The word “rules” stirs up a lot of debate in the University of Screenwriting. Some believe there should be no rules when you write. Others believe rules are the lifeblood of a screenplay. I fall somewhere in between. You definitely need to know the rules. Whether you choose to use them, however, is up to you. The thing is, most great scripts break at least a couple of rules. Why? Because if you follow ALL the rules then your story will be predictable, average, and boring. You need to take those chances in order to stand out. The problem is when these deviations get celebrated and writers erroneously believe that that’s proof rules aren’t important (“Quentin Tarantino writes 10 page dialogue scenes
The Social Network
Rule Broken: Page Count 162 pages
Why It Didn’t Matter: 162 pages! I get mad at people who write 122 pages. Who in the world gets to write 40 more pages than THAT and still get a pass? Why Aaron Sorkin of course! The man who could write a script in comic sans on discarded wallpaper and still get away with it. Well, before you think about reinstating that 30 page subplot about your hero’s blind Nazi mistress who’s just come down with a bout of scurvy, let’s take a look at the content of this behemoth. Go ahead and open up The Social Network right now. What I’m betting you’ll find is dialogue. Lots of dialogue. I’d go as far as to say that The Social Network is 95% dialogue. That’s important for two reasons. One, dialogue reads a LOT faster than action, making a 162 page script fly by like it’s 110 pages (Fincher actually shot the draft word for word and it ended up being under 2 hours). And two, dialogue is this particular writer’s biggest strength. If the reason your script is too long is because you have a lot of dialogue and you’re a dialogue master, then it’s not going to read like a script that’s too long. Now does this mean you get to write a 160 page script if it’s all dialogue? Hell no. Learn to be great with dialogue, put a few hit shows on the air famous for their dialogue, get a dialogue driven-script near the top of the Black List, THEN maybe you can write that 160 pager. But I’d still stick with the good old 110 page rule. That’ll force you to learn one of the most important skills in screenwriting, cutting out the pieces of the story that don’t matter.
Titanic
Rule Broken: The inciting incident doesn’t happen until 2 hours into the story.
Why It Didn’t Matter: The inciting incident is the incident that throws your hero into peril, that forces him or her to go on their journey. It usually happens around 15 minutes into the story (In Shrek, it’s when his swamp is invaded). Some might say that the inciting incident in Titanic is Jack meeting Rose. Some might say it’s Rose meeting Jack. And you can probably make a good case for either of those. But to me, what really incites this story is when the ship hits the iceberg. And that doesn’t happen until a full 2 hours into the movie. That means we’re stuck watching two people diddle around a ship and fall in love for two hours! Doesn’t that sound boring to you? And yet it works. You want to know why? Because Titanic has one of the most unique and powerful story advantages in the history of cinema – a built in super-dose of dramatic irony. Dramatic irony is when we the audience know something about the characters and their situation before they do, preferably something that puts them in danger. Remember in Die Hard when McClane gets stuck up on the roof with Hanz, who pretends to be a hostage but WE KNOW he’s the villain? That scene is exciting because of the dramatic irony. *We* know McClane is in trouble. But he doesn’t. Well Titanic has the mother of all dramatic ironies. We know that the Titanic is going to sink, and our poor characters don’t. So we watch for 2 hours with baited breath, wondering how they’re going to handle it, what they’re going to do when it happens, and specifically what will happen to Jack, since he’s unrepresented in the modern day storyline. Cameron could’ve added a whole extra hour in front of the iceberg collision if he wanted to because he had the single biggest case of dramatic irony on his side during the story. I don’t know if there can ever be another movie with this advantage. But I do know that a solid dose of dramatic irony will allow you to push key story points back if need be.
