The Princess Bride (who’s MAJORLY ARROGANT by the way) is actually a really smart guy.  He looks over the battleground after the Man In Black and Inigo Montoya’s sword fight and knows exactly how it went down and which direction the Man in Black went.  Smart villains are worthier villains.

Deceitful – Everybody hates deceitful people, people who go back on their promises.  Therefore this is a great trait to give your villain.  One of the scenes in Star Wars where our hatred for Grand Moth Tarken goes through the roof is when he asks Princess Leia where the Rebel Base is, promising he’ll spare her planet if she does.  She ends up telling him, and he goes ahead and blows the planet up anyway!  Or in Up.  Charles Muntz pretends to be all nice and friendly to our heroes.  Until his true colors come out later.  We hate deceitful people!

Emotionless – Sociopaths are REALLY SCARY.  Cold and collected, villains who feel no remorse for killing are as terrifying as it gets.  They just have that blank emotionless look on their faces?  Ugh, creeee-py!  Look no further than the flagship villain for this category, Anton Chigurgh in No Country For Old Men.  This dude is terrifying because he doesn’t have a single feeling bone in his body.  John Doe from Seven is another one.

Motivated – Most villains only work if they have a strong motivation behind their actions.  Take the T-1000 in Terminator 2 for example.  He’s been programmed to come here and eradicate John Connor in order to make sure the machines win the war in the future.  It’s a simple motivation, but it’s also dead solid.  We understand why he’s obsessed with killing John Connor at all costs.  You can certainly try writing an unmotivated villain, like The Joker in The Dark Knight, but be careful.  Villains who do bad shit just to do bad shit often confuse and frustrate the reader.  Also, it’s likely your villain won’t have 80 years of built-up audience awareness behind him to get an audience to go with it, such as the case is with The Joker.

Villain is strongest where hero is weakest – This is often tied into a hero’s fatal flaw, and therefore can be quite powerful if applied correctly.  The idea is that whatever your hero’s flaw is – whatever his biggest weakness is – make the villain extremely powerful in that area.  Take Luke Skywalker for example.  His flaw is that he doesn’t believe in himself.  Darth Vader, on the other hand, is the epitome of belief.  He’s the most confident motherf*cker in the galaxy (buoyed by his expertise in The Force).  Because Vader is so strong in the area that our hero struggles with the most, it creates a sense of doubt in whether Luke will be able to defeat him, and those situation tend to be the most compelling to watch.

Backstory – This is a choice.  You don’t have to do it.  But backstory adds depth to your villain, and readers/producers/agents tend to favor depth.  They want some info on why your bad guy turned into a bad guy.  Well, here’s my take on that.  I think what they really want is to know is something about your villain before the story began.  It doesn’t have to be WHY they became a bad person (i.e. daddy used to beat me when I was a kid), it can simply be fucked up pieces of that character’s past.  For example, the backstory we get on Hannibal is that he tore people’s faces off and used to be a therapist who preyed on his victims.  It doesn’t really tell us why he’s the way he is, but it adds depth to his character since we know more about him.  I will also say this about backstory.  Be careful about making your villain’s situation too sympathetic.  At a certain point, if we’re sympathizing with them too much, we don’t want to see them go down.  And we have to want to see the villain go down.

And there you have it!  My take on how to create a great villain.  However, like a lot of these articles, I feel like I’m only scratching the surface.  I know you guys have some thoughts of your own on how to create great villains, so throw’em at me.  If there’s anything really good, I’ll add it to the article! :)

Genre: Sci-Fi
Premise: 100 years in the future, artificially intelligent robots begin to rebel, forcing the planet to build a world of generators that fry anything with circuitry, as its the only sure way to eradicate all robotic forces. Little do they know that a group of A.I. robots have escaped to deep space, where they are training humans to help them take back the planet.
About: This is a script from the Zombieland writers, who have ditched the horror and the humor this time around for serious sci-fi.  The script sold a couple of weeks ago.  For those who turn their noses up at writers who aren’t writing A-list projects, note that co-writer Rhett Reese’s first feature credit was Cruel Intentions 3, and that Reese and Wernick were doing reality TV before breaking through with Zombieland.  You gotta start at the bottom, folks, then work your way up!
Writers: Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick
Details: 109 pages, Sept. 10, 2012 draft

