Big Hole (Guest Review!)

Posted on July 12, 2011 | by admin

Hello everybody.  Carson here.  It’s a busy week so I’m going to be taking the day off.  But good news.  Commenter and site regular, Christian Savage, will be taking over the reviewing reins today.  And I say “reins” quite literally cause we got ourselves a good ole fashioned Western on our hands.  Or a good current day Western on our hands.  Or a Western, but set in today’s time, movie, on our hands.  Aw screw it.  You get what I’m saying.  This is Christian’s first time in the review chair so be nice to him!

Genre: Modern Western
Premise: An old cowboy goes on a mission to recover his money after a million dollar sweepstakes scam cleas out his entire bank account.”n
About: Big Hole was a very high ranking script on the 2008 Black List (finishing fourth behind The Beaver, The Oranges, and Butter – all of which were produced). Afterwards, Pirates Of The Caribbean director Gore Verbenski attached himself to the project. However, it’s unclear where the project now stands and if Verbenski is still attached. Writer Michael Gilio has spent most of his life as an actor, appearing in a lot of TV, such as Chicago Hope and CSI: NY. He wrote and directed his first feature, titled “Kwik Stop,” back in 2001.
Writer: Michael Gilio
Details: 124 pages – undated (This is an early draft of the script. The situations, characters, and plot may change significantly by the time the film is released. This is not a definitive statement about the project, but rather an analysis of this unique draft as it pertains to the craft of screenwriting).

It’s hard to get a western made, no matter if it’s set in modern times. It’s even harder when the hero is closer to a hundred years old than he is to fifty.
And while this script wasn’t written for Clint Eastwood, he’s the only brand name I can think of who fits the age and curmudgeonly attitude of the protagonist with ease. The trouble is that he’s gone on record saying he has no plans of starring in another movie.
Those are some major setbacks to overcome. But, this script is so good that it’s getting made anyway. At least, the last I heard Gore Verbinski was attached to direct. I hope that’s still the case, because Big Hole is terrific and deserves to be seen.
It begins, as any good story should – with a desperate man at the end of his rope.
Francis Lee, Sr. is tired, broken, and searching for a miracle.
For the past 78 years, he’s tried living the best he could, serving his country as a Marine in World War II, and then working as a rancher on his 51,000-acre property in Glass Valley, Montana.
Lee has wanted so badly to be the model of a good man, untarnished by regret. But, the faded tapestry of his life has been shorn to pieces, with the twin blades of bad luck and poor judgment.
After years of terrible eating habits, he needs to take several pills a day, to fight the effects of heart disease and diabetes. The medical bills alone swing like a wrecking ball through his savings.
His dead wife, Patty, haunts his dreams, leaving him gasping and trembling in the dark.
A chasm of bitterness separates Lee and his son, and by extension, the granddaughter he’s not allowed to know.
The only day Lee looks forward to anymore is the first of each month, when his tough Indian caretaker, Maya, drives him downtown to get a haircut, buy groceries, and have a meal at the local diner.
Lee is stuck, angry, and longing for a change. So, he fills out a sweepstakes entry form he gets in the mail: You could win a million dollars! Hey, if it could happen to anyone, why not him?
Time passes and he forgets about the contest, until he receives a phone call one night. The caller makes sure Lee is sitting down, because he’s about to get a big shock. He’s just won a million dollars. That’s right, a million dollars.
In that moment, decades of despair melt away. He cries tears of relief and gratitude. The caller, Jeffery Smith, becomes Lee’s new best friend.
His sudden and unexpected wealth puts Lee in a good mood, so he lets his guard down for the first time in recent memory.
He talks to Jeffery about his wife, and the legendary fishing trip he had long ago with his son at Big Hole River. Fishing with his son was the greatest moment of his life, but winning that money is a serious contender.
Lee is an intensely private man, so this intimate conversation with a stranger is a rare and touching experience for him. And, it’s a conversation that takes on a darker meaning in the days ahead.
A month after Jeffery took his bank account information, Lee arrives in town and discovers he can’t pay for his groceries. He goes to his bank and learns that the $34,190 in his account, which had to last the rest of his life, is gone. He’s the latest victim of financial fraud.
And, almost as hurtful, Lee revealed his true self to a man who took advantage of that trust.
This is where Lee gets really mad.
Man, this script is good.
It’s not afraid to start with a slow burn. You get to know Lee very well, before he loses control. And the story moves with an almost biblical cadence, measured and graceful.
It also pulls a pretty neat trick. There’s so much history between these people, but not one flashback is used.
You find out who these people are through body language, photographs, the way they avoid talking about certain topics. I still don’t quite know how the author does it, but it’s incredible.
I will say, though, that this lack of back story does make it a little hard to see why Lee and his son are at odds. I think I know why.
(Potential spoiler) Near the end, the audience sees a photo of Lee’s son, posing with his daughter, and his wife, who’s black. There’s a hint early in the movie that Lee may have told his son he didn’t approve of him marrying a black woman. But, it’s subtle and I didn’t catch it until I read the script a second time. (End spoiler)
The other thing that felt off to me was the cattle stampede that crushed the sheriff’s car. The sheriff knows Lee is going to show up at the bank headquarters to cause trouble. But instead of waiting for him there, he heads onto the plains nearby to question some ranchers who may have seen Lee.
As a result, the sheriff misses Lee at the bank and gets caught in the stampede, which he caused himself by turning on his car siren. That scene feels like it was added more as a set piece for the trailer than to move the story forward.
Not to mention, it immediately brings to mind the scene in City Slickers with Billy Crystal and the coffee grinder. It doesn’t match the rest of the script’s tone.
But those are small complaints, since the story as a whole is lovingly crafted.
Big Hole will probably be advertised as a revenge tale, but it’s about so much more than that.
It’s a complex character study of an elderly man coping with how unnecessary he’s become, in a youth-obsessed culture that keeps pushing forward.
It’s about a set of values – loyalty, a strong sense of home and duty, simple politeness – that now seems to be dying alongside a generation that tried to live by it.
It’s about learning how much of your dignity you’ll let people steal, before you say, that’s enough. And then deciding how far across the line you’re willing to go to take your dignity back.
(Potential spoilers ahead. Read at your own risk.)
And, perhaps most meaningful, to me, anyway, it shows how easy it is to lose your last chance to connect with loved ones, before they’re gone forever.
This last theme broke through to me, because it reminds me of my grandfather.
He was a year older than Lee when he died a few years back. He was a WWII veteran and raised a close family. Grandpa was so dapper and charming, like an aging movie star from the golden era.
There’s nothing he enjoyed more than a good joke, and if you were lucky enough to make him laugh, you glowed inside.
As soon as I was old enough to appreciate him, I loved him.
In the early 2000s, he was diagnosed with pulmonary fibrosis, a lung disease acquired from smoking, even though he quit more than 30 years ago.
At first, I didn’t notice any changes in him. He was still that handsome old man with the puckish smile and eyes that shined.
But then, I started seeing him take a breath or two from an oxygen tank. Soon after, he needed to pull that tank around wherever he went. A few years later, he was so breathless he had to be pushed in a wheelchair every day.
Knowing that time was running out, I told him I’d like to interview him soon, to get the fundamental truth of his life down on paper. Not just for the sake of posterity, but because I wanted to hear the stories he never would’ve told me as a kid.
I wanted to know the dirty details of who my grandpa was, a man who lived, fought, cherished, and died on this planet.
That interview never happened.
I got caught up in my own problems and, without even realizing it, the chance to have a real talk with my grandpa kept slipping further away.
My sister called me in a panic one day in late September. I’d been at work with the phone off and had no idea what was happening. She told me if I wanted to say goodbye to grandpa, I better get to his house now, because he’s been dying all afternoon.
When I walked through his front door, my family was huddled around my grandpa’s bed. I was so unprepared to see him.
He struggled for each breath, as if it was the hardest thing he’d ever done. His back arched in terror, bed sheets clenched in his fists. He didn’t even seem to acknowledge anyone was in the room with him. The only thing that mattered was the next gulp of air.
Oh, god, how I knew I’d never make him laugh again. Or do anything with him again.
All I could do was say, I’m here with you, Grandpa. I’m here. I love you.
I made a promise to myself that day that I wouldn’t miss that final talk with my own father.
That’s what this script reminded of.
I may be wrong, but I think the author intended Lee’s relationship with his son to be the point of this movie. It all goes back to the title. If Citizen Kane had been named after its emotional core, it would’ve been called Rosebud, instead.
While he would never admit it, Lee wants nothing more than to return with his son to Big Hole, and recapture what it means to be at peace.
But, as it happens too often in this life, we’re sometimes blind to the opportunities given to us. And there’s no going back.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[x] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: I learned a couple things with this one. First, the western movie is a good template to follow, when you write a script in any genre. The plot is clean, simple, and from the gut, which gives you a lot of room to write meaty roles for the A-list. The other thing I learned is that every relationship we have has a certain level of importance. Strangers and acquaintances are low level, while family is high level. If you add one or two intense, high-level relationships to your script, it may elevate what is otherwise a low-concept idea. Think Adam’s Rib or Kramer vs. Kramer.
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Killing On Carnival Row (Carson Review)