Lost In Translation
Rule Broken: No character goal
Why It Didn’t Matter: Lost In Translation is a story that wanders. Which makes sense because it’s about a girl stuck in a city where she doesn’t understand the language or know anyone. So the fact that she doesn’t have a goal stems organically from the situation. But make no mistake, if you’d had Scarlett Johanson, voluptuous as she is, wandering around Tokyo and riding trains for 2 straight hours, we would’ve killed ourselves by minute 40. If you don’t have a goal, you need to create a dramatic question that will drive the story. That question almost always comes in the form of a romantic interest. Bring in another character and now your dramatic question is posed: “Will these two end up together?” Or “What will happen between these two?” But Coppola takes it a step further. Had the person our protagonist met been some suave-ish good-looking 20-something who’s also stuck in Tokyo for a few weeks, that would’ve been a boring question. Because we’d already know the answer (“Yes, of course they’ll end up together”). Instead, she introduces an offbeat, older, weird guy who’s about as opposite from her as they come. Now that question has some real meat to it, some real uncertainty. I still recommend giving your characters a goal AND adding a dramatic question (in the recently discussed spec, “Seeking A Friend At the End Of The World,” about two people who meet a few days before the earth is to be struck by an asteroid, the couple is trying to reach a certain location (goal) and we’re wondering if they’re going to end up together (question)). But if you can’t add that goal, like Lost In Translation, you better add an interesting question to the mix or else there’s no reason for us to watch.
Apollo 13
Rule Broken: Audience already knows how the story ends.
Why It Didn’t Matter: I don’t’ know if I’d call this a broken rule per se, but it is something that a lot of famous real-life stories have to deal with, and Apollo 13 was one of the more famous ones so it’s worth exploring. How do you make a disaster movie work when everybody who sees it knows that your main characters get out alive? If dramatic irony is the audience being ahead of the characters in knowing something bad is going to happen to them, isn’t this the opposite? Which would then create the opposite effect? “Oh, well we know they’re going to be okay, so who cares?” Writers Broyles Jr. and Reinert, under Ron Howard’s direction, did two things to combat this problem. First, they made sure you loved these characters more than anything. That was key. Once we love the characters, we’re going to care about any threatening situation they’re in. And second, they always kept the focus on THE HERE AND NOW. Apollo 13 hits its characters with one obstacle after another, each one bigger and with larger implications than the last, sometimes compounding these obstacles on top of each other (they need to get the navigation data while coming up with a way to conserve air). Their journey is so battered with obstacles that all we’re focusing on is the RIGHT NOW. They’re so focused on surviving that so are we. If they didn’t have all these things to do up there. Had the obstacles been less challenging or not as many, there’s a good chance we would’ve seen through the charade and said, “Hey, don’t these guys all live? Who gives a shit?”
Rush Hour
Rule Broken: Derivative story execution
Why It Didn’t Matter: Being derivative is one of those mistakes that 99.999% of scripts can’t overcome. If we’ve seen it before, we will not want to see it again. Yet Rush Hour has one of the most derivative stories you can imagine and still works. This script is 48 Hours
Big
Rule Broken: No urgency (no ticking time bomb)
Why It Didn’t Matter: On its surface, Big is one of those scripts that seems like it follows the Hollywood formula to a tee. Well, yeah, concept-wise, it does. But the next time Big is on, fire up some popcorn and pay attention to the plot. What you’ll see is that there’s no urgency to the story at all. There *is* a time frame (I believe it’s six weeks until the wish-machine shows up again) but Hanks isn’t in a hurry to accomplish anything in the story. Contrast this with another high-concept comedy
Star Wars
Rule Broken: Main character isn’t introduced until 15 minutes into the story.
Why It Didn’t Matter: These days, if you’re not introducing your main character in the very first scene, then you sure as hell better be introducing him in the second one. Anything beyond that, and it’s no soup for you. The hero is the person the audience identifies with. We want to meet him as soon as possible. So then how does one of the greatest movies in history introduce its main character fifteen minutes into the story and get away with it? The answer is simpler than you think. It doesn’t matter that it takes so long for our hero to arrive because AN EXCITING STORY IS HAPPENING IN THE MEANTIME. Characters with immediate wants are tracking down characters with harmful plans. People are being killed to retrieve information. There’s mystery. Excitement. High stakes. Why would we be thinking about our main character when so much story awesomeness is going on? Had we started with Darth Vader chilling out on his throne back on Coruscant casually inquiring if his cronies had located the Death Star plans yet… Had we cut to R2 and C3PO casually landing on Tantooine, in no rush to find Obi-Wan… then yeah, we probably would’ve been like, dude, where the fuck is the main character?? But the intensity of the story, the immediacy of everyone’s actions, the mystery behind why it was all happening, kept us engaged to the point where we just weren’t thinking about it.
