Genre: Action Comedy
Premise: (from IMDB) A recently slain cop joins a team of undead police officers working for the Rest in Peace Department and tries to find the man who murdered him.
About: RIPD is an adaptation of a comic book written by Peter M. Lenkov. Ryan Reynolds and Jeff Bridges are attached. I might be insane, but I thought I heard Jack Black was attached to it as well. Maybe someone can clarify this for me. I’d love to know, since I think Black and Reynolds would make an interesting pairing (which would then make Bridges the bad guy). Though from the comic cover, it looks like Bridges may be one of the two cops. Phil Hay and Matt Manfredi, the writers, wrote Aeon Flux, The Tuxedo, Clash of The Titans, and Crazy/Beautiful.
Writers: Phil Hay & Matt Manfredi (revisions by Brian Koppelman & David Levien) (Current Revisions by Phil Hay & Matt Manfredi) (Based on the comic by Peter M. Lenkov.)
Details: 9/12/08 draft (This is an early draft of the script. The situations, characters, and plot may change significantly by the time the film is released. This is not a definitive statement about the project, but rather an analysis of this unique draft as it pertains to the craft of screenwriting).

I can’t decide if RIPD is a really cool update of Ghostbusters or an eerily similar retread of Men In Black. But I can tell you this. It’s damn fun. And funny too. It wouldn’t have mattered if they weren’t coming out with a second installment of the MIB franchise (or third – depending on how you classify MIB2) soon, but since we’re going to be re-reminded of this format, RIPD will have to differentiate itself somehow. Then again, they did just digitally overlay Thailand on top of The Hangover and called it Hangover 2 and it made a bajillion dollars. So maybe being an exact replica doesn’t matter. What’s strange is the element that makes RIPD so similar to MIB doesn’t need to be in the story if you think about it. More on this in a bit.

Nick Walker is a good cop. Except he’s also a bad cop. Well, not “bad” bad, but bad enough where he’s buried a box of gold he helped steal with his partner, which he of course plans to use for good things – like setting up a safe future for him and his wife. The problem is, Nick gets shot dead a day later while pursuing Chicago’s most notorious criminal, a man they simply call “Lime.”

Instantly, he’s recruited into the Chicago R.I.P.D. – The Rest In Peace Department – the police department responsible for keeping the undead in check. You see, since so many people die every day, certain souls are able to slip through the system, souls who are almost certainly on their way down, which means there are plenty of bad dudes hanging around the city needing a little undead justice.

There are a couple of caveats. First, Nick’s not allowed to make contact with anyone he knew in the real world. That means no booty calls with the wifey. Second, he’s paired up with Bo, a veteran cop who died all the way back in the 1800s and was originally a sheriff in the Old West. Bo is particularly prickly because he once had the greatest partner in the world and no one – and he means no one – can ever measure up to him. Especially Nick. Which he is going to let Nick know about every step of their undead journey together.

Anyway, these two bickering badges are tasked with taking down Lime, who we find out is not only the kingpin of the real criminal world, but also the ghost world. The plot thickens when we find out that a certain key Lime is looking for that will release all of the undead into the real world happens to be locked in that box of gold Nick buried at the beginning of the movie and since the bad dudes can’t get a hold of Nick, they go straight to his wife to find out where the box is. With his wife in danger, Nick and Bo will need to figure out a way to save her without being able to contact her, and oh yeah, then save the world.

Okay, heres’ the skinny on RIPD. It’s good. Dare I say it has the potential to be super-good, which is a level of good just under awesome but still above sweet. But here’s the issue that keeps rearing its ugly head. Every bad guy in RIPD sounds exactly like an alien out of MEN IN BLACK. They’re big. They’re slimy. They have tentacles. They’re basically monsters. My question is: Since when do dead people become monsters? Aren’t ghosts and monsters two different things? The obvious answer is that big tentacled 20 foot tall monsters are a lot more cinematic than invisible people. However, I think the audience is savvy to this cheat. So before this goes any further, the writers need to at least explain why once you become a ghost, you turn into a chowder-slinging dump-truck sized pile of pus. Either that or just go with ghosts. Maybe the ghosts have cool powers, and that’s where the sizzle needed for the trailers happens (although I guess you could argue that there were a lot of monsters in Ghostbusters – though in my memory that was explained better somehow).

