The May Logline Showdown deadline is tonight (Thursday)! If you want to compete, send me your title, genre, and logline to carsonreeves3@gmail.com. The five best loglines compete over the weekend. Winning logline gets a script review next week! So the script has to be written. You have until 10pm Pacific time to get your loglines in.
Every screenwriter has been bombarded with the advice that they must start their script strong. It’s hammered into their stubborn noggins on the daily. Why is it important? Because nobody likes to read. Everyone’s impatient. And everyone expects a script from a writer they’ve never heard of before to suck. So when someone opens your script, they’re expecting to be bored out of their minds.
By adopting this mentality of writing a great opening scene, you at least give yourself a chance against these scruffy-looking nerfherders. However, despite everybody knowing this advice, no one’s ever talked WHAT KINDS OF SCENES you should write to immediately capture the reader. That’s what I want to do today. I want to give you ten opening scene options you can use to lasso onto that reader and pull them in. YEEE-HAWWW.
In Media Res – “In Media Res” just means that you’re dropping the reader into “the sh*t” right away. You’re not taking your time to set the scene. The scene is already going on and we’re being air-dropped into it. A classic example of this is Star Wars. We’re literally dropped onto a ship that’s being chased by another, much bigger ship. Remember, Star Wars originally started down on Tatooine with Luke Skywalker mowing dust. Imagine how much weaker that opening would’ve been. Especially in script form. A more recent example of this is Source Code. We’re thrown into the mix of a guy who wakes up in another person’s body on a moving train. About as ‘in media res’ as you can get. By starting out in the middle of something, we’re immediately pulled into the story whether we like it or not!
The Mini-Movie – The Mini-Movie opener is when you create an entire story, in your opening scene, that has a beginning, middle, and end. The reason this is so effective is because the audience gets an immediate payoff. They don’t have to wait for 2 hours to get their ending. They’re going to get it within the next 5-10 minutes! To that end, these work best when the stakes are high and the purpose of the scene feels important. Inglorious Basterds’ milk scene is a mini-movie. Scream is a great mini-movie. Up is a great mini-movie. It is a little different in that it contains a montage. But it has that clear beginning, middle, and end.
The high-stakes dramatic choice – A great opening scene option is to have a character (preferably your protagonist) given a difficult dramatic choice. The thing about choices is that audiences lock onto them immediately as they’re curious which choice the character is going to make. One of the most famous examples of this is the opening of American Sniper. Chris, our protag sniper, is covering his team when out walks a kid and his mom who may be carrying a bomb. Which gives Chris the most difficult choice ever. Does he murder a mom and her kid? This specific scene also reminds us that the bigger the consequences behind the choice, the more compelling the scene is going to be.
Suspense and Action – Action, all on its own, is boring to read. But action and suspense are captivating to read. Which is why Raiders has the best opening scene ever. It vacillates, for 8 full minutes, between suspense (how do we get through all these trick sections of a cave) and action (killer darts, pitfalls, boulders). Most beginner writers don’t get anywhere with their writing until they understand suspense. Suspense is something that has power on the page AND onscreen. You tell the reader that a potential bad result is coming and then you string out the buildup to that moment. There’s a big fat golden statue sitting on this stone table. But it’s clear that, if you take it, something bad is going to happen. So we build up to that moment through Indy’s careful deliberation and planning on how to deactivate the bomb. One of the most suspenseful 15 seconds you’re going to see.
Suspense and Danger – Give us an opening scene that places our character in danger and then draw the suspense out as much as possible until the dangerous moment comes. This is the most old school version of writing a great scene you can use. It can be (and should be) used anywhere, not just \ your opening scene. A brilliant example of this is the opening scene in The Hurt Locker. Our main character has to defuse a bomb in an active war zone. What makes the scene so good is not just the suspense of deactivating the bomb itself. But the fact that the area is teeming with additional dangers. They could be attacked at any moment. It’s a great scene.
Mystery – This one is kind of obvious but boy does it work well. And it can be combined with suspense and danger to create an even more potent opening. Jurassic Park uses all three. We start with the suspense. A bunch of workers look terrified as they wait for this shipment to arrive. Then we see this giant box and hear noises inside. There’s your mystery. What’s in this thing??? Now we’re totally hooked. But then you add danger (whatever’s inside is clearly dangerous) and we can’t wait to turn the page. The Matrix is another one. We build all this mystery around Trinity and these cops who are going into the building to capture her. Then we get more mystery with her being able to achieve all these supernatural feats. It’s a mystery party.
