For those of you unfamiliar with the First Ten Pages Experiment, what I did was have longtime Scriptshadow readers send in a logline for their screenplay. The top five loglines, voted on by those readers, would get the first 10 pages of those scripts reviewed on the site this week. Well, the week is almost here and it’s time for YOU GUYS to read those submissions. So here are the winners, with links to the pages. Now I’ve already read all five entries and I KNOW there is going to be a TON of discussion. However I don’t want that discussion to begin until the reviews have been posted so I am CLOSING THE COMMENTS on this thread. This is a download post only. That being said, prepare to answer this simple question: Would you keep reading?
MONDAY
STATIONARY (54 votes)
GENRE: Comedy-drama
LOGLINE: A businessman begins seeing Post-It Notes that give him directions on how to improve his life.
TUESDAY
THE FOURTH HORSEMAN (35 votes)
GENRE: Action/Thriller
LOGLINE: Hired by Homeland Security to envision terrorist attack scenarios, a skillful ex-soldier turned novelist, must battle anarchists when they hijack his nightmare plot to destroy new York
WEDNESDAY
THE OSWALD SOLUTION (21 votes)
GENRE: DRAMA
LOGLINE: When a prison guard falls in love with the wife of a death-row inmate, he’s forced to choose between his love for her or reveal the discovery of crucial evidence that will save her husband’s life.
THURSDAY
NICE GIRLS DON’T KILL (20 votes)
Genre: Action Comedy
Logline: When a meek and universally abused copy editor is mistaken for the professional killer she accidentally bumped off, she decides to take on this violent new identity until the killer turns out to be not so dead, and very pissed off.
FRIDAY
DEEP BURIAL (17 votes)
Genre: Thriller
Logline: Posted out to a remote nuclear waste dump site in the Australian Outback to secretly assess the mental state of the ex-addict Aboriginal worker who mans the plant, an anxious young female psychiatrist is forced into a fight for survival when they find a mysterious stranger stranded in the desert.
Genre: Period/Noir
Premise: (from writer) In wartime LA, a lounge singer falls for the detective hired by a vigilante group to investigate her gangster boyfriend’s treasonous activities.
About: Fatal Woman won this year’s Zoetrope screenwriting contest. – Every Friday, I review a script from the readers of the site. If you’re interested in submitting 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.
Writer: Laura Kelber
Details: 106 pages (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 loved what Laura had to say in her query letter. Not only was her attitude great but she had an interesting story to tell. This is what she said: “When this won the grand prize of a major contest back in February, I thought I had it made. I thought, at the very least, I’d get a mid-level manager. But there was zero interest. Zip. Nada. I didn’t get so much as a “what else you got?” query. In fact, I got a helluva lot more response when one of my comedy scripts made the Nicholl Quarterfinals. OK, I know exactly what you’re gonna say: amateurs shouldn’t write period pieces. I know! I’ve written 17 screenplays now, including comedy, drama, and supernatural, dutifully submitting them to contests. But it was an effin’ period piece that won the grand prize. It’s a sad fact (or maybe it’s a good one), that contest winners don’t always tend to be commercial. After the disappointment of getting nowhere with this script, I’ve moved on to others. I like to write. So this one is more or less dead to me. Tear it to shreds!”
Well Laura, your wish is my command. :)
No, I’m not going to tear Fatal Woman to shreds. But I do think it has some significant problems. Having said that, I have a pretty good idea why it won. I talk to a lot of contests readers and I’ve held a couple of contest myself. There’s this wide-held belief that if you have a thousand screenplay submissions to anything, that at least one of them is going to be great. Not true unfortunately. You have to remember that like 80% of the scripts are from people who’ve never even read a screenwriting book before, which makes the pool of relevant scripts considerably smaller. And even then, as you all know by reading this site, it’s still incredibly hard to write something great. So what ends up happening is that it isn’t necessarily the best script that wins the contest, but the best writer. And I think that’s what happened here. The writing here is great. But the story itself is often muddled and confusing. Let’s take a look.
It’s Los Angeles circa 1942, the middle of the war, and Monique is a Veronica Lake-like lounge singer who’s nearing that age where people will start seeing her as a Ricki Lake-like lounge singer. In fact, her thuggish boyfriend who owns the nightclub, Flip Foster, is already moving on to the new hot younger version of her, creating all sorts of tension at work. Rrrreow!
