Genre: Indie Dramedy
Premise: After sabotaging another family vacation, a travel agent who’s afraid to fly battles his irrational phobias in order to win back his wife and daughter.
About: Paper Airplane landed in the middle of the pack of the 2010 Black List. Karger has written and directed a few shorts over the last five years, but this is his breakthrough script.
Writer: Sid Karger
Details: 104 pages (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).

If there’s a lesson to be learned from Paper Airplane, it’s in the logline, specifically the easy to identify ironic component: “After sabotaging another family vacation, a travel agent who’s afraid to fly battles his irrational phobias in order to win back his wife and daughter.” Not every story has an ironic hook or character, but I’ve found ones that do get a lot of reads. There’s no guesswork involved because the meat of the conflict is right there for an exec to see.

However as a screenplay, I had some problems with Paper Airplane, and part of that has to do with high expectations. See The Black List is renowned for finding and championing quirky material. You might even call it the preeminent source for doing so. The Beaver finished atop the Black List two years ago. Muppet Man last year. We have The Voices and Butter and Juno and Everything Must Go and Little Miss Sunshine and The Oranges and The Ornate Anatomy of Living Things. These scripts take quirky characters and dysfunctional families to another level. But what’s often forgotten, despite the contradictory nature of the declaration, is that quirky can easily become cliché. And for me, I think that’s what happened here.

Henry Tripp is Mr. Risk Averse. He’s settled into that middle-aged safety-net phase where you’re aware of every possible thing that has the potential to end your life. And for that reason, he avoids it all. There is nothing he avoids more vehemently however, than flying. Getting on one of those long metal tubes and barreling through the air six miles above the earth for hours on end is the equivalent of repeatedly stabbing yourself with a rusty fork as far as Henry is concerned.

And it’s killing him. Or more specifically, it’s killing his family.

His selfish powder-keg of a wife, Joyce, is sick of all the fear. She’s sick of Henry being such a fucking wuss. And his cute but dark 17 year old daughter, Carolyn, has been around this for so long that she’s in danger of actually thinking it’s normal.

So one day, Joyce says she’s had enough and reads a letter to the family explaining that she’s decided to leave. So she takes her things and moves out. Henry and Carolyn are jaws-to-the-floor shocked. Didn’t see that coming. If only that were all they had to worry about.

In one of the more original choices of the screenplay, it turns out that Joyce, the wife, is the one who has the mid-life crisis. In a desperate bid to find that freedom and that happiness she had before her marriage, Joyce makes a play for Ethan, Carolyn’s overly pretentious artsy boyfriend. Ethan, who believes he’s an adult anyway, is all too eager to take Joyce up on the opportunity, and so starts banging his girlfriend’s mom.

In the meantime, Henry believes that if he can just overcome his fears and find the courage to fly, that Joyce will fall back in love with him and he can save the family before it’s too late. So he joins an “afraid to fly” Support Group and makes one last desperate bid to destroy all his phobias.

Paper Airplane plays out as an amalgam of a lot of quirky scripts and movies that you’ve seen before. In fact, it almost feels like it’s competing against them. The problem is, it’s really hard to compete against what came before you. The Monkees never measured up to the Beatles. Remo Williams never measured up to The Karate Kid. And Paper Airplane never quite reaches the heights of its successors, most notably the gold standard in the dysfunctional family genre, and its biggest influence, American Beauty.

Part of my problem with the screenplay is that it’s so….cruel. A mom who steals her daughter’s boyfriend?? I mean how unlikable can you make a character? Even if the point was to make her unlikable, the problem is that the driving force behind the story is Henry trying to get Joyce back. So if we don’t want Henry to achieve that goal because his wife is so despicable, then what’s our incentive to keep reading?

I think I might’ve been able to stomach this if Ethan came on to Joyce first.  But she clearly is the hunter in this scenario.  And the only word I can think of to describe it is…disgusting.  This is your own daughter we’re talking about!  And Carolyn isn’t even the person you have the problem with.  It’s Henry.Why would you hurt her? 

But that’s only part of the problem. The biggest pitfall you can fall into when writing one of these scripts is focusing too much on the quirkiness and dysfunction-ality of the universe and not enough on the reality of the characters. In essence, you say, “Okay, what fucked up thing can I add next?” instead of building your characters from the inside out so that their actions stem from reality as opposed to a need to shock the audience. And I saw too much of that going on in Paper Airplane.