Posted on July 11, 2011 | by admin

Genre: Dark fantasy
Premise: In the city of The Burgue, a police inspector pursues a serial killer who is targeting fairies.
About: Travis Beacham sold this script back in 2005. While becoming a town favorite, it has often been deemed too expensive to make, particularly because it doesn’t have a pre-built in audience. However, the script jump-started Beacham’s career and allowed him to do assignment work on some of the biggest projects in town. He eventually got sole credit on Clash Of The Titans, and is the writer on Guillermo del Toro’s upcoming self-proclaimed “biggest monster movie ever,” Pacific Rim. If you’re a writer who wants to write big Hollywood effects-driven flicks, Travis Beacham is probably your template-writer on how to get there.
Writer: Travis Beacham
Details: 116 pages – July 22, 2005 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).

Do not adjust your screens. That déjà vu you’re experiencing does not mean the Matrix has reloaded. Killing on Carnival Row HAS been reviewed on Scriptshadow before. But it was Roger who reviewed it, not moi.

Before and since then, I have heard numerous screenwriters tout how this screenplay is the greatest thing since Final Draft. Imaginative, daring, edgy, fascinating, original, dark – these adjectives bombard my sensitive ears whenever Killing on Carnival Row’s brought up. Which begs the question? Why haven’t I read it?

Well, I don’t dig the fairy thing. These kinds of fantasy worlds remind me of Harry Potter, whose movies have provided me with some of the more severe “what the fuck” expressions that have ever graced my mug. So the last thing I wanted was to crash the party with a big fat negative review of a script everybody considered their script girlfriend. So I avoided it. And avoided it. And avoided it. And then one day I woke up and for no good reason proclaimed, much like Annette Benning’s character in American Beauty, “I shall read Killing On Carnival Row today!” But I knew if I was going to do this, I was going to have to do it in style. So I went to the costume shop and bought one of those cheap fairy costumes. I strapped on my wings and got ready to immerse myself in The Burgue.

Worgue.

Killing on Carnival Row introduces us to Inspector Rycroft Philostrate. Besides being a mouthful, Philostrate is kind of this deep dark dude who roams this deep dark city known as The Burgue. Philostrate has just learned of the killing of a poor defenseless fairy, and it’s his job to find out who the killer is.

The main witness at the crime scene – to give you an idea of how weird this world is – is a seal/sea creature named Moira who speaks in song. She sings out what she saw, probably making things more confusing than they were in the first place. But that’s okay, because we later find out that she impressed enough people to make it to Hollywood Week on The Burgue Idol.

Philostrate surmises from the Rebecca Black breakdown that the place to look for answers is Carnival Row, the quarter of The Burgue where all fairies live. But we soon find out this isn’t a professional visit. Oh no. It turns out Philostrate is in love with a fairy hooker named Tourmaline. So the two make some very graphic but very sweet human-fairy love, and afterwards throw out wishful asides about becoming a “real couple” someday. Riiiiight. Not to ruin the moment here guys, but there’s a bigger chance of Harry Potter hooking up with Volgemart.

