Genre: Action-Adventure/Romance/Comedy
Premise: When the infamous womanizer Don Juan starts to fall for a woman for the first time in his life, he must decide if that love is worth giving up his woman-chasing ways.
About: Don Juan won the Scriptapalooza contest back in 2004. Not the actual Don Juan, but the writer who wrote Don Juan, Patrick Andrew O’Connor.  Believe it or not, this is the second script O’Connor ever wrote, which is a rare feat, winning a major screenwriting competition off your second script. O’Connor got his first produced credit last year with the indie flick “The Break-Up Artist” which he sold at the Cannes Film Festival. O’Connor recently optioned another script (whose title I can’t find) which is why people are going back and giving this script another look.
Writer: Patrick Andrew O’Connor
Details: 105 pages – undated (This is an early draft of the script. The situations, characters, and plot may change significantly by the time the film is released. This is not a definitive statement about the project, but rather an analysis of this unique draft as it pertains to the craft of screenwriting).

I’m not the swashbuckling type.

I always thought The Three Musketeers were lame and that Zorro was a wussy for always wearing that mask. So to plop me down in the middle of the 19th century and force me to watch some primpy man trade clever barbs with another primpy man, slashing and dicing at each other in the 19th Century equivalent to Dancing With The Stars, it was akin to sending me through TSA at LAX for an extended pat-down.

But you guys have demanded more contest winners and since I work for you, the people, then dammit if I wasn’t going to review more contest winners.

Don Juan starts with, well, Don Juan standing at the foot of his dying mother’s bed. Before she kicks it, she tells Don Juan to make sure he finds love. Being only 12 at the time, Don Juan interpreted this to mean “find as much love as humanly possible.” And when we flash forward 15 years, that’s exactly what Don Juan’s doing, finding love, sometimes with three or four women a day.

In fact, Don Juan has a bet going with his biggest Lothario competition, Don Luis, on who can bed the most women in a single year. Since Don Juan is the ultimate lover, he wins handily, but not without some questionable record-keeping (he was supposedly with two women on the same day in two different countries – not an easy feat in 1830).

In order to clear his name, he proposes another bet. This bedding competition has left Don Luis yearning for the true love of a woman. As such he has asked the beautiful Ana for her hand in marriage. Don Juan proposes that he can bed Ana before Don Luis marries her in a couple of days. Under the tight scrutiny of an eager crowd, Don Luis accepts the challenge in order to secure his dignity (why this is considered “dignified” is something I can only assume people 180 years ago understood).

As soon as the challenge is accepted, Don Luis races home to his fiance to prepare her for the ensuing onslaught of Don Juan.

In the meantime, Don Juan runs into Ana’s best friend, the heartbreakingly beautiful Ines, who is a few days away from taking her oath as a nun. Don Juan is struck by the unbridled beauty of this woman and experiences something he’s never felt before while around a woman – feelings. The only problem is that Ana is the one woman on the planet not affected by Don Juan’s charms. Even his most time-tested methods fall flat with her.

And thus begins a most impossible conquest. Sleep with Ana before Luis marries her and get Ines to fall in love with him before she takes her vows as a nun. This isn’t going to be easy!

Along the way Don Juan is chased by Ines’ father, who happens to be the captain of the Sevilla Royal Guard, gets thrown into jail, helps his affable and hilarious servant hook up with Ines’ servant, breaks out of jail, and struggles to achieve these two impossible goals before the sun rises.

As you can probably tell from my exuberant review, I enjoyed this a lot more than I thought I would. One thing I worried about right away was that this was yet another standard treatment of a character we’ve seen dozens of times before. In fact, Heath Ledger just played the kindred spirit to this character, Casanova, a few years ago. The forgettable generic treatment of that character is exactly what I was expecting with Don Juan.

Usually, the writers who rise up out of that giant amateur screenwriting stew are writers who take characters like this and find a fresh take on them. That’s why Baz Luhrman’s Romeo & Juliet worked, as he transported it to modern day Los Angeles. That’s why Steve Martin’s “Roxanne” worked, as they took Cyrano de Bergerac and found a present-day angle.  Here, we stay with the same character in the same setting in the same time period as we’ve always seen Don Juan. So how interesting could it be?

