Genre: Sci-Fi Adventure
Premise: The last human on earth, a young girl, is protected by an army of robots against an even bigger army of zombies.
About: Zombies vs. Robots (Inherit the Earth) is yet another graphic novel that has been translated into a screenplay. The geek-tastic set up feels like a kissing cousin to All You Need Is Kill, a graphic novel about a young man forced to take on an alien army over and over again. While both scripts seem to be catered to the tween crowd, both also have soft chewy emotional cores, especially Inherit the Earth. The writer, Petty, has made his name mostly in the videogame world, working on such titles as Batman Begins and Splinter Cell.
Writer: JT Petty (based on the graphic novel by Chris Ryall & Ashley Wood)
Details: 115 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 don’t know if Inherit the Earth will ever get made. It’s such a bizarre idea I’m not sure your average audience member can wrap their head around it. I mean let’s be honest. It has robots. And zombies. And time travel. This goes beyond Blake Snyder’s double mumbo-jumbo into triple mumbo-jumbo. Does the third mumbo-jumbo cancel out the second mumbo-jumbo? I sure hope so, because if people can accept this, they’re going to find one of the more heartfelt science-fiction movies ever made.

Inherit the Earth is about a crazy scientist named Dr. Satterfield who’s consumed with building a time machine. He’s helped around his lab mostly by robots – I’m presuming this is sometime in the future – most notably his young-looking robot assistant, William.

Satterfield goes a little nuts, insisting that he try his time machine himself, even though it hasn’t been tested properly. Before his assistants can stop him, he leaps through, only to come back 3 seconds later as a raging flesh eating zombie. He starts munching on everyone who subsequently start munching on everyone else, and before you know it, the entire world is one big zombie party.

Cut to seven years later where the last human alive – a young girl named Lucy – is being holed up in the US government’s indestructible Cheyenne Mountain base. Lucy is the last hope for humankind, so the entire mountain is fortified by hundreds if not thousands of military robots.

Now up until this point, keeping the zombies at bay has been easy. As we all know, the only thing slower than a zombie is a Walmart customer. But what these robots don’t know is that the zombies have evolved and there are now “smart” zombies. So when a huge army of zombies strategically breaks through the barrier, the robots are unprepared. Chaos ensues and the biggest robot-zombie massacre ever goes down. When Lucy’s nurse bot is destroyed (the only robot programmed to provide humanlike emotional support for Lucy), that old assistant from Satterfield’s original outbreak, William, is assigned to replace her.

William’s terrified of being thrown into the role as he’s never been programmed to provide emotion. But zombies are everywhere, killing everyone, and there isn’t a lot of time to argue. So he and a really hot gun toting mega-babe robot named Rose escape with Lucy out into the desert.

With the zombies in hot pursuit, and with no more huge mountain barricades to protect her, it’s looking like the end of the human race is near. However, the group gets an idea. The Satterfield of the past will be arriving in the present within a few days. If they can get to his lab and kill him before he has time to get back to the past, they can prevent the zombie outbreak from ever happening and save the world. Since robots are not allowed to kill humans, Lucy will have to be the one to kill Satterfield.

I’ve said this before. If you’re going to give us a sci-fi movie or a fantasy movie or an adventure movie, you better find a way to connect with us on an emotional level as well as give us the action and the trailer moments and the special effects that we crave. Throwing zombies and robots up on screen is going to be fun for about 5 minutes. But if you want us to stay interested for the other hour and 55 minutes, you have to create an unresolved relationship in the movie that we care about and want to see resolved.

That relationship here is the relationship between William and Lucy. What this script does a really good job of, is conveying the loneliness of Lucy’s plight. She’s the last human on earth and she’s just a little girl. She’s surrounded by nuts and bolts and ones and zeros. Nobody knows what it’s really like to be in her position. And that alienation eats at her every day. The robots have actually had to program themselves to provide an artificial version of emotional support in order to mirror the kind of support a child needs.

When the robot responsible for this dies, that task is left to William, who’s just an assistant robot meant for simple duties. What makes it even worse is that Lucy hates him. Whenever she’s upset or confused or sad or lonely, she looks to him for support, and he has nothing to offer her. So in a way, it’s like a typical troubled parent-daughter relationship where two people are just not able to find any common ground.

While all the running from zombies stuff is fun, the real story – the thing that we really want to see resolved – is whether William can finally learn to make an emotional connection with this girl. Likewise, we want Lucy to see how hard William is trying. We want her to see that even though he’s not capable of love, he’ll do anything to save her.

