Genre: Comedy
Premise: When a controlling fiance-to-be loses her boyfriend and descends into bitterness, her friends send her to “Man Camp” to learn how to date again.
About: Every Friday, I review a script from the readers of the site. If you’re interested in submitting your script for an Amateur Review, send it in PDF form, along with your title, genre, logline, and why I should read your script to Carsonreeves3@gmail.com. Keep in mind your script will be posted (feel free, however, to use an alias and a fake title).
Writers: Amie Kelbing & Eva Taylor (story by Ami, Eva, and Danielle Morrow)
Details: 90 pages
It’s probably unfair to put Man Camp under the spotlight a day after reviewing the best movie about bridesmaids ever put to paper. However, it’s a great opportunity to compare a professionally sculpted screenplay shepherded by a dozen industry pros to one written by a couple of amateur scribes still figuring things out. Actually, I wouldn’t be surprised at all if Wiig and Mumolo’s first draft looked similar to this one, more of an unfocused collection of thoughts than a fully fleshed out story.
That’s the big problem with Man Camp. It’s majorly unfocused. The narrative feels like it’s been strapped to an overanxious rabbit set loose in the jungle. You think you’re going one way, but oh wait, let’s go over here, but oh no, how about checking this out, wait, let’s go back to where we started, no, changed my mind, let’s go this way again. Structure is so important for a screenplay. And there isn’t a lick of it here.
Man Camp has a surprisingly similar setup to Bridesmaids. Annie (same name!) is in a relationship with Ryan, the key difference being she expects to be marrying Ryan soon. The problem is, Annie can’t shut up. She makes all the decisions, she takes all of the control, she doesn’t let her boyfriend get a word in edgewise – about anything. As a result, Ryan dumps her, and there Annie is, back to square one.
Even worse, Annie’s friends all start finding husbands and having babies, leaving Annie further and further out of the loop. She begins to feel sorry for herself, gives up on dating, and becomes a hermit. Worried she’ll become a cat lady, her friends set up an intervention and send her to “The Center” – a place that teaches destitute women how to get back out there and start dating again.
Except The Center is run like an insane asylum, which is appropriate because Annie’s rambunctious roommate, Nina, is about as crazy as they get. While everyone else conforms to the “warden’s” strict rules, Nina’s running around wreaking havoc, trying to get the girls, and in particular, Annie, to live a little. Eventually Annie learns enough from the camp to land another man, Eric.
In a kind of unclear development, the very friends that cared so much about getting Annie help, have now completely forgotten about her, instead wrapped up in their own married pregnant lives. Eric is Annie’s ticket back into that selective group, and she carefully grooms him for reinsertion. But just before they get to the party, Annie can’t help but be too demanding, and loses Eric right before going in. In a lucky coincidence she convinces the bartender, a flamboyant weirdo named Javier who she met while at The Center, to pretend he’s Eric so that her friends won’t know she’s alone again.
And if that doesn’t test the boundaries of believability, Annie then convinces Javier to marry her, and the next thing you know the wedding is set! But at the last second, Annie’s old friend from The Center, Crazy Nina, shows up, drugs Javier, and dresses up like a man so she can scold Annie for marrying just to get married. The moment causes outrage from the wedding party, and Annie is forced to come clean about the whole ordeal.
Okay, first of all, Amie and Eva? I want you guys to know that I love you. But it does neither of us any good if I sugarcoat my notes here, so this is going to get a little bumpy. It’s important for readers of this script to remember, before you go crazy in the comments, that this is likely a first or second effort from the writers, and as anyone who writes knows, the first and second efforts are usually best left as learning experiences. So, let’s get into what’s wrong with Man Camp.
The problem here is a maddening lack of structure. First, we have a main character, Annie, who’s given up on dating. So her friends send her to a “Man Camp,” to learn how to date men again. The script then switches gears and becomes sort of a broad comedy version of Girl Interrupted. And even though we just met an entire cast of Annie’s friends, we’re asked to meet and remember a whole new cast of friends.
But what’s strange about Man Camp is that the actual Man Camp ends halfway through the script. We then cut to THREE MONTHS LATER with Annie now in a relationship with Eric. It’s a little jarring that we’ve now left a second set of characters in the dust, but we try and go with it. But in an ongoing trend of “this is the story, oh wait no it isn’t,” Nick disappears from the script three scenes later! Another seemingly key character left in the dust!