A Dead Body or a Death – It’s simple. It’s straight to the point. But an immediate death tends to draw the reader in. Especially if the death is unique or intriguing. Because the more intriguing/weird/interesting the death is, the more curious we’ll be. Watching the young woman choose to plunge to her death in the opening of Lethal Weapon definitely pulls us in. Just as the opening of Sunset Boulevard, with the dead body staring at us in the pool, pulls us in.
Make sure something happens – We’re not always writing some big action movie, or suspense movie, or horror, or sci-fi. Sometimes, we’re just writing character-based stuff. But that doesn’t give you an out when it comes to your opening scene. The reader doesn’t say, “Oh, he’s got less to work with. I’ll give him a break.” No. If anything, they demand more from you because they’re assuming your script is going to be even more boring than normal. So prove them wrong. You can do this by starting your story with something important happening. A great example is The Social Network. We don’t start with Mark Zuckerberg arriving at school as a freshman with stars in his eyes. No. We start with him getting dumped by his girlfriend. The resulting scene is their discussion about that break-up. Remember, “stillness,” “inaction,” “taking your time,” — these things never work for opening scenes. We don’t meet The Joker taking care of his sick mother. We meet him at work, with kids stealing from him, and then see him get beat up. Something important in this character’s life should be happening in your opening scene. Trust me: We’ll want to keep reading.
Time Crunch – Any situations where your protagonist is in some sort of time crunch is a great way to start your movie. Because readers have a natural desire to see people catch up with time. When we meet Marty McFly in Back to the Future, he’s late for school. So he has to hurry the heck up and get there. The script could’ve easily started with him meeting up with his girlfriend at the school entrance with plenty of time before class. Bob Gale and Bob Zemeckis would’ve probably loved that because they could’ve taken their time and helped the reader get to know those characters and how much they liked each other. But that would’ve been boring. By making Marty late, you pull us in right away because we want to see if Marty gets to school on time. I know it seems silly that we’d be invested in such an objective. But that’s the power of a time crunch.
Shock – It’s becoming harder and harder to shock audiences. To be honest, I don’t love this option because shock is over quickly. It doesn’t take up a lot of space, like suspense. But if you have a great shocking moment, you better believe you can pull a reader in with it. The opening of Goodfellas, with the men in the car, is a good example. The scene actually starts with some mystery. They hear a banging from inside the car. That’s initially what draws us in. But after they stop and open the trunk and we see the bloodied but still alive guy begging for his life, that’s when the shock comes. Tommy Devito lunges at the dying desperate body and viciously and repeatedly stabs him. That’s followed by James shooting him five more times. It’s unsettling and very shocking. If you can shock a reader, you can buy a good 20 pages from them easy. Cause they now think you’re capable of surprising them again. They got their dopamine hit and they want more!
There you have it. If you’re not using these 10 scene templates to open your script, you probably aren’t doing everything in your power to hook the reader.
Logline Showdown tomorrow. GET THOSE LOGLINES IN!
May Logline Showdown
Send me: title, genre, logline
Deadline: 10pm pacific time, Thursday, May 18th
Where: carsonreeves3@gmail.com
Genre: Horror
Premise: (from Black List) A mother and her young son fleeing Nazi-occupied Poland are forced to take shelter from a blizzard in an isolated manor, where they discover the Nazis may be the least of their worries.
About: Screenwriter Ian Shorr has made the Black List many times. He’s also sold a few spec scripts. One of those became the 2021 Mark Wahlberg film, Infinite. In an interview with Go Into the Story, Shorr said this about why he chooses to keep writing spec scripts instead of chasing assignments: “Specs are still one of the most reliable ways to break in – having a calling card script that showcases your voice, where you just put all your chips down and bet on yourself. Once you’re already in, the question is: why keep gambling with your time? And for me, it comes down to this: if I’m doing nothing but chasing assignments, I’m just servicing other people’s visions. I don’t have something that I can call 100 percent my own thing. When I’m writing a spec, it’s one of the few times in my life that I have total creative control over something.”
Writer: Ian Shorr
Details: 110 pages
Rachel Brosnahan for Rivka?
Ahhh, horror.
We all love it.
So why is it so darn hard to write?
You’d think it would be one of the easiest genres to master. Introduce a crazy dude in a mask. Put your hero in a scary house with a lot of unexplained noises. Possess someone.
I think the key to horror is the pact you make with the reader: Something bad is coming. You do this in, both, a macro sense, and a micro sense. The very promise of a horror screenplay is that something bad is going to be delivered. And you’re going to want to read the script to find out what.
