Genre: Action
Premise: Following in his murdered mother’s footsteps, Michael Griffiths enlists in the United States Postal Service… only to discover a mail route full of surprises and a job that means maybe, just maybe, saving the world.
About: This script finished with 11 votes on last year’s Black List. This writer is just getting started. He does have some Hollywood experience though, being Nicholas Stoller’s assistant on both Neighbors 2 and Storks. It looks like Amazon Studios may have purchased this to produce. It also appears to be an original spec. It isn’t based on anything that I know of.
Writer: Perry Jane
Details: 122 pages

Damon Wayans Jr. for Michael?

Before I dive into this one – because I’m going to warn you in advance, it wasn’t for me – I want to say something positive. Which is that it was nice to see a big fun movie on the Black List for once. The Black List has become… I don’t know… weird. Some of the scripts that make the list defy explanation. So it’s cool that something your average moviegoer would pay for got on there.

Unfortunately, for script snobs like me, The U.S.P.S. was more “general postage rate” than “Express Mail.”

When word gets to 20-something security guard Michael that his mother died on her postal route, he’s already feeling guilty about not spending more time with her. But then Michael gets a security box key, and that’s where he learns that his mom was a lot more than your average postal worker. She was an agent who used her postal office cover to take down bad nasty people. His mother didn’t die. She was murdered!

Michael is quickly recruited by someone named Sinda, who knew his mother well. She takes Michael to a secret underground location where he’s instated as a trainee in the U.S.P.S. program – The United States Program of Spies!!!!! (“Neither snow nor rain nor gloom of night, nor threat of suffering and death, stays these agents from the swift completion of their mission.”)

Sinda believes that Michael’s mother was killed by a woman named Bonnie Jo Boone, who has just sent a message to the U.S. government that they have to give back 5 trillion dollars to be dispersed to all the poor people in the country that it was “stolen” from. Bonnie Jo works with six modified humans that are basically like, cyborgs, I guess. Translation: she’s serious.

Michael doesn’t get the gig right away, though. He has to try out against a bunch of other prospective spies. So he has to do things like sneak up to a house and deliver mail without anybody noticing.

When Bonnie Jo accelerates her plan, Sinda realizes they have to do the same. So Michael is promoted to a spy on a ‘probationary period.’ Michael is sent to a suspicious bank in the middle of Manhattan, where he discovers Bonnie and her team, waiting to rob it. The postal spies attack, which sends everyone on a crazy car chase through New York, complete with an old postal truck that transforms into a super-car-weapon-thing.

Bonnie Jo is able to get away. But Sinda learns something even worse. That Bonnie Jo is working with someone from the inside! They have a traitor in their midst! So off they go to the supposed traitor’s party (someone at the FBI) where they look for clues to take him down before Bonnie is able to commence her bank-draining plan that will move 5 trillion dollars out of the hands of the wealthy and into the hands of the people!

What is plot?

Plot is the sequence of events that push your primary story forward.

The spacing between these “plot beats” will dictate whether your script is designated as “plot heavy” or “plot light.” Smaller movies tend to have more spacing between their plot beats. Big Hollywood movies tend to have less. The reason is obvious. People who go to see a big Hollywood movie are expecting to be entertained consistently the whole way through. So you’ll see a lot of plot beats in Fast Furious, Iron Man 3, Star Wars.

Here’s the problem, though. If you erase all spacing between plot beats, your story loses its soul. If the only thing that is happening in your script is you’re racing your characters from one plot marker to the next, it’s hard for the viewer to connect with the characters. And that’s my problem with The U.S.P.S. It’s plot plot plot plot plot plot plot plot and plot.

Now the writer of The U.S.P.S. may argue that he does have some slower moments. We see Michael get drunk one night thinking about his mom’s death. I think there are a couple of more scenes like that throughout the script. Here’s the thing, though. You don’t get points for trying. For character-driven moments to resonate, you, the writer, have to care about them. If you’re just putting them in there because a screenwriting website told you to, or because you want to avoid someone giving you the note that you didn’t focus enough on character, they’re not going to work.

For character stuff to work, you have to be interested in the internal workings of your characters. You have to want to be exploring something with them that you’re just as curious about as your plot. One of the reasons the last two Avengers movies were so popular is because of Thanos. This is a guy who truly believed in what he was doing and had to make some horrible choices, including killing his own daughter, to succeed at his mission. There was something going on in that character. Something he was battling inside.

