Genre: Comedy
Premise: A recently dumped high school senior gets a visit from a hologramed version of his 37 year old self, who helps him put his life back together.
About: What Would Kenny Do made the bottom quarter of the 2008 Black List. The writer, Christopher Baldi, has been busting his ass writing, directing, producing, and editing shorts and small indie projects over the past half-decade. This was his breakthrough screenplay. Recently, Justin Bieber and Ashton Kutcher signed on to star in the film, however the producers (of which Ashton is one) want a major rewrite before going forward.
Writer: Christopher Baldi
Details: 107 pages – April 1, 2008 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).
Justin Bieber.
Ashton Kutcher.
Is there anything more that needs to be said?
Okay maybe there’s a lot of things that need to be said. And I’m sure you’re saying them right now. But before you, you know, do anything drastic, let’s dial down your “all pop culture” sucks attitude and look at this script purely on potential. Even though Kutcher is seriously lacking in the acting department, the one type of role he does well is the one where he’s making fun of himself, where he’s winking at the audience.
In that sense, What Would Kenny Do is a genius career move, for both him and Bieber. Bieber’s poking fun at himself. Ashton’s poking fun at himself. Ashton’s poking fun at Bieber. Bieber’s poking Selena Gomez. I mean, come on, I would rent that movie. Or one of those movies.
Now that doesn’t mean the script gets power of attorney to vomit out a lackluster story. This is a mistake I see a lot writers make actually – they believe that since the subject matter is light and fluffy, the effort can be light and fluffy. BIG mistake. If there’s one thing I’ve realized about screenwriting, it’s that every script is a challenge. Every script requires the same amount of dedication and effort to pull off. If you half-ass any script, I guarantee it will show.
17 year old Kenny Bellmore is devastated by the recent dumping he received by his long time girlfriend, Holly. High school is tough. You can put two long years into a relationship, slowly chipping away at that magical end goal known as losing your virginity, only to have your gf break up with you weeks before it’s supposed to happen, which is what happens to poor little Kenny.
Needless to say, he’s kinda devastated.
Luckily, Kenny is BFFs with Jared, his burnout buddy who’s not only a genius, but also secretly works for NASA. Bummed about his best friend’s quickly deteriorating life, he offers Kenny up an opportunity to salvage his high school career. What if, he asks him, he could meet his grown up self, who could then steer him in the right direction and fix all his problems via the power of hindsight? Kind of like a really advanced science-fiction version of MTV’s “Made.”
Kenny’s a little weirded out about meeting his grown-up self but, because this is a movie, he goes along with it and soon an eerily similar looking 37 year old version of himself is standing in front of him. Old Kenny has one simple rule. Do what he says and everything will turn out dandy.
The goal for the Kennys is three-fold. Make his ex-girlfriend jealous for leaving him, find a date for the prom, and lose his virginity. Not exactly a trifecta of depth, but let’s remember that this is high school, where sex took precedence over world hunger.
Over the next couple of days, Old Kenny orchestrates situations where his ex sees him talking to other women, hanging out at parties, and courting the school slut. Though he doesn’t always agree with him, Young Kenny has to admit that everything Old Kenny tells him to do is working. Which makes Young Kenny one happy little terrier. Although I’d advise anyone to “never say never” (if you get that reference, shame on you), it looks like all of Young Kenny’s problems are going to dissolve away.
I thought “What Would Kenny Do?” started off well. It was clearly going for a “Weird Science” vibe and did a great job pulling it off. However, I’m afraid there are a couple of script-crippling issues here that are going to have to be addressed if they want this film to reach any higher than 30% on Rotten Tomatoes.
The first is the same problem I had with yesterday’s script – but here it’s even worse. Our main character is cripplingly passive. And that’s because of the way the main characters – Young Kenny and Old Kenny – are constructed. You see, usually, in these types of movies (older self mentors younger self), we tell the story from the older self’s point of view. So in 17 Again, we’re with the 40 year old adult version of Zac Efron first.
The reason for this is because the central issue at the heart of these movies – wishing you would’ve done things differently – can only be realized from the perspective of the person who’s already screwed them up. They’re the ones who know what happens later on, and therefore the ones who can offer advice for change. You see this in 17 Again, where Zac Efron (who’s really 40 year old Matthew Perry) tries to guide his high school daughter through the right decisions.
