Pilot Showdown and David Aaron Cohen’s New Navigating Hollywood Master Class!

Since this is probably our only TV Pilot Logline Showdown of the year, I want to find a great TV show. This is where the industry’s bread and butter is – television. So if we can pitch a great show to these streamers, who’s to say you can’t be the writer of the next big Netflix hit?

If you haven’t done Logline Showdown before, e-mail me your title, genre, and logline. I then choose the five best loglines to compete. The site then votes for their favorite logline and I review the full script (in this case, the pilot) the following week. Here are the details!

What: TV Pilot Logline Showdown
When: July 21st
Deadline: Thursday, July 20th, 10pm Pacific Time
What: send your title, genre, and logline
Where: carsonreeves3@gmail.com

Also, our buddy David Aaron Cohen is doing a Reddit AMA (Ask Me Anything) next Thursday at 9am Pacific Time. You can find out more here. David is actually doing a second Master Class at the end of the month and I highly encourage you to join if you can. He has a ton of professional screenwriting knowledge to share about how to navigate this highly tricky industry.

One of David’s regrets from last time was that there were a lot of European writers who couldn’t join because of the time difference. So David’s now offering a European-friendly class time. He’s also adding a 10th part to his Navigating Hollywood course: a one-on-one 60-minute coaching session to help you jumpstart your screenwriting career.   And yes, you still get the Scriptshadow 10% off discount if you mention “Scriptshadow” to David.  To apply for the Master Class and get additional info, you can go to David’s website here.

Enjoy your weekend. I’ll be watching “Mission Impossible” and reviewing it on Monday!

And the power of containing your set pieces!

This weekend, I’ll be seeing the latest Mission Impossible movie. These movies have become known for their set-pieces, specifically the ones that Tom Cruise does himself. Tom Cruise scales a real skyscraper. Tom cruise HALO jumps out of a plane. Tom Cruise takes off on the side of another plane. Tom Cruise drives off a cliff on a motorcycle.

But Mission Impossible has plenty of other big set pieces, such as helicopters chasing trains through tunnels. Motorcycle racing through the hearts of European cities.

And I’m here to tell you that all of these set pieces suck.

Well, maybe “suck” is a strong word.

But none of them truly engage the viewer. They’re just throwing a lot of movement at you and hoping you say “Wow.” Some people do say “Wow.” But it’s always an empty “Wow.”

I don’t just blame Mission Impossible for this issue. I blame all movies. Specifically Hollywood movies. They have destroyed the set piece mainly because they have no idea what actually engages a viewer anymore.

They think having a million things going on onscreen at once with as much action as possible is the way to go. And they’ve been doubling down on that strategy for over a decade now. They ask, “How can we create MORE movement? MORE wows?”

In the process, they’ve lost the thread.

They’ve actually lost it so bad that it’s ruined 99% of big-budget studio films.

What Hollywood has forgotten is that it isn’t the big flashy action set piece that gets audiences excited. It’s the contained smartly-crafted set piece that audiences remember for the rest of their lives.

There’s no better example of this than the file copy hack at CIA headquarters in the first Mission Impossible. It’s the famous scene where Ethan Hunt is lowered down into the white computer room and must steal a file from an off-line computer without tripping any of the advanced alarms that have been put in place.

How I do know this is the best set piece?

Cause when I say, “Mission Impossible,” what is the first image that comes to mind? It’s that scene. And that’s because *that* scene is *that* good.

But why is it good? Why is it more memorable than all of the garbage set pieces that these superhero and Fast and Furious and Star Wars movies keep pumping out?

For starters: IT’S SIMPLE.

I cannot emphasize how much better your set piece will be if you make it simple. Dude is lowered into a room and must hack a computer.

THAT’S IT!

That’s the scene.

There will not be a single person in the movie audience who will not understand what’s going on in that scene.

Contrast that with Dr. Strange when Strange and that America chick were running around on floating virtual objects. Did anyone know what was happening there? I didn’t.

That’s the mistake the studios are making. They’re creating these big visually wild set pieces that don’t make a lick of sense. And then young writers see these and they think, “Oh, that’s the way you’re supposed to do it.” So then *they* write big awkward CGI scenes. Those scenes are then put in the next superhero movie. And it becomes a vicious circle.

