I was going to try to get out to A Wrinkle In Time this weekend until I found out it wasn’t playing at the Arclight Hollywood! It was the first indication that something was up. Arclight ALWAYS has the best movies. For them to say, “No thanks,” told you what they thought of the film’s financial prospects. Then I saw the RT score, remembered that abysmal trailer… and all of a sudden getting in my car and driving to that nightmare parking structure at the Grove sounded like the worst thing I could do with my day. It turns out I made the right choice. The film bombed.

While we’re on the topic, I don’t get the protective bubble being placed around Ava DuVernay. Why is everyone so scared to say her movie was bad? I’m reading these reviews, many of which have negative scores, yet 95% of the review is qualified by how much the reviewer loves DuVernay and loved “certain aspects” of the movie. I bet every director in Hollywood is wondering where that positivity is when their films are being reviewed.

I think three things pushed people away from this film. The first is DuVernay herself. There’s a self-importance to her presence that’s off-putting. The second is that Wrinkle promoted itself too aggressively as a “diverse female empowerment” film and, in doing so, pushed half of America away. I was not surprised to hear that the demo split for this film was an unheard of 70% female, 30% male. Finally, the film looked bad. Plain and simple. When a film looks bad, people don’t show up.

I hope Hollywood learns a lesson here. People don’t go to the movies to support messages. They go to be entertained. It seems like Wrinkle failed at that basic level.

Documentary watch! A couple of documentaries I need to comment on. One that I hated, the other that I lurrrved. The first is called Icarus. It’s the Netflix documentary about doping that won Best Doc at the Oscars. I am here to tell you that THIS IS ONE OF THE WORST FILMS I’VE EVER SEEN!!! Do NOT. EVER. SEE THIS FILM. Everything about it is scammy and weird and suspicious and manipulative.

I’m going to let you in on a secret. Always be wary of out-of-work actors making documentaries about themselves. They have zero interest in pursuing anything resembling the truth (which is the whole point of making a documentary). All they care about is promoting themselves. And you could see that right from the start with Icarus. There isn’t an honest bone in the main subject’s body. From the second the cameras are on, this guy’s looking for his close-up.

For those who don’t know anything about the doc, it’s about an American cyclist who wants to see if steroids will help him win a bike race so he hires a Russian doping specialist who lives in Russia to help him. That sounds kind of interesting until you learn that the race he’s entering isn’t the Tour De France. It isn’t even the Tour De French Toast. It’s some low-level non-professional event where it doesn’t matter if you dope or not! You could literally show up and say, “I’m on steroids” and nobody cares. And why exactly am I rooting for a cheater again?

Anyway, he meets this Russian doper who they then try and turn into a sympathetic figure. But this guy is so creepy and weird, your skin crawls every time he’s on screen. To provide some context, our star (aka “the out of work actor”) has to keep sending urine samples to the Russian to get them cleaned so they don’t test positive. On multiple occasions, it’s implied that the Russian guy has a sexual fetish with the urine. Oh, okay. Yeah. That’s what I want to see. A weird 55 year old Russian man swirling urine in a tube and staring at it sexually. Sign me up, brother.

You’re probably wondering how in the world this won an Oscar then. The answer is surprisingly simple. Nobody in the Academy watches the documentaries they vote for. They saw “Russia” in the description. They saw, “scandal,” in the description. And they voted for it based on that. I would not be surprised if not a single person who voted for this movie knew it was about cycling. Consensus: Steer clear of this movie!

Now on to a documentary that you MUST see as soon as possible. Yes it came out a couple of years ago. But it ran into so many legal snafus, it became impossible to find. Just to give you a teaser of how crazy the production of this film got, here’s what happened during a Sundance screening when a representative for the film’s subject encountered the co-director in the lobby beforehand.

The film is called Tickled. It’s about a gay New Zealand journalist who finds out, through the glories of the internet, that there’s a competitive tickling league. As in, people tie each other down and tickle each other. They have to endure as much tickling as possible to “win.” The “sport” is so bizarre that the journalist can’t help but dig deeper. And what he finds is that, strangely, this league of ticklers only includes young fit good-looking men between the ages of 16-22.

So he e-mails the league’s president, a woman, and says he’s interested in doing a story about the league. The woman instantly e-mails back and berates the journalist for being “gay” and a “faggot,” telling him that if he does a piece on the league, he’ll regret it. Keep in mind he never told this woman he was gay. So how did she find out?

The president then continues to e-mail the journalist every day with similar e-mails. This only piques the journalist’s interest more. Why was this woman so cruel in regards to his homosexuality when the sport she was funding was so… well… gay?

And thus began a deep dive into the history of this league and its mysterious president that has a shocking revelation every 10 minutes. The deeper they dig, the crazier this insane president gets, to the point where we’re certain these filmmakers are going to be spending the rest of their lives crawling out of a mountain of legal debt.