And there you go. Seven movies. Seven broken rules. Seven reasons why those movies still worked. Remember, no rule is carved in stone. Any rule can be broken. But if you’re going to break it, know why you’re breaking it and make sure it’s for a good reason. Otherwise, you’re flying by the seat of your pants. I’m still waiting for the first great script that isn’t built on a foundation of solid storytelling. I don’t think that script is coming any time soon so best to stick with what’s worked for thousands of years.
Genre: Family/Fantasy
Premise: 13 year old aspiring inventor Andrew Henry begins to suspect that the world he lives in is not what it seems.
About: Didn’t research this until after I wrote the review, but it appears that Andrew Henry’s Meadow is a well-known children’s book, which would make this an adaptation, not a spec script, as I had originally thought. Although I don’t know as much about Adam as I do Zach Braff, I’ve read in several of Zach’s interviews that Adam is interested in writing children’s books, which would make this adaptation a logical choice. Zach Braff starred in the NBC sitcom, Scrubs
Writers: Adam and Zach Braff (based on the 1965 children’s book by Doris Burn)
Details: 126 pages – 2004 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).
Well, for reasons I won’t get into here, today was supposed to be the review of my first “impressive” script (possibly even Top 25!) that I’d read in a long time. The script was “Seeking A Friend At The End Of The World,” which I’m guaranteeing will end up top 10 in this year’s Black List. But a series of events have prevented this from happening so instead I’m going to review Zach Braff and his brother’s script, Andrew Henry’s Meadow. However, if you’ve read “Seeking a Friend” and want to comment on it in the comments section, feel free to.
I didn’t know anything about Andrew Henry’s Meadow but the title made it sound like a more fantastical version of Garden State (Meadow? Garden?), so I was down. I’ll be the first to admit that Garden State’s script lacked some punch, but the movie was different and definitely captured the frustration and uncertainty that we often experience at different points in our lives. I was in that kind of mood so it sounded like a nice fit.
Well, as I would quickly realize, this wasn’t that script at all. Andrew Henry’s Meadow reads like a mix between Meet The Robinsons
13 year old Andrew Henry lives in a Truman Show
An aspiring inventor, Andrew finds a secret room in his house that contains an old book which states that, gasp, there are no mutants! That there’s nothing evil or scary outside of the city! So off he goes to test this theory, and finds that, indeed, all there are are big beautiful meadows as far as the eye can see. He begins to build the Michael Jackson mansion of all treehouses in this meadow, and soon other outcast kids, like himself, join him to help.
Naturally, he learns that Omnimega has made all this stuff up to scare people (hey, just like leaders in the real world do!) so he and his outcast friends must find a way to expose them before it’s too late (the Omnimega president is transmitting content through TV waves that keeps the populace in a zombie state). The plan is to break into the Omnimega TV tower, seize the production floor, and transmit the truth to everyone out there.
Okay, so, I’m sure you’ve already identified several things wrong with this script just by reading my summary. Most notably, it reads like an amalgam of two writers’ favorite movies. We have scenes straight out of the The Truman Show, The Village, The Goonies. Although I’m forgetting which one, the whole “TV static in people’s eyes” thing has been done in several super hero movies before. We have The Running Man
But the problems with Meadow began before that. This is a laborious read. Open this up to any page and you will find skyscraper sized paragraph chunks that go on forever and ever. Over-description is an easy way to spot a new screenwriter, as they approach their scripts more like a novelist (since that’s where the bulk of their fiction reading has come from). You don’t need to tell us every little place your character walks, every little thing they see, every little way they react, every little crevice in their apartment. Only tell us what’s necessary for the story to continue. If you can’t describe an action beat in 3 lines or less, you’re probably writing too much description.
The direction of this story is all wonky as well. I understand that this is called “Andrew Henry’s Meadow
There’s a really good script that made the 2009 Black List called “Toy’s House,” where a high school kid builds a house in the forest and starts living there with his friends. That made sense because THAT WAS THE STORY – his building of that house and how it changed his life. In Andrew Henry’s Meadow, going to build this house feels like an unnecessary detour. Had they eliminated it, the story still would’ve made sense, which usually means it’s unnecessary.