A perfect example (spoiler) was later in the script when Carolyn was spending a lot of time with her girlfriend. And I kept saying to myself, “Please don’t realize you’re a lesbian. Please don’t realize you’re a lesbian.” And sure enough, a few scenes later, a goof-around session results in them making out and Carolyn realizing she’s a lesbian. The problem was, there was nothing previously set up in Carolyn’s character to indicate she had any interest in girls whatsoever. But it was shocking and dysfunctional, so it was used.

Contrast that with a film like “The Kids Are All Right.” Julianne Moore gets absolutely zero positive feedback from her wife. She starts working with Mark Ruffalo and he’s Mr. Positive Feedback, the exact quality that she’s missing from her partner. On top of that, he’s the biological father of their kids. So there’s a natural intrigue and chemistry and connection and curiosity between the two. That way when they start having an affair, it makes sense, because it was born out of character.

Anyway, there were some things here to admire. While I didn’t enjoy the wife storyline, I totally admired Karger for creating such a daring female lead. I’ve definitely never read a character like this in a script before so that was different. And there was something quietly likable about Henry. His dogged determination to get his family back together, no matter how misguided it was, was fun, and slightly inspiring, to watch.

In the end though, this just didn’t do it for me.

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

What I learned: In the eternal struggle to “show” and not “tell” in your screenplays, pictures can be your best friend. Instead of building a whole scene where your characters argue about how good things “used to be,” just show your hero catch a glance of a picture on the fridge showing the family in happier times. In fact, look to use photographs in every aspect of your script to convey quick easy backstory about your characters (i.e. need to convey that one character is adventurous? Show a picture of them rock climbing).

Genre: Rom-Com
Premise: A news anchor who idolizes Audrey Hepburn gets left at the altar, then starts a friendship with her ex-fiancé’s best friend.
About: Ryan Murphy is one of the biggest names in the business right now. The public at large first came to know his work as the series creator of the trashy but yummy Nip/Tuck. He went on to direct the sorta critically acclaimed “Running With Scissors,” and more recently shot to superstardom as the series creator of Glee (he also wrote and directed Julia Roberts in Eat Pray Love). What you don’t know about Ryan is that he toiled away for a long time as a writer before he got his break. None other than Steven Spielberg saw Murphy’s talents and ended up buying this script as a result. Murphy recalls the experience: “Well I wrote the script based on a breakup I was going through at the time called Why Can’t I Be Audrey Hepburn? It’s this great soufflé of romantic comedy and it was close to her death, and he bought the script and we worked on it. It never got made. It had every female star in Hollywood attached to it—right before they became big stars. Renee Zellwegger, Jennifer Aniston wanted to do it … Halle Berry wanted to do it. It was thrilling to sit in a room with him and basically have him talk about movies.”
Writer: Ryan Murphy
Details: 113 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 know this is going to be hard for some of you to accept, but I’m not a Gleek. I know Gleeks. I’ve interacted with Gleeks. I’ve just come to the conclusion that we speak a different language. I’m not saying I wouldn’t use song and dance to express reviews here on Scriptshadow if I could. But I am saying that any show that celebrates Britney Spears and Justin Bieber with a badge of pride is not a show for me.

That said I have nothing against Gleekdom. Feel free to Gleek your way through the comments you Gleeks. If you want to tell me to Gleek Off or Gleek a life, I’m all for it. Express your Gleek with pride as I am not a Gleek-a-phobe. Okay, I’m going to stop saying ‘Gleek’ now and start this review.

Oh boy.

Here we go.

Let me get this straight. We have a rom-com where a girl gets left at the altar (barf!). She befriends a “bad boy” player who she hates more than anyone (double barf!). But they end up falling in love (triple barf!) But the original groom realizes he made a mistake and wants her back! (Barftopia!)

Could a romantic comedy be any more formulaic?

No, I’m sorry. It cannot. It is mathematically impossible.

So then explain to me this: Why the hell did I like it?

Why Can’t I Be Audrey Hepburn is, indeed, a mini-tribute to the silver screen goddess who gave us so many memorable performances. The movie starts out with our stylishly attractive female lead, Perry Forman, grabbing her gay best friend Duncan (yes, the token gay best friend – you have to remember though, this was written like 10 years ago – when token gay best friends weren’t token yet) and role-playing the famous scene in Breakfast At Tiffany’s where Audrey Hepburn and George Peppard go inside and buy the cheapest item that Tiffany’s sells, a sterling silver telephone dialer.

