About: Alexander Payne (Sideways, The Descendants, Election) was getting ready to make this a couple of years back but, at the last second, moved away from it and made The Descendants instead.  Although no one’s stated exactly WHY the project was ditched, I have a pretty good idea after reading the script.

Writers: Alexander Payne

Details: 157 pages – undated

Errr…Umm….

Am I in the Twilight Zone?

This has to be one of the strangest scripts I’ve ever read by a professional screenwriter.  Even Charlie Kaufman is going, “Dude, you went off the reservation with this one, buddy.”

Now going off the reservation can be a good thing.  Most writers write stories smack dab in the middle of the reservation.  Which is why they’re so predictable and boring.  This is anything but predictable.  However, there’s a point when you have to say, “Maybe I’ve gone too far.”  And, actually, it appears that this Academy Award Winning writer realized that, which is why he made The Descendants instead.

So what is Downsizing?

Maybe I’ll find out during this review.

A Norweigen scientist named Dr. Jorgen Asbjornsen accidentally discovers how to shrink living matter down to 1/6000^thof its original size.  The implications of this are extraordinary.  In a world where we’re destroying our resources on an hourly basis, the idea of shrinking someone down to the point where they leave 1/6000^th of a carbon footprint on the planet could be the difference between losing our world and saving it.

Four years later, “downsizing” is becoming a niche trend.  It’s not just about saving the environment, either.  Because you consume so little as a little guy, downsizing makes you RICH beyond your wildest dreams.  A couple hundred thousand bucks translates to the equivalent of 20 million bucks in the downsized world.  Think about it.  A normal big mac could feed 4000 downsized people.  A downsized mansion only needs eight feet of space.

The central hub for most downsized peeps is a place called Leisureland Estates – the first full-time city dedicated to downsized folks.  It’s here where our hero, the underachieving painfully unambitious Paul, is thinking of spending his future.  Paul doesn’t have a lot of money.  He’s one of many Americans feeling the pinch of that day to day grind.  Miniaturizing himself would change all that.  He’d be rich.  He’d never have to worry about money again.  It seems like a win-win.

After speaking to his wishy-washy wife, Audrey, she agrees to go through the process with him.  So after all the prep and legalese, the two are split up, shaved, oiled, and thrown into the gamma-ray shrinking whatchumacalit.  But when Paul comes out, he notices that his wife isn’t around.

Uh-oh.

Yup, turns out his wife chickened out.  She doesn’t want to be miniaturized.  Paul is furious, but in that way that some ladies are known to do, ahem, she turns it around and blames it on him.  Either way, it’s over.  Miniaturizing is irreversible and it’s kind of hard to have a relationship with someone 20 times your size.

But this is where Downsizing gets really freaky.  We switch gears to a group of downsized Chinese immigrants who try to sneak into America via a TV box.  All of them die except for one, a woman named Gong Jiang, who’s just barely survived, even though she lost her foot in the process.

Apparently China was illegally miniaturizing people to put less strain on the country and these test subjects had escaped.  So we’re going to get a feel-good story about this miniaturized woman overcoming adversity, right?

Errr, no.

Gong is the most annoying person you can imagine.  And not in a subjective way.  She’s written to be REALLY ANNOYING.  She barely speaks English and spends the majority of her time chastising everyone for not doing enough to help the world.  She’s baffled by how much the Americans waste, going so far as to recycle their trash, since much of it could still be used in China.

What this has to do with the story, I have no idea.

Eventually, some international businessman named Javier enters Paul’s life and tries to get him back on track.  But Paul is still devastated by the loss of Audrey, even though it happened over a year ago.  Move on buddy.  It’s over.  Nope.  Instead, Paul is inactive and boring and whiney.  Is there ANY character we want to root for here??

Even now, I’m not sure what happens at the end.  I know they go off to some Mexican version of Leisureland where everyone’s much poorer.  It’s there where Paul and Javier and Gong all connect.  A love story develops between Gong and Paul, even though she’s annoying and the two have absolutely no chemistry.  It’s as if Payne said – “well, they’re the male and female leads in the film, so they HAVE to get together!”

Paul continues to be depressed.  Gong continues to be annoying.  And Javier continues to derail the story with random missions.  And that, my friends, is Downsizing!

There are so many things wrong with this script, I don’t know where to begin. I’m desperately hoping this is an early draft and Payne was just trying to get all his thoughts down on paper.  I also have to take into consideration that Payne is such a unique voice that some of the things that don’t make sense on the page will make sense on the screen.  And finally, all writer-directors tend to overwrite, since they use the script to remind them what to shoot later on.

But even with all that, this is a mess.  First of all, the main character is passive. This is like Screenwriting 101 – one of the first things you learn.  If your main character isn’t after anything, the whole movie’s going to sit there.  Look at Payne’s last movie,  The Descendents.  Clooney had to take care of all the logistical stuff before pulling the plug on his wife.  Not the most heartwarming story but at least he was ACTIVE.  At least he had things to do.