Everything here takes too long to get to. It seems like we spend years before the inciting incident happens (he finds the book). It takes way too long for him to then get out of the city. I guess the “have fun in the meadow” stuff is supposed to be the second act, but since the second act is, by definition, the conflict stage of your story, it’s weird that this whole section is happy happy joy joy with no conflict whatsoever. This is followed by the “comes out of nowhere” Omnimega uses TV to hypnotize people subplot. Had that been set up earlier, it might have had a chance of working. Here it just…comes out of nowhere. And then the last act is so much like The Running Man that all we can think is, “Man, this is exactly like The Running Man.”
Now, it’s not all doom and gloom. Clearly, Zach Braff’s experience as an actor has taught him the importance of character, and while I didn’t fall in love with any of the characters in Meadow, I acknowledge that all of them were unique and interesting. We’ve seen the young shunned inventor protagonist before, but Andrew Henry’s underdog starry-eyed determined persona was easy to root for. Whereas in yesterday’s TV pilot, 17th Precinct, we only got the Cliff’s Notes version of each character, here, with Andrew, his parents, the girl he liked, his nerdy best friends, there was enough detail where the story could’ve centered around any one of them. And that’s not easy to do.
But the attention to character detail was the only thing that really worked for me. One of the most important things a script must accomplish is telling a story in a way that an audience hasn’t quite seen before. In other words, surprise us. If we can guess what’s coming around the corner every step of the way, if every plot development feels like, “Hmm, I’ve already seen this in another movie,” then the reader’s going to lose interest. And that’s how I felt reading Meadow.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: In any script where you’re introducing a made-up world, there’s going to be more description than usual. However, there isn’t a more suicidal tactic in screenwriting than writing huge paragraphs. First of all, it depresses the reader. They know their reading time just went up by 50%. They hate sloshing through tons of extraneous detail to get to the important stuff. And sooner or later they just start skimming through those paragraphs anyway, causing them to miss key important details, which leads them to become confused later on. So only include the details in your description that are necessary to tell your story and NOTHING MORE. The reader will love you for it.
Genre: TV pilot – police procedural/fantasy
Premise: In a modern day San Francisco-like city where the laws of physics are superseded by hard magic, the deputy mayor’s right hand man is murdered, leaving some to suspect he is responsible.
About: Writer and show-runner Ronald D. Moore went to Cornell but failed out when he was a senior, and was only passively interested in writing while there. Afterwards, his interest in writing for TV grew, and he ended up writing for Star Trek: The Next Generation
Writer: Ronald D. Moore
Details: 65 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).
TV really is turning into the final frontier of experimentation. And if writers out there are taking more chances like this, I want to be there when they do. Because 17th Precinct is OUT THERE. I reviewed a script a couple of weeks ago called “Atlas” about a magical city that existed parallel to ours. Overall it felt like a soft treatment of the premise – wrapped in the safety of 8 dollar popcorn and stale boxes of milk duds. This is a way more interesting exploration of similar subject matter. In this world, Moore asks, what if our cities were fueled by magic? Not the Harry Potter kind. But “real life” practical magic. Sound interesting? It is.
17th Precinct begins with a dark figure murdering a man in an alley. The man cries out. But we hear nothing. I was a little disappointed in the writing of this scene only because it wasn’t made clear whether the lack of sound was a stylistic choice or we really couldn’t hear him. It was only later, once I understood the world, that I realized his screams had been muted out by some magical means. A small plant sprouting out of a crack nearby turned out to be the culprit, emitting a sound bubble around the immediate area. Clearly, it had been planted there earlier for that exact purpose.
Welcome to Excelsior.
The murder in question was that of Gilmore Pettigrew, which is a big deal, because Gilmore Pettigrew advises the Deputy Mayor on visions of the city’s future. No, I’m not talking about speculations. He can actually see the future. And that makes his murder all the more troubling. How can a man who sees the future not predict his own death?
We realize this is a different set of rules right away when inspectors Jeff and Caolan come in and begin investigating the crime scene. In this world, you can shift the blood around with the flick of a finger to see how it shot out of the body. You can also bring in necromancers to briefly bring the murdered victim back to life (in smoke-filled form) and get clues about what they saw before they were attacked.
