Genre: Horror/Thriller
Premise: A young woman watching over a blind child must protect her when the home is invaded by the unthinkable.
About: The Watching Hour sold a couple of weeks ago. The Van Dykes are related to the great Dick Van Dyke, and there was a big comment war over on Deadline Hollywood that this sale represents nepotism at its best, which made me burst out laughing. Not only is this a ridiculous reasoning for why this script sold, but the Van Dykes have been writing, rewriting, assignment writing, working their asses off for years to get to this point. This isn’t a case of having a name. This is a case of good old fashioned hard work.
Writers: Carey and Shane Van Dyke
Details: 99 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).

Every once in awhile I’ll read a script and I’ll say, “I don’t know if I have an opinion on this one.” The Watching Hour is one of those scripts. The writing is professional, as you’d expect it to be from two veterans like the Van Dyke siblings. But after reading After Hailey, where each page was packed with gobs and gobs of character development, I can’t help but feel that The Watching Hour is too thin, that there isn’t enough going on where you want things to be going on.

However, I do understand why it sold. In fact, if I were telling you to choose between writing a script like After Hailey or The Watching Hour, I would choose The Watching Hour every time. After Hailey is a once in a decade deal – nailing every single emotional beat in a complex character driven drama. It just doesn’t happen often. Whereas with a home-invasion thriller, the marketable premise and genre ensure a buying audience that’ll be much more forgiving. If they can see the poster, they’ll invest in fixing your mistakes.

20-something Shelby specializes in providing care for children with special needs. If your child is blind or deaf or physically limited in some capacity, you don’t call up a normal babysitter, you call up Shelby. As 9 year old McKenzie fits this criteria (she’s blind), her parents bring Shelby into their small rural home (far enough away from the neighbors so that they can’t hear you scream – heh heh) to take care of Mckenzie while they’re out for the night.

McKenzie’s parents are a little nervous about Shelby at first, but when they see how quickly she bonds with McKenzie, their fear disappears and they’re off for the evening.

Across town, another family is experiencing quite a different evening. Their 9 year old daughter, Katy, disappeared two weeks ago, and friends and family wade through the house to lend support. The curious thing about Katy is that she’s mute. I say curious because a few years back, another handicapped girl who lived nearby (a paraplegic) was found drowned in a pond. It’s clear that somewhere out there is a sick man snatching these helpless girls up, doing god knows what to them.

Which segues back to Shelby and McKenzie, who begin to receive strange phone calls with distant scratchy 50s music on the other end. This is accompanied by a pair of headlights at the edge of the property, headlights that just sit there, that seem to be watching them. Is this the man who’s been snatching up all the children? Is he coming to get McKenzie?

The answer to that? They wish!

In a nice little homage to Close Encounters, the headlights RISE off the ground STRAIGHT UP INTO THE AIR. And soon we start hearing feet outside, pitter-pattering. Something’s out there. But what? I’ll tell you what. Aliens motherfucker! Shelby and McKenzie are being attacked by aliens. Why they’re here, what they’re doing, what they want? We don’t know. But we assume they’ll do anything to snatch McKenzie away, so it’s off to every crevice in the house to prevent that from happening.

Okay, here’s my main gripe with The Watching Hour. And it’s not even really about The Watching Hour. It’s about these kinds of movies in general. You have the audience in the palm of your hand before the aliens/monsters/whoever show up. But as soon as they show up, the mystery is gone. And what usually happens after that is a series of repetitive chase scenes inside the house/base/building/whatever. If there isn’t enough variety to those chase segments, the audience gets restless, and I can’t speak for anyone else, but I definitely became restless with the repetitive in-house alien chases. Alien pops out, run to another area of the house, hide, alien pops up again, run to another area of the house, hide. Wash, rinse, repeat.

Now the Van Dykes do break up the monotony a little with the occasional hop over to Katy’s house (the other girl who’s missing). The problem with this is, we’re never clear on why we’re in that house. It’s a whole bunch of people grieving, but it’s been two weeks since Katy went missing. Have they been here the whole two weeks? Or if not, why are they here today? Is today special? That isn’t made clear and therefore its entire reasoning for being in the script feels suspect. If there was more going on in this section, it could’ve worked, but whenever we cut back to this house, I kept asking, “Why are we here?”  

There were little things that bothered me as well. The haunting 50s music will definitely play well onscreen, but I hate when “cool” things are forced into the story instead of stemming organically from the situation. Why would the aliens use 50s music? Was this a callback to the time when Roswell happened? I wasn’t sure. You also have what is quickly becoming the single biggest problem in modern day horror flicks – the fact that nobody has a cell phone that works. I can kind of buy it since they’re out in the boonies, but since audiences have become so savvy to this cheat, it sticks out like a sore thumb.

Overall, I wanted more meat to this story and these characters. While Shelby becomes three-dimensional in the final ten pages, her and the rest of the characters feel paper-thin during the previous 90. You’re never going to write characters in a thriller that are as deep as characters in a drama, but this script came at a really bad time, since I had just read After Hailey, and that script was a master course in character development. I kept thinking over and over again with Watching Hour, “I barely know anything about any of these people.”

