Genre: Period/Drama/Thriller
Premise: A young drifter infiltrates a married couple’s home, roping them into an insurance scam that results in disaster.
About: Every Friday, I review a script from the readers of the site. If you’re interested in submitting your script for an Amateur Review, send it in PDF form, along with your title, genre, logline, and why I should read your script to Carsonreeves3@gmail.com. Keep in mind your script will be posted.
Writer: David H. Littleton
Details: 101 pages

This Friday I wanted to read something different. I was tired of fantasy and sci-fi and big bubbly rom-coms. I wanted something that challenged me, that treated its subject matter a little more maturely, something like The Brigands of Rattleborge. Perhaps that’s why I took a chance on Vortex, which had the makings of a good old fashioned character piece, wrapped inside a thriller.

The year is 1947. Brittle but hard-nosed beauty Evelyn Abbott is being questioned by a detective regarding a recent event that, for right now, will remain a mystery. All we know is that a handsome young drifter named Nick Driscoll keeps coming up in conversation and is therefore a central component to whatever interrogation-worthy event that just happened. 

Evelyn explains that it all started when her clumsy husband, Nathaniel, nearly ran into Nick on his way home from work. Feeling terrible about the near catastrophic accident, Nathaniel insisted that Nick come to his home and spend the night to recover.

Uptight Evelyn disagreed with this, but as her husband was notoriously philanthropic, she realized she had no say in the matter. Of course one night quickly became two, two three, and before Evelyn knew it, Nathaniel was asking Nick to work at the family General Store.

Evelyn avoided the pesky Nick whenever she could, but soon began to fall for him. Not long after, they started having an affair. Somewhere around this time we finally learn what the investigation is about. This store of theirs recently burned down, and the authorities believe the reason for this to be arson, an attempt by the couple to collect on insurance.

When Evelyn denies any such tomfoolery, the detective moves on to Nathaniel, her husband, and we get his side of the tale. Surprisingly, their stories match up identically, expect for one key difference. (Spoiler) Nathaniel and Nick were having an affair as well! Nick was actually playing both sides of the fence, and it was HE who had come up with the idea to commit arson so they could collect the insurance. However, ever since the store burned down, Nick is nowhere to be found. And both Evelyn and Nathaniel swear that while they initially considered the plan, they both backed out at the last second. This would imply, of course, that Nick went through with the fire himself. However why is it, then, that he’s nowhere to be found. He can’t collect a check if nobody knows where he is. This, of course, leads to an even deeper question.  Who is Nick Driscoll? 

Vortex is a funky script. It’s got some good things going for it. The writing feels very professional. The prose and dialogue unwind satisfactorily. But the story itself isn’t constructed in a way that best takes advantage of the dramatic situation at hand.

My first issue is one of confusion. Nobody tells us what’s happened when the movie starts. We don’t know why we’re in this interrogation room or what our characters are talking about. There are brief allusions to events, but we don’t know where or what or how any of these things have to do with Evelyn. Contrast this with the opening of the similarly constructed Nautica, which I reviewed a couple of weeks ago. We open on an exciting rescue of a barely-alive man in a nearly sunken yacht, who’s charged with the murder of another man found 500 miles away in the sea. So right away we know what our story is about and the sense of mystery has us asking a lot of questions we want to know the answers for.

In Vortex, we don’t know anything, so the introduction of flashbacks feels unnecessary. Why flash back to see what happened when we haven’t been given a reason to be curious about what happened in the first place?

This leads to one of the biggest problems with Vortex: Stakes. In Nautica, the stakes are a murder charge! That’s a huge freaking deal. You get charged for murder and you’re either getting the chair or spending the rest of your life in jail. Here, the stakes are…arson? Which gets you…what? With a good lawyer, maybe a year in jail? Possibly community service if you’re lucky. As a result, we never feel any true danger for our protagonists.

Incidentally (spoiler) much later on, we find out there was a body in the fire, but for whatever reason, this is treated as an insignificant development compared to the arson itself. What Littleton probably should’ve done was make that dead body the hook of the story. They meant to burn this place down for the insurance, but instead, someone was found inside, and now both of them are being charged with murder. Now we have ourselves some stakes. Now we have ourselves a story.

Speaking of story, there isn’t enough story density in Vortex. Very little happens in this movie. When we flash back, we get scene after scene of characters getting to know each other. We have a few arguments. A couple of minor run-ins at the General Store. Some reluctant flirting. Overall, the relationship takes forever to move along. Contrast that with Nautica, where one scene we’re on the island with two old friends recognizing each other, next we’re on the boat where the girlfriend is flirting with our hero, next they’re making out down below with the boyfriend ten feet away, later there’s a fight and they’re thrown off the boat, then we’re flashing back to New York to figure out how they got here. I mean every scene is yanking a Titanic sized ship of story along with it, whereas in Vortex, it feels like we never leave the island. You have to *pack* story into your script. If you inch along, you’re going to lose your audience. When a reader or a development exec calls a story “thin,” this is usually what they’re referring to. Not enough happens.