Here, since the movie is told from the perspective of Young Kenny, you have this really weird dynamic whereby our main character doesn’t make *any* decisions. He just follows orders from his older self. Obviously, if you’re doing what somebody else tells you to do for the entire film, that’s the very definition of passive.
This could’ve been salvaged had Older Kenny been a more complex character, but since we’re telling the story from Young Kenny’s point of view, we never get an opportunity to explore Older Kenny. I know I know. I just said not to give Ashton Kutcher any complex parts, but just from a screenplay perspective, we needed some depth here.
Actually, there was a late attempt to add some complexity to Old Kenny’s character, when he finally gets a chance to see his father alive again, but it was so thin, so barely realized (I didn’t even know his father was dead in the future) that it didn’t work.
Another major issue is that in all these “wish fulfillment” films, there comes a point where things need to start falling apart. At first, it should be puppy dogs and ice cream for your hero. But then, after the initial shine begins to fade, our hero’s situation needs to gradually deteriorate into something worse than had they never made the “wish” in the first place. This usually ends up teaching our hero a lesson, which allows them to change and become a better person.
Big is a great example of this. Initially, Hanks’ character reaped all the benefits of being an adult, but eventually learned that with that came an overwhelming amount of responsibility and “adult problems,” that he wasn’t yet prepared to handle. “What Would Kenny Do” has a “blink and you miss it” troubling sex scene with a slut late in the third act, and that’s it, that’s the extent of his “deterioration.” As a result, the script lacks any real conflict for the main character and therefore any drama. It feels one-note and way too easy of a journey.
When it’s all said and done, there’s barely any story to speak of in “Kenny.” Things move along, but do so without the necessary emotional peaks and valleys, and without a character who’s deciding his own fate or learning anything. I’m not saying you need to tell “Kenny” from the point of view of his older self, cause then you just have 17 Again Part 2, 17 Again: Text Patrol. But something needs to be figured out so that the main character in this script is more active. I hope they figure it out, cause Bieber and Ashton on the big screen together is comedic gold! (even if that comedy is more of the “laugh at” than “laugh with” variety)
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Usually, the last 15-20 pages of Act 2 should be reserved for your hero slowly descending until they reach their lowest point (which is the end of Act 2). If that descension is shortchanged (only given a scene or two), or worse, not addressed at all, your script won’t feel like it has a third act, but instead, one long second act, which will throw off the script’s rhythm and confuse the reader.
Genre: Drama
Premise: An alcoholic pilot becomes a reluctant hero when he saves a crippled plane from certain catastrophe.
About: If this is based on anything (a novel?), I wasn’t able to find out what. Which means we have the rare exception to the rule that is a drama spec sale. The writer, Gatins, has jumped back and forth between small roles in films and being a feature writer. He wrote the Dakota Fanning film, Dreamer, as well as Coach Carter and Keanu Reeves’ Hardball. Robert Zemeckis is said to be interested in directing. And Denzel Washington is currently attached to star.
Writer: John Gatins
Details: 134 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).
Robert Zemeckis used to be my favorite director. What I loved about him was that he always put the story first. And the bigger he got, the more effects-driven his movies became, it was fascinating to watch him stick to that philosophy. I still remember going through the Forrest Gump DVD extras and realizing just how many special effects were invisible.
So when Zemeckis gave up live-action movies to become this 3-D motion capture pioneer, I was left not only confused, but baffled that he was no longer embracing the principals he’d built his career on. This motion capture stuff seemed to be ONLY about the special effects, with the story being an afterthought. It’s no coincidence that every one of those movies was absent of any soul. What’d happened to the Robert Zemeckis that I loved?
Well, I’ll say this. I have no idea what it’s like to direct a dozen movies in Hollywood. But I’d imagine that, as hard as this is for someone like you or I to believe, you probably get bored after awhile and look for new challenges. Pioneering a new technology then, would be alluring. Still, I’ve been impatiently waiting for Zemeckis to return to the live-action well, and finally it’s starting to look like that will happen, with Flight being one of his first steps back.
40-something Whip Whitaker is waking up from a long night of drinking and fucking. In order to kickstart the old ticker and put an end to his post-wasted sluggishness, he snorts up a few lines of cocaine. Nice! Breakfast of Champions baby.