One night after a set, Monique is approached by private detective Dan Armstrong, a handsome bloke (they used that word back then right?) who lost his leg in an accident and is therefore unable to fight for his country. Dan thinks that Flip is involved in some suspect illegal activity and wants to know if Monique will help him get to the bottom of it. Since Flip no longer wants to make sexy time with Monique, she decides, “Why not?”
Unfortunately, that’s where I started getting confused. A bunch of strange plot points are thrown at us one after another and we’re stuck trying to figure out what the actual story is. It starts when Flip takes Monique out on his ship and Dan sneaks onto it as well, only to get captured by Flip and questioned as to who he’s working for. In one of the more bizarre moments, they actually make him take a truth serum. I think that’s the official moment where I started pulling away from the script.
Eventually Flip, who I’d assumed was this terrifying dangerous crime lord, politely shuttles Dan back to shore and lets him go without a scratch. Since when are bad guys so nice? In the meantime, Monique finds out that Flip is using the roundup of Japanese Americans at the time (For those who don’t know, our racist 1942 government rounded up all the Japanese-Americans and put them in concentration camps on the off chance they were spies) to change their identity into Chinese-Americans, release them back into the general population, and make a nice chunk of change out of it.
At some point, Monique decides she’s in love with Dan and wants to run away from him, but when Flip hears about this, he’s furious and refuses to let her go. Because Flip is footing the bill for Monique’s ailing brother, she has no choice but to stay with him, and that means she’ll never get to be with the man she’s fallen in love with.
As she alludes to in her e-mail, Laura starts off with a concept that has such narrow audience appeal that the majority of people who hear the logline aren’t going to be interested in reading it. Literally the only way you can write one of these scripts and get others interested is if the script is absolutely flawless. That’s the only way. You get an L.A. Confidential, what, once every 20 years? That’s why I try and steer you guys away from this stuff because I don’t want to see you waste your time.
As for the script itself, I think it gets buried under too many plot threads and too many ideas. One of the ways I measure a script’s potential is I imagine somebody asking me what it’s about. If I have trouble with that explanation or the explanation itself doesn’t sound very exciting, there’s a good chance that the script is in trouble. If you asked me what Fatal Woman was about, I’m not sure how I would answer. I would say something like, “It’s sort of about a lounge singer in 1942 who falls for a private investigator. But it’s also about trafficking Japanese-Americans for money. Though not really because that plot doesn’t really play into the ending.” You get a semblance that there’s something there but it’s not concrete. It’s not clear or “hook-y” enough.
Let’s use that old trick of trying to find some irony in the premise and see if we can’t come up with something better. What if a guy who was trafficking Japanese-Americans during World War 2 ended up falling in love with one of them? That’s not great and I would brainstorm it extensively to find more conflict and higher stakes, but already I think it’s a more interesting story. I mean what does a lounge singer have to do with trafficking Japanese-Americans? There’s too big of a disconnect between the elements (stealing a phrase from yesterday’s logline article). This seems so much cleaner.
Now I’m not saying everything’s bad here. I thought Dan was a really interesting character. I like the idea of a man who desperately wants to fight for his country but can’t because he’s handicapped. I thought it was interesting seeing the shame and guilt he lived with every day. So I really felt that character was well developed.
And the writing itself, as advertised, was very good. I mean here’s Monique’s character introduction: “She’s talented and perky enough to please the audience, but would draw yawns from any passing talent agent.” I mean that told me everything I needed to know about the character in one line, which is the mark of a great screenwriter.
But this script suffers from too many problems, the biggest of which is that I’m not sure it knows what it’s about. There’s only a semi-commitment to the Japanese-American smuggling subplot, and that leaves the bulk of story to rest on the Dan/Flip/Monique love triangle, which I don’t think has the muscle to keep our interest. We’re also confused about what characters are doing and why they’re doing them half the time. I had no idea why Flip would just let Dan go. Why not kill him? I’m still not sure who was fighting at the end of the script. Was it Dan’s people versus Flip’s people? If not, who were these other guys? And what did any of it have to do with the Japanese-American smuggling plot? Why is it that that plot became a big deal in the middle of the second act and then simply vanished? And why have the climactic scene in the movie take place in a tiny office? Since I wasn’t clear about a lot of these things, Fatal Woman basically became a bunch of characters wandering around talking to each other. The goals weren’t clear. The stakes weren’t clear. So no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t get into it.
My advice to Laura would be this: “You’re a really good writer. I think trying to fix this story is more trouble than it’s worth. Move on to the next script and kick ass with it.”
