Guest reviewer Andrew Page gets a chance to review a screenplay about one of his idols, Jimi Hendrix.

Hello all. As I work tirelessly around the clock to bring you some fun Scriptshadow changes in the coming months, I’ll be depending on longtime Scriptshadow readers to fill in with the occasional guest review. Today, I want everyone to welcome Andrew Page, who’ll be reviewing a genre I avoid like the plague, the biopic! All you biopic fans rejoice, cause you know these don’t come along often. I’ll be back tomorrow with a strange sci-fi spec.

Today’s screenplay probably won’t win the Nicholl anytime soon, but it might just win your death from laughing so hard.

Genre: Comedy
Premise: An angry bitter 30-something finds a loophole in the National Spelling Bee rules which allows him to join the competition.
About: Bad Words made the 2011 Black List, finishing near the middle of the pack. This is Andrew Dodge’s breakthrough screenplay.
Writer: Andrew C. Dodge
Details: 106 pages, undated (This is an early draft of the script. The situations, characters, and plot may change significantly by the time the film is released. This is not a definitive statement about the project, but rather an analysis of this unique draft as it pertains to the craft of screenwriting).

The Bad Trilogy. First, there was Bad Santa. Then…there was Bad Teacher. And now, the trilogy is complete with…………BAD WORDS! The baddest of all the baddery. And boy is this one bad. You thought Billy Bob Thorton was bad. You ain’t seen nothing yet. Buster.

I have no idea what your reaction is going to be to this script. Nobody agreed with me on He’s Fucking Perfect except for the funny people. This is way more extreme than that. It’s low-brow. It’s vulgar. It’s cruel. It’s anti-human. It’s basically one man telling everyone else to fuck off for 90 minutes. Oh, while spelling words in the meantime. If you are cynical, or if you’re one of those really nice people who secretly laughs at the less fortunate, you’ll love this.

Guy Duncan is a bitter dude. He’s one of those guys who thinks the world is after him – that everybody wants to take him down. So his plan is to take everybody down first. And right now, he’s set his sights on the 2012 Scripps National Spelling Bee. You see Guy found this loophole in the rules that states as long as you haven’t graduated 8th grade yet, you’re eligible for the Bee. And Guy never graduated 8th grade. He’s even got the documentation to prove it (how you get documentation to prove you *didn’t* graduate from somewhere is beyond me).

Try as they may, try as they might, the Bee organizers can’t find a way to legally keep Guy out of the competition. But they figure he won’t last long anyway so what’s the harm? I mean, he didn’t even graduate 8th grade. How good can he be?

V-E-R-Y G-O-O-D. Great even. Amazing.

One of the funnier earlier moments is watching the kids go through their time tested routines when given a word (“Could you give the country of origin please?” “Could you use the word in a sentence please?”) taking hours upon hours to get to the actual spelling of the word. Then Guy marches up, and before the judge can even finish the word, Guy spells it and trudges back to his chair.

The organizers quickly realize – they might be in trouble.

And that seems to be Guy’s focus – causing trouble. Except we’re not sure why. I mean, this guy has a huge chip on his shoulder for SOME reason. But we’re never given a C-L-U-E as to what it is.

Eventually, Guy meets Chaitanya, a weird clueless 12 year old Indian boy who’s a favorite in the competition but who’s so hopelessly awkward, he has no friends. He also has no social awareness whatsoever, so when he asks Guy if he wants to hang out and Guy tells him to fuck off, it doesn’t faze him. He just shrugs his shoulders, stands there for awhile, then changes the subject, asking him what his favorite color is or something.

At a certain point Guy realizes there’s no getting rid of Chaitanya, so he just starts hanging out with him. Chaitanya plays games by himself while Guy drinks all of Chaitanya’s booze from his mini-fridge. Little by little, though, Guy realizes that Chaitanya’s not too different from him. They’re both outsiders, misfits in their own way, so Guy, although he’d never admit it, actually starts to like the kid.

As you can probably guess (and if you can’t, you’ve never seen a movie before), Guy and Chaitanya end up battling it out for the final prize. What you won’t guess is how it goes down, as their spell-off transforms into one of the weirder showdowns ever.

I’ll give Bad Words this. The Spelling Bee is the perfect subject matter for a comedy. I don’t know why it hasn’t been done before. I mean – and I say this with all the love and respect in the world – these kids are so dorky! And dorkiness is comedy gold. Chaitanya is comedy gold. Who hasn’t met a kid just like him before?