It is to our horror, then, that we realize Whip is piloting a commercial airliner that morning. His co-pilot, a ball of nervous energy to begin with, is staring at Whip suspiciously. He wants to believe that he doesn’t smell booze. But man does he smell booze. Does he say something? Does he do something? If he’s wrong, his career could be over before it begins.
Despite Whip’s questionable shape, he seems amazingly calm during a rough take-off. And later in the flight, after a huge BANG and a collapse of the plane’s hydraulics which results in the plane flipping upside-down, it’s the co-pilot who freaks out and Whip who’s as calm as a cucumber. I won’t ruin what happens next, but let’s just say that, if executed well, it will be one of the more harrowing scenes ever put on film. In the end, Whip crash-lands the plane, saving all of the passengers except a few. It is seen as the single most amazing maneuver in commercial piloting history.
Whip’s injuries put him in the hospital where he misses the majority of the media coverage and it is there that he meets Nicole, a 30 year old drug addict who’s resorted to giving hand-jobs during massages to secure money for her next high. She overdoses on heroin which is what led her here. Her and Whip then form an unlikely friendship, that slowly turns into something more.
What Whip doesn’t know is that when he was unconscious, they took blood and skin samples from him, and know he was drunk and high during the flight. This becomes the central focus of the story – an inside look at the politics of a crash investigation, as each of the parties (the union, pilots, airlines, plane manufacturers) all fight against one another for who’s to blame so that THEY aren’t responsible for footing the bill. It’s the uniquest of unique situations. There’s no doubt that Whip saved all of these people. Yet he still might get tabbed as the cause of the crash.
There are so many ideas in Flight, and the structure of the story is so unpredictable, I’m not sure how to break it down. I guess that ultimately it didn’t work for me, and the reason is, that for all the interesting stuff going on with the crash and post-crash politics, this is really just a hard-core look at alcoholism (and addiction in general). It’s kind of like Leaving Las Vegas in that sense. A good movie, but not something you pop in after a long week for entertainment.
I’ll give Gatins credit though. He went against the grain a lot, and made choices you didn’t expect him to make. For example, the hero aspect of the story is never explored. Whip is a hero, yet is never seen by the media, never recognized by the public.
My question is, is that realistic? I think every person in America knew exactly who Captain Sulley was after he landed that plane in the Hudson (granted, he was kind of a funky looking dude). My issue with Whip never experiencing his celebrity firsthand, was that it made the event seem less significant. We’re told this was the greatest commercial airplane maneuver in history, yet if we’re going by what Whip experiences in the aftermath, it’s like it never happened.
It actually had me wondering why Gatlins didn’t go in the opposite direction. Why not have it so Whip becomes this huge celebrity with all these opportunities stemming from his heroics? He’s hugging babies, he’s the spokesperson for the airlines. For the first time, he’s got real control over his life. And THEN the union comes to him and tells him about his toxicology report.
The reason I think this works better is because now Whip actually has something to lose. He has this perfect life that hangs in the balance of these reports getting out. This would in turn make the backroom politicking more interesting. They have a national hero on their hands who’s changing the industry for the better. Do they really want to lose that? In other words, the stakes would be higher on both ends.
This led to the biggest bout of turbulence during Flight: Whip Whitaker doesn’t really give a shit about his goal – keeping his job. Protagonists not caring about their goals is a huge problem, because if they don’t care, we the audience don’t care. Look at some of Zemeckis’ other films. Marty McFly is desperately trying to get back to the future. Tom Hanks is desperately trying to get off that island. Jodie Foster is desperately trying to make contact with aliens. Whip Whitaker is barely interested in keeping his job as a pilot. And this lack of interest just kills any significant stakes in the story. I will say this all day long. If there’s nothing to lose for your hero, you don’t have a movie.
Despite all this, I didn’t dislike Flight. I thought it was an interesting script with some great moments (the crash landing sequence was truly awesome) and should be an awesome role for Denzel. But in the end, it’s a huge downer, and because of that, not the kind of reading experience I’d recommend.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: I think there are two kinds of passive characters. The worst kind is the one without a goal. Without a goal, your hero will be directionless, and the movie will be directionless as well. The second kind of passive character, which isn’t as bad but still not good, is the character who DOESN’T CARE ABOUT HIS GOAL. So Whip Whitaker has a goal here – to save his career. But he just doesn’t seem that interested in it. We get the sense the whole way through that if he fails, then he fails. He doesn’t really lose anything. This lowers the stakes and makes us less interested in his journey.
