Heat meets The Town meets… Secretariat?

Genre: Crime
Premise: A horse veterinarian who uses his practice as a cover to treat injured criminals finds himself targeted by a corrupt cop, who needs him to help rob the Thoroughbred Cup.
About: This script just sold for a million dollars to Amazon, which beat out Netflix in the bidding. We don’t get many big spec sales these days unless they’re in the short story format, so this is exciting. It comes from the writer of Ballast, that nifty script about a car ferry that has a bunch of its cars rigged with bombs. Some thought it was a little too “thinking man” for a fun action script but I liked it. Today’s script feels like it better matches the writer’s heady-thoughtful writing style. Let’s see how it turns out.
Writer: Justin PIasecki
Details: 116 pages

Succession’s Jeremy Strong to level up to feature film leading man?

By the time you read this, screenwriters in Hollywood may be on strike. It’s going down to the wire. Obviously, this is going to be rough on everyone. If you’re a writer, there will be no work. If you’re a studio, you have nobody to write your movies or shows.

However, the one good thing to come from an impending strike is that it gets studios trigger-happy. They need content in case the strike goes on for a while. Which is how we end up with today’s sale. This script is said to have been purchased exclusively because of the impending strike. So good for Justin for taking advantage of an opportunity.

Nick Easter, a 40-something horse vet, has been a Chicago guy his whole life. Nick’s been dealt a few harsh blows lately. His wife died and his 17 year old addict son is stuck in juvie. Since regular vet work isn’t paying the bills, Nick has taken to outfitting his practice with a secret underground medical facility for gnarly Chicago criminals.

It’s pretty easy to pull off, actually. You just order a little extra horse medicine and you use it on the humans. Well, easy is about to get hard. Because a group of Chechens try to steal Nick’s boss’s medical shipment, which just happens to have a plethora of heroin in it as well.

The cops think it’s a standard drug deal gone bad until they find traces of horse manure in the truck. This sends them on a roundabout trip that ends up at Nick’s secret doctor’s office. Surprisingly, the cop who discovers him doesn’t want to arrest him. He wants Nick to help him rob the place where Nick works, Hawthorne Racetrack. The Thoroughbred Cup is coming up and millions of dollars are going to be bet there that day.

Of course, Nick says no way. But our cop reminds him that he just might pay a visit to the local juvie hall and, oh, I don’t know, stash some heroin under Nick’s son’s pillow. If he does that, juvie may be a fond memory compared to where the son is going next. So Nick is stuck doing the job. Saddle up everyone. We’re about to experience the mane event.

Something it took me a really long time to figure out was that crime is a great way to write a character piece that Hollywood actually wants to buy. When I first started writing, I was writing all these dramadies that were, essentially, character pieces with a little bit of humor in them. Nobody wants to buy those. Those scripts only get made if they’re directed by the writer themselves.

Crime, on the other hand, sells. Because crime ups the stakes of everything. Now there are guns involved, drugs involved, theft involved, people are actually dying. You can build a marketing campaign around that. Heck, just put a well-known actor on a poster with a gun and people will go to see that movie. It’s much harder to get investors or studios if all you’ve got is characters trying to make it through life.

Case in point, Red Rocket is one of my favorite movies of the last two years. But NO ONE HAS SEEN IT. Cause it’s an offbeat coming-of-age love story. The only reason it got made was because the writer is well known and he was also the director.

Which is me telling you, if you’ve got a character piece that doesn’t have a hook, consider turning it into a crime film. Cause it all of a sudden becomes a million times more marketable. It’s one of those few times that crime does pay.

That doesn’t mean writing these is easy. With crime films, the problem is always that they feel the same. Grungy looking serious people dealing with criminal problems, occasionally pulling out their guns and firing them then jetting off until they deal with their next skirmish. So how do you differentiate yourself?

You gotta find one or two unique elements to hang your concept’s hat on.

Imagine yourself hanging out with a friend, who, of course knows you’re a screenwriter, and they ask you, “What are you working on right now?” Imagine answering that question. Would your answer make that friend believe that you’ve got something cool on your hands? Or would your pitch, no matter how you spun it, sound like every other crime movie out there? Cause if it’s the second one, you’re working on the wrong idea.

With this script, it’s the horse angle. Why is that unique? Cause I’ve read hundreds of crime scripts and I can only think of a couple that dabble in this subject matter. That’s it. That’s all you need. If you have that, chances are you’re in good shape. If you would’ve told me it’s a script about bank robbers or drug dealers or a guy who gets in trouble with the Russian mob, we’ve got a problem.