Anyway, our fairy killer isn’t done fairy killing yet, and after taking out another clueless wing-flapper, he kills Tourmaline herself, the hooker fairy! Uh-oh, shit just got personal. And to make things worse, the press has picked up on the ordeal. They’re calling our fairy serial killer: Unseelie Jack (I think “Seelie” is the name of one of the quarters in The Burgue. But I can’t tell you for sure. This is a script where, remember, people peel off seal-like exteriors and speak in song).

Philostrate is pretty down about the whole Tourmaline thing, but apparently not that down, cause he starts hooking up with this other fairy named Vignette quickly afterwards. Karma comes back to bite his ass though, as Philostrate soon becomes the number one suspect for the fairy killings! Say what!? That’s right. They think HE’S Unseelie Jack. So Philostrate does his best Harrison Ford impression, trying to solve the case while on the run, and develops deeper and deeper feelings for Vignette. Will they catch him? Is Philostrate Unseelie Jack? Find out…well…in the comments section here on this review.

I’m guessing you already know where I stand on this one. In a lot of ways, Killing on Carnival Row was exactly what I expected it to be. A story where film geeks go to gorge themselves. You got your dark noir-ish city. You got your hot naked fairies. You got your half-human half-seal singing whatchumacalits. This is a movie that David Fincher or Guillermo del Toro would hit out of the park. In fact, this script is basically Seven meets the fairy world. Meets Harry Potter. I’m not sure what fairy sex would look like onscreen, but this movie wants you to know.

The writing style’s also very visceral. I may not have liked the world I was in, but I definitely felt like I was there. There is no doubt Beacham thought this universe up and down and back and forth. Carnival Row has the same attention to detail as films like Star Wars, Avatar, and even Lord Of The Rings. Reading it is kind of like the difference between playing a good video game and a bad video game. In a bad video game, you walk outside the expected field of play and you see a bunch of blurry pixels. Do the same thing in a good video game, and you might find this huge beautiful wheat field, glimmering in the sunset. The details and depth here are just first rate.

In fact, I think Beacham’s kind of a genius in that sense. When you think about the highest paying screenwriting jobs in Hollywood? They’re usually effects driven films with lots of monsters. So why not show Hollywood you can write effects driven movies with lots of monsters? But the difference between Beacham and everyone else who takes this approach is that Beacham really studied his world. This isn’t some slapped together paper-thin universe. This is a full blown bona fide mythology. Carnival Row may not ever be made, but the script will be reaping assignment residuals for the rest of Beacham’s life.

Another biggie I realized halfway through the script, is that even though I wasn’t into the subject matter, I would definitely go see this movie. I mean, imagine the trailer for this sucker. Naked fairies and huge mechanical dragonfly blimps and singing seal whatchumacalits. It would be unlike anything you’ve seen before. And I think that’s what I’m forgetting here. My narrow-minded grown-up Harry Potter references aside, you have never seen a movie like this in your life. That alone should merit making it.

As for the script itself, let’s just say while reading it, I felt like the uptight yuppie dude walking through downtown Tijuana. I had a hard time comprehending what the hell was going on half the time. For example, fairies are often referred to as scum in this world. But I always thought fairies were cute and sweet. Tinker Bell may be many things – annoying near the top of the list – but I’d never equate her to a cockroach. Why they gotta be so fairy racist in this movie? I couldn’t wrap my brain around it. Trolls. Yuck. Lizard people. Icky. Fairies? Cute!

And on the story front, I had a hard time figuring out why the hell they were after Philostrate. One second Philostrate’s the main detective on the case. Next, he’s the main suspect. Hold up, WHAT?? When the hell did this happen?? Did I miss something? Don’t you have to, like, have the one-armed man kill your wife but she erroneously whispers your name into the phone before she dies to become a number one suspect in a murder? If someone could explain this plot point to me, I would be grateful.

But when it was all over? I appreciated Carnival Row. It’s different. It’s bold. It’s extremely well-written. So I definitely think it’s worth reading. But I will not be joining Team Philostrate or Team Tourmaline any time soon.

linkage: While I won’t be linking to the script here, this script can actually be found online.  Just type the title and “PDF” into google and you should find it no problem.  

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

What I learned: Pay particular attention to the way you describe your action. If you look at the first scene in Killing on Carnival Row, you’ll find a lot of descriptive visceral words. “Laboured BREATHING” “SPLISH SPLASH” “BURSTS” “Eerie WAIL” “slams” “kicks free.” Notice how I haven’t even told you what the scene was about but you still have a strong sense of what’s happening. Compare that to if I used, “runs” “flies” “screams” “breathes”. Those words do the job, but not nearly as effectively. So choose your adjectives and your descriptive phrases wisely. You want to connect with that reader on a visceral level.

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Amateur Friday – Orbitals

Posted on July 8, 2011 | by admin

Genre: Sci-Fi Comedy
Premise: Set in the future, a married couple trying to join an exclusive orbiting community (above earth), is forced to adopt a 13 year old girl due to the community’s “families only” policy. Little do the girl and the community know, the couple’s intentions aren’t so kosher.
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: John Sweden
Details: 97 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’ve been hearing some strongly opinionated rumblings about this script all week. I just want everyone to remember, this isn’t Trajent Future we’re talking about here. We don’t have the writer telling everyone they’re idiots for not liking his script (or at least, not yet). My assessment of John Sweden is that he’s a nice guy, someone interested in the craft, but whose proximity to screenwriting may not be as close as the rest of us. We all started somewhere. We all know what those early scripts of ours looked like, so don’t be mean here. Be critical, but don’t be mean. Now, having said that, I have to call it like I see it, so to Mr. Sweden, take a seat. There’s going to be some tough love in this breakdown. Try to take it constructively. In the end, it’s about learning from your mistakes and becoming a better screenwriter the next time around. :)

The first hint that something’s off here comes in that DAD and MOM, the main characters in Orbitals are referred to in quotes throughout the screenplay. So they’re “DAD” and “MOM.” Anyway, “Dad” and “Mom” are obsessed with sex. In fact, the movie starts out with them trying to make a sex tape. I’m not sure what this has to do with the story, other than maybe being a viral offshoot of Monday’s script review, but it’s a pretty darn strange way to open a script, I’ll tell you that.