What makes this murder so suspicious is that the Deputy Mayor lied about receiving Pettigrew’s yearly prophesy the night before. Coupled with a wild well-documented fight on the phone, the mayor definitely seems to be hiding something. The question is, is he lying to hide his hand in the murder? Or is he lying because that prophesy said something so horrible that it could never be uttered again in public?
What’s interesting about 17th Precinct is that you’ve never seen anything quite like it. In features, I always say, “Don’t fall in love with the details of your sci-fi world. Move the story along instead.” However, I don’t know if that applies to TV. Obviously, you have over a hundred episodes to delve into your characters’ storylines, so I guess it’s more acceptable to explore the details of your world. Here, for example, a lot of time is spent describing skyscrapers that are wrapped in some sort of living plant life. Or how the physical presence of someone might not be who they are on the inside (an old man could be a young woman). In the 17th Precinct, people keep cabinets full of spells the same way we keep cabinets full of food. I’ve never seen magic taken this seriously before. And that made getting into the details fun.
But make no mistake, that choice had residual effects. Whenever you spend too much time on one thing, you’re taking time away from something else, especially if you only have 48 minutes to tell your story. And the big weakness of 17th Precinct is that there wasn’t a single central character who popped off the page – who you remembered. The “rugged” Detective Chief Inspector, Wilder Blanks, looks the part. But at least in this draft, there’s nothing going on with him underneath the surface. No flaw. No fear. No inner conflict. And that, disappointingly, was the case with pretty much everyone. I’m writing this a week after I read the script, and I don’t remember any notable flaws that any of the characters were battling. Granted this is a pilot, but at least the hint of a flaw would be nice. I remember in that pilot for Lost
However, if I had to pick the most memorable character of the bunch, it would be Detective Mira Barkley. Why? Because she’s overweight and in her 60s. In all these procedural shows, I can’t remember a single one that featured a 60-something overweight woman in a detective role. It was refreshing and different and intriguing. I wanted to learn more about her. Having said that, even her character was lazy. One second the recently retired Mira is refusing to come back and be a detective again unless she gets the star treatment. The next she barely bats an eye after being paired with a rookie cop at the bottom of the barrel.
The most memorable characters from the pilot episode of 17th Precinct were, in fact, the single-episode characters, the characters being focused on in the investigation, which included the Deputy Mayor’s girlfriend and her son. And I admit to not knowing pilots that well but is this normal? I watch something like The Shield
Here’s the thing though. 17th Precinct still works. Because the star isn’t the characters. It’s the city. And luckily, that part is so fascinating and so different, it makes up for the lack of interesting characters, who you figure have plenty of time to grow in future episodes anyway. Still, I’m curious how the hell they’re going to pull this off. You’re going to have these huge buildings covered with plants, trees running through the middle of offices, people coming back to life in the form of smoke. If you’re not careful, it could end up looking like a Sonic The Hedgehog
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[xx] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: When writing about a visually exciting unique world, don’t let that world overshadow your characters. This is not to say you should tone down your world. Rather, bring the level of your characters up to the world you’ve put them in. Memorable characters would’ve easily put this into impressive territory.
Happy they finally got to Osama. But man is this burying him out in the sea less than 24 hours later going to feed the hell out of conspiracy theorists for the next 50 years.
Genre: Comedy
Premise: A Bob Ross-esque PBS painting show host must fight for his career when his station brings in a rival painting host.
About: “Paint” landed on the bottom half of the 2010 Black List. Brit McAdams, the writer, directed the Daniel Tosh web series, Tosh.0. He’s worked on some other internet related content, but this appears to be his first feature script (or at least the first one that got noticed).
Writer: Brit McAdams
Details: 112 pages, Sept. 09 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).
20 pages into Paint, I wondered if it wouldn’t have been a better idea to watch paint dry. Was this Franklin Leonard’s idea of a joke? A Black List entry meant to test just how much influence he had in Hollywood? “Hey guys, look! I can make anything a hot property!”