But the thing that’s going to determine your love (or hate) for this script is if you like angry humor. If you like grown men sitting down next to fat 12 year old children and saying, “Christ. Would it kill you to lose some weight? I barely have any room here,” you’re going to love this. And I admit – I hate to say it – but I laughed. At that and a lot more of these transactions.

The thing is, a couple of months back, we reviewed an amateur script titled “Mrs. Satan,” where the main character, a girl, was kind of a bitch. And the argument in the comments section was that she wasn’t likable enough for us to root for. The writer pointed out that movies like Bad Santa had asshole main characters that worked. Why couldn’t he do the same?

Eventually someone made a great point. He said, the reason Bad Santa worked was because of the irony. Santa isn’t supposed to be bad. That’s what makes it so funny. Same thing with Bad Teacher. A teacher isn’t supposed to be a bitch. She’s supposed to be helpful!

The irony in Bad Words isn’t as obvious, but there is some irony in a grown man competing in a children’s competition. So even though the guy’s a big jerk, the irony of the situation has you giggling despite yourself.

What you also want to take away from Bad Words is that most beginner writers come up with funny ideas, yet by page 20, they run out of story. They’ve used up all their funny “grown man in a spelling bee” jokes. So what are you left with? The way to extend any idea out to feature length is via relationships.

So Dodge wisely brings in Chaitanya and that friendship is what moves the story through its second act. If you’re not building compelling relationships, you don’t have a second act. Exploring those and resolving those is what writing screenplays is all about.

Now was that enough to save Bad Words? Well, I’m not sure. It still felt a little thin to me. Maybe that single relationship wasn’t enough. Maybe Dodge needed another one. He tried to create one with Guy and his assistant/journalist, Jenny, but that character was so weak, I’d forget about her the second she wasn’t in a scene. I’m not sure her inclusion even makes sense.

I wouldn’t have minded a more extensive exploration of Chaitnaya and his father, as there seemed to be some real meat to that relationship there. However, maybe Dodge didn’t want to go that deep.

But you know what? As it stands, Bad Words is still pretty good. I mean, I laughed out loud at least a dozen times, which is a very good sign for a comedy. You rarely laugh if you don’t care about what’s going on. So I’m going to give this a “worth the read.” It ain’t going to change the world, but it might entertain it a little.

[ ] Wait for the rewrite
[ ] wasn’t for me
[x] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius

What I learned: Be careful about shrouding your character’s main motivation in mystery. Audiences become frustrated when they don’t know why their hero is doing what he’s doing. For example here, we have no idea why Guy wants to win this contest. You can make the argument that this causes curiosity, which entices the reader to keep reading. But most of the time, it just causes frustration. We want to know: “Why the hell is he doing this???” I mean, isn’t that what movies are about? People going after things that are important to them? If we don’t know why they’re going after them in the first place, we’re missing a key component to enjoying the movie. I’m not saying this approach NEVER works. I’m sure a few of you can point out examples where it does. I’m just saying be careful if you use it because it’s really hard to pull off.

 
Come one, come all, and join me tomorrow for the Scriptshadow Super Bowl Tweet Party.  In it, I will be tweeting thoughtless but illuminating observations about the game and commercials.  But here’s the best part.  During my unquestionably insightful but meaningless rants, I will extract TEN – count’em – TEN screenwriting lessons gleamed from the Super Bowl.  Impossible you say?  Pft. I can find a screenwriting tip in a garbage can (right next to a few of the scripts I reviewed last month).  So join me for this screenwriting super bowl bonanza.  I promise to mildly entertain you!

What better screenwriting treat is there than a pilot…about a pilot! I ditch the normal screenplay review today to take a rare look at a teleplay.

Amateur Friday Submission Process: To submit your script for an Amateur Review, send it in PDF form, along with your title, genre, logline, and why I should read your script to Carsonreeves3@gmail.com. Keep in mind your script will be posted in the review (feel free to keep your identity and script title private by providing an alias and fake title). Also, it’s a good idea to resubmit every couple of weeks so that your submission stays near the top of the pile.