They are shocked to find out, unfortunately, that Tiffany’s stopped making the sterling silver telephone dialer over 3 decades ago. Whaaaat???

Anyway, Perry is getting ready for her big wedding with “owlishly handsome” Ross Miller, the seemingly perfect guy. But it turns out Ross isn’t so perfect, because he decides AT THE WEDDING that he wants no part of this “til death do you part” tomfoolery and leaves poor Perry at the altar.

Perry – who’s had her whole life planned out since she was five – has no idea how to process this turn of events, so she does the unthinkable and contacts brash badboy Sam, Ross’s best friend who Perry hates more than anything (the feeling is mutual: he doesn’t like her either) to get some insight on what happened.

While Sam isn’t exactly a Perry fan, he is an Audrey Hepburn fan, and the two’s mutual appreciation for the screen icon bridges an initial gap that would have otherwise remained gaping. The next thing you know, the idiots sleep with each other, and it gets all weird in that When Harry Met Sally way.

Sam is particularly shaken up because he’s screwed over his own best friend, a friend who happens to call him soonafter to tell him that he made a mistake and wants to get back together with Perry! He even lets Sam know what a good friend he’s been by helping Perry through this tough time. Yeah right. Friend now. Maury Pauvich guest tomorrow.

Naturally, things end with a second wedding, and Perry will have to decide who she really loves.

Okay, so I know how cliché and obvious this script sounds, but the thing is, it’s really well-written. Yesterday I made note of the fact that The Ark got boring because I always knew what was going to happen next. Well I pretty much knew what was going to happen here as well, but I was still into it. Why? Simple answer, the characters.

Whereas the characters in The Ark were one-dimensional, Murphy obviously put a lot of work into the people populating his universe. There are lots of ways to make your characters “three-dimensional,” yet strangely many writers avoid them. Start with a job for your hero. Make it a real job. Not something with a suit and an office where the only thing we see your character doing is answering a phone but rather something specific, preferably a job that helps define your character. Perry is an on-air news personality. Then take that a step further. Give them a goal at work, so it seems like there’s something going on in their life. Perry is up for a job at network.

Dig in to your character. Find out that thing that’s holding them back. Perry depends too much on planning. She doesn’t “go with the flow” enough. Then give your hero fears (she’s afraid to be alone) and obsessions (she loves Audrey Hepburn). There are lots of other things you can do (and should do) to flesh out your character but this is where to start and I can tell you this. If you don’t do any of these things? Your hero is going to come off thinner than a coat of paint. You gotta work on them so they feel like real flesh and blood human beings.

I also liked how the dynamics between the characters were maximized to create the most amount of conflict. This is an absolute necessity in rom-coms. Perry and Sam don’t like each other. That’s one source of conflict. Sam is Ross’s best friend. That’s another source of conflict. Perry and Sam have completely different philosophies on life. That’s another source of conflict. All these layers of conflict make Sam and Perry’s interactions interesting. Too many writers worry about making their dialogue “pop.” If you establish layers of conflict, the dialogue will write itself. It will “pop” without you having to try.

If there’s something I didn’t like, it’s that Perry’s flaw is told mainly through dialogue as opposed to action. Again, her flaw is that she’s a planner to a fault. But the only time we see this is when she *says* it. And she says it a lot. This is a lazy way to convey a character’s problem and should always be substituted by action if possible. For example, you might show Perry going to work with her blackberry, studiously checking away every little minor task she finishes – then have someone really important show up to her work unexpected for a meeting, and she’s simply unable to fit him in because it’s unexpected, not part of the “plan.” That’s off the top of my head but you get the idea. Show don’t tell. ESPECIALLY WHEN IT COMES TO YOUR HERO’S CHARACTER FLAW.

This script is good. I probably would’ve rated it even higher if it were just a little more original. But the execution is great. With Ryan Murphy’s heat right now, I don’t understand why this can’t get made. I mean it’s better than 90% of the romantic comedies they’re dumping on us right now. Slap his name on it and you have a hit. What’s the hold up?