Which is why nobody knows how to do this anymore.

So, for starters, when you’re trying to construct a set piece, don’t think big first. Think SMALL first. Small is much easier to understand. It will require way less geographical orientation. And it will allow you to come up with a set of simple rules that you can then play with to make your set piece as dramatic and suspenseful as possible.

Which is exactly what the CIA computer hack scene in Mission Impossible does.

It’s a tiny room. That’s our set piece. That and the vent.

Once you have your contained space, set up the rules of the set piece. In this case, the room is the most sophisticated room in Langley. It detects weight changes, sounds, even heat.

This is where the fun starts. You have these challenges, such as, we can’t walk in because it will detect our body weight. Okay, so I guess we have to suspend Ethan and lower him from above. How do we do that? Well, there’s this vent here. Okay, but how do we create a suspension system within that small space that’s going to be reliable?

Notice how even before we’ve gotten to the set piece, we’re already becoming invested in it. Nobody does that anymore. They just throw us into some wild mid-city chase with a bunch of characters we barely know.

Then, once we get to the set piece, we can continue to have fun with the rules we’ve set up. For example, if Ethan so much as touches the floor, it will trigger the weight sensor and they’ll be caught. So, one of the first things that happens is that the cords slip and Ethan falls quickly towards a collision with the floor, only to be caught at the last second.

I’ll never forget the collective gasp from the audience in my theater when that moment happened. That’s when you know you’ve created an awesome set piece.

The rules are so perfectly set up in that scene that there’s a moment where Luther has a bead of sweat that’s in danger of dropping from his nose down into the room and hitting the floor, and we’re all on the edge of our seats hoping it doesn’t happen.

Give me one Marvel set piece in 25 freaking films that achieves that. You can’t!

If you want to upgrade your set pieces, do everything I just said. But there’s one additional thing you can do to bring it to the next level: ADD AN EMOTIONAL ELEMENT – something between the characters that gives the scene a little extra oomph.

Take The Matrix for example. One of the great set pieces in that film is Neo fighting Agent Smith in the subway. Once again, contained, right? Simple, right? But, in addition to the Mission Impossible scene, we have some history between these two. Agent Smith was the bully following Neo around in the Matrix. And Neo is someone Agent Smith needs to dispose of if he’s going to execute his plan.

The irony here is that the Wachowskis were hoping to get Will Smith to star in The Matrix so they’d have this giant budget, which would have allowed them to write much bigger and flashier set pieces. But when they had to settle for Keanu Reeves, they had to rethink all their set pieces which made them into what I’m telling you to do here.

Contained. Simple.

The dojo fight, the lobby gunfight, even Morephues rescue is contained to an office in a skyscraper and then a helicopter right outside.

I don’t think I need to remind you what happened when the Wachowskis got all the money they wanted for the sequels. Big bombastic set pieces that didn’t hold a candle to anything that happened in the much smaller first film. If that isn’t proof that smaller more contained set pieces are better, I don’t know what is.

Getting back to Mission Impossible, a few years ago we had that well-received bathroom brawl – the one where Henry Cavill’s character and Ethan Hunt kept pummeling people who came into the club bathroom.

That’s a contained scene. So why isn’t it as famous as the Langley hack scene? This is your last lesson so pay attention: BECAUSE THE HACKING SCENE HAD STAKES. There was this long build-up towards it, which, on its own, created stakes. Since we had so much personal time invested in it. But even still, they needed something vital in that computer to execute the bigger plan.

The bathroom scene was fun but it was haphazard. There’s nothing truly on the line here. It’s just people beating each other up. So when you create that set piece, make sure there’s something big on the line. Or else, even the best execution of the scene isn’t going to grab the audience and shake them.

I hope writers take this to heart. It’s one of my crusades as a teacher of screenwriting. I see so many movies making this mistake and they’re just creating this garbage because of it. When it comes to set pieces, it’s always better to be think contained, to think simple, and to be clever. Only go big as a last resort.

Good luck!

