Something happened with the bogus joke of a blogging system that is Blogger, and when I woke up this morning, the look of my page had changed.  I’m not sure why this happened and since I haven’t gone into the design segment of Blogger in over a year, it’s probably going to take me a couple of days to figure it out.  Viva Las Blogger!

Genre: Comedy
Premise: A pair of pharmaceutical reps, one crazy, one conservative, travel to a drug expo to try and land the most important deal of the year.
About: This finished on the lower half of the 2009 Black List. Outside of that, little is known about the script. It appears to be Eric Lane’s breakthrough screenplay.
Writer: Eric Lane
Details: 116 pages – December 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).

Today’s script is a comedy so I’m going to take this moment to talk about another “comedy” that I saw last night. After all of this hype, I decided to watch the “Two And A Half Men” season premiere. I’d never watched Two And A Half Men before, so I wasn’t sure what I was expecting, but what I got was quite possibly the worst 22 minutes of television I’ve ever witnessed. I’m not sure if it’s possible to die just by watching a TV show, but I’m pretty sure I came close a couple of times. I’ve never seen anything more juvenile, more stupid, more on the nose, and more insulting than those two and a half men. I’ll tell you when I turned it off. That would be when the kid answered a question by farting. I don’t have any other words. I’m just baffled that people watch that show and enjoy it.

Anyway, that leads us into today’s script. Yay! The good news is, this is way better than Two And A Half Men. Then again, so is soaking your eyeballs in sulfuric acid. But at least Con Men doesn’t try and insult your intelligence. Well, actually, that’s not true. Maybe I should just get to the review.

Con Men is about 25-year-old Greg Weinstock. Greg is really good at what he does, which is sell prescription drugs, and all things considering, he’s got a lot going for him, except for his material girl who lives in a material world girlfriend, Tiff. Tiff’s big beef with Greg is that he’s not really a take charge guy. He’s too comfortable with his lifestyle.

So when the boss man asks Greg to join up with the company party boy, Kevin, and try to land the biggest deal of the year at the Milwaukee drug expo, his initial reaction is, no way. The reward may be high but so is that damn risk. However, after Tiff dumps him, Greg gets it into his head that if he lands this deal, maybe he can prove to her that he is a risk taker, and she’ll end up taking him back.

Like the recently released Cedar Rapids, Greg is all business and Kevin is all party. In fact, as soon as they land, Kevin heads straight to the bar and starts having sex with as many women as possible. A scary prospect if you’ve ever been to Milwaukee before.

Anyway, they eventually run into the reason that they got this job in the first place – Sheera and Mandy. These two used to be the top pharmaceutical reps at their company until they quit and started working for the competition. Because they are hot and because they will do anything to get the sale, they are every pharmaceutical rep’s nightmare. Our guys basically have no chance against these two. And to make matters worse, Sheera is Kevin’s kryptonite – the only girl he’s ever truly loved. He basically turns into a drooling half-witted Nerf Herder whenever he’s around her, which Sheera uses to her full advantage.

I’d detail more of the plot but that’s about it. There’s a lot of double-crossing. A lot of sex. A lot of drinking. A lot of lying. Each side tries every trick in the book to land the big fish but only one will come away with the prize.

Con Men is a script from an extremely talented writer who has a huge future ahead of him. I say that mainly because his dialogue is so strong, some of the best I’ve read in a while. Here’s one of Kevin’s many meanderings in the script: “A few months ago Lindsay came over. She’s a middle reliever I keep in the bullpen for weeknights. Anyway, we’re changing the batteries in the smoke detectors. One thing leads to another. You lick a nine volt battery and put it against your chode during sex. Turns out, when you climax, fireworks. Buttermilk into thunderbolts, lead into gold. You can literally singe the minge. It’s a K Russell Orig. But yours if you need it. Point is, Lulu dug the spark. Lucha libre.”

I don’t know how to put it other than to say his dialogue has a lot of texture. It’s interesting and unique and, most importantly, memorable. Which is going to make it all the more confusing pointing out Con Men’s biggest weakness: the dialogue.