There are a couple of reasons why Tickled succeeds while Icarus fails. The first is something I always tell you guys to look out for – IRONY! Who would think that a documentary about tickling would tackle bullying, aggression, homophobia, legal threats and anger? Irony can sell a concept like nothing else. The second is that, unlike the fraud at the center of Icarus, the Tickled journalist is interested in getting to the truth. He wants to expose a man who’s used his lies and money to destroy dozens of young men over the years. You won’t believe where this one goes, guys. I’m telling you.

A few other quick reviews. I finally saw Jumanji, which I loved. I may do an article on it because they successfully went back to the 1996 screenwriting playbook to write this one and I’m curious if that winning formula was specific to this movie or if more screenwriters need to start using old school screenwriting tactics to write great scripts. I would argue this is perfect high-concept non-superhero blockbuster execution. It got EVERYTHING right.

I also saw Ladybird. This was either the best average movie I saw all year, the most average decent movie I saw all year, or the worst great movie I saw all year. What’s interesting about Ladybird is that, 10 years ago, this is a random coming-of-age indie that makes 10 bucks at the box office. In 2017, it’s a defining piece of inclusive art. There’s something to be said for timing, folks. Oh, and I saw this great little Icelandic movie on Netflix called, “The Oath.” It’s about a man whose drug-addicted daughter falls in love with a dealer. He does everything possible to get her out of his clutches but she’s so far gone that no matter what he does, she won’t leave the dealer. It’s so frustrating to watch but the movie takes some unexpected twists and turns that only a non-American movie could pull off. I really liked it.

Finally, what are these rumors about a disastrous Deadpool 2 screening?? How is this not bigger news? They’ve been forced to do reshoots with less than a month until release! What the fuhhhh???? I’ve been worried about Deadpool 2 for a couple of reasons. The first is Tim Miller leaving the project. It’s never good when a key collaborator leaves a project. Deadpool may be Ryan Reynolds’ baby. But it was Tim Miller’s movie. He’s the one who came up with that fx reel that brought that project out of development hell. On top of that, it’s hard to pull off the “breaking the fourth wall” thing two movies in a row. It’s always cute the first time around. But by definition, gimmicks don’t have staying power. I’m guessing the asides to the audience are inducing eye-rolls this time around (“Haven’t we already seen this?”). With that said, I’d be first in line to see Deadpool team up with the Avengers. That’d be so rad.

Genre: Sci-fi/Comedy
Premise: (from Black List) In the 1950s, a manufacturing company stirs up controversy when they publish a user’s manual to a time machine called the Gadabout TM-1050.
About: Today’s script finished number 37 on last year’s Black List with 9 votes. The idea came through Safe House (“Edge of Tomorrow”) and Sony, and newbie Ross Evans was brought in to write it.
Writer: Ross Evans
Details: 121 pages

Jack Black for Wilbur?

Most of the Black List scripts these days are World War 2 stories, book adaptations, whatever the current trend is (Jane Wick this year), and biopics, biopics, and more biopics. Man are there are lot of biopics. So it was a nice change of pace to see amongst all that sameness, a classic Spielbergian story aimed squarely at the family crowd. We don’t usually get that in Blacklistville.

Don’t worry, this isn’t another 80s nostalgia bomb with four precocious 12 year-olds making vaguely inappropriate jokes about boobs n stuff. I think that trend’s about to die. Instead, Gadabout is more inspired by Back to the Future. And it does so better than most of the scripts that are inspired by Back to the Future in that it isn’t a beat-for-beat remake of Back to the Future. That’s the good news. But have the 80s Gods blessed it with a totally tubular story? That’s yet to be determined.

After his grandmother, Gennie, dies, a distraught 10 year-old Henry asks his mom if he can stay with Grandpa Wilbur for the night to help him deal with the pain. Grandpa Wilbur’s a bit of a weirdo and says that Henry can do anything he wants while he’s here, except go into his shed. That’s his sacred place.

Being a 10 year-old boy, that’s the first place Henry goes, and it’s there where he finds a manual for the Gadabout TM-1050 time machine, written by… his grandpa! No sooner has he found it than Wilbur appears, upset that Henry broke his one rule. But after Henry puts on the charm, Wilbur decides to tell him the story of the Gadabout.

Flash back to 1958, when Wilbur was a young inventor, trying to make his way. Wilbur was a classic scatterbrain inventor – good at inventing, terrible at explaining. So when he pitches his giant box called “The Go-Backer” to the bank in hopes of securing funding, they laugh him out of the room.

Once home, a young Gennie tells Wilbur she can’t wait for him to follow his dreams anymore and walks out on him. Only minutes later, Don, a sketchy vacuum salesman, arrives at the door and notices the time machine. Curious, he wants to know how it works. After Wilbur proves to him it’s the real deal, Don tells him that all it needs is a new name, a shiny makeover and they’ll make millions.