This leads to the impossible-to-believe development of Annie spotting a bartender she barely knows and paying him to pretend that he’s her boyfriend (and subsequently marry her). This is the fourth time now that the focus of the script has changed. First it was about a woman losing her boyfriend. Then it was about a Man Camp. Then it was about the relationship that stemmed from Man Camp being a success. Now it’s about a woman paying a man to pretend that he’s her boyfriend. In other words, you’ve officially said to your audience, “We have no idea what this movie is about anymore.”
So first and foremost, this script needs focus. If it’s about Man Camp, then Annie needs to be in Man Camp for 80% of the movie. If it’s about paying a man to pretend he’s your boyfriend so you can hang out with your married friends, then that needs to be explored for 80% of the movie. The fact that Man Camp keeps switching around on us is what makes it so damn frustrating.
Man Camp also cares little about making sense. I get that this is a comedy, but that doesn’t mean characters can just do things because the writers want them to. Actions need to be rooted in some sort of reality for the audience to go along with them. Annie’s friends love her enough to have an intervention for her. Yet we’re to believe they won’t hang out with her unless she has a boyfriend? Nina hates Man Camp. Why doesn’t she just leave? Random bartender Javier agrees to marry Annie on a lark for a few extra dollars? This is nonsensical even by broad comedy terms. Every character here acts like they’re in a cartoon, like there are no consequences to their actions, and because there are no consequences, we stop caring.
Also of note is how Annie’s character is constructed. In Bridesmaids, (the other) Annie is getting screwed over by an asshole, creating instant sympathy for her. In Man Camp, it’s Annie who’s doing the screwing over (of her boyfriend), leaving us sympathizing with the boyfriend as opposed to her. I’m not saying you can’t make your protagonist unlikable or be the one with the unflattering problem. But it’s important to note how this seemingly minor approach dramatically changed how we perceived these two protagonists.
Also, like I was talking about yesterday in the Bridesmaids breakdown, you gotta spend time on your secondary characters. I couldn’t remember any of the characters in this movie besides Annie, Javier, and Nina. There was nothing distinct about any of the original group of friends. There were no memorable characters inside The Center besides Nina. You need to sit down and create big full backstories for these people if you expect them to come alive. Then and only then will you discover the unique characteristic that will help them stick out.
But these problems are minor when compared to the structural issues of Man Camp. The lack of focus and a clear plan is what really hurts the script. Figure out what this movie is about, make sure the entire movie follows that plan (not just parts of it), and you should be okay. Remember, you’re making one movie, not 5-6 mini-movies. Good luck on the next draft! :)
Script link: Man Camp Project
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Unless you’ve set up a comedy that logically progresses over a long period of time (Knocked Up, Juno), you don’t want to throw a random huge time jump into the middle of your story. The 3 month jump in the middle of Man Camp is so awkward, so random, that it deflates everything that came before it. Good comedies usually have some kind of immediacy to them, a ticking time bomb, a feeling that things need to happen RIGHT NOW. Hangover. Liar Liar. Meet The Parents. Even Knocked Up, which takes place over 9 months, has that feeling of, “Oh boy, we’re running out of time!” If you can just randomly fast-forward your story to 3 months later? That tells me you were missing urgency in your story. I mean imagine in Bridesmaids if, in the middle of the movie, we just cut to 3 months later. How awkward would that have been? Condense your storyline into a more stable time frame and make everything happen inside that timeframe. Random large time jumps in the middle of your movie are momentum killers.
A friend of mine was telling me that Bridesmaids was written in six days. I laughed at him. “No it wasn’t.” “Yes,” he assured me, “It was written in six days. I’m positive. I read it in an interview.” Having just come from the film, and marveling at how well-written it was, I assured him, that without question, there was no way in a Bridezilla-infested hell that this movie was written in six days. If a thoughtful nuanced character driven comedy was written in six days, it would mean I would have to reevaluate the totality of screenwriting. I mean, there was just no way.
So I did a little digging. Read a few interviews. My friend was right. Bridesmaids was written in six days. Oh, but there was one small detail he left out. It was then rewritten over the course of five years. Now THAT sounded more like it. Not that I have any problem with genius writers writing amazing scripts in the same time it takes to read a novel. I just felt that this script was way too good to be haphazardly thrown together over five nights of Hawaiian pizza and pajamie-jam parties.
Another key piece of the puzzle revealed itself when I heard that Judd Apatow shepherded the script. Wiig and Mumolo had never written anything bigger than a comedy sketch before. And when that’s the case, you need someone who understands structure, who knows what to do with all 110 of those big white pages. Again, this is not to take anything away from Mumolo and Wiig. Actually, these two contributed the single most important element of the script that’s led to Bridesmaids’ success.