Here’s the thing though. The Watching Hour still gets a worth the read. Barely. And I’ll tell you why. First, this is a great spec premise. A fast paced marketable genre picture with high concept elements. Second, the twist ending. Now I’m not going to spoil the ending here but I’ll just say this. While I had suspicions, I genuinely didn’t see it coming. Is it perfect? No. It’s not The Sixth Sense. But it’s good enough to make us go back and reevaluate everything we just saw.

I get the sense, however, that the Van Dyke’s are resting a little too heavily on this ending. It’s almost like they know that they have an ace up their sleeve so they put the rest of the script on cruise control. The scenes at Katy’s house in particular go nowhere.

I’m going to guess that the younger crowd will like this but the savvy vets will take it to task for its thin characters and plot. We’ll see. :)

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

What I learned: In an interview with the writer of yesterday’s script, Scott Frank, he was asked about twist endings. This is what he said, which I think is good advice: “If you’re writing simply to have a twist [ending] then you’re in trouble. If the twist comes to you organically, then I think you’re on much firmer ground.”  There are parts of Watching Hour where it seems like it’s being written just to have a twist ending. 

Aliens is, quite simply, awesome. It’s one of those movies that works if you’re 15 or you’re 35. It’s got action. It’s got mystery. It’s got emotion. And it’s in the running for best sequel ever. When I give notes, there’s no movie I reference more than this one. I’ve been known to bring up Aliens while consulting on a romantic comedy.  That’s how rich it is in screenwriting advice.  Now I could sit here and whine that “Studios just don’t make summer movies like this anymore.” But the truth is, they’ve never made these kinds of summer movies consistently – movies with depth, movies with thought, movies where the story takes precedence over the effects. But when they do, it’s probably the best moviegoing experience you can have. So, keeping that in mind, here are ten screenwriting lessons you can learn from one of the best summer movies of all time.

KILL YOUR BABIES

Listening in on the director’s commentary of Aliens, you find out that Aliens was originally 30 minutes longer, as it included an extra early sequence of the LV-426 colonists being attacked by the aliens. Under the gun to deliver a 2 hour and 10 minute film, Cameron reluctantly cut the sequence at the last second, and wow did it make a difference. Without it, there was more build-up to the aliens, more suspense, more anticipation. We were practically bursting with every peek around a corner, every blip of the radar. Now Cameron only figured this out AFTER he shot the unnecessary footage, but let this be a lesson to all of us screenwriters. Sometimes you gotta get rid of the things you love in order to make the story better. Always ask yourself, “Is this scene/sequence really necessary to tell the story?” You might be surprised by the answer.

NOT EVERY FILM NEEDS A LOVE STORY

There’s a temptation to insert a love story into every movie you write, especially big popcorn movies, since the studios are trying to draw from every “quadrant” possible and therefore need a female love interest to bring in the female demographic. But there are certain stories where no matter what you do, it won’t fit. And if you’ve written one of those stories, don’t try to force it, because we’ll be able to tell. I thought Cameron handled this issue perfectly in Aliens. He knew a love story in this setting wasn’t going to fly, so instead he created “love story light,” between Ripley and Hicks, where we see them flirting, where we can tell that in another situation, they might have worked. But it never goes any further than that because tonally, and story-wise, he knew we wouldn’t have accepted it.

ALWAYS MAKE THINGS WORSE FOR YOUR CHARACTERS

As I’ve stated here many times before, one of the most potent tools a screenwriter possesses is the ability to make things worse for their characters. In action movies, that usually means escalating danger whenever possible. Aliens has one of the most memorable examples of this, when our characters are moving towards the central hub of the station, looking for the colonists, and Ripley realizes that, because they’re sitting on a nuclear reactor, they can’t fire their guns. The Captain informs his Lieutenant that he needs to collect all of the soldiers’ ammo (followed by one of the greatest movie lines ever “What are we supposed to use? Harsh language?”), and now, with our marines moving towards the nest of one of the most dangerous species in the universe, they must take them on WITHOUT FIREPOWER. Always make things worse for your characters!

USE YOUR MID-POINT TO CHANGE THE GAME

Something needs to happen at your midpoint that shifts the dynamic of the story, preferably making things worse for your characters. If you don’t do this, you run the risk of your second half feeling a lot like your first half, and that’s going to lead to boredom for the reader. In Aliens, their objective, once they realize what they’re up against, is to get up to the main ship and nuke the base. The mid-point, then, is when their pick-up ship crashes, leaving them stranded on the planet. Note how this forces them to reevaluate their plan, creating a second half that’s structurally different from the first one (the first half is about going in and kicking ass, the second half is about getting out and staying alive).

GET YOUR HERO OUT THERE DOING SHIT – KEEP THEM ACTIVE

Cameron had a tough task ahead of him when he wrote this script. Ripley, his hero, is on the bottom of the ranking totem pole. How, then, do you believably prop her up to become the de facto Captain of the mission? The answer lies inside one of the most important rules in screenwriting: You need to look for any opportunity to keep your hero active. Remember, THIS IS YOUR HERO. They need to be driving the story whenever possible. Cameron does this in subtle ways at first. While watching the marines secure the base, Ripley grabs a headset and makes them check out an acid hole. She then voices her frustration when she doesn’t believe the base to be secured. Then, of course, comes the key moment, when the Captain has a meltdown and she takes control of the tank-car and saves the soldiers herself. The important thing to remember is: Always look for ways to keep your hero active. If they’re in the backseat for too long, we’ll forget about them.