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

What I learned: Asked what the best advice he’s ever been given was, Murphy answered: “Two things. One, you know, the people who are successful, particularly in Hollywood are the people who don’t give up. And I think that is really true. And the thing that I know, someone once told me this great thing… it only takes one yes to change your life. And I think that’s been really true for me. The power of one yes. You work for years, and you get all these no’s and one person believes in you and your whole life can turn around. People need to wait for that one yes. And I think this can apply to anybody. My Yes was Steven Spielberg, so it was a big fucking yes. And you get No, you’ve got no talent, and your tone is so weird, and the way you see the world is so weird. And he was like, I like how you see the world, yes. And I have not stopped working since. I think our careers are like that. We do very unusual things that are very specific, but they are so specific that they become universal. A lot of people do things really broad, and I never think that anything I am going to do is going to be successful because it’s so specific but it becomes a success.”

I know this is a weird post, but I’m making a call out to all you Scriptshadow readers to answer a question I’m dying to know.  Last night I was watching Risky Business and realizing what a great movie it was.  Not only is the screenplay incredibly tight but the directing is unique and inventive and captivating – there’s clearly a vision here.  The movie made Tom Cruise a star and yet the director ended up making like 3 more movies, none of which were very memorable, and then disappearing off the face of the earth.  It’s so odd.  Outside of a post on Hollywood Elsewhere, there’s no information on Brickman whatsoever.  Do any of you know what happened to this guy?  I’m dying to find out something – anything.

Genre: Horror/Sci-Fi
Premise: Jurassic Park meets Michael Bay via Jerry Bruckheimer. A team of scientists study what could be Noah’s Ark, trapped underneath a mountain of ice. But this is not the same ark we’ve been told about in stories.
About: The 2005 sci-fi script “The Ark” is what got Holly Brix her agent. This later led to her selling her first spec, “Mile Zero,” about a young woman who takes a job on an Alaskan oil rig so she can prove her father’s innocence in a series of murders (to star Milla Jovavich). Finally, last year, Brix got her first produced credit with “The Butterfly Effect 3: Revelations.” Lucky for us, she’s made her first script available through the WGA website which I link to at the end of the review.
Writer: Holly Brix
Details: 125 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).

Hooray! A script all of you can participate in. We haven’t had much action oriented sci-fi stuff on the site lately, so I decided to change that. The Ark is one of those big idea scripts, the kind that Roland Emmerich and Dean Devlin get all hot and bothered over. Something a younger Spielberg might have made. And make no mistake, The Ark has its influences steeped in Jurassic Park. The big question with these “big idea” scripts is always, does the execution live up to the idea? The answer is almost always no because a big idea only requires you to write 2 great lines. A script requires you to write 5000 great lines. Naturally, the odds aren’t in your favor. But hey, if it were easy, everyone would be doing it, right? Let’s hope Brix is one of the few who pulled it off.

Abby Archer, that rare breed of knockout archeologist you only find in movies, is approached by a man explaining to her that they’ve “found it.” Whatever “it” is, Abby seems to understand what he’s talking about, but doubts that it’s true. “It” is obviously something very rare.

Complicating matters is that Jeff, her ex-husband, is also being summoned to the “it” party. That’s good news for us readers (conflict!) but bad news for Abby. While it all seems like a lot of hassle for what will likely be nothing, in the end Abby agrees to participate because the scientific ramifications are just too large.

So it’s off to Iceland where Abby and an entire team are greeted by Allister Eckmann, a 56 year old Richard Branson times 20. Eckmann believes he’s found the Ark. Yes, the Ark as in that boat with all the animals on it. Well great, Abby says, let’s get the hell down there and check it out.

So they head down under stories and stories of ice and are shocked to see what doesn’t look like a boat at all. This looks more like a…giant space ship. Abby takes the group inside and they immediately come upon some frozen animals, but not like any animals you and I know. More like animal hybrids. Dog-bears and Emu-vultures. That kind of thing.

What this means, they beleive, is that Noah’s Ark is a ship that originated from another planet, and came here to populate the earth. Nobody’s quite sure why the ship then would be down here, with all the animals seemingly still entombed, but since they’re all scientists, they’re eager as hell to find out.

Unfortunately, while taking a stroll through the stadium sized ship, it TURNS ON, and all these animals start thawing out. These animals weren’t frozen after all. They were in cryogenic sleep! And since half of them seem to be the really nasty hunting type, our characters realize they’re playing the part of eggs and bacon in these animals’ breakfast.