And then, once you’re in the script and the concept is established, the reader makes a new promise that a series of “bad somethings” is coming. Something scary is waiting in the other room. The first reveal of the monster. Someone just called from inside the house.
As long as it’s coming and it’s bad, there’s hope for your horror script.
But the rest of the script has to work as well – I’m talking about the things that need to work in every script. We have to root for the main characters. There has to be a reasonably compelling plot. The story has to keep us on edge. There has to be some development inside the main relationships in the story that we care about. Let’s see if Crooked Forest meets all this criteria.
It’s 1942 in occupied Poland. With the war heating up, Nazi soldiers are becoming reckless, storming into Polish homes and gunning down people. During one of these exterminations, 30-something Rivka and her 9 year old son, Hugo, barely escape.
They make a deal with the underground resistance to get transferred to a Polish military base about 15 miles away. However, in the car ride there, they’re attacked by Germans and must flee into the nearby forest. It’s freezing outside and Hugo is getting frostbite but they luck out and find a large unattended mansion in the forest, Vormelker Manor.
The giant house with weird aristocratic paintings is a needed refuge. But then Rivka and Hugo start seeing things in the shadows. There’s a man with no legs. There’s a naked skinny man with a body full of tattoos long before it was cool. There’s a freaky elongated woman. Rivka figures out very quickly that they need to get out of here.
Unfortunately, the Nazis catch up with them. With no other houses in the area, they know Rivka and Hugo have to be here. So, as the night kicks in, the Germans start looking around. Rivka comes up with a plan. They’ll hide, waiting the Nazis out. When the Nazis go to sleep for the night, Rivka will steal their Jeep keys and they’ll make a run for that elusive base. But, as you’d expect, the plan doesn’t work. And the real terror, which includes a dark history for this home, is just beginning.
There are some things in a script that it’s hard for me to get past. If I see them, I immediately turn on the screenplay. One of those things is asthma inhalers. I don’t know what it is, but I get triggered when I see an asthma inhaler. Triggered in a “come on, seriously???” kind of way.
You have to understand, anybody who reads a lot of screenplays reads certain scenarios over and over again. So, when we see these things, you’re bummed out. You’re bummed out because it gives you the sense that you’re not going to be getting anything new today. It’s going to be another cookie-cutter experience.
Isn’t that every movie, though, Carson? To an extent, yes. But every creative choice is a representation of your script. If you make a cliched creative choice, my history of reading scripts tells me there will be a lot more where that came from. It’s never an isolated incident.
To tie this into yesterday’s review, Kazuo Ishiguro would never EVER write an asthma inhaler scene. He knows that’s something any writer could come up with. As a writer, you want to be the guy who comes up with new stuff. Or, take old stuff and repackage it in some way we haven’t seen before. So that asthma inhaler moment deflated me.
To Shorr’s credit, the script rebounds once we get to the house. The choice to add TWO VILLAINS (Nazis AND scary ghost-demons) gave this a little more pop than I was expecting. If it was just Nazis or just scary demon things, I probably would’ve mentally checked out.
And I liked the “false midpoint” in this script, which had Rivka and Hugo making it to the jeep to escape, only to see the car’s engine, disassembled and wrapped together in a giant hunk of mismatched metal, hanging from one of the nearby trees. This forces Rivka and Hugo to go right back into the house — once again at the mercy of the dual-threat.
You know what this script reminded me of? Barbarian. It’s like a 1942 World War 2 version of Barbarian, with its horror waiting in the innards of the house and its weird monsters waiting to make mincemeat out of the home’s guests. I could totally see Craig Zegger directing this.
But the whole mixing of Nazis and horror DEFINITELY has a ceiling to it. I come across this combo all the time. In fact, I just got a consultation script a couple of weeks ago that was a Nazi-horror crossover. I want writers to be aware of this because we all think that we’re super-oringinal. And I’m here to remind you that whatever you think is original, you probably need to dig several layers deeper to get to the real original.
Either that or just be the world’s greatest writer, like Kazuo Ishiguro. Then you can write about anything you want, no matter how mundane it is, and it will still be awesome.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[x] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Be careful when writing analogies, which can go from clever to forced in a heartbeat. This script starts off with the analogy, “Blacker than the inside of your fist.” The reason I don’t like this analogy is because it doesn’t invite the proper image of darkness into your head. If you said, “blacker than the inside of a coffin,” that analogy makes me think of darkness in a more relevant way than “blacker than the inside of your fist,” which sets me off for a good minute trying to imagine what the inside of a fist even looks like. Always imagine what your reader is going to think when you make an analogy. If it’s effortless, good. But if there’s any chance they might be confused by the analogy, come up with another one (or don’t use an analogy at all).