MOVE YOUR STORY ALONG

Beginning writers make this mistake constantly. They add numerous scenes between key plot points that don’t move the story forward. Bad move. You have to move from plot point to plot point quickly. Take a look at the first act here. We get the early boardroom scene where Ripley is informed that colonists have moved onto LV-426. In the very next scene, Burke and the Captain come to Ripley’s quarters to inform her that they’ve lost contact with LV-426. You don’t need 3 scenes of fluff between those two scenes. Just keep the story moving. Get your character(s) to where they need to be (in this case – to LV-426).

THE MORE UNLIKELY THE ACTION, THE MORE CONVINCING THE MOTIVATION MUST BE

You always have to have a reason – a motivation – for your character’s actions. If a character is super happy and loves life, it’s not going to make sense to an audience if they step in front of a bus and kill themselves. You need to motivate their actions. In addition to this, the more unlikely the action, the more convincing the motivation needs to be. So here, Burke wants Ripley to come with them to LV-426 as an advisor. Answer me this. Why the hell would Ripley put herself in jeopardy AGAIN after everything that just happened to her – what with the death of her entire crew, her almost biting it, and barely escaping a concentrated acid filled monster? The motivation here has to be pretty strong. Well, because the military holds Ripley responsible for their destroyed ship, she’s basically been relegated to peasant status for the rest of her life. Burke promises to get her job back as officer if she comes and helps them. That’s a motivation we can buy.

STRONG FATAL FLAW – RARE FOR A SUMMER MOVIE

What I loved about Aliens was that Cameron gave Ripley a fatal flaw. Usually, you don’t see this in a big summer action movie. Producers see it as too much effort for not enough payoff. But giving the main character of your action film an arc – and I’m not talking a cheap arc like alcoholism – is exactly what’s made movies like Aliens stand the test of time while all those other summer movies have faded away. So what is Ripley’s flaw? Trust. Or lack of it. Ripley doesn’t trust Burke. She doesn’t trust this mission. She doesn’t trust the marines. And she especially doesn’t trust Bishop, which is where the key sequences in this character arc play out. In the end, Ripley overcomes her flaw by trusting Bishop to come back and get them. This is why the moment when she and Newt make it to the top of the base is so powerful. For a moment, she was right. Bishop left them there. She never should’ve trusted him. Of course the ship appears at the last second and her arc is complete. She was, indeed, right to leave her trust in someone.

SEQUENCE DOMINATED MOVIE

One way to keep your movie moving is to break it down into sequences. Each sequence should act as a mini-movie. That means there should be a goal for each specific sequence. In the end, the characters either achieve their goal or fail at it, and we then move on to the next sequence. Let’s look at how Aliens does this. Once they’re on LV-426, the goal is to go in and figure out what the fuck is going on (new sequence). Once they find the colony empty, their goal shifts to finding out where the colonists are (new sequence). After that ends with them getting attacked by aliens, their goal becomes get off this rock and nuke the colony (new sequence). Once that fails, their goal becomes secure all passageways so the aliens can’t get to them (new sequence). Once that’s taken care of, the goal is to find a way back up to the ship (new sequence). Because there’s always a goal in place, the story is always moving. Our characters are always DOING SOMETHING (staying ACTIVE). The sequence approach is by no means a requirement, but I’ve found it to be pretty invaluable for action movies.

ACTIONS SPEAK LOUDER THAN WORDS (SHOW DON’T TELL!)

Aliens has one of the best climax fights in the history of cinema (“Get away from her you BITCH.”) And the reason it works so well? Because it was set up earlier, when Ripley shows the marines she’s capable of operating a loader (“Where do you want it?” she asks). Ahh, but I have a little surprise for you. Go pop Aliens in and fast-forward it to the early scene where Burke first comes to recruit Ripley. THIS is actually the first moment where the final fight is set up. “I heard you’re working the cargo docks,” Burke offers, smugly. “Running forklifts and loaders and that sort of thing?” It’s a quick line and I bring it up for an important reason. I bet none of you caught that line. Even if you’ve watched the film five or six times. That line probably slipped right by you. And the significance of it slipping by you is the point of this tip. You should always SHOW instead of TELL. When we SEE Ripley on that loader, it resonates. When we hear it in a line, it “slips right by us.” Had we never physically seen Riply on that loader, and Cameron had depended instead on Burke’s quick line of dialogue? There’s no way that final battle plays as well as it does. Always show. Never tell.

AND THERE YOU HAVE IT

I actually had 15 more tips, but contrary to popular belief, I do have a life, so those will have to wait for another day. I do have a question for all Aliens nerds out there though. How do they pull off the Loader special effects? I know in some cases it’s stop motion. And in other cases, Cameron says there’s a really strong person behind the loader, moving it. But there are certain shots when you can see the loader from the side that aren’t stop motion and nobody’s behind it. So how the hell does it still look so real? I mean, these are 1986 special effects we’re talking about here! Tune in next week where I give you 10 tips on what NOT to do via the disaster that was Alien 3.