This is what screenwriting is about. It’s not about all of the whizbang special effects gadgetry. Once you map that stuff out – once you have your plot structured – you better have a relationship at the core of your second act that needs deep exploration and that an audience is going to be interested in. The further apart you put the two people in that relationship – Lucy hates William and William is light years away from being emotionally available to Lucy – the more compelling that story is going to be. If you don’t have this, you get Transformers – movies with fake relationships and thin unresolved surface level issues that leave you feeling empty and detached from the two-hour experience minutes after they’re over. Now a studio executive may point out: yeah, but Transformers made $1 billion. Well my reply is: yeah, but you could’ve made 2 billion.

The great thing about Inherit the Earth is that it gets the plot stuff right too. We have a clear goal here: get to and kill Satterfield. We have urgency: Satterfield will arrive in a couple of days so they have to move it. We have more urgency: Thousands of zombies are chasing them (always try to add more urgency!). We have high stakes: literally the fate of the world is at stake. We have unexpected twists and turns: the strange cult that they run into. Everything is in place here for a great story.

What I also liked was that Inherit the Earth didn’t always take the safe route. I think whenever you’re writing a screenplay, it’s your job to explore avenues you’re a little afraid of. You have to take some chances and maybe go into a few places you wouldn’t normally go in. These decisions are the decisions that end up making your screenplay different from every other screenplay out there. So when our characters run into a cult, and we get into the scene where we find out what’s really going on with these people, and what they’re really planning to do with Lucy, it’s horrifying. And it’s not somewhere I expected this screenplay to go. But that’s why I liked the decision so much. It took a chance.

Maybe my only complaint with “Earth” is that the ending gets a little messy and in doing so misses an opportunity to truly pay off the emotional set up between William and Lucy. It’s hard to explain but the final scene is like a category five tornado, and because of all the wind and the noise and the chaos, we’re unable to experience the perfect closure we need between William and Lucy. It’s not a huge deal and I think it only needs some tweaking, but it’s a good reminder that clarity is important every step of the way. You can’t fake your way through anything. You have to make sure that every single word is carefully constructed to convey what you need to convey, especially in the end, when all the threads are finally paying off. However, the reason it didn’t bother me was because the final image was so perfect and so haunting. It totally made up for it.

I just really liked this and I hope the studio takes a chance on it. I have no idea if an American audience would be able to buy into the premise. But if they can, they certainly have the screenplay in place to make it work.

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

What I learned: Beware of predictability and safety when you’re writing. They are your enemies. If your script is always predictable and always safe, then there’s a good chance what you’re writing isn’t very interesting. The Shawshank Redemption has our lead character getting raped repeatedly. Back to the Future has a son who has to make out with his own mom. Even a movie like Up kills off one of the most delightful characters you’ve ever met within the first 10 pages. Here in Inherit the Earth, the whole cult sequence is unsettling and unexpected, a dark place a lot of writers would have been too afraid to tackle. But for me, that’s the sequence that legitimized the story. It showed just how dark and terrible a place the world had become, and that made the need to save it all the stronger. So always check yourself. Make sure you’re not the predictable safe writer.

Genre: Romantic Comedy
Premise: Two best friends, Daphne and Henry, sign up for an online dating service only to find out that they’re each other’s perfect match.
About: Yet another 2010 Black List script, and yet another pair of brand-new writers. “Match” finished on the lower half of the list with 10 votes and was purchased by Mike De Luca productions.
Writers: Morgan Schechter & Eric Pearson
Details: 114 pages – June 22, 2010 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).

The gimmick.

These days you can’t write a romantic comedy without a gimmick. Either somebody has to be a friend with benefits. Somebody has to be knocked up. Somebody has to be a 40-year-old virgin. Just writing about a relationship – a.k.a. When Harry Met Sally – isn’t an option anymore. And I guess when you think about it, it wasn’t really an option back then either. When Harry Met Sally may be the one exception to the romantic comedy rule.

However, people have been trying to write the next When Harry Met Sally for 20 years now. So the trick is, how do you write the next When Harry Met Sally but with a gimmick? I think Perfect Match has figured it out. Now calm down. Calm down. I’m not saying Perfect Match measures up to the best romantic comedy of all time, but this is one of the better “friendship” romantic comedies I’ve read.

Perfect Match centers around the friendship of late twentysomethings Daphne and Henry. These roommates are like two peas in a pod. They finish each other’s sentences. They laugh at each other’s jokes. They make fun of each other’s shitty love lives. They’d probably be fine living with each other for the next 50 years if the pressures of society haven’t made Daphne so focused on finding someone to spend the rest of her life with – a task she’s pretty miserable at.

So one day when a commercial comes on for Match.com-like website Charm.com, and she sees that her ex-boyfriend, the one who wrote her sonnets while banging every floozy from Santa Monica to the Jersey Turnpike, is now a spokesman for the site after finding true love through it, Daphne furiously insists that she and Henry try it.