Genre: Comedy
Premise: When a controlling fiance-to-be loses her boyfriend and descends into bitterness, her friends send her to “Man Camp” to learn how to date again.
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 (feel free, however, to use an alias and a fake title).
Writers: Amie Kelbing & Eva Taylor (story by Ami, Eva, and Danielle Morrow)
Details: 90 pages
It’s probably unfair to put Man Camp under the spotlight a day after reviewing the best movie about bridesmaids ever put to paper. However, it’s a great opportunity to compare a professionally sculpted screenplay shepherded by a dozen industry pros to one written by a couple of amateur scribes still figuring things out. Actually, I wouldn’t be surprised at all if Wiig and Mumolo’s first draft looked similar to this one, more of an unfocused collection of thoughts than a fully fleshed out story.
That’s the big problem with Man Camp. It’s majorly unfocused. The narrative feels like it’s been strapped to an overanxious rabbit set loose in the jungle. You think you’re going one way, but oh wait, let’s go over here, but oh no, how about checking this out, wait, let’s go back to where we started, no, changed my mind, let’s go this way again. Structure is so important for a screenplay. And there isn’t a lick of it here.
Man Camp has a surprisingly similar setup to Bridesmaids. Annie (same name!) is in a relationship with Ryan, the key difference being she expects to be marrying Ryan soon. The problem is, Annie can’t shut up. She makes all the decisions, she takes all of the control, she doesn’t let her boyfriend get a word in edgewise – about anything. As a result, Ryan dumps her, and there Annie is, back to square one.
Even worse, Annie’s friends all start finding husbands and having babies, leaving Annie further and further out of the loop. She begins to feel sorry for herself, gives up on dating, and becomes a hermit. Worried she’ll become a cat lady, her friends set up an intervention and send her to “The Center” – a place that teaches destitute women how to get back out there and start dating again.
Except The Center is run like an insane asylum, which is appropriate because Annie’s rambunctious roommate, Nina, is about as crazy as they get. While everyone else conforms to the “warden’s” strict rules, Nina’s running around wreaking havoc, trying to get the girls, and in particular, Annie, to live a little. Eventually Annie learns enough from the camp to land another man, Eric.
In a kind of unclear development, the very friends that cared so much about getting Annie help, have now completely forgotten about her, instead wrapped up in their own married pregnant lives. Eric is Annie’s ticket back into that selective group, and she carefully grooms him for reinsertion. But just before they get to the party, Annie can’t help but be too demanding, and loses Eric right before going in. In a lucky coincidence she convinces the bartender, a flamboyant weirdo named Javier who she met while at The Center, to pretend he’s Eric so that her friends won’t know she’s alone again.
And if that doesn’t test the boundaries of believability, Annie then convinces Javier to marry her, and the next thing you know the wedding is set! But at the last second, Annie’s old friend from The Center, Crazy Nina, shows up, drugs Javier, and dresses up like a man so she can scold Annie for marrying just to get married. The moment causes outrage from the wedding party, and Annie is forced to come clean about the whole ordeal.
Okay, first of all, Amie and Eva? I want you guys to know that I love you. But it does neither of us any good if I sugarcoat my notes here, so this is going to get a little bumpy. It’s important for readers of this script to remember, before you go crazy in the comments, that this is likely a first or second effort from the writers, and as anyone who writes knows, the first and second efforts are usually best left as learning experiences. So, let’s get into what’s wrong with Man Camp.
The problem here is a maddening lack of structure. First, we have a main character, Annie, who’s given up on dating. So her friends send her to a “Man Camp,” to learn how to date men again. The script then switches gears and becomes sort of a broad comedy version of Girl Interrupted. And even though we just met an entire cast of Annie’s friends, we’re asked to meet and remember a whole new cast of friends.
But what’s strange about Man Camp is that the actual Man Camp ends halfway through the script. We then cut to THREE MONTHS LATER with Annie now in a relationship with Eric. It’s a little jarring that we’ve now left a second set of characters in the dust, but we try and go with it. But in an ongoing trend of “this is the story, oh wait no it isn’t,” Nick disappears from the script three scenes later! Another seemingly key character left in the dust!