This is a major difference between the screenplays I read that are good and the ones that are bad. The good screenplays are almost always the ones where the writer is curious about the human condition with at least one of their characters. They want to know what makes a person tick, not how many ticks to the next plot twist. They’re interested in what it feels like to be Wade Wilson (Deadpool), who’s forced to stay away from the love of his life because he’s been burned beyond recognition and is ashamed of how he looks. They don’t care about the flashy Deadpool fight scenes. Well, they do, but they know those won’t work unless they get the character right.

And what’s so hard for writers – especially new writers – to understand, is that you can’t fake it. You can’t show a character looking sad remembering their dead parent if you haven’t sat down and thought about how that death has shaped them as a human being. Because it’s that shaping that’s going to come out in every scene they’re in. If you have to remind an audience that a character is affected by a traumatic event, you probably haven’t figured out who your character is yet. Characters LIVE those events.

Look, this script wasn’t bad. It’s like an American version of Kingsman. So if all you care about is eye entertainment, it might be fun. It’s a little out-there. A bit goofy for my taste. But it should make for an interesting movie.

I guess my issue is that U.S.P.S. felt like a writer who had 52 beats he had to stuff into a 120 page package and his mission, instead of writing something that explored the human condition in an entertaining way, was to make sure all 52 beats got in there through hell or high water. For that reason, the script couldn’t breathe. It was always about getting to the next checkpoint. And that’s why it wasn’t for me.

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

What I learned: I want to talk about bolded underlined sluglines for a second because I see them being used occasionally, including here. One of the goals of a writer should be to make the reading experience as easy as possible. The more your eyes flow from left to right and down the page, the better. Bolded underlined sluglines create the effect of blockages on the page. That big ugly black line feels like something you have to burrow through or go around. If your script is light on locations (and therefore doesn’t have a lot of sluglines), this might not be a big deal. But if you’re switching locations a lot? If you’ve got 3 or 4 on a page? Those bolded sluglines can start to look like giant blockades in the middle of a street. It’s not pleasant. It’s something you should definitely think twice about.

Has Scriptshadow become the “I Care A Lot” channel? Is tomorrow a 5000 word breakdown on Peter Dinklage’s character in the film? No, but the Golden Globes are so weak this year (it feels like the bronze medal game at the Olympics) I don’t have anything to say about them other then they should come up with a new category called, “Most Boring Movie” and just put all the movies in that category because that’s how good these movies look.

On the plus side, this gives me an opportunity to talk about my favorite topic: “I Care A Lot,” a movie I just highlighted a scene from last week. At that point, I had only watched half the movie, mostly because everyone said the movie “fell apart in the second half” and that didn’t exactly motivate me to finish it. But this weekend I sat down and gave it a full watch and you know what?

You were all wrong.

This is a good movie from start to finish and I’m going to explain why. Now, you should know that this is a twisty turny flick and, therefore, you should check it out before you read this because I’m going to be spoiling the bejesus out of everything. But if you’re okay with spoilers, let’s continue.

“I Care A Lot” attempts to walk one of the thinnest tightropes in screenwriting – building the story around an unlikable protagonist. Marla is someone who makes her living off of conning old people. These seniors are perfectly healthy. Yet she thrusts them into assisted loving homes without their permission so she can take control of their finances and rob them blind.

The reason it’s so hard to make scripts like this work should be obvious. If we’re not rooting, in some way, for the main character, nothing else matters. You can have the most amazing plot in the world and it doesn’t matter if we detest the protagonist.

I want to highlight something I’ve never seen any other screenwriting enthusiast talk about. Which is that there are three degrees of unlikable protagonists. I bring this up because a lot of writers push back when you talk about unlikable protagonists and say that as long as they’re “interesting,” you can build a story around them.

But it’s actually more complicated than that because the different degrees of ‘unlikable’ dictate how hard you have to work to get the reader to root for your hero. The first and most common unlikable hero is the ‘bad but not really bad’ protagonist. This would be someone like the Mandalorian. He’s not very nice to anybody. He only does things if it helps him. He doesn’t talk a lot. But let’s be real. He loves Baby Yoda and at the end of most episodes, he’s helped someone else out. Readers will always root for these characters because they know, deep down, they’re good.

