The Captain America screenwriters tackle the Cold War with this 2009 Black List screenplay
Genre: Spy/Romance
Premise: (from the Black List) Two spies fall in love while participating in separate Cold War missions in Prague during the 1980s.
About: This finished in the middle of the pack of the 2009 Black List. Markus and McFeely, the writers, have a list of impressive credits on their resume which include all three Chronicles of Narnia films and, most recently, Captain America.
Writers: Christopher Markus & Stephen McFeely (based on the short story by Arthur Phillips)
Details: 123 pages – May 14th, 2009 – 2nd draft (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).
Okay, I have a lot to say about this one but before I do, I’m going to put forth a theory on what I think went down. This is just a theory. I have no inside information. But it’s the only thing that makes sense. Especially because today’s writers are no slouches. You don’t get writing credit on some of the biggest movies of the year by being a hack.
Remember, almost all the money writers make in this business is from assignment work. For that reason, writers are forced to consistently take on material that isn’t very good. It’s sort of the same predicament non-A-List actors are in. Sure, they’d all love to be in the latest David Fincher or Quentin Tarantino movie, but only a few actors in the world are lucky enough to get those opportunities.
For those who don’t, they need to make a living. And that usually means, at least occasionally, being in Spieces 4: The Egg Layer. Especially if they’re willing to pay you a trunk full of cash to be in it.
That’s the big misperception about screenwriting – that it’s an all or nothing deal. You’re either Joe Nobody, or Dan Fogelman, making 2.5 million dollars per spec. I got news for you. There’s this whole area in between where writers are jockeying for position to get on any project that’s going to pay them money, regardless of whether the project’s any good or not.
I mean, if you were offered $200,000 to adapt some book you knew was terrible, would you do it? Of course you would.
I bring this up because this is the only way I can explain today’s screenplay. I’m guessing that the short story this script was based on was so boring that it had no hope of being turned into a good script. These writers did the best that they could, and delivered the best possible draft they could, but because the material was so devoid of story, the screenplay was doomed from the start. Let’s take a look at the plot, if that’s what you want to call it.
It’s the 1980s. 20-something Tyler Vanalden is working as a low level US official in Czechoslovakia. Tyler is sly. Tyler is charming. He’s a guy you’d want to hang out with on a Friday night.
At the beginning of the story, he walks into a local bar and runs into Jarmila, a beautiful Czechoslovakian woman. He’s instantly smitten by her, or so it seems, and they start chatting. As we will later find out, Tyler is targeting this woman for possible information gathering. I think. Actually I have no idea because it was never adequately explained.
Eventually we realize that Jarmila holds a similar low level position at her country’s own information gathering agency. She, in fact, is targeting Tyler just like he’s targeting her. But what she doesn’t know is that Tyler knows she’s targeting him. I think. Maybe?
So as the two start a love affair – or “fake” love affair – Tyler starts feeding her enough low-level information to gain her trust. In the meantime, he’s also extracting information from her. Or at least, that’s what he tells his bosses. I personally never saw it. The only thing I ever heard them talking about was some boyfriend of hers that the script dedicates 50% of its time to even though we never meet the guy or understand what he has to do with anything. I wish I could wrap up this synopsis with some kind of definable climax but there really isn’t one. The two just keep talking the entire script in repetitive scene after repetitive scene until the screenplay runs out of pages.
Now it should be noted, this is a second draft. So you have to give the script some leniency. However, it’s the draft that made The Black List, which is why I’m reviewing it.
Okay, so, where to start here. This is actually a situation that *should* work for a movie. You have two spies, both hiding their identities from each other, who start falling in love. You have built-in dramatic irony, conflict, tension. So why doesn’t any of it work?
Simple. There aren’t any stakes! Not only are these two on the lowest rung of the ladder in their respective agencies, but absolutely nothing will happen to them if either of them get caught. Seriously, ask yourself, what happens if one of these two catches the other? I’m guessing they shrug their shoulders, smile, say “You got me,” and walk away.
This is a huge issue in a script like this. Stakes are everything. But what makes the script so bad is that the motivations are ALSO non-existent. We’re never sure why anybody is doing anything. What is it these two agents/agencies are trying to get from one another? We’re never told. So now you have no clear motivation and no clear stakes. That is a recipe for screenplay disaster.
The lack of these two critical components puts all of the focus squarely on the love story– on the interaction between the two leads. And that too is below average. Which means there’s nothing in this screenplay to get excited about.