Genre: (TV pilot) – Crime
Premise: From the writer: Based on a true story, Full Tilt Boogie follows Danny, a middle-aged pot pilot who juggles his life as a smuggler busting the US/Mexican border with his responsibilities as a father and ex-husband.
About: This story is based on the writer’s own father! The script was a top ten finalist in the Scriptpipeline TV competition. It’s also been a finalist in several other competitions.
Writer: Amber Crawford-Idell
Details: 59 pages

How about today’s pilot? The author is the daughter of our hero! I actually didn’t know that when I first read it. It definitely colors my perception in retrospect. But after thinking about it for awhile, I believe Amber’s closeness to the material is both its biggest strength and its biggest weakness. This is no doubt a fascinating situation with writing that leaves most amateurs clutching their bags in the standby line as their plane speeds down the runway. But on the storytelling end, I’m not sure this one ever gets off the ground. It’s not time to cancel this flight yet though. I think with a little help, it can still get to its destination.

48-year-old Danny is a pot smuggler. He shuttles weed back and forth across the Mexican border in a small airplane with a small crew. But on this particular evening, his plan has gone haywire and he and his buddies find themselves in the Mexican desert running from the authorities. They’re just barely able to get away, but the next day, when they head down to their plane, IT’S GONE!

Strangely, Danny doesn’t seem too concerned about this. I don’t know about you, but when I’m flying a couple of million dollars’ worth of weed around, I get upset when it disappears. To Danny’s credit, he does want to get to the bottom of it, but man does it not seem like a priority.

After questioning several folks, he ends up at a large private party in Mexico where he’s offered the lead pilot job on a big operation. But Danny’s not interested in getting bigger and instead heads back to America to explain to his business partner that his plane vanished.

Shockingly, when he gets there, he finds out his plane – with the marijuana and everything in tow– has just SHOWN UP. Nobody knows how it got there. Nobody knows who flew the thing. It simply arrived without a trace.

It isn’t long before this intriguing mystery is answered, and not in a very satisfying way. Apparently, a Mexican child saw Danny flying through the mountains late at night many years ago. After seeing how happy Danny was, the young man decided he was going to grow up and work with Danny. So he’s been researching/stalking Danny ever since. Now a man, he’s taken it upon himself to prove to Danny he’s worthy, I guess by stealing his plane?

Hmm, I’m not sure that’s the best way to get someone to hire you. Steal a couple million bucks of their property. Why not just approach him and ask for a job? I had some other problems with this section as well. How do you even see a man, at night, hundreds (thousands?) of feet above you, flying by at 200 miles per hour? Much less how happy they are? Wouldn’t that be impossible??

Anyway, the twist is that the man is the son of Danny’s drug rival, and he wants to take down his father just as much as Danny does. At the end of the episode, Danny flies back to America and it’s there where we realize he actually has a normal family life with a son and a daughter, who have no idea that he’s secretly running drugs across the Mexican border every day.

There’s lots of fuel for a TV show here. Combined with the high level of writing, Amber has a genuine reason to be excited about Full Tilt Boogie.

But what this pilot lacks is storytelling. There’s never a clear through line to the story. Danny’s in Mexico, he goes back to America, he’s back in Mexico, then he’s back in America, then he goes back to Mexico, then he goes back to America. I understand the nature of this show requires our character to fly around a lot but because we’re never in one place for very long, the story never gets a chance to establish anything.

I was particularly confused by a sequence where Danny flies to some random town – either in America or Mexico – and just randomly bumps into a Mexican girlfriend who he throws a roll of money at and then flies away. You can’t waste scenes in your script, ever. What did this have to do with anything?

Granted, I’m not as savvy about TV writing as I am features, but this script needs a clear goal with some high stakes. What I would do is focus the entire pilot on the disappearing plane. Instead of that being solved by the midpoint, I’d draw it out until the very end. That, then, is your hero’s goal – to find out what happened to the plane.

But where I’d really change things up is in the stakes department. Right now, Danny doesn’t care about his 2 million dollar payload and plane being stolen. And neither does anyone else to be honest. Not only does that not make sense, but it’s boring.

Obviously, this marijuana is someone’s. And if there’s someone who just lost $2,000,000 worth of marijuana, they’re going to be angry. And they’re going to take that out on whoever lost the marijuana. Which means our buddy Danny needs to be in BIG TROUBLE. If he doesn’t find that plane and those drugs soon, he’s dead. NOW you have yourself a story!

Stakes need to be raised in other places as well. For example, in another scene Danny steals an airplane from one of the biggest drug dealers in Mexico. Does the dealer get angry? No, not at all. He actually forgets about it. And when Danny brings it back, the dealer doesn’t even mention it.

I don’t know about you, but the Mexican drug cartels I hear about don’t forget about stuff like that. They decapitate stuff like that. Then throw the bodies on the local highway. In other words, they’re fucking scary. All the drug people in this script are like your best friends from high school. That needs to change.