Taika Waititi’s flight stick is shaking. The onboard computer is repeating, “Stall imminent! Stall imminent!” Will this next project save his career from spiraling into the ocean?
Genre: Drama/Sci-Fi
Premise: A young female robot becomes a companion for a sick rich girl who is trying to navigate her increasingly difficult life.
About: Taika Waititi just signed on to direct the adaptation of this book, which was written by Kazuo Ishiguro, who wrote Never Let Me Go and The Remains of the Day.
Writer: Kazuo Ishiguro
Details: About 450 pages
I could speak for days about Taika and Star Wars.
Okay, screw it. I’m going to get it all out here. The thing I hate so much about Kathleen Kennedy is that she insists that everything is fine when it’s clearly not. She’s the ‘house burning down everything-is-okay’ meme in real life.
She tells us that Taika’s Star Wars movie is still happening when it’s CLEARLY not. The guy has signed onto three different movies now since the Star Wars announcement. Just be honest with us. Tell us it’s been canceled. Stop living on Da Nile River with your Rian Johnson canoe and your Patty Jenkins gambling boat. The movies are dead.
And you know what? Thank God for Taika that they are. Because Taika’s career is in flux right now. Love and Thunder was a disaster. Our Flag Means Death was made for Twitter points. Nobody cares about Next Goal Wins.
He needs his next movie to be a hit and Star Wars is starting to look like a cursed franchise as long as Kennedy is in charge.
So good for Taika for escaping the Sarlac Pitt. And better for Taika to choose Klara and The Sun. Because Klara and The Sun very well might be the best thing I read all year.
13 year old Klara is an “artificial friend.” Or, to put it in today’s terms, an AI robot. But unlike a lot of robots, Klara is more perceptive than others. And when a 14 year old girl named Josie comes to the store and zeroes in on her, Klara is convinced that she’s found her match. This girl is pure kindness. Klara was meant to be Josie’s lifelong friend.
Josie’s mother buys Klara and they head back to their remote upscale home. We learn very quickly that Josie is sick. Every day, she gets a little bit weaker. However, the addition of Klara in her life is making the sickness more bearable. Josie is candy-apple sweet and Klara will do anything to keep her that way.
Soon after, we meet Rick, Josie’s neighbor. Rick is a nerdy middle-class weird kid, the kind of kid that upscale families like Josie’s don’t mix with. But Josie and Rick are so close that Josie’s mom tolerates him. Josie brings Klara into her special friendship with Rick and the three become the most offbeat trio ever.
As Josie’s health worsens, reality sets in, and Klara senses that the mother is preparing for the worst. But the worst is different from what Klara, and we, thought it was. It turns out Mother had a plan all along for her daughter’s doomed future, and Klara is going to figure into that quite prominently.
I want you to imagine something for me.
Remember that movie, “A.I.”, directed by Steven Spielberg? Okay, now imagine if that movie was actually good.
That’s Klara and the Sun.
One of the ways I determine good writing – which I encounter less and less these days – is by asking if I could’ve written the story. Given enough time, could I have approximated what the writer did here? For 98% of the Black List scripts, that answer is yes. And for most spec sales, same thing. I could’ve written something equivalent.
But that wasn’t anywhere close to the truth here. Kazuo Ishiguro writes in a way that scares other writers. He writes in a way where you think, even if I came up with my best concept, and I conceived of my best characters, and every day I wrote was a charmed day, I could never come up with anything close to this.
This guy is writing on another level. I spent half my reading enraptured by the story and the other half marveling at Ishiguro.
I usually have a good sense of how the writer is coming up with their approach to the story. But I was at a loss while reading Klara and the Sun. I guess I understood, in some ways, the broad strokes of what Ishiguro was doing. But I could never grasp the reasons he was making the choices he was making.
For example, there’s a chapter in the book where Klara has to attend a party for other teenagers her age. I guess, in the future, a lot more people are homeschooled, especially the smart ones, and so in order to socialize them before they go off to college they create these meetings, where the kids meet up so that they know how to interact with other people.
The chapter was tense and uncomfortable, and contained a couple of memorable moments, as the kids endured an accelerated obstacle course into high school politics. But I couldn’t figure out what the chapter had to do with the larger story. As it turned out, it didn’t really have much purpose at all.
And yet, I couldn’t imagine the book without it. It provided context to the story in a unique way, sort of like how, when you’re looking at a painting, you’re taking everything in at once, as opposed to understanding each individual piece of the puzzle. I could see everything – the whole story – in each of Ishiguro’s chapters. It was nothing like what I’m used to seeing in my daily script readings, where you see all the little strips of Matrix code the writer is clumsily stringing together to write the story he thinks he’s supposed to write.