This leads to the impossible-to-believe development of Annie spotting a bartender she barely knows and paying him to pretend that he’s her boyfriend (and subsequently marry her). This is the fourth time now that the focus of the script has changed. First it was about a woman losing her boyfriend. Then it was about a Man Camp. Then it was about the relationship that stemmed from Man Camp being a success. Now it’s about a woman paying a man to pretend that he’s her boyfriend. In other words, you’ve officially said to your audience, “We have no idea what this movie is about anymore.”
So first and foremost, this script needs focus. If it’s about Man Camp, then Annie needs to be in Man Camp for 80% of the movie. If it’s about paying a man to pretend he’s your boyfriend so you can hang out with your married friends, then that needs to be explored for 80% of the movie. The fact that Man Camp keeps switching around on us is what makes it so damn frustrating.
Man Camp also cares little about making sense. I get that this is a comedy, but that doesn’t mean characters can just do things because the writers want them to. Actions need to be rooted in some sort of reality for the audience to go along with them. Annie’s friends love her enough to have an intervention for her. Yet we’re to believe they won’t hang out with her unless she has a boyfriend? Nina hates Man Camp. Why doesn’t she just leave? Random bartender Javier agrees to marry Annie on a lark for a few extra dollars? This is nonsensical even by broad comedy terms. Every character here acts like they’re in a cartoon, like there are no consequences to their actions, and because there are no consequences, we stop caring.
Also of note is how Annie’s character is constructed. In Bridesmaids, (the other) Annie is getting screwed over by an asshole, creating instant sympathy for her. In Man Camp, it’s Annie who’s doing the screwing over (of her boyfriend), leaving us sympathizing with the boyfriend as opposed to her. I’m not saying you can’t make your protagonist unlikable or be the one with the unflattering problem. But it’s important to note how this seemingly minor approach dramatically changed how we perceived these two protagonists.
Also, like I was talking about yesterday in the Bridesmaids breakdown, you gotta spend time on your secondary characters. I couldn’t remember any of the characters in this movie besides Annie, Javier, and Nina. There was nothing distinct about any of the original group of friends. There were no memorable characters inside The Center besides Nina. You need to sit down and create big full backstories for these people if you expect them to come alive. Then and only then will you discover the unique characteristic that will help them stick out.
But these problems are minor when compared to the structural issues of Man Camp. The lack of focus and a clear plan is what really hurts the script. Figure out what this movie is about, make sure the entire movie follows that plan (not just parts of it), and you should be okay. Remember, you’re making one movie, not 5-6 mini-movies. Good luck on the next draft! :)
Script link: Man Camp Project
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Unless you’ve set up a comedy that logically progresses over a long period of time (Knocked Up, Juno), you don’t want to throw a random huge time jump into the middle of your story. The 3 month jump in the middle of Man Camp is so awkward, so random, that it deflates everything that came before it. Good comedies usually have some kind of immediacy to them, a ticking time bomb, a feeling that things need to happen RIGHT NOW. Hangover. Liar Liar. Meet The Parents. Even Knocked Up, which takes place over 9 months, has that feeling of, “Oh boy, we’re running out of time!” If you can just randomly fast-forward your story to 3 months later? That tells me you were missing urgency in your story. I mean imagine in Bridesmaids if, in the middle of the movie, we just cut to 3 months later. How awkward would that have been? Condense your storyline into a more stable time frame and make everything happen inside that timeframe. Random large time jumps in the middle of your movie are momentum killers.
A friend of mine was telling me that Bridesmaids was written in six days. I laughed at him. “No it wasn’t.” “Yes,” he assured me, “It was written in six days. I’m positive. I read it in an interview.” Having just come from the film, and marveling at how well-written it was, I assured him, that without question, there was no way in a Bridezilla-infested hell that this movie was written in six days. If a thoughtful nuanced character driven comedy was written in six days, it would mean I would have to reevaluate the totality of screenwriting. I mean, there was just no way.