The thing is, there’s potential for a story here somewhere. We find out near the end that this was all happening right before the fall of communism. But even though that information would’ve benefited the story greatly, nobody ever gives us a hint that it might happen.
Why not put the state of the entire Cold War on the shoulders of these two characters? Now you have stakes. Now their lies to one another actually mean something. Now lives are the line. Freedom is on the line. Nuclear war is on the line. Doesn’t that sound just a tad more exciting than the stakes of the current script –Jarmila’s husband being angry with her?
There were also a lot of confusing choices in the screenplay. For example, one of the Czechoslovakian agents is named Johnny 1950. No, you didn’t read that wrong. A Czech agent is named “Johnny 1950.” How does that even make sense? Wouldn’t that be like a CIA agent named Yvgengy 1812? I don’t know man, I just kept shaking my head during this script, wondering if it was some sort of joke.
And then people would say things that made no sense. Here’s a character line from after the Berlin Wall is torn down: “Look, our primary job now is to sift the fallout for gold. If the Communists bail, there are going to be a lot of spooks in the wind, and not all of them want to go house hunting in Moscow.” I don’t have any idea what that means.
I will throw up this disclaimer. I’m not the biggest spy movie fan. So I may have missed a lot of nuances here. And I had a similar reaction to that German film everybody loved, “The Lives Of Others,” so who knows? Maybe I just didn’t get it. But no matter how hard I try, I can’t find anything good about this screenplay. I don’t understand how it made the Black List. Maybe spy fans can enlighten me.
[x] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: “Love” cannot be the only thing at stake in your movie. There must be something bigger. If you look at another love story – Titanic – Rose deciding whether or not to be with Jack isn’t just about her. Her father left her family in a boatload of debt (no pun intended). For that reason, if Rose doesn’t marry Cal, she’s not just hurting herself, she’s hurting her mother, who will likely have to become a seamstress. And then, of course, there’s the whole second half of the movie, where the characters’ very lives are at stake. This was my issue with Wencesles Square. The only thing at stake was the characters’ feelings for one another. That can carry a small portion of the movie. But it can’t carry the whole thing.
This is not the current Scriptshadow site. That’s still back at the old page here – http://scriptshadow.blogspot.com/
We should have the new site up and running by November 1st, 2012.
There hasn’t been a good art heist screenplay in over a decade. Does The Fugitive screenwriter finally crack the code?
Genre: Action/Adventure/Heist
Premise: A pair of rival art thieves must team up to steal a Leonardo da Vinci painting that nobody knows exists.
About: This is a spec script written by David Twohy. Twohy is probably best known by today’s moviegoers as the writer of Pitch Black. But his most well-known work is, obviously, The Fugitive. Right now, Twohy is currently filming the new Riddick movie with Vin Diesel. If they’re filming the same script that I read, that one will go back to Pitch Black’s roots, keeping things simple (Riddick stalking a group of men on an isolated planet).
Writer: David Twohy
Details: 117 pages – April 16, 2011 draft (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).
I kind of love David Twohy. How can I not. He wrote The Fugitive, the best thriller ever. He also penned one of the great sci-fi screenplays of all time with “Pitch Black.” Not only did it have one of the coolest central characters you’ve ever seen in a sci-fi film, but talk about a midpoint shift! An entire planet turning dark and billions of aliens shooting out of the planet’s core to feed on anything they can find!
Where I’m still smarting, however, is in Twohy’s last effort, The Perfect Getaway. That movie was awesome for about 90 minutes. And then……well, and then…the ending happened. The “big twist.” And oh boy was it not good. It was everything you don’t want your twist to be. Manufactured. Forced. Nonsensical. So while my love for Twohy still remains, I still haven’t gotten over that flick.
But I have good news. Twohy is back! And if The Leonardo Job turns out anything like the script, it’s going to be great.
Steve Styles is a gadget heister. He’s the kind of guy who will build a $50,000 mechanical dragonfly to scout out the room that houses the painting he’s about to steal. And that’s exactly how this movie begins, with Styles deftly using a number of gadgets to get into a museum and steal a 3 million dollar painting.
But as he’s speeding away in a getaway car, he’s unaware that a man on a sled is secretly breaking into his trunk, stealing the very painting he just stole…AT 65 MILES PER HOUR. When Styles figures this out, he knows exactly who’s responsible: Kofax.