I know what some of you are thinking.
Cancer.
And Kid.
Cancer Kid.
I was thinking the same thing. As soon as I saw, “cancer kid,” I groaned. I have long insisted that there’s no way to write about cancer kids that works. It’s just too freaking sad. And people don’t go to movies to be bummed out. They just don’t.
So that’s where my head was at first. I would read every five pages skeptically, ready to bail at the first red flag. But like any good story, each five pages was better than the previous five pages. Ishiguro knew how to keep us there.
For example, we start the story with Klara in the store, waiting to be bought. There’s a lot of exposition and world-building Ishiguro has to set up before the story begins. So what he wisely does is he brings Josie into the store early on. Josie immediately falls in love with Klara and Klara her. Josie says, I want to buy you. I’ll come back for you, I promise. And then she leaves.
As each day goes by, we wonder, where the heck is Josie???
What this does is it creates suspense. As Ishiguro continues to set up this world, we continue reading because WE WANT TO SEE IF JOSIE COMES BACK FOR KLARA. It’s a small thing but it’s a device that all good writers use. Cause they know that if a reader is going to quit on a book, it’s most likely going to happen early. So they have to give you a reason to keep reading during those early pages.
From there, the story is simple. Josie is sick. We don’t know how sick, which keeps us curiously turning the pages. And then Klara cares only about keeping Josie happy. Klara is different from the other AFs in that she will disobey an order if she thinks it will make Josie unhappy. All the other robots have to follow orders. She does not. So it creates a special bond between them and we become fully invested in that bond.
In fact, I was more worried about how Klara would take Josie’s death than Josie dying. Cause I knew Josie was Klara’s everything. So what happens when she’s no longer around? Does she lose all purpose? And would the family just throw her away? But don’t think you know where this story is going. Another great thing about Klara and the Sun is that it has its share of twists and turns.
On top of all that, it’s one of the most fascinating character studies I’ve ever read. Since we’re in Klara’s POV, we’re basically learning how to be a human in real time. Everything that Klara experiences is a first-time experience. And because she’s so ignorant to it all, it highlights the complexities of being human from an angle we haven’t seen before.
For example, Klara will do anything for Josie. But then Josie’s mom takes Klara out for the day and makes her do something really weird. She then tells Klara that she cannot, under any circumstances, tell Josie about what Klara and the mom did. For Klara, she can’t comprehend this – lying to Josie. It doesn’t compute. But she understands that if she loses the mom’s trust, she could be booted from the family and no longer have access to Josie. So what does she do? There is no correct choice.
There are a lot of moments like this that we, as humans, learn to navigate over time. But Klara learns all of them at once. And it’s interesting to see how she tackles these challenges.
This is going to be an amazing movie. I have zero doubt about that. It’s going to be up for multiple Oscars. And it could be Taika’s opus. Even better than JoJo Rabbit.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[x] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: I used to think you couldn’t touch kid cancer. But this book has made me rethink that position, and the position of handling difficult subject matter in general. What I’ve learned is that you can cover kid cancer if you don’t dwell on how depressing it is. The thing about this book is that, although Josie is dying, the story mostly focuses on her positivity and her happy moments, as well as her perseverance. Only occasionally do we delve into her pain. And, even then, Ishiguro covers it with a neutral brush. He doesn’t dwell on the pain and sadness.
For example, there’s a chapter where Josie has been wanting to go to a waterfall but her mother will only allow her to do so if she rests up and gets well. So Josie fakes being well so she can go on the trip. Halfway there, her mom figures out what’s up, and they get into an argument about it. This is, technically, a depressing scene. Josie’s health deteriorates to a point where she’s so weak, she can’t even walk. But that’s not the chapter. The chapter focuses on the mom being upset that Josie wasn’t honest with her. Ishiguro consistently skates around any truly depressing moments. He, instead, finds a way to dramatize them or talk around them. I swear to you – this is a movie about kid cancer and, yet, it never feels depressing. I did not know that was possible.
A dissection of a doomed movie concept
Guess what?
MAY LOGLINE SHOWDOWN IS THIS WEEK!
If you have a script written and you want to battle your peers, get some feedback from the community, and get that all important exposure for your screenplay, this is a great opportunity.
Send me your title, genre, and logline by THIS THURSDAY (May 18th). The top 5 loglines I receive will compete over the weekend. The winning logline gets a script review the following Friday. We’ve already found some killer scripts through this process. Let’s find some more!
