Genre: Sci-Fi
Premise: In a world where families are allowed only one child due to overpopulation, a resourceful set of identical septuplets must avoid governmental execution and dangerous infighting while investigating the disappearance of one of their own.
About: This spec script sold to Vendome Pictures after it landed on the 2010 Black List. Vendome Pictures is a new production company who also happens to be the company that produced Source Code. This seems to be a major departure for Max Botkin, the writer, as his one other produced credit is a comedy called “Opposite Day.”
Writer: Max Botkin
Details: 116 pages, 9/9/10 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).

The other day we talked a bit about assignment work. How the time constraint and lack of passion in assignments usually results in mediocre work. What Happened To Monday is the opposite of that. This is a script that is clearly a passion project for the writer. Whereas with Dibbuk, story parts came and went faster than hot Krispy Kreme donuts, the pieces in this story are intricately researched and weaved into an impressively complex plot.

However, this attention to detail brings about its own set of problems. Namely, can a world be TOO specific? Are the characters and situations so singular that they’re impossible for an audience to relate to? I’m not sure I can answer that definitively, but I can say that despite how character-driven What Happened To Monday is, its universe is as sterile as a surgeon’s gloves. How a script can feel so detached and yet so connected at the same time is a mystery to me, and it’s part of the complexity that makes “Monday” such an intriguing read. In the end I’m left to wonder whether the story is so unique that there’s nothing for the reader to grab onto.

It’s the future. How far in the future, we’re not sure.

But in this future, the combination of overpopulation and dwindling resources has become a huge issue. As a result, the government is forced to pull a China and limit every family to one child. Any more children than one and a newly formed bureau (headed up by the evil Nicholas Cayman) will take them away, to God-Knows-Where.

Around this time, a young woman named Karen Settman has septuplets. The law states that each child born after the first one must be taken away. But Karen, an architect, decides to keep her children, building them a specially designed condo with multiple hiding places for if the authorities ever stop by.

In order to give each of her children a life, Karen constructs a logistically elaborate set of rules whereby her seven identical sons can go out into the world, one day at a time, living life as a single person. This, of course, is why they’re named after the days of the week.

For those wondering how they pull this off, it’s by no means an easy sell (for them and for us). After each day they have to have an hours-long meeting relating back what happened during the day so that the others always know and understand the details of their singular life.

As they become adults, however, the brothers start getting restless. Nobody can express any individuality once they leave that building. They’re all living a lie. They can’t even experience the greatest thing life has to offer – love. And this starts to take its toll.

Some agents come sniffing around the building and Thursday, our narrator in this journey, realizes that somebody may have given them up. The brothers split up and one by one are either caught or killed, sometimes by agents, sometimes by unknown factors. Thursday realizes that if he doesn’t find out who sold their family out, that it’s only a matter of time before the whole damn week is dead.

If all that sounds complex to you, that’s because it is. Reading this screenplay was exhausting. You have to learn about the universe, you have to learn about the backstory, you have to learn about the rules, you have to watch the brothers grow up, you have to establish the relationships between them all. By the time we actually get to the story, your brain feels like a 50 pound anvil. That may be my biggest complaint here – there’s just…too much. What Happened To Monday feels a lot more like a novel than it does a screenplay.

There’s this popular theory (which I don’t subscribe to) that the best sci-fi is a commentary on some aspect of the modern world. District 9, for instance, was more about the ghetto districts in South Africa than it was about aliens coming down to earth. I get the sense that What Happened to Monday is likewise about a bigger issue, but I’m not sure what that issue is.

I mean is this about China? Is it a human rights film? Part of me thinks yes, but then you get into the whole “naming your seven characters after the seven days of the week” thing and the China connections end. I actually found it cute that each brother acted like their day of the week (Monday was always pissed, Saturday was a party guy, Sunday was the religious one). It was funny and clever. But it contrasted with the larger picture, which seemed to be making a grander statement. What that statement was still eludes me, so I’m eager to find out if any of you caught it.

I think the problem here may be theme. There’s a lot of interesting ideas in “Monday,” but unlike the seven brothers in the script, they don’t have a home. They don’t have a centralized unit to stabilize and unify their message. There are just so many competing elements here.

