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Will the real Jeff Spencer please stand up?
I need to talk to him. Ask him a few questions. Such as, “Will Carson once again completely disagree with his readership when it comes to a comedy script?” I’ve already had a couple of pro Jeff Spencer e-mails sent my way and am wondering if that’s the general consensus. And if so, what’s my consensus? Am I texting Jeff Spencer back or am I leaving him hanging? y don’t u read the revu & fnd out urself.
We meet Jeff Spencer on his 25th birthday hanging with his best buddies Brendan (the stud of the group), Stevie (the inappropriate fat friend), and Cooper (the not flamboyantly gay friend). They’re drinking at a hip hotel bar, talking about the big 2-5, when Jeff Spencer appears up on television. No, not this Jeff Spencer, but the “real” Jeff Spencer, TV super-stud vampire on the show “Shadows.”
Hahaha. Jeff has had to deal with this joke ever since this ass-clown became famous. But he takes it in stride, yukking it up with his buddies and letting them have their jokes. When the laughs are over, the conversation turns to the fact that Kaitlyn Taylor, the most beautiful actress in the universe, is in town shooting something. Not only that, but the rumor is that she’s staying right here at this hotel!
Liquid courage enables the friends to ask the front desk what room she’s staying in, which they inexplicably give them, and they call her up with Jeff’s phone. It goes to voice mail and they think nothing of it, getting drunker and partying into the night.
Well a day later Jeff gets a call…from Kaityln! She wants to say thanks for calling. Of course, there’s a catch. Kaitlyn thinks this is TV star Jeff Spencer and not “Fake” Jeff Spencer.
When Jeff tells his buddies about the case of mistaken identity, they want him to take full advantage of it. They want him to…TEXT HER. Jeff is not a texter by nature and initially resists but the opportunity to communicate with his dream girl is too awesome to say no to.
So he texts her. And she texts back. And he texts back. And she texts back. And they start a little texting relationship. Jeff’s friends get so involved in this relationship that one of them actually puts together a Kaitlyn “strategy team,” four girls dedicated to studying Kaitlyn so that Jeff’s texts have maximum texting punch.
Of course, Kaitlyn eventually gets to the point where she wants to see Jeff. Which is a problem. Since Jeff isn’t Jeff. He’s “Fake Jeff.” Jeff makes up a variety of excuses why he can’t see her and she eventually leaves it at this – she’ll be at a club for a big party. If he wants to come by and say hello, it’s up to him. Will the fake Jeff Spencer have the guts to go and tell Kaitlyn that he’s not the real Jeff Spencer? The script is yours to download and find out!
I can see the marketing campaign for this one already. Millions of texts appearing on smart phones everywhere. “Is this Jeff Spencer?” It’s a catchy little name, isn’t it? Almost tailor-made for movie advertising.
However, I’m afraid the problem here is that Jeff Spencer’s story could probably be boiled down to a single text. I mean this plot is sooooooooo simple. There is so little that happens that it was hard to get emotionally involved. I mean it was basically, “She texted me. Should I text her back?” “Yes.” Two scenes later. “She texted again. Should I text her back?” “Yes.” I rarely fault a screenplay for being too short, but looking back at Jeff Spencer, I feel like I’ve been the victim of a screenplay drive-by.
This also feels like it’s been written too fast. Important plot points have been glazed over. I mean these guys ask the front desk for the room number of the most famous actress in the country and they just GIVE IT TO THEM??? The guy who earns $5 an hour running a Motel 6 night desk wouldn’t give you the room number for one of his customers. But I guess they give away famous people’s room numbers at prestigious hotels if you ask nicely. And it would be so easy to have fixed this. If they had been best friends with the desk person, then it’d be believable that she’d give them Kaitlyn’s number.
Then they call the room with Jeff’s phone. This then becomes how Kaitlyn gets Fake Jeff’s number. But how did she get his number if he called the room phone? Maybe I’m missing something obvious here but I couldn’t figure that out.
Once we get into the story, the thinness really starts to hurt things. There are zero subplots here. We have 3 other characters and none of them have anything going on other than helping their buddy. Jeff doesn’t have a clear job as far as I can tell. Maybe it has something to do with editing (since he edited something for Kaitlyn at the end) but I couldn’t figure that out during the story. So it just felt like a main character whose only job was figuring out what to text a girl.