Motivation is another issue here. Whenever your characters put together a dangerous plan, they need to have a good reason to do it. Or else why risk it? Normally, this motivation is money. Someone’s in over their head and their only way out is [the big risky plan with the big financial payoff]. Here, I couldn’t figure out why Evelyn and Nathanial needed this money so badly. They occasionally bring up the notion of “starting over,” but we’re never sure what they need to start over from. Granted they’re not the Rockefellers, but it seems like they’re doing just fine financially. This is compounded by the fact that on the verge of the big fire, they still don’t even know what they’re going to do with the money. If your characters don’t desperately NEED whatever it is they’re going after, then we the audience are thinking, “Why are we supposed to care about this?”

This stems from a much bigger issue, however, which is that Nathaniel and Evelyn’s relationship is never defined. We don’t know what their relationship used to be like, when it got bad, why it got bad, what their central issues are, what they loved about each other, what they hate about each other, what caused their downfall. All we know is that there’s some distance between them. That’s it. This vague interpretation of their relationship makes it impossible for us to get interested when Nick comes along and breaks them up. Cause he’s not really breaking anything up. For all we know, these two are living two completely separate lives anyway. If we don’t sense that there are consequences to them getting caught, then there’s no tension to either of these devious affairs.

I know Nautica wasn’t perfect, but it got all those story elements right. And I’m not knocking Littleton. I think Vortex has a ton of potential. But these are the differences between most pro and amateur scripts. Amateur scripts have good ideas, a few nice scenes, and lots of potential, but the story elements that actually mine the drama aren’t realized yet. Sometimes that’s because the writer doesn’t want to put in the effort and sometimes it’s because he just doesn’t know how important these things are yet. But for Vortex to exist on the same level as Nautica, it’s going to need to address things like stakes, clarity, and character exploration.

As a writer, I like Littleton’s vision, but let’s infuse more drama into this situation. Vortex has the potential to be a solid thriller if he puts the work in.

Script link: Vortex

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

What I learned: You can’t have a relationship/marriage at the center of your screenplay and not explore that relationship/marriage. And for that to happen, you have to figure out who your couple is. You have to know how they met, why they fell in love with each other, important moments that shaped their lives, when it went wrong, why it went wrong, what the central issue is in their relationship right now. I had a friend who had the perfect marriage, and then one day his wife was incorrectly accused of stealing money from the company she worked for and got fired. This was a devastating blow to her confidence. The problem was, my friend traveled a lot for his own job so he wasn’t there for her during this critical time. She held that against him, started pulling away, found someone else who was sympathetic to her situation, and badaboom badabing, marriage over. All in a matter of six months. My point is, there are *real things* that pull people apart. There are real reasons behind people’s actions. If you don’t know the history behind the couples you’re exploring, you can’t explore them, and both the relationship and the story will feel thin as a result.

Whoa, I’m not usually nervous while writing up Scriptshadow posts but this one’s got me a little jittery. Outside of the prequels, I don’t think there’s been a more documented breakdown of a film’s failure to deliver on an audience’s expectations than that of Indiana Jones And The Kingdom Of The Crystal Skull. The thing is, I didn’t participate in that documentation. There was something never quite right to me about a 65 year old Indiana Jones. This was a character built on his vitality, on his youth and strength, so to turn an Indiana Jones film into Space Cowboys 2: Let’s Laugh At The Old Guy, felt like a disaster in waiting.

This allowed me to approach Skull with super-low expectations, and ironically, enjoy the film for what it was – a sloppily constructed summer tentpole film. The movie was clunky and awkward and weird – like a lot of those films tend to be – and seemed to spend most of its running time trying to figure out what it wanted to be rather than just…be.

And I think that’s the ultimate failure of Indiana Jones 4. Clearly, Lucas and Spielberg wanted to make two different movies, and a handful of unfortunate writers were assembled to balance those opposing visions and turn them into a cohesive story.

Now it’s important to know that my goal here is not to rip this movie apart. Millions of internet nerds took care of that long ago. I want to identify the poor screenwriting choices Skull made so we can learn from them and avoid those mistakes in our own writing. So, I give you the opposite of my previous Raiders article: Ten screenwriting no-nos you can learn from Indiana Jones and The Kingdom of The Crystal Skull.

THE PROTAGONIST ISN’T ACTIVE
Remember Raiders of The Lost Ark? Remember my very first observation about that movie? Indiana Jones was ACTIVE! In the very first scene, the man is risking his life to secure a golden idol from a trap-filled cave with death at every corner. When he hears about the Ark’s possible resting place, he’s on the first plane to Nepal, obsessed with locating the mythical relic. In this film? You wanna know what happens in the first scene? Indy’s been captured. Indy is REACTING to everyone else. Indy is doing WHAT OTHERS TELL HIM TO DO. It sets the tone for who Indy will be for the next 2 hours (or is it 3 hours?). He will be a REACTIVE character. He will be following Mutt around on this quest for the crystal skull. And because someone else is driving the story besides our main character, everything seems…less important. Think long and hard if you want to have a reactive hero in your action script. Chances are, it ain’t going to work.