I think one of the reasons the script sold, however, goes back to a tip I gave you guys a couple of months ago, in my “How to Write For An A-List Actor” article. Write a part where an actor gets to play more than one role. They love that shit. And here, you give an actor seven different roles to play. Talk about challenging. It’s almost too many, but I can definitely see actors giving it a read for that reason.

And you know, once the story gets going, it’s actually pretty good. The mystery of who’s killing off these days of the week gets pretty intense, and while I wouldn’t say the ending was wonderful (again – we’re trying to keep track of so many things that it’s hard to keep up with the intricate plot), it was satisfying.

And I do admit that the script made me think. I kept imagining how miserable these characters’ lives must have been, trapped in this house for six days a week, having only a single day to go out and enjoy the world, and how even when that moment came, they had to pretend to be someone they weren’t. If there’s one thing “Monday” doesn’t lack, it’s complex characters.

But ultimately, the premise requires such a suspension of disbelief and there’s so much to learn before the story can actually get going, that I spent more time fighting this script than reading it.

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

What I learned: This is a complicated lesson but it’s definitely worth discussing. When you’re writing a sci-fi screenplay, you’re establishing a lot of rules. One thing you have to be careful about, however, is establishing a rule that makes sense in your sci-fi world, but not to the audience. In “Monday,” one of the things we keep asking is, “Why can’t these brothers just split up and live off the grid, each with their own separate lives?” What we’re told is that biometric machines are constantly floating around the city, scanning for “siblings.” This sort of makes sense, but how many of these biometric scanners do you think they’d have floating around in Gemini, Texas? Or Marxville, Wyoming? To you and I, going out of state is as simple as making a phone call. So it’s hard for us to imagine it being difficult for our septuplets, even if it is the future. My feeling is that the more influential a story element is in suspending the audience’s disbelief, the more convincing it has to be, and I was never quite convinced that these seven couldn’t just spread out and split up.

Hip Hip Hooray! Oscar nominations day. Maybe I’ll get to my thoughts on that later in the week. As of now, Article Thursday has been moved up to today, and Thursday will become a review day. Also, I found a new draft of Dibbuk Box, so I decided to do something unprecedented: go back and remix my review. So if you want to see my review for the newest draft of Dibbuk Box, head back to yesterday’s review now. Now, it’s time to talk about the increasingly strange behavior of Kevin Smith.

What a strange day Monday was. I woke up and every single site I went to had some blogger ranting about how Kevin Smith had become the anti-Christ. At first I thought they were part of a viral marketing campaign for Smith’s new religious-themed horror film, but no, everybody seemed to be genuinely upset, though it was hard to figure out why. After digging around (and reading through 100-something tweets on Smith’s Twitter feed) I finally put it together.

To summarize it, Smith previewed his long in development horror film, Red State, at Sundance Sunday night. Apparently, he’d told the public for weeks that he would have a live auction for the movie after the screening. So all the major indie companies sent their people there to potentially bid for the film. Except afterwards, Smith went on a 25 minute rant (or so we were told – the actual footage is only semi-ranty) telling those very people that they sucked and he was tired of them stealing his money so they could suck his dick. He then proceeded to “sell” the movie to himself, subsequently pissing off a lot of distributors who could’ve used that time to target other Sundance material.

He then announced he’d be taking Red State on tour, one city at a time, and charging $70/ticket (presumably each screening would end with one of Smith’s famous extensive Q&As – so the cost would cover more than the actual film). Smith’s argument was that this old model of marketing movies, where you spend four times the budget of your film on advertising, forcing you to make five times what your film cost just to break even, was ridiculous, and he wanted to try something new.

So instead of traditional advertising, Smith was going to utilize the power of his Podcast and Twitter feed (which has over 1 million followers) to let everyone know where the film was playing and how to buy tickets. After the tour, he’d release the film more traditionally, but with himself distributing the film instead of some big money-sucking distribution company, giving theaters more lucrative terms as an incentive to work with him.

Now I know this isn’t technically connected to screenwriting, but it kind of is. People with 1 million dedicated “can contact them at any time” followers simply weren’t around two years ago. That gives a ton of power to the individual, whereas before the individual had to depend almost exclusively on the company who financed his film. It’s a different ballgame and it might be time to start thinking about things differently. To think that the old model is going to transfer over seamlessly in this ever-changing world of social media is kind of silly.