The second type of unlikable protagonist is the “genuinely bad” protagonist. This is someone slightly more sinister than the Mandalorian and truly in it for himself. A good comp would be Melvin Udall (Jack Nicholson) in As Good as It Gets or Louis Bloom in Nightcrawler. These characters can be downright nasty, saying mean things to people or constantly screwing those people over. Still, if you know what you’re doing as a writer, you can keep us rooting for characters like this.

The third type of unlikable character is the “truly bad” protagonist. What separates this character from the others? These characters are morally bankrupt. Not only do they hurt others, but they hurt people who are lesser than them. Children. Old people. The poor. Underlings. This is what Marla is and this is the single hardest character to make an audience give a shit about.

Which is why so many viewers had a problem with I Care A Lot. We watched this despicable character get away with destroying numerous old peoples’ lives and then, once she’s finally met her match (the son of one of the old people she screws over turns out to be a crime boss), the writer asks us to get behind Marla and root for her in the last 45 minutes.

One of the best tricks you can use when you have an unlikable protagonist is to make the antagonist even worse than they are. That’s the method writer-director J Blakeson used when constructing this movie. He brought in crime boss, Roman, who was even nastier than Marla. Theoretically, at least. Roman tries to kill Marla and her girlfriend, but Marla survives and wants revenge.

Where Blakeson gets in trouble, in my opinion, is that Roman isn’t bad enough to make us Marla’s number one fan. What you have to remember with screenwriting is that how you introduce your character influences the lion’s share of how the audience perceives them. Even though Roman’s a big fat heartless meanie to Marla, we haven’t forgotten how horrible Marla is. How horrible are we talking? Well, I recommended this movie to a friend and she stopped me halfway through the pitch saying, “Oh, that’s horrible,” in response to what Marla was doing to people. She then said she wouldn’t watch the movie.

In other words, your villain has to be EXTREMELY TERRIBLE for the average viewer to change their mind and root for Marla.

While at first I thought Marla and Roman ending up on the same level was a mistake, I began to think that that was Blakeson’s plan all along. This feeds into why the movie works for me. After Marla survives, she kidnaps Roman and brings him to the brink of death, leaving him out in the middle of nowhere, which results in the police finding him, bringing him to the hospital, and labeling him a ‘John Doe.’


We then learn that when a John Doe is found and can’t take care of himself, a legal guardian must be assigned to them. And guess who that legal guardian is? That’s right. Marla. — When movies fall apart, it’s because the writer didn’t come up with a plan. So as they race towards their ending, they throw in a bunch of craziness hoping it’s enough to distract the reader from the fact that they have zero plan. But by creating this twist that pays off Marla’s job, the writer clearly had a plan in mind.

Next up, Marla says she’ll release Roman from her care if he gives her 10 million dollars, which is the amount of money she’s wanted all along. Roman comes up with an alternative idea. Expand her care-taking business. Enough of this small-potatoes shit. Let’s lean into the American dream and go national with this business model of yours. He’ll fund it. She’ll build it. They’ll become partners.

It’s an admittedly zany development. But here’s what I respected. Blakeson understood that neither character should win. They were both too despicable. If she destroys him, we’re upset. If he destroys her, we’re frustrated. The one direction we do not expect the plot to take is a team-up. And the more you think about it, the more sense it makes. They’re both greedy. Of course they want to team up to make even more money than they could separately. It’s the right choice for the story.

What Blakeson also knows is that you can’t have a negative character who doesn’t change over the course of the movie be rewarded. The audience won’t accept it. They need “the right thing” to prevail so they can leave feeling like the world is fair. And so Blakeson has one more payoff. After Marla becomes a multi-millionaire, she’s heading to her car when a crazed man who we recognize from the opening charges at her screaming that his mom died and because of her, he never got to see her, and he shoots Marla dead.

The wicked witch is dead. Order has been restored.

I was told that everything that happens in the last 40 minutes of this movie was random and dumb. But I didn’t see it that way at all. It was all clearly and cleverly constructed with setups and payoffs that make sense. Blakeson knew what he was doing, delivered the movie he intended, and I’m here to tell you he pulled it off. In fact, I would go so far as to say that the reason so many people are so passionate about this film not working is why it works. A movie only truly doesn’t work when our response is apathy. Passion, positive or negative, only comes when a movie affects us in some way. And while this movie made some unconventional choices, the fact that you care a lot about discussing it tells me it worked. :)

Are we getting a black Superman? What’s going on with Kinetic? Are there any updates? What the heck is a “programmer” and why is it now my least favorite word? A trip down memory lane on the eve of David Fincher and Andrew Kevin Walker re-teaming. What is the hardest character for a reader to remember? I review the SINGLE HOTTEST PROJECT IN HOLLYWOOD right now. Did I like it? And what is it like breaking up with Gerard Butler just 14 short days after Valentine’s Day? All of that and more in this month’s newsletter!