Finally, the main character didn’t have a flaw. In a comedy, you pretty much have to give your main character a fatal flaw. Even Mikey’s flaw in Swingers (which is referenced several times here) is that he can’t let go of his old girlfriend – he can’t move on – and that’s what gives his character depth. If he was just a guy trying to pick up girls in Hollywood, we wouldn’t care. It’s that he’s trying desperately to get back on the horse that makes him interesting. Here, with Jeff, there’s nothing going on inside of him, which just makes you feel like there’s nothing that’s happened in his life beyond this event with Kaitlyn.
What really makes or breaks these scripts, though, is dialogue. And the dialogue here is okay. It sounds like a group of 25 year olds talking, which is good. But the dialogue cannot just be “okay” in these scripts. It’s gotta be fucking hilarious and smart and clever all the time. It’s basically gotta blow you away. Either that or the story has to be amazing so there isn’t so much pressure on the dialogue. But since the story is so thin, everything rests on the dialogue and “relatively solid” just isn’t good enough. It’s gotta be great.
If I were Fred, I’d focus on some simple things here. Give the main character a fatal flaw. Add some subplots for the other characters. Add some variety to the main plot. And keep pushing yourself on the dialogue. Keep rewriting it until every single scene is the best you can possibly make it.
This one needs to be beefed up, and therefore wasn’t for me. :(
Script link: The Real Jeff Spencer
Oh yeah baby. It’s Tundra time. Tundra is the first Twit-Pitch script I’m reviewing from my “definite” pile. Now as many of you know, when I reviewed the first ten pages of the Twit-Pitch finalists on Twitter, I had three piles. Pass (didn’t make it to the next round). Maybe (I would look at it again later). And Definite (automatically made it to the next round). There were only 7 definites. This was one of them.
Originally I said I was only going to save the best scripts for last but I really wanted to read something good so I moved Tundra to the front of the line. Please Tundra, don’t let me down.
We’re somewhere near Antarctica inside a German U-Boat. The year is 1942, which means we’re smack dab in the middle of World War 2 when these pesky Germans and their Enigma machines were occupying every centimeter of every ocean and blowing up whatever ship they wanted. If we didn’t figure out a way to crack this Enigma code (the way the Germans communicated with each other) soon, it was looking like there’d be a statue of Hitler outside New York instead of a Statue Of Liberty.
Unfortunately, the Germans in this U-boat won’t be around to see any statues because their ship is attacked by a mysterious entity, jostled around like a can of coke inside the hands of pissed off juggler, and they all die. Cut to black.
Enter the Marines two weeks later. They’ve been sent over from the good ole U.S. of A. to grab themselves a FREE Engima machine courtesy of the mysterious water creature that burped that submarine up to the Antarctic surface. The centerpiece of this operation is a soldier named Sam Gavin, who’s just come back from a recent court martial which you can bet your ass he refuses to talk about.
When they get to the 10 million square foot skating rink, however, they find that things aren’t exactly as they expected (are they ever??). Some guy named Tillman, who’s part of a separate operation out in the Antarctic, has lost his entire camp due to some mysterious attack. Tillman’s here to guide them, I guess, first to his camp where the massacre occurred, and then to the U-Boat.
The marines aren’t too perked about this little side-mission, but they soon learn that the two incidents might be related. Once at the camp, they find a bunch of footprints heading off to the submarine, which we see is sticking ass-up out of the ice about a mile down.
When they finally get to the U-boat, however, they’re attacked by a plane. It’s the Germans, who’ve come to get that Enigma machine before the Americans do. A few marines die but it turns out they’re the lucky ones. You see, the Germans aren’t the only ones out there. An unknown species that looks like a werewolf with a shark head has placed the marines squarely in their sites and plan on killing every one of them.
So to summarize we have marines, Nazis, and werewolf creatures. We have a U-boat, an enigma machine, and also some glowing blue rod that I forgot to mention, that’s found inside the U-boat. Not sure what that’s all about, but I think Tillman wants it. In fact, Tillman wants more than that. Guy wants to capture a few of these Hunter creatures and take them back to the U.S. to study. And he’s willing to kill a marine or five to do it. With all of this chaos, who’s going to come out alive? And oh yeah, what the heck did Sam Gavin get court-martialed for?
Tundra started out great. Of course it started out great. That’s why I put it on my “definite” pile. But I started getting a little nervous soon after. Something about the dialogue felt off. I don’t know many writers who can pull off this “tough guy” marine talk well and I’m not sure Kearney succeeds either. I’ve said this before but it feels like a writer who’s watched a lot of movies with characters who talk like this as opposed to giving the marines their own distinct unique voices.