Genre: TV Pilot – 1 Hour Drama
Premise: During the Black Plague, a group of rich Italians head off into the countryside to party out the plague in a beautiful villa.
About: Word on the street is that Bridgerton was so big for Netflix that they wanted more period stuff. Enter Jenji Kohan, creator of Netflix’s famed, “Orange is the New Black.” Let’s just say that Jenji’s version of “fun” is obviously a lot more complex than everybody else’s version of “fun.” Although Jenji is the producer, the creator of the show is Kathleen Jordan, who wrote Teenage Bounty Hunters.
Writer: Kathleen Jordan
Details: 61 pages

Tony Hale will be playing the hapless Panfilo

I’m reviewing today’s pilot to remind everyone that Pilot Showdown is coming up!!! Send in your pilot logline along with your title and genre. The best 5 pilot loglines will compete against each other with you, the readers of the site, voting for the best. Whoever wins will get their pilot reviewed the following Friday. There’s obviously an appetite for this because I’ve been getting a lot of pilot loglines sent in. It’s going to be a dandy.

What: TV Pilot Logline Showdown
When: July 21st
Deadline: Thursday, July 20th, 10pm Pacific Time
What: send your title, genre, and logline
Where: carsonreeves3@gmail.com

As the world attempted to decipher why brooding Timothy Chalamant was cast in the role of one of the most charismatic characters in history, I reminisced about when Orange is the New Black first hit Netflix. Along with House of Cards, it felt like a new era in television had emerged, rivaling when Jackie Gleason first appeared on TV.

If you remember, this was the first time in history that an entire season of television shows was offered at once.

It was a strange decision that streamers have, since, backtracked on, at least for their larger shows, as it practically begs people to sign up for a month, binge the new show, then ghost the service.

The practice also inadvertently birthed a new storytelling format – the “movie” TV show. Narratives were now being designed like films, to build over an entire season, as opposed to ebbing and flowing, delivering standalone experiences you could enjoy without having kept up with the series.

My jury’s still out on this format. I don’t think it quite works yet. But writers continue to play with it and learn it. Hopefully, we’ll figure it out because I do like the idea of one long enjoyable narrative.

It’s 1348 in Firenze, Italy. Peasant Licisca is a handmaiden for the worst woman in the world, Filomena, a sort of 1300s version of Paris Hilton. Everything revolves around her. Especially now that her entire family has died from the black plague. Well, except for her dad, but he’s on his way out.

Filomena is visited by a messenger who invites her to Villa Santa at the behest of Leonardo, a really rich bachelor whose plan is to have everyone stay at his villa for one long party until this whole black plague thing goes away.

Filomena ditches her barely alive father, taking Licisca with her, believing she will finally find the husband she so desperately covets. However, along the way, Filomena and Licisca get into a fight that spills out of their carriage and near a bridge where Licisca inadvertently pushes Filomena to her death.

This is when Licisca gets a brilliant idea. Nobody at this place knows what Filomena looks like. So SHE’S going to be Filomena!

Once she gets there, we meet the rest of the crew. There’s the studly doctor, Dioneo, who Licisca immediately crushes on. Dioneo is the doctor for the hapless Panfilo, an ugly dork of a man who can get sick at the drop of a hat. There’s the religious horndog, Neifile, who, unfortunately, married the very gay, Panfilo. Translation: she’s not getting any.

But the biggest surprise is that the two elderly caretakers of the villa, Sirisco and Stratilia, are containing a giant secret. Their master, the owner of the villa, Leonardo, is dead of the black plague. They buried him. If Leonardo is dead, neither of them have masters and they’ll be cast off into homelessness during the worst plague in history. So they must do everything in their power to make sure that their secret never gets out.

What a weird idea.

What a weird FUN idea.

I love a bit of irony in a concept. But the thing with irony is that there are weak versions of it and clever versions of it. This definitely lands on the clever side. One of the things I judge an idea on is how easy it is to come up with. And I’ve never read a single idea that was anything close to this. It’s truly unique. And clever as s—t.

Cause think about it. We’ve seen a bunch of rich people living in these mansions with servants before. That format has been done to death. But this puts an ENTIRELY new spin on it and one that opens up all sorts of fun ideas that the writer takes advantage of.

For example, in what other version of this idea could you kill off the villa owner and everyone just goes along with it? In what other version could your heroine believably take on the persona of a rich noble?

And then you have these interesting relationships. Like this guy who just walks around with his own personal doctor everywhere. As it so happens, the patient is a disgusting rat of a man and the doctor is the most handsome man in the world. So wherever they go, even though he’s the wealthy and important one, everyone falls in love with his doctor.