The way that it works is it gives you five “perfect matches.” The two agree that they will go out with all five matches until they find their perfect companion. Henry is reluctant at first but Daphne talks him into it. What follows is a second act filled with them basically going out on all these wacky dates. She goes out with a guy who’s really cheap. He goes out with a gold digger. She goes out with a muscle fitness freak – etc., etc.

On the fourth match, Henry is shocked when he finds a girl he likes, which is bad news for Daphne since she checks the last match and finds out that it’s Henry. Daphne of course realizes that she’s been in love with Henry all this time, but the question is, now that he’s found a girlfriend, is it too late?

Perfect Match falls into that tricky category of the late arriving hook. The late arriving hook is when the thing that makes your concept interesting doesn’t show up until the end of the screenplay. So here you have a movie about two people who are supposedly a perfect match. Yet they don’t figure this out until the third act.

Now on the one hand you can call this dramatic irony in that we’ve been told (just by the title alone) that they’re a perfect match, and now we’re just waiting for them to catch up to us. The tension comes from us wanting them to realize that they’re supposed to be together – sort of like When Harry Met Sally. But the other way to look at it is that an audience could easily get frustrated that it’s taking the entire God damn movie to get to the hook.

I actually wondered if this script would have been better making them the very first match. That way, they could’ve been weirded out, dismissed it as a glitch, and went on with the other four matches. Now, there’s a lot more tension in the scenes because both of them are secretly wondering, “Could the site have been right?” All of their really relaxed hangout sessions would all of a sudden become awkward and filled with subtext. But the script chooses to take a more straightforward lightweight approach and just have fun.

Luckily, the writers are really good with guy-girl dialogue and have tuned in on the relationship. You feel like these two people have lived together and loved each other as friends for a long time (Henry will be the first to yell out that he can hear Audrey using her vibrator). Building a believable friendship isn’t easy but these guys do it.

Too often in these rom-coms the writers are working hard to create those little cutesy “these two really love each other but just don’t know it yet” moments. But there’s none of that here. Their friendship is totally natural and unencumbered by romantic comedy clichés. They just hang out, discuss their romantic tragedies, and move on to the next moment.

As for the stuff that bothered me, I did have an issue with the rhythm of the script, which became too predictable. Once we understood how this was going to work –that they were going to go out with each one of their five dates one at a time – we just sort of knew what to expect. Sure, each date was funny, but because we understood that these two were going to be each other’s final match, it became an exercise in waiting the dates out. There wasn’t enough variety.

I’m not a fan of allowing the reader to get too comfortable in a story because if the reader’s too comfortable then you’re probably losing them. So it would have been nice to have a few twists or turns to throw that rhythm off. Henry meeting a girl he actually liked was a good twist, but it didn’t happen until the end of the screenplay. We needed stuff like that to happen earlier.

Another moment I didn’t love was the ending. I think any writer writing a romantic comedy feels the pressure of having to come up with that big spectacular final mad dash set piece. However, you have to stay consistent with the tone you’ve established. The tone of this story is low key and honest. The rules stay pretty close to the real world. So creating this huge “galloping across the city on a horse” moment felt like the script had turned the channel just before the climax to a Hugh Grant film, which I don’t think it is.

But neither of those things affected my enjoyment of the screenplay too much. In the end, whenever you write a romantic comedy, it’s about creating two compelling people who we want to see together. If you do that, none of the gimmicky stuff surrounding your story matters. It’s just about those two characters. Perfect Match achieves that.

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

What I learned: There tend to be two types of romantic comedies. There are romantic comedies where the characters meet for the first time. And there are romantic comedies where the characters already know each other. It’s important to know how each of those situations affects the audience. There’s usually (but not always!) more at stake in a relationship if there’s a history there. Think about it. If you meet someone, spend a month or two with then, fall for them, then break up, there’s a good chance you’ll be able to get over that person. But when a long term friendship is on the line, or a marriage is on the line, or a really long relationship is on the line, then it’s not just the love that’s at stake, it’s everything. History creates stakes because both people have more invested in each other. Now there are circumstances where movies do both – such as When Harry Met Sally – where the two characters meet AND establish a long history with one another. But if you’re choosing one or the other, make sure you understand how each type of relationship affects the audience.

Genre: Comedy
Premise: A young man begins to suspect that his bosses are monsters – real monsters.
About: 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).
Writer: Richmond Weems
Details: 94 pages

I had some major déjà vu going on when I picked this. I don’t know if there was a spec a few years ago similar to this, or if I read an earlier draft of the screenplay. But there is definitely something familiar about this concept.

As for the concept in question, it’s pretty good. While Lady Jane may disagree with me, the second you add monsters to your story, you get your screenplay a lot closer to high concept land. And I love the idea of a group of employees finding out that their bosses are secretly monsters. The question is – as it always is – did the writer execute?