The big payoff scene in Stakehorse is reminiscent of the famous bank robbery in Heat. It’s not quite to that level. But it has the same intensity as that scene. In it, Nick’s boss takes a group of criminals on one of those truck-train combos that can ride on train tracks. Knowing when a brinx truck is going to be coming to a train crossing, they’re able to close the crossing gates, blocking the truck (as well as the rest of the traffic) there.

They then blow the tires off the thing and use some elaborate tools to get into the truck. It’s a really cool scene mostly due to the fact that you haven’t seen it before. It’s SO HARD in these crime films to come up with fresh set pieces but this was totally fresh. My one complaint – and it’s something I can’t believe Piasecki didn’t think of – was that he didn’t have an unscheduled train show up, barreling towards them, adding a super intense ticking time bomb to the scene. But it was still cool!

The biggest problem I have with this script is that it reads thick. By that I mean, it’s one of those scripts where if you miss even one action or dialogue line, you might be confused. So you have to concentrate a lot more to keep up with what’s going on.

Yeah yeah. Technically, that’s what a script should be – every line contains relevant information. But you can definitely go overboard with that, and if you’re writing a script with a lot of characters and nuance and exposition and detail, it can start to feel like work reading the script.

Go back and read Friday’s script, which is one of the easiest reads you’ll have all year then read this script, and you’ll see what I mean. I’m not saying it’s a bad thing. You can certainly get away with it if you’re a good writer, like Piasecki. But I don’t like scripts where I check that page number, thinking I’m on page 30, and I’m only on page 12. That tells me your script is too dense, in description, information, plot, or all three.

Still, I thought this was good stuff. If you liked The Town, you’ll love this script.

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

What I learned: There’s always a more clever way to say something. Early on, when the cops are traipsing through a truck crime scene, they note that there are a couple of dead bodies in the back of the drug truck. How would you refer to those bodies in dialogue? Most writers would write something like, “We got a couple dead bodies back here!” The less lazy writer might add a little more flourish, saying something like, “We got two big beefy corpses back here.” Piasecki goes with something better than both of these: “I figure we got a buy gone wrong. Driver catches an unlucky one in the front. A hundred and twenty kilos of brown and five hundred pounds of dead Chechens in the back.” “Five hundred pounds of dead Chechens” is a much more clever way to refer to two dead bodies.

Did we get duped?

All along, were the Russos, actually, bad filmmakers?

This is a bold, maybe even triggering, accusation.

But the question needs to be asked because I watched Citadel this weekend, the gigantically budgeted new Amazon show that uses the words “highly enriched uranium” in its very first scene — WHAT YEAR IS THIS? 1984??? — and it was created by the Russo brothers.

The show’s 51% Rotten Tomatoes score clearly isn’t accurate as the show can’t be measured in ripe and rotten tomatoes.  It must be measured in those mass produced faded tomatoes you find at the big brand supermarkets, the ones so devoid of taste, you wonder if they can even legally be called tomatoes.  If we’re measuring this show by those tomatoes, it gets 100%.  Because it is 100% bland.

Since their Marvel experience, the Russos gave us their gritty miscast character piece, Cherry, which I hear did quite well at the cast and crew screening, the only people who actually saw the movie.  They then gave us The Gray Man, possibly the most generic piece of action filmmaking the universe has been subjected to. And now this. This…. Whatever Citadel is. If nobody had told me, I might assume it was a very long commercial for a new fragrance.

The Russos have long been an anomaly. They were comedy directors, giving us the Owen Wilson film, “You, Me, and Dupree.” They then became TV show directors, helming episodes of Arrested Development, Happy Endings, and Community.

People thought Kevin Feige had lost his marbles when he gave the Russos a Marvel film (Captain America: Winter Soldier). But they delivered. That got them Captain America: Civil War and then the Avengers films, which turned them into household names.

But are the Russos merely beneficiaries of the Marvel formula at a time when it was at its most potent? Or are they actually exceptional?

Hollywood is a strange place that has the power to make people and things look bigger and better than they actually are. It’s a spin zone, the most formidable of all time. They can spin you up or, when they no longer need you, spit you out.  It’s that spitting part that exposes you – that leaves you naked and bare.  Those who were actually good survive this spitting.  Those who don’t churn out an endless stream of tomato compost.

I watched this Jennifer Lawrence trailer for her latest movie, No Hard Feelings. The film, about an older woman who gets paid by a couple of parents to help their son lose his virginity before he goes to college, is the result of Lawrence “taking control of her career” and making her own choices, as opposed to doing her agents’ bidding. It literally looks like the worst film of all time.