Very.

And there’s a reason for that. O’Connor nails the execution. It’s the hardest thing to do – take a story that we’ve seen before, tell it the same old fashioned way that everyone else has told it, and still make it exciting. The reason it’s so hard is because you have to do everything perfectly. And this is made even more amazing by the fact that this is only O’Connor’s second screenplay. I would like to know the rewrite situation on this script (is this the draft that won the contest or a newer draft?) because there are so many things he does right here.

First, the goals are very strong. And I love how Don Juan bucks the traditional single-goal protagonist structure and instead gives Don Juan TWO goals, making his job twice as difficult. I love the dual ticking time bombs, ensuring that our story moves at a breakneck pace. I love that Don Juan’s being chased by Ines’ father, which adds even more momentum (and ups the stakes – if he gets caught, he could end up in jail for the rest of his life…or worse!). And I love the exploration of Don Juan’s character flaw, his confusion and rejection of the emotion he’s so terrified of feeling – love. These are all very basic story-telling devices, but O’Connor puts them to use with amazing results.

I also loved Ciutti, Don Juan’s noble servant, who’s stuck doing everything Don Juan does, even though he’s one-fourth as capable. I thought the dialogue was witty and funny, not an easy feat when this genre practically expects it. And I really grew to love and understand the advantage of writing a story around this character. Don Juan is that impossible to resist rogue lead – he’s a liar and a cheater, which gives him a dark side, but he’s eternally optimistic and funny, making it hard to dislike the guy.

All in all I’d say this was a rousing success. And yes, I’m using “rousing” because it’s a word they’d use in the 19th Century. I’m that inspired by this script. I kind of stumbled onto it after attempting to read two Brit List scripts (both of which were littered with misspellings and sloppy writing – what the hell man??), and boy am I glad I did. The only reason this doesn’t get an “impressive” is because the subject matter isn’t my cup of tea, so there were parts I couldn’t get into no matter how well-written they were. But for a script that started at a “Wasn’t For Me” before I opened the first page, I’d say a double “worth the read” is impressive in itself.

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

What I learned: It’s important to always make it hard for your hero to achieve his goal. Anything that comes easy for him will feel like a cheat. However, I realized that sometimes, in a comedy, if you set it up properly, you can make a key plot point easy for your hero as long as it gets a big laugh. In Don Juan, there’s a guard guarding Ana’s house who’s both deaf and blind. We get some early exchanges with a worried Don Luis that the guard won’t be able to keep Don Juan out. The guard assures him that he can handle the job, and later when Don Juan sneaks past him easily in a funny scene, we accept it. Since it was properly set up and funny, we don’t feel cheated. Contrast this with a comedy script I reviewed the other week, We’re the Millers. I was really upset that in a movie about smuggling drugs into America, that our criminals don’t encounter any problems at the U.S./Mexico border. It’s not funny and the reason it’s easy was never set up, so we feel cheated.

 Hey, how bout that?  It’s Turkey Week!  Again, for those outside the U.S., we have a holiday this Thursday where everybody thanks themselves.  Or each other.  Or someone.  For reasons unknown to I, we need an entire day to do this thanking, so even though my own personal thanking will last a total of 25 seconds, I will be utilizing the other 23 hours, 59 minutes and 35 seconds to prepare for the chaos that is Black Friday (by the way, if you’re going to do your Christmas shopping, don’t forget to get either this or something from here for your screenwriting friends).  So no review this Thursday unfortunately.  But that still leaves four reviews, which include a contest winner, a sci-fi spec that made some noise, and maybe an amateur script (I haven’t figured out if I’m doing Amateur Friday this week or next).  Right now, Roger brings us another Blood List script, and one of the crazier sounding ones at that, Underground. 

About: Underground was on 2010’s Blood List with 2 votes, but before that list was released, the script got some press in the trades back in August when it was reported that Neil Marshall (“Dog Soldiers“, “The Descent“, “Doomsday” and “Centurion“) signed on with Ozla Pictures to direct. Taka Ichise (“The Grudge“), Jeremy Platt (“The Haunted World of El Superbeasto“) and Erin Eggers (“The Hoax“) are the producers.