The next issue is that it’s unclear how the dead world and the living world interact. It seems like there are no ill-effects on the real world when something happens in the dead world, lowering the stakes for all of the action that happens. When our guys are racing through Dead Chicago, chasing the bad guys, nobody living even notices. Something feels wrong about that. There needs to be an effect on the real world somehow.

Now on to the good. And there’s a lot of it. This is a great execution of a high concept summer movie premise. Remember, whenever you’re writing a summer adventure movie, you’re dealing with characters who don’t exist in the real world. If you and I were both chasing a 40 foot tall killer squid, for example, you wouldn’t start humming “Under the sea” to lighten the mood while we dashed and ducked our way to turning him into sushi (that doesn’t happen here – I’m just using it as an example). Because characters don’t act in anything resembling a real-world manner, it leaves the writer out in left field as to how to make their actions believable. I felt that Hay and Manfredi pulled that off here.

One of the ways they did this was with the wife character. Putting Nick’s wife in peril gave the story a sense of real-world stakes. We wanted her to live and were therefore willing to suspend our disbelief to see if she did. Making it so that Nick couldn’t contact her was also a stroke of genius as it had us asking the terrifying question of, “Well then how is he going to save her??”

I also loved Bo. I loved him talking about his old partner and getting all emotional about the Old West and how it wasn’t as easy as everybody thought it was. I can’t remember a time this year I laughed as hard as when Bo offers the revelation about what happened between his skull and a coyote. I guess I’m just so used to these pairings being by-the-book, that having a crotchety old ghost harping on about shit that happened to him 130 years ago was just… different. I loved it.

The script also did the little stuff well. Like I’ve noted before. If you’re writing a high-concept film, you HAVE TO HAVE a ticking time bomb. This provides URGENCY for your movie. If you don’t have urgency in a summer movie, I got news for you fella. You don’t have a movie. The 56 hours til Full Moon is the clock here. There’s also lots of twists in RIPD, another necessity in a movie like this. You gotta keep your audience on its toes. They’re not here just to watch special effects. They want to be engaged in the story. That means you need to be unpredictable, you need to turn things on their head every once in awhile. For example (spoiler), when we find out Nick’s partner sold him out, it hits us hard, because we trusted him.

In the end, this nails that fun high concept feel a big blockbuster should have. Sure there are little problems here and there. The rules connecting the two worlds haven’t been ironed out yet. And it’s convenient that that little buried box has so many things in it that so many people want, but the chemistry between the leads is great, there’s a satisfying emotional element in the Nick/wife relationship, and overall, it’s just fun.

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

What I learned: I have a friend I speak to about once a week. He likes movies, but is not in, nor does he know anything about, the movie business. At some point during our weekly conversation, he asks me if I’ve read any cool scripts lately. Now on an average week, I can read anywhere between 10-20 scripts. Despite this, there are weeks where I can’t think of a single idea worth telling him about. Think about that for a second. 20 ideas. Nothing worth telling another person about. Since the pursuit of this profession is all about getting people to read your screenplays, that’s a problem. So the next time you’re gearing up to write a screenplay, ask yourself that. “Is this an idea that someone would want to tell someone else about?” It’s a simple but very important question. A movie about dead cops who patrol the afterlife is an idea I’d tell my friend about. Now that doesn’t mean that every idea has to be a summer movie type idea. It just means the idea has to have something interesting, unique, clever, or cool about it. Something that – simply – gets other people talking about it.

Genre: Comedy
Premise: Donny, infamous for impregnating a schoolteacher when he was 13, must reunite with his bitter son 25 years later on the eve of his marriage.
About: David H. Caspe is the co-executive producer of the new sitcom “Happy Endings.” He sold “I Hate You Dad” as a pitch to Columbia back in 2008, for Happy Madison (Adam Sandler’s company) to produce. “Dad” also made the lower third of the 2010 Black List.
Writer: David H. Caspe
Details: 115 pages – 12/04/08, 2nd draft (This is an early draft of the script. The situations, characters, and plot may change significantly by the time the film is released. This is not a definitive statement about the project, but rather an analysis of this unique draft as it pertains to the craft of screenwriting).