What? Carson, have you gone mad? Didn’t you just tell us the dialogue was great? The content of the dialogue is great but it seems like Eric knows this and as a result goes way too far with it. There is so much needless dialogue here that pages upon pages go by where nothing happens but people talking (about nothing). Every time someone speaks it’s a mini monologue. We’re consistently getting 10 to 12 line dialogue chunks and it just kills the momentum. There’s a reason this script is a needless 120 pages. It’s because people talk for too damn long! I don’t care how good your dialogue is. You have to show restraint. Everybody loves cake. But nobody wants to eat cake for breakfast, lunch and dinner.

Unfortunately, there are a ton more beginner mistakes in the script. Character actions don’t match up with their motivations for example. When we meet Kevin, he’s the one dying to go on this sales trip. He’s the one who wants this more than anything. So it’s beyond strange that the second he lands in Milwaukee, he doesn’t spend a single moment trying to land the sale. You could even argue that he could care less about the sale. If a character really wants something then does the complete opposite, you have character problems.

The character flaws are also clumsily executed. When you have a character flaw, the best way to convey it is through action. So if you have a character who’s selfish, you want to show them encountering a situation where they can either help themselves or help someone else. You show them helping themselves and you’ve conveyed their flaw. The lazy way to do it is to have somebody come up to that person and say, “You know what. You’re selfish,” which is exactly what happens here when Tiff tells Greg exactly what’s wrong with him. This is okay if you’ve already shown the flaw in action. But here, all we’ve seen from Greg is how awesome he is at his job. It’s not like this is Seth Rogan in Knocked Up. Greg has a high-paying job with a great future ahead of him. So his girlfriend telling him that he doesn’t have his shit together doesn’t make sense.

And outside of that, this story is just all over the place. Once they actually get to Milwaukee, there’s no form. There’s no structure. It’s just a series of repetitive sequences where people get drunk and try to bang each other. Combined with an extremely inconsistent tone, the script never finds itself. I mean, Con Men starts off feeling like a sophisticated comedy. The first 10 scenes convey tasteful and occasionally sophisticated humor. Open the script to the middle however, and you’ll read a scene where a character shoots his sperm up into an exposed wire, which starts a fire and turns on the entire hotel sprinkler system. That’s Scary Movie 5 territory there and an example of a young writer just trying to make anything funny without thinking how it fits into the bigger picture.

I will say that I loved the inclusion of Sheera and Mandy though. Usually in these scenarios the competition is two men. So to make it two women was a good twist as it created a whole new dynamic between the main players. Now sex could be used as a weapon. An old relationship that still had ripple effects on the characters could be included. It just gave everything a fresh feel. I wish Eric could have brought more of that freshness to the rest of the screenplay. But I still think he has a great future. He just needs to learn how to hone the rest of his craft.

[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius

What I learned: Less is always more when it comes to dialogue. If you bust out screenplays for your five favorite movies, you’ll probably find that the large majority of time each person speaks, they’re doing so in 3 lines or less. Not 10 to 12 lines or more, which is the problem with Con Men. Now obviously, each story is unique with unique requirements. Some characters talk more than others. Some stories require more exposition than others. But I promise you that your dialogue will be a lot better if, on the whole, you show restraint.

Genre: Drama
Premise: A young woman at a care facility for at-risk teenagers deals with an unexpected pregnancy.
About: One of the winners of the 2010 Nicholl Fellowship.
Writer: Destin Daniel Cretton
Details: 121 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).

Well, we have another Nicholl winner here, which means we’re probably jumping into a character development sandwich with a healthy dose of thematic honey mustard. Gone are plot mechanics and the kind of poster that will bring the teenagers in in droves. But in their place is hopefully something that hits a little deeper and stays with you a little longer. And hey, it’s about teenagers. So maybe those mini versions of ourselves will show up.

Short Term 12 is a short term foster care facility for at-risk teenagers. 20-something Grace, one of the head counselors at the facility, has just learned of some unfortunate news – she’s pregnant. Now Grace is in a happy loving relationship with fellow counselor Mason, so that’s not the problem. The problem is that, like a lot of these kids she takes care of, she had a horrible childhood, and isn’t keen on bringing another child into the world. So she doesn’t tell her boyfriend, and sets up plans for an abortion.