You know, sometimes I don’t understand Neil Marshall’s schizophrenic editing style, especially during action sequences. It worked in “The Descent” because the setting was so claustrophobic, and fear and terror were the emotions that reigned in both the characters and the audience, but I get all discombobulated and frustrated when I see it in one of the duels in “Doomsday”. Makes me wonder if the director is agoraphobic, afraid to film wide open spaces without chopping it up and reassembling it like some William Burroughs protégé playing with celluloid.

Does this script read like the bastard child of Chuck Palahniuk’s “Fight Club” and Anthony Bourdain’s “Kitchen Confidential“, Rog?

However, this script is more of a modern “Texas Chainsaw Massacre” with its snobby supper club backdrop and the world of perverse gourmands it explores, and not only did it peripherally remind me of Peter Greenaway’s “The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover“, but by the time I got to the second half I thought this could be the third movie in Eli Roth’s “Hostel” franchise.

In the dining area, we meet the wealthy and weird foodies, who have seemed to have paid a hefty sum to buy a plate at this table. There’s a senator and his wife, a wealthy Russian woman, and a Takashi Miike-esque Japanese weirdo. We watch as waiters serve the various courses, and as we watch them eat we get a little sick, if we’re not already from watching Charlie (who gets more and more suspicious) prepare the dishes.

What happens next thrusts the story into “Hostel” or “Saw” territory, and it’s pretty disgusting, and some fates are rather inventive in a culinary horror type of way (especially the foie gras torture), but I found it pretty familiar. Oddly, I was reminded of another spec, a horror script called “Pet” by Jeremy Slater.

What I learned: Dread. The anticipation that something horrible is going to happen to a character you care about. If you want to create moments that truly terrify (you are aiming for terror, not horror, which are two different things), learn how to create dread. Charlie is a smooth-talking wanna-be chef. I suppose his likeability can be argued, but I cared about him because I liked his relationship with Quinn. I was interested in their goal, which was their dream to open up their own restaurant and build a future together. Orbiting this couple was Seamus, a threat who wasn’t above serving fried human skin to a food critic. We know that Seamus was into bad, nasty stuff, that there was a monster within him lurking. We were waiting for the moment for this monster to reveal itself. Stakes are raised when we find out that Quinn is pregnant with Charlie’s child, and our minds can’t help but wonder, “Is this unborn child going to be put in danger? And not only that, but what kind of danger?” Because the writer put the elements of characters we care about in the orbit of a perverse monster, we anticipated a collision of the two worlds. That anticipation is dread, and it not only does it create unease and gets the imagination thinking unpleasant thoughts, but it keeps the reader wanting to know what happens next. You want to write good horror? Dread should be the bread and butter of your horror scripts.
 

Genre: Dramedy
Premise: A lost letter written to him by his idol, John Lennon, inspires an aging musician to change his life.
About: Dan Fogelman’s using the buzz from his recent writing triumphs to jump into the directing arena with his newest spec, Imagine. The script sold for 2 million dollars and Fogelman will receive another 1 million when/if the film is made. The 3 million dollar payday beats the 2.5 million dollar sale he made earlier this year with Scriptshadow favorite, “Crazy Stupid Love.” Fogelman’s muse, Steve Carrell, is said to be starring as the son in Imagine (he also stars as the lead character in “Crazy Stupid Love”). Fogelman made his name doing assignment work on large-scale animation projects such as Cars, Bolt, and Tangled. Fogelman made last year’s Black List with yet another script, “My Mother’s Curse.”
Writer: Dan Fogelman
Details: 111 pages – November 2, 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).

There aren’t many writers whose scripts I eagerly await, but Dan Fogelman is one of them. He is the most successful screenwriter in the world at the moment, pulling in over 5.5 million dollars for original screenplays this year. That beats the next closest guy by about 4 million. And who knows what he’s making touching up other scripts. I loved his last spec, “Crazy Stupid Love,” and although My Mother’s Curse didn’t blow me away, it was a solid read. So when I heard that Fogelman wasn’t done making money in 2010, I wanted in on his latest offering.

Imagine is about Danny Collins, an over-the-hill but embarrassingly successful 60-something rock star who makes his living touring the countryside, playing the cheesy but popular hits that made him a star a few decades ago.