True to his word, it isn’t long before everyone in town owns a Gadabout. But there are limitations. Due to power restrictions, you can only go back 30 minutes in time. And traveling to the future requires more power than anyone can produce. So you can forget about that. Still, that’s enough for people to do stuff like re-run their dates if they go bad, or pick up an extra 30 minutes around the house if they’re running late.

It’s when Don wants to go national that things become a problem, particularly because the machine is faulty. For example, a local Gadabout addict has over 20 versions of herself living in her house. All of this leads us to the ultimate question, and the one Henry himself wants to know: If all of this really happened, how come nobody’s ever heard about it?

I’ll never forget a note I received on one of my first screenplays. “It’s all rather… easy.” I must’ve sat on that note for a month. Easy? Easy?? I’ll show you “easy” you ignorant mother&*%$#. It took time. And Bob’s Corner Liquor Store. But I eventually figured out what he meant. There wasn’t a whole lot of conflict in my screenplay. There weren’t any obstacles. If the script were a rollercoaster, it was one that went in a straight line with a few mildly high rises and a few mildly low dips.

For the majority of its running time, that’s how Gadabout felt to me. It was all very pleasant and sweet and nice. But it was one hell of a straight roller-coaster ride. Nothing went too well and nothing went too bad. Eventually, things do get out of hand and the blood starts pumping. But that isn’t until page 80. And that’s a really long time to wait for the good stuff.

Cause that’s all storytelling is when you think about it. It’s the storyteller manipulating the emotions of the story reader. And it’s not a bad kind of manipulation. The reader WANTS to be manipulated. They want those high highs and low lows. I mean look at a film this script was clearly inspired by, The Princess Bride. That movie probably has more highs and lows then any family film ever. Within the first 15 minutes, our princes is kidnapped by three bad men. The emotional manipulation starts immediately.

And that was my frustration here. I never felt anything throughout the first 80 pages of the script.

Part of the problem is that it wasn’t clear what was at stake. The only question that’s being asked is, if all this time machine stuff happened, how come there’s no record of it? And while that’s a fun mystery, it’s not enough to carry an entire movie.

Since the love of Wilbur’s life, Gennie, dies at the beginning of the story, why not build a high-stakes storyline around that? Maybe he never got to tell her something. And if he still had a Gadabout, he’d have the chance to go back and have one last conversation with her. But the Gadabout doesn’t work anymore. It’s permanently damaged. And so the flashback storyline is setting up a present-day storyline that actually matters, because maybe Wilbur realizes how to make the fix that gives him one more time-travel.

I admit that’s clumsy because I’m thinking it up on the spot. But this script needed something LIKE that. Where something BIG matters. Because there wasn’t once here where I said, “Ooh, I HAVE to find out what happens with that.” And with every screenplay, you want to have four or five of those things.

None of this is to say the script is bad. It’s fine. The last act is actually balls-to-the-wall crazy, as we start jumping all the hell over time. The question is, will people be able to muscle through a day-long walk in the park to race the Indy 500? I guess that depends on how much you like walking in the park.

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

What I learned: When it comes to time travel scripts, you need restrictions so every time your hero fails at something, the audience doesn’t say, “He’s got a time machine. Why can’t he go back and try again?” One of the best ways to combat this plot hole, and it’s something we see in Gadabout, is POWER RESTRICTIONS. You can always say that the time machine takes up so much power that it has limitations in how much it can be used and for how long. It’s logical and it saves you from having to deal with a bunch of “But why didn’t they just…” questions.

What I learned 2: If you’re going to write a time travel movie, I recommend doing a time-travel comedy. Time-travel is a complicated concept that, the more you use it, the more plot holes it creates. When you write a comedy, people are more forgiving of these holes as they don’t need everything to make perfect sense.

Genre: True Story
Premise: (from Black List) Google’s Larry Page, Sergey Brin, and Eric Schmidt struggle with their corporate motto, “Don’t Be Evil,” in the face of their meteoric rise to a multi-billion dollar valuation and a major Chinese hacking incident.
About: This script finished with 10 votes on last year’s Black List, putting it in the top 25. It’s based on a couple of books, the more popular being “In the Plex,” about Google. The three writers who adapted this are all newbies. Two of them, Diani and Devine, have mostly focused on acting.
Writers(!): Gabriel Diani & Etta Devine & Evan Bates, based on “In The Plex” by Steven Levy & “I’m Feeling Lucky” by Douglas Edwards
Details: 122 pages (June 2017 draft)

Mark my words. If this gets made, Gyllenhaal will be playing Page.

The Big Short and The Social Network ushered in a new quasi-genre I like to call the Tricked Out Geek True Story. They take what should be nerdy subject matter and INFUSE it with a hip style, cool characters, and loads of energy. The reason the genre’s worked so far is that it orders up a powerful item on the screenwriting “secret menu,” that being irony. They present a GEEKY story in a COOL way. If you present a geeky story in a geeky way, that’s kind of on-the-nose, isn’t it?