MOVIE TAKES FOREVER TO GET GOING
Remember how quickly Raiders moved? Remember how there wasn’t an ounce of fat on it? A big reason for that was that the story knew what it wanted to be so it was able to get there right away. 15 pages in (FIFTEEN PAGES!) we’re given our goal: Get the Ark Of The Covenant. Contrast that with the bumbling, stumbling, mumbling Skull. Do you know when the plot is revealed to us in this film? Page 30! That’s when Mutt tells Indy about the coded Mayan message. Do you know when we actually START our adventure? Page 38! That’s over 20 pages further along than when Raiders got going. And people wonder why Skull feels like it drags.

PLOT IS UNCLEAR
Clarity in your main character’s central objective is crucial to the audience’s enjoyment of the movie. It’s the key to everything else working in the script. If, for example, in Raiders, we didn’t know that Indiana was looking for the Ark, we wouldn’t have cared nearly as much as we did. Yet that’s exactly how Skull tells its story. We’re never exactly sure what we’re looking for. I mean, the title mentions a crystal skull, but we only find out about the skull once Indy and Mutt locate it. Then what’s the movie about? We’re never sure! Indy’s double-agent buddy mumbles something about a city of gold. Russian Psychic Chick talks about plugging the skull in somewhere. But all this jibber-jabber is incredibly vague and we’re constantly wondering what the endgame is. The point is, the audience is never clear what the characters are going after in Skull and the second we’re unclear about your characters’ objectives, your movie is dead.

DON’T BE TOO ‘WRITERLY’
Someone gave me a note on a script once that I’d never heard before, yet I understood exactly what he meant as soon as I read it. He said my scene was too “writerly”. It’s tricky to define this word, but essentially it’s when you’re too clever for you own good, when a scene seems original and interesting as you write it, but feels false when it’s read. The magnet bullet scene in the beginning of Indy 4 is a “writerly” scene. I’m sure it felt inventive when it was conceived. (“And, like, these bullets will be dancing down the warehouse and we’ll be like, ‘Where is it taking them???’”) But man does it feel awkward when you watch it. Another “writerly” moment is the “family holds hands on top of car with baby monitor to get the alien signal” scene in M. Night’s “Signs.” Sometimes we can fall so in love with our creativity, we can’t see the forest through the trees. Be aware of “writerly” scenes in your script.

DON’T PUT GAGS BEFORE YOUR STORY
The reason people got so worked up about the infamous “nuke the fridge” scene in Skull actually had nothing to do with nuking the fridge. The problem was that the scene shouldn’t have existed in the first place. We could’ve easily cut straight from the warehouse to Indy’s classroom. So why, then, was this scene included? Because Spielberg (or Lucas) liked the gag. That’s the only reason it was there. And boy did they pay the price for it, because by holding the movie up for an entire 8 minutes for a silly gag that added nothing to the story and did nothing to push the plot forward, it allowed the audience to focus their attention on the absurdity of surviving a nuclear blast in a fridge. Except in rare circumstances, avoid putting anything in your screenplay that isn’t pushing the plot forward. Didn’t Spielberg learn this after his buddy’s whole fish-dragon sequence in Phantom Menace?

FORCED PLOT POINTS
Don’t force unnatural plot points on your audience. After the opening warehouse sequence, the FBI – for no logical reason – thinks Indy is a commie, which leads to an embarrassingly forced scene where Indy gets fired. If you need your hero to get fired for story purposes, GIVE US A REALISTIC REASON THEY’D BE FIRED. Don’t make up something that takes us out of the story. I’d easily buy Indiana Jones being forced into retirement because of his age (he is 65). Any time you insert a nonsensical plot piont in your story, you run the risk of breaking the audience’s suspension of disbelief. Keeping that suspension intact is essential to making the story work.

UNCLEAR ACTION SCENES
Remember how much I praised Raiders Of The Lost Ark’s action scenes. Do you remember why? Because the main character always had a clear objective! Here, action scenes are given out like past due Halloween Candy, none more random than the university motorcycle chase. On the one hand, we know Indy and Mutt are trying to escape. The problem is, we don’t know why. What do these men want? Are they killers? Are they kidnappers? Do they want the scribbled note? Do they want Jones to explain it? Is it okay to kill Indy and Mutt? Or do they need them alive? There’s an overwhelming lack of clarity in this chase, which is why it feels so pointless. To make an action scene work, make sure everyone’s motivation in the scene is clear. (as a side note: Compare how much Indiana is BEING CHASED in Skull to how much he was DOING THE CHASING in Raiders. Coincidence that the first film was more fun and exciting? Hmmm…)

EXPOSITION EXPOSITION EXPOSITION
I’m starting to think Christopher Nolan did a rewrite on Indiana Jones 4. The exposition in this script is so abundant and so lazy it’s embarrassing. How many pure exposition scenes do you remember in Raiders? Me? I remember one. The scene where they discuss going after the Ark. Here we have an exposition scene with the CIA agents after the Nuke The Fridge scene. We have one with Mutt in the cafe. We have another Mutt-Indy exposition scene after the motorcycle chase. Then we fly to the Amazon and get ANOTHER exposition/backstory scene as Indy and Mutt walk through the market. We then have another exposition scene down in the haunted cave. Usually when you have that much explaining to do in your story, it’s because you haven’t figured everything out beforehand, and are therefore forced to work it out during your script, resulting in…..you guessed: lazy overly abundant exposition.