Too many writers make this mistake. Yeah, you’re writing a fun sci-fi horror thriller. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t dig into your characters’ backstories and find out what’s unique about them so that they can talk and act in a unique way. If you don’t do that extra work, you’ll fall back on cliches and stereotypes, such as…you guessed it…previous movie characters you’ve watched. Don’t think for a second that the reader doesn’t pick up on this. We do. And it’s a sad moment, because we know from that point on, the story’s going to lack an element of originality.
On the plus side, we jump into the story REALLY FAST. I mean after we meet the marines it’s off to Antarctica and the mission begins. However immediately after they get there, I started getting confused. I couldn’t figure out who exactly Tillman was or what he had to do with anything. He was the only survivor of this nearby camp? Yet he didn’t know what attacked him? Later, when we go to his camp to try and figure things out, they find footprints heading off to the submarine. If Tillman survived this thing, how come he didn’t already know everyone else ran to the submarine? Why is he finding this out for the first time with the marines? There were little pieces of information here and there that were kept from us that we needed to know in order to understand Tillman’s situation. So his whole storyline was a challenge to keep up with.
After the Germans show up, the story starts to lose form. The goals aren’t as clear. The marines split up into two groups. Tillman starts going after the hunters, which is a clear goal, but I’m not sure what Gavin and Decker (another marine) were doing in the U-boat.
As I’ve always preached on the site, you want to give your characters a clear goal – something they’re after. This it the MAIN thing you’ll need to do to keep the story focused. If you decide to split your characters up into two (or even three) groups, then, you need to give BOTH GROUPS clear goals. This is super-important because you’re now asking the audience to keep track of two separate story lines. If one of those story lines is unclear, then you’ve failed as a writer because we can’t properly follow the story anymore. I could never quite figure out what Gavin was doing in his half of the storyline and that did Tundra in for me.
Finally, I thought the end of the story could’ve used some original choices. We find out there’s a ship under the snow. It’s essentially an alien “Noah’s Ark,” with a bunch of alien animals being let loose. I’ve seen lots of versions of this before. I’ve even reviewed a spec detailing this exact same scenario. So I was sort of let down as I wanted something new and different. It’s a cool idea. But you have to remember that you’re competing against millions of imaginations. If you don’t dig deep enough, chances are you’re writing something that’s already been written.
On the technical front, the script was a quick read. The writing was descriptive and succinct. Formatting was excellent. A couple of typos but nothing terrible. If I were Burke, I would work harder on character backstory and really trying to come up with characters who are unique. Don’t just base people off your favorite movie characters. This would clear up some of the dialogue issues I had. In addition to that, challenge yourself more with plot. Dig a couple levels deeper so you erase any chance of writing something unoriginal. Oh, and clarity! Make sure the reader always knows what’s going on.
This is stronger than your average amateur effort for sure. But it’s not quite up to pro level for the reasons I listed. However, Burke has enough talent to take this feedback and kick ass on his next effort.
Script link: Tundra
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I Learned: Remember that movies primarily stimulate two senses – what you see and what you hear. Therefore, when you’re writing description, you want to focus on images and sounds. Read the first few pages of Tundra and you’ll see why I put it in the “definite” pile. The “lazy groaning of steel under pressure.” Or “Icy winds batter white-tipped waves.” “A periscope breaks through.” It points towards the “misty mass of Antarctica.” You want to transport your reader into a world. Focusing on sounds and images is the best way to do that.
Instead of driving Scriptshadow readers mad who are repeatedly pushing their “refresh” buttons to no avail, I’ve decided to announce that today is probably going to be a Scriptshadow Sick Day. Between trying to get ready for the LA move (the last two moving quotes I got were $4000???), the site, script consults, book stuff, site relaunch stuff – it all finally caught up with me. I simply could not get out of bed this morning. My body physically wouldn’t move. Therefore, the script I was going to review today, I’m going to review it next Wednesday instead.
In the meantime, to tide you over, here are 10 of the most popular Scriptshadow articles to revisit. Hopefully one of them jumpstarts that script you’ve been having trouble with. :)
10 Things You Can Learn From Aliens
10 Writing No-Nos You Can Learn From Crystal Skull
So You Wanna…
I Hate Dialogue
Scriptshadow Character Generator
GSU
How To Conquer Your Second Act
10 Things You Can Learn From Die Hard
10 Ways I Know I’m Reading An Amateur Script
Why Bad Scripts Sell
By the way, “Sick Day” sounds like it could be a cool movie idea. Anyone want to fancy a logline in the comments section? I went back to the old Disqus engine so those having trouble with Disqus this past week, your comments should post now.
Genre: Period/Historical
Genre: Sci-Fi