I see that streak Lawrence was on with Hunger Games, Silver Linings Playbook, and American Hustle, and she just looked invincible. When you saw her getting nominated for Oscars, you didn’t bat an eye. It made sense because the Hollywood machine told you it made sense. This was one of the greatest actresses of our generation, they said, and we nodded like zombies who’d been promised fresh brains for dinner.

Since then, she’s made Red Sparrow, Serena, X-Men Apocalypse, Joy, Passengers, Mother, Dark Phoenix, Don’t Look Up, and Causeway – a stretch of extremely mediocre films. So which one is the real Jennifer Lawrence? Is it the one who went on that first streak or this one?

There’s an argument to be made that it’s so hard to make anything good in this town that if you can make even ONE great film, you’ve done the impossible. And if you can make three great films? You’ve done something 99.99999999% of people who come to Los Angeles never achieved. That cannot be a fluke. So why not celebrate that instead of focusing on all the duds they made?

Fair. But when you make five bad movies in a row (or six, or seven, or eight), it’s hard not to question whether you were as good as everyone said you were. Maybe the powers that be knew how to protect your weaknesses as an actor, or, in the Russos’ case, as directors.

If you’re looking to watch something actually good, I suggest staying away from Amazon’s solipsismistic snafu, and starting up Beef, on Netflix. I know some people have had a problem with this series because Amy Lau (Ali Wong) is the single most unlikable person on the planet. But if you push past the first couple of episodes, she becomes more tolerable.

The series is about a down-on-his-luck landscaper, Danny, who gets in a road rage incident with the CEO of a Goop-like wellness company, Amy. Danny chases her down, finds out her name, and starts stalking her. She retaliates in kind. And the two go back and forth at each other, the stakes escalating each time, until they’re at life-destroying levels.

There are a couple of great screenwriting lessons the series teaches us, the most obvious being the power of conflict. This entire series is built around a strong case of conflict. But conflict all on its own can’t carry a story. And it definitely can’t carry 10 episodes of television. You need something more.

So the second thing we’ve got is CLASS. These aren’t two rich people going at it. It’s not two poor people battling. It’s one rich person and one poor person. This turbo-charges the conflict because now we’ve got a class war. Also, in that initial interaction, Amy “wins” the road rage duel. Which creates an underdog scenario. Because, now, we want Danny to get her back. That’s why we’re going to tune in to the next episode. And the episode after that.

Then, like any good TV show, it starts giving you insight into these peoples’ lives, particularly Amy’s life, which, we find out, is a difficult one. She’s the breadwinner in her family. Her impotent husband is a lousy artist living off his much more famous father’s talent. So all the pressure is on her to make the money.

The screenwriters wisely create this storyline in which Amy is trying to sell her company to a bigger company, which places a ticking clock on the timeline and also places something at stake. If Danny were to do something that ruins this sale, Amy’s entire life would fall apart. Which means that all their interactions have weight. There are consequences involved.

The mistake a lot of amateur writers make is that there are never any real consequences to anything the characters do. You need to create situations where a conversation actually has implications on the characters’ lives.

The show still exhibits issues that Streaming TV hasn’t solved yet. Which is that if you’re a straight serialized show, your series inevitably falls into a rut. As a reminder, a serialized show has one continuous storyline, like Breaking Bad. A procedural show, like CSI, is a series of self-contained stories with little continuity or overarching plot.

It’s much harder to create episode ideas in a serialized show because, unlike Grey’s Anatomy, you can’t just throw in a new “sick person of the week.” You have to create brand new plot and, inevitably, these shows don’t have enough plot to fill up all that space. This forces them to start going backwards, via flashbacks, disrupting the forward momentum of the story. Which is exactly what happens in Beef, a show that is at its apex SPECIFICALLY when it has momentum.

The writers will always defend these choices as “getting to know the characters better,” and that’s true. We do learn more about the characters if we go into their pasts. But good writers are supposed to be able to do this WHILE KEEPING THE STORY MOVING. Any schmo off the street can write a flashback scene to some traumatic event that happened when their character was five. Real screenwriters are supposed to be able to come up with creative ways to get those details across within the flow of the story.

With that said, faults and all, I really liked this series. Beyond what I talked about, it does a great job expanding all of the characters’ lives. Characters who you think are going to be unimportant turn out to have these fully fleshed out complex storylines. I loved Danny’s lughead brother and Amy’s talentless stay-at-home husband. And the series isn’t afraid to get weird. It’s the polar opposite of Citadel. And gosh darnit, thank god for that.