If you want to read my newsletter, you have to sign up. So if you’re not on the mailing list, e-mail me at carsonreeves1@gmail.com with the subject line, “NEWSLETTER!” and I’ll send it to you.

p.s. For those of you who keep signing up but don’t receive the newsletter, try sending me another e-mail address. E-mailing programs are notoriously quirky and there may be several reasons why your e-mail address/server is rejecting the newsletter. One of which is your server is bad and needs to be spanked.

You know there’s not a lot to talk about in Hollywood when you’re thinking, “Maybe I should cover Kim Kardashian and Kanye West’s divorce today. Maybe there’s some screenwriting tip we can draw from Kanye’s tweets.” I thought I had a juicy nugget to build today’s article around when someone sent me a link to “JJ Abrams’ Episode 8 Treatment.” The presentation was somewhat convincing. The treatment is a series of pictures (as opposed to a PDF) on red paper, the color that makes them hard to photocopy, and therefore preferred by writers trying to keep something from leaking. But I barely got to the second page before my b.s. meter started chirping.

It always amuses me when people say things like, “JJ Abrams doesn’t know what he’s doing! He only knows fan service.” Go ahead and read this treatment. This is what true fan service looks like. Within seconds of Rey handing Luke the lightsaber on the mountain, the two start dueling, Luke immediately jumping into exposition mode. “Did you ever ask yourself how an untrained pilot like you could suddenly fly the Falcon & outmaneuver those Tie Fighters? Then, somehow rendezvous with Han & Chewie shortly after? You know how to pilot the Falcon, because I know how to pilot th eFalcon. You beat Kylo on Starkiller because I was with you… aiding your untrained mind. It’s an old trick Jedi masters used to help their padawans.” You gotta love the ampersands, incorrectly capitalized words, and randomly placed commas, lol.

I was bummed it was fake cause I wanted something to talk about today. But then I realized I hadn’t updated everyone on my producing endeavors in a while. So guess what? I’m going to do that right now!

PRIORITY NUMBER 1 – KINETIC

For those of you who visit the site less frequently, Kinetic is the script that won my contest. The logline is: “Following a harrowing phone call while out on the road, a long haul trucker with a tormented past must deliver a tank of liquid crystal meth before sundown in order to save his pregnant wife.” If you remember, I told you that our number one priority was attaching Gerard Butler. So we first went to Millennium, a production company he does a lot of movies with, and they passed. As soon as that happened, I was able to get the script to Butler’s gatekeeper through a mutual friend. And that’s where it is now.

All I can do at this point is wait until she reads it. One of the most frustrating things about this business is the waiting game. Especially when you’re low on the priority list. Until I’ve got movies under my belt, it’s going to be a grind. And I know that. I’m not afraid of that. If Butler doesn’t work out, I’ve got the next three steps ready for Kinetic. Cause here’s the thing with Kinetic. And it’s something I’ve never really had with a project before: THIS IS GOING TO BE A MOVIE. It’s too perfectly suited to become movie for it not to become a movie. It’s too guaranteed to make money for whoever produces it. It has all the elements that result in a profitable fun film. And not only that. If the execution of the film is as good as this script, it has the potential to become a franchise. So all I have to do is keep getting it to people. There’s no question, in my mind, that, sooner or later, one of those reads is going to lead to the project getting greenlit.

PRIORITY NUMBER 2 – MOTHER REDEEMER

Here’s the logline for Mother Redeemer for those who don’t remember: “After a devout member of a small religious sect receives a sign from their God that she will be the mother of Earth’s messiah, she must find a way to protect her divine child from the cult’s corrupt leader.” Mother Redeemer is an interesting project because I’ve been sending it out and getting lukewarm responses. Now, here’s the thing. I know this is a good script. I read scripts like it all the time. And this is a cut above all of them. But the script is undeniably a slow burn. And what I’m realizing is that the hardest kind of spec script to get people excited about is a slow burn. The spec scripts that work best on the market are scripts like Bullet Train or Kinetic. Stuff that moves quickly on the page. Mother Redeemer is all about ‘build’ and tension and suspense, all of which it does beautifully.