Okay, I pretty much hate the Happy Madison banner. I think the whole team has been mailing it in for over a decade. And I say that with the knowledge that they’re not trying to win Oscars. They’re only looking to make people laugh. Still, their concepts and their execution are so garden variety vanilla that they actually suck all other flavors into a vortex. Having said that, you won’t find a more perfect casting/concept pairing than this one. Adam Sandler playing Andy Samberg’s father is one of those pitch perfect “duh” marriages that you put in a trailer and everyone in the world will go see the film. Or at least, everyone in Middle America. So now all that’s left is writing a great script. Easy, huh?

One of the things I liked about “I Hate You Dad” was that it did a few things you didn’t expect it to do. The opening is a good example of that. 13 year old Donny is hot for teacher in that special 80s way where it was pretty hot to be hot for teacher. The difference is that the teacher is hot for Donny back, so much so that when Donny makes his big move, she reciprocates, and has sex with him right there in the classroom!

With comedies so obsessed with playing it safe these days, starting a script off with pedophilia was a bit of surprise. Cut to 25 years later and the offspring of that wonderful day, Todd, is preparing for his wedding. Now Todd hasn’t told his wife that he’s the love child of that scandalous affair, and for good reason. The teacher ended up going to jail, the trial was a media circus, and Donny became an early Z-list celebrity before the Z-list was officially invented (btw, they’re considering adding a new letter to the alphabet to make a list even worse than the Z-list, for the specific purpose of classifying Chyna). Donny actually owns a hot tub business that allows him to cash in on his famous hot-for teacher exploits. This is so disturbing to poor Todd, that he’s gone so far as to change his name so that his father can’t find him.

Here’s the problem though. Donny is in a lot of trouble. Getting his tax advice from Richard Hatch (another candidate for the post-alphabet list), Donny decided not to pay taxes for a decade (hey, sort of like Happy Gilmore’s grandmother…hmmmm), and now, unless he comes up with a lot of dough, he’s going to jail. How convenient then, that his estranged son is a very successful stock broker. I think we know where this is going.

Donny shows up at Todd’s house just as the whole wedding party has arrived, claiming he’s his father, which seems odd, since Todd’s told everyone that his father is dead (he died in a massive explosion). Todd assures them all that Donny is joking and is just passing through, but when Donny refuses to leave, he’s forced to claim that Donny is his best friend. Naturally, um, hilarity ensues.

This one was somewhere between bearable and decent, though not enough of either to get excited about. As you’d expect, all the jokes here are rehashes of jokes we’ve seen in other Sandler films. You have the joke Sandler loves more than anything, which is to have one of the characters repeatedly say, with reckless glee, that another character is dead. You have the ubiquitous D-list celebrity show up (here, it’s Ian Ziering of 90210 fame). You also have something about Todd being really fat when he was younger, which, not surprisingly, has nothing to do with his character or the story whatsoever.

I’m not really sure what to say here since the script, outside a couple exceptions, was so exactly what you expected it to be. My biggest gripe was probably that the wife character was so under-written. She’s basically there so we can use the wedding as a ticking time bomb, but never once did she feel like a real person. I keep telling male writers this: put just as much effort into your female characters as you do your male characters. Your scripts will be a lot better for it. I promise.

Also, the concept was plagued with a near fatal flaw. Obviously, this story works best if nobody in the wedding party knows Donny as the famous “Hot For Teacher” father. But doing that is impossible, since they’ve made Donny a mini-celebrity. So now Todd has to pretend Donny is his best friend, which sort of makes the big secret (that he’s his son) pointless. They’ve already accepted “Hot For Teacher” Donny as Todd’s friend. How much worse is it if they find out he’s his son? The bigger faux-pas, however, is that Todd’s fiance seems to have no opinion on this slimy piece of filth being her fiance’s friend whatsoever. Actually, now that I think about it, I don’t think the two even have a scene together. It’s almost like the writers just didn’t want to deal with it.