“Don’t Be Evil” is Google’s introduction into this genre and boy does it want you to love it. This script is so intent on winning you over that it will do whatever it takes. Ongoing hip voice over narration. You got it. Staring into the camera and breaking the fourth wall. You better believe it. Recklessly cutting between six different time periods. You bet your ass we’re not stopping at five. Characters constantly referencing screenwriting terminology. Oh, hell yes. We got that too. How does this overcranked CPU stack up? Let’s find out.

It’s 2009 and Google’s just been hacked by the Chinese. At least that’s what Larry Page, the co-founder of Google, believes. Larry is our eyes and ears in this story, our “Ferris Bueller” if you will. That’s a good way to think of him because… well because the script tells us to think of him that way.

The story uses the Chinese hack as a starting point into how Google was born. We jump all the way back to Larry’s childhood, when he read a biography on Nikola Tesla, the famed inventor. The moral of Tesla’s biography was – you can’t just be a good inventor. You have to be good at business too.

Larry’s right hand man is Sergey, a programmer who grew up in communist Russia and therefore hates other communist countries, like China. He’s joined by Google’s head of security, Heather Adkins, and Google’s CEO, Eric Schmidt, a man who was forced upon Larry by his investors since Larry didn’t know jack about running a business.

Amidst this Chinese hack, the team desperately tries to hold onto its company motto: Don’t Be Evil. After jumping back through a million time periods, we learn that this motto came about due to Larry’s belief that all corporations put their profits in front of their customers and he wanted Google to be the first company that didn’t do that.

The Chinese hack is the first time Google is faced with a decision that threatens their fabled motto. The quandary goes like this. The group feels they have a moral obligation to let their users know that their data has been compromised by China. However, if they do this, it would expose the Chinese, who would likely then kick Google out of their country. Since China represents billions of dollars in potential profits, this is an extremely hard decision.

As we get closer to the decision, we continue to take more diversions into the past, where the characters self-referentially remind us that they know they’re relying heavily on backstory and flashbacks, but that it will all make sense in the end. That end comes with Larry making the final call on the hack, which will inform the path that Google takes from this point forward.

Something we haven’t talked about in awhile is level of difficulty. If your routine incorporates six triple-axels and this is the first time you’ve ever skated, you’re probably not going to execute your routine. Don’t Be Evil was like three skaters trying to win the Olympics their first time out. Not even a brand new Zamboni could clean up the aftermath.

My newbie antennae goes up whenever I see FLASH. If a script is dominated by flashiness – talking to the camera, lots of self-referencing, tons of flashbacks, etc. – it’s usually an indication of a new writer. Here’s an example of what I’m talking about. After an NSA agent is introduced, we get: “She’s completely fictional because there’s no way anyone is giving the screenwriters any information about Google’s very real relationship with the NSA.” Seasoned writers have failed enough times to know that flash is fool’s gold and that substance – deep characters, a well-designed plot, conflict-filled scenes, etc. – is your best bet at writing a good script.

What complicates this analysis is that the theme of this story is actually pretty strong, this question of is it possible for a corporation not to be evil? So it masks, at times, the attention deficit disorder writing that surrounds it. But, in the end, the script can’t escape this obsessive need to make you love it. It wants to be The Big Short. But it’s like The Big Short written by Max Landis, if that makes sense.

For example, the creation of deep characters. Outside of that first Larry Page flashback scene where he reads Tesla’s biography, I can’t remember a single scene where we actually get to know someone. And that’s because the script was so intent on never staying anywhere for any amount of time. It was like BAM, time to jump to the next flashback!! Contrast this with The Social Network, which gave you 8 entire minutes with our main character in the film’s very first scene (the breakup scene). We learned so much about Mark Zuckerberg in that scene.

Not to mention, reading a book is a lazy way to introduce a character. If you want to introduce a character in a way where we get to know them, do it through action. Preferably, give them a tough choice. We learn so much about characters when they’re faced with a choice. If you try and jump the line and never write the 4-5 scripts that teach you this, you’ll never know how to properly introduce a character, which is one of the most influential moments in a screenplay.

And I couldn’t for the life of me understand why the writers kept referencing screenwriting! Here’s a real exchange between characters in the story: “I found something important.” “I thought you were in New Zealand?” “I came over during that flashback.” It was bizarre. This story had nothing to do with screenwriting. It’s about Google and hacking. Maybe had they referenced movie cliches, that would’ve made more sense. But for some reason screenwriting became this huge theme in the script.

Now does all of this mean you should never use too-cool-for-school writing techniques? No. The Big Short obviously proved that it’s possible. But The Big Short was written by one writer, Charles Randolph, whose credits dated back over a decade, and another, Adam McKay, who had over 30 credits. These guys know how to navigate the potholes that come with this kind of writing style.