LONG SCENES IN ROOMS IN ACTION MOVIES
This is an action movie. So can someone please tell me why there is a 15 minute scene in the middle of the movie that takes place in a tent? Putting your characters in a room for too long in any movie is a bad idea. But in an action movie, where the audience is expecting…ACTION?, a scene like this is deadly. And here’s the thing. WE DON’T EVEN KNOW WHAT THE PURPOSE OF THIS SCENE IS! CIA Double Agent Buddy comes in and yells at Indy about a city of gold or something. Russian Chick comes in afterwards (as if she was waiting for her turn – GOD THE LAZINESS IN THIS SCRIPT!) and tries to read Indy’s mind for…some reason. Then Rickshaw Jim The Mental Moron shows up to write something on a piece of paper. How many “people in a room” scenes were in Indy that went over 3 minutes? The Marion-Belloq scene maybe. But that scene actually had a purpose. Marion was trying to escape. This is just a big fat tent of non-stop  exposition (and what’s even more baffling is that the point of exposition is to CLARIFY things for the audience.  After this scene, we’re actually MORE confused than we were before it). The lesson here? Don’t place your action hero in a room for any extended period of time unless there’s a strong plot-related reason for it.

NEVER MAKE THINGS CONVENIENT OR EASY FOR YOUR CHARACTERS
You remember the truck chase in Raiders? Remember how Indy had to use every ounce of strength, every punch, every kick, every last brain cell (cleverly sliding underneath the truck so as not to get smushed). He worked his tail off to get control of that truck. Here? Everything, from fights to escapes are just HANDED OUT to our heroes. That 15 minute long tent scene I mentioned above? How did they get away? Shia KNOCKS OVER A TABLE! Are you kidding me? When Indy is shot into the desert with the Russian after the warehouse scene, what happens when he comes to a stop? The Russian has fallen asleep! In the back of the truck arguing with Marion? Indy KICKS the guard in the ass when he’s not looking, resulting in him passing out! But the worst is when our characters accidentally fall into a river, get dumped down three successive waterfalls, and miraculously happen to end up RIGHT IN FRONT OF THE MYSTERIOUS CAVE THEY’VE BEEN LOOKING FOR! This is a huge reason why the Indy 4 experience feels so unsatisfying. Our characters don’t earn anything. They’re HANDED everything. So please, always make things difficult for you characters. And make sure they earn their way.

So, I guess the only question left to ask is…did Indy 4 do anything right? Barely. While the goals are weak, the stakes are low, the urgency isn’t there, the plot’s unclear, there’s too much exposition, the villains suck, and the characters are barely developed, I will admit that the last 40 minutes or so were pretty exciting. Unfortunately, the reason for this had little to do with the screenplay. We, as an audience, simply knew that the story was coming to an end, and this finality, while artificially generated, gave the story some much-needed purpose. I’m disappointed with Spielberg and Lucas. I understand that there were a lot of factors at play in making this movie happen, but you’d think they’d at least put together a COMPREHENSIBLE screenplay, one where we actually understood what was going on. For some odd reason, when directors get older, they get lazier, and we got the result of that laziness here. Oh well, I heard they’re making a fifth film. Maybe someone actually plans to write a screenplay for that one?

Genre: Romantic Comedy
Premise: After a woman spills her secrets to a stranger during a turbulent plane ride, she shows up at work to discover that he is the recently returned CEO of her company.
About: Can You Keep A Secret landed on the bottom half of the 2010 Black List and is an adaptation of a novel by Sophie Kinsella. This appears to be a departure for Megan Martin, the writer, whose previous credits include spy fare (TV movie “Tangled”) and horror (Ginger Snaps: Unleashed). Although she did work on the 2009 series “Being Erica,” about a doctor who sends a woman back to all the bad decisions she made in her life so she can correct them. As I’m typing this, I’m figuring that’s what got her the job to adapt “Can You Keep A Secret.”
Writer: Megan Martin (Based on the novel by Sophie Kinsella)
Details: 114 pages – 10/04/10 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).

Oh boy, I’m already anticipating some blowback from this one. I feel the readers descending upon me, chastising me for endorsing a seemingly straightforward romantic comedy. But here’s the thing with romantic comedies: Even if they follow the traditional clichéd romantic comedy path, if you can create two characters that we fall in love with, the predictable plot elements can be excused (TO A POINT! – I am NOT saying that plot isn’t important). And the truth is, I loved both of these characters, starting with our heroine, Emma.

Emma Corrigan is living a lie. Well, aren’t we all living a lie? But Emma’s living lie is one that makes life quite difficult – she’s lying to her parents. She pretends to be a big corporate hotshot on the express elevator to the top when in reality she’s barely holding on to her assistant marketing job at a dying energy drink corporation, a job she hates with a passion and yet, like many of us, is too terrified to leave.

A big reason for Emma’s fakery is her beloved golden child cousin, Kerry, who is the apple of her parents’ eye. Kerry really *is* living the high-class corporate lifestyle, making Emma’s lack of success look more embarrassing at every turn. Of course after a couple of fibs, it’s all even again, to the point where Emma’s parents believe she’s living the exact opposite life that she actually is.