Paul just sits around feeling sorry for himself 75% of the time.  When you do that, it makes the character boring and by association the story boring.  So the script was pretty much doomed from the start.  Even if everything else was perfect, that component of a story is so important that it’s a bona fide script killer.

Then Payne makes the decision to have about a dozen time jumps in the movie.  Pulling off ONE time jump in a script is hard enough.  And it usually needs to happen right away, like within 10 pages of the opening after a flashback sequence or something.  But here we get 4 month jumps, 4 year jumps, six month jumps, 2 year jumps.  When you have so many jumps, it sucks all the urgency out of your story.  And as we all know from GSU, you want SOME sense of urgency in your story.

Again, to use The Descendents as an example, the urgency came via the need to sign the deal with the hotel owners to net himself and his family members millions of dollars. I think it was something like a two week deadline.  This gave that story a sense of urgency.  Imagine if we would’ve taken a 2 year jump in the middle of that story.  Then a 2 month jump.  Then an 8 month jump.  We would’ve been like, “Huh?”

And I get that Downsizing is a different story with a trickier setup – one that seemingly requires time to pass so we can push the evolution of downsizing along.  But that’s one of the challenges you have to figure out as a screenwriter.  You have to figure out a way to place us in the now, not in twelve different “nows.”

I mean sure, Mad Max could’ve had a 50 minute prelude that took place over several time periods to show us how we got to a point where the last remaining people on earth were fighting for fuel, but instead they gave us a 2-minute opening montage/voice over and put us smack dab in the “present” in order to give the story urgency.

But where this script really went off the rails for me was Gong.  I have no idea why this character was included or what the hell she had to do with the rest of the story.

I mean, why give her an amputated foot?  What did that have to do with ANYTHING?  It just felt like the entire movie turned into something else once she arrived.  And worst of all, that movie could’ve taken place outside the downsized world.  Why create a movie about downsizing if you’re not going to explore the specific issues of being downsized?

And who is Javier?  I still don’t know.  All I know is that on page 100, he practically becomes the protagonist.

I am BEYOND BAFFLED by this screenplay.  It’s so bizarre.  It’s so off.  It’s so all over the place…I’m still not sure what I read.  And you know what that means…

[x] what the hell did I just read?

[  ] not for me

[  ] worth the read

[  ] impressive

[  ] geniusWhat I learned: For heaven’s sake – OUTLINE!  When you outline, you prevent the need to make it all up as you go along.  When you make stuff up as you go along, you have severed feet and Chinese immigrants touting Christianity and sending your characters into an underground community for 7000-8000 years while the world reboots and Spanish businessman that have nothing to do with anything.  Use the outlining stage to explore ideas on a macro level so you can see what fits and what doesn’t BEFORE integrating it into your screenplay.  Outlining would’ve helped Downsizing tremendously.

Genre: Spy/Thriller/Drama

Premise: In the Soviet Union, post World War 2, a Soviet agent suspects a man of killing and mutilating dozens of children.   

About: This script is based on the book of the same name.  This 2008 draft (which made the Black List) was written by Richard Price, who wrote many episodes of The Wire.  The part-time novelist also wrote the films, Ransom, Sea of Love, and The Color Of Money. 

Writers: Richard Price (based on the novel by Tom Rob Smith)

Details: 136 pages

I’ve been hearing about Child 44 forever.  Writers have told me they love the book. Writers have told me they love the script.  Writers have told me they love love LOVE this story. 

But I’m not going to lie.  Spies?  Russia?  The 1940s?  I’d rather ingest copious amounts of bath salts on top of the John Hancock building.  And by the way, these drug dealers are getting lazy. Can’t you come up with a better drug name than “bath salts.”  That sounds like something your grandma rubs on herself every day at 2:30pm.

Where were we?  Oh, yeah, the Soviet Ukraine in the 1930s.  This is where we meet a bunch of kids chilling out in the middle of a forest.  These kids are known as the alphas (the older ones) and the betas (the younger ones).  I guess back then, food was scarce in Russia, so these abandoned children were left to scour the forest for happy meals.  The Alphas made the Betas do all the hunting.  And when they didn’t come back with goodies, they tortured them by making them squeeze sponged water all over themselves.  Not sure how this was considered torture but it might have been an early precursor to waterboarding.  

600 unimportant character names later and it’s 1951.  Our hero, Leo Demidov, is 28 years old and lives with his super-hot wife, Raisa, who doesn’t like him.  Leo’s kind of arrogant though and not privy to her feelings.  He assumes she’s having the time of her life.  I mean, who doesn’t love Leo?

Leo works for something called the ‘MGB,’ which I’m guessing is an early version of the KGB.  He snuffs out people who are sympathetic to the opposition and makes them disappear.  BY KILLING THEM.  Leo doesn’t exactly love the henchman lifestyle, but hey, Soviets got bills too yo.