With guys like Ed Burns foregoing traditional distribution and selling his movie directly on Itunes (where we’ll likely be watching all of our rented films in two years) so that he could retain ownership of his film, rather than hand it over to some prodco, has both its pros and cons. You’re not going to get that big marketing push, and thus your movie won’t be grossing nearly as much money, but you’ll be receiving some hefty royalties from being the sole owner of your film for quite some time.

Back in the days of video stores (I can’t believe I’m saying that – “Back in the days of video stores”), where shelf space was limited, you wouldn’t have thought of that. Not having that juicy “Miramax” or “Lionsgate” tag on your film would keep corporate-minded Blockbuster from even glancing at your film. But a virtual porthole, such as Itunes or Netflix, where the system is intelligent enough to know which movies you like and recommend them to you, makes those companies excited about a small movie owned exclusively by Ed Burns. It doesn’t cost them anything to throw it up there, and targeted recommendations means people will keep watching it.

At some point I expect this to trickle down to the development stage. If you developed your script openly, providing numerous drafts on the internet and encouraged feedback from fans, it’s an easy way to build awareness for your film (not to mention improve your script) and thus create anticipation throughout the development process. A case can be made that the leaked scripts for Inglorious Basterds and Avatar helped make those films what they were, and I would anticipate that same kind of buzz would happen with any filmmaker who has a built-in fanbase. I know some form of this is going to happen soon. I’m just not sure which major name is going to do it first.

So I’m really interested in what happens here with Smith. What sucks, and what’s turning out to be a distracting factor in this giant experiment, is that Smith may be heading off to Crazy Land. The guy is curling himself up into a cocoon of safety in order to protect himself from any sort of negative reaction whatsoever. First he takes on critics for hating a movie that was truly awful and says he’s not going to screen his movies for critics anymore. And now he’s giving a big fat middle finger to studios and production companies, which is allowing him to try this unique experiment, but creating an unhealthy amount of insulation in the process.

What he doesn’t realize, is that he’s effectively becoming the low-budget version of George Lucas. Just make movies in his own back yard and nobody’s allowed to tell him if they’re any good or not. This is the absolute worst way you can approach writing, and almost always leads to subpar work. If you have any doubt about that, go read The Phantom Menace.

It’s a weird scenario, and I don’t know if Smith’s post-modern Howard Huges-like behavior is going to get in the way of determining whether this is a viable option or not. Which sucks, because if it does work, it could be a game-changer. It could give birth to an entirely new generation of writer-directors, guys like Gareth Edwards and Neil Bloomkamp, who have a unique voice and realize that with emerging technology, they can make their movies on the cheap and distribute them outside the studio system, building followers on social media outlets through teaser scenes, short films, and word of mouth, then use those outlets to directly advertise screenings, whether they be in real theaters or online.

I think what Smith is doing is cool. I’m just worried that his questionable red state of mind may screw up the test. What do you think?

Genre: Horror
Premise: Dibbuk Box is apparently based on the real-life events of people tracking and buying some box on ebay that was haunted. Every recipient of the box would have strange and/or terrible things happen to them. To show you just how spooky and haunted this box is, since I posted this review, the real live Dibbuk box has actually started commenting in the comments section. Scroll down to see what it said.
About: Raimi’s Ghost House Pictures started developing this project with Mandate a long time ago, going through a slew of writers. When Lionsgate ate up Mandate, they put some major money behind the project and brought in writers Juliet Snowden and Stiles White, who wrote the draft that finally lit up the green light. Snowden and White are hot horror writers, who got final credit on the Nicholas Cage film “Knowing,” and have also written a draft of the Poltergeist remake. White used to be a production coordinator, working on such films as Pearl Harbor and The Sixth Sense. Jeffrey Dean Morgan will star in Dibbuk Box, which will be hitting theaters this Halloween. Originally, this review was of one of the older drafts (which is why the beginning of the comments refer to a different storyline) but upon receiving the latest draft, I remixed the review to cover it instead.
Writer: Juliet Snowden and Stiles White
Details: 108 pages – Sept 30, 2010, 2nd draft (This is an early draft of the script. The situations, characters, and plot may change significantly by the time the film is released. This is not a definitive statement about the project, but rather an analysis of this unique draft as it pertains to the craft of screenwriting).