What would that element be? What is it that makes this film so much better than the awful comedies studios have been peddling to us like “The Dilemma” and “Couples Retreat?” The answer is simple: Character. Everything that happens in Bridesmaids is born out of character. And you just don’t see that anymore. We preach it. I preach it on the site here all the time. But nobody listens to me! The majority of comedy writers these days start with a funny idea, come up with a few funny scenes, and then look for a plot and characters they can jam into those scenes. But in Bridesmaids, every single laugh is born out of character.
So what do I mean when I say “born out of character?” Well, there are four main character components that drive the comedy in this film. Let’s take a look at them. We start out Bridesmaids with Kristin Wiig’s character, Annie, having sex with super asshole take-advantage-of-her-guy Ted (Jon Hamm). Now it’s a goofy scene in that they’re never in sync, that she’s never comfortable with anything Hamm tries. But the thing you’re getting from this scene goes way beyond the hilarity of awkward sex. This scene does an amazing job of setting up our main character so that we both love her and understand her flaw. Annie is desperate to find someone to be with. She wants that other half in life so bad, that she’s deluded herself into believing that Ted might be the guy. The fact that he’s so shitty to her makes us feel bad for Annie. Which means we now want her to be happy, to not have to cling to jerks like Ted. This is the first character component that drives the humor.
Cut to a nonchalant lunch scene between Annie and her best friend Lillian (Maya Rudolph). I always say to never put two characters at a table together unless you absolutely have to. It’s really hard to make two people sitting down and talking interesting. And as far as this scene goes, it’s probably one of the weaker in the script. However, the scene does a great job establishing the amazing friendship between Annie and Lillian. We see these two play off each other, understand each other, finish each other’s sentences. There’s no doubt in our minds after leaving this scene that these two have an amazing friendship. This is the SECOND character component that drives the humor.
Soonafter, Lillian tells Annie that she’s getting married, and while we can see that Annie is happy for her, we also sense that this affects her in two important ways. 1) She realizes her friendship with Lillian is never going to be the same again, and that terrifies her. And 2) Her best friend getting married highlights her own biggest fear – that she’ll never get married herself. These two things combine to give Annie her defining characteristic which will drive much of the comedy – her fear of being alone. Therefore, it’s the third key component.
This leads us to the (pre?) bridal shower party and it’s here where we meet the fourth and final component that makes the film work: Helen (Rose Byrne). Helen is Lillian’s best friend at work, and when Annie sees them together for the first time, she realizes that they’re a lot better friends than she thought. For that reason, Helen becomes the embodiment of Annie’s fear. Losing Lillian to Helen, in Annie’s mind, means being alone for the rest of her life. And that leads to the main engine that drives this story. Annie will do anything – and I mean ANYTHING – to make sure she doesn’t lose Lillian to Helen.
And there you have it. This is why the movie works so well. Those four character-related components drive 95% of the laughs in the movie.
Take a look at the bridal shower speech stand-off for example. That scene’s not funny because Annie is making a fool of herself or because Kristen Wiig is mugging for the camera. It’s funny because the entire scene is born out of her character’s need to prove that SHE’S Lillian’s best friend, NOT Helen. Had the writers not put all of that legwork into establishing the characters’ flaws and relationships, scenes like this would just die on the screen.
One of the things that shocked me about Bridesmaids was all of the long scenes in the film. One of the “rules” often touted in screenwriting books is to keep your scenes between 2-3 pages. Which is actually good advice. Scenes tend to play a lot slower than you think they will, so writing a 4-5 page scene is often akin to putting a dead fish on the screen for 5 minutes. But there are tons of scenes in Bridesmaids that last 6-7-8 minutes long. Why do these scenes work?
Well I hate to sound like a broken record but it’s the same answer. The character work. If you make your characters likable? If you build people whom we want to see succeed? If you show us characters with real fears (being alone) and real backstories (lost their business) and real dreams (finding happiness) and real failures (being a hook-up for a guy who will never love you)? Those characters will end up “fixing” a lot of your scripts’ other problems. It’s no different than in real life. If you like somebody, you don’t need to be with them at Disneyworld to be having fun. You could be in the back alley of a Tijuana suburb and still be having a good time.