But then Leo gets a shocking assignment.  He’s told to survey someone the government is certain is a spy.  HIS WIFE.  Duh duh DUHHHH! Yup, turns out Grumpy Raisa is hanging around some shady Westerners, reading books that talk about freedom n’ shit.

So Leo starts looking into his wife, a wife he realizes he’s never known, and when pressure comes down from the big guys to take her out, he decides to stick with her instead.  The MGB doesn’t take kindly to this and banishes he and his wife to another town or something. 

It’s there where Leo comes across a dead mutilated child in the woods.  This isn’t the first time he’s run into a dead mutilated child actually.  He saw another one back at his old town.  Since both bodies were found by the train tracks, though, the assumption is that they met their fate via the front of a choo-choo train.  But Leo suspects there’s a lot more going on here.

So Leo starts looking into their deaths and eventually learns that dozens of dead children have been found near train tracks over the last few years, all of which have gone down as accidents of some sort.  Leo realizes that there’s a serial killer on the loose.  So he goes to his bigshot employees and tells them he wants to look into this, but nobody wants to deal with a child serial killer in the government.  There are way bigger fish to fry.

So Leo divides his time between reconnecting (or connecting period) with his wife and investigating these child murders.  It’s a tough road for our hero since no one wants him to do either, including his wife.  Then again, if it were easy, we wouldn’t have a movie now, would we?  

The short and skinny about Child 44?  I didn’t like it.  Not so much because of the writing.  The writing was solid.  I mean, we have conflict coming at as from almost every direction here (conflict coming from the party, from his wife, from his division re: investigating the murders) but my main problem with it was that Child 44 felt like two totally different movies.

You have two hooks here.  You have an MGB agent who learns that his wife may be a traitor. That’s its own movie.  Then you have a child serial killer in 1950s Soviet Union.  That’s its own movie. 

By combining these two, the script doesn’t know what it is.  But more importantly, one of these storylines undercuts the other.  There is so much emphasis put on whether Raisa is a traitor, that the serial killer storyline feels like an afterthought.  I’m serious.  It honestly feels like something to fill up time.  I don’t think you can have a major serial killer plot in your movie and have it be the second most important thing your hero deals with. 

On top of that, this script takes FOREVER to get going.  I guess the whole “Alpha and Beta” flashback opening was unique, but I kept asking myself, “Did we really need to burn 10 pages on that?”  It is sort of paid off in the end, but I don’t know.  I fell asleep 3 times during the opening act.  That’s not a good sign.

I’m trying to figure out why people like this script so much and I guess it comes down to a few things.  First, it’s very specific.  This isn’t like tomorrow’s script where everything feels made up on the spot.  There’s a texture and a richness to this universe that’s all very…explored.  And to some, those dual plotlines complement each other, creating a challenging non-traditional storyline. 

But to me they…don’t.  And a few other things didn’t work for me either.  First of all, I hated Raisa.  She was so bitter and boring.  I mean, you hated Carolyn from American Beauty, but at least she had personality.  At least she was funny.  Raisa is just…super boring.  Why am I rooting for a guy to reconnect with some bitch who hasn’t smiled in 10 years? 

And as far as the murder investigation went, there was something very “low-stakes” about it.  At first the implication was that the government was covering these killings up.  That had me intrigued.  “Why?” I wanted to know.  Then we learn that there’s no cover-up at all.  The government just doesn’t want to waste resources on child killings.  Hmmm, I guess I’ve been conditioned through Hollywood filmmaking to want more there but, even if I hadn’t, I’D STILL WANT MORE THERE.

And motivation-wise, there was something missing.  Why did Leo want to solve these child murders so much?  I suppose wanting justice for murdered children SHOULD be enough, but from a movie motivation point-of-view, I didn’t understand why Leo was the ONLY person who cared about it.  What was it in him that wanted to solve all these murders whereas everyone else could care less?  Why why why?  I wanted to know why and the explanation I got was a guy sort of doing his job. 

I also wanted to get to know at least ONE of these kids.  Then I could’ve had a personal connection with them and cared about them being avenged.  We didn’t get to know the captured girl in Silence Of The Lambs THAT well, but we got to know her enough to care for her life.  Well, I actually know some people who were rooting for Buffalo Bill in that movie.  But that’s a review for another time.

And why, exactly, when Leo sticks up for his wife – who’s possibly a spy – do they just send him off to another town?  Aren’t we supposed to fear this regime?   Isn’t this the terrifying Communist Soviet Russia???  If the stakes are going to be high, shouldn’t we fear death?  But the big punishment for being a spy is, apparently, having to move 20 miles out of town??  I don’t know.  That doesn’t seem very scary to me.

I didn’t really get any of this script.  I’m sure the spy-heads will tell me why I’m wrong.  I know a certain recently sold screenwriter who LOVES this script.  And boy do I know what it feels like to love something that much.  But I just couldn’t get into Child 44.

[  ] what the hell did I just read?