Figure out how to write simple stories first. Introduce a big problem, which results in a strong goal, for a compelling main character, with some urgency and high stakes. There wasn’t a single compelling character in this movie. The problem the characters are dealing with is arguably compelling. But we know nothing about anyone so it doesn’t matter. And that’s the kind of thing writing a simple story forces you to learn – how to construct a compelling character.

Reading my review back, it sounds harsher than I meant it to. This is the kind of thing everybody who jumps into a new medium does. They go for big and flashy because big and flashy gets noticed. And with this making the Black List, you can say that it worked. But if you want to work in this business a long time, you gotta learn the basics. And no basics were on display here.

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

What I learned: If you jump around in time too frequently, the reader never gets pulled in. I’d say this script jumped to a different time period, on average, once every 5 pages. I couldn’t get invested in the story because the story never slowed down enough for me to understand what I was investing in.

Who won a wild weekend? Was it Altered Carbon, Solo, Cloverfield, Avengers, Jurassic World, an unknown Swedish movie? The Super Bowl itself? Mish-Mash Monday has the answer and so much more!

I have a request to anyone who wants to join the “rip off Blade Runner universe” movement.

Stop.

Please.

Just stop.

It’s done. It’s over. It’s 30 years ago. The aesthetic is tired. From the overpriced sequel to Ghost in the Shell to Altered Carbon to Mute. Stop.

First of all, it’s proven that the audience for this stuff is niche. I’ve seen more Bronies than Bladers. But more importantly, writers need to come up with their own shit! Duncan Jones’s Mute script (the next in line of the Blade Runner ripoffs) is terrible. It’s beyond awful. It makes no sense. There’s no story. It only exists so that Jones can play in his ripped-off version of the Blade Runner universe. Stop people. It’s over. Time to come up with something other than floating cars and giant TV ads on the sides of buildings with Japanese women. It’s over.

I’m so glad I got that out of my system.

Speaking of originality, I saw a movie this weekend I’m still trying to process. It’s called “The Square.” I sat down expecting, as I usually do when I’m about to watch a movie, something that made sense. But The Square had no intention of adhering to logic. I’ve never seen a movie like this. David Lynch’d walk out of this one scratching his head. It seemed to be written via a series of individualized sequences linked together by nothing other than they involved the same characters.

The movie, which takes place in the art world, starts out with a great scene. A man is leaving the subway with dozens of other people, and all of a sudden this woman comes running towards him, screaming. “Help! Help! He’s after me! Hellllp!” The man, a curator at a museum, is thrown into the role of protector. The fleeing woman leaps behind him while another man joins him as the crazed man approaches. They prepare for battle. The chaser barrels up, grabs our hero, then says, “Eh, never mind,” then walks away.

What’s so cool about this scene is the way it’s shot. We never cut away from the curator. We hear the crazed guy coming, but we can’t see him. We only see our guy preparing, the woman grabbing him from behind, screaming for help. In a Hollywood movie, we’d be cutting through 20 different angles as he got closer and closer. But staying with the man made the scene so much more harrowing.

The woman thanks him afterwards. Our hero high-fives the other guy who helped, then everyone goes their separate ways. A minute later, hopped up on adrenaline, our hero reaches into his pocket, only to realize that his wallet and phone are gone. He was scammed. It was such an unexpected development, I thought, “This is the way to start a movie! I’m in.”

The movie then cuts to the museum, a place that curates only the most cutting edge contemporary art. One of the exhibits is a giant TV screen with a video on loop of a 50 year old muscled man with bad teeth growling into the camera. To say it’s unsettling is an understatement.

This is followed by a 7 minute staff meeting that is shot so realistically and deals with details so mundane, you wonder if it was put in the movie by accident. Soon after, we get another endless scene, this time an interview with a famous artist. The scene focuses on a man in the audience with Tourette’s Syndrome who keeps screaming out horrible things, like “Show us your cunt” to the female interviewer. You get the sense that maybe this is an exhibit? Performance art? But the movie never lets on. It’s up to the viewer to decide.

Afterwards, a woman (played by Elizabeth Moss of The Handmaiden’s Tale) mistakes the curator for the artist in the interview, and, in an attempt to endear herself, mocks the event, “Show us your cunt!” she belts at him. The curator, who has no idea what she’s talking about because he wasn’t at the interview, mistakes it for a come-on. He then goes to her place and sleeps with her, only to find out she lives with an orangutan. Yes, you read that right. She lives with a giant monkey. You can’t make this stuff up.

Usually I HATE these movies where the script is all over the place. But the movie is shot so beautifully, so uniquely, and the events are so unexpected, it’s impossible to look away. If you’re tired of watching the same old stuff and need a movie that surprises you, by golly I’ve found it. Check out The Square and report back. I’m curious to see what you think.