Genre: Thriller
Premise: Over the course of one day, a resilient young woman is terrorized by a self-proclaimed “nice guy” who refuses to take no for an answer after asking her out.
About: This is our April Logline Showdown WINNER!  What you see above was the logline used in the competition. If you want to participate in the next Logline Showdown, the deadline is Thursday, May 18th, 10pm Pacific Time. Send your title, genre, and logline to carsonreeves3@gmail.com. The script must be written!
Writer: Patrick Bottaro
Details: 89 pages

I saw some comments where readers were baffled about this logline winning. But I think it’s a really good idea. Let me explain why. The persona of “nice guys” is a fascinating one. The “nice guy” was born out of this idea that if you were just really kind to girl, you could nice your way into her bedroom.

This led to a phenomenon known as “white knighting,” where nice guys would go a step further and “defend” women in public if a perceived “creepy” or “douchey” guy were to hit on her. On the surface, such an action was noble. But what became clear was that the nice guy was not trying to be nice. He was hoping that his niceness would imbue himself to the woman and she would reward him with bedtimes shenanigans.

That’s the appeal of today’s logline. The nice guy is the poster child for irony. He pretends to be one thing, but he’s really the opposite. And those are always great characters – where the external is at odds with the internal.

Now let’s find out if the script is any good!

20-something Grace is setting up a hookup on text with a new guy she’s seeing, Chris, while waiting for her coffee. While she waits, Jon approaches: “JON (mid-30s) creeps up beside her, a little too close. Everything about him is off, the type of person men and women avoid, for different reasons.”

Jon lays it on thick. He tells her she has a beautiful name. That she’s beautiful. That she’s in great shape. Does she want to have a drink with him? Grace rejects him pretty hard but Jon remains persistent, following her outside. She finally has to tell him, as harshly as possible, to get away from her. She’s not interested.

Grace heads to the gym she works at where she confides to her work buddy, Shane, what just happened. Grace heads up to the main desk to get to work and that’s when Jon arrives. He causes some commotion and is able to snatch her phone in the process, before running back out. 20 minutes later and everyone who works at the gym receives nude selfies from Grace’s phone.

Grace wants to go to the cops but the cops need evidence. And they also need a suspect. All they know about this mystery nice guy is that his name is Jon. Grace tries to get security footage of Jon coming in the gym from her boss but the boss is being difficult. Shane tells Grace he’ll get the video. In the meantime, go file a police report.

Grace does that but, afterwards, is attacked by Jon outside, who now has a van. After a brief stint in the hospital where she has to escape Jon once again, she’s able to get to her new bed buddy, Chris’s, house. Chris is a little thrown by Grace showing up unannounced but he’s determined to help her take down this creep. They call the cops but before the cops get there, Jon is able to trick Chris (making him think he’s a cop) and get inside, where he kills Chris and kidnaps Grace.

Back at Jon’s house, Jon puts together the date that he wanted in the first place. With a shock collar on Grace in case she tries anything funny. Shane is able to figure out where Chris lives and shows up, where he barely manages to kill Jon and save Grace’s life. Now that he’s done so, he suggests grabbing a drink with Grace. But Grace tells him, sorry, but we’re just friends. A dark look comes over Shane’s face. The end.

First off, props to Patrick here.

This is a really fast read. I can’t emphasize enough how awesome it is when the writer prioritizes making the reading experience effortless.

And this truly was effortless. Ironically, that ended up hurting the script. But I’ll get to that in a second.

First, I want to say that the trick with these scripts (fast moving thrillers) is that they must read fast but not feel like they were written fast.

This felt like it was written fast. What does that mean? Why would I suspect that? It boils down to how bland the creative choices are. Are the characters all standard and expected? Is the dialogue too basic? Does it lack thoughtfulness? Are things too easy for the heroes and the villains? Are the plot beats easy to see coming? Can I predict, with 80% or higher accuracy, what’s going to happen in the next 20 pages?

Let’s key in on one of those rules.

Are things too easy for the heroes and villains?

Yes. They consistently were. Jon gets through this story with immense ease. He barely has to do anything to get anywhere he wants. At one point, Chris is waiting for the police to show up at his place to pick up Grace. He knows Jon is dangerous. He knows Jon has Grace’s phone. So when the “cops” show up at his building (aka John), and he doesn’t think twice about letting him in — I’m not buying that.

Nor am I buying a woman screaming for help from a crazed man following her to a convenience store owner and all Jon has to say is, “I’m taking my crazy girlfriend back to the mental hospital” to get the store owner to give him Grace. That was consistent with the whole movie. Things happened way too easily.