Script link: Fatal Woman
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: One thing I’m sure people will bring up is the 5 to 6 line unfilmable asides Laura uses throughout the script, such as this one on page 38: “Wait a minute! What happened to that steamy lip-lock? Apparently, afterwards, they hopped into the cab and drove all the way back to Dan’s place. Obviously, they’ve had sex. It might have been a long night of Kama Sutra passion, or maybe Dan thinks a simple wham-bam routine’s all he needs to impress a dame. We’ll never know, because it’s the ‘40s and the Hays Code is in full swing. Why else would Dan use a word like “heckuva”?” For the most part, I found these asides charming and fun. But here’s my theory on this. Your primary goal as a screenwriter is to make somebody believe that your story is *real*. If you can convince somebody that a made-up string of sequences from inside your imagination REALLY HAPPENED, you have reached the mountaintop as a storyteller. That’s what we’re all trying to do. The second they’re aware they’re reading a script, you’ve lost that spell. You’ve brought them back to reality. So why put anything in a script that’s going to facilitate that? It’s the equivalent of walking up to them and saying “Hey, you know this is all fake right?” Ironically, the reason I didn’t mind the asides here was that I wasn’t really into the story to begin with, so they were a welcome distraction that made me smile. But had I been engulfed in Fatal Woman, I probably would have had a big issue with them. There are exceptions to this rule of course. For example, I don’t mind them much in goofy comedies when we know what we’re reading isn’t real anyways. But I do have problems with them in almost every other genre.
For those of you unfamiliar with the First Ten Pages Experiment, what I did was have long time Scriptshadow readers send in a logline for their screenplay. The top five loglines, voted on by those readers, would get the first 10 pages of those scripts reviewed on the site next week. Of those five, if any of them were well-liked enough (by you guys), I’d review them on a future Amateur Friday. Now in a last second surprise (hey, every contest has to have some drama right?), CLOTH removed themselves from the competition due to the production team deciding it’d be best to keep the project under wraps. I was kinda bummed cause I wanted to read the script but that just means one of YOUR scripts gets to take its place. If you’re interested in becoming a part of future private contests such as this one, e-mail Carsonreeves3@gmail.com with the subject line, “Include.” Here are the top 5!
WINNER!!!
STATIONARY (54 votes)
GENRE: Comedy-drama
LOGLINE: A businessman begins seeing Post-It Notes that give him directions on how to improve his life.
2nd PLACE
THE FOURTH HORSEMAN (35 votes)
GENRE: Action/Thriller
LOGLINE: Hired by Homeland Security to envision terrorist attack scenarios, a skillful ex-soldier turned novelist, must battle anarchists when they hijack his nightmare plot to destroy new York
3rd PLACE
THE OSWALD SOLUTION (21 votes)
GENRE: DRAMA
LOGLINE: When a prison guard falls in love with the wife of a death-row inmate, he’s forced to choose between his love for her or reveal the discovery of crucial evidence that will save her husband’s life.
4th PLACE
NICE GIRLS DON’T KILL (20 votes)
Genre: Action Comedy
Logline: When a meek and universally abused copy editor is mistaken for the professional killer she accidentally bumped off, she decides to take on this violent new identity until the killer turns out to be not so dead, and very pissed off.
5th PLACE
DEEP BURIAL (17 votes)
Genre: Thriller
Logline: Posted out to a remote nuclear waste dump site in the Australian Outback to secretly assess the mental state of the ex-addict Aboriginal worker who mans the plant, an anxious young female psychiatrist is forced into a fight for survival when they find a mysterious stranger stranded in the desert.
Since I know you guys just couldn’t survive without knowing who finished 6-10, the rest of the top 10 went like this: The Wreckage, The Lost Colony, Sagittarius and The Crab, The Wake, and then we had a three way tie between Plurally Inclined, The Accidental Lawyer, and Long Way To Tippery. I would be more than happy to read any of these for future Amateur Friday reviews so if any of you are interested in submitting, let me know.
Anyway, this little experiment took on a life of its own and I came to realize just how opinionated people were when it came to loglines. Particularly when their own logline was ignored in favor of someone else’s! But I think there’s a bigger lesson to be learned here. When you start looking through a lot of loglines you begin to see them through the eyes of an agent or a producer or a manager. You start to understand that this is the process by which you’re being judged. And if you come up with a concept that’s only “decent” or “pretty good,” you’re going to be out-shined by loglines that are of lot more exciting, even if your script itself is better. It helps you realize just how important concept is.