I can’t do a Mish-Mash Monday without an update on The Last Jedi. The movie’s box office take has fallen even quicker than expected in recent weeks. Three weeks ago, a lot of box office experts had the film hitting $670 million. I thought it’d get to $630. It’s middling now at $615, making a paltry 2 million bucks over the weekend.

It’s finally safe to say that the majority of people who saw this film hated it. I know there are people out there who genuinely like the film. But they’re in the vast minority. More and more people are being honest with themselves and admitting the truth. This is a bad script on almost every level – pacing, plotting, characters, choices. And hey, if you’re still trying to convince yourself you liked it, I understand. I convinced myself I liked The Phantom Menace for a full year after it was released.

What’s odd about the whole Last Jedi thing is the Riansplaining Tour. I know Rian Johnson is just answering questions people ask him. But I’ve never seen a director spend this much time defending his movie. Ever. Tell me one director who’s ever done this. Some people didn’t like The Force Awakens. I think JJ Abrams did, maybe, two interviews responding to the criticism? Rian Johnson has done like 50.

For the purpose of sites like these, these explanations give us a rare glimpse into the screenwriting process of major franchises. It also highlights a rarely talked about trend that can be dangerous in screenwriting – using the tools of the craft to talk yourself into bad ideas.

I discussed this the other day, actually – this notion of tools. And how tools are there to help you. But they only work when used in conjunction with your gut. In a recent Collider Interview, Rian rehashed why he made the now infamous choice for Rey’s parents to be nobodies. This is what he said:

It was more a dramatic decision of ‘What is the toughest thing she could hear about her parents? What is the thing for her and for us what will make her have to stand on her own two feet and will make things the hardest for her?’ Because she’s the hero and that’s her job—to have things be the hardest for her.

This is a well-known screenwriting tool – making things as hard as possible on your character. But used in isolation, it can lead to some seriously bad choices. For example, if I wanted to “make things as hard as possible” on the hero of my latest screenplay, Lou, I could kill off his entire family. If critics who disliked the choice said, “Don’t you think that was a bit harsh? Killing off his entire family?” “No,” I’d say. “Because in storytelling, you want to make things as hard as possible on your hero. And you have to agree this made things hard on Lou, right?”

Uhhhh…but…well… I guess?

The missing element here is gut. While the tool is used to build the choice. It’s your gut that must decide if the choice is correct. If something in your gut tells you it doesn’t feel right? That means it’s the wrong choice. Rey’s parents being nobodies doesn’t FEEL right for a Star Wars film, regardless of whether the tool said the choice should work. And that’s the component Rian Johnson forgot to apply. Just remember, guys, a tool is something that builds a possibility. But ultimately it’s up to you to decide if the choice feels correct.

Moving on to the Super Bowl spots. I think it’s pretty clear who won the night. It’s Cloverfield, baby. For those who didn’t hear, not only did Netflix debut the first trailer for the film during the Super Bowl, they’re releasing the film TONIGHT! SAY WHAT!!??? First off, kudos to Netflix for continuing to change the game. They said, “What can we do that nobody else can?” What they can do is debut a movie whenever they want. They don’t have to send it to 10000 theaters. That’s what good screenwriters do. They ask, “What can I do with my concept that nobody else can do with theirs? What’s unique about my story and how can I exploit that?” Nobody has EVER DONE THIS BEFORE. Released a major movie trailer and then had it come out ON THE SAME DAY!!! Kudos to JJ for continuing to surprise us. Kudos to the marketing team for thinking up this clever stunt. When is a movie ever going to be in more demand than right after its Super Bowl commercial? Genius.

Sadly, not everyone hit a home run. I’m going to wait to talk about Solo since they’re releasing the new trailer tomorrow morning (I’ll add my thoughts to the end of this article when it debuts). Someone forgot to tell the people at Avengers Headquarters that a trailer is more than 5 close-ups and the words, “May 8th.” The Jurassic Park trailer was so bland. Rule number 1 for a sequel trailer. Show us what’s different this time around. They’re hoping that adding a girl’s bedroom will be different enough to bring in crazy box office? Yeah, good luck with that. Skyscraper, a script I reviewed here on the site, did nothing to improve my thoughts on the project. But The Rock is The Rock so maybe that’s all that matters. Mission Impossible looked pretty good but it’s the same problem. What’s different this time around? Tom Cruise broke his foot?

I’m stoked for the Stephen King Universe on Hulu. I’ve been DYING for a good TV show. This one highlights Shawshank AND has Pennywise in it? The exact same actor as in It? Uhhh… dial me up and call me Sally. This looks tremendous. I’m torn on Annihilation. It looks unique. It’s directed by Alex Garland, who wrote and directed one of my favorite scripts of 2015, Ex Machina. But I’ve started and stopped reading the book 5 times now. I can’t get through it. There’s something about it that doesn’t work. Paramount trying (and failing) to sell it off doesn’t bode well either. I’m actually shocked they’d pay for a Super Bowl spot. Usually when studios are unsure about a movie, they give it a smaller marketing campaign, not a bigger one. I’m hoping this is good.