But in the meantime, she’s got a job to do. Over at Short Term 12 we meet the major players. There’s 14-year-old Sammy, small for his age and someone who loves to run around without any clothes on screaming at the top of his lungs (for a similar story, see Carson’s childhood). There’s 17-year-old Mark, a beast of a teenager who rarely talks to anyone. There’s 15-year-old sex-obsessed Kendra. And then there’s the new girl, Jayden, a small girl with a big chip on her shoulder who reminds Grace of herself when she was younger.

Short Term 12 doesn’t really have a plot. It’s more about the day-to-day happenings of this facility. And it’s quite a facility. All of these kids are here for a reason, that reason being that they don’t fit into the confines of “normal” society. They’ve been left here mainly because they’re considered rejects, and most of them are aware of this label and seem to live up to it if only because the world expects them to. A normal day might have one kid trying to escape, another kid trying to kill himself, and a third kid beating the hell out of his roommate. Being a counselor here and dealing with this stuff isn’t easy, but most of the people who work here work here because they were at-risk kids themselves, and feel it’s only appropriate that they give back.

The bulk of the story focuses on Grace and the new girl Jayden. We eventually learn that Grace was abused by her father when she was a kid and that Jayden is currently going through the same thing. The problem is that Jayden is afraid to admit it because she knows it means losing her father and being stuck in a place like this forever. So as Grace tries to save her, she’s constantly running up against a wall. And of course, there’s the reality that she’s approaching this from a slightly selfish perspective. She feels that if she can help this girl, she can find closure in her own relationship with her father.

And then of course there’s the whole pregnancy thing. She knows that if Mason were to find out, he would be thrilled, want to get married, and want to have the kid. But even though Grace knows she would never be the way her parent was with her, she’s terrified of just how cruel this world can be to children and she doesn’t want to put any human being through that, especially one she brings into the world herself. So the ultimate question, I suppose, is will Grace come around and want to have her child?

You know, this was a tough one to judge, especially after reading yesterday’s script. Because yesterday’s script was so full of fluff and so devoid of any real…well…anything, this script feels like reading American Beauty in comparison. It’s all character development all the time. But even though it was nice to just experience the inner battles people go through every day, especially people like this who are so damaged, I was still craving some sort of story, some sort of wrapper, to bring it all together. I’m a greedy reader. I don’t want all of one thing or all of another. I want everything. So even though this script had so much more depth and richness and passion than yesterday’s offering, I still found myself moving my hand in a circular motion and subconsciously saying, “Okay, but where’s the plot?”

But the script does teach some good lessons. I think the most obvious one is that you’re able to bring more to the table if you write what you know (I would be shocked if the writer, Destin, didn’t work at one of these facilities himself). What that affords you is specificity. Now it by no means guarantees a good story. Sometimes you can write what you know, yet only seem to find the most mundane boring parts of what you know. Believe me, I’ve read plenty of those scripts. But as long as you channel in on something that has dramatic potential, you can bring specific things in that nobody else who doesn’t know that subject matter can, and the reader feels that. For example, Sammy running around naked. That feels very much like something that happened in real life that only someone who worked at a place like Short Term 12 would experience.

I also think the character development here is pretty good, especially for the character of Grace. When you don’t have a plot driving your story, you need your characters to develop in an interesting way. You need interesting things about their backstory to come up (we find out some disturbing things about her father from early on in her life). You need interesting choices that cut to the core of the issues they’re having (she has to deal with whether or not to have her baby). You need to put them in positions that force them to think about their point of view (she meets someone who reminds her of herself when she was a kid). That’s how you develop an interesting character. I don’t think that this is ever going to be as compelling as if you have a story driving things forward, but if you don’t have that story, you better have an interesting character. And I think Short Term 12 does.

There were also a couple of signals that this writer had studied his craft. Destin knew he would be constantly explaining how the facility worked, so he brought in the “question character,” a new counselor who would constantly be asking questions so that the other characters could explain things to him (and by association, to us). This is a tool that every writer should have in their tool shed.