On her way back to the West Coast, Emma experiences one of her few fortuitous moments, finding herself upgraded to first class. Her seat-mate must have gotten bumped up as well because with his five-o’clock shadow and grubby outfit, he’d be lucky to be accepted on a Greyhound bus, much less the first class cabin of an airplane.

Somewhere during that five hour flight, the plane starts careening out of control, and it looks like they’re going down. A terrified Emma responds by barking out an endless closet of secrets she’s never told anyone, starting, of course, with how much she hates her job, moving on to how she made up a charity organization she volunteered for to get the job in the first place, and going into her deepest darkest sexual secrets that she’s never been able to act out (which include, amongst other things, dressing up like a nurse and being taken advantage of by a doctor).

Well wouldn’t you know it, the captain regains control of the ship, and an embarrassed Emma realizes she just told her whole life to a complete stranger. AWK-WARD. But it’s about to get a lot more awkward honey. You see, Panther Cola’s elusive CEO shows up for the first time in forever at the company. And wouldn’t you know it? It’s Airplane Guy. Who will henceforth be known as Jack Harper.

Emma assumes she’s screwed nine ways to Tuesday but is shocked when Jack calls her in and tells her she’s inspired him. Panther Cola has been down in the dumps and he’s been frantically searching for a new marketing campaign. Unleashing who you truly are, in essence, all your secrets, is the inspiration behind the campaign. And since she inspired it, he wants her to head it up.

Emma is re-energized, in both her work and her personal life, charging up those around her in ways that nobody ever expected. But as Emma and Jack’s professional relationship becomes personal, it becomes unclear if Emma is really earning all these accolades on her own, or they’re being handed to her because she’s – let’s not mince words here – “banging the boss.” When the truth finally comes out, Emma’s credibility is called into question, and all this success she’s finally been able to achieve, very well may come crumbling down.

I’ll get to the characters in a second, but what I really liked about Can You Keep A Secret was the uniformity of the theme. This romantic comedy is about something: Lying and/or the omission of truth. There’s the life we project to everyone else, and there’s the life we actually live. The distance between those worlds is usually wider than we’d prefer. Emma must lie to her parents to live up to their lofty expectations. Jack omits the truth in his relationship with Emma. Emma can’t tell her co-workers the truth about her relationship with Jack. The manipulation of truth is one of the most relatable themes out there, and I thought Can You Keep A Secret explored this in a wonderful way.

That’s why I liked Emma. I could relate to her plight. We all exaggerate things (especially us storytellers!) in order to impress the people we love, even though we know there will be consequences to those actions. And I think that’s what makes her situation so fun to watch, is that we know that, sooner or later, the consequences are coming. You can’t keep doing something “bad” forever and not have to pay for it. Just ask Bernie Madoff.

The care and attention to Jack was what really set this apart though. Usually writers will put all this work into their rom-com lead, then maybe half or three-quarters of that same work into the romantic interest. But Jack is not the typical happy-go-lucky “everything is peachy, I’m going to turn your life around” mate you usually see in these films. He’s got some pretty big problems of his own, and although it takes a while before we’re let in on those problems, we can see that they’re weighing on him.

That’s why this script got to me. Despite a lot of the formulaic plot choices (the company that NO real person ever works for – a protagonist with a marketing job), I thought the relationship itself felt realistic, with each person having real problems and real obstacles keeping them from being together.

In fact, I was all set to give this a double worth the read, but then, unfortunately, we get a huge plot contrivance late in the story, and it’s one of those contrivances you can’t make in your rom-com. In every romantic comedy, you need the “guy and girl break up” scene late in the second act. That way, they can get back together in the third act. But the break up in “Secret” is so manufactured (it involves Jack doing a CNN interview and revealing all of Emma’s secrets in a way that would never happen in real life), that it really hurt what was, up until that point, a fun romantic comedy about two people you liked.

That was a bummer, cause otherwise I would’ve given this a huge thumbs up. Unfortunately it will have to stand as a solid recommendation, a smart if predictable entry into the romantic comedy genre that WILL NOT be converting any non-rom-com fans, but should be plenty satisfying for the Notting Hill and Pretty Woman fan clubs. Just goes to show. Work on your characters first. Figure out what makes them tick. You do that and the rest of the story will come.

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

What I learned: The late rom-com break up scene people. IT HAS TO BE BELIEVABLE. It has to be realistic! I can’t tell you how many writers I see fudge their way through this. They believe that because it’s part of the convention of the genre, that the audience will accept any version of it you vomit onto the page. Here, Jack gives up the details on Emma’s deepest darkest secrets on national TV completely unprovoked!!! There’s no way in a million years he would do this.  Look at how this convention is handled in When Harry Met Sally. They sleep together. Harry is confused as hell about it afterwards so he doesn’t call her. Naturally, she pulls away from him. I buy that. I’ve seen it happen in real life before. It goes back to something I talk about on the site all the time: Logic. If it’s a pivotal plot point in the movie, make sure it makes sense on a logical level. If you try and fake it, I promise you, you will lose your audience.