As is the norm in these movies, people start splitting up, and each group is hunted down by a set of nasty monsters. One group takes on a rhino…thing. Another takes on a room full of cougars, and no, not that kind of cougar (though I’m not sure which would be worse). And others still take on some kind of Yeti beast.

There’s a big storm that prevents them from getting up to the surface. There’s a bad guy who’s got his own motives for the Ark. And there’s plenty of hypotheses about what planet the ship is from and why it came to earth. But in the end, it’s just about getting the fuck off this thing alive.

So, does The Ark work? I’m afraid to say “not really.” It’s certainly a fun idea but the treatment of that idea is too simple and too obvious. If you’re a fan of these kinds of movies, you’re not going to find anything new here, and while that certainly isn’t required for these films to work, the lack of surprises leads to us being way ahead of the story, which is never a good thing.

One of the overlooked things in these genre, believe it or not, is character development. Outside of Abby’s past relationship with Jeff, there’s nothing linking any of these people together – no history, no secrets, no conflict, no problems. In other words, there’s no drama to get wrapped up in, and as a result, we lose interest in the characters.

Look at a movie like Pitch Black. Look at all the tension and secrets and history and conflict going on between the characters in that movie. Riddick and Johns have a past. Riddick is the only one who can save them, but is also the one who can hurt them the most. So half the people want to let him free and the other half don’t. This causes a divide between the group. Certain characters are building trust with other characters, some of them lying, some not, so that there’s this intricate web of drama and deceit going on underneath the story. This way, when all the exterior stuff happens (they’re attacked), the character moments become a lot more interesting. Is a person who hates another person going to save them or let them die? You need that kind of stuff to make these stories work and there just wasn’t any of that going on here. Even the stuff with Abby and Jeff gets forgotten, which leaves almost zero conflict to play with.

The stuff that happened topside with Eckmann and our bad guy, Joe, was kind of interesting. But it felt completely detached from the rest of the story, since the two plots had little to do with each other, so it was tough getting into it.  Plus, if you’re going to have a bad guy, you want him to be a part of the party, right in the mix of everything, not safely upstairs in another subplot.  Imagine if Burke was still up on the main ship in Aliens. 

To be honest, I would’ve preferred they got rid of the topside plot altogether. Some of the stuff there was hard to buy anyway (Eckmann went down and set up cameras all over the ship ahead of time so he could watch the scientists expressions when they looked around). I think one of the reasons The Thing worked so well was that they were all alone, no way to call for help, stranded. I think this would’ve been more scary if our characters were experiencing that same kind of uncertainty.

This script actually feels more like a first draft, where the writer is getting the basic ideas down, with plans to flesh everything out later. If that’s the case, I think it has potential. Mutated animals hunting down humans is definitely movie material. But right now, too many aspects are only half-realized.

Script link: http://www.wga.org/uploadedFiles/theark.pdf (This link is for the WGA’s server, where you can download the screenplay)

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

What I learned: Use a lingering mystery in your first act to take us through boring character introductions. In some scripts, you have to set up a lot of characters. This can be really boring for a reader to trudge through, but here’s a trick to make it more bearable. Set up a mystery ahead of time. In The Ark, we’ve been told that he’s found “it.” What’s “It?” We’re not sure but from everyone’s excitement, we sure as hell want to find out. For that reason, while we meet 8 characters in a row, the pages fly by, because we’re excited to find out what it is they’re all talking about. If you ONLY introduce 8 characters in a row, you’re probably going to put us to sleep.

Hey guys.  As a lot of you know, I’m a big fan of The Tracking Board website.  For those not aware of what a tracking board is, it’s a site that tracks spec scripts as well as writing assignments in the industry and lets you know how those scripts are faring.  Which ones find that elusive sale, where that sale comes from, which ideas fall by the wayside, what big writer just landed the new Pirates rewrite, etc., etc.  The site is invaluable for writers to keep a gauge on what ideas are selling, what ideas aren’t, and it’s a great way to make sure someone hasn’t already written that masterpiece you were preparing to spend the next two years of your life on.

The site also keeps you updated on job openings (i.e. a personal assistant job for a producer, assistant at an agency), new project attachments, TV pilot happenings, festival info, private screenings, and a whole bunch of other stuff.

I know they have a holiday deal of 15% going on, but for Scriptshadow readers, I managed to get it down another 10% so the normal price of $59/yr is down to $44.25!  The deal is going on through January 10 so sign up if you’re not signed up already.  Happy holidays!