Anyway, the other thing “Dad” and “Mom” do is swear a lot. Fuck this and fuck that and fuck fuck fuck and lots of use of the word fuck. I did a word count and there are over 150 uses of the word fuck. That’s almost 2 per page!

Now I’m a little confused about this next part, but I think “Dad” and “Mom” work for the military. And they need to get up to this orbiting community to execute a top secret plan. Unfortunately, the “Orbitals” don’t allow you up there unless you’re a full family, with children and such. So “Dad” and “Mom” decide to adopt a teenager.

Luckily for us, “Teenager” has a real name. Aubrey. And Aubrey, just like her new parents, likes to use the word “fuck” a lot. Now for reasons that aren’t entirely clear to me, once they have Aubrey, they do not go on their mission. They instead hang out at their apartment, celebrate a birthday, go shopping, try to have sex a few times, and watch movies. After awhile, they decide it’s time to head up to Orbital-Land, where we quickly learn their intentions aren’t as pure as we thought. “Dad” and “Mom” are terrorists! And they’re planning on blowing up the entire Orbital community – while discussing sex of course.

I’m just going to tell you right now – Orbitals is getting the worst Scriptshadow rating there is. And I don’t want to discourage John because this is not a rating that reflects his writing for the rest of his life. It is a rating that reflects this script only. The great thing about screenwriting is that as long as you have the drive, you can keep learning, keep getting better. This is probably a rating that would reflect every screenwriter’s first screenplay – which I assume that this is – so try to take these notes as constructively as possible.

When I first got to LA, I wrote a script with a friend and we managed to finagle it into a few pretty big hands by basically lying our asses off. We told our few contacts that we’d written something that huge producers were interested in (lie), tricking them into reading it themselves.

Eventually, a really big agent agreed to “have lunch” with us and we prepared for our imminent big break. “I knew this was going to be easy,” I thought, mapping out which kind of car I was going to buy, a Bentley or a Ferrari. Now let me tell you something I learned in retrospect. This script was fucking AWFUL. Like the worst script you can imagine. It was about the internet coming alive or something. I don’t even remember exactly because I’ve tried to purge my brain of its existence. To give you an idea of how bad it was, we gave the script to a couple of 15 year olds since that was our target demo and one of them came back and said it was the single worst thing he had ever read in his life. He actually thought we were kidding. “You didn’t really write this, did you?” He was 15! 15 year olds like everything!

Anyway, we later realized (hindsight is a beautiful thing huh?) that the agent who was most certainly going to give us our big break, wanted nothing to do with us. She was doing a favor for the person who gave her the script, who she thought was a lot closer to us than she actually was. So she sent her crony assistant, this total Hollywood douchebag who spent more effort trying to pick up our waitress than talk to us, which in retrospect sucked because we convinced ourselves the guy was a moron and therefore ignored everything he said to us. But the guy gave us some really important advice that I only grasped 5-6 years later. This is what he said.

Writing screenplays is not a joke. You are competing against guys who have dedicated their lives to this craft, who have a 15-20 year head start on you. These are the Derek Jeters and the David Beckhams of the screenwriting world. They will spend 1-2 years on their screenplay. They will have written 30-40 drafts. They will go over every scene 200-300 times. They will make sure every line of dialogue is sharp, relevant, reveals character, and pushes the story forward. They will obsess over that screenplay like you wouldn’t believe. And because they’ve written 30 screenplays already, they will know where all the mistakes are and how to fix them.

If you think you can just slap together a high concept idea with 2 good scenes and a threadbare story that barely makes sense and compete with that? You’re off your fucking rocker.

The agent-assistant (whatever he was) then made us pick up the tab and went over and asked that waitress out (she said yes) and in that moment I hated everything about Hollywood. But you know what? He was right. He was so very right. This isn’t a joke. It doesn’t matter how many bad movies you’ve seen. If you expect to break in with a script you wrote in 14 days? If you think that professionals in this business won’t be able to tell that you wrote the script in 14 days, due to its unoriginality, its sloppiness, its 70% of scenes that repeat information we already know, its lack of character development? That readers won’t know that you didn’t think a single plot point through or do more than a single rewrite, you’re crazy. The guys who matter know these things. You cannot trick them.

That’s not to say newcomers can’t write something decent. But if you want a fighting chance, go out and read the 5 best-selling screenwriting books so you have SOME idea of how to tell a story. Read at least a hundred screenplays so you know what kind of quality you’re going up against. Plot out your story beforehand so it doesn’t look like something that was made up on the spot. When you’re finished, read through it and note all the places you were bored. Come up with solutions and then rewrite it. And when you’re finished, repeat that process. Again. And again. And again. Give it to friends and ask them what parts they liked and didn’t like. Incorporate those responses. Rewrite it again. And again. And again.

Honestly, I don’t know where to begin with Orbitals. I guess I’ll start with the basics. Movies are about only giving the audience the good parts and cutting out all of the boring stuff. Orbitals is written the opposite way. It only gives you the boring parts, and could care less about the interesting stuff.

For example, the script is supposedly about a couple who adopts a girl to get access to the orbiting system above earth that they normally wouldn’t have access to. Therefore, when they adopt the girl, you’d think that we’d be – you know – on our way to the orbiting system. No. Orbitals spends the next 50 pages back at the apartment with its two lead characters talking about sex. That is not the “good parts.” The equivalent would be like in Star Wars, after Obi-Wan and Luke went and got Han as their pilot to go to Alderran, they then went back to Obi-Wan’s hut, shot the shit for 50 minutes, and THEN went to Alderran. Honestly, we have one straight 50 minute chunk in Orbitals that could be axed and the screenplay would be exactly the same (actually it would be better because it would be over sooner). That’s not a good sign.

The reason this makes me so angry is because this is Screenplay 101 stuff here. This is some of the first stuff you learn when writing. And so the fact that it’s ignored tells me the writer hasn’t even attempted to learn the craft. I have less sympathy for Amateur Friday writers if they’re not taking the craft seriously. Once again, you’re stepping up to the plate facing a jacked up on steroids Roger Clemens in his prime. You better have spent as much time as possible learning the difference between fastballs and curveballs and sliders before you grace that batting box.