The problem with Paint was that it was just so…weird. I assumed it was a comedy going in. But the humor was so dry I needed a humidifier to make it to the second act. It wasn’t until the halfway point that I began to warm up to McAdams’ unique sense of humor. If I was forced into summarizing the tone, I’d say it was like an adult Napoleon Dynamite
I’d never seen Bob Ross (the real life guy who “Paint” was based on) before, but I looked him up on the internet and the first video Youtube returned was a 2 minute clip from his show that had over a million hits. A million hits? I pressed play, half-expecting his hair to catch on fire. Not the case. It was just him. Painting. A mountain. And talking about it.
What the hell??
Carl Nargle plays the fictional version of this man. He’s in his mid-40s, has a large unseemly afro, speaks in a whisper, and never paints without a pipe. Every day he does a show where he paints a mountain. And bushes. And animals. But never animals in front of bushes. He always paints animals behind bushes. That way the viewer has to work to imagine the animal, forcing them to become a part of the painting.
Carl Nargle also loves the ladies. Well, he loves to make love to the ladies. And he has bedded four generations of women here at the station, including 55 year old former secretary Wendy, 45 year old former secretary Beverly, 35 year old current secretary, Katherine, and most recently his 25 year old assistant Jenna.
What’s unique about this situation is that all the women still carry a torch for him. This was a big reason why it took me so long to “get” this script. I didn’t understand a) why all these women still loved a man who dumped them once they got too old, and b) why they’d talk openly about how much they still loved him. I mean here you have his current girlfriend, Jenna, getting advice from the other girls on what to expect when her and Carl have sex for the first time, as well as hearing how much they still wanted him. Yeah, cause women love to hear how much their boyfriend’s exes are desperately trying to get him back.
But this God-like domination he has over his staff is about to be swashbuckled. That’s because a new painter who’s even more soft-spoken than Carl is hired to do a second painting show for the network. Stephan is 20 years younger, handsome (relatively speaking), but most threateningly, does not just paint mountains. He paints people, underwater villages, even animals IN FRONT OF BUSHES! Blasphemy!
Carl writes Stephan off as an MTV flash in the pan (Carl’s old enough to believe that MTV is still “in”). But when Stephan starts getting higher ratings in the younger 12-24 demographic (“higher” meaning a .2), Carl’s show all of a sudden doesn’t look so important. In fact, whereas before all the crew would take their lunch breaks to watch Carl’s show, they now take their breaks to watch Stephan’s!
Their brewing rivalry reaches a head during the PBS fund drive, where 2 lucky bidders win a chance to have their portraits painted live by Carl and Stephan. Carl gets the higher bid, which secures his spot as PBS’s top painter, but falters under the pressure, painting a mountain instead of the woman’s portrait. He’s let go soon after, and his life spirals out of control.
I remember seeing Wes Anderson’s Rushmore
What saved it for me was the second half. Once Carl fell from grace, the humor really kicked in. He’s forced into a teaching job where everyone thinks he’s a hack, becomes a greeter at the state welcome center, and is finally forced to take a snow-plowing job. We delight in his misery because, quite frankly, he was a pompous asshole who used his “fame” to take advantage of people.
From a structural standpoint, Paint is interesting in that there’s no character goal driving the story. We talked about how important this was during Comedy Week (it was present in every script), so then why didn’t it matter that it wasn’t used here? Well, it did matter. A big reason why the first half wanders so much is that we don’t know where the story is going because there’s no goal.
However, an alternative that works in comedies (and thrillers for that matter) is throwing your character into a conflict-heavy situation and watching their world unravel. So in The Hand That Rocks The Cradle
Still, I only recommend this route if you know what you’re doing because it practically requires going with a passive protagonist (obviously if your protagonist doesn’t have a goal, he’s passive), and we all know how difficult it is to make a passive hero work over the course of an entire movie.