I also liked how Destin used the pregnancy as a soft ticking time bomb. Again, we have a story here without any real form so it’s important to frame it in any way possible so that the audience has some sense of when it’s going to end. The decision on whether or not to have the abortion was a great way to do that. Incidentally, I would’ve liked if it would’ve been highlighted more, such as a specific day that was coming up, or maybe just have the characters talk about it more (it seemed to be forgotten a tad in the second act), but I still thought it was well executed.

You know, I wish this script would’ve had more story, but when I’m taking everything into account, I would have to say that it does a lot more good than bad. Destin did a great job with character development here, much better than most scripts I read, and to that end this is deserving of a “worth the read.”

[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[x] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius

What I learned: Writing what you know does not guarantee a good script. What it does guarantee is knowledge. You know that subject matter better than 99% of the people out there and that’s what you want to take advantage of. The reason David Seidler was able to write that memorable scene in The King’s Speech where Birdy reads while listening to music was because Seidler himself was a stutterer and was taught the exact same thing. Those are the kinds of memorable moments that only come from experiencing that stuff yourself (or through heavy research). Still, no matter how well you know a particular subject matter, no matter how much you’ve lived it, it’s always best to wrap that subject matter in an entertaining concept/story. Don’t get me wrong, Short Term 12 was a solid script, but this is a script that never would have been heard of without the Nicholl Fellowship, as it’s the only place that really celebrates these kinds of screenplays.

Genre: Thriller
Premise: An air marshal finds himself in the middle of a unique terrorist attack.
About: This script sold very recently, I believe two or three weeks ago. It sold via the popular method of the writers developing it with a producer, who got it to a point where he liked it, then went out and sold it. This seems to be the best bet for selling scripts these days if you don’t have anybody attached.
Writers: John Richardson and Chris Roach
Details: 109 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).

You know I have either read or heard about a dozen of these stuck on an airplane thrillers, mainly because I actively seek them out. I believe it’s one of the most naturally tension filled situations you can put your characters in. You’re stuck up at 37,000 feet. You’re in a long metal tube with no way out. And on top of dealing with whatever problem you’re dealing with, you also have to worry about keeping that damn plane up in the sky.

But for all these positives, there’s one giant negative. You don’t have a lot of room to play around in. I don’t think I need to tell you guys how little space there actually is on an airplane. They got us packed in like sardines so they can offer us those nice cushy low prices. So cinematically, it’s not an ideal location. On top of that, you have the issue of 200 or more extra people on the plane that you have to figure out what to do with. This is why you get scenes like the one in Knight and Day where there’s only 15 people on the plane. Even though it doesn’t make sense, it makes it easy to account for everyone. So anyway, this is a long prelude to me saying I’m always interested in what writers do with this set up and how they tackle these unique problems.

Bill Marks is a 50-something air marshal who’s mega bored with his job. Apparently these poor air marshals basically jump on one plane to the next without ever getting a break. Flying is their life and since 99% of the time, nothing dangerous happens on a plane, it’s easy to get bored. And Bill is really bored.

About the only thing that keeps him going is women. Yup, Bill is a pretty simple guy. If he can strike up a conversation with a pretty woman, he just might make it through the flight with his sanity intact. So when he’s seated next to 29-year-old hottie Jamie on his Hawaii to LA flight, he thanks the lucky stars he’s about to be 37,000 feet closer to.

The two get to talking and while she’s hesitant at first (he is like 20 years older) she starts to actually like Bill. But before the sparks can start flying, Bill gets a text that grounds him real quick. The text says that unless he kills himself right now, one person will start dying every 20 minutes. Bill leaps into action, heading back into Coach, and indiscreetly starts searching for the culprit. As he centers in on the obvious suspects, the best twist in the screenplay occurs. He gets a text that says, “I never said it was a passenger.” The plane starts flailing wildly and we learn that the Captain is dead.

Bill realizes now that this is serious and also realizes that the only person he can completely trust is Jamie, since she was sitting next to him when he got the first text. They also end up recruiting an Oakland police officer on the flight, who unfortunately turns out to be almost as gung ho in his pursuit of the terrorist as the terrorist is in pursuing them.