And really, it begs a bigger question, which is that, “Is it my logline that’s the problem or is it my idea that’s the problem?” And that’s one of the hardest questions to ask yourself as a writer. Because nobody likes to work on something for a year only to find out that nobody’s interested in reading it. Yet I see it happen all the time. I would go as far as to say it happens to 75 percent of the writers out there. This is why I tell you to test your logline BEFORE you write your script and not after because if you wait until after, you may find out that you’ve just wasted a year of your life.
So with that in mind, I want to look at the 9 loglines that got 3 or less votes and give you my opinion on why they didn’t garner more attention. The objective here is not to embarrass anyone. One of the problems with this business is that nobody tells you WHY they didn’t like something. How can you fix something or move on from something if no one’s explaining why it isn’t working? I want to explain – in my opinion – why these loglines aren’t working. Now some of you are probably asking, “Well if these loglines weren’t working, why did you pick them in the first place?” As I stated to the people submitting, I didn’t just include my favorite loglines. I included loglines from longtime readers who I felt had earned a chance, as well as top commenters whose scripts I was interested in reading. Anyway, let’s look at the logs…
GENRE: Action
TITLE: HELL AWAY FROM HOME
LOGLINE: An unhinged former DEA agent sneaks into Mexico (all the while being hunted by his ruthless ex partner) to get revenge on the Chief of Police/Narcotrafficker who captured and tortured him nine months earlier.
Patrick is one of the most knowledgeable commenters on the site. So why didn’t his logline attract more attention? My fear is that there isn’t anything that stands out or sounds original in the logline. DEA, Mexico, ex-partner, revenge, Chief Of Police. How many movies have you seen that have included this exact set of variables. A LOT. You gotta have that ONE thing that truly stands out about your logline or else you’re fighting an uphill battle.
GENRE: Sci-Fi/Action
TITLE: Foe
LOGLINE: In a near-future world shattered by an alien invasion, a lone Special Forces soldier stumbles on a group of military veterans holding their abandoned VA Hospital as the invaders lay siege.
I’m a big sci-fi fan so at first glance, I see this as something I’d want to read. But a closer look gives me pause. “Lone Special Forces solider” is a very generic sounding character. It seems like every character in an action movie is a lone special forces soldier. Then you have a bunch of military veterans trying to protect their hospital. So now I’m imagining a bunch of old guys fighting aliens. I suppose that might be cool but it almost seems like two different movies – aliens on the one side and military veterans on the other. I can see why this logline would confuse people.
GENRE: Science Fiction/Thriller
TITLE: SCINTILLATION
LOGLINE: A disturbed woman fleeing an abusive marriage finds work at an observatory in New Mexico where she discovers a relativistic attack is about to be launched against the Earth — and she’s the only one who can do anything about it.
One of the commonalities I see in non-hooky loglines is a disconnect between the elements. For example, here, we have a disturbed woman fleeing an abusive marriage. Then all of a sudden she’s the only one who can stop the world from being destroyed. What do those two things have to do with each other? Why do we need to know that she’s fleeing a marriage? I’m not saying that her failed marriage isn’t an important part of her character but we only have one sentence to convey what our movie is about. Why point out something that, relatively speaking, is so unimportant?
GENRE: Comedy
TITLE: Finger Lickin Code
LOGLINE: Once the two most senior members of a famous chicken organization are murdered by a one-legged man, a disturbed puzzle solving whiz finds himself with a possibly schizophrenic sidekick, 11 sealed cryptexes, and one secret recipe he must save.
I haven’t really figured this out yet so maybe somebody can help me, but there seems to be a real abrasiveness towards wacky comedy ideas. However, we know movies like this get made, so who are the people who like these ideas and where are they hiding? Keeping that in mind, this might be one of those loglines that suffers from information overload. It’s just a lot of stuff going on and you can’t really wrap your head around it all.
Genre: Drama, Crime, Sports
Title: Short of a Miracle
Logline: A basketball prodigy escapes the inner city to play collegiate basketball, but the actions of his father, a corrupt NYPD officer, threaten to derail his promising career.
I’ve had this conversation with the writer before (very cool and nice guy) and he seems to be aware of it even though he’s still pushing the script. People just don’t seem to be interested in fictional sports movies unless they’re comedies or boxing films. It’s as simple as that. I’m not saying this script can’t be great, but everybody in the business knows you can’t get these movies financed so they’re never going to read it. You can drive yourself insane trying to push this idea out there.