Structurally, the script is pretty good. We have the goal (get married), the ticking time bomb (the wedding), and the main source of conflict (the father). I’m getting tired of the wedding angle for comedies but the reason people keep using it is because, admittedly, it’s the easiest template to structure a story around that there is. And you know, the last 20 pages of I Hate You Dad were actually pretty good. In most of these movies, you can predict what’s going to happen down to the individual scene, up to 30 pages in advance. So I was surprised when “I Hate You Dad” did not take the most obvious route, making the final act, at the very least, unexpected.

Combined with the opening, that meant the script had two big surprises. My problem is that everything in between is so blasé. It was like a sandwich made with two slices of freshly baked Tuscan cheese bread, but with bologna and miracle whip slapped in the middle. What the hell is Tuscan Cheese Bread? Not important. I love the poster and trailer for this project, but the script needed a second act kick in the ass.  I wouldn’t go as far to say “I Hate You Script,” but I would say, “You Have Problems You Need To Work On Script Before We Can Be Friends.” 

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

What I learned: In a comedy, you have an advantage if you can convey the central source of conflict right there in your movie title. “I Want To Fuck Your Sister.” We know the main character will need to fend off (conflict) people from trying to have sex with his sister. “Ghostbusters.” We know our characters will need to defeat (conflict) some ghosts. “I Hate You Dad.” We know a father and a son are going to go at it (conflict) for most of the movie. Even “40 Year Old Virgin,” indicates a man trying (conflict) desperately (and probably unsuccessfully) to get laid. This all seems rather insignificant and obvious once a 70 million dollar marketing campaign is behind your film, and you’re watching trailers and posters that convey all this stuff in excruciating detail, but at the spec stage, your title is often the only marketing tool you have. Use it to your advantage.

It’s a travel day folks.  So the Monday review will be posted around 4pm Pacific Time.  See you then! :)

Hey guys.  So I’ve been chatting with my friends over at The Tracking Board and It’s On The Grid and have set up another opportunity for you to get a nice discount on subscriptions to each.  For those who don’t know what a tracking board is, it’s a private online site that provides insider industry information. They tell you which spec scripts are being sent around town, which specs are selling, which are failing to sell, which writers are picking up assignments, which scripts are getting heat, what studios they’re getting heat at, etc. etc. As a writer, this is really valuable information. Being able to track which genres and concepts are flooding the market, and where they ultimately end up (or don’t end up), is an essential component to choosing how you want to approach the market with your own screenplay.

People often ask me how I know about all these scripts, how I choose which scripts I’m going to review, how I keep tabs on all these projects.  Well, I’m officially revealing my magic trick.  I get my info from The Tracking Board.  If you’re serious about the craft of screenwriting (or becoming an agent, manager, producer, etc), if you want to excel in not just the writing side of this business, but the selling side, it’s a good idea to join at least one tracking board. Now for the month of June, I’ve set up a deal with The Tracking Board to bring their annual rate of $79 down to $59 for Scriptshadow readers.  Make sure to go through this link below to get the discount.

Now if you’re super-serious about writing and want to take an even bigger step, you should check out It’s On The Grid, which is basically an up-to-date screenwriting version of IMDB, tracking all the projects out there in detail.  A couple of great things about It’s On The Grid are its inclusion of up-do-date open writing assignment info as well as a studio/agency style searchable database.  This is the kind of information that Hollywood has kept to itself for over 80 years.  You would not have been able to find it as an “outsider” just two years ago.  If you’re interested in The Grid, The Tracking Board has partnered up with them to give you a combo annual subscription price of $299.  However, if you sign up through Scriptshadow via the link below, you can get it for $247.  Happy gobs of new screenwriting information everyone!  I’ll be leaving this deal up through the end of the week. 