But Bridesmaids didn’t stop there with its character work. It did something that is so rarely done nowadays that I’ve almost given up on expecting it. Bridesmaids puts just as much thought into its secondary characters as it does its primary characters. Here we have Rita, the disgruntled overworked mom whose home has become a prison, Becca, the “married the first man she had sex with” innocent newlywed, Officer Rhodes, the earnest mini-carrot loving perfect for Annie but she doesn’t know it yet love interest, and even Megan, the weird puppy-stealing positive-thinking-for-no-good-reason sister of the groom. The writers take advantage of every single moment of screentime to make these characters distinct and memorable. I just don’t see that in comedy scripts anymore. There’s usually the main character, the wily friend, and those are the only two people in the entire screenplay that the writer puts any time into.
What I take away most from Bridesmaids – the thing I “learned” from this film – is that great comedies are character pieces first and comedies second. Mumolo and Wiig – either through Judd Apatow or on their own volition – decided to explore their characters first, and see what kind of funny situations arose from that exploration, as opposed to coming up with a bunch of funny scenes and then trying to reverse engineer characters to fit those scenes. I’m hoping the staggering staying power of Bridesmaids (20% weekend hold??) will prove that audiences want to connect with people first and laugh second. For all you comedy writers out there, take heed of this advice, and go write your next character piece. I mean your next comedy!
Genre: Crime Thriller
Premise: After being double-crossed during a bank heist, a safe-cracker teams up with the hitman hired to kill him to take down the double-crosser.
About: Knight is one of the top-dollar assignment dogs in Hollywood. I don’t know what his fee is but I’m pretty sure it’s close to a million bucks an assignment? Maybe more? Someone want to confirm or deny this? Before Knight hit the big-time, he, well, hit the big time, being one of the co-creators of the original British version of Who Wants To Be A Millionaire. After writing Dirty Pretty Things and Eastern Promises, he became one of the more sought after screenwriters for weightier fare. He’s claimed that he wants to write screenplays for another year or two and then go write novels. Of course, when they’re UPS’ing you bags of money, that decision becomes considerably harder. The Red Circle is an adaptation for a remake of a French thriller.
Writer: Steven Knight
Details: 106 pages – 2nd Polish – Feb 6 2009 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).
As you may have noticed, Steven Knight is the writer of my second favorite unproduced script, Untitled Chef Project, which I’m begging someone to get off their ass and make. But Knight is also in charge of Pawn Sacrifice, which I found decidedly underwhelming (it was too straightforward for me). So I was more than happy to take a look at a third Knight script to see where my loyalties lie with the man.
It’s Hong Kong, and brothers (friends?) Sean and Corey are on the eve of a huge job. All they have to do is sneak into a lightly guarded building, crack a safe, and walk away with a ton of dough. Everything goes according to plan until they get back to their car, where they pop the trunk to find peculiar sociopath and hitman Vogel waiting for them. We’ll find out later that the nasty crime boss Santi, who’s friends with Corey, hired Vogel to double-cross them.
But this double-cross is about to get triple….crossed? Two Hong Kong cops, the stylish and confident Mai and her by-the-books partner Junji, spot our trio in the alley and decide to enter the equation. A wild three-way shootout follows, and when it’s all said and done, Mai and Sean are dead.
Five years later Corey gets out of jail and wants only one thing – to kill Santi. But before he does that, he’s going to steal all his money (actually, I guess that’s two things). That won’t be easy so he’ll need help. And who better to help than the man who got the jump on him and the cop who lost his partner. So Corey goes back and recruits Vogel, who signs on for a 25 million dollar payday, and Junjie, whose alcoholism has become worse than a bad David Hasslehoff home video.
During the workup to the heist (and murder), Corey reconnects with his lover, An. Suddenly, a more complicated picture materializes. We realize that An is married to Santi, who found out about her and Corey’s affair, and THAT’S why he double-crossed him. With Santi and An being around each other all the time, Corey institutes a stipulation that they can’t hurt her in the raid, which angers Vogel, who thought Corey was doing this for the revenge. But now it’s clear he’s doing it for love.
To make things even more complicated, Officer Mattei, who took Junji’s spot on the force after that fateful night, is looking to make a big move to expedite his career. He wants to take down Santi as well as Corey and Vogel, all in one fell swoop. So he befriends Junji to give him eyes and ears into the operation, with plans on being there when the shit goes down.
In the end, Corey will need to decide what’s most important. The revenge? The money? Or the love?
You know what Red Circle reminded me of? It reminded me of a Hong Kong version of The Town. Like that film, it creates some exciting multiple character relationships at the center of the story, and like that film, it doesn’t quite come together at the end. The ultimate difference is, though, that it’s not as good of a script. Red Circle has so much double-crossing and such an intricately woven set of storylines that you’re not always sure what’s going on, or if it all makes sense.