Another Screenplay 101 mistake is that every character in Orbitals talks EXACTLY THE SAME. This is probably the number 1 telltale sign that you’re dealing with a new writer. Everyone here uses “fuck” in equal disparity, meaning nobody sounds unique. All the conversations have the exact same rhythm. And worse, they are exactly the same scenes repeated over and over and over again. The parents want to have sex. We get it. We don’t need 13 scenes in a row telling us that, specifically since having sex has nothing to do with the plot.

And the scenes themselves are like 10-15 pages long. The average scene is supposed to be 2-3 pages long. A “long” scene is considered 5 pages. And you should only have a few of those in your script. 10-15 pages is a lifetime for a scene. There’s a moment in Orbitals where the characters sit down and watch The Shining for five pages, get in an argument, and then have another 5 minute scene talking about watching The Shining and getting in an argument! I don’t even know where to begin with that. Why are we wasting five pages of a screenplay with our characters watching a movie???

There’s no structure here. There’s no conflict. There are no stakes. There’s no urgency.  The characters are all the same. The dialogue is repetitive. The story repeats itself. The script basically ignores every good storytelling tenet in the book. And again, this is more a condemnation on the writer for thinking it’s easy than it is on the writing itself. I feel that if John actually studied the craft, read a few books, learned the basics, mapped out a plot ahead of time instead of making it up as he goes along, he could come up with something a thousand times better than this. But this is all we have. And it’s a great reminder that this craft is a lot harder than everybody thinks it is.

Script link: Orbitals

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

What I learned: Readers have strong negative – often angry – reactions to scripts like this because we’re pissed that the writer actually made us spend 2 hours of our lives reading something that they scraped together in a couple of weeks between Modern Warfare and World of Warcraft sessions. You’re going up against veteran screenwriters who know ALL the tricks in the book. Who know how to mine emotion on the page so that they already have the reader in the palm of their hand by page 5. You’re going up against people who are getting professional feedback from producers and agents, then going back and fixing their mistakes until there are no mistakes left. You’re going up against people who are not only pouring over every scene in their screenplay, but every *sentence.* Every *word*. You’re going up against writers who can attach Robert Pattinson or Leonardo DiCaprio to their screenplays.  That’s your competition. That’s why you have to be perfect . Every writer loves that fever draft you shoot through in a couple of weeks. But believe it or not, that’s the easy part. The real work comes afterwards. In the rewriting. If you’re not willing to make that commitment, this business isn’t for you.

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Scriptshadow Interview – Elan Mastai (writer of The F Word)

Posted on July 7, 2011 | by admin

Many of you know Mastai’s work through “The F Word,” one of my favorite scripts I’ve read here on the site, and a 2007 Black List member. Since then he’s done a lot of assignment work, and it’s really paid off recently. He wrote an upcoming film starring Sam Jackson called “The Samaritan,” and is currently working with Oscar winner Alan Ball on his next directing project. This is one of my favorite interviews yet.  There’s a ton of great screenwriting advice in Elan’s answers. 

SS: How much time had you put in as a screenwriter before you finally found success? Are we talking years? Decades? How many scripts had you written?

EM: The short, simple answer is about seven years and fifteen scripts before I wrote “The F Word” and it launched my career in LA, scoring me my agents and manager, getting on the “Black List” and picked up by Fox-Searchlight, and opening doors for me to start writing studio projects, which I’ve now been doing since late-2008.

The longer, convoluted answer is that of those fifteen scripts, four got produced as low-budget independent features of varying degrees of quality, three got optioned but never made, five were assignments I got hired to write or rewrite, one of which also got produced but without my name on it (thankfully, because it’s atrocious), and three were semi-successful attempts to figure out what kind of writer I wanted to be, what my quote-unquote “voice” was, that I never did anything with because I knew they weren’t there yet.

Even though I was making a living as a screenwriter (in Canada, where I’m from), it wasn’t as rewarding as it maybe should’ve or could’ve been, because I wasn’t writing stuff in my own voice.

So, a super-low-budget movie I co-wrote premiered at Sundance in 2007. And everyone was very complimentary and all that, but deep-down I knew I couldn’t really present that movie, or any of the scripts I’d written to that point, to anyone as an example of what I felt I could really do as a writer. I realized I needed to re-think my approach to screenwriting.

And that led to me writing “The F Word”, which was the first script I wrote that conveyed my point of view, told the story in a way that only I could. In retrospect, it makes sense that it was the script that got me all kinds of attention in LA. But I had a lot of kinks to work through in my writing before I had the solid storytelling skills to pull off a script as low-concept and voice-driven as “The F Word”.

SS: During that time, when everything’s so uncertain, and that big beautiful dream of being a “professional” screenwriter is so unclear, what kept you going? How do you know whether to keep pushing through or not?

EM: Basically, I met other aspiring filmmakers through film festivals and film-related events. We watched movies, talked movies, made short films, read each other’s stuff and gave candid feedback, helped each other improve, kicked each other in the ass a little when it was needed.

In general, though, I’m pretty clear-eyed about my strengths and weaknesses as a writer. So I also spent those seven years writing scripts that allowed me work on my weaknesses. I wrote, like, kid’s movies, horror flicks, crime thrillers, teen comedies, sports movies, anything that would teach me something I didn’t know and fill in a blank in my toolkit.

It was very cool to read your review of “The F Word” and the ensuing comments thread because, whether people love or loathe the script, they’re seriously engaging with my writing. That’s awesome. But it’s also a little odd for me because the draft everyone’s discussing is, like, three-and-a-half years old. I’m proud of the script and it’s been a fantastic calling card for me, but I’ve also had the chance to rewrite it twice for Fox-Searchlight and write four or five other movies since then. And it’s funny because all the points being discussed in the comments are the exact same debates I had with the producers and execs when I was rewriting the script. I’d say, in fact, basically all the criticisms you voiced in your review have been dealt with in subsequent rewrites.