All right, for those who didn’t tune in yesterday, I reviewed an earlier draft of Dibbuk Box. In short, I didn’t like it. The story was way too simplistic and there wasn’t enough tension or suspense. Though to the writer’s credit, I got the feeling that it may not have been entirely his fault. The safeness of the work smelled like overdevelopment, or at the very least a difference in opinion on where the story should go.

So when someone sent me this new draft from writing team Juliet Snowden and Stiles White (great writing name btw!), I thought I’d take a crack at it. It’s always interesting to see a completely different take on the same material. Unlike reading a singular screenplay, you get to compare and contrast the different choices that were made and pinpoint why some worked and others didn’t. Overall I wouldn’t say this new premise was any better than the previous draft, but I thought the relationships between the characters and the direction of the story were more complex and interesting.

In the new version, Division III basketball coach Clyde Brenek has just moved in to his new home. It’s been bachelor central in Apartmentsville since his wife left him a year ago and in order to make things more comfortable for his daughters, 15 year old cheerleader Hannah and 10 year old adult-like Em, he’s purchased himself a house.

After settling in, Clyde realizes he’s forgotten to buy dishes. So they head over to a nearby yard sale where Em falls in love with a weird European-style box. She asks her dad if he can buy it for her and Clyde can’t break out his wallet fast enough. Hey, when you’re a father fighting for custody, keeping your daughter happy is priority number 1.

Well, it should’ve been priority number nuh-uh. Cause what Clyde doesn’t realize is that he’s just purchased…The Dibbuk Box!

Right on schedule, Em becomes inappropriately attached to the box, whispering and humming to it, becoming all “creepy horror film kid-like” whenever it’s nearby.

Clyde doesn’t think much of it, as he’s more focused on a head coaching job at Division 1 North Carolina. This is that once in a lifetime dream opportunity he’s been waiting for, except he knows that if he takes it, he’ll rarely see his daughters.

Things start getting downright creepy at the house. There’s scratching noises everywhere. A huge roach problem develops. And some rooms are trashed without rhyme or reason.

When Clyde suspects that the box is the problem, he buries it out in the forest. But the Dibbuk Box calls to Em, who runs away from home and digs the box back up herself!

Afterwards, she takes it to school so her father can’t hide it from her anymore. When her teacher finds out, she puts the Dibbuk Box in a closet. Em doesn’t like that, and locks her teacher inside, where the Dibbuk Box gets all dibbucky on her, making weird noises and whispering unpleasant phrases.

Eventually, like the previous draft, Clyde must go find someone to exorcise the demons from the box in order to save his daughter from the Dibbuk curse. The question is, will he be able to do it before it’s too late?

A lot of the problems I had with the previous draft were fixed here. In fact, there’s a lot of good stuff in this latest draft of The Dibbuk Box.

First, they’ve set up key unresolved relationships in the movie. You want conflict in your story and one of the easiest places to find it is in unresolved relationships. Here, Clyde is dealing with the separation from his wife, and more recently her finding a new boyfriend. Not only does this give us something to resolve over the course of the story, but it adds depth to our main character. We see what Clyde is going through. We can tell it hurts him. This adds dimension, which in turn makes him more “real” (three-dimensional) to us.

Also, we have characters with lives here. I always say to writers, if you took away your movie from your characters, would they still have something to do? Or is the story the only way they can exist? Cause if the story’s the only way your characters can exist, then you don’t have real characters.

Here, Clyde has a job as a basketball coach, and more specifically a job offer out of state that he’s considering. Even if there was no movie here, Clyde would have something to do (a job, goals, events to look forward to). Hannah, the older sister, has her cheerleading at school. So she, also, has something to do (albeit less developed). You want as many characters in your script going through the motions of life as possible. Ask yourself “What would they be doing if there was no movie for them to be in?” It’s a quick way to add depth to your characters.