Still, there’s a lot to like here. First of all, I love stories where two people who don’t trust each other are forced to work together. I understand it’s cliché, but it’s also one of those things where if you set it up right (so that we believe in the pairing), your script will be dripping with conflict from start to finish. Which is important. Because lack of conflict is where a lot of scripts falter. They’ll have too many pages where there isn’t anything going on underneath the surface. This solves that issue definitively.
As for the characters, I wouldn’t say they were perfectly drawn, but they were all pretty interesting. Corey’s motivation was strong, with both the loss of his friend and the love for Santi’s wife. Vogel was a little over the top at times (playing PSP in the trunk while he waited to execute his hit?) but his weirdness and sociopathic behavior kept him interesting. And while Junji was the weakest of the bunch, I thought making him a drunk who mourned the loss of his partner and having his loyalties tugged at by the police force he left, gave him plenty to work with.
I thought the Hong Kong setting was fresh as well. This would’ve felt too generic, for example, if it had been set in LA. And there were a handful of scenes that really stuck out. My favorite was the pet shop scene and the throwing of the snake. Added an interesting wrinkle that’s a lot more fun than two dudes pointing guns at each other.
I did want to bring something up about Red Circle though, and I want the opinion of the advanced writers out there, as it’s my understanding that after you figure out structure, after you figure out character, after you figure out theme, that a lot of writers become orgasmically obsessed with visual motifs.
I’ll never forget the interview with the writer of Spielberg’s TV mini-series “Into The West.” The writer explained that the reason he got the job was because he pitched this idea about the WHEEL as a visual motif throughout the series. That we would constantly see images that evoked the image of a wheel moving. And as soon as Spielberg heard that, he gave him the job. And I remember thinking at the time, “What a dumb reason to give a writer a job.” And still today, I think, “What a dumb reason to give a writer a job.” I guess I’m not sold on why something like this would matter.
I bring it up because in The Red Circle, we’re constantly seeing red circles in the script. A red stop light. The red blood outline of a bullet hole. A red bullseye. Whatever. That seems to be a big visual motif in the script. And I don’t know. To me it just screams “on the nose.” Like, “It’s called The Red Circle and now we’re actually seeing ALL THESE RED CIRCLES! Cooooooool.” Does anybody else feel like this is too obvious?
Anyway, I thought The Red Circle was a pretty good script that went about things just differently enough to make it fresh. The reason I didn’t rate it higher is because there’s something murky about it, sort of the way you only remember certain aspects about a dream . If this could be jammed into a pencil sharpener until it’s sharp as a tac, it could be awesome. As long as you don’t then prick yourself and create…another red circle.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[x] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Here’s a great technical tip. When your characters speak in another language, instead of wasting a whole parenthetical saying, “in Spanish,” whenever they speak, just note in the description that they’re speaking Spanish and from that point on, put parenthesis around their dialogue. i.e. — Joe: (We need to go find Hank). – Some writers will use italics to convey this as well, but either one is fine.
Genre: Comedy
Premise: When his sister joins him at the New York Stock Exchange as an intern, Drew thinks it’s going to be the best summer ever – until he realizes that every single guy at the company wants to _____ his sister.
About: I Want To ____ Your Sister made huge waves back in 2007 and rode those waves to a top spot on that year’s Black List. While Stack still doesn’t have a produced credit, she’s got a Jennifer Aniston project called “Pumas” in development (about a pair of women who experience some misadventures on a French skiing trip) and has been making a lot of money doing uncredited dialogue polishes around town (due to the impressive dialogue in “Sister.”)
Writer: Melissa Stack
Details: 110 pages – undated (This is an early draft of the script. The situations, characters, and plot may change significantly by the time the film is released. This is not a definitive statement about the project, but rather an analysis of this unique draft as it pertains to the craft of screenwriting).
At the very beginning of Scriptshadow, Sister was at the bottom of my Top 25. But I’ve never reviewed it on the site. Also, I’ve read a thousand scripts since then, so I was interested to see how the script held up after all those pages in between. Was it really Top 25 worthy? Or was that awesome title (it really was “Title Of The Year”) a distracting smokescreen for an average screenplay? Let’s find out.
21 year old Mandy, beautiful and blossoming, is heading to New York City for her first big internship. Her overprotective parents are terrified of course, maybe not so much by the city as they are of Mandy living with her successful trader brother, Drew. Drew may be making millions of bucks at the Stock Exchange, but he’s not exactly Mr. Dependable.