These are 10 tips from the movie “Aliens.” To get 490 more tips from movies as varied as “Star Wars,” “When Harry Met Sally,” and “The Hangover,” check out my book, Scriptshadow Secrets, on Amazon!

Genre: Drama
Premise: After a newlywed war photographer’s wife dies, he must decide whether to help out her troubled son from a previous marriage or move on and start a new life.
About: Scott Frank is one of the biggest screenwriters in town, the guy you pay a million bucks to to put your script on the development red carpet. Frank has over a dozen produced credits, including Dead Again, Minority Report, Out of Sight, The Lookout and Get Shorty, which got him nominated for an Oscar. After Hailey is an adaptation of a book by Jonathan Tropper (How To Talk To A Widower). It, like yesterday’s entry, made the 2008 Black List. I’ve done some digging and found that the script has a lot of fans in the industry (Bill Martell and Mystery Man on Film being a couple).
Writer: Scott Frank (based on a novel by Jonathan Tropper)
Details: 128 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 first busted out After Hailey two years ago and promptly threw it down 14 pages later. A heartfelt drama about an Iraq war photographer (NO! No more Iraq vets!) grieving the loss of his wife? Every sentence I read indicated this was going to be a slow sorry depressing “woe is me” snore-fest.

But one of our longtime readers has been telling me at every turn that I need to review more Scott Frank scripts, that in the battleground that is the Hollywood screenwriting business, Frank writes circles around even the mightiest money-earners. He is the guy you go to when you want to get a script right. He doesn’t come cheap, but he’s worth every penny. I squinted skeptically at the reader’s e-mail. Hmmm, I thought, do I really want to try After Hailey AGAIN and willingly bring depression into my life for the next two hours? Not really. But I popped the script open for a second chance anyway, hoping for a miracle.

Guess what? I got one.

24 year old Doug Parker is a talented war photographer. Buoyed by his fearlessness, he’s willing to get in close to capture the moment, however horrifying that moment might be. What Doug doesn’t realize is that the accumulation of these moments has stripped him of any feeling, of any emotion. He is a walking zombie. Photographs are all he has left.

Until he meets Hailey.

Hailey is a magazine journalist 14 years his senior. But that age gap means nothing to Doug. This is love at first sight. This is “spend the rest of our lives together at all costs magic.” Hailey, a divorcee, is hardened by real life the same way Doug is hardened by his career, and for that reason, she’s nervous about becoming involved with him. She wonders if he can handle being with someone who has a past, who has baggage. In the end she decides to take a chance, and the two get married.

Cut to two years later. A suburb of New York. Doug’s come back for a few weeks to sell the home he and Hailey bought together. Hailey’s dead. Died in a plane crash. And if he could run away and just let this home rot, that’s what he would do. But he’s trying to be strong. He’s trying to be responsible.

There’s one complication however. Hailey had a son, 15 year old Russ, who’s lived a real shitty life. Besides his mother dying, his father is a total asshole. So at the beginning of Doug’s week, Russ gets hand-delivered by the cops who say they won’t take him to jail if Doug keeps an eye on him for the rest of the night.

Although we only get bits and pieces of their past, we get the sense that Doug married Hailey, not Hailey and Russ, and that that caused a lot of distance between him and this boy. So with Hailey out of the picture, the last thing Doug wants to do is deal with her troubled son.

In addition to Russ, we have Laney, Hailey’s best friend, who keeps coming to check up on Doug, and is willing to do anything – and I mean anything – to make him feel better. There’s his twin sister Claire, who’s pregnant and wants to leave her husband, eventually leading to her moving in (Move in?? He’s trying to sell the house!). There’s Russ’s real dad, Jim, who’s moving to Florida and is trying to cast Russ off on Doug. And then there’s Doug’s family, highlighted by his brain-damaged-for-the-better father (who used to be a total dick but now is the life of the party). All of these people are pulling at Doug in their own way, when all Doug wants to do is get out.

If there’s a script out there that challenges my proclamation to stay away from passion projects, this would be the one. This is your horse in the “prove Carson wrong” race. There’s no strong character goal in this story. There’s no sense of urgency. It’s a straightforward character piece with the only thing driving the story being, “What’s going to happen with Doug and the rest of these people?” So why does it still work?

Well, let’s take a closer look. While the character goals don’t dominate the narrative like they would in a more traditional “Hollywood” movie, they are there. Doug’s goal is to sell the house so he can get the hell out of this town and never come back. Now because Doug is so passive about it, it never dominates the narrative, but it’s definitely there.

There are actually two soft ticking time bombs set up. The first is needing to sell the house (although I would’ve liked the time frame to be more defined) and the second is his younger sister’s wedding. Although it’s never said that this will be the finale of the movie, viewers are trained to know that usually, when there’s a wedding, it’ll be close to the end.

But what really makes this story great are the stakes. You quickly realize that unless Doug and Russ find some connection, unless they become a permanent part of each other’s lives, they’re doomed. And that feeling only grows as the script goes on. This, in turn, becomes the main engine that drives the story. We want to see if these two “get together” so that we know they’ll be okay. In that sense, it was a lot like the structure used in a Romantic Comedy.