[x] not for me

[  ] worth the read

[  ] impressive

[  ] genius

What I learned: Get into your story as late as possible.  I didn’t see the point of wasting the first 10 pages on a flashback that introduced a dozen characters we’d never see again and cover backstory that wasn’t entirely necessary in understanding our main character.  I guess you could argue that it’s a setup to the ultimate payoff in the end (of the murderer’s motivation) but you could’ve set that up in a number of less intrusive ways. 

What I learned 2: Be wary of competing concepts in a story.   It’s best to stay with one, or else the two will overshadow each other. Is this a movie about an agent who learns his wife is a spy?  Or is it about an agent who’s inspecting a child serial killer?  I still don’t know.  Dueling concepts can sometimes work if there’s a natural thematic connection between the two, but I never saw the connection between a spy wife and a child murderer. 

So why did I pick Endangerous for today’s Amateur Friday review?  I’m not sure.  I mean we’ve seen this movie before.  It’s called “The Grey.”  Actually, there’s your answer. The Grey was one of my favorite scripts.  Top 10.  I wanted to see someone else take on the idea so I could compare the two.

It’s not that I didn’t desperately want Endangerous to be great. But I knew the chances of finding two scripts covering the same territory both being great were slim to none.  I hoped by comparing a pro and amateur script dealing with the same material, I’d be able to see what made The Grey so awesome.

And hey, if I was wrong?  And Endangerous turned out amazing?  Then sweet.  I found another great amateur script.

So what’s Endangerous about?

Well, as I’ve mentioned, the story is a familiar one.  Some people are on a plane.  The plane crashes in the jungle, and they must all find safety while Bengal tigers hunt them down.  

We’ve got our pilot, Katherine, a semi-tough broad.  Ripley-light.  We’ve got her son, 10 year old Henry, who’s deaf and mute.  We’ve got Taj, a drug addict always looking for his next fix.  We’ve got Jacob, a mean son of a bitch who appears to be working for the law.  And we have Eisner, his prisoner, a scary dude who wears a scar with an eye-patch. 

The group is in Southeast Asia for some reason and this was the script’s first misstep.  What was cool about The Grey was its unique setting.  A bunch of convicts and castoffs working at the end of the world (the Antarctic) because the rest of society wouldn’t give them a chance. 

It was such a unique and specific universe, you felt like you were reading something truly different.  Here, I’m not sure why any of these people are here in Asia.  I don’t get a sense of what anyone’s journey is.  We were talking about backstory yesterday, and the backstory for all of these characters is murky.  I don’t get a sense of place or past.  So there’s something generic about it all right away.

Anyway, onto the plane they go and a little while later, we get one of the most anti-climactic plane crashes in history.  It’s not clear what happens or why.  Out of nowhere the propellers stop and Katherine simply says, “We’re going down.” 

They crash, and once they do, they immediately spot a Bengal tiger lurking in the shadows.  Eisner, our prisoner, lets them know that he can get them out of here.  Follow him into the jungle, to the river, and he’ll find them a village where they can get help.  Everyone’s reluctant, especially Eisner’s handler, Jacob, but the group doesn’t have much of a choice. 

So into the jungle they go, with the tiger following them, and that’s pretty much the rest of the story.  There aren’t any deviations that I can think of.   There’s lots of arguments.  Lots of people not trusting one another.  But basically, a tiger follows a bunch of frustrated people into the jungle.  That’s your story.

And that’s where I first took issue with Endangerous.  Nothing surprising happens.  In fact, the same character issues are repeated over and over again.  Take Jacob and Eisner for example.  These two have about 10 scenes together that are exactly the same.  Eisner says he wants to be free.  Jacob tells him that there’s no way that’s happening.  They curse at each other, complain to each other.  And that’s it.  Sometimes, in fact, they say the EXACT SAME THING to each other that they’ve already said.

When you write a screenplay, you don’t want to repeat yourself.  No scene should be exactly the same.  Relationships need to evolve or change.  Situations must arise that add new dynamics to established conflicts.  If you look at a similar movie, Pitch Black, you saw this with Riddick and his handler, Johns.  At first Johns was in charge.  Then the group realizes Johns is a junkie. Then the group realizes Johns isn’t a cop.  With each reveal, the group is siding more and more with Riddick, changing the dynamic between the two men repeatedly.

Here it was the same conversation over and over again: “I want to be free.”  “Fuck you. You’ll never be free.”  “I hate you.” “I hate you more.”  The dynamic never changed, which left the relationship repetitive, and therefore boring. 

And the problem was, the entire screenplay was focused on that relationship.  It took up, I’d say, about 65% of the story.  And what was left wasn’t much.  For example, you had the deaf-mute Henry character.  Right away, that felt cliché to me.  I didn’t like it.  I mean if something – anything – unique had been done with it, I would’ve been down. 

Instead, Henry just sort of disappears.  For long stretches of the screenplay, he’s nowhere to be found.  This is one of the hard things about writing mute characters to begin with. It’s easy for them to get lost on the page because they don’t speak. If you’re going to create a character with this extreme of a disability, you have to utilize him in an interesting way.  And I’m not sure Julian knew what to do with him.  Henry just pops up every once in awhile looking confused.