Genre: Comedy
Premise: A marginally talented tribute band finds itself magically/accidentally transported back to the year 1973 and seizes the opportunity to become actual rock stars by “stealing” the career of the group they’ve long made a living out of impersonating.
About: Okay you guys who want to submit to Amateur Friday, I expect your loglines to get a lot better after yesterday’s great discussion. Feel free to re-submit with something new and improved. —- Every Friday, I review a script from the readers of the site. If you’re interested in submitting your script for an Amateur Review, send it in PDF form, along with your title, genre, logline, and why I should read your script to Carsonreeves3@gmail.com. Keep in mind your script will be posted (feel free, however, to use an alias and a fake title).
Writers: Charles Wellington and Michael Bloat
Details: 118 pages (This is an early draft of the script. The situations, characters, and plot may change significantly by the time the film is released. This is not a definitive statement about the project, but rather an analysis of this unique draft as it pertains to the craft of screenwriting).

Let me start this by reiterating a common theme that comes up during comedy reviews: this genre is subjective as hell. I bring this up because Tribute didn’t win me over in the end, but it clearly won a lot of other people over. I had a half-dozen people e-mail me during the week to tell me how much they liked this. So I want to strike a deal with you. Give this script a chance. Don’t go by my review alone. It’s rare that I get a chance to hype up an Amateur Friday screenplay and it seems like the one time everybody seems to like something, I’m the Debbie Downer. I’m the guy crapping on the parade. I’ll explain why I felt this way after the synopsis.

40-something Guy Kirshner is the lead singer of a group called “Swords of Britain,” a moderately successful tribute band celebrating the legendary hard rock group “Jabberwocky.” His group consists of guitarist and music aficionado Sean Goolsby, as well as his short and stubby drummer and bassist team, the Ramirez brothers. Guy’s one of those eternal optimists who thinks Swords of Britain’s big break is always around the next corner.

Which it kind of is. Richie Loud, the elusive and partly insane lead singer of Jabberwocky, has just been found dead, which has thrust Jabberwocky’s music back into the spotlight. Guy realizes that they’re not going to get many opportunities like this again, and convinces his band to crash Richie’s funeral to promote tonight’s gig.

However, as the band drives to the bar later, they get in a pretty gnarly accident. Guy, hellbent on still making their gig, gets the band to suck it up and rush to the bar, and it’s only once there that they realize they’ve been magically transported back to 1973! In fact, after they play their set, they realize they’ve accidentally been mistaken for the REAL Jabberwocky, who are (or WERE) about to play their first American gig, the one that started their success. This means that Knights of Britain have taken the real Jabberwocky’s place!

Of course everyone else is nervous about this, but Guy realizes this is his one and only real shot at becoming a rock star, and so convinces them to take advantage of the opportunity. The next thing you know, they’re recording Jabberwocky’s first album and living Jabberwocky’s success!

In the meantime, an angry Richie Loud, who’s convinced that these men stole his music, though he has no idea how, since he’s never played it before (At one point, he starts writing a song on Sunset Boulevard, only to hear it blasting out of a car radio seconds later), plots to expose Guy and his band of imposters to save Jabberwocky.

That job may take care of itself though since Jabberwocky only recorded one album. So when the media starts asking Guy and the others what’s next, Guy realizes there is no next. There are no more songs left to steal. Or are there? That’s when Guy formulates his ultimate plan, to steal every single great tune recorded after 1973 and make it a Swords of Britain song. Will he succeed? Or more importantly, will everyone else in Swords of Britain go along with it?

There’s no doubt this is a cool premise. And I’ll back this script all day for potential. But I had a lot of issues with it, and it will be interesting to see why others didn’t. As a reminder, I don’t check boxes when I read scripts. I first judge a script on how I feel while reading it. If I’m not feeling it, I go back and try to figure out why. In this case, the story felt like it was wandering. So I asked myself, “Why did it wander?” Did it wander because I lost interest in the story and therefore wasn’t fully paying attention? Did it wander because I never connected with the characters? Or did it wander because there was really something structurally wrong here? That’s not always an easy question to answer. The simple solution is to just slap a cliché screenplay analysis term on it (NO TICKING TIME BOMB!) and call it a day. But I always want to get to the heart of why something didn’t work, or else I don’t learn anything from it.