GENRE: Contemporary Noir Thriller
TITLE: ELLA CINDER
LOGLINE: When a sexy female private investigator in Los Angeles tracks down a femme fatale for a playboy from a famous family, she uncovers a deadly conspiracy to rob the family’s fortune that may be linked to her own mysterious childhood as an abused orphan.
There’s too much going on in this logline. By the time you get to the end of the logline you don’t even remember the beginning because there’s so much stuff in between. We have a female private investigator, a femme fatale, a playboy, a deadly conspiracy, the robbing of a family fortune, and a mysterious childhood as an abused orphan. Where is the person reading the logline supposed to begin? This logline needs to focus on the core concept of the story and strip everything else away.
GENRE: Horror
TITLE: Fetalgeist
LOGLINE: A pro-life student group finds itself trapped inside a long since abandoned yet very much haunted abortion clinic.
You know I actually thought this one would do better. It has some nice irony in it and a great spooky setting. But maybe the biggest lesson I learned from this process was to stay away from subject matter that divides people so much. That sounds contradictory even as I’m writing it because I’ve always learned that you SEEK OUT subject matter that causes conflict and brings out passion. But when you’re talking about abortion, you’re talking about something people just get really wound up about.
GENRE: Heist Movie
TITLE: The Inside Job
LOGLINE: To save a sick little girl, a master thief must team up with his doctor ex-girlfriend to steal stem cells from a vicious mobster who can’t know he’s had surgery.
I thought this would have potential but I think it runs into trouble in the second half. The second you use the word “mobster” in your logline, you’ve stepped into an arena of cliché that a lot of people dislike. That’s not to say to never put mobsters in your movie. But I find it’s a word that turns people off for some reason. Maybe others can chime in on this and let me know if they feel the opposite. But it’s the last part: “vicious mobster who can’t know he’s had surgery” that’s the real confusing part. The mobster can’t know he’s had his own surgery? If your logline is even a little confusing, you’re screwed. Because how can somebody expect you to write a clear story if you can’t even write a clear sentence? That’s why it’s so important to workshop your logline and get others opinions on it so you know that it works.
GENRE: Horror (Realism ala “Carrie”)
TITLE: Deafo
LOGLINE: In a town torn apart by enforced pit closures, a deaf teenage loner sets out on a dark journey of violent revenge against everyone who has ever wronged him
Again, look at the disconnect between the elements here. The first half of the logline is about a town torn apart by “Enforced pit closures (a clunky phrase that probably shouldn’t have been included). Then the second half is about a deaf teenage loner who goes out for revenge. What do enforced pit closures have to do with a deaf teenage loner? Guys, the elements in your logline (and story for that matter!) have to connect. They have to be cohesive. The Matrix isn’t about a circus trainer who learns that he’s living inside of a computer program. It’s about a *programmer* who learns that he’s living inside of a computer program.
Those are my thoughts on the loglines. But really, I’m just one opinion. Let’s go to you guys, the people who voted. Why did you pass up on these loglines? Try and be constructive and not just tear them to shreds. Remember, we’re trying to help each other here. Let’s learn what people dislike so we can all avoid these mistakes in the future.
Genre: Comedy/Historical
Premise: (from writer) Before James Bond, there was Benjamin Franklin: inventor, philanthropist, and the single largest exporter of kicking British ass. Using his array of inventions and weapons, Franklin is a one-man army thirsty for Redcoat blood, especially when he’s wrongly accused of treason.
About: This won the $20,000 monthly grand prize at the Amazon Studios contest a few months ago. A little birdy told me it’s a project the media giant is really excited about. You can learn more about it, download it yourself, and see a storyboard trailer of the film here.
Writer: Jason Ungate (revisions by Frank Pasquine)
Details: 116 pages – November 10th, 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 have to admit that I’m still confused about a lot of Amazon’s contest rules. I know they (thankfully) changed it so that random writers can’t rewrite your script (dumbest idea ever?), but as I’m looking at the title page for Ben Franklin, I see that it’s been revised by Frank Pasquine. Unfortunately I don’t have any idea if this rewrite was authorized, if the original writer approved of it, if it’s something that Amazon themselves facilitated. I’m not even sure if this is the draft that won the contest. It’s all very peculiar and confusing to me, but hey, where’s the fun in clarity?