Despite Drew’s overt selfishness and self-destructive behavior (which revolves mainly around banging chicks), these two are inseparable, that disgusting brother-sister duo that love each other to death no matter what. Kind of like the Kardashian siblings. Not that I watch any of those stupid shows of course. The fact that a glitch resulted in me following Kim’s Twitter feed just so I could hear her say “I just finished working out” and “Don’t forget to watch Khloe and Lamar tonight” 47 times a week was not something that happened by choice, I assure you.
Totally an accident.
Anyway, Drew is more than excited to introduce Mandy to her new intern job at the stock exchange. This is like a dream come true. He gets to do what he loves every day AND hang out with his baby sister while he does it. That unbridled optimism dissolves, however, about 5 minutes into Mandy’s first day, when a horrifying truth begins to dawn on Drew. Every single guy at the Exchange is looking at Mandy. Every single guy at the Exchange wants to fuck his sister. Err…uh oh.
Drew instantly transforms into warrior mode, using every free second to push guys away from his sister. But when Drew is tasked with landing the new big fish for the company, super-rich Lothario Jameson Winters, he can only dedicate so much of his time to saving his sister’s innocence.
The pressure of handling these two extremes begins to wear on Drew, and soon he’s acting like an overprotective parent, setting rules and talking down to his sis like she’s 14 again. Mandy starts resenting him for this of course, and starts dating the guy Drew hates more than anyone, deli owner Aarjev, to teach him a lesson. But it’s when she starts hanging out with Jameson Winters, the “big fish” he’s supposed to land, that things really spin out of control.
“Sister” starts out strong. Really strong. One thing I’ve begun to realize and something that “Sister” reminded me of, is that you can use your title to enhance your story – specifically to create dramatic irony. Remember, dramatic irony is when the audience knows something bad that’s going to happen to the characters before the characters do, causing anticipation. So here, we know from the title that people are going to want to fuck Drew’s sister. So the entire first act is thick with anticipation as we’re waiting for and expecting that to happen. We can’t wait to see the look on Drew’s face when the reality hits him.
This works especially well due to the irony of Drew’s character. Here’s a guy who wants to fuck everything that walks, who’s had sex with EVERY SINGLE INTERN in the company, who flaunts it, who encourages it. Yet now, his sister is one of those interns, so in an unthinkable turn of events, he has to prevent everyone else from fucking her.
Stack also does a nice job making us like Drew, even though he’s kind of a doucebag. An easy way to make us like “bad” people is to show them loving someone else. The love here is so strong between Drew and his sister, that we forgive him for being the unsavory guy that he is. In fact, Stack doubles up and gives Drew a little “save the cat” “show don’t tell” moment when Mandy can’t afford a dress early on and Drew buys it for her. Awwwwww.
You also have to give credit to Stack for her dialogue. From the people I’ve talked to, the title is the reason they opened the script, but the dialogue is the reason they stayed. Stack joins Headland (Bachelorette) and Diablo Cody as yet one more razor-sharp dialogue feminista. But for me, it wasn’t the sharpness of her dialogue. It was the realness of it. I read so many scripts where people talk to one another like robots. This person’s turn then that person’s turn then this person’s turn then that person’s turn. It’s predictable and boring. When Drew punctuates one of his points with “KARATE CHOP THAT!” and then does a karate chop move, it’s silly and stupid but it reminds me of the kind of shit my own friends do when they’re hanging with each other. It wasn’t about ‘taking turns.’ It was about what people really say, no matter how nonsensical or non-sequitur those things might be.
My problem with “Sister” is that it has a great first act, but an average second and third acts. There’s nothing bad here. The writing is solid all the way through. But it’s almost like Stack was struggling to figure out reasons for the story to keep going. We do have a goal here (land Winters), but I’m not sure how important that goal is. And the fact that we endure an endless barrage of meaningless gatherings before we get to it didn’t help. My feeling is that Stack needed something to surround the main question driving the story with – will someone fuck Drew’s sister? – and came up with just enough to do the job, but nothing more.
I also thought the Aarjev storyline rang false. In any romantic comedy, you make the choice of basing the comedy in reality or basing it in “movie reality.” An example of movie reality is when a man bets a woman he can make her fall in love with him in ten days. It’s obviously something that would never happen in real life. I’m not saying that kind of humor can’t work. It obviously has fans. But where you run into trouble is when you start mixing the two worlds up. So in “Sister,” the tone here, while slightly exaggerated, clearly strives to exist in the real world. For Mandy and her buddy to conceive of this little plan to start dating disgusting deli owner Aarjev just because Drew hates him…I don’t know. It wasn’t realistic and therefore didn’t match up with the tone in the rest of the script.