I think that’s another thing that sets this pilot apart. The writer put a ton of effort not just into the individual characters, but the main relationship that each character had. One with their maid, one with their spouse, one with their doctor, the two caretakers. There are these interesting pairings that lead to a bunch of great dialogue and fun scenarios. It’s almost like teams, which adds a different dynamic when the teams talk to other teams.

I personally think this is going to be too weird for a lot of people. But if you like weird TV and writers that take chances, you’re going to absolutely love this.

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

What I learned: Exploit your premise! Identify what’s unique about your premise and make sure there are characters and plot developments that specifically exploit it. This is a show about rich people vacationing in a big villa while waiting out a plague. So the writer killed a character off and had our hero impersonate her. The writer killed off the villa owner, leaving everyone waiting for a guy who’s never going to show up. Most writers wouldn’t have thought that deep. They would’ve got Licisca and Filomena to the villa together. Leonardo would’ve still been alive. The lazy writer thinks in terms of their original idea and not in terms of, “What does a *lived in* version of my idea look like?” The *lived in* version is always dirtier. Things have already happened inside the lived-in version to muddy it up. So make sure to think beyond that very first concept that came into your head.

Genre: Drama
Premise: (from Black List) After a young, newly widowed janitor in a small mining village is unexpectedly elected Mayor, she navigates a new relationship with a mysterious man from the city and tries to determine how to use her new position of power to confront the corruption that has plagued the town for years.
About: This script finished pretty high on the Black List last year, with 13 votes. The writer has produced a few small projects and has mainly worked in short films.
Writer: Brendan McHugh
Details: 92 pages

Dakota Johnson for Sasha?

Every once in a while, you read a logline on the Black List and you say, “This is such a bad logline that the script must be amazing.” In other words, your script would have to be great to overcome this logline.

This has happened a few times before – where I’d see a terrible logline that was summarizing an equally terrible concept but then something about the writer’s voice or the characters in the script blew me away. It doesn’t happen often. But it does happen. Will it happen again today?

Sasha is a maid in a small corrupt mining town that’s basically run like the mafia by the town’s mining czar, Pike. Technically, the town has a mayor (who’s Sasha’s boss), but he’s a mayor in name only. His sole duty is to do what Pike tells him to do.

Sasha has a particularly combative relationship with Pike due to the fact that her husband recently died in the mines and instead of Pike giving her his life insurance, he tells her that her husband was liable, so there’s no insurance to pay out.

And, oh yeah, Sasha is eight months pregnant.

When Sasha is at her lowest point, a cool-as-a-cucumber surveyor named Jack rides into town on his motorcycle. He asks Sasha out on a date and she says yes. The two have a great time.

The next day, the mayor tells Sasha that reelection is coming up and the election is not official unless he has an opponent so she has to run against him. She doesn’t want to but he forces her to sign the papers. When the miners (who are mostly drunk all the time) learn that Sasha is up for the job, they get excited and Sasha ends up winning in a landslide.

Sasha then starts changing things around town. And helping the miner get better pay. Pike sits her down and says if she gets any chummier with the workers, he’s going to kill her. But she’s already in it. There’s no turning back now.

She enlists her new semi-boyfriend (Jack) for help, only to realize that he was secretly working for Pike this whole time! Jack swears he’s had a change of heart and wants to help Sasha. But can she trust him? Going off the many seasons of Love Island I’ve watched, I can tell you that when a man lies, he’s going to lie again! Stay away from him, girl! But who knows. Maybe Jack will surprise us.

What a weird script.

For starters, it does an excellent job making you love the main character. If you ever want to create a protagonist the audience loves, make your protagonist someone who’s being taken advantage of. And if you want the audience to love them even more, put them in a really crappy situation as well. Someone in a crappy situation who’s being taken advantage of is the screenwriting equivalent of saving thousands of cats.

You just feel for this poor woman. Her husband died. And this a-hole mine czar b.s.’s her about the insurance, saying her husband was negligent so she gets no money to raise her child. We hate this guy more than anything. And, of course, we’re rooting for our screwed-over protagonist to defeat him.

So that part of the script was great which, by the way, is the hardest part of the script to get right. Getting a reader to fall in love with and care about your protagonist is super difficult to do. You could write a thousand-page screenwriting book on how to achieve this and, still, 90% of screenwriters would struggle with it.