But while Danny’s wildly rich in stature, he’s a broken man everywhere else. He’s got a fiance half his age who cheats on him daily. He’s got no real friends, no sense of home, and worst of all he has a son he’s never met, the result of some post-concert partying he did in the 60s.

But Danny’s life is about to change. On his 60-something’th birthday, his manager hands him a gift-wrapped letter from his idol, John Lennon. You see, when Danny was first starting out, he gave an interview for a Rolling-Stone like magazine where he talked about his fear of becoming a star. Lennon read that interview and sent him a letter, advising him how not to fall into the trappings of being a rock star. It was sent to the interviewer though, who greedily realized he could make a buck off it, and sold it to someone else. His manager figured this out through a fortunate mistake, and now here Danny was, receiving a letter from John Effing Lennon!  To him!

The letter basically says that friends and family are what’s important in life, not material things (sounds very John Lennon’esque, doesn’t it?). So Danny decides to become the person he would’ve been had he received that letter when he was supposed to. He politely tells his cheating fiancé (and her lover, who’s hiding in the closet) that they’re over, leaves his Manhattan mega pad, and moves into a hotel. His goal? Reconnect with his son and start writing music again.

But Danny has no idea how steep the hill is he’s about to climb. His son, Tom, hates him. Hates him with every fiber of his being. And when Danny tries to nudge his way into Tom’s family, which includes his perfect wife and asthmatic six year old daughter (Danny’s granddaughter), Tom tells him to fuck off.

Back at the hotel, Danny starts writing new music for the first time in forever, and befriends the pretty manager there, Mary, who may be the first age appropriate woman he’s fallen for since he was…oh…30.

He doesn’t give up on Tom either. Danny wants to help fix his granddaughter’s crippling asthma, and his star shines bright enough where he can get her into the best asthma doctor in the country. Slowly but surely, Danny gains his son’s trust. However just when things are looking up, some catastrophic news arrives that slams Danny back to reality. He’s about to learn that you can’t just make up for 40 lost years. Sooner or later, you’ll have to atone for your mistakes, and Danny’s mistake is that he’s never been responsible…ever.

A commenter brought it up yesterday and it’s something I’ve been thinking about for awhile. Dan Fogelman is the new Cameron Crowe. I don’t know how his scripts are going to translate once they hit the screen, but Fogelman is doing the same thing for the family dynamic that Crowe did for the romantic dynamic back in the 90s. Which is skating that fine line between emotion and humor. Both of these guys know how to walk right up to that line and milk it for everything its got, without crossing it.

Somewhere over the last five years though, Crowe’s line has become scribbled, and while Imagine does make a critical mistake later in the script, Fogelman is now the only writer who can toe this line throughout an entire screenplay. Indeed, this feels almost like a movie Cameron Crowe would write. It’s based on a musician, it’s steeped in music, and it’s not afraid to test your stash of Kleenex. In fact, you might even call it an unofficial 30-years later sequel to Almost Famous.

But let’s avoid the Crowe comparisons for now and look at what Imagine does well structurally. There’s a few things that make it work. First, you have the hook. There’s something magical about receiving a letter from someone who’s been dead for 30 years, especially since John Lennon is a mystical figure in himself. So it’s a nice “gimmick” to pull us into what’s essentially a family reconnection story. 

Next you have the change. While there is a major plot point driving the story (which I’ll get to in a second) just from a character perspective, we have a compelling situation. A 60-something man, a man near the end of his life, decides to make a major change. There’s some irony in that. It doesn’t really make sense to try and change yourself that late in life, and since we’re all trying to change, we think that if this man can do it (at this late stage), why cant’ we?  So there’s a vested interest in seeing Danny succeed right from the start.

Finally you have the unobtainable goal. Danny wants to be a part of his son’s life, but his son hates his guts. Remember, giving your hero a goal is good. But giving your hero an unobtainable goal is great. The more difficult the goal is, the more convinced we are that it can’t be achieved, and the more convinced we are that it can’t be achieved, the more we’ll want to see if our hero can achieve it.

So there’s a lot of good stuff going on here, but Imagine had some faults which I’m hoping Fogelman will address. The asthmatic daughter worked, but just barely. It felt like our heart strings were being tugged a little too hard with this girl, to the point where I could feel the writer’s hand. But the real gamble Imagine takes is a late-story twist that tests the threshold of what the audience is willing to accept.