May Logline Showdown
Send me: title, genre, logline
Deadline: 10pm pacific time, Thursday, May 18th
Where: carsonreeves3@gmail.com
Speaking of loglines, we here at Scriptshadow love ourselves a good concept discussion. “That idea is amazing!” “No, that idea sucks!” Concept development is really the heart of screenwriting. Because it solves so many problems when you’ve got a good one. Conversely, if you have a weak or bland movie idea, your entire script is an uphill battle as you attempt to make up for your problematic idea.
This process is complicated by the fact that there’s no universally accepted standard for what constitutes a good idea. The only real way to know is to field test it. The bigger the field, the more accurate the assessment is. But, even then, you’ll have people who think a good idea is a bad one. Every single project that’s been made into a movie in Hollywood had its detractors.
But that’s what makes talking about this stuff so fun! And, today, I want to talk about two movie ideas that fall on opposite ends of the good-bad spectrum.
So, over the weekend, I stumbled upon an article about that Jennifer Lawrence comedy, No Hard Feelings, which is one of the rare comedies that’s being released into theaters. In the article, they talk about how the movie came to be.
Jennifer Lawrence’s close friend is writer/director Gene Stupnitsky (Good Boys, Bad Teacher). Stupnitsky showed Lawrence the original Craig’s List ad that inspired the movie several years ago. Lawrence fell on the floor laughing when she heard it and thought it was the most hilarious thing ever. What kind of crazy family would actually hire a woman to de-virginize their son??
Stupnitsky, smart screenwriter that he is, secretly began writing the script as soon as he got that reaction. Then, two years later, he came to Lawrence and said, “Hey, remember that hilarious ad about the family that hires a woman to have sex with their son? I wrote a script about it!” Quite possibly the easiest way in existence to get a movie made: Not only know a movie star, but know EXACTLY the kind of movie they want to make. I do not begrudge Stupnitsky for doing this. It’s so hard to get any movie made and he was given a golden ticket.
Now, did Stupnitsky know this was a bad movie idea and write it anyway cause he knew he could get Lawrence and, therefore, get the movie made? Maybe he thought, like a lot of writers, that the idea had problems, but he could overcome them when writing the script. Because, the truth is, this is an awful movie idea, as it has a poison pill embedded in the bowels of its story. But before I explain what that pill is, let’s talk about another movie idea.
A year ago, I heard about this “Flamin Hot Cheetos” project which was ALSO being adapted from a real-life story. I was neutral on the announcement but they released the trailer last week and it looks pretty good. It’s got an underdog story of this janitor working at the Frito Lay plant and he comes up with this idea to make Cheetos taste even better by adding hot sauce.
The story is about him being thrust into the buttoned-up corporate world of which he’s highly unfamiliar, as he pushes his snack idea to the top ranks of Frito Lay. The movie seems to be marketing mostly to the Latino family crowd. But it certainly looks like a crowd pleaser.
So why do I bring these two projects up?
Because, as screenwriters, you have to understand why one concept works and another doesn’t. I get hired by writers all the time (e-mail me at carsonreeves1@gmail.com – logline consults for just $25!) who send me a couple of ideas and want to know which one they should write. When I do these consults, the answer is always easy. One logline is always a lot better than the other. But screenwriters have a tough time seeing this.
So why is Flaming Hot Cheetos a markedly better idea than No Hard Feelings? One of the most dependable templates in all of storytelling is the underdog template. If you can find a really great underdog story, especially one based on real events, write it. Cause Hollywood loves to make them and people love to watch them. This is why Flamin Hot Cheetos is a great bet.
Now let’s move over to No Hard Feelings. Even the title of this film is bad. What does that even mean? If you have a title, especially for a comedy, that doesn’t give the audience any indication whatsoever what the movie is about, you are in MAJOR trouble. To be fair, I understand why Lawrence and Stupnitsky thought this ad was funny. If someone had read this ad out loud to me, I probably would’ve laughed as well. It really is bizarre that a family actually put an ad out for this.
HOWEVER.
That doesn’t mean it’s a good movie idea!
The more you dig into No Hard Feelings, the more you realize how bad of an idea it actually is. What’s sympathetic about Jennifer Lawrence’s character? Why do we like her? Why would we want to root for her? Who’s rooting for a 30 year old woman to successfully take the virginity of a high school kid under the pretense of scoring some money so she can continue her loser narcissistic lifestyle? Anyone?