What I learned: This is sort of a unique “What I learned” but helpful enough to mention.  Writers will set their scenes or montages to music all the time.  They’ll name the title of the song that’s playing at the beginning of the sequence, then proceed to write the scene.  The problem with this is, since the music isn’t actually *playing*, the reader will forget it.  So if you’re really trying to set the mood of a scene through music, it’s likely that mood won’t stick.  In the bizarre opening sequence to Epsilon, the writers set it to Patsy Cline’s “I Fall to Pieces.” As the sequence goes on, a couple of pages later, Reese and Wernick organically weave into the action description, “Patsy Cline continues to sing about things falling to pieces.” It seems like a harmless line, but it immediately reminded me that the music was playing, keeping the intended cinematic effect alive.  Remember guys, the reader CAN’T HEAR music.  So if you have it playing over montages or long scenes, look for ways to subtly remind the reader that it’s there.

Genre: Period
Premise: In a small town during the 1935 dust bowl, a former soldier must protect a fleeing city woman from a group of gangsters who want her dead.
About: I don’t know much about the writer, but this script made the Black List in 2008.  People have been describing it as the next Low Dweller (now titled “Into The Furnace.”) although I’ve been told it’s very “Desperate Hours’ish” as well.
Writer: Jeremy H. Bailey
Details: 110 pages (undated)

So there’re two things I’ve been going gaga about over the past month.  One is Gangnam Style and two is Desperate Hours.  Both are amazing and world-changing in their own way.  Now if there was some way to combine these two forces into one super-force…well gosh-darnit we might have the single greatest piece of entertainment in world history.  The only thing better than that mobster battle in Act 3 of Hours would be if Psy popped out and said…..LONG PAUSE…”Oppam Gangnam style!” and started doing the horsie dance.  And then the pelvic-thrusting elevator guy began doing his pelvic-thrusting elevator dance to ward off some of the mobsters.  I know if I were one of those mobsters, I’d run for my life.

What were we talking about again?  Oh yeah, a period piece.  Makes total sense that I’m including a South Korean pop star in this review then.  So the reason I picked this script today was because someone told me it was similar to Hours, but “EVEN BETTER.”  Well, since it took me over two years to crown a new number 1 script on my Top 25 list, I’m not sure how you can get any better than that, but I was willing to give it a shot.

And I quickly found out that it was, indeed, similar to Hours in many ways.  Both scripts start out in a really depressing era, with Layman’s beginning during the Dustbowl.  Don’t know what the Dustbowl is?  From my shaky history class memory, it was the time after we planted all our crops and didn’t consider how to keep the moisture intact (something about crop rotation?).  So all the land went dry, and that caused these huge dust storms to swirl around the country, making the problem even worse.  Basically, America went all North Korea farming, to stick with today’s theme.

This has caused the tiny Oklahoma town of Red Thistle to go near-broke.  The only one with any money is a not-very-nice man named Two Bills Calahan.  A fat bald sweaty pervert of a fellow, Two Bills understands the power he yields, and he makes sure he takes advantage of every ounce of it.  This guy is such a scumbag that he actually brings in a beautiful struggling farmer’s widow every day, Evelyn, and pays her for his sexual needs.  Evelyn, who has a sick daughter, is so desperate for money that she has no choice but to do it.

Staying with Evelyn, it turns out she lost her husband in the war, and got back his brother as the prize.  Crane McNamee has been shunned by the community since he left town when they needed him most, and has come back with his tail between his legs to take care of Evelyn now that she’s living alone with her daughter.  The two have a complicated relationship that revolves around her constantly being pissed off at him.

Their relationship is about to get even more complicated though as, during one of the many dust storms, Crane finds a crashed car on the side of the road with a passed out woman and a dead men inside  He schleps the woman, a city girl we’ll come to know as Cassidy, back to his house, not knowing that the men who were chasing her aren’t far behind.

These men, led by a really scary motherf*cker named Washington, head to the middle of Red Thistle and demand to know where this woman is.  They make a deal with Two Bill that whoever finds her first gets a reward, and that Two Bill gets half of it.  Never one to turn away money, Two Bill takes the fight to the people, encouraging them to look under ever rock, behind every loose board.  They MUST find this woman.  And the people, desperate for money, become a senseless mob in the process.

Naturally, word comes down that Crane is hiding her, and Washington’s crew, along with the town, go to claim their prize.  But Crane is not giving her up.  He’ll do anything, including becoming the killer he left in the past, to protect her.  An awkward four-pronged battle then ensues between Crane, Washington, Two Bill, and the town, which seems headed in one direction and one direction only: Disaster.