I will say this about the Amazon contest. They clearly have a vision for what they’re trying to do. This contest is almost the exact opposite of the Nicholl contest in philosophy. Amazon doesn’t care about deep character driven thematic pieces. They want movies. They want films that people will go see. Now they might not always be right in choosing those films, but at least their contest is more reflective of the industry.
So. What’s this script Amazon’s so high on about? Well, it’s about a 70-year-old Ben Franklin superspy type dude. This isn’t the Franklin you read about in your history books. Oh no no no. This is the medical anomaly who can take down a gaggle of bad guys faster than Jason Bourne. If that kind of thing excites you, you’re going to love this.
Unfortunately, the US government isn’t as excited about our hero’s martial arts abilities as we are. In particular, a rising young general named George Washington is sick of getting one-upped by Franklin, who’s constantly stealing his spotlight. Even more concerning to Washington, however, is that Franklin uses phrases like, “A bullet a day keeps the motherfuckers away.” Yes, I’m afraid to say, that line *is* in the screenplay.
Anyway, the British sail over to our shores because we weren’t paying our taxes or something and like the big mountain of meanies they are take over Philadelphia, pushing all of us Americans out of the city. It’s there where Franklin meets Benedict Arnold, who’s already crafting a plan to take Philadelphia back. Right before Franklin can help, however, the Americans find a letter that Franklin wrote to the British telling them in detail how to capture Philadelphia! What!? No! Franklin has secretly been working for the British??
Of course not sillies. He’s been set up! So he does some kick ass move to escape from jail then goes on a search to find out who framed him. Due to circumstances out of his control, he’s forced to team up with Washington, who as we’ve established, hates him more than a cherry tree that won’t grow. Somewhere around this point, Franklin gets a hold of a 1956 Thunderbird. It was at this point that I either stabbed myself in the gut or tried to rip my eyes out of my head in order to make the torture stop. Unsuccessful, I was forced to keep reading.
Essentially, an evil British general arrives and demands that Franklin create for him the elusive electrocution string, rumored to be the most powerful weapon on the planet. Franklin refuses but when the evil General steals his girlfriend (who I forgot to mention he met along the way. And oh, she’s 24 – remember, Franklin is 70), he has no choice but to risk the safety of the world and create a weapon that makes the atom bomb look like a firecracker. And oh, somewhere in all of this is a plot I think, even though I never really figured out what it was.
Well, let’s see.
I guess the first thing I should say is that I’m not really into these historical mash-ups to begin with. You will not see me in line for Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter for example, even though Fox is spending like $200 million dollars on it. So Ben Franklin: Electrocution String had about as much chance with me as me trying to get up a ski slope without the electricity required to make the tow-rope go. I’m sorry. I was trying to make an electricity joke there. Oh my god! This script has destroyed my sense of humor!
Where was I? Oh yeah. Ben Franklin suffers from a disastrously unclear plot. I have no idea what anybody’s goal is in this movie. I think the main goal was that Franklin and Washington had to find out who wrote the letter that framed Franklin. I don’t care how you spin that. That’s gotta be the most boring goal you could possibly give to a story like this. Bodhicat just said this the other day and I couldn’t agree more, but: Who cares??? Who cares if they find out who sent the letter? Are we the audience really on the edge of our seats saying, “Oh man, oh man, I *hope* they find out who sent that letter!?” No. Of course not. This is why it’s so important to make your goals strong. You have to give your heroes objectives that the audience desperately wants them to achieve, that there are real genuine stakes attached to, that have consequences. If Franklin and Washington never find out where this letter came from, what happens to them? As far as I can tell, nothing. So there are no consequences. And if there are no consequences to the main objective of the story, who cares?
I also thought that they could have done more with the humor here. It felt like the humor was either really cheap or really random, such as all of these historical figures swearing at each other, or our hero busting out a car that hasn’t been invented for 200 years yet. I suppose that’s okay for a younger audience in the 13 to 18 demo, and maybe that’s the demo they’re going after. But if you dig a little deeper and give just a little more effort, you can broaden that audience outside of high school. I mean we all know Washington as the most honest man in history. Why not make him a liar? Why not have him keep getting caught in his lies and be forced to cover them up with even more lies? I mean have some fun with history here.
The only shining moment in Franklin comes at the end. I had to admit that the whole electrocution string weapon stuff (which turned out to be Franklin’s kite experiment) was kind of genius. Unfortunately, it was the only moment in the script where I felt like the writer had actually tried, where he pushed himself to come up with something original. I don’t take any pride in disliking this so much but I just couldn’t get into it at all.