We also have a pseudo-ticking time bomb here, which was smart. Sometimes a story doesn’t work well with a blatant ticking time bomb (i.e. Joe has 72 hours to save his sister or a mobster will kill her). But you still want time to feel contained in some capacity, as that gives the illusion of time moving faster for the reader (and the audience). Here, we’re told right off the bat that this is the true story of what happened to a family over 29 days. Every 15 pages or so, we’re then told what number day we’re on. So even though we’re not screaming towards the finish line, we feel like we’re progressing towards a conclusion. It’s a small thing but it helps if your story takes place over weeks or months.

I also thought there were some smart story choices here. When Em runs away to find the Dibbuk Box, Clyde is deemed an unfit father, and the girls are ordered by a judge back to their mother’s place. Of course, this is right when the Dibbuk Box becomes the most dangerous, and Em is in the most danger. So the moment Em needs Clyde the most is the moment he can’t be with her. There were a few story choices like this that I thought worked really well.

If I had a complaint, it’s that, in the end, we’re going with the well-tread “creepy horror film child” device. We’ve seen this used a lot, in movies like The Ring, like Sixth Sense, like Case 39, like The Omen. So despite some of the sound storytelling here, we’re basically rehashing previously-hashed territory.

This new draft of Dibbuk Box is nothing to write home about, but in a sea of bad horror scripts, it’s not too shabby. If you’re a horror fan, you’ll probably want to check it out.

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

What I learned: Every horror film should have at least one big memorable scene – something that an audience can’t stop talking about afterwards. Masturbating with a crucifix in The Exorcist. The rape scene in Rosemary’s Baby. The feet bashing scene in Misery. If your horror film doesn’t have that memorable scene, you might as well not even write it. Dibbuk Box might have that moment. I’m not going to spoil it, I’ll just say: The MRI scene.

On a day where they’ve announced that they’re remaking Lethal Weapon (remaking Lethal Weapon?? Really?) you’re probably wondering why I’m writing yet another article telling you what you SHOULDN’T do. But here’s the thing. I was reading away last weekend, burning through script after script, each one in a different genre, becoming more and more frustrated as each script ended. And I was wondering why I was getting so worked up. I go through bad stretches of scripts all the time. It eventually turns. So why was this bothering me more than usual?

And I realized that in each script I’d read, some basic common mistake was being made. These weren’t unique problems that only pop up once every hundred screenplays or so. These were genre-specific mistakes that I see over and over again. So I thought, hey, if I knew the number one mistake to avoid when I started writing a screenplay, wouldn’t that give me an advantage over other writers?

So lo and behold, that was the genesis for this article. I marked the 15 most popular genres and the most common mistakes I run into while reading those genres. Other readers may have different experiences, but this is mine. So either silently curse me for pointing out, once again, what NOT to do in a script, or use this advice to topple your competition. Here we go!

PERIOD PIECES – Number one mistake I see in period pieces is writers getting lost in their work. We’re cutting to a king in France and a peasant in Russia and a little known uprising in Austria and dozens of years pass and the old characters die and new characters are born and blah blahblahblah blah blah blah. Jumping around to 15 different characters in 18 different countries for 2 and a half hours isn’t going to entertain a reader. It’s going to frustrate them. Instead, find the focus in your period piece. Make the main character’s journey clear. The King’s Speech is about a King who must overcome his speech impediment before giving the most important speech in the country’s history. It’s clean and it’s simple. If you do want to go “sprawling,” remember this: The more sprawling you get, the clearer your main character’s goal has to be. So the story of Braveheart encompassed dozens of years, but the goal (obtain freedom for his country) was always as clear as day.

DRAMAS – Many writers believe drama is a license to lay everything on thick as molasses. Cancer, death, car crashes, disease, abuse, addiction, depression. If you have more than a couple of these going on in your drama, consider taking them out now. Dramas are at their best when they pick and choose which moments to explore, not just hurl it all down in one giant depression sundae. It’s a delicate balance and by no means easy to navigate, but I always subscribe to the theory that less is more in drama.