It’s hard to write this review without comparing Layman’s to Hours.  Had I read Layman’s first, I’m sure I would’ve rated it higher.  It’s still a very good script, but in the back of my head I was always saying, “Oooh, Hours did that better.”  The first thing that struck me was the time and place.  What I liked about Hours was that it was set at the end of all that depressing shit.  America had started to recover.  There was a sense of hope.  With Layman’s, it’s set in the heart of hopelessness.  The Dustbowl had made everyone as poor as dirt, and there didn’t seem to be any end to it.  It was super-damn depressing. Like, the complete opposite of watching the Gangnam Style video.

I was actually telling a friend about the script after I read it, and I realized after a few minutes what I was saying…”Dustbowl, dying daughter with pneumonia, mom who must prostitute herself to stay afloat, crippled main character, dead soldier brother” — and all of a sudden we both just started laughing at how depressing it all was.  And the thing is, it really isn’t as bad as it sounds, but yeah, the hopelessness definitely played a part in my reaction here.

I’ll tell you one area where Layman’s DID eclipse Hours, though, and that was in the villain department.  It has two really nasty villains, one in Two-Bill and the other in Washington.  These are just two really BAD dudes, each in their own way.  And like I always say, if you can develop a great villain, you will rope in the reader.  Because there’s nothing more fun than watching a villain you hate go down.

To me, that’s what sets this script apart.  I so wanted to see this pompous megalomaniac Washington get his ass handed to him by Crane.  But the thing is, it could’ve been even better.  Crane was an okay protagonist, but not nearly as good as Frank from Hours.  With Frank, his situation was always clear.  He’d lost his family to the Spanish flu and he was still in love with the woman he left when he was young, only to come back and find out she’d married another man.  With Crane, there was something about how he could’ve saved his brother in the war but didn’t.  Maybe??  I wasn’t sure.  I could also never figure out what his relationship was with Evelyn.  Was he just a caretaker or was there more there?  She seemed to hate him.  But at the end she says she always loved him.  Loved him as a family member or like “in love” with him?  I couldn’t figure that out.  And it drives me batty when main characters’ intentions and motivations and their situations are unclear.  I just couldn’t get a handle on Crane.

The ending, also, was a little confusing.  At a certain point (spoiler) Cassidy tells Crane she came here for him?  But wait?  Why did she wait until the very end to tell him that?  Did she not know who he was yet?  I’m not sure.  It was one of those situations where it felt like the writer was so set on the twist, that he was going to force it in there through hell or high water, regardless of if it was clear or not.  I’m not upset about it.  Let’s face it: WE’VE ALL BEEN THERE.  But still, that third act definitely could’ve used another draft or two.

But boy oh boy, those villains.  They really kept me around wanting to know what happened.  They were so strong, in fact, and so fun to watch, that they pumped this script up to a double worth-the-read.  Them and that damn rain-maker, who was a stroke of atmospheric genius!

What I learned: Today’s “what I learned” came out of nowhere.  I realized that having two villains go toe-to-toe is a guaranteed great scene!  My favorite scene in the script is when Washington and his gang interrupt a church sermon to confront our other villain, Two Bills, to ask where their girl is.  There’s something about seeing two evil factions who we’ve met individually square off against each other that’s fascinating.  I just couldn’t wait to see who was going to bend first.  This is a cool tip to remember.

Genre: Dark Comedy
Premise: When the writer dies, a struggling creative exec changes the name on his screenplay to his own, only to find out that there are others who’ve read the screenplay, others who he must now take care of.
About: This script sold all the way back in 1997 and obviously never became a movie (unless it was released under a different title and went straight to DVD??). Now through sheer coincidence, Mr. Queen did not have a single feature credit until last year, when he wrote Cars 2.  Man, making a career in screenwriting can be a looooong journey!
Writer: Benjamin Queen
Details: 131 pages – October 1997 draft

Hey, who am I to turn down a spec about screenwriting!?  With like deceit and murder ‘n stuff.  Not only that, but it was set back in 1997, which makes the read almost comical in how much everything has changed since then.  I mean, people were sending each other PHYSICAL DRAFTS of screenplays in the 90s. With, like, BRADS ‘n stuff.  What’s a brad?