More people start dying. Bill searches frantically. The terrorist eventually reveals himself and it turns out that discreetly killing people was only the first part of a much more complicated plan. So Bill must search deep down for every skill he’s ever learned and figure out how he’s going to save everyone on this plane.

When I first wrote up this review, I read it back and realized how bitter it sounded. I want to make something clear. This appears to be these writers’ first sale and I couldn’t be more happy for them. This business is a heartbreaking lonely relentless profession that rarely lets new members through the door. So it needs to be celebrated when one of us becomes one of them. And you know, I can see why this script sold. It’s fast. It’s intense. It’s fun. It’s got plenty of twists and turns. It has a solid part to play for a well-known actor.

But having said that, I couldn’t get into it because I didn’t believe it. I suppose if you take this as more of a fun tongue in cheek type thriller, you probably won’t care about a lot of the things I’m about to bring up. And I did try to let myself go and not take things too seriously. But there were just some glaring issues that no matter how hard I tried to ignore, I couldn’t.

My first huge problem was that Bill practically pranced around with a sign on his chest that read “I am an air marshal.” While I don’t know the exact protocol, I believe it’s valid that the pilots and crew would know who the air marshal was on their plane. So that I didn’t have a problem with. What I did have a problem with was Bill walking up right in front of every passenger on the plane and chumming it up with the Captain, the Co-Captain and the rest of the crew. Could you be any more transparent?

Then, about 90 seconds after meeting Jamie, she says “You’re an air marshal aren’t you?” Now I’d imagine that the answer you’d be trained to say would be: “No.” But instead, Bill smiles and says “How did you know?” Is this the least professional air marshal in the history of air marshaling? So then later when Bill expresses some element of shock that the terrorist knows who he is, all I could think was, maybe if you didn’t pull out your bullhorn and announce it to the entire flight every time you got on a plane, you wouldn’t have this problem. So I really had no sympathy for the guy because he was so stupid. Once I’m not on board with the main character, it doesn’t matter how well the rest of the script is written. I’m probably not going to care. And that’s unfortunately what happened here.

And really, an oversight like this leads to a bigger problem. The second you give the reader something to doubt, they start looking for other things to doubt. They’re counting problems instead of enjoying your story. So for example, we have a terrorist who’s killing people one by one and yet this plane is flying through the sky problem free. As you may remember, just last Sunday, they sent two F-16s after a plane where a man was in the bathroom for too long. Hawaii and California have the largest defensive presence in all of the United States. So why F-16s weren’t scrambled to intercept this plane is beyond me. Especially since the plane had internet access, and everyone on it was giving CNN a second by second update of the ordeal.

I’m not going to get into the ending here because I don’t want to spoil it. But I’ll just say that it was way too convoluted. The coolest thing about these movies is what happens at the beginning. Part of the reason it’s so cool is because you want to know how and why it’s happening. Why would somebody want an air marshal to kill himself? How is this guy killing these people one by one, especially the Captain himself? That’s an intriguing question I want an answer to. So when the answer comes and it feels silly and doesn’t really make sense, it’s disappointing.

I received a handful of positive reviews for Nonstop, which is why I decided to read it. So I think there are people out there who are going to look at this as a fun ride and nothing more. If you’re not as anal as I am and aren’t really concerned about authenticity, or you don’t really know or care how things really work in a situation like this, there’s a good chance you’ll just go with the flow and enjoy this. And I’m guessing that that’s what the company who bought it is banking on. But unfortunately, that lack of authenticity killed it for me.

[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius

What I learned: The lazy “doesn’t really make sense” villain motivation. We’ve all done it. And I’ll tell you why it happens. Nonsensical villain motivations occur when you fall in love with your setup even though you have no idea how you’re going to explain it. You leave that up to your future self. Or, as the old saying goes, you “write yourself into a corner.” This forces you to come up not with the best possible ending, but with the best possible ending that still allows you to keep your setup. Often times, this forces the writer to patch together a forced overly explanatory climax that makes little sense. The best endings usually come when you back engineer your setup after you figure out your ending. Unfortunately, this often means reworking your setup into something that isn’t as exciting as you originally envisioned. But I still think it’s necessary, because the ending has to make sense. It has to be an organic extension of everything that came before it. If you have your bad guy going through a 5 minute overly complicated “Exposition Eddie” explanation of why he did this, it’s usually a sign that something is wrong.