So I did a little digging. Read a few interviews. My friend was right. Bridesmaids was written in six days. Oh, but there was one small detail he left out. It was then rewritten over the course of five years. Now THAT sounded more like it. Not that I have any problem with genius writers writing amazing scripts in the same time it takes to read a novel. I just felt that this script was way too good to be haphazardly thrown together over five nights of Hawaiian pizza and pajamie-jam parties.
Another key piece of the puzzle revealed itself when I heard that Judd Apatow shepherded the script. Wiig and Mumolo had never written anything bigger than a comedy sketch before. And when that’s the case, you need someone who understands structure, who knows what to do with all 110 of those big white pages. Again, this is not to take anything away from Mumolo and Wiig. Actually, these two contributed the single most important element of the script that’s led to Bridesmaids’ success.
What would that element be? What is it that makes this film so much better than the awful comedies studios have been peddling to us like “The Dilemma” and “Couples Retreat?” The answer is simple: Character. Everything that happens in Bridesmaids is born out of character. And you just don’t see that anymore. We preach it. I preach it on the site here all the time. But nobody listens to me! The majority of comedy writers these days start with a funny idea, come up with a few funny scenes, and then look for a plot and characters they can jam into those scenes. But in Bridesmaids, every single laugh is born out of character.
So what do I mean when I say “born out of character?” Well, there are four main character components that drive the comedy in this film. Let’s take a look at them. We start out Bridesmaids with Kristin Wiig’s character, Annie, having sex with super asshole take-advantage-of-her-guy Ted (Jon Hamm). Now it’s a goofy scene in that they’re never in sync, that she’s never comfortable with anything Hamm tries. But the thing you’re getting from this scene goes way beyond the hilarity of awkward sex. This scene does an amazing job of setting up our main character so that we both love her and understand her flaw. Annie is desperate to find someone to be with. She wants that other half in life so bad, that she’s deluded herself into believing that Ted might be the guy. The fact that he’s so shitty to her makes us feel bad for Annie. Which means we now want her to be happy, to not have to cling to jerks like Ted. This is the first character component that drives the humor.
Cut to a nonchalant lunch scene between Annie and her best friend Lillian (Maya Rudolph). I always say to never put two characters at a table together unless you absolutely have to. It’s really hard to make two people sitting down and talking interesting. And as far as this scene goes, it’s probably one of the weaker in the script. However, the scene does a great job establishing the amazing friendship between Annie and Lillian. We see these two play off each other, understand each other, finish each other’s sentences. There’s no doubt in our minds after leaving this scene that these two have an amazing friendship. This is the SECOND character component that drives the humor.
Soonafter, Lillian tells Annie that she’s getting married, and while we can see that Annie is happy for her, we also sense that this affects her in two important ways. 1) She realizes her friendship with Lillian is never going to be the same again, and that terrifies her. And 2) Her best friend getting married highlights her own biggest fear – that she’ll never get married herself. These two things combine to give Annie her defining characteristic which will drive much of the comedy – her fear of being alone. Therefore, it’s the third key component.
This leads us to the (pre?) bridal shower party and it’s here where we meet the fourth and final component that makes the film work: Helen (Rose Byrne). Helen is Lillian’s best friend at work, and when Annie sees them together for the first time, she realizes that they’re a lot better friends than she thought. For that reason, Helen becomes the embodiment of Annie’s fear. Losing Lillian to Helen, in Annie’s mind, means being alone for the rest of her life. And that leads to the main engine that drives this story. Annie will do anything – and I mean ANYTHING – to make sure she doesn’t lose Lillian to Helen.
And there you have it. This is why the movie works so well. Those four character-related components drive 95% of the laughs in the movie.
Take a look at the bridal shower speech stand-off for example. That scene’s not funny because Annie is making a fool of herself or because Kristen Wiig is mugging for the camera. It’s funny because the entire scene is born out of her character’s need to prove that SHE’S Lillian’s best friend, NOT Helen. Had the writers not put all of that legwork into establishing the characters’ flaws and relationships, scenes like this would just die on the screen.
One of the things that shocked me about Bridesmaids was all of the long scenes in the film. One of the “rules” often touted in screenwriting books is to keep your scenes between 2-3 pages. Which is actually good advice. Scenes tend to play a lot slower than you think they will, so writing a 4-5 page scene is often akin to putting a dead fish on the screen for 5 minutes. But there are tons of scenes in Bridesmaids that last 6-7-8 minutes long. Why do these scenes work?