As for the tiger aspect, it was pretty standard stuff.  Tiger saw humans.  Tiger wanted to kill humans.  There was nothing unique about it.  What I loved about The Grey was that these wolves had likely never seen humans before – being that our plane had crashed in the middle of nowhere.

Also, the wolves were much bigger and more intelligent than your average wolves, setting up a great standoff between humans and beasts.  You got the sense that the wolves were adapting, outthinking the men, and that elevated a basic showdown into something bigger and more interesting.    

Another issue with Endangerous was that the dialogue was way way way too on-the-nose.  There’s a scene where an injured passenger who can barely keep up with them is being stalked by the tiger.  Katherine and Taj are arguing about whether to help him or not.  KATHERINE: “We can’t just leave him here to die.”  TAJ: “We’re not leaving him to die, we’re just saving ourselves, it’s human nature!”  Oh man.  There isn’t an inch of subtlety in this response.  And characters are talking like this the entire way through.  So nothing feels natural. 

The thing is, there’s some good stuff in Endangerous.  First, the script is written in a really lean style.  Rarely do the action lines clock in at over 2 per paragraph. 

We have a clear goal.  They’re trying to get to the river.  So we always know where the story’s heading.  That’s good.

Julian rarely writes a scene without conflict in it.  So most of the pages have some form of clashing going on, which is good.

I think that’s one of the most frustrating things about screenwriting.  Is you can do a lot of things right, but if you also do a lot of things wrong, it doesn’t matter.  Sure, there’s conflict, but that conflict is all very one-note and repetitive.  Jacob and Eisner are always arguing about the exact same thing, repeating their issues with each other over and over again. 

Julian needs to be commended for keeping the writing sparse. But after every grouping of these sparse paragraphs, we get some really on-the-nose dialogue, which has us immediately forgetting the style. 

I’m pumped that Julian keeps us focused on a goal. But at the same time, I’ve seen too many of the characters in Endangerous before.  Taj reminds me of Charlie from Lost.  The Jacob/Eisner dynamic reminds me of the same dynamic in Lost and Pitch Black.  And our female lead character late in the script tells a tiger who’s got a hold of Henry to “Get away you bitch!” one of the most famous lines ever, lifted right out of Aliens.  It’s all too familiar. 

So I guess the lesson here is to master as many facets of the craft as you can.  Nailing 8 or 9, sadly, isn’t enough.  You have to keep learning.  You have to get as many of these pieces right as possible because if you have even 3 or 4 elements that are shaky, that might be enough to doom your script.

But if you keep at it, you’ll get there eventually.  So I wish Julian and everyone else the best of luck!  J

What I learned: I want to point out how yesterday’s article could’ve helped this script a lot.  Remember, we were talking about never allowing characters to reveal their own backstory?  So here’s a moment where Jacob is talking to Eisner late in Endangerous: “I’ve spent seven fucking years hunting you, and everything I’ve ever had has been lost in them. You’ve taken it all from me. I don’t even know who I am anymore. And the more I look at you, the more it makes me want to kill you.” 

Since he’s talking about himself, Jacob’s monologue feels forced and wrong. So instead of having Jacob say this to Eisner, what about putting Jacob in a position where Eisner has turned the tables on him, and has him tied up.  This time, it’s EISNER who addresses this backstory: “How does it feel?  Chasing me for seven years?  Your entire life lost because of me.  Look at you.  You don’t know who you are anymore.  It’s created a rage in you.  I can smell it.  You want to watch me die.  You want to be there for my last breath.  And now you won’t.  How does that feel?”   

I mean I don’t LOVE this, but the monologue works a thousand times better coming from Eisner than it does from Jacob.  Scriptshadow advice in practice baby!!

Backstory.

It’s essential to every screenplay.

Yet so few writers understand how to apply it.

Some choke their screenplays with so much backstory, their story suffocates and passes out.  While others add so little, it’s like their characters were born the second they typed “FADE IN.”  How much backstory should you be adding to your screenplays?  The answer lies in why you’re adding backstory in the first place.

Backstory is the key to character depth.  Some teacher or writer started a rumor a few years back that nobody cares about a character’s past.  The only thing that matters is the present – what the character is doing right here and now.  The sentiment of that opinion is correct.  The character present – the choices your hero makes right now – have the biggest influence on how your character is perceived.  But your character can’t make a single choice that isn’t motivated by his past.  Which is why backstory IS relevant.

For example, if a character was sexually abused growing up, their choices in pursuing a serial rapist are going to be different from someone who’s never experienced abuse before.  Or, if you want to go to even more of an extreme, than someone who’s a closet rapist themselves.