ZOMBIE/SERIAL KILLER/ROM COMS – What the hell are all three of these doing in one category? That’s easy. All three inspire the same problem. Writers never do anything fresh with these genres. Zombie: Group of people gets chased by zombies, usually in a city. Rom-Coms: Boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl again. Serial Killer: Serial killer leaves cryptic puzzle behind for detectives to try and figure out. I see these plots over and over and over again. You have to come up with a fresh angle! Look at Zombieland. They added comedy, silly rules, a voice over, and a road-trip story to the genre. It was fresh. Look at 500 Days of Summer. It mixed the whole damn relationship up. As for serial killers, I don’t have an example for you because since Seven NOBODY has done anything new with the serial killer genre (NOTE TO ALL SCREENWRITERS: IF YOU WANT TO CASH IN, FIND A FRESH ANGLE FOR THE SERIAL KILLER GENRE). Remember, all three of these markets are super-competitive. So beat em by coming up with something new.

SCI-FI/FANTASY – Most new writers get into sci-fi and fantasy for the wrong reasons. They’re more interested in the macro than the micro. In other words, they care more about the world than their hero’s journey. I remember reading a really ambitious incredibly detailed sci-fi script that didn’t have a lick of story to speak of, and the writer’s one big question to me afterwards was, “Do you think the disappearing mech suits on page 25 are realistic?” Of all the questions they could’ve asked, they didn’t want to know, “Was my main character’s motivation strong enough?” Or “Do you think the connection between these two characters worked?” but if a singular tiny sci-fi geeky machine that had nothing to do with the rest of story was realistic. This is representative of how writers think of these scripts. They’re focusing on the wrong things. Focus on the character’s journey first (The Matrix is more about Neo believing in himself than it is about cool wire-fu) and everything else will follow.

COMING-OF-AGE – Coming-of-Age is a commonly encountered amateur genre because most writers are in their 20s when they begin writing. Naturally, they start writing about their own confusing directionless lives. Unfortunately, this confusion almost always translates to NO STORY! The writer feels content to just let their character wander about, experiencing life and all its eccentricities, believing that the “realness” of the journey will be enough to capture the audience’s imagination. It isn’t. It just makes everything directionless and boring. If you want to write coming-of-age, give your script a hook and a story just like any other genre. A perfect example is Everything Must Go – very much a coming of age story, but structured so as to keep the story on track and so we always know what’s going on.

COMEDY and HORROR – I’ve said this a million and one times on the site. The biggest mistake comedies and horror films make, is to focus on the laughs and the scares as opposed to character development. Comedy and Horror plots don’t tend to be that complicated, which is fine. As long as you have a good hook, you’re okay. But the characters in these scripts are a different story. The audience *has to connect* with them in order for the script to work. Yet writers refuse to dig any deeper into those character’s lives than the width of a tic-tac. So figure out what makes your hero tick. What are they afraid of? What’s their biggest flaw? Then use your story to explore that flaw. Happy Gilmore had major anger issues. The story was just as much about him learning to overcome that anger as it was about winning at golf.

WESTERNS – Back in the heyday of Westerns, the world moved much slower. People had more patience, more time. That’s not the case anymore in this information-overload Twitter-centric multitasking world. So you have to update the way you approach the genre. By far, the biggest problem I see in Westerns is that they move too slow. So speed things up a little bit. Develop your characters faster, get to your story sooner, add a few more twists and turns to keep the audience interested. I’m not saying you have to use Scott Pilgrim pace (though that might be interesting), I’m just saying that the Westerns I read these days assume the patience of yesteryear.  Guess what?  It’s not yesteryear anymore (and yes, I’m aware of the hypocrisy of this statement, seeing as I’m such a Brigands of Rattleborge fan, however I’m going to call that script the “When Harry Met Sally” of the Western world – a great big exception to the rule).

ACTION – The big thing with action flicks is the propensity to depend on clichés. Action writers are almost by definition uninterested in character development, and luckily the action genre is the least dependent on that area of writing, so you can actually get away with it. But if your script is just rehashing all the clichés we’ve seen in action movies of the past (a snappy line when disposing of a bad guy, the girl gets kidnapped by the villain in the end, the bad guy is bad for no reason) then you’re not trying hard enough. Some of these things can be done tongue-in-cheek effectively, but even that’s becoming cliche. The reason that the Bourne movies became so popular was because they updated the creaky action formula of the James Bond films, adding a mystery (a character who didn’t know who he was) making the story more sophisticated and taking itself more seriously. It was different, and that difference lured us in.