Well I hate to sound like a broken record but it’s the same answer. The character work. If you make your characters likable? If you build people whom we want to see succeed? If you show us characters with real fears (being alone) and real backstories (lost their business) and real dreams (finding happiness) and real failures (being a hook-up for a guy who will never love you)? Those characters will end up “fixing” a lot of your scripts’ other problems. It’s no different than in real life. If you like somebody, you don’t need to be with them at Disneyworld to be having fun. You could be in the back alley of a Tijuana suburb and still be having a good time.
But Bridesmaids didn’t stop there with its character work. It did something that is so rarely done nowadays that I’ve almost given up on expecting it. Bridesmaids puts just as much thought into its secondary characters as it does its primary characters. Here we have Rita, the disgruntled overworked mom whose home has become a prison, Becca, the “married the first man she had sex with” innocent newlywed, Officer Rhodes, the earnest mini-carrot loving perfect for Annie but she doesn’t know it yet love interest, and even Megan, the weird puppy-stealing positive-thinking-for-no-good-reason sister of the groom. The writers take advantage of every single moment of screentime to make these characters distinct and memorable. I just don’t see that in comedy scripts anymore. There’s usually the main character, the wily friend, and those are the only two people in the entire screenplay that the writer puts any time into.
What I take away most from Bridesmaids – the thing I “learned” from this film – is that great comedies are character pieces first and comedies second. Mumolo and Wiig – either through Judd Apatow or on their own volition – decided to explore their characters first, and see what kind of funny situations arose from that exploration, as opposed to coming up with a bunch of funny scenes and then trying to reverse engineer characters to fit those scenes. I’m hoping the staggering staying power of Bridesmaids (20% weekend hold??) will prove that audiences want to connect with people first and laugh second. For all you comedy writers out there, take heed of this advice, and go write your next character piece. I mean your next comedy!
Genre: Crime Thriller
Premise: After being double-crossed during a bank heist, a safe-cracker teams up with the hitman hired to kill him to take down the double-crosser.
About: Knight is one of the top-dollar assignment dogs in Hollywood. I don’t know what his fee is but I’m pretty sure it’s close to a million bucks an assignment? Maybe more? Someone want to confirm or deny this? Before Knight hit the big-time, he, well, hit the big time, being one of the co-creators of the original British version of Who Wants To Be A Millionaire. After writing Dirty Pretty Things and Eastern Promises, he became one of the more sought after screenwriters for weightier fare. He’s claimed that he wants to write screenplays for another year or two and then go write novels. Of course, when they’re UPS’ing you bags of money, that decision becomes considerably harder. The Red Circle is an adaptation for a remake of a French thriller.
Writer: Steven Knight
Details: 106 pages – 2nd Polish – Feb 6 2009 draft (This is an early draft of the script. The situations, characters, and plot may change significantly by the time the film is released. This is not a definitive statement about the project, but rather an analysis of this unique draft as it pertains to the craft of screenwriting).
As you may have noticed, Steven Knight is the writer of my second favorite unproduced script, Untitled Chef Project, which I’m begging someone to get off their ass and make. But Knight is also in charge of Pawn Sacrifice, which I found decidedly underwhelming (it was too straightforward for me). So I was more than happy to take a look at a third Knight script to see where my loyalties lie with the man.
It’s Hong Kong, and brothers (friends?) Sean and Corey are on the eve of a huge job. All they have to do is sneak into a lightly guarded building, crack a safe, and walk away with a ton of dough. Everything goes according to plan until they get back to their car, where they pop the trunk to find peculiar sociopath and hitman Vogel waiting for them. We’ll find out later that the nasty crime boss Santi, who’s friends with Corey, hired Vogel to double-cross them.
But this double-cross is about to get triple….crossed? Two Hong Kong cops, the stylish and confident Mai and her by-the-books partner Junji, spot our trio in the alley and decide to enter the equation. A wild three-way shootout follows, and when it’s all said and done, Mai and Sean are dead.
Five years later Corey gets out of jail and wants only one thing – to kill Santi. But before he does that, he’s going to steal all his money (actually, I guess that’s two things). That won’t be easy so he’ll need help. And who better to help than the man who got the jump on him and the cop who lost his partner. So Corey goes back and recruits Vogel, who signs on for a 25 million dollar payday, and Junjie, whose alcoholism has become worse than a bad David Hasslehoff home video.