Calm down calm down.  Before the anti-Scriptshadowers begin their uproar, I *do* know what a brad is.  However the rest of this world is quite foreign to me.  Everything is done physically as opposed to digitally, which means if this script were ever to be made today, it would need to be majorly rewritten.  I guess that’s the question, isn’t it?  Is One Track Mind good enough to be rewritten?

Well it starts off introducing us to Clay Buckley, a 25 year old creative exec at mega-movie-star Max Rebello’s production company.  Except Max Rebello is never there and doesn’t even know who Clay is, so it’s not as glamorous a job as one might assume.  In addition to that, Clay works under an asshole of a boss, V.P. of Production Larry Dealing (who we never actually see, only hear).  All these things are a reminder of just how low on the totem pole Clay is.  He’s just another tadpole in the gigantic pond that is Hollywood.  And he’ll continue to be, until he finds that next great script.

But the next great script hunt isn’t going so well.  It’s the same old garbage from the same old agencies. He’s being slipped scripts left and right, but nothing’s actually sticking.  And on top of that, there’s one writer who lives in the middle of nowhere who continues to clog up their mailing system with the same script over and over again.  Ugh! Amateurs! – they just never give up!

Unbeknownst to him, however, that very script ends up in his bag before a meeting with another creative exec, frenemy Jennifer.  Jennifer is desperate for some other script she’s been tasked with finding for her boss because if she doesn’t find it, she’ll lose her job.  Because Clay has this script, she needs his help.  Clay has to keep the script private, however, so he tells her no.  She apologizes for putting him on the spot and they go their separate ways.

That night, just out of curiosity, Clay starts reading the amateur script, and it’s AMAZING.  He contacts the writer, who happens to have just gotten to LA, and sets up a meeting on the Universal lot.  They meet the next day, and the writer tells him that no one knows he’s a writer and that he’s never sent the script to anyone else.  He then proceeds to back up into the street and get RUN OVER by one of Universal’s back-lot tourist trams.  And DIES!

Clay is horrified by the ordeal but then realizes…hey wait a minute…NO ONE knows about this script.  So Clay changes the name on the script to his own and gives it to a buddy at another studio.  He’s going to sell this script for a cool million, dammit, and not a soul is going to know the truth.

Errrr…not so fast.  Remember Jennifer?  Yeah, it turns out that meeting was a little con.  She did it to distract Clay while her assistant took the script from Clay’s bag, ran to Kinkos, and made a copy.  Except the dumb assistant copied the WRONG SCRIPT.  The DEAD GUY’S SCRIPT.

Oh shit.

Clay goes to Jennifer to get the script back, but it turns out Jennifer has read it!  And she loved it!  And wants to know all about the writer.  Clay demands the script back and the two struggle for it with Jennifer falling directly on one of the script’s brads, which impales her neck right at the main artery, killing her!  Yes, death by brad!  What’s a brad again?

Clay gets the hell out of there, with the script of course, and it finally looks like he’s in the clear.  Except then he finds out Jennifer slipped the script to someone else.  And of course when he goes to that person, he finds out the script’s been slipped to someone else, and so on and so forth.  So Clay must race to all of these people and CONTAIN the mess, which oftentimes means KILLING THEM.

When it’s all said and done, Clay is either going to sell this damn script or be forever blackballed in Hollywood or…you know, go to prison for the rest of his life.

One Track Mind (a strange misguided title if there ever was one) was a pretty funny little script and I can totally see why it sold.  It’s got a situation at the heart of it that’d have all the nuts in Hollywood wondering what they would do in the same situation, and it’s actually quite clever a lot of the time.

For example, when Jennifer is killed by the brad, it turns out she didn’t die right away, and is able to scrawl onto the floor in her own blood, “Clay did it.”  Clay luckily stumbles upon the scene right before the cops get there and changes the scrawled message to, “C.A.A did it.”

Then there’s the genius choice to make Max Rebello, the movie star Clay works for but has never met, researching his next role as a detective.  So Max is actually with all the detectives when they’re investigating Clay’s murders.  Max, of course, is the only one who’s putting the pieces together, so it’s him who’s actually realizing that Clay did it.  But because he’s just a dumb movie star, the other cops ignore him.

There were some issues with the script though, in my opinion.  First, I hate when young writers write young characters who are supposedly in these “my life is over if I don’t figure this out” situations, when they’re only 25 years old.  Clay’s life is supposedly going to fall apart if he doesn’t find that next big script soon, but really, he’s only 25.  If he gets fired, he still has his whole life ahead of him. He’ll get plenty more chances.  If he was, say, 35, now you have a character who really is in trouble if he doesn’t figure this out.  It really is his last shot.  I don’t know – I just felt like there was no desperate reason why he needed to put his name on this script.