SPORTS – Cliché endings. Amateur sports scripts always end up with some variation of being down by 3 runs with two outs in the bottom of the ninth, and the bases loaded. Then our hero hits the grand slam. It’s sappy, it’s predictable, it’s stupid. You have to find some other way. Look at Rocky. Rocky didn’t knock out Apollo to win the heavyweight championship of the world. He just lasted 15 rounds with him. Bull Durhum and Field of Dreams are considered two of the best sports movies of all time and yet there’s no “last at bat” scene. Find a unique way to end your sports story that doesn’t rely on the cliché last minute goal or home run.

BIOPIC – You’ve heard me drone on about this before. Biopic writers notoriously get caught up on the “best of” or “key” moments of the title character’s life, instead of looking for the most *dramatically compelling* moments of that person’s life. In addition to this, the biopic, more than any other genre out there (since our hero IS the genre) needs to have a *compelling character flaw.* Focus on the events in that person’s life that challenge that flaw and that’s where you’re going to find your story. So if your subject’s flaw is a fear of connection, then place him in a bunch of situations where he’s forced to connect with others. If doing this means leaving out the 3rd most famous moment from that person’s life, then leave that moment out.

THRILLER – The amateur thrillers I read don’t have enough story developments. The writer erroneously assumes that keeping the pace of the story up is all he has to do. But if you don’t throw us for a loop every once in awhile, if you don’t up the stakes, bring in a new character, force your character to deal with unexpected problems, then your thriller’s going to run out of steam. Just try to make sure something interesting happens every 15 pages or so. In Buried, we have the bad guys wanting him to make a video, we have the good guys needing his help to find him, we have snakes, we have sand seeping in. Some new story development is always happening to keep the story alive. Make sure you’re packing the same amount of story density into your thriller.

Genre: Action
Premise: A woman must fight off hundreds of yakuzas all sent to do one thing – kill her. The hook? The entire battle takes place in her apartment.
About: Yale Hannon spent ten years as a script coordinator on TV shows, working on such series as Parenthood, In Treatment, Vanished, and Big Love. What a nice story to see Hannon finally break through with his own script. Everly finished in the middle of the pack of 2010’s Black List.
Writer: Yale Hannon (Story by Joe Lynch & Yale Hannon)
Details: 92 pages, March 23, 2010 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).

This script sounded too bizarre to be true. A woman stuck in an apartment fighting off hundreds of Yakuzas? Why would Yakuzas want to kill a woman so badly that they’d send hundreds of themselves to do the job? And, um, what is a Yakuza anyway?

Let’s face it. This is geek fantasy at its finest. One woman. Hundreds of warriors. Guns, sweat, and blood. Visions of Matrix, Kill Bill, and Sin City dancing in our heads. Reality isn’t exactly top priority in these instances. And usually, when you throw reality out the window, Carson jumps with it. Who wants to watch 90 minutes of fight porn?

Okay, don’t answer that. Sorry.

30 year old Everly has just been raped by half a dozen men when we meet her. What a wonderful way to meet a hero. She’s holed up in the bathroom of her apartment, barely able to move, the incessant taunts of the men from outside barreling through the door like bullets. They want her back out there, where they can finish their job then do what they came here to do – end her life.

Of course Everly would never be in this position if she hadn’t made some previous mistakes. See Everly used to be involved with a man named Taiko, a Japanese mobster who owns half the city. Then one day, presumably after she realized – you know – that she was schtooping a guy who kills people for a living, she decides she’s going to turn him in to the DEA. Except in this case, the DEA was on Taiko’s payroll.

There are two truths in this world: Never expect a monogamous relationship from a girl named Candy and never double cross a guy named Taiko. Especially if he’s a mob boss. I have personal experience with both of these mistakes so just trust me.

Taiko is so pissed, in fact, that he’s decided to not only kill Everly, but to make her suffer like no one has ever suffered before. And he ain’t stopping there. He’s going to lop off Everly’s mother’s head and put her daughter into a lifetime of prostitution…and probably kill her afterwards just for kicks.