It’s too bad, because this is a really good idea for a comedy. And if there were a way to breathe some life into the storyline, as opposed to having a storyline that punches the clock, this script could be a classic. Right now it’s just a solid comedy, which is still something to celebrate, since we don’t see many of those anymore.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[x] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: I want to bring up “unfilmables” because they’ve been such a hot topic lately. “Unfilmables” is the buzz word for written description in a screenplay that can’t be filmed. So if I write, “Joe walks to the car,” that’s okay cause it can be filmed. But if I write, “Joe loves this car,” that’s “unfilmable,” cause you can’t “film” Joe’s love for the car. Therefore, certain people argue, you should never ever write “Joe loves this car” (or any other unfilmable) into your screenplay. Okay, I’d agree with this line of thinking…IF THE YEAR WERE STILL 1953. However, things have changed. A lot. It started with Shane Black and it continued with the spec market boom. No longer were scripts meant PURELY AS BLUEPRINTS. They now had to read well in order to have a chance at selling. This is why scripts have become less technical over the years – to make them easier reads. What that means is you have a little more leeway in the “unfilmable” department. I’m not saying that you can now write 18 page internal monologues for your characters, but if you want to throw in a “cheat” every now and then to make the reading experience easier, go for it. I’ve literally read hundreds of professional writers who write unfilmables. So Melissa Stack writes of Mandy’s parents, “They’re batshit crazy, but she loves them.” Yeah, that’s an unfilmable. But it helps tell the story. As long as you use your unfilmables judiciously, and don’t litter your scripts with them, you should be fine.
Genre: Crime/Drama/Noir
Premise: A retired detective is hired by a drug dealer to find the men who brutally murdered his wife.
About: The other day, I reviewed a new (old) script that made it on to my Top 25, After Hailey, by Scott Frank. Afterwards, I sought out more Scott Frank scripts hoping to strike gold again. This is an old screenplay by Frank that was originally supposed to star Harrison Ford. It was a critical moment in Ford’s career, if I remember correctly. He’d been making a series of blasé films and people were starting to question if he’d ever challenge himself again. This script was supposed to be him challenging himself. But alas, he pulled out at the last minute and the project died. Frank, however, holds a deep passion for the script and believes it will still get made. — Frank talks about what to do when you get stuck in your script in this interview: “If I get stuck it means I haven’t done my homework on the characters. I don’t know enough about the people in my story to write about them. So I’m just trying to make things up. If I’ve created real people, they start to develop a life of their own and take over the story from me at some point. What is inconsistent or dishonest to the people I’ve created sticks out. I also read a lot books that inspire me more than movies. If I’m stuck, I’ll force myself to stop—which is hard for me—and pick up a book. Something that inspires or relaxes me. Something that makes me want to write and that gets the juices flowing. Something that’s fun when you write, it’s about play so you should have a good time now and then even though it’s so damn hard.”
Writer: Scott Frank (based on the novel by Lawrence Block)
Details: 131 pages (revised 3/7/04) (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).
When you bust out a script called “A Walk Among The Tombstones,” you’re not exactly expecting a quick read. You know it’s going to require a lot of concentration, a lot of thought, and a big time commitment. I’m not usually willing to take that risk unless I’ve heard a script’s amazing ahead of time, because most of these dark dramas can be found at the intersection of Depressing and Slow. But after After Hailey was so awesome, and with my Scott Frank love growing, I had high expectations for Tombstones.
So did it deliver?
Matt Scudder is a former cop who was forced out of law enforcement because of a screw-up stemming from a nasty drinking problem. These days, the haunted Scudder just tries to make it to the end of the week. He doesn’t do shit to the world and he doesn’t expect the world to do shit to him.
But that changes when a drug dealer named Kenny Kristo approaches him about the murder of his wife. Some nasty dudes not only kidnapped her and took 400 thousand dollars from him, but they didn’t deliver on their promise. Instead of returning his wife, they killed her, cutting her up into little pieces. Well, I guess technically they did give her back, just not all together.
Kenny wants to find these men and do to them what they did to his wife, so he contacts Scudder. Scudder refuses at first, but then Kenny plays the tape of the men raping his wife which they sent, and Scudder is in.
As he starts his investigation, he runs into an African-American teenager named TJ who always seems to be sick, always seems to be causing trouble, and is, overall, just a weird little dude (he keeps a backpack full of fresh vegetables with him at all times). Although I’m not sure how common it is to keep randomly bumping into the same person in a giant city over and over again, wherever Scudder goes, TJ’s not far behind, and soon the two develop a friendship.