The only other big issue I had was the opening. It just took too long to get things going. We get like 80 scenes telling us that all the girls love him when we could’ve had a single scene with him painting and all the girls with hearts in their eyes. We would’ve “gotten it” and been able to move to Stephan’s arrival, which is where the story really starts to pop. But I have to say, for a script that was 10 runs down in the fifth inning, it was nice to see a comeback. I’m not sure it won the game, but at least it made it entertaining.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[x] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Oftentimes I read a script that takes forever for the story to begin, only to check the page count and realize that everything is happening exactly where it’s supposed to. So here, Stephan shows up on page 23. That’s about where the first act break should be. Which is weird, cause it felt like he showed up on page 50. Here’s why that happens. There’s a difference between how long a script ACTUALLY is and how long it FEELS like it is. Everyone who reads this blog knows what I’m talking about. You’re trudging through a script, bored out of your mind, check the page count, expecting to be on page 70, and realize you’re only on page 30! Ahhhh! This is usually due to the fact that the script is repeating itself, is dragging out unnecessary plot threads, or in the case of Paint, setting up characters instead of pushing the story along. The first act of Paint is a series of scenes setting up Carl as a painter and the 5000 girls who like him. Contrast that with a comedy we just reviewed, There’s Something About Mary
Genre: Drama
Premise: After the wife of a missionary is killed, we jump back and explore the couple’s life together.
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.
Writer: Karl D Larsson (“Karlosd” in the comments section).
Details: 113 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 always get a little worried when I can’t come up with a logline for a script I just read. This is by no means a death sentence. Films like American Beauty
Blood and Fire starts out strongly. We meet a family living in an unfamiliar country having breakfast. They’re slightly dysfunctional but no more so than the average family. The key players are the father, Shane, a 40 year old Salvation Army officer, Kara, his beautiful wife, and Chloe, his 17 year old goth-ish daughter. After they finish eating, Kara goes out for her morning jog, only to be shot and killed by the local thug tandem of Carnel and Faron.
Jump back to Afghanistan in 2002 where we discover how Shane and Kara met. He was a soldier and she was a nurse. After getting injured and brought in to her hospital, the two begin to bond, and Kara, who’s actively religious, introduces Shane to the power of faith, going so far as to bring him to a local Afghanistan church service, a dangerous endeavor in a country currently at war with his people.
The story then jumps back 3 days earlier to highlight an event that (I believe) got Shane sent to the hospital in the first place. He and another soldier were on patrol in the city and his dim-witted partner caused a panic that got some poor pedestrian trampled, causing all sorts of mayhem that resulted in the two barely getting out alive.
We then jump forward in time to Los Angeles, years later, where we learn that Shane has become a preacher, is now married to Kara, and has a couple of children. Shane is actively involved in helping the community, but also worried that his teenage daughter, Chloe, is heading down the wrong path by dating suspect guys. Eventually, the Salvation Army decides to make Shane a missionary, and he takes his family to Belize, which is, of course, where our story began.
It’s here that we meet the local crime lord Carnel, and his cronie, Faron. Carnel likes his community nice and dirty, as it’s easier to operate as a criminal that way, and therefore doesn’t like Shane and his family barging in, trying to clean things up. Things only get worse for Shane when his daughter Chloe starts dating Faron. But Faron is like a meek little bunny compared to Carnel, who’s constantly warning Shane to go back to America. When Shane ignores him, Carnel finally takes matters into his own hands, and kills Kara.
This is a tough one. With no hook, no discernable character goals and no real story structure, there isn’t a whole lot to grab onto with Blood and Fire, especially because we spend a lot of the story randomly bouncing around in time. In any story, you’d like for the reader to have an idea of where things are going by the end of the first act. I never pinpointed that direction, and thus had a hard time staying interested.
Part of the problem here is the lack of clarity in why we’re jumping around so much. Take the jump backwards to the Kabul incident for example. We watch as mayhem occurs and a girl is trampled. This is probably one of the more active moments in the script. But ultimately, it doesn’t have anything to do with the story. The person responsible for the pedestrian’s death isn’t even our main character. It’s another character altogether, one who we never see again. Which leads me to wonder, why include the scene at all? If it was our main character, Shane, that would have huge implications on the story and his character. But since it isn’t, it’s just a scene where something bad happens to someone we don’t know by someone else we don’t know.