I’ll be back when the Solo trailer debuts. The word on the street is that Alden Ehrenreich either can’t act, is unconvincing as Han Solo, or both. Some people who claimed to see footage have even floated the rumor that they’re considering dubbing him with a different actor. I doubt that’s true but, hey, it would stick with Star Wars tradition, right? So that’s what I’ll be looking for in the trailer – Han speaking. Because based on the small sampling of footage in the Super Bowl, the movie looks pretty cool. Almost to the point where you’re like, “What’s the big worry?” The big worry is a movie called “Solo” where the actor playing Han Solo is the worst part of the movie. Nothing else matters unless they get that right. I’m praying they do!

****Solo Trailer Reaction – Coming Soon!****

It’s here! The full Solo trailer. So what do I think?? I think it looks good! I tried to watch the trailer through the eyes of someone who had no idea about the film’s troubled production. As a trailer, all by itself, was it good? And I’d say the answer is a resounding yes. You’ve got lots of action. There’s a distinct look to this thing. There are some really cool aliens (who’s that badass masked drifter dude?). Han originally trying to work for the Empire. Even Woody Harrelson looks cool.

The question mark has always been Alden Ehrenreich. And while I don’t think he blows anyone away in this trailer, he doesn’t seem nearly as bad as rumors have suggested. One thing to keep in mind here is that Han Solo is not “Han Solo” in this movie yet. He wasn’t always a carefree wisecracking shit-grinning rogue. I think they were hoping to do three of these Solo movies, and one of the ideas was to show how Han got to that place. Which would mean starting from another place – one that was more serious. If you’re younger and more idealistic, your personality is going to be different. I’m guessing that’s what’s going on here. I’m not saying that it’s going to work. But that was probably their thought-process.

If we’re ranking pre-interest based on trailers for Star Wars films, I put this behind Force Awakens, but definitely ahead of Last Jedi and Rogue One. Actually, this feels like the movie Rogue One should’ve been. We were told with that film we were getting all these cool rogue Star Wars underbelly characters. Instead we got a bunch of lame boring losers. Solo seems intent on correcting this. These characters look more colorful (literally!) and more fun. By the way, is that Maz Kanata at 36 seconds in??

As Han would say, though, we’re not in the clear yet, kid. This is supposed to be the first “full” trailer and the title card arrives at 1:06. That seems early. Like they don’t have enough cool stuff to fill an entire trailer. Then again, I think they’re still shooting this thing. They literally might not have enough footage! I’m intrigued, though. I think this movie could be cool. Let’s hope so for the sake of this franchise! It has to win back fans after Last Jedi.

There was a fun little debate going on in the comments section of this Monday’s book review, Killers of the Flower Moon. It came up when I pointed out that the biggest problem with the book was that the main character, Tom White, was so vanilla, so uninteresting, that I had a hard time understanding how they were going to make him work. A few of you chimed in by saying, “Actually Carson, that’s how movies are. The main character is usually the grounded everyman, while it’s the surrounding characters who are the flashy interesting ones.”

As the evidence was laid out before me, I found that my entire understanding of a main character was shattered. Luke Skywalker certainly fit this bill. As did Clarice Starling in Silence of the Lambs. Andy Dufresne in The Shawshank Redemption DEFINITELY fit this mould. And let’s not forgot Neo. These were some of my favorite movies ever. And all the characters were, if not “uninteresting,” certainly not stand-out crazy memorable types. What the hell was going on?? Was it true that in order to write a good movie, your main character had to be, gasp, plain?

So then I started going back through some of the best movies of the last 3 decades to see if this applied across the board. What I quickly found out was that this theory didn’t hold up… at all. Tony Stark. Peter Parker. Ferris Bueller. Louis Bloom (Nightcrawler). Deadpool. Jason Bourne. Forrest Gump. Jordan Belfort. Pat (Silver Linings Playbook). John McClane. Indiana Jones. Juno. William Wallace. Leonard (Memento). When in doubt, go to the data. And the data clearly shows that there are more movies out there where the main character is big, memorable, and interesting than small, ordinary, and plain.

With that said, there are clearly movies where an ordinary main character works. Luke, Neo, Agent Starling, Andy Dufresne. So what’s going on there? A few things, I think. The first is to figure out what your story calls for, an ordinary hero or an extraordinary one? In movies like Star Wars and The Matrix, the entire make-up of the story is built around an ordinary person being thrown on an adventure where they learn to become “extraordinary.” It’s the classic “Hero’s Journey.” For those movies, an extraordinary hero wouldn’t make sense because then there’d be no need to go on the adventure.