Had he been made a little older and his boss would’ve made it clear that if he didn’t bring something great in soon, he was going to be fired, then we would’ve felt Clay’s desperation more, and his reasoning for taking the risk that he did.  This wasn’t a deal breaker by any means.  I was still into the story.  It’s just nice when you make the stakes clear.

There were also some conveniences that bothered me.  Jennifer for example.  Someone he needs to erase from the equation conveniently falls and dies?  The falling on a brad made it funny enough that you almost ignored it, but it just seemed a little too perfect that, now, a second person who he needs to die, dies for him.  And honestly?  I don’t like when anybody dies by falling down.  It just seems…I don’t know, lazy.

And finally, I cannot fathom that Queen, someone who was clearly a creative exec or reader himself, as he knows so much about this world, would write a 130 page script!  That’s, like, rule #1!  That’s what all the readers and execs joke about.  “Some writer sent me a 130 page script.  Give me a fucking break!”  Either Queen really thought highly of himself or this was an early draft.

Actually, I’m prone to think it was an early draft, as the script definitely got sloppier as it went on.  The first half was tight and focused, while the second half started splitting into too many threads with too many stories to clean up.  And the ending, which involves an unexpected request by one of the main characters, didn’t make sense at all.

Despite all that, I did want to keep reading and I did want to find out what would happen until the end.  And if you’ve achieved that with your screenplay, you’ve done something right!

Script link: One Track Mind

What I learned: Beware the “sloppier as you go on” problem.  I see this quite a bit.  We write from the top down.  Therefore, we ALWAYS put more time into the first half of our scripts than the second.  This means the second half isn’t as well-tuned, and that’s a problem because the second half actually needs MORE attention than the first half.  That’s the half where you wrap everything up, where you make everything make sense.  If that isn’t written to perfection, your script will seem sloppy, or worse, confusing. One Track Mind definitely suffered from this problem.

Genre: Sci-Fi/Western

I remember reading through the first ten pages of this one and thinking…hmmm, now this is different.  Writers are trying to come up with high concept ideas all the time.  But it’s a tough proposition.  I encounter a lot of ideas that seem high concept, or are high concept “on paper,” but there’s something about them that doesn’t scream movie high concept, the kind of true bona fide high concept idea you hear and you say, “Oooh, now that’s a movie I’d check out.”  And it’s usually a tiny unique addition to a tried-and-true idea that does it.  The tried and true idea here is a small group of people fighting off “monsters.”  The unique twist is that they aren’t “monsters,” per se, but rather mech machines designed to kill humans.

And I’ll just be honest.  I’m a sucker for movies where a hero wakes up someplace unfamiliar with no idea how he got there.  I know it’s cliche.  I know it’s been done a billion times over, but I just think it’s such a compelling situation.  That’s why I put this one in the coveted “definite” pile when I first read it. However, the “definite” pile hasn’t exactly been a bastion of quality.  None of the definites so far have even reached “worth the read” status.  Let’s hope today’s script changes that.

John Caan has just woken up in a Mexican pueblo.  He doesn’t know where he is.  He doesn’t know how he got here.  He’s never even been to Mexico.  So why he would be here is beyond him.  But that’s not even on the radar right now.  What is on the radar are the noises coming from outside.

Caan peeks out the window to see the most horrifying most baffling sight he’s ever seen in his life.  Large mech machines, with saws, with machetes, with lasers, with guns, are massacring a bunch of people in the town square.

While this would be too much for any sane man to handle, Caan’s slightly insane.  And he knows exactly what he has to do.  GET THE HELL OUT OF HERE.  So he loads up his gun and heads outside to get the huh-zell out of Dodge.  There are people dying all around him but he doesn’t care.  It isn’t until a small girl is in trouble that he actually does anything.  But after saving her, he slips out and heads through the desert to safety.

Except it’s not that easy.  Far off in the desert he encounters a huge electrically charged fence.  And more MECHS, standing guard, making sure no humans make it past them.  They chase Caan back to the town and it’s time for plan B.

Back in the town we meet a series of other characters – Michael, the almost Alpha-Male, Lily, the mother of the child Caan saved, Petra, a 20-something goth girl, Tom, a 50-something ex-cop, and a few more.  This is Caan’s army.  And they’re all looking to him for leadership.