Kofax is much older than Styles and doesn’t believe in gadgetry. He believes in good old-fashioned hard work. And this is just one of the many differences between these two rivals – art thieves who hate each other with every bone in their body.
After Kofax steals from the stealer, he learns of a big deal going down in Europe and so he flies there, where he eventually meets Gina, a woman who claims to know about a secret 23rd painting from Leonardo da Vinci. But this isn’t any ordinary painting. It’s a fresco. That means it’s the size of a giant wall. It’s also hidden behind another wall in a museum due to a misguided construction choice 500 hundreds years ago.
Kofax thinks the job is impossible (how do you even get behind a wall in an active museum?) and isn’t convinced that the painting exists anyway. So he’s out. Enter Styles, who’s eager to take on the challenge. But once Kofax realizes Styles is on, he wants back on too, and Gina’s solution is to have them work together.
Of course, since this is a Twohy script, there are lots of twists and turns along the way, and just when you think you know what’s going on, you realize you don’t. There is plenty of jockeying to figure out who here is telling the truth, who’s lying, who you can trust, who you can’t. In the end, someone’s going to end up with this painting – if it indeed exists. The question is…who?
Let’s start off with the obvious. This script is expertly written. This is what a script looks like from a seasoned professional who’s mastered his craft. Let me give you an example.
The movie starts out with an art heist. It’s a reasonably simplistic scene that we’ve seen many times before. It’s well written but nothing special. Yet here’s the difference. Most amateurs would stop there. They’ve written their opening heist scene. They’re done.
What makes Twohy different is that he’s not done. As Styles races away, we cut to somebody on a sled, picking the lock of the trunk. This surgeon of a man is about to lift the painting this guy just lifted. Now THAT’S something I’ve never seen before. In other words, the writer pushes himself to do something different – to do something fresh.
The next awesome choice Twohy makes is in the construction of the heist itself. Whenever you create a heist scenario, it’s imperative that you make the heist look impossible. If it doesn’t look impossible, then we’ll have no doubt our hero can pull it off. And if there’s no doubt, there’s no movie. The doubt is what creates the drama! So the more of it you can produce, the more exciting your movie will be.
Thirdly, Twohy creates a ton of conflict between the two main characters. No, we’re not talking Chris Tucker/Jackie Chan conflict here. Styles and Kofax have tons of history together and absolutely despise one another. They’ve stolen paintings from each other worth millions of dollars. So we have a real conflict and a real distrust between the two. That makes every scene between them fun.
On the flip side, there were a few things I didn’t like. One thing that always bothers me is when a writer starts the movie off with one character, then switches over to another character, who becomes our hero. The reason I don’t like that is because, mentally, I’m always waiting for that first character to come back and lead the story. He was introduced first, so naturally I assumed he was the hero.
So I kept waiting for Styles to reemerge, until, after 25 pages, I realized Kofax was the protagonist. Complicating this is that Kofax is introduced as the bad guy. He’s the one who stole the painting from the guy we liked. It would be like in Raiders, if after Belloq stole the idol Indy just secured from the cave, that we followed Belloq for the next half hour. Do we really want to follow him? Or do we want to follow the guy who stole the idol in the first place?
I admire that Twohy likes to explore the antihero (as he did with Riddick), but it threw me off guard as I wasn’t sure who I was supposed to be rooting for for the first 40 minutes.
Twohy also makes the questionable decision to bring in our villain late. I don’t think he shows up until page 75. This is something I tell writers to avoid if at all possible. Not only does the audience need someone to root against in these kinds of films, but it’s really hard to build up an entire bad guy with just 45 pages left in a screenplay. So I wish Twohy would’ve found a way to get him in earlier.
Still, Twohy is such a great screenwriter that even with these unconventional choices, he finds a way to make it work. And like I always say, you have to do something differently in your script or else it feels cookie-cutter, which can sometimes be worse than writing a straight up bad script. So in the end, this is definitely a script worth celebrating.
[ ] What the HELL did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[xx] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: To spice up a predictable scene, add a ticking time bomb. There’s a nifty little scene early in the movie where Styles is chasing Kofax after Kofax stole the painting Styles stole. Styles, in order to catch him, calls the On-star people on a fake police line, telling them that Kofax’s car is stolen. The Onstar people remotely turn Kofax’s car off, inadvertently stopping it in the middle of some train tracks. This allows Styles to confront Kofax, while in the distance, a train approaches. With the painting tucked into the trunk, neither of them will leave until it’s safely secured. – Notice how the ticking time bomb here adds tension to the scene. If Styles had simply run Kofax off the road, hopped out, and demanded the painting, there’s no “ticking time bomb,” there’s no reason to take care of things immediately. It might’ve been an okay scene. But it wouldn’t have been nearly the scene that’s in the script now. So add a ticking time bomb to your scenes to bring them alive (you’ll notice that we had a similar scene in The Fugitive – with Richard Kimble trying to get out of the bus before the train hit).