Pike is a great villain as well. You know who he reminded me of? Mr. Potter in It’s A Wonderful Life. But even nastier. Cause this guy is willing to kill you if you don’t do what he says.

If you’ve got a hero we love and a villain we hate, you’ve got a readable screenplay. Because when stories are told well, they’re an EMOTIONAL EXPERIENCE. The reader is FEELING SOMETHING. The more you’re making them feel, the more they’re going to like your script.

So the fact that we love Sasha and hate Pike does the heavy lifting for Pikesville.

Which is why it’s such a bummer that everything outside of the character work stinks like last night’s fettuccine alfredo. Nothing about this situation feels real. There’s zero specificity. I don’t know what state this is. I don’t even know what COUNTRY this is. Come to think of it, I don’t even know what YEAR it is.

I don’t know if the writer kept these secrets as a deliberate creative choice. But I don’t think he did. None of the character names were capitalized in this script when they were introduced. That tells me this is a newbie writer. And if they’re a newbie writer, they’re more inclined to make mistakes like being too general with the setting.

Why does this matter? Cause this movie plays different if it’s 1975 as opposed to 2023. Women’s rights weren’t nearly as advanced back then as they are today. Which would imply that the writer was making a commentary about that time. But it seems like it’s 2023 and yet we’re treating this girl like she lives in Russia 50 years ago. It’s hard to grasp what’s happening culturally.

This extended into the major plot beats of the script.

I consider major plot beats to be the pillars that hold your screenplay up. You need them to be strong. The first major plot beat here is the mayor saying to his cleaning lady, “You’re running against me for mayor.”

When has this ever happened in the history of the world?

That’s not a pillar made of stone. It’s a pillar made of styrofoam.

One last observation I had was that this is one of the slimmest scripts I’ve read all year. It’s so sparse. And that’s… a good thing? Right? We talk about it all the time. Make the script easy to ready. Keep your prose as sparse as possible.

That’s true for CERTAIN GENRES. But not for every genre. Some genres need more meat. You couldn’t write The Godfather, for example, with 2 line paragraphs all the way through. You wouldn’t be able to add the density necessary to give the story its required weight.

Same thing with Guardians of the Galaxy. There’s too much in that world that needs to be explained for them to distill it down to quick ‘soundbite’ paragraphs.

And I would argue it’s the same for Pikesville. It needed more description of the town, of the setting, of the people. It needed more detail in the interactions in order to convey the complexity of the relationships. Writing this in the style of a 90 minute thriller was not a good decision.

Main character was great. Villain was great. Any time those two were in a scene together, I was on the edge of my seat. But nothing else in the script worked, unfortunately. So I can’t endorse this.

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

What I learned: When major plot points arrive in your script, make sure they’re rock solid. The audience must believe in them 100% or else your story will fall apart. Who’s going to believe that a mayor forces his cleaning lady to run against him? I’m not even convinced you can get away with that in a comedy.

Upon first glance, the weekend box office looks insignificant. The only movie that opened wide was a smaller studio horror movie, Insidious 4.

But I would argue that this weekend’s box office is one of the most important box offices of the year. The box office is its own form of AI, an accumulation of the collective consciousness of every potential moviegoer in the world. And, therefore, when it delivers a number, it is making a point. It is trying to tell us something.

So what is it trying to tell us by anointing Insidious as the biggest movie of the weekend, a small horror franchise that isn’t even associated with an identifiable image?

To answer that question, we must first acknowledge what’s been happening to Disney movies as of late. Disney took over the industry for a decade. It was a super-hitmaker the likes of which had never been seen before in Hollywood. It had Pixar, Marvel, Star Wars, its own animation library, and its live-action animation remakes. The studio pumped out billion-dollar hits like it was Michael Jackson in the 80s.

But everything has changed. Here are some of their recent releases…

Strange World
Elemental
Buzz Lightyear
Ant-Man
The Little Mermaid
Eternals

Why is this relevant? Because Disney drove the business strategy that all the other studios were forced to adapt to in the 2010s. Which was to create super-movies. In the 90s, they would’ve called these “tentpoles.” But Disney took that concept to a new level. Tentpoles didn’t bring in enough money. They wanted SUPER-TENTPOLES – these gigantic movies that created their own orbit they were so big.