Half of my notes on this one were destroyed in the great Chicago Fire so you’ll have to excuse me if I get some of the details wrong. Thirtysomething Zach Taylor works at a company doing a vague job with not a whole lot of upside. In fact, Zach, along with the rest of his employees, are all just mindlessly sleepwalking through their careers.

That is until one of their coworkers, John Miller, doesn’t show up for work the next day. The company has a long-standing practice of firing its employees who then disappear off the face of the earth. But these guys knew John Miller so they’re curious why he didn’t say anything to them.

The event results in Zach being a little more perceptive, and he quickly starts noticing a lot of strange things going on at the workplace. For example, the cleaning lady will be standing there one moment and then be gone the next. Instead of assuming she’s just a really fast cleaner, Zach thinks something fishy is going on. This is followed up by an urgent phone call from someone in the building screaming for help. And that’s when Zach really knows something’s up.

But it isn’t until Zach starts paying really close attention to his three bosses that he becomes convinced that they’re actually monsters. The problem is, the second he’s onto them, they’re on to him. And when they realize that Zach could potentially expose their long-running plan of gobbling up their downsized minions, they set up a big party at the end of the week for which Zach is certain will be the death of himself and all of his fellow employees.

So how was Inhuman Resources?

I got one word for you.

Plastics.

Actually, I take that back. I have another word for you.

Subplots.

This screenplay needed more subplots! It also needed fleshing out in almost every area. The idea is executed in the most minimal way, so it doesn’t feel so much like a movie as it does a short extended out to 100 minutes. Let’s start with the location. I may be mistaken because it’s been a few days since I read this, but I don’t remember a single scene that took place outside of the building. If you’re making a contained thriller that happens over the course of a few hours, then keeping everything in one place is fine. But if you’re telling a more traditional story, you need to get outside of that workplace and into the rest of the world so you can give your story some actual texture. With us seeing these people’s lives only within the walls of this company, it was like only seeing one fourth of who they were.

But back to subplots. What should the subplots be in a movie like this? I don’t know but I’ll teach you a trick to help you find them. It’s a simple trick. I call it “pretend that you don’t have a concept.” Pretend like the screenwriting gods came down from above and said to you “I can give this screenplay to the biggest producer in town. The only catch is that you can’t include the monster stuff.” What would you then do to make your screenplay interesting? Well, the only thing you really have at your disposal are your characters and your plot. So one thing you might do is create a love story between two of the people who work at the company. You might create a rivalry with one of the coworkers. You might create a work storyline where there’s some deadline they have to make. Those are very simple options and you would definitely want to dig deeper, but do you see how once you can no longer lean on your concept, you’re forced to actually come up with a story? And by doing so, without you even knowing it, you’ve created subplots.

Next up is a huge pet peeve of mine and something I’ve brought up many times before but in this instance it’s almost inexcusable. You need to know what your character’s job is. Why? Because people spend one third of their lives performing a job. It is one of the biggest insights into who a person is. If I introduced you to Joe and said he was a butcher, you’d get a pretty good idea of who he was, right? Now let’s say I introduced you to Stacy, and told you she was a divorce lawyer. Again, you’d have a pretty good idea of who Stacy was just by her job. Now I’m not saying you can’t play against those stereotypes and change things around once you get into the story, but you have to start somewhere – and knowing what your character does for a living is immensely helpful in figuring out who they are. If you don’t know what your character is doing for nine hours of every day, then you don’t know your character.

Now in this instance it’s even more of a problem, because the entire movie takes place at the character’s place of work. I suppose there is an off chance that keeping the workplace ambiguous is a part of the plan but I doubt it. But even if that was the case, I think it’s a bad idea. If you don’t know what these people do, then you don’t know what tasks to give them, what projects they need to work on, what their routine would be like. I mean think about it, if they work at a comic book company, it’s going to be a lot different than if they work at the IRS. Every single detail of their day is probably going to be different. But since this hasn’t been figured out, the characters are forced to do generic tasks (or in most cases no tasks), which contributes to the overall generic feel of the screenplay.

Plus, when you have a fun idea like this, it should be fun to come up with the company, because you can play off the monster angle. Maybe, for example, they’re a closet manufacturing company (monsters like to hide in closets). That’s pretty lame, but you get the idea. Now that you have a real company that does real things, you can start coming up with real tasks for your characters. Maybe they’re designing a closet for the richest man in town. Or maybe they’re designing closets for a new school (which the monsters picked specifically because it offered a lot of eatable children). Now you can get your characters out of the building and into the real world doing things. The point is, now you can flesh out your story.

Inhuman resources is an example of a script where the writer has thought of their concept and nothing else. Every single element in the screenplay needs to be fleshed out. I like the idea for the movie. It definitely has potential. But this thing won’t shine until it gets a giant makeover.