One of the responsibilities of us screenwriters is making the job difficult. Make the characters EARN everything they get.

I recently watched the thriller, “Missing,” and that’s a great example of making the character earn everything. When her mom goes missing in Columbia during a holiday with her new boyfriend, our teenaged main character has to figure out how to find her. But everyone she calls in Columbia – the hotel, the police – speaks another language. She can’t communicate with them.

The writers then pay off a “task rabbit” setup from earlier in the story. Our heroine sees the link for Task Rabbit again on her computer screen, gets an idea, searches the web for Columbia’s version of Task Rabbit. Even that doesn’t come up with an initial hit. She has to dig deeper (always make things hard on your hero!) and finally finds an equivalent and cycles through a bunch of potentials before she locates a guy who knows English and now she’s got boots on the ground in Columbia to look for things for her.

Side note: The writers of the movie used to read Scriptshadow religiously! They listened!

The point is, you always felt in that movie like the characters had to work for it. The reason you don’t see that in the typical screenplay is because IT’S HARD. It’s one of those things that takes time. It takes trial and error, new ideas forming between drafts. It’s time-consuming. Which is why most writers don’t do it. That’s the first thing that needs to be fixed here.

Now, when it comes to our “nice guy,” Jon, I had issues with his opening scene. Because it wasn’t a nice guy interaction! He comes in and clearly starts hitting on Grace. That’s not “nice guy” behavior. Nice guys would consider hitting on a girl “creepy.” The nice guy would come up and make indirect conversation about her coffee or the weather – safe topics that keep things nice and pleasant. He would then hope that the girl would appreciate him and then start to like him because of that.

The reason this matters is because if this is just a guy who asks a girl out and she says no and he goes psycho, then there’s nothing unique about your idea. You’ve just got a dude stalking a girl. What makes your idea unique IS the “nice guy” part. So you have to get that right.

To Patrick’s credit, I think he’d say the real nice guy was Shane. And Shane definitely does exhibit nice guy behaviors. He wants to help Grace by any means possible just out of the goodness of his heart. Except, of course, that’s not why he’s doing it at all. He’s doing all this with the hopes of getting Grace at the end. It’s the ultimate nice guy move.

And I’ll also give Patrick props for giving us a climax to that storyline which hits us like an Oppenheimer bomb. It was the one moment that truly went against the grain of how that moment is SUPPOSED TO GO in a typical script. To, also, end the script on that moment was a bold move. I just wanted to see more of those bold moves throughout the script. If you could do that as well as make things harder for everyone and make everyone have to work for what they were getting, as well as throw in a monster twist or two, now you’ve got a movie!

A good template is Missing. I swear to you. I was halfway through that movie and I had NO idea where it was going. I can’t remember the last time I saw a Hollywood movie and halfway through didn’t know how it was going to end. And that movie also has that MONSTER twist I was talking about this needing. So you could use that as inspiration.

This feels like a first draft. It needs 5 or 6 more to get it to that mature state where it really cooks.

What’d you guys think?

Script link: Nice Guy

[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me (but close to a ‘worth the read’)
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius

What I learned: One of the ways to “mature” a script through rewrites is to figure out which of your primary characters are on-the-nose and look for ways to add complexity to them. Jon is very on-the-nose in this script. He literally says, a number times, “I’m just a nice guy.” On-the-nose villains are the most boring characters you can write. So how do we fix this? Well, in the opening scene, after Grace rejects Jon and goes to her car, there’s a van blocking her and the van door opens and there’s a woman helping a child in a wheelchair get out. The scene was meant to keep Grace from getting in her car so that Jon could catch up with her. Why not make it so the girl in the wheelchair IS WITH JON? You would rewrite it so that after she harshly rejects Jon in the coffee shop, she spots him walking back to sit down with the girl in the wheelchair. They’re together. Just as a starting pointing for a character, that’s way more interesting. Psychos who chase women aren’t supposed to be helping push around little girls in wheelchairs. Maybe this is his sister. Maybe it’s his sibling’s daughter and he uses her as part of his “Nice Guy” schtick. I just know that that makes him more complex than just asking a girl out and when she says no he freaks out and decides to chase her for the rest of the day.