I suspect that the people reading it aren’t sticking with it long enough to lose themselves in it. The reason I suspect that is because the same thing happened to me when I first read it. The main reason the script made it through the “First Ten Pages” round was not because I was enamored with the story. I simply recognized that the writing was strong. Then, when I started reading the script in the second round, I remember being on the fence about it 25 pages in. I specifically remember being tired and wanting to go to sleep. Then I thought, “Ehhh, I’ll finish it up so I have more time to myself tomorrow.” And, from there, every 10 pages, the script got better. And better. And better. And by the third act, my face was two inches from the screen, I was so into it. The dirty little secret about script reads is that nobody owes you a full script read. If they’re bored on page 20, they may decide to not read the rest and tell you they did. It’s not like they’re going to be quizzed about it. I suspect that might be what’s happening here. People aren’t making it past that same threshold in the script that I made it past where the script got infinitely better. So, the writer, Brian, and I, are trying to address this issue and make those first 20 pages read quicker. I still have a ton of confidence in the project. It could literally be made for 3-5 million dollars and it’s got two AWESOME roles for actors: the young pregnant woman (think Margaret Qualley) and the cult leader (think Michael Shannon or Adam Driver). I would love to get a Jennifer Kent (Babadook) to direct this. Ultimately, it’s going to be about finding people who, like Brian and I, are fascinated by the cult world.

PRIORITY NUMBER 3 – MANIACAL

You guys might not know about this horror project yet. Here’s the logline: “A teenager is forced to protect her half-siblings when mysterious masks begin appearing around the world that compel people to put them on, turning them into homicidal psychopaths.” It comes from co-writers Andy Marx and William McArdle. The two made the finals of my contest with their script, Crescent City (“A woman with the ability to control ghosts is forced to protect a witness being hunted by supernatural assassins.”). So why am I focusing on Maniacal instead of Crescent City? Simple. It will cost 1/10th as much money to produce. This is a 3-5 million dollar movie. Crescent City is a 30-50 million dollar movie. It’s John Wick with a female lead in the voodoo world. And it’s a movie I want to make badly. But Maniacal feels like the clearer path to victory, right now. And then, once we get that movie made and the writers have some heat on them, we’ll pitch Crescent City. Because I think Crescent City has the most upside of all of these projects. It could become a HUGE franchise.

The writers and I are currently fixing a few issues with the script. One of the main problems was that the mythology was a little thin. This crazy stuff starts happening all around the world and I wasn’t convinced that the reader understood what was happening. So we’re adding more scenes that give us insight into what’s going on. The thing I love about Maniacal is that it harkens back to those fun horror movies they made in the 80s. Simple but scary. And I love this hook of, what if you woke up one day and everyone was Michael Meyers? It wasn’t just one guy. What do you do? As soon as we get the script right, we’ll start targeting the horror production companies.

REST OF PROJECTS

What else am I working on? Contest finalist, That Wind Come Down (“After taking the fall for a horrific crime and spending twenty five years in prison, a neurologically disabled ex-con must confront his troubled past as he desperately tries to find a kidnapped young woman who’s disappearance may be connected to his past transgressions”) is still in the development stage. The script made the finals mainly on the talent of its writer, Chris Rodgers. But the story needs to go through a maturation process before it’s ready for the market.

I still have to re-read Tighter (“When a Japanese rope bondage workshop is taken hostage by masked intruders, a couple must find a way to escape their captors while tied together at the wrists”) and give Arun Croll notes. I’ve been slammed wall-to-wall with work so I haven’t been able to find the time yet. I found this amazing writer who wrote this great NASCAR pilot about a race car driver who finally gets a chance to shine after the retirement of his famous father but then his father wants back in. It’s basically NASCAR meets SUCCESSION. This might be the best-written thing of all the scripts I have but I’m struggling to understand the TV world. It’s something I don’t know as well as the movie world. So this might take a little longer to get through the system as I educate myself (feel free to e-mail me if you have advice cause this pilot is better than 95% of the stuff on TV right now. It deserves to be made).

I’m also working on a unique tennis project called, “Loser.” Let’s just say it’s unlike any sports movie you’ve seen before and is built around the premise of a professional tennis player who loses… a lot. There’s a script from long-time Scriptshadow reader, Alexander Bashkirov (who’s had tons of scripts reviewed on the site) called “Scorcher,” which is an action thriller with a REALLY fun premise that we’re working on. And there’s a thriller set in India that I hope to share more about in the coming months.