During the workup to the heist (and murder), Corey reconnects with his lover, An. Suddenly, a more complicated picture materializes. We realize that An is married to Santi, who found out about her and Corey’s affair, and THAT’S why he double-crossed him. With Santi and An being around each other all the time, Corey institutes a stipulation that they can’t hurt her in the raid, which angers Vogel, who thought Corey was doing this for the revenge. But now it’s clear he’s doing it for love.
To make things even more complicated, Officer Mattei, who took Junji’s spot on the force after that fateful night, is looking to make a big move to expedite his career. He wants to take down Santi as well as Corey and Vogel, all in one fell swoop. So he befriends Junji to give him eyes and ears into the operation, with plans on being there when the shit goes down.
In the end, Corey will need to decide what’s most important. The revenge? The money? Or the love?
You know what Red Circle reminded me of? It reminded me of a Hong Kong version of The Town. Like that film, it creates some exciting multiple character relationships at the center of the story, and like that film, it doesn’t quite come together at the end. The ultimate difference is, though, that it’s not as good of a script. Red Circle has so much double-crossing and such an intricately woven set of storylines that you’re not always sure what’s going on, or if it all makes sense.
Still, there’s a lot to like here. First of all, I love stories where two people who don’t trust each other are forced to work together. I understand it’s cliché, but it’s also one of those things where if you set it up right (so that we believe in the pairing), your script will be dripping with conflict from start to finish. Which is important. Because lack of conflict is where a lot of scripts falter. They’ll have too many pages where there isn’t anything going on underneath the surface. This solves that issue definitively.
As for the characters, I wouldn’t say they were perfectly drawn, but they were all pretty interesting. Corey’s motivation was strong, with both the loss of his friend and the love for Santi’s wife. Vogel was a little over the top at times (playing PSP in the trunk while he waited to execute his hit?) but his weirdness and sociopathic behavior kept him interesting. And while Junji was the weakest of the bunch, I thought making him a drunk who mourned the loss of his partner and having his loyalties tugged at by the police force he left, gave him plenty to work with.
I thought the Hong Kong setting was fresh as well. This would’ve felt too generic, for example, if it had been set in LA. And there were a handful of scenes that really stuck out. My favorite was the pet shop scene and the throwing of the snake. Added an interesting wrinkle that’s a lot more fun than two dudes pointing guns at each other.
I did want to bring something up about Red Circle though, and I want the opinion of the advanced writers out there, as it’s my understanding that after you figure out structure, after you figure out character, after you figure out theme, that a lot of writers become orgasmically obsessed with visual motifs.
I’ll never forget the interview with the writer of Spielberg’s TV mini-series “Into The West.” The writer explained that the reason he got the job was because he pitched this idea about the WHEEL as a visual motif throughout the series. That we would constantly see images that evoked the image of a wheel moving. And as soon as Spielberg heard that, he gave him the job. And I remember thinking at the time, “What a dumb reason to give a writer a job.” And still today, I think, “What a dumb reason to give a writer a job.” I guess I’m not sold on why something like this would matter.
I bring it up because in The Red Circle, we’re constantly seeing red circles in the script. A red stop light. The red blood outline of a bullet hole. A red bullseye. Whatever. That seems to be a big visual motif in the script. And I don’t know. To me it just screams “on the nose.” Like, “It’s called The Red Circle and now we’re actually seeing ALL THESE RED CIRCLES! Cooooooool.” Does anybody else feel like this is too obvious?
Anyway, I thought The Red Circle was a pretty good script that went about things just differently enough to make it fresh. The reason I didn’t rate it higher is because there’s something murky about it, sort of the way you only remember certain aspects about a dream . If this could be jammed into a pencil sharpener until it’s sharp as a tac, it could be awesome. As long as you don’t then prick yourself and create…another red circle.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[x] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Here’s a great technical tip. When your characters speak in another language, instead of wasting a whole parenthetical saying, “in Spanish,” whenever they speak, just note in the description that they’re speaking Spanish and from that point on, put parenthesis around their dialogue. i.e. — Joe: (We need to go find Hank). – Some writers will use italics to convey this as well, but either one is fine.