Genre: Fantasy
Premise: The death of the king’s right hand man results in a reclusive knight being recruited to replace him. Not only is the world he’s about to join filled with backstabbing and murder, but is threatened by the looming reemergence of a mysterious ghost-like species to the north.
About: Game Of Thrones is the new series debuting on HBO this April. A sort of weird hybrid of knight-ly tales mixed with Lord of The Rings like influences, the series is based on the novel of the same name. The pilot was written by the ultra-successful pen of David Benioff, who makes more on a three week rewrite than most of us make in five years, and D.B. Weiss, whose bounty hunter spec script “Kashmir” sold a couple of years ago. (note to Thrones fans: I do not know the vernacular of this world well.  I apologize in advance if I misappropriate titles and such.  It was hard enough to keep track of the 30+ characters and dozen storylines).
Writers: David Benioff & D.B. Weiss, (based on the novel “A Game Of Thrones” by George R.R. Martin)
Details: 59 pages – 3/27/09 draft (This is an early draft of the script. The situations, characters, and plot may change significantly by the time the film is released. This is not a definitive statement about the project, but rather an analysis of this unique draft as it pertains to the craft of screenwriting).

You asked for it. You’re getting it. A teleplay! Lots of e-mails from writers wanting me to cover more TV. The reason I don’t is because I don’t know the TV world nearly as well as I know the feature world. I’m not as familiar with how a series gets made. I’m not as familiar with how a show is supposed to be structured. But dammit if I’m going to let that get in the way of me pretending like I do! Truthfully though, the reason I decided to review this was because HBO creates some of the best programming on television, and since they’re heavily promoting this, I wanted to take a look. Okay, that’s a lie. I’m reviewing it because it’s 60 pages.

Game Of Thrones is packed with TONS of characters, and the first half of the script is pretty much an introduction smorgasbord. The most important of these people seems to be Lord Eddard Stark, a 40 year old knight who mans the northernmost castle in this imaginary land, a few short miles from “the wall,” a sort of “Great Wall of China” but bigger. Way bigger. What’s beyond that wall remains a mystery for this episode, but we get hints that an 8000 year old species of…human once lived there, and even though 8 millennia have passed, nobody has any interest in taking the wall down. Man, talk about a legacy. People are still afraid of you 8000 years after your extinction!!??

After an unexpected death by the king’s hand, King Robert takes a trip up to Eddard’s northern fortress to ask for his help. He wants Eddard to replace his enforcer and help manage his kingdom. While this would up his family’s profile quite a bit, Eddard is noticeably reluctant. He likes hanging out up here in the middle of nowhere – living the simple life so to speak. This would change his world considerably, and he’s not sure the pros outweigh the cons.

The rest of the script is a series of tiny subplots setting up a multitude of characters. We have an angry sex-crazed dwarf named Tyrion who’s so much like Charlie Sheen you wish Mr. Tiger Blood himself could turn into a dwarf so he could play the role.  We have a young woman being forced into a marriage for political gain by her evil power-obsessed brother. We have the beheading of a prominent knight for deserting his duties after supposedly seeing a clan of ghosts. And we have the king’s 8 year old son accidentally seeing something he should not have seen, resulting in a shocking “guaranteed to get you back for a second episode” finale. All in all, a very jam-packed episode of TV.

Okay, there’s a secret being whispered about in the back rooms of Hollywood screenwriting channels. It’s one of those things you tell your feature-loving friends behind closed doors, but not dare say in public as doing so would be admitting a horrifying truth – that TV has become more interesting than film. I was watching The Walking Dead marathon this weekend on AMC and it hit me: This is really fucking good. But more importantly, it was different. It was challenging. It was unique. It took chances. Does any of this sound familiar? Of course not. That’s because movies stopped doing any of this stuff ten years ago (some would argue even 20 or 30 years ago).

This is a particularly interesting conversation as we were just debating this with last week’s Amateur submission, Glastonburied. Sean argued, soundly, that writers shouldn’t always follow the rules and should instead take chances and let their instincts guide them. But therein lies the rub. Just being different does not equal “better.” In fact, the large majority of the time, different means much worse, and that’s because most of the people being different don’t even know how they’re being different, cause they never learned how to be the same. It’s an ugly confusing state us cinema lovers are in right now because we need vision, we need to take chances like these television people do, but I’m not sure enough people know how to take good chances that pay off. The reason The Walking Dead is so good is because it’s produced by Frank Darabont, one of, if not the, best screenwriters in the business. He knows how to be different because he understands all the rules he’s breaking.

Getting back to Thrones, this show is indeed a unique shifty story that could only be made on TV these days, and that’s a crying shame, as it ambitiousness is exactly what the feature world lacks at the moment.  But is Thrones different good?  Or is it different bad? 

Maybe it’s because I’m not as familiar with TV, but holy moses smell the roses there are a TON of freaking characters introduced here. The first 30 pages consist entirely of characters being set up. Ugh, I felt like I was swimming in the La Brea tar pits. What made it even worse was that everyone was a “Ser” or a “Lady” or a “Lord,” There were so many damn sers and ladies and lords I felt like I was at a Dungeon and Dragons convention. But if you stick with it, if you push past this early portion of the script, Game Of Thrones starts to get good.