A couple of final thoughts that can double as today’s “What I learned.” Think hard about writing slow-burn spec scripts. They aren’t naturally suited for the spec market, which favors faster moving stories. Don’t get me wrong. If they’re great, they can get you noticed. But there’s no question you’ll have to send your script out to more people than you would if you wrote a more spec-friendly genre. Also, one of the things about sending your scripts out there is that everyone is going to tell you why your movie *can’t* be made. Back to the Future, one of the greatest movies ever, was famously rejected by everyone. The Anchorman creators were famously told by one studio to never EVER send them a script like that again, lol. It took John Lee Hancock, who has a successful career in the business, 30 years for someone to finally let him make The Little Things. The point is, there is no script that automatically goes to the front of the line. It’s always “Here’s why this doesn’t work.” Your job as a producer, or as a writer promoting their own script, is to not take these critiques personally and understand that they’re part of the process of getting a movie made. No movie has ever been made without people persevering through a lot of adversity. If you believe in a script, keep going until the cameras start rolling.

Have a wonderful week, guys. And if you’re a production company or director or financier or actor who wants to be involved in one of these films, e-mail me at carsonreeves1@gmail.com. Get in before it’s too late! :)

One of the interesting things about reading all those scripts in a row for my contest was seeing so many scripts fall apart in real time. Which was frustrating. You want every script to be good. And with all these scripts passing the “First 10 Pages Test,” your expectations are already high.

So why is it, then, that so many scripts start off strong, then fall apart?

I remember reading semi-finalist script, Wish List. In case you forgot, here’s the logline: “An Amazon delivery man is ambushed in Mexico by a group of gangsters who mistake him for a drug mule, and must survive using only the packages inside his van.” The opening teaser followed an Amazon delivery guy (not the main character) who’s attacked by a crooked Mexican cop. He doesn’t get out alive, establishing the stakes for when we meet *our* Amazon delivery driver.

It didn’t take long for me to lose some of that early confidence in the script. The main character was a bit too goofy for my taste. He reminded me of someone Kevin James might play. Which is fine if you’re writing a comedy. But this wasn’t a comedy. The driver is soon trapped by a Mexican cartel and his situation is anything comedic.

A great concept is both a blessing and a curse. It’s a blessing because it gets you more reads. It’s a curse because you now have to live up to that great concept. That means you have to be as clever as your logline implies. And this is where the edges of Wish List started to fray.

Let me be clear about something first, though. Wish List doesn’t make any big mistakes. The mistakes it makes are actually quite average. Unfortunately, that’s all it takes for a reader to lose interest. You guys know this. You read scripts from the site all the time. The second an even mildly questionable writing choice is made, you raise an eyebrow, and by the time a second one arrives, you’re out.

Wish List already had one strike against it because I didn’t feel the tone of the hero matched the tone of his predicament. Then, once the driver started using his packages, that’s where my interest dropped for good. When you have an idea like this, you’re looking for interesting packages the driver uses in clever ways.

The first package we open is an iPad, which the driver uses to translate what the bad guys are saying outside, which was okay. But the only reason he had to do that was because he didn’t have his phone. A phone could’ve done that as well. So we’re not using things in a clever way yet.

Now the driver has to find a phone to call for help. So he starts opening packages until he finds one. However, the only phone he finds turns out to be a kid’s phone, which doesn’t have all the adult features. Which is sort of clever. You always want to make things hard for you hero. Not giving him a fully-featured phone does make things harder than if he had an iPhone. But that’s two packages so far where I’m not seeing much ingenuity. I’m not seeing anything clever. And that’s the whole reason I picked this script.

So even though I would continue to read, my heart wasn’t in it anymore. And that’s how quickly a script can fall apart.

In the case of Wish List, I don’t think the writer made any giant mistakes. I just think he underestimated what the bar is for a good script. Scripts like this are all about the choices you make. It’s how imaginative you can be with those items. If I were the writer, one of the first things I would’ve done was google, “Top 100 things ordered on Amazon” and obsessively combed through the list. You’d probably come up with 50 fun ideas to play with.

But the bigger lesson here is: Don’t assume the movies you see made are the bar you must hurdle. The bar is actually a lot higher than that for any spec screenwriter. You have to write something great to get people interested. It’s only later that over-development and bad notes from studios execs and maybe a director who doesn’t know how to write will ruin your script. But to get to that place, it first has to be great.