Amber’s got some major writing talent. Now she just needs to focus on the storytelling component. When in doubt, always go back to GSU!

Script link: Full Tilt Boogie

[ ] Wait for the rewrite
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius

What I learned: This is a HUGE problem I see over and over again with young writers: Lack of clarity in the writing. If a reader misinterprets one plot point, they might be confused for the rest of the script. Therefore you have to be clear about what’s going on! For example, in the opening scene, Danny and several other drug runners are being chased by Mexican agents. As they’re running, we see their plane down by an airfield with a bunch of marijuana beside it. Danny and the men hide in a hole, barely escaping the agents. The next day, Danny comes out to see that the plane and the drugs are missing. Now with what I’ve told you so far, what would *you* assume happened to the plane? The agents took it, right? That’s what I thought at least. But Danny seemed shocked that the plane was gone. Well isn’t that the whole reason the agents were chasing you? Because you were smuggling drugs? Therefore if they saw your plane full of drugs, wouldn’t they confiscate it? That lack of clarity resulted in me being confused for the next 20 pages. I just kept thinking, why doesn’t he know that the agents took it? — There’s another scene later on where Danny is at a big Mexican party. He’s offered a job and a brand new plane, but it’s never made clear whether he accepts the job or not. We next see him on the outskirts of the mansion, talking to his buddy. They then hop into the plane that was a part of the deal and fly off in it. But because it wasn’t adequately explained whether he turned down the job or not, I couldn’t figure out if had just stolen the plane or had taken it for the job. This is a big deal! Because it’s a totally different story if he’s given the plane or he’s taken it. It’s your duty as a writer to make all of these things crystal clear. The murkier your writing is, the more confusing, and therefore less enjoyable, your script will be.

I take a look at the movie for one of my favorite screenplays, The Grey. But does a major script change derail the experience?

I have seen The Grey!!!

The question is, have I lived to tell about it?

Barely. I almost had heart attacks on three separate occasions. After recovering, I went back to the Tweetdeck where I went over everyone’s responses to the film and realized this movie is seriously dividing people. I think I know why.

Actually, that’s the understatement of the year. I KNOW why. This darn ENDING. Talk about a risky choice. But I’m getting ahead of myself. Let’s talk about the rest of this movie first, which was pretty damn awesome!

The first difference I noticed between the script and the movie was just how relentless Carnahan was. I mean he took everything on the page and amped it up tenfold. The sound in particular was just relentless. People who’ve survived plane crashes say the noise of all that metal mashing together is like no noise you’ve ever heard. I think Carnahan captured that noise – and then some. I can still hear the shrieking and the tearing of that metal a day later.

And that wind – it’s just whipping at you so loudly, you feel like you’re standing out there right next to Ottway. I’m not kidding. I found myself subconsciously closing my shoulders to stay warm.

And the howling of those wolves. Oh my God! I got chills up my spine. It was like every corner of that theater was transformed into an Alaskan forest.

I also loved the Jaws approach Carnahan took with the wolves. When we first see those glowing eyes staring us down through the darkness? Yikes! That’s the kind of stuff that’s hard to convey on the page.

And I especially loved the kills. I was caught off guard by nearly every one of them – and I knew when they were coming! It was just like it would really be – complete silence one second and then BAM! A wolf’s got you by the neck and is yanking you back into the darkness. Awesome!

Now it’s been awhile since I read the script but that “jump-tether” scene is new right? Even though the idea was completely ridiculous (those trees looked really far away), it quickly became one of the best scenes in the movie. One thing you can’t write is how Carnahan holds the camera on Dermot Mulroney’s face (who’s terrified of heights) for a full minute before it’s his turn to shimmy across the tether. Then, without cutting, we follow him as he gets on the rope and starts crawling across, a 1000 foot drop underneath him.

When you’re writing a scene like this, you want to look for any opportunity to make things even worse for your character. So I loved the choice to give him a broken hand (forcing him to use his elbow to hold on instead of his hand). And then of course when his foot buckle gets caught on the rope (what the hell do you do now??).

And I loved how Carnahan used the moment as a red herring, making us think the sequence was going to be about getting his foot unhooked. Except a second later – SNAP! – the rope breaks, and he goes swinging into the trees where we follow him crashing into each and every branch as he falls with brutal force (THWACK! THWACK! THWACK!!!). Until finally – THUMP! – he SLAMS into the ground. You could hear his bones break.