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

What I learned: A couple of lessons here. Never tell anyone that the script you’re giving them is your first script. Richmond was able to get away with it in this case but that’s mainly because I had a déjà vu moment when I read the concept. But most agents/producers/managers know that it usually takes about six scripts before writers really start to understand the craft. So usually, when a writer points out that this is their first script, I close that e-mail faster than George Lopez’s late-night show. You may be proud that you’ve completed your first script – and you should be – but if you want your script to be read, it’s best to keep that information to yourself. Another lesson to learn here– and I’m just bringing this up because the first lesson reminded me of it: Do not inundate your industry contacts with seven or eight different script loglines from your script archives in addition to the script you’re sending them. I don’t claim to know the exact psychology behind this, but whenever a writer does it, it gives off a desperate vibe. But the bigger issue is that readers will probably start wondering, if this person has all these old screenplays that no one liked before, what’s to say this one is any better? When talking about your screenplays, you should probably only mention the screenplay you just finished (that got you the meeting), the screenplay you’re working on, maybe the last screenplay you wrote, and then possibly some future ideas for screenplays. You can even cheat and give them “ideas you’re thinking about writing” that you’ve actually already written. Then, if they like them, you can “write them” really quickly and send them off to them. Now, not only have you given them a screenplay that you know they’ll be interested in, but they think you wrote it in a month, which is always good.  Hey, agents lie all the time. Why can’t we?

“Writing Movies for Fun and Profit” is one of the more interesting books to come along in the screenwriting community in a while. Its authors, the writers of such movies as Night at the Museum and Herbie Fully Loaded, seem to take the opposite approach when it comes to writing than mainstays such as Robert McKee and Blake Snyder. Gone are long chapters on how to develop your characters. Absent is any in-depth look at structure. In their place is a single core piece of advice: Write big fun family “four quadrant” movies and rake in the dollars.

Despite the actual screenwriting advice being some of the worst I’ve ever encountered, the backstage insider look into the business side of screenwriting is nothing short of amazing. Basically, the book tells you what happens after you break into the club. It’s funny, it’s sad, it’s interesting, but if you ever wondered what it’s really like to be a working screenwriter or you want to prepare yourself for when you finally make that big jump, this is definitely a book for you.

Before I get into some of the more interesting aspects of the book, I’d like to warn you about its biggest weakness – its unequivocally terrible advice when it comes to writing a screenplay. You see, these guys believe it’s as easy as slapping together a bunch of funny scenes and making a $1 million sale. Let me tell you why they think this and why they’re wrong. As the authors point out in their book, on most big projects there are a lot of writers. Oftentimes, new writers are brought in to beef up the weak portions of the screenplay. So if the dialogue is bad, the producers will bring in writers who are good with dialogue. Once they’re finished, the producers may realize that the structure is sloppy. So they’ll fire the dialogue guys and bring in some structure guys. What our authors seem to understand but not acknowledge is that they’re the “comedy” guys. They’re the writers you bring in when you want jokes. But the between the lines message here – and I’m not even sure our authors are aware of it – is that when the producers want people who actually know how to write a screenplay, who understand the guts, the depth, how to add heart, and all those things that actually make a story resonate with people, they bring in writers who actually know how to write. So while our authors implying that none of that “deep” stuff really matters may be true for their own specific experiences, it has nothing to do with Joe Nobody’s approach to a screenplay. Joe Nobody still has to display an intrinsic understanding of the craft to impress a reader. It would be nice if all you had to do was tell a couple of jokes to make a million bucks. But that’s simply not the case.

The good news is, none of that stuff is the focus of the book. The main focus here is the business end. And I have to give it to these guys. They taught me a hell of a lot about how things work once you’re a highly paid screenwriter. Here are some of the highlights.

OH NO
My favorite chapter (and probably the most terrifying chapter you’ll ever read if you’re a screenwriter) is the one that deals with the authors’ experience writing Herbie: Fully Loaded. Now if you ask me, I’m not jumping up and down begging somebody to let me write another Herbie movie. But hey, everybody’s got their thing. So these guys pitched Herbie to the studio president and she loved it. She thought it was the greatest idea ever and quickly made Herbie the most important movie on the studio’s slate. She then set them up with a producer who basically had zero interest in making a Herbie movie and therefore tried to make a version of what she believed a Herbie movie for people who don’t like Herbie would be like. She then proceeded to make the writers change every single aspect of their story, even though those were all the things the studio fell in love with. And they couldn’t do anything about it. When you’re the writers, you can’t just call the studio president and say, “Hey, this producer is making us change all the things you love.” There is a hierarchy. You’re not allowed to go over anybody’s head. So all they could do was stand on the deck and watch the Titanic sink.