The reason was because a super-tentpole could net them half a billion dollars. If you could net half a billion dollars with one movie, why would you concern yourself with making Insidious’s? Insidious may have doubled its budget with its opening weekend take of 30 million bucks. But in “Disney” parlance, that’s a pittance. A 50 million dollar profit when it’s all said and done is weak-sauce when compared to 500 million.

And for a while, that operating procedure worked.

But here’s the problem.

When you make 300 million dollar movies that don’t do well, such as Indiana Jones, you don’t lose 15 million bucks. You lose 150 million. Or 250. Or 350. And while, before, Disney was so successful that they could weather one of these occasional duds, they’re starting to fail a lot more now.

I don’t care who you are. If you’re losing 200+ million a movie? You’re not going to be around for long. And Disney is losing a lot more than they’re winning these days.

Bringing this back to Insidious, studios may have to reevaluate their business strategy. Maybe super-movies aren’t the way to go anymore. They’re too darn risky. And it’s not just because of the pandemic. It’s because they got lazy. They got real real lazy over the last decade and they thought anything with a superhero in it would make a billion bucks. They thought any live-action remake of one of their cartoons would make a billion bucks. They thought any sort of nostalgia would make a billion bucks.

THEY STOPPED INNOVATING.

I say it all the time here. Audiences will NOT EAT EVERYTHING UP. You do have to take some chances. Or, if you’re going to stick with the tried-and-true superhero genre, you have to innovate in *some* capacity. And they’re just not doing that right now.

To be honest, I don’t know if they know how to innovate anymore. When was the last time they tried?

Next weekend’s going to be interesting because Mission Impossible comes out and I don’t know if people are going to see it. It is the definition of something we get ALL THE TIME. And if Fast and Furious is any indication of what to expect, Tom Cruise could be in trouble. By the way, what’s up with Tom? The guy is more concerned with hyping up his competition than his own films!

Following Mission Impossible is going to be one of the weirdest movie weekends I can remember, with Barbie and Oppenheimer opening. To be fair, Oppenheimer is doing exactly what I just asked for, which is to innovate. There hasn’t been a movie like this in decades. Which on the one hand is great. I just don’t know how you pull in a lot of money from a movie that’s not going to have a single female in the audience. Does anyone know a woman who’s going to see this movie?

While unimaginable six months ago, Barbie looks like it’s going to be the film of the summer. It looks like it’s going to be huge. And I *do* think Barbie is trying something different. It looks like it’s hiding very adult subject matter inside a fun summer movie. Which means it’s going to bring in young and old audiences. I have to commend Greta and Margot. I didn’t think they could do it. Yet, here they are. No one’s talking about any movie this summer as much as they’re talking about Barbie.

By the way, for those of you who don’t know, the Barbie movie has been in development for a decade. Ten years ago, Diablo Cody was hired to write the film with Amy Schumer starring. I think we all did a little prayer thanking our lord and savior that that didn’t happen.

But what’s interesting is that Diablo came out this week explaining why their movie didn’t get greenlit and it’s because the studio wanted to deconstruct Barbie and basically crap all over the brand – say all this stuff about how femininity was bad and girls wanting to look like Barbie was bad. And Diablo just couldn’t make it work because that’s not Barbie. How do you make a movie about Barbie where the theme is, “Barbie is bad.” It was impossible to crack.

Whereas it seems, now, they’re making this movie to celebrate Barbie. But it’s also subtly acknowledging that times have changed.

Maybe the biggest surprise this weekend was the conservative film Sound of Freedom, which added another 18 million bucks to its take, allowing it to top 40 mil. This is another genre that isn’t going to get you superhero returns but it’s also not going to strap you with superhero losses if it bombs.

The problem with conservative films in the past has been that they’re too faith-based. Which basically keeps them niche. Cause liberal audiences don’t care about religion. So what Taylor Sheridan introduced was this idea that you could play to other more profitable aspects of conservative beliefs (justice, survival, connection to nature, family), the kind of stuff that works better inside the feature fictional format.

If more conservative writers realized that, there’s a huge market to be tapped there, as Sound of Freedom has proven.