This is why laying out an extensive backstory for your characters is essential.  The more you know about your character’s past, the easier it is to inform their present and future.  In fact, as far as I’m concerned, it’s one of those things that separates the great scripts from the average ones.  I can tell when someone’s done their backstory homework.  Their characters all act and speak specifically.  Whereas when a writer knows nothing about their characters’ backstory, their characters speak in generalities and clichés, usually those that echo popular movies they’ve seen.

For example, one of the reasons Will Hunting is such an amazing character is because of how well Matt Damon and Ben Affleck knew his history.  They knew the neighborhood Will grew up in, the friends he ran with, the girls he slept with, that his father beat him, how his father beat him, that he was self-taught, how loyal he was, how he’d kill someone before embarrassing a friend while out for drinks.  They knew the same thing about Sean, Robin Williams’ character.  They knew when he met his wife, how he met her (during the Red Sox game), the type of cancer that killed her, how long he had to take care of her.  These two characters were memorable BECAUSE of how well the writers understood them.  And that all goes back to how much research they put into their characters’ backstory.

Not only that.  But the more backstory you know, the more intricate and textured your story will be.  The backstory is where you’ll find out Marty McFly wants to be a rock star, that he’s become best friends with a mad genius, that his father’s been a loser geek his whole life, that his mom used to be a bad girl, that he’s fallen in love, that the clock tower died in the 50s after a giant storm.  The backstory is where you’ll find out John McClane’s wife moved to Los Angeles to pursue her career, leaving him behind.  It’s where you’ll find out Thor’s complicated relationship with his brother.  It’s where you’ll find out Hannibal used to eat his victims.

But how do you integrate backstory into a script?  How do you know when you’re writing too much backstory or not enough?  First, you need to understand the two types of backstory – VISIBLE backstory and INVISIBLE backstory.  Invisible backstory will account for 90% of your backstory research.  It’s everything from where your character grew up to their first love to their level of education to their biggest tragedies to their biggest fears to who they had the best sex of their life with.  Yes, all that stuff matters.  The more you know about your character, the easier it is to make them original and interesting.  The thing is, rarely will invisible backstory show up in a script.  It’s there more to inform your own relationship with your character.  It’s there so you can understand them and motivate their choices.

For example, if you’re writing a Romantic Comedy and your hero, Kate, is about to get married to the love of her life, the boring yet “perfect” Thaddeus, and the dangerous guy she had the best sex of her life with, Cabe, just happened to come back into town, you’ve created the perfect opportunity for conflict. Without having done your invisible backstory research, this knowledge, this opportunity for conflict, may have never presented itself.

VISIBLE backstory is different.  These are the 3-4 major things that have happened in your character’s past that WILL PLAY A PART in the movie itself. You only want to bring visible backstory up if it’s going to be relevant to the story in some way.  So in Taken, we learn that Liam Neeson has been a terrible father and husband.  He was not there for his family, which resulted in his wife falling out of love with him and running off with another man, taking his daughter with her.  His desire to win his daughter over again, to repair that relationship, is what creates the bond necessary for us to root for him saving her once she’s kidnapped.

Or in Bridesmaids, Kristin Wiig’s failed bakery stole a big part of her confidence away.  When it went under, she was forced to take a job she hated, leaving her desperate to find a man.  When she starts dating the police officer, baking again becomes a major theme in their relationship. And when she experiences her rock bottom at the end of the second act, baking visually represents her rebirth.

The point is, visible backstory represents 3 or 4 major things that will influence the story.  Your character may be the world’s pre-eminent Depression-Era nickel collector.  But if collecting nickels never influences the story in a relevant way, then log that under the “invisible” category, not the “visible.”  You only want to mention backstory that influences the plot (“Save the Clock Tower!”) or a character arc (Sean not being able to live life after his wife died in Good Will Hunting).

So now that you understand backstory, how do you get it into your story?  Do you just throw it in there willy-nilly and hope for the best?  Of course not.  The way backstory is placed in your story is almost as important as the backstory itself. The worst thing a writer can do is have a character dive into their backstory unprovoked.  You guys know what I’m talking about.  Your characters may be between chase scenes.  It’s a quiet moment.  Then all of a sudden one of them launches into a monologue that starts off like: “I was six years old when my father first beat me. I still remember it like it was yesterday…”  Ugh.  Groan.  Please never do this.

Instead, use Scriptshadow’s Fabulous Five Ways For Better Backstory Integration. You’ll thank me afterwards.

Resistance – One of the best ways to reveal backstory is through resistance. The character revealing their backstory shouldn’t want to.  This eliminates the falseness that comes with your character revealing backstory in the first place.  For a great example of this, watch the “Cage” scene in Silence Of The Lambs.  In it, Hannibal refuses to give Clarice the information she wants until she tells him the lamb story.  She’s desperate not to tell him, but she knows it’s the only way she’ll be able to get to Buffalo Bill before he kills the girl.  So she tells him.