Genre: Thriller
Premise: When a group of bank robbers kidnap his wife, an accountant must try and save her. But when they all end up in a strange Rube Goldberg-like trap-filled mansion, the kidnapping becomes the least of their worries.
About: John Burch, the writer, has informed me that he plans to shoot the first 11 minutes of this movie himself to drum up interest. You can donate to the movie or find out more over at his Kickstarter page – 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: John Burch
Details: 99 pages

I have a schizophrenic relationship with this script. There is some really good stuff in here. But there’s also some really questionable stuff. One page I’ll be flying through it, excited and feeling like I’m right there in the theater, and the next someone will say something cheesy or do something nonsensical that takes me right back into my living room. Knowing now that John plans to shoot this himself, I think I understand the inconsistency. He obviously has a strong visual sense of what he wants, which is why the house and the situation itself feel so compelling. But from a storytelling perspective, I don’t think the story is as intricate or as “thought through” as it needs to be.

The script starts out great. We wake up in the trunk of a car with our hero, Kole, an accountant who’s recently been having some problems with his wife, Nicoletta. But right now those problems are on hold because Nicoletta is up in front with five bank robbers who just snatched their ride when their own getaway car was blocked in after their robbery.

Kole tries desperately to phone for help but service is spotty and the next thing you know there are cops chasing them and a lot of shooting and bulletholes are puncturing just inches above Kole’s face. Our bank robbers shoot back, taking the cops out. The robbers then ditch the car with Kole still stuck in the trunk.

After tearing through the backseat and getting out just before the thing blows up, Kole realizes he’s in a half-deserted dead suburb with no help in sight. He follows the trail of the bank robbers and ends up at an enormous mansion, presumably where the robbers have taken his wife. It’s there where he meets Gunther, a slow witted caretaker of the mansion, who guides him into the basement.

In the meantime, our bank robbers are tending to their wounds trying to figure out what to do next. But when one of them sets off a tripwire, a series of mechanisms shifts into place locking all doors and windows and holding them captive. If that isn’t bad enough, the place is a hoarder’s paradise, with junk and trash stacked from floor to ceiling blocking every potential exit and making the house one giant maze. All of a sudden that money they stole doesn’t seem so important.

Back downstairs, Kole is trying to get Gunther to help him save his wife. Gunther eventually shows him a way to climb through the walls, which not surprisingly have been rigged for the specific purpose of climbing around and spying on people.

When our bad guys figure out that the cops are hot on their trail, they speed up their attempts to get the hell out. But when they come to learn that the reason the house is so protective is because it’s hiding something valuable inside, everybody’s plan changes. In the end, Kole will have to find a way to pry his wife away from these men and get the hell out of here before things get really bad. But if the house has its way, that will never happen.

So before I get into what I really liked about Captive, I want to point out some issues I had, because there are a few. The first thing I’m concerned about is the role of our hero. I’m not a fan of the main character being stuck in a wall for a large portion of the screenplay. I always get nervous when the main character isn’t driving the story. And in this case, Kole is definitely more of an observer than an active participant. I mean, imagine if John McClane just observed our terrorists from inside a wall during all of Die Hard. It probably wouldn’t have been a very good movie. I’m still not sure how I would change it, but I’d definitely like it if he were more active .

My next concern is the promise of the premise. For newbies who don’t know what this means, the promise of the premise is what the audience expects to see when they hear a cool idea. So when you hear about a movie set at a dinosaur park, you want scenes like Tyrannosaurus Rexes chasing your main characters. I think the Captive house only fulfills half of the promise that it makes. It’s a really cool house. It’s a really creepy house. I absolutely love this ticking time bomb bowling ball creepily rolling around the track that you can always hear in the bowels of the house. But after a while, it starts to feel a little repetitive. I would like to see more imagination going into the house other than basic traps that involve things shooting at you or slicing at you. Each room should probably be unique with a unique way to harm or kill you. Think Cube.