My first problem with Tribute? There was nothing FOR ME PERSONALLY that I hadn’t seen before. The tricky thing about any premise, particularly a high concept one, is that you have to give the audience what they’re expecting, but you have to do it in a better way than they’re expecting it. That’s what we writers do. We give you what you want but in a higher quality version of how you thought you’d get it. If the audience already knows exactly how everything goes down, why even show up? The problem with this is that each person brings a different depth of movie knowledge to the table. The more they know, the harder it is to give them something they weren’t expecting. I suspect that that’s part of the problem here. I’ve seen this all before.  However, someone who’s younger (and surely someone who’s read a few thousand less scripts) is going to be surprised more often, and therefore more likely to enjoy Tribute (and other films like it).

My second problem was – yes – the lack of a ticking time bomb. Everybody’s allowed their opinions on ticking clocks. There are some cases, particularly slow character driven indie-fare, where the artificial quality of a ticking time bomb does more harm to a story than good. But when it comes to high concept movies, especially high concept comedies, ticking time bombs are essential. You have to have one dominating your narrative, or else your story gets lost. The moment where this story lost me was after Swords of Britain recorded their first album and realized they didn’t have any music left. After that point I was like, “What now?” The finish line was nowhere to be seen. I had no idea what the goal was anymore (vaguely continue to try and be famous?). There was no indication of when the story would end. I felt lost.

I understand that the concept here is to see a band become successful, and that takes time, but when you’re talking about a movie, you have to find a way to bookend the journey. For example, maybe Jabberwocky’s history is that they first started to get popular in Los Angeles, but it wasn’t until they opened for the Stones at the Rose Bowl that they became national rock stars. Assuming this, you’d now have Swords Of Britain arrive in 1973 just like in the current script, accidentally steal Jabberwocky’s first gig, then begin to get famous in L.A. only (this way you can still have scenes of them experiencing success) and then place that Rose Bowl concert in three weeks. That then becomes your ticking time bomb. Your characters will have to make a choice by that night whether to play the concert (live a lie for the rest of their lives) or walk away (do what’s right).

Character-wise, Tribute was a mixed bag. Sam (the guitarist) was obviously the deepest character. I loved how he’d been trying to get Guy to listen to his demo. But after that, there’s less character depth than the Los Angeles Clippers’ bench. Our next deepest characters are Richie Loud, who’s relegated to solo scenes of being pissed off. And Tess the Weirdo Groupie, who’s actually a pretty sad and interesting character, but since she’s relegated to scenes with Richie, who’s number 3 on the depth chart, she never has a chance to shine.

And that was another problem I had – I was never sure who the main character was. Remember that whoever you introduce us to first in a screenplay, that’s who we assume is the main character. So for a long time, I thought Guy was the main character. But then Sam sort of emerged as the main character and Guy became this caricature of a man obsessed with fame. Then there are times when Richie could be interpreted as the main character. Yet just when you think that’s the case, he disappears for a few scenes. I don’t know. I couldn’t figure it out.

Now having said all these terrible things, I want to reiterate the strength of this concept and the strength of this story’s potential. You can see A-list comedy actors dying to play these roles (Jack Black alone is probably begging Charles and Michael for an audition). I’d just like to see a rewrite with a little more structure, some more character depth, and a few more surprises. I wish these guys luck. This could be a project to look out for.

Script Link: Tribute

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

What I learned: A 118 page comedy equals a big no-no. You want to keep your comedies under 110 pages, unless you’re a known movie star or you already have ins in the industry (and even then, it’s not advised). I’m not saying 118 pages is bad because it’s 118 pages. I’m saying 118 pages is bad because it almost guarantees that a comedy will be unfocused and/or bloated. If you have a clear character goal, if you have a ticking time bomb, you can make sure that every single scene you write is necessary to tell the story. If you don’t (and as you can see, these were my issues with the script), you end up writing too many unnecessary scenes, which in turn bloats your screenplay up to 120 pages.