The character work in After Hailey is almost flawless. I talked about this with Maggie the other week, how when you have a depressing situation, you need someone to come in and add some levity so the audience isn’t ready to slit their wrists by Act 2. Bringing in Doug’s twin sister, Claire, who calls it like it is (her commentary on Doug’s bedroom exploits with Laney are particularly hilarious), was the perfect remedy for distilling a script that could’ve easily slipped into melodrama.

And even the relationship that we barely saw, that between Doug and Hailey, was different and new. I can’t remember a movie where they so deftly explored the marriage problems between a younger man and an older woman as realistically as this one. This idea that some people are a package deal, and how that can be hard for a younger person to understand, helped contribute to the freshness of After Hailey.

Like all good writers, Frank/Tropper tell the story through ACTION instead of dialogue whenever possible. So as Russ starts enjoying time with Doug, instead of saying, “I don’t want you to sell this house. Let’s just keep it.” – which a rebellious teenager like Russ would never say – Frank/Tropper instead show Doug repeatedly coming home to find the “For Sale” sign hidden, trashed, even run over. I mean that’s really good writing.

Truth be told, almost all of Frank and Tropper’s choices were spot on. In Doug’s younger sister’s wedding, for example, Doug takes the mic near the end and we think – oh, here we go – the typical heartwarming wrap up the theme of the movie speech. But we’re shocked to see Doug totally choke and then a drunk Russ pick up the mic and use the toast to propose his love to Doug’s younger sister – the one who just got married! It was unexpected and not like any movie I’d ever seen and therefore perfect.

I was sure at the beginning of the story that the photography stuff was going to be boring and stupid. One of my pet peeves is when writers give characters cool jobs even if it doesn’t fit the character. But here, Frank/Tropper use the photography to show how distanced Doug is from the real world (hiding behind a lens), he uses it to help bond Doug and Russ (Doug gives Russ a camera to go out and shoot with), and finally he uses it as a later plot point (the job threatens to take him out of the city). There was an actual plan here with the job, which is nice, cause I usually don’t see that.

If I have any complaints about After Hailey, they’re minor. Doug’s family may have been a little too wacky (the brain-beaten dad was kind of over-the-top). And since his younger sister was barely around during the screenplay, her wedding at the end felt thrust upon us. But Frank and Tropper did such a good job that most of these things slipped by unnoticed. Can’t say enough about this one. Great script!

[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[x] impressive (Top 25!)
[ ] genius

What I learned: That you can take successful elements from other genres and use them in genres they weren’t meant for. I loved how this was essentially a romantic comedy format. We’re wondering if Doug and Russ are going to “get together.” Just like we were wondering if Hugh Grant and Julia Roberts were going to get together in Notting Hill. Just like we were wondering if Ryan Reynolds and Sandra Bullock were going to get together in The Proposal (okay, maybe we weren’t wondering that, but you get the idea). That was a neat trick I plan to take with me.

Aliens is, quite simply, awesome. It’s one of those movies that works if you’re 15 or you’re 35. It’s got action. It’s got mystery. It’s got emotion. And it’s in the running for best sequel ever. When I give notes, there’s no movie I reference more than this one. I’ve been known to bring up Aliens while consulting on a romantic comedy.  That’s how rich it is in screenwriting advice.  Now I could sit here and whine that “Studios just don’t make summer movies like this anymore.” But the truth is, they’ve never made these kinds of summer movies consistently – movies with depth, movies with thought, movies where the story takes precedence over the effects. But when they do, it’s probably the best moviegoing experience you can have. So, keeping that in mind, here are ten screenwriting lessons you can learn from one of the best summer movies of all time.

KILL YOUR BABIES

Listening in on the director’s commentary of Aliens, you find out that Aliens was originally 30 minutes longer, as it included an extra early sequence of the LV-426 colonists being attacked by the aliens. Under the gun to deliver a 2 hour and 10 minute film, Cameron reluctantly cut the sequence at the last second, and wow did it make a difference. Without it, there was more build-up to the aliens, more suspense, more anticipation. We were practically bursting with every peek around a corner, every blip of the radar. Now Cameron only figured this out AFTER he shot the unnecessary footage, but let this be a lesson to all of us screenwriters. Sometimes you gotta get rid of the things you love in order to make the story better. Always ask yourself, “Is this scene/sequence really necessary to tell the story?” You might be surprised by the answer.

NOT EVERY FILM NEEDS A LOVE STORY

There’s a temptation to insert a love story into every movie you write, especially big popcorn movies, since the studios are trying to draw from every “quadrant” possible and therefore need a female love interest to bring in the female demographic. But there are certain stories where no matter what you do, it won’t fit. And if you’ve written one of those stories, don’t try to force it, because we’ll be able to tell. I thought Cameron handled this issue perfectly in Aliens. He knew a love story in this setting wasn’t going to fly, so instead he created “love story light,” between Ripley and Hicks, where we see them flirting, where we can tell that in another situation, they might have worked. But it never goes any further than that because tonally, and story-wise, he knew we wouldn’t have accepted it.