This is what I don’t get about Hollywood. It would seem to me that one of the more important decisions you would make as a president would be to match up a project with a producer who understands and cares about that project. It sounds like a producer was just randomly assigned to these guys. I don’t see how good movies could consistently be made under that process (note to readers: the authors assure us rather proudly that that producer is no longer working in the business). But what should really tickle your noodle is that these guys also wrote Taxi – a movie in which the development process went as smoothly as newly churned butter. Now comparing Herbie to Taxi is kind of like comparing Jersey Shore to Basketball Wives. But in a close race I would still say that Herbie comes out on top. Which begs the question: How much does development really matter?

PITCHING
One of the big changes in your life after your first sale is that you’ll now become a human pitch machine, pitching your own projects or pitching yourself as the best option for someone else’s projects. This is an element of the business that very few people talk about outside of working screenwriters. And these guys do a pretty good job of preparing you for it. Probably the most important advice they give you is that whatever movie you’re pitching should have a main character a movie star will want to play. Because no matter how much movie blogs and Hollywood insiders are trying to convince us that stars no longer matter, the easiest way to get financing and confidence behind a project is to have a movie star attached. They also point out that your idea should be different but shouldn’t reinvent the wheel. It should sound like a cross between two really successful films (they use the example “Die Hard” meets “Home Alone” but I’m pretty sure they were joking – although it’s hard to tell – these are the guys who wrote Taxi remember). The rest of their advice about pitching is rather practical – be excited about your movie, don’t be afraid to act out some of the parts, and keep it short (a typical pitch is 15 min. long). But the point is, this is the part of Hollywood that most screenwriters have no clue about until they’re thrown into the fire. It sure is nice to get a look at the logs before the match is lit.

PAGE LENGTH
One of the more amusing chapters I ran into was in regards to page count and page formatting. For everybody who thinks that the length of their screenplay doesn’t matter, wait till you start writing for a big studio. The studios are so obsessed with page length that they actually have their own specific formatting requirements. They give you specific indents and formatting rules you must enter into your screenwriting software when you write drafts for them. If you turn a script in that doesn’t follow that formatting data, they will chop off your fingers. The reason for this is, obviously, every page is roughly equal to a certain amount of screen time, usually 1 min. And each of the studios have perfected a formatting template that allows them to best measure the length of a movie based on the length of the screenplay. So for those of you freaking out about page length now, wait until you have to start formatting a studio script. That’s when shit gets real.

GETTING PAID
One of the most enlightening chapters in the book is the chapter about getting paid. I can’t tell you how many writers have asked me how much they should expect to make selling their first screenplay, and then, if the screenplay gets made, how much they should expect to make on the back end. These are the details I’ve always wanted answers to and the book goes into as much minutia as I’ve ever seen on the matter. So how much is the minimum one can make from selling a screenplay? The short answer is, the Writers Guild requires a writer be paid at least $110,000 for an original screenplay. However, you aren’t in the Writers Guild. And that means somebody could pay you 200 bucks. Where things get interesting though is on the backend. This is where the writing business gets messy. The reason that those writing credits are so coveted – even on total pieces of shit like Paul Blart 3 – is because as long as you have an official credit on the film, you’ll be getting paid for the rest of your life. All those writers who worked on the script but didn’t get credit? They don’t get diddly squat outside of their rewrite fee.

The fight for that coveted credit has created one of the most highly controversial arbitration processes in any union. Without getting into too much detail, in order to determine who gets the credit on a screenplay, a bunch of your fellow writers read all the drafts from all the people who worked on the project, and decide who to give the credit to. Each writer is also allowed to give a written argument as to why they believe they should get the credit. Oftentimes, credit is given to the writer with the most persuasive argument. So Writer A may have done a lot more work on the screenplay than Writer B, but Writer B came up with a much better argument, so he wins. This has become such an intense process, that there are actually arbiters out there that you can hire for thousands of dollars who’ll write your argument for you to give you the best chance at getting written credit on the film.

This has also led to some really shady practices in the screenwriting community, some of which actually encourage writers to sabotage a good script. If you’re hired to rewrite another writer, and you want to make as much money as possible, it’s in your best interest to rewrite as much of the story as possible, regardless of if that new story is better than the current story. If you know that the movie you’re working on is already getting made, then it’s practically demanded of you to change as much as possible so you can get final credit on the film. This is at least part of the reason why there are a lot of bad movies out there. The system is rigged to encourage writers to change what’s working. There are actually standard tricks of the trade – like changing all of the characters names – to help it look like you’ve written the majority of the story. Arbitration is one of, if not the, most heated topic amongst professional screenwriters. I can’t say I know how to fix it but from the way these guys lay it out, it’s clear that the process is broken. Maybe some savvy Scriptshadow readers have some ideas on how to fix it and can share their ideas in the comments section.