It’s hard to talk about it without spoiling it so step away from the laptop if you don’t want spoilers. A key character in the story gets cancer. And here’s why I didn’t like it. First, it comes in late. As a result, it feels like the idea doesn’t have enough space to breathe. And second, we already have a major medical complication with another character in the granddaughter. To throw two major medical complications in the same movie….I’m just not sure the audience is going to buy that. I mean until that point, I was giving Imagine an “impressive.” But once that happened, it immediately dropped to a “worth the read.”

The story salvages itself though through the music subplot . I imagine Imagine will really come to life when its soundtrack is added, and I’m curious to hear some of the songs Fogelman’s team comes up with as Danny’s “hits” from his past, which are supposed to be in the vein of “Sweet Caroline.” That could be fun. There’s also a music related scene near the end where Danny has to make an in-the-moment decision about whether he truly wants to commit to this new life or fall back into that old worthless role. Since the choice gets to the essence of who he is as a character, since it forces him to make that choice at such a critical juncture, it’s extremely powerful, and shows why Fogelman is selling scripts for the GNP of small countries.

This had the potential to be better than Crazy, Stupid, Love but that aforementioned medical storyline kept it from obtaining great heights. Still another solid piece of writing from Fogelman though.

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

What I learned: I love all the little mini-subplots Fogelman adds to his scripts. Even the tiniest characters have a little story going on. For example, two potentially throwaway characters, the valet and the hotel desk girl, have a little love story going on which Danny orchestrates. It’s just 1/8 of a page here and ¼ of a page there but when you add it all up, it’s a little mini-story. It’s these little touches and details that make Fogelman’s scripts stand apart.

Genre: Action
Premise: A terrorist has planted a series of bombs inside several malls in Los Angeles. Although they capture the man before the bombs go off, a bout of amnesia prevents him from remembering where he put the bombs, or if he’s the terrorist at all.
About: Mondry and Bagarozzi met as teen-age video store clerks back in 1987. In 2000, they sold this script for 1 million dollars. “Every night we worked, we took home videos and we would find a director whose work we loved,” said Mondry. “We’d just basically go through the whole catalog and watch one film after another. It was sort of a self-taught film history course.” Bagarozzi sold one screenplay on his own before this called “The Tin Man,” a revisionist noir L.A. detective story, to the Walt Disney Co. for $250,000. Unfortunately, this is not the spec draft that sold, but rather a draft from a few years later.
Writers: Anthony Bagarozzi & Charles Mondry
Details: 128 pages – 12/21/04 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).

I remember first posting my views of this script on a screenwriting forum a few years ago. I’d only read 30 pages, but what I’d read, I didn’t like. I thought it felt like a wannabe Die Hard sequel written by someone who’d read way too many Shane Black scripts. In general, I’m not a fan of overly-stylized writing unless it helps tell the story, so when I got to passages where the writers would actually describe what happened to the camera during an explosion, I didn’t think, “Cool,” I thought, “Is that necessary?”

Imagine my shock, however, when everyone else who read the screenplay absolutely loved it. In fact, I can’t remember a single person having a bad thing to say about it. Everyone kept talking about the “confidence” of the writing, how assured the writers were in carving out their words. I’d never really thought of writing in those terms before – “confidence” – so it took me awhile to figure out how that might affect someone’s reading experience.

To me, writing had always been about the story. Style and confidence are great, but they don’t address character arcs or sustain second acts. Could it be that style and confidence alone could carry a screenplay? I’m inclined to say no, but Tick Tock has a few other things going for it, namely that it’s never slow. This script moves at the breakneck speed of a Ferrari, and it should, since it’s being told in real time. I’m curious as to what the Scriptshadow readers will think of it. Does this spec-friendly real time confident action romp satisfy? Or is it pure sizzle?

Los Angeles.

Red-headed FBI Agent and tough-girl beauty, Claire, is racing to the Federal Building. She’s been informed of a terrorist threat. A man has threated to blow up some bombs in malls scattered throughout Los Angeles today, which just happens to be the biggest shopping day of the year.

The good news is they already have the bomber in custody. The bad news?