“First of all, this script is way too long. 180 pages is 80 pages more than anyone in Hollywood is willing to read. Next, you’ve got this overwhelming theme of saving the planet that’s obviously a political message. Nobody wants political messages in their movies. They just want to be entertained. Your main character, Jake, is boring. He’s a lughead without any personality. A movie that’s going to cost this much money needs a way more interesting main character. And let’s not even get into how ridiculous this mythology is. I was confused half the time. So, they’re on a planet with aliens and then they become the aliens by growing the aliens and putting themselves inside their heads digitally. Basic questions like, what happens when their avatars need to sleep, are never adequately answered. A movie like this is a bridge too far, too weird, and too expensive to ever get made.”

-Avatar
Worldwide box office: 2.7 billion

“There are so many things wrong with this script, I don’t know where to start. Maybe start with the fact that in a movie about people living in a simulation, that whenever people fight each other, they can only use kung-fu. Why don’t they fight like normal people? Why only kung-fu? The script is packed with pseudo-philosophy that is consistently eye-rolling. I kid you not, one of the lines is, “Do not try and bend the spoon, that’s impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth… there is no spoon. Then you’ll see that it is not the spoon that bends, it is only yourself.” Good lord. This doesn’t even get to all the logical faults in the movie. Why do they have to go through this entire song and dance to get Neo out of the Matrix? Why not just take him out right away? This whole script is ridiculous.

-The Matrix
Worldwide box office: 467 million
Also, the most successful DVD of all time

“This is one of the most disjointed scripts I’ve ever read. It has a great opening sequence that pulls you in but then, inexplicably, you leave that storyline and follow another one with a douchey Hollywood sex offender who we hate. Why would you build a story around this guy? Eventually, we get back to the house where all the good stuff was happening and that’s when you introduce the most ridiculous character I’ve ever seen, a giant naked orc-woman with superhuman strength who thinks everyone is her baby. This went so far away from your cool opening that it made me completely lose faith in both you and the script. This would never get made because everybody who watched it would leave the theater fuming.”

-Barbarian
Budget: 4.5 million
Worldwide box office: 45 million
Turned its director into one of the hottest names in Hollywood

“I’ve never seen a dumber idea in my life. You’re making a superhero film with a main character that doesn’t have any superpowers. And, oh yeah, you’re not focusing on the superhero. You’re focusing on the supervillain. Why in the world would we root for the bad guy???? He’s one of the most diabolical awful human beings in existence. We see that here in spades. His primary storyline is stalking the single mom who lives in his building.  Who’s our target demo here?  4chan?  The script doesn’t have a narrative either. The character just drifts through life, occasionally trying to be a stand-up comedian. This is too heady and slow for superhero fans and cinephiles have no interest in watching superheroes. I don’t see any audience for this movie.”

-Joker
Budget: 55 million
Worldwide box office: 1 billion

“I don’t understand why we’re considering this script. This is a horror film, which is a genre that plays to 13-21 year olds, and the whole thing is a silent film. Nobody speaks! What Gen-Z moviegoer that you know is going to pay to watch a silent film? The script is so desperate to be seen as clever.  It makes the daughter character deaf.  Get it!?  The monsters hunt on noise and she can’t hear any noise!  Oh, the irony!  Give me a break.  The rules dictating this world don’t make sense.  As humans, we always make noises. We sneeze, we cough, we fart. All of this is ignored in the movie. Audiences would tear the logic of this film apart. And teens – our primary audience – are going to massacre us online for a horror film where nobody talks.”

-A Quiet Place
Budget: 17 million
Worldwide box office: 340 million

“So let me get this straight. We’re going to go all in on making a period piece about a boat sinking and the whole thing is going to rest on a love story? I get it if this is Dirty Dancing and we’re shooting in a small town for 10 million bucks. But we’re recreating 1912!  We’re recreating an entire boat down to the last detail and we’re shooting on multiple sets with hundreds of extras and endless costuming. This is going to cost us a fortune. There’s no scenario whatsoever where enough people will pay to see this movie to make up for that cost. We’re literally throwing money away.”

-Titanic
Worldwide box office – 2.3 billion

“I have never read a script with a more passive main character in my life. Nothing that happens in this story happens because the main character made it happen. It only happened because he fell into it. For that reason alone, we have zero shot at getting an actor big enough to convince a studio to finance the movie. But even if we somehow trick someone to be in the film, it’s three hours of a wandering narrative that doesn’t have a clear destination. We’re in Vietnam, then we’re playing ping-pong at the Olympics, then he decides to walk across the US for no reason. It’s like the writer couldn’t make up his mind what kind of story he wanted to tell. I feel certain in my assessment that if we make this, it will be one of the biggest flops the studio has ever made.”