ALWAYS MAKE THINGS WORSE FOR YOUR CHARACTERS

As I’ve stated here many times before, one of the most potent tools a screenwriter possesses is the ability to make things worse for their characters. In action movies, that usually means escalating danger whenever possible. Aliens has one of the most memorable examples of this, when our characters are moving towards the central hub of the station, looking for the colonists, and Ripley realizes that, because they’re sitting on a nuclear reactor, they can’t fire their guns. The Captain informs his Lieutenant that he needs to collect all of the soldiers’ ammo (followed by one of the greatest movie lines ever “What are we supposed to use? Harsh language?”), and now, with our marines moving towards the nest of one of the most dangerous species in the universe, they must take them on WITHOUT FIREPOWER. Always make things worse for your characters!

USE YOUR MID-POINT TO CHANGE THE GAME

Something needs to happen at your midpoint that shifts the dynamic of the story, preferably making things worse for your characters. If you don’t do this, you run the risk of your second half feeling a lot like your first half, and that’s going to lead to boredom for the reader. In Aliens, their objective, once they realize what they’re up against, is to get up to the main ship and nuke the base. The mid-point, then, is when their pick-up ship crashes, leaving them stranded on the planet. Note how this forces them to reevaluate their plan, creating a second half that’s structurally different from the first one (the first half is about going in and kicking ass, the second half is about getting out and staying alive).

GET YOUR HERO OUT THERE DOING SHIT – KEEP THEM ACTIVE

Cameron had a tough task ahead of him when he wrote this script. Ripley, his hero, is on the bottom of the ranking totem pole. How, then, do you believably prop her up to become the de facto Captain of the mission? The answer lies inside one of the most important rules in screenwriting: You need to look for any opportunity to keep your hero active. Remember, THIS IS YOUR HERO. They need to be driving the story whenever possible. Cameron does this in subtle ways at first. While watching the marines secure the base, Ripley grabs a headset and makes them check out an acid hole. She then voices her frustration when she doesn’t believe the base to be secured. Then, of course, comes the key moment, when the Captain has a meltdown and she takes control of the tank-car and saves the soldiers herself. The important thing to remember is: Always look for ways to keep your hero active. If they’re in the backseat for too long, we’ll forget about them.

MOVE YOUR STORY ALONG

Beginning writers make this mistake constantly. They add numerous scenes between key plot points that don’t move the story forward. Bad move. You have to move from plot point to plot point quickly. Take a look at the first act here. We get the early boardroom scene where Ripley is informed that colonists have moved onto LV-426. In the very next scene, Burke and the Captain come to Ripley’s quarters to inform her that they’ve lost contact with LV-426. You don’t need 3 scenes of fluff between those two scenes. Just keep the story moving. Get your character(s) to where they need to be (in this case – to LV-426).

THE MORE UNLIKELY THE ACTION, THE MORE CONVINCING THE MOTIVATION MUST BE

You always have to have a reason – a motivation – for your character’s actions. If a character is super happy and loves life, it’s not going to make sense to an audience if they step in front of a bus and kill themselves. You need to motivate their actions. In addition to this, the more unlikely the action, the more convincing the motivation needs to be. So here, Burke wants Ripley to come with them to LV-426 as an advisor. Answer me this. Why the hell would Ripley put herself in jeopardy AGAIN after everything that just happened to her – what with the death of her entire crew, her almost biting it, and barely escaping a concentrated acid filled monster? The motivation here has to be pretty strong. Well, because the military holds Ripley responsible for their destroyed ship, she’s basically been relegated to peasant status for the rest of her life. Burke promises to get her job back as officer if she comes and helps them. That’s a motivation we can buy.

STRONG FATAL FLAW – RARE FOR A SUMMER MOVIE

What I loved about Aliens was that Cameron gave Ripley a fatal flaw. Usually, you don’t see this in a big summer action movie. Producers see it as too much effort for not enough payoff. But giving the main character of your action film an arc – and I’m not talking a cheap arc like alcoholism – is exactly what’s made movies like Aliens stand the test of time while all those other summer movies have faded away. So what is Ripley’s flaw? Trust. Or lack of it. Ripley doesn’t trust Burke. She doesn’t trust this mission. She doesn’t trust the marines. And she especially doesn’t trust Bishop, which is where the key sequences in this character arc play out. In the end, Ripley overcomes her flaw by trusting Bishop to come back and get them. This is why the moment when she and Newt make it to the top of the base is so powerful. For a moment, she was right. Bishop left them there. She never should’ve trusted him. Of course the ship appears at the last second and her arc is complete. She was, indeed, right to leave her trust in someone.

SEQUENCE DOMINATED MOVIE

One way to keep your movie moving is to break it down into sequences. Each sequence should act as a mini-movie. That means there should be a goal for each specific sequence. In the end, the characters either achieve their goal or fail at it, and we then move on to the next sequence. Let’s look at how Aliens does this. Once they’re on LV-426, the goal is to go in and figure out what the fuck is going on (new sequence). Once they find the colony empty, their goal shifts to finding out where the colonists are (new sequence). After that ends with them getting attacked by aliens, their goal becomes get off this rock and nuke the colony (new sequence). Once that fails, their goal becomes secure all passageways so the aliens can’t get to them (new sequence). Once that’s taken care of, the goal is to find a way back up to the ship (new sequence). Because there’s always a goal in place, the story is always moving. Our characters are always DOING SOMETHING (staying ACTIVE). The sequence approach is by no means a requirement, but I’ve found it to be pretty invaluable for action movies.