The screenwriting duo that is The Duplass Brothers follow up Cyrus with their new screenplay about fate.
Genre: Drama-Comedy-Indie
Premise: A thirty-something man who still lives at home unexpectedly bonds with his brother when the two try and find out if his brother’s wife is cheating on him.
About: “Jeff, Who Lives At Home,” is coming to theaters soon. It stars Jason Siegel, Ed Helms, and Susan Sarandon. The screenplay is written by writer-directors Mark and Jay Duplass. Their previous films include Cyrus, Baghead, and The Puffy Chair.
Writers: Mark and Jay Duplass
Details: 87 pages – June 1, 2009 Draft(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).
Some people blame the Duplass Brothers for pioneering the horror that is Mumblecore. You know what I’m talking about. Those movies shot on video with available lighting and a handheld camera and characters who improvise. It’s not that the movies are bad so much as they’re terrible. I mean, you’re not supposed to want to throw your TV out the window during a movie, right?
My problem with the Duplass Brothers is that they have a tendency to back away from the moments that define a movie. For example, in Cyrus, I kept waiting for something interesting to happen with Cyrus but it never did. Cyrus was only *sort of* psycho, so you always felt safe, like our hero was going to be okay in the end. And was that movie a comedy? I’m still not sure.
However, I’ll always give the brothers a shot for one reason: Baghead. Baghead was one of the weirder movies I’ve seen. It’s about these four people who head up to a cabin in the middle of the woods and start getting stalked by a man with a bag on his head (we’re unsure, of course, whether the stalker is one of them or someone else). It walks this unpredictable line between humor and horror that I’ve never seen baked up that way before. It’s a film you should check out if you have the chance. But be prepared for something really different or you’ll leave disappointed.
That brings us to “Jeff, Who Lives At Home,” about a guy named Jeff (Jason Siegel) who, well, lives at home. While we’re not clear WHY Jeff lives at home, the implication is that some traumatizing event happened to him as a child which never allowed him to grow up.
When we meet Jeff, he’s sitting around, thinking about how the movie Signs is the best movie ever, mainly because it was about fate and how we all have a purpose. So Jeff starts thinking, what’s his purpose? What signs are out there to guide him through his life?
Right at that moment, Jeff gets a call from someone asking for “Kevin.” There’s no one named Kevin who lives there, but Jeff thinks this is a sign, and rearranges the letters in the name “Kevin” to come up with “knive.” He then goes and checks the silverware drawer, grabs a knife, and finds the word “Delta” carved on the handle. Cut to Kevin in his closet where he finds a group of Delta Airlines playing cards. He throws them against the wall (no, I’m not kidding) and the only card that is face up is the ace of hearts. This is the end of the sequence.
Naturally, at this point, I was thinking about peeling the skin off my body with a potato peeler. But I forced myself to press on. Jeff then goes to pick up something for his mother but since he can’t drive, he takes the bus. On the bus he spots an African-American kid about 18 years old who’s wearing a jacket with the name “Kevin” on his back.
So he follows him to a basketball pickup game and ends up somehow playing. It turns out Jeff’s really awesome at basketball (even though this has nothing to do with the story at all). Afterwards, he and Kevin become quick friends until Kevin robs him. Friendship over.
At this point I was getting so angry at the pointlessness of the story that I wanted to pillage my neighbor’s basement. But I soldiered on. Eventually, Jeff runs into his brother who he has an even worse relationship with than Snooki and The Situation (sorry, I had to get a Jersey Shore reference in there). He and his brother become convinced that his brother’s wife is cheating on him. So they decide to follow her around.
During this time, Jeff shares his new revelation about fate with his brother, who thinks his theories are insane. We’re also intercutting with their mother, who spends the movie in a cubicle at her office, and finds herself the recipient of a secret IM’ing admirer.
Eventually, the three of them come together in the end and encounter an unexpected event that may or may not prove Jeff’s theory about fate.