-Forrest Gump
Worldwide box office: 678 million

“This was a good script but these movies don’t make money! Small town crime dramas have a ceiling of 10 million at the box office if they’re lucky. Their audience, older men, is too small. Also, with everything moving online, people are getting more and more used to watching these kinds of movies at home.  Not to mention, the golden age of TV is allowing audiences to get their fix of this genre in TV shows, which is probably what this movie should be since it’s so character-driven. No way this justifies the cost.”

-Hell or High Water
Budget: 12 million
Worldwide box office: 37 million
The movie is the first step in the writer creating a billion dollar franchise (Taylor Sheridan)

“This is the most generic laughable action movie I’ve ever read. It starts off with some Russian guys killing our protagonist’s dog. That becomes the primary motivation in the film – to get them back. No, actually, they kill his dead wife’s dog. It wasn’t even his dog! That would actually make more sense. So he decides to unretire and kill an entire Russian crime organization because of the dog. I kid you not. And then we get five standard gun shootouts and that’s the movie. We’ll be lucky to get 20 rentals on digital video if we make this.”

-John Wick
Budget: 14 million
Worldwide box office: 86 million
Begins a billion dollar franchise

A story that’s always stuck with me is Zach Braff’s pursuit of making Garden State. Everyone told him that script was terrible. And, to be fair, it wasn’t very good. But he pushed through all that resistance, made the movie, and it was the big surprise hit at that year’s Sundance. It then went on to have a long successful theatrical run.

That story made me realize that every single script that ever gets written is going to be criticized. In fact, more people are going to criticize your script than not criticize it. No matter how good it is. Without going into the weeds, art is weird. It is the most criticized of any pursuit in life. Everybody has opinions on why a piece of art doesn’t work. And if every artist and writer gave up because of those critiques, nothing would ever get made.

Everything you read in this post is something I’d heard was said or was likely said. Yet, in every case, the writer pushed through regardless of the criticsm. Which is exactly what you should do if you believe in your screenplay. It doesn’t matter what anyone on this board says, what I say, what some random agent says. You will get negative criticism no matter what. Once you understand that, you have a superpower. Cause now you know you can ignore those people and find the people who do get your script. That’s the only way movies happen, is people pushing through the criticism and finding a way to get their art produced.

Do the same and your movie will be on my sequel to this post!

One of the more controversial new screenwriters on the scene comes at us with yet another one of his high concept ideas

Genre: Drama/Thriller
Premise: (from Black List) When her domineering director makes her film the same scene 148 times on the final night of an exhausting shoot, actress Annie Long must fight to keep her own sanity as she tries to decipher what is real, and what is part of his twisted game.
About: Screenwriter Collin Bannon routinely makes the Black List. He’s done it again here, as this script finished with 12 votes on last year’s list, the unofficial compilation of the “best screenplays in Hollywood.”
Writer: Collin Bannon
Details: 109 pages

Scarjo for Annie?

All right, now that we’ve got all of that conflict out, let’s take things down a notch and review a screenplay about going crazy!

I remember reading these stories about Stanley Kubrick forcing Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman to do a million takes on Eyes Wide Shut and how Kidman, in particular, almost went insane.

Then later, probably because he was inspired by Kubrick, David Fincher did the same thing to his actors. I remember Edward Norton being particularly thrown by the first scene he shot for Fight Club. Norton thought he did a pretty good job on take one. But Fincher ended up making him do 20 more. And not just doing the takes, but not giving any direction. I got the feeling from Norton that it was a bit of a mind f—k.

I think the idea of tons of takes is to strip the acting away from the actors. And just have them “be.” I’m not convinced it works. I guess if a scene requires you to look emotionally spent it might work. But it’s hard to give when you’ve been told you’ve failed 27 times in a row.

So I thought building a movie around this concept was cool. It’s also a unique way into a loop narrative. Whenever you can exploit a trend in a way that doesn’t feel like the trend, I always give writers props for that.

It’s 1981 and we’re filming an elevated horror movie (Think The Exorcist, not Friday the 13th) in the middle of some eastern European country. At the start of the script, Annie, our hero, is at her wit’s end. They’ve filmed the entire incredibly intense movie. There’s only one scene left. And Annie is desperate to finish so she can get home for her cancer-stricken mother’s surgery.

There’s one man in the way, though. Howard Bloch. I could get detailed about who Bloch is but just think: Stanley Kubrick. The final scene in question has Annie’s character fighting with her husband in their bedroom, who she seems to suspect did something terrible – maybe even murdered someone. Annie is screaming at him that she’s not crazy, she knows what he did, which leads to a physical altercation.