My roundabout point is that being hyper-aware of your strengths and weaknesses as a writer, without being so self-critical that you paralyze yourself from actually writing anything, is just as important before you break through as it is once you have.

Working as a professional screenwriter in LA, you have to present this confident, positive version of yourself to potential employers and creative partners. But you also have to be chronically objective about your limitations in order to improve as a writer. So the arguments in the comments thread (is my writing innovative and hilarious or overrated and boring?) are the same ones I ask myself every single goddamn day when I sit down at the keyboard to write something new.

SS: You’re from Canada. How difficult was it breaking into Hollywood from a different country, and what do you think the key was? (i.e. Did you have to travel there a lot? Get a second home there?)

EM: I’ve never lived in Los Angeles. I got my agents, manager, and lawyer and set up all of my studio projects coming to LA for a week at a time every few months. In between trips, I keep in touch via phone and email. I have a good long-distance plan on my cell.

But the key was definitely getting great representation. If my agents and manager weren’t doing the day-to-day groundwork for me in LA, it would’ve been impossible to build a career without living there.

SS: Every writer has their own journey finding their first agent. How did you find yours?

So, this is a story that people either find kind of inspiring or totally aggravating…

I didn’t do anything.

I wrote “The F Word”. It actually started as an assignment to adapt this one-act play, which was very funny and charming, but ran about 30 pages, only had two characters in it, and was confidently “stagey” in execution. Which was great because, like a good short story, it allowed me to fill it out to movie-size with my own eccentric inventions.

The plan was to make it as a low-budget indie. So the original producer (Marc Stephenson of Sheep Noir Films, currently working hard to get the movie into production) sent it to a few agencies hoping to attract interest from someone who represented an actor who might possibly meet our at-the-time hilariously low standards of “bankability”…

So, what happened was, people at the various agencies liked the script and, for reasons I’ll never entirely understand, passed it along to other people at other companies. And those people liked it enough to do the same. And so, without me even knowing it, my script started circulating through Hollywood. And I’d cite all these people by name but I don’t know who any of them are. They’re total strangers who basically gave me a Hollywood screenwriting career by liking my script and recommending it to other people, who did the same thing, all for absolutely no possible personal gain, until it somehow ended up in the in-box of my future agents at Gersh. And they called me out of the blue one day and said, you know, they love my voice as a writer and they’d really like to meet me sometime to talk about my future.

Honestly, it was completely crazy and before it happened to me I’d have been way too cynical to ever believe that’s how this stuff works. Random strangers read your script and recommend it to other random strangers and eventually someone reads it who can change your life.

So, I don’t know, you tell me: inspiring or aggravating? Kind of both, right?

SS: What’s your number 1 tip for aspiring screenwriters? How do you break in?

EM: I wish I had some magical secret insight to offer. But all I have is the usual advice that’s so easy to give but so tough to actually take: write your ass off until you find your voice as a writer, and then choose a story to tell that will highlight that voice in the clearest possible way. Because your voice, your unique storytelling point of view, is the thing that creates a market for your work. If anyone else can write a script the way you do, why should anyone hire you instead of them?

SS: As I pointed out in my review, The F Word is sort of a low-concept idea. With the screenwriting market being so competitive, what do you think the key is to sending a script out that doesn’t have that obvious high concept hook? How do you make up for it? And do you recommend it?

I think it has to be the right kind of low-concept. In the case of “The F Word”, the draw was the universality. Everybody has been through their personal version of this story, either from Wallace’s point of view (falling for someone who is in a serious relationship and convincing yourself you’d be happy as just friends) or Chantry’s point of view (being in a relationship and meeting someone you find really interesting and convincing yourself there’s no reason you can’t be just friends) or both.

So I took a lot of generals with development executives who spent most of the meeting telling me about the time they had an experience just like the one in “The F Word”. Or even better were going through it right now. So instead of a stressful quasi-job interview kind of thing, we bonded about our personal relationship histories and how they made us who we are today. So, for me, the universality of the story was a huge boost.

I think that, fundamentally, the audience doesn’t care about anything other than empathizing with characters. Everything else in a movie is window-dressing on empathy. Now, in an absence of characters that the audience cares about, well, yeah, they’ll accept explosions and nudity and shocking plot-twists that make no sense when you really think about them.

So, with “The F Word”, I guess going low-concept showed people I could write characters you care about, especially since they weren’t operating in this propulsive plot-engine with world-rumbling stakes. Low-concept can be a great way to show off your pure writing skills. But, look, first you’ve got to spend a lot of time developing those pure writing skills. Or at least I had to.

SS: Your dialogue is great. Any tips you can give us to write better dialogue?

EM: Well, something to remember is that your dialogue will be read many times in script-form before it’s ever spoken by actors. So I use a lot of simple modifiers to make the dialogue read better.

Off the top of my head, here’s a flat line of dialogue: “She’s not coming back.”

Or you could write it like: “Look, I mean, you know she’s not coming back, right?

The two versions contain the same essential information. And I’m sure a great actor could make the former version sound awesome. But the latter version imbeds a lot of implied character information into the dialogue itself, the written-equivalent of all the nonverbal nuances an actor will eventually bring to the delivery.

Of course, you can overdo it with the “likes” and “you knows” and “wells” and “I means”. That’s why I read and re-read every line of dialogue out loud until the balance is there.

I also do live script-readings with actors. I did five full readings of “The F Word”, each with a completely different cast, so I could hear every line of dialogue in a different actor’s voice, hear what each line sounds like with varying intonations, pauses, verbal tics, emphases, and so on.

SS: One of the interesting things I found about The F Word was that the situations our characters found themselves in were situations I’ve seen characters in before. For example, we’ve seen the “both in the changing room scene” in Tootsie. Yet I still loved all of them. Knowing that you’re walking on ground that’s already been walked on, how do you still make your own scenes fresh?

EM: I guess my approach is, look, how many times have you had a “first kiss” moment in your life? Is it ever boring? Every first kiss I’ve been involved in was pretty electrifying because I really wanted to know what was going to happen next.

A person pointing a gun at another person can be tedious or riveting if you care about the people involved. The bond you create between your audience and your character, right off the top, that’s the fuel for the rest of your story.