And then of course, before he dies, the wolves come shooting out of the forest and eat him. AWESOME!

Everything up to that point, I loved. From there, though, I think the film lost some steam. And I remember the script losing a little steam around this area as well. But here, Carnahan really starts to take his time, and I think it’s a dangerous choice. Remember guys, the end of the second act is where 95% of scripts lose their footing. There’s a tendency to meander in this section, to let things play out instead of keeping the script moving and building up to the finale.

Diaz’s farewell, in particular, felt a good 2-3 minutes too long (however I loved how Carnahan pushed in on him from behind afterwards, all alone, the low grumbling of wolves nearby, getting ready to feast.).

I also had some issues with the characters. And this was my one gripe with the script itself. The secondary characters didn’t make enough of an impact – they weren’t memorable enough. Outside of Ottway and Diaz (the asshole) none of the other characters really popped.

And I remember wondering if casting would fix that. I actually thought the casting was quite good. But the result proved what I suspected – you can’t fix underwritten characters with casting. It has to be on the page.

Obviously, Ottway was memorable, with everything he was going through. Diaz was memorable because he was the opposing voice – the dissident. But what about everyone else? The big dude was just “the sick guy.” I can’t remember much about Mulroney’s character except that he was scared of heights. The guy who lasts til the end with Ottway – I couldn’t figure out what he brought to the table. Flannery looked interesting but he got killed early on (I remember him lasting longer in the script).

It’s just so important to define each character with a strong memorable trait or they’ll disappear onscreen. The thing is, those “middle” characters are always tough to write. If they’re not your alpha dog hero or the boisterous asshole, how do you make them memorable? How do you make them stick out? Anybody can be memorable if they’re yelling at someone. I think all writers deal with this problem. I’d be interested to hear your thoughts on this. How do YOU make YOUR middle characters memorable?

I’ll tell you another place where Carnahan made a major change: the theme. The script to me was more about man vs. nature and how man wasn’t that much different from animal. There’s still a lot of that here but this film seems to be more about faith, about holding out hope and believing in something, whether it be a higher power or that you’re going to make it out of this alive.

I thought it worked in places, but it felt like one of those deals (and we’ve all been here) where you decide to make that change late in the writing process, and so SOME of the script reflects it, but the other part’s still about your original vision. The first 3/5 of The Grey still feels like man vs. nature to me, while the last 2/5 is about faith.

Had Carnahan had more time, he probably could’ve weaved that theme in there a little more effectively. But I think this is why people are having problems with this last 2/5 of the film. Thematically, it feels slightly different form the movie we were watching earlier.

I’m not saying I didn’t like it. I’m just saying it didn’t quite fit.

And that brings us to our ending. When Ottway cracks those fucking liquor bottles and tapes them to his left hand then tapes that knife to his right hand, I got goose bumps. I was ready for the battle that I had read in the screenplay. This is why I came to see this movie. Ottway vs. the Alpha Wolf.

And then…. (spoilers)

And then…the movie ended.

I’m still trying to figure this choice out. Was it artistic? Was it budgetary? Did the animatronic wolf break down? Did the fight look fake? Could they not use the footage? We know the battle was in the script so we know Carnahan wanted it (at some point at least). So why the decision not to use it?

Was it because of the change in theme? Because Carnahan decided it really wasn’t about man fighting wolves? But about faith?

I don’t know. But I felt like the audience deserved that fight. Could you imagine kids walking out of the theater after that battle? They’d be telling every friend they know how awesome it was.

And yeah, I know if you wait until after the credits (spoiler) you see Ottway lying on the wolf, seemingly victorious. But that left me with more questions than answers. It indicated that there might have been a fight that was cut out of the film. Also missing from the script was the helicopter coming down after the fight. Because that GPS device was so heavily set up during the film, that also tells me the original ending was filmed but not used.

But I guess this discussion is fruitless until Carnahan talks about it or we get an alternate ending on the DVD. I’d love to see a version of this film with that fight. Maybe even when they re-release it in October.

Still, I really enjoyed this film. I’m still thinking about it almost every second of the day, and it’s rare a movie makes me do that. I mean it was just raw in-your-face filmmaking. Definitely worth checking out.

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

What I learned: I love the use of quick flashbacks. Long flashbacks take up too much time in your script and slow the story down. But quick flashbacks are great. They convey what you need to convey but do so quickly. We needed to see that Ottway had someone back home. So Carnahan would momentarily cut to he and his wife together for maybe 5-10 seconds and then we’d cut back to the present.