Stupnitsky and Lawrence not only raised their hands, they doubled down! In the trailer, we see Lawrence’s character deceive a freshly-axed boyfriend so she could bang some hot dude via a one night stand!! Sure. Let’s instantly come up with a way for the audience to hate the main character, and then we’ll send her off on this totally sketchy adventure. (I think I liked that scene in the script – I was clearly high on drugs at the time)
But hold up here, Carson. Just hold the heck up. What about The Graduate? Doesn’t that have the exact same situation in it? Mrs. Robinson seduces Benjamin Braddock. Yes, it does. Except for one critical difference. MRS. ROBINSON ISN’T THE MAIN CHARACTER. And The Graduate wouldn’t have been a good movie if she was.
Which is the clue that gives us the fix to this entire premise. Maybe, just maybe, the movie works if the KID in No Hard Feelings is the main character. If you built the movie around him and his inability to connect with people and his helicopter parents are terrified their son is never going to find anyone so they hire a woman to seduce him, there might be a movie there.
I could even see that being a midpoint twist. Nerdy guy meets older woman. They get together. Halfway through, the reveal comes – his parents hired her to have sex with him. Second half of the movie is, what happens between these two after the fallout?
So why didn’t they do that? I’m about to tell you a dirty little secret about Hollywood so get ready to take a shower afterwards: Cause then Lawrence doesn’t sign on. If Lawrence is just some secondary character, she doesn’t sign onto the movie. This is what I hate most about Hollywood. The system is designed, at least in situations like this, to make the worst version of the movie.
Now there’s actually a little more nuance to this story because keep in mind who’s writing No Hard Feelings. Gene Stupnitsky. What is Stupnitsky known for? He’s known for writing a female teacher who’s a total b—h. He’s known for writing about a group of middle schoolers who run around swearing at everyone. It looks like Stupnitsky believed that, because he’s been able to get away with writing “unlikable” characters before, he could do it again.
But he’s miscalculated this time. Unlike those scripts, which have a singular problematic element, this script has TWO of them. The main character is unlikable AND the adventure itself is unlikable. We don’t like that Lawrence’s character is in this situation. We don’t want her to succeed. What’s left to like? What’s left to root for?
Maybe if you made her the world’s sweetest person and she’s forced into this instead of chooses it, there’s a fraction of a chance we would root for her. But even then I’d be unconvinced. Years after the movie, Flashdance, was released, producer Lynda Obst was asked about the 30+ different drafts that were written of the script before it got made. She said, in retrospect, that it was one of those movies, with its cleverly ironic main character, that was always going to work no matter what. Every draft would’ve worked. No Hard Feelings is the opposite. I don’t think there’s any way the premise could’ve been saved.
Before I check out today, I want EVERYONE from this site to read the TJ Newman article over at Deadline. Newman is the writer of the two airplane novels that netted her a total of 3 million dollars from Hollywood. She wrote a guest article explaining how it took her 20 years (TWENTY YEARS!) to sell both of those novels. She was rejected 40 times. It’s an inspiring and insightful look into the persistence and perseverance required to be a successful writer. Never let that flame extinguish!
A secret about screenwriting that only the tippy-top screenwriters know
One of the weirder things I’ve learned about screenwriting over the years is that there are things that work in a script that don’t work in a movie and there are things that work in a movie that don’t work in a script. Understanding why this bizarro process takes place can help you elevate your scenes – especially your dialogue scenes – to another level.
For example, montages work great in movies. Montages don’t work very well in scripts. That’s because movies are great for images and music. But you can’t see images and can’t hear music when you’re reading a script. In a screenplay, a montage is just a bunch of factual description a reader has to read through. Where’s the fun in that?
On the flip side, limited characters and limited locations work great in scripts because everybody who reads a screenplay wants it to read fast. So they love it when there’s any setup with 2-3 characters, minimal description, and a lot of dialogue. So if you have two characters trapped on a tower talking most of the time (“Fall”), a reader can get through that script in 30 minutes. It’s a dream read.
However, limited location movies, especially if they’re set somewhere stagnant, like a basement (the Duffer Brothers’ “Hidden”) become very boring on screen. That screenplay that read faster than lightning is boring to watch because it’s aesthetically boring to look at. Same background and little-to-no movement aren’t exactly cinematic.
This opens up a “4-D Chess” strategy to screenwriting because you’re now making choices about whether to write something that’s going to work in the script even if you know it’s not going to work in the movie (good idea for spec writers), or something that’s going to work in the movie even though it doesn’t work in the script (good idea for a writer who’s already hired). In other words, do you write for the ‘great read’ or do you write for the ‘great movie?’