He doesn’t remember anything.

He doesn’t even know his own name. In fact, the FBI isn’t 100% sure this is even the guy. They just have some evidence to indicate he is.

The man, who we’ll refer to as Crosby, is a nice affable guy who’s convinced that he’s been misidentified. He doesn’t think he’s capable of doing something this terrible. But the doctors say that amongst other things, Crosby’s also lost his personality, which means if he were a true baddie, he wouldn’t even know it. The “good” news is they believe his amnesia will disappear within a few hours and the real “Crosby” will emerge.

But they don’t have a few hours! The bad guy’s taped threat says these bombs are going to blow up soon!

So Claire grabs Crosby along with a small crack FBI team and heads to Fox Hills Mall, where the first of the bombs is said to be planted. Her hope is that with a little visual stimulation, Crosby will remember where he put the bombs so they can deactivate them in time.

But wait! Crosby points out that even if he was the bad guy and all of a sudden remembered it, the last thing he’d do is expose his bomb locations. He’d just keep pretending he’d forgotten. I’m still not sure why Claire doesn’t see this as a problem, but she says something to indicate she’s not worried about it.

Basically, we jump from mall to mall as the threats get bigger and the bombs get explosioneyer. Claire and Crosby begin developing a friendship, even though they know that when Crosby finally realizes who he is and becomes Evil Crosby, that that friendship will dissolve faster than a lit bomb wick. Eventually they end up at The Beverly Center, a huge indoor upscale mall in Beverly Hills, where it appears this cat and mouse game will end with a big explosion.

Okay so first the good. Real-time. The real-time angle makes this movie a little different from the now two-decade long string of Die Hard copycats. It also keeps the script moving at a breakneck pace, which is always advantageous when writing a spec (faster more immediate stories tend to do better in the spec market).

Making the bad guy essentially a good guy was also a unique twist. Normally in these films the bad guy is obvious. Here, he’s actually helping our hero. When you combine this with the mystery of whether this really is the bad guy or not, I have to admit you have an interesting dynamic you’re not used to seeing in an action film.

However here’s the problem I had with Tick Tock. There’s a lot to buy into here, and the story almost feels like two movies trapped inside one. First you have a film about malls being blown up by some terrorist mastermind, and then you have a movie about a terrorist who doesn’t remember being a terrorist. They kind of go together but it all seemed a little too convenient that this was happening at the same time.

And that’s not the only thing you have to buy into. Tick Tock tests the limits of suspended disbelief. Let’s start with what I mentioned above. If this is the terrorist, once he remembers who he is, there’s a strong chance he’s not going to admit it. Also, our FBI team is running directly into malls that they know are going to blow up. Does that make sense to you? Cause I’m not sure it makes sense to me. Also, since they know all the bombs are placed in Los Angeles malls, why not just evacuate all the malls? There are attempts to explain this throughout the story, but for reasons I’m still not clear about, none of the malls are ever entirely evacuated. Also, it’s never clear how they know which mall to go to (they just sorta guess) or when the bombs are going to blow (they just sorta estimate).

All in all, there are a ton of rules you have to buy into to accept Tick Tock, a few too many for me, and that really prevented me from enjoying it. It helps that the script is not trying to be anything more than a fun action flick, but even that didn’t prevent a good handful of “Oh come ons!” during the read.

The funny thing is, Tick Tock incorporates a lot of things that I preach on this site. The writing is lean. The structure is sound. The script is the very definition of a ticking time bomb (it’s titled “Tick Tock!”). So I’m not going to go out of my way to say it has nothing to offer. It’s just that while I could buy into all these things on an individual basis, together they were too much. Not to mention that the reveal of the bad guy was lame.

I have a feeling some of you will find this fun, especially action buffs. But 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: There is something to be said for confidence in one’s writing. If you charge ahead, are in control of your words, if you show conviction in your choices, you can almost fool the reader into believing anything you write. If you’re timid and unsure of yourself when you write, the reader will sense it. If we don’t believe that *you* don’t believe in your story, then we’re not going to believe in it. Just remember, confidence doesn’t mean aggressiveness. The aggressive in-your-face writing works here because it’s a testosterone filled action flick. “Confidence” might be written much differently in, say, a horror script.