The thing is, the audience brings certain expectations to every genre. And expectations are meant to be fucked with. When the audience anticipates something because they think they’ve seen it before, their guard goes down and that gives you a lot of narrative power to play around with them, sometimes without them even realizing it.

I mean, I don’t want to overstate it, because “The F Word” isn’t exactly “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind”. But basically I think about what the audience expects to happen in a given set-up and how I can mess with that a bit. And if you do that a few times, the audience gets a little off-balance, unsure whether their assumptions are correct, and that builds a useful slow-burn tension the audience isn’t necessarily even aware they’re feeling. Then if you do go for the expected result of a set-up every once in a while, the audience gets a little jolt of pleasure from being correct. And then on the next set-up you throw them off-balance again, and so on.

SS: You got to work with Alan Ball, who I think may be the best screenwriter on the planet. Did you learn any screenwriting advice from him? Feel free to go on as long as you’d like with this one. :)

EM: Well, look, I’m in the middle of the working relationship right now, so I don’t have a sweeping, incisive analysis of the experience for you. It’s a work-in-progress. And out of respect for the process, I don’t want to get too into it.

But, I mean, it’s been a fantastic experience so far. Alan is a writer first, thinks like a writer, talks like a writer, has a shockingly laser-like eye for raising stakes, revealing character details, propulsive storytelling. He’s the real deal and I’m lucky as hell to be working with him.

And, yeah, I know that’s all kind of vague and self-congratulatory and unhelpful to anyone reading this. So, okay, here’s something specific. When you introduce your main characters, give them an immediate decision that tells the audience who they are, right away. It doesn’t have to be a big moment. It can be a small, everyday choice. But it lets the audience notice that they probably would or wouldn’t make the same choice that the character just did. And that immediately tells them something important about who that person is.

SS: What do you think is the most common mistake beginning screenwriters make?

EM: Probably waiting for their big break to magically appear instead of writing as much as possible as often as possible. Because when you do get your big break, it really sucks if you’re not developed enough as a writer to take full advantage of it.

I say that as someone who did have their big break magically appear. But when it happened, I was more or less ready to jump on it. I was (thankfully) a much better writer than I’d been in previous years because I’d spent the previous years writing as much as I could.

SS: The relationship comedy genre is a crowded one. It seems like every 20-something writer is trying to break in with one of these specs. What do you think the key is to writing this kind of script successfully?

EM: The thing I really like about relationship comedies is that it’s the one genre you can’t hide in. You can hide inside horror flicks and family comedies and crime thrillers and sci-fi epics. But everyone is an expert in attraction. Everyone has intimate personal experience with falling in love and heartbreak and unrequited feelings and romantic longing and sexual tension and flirtatious banter and unforgettable first encounters. So what you have to say about those things exposes you in a very personal way to whoever happens to read your script.

Of course, many relationship comedies are bad. And the bad ones tell you a lot about the person who wrote them. Maybe it’s telling you they’ve got really screwed up ideas of what’s attractive to another person. Maybe it’s telling you they’ve had their ass kicked by love and still can’t stand up. Maybe it’s telling you they can’t open themselves up to a genuine human connection. Or maybe it’s telling you they’re not funny.

If there’s a key to writing a relationship comedy, it’s taking a good long look in the mirror and asking yourself if what you might accidentally show people is something you’re okay with them seeing.

SS: Screenwriters are constantly evolving, learning new things all the time. What’s your most recent revelation that you’ve been applying to your writing?

EM: I have the kind of brain that tends to not learn from other people’s advice, so I need to make the mistake myself to figure out how not to do it again, even if it probably seems like totally obvious screenwriting territory.

Like, here’s something completely self-evident and basically corny when you boil it down to a snappy sentence: there’s no success without risk. I know, I know, such a brilliant piece of advice that no one has ever mentioned before…

But the point for me is to always try, as much as it’s possible, to work with people I can fail in front of. Because unless you take some real chances with your storytelling, try something bold enough to potentially veer into humiliating failure, you’re never going to truly excite anyone. Especially in comedy, but really in any genre. Anytime I’ve played it safe with a script, because I didn’t feel like I could take the chance of screwing up, I ended up with a screenplay that everyone liked but no one loved. And if no one loves it, it’s never getting made.

Now, taking bold chance with the storytelling means being potentially divisive. Some people may hate it. Hopefully the people who love it have more clout. It’s risky. But it’s the only way to get your material to stand out.

So, yeah, it’s a well-worn notion. But when you’re actually doing what you always wanted to be doing, writing studio movies, it’s so easy to not want to screw it up by doing anything too bold, even though being bold is what got you there in the first place.

SS: And finally, the question we’ve all been waiting for…Can a man and a woman really be just friends?

EM: Probably. But it kind of depends on your definition of “just”.

It comes down to whether or not both people are being honest about what they really want from each other. And that includes being honest with themselves.

Which is a good screenwriting lesson too. Being honest with yourself about whether or not your script is ready for outside eyes. About what your strengths and weaknesses are as a writer. About what you’re doing to enhance those strengths and bolster those weaknesses. About whether every line of dialogue sounds like an actual human could say it, since an actual human will have to when it gets made. About whether you’re avoiding that last polish because the script is really perfect or because you just want it to be done. And so on.

If there’s a basic theme to all my writing it’s this: You can’t lie your way to happiness.

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Read My Lips

Posted on July 6, 2011 | by admin

Genre: Thriller/Romantic Drama mash-up
Premise: A half-deaf woman who’s repeatedly taken advantage of at her job, hires a young ex-con to help around the office, who she then begins to fall in love with.
About: Sur Mes Levres was originally a 2001 French thriller. Naturally, since this is what we do here in America, a company bought the rights to the movie to remake it. And apparently had some dough to do so, bringing in hotshot script writer Tony Gilroy (all the Bourne movies, Michael Clayton, Armageddon, The Devil’s Advocate) to sculpt the screenplay. Alas, this draft was written in 2004, and a remake of the film has yet to pass. Gilroy has two rules for his moves. “Bring it in within two hours” and “Don’t bore the audience.” You can read more about him in this New Yorker article here.
Writer: Tony Gilroy (based on the film “Sur Mes Levres” written by Jacques Audiard and Tonio Benacquista)
Details: 127 pages – 9/28/04 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).