Where to begin here. The first 25 pages of this script where almost unreadable. I don’t like scripts where no story emerges within the first 25 pages (I don’t like scripts where no story emerges within the first 10 pages!). I want to know where my story is going. We don’t get a whiff of that here so Carson not happy.
But when Jeff’s brother enters the equation, the script takes a turn for the better. Maybe it’s because we were thankful that at least SOME purpose had entered the story, but I thought the conflict between the brothers was actually pretty authentic. As soon as you present a relationship that needs to be repaired to an audience, the obvious response is going to be wanting to see if that relationship can be repaired (which means – most importantly – we want to keep watching!).
As for the cheating stuff…I don’t know. Here was my problem with it. We only get one scene with the brother and his wife that establishes their relationship. And neither of them seemed to like each other. So when the brother becomes devastated by his wife’s cheating, I’m not sure we buy into it. I mean, I barely know these people. Why do I care if his wife is cheating on him?
That’s the problem with an 87 page screenplay. You don’t have enough time to establish the relationship to the point where we care what’s happening with it. And it doesn’t help that you spent the first 30 pages of your script with one of your characters throwing cards at a wall.
I also felt the subplot with the mom was too thin. It basically entailed a secret admirer IM’ing her from inside the office all day. It’s a nice little surprise when we find out who the person is, but the storyline itself was so lightweight that it felt like padding to get the script up to feature length.
The script’s shining light is probably its ending. I like indie movies that go big with their endings and the climax here definitely has some weight to it. I just wish there was more of that weight throughout the rest of the script.
[ ] Wait for the rewrite
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Flesh out your subplots. Thin subplots feel empty and pointless. To combat this, try to add as much detail and thought to your subplots as you do your main plot. The mother’s storyline here amounts to a woman at a cubicle receiving IMs. I don’t know what the mother does. I don’t know what her company does. It seems like there’s nothing for her to do all day other than answer IMs. That’s not how the real world works (well, for most of us anyway). Build up the details of your subplot world. Give her company a purpose. Maybe she’s a debt collector (would explain why she’s angry all the time). Or maybe she’s a customer support person (again, would explain why she’s so angry – she gets yelled at all day!). Have her boss demand that something be done by the end of day. Now those IMs are interrupting all the calls coming in AS WELL AS a deadline. It’s much more compelling to watch a character make a tough choice (do I answer this IM or keep working?) than freely answer IMs to her heart’s content. Flesh out those subplots people. Add details. Add reality. Or else your subplot is nothing more than a boring distraction.
Subtle Screenwriting Scratches that Itch.
“How bout this? Shut your mouth. Or I’ll kick your teeth down your throat and I’ll shut it for you.”
Genre: Crime/Action/Thriller
Premise: A stunt driver moonlighting as a getaway driver gets caught up in a job that’s over his head.
About: Drive is adapted from James Sallis’ novel of the same name and will star Ryan Gosling, Carey Mulligan, and…Albert Brooks? Relatively unknown Nicolas Winding Refn will direct. Bryan Cranston, whose stock is building hourly with his show “Breaking Bad,” is also said to be cast in the film. The writer, Hossein Amini has a half a dozen produced credits, the most well-known of which might be “The Four Feathers,” starring Kate Hudson and Heath Ledger. Personally, I would’ve cast Brooks in the role of Shannon. But man, if he can somehow pull off the heavy role, his career’s going to have a huge resurgence.
Screenwriter: Hossein Amini (adapted from the novel by James Sallis)
Details: 121 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).
Is Drive the thinking man’s “Fast and Furious?” That’s what I thought when I first heard about the project. When hardcore thespian Ryan Gosling teams up with critical darling It Girl Carey Mulligan on a film titled Drive, it’s the equivalent of hearing Oprah’s interviewing the cast of Jersey Shore. The two worlds just don’t collide. Was Gosling tired of all the serious roles and wanted to have some fun? Did Mulligan simply sign up to work with Gosling? Truth be told, I didn’t know what to expect when I opened Drive, and through the first 20 pages, I found the script chugging along as if it hadn’t had an oil change since 2003. But as this story unfolded, I realized we were on the cusp of a potentially great film. We may start out on the backroads, but we end up at the Indy 500.
Drive is a richly layered script with lots of moving parts but I’m going to try and simplify it for you. Our hero on this journey is nameless. We refer to him only as “Driver.” Yes, I thought this was pretentious too. But fire up the dual climate control. It gets better.