It’s an interesting topic that I was thinking about the other day because I watched this show where, in a scene, two girl friends (I forgot their names but we’ll call them Sara and Nancy) needed to have a discussion about whether Nancy was going to marry her fiancé.
Whenever you have two people trying to work out a problem via dialogue, there’s a lot of variety in where you can set the scene. Theoretically, you can place a conversation anywhere. So, in this case, the writer placed it at a gym. Sara and Nancy were doing a workout routine with one of those giant tires that you flip over again and again. And, while doing so, they talked about whether the fiancé was marriage material.
The scene was actually okay, mostly because you were invested in the characters. But also because the movement and pauses and catching of their breath gave the conversation a little extra oomph.
However, I noted that, if you had read this scene in a script, nothing about this workout would affect how you read the scene at all. You could’ve set the very same scene at a cafe and it would’ve read the exact same. Because dialogue reads the same on the page whether your characters are working out or hanging out.
I’ll see this a lot, also, with characters doing the dishes together. Instead of placing your characters on a couch to have a conversation, you give them something to do, like dishes, while they have their conversation. Again, in a movie, that’s a good idea. But in a screenplay, it doesn’t matter where that conversation is had because we’re just reading the dialogue. We don’t care if Husband Joe properly places the egg-beater in the right dishwashing compartment.
The more I thought about this, the more I realized that the real problem here was that you wrote a scene that was so stale, you needed all this artificial movement — whether it be a giant tire workout or loading the dishwasher – to make up for the weak scenario. A scenario should never be so boring that it needs an extra on-screen boost.
Instead, you should be looking to write scenes that work on the page AND on the screen. To achieve this, you need a two-pronged approach.
First, you want the CONTENT of the scene to be good enough on its own that it wouldn’t matter where you placed it. You could have something as static as two characters sitting in bed together before they go to sleep. If the content of the conversation is compelling, we don’t care where it takes place, either on the page or on screen.
There’s no better example of this than Marlon Brando’s famous “I coulda been a contender” scene in On The Waterfront. It was the culmination of his entire life, this “contender” admission. So it was a very important moment. And, originally, the director, Elia Kazan, had this elaborate background projection sequence planned that would play behind the two characters as they had this conversation in the car.
But the projection broke, forcing them to film the scene with the back window closed, making it the most boring background ever. But it didn’t matter because the content of the scene was so strong. So make sure the content of the conversation is awesome first and foremost. That will take care of 75% of bad dialogue scenes.
Second, if possible, you want to use the physical scenario the characters are in TO ENHANCE the conversation, not just be incidental movement. Let’s say our married dishes couple is just getting things back on track after some infidelity by the husband. It still stings for the wife. So there’s pain there.
If these two had a dinner party with another couple and the wife thought the husband was too flirtatious with the guest wife, then that dishes scene is going to be a little more interesting. Just the way that the wife is handling the dishes. You could have her GRAB them and SHOVE them into the dishwasher to add an exclamation point to her frustration.
But guess what? You could make this scene EVEN BETTER if you used the scenario to enhance the conversation, not just use it as a minor visual distraction.
One thing you could do, for example, is to set the scene at a restaurant. The husband is taking the wife out to patch things up. But then, they get a really attractive waitress. And the waitress keeps coming in. She seems to be giving the husband more attention than the wife. This starts upsetting the wife. And now we’ve got a scene where, if you’ve taken care of the content part, we’re using the scenario they’re in to poke the bear – to fire up the coals beneath the dialogue. It becomes a much more interesting scene cause there’s an extra element going on.
I just watched this Portuguese show called “Gloria,” about the Cold War. Our hero, a spy who was transporting highly classified audio tapes across countries, regularly has to drive through checkpoints. But he knows all the checkpoint people so he’s able to shoot the sh— with them and move on.
In one of the scenes in the pilot, though, he’s chatting with a checkpoint friend but then, behind them, a new checkpoint guy strolls up. And this new guy decides to inspect the trunk, where our hero has hidden one of his audio tapes. So you’ve got your dialogue between the hero and his checkpoint friend. And then you’ve got the other thing going on behind them that, if it goes badly, our hero could be thrown in prison.
That scene’s going to work on the page and on the screen. Which is what I’m asking for here. First and foremost, make sure the scene works on the page. Cause you have no control over whether your script is going to get produced. All you have control of, at the moment, is making the read as good as possible.
Once you’ve got that down, see if you can improve the scene so that it also works on screen. Maybe it already does cause you got lucky. But if it doesn’t, see if you can find a way to create a scenario that enhances the good dialogue you already have. If you do that, you’re going to turn that good dialogue into great dialogue.