In the meantime, Scudder is getting closer to our dynamic duo of killers (which consists of a very tall man and a very round man). When they target yet another drug dealer, Yuri (snagging his daughter), who’s an acquaintance of Kenny’s, Scudder realizes that this will be his only opportunity to take these guys down. He becomes point man on the operation, installing his own reckless brand of negotiating. When it’s all said and done, the big showdown happens in a cemetery, and either our killers or Scudder are going to go down.
Okay, I’m hoping that a lot of these problems are because this isn’t the final draft, but man, I’m not sure all these issues can be rectified. There are just so many things fundamentally wrong with this screenplay. I’m really disappointed. Hailey was so good. Tombstones, unfortunately, is a mess.
Let’s start at the top. As I’ve stated before with these kinds of stories, there needs to be some sort of personal connection to the case for the protagonist. So in Chinatown, Gittes falls in love with Evelyn Mulwray, making it more than just an in-and-out investigation. Or even in the more bubble-gum pop world of Taken, the protagonist is looking for his own daughter. If you don’t have that, there should at least be a logical motivation for your main character to get involved, particularly in something as dangerous as this. Here in Tombstones, I can’t make out a single definable reason why Scudder takes the case. He’s not doing it out of a sense of duty since he’s no longer a cop. He doesn’t need any money. He doesn’t know Kenny so he’s not doing it as a friend. He didn’t know the woman who was murdered, so there’s no connection there. The thing that gets him to sign on the dotted line is listening to the wife get raped, which kind of works but it’s not like something happened in Scudder’s past that makes him want to avenge all rapes. He signs on…well, so that we have a movie. And that was my biggest problem with Tombstones. There was no reason for our protagonist to get involved.
But if not knowing one client wasn’t bad enough, the final act actually goes one step further and introduces us to A NEW client, Yuri, whose story we’re even less invested in. Who the hell is Yuri? Why the hell do we care about Random Drug Dealer #2’s daughter? At least I experienced Kenny’s pain when he found out about his wife’s death so I could sympathize with him. I have no idea who Yuri is at all.
The next thing was TJ. Boy, this character was just a huge miscalculation. He felt like a “written” character from the get go: He illogically runs into our protagonist whenever he’s in the city, he carries vegetables in his backpack, he tells you what’s on his mind whether you like it or not, he’s got sickle-cell anemia (which doesn’t have anything to do with the story if you were wondering). He was just a manufactured fake person from his very first line. And to top it all off, he had nothing to do with the story. If you took him out of the script, it wouldn’t affect the plot one iota, which is why every time he showed up you said, “Why are we wasting our time on this guy? He doesn’t have anything to do with this story!”
The details here are also choppier here than a flight over the Rocky Mountains. For example (spoiler), late in the movie, Scudder finds out while questioning one of the main bad guys that, shockingly, Kenny’s wife was a cop. I admit I’ve never investigated anything in my life. But wouldn’t one of the first things you did in your investigation be a background check on the person murdered? One internet search would’ve probably told you that the wife was a cop. — Also, our serial killers? The bad guys? One of them is seven feet tall. I’m sorry but you will never ever find a 7 foot tall serial killer. You don’t sneak around successfully pulling off murders if you’re seven feet tall. No matter where you go or what you do, every single person in the area is going to remember you. Serial killers are people who can blend in with the rest of the world. I’d be willing to bet that you could not find a single serial killer in history who was over 6 foot 2. I don’t’ know. It was stuff like this that really bothered me.
About the only thing I liked in this script was the ending. Despite not caring about Yuri or his daughter, I have to admit that the trade-off in the cemetery was packed with tension and very well-written. I wanted to see the bad guys go down, particularly the “round” guy. But overall, this was a frustrating read for me. The goal here (find the bad guys) is ten times more clear than the goal in After Hailey, and yet the story has 1/10 the impact of that perfectly constructed script. It just goes to show that in the end, it’s about the characters and the relationships you create between them. If you have a character who doesn’t have any emotional connection to anything related to the case, you’re dead in the water, cause no one’s going to care whether he succeeds or not.
I admit that a lot of my frustration here comes from my high expectations, but man, this could’ve been so much better.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: A bit of a spoiler here. But it’s something I feel strongly about. Please. Never. Ever. Ever. Include a backstory where your cop accidentally shoots a kid. The moment we find out that Scudder’s career ended because he accidentally shot a kid when he was drunk is the end of the screenplay for me. It’s so melodramatic, so clichéd, so ‘been done before’ that it kills the character and by association the story.