But Caan’s not interested in being a leader.  He just wants to find a way out of this situation.  Unfortunately, that’ll mean fending these mechs off for a few days while he figures things out.  So he reluctantly rallies the troops and does the best job he can.

The thing is, nothing goes quite as expected.  The weirdness of this situation just keeps getting weirder. For example, sometimes the mechs don’t want to kill them.  They just want to toy with them.  And (spoiler), the group finds a room deep under the town where 9 bodies lie.  A closer look at the bodies show that they’re exact copies of THEM.

So yeah, shit is pretty f*cked up!  Caan not only needs to find out how to get them out of this alive, but also what the hell is going on here.  And boy is it a shocker when he does figure out the truth!

First off, this is superbly written.  The lines are lean.  The prose is bare but descriptive.  This feels like a spec.  It feels like something that deserves to go out wide and vie for producers’ attention.

And it nails a lot of its components as well.  Our anti-hero leader, Caan, is mysterious and dark enough to keep our interest throughout. Dare I say he’s a worthy successor to Mad Max himself with his selfish yet reluctantly compassionate demeanor.

The situation driving the story is so damn weird (human-killing mechs) that you have to keep reading to find out why the hell this is all happening.  And surprisingly enough – while I admit a tad far-fetched and “out there,” the explanation is – it worked for me in regards to the universe Topham created. That’s where these scripts always fall apart.  An outrageous situation to start the script, yet the writer never explains that situation in a satisfactory way.  I don’t know if it’s that Topham is such a good writer that you believed it all despite its weirdness, or if it honestly just felt right, but it made sense to me and I was satisfied.

I liked the nice little twists and turns also.  For example, early on Caan finds a drawing in a school that shows a man shot in the head, the same man he just saw shot in the exact same way minutes ago.  And (spoiler), when the characters find dead versions of themselves in a room…that’s when I really took notice.  I like those “sit up” moments in a script – moments that are so shocking or weird or cool, that you actually readjust yourself and sit up.  That doesn’t happen very often!

The script is always kept moving by the inherent GSU.  The goal is to hold of the mechs and find a way out of here.  The urgency is the constant barrage of mechs that keep coming.  And the stakes are, obviously, their lives.

I liked how Topham always kept his characters active too.  One of the pitfalls of placing your characters in a confined area is that you’ll just have them sitting around doing nothing for long stretches of time.  In order to combat this, you must always give them a plan, always keep them trying to achieve something, never sitting down and talking in safety for too long. I remember I reviewed an Amateur script awhile back called “Zombie Knights,” that had this exact problem.  The characters just got inside the castle grounds and hung out.  Nothing happened for long stretches of time.  That can NEVER be the case in this kind of story or in a spec script period.

The only real issues I had here surrounded Caan.  Even though I liked him (and I’ll go into why in the ‘what I learned’ section), there were times where he tested me.  He was almost too brooding.  And the eventual reveal to his backstory was boring.  It could’ve been a lot better.  And seriously, writers, don’t have your heroes deliberately kill nice animals – EVER.  When Caan kills the dog/coyote in this, I was like, “Really?? Are you trying to make us hate this guy?”  I find that a little bit of dark or gallows humor can quickly up the likability quotient of your anti-hero.  Let’s go that route instead of making him a dog-killer.

Anyway, this one was fun!  And it now takes the lead as THE BEST TWIT-PITCH SCRIPT OF THE CONTEST!  Check it out yourself in the link below!

Script link: Proving Ground (Since the writer didn’t want his contact info on the script, if you like the script and want to get in touch with the writer, e-mail me and I’ll put you in contact).

What I learned: When you have a brooding protagonist, an anti-hero, or a protagonist who doesn’t talk much, it can be hard for the audience to like/sympathize with him.   The lack of talking makes it difficult to identify with or get into the hero’s head.  Therefore, look to make us like your character through action or choice.  Proving Ground does a great job of this early on.  While everyone’s fighting off the mechs, Caan is simply trying to escape.  That moment presents itself when a mech leaves its guard at the gate to go kill a little girl.  Caan has a choice now.  He can slip out the unattended gate or save the girl.  In the end, he chooses to save the girl.  It’s this action, this choice that makes us like him! Oh, and always place these moments EARLY ON.  It’s important that we like our hero right away!