Another script whose first ten pages I loved was Honey Mustard. We meet this woman, Stella, who’s married to this utterly awful excuse for a human being. A guy who’s pure evil. The first ten pages is all about her reaching her breaking point and killing him. It’s a really intense first ten pages so I had high hopes for this one.

We then meet this other character, Buford, who’s having a really tough time of it. He’s out of a job. He’s got a family to support. We see him get coldly rejected after an interview. So he’s having a lousy day too.

What happens next is we follow Stella to her workplace. She’s a waitress at a diner. And her first customer is, guess who? Buford. Clearly, neither of these two are in a good place and we can feel that undercurrent of tension in their interaction. Which is credit to the writer who did a wonderful job of setting up the immediate backstory of these two characters to create this charged moment.

Buford gets annoyed when Stella keeps forgetting to bring him honey-mustard sauce for his order. He keeps reminding her and reminding her and reminding her. But she’s dealing with her sexually harassing boss and a handful of other impatient customers and she just killed her husband, so yeah, she’s a little distracted.

So Buford does something really mean. In order to get her back, he doesn’t tip her (he puts “Honey Mustard” on the tip line, lol). And off he goes.

We then follow Buford home where he gets some good financial news. And maybe, just maybe, his family is going to be okay. Meanwhile, we cut back to the diner…. AND EVERYONE IN IT IS DEAD. They’ve all been shot and killed. The cops are trying to figure this out. Stella is not there so she’s their first suspect.

We then cut back to nighttime at Buford’s house. Buford starts seeing a car drive past his place repeatedly. He gets worried. Then he sees the words “HONEY MUSTARD” finger-written through fog on the window. And he realizes that the waitress is here to kill him and his family.

So where did everything go so wrong so fast? Simple. There should not have been a mass-killing at the diner. Literally, the second that happened, I said to myself, “This script is done.” And every subsequent page further supported that. The reason this script was so strong early on was because everything was character-based. It was all about setting up the characters’ lives and then watching what happens when those lives collide.

The second you turn it into a mass-killing, it becomes a whole other movie. And not the movie that you set up, by they way. This isn’t “Unhinged.” However, a part of me understands why the writer, Michael, made these choices. He’s been told time and time again, by people like myself, that THINGS NEED TO KEEP HAPPENING in a screenplay or else the reader will get bored.

Fearing that his script was TOO character-driven, he went all in on taking things to Mach 10. But here’s the thing. When you write good characters, you don’t need a bunch of fireworks. This script could’ve survived as a slow-building character piece. You could even add 3-4 other characters, whose lives we follow, and then have all of them collide in the ending. But turning Stella into this (potentially) mass-killing house-invader was the least interesting choice you could’ve made after that setup, in my opinion. You started with believable and switched to unbelievable in a heartbeat.

So what can we learn from these two scripts? First, deliver on the promise of your premise. And start to do so early. You have to prove to your reader that you’re going to give him what he paid for. Jurassic Park does a great job of this with the whole mosquito-blood scene. I remember watching that and thinking, “Wow, that totally makes sense for how they’d be able to create dinosaurs in modern day.” It was clever and it hooked me.

Next, don’t feel like you’re serving a stadium full of ADD-riddled idiots when you write a script. The problem with that mindset is you think you have to have a car-chase (or a “car chase equivalent”) every scene. So you end up writing these great big plot developments when the script doesn’t need them. It’s hard to be patient as a writer. But just remember that, if you write great characters who are involved in interesting situations, readers are going to want to keep turning the pages.

Finally, have a plan for your second act. This is where most scripts fall apart because it’s the moment where the writer has to actually write the story. The first act is just setting up the concept you came up with. But the second act is where we need to feel like there’s a plan in place. We need to feel like the characters have goals or a clear direction. If it helps, break your second act into four sequences of, between, 12-15 pages. Doing so is automatically going to give your act more structure.

If you go into the second act with only a vague sense of what you’re going to do? It’s going to show on the page. You can’t hide it. A reader senses when the person telling the story isn’t quite sure where he’s going. If you hate outlines, that’s fine. But it means you’re going to have to do a lot more rewriting on your second act to get it to a place where it feels purposeful. If you do these three things, you should be good to go!

By the way, I’m curious what your thoughts are on Honey Mustard and Wish List. I still think both these scripts have potential. So, what are your fixes?