It starts with Eddard. There’s something broken about this man that we want to know more about. He’s given this great opportunity to change his life. So why is he so reluctant to do so?  We also get a large dose of conspiracy, as we find out that the king’s hand might not have died, but instead was murdered. Hmm… And don’t get me started about this strange mythical species on the other side of the wall. Who the hell are these guys? What exactly did they do to have a kingdom keep a wall up 8000 years after their extinction? We have emerging nemeses with studly knights. We have beheadings. We have forced marriages. We have incest. There’s a lot of interesting fucked up shit going on here.  It kind of feels like Tudors on steroids.  And acid.  Lots of acid.

One of the reasons I believe reading TV pilots is important is because the medium depends more on its characters. Story is important, but not nearly as much as the people who populate that story. For that reason, all of the characters tend to be richer, more detailed and more interesting.

For example, Eddard’s oldest son must bear the brunt of being a bastard child, born from one of his father’s whores. This reality clearly eats away at him every second of every day, to be a lord’s son, and yet not be one, and we can already tell that at some point, this situation is going to explode. In its short running time, Game of Thrones introduces tons of characters like this, all battling some inner unresolved conflict, and when reading features, I rarely see that attention to detail in what’s going on INSIDE of everyone.  Not every character hits in Thrones, but a lot of them do.

The one thing I do know about TV is you need that last minute cliffhanger to bring the audience back for week 2, and while I wouldn’t call what happens at the end of Game of Thrones a “twist,” the way they used to throw around shockers on Lost, it’s shocking enough that you won’t believe it happened, and I guarantee you that you’ll be checking in next week. I’ll be checking in for Week 2 of Game Of Thrones and I haven’t even seen the first week yet.:)

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

What I learned: A great reminder that your characters should be battling some inner conflict.  Whether it’s with their own identity (being a bastard son), with a belief in themselves, their commitment to family, selfishness, obsession with power.  The characters in Thrones are all fighting battles inside, which is why they all feel a cut above normal movie fare.

Genre: Sci-Fi/Comedy
Premise: Every man in the world is dead except for a young slacker and his pet monkey, leaving a world entirely populated by females.
About: Brian K. Vaughan is a comic book writer, a TV writer (Lost), and has sold a few spec screenplays. This is an adaptation of Vaughan’s own comic book, Y The Last Man, which he sold a few years back.
Writer: Brian K. Vaughan (Based on the series from Vertigo Comics Created by Brian K. Vaughan & Pia Guerra)
Details: Draft 1.2 (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).

There are few screenwriters out there who have as much geek cred as Brian K. Vaughan. You say his name and geeks everywhere smile unintentionally, their cheeks turning red the way a 13 year old girl reacts when the school stud says hi to her in the hallway. I, however, am still undecided on Vaughan. I loved the majority of Roundtable, his Ghostbusters-like spec sale from a few years back about modern day knights trying to save the world. But The Vault left me colder. I liked it enough to recommend it, but parts of it were just so weird and out there. The guy’s imagination is so deep it gives George Lucas pause, and at times that gets him into trouble. But I knew this one was supposed to be good. Plenty of people have recommended it to me before, so I was more than happy to finally read it. Indeed, it starts out with a great question: What if you really were the last man on earth?

Y The Last Man starts the way a spec script should: with something happening. And boy is something happening. Moms are driving their dying husbands and sons to the hospital. Businessmen are keeling over mid-stride. 747s are crashing into the middle of cities. It appears we’re smack dab in the middle of the Apocalypse. Well, sort of anyway. We realize quickly that this apocalyptic event is selective, only killing off the men in the world, sparing the ladies and girls completely. Within 5 hours, every damn living creature with a y chromosome is a burnt pop tart, el officio deadondo.

Or wait, not EVERY living man. It appears that eternal slacker Yorick Brown and his pet monkey, Ampersand, have somehow survived this ordeal. We’re not sure how yet but a guess is that the monkey has something to do with it. So Yorick throws on a gas mask to disguise himself, and heads to his mom’s place, where he hopes she’ll know what to do. Shock City then when his mom betrays him and calls the CIA!

Yorick grabs the monkey, jumps out the back window (don’t you love how awesome back windows are in movies?) and sprints for his life. A test subject for the remainder of his existence does not sound like fun. The last Yorick heard, his girlfriend, Beth, touched down in Los Angeles, and the poor romantic sap feels like if he can just make it to her, everything will be okay. Too bad finding your girlfriend in an apocalyptic wasteland isn’t as easy as jumping out the back window.

Unfortunately, Colonel Alter Tse-Elon, a female soldier in the Israeli defense force, hears about Yorick and makes it her mission to find him. She believes (I think – I wasn’t clear) that if Yorick is found alive that the earth could be repopulated with men, the root of all war, and that once again Israel would be subject to attack. Finding and killing off Yorick would essentially ensure world peace.

And you know what? She’s not the only one who wants to take Yorick down. A huge female biker gang that may or may not be hardcore feminazi lesbians, discover the presence of Yorick and want to pave his way down the Highway to Hell as well. Ugh, not good.

Luckily Yorick runs into Agent 355, a smoking hot secret agent for…some really secret agency, who decides to help him get to Los Angeles. She’s really the only thing that stands between him and capture, as she fights off the biker chicks and Israeli army at every turn, all the while trying to convince Yorick to offer himself to science so they can repopulate the world with men. Will this happen? Will the world’s biggest slacker be able to save mankind? We’ll have to see.