This could be the future of the box office if these giant movies keep failing. Cause it’s not just Disney. It’s WB as well. Superheroes are no longer teflon. Spider-Man, maybe. But that’s because he’s the best superhero. So, of course his movies are going to do well. But everyone else? They’re in trouble.

Which means getting smarter and exploiting these neglected crevices in the market. Or just write horror films. Cause horror films always do well.

Speaking of horror, I bucked up and got MGM Plus so I could watch that show, “From.” A few of you told me it was awesome. I finally listened. I watched the pilot and it was indeed, very good.

For those who don’t know, the show is about this town in the middle of nowhere that people are stuck in. If you drive out on the road, you always loop back to the town automatically. What’s interesting is that people keep showing up. Every couple of weeks, a new person or family will drive into the town, lost, wondering where they are. When they’re told they’re forever stuck here, they of course try to leave, only to keep looping back into town. It’s a fun little premise. And it also has these monsters that come out at night, which forces everyone to be home by nightfall. It’s one of those rare gems that treats their setup with such respect that it doesn’t come off as cheesy.

I don’t know if you remember that disaster on NBC called La Brea about the people who fall into a wormhole and end up in Los Angeles a million years ago. If you watch “La Brea” and then watch “From,” you’ll notice the sophistication in the writing is night and day. One understands how to do their genre premise right. The other makes almost every mistake in the book.

Anyway, I loved the pilot episode. I’m going to keep watching. If you want to check it out, the first 7 days of MGM Plus are free.

But, despite my overall love for the pilot, I did want to highlight one major mistake in “From” only because I see this in screenplays ALL THE TIME and it drives me insane. I call it “dialogue tunnel vision.” Dialogue tunnel vision is when you get so determined to write a certain line of dialogue, that you’re unable to realize how inappropriate the line is within the context of the moment.

So, in the pilot, this lost family in an RV rolls into the town. They’re confused. They coulda swore they were supposed to run into a highway by now. And it just so happens that they arrive during a town funeral. Two people were killed last night by the monsters.

The RV parks next to the service, which is ending. As the townspeople all walk away from the service, the teenaged daughter in the RV opines to her family, sarcastically, “They seem like a cheery group.”

Now, I want you to think about this line for a second. Cause this is the epitome of dialogue tunnel-vision. I know exactly what the writer was thinking. They were thinking, “Let’s establish that something weird is going on in this town. The people aren’t right. They’re not acting normal.  Let’s have our outsiders vocalize that.”

But the writer had so much tunnel-vision in establishing that reality with this observational line of dialogue, that he completely overlooked the fact that ALL OF THESE PEOPLE WERE JUST LEAVING A FUNERAL!!!! Who has ever looked cheery after a funeral? What the daughter is saying, objectively, makes zero sense. Why would you expect anyone to be looking cheery right now? Hence, dialogue tunnel-vision.

I’ve got a couple of other examples for you. In Gareth Edwards’ first movie, “Monsters,” about these giant monsters that lived in the jungles, we watch this couple who has to travel through one of those jungles. Everywhere you looked, in that movie, there was a sign that said, “Warning: Giant Monsters Ahead.” Then, halfway into the jungle, the couple hear this loud terrifying gurgling grumble off-screen and the husband says to the wife, I kid you not, “What was that?”

IT WAS THE MONSTERS!!!!!!!! ARE YOU DENSE OR SOMETHING????!!!!!

But, again, Gareth Edwards wanted that line in there. He wanted to, I don’t know, create suspense or something. He wanted that quiet scared moment where his characters tried to figure out what was making such a strange noise, despite the fact that the whole movie you’d written up to that point told us exactly what it was.

And then, we can’t leave the dialogue non-master, George Lucas, out of this, who, in Attack of the Clones, when Padme’s double lays dying on the ship platform after her ship blew up, Padme runs up to her and her double, in her last breaths, says, “I’m sorry your highness. I failed you.”

Uhhhhh, no you didn’t fail her. You actually did exactly what you were supposed to do!!! You made the bad guys think you were Padme, so that they tried to kill you instead of her. But Lucas was so zoned in on delivering that line, he couldn’t see the forest through the trees.

So just be aware of this, please. Place yourself in the reality of the moment and ask what would really be said in that moment. Don’t just write dialogue that you wanna write. Cause it may not stand up to the scrutiny of the situation.

What’d you watch this weekend?