ACTIONS SPEAK LOUDER THAN WORDS (SHOW DON’T TELL!)

Aliens has one of the best climax fights in the history of cinema (“Get away from her you BITCH.”) And the reason it works so well? Because it was set up earlier, when Ripley shows the marines she’s capable of operating a loader (“Where do you want it?” she asks). Ahh, but I have a little surprise for you. Go pop Aliens in and fast-forward it to the early scene where Burke first comes to recruit Ripley. THIS is actually the first moment where the final fight is set up. “I heard you’re working the cargo docks,” Burke offers, smugly. “Running forklifts and loaders and that sort of thing?” It’s a quick line and I bring it up for an important reason. I bet none of you caught that line. Even if you’ve watched the film five or six times. That line probably slipped right by you. And the significance of it slipping by you is the point of this tip. You should always SHOW instead of TELL. When we SEE Ripley on that loader, it resonates. When we hear it in a line, it “slips right by us.” Had we never physically seen Riply on that loader, and Cameron had depended instead on Burke’s quick line of dialogue? There’s no way that final battle plays as well as it does. Always show. Never tell.

AND THERE YOU HAVE IT

I actually had 15 more tips, but contrary to popular belief, I do have a life, so those will have to wait for another day. I do have a question for all Aliens nerds out there though. How do they pull off the Loader special effects? I know in some cases it’s stop motion. And in other cases, Cameron says there’s a really strong person behind the loader, moving it. But there are certain shots when you can see the loader from the side that aren’t stop motion and nobody’s behind it. So how the hell does it still look so real? I mean, these are 1986 special effects we’re talking about here! Tune in next week where I give you 10 tips on what NOT to do via the disaster that was Alien 3.

People have been e-mailing me asking me what I thought of Everything Must Go.  To be honest, I’m terrified to see it.  The movie is already perfect in my head, and I’m scared to ruin that by watching the film.  But I’ll probably force myself to do it in the next couple of weeks.  Also, for those following me on Facebook, I ended up seeing Fast Five instead of Thor.  It was WAY better than 4, but what the hell?  That Vin-Rock fight was weak as hell.  That thing should’ve been epic!

Genre: Dark Comedy
Premise: Imagine if the Mean Girls from high school grew up and became your bridesmaids.
About: Bachelorette started out as a play, which writer Leslye Headland turned into a screenplay, which made it onto the 2008 Black List. It was subsequently forgotten about, until the recent buzz surrounding Bridesmaids, when Will Ferrell and his team came on as producers (incidentally, I had always assumed that Bridesmaids, was, in fact, a retitled “Bachelorette”). Headland went to school at NYU, where she studied directing, then got a personal assistant job at Miramax. “I learned a lot,” she recalls. “Harvey was a great boss. He read my stuff and said, ‘Why aren’t you pursuing writing?’ It gave me the balls to go out and do it.” In 2007, she moved to California. “I thought that doing low-budget, independent theater would be easier in Los Angeles because it’s a little cheaper there,” she explains, adding: “And it’s not a theater town, so I thought, if I fail miserably, no one will notice!” The opportunity eventually led to a writing gig on the FX show, Terriers.
Writer: Leslye Headland
Details: 95 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 like the story behind Leslye’s success. It’s a great reminder that becoming a successful writer (or filmmaker or anything in this business) never happens how you think it’s going to happen. It’s not this straightforward linear journey where you send a script out, someone buys it for half a million, then you live happily ever after. It usually takes work, some diversions, different jobs, building contacts, and maybe a little luck here and there. When things didn’t happen for Lesyle right away, she said, “You know what? I’m not going to wait for my break here in New York, I’ll go produce this play in L.A.” It got her Bachelorette project noticed, which allowed her to get the screenplay version of her play out there, which ended up on the Black List, which got her notoriety. And eventually, a few years later, when another Bridesmaids flick gained some buzz, she got her shot. You just gotta keep plugging away, trying different things, until you reach your goal. You can’t sit in your basement and hope for the best.

Anyway, on to Bachelorette, which is a very…….(I’m going to choose my words carefully here) different screenplay. I say “different” because there are some great things about it, but also some really amateur things. I’ll get to those in a moment. But let’s start with the plot.

Gena Myers is a borderline waste of a human being. She’s 29 years old and she still goes out every night, drinks til she blacks out, and always wakes up with some piece of shit random dude in her bed. Her life is ten shades of pathetic, and yet she has no plans to change.

Her partner in crime is Katie Neuberg, her bff since high school. While she’s not as pathetic as Gena, she does spend a couple of hours a day on the treadmill and will throw up everything she eats for breakfast, lunch, and dinner in order to stay thin and perfect.