Argument – Hiding backstory is easily achieved when two characters are going at it.  Because we’re so wrapped up in the argument (or conflict), we’re not aware that the writer is actually giving us key pieces of backstory on the character(s).  Watch the Good Will Hunting scene where Will talks to Sean in therapy for the first time.  Will starts challenging Sean’s credentials, and ultimately, his love for his wife.  The end of the scene gets very heated, with Sean physically choking Will – something he clearly deserved.  The conflict in the scene is top-notch, but check out what we learned during it – Sean’s storied education as well as how much he loves his wife.  Use those arguments baby.  They’re backstory batter.

Another Character Reveals The Backstory – You want to avoid your hero revealing his own backstory.  It just never comes out right.  A great way to avoid this is to have someone else reveal it for him.  Check out the limo scene in Die Hard for a great example.  We need to know why John has come to LA to visit his wife.  Instead of John telling the driver (which would’ve been totally out of character), the limo driver takes some guesses.  He figures out that she left to pursue a bigger job.  He figures out that John thought she would fail and crawl back to New York.  John never says a word about his life in this scene and yet we get a ton of backstory on him.

Showing, Not Telling – This screenwriting staple is a great way to reveal backstory.  Why?  Because you don’t have to say a word.  You show it instead.  And showing always resonates more with an audience.  In Moneyball, there’s a scene where Brad Pitt’s character comes to his ex-wife’s place to pick up his daughter.  Do we ever get a monologue about how he screwed up his marriage and wasn’t there for his family and now rarely gets to see his daughter?  No.  But we get a scene where he awkwardly waits in a living room with his ex-wife and her boyfriend while his daughter gets ready that tells us everything we need to know about his past.  Great screenwriters use this technique as much as possible.

Bits and Pieces – The longer you dedicate a moment to revealing backstory, the clearer it becomes that you’re revealing backstory.  The naturalism of the scene disintegrates, and pretty soon it feels like the writer’s stopped the story cold to directly remind the reader what’s going on.  A great way to combat this is to reveal backstory in bits and pieces.  Spread it out instead of throwing it at the reader all at once.  This will hide it, making it harder for the reader to discern that backstory is being disseminated.  One of the best examples of this is Field Of Dreams.  The reason Ray reuniting with his father in the climax is one of the great endings of all time, is because the writer mentioned Ray Cancella’s issues with his father in tiny bits and pieces throughout the screenplay.  You were never bombarded with any huge father backstory moments. So spreading out backstory in small easy to digest pieces is a super way to hide it.

And there you go folks.  You now know everything you need to know about backstory – one of the more underrated facets of screenwriting.  I can’t stress enough that if you haven’t done an extensive amount of backstory research on your characters, your story is never going to have enough depth to impact a reader.  So go back to your current screenplay and see if that depth is there.  If it isn’t, it might be time to go back to the beginning of your character’s life.  Find out everything you can about him before your story started. I promise that once you do, your story is going to come alive.

Genre: Supernatural Drama

Premise: Set during the Depression, a widow and her son are visited by a strange man who may have the ability to communicate with the dead. 

About: This is the writer’s breakthrough screenplay.  Before this, he was one of the writers on the HBO show, “In Treatment.”  He’s repped over at CAA.  Ezekiel Moss finished high on last year’s Black List. 

Writers: Keith Bunin

Details: 104 pages – Black List draft

I’ve been meaning to read Ezekiel Moss for awhile but everybody keeps telling me, “It’s a good script but really slow.”  That “but” was the killer.  You don’t want any “buts” before you pick up a script.  You want “ands.”  You want “thens.”  But please, no “buts.”

But it turns out the slowness of Ezekiel Moss hit a reading sweet spot for me.  I was heading home from LA.  And since I find it impossible to do multiple things on travel days, I basically had one task – to read a script.  It was one of those rare times when I wasn’t rushed.  The script was slow-developing?  Fine with me.  I had hours to spare.

Add to that the melancholy feeling you get when going home after a trip and I was in the perfect mood for this story.  You’ve spent the last month of your life preparing for something, and then one day it’s just….over.  It’s like “What do I do now?”  You feel kind of empty.  Yet “empty” is the perfect mood to read Ezekiel Moss in.  The characters in this script are all empty.  They need something to fill up their lives.  And little do they know, that something is each other.

It’s 1934, the heart of the Depression.  It’s a small town, too small “for anyone to care about the name” according to the writer.  11 year old Joel Carson has a giant imagination and zero friends.  He lives with his widowed mother, Iris, an emotionally fragile woman, in the tiny Inn she runs.  Iris finds occasional moments of happiness sleeping with the salesman who stop by her Inn every week.  She hates herself for it, but if not for that, she’d be too lonely for words.

The thing with Iris’ job is that it’s predictable to the point of boredom.  The faces may change, but it’s the same travelling salesmen, the same practiced smiles, the same broken promises.  That is until the darkly intense Ezekiel Moss shows up with his witch-like partner, Hepzibah Webb. 