Problemo number three is the bad guys. Unfortunately, a lot of the time they come off as cliché. I thought Brody was a really solid leader. He was focused and he was scary. But the rest of the bad guys sort of bleed into each other. One of my problems with these types of movies is that all the bad guys basically become these faux macho meatheads who seem more concerned with spewing out witty one-liners than tackling the problem at hand. And the problem here is a pretty big one. They’re trapped inside a killer house where one wrong step could get them killed. So a lot of the banter didn’t feel authentic. I think it’s okay to have humor in these situations, but it has to come from an organic place. A nervous joke here. An angry justified outburst there. But guys can’t be making the same jokes that they would make walking down the street on a Saturday afternoon.

Finally, the ending needs work. It’s rushed and it doesn’t make total sense. This idea that the owner of the house is trying to protect the treasure is a neat idea. But right now it’s not exactly logical. (Spoilers follow) If the house is rigged to collapse into a giant heap in order to bury the treasure (a bunch of gold coins), well then all it would take was a day or two of construction company cleaning to uncover the gold. Even if it’s in a safe, it’s only a matter of time before somebody breaks into the safe. So if the objective is to never have anybody get the gold, it seems like a poor execution of that objective. Then there’s the twist of Gunther himself. There’s no real script analysis that needs to go into this. It just feels wrong. Sometimes we try so hard to come up with a twist, that we convince ourselves that as long as it’s surprising, it works. I don’t believe this works and is one of the key things I would change in the rewrite.

Now, onto the good stuff. There is a lot to like here. I love the opening. I love how we’re just thrust into this story right away. I like how we end up at this mansion. I had no idea where the story was going – at one point I thought we were going to be stuck in the trunk the entire screenplay and boy was I not liking that- so when we ended up in this mansion, I was like, hmmmmm, I didn’t expect this to happen. As you know, I love when stories do unexpected things and I did not expect it to go in this direction.

Then once we get inside the mansion and there’s all this mystery involved with the hoarding and the Rube Goldberg traps and this weird halfwit caretaker — I was all in. So many times, I read screenplays that are anywhere between fairly well written and really well written, that don’t have a chance of being purchased or made because the story is not a movie – not something people would pay 10 bucks for. Here, you definitely have a movie. Throughout the first 50 pages of Captive, I kept thinking to myself, if I were a producer, I would probably purchase this and develop it with the writer. Because I could see the poster. I could see the movie. And it’s just a little bit different from what we’re used to seeing with these types of films.

I also liked Gunther. I think he’s an intriguing obstacle to our main character achieving his goal. I mean what’s more frustrating than being 50 feet away from your wife, not knowing how to get to her, and the only thing that stands in your way is convincing a dim-witted simpleton to help you who could care less? Not to mention, he was kind of creepy, which fit the theme of the house.

Story wise, we have a clear objective. Get out of the house. We have twists and turns. The gold throws everything for a loop. We have urgency, with our characters monitoring the cops getting closer and closer. The stakes are high, obviously, since everybody here could potentially die. I know I’m on to something good when even though I’m encountering mistakes, I’m actively trying to solve them in my head.

Like I said, this is a schizophrenic script. It has some really great stuff and it has some really not so great stuff. There’s no doubt it needs to be developed more. But I like this idea so much and I’m so sure that this could be a real movie someday, that I would say it’s worth giving a shot. I’d also like to hear some of your insightful ideas on how to solve the problems I listed above.

Script link: Captive

[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[x] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius

What I learned: I still think it’s dangerous to have your main character not affecting the storyline for such a long period of time. Especially in a thriller, which is a genre built for active main characters. Besides the story implications (that your main character isn’t close enough to the action), I have questions about whether big actors would be interested in a role where they’re basically watching things from behind a wall. I don’t think it doomed the script because we do want Kole to save his wife. But there’s just something that never feels quite right about our hero playing such a passive role for the majority of the story.