Script link: Benjamin Franklin: Electrocution String
[x] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Research your contests. Know what kind of scripts traditionally win in a contest before entering. If you look at all the past winners for Amazon, you’ll see that they’re all basically high concept ideas aimed at the 14-25 male demographic. So if you enter a script that’s set in the 17th-century about a man obsessed with studying tree bark called Dark Leaves, then shame on you when you’re surprised that it didn’t win. Enter that same script into the Nicholl, however, and you may have a shot. This is the age of the internet people. It doesn’t take much effort to figure out what the winners of every contest are. Do your homework so you don’t waste money (and yes, I know Amazon is free – but why enter a script and lose the rights to it if it has no chance of winning?).
Genre: Survival
Premise: In one of the greatest survival stories ever told, Ernest Shackleton took a crew of 22 men into the Antarctic, only to lose his ship, and be tasked with finding a way back home through some of the harshest weather conditions on the planet.
About: We’re going back in the time machine here to 2001, when Columbia was getting ready to make this movie with Wolfgang Petersen. Peterson had recently made another big picture survival story in The Perfect Storm. Although Zallian put the final touches on the script, it was actually finely honed by a number of high-profile (and very expensive) writers at the time, including Dan Gilroy, Jeff Maguire, David Field, Ron Bass and “Perfect Storm” scribe Bill Witliff. Zallian won an Oscar for his adaptation of Schindler’s list and is one of the most expensive screenwriters in Hollywood.
Writer: Steven Zallian
Details: 130 pages 4/28/01 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).
Ron Bass and Steve Zallian don’t come cheap. So when you’re paying them, you’re all in. So why, then, did Endurance fall by the wayside? Why did all those penguins and killer whales swim away? Who knows? Peterson had already made The Perfect Storm, which had some similarities to this, so maybe he wanted to do something different. And then of course, you had September 11th that year, which threw just about every project into disarray. So maybe Endurance suffered the same fate as a lot of films in development: a confluence of bad timing and bad circumstances.
But…BUT! Maybe it was a lot simpler than that. Maybe the script wasn’t good enough. Endurance is one of those projects that is only going to make money if it’s in the Oscar race. So the project is more dependent on its script than, say, Twilight: Breaking My Brain. Let’s solve this mystery right now. Was Endurance any good?
It’s the early 1900s. Ernest Shackleton has already made one attempt at exploring the last unexplored continent, Antarctica. Unfortunately, he had to give up a mere 100 miles from shore. That’s the thing with Antarctica. Getting there is just as big of a battle as surviving there.
But what really chapped Shackleton’s ass was that soonafter, another explorer DID make it there, destroying his dream of making it into the history books.
The pompous and determined Shackleton is nothing if he’s not exploring though, so he eventually decides to go to Antarctica anyway. There’s still plenty of unexplored land to claim. To his shock though, nobody gives a shit about him or Antarctica anymore. Nobody cares about the second guy to walk on the moon. So a humiliated Shackleton must drum up his own funds for the expedition.
Money is so tight that he actually has to hire a ragtag team of explorers with little to no experience. Many people thought Shackleton was crazy for doing this but this becomes a recurring theme. Shackleton is so fearless that he IS crazy. This man would swim to Antarctica if he didn’t have a boat.
That craziness eventually dooms him though. As they’re nearing the continent, pushing through large packs of ice, their boat is crushed as if it were made out of twigs, and the entire crew scampers off onto the ice, now stranded in the middle of the sea with no one who knows where they are and the nearest help 1000 miles away. And remember, this is 1915. There were no cell phones around except for this one.
It turns out Shackleton’s team was stuck in a swirling sea that was taking them around in circles, a hundred mile long H20 merry-go-round. And the land they were on wasn’t really land. It was packs of ice, great big sheets that weren’t even connected. To put it layman’s terms, 999 out of 1000 exploring teams would’ve been doomed.
But this is why Shackleton is considered one of the three greatest explorers of all time. He never gives up. Ever. Even when all hope is lost and he doesn’t have an answer, he creates an answer. His idea was to get to Elephant Island, which was 600 miles away and had never been officially explored before because it was so inhospitable (google it if you want to see why). The thing was, nobody on his team knew how to actually get to Elephant Island, and certainly didn’t know how to do it with their location constantly changing due to their sea-land merry-go-round.