Rounding out the trio is Regan, the “Stepford Wife” of the clan. She’s snobby, elitist, and like the other two girls, incredibly selfish. Yup, these three are real winners. And they’re all reuniting in order to be bridesmaids for an old high school acquaintance’s wedding. “Pigface Becky,” as they remember her, is finally getting married. And she doesn’t have any bridesmaids, so she’s given Regan power of attorney to find some for her. Regan, of course, picks her two buddies, both of whom spent the majority of high school making fun of the pigster.

Everyone flies to New York, and even though Becky’s not pigfaced anymore, that doesn’t prevent them from starting up the fat jokes as soon as she turns her back. There’s obviously tension here, but the girls do their best to eliminate it, and the next thing you know, it’s prep time. We have a wedding tomorrow!

Complicating things is three men from the bridesmaids’ pasts. For Gena, it’s Clyde (“John Cusack meets Vince Vaughn”), her high school sweetheart. For Katie it’s Joe, the geeky computer dork who’s always been in love with her. And for Regan, it’s Jeff, the hottie who she’s wildly attracted to but whom she must deny since she’s engaged.

When the guys go to a strip club, the girls decide to join them, and that’s when all hell breaks loose. The girls do a flour bag sized mountain of coke, drink more alcohol than is imported to the state of Utah, and engage in every unspeakable activity one can think of. It all comes to a crashing halt though when they accidentally rip Pigface Becky’s wedding dress and drip blood all over it. Instead of fixing the dress, however, they decide to party instead, and naturally, this has major implications the next morning, when the wedding finally takes place.

Bachelorette should lead to some interesting discussion. Just the other day I was talking about Jimmy’s asshole character in the Mighty Flynn, and how his assholeness didn’t turn me off. Well here, we have three of the nastiest meanest most horrible women you can imagine. They’re inappropriate (going into the gory details of giving guys blowjobs to complete strangers). They’re cruel (openly making fun of Pigface Becky at every turn). They’re off-putting (nothing like watching a bunch of slutty whores dive head first into a mountain of coke). But most of all they’re just bad people.

Someone brought this up a few months ago – how audiences will accept a male asshole protagonist but they won’t accept a female asshole protagonist. I don’t know how true that is (I liked Bad Teacher), but it sure was true in this case. As much as I tried, I couldn’t root for these characters, or care about them, or support them. They didn’t possess a single redeemable trait, and almost everything that came out of their mouths was heartless, hurtful, or disgusting. As they pull out Becky’s wedding dress while coked up to Scarface proportions, rip it, laugh, and then decide to go out instead of fix it, all I could think was, “God do I hate all of you.”

Also, the script has a huge logic hump the audience has to get over. Why the hell would our sweet innocent pleasant bride agree to have the three bitchiest most terrible popular girls who haunted her in high school as her bridesmaids??? In comedy, we’re supposed to be more forgiving of logic holes, but as I’ve pointed out before, you want to keep those holes as far away from your premise as possible. And this hole is smack dab in the middle of the premise. This movie is about three bitches becoming a woman’s bridesmaids. So it should make sense why they’re her bridesmaids. There’s an attempt at an explanation later on (Regan was given carte blanche to pick the bridesmaids so she picked Gena and Katie). But come on. I refuse to accept that Becky has no real friends in life. It’s just impossible to buy into.

There are some other things that bothered me as well. Remember, you want every scene you write to push the story forward. But scenes in Bachelorette would appear for no reason. For example, we have this totally needless scene with Gena flying to New York where she gives a 5 minute monologue about how to give a great blowjob to the random guy sitting next to her. There is not only no reason to include this scene (the movie wouldn’t have changed had they just cut to her landing in New York) but there’s no logical reason for why she even talks to this guy. It’s clearly there just to squeeze in the blowjob monologue.

What saves this script though, and what makes you battle with whether you like it or not, is that the writing and the dialogue are really strong. As I open the script now to a random page, I read, “Text me later. I bet you could take a poke at one of the bridemaids. They’re easy like Sunday morning.” Or on another page I found this description, where Katie is wearing a green face mask, “Katie, on the treadmill, looking like an out-of-breath Gremlin after midnight.” That descriptive imaginative writing can be found on almost every page. There’s definitely a manic energy here, even if it’s being siphoned through these three nasty human beings, that you have no choice but to admire.

But the reason I can’t recommend this is best described by my mood afterwards. After finishing Bachelorette I felt spent, dirty, sad, and depressed. There’s so much bitterness in the writing, so much hate, that I just wanted to get away from this script and forget about it. It had nothing to do with talent, as the writer clearly has plenty. It was just my personal reaction to the characters, the kind of people I would cut my arm off for to avoid in real life. It bothers me, however, that I can’t articulate why I liked reading Jimmy Flynn or why I liked reading the main character in Bad Teacher, yet hated these three. Maybe it’s because they’re ten times worse than either of those characters? I don’t know. If anyone feels the same way, I’d be interested to hear your opinion. Anyway, I’m going to go take a bath. After this review, I need one.

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

What I learned: Another reminder to stay away from current events/popular references in your screenplays. References to Zach Braff and Lost are all but meaningless now (though they probably read like gangbusters back in 2007). You never know how many years down the line someone might read your script. Best to stay away from these time-capsule references.