The inclusion of the Los Angeles storyline also stumped me. To me, backstory is backstory for a reason. It’s not important enough or exciting enough to document in the main story. And I felt that a lot of this script, in particular the Los Angeles section, was background story on our main characters. I say that because there were very few things in the Los Angeles thread that influenced the central question of the story, which is, why did Carnel shoot Kara? Instead, it’s just a bunch of scenes showing a married couple trying to live together while raising a family. If there was a more immediate problem in Los Angeles, more interesting story threads, higher stakes, more conflict between the characters (there’s conflict between Shane and Chloe, but it’s too subtle to spend 40 pages on), these scenes could have been justified. But for me, at least, it all felt like backstory.
It’s only natural, then, that I feel that the bulk of this story needs to take place in Belize. The last 30 pages of this script are its best, and there’s a reason for that. That’s where all the conflict and drama is. We could feel the tension growing between Carnel and Shane’s family, Carnel and Shane’s work, which is why we’re so invested in this part of the story. You always want to ask yourself, “Why am I including this section? Is it worth including? Is there enough conflict here? Enough tension? Enough story? Enough shit going on? Does it pay off?” I would argue that the whole Los Angeles middle act does not. It just tells us about the characters. Belize is where all the drama is. All the conflict, stakes, and story progression. Let’s keep as much as the story there as possible.
This is where I’m going to put my producer hat on and pretend like this is a project in my vault. How can I move this out of passion project territory and into “worth the 20 million dollar investment I’m going to make” territory? How bout this? Instead of following Kara off on her jog, don’t show her beyond when she leaves the house. 30 minutes later, Shane gets a call. He goes out to find out his wife has been killed. But in this version, we don’t know who it was. We know they have people in custody (maybe even Carnel), but they’re denying they were involved.
Now we have a mystery. So when we jump back to 2 weeks ago, here on the island, we as an audience are more actively engaged in the story, cause we’re trying to figure out, which one of these characters killed Kara? This is exactly what they did in American Beauty. Had they spun that story so that you knew who killed Lester at the beginning of the movie, I’m not saying the film would’ve stunk, but it certainly would’ve been less interesting. A lot of what drove our interest in that film was, “How does Lester die?”
As for the stuff in Afghanistan and Los Angeles, I don’t think you need it. It really is backstory and most of what’s shown is monotonous. I understand you want to build up how the two fell in love to make Kara’s death more impactful, but by giving the couple a key unresolved issue here on Belize, you can delve into a lot of the same themes and issues, yet still keep the story moving along (and not stopping for 50 pages to learn how the two met and spent their day-to-day lives). And if you absolutely must jump back to when they first met, just show a couple of those scenes and keep them sparse. And make sure they reveal something new and interesting about their relationship that we didn’t know before. If they’re just average scenes about two people getting to know each other, that’s not worth stopping the story and going back in time to see. We’re imagining something similar to that anyway so to show it to us is just redundant. Instead, use those early meeting scenes to surprise us. Not that you’re writing Lost
This sounds very much like the “passion project” problem I was describing yesterday. I can feel you exploring some really deep and meaningful themes and issues in the writing of this story. I can tell that it’s moving you. But now take a step back and put yourself in the reader’s shoes. We have a slow-moving, structurally confusing concept-less meditation on faith and family. That’s not an easy sell, nor is it an easy story to invest in in screenplay form (I could see this working more as a novel where you could get into these characters’ heads). So the trick is trying to find a stronger way into the story (a better concept/hook) which allows you to do the same things you’re doing here, yet make it more market-friendly. Maybe you cross-cut an investigation into Kara’s murder with the two weeks leading up to her murder. Or maybe something else entirely. But I do think there needs to be a more active story here, and not just a look back at a couple’s relatively predictable life.
I will say that the writing itself is strong, succinct, and professional though. While I didn’t respond to the story as strongly as I would’ve wished, I felt like you were telling the exact story you wanted to tell. You just need to bring the structural aspects and the conceptual aspects to the same level as your writing skills. Good luck. :)
Script link: Blood and Fire
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: You are no longer a struggling writer barely able to pay his rent. You are now a low to mid level producer who’s desperately trying to keep his job at a studio. These are the eyes you should be looking at your screenplay through. You’re a producer who needs to make money to live. To pay the rent. To support your family. To put your two daughters through college. — Now does that mean you have to write a zombie flick to impress this person? No. But it does mean you need to find a marketable hook to the story you’re telling. Black Swan