Eluding starvation, the coldest temperatures in the world, and killer whales that were willing to break through ice to snatch themselves a human popsicle, Shackleton’s pure determination somehow got them to the edge of the ice pack and with their three life rafts, they sailed through the most dangerous sea in the world to make it to Elephant Island.
From there, Shackleton took a smaller group of men on one of the life rafts to get to the only island within 1000 miles that had people on it, with the plan being to come back with a rescue team to get the others. That also turned out to be an impossible journey as all they had was a compass and a vague sense of direction to find this tiny speck in the middle of an endless universe of water. In the end though, they did it, and even managed to get back to the other men and save them. Somehow, some way, they did not lose a single man on the entire team.
The script for Endurance was a little like a night of karaoke. You don’t really want to go. Someone has to drag you into it. You’re immediately turned off by these people making idiots of themselves up on stage. Then you have a few drinks. It starts seeming not so ridiculous. Then somebody signs you up without you knowing. And the next thing you know you’re up on stage belting out Sonny and Cher’s “I’ve got you Babe” and having the time of your life.
That might be the worst analogy of all time but the point I’m trying to make is that even though Endurance ends well, it takes a long time to get going. You always want to get to the meat of the story – the main problem – by the end of act one, so around pages 25 to 30. The meat of this story has nothing to do with *going* to Antarctica. It has to do with what happens after their mission fails – once they become stranded. Unfortunately, that moment doesn’t come until the middle of the screenplay, so a full 60-70 pages in.
I had a lot of people complaining to me about that. It takes so long to get to the good stuff. The question then is, could you move the ship sinking up to page 30? Now the survival story starts at the end of the first act instead of the midpoint. You could, and now the entire second act can be about the escalating obstacles preventing them from surviving. But there is a trade-off. You lose the ability to set up many of the characters. You lose some time to set up the scenario. You risk things coming off as too rushed, and in the process, your script loses some depth. But I still think we’re waiting way too long to get to the good stuff so it might be the way to go (or maybe we can compromise – page 45?).
Luckily, once we do get to the good stuff, the script really picks up. What pulled me in was the sheer number of times that these guys should have died. I mean there are KILLER WHALES HUNTING THEM. Not those big nice cuddly whales you see in Pinocchio. But the kind that eat human flesh. They’re looking up at your shadows underneath the ice and then BURSTING through it to munch on you like a bag of potato chips. I’ve never personally encountered this problem, but I’d imagine it’d be difficult to survive.
And then there’s Shackleton’s pure craziness. When he doesn’t know how to get out of a situation, he just makes something up. He just points in a direction and says, we’ll go this way, because he knows that if people give up, if they have nowhere to go or no hope then they’ll die. And that is not an option for Shackleton. They should’ve died on that ice. They should’ve died on their way to Elephant Island. They should have died on their way to the second island (they should’ve never found it either). They should’ve died when they had to climb some of the biggest mountains in the world to get to the people on the other side of that island. After a while you just begin smiling and shaking your head at the ridiculousness of it all. “Did this really happen?” you ask yourself. I mean it’s too outrageous to imagine.
And the star of the script is obviously Shackleton. He just never gave up. I think that’s the big draw here. We’re always trying to come up with characters that audiences will love, and what’s more lovable than a hero who never gives up – who in the face of the most hopeless circumstances shrugs his shoulders and says, ‘No problem guys. We’ll just try this?’ We tend to like people we wish we could be – true heroes. And I don’t see anyone not wanting to be more like Shackleton after reading this story.
So this was a strange one. It started off slow. You weren’t really sure where it was going for awhile, and then it just had a great final 50 pages. I rarely get goosebumps at the end of screenplays but I got goosebumps at the end of this. So even though it’s not perfect, I would definitely recommend checking Endurance out.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[xx] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: It’s especially important in stories like these to repeatedly remind the audience how impossible the upcoming situation is. The more impossible something seems, the more we’re going to want to see if our heroes can overcome it. So we’re reminded how inexperienced our crew is. We’re reminded that no boat has ever made it through this sea during this time of year before. We’re reminded that there is no possible way to get off these ice patches they’re on. We’re reminded that there’s no way to navigate a lifeboat through the most dangerous sea in the world. We’re reminded that there’s little to no chance they’ll find this tiny speck of an island in the middle of a vast ocean. By telling us these things before they happen, you create anxiety and anticipation in the audience. By being told it’s impossible, we want to see if they can overcome that impossibility.