Every time they shoot the scene, Bloch says, “Let’s go again.” Annie asks what changes he wants but he never answers her. He just says, “Let’s go again.” That alone would drive a person crazy. But to make matters worse, everyone on set seems to hate Annie, who, by the way, is the only woman on the entire production (this is 1981 remember). So she feels super isolated outside of her assigned personal assistant, Laszlo, who’s a sweetheart.

As the night turns into day, and 1 take turns into 20, then 50, then 70, Annie really starts to lose it. She’s convinced the eye-patch that the DP wears has switched eyes. She thinks the wallpaper in the bedroom has changed color. The photo on the wall of her character and her co-star’s character turns into a photo of her and her mom. She repeatedly sees her mom in the back of the set. She thinks one of the stunt doubles wants to assault her.

Then the worst imaginable thing happens. The hospital calls and lets Annie know that her mom passed away unexpectedly. Bloch apologizes profusely. He tells Annie that he’ll get her on a flight home immediately. But now Annie is determined. She asks Bloch if he got the take. Bloch confesses he did not. “Then let’s go again,” she says. It’s clear that nobody’s leaving until they GET THIS TAKE RIGHT.

The byline of this post is, “yet another high concept idea.”

Since I know “high concept” can be confusing, I want to explain why this idea is high concept. The best way to do so is by showing you what the “low concept” version of this idea looks like.

The low concept version of this is the aftermath of an actress who’s had a long day after trying to film a scene that wasn’t working. We see her depressed and struggling and maybe her boyfriend has to build her back up again for the next day. Another version would be an actress trying to make it through a tough production in general. Every day is a challenge and she’s beaten down by the process.

In other words, straight-forward boring explorations of what it’s like to be an actress on a difficult shoot.

The second you make it 150 takes, the whole concept takes on an elevated feel. It feels bigger. It’s more intriguing. This is what makes the concept “high,” is the clever elevation of the common interpretation of an idea.

But what about the execution?

I’m, self-admittedly, not a fan of descent-into-madness screenplays for one simple reason. The screenwriter never gets the line right between keeping the script understandable and the story crazy. They always bring the craziness and messiness into the writing itself so we’re not sure what’s going on. These scripts have to be understandable even if what’s going on in the story isn’t supposed to be understood.

That’s a hard balance for even experienced writers to master.

While Bannon’s tackling of the problem isn’t perfect, he does a pretty good job. He definitely captures this character’s insanity but I still, usually, understood what was going on. I think the reason he was able to do this was because he kept the story simple.

Literally, we’re on the same set filming the same scene over and over again. So when there are crazy elements like, say, a mysterious woman that nobody else can see walking around in the background, we’re able to identify that as the lone variable that has changed and therefore an extension of Annie’s psychosis.

Plus, Bannon added some smart elements to his screenplay that exploited the idea. For example, at one point, Annie’s P.A. accidentally lets out that Howard has been telling everyone on set to be mean and isolating to Annie so he can get the performance he wants out of her.

There’s also mystery elements. The hospital calls to inform Annie that her mother passed away. But we’re immediately questioning, did that really happen or did Bloch make that up in order to get a better performance out of her? So now we have this carrot dangling in front of us, pushing us to keep walking, cause we want to know if her mom really is dead or not.

In other words, it isn’t just about doing the scene over and over again. There are other unresolved threads.  Thank God for that because the movie would not have worked if that was the only thing propelling the narrative. Lots of newbie writers would make that mistake, by the way. They’d only focus on what’s in the logline – the bare-bones interpretation of the concept. But movies are too long for that. You need to keep feeding the beast – the beast being the reader – new meals every ten pages or so to keep them interested.

The irony about this script is that if it was ever tuned into a real movie, it would have the exact same effect on the real actress who took the part. She would be shooting 300-400 takes of the same scene. Cause she’s shooting multiple takes to get each of the takes right within the story itself. You’d have to be crazy to volunteer for that. But maybe that’s the point.

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

What I learned: Your most clever dialogue lines are going to stem from YOUR CONCEPT. Your concept is the primary generator of all that is unique within your script. So if you want to write clever lines, lean into the concept. For example, early on, the hair and makeup guy comes up to Annie before she’s about to shoot her scene and he says, referring to her exhausted face, “Are those dark circles mine or yours?” Annie responds, “I think they’re mine.” “You make my job easier every day.” So, why is this a clever line? Cause the obvious line is, “You look like s—t. We need to get you back in makeup pronto.” That line contains the exact same sentiment, but is on-the-nose and, therefore, boring. A compliment that’s actually an insult delivered in a way to make the heroine feel bad about herself – that’s good writing.