IN SUMMARY
What I’ve highlighted above is just scratching the surface. There are a ton of other topics that the book covers (including how to take notes from Martin Lawrence – well kinda). Despite some of the worst pure screenwriting advice I’ve ever read (please, don’t listen to anything these guys say when it comes to the actual writing), I have to admit that I’ve never seen this kind of insight into the professional plight of a working screenwriter. Not all of us are going to hang on long enough to become screenwriting superstars, but for those of you who are in this for the long haul and expect to be looking at real estate in the Hollywood Hills at some point in your life, you’ll definitely want to read this book. For those who have already bought it, feel free to offer your opinions in the comments section.

“Writing Movies for Fun and Profit” is one of the more interesting books to come along in the screenwriting community in a while. Its authors, the writers of such movies as Night at the Museum and Herbie Fully Loaded, seem to take the opposite approach when it comes to writing than mainstays such as Robert McKee and Blake Snyder. Gone are long chapters on how to develop your characters. Absent is any in-depth look at structure. In their place is a single core piece of advice: Write big fun family “four quadrant” movies and rake in the dollars.

Despite the actual screenwriting advice being some of the worst I’ve ever encountered, the backstage insider look into the business side of screenwriting is nothing short of amazing. Basically, the book tells you what happens after you break into the club. It’s funny, it’s sad, it’s interesting, but if you ever wondered what it’s really like to be a working screenwriter or you want to prepare yourself for when you finally make that big jump, this is definitely a book for you.

Before I get into some of the more interesting aspects of the book, I’d like to warn you about its biggest weakness – its unequivocally terrible advice when it comes to writing a screenplay. You see, these guys believe it’s as easy as slapping together a bunch of funny scenes and making a $1 million sale. Let me tell you why they think this and why they’re wrong. As the authors point out in their book, on most big projects there are a lot of writers. Oftentimes, new writers are brought in to beef up the weak portions of the screenplay. So if the dialogue is bad, the producers will bring in writers who are good with dialogue. Once they’re finished, the producers may realize that the structure is sloppy. So they’ll fire the dialogue guys and bring in some structure guys. What our authors seem to understand but not acknowledge is that they’re the “comedy” guys. They’re the writers you bring in when you want jokes. But the between the lines message here – and I’m not even sure our authors are aware of it – is that when the producers want people who actually know how to write a screenplay, who understand the guts, the depth, how to add heart, and all those things that actually make a story resonate with people, they bring in writers who actually know how to write. So while our authors implying that none of that “deep” stuff really matters may be true for their own specific experiences, it has nothing to do with Joe Nobody’s approach to a screenplay. Joe Nobody still has to display an intrinsic understanding of the craft to impress a reader. It would be nice if all you had to do was tell a couple of jokes to make a million bucks. But that’s simply not the case.

The good news is, none of that stuff is the focus of the book. The main focus here is the business end. And I have to give it to these guys. They taught me a hell of a lot about how things work once you’re a highly paid screenwriter. Here are some of the highlights.

OH NO
My favorite chapter (and probably the most terrifying chapter you’ll ever read if you’re a screenwriter) is the one that deals with the authors’ experience writing Herbie: Fully Loaded. Now if you ask me, I’m not jumping up and down begging somebody to let me write another Herbie movie. But hey, everybody’s got their thing. So these guys pitched Herbie to the studio president and she loved it. She thought it was the greatest idea ever and quickly made Herbie the most important movie on the studio’s slate. She then set them up with a producer who basically had zero interest in making a Herbie movie and therefore tried to make a version of what she believed a Herbie movie for people who don’t like Herbie would be like. She then proceeded to make the writers change every single aspect of their story, even though those were all the things the studio fell in love with. And they couldn’t do anything about it. When you’re the writers, you can’t just call the studio president and say, “Hey, this producer is making us change all the things you love.” There is a hierarchy. You’re not allowed to go over anybody’s head. So all they could do was stand on the deck and watch the Titanic sink.

This is what I don’t get about Hollywood. It would seem to me that one of the more important decisions you would make as a president would be to match up a project with a producer who understands and cares about that project. It sounds like a producer was just randomly assigned to these guys. I don’t see how good movies could consistently be made under that process (note to readers: the authors assure us rather proudly that that producer is no longer working in the business). But what should really tickle your noodle is that these guys also wrote Taxi – a movie in which the development process went as smoothly as newly churned butter. Now comparing Herbie to Taxi is kind of like comparing Jersey Shore to Basketball Wives. But in a close race I would still say that Herbie comes out on top. Which begs the question: How much does development really matter?