The two ask to stay in one of her rooms for a week and they come with two stipulations – stay out of their way and don’t ask questions.  Iris knows something is up but a girl’s gotta put food on the table so as long as it doesn’t incriminate her, they can do whatever they want. 

Joel finds the odd but vulnerable Ezekiel fascinating, and starts following him around, trying to figure out what it is he and Hepzibah do.  It turns out they travel from town to town to find people who’ve lost loved ones.  And that’s where things get interesting.  Ezekiel has a special talent – he can allow spirits to possess his body.  He can allow the dead to speak to the living.  Or, at least, that’s what he and Hepzibah claim.   

After seeing one of these possessions himself, Joel is a believer, and he runs to his mother to tell her what’s going on.  But because Joel’s imagination has always been so outrageous, Iris doesn’t believe him.  Nor does she want to believe him, as she’s begun to fall for Ezekiel. 

While all that’s going on, the town priest gets wind of Ezekiel.  He’s heard of these two. They’re wanted in towns all over the region for conning people out of money at a time when money is most in need.  It’s time to put a stop to this.

The thing is, all Ezekiel wants is to be normal, is to not live with this curse.  And if this priest tells him he can save his soul, Ezekiel’s ready to take that chance. He now has a child who looks up to him and a woman who’s falling for him.  If he can be “normal,” then maybe he can be part of a real family for once.  In a way, that’s his goal, even if deep down he knows it will never happen. 

Did I mention Ezekiel was slow?  Yeah, reading it feels like every two pages should be one.  But it still works!  Why?  Because the character development here is freaking top-notch.  I mean take a look at Iris.  Here’s a woman who was soul-mate in love with her husband before losing him.  During the accident, he shielded her to save her, ensuring his own death in the process.  She was pregnant with Joel at the time.  Which means there are moments, moments she’d never admit out loud, where she wishes he would’ve lived instead of Joel.  She seeks closeness from the company of other men, even though they’re gone before she wakes up.  The entire town calls her a whore behind her back.  She’s poor, can barely pay the bills.  She ignores the one sense of community the town has – church, alienating herself even more.  I mean that’s a f*cking complex character!  A sympathetic character.  The kind of person you want to know more about. 

But what’s great about Ezekiel is that everyone has a deep backstory – specifically about someone they lost.  And while in most stories, these tropes can become cliché and eye-roll worthy, here, they’re intricate parts of the plot.  Because Ezekiel can speak to the dead, he can bring these figures back.  The characters can resolve their issues with these ghosts.  That was my favorite part about Ezekiel.  People’s backstories actually mattered!

Another reason the slow-build works is that Bunin uses very simple but effective storytelling methods to keep you interested.  First there’s the arrival of Ezekiel Moss.  Everything about this man is interesting.  You want to know more.  You want to turn the page to see who he is and what he’s about.

Once you do find out, there’s a new mystery: “What are Ezekiel and Hepzibah doing here?  What’s their business?”  And as you gradually figure that out, a threat presents itself – the priest.  People are closing in on Ezekiel.  Their business is in danger (conflict).  So even though everything’s moving along at a deliberate pace, Bunin seems to use just the right amount of suspense or conflict or mystery to keep us involved. 

With that said, we could definitely move things along faster.  Bunin has a terrible habit of commenting after every line of dialogue. And not just commenting – but giving a really detailed comment that just sucks up page real estate.  For example, later in the script, Ezekiel is speaking to Iris and says, “Don’t you hope that someday you’ll get married?”  Immediately afterwards we get this action line:  “Ezekiel is asking this question for all kinds of reasons. Iris is deeply affected but she still keeps things light.”

I mean, just get to Iris’ response! That entire action line has already been implied.  This is done ENDLESSLY throughout the script and if Bunin could cut out 75% of these lines, the script would fly.  Right now, it’s in danger of being tossed because of Hollywood’s ADD epidemic.  And that’s too bad.  Because it’s a very powerful story.

For those interested in writing supernatural/horror movies, Ezekiel Moss is a good script to study.  The character development is top notch.  BECAUSE it’s top notch, the dialogue’s strong (a great understanding of character usually results in strong unique dialogue for each character).  And then everything just feels authentic – not easy to do when you’re setting your story 80 years ago.  I really liked this.  Speed it up a little and maybe we have something great. 

[  ] what the hell did I just read?

[  ] wasn’t for me

[xx] worth the read

[  ] impressive

[  ] genius

What I learned: Beware character descriptions that contradict themselves.  I see this all the time for some reason.  “Joe is intelligent yet a bit of an imbecile.”  “Linda is one of those people who’s both happy and miserable.”  Uhhh, what does that mean?  Which one am I supposed to go with? Remember, writing a character description is not about it reading cool on the page – it’s about conveying the character as clearly as possible to the reader.  So here in Ezekiel, Iris is described as having a “winning mixture of toughness and fragility.”  I suppose you can make an argument that this makes sense but to me it’s just confusing.  All I want to know is “Who is this character?”  And that line doesn’t tell me.  Go for clear.  Readers like clear.