Also, each of the worlds those characters existed in were interesting. The world of Star Wars, the world of the Matrix, the world of sordid serial killers, the world of this prison. You could throw Michael Corleone in there from the Godfather – that universe was fascinating as well. These movies could withstand an “ordinary” hero because the worlds themselves were so big and vibrant, characters in themselves. If you tried to place an ordinary character into, say, Die Hard, which takes place in a building, it doesn’t work. The smaller the world, the bigger the character has to be, since he’s going to be carrying more of the load.

So what does this mean for you who’s starting up that next screenplay? Should you go with a more reserved “everyman” or do you try and make your hero flashy and memorable? Unless you’re writing a story that fits squarely into the Hero’s Journey structure, you should try and make your main character stand out IN SOME CAPACITY. How crazy you want to make your character will depend on what you’re going for.

One of the easiest ways to answer this question is to ask if this is a character based movie or a plot based movie. Star Wars is plot based. Nightcrawler is character based. The plot is almost incidental. Therefore, in a movie like Nightcrawler, you’ll want to go big with the character. Do something interesting with him. What that is is up to you (they went with psychopathic whereas a movie like Flight went with addict) but a movie like Nightcrawler won’t work with an ordinary character.

Now, let’s say you decide that your movie is plot-centric. Does that mean you have to go with a reserved main character? No. What it means is that you HAVE THE OPTION to go with a reserved main character. There’s evidence, based on past movies, that it can work. But that doesn’t mean you can’t go big with your main character. And I would suggest that, if you have a choice between one or the other, you make your main character interesting as opposed to not.

Could Iron Man have worked if Tony Stark was a quiet average guy? Maybe. We’ll never know. But I know this – as a fast-talking narcissist, he sure was an interesting character to follow. Could Indiana Jones have worked if Indy was more mild-mannered, didn’t have a sense of humor, sex appeal, or was bit of a dick? Maybe. But it was those added traits that turned him into one of the most memorable characters of all time.

With that said, we can’t discount the evidence that there have been HUGE movies over time with vanilla main characters. So if you write one of those movies yourself, how do you avoid making the main character too boring? How do we make someone work despite the fact that they don’t naturally stand out?

All we need to do is look at the data to find our answer. In the case of Andy Dufresne, Luke Skywalker, and Clarice Starling, there’s one common trait in all of them. Do you know what it is? THEY. DON’T. GIVE. UP. In fact, they’re quite the opposite. They are constantly charging forward despite the odds. Audiences LOVE characters who never stop fighting no matter how bad it gets (mostly because we, as human beings, wish we were that way ourselves). So that’s a big factor. Even though Clarice, Luke, and Andy are kind of “meh” on the outside. We like that their internal guide is always trying. If Andy Dufresne would’ve walked into Shawshank and moped around for 120 pages, that’s the worst movie of all time.

One of the more obvious things is to give the character an internal struggle. It can be in regards to a flaw, an addiction, their past, mourning, anything – as long as they have something to battle with. But this advice comes with a warning label. If it isn’t truthful, IT WILL DO MORE HARM THAN GOOD. If whatever you add only works to tick some screenwriting book box, it won’t work. It needs to feel honest, like something a person in real life would be going through. For Luke, it’s that he has doubts. He wants to be great but he has doubts he can be. And that’s a very honest relatable struggle since we all doubt ourselves. With Agent Starling, the whole saving the lambs backstory —- ehhhh, let’s just say it wasn’t the best part of the film. It felt a bit manufactured. When applying a conflict to these types of characters, better to be understated than over the top.

But for me, the secret sauce in adding spice to a character yet still keeping him grounded is a sense of humor. The great thing about a sense of humor is that it’s one of the easiest ways to connect the audience to a fictional being. If someone says something you think is funny, you immediately like them. The greatest example of this is Rocky Balboa. On the surface, Rocky is the prototypical “everyman.” But the reason Rocky is seen by many as the best everyman of all time is that he’s got personality and he’s got a sense of humor. He’s not afraid to make dumb jokes to get a girl. He’s not afraid to give advice to random kids who flip him off. He’s not afraid to talk to pet turtles. If Rocky was a classic personality-less everyman, he would’ve gotten swallowed up by the burning star that was Apollo Creed. But it was his understated sense of humor that made him stand out.

When it’s all said and done, the type of movie you’re writing will inform you what kind of person your hero should be. But it’s my contention that you’re better off trying to make your hero interesting REGARDLESS of the circumstances, than going with the safer, and only occasionally successful, vanilla everyman.

Carson does feature screenplay consultations, TV Pilot Consultations, and logline consultations. Logline consultations go for $25 a piece or 5 for $75. You get a 1-10 rating, a 200-word evaluation, and a rewrite of the logline. I highly recommend not writing a script unless it gets a 7 or above. All logline consultations come with an 8 hour turnaround. If you’re interested in any sort of consultation package, e-mail Carsonreeves1@gmail.com with the subject line: CONSULTATION. Don’t start writing a script or sending a script out blind. Let Scriptshadow help you get it in shape first!