PITCHING
One of the big changes in your life after your first sale is that you’ll now become a human pitch machine, pitching your own projects or pitching yourself as the best option for someone else’s projects. This is an element of the business that very few people talk about outside of working screenwriters. And these guys do a pretty good job of preparing you for it. Probably the most important advice they give you is that whatever movie you’re pitching should have a main character a movie star will want to play. Because no matter how much movie blogs and Hollywood insiders are trying to convince us that stars no longer matter, the easiest way to get financing and confidence behind a project is to have a movie star attached. They also point out that your idea should be different but shouldn’t reinvent the wheel. It should sound like a cross between two really successful films (they use the example “Die Hard” meets “Home Alone” but I’m pretty sure they were joking – although it’s hard to tell – these are the guys who wrote Taxi remember). The rest of their advice about pitching is rather practical – be excited about your movie, don’t be afraid to act out some of the parts, and keep it short (a typical pitch is 15 min. long). But the point is, this is the part of Hollywood that most screenwriters have no clue about until they’re thrown into the fire. It sure is nice to get a look at the logs before the match is lit.

PAGE LENGTH
One of the more amusing chapters I ran into was in regards to page count and page formatting. For everybody who thinks that the length of their screenplay doesn’t matter, wait till you start writing for a big studio. The studios are so obsessed with page length that they actually have their own specific formatting requirements. They give you specific indents and formatting rules you must enter into your screenwriting software when you write drafts for them. If you turn a script in that doesn’t follow that formatting data, they will chop off your fingers. The reason for this is, obviously, every page is roughly equal to a certain amount of screen time, usually 1 min. And each of the studios have perfected a formatting template that allows them to best measure the length of a movie based on the length of the screenplay. So for those of you freaking out about page length now, wait until you have to start formatting a studio script. That’s when shit gets real.

GETTING PAID
One of the most enlightening chapters in the book is the chapter about getting paid. I can’t tell you how many writers have asked me how much they should expect to make selling their first screenplay, and then, if the screenplay gets made, how much they should expect to make on the back end. These are the details I’ve always wanted answers to and the book goes into as much minutia as I’ve ever seen on the matter. So how much is the minimum one can make from selling a screenplay? The short answer is, the Writers Guild requires a writer be paid at least $110,000 for an original screenplay. However, you aren’t in the Writers Guild. And that means somebody could pay you 200 bucks. Where things get interesting though is on the backend. This is where the writing business gets messy. The reason that those writing credits are so coveted – even on total pieces of shit like Paul Blart 3 – is because as long as you have an official credit on the film, you’ll be getting paid for the rest of your life. All those writers who worked on the script but didn’t get credit? They don’t get diddly squat outside of their rewrite fee.

The fight for that coveted credit has created one of the most highly controversial arbitration processes in any union. Without getting into too much detail, in order to determine who gets the credit on a screenplay, a bunch of your fellow writers read all the drafts from all the people who worked on the project, and decide who to give the credit to. Each writer is also allowed to give a written argument as to why they believe they should get the credit. Oftentimes, credit is given to the writer with the most persuasive argument. So Writer A may have done a lot more work on the screenplay than Writer B, but Writer B came up with a much better argument, so he wins. This has become such an intense process, that there are actually arbiters out there that you can hire for thousands of dollars who’ll write your argument for you to give you the best chance at getting written credit on the film.

This has also led to some really shady practices in the screenwriting community, some of which actually encourage writers to sabotage a good script. If you’re hired to rewrite another writer, and you want to make as much money as possible, it’s in your best interest to rewrite as much of the story as possible, regardless of if that new story is better than the current story. If you know that the movie you’re working on is already getting made, then it’s practically demanded of you to change as much as possible so you can get final credit on the film. This is at least part of the reason why there are a lot of bad movies out there. The system is rigged to encourage writers to change what’s working. There are actually standard tricks of the trade – like changing all of the characters names – to help it look like you’ve written the majority of the story. Arbitration is one of, if not the, most heated topic amongst professional screenwriters. I can’t say I know how to fix it but from the way these guys lay it out, it’s clear that the process is broken. Maybe some savvy Scriptshadow readers have some ideas on how to fix it and can share their ideas in the comments section.

IN SUMMARY
What I’ve highlighted above is just scratching the surface. There are a ton of other topics that the book covers (including how to take notes from Martin Lawrence – well kinda). Despite some of the worst pure screenwriting advice I’ve ever read (please, don’t listen to anything these guys say when it comes to the actual writing), I have to admit that I’ve never seen this kind of insight into the professional plight of a working screenwriter. Not all of us are going to hang on long enough to become screenwriting superstars, but for those of you who are in this for the long haul and expect to be looking at real estate in the Hollywood Hills at some point in your life, you’ll definitely want to read this book. For those who have already bought it, feel free to offer your opinions in the comments section.