Now Everly’s a tough cookie. She can handle pain. But when Taiko brings family into it, all bets are off.

So she calls up her mom (who by the way, is one of those moms who’s eternally disappointed in their children’s life choices – although in this case I think she may have a point) and tells her to come to her apartment with her daughter. It’s the last place Taiko will expect them to go, and therefore the safest place they can be.

In the meantime, she pulls out one of her many stashed guns and blows through the bathroom door, taking out all the dudes who thought it was funny to rape her. She succeeds, but this only pisses off Taiko more. So he sends a bigger wave of henchmen to take Everly out.

For those wondering how in the hell you shoot up an apartment and not have the entire force bearing down on you within five minutes, well, it turns out Taiko owns this building. Everybody who lives here works for him in one way or another. So instead of these folks calling the police for help, they’re answering Taiko’s calls, to KILL EVERLY.

Everly fights off wave upon impossible wave of these psychos until her daughter and mom arrive. She hurries them into her neighboring friend’s apartment while somehow fighting off even more waves of baddies. Finally, Taiko realizes he has to stop fucking around, and sends in The Sadist. The Sadist is clearly the highlight of the film and maybe even the reason the script was written.

Basically, he’s some fucked up Japanese guy with a lot of masks and a lot of chemical concoctions and even carries with him a slave in a cage. Think of him as a combination of Sling Blade (the Japanese version), that dude in Animal Kingdom, Buffalo Bill from Silence Of The Lambs, and Charles Manson. The Sadist is Taiko’s personal guarantee that Everly will suffer history’s most long and drawn out death.

When it’s all said and done, the entire apartment is leveled to the point where it looks like a tornado, a bomb, an earthquake, and a tsunami hit it all at once. There’s no floor, no ceiling, and of course, Taiko has to show up to finish the job himself. Will he succeed? Or will it be Everly who wins?

A spade is a spade right? Everly is long on stylized action and short on story. But I have to give it to Yale. He injects just enough reasons for this story to exist (surviving, saving the daughter) that it works. Not only that, but you can see this as a movie. In fact, I see directors drooling over this script. There’s just so much craziness to play with. It’s kind of like Kill Bill without all the slow parts. And I’m guessing that after seeing Everly, Tarantino may be drooling as well, wondering why he didn’t think of it first.

If there’s something that places this above all the wannabes – and make no mistake about it, it’s easy to fail here – it’s the “impossible” factor. When you write a story, you want the goal to seem impossible for your main character. The more impossible it is, the more gripping the story tends to be. It’s like watching a football game where your team is down 21 points in the 4th quarter. You know they’re probably going to lose – but dammit you want to watch to see if they win.

I mean just the sheer number of people trying to take Everly out has us in constant flux, wondering how she’s going to pull it off.

The other driving force here is one of the oldest story devices in the book. Make us hate your bad guy. Make us want to take that fucker down. BUT! Don’t forget to also give your villain proper motivation. I was just talking about this with some writers the other day. If your villain is bad just to be bad, he won’t work. There has to be a REASON he’s bad. In this case, Everly double crossed Taiko. That’s why Taiko is so relentless. He’s not just trying to kill Everly cause he’s a bad guy.

Everly has some problems. I would’ve liked a twist or two. This script goes pretty much according to plan. And man is it a chore to read through at times. You’d have a better chance finding Emelia Earheart than you would a full page of dialogue in Everly. This is only a 95 page script, but because it’s so much action, it reads like it’s 135. I would strongly advise anyone writing an action heavy script to please keep the paragraph chunks lean, since failure to do so results in novel-itis, a disease you don’t want your screenplay to catch.

But other than that, this is a cool screenplay, and probably a movie you’ll see on the big screen within the next couple of years.

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

What I learned: This is the very definition of the kind of script I see a lot of unknown writers break in with. Unique hook (1 girl, hundreds of attackers). Marketable (who can’t see this trailer?). Clear singular goal (survive). Contained space and time (one apartment, one night). By no means do I think Everly’s execution is perfect, but that’s the advantage of writing this kind of script – you keep the story so simple that your mistakes don’t matter nearly as much as they normally would.