If yesterday’s script was tough to get a handle on due to its simplicity, today’s script is hard to get a handle on because of its complexity. The narrative here is all over the place. There’s no defining hook to the story, making it difficult for an average American audience to understand why in the world they would waste their time on it. Americans like clarity in their concepts. They like when you tell them, “This is why you’re going to show up.” Read “Crazy Stupid Love” and then go watch the trailer. There’s no true hook in “Crazy Stupid Love,” but notice how the trailer emphasizes the “nerd to stud” angle of Steve Carrel, so that audiences can go home and identify it as “that movie where Steve Carrel turns into a stud.” Read My Lips doesn’t have any concept to hang its hat on, so I’m not sure how it would be marketed.

Carla is an executive assistant for a construction management company. This is man’s world she works in, so she’s already fighting for her life, but Carla’s situation is complicated by her hearing problem. She’s half-deaf, and her co-workers relentlessly use her impairment to take advantage of her.

At the center of this advantage-taking is her boss, Paul Verlawn. This man is as pathetic and as slimy as they come, and he repeatedly has Carla doing the dirty work for him then taking all the credit when the big board meetings come around.

One day, after Carla is chastised for not getting enough work done, she’s told to hire an assistant (an assistant to the assistant! – I thought that only happened in Hollywood). She brings a guy in named Danny, who immediately informs her that everything on his resume is a lie and he just wrote it to get the interview. Boy did this guy not get the memo on how to nail an interview. Oh, and he’s also an ex-con who just got out of the slammer. A real winner. But Carla, feeling bad for the guy, actually hires him.

Danny begins to see how Carla is treated and implores her to stand up for herself. So the two hatch a plan to prove that her slimy boss, Paul, is dealing in some shady bidding practices and is on the take. Carla uses her “secret power” of reading lips to track what the big timers are saying to each other in meetings, and uses the info to take Paul down.

In the meantime, Danny’s criminal past catches up to him (those darn criminal pasts – they never go away do they?). He owes some big-timer named Marco a lot of money, and Marco plans to get that money back. So he has Danny start bartending at his club, despite Danny being on probation and knowing that if he’s caught around these dudes, he’s probably going back behind bars, filming scenes for MSNBC’s Lockup.

Eventually Carla figures out that Danny’s homeless, and so illegally sets up a makeshift apartment for him in one of the buildings her company owns. He then starts to hit on her, but because Carla is so unfamiliar with any sort of intimate contact, she doesn’t know how to react, and solves the problem pretty much by running away. However, secretly, when she gets home, all she can think about are Danny’s advances. In the end, they’ll have to take down her boss, escape Danny’s thug friends, and figure out if they’re going to be an item or not.

Just from my summary there, you’re probably a little confused, which shows just how off-beat this screenplay is. There’s a lot going on and unlike a traditional Hollywood movie, the A-plot doesn’t have much to do with the B-plot. What I mean is, part of the movie is about Carla taking down her boss, which is sort of a PG run-of-the-mill underdog story. But then Danny’s storyline is a hard R John Woo mini crime saga with Danny being roped into a sketchy murder attempt. I guess other countries like these schizophrenic storylines. But to Americans, they just don’t make sense.

Also, the love story is really odd. It’s never clear why Carla hires Danny in the first place (“feeling sorry for him” was my best guess). Carla spends the majority of the time equal parts angry and afraid of Danny. Yet when she’s alone she walks around naked in his smelly t-shirt. When she does start to accept his advances, he’s angry and frustrated by her for some reason. I don’t know. I just never really understood what was going on there. But at the same time, that’s why I kept reading. Their relationship was so weird, I had to see where it ended up.

Where you could really sense the Europeaness of the story, though, was in Carla’s impairment. Carla is half-deaf. This is so not a Hollywood choice. In Hollywood movies, things are black and white. You’re either all deaf or not deaf. You’re not half-deaf. An audience doesn’t know what to do with half-deaf. “Well, she can still hear,” they say. “What’s the difference between that and being able to hear perfectly?”

I suspect it’s to set up her lip-reading ability, but that was another problem I had with the script. The lip-reading is given a pronounced set-up, but it never really comes into play in a huge way. It’s more something they depend on sporadically, helping them here and there but that’s it. It’s this sort of “one foot in the pool, one foot out of the pool” approach that confuses us dumb Americans. (“If you made such a big deal out of it, why doesn’t it become a big deal later?”)

Read My Lips’ strength is in its characters. There’s so much going on with these guys. Look at Carla. We know about her flaw (doesn’t stand up for herself), her desires (take down her boss), her handicaps (her hearing), her inner conflicts (wanting to be with Danny but being scared), her relationships (her conflicted relationship with her sister). That’s a character you remember right there. On the downside, the plot is disjointed and unsure of itself. The main storyline we’ve been introduced to (taking down the boss) is solved 70% into the screenplay, turning Danny’s life into the main plot, a strange shift that requires a readjustment we’re not very comfortable making.

I’m going to be a little French Film racist here but I see a lot of French movies that take this unclear narrative route and I’m not sure I like it. I remember watching 2010’s “A Prophet” for instance, and thinking, this film is freaking amazing. It’s this gritty story about a dude dealing with the complexities and politics of jail. But then like 70% into the movie, it switches gears into something completely different. And then it just kept going. And going. And going. At a certain point I realized I no longer had any idea what the movie was about.

But I’m getting off track. Despite all this, Read My Lips has something undeniably compelling about it. Whether it’s the weird romance, the moody atmosphere, or its dual storylines. You want to get to the end. And that’s why I think it’s worth your time.

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

What I learned: Tell us who a character is through the way they react to something. On page 18, Carla’s sister tells her that she’s cheating on her husband. Carla’s reaction to this is one of horror. But not just horror. Naiveté. It’s as if Carla’s never heard of a woman cheating on her husband before, much less her own sister. This tells us a ton about Carla’s character. She’s sheltered, naïve, buttoned up, traditional. It’s a clever way to reveal character. All you had to do was show her react to something.

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