Y The Last Man is as crazy as it sounds. And that’s both its biggest strength and its biggest weakness. What I like about Vaughan is that he gives you what every reader asks for. Surprise. Show me something different. And when Vaughan writes, indeed, you’re never quite sure what’ll happen on the next page. But it’s a double-edged sword, since what you get isn’t always satisfying, and occasionally is so broad that even the developers of those weird Japanese video games step back and say, “Whoa dude, not bi-winning, too far.” A lesbian biker gang? The Isralei army? A pet monkey? It’s not as out there as The Vault, but you definitely need to be up for the absurd when reading one of Vaughn’s scripts.

On the technical side, I wished Vaughan had explored his premise a little more. What if there really were no men left in the world? There’s a great little scene early on where this super-hot chick pulls up in a garbage truck (which she can barely drive), clumsily screwing up her job at every turn, and we’re going, “What the hell is this girl doing driving a garbage truck?” And she explains how she used to be a model, but when all the men disappeared, there was no use for models anymore, forcing her to take the lowliest of lowly jobs. True it was a gimmicky scene that had nothing to do with the plot but I loved that it was actually exploring the premise in a clever way. And I wanted to see more of that. There’s a little of it (the energy sector was dominated by men so there’s basically no electricity anymore) but I was hoping for more.

Structurally, the script has some good and bad things about it. You have a main character with a clear goal (“Get to Beth”) and plenty of urgency behind the goal, since Yorick is constantly being chased. Remember, if you don’t have a ticking time bomb in your script, a great supplement is to create a chase scenario. If someone’s always on your hero’s heels, it creates the illusion of a ticking time bomb. And whenever you have a road trip scenario, you probably want someone chasing your characters anyway, as it gives the story an added edge.

On the stakes front, I’m not sure the script achieves its goal. While Yorick IS the last man on earth, and therefore the last chance to save mankind, that’s not what his mission is about. His mission is to get to his girlfriend. It’s not like Will Smith in I Am Legend, where his goal was to come up with a cure to save makind, truly high stakes. Yorick is trying to get to Beth, which doesn’t really do anything but…get him to Beth. If you look at a movie like The Day After Tomorrow, where a father is trying to find his son, him finding his son actually means something, since he (as well as everyone) is in danger. Beth’s not in danger. And on top of that, when we last saw these two together, she didn’t even like Yorick, so the stakes driving the story are a little soft.

The biggest misstep, however, was one I noticed only because I’d watched Raiders recently. Every third or fourth scene In Y The Last Man is Yorick and Agent 355 in a safe setting (on a train, on the side of the road) talking. These scenes are weak because the story isn’t being pushed forward in any noticeable way. Instead, the characters are talking about their pasts or discussing the effects of the plague. They’re not TERRIBLE scenes because Vaughan is good with dialogue (i.e. “You know what the strongest muscle in the human body is?” “The heart?” “No, it’s not the heart, you sappy fuck. It’s your jaw muscle. Even a scrawny dude like me has five hundred pounds of bite strength.” “Great, that’ll come in handy when you’re fighting food.”) but there’s no outside force or conflict or subtext going on during them. It’s just two people talking.

Compare that with the “dialogue” scenes between Indiana and Marion in Raiders. When he first finds Marion, he has to convince this woman whose life he ruined to help him. Or later on when they’re talking in Cairo, the baddies are moving into place to attack them. Or when she’s dressing Indy’s wounds, probably one of the truest “straight dialogue” scenes in the movie, even there the sexual chemistry that’s been building through them the entire movie is about to burst. In other words, there’s ALWAYS SOMETHING GOING ON in those scenes, whereas here in Y The Last Man, it just feels like two people talking. This is more a testament to how good Raiders is than any defining statement about Y The Last Man, but it is a reminder to add layers to your dialogue scenes.

In my opinion, Y The Last Man is too broad, too loose with the reigns, but there’s no denying that Vaughan always keeps you guessing and has some of the more unique characters you’ll find in a script. You want to talk about a unique voice, a voice that separates a writer from everybody else out there, go ahead and read one of Vaughan’s scripts. And for that reason alone, I think Y The Last Man should be read.

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

What I learned: I’m surprised I’m bringing this up with a Brian K. Vaughan script, since I just championed his originality, but this is proof that even the top writers fall into the same traps as the rest of us. No less than six days ago – SIX DAYS AGO! – I read an apocalypse script where in the opening scene, a jumbo jet crashes into the city. What happens in the opening scene of Y The Last Man? A jumbo jet crashes into the city. This is proof that ALL WRITERS THINK ALIKE. We think apocalypse and we imagine a plane diving into the middle of New York. It’ll be epic! But did we ever stop to consider that everyone else who’s writing an apocalypse script would think of the same thing? For that reason, always keep your competition in mind. Ask yourself if another writer would write the same thing. And if they would, write something else. Maybe an oil tanker with no one at the helm plows into the port instead. I don’t know. But keep in mind that that cool original scene you just wrote? A reader may have just read it last week. Which means you’re playing the role of second fiddle.